Wealth & Money Quote by Bill Lear

Lear’s line reads like a manifesto for the mid-century American inventor: life isn’t primarily to be contemplated, confessed, or even enjoyed in the leisure-class sense. It’s to be engineered. The phrase “the best of life” sounds philosophical, but he immediately yanks it out of abstraction and plants it in verbs and systems: “exercise of ingenuity.” Ingenuity isn’t a gift here; it’s a muscle, something you work until it performs under pressure.

The list that follows is the real tell. He doesn’t stop at “design,” the noble, aesthetic wing of invention. He insists on “finance” and “business,” then slips in “flying” as both a literal domain (Learjet) and a symbol of modernity’s glamour. That sequencing matters: ideas aren’t enough; you have to fund them, manufacture them, sell them, scale them. Lear’s subtext is almost combative toward the romantic myth of the lone tinkerer. In his world, the purest creativity is inseparable from commerce.

Context sharpens the intent. Lear built radios, avionics, and the Learjet in an era when American capitalism sold itself as innovation with a patriotic sheen: the Cold War’s technological sprint, the jet age’s status fever, the corporate R&D boom. This quote is also self-justification. It makes a moral claim for ambition: if ingenuity is life’s “best,” then risk-taking, deal-making, even obsession become virtues rather than vices.

What makes it work is its clean refusal of sentimentality. Lear doesn’t ask you to find meaning; he dares you to make it.