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57aed8e
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Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
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writing
inspirational
productivity
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Stephen King |
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1dc119d
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It couldn't last. Everyone was just killing time. But if all they did was kill time, time would end up killing them.
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the-fayz
work-ethic
productivity
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Michael Grant |
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fc2edc3
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Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values--that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others--that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human--that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay--that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live--that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road--that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up--that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.
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morality
work
life
love
productivity
intellect
loyalty
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Ayn Rand |
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0c5e9aa
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...you cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that will be enough, at least for the time being.
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frogs
productivity
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Brian Tracy |
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cb93884
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The true price of anything you do is the amount of time you exchange for it.
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time
success
productivity
|
Henry David Thoreau |
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60c7241
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You are where you are and what you are because of yourself, nothing else. Nature is neutral. Nature doesn't care. If you do what other successful people do, you will enjoy the same results and rewards that they do. And if you don't, you won't.
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motivational
productivity
|
Brian Tracy |
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2714d3c
|
"Now observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists--amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for "harmony with nature"--there is no discussion of man's needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision--i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears.... In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire."
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nature
manufacturing
productivity
survival
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Ayn Rand |
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236b191
|
If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.
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money
work
simple-life
simple-living
productivity
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Henry David Thoreau |
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4f2d01a
|
The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours
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discovery
tversky
innovation
productivity
|
Michael Lewis |
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afac99e
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If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
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nature
productivity
nature-s-beauty
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Henry David Thoreau |
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ec51145
|
Stop saying drug use makes people lazy. Jimi Hendrix did a lot of drugs, even though he's been dead for forty years, he's making new records. Suck on , Partnership for a Drug-Free America!
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music
humor
jimi-hendrix
laziness
productivity
|
Bill Maher |
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4d704c4
|
The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasise specific starting times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones. 'Inspiration is for amateurs,' the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. 'The rest of us just show up and get to work.
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work
work-ethic
productivity
|
Oliver Burkeman |
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805f9f2
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You can only do what you can, and what doesn't get done, just doesn't get done.
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positivity
productivity
|
Will Schwalbe |
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5c6b13f
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"I always had the uncomfortable feeling that if I wasn't sitting in front of a computer typing, I was wasting my time--but I pushed myself to take a wider view of what was "productive." Time spend with my family and friends was never wasted."
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time
productivity
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Gretchen Rubin |
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eacab45
|
Your life and work are made up of outcomes and actions. When your operational behavior is grooved to organize everything that comes your way, at all levels, based upon those dynamics, a deep alignment occurs, and wondrous things emerge. You become highly productive. You make things up, and you make them happen.
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behavior
productivity
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David Allen |
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1a0411a
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Refuse to allow a weakness or a lack of ability in any area to hold you back. Everything is learnable. And what others have learned, you can learn as well.
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productivity
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Brian Tracy |
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3601f72
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Yet for some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it's better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafes arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends' complex polyamorous love affairs.
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joy
time-allocation
productivity
society
purpose
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David Graeber |
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d34ca7f
|
We often get into ruts, on treadmills, caught up in patterns and habits that aren't useful. We don't stop to ask, what can I learn from this week that will keep next week from essentially being a repeat of the same?
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life
inspirational
repeating-the-past
productivity
|
Stephen R. Covey |