The #1 guideline to success is you must be in business for yourself. When you work for someone else, you sell your time at wholesale to your employer, who then re-sells it at retail to the customer.
Interpretation
True success comes from being self-employed rather than working for someone else.
This quote by J. Paul Getty emphasizes the importance of entrepreneurship and self-employment as the key drivers of success. It suggests that when individuals work for others, they are undervalued and their true potential is not realized, as they only receive a fraction of the value they create. Instead, working for oneself allows one to fully capitalize on their skills and efforts.
In practice
During a motivational seminar on entrepreneurship, this quote can inspire aspiring business owners.
Today's dissenters mainly focus their attention and expend their energies on the most inconsequential of trivia. ...Allegedly serious intellectuals quibble endlessly over such ridiculous trivialities...In the meantime, the public is lulled into a perilous somnolence, spoon-fed pap, and palpable untruths, many of which are turned out by special-interest and pressure groups and well organized propaganda machines.
You must not only learn to live with tension, you must seek it out. You must learn to thrive on stress.
In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.
Patience; this is the greatest business asset. Wait for the right time to make your moves.
There is only one way to make a great deal of money; and that is in a business of your own.
To succeed in business, to reach the top, an individual must know all it is possible to know about that business.
The Oscar is very beautiful, utterly mesmeric, but I don't feel any more important because I have won one. It doesn't mean I'm any better than anyone.
I never waited 27 years, because 27 years ago I was just born. My parents never told me, 'If you don't win Roland Garros we take you to the orphanage.
Battles that last five minutes spawn legends that live a thousand years.
The true measure of success for the U.N. is not how much we promise, but how much we deliver for those who need us most.
All of us are born for a reason, but all of us don't discover why. Success in life has nothing to do with what you gain in life or accomplish for yourself. It's what you do for others.
Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, 'She doesn't have what it takes'; They will say, 'Women don't have what it takes.'
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.