Daily Inspiration Quote by Russel Honore

There is a particular kind of candor in a career soldier admitting he once saw the uniform as temporary. Honore is describing a bargain with himself: stay long enough to earn rank, credibility, maybe a pensionable foothold, then exit before the institution becomes your whole identity. The phrase "I told myself" matters. It frames the plan as private self-management, the mental accounting service members do when they’re trying to keep agency inside a system built on orders, timelines, and hierarchy.

The subtext is that the military rarely lets you keep that bargain clean. "Until I reached major" is a precise milestone: not a romantic "serve my country" endpoint but a bureaucratic rung that signals you’ve crossed from promising officer to real middle management. Major is where you stop being purely a doer and start being responsible for outcomes, people, and messes you didn’t create. That’s also where the institution starts rewarding you in ways that make leaving harder: deeper specialization, stronger networks, more sunk cost.

Contextually, Honore’s public persona is shaped by high-stakes, highly visible leadership (most famously, disaster response). That kind of work doesn’t fit neatly inside a prewritten exit plan. The line reads like a retrospective admission that competence can trap you: you become the person who can handle chaos, and the system keeps finding chaos for you to handle. It’s less a confession of wavering commitment than an insight into how service careers extend themselves one promotion, one crisis, one "just a little longer" at a time.