Audit Time Quotes

I like threesomes with two women, not because I'm a cynical sexual predator. Oh no! But because I'm a romantic. I'm looking for "The One." And I'll find her more quickly if I audition two at a time.

I feel his arm Lightly Over me. He takes one of my outstretched hands. Draws it beneath my stomach. "One more time..." This is not sex, Not friendship. Something Strange Special In the stillness of his breath, The waterlike way he moves. He is making a dance. We are making a dance.

It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.

One sure way to increase a businesses profits is to implement a process improvement program. When a business audits it's internal processes and extracts waste from those processes, the result is inevitably more time or money being leftover.

Well?" Nat says after a few seconds. "I'm surprised you're here again, Harriet. I thought you'd be busy auditioning for A Midsummer Night's Dream." I blink a few times in surprise. "No. I'm not." "You should be. I heard they're looking for an ass." Oh. Now why can't I think of quips like that when I need them?

Only time can heal wounds as deep as that—a lot of time—and all you can really do is place yourself in its hands and try to consider the passing of each day a victory.

Are you auditioning for Romeo?” He shakes his head. “No way. I’d have to have my balls removed to play that pussy.” “Hey, that’s no way to talk about one of the greatest romantic heroes of all time.” “He’s not a hero, Taylor, he’s a limp, fickle dick who confuses lust with love and kills himself over a chick he’s just met.

Her voice was trained, supple as leather, precise as a knife thrower's blade. Singing or talking, it had the same graceful quality, and an accent I thought at first was English, but then realized was the old-fashioned American of a thirties movie, a person who could get away with saying 'grand.' Too classic, they told her when she went out on auditions. It didn't mean old. It meant too beautiful for the times, when anything that lasted longer than six months was considered passe. I loved to listen to her sing, or tell me stories about her childhood in suburban Connecticut, it sounded like heaven.

It has been conquered, razed, and rebuilt so many times that its stones seem to possess life, bestowed by the audit trail of prayer and blood.

But sometimes things happen that no one hopes for. Events that cause everything you've worked towards, the life you've carefully constructed piece by piece, to come tumbling down all around you. No one is to blame, but you're left with a wound you can't heal on your own and can't believe you'll ever learn to accept, so you struggle to escape the pain. Only time can heal wounds as deep as that - a lot of time - and all you can really do is place yourself in its hands and try to consider the passing of each day a victory. You tough it out moment by moment, hour by hour, and after some weeks or months you begin to see signs of recovery. Slowly the wound heals into a scar.

I’m very interested in the emotional honesty of things, which at times looks kind of ugly and at times looks scary and not polished, and so there were many times when I would audition for something and I would come from, for me, a very honest place, but it’s completely not what they’re looking for for that type of material. But I was always very steadfast in what I was interested in, and I felt like, I’m gonna tell the truth as best as I know it. And you eventually start to understand that the projects find you that meet up with that. It takes as long as it takes, and for me it took like 20 years, but I’m really glad. You know, the jobs always ultimately end up going to the person who’s supposed to tell that story, and those weren’t my stories to tell.

Karma is a balance sheet of life which debits and credit all your deeds.YourWhich is audited by our creator and actions are based on what we accumulated in it.

This is from "Marabou Stork Nightmares". Bernard's Poem: Did you see her on the telly the other day good family entertainment the tabloids say But when you're backstage at your new faeces audition you hear the same old shite of your own selfish volition She was never a singer a comic or a dancer I cant say I was sad when I found out she had cancer Great Britain's earthy northern comedy queen takes the rand, understand from the racist Boer regime So now her cells are fucked and thats just tough titty I remember her act that I caught back in Sun City She went on and on about 'them from the trees with different skull shapes from the likes of you and me' Her Neo-Nazi spell it left me fucking numb the Boers lapped it up with zeal so did the British ex-pat scum But what goes round comes round they say so welcome to another dose of chemotherapy And for my part it's time to be upfront so fuck off and die you carcinogenic cunt.

...I learned a valuable lesson that stays with me to this day and plays on a loop in my head any time I have a big audition. It goes a little something like this: "Bitch, stop wasting time fearing the worst! Living through the worst is never as hard as fearing it. Fight the fear and go do what you gotta do. That's what you came here for.

It takes such a long time to realize that it’s worth it. I wonder why we’re engineered that way. We’re sleep-deprived to the point of madness those first couple of years and then one day you wake up and you see the little person you’ve created and she says a sentence to you and you realize that everything in your life has been an audition for the creation of that specific person. That you’re sending freestanding beings off into the world and it’s entirely on your shoulders.

A Buyback Loop occurs as you continually audit your time to determine the low-value tasks that are sucking your energy. Then you transfer those tasks, optimally, to someone who’s better at them and enjoys them. Lastly, you fill your time with higher-value tasks that light you up and make you more money. Then you start the process over again.

The death of someone close to you, he realized at that moment, was something you came to accept one concrete fact at a time.

Karma is the balance sheet of life which debits and credit all your deeds.YourWhich is audited by our creator and actions are based on what we accumulated in it.

I wish I could concentrate on dancing Instead of spending so much time pretending I am still in junior high But with Rem, I want to be sixteen Or, like Alice in Wonderland, Sometimes smaller, Sometimes bigger still.

In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in — or more precisely not in — the country’s businesses and banks. This inventory — it should perhaps be called the bezzle — amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks. … Just as the boom accelerated the rate of growth, so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery. Within a few days, something close to a universal trust turned into something akin to universal suspicion. Audits were ordered. Strained or preoccupied behavior was noticed. Most important, the collapse in stock values made irredeemable the position of the employee who had embezzled to play the market. He now confessed.

Staying level with Tess was going to require fast thinking, which was mighty difficult considering all the blood he needed for said thought processes was now hurtling south. “What would this job involve?” “Only one task. Make. Me. Believe.” “That I’m your fiancé?” Cue her smile, sly and sexy. First time she’d let him in on that action, too. “That you want me more than your next breath.” If she moved forward a couple of inches, his boner would make her believe.

It was as if he’d abandoned himself to his despair, but in fact, Aoyama knew, he was fervently searching for something. Something that, once found, would keep him from having to feel the pain of his wound. To just entrust oneself to time was to exterminate oneself, to temporarily accept a kind of death.

I have always found it difficult not to be moved by Jerusalem, even when I hated it—and God knows I have hated it for the sheer human cost of it. But the sight of it, from afar or inside the labyrinth of its walls, softens me. Every inch of it holds the confidence of ancient civilizations, their deaths and their birthmarks pressed deep into the city's viscera and onto the rubble of its edges. The deified and the condemned have set their footprints in its sand. It has been conqured, razed and, rebuilt so many times that its stones seem to possess life, bestowed by the audit trail of prayer and blood. Yet somehow, it exhales humility. It sparks an inherent sense of familiary in me—that doubtless, irrefutable Palestinian certainty that I belong to this land. It possesses me, no matter who conquers it, because its soil is the keeper of my roots, of the bones of my ancestors. Because it knows the private lust that flamed the beds of all my foremothers. Because I am the natural seed of its passionate, tempestuous past. I am a daughter of the land, and Jerusalem reassures me of this inalienable right, far more than the yellowed property deeds, the Ottoman land registries, the iron keys to our stolen homes, or UN resolutions and decrees of superpowers could ever do.

I had found a woman whom I had not known, and who from day to day had grown stranger to me, yet closer. Now she seemed to be slipping away from me again, into a realm where all names are forgotten, where there is only darkness and perhaps certain unknown laws of darkness. She rejected that dark realm; she came back, but she no longer belonged to me as I had tried to believe. Perhaps she had never belonged to me; who, after all, belongs to whom, and what is it to belong to someone, to belong to one another? Isn't it a forlorn illusion, a convention? Time and again she turned back, as she called it, for an hour, for the duration of a glance, for a night. And always I felt like a bookkeeper who is not allowed to audit. I could only accept without question whatever this unaccountable, unhappy, damned, and beloved creature chose to be and to tell me. ... Loneliness demands a companion and does not ask who it is. If you don't know that, you may have been alone, but you were never lonely.

I can't remember the last time just taking to a woman made me want a cigarette.

Even then, when time decelerates and the relative importance of our lives, of our hurry, undergoes a sudden, essential audit; even then, our heart never stops.

Unseasonably chilly tonight.” “Feel free to take your weatherman audition elsewhere.” This time, the hum almost sounds like a laugh. “I was referring to your personality, dear.

Potential stakeholders usually rely upon governance elements prior to investing their time, talent, and/or money.

This was undoubtedly because, for the first time in many years, I saw our marriage for what it really was, something fragile that could still be tarnished or lost.

Against that time, if ever that time come,   When I shall see thee frown on my defects,   When as thy love hath cast his utmost sum,   Call'd to that audit by advis'd respects;

I see that you have come to the last stage of human life; you are close upon your hundreth year, or even beyond: come now, hold an audit of your life. Reckon how much of your time has been taken up by a money-lender, how much by a mistress, a patron, a client, quarreling with your wife, punishing your slaves, dashing about the city on your social obligations. Consider also the diseases which we have brought on ourselves, and the time too which has been unused. You will find that you have fewer years than you reckon. Call to mind when you ever had a fixed purpose; how few days have passed as you had planned; when you were ever at your own disposal; when your face wore its natural expression; when your mind was undisturbed; what work you have achieved in such a long life; how many have plundered your life when you were unaware of your losses; how much you have lost through groundless sorrow, foolish joy, greedy desire, the seductions of society; how little of your own was left to you. You will realize that you are dying prematurely.

This is Quilty's audition ritual: whenever he feels it is time for it, he calls upon himself to audition for love. He has no script, no reliable sense of stage, just a faceful of his heart's own greasepaint and a relentless need for applause.

Audition me, Mr. Thornton. I dare you.” His head quirked to the side. “I beg your pardon?” “Give me the chance to prove my value.” Nicole raised a brow of her own. “If I fail to meet your expectations, you may send me on my way, and I’ll leave without a word of complaint. But if I demonstrate myself capable of the tasks you demand, well . . . then we both end up with what we want. You’ll have your secretary, and I’ll have employment. Surely that’s worth wagering a few moments of your oh-so-precious time.

But sometimes things happen that no one hopes for. Events that cause everything you’ve worked towards, the life you’ve carefully constructed piece by piece, to come tumbling down all around you. No one is to blame, but you’re left with a wound you can’t heal on your own and can’t believe you’ll ever learn to accept, so you struggle to escape the pain. Only time can heal wounds as deep as that – a lot of time – and all you can really do is place yourself in its hands and try to consider the passing of each day a victory.

TRY THIS: AUDIT YOUR TIME Spend a week tracking how much time you devote to the following: family, friends, health, and self. (Note that we’re leaving out sleeping, eating, and working. Work, in all its forms, can sprawl without boundaries. If this is the case for you, then set your own definition of when you are “officially” at work and make “extra work” one of your categories.) The areas where you spend the most time should match what you value the most. Say the amount of time that your job requires exceeds how important it is to you. That’s a sign that you need to look very closely at that decision. You’re deciding to spend time on something that doesn’t feel important to you. What are the values behind that decision? Are your earnings from your job ultimately serving your values?

Audit: What tasks do I hate doing that are easy and inexpensive to offer someone else? Transfer: Who do I have on my team—or who can I hire, even part-time—to take these over? Fill: What tasks should I focus on that I love doing that can immediately bring more money to my company?

You might make a mistake with your feet, but the judges can't watch your steps the whole time. They're more impressed by how you handle yourself.' There wasn't much I could do to prove that Jeff was marking the audit sheet incorrectly. The only thing I could do was handle myself with grace.

Here's the truth. If you have a choice between auditioning for a great role over a bad role, you are privileged. That means not only do you have a top agent who can get you in, you are at a level that you would be considered for it. Our profession at any given time has a 95 percent unemployment rate. Only 1 percent of actors are famous, and we won't get into defining famous. The 0.04 percent are the stories you read about in the media. 'Being picky,' 'dropping agents,' making far less than male counterparts. Never having any regrets in terms of roles they've taken. Yada, yada, yada.

When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop? In earlier, more rigid, less encouraging (and ultimately, more helpful) decades, things would be much clearer: you would stop when you turned forty, or when you got married, or when you had kids, or after five years, or ten years, or fifteen. And then you would go get a real job, and acting and your dreams for a career in it would recede into the evening, a melting into history as quiet as a briquette of ice sliding into a warm bath. But these were days of self-fulfillment, where settling for something that was not quite your first choice of a life seemed weak-willed and ignoble. Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault. Would Willem work for year upon year at Ortolan, catching the same trains to auditions, reading again and again and again, one year maybe caterpillaring an inch or two forward, his progress so minute that it hardly counted as progress at all? Would he someday have the courage to give up, and would he be able to recognize that moment, or would he wake one day and look in the mirror and find himself an old man, still trying to call himself an actor because he was too scared to admit that he might not be, might never be? According

People always talk about the health benefits of Japanese food,’ he said, ‘but I’m fascinated by other aspects of the Japanese dining experience. Like the whole system of serving food at a counter like this, with the customers all facing the same direction, instead of each other. It’s strange when you think about it. At a sushi bar, for example, everyone’s facing the itamae-san, and you discuss the things you’re eating – what type of squid this is, and where they’re caught, and how this is the season for them but they’ll only be at their best for another couple of weeks, and so on. Discussing the food with the chef even as you eat it – that’s a peculiar system.’ ‘I suppose it is, isn’t it? I don’t go to sushi restaurants very often – they’re so expensive – and I could probably count the number of times I’ve sat at the counter, but I know what you mean. There’s something about that atmosphere.’ ‘At its worst, it’s almost an atmosphere of collusion.’ ‘Collusion?’ ‘Everyone at the counter becomes a member of the group. In some sushi bars, all the customers are regulars and they all know each other. As an outsider, you need courage to walk into a place like that and take a seat. It’s a tight-knit little community, and harmony is of the utmost importance. Nobody’s confronting anyone else individually. The conversation all proceeds through the chef, who’s like a moderator or a master of ceremonies. You couldn’t spend some quiet time with a lover, for example, in a place like that, because you’d be isolating yourselves from the others and spoiling the atmosphere for everyone.

Having to cycle through identities to give whoever is in front of you the girl they want, feeling like you have to audition for the job you already have, having a quarter of the time that men do to achieve your dreams before your tits are in your shoes and the government deems you disgusting and banishes you to eat sleeves of tear-soaked saltines in bed until you die.

I wrote two five-page short stories, two five-page epics, to audition for my college's creative writing workshops, and was turned down both times. I was crushed, but in retrospect it was perfect training for being a writer. You can keep ‘write what you know’—for a true apprenticeship, internalize the world’s indifference and accept rejection and failure into your very soul.

sometimes things happen that no one hopes for. Events that cause everything you’ve worked toward, the life you’ve carefully constructed piece by piece, to come tumbling down all around you. No one is to blame, but you’re left with a wound you can’t heal on your own and can’t believe you’ll ever learn to accept, so you struggle to escape the pain. Only time can heal wounds as deep as that

Every time Tesla interacted with Detroit it received a reminder of how the once-great city had been separated from its own can-do culture. Tesla tried to lease a small office in Detroit. The costs were incredibly low compared with space in Silicon Valley, but the city’s bureaucracy made getting just a basic office an ordeal. The building’s owner wanted to see seven years of audited financials from Tesla, which was still a private company. Then the building owner wanted two years’ worth of advanced rent. Tesla had about $50 million in the bank and could have bought the building outright. “In Silicon Valley, you say you’re backed by a venture capitalist, and that’s the end of the negotiation,” Tarpenning said. “But everything was like that in Detroit. We’d get FedEx boxes, and they couldn’t even decide who should sign for the package.

Perhaps the best way to slip through a system unnoticed is through confusion and disorganization. Where could I find both in one place? The Department of Motor Vehicles. Before I went down to The Most Miserable Place on Earth, I decided to prep for it. I treated it like an audition. I spent an hour on my hair and makeup, and an additional twenty minutes picking out the perfect short dress. Now it was time for some Irish charm.

You didn't call me last night." "Was I supposed to?" He looked down. "Just figured now that you had my number...Kept my phone on all night, just in case." He laughed. "I started to worry that it didn't work. Actually went out to a pay phone to test it." "You could have called me. That way you left me after lunch on Saturday, I figured..." I ended there and shrugged, not wanting to be mad at him or get into any kind of argument. "Anyway, after auditions I went to the gym with Steph, and I'm so behind in my homework it's not even funny." Of course I'd punched in his number about eighteen times without actually ever calling him. I wasn't sure what I'd say, and worried about how I'd feel if he didn't answer. "I shouldn't have left like that on Saturday." "Yeah, well." I waved my hands. "Don't worry about it. I have to finish getting ready. There's cereal and stuff...just make yourself at home.

Amma was shorter, with African hips and thighs perfect slave girl material one director told her when she walked into an audition for a play about Emancipation whereupon she walked right back out again in turn a casting director told Dominique she was wasting his time when she turned up for a Victorian drama when there weren’t any black people in Britain then she said there were, called him ignorant before also leaving the room and in her case, slamming the door

This fusion of flower power and processor power, enlightenment and technology, was embodied by Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics classes at Stanford, worked nights at Atari, and dreamed of starting his own business. “There was just something going on here,” he said, looking back at the time and place. “The best music came from here—the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin—and so did the integrated circuit, and things like the Whole Earth Catalog.

I would like to fasten on someone from the older generation and say to him: ‘I see that you have come to the last stage of human life; you are close upon your hundredth year, or even beyond: come now, hold an audit of your life. Reckon how much of your time has been taken up by a money-lender, how much by a mistress, a patron, a client, quarrelling with your wife, dashing about the city on your social obligations. Consider also the diseases which we have brought on ourselves, and the time too which has been unused.

But sometimes things happen that no one hpes for. Events that cause everything you've worked toward, the life you've carefully constructed piece by piece, to come tumbling down all around you. No one is to blame, but you're left with a wound you can't heal on your own and can't believe you'll ever learn to accept, so you struggle to escape the pain. Only time can heal wounds as deep as that - a lot of time - and all you can really do is place yourself in its hands and try to consider the passing of each day as a victory.

Our noise audit found much greater differences. By our measure, the median difference in underwriting was 55%, about five times as large as was expected by most people, including the company’s executives. This result means, for instance, that when one underwriter sets a premium at $9,500, the other does not set it at $10,500—but instead quotes $16,700. For claims adjusters, the median ratio was 43%. We stress that these results are medians: in half the pairs of cases, the difference between the two judgments was even larger.

HOW TO KNOW IF SOMEONE CAN BE TRUSTED Use this expanded checklist to audit your relationship with regard to your partner toward you and you toward him or her. Show this list and your responses to it to your partner. Ask him or her to use the same list regarding you. If you or your partner are not truly described by this list of positive qualities, discuss what action you can take to change things for the better. MY PARTNER   Shows integrity and lives in accord with standards of fairness and honesty in all his or her dealings. (There is a connection between integrity and trust in the Webster’s Dictionary definition: “Trust is the assured reliance on another’s integrity.”)   May operate on the basis of self-interest but never at my expense or the expense of others.   Will not retaliate, use the silent treatment, resort to violence, or hold a grudge.   Predictably shows me the five A’s.   Supports me when I need him or her. Keeps agreements. Remains faithful.   Does not lie or have a secret life. Genuinely cares about me.   Stands by me and up for me.   Is what he or she appears to be; wants to appear just as he or she is, no matter if at times that is unflattering.

The Life of Riley in its best-known version evolved from a prospective Groucho Marx vehicle called The Flotsam Family. The Marx series failed at audition when the would-be sponsor wouldn’t accept Groucho in what was, for him, a straight role—as head of a family. Then producer Irving Brecher saw a film, The McGuerins of Brooklyn, with a rugged-looking and typically American blue-collar man, William Bendix, in one of the leading roles. There, on the screen, was his character. A new audition was recorded, with Bendix as star and the character renamed Chester A. Riley. It became a solid midlevel hit.

I have always found it difficult not to be moved by Jerusalem, even when I hated it—and God knows I have hated it for the sheer human cost of it. But the sight of it, from afar or inside the labyrinth of its walls, softens me. Every inch of it holds the confidence of ancient civilizations, their deaths and their birthmarks pressed deep into the city's viscera and onto the rubble of its edges. The deified and the condemned have set their footprints in its sand. It has been conquered, razed and, rebuilt so many times that its stones seem to possess life, bestowed by the audit trail of prayer and blood. Yet somehow, it exhales humility. It sparks an inherent sense of familiarity in me—that doubtless, irrefutable Palestinian certainty that I belong to this land. It possesses me, no matter who conquers it, because its soil is the keeper of my roots, of the bones of my ancestors. Because it knows the private lust that flamed the beds of all my foremothers. Because I am the natural seed of its passionate, tempestuous past. I am a daughter of the land, and Jerusalem reassures me of this inalienable right, far more than the yellowed property deeds, the Ottoman land registries, the iron keys to our stolen homes, or UN resolutions and decrees of superpowers could ever do.

Jimmy’s father had been apologetic towards him lately, as if he’d punished Jimmy for something Jimmy hadn’t done and was sorry about it. He was saying Right, Jimmy? a bit too much. Jimmy didn’t like that – he didn’t like being the one handing out the good marks. There were a few other moves of his father’s he could do without as well – the sucker punches, the ruffling of the hair, the way of pronouncing the word son, in a slightly deeper voice. This hearty way of talking was getting worse, as if his father were auditioning for the role of Dad, but without much hope. Jimmy had done enough faking himself so he could spot it in others, most of the time.

Every year before the Days of Awe, the Ba-al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism, held a competition to see who would blow the shofar for him on Rosh Hashanah. Now if you wanted to blow the shofar for the Ba-al Shem Tov, not only did you have to blow the shofar like a virtuoso, but you also had to learn an elaborate system of kavanot — secret prayers that were said just before you blew the shofar to direct the shofar blasts and to see that they had the proper effect in the supernal realms. All the prospective shofar blowers practiced these kavanot for months. They were difficult and complex. There was one fellow who wanted to blow the shofar for the Ba-al Shem Tov so badly that he had been practicing these kavanot for years. But when his time came to audition before the Ba-al Shem, he realized that nothing he had done had prepared him adequately for the experience of standing before this great and holy man, and he choked. His mind froze completely. He couldn’t remember one of the kavanot he had practiced for all those years. He couldn’t even remember what he was supposed to be doing at all. He just stood before the Ba-al Shem in utter silence, and then, when he realized how egregiously — how utterly — he had failed this great test, his heart just broke in two and he began to weep, sobbing loudly, his shoulders heaving and his whole body wracking as he wept. All right, you’re hired, the Ba-al Shem said. But I don’t understand, the man said. I failed the test completely. I couldn’t even remember one kavanah. So the Ba-al Shem explained with the following parable: In the palace of the King, there are many secret chambers, and there are secret keys for each chamber, but one key unlocks them all, and that key is the ax. The King is the Lord of the Universe, the Ba-al Shem explained. The palace is the House of God. The secret chambers are the sefirot, the ascending spiritual realms that bring us closer and closer to God when we perform commandments such as blowing the shofar with the proper intention, and the secret keys are the kavanot. And the ax — the key that opens every chamber and brings us directly into the presence of the King, where he may be — the ax is the broken heart, for as it says in the Psalms, “God is close to the brokenhearted.

have been walking away from institutional religion for a long time now—half my life, at this point, fifteen years dismantling what the first fifteen built. But I’ve always been glad that I grew up the way I did. The Repentagon trained me to feel at ease in odd, insular, extreme environments, a skill I wouldn’t give up for anything, and Christianity formed my deepest instincts. It gave me a leftist worldview: a desire to follow leaders who feel themselves inseparable from the hungry, the imprisoned, and the sick. Years of auditing my own conduct in prayer gave me an obsession with everyday morality. And Christian theology convinced me that I had been born in a compromised situation. It made me want to investigate my own ideas about what it means to be good.

I never told you the details of how Cea and I started dating...I was worried and embarrassed back then about my decided lack of interest, in, well, everybody. I went out on date, well that part doesn’t really matter Cecilia was auditing a company representing at the time and there was a court case involved so we spent a lot of time together and became friends. Everything else, dating and being attracted to her, that followed after.” “What are you saying here?“ Kai asks. “I’m saying,“ I take a step closer, “ that I don’t get attracted to people that easily. In fact, it almost never happens. So I don’t think we can draw any fundamental conclusions about my sexuality. And maybe we don’t have to. I’ve never felt the need to label myself before, so why can’t I say I am more attracted to you and anyone else?

Hope, though; now there’s a real pest. Hope doesn’t just nibble your cheese and chew holes in your skirting boards. Hope keeps you plodding on when it really is time to call it quits. Hope drags you to sixteen auditions in a single day, when there’s a nice job in your brother-in-law’s tannery just waiting for you. Hope keeps you going in Old Stairs or Paradise, even though there’s no money and nothing to eat and the landlord just took your chair and your chamber pot. Personally, I can see no great merit in simply being alive if you’re miserable and in pain, but Hope won’t let you go. She’s a tease, like bad children teasing a dumb animal, and I’ve made a point of avoiding her whenever I can. Still, sometimes she runs you down and there’s nowhere left for you to go. You can turn and fight her and lose, or let her scoop you up and turn your brain to mush. Hope against hope. We had human chains shifting those blocks with levers and rollers, through the narrow alleys where carts couldn’t go. We had shifts digging the ditch by lamplight, in the rain. And in every working party there was at least one man who cheerfully announced that it wasn’t going to work, the whole idea was stupid, the enemy’ll find a way round this in two shakes, just you see; and even he didn’t really believe it, because of Hope. Hope turns a hundred men and women ripping the skin off their hands on a coarse hemp rope into a street party. Someone tells a joke, or clowns around, or starts singing a favourite song from one of the shows, and Hope bursts through, like sappers, and next thing you know she’s everywhere, like smoke, or floodwater, or rats. We’re going to beat Ogus, she whispers in every ear, and this time it’ll be different.

He knew how the audition was going to affect their lives for the next ten weeks as she slowly lost her mind from nerves and the strain of trying to scrounge precious practice time from an already jam-packed life. No matter how much time poor Sam gave her, it would never be quite enough, because what she actually needed was for him and the kids to just temporarily not exist. She needed to slip into another dimension where she was a single, childless person. Just between now and the audition. She needed to go to a mountain chalet (somewhere with good acoustics) and live and breathe nothing but music. Go for walks. Meditate. Eat well. Do all those positive-visualization exercises young musicians did these days. She had an awful suspicion that if she were to do this in reality, she might not even miss Sam and the children that much, or if she did miss them, it would be quite bearable.

It seems strange that George Burns and Gracie Allen would be discovered, as radio properties, by the British. They were doing a vaudeville tour in England, playing to packed houses everywhere. The British just loved Gracie; her routines became so well known during the six-month trip that the audience would sometimes shout out the punchline in unison. They were aided in this by radio, using the infant medium to promote their stage shows, doing short bits from their act on various BBC stations as they traveled. From the beginning, Gracie had severe mike fright. She never really lost her fear of the microphone, Burns would say in interviews and in his books, but she always coped with it. Returning home, they auditioned for NBC and Grape Nuts in 1930. But the agency executive thought Gracie would be “too squeaky” on the air, and they lost the job. It was an irony: a few years later, the same product would be carrying their radio show, then one of the most successful in the nation.

But these were days of self-fulfillment, where settling for something that was not quite your first choice of a life seemed weak-willed and ignoble. Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault. Would Willem work for year upon year at Ortolan, catching the same trains to auditions, reading again and again and again, one year maybe caterpillaring an inch or two forward, his progress so minute that it hardly counted as progress at all? Would he someday have the courage to give up, and would he be able to recognize that moment, or would he wake one day and look in the mirror and find himself an old man, still trying to call himself an actor because he was too scared to admit that he might not be, might never be?

When Sloboda and a colleague conducted a study with students at a British boarding school that recruited from around the country—admission rested entirely on an audition—they were surprised to find that the students classified as exceptional by the school came from less musically active families compared to less accomplished students, did not start playing at a younger age, were less likely to have had an instrument in the home at a very young age, had taken fewer lessons prior to entering the school, and had simply practiced less overall before arriving—a lot less. “It seems very clear,” the psychologists wrote, “that sheer amount of lesson or practice time is not a good indicator of exceptionality.” As to structured lessons, every single one of the students who had received a large amount of structured lesson time early in development fell into the “average” skill category, and not one was in the exceptional group. “The strong implication,” the researchers wrote, is “that that too many lessons at a young age may not be helpful.

Is more committed to being honest about his or her mistakes and apologizing when necessary than in defending his or her ego. A partner who can’t admit he was wrong but instead loudly insists he was justified in his unkind behavior is not a good candidate for intimacy. Imagine that same kind of ego in a doctor—or a president. (I recall an interview in which Henry Kissinger said that Richard Nixon did not end the war in Vietnam early on in his terms because “he did not want to be remembered as the president who lost a war.” Imagine having a son in the army with that attitude in the White House.) We can take both trustworthiness and untrustworthiness as information about whether a relationship can go on but never as an incentive to hurt back if we are betrayed or to stay put if we are hurt. We can also do an audit of our sex life:   How interested am I in being sexual with you?   How delighted am I by seeing you, being with you, or thinking about you?   How is our sexuality contributing to our intimacy?   Can we be intimate without having to be sexual every time?

Indeed, equal amounts of research support both assertions: that mentorship works and that it doesn’t. Mentoring programs break down in the workplace so often that scholarly research contradicts itself about the value of mentoring at all, and prompts Harvard Business Review articles with titles such as “Why Mentoring Doesn’t Work.” The mentorship slip is illustrated well by family businesses: 70 percent of them fail when passed to the second generation. A business-owner parent is in a perfect spot to mentor his or her child to run a company. And yet, sometime between mentorship and the business handoff, something critical doesn’t stick. One of the most tantalizing ideas about training with a master is that the master can help her protégé skip several steps up the ladder. Sometimes this ends up producing Aristotle. But sometimes it produces Icarus, to whom his father and master craftsman Daedalus of Greek mythology gave wings; Icarus then flew too high too fast and died. Jimmy Fallon’s mentor, one of the best-connected managers Jimmy could have for his SNL dream, served him up on a platter to SNL auditions in a fraction of the expected time it should take a new comedian to get there. But Jimmy didn’t cut it—yet. There was still one more ingredient, the one that makes the difference between rapid-rising protégés who soar and those who melt their wings and crash. III.

Staying at Home during this lockdown period is the right time to find your life purpose within Ba Ga Mohlala family/clan. This is an opportunity to know yourself better and to understand what motivates and feeds your mind and your soul, and also to find out as to where you fit in the bigger Ba Ga Mohlala family/clan. All members of each family/clan possess characteristics, abilities, and qualities specific to that family/clan. It is up to the family/clan to distinguish itself amongst other families/clans. Ba Ga Mohlala has become an institution to build cooperation in order to build and forge unity for social and economic benefits for Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng in general. An institution is social structure in which people cooperate and which influences the behavior of people and the way they live. intelligence and assertiveness comes to us as our nature, it is in our blood (DNA) and all there is for us to do is to nature it and it will shine, otherwise it will gather dust and rust in us. The key of brotherhood and sisterhood is that brothers and sisters carry the same genetic code. Together, united, they carry the legacy of their forefathers. Our bond (through our shared blood/DNA) as Ba Ga Mohlala family/clan is our insurance for the future. As Ba Ga Mohlala we can have our own Law firms, Auditing Firms, Doctors's Medical Surgeries, Private School, Private Clinics or Private Hospital, farms and lot of small to medium manufacturing, service, retail and wholesale companies and become self relient. All it takes to achieve that is unity, willpower and commitment.

He found himself thinking of something Barry Grieg had once said to him about a rhythm guitar player from L.A., a guy named Jory Baker who was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. Not the kind of guitar player that caught your eye, no showboat like Angus Young or Eddie Van Halen, but competent. Once, Barry had said, Jory Baker had been the driving wheel of a group called Sparx, a group everybody seemed to think that year's Most Likely to Succeed. They had a sound something like early Creedence: hard solid guitar rock and roll. Jory Baker had done most of the writing and all of the vocals. Then a car accident, broken bones, lots of dope in the hospital. He had come out, as the John Prine song says, with a steel plate in his head and a monkey on his back. He progressed from Demerol to heroin. Got busted a couple of times. After a while he was just another street-druggie with fumble fingers, spare-changing down at the Greyhound station and hanging out on the strip. Then, somehow, over a period of eighteen months, he had gotten clean, and stayed clean. A lot of him was gone. He was no longer the driving wheel of any group, Most Likely to Succeed or otherwise, but he was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. He didn't talk much, but the needle highway on his left arm had disappeared. And Barry Grieg had said: 'He's come out the other side.' That was all. No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just . . . come out the other side. Or you don't.

When Surkov finds out about the Night Wolves he is delighted. The country needs new patriotic stars, the great Kremlin reality show is open for auditions, and the Night Wolves are just the type that’s needed, helping the Kremlin rewrite the narrative of protesters from political injustice and corruption to one of Holy Russia versus Foreign Devils, deflecting the conversation from the economic slide and how the rate of bribes that bureaucrats demand has shot up from 15 percent to 50 percent of any deal. They will receive Kremlin support for their annual bike show and rock concert in Crimea, the one-time jewel in the Tsarist Empire that ended up as part of Ukraine during Soviet times, and where the Night Wolves use their massive shows to call for retaking the peninsula from Ukraine and restoring the lands of Greater Russia; posing with the President in photo ops in which he wears Ray-Bans and leathers and rides a three-wheel Harley (he can’t quite handle a two-wheeler); playing mega-concerts to 250,000 cheering fans celebrating the victory at Stalingrad in World War II and the eternal Holy War Russia is destined to fight against the West, with Cirque du Soleil–like trapeze acts, Spielberg-scale battle reenactments, religious icons, and holy ecstasies—in the middle of which come speeches from Stalin, read aloud to the 250,000 and announcing the holiness of the Soviet warrior—after which come more dancing girls and then the Night Wolves’ anthem, “Slavic Skies”: We are being attacked by the yoke of the infidels: But the sky of the Slavs boils in our veins . . . Russian speech rings like chain-mail in the ears of the foreigners, And the white host rises from the coppice to the stars.

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined. On the terrace of the Bundesterrasse is a striking view: the river Aare below and the Bernese Alps above. A man stands there just now, absently emptying his pockets and weeping. Without reason, his friends have abandoned him. No one calls any more, no one meets him for supper or beer at the tavern, no one invites him to their home. For twenty years he has been the ideal friend to his friends, generous, interested, soft-spoken, affectionate. What could have happened? A week from this moment on the terrace, the same man begins acting the goat, insulting everyone, wearing smelly clothes, stingy with money, allowing no one to come to his apartment on Laupenstrasse. Which was cause and which effect, which future and which past? In Zürich, strict laws have recently been approved by the Council. Pistols may not be sold to the public. Banks and trading houses must be audited. All visitors, whether entering Zürich by boat on the river Limmat or by rail on the Selnau line, must be searched for contraband. The civil military is doubled. One month after the crackdown, Zürich is ripped by the worst crimes in its history. In daylight, people are murdered in the Weinplatz, paintings are stolen from the Kunsthaus, liquor is drunk in the pews of the Münsterhof. Are these criminal acts not misplaced in time? Or perhaps the new laws were action rather than reaction? A young woman sits near a fountain in the Botanischer Garten. She comes here every Sunday to smell the white double violets, the musk rose, the matted pink gillyflowers. Suddenly, her heart soars, she blushes, she paces anxiously, she becomes happy for no reason. Days later, she meets a young man and is smitten with love. Are the two events not connected? But by what bizarre connection, by what twist in time, by what reversed logic? In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world? In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective. Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

So, Cameron," Steph continued, "auditions for the school play are next week. You should come. We need more males of the species to try out." "Not my thing," Cameron said. "okay, so you don't want to be onstage. You could be backstage." "With Jenna," Gil said helpfully. "She's the stage manager-" Ethan talked over Gil. "But if it's not our thing," he said, "it's not your thing. You don't even have to have a thing if you don't want." "Right," Katy said, "no thing required." Cameron didn't respond, didn't even act like anyone was waiting for him to say anything. He just ate his lunch, scooping spaghetti onto a piece of bread and folding the bread over into a sort of sandwich before putting it in his mouth. I was fascinated by the most mundane little details of him-how he held his paper napkin in his left hand while he ate with his right, the space he took up when both his elbows were on the table. I was suddenly aware that I'd been staring at him, and everyone else at the table was staring at me. They were all done with their lunches. I wondered how much time had passed. "Um," Katy said to me, "are you all right?" Steph caught my eye and smiled slowly. "Oh,yeah." I concentrated on my half sandwich trying to think of something witty to say, but I was in total Jennifer Harris territory now, spacing out and forgetting how to make simple conversation. Cameron picked up his empty tray. "Nice to meet you all. See you later." He lifted a finger toward me. "Bye, Jennifer." We watched him leave, then Gil said, "How come he calls you Jennifer?" I crumpled up my lunch bag. "because that used to be my name." "Really?" Ethan said. "I didn't know that." "I changed it a long time ago." "He's shy," Steph said, still watching the spot where Cameron had been sitting. Katy smirked. "Not with Jenna." Ethan surprised me by coming to Cameron's defense. "That's because they've known each other forever. I'd be nervous, too, if I were meeting all you retards for the first time." "Good point," Junior Dave said.

The game had only two rules. The first was that every statement had to have at least two words in which the first letters were switched. “You’re not my little sister,” Shawn said. “You’re my sittle lister.” He pronounced the words lazily, blunting the t’s to d’s so that it sounded like “siddle lister.” The second rule was that every word that sounded like a number, or like it had a number in it, had to be changed so that the number was one higher. The word “to” for example, because it sounds like the number “two,” would become “three.” “Siddle Lister,” Shawn might say, “we should pay a-eleven-tion. There’s a checkpoint ahead and I can’t a-five-d a ticket. Time three put on your seatbelt.” When we tired of this, we’d turn on the CB and listen to the lonely banter of truckers stretched out across the interstate. “Look out for a green four-wheeler,” a gruff voice said, when we were somewhere between Sacramento and Portland. “Been picnicking in my blind spot for a half hour.” A four-wheeler, Shawn explained, is what big rigs call cars and pickups. Another voice came over the CB to complain about a red Ferrari that was weaving through traffic at 120 miles per hour. “Bastard damned near hit a little blue Chevy,” the deep voice bellowed through the static. “Shit, there’s kids in that Chevy. Anybody up ahead wanna cool this hothead down?” The voice gave its location. Shawn checked the mile marker. We were ahead. “I’m a white Pete pulling a fridge,” he said. There was silence while everybody checked their mirrors for a Peterbilt with a reefer. Then a third voice, gruffer than the first, answered: “I’m the blue KW hauling a dry box.” “I see you,” Shawn said, and for my benefit pointed to a navy-colored Kenworth a few cars ahead. When the Ferrari appeared, multiplied in our many mirrors, Shawn shifted into high gear, revving the engine and pulling beside the Kenworth so that the two fifty-foot trailers were running side by side, blocking both lanes. The Ferrari honked, weaved back and forth, braked, honked again. “How long should we keep him back there?” the husky voice said, with a deep laugh. “Until he calms down,” Shawn answered. Five miles later, they let him pass. The trip lasted about a week, then we told Tony to find us a load to Idaho. “Well, Siddle Lister,” Shawn said when we pulled into the junkyard, “back three work.” — THE WORM CREEK OPERA HOUSE announced a new play: Carousel. Shawn drove me to the audition, then surprised me by auditioning himself. Charles was also there, talking to a girl named

This game is likewise fantastic for study hall educating. Instructors can draw in understudies in a study hall jargon or sentence structure audit. Jed Fernandez is appropriate for middle of the road and progressed esl students. It very well may be utilized to invigorate a dull class, to audit work that was done or essentially as a compensation for good study hall work. Have some good times educating and learning English.

building tension. At times like this, she sometimes thought she should take up amateur dramatics as a hobby. “Audits.” Gayle looked blank. “Sorry?” “Audits,” Kate repeated once more. “I presume you’re familiar with the term.” Gayle sounded flustered. “Yes – yes, of course, but I don’t see— ” “Well, it’s like this,” said Kate. “Obviously, as a registered charity, I assume Sanctuary would have been audited at some point?

The combination of globally distributed computers that can cryptographically verify transactions and the building of Bitcoin’s blockchain leads to an immutable database, meaning the computers building Bitcoin’s blockchain can only do so in an append only fashion. Append only means that information can only be added to Bitcoin’s blockchain over time but cannot be deleted—an audit trail etched in digital granite. Once information is confirmed in Bitcoin’s blockchain, it’s permanent and cannot be erased. Immutability is a rare feature in a digital world where things can easily be erased, and it will likely become an increasingly valuable attribute for Bitcoin over time.

As markets mature over time, there is more regulation on what information asset issuers must provide and by whom that information must be verified and audited. With cryptoassets, however, these standards are not yet in place.

so if all goes well with this audition and they want to sign me to a contract, I’m all by my lonesome. And you know that ain’t the best situation for an artist. Especially against some commercial giant like Columbia Records and Tapes.

One important duty of public company directors is to oversee strategic planning, but in Waterloo it seemed like an afterthought. RIM’s board paid “limited attention” to strategic planning according to Protiviti. In 2009, the year Apple started taking big bites out of BlackBerry’s market share and RIM was betting heavily on Storm phones, the board’s Strategic Planning Committee met exactly once, for less than two hours, according to Protiviti. As RIM stepped up acquisitions of technology companies to bolster BlackBerry services, directors had little time to assess some deals. According to Protiviti, directors sometimes learned about deals during the same meeting they were asked for approval. Elsewhere, the board’s audit committee was asked to review financial press releases after publication. RIM’s employee count soared 53 percent to 12,800 in 2009. The surge of new hires was so great that “a number” of new executives were not vetted or approved by the board, Protiviti said. The report attributed the board’s inactivity to a lack by some directors of “sufficient understanding of the company’s business” and excessive deference to Balsillie and Lazaridis. “For these and other reasons, there has been some hesitancy for directors to question or challenge management,” the report concluded.

parties at the Argentine Embassy and had a very pleasant dalliance with Ambassador Orfila. We went out several times and I was startled when, out of the blue, he asked me to marry him. Was he kidding? I brushed off his proposal, if that’s what it was, and we continued to be friends. Maybe he just wanted an American wife. Orfila went on to become the twice-elected secretary-general of the prestigious Organization of American States (OAS).

The parliamentarian represented a bottleneck in the process. She would need to scrutinize each provision, judging whether it fell within the acceptable bounds of the rule governing reconciliation, an audit known as a Byrd Bath—in honor of the West Virginia senator Robert Byrd, who created the arcane rules back in the seventies. Every provision in a reconciliation bill needed to have a “fiscal implication.” Otherwise, the parliamentarian would rule it out of bounds and excise it from the bill. If she rejected a provision, Schumer would be sent scrambling for a last-minute fix. The fragile structure that Schumer and Manchin had concocted might collapse. Before the Senate dispersed, Schumer summoned Manchin to his office. He felt as if he needed to light a fire under Manchin, to convince him that it was time to rush. —

Knowing that she won’t leave doesn’t stop the dread in my body every time she’s away. That’s the thing about childhood pain. It sets in deep. It never really goes away.

Adelina Patti was the highest paid soprano of her time. She made her debut as a child in New York and sang at Covent Garden for twenty-five seasons. When asked for her rates to perform, the theater manager replied, “Why, Madame, that is four times as much as we pay the President of the United States for a full year.” Patti replied, “Well, then, why don’t you get the President to sing for you?

The moon shines brighter than a floodlight, so I get a front-row seat to every moment of the pain I’m causing her. Her fists shake against her belly. For a terrible moment I think she might really have a knife sprouting from her skin. I would believe it if my barbed words had become barbed metal. It’s fucking unbearable. This is it. This is the thing that breaks me. That shatters my spine and leaves me broken at her feet. I’ve survived all this time only to tear myself apart in the name of some fucked-up need to remain invulnerable.

Ballet originated in Italy in the 15th century. At the time, it was illegal for women to dance in public, so they couldn’t join the ballet.

I stroke down the length of his lifeline. “Long. Deep. You’ll live a long time.” “If you’re going to curse me, couldn’t you do it with locusts instead?” Too intimate. His hand feels abruptly intimate, as if I’m cradling some more sensitive part of him—his heart, maybe. “It’s not a curse.” “For someone who’s been trying to die his whole life, it is.

I make a face. “Do you have to be so terrible all the time?” “Me? Terrible? I’m shocked.” He puts a hand over his heart. “Wounded.” “You’re an asshole.” He gives me a stately bow. “Yes, but I’m an asshole who’s going to keep you alive.

You’re trying to convince me to forgive you?” “No. God, no. In the history of time. In the history of humanity. There has never been a bigger bastard than me.” He turns my bloodied hand over and brushes his lips against my knuckles. “Don’t ever forgive me.

You’ve been living in this space a long time, haven’t you?” She raps a knuckle on the center of the card. “Very much alone.

This time, when she kisses me back, it’s hot and brave. It lands like a cannonball at the center of my soul. I pretend with all my might that there’s something left for Bethany to destroy, but I’m already rubble.

Finding the right people for your team starts with a continual self-audit. Examine yourself in the mirror. Figure out who you are and who you aren’t. Then look at your friend group, the people who are around you all the time. Who’s building you up? Who’s bringing you down? The people in your circle, they’re either adding to you or subtracting from you. Maybe they’re helping to multiply your blessings. Or maybe they’re dividing you from things that are really important. To get the results you want in the MATHEMATICS OF LIFE, you’ve got to surround yourself with the right kind of folks.

Quincy, I’m, I’m . . . not prepared to do an audition,” I stammered. “I didn’t know, when you called, you know, what we were doing and all that.” “It’s only a couple of scenes. I got some people out there who will read with you. You just gotta be you and have fun.” “Quincy, I can not do an audition in the middle of a party. I need to prepare, I just need some time, to work on it.” “OK, I hear that—how much time you need?” Quincy asked. “I mean, just, uh, give me a week, and I’ll find an acting coach, and I can study it, so I can do it, not just read it.” Quincy considered my words. “OK, so you need a week?” “Yes, a week, a week is perfect!” “OK, so you know what’s gonna happen in a week?” Quincy asked. But before I could answer, he said, “Brandon Tartikoff is going to have an emergency on one of his shows and he’s gonna have to fly to Kansas to fire somebody. Then he’s gonna have to reschedule for the following week.” “Oh, cool, cool! Two weeks would be even better,” I said, missing the subtleties of Quincy’s point. “Right, two weeks. Then Warren Littlefield is gonna have something at his kids’ elementary school that he forgot was on the schedule he can’t get out of because his wife’s going to tear him a new one if he doesn’t show up. And he’s gonna have to reschedule for two weeks after that.

If you audit your life, skip the bullshit, and use backstops, you’ll find time to do everything you need and want to do.

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

If you find yourself in that situation, we recommend doing an analytics audit and reassessing what data points you’re recording—removing the irrelevant ones—before using the data to make decisions. The next part is how we group metrics together so that we can spot trends and opportunities. There are three key ways: segmentation, cohort analysis, and funnels. Analytics track every customer equally and report the average behavior. For example, a new customer will use an app’s first-use tutorial—some might skip it—but a returning customer won’t even see the first-use tutorial. If you simply looked at how often a customer views the tutorial out of how many times people use the app, it’d look like very few people use the tutorial overall. It’s up to you to segment your data, which means grouping it by common characteristics.

What are you trying to buy? Asset type? Size? Price? To determine the answer to the first question, do the following: Start with your own net worth. Add in friends and family. The total team net worth is your starting point. Choose a market. Consider travel time and expense. You must be able to be in your market to look at deals at least once a month. Determine the viability of your market. Job growth? Population growth? Get deal flow from the market. Real estate agents Find all commercial realty companies in the city. Get on all their mailing lists. Analyze deals online from realtors in the area. Call the realtors about their listings. Direct to owners Get lists of owners. Create a system to reach owners directly. Mail Text Cold calling Analyze deals. Income approach Income – Expenses = Net operating income Net operating income – Debt service = Cash flow Check with lenders for current terms on debt. What is the CoC return? Cap rate? Debt ratio? Comparable data Check the analyzed cap rate against cap rates in the area for similar properties. Check comparable sale prices. Comps should be close in size and age to the subject property. Comps should have similar amenities. Comps should be within a few miles of the subject property. Exit Hold and operate. Refinance. Sell or flip. Consider upcoming market conditions. Debt Check with lenders or a mortgage broker to determine the availability of loans for this type of property. What are the terms and conditions? Is this the information you used to analyze the deal originally? Make the offer. Use an LOI to submit the offer in writing. The LOI will summarize the main deal points. If your offer is less than 15 percent of the asking price, speak with the realtor before you submit the offer. Once the offer is accepted, send the LOI to your attorney and have them draft the purchase agreement. Draft the purchase and sale agreement. Now that you have a fully executed contract, the clock starts. Earnest money goes into escrow. Do your due diligence. Financial inspection Physical inspection Lease audit Begin your loan application. The lender will complete three inspections. Appraisal Environmental inspection Physical engineer inspection of the buildings Do your closing. The lender will wire the loan proceeds to the closing escrow. Wire your down payment funds to the closing escrow. You own a new property! Engage property management for takeover of operations.

Next time they're holding auditions for Fast & Furious in my driveway. Let me know. Lol

My grandfather said the sfumato described a psychological and spiritual transition between states of being. This transition was infinite and that’s why we, living in the finite, didn’t understand it. Some called it the Void. But that wasn’t sfumato. We chased the Smoky Dragon. We rode the dragon. We were the dragon. Finite time was our dance audition. Eternity was opening night.

Identify Your Strengths With Strengths Finder 2.0 One tool that can help you remember your achievements is the ‘Strengths Finder’ "assessment. The father of Strengths Psychology, Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D, along with Tom Rath and a team of scientists at The Gallup Organization, created StrengthsFinder. You can take this assessment by purchasing the Strengths Finder 2.0 book. The value of SF 2.0 is that it helps you understand your unique strengths. Once you have this knowledge, you can review past activities and understand what these strengths enabled you to do. Here’s what I mean, in the paragraphs below, I’ve listed some of the strengths identified by my Strengths Finder assessment and accomplishments where these strengths were used. “You can see repercussions more clearly than others can.” In a prior role, I witnessed products being implemented in the sales system at breakneck speed. While quick implementation seemed good, I knew speed increased the likelihood of revenue impacting errors. I conducted an audit and uncovered a misconfigured product. While the customer had paid for the product, the revenue had never been recognized. As a result of my work, we were able to add another $7.2 million that went straight to the bottom line. “You automatically pinpoint trends, notice problems, or identify opportunities many people overlook.” At my former employer, leadership did not audit certain product manager decisions. On my own initiative, I instituted an auditing process. This led to the discovery that one product manager’s decisions cost the company more than $5M. “Because of your strengths, you can reconfigure factual information or data in ways that reveal trends, raise issues, identify opportunities, or offer solutions.” In a former position, product managers were responsible for driving revenue, yet there was no revenue reporting at the product level. After researching the issue, I found a report used to process monthly journal entries which when reconfigured, provided product managers with monthly product revenue. “You entertain ideas about the best ways to…increase productivity.” A few years back, I was trained by the former Operations Manager when I took on that role. After examining the tasks, I found I could reduce the time to perform the role by 66%. As a result, I was able to tell my Director I could take on some of the responsibilities of the two managers she had to let go. “You entertain ideas about the best ways to…solve a problem.” About twenty years ago I worked for a division where legacy systems were being replaced by a new company-wide ERP system. When I discovered no one had budgeted for training in my department, I took it upon myself to identify how to extract the data my department needed to perform its role, documented those learnings and that became the basis for a two day training class. “Sorting through lots of information rarely intimidates you. You welcome the abundance of information. Like a detective, you sort through it and identify key pieces of evidence. Following these leads, you bring the big picture into view.” I am listing these strengths to help you see the value of taking the Strengths Finder Assessment.

And then there’s Mississippi. A 389-page audit released in 2020 found that money overseen by the Mississippi Department of Human Services (DHS) and intended for the state’s poorest families was used to hire an evangelical worship singer who performed at rallies and church concerts; to purchase a Nissan Armada, Chevrolet Silverado, and Ford F-250 for the head of a local nonprofit and two of her family members; and even to pay the former NFL quarterback Brett Favre $1.1 million for speeches he never gave. (Favre later returned the money.) There’s more. DHS contractors squandered TANF dollars on college football tickets, a private school, a twelve-week fitness camp that state legislators could attend free of charge ($1.3 million), and a donation to the University of Southern Mississippi for a wellness center ($5 million). Welfare funds also went to a ministry run by former professional wrestler Ted DiBiase—the Million Dollar Man and the author of the memoir Every Man Has His Price—for speeches and wrestling events. DiBiase’s price was $2.1 million. Brett DiBiase, the Million Dollar Man’s son, was serving as deputy administrator for Mississippi’s Department of Human Services at the time. He and five others have been indicted on fraud and embezzlement charges.[15]

I wasn’t opposed to auditioning as a concept. I understood and respected the purpose of the exercise, and there had even been a time when I reveled in any opportunity to show off. To perform. When that giddy, nervous energy could sustain me for days.

the die is cast, There will be time to audit The accounts later, there will be sunlight later And the equation will come out at last.