If you do not feel yourself growing in your work and your life broadening and deepening, if your task is not a perpetual tonic to you, you have not found your place.
Make the work interesting and the discipline will take care of itself.
Whenever I get a task I can focus on, I get excited for that.
When you spend time working on something for a time period, and then it doesn't correlate, it decreases in your motivation.
Smart hiring managers in the modern world should be asking, “How long can you concentrate on a task before you have to take a break?” I wonder how many of them do?
We only do well the things we like doing.
I get involved in the beginning, less in the middle, and very much at the end.
I think you can lose yourself in any creative activity - if you enjoy your job or enjoy a task, you can lose yourself in that.
There's no time to be bored. I'm so busy doing the horse dance...
Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.
I spoke at TED Global 2010 about the ways that video games engage the brain, and in particular, the idea of reward structures: how a challenge or task can be broken down and presented to make it as engaging as possible.
I find that if I get up and push myself, I get lost in what I'm doing, and I forget about everything else until I stop doing it.
There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.
I read upon the subject and grew more and more interested, and after a time I became a member of the National Board, and had duties and responsibilities that kept me busy after my day's work was done.
When people have a hard task to do - one which stretches them - they become less concerned with trivial matters.
At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction.
Set me a task in which I can put something of my very self, and it is a task no longer; it is joy; it is art.
You know, it's hard sometimes to just detach yourself from what you're doing.
I realized that I was more of a sprinter than a marathon man. With a long, long project, I get bored easily.
The man who has not learned the secret of taking the drudgery out of his task by flinging his whole soul into it, has not learned the first principles of success or happiness.
And then what makes the work interesting is if you choose the right questions.
I don't want to do something, if I don't feel like I can do a good job serving the material.
When I try to concentrate, I really enjoy writing.
One must work, if not from inclination, at least out of despair — since it proves, on close examination, that work is less boring than amusing oneself.
I have to feel that each thing I've learned I can push to another point next time. I'm not very good with repetition. I would rather not work than feel that repetition is the order of the day.
