Success Quote by Richard M. DeVos

The line sells a comforting kind of agency: adjust your outlook and reality will follow. Coming from Richard M. DeVos, the Amway co-founder who helped popularize modern multi-level marketing and a broader self-help-inflected business ethos, that promise isn’t just motivational wallpaper. It’s a worldview that doubles as a business model.

“Life” is cast as pliable, almost customer-service friendly: it “responds,” it “shapes itself,” it “meets” you where you are. Those verbs smuggle in a moral logic without stating it outright. If success arrives, your expectations were healthy; if it doesn’t, the problem is likely your outlook. That’s the subtextual pivot from empowerment to quiet accountability, a rhetorical move that fits entrepreneurial culture’s need to keep failure legible as personal rather than structural. Optimism becomes not merely a mood but a duty.

DeVos’s ellipsis matters, too. “Life...” performs a knowing pause, as if he’s naming a big, unruly force and then taming it with a simple principle. It invites the listener to nod along because it feels psychologically true (placebo effects, confidence, persistence) while skirting harder truths about inheritance, networks, discrimination, and sheer luck.

In late-20th-century American business culture, this kind of language thrived: part Protestant work ethic, part motivational seminar, part sales script. It works because it makes ambition feel ethical and controllable. It also flatters the listener with a seductive idea: your inner narrative is not just a response to the world; it’s the lever that moves it.