Success Quote by George Schultz

Schultz’s line is a blunt instrument wrapped in a statesman’s cadence: the moment you narrate your own defeat, you’re already negotiating with it. It’s not magical thinking so much as a warning about the psychology of power. Public life runs on signals. When a leader publicly rehearses failure, audiences don’t hear “prudence”; they hear wavering resolve, and opponents hear opportunity. In that sense, the quote is less about inner confidence than about the external economy of credibility.

The intent is disciplinary. Schultz isn’t banning contingency planning (any serious operator plans for loss); he’s banning the performance of contingency. “Start talking” is the tell. Speech becomes a leak in the hull: it redistributes attention from execution to self-protection, from persuasion to hedging. The subtext is that defeat often arrives first as a story you tell yourself and others, a softening of posture that makes hard outcomes easier to accept. Once you’ve made loss discussable, you’ve made it livable, and that lowers the cost of quitting.

Context matters because Schultz came out of Cold War governance, where bargaining, deterrence, and diplomacy hinged on perceived steadiness. In those arenas, even hypothetical weakness can be exploited; private realism is essential, public doubt is radioactive. The line also captures an older civic ethic: leaders are judged not only by the plans they draft but by the nerve they project. It’s a credo of commitment politics, where willpower is treated as a strategic asset, and “losing” begins long before the final vote, deal, or battle.