Success Quote by Roger von Oech

Von Oech is quietly trying to smuggle humility into the meritocracy story. If success and failure feel like moral verdicts, it is because we treat outcomes as identities: you are a winner, you are a loser. His line flips that binary into something more operational. Success and failure aren’t enemies; they’re siblings, born from the same messy routine of trial, error, iteration, and persistence. The intent is pragmatic, almost managerial: stop fetishizing the highlight reel and start paying attention to the pipeline that produces it.

The subtext is a rebuke to the cultural obsession with clean narratives. We love to pretend the successful took a straight path powered by talent and discipline, while the unsuccessful “chose wrong.” Von Oech, a creativity writer best known for making innovation sound like a set of habits rather than lightning strikes, points to the unphotogenic reality: the same process that generates breakthroughs also generates duds, and you don’t get to keep one without tolerating the other. Failure, in this framing, isn’t the opposite of success; it’s evidence that you’re actually running the experiment.

Context matters here. Coming out of late-20th-century creativity and business culture, von Oech is speaking to workplaces and students trained to avoid mistakes because mistakes look like incompetence. He’s offering a psychological hack with ethical edge: evaluate yourself by the quality of your process, not the volatility of your results. That doesn’t romanticize failure; it demystifies success. The line works because it drains drama from the binary and replaces it with agency.