Happiness Quote by Branch Rickey

Branch Rickey’s line reads like a locker-room pep talk, but it’s really an argument about what makes achievement feel real. “If things don’t come easy, there is no premium on effort” flips the usual complaint about hardship into a kind of economic logic: struggle is the price tag that gives success its value. Rickey isn’t romanticizing pain; he’s insisting that ease cheapens outcomes. If the win costs nothing, it means nothing.

The subtext is classic Rickey: disciplined optimism with teeth. As the baseball executive who engineered both the farm system and Jackie Robinson’s signing, he lived in a world where “pursuit” wasn’t abstract self-help language. It meant grinding through unglamorous development, taking bets on potential, and absorbing backlash when the stakes were social as well as competitive. “Joy in the chase” isn’t naïve cheerleading; it’s a coping strategy for long timelines and public pressure. You don’t get to control the scoreboard, but you can control whether the process has “zest.”

That word choice matters. “Joy” and “zest” turn effort from punishment into identity. Rickey is coaching the psyche: if you only feel alive at the finish line, you’ve built a fragile motivation that collapses under losing seasons, injuries, or history moving slower than you want. The quote sells a tougher idea: loving the work is how you endure when the reward is delayed, disputed, or uncertain.