Success Quote by John Fredriksen

There’s a hard-edged ambition baked into this line, the kind that reads like a mission statement and a warning label at once. “Waiting” is framed as passivity, almost a moral failure, while “creating” turns opportunity into something engineered: manufactured through leverage, risk tolerance, and an appetite for chaos that most people politely avoid. For a businessman like John Fredriksen, that phrasing isn’t motivational wallpaper. It’s a worldview shaped by industries where cycles are brutal, timing is everything, and fortunes are made by acting before consensus forms.

The intent is to reclaim agency. He’s not selling patience or faith in meritocracy; he’s selling initiative as the only reliable currency. The subtext, though, is that “opportunity” isn’t neutral. Creating it often means moving faster than competitors, exploiting inefficiencies, and using scale or capital to bend a market in your favor. In shipping and commodities-adjacent empires, you don’t just find openings; you can create them by buying distressed assets, consolidating capacity, or making contrarian bets when everyone else is nursing fear.

It also quietly rejects the comforting story that the world rewards readiness. Fredriksen’s version implies the world rewards force: the ability to decide, deploy, and endure volatility. That’s why the sentence hits the way it does: it’s concise, binary, and impatient. It flatters action-takers, but it also reveals a reality about power - the people who “create opportunities” are often the ones with the resources to make their own luck look like a virtue.