And enough for me that when my hand touched your shoulder, you leaned on me; and when you felt me slip away, you called my name.
Orson Scott CardRead
The best thing about my job, though, is stopping at the end of the day and rejoining the human universe.
Interpretation
The joy of work comes from connecting with people after a day of responsibility.
Orson Scott Card expresses that the most fulfilling aspect of his job is not just the tasks he performs but the ability to pause at the end of the day and reconnect with others. This highlights the importance of social connections and community in our lives, suggesting that work should lead us back to shared human experiences rather than isolate us in our individual roles.
In practice
In a motivational speech for employees emphasizing work-life balance.
And enough for me that when my hand touched your shoulder, you leaned on me; and when you felt me slip away, you called my name.
The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win.
Never mind that the story had turned out to be lies and foolishness—there was always folks stupid enough to say, Where there's smoke there's fire, when the saying should have been, Where there's scandalous lies there's always malicious believers and spreaders-around, regardless of evidence.
The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.
You take a step, then another. That's the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it's a remaking of your own mind.
I've had your tears with mine, and you've had mine with yours. I think that's more intimate even than a kiss.
Labor rids us of three great evils; tediousness, vice, and poverty.
I need to feel like the work I'm doing is not necessarily important, but meaningful, at least to me, because otherwise it just becomes a day job. It just becomes factory work and I get really frustrated.
In an ideal world, nobody's work would be just about the money. People could pursue excellence in what they do, take pride in achievement, and derive meaning from knowing that their work improved the lives of others.
A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests. Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization slowly crushes a person.
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
It is right and necessary that all should have work to do which shall be worth doing and be of itself pleasant to do, and which should be done under such conditions as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious.
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