Quotes About Work

O]ne of the read truths about life in any police department: For a detective or street police, the only real satisfaction is the work itself; when a cop spends more and more time getting aggravated with the details, he's finished. The attitude of coworkers, the indifference of superiors, the poor quality of the equipment - all of it pales if you still love the job. All of it matters if you don't.

cairn. She recognized a few outlines, of dump trucks and backhoes

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.

The true signature and perhaps even the miracle of human love is helplessness, and all the more miraculous because it is a helplessness which we wittingly or unwittingly choose; in our love of a child, a partner, a work, or a road we have to take against the odds.

Any life, & any life's work, is a hidden journey, a secret code, deciphered in fits & starts. The details only given truth by the whole, & the whole dependent on the details." "...having the powerful characteristics of captaincy or leadership of any form is almost always an outward sign of a person inhabiting their physical body & the deeper elements of their own nature.

Work, like marriage, is a place you can lose yourself more easily perhaps than finding yourself. It is a place full of powerful undercurrents, a place to find our selves, but also, a place to drown, losing all sense of our own voice, our own contribution and conversation.

The marriage of work has everything to do with the romance of the everyday.

Work among all its abstracts, is actually intimacy, the place where the self meets the world.

To quote a Shakespearean cliché, repeated to death because it is so stubbornly true: "All the world's a stage." Work is theater. The place where life unfolds to our tragic or comic satisfaction.

Work is freighted with difficulty and possibility of visible failure, failure to provide, to succeed, to make a difference, to be seen and to be seen to be seen. Work, therefore is robust vulnerability, and a good part of the time, a journey leading us through very unbeautiful private and public humiliations.

work is achieved not by creating a hermetic space sealed off from the world, but nel mezzo, in the middle of everything.

We have the same strange idea in work as we do in love: that we will engender love, loyalty, and admiration in others by exhibiting a great sense of power and competency. We are surprised to find that we garner fear and respect but forgo the other, more intimate magic. Real, undying loyalty in work can never be legislated or coerced; it is based on a courageous vulnerability that invites others by our example to a frontier conversation whose outcome is yet in doubt.

Hard fun is, of course, the idea that we take pleasure in accomplishing something difficult: the joy in meeting and mastering a challenge. As a result, when someone is doing something that is hard fun, moment by moment it looks more like "work" than "fun," but the net effect is pleasurable overall.

Do they know they make the honey for you? Or do they work tirelessly because they think its their own choice?

Do the bees know they make the honey for you? Or do they work tirelessly because they think it is their own choice? Have you never noticed that, after hearing a new word for the first time in your life, you'll hear it again within twenty-four hours? Do you ever wonder why sometimes you'll see a single shoe lying along the road?

Yes. That, right there, is the difference between the heroes and the nobodies. The difference between people like you and people like me. People like me know that there is no magic. There is only the grind. Work looks like magic to those unwilling to do it.

Do the bees know they make the honey for you? Or do they work tirelessly because they think it is their own choice?

In fact, Invisibles are found in all walks of life. What binds them is their approach—deriving satisfaction from the value of their work, not the volume of their praise.

But if you come to define success, in both business and in life, as philosophers and religions have for millennia, by the satisfaction derived from work itself and not the degree of attention you receive for it, people like Johns and Canby—the Invisibles—offer a model you would do well to follow. Ask yourself: Do I want to be on a treadmill of competition with others, or do I want to find lasting reward by challenging myself?

Do your work not just your work and no more, but a little more for the lavishings sake--that little more which is worth all the rest.

The more we are united in our spirits, souls, and strengths, the more we will work hard through synergy for the great of everyone.

We are united willfully for the work of YAHWEH.

For some teams, a nice, well-formed, and deep backlog gives them a sense of control of their destiny. They can see the work ahead, they can plan for current and future work, and they have a sense of comfort in knowing that they are always working on the next higher-prioritized thing.

What tame, memory-dependent work I was doing. How polite my poems were, how still they sat, how representational. We poets talked about craft, but what we meant were tricks and illusions.