We have seen, already, that the best people aren’t well-rounded, but are instead spiky—they have honed one or two distinctive abilities that they use to make their mark on the world. What we see in the best leaders is a similar extremism—a few signal abilities refined over time. But now, these abilities are so pronounced, and the leaders so adept at transmitting them to the world, that they stand out to all of us. And so this truth: we follow spikes.

All the mythologizing is so unfortunate. It has popularized badly misguided notions about how a CEO can succeed in a job that’s not only crucial to the economic foundations of our society but also so cognitively, emotionally, and physically challenging that nearly a third of those appointed last fewer than three years in the role. The mythmaking has obscured so many important lessons we can learn from observing how CEOs struggle mightily with the changing challenges of the role. And overcome them, not only in the early going but also throughout their tenures.

Yet, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, who has tried for twenty years to determine the characteristics of the most effective corporate leaders, cautions, “You look at the data, there’s ten different recipes for success. Sure, there are some people who are better than others, but it’s damn hard to tell what it is.

As former Intel CEO Andy Grove wrote in his influential book Only the Paranoid Survive, “Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction.” CEOs who make it to the Complacency Trap stage have navigated the rough-and-tumble of the Launch, Calibration, and Reinvention stages of the first few years. One unintended consequence of leading their firms adroitly can be an overly assured attitude about the course they’ve set and the organizational improvements they’ve made.

Nigel Travis, who led Dunkin’ to strong revenue growth in nine years at the helm, observed in his book The Challenge Culture that companies “can quickly go from success to trouble . . . because the culture does not allow for challenging the status quo.” He shared with us that finding ways to break the spell of satisfaction with success was a main focus of his leadership. That was in part because of what he’d witnessed as a senior executive at Blockbuster.