There is definitely a connection between finding your passion and reaching your potential. People ask me all the time, 'John, how do I know what I am meant to do in life?' The answer is really simple: Energy and Excellence. When you experience unbounded energy in what you are doing, when you are driven to excellence in your work and love what you do - then you can rest assured that you have found your passion and are definitely in pursuit of your full potential.
I'm a work horse. I like to work. I always did. I think that there is such a thing as energy, creation overflowing. And I always felt that I have this great energy and it was bound to sort of burst at the seams, so that my work automatically took its place with a mind like mine. I've never had a day when I didn't want to work. I've never had a day like that. And I knew that a day I took away from the work did not make me too happy. I just feel that I'm in tune with the right vibrations in the universe when I'm in the process of working. ... In my studio I'm as happy as a cow in her stall.
If you work without love, you are working like a slave. When you work with love, you work like an emperor. Your work is your joy, your work is your dance.
Get happiness out of your work or you may never know what happiness is.
Those people who spend their time working on things they love are usually the ones enjoying life the most. They are also the ones who dared to take a risk and chase their dreams.
The best part of getting to do what you like is just doing it. That doesn't have to do with being famous or even successful or even powerful. I see people in life who are just doing a job and seem to be having a good time. And that's the trick.
It makes me happy to encounter goodness, love of work, humane intelligence, and people no matter at what kind of job, be it ever so humble, or ever so exalted, who do it well and con amore.
Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.
The truth is that finding happiness in what you do every day is so imperative.
When the reward is the activity itself--deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one's best--there are no shortcuts.
You have got to love what you're doing. No matter what it is. Whatever you undertake in life, if you don't love it, and you don't enjoy it, you are making a big mistake. You have got to love what you are doing. You have to appreciate what you are getting, and you have to do it to the best of your ability.
I am invigorated by work, wasted by pleasure.
I believe in my work and in the joy of it. You have to be with the work and the work has to be with you. It absorbs you totally and you absorb it totally.
I really enjoy what I do, and I'm very grateful to be given an opportunity to do it. That's one thing that people can say about me.
You have to work hard, and you have to enjoy what you're doing. If you don't enjoy it, no matter how hard you seem to work, you're not going to be working as hard as you can because you're not enjoying it.
Work was never about wanting fame or money. I never thought about that. I loved getting the job, going to rehearsal, playing someone else, hanging around with a bunch of actors. I needed that, the way you need water.
If you love your work, if you enjoy it, you're already a success.
I work for enjoyment and satisfaction - not just to earn a living.
I just feel that I enjoy the work more than I ever have... or just as much certainly... I enjoy making films behind the camera equally to making them in front of the camera on all those years. I just enjoy it, that's all. I've been lucky enough to work in a profession that I have really liked and so I figured I'd just continue until someone hits me over the head and says "get out".
If we actually love what we're doing and we go and do what we love, and every day we get up because we're really happy to get up and go and do what we do, you can't actually do that without expression, and art forms part of that mix of expression that makes the whole package of life so enjoyable to be in.
The only advice my Dad's given me is: If you ain't having fun, it ain' working, so always have fun with what you're doing. If you don't love it then there's no reason to do it. And don't do it for fame or money- do it because it's something that you feel is right.
I hope never to retire. I write so many because it's the thing I like to do most - to write. And if you write every day, you just naturally get a lot of books.
Work, look for peace and calm in work: You will find it nowhere else. Pleasures flit by -- they are only for yourself; work leaves a mark of long-lasting joy, work is for others.
The man who does not work for the love of work but only for money is not likely to make money nor find much fun in life.
I'm enjoying [my career]. If anything I'm aware that the pressure of the first, I suppose, six or seven years I was in America - I mean that energy of having such a rapid and ascending celebrity - it's not there anymore. It's the end of that chapter and now I'm just enjoying the work probably more than I ever have and yet I'm simultaneously less attached to it I think, which is kind of a strange state of grace to be in.
