"This is true enough, but success is the next best thing to happiness, and if you can't be happy as a success, it's very unlikely that you would find a deeper, truer happiness in failure"
About this Quote
Korda’s line is a velvet-gloved provocation: it flatters our idealism about “authentic” suffering, then calmly takes it away. The opening concession - “true enough” - nods to the familiar argument that success doesn’t guarantee happiness. But he immediately reframes the debate with a ruthlessly pragmatic ranking: success may not be happiness, yet it’s “the next best thing.” That phrase does a lot of cultural work. It treats success not as a moral achievement but as a functional substitute: stability, leverage, options, insulation from needless pain. Not bliss, but bandwidth.
The sting is in the second clause, where Korda punctures the romantic myth that failure is purer, more soulful, more real. The subtext is almost managerial: if you can’t convert advantage into well-being, why would disadvantage unlock some secret, higher-grade joy? It’s a quiet rebuke to people who fetishize the struggling artist narrative, or who use imagined “truer happiness” as a consolation prize for losses they don’t want to admit hurt. Korda isn’t denying that failure can teach or clarify; he’s denying that it reliably redeems.
Context matters: Korda wrote from inside the machinery of publishing and status - worlds where success brings privileges that are easy to moralize against and hard to renounce. The sentence reads like an industry veteran’s corrective to self-deception: don’t confuse hardship with depth, and don’t outsource your happiness to a hypothetical life where disappointment finally makes sense.
The sting is in the second clause, where Korda punctures the romantic myth that failure is purer, more soulful, more real. The subtext is almost managerial: if you can’t convert advantage into well-being, why would disadvantage unlock some secret, higher-grade joy? It’s a quiet rebuke to people who fetishize the struggling artist narrative, or who use imagined “truer happiness” as a consolation prize for losses they don’t want to admit hurt. Korda isn’t denying that failure can teach or clarify; he’s denying that it reliably redeems.
Context matters: Korda wrote from inside the machinery of publishing and status - worlds where success brings privileges that are easy to moralize against and hard to renounce. The sentence reads like an industry veteran’s corrective to self-deception: don’t confuse hardship with depth, and don’t outsource your happiness to a hypothetical life where disappointment finally makes sense.
Quote Details
| Topic | Success |
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