If you want to be great and successful, choose people who are great and successful and walk side by side with them.
Interpretation
Surrounding yourself with successful individuals can help you achieve greatness.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of association in the pursuit of success. By choosing to walk alongside those who are already great and accomplished, you open yourself to inspiration, learning, and opportunities that can propel you towards your own greatness.
In practice
A speaker at a career development seminar might use this quote to encourage attendees to network with successful individuals.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
I think about my own career, and when I graduated from college, the Internet didn't really exist yet. And so not having a specific plan, being able to be opportunistic at the end, is what enabled me to make some of my best decisions, which is to go to places that were growing but that I didn't plan to have happen.
It takes 20 victories for people to recognize you as a great pitcher.
And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball.
What has made me successful is the ability to surrender my plans, dreams and goals to a power that's greater than other people and greater than myself.
Success in God's eyes is faithfulness to His calling.
I look for the entrepreneur to capture my attention. If you don't come out with a great presentation, you're dead. That's a big red flag.
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