On top of this, if you do great work you gain the reward of knowing you're doing great work. Your day snaps into alignment with your dreams, and you no longer have to pretend you're mediocre. You're free to contribute.

You will never become a category of one if you run with the pack.

This is not a book for the wild-haired crazies your company keeps in a corner. It is a book for you, your boss, and your employees, because the best future available to us is a future where you contriubute your true self and your best work. Are you up for that?

The status quo doesn't shift because you're right. It shifts because the culture changes. And the engine of culture is status.

The lesson is that one person with a persistent vision can make change happen, whether climbing rocks or delivering services.

Emotional labor is the hard work of making art, producing generosity, and exposing creativity. Working without a map involves both vision and the willingness to do something about what you see. Emotional labor is what you get paid to do, and one of the most difficult types of emotional labor is staring into the abyss of choice and picking a path.

Sooner or later, each of us becomes (for a while) the kind of person who believes in the reptile people that control the earth. We're seeking our own little pocket of uniqueness.

Recent research estimates that 40 percent of the workforce has a job that requires innovation, human interaction, and decision making. And for each of these people, every day exposes them to the feeling of being a fraud. Of course you're not sure it's going to work. How could you be?

It's easy to get caught up in the foibles of a corporate culture and the systems that have been built over time, but they have nothing at all to do with the faith that built the system in the first place.

A day's work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters.

Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.

We've gone from all of us being everyone to all of us being no one.