Everyone knows how to use quotes. Some of us also come up with a few that others end up using.

But certain people are responsible for producing some very profound ones (e.g. Emerson, Edison, Socrates, Plato, Hemingway, and many other great minds).

And we all accept that they were truly inspired.

But do people credited with voicing such memorable quotes just come up with them at will? Or is there a process they undergo that leads them to uncover such deep truths?

I once heard a radio presenter use the following quote (credited to a famous American celebrity):

“Success is the result of good judgement. Good judgement is the result of experience. Experience is the result of bad judgement”.

This quote means failures we experience (as a result of bad judgements), actually teach us the lessons we need to learn, in order to make better judgements that will enable us succeed

Edison himself once said:

“Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

Anyone who knows Edison’s story, will readily acknowledge that he uttered those words based on very personal experience.

Today, Many Are Unwilling to Acquire Necessary Experience to Achieve Success

Today however, it appears many people are unwilling to view failure as useful in any way. They look down on anyone who fails – or appears to be failing.

They even avoid failure (by refusing to take any risks), and will often hide all evidence of it when it does happen to them.

What’s more, fewer people are willing to invest time and effort to acquire real or practical experience in their chosen vocations or fields of expertise.

And yet, this is an essential requirement for becoming more capable of making good judgments – as is confirmed in the above quote.

So many people seem to be in a hurry to succeed.

They have no time or patience to learn or apprentice. They just want to jump in and get made INSTANTLY. If the opportunity comes up they’ll even cut corners. Such bad judgement eventually leads them to failure. But they refuse to learn, and so repeat the mistake, again and again.

Incidentally, this problem is quite widespread amongst many who engage in writing as a vocation online.

That’s why we have people who engage in spinning articles, stealing content, plagiarizing others and so on. They simply cannot convince themselves to do the required honest work to get the results they want.

Authentic Success Cannot Be Had By Cutting Corners

Thankfully, Google, other search engines, as well as discerning internet users increasingly ignore them.

Like the earlier mentioned radio presenter pointed out, many successful people we know actually started by recording a lot of failures, till they learnt enough to succeed.

It’s so easy to use quotes. But DOING what the quotes say is a totally different proposition.

Those we quote, often drew from their own experience based knowledge to utter such deeply inspiring and/or enlightening truths.

By following the same process of doing, we can also develop noteworthy expertise in our various fields of interest. And we’ll eventually begin to discover – and share – truths that others will want to put on marble as quotable quotes!

Final Words: Quotable Quotes Come from Paying the Price of “Experience”

It won’t matter how much – or for how long – a person engages in self-delusion. Without practical experience, s/he is unlikely to achieve sustainable and noteworthy success, in any vocation.

When we hear quotable quotes, they often readily make sense. Sometimes we even wonder why we never thought of them ourselves.

And that’s often why they become quotable!

Those who utter them have often been exposed to visual, physical, psychological or even emotional experiences that made them arrive at such powerful insights.

Just like Quotable Quotes, Authentic Writing Success will only come to people who pay the price of experience…by doing it right .

And that, is what “quotable quotes” and “writing success” have in common.

I’ll leave you with the following quote by Ernest Hemingway (taken from Maria Popova’s article on Brainpickings.org). It offers insights relevant to the theme of this article:

“There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them, the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.” – Ernest Hemingway

Just like Edison, Hemingway’s life story reveals that he made the above assertion based on deep personal experience.

The rest of us would be wise to emulate them.