Crisis Motivational Quotes

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For most of us, creative motivation requires a crisis—either externally, like a threat to our physical survival, or an internal crisis of intense suffering.
Amit Goswami (Quantum Creativity: Think Quantum, Be Creative)
Courage is like magic, courage vanishes crisis.
Amit Kalantri
How can you motivate yourself to continue to follow a leader when he appears to be going around in circles?
Andrew S. Grove (Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company and Career)
SOUL SHINE You know that thing You do so well, That little spark You hide In the dark, That you think Nobody knows about – But You? Well, Did you know That There's A gleam That you beam When you talk Or do Anything, That everyone Knows about – But You?
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Remember, too, that all who succeed in life get off to a bad start, and pass through many heartbreaking struggles before they “arrive.” The turning point in the lives of those who succeed, usually comes at the moment of some crisis, through which they are introduced to their “other selves.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich (Start Motivational Books))
unless I am myself, I am nobody.
Virginia Woolf
...our free will could convert a curse into a blessing or a blessing into a curse...To transform a crisis into an opportunity was true wisdom
Radhanath Swami (The Journey Home)
In a democracy, there will be more complaints but less crisis, in a dictatorship more silence but much more suffering.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
People are then spurred to do something about their boredom. “Tolstoy had this great quote in Anna Karenina that says boredom is a ‘desire for desires,’ ” said Danckert. “So boredom is a motivational state.
Michael Easter (The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self)
The way we’ve set up corporations, even a majority vote of stockholders cannot demand that a corporation’s policies reflect the public good or preserve the environment for future use. That’s because profit is the one and only motive. It’s up to government and it’s up to people to protect the public interest. Corporations are simply not allowed to.
David Suzuki (From Naked Ape to Superspecies: Humanity and the Global Eco-Crisis)
Sometimes what not to do is more important than what to do. Sometimes when you are in crisis, when frustration are high or when you are under pressure, what you don't do is more important than what you do. Don't be afraid. ....
Patience Johnson (Why Does an Orderly God Allow Disorder)
It can also be useful to politics, enabling that science to discover how much of it is no more than verbal construction, myth, literary tops. Politics, like literature, must above all know itself and distrust itself. As a final observation, I should like to add that it is impossible today for anyone to feel innocent, if in whatever we do or say we can discover a hidden motive - that of a white man, or a male, or the possessor of a certain income, or a member of a given economic system, or a sufferer from a certain neurosis - this should not induce in us either a universal sense of guilt or an attitude of universal accusation. When we become aware of our disease or of our hidden motives, we have already begun to get the better of them. What matters is the way in which we accept our motives and live through the ensuing crisis. This is the only chance we have of becoming different from the way we are - that is, the only way of starting to invent a new way of being.
Italo Calvino (The Uses of Literature)
Successful people recognize crisis as a time for change – from lesser to greater, smaller to bigger.
Edwin Louis Cole
No matter what, its always an opportunity.
Todd Stocker (Leading From The Gut: 3 Power Principles of Effective Leaders)
Stubborn optimism needs to motivate you daily; you always need to bear in mind why you feel the future is worth fighting for.
Christiana Figueres (The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis)
There is no such thing as an ordinary human. Crisis and willpower can turn even the most ordinary human into the most extraordinary beacon of hope and will.
Abhijit Naskar (When Call The People: My World My Responsibility)
Social psychologists have shown that group belief is a powerful motivator in performance
J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
The world’s people are in peril. We no doubt live in a noisy, numb, narcissistic age. The talents and attentions of the majority are not invested in personal mastery and social responsibility but squandered on games, voyeurism, and base sensationalism. We have recklessly abandoned what truly matters—the striving to be great as individuals and as a society—for the glamour and thrill of speed, convenience, and vain expression, in a kind of humanity-wide midlife crisis. Gone are the big visions; here are the quick wins and the sure things. Effort has lost out to entitlement. In the transition to our age of self-adoration and conceit, the page turned long ago on the dreams to rise as a people. Greatness is so rarely sought, and generation after generation fail to hold the line of human goodness and advancement. Why? Because
Brendon Burchard (The Motivation Manifesto: 9 Declarations to Claim Your Personal Power)
You can either follow your dreams or adjust with your society's expectations... Either way, consequences are uncertain... the path to glory or the boulevard of mediocrity, both lead to the grave... Choose what's worthwhile, for the end is the same.
K.Hari Kumar
As recently as the early 1970s, a Republican president - Richard Nixon - was willing to impose wage and price controls to rescue the U.S. economy from crisis, popularizing the notion that “We are all Keynesians now.” But by the 1980s, the battle of ideas waged out of the same Washington think tanks that now deny climate change had successfully managed to equate the very idea of industrial planning with Stalin’s five-year plans. Real capitalists don’t plan, these ideological warriors insisted - they unleash the power of the profit motive and let the market, in its infinite wisdom, create the best possible society for all.
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
The root of identity crises: we seem to know a lot about ourselves, but we can't tell who we are. Realize your self!
Stefan Emunds
An alignment crisis happens when we remain chronically misaligned with our purpose.
Karen Whitten (The 25 Mindsets: Understand Anyone, Even Yourself)
If you chronically inhabit your void, burnout is a predictable consequence.
Karen Whitten (The 25 Mindsets: Understand Anyone, Even Yourself)
Every crisis is a wisdom crisis. If you have no peace around you then you lack wisdom.
Patience Johnson (Why Does an Orderly God Allow Disorder)
I never encountered any crisis in life, because I solved my problems before they turned into crisis.
Amit Kalantri
I don't know who needs to hear this but it's going to be ok. You're doing the best you can with what you have.
Kierra C.T. Banks
You are trapped by nothing more than a poor attitude
Sid Mittra (To Bee or Not to Bee: Winning Against All Odds)
Sometimes crisis triggers the genius within
Bernard Kelvin Clive
Since dad is most at risk of being both bad-mouthed and less involved, lets look at three reasons bad-mouthing sin is in conflict with your child's best interest: 1. Your children grow up feeling, "I hate who I am." 2. Your children fear that "loving dad is betraying mom." 3. Bad-mouthing undermines dad's motivation to invest money and time in the bank of love and to become responible in response to the hope for love.
Warren Farrell (The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It)
What’s a boy-friendly way for a nonacademically inclined boy to use his mind? Having a concrete goal. If a boy has a concrete goal of being a welder, that catalyzes motivation to study the physics and chemistry necessary to become a high-paid welder.
Warren Farrell (The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It)
Moreover, the fact that more than a third of the electorate voted Nazi in 1932 was a hugely significant factor in the Republic’s fall and in the rise of Hitler. But most of those voters were not motivated by a broad discontent with the Republic, including with its sexual politics, as some studies have asserted.54 Rather, voters were radicalized, driven to the extreme parties, and drawn to the polls by specific issues, such as the economic crisis, the fear of communism, and the trauma of unemployment.55
Laurie Marhoefer (Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (German and European Studies Book 23))
The current crisis in particle physics springs from the fact that the theories have gone beyond the standard model in the last thirty years fall into two categories. Some were falsifiable, and they were falsified. The rest are untested-either because they make no clean predictions or because the predictions they do make are not testable with current technology. Over the last three decades, theorists have proposed at least a dozen new approaches. Each approach is motivated by a compelling hypothesis, but none has so far succeeded. In the realm of particle physics, these include Technicolor, preon models, and supersymmetry. In the realm of spacetime, they include twistor theory, causal sets, supergravity, dynamical triangulations, and loop quantum gravity. Some of these ideas are as exotic as they sound
Lee Smolin (The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next)
The masses are existentially entitled to talk nonsense and advocate for prejudices, but when an authority of the masses begins to talk nonsense and advocate for prejudice and bigotry, it is an existential crisis for not just those masses but all humans around the world, with implications of catastrophic proportions.
Abhijit Naskar (Build Bridges not Walls: In the name of Americana)
Something big and bad suddenly happening motivates us more than do slowly developing problems, and also more than the prospect of something big and bad happening in the future. I’m reminded of Samuel Johnson’s saying: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
Jared Diamond (Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis)
Now, I’ve argued that the motivation for Islamists and jihadists is ideological dogma, fed to them by charismatic recruiters who play on a perceived sense of grievance and an identity crisis. In fact, I believe that four elements exist in all forms of ideological recruitment: a grievance narrative, whether real or perceived; an identity crisis; a charismatic recruiter; and ideological dogma. The
Sam Harris (Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue)
What we feel and how we feel is far more important than what we think and how we think. Feeling is the stuff of which our consciousness is made, the atmosphere in which all our thinking and all our conduct is bathed. All the motives which govern and drive our lives are emotional. Love and hate, anger and fear, curiosity and joy are the springs of all that is most noble and most detestable in the history of men and nations. The opening sentence of a sermon is an opportunity. A good introduction arrests me. It handcuffs me and drags me before the sermon, where I stand and hear a Word that makes me both tremble and rejoice. The best sermon introductions also engage the listener immediately. It’s a rare sermon, however, that suffers because of a good introduction. Mysteries beg for answers. People’s natural curiosity will entice them to stay tuned until the puzzle is solved. Any sentence that points out incongruity, contradiction, paradox, or irony will do. Talk about what people care about. Begin writing an introduction by asking, “Will my listeners care about this?” (Not, “Why should they care about this?”) Stepping into the pulpit calmly and scanning the congregation to the count of five can have a remarkable effect on preacher and congregation alike. It is as if you are saying, “I’m about to preach the Word of God. I want all of you settled. I’m not going to begin, in fact, until I have your complete attention.” No sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as crystal. The getting of that sentence is the hardest, most exacting, and most fruitful labor of study. We tend to use generalities for compelling reasons. Specifics often take research and extra thought, precious commodities to a pastor. Generalities are safe. We can’t help but use generalities when we can’t remember details of a story or when we want anonymity for someone. Still, the more specific their language, the better speakers communicate. I used to balk at spending a large amount of time on a story, because I wanted to get to the point. Now I realize the story gets the point across better than my declarative statements. Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. Limits—that is, form—challenge the mind, forcing creativity. Needless words weaken our offense. Listening to some speakers, you have to sift hundreds of gallons of water to get one speck of gold. If the sermon is so complicated that it needs a summary, its problems run deeper than the conclusion. The last sentence of a sermon already has authority; when the last sentence is Scripture, this is even more true. No matter what our tone or approach, we are wise to craft the conclusion carefully. In fact, given the crisis and opportunity that the conclusion presents—remember, it will likely be people’s lasting memory of the message—it’s probably a good practice to write out the conclusion, regardless of how much of the rest of the sermon is written. It is you who preaches Christ. And you will preach Christ a little differently than any other preacher. Not to do so is to deny your God-given uniqueness. Aim for clarity first. Beauty and eloquence should be added to make things even more clear, not more impressive. I’ll have not praise nor time for those who suppose that writing comes by some divine gift, some madness, some overflow of feeling. I’m especially grim on Christians who enter the field blithely unprepared and literarily innocent of any hard work—as though the substance of their message forgives the failure of its form.
Mark Galli (Preaching that Connects)
This isn’t some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in any democracy. This is deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society. And it’s becoming more and more mainstream. We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs. You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society. Social psychologists have shown that group belief is a powerful motivator in performance. When groups perceive that it’s in their interest to work hard and achieve things, members of that group outperform other similarly situated individuals. It’s obvious why: If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown’s temptations—premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault. My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When
J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
The great majority of those who, like Frankl, were liberated from Nazi concentration camps chose to leave for other countries rather than return to their former homes, where far too many neighbors had turned murderous. But Viktor Frankl chose to stay in his native Vienna after being freed and became head of neurology at a main hospital in Vienna. The Austrians he lived among often perplexed Frankl by saying they did not know a thing about the horrors of the camps he had barely survived. For Frankl, though, this alibi seemed flimsy. These people, he felt, had chosen not to know. Another survivor of the Nazis, the social psychologist Ervin Staub, was saved from a certain death by Raoul Wallenberg, the diplomat who made Swedish passports for thousands of desperate Hungarians, keeping them safe from the Nazis. Staub studied cruelty and hatred, and he found one of the roots of such evil to be the turning away, choosing not to see or know, of bystanders. That not-knowing was read by perpetrators as a tacit approval. But if instead witnesses spoke up in protest of evil, Staub saw, it made such acts more difficult for the evildoers. For Frankl, the “not-knowing” he encountered in postwar Vienna was regarding the Nazi death camps scattered throughout that short-lived empire, and the obliviousness of Viennese citizens to the fate of their own neighbors who were imprisoned and died in those camps. The underlying motive for not-knowing, he points out, is to escape any sense of responsibility or guilt for those crimes. People in general, he saw, had been encouraged by their authoritarian rulers not to know—a fact of life today as well. That same plea of innocence, I had no idea, has contemporary resonance in the emergence of an intergenerational tension. Young people around the world are angry at older generations for leaving as a legacy to them a ruined planet, one where the momentum of environmental destruction will go on for decades, if not centuries. This environmental not-knowing has gone on for centuries, since the Industrial Revolution. Since then we have seen the invention of countless manufacturing platforms and processes, most all of which came to be in an era when we had no idea of their ecological impacts. Advances in science and technology are making ecological impacts more transparent, and so creating options that address the climate crisis and, hopefully, will be pursued across the globe and over generations. Such disruptive, truly “green” alternatives are one way to lessen the bleakness of Earth 2.0—the planet in future decades—a compelling fact of life for today’s young. Were Frankl with us today (he died in 1997), he would no doubt be pleased that so many of today’s younger people are choosing to know and are finding purpose and meaning in surfacing environmental facts and acting on them.
Viktor E. Frankl (Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything)
Social entrepreneurs are among the most dynamic engines of the cooperative movement. Where corporate moguls work for personal enrichment, these civic-minded business leaders work for the cooperative equivalent, which is a desire to generate community self-reliance, abolish poverty, and enhance community economic well-being by improving housing, food, transportation, energy, health, finance, and a host of other products and services. Their motivations are not selfishly financial; they are far deeper, rooted in both the human spirit and the pervasive sense of community that human beings have striven to express throughout history. As the economist Jean Monnet once said, “Without community, there is crisis.
Ralph Nader (The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future)
This makes us, however unintuitively, the most powerful people that have ever lived…Nothing has threatened our ecologies more than the extraction and burning of fossil fuels and the affluent consumer culture…But we have also been granted an astonishingly beautiful gift that has never before been given to humans: the chance to shepherd human and animal life into the coming centuries and millennia, when we know that much of it would otherwise disappear. That’s a power that should make us very humble and a privilege that can motivate us profoundly. In a way, our darkness- the knowledge that without our great effort, many or most of Earth’s creatures will vanish- is what reveals the light within, the seed of life and possibility that we share with all of Earth’s life, the one that we can carry forward. For better and for worse, we are the ones at the intersection of knowledge and agency. LOVING A VANISHING WORLD by Emily N. Johnston
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis)
There are different interpretations of perestroika in the West, including the United States. There is the view that it has been necessitated by the disastrous state of the Soviet economy and that it signifies disenchantment with socialism and a crisis for its ideals and ultimate goals. Nothing could be further from the truth than such interpretations, whatever the motives behind them. Of course, perestroika has been largely stimulated by our dissatisfaction with the way things have been going in our country in recent years. But it has to a far greater extent been prompted by an awareness that the potential of socialism had been underutilized. We realize this particularly clearly now in the days of the seventieth anniversary of our Revolution. We have a sound material foundation, a wealth of experience and a broad world outlook with which to perfect our society purposefully and continuously, seeking to gain ever greater returns—in terms of quantity and quality—from all our activities.
Mikhail Gorbachev (Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World)
Do countries require a crisis to motivate them to act, or do nations ever act in anticipation of problems? The crises discussed in this book illustrate both types of responses to this frequently asked question. Meiji Japan avoided dealing with the growing danger from the West, until forced into responding to Perry’s visit. From the Meiji Restoration of 1868 onwards, however, Japan did not require any further external shocks to motivate it to embark on its crash program of change: Japan instead changed in anticipation of the risk of further pressure from the West. Similarly, Finland ignored Soviet concerns until it was forced to pay attention by the Soviet attack of 1939. But from 1944 onwards, the Finns did not require any further Soviet attacks to galvanize them: instead, their foreign policy aimed at constantly anticipating and forestalling Soviet pressure. In Chile, Allende’s policies were in response to Chile’s chronic polarization, and not in response to a sudden crisis, so Allende was anticipating future problems as well as addressing current ones. In contrast, the Chilean military launched their coup in response to what
Jared Diamond (Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis)
Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm—to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut. This principle is also true, ultimately, in human behavior, in human relationships. They, too, are natural systems based on the law of the harvest. In the short run, in an artificial social system such as school, you may be able to get by if you learn how to manipulate the man-made rules, to “play the game.” In most one-shot or short-lived human interactions, you can use the Personality Ethic to get by and to make favorable impressions through charm and skill and pretending to be interested in other people’s hobbies. You can pick up quick, easy techniques that may work in short-term situations. But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success. Many people with secondary greatness—that is, social recognition for their talents—lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you’ll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently. As Emerson once put it, “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.” There are, of course, situations where people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well. But the effects are still secondary. In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. We all know it. There are people we trust absolutely because we know their character. Whether they’re eloquent or not, whether they have the human relations techniques or not, we trust them, and we work successfully with them. In the words of William George Jordan, “Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil—the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
Sociologist Barry Glassner (1999) has documented many of the biases introduced by “If it bleeds, it leads” news reporting, and by the strategic efforts of special interest groups to control the agenda of public fear of crime, disease, and other hazards. Is an increase of approximately 700 incidents in 50 states over 7 years an “epidemic” of road rage? Is it conceivable that there is (or ever was) a crisis in children’s day care stemming from predatory satanic cults? In 1994, a research team funded by the U.S. government spent 4 years and $750,000 to reach the conclusion that the myth of satanic conspiracies in day care centers was totally unfounded; not a single verified instance was found (Goodman, Qin, Bottoms, & Shaver, 1994; Nathan & Snedeker, 1995). Are automatic-weapon-toting high school students really the first priority in youth safety? (In 1999, approximately 2,000 school-aged children were identified as murder victims; only 26 of those died in school settings, 14 of them in one tragic incident at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.) The anthropologist Mary Douglas (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982) pointed out that every culture has a store of exaggerated horrors, many of them promoted by special interest factions or to defend cultural ideologies. For example, impure water had been a hazard in 14th-century Europe, but only after Jews were accused of poisoning wells did the citizenry become preoccupied with it as a major problem. But the original news reports are not always ill-motivated. We all tend to code and mention characteristics that are unusual (that occur infrequently). [...] The result is that the frequencies of these distinctive characteristics, among the class of people considered, tend to be overestimated.
Reid Hastie (Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making)
There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the civil war to defend slavery. And its leaders made no secret of this motive. Slavery they argued Ad nauseam was the foundation for a virtuous biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states. When 19th century deep southerners spoke of defending their “traditions”, “heritage”, and way of life they proudly identified the enslavement of others as the center piece of all three. Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower class people should be enslaved regardless of race for their own good. In response to Yankee and midland abolitionist the Deep South’s leaders developed an elaborate defense for human bondage. James Henry Hammond, former governor of South Carolina, published a seminal book arguing that enslaved laborers where happier, fitter and better looked after than their free counter parts in Brittan and the North, who were ruthlessly exploited by industrial capitalists. Free societies were therefore unstable as there was always a danger that the exploited would rise up creating a fearful crisis in republican institutions. Salves by contrast were kept in their place by violent means and denied the right to vote, resist or testify, ensuring the foundation of every well designed and durable republic. Enslavement of the white working class would be in his words a most glorious act of emancipation. Jefferson’s notion all men are created equal, he wrote, was ridiculously absurd. In the deep southern tradition, Hammond’s republic was modeled on those of ancient Greece and Rome. Featuring rights and democracy for the elite, slavery and submission for inferiors. It was sanctioned by the Christian god whose son never denounced the practice in his documented teachings. It was a perfect aristocratic republic, one that should be a model for the world. George Fitzhugh endorsed and expanded upon Hammond’s argument to enslave all poor people. Aristocrats, he explained, were really the nations Magna Carta because they owned so much and had the affection which all men feel for what belongs to them. Which naturally lead them to protect and provide for wives, children and slaves. Fitzhugh, whose books were enormously popular declared he was quite as intent on abolishing free society as you northerners are on abolishing slavery.
Colin Woodard (American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America)
Ultimately then, as one gets ready for kundalini awakening, the goal is to help those chakras clear, open, and align. Kundalini will respond with the greatest ease of motion accomplished and will demonstrate how well it knows what to do. As you begin to work through these chakras blockages or energetic reversals, you may find that those struggles look something like this. Blockages for the root chakra may look like low energy, general fear, persistent exhaustion, identity crisis, feeling isolated from the environment, eating disorders, general lack or erratic appetite, blatant materialism, difficulty saving money, or overall constant health problems. For the sacral chakra, blockages or reversals may look like lack of creativity, lack of inspiration, low or no motivation, low or no sexual appetite, feelings of insignificance, feelings of being unloved, feelings of being unaccepted, feelings of being outcasted, inability to care for oneself or persistent and recurrent problems of relationship with one's intimate partners. Blockages may look like identity crises or deficits for the solar plexus chakra, low self-esteem, low or no self-esteem, digestive problems, food intolerance, poor motivation, persistent weakness, constant nausea, anxiety disorders, liver disorder or disease, repeated illnesses, loss of core strength, lack of overall energy, recurrent depression with little relief, feelings of betrayal, For the chakra of the heart, reversals and blockages may seem like the inability to love oneself or others, the inability to put others first, the inability to put oneself first, the inability to overcome a problem ex, constant grudges, confidence issues, social anxiety or intense shyness, the failure to express emotions in a healthy way, problems of commitment, constant procrastination, intense anxiety For the throat chakra, blockages might seem like oversharing, inability to speak truthfully, failure to communicate with others, severe laryngitis, sore throats, respiratory or airway constraints, asthma, anemia, excessive exhaustion, inability to find the right words, paralyzing fear of confusion, nervousness in public situations, sometimes extreme dizziness, physical submissiveness, verba. For the third eye chakra, blockages or reversals might seem like a lack of direction in life, increasingly intense feelings of boredom or stagnation, migraines, insomnia, eye or vision problems, depression, high blood pressure, inability to remember one's dreams, constant and jarring flashbacks, closed-mindedness, fear, history of mental disorders, and history of addiction. For the crown chakra, blockages may look like feelings of envy, extreme sadness, need for superiority over others, self-destructive behaviors, history of addiction, generally harmful habits, dissociations from the physical plane, inability to make even the easiest decisions, persistent exhaustion, terrible migraines, hair loss, anemia, cerebral confusion, poor mental control, lack of intellect.
Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
Now, with all seven of these chakras revolving in the right direction with no blockages whatsoever, your kundalini would not be able to help itself from rising into that state of bliss, which it perceives above. Ultimately then, as one gets ready for kundalini awakening, the goal is to help those chakras clear, open, and align. Kundalini will respond with the greatest ease of motion accomplished and will demonstrate how well it knows what to do. As you begin to work through these chakras blockages or energetic reversals, you may find that those struggles look something like this. Blockages for the root chakra may look like low energy, general fear, persistent exhaustion, identity crisis, feeling isolated from the environment, eating disorders, general lack or erratic appetite, blatant materialism, difficulty saving money, or overall constant health problems. For the sacral chakra, blockages or reversals may look like lack of creativity, lack of inspiration, low or no motivation, low or no sexual appetite, feelings of insignificance, feelings of being unloved, feelings of being unaccepted, feelings of being outcasted, inability to care for oneself or persistent and recurrent problems of relationship with one's intimate partners. Blockages may look like identity crises or deficits for the solar plexus chakra, low self-esteem, low or no self-esteem, digestive problems, food intolerance, poor motivation, persistent weakness, constant nausea, anxiety disorders, liver disorder or disease, repeated illnesses, loss of core strength, lack of overall energy, recurrent depression with little relief, feelings of betrayal, For the chakra of the heart, reversals and blockages may seem like the inability to love oneself or others, the inability to put others first, the inability to put oneself first, the inability to overcome a problem ex, constant grudges, confidence issues, social anxiety or intense shyness, the failure to express emotions in a healthy way, problems of commitment, constant procrastination, intense anxiety For the throat chakra, blockages might seem like oversharing, inability to speak truthfully, failure to communicate with others, severe laryngitis, sore throats, respiratory or airway constraints, asthma, anemia, excessive exhaustion, inability to find the right words, paralyzing fear of confusion, nervousness in public situations, sometimes extreme dizziness, physical submissiveness, verba. For the third eye chakra, blockages or reversals might seem like a lack of direction in life, increasingly intense feelings of boredom or stagnation, migraines, insomnia, eye or vision problems, depression, high blood pressure, inability to remember one's dreams, constant and jarring flashbacks, closed-mindedness, fear, history of mental disorders, and history of addiction. For the crown chakra, blockages may look like feelings of envy, extreme sadness, need for superiority over others, self-destructive behaviors, history of addiction, generally harmful habits, dissociations from the physical plane, inability to make even the easiest decisions, persistent exhaustion, terrible migraines, hair loss, anemia, cerebral confusion, poor mental control, lack of intellect.
Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
Anglos dominated the prisoner population in 1977 and did not lose their plurality until 1988. Meanwhile, absolute numbers grew across the board—with the total number of those incarcerated approximately doubling during each interval. African American prisoners surpassed all other groups in 1988, but by 1995, they had been overtaken by Latinos; however, Black people have the highest rate of incarceration of any racial/ethnic grouping in California, or, for that matter, in the United States (see also Bonczar and Beck 1997). TABLE 4 CDC PRISONER POPULATION BY RACE/ETHNICITY The structure of new laws, intersecting with the structure of the burgeoning relative surplus population, and the state’s concentrated use of criminal laws in the Southland, produced a remarkable racial and ethnic shift in the prison population. Los Angeles is the primary county of commitment. Most prisoners are modestly educated men in the prime of life: 88 percent are between 19 and 44 years old. Less than 45 percent graduated from high school or read at the ninth-grade level; one in four is functionally illiterate. And, finally, the percentage of prisoners who worked six months or longer for the same employer immediately before being taken into custody has declined, from 54.5 percent in 1982 to 44 percent in 2000 (CDC, Characteristics of Population, various years). TABLE 5 CDC COMMITMENTS BY CONTROLLING OFFENSE (%) At the bottom of the first and subsequent waves of new criminal legislation lurked a key contradiction. On the one hand, the political rhetoric, produced and reproduced in the media, concentrated on the need for laws and prisons to control violence. “Crime” and “violence” seemed to be identical. However, as table 5 shows, there was a significant shift in the controlling (or most serious) offenses for those committed to the CDC, from a preponderance of violent offenses in 1980 to nonviolent crimes in 1995. More to the point, the controlling offenses for more than half of 1995’s commitments were nonviolent crimes of illness or of illegal income producing activity: drug use, drug sales, burglary, motor vehicle theft. The outcome of the first two years of California’s broadly written “three strikes” law presents a similar picture: in the period March 1994–January 1996, 15 percent of controlling offenses were violent crimes, 31 percent were drug offenses, and 41 percent were crimes against property (N = 15,839) (Christoper Davis et al. 1996). The relative surplus population comes into focus in these numbers. In 1996, 43 percent of third-strike prisoners were Black, 32.4 percent Latino, and 24.6 percent Anglo. The deliberate intensification of surveillance and arrest in certain areas, combined with novel crimes of status, drops the weight of these numbers into particular places. The chair of the State Task Force on Youth Gang Violence expressed the overlap between presumptions of violence and the exigencies of everyday reproduction when he wrote: “We are talking about well-organized, drug-dealing, dangerously armed and profit-motivated young hoodlums who are engaged in the vicious crimes of murder, rape, robbery, extortion and kidnapping as a means of making a living” (Philibosian 1986: ix; emphasis added).
Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (American Crossroads Book 21))
In a futile gesture against the overwhelming consensus, I did call a New York Times editor to complain about a damaging story portraying the AIG rescue as a backdoor bailout for Hank’s former colleagues at Goldman Sachs. I had asked Lloyd Blankfein about Goldman’s direct exposure to AIG; when he assured me Goldman’s exposures were relatively small and fully hedged, I made him send me the documentation. Still, the Times wouldn’t correct the record, and my call probably strengthened its suspicions. The same reporter later did a story portraying the entire crisis response team as servants of Goldman, accompanied by a vampire squid–like diagram with me in the middle. In the media, in the public, even in the financial community, we faced withering skepticism about our motives as well as our competence. After all, we had lent a mismanaged insurance company three years’ worth of federal spending on basic scientific research.
Timothy F. Geithner (Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises)
The amateur asserts that principles, rather than interest, ought to be both the end and the motive of political action,” Wilson writes. Far from taking a detached attitude, the amateur “sees each battle as a ‘crisis,’ and each victory as a triumph and each loss as a defeat for a cause.”10 The choice of candidates and leaders, for the amateur, should be based on their commitment to principles and policies rather than on personal loyalty or party label or parochial advantage. Parties, rather than being “neutral agents” to mobilize majorities and gain power, should be “the sources of program and the agents of social change.
Jonathan Rauch (Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy)
Premillennialists tended to have an even more melancholy view of nonChristians than had prevailed among their predecessors; sometimes this view was applied even to those who professed to be Christians but clearly had a different understanding of the gospel. All reality was, in essentially Manichean categories, divided into neat antitheses: good and evil, the saved and the lost, the true and the false (cf Marsden 1980:211). “In this dichotomized worldview, ambiguity was rare” (:225). Conversion was a crisis experience, a transfer from absolute darkness to absolute light. The millions on their way to perdition should therefore be snatched from the jaws of hell as soon as possible. Missionary motivation shifted gradually from emphasizing the depth of God's love to concentrating on the imminence and horror of divine judgment.
David J. Bosch (Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission)
The church's motive for mission is love for her Lord and all those he died to save. If we do not love, we will not act. But it is faith that tells us who God is in Christ and whom God loves. It is faith that tells us how to love. A crisis of faith weakens the charity which is the soul of the church, and a church so weakened cannot act, cannot be missionary.
Francis George
Frederick Hertzberg begins his famous article “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?” as follows: “How many articles, books, speeches, and workshops have pleaded plaintively, ‘How do I get an employee to do what I want him to do?’” (italics added). Read it again. Is Hertzberg speaking about motivation or manipulation? In
Ichak Kalderon Adizes (How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis)
Remember, too, that all who succeed in life get off to a bad start, and pass through many heartbreaking struggles before they “arrive.” The turning point in the lives of those who succeed, usually comes at the moment of some crisis, through which they are introduced to their “other selves.” John
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich (Start Motivational Books))
The wisdom of hindsight would reveal that I had no clue how to find myself, no idea how to love myself, and no ability to be myself. Mix all of those three dilemmas, and you’ve created a cocktail that will knock anyone out. Even though I couldn’t name those specific issues that night, I did own where I was to the best of my ability. That’s often all we can do in a crisis. So that night, I looked myself in the eyes and said, “It isn’t supposed to be this way.
Stephen Lovegrove (How to Find Yourself, Love Yourself, & Be Yourself: The Secret Instruction Manual for Being Human)
Let us not give up praying until this pandemic is over
Lailah Gifty Akita
Having an appreciation for what you do not know and understand is actually an important step in building broader knowledge and deeper understanding. It is the motivation for curiosity and the springboard for imagination. You become open to thoughts you might otherwise miss. You seek evidence, data, and facts from sources you know to be reliable even if they run contrary to your assumptions and views.
Leonard J. Marcus (You're It: Crisis, Change, and How to Lead When It Matters Most)
So I come to the abiding paradox that defines our predicament. An affluent, well-educated, hyper-connected public is in revolt against the system that has bestowed all of this bounty upon it. The great motive power of the revolt isn’t economic resentment but outrage over distance and failure. Everyday life is increasingly digital and networked. From dating to hailing a cab, most social and commercial transactions occur at the speed of light. This mode of life incessantly collides with the lumbering hierarchies we have inherited from the industrial age. Modern government, above all, is institutionally unable to grasp that it has lost its monopoly over political reality. It behaves as if imposture and depravity will never be found out: but under the digital dispensation, everything is found out. The public is accustomed to proximity but finds the exercise of power removed an impossible distance away: reasons are never given, questions are never answered, and in this way begins the long, foul rant that is our moment in history.
Martin Gurri (The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium)
Like Kamadhenu is knowledge; in crisis it is fruitful; in journeys like a mother it offers good advice; knowledge is hidden treasure, remember.
Rajen Jani (Old Chanakya Strategy: Aphorisms)
For times of crisis, wealth should be protected; women should be protected more than wealth; the own self constantly should be protected more than women and more than wealth.
Rajen Jani (Old Chanakya Strategy: Aphorisms)
For times of crisis, wealth should be protected by keeping it undisclosed hidden away, meant to be used only in crisis; for perhaps the unsteady Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, may destroy all accumulated disclosed wealth.
Rajen Jani (Old Chanakya Strategy: Aphorisms)
had been motivated by the need to act quickly, but, on reflection, I decided that they had a point. At
Ben S. Bernanke (Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath)
I emailed, thanking her for the prompt response. “Amazing what a little credit crisis can do to motivate,
Ben S. Bernanke (Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath)
I knew that psychological as well as economic factors motivate human behavior.
Ben S. Bernanke (Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath)
the idea that free markets produce socially desirable outcomes even though each buyer and seller acts purely out of selfish motives.
Ben S. Bernanke (Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath)
Am I campaigning? What are my motivations in telling this? Am I trying to get support and process my experience, or am I trying to get other people to think badly about this person?
Dean Spade (Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis (And the Next))
If your mid-semester crisis keeps you awake at night because you don’t think you’re good enough, just know that you are. You tried your best, and that’s all your dean expects of you. If you’re not perfect from the start, that’s okay. You have four years to get it right!
Joel B. Randall (Study, Sleep, Repeat: 130 Tips to Schedule Your College Life)
Leadership is shown through difficult and challenging times. If people face hardship or difficult , challenging times and there is no one to lead them. People tend to lead themselves to disaster, because everyone thinks they are right by what they doing and they are only thinking about themselves.
D.J. Kyos
America is neither a land of the free and home of the brave nor a bastion of white supremacy. Or rather it is both, and other things as well, changing all the time and yet somehow remaining itself. Whether you see it as one or the other or something else altogether is not a neutral observation -- it's a choice. Every choice satisfies a desire. Neither Sinful America nor Exceptional America, the 1619 Project nor the 1776 Report, tells a story that make me want to take part. The first produces despair, the second complacency. Both are static narratives that leave no room for human agency, inspire no love to make the country better, provide no motive for getting to work.
George Packer (Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal)
The motive that most captured the imaginations of the upper reaches of the George W. Bush administration, though, was the belief that a post-Saddam Iraq would become democratic, setting an example and a precedent that the other Arab states and Iran would have great difficulty resisting. The road to a transformed Middle East, it was widely believed, ran through Baghdad.
Richard N. Haass (A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order)
Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible. At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales. Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day. We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.[431]
Charles Morris (Tesla: How Elon Musk and Company Made Electric Cars Cool, and Remade the Automotive and Energy Industries)
The new underclass, so the customary reproach runs, shuns education, is work-shy and has lost its orientation to upward social mobility.139 The status anxiety of the middle class leads among other things to the economic interpretation, negative classification and devaluation of weaker groups, as shown in Wilhelm Heitmeyer’s long-term study on xenophobic attitudes among the German population Deutsche Zustände.140 To a certain degree the middle class has abandoned solidarity with the weak; it has built security by shutting itself off. Where there was previously a certain liberality, more rigorous ideas of morality, culture and behaviour have now returned. With increased fears of ‘contamination’ and ‘infection’, people seek the greatest possible distance and strict isolation from the ‘parallel society’ of the lower class.141 They are generally less inclined to accept society’s ‘encouragements to diversity’.142 The precarious middle classes, who actually experience relative downward mobility, count this as personal failure. Here individualistic and fatalistic interpretations of their own work prevail. They seek at almost any price to integrate into society by competition at work. This also has the consequence of resentment towards the weaker, the supposedly lazy or those considered less motivated.143
Oliver Nachtwey (Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe)
It is right to care for the environment and it is indeed a moral issue. It is right to care for the rights of the poor and to help protect them against policies motivated by greed and not respecting their well-being. But as I read all of them—and they are long!—I kept asking myself, Can you imagine Jesus saying things like this? No. Jesus was laser focused on the salvation of souls, on faith and repentance, on our eternal destinies, and these notes are hardly found in any of the documents. When they are found, they are completely overwhelmed by the very much greater abundance of “this world” concerns.
Ralph Martin (A Church in Crisis: Pathways Forward)
When we become psychologically dependent upon crisis, it actually becomes our life motivator, and if we don’t have a present crisis, we’ll learn to create one.
Beth Moore (So Long, Insecurity: You've Been a Bad Friend to Us)
You can conquer any circumstance with prayerful faith.
Lailah Gifty Akita
In the midst of the pandemic, our fervent prayers can change the course of history.
Lailah Gifty Akita
Panic not but pray.
Lailah Gifty Akita
Now that the crisis had come she found herself able to confront it coolly - nay, more, to take a curious interest in it under all her secret fear and shame, as if some part of her had detached itself from the rest and was interestingly absorbing impressions and analyzing motives and describing settings.
L.M. Montgomery (Emily of New Moon (Emily, #1))
It has been said that what we face with this climate crisis is harder than winning World War II, achieving civil rights, defeating bacterial infection and sending a man to the moon . . . combined. So let’s get super duper clear, my dear friends: this is a human despair crisis. Rebecca Solnit: “The scale is not like anything human beings have faced and journalists have reported on, except perhaps the threat of all-out nuclear war.” She then added the whopper caveat that nuclear war was something that “might happen, not something that is happening.” I add this: with nuclear war, we all agreed the threat was real and we talked about it openly. We weren’t fighting the science on it. Sure, we’ve had climate change before. And, yep, the planet survived. But this is not the point. No doubt the planet will survive again. There’s just one small problem that we get distracted from. This time, we probably won’t. Or at least, our lives as we know and love them won’t….Scientists and activists have no vested interest in making this shit up. There is no money to be made and no power to be gained from spreading information about the worth of sustainable energy, or consuming less. I said this to someone who challenged me at a dinner party as to my motives behind engaging in climate activism: “We would much rather be at the beach.” Fair point, they replied.
Sarah Wilson (This One Wild and Precious Life: A Hopeful Path Forward in a Fractured World)
Creativity can flourish in times of crisis, and the absence of specific instruments, circumstances can become a motivator to create. Shifting attention from “I don’t have this, that’s why I can’t do that” to “I want this, and how can I get that?” liberates intrinsic resources that help to be proactive and see opportunities rather than obstacles. Creativity is the result of giving birth to something new, and it’s challenging but the result is gratifying.
Elena Sullivan
Creating opportunities for self-reliance is not in itself a long-term solution for refugees, but it is an important step towards all of the main long-term solutions: repatriation, local integration, or resettlement. This is because offering people autonomy and economic opportunity is likely to empower them to better contribute to whichever society into which they are ultimately assimilated. It can make refugees' eventual return more sustainable because they will return with the skills and motivation to rebuild their country of origin. It can make people better equipped to contribute to a new society once resettled. And it can make them a more desirable resettlement prospect because of their ability to find work and live autonomously.
Alexander Betts (Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System)
They Are Self-Referential, Not Self-Reflective Emotionally immature people are highly self-referential, meaning that in any interaction, all roads lead back to them. However, they aren’t self-reflective. Their focus on themselves isn’t about gaining insight or self-understanding; it’s about being the center of attention. As you talk to them, self-referential people will turn whatever you say back to one of their own experiences. An example would be a mother listening to her daughter describe a relationship crisis and using it as a springboard to talk about her own divorce. Another example would be parents who upstage their child’s victory with recollections of their own accomplishments. Those who are more socially skilled might listen more politely, but you still won’t hold their interest. They may not overtly change the subject, but they won’t ask follow-up questions or express curiosity about the details of your experience. They’re more likely to bring the conversation to a close with a pleasant comment that effectively ends it, such as “That’s wonderful, dear. I know you had a good time.” Because they lack self-reflection, emotionally immature people don’t consider their role in a problem. They don’t assess their behavior or question their motives. If they caused a problem, they dismiss it by saying they didn’t intend to hurt you. After all, you can’t blame them for something they didn’t mean to do, right? In this way, their egocentric focus remains on their intention, not the impact on you.
Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
Today, however, this period of egoistic exchange has ended. You cannot receive nor give for the sake of receiving anymore. But then how can we exist? What should we do? Humanity has not realized its new state yet. People still do not understand that the old regulators are gone, and that from now on everyone will be able to live only by being completely interconnected with the world. This is the condition of the global, integral world. This condition is called “mutual guarantee.” People will attain prosperity only through others, depending on how kindly they will think of others, and on how much they desire to give to others. This is what today’s crisis is pushing us toward.
Michael Laitman
This could come as disheartening news to ecological campaigners who believe that positive and optimistic messages of a better future are far more effective than visions of apocalypse in rousing people to action. While that may be true for motivating action among the general public, it is less obviously the case for the privileged and powerful, who are more likely to respond to crisis and even fear. The chances are that they will only take radical action if they feel they have something to lose.
Roman Krznaric (The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking)
This goes for any type of positive change, including how we try to motivate ourselves. We need to feel like the kind of person who wants to do the right thing. Moral licensing turns out to be, at its core, an identity crisis. We only reward ourselves for good behavior if we believe that who we really are is the self that wants to be bad. From this point of view, every act of self-control is a punishment, and only self-indulgence if a reward. But why must we see ourselves this way? Moving beyond the traps of moral licensing requires knowing that who we are is the self that wants the best for us—and the self that wants to live in line with our core values. When this happens, we no longer view the impulsive, lazy, or easily tempted self as the "real" us. We will no longer act like someone who must be bribed, tricked, or forced to pursue our goals, and then rewarded for making any effort at all.
Kelly McGonigal (The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It)
But as law school acquaintances became close friends, I became less comfortable with the lies I told about my own past. - At Yale, I decided to change that. I'm not sure what motivated this change. Part of it is that I stopped being ashamed: My parents' mistakes were not my fault, so I had no reason to hide them. But I was concerned most of all that no one understood my grandparents' outsize role in my life. Few of even my closest friends understood how utterly hopeless my life would have been without Mamaw and Papaw. So maybe I just wanted to give credit where credit is due.
J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success. Many people with secondary greatness—that is, social recognition for their talents—lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you’ll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
the threat today is not western religions, but psychology and consumerism. is the Dharma becoming another psychotherapy, another commodity to be bought and sold? will western Buddhism become all too compatible with our individualistic consumption patterns, with expensive retreats and initiations, catering to overstressed converts, eager to pursue their own enlightenment? let’s hope not, because Buddhism and the west need each other. despite its economic and technologic dynamism, western civilisation and its globalisation are in trouble, which means all of us are in trouble. the most obvious example is our inability to respond to accelerating climate change, as seriously as it requires. if humanity is to survive and thrive over the next few centuries, there is no need to go on at length here about the other social and ecological crisis that confront us now, which are increasingly difficult to ignore [many of those are considered in the following chapters]. it’s also becoming harder to overlook the fact that the political and economic systems we’re so proud of seem unable to address these problems. one must ask, is that because they themselves are the problem? part of the problem is leadership, or the lack of it, but we can’t simply blame our rulers. it’s not only the lack of a moral core of those who rise to the top, or the institutional defamations that massage their rise, economical and political elites, and there’s not much difference between them anymore. like the rest of us, they are in need of a new vision of possibility, what it means to be human, why we tend to get into trouble, and how we can get out go it, those who benefit the most from the present social arrangements may think of themselves as hardheaded realists, but as self-conscious human beings, we remain motivated by some such vision, weather we’re aware of it or not, as why we love war, points out. even secular modernity is based on a spiritual worldview, unfortunately a deficient one, from a Buddhist perspective.
David R. Loy (Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution)
She wrote, “The greater the crisis, it seems, the swifter the evolution.” She wrote, “All transformation appears to be motivated by desperation and emergency.” She
Elizabeth Gilbert (The Signature of All Things)
Instead of using one exam as the primary summative assessment, he told teachers to use multiple formative assessments along the way—assignments, discussions, observations, and conversations—to inform semester grades. Instead of focusing on getting a grade on a specific exam, he wants students to focus on doing interesting work and teachers to focus on providing meaningful feedback throughout the semester.
Mike Anderson (Tackling the Motivation Crisis: How to Activate Student Learning Without Behavior Charts, Pizza Parties, or Other Hard-to-Quit Incentive Systems)
Everyone is now so eager to see the government "reveal" this long-awaited information that no one questions the reality of the basic facts and the political motivations that could inspire a manipulation of those facts. Trying to outsmart the CIA and the Pentagon has become such a national pastime that lawsuits against federal agencies under the Freedom of Information Act have begun to accumulate. All that has been shown so far is that these agencies were involved – often covertly – in many aspects of the UFO problem. I suspect that they are still involved. Discovering the secret of the UFO propulsion mechanism could be such a military breakthrough that any research project connected with it would enjoy the highest level of classification. But these UFO enthusiasts who are so anxious to expose the government have not reflected that they may be playing into the hands of a more sophisticated coverup of the real situation. Because of their eagerness to believe any indication that the authorities already possess the proof of UFO reality, many enthusiasts provide an ideal conduit for anyone wishing to spread the extraterrestrial gospel. The purpose of such an exercise need not be complex or strategically important. It could be something as mundane as a political diversion, or a test of the reliability of information channels under simulated crisis conditions, or a decoy for paramilitary operations. None of these rumors is likely to lead us any closer to a solution that can only be obtained by careful, intelligent, and perhaps tedious scientific research. The truth is that the UFOs may not be spacecraft at all. And the government may simply be hiding the fact that, in spite of the billions of dollars spent on air defense, it has no more clues to the nature of the phenomenon today than it did in the forties when it began its investigations.
Jacques F. Vallée (Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact)
If there was one thing Snake knew about people, it was that once they got attached to a theory, it was hard to get them detached. They’d screen out unhelpful facts, invent favorable ones, and ignore contradictions in their own claims. Look at those Sandy Hook truthers, babbling about false flags and crisis actors and all the rest. When people were motivated enough to believe something, they were going to believe it no matter what. There was no such thing as a bridge too far.
Barry Eisler (All the Devils (Livia Lone #4))
We were never meant to be like each other. Instead, we’re perfectly designed to complement one another.
Karen Whitten (The 25 Mindsets: Understand Anyone, Even Yourself)
You are far more extraordinary than you have allowed yourself to believe. Every mindset is important, valuable, significant, and equipped with incredible gifts. Our world would not be as enjoyable, beautiful, or productive without any one mindset.
Karen Whitten (The 25 Mindsets: Understand Anyone, Even Yourself)
You aren’t a jumbled assortment of traits and characteristics. On the contrary, the various aspects of your being are sublimely interconnected.
Karen Whitten (The 25 Mindsets: Understand Anyone, Even Yourself)
To find out who you are, you must also see who you are not.
Karen Whitten (The 25 Mindsets: Understand Anyone, Even Yourself)
A mindset is an innate disposition governing how you expect people to behave (and not behave), what you are motivated to do (and not do), and why you do what you do (and the consequence if you do not).
Karen Whitten (The 25 Mindsets: Understand Anyone, Even Yourself)
Though you may value many principles, there is one you instinctively uphold above all others.
Karen Whitten (The 25 Mindsets: Understand Anyone, Even Yourself)
The formula to end burnout is straightforward: maximize your passion and minimize your void.
Karen Whitten (The 25 Mindsets: Understand Anyone, Even Yourself)
Purpose isn’t what you do. Purpose is your reason for doing something. It’s the why behind what you do.
Karen Whitten (The 25 Mindsets: Understand Anyone, Even Yourself)