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.
Attitude is the first quality that marks the successful man. If he has a positive attitude and is a positive thinker, who likes challenges and difficult situations, then he has half his success achieved.
Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.
The defining factor [for success] is never resources; it’s resourcefulness.
Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.
Price doesn't make deals, and salary doesn't control your career.
Approach each customer with the idea of helping him or her solve a problem or achieve a goal, not of selling a product or service.
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