
Mediocre Success Is Worse Than Outright Failure

Early success is a terrible teacher. You’re essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can’t do it. You don’t know how.
Chris Hadfield • An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything
Put simply, because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure.
Chris Argyris • Teaching Smart People How to Learn (Harvard Business Review Classics)
Dr Burgelman, a famous Stanford business school professor said, it is far better to have understood why you failed than to be ignorant of why you succeeded.