Aggression Leads To Success Quotes

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Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.
Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.17
Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
Gary Noesner notes that we could all learn from the successes and failures of hostage negotiation.7 At the beginning of such situations, emotions run high. Efforts to speed matters along often lead to disaster. Staving off natural desires to react aggressively to emotional provocations allows time for the molecules of emotion to gradually dissipate. The resulting cooler heads save lives.
Barbara Oakley (A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra))
Wisdom is really the key to wealth. With great wisdom, comes great wealth and success. Rather than pursuing wealth, pursue wisdom. The aggressive pursuit of wealth can lead to disappointment. Wisdom is defined as the quality of having experience, and being able to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting. Wisdom is basically the practical application of knowledge. Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs. Become completely focused on one subject and study the subject for a long period of time. Don't skip around from one subject to the next. The problem is generally not money. Jesus taught that the problem was attachment to possessions and dependence on money rather than dependence on God. Those who love people, acquire wealth so they can give generously. After all, money feeds, shelters, and clothes people. They key is to work extremely hard for a short period of time (1-5 years), create abundant wealth, and then make money work hard for you through wise investments that yield a passive income for life. Don't let the opinions of the average man sway you. Dream, and he thinks you're crazy. Succeed, and he thinks you're lucky. Acquire wealth, and he thinks you're greedy. Pay no attention. He simply doesn't understand. Failure is success if we learn from it. Continuing failure eventually leads to success. Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly. Whenever you pursue a goal, it should be with complete focus. This means no interruptions. Only when one loves his career and is skilled at it can he truly succeed. Never rush into an investment without prior research and deliberation. With preferred shares, investors are guaranteed a dividend forever, while common stocks have variable dividends. Some regions with very low or no income taxes include the following: Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, Delaware, South Dakota, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Panama, San Marino, Seychelles, Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Curaçao, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Monaco, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Bermuda, Kuwait, Oman, Andorra, Cayman Islands, Belize, Vanuatu, and Campione d'Italia. There is only one God who is infinite and supreme above all things. Do not replace that infinite one with finite idols. As frustrated as you may feel due to your life circumstances, do not vent it by cursing God or unnecessarily uttering his name. Greed leads to poverty. Greed inclines people to act impulsively in hopes of gaining more. The benefit of giving to the poor is so great that a beggar is actually doing the giver a favor by allowing the person to give. The more I give away, the more that comes back. Earn as much as you can. Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. Give as much as you can.
H.W. Charles (The Money Code: Become a Millionaire With the Ancient Jewish Code)
First the child attempts to keep up with other children. When these efforts fail, for whatever reason, discouragement sets in. The child stops trying as hard as the children who meet with success and encouragement. The next phase is acting out, making disruptive noises or pranks to attract attention. Every child needs attention, even if it is negative. The disruptions can be aggressive, but eventually the child realizes that nothing good is happening. Acting out leads to disapproval and punishment. So he enters the final phase, which is sullen silence. He makes no more effort to keep up in class. Other children mark him as slow or stupid, an outsider. School has turned into a stifling prison rather than an enriching place. It’s not hard to see how this cycle of behavior affects the brain.
Deepak Chopra (Super Brain: Unleashing the explosive power of your mind to maximize health, happiness and spiritual well-being)
Wolf was taken aback. This was the 1950s, years before the advent of cholesterol-lowering drugs and aggressive measures to prevent heart disease. Heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause of death in men under the age of sixty-five. It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease. Wolf decided to investigate. He enlisted the support of some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma. They gathered together the death certificates from residents of the
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
With deep theoretical roots (e.g., Bandura 1973; Dollard et al. 1939), there are at least two functions of aggression: aggression that serves to attain some goal of the perpetrator (i.e., instrumental aggression, which can be considered planful and cool-headed) and aggression that is impulsively enacted in response to some provocation, real or imagined (i.e., reactive aggression, which can be considered unplanned and hot-headed). A simple example of instrumental aggression is an attack on the victim for some material reward, such as money or an iPhone. Reactive aggression is exemplified by an outburst to a perceived or actual slight. For child developmentalists, the distinction is important because each is associated with a unique developmental trajectory and consequent socioemotional outcomes. For example, reactively aggressive children are more apt to display poor psychological adjustment because their dysregulation leads to related social difficulties such as peer rejection (Coie and Koeppl 1990). By contrast, instrumentally aggressive children are not necessarily dysregulated. Moreover, their success at goal attainment may even lead to positive peer regard.
Todd K. Shackelford (The Evolution of Violence (Evolutionary Psychology))
In retrospect, it is easy to see that Hitler's successful gamble in the Rhineland brought him a victory more staggering and more fatal in its immense consequences than could be comprehended at the time. At home it fortified his popularity and his power, raising them to heights which no German ruler of the past had ever enjoyed. It assured his ascendancy over his generals, who had hesitated and weakened at a moment of crisis when he had held firm. It taught them that in foreign politics and even in military affairs his judgment was superior to theirs. They had feared that the French would fight; he knew better. And finally, and above all, the Rhineland occupation, small as it was as a military operation, opened the way, as only Hitler (and Churchill, alone, in England) seemed to realize, to vast new opportunities in a Europe which was not only shaken but whose strategic situation was irrevocably changed by the parading of three German battalions across the Rhine bridges. Conversely, it is equally easy to see, in retrospect, that France's failure to repel the Wehrmacht battalions and Britain's failure to back her in what would have been nothing more than a police action was a disaster for the West from which sprang all the later ones of even greater magnitude. In March 1936 the two Western democracies were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggressive, totalitarian Germany and, in fact - as we have seen Hitler admitting - bring the Nazi dictator and his regime tumbling down. They let the chance slip by. For France, it was the beginning of the end. Her allies in the East, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia, suddenly were faced with the fact that France would not fight against German aggression to preserve the security system which the French government itself had taken the lead in so laboriously building up. But more than that. These Eastern allies began to realize that even if France were not so supine, she would soon not be able to lend them much assistance because of Germany's feverish construction of a West Wall behind the Franco-German border. The erection of this fortress line, they saw, would quickly change the strategic map of Europe, to their detriment. They could scarcely expect a France which did not dare, with her one hundred divisions, to repel three German battalions, to bleed her young manhood against impregnable German fortifications which the Wehrmacht attacked in the East. But even if the unexpected took place, it would be futile. Henceforth the French could tie down in the West only a small part of the growing German Army. The rest would be free for operations against Germany's Eastern neighbors.
William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany)
Cohen continued to struggle with his own well-being. Even though he had achieved his life’s dream of running his own firm, he was still unhappy, and he had become dependent on a psychiatrist named Ari Kiev to help him manage his moods. In addition to treating depression, Kiev’s other area of expertise was success and how to achieve it. He had worked as a psychiatrist and coach with Olympic basketball players and rowers trying to improve their performance and overcome their fear of failure. His background building athletic champions appealed to Cohen’s unrelenting need to dominate in every transaction he entered into, and he started asking Kiev to spend entire days at SAC’s offices, tending to his staff. Kiev was tall, with a bushy mustache and a portly midsection, and he would often appear silently at a trader’s side and ask him how he was feeling. Sometimes the trader would be so startled to see Kiev there he’d practically jump out of his seat. Cohen asked Kiev to give motivational speeches to his employees, to help them get over their anxieties about losing money. Basically, Kiev was there to teach them to be ruthless. Once a week, after the market closed, Cohen’s traders would gather in a conference room and Kiev would lead them through group therapy sessions focused on how to make them more comfortable with risk. Kiev had them talk about their trades and try to understand why some had gone well and others hadn’t. “Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it,” was how one skeptical staff member remembered Kiev being pitched to them. Kiev’s work with Olympians had led him to believe that the thing that blocked most people was fear. You might have two investors with the same amount of money: One was prepared to buy 250,000 shares of a stock they liked, while the other wasn’t. Why? Kiev believed that the reluctance was a form of anxiety—and that it could be overcome with proper treatment. Kiev would ask the traders to close their eyes and visualize themselves making trades and generating profits. “Surrendering to the moment” and “speaking the truth” were some of his favorite phrases. “Why weren’t you bigger in the trades that worked? What did you do right?” he’d ask. “Being preoccupied with not losing interferes with winning,” he would say. “Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win.” Many of the traders hated the group therapy sessions. Some considered Kiev a fraud. “Ari was very aggressive,” said one. “He liked money.” Patricia, Cohen’s first wife, was suspicious of Kiev’s motives and believed that he was using his sessions with Cohen to find stock tips. From Kiev’s perspective, he found the perfect client in Cohen, a patient with unlimited resources who could pay enormous fees and whose reputation as one of the best traders on Wall Street could help Kiev realize his own goal of becoming a bestselling author. Being able to say that you were the
Sheelah Kolhatkar (Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street)
They typically start out leading ordinary lives in an ordinary world and are drawn by a “call to adventure.” This leads them down a “road of trials” filled with battles, temptations, successes, and failures. Along the way, they are helped by others, often by those who are further along the journey and serve as mentors, though those who are less far along also help in various ways. They also gain allies and enemies and learn how to fight, often against convention. Along the way, they encounter temptations and have clashes and reconciliations with their fathers and their sons. They overcome their fear of fighting because of their great determination to achieve what they want, and they gain their “special powers” (i.e., skills) from both “battles” that test and teach them, and from gifts (such as advice) that they receive from others. Over time, they both succeed and fail, but they increasingly succeed more than they fail as they grow stronger and keep striving for more, which leads to ever-bigger and more challenging battles. Heroes inevitably experience at least one very big failure (which Campbell calls an “abyss” or the “belly of the whale” experience) that tests whether they have the resilience to come back and fight smarter and with more determination. If they do, they undergo a change (have a “metamorphosis”) in which they experience the fear that protects them, without losing the aggressiveness that propels them forward. With triumphs come rewards. Though they don’t realize it when they are in their battles, the hero’s biggest reward is what Campbell calls the “boon,” which is the special knowledge about how to succeed that the hero has earned through his journey. Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey schema from The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New World Library), copyright © 2008 by the Joseph Campbell Foundation (jcf.org), used with permission. Late in life, winning more battles and acquiring more rewards typically becomes less exciting to heroes than passing along that knowledge to others—“returning the boon” as Campbell called it.
Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
beaten and humiliated and experience indescribable suffering and anguish. Will become sin offering and die on job. To qualify: Must be male, minimum age 30. Father must be God, mother must be of house and lineage of David, must have been virgin when he was born. Adopted father must also be of house of David. Must have sinless blood and spotless record. Must have been born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth. Must be self-motivated, with aggressive personality and burning desire to help people. Must have tremendous knowledge of Old Testament and firm reliance on biblical principles. Must incorporate the foresight of Noah, the faith of Abraham, the patience of Job, the faithfulness of Joseph, the meekness of Moses, the courage of Joshua, the heart of David, the wisdom of Solomon, the boldness of Elijah, the power of Elisha, the eloquence of Isaiah, the commitment of Jeremiah, the vision of Ezekiel and the love of God. Wages: Holy spirit (without measure) to start. Additional payoff in intimacy with God and receiving revelation as necessary to complete job. Constant on-job training, supervision and guidance by top-level management. Benefits: Position will lead to highly exalted position in future if job carried out successfully. Workman’s compensation: Injuries sustained on job, including death, well compensated by promotion including new body. Management will highly promote name upon successful completion of job, and entire publicity department will be devoted to getting name before multitudes. Will assume presidency of expanding international venture (The Ministry of Reconciliation), as Head of Body of well-equipped members ready to move dynamic new product on world market. All in all, tremendous eternal potential for growth and rewards in return on initial investment of giving life. If qualified, management will contact you. No need to apply.
John A. Lynn (One God & One Lord: Reconsidering the Cornerstone of the Christian Faith)
The Twelve Behaviors 1.​Focus on customers and growth (serve customers well and aggressively pursue growth). 2.​Lead impactfully (think like a leader and serve as a role model). 3.​Get results (consistently meet any commitments that you make). 4.​Make people better (encourage excellence in peers, subordinates, and/or managers). 5.​Champion change (drive continuous improvement in our operations). 6.​Foster teamwork and diversity (define success in terms of the entire team). 7.​Adopt a global mind-set (view the business from all relevant perspectives, and see the world in terms of integrated value chains). 8.​Take risks intelligently (recognize that we must take greater but smarter risks to generate better returns). 9.​Be self-aware (recognize your behavior and how it affects those around you). 10.​Communicate effectively (provide information to others in a timely, concise, and thoughtful way). 11.​Think in an integrative fashion (make more holistic decisions beyond your own bailiwick by applying intuition, experience, and judgment to the available data). 12.​Develop technical or functional excellence (be capable and effective in your particular area of expertise).
David Cote (Winning Now, Winning Later: How Companies Can Succeed in the Short Term While Investing for the Long Term)
Success in any endeavor comes from aggressive individuals with a strong bias for action.
Bing West (Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead)
Professional ambition is expected of men but is optional—or worse, sometimes even a negative—for women. “She is very ambitious” is not a compliment in our culture. Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.
Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
in the markets and in life, to be successful one should bet on the upside that comes from a) evolution that leads to productivity improvements, but not so aggressively that b) cycles and bumps along the way knock you out of the game.
Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)
Another study showed that since 1940, the color of NCAA uniforms for teams who won was rarely black, where red was the top color for winning teams. Not only is black the color that leads to loss, it is the leading color that can result in aggression and depression — a loss in grounding and joy that is critical to true success and inner wealth.
Cary G. Weldy (The Power of Tattoos: Twelve Hidden Energy Secrets of Body Art Every Tattoo Enthusiast Should Know)
At the heart of TCP congestion control is an algorithm called Additive Increase, Multiplicative Decrease, or AIMD. Before AIMD kicks in, a new connection will ramp up its transmission rate aggressively: if the first packet is received successfully it sends out two more, if both of those get through it sends out a batch of four, and so on. But as soon as any packet’s ACK does not come back to the sender, the AIMD algorithm takes over. Under AIMD, any fully received batch of packets causes the number of packets in flight not to double but merely to increase by 1, and dropped packets cause the transmission rate to cut back by half (hence the name Additive Increase, Multiplicative Decrease). Essentially, AIMD takes the form of someone saying, “A little more, a little more, a little more, whoa, too much, cut way back, okay a little more, a little more…” Thus it leads to a characteristic bandwidth shape known as the “TCP sawtooth”—steady upward climbs punctuated by steep drops.
Brian Christian (Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions)
Seeing the ugliness, whatever form it takes - malice, misery, aggression, negativity - constantly defeating the happiness of the people around me and seeing how much useless misery is born in the world and how much useful happiness is wasted, I grabbed in my hand the most eager "why" I could find and started writing, in the chance that I can defeat ugliness by explaining it. I wanted to understand how we've become so good at being sad, how we've become so good at not only at abandoning the beauty of our soul but asking its ugliness to show the world around us who we are. Every time I struggled with the question of who gives birth to my misery, I stumbled upon my own weaknesses. By writing for others, I learned myself. Nothing is accidental, not even anything that seems to happen by accident. It is no coincidence that there is so much sadness in the world. It exists because, by choosing to do what is easy and not what is right, we don't try to learn our weaknesses as well as we should to prevent them from producing misery or magnifying the misery someone else's weaknesses have produced. The more I wrote, the more I realized the value of the truth we should tell ourselves in achieving our happiness. Maybe it's time to say no to the lies we tell ourselves and finally tell the truth. This way, we will build self-knowledge, become as self-sufficient as we need to disarm our weaknesses and become happy. Every time we tell the truth to ourselves, we create self-knowledge and every time we lie, we tear it down. We all want to be happy, but we aren’t willing to do everything needed to deserve our happiness. Happiness is the disarming of misery. How can we feel happy though, when we aren't willing to defend our happiness from the onslaught of the ugliness of the world around us? How do we want to live a happy life when we fill it with ugliness? That's what we need to change. CALILO. Create a life you can fall in love with. However, the more we praise change, the more we remain the same, because we know that change often has more truth in it than we can bear. That's why we love to hide in the routine so much. Life doesn't come with an instruction book. We have to write it ourselves, one mistake at a time. Self-knowledge is the mother of happiness. When we get to know ourselves, we will feel as strong as we need to be to disarm our weaknesses and therefore be able to create beauty by neutralizing the ugliness within us and the ugliness around us. In this way, we will be able to change our lives for the better. When we learn ourselves well enough to disarm our weaknesses, we will allow our strengths to make us as successful and happy as they can. We will therefore create a life that has as little ugliness as possible, a life that has so much beauty that we will want to fall in love with. Let's tell ourselves the truth in order to drive away the ugliness we have been producing for so many years with our lies. The lies we tell ourselves create ugliness, which in turn, leads to misery. On the contrary, truth creates beauty that leads to happiness. We all have beauty in our souls, as long as we aren't afraid of the truth from which it is made. Let's live by translating the beauty of our soul into happiness, and not by translating its ugliness into the pain and misery of the people around us. We will then be able to create a world that is as real as it needs to be to feel so beautiful that it overflows with happiness.
Angelos Michalopoulos
Avoidance starts with the child’s ADHD symptoms of forgetfulness, disorganization, and distractibility that irritate parents due to a lack of understanding. The parent displays their frustration in a way that confuses and generally labels the child without understanding. The child then withdraws from the parent and doesn’t ask for help with any executive functioning skills, which they absolutely need. The parent reiterates expectations, usually in a louder and more aggressive way, and then the child continues to display the same symptoms, leading to more resentment from the parent toward the child. It’s a dangerous cycle, and the responsibility is on the parents to break that cycle. Breaking this pattern requires education, patience, empathetic discussions of expectations, and an accurate understanding of ADHD or executive functioning deficiencies. Although that may sound a bit overwhelming, picking up this book is a great first step. Studies have shown that parental understanding of ADHD is the number-one predictor of adult success for children with ADHD.
Zac Grisham (Scattered to Focused: Smart Strategies to Improve Your Child's Executive Functioning Skills)
The following are some of the most common mistakes made by project managers: Not clearly understanding how or ensuring that the project is aligned with organizational objectives. Not properly managing stakeholder expectations throughout the project. Not gaining agreement and buy-in on project goals and success criteria from key stakeholders. Not developing a realistic schedule that includes all work efforts, task dependencies, bottom-up estimates, and assigned leveled resources. Not getting buy-in and acceptance on the project schedule. Not clearly deciding and communicating who is responsible for what. Not utilizing change control procedures to manage the scope of the project. Not communicating consistently and effectively with all key stakeholders. Not executing the project plan. Not tackling key risks early in the project. Not proactively identifying risks and developing contingency plans (responses) for those risks. Not obtaining the right resources with the right skills at the right time. Not aggressively pursuing issue resolution. Inadequately defining and managing requirements. Insufficiently managing and leading the project team.
Gregory M. Horine (Project Management Absolute Beginner's Guide)
Professional ambition is expected of men but is optional—or worse, sometimes even a negative—for women. “She is very ambitious” is not a compliment in our culture. Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.17
Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
Maslow was right. Insecurity is main source of ego and aggression. Achievements and success lead.
Talees Rizvi (21 Day Target and Achievement Planner [Use Only Printed Work Book: LIFE IS SIMPLE HENCE SIMPLE WORKBOOK (Life Changing Workbooks 1))
Here are a few of the defenses that many people carry inside, sometimes for the rest of their lives: AVOIDANCE. Avoidance is usually about fear. Emotions and relationships have hurt me, so I will minimize emotions and relationships. People who are avoidant feel most comfortable when the conversation stays superficial. They often overintellectualize life. They retreat to work. They try to be self-sufficient and pretend they don’t have needs. Often, they have not had close relationships as kids and have lowered their expectations about future relationships. A person who fears intimacy in this way may be always on the move, preferring not to be rooted or pinned down; they are sometimes relentlessly positive so as not to display vulnerability; they engineer things so they are the strong one others turn to but never the one who turns to others. DEPRIVATION. Some children are raised around people so self-centered that the needs of the child are ignored. The child naturally learns the lesson “My needs won’t be met.” It is a short step from that to “I’m not worthy.” A person haunted by a deprivation schema can experience feelings of worthlessness throughout life no matter how many amazing successes they achieve. They often carry the idea that there is some flaw deep within themselves, that if other people knew it, it would cause them to run away. When they are treated badly, they are likely to blame themselves. (Of course he had an affair; I’m a pathetic wife.) They sometimes grapple with a fierce inner critic. OVERREACTIVITY. Children who are abused and threatened grow up in a dangerous world. The person afflicted in this way often has, deep in their nervous system, a hyperactive threat-detection system. Such people interpret ambivalent situations as menacing situations, neutral faces as angry faces. They are trapped in a hyperactive mind theater in which the world is dangerous. They overreact to things and fail to understand why they did so. PASSIVE AGGRESSION. Passive aggression is the indirect expression of anger. It is a way to sidestep direct communication by a person who fears conflict, who has trouble dealing with negative emotions. It’s possible such a person grew up in a home where anger was terrifying, where emotions were not addressed, or where love was conditional and the lesson was that direct communication would lead to the withdrawal of affection. Passive aggression is thus a form of emotional manipulation, a subtle power play to extract guilt and affection. A husband with passive-aggressive tendencies may encourage his wife to go on a weekend outing with her friends, feeling himself to be a selfless martyr, but then get angry with her in the days before the outing and through the weekend. He’ll let her know by various acts of withdrawal and self-pity that she’s a selfish person and he’s an innocent victim. —
David Brooks (How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen)
DON’T LET YOUR CULTURE BECOME TOXIC SUCCESSFUL START-UPS often begin with a culture where people challenge one another directly and even fiercely, but also show they care personally. That’s because they start small, involve people who get to know each other really well, and are fighting for survival. However, as the business grows and new people join the firm, it’s impossible to know everyone’s name, let alone to have strong relationships with everyone. The kind of super-direct challenges that are easy when people know each other well become difficult. Not wanting to lose the friendly culture of the early days, many hesitate to speak up when they see problems, backing off of Challenge Directly and retreating to Ruinous Empathy. Because Obnoxious Aggression is more effective than Ruinous Empathy, that kind of behavior has an advantage; people who behave badly begin to win, rising in the company. When confronted with a powerful jerk, many people retreat to Manipulative Insincerity, more out of instinctive self-protectiveness than intentional wrongdoing. In this kind of environment, there’s an incentive to retreat to Manipulative Insincerity in front of those who are more senior to them, and resort to Obnoxious Aggression with those who are less powerful. The culture becomes toxic—many kissing up and kicking down, few willing to speak truth to power. This kind of behavior won’t kill a company right away. Instead, it leads to a slow, painful death of innovation, and lives of quiet desperation. That’s the bad news. The good news is that many companies large and small are now taking active measures to shift to a culture in which caring personally and challenging directly go hand in hand. When people learn to do both simultaneously, bad behavior no longer gives anyone an advantage. Bad behavior is punished not rewarded, the truth comes out, and the environment is more conducive to both success and happiness.
Kim Malone Scott (Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity)
It is from the point of view of how does a culture meet the needs of human beings and how does it promote healthy or unhealthy development that we have to judge any society. Now we have the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), this is how we measure success and wealth. In a materialistic society we measure success by the possession or the control or the production of matter, of materials. That's what it means to be materialistic, it is materials that matter. Well, is that really the true measure of a human society? It is one measure, but is it a true measure of a successful society? Can a society be called "successful" because it produces more matter or controls or owns more matter than some other society? I would suggest that an equally important measure of a society and a culture and a system is to what degree does it meet human needs and how well does it promote healthy human development and to what degree or in what ways does it undermine it. So what is the nature of human nature? Well.. again, in this system, it is believed and often thought that human nature is essentially selfish, individualistic, aggressive and competitive. That's human nature. And so when somebody behaves that way, you say "oh well.. what can you do.. it is human nature.." But I believe that to speak of that is to make a rather elementary mistake. Which is to take this society as the standard over how human beings are supposed to be. It's true that we are taught to behave that way, as a matter of fact, not only we are taught to behave that way, the most successful people in this society do behave that way. That's how they become successful. But what if that is not human nature? What if that is a distortion of human nature? What if, in fact, our nature demands something else entirely? To look at human nature, we need to look at how human beings developed through aeons and then we have to look at what are the needs of the human child and what needs does the human being actually have. And rather than trying to determine the nature of human nature from our human behavior in certain situations, let's look at it from the point of view of their needs. And then, what I think we will find, it is not so much that there is human nature that predicts certain behaviors, because there are so many different human behaviors.. I mean you can have a Hitler or you can have a Jesus or a Martin Luther King. These are all human beings. So what then is human nature? What if we understood that there isn't so much a human nature that predicts human behavior, but what there actually is, is a human nature that means that we have certain needs. And if those needs are met, we are going to behave in predictable ways. And if those needs are not met, we are also going to behave in predictable ways. So it is not our behavior that defines our nature, but our needs that define our nature. And the behavior reflects the degree to which those needs are met or they are not met. What if we look from that point of view? Well.. what do we find from that point of view? And how would it looking at human nature from that angle lead us to understand what we call physical or mental pathology? And I say "what we call" because diagnoses and pathology and so on are just a certain way of looking at something. It doesn't necessarily reflect reality. Or it might describe a certain reality but it doesn't necessarily explain reality. And we have to make a distinction between descriptions and explanations.
Gabor Maté
Attempts to Close the Detention Center The United States Detention Center on the grounds of the Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba was established in January of 2002 by the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. It was designated as the site for a prison camp, euphemistically called a detention center, to detain prisoners taken in Afghanistan and to a lesser degree from the battlefields of Iraq, Somalia and Asia. The prison was built to hold extremely dangerous individuals and has the facilities to be able to interrogate these detainees in what was said to be “an optimal setting.” Since these prisoners were technically not part of a regular military organization representing a country, the Geneva Conventions did not bind the United States to its rules. The legality of their incarceration is questionable under International Law. This would lead one to the conclusion that this facility was definitely not a country club. Although, in most cases these prisoners were treated humanely, there were obvious exceptions, when the individuals were thought to have pertinent information. It was also the intent of the U.S. Government not to bring them into the United States, where they would be afforded prescribed legal advantages and a more humane setting. Consequently, to house these prisoners, this Spartan prison was constructed at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base instead of on American soil. Here they were out of sight and far removed from any possible legal entanglements that would undoubtedly regulate their treatment. Many of the detainees reported abuses and torture at the facility, which were categorically denied. In 2005 Amnesty International called the facility the “Gulag of our times.” In 2007 and 2008, during his campaign for the Presidency, Obama pledged to close the Detention Center at Guantánamo Bay. After winning the presidential election, he encouraged Congress to close the detention center, without success. Again, he attempted to close the facility on May 3, 2013. At that time, the Senate stopped him by voting to block the necessary funds for the closure. The Republican House remained adamant in their policy towards the President, showing no signs of relenting. It was not until thaw of November of 2014 that any glimmer of hope became apparent. Despite Obama’s desire to close the detention center, he also knew that the Congress, headed by his opposing party, would not revisit this issue any time soon, and if anything were to happen, it would have to be by an executive order. The number has constantly decreased and is now said to be fewer than 60 detainees. There are still problems regarding some of these more aggressive prisoners from countries that do not want them back. It is speculated that eventually some of them may come to the United States to face a federal court. Much is dependent on President-Elect Trump as to what the future holds regarding these incarcerated people.
Hank Bracker