Success Quote by Guy Laliberte

“I don’t believe in pitfalls” is a deliberately provocative line from a man whose brand was built on turning the unsafe into the spectacular. Guy Laliberte, Cirque du Soleil’s co-founder, talks like an entrepreneur but thinks like a showman: the sentence rejects the whole culture of caution that dominates corporate life. A “pitfall” is what management consultants warn you about; Laliberte’s move is to deny the category entirely, as if failure isn’t a trap in the road but a prop you can repurpose.

The subtext is confidence bordering on defiance: if you’re truly inventing, you can’t obsess over what could go wrong without shrinking the idea to something already familiar. That’s why the second sentence lands harder. “Taking risks” is common startup rhetoric; “not doing the same thing twice” is the more stringent ethic. It’s a commitment to novelty as a discipline, not a mood. It also hints at an anti-industrial stance: repetition is for factories, not for art, and Laliberte’s core pitch was always that entertainment could be scaled without becoming standardized.

Context matters: Cirque emerged when traditional circus was a declining, animal-centric format. Laliberte’s innovation was to hybridize circus technique with theater, design, and music into a premium experience. In that world, “pitfalls” aren’t avoided; they’re edited, rehearsed, and transformed into risk you can sell. The quote isn’t naive about danger. It’s a manifesto for forward motion: if you keep repeating yourself, you’re not safe-you’re already obsolete.