A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.
Interpretation
A true professional excels in their work even when not motivated or inspired.
This quote emphasizes the essence of professionalism as the ability to perform at one's best regardless of personal feelings or circumstances. It suggests that true dedication and skill in one's field is demonstrated by the capacity to push through reluctance or lack of motivation to deliver quality work.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech to inspire employees when facing challenges.
More than anything else, though, to anyone who would write about it, golf offers a four-hour drama in two acts, which becomes memorable even in the tape-recorded reminiscenses of old champs, and which - in the hands of someone like Herb Wind - can become a piece of war correspondence as artfully controlled as Alan Morehead's account of Gallipoli.
Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.
It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.
Curiosity endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and a serenity in their own mode of life which springs from their cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will.
Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others.
It is a wonderful tribute to the game or to the dottiness of the people who play it that for some people somewhere there is no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle, an unplayable course, the wrong time of the day or year.
I don't play against any team in particular. I play to fight against defeat.
Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.
I'd applied to graduate school for playwriting, and I got rejected by every school. I felt that theatre was closed but that, when it came to film, the door was very slightly ajar. If I have any virtues, it's that I'm good at walking through doors that are slightly ajar.
Do today's duty, fight to-day's temptation; and do not weaken and distract yourself by looking forward to things which you cannot see, and could not understand if you saw them.
Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.
How you see your future is much more important that what has happened in your past.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.