Success Quote by Richard M. DeVos

The line lands like a businessman’s version of a punchline: the finish line is a comforting fiction other people need, not the way power actually experiences itself. DeVos frames ambition as perpetual motion, and he does it with a sly rhetorical trap. The question isn’t seeking an answer; it’s designed to make you feel naive for asking. If there were a clear endpoint to wealth-building, empire-making, or “success,” he implies, a competent operator would have hit it long ago. Since he hasn’t, the only logical conclusion is that the game has no agreed-upon end.

That subtext matters because it politely refuses accountability. A finish line would invite judgment: enough profit, enough growth, enough influence. By denying its existence, DeVos converts endless expansion into something like common sense. It’s also a soft flex. “Years ago” signals not only longevity but dominance: he’s been running this race so long that the idea of completion becomes absurd.

Context sharpens the intent. Coming from a corporate founder, the remark doubles as a credo for enterprise culture: growth is virtue; stasis is failure; stopping is for people without vision. It’s motivational on the surface, but it also smuggles in a worldview where accumulation is self-justifying. The line works because it sounds modestly exasperated rather than triumphal, as if relentless striving isn’t a choice but a fact of life. That’s the sleight of hand: ambition recast as inevitability.