Success Quote by W. Clement Stone

Stone’s mantra sells persistence with the brisk confidence of someone who made a career out of turning temperament into a business plan. The triple “try” isn’t poetry; it’s cadence as conditioning, a verbal treadmill designed to keep you moving when motivation fails. By the time he lands on “must,” the line stops being encouragement and becomes doctrine: effort isn’t just advisable, it’s compulsory. That’s the voice of mid-century American self-help braided tightly to commerce, where personal development reads like an operating manual for upward mobility.

The subtext is both empowering and quietly coercive. If expertise is a simple function of repeated trying, then quitting becomes a moral failure, not a strategic choice. The messier realities - unequal starting lines, luck, gatekeeping, burnout - get edited out. Stone’s world is one where grit is the great equalizer, a comforting story for strivers and a convenient one for employers and sales cultures that need people to absorb risk personally: if you’re not winning, you’re not trying hard enough.

Context matters: Stone helped popularize “positive mental attitude” and thrived in an era when corporate America was busy translating Protestant work ethic into motivational seminars. The line works because it compresses a whole ideology into a pocket-sized rule: keep producing effort, and expertise (and status) will eventually pay out. It’s less a description of how mastery actually happens than a rallying cry for people who can’t afford to believe otherwise.