Don't be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.
Interpretation
Focus on important tasks yearly instead of overwhelming ambition for the future.
Henry A. Kissinger's quote suggests that rather than overwhelming oneself with excessive ambition, individuals should concentrate on accomplishing the most crucial tasks each year. By prioritizing significant and impactful actions, one can navigate their career path successfully, allowing opportunities to unfold naturally over time.
In practice
In a motivational speech about career advancement, this quote can be used to encourage focus on yearly goals.
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that werenβt realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.
Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.
What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.
I'm just a skinny kid from Glennville, Georgia. I'm going to the Hall of Fame. Not to the Hall of Very Good. The Hall of Fame.
Yes, winning the gold medal was undoubtedly the biggest day of my career - mostly because I won the way I had prepared to run it. It was a totally satisfying experience.
There's no such thing as talent; you just have to work hard enough.
The man who has done his best has done everything.
I've found that small wins, small projects, small differences often make huge differences.
I never thought I'd make it in the NBA, so everything else is gravy.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.