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?
Winning a Nobel Prize is no big deal, but winning it with an IQ of 124 is really something.
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. Overnight success is a fallacy. It is preceded by a great deal of preparation. Ask any successful person how they came to this point in their lives, and they will have a story to tell.
The speed at which a business success is recognized, furthermore, is not that important as long as the company's intrinsic value is increasing at a satisfactory rate. In fact, delayed recognition can be an advantage: It may give us the chance to buy more of a good thing at a bargain price.
The best way to measure how much you've grown isn't by inches or the number of laps you can now run around the track or even your grade point average - though those things are important, to be sure. It's what you've done with your time, how you've chosen to spend your days, and whom you have touched this year. That, to me, is the greatest measure of success.
Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
Let the path be open to talent.
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