Success Quote by Allen Neuharth

Neuharth’s line has the clean, bracing pragmatism of an executive who watched reputations rise and collapse on quarterly clocks. It sounds like encouragement, but it’s also a cultural corrective aimed at a particular American pathology: the worship of seamless ascent. By insisting on a “big way” failure, he rejects the polite, résumé-friendly stumbles people rebrand as “learning experiences.” He’s talking about the kind of loss that leaves marks on your ego, your bank account, maybe your standing in the room. The point isn’t masochism; it’s calibration.

The “before forty” detail is doing more work than it seems. Forty is a social border: old enough to have accumulated authority, young enough to still be remade. Neuharth is essentially arguing for inoculation. Take your collapse while you still have time, stamina, and fewer dependents, so you don’t become the risk-averse manager whose identity is welded to never being wrong. There’s a stealth critique of corporate America here: the higher you go, the more incentives you have to avoid big bets, and the more you punish people who tried and missed.

Context matters. Neuharth built USA Today by betting against newsroom orthodoxy, packaging, and the gatekeeper culture of “serious” journalism. That kind of disruptive confidence tends to be forged less by uninterrupted success than by surviving public misreads. The subtext is almost managerial: if you’ve never failed loudly, you probably haven’t attempted anything ambitious enough to justify your salary.