Quotes from Tom Hodgkinson

The great management guru Charles Handy says that, as far as money goes, you have to look after yourself. He reckons you may need to do something else as well as your "passion project" to earn money, particularly in the early stages of a new business

Sembra un paradosso ma per x esser davvero oziosi bisogna essere efficienti

A business plan is a campaign, a strategy, an outline of what you want to do and how you plan to do it. And you need to write one whether or not you are looking for finance.

Your business plan should tell a compelling story. It should present a problem that you are going to fix.

Include some material in your business plan about your competition. Become obsessed by your competition. You may think you have none, but you do.

Sembra un paradosso ma per essere davvero oziosi bisogna essere efficienti

sembra un paradosso ma per esser davvero oziosi bisogna essere efficienti

Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane "experiences" which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That's not really living: that is slavery with the occasional circus thrown in.

A diet of solely mental work is suffocating.

No! Be weak! Give up! You can't do everything. Lower your standards. Get friends to come and help you.

it is while prone that ideas come. "A writer could get more ideas for his articles or his novels in this posture than he could by sitting doggedly before his desk morning and afternoon," writes Lin Yutang in his essay "On Lying in Bed.

It's hard to drift off into nowhereland when your arousal hormones are circulating wildly as a result of your rage at mobile-phone users. Fantasies of hurling their mobile phones from the train window tend to disturb the search for inner calm.

the fat cats used to send us into the mills to make their millions, and now they send us to the shopping centres.

Martin also reveals the many scientific studies that have shown the benefits of long sleeping and napping to our health and happiness, and also shows how major disasters such as Chernobyl, and smaller ones such as train and motorway crashes, were caused by lack of sleep. Chasing profit leads to lack of sleep, and lack of sleep can lead to death.

The difficulty is that we get ourselves caught in a double bind: we work so hard that we do not allow ourselves time to dream, and therefore we continue to work hard because we have not had the time to dream up an alternative. If you are ever sacked or made redundant, then I suggest you thank the good Lord above.

How much better life would be if we began the day with a poem rather than the empty prattle of newspapers, with their diet of fear, hate, envy and jealousy.

Real dreams are about seeing what others miss. If you have your head in the clouds, you can see the world more clearly. Maybe this is why so many poets and visionaries die young or drink heavily—it is painful when you can see the truth up close. It can be unbearable.

In the West, we have become addicted to work. Americans now work the longest hours in the world. And the result is not health, wealth and wisdom, but rather a lot of anxiety, a lot of ill health and a lot of debt.

the job was invented in order to make things easier for those at the top.

Long periods of languor, indolence and staring at the ceiling are needed by any creative person in order to develop ideas.

as Charles Handy puts it: "It has always seemed to me slightly bizarre that we should queue up to sell our time to someone else. It's a form of slavery, voluntary slavery. We think it's great but it's crazy.

Der Müßiggänger hat den Wunsch, ständig ein gutes Leben zu haben, nicht nur an Samstagabenden.

Wir kommen uns klein vor unter den Sternen, aber paradoxerweise fühlen wir uns mehr bei uns. Wir sind, wer wir sind.

Education itself is a putting off, a postponement; we are told to work hard to get good results. Why? So we can get a good job. What is a good job? One that pays well. Oh. And that's it? All this suffering, merely so that we can earn a lot of money, which, even if we manage it, will not solve our problems anyway? It's a tragically limited idea of what life is all about.