Life & Wisdom Quote by William Edward Hickson

A neatly buttoned dose of self-reliance, this line flatters the reader while quietly indicting everyone else. Hickson’s phrasing turns “want” into a moral lever: if the outcome matters to you, responsibility follows. “Done well” is the key tell. It’s not about getting something done; it’s about standards, taste, and the anxiety that other people won’t share them. The quote works because it takes a private irritation - incompetence, indifference, half-measures - and converts it into a principle you can live by (or justify yourself with).

The subtext is suspicious, almost proprietary. It assumes quality is personal, not collaborative; that delegation is a gamble; that trust is a luxury. In that sense it’s less a productivity tip than a worldview: control equals competence, and competence is solitary. There’s also a sly psychological payoff. If you do it yourself, you can’t be disappointed by others, and you also can’t be outshone. The motto protects ego as much as it protects results.

In a 19th-century context - an era of expanding bureaucracy, industrial specialization, and social hierarchies built on servants, clerks, and intermediaries - the aphorism reads like a countercurrent. It’s the writerly suspicion of systems: the belief that once a task passes through other hands, it picks up compromise. Still, its bite today is familiar: a sentence that can inspire agency and quietly rationalize micromanagement, depending on who’s wielding it.