Success Quote by Donald Rumsfeld

The advice sounds like a graduation-card platitude until the last clause snaps it into something colder: success isn’t just merit, it’s performance. Coming from Donald Rumsfeld, a politician and Pentagon power broker who made “known knowns” into a rhetorical brand, “Be yourself” reads less like self-help than like operational guidance. In politics, “yourself” isn’t the private self; it’s the persona you can deploy consistently under pressure.

“Follow your instincts” flatters the idea of decisive leadership, the kind that moves faster than deliberation and treats doubt as weakness. That’s not accidental. Rumsfeld’s era prized executive confidence, and his public image was built on unflappability: the crisp briefing, the quick pivot, the insistence that uncertainty could be managed by force of will and framing. Instinct becomes a substitute for consensus, a way to act first and narrate later.

Then the key: the ability to “carry it off.” Those quotation marks are doing heavy lifting, acknowledging the slightly disreputable truth that outcomes are judged by optics. “Carry it off” is stage language, the politics of seeming inevitable. The subtext is that credibility is not merely earned; it’s projected. If you can make the move look like the right move - calm voice, coherent story, disciplined posture - you buy time, allies, and legitimacy.

In Rumsfeld’s context, that’s both a manual and an indictment: the same performative skill that powers leadership can also launder miscalculation into resolve, at least until reality refuses the script.