03/09/2024
"Wherever I am, I cannot help working at problems that present themselves to me and seem so important that I cannot help but try to solve them. I spend many hours at my laboratory at times that my friends become alarmed and threaten to lock the place up and hid the key. Seriously, if they tried to do that I should shoot them. i would, in deed.
“It makes no difference to a man’s health how long he works so long as he loves his work, for his affection is like the oil in the lamp which keeps the wick burning without consuming the wick itself. When the oil is gone, then it is that the wick goes fast. If at any moment I lost my eagerness and enthusiasm, then very likely I would go to pieces.
"That was what would have happened to me if I continued to be a journalist. You never knew that I was once a member of your profession? Well, I was. The trouble with me was that I wrote to carefully, and, as it seems to me, too thoughtfully. When I wrote an article of which I was particularly proud, my friends would say: ‘Tesla that was a masterpiece!’ But the editor would say: ‘Why don’t you write something more lively? Not half a dozen people will read that stuff.’ No, journalism is the hardest work in the world for the man who wishes to be thoughtful. My heart was not in it, and it would have worn me out soon, like the wick without any oil. Even as it is now, I get worn out sometimes, but is a great comfort to be one’s own master and to feel that there is nothing to prevent ones dropping of work at any moment and starting for Europe or somewhere else for as long a rest as one wants.”
–Nikola Tesla
“A Man of the Future.” The Wichita Daily Eagle. Wichita, Kansas, October 23, 1894.