Quotes About Work

And the management team is not really a team. A team is a group of people who have joint responsibility for—and joint ownership of—one or more work products. People who own nothing in common may be called a team, but they aren't. This is not to say that companies never form real management teams, only that they do so rarely. Most of what are called management teams are a mockery of the team concept.

Appearance is stressed far too much in workplace design. What is more relevant is whether the workplace lets you work or inhibits you.

we don't work overtime so much to get the work done on time as to shield ourselves from blame when the work inevitably doesn't get done on time.

This is clearly not the most expedient route—we learned that writing a collaborative novel doesn't amount to doing half the work, but rather, doing twice the work—but it was a wild new kind of work, a work that takes the other's half, and raises it by half. This felt intimate—showing

It's just as hard... staying happily married as it is doing movies.

We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves

If Adam and Eve were not hunter-gatherers, then they were certainly gatherers. But, then, consumer desire, or self-embitterment, or the 'itch,' as Schopenhauer called it, appeared in the shape of the serpent. This capitalistic monster awakens in Adam and Eve the possibility that things could be better. Instantly, they are cast out of the garden and condemned to a life of toil, drudgery, and pain. Wants supplanted needs, and things have been going downhill ever since.

A conclusion I've come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it's really about making work into something that isn't drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.

Career is just posh slavery.

Paradoxically, to be truly idle, you also have to be efficient.

I think it's good that I had some experience of the real world before I became successful. You know, having to get up in the morning and going to work in construction.

Only the very simple can work in war," as Clausewitz observed. Complex drills simply won't work, even leaving aside that the time required to condition something goes up with that something's complexity, even as the probability of conditioning it drops.

interpreting to [ourselves] the directions of [our] lives, [our] pasts, presents, and futures. Small details and big developments. [We are] attaining clarity about [our] own hearts. . .arriving at self-knowledge as well as knowledge of the world. [Our] goals for work, for family life, and for personal development naturally [grow] out of this knowledge, as a powerful by-product of [our] habits of articulation.

Would it not make sense that God not only wants to join us in our work but to increasingly conform us into greater Christlikeness while we work?

We find our vocational sweet spot when our creativity is most unleashed, our passions most engaged, and our work makes the greatest contribution to advancing the mission of the organization or the business where we serve.

All too often I viewed my work as an obstacle to my spiritual growth.

A preacher will preach, a teacher will teach, a miner will dig in the mines. I ride the rods, trusting in God, Holding my bottle of wine.

Do something you really like, and hopefully it pays the rent. As far as I'm concerned, that's success.

You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.

When you retire, it's a place in life, a part of the journey. You just don't quit work you develop an attitude where you can do what you please.

We live in an age of high performance, in which everyone is supposed to be constantly maximizing their potential, living their "best life." Social media has made everything from marriage proposals to this morning's breakfast into exquisitely choreographed, unsubtly competitive rituals. The ethos of work—"the long arm of the job," as one scholar put it—pervades our leisure, to the extent that we even have any.

If you think of what food is, it's the energy we use to do our daily work. I want people to know about the USDA. This is a very important department. It's not fully appreciated as such.

They say that I have no hits and that I'm difficult to work with. And they say that like it's a bad thing.

You have to keep busy. After all, no dog's ever pissed on a moving car.