Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles F. Kettering

Kettering’s line lands like a thumb on a bruise: habit isn’t just lazy, it’s suspect. The phrasing is engineered for a workshop, not a seminar. “Always” is the trigger word, a little alarm bell for any process that’s calcified into ritual. Then he slips in “probably,” a modest hedge that actually makes the jab sharper. He’s not preaching certainty; he’s calling for a default posture of skepticism. In an inventor’s mouth, that’s less philosophy than survival tactic.

The intent is managerial as much as it is creative. Kettering spent his life inside the machinery of American innovation, notably at GM, where big organizations can turn yesterday’s workaround into tomorrow’s sacred rule. This is a line meant to puncture that institutional complacency. It gives permission - even an obligation - to question “the way we do things,” especially when success has made people superstitious about their methods.

The subtext is a critique of tradition as a false credential. “We’ve always done it this way” sounds like evidence, but it’s often just a way to end an argument and protect someone’s status. Kettering flips that social logic: longevity isn’t proof of correctness, it’s a clue that nobody’s been allowed to revisit the premise.

In the industrial 20th century, when electrification, mass production, and consumer technology kept rewriting the rules, repeating the past wasn’t conservative; it was reckless. The quote works because it turns innovation from a personality trait into a discipline: treat routine as a hypothesis, not a shrine.