During a recent convention seminar for automotive dealers, one of the speakers gave this piece of advice to sales managers; “All you have to do to get out of a selling slump is to teach your salespeople to repeat their own best performance more often.”

The speaker brought a puzzling problem into focus: “What causes salespeople to forget their own successes and lose the skills that caused them to be great?”

Dr. Norman Vincent Peale once said that a problem contains the seed to its own solution. We can turn this meaningful insight 180 degrees and say that every success contains the seed to its own undoing. People often believe that success only breeds success, but more often than not, success breeds complacency and arrogance and it can lower our competitive drives. When success comes too fast, it often disappears as quickly as it came. I remember a salesman who made $1 million in commissions only five years ago. Last year he barely made $30,000. He lost his home, his family and his self-esteem. Five years ago, hundreds of people listened eagerly to his success stories; today only his creditors follow his footsteps.

Charles Givens, the author of the recent bestseller, Wealth Without Risks, once told me that only after he lost everything he had (he went from millions to nothing twice) did he realize that it was easier to make money than to hang on to it. It seems obvious that becoming successful is far less challenging than staying successful.

There are many salespeople who have mastered the challenges of continuous success, year after year. Take Zig Ziglar, who is probably the best known sales trainer in America today. Zig keeps himself in great physical shape. He keeps writing new, bestselling books and produces more and more exciting video and audio programs for the profession of selling. For the past 30 years, Zig has been a model of ongoing growth and success.

Take W.C. Stone, the famous insurance salesman who started his own company and built a personal fortune of 1/2 billion dollars. He has recently turned 87 and still spends a half-hour each day on creative thinking. He is still generating new ideas for success products, audiocassettes, videotapes and newsletters.

Duplicating one’s own success seems to be the result of a) our awareness of the laws of success, b) our commitment to ongoing growth, and c) our willingness to keep learning and sharpening our skills.

Erik Erikson once called the key conflict of growing as a struggle between generativity and stagnation. Stagnation leads to an erosion of our skills. People who stagnate become so involved with themselves that they become unable or unwilling to take on new challenges. They have bought the illusion that they have “arrived” and they feel entitled to being celebrated and waited on. Generativity, on the other hand, is the drive for renewal, the hunger for growing, the need for achieving our next level of positive transformation.

While the forces of generativity become responsible for advancing and growing, the forces of stagnation arrest growth and spur erosion. We all know that there are limits to our capacity for growth just as there are limits to how much we can slow erosion.

People who have learned to duplicate their success have learned not to look at limitations; they focus on opportunities, instead. Only if we keep our antennae tuned to new opportunities, will we recognize them and grow with them. There is only one choice, a wise man once said: “If you plan to keep on living, you better plan on growing.”