Tackling Large Tasks Quotes

Do first what you don't want to do most. ~ Clifford Cohen

Embrace every challenge you have, every person you meet, every place you visit, every task you succeed at, and especially those at which you fail. You will learn from them all. You'll learn about the world at large and about other people but most important, you'll learn about yourself. ~ Richie Sambora

The first element in a symmetrical life is work. Three-fourths of our time is probably spent in work. Of course the meaning of it is that our work should be just as religious as our worship, and unless we can work for the glory of God three-fourths of life remains unsanctified. The proof that work is religious is that most of Christ's life was spent in work. During a large part of the first thirty years of His life He worked with the hammer and the plane, making ploughs and yokes and household furniture. Christ's public ministry occupied only about two and a half years of His earthly life; the great bulk of His time was simply spent in doing common everyday tasks, and ever since then work has had a new meaning. ~ Henry Drummond

Peace is more than a lofty ideal. It is a practical principle that, with conscious effort, can become a normal part of our lives as we deal with matters both large and small. One habit that prevents inner peace is procrastination. It clutters our minds with unfinished business and makes us uneasy until we finish a task and get it out of the way. ~ Joseph B. Wirthlin

In every age states of varying size and constitution and at every level of development have found naval warfare to be one of their most formidable and expensive tasks. Ships have always been large, costly and complicated, and warships much more complicated and costly than any others. Scholars are nowadays inclined to emphasize the power, wealth and sophistication of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and there is not more striking illustration of this than the advanced and elaborate administrative structures of the early English navy. ~ Nicholas Rodger

In 1951, the Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills published a study titled White Collar: The American Middle Classes.26 Like Ronald Coase, Mills was fascinated by the rise of large managerial corporations. He argued that these firms, in their pursuit of scale and efficiency, had created a vast tier of workers who carried out repetitive, mechanistic tasks that stifled their imagination and, ultimately, their ability to fully participate in society. In short, Mills argued, the typical corporate worker was alienated. For many, that alienation was captured in the warning printed on the Hollerith punch cards that, thanks to IBM and other data processing firms, became ubiquitous symbols and agents of bureaucratized life during the 1950s and 1960s: "Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate. ~ Moises Naim

People would do well to ask themselves how many of their ambitions and aspirations derive from the type of economic system they inhabit and the insecurity and exhaustion it creates, and question the sense and purpose of a society where control of a large portion of life is abdicated under contract in the labour market, and where immense creativity and potential is stifled by the need to do difficult and repetitive tasks in order to earn a wage. ~ Tony Benn

The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation. ~ E.F. Schumacher

Learn to live, and live to learn,
Ignorance like a fire doth burn,
Little tasks make large return. ~ Bayard Taylor

Deal with difficult tasks while they are easy. Act on large issues while they are small. ~ Laozi

Put the uncommon effort into the common task ... make it large by doing it in a great way. ~ Orison Swett Marden

A hundred people is rather a large handful for the four of us to take on," Malcolm pointed out. "Do you have any ideas about how we're going to handle that task?"
"Simple," Halt told him. "We'll surround them. ~ John Flanagan

Technology has also given us greater automation that allows us to take large tasks and turn them into more manageable tasks. The pressure then comes from executive management to be "fully informed and fully engaged" in every aspect of our operation, after all, it's easier than ever to do so! This of course misses the point that those advancements free the leader from the "small" things and allows them to focus on things with bigger impact like, team member development, strategy and other proactive measures. We're missing out on the big picture if we are constantly focused on the small things. ~ Cameron L. Morrissey

All too often we say of a man doing a good job that he is indispensable. A flattering canard, as so many disillusioned and retired and fired have discovered when the world seems to keep on turning without them. In business, a man can come nearest to indispensability by being dispensable in his current job. How can a man move up to new responsibilities if he is the only one able to handle his present tasks? It matters not how small or large the job you now have, if you have trained no one to do it as well, you're not available; you've made your promotion difficult if not impossible. ~ Malcolm Forbes

The children were watched through a one-way mirror, and the film that shows their behavior during the waiting time always has the audience roaring in laughter. About half the children managed the feat of waiting for 15 minutes, mainly by keeping their attention away from the tempting reward. Ten or fifteen years later, a large gap had opened between those who had resisted temptation and those who had not. The resisters had higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, and especially the ability to reallocate their attention effectively. As young adults, they were less likely to take drugs. A significant difference in intellectual aptitude emerged: the children who had shown more self-control as four-year-olds had substantially higher scores on tests of intelligence. ~ Daniel Kahneman

In a sense, New World conquest was about men seeking a way around one of life's basic rules - that human beings have to work for a living, just like the rest of the animal world. In Peru, as elsewhere in the Americas, Spaniards were not looking for fertile land that they could farm, they were looking for the cessation of their own need to perform manual labor. To do so, they needed to find large enough groups of people they could force to carry out all the laborious tasks necessary to provide them with the essentials of life: food, shelter, clothing, and, ideally, liquid wealth. Conquest, then, had little to do with adventure, but rather had everything to do with groups of men willing to do just about anything in order to avoid working for a living. Stripped down to its barest bones, the conquest of Peru was all about finding a comfortable retirement. ~ Kim MacQuarrie

Client-therapist disagreement about the goals and tasks of therapy may impair the therapeutic alliance. This issue is not restricted to group therapy. Client-therapist discrepancies on therapeutic factors also occur in individual psychotherapy. A large study of psychoanalytically oriented therapy found that clients attributed their successful therapy to relationship factors, whereas their therapists gave precedence to technical skills and techniques.84 In general, analytic therapists value the coming to consciousness of unconscious factors and the subsequent linkage between childhood experiences and present symptoms far more than do their clients, who deny the importance or even the existence of these elements in therapy; instead they emphasize the personal elements of the relationship and the encounter with a new, accepting type of authority figure. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

It is, of course, necessary to have rules and procedures if we wish to accomplish large and complex tasks, but the question of whether or not it is worth the cost must be perennially re-examined. (117) ~ Sheldon B. Kopp

The fact is if we followed the history of every little country in this world - in its dramatic as well as its quiet times - we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or to apply ourselves to our necessary tasks, never mind indulge in occasional pleasures, like swimming. Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be? ~ Zadie Smith

It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true ~ Freeman Dyson

Much more plausible is the computer-based explanation that dreams are a spillover from the unconscious processing of the day's experience, from the brain's decision on how much of the daily events temporarily stored in a kind of buffer to emplace in long-term memory... The American psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann of Tufts University has provided
anecdotal but reasonably persuasive evidence that people who are engaged in intellectual activities during the day, especially unfamiliar intellectual activities, require more sleep at night, while, by and large, those engaged in mainly repetitive and intellectually unchallenging tasks are able to do with much less sleep. ~ Carl Sagan

Know Brainers Brainpower of none: When you hit a mental wall, quiet your mind to regain brain energy and find fresh solutions. Learn to use silence to solve perplexing problems and think deeply. Brainpower of one: Work on one thing at a time. Sequential-task instead of multitask. Secondly, strategically block a large percentage of incoming information and consciously know what to select. Brainpower of two: Every day identify and dedicate the majority of time to your two most important "elephant" tasks. ~ Sandra Bond Chapman

Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user's task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large. ~ Jakob Nielsen

The Job Application

Esteemed gentlemen,
I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. I know that your good firm is large, proud, old, and rich, thus I may yield to the pleasing supposition that a nice, easy, pretty little place would be available, into which, as into a kind of warm cubbyhole, I can slip. I am excellently suited, you should know, to occupy just such a modest haven, for my nature is altogether delicate, and I am essentially a quiet, polite, and dreamy child, who is made to feel cheerful by people thinking of him that he does not ask for much, and allowing him to take possession of a very, very small patch of existence, where he can be useful in his own way and thus feel at ease. A quiet, sweet, small place in the shade has always been the tender substance of all my dreams, and if now the illusions I have about you grow so intense as to make me hope that my dream, young and old, might be transformed into delicious, vivid reality, then you have, in me, the most zealous and most loyal servitor, who will take it as a matter of conscience to discharge precisely and punctually all his duties. Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-ranging sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and fo ~ Robert Walser

Like most such tasks, cooking vegetables involves investing large amounts of time in deep thought and procrastination and a relatively small amount of time actually doing the job. ~ Richard David Feinman

All Religions have this in common, that they are an outrage to common sense for they are pieced together out of a variety of elements, some of which seem so unworthy, sordid and at odds with man's reason, that any strong and vigorous intelligence laughs at them ... The human intellect is only capable of tackling mediocre subjects: it disdains petty subjects, and is startled by large ones. There is no reason to be surprised if it finds any religion hard to accept at first, for all are deficient in the mediocre and the commonplace, nor that it should require skill to induce belief. For the strong intellect laughs at religion, while the weak and superstitious mind marvels at it but is easily scandalized by it. ~ Pierre Charron

Amount of search is not a measure of the amount of intelligence being exhibited. What makes a problem a problem is not that a large amount of search is required for its solution, but that a large amount would be required if a requisite level of intelligence were not applied. ~ Allen Newell

Once upon a time, a monk along with his disciples was traveling on a road, and they saw a large pile of bricks. The monk asked the disciples, "What is this?" The disciples said, "It is a pile of bricks." After sometime, they came across a house. The monk asked the disciples, "What is this?" The disciples said, "It is a house." The monk asked, "How is it different from the pile of bricks that we saw earlier?" The disciples thought for a while but could not answer the question. Then the monk enlightened the disciples, "In the first case, the pile of bricks was just a pile of bricks. In the second case, the pile of bricks was a house. A house is more than the sum of the pile of bricks that make it." A team succeeds where an individual fails. ~ Rajen Jani

International organizations are to a large extent dependent upon these territorial entities and the willingness of their governments to support them. Only states can be members of the United Nations,14 only states are entitled to call upon the UN Security Council if there is a threat to international peace and security,15 only states may appear in contentious proceedings before the International Court of Justice,16 and only states can present a claim on behalf of a national who has been injured by another state,17 if there is no treaty to the contrary. ~ Anonymous

An invitation to dinner was soon afterwards dispatched; and already had Mrs. Bennet planned the courses that were to do credit to her housekeeping, when an answer arrived which deferred it all. Mr. Bingley was obliged to be in town the following day, and, consequently, unable to accept the honour of their invitation, etc. Mrs. Bennet was quite disconcerted. She could not imagine what business he could have in town so soon after his arrival in Hertfordshire; and she began to fear that he might be always flying about from one place to another, and never settled at Netherfield as he ought to be. Lady Lucas quieted her fears a little by starting the idea of his being gone to London only to get a large party for the ball; and a report soon followed that Mr. Bingley was to bring twelve ladies and seven gentlemen with him to the assembly. The girls grieved over such a number of ladies, but were comforted the day before the ball by hearing, that instead of twelve he brought only six with him from London - his five sisters and a cousin. And when the party entered the assembly room it consisted of only five altogether - Mr. Bingley, his two sisters, the husband of the eldest, and another young man. ~ Jane Austen

In a world where for pedagogic and other purposes a very large number of economists is required, an arrangement which discourages many of them from ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

How about this? Hong Kong had been appropriated by British drug pushers in the 1840s. We wanted Chinese silk, porcelain, and spices. The Chinese didn't want our clothes, tools, or salted herring, and who can blame them? They had no demand. Our solution was to make a demand, by getting large sections of the populace addicted to opium, a drug which the Chinese government had outlawed. When the Chinese understandably objected to this arrangement, we kicked the fuck out of them, set up a puppet government in Peking that hung signs on parks saying NO DOGS OR CHINESE, and occupied this corner of their country as an import base. Fucking godawful behavior, when you think about it. And we accuse them of xenophobia. It would be like the Colombians invading Washington in the early twenty-first century and forcing the White House to legalize heroin. And saying, Don't worry, we'll show ourselves out, and take Florida while we're at it, okay? Thanks very much. ~ David Mitchell

He wanted a faery. More than anything else in the world. He had already imagined exactly how it should happen. He would set up the invitation, and the next day there would be a petal-winged pisky clinging to the top of his bedpost. It would have a foolish grin on its face, and large ears, and it wouldn't notice at all that Bartholomew was small and ugly and different from everyone else.
But no. Mother had to ruin everything. ~ Stefan Bachmann

Never refer to a large dog as a friend - he is in custody and he knows it. ~ Steve Aylett

We are small and insignificant but our souls are large because we have set out on a journey to know the universe. ~ Tony Taylor

Apple is apparently building a large solar energy farm in North Carolina. And if there's any justice, the minute they're done building it, God will introduce a newer, smaller sun that's not compatible with their machinery. ~ Jimmy Fallon

Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I can't think of many reasons as to why, but gay men and straight women both share an inherent attraction to men, and attraction informs a large part of human nature. ~ Gideon Glick

What we are after is first noticing and then participating in the way the large world of the Bible absorbs the much smaller world of our science and economics and politics that provides the so-called worldview in which we are used to working out our daily concerns. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

'Bloomberg's, you know, for people who don't use the service, provides through the Internet - through specialized computers - information about the financial world. It's a very large data base. I think they have on the order of a billion dollars or more a year in revenue. ~ Craig Venter