Off Course/On Purpose Part 2- The Danger of Auto-Pilot Living

Jul 19, 2025

“Just because the road is simple doesn’t mean you can’t get off track.”

On that road trip, I was cruising. The highway was straight. The weather was clear. The route was familiar. I’d driven this path from Florida to Delaware countless times before. I-95 was second nature.

And that’s exactly why I got lost so easily. When things feel familiar, we tend to stop paying attention. We stop checking the signs. We turn off the GPS.

We assume we’re heading the right way—just because the road feels the same.

The Comfort Trap

Here’s what I’ve learned: Comfort breeds complacency.

When we’re in a comfortable place—in our careers, our relationships, our leadership—it’s easy to go into auto-pilot mode. We stop questioning. We stop evaluating. We stop being intentional.

That is a dangerous place to be…

That’s when the mistakes start. Not always big ones…sometimes small, silent ones that stack up over time. You wake up months—or years—later, wondering how you got so far off course.

I was speaking to a former cop years ago about this and he told me complacency is what causes someone to get shot. Law enforcement offices go through extensive training, learning the procedures, practicing, practicing some more. Sometimes when they feel like they’ve got it under control, they get comfortable…which can lead to complacency…which leads to mistakes.

A Simple Road, A Simple Mistake

The irony for my drive? I was on one of the most straightforward and traveled interstates in America—I-95.

North or South. That’s it. Yet I still got turned around.

The problem wasn’t the road—it was my assumptions.

I assumed familiarity meant I didn’t have to think; surely I’d notice if I went off track. I couldn’t possible make a mistake on a route this simple, right? But assumptions often can cause us to skip over the very things that keep us on track.

Familiar Doesn’t Mean Fruitful

Let’s take that one step deeper: just because something is familiar doesn’t mean it’s fruitful. Just because you’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean it’s still working. Just because you’re “in motion” doesn’t mean you’re making progress.

Traveling down the same road can feel like progress, but without intentionality, we are burning the miles and not moving forward. Have you ever heard the question, “Do you have 5 years of experience? Or do you have the same 1 year of experience repeated 5 times?”. That’s the point. When we are comfortable on a familiar road, we lose our intentional pursuit of growth and drift into complacency.

Craig Groeschel often says “Vision leaks and culture drifts”. It sure does. It's human nature, and that’s precisely why attention and intention must be constant.