Wealth & Money Quote by Donald G. Mitchell

Ambition, dressed up as moral advice, is doing double duty here: it flatters the reader with the promise of excellence while quietly justifying the era's faith that markets reward merit. Mitchell's line works because it treats "best" as a moral category, not just a ranking. The phrasing "Determine" makes success sound like an internal decision rather than a tangle of access, timing, and patronage. That rhetorical move is the engine of the quote: willpower becomes destiny.

The money claim is the sly hinge. "Almost automatically" is a soothing modifier, suggesting wealth arrives the way gravity does, not the way invoices and gatekeepers do. It's motivational, but it also performs cultural reassurance, smoothing over the anxieties of a nineteenth-century America where professional identity was hardening and capitalism was learning to sell itself as fairness. If you're not getting paid, the subtext implies, maybe you're not truly among the best. The comfort for the winners is obvious; the quiet cruelty for everyone else is built in.

Mitchell, a writer in a period when authorship could be both genteel calling and precarious hustle, offers a bridge between artistry and commerce. He doesn't say "chase money"; he says chase distinction, and money will follow like a respectable chaperone. It's an early, cleaner version of today's "do what you love" ethic: status first, compensation later, with the market cast as an impartial judge rather than a human institution with biases and bottlenecks.