Success Quote by Frederick W. Smith

In a business culture that loves to romanticize the “visionary,” Frederick W. Smith’s line lands because it strips ambition down to its least glamorous requirement: tolerance for visible failure. “Take a swing” borrows from baseball’s clean moral math - you don’t get credit for intention, only for contact - but the real punch is in “and miss,” the part most executives edit out when they’re packaging their origin stories. Smith is signaling a founder’s posture: the willingness to be wrong in public, to spend money, reputation, and time on bets that might not pay off.

The specific intent is practical, almost managerial. It’s permission-giving language aimed at teams and investors: experimentation isn’t a side hobby, it’s the job. The subtext is also defensive. In corporate life, fear of a miss produces safer, slower decisions that look rational on PowerPoint and disastrous in the market. By framing risk as a swing, he recasts “failure” as a normal statistic, not a moral indictment.

Context sharpens it. Smith built FedEx on a high-wire idea - overnight logistics as a system, not a perk - and famously kept it alive through moments when cash, credibility, and timing all looked hostile. In that light, the quote functions as a quiet doctrine of scale: big outcomes require attempts that invite embarrassment. It’s not bravado; it’s an operating principle for anyone trying to build something where the downside is immediate and the upside is asymmetric.