Life & Wisdom Quote by Norman Ralph Augustine

The line lands like a proverb with a grin: if you have survived hunting lions long enough to be a “veteran,” you didn’t get there by cutting corners. Augustine compresses a whole worldview about competence into seven words, and it works because it smuggles modern performance culture into an old, almost mythic image. “Lion hunters” evokes the kind of work where mistakes don’t just cost you reputation; they cost you your life. In that arena, laziness isn’t a personality trait, it’s a fatal strategy. So the joke is dark: nature already ran the ultimate HR screening.

The intent is less about macho bravado than about systems that punish complacency. Augustine spent a career around aerospace and high-stakes engineering, where the “lion” is complexity: rockets, budgets, deadlines, and physics. In those worlds, the slack get filtered out early, not always fairly, but decisively. Calling the survivors “veteran” suggests repetition under pressure, the grind of competence earned through close calls, postmortems, and incremental discipline.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to institutions that tolerate mediocrity because consequences are deferred or outsourced. If your organization has “lazy veterans,” you’re not hunting lions; you’re playing a game with padded outcomes. Augustine’s cynicism is managerial and cultural at once: seriousness isn’t a vibe, it’s enforced by reality. The irony is that many modern workplaces mimic lion-hunt rhetoric while operating more like safaris, where comfort is subsidized and failure is survivable.