Walk into a motivational poster shop, scroll through a LinkedIn feed at six in the morning, or attend a corporate team-building seminar, and you will almost certainly encounter some version of a cheerful maxim about success living in cans while failure dwells in can’ts. The quote has achieved a peculiar kind of immortality in our age—not the solemn, canonical immortality of Shakespeare or Lincoln, but something more resilient and democratic. It appears on Instagram, in self-help books, printed on desk calendars, whispered by coaches to athletes before the big game. Parents cite it to children struggling with math homework. Therapists invoke it in sessions about overcoming limiting beliefs. What accounts for this remarkable staying power is not the profundity of the idea—which is, at its heart, quite simple—but rather the elegant marriage of wordplay and psychology it achieves. The quote manages to be simultaneously clever and sincere, funny and urgent, easy to remember and difficult to dismiss. It works because it appeals to something fundamental in the human condition: our hunger to believe that success is not a matter of luck or destiny, but of our own will and determination.
Before we can properly understand the quote’s journey, we must first reckon with the man most commonly credited with it: Evan Esar, an American humorist and prolific quotation compiler whose name appears in dictionaries of humor and wit throughout the twentieth century. Esar was born in 1899 and spent much of his career collecting, curating, and commenting upon the wisdom and follies of human speech. He was not a great original thinker in the philosophical sense, nor was he a famous public intellectual whose every utterance was transcribed and archived. Rather, Esar occupied a more modest but no less important cultural niche: he was a professional noticer and arranger of words, a man who understood that the real work of wisdom often lies not in originating new ideas but in recognizing the power of existing ones and giving them new contexts and audiences. His book “Humorous English,” published in 1961, became a standard reference work for teachers, students, and anyone interested in the wit and wordplay embedded in the English language. It was in this collection that Esar presented the “success comes in cans” formulation to a broad readership, lending it the authority of his editorial judgment and his reputation for discernment.
Yet here we encounter the first and most important truth about this quote: it is not originally Esar’s, and attributing it solely to him represents a common and instructive form of misquotation. According to the meticulous research conducted by Quote Investigator, the saying’s actual origins stretch back much further than 1961. The earliest documented version appeared anonymously in “The Hartford Courant” of Connecticut in 1907, presented simply as a maxim for the day: “Success comes in cans. Failure in can’ts.” No author was credited, no grand claim was made. It was presented as folk wisdom, the kind of thought that circulates through newspapers and magazines without a clear source, gradually acquiring the patina of universal truth. In 1909, the saying appeared again in “The Chicago Live Stock World,” still without attribution. By 1911, when A. K. Karlson of Portland, Oregon published an article about the canning industry, he included the phrase as if it were already well-established enough to serve as a casual closing sentiment. The wordplay was so effective that it inspired variations and elaborations. A 1913 advertisement in Long Beach actually expanded the conceit, describing a man who had “knocked the T off c-a-n-t” to leave “CAN”—transforming the visual pun into a near-physical feat of will.
The quote continued to evolve throughout the early twentieth century, taking on different forms as it moved through different contexts. A 1920 high school in Heavener, Oklahoma adopted the phrase “Success comes in cans—I can, you can, we can” as its official motto, introducing the grammatical conjugation that would become one of the most popular versions. This refinement is particularly significant because it shifts the quote from a simple play on words into a more genuinely inspirational statement about collective human capability. By conjugating the verb across first, second, and third person—by saying “I can,” “you can,” “we can”—the quote transforms itself from mere wordplay into a statement about democratic possibility and shared responsibility. It suggests that success is not the province of a select few, but rather a capability that extends across all persons and all groups. This version proved so resonant that by 1922, multiple high schools had adopted similar mottos, each making minor adjustments to suit their particular needs or sensibilities. Evan Esar encountered this rich tradition of quotation when he was compiling “Humorous English” in the late 1950s, and he recognized in it something worth preserving and presenting to a new generation of readers.
To understand the deeper meaning of this quote, we must look beyond the obvious wordplay and recognize what philosophical work it is actually performing. On the surface, it trades on the homophonic similarity between “can” (the auxiliary verb expressing ability and possibility) and “can” (the metal container). But this linguistic accident becomes the vehicle for expressing something psychologically and morally serious: the idea that the container of success is filled not by fortune or fate or the whims of others, but by our own willingness and effort. The quote articulates what we might call a philosophy of voluntary agency. It insists that between the desire for success and its achievement lies a single crucial variable: belief in one’s own capacity. To say “failure comes in can’ts” is to suggest that failure is not imposed upon us from without, but that we often fail because we have preemptively limited ourselves through negative self-talk and doubt. This is not a claim that success is easy or that willpower alone conquers all obstacles. Rather, it is a claim that negative self-conception is itself an obstacle, and perhaps the most formidable one, because it prevents us from even attempting what we might otherwise achieve. The quote thus functions as a kind of mental hygiene—a reminder that we are often our own greatest impediment.
In the decades following its inclusion in “Humorous English,” the quote achieved an almost ubiquitous presence in American motivational culture, a presence that has only intensified with the rise of social media and the internet’s appetite for inspirational content. It has been quoted in commencement addresses at colleges and universities. It appears in countless self-help and business motivation books. Sports coaches, life coaches, and corporate trainers have adopted it as a core principle. The phrase has been translated into other languages and shared across cultural boundaries, suggesting that the human appetite for reassurance about our own capacity for success is genuinely universal. What is perhaps most interesting about the quote’s cultural journey is how it has managed to remain relevant across vastly different historical moments. When it was first printed in 1907, in a newspaper addressed to an industrial audience, it spoke to an age of entrepreneurship and self-improvement. When high schools adopted it as a motto in the 1920s, it spoke to the dreams of young people coming of age in the twentieth century. Today, when it circulates on social media and self-help platforms, it speaks to an age that is simultaneously more competitive and more anxious about individual achievement than ever before.
The practical wisdom embedded in “Success comes in cans. I can, you can, we can” operates on multiple registers simultaneously. At the most immediate level, it offers a simple cognitive technique: when you find yourself saying “I can’t,” the quote invites you to pause and examine whether that statement is factually true or whether it is merely an expression of fear, doubt, or lack of motivation. Often enough, when we examine such statements closely, we discover that we can indeed accomplish the task at hand—we simply don’t want to, or we fear the effort, or we doubt ourselves without good reason. The quote functions as a gentle but firm invitation to distinguish between actual inability and mere reluctance or anxiety. At a deeper level, the quote speaks to the importance of collective belief and mutual encouragement. The conjugation “I can, you can, we can” acknowledges that individual success is not achieved in isolation but in relation to others, and that part of what makes success possible is our willingness to believe in one another’s capacities. This has profound implications for how we relate to the people around us. If we internalize the philosophy expressed in this quote, we become the kind of people who encourage rather than discourage, who point out capacities rather than limitations, who help others believe in themselves.
In our contemporary moment, when self-doubt and imposter syndrome have become almost epidemic, when anxiety about failure haunts many of us even in moments of achievement, the words “I can, you can, we can” retain a peculiar power. They offer no false promises and make no claims about the inevitability of success or the absence of real obstacles. What they do offer is something simpler and perhaps more valuable: a reminder that our own willingness and effort matter, that we are not merely passive recipients of fortune, and that our capabilities are more vast than our fears often allow us to recognize. The quote survives not because it is original to any single author, but because it expresses a truth that each generation must rediscover for itself: that the greatest barrier to success often lies not in the world around us, but in the internal conversation we maintain with ourselves about what is possible. Evan Esar, in choosing to include this anonymous saying in his collection, recognized this enduring truth and helped ensure that future readers would have access to it. In doing so, he performed the essential work of the quotation editor—not claiming credit for wisdom, but recognizing it, preserving it, and passing it forward to those who would need it.