Activities Professional Quotes

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give. Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.

Forget professional,” Penny said. “Tonight, you and I are just man and woman like Adam and Eve, Tarzan and Jane.

We are adults undertaking a team-building activity in a professional capacity, so naturally we spend several minutes horsing around, striking poses with our paintball guns and making sound effects. Joshua and Sergeant Paintball watch us like orderlies at a mental facility.

The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet its inhabitants are strikingly unhappy. Accordingly, we present to the rest of mankind, on a planet rife with suffering and tragedy, the spectacle of a clown civilization. Sustained on a clown diet rich in sugar and fat, we have developed a clown physiognomy. We dress like clowns. We move about a landscape filled with cartoon buildings in clownmobiles, absorbed in clownish activities. We fill our idle hours enjoying the canned antics of professional clowns... Death, when we acknowledge it, is just another pratfall on the boob tube. Bang! You're dead!

Activity, effort, achievement, or service outside a hierarchical relationship and unmeasured by professional standards, threatens a commodity-intensive society.

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

The difference between "active" and "busy" is that the former includes reflection and is directed, whereas the busy life feels out of control and does not seem purposeful or meaningful.

No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensible to the preservation and justification of existence in society. Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one — if, that is to say, by means of sublimation, it makes possible the use of existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally reinforced instinctual impulses. And yet, as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men. They do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction. The great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems.

Until you take your profession as passion, each and every activity looks as a headache

Sometimes a strikeout means that the slugger’s girlfriend just ran off with the UPS driver. Sometimes a muffed ground ball means that the shortstop’s baby daughter has a pain in her head that won’t go away. And handicapping is for amateur golfers, not ballplayers. Pitchers don’t ease off on the cleanup hitter because of the lumps just discovered in his wife’s breast. Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake. Perhaps they are. I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G.Q. Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it’s so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself, according to Gale, is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball, he says, is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G.Q.’s thesis that pro ball-players—little as some of them may want to hear it—are basically just a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working hard and artfully to prevent wars, by making peace more interesting.

Though you will save many hours by seizing control of your calendar, and clearing away non-core-competency activities, in the long run, the best way to create more time is to actually get better at your professional craft.

The fundamental difference between pleasure and satisfaction is that pleasure cannot be sustained beyond the activity producing it.

Adoption is a lifelong journey. It means different things to me at different times. Sometimes it is just a part of who I am. Other times it is something I am actively going through.

Mitchell Maxwell’s Maxims • You have to create your own professional path. There’s no longer a roadmap for an artistic career. • Follow your heart and the money will follow. • Create a benchmark of your own progress. If you never look down while you’re climbing the ladder you won’t know how far you’ve come. • Don’t define success by net worth, define it by character. Success, as it’s measured by society, is a fleeting condition. • Affirm your value. Tell the world “I am an artist,” not “I want to be an artist.” • You must actively live your dream. Wishing and hoping for someday doesn’t make it happen. Get out there and get involved. • When you look into the abyss you find your character. • Young people too often let the fear of failure keep them from trying. You have to get bloody, sweaty and rejected in order to succeed. • Get your face out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Close your e-mail and pick up the phone. Personal contact still speaks loudest. • No one is entitled to act entitled. Be willing to work hard. • If you’re going to buck the norm you’re going to have to embrace the challenges. • You have to love the journey if you’re going to work in the arts. • Only listen to people who agree with your vision. • A little anxiety is good but don’t let it become fear, fear makes you inert. • Find your own unique voice. Leave your individual imprint on the world, not a copy of someone else. • Draw strength from your mistakes; they can be your best teacher.

48. Imagine, for example, someone who fucks like a whore. Someone who seems good at it, professional. Someone you can still see fucking you, in the mirror, always in the mirror, crazy fucking about three feet away, in an apartment lit by blue light, never lit by daylight, this person is always fucking you from behind in blue light and you both always seem good at it, dedicated and lost unto it, as if there is no other activity on God’s given earth your bodies know how to do except fuck and be fucked like this, in this dim blue light, in this mirror. What do you call someone who fucks this way?

Work done off the paid job is looked down upon if not ignored. autonomous activity threatens the employment level, generates deviance, and detracts​ from the GNP...Work no longer means the creation of a value perceived by the worker but mainly a job, which is a social relationship. Unemployment means sad idleness, rather than the freedom to do things that are useful for oneself or for one's neighbour. An active woman who runs a house and brings up children and takes in those of others is distinguished from a woman who 'works,' no matter how useless or damaging the product of this work might be.

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. Deep

Upper-class parents enable their kids to form weak ties by exposing them more often to organized activities, professionals, and other adults. Working-class children, on the other hand, are more likely to interact regularly only with kin and neighborhood children, which limits their formation of valuable weak ties.

...an external reward can affect one's interpretation of one's own motivation, and interpretation that comes to be self-fulfilling. A similar effect may account for the familiar fact that when someone turns his hobby into a business, he often loses pleasure in it. Likewise, an intellectual who pursues an academic career gets professionalized, and this may lead him to stop thinking. This line of reasoning suggests that the kind of appreciative attention where one remains focused on what one is doing can arise only in leisure activities. Such a conclusion would put pleasurable absorption beyond the ken of any activity that is undertaken for the sake of making money, because although money is undoubtedly good, it is not intrinsically so.

In the face of increasing pressures to perform at a level unattainable for them, and in fear of being discovered as incompetent, they begin to direct attacks against anyone with greater talent or skill, removing them from appropriate posts and playing an active role in degrading their social and professional adjustment.

A woman who has acquired any kind of professional skill ought, both for her own sake and for that of the community, to be free to continue to exercise this skill in spite of motherhood. She may be unable to do so during the later months of pregnancy and during lactation, but a child over nine months old ought not to form an insuperable barrier to its mother's professional activities. Whenever society demands of a mother sacrifices to her child which go beyond reason, the mother, if she is not unusually saintly, will expect from her child compensations exceeding those she has a right to expect.

Everyone knows about market risk and management risk. But there are a variety of non obvious risks to consider when managing a portfolio of investments. They include political risk, share premiums and discounts risk, Interest Rate risk, Income Risk, Tax law changes risk, valuation risk, and liquidity risk, among others. This is why professional active portfolio management is the way to go.

The benefits of maintaining an active lifestyle are not only physical, but also mental. Physical exercise helps us to clear our minds, to detach from the inherent challenges that we face, both professionally and personally, and to find solutions for tackling those challenges.

First, if you are a homosexual or feel that inclination, keep yourself pure. If you are unmarried, you should practice abstinence from all sexual activity. I know this is difficult, but really what God is asking you to do is pretty much the same thing that he requires of all single people. That means not only keeping your body pure, but especially your mind. Just as heterosexual men should avoid pornography and fantasizing, you, too, need to keep your thought-life clean. Resist the temptation to rationalize sin by saying, “God made me this way.” God has made it very clear that He does not want you to indulge your desires, but to honor Him by keeping your mind and body pure. Finally, seek professional Christian counseling. With time and effort, you can come to enjoy normal, heterosexual relations with your spouse. There is hope.

One of the first expedients of the professional writer that Isabella had learned from me was the art of procrastination. Every veteran in the trade knows that any activity, from sharpening a pencil to cataloging daydreams, takes precedence over sitting down at one’s desk and squeezing one’s brain.

Many conflict-resolution professionals stress the value of curiosity, accompanied by active listening. Many conflicts can be avoided or de-escalated if the parties involved are willing to set aside their prejudgments—and the intense feelings connected to them—and ask a question. And then be curious about the actual answer. Not just any question, though. The question should be genuine and open-ended, a serious request for more information about another person's feelings, intentions or motivations. It should not be a choice between predefined alternatives, or an accusation followed by a demand for a response. It should be, as much as possible, unburdened from what you think will be the answer. That means being curious about what it really is.

I look at it this way - I don't ever want to apologize for something i've said, but I want to be gracious enough to be ready to apologize if I ever need to. My answers to those questions have come gradually and after some trial and error. In my own life, personally and professionally, I've realized that being civil is an active decision that I get to choose to make several times a day. That's why I believe there's hope - civility is not extinct. It is a choice.

I have no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary. I acknowledge freely the great power of education and social influences in developing the active powers of the mind, just as I acknowledge the effect of use in developing the muscles of a blacksmith's arm, and no further. Let the blacksmith labour as he will, he will find there are certain feats beyond his power that are well within the strength of a man of herculean make, even although the latter may have led a sedentary life.

Unemployment means sad idleness, rather than the freedom to do things that are useful for oneself or for one's neighbor. An active woman who runs a house and brings up children and takes in those of others is distinguished from a woman who 'works', no matter how useless or damaging the product of this work might be. Activity, effort, achievement, or service outside a hierarchical relationship and unmeasured by professional standards, threatens a commodity-intensive society. The generation of use-values that escape effective measurement limits not only the need for more commodities but also the jobs that create them and the paycheques needed to buy them.

All of these arenas of American life are facets of the same widely discussed phenomenon: the decline of what is termed “social capital.” As defined by political scientist Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone, “… social capital refers to connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some have called ‘civic virtue.’” It’s the trust, friendships, group affiliations, helping, and expectation of being helped built up by actively participating in and being a member of all sorts of groups, ranging from book clubs, bowling clubs, bridge clubs, church groups, community organizations, and parent-teacher associations to political organizations, professional societies, rotary clubs, town meetings, unions, veterans associations, and others.

Birthdays are a time when one stock takes, which means, I suppose, a good spineless mope: I scan my horizon and can discern no sail of hope along my own particular ambition. I tell you what it is: I'm quite in accord with the people who enquire 'What is the matter with the man?' because I don't seem to be producing anything as the years pass but rank self indulgence. You know that my sole ambition, officially at any rate, was to write poems & novels, an activity I never found any difficulty fulfilling between the (dangerous) ages of 17-24: I can't very well ignore the fact that this seems to have died a natural death. On the other hand I feel regretful that what talents I have in this direction are not being used. Then again, if I am not going to produce anything in the literary line, the justification for my selfish life is removed - but since I go on living it, the suspicion arises that the writing existed to produce the life, & not vice versa. And as a life it has very little to recommend it: I spend my days footling in a job I care nothing about, a curate among lady-clerks; I evade all responsibility, familial, professional, emotional, social, not even saving much money or helping my mother. I look around me & I see people getting on, or doing things, or bringing up children - and here I am in a kind of vacuum. If I were writing, I would even risk the fearful old age of the Henry-James hero: not fearful in circumstance but in realisation: because to me to catch, render, preserve, pickle, distil or otherwise secure life-as-it-seemed for the future seems to me infinitely worth doing; but as I'm not the entire morality of it collapses. And when I ask why I'm not, well, I'm not because I don't want to: every novel I attempt stops at a point where I awake from the impulse as one might awake from a particularly-sickening nightmare - I don't want to 'create character', I don't want to be vivid or memorable or precise, I neither wish to bathe each scene in the lambency of the 'love that accepts' or be excoriatingly cruel, smart, vicious, 'penetrating' (ugh), or any of the other recoil qualities. In fact, like the man in St Mawr, I want nothing. Nothing, I want. And so it becomes quite impossible for me to carry on. This failure of impulse seems to me suspiciously like a failure of sexual impulse: people conceive novels and dash away at them & finish them in the same way as they fall in love & will not be satisfied till they're married - another point on which I seem to be out of step. There's something cold & heavy sitting on me somewhere, & until something budges it I am no good.

When deciding how to spend your time, remember: Don’t trade an activity you’d love to pursue for a reward you don’t value.

All I ask of myself is to live a good Christian life and toward that objective I bend every effort in shaping my personal, domestic and professional activities and growth,

It’s important to be socially active, engaged and connected with powerful tools like LinkedIn. These tools can be used in a myriad of ways to benefit you both personally and professionally.

Even you, the professional helper, often mistaken for the enlightened Guru or Staretz, can become lost in your thoughts that you must be competent without fault. You may become enthralled with your identity as a professional, even the pressures of the culture of mastery that expects you to heal your clients without fail. Never mind all of the variables over which you have no control, it is up to you, according to the canons of mastery, to control the health and well-being of those for whom you provide professional care. This potentiates a furthering alienation between you and your clients. You are at risk to become, if you have not already, the one who does to your clients; to be the one the active subject acting upon the passive and receptive objects, your clients; to be the one in possession of special knowledge, technique and mastery. All of this conspires to coax or coerce you into treating your client as reduced, a mere case. Unawareness to these influences gives you little chance to consider their influence on your practice in the clinical setting, much less give attentive efforts to resist or change them.

Type 3: Consumption Consumption Time is one of the two forgotten types of professional time. It is where new ideas for creation and growth are planted. Typical activities of Consumption Time include: Reading Listening Studying

As Ericsson explains, “Most individuals who start as active professionals… change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance.” Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.

SMART Goal NICE Goal Fitness Lose 20 pounds within the next three months. Exercise for 30 minutes daily, focusing on activities that are enjoyable and manageable. Career Get a promotion to a senior management position within two years. Dedicate an hour each week to improving one key skill or networking with industry professionals. Education Complete a Master’s degree in two years. Spend 30 minutes each day reviewing course material and work on assignments in manageable chunks.

Psychology, above all, is applying human understanding in a scientific manner. . . . The only profession I have ever encountered which separates the role of a human being from his professional activity,” he declared, “was the role of the SS man.

The war had “a notable effect on physics,” he said. “It practically stopped it.” He soon came to believe that during the war we “perhaps witnessed a more total cessation of true professional activity in the field of physics, even in its training,

The practical joker despises his victims, but at the same time he envies them because their desires, however childish and mistaken, are real to them, whereas he has no desire which he can call his own. His goal, to make game of others, makes his existence absolutely dependent upon theirs; when he is alone, he is a nullity. Iago’s self-description, I am not what I am, is correct and the negation of the Divine I am that I am. If the word motive is given its normal meaning of a positive purpose of the self like sex, money, glory, etc., then the practical joker is without motive. Yet the professional practical joker is certainly driven, like a gambler, to his activity, but the drive is negative, a fear of lacking concrete self, of being nobody.

Among the cultivated and mentally active, hagiography is now a very unpopular form of literature. The fact is not at all surprising. The cultivated and the mentally active have an insatiable appetite for novelty, diversity and distraction. But the saints, however commanding their talents and whatever the nature of their professional activities, are all incessantly preoccupied with only one subject—spiritual Reality and the means by which they and their fellows can come to the unitive knowledge of that Reality. And as for their actions—these are as monotonously uniform as their thoughts; for in all circumstances they behave selflessly, patiently and with indefatigable charity. No wonder, then, if the biographies of such men and women remain unread. For one well educated person who knows anything about William Law there are two or three hundred who have read Boswell’s life of his younger contemporary. Why? Because, until he actually lay dying, Johnson indulged himself in the most fascinating of multiple personalities; whereas Law, for all the superiority of his talents was almost absurdly simple and single-minded. Legion prefers to read about Legion. It is for this reason that, in the whole repertory of epic, drama and the novel there are hardly any representations of true theocentric saints.

It is the professional pilot's bounden duty to know the idiosyncrasies of each type (of airplane), for he must spend a large proportion of his active career exploiting its qualities and compensating for its faults. These secrets cannot be discovered in a ground school.

Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and counterfeiting [central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be “reformed”,”improved”, nor “limited” in scope, simply because of their innate criminal nature. 
Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class.

Our vocation and professional work is not a second class activity, something we do just to put food on the table. It is the high calling for which we were originally created. The way we serve a Creator God is by being creative with the talents and gifts He has given us.

An attention economy dissolves the separation between the personal and professional, between entertainment and information, all overridden by a compulsory functionality of communication that is inherently and inescapably 24/7. Even as a contemporary colloquialism, the term “eyeballs” for the site of control repositions human vision as a motor activity that can be subjected to external direction or stimuli. The goal is to refine the capacity to localize the eye’s movement on or within highly targeted sites or points of interest. The eye is dislodged from the realm of optics and made into an intermediary element of a circuit whose end result is always a motor response of the body to electronic solicitation. It is out of this context that Google and other corporate players now compete for dominance over the remains of the everyday.

An e-reader is super helpful. And no more toe paper cuts. 10. Some kind of sport or recreational activity—soccer, dance, swimming, professional hopscotch. You can do it! I’m trying out my motivational speaking skills here. 11. Pants that button easily. Trust me, when nature calls at school, you’ll be grateful you listened. 12. Your handy-dandy hook. From buttoning pants to lifting a dollar out of your pocket, a good hook is essential. 13. A wide variety of nail polishes. Boys probably don’t care much about this, but when people are staring at our feet as much as they do, we want to look our best. Am I right, ladies, or am I right? 14. Nunchuks. At least until bully spray becomes available. 15. An open heart and eyes. You think you’re the only one out there who feels different? What about that kid sitting alone in the library or out on the sidewalk? 16. Awesome parents. This is a must. 17. Friends who listen.

Why do you choose to write about such gruesome subjects? I usually answer this with another question: Why do you assume that I have a choice? Writing is a catch-as-catch-can sort of occupation. All of us seem to come equipped with filters on the floors of our minds, and all the filters have differing sizes and meshes. What catches in my filter may run right through yours. What catches in yours may pass through mine, no sweat. All of us seem to have a built-in obligation to sift through the sludge that gets caught in our respective mind-filters, and what we find there usually develops into some sort of sideline. The accountant may also be a photographer. The astronomer may collect coins. The school-teacher may do gravestone rubbings in charcoal. The sludge caught in the mind's filter, the stuff that refuses to go through, frequently becomes each person's private obsession. In civilized society we have an unspoken agreement to call our obsessions “hobbies.” Sometimes the hobby can become a full-time job. The accountant may discover that he can make enough money to support his family taking pictures; the schoolteacher may become enough of an expert on grave rubbings to go on the lecture circuit. And there are some professions which begin as hobbies and remain hobbies even after the practitioner is able to earn his living by pursuing his hobby; but because “hobby” is such a bumpy, common-sounding little word, we also have an unspoken agreement that we will call our professional hobbies “the arts.” Painting. Sculpture. Composing. Singing. Acting. The playing of a musical instrument. Writing. Enough books have been written on these seven subjects alone to sink a fleet of luxury liners. And the only thing we seem to be able to agree upon about them is this: that those who practice these arts honestly would continue to practice them even if they were not paid for their efforts; even if their efforts were criticized or even reviled; even on pain of imprisonment or death. To me, that seems to be a pretty fair definition of obsessional behavior. It applies to the plain hobbies as well as the fancy ones we call “the arts”; gun collectors sport bumper stickers reading YOU WILL TAKE MY GUN ONLY WHEN YOU PRY MY COLD DEAD FINGERS FROM IT, and in the suburbs of Boston, housewives who discovered political activism during the busing furor often sported similar stickers reading YOU'LL TAKE ME TO PRISON BEFORE YOU TAKE MY CHILDREN OUT OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD on the back bumpers of their station wagons. Similarly, if coin collecting were outlawed tomorrow, the astronomer very likely wouldn't turn in his steel pennies and buffalo nickels; he'd wrap them carefully in plastic, sink them to the bottom of his toilet tank, and gloat over them after midnight.

The history of transformational phenomena—the Internet, for example, or paradigm shifts in science, or the spread of a new religion—suggests that transformation happens less by arguing cogently for something new than by generating active, ongoing practices that shift a culture’s experience of the basis for reality.

Trust of others is in short supply for many adult survivors, as complex trauma generally involves major relational betrayal. It is, therefore, expectable (although paradoxical) that clients with these histories are predisposed to be mistrustful at the outset of therapy, precisely because of (and in proportion to) the actual trustworthiness of the therapist. When past experiences have thought hard lessons, namely, that one can least afford to trust the people who should be most trustworthy, it stands to reason that confusion about trust results. The therapist must understand and not take offense either personally or professionally and not react judgmentally or defensively. Practically speaking, this involves the therapist being prepared to patiently and empathically respond to active or passive tests or challenges to trustworthiness as legitimate and meaningful communication that deserves a respectful reply in action as well as in words.

Responsibility to yourself… means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short, simply to avoid conflict and confrontation. And this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be 'different'; not to be continuously available to others when we need time for ourselves and our work; to be able to demand of others that they respect our sense of purpose and our integrity as persons… The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.

Stress, burnout and strain on the human heart are all increasingly taking their toll for millions of hardworking people. However, even someone who is working in a job that simply ‘pays the bills’ can turn mundane and stressful tasks into pleasant activities with a slight adjustment in attitude and by adopting a daily mindful practice.

Capital’s interests lie in paying the worker as little as possible and in preventing him from exercising control over the process of production, while the worker wants to be paid as much as possible and to exercise greater control over production. This simple structural antagonism is the basis for the whole history of the labor movement, the continual confrontations, the unions and union-busting, the private armies deployed to break up strikes, the government suppression of labor parties, the revolutionary social movements, the constant and pervasive stream of business propaganda, and the periodic bursts of cooperative economic activity among the ranks of labor. At the same time, the vicissitudes of the capitalist economy leave many people unemployed at any given time, unable to find work because their skills and needs are not valued or because of insufficient investment in their geographical or professional area, or because of outsourcing to countries where labor is cheaper, or for other reasons.

Mindfulness (present-moment awareness) is deliberately focusing our attention on our thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations and mental activity without losing awareness of what is happening in the present moment. It is essentially being in a state of present-moment awareness and maintaining clarity without being swayed or distracted by mental commentary.

You seem disappointed that I am not more responsive to your interest in "spiritual direction". Actually, I am more than a little ambivalent about the term, particularly in the ways it is being used so loosely without any sense of knowledge of the church's traditions in these matters. If by spiritual direction you mean entering into a friendship with another person in which an awareness and responsiveness to God's Spirit in the everydayness of your life is cultivated, fine. Then why call in an awkward term like "spiritual direction"? Why not just "friend"? Spiritual direction strikes me as pretentious in these circumstances, as if there were some expertise that can be acquired more or less on its own and then dispensed on demand. The other reason for my lack of enthusiasm is my well-founded fear of professionalism in any and all matters of the Christian life. Or maybe the right label for my fear is "functionalism". The moment an aspect of Christian living (human life, for that matter) is defined as a role, it is distorted, debased - and eventually destroyed. We are brothers and sisters with one another, friends and lovers, saints and sinners. The irony here is that the rise of interest in spiritual direction almost certainly comes from the proliferation of role-defined activism in our culture. We are sick and tired of being slotted into a function and then manipulated with Scripture and prayer to do what someone has decided (often with the help of some psychological testing) that we should be doing to bring glory to some religious enterprise or other. And so when people begin to show up who are interested in us just as we are - our souls - we are ready to be paid attention to in this prayerful, listening, non-manipulative, nonfunctional way. Spiritual direction. But then it begins to develop a culture and language and hierarchy all its own. It becomes first a special interest, and then a specialization. That is what seems to be happening in the circles you are frequenting. I seriously doubt that it is a healthy (holy) line to be pursuing. Instead, why don't you look over the congregation on Sundays and pick someone who appears to be mature and congenial. Ask her or him if you can meet together every month or so - you feel the need to talk about your life in the company of someone who believes that Jesus is present and active in everything you are doing. Reassure the person that he or she doesn't have to say anything "wise". You only want them to be there for you to listen and be prayerful in the listening. After three or four such meetings, write to me what has transpired, and we'll discuss it further. I've had a number of men and women who have served me in this way over the years - none carried the title "spiritual director", although that is what they have been. Some had never heard of such a term. When I moved to Canada a few years ago and had to leave a long-term relationship of this sort, I looked around for someone whom I could be with in this way. I picked a man whom I knew to be a person of integrity and prayer, with seasoned Christian wisdom in his bones. I anticipated that he would disqualify himself. So I pre-composed my rebuttal: "All I want you to do is two things: show up and shut up. Can you do that? Meet with me every six weeks or so, and just be there - an honest, prayerful presence with no responsibility to be anything other than what you have become in your obedient lifetime." And it worked. If that is what you mean by "spiritual director," okay. But I still prefer "friend". You can see now from my comments that my gut feeling is that the most mature and reliable Christian guidance and understanding comes out of the most immediate and local of settings. The ordinary way. We have to break this cultural habit of sending out for an expert every time we feel we need some assistance. Wisdom is not a matter of expertise. The peace of the Lord, Eugene

Who amongst us can claim true satisfaction from living a hedonistic lifestyle? Why I loathe myself with sufficient fury to dream of murdering myself is no great mystery. Making a pact with the devil’s henchmen, I callously plodded along tackling one superficial milepost after another, conquering thinly guised goals that reek of greediness and self-indulgence, all in a futile effort to stave off the inevitability of my doom. My professional work was devoted to promoting the private agenda of clients with ample cash to spare. I spent free time shopping for baubles. Similar to other Americans caught up in securing acquisitions and escaping through mindless recreational activities, shopping and pleasure seeking was my mantra.

The biggest threat facing minority New Yorkers now is not “over-policing,” and certainly not brutal policing. The NYPD has one of the lowest rates of officer shootings and killings in the country; it is recognized internationally for its professionalism and training standards. Deaths such as Eric Garner’s are an aberration, which the department does everything it can to avoid. The biggest threat facing minority New Yorkers today is de-policing. After years of ungrounded criticism from the press and activists, after highly publicized litigation and the passage of ill-considered laws—such as the one making officers financially liable for alleged “racial profiling”—NYPD officers have radically scaled back their discretionary activity. Pedestrian stops have dropped 80 percent citywide and almost 100 percent in some areas. The department is grappling with how to induce officers to use their lawful authority again to stop crime before it happens. Garner’s death was a heartbreaking tragedy, but the unjustified backlash against misdemeanor enforcement is likely to result in more tragedy for New Yorkers.

African Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites, but they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct. In fact, studies suggest that white professionals may be the most likely of any group to have engaged in illegal drug activity in their lifetime, yet they are the least likely to be made criminals.

We don’t think about how we want to spend our time, and so we spend massive amounts of time on things—television, Web surfing, housework, errands—that give a slight amount of pleasure or feeling of accomplishment, but do little for our careers, our families, or our personal lives. We spend very little time on things that require more thought or initiative, like nurturing our kids, exercising, or engaging in the limited hours we do work in deliberate practice of our professional crafts. We try to squeeze these high-impact activities around the edges of things that are easy, or that seem inevitable merely because we always do them or because we think others expect us to. And consequently, we feel overworked and underrested, and tend to believe stories that confirm this view.

While the layman sees an opportunity and decides to take it, the professional criminal through the use of deceit and treachery, is able to create opportunities. This individual not only actively searches for a crime to commit, the professional criminal assembles teams of similar people and generates situations in which crime can be safely perpetrated in a controlled environment for maximum profit.

Simply, singing may be the one human activity that most perfectly combines heart, mind, soul, and strength. Almost everything else we do requires at least one of these fundamental human faculties: the heart, the seat of the emotion and the will; the mind, with which we explore and explain the world; the soul, the heart of human dignity and personhood; and strength, our bodies’ ability to bring about change in the world. But singing (and maybe only singing) combines them all. When we sing in worship, our minds are engaged with the text and what it says about us and God, our hearts are moved and express a range of emotions, our bodily strength is required, and—if we sing with “soul”—we reach down into the depths of our beings to do justice to the joy and heartbreak of human life. To sing well—not in the sense of singing in perfect tune or like a professional, but in this sense of bringing heart, mind, soul, and strength to our singing—is to touch the deepest truths about the world. It is to know wisdom. And it’s also to develop the courage and character to declare that God is this good, that we are this in need of him, that we are this thankful, that we are this committed to be part of his story.

When people work with Multipliers, they hold nothing back. They offer the very best of their thinking, creativity, and ideas. They give more than their jobs require and volunteer their discretionary effort, energy, and resourcefulness. They actively search for more valuable ways to contribute. They hold themselves to the highest standards. They give 100 percent of their abilities to the work--and then some.

People have read so much hype about passion that they feel they are missing something because they do not jump out of bed champing at the bit to get to work. They are afraid that if they are not completely engaged, then they must be dull and uninteresting at best, spiritually bankrupt at worst. The reality is that not everyone needs to feel passionate in their work. Lifestylers, for example, want to have a general sense of professional accomplishment, but they derive their sense of personal fulfillment from activities outside their workplace, whether sports, hobbies, charity work, or family. Many people fulfill vital functions in out society without loving their work, yet they are content in their lives. Perhaps it is only the current obsession with passion that leads some to worry that something is missing.

Participatory Medicine is a model of cooperative health care that seeks to achieve active involvement by patients, professionals, caregivers, and others across the continuum of care on all issues related to an individual’s health. Participatory medicine is an ethical approach to care that also holds promise to improve outcomes, reduce medical errors, increase patient satisfaction and improve the cost of care.

Look at last week’s schedule. How much of your time did you devote to regular, disciplined activities? Did you do anything to grow and improve yourself professionally? Did you engage in activities promoting good health? Did you dedicate part of your income to savings or investments? If you’ve been putting off those things, telling yourself that you’ll do them later, you may need to work on your self-discipline.

Normally when Christians go to church, they do not have to prepare to contribute anything other than some money for the tithing plate in their 'Sunday best.' They go to listen and watch those who have done the preparations carry out their professional services. Therefore, there is a hard shift in the concept that assembling according to the New Testament is very different and will require preparation, if the goal is to build up the assembly. Since an assembly's activities depend on member's contributions, if no one prays, sings, or says anything concerning Jesus it will be a very dead and boring gathering -- or the gathering will end up focused on other things. Therefore, a proper assembly requires every member to prepare something to bring and share. This is why 1 Corinthians 14:26 speaks of each one having a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, etc.

If, as is the tendency today, the governing class defines job-creation as its main aim, where will this transformation of all activities into paid activities (with remuneration as their sole rationale and maximum productivity as their goal) finally end? How long will the extremely fragile barriers which still prevent the professionalization of motherhood and fatherhood be able to hold out? When shall we see the commercial procreation of embryos, the sale of children, or a trade in organs? Are we not already monetizing, professionalizing and selling not only those things and services we produce, but also what we are and what we cannot produce at will or detach from ourselves? In other words, are we not already transforming ourselves into commodities and treating life as one means among others rather than the supreme end which all means must subserve?

In the first case it emerges that the evidence that might refute a theory can often be unearthed only with the help of an incompatible alternative: the advice (which goes back to Newton and which is still popular today) to use alternatives only when refutations have already discredited the orthodox theory puts the cart before the horse. Also, some of the most important formal properties of a theory are found by contrast, and not by analysis. A scientist who wishes to maximize the empirical content of the views he holds and who wants to understand them as clearly as he possibly can must therefore introduce other views; that is, he must adopt a pluralistic methodology. He must compare ideas with other ideas rather than with 'experience' and he must try to improve rather than discard the views that have failed in the competition. Proceeding in this way he will retain the theories of man and cosmos that are found in Genesis, or in the Pimander, he will elaborate them and use them to measure the success of evolution and other 'modern' views. He may then discover that the theory of evolution is not as good as is generally assumed and that it must be supplemented, or entirely replaced, by an improved version of Genesis. Knowledge so conceived is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges towards an ideal view; it is not a gradual approach to truth. It is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives, each single theory, each fairy-tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others in greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness. Nothing is ever settled, no view can ever be omitted from a comprehensive account. Plutarch or Diogenes Laertius, and not Dirac or von Neumann, are the models for presenting a knowledge of this kind in which the history of a science becomes an inseparable part of the science itself - it is essential for its further development as well as for giving content to the theories it contains at any particular moment. Experts and laymen, professionals and dilettani, truth-freaks and liars - they all are invited to participate in the contest and to make their contribution to the enrichment of our culture. The task of the scientist, however, is no longer 'to search for the truth', or 'to praise god', or 'to synthesize observations', or 'to improve predictions'. These are but side effects of an activity to which his attention is now mainly directed and which is 'to make the weaker case the stronger' as the sophists said, and thereby to sustain the motion of the whole.

Yeah, personally I hate my period and think it’s annoying and gross, but it’s not more gross than anything else that comes out of a human body. It’s not more gross than feces, urine, pus, bile, vomit, or the grossest bodily fluid of them all—in my mother’s professional opinion—phlegm. And yet we are not horrified every time we go to the bathroom. We do not stigmatize people with stomach flu. The active ingredient in period stigma is misogyny. This

Conscious breathing anchors us into the nowness of life and gives us a fresh outlook, no different from how a baby observes reality without mental commentary. The baby enjoys watching the world and human activity without any limiting mental concepts spoiling his or her perception. Naturally, we all have to evolve from the helpless state of babyhood, but to be able to tap into that wonderful ability and truly BE in the moment is immensely liberating.

is turning all life into a unified flow experience. If a person sets out to achieve a difficult enough goal, from which all other goals logically follow, and if he or she invests all energy in developing skills to reach that goal, then actions and feelings will be in harmony, and the separate parts of life will fit together—and each activity will “make sense” in the present, as well as in view of the past and of the future. In such a way, it is possible to give meaning to one’s entire life. But isn’t it incredibly naive to expect life to have a coherent overall meaning? After all, at least since Nietzsche concluded that God was dead, philosophers and social scientists have been busy demonstrating that existence has no purpose, that chance and impersonal forces rule our fate, and that all values are relative and hence arbitrary. It is true that life has no meaning, if by that we mean a supreme goal built into the fabric of nature and human experience, a goal that is valid for every individual. But it does not follow that life cannot be given meaning. Much of what we call culture and civilization consists in efforts people have made, generally against overwhelming odds, to create a sense of purpose for themselves and their descendants. It is one thing to recognize that life is, by itself, meaningless. It is another thing entirely to accept this with resignation. The first fact does not entail the second any more than the fact that we lack wings prevents us from flying. From the point of view of an individual, it does not matter what the ultimate goal is—provided it is compelling enough to order a lifetime’s worth of psychic energy. The challenge might involve the desire to have the best beer-bottle collection in the neighborhood, the resolution to find a cure for cancer, or simply the biological imperative to have children who will survive and prosper. As long as it provides clear objectives, clear rules for action, and a way to concentrate and become involved, any goal can serve to give meaning to a person’s life. In the past few years I have come to be quite well acquainted with several Muslim professionals—electronics engineers, pilots, businessmen, and teachers, mostly from Saudi Arabia and from the other Gulf states. In talking to them, I was struck with how relaxed most of them seemed to be even under strong pressure. “There is nothing to it,” those I asked about it told me, in different words, but with the same message: “We don’t get upset because we believe that our life is in God’s hands, and whatever He decides will be fine with us.” Such implicit faith used to be widespread in our culture as well, but it is not easy to find it now. Many of us have to discover a goal that will give meaning to life on our own, without the help of a traditional faith.

These are the terms amateur and dilettante. Nowadays these labels are slightly derogatory. An amateur or a dilettante is someone not quite up to par, a person not to be taken very seriously, one whose performance falls short of professional standards. But originally, “amateur,” from the Latin verb amare, “to love,” referred to a person who loved what he was doing. Similarly a “dilettante,” from the Latin delectare, “to find delight in,” was someone who enjoyed a given activity.

Normal cells could acquire these cancer-causing mutations through four mechanisms. The mutations could be caused by environmental insults, such as tobacco smoke, ultraviolet light, or X-rays—agents that attack DNA and change its chemical structure. Mutations could arise from spontaneous errors during cell division (every time DNA is replicated in a cell, there’s a minor chance that the copying process generates an error—an A switched to a T, G, or C, say). Mutant cancer genes could be inherited from parents, thereby causing hereditary cancer syndromes such as retinoblastoma and breast cancer that coursed through families. Or the genes could be carried into the cells via viruses, the professional gene carriers and gene swappers of the microbial world. In all four cases, the result converged on the same pathological process: the inappropriate activation or inactivation of genetic pathways that controlled growth, causing the malignant, dysregulated cellular division that was characteristic of cancer.

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like... [It] often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. Nevertheless, so long as those commitments retain an element of the arbitrary, the very nature of normal research ensures that the novelty shall not be suppressed for very long... [N]ormal science repeatedly goes astray. And when it does—when, that is, the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice—then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science. The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.

I found, cooking on the line, that I got a quiet buzz every time I made a plate of food that looked exactly and aesthetically correct and then handed it over the pass to Andy. If, on a busy night, I made, say, fifty good-looking plates, I had fifty little buzz moments, and by the end of service I felt pretty good. These are not profound experiences—the amount of reflection is exactly zero—but they were genuine enough, and I can’t think of many other activities in a modern urban life that give as much simple pleasure.

In the Vassar study, there was a group of students who, in Senior year, neither suffered conflict to the point of breakdown, nor stopped their own growth to flee into marriage. These were students who were preparing for a profession. They gained in college interests deep enough to commit themselves to a career. The study revealed that virtually all such students with professional ambitions plan to marry, but marriage is for them an activity in which they will voluntarily choose to participate, rather than something that is necessary for any sense of personal identity. Such students have a clear sense of direction, a greater degree of independence and self-confidence than most. They maybe be engaged or deeply in-love, but they do not feel they must sacrifice their own individualities or their career ambitions if they wish to marry. With these girls, the psychologists did not get the impression --as they did with so many-- that interest in men and in marriage is a kind of defense against intellectual development. Their interest in a particular man was real.

I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's "control" not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the warm skin of which he felt a "teleplastic" mass that appeared to the touch uncommonly like cold, uncooked liver. ("The Vane Sisters")

The temptation is to insist that black men 'choose' to be criminals; the system does not make them criminals, at least not in the way that slavery made blacks slaves or Jim Crow made them second-class citizens. The myth of choice here is seductive, but it should be resisted. African Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites, but they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct. In fact, studies suggest that white professionals may be the most likely of any group to have engaged in illegal drug activity in their lifetime, yet they are the least likely to be made criminals. The prevalence of illegal drug activity among all racial and ethnic groups creates a situation in which, due to limited law enforcement resources and political constraints, some people are made criminals while others are not. Black people have been made criminals by the War on Drugs to a degree that dwarfs its effect on other racial and ethnic groups, especially whites. And the process of making them criminals has produced racial stigma.

Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very small.

what I heard was that villains, at least for the purposes of this particular human resources presentation, were not bad people, and not evil people. What they were, were professional disrupters: the people who looked at systems and processes; found the weak spots, loopholes and unintended consequences of each of them; and then exploited them, either for their own advantage or the advantage of their client base. These activities, Yang explained, were neither inherently good nor bad in themselves—their “goodness” or “badness” was entirely dependent on the perspective of the observer.

Health professionals have a formal classification system for the level of function a person has. If you cannot, without assistance, use the toilet, eat, dress, bathe, groom, get out of bed, get out of a chair, and walk—the eight “Activities of Daily Living”—then you lack the capacity for basic physical independence. If you cannot shop for yourself, prepare your own food, maintain your housekeeping, do your laundry, manage your medications, make phone calls, travel on your own, and handle your finances—the eight “Independent Activities of Daily Living”—then you lack the capacity to live safely on your own.

The phenomenon of the "creative ilness", described in detail by Henri Ellenberger, in his massive study of the history of the unconsious, is alive and well in our own culture. Ellenberger described its characteristic elements: A creative illness succeeds a period of intense preoccupation with an idea and search for a certain truth. It is a polymorphous condition that can take the shape of depression, neurosis, psychomatic ailments, or even psychosis. Whatever the symptoms, they are felt as painful, if not agonizing by the subject, with alternating periods of allevation and worsening. Throughout the illness the subject never loses the thread of his dominating preoccupation. It is often compatible with normal, professional activity and family life. But even if he keeps to his social activities, he is almost entirely absorbed with himself. He suffers from feelings of utter isolation, even when he has a mentor who guides him through the ordeal (like the shaman apprentice with his master). The termination is often rapid and marked by a phase of exhilaration. The subject emerges from his ordeal with a permanent transformation in his personality and the conviction that he has discovered a great truth or a new spiritual world.

Addicts should not be coerced into treatment, since in the long term coercion creates more problems than it solves. On the other hand, for those addicts who opt for treatment, there must be a system of publicly funded recovery facilities with clean rooms, nutritious food, and access to outdoors and nature. Well-trained professional staff need to provide medical care, counseling, skills training, and emotional support. Our current nonsystem is utterly inadequate, with its patchwork of recovery homes run on private contracts and, here and there, a few upscale addiction treatment spas for the wealthy. No matter how committed their staff and how helpful their services may be, they are a drop in comparison to the ocean of vast need. In the absence of a coordinated rehabilitation system, the efforts of individual recovery homes are limited and occur in a vacuum, with no follow-up. It may be thought that the cost of such a drug rehabilitation and treatment system would be exorbitant. No doubt the financial expenses would be great — but surely less than the funds now freely squandered on the War on Drugs, to say nothing of the savings from the cessation of drug-related criminal activity and the diminished burden on the health care system.

Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago,” [Christopher] observed in his final column for Vanity Fair, “I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive sense . . . However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”6

Addiction to internet pornography is a very real phenomenon with a very real impact on well-being. It is a phenomenon which has grown exponentially in the last decade, even though it has remained largely invisible and undetected by society. Tragically, its risks continue to be ignored or actively denied by all but a few enlightened medical professionals. It is a phenomenon that is not just here to stay, but also likely to increase. It is almost certainly the cause of the widespread sexual dysfunction found in recent studies of late adolescence.[1] It is a problem that is most likely impacting you, or your loved ones, without you even being aware of it.

Stop Telling Yourself You’re Not Ready As we noted yesterday, we fear the unknown. For example, in our personal lives, we hesitate before saying hello to strangers. We immediately call a plumber before trying to fix plumbing problems on our own. We stick to the same grocery stores rather than visiting new stores. We gravitate toward the familiar. In our professional lives, we shy away from taking on unfamiliar projects. We cringe at the thought of creating new spreadsheets and reports for our bosses. We balk at branching out into new avenues of business. Instead, we remain in our comfort zones. There, after all, the risk of failure is minimal. One of the biggest reasons we do this is because we believe we’re unready to tackle new activities. We feel we lack the practical expertise to handle new projects with poise and effectiveness. We feel we lack the knowledge to know what we’re doing. In other words, we tell ourselves that we’re not 100% ready. This assumption stems from a basic and common fallacy: that we must be 100% prepared if we hope to perform a given task effectively. In reality, that’s untrue. The truth is, you’ll rarely be 100% ready for anything life throws at you. Individuals who have achieved success in their respective fields claim their success is a reflection of their persistence and grit, and an ability to adapt to their circumstances. It is not dictated by whether the individual has achieved mastery in any particular area.

Active scholars are uniquely attracted by a high-quality graduate school of arts and sciences. Faculty members consider the teaching and training of new generations of graduate students as their highest calling. They believe that working with graduate students maintains and develops their professional skills more effectively than any other activity. It may be the main reason for the great attraction of academic jobs. Laboratory scientists have told me that the opportunity to work with graduate students keeps them in the university. For them, other options would center on research in commercial laboratories, but there the principal investigator would be assisted by technicians, and that is considered a far less creative interaction.

TOBY CALLED HIS therapist, Carla, whom he’d stopped seeing actively when the apps took over his attention span and his time, but it was August and she was gone to the island where mental health professionals vanished to in the summer. The useless social worker from school was even more useless than usual, camping in the Adirondacks with her family for two weeks. He called mental health services at the hospital but was told that all adolescent and pediatric psychologists were out until September. This is what happened when an entire field of medicine was as disrespected as psychologists. They made their own rules, and one of them was that nobody was allowed to have a breakdown during August, and the other was that this was fucking Europe and they got to take a whole month off from work.

Lansky was credited with obtaining compromising photos of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sometime in the 1940s, which showed “Hoover in some kind of gay situation,” according to a former Lansky associate, who also said that Lansky had often said of Hoover, “I fixed that sonofabitch.” Meyer Lansky’s widow also later claimed that her husband had acquired “hard proof of Hoover’s homosexuality and used it to neutralize the FBI as a threat to his own operations.”59 The photos showed Hoover engaged in sexual activity, specifically oral sex, with his long-time friend, FBI Deputy Director Clyde Tolson.60 There is considerable, separate evidence from the period that the close, professional relationship between Hoover and Tolson was also intimate and that this was an “open secret” in Washington.61

Today, it is becoming possible for [the girl] to take her future in her hands, instead of putting it in those of the man. If she is absorbed by studies, sports, a professional training, or a social and political activity, she frees herself from the male obsession; she is less preoccupied by love and sexual conflicts. However, she has a harder time than the young man in accomplishing herself as an autonomous individual. . . . [N]either her family nor customs assist her attempts. Besides, even if she chooses independence, she still makes a place in her life for the man, for love. She will often be afraid of missing her destiny as a woman if she gives herself over entirely to any undertaking. She does not admit this feeling to herself: but it is there, it distorts all her best efforts, it sets up limits.

The number of her acquaintances multiplied over the years as the number of her true friendships diminished. The Grant Longitudinal Study found that people who were neglected in childhood are much more likely to be friendless in old age... Erica was not solitary. But sometimes she felt she lived in crowded solitude. She was around a shifting mass of semi-friends, but was without a small circle of intimates. Over the years, in other words, she had become more superficial. She had been publicly active but privately neglectful. She had, over the course of her career, reorganized her own brain in ways that were perhaps necessary to professional achievement, but which were not satisfying now that her drive for worldly achievement had been fulfilled. She entered retirement beset by a feeling of general numbness. p341-2

I was having a medical checkup recently, and as the doctor started to check my blood pressure, she launched into a lecture: “You know, people like you tend to be under a lot of stress. You really should . . .” But I had already quit listening to her. I have had heard this so many times from so many people. People are always telling me how stressful my life must be who, in truth, have no clue whether I am experiencing stress or not. I’m not experiencing stress; I’m loving my life. I love and crave all the activity and all the crazy new challenges. What these professional worriers are really saying is that they think they would get stressed out if they were doing all that I do. They’re saying more about themselves than about me. I’ll tell you, that doctor was the one who looked stressed, tired, beat up, and hammered.

What Does It Mean to Be a Villain?” in yellow, on a blue gradient background. “Do they give this presentation to all the new hires?” I whispered to Morrison. “Executives and managers, yes,” Morrison said. “Shut up and listen.” I shut up and listened. And what I heard was that villains, at least for the purposes of this particular human resources presentation, were not bad people, and not evil people. What they were, were professional disrupters: the people who looked at systems and processes; found the weak spots, loopholes and unintended consequences of each of them; and then exploited them, either for their own advantage or the advantage of their client base. These activities, Yang explained, were neither inherently good nor bad in themselves—their “goodness” or “badness” was entirely dependent on the perspective of the observer.

I'm near tears at this moment. But I also get an unexpected burst of courage, and here's what it feels like: I don't care anymore if this guy hates me or badmouths me to other club owners. Because now - and I've never felt this before - I actively want him to hate me. It becomes imperative, for my self-worth, that and asshole like Reed actively loathe me. If someone like this were to like me, to like my comedy, and to like the way I conduct myself professionally, it would mean I suck as a person. I've encountered this a few times since then. Not very often. But there are those rare occasions - and they're bracing, freeing sensations when they occur - when you absolutely crave someone's disapproval and disgust. You can see it actually helping your career, your social relations, and your life if it becomes known that this person thinks you're shit.

Social groups are also a big part of Danish life. Called foreningsliv (or “association life”), these groups are based on a shared hobby or interest. The objective can be economic, political, academic, or cultural. Their function can be to change something in society, such as in a political association, or to express themselves in a way that meets the members’ social needs, such as in a choral society or a bridge club. Statistics show that 79 percent of Denmark’s business leaders have been active in associations before the age of thirty. Respectively, 94 percent, 92 percent, and 88 percent of managers with experience in associations believe that these years of involvement benefited their social skills and interpersonal skills and gave them a strong network. Ninety-nine percent of Denmark’s governors believe that participation in these voluntary associations promotes young people’s professional skills.

In his 1995 book Trust, he argues that the ability of a society to form large networks is largely a reflection of that society’s level of trust. Fukuyama makes a strong distinction between what he calls “familial” societies, like those of southern Europe and Latin America, and “high-trust” societies, like those of Germany, the United States, and Japan. Familial societies are societies where people don’t trust strangers but do trust deeply the individuals in their own families (the Italian Mafia being a cartoon example of a familial society). In familial societies family networks are the dominant form of social organization where economic activity is embedded, and are therefore societies where businesses are more likely to be ventures among relatives. By contrast, in high-trust societies people don’t have a strong preference for trusting their kin and are more likely to develop firms that are professionally run.

My idle dreams of leaving behind what I was already doing professionally in order to study, to direct films, or to write receded with the shock of prison and exile. I simply lacked the strength even to adumbrate an act of will. The bell that had rung as I was falling asleep that morning the police had come to take me away had so deeply left its mark that I was still trembling at the sound of the doorbell in Chelsea. So it was impossible for me to dare do anything I might wish. And insofar as there was growing receptivity to what I did among my fellow professionals in London, a simple instinct for survival bound me to the activity in which I was already installed. I would stay home listening to Gil play, at times playing myself, watching television, reading, and above all conversing with people who came by. I was always chatty, but my happiness did not last even until my head hit the pillow. There was always something to feel ashamed of. And I didn't know how to get out of this.

Labor unions can and often do provide useful services for their members—negotiating the terms of their employment, representing them with respect to grievances, giving them a feeling of belonging and participating in a group activity, among others. As believers in freedom, we favor the fullest opportunity for voluntary organization of labor unions to perform whatever services their members wish, and are willing to pay for, provided they respect the rights of others and refrain from using force. However, unions and comparable groups such as the professional associations have not relied on strictly voluntary activities and membership with respect to their major proclaimed objective—improving the wages of their members. They have succeeded in getting government to grant them special privileges and immunities, which have enabled them to benefit some of their members and officials at the expense of other workers and all consumers. In the main, the persons benefited have had decidedly higher incomes than the persons harmed.

I look around and see many shelters and services for survivors of domestic violence, but no large-scale movement to end male violence. I see many batterer intervention programs, but few men involved in challenging sexism. The loss of vision that narrowed the focus of men's work reflects a change that occurred in other parts of the movement to end violence, as activists who set out to change the institutions perpetrating violence settled into service jobs helping people cope. [...] Social service work addresses the needs of individuals reeling from the personal and devastating impact of institutional systems of exploitation and violence. Social change work challenges the root causes of the exploitation and violence. In my travels throughout the United States, I talk with many service providers, more and more of whom are saying to me, "We could continue doing what we are doing for another hundred years and the levels of violence would not change. I meet more and more people who are running programs for batterers who say ,"We are only dealing with a minute number of the men who are violent and are having little impact on the systems which perpetuate male violence." [...] While there is some overlap between social service provision and social change work, the two do not necessarily go readily together. In our violent world, the needs and numbers of survivors are never ending, and the tasks of funding, staffing, and developing resources for our organizations to meet those needs are difficult, poorly supported, and even actively undermined by those with power and wealth in our society. Although some groups are both working for social change and providing social services, there are many more groups providing social services that are not working for social change. In fact, many social service agencies may be intentionally or inadvertently working to maintain the status quo. After all, the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC) wouldn't exist without a lot of people in desperate straits. The NPIC provides jobs; it provides opportunities for professional development. It enables those who do the work to feel good about what we do and about our ability to help individuals survive in the system. It gives a patina of caring and concern to the ruling class which funds the work.

But we noted also in all these victoruous worlds a remarkable identity. For instance, in the loosest possible sense, all were communistic; for in all of them the means of production were communally owned, and no individual could control the labor of others for private profit. Again, in a sense all these world-orders were democratic, since the final sanction of policy was world-opinion. But in many cases there was no democratic machinery, no legal channel for the expression of world-opinion. Instead, a highly specialized bureaucracy, or even a world-dictator, might carry out the business of organizing the world's activity with legally absolute power, but under constant supervision by popular will expressed through radio. We were amazed to find that in a truly awakened world even a dictatorship could be in essence democratic. We observed with incredulity situations in which the "absolute" world-government, faced with some exceptionally momentous and doubtful matter of policy, had made urgent appeals for a formal democratic decision, only to receive from all regions the reply, "We cannot advise. You must decide as your professional experience suggests. We will abide by your decision.

I believe that social media, and the internet as a whole, have negatively impacted our ability to both think long-term and to focus deeply on the task in front of us. It is no surprise, therefore, that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, prohibited his children from using phones or tablets—even though his business was to sell millions of them to his customers! The billionaire investor and former senior executive at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, argues that we must rewire our brain to focus on the long term, which starts by removing social media apps from our phones. In his words, such apps, “wire your brain for super-fast feedback.” By receiving constant feedback, whether through likes, comments, or immediate replies to our messages, we condition ourselves to expect fast results with everything we do. And this feeling is certainly reinforced through ads for schemes to help us “get rich quick”, and through cognitive biases (i.e., we only hear about the richest and most successful YouTubers, not about the ones who fail). As we demand more and more stimulation, our focus is increasingly geared toward the short term and our vision of reality becomes distorted. This leads us to adopt inaccurate mental models such as: Success should come quickly and easily, or I don’t need to work hard to lose weight or make money. Ultimately, this erroneous concept distorts our vision of reality and our perception of time. We can feel jealous of people who seem to have achieved overnight success. We can even resent popular YouTubers. Even worse, we feel inadequate. It can lead us to think we are just not good enough, smart enough, or disciplined enough. Therefore, we feel the need to compensate by hustling harder. We have to hurry before we miss the opportunity. We have to find the secret that will help us become successful. And, in this frenetic race, we forget one of the most important values of all: patience. No, watching motivational videos all day long won’t help you reach your goals. But, performing daily consistent actions, sustained over a long period of time will. Staying calm and focusing on the one task in front of you every day will. The point is, to achieve long-term goals in your personal or professional life, you must regain control of your attention and rewire your brain to focus on the long term. To do so, you should start by staying away from highly stimulating activities.

That any society ought to have philosophers in its midst seems to us an axiom of any possible social philosophy. Probably any society will have some reflective people in it, some Socrates or Mandeville or Wollstonecraft to ask awkward questions, but even if this is to be welcomed, it does not follow that any society should have professional philosophers in its midst, nor, if it does have them, that their activities should the take the form ours assume. The very professionalization of philosophy makes the likelihood more remote that those awkward questions, necessary for a healthy social consciousness, should come from philosophers. It may make for better philosophy and a better society if they come from a social misfit like Diogenes, or from an anathemetized lense-grinder like Spinoza, or from a man of affairs, an unsuccessful aspirant to two chairs of philosophy, like Hume. (Even more conventionally acceptable moral philosophers like Aquinas and Butler earned their living as clerics, not as philosophers.) The questions we need to ask occasionally are, first, why anyone should be a philosopher (in our sense); second, why anyone else should pay one to be a philosopher; third, how many should be paid philosophers; and fourth, what exact form the activity of paid philosophers should take.

Yet, it was precisely our failure to differentiate between work and politics, between reality and illusion; it was precisely our mistake of conceiving of politics as a rational human activity comparable to the sowing of seeds or the construction of buildings that was responsible for the fact that a painter who failed to make the grade was able to plunge the whole world into misery. And I have stressed again and again that the main purpose of this book—which, after all, was not written merely for the fun of it—was to demonstrate these catastrophic errors in human thinking and to eliminate irrationalism from politics. It is an essential part of our social tragedy that the farmer, the industrial worker, the physician, etc., do not influence social existence solely through their social activities, but also and even predominantly through their political ideologies. For political activity hinders objective and professional activity; it splits every profession into inimical ideologic groups; creates a dichotomy in the body of industrial workers; limits the activity of the medical profession and harms the patients. In short, it is precisely political activity that prevents the realization of that which it pretends to fight for: peace, work, security, international cooperation, free objective speech, freedom of religion, etc.

DOES HARVARD MAKE YOU SMARTER? Swimmer’s Body Illusion As essayist and trader Nassim Taleb resolved to do something about the stubborn extra pounds he’d be carrying, he contemplated taking up various sports. However, joggers seemed scrawny and unhappy, and bodybuilders looked broad and stupid, and tennis players? Oh, so upper-middle class! Swimmers, though, appealed to him with their well-built, streamlined bodies. He decided to sign up at his local swimming pool and to train hard twice a week. A short while later, he realised that he had succumbed to an illusion. Professional swimmers don’t have perfect bodies because they train extensively. Rather, they are good swimmers because of their physiques. How their bodies are designed is a factor for selection and not the result of their activities. Similarly, female models advertise cosmetics and thus, many female consumers believe that these products make you beautiful. But it is not the cosmetics that make these women model-like. Quite simply, the models are born attractive and only for this reason are they candidates for cosmetics advertising. As with the swimmers’ bodies, beauty is a factor for selection and not the result. Whenever we confuse selection factors with results, we fall prey to what Taleb calls the swimmer’s body illusion. Without this illusion, half of advertising campaigns would not work

These include: the Bar Raiser hiring process that ensures that the company continues to acquire top talent; a bias for separable teams run by leaders with a singular focus that optimizes for speed of delivery and innovation; the use of written narratives instead of slide decks to ensure that deep understanding of complex issues drives well-informed decisions; a relentless focus on input metrics to ensure that teams work on activities that propel the business. And finally there is the product development process that gives this book its name: working backwards from the desired customer experience. Many of the business problems that Amazon faces are no different from those faced by every other company, small or large. The difference is how Amazon keeps coming up with uniquely Amazonian solutions to those problems. Taken together, these elements combine to form a way of thinking, managing, and working that we refer to as being Amazonian, a term that we coined for the purposes of this book. Both of us, Colin and Bill, were “in the room,” and—along with other senior leaders—we shaped and refined what it means to be Amazonian. We both worked extensively with Jeff and were actively involved in creating a number of Amazon’s most enduring successes (not to mention some of its notable flops) in what was the most invigorating professional experience of our lives.

Each of the three recognized categories—care, service, and education—would encompass a wide range of activities, with different levels of compensation for full- and part-time participation. Care work could include parenting of young children, attending to an aging parent, assisting a friend or family member dealing with illness, or helping someone with mental or physical disabilities live life to the fullest. This category would create a veritable army of people—loved ones, friends, or even strangers—who could assist those in need, offering them what my entrepreneur friend’s touchscreen device for the elderly never could: human warmth. Service work would be similarly broadly defined, encompassing much of the current work of nonprofit groups as well as the kinds of volunteers I saw in Taiwan. Tasks could include performing environmental remediation, leading afterschool programs, guiding tours at national parks, or collecting oral histories from elders in our communities. Participants in these programs would register with an established group and commit to a certain number of hours of service work to meet the requirements of the stipend. Finally, education could range from professional training for the jobs of the AI age to taking classes that could transform a hobby into a career. Some recipients of the stipend will use that financial freedom to pursue a degree in machine learning and use it to find a high-paying job.

It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.

Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black. The temptation is to insist that black men “choose” to be criminals; the system does not make them criminals, at least not in the way that slavery made blacks slaves or Jim Crow made them second-class citizens. The myth of choice here is seductive, but it should be resisted. African Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites, but they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct. In fact, studies suggest that white professionals may be the most likely of any group to have engaged in illegal drug activity in their lifetime, yet they are the least likely to be made criminals.52 The prevalence of illegal drug activity among all racial and ethnic groups creates a situation in which, due to limited law enforcement resources and political constraints, some people are made criminals while others are not. Black people have been made criminals by the War on Drugs to a degree that dwarfs its effect on other racial and ethnic groups, especially whites. And the process of making them criminals has produced racial stigma.

Performance measure. Throughout this book, the term performance measure refers to an indicator used by management to measure, report, and improve performance. Performance measures are classed as key result indicators, result indicators, performance indicators, or key performance indicators. Critical success factors (CSFs). CSFs are the list of issues or aspects of organizational performance that determine ongoing health, vitality, and wellbeing. Normally there are between five and eight CSFs in any organization. Success factors. A list of 30 or so issues or aspects of organizational performance that management knows are important in order to perform well in any given sector/ industry. Some of these success factors are much more important; these are known as critical success factors. Balanced scorecard. A term first introduced by Kaplan and Norton describing how you need to measure performance in a more holistic way. You need to see an organization’s performance in a number of different perspectives. For the purposes of this book, there are six perspectives in a balanced scorecard (see Exhibit 1.7). Oracles and young guns. In an organization, oracles are those gray-haired individuals who have seen it all before. They are often considered to be slow, ponderous, and, quite frankly, a nuisance by the new management. Often they are retired early or made redundant only to be rehired as contractors at twice their previous salary when management realizes they have lost too much institutional knowledge. Their considered pace is often a reflection that they can see that an exercise is futile because it has failed twice before. The young guns are fearless and precocious leaders of the future who are not afraid to go where angels fear to tread. These staff members have not yet achieved management positions. The mixing of the oracles and young guns during a KPI project benefits both parties and the organization. The young guns learn much and the oracles rediscover their energy being around these live wires. Empowerment. For the purposes of this book, empowerment is an outcome of a process that matches competencies, skills, and motivations with the required level of autonomy and responsibility in the workplace. Senior management team (SMT). The team comprised of the CEO and all direct reports. Better practice. The efficient and effective way management and staff undertake business activities in all key processes: leadership, planning, customers, suppliers, community relations, production and supply of products and services, employee wellbeing, and so forth. Best practice. A commonly misused term, especially because what is best practice for one organization may not be best practice for another, albeit they are in the same sector. Best practice is where better practices, when effectively linked together, lead to sustainable world-class outcomes in quality, customer service, flexibility, timeliness, innovation, cost, and competitiveness. Best-practice organizations commonly use the latest time-saving technologies, always focus on the 80/20, are members of quality management and continuous improvement professional bodies, and utilize benchmarking. Exhibit 1.10 shows the contents of the toolkit used by best-practice organizations to achieve world-class performance. EXHIBIT 1.10 Best-Practice Toolkit Benchmarking. An ongoing, systematic process to search for international better practices, compare against them, and then introduce them, modified where necessary, into your organization. Benchmarking may be focused on products, services, business practices, and processes of recognized leading organizations.

Further evidence for this comes from journalist and author Burton Hersh who alleges in his book Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America that Hoover had also been tied to Sherman Kaminsky, who helped run a sexual blackmail operation in New York that involved young male prostitutes.67 Kaminsky claimed to have been New York-bred, but federal investigators later stated he was originally from Baltimore. Some reports claim Kaminsky had ties to Israel, having served in the Israel Defense Forces.68 The ring, which was called “The Chickens and the Bulls” by the NYPD, targeted prominent men who were closeted homosexuals throughout the United States, many of them married with families. Among those who had been blackmailed were a Navy admiral, two generals, a US congressman, a prominent surgeon, an Ivy League professor and well-known actors and television personalities.69 That operation was busted and investigated in a 1966 extortion probe led by Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan, though the FBI quickly took over the investigation and photos showing Hoover and Kaminsky together soon disappeared from the case file.70 Kaminsky successfully avoided arrest for 11 years, having “disappeared” from a New York courthouse undetected during his sentencing hearing.71 Why would Hoover have been involved with the activities of Kaminsky? There are only a few possibilities. One possibility is that Hoover had been blackmailed by Kaminsky, though it’s more likely that Kaminsky instead had ties to figures in organized crime that had already blackmailed Hoover long before. Another possibility is that Hoover was cozy to a second sexual blackmail operation targeting closeted homosexual men because he sought to pad his own library of blackmail for personal and professional gain.

Professional Bio of Shahin Shardi, P.Eng. Materials Engineer Welding and Pressure Equipment Inspector, QA/QC Specialist Shahin Shardi is a Materials Engineer with experience in integrity management, inspection of pressure equipment, quality control/assurance of large scale oil and gas projects and welding inspection. He stared his career in trades which helped him understand fundamentals of operation of a construction site and execution of large scale projects. This invaluable experience provided him with boots on the ground perspective of requirements of running a successful project and job site. After obtaining an engineering degree from university of British Columbia, he started a career in asset integrity management for oil and gas facilities and inspection of pressure equipment in Alberta, Canada. He has been involved with numerus maintenance shutdowns at various facilities providing engineering support to the maintenance, operations and project personnel regarding selection, repair, maintenance, troubleshooting and long term reliability of equipment. In addition he has extensive experience in area of quality control and assurance of new construction activities in oil and gas industry. He has performed Owner’s Inspector and welding inspector roles in this area. Shahin has extensively applied industry codes of constructions such as ASME Pressure Vessel Code (ASME VIII), Welding (ASME IX), Process Piping (ASME B31.3), Pipe Flanges (ASME B16.5) and various pressure equipment codes and standards. Familiarity with NDT techniques like magnetic particle, liquid penetrant, eddy current, ultrasonic and digital radiography is another valuable knowledge base gained during various projects. Some of his industry certificates are CWB Level 2 Certified Welding Inspector, API 510 Pressure Vessel Inspector, Alberta ABSA In-Service Pressure Vessel Inspector and Saskatchewan TSASK Pressure Equipment Inspector. Shahin is a professional member of Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta.

On my next weekend without the kids I went to Nashville to visit her. We had a great weekend. On Monday morning she kissed me goodbye and left for work. I would drive home while she was at work. Only I didn’t go straight home. I went and paid her recruiting officer a little visit. I walked in wearing shorts and a T-shirt so my injuries were fully visible. The two recruiters couldn’t hide the surprise on their faces. I clearly looked like an injured veteran. Not their typical visitor. “I’m here about Jamie Boyd,” I said. One of the recruiters stood up and said, “Yes, I’m working with Jamie Boyd. How can I help you?” I walked to the center of the room between him and the female recruiter who was still seated at her desk and said, “Jamie Boyd is not going to be active duty. She is not going to be a truck driver. She wants to change her MOS and you’re not going to treat her like some high school student. She has a degree. She is a young professional and you will treat her as such.” “Yes, sir, yes, sir. We hold ourselves to a higher standard. We’ll do better. I’m sorry,” he stammered. “You convinced her she can’t change anything. That’s a lie. It’s paperwork. Make it happen.” “Yes, sir, yes, sir.” That afternoon Jamie had an appointment at the recruitment center anyway for more paperwork. Afterward, she called me, and as soon as I answered, without even a hello, she said, “What have you done?” “How were they acting?” I asked, sounding really pleased with myself. “Like I can have whatever I want,” she answered. “You’re welcome. Find a better job.” She wasn’t mad about it. She just laughed and said, “You’re crazy.” “I will always protect you. You were getting screwed over. And I’m sorry you didn’t know about it, but you wouldn’t have let me go if I had told you ahead of time.” “You’re right, but I’m glad you did.” Jamie ended up choosing MP, military police, as her MOS because they offered her a huge signing bonus. We made our reunion official and she quit her job in Nashville to move back to Birmingham. She had a while before basic training, so she moved back in with me. We were both very happy, and as it turned out, some very big changes were about to happen beyond basic training.

The day after setting foot upon the deck of the whale-ship, Snowball was appointed chef de caboose, in which distinguished office he continued for several years; and only resigned it to accept of a similar situation on board a fine bark, commanded by Captain Benjamin Brace, engaged in the African trade. But not that African trade carried on by such ships as the Pandora. No; the merchandise transported in Captain Brace’s bark was not black men, but white ivory, yellow gold-dust, palm-oil, and ostrich-plumes; and it was said, that, after each “trip” to the African coast, the master, as well as owner, of this richly laden bark, was accustomed to make a trip to the Bank of England, and there deposit a considerable sum of money. After many years spent thus professionally, and with continued success, the ci-devant whalesman, man-o’-war’s-man, ex-captain of the Catamaran, and master of the African trader, retired from active life; and, anchored in a snug craft in the shape of a Hampstead Heath villa, is now enjoying his pipe, his glass of grog, and his otium cum dignitate. As for “Little William,” he in turn ceased to be known by this designation. It was no longer appropriate when he became the captain of a first-class clipper-ship in the East Indian trade,—standing upon his own quarter-deck full six feet in his shoes, and finely proportioned at that,—so well as to both face and figure, that he had no difficulty in getting “spliced” to a wife that dearly loved him. She was a very beautiful woman, with a noble round eye, jet black waving hair, and a deep brunette complexion. Many of his acquaintances were under the impression that she had Oriental blood in her veins, and that he had brought her home from India on one of his return voyages from that country. Those more intimate with him could give a different account,—one received from himself; and which told them that his wife was a native of Africa, of Portuguese extraction, and that her name was Lalee. They had heard, moreover, that his first acquaintance with her had commenced on board a slave bark; and that their friendship as children,—afterwards ripening into love,—had been cemented while both were castaways upon a raft—Ocean Waifs in the middle of the Atlantic. The End.

The ten rules of ikigai We’ll conclude this journey with ten rules we’ve distilled from the wisdom of the long-living residents of Ogimi: Stay active; don’t retire. Those who give up the things they love doing and do well lose their purpose in life. That’s why it’s so important to keep doing things of value, making progress, bringing beauty or utility to others, helping out, and shaping the world around you, even after your “official” professional activity has ended. Take it slow. Being in a hurry is inversely proportional to quality of life. As the old saying goes, “Walk slowly and you’ll go far.” When we leave urgency behind, life and time take on new meaning. Don’t fill your stomach. Less is more when it comes to eating for long life, too. According to the 80 percent rule, in order to stay healthier longer, we should eat a little less than our hunger demands instead of stuffing ourselves. Surround yourself with good friends. Friends are the best medicine, there for confiding worries over a good chat, sharing stories that brighten your day, getting advice, having fun, dreaming . . . in other words, living. Get in shape for your next birthday. Water moves; it is at its best when it flows fresh and doesn’t stagnate. The body you move through life in needs a bit of daily maintenance to keep it running for a long time. Plus, exercise releases hormones that make us feel happy. Smile. A cheerful attitude is not only relaxing—it also helps make friends. It’s good to recognize the things that aren’t so great, but we should never forget what a privilege it is to be in the here and now in a world so full of possibilities. Reconnect with nature. Though most people live in cities these days, human beings are made to be part of the natural world. We should return to it often to recharge our batteries. Give thanks. To your ancestors, to nature, which provides you with the air you breathe and the food you eat, to your friends and family, to everything that brightens your days and makes you feel lucky to be alive. Spend a moment every day giving thanks, and you’ll watch your stockpile of happiness grow. Live in the moment. Stop regretting the past and fearing the future. Today is all you have. Make the most of it. Make it worth remembering. Follow your ikigai. There is a passion inside you, a unique talent that gives meaning to your days and drives you to share the best of yourself until the very end. If you don’t know what your ikigai is yet, as Viktor Frankl says, your mission is to discover it.

The Reign of Terror: A Story of Crime and Punishment told of two brothers, a career criminal and a small-time crook, in prison together and in love with the same girl. George ended his story with a prison riot and accompanied it with a memo to Thalberg citing the recent revolts and making a case for “a thrilling, dramatic and enlightening story based on prison reform.” --- Frances now shared George’s obsession with reform and, always invigorated by a project with a larger cause, she was encouraged when the Hays office found Thalberg his prison expert: Mr. P. W. Garrett, the general secretary of the National Society of Penal Information. Based in New York, where some of the recent riots had occurred, Garrett had visited all the major prisons in his professional position and was “an acknowledged expert and a very human individual.” He agreed to come to California to work with Frances for several weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas for a total of kr 4,470.62 plus expenses. Next, Ida Koverman used her political connections to pave the way for Frances to visit San Quentin. Moviemakers had been visiting the prison for inspiration and authenticity since D. W. Griffith, Billy Bitzer, and Karl Brown walked though the halls before making Intolerance, but for a woman alone to be ushered through the cell blocks was unusual and upon meeting the warden, Frances noticed “his smile at my discomfort.” Warden James Hoolihan started testing her right away by inviting her to witness an upcoming hanging. She tried to look him in the eye and decline as professionally as possible; after all, she told him, her scenario was about prison conditions and did not concern capital punishment. Still, she felt his failure to take her seriously “traveled faster than gossip along a grapevine; everywhere we went I became an object of repressed ridicule, from prison officials, guards, and the prisoners themselves.” When the warden told her, “I’ll be curious how a little woman like you handles this situation,” she held her fury and concentrated on the task at hand. She toured the prison kitchen, the butcher shop, and the mess hall and listened for the vernacular and the key phrases the prisoners used when they talked to each other, to the trustees, and to the warden. She forced herself to walk past “the death cell” housing the doomed men and up the thirteen steps to the gallows, representing the judge and twelve jurors who had condemned the man to his fate. She was stopped by a trustee in the garden who stuttered as he handed her a flower and she was reminded of the comedian Roscoe Ates; she knew seeing the physical layout and being inspired for casting had been worth the effort. --- Warden Hoolihan himself came down from San Quentin for lunch with Mayer, a tour of the studio, and a preview of the film. Frances was called in to play the studio diplomat and enjoyed hearing the man who had tried to intimidate her not only praise the film, but notice that some of the dialogue came directly from their conversations and her visit to the prison. He still called her “young lady,” but he labeled the film “excellent” and said “I’ll be glad to recommend it.” ---- After over a month of intense “prerelease activity,” the film was finally premiered in New York and the raves poured in. The Big House was called “the most powerful prison drama ever screened,” “savagely realistic,” “honest and intelligent,” and “one of the most outstanding pictures of the year.

And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout. Now take a man of this type, and let him be also a philosophic amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-podge system after the fashion of a common layman, and what does he find his situation to be, in this blessed year of our Lord 1906? He wants facts; he wants science; but he also wants a religion. And being an amateur and not an independent originator in philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to the experts and professionals whom he finds already in the field. A very large number of you here present, possibly a majority of you, are amateurs of just this sort. Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough. If you look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find the whole tough-minded program in operation, and the 'conflict between science and religion' in full blast. The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of 'nothing but'—nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the tough-minded find themselves congenially at home.If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what do you find? Religious philosophy in our day and generation is, among us English-reading people, of two main types. One of these is more radical and aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat. By the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-called transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school, the philosophy of such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, and Royce. This philosophy has greatly influenced the more studious members of our protestant ministry. It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has already blunted the edge of the traditional theism in protestantism at large. That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through one stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scholastic theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the catholic church. For a long time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of the hegelians and other philosophers of the 'Absolute,' on the one hand, and those of the scientific evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that give us this kind of a philosophy, James Martineau, Professor Bowne, Professor Ladd and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical in temper. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises, that seeks a modus vivendi above all things. It accepts the facts of darwinism, the facts of cerebral physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with them. It lacks the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in consequence; whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical style of it.

10 Practical Strategies to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills and Unleash Your Creativity In today's rapidly changing world, the ability to think critically and creatively has become more important than ever. Whether you're a student looking to excel academically, a professional striving for success in your career, or simply someone who wants to navigate life's challenges with confidence, developing strong critical thinking skills is crucial. In this blog post, we will explore ten practical strategies to help you improve your critical thinking abilities and unleash your creative potential. 1. Embrace open-mindedness: One of the cornerstones of critical thinking is being open to different viewpoints and perspectives. Cultivate a willingness to listen to others, consider alternative opinions, and challenge your own beliefs. This practice expands your thinking and encourages creative problem-solving. 2. Ask thought-provoking questions: Asking insightful questions is a powerful way to stimulate critical thinking. By questioning assumptions, seeking clarity, and exploring deeper meanings, you can uncover new insights and perspectives. Challenge yourself to ask thought-provoking questions regularly. 3. Practice active listening: Listening actively involves not just hearing, but also understanding, interpreting, and empathizing with the speaker. By honing your active listening skills, you can better grasp complex ideas, identify underlying assumptions, and engage in more meaningful discussions. 4. Seek diverse sources of information: Expand your knowledge base by seeking information from a wide range of sources. Engage with diverse perspectives, opinions, and ideas through books, articles, podcasts, and documentaries. This habit broadens your understanding and encourages critical thinking by exposing you to different viewpoints. 5. Develop analytical thinking skills: Analytical thinking involves breaking down complex problems into smaller components, examining relationships and patterns, and drawing logical conclusions. Enhance your analytical skills by practicing activities like puzzles, riddles, and brain teasers. This will sharpen your ability to analyze information and think critically. 6. Foster a growth mindset: A growth mindset is the belief that your abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. Embracing this mindset encourages you to view challenges as opportunities for growth, rather than obstacles. By persisting through difficulties, you build resilience and enhance your critical thinking abilities. 7. Engage in collaborative problem-solving: Collaborating with others on problem-solving tasks can spark creativity and strengthen critical thinking skills. Seek out group projects, brainstorming sessions, or online forums where you can exchange ideas, challenge each other's thinking, and find innovative solutions together. 8. Practice reflective thinking: Taking time to reflect on your thoughts, actions, and experiences allows you to gain deeper insights and learn from past mistakes. Regularly engage in activities like journaling, meditation, or self-reflection exercises to develop your reflective thinking skills. This practice enhances your critical thinking abilities by promoting self-awareness and self-improvement. 9. Encourage creativity through experimentation: Creativity and critical thinking often go hand in hand. Give yourself permission to experiment and explore new ideas without fear of failure. Embrace a "what if" mindset and push the boundaries of your thinking. This willingness to take risks and think outside the box can lead to breakthroughs in critical thinking. 10. Continuously learn and adapt: Critical thinking is a skill that can be honed throughout your life. Commit to lifelong learning and seek opportunities to expand your knowledge and skills. Stay curious, be open to new experiences, and embrace change.

The only way to free ourselves from the grips of compulsive thinking is to completely transcend it. By this, I mean learning to observe our mental activity without being drawn into identifying with each and every thought.

Best Ideas and Tips for Career Growth and Development In case you're thinking about how you will get where you need to be in your career, there are some basic advances you can take that will assist you in making your own professional development. Similarly, as with all endeavors, you should be clear about your course when you make your own career development plan. You don't take an excursion without knowing where you need to wind up. You additionally don't have to excessively confound this undertaking. For profession improvement wanting to be compelling, extend your perspective on advancement and that of your representatives. An outside instructional course isn't the best way to create workers. Worker advancement is an incredible idea yet it isn't without issues. The best plans save the duty regarding finish unequivocally on the shoulders of representatives. Something else, if a worker doesn't finish their advancement openings, the individual in question may decide to put the fault on the board, which is counter-profitable for the entirety of the included gatherings. Certain issues and articulations exist that you would need to maintain a strategic distance from as you and the workers who report to you make plans and strategies for career development. Best Ideas for Career Growth and Development 1. Analyze your skills by yourself Experience the expected set of responsibilities detail by detail and rate your present condition of aptitudes, training, or experience to what is recorded. Your rating framework can be as straightforward as 1-10, with 10 an ideal match and one being totally absent. As you rate, make notes about your manner of thinking for future reference. When you have finished this activity, distinguish the entirety of the things where there is anyplace from a decent measure to a considerable measure of improvement that is required. Search for shared characteristics and cluster those all together. You will find that there will be subjects for your holes. 2. Change Job If or Whenever You Want You may likewise need to have numerous methods of amplifying your range of abilities to add profundity to it. A model is in the event that you need to move to a venture the board position, you might need to get confirmation and furthermore request venture duties. At first, these might be little, which are fine; they will offer you a chance to develop and learn. Also, you may need to inquire about different approaches to get what it takes you have to develop in your profession. You can't anticipate to what extent or how much work you should do so as to build up the expertise at the level you need, however, you do have command over the move you make to begin. Follow along. You have to focus on your career development plan at least two times every year. This will permit you to remain concentrated on your advance and help you to remember subsequent stages. 3. Growth Takes Time: But not for Everyone Some portion of the explanation we presume development is such a high need when you search for an occupation is on the grounds that you weren't getting development and improvement at your last one. You can totally change occupations at regular intervals to fulfill your longing for development. In any case, that despite everything leaves an extensive timeframe when you're not developing once you sink into work and before you move onto the following one. Here are some of the plan and strategies for career development, if you have any doubt, let us know in the comment section. Can also check: Things which is Important for student to get success

With Trump and Trumpism, we have had no such murderous arrangement in American society, but we have experienced a national malignant normality of our own: extensive lying and falsification, systemic corruption, ad hominem attacks on critics, dismissal of intelligence institutions and findings, rejection of climate change truths and of scientists who express them, rebukes of our closest international allies and embrace of dictators, and scornful delegitimization of the party of opposition. This constellation of malignant normality has threatened, and at times virtually replaced, American democracy. As citizens, and especially as professionals, we need to bear witness to malignant normality and expose it. We then become what I call “witnessing professionals,” who draw upon their knowledge and experience to reveal the danger of that malignant normality and actively oppose it. That inevitably includes entering into social and political struggles against expressions of malignant normality.

The 1970s can be characterized as a decade of search for identity. While intellectuals and professionals searched for Egypt's true identity, the majority of the built environment from then on was produced outside the confines of architecture as a profession increasingly irrelevant, and informal building activity proliferated.

With the stakes as high as they are, I don't separate my professional voice with my activism. Our voices are desperately needed to create change.

Why the us government Should Maintain students Healthcare Claims education and learning is probably the finest ventures in ensuring the people stay a greater existence from the contemporary setting. Over time, education and learning methods have transformed to guarantee individuals gain access to it in the very best ways. Besides, the adjustment can be a purposeful relocate making sure that learning meets pupils distinct needs nowadays. Consequently, any country that is focused on establishing in the current technical period must be ready to devote in schooling no matter what. We appreciate that lots of claims have was able to meet the most affordable threshold in offering secondary and basic education. It is actually commendable for schooling is focused and attends on the needs in the present environment. In addition to, we certainly have observed reduced rates of dropouts due to correct education and learning systems into position. Nevertheless, it is not enough because there are many other factors that, in turn, lower the superiority of education. We appreciate the reality that educational costs is mainly purchased and virtually totally given through the express or low-successful businesses. Sadly, small is defined in range to be sure the unique treatment of learners. It has led to the indiscriminate govt accountability. Apart from putting everything in place, the government must also provide the proper healthcare of a learner because it' s the foundation of excellent learning. The arranged provision of health care to students is defined around the periphery, plus it is amongst the essential things that degrade the grade of training. Standard attendance is actually a necessity for pupils to acquire much more and carry out greater. For that reason, government entities need to ensure an original set up of arranged healthcare to pupils to ensure they are certainly not stored away from university because of health care problems. Re-Analyzing the goal of Government in mastering It can be only by re-dealing with government entitiesAnd#039; s role in supplying primary and secondary education and learning that people can completely set up the skewed the outdoors of learner’s health care and the desire to influence the state to reconsider it. The cause of why the government must pay for the student’s healthcare is that its responsibility is unbalanced. It provides maintained to purchase basic training effectively but has did not shield the health-related requirements of any learner. Aside from, it is suitably interested in increasing the size of young menAnd#039; s and ladiesAnd#039; s chances in obtaining technical and professional education. But it has not searched for has and aims unacceptable method of achieving the medical care requirements of any learner. As a result, education require is not met because its services are skewed. The possible lack of equilibrium in government activities replicates the malfunction to discrete primarily sharply amid the steps right for authorities financing and activities to become implemented. Financing healthcare for students, which is equally essential, is neglected, though Financing education is largely accepted. For that reason, this is a deliberate demand government entities to perform the circle by paying for student' s health care. When there is stability in federal government commitments in education and learning, its requirements will probably be fulfilled. So, the state should pay for pupil' s medical care. If they are healthful, they find out better. In addition to, a large stress will probably be lifted, and will also unquestionably raise enrolment in professional coachingcenters and colleges, along with other studying companies.

In 1963, Choh Hao Li, chairman and lone tenured faculty member in the Institute of Experimental Biology at Berkeley, announced that he had isolated and purified his sixth pituitary hormone, lipotropin. The magnitude of such a feat is clear considering that only one other person had ever purified a hormone, and that person was not coincidentally a student of Li's. The purification of lipotropin should have been a reason to celebrate; however, Li's colleagues at Berkeley acknowledged but did not rejoice in his success. As they perceived it, endocrinology was a scientific field that came out of the clinical sciences, which meant that Li's research was completely unsound, and they put enormous pressure on him to change his scientific topic. When that did not work, Wendell Stanley tried to 'promote [Li] out of the Virus Laboratory,' then later University Chancellor Clark Kerr threatened to discontinue the Institute for Experimental Biology because it did not fit with Berkeley's commitment to pure research. Things got infinitely worse for Li, of course, because he became perceived as less qualified with each professional achievement. [...] C. H. Li's travails at Berkeley are only half the story. In 1969, five years after transferring from Berkeley to UCSF, Li and his laboratory assistants assembled a highly complex synthetic version of human growth hormone (HGH) that was biologically active and could promote the growth of bones and muscle tissue. Rather than ignore or criticize the work, however, journalists waxed eloquently [sic] about Li's creation of HGH. One described it as no less than a panacea for most of the world's problems. Others clearly saw specific applications: 'it might now be . . . possible to tailor-make hormones that can inhibit breast cancer.' Li's discovery of synthetic HGH 'constituted a truly . . . great research breakthrough [that had] obvious applications,' ranging from 'human growth and development to . . . treatment of cancer and coronary artery disease.' Desperate letters poured in too; athletes wanted to know if HGH would help them become faster, bigger, stronger, and dwarfs from all over the world begged for samples of HGH or to volunteer as experimental subjects. Unlike at Berkeley, Li's discovery made him a hero at UCSF. None other than UCSF Chancellor Phillip Lee described Li's discovery as 'meticulous, painstaking, and brilliant research' and then tried to capitalize on the moment by asking the public and their political representatives to increase federal support of bioscience research. 'Research money is dwindling fast,' repeated Lee to anyone who cared to listen. 'We've proven than synthesis can be done, now all we need is the money and time to prove its tremendous value.' It is not surprising that federal and state money began to pour into Li's lab. What is shocking, however, is how quickly Li achieved scientific acclaim, not because he changed, but because the rest of the world around him changed so much.

If you qualify for one of these exceptions (and most landlords can), you’ll be able to deduct at least a portion of your rental property losses against all of your other income. The two exceptions cover landlords who “actively participate” and real estate professionals. Both of those come with some strict IRS definitions, so make sure you really qualify (your CPA will be able to help if you’re not sure) before you take the deduction.

A few stations, starting with one owned by AT&T, started broadcasting messages for advertisers. Within a couple of years, AT&T’s broadcast activities had become far more professional. Baseball games and highlights, news reports, music, and other forms of entertainment soon made their way onto the air. AT&T, as the nation’s telephone company, owned an advanced wiring system that enabled small and distant radio broadcasters nationwide to pick up programming from hundreds of miles away—with this, a small station in Maine could pick up a signal from Washington DC via a wire and broadcast the signal to a local audience. Rather than have countless stations develop their own expensive programming, AT&T’s primary station, WEAF, allowed other local stations to broadcast a programming block. With its national infrastructure and early entry into broadcast advertising, AT&T’s national broadcast operation was profitable.

a little part of your brain that is constantly noticing and identifying the resources and opportunities you need to reach your dream. This little part is called the reticular activating system (RAS), and it’s the central reason that your results in life can never exceed your expectations.

Best Tips for a Stress-Free Pregnancy – Motherhood Chaitanya Hospital Bringing a new life into the world is an extraordinary journey, one filled with anticipation and joy. Yet, the path to motherhood can also be fraught with stress and anxiety. The good news is that there are ways to navigate this period with greater ease. From seeking support through childbirth and parenting classes in Chandigarh to embracing the serenity of Pre-Natal Yoga Classes for Pregnant Mothers in Chandigarh, let’s explore some of the best tips for a stress-free pregnancy. Understand Your Body Pregnancy is a unique and transformative experience, but it also brings a host of physical changes. Understanding these changes can alleviate anxiety. Remember, your body is doing something miraculous. It’s nurturing and growing a new life. Embrace the journey with wonder and gratitude. Stay Active with Pre-Natal Yoga Pre-Natal Yoga Classes in Chandigarh provide an exceptional avenue to connect with your body and your baby. Yoga helps maintain flexibility, ease discomfort, and reduce stress. The gentle stretches and mindful breathing techniques impart a sense of calm and inner peace. Educate Yourself Knowledge is power, and when it comes to pregnancy, it’s empowering. Enroll in childbirth and parenting classes in Chandigarh to gain insight into what to expect during labor, delivery, and early parenthood. Knowing what lies ahead can significantly reduce apprehension. Nurture Emotional Well-being Pregnancy is not just about physical health; emotional well-being is equally vital. Seek emotional support from your partner, friends, or a counselor if needed. Express your feelings and allow yourself to experience a range of emotions without judgment. Eat Mindfully Nutrition is crucial for both you and your baby. Consume a balanced diet rich in essential nutrients. Remember, you’re not eating for two adults; you’re providing the building blocks for a new life. Consult with a healthcare professional for dietary guidance. Stay Hydrated Hydration is key to a healthy pregnancy. It helps prevent common issues like constipation and urinary tract infections. Aim for at least eight glasses of water a day, and adjust your intake as needed to accommodate your changing body.

Staying calm and focusing on the one task in front of you every day will. The point is, to achieve long-term goals in your personal or professional life, you must regain control of your attention and rewire your brain to focus on the long term. To do so, you should start by staying away from highly stimulating activities.

It seemed implausible that an actual enhancement of cognitive processing could have been missed, with so many experimenters so keen to come up with justifications for their professional or recreational activities;

At some point during this decade, people stopped being people and became consumers. The word conjures up an image of a parasite or leech, a ravenous entity existing only to devour. No longer were people simply satisfying needs, they were actively pursuing wants and becoming professional at consuming in the process. Whether it was a big bandwagon or locust mentality, ever increasing numbers of people sought the perfect home with a swimming pool, a piano in the living room, vacations, and second cars.

Now look again at the nature of those questions: What one thing could you do in your personal and professional life that, if you did it on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in your life? Quadrant II activities have that kind of impact. Our effectiveness takes quantum leaps when we do them.

In the 1960s, helping professionals began actively promoting a child-rearing philosophy which holds that parent and child are equals-not in theory, mind you, but in fact. According to psychologist Thomas Gordon, one of the chief architects of the democratic family movement and author of Parent Effectiveness Training (1970), or P.E. T, one of the all-time best-sellers in the parenting field, parents should treat children as they would treat adult friends.

For me, dating is a lot like going to a professional baseball game—it’s an activity that always seems better in the abstract.

For a scientist, the only valid question is to decide whether the phenomenon can be studied by itself, or whether it is an instance of a deeper problem. This book attempts to illustrate, and only to illustrate, the latter approach. And my conclusion is that, through the UFO phenomenon, we have the unique opportunities to observe folklore in the making and to gather scientific material at the deepest source of human imagination. We will be the object of much contempt by future students of our civilization if we allow this material to be lost, for "tradition is a meteor which, once it falls, cannot be rekindled." If we decide to avoid extreme speculation, but make certain basic observations from the existing data, five principal facts stand out rather clearly from our analysis so far: Fact 1. There has been among the public, in all countries, since the middle of 1946, an extremely active generation of colorful rumors. They center on a considerable number of observations of unknown machines close to the ground in rural areas, the physical traces left by these machines, and their various effects on humans and animals. Fact 2. When the underlying archetypes are extracted from these rumors, the extraterrestrial myth is seen to coincide to a remarkable degree with the fairy-faith of Celtic countries, the observations of the scholars of past ages, and the widespread belief among all peoples concerning entities whose physical and psychological description place them in the same category as the present-day ufonauts. Fact 3. The entities human witnesses report to have seen, heard, and touched fall into various biological types. Among them are beings of giant stature, men indistinguishable from us, winged creatures, and various types of monsters. Most of the so-called pilots, however, are dwarfs and form two main groups: (1) dark, hairy beings – identical to the gnomes of medieval theory – with small, bright eyes and deep, rugged, "old" voices; and (2) beings – who answer the description of the sylphs of the Middle Ages or the elves of the fairy-faith – with human complexions, oversized heads, and silvery voices. All the beings have been described with and without breathing apparatus. Beings of various categories have been reported together. The overwhelming majority are humanoid. Fact 4. The entities' reported behavior is as consistently absurd as the appearance of their craft is ludicrous. In numerous instances of verbal communications with them, their assertions have been systematically misleading. This is true for all cases on record, from encounters with the Gentry in the British Isles to conversations with airship engineers during the 1897 Midwest flap and discussions with the alleged Martians in Europe, North and South America, and elsewhere. This absurd behavior has had the effect of keeping professional scientists away from the area where that activity was taking place. It has also served to give the saucer myth its religious and mystical overtones. Fact 5. The mechanism of the apparitions, in legendary, historical, and modern times, is standard and follows the model of religious miracles. Several cases, which bear the official stamp of the Catholic Church (such as those in Fatima and Guadalupe), are in fact – if one applies the deffinitions strictly – nothing more than UFO phenomena where the entity has delivered a message having to do with religious beliefs rather than with space or engineering.

Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves. All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends; man is an automaton—well fed, well clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place. The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serves it. He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share in profits. Society must be organized in such a way that man’s social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. Indeed, to speak of love is not “preaching,” for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate and real need in every human being. That this need has been obscured does not mean that it does not exist. To analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social conditions which are responsible for this absence. To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man.

1. I feel my competence declining 2. Those close to me begin to notice that I am not as sharp as I used to be 3. Other people receive the social and professional attention I used to receive 4. I have to decrease my workload and step back from daily activities I once completed with ease 5. I am no longer able to work 6. Many people I meet do not recognize me or know me for my previous work

Understanding Financial Risks and Companies Mitigate them? Financial risks are the possible threats, losses and debts corporations face during setting up policies and seeking new business opportunities. Financial risks lead to negative implications for the corporations that can lead to loss of financial assets, liabilities and capital. Mitigation of risks and their avoidance in the early stages of product deployment, strategy-planning and other vital phases is top-priority for financial advisors and managers. Here's how to mitigate risks in financial corporates:- ● Keeping track of Business Operations Evaluating existing business operations in the corporations will provide a holistic view of the movement of cash-flows, utilisation of financial assets, and avoiding debts and losses. ● Stocking up Emergency Funds Just as families maintain an emergency fund for dealing with uncertainties, the same goes for large corporates. Coping with uncertainty such as the ongoing pandemic is a valuable lesson that has taught businesses to maintain emergency funds to avoid economic lapses. ● Taking Data-Backed Decisions Senior financial advisors and managers must take well-reformed decisions backed by data insights. Data-based technologies such as data analytics, science, and others provide resourceful insights about various economic activities and help single out the anomalies and avoid risks. Enrolling for a course in finance through a reputed university can help young aspiring financial risk advisors understand different ways of mitigating risks and threats. The IIM risk management course provides meaningful insights into the other risks involved in corporations. What are the Financial Risks Involved in Corporations? Amongst the several roles and responsibilities undertaken by the financial management sector, identifying and analysing the volatile financial risks. Financial risk management is the pinnacle of the financial world and incorporates the following risks:- ● Market Risk Market risk refers to the threats that emerge due to corporational work-flows, operational setup and work-systems. Various financial risks include- an economic recession, interest rate fluctuations, natural calamities and others. Market risks are also known as "systematic risk" and need to be dealt with appropriately. When there are significant changes in market rates, these risks emerge and lead to economic losses. ● Credit Risk Credit risk is amongst the common threats that organisations face in the current financial scenarios. This risk emerges when a corporation provides credit to its borrower, and there are lapses while receiving owned principal and interest. Credit risk arises when a borrower falters to make the payment owed to them. ● Liquidity Risk Liquidity risk crops up when investors, business ventures and large organisations cannot meet their debt compulsions in the short run. Liquidity risk emerges when a particular financial asset, security or economic proposition can't be traded in the market. ● Operational Risk Operational risk arises due to financial losses resulting from employee's mistakes, failures in implementing policies, reforms and other procedures. Key Takeaway The various financial risks discussed above help professionals learn the different risks, threats and losses. Enrolling for a course in finance assists learners understand the different risks. Moreover, pursuing the IIM risk management course can expose professionals to the scope of international financial management in India and other key concepts.

Did you know that people with mental illness can have strong mental health? More often than not, mental illness and mental health are used interchangeably, however they do not mean the same thing! Every person has mental health, but not every person will have a mental illness. Mental health is the ability to adapt to change, be resilient in difficult circumstances and live a full and passionate life. Mental illness on the other hand is diagnosed by a professional (psychologist etc.) and require a well-managed plan, therapy and occasionally medication. Mental health is improved by journaling, yoga, exercise, healthy boundaries, good diet and active self-care!

The artist has no right to an idea to which he is not socially committed, or the realisation of which could involve a dichotomy between his professional activity and the rest of his life.

When foreigners fail to recognise the ubiquitous role of the Party and are mistaken about who they are dealing with, it’s not solely their fault; the CCP actively attempts to obfuscate. A leading tactic is the front group. In Western countries, hundreds of organisations for ethnic Chinese people have been formed, each with direct or indirect links to the network operated by the United Front Work Department. They may be expressly political, such as those with ‘peaceful reunification’ in their names, but more often they are business groups, professional associations, or cultural and community organisations.

From that day on I stopped comparing myself to my peers and started to actively take joy in the success of others. Not only has this made me a happier person in my professional life, but also in my personal interactions. Indeed, I have found that rejecting envy helps you appreciate others more, and helps build lasting friendships and relationships. I hope that my friends and family know that I’m their biggest cheerleader and I always will be, thanks to Richard.

Mentors are the business version of “not your little friends.” They are essential because even though they aren’t your peers, they can be life rafts. Mentors might take the form of a college professor who became your favorite thought leader, an old boss who championed your work and made sure you got your next position, or someone you met at a conference, had great conversation with, and now have access to. Because mentors care about your life even outside of the business (because your personal life absolutely affects your career), you confide in them. They’re friends as well as guides. Mentors are incredible, because they can unlock doors in our lives. They can make our dreams more tangible, because they are invested in our success. We need a new job? Well, they might be able to make a phone call to someone who then makes a phone call to get us the interview we need to be considered. They actively ask, “How can I help?” without necessarily expecting anything.

Consider the sun above you, centered in the middle of the sky, radiating upon you. That ray is your source of power, a place to grow and become. Receive those rays: let them flow from above over you, over your head, over your shoulders, over your arms and over your hands. Close your eyes, and be nourished by the sun's connection. In this moment all the powers of light are with you. They're here to reinforce you and remind you of your own competence and power. You have the knowledge and experience in your life that you need to step on confidently, make good choices and choices, and manifest what you are doing. •       By actively binding the Solar Plexus Chakra to your own personal power, you are also inspiring those around you to fulfill their potential. As each person finds his or her strength in this existence, the entire collective is motivated to grow in this way. Feel how your own inner sense of monarchy, your own inner sense of supremacy, is now becoming involved. You are so ready to unfold in the next chapter of your life. Feel that excitement before you, and step boldly through the door. It's your turn. Everything was giving you help here. •       Invite any elders or spirit guides who want to accompany you until you feel fully prepared to walk through this door of possibility. Feel their energy as they surround you, and believe they will give whatever advice you need to comfortably proceed to the next stage of your evolution. With universal blessing close your induction: Amen. SUMMARY • Where is it: Manipura chakra is found in the spine behind the navel. •       What is it: It's the seat of power and confidence. It's what pushes you through your life and is responsible for your personal and professional growth. The solar plexus in the physical body is the core which regulates digestion and the metabolism of food. •       When it’s blocked: A blockage in this chakra could make you feel anxious and insecure. Digestive problems can also be symptoms of an unbalanced chakra in the solar plexus. •       How to balance this chakra: If you want to combine this chakra with yoga, select asanas that reflect on the core strength. Warrior pose is the easiest asana to get this chakra open. Every morning, you can just hold it for a few minutes and your chakra will balance out. Since the chakra of the solar plexus is linked to the sun and flames, simply going outside can help. The therapeutic effects of your exercise can be maximized by meditating or doing yoga outdoors. Even going for a walk in the sunshine will still do the trick, though.

Hamas seeks to derive prestige and political profit from social welfare activism precisely by maintaining the professionalism and integrity of such institutions rather than politicizing them. It appears to understand better than others that if schools and medical clinics developed a reputation as recruitment centres, and services were provided in exchange for support, the crown jewels of the Islamist movement would be irretrievable debased in exchange for short-term gains of dubious value. [Quoting the International Crisis Group]

Our mind often seems to be pursuing two contrary sets of goals. The activities that we should be doing are often not the activities that the lower mind necessarily enjoys doing.

Done by the people and done with the people ALWAYS beats done to the people!

Yeah, personally I hate my period and think it’s annoying and gross, but it’s not more gross than anything else that comes out of a human body. It’s not more gross than feces, urine, pus, bile, vomit, or the grossest bodily fluid of them all—in my mother’s professional opinion—phlegm. And yet we are not horrified every time we go to the bathroom. We do not stigmatize people with stomach flu. The active ingredient in period stigma is misogyny

A coaching session can be compared to the creative process of freestyle rap. Neuroscientists at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders scanned the brains of twelve professional rappers with an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine. The scientists discovered that although the brain’s executive functions were active at the start and end of a song, during freestyle, the parts of the brain responsible for self-monitoring, critiquing, and editing were deactivated. In this context, the researchers explained that the rappers were “freed from the conventional constraints of supervisory attention and executive control,” so sudden insights could easily emerge.1 In other words, the rappers used the executive functions of their cognitive brains as they started rapping to deliberately set the intention of the composition up front. Once they had a sense of where they were going, they switched off their inner critic and analyzer. This allowed for more activity in the inner brain, where the eruption of new ideas—creativity—takes place. As they moved to closing out the song, their cognitive brains came back online to provide a consciously designed ending to the composition.

The Impact of Continuous Glucose Monitors on Diabetes Management Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) have revolutionized diabetes management by providing real-time insights into blood sugar levels. These small wearable devices offer a continuous stream of data, enabling individuals with diabetes to make informed decisions about their health. Unlike traditional glucose meters, which only provide a snapshot of blood sugar levels at a single moment, Continuous Glucose Monitors track fluctuations and trends throughout the day and night. This constant monitoring allows for better glycemic control and reduces the risk of complications associated with diabetes. One of the key benefits of CGMs is their ability to provide immediate feedback on how food, physical activity, and medication affect blood sugar levels. This empowers individuals to make timely adjustments to their lifestyle and treatment plans. Moreover, CGMs offer enhanced convenience by eliminating the need for frequent finger pricks. Instead, users can simply wear the device and receive continuous glucose readings without interruption. Another advantage of Continuous Glucose Monitors is the ability to set customizable alerts and alarms for high or low blood sugar levels. These notifications help individuals to take prompt action to prevent dangerous situations such as hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia. Furthermore, many CGM systems allow for data sharing with healthcare providers, facilitating more personalized and collaborative diabetes management. This improves communication between patients and healthcare professionals, leading to better treatment outcomes. Overall, Continuous Glucose Monitors have improved diabetes management by delivering real-time insights, convenience, and glycemic control. Embracing this technology can empower individuals with diabetes to take control of their health and live fuller, healthier lives.

Team meetings are a major source of open communication and information sharing between team members, hence, it is critical that team meetings are run as effectively as possible. The following guidelines will help ensure that team meetings are effective: Set an agenda before each meeting. Make sure that the agenda is communicated to each team member before the meeting, especially if they are to present something at the meeting. Allocate time allotments to each subject to ensure that the team stays focused Ensure that each member of the team contributes to the discussion or invite them to join in Stress that all views need to be heard Open each meeting by going over the purpose, objectives, and agenda of the meeting. Stress how the meeting ties into the overall goals and purpose of the team Bring closure to each agenda item. Do not let discussions remain open. Open items or viewpoints not mentioned in a meeting will creep into hallway discussions and could lead to tension within the team If decisions need to be made in the meeting, drive the discussion so that the team reaches a decision. Use the teams agreed upon method of decision making to make the final discussion (majority rule, consensus, small group, or leader) End each meeting with an action plan. Make sure that during the meeting action items are taken. Go over the actions taken in each meeting and make sure that the individual that was given the action agrees to the action item and deadline Publish meeting minutes and the action log and date for the next meeting within a timely fashion after the meeting. In the meeting minutes, publish the items discussed and all decisions made. Meeting minutes are a good way to show team progress and to keep as an active record for future meetings and discussions.

The first twenty-minute pocket of The 20/20/20 Formula requires that you Move. Simply put, doing some sweaty exercise first thing every morning will revolutionize the quality of your days. The second pocket encourages you to Reflect for twenty minutes. This segment is designed to help you reaccess your natural power, boost self-awareness, dissolve your stress, fuel your happiness and restore your inner peace in an era of acute overstimulation and excessive activity. And you’ll round out this sixty-minute Victory Hour of personal fortification with twenty minutes centered around ensuring that you Grow, whether that means investing some time reading a book that will improve your understanding of how the best lives were made or an article that will refine your professional prowess or listening to an audio session on how the virtuosos accomplish their unusual results or watching an educational video that will show you how to lift your relationships or increase your finances or deepen your spirituality.

in believing that anxiety disorders typically arise from failed efforts to resolve basic existential dilemmas, Dr. W. is, as we will see, running against the grain of modern psychopharmacology (which proffers the evidence of sixty years of drug studies to argue that anxiety and depression are based on “chemical imbalances”), neuroscience (whose emergence has demonstrated not only the brain activity associated with various emotional states but also, in some cases, the specific structural abnormalities associated with mental illness), and temperament studies and molecular genetics (which suggest, rather convincingly, a powerful role for heredity in the determination of one’s baseline level of anxiety and susceptibility to psychiatric illness). Dr. W. doesn’t dispute the findings from any of those modes of inquiry. He believes medication can be an effective treatment for the symptoms of anxiety. But his view, based on thirty years of clinical work with hundreds of anxious patients, is that at the root of almost all clinical anxiety is some kind of existential crisis about what he calls the “ontological givens”—that we will grow old, that we will die, that we will lose people we love, that we will likely endure identity-shaking professional failures and personal humiliations, that we must struggle to find meaning and purpose in our lives, and that we must make trade-offs between personal freedom and emotional security and between our desires and the constraints of our relationships and our communities. In this view, our phobias of rats or snakes or cheese or honey (yes, honey; the actor Richard Burton could not bear to be in a room with honey, even if it was sealed in a jar, even if the jar was closed in a drawer) are displacements of our deeper existential concerns projected onto outward things. Early

If you spend more time in real estate activities than you do in your regular job and the number of hours in real estate exceeds 750 hours in a year, you can fully write off your real estate paper losses against other income—no matter how much money you make and no matter how much your paper losses are. Of course, Jean kept good records to document her real estate professional status, so she had no worries from an IRS audit.

What England didn’t know was that Uber’s general managers, engineers, and security professionals had developed a sophisticated system, perfected over months, designed to help every city strike team—including the one in Portland—identify would-be regulators, surveil them, and secretly prohibit them from ordering and catching Ubers by deploying a line of code in the app. The effect: Uber’s drivers would evade capture as they carried out their duties. Officers like England could not “see” the shady activity, and could never prove it was happening. England

As it happens, he and Raphael are both very much focused on the future. Raphael recently created a nonprofit network of successful Black men and women—some white, too—that he named the Lantern Network, after the lanterns people once used to indicate safe houses along the Underground Railroad. His goal is to provide a resource for talented Black professionals who lack the high-powered social networks white men take for granted—the family friends and relatives and neighbors one can turn to for mentorship, financial counsel, introductions, and access to capital. As of summer 2020, the future looked more promising. The COVID crisis had left economic inequality nowhere to hide. Then came the police lynching that broke the camel’s back. An exceedingly bitter election season contributed a third element to what was shaping up to be a perfect storm. The pandemic and “the high-resolution video of the George Floyd murder by someone who was confident that he would NOT be brought to justice” were the catalysts we needed, Raphael said in an email. Overt racism has crawled out of its hole these past four years, but “there are even more nonracists and a growing number of anti-racists who will actively engage in the fight.

And yet, listening is arguably more valuable than speaking. Wars have been fought, fortunes lost, and friendships wrecked for lack of listening. Calvin Coolidge famously said, “No man ever listened himself out of a job.” It is only by listening that we engage, understand, connect, empathize, and develop as human beings. It is fundamental to any successful relationship—personal, professional, and political. Indeed, the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus said, “Nature hath given men one tongue but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.” So it’s striking that high schools and colleges have debate teams and courses in rhetoric and persuasion but seldom, if ever, classes or activities that teach careful listening. You can get a doctorate in speech communication and join clubs like Toastmasters to perfect your public speaking, but there’s no comparable degree or training that emphasizes and encourages the practice of listening.

I am interested to see how the USA government is going to cover up the illegal activities of professional astronomers.

You are at your desk, you have set the book among your business papers as if by chance; at a certain moment you shift the file and you find the book before your eyes, you open it absently, you rest your elbows on the desk, you rest your temples against your hands, curled into fists, you seem to be concentrating on an examination of the papers and instead you are exploring the first pages of the novel. Gradually you settle back in the chair, you raise the book to the level of your nose, you tilt your chair, poised on its rear legs, you pull out a side drawer of the desk to prop your feet on it: the position of the feet during reading is of maximum importance, you stretch your legs out on the top of the desk, on the files to be expedited. But doesn’t this seem to show a lack of respect? Of respect that is, not for your job (nobody claims to pass judgment on your professional capacities: we assume that your duties are a normal element n the system of unproductive activities that occupies such a large part of the national and international economy), but for the book. Worse still if you belong—willingly or unwillingly—to the number of those for whom working means really working, performing, whether deliberately or without premeditation, something necessary or at least not useless for others as well as for oneself; then the book you have brought with you to your place of employment like a kind of amulet or talisman exposes you to intermittent temptations, a few seconds at a time subtracted from the principal object of your attention, whether it is the perforations of electronic cards, the burners of a kitchen stove, the controls of a bulldozer, a patient stretched out on the operating table with his guts exposed. In other words, it’s better for you to restrain your impatience and wait to open the book at home.

You are at your desk, you have set the book among your business papers as if by chance; at a certain moment you shift the file and you find the book before your eyes, you open it absently, you rest your elbows on the desk, you rest your temples against your hands, curled into fists, you seem to be concentrating on an examination of the papers and instead you are exploring the first pages of the novel. Gradually you settle back in the chair, you raise the book to the level of your nose, you tilt your chair, poised on its rear legs, you pull out a side drawer of the desk to prop your feet on it: the position of the feet during reading is of maximum importance, you stretch your legs out on the top of the desk, on the files to be expedited. But doesn’t this seem to show a lack of respect? Of respect that is, not for your job (nobody claims to pass judgment on your professional capacities: we assume that your duties are a normal element in the system of unproductive activities that occupies such a large part of the national and international economy), but for the book. Worse still if you belong—willingly or unwillingly—to the number of those for whom working means really working, performing, whether deliberately or without premeditation, something necessary or at least not useless for others as well as for oneself; then the book you have brought with you to your place of employment like a kind of amulet or talisman exposes you to intermittent temptations, a few seconds at a time subtracted from the principal object of your attention, whether it is the perforations of electronic cards, the burners of a kitchen stove, the controls of a bulldozer, a patient stretched out on the operating table with his guts exposed. In other words, it’s better for you to restrain your impatience and wait to open the book at home.

The nonbeliever, in turn, may begin to wonder what, exactly, he is opposing. Certainly, nobody, not even the most rabid Bible-smashing professional atheist, can deny that all the forces, principles and laws observable in nature may be aspects of one bedrock underlying in-form-ation system or implicate order active in all times and all places. "And this," as Aquinas says, "it is customary to call God." It may be conscious, even; or, if not conscious as we are conscious, It may still be "intelligent" in some sense. Yositani Roshi, trying to explain the Zen concept of "Buddha-mind" (the closest thing Zen has to a "God"), used to say it is not far away and metaphysical but always right where you are sitting now. "When the room gets cold at night and you pull up the covers without waking, that is Buddha-mind acting," he said. This "trans-personal" (or un-personalized) It is invoked by Lao-Tse as follows: Something cloudy and unclear Before existence and non-existence, Before heaven and earth, I do not know its name So I call it Tao

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RESEARCH SUPPORTS THE use of intuition in at least a limited capacity for subtle—and maybe even all—energy work. Norman Shealy, MD, for example, published a study referencing the work of eight psychics to diagnose seventeen patients. These diagnoses were 98 percent accurate in making personality diagnoses and 80 percent correct in determining physical conditions.28 Research by the HeartMath Research Center at the Institute of HeartMath in California is corroborating the existence of intuition and its accuracy. Most of its studies showcase the heart as a key intuitive center, responding even to information about the future. As an example, the heart decelerates when receiving futuristic, calming stimuli versus agitating emotional stimuli.29 A myriad of issues are involved in using intuition for energy work, including questions about boundaries; the importance or applicability of the information; accuracy of interpretation; the unpredictable and changeable nature of the future; the effects of the information on the recipient (i.e., to “prove” or “disprove” the data); and overriding all of these, the intuitive skills of the energy professional. Regardless of the inexact nature of intuition, a professional should not be embarrassed to exercise intuition in his or her trade. Energy work is an art and has traditionally encompassed intuition. Your energy fields interact with your patients’ fields. How you feel about yourself—what you hold near and dear in your heart-space—transfers into a client’s heart-space, and from there, into his or her body. (There is more information about heart-centered healing below.) As mind-body practitioner Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard puts it, “Our brains are wired for beliefs and expectancies. When activated, our body can respond as it would if the belief were a reality, producing deafness or thirst, health or illness.”30

...it was over the course of the nineteenth century that the definition of the word 'amateur' transformed. It had originally been an elevated rank, suggesting that someone was doing the work because they loved it, not because it would earn them money. It implied a certain purity of intention. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century and onward, it gradually took on a negative connotation and meant someone who was unskilled and unqualified, the opposite of an expert. Given how murky the process of professionalization was, the line between amateurs and experts was blurred, and those without formal training continued to participate in organizations and activities. Still, the more derogatory the term became, the more it was tied to the activities of women who faced more obstacles gaining access to the kinds of training and employment that would have classified them as professionals or experts.

Gilbert, Arizona, is known for its vibrant community and welcoming atmosphere. This town is particularly popular with young families and professionals, thanks to its excellent schools, strong job market, and family-friendly activities. Let's dive into the key demographic features that make Gilbert a great place to live.

Other research establishes the ability of one person to affect another through these fields. For instance, studies at the Institute of HeartMath in California have shown that one person’s electrocardiograph (heart) signal can be registered in another person’s electroencephalogram (EEG, measuring brain activity) and elsewhere on the other person’s body. An individual’s cardiac signal can also be registered in another’s EEG recording when two people sit quietly opposite one another.89 This interconnectivity of fields and intention is a marriage of subtle energy theory and quantum physics. As Dr. Benor pointed out, Albert Einstein has already proven that matter and energy are interchangeable. For centuries, healers have been reporting the existence of interpenetrating, subtle energy fields around the physical body. Hierarchical in organization (and vibration), these fields affect every aspect of the human being.90 Studies show that healing states invoke at least the subtle biomagnetic fields. For example, one study employed a magnetometer to quantify biomagnetic fields coming from the hands of meditators and yoga and Qigong practitioners. These fields were a thousand times stronger than the strongest human biomagnetic field and were located in the same range as those being used in medical research labs for speeding the healing of biological tissues—even wounds that had not healed in forty years.91 Yet another study involving a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) showcased large frequency-pulsing biomagnetic fields emanating from the hands of therapeutic touch professionals during treatments

The irrationality of the system is expressed scarcely less clearly in the parasitic psychology of the individual than in his economic fate. Earlier, when something like the maligned bourgeois division between professional and private life still existed - a division whose passing one almost now regrets - anyone who pursued practical aims in the private sphere was eyed mistrustfully as an uncouth interloper. Today it is seen as arrogant, alien and improper to engage in private activity without any evident ulterior motive. Not to be 'after' something is almost suspect: no help to others in the rat-race is acknowledged unless legitimized by counterclaims. Countless people are making, from the aftermath of the liquidation of professions, their profession. They are the nice folk,the good mixers liked by all, the just, humanely excusing all meanness and scrupulously proscribing any non-standardized impulses as sentimental.

Ehsan Sehgal Quotes about Media — — — * Words matter and mirror if your head is a dictionary of insight and your feelings are alive. * Sure, fake news catches and succeeds attention, but for a while; however, it embraces disregard and unreliability forever. * Media rule the incompetent minds and pointless believers. * A real journalist only states, neither collaborates nor participates. * The majority of journalists and anchors have the information only but not the sense of knowledge. * When the media encourages and highlights the wrong ones, anti-democratic figures, criminals in uniform, and dictators in a supreme authority and brilliant context, sure, such a state never survives the breakdown of prosperity and civil rights, as well as human rights. Thus, the media is accountable and responsible for this as one of the democratic pillars. *Media cannot be a football ground or a tool for anyone. It penetrates the elementary pillar of a state, it forms and represents the language of entire humanity within its perception of love, peace, respect, justice, harmony, and human rights, far from enmity and distinctions. Accordingly, it demonstrates its credibility and neutrality. * When the non-Western wrongly criticizes and abuses its culture, religion, and values, the Western media highlights that often, appreciating in all dimensions. However, if the same one even points out only such subjects, as a question about Western distinctive attitude and role, the West flies and falls at its lowest level, contradicting its principles of neutrality and freedom of press and speech, which pictures, not only double standards but also double dishonesty with itself and readers. Despite that, Western media bother not to realize and feel ignominy and moral and professional stigma. * Social Media has become the global dustbin of idiocy and acuity. It stinks now. Anyone is there to separate and recycle that. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean to constitute insulting, abusing, and harming deliberately in a distinctive and discriminative feature and context, whereas supporting such notions and attempts is a universal crime. * Social media is a place where you share your favourite poetry, quotes, songs, news, social activities, and reports. You can like something, you can comment, and you can use humour in a civilised way. It is social media, but it is not a place to love or be loved. Any lover does not exist here, and no one is serious in this regard. Just enjoy yourself and do not try to fool anyone. If you do that, it means you are making yourself a fool; it is a waste of time, and it is your defeat too. * I use social media only to devote and denote my thoughts voluntarily for the motivation of knowledge, not to earn money as greedy-minded. * One should not take seriously the Social-Media fools and idiots. * Today, on social media, how many are on duty? * Journalists voluntarily fight for human rights and freedom of speech, whereas they stay silent for their rights and journalistic freedom on the will and restrictions of the boss of the media. Indeed, it verifies that The nearer the church, the farther from god. * The abuse, insult, humiliation, and discrimination against whatever subject is not freedom of expression and writing; it is a violation and denial of global harmony and peace. * Press freedom is one significant pillar of true democracy pillars, but such democracy stays deaf, dumb, and blind, which restricts or represses the media. * Press and speech that deliberately trigger hatred and violation fall not under the freedom of press and speech since restrictions for morale and peace apply to everyone without exemption. * Real press freedom is just a dream, which nowhere in the world becomes a reality; however, journalists stay dreaming that.

Just as a physician should understand the effects of pharmaceuticals or surgical procedures, similarly, a professional music therapist should understand the influence of music and musical activity on physiological, psychological, and social functioning, and specific uses of music in a treatment regimen.

Andrew Gibbons charts our investigation with a comparison of the design activity in other professional fields such as architecture and digital design to instructional design. He maps the theories and practices of instructional design to the broader fields of design and examines the range of scales present in design practice. Building from the seminal work of Donald Schön in his examination of the architectural design studio, Monica Tracy and John Baaki examine the principle of Refection-in-Action in terms of theory, design practice, and our understanding of the design process, illuminating these examples through the lens of a case study of active designers. How instructional designers learn and evolve as practitioners is examined by Elizabeth Boling and

Accountants and finance professionals rely on a system called Segregation of Duties to prevent all sorts of shady activities. The system, which is intended to reduce cases of fraud and theft, limits a single person’s ability to complete the following business processes: 1. Authorization: reviewing, approving, or overseeing a Transaction. 2. Custody: receiving, accessing, or controlling any assets related to that Transaction. 3. Record keeping: creating and storing accounting records related to each Transaction. 4. Reconciliation: verifying that two sets of records, like internal company Transaction records and external bank statements, match with respect to timing and amount.

A quicker way to stem flight risk and activism is tuning in to employee voices! Smart organisations protect memory via formal processes such as professional data archiving and recording critical conversations, interviews and meetings.

The Importance of Bookkeeping for Business Success Bookkeeping is a vital component of any business, regardless of its size or industry. It involves the accurate recording of financial transactions, which provides essential data for financial reporting, decision-making, and tax compliance. By maintaining well-organized and detailed financial records, businesses can ensure long-term stability and growth. What is Bookkeeping? Bookkeeping refers to the process of systematically recording a company’s financial transactions, including income, expenses, payroll, and other financial activities. It provides the foundation for creating financial statements such as balance sheets and income statements. Without proper bookkeeping, businesses would struggle to maintain accurate records, which could lead to financial mismanagement and compliance issues. Benefits of Professional Bookkeeping One of the most important benefits of bookkeeping is improved financial management. Professional bookkeepers help businesses maintain accurate and up-to-date records, ensuring that every transaction is tracked and categorized correctly. This level of organization allows business owners to monitor their cash flow, identify areas where they can cut costs, and make informed decisions. Additionally, by outsourcing bookkeeping, businesses can focus on their core operations without worrying about financial details. Tax Compliance and Preparation Tax season can be stressful for businesses, but proper bookkeeping makes it much easier. When financial records are well-maintained throughout the year, tax preparation becomes a seamless process. Bookkeepers ensure that all income and expenses are accurately recorded, allowing businesses to file their taxes without errors. Moreover, organized records help businesses take advantage of tax deductions and avoid penalties for late or inaccurate filings. Financial Reporting and Growth Accurate bookkeeping also plays a key role in generating financial reports. These reports provide insights into a business’s profitability, cash flow, and overall financial health. With this information, business owners can plan for future growth, make strategic investments, and secure loans if needed. Without reliable financial data, making informed decisions becomes much more difficult. In conclusion, bookkeeping is an essential practice for any business. By ensuring accurate financial records, tax compliance, and detailed reporting, businesses can achieve greater financial stability and growth opportunities.

The Importance of Accounting Services for Businesses In today’s competitive business environment, maintaining accurate financial records and ensuring compliance with tax regulations is essential for long-term success. Accounting services provide businesses with the necessary tools and expertise to manage their finances efficiently. Whether for small businesses or large corporations, professional accounting services help streamline financial processes, ensure regulatory compliance, and offer strategic insights for growth. What Are Accounting Services? Accounting services encompass a wide range of tasks, including bookkeeping, financial reporting, tax preparation, payroll management, and auditing. These services are designed to help businesses track their income, expenses, and overall financial health. By outsourcing accounting tasks to professionals, businesses can focus on their core activities while ensuring that their financial operations run smoothly. Additionally, accurate and timely accounting services help businesses avoid costly errors and penalties. Benefits of Professional Accounting Services One of the main advantages of hiring professional accounting services is the accuracy they bring to financial management. Skilled accountants have a deep understanding of financial regulations and tax laws, ensuring that businesses remain compliant. Moreover, accountants can identify tax-saving opportunities, helping businesses reduce their tax liabilities. This level of expertise allows businesses to save time and money, as they no longer need to navigate complex financial tasks on their own. Strategic Financial Planning In addition to managing day-to-day financial tasks, accounting services play a crucial role in strategic financial planning. Accountants analyze a company’s financial data to provide valuable insights into cash flow, profitability, and potential areas for improvement. This data-driven approach enables business owners to make informed decisions, allocate resources efficiently, and plan for future growth. Compliance and Risk Management Compliance with financial regulations is vital for businesses to avoid legal and financial risks. Accounting services ensure that all financial documents are in order, tax filings are accurate, and deadlines are met. By maintaining accurate records and staying up to date with tax laws, businesses can reduce the risk of audits and penalties. In conclusion, accounting services are an essential component of successful financial management for businesses of all sizes. By providing accurate financial reporting, strategic insights, and ensuring compliance, professional accountants enable businesses to focus on growth and sustainability.

Dramatic. Was it normal for doctors to think black women were professional actresses, using their pregnancies to try to garner sympathy and attention from others?

to achieve long-term goals in your personal or professional life, you must regain control of your attention and rewire your brain to focus on the long term. To do so, you should start by staying away from highly stimulating activities.

This was not the intent of the reformers who advanced such changes in both parties. They sought to democratize the parties’ internal procedures and so to give the public more of a voice in the earliest stages of the political process. But the result has been a less democratic American party system, because it is one that empowers only the most active fringes of both parties—and especially the small percentage of voters who participate in party primaries. Those tend to be the voters least interested in bargaining and compromise and least inclined to see the point of the accommodationist structure of our system’s core institutions. Primaries have actually empowered elites—elites who are amateur activists with a lot of time for politics, not those who are party professionals but elites nonetheless, and not the broad public. By making office seekers most attentive to those voters rather than to the marginal voters essential for broader coalition building and who had been the focus of party professionals, the modern primary system has drawn into politics a type of politician who is not well suited to the work of the institutions, and so to the office to which he or she is seeking election.

For the academics who currently populate top professional schools, design is a bit like shop class, akin to automobile repair or welding, and residing at a far remove from respectable activities like the mathematical modeling of stochastic processes and the statistical analysis of selection bias.

Over the years, I’ve made a habit of asking professionals with unlike areas of expertise for advice whenever I find myself venturing out of my comfort zone and into theirs for the first time. It’s a habit that’s served me well time and again—and certainly far better than letting ego stand between me and the information I need. There’s no shame in allowing yourself to lean on others’ expertise and become the student again; the only shame would be in not returning the favor should your wisdom be sought out someday. Most people—myself included!—love doling out wisdom, especially on subjects they’ve dealt with for most of their professional lives. It’s a big, confusing world out there, especially in the entertainment industry, and it’s important to actively develop for yourself a team of unofficial advisors that you can turn to for help in navigating the myriad decisions and dilemmas you’ll undoubtedly encounter in life. As

Rebuilding Your Life: Accepting the Reality of Divorce Divorce is undeniably one of life's most challenging and emotionally charged experiences. The decision to end a marriage can be accompanied by a rollercoaster of emotions, such as sadness, anger, and uncertainty about the future. During this difficult time, it is important to seek support and guidance from professionals, such as divorce lawyers in St George, Utah, and family law attorneys who can offer the expertise and guidance needed to navigate the complexities of divorce. Acceptance: The First Step Towards Rebuilding When a marriage is no longer working, acceptance becomes the crucial first step towards moving forward and rebuilding your life. It is essential to recognize that divorce is not a failure, but rather a decision made in the best interest of both parties involved. Divorce lawyers in St George, Utah, and family law attorneys in St George, Utah, can provide the legal support and guidance necessary to ensure a fair and amicable settlement, assisting in the overall acceptance process. Embracing the Grieving Process Divorce can be likened to a grieving process, as you mourn the loss of a relationship and the dreams that accompanied it. It is crucial to understand that it is natural to experience a wide range of emotions during this period, and it is essential to allow yourself the space and time to grieve. Seeking the assistance of a supportive network, including family, friends, and a qualified family law attorney in St George, Utah, can be beneficial during this challenging time. Navigating the Legal Maze Divorce involves various legal procedures, including property division, child custody arrangements, and spousal support. These complexities can be overwhelming and confusing for those going through a divorce. Consulting with a knowledgeable family law attorney in St George, Utah, is crucial to ensure that your rights are protected and that you receive a fair settlement. By working closely with divorce lawyers in St George, Utah, you can navigate the legal maze with confidence, knowing that you have a qualified advocate fighting on your behalf. Prioritizing Your Well-being Throughout the divorce process, it is essential to prioritize your emotional, mental, and physical well-being. Self-care activities, such as seeking therapy, joining support groups, and engaging in healthy lifestyle choices, can be immensely beneficial during this challenging time. By taking care of yourself, you can remain strong, focused, and resilient as you navigate the path towards rebuilding your life. Creating a New Vision for the Future Divorce marks the end of a chapter, but it can also be the beginning of a new, fulfilling life. As you begin the process of rebuilding, it is important to create a new vision for your future. Set personal goals, discover new passions, and surround yourself with positive influences. Remember, with the support of divorce lawyers in St George, Utah, and family law attorneys, you have the opportunity to start afresh and build the life you deserve. Conclusion: Rebuilding your life after divorce is undoubtedly a challenging journey, but it is also an opportunity to rediscover yourself and create a brighter future. By accepting the reality of divorce, seeking professional legal guidance from family law attorneys in St George, Utah, and embracing the support of your loved ones, you can navigate through this transition with resilience and strength. Remember, you are not alone, and with each step, you move closer towards a life filled with happiness, fulfillment, and new beginnings.

WHAT MAKES YOUR HEART SING? Ask yourself, “What makes my heart sing?” Your passion is not a passing interest or even a hobby. A passion is something that is intensely meaningful and core to your identity. Once you identify what your passion is, can you say it influences your daily activities? Can you incorporate it into what you do professionally? Your true passion should be the subject of your communications and will serve to truly inspire your audience.

Escalation is never a pleasant activity as you can guarantee that someone is going to be hurt by it. But always remember that if your project suffers because of your desire to be a nice person or because you are afraid of the repercussions, you can’t call yourself a professional project manager.

So here we are today, where we have toxicologists and experts in food safety who disagree with the AHA’s position on the safety of polyunsaturated fats, and, because the AHA’s vast influence gives it control over nutrition thought, these professionals have trouble getting necessary work funded. Meanwhile, the AHA continues to actively promote seed oils, and it continues to support those, like Dr. Walter Willett, who dismiss or discredit experts like Dr. Chris Ramsden who are producing evidence to the contrary. In other words, the AHA is effectively blocking progress in medical science, and, perhaps most egregiously, it is promoting a diet that’s actively harming our cardiovascular health. In the beginning, however, the association’s culture was very different. When the AHA was founded in 1924, it was supported only with annual dues from a small collection of doctors concerned about the growing problem of heart disease. Heart attacks skyrocketed after World War I, and the organization felt the pressure of knowing there was so much to learn but such little funding to do the necessary research. In 1942, AHA executive director H. M. “Jack” Marvin, a New Haven, Connecticut, cardiologist, made an ambitious proposal to solve the AHA’s “chronic fiscal problems.” Lack of funds stood in the way of two of the organization’s highest-priority goals: sponsoring research and establishing public health and lay education programs. Without fundraising, the organization would be limited to utilizing the small pool of government funds to achieve its goals. And that pool had just grown a little too crowded for the AHA’s tastes.

He shrugs again. “I make millions as a professional athlete. It comes at a cost that I will never pay.” “What do you mean?” I step in closer. “I mean to say that I uphold an industry that thrives on the decimation of the environment. I spend a third of my life traveling and living as unsustainably as possible. I play in arenas that create mountains of waste. Every day. Every game. For the whole of my life, this has been my life. I do harm, Rachel. Active harm.

go to the bank Monday and Thursday at noon; and you will attend your professional seminar alternate Tuesdays at 6 P.M. Before you know it, these regular appointments take root in your subconscious. Thursday afternoon becomes dry cleaners’ time, and after a while you drive to the cleaners almost without thinking about it. Wednesdays and Fridays become work-out time, and not only does the time become automatically reserved for you, but also you do not have to worry about when you will find the time to work out. You have decided in advance, not impulsively, what you want to make enough of a priority to pre-plan, and where to put each such activity or obligation. You know that you will do these things, and you know when you will do them. This means you do not need to wonder every day when you will get to the dry cleaners, or if you will get to the bank, or how you will find time to work out, or whether you can ever make it to that professional seminar again.

It has been said that we have been given two ears and only one mouth, so we should listen twice as much as we talk. Listening is an art form, and asking questions is a tool to active listening. Yet, asking

It's always been important for writers to be disciplined but now even more so. In addition to the traditional displacement activities like cleaning the fridge or eating cake writers are faced with a plethora of online possibilities (some of which may be professionally worthwhile as well as interesting and fun). As a writer it's important to learn how to focus so you can do both as and when you need to.

service personnel and the development of human resource pools for the performance enhancement of active professionals in the

Habit 2: Begin With the End in Mind Effective network marketers have a clear vision and passion for that vision. They know what they want to achieve where they see themselves in their business organization. Everything they do, every activity they perform, is driven by that vision. That’s why they practice Habit 2: Begin With the End in Mind. Instead of waiting for others to make things happen, they develop their own clear vision of what they want to achieve in their business and where they will land in the future.

In so much of life and professional activity, the simple strategies and techniques can be the most powerful.

It may, at first sight, be matter of surprise to the thoughtless few that Mr Brass, being a professional gentleman, should not have legally indicted some party or parties, active in the promotion of the nuisance, but they will be good enough to remember, that as Doctors seldom take their own prescriptions, and Divines do not always practise what they preach, so lawyers are shy of meddling with the Law on their own account: knowing it to be an edged tool of uncertain application, very expensive in the working, and rather remarkable for its properties of close shaving, than for its always shaving the right person.

both hands against the door. “Feet wider apart. That’s right. Like in the American movies.” Satisfied, Qazi patted the man down. “What, no gun? A GRU man without a gun …” Qazi carefully felt the man’s crotch and the arms above the wrists. “First humor and now this! The GRU will become a laughingstock. But of course there is a microphone.” Qazi lifted all the pens from the Russian’s shirt pocket and examined them, one by one. “It had better be here, Chekhov, or you will have to part with your buttons and your shoes.” It was in the third pen. “Now turn around and sit against the door.” The Russian’s face was covered with perspiration, his fleshy lips twisted in a sneer. “The shoes.” Qazi examined them carefully and tossed them back. “Now the coat.” This he scrutinized minutely. From the uppermost of the large three buttons on the front of the coat a very fine wire was just visible buried amid the thread that held the button on. Qazi sawed the button free with a small pocketknife, then dropped the pen and button down a commode. He tossed the coat back to Chekhov. “And the belt.” After a quick glance, Qazi handed it back. “Hurry, we have much to say to each other.” He unscrewed the silencer and replaced the pistol in his ankle holster. He opened the door as the Russian scrambled awkwardly to his feet. An hour later the two men were seated in the Sistine Chapel against the back wall, facing the altar and Michelangelo’s masterpiece The Last Judgment behind it. On the right the high windows admitted a subdued light. Qazi kept his eyes on the tourists examining the paintings on the ceiling and walls. “Is it in Rome, as General Simonov promised?” “Yes. But you must tell us why you want it.” “Is it genuine, or is it a masterpiece from an Aquarium print shop?” The Aquarium was the nickname for GRU headquarters in Moscow. The Russian’s lips curled, revealing yellow, impacted teeth. This was his smile. “We obtained it from Warrant Officer Walker.” “Ah, those Americans! One wonders just how long they knew about Walker’s activities.” The Russian raised his shoulders and lowered them. “Why do you want the document?” “El Hakim has not authorized me to reveal his reasons. Not that we don’t trust you. We value the goodwill of the Soviet Union most highly. And we intend to continue to cultivate that goodwill. But to reveal what you do not need to know is to take the risk that the Americans will learn of our plans through their activities against you.” “If you are implying they have penetrated—” “Chekhov, I am not implying anything. I am merely weighing risks. And I am being very forthright with you. No subterfuge. No evasion. Just the plain truth. Surely a professional like you can appreciate that?” “This document is very valuable.

Most individuals who start as active professionals… change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance.” Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.

Second Week Of June 2012 I agreed to be Dr. Arius’ case study. In my reply to the psychiatrist, I wrote: Good Day Dr. A. I’m surprised and flattered that you consider me an appropriate candidate to conduct a case study on my unique E.R.O.S., Bahriji, elite Arab Household, and secondary school experiences. As much as I am delighted to agree to your proposed challenge and to answer your questionnaires to the best of my abilities, I also have questions for you for which I would like answers before being an active participant in the survey. * Are you planning to publish professional psychiatric papers and publications to your findings? Or are you working on this project solely for your personal interest? * If your research reveals a positive alternative to the current accepted educational norm, are you planning to actively advocate for change? As you are aware, I can only provide you with my personal opinion on my educational experiences. I cannot speak for other  E.R.O.S. members. Before I agree to undergo this case study, I wish to make it very clear that I only speak for myself. Under no circumstances will I undermine to reveal the actual names of people and places, or jeopardize their society and individual standing in any way. I am obligated to honor my oath of confidentiality and pledge never to reveal the true identity of the clandestine society. As long as you are aware of my pledge, I am happy to answer your questions to the best of my ability. Although I have not known you for very long, I consider you a trusted friend. My intuition tells me you are a man of integrity. I have always trusted my inner voice and it has never failed me. I look forward to your next correspondence and your answers to my questions. I hope all is going splendidly in your part of the world. Keep me posted on the progress of your gay organization. It is good to receive your emails as always. Yours truly, Young.

Nor are any of the statements or activities of the Trump campaign, no matter how distasteful, the behaviors or actions of clandestine agents of the Russian regime. However, even a cursory glance at the evidence reveals to intelligence professionals that the probability that Vladimir Putin has handled Trump and his associates, doing their bidding without even knowing it, is well within the KGB playbook. These Americans may be not be real agents of the Russian Federation but they may have unwittingly exposed themselves to a massive intelligence manipulation machine that, once involved, may be completely out of their control to extract themselves. The rhetoric election of 2016 reveals that damage has already been done.

Flotsam Some people figuratively, although sometimes literately, washed up on the barren beaches of West Africa because they were unwelcome in most other countries. Adventurers, seamen, construction contractors, military mercenaries, as well as missionaries and professional government employees, found themselves here. Money was frequently the motivating factor for people who came to this third world country and most of the typical tropical tramps I knew were involved in the many unsavory activities going on. The dank weather which is usually heavy with moisture from May until October, with a short reprieve of a week or two in July or August, contributed to the bleak attitude people had. What passes for a dry season lasts from November through April with the least likely chance of rain in December and January. The frequent heavy showers and rainstorms make Liberia and Sierra Leone the wettest climatic region in Africa. One way or another, everyone was always wet…. This in turn attributed to the heavy drinking and it was said that if the moisture didn't come from the sky it certainly came from the pores... Generally speaking in West Africa near the Equator the climate is tropical, hot and humid all year round! There were numerous meeting places or drinking holes for the expats. Guaranteed, there was no way any of us would be able to survive the conditions of West Africa without occasionally imbibing, which in reality we did constantly. The most popular bars for Europeans, which in Liberia included Americans, were run by foreigners to the country and these included the more upscale American Hotel and the old Ducor Hotel, near the Cape Mesurado Lighthouse on Mamba Point.

Playwright Noel Coward once said, “Work is more fun than fun.” I included that quote in a seminar guidebook for a sales group a year ago and one of the participants in the back of the room raised his hand and said, “Yeah, Steve, who is this Noel Coward guy? I figure with a quote like that he’s either a porn star or a professional golfer.” That line got a great laugh at my expense, but it also revealed a truth (which almost all humor does). People believe that the fun jobs are always somewhere else. “If only I could get a job like that!” “If only I had been a pro golfer!” But the truth is that fulfilling and fun work can be found in anything. The more we consciously introduce game-playing elements (personal bests listed, goals, time limits, competition with self or others, record-keeping, and so on), the more fun the activity becomes.

Mark is a walking dilemma, one of those people who’s hard to figure out. He is an unmarried Christian professional man with no “horrible” problems like drugs, sex, or compulsive addictions. He’s intelligent, athletic, and good-looking. He’s responsible and loves God. Mark is forty-five years old. And he has no friends, safe or otherwise. He is very, very alone. How does that picture come together? On the outside, it doesn’t make sense. A guy with Mark’s qualities should have a rich, active relational life. But when you understand the power of perfectionism, it makes “perfect” sense. For Mark is a perfectionist and has only recently seen the devastating consequences of this trait. Sometimes we make jokes about our perfectionism: “I looked in the mirror and got depressed about being three pounds overweight.” The genuine article, however, can be much more serious. Perfectionism can be a major cause of depression, destructive behaviors, and divorce. What is perfectionism? Simply put, it’s an inability to tolerate faults. Perfectionists have a phobia about imperfections and blemishes in themselves, in other people, and in the world. They spend enormous amounts of time trying to create a perfect world, running in futility from the realities of sin, age, loss, and cellulite. The perfectionist tries to live in the land of ideals. He sees life the way “it should be.” People should treat each other right. I should be a productive, successful person. Fairness and equality should rule. Then he sees the huge chasm between the land of ideals and the land of the real. For example, he cannot live up to his expectations of himself. Or he is let down by someone important to him. And he has great difficulty accepting where he lives—the land of the real. So he tries to change his permanent address to ideal-land again.

Like playing cards in the hands of an unprofessional player, the school activities papers are scattered lacking the connection between them and the upper educational goals. And like the playing cards scatter all around the place when played by amateurs who don’t know the rules of the game, the school activities spread in time and place leaving behind them a crowded painting full of colors and lines that don’t show the watcher that it was painted by a professional drawer who mastered the lines and colors in his complicated piece.

You don’t have to be a professional troublemaker to take a stand...