Steven Erikson (Midnight Tides (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #5))
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If Hell is where nothing connects, then being in the field of English must be the key to heaven's door! We are in the business of finding connections--within texts, between texts and contexts, between texts and ourselves, between our readings and the readings of other interpreters.
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T.S. Eliot
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No matter what your job is, the key is your context, your beliefs about your responsibility to customers and the relationships you intend to enjoy or endure with them.
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Susan Scott (Fierce Leadership: A Bold Alternative to the Worst "Best" Practices of Business Today)
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Separate text from context and all that remains is a con.
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Stewart Stafford
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Commandment 2: Observing in context is key to understanding nonverbal behavior.
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Joe Navarro (What Every Body is Saying: An FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People)
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I thought it best, finally, to start seeing where I've been rather than where I'm going.
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David Ohle (The Age of Sinatra)
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To put Göbekli Tepe in context, its megaliths predate Stonehenge by at least six thousand years. They predate the first literate civilizations of Egypt, Sumer, India, and Crete by even more. Unearthing this kind of Stone Age sophistication so deep in our past is like finding out your great-grandparents have been secretly coding apps and trading cryptocurrency behind everyone’s back.
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Brian C. Muraresku (The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name)
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Mindfulness involves two key strategies for improving health: attention to context and attention to variability.
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Ellen J. Langer (Mindfulness (A Merloyd Lawrence Book))
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Life does not change if you only modify the content, your life will change if you will dare to alter the context.
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Santosh Kalwar
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Always remember, women care less about the content of what’s being communicated and more about the context (the how) of what’s being communicated. Never buy the lie that good communication is the key to a good relationship with out considering how and what you communicate. Women are naturally solipsistic. Your ‘feelings’ aren’t important to her until you make them important for her.
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Rollo Tomassi (The Rational Male)
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Time’s existence cannot be found between the tick and the tock of a clock. It is the language of life and, as such, is most powerfully felt in the context of human experience.
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Robert Lanza (Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe)
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I should have been put down at birth.
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Richard Dawkins (An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist)
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Good Heaven! That is enough to drive away all my pains; I could mount him with thirty balls in my body. On my soul, handsome stirrups!
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Alexandre Dumas (Les Trois Mousquetaires)
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He wanted me to play Scrabble with him, and kiss him as if I meant it.
This is one of the most bizarre things that's happened to me, ever.
Context is all.
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Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1))
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Family life is the normal context in which we can learn that a life filled with thinking about others instead of ourselves is the sure road to the most fulfilling joys and satisfactions.
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Alan Keyes
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Separateness" does not mean emotional distance, which is simply one means of managing anxiety or emotional intensity. Rather, separateness refers to the preservation of the "I" within the "we" - the ability to acknowledge and respect differences and to achieve authenticity within the context of connectedness.
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Harriet Lerner (The Dance of Intimacy: A Woman's Guide to Courageous Acts of Change in Key Relationships)
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It is no longer just engineers who dominate our technology leadership, because it is no longer the case that computers are so mysterious that only engineers can understand what they are capable of. There is an industry-wide shift toward more "product thinking" in leadership--leaders who understand the social and cultural contexts in which our technologies are deployed.
Products must appeal to human beings, and a rigorously cultivated humanistic sensibility is a valued asset for this challenge. That is perhaps why a technology leader of the highest status--Steve Jobs--recently credited an appreciation for the liberal arts as key to his company's tremendous success with their various i-gadgets.
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Damon Horowitz
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You know, Junie, you're fourteen now. I think you can certainly manage to put together a sandwich. ...
The thing is, if my mother had any idea what I had in my backpack, she would have made me that sandwich. If she knew that I'd searched and searched the house until I finally found the little key to the fireproof box buried in the bottom of her underwear drawer, if she knew that I'd unlocked the box and taken my passport out, that I had it with me right that very second in a Ziploc bag in the bottom of my backpack, if she knew why I had it there, if she knew even a bit of all that, she might have made me that PBJ. She wouldn't have said, "You're fourteen now," like she thought I was some kind of responsible adult. No. If she knew about my plan, she would have said, "you're only fourteen." She would have told me that I was crazy to think about going to England with I was only fourteen.
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Carol Rifka Brunt (Tell the Wolves I'm Home)
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Peter Koestenbaum also elaborated on the importance of others, particularly romantic lovers, in the existential context. Love is the choice to create and reflect each other mutually, verifying and illuminating each other's uniqueness because this is how we learn that we exist and who we are. A key theme of authentic love is resistance between, but welcoming of, two independent consciousness acting like positive and negative magnets within a single magnetic field.
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Skye Cleary (Existentialism and Romantic Love)
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Words are never good or bad on their own, context makes them so.
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Abhijit Naskar
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A structure located in the left and right sides of the brain, called the amygdala—a key hot spot for triggering strong emotions such as anger and rage, and linked to the fight-or-flight response—showed well over a 60 percent amplification in emotional reactivity in the participants who were sleep-deprived. In contrast, the brain scans of those individuals who were given a full night’s sleep evinced a controlled, modest degree of reactivity in the amygdala, despite viewing the very same images. It was as though, without sleep, our brain reverts to a primitive pattern of uncontrolled reactivity. We produce unmetered, inappropriate emotional reactions, and are unable to place events into a broader or considered context.
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Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams)
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The Mysteries are teachings that cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, but only by the deep mind made accessible in trance. They may be conveyed by an object—a shaft of wheat, as in the Eleusinian Mysteries—by a key phrase, or symbol. The secret itself may be meaningless when out of context: only within the framework of the ritual does it take on its illuminating power.
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Starhawk (The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religions of the Great Goddess)
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Choral reading opens up the possibility of using newspapers, magazines, all manner of high interest books, comic books, and personal letters…it makes reading accessible to adults and students who are completely unmotivated by the simplistic fare at their tested reading level. While participating in choral reading, the student repeatedly sees words in context. Repetition in context is a key to dyslexic reading. Practicing
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Yvonna Graham (Dyslexia Tool Kit for Tutors and Parents: What to do when phonics isn't enough)
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Developer Relations, and more broadly how we engage and build culture in communities, is a remarkably nuanced, complex, and context-specific discipline. There simply isn’t a one-shot recipe that works well for everyone.
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Mary Thengvall (The Business Value of Developer Relations: How and Why Technical Communities Are Key To Your Success)
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first, that co-created relationships of attachment are the key context for development; second, that preverbal experience makes up the core of the developing self; and third, that the stance of the self toward experience predicts attachment security better than the facts of personal history themselves.
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David J. Wallin (Attachment in Psychotherapy)
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I must always seem so reserved and remote to them. Once in a while they ask questions that seem to call for a statement of what the hell I'm always thinking about, but if I were to babble what's really on my mind about, say, the a priori presumption of the continuity of a motorcycle from second to second and do this without benefit of the entire edifice of the Chautauqua, they'd just be startled and wonder what's wrong. I really am interested in this continuity and the way we talk and think about it and so tend to get removed from the usual lunchtime situation and this gives an appearance of remoteness. It's a problem.
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Robert M. Pirsig (Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance and Siddhartha 2 Books Collection Set)
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I am giving you the key to get out of frustration. Listen! Any situation you are in, when you are frustrated, look in and find out ‘What must be the best thing in this situation for which I have aspired this situation in my past? Let me look from that context at this situation.’ You will see you are enjoying exactly what you wanted!
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Paramahamsa Nithyananda
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So from the context of 1 Thessalonians 5 I say that the key to “rejoice always” is to “pray without ceasing.” Lean on God all the time for the miracle of joy in your life. Never give up looking to him for help. Come to him repeatedly during the day and often. Make your default mental state a Godward longing for all that you need, especially for spiritual desires.
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John Piper
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[The Chinese here is tricky and a certain key word in the context it is used defies the best efforts of the translator. Tu Mu defines this word as “the measurement or estimation of distance.” But this meaning does not quite fit the illustrative simile in ss. 15. Applying this definition to the falcon, it seems to me to denote that instinct of SELF RESTRAINT which keeps the bird from swooping on its quarry until the right moment, together with the power of judging when the right moment has arrived. The analogous quality in soldiers is the highly important one of being able to reserve their fire until the very instant at which it will be most effective. When the “Victory” went into action at Trafalgar at hardly more than drifting pace, she was for several minutes exposed to a storm of shot and shell before replying with a single gun. Nelson coolly waited until he was within close range, when the broadside he brought to bear worked fearful havoc on the enemy’s nearest ships.] 14. Therefore the good fighter will be terrible in his onset, and prompt in his decision. [The word “decision” would have reference to the measurement of distance mentioned above, letting the enemy get near before striking. But I cannot help thinking that Sun Tzu meant to use the word in a figurative sense comparable to our own idiom “short and sharp.” Cf. Wang Hsi’s note, which after describing the falcon’s mode of attack, proceeds: “This is just how the ‘psychological moment’ should be seized in war.”]
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Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
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Shakespeare's plays do not present easy solutions. The audience has to decide for itself. King Lear is perhaps the most disturbing in this respect. One of the key words of the whole play is 'Nothing'. When King Lear's daughter Cordelia announces that she can say 'Nothing' about her love for her father, the ties of family love fall apart, taking the king from the height of power to the limits of endurance, reduced to 'nothing' but 'a poor bare forked animal'. Here, instead of 'readiness' to accept any challenge, the young Edgar says 'Ripeness is all'. This is a maturity that comes of learning from experience. But, just as the audience begins to see hope in a desperate and violent situation, it learns that things can always get worse:
Who is't can say 'I am at the worst?'
… The worst is not
So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'
Shakespeare is exploring and redefining the geography of the human soul, taking his characters and his audience further than any other writer into the depths of human behaviour. The range of his plays covers all the 'form and pressure' of mankind in the modern world. They move from politics to family, from social to personal, from public to private. He imposed no fixed moral, no unalterable code of behaviour. That would come to English society many years after Shakespeare's death, and after the tragic hypothesis of Hamlet was fulfilled in 1649, when the people killed the King and replaced his rule with the Commonwealth. Some critics argue that Shakespeare supported the monarchy and set himself against any revolutionary tendencies. Certainly he is on the side of order and harmony, and his writing reflects a monarchic context rather than the more republican context which replaced the monarchy after 1649.
It would be fanciful to see Shakespeare as foretelling the decline of the Stuart monarchy. He was not a political commentator. Rather, he was a psychologically acute observer of humanity who had a unique ability to portray his observations, explorations, and insights in dramatic form, in the richest and most exciting language ever used in the English theatre.
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Ronald Carter (The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland)
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Texts on a lifeless strings of facts, but the keys to unlocking the character of human beings, people with likes and dislikes, diocese and foibles, errors and convictions. Words have texture and shape, and it is their almost tactile quality that leads readers to sculpt images of the writers who use them. These images are then interrogated, mocked, congratulated, or dismissed, depending on the context of the reading and the disposition of the reader.
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Sam Wineburg
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The Bacchae left behind a thick trail of clues that we will begin exploring later in this book. Clues that lead to a magical version of Jesus: equal parts natural healer, initiator of mysteries, and concoctor of drugged wine. Unknown to many faithful today, it’s a version that places the founder of Christianity in the kind of detailed historical context that would have been self-evident to the earliest generations of Greek-speaking paleo-Christians.
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Brian C. Muraresku (The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name)
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The key context of this passage is that at this point in history, Jews and Samaritans hated each other. That means the love demonstrated by the Samaritan isn’t one of admiration, it’s one of determination. It’s the kind of love we would naturally show to ourselves even when we look in the mirror and don’t like what we see. It’s one defined by kindness, protection, and preservation. As C. S. Lewis says, “Love is not an affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s good as far as it can be obtained.
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Allie Beth Stuckey (You're Not Enough (and That's Ok): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love)
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What is our UN-VICE in the context of Disruption 3.0?
To sum up, UN-VICE is an updated way of capturing the state of the world. Framing the dynamics of systemic disruption as UNknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex, Exponential enables an empowering response. We are not helpless victims unable to make decisions. With UN-VICE, we have the power to shape our own futures.
KEY POINTS: OUR UN-VICE ACRONYM
- UNknown: Uncertainty becomes our comfort zone. Recognize you can’t know anything perfectly and many decisions are based on assumptions. Increased uncertainty lowers the value of advice and requires increased self-reliance. Learn how to respond regardless of the lack of precedents.
- Volatile: Harness change for gain. Our world, and change itself, is evolving faster than ever before. Volatility is not new; we simply can’t ignore its impact. In volatility, we see the shifting speed and texture of the changing environment.
- Intersecting: Everything connects to everything else. The broader our lens, the greater the insights gained from realizing how boundaries are disappearing.
- Complex: Notice emergent properties and adapt. In complex environments, inputs do not map clearly to outputs. Practitioners must acknowledge emergent properties and reconcile the immediate with the indefinite. Such systems require critical thinking, experimentation, and judgment. Evaluate emerging issues, build resiliency, and learn to adapt to expanding complexity.
- Exponential: Pay attention to nonlinear types of change that increase in growth rate. Notice rapid acceleration of seemingly small shifts. Monitoring early on will mean fewer surprises.
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Roger Spitz (Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World)
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Synergy refers to the interaction of elements that when combined produce a total effect that is greater than the sum of the individual elements. In the context of your business, consider how a team can put forth a collaborative effort that exceeds an individual’s output. Now on task, you may begin to share the key parts of your plan with the pillars of your business or family. Embrace the opportunity and be enthusiastic as you are assigning responsibilities. Everyone needs to have a “paddle in the canoe” and work in synchronicity to achieve the desired outcome.
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Tony Carlton (Evolve: Your Path. Your Time. Your Shine. (The Power of Evolving))
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Suggested outline of a strategy document Once you have devised the strategy, you’ll need to explain it to the organisation by writing a strategy document. Below are the key elements it should contain: Where the organisation has come from The successes it has achieved thus far The changing environment and context in which it operates The vision for the future The unique role that the organisation plays The specific strategies that will get it there The timelines The challenges How you’ll measure success The role the organisation’s people play The role of the support functions
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Jennifer Geary (How to be a Chief Operating Officer: 16 Disciplines for Success (How to be a...))
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Jesus came preaching, “The reign of God is at hand; repent, therefore, and believe the good news.” The good news of what God has for us is so good that the contrast with present actuality convinces us we need to repent; the good news is so forgiving that we are freed to be honest about where we need to repent; the judgment involved is so serious that we need to be serious about repentance. Therefore, a key move in a Christian ethics patterned after Jesus is to listen carefully to criticisms and learn from them. Christian ethics is continuous learning, transformational repenting, making corrections and growing in Christ.
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Glen H. Stassen (Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context)
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Each of the eight scales represents one key area that managers must be aware of, showing how cultures vary along a spectrum from one extreme to its opposite. The eight scales are: • Communicating: low-context vs. high-context • Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs. indirect negative feedback • Persuading: principles-first vs. applications-first • Leading: egalitarian vs. hierarchical • Deciding: consensual vs. top-down • Trusting: task-based vs. relationship-based • Disagreeing: confrontational vs. avoids confrontation • Scheduling: linear-time vs. flexible-time
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Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
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What is the meaning of the phrase “shall be bound in heaven... shall be loosed in heaven?” Williams, the Bible translator, points out for us that the verb form is the perfect passive participle, so the reference is to things in a state of having been already forbidden (or permitted). This tells us that whatever is bound or loosed by the believer is done on the basis that it has already been done “in heaven,” i.e. by the Lord himself. What is it, then, that the Lord has already bound and which he has given us power to bind again? Jesus teaches us: Or else how can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil his house. Matt. 12:29 The context of this passage finds Jesus casting out demons. His authority for thus doing is challenged by the religious authorities. They accuse him of doing it by the power of the devil himself. Jesus is explaining that he is able to control demon spirits and make them obey him because he has already bound the strong man — Satan. The fact that the demons obey Him is evidence of Satan being bound. Satan is already bound “in heaven” — by heaven’s power. His power is broken. The key is given to us. We have power over him, too. Amen! The Greek word for “bind” in the passage before us is deo. It means to fasten or tie — as with chains, as an animal tied to keep it from straying. This is glorious! When Satan is bound he is made inoperable. He loses his ability to act against us.
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Frank Hammond (Pigs in the Parlor: The Practical Guide to Deliverance)
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Doubt is crucial in science—in the version we call curiosity or healthy skepticism, it drives science forward—but it also makes science vulnerable to misrepresentation, because it is easy to take uncertainties out of context and create the impression that everything is unresolved. This was the tobacco industry's key insight: that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge."
...Individual clinicians cannot single-handedly combat this kind of antiscience, a climate that has only been fostered by some political and religious leaders and by the social media. But at the very least, we can make our patients aware of the forces at play and the mind games that such merchants of doubt employ.
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John Halamka (The Transformative Power of Mobile Medicine: Leveraging Innovation, Seizing Opportunities and Overcoming Obstacles of mHealth)
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What emerged for me as purpose was the search for and cultivation of possibilities for experiencing meaningful human transactions in different languages and across cultural differences through play, sports, travel, food, literature, and conversation. I sought to establish relations of mutual understanding and love with people no matter what their culture or place of origin in the world—relations based on philia, eros, and agape, according to context and persons. I perhaps sensed instinctively that such relations were the key to being equally at home everywhere, even in la Yunai. More than an immigrant, at that time I still felt myself to be a sojourner in this country, but I wanted my sojourn to be imbued with the meaning found in earnest, sincere connections with the people and places that life brought to my experience.
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Daniel G. Campos (Loving Immigrants in America: An Experiential Philosophy of Personal Interaction (American Philosophy Series))
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WE’RE GOOD AT WRONG SPOTTING If you’ve ever received feedback at work—or had an in-law—you are familiar with the many shapes and sizes of wrong: It’s 2 + 2 = 5 wrong: It is literally incorrect. I could not have been rude at that meeting because I was not at that meeting. And my name is not Mike. It’s different-planet wrong: Somewhere in the universe there may exist a carbon-based life form that would have taken offense at my e-mail, but here on Earth everyone knows it was a joke. It used to be right: Your critique of my marketing plan is based on how marketing worked when you were coming up. Before the Internet. And electricity. It’s right according to the wrong people: Some see me that way, but next time, talk to at least one person who is not on my Personal Enemies List. Your context is wrong: I do yell at my assistant. And he yells at me. That’s how our relationship works—key word being “works.” It’s right for you, but wrong for me: We have different body types. Armani suits flatter you. Hoodies flatter me. The feedback is right, but not right now: It’s true that I could lose a few pounds—which I will do as soon as the quintuplets are out of the house. Anyway, it’s unhelpful: Telling me to be a better mentor isn’t helping me to be a better mentor. What kind of mentor are you anyway? Why is wrong spotting so easy? Because there’s almost always something wrong—something the feedback giver is overlooking, shortchanging, or misunderstanding. About you, about the situation, about the constraints you’re under. And givers compound the problem by delivering feedback that is vague, making it easy for us to overlook, shortchange, and misunderstand what they are saying. But in the end, wrong spotting not only defeats wrong feedback, it defeats learning.
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Douglas Stone (Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well)
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Language can often seem abstract and transcendent of the body, the world, and even time itself. But language is more closely tied to your body mandala than you may realize, especially where its acquisition during childhood is concerned. If you read the verb “lick,” your tongue area will light up. If you hear someone say “kick,” it activates your leg areas. Christian Keysers, a mirror neuron researcher at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands, says that mirror neurons may very well be a key precursor to abstract thought and language. For example, he explains, you use the word “break” as a verb as in “I see you break the peanut, I hear you break the peanut, and I break the peanut.” The constant is the mental simulation of breaking even though the context varies in each case. So your body is the foundational source of meaning—not just of words and actions but even the meanings of things you learn about through your eyes, ears, and bodily experience.
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Sandra Blakeslee (The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better)
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Trauma symptoms themselves can become drivers of cycles of violence. Hyper-vigilance exxagerates survivors' sense of threat-so that a minimal threat can legitimately feel like a substantial and potentially even life-threatening one. How endangered one feels depends in part on the baseline of danger that exists. So for survivors who are hurt in the context of relative safety, their exaggerated sense of danger may result in simple self-protective actions like crossing the street when they get a bad feeling about someone approaching, holding their keys as they approach their apartment, or carrying pepper spray in their bag. For people who live where there is a more widespread, regular threat of violence, where day in and day out, they are making decisions that will affect whether or not they get home safe and alive, perceiving threats as more immediate than they are may mean that the self-protective actions people choose are graver. Not all survivors cope in this way, but many do.
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Danielle Sered (Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair)
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Artists and designers have a largely shared skill set and knowledge base but the work they create, however indistinguishable in terms of technique, subject matter and visual language, is made for entirely different reasons. Attempts to define or make clear distinctions between art and design are always contestable, but at the beginning of a diagnostic process it is useful to identify a simple delineation between the two:
Art
An artist's practice generally emerges from their own individual concerns explored over varying durations in the studio. The work is then usually presented to a knowing public either in galleries or in designated public spaces.
Design
Design is largely initiated externally from the needs or desires of a client or external body. The functionality of the designed solution is as important as its desirability, craft and aesthetics.
Design is in the public domain and, as such, its messages, meanings and functions are inextricably linked to the political, social and economic concerns of its audience/ user and its context.
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Lucy Alexander (The Central Saint Martins Guide to Art & Design: Key lessons from the word-renowned Foundation course)
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Unnecessary Creation gives you the freedom to explore new possibilities and follow impractical curiosities. Some of the most frustrated creative pros I’ve encountered are those who expect their day job to allow them to fully express their creativity and satisfy their curiosity. They push against the boundaries set by their manager or client and fret continuously that their best work never finds its way into the end product because of restrictions and compromises. A 2012 survey sponsored by Adobe revealed that nearly 75 percent of workers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan felt they weren’t living up to their creative potential. (In the United States, the number was closer to 82 percent!) Obviously, there’s a gap between what many creatives actually do each day and what they feel they are capable of doing given more resources or less bureaucracy. But those limitations aren’t likely to change in the context of an organization, where there is little tolerance for risk and resources are scarcer than ever. If day-to-day project work is the only work that you are engaging in, it follows that you’re going to get frustrated. To break the cycle, keep a running list of projects you’d like to attempt in your spare time, and set aside a specific time each week (or each day) to make progress on that list. Sometimes this feels very inefficient in the moment, especially when there are so many other urgent priorities screaming for your attention, but it can be a key part of keeping your creative energy flowing for your day-to-day work. You’ll also want to get a notebook to record questions that you’d like to pursue, ideas that you have, or experiments that you’d like to try. Then you can use your pre-defined Unnecessary Creation time to play with these ideas. As Steven Johnson explains in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, “A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness. A new idea is a network of cells exploring the adjacent possible of connections that they can make in your mind.”18
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Jocelyn K. Glei (Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind)
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You can change your patterns. You can change your roles, but you can only do that by altering your environment—whether that means having frank conversations to reestablish boundaries and expectations, or whether that means physically separating yourself from certain individuals or places. If you remain stuck in the same roles and patterns, it doesn’t matter how much willpower you exert; your efforts will continue to be confined within the limiting context of your role. You’ll remain hostage to a context that you mistakenly believe to be fixed identity. But you absolutely can change your roles, even abruptly and dramatically. People mistakenly believe they must be fully qualified to take on a particular role. But this is false. You actually become qualified through the role itself. For example, when Lauren and I became foster parents, we didn’t have any parenting experience. Sure, I read several books on the topic, many with smart ideas and innovative solutions to try. But theory and experience are two radically different things. I imagine all first-time parents go through a similar trajectory—you learn through doing.
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Benjamin P. Hardy (Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success)
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How many thefts have there been?’ I asked.
‘That depends on how you define it,’ said Adrian.
Because material went missing off sites all the time, which is why important finds were collated and secured the day they were found.
Important in archaeological terms not always being the same as valuable – at least not in the fenceable sense. Archaeology came in all shapes, sizes, and apparent degrees of nickableness.
‘We wouldn’t have even noticed some of the thefts if they hadn’t been important to the context,’ said Adrian.
Context being the key concept of modern scientific archaeology, and what separates your modern professional from the fumbling archivists and swivel-eyed tomb raiders of the past. It’s a religion they share with scene of crime technicians and it had been drummed into me from my first day at Hendon.
Context – where you find an object – is more important than the actual object. In policing it’s whether the broken glass is on the inside or the outside. In archaeology it’s whether that datable coin is found in the wall foundations or its demolition infill. You can live without the coin, but you need the dating information.
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Ben Aaronovitch (Lies Sleeping (Rivers of London, #7))
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Looking back on all my interviews for this book, how many times in how many different contexts did I hear about the vital importance of having a caring adult or mentor in every young person’s life? How many times did I hear about the value of having a coach—whether you are applying for a job for the first time at Walmart or running Walmart? How many times did I hear people stressing the importance of self-motivation and practice and taking ownership of your own career or education as the real differentiators for success? How interesting was it to learn that the highest-paying jobs in the future will be stempathy jobs—jobs that combine strong science and technology skills with the ability to empathize with another human being? How ironic was it to learn that something as simple as a chicken coop or the basic planting of trees and gardens could be the most important thing we do to stabilize parts of the World of Disorder? Who ever would have thought it would become a national security and personal security imperative for all of us to scale the Golden Rule further and wider than ever? And who can deny that when individuals get so super-empowered and interdependent at the same time, it becomes more vital than ever to be able to look into the face of your neighbor or the stranger or the refugee or the migrant and see in that person a brother or sister? Who can ignore the fact that the key to Tunisia’s success in the Arab Spring was that it had a little bit more “civil society” than any other Arab country—not cell phones or Facebook friends? How many times and in how many different contexts did people mention to me the word “trust” between two human beings as the true enabler of all good things? And whoever thought that the key to building a healthy community would be a dining room table? That’s why I wasn’t surprised that when I asked Surgeon General Murthy what was the biggest disease in America today, without hesitation he answered: “It’s not cancer. It’s not heart disease. It’s isolation. It is the pronounced isolation that so many people are experiencing that is the great pathology of our lives today.” How ironic. We are the most technologically connected generation in human history—and yet more people feel more isolated than ever. This only reinforces Murthy’s earlier point—that the connections that matter most, and are in most short supply today, are the human-to-human ones.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
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The story of the Internet's origins departs from the explanations of technical innovation that center on individual inventors or on the pull of markets. Cerf and Kahn were neither captains of industry nor "two guys tinkering in a garage." The Internet was not built in response to popular demand, real or imagined; its subsequent mass appeal had no part in the decisions made in 1973. Rather, the project reflected the command economy of military procurement, where specialized performance is everything and money is no object, and the research ethos of the university, where experimental interest and technical elegance take precedence over commercial application. This was surely an unlikely context for the creation of what would become a popular and profitable service. Perhaps the key to the Internet's later commercial success was that the project internalized the competitive forces of the market by bringing representatives of diverse interest groups together and allowing them to argue through design issues. Ironically, this unconventional approach produced a system that proved to have more appeal for potential "customers"—people building networks—than did the overtly commercial alternatives that appeared soon after.
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Janet Abbate (Inventing the Internet (Inside Technology))
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key principle of their navigation, Bruno had explained, was an inversion of movement: destinations arrived toward sailors, rather than sailors moving toward destinations. This concept of seafaring was called etak, Bruno had instructed, or “moving island”—in which a sailor in a canoe traveling the open ocean, whether standing with his legs apart feeling wave-swell, or seated and rowing, or seated and not rowing, this sailor was himself stationary, while waves and the occasional landmass flowed past his boat. These sailors weren’t stupid, Bruno had said. They knew they were not actually standing still. They were employing a special form of cognition, a skill that was crucial to getting somewhere. You and I, Bruno had said, don’t live in their world. Our own earth, our version of it, is fitted with Cartesian coordinates, a straitjacket of plumb lines and cross-stitches. The sky is no longer visible in most places. Our stars have been replaced by satellites, whose clocks tell atomic time. With GPS you can know your location without looking out the window, he had said. You can know your location without knowing your location. You can know things without knowing anything. We often proceed as if we know things without a sense of what knowledge even is, Bruno had said. The earth is turning, for instance: sure, we know that because we’ve memorized it. But our knowledge of the earth’s turn is false, it is knowledge without context, disconnected from the rest of the universe. When the sun rises, we think it’s rising. When it sets, we think it’s setting.
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Rachel Kushner (Creation Lake)
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The game within the game is the game that only the players see. They experience it in relation to one another on the floor at a particular time and in the middle of the action. It is one of the nuances of the game of basketball.
As Knick teammates during those years, we knew what a teammate was going to do almost before he did it. We helped one another on defense and shared the ball on offense. We made room for each of us to be his best within the context of the team. For example, I often would see Clyde come down the floor with the ball. I'd catch his eye. I knew he wanted to go down my side of the floor. In order to give him a little more room to move, I would clear out. That way I didn't clog up his space. Or, when I had the ball on the side and he was at the top of the key, waiting to go backdoor, our center knew he had to move to the other side of the floor to create the room for the backdoor bounce pass from me to Clyde who was moving down the lane toward the basket. That was the game within the game. On one level, the game within the game was a matter of mechanics but is also operated on a psychological level in that we truly were all for one and one for all. We challenged one another in practice to become better. We helped one another come back from defeat. We inspired one another to reach our peak team performance. None of us felt we could be as good alone as all of us could be together. Our unity came sometimes with laughs, sometimes with conflicts, sometimes with moments of collective insight, but it was that spirit of camaraderie which brought us together in a way that allowed the fans to see something very special.
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Walt Frazier (The Game Within the Game)
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There are three key things that matter in having a voice: audibility, credibility, and consequence. Audibility means that you can be heard, that you have not been pressed into silence or kept out of the areas of where you can speak or write or denied the education to do so or in the age of social media, been harassed and threatened and driven off the platform as so many have. Credibility means that when you get into those arenas, people are willing to believe you, by which I don't mean that women never lie, but that stories should be measured on their own terms and context, rather than patriarchy's insistence that women are categorically unqualified to speak. Emotional, rather than rational. Vindictive, incoherent, delusional, manipulative. Unfit to be heeded. Those things often shouted over a women in the process of saying something challenging. Though now death threat are used as a short-cut, and some of those threats are carried out. Notably with women who leave their abusers, because silencing can be conversational or can be premeditated murder. To be a person of consequence is to matter. If you matter, you have rights, and your words serve those rights. And give you the power to bear witness, make agreements, set boundaries. If you have consequence, your words possess the authority to determine what does and does not happen to you. The power that underlies the concept of consent as part of equality in self-determination. Even legally, women's words have lacked consequence. And only in a few scattered places on earth, could women vote before the 20th century, and not so many decades ago, women rarely became lawyers and judges.
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Rebecca Solnit (Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir)
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The empowerment triangle turns drama upside-down, transforming the persecutor (or scapegoat) into a challenger, the rescuer into a coach, and the victim into a creator. The empowerment dynamic allows all the roles to be essential for growth. In the drama triangle, the persecutor works with issues of power, the rescuer works with issues of responsibility, and the victim works with area of vulnerability: The drama triangle is familiar to many of us. We all know this pattern inside ourselves. We get stuck in a situation that we want to escape, and it creates drama. By leaning into the dynamic and entering deeper into relationship, we can work the energy so that it becomes an enriching transformation. If you can work this in a group, then you’ve subdued the scapegoat archetype and turned it into something more life affirming. The most important thing about the drama triangle is to make people aware of it. When a group can understand and recognize how this is a kind of destructive pattern, it becomes empowered to change the pattern. Uncoupling drama from our organizational and personal lives is the key. The group as a whole can embody a role to create safety and make sense of the system. Transformation from the drama to the redeemed starts with a pause, then an inquiry of what’s happening here, then a recollection of the three roles and who is playing what role in this context. Once the system is self-aware, ask the questions: “what else is possible? How can I become so centered that something new can happen? How can a new perception take place?” With enough safety and connection, the group will be able to follow the healing energy into re-organization and re-integration of the parts. Claiming or remembering your own archetype can protect against falling into one.
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Mukara Meredith (Matrixworks: A Life-Affirming Guide to Facilitation Mastery and Group Genius)
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The Delusion of Lasting Success promises that building an enduring company is not only achievable but a worthwhile objective. Yet companies that have outperformed the market for long periods of time are not just rare, they are statistical artifacts that are observable only in retrospect. Companies that achieved lasting success may be best understood as having strung together many short-term successes. Pursuing a dream of enduring greatness may divert attention from the pressing need to win immediate battles.
The Delusion of Absolute Performance diverts our attention from the fact that success and failure always take place in a competitive environment. It may be comforting to believe that our success is entirely up to us, but as the example of Kmart demonstrated, a company can improve in absolute terms and still fall further behind in relative terms. Success in business means doing things better than rivals, not just doing things well. Believing that performance is absolute can cause us to take our eye off rivals and to avoid decisions that, while risky, may be essential for survival given the particular context of our industry and its competitive dynamics.
The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick lets us confuse causes and effects, actions and outcomes. We may look at a handful of extraordinarily successful companies and imagine that doing what they did can lead to success — when it might in fact lead mainly to higher volatility and a lower overall chance of success. Unless we start with the full population of companies and examine what they all did — and how they all fared — we have an incomplete and indeed biased set of information.
The Delusion of Organizational Physics implies that the business world offers predictable results, that it conforms to precise laws. It fuels a belief that a given set of actions can work in all settings and ignores the need to adapt to different conditions: intensity of competition, rate of growth, size of competitors, market concentration, regulation, global dispersion of activities, and much more. Claiming that one approach can work everywhere, at all times, for all companies, has a simplistic appeal but doesn’t do justice to the complexities of business.
These points, taken together, expose the principal fiction at the heart of so many business books — that a company can choose to be great, that following a few key steps will predictably lead to greatness, that its success is entirely of its own making and not dependent on factors outside its control.
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Philip M. Rosenzweig (The Halo Effect: How Managers let Themselves be Deceived)
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[A] central theme is why social, political, and economic institutions tend to coevolve in a manner that reinforces rather than undermines one another. The welfare state is not 'politics against markets,' as commonly assumed, but politics with markets. Although it is popular to think that markets, especially global ones, interfere with the welfare state, and vice versa, this notion is simply inconsistent with the postwar record of actual welfare state development. The United States, which has a comparatively small welfare state and flexible labor markets, has performed well in terms of jobs and growth during the past two decades; however, before then the countries with the largest welfare states and the most heavily regulated labor markets exceeded those in the United States on almost any gauge of economic competitiveness and performance.
Despite the change in economic fortunes, the relationship between social protection and product market strategies continues to hold. Northern Europe and Japan still dominate high-quality markets for machine tools and consumer durables, whereas the United States dominates software, biotech, and other high-tech industries. There is every reason that firms and governments will try to preserve the institutions that give rise to these comparative advantages, and here the social protection system (broadly construed to include job security and protection through the industrial relations system) plays a key role. The reason is that social insurance shapes the incentives workers and firms have for investing in particular types of skills, and skills are critical for competitive advantage in human-capital-intensive economies. Firms do not develop competitive advantages in spite of systems of social protection, but because of it.
Continuing this line of argument, the changing economic fortunes of different welfare production regimes probably has very little to do with growing competitive pressure from the international economy. To the contrary, it will be argued in Chapter 6 that the main problem for Europe is the growing reliance on services that have traditionally been closed to trade. In particular, labor-intensive, low-productivity jobs do not thrive in the context of high social protection and intensive labor-market regulation, and without international trade, countries cannot specialize in high value-added services. Lack of international trade and competition, therefore, not the growth of these, is the cause of current employment problems in high-protection countries.
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Torben Iversen (Capitalism, Democracy, and Welfare (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics))
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In a Harvard Business Review article titled “Do Women Lack Ambition?” Anna Fels, a psychiatrist at Cornell University, observes that when the dozens of successful women she interviewed told their own stories, “they refused to claim a central, purposeful place.” Were Dr. Fels to interview you, how would you tell your story? Are you using language that suggests you’re the supporting actress in your own life? For instance, when someone offers words of appreciation about a dinner you’ve prepared, a class you’ve taught, or an event you organized and brilliantly executed, do you gracefully reply “Thank you” or do you say, “It was nothing”? As Fels tried to understand why women refuse to be the heroes of their own stories, she encountered the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, which confirms that society considers a woman to be feminine only within the context of a relationship and when she is giving something to someone. It’s no wonder that a “feminine” woman finds it difficult to get in the game and demand support to pursue her goals. It also explains why she feels selfish when she doesn’t subordinate her needs to others. A successful female CEO recently needed my help. It was mostly business-related but also partly for her. As she started to ask for my assistance, I sensed how difficult it was for her. Advocate on her organization’s behalf? Piece of cake. That’s one of the reasons her business has been successful. But advocate on her own behalf? I’ll confess that even among my closest friends I find it painful to say, “Look what I did,” and so I don’t do it very often. If you want to see just how masterful most women have become at deflecting, the next time you’re with a group of girlfriends, ask them about something they (not their husband or children) have done well in the past year. Chances are good that each woman will quickly and deftly redirect the conversation far, far away from herself. “A key type of discrimination that women face is the expectation that feminine women will forfeit opportunities for recognition,” says Fels. “When women do speak as much as men in a work situation or compete for high-visibility positions, their femininity is assailed.” My point here isn’t to say that relatedness and nurturing and picking up our pom-poms to cheer others on is unimportant. Those qualities are often innate to women. If we set these “feminine” qualities aside or neglect them, we will have lost an irreplaceable piece of ourselves. But to truly grow up, we must learn to throw down our pom-poms, believing we can act and that what we have to offer is a valuable part of who we are. When we recognize this, we give ourselves permission to dream and to encourage the girls and women
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Whitney Johnson (Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream)
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Ellen Braun, an accomplished agile manager, noticed that different behaviors emerge over time as telltale signs of a team’s emotional maturity, a key component in their ability to adjust as things happen to them and to get to the tipping point when “an individual’s self interest shifts to alignment with the behaviors that support team achievement” (Braun 2010). It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. —James Thurber Team Dynamics Survey Ellen created a list of survey questions she first used as personal reflection while she observed teams in action. Using these questions the same way, as a pathway to reflection, an agile coach can gain insight into potential team problems or areas for emotional growth. Using them with the team will be more insightful, perhaps as material for a retrospective where the team has the time and space to chew on the ideas that come up. While the team sprints, though, mull them over on your own, and notice what they tell you about team dynamics (Braun 2010). • How much does humor come into day-to-day interaction within the team? • What are the initial behaviors that the team shows in times of difficulty and stress? • How often are contradictory views raised by team members (including junior team members)? • When contradictory views are raised by team members, how often are they fully discussed? • Based on the norms of the team, how often do team members compromise in the course of usual team interactions (when not forced by circumstances)? • To what extent can any team member provide feedback to any other team member (think about negative and positive feedback)? • To what extent does any team member actually provide feedback to any other team member? • How likely would it be that a team member would discuss issues with your performance or behavior with another team member without giving feedback to you directly (triangulating)? • To what extent do you as an individual get support from your team on your personal career goals (such as learning a new skill from a team member)? • How likely would you be to ask team members for help if it required your admission that you were struggling with a work issue? • How likely would you be to share personal information with the team that made you feel vulnerable? • To what extent is the team likely to bring into team discussions an issue that may create conflict or disagreement within the team? • How likely or willing are you to bring into a team discussion an issue that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view? • If you bring an item into a team discussion that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view, how often does the team reach a consensus that takes into consideration all points of view and feels workable to you? • Can you identify an instance in the past two work days when you felt a sense of warmth or inclusion within the context of your team? • Can you identify an instance in the past two days when you felt a sense of disdain or exclusion within the context of your team? • How much does the team make you feel accountable for your work? Mulling over these questions solo or posing them to the team will likely generate a lot of raw material to consider. When you step back from the many answers, perhaps one or two themes jump out at you, signaling the “big things” to address.
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Lyssa Adkins (Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition)
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The centre of the conception of wisdom in the Bible is the Book of Ecclesiastes, whose author, or rather, chief editor, is sometimes called Koheleth, the teacher or preacher. Koheleth transforms the conservatism of popular wisdom into a program of continuous mental energy. Those who have unconsciously identified a religious attitude either with illusion or with mental indolence are not safe guides to this book, although their tradition is a long one. Some editor with a “you’d better watch out” attitude seems to have tacked a few verses on the end suggesting that God trusts only the anti-intellectual, but the main author’s courage and honesty are not to be defused in this way. He is “disillusioned” only in the sense that he has realized that an illusion is a self-constructed prison. He is not a weary pessimist tired of life: he is a vigorous realist determined to smash his way through every locked door of repression in his mind. Being tired of life is in fact the only mental handicap for which he has no remedy to suggest. Like other wise men, he is a collector of proverbs, but he applies to all of them his touchstone and key word, translated in the AV [the Authorized Version] as “vanity.” This word (hebel) has a metaphorical kernel of fog, mist, or vapour, a metaphor that recurs in the New Testament (James 4:14). It this acquires a derived sense of “emptiness,” the root meaning of the Vulgate’s vanitas. To put Koheleth’s central intuition into the form of its essential paradox: all things are full of emptiness.
We should not apply a ready-made disapproving moral ambience to this word “vanity,” much less associate it with conceit. It is a conception more like the shunyata or “void” of Buddhist though: the world as everything within nothingness. As nothing is certain or permanent in the world, nothing either real or unreal, the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal. All goals and aims may cheat us, but if we run away from them we shall find ourselves bumping into them. We may feel that saint is a “better” man than a sinner, and that all of our religious and moral standards would crumble into dust if we did not think so; but the saint himself is most unlikely to take such a view. Similarly Koheleth went through a stage in which he saw that wisdom was “better” than folly, then a stage in which he saw that there was really no difference between them as death lies in wait for both and finally realized that both views were equally “vanity”. As soon as we renounce the expectation of reward, in however, refined a guise, for virtue or wisdom, we relax and our real energies begin to flow into the soul. Even the great elegy at the end over the failing bodily powers of old age ceases to become “pessimistic” when we see it as part of the detachment with which the wise man sees his life in the context of vanity.
We take what comes: there is no choice in the matter, hence no point in saying “we should take what comes.” We soon realize by doing so that there is a cyclical rhythm in nature. But, like other wheels, this is a machine to be understood and used by man. If it is true that the sun, the seasons, the waters, and human life itself go in cycles, the inference is that “there is a time for all things,” something different to be done at each stage of the cycle. The statement “There is nothing new under the sun” applies to wisdom but not to experience , to theory but not to practice. Only when we realize that nothing is new can we live with an intensity in which everything becomes new.
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Northrop Frye (The Great Code: The Bible and Literature)
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Delusional beliefs are key symptoms of mental illness, and physicians over hundreds of years have attempted to understand and offer treatments for patients with such beliefs.
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Lisa Bortolotti (Delusions in Context)
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As a guide, then, the key question of explore is: What does this story say about who God is or what God does? As you explore a story, you might do the following: • Read, paraphrase, or listen to a Bible story. • Look for who God is and what God is like. • Offer a key detail about the context of the story to help it make more sense in our time. • Invite interruptions from your kid and encourage their questions. • Notice the emotions of God and the humans at different points along the way. • See if you can connect pieces of this story to other stories in the Bible. • Try asking one question, such as: ○ What was your favorite part of this story? ○ What was the strangest part of this story to you? ○ How do you think people felt at the beginning, the middle, and the end? ○ What did you notice about who God is or what God’s like in this story?
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Meredith Miller (Woven: Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn't Have to Heal From)
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The supervisory relationship provides the context and the environment wherein the learning process takes place and lays the foundation for the work that will occur in supervision. The quality of the working relationship between the supervisee and supervisor is one of the key components determining the outcomes of clinical supervision. The effectiveness of these relational interactions largely depends on the kind of person the supervisor is and his or her ability to establish and maintain a good connection with the supervisee.
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Evangeline Willms Thiessen (A Clinical Supervision Training Handbook: Becoming a Reflective Systemic Supervisor)
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One of the key lessons to draw from Bazalgette’s sewers is that successful long-term planning needs to be based on building adaptability, flexibility, and resilience into the original design. In his book How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand points out that the most long-lasting buildings are those that can “learn” by adapting to new contexts over time: They can accommodate different users or be easily extended, retrofitted, or upgraded. He draws an analogy with biology: “The more adapted an organism to present conditions, the less adaptable it can be to unknown future conditions.”24 This is exactly where the London sewers were exemplary. By making the tunnels double the size needed at the time, Bazalgette designed long-term adaptability into the system, just as his use of the finest building materials gave the sewers enough resilience to survive over a century of constant wear and tear. Of course, we can learn about resilience not just from cases like the Victorian sewers, but from natural phenomena such as a delicate spider web that manages to survive a storm or the way sweating and shivering help regulate human body temperature.
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Roman Krznaric (The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking)
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What makes a failure qualify as intelligent? Here are four key attributes: it takes place in new territory; the context presents a credible opportunity to advance toward a desired goal (whether that be scientific discovery or a new friendship); it is informed by available knowledge (one might say “hypothesis driven”); and finally the failure is as small as it can be to still provide valuable insights.
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Amy C. Edmondson (Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well)
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In an ecosystem context, however, you need to focus only on the objectives and key results (OKRs) that are at the core of each agile chapter, tribe, or squad's work. As you do so, remember to always ask yourself: What objective did we give the teams, and what key results are we expecting them to drive?
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Venkat Atluri (The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders)
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When you judge people’s success by raw numbers without conversations and context, you end up with all sorts of “hacks”—people cheating to hit the numbers because the stakes are high and failure isn’t acceptable. In those circumstances, no one’s getting smarter; they’re all just inflating a balloon that will pop at some point.
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Christina Wodtke (Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results (Empowered Teams))
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THE ABHIDHARMA IS NOT A SCHOOL AS SUCH, but rather a body of literature. Not all the early schools had such a body of literature, but when they did they incorporated it into the canon. In essence it is an ordering and explanation of the key terms and categories of analysis that appear in the sūtras. The prefix abhi- means ‘above’ or ‘for the sake of, with regard to’, so the title is usually understood to mean ‘that which is above the Dharma’ or ‘the higher or special teaching’. However, it could also be construed as meaning ‘for the sake of the Dharma’ or ‘the ancillary to the Dharma’. The Abhidharma was regarded as special in the sense that it presents the Dharma in a pure, theoretical framework, rather than in a historical context, as do the sūtras – though whether this is an advantage could be disputed. It is regarded as a ‘higher’ Dharma because it is thought to be offering an explanation of these terms superior to that offered by the sūtras themselves.
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Andrew Skilton (Concise History of Buddhism)
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was an old police, prosecution, and political trick to separate a few items from the total context, but still a good one; for the public never bothered to know the whole context of anything. An old trick to fasten on phrases and slogans to fix an attitude in the public mind, for a phrase or slogan was about all the public was able to master. Anyone who had ever served on a jury, observed its deliberations, knew that out of all the welter of evidence, only certain isolated statements or facts, often minor and insignificant, penetrated the juror's mind, and around these bits he formed his conclusions. Any smart lawyer knew that, and tried to set up his case accordingly.
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Mark Clifton (Eight keys to Eden)
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The key shortcoming of the multiverse theory, however, is that it appeals to something outside the universe, namely, a vast ensemble of other universes and a set of meta-laws that exist for no reason (e.g., quantum mechanics, string theory). In this respect, the multiverse theory is little better than a direct theistic explanation where an appeal is made to an external creator/designer.
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Steven J. Dick (Cosmos & Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context)
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The key weakness of romanticism is that it seeks intimacy but refuses to encourage the habits that form people who are able to enter into and sustain genuinely intimate relationships. This is because real intimacy requires giving ourselves faithfully and permanently to another person in vulnerable trust. It is only in this context of safety that genuine intimacy, as opposed to just a powerful romantic or sexual attraction, can develop.
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Jonathan Grant (Divine Sex: A Compelling Vision for Christian Relationships in a Hypersexualized Age)
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It is here, I think, that the most important phase of education appears, in the capacity to learn from each thing you see, from each fact you acquire, from each experience you have, from each person you meet. And nothing you learn, however wide of the mark it may appear at the time, however trivial, is ever wasted. In all my life, nothing I have ever learned has failed to be useful to me at some time or other, often in the most unexpected way and in some quite unforeseen context.
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Eleanor Roosevelt (You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life)
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The key to Joy is unconditional kindness to all of life, including one’s own, which we refer to as compassion.1 Without compassion, little of any significance is ever accomplished in human endeavor. We may generalize to the greater social context from individual therapies, wherein patients cannot be truly cured or fundamentally healed until they invoke the power of compassion, both for themselves and others. At that point, the healed may become a healer.
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David R. Hawkins (Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior (Power vs. Force, #1))
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Lastly, when you think about improvements, make sure you consider every key stakeholder, not just your customers. For example, in the ecosystem context, make sure you focus on significantly improving the experience for your partners, too.
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Venkat Atluri (The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders)
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The key to getting the best results from these tools is to write a good prompt. You want to give the tool enough information and context so that it can generate something useful and relevant to what you’re looking for. Trust me, it makes all the difference, and
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Rachelle Ayala (Love by the Prompt: A Romance Writer’s Guide to AI-Powered Writing: Learn How to Use AI Tools like ChatGPT to Generate Fresh Ideas, Develop Compelling ... Ease (A Romance In A Month How-To Book))
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What is missed in a discussion limited to mental illness and lone wolves are the exploitatively political and social contexts that make individuals feel like lone wolves in America. Understanding those contexts is key to understanding why most (but not all) people who commit mass shootings in America are white males, and why white males have committed mass shootings more and more frequently over the last half century.
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Thom Hartmann (The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment: How to Talk about Race, Religion, Politics, and Other Polarizing Topics)
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Whenever I attempt to understand the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence and the civilian Intelligence Bureau, whose purpose is to collect crucial information on the security of the state, I am left with biting questions about their true roles in internal and external matters.
It is a fact that such countries as India and Pakistan have always suffered from a lack of limits on the role of their intelligence agencies and respect for international law and human rights, including the privacy of individuals within the concept and context of global peace and fundamental freedoms.
The ISI, driven by the Pakistan Armed Forces, ignores the supreme constitutional role and rule of a democratic head of state, under which even the Armed Forces themselves fall. This is not only a violation of the constitution but also a rejection of the civilian leadership. This can be interpreted as Pakistan is a country where the servant rules its leader and patron.
It is this bitter reality that leads toward the collapse of all systems of society, which the Pakistani nation has faced since the first introduction of martial law by General Ayub Khan in 1958, and such conduct has continued to exist ever since, whether visibly or invisibly.
One cannot ignore, avoid, or deny that Pakistan has maintained its physical independence for more than 7 decades. However, its real freedom as conceptualized upon the nation’s creation has been only a dream and abused by its so-called defenders and its power-mongers. Unfortunately, such figures control the ISI and lead it in the wrong direction, beyond the constitutional limits of its power.
Consequently, the ISI plays the role of a gang that disrupts the stability of the main political parties and promotes tiny, unpopular parties to gain power for itself. There is thus no doubt that the ISI has failed in its responsibility to support constitutional rule and to secure and defend the state and its people.
The failure of the democratic system in the country, directly or indirectly, reflects the harassment practiced by both intelligence agencies without proof or legal process, even interfering with other institutions. The consequences are the collapse of the justice system and the imposition of foreign policies that damage international relationships. The result is a lack of trust in these agencies and their isolation.
In a civilized century, it is a tragedy that one dares not express one’s feelings that may abuse God, prophets, or sacred figures. But more than that, one cannot speak a word against the wrongdoing of a handful of army generals or ISI officials. In Pakistan, veteran journalists, top judges, and other key figures draw breath under the spying eyes of the ISI; even higher and minister-level personalities are the victims of such conduct. One has to live in such surroundings.
Pakistan needs a major cleanup and reorganization of the present awkward role of the ISI for the sake of international relations, standards, and peace, including the privacy of individuals and respect for the notable figures of society, according to the law.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Now, suppose that in your process of experimentation, you end up creating a cake that is actually quite small. It’s so small you could sell it as a self-contained, single-serving cake, so you put a little wrapper around it. You realize that you’ve actually made supreme chocolate muffins instead of better chocolate cake. At first it might not seem like this is much of a change. The product hasn’t changed much — it’s the same batter— but almost everything else about your business has. Why? Because we changed the mental frame of reference around the product from “cake” to “muffin.” That change in context changes everything about the business: Target buyers and where you sell. Unlike cakes, muffins are sold at coffee shops and diners. Competitive alternatives. You are now competing with donuts, Danishes and bagels. Pricing and margin. Muffins sell for a buck or two, and you will be looking to sell a lot of them. Key product features and roadmap. You are now fighting for the hearts and minds of a noble class of people who eat chocolate for breakfast. They’re likely not worried about gluten or the origin of the salt in your caramel. They might like your muffin larger or with more caramel or maybe they want it deep-fried like a hash brown (you might be laughing, but deep down I think you want to try one of those).
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April Dunford (Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It)
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Context constitutes 90 % of a message, words only 10 %.
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Abhijit Naskar (Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables)
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The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess, if this view is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, or morality
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Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory)
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When you are expectationless, when you focus only on your actions, on what you can do best in a given context, and leave the results to a higher energy, to Life, then, you are non-frustrated. When frustration sets in, you become unhappy. And when you are not happy, you are dysfunctional. Which is why, being non-frustrated is key to constructive action, on any front, in any walk of Life.
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AVIS Viswanathan
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third key aspect of Wikipedia’s good gameness: it has good game community. Good game community requires two things: plenty of positive social interaction and a meaningful context for collective effort. Wikipedia has both. As Wikipedians describe it: Every unique location (article) in the game world (encyclopedia) has a tavern (“talk page,” or discussion forum) where players have the opportunity to interact with any other player in real time. Players often become friends with other players, and some have even arranged to meet in real life (“meetups,” or face-to-face social gatherings for frequent Wikipedia contributors).
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Jane McGonigal (Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World)
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But perhaps most importantly, the website also featured a section labeled “Data: What we’ve learned from your work so far.” This page put the individual players’ efforts into a much bigger context—and guaranteed that contributors would see the real results of their efforts. Some of the key results of the game included these findings: • On average, each MP expensed twice his or her annual salary, or more than £140,000 in expenses on top of a £60,675 salary. • The total cost to taxpayers of personal items expensed by MPs is £88 million annually. And the game detailed: • The number of receipts and papers filed by each MP, ranging between 40 and 2,000 • The total expense spending by party and by category (kitchen, garden, TV, food, etc.) • Online maps comparing travel expenses filed with actual distance from the House of Commons in London to the MPs’ home districts, making it easy to spot MPs grossly overcharging for travel (for example, MPs from nearby districts who filed £21,534 versus £4,418, or £10,105 versus £1,680) Bringing these numbers to light helped clarify the true extent of the crisis: a far more pervasive culture of extravagant personal reimbursement than originally suspected.
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Jane McGonigal (Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World)
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Church services often include ritualized group processes that can induce trance states. Music, prayers, and a mesmerizing preaching style can create a state of relaxation and suggestibility. When a congregation proceeds to sing and pray aloud together with enthusiasm and speaking in tongues, an individual can easily conform. The aroused emotions and the group consensus about reality are convincing enough to inspire a response to get saved, “rededicated,” or “filled with the Spirit.” In the typical evangelical service, after a rousing sermon comes the “altar call.” This routine is strikingly similar to hypnotic induction methods in other contexts: The key is to get people to focus attention inward rather than outward, so that they see, hear, and feel internally rather than externally, through the five senses. At such times, you are much more susceptible to suggestions and less able to use your critical abilities. After an emotional sermon, which has likely already employed manipulative techniques such as fear and guilt, you are asked to bow your head and close your eyes. Soft music plays while everyone focuses inward. Quiet hymns repeat “Jesus is calling” or “Just as I am.” The minister then speaks softly into the microphone, suggesting that the Holy Spirit is present and moving in the congregation.
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Marlene Winell (Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion)
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It should be clear that in Finnegans Wake, past, present, future, space, time and Ego-reality are all dissolved into the multiple "realities" described by mystics and quantum physicists; that Joyce, a man of timid courage, has seized the keys of hell of death, by showing that the Ego dies and is reborn more continually than we realize, and that absence or death are as unreal in this context as the famous Schrödinger equations which demonstrated in quantum theory that a cat may be dead and alive at the same time.
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Robert Anton Wilson (Coincidance: A Head Test)
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During: ● Meals: Fundraising in the time of Zoom is an even more intense experience. It can be difficult to carve out enough time to get out of your house, or even away from your computer, for a proper meal. I suggest doing meal prep or planning every Sunday. Meals should be light and calorically restricted to keep your mind and body active — you shouldn’t bring any afternoon grogginess to a pitch because you ate a burger for lunch. ● Exercise: Add blocks to your calendar to carve out exercise time. Getting your blood pumping and providing an alternative to staring at your own face on Zoom is key to providing context and awareness. Exercise helps reset the body and the mind. ● Emotional support: A great fundraise is still an experience in rejection (seriously, most meetings result in a “no”). Make sure you have a weekly check-in with someone (not your cofounder) who can help rationalize and normalize this crazy process. ● Breaks: Schedule time to take breaks. Watch a movie. Take a hike. Go swimming. Do something to get your mind off the fundraise for at least 30 minutes every day. ● Meditating: There is nothing in this world that I believe in more than meditation. I started meditating twelve months ago, and since then have nearly 10X’d our business. It’s never too late to start!
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Ryan Breslow (Fundraising)
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Be as transparent, clear, and specific as possible. Explain exactly why you are calling. Assert your opinions transparently. Show all of your cards up front. At the end of the phone call, recap all the key points again, or send an e-mail repeating these points straight afterwards. If you are ever not 100 percent sure what you have been asked to do, don’t read between the lines but state clearly that you don’t understand and ask for clarification. And sometimes it would be better to not be quite so polite, as it gives the impression of vagueness or uncertainty. With a little effort and practice, someone from a higher-context environment can learn to work and communicate in a lower-context way.
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Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
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Context: This is the topic you want to talk about. Of all the topics in the world, this is the one you will talk about now. Intent: What you want the audience to do with the information you are about to share. Key message: The most important part of the overall message you are about to deliver (the headline).
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Chris Fenning (The First Minute: How to Start Conversations That Get Results (Business Communication Skills Books Book 1))
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The judges who breach, violate, and break the concept of the constitution and law are not fair to society, even to themselves; they just put the mask on their faces as the judge. However, history is their judge that does not ignore the reality.
A verdict is neither a vote nor a consensus nor a customary decision; it is the interpretation and conclusion of the constitution and law, and judges set it accordingly in the context of that and ensure its implementation.
The constitution is like a rose; foreign policy is its fragrance that flies freely everywhere, and everyone feels equally beyond restrictions. Sure, such context carries beauty, dignity, self-determination, freedom, and success; otherwise, the sting of thorns becomes a painful risk.
In a civilized century, it is a tragedy that one dares not express one’s feelings that may abuse God, prophets, or sacred figures. But more than that, one cannot speak a word against the wrongdoing of a handful of army generals or ISI officials. In Pakistan, veteran journalists, top judges, and other key figures draw breath under the spying eyes of the ISI; even higher and minister-level personalities are the victims of such conduct. One has to live in such surroundings.
Tit for Tat is neither a constitution nor a law; it is just an act of revenge. If it continues, be sure everything collapses wherever it happens.
The cheap army, undemocratic state, and corrupt nation neither fulfill their oath nor comply with their constitution.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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The key to making money in this context, then, is understanding the financial structure of your business.
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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Do not understand only the words; also understand their contexts since they illuminate you precisely.
If you vote wisely, you won’t have to fight for your rights and peace everywhere.
The political mafia is the mother of all mafias and often causes wars and uses vetoes to disrupt global peace.
My every minute of life is for the entire humanity and human rights; it is a core prayer of all my prayers.
What is a mafia, how do you understand it, and when do you overcome it? It is neither easy nor difficult; just be brave for your rights and never ignore them. No one can stand in front of your rights if you truly believe that.
I have described the context of the mafia in the form of quotations that may guide and enlighten your life journey honourably.
When a nation faces the Mafia Judiciary, which employs and applies an unfair way that fractures justice, the criminal mafia groups become licensed, and freehand is a juristic disaster.
Wherever the medical, trade, business, media, and political interests of the mafia prevail, there is certainly neither a cure nor freedom possible nor justice nor peace.
A vote holds not only significant power; it also carries a key to a system, essence to the welfare, surety to the career of a future generation, and a magnet to the stability of the state. The wrong choice or emotional pledge and favor of the vote-casting can indeed victimize a voter himself as a consequence. Realize this power and use it wisely, disregarding all external influences and tricks.
Such a political party remains the proprietorship of a particular family, a rich circle, a corrupt mafia, or an establishment that accomplishes neither transparent democratic legitimacy nor fair democracy. Undoubtedly, such a party enforces majority dictatorship when it comes to power. It is mendacious dishonesty and severe corruption in a precise democratic voting context.
I have been critical of the undemocratic rule, but now I think it may be the option of neutral law, but not martial law, which is essential for the stability and unity of Pakistan’s state, constitution, economy, and institutions to eliminate the democratic mafia and terror.
International intelligence agencies and their hired ones avoid the weapons now; however, they utilize deadly chemicals to kill their rivals, whether high-level or low-level, whereas doctors diagnose that as a natural death. Virtually becoming infected and a victim of deathly diseases through chemicals is neither known publicly nor common. As a fact, the intelligence mafia can achieve and gain every task for their interests.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Answer must be molded compatible with context, contextless answer creates only more problems.
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Abhijit Naskar (Dervis Vadisi: 100 Promissory Sonnets)
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qualitative market research in Myanmar
Address
Ramakrishna Paramhans Ward,
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Subjective Statistical surveying in Myanmar: Revealing Bits of knowledge for Business Development
In the present globalized commercial center, understanding buyer conduct and market elements is urgent for organizations to flourish. Myanmar, with its quickly developing economy, presents special open doors and difficulties for organizations hoping to lay out areas of strength for an in the district. As organizations look to acquire an upper hand, the meaning of subjective statistical surveying in Myanmar couldn't possibly be more significant. This article digs into the significance of
qualitative market research in Myanmar and how it tends to be instrumental in driving business development in the powerful Myanmar market.
Myanmar, previously known as Burma, has seen critical political and monetary changes as of late, prompting expanded unfamiliar speculation and development across different areas. This change has brought about shifts in buyer inclinations, buying power, and market patterns. To explore this advancing scene effectively, organizations should participate in thorough subjective statistical surveying to acquire nuanced experiences into buyer conduct, inclinations, and social impacts.
qualitative market research in Myanmar centers around understanding the "whys" behind buyer conduct, digging into the basic inspirations, feelings, and insights that drive dynamic cycles. Dissimilar to quantitative exploration, which gives mathematical information and factual examination, subjective examination offers a more profound comprehension of customer perspectives and inclinations, making it priceless for organizations looking to fit their techniques to the Myanmar market.
One of the critical benefits of subjective statistical surveying in Myanmar is its capacity to uncover social subtleties and context oriented factors that impact buyer conduct. Given Myanmar's different ethnic gatherings, dialects, and cultural standards, a nuanced comprehension of nearby traditions and customs is fundamental for organizations meaning to resound with the interest group. Subjective examination procedures, for example, inside and out interviews, center gatherings, and ethnographic investigations empower scientists to dive into these social complexities, giving organizations noteworthy bits of knowledge for item improvement, promoting methodologies, and brand situating.
Also, subjective examination assumes a significant part in distinguishing arising patterns and market holes that may not be obvious through quantitative information alone. By connecting straightforwardly with buyers and key partners, organizations can acquire subjective experiences into advancing business sector elements, possible undiscovered portions, and moving customer inclinations. This, thus, enables organizations to adjust their contributions and methodologies proactively, remaining on the ball in Myanmar's quickly changing business sector scene.
As well as illuminating vital business choices, subjective statistical surveying encourages a more profound association among organizations and the nearby local area. By effectively including Myanmar purchasers in the examination cycle, organizations show a promise to understanding and tending to their requirements, cultivating trust and brand reliability simultaneously. This human-driven approach is especially relevant in Myanmar, where individual connections and local area ties hold huge influence over customer conduct.
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qualitative market research in Myanmar
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the key phrase is, “I belong not to myself but to Jesus Christ.” In our present context, the answer might also have said, “I belong not to the state, but to Jesus Christ.” That affirmation of course is a Christian confession that many others may not make. It is, nonetheless, the claim of our faith that whether we confess Christ or not, we are—all of us!—creatures who receive life from the creator, live our lives back to the creator, and belong to our creator. It is the claim of our faith that we are creatures well beloved by the creator, created by God ex nihilo, or as Norman Wirzba has said so well, creatio ex amore, out of nothing . . . out of love. Such beloved creatures do not and cannot belong to the state, and cannot have the state making claims on our bodies that are gifts from God.
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Walter Brueggemann (Real World Faith)
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Metalepsis is a literary technique of citing or echoing a small bit of a precursor text in such a way that the reader can grasp the significance of the echo only by recalling or recovering the original context from which the fragmentary echo came and then reading the two texts in dialogical juxtaposition.
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Chad Bird (The Christ Key: Unlocking the Centrality of Christ in the Old Testament)
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The culture of production was a key environmental contingency that was part of their worldview. The culture of production included norms and beliefs originating in the aerospace industry, the engineering profession, and the NASA organization, then uniquely expressed in the culture of Marshall Space Flight Center. It legitimated work group decision making, which was acceptable and nondeviant within that context.
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Diane Vaughan (The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA)
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How can we overcome our self-doubt? Through a simple practice: act lovingly. Lovability is actually the other side of the coin of loving. People who believe they are lovable are people who love. People who love are more likely to be loved. This involves letting go of ego, but it also requires a unique frame of mind: When any conflict or issue arises between ourselves and someone else, we ask not how to win but how to summon up a loving intent and how to act on it. Our immediate question is “How can I be as loving as possible in this circumstance?” When we show the five A’s to others, they feel loved and at the same time see us as lovable. To shift our focus from concern for personal victory or vindication to an attempt to be more loving brings us bliss, and that bliss is the best context for letting go of ego and releasing the five A’s.
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David Richo (How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving)
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groups of executives and other stakeholders all too often come up with the quarterly “roadmap” of features and projects and then pass them down to the product teams, essentially telling them how to solve the underlying business problems. The teams are just there to flesh out the details, code and test, with little understanding of the bigger context, and even less belief that these are in fact the right solutions. Teams today are all too often feature factories, with little regard for whether or not the features actually solve the underlying business problems. Progress is measured by output and not outcome.
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Christina Wodtke (Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results (Empowered Teams))
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context is fundamental to most women’s sexual wellbeing. Context is the crux and the key. Context is the cause.
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Emily Nagoski (Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life)
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The critical context is comprised of two things: The overall product vision The specific business objectives assigned to each team We will discuss both of these key topics in the coming chapters. Problems arise if the leadership does not provide clarity on these two critical pieces of context. If they don't, there's a vacuum, and that leads to real ambiguity over what a team can decide and what they can't.
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Marty Cagan (Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group))
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When applied immediately to spaces of a submolecular order of magnitude, Einstein’s theory breaks down altogether. In the relativity theory, motion is described in the context of a four-dimensional continuum of space-time. Therefore, using it alone, it should have been possible to determine both position and momentum or energy and time simultaneously with unlimited accuracy—a conclusion that wound up being inconsistent with the limits imposed by the uncertainty principle.
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Robert Lanza (Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe)