kyleschen

Excessive productivity can bring the most gifted man almost to madness.

Get a good idea and stay with it. Dog it, and work it until it’s done and done right.

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.

Don’t fight forces, use them.

Love, children, and work are the great sources of fertilizing contact between the individual and the rest of the world.

We look for ourselves many places – meditation retreats, personality assessments, twitter rankings. But the best place to find the reason we were put on this earth is a private moment immersed in our craft. In that sacred instant, we see without a reasonable doubt that we were made to create and contribute.

Warren Bennis, our preeminent scholar of leadership, tells us that the basic passion in the best leaders he has studied is for self-expression. Their work is clearly a vehicle for self-actualization. Their desire is to bring ‘who they are’ into the world, into reality, which I speak of as the practice of self-assertiveness.

If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert.