Quotes About Success

One theme common to all of these failures, however, is that the decisions that led to failure were made when the leaders in question were widely regarded as among the best companies in the world.

School is one of the things that children might hire to do the job. But the job is that children need to feel successful—every

Most schools don't do this job well at all. Instead, most children feel failure when they go to class. They could also hire athletics to do the job. For a few, sports do the job well. But for the less gifted, athletics makes students feel failure, too. So they hire electronic games to feel successful. And yet for many, even such games yield failure. So they hire friends who have feelings of failure, too—and engage in drugs and other things to feel successful.

the more successful approach has been to find a new market that values the current characteristics of the disruptive technology. Disruptive technology should be framed as a marketing challenge, not a technological one.

To succeed predictably, disruptors must be good theorists. As they shape their growth business to be disruptive, they must align every critical process and decision to fit the disruptive circumstance.

Managers who don't bet the farm on their first idea, who leave room to try, fail, learn quickly, and try again, can succeed at developing the understanding of customers, markets, and technology needed to commercialize disruptive innovations.

Companies make attractive money when they solve the hardest problems.

Every successful product or service, either explicitly or implicitly, was structured around a job to be done. Addressing a job is the causal mechanism behind a purchase. If someone develops a product that is interesting, but which doesn't intuitively map in customers' minds on a job that they are trying to do, that product will struggle to succeed

It is hard to overestimate the power of these motivators—the feelings of accomplishment and of learning, of being a key player on a team that is achieving something meaningful.

What are all the experiences and problems that I have to learn about and master so that what comes out at the other end is somebody who is ready and capable of becoming a successful CEO?

Tell them that if they're not occasionally failing, then they're not aiming high enough.

If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing." After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I've come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do?

the hallmark of a great manager is the ability to identify the right person for the right job, and to train his or her employees so that they have the capabilities to succeed at the jobs they are given.

Research has shown, in fact, that the vast majority of successful new business ventures abandoned their original business strategies when they began implementing their initial plans and learned what would and would not work in the market. 9

Strategy almost always emerges from a combination of deliberate and unanticipated opportunities. What's important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out what really works for you, then it's time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one.

Despite such professional accomplishments, however, many of them were clearly unhappy.

He'd followed in the footsteps of a man who knew the way.

So I proposed to give the people scientific government…a business administration. An administration that would have run the government exactly as a successful businessman runs his business. The people would have resented it if I had told them they didn't know how to run their affairs. There was only one way to do it…gain control and force it down their throats.

Money here on Earth is more than the paper or the metal that you use for money, more than the rows of figures that account for money. Here on Earth you have given money a symbolism such as no medium of exchange has anywhere else I have ever known or heard of. You have made it a power and a virtue and you have made the lack of it despicable and somehow even criminal. You measure men by money and you calibrate success with money and you almost worship money.

Worrying about what 'people are going to say' and 'what the neighbours might think' is always in the minds of working people. They aren't afraid of failure. They are afraid of success and how they would have to make excuses to their friends if it ever came their way.

You get what you work for not what you wish for

there's nothing in the world more fun than doing something you're good at.

Winning is beauty. It is like life itself.

All rising to great place is by a winding stair. —Sir Francis Bacon