Breakthrough Experience Quotes

Let your creative and imaginative mind run freely; it will take you places you never dreamed of and provide breakthroughs that others once thought were impossible.

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.

Relationships may become wrecked by a quirky syndrome: the “Ain't broke, don't fix”-syndrome. When there is no interaction in the neural network and no breakthrough into the mind but only a shallow skin experience, living together might be very torturous. If a heartfelt bond has not been molded, nothing can be broken and thus nothing needs to be fixed. (“I wonder what went wrong.”)

No one else knows exactly what the future holds for you, no one else knows what obstacles you've overcome to be where you are, so don't expect others to feel as passionate about your dreams as you do.

At the very moment when people underestimate you is when you can make a breakthrough.

There is a moment in our healing journey when our denial crumbles; we realize our experience and it's continued effects on us won't "just go away". That's our breakthrough moment. It's the sun coming out to warm the seeds of hope so they can grow our personal garden of empowerment.

No matter how dysfunctional your background, how broke or broken you are, where you are today, or what anyone else says, YOU MATTER, and your life matters!

The moment you realize you already have everything you’re looking for, the universe gives it to you.

When you can truly understand how others experience your behavior, without defending or judging, you then have the ability to produce a breakthrough in your leadership and team. Everything starts with your self-awareness. You cannot take charge without taking accountability, and you cannot take accountability without understanding how you avoid it.

The stock market is a financial redistribution system. It takes money away from those who have no patience and gives it to those who have.” — Warren Buffet

In confession occurs the breakthrough of the Cross. The root of all sin is pride, superbia. I want to be my own law, I have a right to my self, my hatred and my desires, my life and my death. The mind and flesh of man are set on fire by pride; for it is precisely in his wickedness that man wants to be as God. Confession in the presence of a brother is the profoundest kind of humiliation. It hurts, it cuts a man down, it is a dreadful blow to pride...In the deep mental and physical pain of humiliation before a brother - which means, before God - we experience the Cross of Jesus as our rescue and salvation. The old man dies, but it is God who has conquered him. Now we share in the resurrection of Christ and eternal life.

Practice makes comfort. Expand your experiences regularly so every stretch won’t feel like your first.

You can't reach your potential by remaining in a past due season. Your breakthrough is coming. Strongholds are breaking. Get Ready!

When you know that bad things aren’t so terrible and good things aren’t so terrific, you can be quietly grateful for whatever occurs. Balance is neither pessimism nor optimism.

Don't wait for the law of attraction to happen to you; make it happen for you, by taking action. Once you do this, you will experience the law of revelation.

Oscar Wilde once said, “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

You cannot get rid of the positive and negative balance. If you try to put on a facade for the world about how positive and upbeat you are, there will be chaos in your private life or your personal health.

Every time I have fasted I have found my worship experience sweeter, the illumination of God’s Spirit brighter and the hunger for God’s Word stronger.

The most valuable lessons come not from teachers or textbooks, but from life experience.

by the mile it’s a pile, by the yard it’s hard, by the inch it’s a cinch!

At times you’ve no one around to be blamed for all the shit you have to go through in life. It’s not always the mistake of the people of the world that you were not granted something you wished so bad to have. It’s just not written for you. It’s not as easy to feel as it sounds to hear this fact from your loved ones who’re trying to console you or read anywhere on a paper, unless and until you’re in those circumstances experiencing the thing you loved the most taken away from your hands. Every second feels like torture that you’ve never heard, never encountered, or experienced before.

He (Comings) has in the past performed successful energy-converting experiments, creating a ringing resonance by injecting certain frequencies into piezo-electric crystals. When the crystal was in resonance with the plenum of space, the power output rose significantly higher than the input. He concluded that, if allowed politically, such discoveries could guide humankind in building a completely clean energy infrastructure -- resonant technologies that allow us to live in harmony with the universal energy field and the Earth.

The rewards of fasting ultimately lead to a more intimate and satisfying experience with the God who made me.

Pursuing a rapid experiment and finding out you were wrong and changing directions isn’t failure. That is the road to success.

Poetic Terrorism WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. ... Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc. Go naked for a sign. Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty. Graffiti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public monuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, Xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement... The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails. PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now. An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE. Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you. Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.

Of course the thinking mind must sooner or later be controlled, developed, and supplied with the force of will for a break-through to non-thinking, a direct experience of non-duality. But at what stage?

Sure. If you hadn’t gone through everything you’ve gone through, there’s no way in the world you’d be ready to hear what I’ve come here to teach you. Life’s had to break you down so you could be rebuilt better. And, boy, just wait until you see the breakthroughs you’re about to experience. Before you know it, you’ll be the rock star of this whole book company,” Tommy said as his voice rose, full of passion.

Why must we have this rain? Why is it that we must fail? I would rather put it in another way - why must we have these failing experiences? In order to illustrate this, it would be better for me to give a couple of examples.

But there are a lot of great pleasures you can get out of the experience of being alone with yourself,” said Bowker. In solitude you can find the unfiltered version of you. People often have breakthroughs where they tap into how they truly feel about a topic and come to some new understanding about themselves, said Bowker. Then you can take your realizations out into the social world, he added: “Building the capacity to be alone probably makes your interactions with others richer. Because you’re bringing to the relationship a person who’s actually got stuff going on in the inside and isn’t just a connector circuit that only thrives off of others.” Research backs solitude’s healthy properties. It’s been shown to improve productivity, creativity, empathy, and happiness, and decrease self-consciousness.

There are few more powerful mirrors of the human brain's astonishing ability to rearrange itself to learn a new intellectual function than the act of reading. Underlying the brain's ability to learn reading lies its protean capacity to make new connections among structures and circuits originally devoted to other more basic brain processes that have enjoyed a longer existence in human evolution, such as vision and spoken language. [...] we come into the world programmed with the capacity to change what is given to us by nature, so that we can go beyond it. We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs.

When clients relinquish symptoms, succeed in achieving a personal goal, or make healthier choices for themselves, subsequently many will feel anxious, guilty, or depressed. That is, when clients make progress in treatment and get better, new therapists understandably are excited. But sometimes they will also be dismayed as they watch the client sabotage her success by gaining back unwanted weight or missing the next session after an important breakthrough and deep sharing with the therapist. Thus, loyalty and allegiance to symptoms—maladaptive behaviors originally developed to manage the “bad” or painfully frustrating aspects of parents—are not maladaptive to insecurely attached children. Such loyalty preserves “object ties,” or the connection to the “good” or loving aspects of the parent. Attachment fears of being left alone, helpless, or unwanted can be activated if clients disengage from the symptoms that represent these internalized “bad” objects (for example, if the client resolves an eating disorder or terminates a problematic relationship with a controlling/jealous partner). The goal of the interpersonal process approach is to help clients modify these early maladaptive schemas or internal working models by providing them with experiential or in vivo re-learning (that is, a “corrective emotional experience”). Through this real-life experience with the therapist, clients learn that, at least sometimes, some relationships can be different and do not have to follow the same familiar but problematic lines they have come to expect.

Experiencing empathy, the freedom to explore, trust, and insight can reset your default reactions to a more curious, tolerant, and confident stance. Because our brains are plastic, consistently positive experiences do stimulate existing neurons to adapt and connect in different pathways. Nurturing relationships help us grow psychologically and neurally in ways that are not possible in nonnurturing relationships. As adults, our most important opportunity for a nurturing relationship comes through committed partnership. It’s a breakthrough to realize that the purpose of committed relationship is not to be happy, but to heal. And then you will be happy!

Whatever you are going through- don't give up. It has been my experience that the biggest breakthroughs are usually preceded by the darkest times. If you quit- you will never know whats on the other side of the coin. But if you have the tenacity and fortitude to endure, you will eventually overcome. Remember, even tough times dont last forever. Eventually something has to give ; it will either be you or the obstacle. Choose to persist and eventually the obstacle will start to crack. However, during these difficult times, never miss reading for 15 minutes a day. Thats where your strength will come from. As evangelist Joel Osteen says "The darkest hour is just before dawn

I‘ve forgotten who it was that said creation is memory. My own experiences and the various things I have read remain in my memory and become the basis upon which I create something new. I couldn’t do it out of nothing. For this reason, since the time I was a young man I have always kept a notebook handy when I read a book. I write down my reactions and what particularly moves me. I have stacks and stacks of these college notebooks, and when I go off to write a script, these are what I read. Somewhere they always provide me with a point of breakthrough. Even for single lines of dialogue I have taken hints from these notebooks. So what I want to say is, don’t read books while lying down in bed.

20% Time” is not Google indigenous. It was borrowed from a company formerly known as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, aka 3M, which allowed its employees to spend 15 percent of their work hours experimenting with new ideas, no questions asked. 3M’s “15% Time” brought us, among other things, Post-it Notes.

The pain you experience today creates the strength and character you’ll need tomorrow.

Why write a novel if it was going to offer more or less the same experience someone could get by turning on a television?

Partnership elasticity stretches the relationship so it can breathe, grow, and expand.

Never assume you know what your customers value or that their preferences will remain static.

Remember, a great conversation with a customer is not debate practice. Be a learner, not an interrogator.

The opportunity to co-create is a gift you give your customer as a way to summon their imagination.

Access to inside your customer’s imagination comes with learning and discovering together, out loud.

In the world of innovation, wacky wins; logical loses.

Deep inside every customer is a treasure trove of half-baked ideas, creative capacity, and ingenuity-in-the-raw.

Curiosity is the secret map to accessing and mining your customer’s imagination.

Be absorbed in what your customer is saying; be inspired by what your customer is meaning.

Schopenhauer’s answer is that such a psychological crisis represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization, which is that you and that other are one, that you are two aspects of the one life, and that your apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.

Even when I’m caught off guard by a lathery shade of peach on the bottom corner of a painting at the Met, as if being reminded that I haven’t seen all the colors, and how there’s more to see, and how one color’s newness can invalidate all of my sureness. To experience infinity and sometimes too the teasing melancholy born from the smallest breakthroughs, like an unanticipated shade of peach, like Buster Keaton smiling, or my friend Doreen’s laugh—how living and opposite of halfhearted it is. Or my beautiful mother growing out her gray, or a lightning bolt’s fractal scarring on a human body, or Fantin-Latour’s hollyhocks, or the sound of someone practicing an instrument—the most sonically earnest sound. Or how staring at ocean water so blue, it leaves me bereft. In postcards, I’ll scribble “So blue!” because, what else?

Continue going after your dreams because you deserve them; life has many incredible experiences ahead of you. Today's obstacles are tomorrow's victories, and tomorrow's breakthroughs are today's possibilities.

The key is to take a larger project or goal and break it down into smaller problems to be solved, constraining the scope of work to solving a key problem, and then another key problem. This strategy, of breaking a project down into discrete, relatively small problems to be resolved, is what Bing Gordon, a cofounder and the former chief creative officer of the video game company Electronic Arts, calls smallifying. Now a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Gordon has deep experience leading and working with software development teams. He’s also currently on the board of directors of Amazon and Zynga. At Electronic Arts, Gordon found that when software teams worked on longer-term projects, they were inefficient and took unnecessary paths. However, when job tasks were broken down into particular problems to be solved, which were manageable and could be tackled within one or two weeks, developers were more creative and effective.

TAKING 100% RESPONSIBILITY PROCESS STEP 1: Identify an issue/complaint about anything going on in your life. State the complaint in “unenlightened” terms. Be dramatic. Ham it up. Blame overtly. STEP 2: Step into 100% responsibility. Physically find a place in the room that represents your internal shift to being 100% responsible for the situation. STEP 3: Gain insight by completing these statements, repeating each of them several times, until you have what feels like a breakthrough: From the past this reminds me of… I keep this issue going by… What I get from keeping this issue going is… The lifelong pattern I’m noticing is… I can demonstrate 100% responsibility concerning this issue by… STEP 4: If during Step 3, you do not experience a shift, go back to Step 1 and repeat the process.

Much to the scientists’ surprise, the men, after seeing an emotional face for just one fifth of a second—so briefly that it was still unconscious—were more emotionally reactive than the women. But it’s what happened to the men’s facial muscles next that helped me explain Neil’s guy face to Danielle. As the experiment proceeded, at 2.5 seconds, well into the range of conscious processing, the men’s facial muscles became less emotionally responsive than the women’s. The researchers concluded that the men consciously—or at least semiconsciously—suppressed showing their emotions on their faces. Meanwhile, the women’s facial muscles became more emotionally responsive after 2.5 seconds. According to the researchers, this suggests that men have trained themselves, perhaps since childhood, to automatically turn off or disguise facial emotions. The females’ expressions not only continued to mirror the emotion they were seeing on the face in the photo, but they automatically exaggerated it, from a grin to a big smile or from a subtle frown to a pout. They, too, had been practicing this since childhood.

Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it... Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents. Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.

There is something that happens when you know that life is finite: a desire for greatness, for whatever fleeting moments of brilliance you can leave in the world after you're gone. And whether the end of your life is five years away or fifty, the fact that you just don't know is a great motivator for not waiting to begin that thing that could potentially be your legacy. Whether it's a work of art, or a scientific breakthrough, a good deed, or a child, leaving something of yourself for others to experience and remember is sometimes the greatest excuse to live a life that's more than just crossing the distance between birth and death.

Psychedelic experience seems to temporarily crack open a kind of new critical window; a window of opportunity with with great neuroplastic potential, with an enriched interpretation of the world in terms of personal relevance, amplified analogical thinking, and a wider web of semantic association; one that not only reveals the elemental foundations of thought and perception to the conscious mind, but invites it to participate, orient toward significance, integrate a variety of personally relevant information, and produce insightful experiences and emotional breakthroughs that can mark the beginning of a process of re-orienting priorities, attention, attitudes, and behavior. A change in the mobilization, distribution, and utilization of limited energetic resources by the serotonin system, in other words; an opportunity for the master homeostatic regulator to integrate all the various pertinent variables, re-orient and re-align the self, body, and outside world.

Decades later, in 2014, Amy Wagers at Harvard University reexamined this experiment. Much to her surprise, she found the same rejuvenation effect among mice. She then isolated a protein called GDF11 that seems to underlie this process. These results were so remarkable that Science magazine chose it as one of the ten breakthroughs of the year.

We may not have all the answers, but we can have full assurance that the negative circumstances that we may sometimes experience are not the works of God, neither are they punishments for our sins. When we have this confidence that God is for us and not against us, we can believe for restoration, breakthroughs and good things to happen to us.

Like everyone else, scientists have intuitions. Indeed, hunches and flashes of insight—the sense that something is true even if you can’t prove it—have been behind countless breakthroughs. The interplay between System 1 and System 2 can be subtle and creative. But scientists are trained to be cautious. They know that no matter how tempting it is to anoint a pet hypothesis as The Truth, alternative explanations must get a hearing. And they must seriously consider the possibility that their initial hunch is wrong. In fact, in science, the best evidence that a hypothesis is true is often an experiment designed to prove the hypothesis is false, but which fails to do so. Scientists must be able to answer the question “What would convince me I am wrong?” If they can’t, it’s a sign they have grown too attached to their beliefs.

Metaphorically, in relation to the idea of heartbreak, we’re given lemons which are the experiences that cause the idea of heartbreak, then the water comes from our tears that may come during the seasons of our trials and finally the sweetener comes from the joy of the breakthrough and transformation, and in the end you end up with this metaphoric lemonade. When we have a better understanding of heartbreak we go from lemons to lemonade.

The Law of Accelerating Returns,” Ray Kurzweil did the math and found that we’re going to experience twenty thousand years of technological change over the next one hundred years. Essentially, we’re going from the birth of agriculture to the birth of the internet twice in the next century. This means paradigm-shifting, game-changing, nothing-is-ever-the-same-again breakthroughs—such as affordable aerial ridesharing—will not be an occasional affair. They’ll be happening all the time. It

People normally describe this kind of internal mental shift as an “ah, ha” experience, or the moment when the light goes on. Everyone has had these kinds of experiences, and there are some common qualities associated with them. First, we usually feel different. The world even seems different, as if it had suddenly changed. Typically, we might say at the moment of the breakthrough something like, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” or, “It was right in front of me the whole time, but I just didn’t see it

Take a moment, right now, and consider the enormity of activity going on inside of you – from the billions of cells to the even more billions of microscopic organisms. And in that same moment consider the enormity of activity in the oceans, the forests, the jungles, the earth below your feet, right now. And before you take your next breath, consider what might be going on in the outer regions of the universe. Finally, ask yourself, am I really in a position to discount possibilities beyond the limits of my conscious experience?

Dunbar witnessed important breakthroughs live, and saw that the labs most likely to turn unexpected findings into new knowledge for humanity made a lot of analogies, and made them from a variety of base domains. The labs in which scientists had more diverse professional backgrounds were the ones where more and more varied analogies were offered, and where breakthroughs were more reliably produced when the unexpected arose. Those labs were Keplers by committee. They included members with a wide variety of experiences and interests.

I used to think optimists were naive and pessimists were smart. Pessimism seemed like an essential feature of a scientist: the basis of science is to challenge every result, to pick theories apart to see which one stands up. I thought cynicism was one of its founding principals. Maybe there is some truth in that. But science is inherently optimistic too. How else would we describe the willingness to try experiments over and over, often with slim odds of success? Scientific progress can be frustratingly slow: the best minds can dedicate their entire lives to a single question and come away with nothing. They do so with the hope that a breakthrough is around the corner. The odds drop to zero if they give up.

Healing is the initial justification for every upgrade. Find some professors experimenting in genetic engineering or brain–computer interfaces, and ask them why they are engaged in such research. In all likelihood they would reply that they are doing it to cure disease. ‘With the help of genetic engineering,’ they would explain, ‘we could defeat cancer. And if we could connect brains and computers directly, we could cure schizophrenia.’ Maybe, but it will surely not end there. When we successfully connect brains and computers, will we use this technology only to cure schizophrenia? If anybody really believes this, then they may know a great deal about brains and computers, but far less about the human psyche and human society. Once you achieve a momentous breakthrough, you cannot restrict its use to healing and completely forbid using it for upgrading.

Theta programming, Phillips said, "involved the surgical implantation of sodium/lithium powered high frequency receiver/transducers coupled to a multi-range discharge capacitor that , when signaled by remote control would electronically stimulate designated parts of the brain to signal the victim to respond according to his or her hypnotic program. "These "Delgado" experiments were only partially successful," Phillips said, "with a high mortality and paralysis rate. However, the technical mind control equipment evolution has advanced to levels well beyond the grasp of most people. Non-implanted, non-programmed victims will hold the largest majority since, in the 1990's breakthroughs were made which allow mind control without either implant or trauma base". The new Theta programming," Phillips said, "operates by computer driven satellite directed energy. Now, anybody can become a target of the new technology.

When an experience is so powerful that it motivates people to change the whole pattern of their lives, we call that a breakthrough, or an epiphany. The value of an epiphany doesn’t lie just in some new or exciting insight. You might be walking down the street and pass a stranger. Your eyes meet, and for some reason there is a connection. It isn’t sexual or romantic or even a suspicion that this person could mean something in your life. Instead, the epiphany is that you are that stranger—your experiencer merges with his. Call this a feeling or a thought, it doesn’t matter which—it’s the sudden expansion that counts. You are flung outside your narrow boundaries, if only for a moment, and that makes all the difference. You have tasted a hidden dimension. Compared to the habit of shutting yourself behind the walls of ego, this new dimension feels freer and lighter. You have a sense that your body can’t contain you anymore.

Bede states that “the essential truth of Hinduism is the doctrine of the Brahman. The Brahman is the Mystery of Being, the ultimate Truth, the one Reality. Yet it also can only be described by negatives.…It is unseen, unrelated, inconceivable, uninferable, unimaginable, indescribable.” Yet it can be experienced “in the depth of the soul as the very ground of its being. It is the Atman, the Self, the real being of man as of the universe. ‘I am Brahman,’ ‘Thou are that,’ ‘All this [world] is Brahman.’ These are the mahavakyas, the ‘great sayings,’ of the Upanishads, in which the Mystery of being is revealed.” How similar these great sayings are to Meister Eckhart — who says we too learn, in the experience of “breakthrough,” that “God and I are one,” that “every creature is a word of God and a book about God,” that “God’s ground and my ground are one ground,” and that the Godhead “has no name and will never be given a name.

healthy deep limbic pathways. Then a bond or connectedness between the parents and the baby can begin to grow. Without love and affection, the baby does not develop appropriate deep limbic connectedness and thus never learns to trust or connect. He feels lonely and insecure, and becomes irritable and unresponsive. Touch is critical to life itself. In a barbaric thirteenth-century experiment, German Emperor Frederick II wanted to know what language and words children would speak if they were raised without hearing any words at all. He took a number of infants from their homes and put them with people who fed them but had strict instructions not to touch, cuddle, or talk to them. The babies never spoke a word. They all died before they could speak. Even though the language experiment was a failure, it resulted in an important discovery: Touch is essential to life. Salimbene, a historian of the time, wrote of the experiment in 1248, “They could not live without

Everybody needs a place where they feel protected, secure, and welcome. Everybody yearns for a place where they can relax and be fully themselves. Ideally, the childhood home was one such place. For those of us who felt accepted and loved by our parents, our home provided this warmth. It was a heartwarming place—the very thing that everybody yearns for. And we internalize this feeling from childhood—that of being accepted and welcome—as a fundamental, positive attitude toward life that accompanies us through adulthood: we feel secure in the world and in our own life. We’re self-confident and trusting of others. There’s the notion of basic trust, which is like a home within ourselves, providing us with internal support and protection. Many people, however, associate their childhood with largely negative experiences, some even traumatic. Others had an unhappy childhood, but have repressed those memories. They can barely recall what happened. Then there are those who believe their childhood was “normal” or even “happy,” only to discover, upon closer examination, that they have been deluding themselves. And though people may attempt to repress or, as an adult, downplay childhood experiences of insecurity or rejection, there are moments in everyday life that will reveal how underdeveloped their basic trust remains. They have self-esteem issues and frequently doubt that they are welcome and that their coworkers, romantic partner, boss, or new friend truly likes them. They don’t really like themselves all that much, they have a range of insecurities, and they often struggle in relationships. Unable to develop basic trust, they therefore lack a sense of internal support. Instead, they hope that others will provide them with these feelings of security, protection, stability, and home. They search for home with their partner, their colleagues, in their softball league, or online, only to be disappointed: other people can provide this feeling of home sporadically at best. Those who lack a home on the inside will never find one on the outside. They can’t tell that they’re caught in a trap.

The ancient war between science and religion is over,” the camerlengo said. “You have won. But you have not won fairly. You have not won by providing answers. You have won by so radically reorienting our society that the truths we once saw as signposts now seem inapplicable. Religion cannot keep up. Scientific growth is exponential. It feeds on itself like a virus. Every new breakthrough opens doors for new breakthroughs. Mankind took thousands of years to progress from the wheel to the car. Yet only decades from the car into space. Now we measure scientific progress in weeks. We are spinning out of control. The rift between us grows deeper and deeper, and as religion is left behind, people find themselves in a spiritual void. We cry out for meaning. And believe me, we do cry out. We see UFOs, engage in channeling, spirit contact, out-of-body experiences, mindquests—all these eccentric ideas have a scientific veneer, but they are unashamedly irrational. They are the desperate cry of the modern soul, lonely and tormented, crippled by its own enlightenment and its inability to accept meaning in anything removed from technology.” Mortati

That’s why traditional religions offer no real alternative to liberalism. Their scriptures don’t have anything to say about genetic engineering or artificial intelligence, and most priests, rabbis and muftis don’t understand the latest breakthroughs in biology and computer science. For if you want to understand these breakthroughs, you don’t have much choice – you need to spend time reading scientific articles and conducting lab experiments instead of memorising and debating ancient texts. That doesn’t mean liberalism can rest on its laurels. True, it has won the humanist wars of religion, and as of 2016 it has no viable alternative. But its very success may contain the seeds of its ruin. The triumphant liberal ideals are now pushing humankind to reach for immortality, bliss and divinity. Egged on by the allegedly infallible wishes of customers and voters, scientists and engineers devote more and more energies to these liberal projects. Yet what the scientists are discovering and what the engineers are developing may unwittingly expose both the inherent flaws in the liberal world view and the blindness of customers and voters. When genetic engineering and artificial intelligence reveal their full potential, liberalism, democracy and free markets might become as obsolete as flint knives, tape cassettes, Islam and communism.

Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Fun They Had” describes a school of the future that uses advanced technology to revolutionize the educational experience, enhancing individualized learning and providing students with personalized instruction and robot teachers. Such science fiction has gone on to inspire very real innovation. In a 1984 Newsweek interview, Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs predicted computers were going to be a bicycle for our minds, extending our capabilities, knowledge, and creativity, much the way a ten-speed amplifies our physical abilities. For decades, we have been fascinated by the idea that we can use computers to help educate people. What connects these science fiction narratives is that they all imagined computers might eventually emulate what we view as intelligence. Real-life researchers have been working for more than sixty years to make this AI vision a reality. In 1962, the checkers master Robert Nealey played the game against an IBM 7094 computer, and the computer beat him. A few years prior, in 1957, the psychologist Frank Rosenblatt created Perceptron, the first artificial neural network, a computer simulation of a collection of neurons and synapses trained to perform certain tasks. In the decades following such innovations in early AI, we had the computation power to tackle systems only as complex as the brain of an earthworm or insect. We also had limited techniques and data to train these networks. The technology has come a long way in the ensuing decades, driving some of the most common products and apps today, from the recommendation engines on movie streaming services to voice-controlled personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa. AI has gotten so good at mimicking human behavior that oftentimes we cannot distinguish between human and machine responses. Meanwhile, not only has the computation power developed enough to tackle systems approaching the complexity of the human brain, but there have been significant breakthroughs in structuring and training these neural networks.

Television* means ‘to see from a distance’. The desire in man to do so has been there for ages. In the early years of the twentieth century many scientists experimented with the idea of using selenium photosensitive cells for converting light from pictures into electrical signals and transmitting them through wires. The first demonstration of actual television was given by J.L. Baird in UK and C.F. Jenkins in USA around 1927 by using the technique of mechanical scanning employing rotating discs.However, the real breakthrough occurred with the invention of the cathode ray tube and the success of V.K. Zworykin of the USA in perfecting the first camera tube (the iconoscope) based on the storage principle. By 1930 electromagnetic scanning of both camera and picture tubes and other ancillary circuits such as for beam deflection, video amplification, etc. were developed. Though television broadcast started in 1935, world political developments and the second world war slowed down the progress of television. With the end of the war, television rapidly grew into a popular medium for dispersion of news and mass entertainment. Television Systems At the outset, in the absence of any international standards, three monochrome (i.e. black and white) systems grew independently. These are the 525 line American, the 625 line European and the 819 line French systems. This naturally prevents direct exchange of programme between countries using different television standards.Later, efforts by the all world committee on radio and television (CCIR) for changing to a common 625 line system by all concerned proved ineffective and thus all the three systems have apparently come to stay. The inability to change over to a common system is mainly due to the high cost of replacing both the transmitting equipment and the millions of receivers already in use. However the UK, where initially a 415 line monochrome system was in use, has changed to the 625 line system with some modification in the channel bandwidth. In India, where television transmission started in 1959, the 625-B monochrome system has been adopted.

Scientists have found that there are two important genes, the CREB activator (which stimulates the formation of new connections between neurons) and the CREB repressor (which suppresses the formation of new memories). Dr. Jerry Yin and Timothy Tully of Cold Spring Harbor have been doing interesting experiments with fruit flies. Normally it takes ten trials for them to learn a certain task (e.g., detecting an odor, avoiding a shock). Fruit flies with an extra CREB repressor gene could not form lasting memories at all, but the real surprise came when they tested fruit flies with an extra CREB activator gene. They learned the task in just one session. “This implies these flies have a photographic memory,” says Dr. Tully. He said they are just like students “who could read a chapter of a book once, see it in their mind, and tell you that the answer is in paragraph three of page two seventy-four.” This effect is not just restricted to fruit flies. Dr. Alcino Silva, also at Cold Spring Harbor, has been experimenting with mice. He found that mice with a defect in their CREB activator gene were virtually incapable of forming long-term memories. They were amnesiac mice. But even these forgetful mice could learn a bit if they had short lessons with rest in between. Scientists theorize that we have a fixed amount of CREB activator in the brain that can limit the amount we can learn in any specific time. If we try to cram before a test, it means that we quickly exhaust the amount of CREB activators, and hence we cannot learn any more—at least until we take a break to replenish the CREB activators. “We can now give you a biological reason why cramming doesn’t work,” says Dr. Tully. The best way to prepare for a final exam is to mentally review the material periodically during the day, until the material becomes part of your long-term memory. This may also explain why emotionally charged memories are so vivid and can last for decades. The CREB repressor gene is like a filter, cleaning out useless information. But if a memory is associated with a strong emotion, it can either remove the CREB repressor gene or increase levels of the CREB activator gene. In the future, we can expect more breakthroughs in understanding the genetic basis of memory. Not just one but a sophisticated combination of genes is probably required to shape the enormous capabilities of the brain. These genes, in turn, have counterparts in the human genome, so it is a distinct possibility that we can also enhance our memory and mental skills genetically. However, don’t think that you will be able to get a brain boost anytime soon. Many hurdles still remain. First, it is not clear if these results apply to humans.

10 Practical Strategies to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills and Unleash Your Creativity In today's rapidly changing world, the ability to think critically and creatively has become more important than ever. Whether you're a student looking to excel academically, a professional striving for success in your career, or simply someone who wants to navigate life's challenges with confidence, developing strong critical thinking skills is crucial. In this blog post, we will explore ten practical strategies to help you improve your critical thinking abilities and unleash your creative potential. 1. Embrace open-mindedness: One of the cornerstones of critical thinking is being open to different viewpoints and perspectives. Cultivate a willingness to listen to others, consider alternative opinions, and challenge your own beliefs. This practice expands your thinking and encourages creative problem-solving. 2. Ask thought-provoking questions: Asking insightful questions is a powerful way to stimulate critical thinking. By questioning assumptions, seeking clarity, and exploring deeper meanings, you can uncover new insights and perspectives. Challenge yourself to ask thought-provoking questions regularly. 3. Practice active listening: Listening actively involves not just hearing, but also understanding, interpreting, and empathizing with the speaker. By honing your active listening skills, you can better grasp complex ideas, identify underlying assumptions, and engage in more meaningful discussions. 4. Seek diverse sources of information: Expand your knowledge base by seeking information from a wide range of sources. Engage with diverse perspectives, opinions, and ideas through books, articles, podcasts, and documentaries. This habit broadens your understanding and encourages critical thinking by exposing you to different viewpoints. 5. Develop analytical thinking skills: Analytical thinking involves breaking down complex problems into smaller components, examining relationships and patterns, and drawing logical conclusions. Enhance your analytical skills by practicing activities like puzzles, riddles, and brain teasers. This will sharpen your ability to analyze information and think critically. 6. Foster a growth mindset: A growth mindset is the belief that your abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. Embracing this mindset encourages you to view challenges as opportunities for growth, rather than obstacles. By persisting through difficulties, you build resilience and enhance your critical thinking abilities. 7. Engage in collaborative problem-solving: Collaborating with others on problem-solving tasks can spark creativity and strengthen critical thinking skills. Seek out group projects, brainstorming sessions, or online forums where you can exchange ideas, challenge each other's thinking, and find innovative solutions together. 8. Practice reflective thinking: Taking time to reflect on your thoughts, actions, and experiences allows you to gain deeper insights and learn from past mistakes. Regularly engage in activities like journaling, meditation, or self-reflection exercises to develop your reflective thinking skills. This practice enhances your critical thinking abilities by promoting self-awareness and self-improvement. 9. Encourage creativity through experimentation: Creativity and critical thinking often go hand in hand. Give yourself permission to experiment and explore new ideas without fear of failure. Embrace a "what if" mindset and push the boundaries of your thinking. This willingness to take risks and think outside the box can lead to breakthroughs in critical thinking. 10. Continuously learn and adapt: Critical thinking is a skill that can be honed throughout your life. Commit to lifelong learning and seek opportunities to expand your knowledge and skills. Stay curious, be open to new experiences, and embrace change.

We all have a choice – to sink or swim when the going gets tough. Sometimes the most hurtful experiences can open the doors to our biggest breakthroughs. Our weakest moments can be the catalysts to showing us strengths we didn’t even know we had

Like The Second City, Upworthy turned its work into rapid, scientific experiments. It turned tiny failures into depersonalized feedback and created an environment where total failure was nearly impossible.

Embracing Failure WE NEED TO FAIL. Churches need to fail more. Leaders need to fail more. Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly has, since the 1990s, been hosting what he calls failure parties for scrapped research projects. 1 Edgy design company 5Crowd has a failure party every month—complete with failure high-fives and often wrapping up with a celebratory failure cake! 2 When venture capitalists assess whether to invest in a new idea, one of the key characteristics they look for is a previous failed startup. They prefer to invest in a leader who has already run a company into the ground.

Sit with this painful comparison for a moment. In a predominantly Muslim country, a brand-new church pioneered a kingdom work that saw thousands of new churches organized in two decades. Meanwhile, in a country where religious freedoms are legally protected, many denominations—with thousands of paid clergy, vast resources, hundreds of thousands of members, and beautiful buildings—saw a decline in their numbers across the board. It’s a bit like being an unsuccessful lifetime golfer and watching video of a five-year-old child hit a hole-in-one. You’ve worked your whole life and have never achieved what someone just starting out has already achieved.

Finances are more likely to follow the mission than to lead it.

Up to this point, Philip hadn’t actually heard much about the kingdom. Even though he had studied theology for four years and listened to thousands of sermons, somehow he had never heard the kingdom of God explained. Philip was shocked to discover that Jesus’s central message was not forgiveness or love or even reconciliation. Rather, the single theme that unites Jesus’s teachings in the Bible is this mysterious kingdom of God.

Often when we think of church planting,” says Philip, “we think of planting worship services, and we think that once we have planted a worship service, we have planted a church. This is just stupid from a theological point of view.

When you call on God for breakthrough, you’re calling on the beautiful, creative power of God that created the earth in Genesis. But you’re also calling on that destructive power of our great warrior King. The very power that we see destroying the kingdom of Satan in the book of Revelation breaks in on our present experience and brings change.

There has to be a more loving dream, a dream that appeals to the hearts of humans. There is I know, a more refined dream, which appeals to the human soul,’ offered Wonder encouragingly. ‘I am not so sure,’ rejoined Double Doubt, responding to the tone of hope in Wonder’s voice. ‘Why choose war over peace? Humankind has trod that path so diligently that they have forgotten that there are other ways of ease.’ ‘True. Tis true! But is it not the dominant actions of the few, who lead the many? Does not the fear of being a voice of reason in the wilderness overwhelm the gentle of heart?’ ‘The gentle of heart are weak! Too weak in energy to perform, to take action, and are drained by the fear of action, a fear which inhibits action. I doubt they will break through the fog of fear.’ ‘The fog of fear you say? Or is it their sense of impotence that overwhelms them from speaking out? Knowing that any attempt to change the consensus reality of their space-time is an enormous task, an overwhelming task, and that just to hold the thought of a breakthrough is about the only choice they have.’ ‘Enormous it may be, in terms of consciousness,’ replied Double Doubt. ‘But consciousness grounded in impeccability, will far outweigh the fog of fear, so why the problem? Humans do not seem to understand that the universal energy supports life-furthering consciousness. Such a waste of human resources! No Doubt. No Doubt.’ ‘I understand what you are propounding Gnome Double Doubt, however, it seems to me that most human beings are still not fully aware of the power of thought, and are still not aware of how energy exists; transforming itself through the power of thought. It is only a matter of space-time before humans come to understand the difficult concept of Universal space-time and energy.’ ‘Your optimism is based on a need for perfection Wonder. Humans also seek perfection, but as yet have not come within a whale’s breath of it, and a whale’s breath is vast! I cannot see why you hold out such great hope for these vulnerable humans. It seems to me that your wonderings about their futures will take you away from the higher pursuits of the experiment. Let us deal with one human at a time. Remember, one action, one thought can change the ways of all,’ encouraged Gnome Double Doubt, now taking on the role of the advocate of hope. ‘It is now urgent that we pull ourselves together and act in a more gnome-like manner and have done with all this wallowing concern for the human race.’ ‘You are always so wise Double Doubt. I know you are on the right path,’ conceded Wonder, knowing that Double Doubt was now out of the foggy mire of confusion and back on the track of practicality. ‘I wish I could let go of seeking something of a higher dreaming for the humans. But alas I know myself,’ sighed Wonder. ‘I am as I am, a wondering wanderlust or a Wonder-last, and the last being to wonder or to lust over a dream of such beauty, that it would vanquish the fear of insecurity in the human realm forever. So near and yet so far! I wonder. I wonder? Is it a possibility, or just a dream, as ephemeral in substance as the gossamer rainbow wings of our dear friends the fairies?' ‘My goodness! You do go on Wonder. It seems to me, but who am I to doubt, that you waste so much energy on a dream without substance, a dream which is based on fear, a dream which is embedded like granite in human thought, a dream that would take earth shattering energy to shift such rigidity of thought. Take my advice Wonder. Begin with the smallest crack in the edifice of human thought, and that lies in the direction of Petunia. Leave the human race to experiencing life as they choose to. Until they validate, that ‘All is connected. All is divine’, then they will not be and cannot be, aware of the realm of All That Is. T.L. Franklin (Excerpt from ‘Wonder and Double Doubt’ - Chapter 9, Page 294)

A company’s revenue engine is a critical success factor. I had seen from my own direct experience how easy it was to get caught in silos: marketing people would just think of marketing, salespeople would just think of sales, and accounting wouldn’t think of itself as part of the revenue engine at all. Furthermore, product and the revenue engine were too often thought of completely independent of each other. The need for a more integrated approach was on my mind from the beginning. The revenue engine is a whole system. It encompasses a diverse set of integrated components, each doing its part to advance the system’s purpose. The engine is not just comprised of marketing and sales— it includes product, accounting, and the underlying technology and data infrastructure required to keep everything flowing. It involves people, tools, workflow, and metrics. Its purpose is to optimize reach, conversion, and expansion of customer spend. I call my revenue engine model “the bowtie schema.” It was the product of continuous iteration. As I interacted with marketing and sales practitioners and waded through the research, the model slowly emerged. The final model conveys not just the product and customer journey across the bowtie, but also the foundational layers that support that journey-- the interaction between people tools, workflow, and metrics that make it all happen. The most basic question a CEO must answer is whether the product has achieved a value breakthrough. Without that, the revenue engine is irrelevant. Once product-market fit is confirmed, the next step is to clearly identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) and your business model. This includes the lifetime value (LTV) profile of your company. Assuming a strong product, a clear ICP, and a solid understanding of the constraints composed by your unit economics, the path forward is clear. Then, the focus will turn to uplifting the maturity of your revenue engine and scaling it efficiently.

In fact, because this antibiotic regime starts early, far too many of us have always lived with compromised intestinal flora and have never been truly healthy. I see more and more of this in my practice every year. It is my experience that chronically ill people, who often present with an elusive diagnosis, have a long history of consuming antibiotics. The earlier they started, the more complicated their symptoms are later in their lives and the harder it is for doctors to find a diagnosis.

Metaphorically, in relation to the idea of heartbreak, we’re given lemons which are the experiences that cause the idea of heartbreak, then the water comes from our tears that may come during the seasons of our trials and finally the sweetener comes from the joy of the breakthrough and transformation, and in the end you end up with this metaphoric lemonade. When we have a better understanding of heartbreak we go from lemons to lemonade.

20% Time” is not Google indigenous. It was borrowed from a company formerly known as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, aka 3M, which allowed its employees to spend 15 percent of their work hours experimenting with new ideas, no questions asked. 3M’s “15% Time” brought us, among other things, Post-it Notes. Behind this concept (which is meticulously outlined in an excellent book by Ryan Tate called The 20% Doctrine) is the idea of constantly tinkering with potential trends—having a toe in interesting waters in case waves form. This kind of budgeted experimentation helps

A few years ago, we engaged a team of experts to determine the “secret sauce” that propelled those rare leaders, organizations, and movements to success. They discovered five principles that are consistently present when transformational breakthroughs take place. To spark this sort of change, you must: 1. Make a Big Bet. So many people and organizations are naturally cautious. They look at what seemed to work in the past and try to do more of it, leading to only incremental advances. Every truly history-making transformation has occurred when people have decided to go for revolutionary change. 2. Be bold, take risks. Have the guts to try new, unproven things and the rigor to continue experimenting. Risk taking is not a blind leap off a cliff but a lengthy process of trial and error. And it doesn’t end with the launch of a product or the start of a movement. You need to be willing to risk the next big idea, even if it means upsetting your own status quo. 3. Make failure matter. Great achievers view failure as a necessary part of advancing toward success. No one seeks it out, but if you’re trying new things, the outcome is by definition uncertain. When failure happens, great innovators make the setback matter, applying the lessons learned and sharing them with others. 4. Reach beyond your bubble. Our society is in thrall to the myth of the lone genius. But innovation happens at intersections. Often the most original solutions come from engaging with people with diverse experiences to forge new and unexpected partnerships. 5. Let urgency conquer fear. Don’t overthink and overanalyze. It’s natural to want to study a problem from all angles, but getting caught up in questions like “What if we’re wrong?” and “What if there is a better way?” can leave you paralyzed with fear. Allow the compelling need to act to outweigh all doubts and setbacks. These five principles can be summarized in two words: Be Fearless.

I often suggest they think about making a limited investment, putting aside maybe only 1 percent of their budget for special projects to test out a new idea. In this way, risk stops being scary and becomes R&D. Talk to private sector CEOs and they will be quick to point out that R&D is the lifeblood of innovative companies. Yes, some things will fail as you discover what works and what doesn’t. But as Einstein reportedly said, “You never fail until you stop trying.” This is true whether you’re launching a program, developing a product, or starting a movement. I’ve often heard people from the social sector protest, “But we don’t have funding for R&D!” My response is to remind them of the words of one of our greatest modern-day innovators, Steve Jobs: “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least one hundred times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” You don’t need a big budget in order to experiment. “You never fail until you stop trying.” —ALBERT EINSTEIN Realistically, budgets are often stretched and funding for programs “locked.” I see this especially with foundations or government programs, which can have rigid protocols. When nonprofits or governments experiment and fail, those failures are often labeled as waste or fraud or abuse, which discourages more risk taking.

While the seven essential elements are a distillation of what we did on an everyday basis, they represent long-term discovery too. An important aspect of this book is the way we built our creative methods as a by-product of the work as we were doing it. As all of us pitched in to make our products, we developed our approach to creating great software. This was an evolution, an outgrowth of our deliberate attention to the task at hand while keeping our end goal in mind. We never waited around for brilliant flashes of insight that might solve problems in one swoop, and we had few actual Eureka! moments. Even in the two instances in my Apple career when I did experience a breakthrough—more about these later—there certainly was no nude streaking across the Apple campus like Archimedes supposedly did. Instead, we moved forward, as a group, in stepwise fashion, from problem to design to demo to shipping product, taking each promising concept and trying to come up with ways to make it better. We mixed together our seven essential elements, and we formulated “molecules” out of them, like mixing inspiration and decisiveness to create initial prototypes, or by combining collaboration, craft, and taste to give detailed feedback to a teammate, or when we blended diligence and empathy in our constant effort to make software people could use without pulling their hair out. As we did all this mixing and combining of our seven essential elements, we always added in a personal touch, a little piece of ourselves, an octessence, and by putting together our goals and ideas and efforts and elements and molecules and personal touches, we formed our approach, an approach I call creative selection.

All ten of the top ten presidents in C-SPAN’s survey were hackers. Only one, JFK, climbed a semblance of a traditional ladder; he served in both houses of Congress, but was a war hero and author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning book—clearly not the average ladder climber. Each of the men on this list worked hard in his career, learned and proved leadership through diverse experiences, and switched ladders multiple times. They continuously parlayed their current success for something more, and they didn’t give up when they lost elections (which most of them did). The ladder switching made them better at getting elected and better at the job. To be a good president, Wead says, “You’ve got to be able to think on your feet.” Stubbornness and tradition make for poor performance—as we see with Andrew Johnson and other presidents at the bottom of history’s rankings. The fact that our best presidents—and history’s other greatest overachievers—circumvented the system to get to the top speaks to what’s wrong with our conventional wisdom of paying dues and climbing the ladder. Hard work and luck are certainly ingredients of success, but they’re not the entire recipe. Senators and representatives, by contrast, generally play the dues-and-ladder game of hierarchy and formality. And they get stuck in the congressional spiderweb. “The people that go into Congress go step by step by step,” Wead explains. But presidents don’t. It begs the question: should we?

Research from Brunel University shows that chess students who trained with coaches increased on average 168 points in their national ratings versus those who didn’t. Though long hours of deliberate practice are unavoidable in the cognitively complex arena of chess, the presence of a coach for mentorship gives players a clear advantage. Chess prodigy Joshua Waitzkin (the subject of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer) for example, accelerated his career when national chess master Bruce Pandolfini discovered him playing chess in Washington Square Park in New York as a boy. Pandolfini coached young Waitzkin one on one, and the boy won a slew of chess championships, setting a world record at an implausibly young age. Business research backs this up, too. Analysis shows that entrepreneurs who have mentors end up raising seven times as much capital for their businesses, and experience 3.5 times faster growth than those without mentors. And in fact, of the companies surveyed, few managed to scale a profitable business model without a mentor’s aid. Even Steve Jobs, the famously visionary and dictatorial founder of Apple, relied on mentors, such as former football coach and Intuit CEO Bill Campbell, to keep himself sharp. SO, DATA INDICATES THAT those who train with successful people who’ve “been there” tend to achieve success faster. The winning formula, it seems, is to seek out the world’s best and convince them to coach us. Except there’s one small wrinkle. That’s not quite true. We just held up Justin Bieber as an example of great, rapid-mentorship success. But since his rapid rise, he’s gotten into an increasing amount of trouble. Fights. DUIs. Resisting arrest. Drugs. At least one story about egging someone’s house. It appears that Bieber started unraveling nearly as quickly as he rocketed to Billboard number one. OK, first of all, Bieber’s young. He’s acting like the rock star he is. But his mentor, Usher, also got to Billboard number one at age 18, and he managed to dominate pop music for a decade without DUIs or egg-vandalism incidents. Could it be that Bieber missed something in the mentorship process? History, it turns out, is full of people who’ve been lucky enough to have amazing mentors and have stumbled anyway.

Physical or emotional stress Microbiome experiences stress Via the enteric nervous system (the nervous system in your gut) and/or the vagus nerve, the gut alerts your brain, specifically, your hypothalamus, a gland that regulates your body’s hormonal system. Your hypothalamus initiates the stress response (also known as the “fight or flight” response) by alerting your pituitary gland. Your pituitary passes the message on to your adrenal glands (located above your kidneys). Your adrenals release a complex cascade of stress hormones, including cortisol.

Intuition is the result of nonconscious pattern recognition,” Dane tells me. However, his research shows that, while logging hours of practice helps us see patterns subconsciously, we can often do just as well by deliberately looking for them. In many fields, such pattern hunting and deliberate analysis can yield results just as in the basketball example—high accuracy on the first try. And that’s where, like the dues-paying presidents or overly patient programmers, what we take for granted often gets in the way of our own success. Deliberate pattern spotting can compensate for experience. But we often don’t even give it a shot. This explains how so many inexperienced companies and entrepreneurs beat the norm and build businesses that disrupt established players. Through deliberate analysis, the little guy can spot waves better than the big company that relies on experience and instinct once it’s at the top. And a wave can take an amateur farther faster than an expert can swim. It also explains why the world’s best surfers arrive at the beach hours before a competition and stare at the ocean. After years of practice, a surfer can “feel” the ocean, and intuitively find waves. But the best surfers, the ones who win championships, are tireless students of the sea. O’Connell says, “One of the main things that you do when you learn to compete is learn how to pick out conditions. Know that the tide is getting higher. Counting waves, how many waves come into a particular area that fit your eye that you want to ride.

Google was in the water when the waves of Internet traffic came because it was tinkering with new ideas under the umbrella of Google’s famous “20% Time.” “20% Time” is not Google indigenous. It was borrowed from a company formerly known as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, aka 3M, which allowed its employees to spend 15 percent of their work hours experimenting with new ideas, no questions asked. 3M’s “15% Time” brought us, among other things, Post-it Notes. Behind this concept (which is meticulously outlined in an excellent book by Ryan Tate called The 20% Doctrine) is the idea of constantly tinkering with potential trends—having a toe in interesting waters in case waves form. This kind of budgeted experimentation helps businesses avoid being disrupted, by helping them harness waves on which younger competitors might otherwise use to ride past them. It’s helped companies like Google, 3M, Flickr, Condé Nast, and NPR remain innovative even as peer companies plateaued. In contrast, companies that are too focused on defending their current business practice and too fearful to experiment often get overtaken. For example, lack of experimentation in digital media has cost photo brand Kodak nearly $ 30 billion in market capitalization since the digital photography wave overwhelmed it in the late ’90s. The best way to be in the water when the wave comes is to budget time for swimming.

There were certainly multiple factors contributing to these men’s post-moonwalk slump, but the question What do you do after walking on the moon? became a gigantic speed bump. The trouble with moonwalkers and billionaires is when they arrive at the top, their momentum often stops. If they don’t manage to find something to parlay, they turn into the kid on the jungle gym who just hangs from the ring. Not coincidentally, this is the same reason that only one-third of Americans are happy at their jobs. When there’s no forward momentum in our careers, we get depressed, too. As Newton pointed out, an object at rest tends to stay at rest. So how does one avoid billionaire’s depression? Or regular person’s stuck-in-a-dead-end-job, lack-of-momentum-fueled depression? Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile took on the question in the mid-2000s in a research study of white-collar employees. She tasked 238 pencil pushers in various industries to keep daily work diaries. The workers answered open-ended questions about how they felt, what events in their days stood out. Amabile and her fellow researchers then dissected the 12,000 resulting entries, searching for patterns in what affects people’s “inner” work lives the most dramatically. The answer, it turned out, is simply progress. A sense of forward motion. Regardless how small. And that’s the interesting part. Amabile found that minor victories at work were nearly as psychologically powerful as major breakthroughs. To motivate stuck employees, as Amabile and her colleague Steven J. Kramer suggest in their book, The Progress Principle, businesses need to help their workers experience lots of tiny wins. (And as we learned from the bored BYU students in chapter 1, breaking up big challenges into tiny ones also speeds up progress.) This is helpful to know when motivating employees. But it also hints at what billionaires and astronauts can do to stave off the depression that follows the high of getting to the top. To get out of the funk, say Joan DiFuria and Stephen Goldbart, cofounders of the Money, Meaning & Choices Institute, depressed successes simply have to start the Olympic rings over. Some use their money to create new businesses. Others parlay sideways and get into philanthropy. And others simply pick up hobbies that take time to master. Even if the subsequent endeavors are smaller than their previous ones, the depression dissipates as they make progress.

It is inevitable that as we develop a critical analysis of the various axes of identity--race, gender, class, ability, and more--we will experience deeply personal and political moments of self-realization--about ourselves and our relationships with others as well as about the way this culture functions. It is important and positive that we make those kinds of developments in identifying how oppression works, internally and externally. Yet we must not get so caught up in our own self-discoveries that we unthinkingly put the emotional weight of those breakthrough moments on others who live daily with he realities we are just beginning to understand. (A Critique of Ally Politics)

Aristotle wrote, “Wisdom is an equal combination of experience plus reflection.