Quotes About Fulfillment

First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don't like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness.

If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center's most popular teachers.

If you spend too much time focusing on whether or not you've found your true calling, the question will be rendered moot when you find yourself out of work.

Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.

The "great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard to his day," he elaborates, is that even though he doesn't particularly enjoy his work (seeing it as something to "get through"), "he persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as 'the day,' to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue.

For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life. Reducing the easy distraction without also filling the void can make life unpleasantly stale.

the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives.

a better objective for support units would be the following: to effectively fulfill their administrative duties with as small an impact as possible on the specialists' main work obligations. If taken seriously this metric might mean a given support unit needs to make its own work less efficient to better serve the organization.

For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life.

The passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it's also dangerous. Telling someone to "follow their passion" is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.

Getting to the cutting edge of a field can be understood in these terms: This process builds up rare and valuable skills and therefore builds up your store of career capital. Similarly, identifying a compelling mission once you get to the cutting edge can be seen as investing your career capital to acquire a desirable trait in your career. In other words, mission is yet another example of career capital theory in action. If you want a mission, you need to first acquire capital.

How do people end up loving what they do?

philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

Why do some people enjoy their work while so many other people don't? Here's the CliffsNotes summary of the social science research in this area: There are many complex reasons for workplace satisfaction, but the reductive notion of matching your job to a pre-existing passion is not among them.

A deep life is a good life.

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy,

The passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it's also dangerous. Telling someone to "follow their passion" is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst. Beyond

Arnold Bennett took up the cause of active leisure in his short but influential self-help guide, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. In this book, Bennett notes that the average London middle-class white-collar worker putting in an eight-hour day is left with sixteen additional hours during which he is as free as any gentleman to pursue virtuous activity.

given week, the higher the subject's life satisfaction. Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging. There

if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill Arnold Bennett's ambitious goal of experiencing, perhaps for the first time, what it means to live, and not just exist. Rule

eudaimonia (a state in which you're achieving your full human potential),

To summarize, I've presented two different ways people think about their working life. The first is the craftsman mindset, which focuses on what you can offer the world. The second is the passion mindset, which instead focuses on what the world can offer you. The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions.

Managing computer systems might not generate the daily bliss that defined Thomas's old daydreams, but as he now recognized, nothing would. A fulfilling working life is a more subtle experience than his old fantasies had allowed.

Ryan and Sarah have heaps of control in their working lives, and this is what makes the Red Fire lifestyle so appealing.