Daily Inspiration Quote by Grantland Rice

Self-reliance gets sold as swagger; Grantland Rice pitches it as training. The line opens with a bracing imperative - "Depend upon yourself" - but the real move is what follows: he makes judgment less a mysterious gift than a discipline you can build. Trust isn’t the reward of good judgment; it’s the prerequisite. "Make your judgement trustworthy by trusting it" is a neat bit of circular logic that works because it names a lived reality: you don’t become decisive by waiting for perfect information, you become decisive by taking responsibility for imperfect calls and learning from the outcomes.

Rice’s context matters. As a journalist who helped shape early 20th-century sportswriting, he lived inside a culture newly obsessed with performance, coaching, and measurable improvement. The muscle metaphor isn’t ornamental; it’s industrial-era common sense applied to character. "Judicious, daily exercise" reads like a regimen: repetition, feedback, gradual overload. He’s importing the athlete’s practice ethic into the office, the newsroom, the masculine code of the time.

The subtext is reputational capitalism. "To be known as a man of sound judgement" isn’t just inner peace; it’s social leverage. Rice is reminding readers that credibility compounds: people hand opportunities to the person who looks steady under pressure. The gendered phrasing ("man of sound judgement") also flags the era’s assumption that public authority is male and that composure is a civic asset. Underneath the motivational varnish is a practical instruction for navigating institutions: act, refine, and let consistency become your calling card.