Success Quote by Walter Scott

Walter Scott isn’t handing out a hustle-poster platitude so much as smuggling a novelist’s worldview into the language of commerce: character beats calculation. The line tilts the scales away from “mental capacities” - raw IQ, training, technique - toward “mental attitude,” a phrase that sounds airy until you hear what Scott is really privileging: temperament under pressure. In business, he implies, the decisive factor is not what you know but how you behave when you don’t know, when the market turns, when pride gets nicked, when risk demands nerve.

The subtext is almost moralistic, in a very early-19th-century way. Scott lived through industrial acceleration, speculative booms, and the churn of modern finance; “business” was becoming less a stable trade and more a volatile arena of credit, reputation, and timing. Attitude here means resilience, patience, and a willingness to keep one’s head when others are panicking - but it also hints at self-command, the ability to resist vanity and impulse. That’s the novelist’s insight: humans don’t fail because the plot is too complex; they fail because they misread themselves.

There’s an irony in Scott’s authority, too. He famously suffered financial collapse after his publisher’s failure and spent years writing relentlessly to repay debts. If this sentence reads like advice, it also reads like a hard-earned diagnosis: talent can be brilliant and still buckle; the mind’s stance toward adversity is what determines whether brilliance becomes outcome.