Leadership Quote by Abraham Lincoln

The line reads like grit with a quiet fuse. Lincoln isn’t romanticizing destiny; he’s putting it on notice. “I will prepare” is the active verb that matters, a declaration that history rewards readiness more reliably than it rewards wishful thinking. The second half - “some day my chance will come” - is the humility that keeps the ambition from sounding arrogant. He doesn’t name the chance, doesn’t demand a timetable, doesn’t claim he deserves it. He simply assumes that opportunity is not a miracle but a recurring event, and that the prepared mind gets to recognize it first.

The subtext is a political worldview built from scarcity. Lincoln came up without pedigree, money, or a guaranteed platform. For someone outside the old networks, “chance” is code for access: the opening created by contingency, crisis, or the sudden failure of established men. He’s telling you that merit is not self-executing; it needs a moment to attach to. Preparation becomes both armor and leverage.

In context, it also sounds like an early draft of the leadership style that would later define him: patient, self-educated, structurally minded. Lincoln’s career was a long apprenticeship punctuated by defeats and detours, and this sentence makes peace with that tempo. It’s not motivational fluff; it’s a strategy for surviving a world where the stakes are real and the gatekeepers are many. The brilliance is how it turns waiting into work.