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All jobs are easy to the person who doesn't have to do them.

Work is something you do rather than something you go to.

The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work.

(Some people) always tend to clamour for a final solution, as if in life there could ever be a final solution other than death. For constructive work, the principal task is always the restoration of some kind of balance.

The work you do should be a test of your perceptiveness. All great work becomes the art of seeing (paraphrased).

The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world's need of work. With it, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get. Without this - with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not need - this life is hell.

The consensus among economists is that the truly momentous changes in working life since the second world war have been in four areas: the decline in manufacturing, the feminisation of work, the growth in part-time work and increasing professional-ism in the workforceÂ…all these trends are likely to continue."

I have found a way to successfully complete 12 months of work in 11. I have never found a way to successfully complete 12 months of work in 12.

Balance is not a math problem: It's not a matter of shifting a few hours each week from one activity to another. If it were that easy, everyone with a PalmPilot would look as serene as the Dalai Lama. Balance is a design problem -- a matter of coming to terms with your values and priorities, of reckoning with the trade-offs that they require. Balance is not about willpower. If you depend only on willpower, you're likely to cave in whenever you feel pressured, tired, or unhappy. Balance is about discipline: It's about deciding what's important and then creating a structure that defines how you spend your time.

People tend to become so engrossed in activity that they lose sight of purpose.

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The famous concern for "legacy" among older execs often is little more than a tacit confession that the power and perks for which one clawed one's way to the top are no longer satisfying.

Work banishes the three great evils - boredom, vice and poverty.

Whether inspiration comes, does not depend on me. The only thing that I can do is to make sure it finds me at work.

How does responsibility constrain you? The worst thing is that it allows you not to focus on real work. Just as the most dangerous forms of procrastination are those that seem like work, the danger of responsibilities is not just that they can consume a whole day, but that they can do it without setting off the kind of alarms you'd set off if you spent a whole day sitting on a park bench.

People follow people they like. And they like people who know how to have fun. Life is too short to treat your work as a life-or-death situation. Those leaders who learn to bring some fun to the workplace will always be welcomed. What it really comes down to is learning to enjoy people and relish life while working together. Your work shouldn't be your life, but you should always try to bring some life to your work.

The Paul Principle: People are promoted until the job is no longer any fun.

Mere work ethic is not enough. The hardened criminal exhibits an excellent work ethic. What is needed is a work ethic conditioned by ethics in work.

To access the energy of the human spirit, people need to clarify priorities and establish accompanying rituals in three categories: doing what they do best and enjoy most at work; consciously allocating time and energy to the areas of their lives—work, family, health, service to others—they deem most important; and living their core values in their daily behaviors.

The best work is not the work that takes the most sacrifices. It's the work in which you can best succeed.

There’s a great saying: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” I find that in business a lot people take the time to write the really long letter, but they don’t take time to write the short one, and it even applies to doing investments.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

Imagine that you are trying to understand someone’s job function. You walk up to them as they’re standing next to a fax machine and ask them to tell you “what” they are doing. They are likely to look at you a bit surprised and say “I am sending a fax.” You might ask some follow-up questions about whether sending a fax is a necessary step in their job and if it is something that needs to happen for them to be successful. They are most likely to say “Yes,” but they are wrong. The “what” that they are doing is actually something like confirming an order or communicating the status of something, while the “how” of what they are doing it is with a fax machine. Once you have successfully disentangled the “what” from the “how,” you can then examine if it matters “how” it is done (my research has shown that it only matters about 20 percent of the time for any given “what.”) You can also ask how valuable that particular “what” is to the overall work set. For a task that has a low value, you should look across the organization to see if that same “what” is being performed repeatedly, and then force a common “how,” either through process or software. You might even consider outsourcing it. For rare, high-value work, you’ll need to go a step further to understand how it’s currently performing. If it is underperforming, then ask what is causing it to do so, whether it’s who is doing it, the process workflow, or the technology, or some blend of those factors that drive the performance. From there you need to carefully analyze where the change is needed to boost performance. Because it’s high-value work, there’s a high risk in making a “wrong” change. So, be cautious.

Richard S. Wellins, Paul Bernthal, and Mark Phelps of Development Dimensions International wrote in a 2005 article, “for the past two decades we have been trying to realize the benefits of empowerment, teamwork, recognition, people development, performance management, and new leadership styles.“

If you want to know why efforts to engage the workforce have failed so dismally, look again at that list. It contains not a word about work itself. Industrial psychologists have long understood that few workers are motivated to excel by pizza parties, bonuses, lunches with the boss, employee-of-the-month awards, or even the promise of annual raises. What does motivate workers is work: interesting work, useful work, work that challenges them, work whose completion satisfies both ego and the social self.

Unfortunately, the focus of conventional management, from hiring to evaluation to compensation to status, is on jobs, not work. The two are not the same, and it’s time we began shifting focus from the former to the latter.

Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.

When we work only to do, we most often find ourselves helplessly doing again without having placed the first doing in any context, without having celebrated any accomplishment… Most people who exhibit mastery in a work or a subject often have left it completely for a long period, only to return for another look. Constant busyness has no absence in it, no openness to the arrival of any new season, no birdsong at the start of its day. Constant learning is counterproductive and makes both us and the subject stale and uninteresting.