Todays winners, tomorrow's losers?

A friend of mine and I got into a conversation yesterday about how alot of the players we feared 7 or 8 months ago, where no longer intimidating to us. As a matter of fact, we tend to play quite well against them, and look forward to having them in our game. My friend pointed out that these players are complacent in their study of the game, and believe they already know everything, while we have continued to study the game and constantly look for more information that will help us.

As I thought about this, I went back and reread Alan Shoomakers comments on having a positive attitude towards constructive critisism. In a nutshell, he was suprised that I wasn't offended by his critisism of my response to a posters question, and went on to make a point of how rare this was amongst poker players. I took this as a great compliment, particularly coming from someone I admire.

My thoughts on these two communications are that if we are winning today, but become complacement in our studies, unwilling to embrace critisism, or are inflexible in our opinions of our own knowledge or beliefs, we are destined to become the fish of tomorrow.

Just some thoughts I wanted to share. They may be somewhat redundant, but isn't it often the obvious that's most overlooked?