Daily Inspiration Quote by B. C. Forbes

Forbes frames hardship not as a moral test or a tragic detour, but as a performance enhancer: a tonic. That word choice matters. A tonic is taken voluntarily, almost medicinally, to improve vigor. It recasts “difficulties” from random misfortune into a kind of productive dosage, implying that adversity has a proper use and, if you’re disciplined, a predictable payoff.

The intent is unmistakably managerial. As a journalist who built an empire chronicling business, Forbes is speaking in the idiom of the early 20th-century striver: efficiency, self-command, progress through effort. “Should” does heavy lifting here. It’s not describing how people naturally respond; it’s prescribing the acceptable reaction. Difficulty becomes less an external condition than a cue for correct behavior, a switch that ought to flip you into “greater exertion.”

The subtext is both empowering and unforgiving. On one hand, it offers a clean, portable optimism: you can metabolize obstacles into momentum. On the other, it quietly naturalizes a work-centric worldview where the “right” relationship to pain is to extract output from it. If difficulties fail to spur you, the failure starts to look personal.

Contextually, this fits a period when industrial capitalism needed not only labor but belief: narratives that dignify strain as character-building and make endurance feel like upward mobility. Forbes isn’t selling suffering; he’s selling the idea that the strongest response to an unstable world is to tighten your grip and work harder - a creed that still underwrites modern hustle culture, for better and for burn-out.