Success Quote by Sarah Ban Breathnach

Breathnach sneaks a life coach into a language joke, and it works because the punchline flatters both your grit and your intelligence. “Even in the dictionary” is the sly hinge: she takes the most literal, non-emotional authority we have on “what words mean” and recruits it as evidence for an emotional claim about how life works. The line winks at the reader: you already know “striving” and “struggle” come before “success” alphabetically, but you’re being invited to treat that trivial fact like a moral law. It’s a small act of persuasion dressed up as a harmless pun.

The intent is motivational, but not in the chest-thumping way. By grounding the idea in alphabet order, Breathnach lowers the temperature of the advice. The subtext is: if you feel stuck in the unglamorous middle, you’re not failing; you’re simply earlier in the sequence. That reframing matters because it steals shame from the present and loans it to the future. Struggle becomes not a sign to quit, but a sign you’re on schedule.

Contextually, this fits Breathnach’s brand of accessible, spiritually tinged self-help aimed at people juggling ambition and exhaustion. The joke is also a subtle critique of “overnight success” mythology: success doesn’t just arrive, it’s preceded. The dictionary bit doesn’t prove anything, of course, but it doesn’t have to. It functions like a mantra with a smirk, memorable enough to repeat when your willpower isn’t.