Success Quote by Barbara Sher

Isolation is less a lifestyle choice here than a slow-acting sedative: it dulls urgency, blurs possibility, and makes even vivid ambitions feel like private fantasies with no real-world traction. Barbara Sher’s line works because it treats “dreams” not as mystical wishes but as practical projects that require oxygen: other people. The verb “killer” is deliberately blunt. It skips the polite language of “lack of support” and frames solitude as an active threat, the way a silent room can magnify doubt until it sounds like truth.

Sher came up through the self-help and career-design ecosystem that boomed alongside late-20th-century entrepreneurial culture, when personal reinvention was marketed as both liberation and responsibility. In that world, isolation isn’t just emotional; it’s structural. If you’re trying to change careers, start a business, write a book, or rebuild your life, being alone means no mirrors, no deadlines, no feedback loops. You don’t get the soft social friction that keeps a plan from dissolving into “someday.”

The subtext is a rebuke to the rugged-individualist myth that willpower is enough. Sher is saying: motivation is social. Accountability is social. Confidence is, embarrassingly, social. Isolation turns every setback into a referendum on your talent because there’s no community to normalize struggle, troubleshoot strategy, or remind you that progress looks like repetition, not revelation.

It’s also a quiet invitation: don’t wait to feel ready; get in the room. Dreams survive contact with other people.