Time & Perspective Quote by William Pollard

A clergyman warning you about “the arrogance of success” lands with a particular sting: it frames complacency not as a strategic error but as a moral failing. Pollard’s line borrows the cadence of a sermon, then slips it into the arena of industry and progress. “Learning and innovation go hand in hand” sounds like managerial common sense today, but in Pollard’s mouth it reads as a discipline of humility: learning is the posture; innovation is the proof.

The subtext is theological without naming God. Success tempts you into a false doctrine of permanence, the comforting belief that yesterday’s methods are a kind of earned salvation. Pollard calls that belief “arrogance,” a word that pulls the conversation away from cleverness and toward character. The target isn’t ambition; it’s the lazy triumphalism that confuses having been right once with being right indefinitely.

Context matters. A 19th-century clergyman watched societies get remade by rail, telegraph, urbanization, and the early architecture of modern capitalism. Old institutions learned, sometimes painfully, that authority doesn’t immunize you against change. Pollard’s sentence compresses that historical lesson into a portable ethic for organizations and individuals alike: yesterday’s wins are not credentials, they’re liabilities if they harden into identity.

It works because it flatters and scolds at once. It grants success, then strips it of its usual entitlement. The future, Pollard implies, is not impressed by your resume. It only responds to renewed attention.