"Success follows doing what you want to do. There is no other way to be successful"
About this Quote
Forbes is selling a heresy in a culture that treats ambition like a spreadsheet: the idea that success is downstream from desire, not discipline or status-chasing. The line is built like a hard rule - "There is no other way" - but it’s really a permission slip. It flatters the reader into believing their private wants are not indulgences; they’re strategy.
The subtext is classic Malcolm Forbes: a publisher who lived at the intersection of money, celebrity, and self-mythology insisting that the only legitimate metric is personal agency. Coming from the man behind a magazine that helped define late-20th-century capitalism’s winners-and-losers narrative, it’s a clever reframing. Instead of denying the hunger for success, he moralizes it through authenticity. Want becomes virtue.
It also smuggles in an elitist assumption: that you have the freedom to choose what you want to do, and the runway to keep doing it until it pays off. In the real economy, plenty of people are successful at things they don’t love, and plenty of people love things that never become rent. Forbes collapses those realities into a single, motivating story because motivation is useful - to leaders, to brands, to anyone trying to make risk feel like destiny.
Rhetorically, the quote works because it’s both aspirational and defensive. If you don’t feel successful, the problem isn’t the system, luck, connections, timing; it’s that you’re not aligned with your wants. That’s empowering, and it’s a little ruthless.
The subtext is classic Malcolm Forbes: a publisher who lived at the intersection of money, celebrity, and self-mythology insisting that the only legitimate metric is personal agency. Coming from the man behind a magazine that helped define late-20th-century capitalism’s winners-and-losers narrative, it’s a clever reframing. Instead of denying the hunger for success, he moralizes it through authenticity. Want becomes virtue.
It also smuggles in an elitist assumption: that you have the freedom to choose what you want to do, and the runway to keep doing it until it pays off. In the real economy, plenty of people are successful at things they don’t love, and plenty of people love things that never become rent. Forbes collapses those realities into a single, motivating story because motivation is useful - to leaders, to brands, to anyone trying to make risk feel like destiny.
Rhetorically, the quote works because it’s both aspirational and defensive. If you don’t feel successful, the problem isn’t the system, luck, connections, timing; it’s that you’re not aligned with your wants. That’s empowering, and it’s a little ruthless.
Quote Details
| Topic | Success |
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