Success Quote by William Faulkner

Faulkner’s advice sounds like the standard “reach for the stars” poster until you notice how ruthlessly it refuses the usual yardsticks. He isn’t telling you to win; he’s telling you to pick a target that makes winning irrelevant. “Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do” is a deliberate provocation: the point is to aim past competence, past what can be neatly planned, into the territory where failure is almost guaranteed. For a novelist who built baroque sentences and entire counties of history, that’s not motivational fluff, it’s a description of craft. You don’t discover new form by staying inside your proven range.

The second move is the sharper one. “Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors” is a rebuke to artistic careerism: prizes, rivalries, the anxious headcount of who’s “important” this decade. Faulkner knew the canon and he knew the petty economics around it; he’s warning that comparison is a low ceiling disguised as ambition. Beating other people can be accomplished by fashion, timing, even luck. That’s not the kind of victory that changes the work.

“Try to be better than yourself” shifts the competition inward, where there’s no finish line and no audience to appease. The subtext is both bracing and grim: your only real opponent is your own taste, your own laziness, your own tendency to repeat what already worked. Contextually, it’s a modernist ethic in plain language: art advances when the maker keeps outgrowing their previous solutions, not when they merely outscore the room.