Quotes About Success

I think a famous parent is really different from a famous grandparent. My parents are very successful, but no one knows who they are, and they live a completely grounded, homey life. I'm friends with the Gummer girls, whose mum is Meryl Streep, and that feels from the outside like a different kind of burden.

I don't understand why people whose entire lives or their corporate success depends on communication, and yet they are led on occasion by CEOs who cannot talk their way out of a paper bag and don't care to.

I think the model that I look at is someone like Jakob Dylan, whose dad is obviously every bit if not more famous than mine. He's a guy who sought to build a career on his own, doing something that's a little bit different than what his father does.

Americans enjoy the exciting, cinematic vision of a squad of muscle-bound Goliath boasting Olympian speed, strength, and precision - a group whose collective success is the inevitable consequence of the individual strengths of its members and the masterful planning of a visionary commander.

There are a lot of ways to make people not like you, but one of the most powerful - if least fair - is to be really, really successful. Nobody resents the guy who just lost his job. But the guy whose Internet start-up made him a billionaire at 25? That's a whole different kettle of envy.

The fact is I've been the kind of parent who has been there at every single sports day, my kids are achievers at school, scoring fantastic grades, they're part of the football and hockey team. In that aspect, people always saw me as a parent whose children have always gone from strength to strength.

The manager sits down with me; I sit down with the board. We assess the success of the year. The manager assesses whose coming through the academy system. His job is to look at what is happening in European and world football.

But I haven't met a player or a coach whose goal isn't to win the Super Bowl.

Barack Obama's enemies are the people who make this country work. Barack Obama's enemies are those who succeed. Those are the people whose income he wants to redistribute. Those are the people whose income he wants to take, using the power and the force of the federal government to do it.

The fact is that, except for those very few whose wealth is overwhelmingly or entirely inherited, the more affluent have usually worked harder than the less affluent.

I don't think that I've had a career like anyone else's, but there are hosts and hosts of actors whose careers I admire.

Being self-made means never making an excuse as to why you can't take steps toward whatever your goal is.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

Success is not greedy, as people think, but insignificant. That is why it satisfies nobody.

Why go through life if you're not going to challenge yourself?

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

Successful people have a bigger fear of failure than people who've never done anything because if you haven't been successful, then you don't know how it feels to lose it all. You don't have that fear. So why do you think people get stuck in those boxes? It's that fear of going back down.

I can't say it enough that learning how to learn is one of the greatest skills anyone can have. It's why I advocate that everyone go to college.

You will learn more from your failures than your successes - so embrace those mistakes, as difficult as that sounds, and grow from them. When a project is successful, you're never really sure why, because so many elements come into play. However, when you fail, you always know why. That is how you learn and grow.

The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption.

I work as hard as anybody will ever work and I like that. That's why I've been successful and that is when I feel good about myself. If I do my damnedest and don't succeed, I feel good about the effort.

Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go so much further than people with vastly superior talent.

Michael Jordan taught me after our game of one-on-one: A loss is not a failure until you make an excuse. When excuses are no longer an option, you can focus your attention on the job you have to do, and not why it didn't get done.

When I was leaving NBC News to go to CNN, people would say, 'What?! Why would you possibly leave the 'Today Show' to go to cable?' If I would've listened to people, I would've been on a great platform, but I wouldn't have grown as a journalist. So far, most of the steps in my career have been really good.