Success Quote by Bruce Feirstein

Feirstein’s line is a neat little grenade lobbed into the cult of “genius”: what we praise as brilliance is often just behavior that survived its trial run. The wit is in the word “measured.” He’s not debating whether insanity and genius are meaningfully different; he’s mocking the instrument we use to tell them apart. Success becomes a yardstick retroactively applied, turning yesterday’s “unhinged” into today’s visionary once the numbers come in.

The subtext is cynical but precise: society doesn’t reward originality so much as it rewards outcomes, and it launders risk through results. An idea isn’t “bold” until it works; it’s “reckless” when it doesn’t. That’s why the same traits - obsession, tunnel vision, social noncompliance - can read as pathology in one person and as artistic purity in another. We claim we’re judging the mind; we’re actually judging the scoreboard.

Feirstein, a writer with a satirist’s ear for social hypocrisy, is also taking aim at the marketplace that canonizes creators. Success here isn’t only money; it’s legitimacy, the permission slip that lets eccentricity become myth. The line has particular bite in cultural industries (film, publishing, tech) where narratives are built after the fact: the flop is evidence of instability, the hit is proof of genius, and the human cost gets reframed as “the price of greatness.”

It works because it refuses comfort. It suggests that our moral and psychological categories aren’t stable truths; they’re labels stapled on by winners.