Quotes About Autonomy

Only man as an individual human being lives; the state is just a system, a mere machine for sorting and tabulating the masses. Anyone, therefore, who thinks in terms of men minus the individual, in huge numbers, atomizes himself and becomes a thief and a robber to himself. He is infected with the leprosy of collective thinking and has become an inmate of that insalubrious stud-farm called the totalitarian State. Our

Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves.

Were not the autonomy of the individual the secret longing of many people it would scarcely be able to survive the collective suppression either morally or spiritually.

in so far as society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists.

In the first case the object works like a magnet upon the tendencies of the subject; it determines the subject to a large extent and even alienates him from himself.

Unless he stands on his own feet the so-called objective values profit him nothing since they only serve as a substitute for character

He is incapable of living his own life and finding the character that belongs to him.

The direct outcome of this renunciation is individualism,71 that is, the need for a realization of individuality, a realization of man as he is.

in so far as society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes – it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one.

Children were not pets, not furniture, not items put on earth to bring pleasure to people who owned them, she raged to herself.

Zézim, ninguém te ensinará os caminhos. Ninguém me ensinará os caminhos. Ninguém nunca me ensinou caminho nenhum, nem a você, suspeito. Avanço às cegas. Não há caminhos a serem ensinados, nem aprendidos. Na verdade, não há caminhos.

it has the three traits that make people love their work: impact, creativity, and control.

to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This doesn't mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it's sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention. The simple strategy proposed here of scheduling Internet blocks goes a long way toward helping you regain this attention autonomy. Work

this irresistible attraction to screens is leading people to feel as though they're ceding more and more of their autonomy when it comes to deciding how they direct their attention. No one, of course, signed up for this loss of control. They downloaded the apps and set up accounts for good reasons, only to discover, with grim irony, that these services were beginning to undermine the very values that made them appealing in the first place:

Ryan and Sarah have heaps of control in their working lives, and this is what makes the Red Fire lifestyle so appealing.

In another study, which I found during my own research, giving autonomy to middle school teachers in a struggling school district not only increased the rate at which the teachers were promoted, but also, to the surprise of the researchers, reversed the downward performance trend of their students.2

Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people

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

To summarize, to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This doesn't mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it's sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention. The simple strategy proposed here of scheduling Internet blocks goes a long way toward helping you regain this attention autonomy.

What's making us uncomfortable, in other words, is this feeling of losing control—a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child's bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience. It's not about usefulness, it's about autonomy.

The Second Control Trap In which I introduce the second control trap, which warns that once you have enough career capital to acquire more control in your working life, you have become valuable enough to your employer that they will fight your efforts to gain more autonomy. Why

when you do have enough capital to successfully make a shift toward more control. It's at this point that you're most likely to encounter resistance from others in your life, as more control usually benefits only you.

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.

When you study the type of careers that make others remark, "That's the type of job I want," this trait almost always plays a central role. Once you understand this value of control, it changes the way you evaluate opportunities, leading you to consider a position's potential autonomy as being as important as its offered salary or the institution's reputation.