Daily Inspiration Quote by Allan Sloan

Sloan is giving permission to swing hard in a profession that quietly rewards batting average. “Go for the gold” borrows the language of sports and medals, but it’s really a newsroom survival strategy: reputation isn’t built on the steady drip of competent copy; it’s built on a handful of pieces that pierce the noise and get stapled to your byline’s mythology. One great column becomes a credential, a calling card, a career-long citation. Mediocrity, even when reliable, is forgettable by design.

The subtext is a rebuke to the risk-averse incentives of modern journalism: daily quotas, pageviews, incremental takes, and the soft tyranny of being “solid.” Sloan frames “some undistinguished ones” as an acceptable cost of ambition, which is also an ethical claim: that pursuing real insight requires experimentation, and experimentation includes misfires. The line is coaching against perfectionism as much as against laziness.

There’s a pragmatic edge, too. Editors and readers have short memories for minor disappointments but long memories for a column that changes how they see a company, a market, a scandal, a moment. Sloan’s economics-of-attention argument is implicit: the upside of greatness compounds; the downside of the occasional dull piece rarely does.

It’s also a warning disguised as encouragement. If you settle for “constant mediocrity,” you don’t just plateau; you train your instincts to avoid the hard calls, the uncomfortable reporting, the contrarian framing. Over time, the safe voice becomes your only voice. Sloan is pushing writers to keep a little danger in the work.