work
There are meetings which, when cancelled at the last minute, give one an ecstatic feeling of having cheated death for a little longer.
Twitter, April 21, 2010.
In the workplace, givers are a relatively rare breed. They tilt reciprocity in the other direction, preferring to give more than they get. Whereas takers tend to be self-focused, evaluating what other people can offer them, givers are other-focused, paying more attention to what other people need from them. These preferences aren’t about money: givers and takers aren’t distinguished by how much they donate to charity or the compensation that they command from their employers. Rather, givers and takers differ in their attitudes and actions toward other people. If you’re a taker, you help others strategically, when the benefits to you outweigh the personal costs. If you’re a giver, you might use a different cost-benefit analysis: you help whenever the benefits to others exceed the personal costs. Alternatively, you might not think about the personal costs at all, helping others without expecting anything in return. If you’re a giver at work, you simply strive to be generous in sharing your time, energy, knowledge, skills, ideas, and connections with other people who can benefit from them.
Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success (New York: Viking, 2013), 4–5.
As I’ve gone through life, I’ve found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old…At that age, you know enough of the world to have opinions about things, but you’re not old enough yet to be overly influenced by the crowd or by what other people are doing or what you think you “should” be doing. If what you do later on ties into that reservoir in some way, then you are nurturing some essential part of yourself.
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, by Michael Ondaatje (New York: Random House, 2002).
I have a bunch of calendars I used before I went digital. Every once in a while, I’ll open up one from 1991 and look at all the names and appointments and things that, at the time, seemed so important. Meetings that I was really worried about, things that I was getting calls four times a day about, and I wonder, “Where did it all go? Where are they now?” It’s so strange, everything has disappeared. The only thing that stays behind is the work.
Interview in How to Think Like a Graphic Designer, by Debbie Millman (New York: Allworth Press, 2007), 12.
The boys working on the house are named Calvin, Ronnie, and Earl, who’re under a contractor named Jesse Parrish. They sing hymns from ladder tops, and keep buttermilk and Rainbo Pickles in my refrigerator.
Letter to William Maxwell, October 23, 1972, in What There Is to Say We Have Said, ed. by Suzanne Mars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2011), 295.
I got married and moved to Memphis, got an apartment, started trying to sell appliances at a place called Home Equipment Company. But I couldn’t sell anything and didn’t really want to. All I wanted was the music, and if somebody in the house was playing music when I would come, I would stop and sing with them.
“Johnny Cash: A Ghost Rider, Still Stirring Souls,” NPR, “Fresh Air with Terry Gross,” originally recorded in 1977, rebroadcast on February 26, 2010.
If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and earth will have to pause and say, “Here lived a great street sweeper, who swept his job well.”
“Facing the Challenge of a New Age,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 139.
Be careful what you get good at doin’ ’cause you’ll be doin’ it for the rest of your life.
Quoted by Gabrielle Hamilton, in Blood, Bones & Butter (New York: Random House, 2011), 91.
I’m married to my calling, but I’m not married to a particular woman. I have no pets. My apartment is full of books and records, the light of Toni Morrison and John Coltrane.
“Called Far and Wide to Touch Minds,” by Cara Buckley, The New York Times, January 22, 2010.
Work: work doesn’t solve everything but when a person is practicing the work that he loves, you can always tell; there is a rhythm in their absorption which shows in the eyes; their eyes glitter with sights brought back from private places: when the right words come together the world becomes at that moment mathematically perfect: so with each stitch of the cobbler’s machine, the tailor’s needle. They are seeing unity, peace, in some tiny fragment of the world and they know that this fragment is themselves.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (vol 5, 1947–1955) (New York: First Harvest, 1975), 172.
Mr. White: If you get that story done, I’ll take steps to get you a new cushion for your chair.
Note written to E. B. White, encouraging him to finish an essay, and quoted in “A Note to Our Readers,” The New Yorker, October 4, 2010, 40.
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!
“The Intelligence Office,” in Mosses from an Old Manse Vol 2 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1882), 365.