Satisfaction fails; dissatisfaction succeeds
Dissatisfaction is a powerful incentive to get things done, especially when it is tied to some goal.
Easy success in early life becomes a handicap when it brings self-satisfaction. That is why many child prodigies become has-been in their twenties. Getting what one wants is sometimes worse for later production than not getting it. That is why new crops of self-made men are always coming to the top, why old family businesses pass into new hands.
Without dissatisfaction one is like a watch without a mainspring. The works are all there, but it takes the spring struggling to release itself to make the watch run. American statesman Bernard Baruch’s mother wound him up by telling him, “No one is better than you, but you are not better than anyone else until you do something to prove it.�
Arthur F. Lenehan (1913-77), U.S. editor and epigrammatist, Bits & Pieces, September 14, 1995.
Download a free sampler edition of my latest book, About Canada; click
Easy success in early life becomes a handicap when it brings self-satisfaction. That is why many child prodigies become has-been in their twenties. Getting what one wants is sometimes worse for later production than not getting it. That is why new crops of self-made men are always coming to the top, why old family businesses pass into new hands.
Without dissatisfaction one is like a watch without a mainspring. The works are all there, but it takes the spring struggling to release itself to make the watch run. American statesman Bernard Baruch’s mother wound him up by telling him, “No one is better than you, but you are not better than anyone else until you do something to prove it.�
Arthur F. Lenehan (1913-77), U.S. editor and epigrammatist, Bits & Pieces, September 14, 1995.
Download a free sampler edition of my latest book, About Canada; click
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