Hope Jahren

You can pick wild strawberries with your eyes closed, locating them by smell, for they are two parts perfume to one part taste. An hour of searching might yield a handful if you're lucky. Wild strawberries can't be encouraged, nor can they be discouraged: They come to you unbidden and unearned. They appear, or do not, by the grace of the sun.

American Scientist

Jennifer Yuh Nelson

If you have a movie that doesn't strive to go to a certain emotional point, you can do anything and it will be fine and funny. But if you have something pretty emotional at its core, you have to make it right. You don't want it overwrought or unearned. Everything has to be moving towards this one thing.

South Korean Director

Ridley Scott

In film, it's very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion.

British Director

LZ Granderson

Sure, the job of high school teachers is not to tear down students' self-esteem. But it's certainly not to inflate students' sense of self-worth with a bunch of unearned compliments and half-truths.

American Journalist

Gina Rinehart

They say that if you give your children too much, they don't get the joy out of work. They just want the unearned things to keep falling from the sky.

Australian Businesswoman

Porter Robinson

If I could turn it on like a faucet then I think it would be kind of unearned. I feel like you need to struggle a little bit to make anything good.

American Musician

Francois Hollande

I don't like indecent, unearned wealth. But it is legitimate for an entrepreneur who has created something to make a good living.

French Statesman

J. Edgar Hoover

Banks are an almost irresistible attraction for that element of our society which seeks unearned money.

American Public Servant

Ryan Gosling

I did what I had to do to get where I wanted to go. I had unearned confidence.

Canadian Actor

Ayn Rand

The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.

Russian Writer

Unearned often refers to money received without active work, like dividends or interest.

Passive Income

Sometimes 'unearned' suggests the wealth or benefit was not justified.

Negative Implication

'Unearned' can imply privilege or advantages in society one is born with.

Social Context

Receiving unearned praise can make someone feel uncomfortable or guilty.

Feeling Undeserving

'Unearned' sometimes disrespects the actual effort put into success.

Undervaluing Effort

In sports, 'unearned' points are not a result of the scoring team's skill.

Sports Errors

Unearned runs in baseball don't count against a pitcher's earned run average.

Scorecard Impact

 isn't actually fun, because it's completely unearned, and the air is filled with guilt, dread, anxiety, self-hatred -- all of those good procrastinator feelings. And the question is, in this situation, with the Monkey behind the wheel, how does the procrastinator ever get himself over here to this blue zone, a less pleasant place, but where really important things happen?