Success Quote by Richard M. DeVos

DeVos packages risk-taking as common sense, but the line is really a moral alibi for the culture he helped sell: if you lose, you simply didn’t “venture” hard enough. The phrasing is almost catechistic - “impossible… unless” repeated like a sales mantra - and it does important work. It doesn’t just praise courage; it narrows the definition of success until it can be framed as a personal choice rather than a social outcome. The race is already assumed to be fair, the battlefield already assumed to reward the brave.

The paired metaphors (“race,” “battle”) pull from two arenas Americans instinctively romanticize: sport and war. Both are clean narratives with winners, losers, and a satisfying sense that effort maps onto result. That’s not accidental. For a businessman whose legacy is tied to entrepreneurial evangelism and a worldview that treats enterprise as character formation, these metaphors convert economic life into a test of virtue. Work becomes a proving ground; hesitation becomes a moral flaw.

The intent is motivational, but the subtext is disciplining: don’t ask for guarantees, don’t ask who set the rules, don’t linger on structural barriers. Just run. Just fight. In the late-20th-century American business climate - booming self-help rhetoric, celebratory capitalism, “anyone can make it” mythology - this kind of sentence operates like a pocket-sized ideology. It flatters the striver, comforts the already successful, and quietly reassigns responsibility for failure back onto the individual.