Quote of the Day: Charles F. Kettering on Daily Inspiration

If you’ve been waiting for a sign to start your next chapter, at work, at home, or inside your own habits, let this be the permission you need. “The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.” It’s a blunt comfort: resistance is not a signal you’re wrong; it’s often the price of moving forward.

We’re wired to protect the familiar. Routines feel like safety, and traditions feel like identity. So when a new plan, idea, or boundary shows up, the mind interprets uncertainty as danger. That’s why change can attract skepticism, eye-rolls, and even hostility, sometimes from others, often from the part of you that prefers certainty over growth.

Kettering’s line reframes the tension: progress isn’t the absence of discomfort; it’s what discomfort can produce when you direct it. The practical move is to stop asking, “Will this feel easy?” and start asking, “What does this make possible?” Pick one area where you’ve been postponing action, your health, your craft, your relationships, and define a tiny experiment you can run for seven days. Experiments lower the ego’s stakes and turn fear into data, which is the doorway to courage and durable success.

That perspective carries weight coming from Charles F. Kettering, the inventor of the electric starter and a former Vice President of General Motors, someone who helped modernize everyday life by repeatedly improving what “normal” looked like.

Today, choose one change small enough to start and specific enough to measure: send the message you’ve been rehearsing, schedule the first session, ship the rough draft, or remove one friction point from your environment. Let the world grumble, then let your progress speak for you.