After a lifetime of swimming upstream, I am convinced that one of the real secrets to Wal-mart's phenomenal success has been that very tendency.

Celebrate your successes. Find some humor in your failures.

Take the best out of everything and adapt it to your needs.

You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.

You can't just keep doing what works one time, everything around you is changing. To succeed, stay out in front of change.

I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they've been.

I loved retail from the beginning, and I still love it today.