Wit & Attitude Quote by Sloan Wilson

Wilson’s line lands like a polite smile that suddenly shows teeth: it flatters the strivers, then turns and indicts the people running the place. The first sentence borrows the comforting meritocratic cliché that hustle beats brains, the kind of wisdom you might find laminated on a manager’s desk. Then comes the trapdoor. If drive is the real currency of advancement, leadership becomes less a test of insight than of appetite: who wants power most, who can outlast, out-network, out-posture.

The joke isn’t just “leaders are dumb.” It’s that our systems often reward a particular kind of competence theater. Energy is visible; intelligence is harder to certify, easier to fake, and sometimes inconvenient. A person with relentless momentum can occupy every room, control the tempo, frame the narrative, and mistake motion for progress. Wilson’s sting is aimed at institutions that confuse intensity with judgment, and ambition with qualification.

As a novelist who spent his career dissecting American status anxiety (especially the corporate, suburban, mid-century kind), Wilson understands how “success” is frequently an outcome of social engineering: charisma, stamina, and strategic blindness can be assets in bureaucracies that prize certainty. The subtext is bleakly funny: if you build a ladder where the key rung is raw drive, don’t act shocked when the climbers arrive without much to say. The line is satire disguised as self-help, and that disguise is the point.