Complacency is an insidious vice. When things feel okay, when you’re not feeling a sense of urgency, in it creeps. And the next thing you know you look around and realize that fixing or changing your complacency is going to cause a lot of pain.

So why do we let it get so rooted in the first place?

I can share a personal example that is a great illustration: The software that runs this website was way out of date. The site worked, and I didn’t want to go through the process up upgrading the software and having to get everything working properly after an upgrade so I just left things alone. I got complacent.

In the process of doing some basic maintenance recently I noticed some content on the site that I definitely didn’t add. Somehow – through a vulnerability in the software – someone was able to inject junk spam links and turn my website into a zombie for the purposes! You better believe that jolt got me motivated to upgrade the software!

I did upgrade – and it was painful – and things still aren’t quite back to normal because of it. My on going complacency actually made my pain even greater because I was in “emergency mode” trying to clean up the mess that happened because I wasn’t doing regular upgrades and updates all along. I kept thinking to myself, “Why did I wait to get this upgrade installed?”

Another example: I was having lunch with a colleague and we were discussing software. He told me that they were facing some major pains because they had not been keeping on top of software updates for a critical system. The reasoning was that it “mostly” worked and allowed them to run that segment of their business. Because of this, none of the executives would make it a priority to perform the updates and testing.

Their complacency wasn’t hurting anything until they ran in to a few problems and learned that the specific version of software wasn’t supported by the vendor. That finally made the feet-draggers wake up and realize that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ™! They’re now planning for an upgrade, but the pain will be even greater because there is no support from the vendor and there isn’t a clear upgrade path from their version to the current version of the software.

Sure, resting on our laurels is easy, but we need to keep in mind that our future pain will be greatly magnified when we give in to complacency.