Quotes About Professionalism

As email spread through the professional world in the 1980s and 1990s it introduced something novel: low-friction communication at scale. With this new tool, the cost in terms of time and social capital to communicate with anyone related to your job plummeted from significant to almost nothing. As the writer Chris Anderson notes in his 2009 book, Free, the dynamics of reducing a cost to zero can be "deeply mysterious,

There is a performative dimension to writing emails and cc'ing everybody, like 'Look at all the work I'm doing.' It's annoying

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill,

You need to get good in order to get good things in your working life, and the craftsman mindset is focused on achieving exactly this goal.

The rise of professional instant messaging, mentioned earlier in this chapter, can be seen as this mind-set pushed toward an extreme. If receiving an e-mail reply within an hour makes your day easier, then getting an answer via instant message in under a minute would improve this gain by an order of magnitude.

the practice of giving of your time and attention, without expectation of something in return, as a key strategy in professional advancement.

Outside of these deep sessions, Grant remained famously open and accessible. In some sense, he had to be: His 2013 bestseller, Give and Take, promotes the practice of giving of your time and attention, without expectation of something in return, as a key strategy in professional advancement.

I call this approach, in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule, the journalist philosophy. This name is a nod to the fact that journalists, like Walter Isaacson, are trained to shift into a writing mode on a moment's notice, as is required by the deadline-driven nature of their profession.

Most individuals who start as active professionals… change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance." Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, you'll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.

there's something liberating about the craftsman mindset: It asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is "just right," and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good. No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it—and the process won't be easy. With

a New York Times column on the topic, David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly: "[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.

When I told Mark about Jordan, he agreed that an obsessive focus on the quality of what you produce is the rule in professional music. "It trumps your appearance, your equipment, your personality, and your connections," he explained. "Studio musicians have this adage: 'The tape doesn't lie.' Immediately after the recording comes the playback; your ability has no hiding place.

For an individual focused on deep work, the implication is that you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours. The general exhortation to "spend more time working deeply" doesn't spark a lot of enthusiasm. To instead have a specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits will generate a steadier stream of enthusiasm.

put into our terminology, enthusiasm alone is not rare and valuable and is therefore not worth much in terms of career capital.

Knuth deploys what I call the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they're pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well.

Scientists' minds may jump around like amorous toads, but they do seem to accept such behavior in one another.

No man ever listened himself out of a job.

Depp and Phoenix had met, but they weren't close. On a professional level, Depp admired Phoenix's work, "there was a specific road he was on that I respected.

if I do enough research before a conference, and build enough relationships online, I can walk into the conference and people will already know who I am and the company I work for. - Tracy Lee

I'm looking at working with people I get on with, that respect me, that don't just see me as a piece of ass. Which I have experienced as well. I've nearly walked off very big films before, and I would, because I don't want that in my life. I want to enjoy the work I do.

the part about the product manager not showing up for the demo pisses her off. What a disrespectful thing to do to engineers who built what you asked them to.

A dentist at work in his vocation always looks down in the mouth.

Time was when much of lawyering consisted (according to turn-of-the-century lawyer and statesman Elihu Root) in "telling would-be clients that they are damned fool's, and should stop.

That's just perfect. I hung up and crossed my arms over my chest. When your butt is permanently attached to a chair, the only thing you can do is sit and hope to look professional.