Leadership Quote by Charles Simmons

Promptitude gets framed here as something stricter than hustle and softer than command: a moral obligation disguised as etiquette. Simmons, a politician with a career built on timing, is arguing that speed is not merely efficiency but social intelligence. Calling it "a part of good manners" is the tell. He sidesteps the nagging tone of self-help by recoding urgency as courtesy: respond quickly, show up on time, follow through, because other people's time counts. In public life, that reads as respect; in private life, it reads as character.

The line is also a quiet piece of reputational strategy. "Favorable to fortune, reputation, influence, and usefulness" is a politician's inventory of what actually moves in society: money, trust, power, and practical impact. Promptitude becomes the hidden lever behind all four. It's not romanticized as personal virtue for its own sake; it's sold as the habit that makes you legible and reliable to institutions. People don't reward brilliance as consistently as they reward predictability.

Then comes the real subtext: promptitude isn't innate, it's engineered. "A little attention and energy" lowers the barrier, implying that chronic lateness and delayed decisions are less personality quirks than choices. The promise that the habit becomes "easy and delightful" is persuasive politics too: discipline marketed as pleasure. For a mid-20th-century civic mindset, this is a blueprint for social mobility and civic trust, built out of something as unglamorous as doing things now.