You know, I'm gay and I grew up being aware of that at a very early age, in a fairly repressed family.
Alan BallRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of finding personal meaning in one's work to avoid frustration and monotony.
Alan Ball expresses the idea that work should hold personal significance beyond its external importance. If one views their job merely as a routine task akin to factory work, it can lead to dissatisfaction and frustration. Therefore, finding meaning in what one does is essential for maintaining passion and fulfillment in work.
Themes
Meaningful WorkJob SatisfactionPersonal FulfillmentFrustrationPurpose
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about finding passion in your career.
More from Alan Ball
All quotes →If a scene is longer than three pages, it better be for a good reason.
Alan BallRead
It's hard for me to get interested in stories that ignore death, which is what American marketing culture would like to do: pretend that death doesn't exist, that you can buy immortality; just buy these products, and you'll be forever young and happy.
Alan BallRead
Death is a companion for all of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we're aware of it or not, and it's not necessarily a terrible thing.
Alan BallRead
I was conveniently bisexual for a long time, and then I went, 'Come on, who am I kidding?' And I have to say, it was the single biggest step I took toward emotional well-being, to stop feeling like I had to hide who I am.
Alan BallRead
I try to tell the best story, and the story that has some heart and some genuine terror and some social commentary and some comedy and some romance and some sex and some violence.
Alan BallRead
Similar quotes
The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most precious possession; like the honor of a soldier, dearer to him than life.
Thomas CarlyleRead
I love working if it's with people who are capable of having a good time. People with a little bit of enjoyment of what they do. If it's enormous pressure, and people feel that their lives are at stake, then it's agony. So I try to pick projects where I feel like I'm going to avoid those traps.
Alan ArkinRead
My feeling about work is it's much more about the experience of doing it than the end product. Sometimes things that are really great and make lots of money are miserable to make, and vice versa.
Alan CummingRead
Work is what structures adults' lives: it gives us purpose, focus, a set of responsibilities, and an identity. So when people are not participating in the labour market, all sorts of other things often start to go wrong.
David AutorRead
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.
Timothy KellerRead
Labor rids us of three great evils; tediousness, vice, and poverty.
John RuskinRead