Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeffrey Skilling

There is something almost chilling in how bland this line is. Skilling isn’t defending a strategy, disputing facts, or offering remorse; he’s narrating. The sentence is padded with temporal scaffolding ("as we built", "in the 1990's") and conversational crutches ("Well", "as I said") that soften the edges of what history now treats as a corporate crime scene. That’s the intent: to domesticate the era, to make the whole Enron saga sound like any other start-up war story told over coffee.

The key verb is "enjoyed". It’s a tell, and it’s also a tactic. "Enjoyed" centers personal sensation over public consequence, shifting the moral frame from responsibility to experience. Skilling’s pleasure becomes the headline, while the cost of that pleasure - distorted markets, shredded pensions, and the wreckage of trust in American business - is left offstage. Even "the business" is evasive: a neutral, almost wholesome phrase that avoids naming the machinery of manipulation and accounting theater that made Enron famous.

Context matters because the 1990s were the decade that taught America to worship disruption without asking what was being disrupted. Enron sold itself as brainy, modern, inevitable. In that cultural climate, enjoying the build wasn’t a confession; it was a credential. Read now, the line lands as accidental candor: not the thrill of serving customers or creating value, but the adrenaline of building a system clever enough to look like success until it collapsed.