I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
Interpretation
Success often comes from challenging conventional wisdom and thinking independently.
In this quote, Gilbert K. Chesterton highlights the paradox of success; he suggests that while listening to expert advice can be beneficial, true success may often come from breaking away from that advice and forming one's own path. By doing the 'exact opposite' of traditional guidance, one can discover innovative solutions and unique paths to success.
In practice
In a motivational speech about entrepreneurship.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.
I want to be able to look back and say, 'I've done everything I can, and I was successful.' I don't want to look back and say I should have done this or that. I'd like to change things for the younger generation of swimmers coming along.
I came to Paris with four Γ©cus in my pocket, and Iβd have fought with anybody who told me I was in no condition to buy the Louvre.
I was lucky enough to co-found a business in college that ended up with 400 employees, and I launched 20 different projects while I was there - a project a week.
Those who try to achieve success without hard work ultimately deceive themselves-or worse-deceive others.
A lot of times when you have very short-term goals with a high payoff, nasty things can happen. In particular, a lot of people will take the low road there. They'll become myopic. They'll crowd out the longer-term interests of the organization or even of themselves.
I'm starting to judge success by the time I have for myself, the time I spend with family and friends. My priorities aren't amending; they're shifting.
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