Success Quote by Samuel McChord Crothers

Perfection, Crothers suggests, is less a finish line than a factory that mass-produces fresh varieties of disappointment. The line turns the self-help promise of mastery inside out: you can practice, optimize, refine your habits, and still end up with results that look like a gallery of near-misses. What makes it land is the sly pivot from moral seriousness to comic inventory. “Try as hard as we may” nods to the Protestant work ethic of his era - the faith that earnest effort should cash out in improvement - then “net result” arrives with accountant’s dryness, as if the universe has audited our striving and found it charmingly deficient.

Crothers’ real target isn’t laziness; it’s the pride hiding inside perfectionism. The subtext is that the obsession with flawlessness is a kind of vanity: we expect error to be rare, then feel uniquely scandalized when it shows up. His punchline - “surprised at our own versatility” - weaponizes that vanity against itself. If we’re going to be impressed with anything, he implies, it shouldn’t be our control but our creativity in messing up.

The context matters. Writing in a period intoxicated with “progress” - industrial efficiency, scientific management, self-improvement culture in pulpits and popular essays - Crothers offers a humane counter-program. He doesn’t preach resignation; he punctures the fantasy that a perfected self is even the correct goal. The humor gives permission to live with messiness without turning it into a personal failure narrative.