Time & Perspective Quote by Howard Schultz

Schultz packages a hard-edged creed in the soft clothing of optimism: life is not a lottery, its a test of attentiveness and nerve. Calling existence "a series of near misses" is a clever reframing. It acknowledges how often things almost work out, how frequently timing and circumstance threaten to undo you, while still insisting the gap between failure and breakthrough is where character shows up. The line flatters the listener with agency, but it also disciplines them: if you missed, you probably didnt see, didnt move, didnt commit.

The subtext is classic American striver mythology, updated for the late-20th-century corporate hero. Schultz, who rose from a working-class background to build Starbucks into a global brand, isnt speaking as a philosopher; he's defending a worldview that makes his own ascent feel both earned and replicable. "A lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all" is less a neutral observation than a moral argument: luck is an alibi people use to avoid responsibility. The quote quietly delegitimizes structural explanations (class, networks, geography) without naming them, replacing them with a more palatable directive: seize the day.

Its most persuasive move is the pivot from personal discipline to quasi-prophetic vision. "Seeing what other people don't see" turns entrepreneurship into perceptual virtue, implying that success belongs to those with uncommon clarity. That rhetoric does real cultural work: it converts market domination into a kind of civic contribution, a reward for better vision rather than better leverage. The result is motivating, even bracing, but also conveniently self-justifying for anyone already on the winning side of the "near miss."