Leadership Quote by Kitty O'Neill Collins

A politician telling you to "write down" unwelcome advice is a small masterclass in power, memory, and motive. Kitty O'Neill Collins isn’t romanticizing tough love; she’s giving you a practical survival tactic. In politics, the most useful guidance is often the least pleasant: the budget reality check, the warning about a colleague’s hidden agenda, the reminder that your blind spot is showing. You won’t like it because it costs you something right now - pride, comfort, momentum. Her line treats that dislike as evidence, not a veto.

The emotional trigger is doing a lot of work. "Him who loves you" smuggles in a high bar for credibility: not the advisor who enjoys being right, not the critic who wants leverage, but the person with skin in your future. Love here is less sentiment than accountability - someone invested enough to risk your irritation. That’s a rare commodity in public life, where flattery is cheap and candor is professionally dangerous.

The command to write it down is the hard-nosed part. It assumes that in the moment, you will rationalize, forget, or rewrite what you heard. Putting it on paper turns advice into a receipt, something you can’t easily mythologize later. Collins’ subtext is that time will change your taste; what you reject today may read as obvious tomorrow. The note becomes a bridge between your present defensiveness and your future clarity.