Top 30 Quotes & Sayings by Marty Nemko

I believe the personal essay is underrated for both writer and reader. It affords the writer great freedom: to speak personally yet invoke others' ideas, to be rational and/or emotional, to be confident or admit doubt.

Some parents let kids "learn on their own skin" and many of those kids end up, as adults, languishing on their parents' sofas.

Essayists write at a length that enables them, within a year, to explore a number of topics, whereas in a book, they'll likely only get to address one.

Liberalism's key principle is to redistribute wealth from the haves to the have nots. That takes money from the entities with the greatest potential to improve society (for example, corporations that create jobs, invent life-saving medicines, etc.) and redistributes it to the people, whom on average, will never contribute more to society than to hold a menial job.

You need to create a 30-minute buffer between the end of your work time and sleep time.

If you don't know what career you'd change to, I've come to believe in starting with your values. What do you care most about: producing a new product, a cause, health, something unpopular but important, whatever. Next, get expertise in that, perhaps not at State U let alone private U but at You U: self-study, articles,, webinars, volunteering, etc. Then use your network rather than answering ads to land a launchpad job in that career.

Answering ads rarely works for career changers because you have no experience in the job for which you're applying.

Entrepreneurship may be the most under-taught subject.

Only someone who already knows and likes you is likely to give you a good job with modest relevant experience.

Education isn't a magic pill. There is no magic pill. But the closest we have is practical expertise and relentless drive.

I'm one of the many people for whom coffee helps but often, inattention is a symptom of something else: for example, that you're not getting six to eight hours of sleep.

Few people make a living as a public speaker but many people build it into their career. A career is like a suit of clothes: to look its best, it must be tailored and accessorized. So whatever career you choose, let's say it's social work - you can, for example, ask your boss - if you can give talks at housing project community centers about the social services available.

Being a good writer may result in your being nicer to more people, having a bigger positive impact.

What may create even more jobs is to develop more entrepreneurs, of course, ethical ones.

Being sleep-derived not only hurts you at work, it hurts your health. You need to value yourself enough to have good sleep hygiene.

Many psychotherapists believe laziness is usually just the symptom. That the real problem is fear of failure, fear of success, or fear of authority.

When you're going to school primarily for career purposes, it's more important to focus on which program is best for you. In addition, your success at college depends far more on what you do at the college than at which college you do it: Choosing the right program, then the right advisor, the right courses, the right term papers, the right co-curricular activities, the right fieldwork, the right internships. You can make those choices at any college.

I believe that a core problem with undergraduate education, especially at research universities like Harvard, Stanford, NYU, etc, is that most teaching is done by PhDs, who by temperament, training, interests, and rewards are researchers first. So they spend most of their time and energy probing a snip of a field's cutting edge. In my view, the attributes needed to be a transformative undergraduate instructor are pretty orthogonal to that. It would seem that undergraduate education would be superior if there was a separate track for teaching faculty.

We're in an era in which we want to believe people have roughly equal potential. IQ gives the lie to that.

The lack of crispness comes significantly from a societal change in what's valued: a replacement of bold individual initiative with collaboration, consensus, teamwork etc. All that team-involved decision-making often leads to tepid solutions and a slow-moving organization.

Some people who are recovering from depression want to use the lessons they're learned in coping with depression and their empathy for people with depression. Others want their career to have nothing to do with depression.

As a writer, you have control: You can play around with your own thoughts and when you find those insufficient, draw upon others': their wisdom, their humor, their failings.

Behaviorism is sometimes criticized as encouraging unethical behavior. For example, most organizations offer rewards for increasing revenue and threat of punishment, perhaps firing if you don't "make your number."

You might want to keep trying to rise, using a path that builds on your natural strengths: sales, analysis, managing people, whatever, and keep asking for honest feedback. When you reach the point at which it feels clear you've topped out, revise your job description or take a step back. Up is not the only way.

Senescence is an inevitability. All we can do is try to strike the balance between graceful acceptance and raging against the dying light.

A half-hour before bedtime, I remind myself that I now deserve to prepare myself for a good night's sleep. You can't focus on your work if you're sleep-deprived even if you have a fascinating job.

Sometimes, low-level jobs are challenging even to someone with CEO potential.

I think people's feeling the need to be more dependent on others is caused more by the lack of good-paying jobs and by today's zeitgeist that insists it takes a village. That's disempowering although possibly true for many people.

If you have an ability, you want to exercise it, not anesthetize it.

It's absurd how aspirants to designer-label colleges become obsessed with perfection so they can get into one. I'm not convinced it's worth prostituting yourself for that.