Life & Wisdom Quote by Logan P. Smith

Ambition gets top billing; satisfaction is treated like an elective only a few manage to take. Logan Pearsall Smith compresses an entire modern neurosis into a tidy two-step: acquisition, then enjoyment. The joke, and the bite, is that the first step is socially rewarded and structurally supported, while the second is oddly underdeveloped in most lives. We train for wanting the way we train for careers: goal-setting, striving, self-branding. We rarely train for inhabiting what we’ve won.

Smith’s line works because it flatters and indicts at once. It sounds like practical advice, but it’s really a diagnosis of a culture that mistakes motion for meaning. “To get what you want” implies clarity and agency; “to enjoy it” exposes how quickly desire mutates once met. The subtext is hedonic adaptation before the term existed: achievement doesn’t end craving, it often upgrades it. The “after that” is doing heavy lifting, marking enjoyment not as a natural payoff but as a separate discipline.

Calling the second stage the province of “the wisest” is also a quiet rebuke to the hustle ethos. Wisdom here isn’t intelligence or talent; it’s the ability to stop narrating your life as a ladder. Enjoyment becomes a moral and psychological skill: gratitude without complacency, pleasure without guilt, pride without the need to convert every win into a new target.

Smith, writing in an early 20th-century milieu wary of industrial ambition and status anxiety, anticipates a very current problem: in a world optimized for wanting, contentment looks almost subversive.