Resting on your laurels gets a bad rap. There's absolutely nothing wrong with following a success with absolute silence. After all, leaving that dead space is how you let other people know where to put their applause. But some people, artists in particular, are so dead set on topping themselves that they feverishly try to rack up more triumphs before the dust has even settled from the first, resulting in careless and hasty career that looks suspiciously like a pile of human feces. The problem is a combination of people falling in love with their own success stories and believing in themselves when they really have no business doing either of those things.

Getty "Note to self: Shit yeah."

In the case of the following four directors, they would have been better off creating one great movie and then bowing out of the spotlight forever. Instead, they insisted that the world keep watching while they strangled their own reputations to death with a roll of 35 mm film. To their credit, they were likely trying to adhere to the adage "Strike while the iron is hot." Unfortunately, that flies in the face of the adage "Quit while you're ahead," which only proves that culturally, we almost never know what the fuck we're talking about.