Quotes About Success

There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.

You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references "money" in his conversation.

I have no large desire to sacrifice much of my personal habits, intellectual pleasures, and personal standards in order to become a billionaire like Warren Buffett, and I certainly do not see point of becoming one if I were to adopt Spartan (even miserly) habits and live in my starter house.

True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one's activities for peace of mind

It was a different feeling: it is hard to focus on a conversation, especially when it is mathematical, when you have just personally earned several hundreds of times the annual salary of the researcher trying to tell you that you are wrong, by betting against his representation of the world.

Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed—but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.

Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.

I had time to kill at the airport and it was a great opportunity for me to buy dark European chocolate, especially since I have managed to successfully convince myself that airport calories don't count. The

Of course chance favors the prepared! Hard work, showing up on time, wearing a clean (preferably white) shirt, using deodorant, and some such conventional things contribute to success—they are certainly necessary but may be insufficient as they do not cause success.

Stoicism's Emotional Robustification Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.

Nicocles, as early as the fourth century B.C., asserts that doctors claimed responsibility for success and blamed failure on nature, or on some external cause. The

In a textbook case of naive empiricism, the author also looked for traits these millionaires had in common and figured out that they shared a taste for risk taking. Clearly risk taking is necessary for large success—but it is also necessary for failure. Had the author done the same study on bankrupt citizens he would certainly have found a predilection for risk taking.

I am also realizing the nonlinear effect behind success in anything: It is better to have a handful of enthusiastic advocates than hordes of people who appreciate your work—better to be loved by a dozen than liked by the hundreds. This applies to the sales of books, the spread of ideas, and success in general and runs counter to conventional logic. The information age is worsening this effect.

I mentioned earlier that to understand successes and analyze what caused them, we need to study the traits present in failures.

By definition, what works cannot be irrational; about every single person I know who has chronically failed in business shares that mental block, the failure to realize that if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid.

from the reference point of the winner (and, who does not, and this is key, take the losers into account), a long string of wins will appear to be too extraordinary an occurrence to be explained by luck. Note

We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We feel responsible for the good stuff, but not for the bad.

You attribute your successes to skills, but your failures to randomness. This explains why these scientists attributed their failures to the "ten sigma" rare event, indicative of the thought that they were right but that luck played against them. Why? It is a human heuristic that makes us actually believe so in order not to kill our self-esteem and keep us going against adversity.

The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything," he said.

It was calculated that actors who win an Oscar tend to live on average about five years longer than their peers who don't.

We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We

The fact that he did not experience John's success was the reason he did not suffer his downfall.

Nero believes that risk-conscious hard work and discipline can lead someone to achieve a comfortable life with a very high probability. Beyond that, it is all randomness: either by taking enormous (and unconscious) risks, or by being extraordinarily lucky. Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.

Missing a train is only painful if you run after it. Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that is what you are seeking.