What's a quote that has stuck with you for your whole life?
I always loved browsing such posts on reddit, so thought I should make one on lemmy too
Edit: Usually these kind of posts only used to have excerpts from books or ancient proverbs, but now I am seeing a lot more quotes from shows/movies/games are also resonating with people. It’s pretty cool to see.
Not my circus, not my monkeys. Let go or get dragged.
I heard them from my mom who went to Al Anon (I was in alcoholics anonymous). The first one is don’t make other people’s problems your problems. The second relates to letting people make their own mistakes. They’re the greatest teacher
I was like 17 or so and had a temp job as a housepainter for a couple weeks, and I was sinking time and energy into doing an excellent job and being really efficient with paint and ... kind of missing the forest for the trees. I was putting unnecessary care & excellence into a back wall and the wall was taking longer to prep than the whole-house job could afford. One of the old guys on site pulled me aside me and, in the eloquent terms above, pointed out that ... the real goal here is paint on the wall. We're doing a good job because we take pride in our work, but the outcome is significantly more important than the journey to everyone else. Doing a "good job" can't wind up as an obstacle to the job itself.
I was always a details person and perfectionist, and that one clear lesson about taking a step back from the details of a task to double-check what the actual goal is ... has always stuck with me.
Damn I should have gotten you to paint our house. Our painter just did a half assed job and started yelling at me when I pointed out lines that weren’t straight or paint splatters from the accent wall on the white wall. He also used the wrong gloss of paint in places and created these shiny patches throughout the house.
And I have to look at this every day until I decide to repaint again. Just a bit more care and effort on his part would have prevented me from being mildly annoyed every day for the next however many years.
(I ended up painting over the glossy stuff myself)
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