He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
Interpretation
Not taking advantage of opportunities can lead to missed successes.
William James highlights the importance of seizing unique opportunities in life. He suggests that failing to embrace such moments is as detrimental as outright failure, indicating that opportunity and success often come hand in hand, and one must be willing to act to achieve their goals.
In practice
In a motivational speech about career advancement.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
To have made even one person's life a little better, that is to succeed.
Personal discipline, when it becomes a way of life in our personal, family, and career lives, will enable us to do some incredible things.
Failure isn't fatal, and success isn't final.
I never set out to be a businessman
No one's just going to hand you a career. I waited for years for someone to hand me one and it never happened.
I will certainly not join politics. I would like to be remembered as a clean businessman who has not partaken in any twists and turns beneath the surface, and one who has been reasonably successful.
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