Life & Wisdom Quote by Norman Ralph Augustine

It lands like a punchline because it flips the narrative we tell ourselves about productivity. We expect projects to “start slow” and then ramp up into competence, momentum, maybe even brilliance. Augustine’s twist - “and then sort of taper off” - weaponizes anticlimax. The joke is structural: the sentence mirrors the life cycle it describes, beginning with a familiar truism and then quietly draining away, as if the thought itself is losing steam mid-flight. That form-as-content is why it sticks.

The specific intent isn’t just to sneer at laziness; it’s to expose a system. Augustine spent a career adjacent to big institutions, where projects are less heroic quests than bureaucratic organisms: committees, shifting requirements, diluted accountability, incentives that reward motion over outcomes. “Taper off” isn’t failure by explosion; it’s failure by entropy. Meetings continue, slides multiply, timelines “re-baseline,” and the work becomes an exercise in managing the appearance of progress.

The subtext is a warning about how organizations metabolize ambition. Early stages feel honest because the gap between idea and execution is obvious; later stages feel murky because everyone has sunk costs to defend. So the project doesn’t end; it fades, maintained just enough to avoid admitting it was never going to land.

It’s also a tiny piece of cultural realism. In an era of roadmaps, sprints, and hustle theater, Augustine reminds you that decay is the default state unless you design against it.