Cohen Motivational Quotes

Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you'd like to act.

Lyor Cohen, who I consider my mentor, once told me something that he was told by a rabbi about the eight degrees of giving in Judaism. The seventh degree is giving anonymously, so you don't know who you're giving to, and the person on the receiving end doesn't know who gave. The value of that is that the person receiving doesn't have to feel some kind of obligation to the giver and the person giving isn't doing it with an ulterior motive. It's a way of putting the giver and receiver on the same level. It's a tough ideal to reach out for, but it does take away some of the patronizing and showboating that can go on with philanthropy in a capitalist system. The highest level of giving, the eight, is giving in a way that makes the receiver self-sufficient.

For an early morning I had so much fucking pep in my step. Lust was a great motivator. I was spending time with Tom Cohen. A Tsunami could sweep through the city and I’d still think I was having a great week.

[T]he history of the twentieth century encourages the thought that the easiest way to generate productivity in a modern society is by nourishing the motives of which I spoke earlier, namely, those of greed and fear. But we should never forget that greed and fear are repugnant motives.

Discontent is the initial motivation to becoming content. Let restlessness propel you to your right place. Your experience of “not it” amplifies your intention to find “it,” and you surely will.

If we allowed ourselves to face and feel the pain in our lives, it would serve its function to get our attention to recognize that we have stepped away from the Tao and we need to get back on course. It is said, “Love how much you hate it.” If you are doing something you find repulsive, or you have had a bad experience, use your disgust as a motivator to change direction. When you are sick of it enough you will do something about it. A Course in Miracles tells us, Tolerance for pain may be high, but it is not without limit. Eventually everyone begins to recognize, however dimly, that there must be a better way. As this recognition becomes more firmly established, it becomes a turning point.

But it is worth recalling the almost genocidal class hatreds of many leading liberal-left intellectuals, because they show that the motives of a part of the intelligentsia were anything but honourable. They did not want the welfare state to reward their fellow citizens for what they and their ancestors had suffered. They wanted the welfare state to transform them from brutes into men or women whose company Virginia Woolf could tolerate.

There are four stages to a person’s career: In Stage 1 you are enthusiastic about your work, but inexperienced (start of your career). In Stage 2 you are both enthusiastic about your work and have gained experience (top of your career). In Stage 3 you’re tired of your work, but you are also still competent/experienced (maintenance stage). In Stage 4 you are sick of your work, and because you haven’t been motivated to keep up with your profession, you are now, once again, inexperienced relative to the state-of-the-art in your field (end of career).

Cohen continued to struggle with his own well-being. Even though he had achieved his life’s dream of running his own firm, he was still unhappy, and he had become dependent on a psychiatrist named Ari Kiev to help him manage his moods. In addition to treating depression, Kiev’s other area of expertise was success and how to achieve it. He had worked as a psychiatrist and coach with Olympic basketball players and rowers trying to improve their performance and overcome their fear of failure. His background building athletic champions appealed to Cohen’s unrelenting need to dominate in every transaction he entered into, and he started asking Kiev to spend entire days at SAC’s offices, tending to his staff. Kiev was tall, with a bushy mustache and a portly midsection, and he would often appear silently at a trader’s side and ask him how he was feeling. Sometimes the trader would be so startled to see Kiev there he’d practically jump out of his seat. Cohen asked Kiev to give motivational speeches to his employees, to help them get over their anxieties about losing money. Basically, Kiev was there to teach them to be ruthless. Once a week, after the market closed, Cohen’s traders would gather in a conference room and Kiev would lead them through group therapy sessions focused on how to make them more comfortable with risk. Kiev had them talk about their trades and try to understand why some had gone well and others hadn’t. “Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it,” was how one skeptical staff member remembered Kiev being pitched to them. Kiev’s work with Olympians had led him to believe that the thing that blocked most people was fear. You might have two investors with the same amount of money: One was prepared to buy 250,000 shares of a stock they liked, while the other wasn’t. Why? Kiev believed that the reluctance was a form of anxiety—and that it could be overcome with proper treatment. Kiev would ask the traders to close their eyes and visualize themselves making trades and generating profits. “Surrendering to the moment” and “speaking the truth” were some of his favorite phrases. “Why weren’t you bigger in the trades that worked? What did you do right?” he’d ask. “Being preoccupied with not losing interferes with winning,” he would say. “Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win.” Many of the traders hated the group therapy sessions. Some considered Kiev a fraud. “Ari was very aggressive,” said one. “He liked money.” Patricia, Cohen’s first wife, was suspicious of Kiev’s motives and believed that he was using his sessions with Cohen to find stock tips. From Kiev’s perspective, he found the perfect client in Cohen, a patient with unlimited resources who could pay enormous fees and whose reputation as one of the best traders on Wall Street could help Kiev realize his own goal of becoming a bestselling author. Being able to say that you were the

Oedipa spent the next several days in and out of libraries and earnest discussions with Emory Bortz and Genghis Cohen. She feared a little for their security in view of what was happening to everyone else she knew. The day after reading Blobb's Peregrinations she, with Bortz, Grace, and the graduate students, attended Randolph Driblette's burial, listened to a younger brother's helpless, stricken eulogy, watched the mother, spectral in afternoon smog, cry, and came back at night to sit on the grave and drink Napa Valley muscatel, which Driblette in his time had put away barrels of. There was no moon, smog covered the stars, all black as a Tristero rider. Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a ' letter, another lover. She tried to reach out, to whatever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet below, still resisting decay-any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself for some last burst, some last scramble up through earth, just-glimmering, holding together with its final strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host, or dissipate forever into the dark. If you come to me, prayed Oedipa, bring your memories of the last night. Or if you have to keep down your payload, the last five minutes-that may be enough. But so I'll know if your walk into the sea had anything to do with Tristero. If they got rid of you for the reason they got rid of Hilarius and Mucho and Metzger-maybe because they thought I no longer needed you. They were wrong. I needed you. Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I've got. She remembered his head, floating in the shower, saying, you could fall in love with me. But could she have saved him? She looked over at the girl who'd given her the news of his death. Had they been in love? Did she know why Driblette had put in those two extra lines that night? Had he even known why? No one could begin to trace it. A hundred hangups, permuted, combined-sex, money, illness, despair with the history of his time and place, who knew. Changing the script had no clearer motive than his suicide. There was the same whimsy to both. Perhaps-she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart-perhaps, springing from the same slick labyrinth, adding those two lines had even, in a way never to be explained, served him as a rehearsal for his night's walk away into that vast sink of the primal blood the Pacific. She waited for the winged brightness to announce its safe arrival. But there was silence. Driblette, she called. The signal echoing down twisted miles of brain circuitry. Driblette! But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

If you’re gonna go broke, go for broke.

You can do anything…but before you can do anything, you have to do something.

Not everything is nefarious.

Cohen said, “Okay, no sense dillydallying,

Why do the powerful always insist on having a “back story” to justify whatever they do? Why can’t they—just once—do something for the simple reason that it is the right thing to do, in itself, for reasons understood and accepted by all? In politics, laws are passed to secretly serve hidden agendas, for without such agendas many lawmakers would never find the motivation to support anything at all.

The Product Backlog will not motivate your team. You need to paint the picture of why they should be motivated. You

Another curious case is that of the word assassin, which you may use to describe a certain kind of politically motivated killer. The word derives from the historical case of a certain religious sect that used to murder people while under the influence of hashis. The word for someone who smokes hashish is hashashin.

Ten shockingly arty events What arty types like to call a ‘creative tension’ exists in art and music, about working right at the limits of public taste. Plus, there’s money to be made there. Here’s ten examples reflecting both motivations. Painting: Manet’s Breakfast on the Lawn, featuring a group of sophisticated French aristocrats picnicking outside, shocked the art world back in 1862 because one of the young lady guests is stark naked! Painting: Balthus’s Guitar Lesson (1934), depicting a teacher fondling the private parts of a nude pupil, caused predictable uproar. The artist claimed this was part of his strategy to ‘make people more aware’. Music: Jump to 1969 when Jimi Hendrix performed his own interpretation of the American National Anthem at the hippy festival Woodstock, shocking the mainstream US. Film: In 1974 censors deemed Night Porter, a film about a love affair between an ex-Nazi SS commander and his beautiful young prisoner (featuring flashbacks to concentration camp romps and lots of sexy scenes in bed with Nazi apparel), out of bounds. Installation: In December 1993 the 50-metre-high obelisk in the Place Concorde in the centre of Paris was covered in a giant fluorescent red condom by a group called ActUp. Publishing: In 1989 Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses outraged Islamic authorities for its irreverent treatment of Islam. In 2005 cartoons making political points about Islam featuring the prophet Mohammed likewise resulted in riots in many Muslim cities around the world, with several people killed. Installation: In 1992 the soon-to-be extremely rich English artist Damien Hirst exhibited a 7-metre-long shark in a giant box of formaldehyde in a London art gallery – the first of a series of dead things in preservative. Sculpture: In 1999 Sotheby’s in London sold a urinoir or toilet-bowl-thing by Marcel Duchamp as art for more than a million pounds ($1,762,000) to a Greek collector. He must have lost his marbles! Painting: Also in 1999 The Holy Virgin Mary, a painting by Chris Ofili representing the Christian icon as a rather crude figure constructed out of elephant dung, caused a storm. Curiously, it was banned in Australia because (like Damien Hirst’s shark) the artist was being funded by people (the Saatchis) who stood to benefit financially from controversy. Sculpture: In 2008 Gunther von Hagens, also known as Dr Death, exhibited in several European cities a collection of skinned corpses mounted in grotesque postures that he insists should count as art.

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging of an uncompleted task. ~ William James ~

The American penchant for subjugating those deemed in need of deliverance was hardly extinguished by the calamity in Canada. As the historian Eliot A. Cohen has observed, that impulse would recur often in the centuries to come, “with mixed motives and uncertain outcomes.” Canada proved a foreshadow.

Indeed, the history of the twentieth century encourages the thought that the easiest way to generate productivity in a modern society is by nourishing the motives of which I spoke earlier, namely, those of greed and fear. But we should never forget that greed and fear are repugnant motives.

In the land of no hope i plant my healing flowers ...

Pour Proust, l'univers intérieur d'un homme constituait un étonnant miracle, un infini vertigineux. Ce n'est pas ce qui étonne Kafka. Il ne se demande pas quelles sont les motivations intérieures qui déterminent le comportement de l'homme. Il pose une question radicalement différente : quelles sont encore les possibilités de l'homme dans un monde où les déterminations extérieures sont devenues si écrasantes que les mobiles intérieurs ne pèsent plus rien ? En effet, qu'est-ce que cela aurait pu changer au destin de K s'il avait eu des pulsions homosexuelles ou un complexe d'Oedipe ? Rien, tandis que pour un personnage de Proust, ça changerait tout. Autoportrait en lecteur, page 62

There are seven reasons people go to work: (1) Money; (2) Passionate self-expression; (3) Rewarding relationships; (4) Service to improve others’ lives; (5) Egoic achievement, competitive victory, or status; (6) Fear, guilt, obligation, rote habit, or debt to tradition; and (7) Avoidance of boredom or escape from a more unpleasant situation. We might boil this list down to two basic motivations: fear-based lack and joy-based expression.

studies with college students have shown that frustration tolerance is a learned skill directly connected to ongoing motivation in the face of temporary failure, as well as a positive sense of self-esteem and confidence.41 This means that even for a person who seems to always win in competition, they do not learn to develop the frustration tolerance required to function adequately outside of their comfort zone—most notably in meaningful social relationships and a rich personal life characteristic to high-quality of life.

COHEN We were all caught in a trap of circumstance. LOUISE How so? COHEN This event, this failure of a knot in a string, catapulted us into rare air. Our desires became disconnected from this earth. Versati motivated by fantasy, myself motivated by jealousy. Your mind clouded by romance.

We far too often fail to account for how situations in real life have also been crafted, intentionally or not, to confer advantages on some and disadvantages on others. This tendency contributes to beliefs that students from difficult homes are less motivated or less capable because of who they are, rather than what their home situation is.

Like a sculpture I shape, create new dimensional form to every soul i read,always reminding them that the future is not set in stone ..

Second: the people can be made to behave as you want them to behave via the subconscious of the public mind—no one else believed such a thing existed—which can be directed with symbols and signs. “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind,” asked Bernays, “is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?

judges did not force the American government to reveal all, and leave it powerless to punish those who leaked its secrets. Instead they established new rules for the conduct of public debate. They were careful not to allow absolute liberty. Private citizens can sue as easily in America as anywhere else, if writers attack them without good grounds. Poison pens are still punished, and individual reputations are still protected. If, however, a private citizen is engaged in a public debate, it is not enough for him or her to prove that what a writer says is false and defamatory. They must prove that the writer behaved ‘negligently’. The judiciary protects public debates, the Supreme Court said in 1974, because ‘under the First Amendment, there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges but on the competition of other ideas.’ Finally, the judges showed no regard for the feelings of politicians and other public figures. They must prove that a writer was motivated by ‘actual malice’ before they could succeed in court. The public figure must show that the writer knew that what he or she wrote was a lie, or wrote with a reckless disregard for the truth. Unlike in Britain, the burden of proof was with the accuser, not the accused.

We are all smart enough to do what we value doing. We find the time, money, and means to achieve what is important to us. We are not motivated to do the things that other people tell us we should do or we should want to do.