Success Quote by Richard M. DeVos

DeVos frames discouragement as the world’s most abundant natural resource, and he does it with a salesman’s knack for making the obvious feel newly urgent. “God’s green earth” isn’t piety so much as scale: the naysayers aren’t a few bad apples, they’re everywhere, baked into the landscape. By calling them “someone,” he turns a system into a person you can mentally dismiss. It’s easier to argue with a face than with an economy.

The intent is classic entrepreneurial moral psychology: shift attention away from external constraints and onto personal agency. The line doesn’t deny that barriers exist; it implies that the most paralyzing barrier is secondhand certainty. “All the things you cannot do” is deliberately totalizing. It mimics the way doubt snowballs, how one “no” becomes a whole identity of “not for you.” DeVos is selling a counter-script: you don’t need a map of limits, you need a tolerance for other people’s fear.

Context matters because DeVos wasn’t just any motivational voice; he helped build Amway, a company synonymous with direct selling and, to critics, with the blur between opportunity and hype. In that world, discouragement is both enemy and fuel. The quote primes followers to treat skepticism - even reasonable scrutiny - as noise from the timid or the invested. It’s a powerful inoculation technique: if you fail, the problem isn’t the structure, it’s that you listened. That’s why it works, and why it’s dangerous. It can spark grit; it can also anesthetize judgment.