Success Quote by Jerry Greenfield

That opening shrug - "I guess" - does a lot of quiet work. Jerry Greenfield, best known for building Ben & Jerry's into a cultural brand as much as a business, frames ambition as a kind of private, almost sheepish emotion: "harboured hopes". The verb makes optimism sound smuggled, held close, protected from the glare of quarterly expectations. It's an entrepreneur talking, but not in the usual Silicon Valley register of domination and disruption. This is patience dressed up as humility.

The line is also a neat piece of expectation management. He admits he wanted speed - the universal itch of founders, activists, and anyone trying to bend systems that resist being bent - while refusing to let delay define the outcome. "Things" stays deliberately vague, a rhetorical hedge that keeps the statement portable: it can apply to sales, policy change, social impact, or personal milestones. That vagueness is strategic. It invites listeners to project their own timeline anxieties onto his and then borrow his composure.

The real subtext is emotional discipline. "I'm not disappointed" isn't a celebration; it's a refusal to perform frustration. In a business culture that rewards intensity and impatience, Greenfield offers an alternate posture: progress can be slower than you'd like without becoming a referendum on whether it was worth doing. Coming from a businessman associated with values-forward branding, it also signals a long game - the kind where success isn't just measured by how fast you scale, but by whether you can keep your ideals intact while you wait.