A good name is easier to lose when you begin treating it as a reason ordinary rules should not apply.

A reputation is easiest to lose from the inside. Once you feel established, the small rules start to look like formalities meant for other people: the queue, the deadline, the form, the courtesy. Each exception seems trivial and reasonable, and together they are exactly what others use to revise their opinion of you. Standing built on ordinary reliability gets spent by abandoning it.

Watch for the moment you catch yourself deciding a rule need not apply to you. Follow that one particularly, especially when nobody would object if you did not.