Success Quote by Koichi Tanaka

Success, in Tanaka's telling, is less a triumph than a scheduled interruption to the grind. The line lands because it refuses the usual heroic mythology around invention. Instead of genius-as-lightning, we get genius-as-shift work: long stretches of repetition, incremental failure, and the quiet dread of showing up tomorrow to do it again.

The phrase "occasional visit" is doing sly work. Success isn't a destination you reach through merit; it's a guest that drops by unpredictably, almost arbitrarily. That framing smuggles in a scientist's realism about variance, luck, and the messy ecology of experiments, funding, and timing. It also punctures the performative optimism demanded by institutions that want innovation on a quarterly schedule. If success only visits, then the engineer's job is less to "be inspired" than to keep the lights on long enough for the visit to happen.

Calling it "excitement" also signals a disciplined kind of joy: not euphoria, but a jolt of proof that the work still has yield. It's motivation as feedback loop. In labs and engineering shops, morale can be a technical constraint as real as budget or materials. Tanaka, a working scientist rather than a professional motivational speaker, implies a pragmatic psychology: you bank small wins because they purchase the next day's stamina.

Subtext: the romance is optional; persistence is not. The quote normalizes discouragement without indulging it, offering a dignified model of ambition built on recurrence, not revelation.