“Be clear (and enthusiastic) about what you do
Some people call this the elevator pitch. It’s actually the standing-around-at-drinks pitch. (No one wants to make small talk in an elevator. Creepy and invasive.) You need to be able to explain what you do very succinctly and in an interesting manner.”
Mike Monteiro
more infosource: Design Is a Job (New York: A Book Apart, 2012), 44.
category: career, job, school of life, self-promotion
medium: Nonfiction
“The more I reveal myself, the harder my job becomes. And so that’s always the challenge: how to preserve myself and how to retain mystique so that people can suspend disbelief when I choose odd terrain.”
Vera Farmiga
more infosource: “For Vera Farmiga, A Search Leads To ‘Higher Ground,'” All Things Considered, NPR, August 26, 2011.
category: acting, filmmaking, identity, job, mystique, work
medium: Interview
“I want my place! my own place! my true place in the world! my proper sphere! my thing to do, which nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my lifetime!”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
more infosource: “The Intelligence Office,” in Mosses from an Old Manse Vol 2 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1882), 365.
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category: calling, identity, job, place, purpose, work
medium: fiction
“Blessed is the man who has found his work, blessed is the man to whom his work appeals with so much interest that he goes from it with a longing to be able to finish what he has been at, and comes back to it with a prospect that now he shall be able to accomplish what time and perhaps fatigue would not allow him to proceed with the day before.”
James Joseph Walsh
more infosource: The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries (New York: Catholic Summer School Press, 1907), 125.
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category: blessed, happiness, job, satisfaction, work
medium: nonfiction
notes: Thomas Carlyle wrote "Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness." And Elbert Hubbard wrote "Blessed is that man who has found his work."
“No one I know has a job anymore. They’ve got Gigs.”
Tina Brown
more infosource: blog posting, “The Gig Economy,” www.dailybeast.com, January 12, 2009.
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category: economy, gig, job, work
medium: blog
“When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others.”
Alain de Botton
more infosource: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (New York: Pantheon, 2009), 78.
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category: delight, job, meaning, profession, satisfaction, suffering, work
medium: nonfiction
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