Backwards Motivational Quotes

She sighed, annoyed at her restlessness. “So,” she said, disrupting Wolf in another backward glance. “Who would win in a fight—you or a pack of wolves?” He frowned at her, all seriousness. “Depends,” he said, slowly, like he was trying to figure out her motive for asking. “How big is the pack?” “I don’t know, what’s normal? Six?” “I could win against six,” he said. “Any more than that and it could be a close call.” Scarlet smirked. “You’re not in danger of low self-esteem, at least.” “What do you mean?” “Nothing at all.” She kicked a stone from their path. “How about you and … a lion?” “A cat? Don’t insult me.” She laughed, the sound sharp and surprising. “How about a bear?” “Why, do you see one out there?” “Not yet, but I want to be prepared in case I have to rescue you.” The smile she’d been waiting for warmed his face, a glint of white teeth flashing. “I’m not sure. I’ve never had to fight a bear before.

Every challenge you encounter in life is a fork in the road. You have the choice to choose which way to go - backward, forward, breakdown or breakthrough.

Motivation will keep you going forwards, Hesitation will only drag you backwards.

Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeat itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against moments, recovering time?

His mouth twisted into a perceptive, sexy smile. "Hmm." "Hmm?" I looked away, flustered, automatically using irritation to cover my discomfort up. "What does 'hmm' have to do with anything? Could you ever use more than five words? All this grunting and miced words make you come across--primal." His smile tipped higher. "Primal." "You're impossible." "Me Jev, you Nora." "Stop it." But I nearly smiled in spite of myself. "Since we're keeping it primal, you smell good," he observed. Hw moved closer, makin me acutely aware of his size, the rise and fall of his chest, the warm burn of his skin on mine. Electricity tingled along my scalp, and I shuddered with pleasure. "It's called a shower...," I began automatically, then trailed off. My memory snagged, taken aback by a compelling and forceful sense of undue familiarity. "Soap, shampoo, hot water," I added, almost as an afterthought. "Naked. I know the drill," Jev said, something unreadable passing over his eyes. Unsure how to proceed, I attempted to wash away the moment with an airy laugh. "Are you flirting with me, Jev?" "Does it feel that way to you?" "I don't know you well enough to say either way." I tried to keep my voice level, neutral even. "Then we'll have to change that." Still uncertain of his motives, I cleared my throat. Two could play this game. "Running from bad guys together is your idea of playing getting-to-know-you?" "No. This is." He dipped my body backward, drawing me up in a slow arc until he raised me flush against him. In his arms, my joints loosened, my defenses melting as he led me through the sultry steps.

The critics…have it backward: The Qur’an is not the source of the Muslim world’s problems, but its untapped solution.

It is hard to focus on going forwards when you are looking backwards.

There's a reason why your toes are forward and your heels backward. It means, step on your past with your heels and approach your furute with your toes.

Great Leadership sometimes requires taking a step backward in order to take a leap forward.

MY FIVE DOS FOR GETTING BACK INTO THE GAME: 1. Do expect defeat. It’s a given when the stakes are high and the competition is working ferociously to beat you. If you’re surprised when it happens, you’re dreaming; dreamers don’t last long. 2. Do force yourself to stop looking backward and dwelling on the professional “train wreck” you have just been in. It’s mental quicksand. 3. Do allow yourself appropriate recovery—grieving—time. You’ve been knocked senseless; give yourself a little time to recuperate. A keyword here is “little.” Don’t let it drag on. 4. Do tell yourself, “I am going to stand and fight again,” with the knowledge that often when things are at their worst you’re closer than you can imagine to success. Our Super Bowl victory arrived less than sixteen months after my “train wreck” in Miami. 5. Do begin planning for your next serious encounter. The smallest steps—plans—move you forward on the road to recovery. Focus on the fix. MY FIVE DON’TS: 1. Don’t ask, “Why me?” 2. Don’t expect sympathy. 3. Don’t bellyache. 4. Don’t keep accepting condolences. 5. Don’t blame others.

Be fueled by the opportunities of today. Do not be passive in your life. Be courageous in driving forward in this journey of life. I know people will try to push you back. I know life will challenge you to find refuge in the past. I know the present induces fear. Do not be fooled into backwards living. Be courageous enough to keep moving forward.

I was, at the end of the day, a slow learner, an extremely slow learner afflicted with the lack of self-awareness to even realize it. I always thought I knew it all, but I was only ever motivated into action by one of two things: pleasure or pain.

I'm the girl that goes backwards, takes wrong turns, stumbles in the dark. I'm also the girl that finds gold where others feared to stray. Perhaps because I follow my heart instead of sage advice thrown my way. I don't want to become numb by always playing it safe. Many of our most cherished times happen when we shatter the damn box, step off the safety zone and listen to the sound of our soul.

Always try to avoid looking backward and forward if you want to be upward.

I was only ever motivated into action by one of two things: pleasure or pain.

You're either moving forward or standing still, and if you're standing still, you might as well be moving backwards.

The wise are like a sprouting seed; they go forward and upward, never backward or downward.

Live & Do everything in such a way so that if you look back in time, you shouldn't say that if had a time machine i would've done it better.

I am the girl that goes backwards, takes wrong turns, stumbles in life’s chasms. I am also the girl that finds gold where others feared to stray. Perhaps because I follow my heart, instead of sage advice thrown my way.

If only I could take it all back. If only I could change a few early choices, those seemingly unimportant, insignificant choices. How vital they appear to me now. How different my life would be if I had not allowed even the least degree of sin to enter in. But time can be turned backwards for no one.

If pain sometimes shatters the creature's false self sufficiency, yet in supreme Trial or Sacrifice' it teaches him the self-sufficiency which really ought to be his - the 'strength which, if Heaven gave it may be called his own': for then, in the absence of all merely natural motives and supports he acts in that strength, and that alone, which God confers upon him through his subjected will. Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God's, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it. In all other acts our will is fed through nature, that is, through created things other than the self - through the desires which our physical organism and our heredity supply to us. When we act from ourselves alone, that is, from God in ourselves - we are collaborators in, or live instruments of creation: and that is why such an act undoes with 'backward mutters of deserving power' the uncreative spell which Adam laid upon his species.

This is a prescription drug, and a functional medical doctor or anti-aging doctor will usually prescribe 1 mg per day (about a tenth of a high dose) starting in your thirties, and increase the dosage by 1 mg for every decade of age after that. In addition to the anti-aging effects, many users notice positive changes in motivation, energy, and concentration.

I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I’d grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/DNA consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata. Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster—spread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten. Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives.

The accepted hierarchy of the good, based on how a low, higher, or a most high egoism desires that thing or the other, decides today about morality or immorality. To prefer a low good (sensual pleasure, for example) to one esteemed higher (health, for example) is taken for immoral, likewise to prefer comfort to freedom. The hierarchy of the good, however, is not fixed and identical at all times. If someone prefers revenge to justice, he is moral by the standard of an earlier culture, yet by the standard of the present culture he is immoral. 'Immoral' then indicates that someone has not felt, or not felt strongly enough, the higher, finer, more spiritual motives which the new culture of the time has brought with it. It indicates a backward nature, but only in degree.

Like any pseudo scientific thinking, denialism begins with a desired conclusion. Rather than supporting a controversial or rejected claim, like many pseudo sciences, denialists maintain that a generally accepted scientific or historical claim is not true, usually for ideological reasons. Denialists then engage in what is called motivated reasoning, rationalizing why the undesired claim is not true or at least not proven. They therefore are working backwards from their desired conclusion, filling in justifications for what they believe, rather than following logic and evidence wherever it leads.

When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What we've actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless. Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn't have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures, and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations. White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obama's ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancements, there's a reaction, a backlash.

But, curiously, Peter did not grasp—perhaps he did not wish to grasp—the political implications of this new view of man. He had not gone to the West to study “the art of government.” Although in Protestant Europe he was surrounded by evidence of the new civil and political rights of individual men embodied in constitutions, bills of rights and parliaments, he did not return to Russia determined to share power with his people. On the contrary, he returned not only determined to change his country but also convinced that if Russia was to be transformed, it was he who must provide both the direction and the motive force. He would try to lead; but where education and persuasion were not enough, he would drive—and if necessary flog—the backward nation forward.

The ordering ef good things and morality. —The rank ordering of good things that was once assumed according to whether a low, or higher, or highest egoism wants one thing or another, now decides what is moral and what is immoral. To prefer a lowly good (for example, sensual pleasure) to a more highly esteemed one (for example, health) is considered immoral, just like preferring a comfortable life to freedom. But the rank ordering of good things is not something settled and identical for all time; if someone prefers revenge to justice, he is moral according to the standard of an earlier culture, immoral according to the present one. "Immoral" therefore signifies that someone does not yet feel or does not yet feel strongly enough the higher, more refined, more spiritual motives that the new culture of a given time has brought with it: it designates someone who is backward, but always only to a certain degree. —The rank ordering of good things is not itself set up and adjusted according to the point of view of morality; though to be sure, its prevailing arrangement will determine whether an action is moral or immoral.

The ordering ef good things and morality. —The rank ordering of good things that was once assumed according to whether a low, or higher, or highest egoism wants one thing or another, now decides what is moral and what is immoral. To prefer a lowly good (for example, sensual pleasure) to a more highly esteemed one (for example, health) is considered immoral, just like preferring a comfortable life to freedom. But the rank ordering of good things is not something settled and identical for all time; if someone prefers revenge to justice, he is moral accord- ing to the standard of an earlier culture, immoral according to the present one. "Immoral" therefore signifies that someone does not yet feel or does not yet feel strongly enough the higher, more refined, more spiritual motives that the new cul- ture of a given time has brought with it: it designates someone who is backward, but always only to a certain degree. —The rank ordering of good things is not itself set up and adjusted according to the point of view of morality; though to be sure, its prevailing arrangement will determine whether an action is moral or immoral.

In any event, should you doubt that your knowledge of Western history is distorted by the work of these distinguished bigots, consider whether you believe any of the following statements: The Catholic Church motivated and actively participated in nearly two millennia of anti-Semitic violence, justifying it on grounds that the Jews were responsible for the Crucifixion, until the Vatican II Council was shamed into retracting that doctrine in 1965. But, the Church still has not made amends for the fact that Pope Pius XII is rightfully known as “Hitler’s Pope.” Only recently have we become aware of remarkably enlightened Christian gospels, long ago suppressed by narrow-minded Catholic prelates. Once in power as the official church of Rome, Christians quickly and brutally persecuted paganism out of existence. The fall of Rome and the ascendancy of the Church precipitated Europe’s decline into a millennium of ignorance and backwardness. These Dark Ages lasted until the Renaissance/Enlightenment, when secular scholars burst through the centuries of Catholic barriers against reason. Initiated by the pope, the Crusades were but the first bloody chapter in the history of unprovoked and brutal European colonialism. The Spanish Inquisition tortured and murdered huge numbers of innocent people for “imaginary” crimes, such as witchcraft and blasphemy. The Catholic Church feared and persecuted scientists, as the case of Galileo makes clear. Therefore, the Scientific “Revolution” occurred mainly in Protestant societies because only there could the Catholic Church not suppress independent thought. ► Being entirely comfortable with slavery, the Catholic Church did nothing to oppose its introduction in the New World nor to make it more humane. Until very recently, the Catholic view of the ideal state was summed up in the phrase, “The divine right of kings.” Consequently, the Church has bitterly resisted all efforts to establish more liberal governments, eagerly supporting dictators. It was the Protestant Reformation that broke the repressive Catholic grip on progress and ushered in capitalism, religious freedom, and the modern world. Each of these statements is part of the common culture, widely accepted and frequently repeated. But, each is false and many are the exact opposite of the truth! A chapter will be devoted to summarizing recent repetitions of each of these statements and to demonstrating that each is most certainly false.

Along with saying no, the easiest thing you can do to become more influential is just ask. Ask more often, ask more directly, and ask for more. People who ask for what they want get better grades, more raises and promotions, and bigger job opportunities and even more orgasm. This might seem obvious but apparently it isn't. Most people do not realize how often they are not asking until they start asking more often. Whenever our MBA course ends and students share the biggest thing they have learned - after we have done so much together - the most common answer is “just ask”. The full realization comes from practice. What if you’re not sure how to ask? Just ask the other person. Seriously. One of the simplest and most surprising influence hacks is that if you ask people how to influence them, they will often tell you. Most of us are reluctant to ask because we fundamentally misunderstand the psychology of asking and we underestimate our likelihood of success. In one series of experiments, employees were more likely to turn in mediocre work than to ask for deadline extension, fearing their supervisor, would think them incompetent if they asked for extra time. But they had it backward: Managers saw extension requests as a good sign of capability and motivation. Pg 64, 65

Generally speaking a view of the available economic systems that have been tested historically must acknowledge the immense power of capitalism to generate living standards food housing education the amenities to a degree unprecedented in human civilization. The benefits of such a system while occasionally random and unpredictable with periods of undeniable stress and misery depression starvation and degradation are inevitably distributed to a greater and greater percentage of the population. The periods of economic stability also ensure a greater degree of popular political freedom and among the industrial Western democracies today despite occasional suppression of free speech quashing of dissent corruption of public officials and despite the tendency of legislation to serve the interests of the ruling business oligarchy the poisoning of the air water the chemical adulteration of food the obscene development of hideous weaponry the increased costs of simple survival the waste of human resources the ruin of cities the servitude of backward foreign populations the standards of life under capitalism by any criterion are far greater than under state socialism in whatever forms it is found British Swedish Cuban Soviet or Chinese. Thus the good that fierce advocacy of personal wealth accomplishes in the historical run of things outweighs the bad. And while we may not admire always the personal motives of our business leaders we can appreciate the inevitable percolation of the good life as it comes down through our native American soil. You cannot observe the bounteous beauty of our county nor take pleasure in its most ordinary institutions in peace and safety without acknowledging the extraordinary achievement of American civilization. There are no Japanese bandits lying in wait on the Tokaidoways after all. Drive down the turnpike past the pretty painted pipes of the oil refineries and no one will hurt you.

two steps forward three steps backwards how would u get there?_

If your needs are not attainable through safe instruments, the solution is not to increase the rate of return by upping the level of risk. Instead, goals may be revised, savings increased, or income boosted through added years of work. . . . Somebody has to care about the consequences if uncertainty is to be understood as risk. . . . As we’ve seen, the chances of loss do decline over time, but this hardly means that the odds are zero, or negligible, just because the horizon is long. . . . In fact, even though the odds of loss do fall over long periods, the size of potential losses gets larger, not smaller, over time. . . . The message to emerge from all this hype has been inescapable: In the long run, the stock market can only go up. Its ascent is inexorable and predictable. Long-term stock returns are seen as near certain while risks appear minimal, and only temporary. And the messaging has been effective: The familiar market propositions come across as bedrock fact. For the most part, the public views them as scientific truth, although this is hardly the case. It may surprise you, but all this confidence is rather new. Prevailing attitudes and behavior before the early 1980s were different. Fewer people owned stocks then, and the general popular attitude to buying stocks was wariness, not ebullience or complacency. . . . Unfortunately, the American public’s embrace of stocks is not at all related to the spread of sound knowledge. It’s useful to consider how the transition actually evolved—because the real story resists a triumphalist interpretation. . . . Excessive optimism helps explain the popularity of the stocks-for-the-long-run doctrine. The pseudo-factual statement that stocks always succeed in the long run provides an overconfident investor with more grist for the optimistic mill. . . . Speaking with the editors of Forbes.com in 2002, Kahneman explained: “When you are making a decision whether or not to go for something,” he said, “my guess is that knowing the odds won’t hurt you, if you’re brave. But when you are executing, not to be asking yourself at every moment in time whether you will succeed or not is certainly a good thing. . . . In many cases, what looks like risk-taking is not courage at all, it’s just unrealistic optimism. Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don’t know the odds. It’s a big difference.” Optimism can be a great motivator. It helps especially when it comes to implementing plans. Although optimism is healthy, however, it’s not always appropriate. You would not want rose-colored glasses in a financial advisor, for instance. . . . Over the long haul, the more you are exposed to danger, the more likely it is to catch up with you. The odds don’t exactly add, but they do accumulate. . . . Yet, overriding this instinctive understanding, the prevailing investment dogma has argued just the reverse. The creed that stocks grow steadily safer over time has managed to trump our common-sense assumption by appealing to a different set of homespun precepts. Chief among these is a flawed surmise that, with the passage of time, downward fluctuations are balanced out by compensatory upward swings. Many people believe that each step backward will be offset by more than one step forward. The assumption is that you can own all the upside and none of the downside just by sticking around. . . . If you find yourself rejecting safe investments because they are not profitable enough, you are asking the wrong questions. If you spurn insurance simply because the premiums put a crimp in your returns, you may be destined for disappointment—and possibly loss.

If you would like to be respected tried hard to be good to others without gaining benefits If you would like to fly above the ground prepared yourself in danger otherwise keep your foot firm in the ground and you will never witness any change in your life. The circle of life is unstoppable but you can stop not to ride the wrong side. Time has a valuable benefit on us but less we benefit from it How hard you try to achieve a goal dependent on how you far away from what you think were important for you before. Look forward before you look back ward but always look backward to realise the important of the past mistake in your life I never assume politics is easier then lead rough gangs into the battle field until you confront the motives of inner group. The more you tried to persuade the fool the more he exposes your weakness, Every man has time to live but brave guys have no time to live themselves The lack of leaders is a lack of light in the middle of a dark forest The student will not realise his potential unless his time in the class

The same researchers also wanted to know why red hampers academic performance. It turns out that the color red activates the right hemisphere of the frontal cortex, a pattern of brain activity that typically indicates avoidance motivation. Avoidance motivation is the technical term for a state in which you’re more concerned with avoiding failure than you are with achieving success. It’s a distracting state of mind that all but guarantees poorer performance when you’re trying to solve questions that require insight and mental effort. Psychologists have also shown that people literally recoil from the color red, leaning slightly farther backward in their seats when they’re about to begin a test with a red rather than green cover. None of these effects occurs consciously, but when they occur together it becomes clear why the color red can be so damaging in academic contexts.

Facing off in 1947-1948 were two very different societies: one highly motivated, literate, organized, semi-industrial; the other backward, largely illiterate, disorganized, agricultural. For the average Palestinian Arab man, a villager, political independence and nationhood were vague abstractions: his affinities and loyalties lay with his family, clan, and village, and, occasionally, region. Moreover, as we have noted, Palestinian Arab society was deeply divided along social and religious lines. And, among the more literate and politically conscious, there was a deep, basic fissure, going back to the 19zos, between the Husseinis and Nashashibis.

If your situation is too tough, don´t go back, go forward. You die quicker when you go backward. Die later when you go forward.

You cannot use food to settle your emotional problem, you cannot use the food and make a deal with your emotion, sometimes you need to set your plates backward to settle your emotional issues. Don’t let the devil fool you with the thinking that drinking excessive alcohol or eating without control will change your situation or anything that is going on around you, it can only complicate your issue by destroying your own body.

...if people do things for lunk-headed, backward-looking reasons, why wouldn't we also do things for significance-seeking, self-actualizing reasons? If we are predictably irrational - and we clearly are- why couldn't we also be predictably transcendent?

Hair •​Stop using chemical-laden personal care products and switch to all-natural versions. Throw out anything containing phthalates, parabens, and benzophenones. And if you are a woman, consider alternatives to hormonal birth control. •​To avoid grays, ramp up your catalase production by taking antioxidants like ashwagandha, curcumin, saw palmetto, and vitamin E. •​For baldness, try a DHT-blocking shampoo instead of prescription meds that have unwanted side effects. •​Deal with your stress, already! Seriously. If the threat of the Four Killers wasn’t enough, maybe avoiding baldness will finally motivate you. This is not optional. •​If you are balding prematurely, get your thyroid levels tested by a knowledgeable anti-aging doctor, and make sure to check your levels of T3/RT3. •​To stimulate blood flow to the scalp, get a head massage or purchase an at-home massager.

Some people will provoke you, just so they can revoke the blessings of God ahead. Do not let them deprive you of your blessings. Forge ahead and forget those who keep pulling you backwards.

The seeking system doesn’t seem to reward us for innovation and creativity, but rather it drives and propels those behaviors. The distinction is mainly temporal—reward happens after a behavioral event, whereas seeking happens before it. We are motivated to do a lot of things based on hope and aspiration that are not described by backward-looking rewards.

Rather than seeking incremental progress from the current state, try thinking about the future state you want to reach and then work backward to the present. What needs to happen to get there? This exercise can be inspiring and motivating, as you become guided by your future vision. Don't try to steer the ship by looking at its wake!

Jeff has an uncanny ability to read a narrative and consistently arrive at insights that no one else did, even though we were all reading the same narrative. After one meeting, I asked him how he was able to do that. He responded with a simple and useful tip that I have not forgotten: he assumes each sentence he reads is wrong until he can prove otherwise. He’s challenging the content of the sentence, not the motive of the writer. Jeff, by the way, was usually among the last to finish reading.

Starting today, I will no longer allow rejection to control me or my actions. I will take responsibility for my own life. I will set my own course. I will make my own success. I will take action. I will persist. I will ask confidently for what I want. I will find lessons in rejection. I will embrace it and allow it to fuel my ambition. I will look forward, not backward. I will turn my haters into motivators. I will be empowered by my circumstances, not impeded by them. I will do the things others are unwilling to do. I will make no more excuses! Rejection no longer owns me. This is my independence day! I will RISE!

There is only one direction in life: forward and not backward.

The Working Backwards process is all about starting from the customer perspective and following a step-by-step process where you question assumptions relentlessly until you have a complete understanding of what you want to build. It’s about seeking truth. Sometimes the Working Backwards process can uncover some surprising truths. Some companies, in a rush to get a project to market, ignore that truth and keep building according to the original plan. In their attachment to the modest gains of that plan, they motivate the team to pursue it aggressively, only to realize much later that there was a much bigger gain to be had if they’d taken the time to question their own assumptions. The cost of changing course in the PR/FAQ writing stage is much lower than after you’ve launched and have an operating business to manage. The Working Backwards process tends to save you from the expensive proposition of making a significant course change after you’ve launched your product.

Leadership is all about making things to move forward, not backward.

Often we misinterpret a student’s self-doubt or negative mindset as a lack of engagement or motivation when we see him exhibiting those common symptoms—zoning out, acting up, or shutting down in class. We then focus on trying to increase engagement with high energy starters such as call and response that aren’t connected to deeper learning, hoping that it flips some internal switch for the student, leading to a more positive academic mindset, which will in turn transform their academic performance. In reality, we have it backward. What we believe about belonging, effort, and value of the task leads to engagement and motivation.

One of my favorite routines for keeping my rear in good form is to sit down on the floor and 'walk' across it on my buttocks, holding my arms out straight in front for balance, and then 'walk' back again, backwards. [...] For more hip improvement - and the waist, too - I lie on my back with my elbows on the floor at my sides. With my legs straight out I make my knees touch the floor on either side, keeping my shoulders and elbows firmly on the floor. Then I stretch my arms out to the sides, I raise my knees as far as I can and bring them over my left shoulder to my left elbow, and then back and over to touch my right elbow. [...] When you succeeded in touching your elbows with your knees, then try to touch the floor.

There are two more things that I do regularly to keep my legs the way I want them: 1. I just walk around my apartment with my toes pointed straight in. Of course one looks like a pigeon, so do it when you're alone. But try always to walk that way when you're puttering around alone. You'll feel all the leg muscles responding. 2. Bend down and put your palms flat on the floor, keeping your knees straight. Then walk 'fourlegged' across the room (or down the hall if you're sure you won't frighten anyone) and backwards again. This is wonderful for both arm and leg muscles, and it draws blood to the face, which helps the complexion.

The new world-conception.—The world exists; it is not something that becomes, not something that passes away. Or rather: it becomes, it passes away, but it has never begun to become and never ceased from passing away—it maintains itself in both.— It lives on itself: its excrements are its food. We need not worry for a moment about the hypothesis of a created world. The concept "create" is today completely indefinable, unrealizable; merely a word, a rudimentary survival from the ages of superstition; one can explain nothing with a mere word. The last attempt to conceive a world that had a beginning has lately been made several times with the aid of logical procedures—generally, as one may divine, with an ulterior theological motive. Lately one has sought several times to find a contradiction in the concept "temporal infinity of the world in the past" (regressus in infinitum): one has even found it, although at the cost of confusing the head with the tail. Nothing can prevent me from reckoning backward from this moment and saying "I shall never reach the end"; just as I can reckon forward from the same moment into the infinite. Only if I made the mistake—I shall guard against it—of equating this correct concept of a regressus in infinitum with an utterly unrealizable concept of a finite progressus up to this present, only if I suppose that the direction (forward or backward) is logically a matter of indifference, would I take the head—this moment—for the tail: I shall leave that to you, my dear Herr Dühring!—

In this fast-paced era, standing still means going backward. But in your quest for progress, be wise not to become a person of questionable character. A flawed character is like a ticking time bomb waiting to destroy hard earned progress.

Then, the American War of Independence began in 1775. After more than a century and a half of unbridled expansion, the Indians saw the writing on the wall, so to speak, of American nationhood. They recognized that if the colonies were free from the governance of Great Britain, it was very likely that the new government—in whatever form it would take—would take even more harsh tactics against the native nations. Remember, American independence was predicated on the belief that the colonists were no longer English subjects and that they owned the land on which they lived and worked. In addition, the southern colonies had grown more and more dependent on slave labor. In tandem, their ideas on racially-based superiority had become more concrete and inflexible. These belief systems left no room for indigenous people or native nationhood and sovereignty. Therefore, many Indian nations decided to fight alongside the British in the Revolutionary War, believing that to be their best chance at survival. Of course, the colonists who would become the founding generation of the United States of America did not see the nuance in this decision. Instead, they believed that the Indians who sided with the British desired to live under a tyrannical monarchy. They viewed it as further evidence of their supposed backwardness rather than a decision for their own survival. Regardless of their motivations, after the colonies achieved independence, the allegiance of the native peoples was simply one more reason to dispossess them of their land and dismantle their way of life.

Human nature itself must have changed very much," I said. "Not at all," was Dr. Leete's reply, "but the conditions of human life have changed, and with them the motives of human action.

The mind has no innate perception to discern order; left or right, backward or forward, the flow of time, to the mind they are meaningless concepts embedded and taught, merely adaptations to survive, it's almost encoded within us to be messy and disordered, to be wild and crazy; to live, love, and laugh, for experience is the only true concept the mind is capable of understanding.

Occasionally, what makes us uncertain, doubtful, and vulnerable becomes the fuel we need to be high achievers. The cure for a snakebite is made from the poison; in the same way, the fear that made you go backward can be the same force that can push you forward. Use fear as motivation!

he assumes each sentence he reads is wrong until he can prove otherwise. He’s challenging the content of the sentence, not the motive of the writer. Jeff,

This obstacle which should be relentlessly combatted as a sign of narrow-minded party fanaticism and backward political culture, is reinforced for a journal like ours through the fact that in social sciences the stimulus to the posing of scientific problems is in actuality always given by practical "questions" Hence the very recognition of the existence of a scientific problem coincides personally, with the possession of specially oriented motives and values A Joumal which has come into existence under the Influence of a general interest in a concrete problem, will always include among its contributors persons who are personally Interested In these problems because certain concrete situations seem to be incompatible with, or seem to threaten. the realization of certain ideal values In which they belIeve. A bond of similar ideals will hold this circle of contrIbutors together and it will be the basis of a further recruitment. This in turn will tend to give the Journal, at least in its treatment of questions of practical social policy, a certain "character" which of course inevitably accompanies every collaboration of vigorously sensitive persons whose evaluative standpoint regarding the problems cannot be entirely expressed even In purely theoretical analysis; in the criticIsm of practIcal recommendations and measures it quite legitimately finds expression under the particular conditions above discussed.

This obstacle which should be relentlessly combatted as a sign of narrow-minded party fanaticism and backward political culture, is reinforced for a journal like ours through the fact that in social sciences the stimulus to the posing of scientific problems is in actuality always given by practical "questions" Hence the very recognition of the existence of a scientific problem coincides personally, with the possession of specially oriented motives and values A Joumal which has come into existence under the Influence of a general interest in a concrete problem, will always include among its contributors persons who are personally Interested In these problems because certain concrete situations seem to be incompatible with, or seem to threaten. the realization of certain ideal values In which they belIeve. A bond of similar ideals will hold this circle of contrIbutors together and it will be the basis of a further recruitment. This in turn will tend to give the Journal, at least in its treatment of questions of practical social policy, a certain "character" which of course inevitably accompanies every collaboration of vigorously sensitive persons whose evaluative standpoint regarding the problems cannot be entirely expressed even In purely theoretical analysis; in the criticIsm of practIcal recommendations and measures it quite legitimately finds expression under the particular conditions above discussed.

Some companies, in a rush to get a project to market, ignore that truth and keep building according to the original plan. In their attachment to the modest gains of that plan, they motivate the team to pursue it aggressively, only to realize much later that there was a much bigger gain to be had if they’d taken the time to question their own assumptions.

While self-flagellation seems motivating—especially to Americans, whose mental models of motivation often begin with howling, red-faced, vein-popping football coaches—it often produces helplessness. Self-compassion, by contrast, prompts people to confront their difficulties head-on and take responsibility for them, researchers have found.

Self-criticism can sometimes motivate our performance when we criticize ourselves for particular actions rather than for deep-seated tendencies. But unless carefully managed and contained, self-criticism can become a form of inner-directed virtue signaling. It projects toughness and ambition, but often leads to rumination and hopelessness instead of productive action.

While in Europe aspiring Communists were motivated, above all, by the desire to ameliorate social injustices, the East Asian version of Communism had both social and nationalist dimensions. In the 1920s and 1930s, in the era when Kim Il Sung, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh were young idealists, Communism in East Asia was widely seen as a shortcut to the national revival and modernity, a way not only to solve social problems but also to leapfrog past stages of backwardness and colonial dependency.

Motivation doesn’t create action; it’s actually the other way around. Action is what produces the motivation to continue taking action. A lot of people think they need motivation to take action, and that’s totally backwards.

For many years, psychologists believed that in any domain, success depended on talent first and motivation second. To groom world-class athletes and musicians, experts looked for people with the right raw abilities, and then sought to motivate them. If you want to find people who can dunk like Michael Jordan or play piano like Beethoven, it’s only natural to start by screening candidates for leaping ability and an ear for music. But in recent years, psychologists have come to believe that this approach may be backward.

The situation was similar in the Soviet Union, with industry playing the role of sugar in the Caribbean. Industrial growth in the Soviet Union was further facilitated because its technology was so backward relative to what was available in Europe and the United States, so large gains could be reaped by reallocating resources to the industrial sector, even if all this was done inefficiently and by force. Before 1928 most Russians lived in the countryside. The technology used by peasants was primitive, and there were few incentives to be productive. Indeed, the last vestiges of Russian feudalism were eradicated only shortly before the First World War. There was thus huge unrealized economic potential from reallocating this labor from agriculture to industry. Stalinist industrialization was one brutal way of unlocking this potential. By fiat, Stalin moved these very poorly used resources into industry, where they could be employed more productively, even if industry itself was very inefficiently organized relative to what could have been achieved. In fact, between 1928 and 1960 national income grew at 6 percent a year, probably the most rapid spurt of economic growth in history up until then. This quick economic growth was not created by technological change, but by reallocating labor and by capital accumulation through the creation of new tools and factories. Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy.

Consider the perennial goal of getting a good night’s sleep. Insufficient sleep is practically a national epidemic, afflicting one-third of American adults (it’s twice as bad for teenagers). Sleep should be easy to achieve. We have the motivation to sleep well. Who doesn’t want to wake up alert rather than foggy, refreshed rather than sluggish? We understand how much sleep we need. It’s basic arithmetic. If we have work or class early the next morning and need six to eight hours of sleep, we should work backward and plan on going to bed around 11 p.m. And we have control: Sleep is a self-regulated activity that happens in an environment totally governed by us—our home. We decide when to tuck in for the night. We choose our environment, from the room, to the bed, to the sheets and pillows. So why don’t we do what we know is good for us? Why do we stay up later than is good for us—and in turn not get enough sleep and wake up tired rather than refreshed? I blame it on a fundamental misunderstanding of how our environment shapes our behavior.

Don't go backward seeing obstacles. Overcome it. Your destination is ahead.

As the legal historian Richard Epstein memorably put it, the “ink was scarcely dry on the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” which forbade the government as well as employers from taking race into account for any reason, when policies of racial discrimination began proliferating throughout the public and private sectors. In the historical blink of an eye, colorblindness transformed from an idea whose time had finally come into a symptom of moral backwardness—from a noble principle responsible for beating slavery and Jim Crow into a marker of evil. In the half century since the victories of the civil rights movement, some of America’s most celebrated scholars have been hard at work writing a false history of colorblindness. In their view, colorblindness was not the motivating principle behind the anti-racist activism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but was instead an idea created by white racists, conservatives, and reactionaries. Kimberlé Crenshaw, for instance, has criticized the “color-blind view of civil rights” that she alleges “developed in the neoconservative ‘think tanks’ during the seventies.” George Lipsitz, a black-studies professor at the University of California, writes that colorblindness is part of a “long-standing historical whiteness protection program” associated with “Indigenous dispossession, colonial conquest, slavery, segregation, and immigrant exclusion.” According to these scholars, there is no contradiction to reconcile: colorblindness had nothing to do with abolition or the civil rights movement to begin with; colorblindness has instead always been a Trojan horse for white supremacy.