Work Perception Quotes

Aside from birthing me my first grey hairs and keeping me up at night more times than I'd like to count, 'The Subtle Art' taught me a lot about the nature of work. And a lot of that had to do with how my perception of the work itself evolved over the course of writing the book.

One man's fantasy is another man's job.

Most people simply don't view going to meetings as doing work.

We have a lot of kids who don't know what works means. They think work is a four-letter word.

When I meet people I try to make a joke out of my occupation, explaining that what I do all day is sit alone in a darkened room, flicking through some pages, jumping on a treadmill now and then. I keep my serious work as a writer private, but that doesn't mean it's not serious work - quite the opposite.

In economic terms, we've always thought of work as a disutility - as something you do to get something else. Now it's increasingly a utility - something that's valuable and worthy in its own right.

Soaps are a double-edged sword. There can be prejudice from some writers and producers who feel you will lower the currency of their work if you've been in one. You have to rise above such ludicrous prejudice.

The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing else.

Change yourself and your work will seem different.

I am not a labor hater.

There's a recycling mentality about my work.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

The phrase "work-life balance" tells us that people think that work is the opposite of life. We should be talking about life-life balance.

Work done by other people sounds easy. How hard can it be to take care of a newborn who sleeps 20 hours a day? How hard can it be to keep track of your billable hours? To travel for one night for business? To get a 4-year-old ready for school? To return a few phone calls? To load the dishwasher? To fill out some forms?

The work my mum does, a lot of it is re-housing homeless people, that's a real job. I play make-believe and dressing up for a living!

Men are much more likely to make sure the boss knows they were in the office until midnight. But women tend to avoid seeking that kind of acknowledgement for their work. They just assume that the boss knows - but the boss usually doesn't. I experienced that firsthand.

What does this contradictory pattern mean?one conclusion seems inevitable: when it comes to work, people do not heed the evidence of their senses. They disregard the quality of immediate experience, and base their motivation instead on the strongly rooted cultural stereotype of what work is supposed to be like. They think of it as an imposition, a constraint, an infringement of their freedom, and therefore something to be avoided as much as possible.

Worst part of being a writer: having to tell my toddler that I can't play with her because I'm working. Keep in mind that working consists of me at home with a laptop on my lap sitting on the couch. It doesn't look like working. I don't have a hammer or anything.

As tough an idea as it often is to stomach, the best way to thrive in a world that requires grunt work is to stop seeing it as grunt work.

"Easy" is a word that's used to describe other people's jobs.

The work that the kids saw around them was so odious, so boring, so worthless that they came to regard WORK as the only dirty four-letter word in the English language.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand...is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.

People think I work a lot more than I do. I think because you're in people's living rooms every day they're like: 'Oh my God, you're always on the telly,' but it's like, 'Yeah but you always have to go to work every day nine till five whereas I finish at 12:30 P.M. and then I'm home.'