The germ of an idea doesn't make the sculpture that stands up... so the next stage is hard work
Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiRead
Our jobs determine to a large extent what our lives are like. Is what you do for a living making you ill? Does it keep you from becoming a more fully realized person? Do you feel ashamed of what you have to do at work? All too often, the answer to such questions is yes. Yet it does not have to be like that. Work can be one of the most joyful, most fulfilling aspects of life. Whether it will be or not depends on the actions we collectively take.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Our jobs significantly influence our overall quality of life and personal fulfillment.
In this quote, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi emphasizes the profound impact that our jobs have on our lives, questioning whether our work leads to illness or unfulfillment. He challenges us to reflect on our professional engagements and hints at the potential for work to be a source of joy and fulfillment, depending on our collective actions and choices
Themes
WorkFulfillmentJoyPersonal GrowthCareer
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about finding joy in your career.
More from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
All quotes →It is not the skills we actually have that determine how we feel but the ones we think we have.
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To know oneself is the first step toward making flow a part of one's entire life. But just as there is no free lunch in the material economy, nothing comes free in the psychic one. If one is not willing to invest psychic energy in the internal reality of consciousness, and instead squanders it in chasing external rewards, one loses mastery of one's life, and ends up becoming a puppet of circumstances.
Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiRead
To live means to experience-through doing, feeling, thinking. Experience takes place in time, so time is the ultimate scarce resource we have. Over the years, the content of experience will determine the quality of life. Therefore one of the most essential decisions any of us can make is about how one's time is allocated or invested.
Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiRead
It is as if evolution has built a safety device in our nervous system that allows us to experience full happiness only when we are living at 100%-when we are fully using the physical and mental equipment we have been given.
Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiRead
When we are involved in [creativity], we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.
Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiRead
Similar quotes
A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman.
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I get to go to work and come home with something interesting or enriching or astonishing.
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Sometimes it gets boring. No justice is supposed to say that. But, you know, there's drudgery in every job you're going to do.
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A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests. Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization slowly crushes a person.
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As long as this great army of workers is scattered among so many craft unions, it will be impossible for them to unite and act in harmony together. Craft unionism is the negation of solidarity. The more unions you have, the less unity.
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I like the job. That's what I'll miss the most... I'm not sure anybody ever liked this as much as I've liked it.
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