The Truth About Complacency
Everything about complacency and why it’s crippling you from the inside.
Feeling satisfied? 🤔
Imagine this. You’ve just finished an enormous project that took you over 100+ hours of work and over 4 months to complete. You’re tired, and rightfully so. You decide a vacation is in order and take a 2 week break and just relax. Afterwards, you’re feeling satisfied with your situation and just go back to doing the same kind of stuff. You don’t want more because you’re happy with what you’ve got. So, what’s the issue? You decide that you don’t need to spend more time on harder projects, because you’ve already proven yourself and you’re good to spend a couple of months chilling. After a few months, you fail to find the motivation to do anymore work, and you find yourself in a slump. What happened? You were able to do so much and used to be excited to work on cool things. Complacency happened. You felt too satisfied and didn’t continue your momentum.
A dictionary definition of complacency is as follows:
a feeling of smug or uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one’s achievements.
But complacency is much more than that. It means to not have aspirations or to be critical of the things around you. In this article, I’ll explain how to tell if you’re being complacent, why being complacent stifles innovations, how to rectify complacency and how you can use this anti-mindset to change the world.
First of all… complacency ≠ taking a break ❌
I’d like to distinguish the fact that being complacent is not the same thing as taking a break. If you’ve worked hard, you should reward yourself and relax. Avoid burnout, as that is one of the worst things that can happen to you. You want to ensure that your physical and mental health is assured. So generally, take breaks but don’t get used to it.
To ensure that you don’t start becoming complacent after taking a prolonged break, make sure that your motivations are in check. If you really want to continue and disrupt whatever you’re passionate about, you will keep going. You’ll know when you’re complacent when you feel you don’t want to continue to work on or continue to instruct change in an industry. It’ll happen when you start accepting the way things are and just accept the conventional norms.
Complacency can also be attributed to irritation. If you get irritated by change very easily, you are indefinitely complacent. But being complacent about something is also very good. For example, you should be complacent about how we treat criminals in a criminal court (in a western liberal democracy). So complacent is okay in some sense but is much different then a break.
Why complacency stifles innovation 💻
Think about the heavy hitter disruptors in our society. Elon Musk, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and you get the idea. All these disruptors practice anti-complacency and is a reason for why they are so successful and made a big impact on the world already. They don’t accept the status quo and decide that they want to change it to how they see fit. They are relentless in the pursuit of change.
If we were all complacent, we would all live much simpler lives. There would fundamentally be less innovation. This is because everyone would be satisfied with the current situation and not wanting to actually change via innovation. We wouldn’t have Elon Musks or Larry Pages.
If all billionaires are really keen on not being complacent, then I think there’s a definitive trend going on. There’s a reason to not be complacent, but how do you or I achieve that?
Signs that you’ve become complacent⚠️
Here are a few ways to tell if you’ve become complacent:
- You live in a constant routine
- You are satisfied with the things around you (but not necessarily happy)
- You never think about innovative ideas
- You don’t care too much about anything
- Just want to constantly relax and chill
Usually you’ll know you’re complacent when you have little to no ambition to better yourself or work on major projects. This is bad as you aren’t capitalizing on your full potential. So how do you fight complacency?
How to fight complacency 🥊
The only way to fight complacency is to have the drive to better yourself everyday. And the only realistic way to achieve this is to understand yourself on the most basic level. We can use first principles thinking as a framework to understand why we do things. Ask yourself what drives you to get out of bed every morning. Is it because you are feeling pressured by others around you? Or is it because you desire status? Or is it because you desire to help the less fortunate?
What pushes you to do things and motivates you should not be for selfish reasons. I give the examples of billionaires again. Most billionaires (~99%) do things because they aspire to help those around them. Elon Musk runs a space company because he wants to push humanity’s limits. If you have a genuine motive to do something, then being anti-complacent will be super easy for you.
I’ve talked a lot about how to not be complacent about your own life. But there’s also complacency in accepting the conventions that our society runs by. You probably never notice why you have to take a highway for over 1+ hours a day just to get to work. You never notice the environmental implications of water bottle companies. You never notice these things because you’re too complacent.
Billionaires aren’t only complacent in their own lives but question everything around them. You should do the same. Next time you think about anything, ask yourself ‘why does it work like this?’ or ‘is there a better alternative?’. That’s how industries are disrupted, by people questioning how they currently work. That’s how the computer was built, how cars were built, how rockets were built and you get the idea.
Above all, anti-complacency is a muscle that you need to build. You need to constantly remind yourself about being intentional about anti-complacency. The more you remind yourself about it and practice it, the more it becomes routine and you naturally disrupt everything around you. A way to practice this is to have actionable goals like “think about why x works like this” or “can I do this in a better way.”
Benefits of anti-complacency ✔️
The benefits of anti-complacency should have become more apparent throughout this article. But to summarize the tangible benefits of complacency, they are as follows:
- Can have a greater positive impact on the world
- Can increase your potential to grow and grow even more
- Can be more happier because working on things you care about
- Understand yourself better
- Get the most out of life
Practicing anti-complacency will change your life and provide so many tangible impacts. There’s virtually no reason not to be anti-complacent. The future unicorns and people that impact this world are all going to be people that naturally practice anti-complacency, so the question becomes: Will you finally stop being satisfied?
On a More Personal Note
Thank you so much for reading this article. I’m constantly exploring machine learning topics and creating projects centered around practical uses of the technology. Check out my personal website for more! Click Here!
