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Success Quote by Sam Walton

"I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time"

About this Quote

There is no romance of collapse here, no myth of the lone genius struck down by fate. Sam Walton’s line is the blunt internal memo of American retail capitalism: you lose, you recalibrate, you scale. The phrasing matters. “Pick myself up” nods to adversity in a folksy, almost moral register, as if failure is less a market outcome than a character test. Then comes the hard pivot: “get on with it.” Not grieve, not litigate, not tell a story about how unfair it was - move.

The key tell is the repetition: “do it all over again.” Walton’s genius wasn’t inventing consumption; it was systematizing it. This sentence reads like the logic of iteration before Silicon Valley baptized it as “pivoting.” Mistakes aren’t tragedies; they’re data. “Only even better this time” is the quiet aggression underneath the humility. It implies that the past attempt was merely a draft, and that improvement is not optional but expected.

Context sharpens the intent. Walton built Walmart through relentless optimization - logistics, pricing, inventory control - and through a public persona that sold thrift and small-town plainspokenness while waging war on inefficiency and competitors. The subtext is a creed: resilience as a business strategy, self-reliance as public virtue, and progress measured in operational superiority. It’s bootstrap poetry with a balance sheet behind it, inviting admiration while quietly normalizing the idea that the only acceptable response to failure is to come back stronger and take more ground.

Quote Details

TopicPerseverance
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Walton, Sam. (2026, January 15). I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-had-to-pick-myself-up-and-get-on-with-it-do-it-98698/

Chicago Style
Walton, Sam. "I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-had-to-pick-myself-up-and-get-on-with-it-do-it-98698/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-had-to-pick-myself-up-and-get-on-with-it-do-it-98698/. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026.

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Pick Myself Up: A Journey of Resilience and Improvement
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About the Author

Sam Walton

Sam Walton (March 29, 1918 - April 6, 1992) was a Businessman from USA.

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