Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas S. Monson

Authority is doing double duty here: Monson isn’t just offering career advice, he’s laundering it through the credibility of a lifetime spent listening. The opening inventory of experience - “counseled many,” “interviewed 1,700” - is a rhetorical flex meant to quiet debate. In a religious culture that prizes obedience and sacrifice, he’s careful to sound pastoral, not prescriptive; the numbers imply he’s not speaking from theory or a single anecdote, but from a dataset of souls.

The context matters. “Returning missionaries” are young adults stepping out of an intensely structured, purpose-saturated two-year service and back into the chaos of choosing a major, a job, a future. Many feel pressure to treat work as mere duty: a means to provide, to serve, to endure. Monson’s intent is to redirect that pressure without undermining the ethic of sacrifice. He doesn’t say “follow your passion” (too individualistic, too slippery). He says “study and prepare,” anchoring enjoyment to discipline and long-term stewardship.

The subtext is a quiet negotiation between devotion and modern life. By blessing enjoyment, he’s validating ambition and personal fit inside a faith tradition often caricatured as purely collectivist. Work becomes not just survival or status, but a calling in the everyday sense: something you can inhabit with energy rather than resentment. It’s a gentle attempt to prevent burnout before it starts, framed in the language of responsibility so it can be heard by people trained to distrust self-indulgence.