Connectors Quotes

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The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.
Wendell Berry (The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture)
When people are overwhelmed with information and develop immunity to traditional forms of communication, they turn instead for advice and information to the people in their lives whom they respect, admire, and trust. The cure for immunity is finding Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen.
Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
Building relationships is not about transactions—it’s about connections.
Michelle Tillis Lederman (11 Laws of Likability)
I guess if you were really determined, you could find a way to get yourself killed by exposing the power connectors under the panels and shielding and, I don’t know, licking them or something, but this dead human clearly hadn’t.
Martha Wells (Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries, #6))
Librarians who are arguing and lobbying for clever e-book lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending the library-as-warehouse concept, as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher, and impresario.
Seth Godin (Stop Stealing Dreams (what is school for?))
A Connector might tell ten friends where to stay in Los Angeles, and half of them might take his advice. A Maven might tell five people where to stay in Los Angeles but make the case for the hotel so emphatically that all of them would take his advice. These are different personalities at work, acting for different reasons. But they both have the power to spark word-of-mouth epidemics.
Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship. Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
Art matters because it is the one true great connector in a world that seems to be very unconnected.
Josh Groban
Sometimes, as in the case of the American Revolution, crucial roles turn out to have been played by people who were not leaders but connectors.
Niall Ferguson (The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook)
The point about Connectors is that by having a foot in so many different worlds, they have the effect of bringing them all together.
Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people—Salesmen—with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups. Who
Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
Bird memories are therefore a tree's dream of the future.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
If you want fans, you have to be a fan first. If you want to be accepted by a community, you have to first be a good citizen of that community. If you’re only pointing to your own stuff online, you’re doing it wrong. You have to be a connector.
Austin Kleon (Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered (Austin Kleon))
The burnt-off connectors and shadows where Ravan once filled my spaces— those, I think, are the sensations of grief.
Catherynne M. Valente (Silently and Very Fast)
Curiosity creates connections.
Michelle Tillis Lederman (The 11 Laws of Likability: Relationship Networking . . . Because People Do Business with People They Like)
Connectors create an experience everyone enjoys.
John C. Maxwell (Everyone Communicates, Few Connect: What the Most Effective People Do Differently)
If you jump to conclusions about someone based on limited, proscribed interactions, you close the door to the possibility of deepening your connection.
Michelle Tillis Lederman (The 11 Laws of Likability: Relationship Networking . . . Because People Do Business with People They Like)
Tea can be a connector that puts your life back together when you feel like it is slowly falling apart. It can be there for you to get your thoughts in order and settle down your mind.
Lu Ann Pannunzio (Tea-spiration: Inspirational Words for Tea Lovers)
Every subject is much easier than the people who wish to make money teaching it would have you know. So, for every single subject that can be systematized, there is a systematization that allows you to get 80% percent of the power with probably 5 or 10% of the effort. So the key question is that you have to prove that you have the superpower to rearrange the subject, to disintermediate the people who get paid for teaching it – which will always push you towards mastery, which is a question of getting the last 2 or 3% out of the system. And so the good news is that you can rearrange any subject to learn most of it very, very quickly. The bad news is that it will feel terrible because you will be told that you are doing the wrong thing and dooming yourself to a life of mediocrity as a jack of many trades, master of none – but in fact, the problem is that the jack of one trade is the connector of none. Good luck!
Eric R. Weinstein
Ideas and statutes that live only in disembodied intellect are fragile, easily manipulated by both sides in a debate. This is as true of European "sustainability" regulations as it is for Amazonian súmac káusai removed from its forest home. Knowledge gained through extended bodily relationship with the forest, including the forest's human communities, is more robust. ... There is truth that cannot be accessed through intellect alone, especially intellect that is not aware of local ecological variations.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
Failure, weakness, and vulnerability is like a connector... it connects you to the rest of the world because what you're doing is giving out a signal to the world that says I need you because I can't do this by myself
Phil Stutz
These people who link us up with the world, who bridge Omaha and Sharon, who introduce us to our social circles—these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize—are Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.
Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
Exiles can write down and preserve what we carry in our minds, but knowledge created and sustained by ongoing relationship dies when connections are broken. What remains is a network of life that is less intelligent, productive, resilient, and creative.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
Librarians who are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.
Alan Bennett (The Library Book)
Rod Steiger is the best connected actor in history because he has managed to move up and down and back and forth among all the different worlds and subcultures and niches and levels that the acting profession has to offer. This is what Connectors are like. They are the Rod Steigers of everyday life. They are people whom all of us can reach in only a few steps because, for one reason or another, they manage to occupy many different worlds and subcultures and niches.
Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people-Salesmen-with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.
Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
But there are a lot of great pleasures you can get out of the experience of being alone with yourself,” said Bowker. In solitude you can find the unfiltered version of you. People often have breakthroughs where they tap into how they truly feel about a topic and come to some new understanding about themselves, said Bowker. Then you can take your realizations out into the social world, he added: “Building the capacity to be alone probably makes your interactions with others richer. Because you’re bringing to the relationship a person who’s actually got stuff going on in the inside and isn’t just a connector circuit that only thrives off of others.” Research backs solitude’s healthy properties. It’s been shown to improve productivity, creativity, empathy, and happiness, and decrease self-consciousness.
Michael Easter (The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self)
By the time workers have picked a field, tens of thousands of words have flown from mouth to ear. Part of the landscape’s mind—its memories, connections, rhythms—is thereby held in human consciousness. Work among the olive trees does more than yield oil; it creates and deepens the stories from which are made human and ecological communities.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
In Steiger's case, of course, his high connectedness is a function of his versatility as an actor and, in all likelihood, some degree of good luck. But in the case of Connectors, their ability to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability, and energy.
Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
No, this is serious, Ollie. So I'm watching this spider building its web in the corner of the window. First it does the main parts, then the little connector rods. It's like so careful and precise, right? And then just when it's done, Mrs. Halverson comes over and says, 'It's so stuffy in here I can hardly breathe. Let's have some air,' and opens the window. And boom, all the spider's work was gone." He paused. "Made me think, man, that was just like life." I touched his cheek. "What do you mean, silly boy?" "You work and work, and all it takes is one bitch to ruin everything." Ollie stared ahead steadily and said, "I think it shows that sometimes for one person to keep breathing, something else has to stop.
Michele Jaffe (Rosebush)
Business relationships are important for strong communities,
Judy Robinett (How to be a Power Connector (PB): The 5+50+100 Rule for Turning Your Business Network Into Profits)
Communicating what we appreciate by saying nice things has powerful results for ourselves and those around us.
Michelle Tillis Lederman (The 11 Laws of Likability: Relationship Networking . . . Because People Do Business with People They Like)
Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.
Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
Connectors change the world. Everything is possible. If you're not having fun, get out.
Ginger Johnson (How to Market Beer to Women, Don't Sell Me a Pink Hammer)
To listen to trees, nature’s great connectors, is therefore to learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
Enough - the Centenarian’s story ends; The two, past and present, have interchanged; I myself, as connector, as chansonnier of a great future, am now speaking.
Walt Whitman (Drum-Taps)
You can start being strategic daily through one simple practice—be a connector.
Steve Browne (HR on Purpose: Developing Deliberate People Passion)
A coherent text is a designed object: an ordered tree of sections within sections, crisscrossed by arcs that track topics, points, actors, and themes, and held together by connectors that tie one proposition to the next. Like other designed objects, it comes about not by accident but by drafting a blueprint, attending to details, and maintaining a sense of harmony and balance.
Steven Pinker (The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century)
In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell explores the influence of “Connectors”—people who have a “special gift for bringing the world together” and “an instinctive and natural gift for making social connections
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
Everything points to the same conclusion: that Twitter hasn’t so much altered our writing as just gotten it to fit into a smaller place. Looking through the data, instead of a wasteland of cut stumps, we find a forest of bonsai. This kind of in-depth analysis (lexical density, word frequency) hints at the real nature of the transformation under way. The change Twitter has wrought on language itself is nothing compared with the change it is bringing to the study of language. Twitter gives us a sense of words not only as the building blocks of thought but as a social connector, which indeed has been the purpose of language since humanity hunched its way across the Serengeti.
Christian Rudder (Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves)
We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship. Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
Descartes did not say that the soul is located in the pineal gland, only that the pineal gland was the ‘seat’ of the soul, not the location. He held the idea that the soul interacts with the body via the pineal gland; hence the pineal gland was more of a connector rather than a storage facility. All matter as we know now, must have a location. Anything other than matter would not require a storage location; therefore, Descartes must have been on the proper track. Could the pineal gland be not only a receptor of light but also a connector to light? And, if God is light or energy, then perhaps it may be a connector to God—the ultimate light. Those who maintain higher pineal gland secretion and a more de-calcified pineal gland will ensure success when healing.
Joseph Bruno (Think and Heal With The Mind: A Metaphysical book that explores the divine power to heal and quantum realms. Adopt this unique way of thinking that utilizes the laws of quantum physics for healing.)
Religion is a sublime and glorious thing, the bond of society on earth, and the connector of humanity with the Divine nature; but there is nothing so dangerous to man as the wresting of its principles, or forcing them beyond their due bounds: this is above all others the readiest way to destruction.
James Hogg
It made me consider one of the reasons I loved my fanbase so much: they are wholly independent and have their own unassailable, discerning tastes. They weren’t looking to me as a leader to follow blindly, there to dictate their choices. They were looking to me as a connector, a coordinator, which was the role I wanted.
Amanda Palmer (The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help)
Bridges are thresholds to other realities, archetypal, primal symbols of shifting consciousness. They are passageways, conduits, and connectors that connote transitioning, crossing borders, and changing perspectives. Bridges span liminal spaces between worlds, spaces I call nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning tierra entre medio.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza)
When you need to fake it, make it real.
Michelle Tillis Lederman (The 11 Laws of Likability: Relationship Networking . . . Because People Do Business with People They Like)
If you don’t want people to make assumptions about you that they automatically consider as facts, be aware of not falling into the same habit.
Michelle Tillis Lederman (The 11 Laws of Likability: Relationship Networking . . . Because People Do Business with People They Like)
It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
Michelle Tillis Lederman (The 11 Laws of Likability: Relationship Networking . . . Because People Do Business with People They Like)
When we are awakened participants within the processes of the network, we can start to hear what is coherent, what is broken, what is beautiful, what is good.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
It is natural for us to form first impressions when we meet someone. The challenge is to remain open to letting the other perception to change.
Michelle Tillis Lederman (The 11 Laws of Likability: Relationship Networking . . . Because People Do Business with People They Like)
Your body language can divulge your disinterest or, conversely, it can affirm your attentiveness and confidence.
Michelle Tillis Lederman (The 11 Laws of Likability: Relationship Networking . . . Because People Do Business with People They Like)
If you don’t believe the message you are trying to transmit, why should anybody else?
Michelle Tillis Lederman (The 11 Laws of Likability: Relationship Networking . . . Because People Do Business with People They Like)
Lets forget about the things you haven't done, and talk about what you have done.
Michelle Lederman, 11 Laws of Likability
Opening up a conversation can be opening up a world of new possibilities.
Michelle Lederman, 11 Laws of Likability
A tree inhales and stills air’s fibrillating breath, holding it in wood, like a kami. Each year’s growth rings jackets the previous, capturing in layered derma precise molecular signatures of the atmosphere timbered memories. Wood emerges from relationship with air, catalyzed by the flash of electrons through membranes. Atmosphere and plant make each other; plant as temporary crystallization of carbon, air as product of 400 million years of forest breath. Neither tree nor air has a narrative, a telos of its own, for neither is its own.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
To master the virtual equation and make all the elements work together, you have to become the connector. In fact, your greatest role as a virtual manager is to link the various parts of his/her team to accomplish the goals that lead to its formation in the first place. You may need to shift gears, perform ream tune-ups, realign, and refuel your team's energy along the way.
Yael Zofi (A Manager's Guide to Virtual Teams)
Whether with a new acquaintance or an existing relationship, stay open to the possibility that your perceptions aren’t entirely accurate; it just may give you the opportunity to strengthen the bond.
Michelle Tillis Lederman (The 11 Laws of Likability: Relationship Networking . . . Because People Do Business with People They Like)
What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus. This, too, contradicts some of the most ingrained assumptions we hold about ourselves and each other. We like to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner-directed, that who we are and how we act is something permanently set by our genes and our temperament. But if you add up the examples of Salesmen and Connectors, of Paul Revere's ride and Blue's Clues, and the Rule of 150 and the New York subway cleanup and the Fundamental Attribution Error, they amount to a very different conclusion about what it means to be human. We are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us. Taking the graffiti off the walls of New York's subways turned New Yorkers into better citizens. Telling seminarians to hurry turned them into bad citizens. The suicide of a charismatic young Micronesian set off an epidemic of suicides that lasted for a decade. Putting a little gold box in the corner of a Columbia Record Club advertisement suddenly made record buying by mail seem irresistible. To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are to even the smallest details of everyday life. That's why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.
Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
For instance, if a computer does not power up, you can start testing at the electrical socket; move to the power supply, power supply connectors, power switch, motherboard; and then move to the devices. This process moves through the sequential chain along the possible path that power would flow. Following a possible resolution path from one end to the other is sometimes referred to as the layered or linear approach.
Glen E. Clarke (CompTIA A+® Certification All-In-One For Dummies®)
Many biologists claim that our thoughts and feelings of”ethics and meaning” derive only from the proclivities of our nervous systems. Our behaviour and psychology developed by the process of evolution, as did the minds and emotions of animals: so no us and them, just different variations on evolutionary themes. If so, ethics are vapors arising from our synapses, not truths with objective validity outside our own minds.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
As I said, this Spirit has two jobs. First, she creates diversity, as exemplified in the metaphor of wind—just breathing out ever-new life in endlessly diverse forms. But then the Spirit has another job: that of the Great Connector—of all those very diverse things! All this pluriform life, the Spirit keeps in harmony and “mutual deference”267—“so there shall be one Christ, loving Himself,” as Augustine daringly put it.268
Richard Rohr (The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation)
no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead, we can make the decisions fluid. Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don’t run into major disagreements. On this day Ive was overseeing the creation of a new European power plug and connector for the Macintosh. Dozens of foam models, each with the tiniest variation, have been cast and painted for inspection. Some would find it odd that the head of design would fret
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
People who create successful strategic relationships demonstrate 10 essential character traits:    1. Authentic. They are genuine, honest, and transparent. They are cognizant of (and willing to admit to) their strengths and weaknesses.    2. Trustworthy. They build relationships on mutual trust. They have a good reputation based on real results. They have integrity: their word is their bond. People must know, like, and trust you before sharing their valuable social capital.    3. Respectful. They are appreciative of the time and efforts of others. They treat subordinates with the same level of respect as they do supervisors.    4. Caring. They like to help others succeed. They’re a source of mutual support and encouragement. They pay attention to the feelings of others and have good hearts.    5. Listening. They ask good questions, and they are eager to learn about others—what’s important to them, what they’re working on, what they’re looking for, and what they need—so they can be of help.    6. Engaged. They are active participants in life. They are interesting and passionate about what they do. They are solution minded, and they have great “gut” instincts.    7. Patient. They recognize that relationships need to be cultivated over time. They invest time in maintaining their relationships with others.    8. Intelligent. They are intelligent in the help they offer. They pass along opportunities at every chance possible, and they make thoughtful, useful introductions. They’re not ego driven. They don’t criticize others or burn bridges in relationships.    9. Sociable. They are nice, likeable, and helpful. They enjoy being with people, and they are happy to connect with others from all walks of life, social strata, political persuasions, religions, and diverse backgrounds. They are sources of positive energy.   10. Connected. They are part of their own network of excellent strategic relationships.
Judy Robinett (How to be a Power Connector (PB): The 5+50+100 Rule for Turning Your Business Network Into Profits)
In the boreal forests there is reason to hope that we’ll guide the human part of this relationship with forethought. Over the last two decades, continent wide planning for conservation, forestry, and industry in the boreal forest have brought people together who have fought for years in the law courts. Now timber companies, industry, conservation groups, environmental activists, and governments, including those of the First Nations, are talking to one another. Such human talk is part of the forest’s larger system of thought, one way that the living network can achieve a measure of coherence; a diffuse conversation, able to listen and to adapt. To date, swaths of boreal forest as big as many countries- hundreds of thousands of square kilometers- more than 10 percent of Canada’s boreal forest- have been mapped for conservation, for carbon-savvy logging, for threatened animals, and for sustainable timber production.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
Chinese and Japanese horticulturists have been aware of the primacy of relationship for centuries. Sakuteiki, the eleventh-century Japanese manual of gardening, possibly the oldest written record of landscape design, exhorts people to open themselves to the disposition of mountain streams, to wind and emotion.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
Mingle • Be the connector—introduce people to each other who may not otherwise connect. • Be a conversation fire starter; point out what people have in common as you are introducing them. • Seek out the folks who may appear to be shy, or awkward, or wallflowers. Find ways to build trust and comfort. Engage them with a kind word to pull them out of their shell. • Arrive early and stay late; connect with people before and after your event. • Stretch beyond your comfort zone to speak with, sit with, and start conversations with people whom you do not know. • Offer to refill someone’s drink or clear their plate. • Encourage introductions: “There is someone whom I would love for you to meet . . .
Susan C. Young (The Art of Action: 8 Ways to Initiate & Activate Forward Momentum for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #4))
Mesolithic hearths likely did more than cook, warm and feed. They opened people to connections with each other, deepening the human social network. Studies of extant hunter-gatherer cultures show that campfires change the nature of human conversation. During the day talk is of economic matters, complaints or jokes. Around the fire the imagination opens and stories emerge. People talk of connections and rifts, of the spirit world, of kinship. Fire anneals the human community, joining strands. Our minds seem particularly attuned to the sounds of fire. Research shows the blood pressure of subjects drops and their sociability increases when the crackle of bring woods fills their ears. The sight of a soundless fire has little effect.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
No doubt what a raven, a bacterium, or a ponderosa pine sense in their worlds is radically different from what I perceive. These creatures also process what they sense in divergent ways. But such variations are not necessarily barriers to aesthetic and ethical judgment. Beauty is a property of networked relationships that might be heard through ears of peculiar and multifarious design.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
Instead, good and harmonious life—súmac káusai, alli káusai—should be “the goal or mission of every human effort.” Such a life emerges from ongoing “reciprocity and solidarity” within the human community and between the human community and the biodiversity and spirits of the forest of which people are a part. Western development destroys these relationships, imposing itself by “blood and fire.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
The belief that nature is an Other, a separate realm defiled by the unnatural mark of humans, is a denial of our own wild being. Emerging as they do from the evolved mental capacities of primates manipulating their environment, the concrete sidewalk, the spew of liquids from a paint factory, and the city documents that plan Denver’s growth are as natural as the patter of cottonwood leaves, the call of the young dipper to its kind, and the cliff swallow’s nest. Whether all these natural phenomena are wise, beautiful, just or good are different questions. Such puzzles are best resolved by beings who understand themselves to be nature. Muir said he walked “with” nature, and many conservation groups continue that narrative. Educators warn that if we spend too long on the wrong side of the divide, we’ll develop a pathology, the disorder of nature deficit. We can extend Muir’s thought and understand that we walk “within.” Nature needs no home; it is home. We can have no deficit of nature; we are nature, even when we are unaware of this nature. With the understanding that humans belong in this world, discernment of the beautiful and good can emerge from human minds networked within the community of life, not human minds peering in from the outside.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
People say Seattle is one of the toughest cities in which to make friends. They even have a name for it, the “Seattle freeze.” I’ve never experienced it myself, but coworkers claim it’s real and has to do with all the Scandinavian blood up here. Maybe it was difficult at first for Bernadette to fit in. But eighteen years later, to still harbor an irrational hatred of an entire city? I have a very stressful job, Dr. Kurtz. Some mornings, I’d arrive at my desk utterly depleted by having to endure Bernadette and her frothing. I finally started taking the Microsoft Connector to work. It was an excuse to leave the house an hour earlier to avoid the morning broadsides. I really did not intend for this letter to go on so long, but looking out airplane windows makes me sentimental. Let me jump to the incidents of yesterday which have prompted me to write.
Maria Semple (Where'd You Go, Bernadette)
It would be a mistake, however, to think that Connectors are the only people who matter in a social epidemic. Roger Horchow sent out a dozen faxes promoting his daughter's friend's new restaurant. But he didn't discover that restaurant. Someone else did and told him about it. At some point in the rise of Hush Puppies, the shoes were discovered by Connectors, who broadcast the return of Hush Puppies far and wide. but who told the Connectors about Hush Puppies? It's possible that Connectors learn about new information by an entirely random process, that because they know so many people they get access to new things wherever they pop up. If you look closely at social epidemics, however, it becomes clear that just as there are people we rely upon to connect us to other people, there are also people we rely upon to connect us with new information. There are people specialists, and there are information specialists.
Malcolm Gladwell
We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship. Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory. We are not, in the words of the folk hymn, wayfaring strangers traveling through this world. Nor are we the estranged creatures of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, fallen out of Nature into a “stagnant pool” of artifice where we misshape “the beauteous forms of things.” Our bodies and minds, our “Science and Art,” are as natural and wild as they ever were.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
An inventor's depth and breadth were measured by their work history. The U.S. Patent Trademark Office categorizes technology into four hundred fifty different classes -- exercise, devices, electrical connectors, marine propulsion, and myriad more. Specialists tended to have their patents in a narrow range of classes. A specialist might work for years only on understanding a type of plastic composed of a particular small group of chemical elements. Generalists, meanwhile, might start in masking tape, which would lead to a surgical adhesives project, which spawned an idea for veterinary medicine. Their patents were spread across many classes. The polymaths had depth in a core area -- so they had numerous patents in that area -- but they were not as deep as the specialists. They aslo had breadth, even more than the generalists, having worked across dozens of technology classes. Repeatedly, they took expertise accrued in one domain and applied it in a completely new one, which meant they were constantly learning new technologies. Over the course of their careers, the polymaths' breadth increased markedly as they learned about "the adjacent stuff," while they actually lost a modicum of depth.
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
We hear the rain not through silent falling water but in the many translations delivered by objects that the rain encounters. Like any language, especially one with so much to pour out and so many waiting interpreters, the sky’s linguistic foundations are expressed in an exuberance of form: downpours turn tin roofs into sheets of screaming vibration; rain smatters onto the wings of hundreds of bats, each drop shattering, then falling into the river below the bats’ skimming flight; heavy-misted clouds sag into treetops and dampen leaves without a drop falling, their touch producing the sound of an inked brush on a page.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
It is for his great mental faculties that I dread him," said he. "It is incalculable what evil such a person as he may do, if so disposed. There is a sublimity in his ideas, with which there is to me a mixture of terror; and, when he talks of religion, he does it as one that rather dreads its truths than reverences them. He, indeed, pretends great strictness of orthodoxy regarding some of the points of doctrine embraced by the reformed church; but you do not seem to perceive that both you and he are carrying these points to a dangerous extremity. Religion is a sublime and glorious thing, the bonds of society on earth, and the connector of humanity with the Divine nature; but there is nothing so dangerous to man as the wresting of any of its principles, or forcing them beyond their due bounds: this is of all others the readiest way to destruction. Neither is there anything so easily done. There is not an error into which a man can fall which he may not press Scripture into his service as proof of the probity of, and though your boasted theologian shunned the full discussion of the subject before me, while you pressed it, I can easily see that both you and he are carrying your ideas of absolute predestination, and its concomitant appendages, to an extent that overthrows all religion and revelation together; or, at least, jumbles them into a chaos, out of which human capacity can never select what is good. Believe me, Mr. Robert, the less you associate with that illustrious stranger the better, for it appears to me that your creed and his carries damnation on the very front of it.
James Hogg
A software architecture is defined by a configuration of architectural elements--components, connectors, and data--constrained in their relationships in order to achieve a desired set of architectural properties.
Anonymous
A configuration is the structure of architectural relationships among components, connectors, and data during a period of system run-time.
Anonymous
When you deliver first-class work as a volunteer, people will assume you deliver the same high-quality work in your professional life.
Judy Robinett (How to be a Power Connector (PB): The 5+50+100 Rule for Turning Your Business Network Into Profits)
they have experiences and insight that I don’t have. . . . You have to genuinely like people to make this work.
Judy Robinett (How to be a Power Connector (PB): The 5+50+100 Rule for Turning Your Business Network Into Profits)
To be a successful random connector, you must trust first and foremost—from the moment you leave your house each day—that the world is a friendly place.
David Topus (Talk to Strangers: How Everyday, Random Encounters Can Expand Your Business, Career, Income, and Life)
This is the first lesson of the Tipping Point. Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key areas. The Law of the Few says that Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen are responsible for starting word of mouth epidemics, which means that if you are interested in starting a word of mouth epidemic, your resources ought to be solely concentrated on those three groups. No one else matters.
Anonymous
I mouth “thank you” softly to the lake and its inhabitants for shaking me out of the doldrums of fatigue then turn up the Pacific Northwest Trail for one last climb to the connector trail that takes me back to the forest trails that lead to the bike path. It wasn’t my body, it was my mind that was tired. The pause at the lake took away the day’s fixation on being tired by reminding me that we are to see while out here—not just pass through.
John Morelock (Run Gently Out There: Trials, trails, and tribulations of running ultramarathons)
Be completely honest. Always own up to a mistake if you’ve made one. It’s more important to be nice than to be right. Forget about your ego, and look out for the feelings and welfare of your business associates and clients. Go the “extra mile” and “toil upward through the night” when necessary. Trust that if you put others first and do an honest job, you will rise to the top somewhere along the way. Never criticize anyone. Never burn bridges. People change—cut them some slack and be forgiving. But if you encounter someone who is not worthy of your trust and respect, politely and quietly disassociate yourself.           In the end, the most important thing will not be the titles you have held or the money you have made but the kind of person you have become.
Judy Robinett (How to be a Power Connector (PB): The 5+50+100 Rule for Turning Your Business Network Into Profits)
The connectors have gained the upper hand. We isolationists languish in the caves. Take
Ethan Canin (A Doubter's Almanac)
Skill is fine, and genius is splendid, but the right contacts are more valuable than either.
Judy Robinett (How to be a Power Connector (PB): The 5+50+100 Rule for Turning Your Business Network Into Profits)
Connectors do the difficult work of keeping it simple.
John C. Maxwell (Everyone Communicates, Few Connect: What the Most Effective People Do Differently)
we have discovered the data signature of what we consider the best type of team member. Some might call these individuals “natural leaders.” We call them “charismatic connectors.” Badge data show that these people circulate actively, engaging people in short, high-energy conversations. They are democratic with their time—communicating with everyone equally and making sure all team members get a chance to contribute. They’re not necessarily extroverts, although they feel comfortable approaching other people. They listen as much as or more than they talk and are usually very engaged with whomever they’re listening to. We call it “energized but focused listening.” The best team players also connect their teammates with one another and spread ideas around. And they are appropriately exploratory, seeking ideas from outside the group but not at the expense of group engagement. In a study of executives attending an intensive one-week executive education class at MIT, we found that the more of these charismatic connectors a team had, the more successful it was.
Harvard Business School Press (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Teams (with featured article "The Discipline of Teams," by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith))
it is a great honor to be a hanai person, as you are the reservoir that holds the lineage of two great families; you are the place and the person where they connect and become one extended family. It is a prestigious position to be the connector of two families.
Joyce Maguire Pavao (The Family of Adoption: Completely Revised and Updated)
Amazonian spiritualities grow from generations of pragmatic empiricism, connecting soil and imagination. In thinking about these spirits, our English words and ideas fail us, coming as they do from another place. The barrier to understanding was expressed most clearly by Mayer Rodriguez, an indigenous forest guide. He said that not only would we not believe his stories of spirits, but we could not understand. We can hear but the sounds will not penetrate. The resonance of understanding is not possible without lived, embodied relationship within the forest community.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
Every cell in the tree integrates information about the state of the internal environment of the needs then open or close to admit gases or release water vapor. Every cell inside the needle is making similar assessments and decisions, sending and receiving signals, modulating its behavior as it learns about and responds to the environment. When such processes run though animal nerves, we call them “behavior and thought”. If we broaden our definition and let drop the arbitrary requirement of the possession of nerves, then the balsam fir tree is a behaving and thinking creature. Indeed, the proteins that we vertebrate animals use to create the electrical gradients that enliven our nerves are closely related to the proteins in plant cells that cause similar electrical excitation. The signals in galvanized plant cells are languid-they take a minute or more to travel the length of a leaf, twenty times slower than nerve impulses in a human limb-but they perform a similar function as animal’s nerves, using pulses of electrical charge to communicate from one part of the plant to another. Plants have no brain to coordinate these signals, so plant thinking is diffuse, located in the connections among every cell.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
As the sounds of foraging birds tumble from the highest part of the trees, clinks and jangles emerge from the ground. A ruffed grouse struts out of a thicket of balsam fir and spruce seedlings. The bird’s steps are fox silent on the needles, and then crackle as its feet pass over the trail. My own footfall is like the grind and punch of walking on a sidewalk strewn with shattered glass. Even tree roots evoke sound. The swell of growing roots causes shards of rocks to click, a sound so quiet and soil-muffled that I detected it only with a probe nestled into the rocky ground. The brush of a fingertip on the probe is a roar compared with the tick of rocks nudged by roots. Some botanists suggest that the quiet sounds made by roots stimulate plant growth, but these claims are controversial. Too few human ears have attended to the soil’s chatter, and experimental evidence is ambiguous
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
A leaf is not just composed of plant cells, though. The waxy surface of leaves are peppered with fungal cells and leaf interiors are host to dozens of fungal cells. Fungi are closer kin to animals than they are to planet, gaining their food not from sunlight but by absorbing food into their bodies. The union melds two different parts of life’s family tree, yielding creatures whose physiology is nimble and many-skilled, both in leaves and the soil. A leaf populated with fungi is able to deter herbivores, kill pathogenic fungi, and withstand temperature extremes better than one composed only of plant cells. There may be one million species of leaf-dwelling (endophytic) fungi on the planet, making them one of the world’s most diverse groups of living creatures. Virginia Woolf wrote that the “real life” was the common life, not the “little separate lives which we live as individuals.” Her sketch of reality included trees and the sky alongside human sisters and brothers. What we now know of the nature of trees affirms her idea, not as metaphor but as incarnate reality.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
The cold not only bears down on human bodies, but also bends sound. The forest sits under an inversion, chilled air pooling under a warmer cap. The colder air is like molasses for sound waves, slowing them as they pass, causing them to lag sound travelling in higher, warmer air. The difference in speed turns the temperature gradient into a sound lens. Waves curve down. Sound energy , instead of dissipating in a three dimensional dome, is forced to spread in two dimensions, spilling across the ground, focusing its vigor on the surface. What would have been muffled, distant sounds leap closer, magnified by the jeweler’s icy loupe. The aggressive whine of the snowmobile mingles with the churr and chip of red squirrels and chickadees. Here are modern and ancient sunlight, manifest in the boreal soundscape. Squirrels nipping the buds of fir trees, chickadee poking for hidden seeds and insects, all powered by last summer’s photosynthesis; diesel and gasoline, sunlight squeezed and fermented for tens or hundreds of millions of years, now finally freed in an exultant engine roar. Nuclear fusion pounds its energy into my eardrums, courtesy of life’s irrepressible urge to turn sunlight into song.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
Imagined from within the abstractions of celestial geometry, water’s movement is orderly, imbued with mathematical elegance. Even with the overtones and ornaments of irregular shorelines and ocean depths are worked into the score, all seems harmonious; Earth and ocean are governed by the steady, predictable hand of the skies. No sunlight, no Moon. A storm pounds offshore. I hear nothing but the violence of water. A few waves hiss, most give a deeper complaint as they charge, then punch. Embayments and spits impede and deflect the assault, causing waves to turn on one another, releasing slaps so loud they resonate in my chest. Every few seconds, lightning cracks the dark: surf sliced by a giant oak that lies dead on the beach; spilling breakers overtopping beaten, limp palm crowns; sea spray so dense that the lightning fires the air with silver. Then darkness. At my feet, shudders emerge from what was steady ground. Waves slam into the knee-high escarpment that marks the highest edge of the beach; body-size fragments of soil cleave away; the roots that held the soil are entirely powerless. The moon presses the tide so tight against the land that spent waves have no room to run back before the next breaker arrives. By my clock, the tide is at its highest point, it should ease back soon, but my whole being tells me, you’re next. There is no celestial harmony but atonal panic, sensory tumult that overwashes all else. Not Newtonian elegance but Prospero’s rough magic and roaring war.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
As I sat through the summer days, listening and watching, I saw what an illusion this security of the dune seemed; even on a windless day at ebb tide, the dune was receding through the accumulation of thousands of tiny losses. The sand on the seaward edge of the dune banked at a sharp angle, running to the beach on one sweep from just below the dune’s peak. Sitting close, I heard this face whisper, a sibilant hesitation, only audible when the seethe of distant wavelets quieted for a few moments. The sound came from liquefied sand, patches of the slope that suddenly lost their grip and turned, in a instant, to fluid from granular solid. The sand hissed as it raced down the slope in narrow chutes. As the flows hit the beach, the sand huffed as it fanned. The slope looked uniform and solid, but gravity spoke otherwise and unlocked one cluster of grains then another. A beetle struggling up the slope unleashed dozens of slippages and a dangling blade of dune grass incised an arc below which the sand was all fallen away. In one afternoon, along a two meter stretch of beach front, the North American continent lost a bucketful of land to the action of beetle feet, grass blades and the fickle grip of sand grains. It took one year for storms and beetle feet to remove the dune. The sabal palm now stood at the top of the beach, still firmly planted among its companions, with just a few of its easternmost roots exposed.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
A graph of seal levels over the past five million years looks like a cross section through choppy surf. In yet deeper time, more than seventy million years ago, the height of this surf was magnificent. All of Florida and half of Georgia were shallow seas dotted with islands. The sabal palm’s ancestors likely grew on the sand of these beaches and islands with dinosaurs nibbling on their fruits. On the scale of thousands of years, sand behaves like water. A dune is a ripple. An island is a cresting wave. The sand water rolls, churns, and streams under the power of ocean and wind. Sabal palm is a surfer on those waves.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
Changing sea levels have refined the palm’s understanding of the coast, an understanding coded in its genes and its relationship with both its physical and biological companions. For the few seeds that successfully germinate and become trunked palm trees, the plants life span often spreads beyond the century mark. Exactly how long sabal palms can live is unknown. Their trunks leave no tree rings of accumulating dead tissues. Our best estimates, though, suggest that about one hundred generations separate the sabal palm on the St. Catherines dune from the palms that grew at the end of the Ice Age, along shorelines one hundred kilometers east of the modern coast.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
Thoreau left a record of his beachcombing for the “waste and wrecks of human art”. His gleanings and those of my student are protoarcheology, glances at cultural artifacts from two times. Cape Cod, 1849, 1850, 1855 Logs washed from the land (many) Wrecked boat lumber (abundant) Pebbles of brick (a few) Castile soap bars (not counted) Sand filled gloves (one pair) Rags (not counted) Arrowhead (one) Water soaked nutmegs (boatload) Items in fish stomachs (snuff boxes, knives, church membership cards, “jugs, jewels and Jonah” Box or barrel (one) Bottle, half full of ale (one) … St. Catherines Island wrack line, 2013-14, 160 square meters Blocks of buoyant plastic foam (163) Plastic drink bottles (12) Plastic pill bottle (1) Balloons, deflated, happy birthday (2) Just married (1) Air filled latex glove (1) Plastic 2 gallon juice jug with 75 barnacles attached (1) Flip flops, unmatched (2) Jar of may, half full, (1) Fishing buoy (1) Fragments of hard plastic (42) …
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
I’m in a copse of ponderosa pine on the edge of an alpine meadow in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. A story emerges from the scrolling graph of the electronic sound probe. The tree is quiet through the morning, signaling an orderly and abundant flow of water from root to needle. If the previous afternoon brought rain, the quiet is prolonged. The tree itself makes this rainfall more likely. Resinous tree aromas drift to the sky, where each molecule of aroma serves as a focal point for the aggregation of water. Ponderosa, like balsam fir and ceibo, seeds clouds with its perfumes, making rain a little more likely. After a rainless day, the root’s morning beverage is brought by the soil community, a moistening without the help of rain. At night tree roots and soil fungi conspire to defy gravity and draw up water from the deeper layers of soil. By noon, the graph tracking ultrasound inflects upward. The soil has dried with the long day’s exposure to dry air and high-altitude sunshine. The species that survive, the gold resting in this alpine crucible, are those who can be miserly with water (with multiple adaptations like the ponderosa.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)