Quotes about Work

This is not a book for the wild-haired crazies your company keeps in a corner. It is a book for you, your boss, and your employees, because the best future available to us is a future where you contriubute your true self and your best work. Are you up for that?

We hire for perfect, we manage for perfect, we measure for perfect, and we reward for perfect. So why are we surprised that people spend their precious minutes of self-directed, focused work time trying to achieve perfect? The problem is simple: Art is never defect-free. Things that are remarkable never meet spec, because that would make them standardized, not worth talking about. Rough

Emotional labor is the task of doing important work, even when it isn't easy. Emotional

As Susan Kare, designer of the original Mac interface, said, "You can't really decide to paint a masterpiece. You just have to think hard, work hard, and try to make a painting that you care about. Then, if you're lucky, your work will find an audience for whom it's meaningful.

A day's work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters.

We worry that we're not in the right emotional moment to do our work. And mostly, we give away our agency, begging someone, anyone, to do the hard part of summoning the muse or getting us approval or a gig or support so that we can maybe, just maybe, feel the light again. It's a trap. Flow is the result of effort. The muse shows up when we do the work. Not the other way around. Set up your tools, turn off the internet, and go back to work.

We have unlimited reasons to hide our work and only one reason to share it: to be of service.

The key piece of leverage was this promise: follow these instructions and you don't have to think. Do your job and you don't have to be responsible for decisions. Most of all, you don't have to bring your genius to work.

Your most generous and insightful work needs help finding the people it's meant to serve. And your most successful work will spread because you designed it to.

Most criticism shared in the internet age is useless, or worse, harmful. It's useless because it often personalizes the criticism to be about the creator, not the work. And it's useless because most critics are unskilled and ungenerous.

If your team is filled with people who work for the company, you'll soon be defeated by tribes of people who work for a cause.

Working from nine till five every day at something that gives you no pleasure just so that, after thirty years, you can retire.