Success Quote by Øystein Stray Spetalen

Spetalen’s line is motivational on the surface, but it’s also a power move: a wealthy businessman rewriting the story of success so it sounds earned, orderly, and repeatable. “Not about luck” is less a factual claim than a moral boundary. It draws a clean line between winners and everyone else, implying that failure is mostly a deficit of discipline or imagination, not a collision with bad timing, inherited constraints, or structural gatekeeping. In a business culture that loves meritocracy as branding, it’s a comforting narrative: the market isn’t random; it’s a scoreboard.

The phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. “Clear vision” flatters the speaker’s class: people with capital get to call their preferences “vision” and fund them until they look inevitable. “Working towards it every day” elevates grind into virtue, and subtly shifts attention away from the messier ingredients of business success: networks, asymmetric information, access to financing, and the occasional regulatory tailwind. It’s a quote built to travel well on LinkedIn because it turns ambiguity into a routine.

Context matters: coming from a Scandinavian financier known for blunt, high-stakes deals, the statement reads like a defense of the system that rewarded him. It’s less a universal rule than an ethos: treat outcomes as controllable, treat uncertainty as background noise, and treat the right to win as proof you deserved to. The subtext is managerial: if you didn’t make it, you didn’t “work towards it” properly. That’s the motivational kick and the ideological alibi in the same sentence.