Success Quote by John H. Johnson

Johnson’s line reads like a simple success maxim, but it’s really a compression of how power gets built when the gates are locked. As the founder of Ebony and Jet, he didn’t just “want it bad enough” in some abstract way; he had to invent a market that mainstream media and advertisers either ignored or treated as a risk. In that light, “creative” isn’t about whimsy or brainstorming sessions. It’s code for strategic improvisation: finding distribution routes, visual styles, editorial angles, and business models that could thrive inside a segregated economy and an indifferent publishing establishment.

“Persistent” does the second half of the heavy lifting. It’s not hustle-culture rah-rah; it’s a recognition that talent without endurance gets outlasted by systems designed to wear you down. Johnson’s era demanded repetition as resistance: pitching the same clients, printing the next issue, keeping payroll alive, insisting on Black middle-class visibility when the culture preferred caricature or silence. Persistence here is an economic and psychological stance, not just a personality trait.

The sentence works because it refuses the comforting myth of a single breakthrough. It offers a two-part engine: creativity as the ability to see an opening where others see a wall, persistence as the willingness to push until that opening becomes infrastructure. Coming from a businessman rather than a motivational speaker, it lands as field-tested advice, shaped by the realities of building legitimacy, audience trust, and capital in a country that routinely withheld all three.