Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Sowell

A good meeting is supposed to be a tool; Sowell treats it as a tell. If someone actively enjoys meetings, he implies, they don’t enjoy decisions, accountability, or the risk of being wrong in public. They enjoy the performance of management: the calendar invitation as a proxy for progress, the conference room as a stage where “alignment” substitutes for outcomes. The line lands because it converts a mundane office habit into a moral diagnostic, and because most readers have lived the punchline: the meeting that multiplies while the work stalls.

Sowell’s economist’s sensibility is doing quiet work here. Meetings are overhead, not output. They’re transaction costs that can be justified only by the value they unlock. When a leader seeks them out for pleasure, the organization is likely optimizing for process rather than results, accruing bureaucracy as if it were capital. The subtext is a critique of institutions that reward visibility and consensus-building over efficacy: if your status comes from chairing the meeting, you’ll keep scheduling them.

Context matters. Sowell is a longtime skeptic of centralized planning and administrative bloat; this quip reads like a miniature theory of governance. It’s also a cultural jab at white-collar managerialism, where “being busy” is safer than making calls that can fail. The irony is that the most competent leaders often don’t hate meetings because they hate people; they hate meetings because they respect time. In Sowell’s worldview, that respect is a prerequisite for being “in charge” of anything real.