“If you work on something you can finish in a day or two, you can expect to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon. If the reward is indefinitely far in the future, it seems less real.”

"Good And Bad Procrastination", December 2005

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If you work on something you can finish in a day or two, you can expect to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly…" by Paul Graham?

Paul Graham43

English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist 1964

Related quotes

“If you doubt you can accomplish something, then you can't accomplish it. You have to have confidence in your ability, and then be tough enough to follow through.”

Rosalynn Carter (1927) Wife of the 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter

“Nice work if you can get it,
And you can get it if you try.”

Ira Gershwin (1896–1983) American lyricist

"Nice Work If You Can Get It", A Damsel in Distress (1937).

“When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.”

Karen Blixen (1885–1962) Danish writer

“You tend to have far more real, intense friendships when you are single, perhaps because you can be more honest when you do not have the marriage or someone else's feelings to protect.”

Merle Shain (1935–1989) Canadian writer

Some Men are More Perfect Than Others (1973)

“You will soon find that it is not his clothes but his political sense and energy that control. You will find that if you expect to do anything there will be mighty little temptation to try to treat the men with whom you are working on any basis save the fundamental democratic basis of what they amount to, and what you can show you amount to as compared to them. So that if you go into life to do anything, it is perfectly useless for me to tell you to get rid of snobbery, because you will have to. It is just as true in every other field as in politics. Every man who works in philanthropy and he can do nothing in philanthropy unless he combines a very earnest desire to accomplish what is decent with the determination to accomplish it in practical fashion […] if he goes into philanthropy and tries to do something in a college settlement, tries to do his part in working to disentangle the tangled knot of our social and civic life, he will find just as soon as he gets interested in his work he wont care and won't know who the people are who are with him except as he judges them by their fruits. The interest that you take in him is, can a given man accomplish something? If he can not, then let him give place to the man who can.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)

“So if you don't have money to offer to people, you must strike their imagination with something as nice as you can think of.”

Martin Villeneuve (1978) Canadian film director, producer and screenwriter

Martin Villeneuve. " How I made an impossible film https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_villeneuve_how_i_made_an_impossible_film/transcript," Subtitles and Transcript at ted.com, 2015