Breakthrough Short Quotes

Self-discipline is often disguised as short-term pain, which often leads to long-term gains. The mistake many of us make is the need and want for short-term gains (immediate gratification), which often leads to long-term pain.

First, break free; then break through.

Short-term pain leads to long-term gain.

Breaking your inner boundaries is an existential art.

I reached my very edge. I was about to break down. I was about to break through.

In some evolving civilizations, for reasons which we don't entirely understand, the evolution of consciousness is attended by a disaster of some sort which occurs shortly after the Sy breakthrough. It has something to do with the discovery of the self and the incapacity to deal with it, the consciousness becoming self-conscious but not knowing what to do with the self, not even knowing what its self is, and so ending by being that which is not, and making others what they are not.

people who commuted by bike had a 40 per cent lower chance of dying during the fifteen-year course of the project than those who didn’t. That’s not far short of a miracle. If these benefits could be administered in an injection, it would be considered one of the greatest medical breakthroughs of all time. The

Annie Jump Cannon (left) and Henrietta Leavitt, whose unsung labours and incisive deductions made Hubble’s breakthroughs possible.

Our obsession with chasing comfort and happiness is leading us down the wrong road... because circumstances (like these) only lead to short-term happiness.

Whatever the losses in warmth and comfort, the gains in space proved irresistible. So the development of the fireplace became one of the great breakthroughs in domestic history: they allowed people to lay boards across the beams and create a whole new world upstairs.

The Chemical Society of London was not founded until 1841 and didn’t begin to produce a regular journal until 1848, by which time most learned societies in Britain—Geological, Geographical, Zoological, Horticultural, and Linnaean (for naturalists and botanists)—were at least twenty years old and often much more. The rival Institute of Chemistry didn’t come into being until 1877, a year after the founding of the American Chemical Society. Because chemistry was so slow to get organized, news of Avogadro’s important breakthrough of 1811 didn’t begin to become general until the first international chemistry congress, in Karlsruhe, in 1860.

Mendeleyev dutifully completed his studies and eventually landed a position at the local university. There he was a competent but not terribly outstanding chemist, known more for his wild hair and beard, which he had trimmed just once a year, than for his gifts in the laboratory. However, in 1869, at the age of thirty-five, he began to toy with a way to arrange the elements. At the time, elements were normally grouped in two ways—either by atomic weight (using Avogadro’s Principle) or by common properties (whether they were metals or gases, for instance). Mendeleyev’s breakthrough was to see that the two could be combined in a single table.

There is nothing, though, in “An International Episode” or “Daisy Miller,” fine as they are, that prepares us for the subtle psychological realism of James’s depictions of the elusiveness of self-knowledge and the terrors of confronting one’s concealed motivations in the three premier stories of this volume, “The Aspern Papers,” “The Turn of the Screw,” and “The Beast in the Jungle.” Beginning in the 1880s with Portrait of a Lady (1881), which literary historians tend to think of as James’s breakthrough novel, the fate of Americans in Europe and the interaction between European sophistication and American innocence became more a matter of the heart and psyche than one of manners, social relations, and cultural differences.

Since the beginning of the electric grid, utilities have placed most power plants close to America’s rapidly growing cities, because it was relatively easy to use railroads and pipelines to ship fossil fuels from wherever they were extracted to the power plants where they’d be burned to make electricity. As a result, America’s power grid relies on railroads and pipelines to move fuels over long distances to power plants, and then on transmission lines to move electricity over short distances to the cities that need it. That model doesn’t work with solar and wind. You can’t ship sunlight in a railcar to some power plant; it has to be converted to electricity on the spot. But most of America’s sunlight supply is in the Southwest, and most of our wind is in the Great Plains, far from many major urban areas.

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.

Future profits come to those who anticipate trends and work toward meeting them with services or products. In this case, the trend is clear. Biomimicry has always been a great source of wealth and opportunity. Now it can be a far greater wealth generator and problem solver than ever before. Most opportunities are still waiting to be identified or marketed, so the potential for intellectual property creation, new manufacturing methods, and breakthrough chemicals and materials is immense. Nothing short of the overhaul of the entire industrial sector is possible.

Continuous Deficiency Syndrome. In short, we’re always aware that we could have more. This part curse, part blessing comes with the territory of being human and has inspired technological breakthroughs and other societal advances over the centuries. In a sense, our consumer society owes its very existence to its flair for fueling discontentment and an unquenchable appetite for more stuff. We are bombarded with thousands of marketing images every day reminding us that      We could be richer.      Our spouse could be even better.      We could be thinner.      Our breath could be fresher.      Our whites could be whiter.      Our carpets could be cleaner.      Our children could be smarter, more popular, or more athletic. CDS can dominate our attitudes unless we consciously counteract it with gratitude. The more we seek to become satisfied as consumers, the emptier we can become as human beings. That’s because ingratitude leaves us in a state of deprivation in which we are constantly pursuing something else. Gratitude, on the other hand, makes us feel that we have enough.

What the most successful people know about weekends is that life cannot happen only in the future. It cannot wait for some day when we are less tired or less busy. If you work long hours, then weekends are key to feeling like you have a life that is broader than your professional identity—even if, and probably because, you take that identity very seriously. The marathoner knows that rest days and cross-training days spur physical breakthroughs.

They say other species have stopped short, and that only the human species, the humanoid branch, has made its definitive breakthrough. In fact while all the others persevered in their specific forms and ended up disappearing genetically, thus leaving evolution to run its course, only the human species succeeded in surpassing itself in the simulacrum of itself - in disappearing genetically to resuscitate artificially. By perpetuating itself in a world of clones and electronic prostheses (perfect in so far as they will have eliminated every potential species, including humanity), man will thus, in a definitive act, have wiped out the natural genesis of things. Contact with the men who wield power and authority still leaves an intang ible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proximity to faecal matter, the faecal embodiment of something unmentionable and you wonder what it is made of and where it acquired its historically sacred character. Why this feeling of loathing for the politician? Is it the impression of being artificially subjected to a will that is even more stupid than your own and which, by its very function, has to be crude? How can the decision-making function be performed without simplifying the mechanisms of thought? Political charisma is precisely not that gracious charisma which emanates from the irresistible power of a pure object, such as the power of a woman, but an ungracious will which derives its power and its glory from voluntary servitude. This is true of all institutions, the military, the clerical, the medical, and more recently the psychoanalytic, but it is particularly so in politics which remains the most striking hallucination of all the weaknesses of the will.

I met with Chad Logan a few days after our first get-together. I told him that I would explain my point of view and then let him decide whether he wanted to work with me on strategy. I said: I think you have a lot of ambition, but you don’t have a strategy. I don’t think it would be useful, right now, to work with your managers on strategies for meeting the 20/20 goal. What I would advise is that you first work to discover the very most promising opportunities for the business. Those opportunities may be internal, fixing bottlenecks and constraints in the way people work, or external. To do this, you should probably pull together a small team of people and take a month to do a review of who your buyers are, who you compete with, and what opportunities exist. It’s normally a good idea to look very closely at what is changing in your business, where you might get a jump on the competition. You should open things up so there are as many useful bits of information on the table as possible. If you want, I can help you structure some of this process and, maybe, help you ask some of the right questions. The end result will be a strategy that is aimed at channeling energy into what seem to be one or two of the most attractive opportunities, where it looks like you can make major inroads or breakthroughs. I can’t tell you in advance how large such opportunities are, or where they may be. I can’t tell you in advance how fast revenues will grow. Perhaps you will want to add new services, or cut back on doing certain things that don’t make a profit. Perhaps you will find it more promising to focus on grabbing the graphics work that currently goes in-house, rather than to competitors. But, in the end, you should have a very short list of the most important things for the company to do. Then you will have a basis for moving forward. That is what I would do were I in your shoes. If you continue down the road you are on you will be counting on motivation to move the company forward. I cannot honestly recommend that as a way forward because business competition is not just a battle of strength and wills; it is also a competition over insights and competencies. My judgment is that motivation, by itself, will not give this company enough of an edge to achieve your goals. Chad Logan thanked me and, a week later, retained someone else to help him. The new consultant took Logan and his department managers through an exercise he called “Visioning.” The gist of it was the question “How big do you think this company can be?” In the morning they stretched their aspirations from “bigger” to “very much bigger.” Then, in the afternoon, the facilitator challenged them to an even grander vision: “Think twice as big as that,” he pressed. Logan

One interesting thing I’ve noticed in my career is that breakthroughs often come after periods of struggle. Every runner, if she keeps it up for a while, will eventually hit a rough patch—a time when she might plateau, fall short of her goals, or give it all on race day only to have a result that doesn’t align with what she would have done in training. Those setbacks or challenges aren’t fun, but they’re often catalysts for the change and growth that ultimately propel her forward.

taught me an exercise to reframe expectations. Instead of aiming for our best performance, something that we can only accomplish rarely, shoot for improving your best average. When we judge ourselves against our all-time best, we inevitably fall short more often than not. Instead, averaging out our five most recent performances gives us a still tricky but achievable goal. The aim is first to be consistent. Don’t lower your expectations just so you can become confident. Understand what you are capable of, and set a standard that falls within that realm or just a touch outside of it. Embrace reality. Understand that a breakthrough doesn’t come from creating a false sense of confidence;

[...]Elihu tried and failed to control a visible shudder. “I haven’t been watching TV, as I told you—but since I’m rooming in the UN Hostel, I’ve been getting first-hand opinions from people of a hundred different nationalities, and take my word, Yatakang is the most cordially hated country on the face of the globe right now, not excluding China.” “And here’s the crunch,” Norman said, leaning forward to emphasise his words. “There hasn’t been a new crisis since Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere took over. They emerged full-blown into the existing contemporary world, with its generation-long antipathies and hatreds. Even so, I’ve seen what they’ve done to public opinion. Tens—scores—of millions of people are becoming identified with that imaginary couple. The next presidential campaign will pivot on what they think, not on the validity of the rival policies. But the Yatakang question is going to hit first, and what’s worse it’ll hit people in the balls. Below the waist you don’t think, you react. Let Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere only say that this isn’t fair, and you’ll have a party in favour of war against Yatakang within a week.” There was a short silence. A kind of anguish was written on Norman’s face. Studying it, Elihu said finally, “It’s remarkable how much you’ve altered in the few days since I met you.” “What? How do you mean?” “Laying away your ancestor to his long-time rest has improved you out of recognition. A couple of weeks ago I can imagine you chortling over the discomfiture of the paleasses in face of this breakthrough by yellowbellies. Now what seems to worry you most is the fact that people won’t get the chance to judge the idea dispassionately for themselves, but may get stampeded into stupid emotional reactions.” “My whole life has been one long emotional reaction,” Norman said, not looking at the older man. “Shall we leave the subject and get back to the business in hand?

A new day has dawned. New Secondary Skills are unlocked: Blades: Your many battles have increased your effectiveness with swords and other bladed weapons. Expressive Magic Theory: You now know more about shaping aetherium with your words. Somatic Magic Theory: You have mastered an Improvised Spellform and learned more of magic in the process. Somatic Battle-Weaving: Each action you take, from the stroke of a sword to a dodge, can contribute to a Spellform in the heat of battle. Dramatic Magic Theory: Combining Somatic and Expressive magics is not easy, but you now know more of this difficult path. Aetheric Channeling: Masters of magic long ago learned the secrets of how aether changes states and moves through the Aura. You have taken steps to recreate that knowledge. Critical Breakthrough! You have progressed very far in a short time, understanding the Aura in ways many arcanologists thought lost to time. Aetheric Sensing: Through innovative use, you have advanced in this Skill without the need for a tutor. Aetheric Projection: Few wand users ever go beyond simple bolts of energy, but you recreated an entirely different weapon from raw aether. Critical Breakthrough! Frenzied use of advanced techniques has ingrained them in you, making even such advanced uses seem trivial. Skill greatly increased. Aura Mastery: You have learned how to fill your Aura with aetherium while still allowing aether to flow into you. Provides damage reduction and allows use of Somatic spellforms without an implement. Greatly increases the aetherium costs of such spells. May have other benefits as well. Korrash

This chart shows how much various energy sources grew over the course of 60 years, starting from the time they were introduced. Between 1840 and 1900, coal went from 5 percent of the world’s energy supply to nearly 50 percent. But in the 60 years from 1930 to 1990, natural gas reached just 20 percent. In short, energy transitions take a long time.

How much would it cost to just suck the carbon out of the atmosphere directly?” That idea has a name; it’s called direct air capture. (In short, with DAC you blow air over a device that absorbs carbon dioxide, and then you store the gas for safekeeping.) DAC is an expensive and largely unproven technology, but if it can work at a large scale, it would allow us to capture carbon dioxide no matter when or where it was produced. The one DAC facility now in operation, which is based in Switzerland, is absorbing gas that might have been spewed out by a coal-fired plant in Texas 10 years ago.

Human nature changes when it must change, John Clay.  Never sooner.  And nothing will change it more than when the survival of an individual group is surpassed by the survival of one’s entire species.  When your entire human race is threatened with extinction, politics and fighting no longer matter.  Another lesson we were forced to learn, as you say, the difficult way.” “How did you get here?  To Earth?” “With great struggle,” Ronin answered.  “We are told that our scientists succeeded in creating portals shortly before the event.

The distinctions between bilaterians, or triploblasts as they are also known, and the more ‘basal’ animal phyla have been noted for over a century. In 1877, the influential English zoologist Ray Lankester contrasted the embryos of bilaterians with those of cnidarians and sponges, and pointed out that in their early development bilaterians have an extra layer of cells destined to develop into the well-defined muscle blocks of the adult. The similarities seen within embryos and in body symmetry are certainly fundamental. Towards the end of the 20th century, biologists were astounded to find similarities that went far, far deeper – right down to the DNA. The discovery that all bilaterians use the same set of genes to build their bodies represents one of the most fascinating scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century, and one that has changed biological science from the 1980s onwards. It was a discovery with explosive impact, yet this was a revolution with a slow fuse.

No. What was the Keely Motor?" "Something along the lines of what you have here," the colonel said dryly, "except that Keely at least had an explanation for where he was getting his power. Back around 1874, a man named John Keely claimed he had invented a wonderful new power source. He called it a breakthrough in the field of perpetual motion. An undiscovered source of power, he said, controlled by harmony. He had a machine in his lab which would begin to turn a flywheel when he blew a chord on a harmonica. He could stop it by blowing a sour note.

E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough.

greatest irony of all: to be rich. To have more money than you will ever need. The irony is that shortly after becoming rich, you realize that what you really need, what everyone needs, is time. You

Like the team at the FDA, the EIR team enlisted entrepreneurs familiar with the obstacles, including SoftLayer senior executive Paul Ford, to work alongside the USCIS personnel committed to removing or clearing them. “You get fresh thinking, you get a very low-cost way of trying to impact the situation because the people doing this are committed to try to find what’s not working and propose solutions, rather than take a partisan or political or hierarchical or structural view to the environment,” Feld said. “They’re short-timers, so they’re committed for a period of time to come do something, but they’re not here for career advancement, so they are going to speak their mind.” Feld also believed that the presence of Ford and other outside entrepreneurs made the participants feel more comfortable to speak freely than if they had been working with government officials alone. In the spring of 2012, the team began building a prototype of an alternative application process for entrepreneurs and by fall had achieved a significant breakthrough: the launch of the Entrepreneurship Pathways web portal, designed to close the information gap between USCIS and those in the entrepreneurial community, by letting them know which visa may be most appropriate—including the O-1—for their situation.24 While the results of this exercise were not empirically conclusive at the time of an interview for this book, Feld did offer his anecdotal assessment “that there’s an increased number of people who I know have been able to get into the country and get valid visas who are entrepreneurs. I’ve definitely heard a decrease in the negative.

CGIAR is the world’s largest agricultural research group: In short, it helps create better plants and better animal genetics.

Steps to changing your subjugation lifetrap 5. Stop behaving passive-aggressively. Push yourself systematically to assert yourself – express what you need or want. Start with easy requests first. Be direct. Do not make a speech. You have a much greater chance of being heard if what you say is short and to the point. Use the word “I” and speak in terms of your own feelings. (Interestingly, many subjugated people avoid the word “I” whenever they talk about their feelings. Instead of saying, “I felt angry when you cut me off,” they say such things as “People feel angry when they are cut off that way.”) Speaking in terms of your own feelings is an important component of assertiveness. This is, in part, a practical matter. No one can argue with your feelings. If you say, “I was right, you were wrong,” a person can argue; but if you say, “I felt angry when you did that,” no one can argue. No one can say, “No, you didn’t feel angry.” By expressing what you feel, you make a statement that how you feel matters.

The physicist Richard Feynman left the following on a blackboard shortly before his death: “What I cannot create, I do not understand

Scheele was both an extraordinary and extraordinarily luckless fellow. A poor pharmacist with little in the way of advanced apparatus, he discovered eight elements- chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen- and got credit for none of them. In every case, his finds were either overlooked or made it into publication after someone else had made the same discovery independently. He also discovered many useful compounds, among them ammonia, glycerin, and tannic acid, and was the first to see the commercial potential of chlorine as a bleach- all breakthroughs that made other people extremely wealthy. Scheele’s one notable shortcoming was a curious insistence on tasting a little of everything he worked with, including such notoriously disagreeable substances as mercury, prussic acid (another of his discoveries), and hydrocyanic acid. Scheele’s rashness eventually caught up with him. In 1786, aged just forty-three, he was found dead at his workbench surrounded by an array of toxic chemicals, any one of which could have accounted for the stunned and terminal look on his face. Were the world just and Swedish-speaking, Scheele would have enjoyed universal acclaim. Instead credit has tended to lodge with more celebrated chemists, mostly from the English-speaking world. Scheele discovered oxygen in 1772, but for various heartbreakingly complicated reasons could not get his paper published in a timely manner. Instead credit went to Joseph Priestley, who discovered the same element independently, but latterly, in the summer of 1774. Even more remarkable was Scheele’s failure to receive credit for the discovery of chlorine. Nearly all textbooks still attribute chlorine’s discovery to Humphry Davy, who did indeed find it, but thirty-six years after Scheele had.

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.

In short, the universe is pure thought made real. Matter and energy don’t create the illusion of consciousness. Consciousness creates the illusion of matter and energy.

Quantum computing is not only faster than conventional computing, but its workload obeys a different scaling law—rendering Moore’s Law little more than a quaint memory. Formulated by Intel founder Gordon Moore, Moore’s Law observes that the number of transistors in a device’s integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. Some early supercomputers ran on around 13,000 transistors; the Xbox One in your living room contains 5 billion. But Intel in recent years has reported that the pace of advancement has slowed, creating tremendous demand for alternative ways to provide faster and faster processing to fuel the growth of AI. The short-term results are innovative accelerators like graphics-processing unit (GPU) farms, tensor-processing unit (TPU) chips, and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in the cloud. But the dream is a quantum computer. Today we have an urgent need to solve problems that would tie up classical computers for centuries, but that could be solved by a quantum computer in a few minutes or hours. For example, the speed and accuracy with which quantum computing could break today’s highest levels of encryption is mind-boggling. It would take a classical computer 1 billion years to break today’s RSA-2048 encryption, but a quantum computer could crack it in about a hundred seconds, or less than two minutes. Fortunately, quantum computing will also revolutionize classical computing encryption, leading to ever more secure computing. To get there we need three scientific and engineering breakthroughs. The math breakthrough we’re working on is a topological qubit. The superconducting breakthrough we need is a fabrication process to yield thousands of topological qubits that are both highly reliable and stable. The computer science breakthrough we need is new computational methods for programming the quantum computer.

provided an important benefit. This conviction was based on intuition, not on evidence, and it had apparent limitations. Not every patient with short runs of PVCs goes on to develop more worrisome patterns; the antiarrhythmics had never been evaluated for this particular use; and any medication

The breakthrough strategy to achieve short- and long-term success is to make the body feel safe throughout the journey with refeeds, diet breaks, and reverse dieting. With these three tools, you can safely lose body fat permanently and avoid the yo-yo effect.

Luxo Jr. was the breakthrough,” Steve told me many years later. If Steve ever was starstruck, it was by Lasseter, whose artistry seemed to be irrefutable evidence of what Steve believed to be the most important attribute of computers: that they were tools that could unleash and enhance human creativity. Despite his boyish ways (his office is stuffed with so many toys it could double as a Pixar museum, and his wardrobe consists exclusively of blue jeans and hundreds of loud, Hawaiian-style print shirts), Lasseter was a confident grown-up, and not persnickety in any way. While he never looked to Steve for creative advice on his short features, he calmly listened to his boss’s opinions, before going ahead with his own plans anyway. But he made compromises when needed, too, rather than insisting on perfection: when he couldn’t prepare a polished version of a short called Tin Toy in time for SIGGRAPH, he simply showed what he could and filled in the rest with line drawings. Lasseter

For the billionaires, champagne baths every morning and new Lamborghinis every afternoon couldn’t deplete the fathomless amount of cash on hand. “Your entire philosophy of money changes,” writes author Richard Frank in his book, Richistan. “You realize that you can’t possibly spend all of your fortune, or even part of it, in your lifetime, and that your money will probably grow over the years even if you spend lavishly.” There are dotcom entrepreneurs who could live top 1 percent American lifestyles and not run out of cash for 4,000 years. People who Bill Simmons would call “pajama rich,” so rich they can go to a five-star restaurant or sit courtside at the NBA playoffs in their pajamas. They have so much money that they have nothing to prove to anyone. And many of them are totally depressed. You’ll remember the anecdote I shared in this book’s introduction about being too short to reach between the Olympic rings at the playground jungle gym. I had to jump to grab the first ring and then swing like a pendulum in order to reach the next ring. To get to the third ring, I had to use the momentum from the previous swing to keep going. If I held on to the previous ring too long, I’d stop and wouldn’t be able to get enough speed to reach the next ring. This is Isaac Newton’s first law of motion at work: objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless acted on by external forces. Once you start swinging, it’s easier to keep swinging than to slow down. The problem with some rapid success, it turns out, is that lucky breaks like Bear Vasquez’s YouTube success or an entrepreneur cashing out on an Internet wave are like having someone lift you up so you can grab one of the Olympic rings. Even if you get dropped off somewhere far along the chain, you’re stuck in one spot. Financial planners say that this is why a surprisingly high percentage of the rapidly wealthy get depressed. As therapist Manfred Kets de Vries once put it in an interview with The Telegraph, “When money is available in near-limitless quantities, the victim sinks into a kind of inertia.

The difference between Franklin’s unconventional work and Abagnale’s was that the former managed to create value for others while the latter cheated others. Franklin’s approach was a lateral solution to the unfairness of present convention. Abagnale’s, however entertaining, was a con, and he paid for it. And that’s the difference between rapid, but short-term gains, which I call shortcuts, and sustainable success achieved quickly through smart work, or smartcuts. Whereas by dictionary definition shortcuts can be amoral, you can think of smartcuts as shortcuts with integrity. Working smarter and achieving more—without creating negative externalities. Abagnale took shortcuts and regretted it. Franklin used smartcuts and got his face on a $ 100 bill. After being released from prison, Abagnale spent three decades repaying his debt to society, working for the FBI, without pay. Eventually, he started a security business, met his future wife while on undercover assignment, and had three kids. “True success is not defined by how much money do I make, how well do I speak, how well do I deal with the subjects I deal with,” he says. “But how great of a father I am.” As we explore the unconventional behavior of history’s overachievers in Smartcuts, I hope we’ll keep Abagnale’s lesson in mind. To some people, success means wealth. To others it means recognition, popularity, or promotions; it means free time, inventing products, growing businesses, making breakthroughs at work. Those can all be good things, and in this book, we’ll look at people and companies that achieved big things in the above categories. But I’m convinced that true success has more to do with our becoming better people and building a better world while we do these things than it does with the size of our bank accounts.

A filmmaker made a short documentary about this happy-go-lucky teenager on death row, called My Last Days. It showed Zach living happily, hanging out with his family, and playing music. Everybody loved Zach. When you see the footage, you can’t help but like him. As you watch him laugh and love and sing, you catch yourself forgetting: this kid is about to die. Zach’s family tells the camera how knowing he would die has helped them realize what matters in life and to find true meaning. “It’s really simple, actually,” Zach says. “Just try and make people happy.” As the 22-minute film closes, Zach looks into the camera, smiling, and says, “I want to be remembered as the kid who went down fighting, and didn’t really lose.” Not long after he said those words, Zach passed away. When Eli Pariser and Peter Koechley of Upworthy saw the film, they thought, This is a story that needs to be heard. Now just over a year old, Upworthy has become quite popular. In fact, it recently hit 30 million monthly visitors, making it, according to the Business Insider, the fastest-growing media company in history.* (Seven-year-old BuzzFeed was serving 50 million monthly visitors at the time.) The Zach Sobiech story illustrates how Upworthy used rapid feedback to do it: According to Upworthy’s calculations, My Last Days had the potential to reach a lot of people. But so far, few had seen it. The filmmaker had posted the documentary under the headline, “My Last Days: Meet Zach Sobiech.” Though descriptive, it was suboptimal packaging. In the ADD world of Facebook and Twitter, it’s no surprise that few people clicked. Upworthy reposted the video with a new title: “We Lost This Kid 80 Years Too Early. I’m Glad He Went Out with a Bang,” and shared it with a small number of its subscribers, then waited to see who clicked.

IMIS is short for InterMammal Interpretive System.” “And this IMIS translates the language?” asked Lewis.

Every American should be able to expect certain standards, freedoms, benefits, and opportunities form a twenty-first-century health system. If they are willing to participate and be responsible, they will gain: •Improved health; •Longer lives with a much better quality of life; •A more convenient, understandable and personalized experience -- all at a lower cost; •Access to the best course of treatment for their particular illness and their unique characteristics; •A system that fosters and encourages innovation, competition, and better outcomes for patients; •A system that truly values the impact that medical innovation has on patients and their caregivers as well as on society as a whole; •A government that facilitates and accelerates extraordinary opportunities to improve health and health care; •Continuous but unobtrusive 24/7 monitoring of their general health, chronic conditions, and acute health problems; •Access to the most modern medical knowledge and breakthroughs, including the most advanced technologies, therapies and drugs, unimpeded by government-imposed price controls or rationing; •The chance to increase their personal knowledge by learning from a transparent system of information about their diagnosis, costs and alternative solutions; •A continuously improving, competitive, patient-focused medical world in which new therapies, new technologies, and new drugs are introduced as rapidly and safely as possible -- and not a day later; •Greater price and market competition, innovation and smarter health care spending; •A system of financing that includes insurance, government, charities, and self-funding that ensures access to health and health care for every American at the lowest possible cost without allowing financing and short-term budgetary considerations to distort and weaken the delivery of care; •Genuine insurance to facilitate access to dramatically better care, rather than the current system, which is myopically focused on monthly or annual payments; •A health system in which third parties and government bureaucrats do not impede the best course of treatment that doctors and their patients decide on; •A health system in which seniors, veterans, or others under government health programs receive the same quality of care as their children in private markt systems. Big reforms are required to transform today’s expensive, obsolete health bureaucracy into a system that conforms to these principles.

Mark Zuckerberg believes in innovation and he believes there can be no great innovation without great risk. So, in the early days of Facebook, he deployed a shocking motto: Move fast and break things. Did the CEO really want us to break things? I mean, he’s telling us to break things! A motto that shocking forces everyone to stop and think. When they think, they realize that if you move fast and innovate, you will break things. If you ask yourself, “Should I attempt this breakthrough? It will be awesome, but it may cause problems in the short term,” you have your answer. If you’d rather be right than innovative, you won’t fit in at Facebook.

There Are Five Hallmark Symptoms of ADD Short attention span, for regular, routine, everyday tasks. People with ADD have a difficult time with boring tasks and need stimulation or excitement in order to stay engaged. Many people with ADD can pay attention just fine for things that are new, novel, interesting, highly stimulating, or frightening. Distractibility. People with ADD tend to notice more in their environment than others, which makes them easily distracted by outside stimuli, such as light, sounds, smells, certain tastes, or even the clothes they wear. Their keen sensitivity causes them to get easily off task. Disorganization. Most people with ADD tend to struggle with organization of time and space. They tend to be late and have trouble completing tasks on time. Many things get done at the last moment or even later. They also tend to struggle keeping their spaces tidy, especially their rooms, book bags, filing cabinets, drawers, closets, and paperwork. Procrastination. Tasks and duties get put off until the last moment. Things tend not to get done until there are deadlines or someone else is mad at them for not doing it. Poor internal supervision. Many people with ADD have issues with judgment and impulse control, and struggle not to say or do things without fully thinking them through. They also have a harder time learning from their mistakes.

Brand new short story writer from Ireland who will become the next “breakthrough” writer. He has all the hallmarks of a wizard storyteller and this book is up there with the very best newcomers

When you use carbon dioxide equivalents, you aren’t fully accounting for this important short-term effect.

The actual lifespan of a thought is very short…unless you believe it, trust it, or take direction from it.. Then it can last a lifetime. Be choosy. Pick the ones with which to do this.

At least functional benefits forced marketers to remain grounded in the product’s material performance. There are no constraints at all for emotional benefits: all emotions are fair game. We are witnessing an emotions arms race in which companies vie to own one of the short list of top emotion words.

A new governing majority will depend on two breakthroughs. The first is that voters, not big money, once again determine election outcomes. We need to break out of the money-politics-media trap. The second is that government be able to translate increased revenues into effective public services and infrastructure. We need, in short, a return to civic virtue, in which Americans recommit to contributing to the common benefit and to cooperating for mutual gain.

There is a group of core symptoms common to those who have ADD. These include short attention span for routine, everyday tasks, distractibility, organizational problems (for spaces and time), difficulty with follow-through, and poor internal supervision or judgment. These symptoms exist over a prolonged period of time and are present from an early age, although they may not be evident until a child is pushed to concentrate or to organize his or her life.

Polly had come to LA when she was nineteen, a beautiful and hopeful girl with lots of charisma and even more talent, and then spent ten years nearly making it. If she’d never gotten anywhere she might have given up and been content to have given it a shot. However, in common with thousands of others, Polly would occasionally get a part in a commercial, or a pilot. She was always auditioning and getting called back, and would be frequently “on avail” (meaning that she was short-listed for something and had to keep her schedule free for a day or so while they made a final choice between two or three girls). It’s this occasional hit of success that makes for a real addict. The breakthrough was always imminent; there was always something about to happen.

To think like a rocket scientist is to look at the world through a different lens. Rocket scientists imagine the unimaginable and solve the unsolvable. They transform failures into triumphs and constraints into advantages. They view mishaps as solvable puzzles rather than insurmountable roadblocks. They’re moved not by blind conviction but by self-doubt; their goal is not short-term results but long-term breakthroughs. They know that the rules aren’t set in stone, the default can be altered, and a new path can be forged.

I walked into a hotel & after going the menu, I ordered some food. After about 20mins a group of guys walked in & ordered theirs. To my dismay, these folks got served first. I even overhead one of them bragging about how he's connected to everyone in the hotel. Unable to take it anymore, I called the waiter. He calmly told me, "Urs is a special order, being prepared by the chief chef himself". Theirs orders were prepared hurriedly by novices because the top chefs are busy with yours. I calmed down & waited patiently. Shortly after, my meal was served by 6 waiters. Unknown to me, the owner (who happened to be a long lost friend) saw me when I entered and decided to surprise me. She changed my simple meal to a five-star meal. The party at the other table were shocked. Such is life ! Some people are ahead of you, eating now, laughing at you, talking about how they are smarter, wiser and better than you, how they are well connected, blessed, have money and are enjoying life. You are waiting tirelessly wondering why its taking so long to breakthrough, you endured mockery and humiliation. Don't you worry! Yours is a special meal. It takes time to prepare. Wait and relax.

She still had a great deal to do, but she was finally on the right track with an incredible, intoxicating blend of rose, tuberose, and jasmine, sandalwood and an amber blend. Inhaling, the romantic scent conjured exquisite joy. The path had come to her in a dream, the melding of sandalwood and patchouli with amber notes of vanillin and labdanum absolute in a manner that was nothing short of exquisite.