When you want success as badly as you want the air, then you will get it. There is no other secret of success.
People who can't rely on their wits and intelligence to reach success -- that's not what government is about, and that's not what I want.
People may recognize me as some sort of superhero, but it's different. Spider-Man and all these other superheroes, they get superpowers and do what they want to save the city. If we need to save Hong Kong, we can't rely on superpowers, we can just rely on the people.
We make films that we ourselves would want to see and then hope that other people would want to see it. If you try to analyze audiences or think there's some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You're making it too complicated.
What I am trying to say is that they need to learn to rely on themselves and to learn from other people, and when you learn something from other people, then you keep moving onward for yourself.
Here is the basic rule for winning success. Let's mark it in the mind and remember it. The rule is: Success depends on the support of other people. The only hurdle between you and what you want to be in is the support of other people.
I want people to see that you don't need to rely on other people to make your dreams happen: you have to grab them yourself.
Failure turns into success. It looks like it happens overnight to other people, but it's just one person's determination to get past a certain goal. Everybody thinks it's an overnight success, but it's not. It's something someone has been working very, very hard on, and more than likely, has been too embarrassed to tell anybody. No one really wants to show other people their failures. They want to show their success.
You've got to be oblivious to other people, the push and pull of other people's opinions, the way other people measure success. It's then that you realize you are 100 percent who you are and you have to use that who-you-are 100 percent in order to create great things.
In places such as Kazakhstan and Mongolia people depend on each other a lot more. We can often be quite detached in the West, with e-mail and telephones, whereas in those countries people rely on each other more. It's lovely because you feel like, although you're a stranger, they respect you as a friend and want to help you.
You think if you make it to the NFL, it's a success. You make it there, but quickly you say, 'I want to be a starter,' and that becomes success. Then it's, 'I want to win a Super Bowl,' and that becomes a success.
The most precise work is generally done by hand, with hand tools. Some people rely on machines for their precision, and my way of working is backwards. I rely on the machines for doing the gross stock removal and then, when it comes to the final refinements and fitting of joints and things, making things work together, I rely more on sharp-edged tools that I push by hand.
The role of a leader is to serve his people. We absolutely must first serve the people who we want to lead. They must be able to rely on the leader as much as we hope to rely on them.
Success: The successful person is willing to do what the unsuccessful person is not willing to do. Draw a profile of success in whatever you are choosing to improve. If you are willing to do what that profile demands, then you have a credible demand of success. If you are not willing to do that then it just will not be there for you. You can't have the one without the other.
I think there's a danger that some people look at the success of my first movie as a fluke. So I want to make sure that my second film is an even bigger success. Then if I direct my third movie and it's terrible, it'll be okay.
Other people want a career or success because they think that will help them find their personal life somewhere. I've done it the other way around. What I have is what everybody else is looking for. I know I've got it made. I know I'm a very lucky man. That came first. Then the music and the career just kind of took care of themselves.