"Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down"
About this Quote
Progress, Kettering suggests, is less a lightning bolt than a trip hazard. The line is engineered like one of his inventions: practical, a little cheeky, and designed to get motion out of the reader. “Keep on going” sounds like boilerplate grit until he pivots to “stumble,” a word that smuggles in humility. Breakthroughs aren’t portrayed as the reward for genius posing heroically at a desk; they’re accidental collisions with reality, the kind you only get by moving through it.
The punchline - “I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down” - is pure workshop logic. It carries the maker’s bias: ideas come from friction, from hands-on iteration, from being in the stream of problems where mistakes can happen. Kettering isn’t romanticizing failure; he’s reframing it as evidence you’re in the arena. If you’re stumbling, you’re at least interacting with the terrain.
Context matters. Kettering was a prolific industrial inventor in the early 20th century, a period when American faith in applied science and mass production was cresting. His world ran on labs, prototypes, and deadlines, not solitary musings. The quote reads like a cultural corrective to “waiting for inspiration,” but it also flatters a particular kind of productivity ethic: the belief that motion itself is moral.
Subtext: effort doesn’t guarantee discovery, but stillness practically guarantees stagnation. The only reliable way to meet the unexpected is to keep walking where it might be.
The punchline - “I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down” - is pure workshop logic. It carries the maker’s bias: ideas come from friction, from hands-on iteration, from being in the stream of problems where mistakes can happen. Kettering isn’t romanticizing failure; he’s reframing it as evidence you’re in the arena. If you’re stumbling, you’re at least interacting with the terrain.
Context matters. Kettering was a prolific industrial inventor in the early 20th century, a period when American faith in applied science and mass production was cresting. His world ran on labs, prototypes, and deadlines, not solitary musings. The quote reads like a cultural corrective to “waiting for inspiration,” but it also flatters a particular kind of productivity ethic: the belief that motion itself is moral.
Subtext: effort doesn’t guarantee discovery, but stillness practically guarantees stagnation. The only reliable way to meet the unexpected is to keep walking where it might be.
Quote Details
| Topic | Perseverance |
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