achievement on Success

Worthy goals are generally motivated by something deeper than success. In her conversations with Nobel laureates, [researcher Xiaodong D.] Lin said she has found that “they all have insatiable passion...

William James, in a famous letter to H. G. Wells in 1906, credited what he called American “moral flabbiness” to “the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpr...

There is a peculiar gratification in receiving congratulations from one’s squadron for a victory in the air. It is worth more to a pilot than the applause of the whole outside world.

Lord Nelson once said that all his achievements in life came down to one simple habit: he was always there a quarter of an hour early, never a quarter of an hour late.

Teams with a vision also perform better. Abraham Maslow is well known as one of the most significant psychologists of the last century. His research into high-performing teams found that the most stri...

When Bob Dylan was recording Blood on the Tracks – possibly the single greatest album in popular music history – he had to deal with a junior recording engineer who “explained” to him that he was goin...

Success is a shining city, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We dream of it as children, we strive for it through our adult lives, and we suffer melancholy in old age if we have not reached it....

Months of struggle, of strategy, of sacrifice all paid off in a landslide victory for President Richard Nixon in 1972. On election night his aide Charles Colson was in the place he had always wanted t...

The Double Helix, James Watson’s 1968 memoir about discovering the structure of DNA, describes the roller coaster of emotions he and Francis Crick experienced through the progress and setbacks of the ...

The politician Helen Violet Asquith (later Bonham Carter) was once attending a dinner with Winston Churchill, who initially seemed lost in abstraction for an awkwardly long period of time. Abruptly he...

The British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory became famous after multiple expeditions on Mount Everest. On a book tour in the U.S. in 1923, people would regularly ask him the question, “why did you wa...

Paul give us an excellent example of what looking at people from a worldly point of view looks like in Philippians chapter 3: If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, ...

When Julius Caesar returned to Rome after many years of fighting its battles abroad, he planned great festivities and triumphal processions to celebrate his victories over Gaul, Egypt, Pontos, and Afr...

Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.

The myth seems to be that you’re born with some magic combination of parents, DNA, and lucky breaks, and they conspire to determine what you accomplish in life. Nonsense. And a good thing, too, becaus...