Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
For Davis schoolchildren, today is the penultimate day of summer.
The plans, the parks, the picnics, the trips, the swimming, and the ceaseless films: They all come to an end this week, as our children return to school. My son Truman has some concerns about his return to school, and the beginning of third grade. He still speaks fondly and wistfully for his days at Davis Parent Nursery School when learning was always disguised as play. As he ages, the assignments may seem more pedestrian and rote, and the connection to internal motivations may feel less clear.
Once we get much older, when we have more control over our lives, many of us can choose how we spend our time. Here’s how Seth Godin represents such choices in a blog entry that he published last month:
“Somehow, I always thought of my career as a series of projects, not jobs. Projects… things to be invented, funded and shipped. Sometimes they take on a life of their own and last, other times, they flare and fade. But projects, one after the other, mark my career. Lucky for me, the world cooperated and our entire culture shifted from one based on long-term affiliations (you know, ‘jobs’) to projects.”
I like how Godin represents work, as a series of projects (what we in our house call “adventures”) rather than as a lifetime of committed drudgery. With this in mind, I spent a couple hours that I should have used to write the Pub Quiz instead researching quotations about work that I will share with Truman. Perhaps I will put one a day in his lunchbox and see to what extent I can shift his attitudes, fortune-cookie style.
Just in case you would like to do the same for a child, or for yourself, I share the quotations here (one of which will appear on tonight’s Pub Quiz):
“Nothing will work unless you do.”
― Maya Angelou
“The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.”
― Richard Bach
“All happiness depends on courage and work.”
― Honoré de Balzac
“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”
― Alexander Graham Bell
“Your purpose in life is to find your purpose and give your whole heart and soul to it.”
― Gautama Buddha
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
― Confucius
“God sells us all things at the price of labor.”
― Leonardo da Vinci
“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old”
― Peter F. Drucker
“We often miss opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work”
― Thomas A. Edison
“Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
― Albert Einstein
“Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.”
― Gustave Flaubert
“It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.”
― Henry Ford
“Earning happiness means doing good and working, not speculating and being lazy. Laziness may look inviting, but only work gives you true satisfaction.”
― Anne Frank
“Rest and you rust.”
― Helen Hayes
“If you care about what you do and work hard at it, there isn’t anything you can’t do if you want to.”
― Jim Henson
“Without hard work, nothing grows but weeds.”
― Gordon B. Hinckley
“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.”
― William James
“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
― Thomas Jefferson
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
― Steve Jobs
“Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.”
― Joseph Joubert
“When your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt.”
― Henry J. Kaiser
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”
― Helen Keller
“No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
― Stephen King
“I am gradually approaching the period in my life when work comes first. No longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow grazes.”
― Kaethe Kollwitz
“Inspiration usually comes during work rather than before it.”
― Madeleine L’Engle
“Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”
― Vince Lombardi
“Derive happiness in oneself from a good day’s work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.”
― Henri Matisse
“Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.”
― Thomas Merton
“The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.”
― Barack Obama
“It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else’s private world with our own.”
― Joyce Carol Oates
“Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.”
― Pablo Picasso
“I learned to always take on things I’d never done before. Growth and comfort do not coexist.”
― Virginia Rometty
“Do one thing every day that scares you.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt
“No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
“Social gains are never handed out. They must be seized.”
― Sheryl Sandberg
“In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don’t try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.”
― Lao Tzu
“This is the real secret of life ― to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
― Alan Wilson Watts
“A professional is one who does his best work when he feels the least like working.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”
― Émile Zola
I am curious to know which of these speaks to you the loudest.
If that’s not enough to think about, you might also consider that tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions about popular music, Batman’s famous duel with the River Nun, cards, multicast videos, the titles of Beatles’ songs, materials, the word that Atlas and cinnamon and spectacled have in common, butlers, Harry Potter, work, hammers, politicians who dabble in other sports, eye surgery, cultivars, knees, record-breaking tenures, divisions of population, dining on music, slaking, fashion, two-word songs, disobedient children from Britain, common spices, “beer,” South America, real estate commissions (Hi Caitlin!), fonts, and Shakespeare.
Happy birthday to Erin Dunning. I don’t think the popular Bikram Yoga instructor has come to a Pub Quiz in years, but I still enjoy waving my hellos to her when passing her on some downtown street, each of us seeking to keep our children happy and safe.
See you tonight at the last Pub Quiz of August, 2014!
Your Quizmaster
https://www.yourquizmaster.com
http://www.twitter.com/yourquizmaster
http://www.facebook.com/yourquizmaster
Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
- Phillip Seymour Hoffman. What are the four words in the title of the Phillip Seymour Hoffman film that opened at the Varsity Theatre a few weeks ago, that last film that he completed before he died? Hint: The last word of the title is MAN.
- Coffee Shops in Davis. What is the name of the independently-owned coffee shop in the Davis Oakshade Plaza in South Davis near Safeway?
- Sports. What former UFC champion gave John Cena a one-sided beat-down at WWE SummerSlam?
- Science. What J shrub commercially grown in North American deserts for its oils has the following nicknames? Goat nut, deer nut, pignut, coffeeberry, and gray box bush?
- Unusual Words. What four-syllable word refers to the study and practice of making maps?
Summer in Davis