Success Quote by John McDonald

Enduring success, McDonald implies, is less about domination than about timing: you don’t conquer the world so much as arrive a step early, then make that step look inevitable. The line has the clipped confidence of 19th-century leadership culture, when “progress” was treated as both a moral project and a competitive advantage. In an era of railroads, telegraphs, industrial scale, and expanding markets, being ahead wasn’t a lifestyle flex; it was structural power. If you reached the future first, you could name it, standardize it, legislate around it, and sell it back to everyone else.

“Travel” does sly work here. It softens what could be a ruthless doctrine into something almost gentlemanly: not scheming, just journeying. “A little” is equally strategic. McDonald isn’t advocating reckless futurism or utopian leaps; he’s recommending incremental lead time, the kind that keeps you legible to the public while still positioning you as the guide. The subtext is paternalistic but savvy: people resist being dragged; they’ll follow if you look like you’ve simply found the clearer path first.

There’s also an implicit warning to leaders who mistake popularity for permanence. If you move only at the pace of prevailing opinion, you’re not leading; you’re echoing. McDonald’s sentence flatters the disciplined visionary: stay close enough to the world to understand it, far enough ahead to shape what it will call “common sense” once it catches up.