Daily Inspiration Quote by James Humes

Every audience has felt the slow dread of a talk that refuses to end, and Humes turns that shared irritation into a clean, prosecutorial verdict: the average speaker is guilty of overstay. The line works because it’s both specific and instantly believable. “Ten minutes” isn’t a metaphorical scolding; it’s a measurable sentence. It suggests Humes has timed this offense in the wild, the way a lawyer notices patterns in testimony and starts trusting the clock more than the storyteller.

The intent is practical but not gentle. Humes isn’t advising speakers to “be mindful” or “respect attention spans.” He’s issuing a corrective with teeth: cut. The subtext is that verbosity is rarely about the audience’s needs and often about the speaker’s ego, anxiety, or desire to sound important. Ten extra minutes become a kind of unearned authority grab, asking listeners to pay interest on ideas that stopped earning it.

Context matters: as a lawyer, Humes comes from a culture where time is money, but also where persuasion hinges on restraint. Courtrooms punish rambling; juries drift, judges intervene, arguments collapse under their own weight. In that world, editing isn’t aesthetic polish, it’s strategy.

The aphorism also lands as a quiet critique of public life: meetings, keynotes, panels, all bloated by people mistaking duration for depth. Humes’s “ten minutes” is the margin where credibility dies. Cut it, and you don’t just shorten a speech; you sharpen your authority.