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Working Quotes

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Working Quotes

“Middle-class Americans, like myself and my fellow seekers, have been raised with the old-time Protestant expectation that hard work will be rewarded with material comfort and security. This has never been true of the working class, most of which toils away at wages incommensurate with the effort required. And now, the sociologists agree, it is increasingly untrue of the educated middle class that stocks our corporate bureaucracies.”

WorkEffortRewardsEmploymentMiddle ClassWorking ClassWorkingAmericansProtestant Work Ethic
Book:Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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“Capitalism, as Marx observed—with surprising admiration for its dynamism—never promised stability, and it’s been a generation since blue-chip companies like IBM offered their white-collar workers a job for life. As the best-seller Who Moved My Cheese advises, dislocated professionals must learn to adapt to new flavors of cheese as the old ones are taken away. But when skilled and experienced people routinely find their skills unwanted and their experience discounted, then something has happened that cuts deep into the very social contract that holds us together.”

JobsWorkCapitalismWorkersBetrayalStabilityWorkingCompaniesKarl MarxProfessionals
Book:Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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“When dusk falls on us, as it will, To dim the light of lives outlived, When night is next, when sleep is sure, When nothing’s left to lift— I will be glad. The work of a day Well done, this rest its good reward, The best we’ve earned and what We’ve won, this doorway opening. Our lives are like this: years moved on Beyond the words that started them.”

LifePoetryWorkPoemLivingTwilightRestWorkingDuskResting
Book:Not Go Away Is My Name
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“Interviewing one of Uber’s earliest executives, who demonstrated the company’s route-finding algorithms with the unbridled enthusiasm of a small child at Christmas, I couldn’t help but think what this company had really innovated was not some brilliant new solution to the traveling salesman problem, but the establishment of a new, lower norm of employee treatment. Success, growth, profit came from taking what might at one time have been decent, stable jobs and rebranding them as side hustles. The brilliant business idea was persuading people to expect less.”

WorkBusinessBottom LineWorkingEmployeesUberGig WorkSide Hustles
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“Build up her own life--how? How to build a life with no one, rooted to nothing but a house full of an old man's things? Desiree began devoting weekday mornings to scouring the internet for jobs. She learned what she had no interest in--hospitality, teaching, medicine--but what she might apply herself to remained as much a mystery as before Nolan died.”

LifeJobsWorkCareersLivingWorkingCallingsOccupationsJob Searching
Book:The Wilderness
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“My human coworker sometimes talks about not wanting to work, and then he'll say something quite odd and rather silly. What is it he says, now? There's more to a person than the work they do, or A person is more than just their work? Something like that. But what else could a person be? Where would your food come from? Who would keep you company? How would you get by without work and without your coworkers?”

HumansWorkEmploymentWorkingEmployeesCoworkers
Book:The Employees
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“Here it comes, then: what we’re doing doesn’t really matter. You know how they always told us we’re indispensable? Not true. We’re dispensable. Highly dispensable. But since we’re here anyway, let’s make something of it. Let’s not get too caught up in identities and job titles. They’re usually only there to put some order in our day. Like summer camp, but with salaries instead of juice boxes. You’ll have to look elsewhere for the really essential stuff.”

WorkImportanceSignificanceWorkingDispensabilityIndispensability
Author:Etgar Keret
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“Any negative feedback stings, but feedback that doesn’t align with who you are at your core can hurt even worse because you feel misunderstood. How you react to the feedback and what you do afterwards will impact your career trajectory at the company. Your first instinct may be to rebut, defend, or explain the behaviors that led to the feedback. But perceptions don’t change because of explanations or more information; they change over time after you adjust your actions and behaviors.”

ChangeWorkExplanationFeedbackWorkingDefensivenessBeing MisunderstoodNegative Feedback
Author:Marlo Lyons
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“O trabalho tem o potencial de ser nossa contribuição genuína ao futuro. Para isso, é preciso entendê-lo como ferramenta de cocriação do mundo. Entender que cada pessoa, com seu papel (que vai muito além de produzir e consumir), desempenha uma função importante nessa grande rede. Logo, em vez de abrir mão dos nossos sonhos para pagar contas, ou ver o trabalho como uma prisão diária cuja única finalidade é o "ganha-pão", devemos permitir que nossa autenticidade direcione nossas escolhas profissionais.”

WorkAuthenticityWorking
Book:Como salvar o futuro: Ações para o presente
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“All winter long, I had glimpsed his deeply set habits, his regimented schedule. When I left, he would eat a dinner of leftovers, then continue to work until sleep. Everything revolved, to a fault, around work, around his next book project. If I had lived alone, I would have turned out the same way. It is the thing I have been most afraid of happening, my strictness toward myself calcifying into a lifestyle, my traits ingrown so deeply that my oddness surfaces, apparent to all.”

WorkHabitsWorkingScheduleOddnessRegimentationStrictnessRegimen
Book:Bliss Montage
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“At work, they knew me to be capable but fragile. Quiet, clouded up with daydreams. Usually diligent, though sometimes inconsistent, moody. But also something else, something implacable: I was unsavvy in some fundamental, uncomfortable way. The sound of my loud, nervous laugh, like gargling gravel, was a social liability. I skipped too many office parties. They kept me on because my output was prolific and they could task me with more and more production assignments. When I focused, a trait I exhibited at the beginning of my time there, I could be detail-oriented to the point of obsession.”

WorkFocusCapabilityDiligenceWorkingDetail OrientationUnsavvy
Book:Severance
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“By the time the blooms Unfurl themselves for a few hours of light, the women who tend them Are already at work. Blue. I’ll never know who started the lie that we are lazy, But I’d love to wake that bastard up At foreday in the morning, toss him in a truck, and drive him under God Past every bus stop in America to see all those black folk Waiting to go work for whatever they want.”

PoetryWomenWorkMorningPoemsFlowersBlack WomenAfrican AmericansBlacksWorking
Book:The Tradition
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“The wheel of fortune turned sharply in America. Education and learning counted for nothing here. Tradesmen and labourers went into the savage pushcart life of Hester Street, fought their way up, became contractors, shop owners, great manufacturers. Intellectuals and professionals preferred the factories, certain they would get out again. Most of these men were lost forever in the sweatshops.”

WorkWorking
Book:Bright star of exile: Jacob Adler and the Yiddish theatre
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“Yet even in the best of cases, the need to be on call, to spend at least a certain amount of energy looking over one's shoulder, maintaining a false front, never looking too obviously engrossed, the inability to fully collaborate with others —all this lends itself much more to a culture of computer games, YouTube rants, memes, and Twitter controversies than to, say, the rock 'n' roll bands, drug poetry, and experimental theater created under the midcentury welfare state.”

JobsCultureWorkJobBullshitPop CultureWorkingMillennials
Book:Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
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“My mom comes home exhausted every night. I have never seen her not exhausted. And also, I have never seen her not working. People in Oklahoma think this must be how refugees are--never sitting, never sleeping, like they have no knees and no dreams. Maybe people think that's just the way my mom talks, kinda panicky and chipper at the same time, like someone scared who doesn't want you to think she's scared--even maybe like you're the one she's scared of.”

FearImmigrantsMothersWorkingExhaustionTirednessBeing Tired
Book:Everything Sad Is Untrue
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“Working for OSHA is a horrible job to have. You have to ignore the whistle blowers and send them illegal letters saying that you cannot find any problems. I have a lot of those fraudulent letters, as I have been through OSHA twice. Once as the utility company employee and once as the utility company subcontractor employee. It is a disgusting & blatently corrupt system.”

CompanyLettersCorruptionHorribleOshaEmployeeIllegalJobProblemsDisgustingUtilityWorkingCorruptSystemIgnoreContractorLotWhistleblowerFraudulentWhistleSendBlowerBlatentSubcontractor
Author:Steven Magee
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