Success Quote by Sam Donaldson

The fantasy Donaldson punctures is the American career myth as a clean graph: talent plus grit equals a predictable climb. Coming from a broadcast journalist who spent decades watching public figures rise, implode, and rebrand in real time, the line reads less like self-help and more like field reporting. He’s saying: I’ve seen the tape. Nobody moves in a straight line.

The intent is practical, almost corrective. Donaldson reframes failure not as a moral verdict but as the default texture of professional life. That matters because the “straight line” story isn’t neutral; it’s a quiet form of gatekeeping. It flatters the winners as uniquely deserving and implies everyone else simply didn’t “have what it takes.” By contrast, “Most people get a little failure” normalizes detours and demotes them from scandal to data point. The smallness of “a little” is doing work: it shrinks the drama, refuses the catastrophic narrative, and makes room for persistence without romanticizing suffering.

There’s subtext, too, about how success is narrated after the fact. Public biographies are edited into coherence; the false smoothness is a PR artifact. A journalist’s ear catches that. Donaldson’s casual cadence (“I mean…”) signals that this is a reality-check offered in plain speech, not a motivational poster. In an era of curated LinkedIn arcs and overnight-success mythology, the quote lands as an antidote: if your path looks messy, you’re not behind. You’re just in the majority.