Success Quote by Max Lerner

Lerner takes a quiet swipe at what he calls the "success cult" - the modern religion that treats achievement as proof of virtue and failure as a kind of moral debt. The line works because it grants that this cult is real and powerful, then undercuts it with a more stubborn psychological truth: people are stirred less by outcomes than by a certain scale of striving. Not the trophy, but the drama around the chase.

The pivot phrase is "grandness of the effort". Lerner isn't praising hustle or productivity; he's pointing to something almost aesthetic. Effort becomes spectacle, narrative, character. We admire the person who risks embarrassment, exhaustion, or loss because that risk makes a life legible in a way a clean win does not. A goal reached can feel administrative, even inevitable. A goal pursued at high cost - and especially a goal missed after an honest, oversized attempt - reads as human.

The subtext is also a critique of how societies market motivation. If the success cult insists that only results count, Lerner reminds us that audiences routinely cheat that logic: we lionize underdogs, mythologize doomed causes, and canonize artists and activists whose "failure" looks, in hindsight, like integrity. That doesn't erase the harm of outcome-based systems (jobs, status, survival still hinge on winning), but it explains why the culture keeps producing stories where the point is the trying.

As a mid-century journalist watching American ambition harden into ideology, Lerner is arguing for a different metric of worth: not whether you arrived, but whether the attempt was large enough to matter.