nothing fails like success
In the foreword to Crucial Conversations (I will tell you what I think when I am done reading it), Steven Covey writes:
I can see the wisdom in the assertion of the great historian Arnold Toynbee, who said that you can pretty well summarize all of history–not of society, but of institutions and people–in four words: Nothing fails like success. In other words, when a challenge in life is met by a response that is equal to it, you have success. But when the challenge moves to a higher level, the old, once successful response no longer works–it fails; thus, nothing fails like success.
It seems to me that there is much truth in this.
Brandon Weber's Marginalia 