There’s a meme that hits LinkedIn every few months that is a picture of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes with the quote:
The minute you have a back-up plan, you’ve admitted you’re not going to succeed.
This quote started going around well before Theranos crashed and burned but picked up again because of their situations.
The point being you can find many great CEOs/founders/leaders that are wrong on a subject at some point in the past. Sometimes vocally, wildly and publicly wrong. Warren Buffett is not 100% in his financial plays. Steve Jobs failed at Apple before coming back as a savior. Yahoo was once bigger than Google.
There is a cult of success that sometimes throws up a blanket of “right-ness” around those that seem to live successfully. Reality is far different though. Success comes not from perfection, success comes from timing, process, skill and (more often than people care to admit) luck. If Google had been founded 3 years earlier on the east coast, would it be what it is today? I highly doubt it.
Don’t take your cues from standalone quotes of successful people. I’d much rather read a well-written biography than a quote-a-day calendar of inspirational business quotes.