"If you’re struggling to raise money for an idea, or are thinking that you will support your idea with unrelated work, then you need to rethink the idea."

"Follow your passion" might just be terrible advice.

Most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.

Self-Determination Theory tells us that motivation requires that you fulfill 3 basic psychological needs: Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important; Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do; Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people.

Working right trumps finding the right work.

Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives.

I am suggesting that you put aside the question of whether your job is your true passion, and instead turn your focus toward becoming so good they can’t ignore you.

The traits that define great work are rare and valuable.

Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital.

The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming "so good they can’t ignore you", is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital. 

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration.

Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.

If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an "acceptable level."

Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.

To summarize, if your goal is to love what you do, your first step is to acquire career capital. Your next step is to invest this capital in the traits that define great work. Control is one of the most important targets you can choose for this investment.

Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable.

The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.

Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action.

A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field.

Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of “small” thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a "big" action.

To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback.

If career capital makes it possible to identify a compelling mission, then it’s a strategy of little bets that gives you a good shot of succeeding in this mission.

The Law of Remarkability: For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.

The core idea of this book is simple: To construct work you love, you must first build career capital by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the type of traits that define compelling careers. Mission is one of those traits.

I argued that the best ideas for missions are found in the adjacent possible—the region just beyond the current cutting edge.

Rule #1: Don't follow your passion. Rule #2: Be so good they can't ignore you by acquiring enough career capital with rare and valuable skills. Rule #3: Cash in your career capital by gaining Control and other traits that make great work. Rule #4: Think small, act big - the importance of missions.

Food is your body's fuel. Without fuel, your body wants to shut down.

I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is.

Of course we are doing this primarily for ourselves, but I know our fans dig most of it, too.

The world is a treadmill, and we are being pulled backward on it if we aren't consciously walking forward.

The required cheerfulness that characterizes many of our churches produces a suffocating environment of pat, religious answers to the painful, complex questions that riddle the lives of hurting people.

Yeah, there were a few years in the early nineties where I really began to hate what was valued as funny and just sort of what was valued in stand-up, period.

I drive around on my scooter in Milan alone - we don't have bodyguards or anything like that. I am a fashion designer, not a celebrity, and although I get stopped for autographs and the like, I don't think I am famous.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

When you meet someone you love, whether or not they love you back, something occurs in you that makes you want to improve yourself.

The deficit crisis is real and must be addressed. But it cannot be solved on the backs of the weak and vulnerable.

You can't look for love, or it will run away from you. But, you know, don't look for it. Don't look for it. Just go where it is and appreciate it, and, you know, it will find you.

We're waiting for the pendulum to swing back again, which I am absolutely confident it will.

Without hustle talent will only carry you so far.

I like to separate the music- and lyric-writing processes if I can. I'll sort of noodle around on my keyboard and my computer until I have a beat or a chord progression, I'll record it as a loop, export it to iTunes, then walk around with the loop and sort of talk to myself in the loop, and that's how I get the lyrics.

Cat: a pygmy lion who loves mice, hates dogs, and patronizes human beings.

I learned in an extremely hard way that the accountability falls with me.

There's no way that I could be the president. You can't have a pacifist in the White House... I'm an actor. This is what I do for a living.

I have to say I wasn't a huge fan of 'Star Wars', and I'm still not, really, but you have to acknowledge that there's a huge fan base for it, and these people are really sweet. You can't stereotype a 'Star Wars' fan.

I try not to pass judgment on anyone, and I wish they wouldn't pass it on me.

Reading a play, you view yourself as part of a whole. You see where the whole thing is going, and so you're willing to go to the very ugly place that your heart may go in order to serve the whole.

A lot of my friends are getting married, but I don't think that is what I need. I am under no such pressure that if everybody is having a boyfriend, I too should have one.

I'm obviously an American citizen. My parents are American citizens. But I'm not looked at as an American.

I am not that good a manager for me to be comfortable borrowing someone else's money.