Success Quote by Charles F. Kettering

Kettering’s line isn’t the sunny poster-version of confidence; it’s an engineer’s permission slip to be reckless in a very specific way. “Believe and act” yokes mindset to behavior, refusing the modern loophole where you can “manifest” success while hedging your bets in practice. The crucial twist is “as if,” a small clause that admits the obvious: failure is absolutely possible, even likely. But you don’t get to let that possibility dictate your design choices, your experiments, or your appetite for iteration.

Coming from an inventor who helped industrialize innovation at General Motors, the subtext reads less like self-help and more like a production philosophy. The early 20th century was an era when technologies weren’t just improving; they were reorganizing daily life. In that environment, “impossible to fail” functions as a mental model for committing resources past the point of comfort. Real breakthroughs often require a kind of willful blindness to reputational risk, sunk costs, and the chorus of sensible objections. Act like failure isn’t an option, not because the universe owes you success, but because half-commitments generate half-results: timid prototypes, underfunded trials, safe ideas dressed up as bold ones.

There’s also a quiet managerial edge. Kettering isn’t only coaching lone geniuses; he’s speaking to teams who need cover to experiment. “As if it were impossible to fail” creates psychological safety by reframing failure as irrelevant to the task at hand: make the next attempt inevitable, not the outcome guaranteed.