Success Quote by George P. Shultz

The line lands like a shrug, but it’s a veteran operator’s philosophy of power disguised as self-deprecation. George P. Shultz, speaking as secretary of state, reduces the job to its smallest verbs: travel, talk, repeat. No fireworks, no cinematic summits, no myth of the lone genius bending history. Just people in rooms, words traded for time, time traded for outcomes that may not show up on a headline schedule.

The apparent confession - “My trips aren’t successful” - is doing two kinds of work. First, it punctures the Washington vanity metric that treats foreign policy as a scoreboard: deals signed, hostages freed, communiques issued. Shultz is reminding you that diplomacy is often measured in negative space: wars that don’t start, crises that cool by a few degrees, misunderstandings caught early. Second, it subtly manages expectations in a domain where “success” is frequently outside any one person’s control. If the public wants a tidy narrative arc, he offers procedural humility instead.

“I just talk to people” sounds almost passive, but it’s the whole strategy. In the Cold War era Shultz inhabited, relationships were infrastructure. Talking isn’t chatter; it’s intelligence-gathering, signaling, testing limits, offering face-saving exits. The subtext is almost countercultural now: statecraft isn’t a viral moment or a decisive tweet. It’s the slow, human labor of keeping channels open when everyone else wants to slam doors for leverage.