Aging & Wisdom Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Failure, in Shaw's hands, isn’t a tragedy; it’s a statistic. The line is engineered to puncture two comforting myths at once: that talent is self-evident early, and that setbacks are evidence you should stop. Shaw reframes embarrassment as data collection, then offers a cold-blooded solution that sounds almost like a joke because it’s too blunt to be inspirational: increase your attempts until probability tilts in your favor.

The wit is doing heavy lifting. “Nine out of ten” has the breezy authority of an empirical finding, as if life were a lab and Shaw the amused technician. That mock-scientific tone masks a sharper subtext: most people quit not because they lack ability, but because they can’t tolerate the social and psychic cost of repeated public failure. Shaw makes persistence sound less like grit and more like refusing to indulge in melodrama. You’re not uniquely cursed; you’re simply in the normal range.

Context matters. Shaw wasn’t a romantic genius mythologizing suffering; he was a professional writer and polemicist who built his authority through volume, revision, argument, and performance. In the churn of late-Victorian and early modern public life - where journalism, theater, and politics rewarded relentless output - “ten times more work” is both practical career advice and a sly jab at genteel notions of effortless brilliance.

The intent, then, is motivational with teeth: stop seeking the permission of early success. Work becomes a way to outlast the math, and the ego.