Napoleon understood something most of us learn too late: that the effort required to achieve fame is trivial compared to the labor of staying visible. The sting in his observation isn't that success fades—everyone knows that—but rather that obscurity doesn't. A brilliant scientist whose research goes unnoticed, or an inventor whose patent gets attributed to someone else, discovers that being forgotten requires no effort at all, while reclaiming recognition demands exhausting, often futile work. This cuts deeper than mere melancholy about mortality; it's a warning that the world's forgetting machine never stops running, grinding down even substantial accomplishments into dust unless we actively, relentlessly tend to them.