Success Quote by Daniel Goleman

Merit gets you through the door; temperament decides who keeps the keys. Goleman’s line is a polite demotion of the IQ fetish that dominated late-20th-century ideas of achievement, especially in corporate and professional culture. The setup matters: “once you are in that field” concedes that cognitive ability, credentials, and baseline competence are real gatekeepers. Then he pivots to the quieter contest that begins after hiring, when performance stops being a solo exam and becomes a social sport.

The subtext is managerial and slightly corrective: your resume may signal potential, but your day-to-day behavior is what people actually experience. “Handle ourselves” does a lot of work here. It frames success not as raw charm or extroversion, but as self-regulation under friction - how you take feedback, manage ego, recover from setbacks, read a room, and avoid turning minor conflicts into institutional drag. “Relationships” is the unglamorous truth of most jobs: you don’t just produce outputs; you navigate dependency. Someone must trust you, champion you, collaborate with you, or at least not dread you.

Contextually, this is Goleman translating psychology into a workplace ethic for a culture obsessed with measurable aptitude. Emotional intelligence becomes a legitimizing language for the soft stuff that everyone knows matters but struggles to quantify. There’s also a subtle redistribution of accountability: if you stall, it’s not the system, the boss, or “politics” alone - it might be your inability to manage yourself in the human mess of work.