Quote by Montesquieu: 'Success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed'

Montesquieu was a French Enlightenment thinker who advocated the separation of powers among the legislature, executive, and judiciary to prevent abuse of power. In 1995, a young online bookseller operating from a Seattle garage put a simple sign on its office wall: "Get Big Fast." To a casual observer, it looked like a typical Silicon Valley promise of rapid growth. But inside the company, founder Jeff Bezos was quietly building infrastructure around a very different timeline. He warned investors early that creating a truly lasting company would take decades, not quarters. When Wall Street demanded quick profits, Amazon continued investing in long-term infrastructure, accepting short-term losses to build a position that could eventually lead to dominance.Bezos was drawing on a reality expressed centuries earlier: “The success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed.”Written by Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, this observation goes straight to the heart of why ambitious projects fail. Most efforts do not fail because the basic idea is wrong, or because the people involved lack talent or determination. They fail because the timeline was wr...