Success Quote by John Carmack

Carmack’s advice lands with the plainspoken authority of someone who spent his career turning impossible-sounding ideas into shipping code. There’s no mystical “genius” here, no vibes-based creativity myth. The sentence structure itself is iterative: short, directive clauses that mimic the rhythm of engineering work - define a target, reduce it to the next actionable move, repeat. That’s not self-help; it’s a workflow.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to two modern temptations: over-planning and over-identifying with being “smart.” “Keep taking the next step” frames success as accumulation, not epiphany. It’s a morale strategy as much as a productivity one: when the goal is distant, the next step is close enough to be real. Carmack’s version of optimism is procedural.

The most revealing line is the last: “do it both ways and see which works better.” That’s empiricism smuggled into a pep talk. It assumes disagreement is cheap to resolve if you can test, and that certainty is overrated compared to feedback. In tech culture, where arguments can metastasize into ideology (tabs vs spaces, architectures, frameworks), Carmack’s move is disarmingly anti-theatrical: stop performing expertise, run the experiment.

Context matters: this is a builder talking, not a brand. Coming from a figure associated with foundational game engines and later VR, it reflects a world where constraints are real, deadlines are brutal, and progress is measurable. Success, in that environment, isn’t a personality trait. It’s a method.