Criteria For Success Quotes

The less you associate with some people, the more your life will improve. Any time you tolerate mediocrity in others, it increases your mediocrity. An important attribute in successful people is their impatience with negative thinking and negative acting people. As you grow, your associates will change. Some of your friends will not want you to go on. They will want you to stay where they are. Friends that don't help you climb will want you to crawl. Your friends will stretch your vision or choke your dream. Those that don't increase you will eventually decrease you. Consider this: Never receive counsel from unproductive people. Never discuss your problems with someone incapable of contributing to the solution, because those who never succeed themselves are always first to tell you how. Not everyone has a right to speak into your life. You are certain to get the worst of the bargain when you exchange ideas with the wrong person. Don't follow anyone who's not going anywhere. With some people you spend an evening: with others you invest it. Be careful where you stop to inquire for directions along the road of life. Wise is the person who fortifies his life with the right friendships. If you run with wolves, you will learn how to howl. But, if you associate with eagles, you will learn how to soar to great heights. "A mirror reflects a man's face, but what he is really like is shown by the kind of friends he chooses." The simple but true fact of life is that you become like those with whom you closely associate - for the good and the bad. Note: Be not mistaken. This is applicable to family as well as friends. Yes...do love, appreciate and be thankful for your family, for they will always be your family no matter what. Just know that they are human first and though they are family to you, they may be a friend to someone else and will fit somewhere in the criteria above. "In Prosperity Our Friends Know Us. In Adversity We Know Our friends." "Never make someone a priority when you are only an option for them." "If you are going to achieve excellence in big things,you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.."..

The President in particular is very much a figurehead — he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had — he has already spent two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud.

Remember, results aren't the criteria for success — it's the effort made for achievement that is most important.

Freedom of Speech doesn't justify online bullying. Words have power, be careful how you use them.

Don't listen to those who say, you are taking too big a chance. Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor, and it would surely be rubbed out by today. Most important, don't listen when the little voice of fear inside you rears its ugly head and says "They are all smarter than you out there. They're more talented, they're taller, blonder, prettier, luckier, and they have connections." I firmly believe that if you follow a path that interests you, not to the exclusion of love, sensitivity, and cooperation with others, but with the strength of conviction that you can move others by your own efforts, and do not make success or failure the criteria by which you live, the chances are you'll be a person worthy of your own respects.

When we start being too impressed by the results of our work, we slowly come to the erroneous conviction that life is one large scoreboard where someone is listing the points to measure our worth. And before we are fully aware of it, we have sold our soul to the many grade-givers. That means we are not only in the world, but also of the world. Then we become what the world makes us. We are intelligent because someone gives us a high grade. We are helpful because someone says thanks. We are likable because someone likes us. And we are important because someone considers us indispensable. In short, we are worthwhile because we have successes. And the more we allow our accomplishments — the results of our actions — to become the criteria of our self-esteem, the more we are going to walk on our mental and spiritual toes, never sure if we will be able to live up to the expectations which we created by our last successes. In many people’s lives, there is a nearly diabolic chain in which their anxieties grow according to their successes. This dark power has driven many of the greatest artists into self-destruction.

In theory, the risk of business failure can be reduced to a number, the probability of failure multiplied by the cost of failure. Sure, this turns out to be a subjective analysis, but in the process your own attitudes toward financial risk and reward are revealed. By contrast, personal risk usually defies quantification. It's a matter of values and priorities, an expression of who you are. "Playing it safe" may simply mean you do not weigh heavily the compromises inherent in the status quo. The financial rewards of the moment may fully compensate you for the loss of time and fulfillment. Or maybe you just don't think about it. On the other hand, if time and satisfaction are precious, truly priceless, you will find the cost of business failure, so long as it does not put in peril the well-being of you or your family, pales in comparison with the personal risks of no trying to live the life you want today. Considering personal risk forces us to define personal success. We may well discover that the business failure we avoid and the business success we strive for do not lead us to personal success at all. Most of us have inherited notions of "success" from someone else or have arrived at these notions by facing a seemingly endless line of hurdles extending from grade school through college and into our careers. We constantly judge ourselves against criteria that others have set and rank ourselves against others in their game. Personal goals, on the other hand, leave us on our own, without this habit of useless measurement and comparison. Only the Whole Life Plan leads to personal success. It has the greatest chance of providing satisfaction and contentment that one can take to the grave, tomorrow. In the Deferred Life Plan there will always be another prize to covet, another distraction, a new hunger to sate. You will forever come up short.

Hiring without clear and strict criteria for cultural fit greatly hampers the potential for success of any organization.

Intelligence...[is] not marathon rac[e]: there is no fixed criteria for success, no start or finish lines -- and running sideways or backwards, might secure victory.

. . ideology. . . is an instrument of power; a defense mechanism against information; a pretext for eluding moral constraints in doing or approving evil with a clean conscience; and finally, a way of banning the criterion of experience, that is, of completely eliminating or indefinitely postponing the pragmatic criteria of success and failure. —Jean-François Revel1

It's amazing how people can find all the mistakes in the world concerning another person, but look into the mirror every day without making changes within. Stop looking down your nose at others, What does that achieve? We all can make room for improvements. Most of the time it starts with a little attitude adjustment.

Try to turn as many soft, aspirational goals as possible into success criteria, and make them specific enough that you can actually tell whether or not you've met them.

By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel, and we are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use

Following Homo sapiens, domesticated cattle, pigs and sheep are the second, third and fourth most widespread large mammals in the world. From a narrow evolutionary perspective, which measures success by the number of DNA copies, the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful boon for chickens, cattle, pigs and sheep. Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness. Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueller with the passing of the centuries. The natural lifespan of wild chickens is about seven to twelve years, and of cattle about twenty to twenty-five years. In the wild, most chickens and cattle died long before that, but they still had a fair chance of living for a respectable number of years. In contrast, the vast majority of domesticated chickens and cattle are slaughtered at the age of between a few weeks and a few months, because this has always been the optimal slaughtering age from an economic perspective. (Why keep feeding a cock for three years if it has already reached its maximum weight after three months?) Egg-laying hens, dairy cows and draught animals are sometimes allowed to live for many years. But the price is subjugation to a way of life completely alien to their urges and desires. It’s reasonable to assume, for example, that bulls prefer to spend their days wandering over open prairies in the company of other bulls and cows rather than pulling carts and ploughshares under the yoke of a whip-wielding ape. In order for humans to turn bulls, horses, donkeys and camels into obedient draught animals, their natural instincts and social ties had to be broken, their aggression and sexuality contained, and their freedom of movement curtailed. Farmers developed techniques such as locking animals inside pens and cages, bridling them in harnesses and leashes, training them with whips and cattle prods, and mutilating them. The process of taming almost always involves the castration of males. This restrains male aggression and enables humans selectively to control the herd’s procreation.

The President in particular is very much a figurehead—he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had—he has already spent two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud. Very very few people realize that the President and the Government have virtually no power at all, and of these few people only six know whence ultimate political power is wielded. Most of the others secretly believe that the ultimate decision-making process is handled by a computer. They couldn’t be more wrong.

We may well discover that the business failure we avoid and the business success we strive for do not lead us to personal success at all. Most of us have inherited notions of "success" from someone else or have arrived at these notions by facing a seemingly endless line of hurdles extending from grade school through college and into our careers. We constantly judge ourselves against criteria that others have set and rank ourselves against others in their game.

AI is a fantasy, nothing but a story we tell about our code. It is also a cover for sloppy engineering. Making a supposed AI program that customizes a feed is less work than creating a great user interface that allows users to probe and improve what they see on their own terms—and that is so because AI has no objective criteria for success.

… ideology… is an instrument of power; a defense mechanism against information; a pretext for eluding moral constraints in doing or approving evil with a clean conscience; and finally, a way of banning the criterion of experience, that is, of completely eliminating or indefinitely postponing the pragmatic criteria of success and failure. —Jean-François Revel

Since the values of the market were the highest criteria, persons also became valued as commodities which could be bought and sold. A person's worth is then his salable market value, whether it is skill or 'personality' that is up for sale. [...] The market value, then, becomes the individual's valuation of himself, so that self-confidence and 'self-feeling' (ones experience of identity with one's self) are largely reflections of what others think of one, in this case the 'others' being those who represent the market. Thus contemporary economic processes have contributed not only to an alienation of man from man, but likewise to 'self-alienation' - an alienation of the individual from himself. As Fromm very well summarizes the point: Since modern man experiences himself both as the seller and as the commodity to be sold on the market, his self-esteem depends on conditions beyond his control. If he is 'successful,' he is valuable; if he is not, he is worthless. The degree of insecurity which results from this orientation can hardly be overestimated. If one feels that one's own value is not constituted primarily by the human qualities one possesses, but by one's succes on a competitive market with ever-changing conditions, one's self-esteem is bound to be shaky and in constant need of confirmation by others. [Erich Fromm, Man for himself] In such a situation one is driven to strive relentlessly for 'succes'; this is the chief way to validate ones self and to allay anxiety. And any failure in the competitive struggle is a threat to the quasi-esteem for one's self - which, quasi though it be, is all one has in such a situation. This obviously leads to powerful feelings of helplessness and inferiority. [p.169f]

Product requirements conversations must then be grounded in business outcomes: what are we trying to achieve by building this product? This rule holds true for design decisions as well. Success criteria must be redefined and roadmaps must be done away with. In their place, teams build backlogs of hypotheses they’d like to test and prioritize them based on risk, feasibility, and potential success.

Conversely, the more we widen the definition of a feature or trait (say, intelligence, or temperament), the less likely that the trait will correlate with single genes—and, by extension, with races, tribes, or subpopulations. Intelligence and temperament are not marathon races: there are no fixed criteria for success, no start or finish lines—and running sideways or backward, might secure victory.

Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness.

in 2015 Ernst & Young professional services in the United Kingdom removed degree classification from its hiring criteria, citing a lack of evidence that university success correlated with job performance.

We talked about how easy it was to make the mistake of anthropomorphising animals, and projecting our own feelings and perceptions on to them, where they were inappropriate and didn't fit. We simply had no idea what it was like being an extremely large lizard, and neither for that matter did the lizard, becuase it was not self-conscious about being an extremely large lizard, it just got on with the business of being one. To react with revulsion to its behavior was to make the mistake of applying criteria that are only appropriate to the business of being human. We each make our own accommodation with the world and learn to survive in it in different ways. What works as successful behaviour for us does not work for lizards, and vice versa.

If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I’m guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that’s worth more to most of us than money. Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful. Being a teacher is meaningful. Being a physician is meaningful. So is being an entrepreneur,

Seduced by the spectacular theoretical and practical successes of the objective sciences into thinking that the methods and criteria of those sciences were the only means to truth, philosophers sought to apply those same methods and criteria to questions relating to the meaning of life and the values that give meaning to life. Philosophy, especially the Analytical species prevalent in the English-speaking world, was broken up into specialized disciplines and fragmented into particular problems, all swayed and impregnated by scientism, reductionism, and relativism. All questions of meaning and value were consigned to the rubbish heap of 'metaphysical nonsense'.

The “IQ fundamentalist” Arthur Jensen put it thusly in his 1980 book Bias in Mental Testing (p. 113): “The four socially and personally most important threshold regions on the IQ scale are those that differentiate with high probability between persons who, because of their level of general mental ability, can or cannot attend a regular school (about IQ 50), can or cannot master the traditional subject matter of elementary school (about IQ 75), can or cannot succeed in the academic or college preparatory curriculum through high school (about IQ 105), can or cannot graduate from an accredited four-year college with grades that would qualify for admission to a professional or graduate school (about IQ 115). Beyond this, the IQ level becomes relatively unimportant in terms of ordinary occupational aspirations and criteria of success. That is not to say that there are not real differences between the intellectual capabilities represented by IQs of 115 and 150 or even between IQs of 150 and 180. But IQ differences in this upper part of the scale have far less personal implications than the thresholds just described and are generally of lesser importance for success in the popular sense than are certain traits of personality and character.

Perhaps it is better to conceptualize it this way: Everyone needs a concrete, specific goal—an ambition, and a purpose—to limit chaos and make intelligible sense of his or her life. But all such concrete goals can and should be subordinated to what might be considered a meta-goal, which is a way of approaching and formulating goals themselves. The meta-goal could be “live in truth.” This means, “Act diligently towards some well-articulated, defined and temporary end. Make your criteria for failure and success timely and clear, at least for yourself (and even better if others can understand what you are doing and evaluate it with you). While doing so, however, allow the world and your spirit to unfold as they will, while you act out and articulate the truth.” This is both pragmatic ambition and the most courageous of faiths.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

The hereditary Emperor is nearly dead and has been for many centuries. In the last moments of his dying coma he was locked in a stasis field which keeps him in a state of perpetual unchangingness. All his heirs are now long dead, and this means that without any drastic political upheaval, power has simply and effectively moved a rung or two down the ladder, and is now seen to be vested in a body that used to act simply as advisers to the Emperor—an elected governmental assembly headed by a President elected by that assembly. In fact it vests in no such place. The President in particular is very much a figurehead—he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had—he has already spent two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud. Very very few people realize that the President and the Government have virtually no power at all, and of these few people only six know whence ultimate political power is wielded. Most of the others secretly believe that the ultimate decision-making process is handled by a computer. They couldn’t be more wrong.

In many life sciences, including psychology, discovery isn’t a black-and-white issue; it is matter of determining, from one experiment to the next, the theoretical contribution made by various shades of gray. When psychologists set arbitrary criteria (p<.05) on the precise shade of gray required to achieve publication—and hence career success—they also incentivize a host of conscious and unconscious strategies to cross that threshold. In the battle between science and storytelling, there is simply no competition: storytelling wins every time.

The implication that the change in nomenclature from “Multiple Personality Disorder” to “Dissociative Identity Disorder” means the condition has been repudiated and “dropped” from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association is false and misleading. Many if not most diagnostic entities have been renamed or have had their names modified as psychiatry changes in its conceptualizations and classifications of mental illnesses. When the DSM decided to go with “Dissociative Identity Disorder” it put “(formerly multiple personality disorder)” right after the new name to signify that it was the same condition. It’s right there on page 526 of DSM-IV-R. There have been four different names for this condition in the DSMs over the course of my career. I was part of the group that developed and wrote successive descriptions and diagnostic criteria for this condition for DSM-III-R, DSM–IV, and DSM-IV-TR. While some patients have been hurt by the impact of material that proves to be inaccurate, there is no evidence that scientifically demonstrates the prevalence of such events. Most material alleged to be false has been disputed by someone, but has not been proven false. Finally, however intriguing the idea of encouraging forgetting troubling material may seem, there is no evidence that it is either effective or safe as a general approach to treatment. There is considerable belief that when such material is put out of mind, it creates symptoms indirectly, from “behind the scenes.” Ironically, such efforts purport to cure some dissociative phenomena by encouraging others, such as Dissociative Amnesia.

How do you judge the professionals you patronize? Too many people judge them by display factors. Extra points are given to those who wear expensive clothes, drive luxury automobiles, and live in exclusive neighborhoods. They assume a professional is likely to be mediocre, even incompetent, if he lives in a modest home and drives a three-year-old Ford Crown Victoria. Very, very few people judge the quality of the professionals they use by net worth criteria. Many professionals have told us they must look successful to convince their customers/clients that they are.

Intuition, like all meditative disciplines, can be enormously effective if and only if, one has the courage and personal power to follow through on the guidance it provides. Guidance requires action, but it does not guarantee safety. While we measure our own success in terms of our personal comfort and security, the universe measures our success by how much we have learned. So long as we use comfort and security as our criteria of success, we will fear our own intuitive guidance because by its very nature it directs us into new cycles of learning that are sometimes uncomfortable.

From a narrow evolutionary perspective, which measures success by the number of DNA copies, the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful boon for chickens, cattle, pigs and sheep. Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness. Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueller with the passing of the centuries.

Following Homo sapiens, domesticated cattle, pigs and sheep are the second, third and fourth most widespread large mammals in the world. From a narrow evolutionary perspective, which measures success by the number of DNA copies, the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful boon for chickens, cattle, pigs and sheep. Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness. Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived.

What does Conway do to counter these vehement arguments? Nothing. He agrees with them that they can make it work. He doesn’t try to convince the founders that they’re wrong. Instead, he asks them what success would look like over the next few months. And he asks them for specifics. That conversation allows him to sit down with the founder and set performance benchmarks that would signal that the company was heading in the right direction. Then, they agree when to revisit those benchmarks and, if the venture is falling short, to have a serious discussion about shutting it down. This probably sounds a lot like Conway is using kill criteria, and that’s because he is.

Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us. If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I’m guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that’s worth more to most of us than money. Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful.

In a similar study conducted at Yale University, undergraduate participants were offered the opportunity to use the same kind of casuistry to maintain the occupational status quo. The students evaluated one of two applicants (Michael or Michelle) for the position of police chief. One applicant was streetwise, a tough risk-taker, popular with other officers, but poorly educated. By contrast, the educated applicant was well schooled, media savvy, and family oriented, but lacked street experience and was less popular with the other officers. The undergraduate participants judged the job applicant on various streetwise and education criteria, and then rated the importance of each criterion for success as a police chief. Participants who rated Michael inflated the importance of being an educated, media-savvy family man when these were qualities Michael possessed, but devalued these qualities when he happened to lack them. No such helpful shifting of criteria took place for Michelle. As a consequence, regardless of whether he was streetwise or educated, the demands of the social world were shaped to ensure that Michael had more of what it took to be a successful police chief. As the authors put it, participants may have ‘felt that they had chosen the right man for the job, when in fact they had chosen the right job criteria for the man.’21 Ironically, the people who were most convinced of their own objectivity discriminated the most.

I have already mentioned two features that successful unifications tend to share. The first, surprise, cannot be underestimated. If there is no surprise, then the idea is either uninteresting or something we knew before. Second, the consequences must be dramatic: The unification must lead quickly to new insights and hypothesis, becoming the engine that drives progress in understanding. But there is a third factor that trumps both of these. A good unified theory must offer predictions that no one would have thought to make before. It may even suggest new kinds of experiments that make sense only in light of the new theory. Most important of all, the predictions must be confirmed by experiment. These three criteria-surprise, new insights, and new predictions confirmed by experiment-are what we will be looking for when we come to judge the promise of current efforts at unification.

As successful companies mature, employees gradually come to assume that the priorities they have learned to accept, and the ways of doing things and methods of making decisions that they have employed so successfully, are the right way to work. Once members of the organization begin to adopt ways of working and criteria for making decisions by assumption, rather than by conscious decision, then those processes and values come to constitute the organization’s culture. 7 As companies grow from a few employees to hundreds and thousands, the challenge of getting all employees to agree on what needs to be done and how it should be done so that the right jobs are done repeatedly and consistently can be daunting for even the best managers. Culture is a powerful management tool in these situations. Culture enables employees to act autonomously and causes them to act consistently. Hence, the location of the

How did we define “poverty-free”? After interviewing many borrowers about what a poverty-free life meant to them, we developed a set of ten indicators that our staff and outside evaluators could use to measure whether a family in rural Bangladesh lived a poverty-free life. These indicators are: (1) having a house with a tin roof; (2) having beds or cots for all members of the family; (3) having access to safe drinking water; (4) having access to a sanitary latrine; (5) having all school-age children attending school; (6) having sufficient warm clothing for the winter; (7) having mosquito nets; (8) having a home vegetable garden; (9) having no food shortages, even during the most difficult time of a very difficult year; and (10) having sufficient income-earning opportunities for all adult members of the family. We will be monitoring these criteria on our own and are inviting local and international researchers to help us track our successes and setbacks as we head toward our goal of a poverty-free Bangladesh.

In the same movie, Emperor Joseph II offers Mozart some musical advice: "Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect." The emperor was put off by the surface complexity of Mozart's music. He didn't see that each note served a purpose-to make a promise or fulfill one, to complete a pattern or vary one. Similarly, at first encounter people are sometimes put off by the superficial complexity of fundamental physics. Too many gluons! But each of the eight color gluons is there for a purpose. Together, they fulfill complete symmetry among the color charges. Take one gluon away, or change its properties, and the structure would fall. Specifically, if you make such a change, then the theory formerly known as QCD begins to predict gibberish; some particles are produced with negative probabilities, and others with probability greater than 1. Such a perfectly rigid theory, one that doesn't allow consistent modification, is extremely vulnerable. If any of its predictions are wrong, there's nowhere to hide. No fudge factors or tweaks are available. On the other hand, a perfectly rigid theory, once it shows significant success, becomes very powerful indeed. Because if it's approximately right and can't be changed, then it must be exactly right! Salieri's criteria explain why symmetry is such an appealing principle for theory building. Systems with symmetry are well on the path to Salieri's perfection. The equations governing different objects and different situations must be strictly related, or the symmetry is diminished. With enough violations all pattern is lost, and the symmetry falls. Symmetry helps us make perfect theories. So the crux of the matter is not the number of notes or the number of particles or equations. It is the perfection of the designs they embody. If removing any one would spoil the design, then the number is exactly what it should be. Mozart's answer to the emperor was superb: "Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?

Nevertheless, the possibility that the evolved order in which we live provides us with opportunities for happiness that equal or exceed those provided by primitive orders to far fewer people should not be dismissed (which is not to say that such matters can be calculated). Much of the ‘alienation’ or unhappiness of modern life stems from two sources, one of which affects primarily intellectuals, the other, all beneficiaries of material abundance. The first is a self-fulfilling prophecy of unhappiness for those within any ‘system’ that does not satisfy rationalistic criteria of conscious control. Thus intellectuals from Rousseau to such recent figures in French and German thought as Foucault and Habermas regard alienation as rampant in any system in which an order is ‘imposed’ on individuals without their conscious consent; consequently, their followers tend to find civilisation unbearable – by definition, as it were. Secondly, the persistence of instinctual feelings of altruism and solidarity subject those who follow the impersonal rules of the extended order to what is now fashionably called ‘bad conscience’; similarly, the acquisition of material success is supposed to be attended with feelings of guilt (or ‘social conscience’). In the midst of plenty, then, there is unhappiness not only born of peripheral poverty, but also of the incompatibility, on the part of instinct and of a hubristic reason, with an order that is of a decidedly non-instinctive and extra-rational character.

The largest and most rigorous study that is currently available in this area is the third one commissioned by the British Home Office (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005). The analysis was based on the 2,643 sexual assault cases (where the outcome was known) that were reported to British police over a 15-year period of time. Of these, 8% were classified by the police department as false reports. Yet the researchers noted that some of these classifications were based simply on the personal judgments of the police investigators, based on the victim’s mental illness, inconsistent statements, drinking or drug use. These classifications were thus made in violation of the explicit policies of their own police agencies. There searchers therefore supplemented the information contained in the police files by collecting many different types of additional data, including: reports from forensic examiners, questionnaires completed by police investigators, interviews with victims and victim service providers, and content analyses of the statements made by victims and witnesses. They then proceeded to evaluate each case using the official criteria for establishing a false allegation, which was that there must be either “a clear and credible admission by the complainant” or “strong evidential grounds” (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan,2005). On the basis of this analysis, the percentage of false reports dropped to 2.5%." Lonsway, Kimberly A., Joanne Archambault, and David Lisak. "False reports: Moving beyond the issue to successfully investigate and prosecute non-stranger sexual assault." The Voice 3.1 (2009): 1-11.

TOTALITARIANISM: People are interested in ants because they think they have managed to create a successful totalitarian system. Certainly, the impression we get from the outside is that everyone in the anthill works, everyone is obedient, everyone is ready to sacrifice themselves and everyone is the same. And for the time being, all human totalitarian systems have failed. That is why we thought of copying social insects (like Napoleon, whose emblem was the bee). The pheromones that flood the anthill with global information have an equivalent in the planetary television of today. There is a widespread belief that if the best is made available to all, one day we will end up with a perfect human race. That is not the way of things. Nature, with all due respect to Mr Darwin, does not evolve in the direction of the supremacy of the best (according to which criteria, anyway?). Nature draws its strength from diversity. It needs all kinds of people, good, bad, mad, desperate, sporty, bed-ridden, hunchbacked, hare-lipped, happy, sad, intelligent, stupid, selfish, generous, small, tall, black, yellow, red and white. It needs all religions, philosophies, fanaticisms and wisdom. The only danger is that any one species may be eliminated by another. In the past, fields of maize artificially designed by men and made up of clones of the best heads (the ones that need least water, are most frost-resistant or produce the best grains) have suddenly succumbed to trivial infections while fields of wild maize made up of several different strains, each with its own peculiar strengths and weaknesses, have always managed to survive epidemics. Nature hates uniformity and loves diversity. It is in this perhaps that its essential genius lies. Edmond Wells Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The

There is no reason at all for thinking that the average intelligent investor, even with much devoted effort, can derive better results over the years from the purchase of growth stocks than the investment companies specializing in this area. Surely these organizations have more brains and better research facilities at their disposal than you do. Consequently we should advise against the usual type of growth-stock commitment for the enterprising investor.* This is one in which the excellent prospects are fully recognized in the market and already reflected in a current price-earnings ratio of, say, higher than 20. (For the defensive investor we suggested an upper limit of purchase price at 25 times average earnings of the past seven years. The two criteria would be about equivalent in most cases.)† The striking thing about growth stocks as a class is their tendency toward wide swings in market price. This is true of the largest and longest-established companies—such as General Electric and International Business Machines—and even more so of newer and smaller successful companies. They illustrate our thesis that the main characteristic of the stock market since 1949 has been the injection of a highly speculative element into the shares of companies which have scored the most brilliant successes, and which themselves would be entitled to a high investment rating. (Their credit standing is of the best, and they pay the lowest interest rates on their borrowings.) The investment caliber of such a company may not change over a long span of years, but the risk characteristics of its stock will depend on what happens to it in the stock market. The more enthusiastic the public grows about it, and the faster its advance as compared with the actual growth in its earnings, the riskier a proposition it becomes.

The urban isolated individual An individual can be influenced by forces such as propaganda only when he is cut off from membership in local groups because such groups are organic and have a well-structured material, spirltual and emotional life; they are not easily penetrated by propaganda. For example, it is much more difficult today for outside propaganda to influence a soldier integrated into a military group, or a militant member of a monolithic party, than to influence the same man when he is a mere citizen. Nor is the organic group sensitive to psychological contagion, which is so important to the success of Nazi propaganda. One can say generally, that 19th century individualist society came about through the disintegration of such small groups as the family or the church. Once these groups lost their importance, the individual was substantially isolated. He was plunged into a new environment generally urban and thereby "uprooted." He no longer had a traditional place in which to live. He was no longer geographically attached to a fixed place, or historically to his ancestry. An individual thus uprooted can only be part of a mass- He is on his own, and individualist thinking asks of him something he has never been required to do before: that he, the individual, become the measure of all things. Thus he begins to judge everything for himself. In fact he must make his own judgments. He is thrown entirely on his own resources; he can find criteria only in himself. He is clearly responsible for his own decisions, both personal and social. He becomes the beginning and the end of everything. Before him there was nothing; after him there will be nothing. His own life becomes the only criterion of justice and injustice, of Good and Evil. The individual is placed in a minority position and burdened at the same time with a total crushing responsibility. Such conditions make an individualist society fertile ground for modern propaganda. The permanent uncertainty, the social mobility, the absence of sociological protection and of traditional frames of reference — all these inevitably provide propaganda with a malleable environment that can be fed information from the outside and conditioned at will. The individual left to himself is defenseless the more so because he may be caught up in a social current thus becoming easy prey for propaganda. As a member of a small group he was fairly well protected from collective influences, customs, and suggestions. He was relatively unaffected by changes in the society at large.

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa. Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin ‘domus’, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.

Establishing Your Criteria for Personal Fulfillment Priority My Value Priorities My Goals for Personal Success Personal development Spiritual life Relationship Financial security Hobby/leisure activity Work I enjoy Social contribution Home life Health and well-being Material possessions Travel/recreation Location (climate/access) Autonomy, freedom Personal influence and prominence Living adventurously Pursuing my passion A leisurely lifestyle Other: Values can and do change.

A key criteria to be successful in any field is the desire to continually strive to be a better version of yourself. This is very different from the skill of accumulating and remembering facts which may helps in studies and in getting qualifications.

Think of the job as the overall object or aim and needs as the success criteria along the way. As with job statements, formulating a need statement in a standard way is critical. Lance Bettencourt and Anthony Ulwick have developed a consistent way to notate needs in what they call desired outcome statements. There are four elements: Direction of change + unit of measure + object + clarifier •

Die-Face Analysis In the 1930s, J. B. Rhine and his colleagues recognized and took into account the possibility that some dice studies may have been flawed because the probabilities of die faces are not equal. With some dice, it is slightly more likely that one will roll a 6 face than a 1 face because the die faces are marked by scooping out bits of material. The 6 face, for example, has six scoops removed from the surface of that side of the die, so it has slightly less mass than the other die faces. On any random toss, that tiny difference in mass will make the 6 slightly more likely to land face up, followed in decreasing probability by the 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 faces. Thus, an experiment that relied exclusively upon the 6 face as the target may have been flawed because, unless there were also control tosses with no mental intention applied, we could not tell whether above-chance results were due to a mind-matter interaction or to the slightly higher probability of rolling a 6. To see whether this bias was present in these dice studies, we sifted out all reports for which the published data allowed us to calculate the effective hit rate separately for each of the six die faces used under experimental and control conditions. In fact, the suspected biases were found, as shown in figure 8.3. The hit rates for both experimental and control tosses tended to increase from die faces 1 to 6. However, most of the experimental hit rates were also larger than the corresponding control hit rates, suggested some thing interesting beyond the artifacts caused by die-face biases. For example, for die face 6 the experimental condition was significantly larger than the control with odds against chance of five thousand to one. Figure 8.3. Relationship between die face and hit rates for experimental and control conditions. The error bars are 65 percent confidence intervals. Because of the evidence that the die faces were slightly biased, we examined a subset of studies that controlled for these dice biases—studies using design protocols where die faces were equally distributed among the six targets. We referred to such studies as the “balanced-protocol subset.” Sixty-nine experiments met the balanced-protocol criteria. Our examination of those experiments resulted in three notable points: there was still highly significant evidence for mind-matter interaction, with odds against chance of greater than a trillion to one; the effects were constant across different measures of experimental quality; and the selective-reporting “file drawer” required a twenty-to-one ratio of unretrieved, nonsignificant studies for each observed study. Thus chance, quality, and selective reporting could not explain away the results. Dice Conclusions Our meta-analysis findings led us to conclude that a genuine mind-matter interaction did exist with experiments testing tossed dice. The effect had been successfully replicated in more than a hundred experiments by more than fifty investigators for more than a half-century.

The success of a good example can always be attributed to luck. Thus, you have to risk your particular, individual life to find out. It is this risk that the ancients described as the sacrifice of personal will to the will of God. It is not an act of submission (at least as submission is currently understood). It is an act of courage. It is faith that the wind will blow your ship to a new and better port. It is the faith that Being can be corrected by becoming. It is the spirit of exploration itself. Perhaps it is better to conceptualize it this way: Everyone needs a concrete, specific goal—an ambition, and a purpose—to limit chaos and make intelligible sense of his or her life. But all such concrete goals can and should be subordinated to what might be considered a meta-goal, which is a way of approaching and formulating goals themselves. The meta-goal could be “live in truth.” This means, “Act diligently towards some well-articulated, defined and temporary end. Make your criteria for failure and success timely and clear, at least for yourself (and even better if others can understand what you are doing and evaluate it with you). While doing so, however, allow the world and your spirit to unfold as they will, while you act out and articulate the truth.

Hackman established that team performance can be assessed by a specific set of standards. One of his enduring contributions includes three criteria for establishing successful outcomes for teams that are applicable across the board, regardless of industry or context: 1) delivering results, or achieving expected goals; 2) facilitating individual growth, or a sense of personal development and well-being; and 3) building team cohesion, or ensuring that the team is operating as one unit.

Let us review three cases from widely separated locations in the world. A Tungus shaman in Siberia agrees to the request of tribal hunters to locate game during a poor hunting season. Using a drumming technique, he enters an ASC and provides information to help his hunters. The Western interpretation—if it accepts at all the validity of this kind of information—would be that the shaman calculates the behavior of the game according to weather and well-known environmental conditions. In other words, his is information based on cognitive processing of sensory data. The explanation of the shaman himself is different: Guidance has been provided by forest spirits. On another continent, hunters of the Kalahari !Kung tribe leave the settlement to hunt for a period that may last anywhere from two days to two weeks. The tribe’s timely preparation for the return of successful hunters is necessary for processing the game. The people left behind make the appropriate steps long before the hunters’ reappearance. Their foreknowledge of the hunters’ return could be explained rationally by attributing it to a messenger sent ahead or the use of tam-tam drums or smoke signals. The tribesmen report, however, that it is the spirit of ancestors who informs them when the hunters will return. Next, we move to the Amazon basin. The Shuar shaman is facing a new disease in the community. An herbal remedy is sought by adding leaves of a candidate plant into the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca, a sacrament indigenous to the Upper Amazon region. The shaman drinks it and, upon return to ordinary consciousness, decides the usefulness of the plant in question. Is his decision based on accumulation of ethnobotanical knowledge of several generations in combination with trial and error? The headhunter Shuar are not likely to be merciful to an ineffective medicine man, and his techniques must be working. As Luis Eduardo Luna explained to me, according to ayahuasqueros, the spirit of a new plant reveals itself with the help of the spirits associated with the ayahuasca. Sometimes, they also tell which plant to use next. We can point to the following contradiction: Healers from different cultures are unequivocal in their interpretation of the source of knowledge, whereas rational thinkers use diverging, unsystematic explanations. Which side should be slashed with Occam’s razor? Also called the “principle of parsimony,” Occam’s razor is usually interpreted to mean something like “Do not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily” or “Do not posit pluralities unnecessarily when generating explanatory models.” The principle of parsimony is used frequently by philosophers of science in an effort to establish criteria for choosing from theories with equal explanatory power. At first glance it is the “primitives” who multiply causes unnecessarily by referring to the supernatural. Yet Occam’s razor may be applied easily to the rational view, if those arguments are less parsimonious.

The journey to success is very scary, sad, hard, tough, and rough. It's not easy, but you must start it to become successful in life.

It is impossible unless you try

you’d already begun to face the reality that you can’t depend on fulfillment arriving at some distant point in the future, once you’ve gotten your life in order, or met the world’s criteria for success, and that instead the matter needs addressing now.

It’s deeply unsettling to find yourself doubting the point of what you’re doing with your life. But it isn’t actually a bad thing, because it demonstrates that an inner shift has already occurred. You couldn’t entertain such doubts in the first place if you weren’t already occupying a new vantage point on your life – one from which you’d already begun to face the reality that you can’t depend on fulfillment arriving at some distant point in the future, once you’ve got your life in order, or met the world’s criteria for success, and that instead the matter needs addressing now.

How do I know I have lived? How can I be certain my days were not squandered? What criteria, which principles qualify life as lived? Certainly, I have endured trials and troubles, and I learned from life’s lessons. I grew wise as well as empathetic. But is edification and its accompanying traits the ultimate aim for living? I have traveled. Oh, I have seen marvelous wonders in this world. Skies that were artic blue, emerald green, soft lilac, and rosy red. Mountains fixed like monuments to the gods. Waters as clear as crystal, as blue as larimar, deeper than a leviathan’s lair, and as vast as the night’s sky. I have witnessed pyramids and castles, colosseums, great walls, and temples. Is this living? To travel, to see, to awe at the world’s aesthetic wonders? I have experienced great joys in my days: laughter, kindness, fun, love, thrills, successes. I have suffered a great many sorrows: sickness, loss, pain, cruelty, vengeance, disparagement. I have valued the good and abhorred the bad. Is this the ultimate feat of living? I have been actively doing: from sailing to flying, acting to singing, hiking to biking. I have dived, danced, drummed, battled, built, raced, and used my incredible body to perform every activity I desired. I gained strength and endurance in the process. Is this a sure sign of living? I have been part of a family and raised my own. I have formed lasting, loyal friendships that have passed the test of time. I have felt what it means to sacrifice for loved ones, shared in their joys and sorrows, prayed for tender mercies and miracles in their lives. I have loved and been loved in return. Is it connection to family and friends, the relationships developed between kindred, is this what it means to truly live? How do I know I have lived? As my days near an end, how can I be certain my life was worthwhile and not wasted? Did I accomplish what life mandates of those who truly live? What qualifies life as lived?

The two tests of an effective goal are whether someone who doesn’t know much about an area can get a feel for a goal’s degree of difficulty, and whether afterward they can evaluate if it was successfully achieved. If you define all four aspects, typically your goal will fulfill both criteria.

If we make friends solely based on people's looks and other unimportant criteria, it can be detrimental to our personal and professional well-being and happiness in the long run.

Interestingly, Freeman describes a set of circumstances in which the unstructured group can, in fact, work: It is task oriented. Its function is very narrow and very specific, like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task that basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people can judge their actions and make plans for future activity. It is relatively small and homogeneous. Homogeneity is necessary to insure that participants have a “common language” for interaction. People from widely different backgrounds may provide richness to a consciousness-raising group where each can learn from the others’ experience, but too great a diversity among members of a task-oriented group means only that they continually misunderstand each other. Such diverse people interpret words and actions differently. They have different expectations about each other’s behavior and judge the results according to different criteria. If everyone knows everyone else well enough to understand the nuances, they can be accommodated. Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent straightening out conflicts no one ever thought would arise. There is a high degree of communication. Information must be passed on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the task. Needless to say, the number of interactions necessary to involve everybody increases geometrically with the number of participants. This inevitably limits group participants to about five, or excludes some from some of the decisions. Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, but only when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which perform specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each other so that knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can be passed around easily. There is a low degree of skill specialization. Not everyone has to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than one person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, people become interchangeable parts. Here

Hire the right people. “We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees,” he wrote in an early shareholder letter. Compensation, especially early on, was heavily weighted to stock options rather than cash. “We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner.” There are three criteria he instructs managers to consider when they are hiring: Will you admire this person? Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group he or she is entering? Along what dimension might this person be a superstar? It’s never been easy to work at Amazon. When Bezos interviews people, he warns them, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.” Bezos makes no apologies. “We are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about,” he says. “Such things aren’t meant to be easy. We are incredibly fortunate to have this group of dedicated employees whose sacrifices and passion build Amazon.com.” These lessons remind me of the way Steve Jobs operated. Sometimes such a style can be crushing, and to some people it may feel tough or even cruel. But it also can lead to the creation of grand, new innovations and companies that change the way we live. Bezos has done all of this. But he still has many chapters to write in his story. He has always been public spirited, but I suspect in the coming years he will do more with philanthropy. Just as Bill Gates’s parents led him into such endeavors, Jackie and Mike Bezos have been models for Bezos as he focuses on missions such as providing great early-childhood education to all kids. I am also confident that he has at least one more major leap to make. I suspect that he will be—and is, indeed, eager to be—one of the first private citizens to blast himself into space. As he told his high school graduating class back in 1982, “Space, the final frontier, meet me there!

Evaluating Prompt Performance: Measuring the success of your prompts is vital; to do that, you need to establish clear evaluation criteria and performance metrics. Consider factors like the relevance and coherence of the generated output, the accuracy of the information provided, and how satisfied you are with the results. When you assess the prompt performance quantitatively and qualitatively, you can pinpoint areas for improvement and further refine your prompt engineering process.

You are the CEO of your life. Forget about what happens in the pass and move on to prepare your future.

There is a continual turnover of theories as they are altered or replaced by new ones. So all the theories are being subjected to variation and selection, according to criteria which are themselves subject to variation and selection. The whole process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche. Variants of theories, like genetic mutations, are continually being created, and less successful variants become extinct when more successful variants take over. ‘Success’ is the ability to survive repeatedly under the selective pressures – criticism – brought to bear in that niche, and the criteria for that criticism depend partly on the physical characteristics of the niche and partly on the attributes of other genes and species (i.e. other ideas) that are already present there.

A computer science professor called Ben Kuipers wrote a paper for a conference in 2012, in which he made the case that corporations met all the criteria necessary to be called independent beings, and that as such, they were artificial, intelligent and surprisingly successful in evolutionary terms.

If success is much easier than you think, everyone will become successful in this world. Do you know that success is like a country race? Many people start, but only few people come back live. Everybody in this world gives it a try, but they are not strong enough, so they quit. Do be like them.

When an engineer with years of familiarity in a problem space begins designing a product, it’s easy to imagine a utopian end-state for the work. However, it’s important to differentiate aspirational goals of the product from minimum success criteria (or Minimum Viable Product). Projects can lose credibility and fail by promising too much,

Every employee starts out on a three-month contract. Tell every new employee that they will receive an evaluation after three months and that the evaluation will determine their continued employment. Show them exactly the criteria on which they will be evaluated. The right type of employee will be inspired to make a huge effort in the beginning, which then sets the framework for their attitude for a long time to come. Conduct

To be successful according to the criteria Christ uses to judge nations, the church must leave the four walls behind which it clusters its saints

The more ambiguous the criterion, the easier it is to detect evidence of success. It is for precisely this reason that many alternative health practices do not offer precise remedies for specific disabilities. They promise instead to bring about “wellness,” “higher functioning,” or “better integration”—ambiguous benefits that may be hard to refute. Faith healers take full advantage of ambiguous criteria and studiously avoid pinning themselves down to verifiable predictions.

The manual lists several criteria for a narcissistic personality disorder, including a “grandiose sense of self-importance,” preoccupied with “fantasies of unlimited success” and power, belief that he or she is uniquely “special,” “requires excessive admiration,” “has a sense of entitlement,” “exploits relationships,” “lacks empathy,” and is “envious” and “arrogant.

An organization’s capabilities reside in two places. The first is in its processes—the methods by which people have learned to transform inputs of labor, energy, materials, information, cash, and technology into outputs of higher value. The second is in the organization’s values, which are the criteria that managers and employees in the organization use when making prioritization decisions. People are quite flexible, in that they can be trained to succeed at quite different things. An employee of IBM, for example, can quite readily change the way he or she works, in order to work successfully in a small start-up company. But processes and values are not flexible. A process that is effective at managing the design of a minicomputer, for example, would be ineffective at managing the design of a desktop personal computer. Similarly, values that cause employees to prioritize projects to develop high-margin products, cannot simultaneously accord priority to low-margin products. The very processes and values that constitute an organization’s capabilities in one context, define its disabilities in another context.

I was somewhat surprised, therefore, to find that my college teachers—famous academics and composers—inhabited an entirely different musical universe. They knew nothing about, and cared little for, the music I had grown up with. Instead, their world revolved around the dissonant, cerebral music of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers. As I quickly learned, in this environment not everything was possible: tonality was considered passé and “unserious”; electric guitars and saxophones were not to be mixed with violins and pianos; and success was judged by criteria I could not immediately fathom. Music, it seemed, was not so much to be composed as constructed—assembled painstakingly, note by note, according to complicated artificial systems. Questions like “does this chord sound good?” or “does this compositional system produce likeable music?” were frowned upon as naive or

Organizer—Using work breakdown, estimating, and scheduling techniques, determines the complete work effort for the project, the proper sequence of the work activities, when the work will be accomplished, who will do the work, and how much the work will cost. • Point Man—Serves as the central point-of-contact for all oral and written project communications. • Quartermaster—Ensures the project has the resources, materials, and facilities its needs when it needs it. • Facilitator—Ensures that stakeholders and team members who come from different perspectives understand each other and work together to accomplish the project goals. • Persuader—Gains agreement from the stakeholders on project definition, success criteria, and approach; manages stakeholder expectations throughout the project while managing the competing demands of time, cost, and quality; and gains agreement on resource decisions and issue resolution action steps. • Problem Solver—Utilizes root-cause analysis process experience, prior project experiences, and technical knowledge to resolve unforeseen technical issues and to take any necessary corrective actions. • Umbrella—Works to shield the project team from the politics and “noise” surrounding the project, so they can stay focused and productive. • Coach—Determines and communicates the role each team member plays and the importance of that role to the project success, finds ways to motivate each team member, looks for ways to improve the skills of each team member, and provides constructive and timely feedback on individual performances. • Bulldog—Performs the follow-up to ensure that commitments are maintained, issues are resolved, and action items are completed. • Librarian—Manages all information, communications, and documentation involved in the project.

The decisive factor is to supply the customer with a clear advantage when compared with the competition. Such a “strategic” competitive advantage must fulfill three criteria: it must be 1. important for the customer;   2. actually perceived by the customer; and   3. sustainable/difficult to copy.   If, for example, the packaging of a product is unimportant for the customer, it is unsuitable as a competitive advantage. If a product has a particularly long life span, but the customer is not aware of this advantage or does not perceive it, this advantage cannot influence the customer’s decision to purchase and does not help the supplier. If a company ruins its margin by reducing a price, the low price advantage cannot be sustained.8 Simultaneous fulfillment of the three criteria “important, perceived, sustainable” is a significant challenge.

of Urology, evaluated nearly five thousand patients from nine hospitals who had received external-beam radiation therapy alone and had been followed for an average of six years. This study, too, looked at how well the ASTRO criteria and other definitions could predict actual clinical failure (the development of distant metastases or the return of cancer in the irradiated prostate). Despite its stellar acronym, the ASTRO definition did not prove to be outstandingly superior; in fact, the researchers found, some of the alternate definitions of biochemical success or failure were slightly better. The Phoenix Definition In 2005, another panel of radiation

In a 2007 study published in the Journal of Family Psychology,3 researchers asked eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds which criteria they felt were most indicative of adulthood. Their criteria were, in order of importance: (1) accepting responsibility for the consequences of your actions; (2) establishing a relationship with parents as an equal adult; (3) being financially independent from parents; and (4) deciding on beliefs/values independently of parents/other influences.

Cultivating an atmosphere of respect through caring relationships is particularly significant for Latino and Latina students (Garza 2008) as it is a critical source of motivation for Latino and Latina students who may feel marginalized by the schooling process (Perez 2000). Ladson-Billings (2009) found that the ability to form positive relationships between students and teacher was one of the most important criteria for identifying exemplary CRP educators. Gay (2000) emphasizes that the actual sites for determining successful learning resides in the interactions between learners—and between learners and their teacher. The fact that this positive student-teacher relationship was missing adds another dimension to the explanation of student nonperformance.

This is called creating local star power. This is critically important. With local star power, you’ll be able to succeed in pitching audiences who don’t know you; the ability to create and sustain local star power literally is going to mean the difference between success and failure. The first impression we make on another person is based on that person’s automatic calculation of our social value. As a survival mechanism, the other person’s brain is making it a priority to understand where you fit in the social structure. The person makes a hasty judgment using three measurable criteria: your wealth, your power, and your popularity. Based on some quick mental shorthand, the person is going to assign you a social status level, and from that calculation, a frame will be fixed. The person will not necessarily even consciously think about this. The people jaywalking behind the man in the nice suit did not deliberately pause to consider his status or think about whether it meant he was likely to cross streets safely. They just automatically calculated his likely status and behaved accordingly.

The person who successfully struggles against weakness and sin may or may not become rich and famous, but that person will become mature. Maturity is not based on talent or any of the mental or physical gifts that help you ace an IQ test or run fast or move gracefully. It is not comparative. It is earned not by being better than other people at something, but by being better than you used to be. It is earned by being dependable in times of testing, straight in times of temptation. Maturity does not glitter. It is not built on the traits that make people celebrities. A mature person possesses a settled unity of purpose. The mature person has moved from fragmentation to centeredness, has achieved a state in which the restlessness is over, the confusion about the meaning and purpose of life is calmed. The mature person can make decisions without relying on the negative and positive reactions from admirers or detractors because the mature person has steady criteria to determine what is right. That person has said a multitude of noes for the sake of a few overwhelming yeses.

The Value of Thinking About Why Here are just some of the benefits of asking why: It defines success. It creates decision-making criteria. It aligns resources. It motivates. It clarifies focus. It expands options.

Peer-Assessment 25 Peer-assessment helps students in many ways. First, it gives them a chance to compare their own work to that of their peers. This helps them to develop a greater sense of what can be done. Second, it opens up success criteria, ensuring pupils can become more familiar with what they need to do to succeed. Third, it allows students to think of new ideas based on what they see while engaged in the task. You can ask pupils to peer-assess any work produced in class or at home. Just make sure they have a mark scheme or set of criteria to use and that you train them on how to give good feedback (that is clear and focussed on the learning).

This isn’t an algorithm for fun, but it’s a useful tool for checking for the absence of fun, because designers can identify systems that fail to meet all the criteria. It may also prove useful in terms of game critique. Simply check each system against this list: Do you have to prepare before taking on the challenge? Can you prepare in different ways and still succeed? Does the environment in which the challenge takes place affect the challenge? Are there solid rules defined for the challenge you undertake? Can the core mechanic support multiple types of challenges? Can the player bring multiple abilities to bear on the challenge? At high levels of difficulty, does the player have to bring multiple abilities to bear on the challenge? Is there skill involved in using an ability? (If not, is this a fundamental “move” in the game, like moving one checker piece?) Are there multiple success states to overcoming the challenge? (In other words, success should not have a single guaranteed result.)

This isn’t an algorithm for fun, but it’s a useful tool for checking for the absence of fun, because designers can identify systems that fail to meet all the criteria. It may also prove useful in terms of game critique. Simply check each system against this list: Do you have to prepare before taking on the challenge? Can you prepare in different ways and still succeed? Does the environment in which the challenge takes place affect the challenge? Are there solid rules defined for the challenge you undertake? Can the core mechanic support multiple types of challenges? Can the player bring multiple abilities to bear on the challenge? At high levels of difficulty, does the player have to bring multiple abilities to bear on the challenge? Is there skill involved in using an ability? (If not, is this a fundamental “move” in the game, like moving one checker piece?) Are there multiple success states to overcoming the challenge? (In other words, success should not have a single guaranteed result.) Do advanced players get no benefit from tackling easy challenges? Does failing at the challenge at the very least make you have to try again? If your answer to any of the above questions is “no,” then the game system is probably worth readdressing.

And then about the criteria for success: "If market pricing is the only legitimate test of quality, why are we still bothering with proving theorems? Why don't we just have a vote on whether a theorem is true? To make it better we'll have everyone vote on it, especially the hundreds of millions of people who don't understand the math. Would that satisfy you?

This book, also known as the Bible of Psychiatry, explains that to be diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) a person has to meet at least five of the following criteria: •​Has a grandiose sense of self-importance; for example, exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior. •​Has fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or idyllic love. •​Believes that they are “special” and should only associate with other “special” or high-status people or institutions. •​Requires excessive admiration. •​Has a sense of entitlement, that is, an unreasonable expectation of favorable treatment, or automatic compliance with their wishes. •​Takes advantage of others to achieve their ends. •​Lacks empathy and is unwilling or unable to recognize other people’s feelings or needs. •​Is often envious of others and believes that others are envious in return. •​Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

The above comments are intended to justify the emphasis in our discussion on the ways in which scientists produce order. This necessarily involves an examination of the methodical way in which observations and experiences are organised so that sense can be made of them. As already noted, we have every reason to believe that the accomplishment of this kind of task is no mean feat, as is clear from a consideration of the corresponding task faced by the observer when confronted by his field notes. The observer’s task is to transform notes of the kind presented at the beginning of this chapter into an ordered account. But exactly how and where should the observer begin this transformation? It is clear that when seen through the eyes of a total newcomer, the daily comings and goings of the laboratory take on an alien quality. The observer initially encounters a mysterious and apparently unconnected sequence of events. In order to make sense of his observations, the observer normally adopts some kind of theme by which he hopes to be able to construct a pattern. If he can successfully use a theme to convince others of the existence of a pattern, he can be said, at least according to relatively weak criteria, to have “explained’’ his observations. Of course, the selection and adoption of “themes” is highly problematic. For example, the way in which the theme is selected can be held to bear upon the validity of his explanation; the observer’s selection of a theme constitutes his method for which he is accountable. It is not enough simply to fabricate order out of an initially chaotic collection of observations; the observer needs to be able to demonstrate that this fabrication has been done correctly, or, in short, that his method is valid.

What I do mean is that they are responsible for the success criteria and risk assessment of the data governance program.

Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger offered six such criteria, drawing upon our experiences in Vietnam and in 1983, the loss of 241 Marines in Beirut: (1) the U.S. should not commit forces to combat unless the vital national interest of the United States or its allies is involved; (2) U.S. troops should be committed wholeheartedly and with the clear intention of winning—otherwise, troops should not be committed; (3) U.S. combat troops should be committed only with clearly defined political and military objectives and with the capacity to accomplish those objectives; (4) the relationship between the objectives and the size and composition of the forces committed should be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary; (5) U.S. troops should not be committed to battle without a “reasonable assurance” of the support of U.S. public opinion and Congress; and (6) the commitment of U.S. troops should be considered only as a last resort.

key roles played by the project manager: Planner—Ensures that the project is defined properly and completely for success, all stakeholders are engaged, work effort approach is determined, required resources are available when needed, and processes are in place to properly execute and control the project. Organizer—Using work breakdown, estimating, and scheduling techniques, determines the complete work effort for the project, the proper sequence of the work activities, when the work will be accomplished, who will do the work, and how much the work will cost. Point Person—Serves as the central point of contact for all oral and written project communications. Quartermaster—Ensures the project has the resources, materials, and facilities it needs when it needs it. Facilitator—Ensures that stakeholders and team members who come from different perspectives understand each other and work together to accomplish the project goals. Persuader—Gains agreement from the stakeholders on project definition, success criteria, and approach; manages stakeholder expectations throughout the project while managing the competing demands of time, cost, and quality; and gains agreement on resource decisions and issue resolution action steps. Problem Solver—Utilizes root-cause analysis process experience, prior project experience, and technical knowledge to resolve unforeseen technical issues and take any necessary corrective actions. Umbrella—Works to shield the project team from the politics and “noise” surrounding the project, so they can stay focused and productive. Coach—Determines and communicates the role each team member plays and the importance of that role to the project’s success, finds ways to motivate each team member, looks for ways to improve the skills of each team member, and provides constructive and timely feedback on individual performances. Bulldog—Performs the follow-up to ensure that commitments are maintained, issues are resolved, and action items are completed. Librarian—Manages all information, communications, and documentation involved in the project.

The following are some of the most common mistakes made by project managers: Not clearly understanding how or ensuring that the project is aligned with organizational objectives. Not properly managing stakeholder expectations throughout the project. Not gaining agreement and buy-in on project goals and success criteria from key stakeholders. Not developing a realistic schedule that includes all work efforts, task dependencies, bottom-up estimates, and assigned leveled resources. Not getting buy-in and acceptance on the project schedule. Not clearly deciding and communicating who is responsible for what. Not utilizing change control procedures to manage the scope of the project. Not communicating consistently and effectively with all key stakeholders. Not executing the project plan. Not tackling key risks early in the project. Not proactively identifying risks and developing contingency plans (responses) for those risks. Not obtaining the right resources with the right skills at the right time. Not aggressively pursuing issue resolution. Inadequately defining and managing requirements. Insufficiently managing and leading the project team.

seven basic project definition questions: Why are we doing this? (Purpose) What organizational-level goal(s) does this project support? (Goals and Objectives) How does this project fit with the other projects that are going on? (Scope, Project Context, Project Dependencies) What is the expected benefit from this project? (Expected Benefits, Business Case, Value, Success Criteria) What are we going to do? (Scope) Who is affected by this and who must be involved? (Stakeholders) How will we know when we are done and whether the project was successful? (Success Criteria)

Answer premortemI questions: What do you want to learn? What is the greatest source of uncertainty or most important question you want to answer? What is most likely to fail? Communicate with stakeholders: Explain to your manager, colleagues, clients, customers, shareholders, contractors, etc., what the project is about and why it matters. Define success criteria: What needs to happen for this project to be considered successful? What are the minimum results you need to achieve, or the “stretch goals” you’re striving for? Have an official kickoff: Schedule check-in calls, make a budget and timeline, and write out the goals and objectives to make sure everyone is informed, aligned, and clear on what is expected of them. I find that doing an official kickoff is useful even if it’s a solo project!

some other items you can include on your Project Completion Checklist. I encourage you to personalize it for your own needs: Answer postmortem questions: What did you learn? What did you do well? What could you have done better? What can you improve for next time? Communicate with stakeholders: Notify your manager, colleagues, clients, customers, shareholders, contractors, etc., that the project is complete and what the outcomes were. Evaluate success criteria: Were the objectives of the project achieved? Why or why not? What was the return on investment? Officially close out the project and celebrate: Send any last emails, invoices, receipts, feedback forms, or documents, and celebrate your accomplishments with your team or collaborators so you receive the feeling of fulfillment for all the effort you put in.