Align Best Quotes

I suspect that God’s plan, whatever it is, works on a scale too large to admit our mortal tribulations; that in a single lifetime, accidents and happenstance determine more than we care to admit; and that the best we can do is to try to align ourselves with what we feel is right and construct some meaning out of our confusion, and with grace and nerve play at each moment the hand that we’re dealt.

A small shift in the gravity between us and suddenly all my stars are out of alignment, planets knocked from their orbits, and I'm left stumbling, without map or heading, through the bewildering territory of being in love with your best friend.

Magic works best for me when it aligns with scientific principles.

Think about this: your thoughts (and the resulting feelings) are not always aligned with what is in the best interests of your life, your health, your finances, or your potential.

I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands.

The best leadership teams have purpose, they are aligned on their strategic objectives, they are a high performing team and have change leadership skills to navigate 4IR

It's best to magnetize your business to specific kinds of customers; customers that are aligned with the businesses goals, purpose, and values. At Mayflower-Plymouth, we're here to help your business figure this out, and to provide holistic solutions.

A small shift in the gravity between us and suddenly all my stars are out of alignment, planets knocked from their orbits, and I’m left stumbling, without map or heading, through the bewildering territory of being in love with your best friend.

Suddenly I came out of my thoughts to notice everything around me again-the catkins on the willows, the lapping of the water, the leafy patterns of the shadows across the path. And then myself, walking with the alignment that only comes after miles, the loose diagonal rhythm of arms swinging in synchronization with legs in a body that felt long and stretched out, almost as sinuous as a snake…when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

I believe that we must align our actions with our highest principles. No matter the outcome, we will not have failed if we act from our best intentions.” “The road to hell is paved with good intentions, Captain,” Chakotay said with equal certainty. “So is the road to peace,” Cambridge observed.

The truth is, I’ve never been a big believer in destiny. I worry that it encourages resignation in the down-and-out and complacency among the powerful. I suspect that God’s plan, whatever it is, works on a scale too large to admit our mortal tribulations; that in a single lifetime, accidents and happenstance determine more than we care to admit; and that the best we can do is to try to align ourselves with what we feel is right and construct some meaning out of our confusion, and with grace and nerve play at each moment the hand that we’re dealt.

The truth is that Percy has always been important to me, long before I fell so hard for him there was an audible crash. It's only lately that his knee bumping mine under a narrow pub table leaves me fumbling for words. A small shift in the gravity between us and suddenly all my stars are out of alignment, planets knocked from their orbits, and I’m left stumbling, without map or heading, through the bewildering territory of being in love with your best friend.

This must be our day to define the best of who we are and what we will stand for. Tonight, in the glow of gratitude for our free will, let us write down the words and phrases that describe our ideal identity. Put them on beautiful paper and in ink. Carry them everywhere. Look at these words, memorize them, verbalize them—become them. The more we align our actions with this identity, the more free, motivated, and whole we shall become. Life will feel brighter and more our own, more deep and satisfying. Destiny will smile on us and we will be welcomed into the gates of heaven as people of purpose and integrity.

Life wants you to live in total alignment with true love, passion and integrity.

Greatness inspires greatness. Creativity inspires creativity. When you align yourself with people who inspire you and help draw out the best in you, you find your best self.

Perhaps walking away right now is for the best. It’s sad, but sometimes loving someone isn’t enough. One day, if the stars are aligned, you might be ready for each other and come together for the right reasons.

In short, the advent of super-intelligent AI would be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours we’re in trouble.

More than anyone, this book is for those young people—an invitation to once again remake the world, and to bring about, through hard work, determination, and a big dose of imagination, an America that finally aligns with all that is best in us.

You can Transform into a Super-Soul! If you align your physical and mental (logical/emotional) self with your core self (or soul being), then you will know your personal path, and find ways to follow it to fulfillment. You can learn how to best nurture your body, plus train your mind as an empowering tool to enhance your overall balance, strength, and unique skills, so that you achieve your goals, as well as optimise your well-being.

Insure your reading is in alignment with your goals. Read everything you can find on your goals and your profession. It's the best investment you can make.

Be with the flow, take the flow with you, align and make a rhythm out of it

Gratitude is the best medicine. It heals your mind, body and soul, increasing its vibration. Once you are vibrating at a higher frequency, you are aligning to the universe to attract more things to be grateful for.

The art is in evolving to such a receptive consciousness, which is aligned to enjoyment and fruition in both ways – expecting and planning the randomizations for ‘specific’ joys as well as designing joys in ‘generic’ randomizations. True love lands you in a consciousness, which relishes the joys of this rainbowish dualism best.

Your Sage’s five great powers are (1) to Explore with great curiosity and an open mind; (2) to Empathize with yourself and others and bring compassion and understanding to any situation; (3) to Innovate and create new perspectives and outside-the-box solutions; (4) to Navigate and choose a path that best aligns with your deeper underlying values and mission; and (5) to Activate and take decisive action without the distress, interference, or distractions of the Saboteurs.

It’s important for employees to be employed in the roles where they are most productive. No matter how excellent someone is, if they are tasked with doing things that don’t align with their excellence, they will produce mediocre results at best.

It’s not just about having the right people in the company. It’s about having the right people in the right places. You don’t want your whales climbing mountains or your eagles swimming in the ocean so to speak. No matter how excellent someone is, if they are tasked with doing things that don’t align with their excellence, they will produce mediocre results at best.

Making predictions based on our beliefs is the best (and perhaps even the only) way to test ourselves. If objectivity is the concern for a greater truth beyond our personal circumstances, and prediction is the best way to examine how closely aligned our personal perceptions are with that greater truth, the most objective among us are those who make the most accurate predictions.

As I learned about the consequences of my food choices and as I recognized that I didn't have to eat animals, and that eating animals caused the animals to suffer, it caused an enormous footprint on our planet, and it wasn't healthy, it made since to go vegan. And, it's one of the best decisions I've ever made, and I think most people who've decided to go vegan share a similar experience. It's very empowering. And, when I went vegan I actually started eating a wide variety of foods I had never tried before. Different ethnic foods. You also start combining things in different ways, you start becoming more creative in the kitchen. But I went vegan just because it seemed to make sense, and it was aligned with my own values, because I didn't want to support this system that was so abusive to animals, and wasting and squandering so many scarce resources on our planet. And it was also healthier, so it was in my interest to eat food that was plant-based instead of animal-based. Living a vegan lifestyle makes a lot of sense.

Want to know one of the most rewarding and holistic ways to heal & make significant life choices that will fully align? Learning to slow down, breath, think, journal, talk, and process before reacting. Knowing you have worked through the issue, be it mentally, emotionally or spiritually, before taking action lets you write the script of your life how you want. Which in turn gives you the best chance of achieving your dreams

Aligning an organization is like preparing for a long sailing trip. First, you need to be clear on whether your destination (the mission and goals) and your route (the strategy) are the right ones. Then you can figure out which boat you need (the structure), how to outfit it (the processes), and which mix of crew members is best (the skill bases). Throughout the journey, you keep an eye out for reefs that are not on the charts.

I feel an obligation toward God to be as honest as I can. I'm human, sir, and I'll admit the Truth can be painful at times, and even a little elusive, but... as best as I can, I must speak the Truth and address things as they are. I don't feel I have any right to take the Truth and cut it up, rearrange it, select what I want and delete what I want just so it'll align with my politics or my Accounting Department." - John Barrett Jr.

Though in this genre we write about the fantastic, the stories work best when there is solid grounding in our world. Magic works best for me when it aligns with scientific principles. Worldbuilding works best when it draws from sources in our world. Characters work best when they’re grounded in solid human emotion and experience.

Correct thinking provides a sense of certainty. Without it, we fear that faith is on life support at best, dead and buried at worst. And who wants a dead or dying faith? So this fear of losing a handle on certainty leads to a preoccupation with correct thinking, making sure familiar beliefs are defended and supported at all costs. How strongly do we hold on to the old ways of thinking? Just recall those history courses where we read about Christians killing other Christians over all sorts of disagreements about doctrines few can even articulate today. Or perhaps just think of a skirmish you’ve had at church over a sermon, Sunday-school lesson, or which candidate to vote into public office. Preoccupation with correct thinking. That’s the deeper problem. It reduces the life of faith to sentry duty, a 24/7 task of pacing the ramparts and scanning the horizon to fend off incorrect thinking, in ourselves and others, too engrossed to come inside the halls and enjoy the banquet. A faith like that is stressful and tedious to maintain. Moving toward different ways of thinking, even just trying it on for a while to see how it fits, is perceived as a compromise to faith, or as giving up on faith altogether. But nothing could be further from the truth. Aligning faith in God and certainty about what we believe and needing to be right in order to maintain a healthy faith—these do not make for a healthy faith in God. In a nutshell, that is the problem. And that is what I mean by the “sin of certainty.

If you are pure in intention and in alignment with beauty and love, in body and mind, the highest levels of your spiritual self will subsume your weaknesses.

have done my best with what nature gave me. Money can’t buy you love but it can buy you a chiselled jaw, perfectly aligned teeth and plumped-up lips.

With best thoughts, words and actions we align our past, present and future.

I have done my best with what nature gave me. Money can’t buy you love but it can buy you a chiseled jaw, perfectly aligned teeth, and plumped-up lips.

Jesus argues that the best leaders, the ones who align with his vision for leadership, will lead as servants who are aware of their responsibility and who answer to a higher calling.

Each day will present many options and opportunities, chose the best opportunities that align with your overall goals and learn to distinguish between what is urgent/important, and things that do not matter.

When we set out to do the best we can do, it is inevitable that great opportunity finds us because we are doing what truly makes us happy. We’re in alignment and ready for the opportunities that life puts in our path.

Aligning your behavior is manifesting in action. The things you do day to day, the way you behave, the way you act, and the way you treat yourself: It all matters. The universe is responding to everything that you do.

Nature is self-renewing as it adjusts to maintain balance. Nature becomes even more vibrant as it yields to allow recycling. It is best to align with success and become nature with your health, wealth, and relationships.

The truth is that Percy has always been important to me, long before I fell so hard for him there was an audible crash. It's only lately that his knee bumping mine under a narrow pub table leaves me fumbling for words. A small shift in the gravity between us and suddenly all my stars are out of alignment, planets knocked from their orbits, and I'm left stumbling, without map or heading, through the bewildering territory of being in love with your best friend.

I learned this truth; we cannot simultaneously be our best selves and avoid pissing off people. When we align our actions with the divine, good, orderly direction we seek, some folks will not like that we are changing the dance steps.

It’s the same feeling we get when we realize the summer is gone and now it is winter again and we didn’t go to the beach and the gym and camping and all the other things we promised ourselves we would do, any more often than we did the summer before. And now we have no choice—our birthday is here again whether we like it or not—so we gamely celebrate it, making the most of it, hiding our dread of mortality behind a cake and a card. Here is something amazing: When you fill every day with the best memories you can possibly make, when you visualize the life you want to live and then move toward it no matter what the cost, that twinge of regret is forever gone. You are aligned. You are exactly where you need to be. You can’t see the future, but that’s okay. You just take another step forward into the mystery, the unknown, knowing that your foot will always hit something. It is a wonderful thing to be free of the feeling of the marching of time; to have the ability to welcome it; to know that all your adventures, small and great, are creating you, a glorious you; to discover that when you love and celebrate your life, others will love and celebrate your life, too.

What was driving you was the trajectory of Well-Being. What was driving you was the understanding that you weren’t born to be dependent on someone else. And you did not come to use someone else as your excuse for not being in alignment.

When people begin to experience the lull of mediocrity, they often question whether they are in the right job. They wonder if there might be another one out there that would better suit them, and that might give them the thrill they once experienced before things went south. They may even act on that impulse, hopping to another job or company, and subsequently find that everything is better for a while. The newness is back, and that craved-for sense of challenge has returned. Problem solved? Actually, no. In many of these situations the job hopper is right back in crisis within a matter of months. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with their new job; it’s because they changed their external situation without changing their mind-set and methods. They were trying to solve an internal problem by changing their external circumstances, which rarely works. You have to begin by finding alignment internally, then question your work environment.

When you are uncomfortable with the tasks you are ignoring in favor of the urgency of the moment, guilt, mental angst, and frustration build up.   To solve this, you need to make a conscious choice between the preplanned and the seemingly urgent at the moment.   Then, renegotiate any timeline agreements with yourself.     This simple and conscious mental alignment combined with the elevated perspective of the weekly review is enough to regain control and relax your mind in the face of daily surprises.

The most believable opinions are those of people who 1) have repeatedly and successfully accomplished the thing in question, and 2) have demonstrated that they can logically explain the cause-effect relationships behind their conclusions. When believability weighting is done correctly and consistently, it is the fairest and the most effective decision-making system. It not only produces the best outcomes but also preserves alignment, since even people who disagree with the decision will be able to get behind it.

Persuasion is not coercion, and it is also not an attempt to defeat your intellectual opponent with facts or moral superiority, nor is it a debate with a winner or a loser. Persuasion is leading a person along in stages, helping them to better understand their own thinking and how it could align with the message at hand. You can’t persuade another person to change their mind if that person doesn’t want to do so, and as you will see, the techniques that work best focus on a person’s motivations more than their conclusions.

Anyone who prefers owning a part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company’s value in the future. Equity can’t create perfect incentives, but it’s the best way for a founder to keep everyone in the company broadly aligned.

I am an extension of Source Energy, who has practiced my vibrational frequency into such alignment with my true nature that anything less than that feels off to me. And because I care about the way I feel, I guide myself easily now toward the things that feel good. And therefore, I am always on my path.

We have an unshakeable conviction that the long-term interests of shareowners are perfectly aligned with the interests of customers.”2 In other words, while it’s true that shareholder value stems from growth in profit, Amazon believes that long-term growth is best produced by putting the customer first.

This kind of circumscribed liberalism, which ends at your property line, not only denied low-income Americans access to some of the nation’s best public schools and safest streets: It also meant that working-class white families were asked to bear the costs of integration in a way that white professionals never were. This bred among blue-collar whites a festering resentment toward elites and their institutions—the university and its science, professional journalism and its standards, government and its decorum—which gave rise to a new political alignment and a new politicized anger still very much with us today.

Csikszentmihalyi teamed up with two other leading psychologists—Howard Gardner at Harvard, and William Damon at Stanford—to study these changes, and to see why some professions seemed healthy while others were growing sick. Picking the fields of genetics and journalism as case studies, they conducted dozens of interviews with people in each field. Their conclusion32 is as profound as it is simple: It’s a matter of alignment. When doing good (doing high-quality work that produces something of use to others) matches up with doing well (achieving wealth and professional advancement), a field is healthy. Genetics, for example, is a healthy field because all parties involved respect and reward the very best science. Even though pharmaceutical companies and market forces were beginning to inject vast amounts of money into university research labs in the 1990s, the scientists whom Csikszentmihalyi, Gardner, and Damon interviewed did not believe they were being asked to lower their standards, cheat, lie, or sell their souls. Geneticists believed that their field was in a golden age in which excellent work brought great benefits to the general public, the pharmaceutical companies, the universities, and the scientists themselves.

And thus one of the key lessons that a lieutenant needs to absorb boils down to this: listen to the people who you’re leading so that they feel like they have a voice, even if they don’t actually have a voice, but never lose sight of the fact that your primary concern is not the men but the mission. Lieutenant Andrew Bundermann Sometimes it’s the case that the mission’s best interest aligns with that of the men. Sometimes it isn’t. Regardless, an officer’s primary concern starts and ends with the mission. So while it’s important to listen to your men, you’re not there to make friends, because you don’t always have their best interests front of mind. I

In Summation A poem by Taylor Swift At this hearing I stand before my fellow members of the Tortured Poets Department With a summary of my findings A debrief, a detailed rewinding For the purpose of warning For the sake of reminding As you might all unfortunately recall I had been struck with a case of a restricted humanity Which explains my plea here today of temporary i n s a n i t y You see, the pendulum swings Oh, the chaos it brings Leads the caged beast to do the most curious things Lovers spend years denying what’s ill fated Resentment rotting away galaxies we created Stars placed and glued meticulously by hand next to the ceiling fan Tried wishing on comets. Tried dimming the shine. Tried to orbit his planet. Some stars never align. And in one conversation, I tore down the whole sky Spring sprung forth with dazzling freedom hues Then a crash from the skylight bursting through Something old, someone hallowed, who told me he could be brand new And so I was out of the oven and into the microwave Out of the slammer and into a tidal wave How gallant to save the empress from her gilded tower Swinging a sword he could barely lift But loneliness struck at that fateful hour Low hanging fruit on his wine stained lips He never even scratched the surface of me. None of them did. “In summation, it was not a love affair!” I screamed while bringing my fists to my coffee ringed desk It was a mutual manic phase. It was self harm. It was house and then cardiac arrest. A smirk creeps onto this poet’s face Because it’s the worst men that I write best. And so I enter into evidence My tarnished coat of arms My muses, acquired like bruises My talismans and charms The tick, tick, tick of love bombs My veins of pitch black ink All’s fair in love and poetry Sincerely, The Chairman of The Tortured Poets Department

The impact we have on others and the world around us is our legacy. For better or for worse, each of us affects our community and the planet we live on, even through the actions of our everyday lives. If we want our impact to be a positive one, we need to remember that what we do matters - but how we do it, the joy we bring to it, and how it aligns with our best selves, also matters.

Rob tries to help and uses his hand to apply direct pressure to his face to stop bleeding. Sergeant Funches is dismayed to see Disney’s hand disappear into his face. Rob’s facial nerves are not working, and he can’t feel what’s going on. Funches removes Disney’s hand, repositions the flap of hanging face to its correct anatomical alignment, and places Sergeant Disney’s own hand on the best spot to apply pressure and stop the bleeding.

When you aren’t being true to yourself, it’s impossible to feel confident in your own skin. It’s very uncomfortable to pretend to be something you’re not, and it becomes nearly impossible to live up to your potential because you’re so focused on keeping up the façade. True success comes when you use your talents and your genuine kindness to do work that is aligned with your values and passions. This is how you can leverage all of the best parts of you.

As people come to understand the environmental damages being caused by carbon and industry pollutants, there is a call for "full-cost accounting." This is an effort to include the adverse environmental costs of manufacturing and other production in the price of producing those items--from the cost of cleanup to the health impacts of carbon pollution. Currently, companies' profit-and-loss statements don't account for these and other costs, which are paid for by us all, and disproportionately by the poor and vulnerable. By failing to pay for the real cost of production, by misrepresenting or ignoring the vast consequences of some of their work, certain businesses and corporations have pursued paths that are at odds with the interests of society. A greater movement toward full-cost accounting is critical if we are going to align business decisions with what is in the best interests of future generations...

Somatic awakening opens us to feeling, sensing, and taking action. It allows us to abandon old ways of behaving that may be outdated or no longer in our best interest and to adopt new ways more aligned with personal values and well-being. A body in touch with its own being is alive to the moment and open to shedding old skin for new, aware, too, that such shedding, a dynamic process of our aliveness, is taking place subcutaneously regardless of our approval.

In Hong Kong, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera”, in which the hero must wait until his seventies before being united with his beloved. In a moment of Melancholy, I inscribed my copy: Angelina, I will love you always. Adam and sent it to her, via Jacinta. It was an unhealthy book for me to have read at that time, and to have then inflicted on Angelina. Just wait long enough and somehow the right people will die. The starts will align, we’ll get over ourselves and we’ll be together. And in the meantime, what?

And he was right. Because Carlos De Vil’s brain, by way of comparison, was almost as big as Cruella De Vil’s fur-coat closet. That’s what Carlos tried to tell himself, anyway, especially when people were making him run the tombs. His first class today was Weird Science, one he always looked forward to. It was where he’d originally gotten the idea to put his machine together, from the lesson on radio waves. Carlos was not the only top student in the class—he was tied, in fact, with the closest thing he had to a rival in the whole school: the scrawny, bespectacled Reza. Reza was the son of the former Royal Astronomer of Agrabah, who had consulted with Jafar to make sure the stars aligned on more than one nefarious occasion, which was how his family had found their way to the Isle of the Lost with everyone else. Weird Science was the class where Carlos always worked the hardest. The presence of Reza, who was every bit as competitive in science lab as he was, only made Carlos work that much harder. And as annoying as everyone found Reza to be—he always had to use the very biggest words for everything, whether they were used correctly and whether he was inserting a few extra syllables where they might or might not belong—he was still smart. Very smart. Which meant Carlos enjoyed besting him. Just the other week they had been working on a special elixir, and Reza had been annoyed that Carlos had figured out the secret ingredient first. Yeah, Reza was almost as smart as he was irritating. Even now he was raising his hand, waving it wildly back and forth. Their professor, the powerful sorcerer Yen Sid,

Through the perfectly-formed chalice archetype, one discovers the fountainhead of reality: that one’s Original Grace (consciousness’s units of sand flowing and shaping themselves to form the chalice of reality) creates the divine alignment. Because of the Psychic Informational Dynamics of Consciousness, if the Outer Ego becomes too isolated or disparaged, dreams will remind of its alignment with the Greater Self’s deeply-held archetypes. Such a unifying system allows one to forever evolve their unique creativity while remaining part of the Universal (God) Force.

every emotion that supposedly differentiates romance can be found in other emotional settings. Sensitivity, attachment, and caring are part of any healthy relationship. People who are polyamorous have multiple romantic partners without the desire for exclusivity. Infatuation might be the factor that aligns most closely with widespread ideas of what romantic love feels like, yet it's common to idealize a new acquaintance or feel possessive when a best friend becomes close with someone else, and romantic love doesn't automatically turn platonic once early energy wears off.

billionaire Jeff Hoffman recently spoke at one of the Quantum Leap Mastermind retreats that my business partner, Jon Berghoff, and I cohost, and of the many takeaways that I wrote down, the following stood out most: “You can’t win a gold medal at more than one [sport].” Let that sink in for a minute. Most Olympic athletes spend their entire lives focused on developing themselves to be best in the world at one thing. And remember what we learned in the last chapter, that when you choose and commit to one mission, achieving your other goals will become more probable, because you will be living in alignment with your highest priority.

At my Christian elementary school, we sang, “Jesus loves the little children…red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight.” In alignment with this song, white people often professed, “I don’t even see color,” reassuring me that I would be safe from racism with them. And yet, I learned pretty early in life that while Jesus may be cool with racial diversity, America is not. The ideology that whiteness is supreme, better, best, permeates the air we breathe—in our schools, in our offices, and in our country’s common life. White supremacy is a tradition that must be named and a religion that must be renounced. When this work has not been done, those who live in whiteness become oppressive, whether intentional or not.

Robust social movements offer an opposing view. We argue that all the aspects of our lives—where and how we live and work, eat, entertain ourselves, get around, and get by are sites of injustice and potential resistance. At our best, social movements create vibrant social networks in which we not only do work in a group, but also have friendships, make art, have sex, mentor and parent kids, feed ourselves and each other, build radical land and housing experiments, and inspire each other about how we can cultivate liberation in all aspects of our lives. Activism and mutual aid shouldn’t feel like volunteering or like a hobby—it should feel like living in alignment with our hopes for the world and with our passions. It should enliven us.

The art of staying motivated, being happy, and continually improving oneself is a dynamic interplay that shapes a fulfilling life journey. Motivation is not a fleeting emotion but a sustained commitment to finding purpose and inspiration in daily pursuits. Happiness, the compass of well-being, emanates from a life aligned with personal values, while self-improvement serves as the engine propelling you towards your best self. To be better and stronger necessitates resilience, a dedication to continuous learning, and the wisdom to discern toxic individuals and political ideologies that may hinder your progress. Surrounding yourself with positivity and steering clear of toxicity is not just a lifestyle choice; it is a deliberate strategy for crafting a life of fulfillment and purpose.

Through the years, many people have asked me why I set up Khan Academy as a nonprofit. After all, my previous career was very for-profit, and I live in the middle of Silicon Valley, where scalable tech-enabled solutions can be worth a lot of money. Many have been skeptical whether a nonprofit could even compete with for-profit companies. There were two notions I couldn’t get out of my head, however. First, I tend to believe in market forces, but there are a few sectors—namely, education and health care—where the outcomes of market forces don’t always align with our values. Education and health care are two areas where our shared values tell us that, ideally, family resources shouldn’t be a limiting factor in accessing the best possible opportunities. Most of us believe that every mind and life deserves to reach its full potential.

If you’re still struggling to recognize your Something Larger, research has found a few strategies that can help: Try writing your own obituary or a “life summary” through the eyes of a grandchild or a student. Ask your closest friends to describe the “real you,” the characteristics of your personality and your life that are at the core of your best self. Imagine that someone you care about is going through a dark moment in their life—they’ve experienced significant loss and feel helpless and isolated (the two things that drain us of meaning fastest). As your best self, write that person a letter to support them through this difficult time. Then reread it. It’s for you.18 Finally, think of a time when you experienced an intense sense of meaning or purpose or “alignment” or whatever it feels like for you. What were you doing? What was it that created that sense of meaning?

The truth is every single one of us possesses lights and shadows. And everything serves us on some level. Other people have their freedom to choose how they think, feel, believe and act. We need not be offended by anything anyone else says or does. By law, some actions will bring natural consequences that are less-than-pleasant. These natural laws govern reality ... whether we understand, know about, or believe in them or not. The core truth is that freedom comes when we stop worrying about what other people think, feel, or believe; and concern ourselves with our own integrity, our own personal responsibility and our own alignment with the natural laws that govern freedom. As we move out of blame, shame and victimhood, we come to a place of true personal empowerment and freedom. We come to understand that we cannot personally be free until we respect the freedom of every other person on this planet. We cannot fully express our highest and best selves until we respect other people's law-abiding-right to express themselves.

Lord, I intend to be aware today of the presence of your divine being in every other living being that I encounter. I intend to center my spirit in alignment with the spirit of Love before I commence my day. I intend to ground my being in your source, Universal Intentional Love Energy, recognizing my role as a cell in the body of the universe. I intend to be loving and compassionate with every person I encounter today, observing their activities in the context of their growth, and not judging their decisions as good or bad. I intend not to attempt to blame or shame other people, but rather to encourage and support. I intend to be creative today, emulating the divine creative essence in my life. I intend to be joyful today, aware of what good things I have, picking up the scent of wonder, and breathing in the good things with thanks and appreciation. I intend to reject any opinion of other people offered which negatively affects my ability to achieve the above goals. I am blessed and will be grateful for the presence of love in my life. I will grow today, learning more and applying love to the best of my ability.

Harris: Let’s talk about how the AI future might look. It seems to me there are three paths it could take. First, we could remain fundamentally in charge: that is, we could solve the value-alignment problem, or we could successfully contain this god in a box. Second, we could merge with the new technology in some way—this is the cyborg option. Or third, we could be totally usurped by our robot overlords. It strikes me that the second outcome, the cyborg option, is inherently unstable. This is something I’ve talked to Garry Kasparov about. He’s a big fan of the cyborg phenomenon in chess. The day came when the best computer in the world was better than the best human—that is, Garry. But now the best chess player in the world is neither a computer nor a human, but a human/computer team called a cyborg, and Garry seemed to think that that would continue for quite some time. Tegmark: It won’t. Harris: It seems rather obvious that it won’t. And once it doesn’t, that option will be canceled just as emphatically as human dominance in chess has been canceled. And it seems to me that will be true for every such merger. As the machines get better, keeping the ape in the loop will just be adding noise to the system.

Dr. Syngmann: But someone must have made it all. Don't you think so, John? Pastor Jón: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and so on, said the late pastor Lens. Dr. Syngmann: Listen, John, how is it possible to love God? And what reason is there for doing so? To love, is that not the prelude to sleeping together, something connected with the genitals, at its best a marital tragedy among apes? It would be ridiculous. People are fond of their children, all right, but if someone said he was fond of God, wouldn't that be blasphemy? Pastor Jón once again utters that strange word 'it' and says: I accept it. Dr. Syngmann: What do you mean when you say you accept God? Did you consent to his creating the world? Do you think the world as good as all that, or something? This world! Or are you all that pleased with yourself? Pastor Jón: Have you noticed that the ewe that was bleating outside the window is now quiet? She has found her lamb. And I believe that the calf here in the homefield will pull through. Dr. Syngmann: I know as well as you do, John, that animals are perfect within their limits and that man is the lowest rung in the reverse-evolution of earthly life: one need only compare the pictures of an emperor and a dog to see that, or a farmer and the horse he rides. But I for my part refuse to accept it. Pastor Jón Prímus: To refuse to accept it - what is meant by that? Suicide or something? Dr. Syngmann: At this moment, when the alignment with a higher humanity is at hand, a chapter is at last beginning that can be taken seriously in the history of the earth. Epagogics provide the arguments to prove to the Creator that life is an entirely meaningless gimmick unless it is eternal. Pastor Jón: Who is to bell the cat? Dr. Syngmann: As regards epagogics, it is pleading a completely logical case. In six volumes I have proved my thesis with incontrovertible arguments; even juridically. But obviously it isn't enough to use cold reasoning. I take the liberty of appealing to this gifted Maker's honour. I ask Him - how could it ever occur to you to hand over the earth to demons? The only ideal over which demons can unite is to have a war. Why did you permit the demons of the earth to profess their love to you in services and prayers as if you were their God? Will you let honest men call you demiurge, you, the Creator of the world? Whose defeat is it, now that the demons of the earth have acquired a machine to wipe out all life? Whose defeat is it if you let life on earth die on your hands? Can the Maker of the heavens stoop so low as to let German philosophers give Him orders what to do? And finally - I am a creature you have created. And that's why I am here, just like you. Who has given you the right to wipe me out? Is justice ridiculous in your eyes? Cards on the table! (He mumbles to himself.) You are at least under an obligation to resurrect me!

crucial that we acknowledge two cardinal truths. First, whining and complaining about unfavorable conditions does nothing to resolve them. Second, it can too easily introduce a host of negative emotions that result in further despair and disappointment. Maintaining a positive mindset is pivotal to facing adversity with courage. Each morning, reflect on things that have gone right for you. Each afternoon, think about everything you have for which to be thankful. Each evening, before you go to bed, contemplate the small victories you enjoyed throughout the day. Practice gratitude daily. Habit #5: Build a tolerance for change. Mental toughness requires that you be flexible to your circumstances. When things go wrong, you must be able to adapt in order to act with purpose. Most of us dread change. We enjoy predictability because it reduces uncertainty. Fear of uncertainty is one of the chief impediments to taking purposeful action. Building this habit entails leaving your comfort zone. It calls for actively seeking changes that you can incorporate into your life. The upside is that doing so will desensitize you to changing circumstances, increasing your tolerance for them. As your tolerance increases, your fear will naturally erode. The great thing about habit development is that you can advance at your own pace. Again, it’s best to start with small steps and progress slowly. But each of us is different with regard to what “small” and “slowly” mean. Design a plan that aligns with your existing routines and caters to your available time, attention, and energy. EXERCISE #6 Write down three habits you’d like to develop. Next to each one, write down

Just how important a close moment-to-moment connection between mother and infant can be was illustrated by a cleverly designed study, known as the “double TV experiment,” in which infants and mothers interacted via a closed-circuit television system. In separate rooms, infant and mother observed each other and, on “live feed,” communicated by means of the universal infant-mother language: gestures, sounds, smiles, facial expressions. The infants were happy during this phase of the experiment. “When the infants were unknowingly replayed the ‘happy responses’ from the mother recorded from the prior minute,” writes the UCLA child psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel, “they still became as profoundly distressed as infants do in the classic ‘flat face’ experiments in which mothers-in-person gave no facial emotional response to their infant’s bid for attunement.” Why were the infants distressed despite the sight of their mothers’ happy and friendly faces? Because happy and friendly are not enough. What they needed were signals that the mother is aligned with, responsive to and participating in their mental states from moment to moment. All that was lacking in the instant video replay, during which infants saw their mother’s face unresponsive to the messages they, the infants, were sending out. This sharing of emotional spaces is called attunement. Emotional stress on the mother interferes with infant brain development because it tends to interfere with the attunement contact. Attunement is necessary for the normal development of the brain pathways and neurochemical apparatus of attention and emotional selfregulation. It is a finely calibrated process requiring that the parent remain herself in a relatively nonstressed, non-anxious, nondepressed state of mind. Its clearest expression is the rapturous mutual gaze infant and mother direct at each other, locked in a private and special emotional realm, from which, at that moment, the rest of the world is as completely excluded as from the womb. Attunement does not mean mechanically imitating the infant. It cannot be simulated, even with the best of goodwill. As we all know, there are differences between a real smile and a staged smile. The muscles of smiling are exactly the same in each case, but the signals that set the smile muscles to work do not come from the same centers in the brain. As a consequence, those muscles respond differently to the signals, depending on their origin. This is why only very good actors can mimic a genuine, heartfelt smile. The attunement process is far too subtle to be maintained by a simple act of will on the part of the parent. Infants, particularly sensitive infants, intuit the difference between a parent’s real psychological states and her attempts to soothe and protect the infant by means of feigned emotional expressions. A loving parent who is feeling depressed or anxious may try to hide that fact from the infant, but the effort is futile. In fact, it is much easier to fool an adult with forced emotion than a baby. The emotional sensory radar of the infant has not yet been scrambled. It reads feelings clearly. They cannot be hidden from the infant behind a screen of words, or camouflaged by well-meant but forced gestures. It is unfortunate but true that we grow far more stupid than that by the time we reach adulthood.

For most of our history, walking wasn’t a choice. It was a given. Walking was our primary means of locomotion. But, today, you have to choose to walk. We ride to work. Office buildings and apartments have elevators. Department stores offer escalators. Airports use moving sidewalks. An afternoon of golf is spent riding in a cart. Even a ramble around your neighborhood can be done on a Segway. Why not just put one foot in front of the other? You don’t have to live in the country. It’s great to take a walk in the woods, but I love to roam city streets, too, especially in places like New York, London, or Rome, where you can’t go half a block without making some new discovery. A long stroll slows you down, puts things in perspective, brings you back to the present moment. In Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Viking, 2000), author Rebecca Solnit writes that, “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord.” Yet in our hectic, goal-oriented culture, taking a leisurely walk isn’t always easy. You have to plan for it. And perhaps you should. Walking is good exercise, but it is also a recreation, an aesthetic experience, an exploration, an investigation, a ritual, a meditation. It fosters health and joie de vivre. Cardiologist Paul Dudley White once said, “A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.” A good walk is anything but pedestrian. It lengthens your life. It clears, refreshes, provokes, and repairs the mind. So lace up those shoes and get outside. The most ancient exercise is still the best.

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

For me, that translated into fund-raising. I knew that I could and I would raise any amount of money to get that job done. Fund-raising to end hunger wasn’t just a job or a fad or a political statement for me. It was an expression of my own soulful commitment, and as such, I could only do it in a way that would call on people to reconnect with their own higher calling, or soulful longing, to be the kind of people they wanted to be, the kind of difference they wanted to make, and see how they could express that with their money. So rather than feeling that fund-raising was a matter of twisting arms for a donation or playing on emotions to manipulate money from contributors, it became for me an arena in which I was able to create an opportunity for people to engage in their greatness. It was in this soul-searching dimension of fund-raising, in these intimate conversations, that I discovered deep wounds and conflicts in the way people related to their money. Many people felt they had sold out and become someone they didn’t like anymore. Some were forcing themselves to do work that wasn’t meaningful. Many felt enslaved by their experience of being overtaxed by their government, or felt beaten down by their boss or by the burden of running a family business or employing others. Their relationship with money was dead—or, more accurately, dread—and there was hurt there. There was resentment. There were painful compromises, a kind of rawness. People were bruised and battered there. Not everyone, but many people were very unsettled and uncomfortable and just not their best selves in their relationship with money. They felt little or no freedom with money, no matter how much they had. This lackluster relationship with money wasn’t for lack of expert advice or practical tips. Money-management strategies were plentiful, but the concept of personal transformation was a stranger there. What became clear was that when people were able to align their money with their deepest, most soulful interests and commitments, their relationship with money became a place where profound and lasting transformation could occur.

God was still smiling when he went into the guest room for his suitcase. He looked in the closet and under the perfectly made bed. He even pulled out the drawers of the one armoire on the far side of the room, but couldn’t find it. He was about to go back downstairs and ask Day when he turned down the long hall and walked into Day’s master bedroom. His suitcase was tucked neatly in the corner. He pulled it out but immediately knew it was empty. He looked in the first dresser but those were Day’s clothes. The second identical dresser was on the other side and God did a double take at his few toiletries that were neatly aligned on top. God rubbed his hand on the smooth surface and felt his heart clench at how domestic this looked. His and his dressers…really. God yanked off his T-shirt and threw it in the hamper along with Day’s items. He washed up quickly and went back to his dresser to put on a clean shirt. His mouth dropped when he pulled out the dresser drawer. His shirts were neatly folded and placed in an organized arrangement. God went through all five drawers. His underwear, socks, shirts, sweats, all arranged neatly and in its own place. He dropped down on the bed and thought for a minute. At first he was joking, but Day really was domesticating him. Was God ready for that? Sure he loved Day, he’d take a bullet for him, but was he ready to play house? He pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and middle finger at the slight tension forming behind his eyes. God had been completely on his own since he was eighteen. He’d never shared space with anyone—hell, no one had ever wanted to. Fuck. Just last night Day was getting ready to fuck mini Justin Bieber, now he was cooking and cleaning for him and doing his damn laundry. He tried his best to shake off his anxiety. He never used the word love lightly. He meant what he’d said last night. God had only loved three people his entire life and for the past four years only one of them returned that love. Should he really tuck tail and run just because this was new territory? Hell no. All he did was unpack my suitcase. No big deal. He was just being hospitable. Damn sure is better than that seedy hotel. “My boyfriend’s just trying to make me comfortable.” He smirked and tried the term on his tongue again. “I have a boyfriend.” “Get your ass down here and stop overthinking shit! Dinner is getting cold!” Day yelled from the bottom of the stairs.

Less is more. “A few extremely well-chosen objectives,” Grove wrote, “impart a clear message about what we say ‘yes’ to and what we say ‘no’ to.” A limit of three to five OKRs per cycle leads companies, teams, and individuals to choose what matters most. In general, each objective should be tied to five or fewer key results. (See chapter 4, “Superpower #1: Focus and Commit to Priorities.”) Set goals from the bottom up. To promote engagement, teams and individuals should be encouraged to create roughly half of their own OKRs, in consultation with managers. When all goals are set top-down, motivation is corroded. (See chapter 7, “Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork.”) No dictating. OKRs are a cooperative social contract to establish priorities and define how progress will be measured. Even after company objectives are closed to debate, their key results continue to be negotiated. Collective agreement is essential to maximum goal achievement. (See chapter 7, “Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork.”) Stay flexible. If the climate has changed and an objective no longer seems practical or relevant as written, key results can be modified or even discarded mid-cycle. (See chapter 10, “Superpower #3: Track for Accountability.”) Dare to fail. “Output will tend to be greater,” Grove wrote, “when everybody strives for a level of achievement beyond [their] immediate grasp. . . . Such goal-setting is extremely important if what you want is peak performance from yourself and your subordinates.” While certain operational objectives must be met in full, aspirational OKRs should be uncomfortable and possibly unattainable. “Stretched goals,” as Grove called them, push organizations to new heights. (See chapter 12, “Superpower #4: Stretch for Amazing.”) A tool, not a weapon. The OKR system, Grove wrote, “is meant to pace a person—to put a stopwatch in his own hand so he can gauge his own performance. It is not a legal document upon which to base a performance review.” To encourage risk taking and prevent sandbagging, OKRs and bonuses are best kept separate. (See chapter 15, “Continuous Performance Management: OKRs and CFRs.”) Be patient; be resolute. Every process requires trial and error. As Grove told his iOPEC students, Intel “stumbled a lot of times” after adopting OKRs: “We didn’t fully understand the principal purpose of it. And we are kind of doing better with it as time goes on.” An organization may need up to four or five quarterly cycles to fully embrace the system, and even more than that to build mature goal muscle.

supposed weakness on national security. Ours was a brief exchange, filled with unspoken irony—the elderly Southerner on his way out, the young black Northerner on his way in, the contrast that the press had noted in our respective convention speeches. Senator Miller was very gracious and wished me luck with my new job. Later, I would happen upon an excerpt from his book, A Deficit of Decency, in which he called my speech at the convention one of the best he’d ever heard, before noting—with what I imagined to be a sly smile—that it may not have been the most effective speech in terms of helping to win an election. In other words: My guy had lost. Zell Miller’s guy had won. That was the hard, cold political reality. Everything else was just sentiment. MY WIFE WILL tell you that by nature I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things. When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously; I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses. When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all take a deep breath. When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate in the current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personal attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in a Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a bad deal. Still, I am not immune to distress. And like most Americans, I find it hard to shake the feeling these days that our democracy has gone seriously awry. It’s not simply that a gap exists between our professed ideals as a nation and the reality we witness every day. In one form or another, that gap has existed since America’s birth. Wars have been fought, laws passed, systems reformed, unions organized, and protests staged to bring promise and practice into closer alignment. No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem. We know that global competition—not to mention any genuine commitment to the values

This pattern became particularly apparent in the 2000s. In 2002 the presidential election was won by Álvaro Uribe. Uribe had something in common with the Castaño brothers: his father had been killed by the FARC. Uribe ran a campaign repudiating the attempts of the previous administration to try to make peace with the FARC. In 2002 his vote share was 3 percentage points higher in areas with paramilitaries than without them. In 2006, when he was reelected, his vote share was 11 percentage points higher in such areas. If Mancuso and his partners could deliver the vote for Congress and the Senate, they could do so in presidential elections as well, particularly for a president strongly aligned with their worldview and likely to be lenient on them. As Jairo Angarita, Salvatore Mancuso’s deputy and the former leader of the AUC’s Sinú and San Jorge blocs, declared in September 2005, he was proud to work for the “reelection of the best president we have ever had.” Once elected, the paramilitary senators and congressmen voted for what Uribe wanted, in particular changing the constitution so that he could be reelected in 2006, which had not been allowed at the time of his first election, in 2002. In exchange, President Uribe delivered a highly lenient law that allowed the paramilitaries to demobilize. Demobilization did not mean the end of paramilitarism, simply its institutionalization in large parts of Colombia and the Colombian state, which the paramilitaries had taken over and were allowed to keep.

When we align with love and beauty we instantly become the answer to every problem.

Differentiating Yourself  Pursuing a differentiation strategy has merit over pursuing a low-cost strategy. Focusing and sharpening your strengths is a major step in developing competitive advantage—the thing that you can do better than anyone else.  The first step is to take stock of your resources and capabilities and assess whether they match your intentions. Do you have what is called “strategic fit”? Aligning your resources and capabilities with your intentions puts you in the best position for crafting and executing a successful strategy.  To help you achieve this, develop a personal USP, a one-sentence description of what you offer people that few others can match. Now do the same for a trusted friend and exchange the results. This is sometimes the best way of taking your personal skills inventory.

dairy, because of the fat content, promotes weight gain and colds. That is far from the whole story, though. There is a high correlation between dairy consumption and health concerns. For example, as milk is high in fats consuming them means we spend a high amount of our metabolic energy processing them. This leads to weight gain and means that that energy is not available for muscle building. Also, as mentioned, modern farm animals consume large amounts of medicine, steroids and hormones. These also end up concentrated in the milk and dairy produced by those animals. Then when we consume that dairy they end up in us. There they have the same negative health impact as they do in the animal’s meat. And finally, milk proteins from other animals are not the same as those produced by a human mother. This leads to digestive track inflammation. You might have felt this. It's that bloated feeling you get after having had too much chocolate or milk-based desserts. Our human cells can actually rupture as a result of trying to digest these large cells. And so, milk products have many negative health repercussions. They are therefore best avoided. Instead we should aim for protein sources more aligned with what our bodies need, such as nuts and seeds!

Instead, he (and Epictetus and Seneca) focused on a series of questions not unlike the ones we continue to ask ourselves today: “What is the best way to live?” “What do I do about my anger?” “What are my obligations to my fellow human beings?” “I’m afraid to die; why is that?” “How can I deal with the difficult situations I face?” “How should I handle the success or power I hold?” These weren’t abstract questions. In their writings—often private letters or diaries—and in their lectures, the Stoics struggled to come up with real, actionable answers. They ultimately framed their work around a series of exercises in three critical disciplines: The Discipline of Perception (how we see and perceive the world around us) The Discipline of Action (the decisions and actions we take—and to what end) The Discipline of Will (how we deal with the things we cannot change, attain clear and convincing judgment, and come to a true understanding of our place in the world) By controlling our perceptions, the Stoics tell us, we can find mental clarity. In directing our actions properly and justly, we’ll be effective. In utilizing and aligning our will, we will find the wisdom and perspective to deal with anything the world puts before us. It was their belief that by strengthening themselves and their fellow citizens in these disciplines, they could cultivate resilience, purpose, and even joy. Born in the tumultuous ancient world,

Getting to cloud effectively means you need to figure out DevOps, but DevOps is often a re-org, not adding or re-naming a team. The whole organization needs to be recruited and compensated with an aligned strategy and rewards to get the culture right.

Embracing value stream thinking is a mark of an organization that has successfully shifted from siloed thinking (what’s best for me and my team?) to holistic thinking (what’s best for the customer and the company?).

Web Design - Give Your Brand Global Recognition Running a small business seems easy but actually, it is not. Surprised? Well, there’s a lot to look after and accomplish without violating the budget and resources. If you own a small business and planning to take it to new heights, you must begin with a professional web design company. Why? Because to let your audience know about your products and services, you got to make your online presence. To make a visible impact online, you need to give your organization a face, which is possible only with a well-designed website that’s professional yet user-friendly. When a website has to be designed, a number of factors are meant to be considered. Font, images, content, alignment, graphics, loading time and interface are the major factors to be careful about. What else? You need to ensure that your brand’s message is displayed the right way and at the right place. Call-to-action has to be there and the design must be in a way that attracts the audience. Want to know more? Length and number of pages also matter, as they play a great role in the presentation and are responsible to hold the audience. All this must be sounding like a lot of stuff and complicated but it is all easy with the right small business web design company by your side. It will understand your business, its needs, and goals for long-term and come with a website which is liked by the audience the moment they click it. All you need to be careful is finding the company that’s worth time and money you invest. The market is flooded with a number of web designers who boast a lot but are not worth what they say. Hiring the wrong designers may cause serious consequences for your website and eventually business. To stay away from coming across such ugly experiences, take enough time and settle for the best professionals. Check their previous work, feedback, price plan and expertise before finalizing anything. Keep this brief piece of information in mind and gift your small business the website it deserves. Good Luck!

Here’s a proven sales meeting checklist of pre-meeting, during meeting, and post-meeting best practices and tips to follow and live by every day: Have clear meeting goals and expected outcomes documented and stated in email before and after meetings. Put agendas that are agreed to by your customers in meeting calendar invites. Meeting agendas should start with introductions and customers’ priorities/challenges review. Meeting agendas should close with discussion and time for questions. Research the company and recent announcements and know how their business is doing. Understand the context of their industry, too. Research the people attending your meeting and identify shared interests and shared executive connections. Connect with meeting attendees on LinkedIn before meeting. Some people believe this should be done after a meeting. My point of view is that it’s an important touch point when a prospect accepts your request to connect. Make the connection, and use your connection’s response and speed of response as a gauge of their awareness. If they connect fast, then it may mean they are excited to meet with you. If they don’t connect quickly, it could mean it’s not top of mind. Both are important to know. Don’t forget to personalize the message. Reconfirm agenda and meeting attendee participation. It’s good to do this the day before the meeting is scheduled to happen. Prepare a list of discovery and qualification questions to ask the prospect. The questions should preferably be open ended. Share the questions with your internal team to get alignment. It’s a requirement and best practice to brief executives attending the meeting with you beforehand. Share with your executives the context, current situation, and everything you learned during company, industry, and executive research. Your executives are busy. Help them help you. Be clear on what their role in the meeting is. Introduce meeting attendees at meeting outset, and let everyone have a voice. Go around and have people share their role and what they hope to get out of the meeting. Take thorough notes, capturing your customer’s words. Listen more and talk less. Watch the clock to begin and end meetings as promised. Leave time for questions and discussion at the end. Recap meeting outcomes and next steps before ending the call. Send meeting follow-up notes with clear action items the same day of the meeting using your customer’s words.

alignment is as much about the process of discussing options, weighing benefits and risks, and reaching an agreement as a leadership team on how best to design the organization to achieve marketplace distinction as it is about the resulting choices. Leaders need to dialogue together to generate creative momentum and climb the path that heads toward new ways of thinking.

When you align your entrepreneurial strengths with the right market and right business idea, you will not only have the best chance to succeed, but the best chance of building a business you love.

When the time came to apply for college, I decided against physics and other technical fields, and ended up at the Stockholm School of Economics, focusing on environmental issues. I wanted to do my small part to make our planet a better place, and felt that the main problem wasn't that we lacked technical solutions, but that we didn't properly use the technology we had. I figured that the best way to affect people's behavior was through their wallets, and was intrigued by the idea of creating economic incentives that aligned individual egoism with the common good. Alas, I soon grew disillusioned, concluding that economics was largely a form of intellectual prostitution where you got rewarded for saying what the powers that be wanted to hear. Whatever a politician wanted to do, he or she could find an economist as advisor who had argued for doing precisely that. Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to increase government spending, so he listened to John Maynard Keynes, whereas Ronald Reagan wanted to decrease government spending, so he listened to Milton Friedman.

We think that there are people who are normal over here, and then there’s the pathological ones who have depression, anxiety, addiction or schizophrenia or Bipolar disorder or ADHD or any number of other conditions. What I see is a continuum; that we are all on a continuum. These traits to one degree or another are present in almost everybody. And it’s a mythology to think that there’s the normal and then there’s the abnormal. According to the research the best place to be a schizophrenic in the world is not North America with all its pharmacopoeia. It’s actually a village in Africa or India - where there’s acceptance, where people make room for your differentness, where connection is not broken but is maintained, where you’re not excluded and ostracized but where you’re welcomed. And where there’s room for you to act out whatever you need to act out or to express whatever you need to express - where the whole community would sing with you or chant with you or hold ceremony with you, and maybe find some meaning in your “craziness”. So, it’s contextual and it’s cultural. So, disease is not an isolated phenomenon of an individual - it’s in fact culturally manufactured or culturally constructed. A society that cuts us off from our spirituality; that cuts us off from society by idealizing individualism, and by destroying social contexts (which is what our society does), ignoring our emotional needs - it’s going to be a society that generates pathology. And I think that has to do with the very nature of the economic system that says that what matters is not who you are, but how you’re valued by others. It’s a materialistic society, which specifically means that what we value is not who people are, but what they produce and what they consume. And the people that neither consume nor produce are shunned to the side and they’re totally devalued. Hence the rejection of the old and the poor because they no longer pursue to produce and they’re not rich enough to consume a lot either. So the very nature of this materialistic society dictates or generates and promotes the separation from ourselves. There is an intelligence - I’m not speaking of an operative creature up there or out there somewhere doing things and deciding things. But there is an intelligence in Nature and creation that if we ignore we create suffering for ourselves and other people. And aligning with that intelligence and aligning with that connection is really how we’re meant to be. Whether we do so consciously or whether we do so because we’re called to do that which manifests compassion, connection and love - that’s the way we’re meant to be. So, recognizing that and striving for that is what I call spirituality. Fundamentally, there’s this spiritual nature that if we ignore it we’re actually ignoring an essential part of ourselves.

Yet for these high, hard goals to really work their magic, Locke and Latham found that certain moderators—the word psychologists use to describe “if-then” conditions—need to be in place. One of the most important is commitment. “You have to believe in what you’re doing,” continues Latham. “Big goals work best when there’s an alignment between an individual’s values and the desired outcome of the goal. When everything lines up, we’re totally committed—meaning we’re paying even more attention, are even more resilient, and are way more productive as a result.

decide for yourself what your proper Sight Alignment, Sight Picture, and techniques are. Do not hold anyone else responsible for your decisions, applications, and use since they bear no responsibility for your personal decisions. Take charge of your own shooting techniques, research your options, and focus on what is best for you, especially about proper sight alignment.   Aiming

The answer and key aiming technique for best accuracy... is to FRONT SIGHT ONLY focus, after your initial cursory Sight Alignment, if you do not use the Flash Sight Picture technique for close-up encounters.