Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Shea

Careerism gets demoted here from sacred merit to a party trick, and Robert Shea knows exactly how much that stings. By calling advancement in an organization "simply another talent", he strips it of the moral perfume institutions like to spray on promotion: leadership, excellence, vision. No, Shea suggests, getting ahead is a skillset with techniques, tells, and incentives - as learnable and as ethically neutral as chess or painting.

The list does the real work. It escalates from socially celebrated competencies (strategy, art, life-saving surgery) to "pick pockets", a punchline that lands like an accusation. The subtext is that organizations often reward the same traits pickpockets rely on: reading people, timing, distraction, extracting value while maintaining plausible innocence. He doesn't claim all ambition is theft; he implies that the structure of many workplaces makes opportunism functional. When the ladder is built on visibility, alliances, credit-taking, and risk-avoidance, the best climbers aren't always the best builders.

Context matters: Shea wrote in a century obsessed with bureaucracies - corporations, governments, universities - where "fit" and internal politics could outweigh craftsmanship. His line is a quiet rebuke to institutional mythology. Promotions are treated as proof of worth, but Shea frames them as proof of fluency in a particular game, one with its own rules and its own hustlers. The sting is liberating: if advancement is a talent, it can be practiced, resisted, or refused without pretending it's virtue.