“
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
“
Quand tu veux construire un bateau, ne commence pas par rassembler du bois, couper des planches et distribuer du travail, mais reveille au sein des hommes le desir de la mer grande et large.
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“
Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.
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Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird)
“
If Jesus gives us a task or assigns us to a difficult season, every ounce of our experience is meant for our instruction and completion if only we'll let Him finish the work. I fear, however, that we are so attention-deficit that we settle for bearable when beauty is just around the corner.
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Beth Moore
“
What's wrong with me? ... I might seem like the ideal student: homework always in early, every extra credit and extra curricular I can get my hands on, the good girl and the high achiever. But I realized something just now: it's not ambition, not entirely. It's fear. Because I don't know who I am when I'm not working, when I'm not focused on or totally consumed by a task. Who am I between the projects and the assignments, when there's nothing to do? I haven't found her yet and it scares me. Maybe that's why, for my senior capstone project this year, I decided to solve a murder.
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Holly Jackson (A Good Girl's Guide to Murder (A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, #1))
“
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
”
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Kim Malone Scott (Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity)
“
If you assign ten new believers the task of studying the Bible to find God’s heart for this generation, not one of them would conclude that spiritual gifts are not for today. You have to be taught that stuff!
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Bill Johnson (When Heaven Invades Earth: A Practical Guide to a Life of Miracles)
“
To learn how to do, we need something real to focus on — not a task assigned by someone else, but something we want to create, something we want to understand. Not an empty exercise but a meaningful, self-chosen undertaking.
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Lori McWilliam Pickert
“
You need to draw upon your willpower to accomplish the self-assigned task of mastering self-control.
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Prem Jagyasi
“
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry captures this well: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
”
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James K.A. Smith (You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit)
“
Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it.
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Shirley Hazzard (The Transit of Venus)
“
You know, having a child changes everything. The father starts loving the soul-sucking job he so detested. The mother begins to find the daily mundane tasks she is assigned as pleasurable. Parents realize that they are accountable to their kid. They, therefore, do things out of responsibility and not out of one’s liking for it.
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Abhaidev (The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit)
“
At every person's birth, he or she is assigned a certain daemon by his own star, a guardian of life to help with his destined task.
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Marsilio Ficino
“
If you want to build a ship
don’t herd people together to collect wood
and don’t assign them tasks and work,
but rather teach them to long for the
endless immensity of the sea.
”
”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“
A simple job becomes hard when you do it half-heartedly.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
“
After all, our brain assigns our partner the task of being our secure base, the person we use as an emotional anchor and a safe haven, the one we turn to in time of need. We are programmed to seek their emotional availability.
”
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Amir Levine (Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love)
“
Whatever the one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing...Thus no generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the previous generation.
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Søren Kierkegaard
“
Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It is the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulations, of scurrying and worrying.
And hoping is not dreaming. It is not spinning an illusion or fantasy to protect us from our boredom or our pain. It means a confident, alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do. It is imagination put in the harness of faith. It is a willingness to let God do it his way and in his time. It is the opposite of making plans that we demand that God put into effect, telling him both how and when to do it. That is not hoping in God but bullying God. "I pray to GOD-my life a prayer-and wait for what he'll say and do. My life's on the line before God, my Lord, waiting and watching till morning, waiting and watching till morning.
”
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Eugene H. Peterson (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society)
“
The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day, from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be to the question posed to a chess champion: "Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?" There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl
“
(1) Jot down new tasks and assignments on your list during the day; (2) next morning, transfer these new items from your list onto your calendar; and (3) then take a couple of minutes to plan your day.
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Cal Newport (How to Become a Straight-A Student)
“
Every reader goes through this rite of passage: the transition from having books chosen for us to choosing books for ourselves. When given the choice, some choose not to read. But you, dear reader, moved from being told what to read to choosing for yourself. From reading on assignment, perhaps to please someone else, to reading at your own leisure to please only yourself. When faced with the task of establishing your own reading life, you did it, or maybe you’re still in the middle of doing it.
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Anne Bogel (I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life)
“
Courage is the ability to execute tasks and assignments without fear or intimidation.
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Jaachynma N.E. Agu
“
Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.
”
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Charles Stross (The Apocalypse Codex (Laundry Files, #4))
“
Whatever the one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing...Thus no generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the previous generation.
”
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J. Krishnamurti (Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti)
“
My grandmother believed that one of the most difficult tasks that the Almighty can assign anyone is being a girl in Afghanistan. As a child, I didn't want to be a girl. I didn't want my dolls to be women.
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Homeira Qaderi (Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother's Letter to Her Son)
“
Life is the school, love is the lesson and relationships are assignments designed to further us into learning to live in a deeper state of love.
”
”
Kate McGahan
“
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
”
”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“
I doubt whether a doctor can answer this question in general terms. For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
“
Apollo succeeded at critical moments like this because the bosses had no hesitation about assigning crucial tasks to one individual, trusting his judgment, and then getting out of his way.
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Gene Kranz (Failure is not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond)
“
The world of things entered your infant mind
To populate that crystal cabinet.
Within its walls the strangest partners met,
And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind.
For, once within, corporeal fact could find
A spirit. Fact and you in mutual debt
Built there your little microcosm - which yet
Had hugest tasks to its small self assigned.
Dead men can live there, and converse with stars:
Equator speaks with pole, and night with day;
Spirit dissolves the world's material bars -
A million isolations burn away.
The Universe can live and work and plan,
At last made God within the mind of man.
”
”
Julian Huxley
“
Perform your task and I shall know you. Perform your task and your genius shall befriend the more.
”
”
Ogwo David Emenike
“
An enlightened man had but one duty--to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led. The realization shook me profoundly, it was the fruit of this experience. I had often speculated with images of the future, dreamed of roles that I might be assigned, perhaps as poet or prophet or painter, or something similar. All that was futile. I did not exist to write poems, to preach or to paint, neither I nor anyone else. All of that was incidental. Each man had only one genuine vocation--to find the way to himself. He might end up as poet or madman, as prophet or criminal--that was not his affair, ultimately it was of no concern. His task was to discover his own destiny--not an arbitrary one--and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a
flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.
”
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Hermann Hesse
“
A true Leader does not point fingers
A true Leader does not assign blame
A true Leader does not celebrate the mistakes of others
A true Leader points you in the right direction
A true Leader assigns praise however meager the task
A true Leader celebrates the accomplishments of his team
I true Leader Leads.
”
”
Mark W. Boyer
“
Another leading senator that I degraded was Caligula’s horse Incitatus who was to have become Consul three years later. I wrote to the Senate that I had no complaints to make against the private morals of this senator or his capacity for the tasks that had hitherto been assigned to him, but that he no longer had the necessary financial qualifications. For I had cut the pension awarded him by Caligula to the daily rations of a cavalry horse, dismissed his grooms and put him into an ordinary stable where the manger was of wood, not ivory, and the walls were whitewashed, not covered with frescoes. I did not, however, separate him from his wife, the mare Penelope: that would have been unjust.
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”
Robert Graves (Claudius the God: And His Wife Messalina)
“
what really matters is not the value someone else assigns to a task but how I personally feel while performing it.
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Chris Hadfield (An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth)
“
God is a man of his word, He always gives assurance that every task or assignment will become a success.
”
”
Euginia Herlihy
“
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
”
”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“
The more you do something, the more cells the brain assigns to that task,
”
”
Louann Brizendine (The Female Brain)
“
The whole process of becoming an astronaut helped me understand that what really matters is not the value someone else assigns to a task but how I personally feel while performing it.
”
”
Chris Hadfield (An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth)
“
I learned to cook by helping my mother in the kitchen. I assisted her with the canning, and she began assigning me some other tasks like making salad dressing or kneading dough for bread. My first attempt at preparing an entire dinner¾the menu included pork chops Hawaiian, which called for the pork to be marinated in papaya nectar, ginger, cumin, and other spices before being grilled with onions and pineapple cubes¾required an extensive array of exotic ingredients. When he saw my grocery list, my father commented, “I hope she marries a rich man.
”
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Mallory M. O'Connor (The Kitchen and the Studio: A Memoir of Food and Art)
“
The biggest mistake that parents make, is believing that their assigned task in life is to teach their children and to guide them in every situation of their children's lives. The truth is that it is the task of parents to both learn from their children and to guide them as well. Parenting is a relationship that goes both ways, from the moment your child is born, you learn from that person, and in fact, your lessons begin long before your child's lessons do. Later on, when you've learned a great deal already, then they begin to learn from you. Throughout our lives, it is a give-and-take relationship, in many ways. Our assigned task is to learn from our children, and to guide and teach them. Their assigned task is to learn from us, and also to teach us.
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C. JoyBell C.
“
Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her. In fact, the more people she assigned to the task of setting the tone for her campaign, the more muddled her message becam
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Jonathan Allen (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign)
“
High performers whom exhibit tremendous self-control tend to be burden by their own competence. Studies indicate that being extraordinary competent can place a person under an unusual amount of stress because it raises other people’s expectation of them. The more task that an exemplary employee produces with a ‘go-getting personality’ while maintaining high quality relationships with peers and clients, the more an organization tends to underestimates their actual effort and the more it expects of them. Other people do not comprehend how difficult it is for a high performer to complete multifaceted tasks. They also tend to underestimate how much effort an enterprising person exerts who maintains a positive and pleasant attitude while completing difficult assignments.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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Bear it in mind that tomorrow must also have its own brand of assignments. Shifting today’s work to tomorrow is an inevitable step towards massing up difficult tasks for yourself, whose risk of leading into failure is high.
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Israelmore Ayivor (Dream big!: See your bigger picture!)
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Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives. There are two reasons why I dislike the passion mindset (that is, two reasons beyond the fact that, as I argued in Rule #1, it’s based on a false premise). First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness. This is especially true for entry-level positions, which, by definition, are not going to be filled with challenging projects and autonomy—these come later. When you enter the working world with the passion mindset, the annoying tasks you’re assigned or the frustrations of corporate bureaucracy can become too much to handle. Second, and more serious, the deep questions driving the passion mindset—“Who am I?” and “What do I truly love?”—are essentially impossible to confirm. “Is this who I really am?” and “Do I love this?” rarely reduce to clear yes-or-no responses. In other words, the passion mindset is almost guaranteed to keep you perpetually unhappy and confused, which probably explains why Bronson admits, not long into his career-seeker epic What Should I Do With My Life? that “the one feeling everyone in this book has experienced is of missing out on life.
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”
Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love)
“
To me, the most startling thing Jesus ever said was when He assigned His followers the task of going out in pairs to share His good news with lost people. He said that He was sending them “as sheep among wolves.” Still, He expected them to prevail. In the history of the world, no sheep has ever won a fight with a wolf. The very idea is insane.
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Nik Ripken (The Insanity of God: A True Story of Faith Resurrected)
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God is a man of His word, He assures us that we'll succeed in every task, every assignment, every dream, every vision He gives us. And always uses catchphrases for us to cling on during tough times. 'Be strong and courageous' (Joshua 1:6).
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Euginia Herlihy
“
If I could teach aspiring managers only one concept, without question I would pick accumulating personal credibility. Credibility is something we earn. How? It’s amassed by successfully accomplishing tasks we’re assigned or which we volunteer to perform.
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Ronald Harris (Concepts of Managing: A Road Map for Avoiding Career Hazards)
“
Steel filled eyes cut to me. “If I had stayed to practise—" […] “What do I do now?”
A purpose, I realised. Assigning her the task of finding a way to repair the holes in the wall… it had given my sister what perhaps our human lives had never granted her: a bearing.
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Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #3))
“
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
”
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
“
That’s the thing about high standards: they don’t have to come with insecurity. Only perfectionism grafts the two together. As Paul understands it, perfectionism isn’t about perfecting things or tasks, nor is it about striving for especially high standards in, say, your assignments, appearances, parenting, or relationships. It’s far, far deeper than that. It’s about perfecting ourselves, or to be more exact, perfecting our imperfect selves; going through life in defensive mode, concealing every last blemish, flaw, and shortcoming from those around us.
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Thomas Curran (The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough)
“
At the end of our lives, He is going to look into hearts. What is it He will find there, I wonder? Will he find that we used the geography lesson, the dreaded math test, the teetering laundry pile and the boiling-over pot of soup to draw closer to Him? Did we use these gifts to teach our children to lift their eyes heavenward? Were the tedious details of a homeschooling day offered up as a way for us to love Him, or were they merely gotten through, checked off and accomplished? Did we even realize that every Monday, every Thursday, we were standing on holy ground? No task is too trivial, no assignment too small. Educating our children is an offering of love we make to the God Who was so gracious to bestow them upon us in the first place. Every moment of the daily grind in raising and teaching and loving on them is hallowed, because we do it for Him and because there would be no point of doing it without Him.
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Sarah Mackenzie (Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace)
“
Perhaps the attitude for us to take towards our many failures is the one adopted by Gopal Krishna Gokhale towards those of the Moderate nationalists: Let us not forget that we are at a stage of the country’s progress when our achievements are bound to be small, and our disappointments frequent and trying. That is the place which it has pleased Providence to assign to us in this struggle, and our responsibility is ended when we have done the work which belongs to that place. It will, no doubt, be given to our countrymen of future generations to serve India by their successes; we, of the present generation, must be content to serve her mainly by our failures. For, hard though it be, out of those failures the strength will come which in the end will accomplish great tasks.9
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Bipan Chandra (India Since Independence)
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One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. As
”
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
“
I respect you heaps, lady knight. I’d’ve thrown myself off a bridge, getting this assignment. You, you’re there with lists and plans. You listen to every flap-mouthed bumpkin who thinks he can do your task better, and you answer with a smile and thanks. Why, you’ve inspired me to be a blessing to my fellow bumpkin, just like you.
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Tamora Pierce (Lady Knight (Protector of the Small, #4))
“
Clearly assign responsibilities. Eliminate any confusion about expectations and ensure that people view their failures to complete their tasks and achieve their goals as personal failures
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Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
“
But for now, I would be the happiest of men if I could just swallow the overflow of saliva that endlessly floods my mouth. Even before first light, I am already practicing sliding my tongue toward the rear of my palate in order to provoke a swallowing reaction. What is more, I have dedicated to my larynx the little packets of incense hanging on the wall, amulets brought back from Japan by pious globe-trotting friends. Just one of the stones in the thanksgiving monument erected by my circle of friends during their wanderings. In every corner of the world, the most diverse deities have been solicited in my name. I try to organize all this spiritual energy. If they tell me that candles have been burned for my sake in a Breton chapel, or that a mantra has been chanted in a Nepalese temple, I at once give each of the spirits invoked a precise task. A woman I know enlisted a Cameroon holy man to procure me the goodwill of Africa's gods: I have assigned him my right eye. For my hearing problems I rely on the relationship between my devout mother-in-law and the monks of a Bordeaux brotherhood. They regularly dedicate their prayers to me, and I occasionally steal into their abbey to hear their chants fly heavenward. So far the results have been unremarkable. But when seven brothers of the same order had their throats cut by Islamic fanatics, my ears hurt for several days. Yet all these lofty protections are merely clay ramparts, walls of sand, Maginot lines, compared to the small prayer my daughter, Céleste, sends up to her Lord every evening before she closes her eyes. Since we fall asleep at roughly the same hour, I set out for the kingdom of slumber with this wonderful talisman, which shields me from all harm.
”
”
Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death)
“
Extroverts tend to tackle assignments quickly. They make fast (sometimes rash) decisions, and are comfortable multitasking and risk-taking. They enjoy “the thrill of the chase” for rewards like money and status. Introverts often work more slowly and deliberately. They like to focus on one task at a time and can have mighty powers of concentration. They’re relatively immune to the lures of wealth and fame.
”
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
Perhaps because I have spent hours sermonizing to students about the sins of the passive voice—how it can obfuscate meaning, deaden vitality, and abandon the task of assigning agency or responsibility—I find the grammar of justice maddening. It’s always “rendered,” “served,” or “done.” It always swoops down from on high—from God, from the state—like a bolt of lightning, a flaming sword come to separate the righteous from the wicked in Earth’s final hour. It is not, apparently, something we can give to one other, something we can make happen, something we can create together down here in the muck. The problem may also lie in the word itself, as for millennia “justice” has meant both “retribution” and “equality,” as if a gaping chasm did not separate the two.
If you really want to know what justice is, don’t only ask questions and then score off anyone who answers, and refute him, roars Thrasymachus to Socrates in The Republic. You know very well that it is much easier to ask questions than to answer them. Give an answer yourself and tell us what you say justice is. When justice is done, writes Anne Carson, the world drops away. This does not seem to me a happy thought. I am not yet sure I want the world to drop away.
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Maggie Nelson (The Red Parts)
“
Many psychologists would also agree that introverts and extroverts work differently. Extroverts tend to tackle assignments quickly. They make fast (sometimes rash) decisions, and are comfortable multitasking and risk-taking. They enjoy “the thrill of the chase” for rewards like money and status. Introverts often work more slowly and deliberately. They like to focus on one task at a time and can have mighty powers of concentration. They’re relatively immune to the lures of wealth and fame. Our
”
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
In the irrational universe of demanded spontaneity, the power of state reaches beyond the prohibition of acts contrary to society, assigning itself the task of prescribing the citizen's thoughts and convictions. To quote Revel's concise conclusion, 'C'est dans les sociétiés totalitaires que l'Etat se charge de 'donner un sens' à la vie des êtres' ['In totalitarian societies the state assumes the task of giving life a meaning']. Thus original thought becomes treason, and life becomes a hell of a particular kind.
”
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Paul Watzlawick (Münchhausen's Pigtail, or Psychotherapy & "Reality")
“
The origin of the caste system, formulated by the great legislator Manu, was admirable. He saw clearly that men are distinguished by natural evolution into four great classes: those capable of offering service to society through their bodily labor (Sudras); those who serve through mentality, skill, agriculture, trade, commerce, business life in general (Vaisyas); those whose talents are administrative, executive, and protective-rulers and warriors (Kshatriyas); those of contemplative nature, spiritually inspired and inspiring (Brahmins). “Neither birth nor sacraments nor study nor ancestry can decide whether a person is twice-born (i.e., a Brahmin);” the Mahabharata declares, “character and conduct only can decide.” 281 Manu instructed society to show respect to its members insofar as they possessed wisdom, virtue, age, kinship or, lastly, wealth. Riches in Vedic India were always despised if they were hoarded or unavailable for charitable purposes. Ungenerous men of great wealth were assigned a low rank in society. Serious evils arose when the caste system became hardened through the centuries into a hereditary halter. Social reformers like Gandhi and the members of very numerous societies in India today are making slow but sure progress in restoring the ancient values of caste, based solely on natural qualification and not on birth. Every nation on earth has its own distinctive misery-producing karma to deal with and remove; India, too, with her versatile and invulnerable spirit, shall prove herself equal to the task of caste-reformation.
”
”
Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi)
“
The task assigned to the RAND* researcher Paul Baran in 1964 was to develop a communication system that would survive a Soviet nuclear attack. Baran suggested three possible structures for such a system. It could either be ‘centralized’, with one central hub and multiple spokes, ‘decentralized’, with multiple components linked loosely together by a number of weak ties, or ‘distributed’, like a lattice or mesh. In theory, the last option was the most resilient, in that it could withstand the destruction of numerous nodes, and that was indeed
”
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Niall Ferguson (The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook)
“
To explain everything as the result of a single factor which, moreover, is fixed by fate, has a great advantage. For then no task seems to be assigned to one; one has nothing to do but wait for the imaginary moment when the curing of this one factor will cure everything else.
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Viktor E. Frankl (The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, Revised and Expanded)
“
Search the most weird thing on Google. You will find some people somewhere doing that thing. Your mind is even more advanced than Google. Whatever you want to believe, it can churn out logic to support that. Look at human history, most brilliant minds have died debating over their beliefs and no common conclusion has been reached so far. And it will never be reached.
Mind is tricky machine that can complete any task that you assign it Give it the task of dissolving itself and it will dissolve itself with its own logic. Then you can experience the oneness - the Paramatma.
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”
Shunya
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System 2 and the electrical circuits in your home both have limited capacity, but they respond differently to threatened overload. A breaker trips when the demand for current is excessive, causing all devices on that circuit to lose power at once. In contrast, the response to mental overload is selective and precise: System 2 protects the most important activity, so it receives the attention it needs; “spare capacity” is allocated second by second to other tasks. In our version of the gorilla experiment, we instructed the participants to assign priority to the digit task. We know that they followed that instruction, because the timing of the visual target had no effect on the main task. If the critical letter was presented at a time of high demand, the subjects simply did not see it. When the transformation task was less demanding, detection performance was better.
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Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
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For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
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He had been living in a down-town Y.M.C.A., but when he quit the task of making sow-ear purses out of sows' ears, he moved up-town and went to work immediately as a reporter for The Sun. He kept at this for a year, doing desultory writing on the side, with little success, and then one day an infelicitous incident peremptorily closed his newspaper career. On a February afternoon he was assigned to report a parade of Squadron A. Snow threatening, he went to sleep instead before a hot fire, and when he woke up did a smooth column about the muffled beats of the horses' hoofs in the snow… This he handed in. Next morning a marked copy of the paper was sent down to the City Editor with a scrawled note: "Fire the man who wrote this." It seemed that Squadron A had also seen the snow threatening—had postponed the parade until another day. A week later he had begun "The Demon Lover."… In
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F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
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Then let us put a speech into the mouths of our opponents. They will say: 'Socrates and Glaucon, no adversary need convict you, for you yourselves, at the first foundation of the State, admitted the principle that everybody was to do the one work suited to his own nature.' And certainly, if I am not mistaken, such an admission was made by us. 'And do not the natures of men and women differ very much indeed?' And we shall reply: Of course they do. Then we shall be asked, 'Whether the tasks assigned to men and to women should not be different, and such as are agreeable to their different natures?' Certainly they should. 'But if so, have you not fallen into a serious inconsistency in saying that men and women, whose natures are so entirely different, ought to perform the same actions?'—What defence will you make for us, my good Sir, against any one who offers these objections? That
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Plato (The Republic)
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At work, they knew me to be capable but fragile. Quiet, clouded up with daydreams. Usually diligent, though sometimes inconsistent, moody. But also something else, something implacable: I was unsavvy in some fundamental, uncomfortable way. The sound of my loud, nervous laugh, like gargling gravel, was a social liability. I skipped too many office parties. They kept me on because my output was prolific and they could task me with more and more production assignments. When I focused a trait I exhibited at the beginning of my time there, I could be detail-oriented to the point of obsession.
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Ling Ma (Severance)
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An enlightened man had but one duty--to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way
forward, no matter where it led. The realization shook me profoundly, it was the fruit of this experience. I had often speculated with images of the future, dreamed of roles that I might be assigned, perhaps as poet or
prophet or painter, or something similar. All that was futile. I did not exist to write poems, to preach or to
paint, neither I nor anyone else. All of that was incidental. Each man had only one genuine vocation--to find
the way to himself. He might end up as poet or madman, as prophet or criminal--that was not his affair,
ultimately it was of no concern. His task was to discover his own destiny--not an arbitrary one--and live it out
wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a
flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.
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Hermann Hesse (Demian)
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He wasn’t concerned with getting credit or even with being in charge; he simply assigned work to those who could perform it best. This meant delegating some of his most interesting, meaningful, and important tasks—work that other leaders would have kept for themselves. Why did the research not reflect the talents of people like the
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
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We are committed to involving as many people as possible, as young as possible, as soon as possible. Sometimes too young and too soon! But we intentionally err on the side of too fast rather than too slow. We don’t wait until people feel “prepared” or “fully equipped.” Seriously, when is anyone ever completely prepared for ministry?
Ministry makes people’s faith bigger. If you want to increase someone’s confidence in God, put him in a ministry position before he feels fully equipped.
The messages your environments communicate have the potential to trump your primary message. If you don’t see a mess, if you aren’t bothered by clutter, you need to make sure there is someone around you who does see it and is bothered by it. An uncomfortable or distracting setting can derail ministry before it begins. The sermon begins in the parking lot.
Assign responsibility, not tasks.
At the end of the day, it’s application that makes all the difference. Truth isn’t helpful if no one understands or remembers it.
If you want a church full of biblically educated believers, just teach what the Bible says. If you want to make a difference in your community and possibly the world, give people handles, next steps, and specific applications. Challenge them to do something. As we’ve all seen, it’s not safe to assume that people automatically know what to do with what they’ve been taught. They need specific direction. This is hard. This requires an extra step in preparation. But this is how you grow people.
Your current template is perfectly designed to produce the results you are currently getting.
We must remove every possible obstacle from the path of the disinterested, suspicious, here-against-my-will, would-rather-be-somewhere-else, unchurched guests. The parking lot, hallways, auditorium, and stage must be obstacle-free zones.
As a preacher, it’s my responsibility to offend people with the gospel. That’s one reason we work so hard not to offend them in the parking lot, the hallway, at check-in, or in the early portions of our service. We want people to come back the following week for another round of offending!
Present the gospel in uncompromising terms, preach hard against sin, and tackle the most emotionally charged topics in culture, while providing an environment where unchurched people feel comfortable.
The approach a church chooses trumps its purpose every time.
Nothing says hypocrite faster than Christians expecting non-Christians to behave like Christians when half the Christians don’t act like it half the time.
When you give non-Christians an out, they respond by leaning in. Especially if you invite them rather than expect them. There’s a big difference between being expected to do something and being invited to try something.
There is an inexorable link between an organization’s vision and its appetite for improvement. Vision exposes what has yet to be accomplished. In this way, vision has the power to create a healthy sense of organizational discontent. A leader who continually keeps the vision out in front of his or her staff creates a thirst for improvement. Vision-centric churches expect change. Change is a means to an end. Change is critical to making what could and should be a reality.
Write your vision in ink; everything else should be penciled in. Plans change. Vision remains the same. It is natural to assume that what worked in the past will always work. But, of course, that way of thinking is lethal. And the longer it goes unchallenged, the more difficult it is to identify and eradicate. Every innovation has an expiration date. The primary reason churches cling to outdated models and programs is that they lack leadership.
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Andy Stanley (Deep and Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend)
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We know from several statements of Knecht's that he wanted to write the former Master's biography, but official duties left him no time for such a task. He had learned to curb his own wishes. Once he remarked to one of his tutors: "It is a pity that you students aren't fully aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live. But I was exactly the same when I was still a student. We study and work, don't waste much time, and think we may rightly call ourselves industrious–but we are scarcely conscious of all we could do, all that we might make of our freedom. Then we suddenly receive a call from the hierarchy, we are needed, are given a teaching assignment, a mission, a post, and from then on move up to a higher one, and unexpectedly find ourselves caught in a network of duties that tightens the more we try to move inside it. All the tasks are in themselves small, but each one has to be carried out at its proper hour, and the day has far more tasks than hours. That is well; one would not want it to be different. But if we ever think, between classrooms, Archives, secretariat, consulting room, meetings, and official journeys–if we ever think of the freedom we possessed and have lost, the freedom for self-chosen tasks, for unlimited, far-flung studies, we may well feel the greatest yearning for those days, and imagine that if we ever had such freedom again we would fully enjoy its pleasures and potentialities.
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Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game)
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Feminists have fought to remove the definition of what a woman is from... masculine institutions and develop their own understandings. Claims to the ‘right’ to self define ‘gender’, subject womanhood to men’s power to define once again.The major task of feminist theory was to bring women out from under the weight of men’s definitions and theories. Feminists developed what has been called ‘feminist standpoint theory’ to describe a new form of knowledge about women, that which is formed out of women’s experience as an oppressed group and refined through struggle and collective process (Harding (ed.), 2004). The very basis of feminism is this declaration of independence, the rejection of men’s ‘knowledge’ about women and the privileging of our own. Men’s ideas about what women are have been formed from their ruling caste position, and have assigned women characteristics that would most advantage their masters, as well as justify men’s rule over them. They do not represent ‘truth’ but have been promoted as if they were, with the backing of science and patriarchal views of biology.
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Sheila Jeffreys (Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism)
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If the president summons the other party to legislate laws to guarantee the best outcome of his executive mandates, then he has every right to do so and the other party must comply and do the tasks which were assigned to them. However, if they refuse to do so, then they are directly responsible for the loopholes (and their consequences) which are present in previous legislation.
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Ibrahim Ibrahim (Quotable: My Worldview)
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At those moments I took it for granted that there was not and never would be a manuscript of Lila’s. I had always overestimated her, nothing memorable would emerge from her - something that reassured me and yet truly upset me. I loved Lila. I wanted her to last. But I wanted it to be I who made her last. I thought it was my task. I was convinced that she herself, as a girl, had assigned it to me.
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Elena Ferrante (The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels, #4))
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Lucifer snapped his fingers and froze them. He didn’t really care what they did to each other, but he’d spent several months in the wild capturing the beast he’d turned into a desk. “Children, children,” he said tucking his hands behind his back and adopting his father figure mode. It usually made his daughter, Muriel, laugh. “Must I remind you that I tasked you with a mission. One that I might add, Ysabel, you should be most eager to complete. What I do not need, is for you to FUCK IT UP!” He let his voice increase in treble until it boomed. “I’ve been more than tolerant, but enough is enough. You will cease bringing me your petty squabbles. You will do the job I assigned. And if you don’t want his tongue in your mouth, Ysabel, then bite it off. Although, really, if you enjoyed it so much, I don’t see what the problem is. Maybe he can help you remove the stick up your ass if you let him kiss the other end. Now, if we’re done here, and since I’m boss, and I say we are, leave and don’t come back until you’re done, because if you do, I’m duct taping the pair of you together and throwing you in a dark room until you learn to get along. Or fuck. I don’t really care which, but I prefer the latter so I can watch.
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Eve Langlais (A Demon and His Witch (Welcome to Hell, #1))
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Where, then, is the discretion or the reason in loading burdens on the backs of those whose strength has not first been tested to make sure that the tasks assigned to human beings are in line with their natural constitutions? Would anyone give a donkey the same load as an elephant? Or the young or very old the same loads as full adults? Can the frail bear as much as the hardy, or the sickly as much as the well?
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Pierre Abélard (The Letters and Other Writings: Selected Songs and Poems (Hackett Classics))
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She left quietly, closing the door behind her.
Only then did Hunter move, wandering to the portal, his large hand clasping the oval brass knob that she had just touched, searching for any remaining warmth her skin might have imparted. He leaned his cheek against the cool, glossy panel and closed his eyes. He craved her body, her sweetness, her hands on his body, her legs open to him, her throat tightening with feminine cries as he pleasured her... He shoved the thoughts away, but it was too late, he was left with a painful erection that wouldn't subside.
How long would it take for her to accept him? What the devil would she require? If only she would assign him some herculean task for him to accomplish and prove himself. 'Tell me what to do,' he thought, emitting a slight groan, 'and by God, I'll do it ten times over.
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Lisa Kleypas (Stranger in My Arms)
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This determination that nurturing should become exclusively a concern of women served to signify to both sexes that neither nurture nor womanhood was very important. But the assignment to women of a kind of work that was thought both onerous and trivial was only the beginning of their exploitation. As the persons exclusively in charge of the tasks of nurture, women often came into sole charge of the household budget; they became family purchasing agents. The time of the household barterer was past. Kitchens were now run on a cash economy. Women had become customers, a fact not long wasted on the salesmen, who saw that in these women they had customers of a new and most promising kind. The modern housewife was isolated from her husband, from her school-age children, and from other women. She was saddled with work from which much of the skill, hence much of the dignity, had been withdrawn, and which she herself was less and less able to consider important. She did not know what her husband did at work, or after work, and she knew that her life was passing in his regardlessness and in his absence. Such a woman was ripe for a sales talk: this was the great commercial insight of modern times. Such a woman must be told — or subtly made to understand — that she must not be a drudge, that she must not let her work affect her looks, that she must not become “unattractive,” that she must always be fresh, cheerful, young, shapely, and pretty. All her sexual and mortal fears would thus be given voice, and she would be made to reach for money. What was implied was always the question that a certain bank finally asked outright in a billboard advertisement: “Is your husband losing interest?
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Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
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The reluctance of unschooled workers to follow orders has taken many forms. For example, workers won’t show up for work reliably on time, or they have problematic superstitions, or they prefer to get job instructions via indirect hints instead of direct orders, or they won’t accept tasks and roles that conflict with their culturally assigned relative status with coworkers, or they won’t accept being told to do tasks differently than they had done them before.
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Kevin Simler (The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life)
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Given how critical it is to keep the production-consumption process flowing smoothly, advertising obviously occupies a place of considerable importance. It has been assigned the specific duty of keeping people buying, buying, buying and therefore working, working, working to get the money to do so. It is the system invented to break the skin barrier, as it were, by entering the human being to reshape feelings and create more appropriate ones as need be. If suburbs are capitalism’s ideally separated buying units, and suburbs can be built profitably, then we must create humans who like and want suburbs: suburb-people. Since before the existence of suburbs there were no suburb-people, advertising has the task of creating them, in body and mind. Since before the creation of electric shavers or hair dryers or electric carving knives people felt no need for these things, the need was implanted into human minds by advertising.
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Jerry Mander (Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television)
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When God gives you understanding, life hands you mysteries.
When He gives you insight, life hands you enigmas.
When He gives you wisdom, life hands you problems.
When He gives you strength, life hands you tasks.
When He gives you courage, life hands you tests.
When He gives you faith, life hands you trials.
When He gives you passion, life hands you chores.
When He gives you talent, life hands you assignments.
When He gives you genius, life hands you obligations.
When He gives you joy, life hands you burdens.
When He gives you patience, life hands you troubles.
When He gives you love, life hands you heartaches.
When He gives you wealth, life hands you stress.
When He gives you possessions, life hands you duties.
When He gives you power, life hands you responsibilities.
When He gives you friends, life hands you demands.
When He gives you children, life hands you commitments.
When He gives you relationships, life hands you inconveniences.
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Matshona Dhliwayo
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Of course, the champions of totalitarianism protest that what they want to abolish is "only economic freedom" and that all "other freedoms" will remain untouched. But freedom is indivisible. The distinction between an economic sphere of human life and activity and a noneconomic sphere is the worst of their fallacies. If an omnipotent authority has the power to assign to every individual the tasks he has to perform, nothing that can be called freedom and autonomy is left to him.
He has only the choice between strict obedience and death by starvation.1
Committees of experts may be called to advise the planning authority whether or not a young man should be given the opportunity to prepare himself for and to work in an intellectual or artistic field. But such an arrangement can merely rear disciples committed to the parrotIike repetition of the ideas of the preceding generation. It would bar innovators who disagree with the accepted ways of thought. No innovation would ever have been accomplished if its originator had been in need of an authorization by those from whose doctrines and methods he wanted to deviate. Hegel would not have ordained Schopenhauer or Feuerbach, nor would Professor Rau have ordained Marx or Carl Menger. If the supreme planning board is ultimately to determine which books are to be printed, who is to experiment in the laboratories and who is to paint or to sculpture, and which alterations in technological methods should be undertaken, there will be neither improvement nor progress. Individual man will become a pawn in the hands of the rulers, who in their "social engineering" will handle him as engineers handle the stuff of which they construct buildings, bridges, and machines. In every sphere of human activity an innovation is a challenge not only to ali routinists and to the experts and practitioners of traditional methods but even more to those who have in the past themselves been innovators.
It meets at the beginning chiefly stubborn opposition. Such obstacles can be overcome in a society where there is economic freedom. They are insurmountable in a socialist system.
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Ludwig von Mises (Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution)
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When assigning responsibilities to employees in a startup, you could start by treating it as a simple optimization problem to efficiently match talents with tasks. But even if you could somehow get this perfectly right, any given solution would quickly break down. Partly that’s because startups have to move fast, so individual roles can’t remain static for long. But it’s also because job assignments aren’t just about the relationships between workers and tasks; they’re also about relationships between employees. The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism. More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.
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Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
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If a woman is flourishing in her home and glorifying God while rejoicing in her domestic duties, and doing them well, but still finding extra hours in her day, she is in a position to look for more to do. She has something to export. This might be volunteer work for the community or church, it may be part-time employment, or it might be learning new skills at home. The possibilities are endless when we really think about it. A new wife may be able to ease gradually into assuming more responsibilities outside the home as she becomes more and more proficient at the job God has given her, but it is unwise to do this too quickly. Sometimes a woman can kid herself into thinking she has extra time, when in fact she is actually just barely getting by with the minimum in her basic domestic duties. For example, if she simply rotates three dinners over and over because that’s all she knows how to make, her problem is not that she has too much time on her hands. She needs help and input and encouragement, not outside activities to give her more to do. She has to determine to become skilled at the tasks God has assigned for her.
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Nancy Wilson (Building Her House: Commonsensical Wisdom for Christian Women)
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Preschoolers make a number of assumptions about words and their meaning as they acquire language, one of the most important of which is what the psychologist Ellen Markman calls the principle of mutual exclusivity. Simply put, this means that small children have difficulty believing that any one object can have two different names. The natural assumption of children, Markman argues, is that if an object or person is given a second label, then that label must refer to some secondary property or attribute of that object. You can see how useful this assumption is to a child faced with the extraordinary task of assigning a word to everything in the world. A child who learns the word elephant knows, with absolute certainty, that it is something different from a dog. Each new word makes the child's knowledge of the world more precise. Without mutual exclusivity, by contrast, if a child thought that elephant could simply be another label for dog, then each new word would make the world seem more complicated. Mutual exclusivity also helps the child think clearly. "Suppose," Markman writes, "a child who already knows 'apple' and 'red' hears someone refer to an apple as 'round.' By mutual exclusivity, the child can eliminate the object (apple) and its color (red) as the meaning of 'round' and can try to analyze the object for some other property to label.
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Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
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A number of factors contribute to the development of an individual’s “practiced self-deception.” First, people who live primarily in fantasy confuse fantasy images with real, goal-directed action. They believe that they are actively pursuing their goals, when in fact they are not taking the steps necessary for success. For example, an executive in the business world may only perform the functions that enhance an image of himself as the “boss,” and leave essential management tasks unattended. The distinction between the image of success and its actual achievement is blurred. Retreat from action-oriented behavior is masked by the person’s focus on superficial signs and activities that preserve vanity and the fantasy image. Secondly, involvement in fantasy distorts one’s perception of reality, making self-deception more possible. Kierkegaard (1849/1954) alluded to this power of fantasy to attract and deceive when he observed: Sometimes the inventiveness of the human imagination suffices to procure possibility. Instead of summoning back possibility into necessity, the man pursues the possibility—and at last cannot find his way back to himself. (p. 77, 79) Thirdly, through its assigned roles and its rules for role-designated behavior, including age-appropriate activities, our culture actively supports people’s tendencies to give themselves up to more and more passivity and fantasy as they move through the life process. In addition, the discrepancy between society’s professed values on the one hand, and how society actually operates, on the other, tends to distort a person’s perceptions of reality, further confusing the difference between idealistic fantasies and actual accomplishments. The general level of pretense, duplicity, and deception existing in our society contributes to everyone’s disillusionment, cynicism, resignation, and passivity. The pooling of the individual defenses and fantasies of all society’s members makes it possible for each person to practice self-delusion under the guise of normalcy. Thus chronic self-denial becomes a socially acceptable defense against death anxiety.
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Robert W. Firestone (The Fantasy Bond: Structure of Psychological Defenses)
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He twirled her around a few more times before he said offhandedly, "Aren't you tired of fighting yet? I'm beginning to find it quite tedious m'self. I've even given you the benefit of the doubt-"
"Don't do me any favor."
He cocked his head to the side because she'd turned away to mumble that. "Are you challenging me to make you sweet and lovable again? I believe you are!"
Her eyes flew back to his, but she could't do anything more than sputter over the absurdity. His pale eyes were twinkling, holding back laughter no doubt. What the devil as he doing! Je couldn't be serious.Yet he rubbed his cheek against hers right there on the dance floor!
"What-"
She should never have turned in toward that unexpected caress. Was she destined to bump lips with him by accident? She drew back instantly while she had the presence of mine to do so. But he didn't.In fact, he moved closer, his mouth actually persuing hers until there was nothing accidental about it! She stumbled as her sensed whirled. That just encouraged him to hold her closer and kiss her more deeply. She was fast approaching the point of not caring!
Desperately, she tore her mouth away to gasp out, "You're going to cause a scandal!"
"I do believe it would be worth it," he said softly by her ear. "But it's only a minor infraction and quite overlooked, since everyone here knows we're married."
"No,they don't.I didn't have it announced."
He stopped abruptly. Several other couples even bumped into them. "Why not?"
She looked away from his frown, which make her feel distinctly uneasy. How to explain her earlier hesitancy without him seeing it for what it was, a full-blown panic? But he didn't wait for her answer.
Suddenly he was leading her off the dance floor. He began a social circuit around the room, missing no one who wasn't currently dancing. From group to group he stopped to introduce Rebecca as his wife,the Marchioness of Rochwood. He did it curtly,as if here completing a task assigned to him, which gave her the odd feeling he was punishing her.She was mortified. Most of those people thought he was joking! They knew him.They knew his reputation. And he wasn't behaving the least bit normally.
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Johanna Lindsey (A Rogue of My Own (Reid Family, #3))
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THE SIX-HOUR SEMINAR that Jack was forced to attend at the beginning of each new semester had been called Orientation until a few years ago, when the university changed the seminar’s name to Onboarding. The name change coincided with a revamp of the orientation curriculum, which had bloated into this all-day human resources horror during which members of the HR team attempted, at unmerciful length, to “socialize the mission statement’s DNA,” is how they put it. They were referring to the many-planked mission statement the university had spent two years and countless consultant dollars developing in a campus-wide effort to express everything the university did in just one sentence. This was the brainchild of the university’s new CFO, who told the faculty in all seriousness that developing a mission statement that captured everything the university did in just one sentence was akin to their “moonshot,” and he asked for their help in this endeavor “not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” Why the university needed to corral its collective intelligence and creativity and energy for the task of expressing everything it did in just one sentence was a mystery to most faculty, but this did not stop their administrator bosses from enthusiastically assigning them to “mission statement working groups” so that they could have a voice (unpaid) in developing this one magical sentence, this one statement that would distill everything everyone did into a phrase ideally small enough for letterhead.
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Nathan Hill (Wellness)
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CHAPTER THREE IN ONE PAGE Multitrack 1. Multitracking = considering more than one option simultaneously. • The naming firm Lexicon widens its options by assigning a task to multiple small teams, including an “excursion team” that considers a related task from a very different domain. 2. When you consider multiple options simultaneously, you learn the “shape” of the problem. • When designers created ads simultaneously, they scored higher on creativity and effectiveness. 3. Multitracking also keeps egos in check—and can actually be faster! • When you develop only one option, your ego is tied up in it. • Eisenhardt’s research on Silicon Valley firms: Multitracking minimized politics and provided a built-in fallback plan. 4. While decision paralysis may be a concern for people who consider many options, we’re pushing for only one or two extra. And the payoff can be huge. • We’re not advocating 24 kinds of jam. When the German firm considered two or more alternatives, it made six times as many “very good” decisions. 5. Beware “sham options.” • Kissinger: “Nuclear war, present policy, or surrender.” • One diagnostic: If people on your team disagree about the options, you have real options. 6. Toggle between the prevention and promotion mindsets. • Prevention focus = avoiding negative outcomes. Promotion focus = pursuing positive outcomes. • Companies who used both mindsets performed much better after a recession. • Doreen’s husband, Frank, prompted her to think about boosting happiness, not just limiting stress. 7. Push for “this AND that” rather than “this OR that.
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Chip Heath (Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work)
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One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.
As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence. p109
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
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Nearly a century ago, French engineer Max Ringelmann (reported by Kravitz & Martin, 1986) found that the collective effort of tug-of-war teams was but half the sum of the individual efforts. Contrary to the presumption that “in unity there is strength,” this suggested that group members may actually be less motivated when performing additive tasks. Maybe, though, poor performance stemmed from poor coordination—people pulling a rope in slightly different directions at slightly different times. A group of Massachusetts researchers led by Alan Ingham (1974) cleverly eliminated that problem by making individuals think others were pulling with them, when in fact they were pulling alone. Blindfolded participants were assigned the first position in the apparatus and told,
“Pull as hard as you can.” They pulled 18 percent harder when they knew they
were pulling alone than when they believed that behind them two to five people
were also pulling.
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David G. Myers (Social Psychology)
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We have separated this perfect virtue into its several parts. The desires had to be reined in, fear to be suppressed, proper actions to be arranged, debts to be paid; we therefore included self-restraint, bravery, prudence, and justice – assigning to each quality its special function. How then have we formed the conception of virtue? Virtue has been manifested to us by this man's order, propriety, steadfastness, absolute harmony of action, and a greatness of soul that rises superior to everything. Thence has been derived our conception of the happy life, which flows along with steady course, completely under its own control. 12. How then did we discover this fact? I will tell you: that perfect man, who has attained virtue, never cursed his luck, and never received the results of chance with dejection; he believed that he was citizen and soldier of the universe, accepting his tasks as if they were his orders. Whatever happened, he did not spurn it, as if it were evil and borne in upon him by hazard; he accepted it as if it were assigned to be his duty. "Whatever this may be," he says, "it is my lot; it is rough and it is hard, but I must work diligently at the task.
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Seneca (Moral Letters to Lucilius)
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If the symbolic father is often lurking behind the boss--which is why one speaks of 'paternalism' in various kinds of enterprises--there also often is, in a most concrete fashion, a boss or hierarchic superior behind the real father. In the unconscious, paternal functions are inseparable from the socio-professional and cultural involvements which sustain them. Behind the mother, whether real or symbolic, a certain type of feminine condition exists, in a socially defined imaginary context. Must I point out that children do not grow up cut off from the world, even within the family womb? The family is permeable to environmental forces and exterior influences. Collective infrastructures, like the media and advertising, never cease to interfere with the most intimate levels of subjective life. The unconscious is not something that exists by itself to be gotten hold of through intimate discourse. In fact, it is only a rhizome of machinic interactions, a link to power systems and power relations that surround us. As such, unconscious processes cannot be analyzed in terms of specific content or structural syntax, but rather in terms of enunciation, of collective enunciative arrangements, which, by definition, correspond neither to biological individuals nor to structural paradigms...
The customary psychoanalytical family-based reductions of the unconscious are not 'errors.' They correspond to a particular kind of collective enunciative arrangement. In relation to unconscious formation, they proceed from the particular micropolitics of capitalistic societal organization. An overly diversified, overly creative machinic unconscious would exceed the limits of 'good behavior' within the relations of production founded upon social exploitation and segregation. This is why our societies grant a special position to those who specialize in recentering the unconscious onto the individuated subject, onto partially reified objects, where methods of containment prevent its expansion beyond dominant realities and significations. The impact of the scientific aspirations of techniques like psychoanalysis and family therapy should be considered as a gigantic industry for the normalization, adaption and organized division of the socius.
The workings of the social division of labor, the assignment of individuals to particular productive tasks, no longer depend solely on means of direct coercion, or capitalistic systems of semiotization (the monetary remuneration based on profit, etc.). They depend just as fundamentally on techniques modeling the unconscious through social infrastructures, the mass media, and different psychological and behavioral devices...Even the outcome of the class struggle of the oppressed--the fact that they constantly risk being sucked into relations of domination--appears to be linked to such a perspective.
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Félix Guattari (Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977)
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The aim is to get the students actively involved in seeking this evidence: their role is not simply to do tasks as decided by teachers, but to actively manage and understand their learning gains. This includes evaluating their own progress, being more responsible for their learning, and being involved with peers in learning together about gains in learning. If students are to become active evaluators of their own progress, teachers must provide the students with appropriate feedback so that they can engage in this task. Van den Bergh, Ros, and Beijaard (2010: 3) describe the task thus: Fostering active learning seems a very challenging and demanding task for teachers, requiring knowledge of students’ learning processes, skills in providing guidance and feedback and classroom management. The need is to engage students in this same challenging and demanding task. The suggestion in this chapter is to start lessons with helping students to understand the intention of the lesson and showing them what success might look like at the end. Many times, teachers look for the interesting beginning to a lesson – for the hook, and the motivating question. Dan Willingham (2009) has provided an excellent argument for not thinking in this way. He advocates starting with what the student is likely to think about. Interesting hooks, demonstrations, fascinating facts, and likewise may seem to be captivating (and often are), but he suggests that there are likely to be other parts of the lesson that are more suitable for the attention-grabber. The place for the attention-grabber is more likely to be at the end of the lesson, because this will help to consolidate what has been learnt. Most importantly,Willingham asks teachers to think long and hard about how to make the connection between the attention-grabber and the point that it is designed to make; preferably, that point will be the main idea from the lesson. Having too many open-ended activities (discovery learning, searching the Internet, preparing PowerPoint presentations) can make it difficult to direct students’ attention to that which matters – because they often love to explore the details, the irrelevancies, and the unimportant while doing these activities. One of Willingham's principles is that any teaching method is most useful when there is plenty of prompt feedback about whether the student is thinking about a problem in the right way. Similarly, he promotes the notion that assignments should be primarily about what the teacher wants the students to think about (not about demonstrating ‘what they know’). Students are very good at ignoring what you say (‘I value connections, deep ideas, your thoughts’) and seeing what you value (corrections to the grammar, comments on referencing, correctness or absence of facts). Thus teachers must develop a scoring rubric for any assignment before they complete the question or prompts, and show the rubric to the students so that they know what the teacher values. Such formative feedback can reinforce the ‘big ideas’ and the important understandings, and help to make the investment of
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John Hattie (Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning)
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THE OBEDIENCE GAME DUGGAR KIDS GROW UP playing the Obedience Game. It’s sort of like Mother May I? except it has a few extra twists—and there’s no need to double-check with “Mother” because she (or Dad) is the one giving the orders. It’s one way Mom and Dad help the little kids in the family burn off extra energy some nights before we all put on our pajamas and gather for Bible time (more about that in chapter 8). To play the Obedience Game, the little kids all gather in the living room. After listening carefully to Mom’s or Dad’s instructions, they respond with “Yes, ma’am, I’d be happy to!” then run and quickly accomplish the tasks. For example, Mom might say, “Jennifer, go upstairs to the girls’ room, touch the foot of your bed, then come back downstairs and give Mom a high-five.” Jennifer answers with an energetic “Yes, ma’am, I’d be happy to!” and off she goes. Dad might say, “Johannah, run around the kitchen table three times, then touch the front doorknob and come back.” As Johannah stands up she says, “Yes, sir, I’d be happy to!” “Jackson, go touch the front door, then touch the back door, then touch the side door, and then come back.” Jackson, who loves to play army, stands at attention, then salutes and replies, “Yes, sir, I’d be happy to!” as he goes to complete his assignment at lightning speed. Sometimes spotters are sent along with the game player to make sure the directions are followed exactly. And of course, the faster the orders can be followed, the more applause the contestant gets when he or she slides back into the living room, out of breath and pleased with himself or herself for having complied flawlessly. All the younger Duggar kids love to play this game; it’s a way to make practicing obedience fun! THE FOUR POINTS OF OBEDIENCE THE GAME’S RULES (MADE up by our family) stem from our study of the four points of obedience, which Mom taught us when we were young. As a matter of fact, as we are writing this book she is currently teaching these points to our youngest siblings. Obedience must be: 1. Instant. We answer with an immediate, prompt “Yes ma’am!” or “Yes sir!” as we set out to obey. (This response is important to let the authority know you heard what he or she asked you to do and that you are going to get it done as soon as possible.) Delayed obedience is really disobedience. 2. Cheerful. No grumbling or complaining. Instead, we respond with a cheerful “I’d be happy to!” 3. Thorough. We do our best, complete the task as explained, and leave nothing out. No lazy shortcuts! 4. Unconditional. No excuses. No, “That’s not my job!” or “Can’t someone else do it? or “But . . .” THE HIDDEN GOAL WITH this fun, fast-paced game is that kids won’t need to be told more than once to do something. Mom would explain the deeper reason behind why she and Daddy desired for us to learn obedience. “Mom and Daddy won’t always be with you, but God will,” she says. “As we teach you to hear and obey our voice now, our prayer is that ultimately you will learn to hear and obey what God’s tells you to do through His Word.” In many families it seems that many of the goals of child training have been lost. Parents often expect their children to know what they should say and do, and then they’re shocked and react harshly when their sweet little two-year-old throws a tantrum in the middle of the grocery store. This parental attitude probably stems from the belief that we are all born basically good deep down inside, but the truth is, we are all born with a sin nature. Think about it: You don’t have to teach a child to hit, scream, whine, disobey, or be selfish. It comes naturally. The Bible says that parents are to “train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).
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Jill Duggar (Growing Up Duggar: It's All about Relationships)
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ON THE MODUS OPERANDI OF OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT, DONALD J. TRUMP
"According to a new ABC/Washington Post poll, President Trump’s disapproval rating has hit a new high."
The President's response to this news was "“I don’t do it for the polls. Honestly — people won’t necessarily agree with this — I do nothing for the polls,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. “I do it to do what’s right. I’m here for an extended period of time. I’m here for a period that’s a very important period of time. And we are straightening out this country.” - Both Quotes Taken From Aol News - August 31, 2018
In The United States, as in other Republics, the two main categories of Presidential motivation for their assigned tasks are #1: Self Interest in seeking to attain and to hold on to political power for their own sakes, regarding the welfare of This Republic to be of secondary importance. #2: Seeking to attain and to hold on to the power of that same office for the selfless sake of this Republic's welfare, irregardless of their personal interest, and in the best of cases going against their personal interests to do what is best for this Republic even if it means making profound and extreme personal sacrifices. Abraham Lincoln understood this last mentioned motivation and gave his life for it.
The primary information any political scientist needs to ascertain regarding the diagnosis of a particular President's modus operandi is to first take an insightful and detailed look at the individual's past. The litmus test always being what would he or she be willing to sacrifice for the Nation. In the case of our current President, Donald John Trump, he abandoned a life of liberal luxury linked to self imposed limited responsibilities for an intensely grueling, veritably non stop two
year nightmare of criss crossing this immense Country's varied terrain, both literally and socially when he could have easily maintained his life of liberal leisure.
While my assertion that his personal choice was, in my view, sacrificially done for the sake of a great power in a state of rapid decline can be contradicted by saying it was motivated by selfish reasons, all evidence points to the contrary. For knowing the human condition, fraught with a plentitude of weaknesses, for a man in the end portion of his lifetime to sacrifice an easy life for a hard working incessant schedule of thankless tasks it is entirely doubtful that this choice was made devoid of a special and even exalted inspiration to do so.
And while the right motivations are pivotal to a President's success, what is also obviously needed are generic and specific political, military and ministerial skills which must be naturally endowed by Our Creator upon the particular President elected for the purposes of advancing a Nation's general well being for one and all. If one looks at the latest National statistics since President Trump took office, (such as our rising GNP, the booming market, the dramatically shrinking unemployment rate, and the overall positive emotive strains in regards to our Nation's future, on both the left and the right) one can make definitive objective conclusions pertaining to the exceptionally noble character and efficiency of the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And if one can drown out the constant communicative assaults on our current Commander In Chief, and especially if one can honestly assess the remarkable lack of substantial mistakes made by the current President, all of these factors point to a leader who is impressively strong, morally and in other imperative ways. And at the most propitious time.
For the main reason that so many people in our Republic palpably despise our current President is that his political and especially his social agenda directly threatens their licentious way of life. - John Lars Zwerenz
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John Lars Zwerenz
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Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration. I would strictly deny that one's search or a meaning to his existence, or even his doubt of it, in every case is derived from, or results in, any disease. Existential frustration is neither pathological or pathogenic. A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. it may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient's existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs. It is his task, rather, to pilot the patient through his existential crises of growth and development.
Logotherapy regards its assignment as that of assisting the patient to find meaning in his life. Inasmuch as logotherapy makes him aware of the hidden logos of his existence, it is an analytical process. To this extent, logotherapy resembles psychoanalysis. However, in logotherapy's attempt to make something conscious again it does not restrict its activity to instinctual facts within the individual's unconscious bu also cares for existential realities, such as the potential meaning of his existence to be fulfilled as well as his will to meaning. Any analysis, however, even when it refrains from including the noological dimension in its therapeutic process, tries to make the patient aware of what he actually longs for in the depth of his being. Logotherapy deviates from psychoanalysis insofar as it considers man a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts, or in merely reconciling the conflict claims of id, ego and supergo, or in the mere adaptation and adjustment to society and environment.
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)