Life & Wisdom Quote by William Feather

Feather’s line needles the great American myth that modern business is smarter, faster, and therefore better. He doesn’t romanticize the past so much as weaponize it: the real scandal isn’t that we lack information, it’s that we ignore what we already know. By picking “not a tenth,” he isn’t offering a statistic; he’s staging an indictment. Most of commerce, he implies, isn’t failing because the world is too complex, but because we’re too distracted, greedy, or impatient to practice basics.

The subtext lands on character before strategy. “Principles” here reads less like clever tactics than old-fashioned disciplines: keep your word, mind your cash flow, treat customers like repeat customers, don’t confuse expansion with health. Feather’s genius is to frame these as inheritance, not innovation. That raises the stakes: if your grandfather understood the fundamentals, your excuses look flimsy. Progress becomes a kind of alibi.

Context matters. Feather wrote through mass advertising’s rise, the boom-and-bust lessons of the Great Depression, and the postwar corporate surge. Each era sold a new promise: techniques, systems, “modern” management. His sentence pushes back against the cult of novelty that business culture loves to monetize. It’s also a quiet critique of American restlessness: we’d rather buy a new method than submit to an old standard.

The intent is motivational, but with a sting. Feather is telling businesspeople that their ceiling isn’t set by the market; it’s set by their self-control. The past isn’t a museum here. It’s a mirror.