The #1 guideline to success is you must be in business for yourself. When you work for someone else, you sell your time at wholesale to your employer, who then re-sells it at retail to the customer.
Interpretation
True success comes from being self-employed rather than working for someone else.
This quote by J. Paul Getty emphasizes the importance of entrepreneurship and self-employment as the key drivers of success. It suggests that when individuals work for others, they are undervalued and their true potential is not realized, as they only receive a fraction of the value they create. Instead, working for oneself allows one to fully capitalize on their skills and efforts.
In practice
During a motivational seminar on entrepreneurship, this quote can inspire aspiring business owners.
Today's dissenters mainly focus their attention and expend their energies on the most inconsequential of trivia. ...Allegedly serious intellectuals quibble endlessly over such ridiculous trivialities...In the meantime, the public is lulled into a perilous somnolence, spoon-fed pap, and palpable untruths, many of which are turned out by special-interest and pressure groups and well organized propaganda machines.
You must not only learn to live with tension, you must seek it out. You must learn to thrive on stress.
In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.
Patience; this is the greatest business asset. Wait for the right time to make your moves.
There is only one way to make a great deal of money; and that is in a business of your own.
To succeed in business, to reach the top, an individual must know all it is possible to know about that business.
Success.. is all about being able to extend love to people... not in a big, capital letter sense but in the everyday. Little by little, task by task, gesture by gesture, word by word.
In my career, I thought I've never wanted to get anywhere in particular. I just wanted to work with interesting people on interesting projects.
Your chances of success are directly proportional to the degree of pleasure you desire from what you do. If you are in a job you hate, face the fact squarely and get out.
I grew up in a working class family where there was no health insurance. I saw first hand the fracturing of the American dream and the bitterness that comes when there is no hope and a lot of despair. So I wanted to build the company, in a sense, that my father never got a chance to work for.
There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.
It is not sufficient that I succeed - all others must fail.
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