Daily Inspiration Quote by Diane Sawyer

Sawyer’s advice lands with the breezy candor of someone who’s spent a career under lights bright enough to bleach out excuses. The line is funny because it punctures the myth of the “natural” broadcaster: the embarrassing mistakes aren’t a risk, they’re a guarantee. By framing failure as inevitable, she quietly removes the shame tax that keeps young journalists overpolishing, overcredentialing, and waiting for permission to begin.

The specific intent is pragmatic career guidance: choose a smaller market where the stakes are lower, the feedback loop is faster, and you’re forced into reps. In local TV you write, shoot, edit, field-produce, improvise when the live shot collapses, and learn to pronounce the mayor’s name correctly at 6:01. That grind doesn’t just teach skills; it builds a tolerance for imperfection, the most undervalued trait in a profession that pretends to be seamless.

The subtext is even sharper: visibility is a currency, and you should spend it wisely. Mistakes are unavoidable, so make them when they’re cheap. There’s also a defense of local journalism embedded here. Small stations are cast not as consolation prizes but as laboratories - places where you’re allowed to be human before you’re expected to be authoritative.

Contextually, Sawyer’s coming-of-age era in broadcast news rewarded apprenticeship and ladder-climbing; you didn’t “go viral,” you earned a market. In today’s internet-wide audience, her point hits harder: the crowd is always bigger than you think, which makes deliberate smallness a strategy, not a detour.