Success Quote by Jose Bergamin

Bergamin’s line doesn’t romanticize failure; it demotes it. “Ready” is doing the quiet heavy lifting here: not hoping to fail, not fetishizing mistakes, but treating failure as an expected toll on the road to anything real. The phrase “prepared for success” smuggles in a rebuke to the culture of spotless trajectories. If success is the prize, then failure is the training regimen, the testing ground where vanity gets sanded down into craft.

As a writer, Bergamin is also talking shop. Writing is a profession built on drafts that don’t work, jokes that land wrong, arguments that collapse under their own cleverness. The subtext is anti-precious: you can’t protect your ego and produce something alive at the same time. Being “ready to fail” means you’re willing to publish the imperfect sentence, take the public no, revise, and keep your nerve when the work refuses to cooperate.

Context matters: Bergamin’s Spain moved through dictatorship, exile, and ideological trench warfare in the 20th century. In that atmosphere, failure isn’t just personal embarrassment; it can be social risk, political cost, reputational damage. The quote reads like a compact ethic for creative and civic life: courage isn’t optimism, it’s stamina. Prepare for failure, and you stop letting fear masquerade as prudence. That’s when success becomes possible, not as destiny, but as an earned byproduct of trying hard in public.