When Winning Becomes Losing

Let’s say you’re part of an awesome team. A fantastic group doing great things – a sports team, a startup, a boy band. It could be anything, really.

But even when it’s going swimmingly, a small part of you is haunted by the fear that it’ll all eventually come crumbling down. 

You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop because, hey, it happens to companies all the time. Look what’s happening to Nike. It was unstoppable for decades but somehow has lost three-quarters of its stock price in the last five years. 

Then there’s Meta, which seems to be having a tough time with morale these days. 

History is awash with similar examples, so how on earth do you stop this from happening to you?

Easy. Just hop in your time machine, whizz over to fourteenth-century Cairo, and book some time with the great Arab philosopher and historian, Ibn Khaldun.

In his great work, “Muqaddimah,” Khaldun spends much of it discussing what holds tribes together.

To him, it all boils down to a single word: “Asabiyya.”

Asabiyya (Arabic: عصبيّة) roughly translates to social solidarity, group consciousness, and shared purpose.

Khaldun describes it more bluntly as a tribe’s willingness to literally fight and die for one’s own.

Using his own tribe as an example, Khaldun points out a trend: tough, fierce, honorable Bedouin clans built extremely strong asabiyyah. This made them excellent fighters, which made them rich and allowed them to move to cities, where life is far more decadent and lazy. Indulgence has a funny way of undermining asabiyyah and leading to eventual decline.

You’ve probably heard of this cyclical nature of civilization. Machiavelli talked about it a century after Khaldun. Spengler wrote about it in the 1920s. The current American colloquialism is, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.”

So how does a great tribe like yours escape this doom cycle?

As the latter colloquialism implies, the key word here is “Hard.” To keep things great, you need to keep things hard.

No, you don’t need to leave the big city and go live like a medieval Bedouin. You just can’t get trapped by the allure of “easy.” 

Keep raising the bar. Keep asking for more. Keep pushing. Keep trying. And failing. And trying again. From civilizations to cities to small startups, human beings were never meant to live easy. 

Don’t let success make your team soft.