"You can't achieve anything without getting in someone's way"
About this Quote
Achievement rearranges the world around it. Pursuing a goal rarely unfolds on an empty field; it takes place amid competing interests, limited resources, and entrenched habits. Abba Eban captures a realist insight: meaningful action inevitably collides with someone else’s plans, privileges, or comfort. To build something new, you occupy space that others counted on, you redirect attention and money, you challenge routines that benefit certain people. Even a benign innovation can disrupt livelihoods; even a just reform can unsettle those who profit from the status quo.
Eban’s career sharpened this view. As Israel’s eloquent diplomat and foreign minister, he operated in arenas where every step created winners and losers, where any concession angered a constituency and any advance provoked a rival. He understood that politics is not mainly a search for unanimous harmony but a management of conflict, the art of assembling coalitions despite the inevitability of pushback. The line distills strategic patience: expect resistance not as a sign you are wrong, but as a predictable cost of moving anything forward.
The claim is not a license for trampling others. It forms an ethical test. If achievement invariably gets in someone’s way, the question becomes whose path you obstruct and how responsibly you do it. Good leadership anticipates the friction, identifies those who will bear the downsides, communicates honestly, offers transition paths, and limits collateral damage. Economics calls this creative destruction; social movements know it as civil disobedience; personal life feels it when setting boundaries or pursuing a demanding ambition.
Avoiding all obstruction confines you to gestures that change nothing. Accepting that friction will come frees you to choose worthy aims and to develop the tact, courage, and empathy that make disruption humane. Progress is not the absence of conflict; it is the wise navigation of it, with eyes open to the people whose footsteps you will necessarily cross.
Eban’s career sharpened this view. As Israel’s eloquent diplomat and foreign minister, he operated in arenas where every step created winners and losers, where any concession angered a constituency and any advance provoked a rival. He understood that politics is not mainly a search for unanimous harmony but a management of conflict, the art of assembling coalitions despite the inevitability of pushback. The line distills strategic patience: expect resistance not as a sign you are wrong, but as a predictable cost of moving anything forward.
The claim is not a license for trampling others. It forms an ethical test. If achievement invariably gets in someone’s way, the question becomes whose path you obstruct and how responsibly you do it. Good leadership anticipates the friction, identifies those who will bear the downsides, communicates honestly, offers transition paths, and limits collateral damage. Economics calls this creative destruction; social movements know it as civil disobedience; personal life feels it when setting boundaries or pursuing a demanding ambition.
Avoiding all obstruction confines you to gestures that change nothing. Accepting that friction will come frees you to choose worthy aims and to develop the tact, courage, and empathy that make disruption humane. Progress is not the absence of conflict; it is the wise navigation of it, with eyes open to the people whose footsteps you will necessarily cross.
Quote Details
| Topic | Success |
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