Success Quote by An Wang

In one clean sentence, An Wang turns “adapt or die” into a business ethic and a warning shot. The repetition of “change” isn’t decorative; it’s a drumbeat meant to normalize instability as the baseline condition of capitalism. Markets shift. Consumers get bored. The only truly optional variable is you.

Wang’s specific intent is pragmatic: push companies (and the people inside them) to treat reinvention as a discipline, not a crisis response. He avoids romantic language about innovation and sticks to competitive necessity. That matters coming from Wang, a computer-industry pioneer whose own trajectory tracked the brutal speed of tech cycles. In the mid-to-late 20th century, hardware and services didn’t just improve; they became obsolete on schedule. If you ran a firm like Wang Laboratories, you weren’t competing against a single rival so much as against time.

The subtext is sharper: loyalty to a product, a business model, or a personal skill set is a liability when “tastes change.” Wang links corporations and individuals deliberately, collapsing any comforting distinction between organizational strategy and personal relevance. Your job title won’t protect you if the market has moved on; neither will a legacy brand if it keeps selling yesterday’s solution.

There’s also a quiet rebuke to complacency culture. “Choose to compete” suggests agency: no one is owed a market. If you stay in the arena, you accept the terms, and the terms are constant motion.