Brilliant Performance Quotes

Six of Crows A smol precious deadly flower, two gaybies, a beautiful Grisha warrior, a grumpy convict, and their brilliant, fearless (and sometimes clueless) leader perform a heist of epic proportions.

Perfectionism is a particularly evil lure for women, who, I believe, hold themselves to an even higher standard of performance than do men. There are many reasons why women’s voices and visions are not more widely represented today in creative fields. Some of that exclusion is due to regular old misogyny, but it’s also true that—all too often—women are the ones holding themselves back from participating in the first place. Holding back their ideas, holding back their contributions, holding back their leadership and their talents. Too many women still seem to believe that they are not allowed to put themselves forward at all, until both they and their work are perfect and beyond criticism. Meanwhile, putting forth work that is far from perfect rarely stops men from participating in the global cultural conversation. Just sayin’. And I don’t say this as a criticism of men, by the way. I like that feature in men—their absurd overconfidence, the way they will casually decide, “Well, I’m 41 percent qualified for this task, so give me the job!” Yes, sometimes the results are ridiculous and disastrous, but sometimes, strangely enough, it works—a man who seems not ready for the task, not good enough for the task, somehow grows immediately into his potential through the wild leap of faith itself. I only wish more women would risk these same kinds of wild leaps. But I’ve watched too many women do the opposite. I’ve watched far too many brilliant and gifted female creators say, “I am 99.8 percent qualified for this task, but until I master that last smidgen of ability, I will hold myself back, just to be on the safe side.” Now, I cannot imagine where women ever got the idea that they must be perfect in order to be loved or successful. (Ha ha ha! Just kidding! I can totally imagine: We got it from every single message society has ever sent us! Thanks, all of human history!) But we women must break this habit in ourselves—and we are the only ones who can break it. We must understand that the drive for perfectionism is a corrosive waste of time, because nothing is ever beyond criticism. No matter how many hours you spend attempting to render something flawless, somebody will always be able to find fault with it. (There are people out there who still consider Beethoven’s symphonies a little bit too, you know, loud.) At some point, you really just have to finish your work and release it as is—if only so that you can go on to make other things with a glad and determined heart. Which is the entire point. Or should be.

Instead of just giving employees an award for the smartest idea or praise for a brilliant performance, they would get praise for taking initiative, for seeing a difficult task through, for struggling and learning something new, for being undaunted by a setback, or for being open to and acting on criticism.

Musicians, actors, athletes, philosophers, scientists, writers understand that brilliant creations are often born of small errors.

I have written this because it may have escaped the notice of many who have admired her [Marie Tempest] brilliant performances that they are due not only to her natural gifts...but to patience, assiduity, industry and discipline. Without these it is impossible to excel in any of the arts.

Why Just ask the donkey in me To speak to the donkey in you, When I have so many other beautiful animals And brilliant colored birds inside That are longing to say something wonderful And exciting to your heart? Let's open all the locked doors upon our eyes That keep us from knowing the Intelligence That begets love And a more lively and satisfying conversation With the Friend. Let's turn loose our golden falcons So that they can meet in the sky Where our spirits belong-- Necking like two Hot kids. Let's hold hands and get drunk near the sun And sing sweet songs to God Until He joins us with a few notes From his own sublime lute and drum. If you have a better idea Of how to pass a lonely night After your glands may have performed All their little magic Then speak up sweethearts, speak up, For Hafiz and all the world will listen. Why just bring your donkey to me Asking for stale hay And a boring conference with the idiot In regards to this precious matter-- Such a precious matter as love, When I have so many other divine animals And brilliant colored birds inside That are all longing To so sweetly Greet You!

It didn't matter he was brilliant and dedicated and good. He was a child. He was young. No he isn't, thought Ender. Small, yes. Bur Bean has been through a battle with a whole army depending on him and on the soldiers that he led. and he performed splendidly, and the won. There's no youth in that. No childhood.

Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.

She, Laura, likes to imagine (it's one of her most closely held secrets) that she has a touch of brilliance herself, just a hint of it, though she knows most people probably walk around with similar hopeful suspicions curled up like tiny fists inside them, never divulged. She wonders, while she pushes a cart through the supermarket or has her hair done, it the other women aren't all thinking, to some degree or other, the same thing: Here is the brilliant spirit, the woman of sorrows, the woman of transcendent joys, who would rather be elsewhere, who has consented to perform simple and essentially foolish tasks, to examine tomatoes, to sit under a hair dryer, because it is her art and her duty.

Consciousness is all there is, flowing, streaming through these instruments in a manner which, in accordance with the perfect unfolding of totality, is perceived as discreet individual entities autonomously performing actions, but in truth this is not the case. There is no individual, no entity, no separate self here to do anything or to be anything, awakened or enlightened included.

I've always felt that the performance of a raag resembles a novel - or at least the kind of novel I'm attempting to write. You know,' he continued, extemporizing as he went along, 'first you take one note and explore it for a while, then another to discover its possibilities, then perhaps you get to the dominant, and pause for a bit, and it's only gradually that the phrases begin to form and the tabla joins in with the beat...and then the more brilliant improvisations and diversions begin, with the main theme returning from time to time, and finally it all speeds up, and the excitement increases to a climax.

...dangers, to Francisco, were merely opportunities for another brilliant performance; there were no battles he could lose, no enemies to beat him.

Matins You want to know how I spend my time? I walk the front lawn, pretending to be weeding. You ought to know I'm never weeding, on my knees, pulling clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact I'm looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever, checking each clump for the symbolic leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already the leaves turning, always the sick trees going first, the dying turning brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform their curfew of music. You want to see my hands? As empty now as at the first note. Or was the point always to continue without a sign?

In this way, the Odyssey’s hero embodies one of its central themes, which is that the capacity to defer satisfaction and endure suffering is as necessary for success as the ability to perform brilliant feats.

You're not the first person who was ever wounded by love. You're not the first person who ever knocked on my door. You're not the first person I ever chanced my arm with. You're not the first person I ever tried to impress with my brilliant performance of not really being impressed with anything. You're not the first person to make me laugh. You're not the first person I ever made laugh. You're not the first person full stop. But you're the one right now. I'm the one right now. That's enough, yes?

Asking where memory is "located" in the brain is like asking where running is located in the body. There are certainly parts of the body that are more important (the legs) or less important (the little fingers) in performing the task of running but, in the end, it is an activity that requires complex coordination among a great many body parts and muscle groups. To extend the analogy, looking for differences between memory systems is like looking for differences between running and walking. There certainly are many differences, but the main difference is that running requires more coordination among the different body parts and can be disrupted by small things (such as a corn on the toe) that may not interfere with walking at all. Are we to conclude, then, that running is located in the corn on your toe?

Imagine the case of someone supervising an exceptional team of workers, all of them striving towards a collectively held goal; imagine them hardworking, brilliant, creative and unified. But the person supervising is also responsible for someone troubled, who is performing poorly, elsewhere. In a fit of inspiration, the well-meaning manager moves that problematic person into the midst of his stellar team, hoping to improve him by example. What happens?—and the psychological literature is clear on this point.64 Does the errant interloper immediately straighten up and fly right? No. Instead, the entire team degenerates. The newcomer remains cynical, arrogant and neurotic. He complains. He shirks. He misses important meetings. His low-quality work causes delays, and must be redone by others. He still gets paid, however, just like his teammates. The hard workers who surround him start to feel betrayed. “Why am I breaking myself into pieces striving to finish this project,” each thinks, “when my new team member never breaks a sweat?” The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability.65 Down is a lot easier than up.

I treasure ruefully some memories of W.H. Auden that go back to the middle 1960s, when he arrived in New Haven to give a reading of his poems at Ezra Stiles College. We had met several times before, in New York City and at Yale, but were only acquaintances. The earlier Auden retains my interest, but much of the frequently devotional poetry does not find me. Since our mutual friend John Hollander was abroad, Auden phoned to ask if he might stay with my wife and me, remarking of his dislike of college guest suites. The poet arrived in a frayed, buttonless overcoat, which my wife insisted on mending. His luggage was an attache case containing a large bottle of gin, a small one of vermouth, a plastic drinking cup, and a sheaf of poems. After being supplied with ice, he requested that I remind him of the amount of his reading fee. A thousand dollars had been the agreed sum, a respectable honorarium more than forty years ago. He shook his head and said that as a prima donna he could not perform, despite the prior arrangement. Charmed by this, I phoned the college master - a good friend - who cursed heartily but doubled the sum when I assured him that the poet was as obdurate as Lady Bracknell in 'The Importance of Being Earnest'. Informed of this yielding, Auden smiled sweetly and was benign and brilliant at dinner, then at the reading, and as he went to bed after we got home.

Once she called to invite me to a concert of Liszt piano concertos. The soloist was a famous South American pianist. I cleared my schedule and went with her to the concert hall at Ueno Park. The performance was brilliant. The soloist's technique was outstanding, the music both delicate and deep, and the pianist's heated emotions were there for all to feel. Still, even with my eyes closed, the music didn't sweep me away. A thin curtain stood between myself and pianist, and no matter how much I might try, I couldn't get to the other side. When I told Shimamoto this after the concert, she agreed. "But what was wrong with the performance?" she asked. "I thought it was wonderful." "Don't you remember?" I said. "The record we used to listen to, at the end of the second movement there was this tiny scratch you could hear. Putchi! Putchi! Somehow, without that scratch, I can't get into the music!" Shimamoto laughed. "I wouldn't exactly call that art appreciation." "This has nothing to do with art. Let a bald vulture eat that up, for all I care. I don't care what anybody says; I like that scratch!" "Maybe you're right," she admitted. "But what's this about a bald vulture? Regular vultures I know about--they eat corpses. But bald vultures?" In the train on the way home, I explained the difference in great detail.The difference in where they are born, their call, their mating periods. "The bald vulture lives by devouring art. The regular vulture lives by devouring the corpses of unknown people. They're completely different." "You're a strange one!" She laughed. And there in the train seat, ever so slightly, she moved her shoulder to touch mine. The one and only time in the past two months our bodies touched.

It may be helpful to let go of the idea that God has somehow screwed up and needs your help and involvement, or that of the sage, to set things right. What is, cannot but be the perfect unfolding in Consciousness. And if an adjustment is needed to maintain the cosmic balance, some ‘one,’ perhaps ‘you,’ will be irresistibly motivated to perform an action which will serve that purpose. And that too will be the perfect unfolding. Just don’t take it personally.

No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity. But brilliant young ladies, a little blinded by their own effulgence, are apt to forget that the modest satellite drowned in their light is still performing its own revolutions and generating heat at its own rate.

I wrote many things for and with John. I know this is one assignment he'd rather I didn't have to take on. Although I had a close – head to head, arm to arm working relationship with John, that proximity never affected the fact that from the moment I met him, through all work, I remain his number one fan. He was a brilliant performer, writer, tactician, business strategist and most importantly, he was the only man that I could dance with. He was a great – a world class – emissary of American humor. John was a patriot, a resident of the most wide open, liberal society on earth, and he took full advantage of it. In come cases, real greatness gives license for real indulgence; whether it's as a reward, as therapy or as sanctuary. For as hard as John worked, there had to be an additional illicit thrill to make the effort all worthwhile. John was a nighthawk, true. But he was not an immoral individual. He was a good man, a kind man, a warm man, a hot man. What we are talking about here is a good man – and a bad boy. Johnny – you can be sure that I'll have my antennae out for the paranatural and the spiritual, and believe me, if there's any contact with him, I'll let you know.

This was a tremendous idea—that to find something out, it is better to perform some careful experiments than to carry on deep philosophical arguments.

The problem of course is that the link between IQ and performance is ‘distinctly underwhelming’ (Gladwell, 2010).

Greatness is predicated on consistently doing things others can’t or won’t do. Simply put, success is not about being brilliant. It is about being consistent.

In many ways, narcissistic parents treat children as conveniences (or inconveniences). When the child is convenient (there are guests in the house and they want to play at being the “uberparent,” or their child has just given a brilliant performance and they want to soak up the adulation being placed on their child), then they will be highly attentive to the child.

Trollbella said. “Welcome to tonight’s performance. As you probably know, I am Queen Trollbella of the Troblin Kingdom. If you don’t know, please ask the person beside you to slap you. I am known for many things in my kingdom: beauty, intelligence, charisma, elegance, passion – but I’m best known for bringing my nation together. Thanks to my brilliant leadership, what was once a territory of greedy trolls and obnoxious goblins is now a kingdom of respectable and sophisticated Troblins. Tonight you will see that transformation before your symmetrical human eyes in ‘The Life and Times of Queen Trollbella’!

Every person fails, nobody achieves everything that he or she set out to achieve. Nobody, regardless of how many personal triumphs they enjoy, no matter how rich or powerful they become, goes through life without encountering failure. You cannot fail unless a person valiantly tries to accomplish a task. The most audacious person readily attempts difficult projects, despite feeling uncertain if they can prevail. Successful people exhibit the character to respond positively to failure. Some failures prove instrumental in altering a person’s outlook, and their revised perspective leads to brilliant successes

Late in November, Lenny took off for his eagerly anticipated job in Chicago. It had been nearly a year since he played the chilly city, and those who hadn't seen him for that period, or even longer, were shocked at the change in his appearance. The once handsome, animated, brilliant performer and commentator was now a fat, bent, shabby-looking street loafer, a horribly dissipated, baggy-eyed, numb-fleshed junkie, with a tragic darkness in his eyes.

certain kind of good fortune generally attends self-made men to the last. It is their children of the first, or first and second, generation who are in greater danger, for the race can no more repeat its most successful performances suddenly and without its ebbings and flowings of success than the individual can do so, and the more brilliant the success in any one generation, the greater as a general rule the subsequent exhaustion until time has been allowed for recovery.

Nevertheless a certain kind of good fortune generally attends self-made men to the last. It is their children of the first, or first and second, generation who are in greater danger, for the race can no more repeat its most successful performances suddenly and without its ebbings and flowings of success than the individual can do so, and the more brilliant the success in any one generation, the greater as a general rule the subsequent exhaustion until time has been allowed for recovery.

Just as in sports, becoming an elite performer in business requires struggle, sacrifice, and honest (often painful) self-assessment... Learning how to implement these approaches is often what separates a brilliant thinker from a creative want-to-be.

Even more essential, however, is the identification of the individuals in the masses with the "führer." The more helpless the "mass-individual" has become, owing to his upbringing, the more pronounced is his identification with the führer, and the more the childish need for protection is disguised in the form of a feeling at one with the führer. This inclination to identify is the psychological basis of national narcissism, i.e., of the self-confidence that individual man derives from the "greatness of the nation." The reactionary lower middle-class man perceives himself in the führer, in the authoritarian state. On the basis of this identification he feels himself to be a defender of the "national heritage," of the "nation," which does not prevent him, likewise on the basis of this identification, from simultaneously despising "the masses" and confronting them as an individual. The wretchedness of his material and sexual situation is so overshadowed by the exalting idea of belonging to a master race and having a brilliant führer that, as time goes on, he ceases to realize how completely he has sunk to a position of insignificant, blind allegiance. The worker who is conscious of his skills—he, in short, who has rid himself of his submissive structure, who identifies with his work and not with the führer, with the international working masses and not with the national homeland—represents the opposite of this. He feels himself to be a leader, not on the basis of his identification with the führer, but on the basis of his consciousness of performing work that is vitally necessary for society's existence.

For a moment, disconnected by the stitch in his side, he listened not to the sense but to the interplay of the two flexible voices, one masculine and light, one mellow and feminine, unreeling their story, faintly affronted amid mounting hysteria. He opened his eyes. He knew, because his memories of Francis Crawford went back further than those of anyone there, that Lymond was rather drunk, although he could still disguise it. The quick-wittedness, the invention, the faultless comedy timing were present at the price of a little concentration which had closed his outer consciousness for the moment. Jerott, no longer laughing, sat in the shadows and watched the dazzling performance and both the players, blond and brown, artist and acolyte. Acolyte. But Philippa was a child no longer: he had known that since that single evening in Lyon. The severe, clear-skinned profile turned towards Francis might have belonged to any great lady. The brown and brilliant gaze only quizzed him at intervals: she seemed able, Jerott saw, to sense by instinct the course of his fantasy; and as with Lymond, what she was doing at present occupied all her awareness. Then Francis surged to his feet, leaving his robe, and launched into Jason’s querulous tour de force, fractured by interruptions and a mounting fury of incoherent resentment, and finally disintegrating in chaos.

Philosophy deals in the abstract and the universal, but not in the particular. History deals only in the particular, not with general principles. Poetry deals with both, illustrating universal principles with particular examples or embodiments of those principles: Now doth the peerless poet perform both: for whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in someone by whom he presupposeth it was done; so as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example. Another advantage poetry has over philosophy is greater clarity: the philosopher teacheth, but he teacheth obscurely, so as the learned only can understand him; that is to say, he teacheth them that are already taught. But the poet is the food for the tenderest stomachs, the poet is indeed the right popular philosopher. Essentially, poetry shows history more brilliantly than history, and explains philosophy more cogently than philosophy.

In December, Angela Lansbury had been signed to play Raymond’s mother, the arch-villainess Eleanor Shaw Iselin. Apparently, Sinatra originally wanted Lucille Ball for the role, a fascinating casting notion, as Tom Santopietro points out: “As Ball aged, she grew into an increasingly hardened performer, losing all traces of the vulnerability that so informed her brilliant multiyear run on television’s I Love Lucy. The resulting quality of toughness would have suited the role of [Eleanor] very well, although it is anyone’s guess whether or not Ball would have felt comfortable delving into the dark recesses of [her] warped character.

A disdain for the practical swept the ancient world. Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them. Aristotle believed that: “The lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master.… The slave shares in his master’s life; the artisan is less closely connected with him, and only attains excellence in proportion as he becomes a slave. The meaner sort of mechanic has a special and separate slavery.” Plutarch wrote: “It does not of necessity follow that, if the work delight you with its grace, the one who wrought it is worthy of esteem.” Xenophon’s opinion was: “What are called the mechanical arts carry a social stigma and are rightly dishonoured in our cities.” As a result of such attitudes, the brilliant and promising Ionian experimental method was largely abandoned for two thousand years. Without experiment, there is no way to choose among contending hypotheses, no way for science to advance. The anti-empirical taint of the Pythagoreans survives to this day. But why? Where did this distaste for experiment come from? An explanation for the decline of ancient science has been put forward by the historian of science, Benjamin Farrington: The mercantile tradition, which led to Ionian science, also led to a slave economy. The owning of slaves was the road to wealth and power. Polycrates’ fortifications were built by slaves. Athens in the time of Pericles, Plato and Aristotle had a vast slave population. All the brave Athenian talk about democracy applied only to a privileged few. What slaves characteristically perform is manual labor. But scientific experimentation is manual labor, from which the slaveholders are preferentially distanced; while it is only the slaveholders—politely called “gentle-men” in some societies—who have the leisure to do science. Accordingly, almost no one did science. The Ionians were perfectly able to make machines of some elegance. But the availability of slaves undermined the economic motive for the development of technology. Thus the mercantile tradition contributed to the great Ionian awakening around 600 B.C., and, through slavery, may have been the cause of its decline some two centuries later. There are great ironies here.

It is the ability to perform for days or weeks like balanced and cheerful automata, when some substrata, something upon which our codes or our hopes had firmly rested has given way. Men who lose their wives or their God are quite capable of behaving in this manner, for an indefinite season. After which the collapse is brilliant and total.

All of this seemed equally trifling to him now. And when he thought again about the world of free people, the difference between it and the miseries and joys of this place seemed minimal. If three tiny fragments of tea leaf chanced to fall into a prisoner's battered cup, he relished them. In Leningrad during the interval at the opera a woman sipped champagne with the same pleasure. Their sufferings were also comparable. Both the prisoner and the woman had painful shoes. Hers were narrow evening shoes which she took off during the performance. The prisoner suffered from what they wore in the camp, section of tyres into which you thrust your foot wrapped in rags and fastened with string. The woman at the opera knew that somewhere in the world there were millions of beings transformed into gaunt animals, their faces blackened by the polar winds. But this did not stop her drinking her glass of wine amid the glittering of the great mirrors. The prisoner knew that a warm and brilliant life was lived elsewhere in tranquility but this did not spoil his pleasure as he chewed those fragments of tea leaf....

But, without preaching, the truth may surely be borne in mind, that the bustle, and triumph, and laughter, and gaiety which Vanity Fair exhibits in public, do not always pursue the performer into private life, and that the most dreary depression of spirits and dismal repentances sometimes overcome him. Recollection of the best ordained banquets will scarcely cheer sick epicures. Reminiscences of the most becoming dresses and brilliant ball triumphs will go very little way to console faded beauties. Perhaps statesmen, at a particular period of existence, are not much gratified at thinking over the most triumphant divisions; and the success or the pleasure of yesterday becomes of very small account when a certain (albeit uncertain) morrow is in view, about which all of us must some day or other be speculating. O brother wearers of motley! Are there not moments when one grows sick of grinning and tumbling, and the jingling of cap and bells? This, dear friends and companions, is my amiable object--to walk with you through the Fair, to examine the shops and the shows there; and that we should all come home after the flare, and the noise, and the gaiety, and be perfectly miserable in private.

Just as the full absurdity of Trump was sinking in, crushing any hope that he would turn “presidential,” Putin, in the American imagination, was turning into a brilliant strategist, a skilled secret agent who was plotting the end of the Western world. In fact, Putin was and remains a poorly educated, underinformed, incurious man whose ambition is vastly out of proportion to his understanding of the world. To the extent that he has any interest in the business of governing, it is solely his own role—on the world stage or on Russian television—that concerns him. Whether he is attending a summit, piloting a plane, or hang gliding with Siberian cranes, it is the spectacle of power that interests him. In this, he and Trump are alike: to them, power is the beginning and the end of government, the presidency, politics—and public politics is only the performance of power.

in fact I’m looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever, checking each clump for the symbolic leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already the leaves turning, always the sick trees going first, the dying turning brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform their curfew of music. You want to see my hands? As empty now as at the first note. Or was the point always to continue without a sign?

Just because you show up on time for every meeting, follow directions and do your part doesn’t mean you’re a high performer or should get promoted. There are plenty of people out there who fall into a bucket I call “process facilitators.” They move things along on the proverbial assembly line but they don’t drive organizational change. They’re in a very different category than the high performers who bust out and create something that wasn’t there before.

Most important, my mother was also given the chance to study acting with the brilliant Charles Laughton, eventually becoming a member of his acting company, the Charles Laughton Players, performing Chekhov and Shakespeare in a small theater on Beverly Boulevard, on the outskirts of Hollywood. Not only did she find herself onstage with Mr. Laughton, but she had the amazing good fortune to be directed by him as well. These moments stayed alive in her always.

Hera also slept well that night as she had brilliantly engineered the coup of her life.Her wayward husband had returned late that evening & announced that he was too tired to make love.He had had a most entangling day,he said, performing his kingly duties.She then told him to have a good night`s rest as she had an important job for him to perform in the morning.It was a job demanded by Chaos & Eros who were responsible for the beginning of things, she said.

Rosenthal went on to study precisely that – what expectation mean for our children. In one line of research he showed that teachers´ expectations greatly affect their students´ academic performance, even when the teachers try to treat them impartially. For example, he and a colleague asked schoolkids in eighteen classrooms to complete an IQ test. The teachers, but not students, were given results. The researchers told the teachers that the test would indicate which children had unusually high intellectual potential. What the teachers didn’t know was that the kids named as gifted did not really score higher than average on the IQ test – they actually had average scores. Shortly afterwards, the teachers rated those not labeled gifted as less curious and less interested than the gifted students – and the students´ subsequent grades reflected that. But what is really shocking – and sobering – is the result of another IQ test, given eight months later. When you administer IQ test a second time, you expect that each child´s score will vary some. In general, about half of the children´s scores should go up and half down, as a result of changes in the individual’s intellectual development in relation to his peers or simply random variations. When Rosenthal administered the second test, he indeed found that about half the kids labeled “normal” showed a gain in IQ. But among those who´d been singled out as brilliant, he obtained a different result; about 80 % had an increase of at least 10 points. What´s more, about 20 % of the “gifted” group gained 30 or more IQ points, while only 5 % of the other children gained that many. Labeling children as gifted had proved to be a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy.

You want to know how I spend my time? I walk the front lawn, pretending to be weeding. You ought to know I'm never weeding, on my knees, pulling clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact I'm looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever, checking each clump for the symbolic leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already the leaves turning, always the sick trees going first, the dying turning brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform their curfew of music. You want to see my hands? As empty now as at the first note. Or was the point always to continue without a sign?

Sir Magnus Donners himself appeared to greet his guests at exactly the same moment. I wondered whether he had been watching at a peephole. It was like the stage entrance of a famous actor, the conscious modesty of which is designed, by its absolute ease and lack of emphasis, both to prevent the performance from being disturbed at some anti-climax of the play by too deafening a round of applause, at the same time to confirm--what everyone in the theater knows already--the complete mastery he possesses of his art. The manner in which Sir Magnus held out his hand also suggested brilliant miming of a distinguished man feeling a little uncomfortable about something.

As you sit there watching a performance of a Shakespeare, Johnson, or Marlowe play, the crowd will fade into the background. Instead, you will be struck by the diction. There are words and phrases that you will not find funny, but which will make the crowd roar with laughter. Your familiarity with the meanings of Shakespeare's words will rise and fall as you see and hear the actors' deliveries and notice the audience's reaction. That is the strange music of being so familiar with something that is not of your own time. What you are listening to in that auditorium is the genuine voice, something of which you have heard only distant echoes. Not every actor is perfect in his delivery; Shakespeare himself makes that quite clear in his Hamlet. But what you are hearing is the voice of the men for whom Shakespeare wrote his greatest speeches. Modern thespians will follow the rhythms or the meanings of these words, but even the most brilliant will not always be able to follow both rhythm and meaning at once. If they follow the pattern of the verse, they risk confusing the audience, who are less familiar with the sense of the words. If they pause to emphasize the meanings, they lose the rhythm of the verse. Here, on the Elizabethan stage, you have a harmony of performance and understanding that will never again quite be matched in respect of any of these great writers.

Without asking sharply why, they felt the absurdity of clothing this bounding figure, with the wild dark face, in a frock coat and string tie: he did not exist in business, trade, or law. More vaguely, they classified him as bookish and a dreamer--Eliza referred to him as "a good scholar," which, in fact, he had never been. He had simply performed brilliantly in all things that touched his hunger, and dully, carelessly, and indifferently in all things that did not. No one saw very clearly what he was going to do--he, surely, least of all--but his family, following the tack of his comrades, spoke vaguely and glibly of "a career in journalism." This meant newspaper work. And, however unsatisfactory this may have been, their inevitable question was drugged for the moment by the glitter of success that had surrounded his life at the university.

Whoooa! Red! Green! Yellow! Brown! Purple! Even black! Look at all those bowls full of brilliantly colored batter!" She used strawberries, blueberries, matcha powder, cocoa powder, black sesame and other natural ingredients to dye those batters. They look like a glittering array of paints on an artist's palette! "Now that all my yummy edible paints are ready... ...it's picture-drawing time!" "She twisted a sheet of parchment paper into a piping bag and is using it to draw all kinds of cute pictures!" "You're kidding me! Look at them all! How did she get that fast?!" Not only that, most chefs do rough sketches first, but she's doing it off the cuff! How much artistic talent and practice does she have?! "All these cutie-pies go into the oven for about three minutes. After that I'll take them out and pour the brown sugar batter on top..." "It appears she's making a roll cake if she's pouring batter into that flat a pan." "Aah, I see. It must be one of those patterned roll cakes you often see at Japanese bakeries. That seems like an unusually plain choice, considering the fanciful tarts she made earlier." "The decorations just have to be super-cute, too." "OOOH! She's candy sculpting!" "So pretty and shiny!" That technique she's using- that's Sucre Tiré (Pulled Sugar)! Of all the candy-sculpting arts, Sucre Tiré gives the candy a glossy, nearly glass-like luster... but keeping the candy at just the right temperature so that it remains malleable while stretching it to a uniform thickness is incredibly difficult! Every step is both delicate and exceptionally difficult, yet she makes each one look easy! She flows from one cutest technique to the next, giving each an adorable flair! Just like she insisted her apple tarts had to be served in a pretty and fantastical manner... ... she's even including cutesy performances in the preparation of this dish!

A person who is brilliantly talented and successful at work but irrational and irresponsible in his or her private life may want to believe that the sole criterion of virtue is productive performance and that no other sphere of action has moral or self-esteem significance. Such a person may hide behind work in order to evade feelings of shame and guilt stemming from other areas of life (or from painful childhood experiences), so that productive work becomes not so much a healthy passion as an avoidance strategy, a refuge from realities one feels frightened to face. In addition, if a person makes the error of identifying self with his work (rather than with the internal virtues that make the work possible), if self-esteem is tied primarily to accomplishments, success, income, or being a good family provider, the danger is that economic circumstances beyond the individual’s control may lead to the failure of the business or the loss of a job, flinging him into depression or acute demoralization.

Suddenly he thought of Wick. He would be at the opera now. Helen would be there too, sitting beside him in the great nearly dark house (she’s only going because of you). The two of them would be looking at the brilliantly lighted sailing-ship scene that was the first act, and now and again one of them would lean toward the other and whisper something about the performance. Not about him; they wouldn’t be talking about him now. Chiefly because he was the only thing on their minds and neither wanted the other to know it. Helen would be wondering if he really wasn’t feeling well, or was he off again; and Wick would be wondering if Helen had accepted the excuse. She didn’t give a damn for the opera under any conditions and he certainly didn’t under these. He would be staring at the stage, half-turned toward Helen to catch her next whispered comment, and thinking: “If he isn’t there when I go back; if he’s gone out—” Don felt sorry for the distraction he knew he was causing them, and yet he couldn’t help smiling, too.

How very small she seemed, tucked in the corner of the library with her knees drawn up. For the past hour and a half, she had been a commanding figure, strung tight with energy, her gaze stern and steely. She had worked in millimeters, doing tiny, crucial things to veins and cellular tissue with astonishing precision. Although West knew nothing about surgery, he'd understood that he was witnessing someone perform with rare skill. Now, in her exhaustion, the brilliant surgeon resembled an anxious schoolgirl who had taken a wrong turn on the way home. West liked her a great deal. In fact, he was rather sorry now that he'd kept shrugging off Helen's efforts to introduce them. He'd envisioned the female doctor as a severe matron, probably hostile toward men, and Helen's assurances that Dr. Gibson was quite pretty hadn't been at all convincing. Helen, with her completely unjustified affection for humanity, loved to overestimate people. But Garrett Gibson was more than pretty. She was riveting. An intelligent, accomplished woman with an elusive quality... a suggestion of hidden tenderness... that intrigued him.

But it was just a paperback by Mircea Eliade. The Sacred and Profane. “Do you know this?” He held it in those big hands as though it were a butterfly he’d caught. “It’s brilliant. There’s two kinds of time, he says—sacred time and profane time. The outside, everyday world—you know, where you go to work, go to school, sort of thing—that’s profane time. “But things like Christmas or holidays, any kind of religious ritual or shared experience, like performing together, or a play—those take place in sacred time. It’s like this—” He grabbed a pen and drew on the inside cover of the paperback. A little Venn diagram: two intersecting circles. “—a circle within a circle. Do you see? This big circle is profane time. This one’s sacred time. The two coexist, but we only step into sacred time when we intentionally make space for it—like at Christmas, or the Jewish High Holy Days—or if something extraordinary happens. You know that feeling you get, that time is passing faster or slower? Well, it really is moving differently. When you step into sacred time, you’re actually moving sideways into a different space that’s inside the normal world. It’s folded in. Do you see?

I missed my workout this morning, so I vault up the stairs to my flat. Breakfast has taken longer than intended, and I'm expecting Oliver at any minute. Part of me also hopes that Alessia will still be there. As I approach my front door, I hear music coming from the flat. Music? What's going on? I slide my key into the lock and cautiously open the door. It's Bach, one of his preludes in G Major. Perhaps Alessia is playing music through my computer. But how can she? She doesn't know the password. Does she? Maybe she's playing her phone through the sound system, though from the look of her tatty anorak she doesn't strike me as someone who has a smartphone. I've never seen her with one. The music rings through my flat, lighting up its darkest corners. Who knew that my daily likes classical? This is a tiny piece of the Alessia Demachi puzzle. Quickly I close the door, but as I stand in the hallway, it becomes apparent that the music is not coming from the sound system. It's from my piano. Bach. Fluid and light, played with a deftness and understanding I've only heard from concert-standard performers. Alessia? I've never managed to make my piano sing like this. Taking off my shoes, I creep down the hallway and peer around the door into the drawing room. She is seated at the piano in her housecoat and scarf, swaying a little, completely lost in the music, her eyes closed in concentration as her hands move with graceful dexterity across the keys. The music flows through her, echoing off the walls and ceiling in a flawless performance worthy of any concert pianist. I watch her in awe as she plays, her head bowed. She is brilliant. In every way. And I'm completely spellbound. She finishes the prelude, and I step back into the hall, flattening myself against the wall in case she looks up, not daring to breath. However, without missing a beat she goes straight into the fugue. I lean against the wall and close my eyes, marveling at her artistry and the feeling that she puts into each phrase. I'm carried away by the music, and as I listen, I realize that she wasn't reading the music. She's playing from memory. Good God. She's a fucking virtuoso. And I remember her intense focus when she examined my score while she was dusting the piano. Clearly she was reading the music. Shit. She plays at this standard and she was reading my composition? The fugue ends, and seamlessly she launches into another piece. Again Bach, Prelude in C-sharp Major, I think.

SOME GREAT ACTORS are like musicians who just happen to be brilliant at their instrument. They are, in every other way, perfectly normal, but they have this extraordinary ability, and the instrument they’ve learned to play is their own emotions. Sandrine Bonnaire is like that. So is Sandrine Kiberlain. Others are people whose emotional lives are so interesting in themselves that there is no question that they belong on screen. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi falls into this category. Their craft consists of transforming their hypersensitive natures into a kind of instrument, flexible enough to assume the shapes and contours that their various characters require. Karin Viard, who emerged as a major star in 1999, is not in either of those categories. She is not playing an instrument. She is not creating an instrument. It is more as if she is the instrument. Her talent is so huge, and her access to it so immediate that she requires no process to turn Jekyll into Hyde. Obviously, this is too facile a description to be completely accurate or to do justice to the effort that her performances require. But one really does get the impression that Viard could get thrown into any artistic ocean and end up doing an Olympics-worthy butterfly stroke in record time.

I step up to a podium and speak to the audience as if I were addressing a rally. But just as I begin, a tall figure in the fifth row stands up and says, "Excuse me, Jesus..." I lean forward to search the blackness for the voice. The figure raises a pistol and fires a shot that echoes all over the auditorium. The place goes nuts. People scream. I smash the blood pack under my shirt and collapse on the floor as the figure dashes out the nearest exit. A couple of audience members actually run after him like it's real. The stage goes to red and the electric guitars start to wail. It's fucking brilliant. There's no time for the audience to recover. Onstage it's chaos: fifty teenagers keen and scream, choristers dressed as cops, paramedics, and reporters dash on trying to restore order, but only complicating things. And in the middle of it all is me, lying in a pool of blood. This, this, this is what being an actor is about. To be able to elicit such a strong reaction from hundreds of people at once - that power is awesome and irresistible and humbling. If you want to think I'm needy because I love applause, go ahead. But I know that the reason I perform is for moments like these, moments when you connect with an audience and take them somewhere.

claque, aka canned laughter It’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s nothing new under the sun (a heavenly body, by the way, that some Indian ascetics stare at till they go blind). I knew that some things had a history—the Constitution, rhythm and blues, Canada—but it’s the odd little things that surprise me with their storied past. This first struck me when I was reading about anesthetics and I learned that, in the early 1840s, it became fashionable to hold parties where guests would inhale nitrous oxide out of bladders. In other words, Whip-it parties! We held the exact same kind of parties in high school. We’d buy fourteen cans of Reddi-Wip and suck on them till we had successfully obliterated a couple of million neurons and face-planted on my friend Andy’s couch. And we thought we were so cutting edge. And now, I learn about claque, which is essentially a highbrow French word for canned laughter. Canned laughter was invented long before Lucille Ball stuffed chocolates in her face or Ralph Kramden threatened his wife with extreme violence. It goes back to the 4th century B.C., when Greek playwrights hired bands of helpers to laugh at their comedies in order to influence the judges. The Romans also stacked the audience, but they were apparently more interested in applause than chuckles: Nero—emperor and wannabe musician—employed a group of five thousand knights and soldiers to accompany him on his concert tours. But the golden age of canned laughter came in 19th-century France. Almost every theater in France was forced to hire a band called a claque—from claquer, “to clap.” The influential claque leaders, called the chefs de claque, got a monthly payment from the actors. And the brilliant innovation they came up with was specialization. Each claque member had his or her own important job to perform: There were the rieurs, who laughed loudly during comedies. There were the bisseurs, who shouted for encores. There were the commissaires, who would elbow their neighbors and say, “This is the good part.” And my favorite of all, the pleureuses, women who were paid good francs to weep at the sad parts of tragedies. I love this idea. I’m not sure why the networks never thought of canned crying. You’d be watching an ER episode, and a softball player would come in with a bat splinter through his forehead, and you’d hear a little whimper in the background, turning into a wave of sobs. Julie already has trouble keeping her cheeks dry, seeing as she cried during the Joe Millionaire finale. If they added canned crying, she’d be a mess.

All that’s as it may be. But I don’t know what the author’ll say. He’s a conceited little ape and it’s not a bit the scene he wrote.' 'Oh, leave him to me. I’ll fix him.' There was a knock at the door and it was the author himself who came in. With a cry of delight, Julia went up to him, threw her arms round his neck and kissed him on both cheeks. 'Are you pleased?' 'It looks like a success,' he answered, but a trifle coldly. 'My dear, it’ll run for a year.' She placed her hands on his shoulders and looked him full in the face. 'But you’re a wicked, wicked man.' 'You almost ruined my performance. When I came to that bit in the second act and suddenly saw what it meant I nearly broke down. You knew what was in that scene, you’re the author; why did you let us rehearse it all the time as if there was no more in it than appeared on the surface? We’re only actors, how can you expect us to — to fathom your subtlety? It’s the best scene in your play and I almost bungled it. No one in the world could have written it but you. Your play’s brilliant, but in that scene there’s more than brilliance, there’s genius.' The author flushed. Julia looked at him with veneration. He felt shy and happy and proud. ('In twenty-four hours the mug’ll think he really meant the scene to go like that.') .

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how that mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with distinctively human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel, and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order. That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardour alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

During [Erté]’s childhood St. Petersburg was an elegant centre of theatrical and artistic life. At the same time, under its cultivated sophistication, ominous rumbles could be distinguished. The reign of the tough Alexander III ended in 1894 and his more gentle successor Nicholas was to be the last of the Tsars … St. Petersburg was a very French city. The Franco-Russian Pact of 1892 consolidated military and cultural ties, and later brought Russia into the First World war. Two activities that deeply influenced [Erté], fashion and art, were particularly dominated by France. The brilliant couturier Paul Poiret, for whom Erté was later to work in Paris, visited the city to display his creations. Modern art from abroad, principally French, was beginning to be show in Russia in the early years of the century … In St. Petersburg there were three Imperial theatres―the Maryinsky, devoted to opera and ballet, the Alexandrinsky, with its lovely classical façade, performing Russian and foreign classical drama, and the Michaelovsky with a French repertoire and company … It is not surprising that an artistic youth in St. Petersburg in the first decade of this century should have seen his future in the theatre. The theatre, especially opera and ballet, attracted the leading young painters of the day, including Mikhail Vrubel, possibly the greatest Russian painter of the pre-modernistic period. The father of modern theatrical design in Russia was Alexandre Benois, an offspring of the brilliant foreign colony in the imperial capital. Before 1890 he formed a club of fellow-pupils who were called ‘The Nevsky Pickwickians’. They were joined by the young Jew, Leon Rosenberg, who later took the name of one of his grandparents, Bakst. Another member introduced his cousin to the group―Serge Diaghilev. From these origins emerged the Mir Iskustva (World of Art) society, the forerunner of the whole modern movement in Russia. Soon after its foundation in 1899 both Benois and Bakst produced their first work in the theatre, The infiltration of the members of Mir Iskustva into the Imperial theatre was due to the patronage of its director Prince Volkonsky who appointed Diaghilev as an assistant. But under Volkonsky’s successor Diagilev lost his job and was barred from further state employment. He then devoted his energies and genius to editing the Mir Iskustva magazine and to a series of exhibitions which introduced Russia to work of foreign artists … These culminated in the remarkable exhibition of Russian portraiture held at the Taurida Palace in 1905, and the Russian section at the salon d'Autumne in Paris the following year. This was the most comprehensive Russian exhibition ever held, from early icons to the young Larionov and Gontcharova. Diagilev’s ban from Russian theatrical life also led to a series of concerts in Paris in 1907, at which he introduced contemporary Russian composers, the production Boris Godunov the following year with Chaliapin and costumes and décor by Benois and Golovin, and then in 1909, on May 19, the first season of the ballet Russes at the Châtelet Theatre.

Islam provides the method by which our hearts can become sound and safe again. This method has been the subject of brilliant and insightful scholarship for centuries in the Islamic tradition. One can say that Islam in essence is a program to restore purity and calm to the heart through the remembrance of God. This present text is based on the poem known as Maṭharat al-Qulūb (literally, Purification of the Hearts), which offers the means by which purification can be achieved. It is a treatise on the “alchemy of the hearts,” namely, a manual on how to transform the heart. It was written by a great scholar and saint, Shaykh Muhammad Mawlud al Ya’qubi al-Musawi al-Muratani, As his name indicates, he was from Mauritania in West Africa. He was a master of all the Islamic sciences, including the inward sciences of the heart. He stated that he wrote this poem because he observed the prevalence of diseased hearts. He saw students of religion spending their time learning abstract sciences that people were not really in need of, to the neglect of those sciences that pertain to what people are accountable for in the next life, namely, the spiritual condition of the heart, In one of his most cited statements, the Prophet said, “Actions are based upon intentions.” All deeds are thus valued according to the intentions behind them, and intentions emanate from the heart. So every action a person intends or performs is rooted in the heart. Imam Mawlud realized that the weakness of society was a matter of weakness of character in the heart, Imam Mawlud based his text on many previous illustrious works, especially Imam al-Ghazali’s great Ihya’ Ulum alDin (The Revivification of the Sciences of the Religion). Each of the 40 books of Ihya‘ Ulum al-Din is basically about rectifying the human heart. If we examine the trials and tribulations, wars and other conflicts, every act of injustice all over earth, we’ll find they are rooted in human hearts.

Talented storytellers had found a way to make viewers care, and the evolution of this storyline made it abundantly clear to me: If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better. The takeaway here is worth repeating: Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. It is easy to say you want talented people, and you do, but the way those people interact with one another is the real key. Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they are mismatched. That means it is better to focus on how a team is performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it. A good team is made up of people who complement each other. There is an important principle here that may seem obvious, yet—in my experience—is not obvious at all. Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.

Time and time again I saw drag and queer culture bringing brilliant and unforgettable ideas to our own simple, self-made platforms. I loved how drag performances could adapt to any setting: theaters and street corners alike. That's transformation-that's art!

Berwick captured this brilliantly in his article, “The Toxicity of Pay for Performance”: “Pay for performance” reduces intrinsic motivation. Many tasks, especially in health care, are potentially intrinsically satisfying. Relieving pain, answering questions, exercising manual dexterity, being confided in, working on a professional team, solving puzzles, and experiencing the role of a trusted authority—these are not at all bad ways to spend part of one’s day at work. Pride and joy in the work of caring is among the many motivations that do result in “performance” among health care professionals. In the rancorous debates about compensation, fees, and reimbursement that so occupy the time of health care leaders and clinicians today, it is all too easy to neglect, or even to doubt, the fact that nonfinancial and intrinsic rewards are important in the work of medical care. Unfortunately, neglecting intrinsic satisfiers in work can inadvertently diminish them.

from spiritual authorities and glorifying him, and by sincerely performing your respective duties, offering him the results of your work. You do not need to be a great personality. Just do these things to the best of your ability, without pretence and with faith in Vishnu. Then you will achieve the highest success, you will get all the necessities of life (kama), and when you quit this body you will go back to Godhead.” Thus, we see that only the Lord can fulfill our personal desires (sva-kama) as well as desires of others (sarva-kama) who depend on us.

Fish and the old woman An old woman, selling fish, Crying at all those who passed by, “Try my fish that you shall relish,” Most of them ignored her calls but many asked why? She answered all whys, all ifs, all questions, As long as you were someone she thought would buy, And I stood there listening to her witty quotations, That addressed all doubts and answered every why, Her greasy hands often patted and placed the fish in order, In the round wicker basket that was wet but clean, And in this fish market she looked much wiser and older, Her face was round, her eyes sharp, with a body frame that was lean, Few minutes passed, unlike the fish she was unable to catch a reliable prospect, Then a man stopped and looked at her basket full of fish, And she had found her much needed suspect, The providence had granted her her wish, She turned the fish around and showed him the best ones, Her greasy hands held them with twin feelings, A feeling that still wanted to retain the best ones, And a feeling that was willing to let go of the few in her commercial dealings, And there was her struggle, and her eyes revealed it clearly, She shuffled the best ones around and then mixed them with the rest, And she did this with a professional dexterity, Creating a mix of the good fish and the best, Because to her all customers are the same, They all deserve to savour the fish that she thinks are the finest, So she had to indulge in this necessary hypnotic game, And she performed it in ways sharp and tidiest, She scrubbed off the scales carefully, And cleaned them with a unique fondness, And when ready she handed them to the man lovingly, He held them with a sense of quickness, And walked away, leaving behind the old woman and her basket full of fish, Who once again shouted in her typical melody, “Try my fish that you shall relish, The fish that will make the tastiest dish, The fish from the lake that breeds the best fish!” While I watched her and her teary eyes, Because she missed the fish that were being taken away, Away from her everyday, with her daily lot gone a part of her in that basket dies, But she does not let her feelings give in or sway, Because this is who she is, the seller of life and joy, Who shouts on the bridge on a cold November day, For she too has a home, where she has to feed her girl and her always waiting boy, It has been so for many decades, and was so today, In the evening when the wicker basket is dry with no fish left in it, She lifts the basket, mops the floor, and places it on her head, Well I guess not all of us can do it, Because she carries the physical load over the head that with a million thoughts is also fed, Yet she walks with a smile and vivaciousness that is radiant, Because she sells the fish that are the best, And in the wicker basket they look magnificent and brilliant, I guess for her, the fish and the basket are her test, Where fate pushes her to the extreme every day, But she never gets tired to shout and say, “Try my fish that you shall relish any day, Why not let that day be today, your luckiest day!” With the old woman gone, the bridge is still crowded but the spot is empty, So, I turn around and look at it, and I hear her echoes, And I feel a wave of humility induced by my realisation of her piety, Towards a different God, the God she invokes often in her melody that resides there in the form of her echoes, I may never see her again, or maybe I will, Whenever I cross the bridge, the bridge that leads people to their destinations, But for me it begins there and it ends there too, there time holds still, Because we all respect her courage and we love her melodious incantations!

The Ballad of Philippe Petit —for the world's greatest rope dancer Philippe Petit hangs his high wire in the third eye of God, fills the dull air with blue fire, all alone on the big city street, Little Phillip, Philippe Petit. Philippe Petit, high priest of daring, feels wind pulse in his feet, flying high on his mystical string, between tall towers above the street. Little Phillip, Philippe Petit. Little Phillip by the Golden Fleece, making Seventh Avenue sing. He draws a magic circle of chalk, rides his cycle around in a ring, Little Phillip, Philippe Petit. Little Phillip, clown gargoyle, spewing light on the grey street, rope dances twirling sticks of fire, bright sparkle of the dark street, Little Phillip, Philippe Petit. Philippe Petit juggles fire and balls, winks at Zeus, laughs at Mars, pulls Newton's beard, sups with God, cycling his way from heaven to street. Little Phillip, Philippe Petit. Little Phillip, when we get there, you'll surely be on high, juggling molecules for your maker on the wide streets of the sky, Little Phillip, Philippe Petit. Philippe Petit, The King of Heaven has a brilliant little fool juggling fire at his footstool. A light on the dark city street, A light, a light, Philippe Petit.

Goethe had actually performed an extraordinary set of experiments in his investigation of colors. Goethe began as Newton had, with a prism. Newton had held a prism before a light, casting the divided beam onto a white surface. Goethe held the prism to his eye and looked through it. He perceived no color at all, neither a rainbow nor individual hues. Looking at a clear white surface or a clear blue sky through the prism produced the same effect: uniformity. But if a slight spot interrupted the white surface or a cloud appeared in the sky, then he would see a burst of color. It is “the interchange of light and shadow,” Goethe concluded, that causes color. He went on to explore the way people perceive shadows cast by different sources of colored light. He used candles and pencils, mirrors and colored glass, moonlight and sunlight, crystals, liquids, and color wheels in a thorough range of experiments. For example, he lit a candle before a piece of white paper at twilight and held up a pencil. The shadow in the candlelight was a brilliant blue. Why? The white paper alone is perceived as white, either in the declining daylight or in the added light of the warmer candle. How does a shadow divide the white into a region of blue and a region of reddish-yellow? Color is “a degree of darkness,” Goethe argued, “allied to shadow.” Above all, in a more modern language, color comes from boundary conditions and singularities.

One day a fellow named Mike was telling me about renting the video Forrest Gump. “Boy, it was great!” he exclaimed. “Tom Hanks was brilliant, which is why he won the Oscar for Best Actor. I laughed and cried all the way through it. I know Brenda and you rent good movies for your kids. You should get this one. It was really clean and wholesome.” “Oh, I can’t watch Forrest Gump with my kids. In fact, I can’t even watch that myself, Mike,” I responded. Taken aback, Mike asked, “Why? It was a great movie!” “Well, do you remember that scene at the beginning where Sally Field has sex with the principal to get her son into the ‘right’ school?” “Uh…” “And how about the bare breasts at the New Year’s party? The nude on-stage guitar performance? And in the end, when Forrest finally ‘got the girl’ in the sex scene and she conceived a child out of wedlock? Sure, in the movie, everything worked out nicely for Forrest anyway. But that normally isn’t how life goes in those situations, so I don’t want to teach that to my kids. I don’t want them to hear all that grunting or see the nudity, either.

So new hires at Zappos go through a week of training. Then, at the end of those seven days, Hsieh makes them an offer. If they feel Zappos isn’t for them and want to leave, he’ll pay them $2,000—no hard feelings. Hsieh is hacking the Motivation 2.0 operating system like a brilliant and benevolent teenage computer whiz. He’s using an “if-then” reward not to motivate people to perform better, but to weed out those who aren’t fit for a Motivation 3.0–style workplace. The people who remain receive decent pay, and just as important, they have autonomy over technique.

Character is best thought of as existing in two distinct but related categories of competency – performance character competency and moral character competency. Performance character consists of specific acquired strengths usually necessary for high achievement and performance: focus, persistence, resilience, confidence, positivity, decisiveness, courage, tough-mindedness, ambition, reliability, discipline, fortitude.

We then looked at the students’ performance. After the experience with difficulty, the performance of the ability-praised students plummeted, even when we gave them some more of the easier problems. Losing faith in their ability, they were doing worse than when they started. The effort kids showed better and better performance. They had used the hard problems to sharpen their skills, so that when they returned to the easier ones, they were way ahead. Would you believe that almost 40 percent of the ability-praised students lied about their scores? And always in one direction. In the fixed mindset, imperfections are shameful—especially if you’re talented—so they lied them away. So telling children they’re smart, in the end, made them feel dumber and act dumber, but claim they were smarter. I don’t think this is what we’re aiming for when we put positive labels—“gifted,” “talented,” “brilliant”—on people. We don’t mean to rob them of their zest for challenge and their recipes for success. But that’s the danger.

Try one or more of Chade-Meng Tan’s suggested exercises, starting on page 154. They are simple and brilliant. I practice a few times per week, often in the sauna.

The point of this passage—part of what W. B. Yeats called “the finest description of sexual intercourse ever written”—is not to urge a more decorous, tepid form of lovemaking. It is to take note of the element of unsated appetite that haunts even the fulfillment of desire. The insatiability of sexual appetite is, in Lucretius’ view, one of Venus’ cunning strategies; it helps to account for the fact that, after brief interludes, the same acts of love are performed again and again. And he understood too that these repeated acts are deeply pleasurable. But he remained troubled by the ruse, by the emotional suffering that comes in its wake, by the arousal of aggressive impulses, and, above all, by the sense that even the moment of ecstasy leaves something to be desired. In 1685, the great poet John Dryden brilliantly captured Lucretius’ remarkable vision:

The research director at Fairchild Semiconductor Co., a brilliant engineer named Gordon Moore, contributed a four-page piece insouciantly entitled “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.” The essay forecast that as circuits became more densely packed with microscopic transistors, computing power would exponentially increase in performance and diminish in cost over the years. Moore contended that this trend could be predicted mathematically, so that memory costing $500,000 in 1965 would come all the way down to $3,000 by 1985—an insight so basic to the subsequent growth and expansion of the computer industry that ever since then it has been known as “Moore’s Law.

We all know of individuals, modern Ben Franklins, who have 1) achieved a massive multidisciplinary synthesis with less time in formal education than is now available to our numerous brilliant young, and 2) thus become better performers in their own disciplines, not worse, despite diversion of learning time to matter outside the normal coverage of their own disciplines.

the simple likelihood of drawing a connection between a dream and a waking experience dwindles with temporal distance from the dream. At this point, it is hard to say if there is any kind of probability curve defining some temporal sweet spot when you are likeliest to identify a waking experience relating to a prior dream. This is one of the many, many open questions that we need armies of precognitive dreamworkers with fat dream journals to help figure out. While the bulk of my precognitive hits occur within about three days of a dream, it is not uncommon to find hits up to a couple weeks after a dream, as well as at yearly intervals (we will discuss calendrical resonances in more detail later). Dunne recommended returning to your dreams up to two days afterward and thereafter discarding dream records. He lived before word processors, and since no one would have the time to check all their dreams on an indefinite daily basis, he felt you had to set limits to make your search most effective. In our day of computer files, it is easy to keep permanent, detailed dream records—they no longer take up space—as well as to search them electronically and potentially perform other kinds of analyses if you are really hardcore. But it remains the case that nobody has the time to compare their entire dream journal, which may grow a bit each day, to their entire life, every day. You can see how that could begin to consume one’s life! You have to make compromises. Revisiting your dream records from the previous three days for a minute or two each evening is minimally sufficient. EMINENT COMPANY In taking the J. W. Dunne challenge, you will be in some brilliant and eminent company. Some of the most influential writers of the mid-twentieth century, including T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien, were powerfully inspired by Dunne’s book, and some undertook his experiment. Most fans of Tolkien’s fantasy epics The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings don’t realize that the timeless worldview of his Elven races was based largely on the serial-universe cosmology developed by Dunne on the basis of his dream experiences.4 So far, no dream diary has emerged among Tolkien’s papers that would prove he carried out Dunne’s experiment systematically, but his friend C. S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, probably did. Lewis hints as much in a posthumously published novel called The Dark Tower, which is partly devoted to Dunne’s ideas.

It was almost funny, to read it written so plainly: Tisaanah Vytezic collapsed the cliffs and shielded the city with an illusion of wings. The display of power was enough to spur the Kazarans to retreat. Oh, I didn’t doubt it. The memory of her voice caressed my ear: We will find a way, she’d whispered. And she had. She used the weapon she knew best, the weapon of a perfect performance, to win a bloodless battle. Brilliant.

Christmas and the New Year were celebrated with vastly more acclaim and spontaneity than in most civilized countries, and there were many other gala days which no voyageur ever passed up without the celebration prescribed in the pays d’en haut. Harmon’s first Christmas in the interior came as somewhat of a shock to him, accustomed to the proprieties of the New England mode of celebration, for he says, “This day being Christmas, our people have spent it as usual in drinking and fighting.”11 Kennicott, however, was alive to the picturesqueness of this class of men and more in sympathy with their methods of self-expression. Consequently his remarks on a Christmas celebration in the Northwest are more detailed and full of interest. “The day after Christmas, Flett gave a Christmas ball…. The dancing was, I may say without vulgarity, decidedly ‘stunning.’ I should hardly call it graceful. The figures, if they may be called such, were only Scotch reels of four, and jigs; and … the main point to which the dancers’ efforts seemed to tend, was to get the largest amount of exercise out of every muscle in the frame…. The music consisted of a very bad performance of one vile, unvarying tune, upon a worse old fiddle, accompanied by a brilliant accompaniment upon a large tin pan.

in successful leadership, it isn’t just education and intellect that matter. It’s the power of will, focus, self-sacrifice, and dedication to a higher goal that can not only make scared teenagers perform brilliantly in combat but also drive often-confused corporate employees, frequently confronted with an overwhelming array of conflicting objectives, toward success.

Rakesh Roshan Rakesh Roshan is a producer, director, and actor in Bollywood films. A member of the successful Roshan film family, Mr. Roshan opened his own production company in 1982 and has been producing Hindi movies ever since. His film Kaho Naa…Pyaar Hai won nine Filmfare awards, including those for best movie and best director. When I remember Diana and her activities in the last years of her life, I strongly feel that God sends some special people into this world to perform some special duties. Diana was one of these special people. Advancing on this godly path of love and goodness, Diana was blossoming like a flower, and with her captivating fragrance she started infusing new life in our dangerously sick garden--which was apparently at the brink of a precipice. The irony is that the cruel winds of autumn ruthlessly blew away this rare flower and deprived the world of its soothing fragrance. Diana, Princess of Wales, is no longer present in this world, but Diana, the queen of millions of hearts, is immortal and will live forever. My heart breaks when I think of her last journey, her funeral, which was brilliantly covered all over the world. One could see the whole of England in tears, and the eyes of all the television viewers were also flooded. Thousands of men, women, and children had lined up along the entire route from the palace to the church where the services were held. All the fresh flowers available in the United Kingdom were there on the passage. All eyes were tearful, and one could clearly hear the sobs of people. There were heartrending scenes of people paying tribute to their departed darling. Last, I would like to write here a translation in English of a poem written in Urdu. We hope you will come back…dear friend But why this pervading sadness…dear friend The familiar flavor in the atmosphere is singing… You are somewhere around…dear friend Please come back, Diana; this sinking world desperately needs a savior.

You do sleight of hand, too?” I asked her. “No, I play his assistant. Hand him things on stage so the performance goes smoothly, with no gaps in the action and movement. It’s the best way to get through a talent show without having an actual talent.” What a brilliant idea. “Don’t happen to need any more assistants, do you?” I looked at Doran and hoped desperation was beaming out of my eyes. “Back off, Shield,” Lydia growled. “He’s my ticket through the Festival.” “And,” Karish tugged on my hair. “You’re doing something with me.” “We never agreed to that,” I protested. “We’re agreeing now.” High-handed bastard. “Neither of us have any talent.” Which was a pretty pathetic state of affairs. “You must be able to do something,” said Lydia. “You’d be stunned by the level of my ineptitude.

Based on my study of Harvard undergraduates, the average number of romantic relationships over four years is less than one. The average number of sexual partners, if you’re curious, is 0.5 per student. (I have no idea what 0.5 sexual partners means, but it sounds like the scientific equivalent of second base.) In my survey, I found that among these brilliant Harvard students, 24 percent are unaware if they are currently involved in any romantic relationship. What

It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.

Jon felt dazed as he stood waiting for his turn to rinse off in the river, his skin coated and tight with dried blood. He knew he would be sick without the iron hold he had on his mind. Float above it. The water downriver was red as he stepped down the bank and waded up to his knees. Next to him, the captain scrubbed his arms and face, scooping up handfuls of the cool water nonchalantly as if performing his morning ablutions. Jon splashed further in and sank down to his chest, eyes lowered. It’s just blood. You’ve washed blood off before, he thought. Not the blood of a hundred men and women… whispered a small voice inside him; Jon felt it should have been a scream. Unnerved, he reached down to the riverbed and brought up a handful of coarse sand. As he rubbed it against his skin, he watched the red drift down current. It was a strange sort of detached hysteria that he felt, his pulse quick and feathery light as he methodically cleansed himself. John lifted his head to look for Tom. The first mate stood on the riverbank with the other slaves, waiting until the free folk were finished before taking their turns. Feeling Jon’s gaze on him, Tom turned to look at him, his lips pressed together and nostrils flared. The blood on the big man’s face made a striking contrast with the brilliant blue-green of his eyes; Jon thought the first mate looked a little pale beneath the gore. Tom’s eyes slid to the captain, and Jon read a deep worry coming off the first mate in waves. What have you not been telling me? he thought.

If you are all set for an enjoyable weekend then simply head towards the magnificent Her Majesty’s Theatre! The popular London Westend theatre is running the award winning London show, The Phantom of the Opera with packed houses. The show has already made its remarkable entry into its third decade. The blockbuster London show by Andrew Lloyd Webber is a complete treat for music lovers. The popular show has won several prestigious awards. The show is set against the backdrop of gothic Paris Opera House. The show revolves around soprano Christine Daae who is enticed by the voice of Phantom. The show features some of the heart touching and spell binding musical numbers such as 'The Music of the Night', 'All I Ask of You' and the infamous title track, The Phantom of the Opera. The Phantom of the Opera is a complete audio visual treat for theatre lovers. In the year 1986, the original production made its debut at the Her Majesty's Theatre featuring Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman. Sarah was then wife of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. The popular London musical, The Phantom of the Opera went on becoming a popular show and still London's hottest ticket. The award winning show is a brilliant amalgamation of outstanding design, special effects and memorable score. The show has earned critical acclamation from both the critics and audiences. The show has been transferred to Broadway and is currently the longest running musical. The show is running at the Majestic Theatre and enjoyed brilliant performance across the globe. For Instance, the Las Vegas production was designed specifically with a real lake. In order to celebrate its silver jubilee, there was a glorious concert production at the Royal Albert Hall. The phenomenal production featured Ramin Karimloo and Sierra Boggess as Phantom and Christine. If you are looking for some heart touching love musical the Phantom of the Opera is a must watch. With its wonderfully designed sets, costumes and special effects, the show is a must watch for theatre lovers. The show is recommended for 10+ kids and run for two hours and thirty minutes.

Known as “Leni,” Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl was born on August 22, 1902. During the Third Reich she was known throughout Germany as a close friend and confidant of the Adolf Hitler. Recognized as a strong swimmer and talented artist, she studied dancing as a child and performed across Europe until an injury ended her dancing career. During the 1920’s Riefenstahl was inspired to become an actress and starred in five motion pictures produced in Germany. By 1932 she directed her own film “Das Blaue Licht.” With the advent of the Hitler era she directed “Triumph des Willens” anf “Olympia” which became recognized as the most innovative and effective propaganda films ever made. Many people who knew of her relationship with Hitler insisted that they had an affair, although she persistently denied this. However, her relationship with Adolf Hitler tarnished her reputation and haunted her after the war. She was arrested and charged with being a Nazi sympathizer, but it was never proven that she was involved with any war crimes. Convinced that she had been infatuated and involved with the Führer, her reputation and career became totally destroyed. Her former friends shunned her and her brother, who was her last remaining relative, was killed in action on the “Eastern Front.” Seeing a bleak future “Leni” Riefenstahl left Germany, to live amongst the Nuba people in Africa. During this time Riefenstahl met and began a close friendship with Horst Kettner, who assisted her with her acknowledged brilliant photography. They became an item from the time she was 60 years old and he was 20. Together they wrote and produced photo books about the Nuba tribes and later filmed marine life. At that time she was one of the world's oldest scuba divers and underwater photographer. Leni Riefenstahl died of cancer on September 8, 2003 at her home in Pöcking, Germany and was laid to rest at the Munich Waldfriedhof.

But the maestro’s biggest project during the second half of the season was the first North American production of Paul Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue, on 29 March 1911. Ariane, a forward-looking, brilliantly orchestrated work, had had its premiere in Paris four years earlier, and had since been performed in Vienna, conducted by Alexander Zemlinsky and admired by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern, among others. Toscanini,

I read about it in Buck Up, Suck Up . . . and Come Back When You Foul Up: 12 Winning Secrets from the War Room, written by James Carville and Paul Begala, the political strategists behind Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign “war room.” Here’s the excerpt that stuck with me: Newt Gingrich is one of the most successful political leaders of our time. Yes, we disagreed with virtually everything he did, but this is a book about strategy, not ideology. And we’ve got to give Newt his due. His strategic ability—his relentless focus on capturing the House of Representatives for the Republicans—led to one of the biggest political landslides in American history. Now that he’s in the private sector, Newt uses a brilliant illustration to explain the need to focus on the big things and let the little stuff slide: the analogy of the field mice and the antelope. A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride. A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope. The distinction is important. Are you spending all your time and exhausting all your energy catching field mice? In the short term it might give you a nice, rewarding feeling. But in the long run you’re going to die. So ask yourself at the end of the day, “Did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope?” Another way I often approach this is to look at my to-do list and ask: “Which one of these, if done, would render all the rest either easier or completely irrelevant?

Genevieve was familiar with one of the duke's properties- Rosemont- as she'd gone to tour it once when he was away at one of his other vast tracts of lands. It was surprisingly modest by duke terms, a redbrick manor in West Sussex presiding over a collection of softly swelling hills, which surrounded a lake populated by enormous, irritable swans and overhung with willows. The garden had been brilliant with its namesake blooms and the fountain in the courtyard featured a lasciviously grinning stone satyr performing an arabesque and spitting water high into the air. She'd found it delightful. Its pocket-sized, whimsical beauty hardly seemed to suit him, but then he normally spent his time in London and likely had all but forgotten he owned it.

In pre-Indira Gandhi days the IB was basically guided by the ‘ear marking’ scheme. This scheme enabled the IB to earmark certain IPS officers while they were under training in the Police Academy. They were earmarked on the basis of their performance in the All India Services Examination, performance in the academy and confidential reports on their shaping up process. A number of brilliant officers, including the illustrious Directors like Hari Anand Barari, M. K. Narayanan, and V. G. Vaidya were inducted through the earmarking scheme. The humble author of this book was also an earmarked officer. Of course, some officers also were inducted on ‘deputation’ from state cadres. They were later absorbed as ‘hard core’ officers. This system was abandoned after 1970 to accommodate ‘loyal and committed officers’ and also to bring the IB at par with other Central Police Organisations (CPO), like the CRPF, BSF. The IB was opened up as a waiting room for IPS officers from the less glamorous state cadres like Manipur and Tripura, Assam, West Bengal and any other state where the prevailing political culture did not suit certain officers. They used the IB to cool off and to catch up with other opportunities.

Newt Gingrich is one of the most successful political leaders of our time. Yes, we disagreed with virtually everything he did, but this is a book about strategy, not ideology. And we’ve got to give Newt his due. His strategic ability—his relentless focus on capturing the House of Representatives for the Republicans—led to one of the biggest political landslides in American history. Now that he’s in the private sector, Newt uses a brilliant illustration to explain the need to focus on the big things and let the little stuff slide: the analogy of the field mice and the antelope. A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride. A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope. The distinction is important. Are you spending all your time and exhausting all your energy catching field mice? In the short term it might give you a nice, rewarding feeling. But in the long run you’re going to die. So ask yourself at the end of the day, “Did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope?” Another way I often approach this is to look at my to-do list and ask: “Which one of these, if done, would render all the rest either easier or completely irrelevant?

This substance over focuses out 15 things which you should remember in the event that you might want have the top astounding voice over. These individuals incorporate things like understanding that the cost 1 costs presumably will are unique in relation to the cost of which an alternate one costs, knowing how to again as well as express profound gratitude to your performer for extraordinary perform, multi checking to maintain a strategic distance from rerecords, being pragmatic concerning the time scale and as of now being clear with as much as occupation necessities are included in addition to other things. On the off chance that you've ever found that there is a brilliant words, then you may have investigated utilizing that phenomenal style as a part of an expert approach as a craftsman, commentator or possibly like a voice-over ability. Voice-over, or maybe joining your own manner of speaking for you to publicizing furthermore noted correspondences, can be an extremely beneficial teach for only a legitimately prepared skill. In this business arranged world parcels of voices are fundamental negligible sounds, whiny remarks, gravelly sounds, smooth commotions and in addition normal voices. Voice over perform has turned out to be very ferocious and hard to get a hold of. In spite of the fact that this work of art is being utilized as a part of a ton of creation all inclusive, you will locate there's vast number of people considering entering this line of business. In any case, just like a fresh out of the box new gamer from the movie creation commercial center, you'll need to asset yourself the kind of voiceover capacity you understand will advance your reality what's more, let the thought for getting awesome suppositions with the group.

the regression fallacy. The regression fallacy refers to the tendency to fail to recognize statistical regression when it occurs, and instead to “explain” the observed phenomena with superfluous and often complicated causal theories. A lesser performance that follows a brilliant one is attributed to slacking off; a slight improvement in felony statistics following a crime wave is attributed to a new law enforcement policy. The regression fallacy is analogous to the clustering illusion: Both represent cases of people extracting too much meaning from chance events.

Not many performers are equally at home in drama and comedy; Claudette Colbert was one of those few. It’s hard to decide whether she was more brilliant in screwball comedies like It Happened One Night, The Palm Beach Story and Midnight, or tragedies like Imitation of Life and So Proudly We Hail! The most modern of actresses, she was also one of the most talented.

The Messenger Ritual 1. Sit down and relax completely. Let your mind wander and your thinking flow without restraint. After a while, begin to repeat to yourself, ‘Now I am relaxed, and I am in the deepest kind of sleep.’ 2. When you feel that your mind is no longer concerned with anything, imagine a billow of fire to your right. Make the flames lively and brilliant. Then quietly say, ‘I order my subconscious to show itself. I order it to open and reveal its magic secrets.’ Wait a bit, and concentrate only on the fire. If an image appears, it will be a manifestation of your subconscious. Try to keep it alive. 3. Keeping the fire always to your right, now begin to imagine another billow of fire to your left. When the flames are lively, say the following words quietly: ‘May the power of the Lamb, which manifests itself in everything and everyone, manifest itself also in me when I invoke my messenger. (Name of messenger) will appear before me now. 4. Talk with your messenger, who should appear between the two fires. Discuss your specific problems, ask for advice, and give him the necessary orders. 5. When your conversation has ended, dismiss the messenger with the following words: ‘I thank the Lamb for the miracle I have performed. May (name of messenger) return whenever he is invoked, and when he is far away, may he help me to carry on my work.’ Note: On the first invocation – or during the first invocations, depending on the ability of the person performing the ritual to concentrate – do not say the name of the messenger. Just say “he.” If the ritual is well performed, the messenger should immediately reveal his name telepathically. If not, insist until you learn his name, and only then begin the conversation. The more the ritual is repeated, the stronger the presence of the messenger will be and the more rapid his actions.

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better. The takeaway here is worth repeating: Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. It is easy to say you want talented people, and you do, but the way those people interact with one another is the real key. Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they are mismatched. That means it is better to focus on how a team is performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it. A good team is made up of people who complement each other. There is an important principle here that may seem obvious, yet—in my experience—is not obvious at all. Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.

The man had a fairly plain appearance, with a walrus-type, sandy colored moustache. When he came in, with a broad brimmed, shapeless hat and coat, he looked like a pauper. His voice was that of an asthmatic, wheezing and short of breath. Yet when he spoke, you heard a brilliant, witty, charming, inventive speaker, a man of enormous literary knowledge and sharp judgment. His reading list was long and one was expected to read the plays before he lectured about them. Whenever there had been an opening night a day or two before, it was expected of him to express his opinion of the play and the performance, before writing his critique in the "Nation".