A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.
Interpretation
A true professional excels in their work even when not motivated or inspired.
This quote emphasizes the essence of professionalism as the ability to perform at one's best regardless of personal feelings or circumstances. It suggests that true dedication and skill in one's field is demonstrated by the capacity to push through reluctance or lack of motivation to deliver quality work.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech to inspire employees when facing challenges.
More than anything else, though, to anyone who would write about it, golf offers a four-hour drama in two acts, which becomes memorable even in the tape-recorded reminiscenses of old champs, and which - in the hands of someone like Herb Wind - can become a piece of war correspondence as artfully controlled as Alan Morehead's account of Gallipoli.
Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.
It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.
Curiosity endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and a serenity in their own mode of life which springs from their cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will.
Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others.
It is a wonderful tribute to the game or to the dottiness of the people who play it that for some people somewhere there is no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle, an unplayable course, the wrong time of the day or year.
Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain't desperate at some point, you ain't interesting.
Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.
I am sorry about the person who is not truly excited about his job. He will not only never truly be happy there, but he won't achieve anything great.
I don't like to lose, and that isn't so much because it is just a football game, but because defeat means the failure to reach your objective.
Most real failures are due to limitations which men set up in their own minds.
This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world. Thank you. Good night, and God bless America.
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