If you get down about the state of American culture, just remember there are still more public libraries in this country than there are McDonalds.
David McculloughRead
Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.
Interpretation
True success comes from doing what you love and finding fulfillment in it.
This quote by David McCullough emphasizes that real success is not solely defined by external achievements or wealth, but rather by identifying and pursuing one's true passion in life. When individuals align their work with what they genuinely love, they experience a deeper sense of purpose and fulfillment, which constitutes true success in their lives.
In practice
In a graduation speech to inspire students about their future choices.
If you get down about the state of American culture, just remember there are still more public libraries in this country than there are McDonalds.
There is only one person who can measure your success. That person is you.
I just thank my father and mother, my lucky stars, that I had the advantage of an education in the humanities.
Napoleon could never imagine that some people loved their country as much as he loved his own.
When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn't mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. In hard work is happiness.
Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free," Jefferson said, "expects what never was and never will be." And if the gap between the educated and the uneducated in America continues to grow as it is in our time, as fast as or faster than the gap between the rich and the poor, the gap between the educated and the uneducated is going to be of greater consequence and the more serious threat to our way of life. We must not, by any means, misunderstand that.
You've got to eat while you dream. You've got to deliver on short-range commitments, while you develop a long-range strategy and vision and implement it. The success of doing both. Walking and chewing gum if you will. Getting it done in the short-range, and delivering a long-range plan, and executing on that.
The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion.
I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.
The great ones have the ability to focus and tune everything else out and see more than the others. Average quarterbacks have tunnel vision. They see what's in front of them. The better you get, the more that tunnel expands, and the more guys on the field you see.
The fame you earn has a different taste from the fame that is forced upon you
For 60 years, I was the most controversial figure in the country, and suddenly, I'm the most popular man in the land. Truth be told, I don't know when I was happier: then or now.
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