Quotes About Work

If you bring your best self to the world, your best work, and the world doesn't receive it, it's entirely possible that your marketing sucked.

The problem with meeting expectations is that it's not remarkable. It won't change the recipient of your work, and it's easy to emulate (which makes you easy to replace).

When we do the work for the audience, we open the door to giving up our attachment to how the audience will receive the work. That's up to them. Our job is to be generous, as generous as we know how to be, with our work.

A successful manager told me that stopped wearing a watch. She found that the work was so immersive, anchoring it to whatever hour it happened to be was pointless. The watch reminded her of the rigors of appointments and the status quo, while her goal was to be there, right here, right now, in the moment, and to do the work in front of her. The watch had no role in doing that right, so, for now, it's gone.

If you need to be authentic to do your best work, you're not a professional, you're a fortunate amateur.

Creativity Is an Action, Not a Feeling Marie Schacht points out that we can't always do much about how we feel, particularly when it's about something important. But we can always control our actions. Your work is too important to be left to how you feel today. On the other hand, committing to an action can change how we feel. If we act as though we trust the process and do the work, then the feelings will follow. Waiting for a feeling is a luxury we don't have time for.

Your work is a tree. The roots live in the soil of dreams and desires. Not the dreams and desires of everyone, simply those you seek to serve.

Work that matters for people who care is the shortest, most direct route to making a difference.

We're humans. Our work isn't us. As humans, we can choose to do the work, and we can choose to improve our work.

We worry that we're not in the right emotional moment to do our work. And mostly, we give away our agency, begging someone, anyone, to do the hard part of summoning the muse or getting us approval or a gig or support so that we can maybe, just maybe, feel the light again. It's a trap. Flow is the result of effort. The muse shows up when we do the work. Not the other way around. Set up your tools, turn off the internet, and go back to work.

The moment you are willing to sell your time for money is the moment you cease to be the artist you're capable of being.

We have unlimited reasons to hide our work and only one reason to share it: to be of service.

Today, a hack isn't something you want to be. A hack reverse-engineers all the work, barely getting by. The hack has no point of view, no assertions to be made. It's simply "what do you need?" and "how little do I have to charge to get this gig?" (or "how much can I get away with?").

When we find the empathy to say, "I'm sorry, this isn't for you, here's the phone number of my competitor," then we also find the freedom to do work that matters.

By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.

The key piece of leverage was this promise: follow these instructions and you don't have to think. Do your job and you don't have to be responsible for decisions. Most of all, you don't have to bring your genius to work.

Amazon.com took the idea of a man inside the computer and created a service with the same name. A person or company can present a task to the Mechanical Turk Web site, and hordes of invisible people will chip away at it, doing work that's eerily human but requires no personal interaction and very little money. These hardworking people are like the little man inside the chess computer: you can't see them, but they're doing all the work.

Most criticism shared in the internet age is useless, or worse, harmful. It's useless because it often personalizes the criticism to be about the creator, not the work. And it's useless because most critics are unskilled and ungenerous.

If your team is filled with people who work for the company, you'll soon be defeated by tribes of people who work for a cause.

For the important work, the instructions are always insufficient.

Emotional labor is the work of doing what we don't feel like doing. It's about showing up with a smile when we're wincing inside, or resisting the urge to chew someone out because you know that engaging with him will make a bigger difference.

Faith is the unstated component in the work of a leader and I think faith is underrated. Paradoxically, religion is vastly overrated.

If we condition ourselves to work without flow, it's more likely to arrive.

The labor we delight in physics pain.