Quotes About Fulfillment

To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you're capable of producing—a task that requires depth.

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last.21 That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone …

I love what I do for a living. I'm also confident that as I continue my commitment to the ideas discovered in my quest, this love will only deepen. Thomas feels the same way about his work. So do most of the people I profiled in the book. I

So next time you start to question whether you're missing out on some dream job waiting for you to muster the courage to pursue it, conjure up a pair of images. First, recall passion-obsessed Thomas, heartbroken and sobbing on the forest floor. Then replace this with the image of the smiling, confident, value-focused man who ten years later joined me for coffee—the version of Thomas who looked at me at one point in our conversation and remarked, without irony, "Life is good.

Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement and sense of fulfillment

The goal of the machine," David explained, "is to create a setting where the users can get into a state of deep human flourishing—creating work that's at the absolute extent of their personal abilities." It

In Wrzesniewski's research, the happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.

Control that's acquired without career capital is not sustainable.

The First Control Trap In which I introduce the first control trap, which warns that it's dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange. Jane's

When it comes to creating work you love, following your passion is not particularly useful advice.

the happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.

if you're not putting in the effort to become, as Steve Martin put it, "so good they can't ignore you," you're not likely to end up loving your work—regardless of whether or not you believe it's your true calling.

I never understood the joy of watching other people play sports, can't stand tourist attractions, don't sit on the beach unless there's a really big sand castle that needs to be made, [and I] don't care about what the celebrities and politicians are doing. . . . Instead of all this, I seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff. Or maybe a better description would be solving problems and making improvements.

This message is not as inspiring as "follow your passion and you'll immediately be happy," but it certainly has a ring of truth. In other words, working right trumps finding the right work.

You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?

The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it.

something more fundamental to human flourishing: the sense of meaning that comes from acting with intention.

build your working life around the experience of flow

flow activities.

The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow

he came to realize a simple truth: Working right trumps finding the right work. He didn't need to have a perfect job to find occupational happiness—he needed instead a better approach to the work already available to him.

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.

It follows that to embrace deep work in your own career, and to direct it toward cultivating your skill, is an effort that can transform a knowledge work job from a distracted, draining obligation into something satisfying—a portal to a world full of shining, wondrous things.

In which I argue that control over what you do, and how you do it, is one of the most powerful traits you can acquire when creating work you love.