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I’ve been thinking about something that we always did junior year when I was on my high school soccer team.

When we’d score a goal, we realized that it’s when a team is at its most vulnerable. I saw it first hand when many earlier teams I had been on would get scored on right after our goal. It negates the whole point of working so hard for that score.

So that year, after a goal, we would pause and celebrate for just a few seconds. And as we ran back to our side of the field, we always had one guy stop and yell at the top of his lungs, “WHAT’S THE SCORE?” and we’d yell back “ZERO-ZERO!”

That scared our competitors, but more importantly it got us results. That year we outscored the teams we played something like 48 goals for and 6 against. We beat some of the best teams in the southeast and some really big schools.

My varsity team was barely 15 guys from a 200 person school. We had a high concentration of really talented people, but the big part of our success wasn’t our talent. Our success was actually the result of our mentality. And that’s the broader point: don’t let your success turn into complacency. Because right after a small success is when you are the most vulnerable to complacency and bad results.