Benchmarking Quotes

There's no benchmark for how life's "supposed" to happen. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, it's up to you how you respond to it.

When love becomes a play of squirming mindgames or a tinderbox of mental conflicts, emotional benchmarks need an unremitting reset. ("Another empty room")

Even if we have bad feelings about our past and it causes a sense of alienation, it belongs to our history. Its benchmarks are stored in the granary of our mind and crucial evaluations for the future cannot be made without consulting the archive of our memory. ( “Not without the past”)

As we walk through the secretive doors of our remembrance, looking for forgotten benchmarks of our history, we can find unexpected escape hatches opening into valuable answers to great expectations. ("Walking down the memory lane" )

By staging our dreams and spreading our wings into real-life, sheltered from the terror of failure, we can enhance our quest for the benchmarks that can help us build the steppingstones into the expectations of the future. ("Loss of urban benchmarks" )

When we walk out of our boundaries, we find out that knowledge is not a completion or a windfall, but a long process of revisions or adjustments. Likewise, we recognize that wisdom results from the painful filtering of experiences we collect on the bumpy path of life. ‘("Loss of benchmarks")

Rather than loitering around, day by day, some prefer to crawl out of the shadow of their squirrel cage and try badly to cuddle up to a brighter side of life by searching out some wiggle room to empower their feeble stance, expecting to eke out some soothing moments of relish and buoyancy in the wings of their expectant quest. ( "Loss of urban benchmarks" )

The idyllic ecstasy of love often overshadows the pitfalls of inattention or monotony and demands, therefore, constant reevaluation and adjustment to reset the emotional benchmarks. ("Another empty room" )

When our thinking pattern is in shambles, we must stay aligned with our core objectives and clear goals before being sidetracked by futile and inconsistent trendy temptations. If we filter our focus, we can hark back to the roadmap of our benchmarks, tailored to our abilities and consistent with the changing contexts in our lives. ("Life with a view")

Time and experience have taught me that fame and money very rarely go to the worthy, by the way - hence we shouldn't ever be too impressed by either of those impostors. Value folk for who they are, how they live and what they give - that's a much better benchmark.

Prayer is an acknowledgment that our need of God's help is not partial but total.

Assimilationist ideas are racist ideas. Assimilationists can position any racial group as the superior standard that another racial group should be measuring themselves against, the benchmark they should be trying to reach. Assimilations typically position White people as the superior standard.

It's funny how people mark their lives, the benchmarks they choose to decide when the moment is more of a moment than any other. For life is made of them. I like to think the best ones of all are in my mind, that they run through my blood in their own memory bank for no one else but me to see.

Hold material goods and wealth on a flat palm and not in a clenched fist.

Don’t let the worst things that happen to you be the benchmark for your self-respect.

Her eyelashes made me hard. That was a new benchmark for me, I had to admit.

Celebrating milestones and benchmarks in work and in life might turn out to be a good way to carve your life.

One of the benchmarks of great communicators is their ability to listen not just to what's being said, but to what's not being said as well. They listen between the lines.

His awe of the mountains grew in the days that followed, as the Yellowstone River led him nearer and nearer. Their great mass was a marker, a benchmark fixed against time itself. Others might feel disquiet at the notion of something so much larger than themselves. But for Glass, there was a sense of sacrament that flowed from the mountains like a font, an immortality that made his quotidian pains seem inconsequential.

There’s a Susan Sontag book called Regarding the Pain of Others, which Frank made me read — there’s a bit where Sontag talks about how when people see terrible things happen, they used to say it felt like a dream, but now they say it feels like a movie. Movies have supplanted dreams in the popular consciousness, and have become our benchmark for the unreal, and the almost real. Today has been a movie, playing on an old, warped videotape.

That many if not most people...who want fresh leafy greens in January buy them at the supermarket after they've been bleached and plastic-bag shipped from California or beyond is not a tribute to modern technology; it's an unprecedented abdication of personal responsibility and a ubiquitous benchmark of abnormality.

We are no longer called Hell," Malfy replied. "After decades of benchmarking studies, our Corporate Overlords identified the name as no longer politically-correct. We have now been rebranded as Happyland.

There is a paradox here: people tend to want wealth to signal to others that they should be liked and admired. But in reality those other people often bypass admiring you, not because they don’t think wealth is admirable, but because they use your wealth as a benchmark for their own desire to be liked and admired.

The best leaders don’t care much about “benchmarking,” comparing their organization to others. They know theirs is not good enough, and constantly push to get better.

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you're on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you've tried all these things, you're still going to have to dismount.

I got nineteen years with your mom. But do you think I would've turned down the idea if I'd known I'd only get one year? Or one month?...There's no benchmark for how life's supposed to happen, Perry. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it's up to you how you respond to it.

Last week my boss told me to rewrite a twenty-page proposal on engagement benchmarking. I turned it in and he wrote a note on the cover that just said, "No, no. Not this." I had no idea what he wanted, so I just put it off, and then when he came in this morning and told me he needed the final draft in a half-hour I printed out the exact same one as before, but this time on prettier paper. This afternoon he brought the whole team together to tell everyone I was the perfect example of being able to listen to constructive criticism.

This isolation has left Americans quite unaware of the world beyong their borders. Americans speak few languages, know little about foreign cultures, and remain unconvinced that they need to rectify this. Americans rarely benchmark to global standards because they are sure that their way must be the best and most advanced. There is a growing gap between America's worldly business elite and cosmopolitan class, on the one hand and the majority of the American people on the other. Without real efforts to bridge it, this divide could destroy America's competitive edge and its political future.

Perhaps the most important moments of all turn out to be the ones we walk through without thinking, the ones we mark down as just another day. Just another day we have to get through before something more interesting comes along. We benchmark our lives with birthdays and Christmases and holidays, but perhaps we should think more about the ordinary days. The days which pass by and we don’t even notice. Elsie once said that you can’t tell how big a moment is until you turn back and look at it, and I think, perhaps, that she was right.

Did that kiss nearly destroy the memory of all other kisses, and become the benchmark against which all future kisses would be measured?

The Timeline of a Life being Long or Short, is Computed on the Benchmark of How You Live It...

Mattia's voice no longer stirred anything in his stomach, but he was aware of the idea of him and always would be, as the only true benchmark for everything that had come afterward.

My point is that life is long, and parts of it can be immensely shitty. You shouldn't focus on the future because you've got little control over it. All you can do is make sure the steps you take now are going in the direction of the future you want and be prepared for trips and falls along the way. Why focus on the past when you cannot change it? Mistakes will always linger there, and all you can do is learn from them and use them as benchmarks for how much you've improved since then. Focus on the now...Life is a series of infinite Nows.

It was amazing, the effect a father had on a person. A father was the benchmark that told you what to expect. What to accept. And, perhaps most importantly, what to believe about yourself. Her father had taught her to expect nothing and to accept less. And he’d taught her to believe that she was nothing.

Mitchell Maxwell’s Maxims • You have to create your own professional path. There’s no longer a roadmap for an artistic career. • Follow your heart and the money will follow. • Create a benchmark of your own progress. If you never look down while you’re climbing the ladder you won’t know how far you’ve come. • Don’t define success by net worth, define it by character. Success, as it’s measured by society, is a fleeting condition. • Affirm your value. Tell the world “I am an artist,” not “I want to be an artist.” • You must actively live your dream. Wishing and hoping for someday doesn’t make it happen. Get out there and get involved. • When you look into the abyss you find your character. • Young people too often let the fear of failure keep them from trying. You have to get bloody, sweaty and rejected in order to succeed. • Get your face out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Close your e-mail and pick up the phone. Personal contact still speaks loudest. • No one is entitled to act entitled. Be willing to work hard. • If you’re going to buck the norm you’re going to have to embrace the challenges. • You have to love the journey if you’re going to work in the arts. • Only listen to people who agree with your vision. • A little anxiety is good but don’t let it become fear, fear makes you inert. • Find your own unique voice. Leave your individual imprint on the world, not a copy of someone else. • Draw strength from your mistakes; they can be your best teacher.

At a mere five feet seven inches, Dan was a head shorter than most of the boys. His body sagged slightly where their muscles rippled, his teeth were crooked where theirs gleamed, and his brown hair was thick and unruly where theirs shone. To judge solely from appearances, it was difficult to believe he’d been accepted into this prestigious little clique. But to judge from appearances was to ignore Dan’s quick wit and effortless charm. These were the characteristics that each of the boys aspired to, and the fact that Dan possessed them in such abundance was a constant source of fascination to them. No matter that he looked so freakishly average. His sense of humour and charisma were the benchmarks toward which the entire group was working, and few within the circle were held in higher esteem.

KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. (As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”)

Love doesn’t have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose. The purpose is not to change the people we love, but to give them what they need to thrive. Love’s purpose is not to shape our beloved’s destiny, but to help them shape their own. It isn’t to show them the way, but to help them find a path for themselves, even if the path they take isn’t one we would choose ourselves, or even one we would choose for them. The

Ask anyone who's nearly died. You should live in the moment. Unfortunately, that's impossible. Every moment keeps slipping past.  You can only go on to the next moment and the one after that, seeking out what you love most with whom you love most. All these moments tallied up? That's your life.  Bucket lists aren't important. Benchmarks aren't important. Neither are goals. You take the wins in small ways: did I wake up this morning? Do I have a roof over my head? Are the people I care about doing okay? You don't need the things you don't have. You only need what you've got, and the rest? It's just gravy.

People go on and on about boobs and butts and teeny waists, but the clavicle is the true benchmark of female desirability. It is a fetish item. Without visible clavicles you might as well be a meatloaf in the sexual marketplace. And I don't mean Meatloaf the person, who has probably gotten laid lotsa times despite the fact that his clavicle is buried so deep as to be mere urban legend, because our culture does not have a creepy sexual fascination on the bones of meaty men. Only women. Show us your bones, they say. If only you were nothing but bones.

If you’re feeling frustrated with your progress toward your goals, it’s tempting to focus on what you lack that other people seem to have, to obsess over followers, engagement, traffic, or any other benchmark. The reality is that numbers don’t necessarily measure success, and they’re certainly not a requirement for fulfillment.

Colored people had it rough. Imagine: You’ve been brainwashed into believing that your blood is tainted. You’ve spent all your time assimilating and aspiring to whiteness. Then, just as you think you’re closing in on the finish line, some fucking guy named Nelson Mandela comes along and flips the country on its head. Now the finish line is back where the starting line was, and the benchmark is black. Black is in charge. Black is beautiful. Black is powerful. For centuries colored people were told: Blacks are monkeys. Don’t swing from the trees like them. Learn to walk upright like the white man. Then all of a sudden it’s Planet of the Apes, and the monkeys have taken over.

The law is not a checklist we keep; it is a benchmark we fail.

Benchmarking is a key component of performing exceptionally well on ESG metrics.

Affluence isn't affluence at all. Hong Kong is the benchmark; everybody else's affluence is mere tat. Until you've experienced that perfume-washed air as polarized glass doors embrace you into a luxury hotel's plush interior, you've only had a dud replica of the real thing.

the basic metaphor of prototypes still seems apt to me. There are no answers or magic pills. There is no alternative to learning through experimentation. Benchmarking and studying “best practices” will not suffice—because the prototyping process does not involve just incremental changes in established ways of doing things, but radical new ideas and practices that together create a new way of managing.

More than purpose, we also need realism. Where do we start? What do we do first? What do we do right now? How are we sure that what we’re doing is moving us forward? What are we benchmarking ourselves against?

There is a biblical benchmark I now use. We will refer to this criterion for every hard question, big idea, topic, assessment of our own obedience, every “should” or “should not” and “will” or “will not” we ascribe to God, every theological sound bite. Here it is: If it isn’t also true for a poor single Christian mom in Haiti, it isn’t true. If a sermon promises health and wealth to the faithful, it isn’t true, because that theology makes God an absolute monster who only blesses rich westerners and despises Christians in Africa, India, China, South America, Russia, rural Appalachia, inner-city America, and everywhere else a sincere believer remains poor. If it isn’t also true for a poor single Christian mom in Haiti, it isn’t true.

One of the findings of the landmark Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey of almost thirty thousand Americans, published in 2000, was that those who give contributions of time or money are 42 percent more likely to be happy than those who don’t give.

To be honest, I hadn’t been emotionally prepared for the emptiness that seemed to accompany my senior year, the many reminders of my mom’s absence. Senior pictures, homecoming, college applications, prom, graduation; as everyone I knew got excited about those high school benchmarks, I got stress headaches because nothing felt the way I’d planned for it to feel. Everything felt… lonely.

I didn't want to think of Benj in terms of syndromes and categories and labels and diagnoses, in terms of his performance on tests and evaluations, in terms of his differences from a perceived norm or imagined ideal. One of the questions my experience with Benj raised for me is: how do you value your child in a culture whose benchmarks for achievement and whose standards for evaluating and assessing kids are so out of line with your own values and who your child is?

Bucket lists aren’t important. Benchmarks aren’t important. Neither are goals. You take the wins in small ways: Did I wake up this morning? Do I have a roof over my head? Are the people I care about doing okay? You don’t need the things you don’t have. You only need what you’ve got, and the rest? It’s just gravy. It’s been three years since I recovered from Covid; two years since I was vaccinated; one year since I finished my degree in art therapy and started my own practice.

everybody else. But it makes complete sense when you consider his perspective: he isn’t measuring himself against the other players; he is measuring himself against himself. The best leaders don’t care much about “benchmarking,” comparing their organization to others. They know theirs is not good enough, and constantly push to get better.

The attempt to prevent our kids from struggling for fear it might scar their permanent records is, instead, scarring them for life.

Just as we can’t tell how much we’ve eaten simply by relying on internal cues, we can’t really tell how much we’ve gained or lost without some external benchmark.

father was the benchmark that told you what to expect. What to accept. And, perhaps most importantly, what to believe about yourself.

With every benchmark, he was living proof that it was possible to have a good life in spite of a disability, and it dawned on me that he could help teach that lesson to others.

Don’t fight, you're already injured, live to fight another day. It’s a lost battle anyways. Just quit. No, the battle isn't over. Although I am injured, but if I quit now, these injuries will always work as a benchmark to quit, today I ain't fighting the enemy I am fighting myself. If I win this battle today, I will get myself an invincible will and that no enemy can defeat.

We love Christmas presents but not Christ; Easter baskets but not crosses. We want to tell our friends with cancer that we will pray for them (we don’t) and our puddle-eyed children that their goldfish have gone to heaven (doubtful). When we lose our jobs we want to take comfort in the idea that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle, but really, how can we? We have absolutely no idea what God has given us or what it might be for. We haven’t talked to Him in ages.

Your belief system should be positive and empowering enough to influence a strong mental state and a positive attitude that will rise up to defeat any suggestion that you are destined to fail.

If the benchmark for the changes to which we aspire is not radically different to the one that has guided development solutions so far, humanity will not escape those strong path dependencies.

Don’t let the worst things that happen to you be the benchmark for your self-respect. Don’t give bad people the power to hurt you again by believing you deserved what they did in the first place.

Man's relation to pain changes with every significant shift in fundamental belief. This relation is in no way set; rather, it eludes our knowledge, and yet is the best benchmark by which to discern a race.

The idea that the GDP still serves as an accurate gauge of social welfare is one of the most widespread myths of our times. Even politicians who fight over everything else can always agree that the GDP must grow. Growth is good. It’s good for employment, it’s good for purchasing power, and it’s good for our government, giving it more to spend. Modern journalism would be all but lost without the GDP, wielding the latest national growth figures as a kind of government report card. A shrinking GDP spells recession and, if it really shrivels, depression. In fact, the GDP offers pretty much everything a journalist could want: hard figures, issued at regular intervals, and the chance to quote experts. Most importantly, the GDP offers a clear benchmark. Is the government doing its job? How do we as a country stack up? Has life gotten a little better? Never fear, we have the latest figures on the GDP, and they’ll tell us everything we need to know. Given our obsession with it, it’s hard to believe that just eighty years ago the GDP didn’t even exist.

A Belgian journalist, struggling to describe the scene, had said that it resembled a cross between a permanent mass wake, an ongoing grad night for at least a dozen subcultures unheard of before the disaster, the black market cafes of occupied Paris, and Goya's idea of a dance party (assuming Goya had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine, which along with endless quantities of alcohol was clearly the Western World's substance of choice). It was, the Belgian said, as though the city, in its convolsion and grief, had spontaneously and necessarily generated this hidden pocket universe of the soul, its few unbroken windows painted over with black rubber aquarium paint. There would be no view of the ruptured city. As the reconstruction began around it, it had already become a benchmark in Tokyo's psychic history, an open secret, an urban legend.

A paper by Gordon Moore (of Moore’s law fame) gives figures for the total number of transistors manufactured per year since the 1950s. It looks something like this: Using our ratio, we can convert the number of transistors to a total amount of computing power. This tells us that a typical modern laptop, which has a benchmark score in the tens of thousands of MIPS, has more computing power than existed in the entire world in 1965.

Oil prices fell from thirty-six dollars a barrel in 1981 to about fifteen dollars by 1986, based on benchmark West Texas Intermediate prices. In 2013 dollars, that’s a decimating fall from over ninety dollars to just over thirty.

We imagine we’ll hear history when it calls. When it doesn’t, we return to our daily lives, our moral mettle still intact. But maybe history doesn’t call, or maybe you have to be listening closely to hear it. To prioritize diversity over perceived merit—the colorblind assessment of ability that has never really been colorblind at all—is to recognize that strategic imperatives can’t be the sole benchmark by which we distribute society’s prizes. There’s an increasing sense—among the millennials who fill our lecture halls, but out in the rougher world of cubicles and delivery vans and hospital waiting rooms as well—that it’s not enough to be right, or profitable, or talented. You must also be just. It’s

Of course this happens when a classic text ‘works’ as a classic, that is when it establishes a personal relationship with the reader. If there is no spark, the exercise is pointless: it is no use reading classics out of a sense of duty or respect, we should only read them for love. Except at school: school has to teach you to know, whether you like it or not, a certain number of classics amongst which (or by using them as a benchmark) you will later recognise ‘your’ own classics

I believe benchmarking best practices can open people’s eyes as to what is possible, but it can also do more harm than good, leading to piecemeal copying and playing catch-up. As one seasoned Toyota manager commented after hosting over a hundred tours for visiting executives, “They always say ‘Oh yes, you have a Kan-Ban system, we do also. You have quality circles, we do also. Your people fill out standard work descriptions, ours do also.’ They all see the parts and have copied the parts. What they do not see is the way all the parts work together.” I do not believe great organizations have ever been built by trying to emulate another, any more than individual greatness is achieved by trying to copy another “great person.

How do you know you love me?” “How do I know?” “Yeah. Doesn’t it seem soon? Fast? Unlikely?” “I don’t know that there’s a prescribed length of time it takes, Bailey. There’s not some magical benchmark or test you need to take to see it. sometimes I think you just know.” “You just know.” “My pain disappears when I’m with you. I get to be a new version of myself when I’m with you. I sleep. I laugh. I have something – someone – to look forward to at the end of the day. I feel …. I feel whole again with you.

No matter what you are dealing with, your goal should be to maximize the resources and capabilities you do have. If you’ve suffered a freak injury or received a diagnosis that changes everything, what does your new maximum effort level look like? A lot of people bide their time and wait to see what happens next, but a year or two later, they find they are still waiting. With every unfortunate turn in life, no matter how heavy the weight, you have to be committed to pushing back against that pressure with effort. No matter your age, abilities, disabilities, or responsibilities, we must all stay committed to finding our new benchmarks. Because not only does that keep your mind engaged and your demons at bay, you actually might achieve things the old you never could have conceived.

Compared with the male benchmark, women are represented as more community minded and pacifist. When political women discuss why women are needed in politics in discourses that support the assumption that women are active primarily in these spheres, they contribute to the normalisation of dominant discourses of femininity. If women bring a 'women's perspective' to politics, what do men bring? This is a question that is rarely posed. Men are the norm, and women are the 'other'. Men do not need to justify their presence : it is taken for granted.

Physicians, nurses, and other caregivers often do not know the costs associated with their treatment protocols. And administrators rarely collaborate with them to develop outcome and cost measurements that would facilitate benchmarking and best-practice-sharing opportunities.

To address strength and endurance issues, Goldblatt initiated a program called the Mechanically Dominant Soldier. What if soldiers could have ten times the muscle endurance of enemy soldiers? What if they could leap seven feet and be able to cool down their own body temperature? What if the military benchmark of eighty pull-ups a day could be raised to three hundred pull-ups a day? “We want every war fighter to look like Lance Armstrong as far as metabolic profile,” program manager Joe Bielitzki told Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau a decade before Armstrong resigned from athletics in disgrace.

Sometimes, on the last day of class, I had out cards with versions of the Golden Rule on them. "Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful." That one is from Judaism. "None of you is a believer until you love for your brother what you love for yourself." That one is from Islam. "This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you." That one is from Hinduism. Some version of the principle shows up in all the great religions of the world, which is a large part of what makes them great: they ask members inside the tribe to use their humanity as the benchmark for how to treat those outside the tribe.

That gave us enough time to get a shot of Ethiopian coffee, espresso style. Nothing tastes better than Ethiopian coffee; almost everywhere you go, it is roasted right before it’s brewed. In the United States, we think it’s a big deal if you wait to grind the beans before you make coffee. Here, the benchmark for freshness is miles higher.

we began the process of learning how incredibly difficult it is to live with someone who is totally anal and slightly OCD (ahem…Victor). And someone who is perpetually accidentally hot-gluing herself to the carpet, and who is sort of mentally unstable, but in an “At-least-I-still-remember-how-pants-work” kind of way (cough…that’d be me). Victor remarked that comparing myself with the sometimes naked hermit next door wasn’t exactly a strong mental-wellness benchmark, especially since I often ended up pantsless myself. I raised my eyebrow at his seemingly seductive remark until I realized he was referring to the time he found me half naked because I’d just hot-glued my jeans to the carpet.

During World War II, the University of Minnesota’s Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene conducted what scientists and relief workers still regard today as a benchmark study of starvation. Partly funded by religious groups, including the Society of Friends, the study was intended to help the Allies cope with released concentration-camp internees, prisoners of war, and refugees. The participants were all conscientious objectors who volunteered to lose 25 percent of their body weight over six months. The experiment was supervised by Dr. Ancel Keys (for whom the K-ration was named). The volunteers lived a spare but comfortable existence at a stadium on the campus of the University of Minnesota.

We don’t gain anything by lowering the bar so that everyone can clear it.

Stephen Prothero's God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World speaks directly to this issue. A professor at Boston University, Prothero observes that the claim that all religions are fundamentally the same is an insult to all religions, because they have different benchmarks and different goals and different frameworks and different worldviews.

My eyes lifted from the blue, white, and yellow pattern of my uniform skirt, to meet those of Dr. Cruz—school psychologist and seeker of the ever-elusive, emotional breakthrough. I realized that was her goal sometime during our first session. I suppose, in her world, that was a benchmark of successful treatment, but, from where I sat, it was just incredibly annoying.

Perfect' - the most misattributed word in English language A 'perfect' thing can never be improved - at least by what the meaning implies. Why should anyone want to be perfect? Unfortunately, this happens to be my greatest flaw. Turning a relative idea into an absolute one. Seeking perfection in others - or should I say 'subconsciously seeking perfection in myself' and projecting a benchmark based in fantasy on others. Makes one come across as judgmental, intolerant, arrogant or impatient - in short, a platinum-class jerk. But you, my friend, are too kind to tell me. Or you'd rather bear for the moment and cuss me roundly when I'm gone. That's unfair to us both. If I have ever done this to you, I am sincerely sorry. Accept my profound apologies

We fluff them and fold them and nudge them and enhance them and bind them and break them and embellish them beyond measure; then, as we drive them up to the college interviews that they’ve heard since birth are the gateway to the lives they were destined to lead based on nothing more than our own need for it to be true, we tell them, with a smile so tight it would crack nuts, “Just be yourself.”�

His awe of the mountains grew in the days that followed, as the Yellowstone River led him nearer and nearer. Their great mass was a marker, a benchmark fixed against time itself. Others might feel disquiet at the notion of something so much larger than themselves. But for Glass, there was a sense of sacrament that flowed from the mountains like a font, an immortality that made his quotidian pains seem inconsequential

A crisis of character is nothing new for the United States of America and its long history of abuses of power. When I look at our country today, I see a nation deep in the terror of its own retooling, stuck between a past it can’t outrun and the trajectory of a future it must outgrow. We are a nation that still cannot wrap its head around the overwhelming inequality among genders and races in our society and institutional systems. We are a nation that cannot agree on the definition of misogyny, let alone put a finger on its pervasiveness or manifestation. But there seem to be benchmark eras in our history that have brought great and radical change to fruition—times when we weren’t just living through difficulties, but actively confronting our values and agitating for revolutionary change. I believe we are in one of those eras right now.

His awe of the mountains grew in the days that followed, as the Yellowstone River led him nearer and nearer. Their great mass was a marker, a benchmark fixed against time itself. Others might feel disquiet at the notion of something so much larger than themselves. But for Glass, there was a sense of sacrament that flowed from the mountains like a font, an immortality that made his quotidian pains seem inconsequential. And

Here’s a list (not exhaustive, by any means!) of phrases that make the Bullsh*t Bingo list. Scrub them from your vocabulary! They will make your talk sound dated and stale. • Synergy • Out of the box • Bottom line • Revisit • 24/7 • Out of the loop • Benchmark • Value-added • Proactive • Win-win • Think outside the box • Fast track • Result-driven • Empower (or empowerment) • Knowledge base • At the end of the day • Touch base • Ballpark • Game plan • Leverage

So, Mr. Graduate, how are you? Denis said cheerfully. He wasn't upset about the graduation business. He had learned to respect the chasm Mattia had dug around himself. Years previously he had tried to jump over the chasm, and had fallen into it. Now he contented himself with sitting on the edge, his legs dangling into the void. Mattia's voice no longer stirred anything in his stomach, but he was aware of the idea of him and would always be, as the only true benchmark for everything that had come afterward.

Where I live, being considered “good” has little to nothing to do with institutional religion. The social benchmarks for moral applause have more to do with whether one eats organic, rides his or her bike to work, and supports a humanitarian initiative in Africa. Things like these—even if good things that contribute to the flourishing of our world, in a manner similar to many traditional religious works—comprise our contemporary bars of righteousness by which one’s social capital is improved. In corporate culture, these bars may have more to do with how much money we’ve made or the size of our portfolio. In political culture, how much power we’ve attained or the heights up the ladder we’ve climbed. In popular culture, how much sex we’ve had or the number of Twitter followers who are interested in what we have to say. The cultural decline of institutional religion has simply meant the relocation, not the destruction, of social norms through which we pursue personal justification and social acceptance for our existence.

By planting rye I am creating carbon sinks in my backyard, expanding my role in the carbon cycle, launching my own backyard campaign to offset global warming. My emissions, after all, reflect a rural but very comfortable life in which I enjoy goods that travel great distances - clementines from Spain, wine from California - and on the occasional holiday I fly south, seeking warmer places. Will planting rye in the shoulder seasons be enough to make a difference? Certainly not, but it is a gesture, a way to frame the question and provide a benchmark to judge the extent of my complicity.

Only a simple black pencil will do for making a notation of a benchmark. Ink will run, be dissolved by the tree sap, be washed away by rain, dew, fog, and snow. Nothing as artificial as ink will do for recording eternity and immortality. Graphite is carbon that has been subjected to enormous pressure for millions of years and that might have become coal or diamonds. Instead, however, it has been transformed into something more precious than a diamond; it has become a pencil that can record all that it has seen… A pencil is a greater miracle than a diamond, although the chemical make-up of graphite and diamond is identical.

I am the daughter of a mother who would never change...The refusal to modify her aspect, her habits, her attitudes was strategy for resisting American culture, for fighting it, for maintaining her identity...When my mother returns to Calcutta, she is proud of the fact that, in spite of almost fifty years away from India, she seems like a woman who never left. I am the opposite. While the refusal to change was my mother's rebellion, the insistence on transforming myself is mine...All my life I've tried to get away from the void of my origin. It was the void that distressed me, that I was fleeing...Writing, I discovered a way of hiding in my characters, of escaping myself. Of undergoing one mutation after another. One could say that the mechanisms of metamorphosis is the only element of life that never changes. The journey of every individual, every country, every historical epoch, of the entire universe and all it contains, is nothing but a series of changes, at times subtle, at times deep, without which we would stand still. The moments of transitions in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments we tend to remember. They give a structure to our existence. Almost all the rest is oblivion.

Discontent is a powerful motivator for change and a fuel of ingenuity, but only when it's coupled with an unwavering sense of self. When applied through a lens of the past, the indomitable spirit of the independent female is wonderfully subversive, a concept that only thrived in secret, printed on words claimed by male monikers. But when that concept is viewed in light of the present, with a clear-eyed glance at the future, we find Brontë's words equally applicable. Not only that, but their intelligence, her own discontent, provides the reader with a timeless benchmark for how to apply change in their own life, even when choices seem few.

It seems as if many church people have been living in Plato’s cave. They think the church enterprise is about “me.” What is at stake is my salvation. The me-and-my-salvation individual “does church” by making a fair exchange of time and money for eternal assurances. But the effect of teaching the fate of the individual soul downplays the beginning of God’s restoration now. It teaches that the important stuff comes later and that “going to heaven” is the benchmark of Christian life. Yet, the Christian life is so much more than any one person’s long-term survival. It is about the world’s future; it is about our hope turning our heads and hearts toward the world.

The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald is one of the few journalists who has been willing to write about race and crime honestly, despite the unpopularity of doing so. In books, op-eds, and magazine articles she has picked apart the media’s disingenuous coverage of the issue. The New York Times, for example, regularly runs stories about racial disparities in police stops while glossing over the racial disparities in crime rates. “Disclosing crime rates—the proper benchmark against which police behavior must be measured—would demolish a cornerstone of the Times’s worldview: that the New York Police Department, like police departments across America, oppresses the city’s black population with unjustified racial tactics,” wrote Mac Donald.

Who are you? Who are the players, the management team? What’s your expertise and track record? Have any of you succeeded in doing this before? Who are your advisors and what are their credentials? #2. What is it? What is your product or service? Even if it’s complex, this explanation must be easily understandable. Do you have any intellectual property rights, such as patents, that will provide some measure of exclusivity? #3. Where are you? What’s the status of your venture? Do you have a working prototype or has anyone tested your product or idea? What benchmarks have you already hit? #4. Where are you going? What’s your goal? What milestones will you attain along the way to achieving that goal? #5. Who wants it? Who’s your target market? What’s the problem being solved? Where’s the PAIN? What itch are you scratching? #6. How many people will want it? What’s your potential market size?

People are trained – brainwashed – to believe that material well-being stands for psychological well-being. If you have a house, a job, a car, lots of commodities, a partner and family then you ought to be happy. But where is the real you in all of that? Of course, psychological well-being, not material well-being, should be the benchmark. But we live in a materialist world thanks to economic materialism (predatory capitalism) and philosophical materialism (scientism). Science more or less denies that we have minds and free will, hence are just machines, while predatory capitalism treats us as material objects. Mind – the psyche, psychology – is exactly what is absent from the materialist hegemony, and that’s why the world is so anxious, depressed and alienated. It comes with the territory. It’s an inevitable aspect of materialism. Materialism shapes us as matter. Consumerism shapes us as consumers. The class system locks us into artificial class identities. In a world of commodities, we ourselves are commodified. All of our values start to revolve around objects, things, commodities, consumption, matter. The human has disappeared. We need to revalue all values in terms of idealism rather than materialism, and rationalism instead of empiricism.

The myriad activities that go into creating, producing, selling, and delivering a product or service are the basic units of competitive advantage. Operational effectiveness means performing these activities better—that is, faster, or with fewer inputs and defects—than rivals. Companies can reap enormous advantages from operational effectiveness, as Japanese firms demonstrated in the 1970s and 1980s with such practices as total quality management and continuous improvement. But from a competitive standpoint, the problem with operational effectiveness is that best practices are easily emulated. As all competitors in an industry adopt them, the productivity frontier—the maximum value a company can deliver at a given cost, given the best available technology, skills, and management techniques—shifts outward, lowering costs and improving value at the same time. Such competition produces absolute improvement in operational effectiveness, but relative improvement for no one. And the more benchmarking that companies do, the more competitive convergence you have—that is, the more indistinguishable companies are from one another. Strategic positioning attempts to achieve sustainable competitive advantage by preserving what is distinctive about a company. It means performing different activities from rivals, or performing similar activities in different ways.

So what was this reincarnated ether, and what did it mean for Mach’s principle and for the question raised by Newton’s bucket?* Einstein had initially enthused that general relativity explained rotation as being simply a motion relative to other objects in space, just as Mach had argued. In other words, if you were inside a bucket that was dangling in empty space, with no other objects in the universe, there would be no way to tell if you were spinning or not. Einstein even wrote to Mach saying he should be pleased that his principle was supported by general relativity. Einstein had asserted this claim in a letter to Schwarzschild, the brilliant young scientist who had written to him from Germany’s Russian front during the war about the cosmological implications of general relativity. “Inertia is simply an interaction between masses, not an effect in which ‘space’ of itself is involved, separate from the observed mass,” Einstein had declared.23 But Schwarzschild disagreed with that assessment. And now, four years later, Einstein had changed his mind. In his Leiden speech, unlike in his 1916 interpretation of general relativity, Einstein accepted that his gravitational field theory implied that empty space had physical qualities. The mechanical behavior of an object hovering in empty space, like Newton’s bucket, “depends not only on relative velocities but also on its state of rotation.” And that meant “space is endowed with physical qualities.” As he admitted outright, this meant that he was now abandoning Mach’s principle. Among other things, Mach’s idea that inertia is caused by the presence of all of the distant bodies in the universe implied that these bodies could instantly have an effect on an object, even though they were far apart. Einstein’s theory of relativity did not accept instant actions at a distance. Even gravity did not exert its force instantly, but only through changes in the gravitational field that obeyed the speed limit of light. “Inertial resistance to acceleration in relation to distant masses supposes action at a distance,” Einstein lectured. “Because the modern physicist does not accept such a thing as action at a distance, he comes back to the ether, which has to serve as medium for the effects of inertia.”24 It is an issue that still causes dispute, but Einstein seemed to believe, at least when he gave his Leiden lecture, that according to general relativity as he now saw it, the water in Newton’s bucket would be pushed up the walls even if it were spinning in a universe devoid of any other objects. “In contradiction to what Mach would have predicted,” Brian Greene writes, “even in an otherwise empty universe, you will feel pressed against the inner wall of the spinning bucket… In general relativity, empty spacetime provides a benchmark for accelerated motion.