Meetings should be like salt - a spice sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings destroy morale and motivation.
Interpretation
Meetings should be used judiciously, as overuse can negatively impact team morale.
This quote emphasizes the importance of moderation in meetings, likening them to salt that enhances a dish when used sparingly but can ruin it when overused. It suggests that just as excessive salt can overwhelm the taste of food, too many meetings can dampen team spirit and motivation, detracting from productivity and engagement.
In practice
During a team workshop on enhancing productivity, this quote could be shared to remind participants about the optimal use of meetings.
That's the great irony of allowing passionate people to work from home. A manager's natural instinct is to worry that her workers aren't getting enough work done. But the real threat is that they will wind up working too hard. And because the manager isn't sitting across from her worker anymore, she can't look in the person's eyes and see burnout.
Most work is not coming up with The Next Big Thing. Rather, it's improving the thing you already thought of six months - or six years - ago. It's the work of work.
We must not allow other people's limited perceptions to define us.
People with intelligence must use their intelligence, people with eyes must use their eyes, people with the capacity to love have the impulse to love and the need to love in order to feel healthy. Capacities clamor to be used, and cease their clamor only when they are used sufficiently. That is to say, capacities are needs, and therefore are intrinsic values as well.
The miserable have no other medicine But only hope.
You can get so confused that you'll start in to race down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space, headed, I fear, toward a most useless place. The Waiting Place.
If I can only keep my good name, I shall have riches enough.
I think when we don't know what to do it's wise to do nothing. Sit down quietly; quiet our hearts and minds and breathe deeply.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.