The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Quotes

Lots and lots of great quotes

  • Quote

    Work is much more fun than fun.

    – Noel Coward

  • Quote

    For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

    – Aristotle

    After spending a week with great people like Traci Fenton, Roosevelt Finlayson, Kareem Mayan, Geneve Stewart and many, many others, this quote comes to mind.

  • Five great tips for successful success

    Guy Kawasaki asks Seth Godin five questions, including “What are the five things that enabled you to be successful?”. Seth answers:

    1. No ulterior motive. I rarely do A as a calculated tactic to get B. I do A because I believe in A, or it excites me or it’s the right thing to do. That’s it. No secret agendas.
    2. I don’t think my audience owes me anything. It’s always their turn.
    3. I’m in a hurry to make mistakes and get feedback and get that next idea out there. I’m not in a hurry, at all, to finish the “bigger??? project, to get to the finish line.
    4. I do things where I actually think I’m right, as opposed to where I think succeeding will make me successful. When you think you’re right, it’s more fun and your passion shows through.
    5. I’ve tried to pare down my day so that the stuff I actually do is pretty well leveraged. That, and I show up. Showing up is underrated.

    I really, really like each of these, and what we have here might as well be the beginnings of a manifest for honest business. What runs through each of Seth’s five points is a certain ego-lessness, a sense that business is not about me or what I can get but about what I can contribute.

    Being in business for the giving rather than the getting is a great approach and a sure path to a happier and more fulfilling work life. And success.

  • Quote

    You have to honor failure, because failure is just the negative space around success.
    – Randy Nelson of Pixar in this excellent article in Wired

    Yes! The whole failure is not an option thing is just misguided. Honor failure. If you’re not failing occasionally regularly, you’re not doing anything interesting.

  • Quote

    Semco has no official structure. It has no organizational chart. There’s no business plan or company strategy, no two-year or five-year plan, no goal or mission statement, no long-term budget. The company often does not have a fixed CEO. There are no vice presidents or chief officers for information technology or operations. There are no standards or practices. There’s no human resources department. There are no career plans, no job descriptions or employee contracts. No one approves reports or expense accounts. Supervision or monitoring of workers is rare indeed.

    Most important, success is not measured only in profit and growth.

    – Ricardo Semler

    And yet they increased annual revenue between 1994 and 2003 from $35 million a year to $212 million. Read more about Semco here.

  • An entire people who refuse to bust their butts

    Lazy dogCaterina Fake has been reading a new book called Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot by Julian Dibbell and loved it. She quotes this passage from the book which talks about the difference between work and play:

    The Kpelle people of Liberia, to name one, scarcely make the distinction at all, allowing for a difference between arduous “forest work” and lighter “town work” but generally avoiding all work that can’t be done playfully, amid song and dance and jest. It’s not that they’re slackers. On the contrary: Diligent rice farmers, they organize their lives around the constant activity of cultivation. But when government advisors pressured them to switch from dry rice farming to more productive paddy-based methods, they resisted–not because they had no interest in making more money, but because they had no interest in working joylessly. The techniques of paddy-rice farming might be more efficient, the anthropologist David Lancy has explained, but they would reduce the Kpelle’s daily activity to “just plain work”, bereft of “the vital leavening of gossip, singing and dance” that makes Kpelle work worth doing.

    An entire people who are happy at work and refuse to bust their collective butts – excellent! This makes a great followup to Fred Gratzon’s refusal to bust his butt.

  • Quote

    Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two steps at a time. We needed to be surrounded by people who could dress whatever way they wanted, even be barefoot. We all needed to have flextime to surf the waves when they were good and take care of a sick child. We needed to blur that distinction between work and play and family.

    – Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, in his excellent book Let My People Go Surfing

  • Quote

    I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

    – Thomas Jefferson

  • Quote

    QuoteYou can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
    – Richard Feynman

  • Quote

    And speaking of politics, here’s a quote by Al Gore taken from this NY Times article:

    Politics has become a game of meaningless, mindless battles, conducted by unscrupulous methods and people, designed to transform even the most serious policy debates into sport.

    – Al Gore