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Knowledge without application is simply knowledge. Applying the knowledge to one’s life is wisdom — and that is the ultimate virtue
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Kasi Kaye Iliopoulos (Living in Light, Love & Truth: You Can Positively Change Your Life by Living in Light, Love, & Truth-Awareness + Reflection + Learning + Application = Wisdom)
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Tough love and brutal truth from strangers are far more valuable than Band-Aids and half-truths from invested friends, who don’t want to see you suffer any more than you have.
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Shannon L. Alder
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She had always thought applying to college would be exciting. Living away from home, meeting so many new people, Learning new things, making a few poor life desicisons....
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Maureen Johnson (13 Little Blue Envelopes (Little Blue Envelope, #1))
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As you go through life, you learn many lessons. Unfortunately these lessons only apply to the specific instances in which you learned them. Therefore you can expect to make horrible mistakes no matter how long you live.
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Jessica Zafra (Chicken Pox for the Soul)
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You don't have to apologize for loving someone or wanting a life that no longer fits your blueprint. The beginning phase of reclaiming your life always starts with apologizing to yourself, then apologizing to others for wasting their time because of your fear based decisions. The truth is when we eliminate fear we often find the real path we were meant to be on.
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Shannon L. Alder
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Acquiring knowledge doesn't bring power into your life, until you apply what you have learned.
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Shannon L. Alder
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I thought of something I learned from reading Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas by Mari Sandoz. Crazy Horse believes that he will be victorious in battle, but if he stops to take spoils from the battlefield, he will be defeated. He tattoos lightning bolts on the ears of his horses so the sight of them will remind him of this as he rides. I tried to apply this lesson to the things at hand, careful not to take spoils that were not rightfully mine.
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Patti Smith (Just Kids)
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Life lessons cannot be applied topically.
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Linda Robinson
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If anybody studying psychology wants a concrete example of what a narcissist looks like, I advise them to consider any man who cheats on his wife. These guys are the textbook me-firsters, the ones who think the rules don't apply to them, the ones who tell themselves as long as she doesn't know, there's no harm done. No woman needs to sleep with these guys. There are so many single self-absorbed narcissists who will fuck you poorly.
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Julie Klausner (I Don't Care About Your Band: Lessons Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters, and Other Guys I've Dated)
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One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in life is this: Do not preemptively take no for an answer. Do not decide your request has been rejected before it officially has. As with so many other lessons that involve assertion, this one applies far more to women than men.
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Curtis Sittenfeld (Rodham)
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Everyday of your life is a another lesson. If you learn the lesson well and apply it; whether positive or negative, you determine what happens in your tomorrow.
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David Kofi Awusi
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Always when I play back my father’s voice,” Maria says, “it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don’t do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply.
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Joan Didion (Play It As It Lays)
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The major lesson Tiggers need to learn is that if they don't control their impulses, their impulses will control them. No matter how much they do, Tiggers are never satisfied because they don't know the feeling of accomplishment that eventually comes when one persistently applies one's will to the attaining of non-immediately-reachable goals.
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Benjamin Hoff (The Te of Piglet)
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But you can't take the bad lessons you learned and apply them to every good thing that comes your way. Because there's nothing about what we have. It's really, really good. You're wonderful, and I love you. Okay, you stupid idiot? So when you've done some thinking and pulled your head out of your stubborn ass, come and find me. You're worth the wait.
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Tessa Bailey (Hook, Line, and Sinker (Bellinger Sisters, #2))
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One semester later I did, indeed, graduate with a 4.0. I had done it. And after that, my GPA did . . . Nothing. I never planned on going to graduate school. I wasn’t applying for jobs that used grades as a measurement. I didn’t need that GPA for any single reason other than to SAY I had it and impress people. I could turn this into an argument for “Let’s reward a high GPA after college in LIFE! Can we get priority seating on Southwest? A free monthly refill at Starbucks? SOMETHING to make four years of my life chasing this arbitrary number WORTH it?!” (Great idea. Never gonna happen.) Or I could argue that if I’d been easier on myself and gotten 10 percent worse grades I could have had 50 percent more friendships and fun. If someone’s takeaway from this story is “Felicia Day said don’t study!,” I’ll punch you in the face. But I AM saying don’t chase perfection for perfection’s sake, or for anyone else’s sake at all. If you strive for something, make sure it’s for the right reasons. And if you fail, that will be a better lesson for you than any success you’ll ever have. Because you learn a lot from screwing up. Being perfect . . . not so much.
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Felicia Day (You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost))
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Wisdom is the lesson learned, applied.
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Rick Beneteau
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It’s not about what happened in the past, it’s about how you respond to what happened in the past. It’s about the lessons you learned and how you’re going to apply those lessons going forward.
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Darrin Donnelly (Old School Grit: Times May Change, But the Rules for Success Never Do (Sports for the Soul Book 2))
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I’m often asked how I take the criticism directed my way. I have three answers: First, if you choose to be in public life, remember Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice and grow skin as thick as a rhinoceros. Second, learn to take criticism seriously but not personally. Your critics can actually teach you lessons your friends can’t or won’t. I try to sort out the motivation for criticism, whether partisan, ideological, commercial, or sexist, analyze it to see what I might learn from it, and discard the rest. Third, there is a persistent double standard applied to women in politics - regarding clothes, body types, and of course hairstyles - that you can’t let derail you. Smile and keep going.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (Hard Choices)
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The past is where you learned the lesson. The future is where you apply the lesson.
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Tracy Malone
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If learning lessons from history is a mark of enlightenment, so is breaking free from it. This applies equally to every religion, caste, creed and group.
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S.L. Bhyrappa (Aavarana: The Veil)
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Wisdom, in short, whose lessons have been represented as so hard to learn by those who never were at her school, only teaches us to extend a simple maxim universally known and followed even in the lowest life, a little farther than that life carries it. And this is, not to buy at too dear a price. Now, whoever takes this maxim abroad with him into the grand market of the world, and constantly applies it to honours, to riches, to pleasures, and to every other commodity which that market affords, is, I will venture to affirm, a wise man.
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Henry Fielding (The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling)
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When Addie had signed up for this course she’d been determined to do whatever it took to get through with a passing grade. She hadn’t expected to enjoy it or even learn from it. Yet the novel they were studying was filled with life lessons that seemed to apply directly to her.
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Debbie Macomber (Mr. Miracle (Angelic Intervention, #10))
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There is a lesson that I learned at twelve - the world does not end at the edge of a quad. There are people outside. The world does not end on the Fourth Level. There are people elsewhere. It took me two years to learn to apply the lesson - that neither does the world end with the Ship. If you want to accept life, you have to accept the whole bloody universe. The universe is filled with people, and there is not a single solitary spear carrier among them.
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Alexei Panshin (Rite of Passage)
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All men are created equal.' That doesn’t mean we are born into equal circumstances, or have the same skills. What we do have in common, though, is the ability to apply ourselves to achieving that which we desire. Each of us has the capacity to dream big, to assess and accept the aspects of our reality that are standing in our way, learn from them, overcome them and succeed.
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Justin Young
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As much as I might have wanted to, I could never change my vote on Iraq. But I could try to help us learn the right lessons from that war and apply them to Afghanistan and other challenges where we had fundamental security interests. I was determined to do exactly that when facing future hard choices, with more experience, wisdom, skepticism, and humility.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (Hard Choices)
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Embrace your past. It's your greatest teacher. When you learn and apply those lessons than it no longer defines your future.
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Sarah Centrella (Hustle Believe Receive: An 8-Step Plan to Changing Your Life and Living Your Dream (51 Stories to Prove It))
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The lessons he learned were diligently applied to modify his methods, resulting in a continuous research loop,
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Wendy Moore (The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery)
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In the arena of life, so many lessons are taught but few are taken and few are applied
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Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
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Case applied the two lessons he had learned at Procter & Gamble: make a product simple and launch it with free samples.
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Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
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So instead of copying, understand why they made the decisions they did. Then apply those insights to your own decisions and your own position.
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Daniel Pecaut (University of Berkshire Hathaway: 30 Years of Lessons Learned from Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger at the Annual Shareholders Meeting)
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You have now learned the valuable lesson, Dee, that law and custom are only there for the common people; they don't apply to exalted persons like me.
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Robert van Gulik (The Haunted Monastery)
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Starting over isn't just a matter of blind trust in the hidden goodness within all of mankind; it is an unfailing trust in the lessons we have learned and our ability to apply them to our future. It stands to reason that never again attempting a path, we were previously defeated along, isn't solely the issue of being mistrusting, but rather being less teachable...
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Stafford Lakay
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Every one of these lessons would serve me well in the years ahead as I began applying the secrets I learned from the long-dead to understanding the stories of the recently murdered. BY
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William M. Bass (Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales)
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here are the main lessons to make each challenge into a source of growth. 1. Don’t avoid conflict, which is your family’s opportunity to learn and grow if you understand where it originates and manage it appropriately. 2. You naturally think compatibility is key to relationship success, and difference brings conflict. In truth, you need enough compatibility to function, but not all that much. What you really need is complementarity to complete you as a person. 3. The culture of a family can get sick from the virus of negativity. This is a basic emotional-management issue, but applied to a group instead of to you as an individual. 4. The secret weapon in all families is forgiveness. Almost all unresolved conflict comes down to unresolved resentment, so a practice of forgiving each other explicitly and implicitly is extremely important. 5. Explicit forgiveness and almost all difficult communication require a policy of honesty. When families withhold the truth, they cannot be close.
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Arthur C. Brooks (Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier)
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When we apply the lessons we've struggled for our whole lives to learn to the lives of people we love, our love becomes judgment—which is toxic. Our fear our daughters will fail leads us to fail them.
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Aspen Matis (Girl in the Woods: A Memoir)
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Those years of anger weren’t just directed inward and towards others, I was also angry with God. As a kid, when I sang songs in the children’s choir and memorized verses in bible study, I was told there was a God who loved and protected us. He was a jealous God and could be angered, yes, but He always showed grace and mercy towards His people. I must not have been one of His people. He never protected me. As a matter of fact, I remember crying and pleading to God to make it stop when I was in DC being raped at five years old. I thought he heard my prayers when I moved to New Jersey. But when the abuse became worse and more frequent, it was easy for me to conclude God’s protection didn’t apply to me.
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Elona Washington (From Ivy League To Stripper Life: 10 Lessons Learned)
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Where did we learn about the American dream? What role models were available to us? You pontificate on the meaning of Michael Chang. Do the lessons passed down to us by books or movies to TV apply to our lives as Asian kids with Asian parents, or do they make us feel inadequate? Why are we always working so hard, proving our smarts, living up to someone else's standards? Maybe it's all a trap. Why are we looking out for help, when it's all around us? We are not men without a culture. We just have to make it ourselves.
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Hua Hsu (Stay True)
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The interrogation and banter [with the IRS auditor] went on until lunch. In the process, Clark learned a valuable lesson that all Americans figure out sooner or later: if the government wants to fuck you, it is only a matter of when and what position they prefer. KY is optional and applied purely at the government's discretion.
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Mark Gilleo (Love Thy Neighbor)
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There are some things you can give another person, and some things you cannot give him, except as he is willing to reach out and take them, and pay the price of making them a part of himself. This principle applies to studying, to developing talents, to absorbing knowledge, to acquiring skills, and to the learning of all the lessons of life.
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Richard L. Evans
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I looked at my son and put my hand on his arm. 'I'd really like to know....What could I have done in the past that would have helped when you were growing up? How could I have been a better mother?'
He thought about it for a few moments and then answered, 'When I was growing up--and even during my difficult years--I would have liked it if you had listened more to my heart than to my words.' ...
Sometimes our children use words or a tone that communicates something completely different from what they are struggling with inside--whether it's fear or insecurity or pain. I realized that this is a great lesson for me to learn and something that could be applied to all my relationships.
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Christopher Yuan (Out of a Far Country: A Gay Son's Journey to God. A Broken Mother's Search for Hope.)
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But you can't take the bad lessons you learned and apply them to every good thing that comes your way. Because there's nothing wrong about what we have. It's really, really good. You're wonderful, and I love you. Okay, you stupid idiot? So when you've done some thinking and pulled your head out of your stubborn ass, come and find me. You're worth the wait.
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Tessa Bailey (Hook, Line, and Sinker (Bellinger Sisters, #2))
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Liebig taught the world two great lessons. The first was that in order to teach chemistry it was necessary that students should be taken into a laboratory. The second lesson was that he who is to apply scientific thought and method to industrial problems must have a thorough knowledge of the sciences. The world learned the first lesson more readily than it learned the second.
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Ira Remsen
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In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest. All that is set forth in books, all that seems so terribly vital and significant, is but an iota of that from which it stems and which it is within everyone’s power to tap. Our whole theory of education is based on the absurd notion that we must learn to swim on land before tackling the water. It applies to the pursuit of the arts as well as to the pursuit of knowledge. Men are still being taught to create by studying other men’s works or by making plans and sketches never intended to materialize. The art of writing is taught in the classroom instead of in the thick of life. Students are still being handed models which are supposed to fit all temperaments, all kinds of intelligence. No wonder we produce better engineers than writers, better industrial experts than painters.
My encounters with books I regard very much as my encounters with other phenomena of life or thought. All encounters are configurate, not isolate. In this sense, and in this sense only, books are as much a part of life as trees, stars or dung. I have no reverence for them per se. Nor do I put authors in any special, privileged category. They are like other men, no better, no worse. They exploit the powers given them, just as any other order of human being. If I defend them now and then — as a class — it is because I believe that, in our society at least, they have never achieved the status and the consideration they merit. The great ones, especially, have almost always been treated as scapegoats.
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Henry Miller (The Books in My Life)
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The Declaration of Independence is not only an American document. It follows on Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as the third great title-deed on which the liberties of the English-speaking people are founded. By it we lost an Empire, but by it we also preserved an Empire. By applying its principles and learning its lesson we have maintained our communion with the powerful Commonwealths our children have established beyond the seas.
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Winston S. Churchill
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We look for happiness in every other thing and being around us. We live in an “if and then” model of happiness. If that happens, then I will be happy. This list of “if and then” never finishes, and we continue through our entire life learning how to be unhappy.”
“Life is a classroom. Learn diligently. Apply the lessons in your life to create joyful experiences; otherwise, you have lost the meaning in living. Share your lessons with others; otherwise, the lessons you learned are lost.
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Rakesh Sethi (Cruising Through Turbulence: An Inspirational Guide for Your Wealth and Wellbeing in Difficult Economic Times and Beyond)
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The fatigue of the climb was great but it is interesting to learn once more how much further one can go on one's second wind. I think that is an important lesson for everyone to learn for it should also be applied to one's mental efforts. Most people go through life without ever discovering the existance of that whole field of endeavor which we describe as second wind. Whether mentally or physically occupied most people give up at the first appearance of exhaustion. Thus they never learn the glory and the exhilaration of genuine effort...
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Agnes Elizabeth née Ernst Meyer
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Wild animals enjoying one another and taking pleasure in their world is so immediate and so real, yet this reality is utterly absent from textbooks and academic papers about animals and ecology. There is a truth revealed here, absurd in its simplicity.
This insight is not that science is wrong or bad. On the contrary: science, done well, deepens our intimacy with the world. But there is a danger in an exclusively scientific way of thinking. The forest is turned into a diagram; animals become mere mechanisms; nature's workings become clever graphs. Today's conviviality of squirrels seems a refutation of such narrowness. Nature is not a machine. These animals feel. They are alive; they are our cousins, with the shared experience kinship implies.
And they appear to enjoy the sun, a phenomenon that occurs nowhere in the curriculum of modern biology.
Sadly, modern science is too often unable or unwilling to visualize or feel what others experience. Certainly science's "objective" gambit can be helpful in understanding parts of nature and in freeing us from some cultural preconceptions. Our modern scientific taste for dispassion when analyzing animal behaviour formed in reaction to the Victorian naturalists and their predecessors who saw all nature as an allegory confirming their cultural values. But a gambit is just an opening move, not a coherent vision of the whole game. Science's objectivity sheds some assumptions but takes on others that, dressed up in academic rigor, can produce hubris and callousness about the world. The danger comes when we confuse the limited scope of our scientific methods with the true scope of the world. It may be useful or expedient to describe nature as a flow diagram or an animal as a machine, but such utility should not be confused with a confirmation that our limited assumptions reflect the shape of the world.
Not coincidentally, the hubris of narrowly applied science serves the needs of the industrial economy. Machines are bought, sold, and discarded; joyful cousins are not. Two days ago, on Christmas Eve, the U.S. Forest Service opened to commercial logging three hundred thousand acres of old growth in the Tongass National Forest, more than a billion square-meter mandalas. Arrows moved on a flowchart, graphs of quantified timber shifted. Modern forest science integrated seamlessly with global commodity markets—language and values needed no translation.
Scientific models and metaphors of machines are helpful but limited. They cannot tell us all that we need to know. What lies beyond the theories we impose on nature? This year I have tried to put down scientific tools and to listen: to come to nature without a hypothesis, without a scheme for data extraction, without a lesson plan to convey answers to students, without machines or probes. I have glimpsed how rich science is but simultaneously how limited in scope and in spirit. It is unfortunate that the practice of listening generally has no place in the formal training of scientists. In this absence science needlessly fails. We are poorer for this, and possibly more hurtful. What Christmas Eve gifts might a listening culture give its forests?
What was the insight that brushed past me as the squirrels basked? It was not to turn away from science. My experience of animals is richer for knowing their stories, and science is a powerful way to deepen this understanding. Rather, I realized that all stories are partly wrapped in fiction—the fiction of simplifying assumptions, of cultural myopia and of storytellers' pride. I learned to revel in the stories but not to mistake them for the bright, ineffable nature of the world.
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David George Haskell (The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature)
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Praise is like sunlight to the warm human spirit; we cannot flower and grow without it. And yet, while most of us are only too ready to apply to others the cold wind of criticism, we are somehow reluctant to give our fellow the warm sunshine of praise. It’s a sad reality that most people would rather criticize others than praise them. It’s sad because praise is what lifts the human spirit and criticism is what brings it down. Why would we make this awful choice? Some believe that by talking badly of other people it will make them in turn feel better about themselves, but this is definitely not the solution. Want to feel better about yourself? Then learn to treat others the way you want to be treated. If you see the good in someone then tell them.
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Joy Jefferson (Carnegie: Carnegie, 70 Greatest Life Lessons)
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What you learn after a long time in math-and I think the lesson applies much more broadly-is that there's always somebody ahead of you, whether they're right there in class with you or not. People just starting out look to people with good theorems, people with some good theorems look to people with lots of good theorems, people with lots of good theorems look to people with Fields Medals, people with Fields Medals look to the "inner circle" Medalists, and those people can always look toward the dead. Nobody ever looks in the mirror and says, "Let's face it, I'm smarter than Gauss." And yet, in the last hundred years, the joined effort of all these dummies-compared-to-Gauss has produced the greatest flowering of mathematical knowledge the world has ever seen.
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Jordan Ellenberg (How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking)
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Mathias remembered that once when he was a boy, he'd gone up to a pile of red apples that lay in the market cart, in the market near Stolberg where his father often took him. He'd always loved apples, and he couldn't resist the temptation of grabbing one out of the pile. He chose the closest, a splendid red piece of fruit that he would never forget because of his overwhelming desire to take it and hide it in the folds of his clothing. A moment after Mathias reached out and snatched it, the pile slid and applies tumbled down all around him. The farmer, who knew his father, would have been satisfied with an apology. But his father, a successful craftsman who was well-known and respected in the town, had insisted on purchasing an entire basketful of apples, because of the trouble Mathias had caused. Mathias got the worst scolding his father had ever given him. Not because of the money, but for the small act of petty thievery, which an upright man like his father would never tolerate. He shouldered his punishment, and in the end was only allowed to eat as single apple from the basket. He spent the night thinking about the pile. He had to remove only one and the whole thing had come down. He wondered if the same thing might happen with any tower, no matter how majestic and imposing it might seem, were someone to remove the right stone from the base.
The thought stayed with him throughout his life. Venice now seemed a lot like that pile of apples. If three murders truly represented an irresistible opportunity, then which nobleman would have seized it, knowing that such a thing would cause La Serenissima and everything it represented to come crashing down?
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Riccardo Bruni (The Lion and the Rose)
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We probably all had the dream, back then, that one day our talent would take us to the big time, and there was nothing wrong with dreaming that dream. That’s what fuels every game of shinny or back-lot baseball in the world. Of course, as you move along in your hockey career, reality begins to set in for most people. The dream begins to slowly fade away with the understanding that you will probably never be playing under the bright lights. But that’s beside the point—that’s not what childhood games are about, anyway. The life lessons we learned about competing remained with us even into adulthood. The types of competitions you engage in as an adult might be different from those you participated in when you were a child, but the rules from childhood still apply. What you learn on the frozen bays and ball fields doesn’t become less relevant, no matter where you end up.
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Bobby Orr (Orr: My Story)
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Having a TV—which gives you the ability to receive information—fails to establish any capacity for sending information in the opposite direction. And the odd one-way nature of the primary connection Americans now have to our national conversation has a profound impact on their basic attitude toward democracy itself. If you can receive but not send, what does that do to your basic feelings about the nature of your connection to American self-government? “Attachment theory” is an interesting new branch of developmental psychology that sheds light on the importance of consistent, appropriate, and responsive two-way communication—and why it is essential for an individual’s feeling empowered. First developed by John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist, in 1958, attachment theory was further developed by his protégée Mary Ainsworth and other experts studying the psychological development of infants. Although it applies to individuals, attachment theory is, in my view, a metaphor that illuminates the significance of authentic free-flowing communication in any relationship that requires trust. By using this new approach, psychologists were able to discover that every infant learns a crucial and existential lesson during the first year of life about his or her fundamental relationship to the rest of the world. An infant develops an attachment pathway based on different patterns of care and, according to this theory, learns to adopt one of three basic postures toward the universe: In the best case, the infant learns that he or she has the inherent ability to exert a powerful influence on the world and evoke consistent, appropriate responses by communicating signals of hunger or discomfort, happiness or distress. If the caregiver—more often than not the mother—responds to most signals from the infant consistently and appropriately, the infant begins to assume that he or she has inherent power to affect the world. If the primary caregiver responds inappropriately and/or inconsistently, the infant learns to assume that he or she is powerless to affect the larger world and that his or her signals have no intrinsic significance where the universe is concerned. A child who receives really erratic and inconsistent responses from a primary caregiver, even if those responses are occasionally warm and sensitive, develops “anxious resistant attachment.” This pathway creates children who feature anxiety, dependence, and easy victimization. They are easily manipulated and exploited later in life. In the worst case, infants who receive no emotional response from the person or persons responsible for them are at high risk of learning a deep existential rage that makes them prone to violence and antisocial behavior as they grow up. Chronic unresponsiveness leads to what is called “anxious avoidance attachment,” a life pattern that features unquenchable anger, frustration, and aggressive, violent behavior.
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Al Gore (The Assault on Reason)
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As he throws himself into one scheme after another, he draws lessons that improve his focus and judgment. He knits what he learns into mental models of investing, which he then uses to size up more complex opportunities and find his way through the weeds, plucking the telling details from masses of irrelevant information to reach the payoff at the end. These behaviors are what psychologists call “rule learning” and “structure building.” People who as a matter of habit extract underlying principles or rules from new experiences are more successful learners than those who take their experiences at face value, failing to infer lessons that can be applied later in similar situations. Likewise, people who single out salient concepts from the less important information they encounter in new material and who link these key ideas into a mental structure are more successful learners than those who cannot separate wheat from chaff and understand how the wheat is made into flour.
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Peter C. Brown (Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning)
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John Wanamaker, founder of the stores that bear his name, once confessed: “I learned thirty years ago that it is foolish to scold. I have enough trouble overcoming my own limitations without fretting over the fact that God has not seen fit to distribute evenly the gift of intelligence.” Wanamaker learned this lesson early, but I personally had to blunder through this old world for a third of a century before it even began to dawn upon me that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don’t criticize themselves for anything, no matter how wrong it may be. Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment. B. F. Skinner, the world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behaviour will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behaviour. Later studies have shown that the same applies to humans. By criticizing, we do not make lasting changes and often incur resentment.
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Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People)
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you, Mr. Rowland.’ Chris taught me a lesson I will never forget – our deep desire to feel important. To help me never forget this rule, I made a sign which reads ‘YOU ARE IMPORTANT.’ This sign hangs in the front of the classroom for all to see and to remind me that each student I face is equally important. The unvarnished truth is that almost all the people you meet feel themselves superior to you in some way, and a sure way to their hearts is to let them realise in some subtle way that you realise their importance, and recognise it sincerely. Remember what Emerson said: ‘Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.’ And the pathetic part of it is that frequently those who have the least justification for a feeling of achievement bolster up their egos by a show of tumult and conceit which is truly nauseating. As Shakespeare put it: ‘. . . man, proud man,/Drest in a little brief authority,/ . . . Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven/As make the angels weep.’ I am going to tell you how business people in my own courses have applied these principles with remarkable results. Let’s take the case of a Connecticut attorney (because of his relatives he prefers not to have his name mentioned). Shortly after joining the course, Mr. R – drove to Long Island with his wife to visit some of her relatives. She left him to chat with an old aunt of hers and then rushed off by herself to visit some of the younger relatives. Since he soon had to give a speech professionally on how he applied the principles of appreciation, he thought he would gain some worthwhile experience talking with the elderly lady. So he looked around the house to see what he could honestly admire. ‘This house was built about 1890, wasn’t it?’ he inquired.
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Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People)
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Looking back on getting fired from Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs said, “It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.” I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limits and that, if you push your limits, you will crash and it will hurt a lot. You will think you have failed—but that won’t be true unless you give up. Believe it or not, your pain will fade and you will have many other opportunities ahead of you, though you might not see them at the time. The most important thing you can do is to gather the lessons these failures provide and gain humility and radical open-mindedness in order to increase your chances of success. Then you press on. My final lesson was perhaps the most important one, because it has applied again and again throughout my life. At first, it seemed to me that I faced an all-or-nothing choice: I could either take on a lot of risk in pursuit of high returns (and occasionally find myself ruined) or I could lower my risk and settle for lower returns. But I needed to have both low risk and high returns, and by setting out on a mission to discover how I could, I learned to go slowly when faced with the choice between two things that you need that are seemingly at odds. That way you can figure out how to have as much of both as possible. There is almost always a good path that you just haven’t discovered yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you. As difficult as this was, I eventually found a way to have my cake and eat it too. I call it the “Holy Grail of Investing,” and it’s the secret behind Bridgewater’s success.
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Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
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Two observations take us across the finish line. The Second Law ensures that entropy increases throughout the entire process, and so the information hidden within the hard drives, Kindles, old-fashioned paper books, and everything else you packed into the region is less than that hidden in the black hole. From the results of Bekenstein and Hawking, we know that the black hole's hidden information content is given by the area of its event horizon. Moreover, because you were careful not to overspill the original region of space, the black hole's event horizon coincides with the region's boundary, so the black hole's entropy equals the area of this surrounding surface. We thus learn an important lesson. The amount of information contained within a region of space, stored in any objects of any design, is always less than the area of the surface that surrounds the region (measured in square Planck units).
This is the conclusion we've been chasing. Notice that although black holes are central to the reasoning, the analysis applies to any region of space, whether or not a black hole is actually present. If you max out a region's storage capacity, you'll create a black hole, but as long as you stay under the limit, no black hole will form.
I hasten to add that in any practical sense, the information storage limit is of no concern. Compared with today's rudimentary storage devices, the potential storage capacity on the surface of a spatial region is humongous. A stack of five off-the-shelf terabyte hard drives fits comfortable within a sphere of radius 50 centimeters, whose surface is covered by about 10^70 Planck cells. The surface's storage capacity is thus about 10^70 bits, which is about a billion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion terabytes, and so enormously exceeds anything you can buy. No one in Silicon Valley cares much about these theoretical constraints.
Yet as a guide to how the universe works, the storage limitations are telling. Think of any region of space, such as the room in which I'm writing or the one in which you're reading. Take a Wheelerian perspective and imagine that whatever happens in the region amounts to information processing-information regarding how things are right now is transformed by the laws of physics into information regarding how they will be in a second or a minute or an hour. Since the physical processes we witness, as well as those by which we're governed, seemingly take place within the region, it's natural to expect that the information those processes carry is also found within the region. But the results just derived suggest an alternative view. For black holes, we found that the link between information and surface area goes beyond mere numerical accounting; there's a concrete sense in which information is stored on their surfaces. Susskind and 'tHooft stressed that the lesson should be general: since the information required to describe physical phenomena within any given region of space can be fully encoded by data on a surface that surrounds the region, then there's reason to think that the surface is where the fundamental physical processes actually happen. Our familiar three-dimensional reality, these bold thinkers suggested, would then be likened to a holographic projection of those distant two-dimensional physical processes.
If this line of reasoning is correct, then there are physical processes taking place on some distant surface that, much like a puppeteer pulls strings, are fully linked to the processes taking place in my fingers, arms, and brain as I type these words at my desk. Our experiences here, and that distant reality there, would form the most interlocked of parallel worlds. Phenomena in the two-I'll call them Holographic Parallel Universes-would be so fully joined that their respective evolutions would be as connected as me and my shadow.
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Brian Greene (The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos)
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Similarly, the brains of mice that have learned many tasks are slightly different from the brains of other mice that have not learned these tasks. It is not so much that the number of neurons has changed, but rather that the nature of the neural connections has been altered by the learning process. In other words, learning actually changes the structure of the brain. This raises the old adage “practice makes perfect.” Canadian psychologist Dr. Donald Hebb discovered an important fact about the wiring of the brain: the more we exercise certain skills, the more certain pathways in our brains become reinforced, so the task becomes easier. Unlike a digital computer, which is just as dumb today as it was yesterday, the brain is a learning machine with the ability to rewire its neural pathways every time it learns something. This is a fundamental difference between a digital computer and the brain. This lesson applies not only to London taxicab drivers, but also to accomplished concert musicians as well. According to psychologist Dr. K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues, who studied master violinists at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music, top concert violinists could easily rack up ten thousand hours of grueling practice by the time they were twenty years old, practicing more than thirty hours per week. By contrast, he found that students who were merely exceptional studied only eight thousand hours or fewer, and future music teachers practiced only a total of four thousand hours. Neurologist Daniel Levitin says, “The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything.… In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.” Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the book Outliers, calls this the “10,000-hour rule.
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Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
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[...]Many of those friends were self-declared socialists - Wester socialists, that is. They spoke about Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Salvador Allende or Ernesto 'Che' Guevara as secular saints. It occurred to me that they were like my father in this aspect: the only revolutionaries they considered worthy of admiration had been murdered.[...]ut they did not think that my stories from the eighties were in any way significant to their political beliefs. Sometimes, my appropriating the label of socialist to describe both my experiences and their commitments was considered a dangerous provocation. [...] 'What you had was not really socialism.' they would say, barely concealing their irritation.
My stories about socialism in Albania and references to all the other socialist countries against which our socialism had measured itself were, at best, tolerated as the embarrassing remarks of a foreigner still learning to integrate. The Soviet Union, China, the German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cuba; there was nothing socialist about them either. They were seen as the deserving losers of a historical battle that the real, authentic bearers of that title had yet to join. My friends' socialism was clear, bright and in the future. Mine was messy, bloody and of the past.
And yet, the future that they sought, and that which socialist states had once embodied, found inspiration in the same books, the same critiques of society, the same historical characters. But to my surprise, they treated this as an unfortunate coincidence. Everything that went wrong on my side of the world could be explained by the cruelty of our leaders, or the uniquely backward nature of our institutions. They believed there was little for them to learn. There was no risk of repeating the same mistakes, no reason to ponder what had been achieved, and why it had been destroyed. Their socialism was characterized by the triumph of freedom and justice; mine by their failure. Their socialism would be brought about by the right people, with the right motives, under the right circumstances, with the right combination of theory and practice. There was only one thing to do about mine: forget it.
[...]But if there was one lesson to take away from he history of my family, and of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances they choose. It is easy to say, 'What you had was not the real thing', applying that to socialism or liberalism, to any complex hybrid of ideas and reality. It releases us from the burden of responsability. We are no longer complicit in moral tragedies create din the name of great ideas, and we don't have to reflect, apologize and learn.
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Lea Ypi (Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History)
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Scientists have found that there are two important genes, the CREB activator (which stimulates the formation of new connections between neurons) and the CREB repressor (which suppresses the formation of new memories). Dr. Jerry Yin and Timothy Tully of Cold Spring Harbor have been doing interesting experiments with fruit flies. Normally it takes ten trials for them to learn a certain task (e.g., detecting an odor, avoiding a shock). Fruit flies with an extra CREB repressor gene could not form lasting memories at all, but the real surprise came when they tested fruit flies with an extra CREB activator gene. They learned the task in just one session. “This implies these flies have a photographic memory,” says Dr. Tully. He said they are just like students “who could read a chapter of a book once, see it in their mind, and tell you that the answer is in paragraph three of page two seventy-four.” This effect is not just restricted to fruit flies. Dr. Alcino Silva, also at Cold Spring Harbor, has been experimenting with mice. He found that mice with a defect in their CREB activator gene were virtually incapable of forming long-term memories. They were amnesiac mice. But even these forgetful mice could learn a bit if they had short lessons with rest in between. Scientists theorize that we have a fixed amount of CREB activator in the brain that can limit the amount we can learn in any specific time. If we try to cram before a test, it means that we quickly exhaust the amount of CREB activators, and hence we cannot learn any more—at least until we take a break to replenish the CREB activators. “We can now give you a biological reason why cramming doesn’t work,” says Dr. Tully. The best way to prepare for a final exam is to mentally review the material periodically during the day, until the material becomes part of your long-term memory. This may also explain why emotionally charged memories are so vivid and can last for decades. The CREB repressor gene is like a filter, cleaning out useless information. But if a memory is associated with a strong emotion, it can either remove the CREB repressor gene or increase levels of the CREB activator gene. In the future, we can expect more breakthroughs in understanding the genetic basis of memory. Not just one but a sophisticated combination of genes is probably required to shape the enormous capabilities of the brain. These genes, in turn, have counterparts in the human genome, so it is a distinct possibility that we can also enhance our memory and mental skills genetically. However, don’t think that you will be able to get a brain boost anytime soon. Many hurdles still remain. First, it is not clear if these results apply to humans.
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Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
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Making A Connection With The Word Of God Now that we’ve discussed the various methods of memorizing, we will move on to what is necessary to prepare for the memorization session itself. When you’re preparing to memorize the first thing that you need to do is read the text to make sure you understand it. It is easier to retain and recall what you memorized if you have full comprehension of what the scriptures are saying. Therefore it is always good to read the scriptures first. When you memorize focus on the meaning of the scripture that it may remain true to you. When you read the word of God certain things will jump out at you. This is God speaking to you through the pages. By memorizing what speaks out to you, you have a heartfelt association linked to the memory. Similar to peg and memorization by association, having a deep heartfelt connection to what you memorize gives your mind something extra to grab onto. It is infinitely more powerful to have a personal heart felt attachment to the verses in order to be able to recall it at the most practical or emotional times. Whereas other methods require a silly mental image or the smell of bacon to associate a verse with which has no emotional connection with you. If we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength then we also should love His word by which we are saved. If then we love His word we will have the heartfelt connection necessary to practically apply the scriptures in a daily walk with Him. However if we do not have a heartfelt connection with the word of God, then we will not apply it at the appropriate times and thus our walks with God will be hindered. Rather than using the other seemingly ridiculous memorizing methods that are out there it is better to focus on the meaning while retaining it for later use. Seeing that it has a special place in your heart you will be able to more accurately recall it at the most necessary times. This is why I teach that you should only memorize what is jumping out at you from the pages. When this happens God is speaking to you through the pages for your daily walk. He uses life experiences mixed with teaching from His “text book” (the bible) to teach you. If then God uses this method to help you retain the scripture and the meaning behind it, shouldn't we also apply it when memorizing? Whatever God is teaching you at the time, He will compare the scriptures to your experiences in life that you’re currently going through. Even as it is written, “These things we also speak, not in words which man's wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.” 1Co 2:13 Understanding this it is good to memorize the subject He is giving us to learn. It will have practical, heartfelt meaning for you and for what you’re going through now. As a result because the meaning was associated with your heart, every time you need to recall this scripture accurately it will pop back up in your mind. A walk with God in His Spirit and His word must be heartfelt. Therefore Beloved, take the time to memorize what God is teaching you. Whatever is speaking true to the current situations of your life, memorize. These current situations God will use for lessons for growth, a troubling situation to overcome, or maybe a doctrinal dispute. If you’re learning new lessons then it’s good to remember these things as a good student of God. If it’s something to overcome always memorize what God has encouraged you with.
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Adam Houge (How To Memorize The Bible Quick And Easy In 5 Simple Steps)
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PART 1-Introduction I:1 A theoretical foundation such as the text is necessary as a background to make these exercises meaningful. Yet it is the exercises which will make the goal possible. An untrained mind can accomplish nothing. It is the purpose of these exercises to train the mind to think along the lines which the course sets forth. 2 The exercises are very simple. They do not require more than a few minutes, and it does not matter where or when you do them. They need no preparation. They are numbered, running from 1 to 365. The training period is one year. Do not undertake more than one exercise a day. 3 The purpose of these exercises is to train the mind to a different perception of everything in the world. The workbook is divided into two sections, the first dealing with the undoing of what you see now and the second with the restoration of sight. It is recommended that each exercise be repeated several times a day, preferably in a different place each time and, if possible, in every situation in which you spend any long period of time. The purpose is to train the mind to generalize the lessons, so that you will understand that each of them is as applicable to one situation as it is to another. 4 Unless specified to the contrary, the exercise should be practiced with the eyes open, since the aim is to learn how to see. The only rule that should be followed throughout is to practice the exercises with great specificity. Each one applies to every situation in which you find yourself and to everything you see in it. Each day’s exercises are planned around one central idea, the exercises themselves consisting of applying that idea to as many specifics as possible. Be sure that you do not decide that there are some things you see to which the idea for the day is inapplicable. The aim of the exercises will always be to increase the application of the idea to everything. This will not require effort. Only be sure that you make no exceptions in applying the idea. 5 Some of the ideas you will find hard to believe, and others will seem quite startling. It does not matter. You are merely asked to apply them to what you see. You are not asked to judge them nor even to believe them. You are asked only to use them. It is their use which will give them meaning to you and show you they are true. Remember only this—you need not believe them, you need not accept them, and you need not welcome them. Some of them you may actively resist. None of this will matter nor decrease their efficacy. But allow yourself to make no exceptions in applying the ideas the exercises contain. Whatever your reactions to the ideas may be, use them. Nothing more than this is required. Lesson 1 - Nothing I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place] means anything. 1 Now look slowly around you, and practice applying this idea very specifically to whatever you see: 2 This table does not mean anything. This chair does not mean anything. This hand does not mean anything. This foot does not mean anything. This pen does not mean anything. 3 Then look farther away from your immediate area, and apply the idea to a wider range: 4 That door does not mean anything. That body does not mean anything. That lamp does not mean anything. That sign does not mean anything. That shadow does not mean anything. 5 Notice that these statements are not arranged in any order, and make no allowance for differences in the kinds of things to which they are applied. That is the purpose of the exercise. The statement is merely applied to anything you see. As you practice applying the idea for the day, use it totally indiscriminately. Do not attempt to apply it to everything you see, for these exercises should not become ritualistic. Only be sure that nothing you see is specifically excluded. One thing is like another as far as the application of the idea is concerned.
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Helen Schucman (A Course in Miracles: Workbook for Students/Manual for Teachers)
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I started to notice similarities between what was good poker strategy and what made for good business strategy, especially when thinking about the separation between short-term thinking (such as focusing on whether I won or lost an individual hand) and long-term thinking (such as making sure I had the right decision strategy). I noticed so many similarities between poker and business that I started making a list of the lessons I learned from playing poker that could also be applied to business:
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Anonymous
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One widespread stereotype about people in Japan is that they're exceptionally dedicated and hardworking, even though some Japanese people say they look like they're working harder than they really are. There is no doubt, though, about their ability to be completely absorbed in a task, or about their perseverance when there is a problem to be solved. One of the first words one learns when starting Japanese lessons is ganbaru, which means "to persevere" or "to stay firm by doing one's best." Japanese people often apply themselves to even the most basic tasks with an intensity that borders on obsession. We see this in all kinds of contexts, from the "retirees" taking meticulous care of their rice fields in the mountains on Nagano to the college students working the weekend shift in convenience stores known as kobinis. If you go to Japan, you'll experience this attention to detail firsthand in almost every transaction.
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Héctor García (Ikigai: Los secretos de Japón para una vida larga y feliz)
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Never run away from your problems they say
They say never run away from your problems just face them and they will make you stronger.
I beg to differ, first of all never run from anything or anyone. There will be a time that you will have to make a choice do I stay and make a go of this or do I walk away with my head held high and never look back. There will also be that time when someone actions leave you with no choice but to back away from them, you don’t hate them you are not mad at them you love them enough to know its better to walk away. Somethings will never ever go back to the ways they were and that’s ok. There is that time that you dig in and make whatever it is you involved in work. So that statement ‘never run away from your problems just face them and they will make you stronger.” does not apply all the time. Every situation is unique in its own right. If it’s meant to be it will no matter what. If it is not meant to be that will become apparent. Never forget the experiences life has taught you and never stop learning life is terrific one minute and sad and hurtful the next minute but be thankful you are alive to still experience Life.
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Charles Elwood Hudson
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A few years ago, we engaged a team of experts to determine the “secret sauce” that propelled those rare leaders, organizations, and movements to success. They discovered five principles that are consistently present when transformational breakthroughs take place. To spark this sort of change, you must: 1. Make a Big Bet. So many people and organizations are naturally cautious. They look at what seemed to work in the past and try to do more of it, leading to only incremental advances. Every truly history-making transformation has occurred when people have decided to go for revolutionary change. 2. Be bold, take risks. Have the guts to try new, unproven things and the rigor to continue experimenting. Risk taking is not a blind leap off a cliff but a lengthy process of trial and error. And it doesn’t end with the launch of a product or the start of a movement. You need to be willing to risk the next big idea, even if it means upsetting your own status quo. 3. Make failure matter. Great achievers view failure as a necessary part of advancing toward success. No one seeks it out, but if you’re trying new things, the outcome is by definition uncertain. When failure happens, great innovators make the setback matter, applying the lessons learned and sharing them with others. 4. Reach beyond your bubble. Our society is in thrall to the myth of the lone genius. But innovation happens at intersections. Often the most original solutions come from engaging with people with diverse experiences to forge new and unexpected partnerships. 5. Let urgency conquer fear. Don’t overthink and overanalyze. It’s natural to want to study a problem from all angles, but getting caught up in questions like “What if we’re wrong?” and “What if there is a better way?” can leave you paralyzed with fear. Allow the compelling need to act to outweigh all doubts and setbacks. These five principles can be summarized in two words: Be Fearless.
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Jean Case (Be Fearless: 5 Principles for a Life of Breakthroughs and Purpose)
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One thing her trip taught, and that is apparent to scientists studying the pronghorn, is the vital importance of “connectivity.” It is a lesson being learned, and preached, by innovative environmental thinkers all over the West, and it applies to many of the region’s threatened species. It comes down to a simple point: wild animals need to roam. It’s true that putting land aside for our national parks may be, to paraphrase Stegner paraphrasing Lord Bryce, the best idea our country ever had, and it’s also true that at this point we have put aside more than 100 million acres of land, a tremendous accomplishment that we should be proud of. But what we are now learning is that parks are not enough. By themselves they are islands—particularly isolated and small islands—the sort of islands where many conservation biologists say species go to die. That would change if the parks were connected, and connecting the parks, and other wild lands, is the mission of an old friend of Ed Abbey’s, Dave Foreman. Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, eventually soured on the politics of the organization he helped create. In recent years he has focused his energy on his Wildlands Project, whose mission is the creation of a great wilderness corridor from Canada to Mexico, a corridor that takes into account the wider ranges of our larger predators. Parks alone can strand animals, and leave species vulnerable, unless connected by what Foreman calls “linkages.” He believes that if we can connect the remaining wild scraps of land, we can return the West to being the home of a true wilderness. He calls the process “rewilding.” Why go to all this effort? Because dozens of so-called protected species, stranded on their eco-islands, are dying out. And because when they are gone they will not return. A few more shopping malls, another highway or gas patch, and there is no more path for the pronghorn. But there is an even more profound reason for trying to return wildness to the West. “We finally learned that wilderness is the arena of evolution,” writes Foreman. Wilderness is where change happens.
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David Gessner (All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West)
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parallel to all other ages, not a chronological series of events. Indeed, one of the great marvels of God’s gracious activity toward us is that it occurs in real time without being prejudiced in favor of any particular age. Just because we are the latest does not mean we are the best. The effects of sin prevent any age—including ours—from being “golden,” at least in the spiritual sense. Every Christian generation learns equally the lessons of Revelation—that God is in control, that the powers of the world are minuscule when compared with God, that God is as likely to work through apparent weakness and failure as through strength and success, and that in the end God’s people will prevail. Revelation is the last book of the Bible. It reveals important truths about the end times. But it is also last in another important sense—it calls on all the hermeneutical courage, wisdom, and maturity one can muster in order to be understood properly. In many ways it serves as a graduation exercise for the NIV Application Commentary Series, an opportunity to fully apply the many lessons we have learned in the Bridging Contexts sections of previous volumes. God’s time is his, not ours. The story of God’s gracious activity on our behalf will be fulfilled in a great and glorious conclusion. But all Christians, everywhere and at all times, have equal access to the time. That access has been and is made possible by God’s message in the book of Revelation. Terry C. Muck Author’s Preface AS A NEW CHRISTIAN recently converted from atheism, I eagerly hurried through Paul’s letters, reaching Revelation as soon as possible. Once I reached it, however, I could hardly understand a word of it. I listened attentively to the first few “prophecy teachers” I heard, but even if they had not contradicted one another, over the years I watched as most of their detailed predictions failed to materialize. Perhaps six years after my conversion, as I began to read Revelation in Greek for the first time, the book came alive to me. Because I was now moving through the text more carefully, I noticed the transitions and the structure, and I realized it was probably addressing something much different from what I had first supposed. At the same time, I catalogued parallels I found between Revelation and biblical prophets like Daniel, Ezekiel, and Zechariah. I also began reading an apocalypse contemporary with Revelation, 4 Ezra (2 Esdras in the Apocrypha), to learn more about the way Revelation’s original, first-century audience may have heard its claims. Yet even in my first two years as a Christian, Revelation and other end-time passages proved a turning point for me. As a young Christian, I was immediately schooled in a particular, popular end-time view, which I respectfully swallowed (the
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Craig S. Keener (Revelation (The NIV Application Commentary Book 20))
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When you learn something new in this course you should immediately go and apply it in practice. That is when you really get to know how well you have learned. The future of the business and all of the people in it are relying on your grasp of this material, so it had better be good”. He looked really serious for a moment or two, then cracked a smile and said brightly “no pressure then!” We all laughed nervously, but we knew the importance of this lesson.
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Erland Bakke (90 Days to Profit: A Proven System To Transform Your Business)
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Why Superbad Worked Superbad worked because Seth and Evan wrote about exactly what they were experiencing at the time. Evan explains, “At the time, all we knew was that we really wanted to get laid, we weren’t getting laid, and we weren’t supercool.” It pays to write what you know. Seth started doing standup when he was 13 years old. He adds: “That’s something that came from standup comedy. There’s a comic named Darryl Lenox who still performs, who is great. I remember he saw me perform. . . . I would try to mimic other comedians like Steven Wright or Seinfeld, like, ‘What’s the deal with Krazy Glue?’ and he said: ‘Dude, you’re the only person here who could talk about trying to get a hand job for the first time. . . . Talk about that!’” Lessons from Judd Apatow EVAN: “I would say the biggest thing we learned from [Judd] is ‘Don’t keep stuff to yourself.’ You’re surrounded by smart people. Bring them in. Get other people’s opinions. Share it with them. And most importantly, emotion is what matters. It’s an emotional journey. . . .” SETH: “. . . I remember one time we were filming a scene in Knocked Up and improvising, or maybe it was even 40-Year-Old Virgin, and the direction he screamed at us—because he screams direction from another room a lot, which is hilarious—was, ‘Less semen, more emotion!’ I think that is actually a good note to apply across the board.” TIM: “You also mentioned that every character has to have a wound of some kind.” EVAN: “That’s a big Judd-ism.” TF: Judd recommended they read The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri (Evan: “If you’re a writer, 60% of it is useless and 40% of it is gold.”), which Judd said was Woody Allen’s favorite writing book.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
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think of the lessons you have learned. Lessons that can be applied to your business over and over again. The secret in business is the same as it is in life. Adaptation. You have to authentically adapt to your current situation. Without the ability to adapt, you won't succeed, you won't thrive, and you won't continue forward.
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Sheila Horgan (Treasured Tea: The Tea Series, Book Sixteen)
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When I was ten years old my father taught me to assess quite rapidly the shifting probabilities on a craps layout: I could trace a layout in my sleep, the field here and the pass line all around, even money on Big Six or Eight, five-for-one on Any Seven. Always when I play back my father’s voice it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don’t do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of the two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply.
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Joan Didion (Play It As It Lays)
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As I near the end of all of that and think back on what I’ve learned, these are the ten principles that strike me as necessary to true leadership. I hope they’ll serve you as well as they’ve served me. Optimism. One of the most important qualities of a good leader is optimism, a pragmatic enthusiasm for what can be achieved. Even in the face of difficult choices and less than ideal outcomes, an optimistic leader does not yield to pessimism. Simply put, people are not motivated or energized by pessimists. Courage. The foundation of risk-taking is courage, and in ever-changing, disrupted businesses, risk-taking is essential, innovation is vital, and true innovation occurs only when people have courage. This is true of acquisitions, investments, and capital allocations, and it particularly applies to creative decisions. Fear of failure destroys creativity. Focus. Allocating time, energy, and resources to the strategies, problems, and projects that are of highest importance and value is extremely important, and it’s imperative to communicate your priorities clearly and often. Decisiveness. All decisions, no matter how difficult, can and should be made in a timely way. Leaders must encourage a diversity of opinion balanced with the need to make and implement decisions. Chronic indecision is not only inefficient and counterproductive, but it is deeply corrosive to morale. Curiosity. A deep and abiding curiosity enables the discovery of new people, places, and ideas, as well as an awareness and an understanding of the marketplace and its changing dynamics. The path to innovation begins with curiosity. Fairness. Strong leadership embodies the fair and decent treatment of people. Empathy is essential, as is accessibility. People committing honest mistakes deserve second chances, and judging people too harshly generates fear and anxiety, which discourage communication and innovation. Nothing is worse to an organization than a culture of fear. Thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness is one of the most underrated elements of good leadership. It is the process of gaining knowledge, so an opinion rendered or decision made is more credible and more likely to be correct. It’s simply about taking the time to develop informed opinions. Authenticity. Be genuine. Be honest. Don’t fake anything. Truth and authenticity breed respect and trust. The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection. This doesn’t mean perfectionism at all costs, but it does mean a refusal to accept mediocrity or make excuses for something being “good enough.” If you believe that something can be made better, put in the effort to do it. If you’re in the business of making things, be in the business of making things great. Integrity. Nothing is more important than the quality and integrity of an organization’s people and its product. A company’s success depends on setting high ethical standards for all things, big and small. Another way of saying this is: The way you do anything is the way you do everything.
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Robert Iger (The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company)
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The more you are receptive to learning from your mistakes, the better you can apply the lessons in your life.
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Roopleen
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If you want to be favoured and fruitful in life, first of all, work on your Faith.
Learn to apply Faith even to the little things. You will be happy to realize that Faith works in your favour.
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Gift Gugu Mona (The Essence of Faith: Daily Inspirational Quotes)
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Life is constantly teaching us lessons. The question is are we listening, learning and applying them?
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Rasheed Ogunlaru
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I don't know why human life seems to require suffering for growth to take place, or why things have to be taken away from us if we are to expand. The pattern branded on the human heart seems to be that only pain brings lasting change, that we must learn how to grieve if we want to truly celebrate, that we have to get lost in order to be found again. The lesson of the grape seems to apply here: in order to get the life out, something has to be crushed.
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Adam McHugh
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You can't take the bad lessons you learned and apply them to every good thing that comes your way.
You can't live your life worrying about what people will think
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Tessa Bailey (Hook, Line, and Sinker (Bellinger Sisters, #2))
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To remain relevant and relatable, learn something new every day. Keep researching and exploring. Keep asking questions. Live new experiences. Read and file content every day. Love what you do. And always update any lesson you intend to teach more than once. Your content will keep getting better only if you keep getting better. If you’re continually growing, you will never run out of content, and you will always have something worth saying.
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John C. Maxwell (The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication: Apply Them and Make the Most of Your Message)
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someone said, “Experience is the best teacher.” Not only is that not helpful, it isn’t true. If experience were the best teacher, everyone who got older would get better. But they don’t. Experience is the best teacher only if you evaluate it, learn from it, and apply the lessons to your life!
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John C. Maxwell (The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication: Apply Them and Make the Most of Your Message)
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You are not the kind of woman any rule applies to. You are the exception. You are the only one they’re meant to be broken for.
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Kandi Steiner (Learn Your Lesson (Kings of the Ice, #3))
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Black students at a predominantly white university, for example, might be particularly prone to feel that they don’t fit in or belong at that university, especially if they experience an academic setback, as many students do in their first semester. If so, then an intervention designed to redirect their narratives from “I don’t fit in here” to “Everyone experiences bumps in the road” might increase their sense of belonging and improve their academic performance. To find out, researchers conducted a study with black and white first-year students at a predominantly white university. In the treatment condition, the students received statistics and read interviews with upper-class students indicating that most students worry that they don’t belong when they begin college, but that these worries lessen over time. To reinforce this message, the students wrote a speech illustrating how this lesson applied to them; that is, how their own worries about belonging were likely to be temporary. They delivered this speech in front a video camera, ostensibly so that it could be shown to future students at their school. Participants in the control group underwent the same procedure, except that they learned that social and political attitudes change over the course of one’s college career—they heard nothing about changes in one’s sense of belonging. The entire session lasted only an hour. Yet, as with other story-editing interventions, it had dramatic long-term effects on the black students’ performance and well-being. Those who got the message about belonging, relative to those in the control group, believed they fit in better at college, became more engaged in college academically (by studying more, attending more review sessions, and asking more questions in class), and achieved better grades in the rest of their college careers. Not only that, but on a questionnaire they completed right before they graduated, black students who had received the “belonging” intervention reported that they were in better health, had visited a doctor fewer times, and were happier than did black students in the control group. The “belonging” message had no effect on the white students, because most of them already felt that they fit in at their university.22
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Timothy D. Wilson (Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By)
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And most important, start applying what you are learning. Remember, to learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
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While it would be nice to use these nine principles as a checklist or formula, they are by no means sacred. Over the years, strategists have suggested a number of others, at least one of which is worthy of discussion here because it so strongly applies to law enforcement tactical operations. The principle of legitimacy is sometimes called the “10th Principle of War.” It identifies the absolute necessity of maintaining the confidence of the community of the lawfulness and morality of actions. The U.S. military learned the significance of this principle the hard way when they lost the support of the American people for the Vietnam War and ultimately withdrew. The lesson should not be lost on domestic law enforcement who are constantly scrutinized as a matter of course.
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Charles "Sid" Heal (Field Command)
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We could learn a lot from the philosophy of Shaolin. Their belief that the ego must be transcended in order to focus on reality is an essential lesson that applies to all of humanity. We could also benefit greatly from their philosophy of independence, individualism and self-reliance. Instead of depending on governments and corporations, we should depend on our environment, our compassionate human interaction, and ourselves. To do this, we must practice what we preach. It is easy to speak of ways to heal the world, but to actually act accordingly is much more difficult.
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Joseph P. Kauffman (Conscious Collective: An Aim for Awareness)
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Learning a second language entails learning numerous aspects of that language, including vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, composition, reading, culture, and even body language. Unfortunately, traditionally vocabulary has received less attention in second language (L2) pedagogy than any of these other aspects, particularly grammar. Arguably, vocabulary is perhaps the most important component in L2 ability. For more than 2,000 years, the study of a foreign language primarily entailed grammatical analysis, which was practiced through translation of written work (Hinkel & Fotos, 2002). As a result, vocabulary has been academically excluded from or at best limited within L2 curricula and classroom teaching. A perusal of ESL textbooks quickly reveals a lack of focus on vocabulary. Unlike books in French, Spanish, or other foreign languages, there are no vocabulary lists in the lessons/units or vocabulary index at the back of the book. Exercises practicing vocabulary may be found in reading books, but such exercises are rarely found in grammar books, speaking books, listening books, or writing books in spite of the importance of vocabulary in these areas.
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Keith S. Folse (Vocabulary Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching)
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Blames after each failure keep lessons unlearned. When you fall, rise up quickly and learn your lessons... Blames will never make any change; applied lessons will do!
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Israelmore Ayivor (Daily Drive 365)
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What I’d learned in this first week of chemo was that when you feel sick, tell someone. Don’t try to keep toughing it out. Once they changed my anti-nausea medication and I quit taking the pain medicine, I felt better. This lesson applies to life as well. We often hold in our thoughts and struggles because we don’t want to burden others, but we can’t be blessed by what change might be offered to us.
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Susan Parris (Cancer Mom: Hearing God in an Unknown Journey)
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But unlike most physicists, Marcus eventually learned Lorenz's lesson, that a deterministic system can produce much more than just periodic behavior. He knew to look for wild disorder, and he knew that islands of structure could appear within the disorder. So he brought to the problem of the Great Red Spot an understanding that a complex system can give rise to turbulence and coherence at the same time. He could work within an emerging discipline that was creating its own tradition of using the computer as an experimental tool. And he was willing to think of himself as a new kind of scientist: not primarily an astronomer, not a fluid dynamicist, not an applied mathematician, but a specialist in chaos.
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James Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science)
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Maya had learned it in the military, but of course, it applied to real life. Your fellow soldiers had to know that you had their back. That was rule one, lesson one, and above all else. If the enemy goes after you, he goes after me too. Maybe
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Harlan Coben (Fool Me Once)
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Tom Hopkins, Selling for Dummies. Selling is applied communication and vastly underrated in business education. If you want to know how viable your business is, go try to sell your product to some potential customers. This book is a solid primer on basic selling skills. You won’t need much more.
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Jim Koch (Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two)
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If you want to accurately judge the spiritual level of any human being, count the number of religions that he is capable of understanding and observe how effective he is in applying the lessons learned to his own life or the life of others.
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Robin Sacredfire
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Lessons take time, and we should not feel condemned because we are still learning them. Remember, we are all on a journey, and if it took Peter time to learn lessons, the same applies to us. So don't be too hard on yourself! God knows that lessons take time, and eventually you will get there, as long as you remain patient, and keep trusting God. We are not robots, who can be programmed like a computer. We are humans who respond in a similar fashion to fruit, which grows over time. Learning lessons has to become part of our culture, and not something that we just understand in our heads. So, be patient with yourself, and with other people, until lessons are truly learnt.
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Christopher Roberts (365 Days With God: A Daily Devotional)
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If you made a mistake, you must never forget to learn from it and make sure to apply that lesson.
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Joy Lincoln (Warren Buffett: Greatest Life Lessons)
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Your past is where you learned the lesson. Now is when you get to apply it.
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Karen Salmansohn
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Use what you learn Students often ask this question of their instructors “How does this apply to real life?” That’s a good question. However, as an instructor I would flip the question around and ask “How will you apply this to your real life”? If you are able to take the subject matter you are learning and apply it to your job or your own personal life, you will likely remember it more easily. Make a connection between what you are learning and what you are doing on the job. Once you make that connection, that light bulb over your head will burn even brighter. Congratulations
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Tim Herrera (What the Online Student MUST Know: Vital Lessons Before Logging On)
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One of the most profound learnings of my life is this: if you want to achieve your highest aspirations and overcome your greatest challenges, identify and apply the principle or natural law that governs the results you seek. How we apply a principle will vary greatly and will be determined by our unique strengths, talents, and creativity, but, ultimately, success in any endeavor is always derived from acting in harmony with the principles to which the success is tied. Many
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
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So in 2013, Patagonia launched a venture capital fund to invest in environmentally and socially responsible for-profit start-ups. We wanted to apply the many lessons we have learned in trying to conduct our business more responsibly to applications beyond the outdoor apparel industry. We were willing to sacrifice short-term returns for long-term financial and environmental gains. Tin Shed Ventures serves as a vehicle for the third pillar of Patagonia’s mission statement: “ . . . use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” But it also serves to do good in the world: providing funding for people who have business ideas that could help solve the environmental crisis. It is really the small private businesses we hope to influence. It is the tens of thousands of young people who dream of owning their small farm someday. All of us working together can create the change that we need.
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Yvon Chouinard (Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual)
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Ever the curious scientist, Pavlov spent months studying how the flood changed his dogs’ behavior. Many were never the same—they had completely different personalities after the flood, and learned behavior that was previously ingrained vanished. He summed up what happened, and how it applies to humans: Different conditions productive of extreme excitation often lead to profound and prolonged loss of balance in nervous and psychic activity . . . neuroses and psychoses may develop as a result of extreme danger to oneself or to near friends, or even the spectacle of some frightful event not affecting one directly. People tend to have short memories. Most of the time they can forget about bad experiences and fail to heed lessons previously learned. But hard-core stress leaves a scar.
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Morgan Housel (Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes)
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If you guys really want to learn everything there is to learn about life just pay attention to gaming, play more video games. Play them with awareness because all the lessons are there. All you need to know is if you can consistently do well in your video games you can learn everything you need to apply to your own life.
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DR. K