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.
You just have to keep trying to do good work, and hope that it leads to more good work. I want to look back on my career and be proud of the work, and be proud that I tried everything. Yes, I want to look back and know that I was terrible at a variety of things.
For life affords no higher pleasure, than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified. He that labours in any great or laudable undertaking, has his fatigues first supported by hope, and afterwards rewarded by joy... To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.
A great investment opportunity occurs when a marvelous business encounters a one-time huge, but solvable problem.
On a personal note, I think it won't be until after I've retired that I'm fully aware of what I've done or what I've gone on to achieve in my career.
Failure is success in progress
If you're trying to create a company, it's like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.
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