Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeffrey Skilling

"It was a very difficult 10 years of very hard work" is the kind of sentence that tries to launder a legacy through sheer exertion. Jeffrey Skilling frames a decade not around outcomes, harm, or accountability, but around effort: difficult, hard, work. The repetition is the point. It’s a rhetorical smokescreen built from bland virtues, the corporate equivalent of saying, "I did my best", while carefully not naming what that "best" produced.

The specific intent is to re-center the story on him as a striver rather than a perpetrator. In a scandal defined by manipulation, he reaches for the most culturally protected alibi in American life: labor. Hard work is supposed to redeem. It’s also supposed to signal merit, even when the merit was deployed toward extraction. The sentence asks the listener to feel sympathy for the pressure of the job and to mistake endurance for innocence.

The subtext is a quiet demand: judge me by my internal experience, not by the external wreckage. It’s a move familiar to disgraced executives and public figures alike: swap moral language for managerial language, replace victims with timelines, convert fraud into stress. A "difficult 10 years" is vague enough to be relatable, and that’s what makes it slippery.

In context, coming from the former Enron CEO, the line reads like reputational triage. It gestures toward sacrifice while refusing the one hard noun the moment requires: responsibility.