Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles F. Kettering

Kettering’s line carries the brisk confidence of an inventor who’s watched teams burn months “solving” the wrong thing. It’s a rebuke to the heroic myth of innovation as sudden inspiration. In his world, progress came from disciplined framing: define the failure mode, isolate the variables, name the constraint, and the path forward stops looking like magic and starts looking like engineering.

The specific intent is practical, almost managerial. Kettering isn’t praising eloquence; he’s prescribing a method. “Well stated” implies a translation process: messy reality turned into a workable model. The subtext is that most problems aren’t difficult because the tools are missing, but because the question is sloppy. If you can state it clearly, you’ve already smuggled in assumptions about causes, boundaries, and what “solved” even means. That’s why it’s “half-solved”: you’ve done the cognitive labor that prevents waste.

Context matters. Kettering helped industrialize invention at General Motors, where complexity wasn’t romantic, it was expensive. When you’re coordinating chemists, machinists, and executives, the bottleneck isn’t effort; it’s alignment. A crisp problem statement becomes a social technology: it gets a room of specialists pointed at the same target and makes accountability possible.

There’s also a quiet warning here for modern culture, where we argue about symptoms as if they were causes. Labeling a situation is power: it determines what data counts, who gets heard, which solutions are “reasonable,” and which are dismissed as off-topic. The sentence works because it flatters clarity while exposing how rarely we earn it.