Quotes About Control

Basic control over your schedule breeds balance.

The Law of Financial Viability When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on. When

The Law of Financial Viability When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on.

The Second Control Trap 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. On

I keep the key with me all the time; no one else is allowed in there except with my permission.

Ryan and Sarah have heaps of control in their working lives, and this is what makes the Red Fire lifestyle so appealing.

If you want to observe the power of control up close in the workplace, look toward companies embracing a radical new philosophy called Results-Only Work Environment (or, ROWE, for short).

this feeling of losing control

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

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

Just because you cannot avoid this tool altogether doesn't mean you have to cede all authority over its role in your mental landscape

No one, of course, signed up for this loss of control. They downloaded the apps and set up accounts for good reasons, only to discover, with grim irony, that these services were beginning to undermine the very values that made them appealing in the first place: they joined Facebook to stay in touch with friends across the country, and then ended up unable to maintain an uninterrupted conversation with the friend sitting across the table.

What's making us uncomfortable, in other words, is this feeling of losing control—a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child's bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience. It's not about usefulness, it's about autonomy.

As a computer scientist, I make a living helping to advance the cutting edge of the digital world. Like many in my field, I'm enthralled by the possibilities of our techno-future. But I'm also convinced that we cannot unlock this potential until we put in the effort required to take control of our own digital lives — to confidently decide for ourselves what tools we want to use, for what reason, and under what conditions.

As a computer scientist, I make a living helping to advance the cutting edge of the digital world. Like many in my field, I'm enthralled by the possibilities of our techno-future. But I'm also convinced that we cannot unlock this potential until we put in the effort required to take control of our own digital lives—to confidently decide for ourselves what tools we want to use, for what reasons, and under what conditions. This isn't reactionary, it's common sense.

Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World," he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. "It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.

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

The First Control Trap In which I introduce the first control trap, which warns that it's dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange. Jane's

The Second Control Trap In which I introduce the second control trap, which warns that once you have enough career capital to acquire more control in your working life, you have become valuable enough to your employer that they will fight your efforts to gain more autonomy. Why

The ability in question is called "attentional control," and it measures the subjects' ability to maintain their focus on essential information.

We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cognitive ability that's not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention," explained Roediger in a New York Times blog post (emphasis mine). The ability in question is called "attentional control," and it measures the subjects' ability to maintain their focus on essential information.

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.

when you do have enough capital to successfully make a shift toward more control. It's at this point that you're most likely to encounter resistance from others in your life, as more control usually benefits only you.

In which I argue that control over what you do, and how you do it, is one of the most powerful traits you can acquire when creating work you love.