Category: Quotes

If you’re crazy enough to do what you love for a living then you’re bound to create a life that matters.

– Herb Kelleher, ex-CEO of Southwest Airlines

Here’s Herb:

Looks like he’s having fun :o)

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This is the right attitude to have towards your job:

My first radio job was with the Minnesota News Network in St. Paul. When I was out with friends and they started talking about their work my first thought was always, “I don’t work. I go to MNN.”

When those friends waxed dreamy about what they’d do if they won the lottery, I thought, “I’d still go to MNN.” Back then my title was “intern” and my salary was “nothing.”

But I knew I was headed somewhere fun because I was already having fun. I imagined myself on an airplane, wearing a suit, and sitting next to someone wearing a suit too. “What’s your business?” that person would ask me. I’d flash the biggest smile and say, “Stories.”

– Maureen Anderson, The Career Clinic

Bay Jordan, the CEO of Zealise, (go read his excellent blog) sent me this quote:

“Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.”
– Ayn Rand

I’d love to hear your opinion on it. Do you agree? Are values (personal or corporate) making you happy or unhappy? Are they an important part of being happy or more peripheral?

This has got to be one of the most inspiring things ever written:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

And also the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base.

All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man’s work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and the like.”

Oh man – that has got to be one of the most inspiring, uplifting things ever written.

The passage about “being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base”… if that’s not unhappiness at work I don’t know what is, and yet that’s exactly how many people feel about work.

I’m with Shaw on this one – we must revolt against it and be artists of our own lives.

You do not lead by hitting people over the head – that’s assault, not leadership.

– Dwight D. Eisenhower

And what is it to work with love?

Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

– Kahlil Gibran in The Profet

Here is how I know someone is successful — If you are able to give from your abundance then you are successful.
– Fred Gratzon (source)

This is Fred Gratzon, author of the excellent book The Lazy Way to Success, in top form giving the best and shortest definition of success I’ve ever seen.

Having abundance is not enough – you are only truly successful when you can share your abundance. And if you only read one book on success, make it Fred’s – it seriously changed my thinking on work, and is one of my favorite books about happiness at work.

Fred’s thought reminded me of the ancient Greeks – they measured a person’s wealth not by how much he owned but by how much he gave away.