Daily Inspiration Quote by Aristotle

Aristotle slips something radical into a sentence that sounds like a workplace poster: excellence isnt primarily a matter of grit, talent, or even discipline. Its a matter of desire. "Pleasure in the job" is doing heavy philosophical work here. For Aristotle, pleasure isnt a guilty add-on to virtue; its evidence that your soul is properly trained. When you take genuine enjoyment in an activity, it signals that the activity fits your nature and that your habits are aligned with reason. The reward isnt separate from the work; it is the work, experienced by a person whose character has been shaped to love the right things.

The subtext is quietly polemical against two common errors. One is the puritan fantasy that suffering equals seriousness. Aristotle suggests the opposite: if you consistently hate the practice, the odds are youre not actually cultivating excellence, youre just enduring. The other is the modern fantasy that perfection is a hack or a KPI. Aristotle frames "perfection" (closer to completion, fulfillment, telos) as a byproduct of a well-formed appetite, not a metric you can chase directly.

Context matters: in the Ethics, pleasure is a kind of companion to activity, "completing" it the way a flourish completes a performance. So the line isnt permission to only do what feels good; its a challenge to become the kind of person for whom the good feels good. That is less motivational and more demanding: if your work cant become a source of pleasure, either the work is wrong for you, or you need to grow into it.