High office teaches decision-making, not substance…. A period in high office consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it.

Kissinger is drawing a distinction between the skills demanded by top political leadership and the deeper intellectual work that precedes it. High office, he suggests, trains a person to choose among options under pressure—an executive habit of decision—but it rarely supplies the time or conditions needed to generate new ideas, frameworks, or “substance.” Instead, the daily churn of crises, meetings, and institutional constraints forces leaders to spend down what they already know: their accumulated reading, reflection, and conceptual reserves. The remark functions as a warning against equating prominence with wisdom and as an argument for continual intellectual replenishment outside the machinery of power.