Leadership Quote by A. J. Liebling

The joke lands because it takes the peppy American gospel of self-improvement and turns it into slapstick self-harm. Liebling borrows the cadences of motivational uplift - "try long enough and hard enough" - then yanks the rug with a grotesquely practical outcome: not success, not virtue, just the satisfaction of proving you can injure your own dignity through sheer persistence. It's optimism rewritten as masochism.

Liebling, a journalist who made a career out of puncturing pomposity, aims this at the kind of moral bookkeeping that treats effort as its own proof. The subtext is that willpower isn't inherently noble; it's merely powerful, and power applied blindly can be disastrous. You can work tirelessly at the wrong thing, cling to a bad plan with heroic stamina, or double down on an ego-saving mistake until it becomes a full-body bruise. The "posterior" keeps it genteel enough for print while still evoking the childish humiliation of getting caught out by your own grand ideas.

Context matters: mid-century America was thick with bootstraps mythology, corporate hustle, and a faith that grit solves structural problems. Liebling's wisecrack functions as an inoculation against that national sermon. It also reads as newsroom wisdom: deadlines, rivalries, and overconfidence make self-sabotage less a tragedy than a professional sport. The line isn't anti-effort; it's anti-self-deception. Persistence, Liebling suggests, is not a compass. Without judgment, it's just a longer route to kicking yourself.