Quotes about Success

You can't really decide to paint a masterpiece. You just have to think hard, work hard, and try to make a painting that you care about. Then, if you're lucky, your work will find an audience for whom it's meaningful.

When you're the best in the world, you share the benefits (the income, the attention, the privileges, the respect) with just a handful of people or organizations or brands.

A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner. Before

Alas, there isn't a pain-free way to achieve your goals.

The act of trying to guarantee the success of an innovation is almost certain to make it less likely that it will succeed.

The second reason there are such tremendous benefits to being number one is a little more subtle. Being at the top matters because there's room at the top for only a few.

As Susan Kare, designer of the original Mac interface, said, "You can't really decide to paint a masterpiece. You just have to think hard, work hard, and try to make a painting that you care about. Then, if you're lucky, your work will find an audience for whom it's meaningful.

Part of leadership (a big part of it, actually) is the ability to stick with the dream for a long time. Long enough that the critics realize that you're going to get there one way or another . . . so they follow.

Quitting creates scarcity; scarcity creates value.

The more important the project we take on, the more difficult it is to find certainty that our work will succeed before we begin. We can begin with this: If we failed, would it be worth the journey? Do you trust yourself enough to commit to engaging with a project regardless of the chances of success?

Your most generous and insightful work needs help finding the people it's meant to serve. And your most successful work will spread because you designed it to.

Less than 3% of newly published authors make enough in royalties and advances to be happy to live on.)