Success Quote by Charles Erwin Wilson

Trouble, in Charles Erwin Wilson's hands, becomes a brag disguised as a shrug. "The price of progress is trouble" borrows the moral language of sacrifice: if things are hard, you must be doing something worthwhile. Then he snaps it into a self-serving punchline - "and I must be making a lot of progress" - turning adversity into proof of personal and institutional virtue. It's a neat rhetorical trick for a businessman who spent his career in the machinery of American industry and, famously, at the intersection of corporate power and public life.

The intent is less inspirational than immunizing. If progress automatically generates trouble, then complaints, resistance, bad press, labor unrest, regulatory scrutiny - all of it can be reframed as collateral damage from necessary improvement. The subtext is managerial confidence with a preemptive defense: don't judge me by the mess; the mess is the metric. It's also a way of claiming agency over chaos. Instead of admitting uncertainty or error, Wilson converts friction into a progress report.

Context matters because "progress" in mid-century corporate America often meant scale, speed, and consolidation, with human costs politely filed under "adjustment". Wilson's quip captures the era's faith that modernization is both inevitable and righteous, while winking at the discomfort it produces. The line works because it flatters strivers: if you're catching heat, you're probably doing it right. It's also a warning: when trouble becomes a KPI, the people paying the price rarely get to define what progress is.