Leadership Quote by Richard Lamm

Politics isn’t just compared to theater here; it’s indicted as theater’s more dangerous cousin. Richard Lamm, a working politician rather than a sniping pundit, slips a hard truth into an easy metaphor: public life runs on performance, timing, and exits. The line flatters the listener with “wise enough,” but it’s really a warning about ego. In politics, the temptation is always to stay for one more act, one more election, one more round of applause, until the role starts playing you.

The subtext is about power’s narcotic quality and the way institutions quietly reward overstay. Parties prefer familiar names; donors like incumbents; voters often stick with the known quantity. That ecosystem makes leaving feel like quitting, even when it’s the most responsible move. Lamm reframes departure as craft: a skilled actor understands that the story collapses when a character refuses to exit. A skilled public servant understands that legitimacy can erode the same way, through fatigue, scandal-by-proximity, or simple misreading of the mood.

There’s also a bite of self-protection in the metaphor. Theater suggests artifice, but also dignity: you can bow out intentionally rather than be dragged offstage by defeat, a scandal, or history’s sudden plot twist. For a politician whose career unfolded in the late-20th-century media era, when governance increasingly competed with optics, the line reads as both advice and confession: the job trains you to chase the spotlight, so wisdom is recognizing when the spotlight has started to distort your judgment.