Time & Perspective Quote by Chris Hughes

“It takes time” is the kind of mild sentence that quietly carries a power move: it reframes public skepticism as a scheduling issue, not a legitimacy problem. Coming from Chris Hughes, the Facebook co-founder who later tried to steer social change through platforms and institutions (from The New Republic to philanthropic projects), it reads like startup pragmatism repurposed for civic life. Don’t panic about the slow uptake; growth curves exist outside tech, too.

The intent is reassurance, but it’s also expectation-management. Causes want urgency. Organizations want runway. Hughes stitches them together by insisting that familiarity is the missing ingredient, as if awareness naturally matures into trust. That’s optimistic - and strategic. If attention is a scarce resource, “time” becomes a way to justify continued fundraising, continued messaging, continued patience from stakeholders who’d prefer results now.

The subtext nods to a modern problem Hughes knows well: legitimacy is increasingly mediated by exposure. People don’t “get to know” a cause the way they meet a neighbor; they encounter it through feeds, headlines, donor decks, and reputational proxies. In that landscape, an organization isn’t just doing the work; it’s doing the work of being recognized as the kind of entity worth believing.

Context matters: post-2010s, trust is brittle, institutions are suspect, and even “good” causes are competing with scandal cycles and cause fatigue. Hughes’s line is a sober admission that the hardest part of advocacy isn’t only changing policy or raising money. It’s earning the slow, unsexy currency of credibility in an attention economy that rewards instant takes.