A Quote by Sam Walton

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.

Sam Walton

Quote Topics

Wisdom Conventional Conventional Wisdom Go Ignore Other Swim Upstream Way

Quote Author

Sam Walton
American - Businessman
March 29, 1918 - April 5, 1992

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.

Sam Walton

Conventional wisdom is no wisdom at all. Conventional wisdom is taking somebody else's word for the way things are It's the followers of this world who rely on assumption. Not the leaders.

Richard Marcinko

Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.

Sam Walton

Create a vision and never let the environment, other people's beliefs, or the limits of what has been done in the past shape your decisions. Ignore conventional wisdom.

Lionel Robbins, Baron Robbins

If you are the kind of person who listens to conservative advice, you may do okay in life, but you probably won't ever be a fantastic leader. You have to take risks, and you also have to go against conventional wisdom, because conventional wisdom doesn't make for startling advances in society.

Ruth Simmons

Conventional wisdom is invariably out of date. Because in the time it has taken to become conventional - to become what everyone believes - the world has moved on. Conventional wisdom is a remnant of the past.

Michael Crichton

I think that sometimes the Democrats have to run upstream or swim upstream because we've got the Republicans making it out as if we don't care about these things, and we should be able to engage and be willing to engage in the discussion about morality and values.

Barack Obama

The problem in our society is the ego psychology and conventional wisdom about "look out for #1." That conventional wisdom thinks that "love your enemy" is to some a principle no one can ever live by.

Robert Thurman

Highly successful leaders ignore conventional wisdom and take chances. Their stories inevitably include a defining moment or key decision when they took a significant risk and thereby experienced a breakthrough.

Larry Osborne

When you find errors in conventional wisdom-when everyone says A and A is not true-you gain competitive advantage. Only a few times do you have to find errors in conventional wisdom to make a living.

Larry Ellison

Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.

W. C. Fields

I think Rowdy Gaines actually said something like: Katie Ledecky doesn't swim like a man. She swims like Katie Ledecky.And that was a good comment. I swim the way I swim. And I take it as a compliment when somebody says I swim like a man, because, as you said, my stroke is kind of taken after what some of the male freestylers have done. But I'm just trying to go as fast as I can go.

Katie Ledecky

What do you first do when you learn to swim? You make mistakes, do you not? And what happens? You make other mistakes, and when you have made all the mistakes you possibly can without drowning - and some of them many times over - what do you find? That you can swim? Well - life is just the same as learning to swim! Do not be afraid of making mistakes, for there is no other way of learning how to live!

Alfred Adler

The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Crime didn't keep soaring in the 1990s, money alone doesn't win elections, and - surprise - drinking eight glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health. Conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to see through, but it can be done.

Malcolm Gladwell

And for me, I reached the point where I know the way I live my life is not conventional, and so I feel like whatever relationship I do end up in is also not going to be conventional. So I don't operate from feeling like I have to be with someone who is Muslim, or the other way around.