Success Quote by David Joseph Schwartz

“Look at things... as they can be” is the kind of managerial optimism that isn’t trying to sound poetic so much as operational. David Joseph Schwartz, a businessman and motivational author, is speaking from a mid-century American confidence that treated mindset as a profit lever: change your perception and you change your outcomes. The ellipsis does a lot of work here. It implies a pause, a corrective breath, a gentle interruption of the default setting most workplaces run on: risk scanning, problem listing, rehearsing why something won’t fly.

The intent is pragmatic: train yourself to see possibilities before constraints calcify into policy. It’s not asking you to fantasize; it’s asking you to prototype a better frame. In business culture, “as they are” often becomes a story people tell to defend inertia. “As they can be” shifts the story from describing reality to designing it. That’s a subtle power move: it relocates agency from the market, the boss, or “the way things work” back to the individual or team willing to imagine an alternate version and then pursue it.

The subtext also carries a warning: cynicism feels like intelligence, but it can be a form of laziness. Vision, in Schwartz’s world, is discipline. You don’t wait for conditions to improve; you rehearse the improved condition until it becomes a plan, then a budget line, then a product. In an era when corporate language can be allergic to candor, the bluntness is refreshing: your first job is to refuse the tyranny of the present tense.