A Message to Garcia
Summary: Elbert Hubbard’s 1899 essay holding up Lieutenant Rowan as the model of initiative and follow-through, someone given a task who executes it completely without asking for hand-holding, contrasted against workers who need every detail spelled out. One of Paul’s foundational philosophies.
Sources: A Message to Garcia - Elbert Hubbard.pdf (1899 essay)
Last updated: 2026-07-09
Flagged as a verbatim-indicated source (see verbatim sources): purpose is precise quotability. This is a public-domain classic Paul references, worth quoting exactly rather than paraphrasing.
The story
During the Spanish-American War, President McKinley needed to reach Calixto García, the leader of the Cuban insurgents, somewhere in the Cuban mountains with no reliable way to communicate. Told “there’s a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can,” McKinley gave Rowan a letter. Rowan did not ask where García was. He sealed the letter over his heart, landed on the Cuban coast by night, crossed the island on foot through hostile territory, and delivered it three weeks later (source: A Message to Garcia - Elbert Hubbard.pdf).
Hubbard’s point isn’t the geography or the war. It’s the single fact that Rowan, given a task, “took the letter and did not ask, ‘Where is he at?‘”
The thesis: initiative without hand-holding
Hubbard contrasts Rowan against a hypothetical office clerk asked to look up a brief biographical fact, who responds with a barrage of questions (who was he, which encyclopedia, was I hired for that, is there any hurry) rather than simply doing the task. The essay’s real target is “this incapacity for independent action… this infirmity of the will,” employees who cannot execute without someone else supplying every missing piece of the plan for them (source: A Message to Garcia - Elbert Hubbard.pdf).
The employer who most needs this quality in others, per Hubbard, is the one “striving to carry on a great enterprise,” who grows old before his time managing people who can’t be trusted with an incomplete instruction. “The man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions… is needed, and needed badly.”
How this connects
Close kin to first-wrong-answer: both resolve ambiguity through action rather than returning it to whoever assigned the task. the-doctrine-of-completed-staff-work makes a related argument from the other side of the desk, a staff officer’s job is to deliver a finished answer to the chief, not to bring the chief unfinished questions. Where Completed Staff Work is about not burdening a superior with half-formed thinking, A Message to Garcia is about not needing a superior to fill in the gaps at all. Paul has named both as foundational philosophies.
Tracked as a planned, not yet written LinkedIn post in linkedin post concepts.