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Who really said it

It's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time

Attributed to Clayton Christensen 1952–2020 · Harvard Business School professor & author of The Innovator’s Dilemma
Attributed In copyright

The line is Christensen’s — that much is not in question, and no competing claimant exists. The source is another matter. Wikiquote files it under The Innovator’s Dilemma ↗ while noting it comes from the introduction to the 2012 edition — so not from the 1997 book the heading names. Elsewhere it is routinely credited to How Will You Measure Your Life? instead. We could not open either text to settle it.

Last verified 17 Oct 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“It's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time” Clayton Christensen (1952–2020). Source contested: cited both to the 2012 introduction to The Innovator’s Dilemma and to How Will You Measure Your Life?. Checked by Quotle.info.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright. A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Clayton Christensen — Harvard Business School professor & theorist of disruptive innovation. Theme: "It's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "It's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Right author, unsettled book

Author
Clayton M. Christensen (1952–2020)
Candidate source
The Innovator’s Dilemma, introduction to the 2012 edition
Candidate source
How Will You Measure Your Life? (HBR essay, 2010; book, 2012)
Verdict
Attribution secure — citation unresolved

It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.

No fuller passage is printed here on purpose. Reproducing the surrounding paragraph would mean copying it from a text we could not open, and a plausible-looking context is exactly the kind of filler this site exists to avoid. The sentence above is the whole of what the sources we could read actually carry.

Clayton M. Christensen — Wikiquote, sourced quotations

How we verified this

  • Wikiquote’s sourced Christensen page ↗ carries the sentence in this wording, under a section headed The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997), with the single-line citation ‘Intro (2012 edition)’.
  • Those two labels contradict each other, and that is our own observation rather than anything the page says: a book first published in 1997 cannot contain the introduction written for its 2012 edition, so the heading and the sub-note cannot both be describing the source.
  • The competing citation — to How Will You Measure Your Life? — appears widely in quote collections, but we were unable to fetch any of those pages from this run, so none of them is linked here and none is being relied on.
  • Neither primary text could be read: hbr.org refused the connection outright, and the Internet Archive’s scan of How Will You Measure Your Life? ↗ is access-restricted, with search-inside unavailable. The citation stays open rather than being guessed.
In copyright

Every candidate source is modern — 1997, 2010 or 2012 — so the rights position is certain even though the citation is not: this sentence is in copyright in the United States and is reproduced here as a short excerpt for identification and comment. We have deliberately not named a rights holder, because that depends on which work it comes from, and that is the thing we could not establish.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Which book is it from?

Nobody is falsely credited here. The error in circulation is about the source, not the speaker.

“The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997)” Mis-sourced

This is how Wikiquote files it ↗, and the citation travels in that form. But the entry’s own sub-note says ‘Intro (2012 edition)’, which rules out the 1997 first edition that the date in the heading points to.

“How Will You Measure Your Life?” Documented but unverified

Widely repeated, and entirely plausible — the 2010 essay of that title argues at length for exactly this position. We could not open the essay or the book to confirm the sentence appears in either, so we are not asserting it.

What can be said without guessing: the words are Christensen’s, and the book they came from has not been established here.

Context

Why 100 beats 98

The argument is in the arithmetic, and it is not the arithmetic you expect. A rule you keep 98% of the time sounds like a rule with a sensible allowance in it. What it actually is, on Christensen’s reading, is a rule you have to re-decide every single time it is tested — because once an exception exists, every new case is a candidate for it.

A rule kept 100% of the time is decided once, in the calm, and never argued again. That is the whole claim: the stricter line is the cheaper one to hold, because it removes the negotiation rather than the behaviour.

An exception is not an allowance. It is a standing invitation to re-open the question.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Character Leadership Wisdom

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wikiquote — Clayton M. Christensenen.wikiquote.org

The sourced quotation page, and the contradictory citation discussed above.
Wikipedia — Clayton Christensenen.wikipedia.org

Life, dates, and the disruptive-innovation work he is known for.
Wikipedia — The Innovator's Dilemmaen.wikipedia.org

The 1997 book one of the two candidate citations points to.
Internet Archive — How Will You Measure Your Life?archive.org

The other candidate source. Catalogued, but access-restricted, which is why this page stops short.
Internet Archive — The Innovator's Dilemmaarchive.org

A scan of the book, likewise access-restricted from this run.

The author

About Clayton Christensen

Clayton Christensen

1952–2020 · Harvard Business School professor & theorist of disruptive innovation

Clayton Magleby Christensen (born Salt Lake City, 6 April 1952; died Boston, 23 January 2020) was the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He coined disruptive innovation in a 1995 article and developed it in The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997), which The Economist cited in calling him the most influential management thinker of his time. He wrote as readily about how to live as about how firms fail, and the two quotations here come from that second strand.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

Christensen, Clayton M. Quoted in Wikiquote, ‘Clayton M. Christensen’, citing the introduction to the 2012 edition of The Innovator’s Dilemma; also widely credited to How Will You Measure Your Life? (2010/2012). Primary text not consulted.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘It's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time’?” Last verified 17 Oct 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/its-easier-to-hold-to-your-principles-100-of-the-time-than/

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