Success Quote by Michael Korda

Korda’s line reads like career advice, but it’s really a rebuke to a very modern form of self-betrayal: the prestige-minded habit of enduring work you can’t stand because it looks sensible on paper. By tying “success” to “pleasure,” he flips the usual Protestant bargain (suffer now, earn later) into something more pragmatic and a little ruthless. The implication isn’t that joy magically summons promotions; it’s that sustained excellence is hard to counterfeit. If you’re animated by the work itself, you’ll outlast the people running on dread, status anxiety, or sheer inertia.

The sentence construction does some quiet heavy lifting. “Directly proportional” borrows the authority of math to make a messy psychological truth feel objective. It’s persuasion by tone: clinical language for an emotional claim. Then he punctures that calm with “face the fact squarely and get out,” a novelist’s command delivered like an editor’s note. No therapeutic cushioning, no romanticizing of “paying dues.” Just the blunt recognition that hating your job isn’t a temporary mood; it’s often a structural mismatch.

Context matters: Korda came up through publishing, an industry where glamour and misery frequently share an office. His advice carries the worldview of someone who has watched talented people calcify under roles they accepted for security or proximity to culture. The subtext is almost moral: staying becomes complicity in your own diminishment, while leaving is framed not as indulgence but as strategy. Pleasure, here, isn’t leisure. It’s fuel.