Quotes & Sayings About A Successful Career

Sometimes I wonder why I'm a novelist right now. There is no definite career reason why I became a writer. Something happened, and I became a writer. And now I'm a successful writer. — Haruki Murakami

The moment I'm perceived to be even a tiny bit successful, my career will go down the pan. — Toby Young

The simplest way to enjoy lasting success in life is to strike a balance between your career and family. If one must suffer, never it be your family. — Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Make excellent mistakes.
Too many people spend their time avoiding mistakes. They're so concerned about being wrong, about messing up, that they never try anything
which means they never do anything. Their focus is avoiding failure. But that's actually a crummy way to achieve success. The most successful people spectacular mistakes
huge, honking screwups! why? They're trying to do something big, but each time they make a mistake, they get a little better and move a little closer to excellence.
Making mistakes seems risky. It is/ But it's more risky not to.
I'm not talking about random, stupid, thoughtless blunders, though. I'm talking about good mistakes.
Mistakes come from having high aspirations, from trying to do something nobody else has done. — Daniel H. Pink

The '80s were about trying to establish myself as an actor with a career. And being a teenager enjoying the fruits of being successful with lots of what I think is appropriate for that age. — Rob Lowe

I wouldn't say there isn't a direct path to a successful career. There are people who knew exactly what they wanted to do from a very young age, weren't going to be diverted, and then they just went out and achieved it. — Clayton M Christensen

Claim whatever you want. Say you only want a happy family or a successful career or a big house. I say: no, that's not what you want. You'll settle for those things, but you really want a monkey that does your evil bidding. Pullman is a genius just for this. — Maureen Johnson

The difficulty with businessmen entering politics, after they've had a successful business career, is that they want to start at the top. — Harry S. Truman

The secret to a successful career in virtually any field is good public relations. Forget results. Forget the facts. Perception is all that matters. — Jack McDevitt

To have a successful writing career, you must be willing to sacrifice a great deal. The book, the deadline come first before anything else. Writing is not a job; it is a lifestyle, and it is a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows. You need self-confidence and an iron carapace. — Virginia Henley

A successful career is defined as a happy and balanced life. — Deepak Mehra

Remember, you can be exalted without a college degree. You can be exalted without being slender and beautiful. You can be exalted without having a successful career. You can be exalted if you are not rich and famous. So focus the best that you can on those things in life that will lead you back to the presence of God - keeping all things in their proper balance. — M. Russell Ballard

Good questions are those that show that you not only want the job, you are prepared to knock the ball out of the park once you have it. So ask, "What would a successful year in the job look like?" or "What did you most value in the person who left?" You've done a Google search of the field and the company, of course, and one of your questions could be about emerging trends. Interviewers love it when questions relate to them and their accomplishments ("I've heard you made some exciting changes recently. What has the outcome been?"). — Kate White

Here's hoping this book will give wishful actors everywhere the inspiration and encouragement they need follow their dream. They need to know what the life of a working actor looks like and that it is possible to have a successful acting career and a full life without becoming a celebrity or star. — Debbie Zipp

The smart way to build a literary career is you create an identifiable product, then reliably produce that product so people know what they are going to get. That's the smart way to build a career, but not the fun way. Maybe you can think about being less successful and happier. That's an option, too. — Karen Joy Fowler

In order to build a career and to be successful, one has to be determined. One has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music, and to paint when I feel like it. — Saul Leiter

To be successful, look for the job you will take if you don't need a job — Warren Buffett

Every piece of art has a buyer. Only Time decides when the right buyer will see it. — Suzy Kassem

She thought too that women didn't know what to do with themselves these days which could turn them into harridans. Hardly a female friend she knew wasn't miserable. Either mind dumb with children, or in the married condition married to an earnest toiler, or lonely unmarried in their successful career. — J.P. Donleavy

A successful career will no longer be about promotion. It will be about mastery. — Michael Martin Hammer

The human heart is an idol factory that takes good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts deify them as the center of our lives, because, we think, they can give us significance and security, safety and fulfillment, if we attain them. — Timothy Keller

As a career, the business of an orthodox preacher is about as successful as that of a celluloid dog chasing an asbestos cat through hell. — Elbert Hubbard

You look great, Senator.I think I could get used to seeing you wet and naked." Lazily she dipped back to float. "If you ever decide to ditch politics, I imagine you could have a successful career as a lifeguard at a nude beach."
"It's always good to have something to fall back on. — Nora Roberts

Since it was too difficult to get into the Screen Actor's Guild in New York, I moved to Miami in 1982 and started a successful career as a television commercial actress, obtaining my SAG card there. — Donna Rice

I wasn't academically successful. And maybe I've spent a lot of my career trying to make up for that. — Anna Wintour

I was going to be a High School teacher. I was studying at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, up in Canada. I was also acting in a wonderfully supportive theatre community in Edmonton. There's a lot of support for theatre there. So, I was having a great time, but I didn't consider acting as a serious career initially, because even the most successful actors that I know in Edmonton are not super successful. Acting over there is just not a success-oriented career. — Nathan Fillion

My career has been successful, but it's been a grind of hard work. — Emmanuelle Chriqui

One of the things that's different about London and the English market is that theater and film and television are all based in London. It's not quite the same as in the States where if the playwright here wants a successful TV or film career, they're whisked away by Hollywood. — Colin Callender

During my career as a standup and actor, I realized it was very frustrating for me to get hired because Hollywood was hiring a different kind of brother, you know, and I was doing political humor. In order for me to really have a long career, I'm going to have to learn how to write and produce for myself. I had no idea I was really going to like it and I'm very fortunate to be successful. But the idea was to always eventually create something for myself. That was the idea from the beginning when I went into writing and producing. — Larry Wilmore

Standing on the podium at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and receiving a gold medal was the crowning jewel in a successful gymnastics career and, most certainly, the confirmation that my parents' sacrifices were not in vain. — Dominique Moceanu

Brooke Berman's voice is utterly distinct, and her book, detailing her nomadic artist's journey toward both a successful playwriting career and a home of her own, through 20 years of cramped sublets, high-rise palaces, writer's colonies, and boyfriend's vans, is a hilarious, hopeful, and penetrating must-read. — Maria Dahvana Headley

To distract from the president's disappointing record, Team Obama has decided to base their entire campaign on attacking the private sector and Mitt Romney's career as a successful businessman. — Reince Priebus

Truth is, you make albums, and some of those songs are hits, and some of the greatest hits albums have songs that weren't hits. You have a career, the reason why we're still around 10 years is that we do have successful songs. — Adam Duritz

For my whole career in retail, I have stuck by one guiding principle. It's a simple one, and I have repeated it over and over and over in this book until I'm sure you're sick to death of it. But I'm going to say it again anyway: the secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want. — Sam Walton

Rouvier was the Finance Minister; I knew him by sight, although I had not yet met him. He was not widely liked. Apart from the whiff of indecency that Lucien referred to, he was also rumoured to be less than straightforward in his dealings with his fellow men. To put it another way, he was devious even by the standards of politicians; a long and successful career awaited him. — Iain Pears

I was lucky to have a successful career as a model, but that was just a way to pay off my college loans. — Padma Lakshmi

Successful career means a happy and balanced life. — Deepak Mehra

Winning is fun and great, but I would rather have a long, successful and healthy career than a short one with a few wins. — Peter Uihlein

Behind every successful woman is a hungry man. — Ljupka Cvetanova

Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald. — James Rollins

Do what you love and success will follow. Passion is the fuel behind a successful career. — Meg Whitman

It's immoral to parent irresponsibly ... And it doesn't help matters any when prime time tv, like "Murphy Brown", a character who is supposed to represent a successful career woman of today, mocks the importance of the father by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another "lifestyle choice." Marriage is probably the best anti-poverty program there is ... Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV, the national newspapers routinely jeer at [such values] I think most of us in this room know that some things are good, and other things are wrong. — Dan Quayle

Here is an entry from June 12, 1989, three and a half years after my father's death: I feel so helpless sometimes. I know that my destiny is in my own hands, but to what extent? There is so much to think about - family, friends, career, LIFE! Will my grandchildren read this, years from now, and see it as the only thing to remember me by? No legacy? We're here for such a short time. But what exactly are my ambitions? I thought ambition was viewed as bad, as wrong. It turns out it's the key to everything. Where will I be in ten years? I want to be successful. What do I believe in - really believe in? Hell, Megyn, what do you even know about the world? I want to know what my teachers know. Where is it all? In books? I know where it is - it's in years and years of research and experiences. That's not something I can just have. I have to get it all for myself. I'm just sitting here wondering who I really am inside and - who am I to become? — Megyn Kelly

In a race, what matters is not who started first, but who finished first. — Ashok Kallarakkal

A man doesn't amount to something because he has been successful at a third-rate career like journalism. It is evidence, that's all: evidence that if he buckled down and worked hard, he might some day do something really worth doing. — Russell Baker

Entrepreneurship is an addiction to being successful, not a job or career. You have to feed the addiction and recharge from it or you'll burn out. — Ryan Blair

Expertise in a subfield was the key to a successful career as an engineer, and expertise was becoming a necessity for the mathematicians and computers as well. — Margot Lee Shetterly

The classic scenario unfolds like this. An ambitious and successful woman heads down a challenging career path with the thought of having children in the back of her mind. At some point, this thought moves to the front of her mind, typically once she finds a partner. The woman considers how hard she is working and reasons that to make room for a child she will have to scale back. A law associate might decide not to shoot for partner because someday she hopes to have a family. A teacher might pass on leading curriculum development for her school. A sales representative might take a smaller territory or not apply for a management role. — Sheryl Sandberg

If you work hard and you learn and you absorb and you pay attention, career in food is great. This job can take you all around the world. You can eat the most delicious food. It allows you to be creative ... [And] don't ever quit. It's going to pay off eventually. It might not be in a year. Might be 20 years or 10 years. But you have to keep pushing. Just have that fire, have the passion, and want to be successful. And don't listen to anybody else. — April Bloomfield

For me, politics is not a career. For me, my career was being in business and starting a business and making it successful. My life's passion has been my family, my faith and my country. — Mitt Romney

I am alone this evening, and I am alone because of a cruel twist of fate, a phrase which here means that nothing has happened the way I thought it would. Once I was a content man, with a comfortable home, a successful career, a person I loved very much, and an extremely reliable typewriter, but all of those things have been taken away from me, and now the only trace I have of those happy days is the tattoo on my left ankle. As I sit in this very tiny room, printing these words with a very large pencil, I feel as if my whole life has been nothing but a dismal play, presented just for someone else's amusement, and that the playwright who invented my cruel twist of fate is somewhere far above me, laughing and laughing at his creation. — Lemony Snicket

A mother that is successful in raising a good boy, or girl, to imitate her example and to follow her precepts through life, sows the seeds of virtue, honor and integrity and of righteousness in their hearts that will be felt through all their career in life; and wherever that boy or girl goes, as man or woman, in whatever society they mingle, the good effects of the example of that mother upon them will be felt; and it will never die, because it will extend from them to their children from generation to generation. — Joseph F. Smith

In business as well as in everything else, you're in business to spread love. Your agency should spread love, your screenplay should spread love, your store should spread love, your life should spread love. The key to a successful career is realizing that it s not separate from the rest of your life, but is rather an extension of your most basic self and your most basic self is love. — Marianne Williamson

Luck is a component that a lot of people in the arts sometimes fail to recognise: that you can have talent, perseverance, patience, but without luck you will not have a successful career. — Bryan Cranston

There is no plan ... You need to make smart choices, But you can make career decisions for two different types of reasons.
You can do something for instrumental reasons
because you think it's going to lead to something else, regardless of whether you enjoy it or it's worthwhile ... or you can do something for fundamental reasons
because you think it's inherently valuable, regardless of what it may or may not lead to.
The dirty little secret is that insturmental reasons usually don't work. Things are too complicated, too unpredictable. You never know what' going to happen. So you end up stuck. The most successful people
not all of the time, but most of the time
make decisions for fundamental reasons.
They take a job or join a company because it will let them do interesting work in a cool place
even if they don't know exactly where it will lead. They're not fools. They're enlightened pragmatists. — Daniel H. Pink

I am a legal immigrant whose parents went from Russia to China to Chile to finally reach the United States and thereby give me a chance to have a better life. I served six years in the U.S. Army Reserve, went to college, have a successful career and have dedicated my life to being a good citizen. — Mike Medavoy

What is needed at that moment is a step away from the problem so that we can view it in the proper perspective. If a student depressed with his result, could just visualize his entire life and see himself years later in a successful career with a happy family and well cared-for parents, would the marks he has got at this moment matter at all? — Various

I'm lucky that I have whatever I had that makes me have a successful career, if you will. — Robert De Niro

I've had young women come to me and say that before they watched 'Voyager' it didn't really occur to them that they could be successful in a higher position in the field of science; girls going to MIT, girls pursuing astrophysics with a view to a career in NASA. — Kate Mulgrew

I have a friend who is a very successful writer. Early in his career, he wrote a script that I thought was terrible, and I told him so. That was not easy to do, because he had spent the better part of a year working on it - but it was the truth (as I saw it). Now, when I tell him that I love something he has written, he knows that I love it. He also knows that I respect his talent enough to tell him when I don't. I am sure there are people in his life he can't say that about. Why would I want to be one of them? Secrets — Sam Harris

It doesn't matter if you're good. If you're just good, you won't succeed. If you have patience and persistence and talent and that's it, you will not have a successful career as an actor. The elusive thing you need is luck. — Bryan Cranston

The secret of a successful art career is to make more art that folks think they need than pieces they just want. When a piece of art emotionally connects with a person the work becomes a need. You are then on your way to becoming successful. — Jack White

You'll sacrifice a lot of things in the early part of your career to be successful, but to be ahead of your competitors, you have to work hard. — Ivan Glasenberg

I let the whole 'Grease' experience be a springboard for me. I wanted to use the exposure I got from that very wisely to continue a successful career. It's taken a lot of work and perseverance. — Laura Osnes

They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead. — Anne Roiphe

When times are not so prosperous, we think at least our successful career will save us and our families from failure and despair. We are attracted, against our skepticism, to the idea that poverty will be alleviated by the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table ... Some of us often feel, and most of us sometimes feel, that we are only someone if we have made it: can look down on those who have not. The American dream is often a very private dream of being a star, the uniquely successful and admirable one, the one who stands out from the crowd of ordinary folk, who don't know how. And since we have believed in that dream for a long time and worked very hard to make it come true, it is hard for us to give it up, even though it contradicts another dream that we have - that of living in a society that would really be worth living in.3 — Chris Hedges

It's fine to have talent, but talent is the last of it. In an acting career, as in an acting performance, you've got to have vitality. The secret of successful acting is identical with a woman's beauty secret: joy in living. — Rosalind Russell

Successful or not, acts of physical courage always bring honor. It is the smaller forms of valor - standing up for principle at the risk of social disapproval, economic loss or injury to career - that require the greatest moral will power. Since there is usually little upside to winning and a significant and often lasting downside to losing, moral courage often requires as much character as physical bravery. — Michael Josephson

Trust me, I did not set out to establish three pen names and, for the record, I do not recommend it as a career strategy. The idea back at the start was that I would stick with the name that proved most successful. — Jayne Ann Krentz

A successful career has been full of blunders. — Charles Buxton

What I always tell people is ... Unless you are so passionate about filmmaking that you would rather live out of your car than not do it, find something else to do as a career and do filmmaking as a hobby. This industry is one of the hardest to break into and be successful. It takes a lot of passion and dedication for it to get anywhere ... — Ryan Connolly

A lot of times, people think that it doesn't make sense for people to be depressed when they have everything, a loving husband, a successful career, fame and fortune. I wanted to make this point that profound despair can strike anybody. — Miriam Toews

Your ability to build a successful sales career is in direct proportion to the quality and quantity of service you render on a daily basis. — Michelle Moore

Successful people do what others know they should do but will not. To become a success, or just be *more* successful, you will do what average, less-motivated people will not. — Chalene Johnson

When a highly successful leader retires after a long career, it is very unlikely that his successor will be of comparable caliber. Anyone of similar ability and drive would have gone somewhere else, instead of waiting in the wings for years for a chance to show his own leadership. — Thomas Sowell

The thing about writing in America is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it's the wrong thing. It's not a profession. — Jamaica Kincaid

tenure at Treasury was not as successful as his career at Alcoa. Almost immediately after taking office he began focusing on a couple of key issues, including worker safety, job creation, executive accountability, and fighting African poverty, among other initiatives. However, O'Neill's politics did not line up with those of President Bush, and he launched an internal fight opposing Bush's proposed tax cuts. He was asked to resign at the end of 2002. "What I thought was the right thing for economic policy was the opposite of what the White House wanted," O'Neill told me. "That's not good for a treasury secretary, so I got fired. — Charles Duhigg

Young men keep telling me they don't 'have it all' either. And they may have a point. But if you define 'having it all' as the opportunity to have a successful career and a family, I'd say this. When a man tells his coworkers he's going to have a child, no one asks him how he'll manage or if he'll be coming back to work. — Anne-Marie Slaughter

Nature designed with a random set of genes and circumstances in which we were born. To be happy, we have to accept it and make the most of nature's design. Are you? Goals will help you do that. I must add, don't just have career or academic goals. Set goals to give you a balanced, successful life. I use the word balanced before successful. Balanced means ensuring your health, relationships, mental peace are all in good order. — Chetan Bhagat

But it's hard to sustain a successful acting career today. — James MacArthur

If any writer in this country has collected as fine and passionate a group of readers as I have, they're fortunate and lucky beyond anyone's imagination. It remains a shock to me that I've had a successful writing career. Not someone like me; Lord, there were too many forces working against me, too many dark currents pushing against me, but it somehow worked. Though I wish I'd written a lot more, been bolder with my talent, more forgiving of my weaknesses, I've managed to draw a magic audience into my circle. They come to my signings to tell me stories, their stories. The ones that have hurt them and made their nights long and their lives harder. — Pat Conroy

Watching my stepfather and mother working in the industry - acting and composing - and seeing firsthand how difficult it is to achieve a successful career in the theater, I thought it might be safer to go to art school with the aim of becoming a painter. — Juliet Rylance

Having a more experienced and successful counselor guiding someone in a chosen profession is wise decision and good career move. — Jose A. Aviles

Do you want a successful career or a close relationship with your family? Both! Do you want a focus on business or have fun and play? Both! Do you want money or meaning in your life? Both! Do you want to earn a fortune or do the work you love? Both! Poor people always choose one, rich people choose both. — T. Harv Eker

I want to be the first Conor Maynard. I think I want to have a successful career that is unique in its own way. — Conor Maynard

I've never been able to tell jokes. In the beginning of my career I did impressions and jokes like any other comedian, but I was never very successful because I did it poorly. So I started to talk to the audience and started talking about the atmosphere around me and started to become angry, not in a mean-spirited way, but in a fun way - and my attitude developed from there. — Don Rickles

I have no patience for any "fairness"-driven complaints. Life isn't fair, love isn't fair, and as long as we breathe the free air of a capitalistic society, business will never be fair. Thirty years into my career, I have yet to hear a valid "that's not fair" career-related complaint that wasn't related to gender or racial bias. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the people complaining were underachievers that relied on their own lazy standards instead of common sense. They tried to do a good job instead of running a successful business. — Ari Gold

It is impossible to pursue a successful literary career and follow the advice of all one's 'best friends'.I feel compelled to follow the light which my own intellect & judgement cast upon my way, rather than any one of the many conflicting rays which other minds would lend me. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

We need to have a better balance between a deliberate strategy and staying open. Because in the end, most of us end up being successful in a career that we never imagined we would be in at the beginning. — Clayton Christensen

There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too. — Clayton M Christensen

Make sure you work at a place which gives you opportunities to learn, travel, explore, interact with intellectuals and new work skills. — Abhishek Ratna

In 1916, when Johnny Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my studio at the south end of the town at five o'clock one May morning, we had no idea of the immense possibilities, or of the thorny but successful career, that awaited the new invention. On a piece of cardboard we pasted a mishmash of advertisements for hernia belts, student song books and dog food, labels from schnaps and wine bottles, and photographs from picture papers, cut up at will in such a way as to say, in pictures, what would have been banned by the censors if we had said it in words. — George Grosz

Successful people inspire me, and I don't mean just in their career but people who have amazing families, or who have made a difference, or followed their dreams. — Benjamin Stone

He was one of that class of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely different kind of culture, literary or artistic, for which their professional specialisation has no use but by which their conversation profits. — Marcel Proust

Franz's domineering father expected his son to take up a profitable business career that would ensure social advancement for the family, as well as a successful marriage promising the same. — Franz Kafka

When I was new, I didn't know where my career will go. Initially, my films were not even successful, but then I learned a lot from my mistakes. — Aamir Khan

I'm realistic about my career as a novelist. I'm certainly not a superstar and far, far from a household name, but I feel successful. — M.J. Rose

The 'either-or' dogmatism, the stubbornly principled refusal to entertain compromise or concession, had served him well and had invariably proved successful in his political 'career' as long as he was combating weak, divided, and irresolute opponents. But it was a massive and insuperable obstacle when enemy positions were strong and united, when initiative had been irretrievably lost, bargaining power was weakening by the day, and more flexible military tactics and more subtle political skills were desperately needed. Not — Ian Kershaw

My three wishes are just be respected out the game. I want respect from everybody. And just make a successful clothing line and company. I'm not going to put a number on it. Just to have a great career. — Nayvadius Cash

I feel like I had a great career in a way. Maybe not the most successful monetarily or in other ways, but creatively, I feel incredibly fortunate. — Jennifer Jason Leigh