Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Shea

Success is the most respectable form of mission drift, and Robert Shea nails that uncomfortable paradox with a sentence that reads like a calm diagnosis and lands like an accusation. The line doesn’t warn that organizations fail by betraying their ideals; it argues they’re most at risk precisely when they’re winning. Prosperity isn’t treated as reward here but as solvent: it loosens the adhesive that once held principles to practice.

The intent is less inspirational than prophylactic. Shea is speaking to founders, true believers, and institutional lifers who want to imagine their cause is self-preserving. His subtext is that growth creates new constituencies - donors, regulators, shareholders, prestige-seekers, careerists - and each arrives with “reasonable” demands that slowly re-rank priorities. What begins as a movement becomes an employer; what begins as a service becomes a brand. Even sincerity gets repurposed into messaging.

The craft of the quote is its incremental escalation: “succeeds and prospers” sounds like a double blessing, then “likely” introduces statistical chill, and the final pileup - “ideals, principles and purposes” - suggests a full-spectrum erosion, from lofty values to everyday aims. It’s not one bad decision; it’s a drift.

Contextually, Shea wrote in a 20th-century landscape where bureaucracies, corporations, political parties, even countercultural projects learned how to professionalize. His warning fits the postwar rise of large institutions: once an organization becomes legible to power - and profitable within it - it starts optimizing for survival inside the system it meant to challenge.