If you want to be great and successful, choose people who are great and successful and walk side by side with them.
Interpretation
Surrounding yourself with successful individuals can help you achieve greatness.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of association in the pursuit of success. By choosing to walk alongside those who are already great and accomplished, you open yourself to inspiration, learning, and opportunities that can propel you towards your own greatness.
In practice
A speaker at a career development seminar might use this quote to encourage attendees to network with successful individuals.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
That good is the enemy of great is not just a business problem. It is a human problem.
Gratitude is the single most important ingredient to living a successful and fulfilled life.
The most successful people in this world recognize that taking chances to get what they want is much more productive than sitting around being too scared to take a shot.
Look, I have no qualms about having played basketball. The game has done so much for me. Look at the places I've been, for one thing.
I want to define success by redefining it. For me it isn't that solely mythical definition - glamour, allure, power of wealth, and the privilege from care. Any definition of success should be personal because it's so transitory. It's about shaping my own destiny.
That feeling of being the NBA Champion is really unparalleled, because you're the best in the world. Without question. How many people can say that in any profession?
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