Posts tagged #flow
Your true self is intensely interested in your real life’s work—but it could give a rat’s ass about anything else. When you pursue a career that pulls you away from your true self, your talent and enthusiasm will quit on you like a bored intern.
– Martha Beck with a signature delightful turn of phrase. I’ll forever think about my talent, enthusiasm, and energy like interns I can give interesting work they’ll enjoy and grow doing, or anything else that will make them quit on me.
Try easier.
My new mantra for 2025: Try easy. No more over-striving, no more perfectionism, no more gritting teeth and grinding through because of some misguided notion that the hardest worker wins. (Spoiler alert: they don’t.)
This year, there will be more relaxing into tasks, letting things take as long as they take, paying attention without judgement to how they are unfolding, more flow, more ease, more deep focus time with fewer distractions, more openness, more delight in the doing versus the outcome. It’s a new and wild and weird way to live. Happy New Year!
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.
For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.
And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.
– Khalil Gibran via my friend Sara, whose book about work is excellent.