Productiveness & Work

Excerpt from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.


Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live and that productive work is the process by which man’s consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one’s purpose of translating an idea into physical form, of making the earth in the image of one’s value; that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine learned from others.

Your work is yours to choose and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible for you and nothing less is human. To cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time; and to settle down into a job that requires less then your full mind’s capacity is to cut your motor and sentence to another kind of motion : decay. Your work is the process of achieving your values and to loose your ambition for values is to loose your ambition to live

As rightly said ... the purpose of any person’s life is to translating one’s ideas into a physical form.