Leadership Quote by Pete du Pont

There is a quiet sales pitch hiding in du Pont's plainspoken shrug: failure isn't a verdict, it's a workflow. The line takes the messy, often privilege-soaked reality of entrepreneurship and recasts it as a steady, almost wholesome habit of mind. Coming from a politician, that matters. He's not just describing founders; he's offering voters a governing ethic that sounds non-ideological but smuggles in a worldview: dynamism good, friction bad, persistence inherently virtuous.

Du Pont, a Delaware Republican tied to one of America's most storied corporate families, understood how the word "entrepreneurial" can function like a moral credential. It doesn't merely denote someone who starts companies; it implies a kind of citizen-hero who learns fast, ignores bureaucracy, and keeps moving. The subtext is a critique of institutions that don't get to "try another" so easily: public agencies, regulators, unions, even democratic deliberation. Those are built to be cautious, accountable, slow. His sentence gently frames that slowness as a character flaw rather than a design choice.

The repetition - "you try... you try..". - is doing rhetorical work. It's hypnotic, self-justifying, a rhythm that makes persistence feel inevitable and therefore right. What's left unsaid is who gets to keep trying after it "doesn't work": who has capital, connections, and a safety net. As political messaging, it's elegant because it turns uncertainty into a virtue while avoiding the harder question of who bears the cost of all those experiments.