Quotes & Sayings About Growth At Work

Erik Erikson has commented: Potentially creative men like (Bernard) Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, at last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden. — Lewis Hyde

And your doubts can become a good quality if you school them. They must grow to be knowledgeable, they must learn to be critical. As soon as they begin to spoil something for you ask them why a thing is ugly, demand hard evidence, test them, and you will perhaps find them at a loss and short of an answer, or perhaps mutinous. But do not give in, request arguments, and act with this kind of attentiveness and consistency every single time, and the day will come when instead of being demolishers they will be among your best workers--perhaps the canniest of all those at work on the building of your life. — Rainer Maria Rilke

But there were other forces at work in the cub, the greatest of which was growth. Instinct and law demanded of him obedience. But growth demanded disobedience ... In the end, one day, fear and obedience were swept away by the rush of life, and the cub straddled and sprawled toward the entrance. — Jack London

People are bad at looking at seeds and guessing what size tree will grow out of them. The way you'll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don't just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it's really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work. That's the way the government does things. They do something really big that's really bad, and they think, Well, we'll make it better, and then it never gets better.
Building Fast Companies for Growth, Inc. September 2013 — Paul Graham

Anybody with leisure can do that who is willing to begin where everything ought to be begun
that is, at the beginning. Nothing worth calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of any good is life, and the very body of created life, and essential to it, being its self operant, is growth. The larger start you make, the less room you leave for life to extend itself. You fill with the dead matter of your construction the places where assimilation ought to have its perfect work, building by a life-process, self-extending, and subserving the whole. Small beginnings with slow growings have time to root themselves thoroughly
I do not mean in place nor yet in social regard, but in wisdom. Such even prosper by failures, for their failures are not too great to be rectified without injury to the original idea. — George MacDonald

[ ... ] endless action and reaction. Those beautifully rounded pebbles which you gather on the sand and which you hold in your hand and marvel at their exceeding smoothness, were chiseled into their varies and graceful forms by the ceaseless action of countless waves. Nature is herself a great worker and never tolerates, without certain rebuke, any contradiction to her wise example. Inaction is followed by stagnation. Stagnation is followed by pestilence and pestilence is followed by death. — Frederick Douglass

Women are often belittled for trying to resurrect these men and bring them back to life and to love. They are in a world that would be even more alienated and violent if caring women did not do the work of teaching men who have lost touch with themselves how to love again. This labor of love is futile only when the men in question refuse to awaken, refuse growth. At this point it is a gesture of self-love for women to break their commitment and move on. — Bell Hooks

At the end of the day, both men and women who become CEOs have showed tenacity and hard work to succeed in their careers. It takes not just skills but also extreme dedication and commitment. And regardless of gender, CEOs are measured by the same criteria - the growth and success of the business. — Susan Wojcicki

In short, avoiding the scourge of unemployment may have less to do with chasing after growth and more to do with building an economy of care, craft and culture. And in doing so, restoring the value of decent work to its rightful place at the heart of society. — Tim Jackson

General editors' preface The growth of translation studies as a separate discipline is a success story of the 1980s. The subject has developed in many parts of the world and is clearly destined to continue developing well into the twenty-first century. Translation studies brings together work in a wide variety of fields, including linguistics, literary study, history, anthropology, psychology, and economics. This series of books will reflect the breadth of work in translation studies and will enable readers to share in the exciting new developments that are taking place at the present time. — Lawrence Venuti

No work you'll ever complete;
no project you'll ever attempt;
no skill you'll ever master;
no book you'll ever write;
no race you'll ever run;
no sculpture you'll ever create;
no task you'll ever perform;
no structure you'll ever build;
nothing you will ever do
is more important than the life you shape one day at a time. — Steve Goodier

To make HP a great company once again, we need more than competitive costs and operational efficiency. We're in the process of assessing and refining our growth strategy, and the same concepts that were behind our operational changes will be at work here: simplicity, focus, alignment, and execution. — Bill Vaughan

Everything big, once started little. Discipline yourself and work to become an excellent person at what you want. Stretch yourself daily and go a little further than yesterday. Growth is the key to winning success. — Mark LaMoure

I think one of the changes of our consciousness of how things come into being, of how things are made and how they work . . . is the change from an engineering paradigm, which is to say a design paradigm, to a biological paradigm, which is a cultural and evolutionary one. In lots and lots of areas now, people say, How do you create the conditions at the bottom to allow the growth of the things you want to happen? - Brian Eno — Katie Salen

If you are going to find work worth doing - a vocation to fulfill and challenge you - you will have to encounter a reality bigger than yourself. It may not be what others say it should be or what you think, but it will come if you are looking for it ... At times, the work you're called to do will be hard and confusing, but if you press in, you will see the purpose behind the pain. You will see how the whole experience is causing you to grow. And you will thank God for the whole journey. — Jeff Goins

Gates put it to me this way: "For good stuff to happen, it requires a lot of things to go well - you need many pieces to get stability right." None of it is going to happen overnight, but we need to work with the forces of order that do still exist in the World of Disorder to start building a different trajectory, beginning with all the basics: basic education, basic infrastructure - roads, ports, electricity, telecom, mobile banking - basic agriculture, and basic governance. The goal, said Gates, is to get these frail states to a level of stability where enough women and girls are getting educated and empowered for population growth to stabilize, where farmers can feed their families, and where you "start to get a reverse brain drain" as young people feel that they have a chance to connect to and contribute and benefit from today's global flows by staying at home and not emigrating. Believe — Thomas L. Friedman

A good rule of thumb is that every single day should include some kind of stimuli that is directed at your personal growth (working through a book, studying a skill or technique, et cetera) and some kind of stimuli that you've sought out for purposes of advancing your work (an industry trend report, a research study, a trade magazine). — Todd Henry

If you're not aiming at perfection, you're not trying hard enough. — Wayne Gerard Trotman

When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to "take in" the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work. — May Sarton

The romance of circumvention is one of the most destructive forces at work in our society. The American Idol freeway to greatness, Instagramming one's way into popular consciousness with selfies of our ass folds beneath short shorts, human growth hormone and performance-enhancing drugs for athletes, Adderall for the idle mind, reality television that sacrifices our dignity for fifteen lousy minutes ... — Daniel Gillies

A man comes walking north. He carries a sack, the first sack, containing provisions for the road and some implements. The man is strong and rough-hewn, with a red lion beard and little scars on face and hands, sites of old wounds
were they gotten at work or in a fight? Maybe he has been in jail and wants to go into hiding, or perhaps he is a philosopher looking for peace; in any case, here he comes, a human being in the midst of this immense solitude. He walks and walks, in a silence broken by neither bird nor beast. — Knut Hamsun

Loving relationships, though necessary for life, health, and growth, are among the most complicated skills. Before we can be successful at achieving relationships, it is necessary that we broaden our understanding of how they work, what they mean and how what we do and believe can enhance or destroy them. We can accomplish this only if we are willing to put in the energy and take the time to study failed relationships as well as examine successful ones. Loving relationships cannot be taken lightly. Unless we are looking for pain, they must not be forever approached in a trial and error fashion. Too many of us have experienced the cost of these lackadaisical approaches in terms of tears, confusion and guilt. — Leo Buscaglia

Your new challenge is to redesign your time allocations.
Your strategic focus determines where your time resources will be mainly invested. Prioritise acting out your own script, make your own movie instead of spending too much time watching others at work through the TV. It is surprising the number of unsuccessful people who spend all their time resources on the social media platforms following the lives of the successful. Make the news, be the leader and let others follow you. Align you priorities and balance your activities. — Archibald Marwizi

Most managers make the innocent mistake of starting at the opposite end. They try to address individual performance and cultural issues through group announcements: generic statements about the need to own your work, care more about the customer, be a better communicator, etc. Managers hope that these messages will reach their intended audience, that they will move people to take action and change unproductive behaviors. But they mostly don't. It's not because people don't care or don't want to grow. It's because that's not how growth happens, especially the personal kind. Those group announcements, at best, point to something that needs to change. But they do nothing to show people how to make the changes themselves. Great — Jonathan Raymond

WE MAY FEEL...BUT WE DON'T

We may feel the need to change employment, but we don't.

We may feel the need to start a specific project, but we don't.

We may feel the need to pursue higher education, but we don't

We may feel the need to heal a broken relationship, but we don't.

We may feel the need to work to improve our spiritual lives, but we don't.

We may feel the need to take steps toward a healthier physical or emotional life for ourselves and/or our family, but again, we don't.

(This list could likely go on for eternity.)

The desire for progression is innate, but the problem we face is that the actual act of progression is also a choice.

Without embracing our inherent need for progress, for positive growth and/or change, we'll still go on living.

...But at what cost? — Richie Norton

When we refuse to work with our disappointment, we break the Precepts: rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it's the moment of being that disappointment which is fruitful; and, if we are not willing to do that, at least we should notice that we are not willing. The moment of disappointment in life is an incomparable gift that we receive many times a day if we're alert. This gift is always present in anyone's life, that moment when 'It's not the way I want it! — Charlotte Joko Beck

Individual growth towards love and wisdom is slow. A community's growth is even slower. Members of a community have to be friends of time. They have to learn that many things will resolve themselves if they are given enough time. It can be a great mistake to want, in the name of clarity and truth, to push things too quickly to a resolution. Some people enjoy confrontation and highlighting divisions. This is not always healthy. It is better to be a friend of time. But clearly too, people should not pretend that problems don't exist by refusing to listen to the rumblings of discontent; they must be aware of the tensions and then learn to work on them at the right moment. — Jean Vanier

I sometimes marvel at how far I've come - blissful, even, in the knowledge that I am slowly becoming a well-evolved human being - only to have the illusion shattered by an episode of bad behaviour that contradicts the new and reinforces the old. At these junctures of self-reflection, I ask the question: "are all my years of hard work unraveling before my eyes, or am I just having an episode?" For the sake of personal growth and the pursuit of equanimity, I choose the latter and accept that, on this journey of evolution, I may not encounter just one bad day, but a group of many. — B.G. Bowers

Look at each day as a chance to invest life into life. A chance to share your experience and deposit it into someone else's conscience. Each day is a chance to work miracles in the lives of others. — Jim Rohn

[Clayton] Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to accomplish it you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with your family, it felt like you hadn't done a thing, and if you skipped it nothing happened. So you spent more and more time at the office, on high-margin, quick-yield tasks, and you even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of your family. He had seen many people tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families
only to find that by then their families were gone. — Larissa MacFarquhar

We base our ideas about the world on our personal experience, and that experience has ingrained the rate of growth of the recent past in our heads as "the way things happen." We're also limited by our imagination, which takes our experience and uses it to conjure future predictions - but often, what we know simply doesn't give us the tools to think accurately about the future. When we hear a prediction about the future that contradicts our experience-based notion of how things work, our instinct is that the prediction must be naive. If I tell you [...] that you may live to be 150, or 250, or not die at all, your instinct will be, "That's stupid - if there's one thing I know from history, it's that everybody dies." And yes, no one in the past has not died. But no one flew airplanes before airplanes were invented either. — Tim Urban

Goals need to build like a fire. It starts as a flame consuming all you put into it and burns hotter and hotter the more you work at it. — John Patrick Hickey

When you refuse to entertain the possibility of a solution because you "know" it will not work, then you have successfully strengthened the problem at hand — Gary Hopkins

Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: "Love. They must do it for love." Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss. — Wendell Berry

You think you're developing and getting better and then you see something you did years ago. Looking at your early work.. sometimes it has a depth that surprises you. — Andrew Wyeth

The internal processes of muscle growth are seriously complicated, people devote their lives to it, but the external processes that kick it off, the things in your control can be distilled down to a few principles: Get stronger in the right rep ranges, eat appropriately, commit to the program and consistently work hard at it. — Daniel Roberts

Good preachers work hard with the text. They want to make the sermon as accurate as possible. They also want to make it as interesting as possible. They want to persuade, admonish, and exhort, yet nothing happens as a result of their skill. Nothing can happen - at least, nothing good. The Holy Spirit, who attends the preached Word, is the only one who moves people to changed lives and growth. The Word is where the power is. It is not in programs or human skills. We can preach this Word till we are blue in the face, but if the Holy Spirit does not work through the Word preached, noth-ing happens. — R.C. Sproul

If you want to grow a giant redwood, you need to make sure the seeds are ok, nurture the sapling, and work out what might potentially stop it from growing all the way along. Anything that breaks it at any point stops that growth. — Elon Musk

We have gone on too long blaming or pitying the mothers who devour their children, who sow the seeds of progressive dehumanization, because they have never grown to full humanity themselves. If the mother is at fault, why isn't it time to break the pattern by urging all these Sleeping Beauties to grow up and live their own lives? There never will be enough Prince Charmings or enough therapists to break that pattern now. It is society's job, and finally that of each woman alone. For it is not the strength of the mothers that is at fault but their weakness, their passive childlike dependency and immaturity that is mistaken for "femininity." Our society forces boys, insofar as it can, to grow up, to endure the pains of growth, to educate themselves to work, to move on. Why aren't girls forced to grow up - to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique? — Betty Friedan

Self-preservation is not a man's first duty: flight is his last. Better and wiser and infinitely nobler to stand a mark for the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" and to stop at our post though we fall there, better infinitely to toil on, even when toil seems vain, than cowardly to keep a whole skin at the cost of a wounded conscience or despairingly to fling up work, because the ground is hard and the growth of the seed imperceptible. Prudent advices, when the prudence is only inspired by sense, are generally foolish. — Alexander MacLaren

For PayPal to work, we needed to attract a critical mass of at least a million users. Advertising was too ineffective to justify the cost. Prospective deals with big banks kept falling through. So we decided to pay people to sign up. We gave new customers $10 for joining, and we gave them $10 more every time they referred a friend. This got us hundreds of thousands of new customers and an exponential growth rate. — Peter Thiel

The same economic relationship is at work underground, where low-density land-use patterns require greater lengths of pipe and conduit to distribute municipal services. This high ratio of public to private expenditure helps explain why suburban municipalities are finding that new growth fails to pay for itself at acceptable levels of taxation. — Andres Duany

In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today. — Peter Thiel

With the threat of failure looming, students with the growth mindset set instead mobilized their resources for learning. They told us that they, too, sometimes felt overwhelmed, but their response was to dig in and do what it takes. They were like George Danzig. Who? George Danzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley. One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard. When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homework problems at all. They were two famous math problems that had never been solved. — Carol S. Dweck

Generally speaking, the people who come to work at Snapchat believe in personal growth. It's part of why Snapchat's stories are ephemeral, because you will be a different person tomorrow. — Evan Spiegel

If we look at the happiest, most successful people and companies, they're those that have a positive attitude about continuously improving. It's growth. It's something new. It's an adventure. — Laurie Sudbrink

Years ago this was just a place where I was assigned to work. Today looking at this place represents the opportunity that God allowed me to see the beauty of His works. The difference in then and now - I guess our views are a representative of our growth. Thankful. — Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

An entertainer is someone who pleases others, and an artist tries to please himself. An artist is on a journey: they don't know where they're going, what is going to happen, but they know they are not there yet, and there is some continuity and growth. I think of myself as an entertainer: I'm a performing entertainer, I'm a stand-up comic. But there's an artist at work here, too. One who interprets his world through his own filter. — George Carlin

I have yet to see any method which can predict a man's development more than a short time ahead. And even if we could predict human growth, we should have no right to play providence. However 'scientific' the method, it would still at best work with 60% or 70% of accuracy; and no man has a right to dispose of other people's lives and careers on probability.34 — Kenneth Hopper

It [motherhood] has changed absolutely everything. I mean, it's changed my life. I think I've changed as a human being more since I've had Kai than in any other period in my life ... It's such an incredible catalyst for growth. I found myself questioning absolutely everything: how I spend my time, how I speak, what kind of projects I work on, how I look at the world. — Jennifer Connelly

I continue to see good growth in the mobile space; I expect to see PCs being the core driver in the home. And I mean that for entertainment along with the work-at-home space. — Jim Allchin

And he looked at her with open eyes, the bone of his heavy brow a bastion above, the flesh of his face wealthy below, and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth. — Seth Dickinson