Success Quote by James A. Michener

Michener’s line lands like a travel brochure that suddenly turns into an autopsy. He starts with the familiar romance of motion - “the journey” - a phrase that in lesser hands would be pure uplift. Then he tightens the screw: the real itinerary isn’t cities or careers or even love, but the harder, lonelier work of “find themselves.” The syntax makes that discovery sound less like a weekend epiphany and more like a lifelong migration, something “men and women make” as if compelled by gravity.

The kicker is the cold accounting in the second sentence. “If they fail in this” reads like an objective diagnosis, not a pep talk. Michener isn’t interested in the sentimental version of selfhood; he treats it as the primary currency of a life. Without it, every other acquisition becomes decorative: knowledge, status, possessions, even adventure. “It doesn’t matter much else what they find” is deliberately dismissive, flattening the modern obsession with optimization into a simple verdict: you can rack up experiences and still come home missing.

Context matters because Michener made a career out of epic, outward-bound narratives - wars, migrations, civilizations in motion. That breadth can seduce readers into thinking meaning is out there, somewhere on the map. This line quietly reverses the premise: the world is vast, but the only discovery that redeems the miles is interior. It’s also a subtle critique of American striving: ambition without self-knowledge doesn’t just disappoint; it nullifies.