Success Quote by Dorthea Brande

Brande’s line is less a pep talk than a tactical reframing of risk. “To guarantee success” dangles an almost fraudulent certainty, then immediately swaps the usual recipe (better planning, more talent) for something more unnerving: behavior. The trick is in “act as if.” She’s not promising you’ll win; she’s prescribing a posture so committed that doubt doesn’t get veto power.

The subtext is an argument about self-sabotage. Most people don’t fail because they lack desire; they fail because they keep one hand on the emergency brake. Acting as if failure is “impossible” doesn’t erase reality, it blocks the mind’s favorite alibi: quitting early so you can preserve the story that you could’ve succeeded if you’d really tried. Brande is aiming at that protective cynicism, the habit of treating ambition as embarrassing unless it arrives pre-approved.

Context matters: Brande wrote in the early 20th century, in the tradition of practical writers who treated creativity and productivity as disciplines, not mystical gifts. Her counsel fits a world where “success” is increasingly tied to self-management - deadlines, output, consistency - and where the biggest obstacle is often internal permission. The sentence works because it’s a dare disguised as a guarantee: adopt the seriousness of inevitability, and you’ll stop negotiating with your own resistance. The risk, of course, is that “impossible to fail” can shade into denial. Brande’s best read is not as delusion, but as a temporary operating system: commit first, audit later.