Overheard

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.” Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement address

“I hear different cats complaining about that and I’m like, ‘Man, you could be somewhere lifting boxes right now.’ This ain’t work, this is leisure. You get to sit and talk about yourself for hours, all day long. What’s hard about that? You’ll never hear me complain, because I know what I could be doing.” R&B star Ne-Yo, on doing interviews

“This is actually a question I’m obsessed with: Why don’t people work hard when it’s in their best interest to do so?… The (short) answer is that it’s really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn’t work hard. It’s a form of self-protection… Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don’t study for tests — which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you’re stupid — and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare.” Blink author Malcolm Gladwell

“Fear of delegation is the belief that no one is as competent to solve a problem as you are. This kind of thinking (which at times may be justified) usually results from the belief that tasks will inevitably be done poorly if not done by capable hands—yours, of course. But how often is this really masking the fear that others can perform jobs you once thought only you could accomplish? This in turn leads to the fear of replaceability…” Ricardo Semler, author of Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace