Success Quote by Peter Nivio Zarlenga

The line lands like a cold splash of boardroom water: seeking safety by attaching yourself to someone smaller, weaker, or less capable is not prudence, its self-sabotage. Coming from a businessman, Zarlenga frames refuge as a transaction. You get temporary cover, a place to hide from risk, criticism, or competition. The price is your own agency.

The word "inferior" is doing deliberate work. Its blunt hierarchy feels less like moral judgment than a warning about incentives. When you choose a lesser standard as your shelter, you quietly accept that standard as your ceiling. You start editing yourself downward: ambitions shrink to fit the room, ethics soften to match the company you keep, and your sense of what you can demand (from others and from yourself) erodes. That is the betrayal: not that the "inferior" person is villainous, but that you let fear recruit you into smallerness.

"Refuge" also implies you had options. You could face the storm, or you could hide behind someone who won't challenge you. In business culture, that reads like the politics of mediocrity: aligning with a weaker boss, joining the safe but stagnant team, staying loyal to the wrong mentor because they make you feel secure. The subtext is that comfort can be a career-killer, and sometimes a character-killer.

Zarlenga's intent is bracingly corrective. He's not selling inspiration; he's naming a common coping mechanism and calling it what it is: a quiet form of self-defection.