Success Quote by E. Joseph Cossman

A businessman telling you to stop obsessing over other people sounds like a Hallmark pivot, until you notice the shrewdness hiding in the humility. Cossman is smuggling an ethic of ambition into a moral frame: keep the engine running, just stop crashing it into the next car. “Get ahead” stays in the sentence on purpose. He doesn’t reject competition; he reroutes it inward, where it’s harder to measure, harder to fake, and, not incidentally, harder for rivals to steal.

The line works because it attacks a common cultural alibi: the idea that success is primarily a scoreboard, not a practice. “Ahead of others” is an unstable target; it makes your identity dependent on someone else’s pace, someone else’s luck, someone else’s starting line. The subtext is risk management. External comparison invites shortcuts, resentment, and fragile confidence. Self-competition invites compounding: skills accumulate, discipline hardens, judgment improves. That’s a better long-term asset than momentary status.

Put in a business context, it’s also a quiet rebuke to zero-sum thinking. Companies (and people) can’t outmaneuver every competitor forever, but they can outgrow their own bottlenecks: bad habits, weak systems, ego, distraction. The phrase “our business in life” is the tell. It borrows the language of commerce to argue for an internal balance sheet: progress as personal operating profit, not social domination. In an era of constant metrics and public ranking, it reads less like self-help than like a strategy memo for staying sane while still trying to win.