A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.
John D. RockefellerRead
If your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it.
Interpretation
Pursuing wealth alone can lead to unfulfilled ambitions.
John D. Rockefeller emphasizes that merely focusing on becoming rich can lead to dissatisfaction. Success should be viewed in broader terms that include purpose, passion, and the impact one makes rather than just the accumulation of wealth.
In practice
In a graduation speech focused on life goals, you could quote this to inspire students to pursue passion over wealth.
A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.
It is wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always happy.
The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.
This Sunday School has been of help to me, greater perhaps than any other force in my Christian life, and I can ask no better things for you than that you, and all that shall come after you in this great band of workers for Christ, shall receive the same measure of blessedness which I have been permitted to have.
The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.
The person who starts out simply with the idea of getting rich won't succeed; you must have a larger ambition. There is no mystery in business success. If you do each day's task successfully, and stay faithfully within these natural operations of commercial laws which I talk so much about, and keep your head clear, you will come out all right.
The extra pass and the extra effort on defense always get the job done.
Hopefully, we can build a rivalry and we'll be able to do this a lot. Make a legacy, then retire champions.
There might have been a thousand people who had a better athletic feat than what I did. So for me, just the fact that they gave Canadian Athlete of the Year - and also, I was voted third in the Male Athlete of the Year - the fact that some people did consider what I did an athletic feat, that really makes me feel good.
No building is better than its structural foundation, and no man (woman) is better than his (her) mental foundation. When I prepared my original Success Pyramid years ago, I put industriousness and enthusiasm as the two cornerstones with LOYALTY right in the middle of the pyramid - Loyalty to yourself and to all those dependent upon you.
I ... have two vocations: chess and engineering. If I played chess only, I believe that my success would not have been significantly greater. I can play chess well only when I have fully convalesced from chess and when the 'hunger for chess' once more awakens within me.
You are not your resume, you are your work.
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