Custom Framing Quotes

You have to remember that even though the long-term goals are tougher and time-consuming to achieve, in the end, they are more rewarding.

I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Then she is on me. Her soft, hot body collapses onto my own ravenous frame. She pushes my legs open with her knees and pulls my arms above my head with her hands, holding me a willing hostage. For one long moment we are eye to eye. Her breasts press down into my nipples, goading them but offering no release, and then her lips come crashing down on mine. She kisses me as though she already owns me; exploring my mouth with her tongue, dragging it aggressively from one side of my lips to the other.

And what impels him to repeat this process at every single lesson, and, with the same remorseless insistence, to make his pupils copy it without the least alteration? He sticks to this traditional custom because he knows from experience that the preparations for working put him simultaneously in the right frame of mind for creating. The meditative repose in which he performs them gives him that vital loosening and equability of all his powers, that collectedness and presence of mind, without which no right work can be done.

I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation Prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the king And queen moult no feather. I have of late--but Wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all Custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily With my disposition that this goodly frame, the Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most Excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave O'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted With golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to Me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! in form and moving how Express and admirable! in action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the World! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, What is this quintessence of dust? man delights not Me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling You seem to say so.

People do not cry because it is the end. They cry because the end does not correspond with their imagination of it. Their first choice is always their own imagining; they refuse to be deterred by warnings. They say I choose this because although the price is high the thing itself is more precious, durable and beautiful. The light of imagined events is always so arranged that the customers do not see the flaws in what they have chosen to buy with their dreams.

When theories of values do not afford intellectual assistance in framing ideas and beliefs about values that are adequate to direct action, the gap must be filled by other means. If intelligent method is lacking, prejudice, the pressure of immediate circumstance, self-interest and class-interest, traditional customs, institutions of accidental historic origin, are not lacking, and they tend to take the place of intelligence.

What is the use of beauty in woman? Provided a woman is physically well made and capable of bearing children, she will always be good enough in the opinion of economists. What is the use of music? -- of painting? Who would be fool enough nowadays to prefer Mozart to Carrel, Michael Angelo to the inventor of white mustard? There is nothing really beautiful save what is of no possible use. Everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and man's needs are low and disgusting, like his own poor, wretched nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet. For my part, saving these gentry's presence, I am of those to whom superfluities are necessaries, and I am fond of things and people in inverse ratio to the service they render me. I prefer a Chinese vase with its mandarins and dragons, which is perfectly useless to me, to a utensil which I do use, and the particular talent of mine which I set most store by is that which enables me not to guess logogriphs and charades. I would very willingly renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a citizen for the sight of an undoubted painting by Raphael, or of a beautiful nude woman, -- Princess Borghese, for instance, when she posed for Canova, or Julia Grisi when she is entering her bath. I would most willingly consent to the return of that cannibal, Charles X., if he brought me, from his residence in Bohemia, a case of Tokai or Johannisberg; and the electoral laws would be quite liberal enough, to my mind, were some of our streets broader and some other things less broad. Though I am not a dilettante, I prefer the sound of a poor fiddle and tambourines to that of the Speaker's bell. I would sell my breeches for a ring, and my bread for jam. The occupation which best befits civilized man seems to me to be idleness or analytically smoking a pipe or cigar. I think highly of those who play skittles, and also of those who write verse. You may perceive that my principles are not utilitarian, and that I shall never be the editor of a virtuous paper, unless I am converted, which would be very comical. Instead of founding a Monthyon prize for the reward of virtue, I would rather bestow -- like Sardanapalus, that great, misunderstood philosopher -- a large reward to him who should invent a new pleasure; for to me enjoyment seems to be the end of life and the only useful thing on this earth. God willed it to be so, for he created women, perfumes, light, lovely flowers, good wine, spirited horses, lapdogs, and Angora cats; for He did not say to his angels, 'Be virtuous,' but, 'Love,' and gave us lips more sensitive than the rest of the skin that we might kiss women, eyes looking upward that we might behold the light, a subtile sense of smell that we might breathe in the soul of the flowers, muscular limbs that we might press the flanks of stallions and fly swift as thought without railway or steam-kettle, delicate hands that we might stroke the long heads of greyhounds, the velvety fur of cats, and the polished shoulder of not very virtuous creatures, and, finally, granted to us alone the triple and glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, striking fire, and making love in all seasons, whereby we are very much more distinguished from brutes than by the custom of reading newspapers and framing constitutions.

And he had a couple of Bibles in need of customized repair, and those were an easy fifty dollars apiece – just brace the page against a piece of plywood in a frame and scorch out the verses the customers found intolerable, with a wood-burning stylus; a plain old razor wouldn’t have the authority that hot iron did. And then of course drench the defaced book in holy water to validate the edited text. Matthew 19:5-6 and Mark 10:7-12 were bits he was often asked to burn out, since they condemned re-marriage after divorce, but he also got a lot of requests to lose Matthew 25:41 through 46, with Jesus’s promise of Hell to stingy people. And he offered a special deal to eradicate all thirty or so mentions of adultery. Some of these customized Bibles ended up after a few years with hardly any weight besides the binding.

Working with a small team of researchers, educators, and scientists, we are creating a curriculum on what we are calling “worldview literacy.”31 We define this as the capacity to comprehend and communicate not only our own worldview but also to recognize that our beliefs come from our particular frame of reference and to understand that others hold different and potentially equally valid worldviews out of which their assumptions, and therefore their actions, arise. This capacity also includes being able to adapt to changes that come through a meeting of different perspectives, customs, practices, and belief systems.

Since Liz’s adolescence, when viewing television commercials that celebrated the ostensibly unconditional love of mothers for their children, or on spotting merchandise in stores that honored this unique bond with poems or effusive declarations—picture frames, magnets, oven mitts—she had felt like a foreign exchange student observing the customs of another country.

Through the years, I have heard that the average person speaks at about 150-160 words per minute, but can listen at a rate of about 1,000 words per minute. What is going on during all that extra mind time? • Our minds are racing ahead and preparing for the next thing we are going to say. • We are preoccupied with other thoughts, priorities, and distractions. • Our subconscious filters are thumbing through our database of memories, judgments, experiences, perspectives, and opinions to frame how we are going to interpret what we think someone is saying.

Bill arrives with a grin about something. Sure, he's got some jets for my machine and knows right were they are. I'll have to wait a second though. He's got to close a deal out in back on some Harley parts. I go with him out in a shed in back and see he is selling a whole Harley machine in used parts, except for the frame, which the customer already has. He is selling them all for $125. Not a bad price at all. Coming back I comment, "He'll know something about motorcycles before he gets those together." Bill laughs. "And that's the best way to learn, too.

In a city of almost three million people, a white van stands out about as much as a pigeon in a park. White vans deliver flowers, they carry plumbers, and boxes destined for front porches. This white van is unlike the rest; it has been customized. The flooring has been torn up and replaced with sheets of steel, powder-coated with black paint so they won’t rust or show stains. Metal drains have been installed, complete with catches, drilled in three separate places for easy maintenance and cleaning. There are thick metal eyebolts fastened into the frame in several spots, impossible to remove, at various heights up and down the walls. The gas tank is a custom installation, almost double the normal size, holding up to thirty gallons of gas, which means that it can drive for almost six hundred miles, to St. Louis and back, without running out of fuel. It can also cruise the dark streets all night long—for days, even weeks—before finally becoming empty, frequent gas station stops to be avoided. And the windows are tinted black, illegal of course, but hardly drawing any attention, so dark that even standing up next to them, it’s impossible to see inside. And for the driver, that’s a good thing—a very good thing, indeed.

Do you know where we are?” he whispered. “Surely that is Baker Street,” I answered, staring through the dim window. “Exactly. We are in Camden House, which stands opposite to our own old quarters.” “But why are we here?” “Because it commands so excellent a view of that picturesque pile. Might I trouble you, my dear Watson, to draw a little nearer to the window, taking every precaution not to show yourself, and then to look up at our old rooms--the starting-point of so many of your little fairy-tales? We will see if my three years of absence have entirely taken away my power to surprise you.” I crept forward and looked across at the familiar window. As my eyes fell upon it, I gave a gasp and a cry of amazement. The blind was down, and a strong light was burning in the room. The shadow of a man who was seated in a chair within was thrown in hard, black outline upon the luminous screen of the window. There was no mistaking the poise of the head, the squareness of the shoulders, the sharpness of the features. The face was turned half-round, and the effect was that of one of those black silhouettes which our grandparents loved to frame. It was a perfect reproduction of Holmes. So amazed was I that I threw out my hand to make sure that the man himself was standing beside me. He was quivering with silent laughter. “Well?” said he. “Good heavens!” I cried. “It is marvellous.” “I trust that age doth not wither nor custom stale my infinite variety,” said he, and I recognized in his voice the joy and pride which the artist takes in his own creation. “It really is rather like me, is it not?” “I should be prepared to swear that it was you.” “The credit of the execution is due to Monsieur Oscar Meunier, of Grenoble, who spent some days in doing the moulding. It is a bust in wax. The rest I arranged myself during my visit to Baker Street this afternoon.

The framing format I like has five key elements. You’re an entrepreneur trying to solve horrible problem X, usher in wonderful vision Y, or fix stagnant industry Z. Don’t mention your idea. Frame expectations by mentioning what stage you’re at and, if it’s true, that you don’t have anything to sell. Show weakness and give them a chance to help by mentioning the specific problem that you’re looking for answers on. This will also clarify that you’re not a time waster. Put them on a pedestal by showing how much they, in particular, can help. Explicitly ask for help. Or, in shorter form: Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask

To narrow natural rights to such neat slogans as "liberty, equality, fraternity" or "life, liberty, property," . . . was to ignore the complexity of public affairs and to leave out of consideration most moral relationships. . . . Burke appealed back beyond Locke to an idea of community far warmer and richer than Locke's or Hobbes's aggregation of individuals. The true compact of society, Burke told his countrymen, is eternal: it joins the dead, the living, and the unborn. We all participate in this spiritual and social partnership, because it is ordained of God. In defense of social harmony, Burke appealed to what Locke had ignored: the love of neighbor and the sense of duty. By the time of the French Revolution, Locke's argument in the Second Treatise already had become insufficient to sustain a social order. . . . The Constitution is not a theoretical document at all, and the influence of Locke upon it is negligible, although Locke's phrases, at least, crept into the Declaration of Independence, despite Jefferson's awkwardness about confessing the source of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." If we turn to the books read and quoted by American leaders near the end of the eighteenth century, we discover that Locke was but one philosopher and political advocate among the many writers whose influence they acknowledged. . . . Even Jefferson, though he had read Locke, cites in his Commonplace Book such juridical authorities as Coke and Kames much more frequently. As Gilbert Chinard puts it, "The Jeffersonian philosophy was born under the sign of Hengist and Horsa, not of the Goddess Reason"--that is, Jefferson was more strongly influenced by his understanding of British history, the Anglo-Saxon age particularly, than by the eighteenth-century rationalism of which Locke was a principal forerunner. . . . Adams treats Locke merely as one of several commendable English friends to liberty. . . . At bottom, the thinking Americans of the last quarter of the eighteenth century found their principles of order in no single political philosopher, but rather in their religion. When schooled Americans of that era approved a writer, commonly it was because his books confirmed their American experience and justified convictions they held already. So far as Locke served their needs, they employed Locke. But other men of ideas served them more immediately. At the Constitutional Convention, no man was quoted more frequently than Montesquieu. Montesquieu rejects Hobbes's compact formed out of fear; but also, if less explicitly, he rejects Locke's version of the social contract. . . . It is Montesquieu's conviction that . . . laws grow slowly out of people's experiences with one another, out of social customs and habits. "When a people have pure and regular manners, their laws become simple and natural," Montesquieu says. It was from Montesquieu, rather than from Locke, that the Framers obtained a theory of checks and balances and of the division of powers. . . . What Madison and other Americans found convincing in Hume was his freedom from mystification, vulgar error, and fanatic conviction: Hume's powerful practical intellect, which settled for politics as the art of the possible. . . . [I]n the Federalist, there occurs no mention of the name of John Locke. In Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention there is to be found but one reference to Locke, and that incidental. Do not these omissions seem significant to zealots for a "Lockean interpretation" of the Constitution? . . . John Locke did not make the Glorious Revolution of 1688 or foreordain the Constitution of the United States. . . . And the Constitution of the United States would have been framed by the same sort of men with the same sort of result, and defended by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, had Locke in 1689 lost the manuscripts of his Two Treatises of Civil Government while crossing the narrow seas with the Princess Mary.

My businessman friend Dudley Wright saw the drawing and I told him the story about it. He said, “You oughta triple its price. With art, nobody is really sure of its value, so people often think, ‘If the price is higher, it must be more valuable!’” I said, “You’re crazy!” but, just for fun, I bought a twenty-dollar frame and mounted the drawing so it would be ready for the next customer. Some guy from the weather forecasting business saw the drawing I had given Gianonni and asked if I had others. I invited him and his wife to my “studio” downstairs in my home, and they asked about the newly framed drawing. “That one is two hundred dollars.” (I had multiplied sixty by three and added twenty for the frame.) The next day they came back and bought it. So the massage parlor drawing ended up in the office of a weather forecaster.

We are told of the time when, with the same beliefs, with the same institutions, all the world seemed happy: why complain of these beliefs; why banish these institutions? We are slow to admit that that happy age served the precise purpose of developing the principle of evil which lay dormant in society; we accuse men and gods, the powers of earth and the forces of Nature. Instead of seeking the cause of the evil in his mind and heart, man blames his masters, his rivals, his neighbors, and himself; nations arm themselves, and slay and exterminate each other, until equilibrium is restored by the vast depopulation, and peace again arises from the ashes of the combatants. So loath is humanity to touch the customs of its ancestors, and to change the laws framed by the founders of communities, and confirmed by the faithful observance of the ages.

Rather, productivity is about making certain choices in certain ways. The way we choose to see ourselves and frame daily decisions; the stories we tell ourselves, and the easy goals we ignore; the sense of community we build among teammates; the creative cultures we establish as leaders: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive. We now exist in a world where we can communicate with coworkers at any hour, access vital documents over smartphones, learn any fact within seconds, and have almost any product delivered to our doorstep within twenty-four hours. Companies can design gadgets in California, collect orders from customers in Barcelona, email blueprints to Shenzhen, and track deliveries from anywhere on earth. Parents can auto-sync the family’s schedules, pay bills online while lying in bed, and locate the kids’ phones one minute after curfew. We are living through an economic and social revolution that is as profound, in many ways, as the agrarian and industrial revolutions of previous eras. These advances in communications and technology are supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, they often seem to fill our days with more work and stress. In part, that’s because we’ve been paying attention to the wrong innovations. We’ve been staring at the tools of productivity—the gadgets and apps and complicated filing systems for keeping track of various to-do lists—rather than the lessons those technologies are trying to teach us. There are some people, however, who have figured out how to master this changing world. There are some companies that have discovered how to find advantages amid these rapid shifts. We now know how productivity really functions. We know which choices matter most and bring success within closer reach. We know how to set goals that make the audacious achievable; how to reframe situations so that instead of seeing problems, we notice hidden opportunities; how to open our minds to new, creative connections; and how to learn faster by slowing down the data that is speeding past us.

It is not a war, it is a lesson of life (first part) It's a life lesson. It's not a war. War brings hatred, violence, destruction, while we are called, at this particular moment, to rediscover values ​​such as solidarity, fraternity, neighborliness and nature. The war metaphor, so dear to journalists and politicians, has the unique purpose of amplifying the context of a narrative, framing it perfectly for the use of Tg and Talk shows to remind us, rather than to inform us, which are meant to sell news, gaining a broad audience. To say that we are at war is, in my humble opinion, a pure example of lexical inclination. Don't fight at war on the couch at home or by repeatedly posting stories on your favorite social network. No border is in danger, there is no enemy out there to shoot down. And then, to understand it sincerely and serenely: we, as human beings, have been waging wars since the dawn of time. We are so brutal that for thousands of years we have killed each other with stones, sticks, swords, spears, cannons, machine guns and atomic bombs. Imagine if we needed a pandemic to declare war ... who are we? A stupid virus that's part of the nature of things? However, at this time there is a disease that affects and does so without distinguishing borders, nationalities, skin color or social status. And this is already a great first lesson in life. He tells us - as it should - that we are all the same. Diversity and distinctions are the fruit of our limited and limiting mind, the apotheosis of our finitude. We are facing a pandemic that, in order to be addressed, requires a strong sense of personal responsibility and collaboration between communities. It requires a counter-current gesture, of altruism, in an individualistic society, in which everyone thinks for himself and defends his goods. And this is a second life lesson. Let's stop looking at our little miserable garden made of selfishness, greed and spiritual misery. Do you know how this pandemic will end? With mutual help! We will have to help each other! Either the sense of community will predominate, or we will be doomed to eat each other. The message "No one is saved alone" launched by the Pope. This virus, in its way of being contagious, in making us stay a little alone with ourselves, tells us that the error was probably the first. The naiveté in believing that our way of life was right, the blindness in believing that we are happy and not superficial, the folly of seeing a world that burns and gets stuck on itself - and on us - pretending that it is normal. The mistake of considering the law of profit as the driving force of all. Instead of investing in healthcare, for our care, in solidarity, to strengthen the sense of community, we preferred to spend in the armament, to defend ourselves from others, from our fellow citizens. Isn't that a life lesson too? We wake up from the heat of a time when possession was more important than knowledge, it was deception and not truth, inhumanity and not benevolence. But not only that, it was the moment of insensitivity, blindness, selfishness, cowardice, appearance, mediocrity, misunderstanding and especially evil, in all its forms. Maybe, dear readers, it's time to acknowledge that the disease is not the virus. We are the disease! So far we have lived convinced that life, in a subtle way, has deceived us. That she was unfair and cruel. We forgot about ourselves watching the clock, with our all-powerful feeling, convinced that we can control the passage of time. As we were convinced that there is still time, that nothing will happen tomorrow and everything can be postponed. I was wrong. An invisible being, transported into the air we breathe and which, in just over a month, has traversed the seas, mountains and entire continents, was enough to bring to our knees all our beliefs and customs.

Because,' he said, 'I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you, especially when you are near me, as now; it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situation in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land, come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and the nI've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, you'd forget me.' 'That I never would, sir; you know -,' impossible to proceed. [...] The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway and asserting a right to predominate - to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last; yes, and to speak. 'I grieve to leave Thornfield; I love Thornfield; I love it, because I have lived in it a full and delightful life, momentarily at least. I have not been trampled on. I have not been petrified. I have not been buried with inferior minds, and excluded from every glimpse of communion with what is bright, and energetic, and high. I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence; with what I delight in, with an origin, a vigorous, and expanded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester; and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you forever. I see the necessity of departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death.' 'Where do you see the necessity?' he asked, suddenly. 'Where? You, sir, have placed it before me.' 'In what shape?' 'In the shape of Miss Ingram; a noble and beautiful woman, your bride.' 'My bride! What bride? I have no bride!' 'But you will have.' 'Yes; I will! I will!' He set his teeth. 'Then I must go; you have said it yourself.' 'No; you must stay! I swear it, and the oath shall be kept.' 'I tell you I must go!' I retorted, roused to something like passion. 'Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automation? a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; it is my spirit that addresses your spirits; just as if both had passed through the grace, and we stood at God's feel, equal - as we are!' 'As we are!' repeated Mr. Rochester - 'so,' he added, including me in his arms, gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips; 'so, Jane!' 'Yes, so, sir,' I rejoined; 'and yet not so; for you are a married man, or as good as a married man, and we'd to one inferior to you - to one with whom you have no sympathy - whom I do not believe you truly love; for I have seen and heard you sneer at her. I would scorn such a union; therefore I am better than you - let me go!' 'Where, Jane? to Ireland?' 'Yes - to Ireland. I have spoke my mind, and can go anywhere now.' 'Jane, be still; don't struggle so, like a wild, frantic bird that is tending its own plumage in its desperation.' 'I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.' Another effort set me at liberty, and I stood erect before him. 'And your will shall decide your destiny,' he said; 'I offer you my hand, my heart, and a share of all my possessions.' 'You play a farce, which I merely taught at.' 'I ask you to pass through life at my side - to be my second self, and best earthly companion.' [...] 'Do you doubt me, Jane?' 'Entirely.' 'You have no faith in me?' 'Not a whit.

I’d met Madison, as I’ve already mentioned, two months earlier, in Budapest. I’d been at a conference. She’d been there with some girlfriends. We’d got talking in the hotel bar. An anthropologist, she’d said; that’s … exotic. Not at all, I’d replied; I work for an incorporated business, in a basement. Yes, she said, but … But what? I asked. Dances, and masks, and feathers, she eventually responded: that’s the essence of your work, isn’t it? I mean, even if you’re writing a report on workplace etiquette, or how to motivate employees or whatever, you’re seeing it all through a lens of rituals, and rites, and stuff. It must make the everyday all primitive and strange—no? I saw what she was getting at; but she was wrong. For anthropologists, even the exotic’s not exotic, let alone the everyday. In his key volume Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the twentieth century’s most brilliant ethnographer, describes pacing the streets, all draped with new electric cable, of Lahore’s Old Town sometime in the nineteen-fifties, trying to piece together, long after the event, a vanished purity—of local colour, texture, custom, life in general—from nothing but leftovers and debris. He goes on to describe being struck by the same impression when he lived among the Amazonian Nambikwara tribe: the sense of having come “too late”—although he knows, from having read a previous account of life among the Nambikwara, that the anthropologist (that account’s author) who came here fifty years earlier, before the rubber-traders and the telegraph, was struck by that impression also; and knows as well that the anthropologist who, inspired by the account that Lévi-Strauss will himself write of this trip, shall come back in fifty more will be struck by it too, and wish—if only!—that he could have been here fifty years ago (that is, now, or, rather, then) to see what he, Lévi-Strauss, saw, or failed to see. This leads him to identify a “double-bind” to which all anthropologists, and anthropology itself, are, by their very nature, prey: the “purity” they crave is no more than a state in which all frames of comprehension, of interpretation and analysis, are lacking; once these are brought to bear, the mystery that drew the anthropologist towards his subject in the first place vanishes. I explained this to her; and she seemed, despite the fact that she was drunk, to understand what I was saying. Wow, she murmured; that’s kind of fucked. 2.8 When I arrived at Madison’s, we had sex. Afterwards,

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 reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.

And indeed at the hotel where I was to meet Saint-Loup and his friends the beginning of the festive season was attracting a great many people from near and far; as I hastened across the courtyard with its glimpses of glowing kitchens in which chickens were turning on spits, pigs were roasting, and lobsters were being flung alive into what the landlord called the ‘everlasting fire’, I discovered an influx of new arrivals (worthy of some Census of the People at Bethlehem such as the Old Flemish Masters painted), gathering there in groups, asking the landlord or one of his staff (who, if they did not like the look of them; would recommend accommodation elsewhere in the town) for board and lodging, while a kitchen-boy passed by holding a struggling fowl by its neck. Similarly, in the big dining-room, which I had passed through on my first day here on my way to the small room where my friend awaited me, one was again reminded of some Biblical feast, portrayed with the naïvety of former times and with Flemish exaggeration, because of the quantity of fish, chickens, grouse, woodcock, pigeons, brought in garnished and piping hot by breathless waiters who slid along the floor in their haste to set them down on the huge sideboard where they were carved immediately, but where – for many of the diners were finishing their meal as I arrived – they piled up untouched; it was as if their profusion and the haste of those who carried them in were prompted far less by the demands of those eating than by respect for the sacred text, scrupulously followed to the letter but naïvely illustrated by real details taken from local custom, and by a concern, both aesthetic and devotional, to make visible the splendour of the feast through the profusion of its victuals and the bustling attentiveness of those who served it. One of them stood lost in thought by a sideboard at the end of the room; and in order to find out from him, who alone appeared calm enough to give me an answer, where our table had been laid, I made my way forward through the various chafing-dishes that had been lit to keep warm the plates of latecomers (which did not prevent the desserts, in the centre of the room, from being displayed in the hands of a huge mannikin, sometimes supported on the wings of a duck, apparently made of crystal but actually of ice, carved each day with a hot iron by a sculptor-cook, in a truly Flemish manner), and, at the risk of being knocked down by the other waiters, went straight towards the calm one in whom I seemed to recognize a character traditionally present in these sacred subjects, since he reproduced with scrupulous accuracy the snub-nosed features, simple and badly drawn, and the dreamy expression of such a figure, already dimly aware of the miracle of a divine presence which the others have not yet begun to suspect. In addition, and doubtless in view of the approaching festive season, the tableau was reinforced by a celestial element recruited entirely from a personnel of cherubim and seraphim. A young angel musician, his fair hair framing a fourteen-year-old face, was not playing any instrument, it is true, but stood dreaming in front of a gong or a stack of plates, while less infantile angels were dancing attendance through the boundless expanse of the room, beating the air with the ceaseless flutter of the napkins, which hung from their bodies like the wings in primitive paintings, with pointed ends. Taking flight from these ill-defined regions, screened by a curtain of palms, from which the angelic waiters looked, from a distance, as if they had descended from the empyrean, I squeezed my way through to the small dining-room and to Saint-Loup’s table.

But if there is one thing we’ve learned from a lifetime of designing and analyzing incentives, the best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency. Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame. It is most powerful when least expected, like when things have gone wrong. Some of the most loyal customers any company has are the ones who had a big problem but got treated incredibly well as it was being resolved. So while designing the right incentive scheme certainly isn’t easy, here’s a simple set of rules that usually point us in the right direction: 1.  Figure out what people really care about, not what they say they care about. 2.  Incentivize them on the dimensions that are valuable to them but cheap for you to provide. 3.  Pay attention to how people respond; if their response surprises or frustrates you, learn from it and try something different. 4.  Whenever possible, create incentives that switch the frame from adversarial to cooperative. 5.  Never, ever think that people will do something just because it is the “right” thing to do. 6.  Know that some people will do everything they can to game the system, finding ways to win that you never could have imagined. If only to keep yourself sane, try to applaud their ingenuity rather than curse their greed.

February 17 Broken Pieces I am forgotten by them as though I were dead; I have become like broken pottery. But I trust in You, O lord; I say, “You are my God.” My times are in your hands.—Psalm 31:12, 14-15a I have a friend who does beautiful work with pieces of broken china and pottery. She gave me a lovely blue and white frame as a gift. She took the china and broke it into small enough pieces to fit the frame. She covered a plain frame with a white mortar and fit the broken pieces of blue and white china around the frame in a way that covered most of the area and filled in the spaces in between with more of the mortar. What a work of art! Not only is it beautiful, but it is custom made to fit my taste and home. But even more beautiful is the note that came with the gift. She wrote: my life has been full of broken pieces. Some of them are a result of my own manipulation and control and some are through no one’s fault, but a result of living in a fallen world. Regardless of what I give the Lord, He takes those pieces and adds them to a beautiful work of art. I hope this constantly reminds you of the Great Planner and Master Creator. We surely can make a mess of our lives, can’t we? But regardless of the mess we’ve made, no matter how fragmented we become, if we offer ourselves to God and trust in Him, He can take all the broken pieces of our life and make them into his work of art. And His work is so beautiful! His plan is custom made for each individual. Our times are in His Hands.

How to locate find out on a Garmin GPS Device Complete Guideline How about receiving message or email on phone that your son/daughter has reached school safely when they actually do so? Don’t you will be relaxed and concentrate more on your work? If you your question how can I do this? Then the answer is with the help of Garmin GPS device. And if next question comes like this How to locate find out on a Garmin GPS Device? Then read complete information mention on page. What Is Garmin GPS Device? Garmin GPS is a device that works on the concept of Global Positioning System. With this device you will not only be able to locate your position, but also you will be able to locate position of person or thing easily. With Garmin there are multiple devices available that works fine to solve all your needs. Garmin GTU10, GPS locator works in same way. This devise is attached to stuff whose location need to be tracked. Person can monitor the activity of items in their smart phone or computer. Benefits of Garmin Locator • You can attach Garmin locator device in your kid bag and draw a virtual parameter of area which you want to track. Once your child reach within the area or out of that area, you will get notification on your phone via mess or email. • Similarly, the position of your pet, car, lovable things can also be tracked • Have you seen in movies how the heroes track location of villain by sending a framed victim with GPS to their location? I am pretty sure devices of Garmin are used there. • With the help of this device accidental bus, cars or any person’s location can be identified too. Check Out Details with Garmin Team So, if you are interested to know more about Garmin devices and How to locate find out on a Garmin GPS Device then give a call to Garmin tech support team. They will answer to all your concerns with perfection. Among all GPS devices Garmin GPS are best. One can trust on accuracy of data present. There are time comes when devices face some hiccups but not often. Also, for that Garmin customer care is there to help users. They can be reached via all communication method i.e. through call, email and online chat. The details for same are mention on web page.

The British public first fell in love with Jamie Oliver’s authentic, down-to-earth personality in the late ‘90s when he was featured in a documentary on the River Café. Jamie became a household name because of his energetic and infectious way of inspiring people to believe that anyone can cook and eat well. In his TV shows and cookery books and on his website, he made the concept of cooking good food practical and accessible to anyone. When Jamie Oliver opened a new restaurant in Perth, it naturally caused a bit of a buzz. High-profile personalities and big brands create an air of expectation. Brands like Jamie Oliver are talked about not just because of their fame and instant recognition, but because they have meaning attached to them. And people associate Jamie with simplicity, inclusiveness, energy, and creativity. If you’re one of the first people to have the experience of eating at the new Jamie’s Italian, then you’ve instantly got a story that you can share with your friends. The stories we tell to others (and to ourselves) are the reason that people were prepared to queue halfway down the street when Jamie’s Italian opened the doors to its Perth restaurant in March of 2013. As with pre-iPhone launch lines at the Apple store, the reaction of customers frames the scarcity of the experience. When you know there’s a three-month wait for a dinner booking (there is, although 50% of the restaurant is reserved for walk-ins), it feels like a win to be one of the few to have a booking. The reaction of other people makes the story better in the eyes of prospective diners. The hype and the scarcity just heighten the anticipation of the experience. People don’t go just for the food; they go for the story they can tell. Jamie told the UK press that 30,000 napkins are stolen from branches of his restaurant every month. Customers were also stealing expensive toilet flush handles until Jamie had them welded on. The loss of the linen and toilet fittings might impact Jamie’s profits, but it also helps to create the myth of the brand. QUESTIONS FOR YOU How would you like customers to react to your brand?

The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists. I’ve spent more than a decade studying this, and it turns out to be far less difficult than I expected. The starting point is curiosity: pondering why the default exists in the first place. We’re driven to question defaults when we experience vuja de, the opposite of déjà vu. Déjà vu occurs when we encounter something new, but it feels as if we’ve seen it before. Vuja de is the reverse—we face something familiar, but we see it with a fresh perspective that enables us to gain new insights into old problems. Without a vuja de event, Warby Parker wouldn’t have existed. When the founders were sitting in the computer lab on the night they conjured up the company, they had spent a combined sixty years wearing glasses. The product had always been unreasonably expensive. But until that moment, they had taken the status quo for granted, never questioning the default price. “The thought had never crossed my mind,” cofounder Dave Gilboa says. “I had always considered them a medical purchase. I naturally assumed that if a doctor was selling it to me, there was some justification for the price.” Having recently waited in line at the Apple Store to buy an iPhone, he found himself comparing the two products. Glasses had been a staple of human life for nearly a thousand years, and they’d hardly changed since his grandfather wore them. For the first time, Dave wondered why glasses had such a hefty price tag. Why did such a fundamentally simple product cost more than a complex smartphone? Anyone could have asked those questions and arrived at the same answer that the Warby Parker squad did. Once they became curious about why the price was so steep, they began doing some research on the eyewear industry. That’s when they learned that it was dominated by Luxottica, a European company that had raked in over $7 billion the previous year. “Understanding that the same company owned LensCrafters and Pearle Vision, Ray-Ban and Oakley, and the licenses for Chanel and Prada prescription frames and sunglasses—all of a sudden, it made sense to me why glasses were so expensive,” Dave says. “Nothing in the cost of goods justified the price.” Taking advantage of its monopoly status, Luxottica was charging twenty times the cost. The default wasn’t inherently legitimate; it was a choice made by a group of people at a given company. And this meant that another group of people could make an alternative choice. “We could do things differently,” Dave suddenly understood. “It was a realization that we could control our own destiny, that we could control our own prices.” When we become curious about the dissatisfying defaults in our world, we begin to recognize that most of them have social origins: Rules and systems were created by people. And that awareness gives us the courage to contemplate how we can change them. Before women gained the right to vote in America, many “had never before considered their degraded status as anything but natural,” historian Jean Baker observes. As the suffrage movement gained momentum, “a growing number of women were beginning to see that custom, religious precept, and law were in fact man-made and therefore reversible.

My dad continually reminded salespeople that their main job was to help the customer win. When you speak the account’s language and frame the sales story around what is most meaningful to the client, you stand out from the competition. Customers see you differently because the words you choose demonstrate a commitment to their success.

The screen-averse attitude is about values, principles, and cultural customs. It's a moral and ethical position. It's grounded in beliefs about proper and improper ways of living a good life. It may be framed as if it were objective, as if it were about physical or mental health; but the real problem is that grown-ups are resistant to change. They are anxious about their kids' adjustment. They should be. After all, today's parents aspire to the impossible: adjusting their kids to old-time habitual norms that no longer characterize the predominant social experience. This is the root cause of their screen-time anxiety - it is not the technology, but rather discomfort with the increasingly ambiguous boundary between home and work. Like Engelhardt, parents don't like it that the private world of the controlled family home fraternizes with the frightening unpredictable chaos that is supposed to happen elsewhere. Connected digital devices exacerbate their stress because, paradoxically, they facilitate deeply private encounters with a wildly public world. Parents see attention streaming away from the household. The lines between inside and outside, private and public, isolated and connected become ambiguous. And grown-ups become become confused. This is why most of the screen-time advice offered by experts, practitioners, and journalists advocates for drawing clearer boundaries and achieving better balance -- these are misguided attempts to bring what's blurry into focus.

Week 1: Build an Arsenal of Ideas Day 1: Predict the Future Day 2: Learn How Money Grows on Trees Day 3: Brainstorm, Borrow, or Steal Ideas Day 4: Weigh the Obstacles and Opportunities of Each Idea Day 5: Forecast Your Profit on the Back of a Napkin Week 2: Select Your Best Idea Day 6: Use the Side Hustle Selector to Compare Ideas Day 7: Become a Detective Day 8: Have Imaginary Coffee with Your Ideal Customer Day 9: Transform Your Idea into an Offer Day 10: Create Your Origins Story Week 3: Prepare for Liftoff Day 11: Assemble the Nuts and Bolts Day 12: Decide How to Price Your Offer Day 13: Create a Side Hustle Shopping List Day 14: Set Up a Way to Get Paid Day 15: Design Your First Workflow Day 16: Spend 10 Percent More Time on the Most Important Tasks Week 4: Launch Your Idea to the Right People Day 17: Publish Your Offer! Day 18: Sell Like a Girl Scout Day 19: Ask Ten People for Help Day 20: Test, Test, and Test Again Day 21: Burn Down the Furniture Store Day 22: Frame Your First Dollar Week 5: Regroup and Refine Day 23: Track Your Progress and Decide on Next Steps Day 24: Grow What Works, Let Go of What Doesn’t Day 25: Look for Money Lying Under a Rock Day 26: Get It Out of Your Head Day 27: Back to the Future

We don’t think about saving money very often. When we finally do think about it, our thoughts rarely lead us to save more. To test the extent that the design of digital wallets could influence behavior, Dan and his colleagues conducted a large-scale experiment with thousands of customers of a mobile money-saving system in Kenya. Some participants received two text messages every week: one at the start of the week to remind them to save and another one at the end of the week with a summary of their savings. Other participants got slightly different text reminders: It was framed like it came from their kid, asking them to save for “our future.” Four other groups were bribed (formally known as “financially incentivized”) for saving. The first of these groups got a 10 percent bonus for the first 100 shillings that they saved. The second group got a 20 percent bonus for the first 100 shillings that they saved. The third and fourth groups got the same 10 percent and 20 percent bonuses for the first 100 shillings that they saved, but they got it together with loss aversion. (In these conditions, the researchers placed the full amount of the match—10 or 20 shillings—into their account at the beginning of the week. The participants were told that they would get the match based on how much they saved, and that the amount of the match that they did not save would be taken out of their account. Financially, this loss aversion approach was the same as the regular end-of-the-week match, but the idea was that experiencing money leaving their account would be painful and would get the participants to increase their savings.) A final set of participants received those same text messages plus a golden-colored coin with the numbers 1–24 engraved on it, to indicate the 24 weeks that the plan lasted. These participants were asked to place the coin somewhere visible in their home and scratch with a knife the number for that week to indicate if they saved or not.2 At the end of six months, the treatment that performed spectacularly better than every other was—drumroll please!—the coin. Every other treatment increased savings a bit, but those who received the coin saved about twice as much as those who only received text messages. You might think the winner would have been the 20 percent bonus or maybe the 20 percent bonus with loss aversion—and this is in fact what most people predict would be the most effective way to get people to save—but you’d be wrong.

Understanding something new is challenging because we don’t yet have a frame of reference.

How an Outsider Becomes an Insider Here's a letter I got from my Platinum Member, Jerry Jones, president of a direct marketing and coaching company providing services to dentists nationwide: “Back in 1997, after about two months of owning this business, I read the ‘10 Smart Questions’ in this chapter. The list exposed my biggest handicap in marketing to dentists: not being one of them. Because I'm not the customer in my niche, I have had to work hard at understanding what motivates them, keeps them awake at night, what the current desirable carrot is to them. Here are six things I do to stay in that frame of mind. And I'm apparently managing to do it, because I am frequently accused of being a dentist! I read every industry publication every month. I visit websites that host discussion forums for dentists. I subscribe to e-mail groups where only dentists communicate back and forth. I attend industry functions, conventions, seminars, and trade shows. I ‘play prospect’ with other product and service providers to dentists. I routinely ‘mastermind’ with dentists and with other marketers and vendors who provide services to the profession. I think this is so important that I even invested in three dental practices to get more firsthand understanding and to have laboratories to test my new strategies, ideas, direct-mail campaigns, and products.

Here on Frogmore, those who govern share a set of cultural practices and values entirely alien to the various cultural groups that together make up a super-majority population. Each member of that super-majority is in theory “allowed” to live in accordance with their cultural traditions and customs. In practice, however, they are in every respect treated as isolated monads assumed to share the cultural values and practices of the rulers. This assumption effectively strips them of their culture in every important context, rendering their cultural context invisible, allowing the rulers’ cultural values to be projected onto them as though they were blank slates. Thus, their voices are inaudible and unintelligible when the policies that affect them are being framed. And thus justice, in the rulers’ courts of law, is an utter impossibility.

Thank you for bringing me home. My heart will sing a song of friendship when I think of you, Hunter--for always into the horizon.” He gestured toward the stallion. “You will take him. He is strong and swift. He will carry you back to Comanche land, eh?” “Oh, no! I couldn’t. He’s yours!” “He walks a new way now. You are his good friend.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “I will never return to Comancheria, Hunter. Please, keep your horse.” “You keep. He is my gift to you, Blue Eyes.” Words eluded Loretta. Before she thought it through, she rose on her tiptoes and pressed her lips against his in what she intended to be a quick kiss of farewell. Hunter had heard of this strange tosi tivo custom called kissing. The thought of two people pressing their open mouths together had always disgusted him. Loretta was a different matter, however. Before she could pull away, he captured her face between his hands and tipped her head back to nibble lightly at her mouth. To learn the taste of her. And to remember. As inexpert as he was, when his mouth touched hers, a wave of heat zigzagged through him, pooling like fire low in his belly. Her lips were soft and full, as sweet as warm penende, honey. She gasped, and when she did, he dipped his tongue past her teeth to taste her moistness, which was even sweeter and made him think of other sweet places he would like to taste. Hunter at last understood why the tosi tivo liked kissing. She clutched his wrists and leaned away from him. He drew back and smiled, his palms still framing her face. Her large eyes shone as blue as the sky above them, startled and wary, just as they had so many times those first few days. She was like his mother’s beadwork, beautiful on the outside, a confusing tangle on the inside. Would he never understand her? “Good-bye, Hunter.” Reluctantly he released her and watched her lead the horse down the hill. At the base of the slope she turned and looked back. Their gazes met and held. Then she turned toward home and broke into a trot, the horse trailing behind her. Hunter shook his head. Only a White Eyes would walk when she had a perfectly good horse to ride.

In the classic book How Will You Measure Your Life?, co-authors Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon frame the issue in starker terms, pointing out that it is easier to stay true to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold steady 98 percent of the time. According to the authors, your personal moral line is powerful because you do not cross it. But once you do, no matter your justifications, you are more likely to do it again.7 In other words, do the right thing because it’s the right thing. That’s especially challenging in emerging organizations where people are under pressure to rapidly grow the business. But when delivering a CPE is your focus, it is easy to see why doing the right thing is so important. Operating with integrity depends on the entire team, so the actions of each person matter. Every person faces situations where they need to put customers’ or colleagues’ interests ahead of their own, and their decisions reflect the organization’s core values. What do your choices — and your team’s choices — say about your values?

Apple may not do customer research to decide what products to make, but it absolutely pays attention to how customers use its products. So the marketing team working on the iMovie HD release scheduled for Macworld, on January 11, 2005, decided to shoot a wedding. The ceremony it filmed was gorgeous: a sophisticated, candlelit affair at the Officers’ Club of San Francisco’s Presidio. The bride was an Apple employee, and the wedding was real. There was one problem with the footage, however. Steve Jobs didn’t like it. He watched it the week before Christmas, recalled Alessandra Ghini, the marketing executive managing the launch of iLife. Jobs declared that the San Francisco wedding didn’t capture the right atmosphere to demonstrate what amateurs could do with iMovie. “He told us he wanted a wedding on the beach, in Hawaii, or some tropical location,” said Ghini. “We had a few weeks to find a wedding on a beach and to get it shot, edited, and approved by Steve. The tight time frame allowed for no margin for error.” With time short and money effectively no object, the team went into action. It contacted Los Angeles talent agencies as well as hotels in Hawaii to learn if they knew of any weddings planned—preferably featuring an attractive bride and groom—over the New Year’s holiday. They hit pay dirt in Hollywood: A gorgeous agency client and her attractive fiancé were in fact planning to wed on Maui during the holiday. Apple offered to pay for the bride’s flowers, to film the wedding, and to provide the couple with a video. In return, Apple wanted rights for up to a minute’s worth of footage of its choosing.

A key technique in implementing this approach is the concept of takt time,3 which precisely synchronizes the rate of production to the rate of sales to customers. For example, for a bicycle firm’s high-end titanium-framed bike, let’s assume that customers are placing orders at the rate of forty-eight per day. Let’s also assume that the bike factory works a single eight-hour shift. Dividing the number of bikes by the available hours of production tells the production time per bicycle, the takt time, which is ten minutes. (Sixty minutes in an hour divided by demand of six bikes per hour.) Obviously, the aggregate volume of orders may increase or decrease over time and takt time will need to be adjusted so that production is always precisely synchronized with demand.

I have noticed generational humor exists as well. Since our frames of reference and cultural influences vary, there is a lot of room for misinterpretation and the potential to not "get it.

Candidate: I sense we’re just missing something critical. Something is causing this to happen. Either customers have changed in a way that has benefited our competitors but not our client, or competitors have changed in a way that attracts new business but we haven’t. (Note how I framed the issue in concrete terms: Either competitors or customers have changed. Laying out an issue in this structured way makes it easier for the interviewer to follow your logic. I could just as easily have said, “I think we need to look into the customers themselves,” or I could have started asking questions about customers. The problem with diving in this way is that it doesn’t give the interviewer any insight into the organization of your thought process. Are you asking questions like a reporter would, or are you asking questions for a specific purpose?

What is our winning aspiration? Framing the choice as “winning” rules out mediocrity as an option. If you want to win, you need to know what game you’re playing and with (and against) whom. What impact do you want to have in and on the world? Where will we play? “Boiling the ocean” is rarely successful. Choosing a sector, geography, product, channel and customer allows you to focus your resources. How will we win? What’s the defendable difference that will open up the gap between you and the others? What capabilities must be in place? Not just what do you need to do, but how will it become and stay a strength? What management systems are required? It’s easy enough to measure stuff. It’s much harder to figure out what you want to measure that actually matters.

HIS RETURN TO LONDON From the dull confines of the drooping west, To see the day spring from the pregnant east, Ravish'd in spirit, I come, nay more, I fly To thee, blest place of my nativity! Thus, thus with hallow'd foot I touch the ground, With thousand blessings by thy fortune crown'd. O fruitful Genius! that bestowest here An everlasting plenty year by year; O place! O people! manners! framed to please All nations, customs, kindreds, languages! I am a free-born Roman; suffer then That I amongst you live a citizen. London my home is; though by hard fate sent Into a long and irksome banishment; Yet since call'd back, henceforward let me be, O native country, repossess'd by thee! For, rather than I'll to the west return, I'll beg of thee first here to have mine urn. Weak I am grown, and must in short time fall; Give thou my sacred reliques burial.

Every time I pass through customs between Mexico and the U.S. I feel certain sensations of anxiety. I "know" I have no illicit drugs in my car, but I begin to wonder, confronted by the hostile and suspicious eyes of the Texas Border Patrol, if some damned drug or other somehow got into the car without my knowledge . . . Did somebody who dislikes my books "plant" some to frame me? Did some young idiot admirer of my works slip some into a video cassette case, a book or other gift as a surprise, not knowing I intended to cross a border the next day? Do these Border people sometimes "plant" drugs themselves, to improve their arrest record? Like Joseph K. in The Trial I begin to feel sure they will find me guilty of something, even though I do not know of any crime I have committed.

Well, she was weak, as weak as you must expect women to be after centuries of custom have bred weakness into their very nature. Why are women weak? Because men have made them so. Because the law that was framed by men, and the public opinion which it has been their privilege to direct, have from age to age drilled into women the belief that they are chattels, to be owned and played with, existing for the male pleasure and passion. Because men have systematically stunted their mental growth and denied them their natural rights, and that equality which is theirs. Weak! Women have become weak because weakness is the passport to the favour of our sex. They have become foolish because education has been withheld from them and ability discouraged; they have become frivolous because frivolity has been declared to be the natural mission of woman. There is no male simpleton who does not like to find a bigger simpleton than he is to lord it over. Truly, the triumph of the stronger sex has been complete, for it has even succeeded in enlisting its victims in its service. The great instruments in the suppression of women, and in their retention at their present level, are women themselves.

Jeremy George Lake Charles The Fast Track C3 Corvette chassis is the ultimate aftermarket chassis for the Corvette 68-82. The development team at Art Morrison Enterprises worked with leading manufacturers to develop the latest addition to the Ames series of GT-Sport bolt-on chassis for C2 applications. In order to simplify assembly, the C3 chassis has been designed to use the factory mounting points for bumpers, core and support bearings. Jeremy George Lake Charles We offer a C-4 conversion, which includes a tailor-made front frame section that accepts crossbeams from 1984-96. Viper Super 44 / 9 QuickChange IRS diffusers are mounted on custom axles. If you move the 500-pound V-8 engine 75 feet to the rear and the 300-pound automatic transmission 28 feet to the rear, you get a Corvette with a different weight distribution. Jeremy George Lake Charles The bearings, in turn, improve acceleration and traction by shortening the braking distance, and all four tires are able to do their share of braking performance.

Mandap Exporters a unit DST EXPORTS are a renowned manufacturer, exporter, and supplier of “WEDDING MANDAPS”. We are the best OEM of Wedding Mandap in INDIA. We are Developing, designing a creative collection of mandaps for marriage. Dst exports are manufacturing all type handicraft wedding mandap which reflects customer choice and taste. we are making all mandaps in accordance to the latest trends. DST Exports is just not making mandaps but we have a huge collection of all type decoration items. Other products and services DST Exports is the manufacturer of all kinds of Wedding Decoration Products like Wedding Mandap, Wedding Stages, Wedding Furniture, Wedding Dolis, Wedding Stage Backdrop Frames and Panels, Wedding Horse Drawn Carriages and many decoration items DST EXPORTS are specialist manufacturer and exporter of Fiber carved wedding mandap. We have a wide range of mandaps for wedding like - Indian Wedding Golden Carved Mandap, Delizio Mandap, Plazo mandap, Fiber Crystal Mandaps, Mustache Mandaps, Double Pole Mandaps, Triple pole Triveni mandap, Bollywood Mandaps, Elephant Trunk Mandaps, Butterfly mandap, Bottle Pillars mandap, etc. These mandaps are made for Indian weddings. We strive to promote Indian culture through our attractive range of wooden carved mandap which can be custom-made to suit the requirements of diverse religions such as Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, etc

Here are the five questions: What is our winning aspiration? Framing the choice as “winning” rules out mediocrity as an option. If you want to win, you need to know what game you’re playing and with (and against) whom. What impact do you want to have in and on the world? Where will we play? “Boiling the ocean” is rarely successful. Choosing a sector, geography, product, channel and customer allows you to focus your resources. How will we win? What’s the defendable difference that will open up the gap between you and the others? What capabilities must be in place? Not just what do you need to do, but how will it become and stay a strength? What management systems are required? It’s easy enough to measure stuff. It’s much harder to figure out what you want to measure that actually matters.

So I am an Indian who's mother tongue is Tamil and Ancestral language is Telugu, Intellectual legacy from Palm leaves is in Vatteluzhuthu (Tamil + Malayalam Mixture), So wherever I go for research studies on Environment/ Ecology/ Biology, I represent myself as INDIAN (Who is comfortable in English) unless I marry a Non - Indian girl, and I represent Tamil Philosophy for defense mechanisms, science, business and all other possible spiritual, social and all other dimensions that are focused. The thing is learning Hindi, Sanskrit, Kannada or any foreign language is not a big deal, if i put effort for 3 to 6 months I can easily grab a language from grammatical foundations to advanced speaking but even after learning another language, at some point of my time in future, either I have become a biological researcher and/or astronaut as I dream of , but at that moment If I do not have the attributes of my current birth place, then there will be a guy or a girl or a leader or even a child who would easily question me that you have forgotten your mother tongue either for money or for women or for passion, so how can we trust you that you will protect/ guide us? So previous life carnation was Rajput and before that was time frame Europe, those things are in my mind and I will never forget, but in this very life I have to represent Tamil Philosophy and Ideology, As English is a common communicative and International language in science and technology, there is no one can deny English, Even lord Krishna was embarrassed just because he was Yadav. So although I have knowledge of all Indian gods and Goddesses and respecting all religions, castes and customs within India, within earth, within universe and beyond, I represent in English with Tamil Philosophy. So wherever I go for research studies on Environment/ Ecology/ Biology, I represent myself as Indian unless I marry a Non - Indian girl, and I represent Tamil Philosophy for defense mechanisms, science, business and all other possible spiritual, social and all other dimensions that are focused. Now choosing Guru is important before starting your passionate journey (Mine is science), so while choosing Guru, three things to remember, 1) Guru must be Knowing context specific problems, 2) Guru must not have lived immoral life 3) Guru must have withstand enormous pressure and opposition to show his/her potential on specific subject in his/her time 4) You can also choose more Guru as you move on in your life but starting point or First Guru must be from your Place My Gurus That I really Consider as my gurus 1) Mahakavi Subramanya Bharathiyar 2) Tholkappiar 3) Carl Sagan 4) Stephen Hawking 5) Bear Grylls 6) Siddhartha 7) Lord Ramachandra 8) Lord Shiva 9) Lord Dasarat (Indra) 10) All goddesses 11) Lilith (She was portrayed as bad but she was not bad) 12) Lord prometheus 13) Lord Surya 14) Lord Krishna (Sometimes because I hate him) 15) Sita

However, keep in mind that most of your target customers have never heard of you or your rival startups—they simply want to know how your product compares to what they use today. Customer-facing positioning must be centered on a customer frame of reference.

Regardless of how your designs were created, InVision and Marvel allow you to easily turn them into functional prototype websites. With InVision, you upload your page designs, and then link them together to make the website navigable. Then, you can carry out user tests on what, to the users, appears to be a real website, even though it hasn’t seen a smidgen of code. InVision also allows other people to give written feedback on your work-in-progress designs. You upload your designs, and then invite others to annotate them with whatever type of feedback you desire. Notable has similar functionality. Alternatives include Firefly and BugHerd. The Composite app connects to Photoshop files, turning them into clickable prototypes. To gather feedback on your work-in-progress videos, you can use Frame.io, a fantastic web-based platform. Alternatives include Wipster, Symu, Vidhub, and Kollaborate. Such services provide great benefits; it’s hard to gather and record such feedback even when everyone’s in the same room. Optimal Workshop provides several tools (OptimalSort, Treejack, and Chalkmark) to help you optimize your website’s navigation and information architecture. The tools are described in our article about card sorting. Alternatives for card sorting include SimpleCardSort, UsabiliTEST, and Xsort.

Each component has a relationship to the others. Attributes of your product are only “unique” when compared with competitive alternatives. Those attributes drive the value, which determines who the best target customers are, which in turn highlights which market frame of reference is the best one to highlight your value. Trends must be relevant to your target customers, and can be used in combination with your market category to make your product more relevant to your buyers right now.

keep in mind that most of your target customers have never heard of you or your rival startups—they simply want to know how your product compares to what they use today. Customer-facing positioning must be centered on a customer frame of reference.

pre-framing is to come up with a solid content marketing plan which will address all the pain points and needs of your potential customers on social media.

Attributes like “15-megapixel camera” or “all-metal construction” enable benefits for customers such as “sharper images” or “a stronger frame.” Articulating value takes the benefits one step further: putting benefits into the context of a goal the customer is trying to achieve. Value could be “photos that are sharp even when printed or zoomed in,” “a frame that saves you money on replacements,” “every level of the organization knows the status of key metrics” or “help is immediately available across every time zone.” Features enable benefits, which can be translated into value in unique customer terms.

Next, share the process. Let them know what happened with their idea and the relevant time frame.

Determine and embrace relevant and meaningful trends. Too many companies ignore important trends for far too long. It is not very hard to identify the important trends. What's hard is to help the organization understand how those trends can be leveraged by your products to solve customer problems in new and better ways. Skate to where the puck is heading, not to where it was. An important element to product vision is identifying the things that are changing—as well as the things that likely won't be changing—in the time frame of the product vision. Some product visions are wildly optimistic and unrealistic about how fast things will change, and others are far too conservative. This is usually the most difficult aspect of a good product vision. Be stubborn on vision but flexible on the details. This Jeff Bezos line is very important. So many teams give up on their product vision far too soon. This is usually called a vision pivot, but mostly it's a sign of a weak product organization. It is never easy, so prepare yourself for that. But, also be careful you don't get attached to details. It is very possible that you may have to adjust course to reach your desired destination. That's called a discovery pivot, and there's nothing wrong with that. Realize that any product vision is a leap of faith. If you could truly validate a vision, then your vision probably isn't ambitious enough. It will take several years to know. So, make sure what you're working on is meaningful, and recruit people to the product teams who also feel passionate about this problem and then be willing to work for several years to realize the vision.

The diamond-and-square framework provides the answers. The framework’s diamond breaks down the startup’s opportunity—that is, the “horse”—into four constituent parts: its customer value proposition, technology and operations, marketing, and profit formula. The diamond is framed by a square whose corners denote the venture’s key resource providers: its founders (that is, the “jockeys”), other team members, outside investors, and strategic partners.

Beside him was a small employee sweeping the floor, just by Andrei. The cleaner clenched the broom with effort and quick movements. She moved forcefully, with so much vigor that one saw a girl scout. But wrinkles had already formed on her neck, that sweated, moistening her black wig. Andrei stared, noticing she was damn good at her job, but too good. She would bend her legs to sweep the difficult corners of the shop. The woman would adjust the picture frames on the wall and wipe down the chairs, tasks which were not part of her required duties. Whenever her co-workers talked casually, the woman steered the conversation to the topic of the conditions of the store, which she knew, or to certain customers, who she knew, or to how business was, which she knew. She drove back home with a smile, knowing she’d done a great job that day. “They need me! Otherwise, who else would have caught the slip hazard by the trash? No one, not even my manager!” she would say before bed. She was naturally helpful. It was tragic to see that kind employee, happy like a little child, be so great at some stupid shop, when in her pumped a heart large enough to fuel the future, a forest, or a country. There was no structure of life, or invention yet created, whose mechanism could righteously allocate the innocence and love embedded in the warm blood of a human being. There deserved to be. She was sacred. But the world, decidedly corporate, had seized her, eaten her up, devouring what was left of the lively.

Once you’ve assembled a set of observations, create a new frame to inspire ideas you can test: “How might we use brutal honesty the way a barber does to build trust with new customers?” That’s a much richer and more interesting prompt than “How can we build trust quickly?” ~

Hey Pete, I'm trying to make desk & office rental less of a pain for new businesses (vision). We’re just starting out and don’t have anything to sell, but want to make sure we’re building something that actually helps (framing). I’ve only ever come at it from the tenant’s side and I’m having a hard time understanding how it all works from the landlord’s perspective (weakness). You’ve been renting out desks for a while and could really help me cut through the fog (pedestal). Do you have time in the next couple weeks to meet up for a chat? (ask)

Finding the best path to your desired outcome is what researchers call an “ill-structured problem”—also commonly called a “wicked problem.” Ill-structured problems are defined by having many solutions. There are no right or wrong answers, only better or worse ones. Much of the work when tackling an ill-structured problem is framing the problem itself.5 How we frame a problem has a big impact on how we might solve it.

Before you set your own outcome, ask your product leader for more business context. Try these questions: What’s most important to the business right now? Try to frame this conversation in terms of business outcomes. Is there a customer segment that is more important than other customer segments? Are there strategic initiatives we should know about? Use the information you gain to map out the most important business outcomes and what product outcomes might drive those business outcomes. Get feedback from your leader. Choose a product outcome that your team has the most influence over.

As generative AI becomes a core component of products, processes, and services, use case development shifts from a tactical step to a strategic capability. Organizations must invest in framing use cases rooted in customer needs, ethical principles and pragmatic execution. Only then can generative AI be leveraged for sustainable shared value.

Eastern Europe is a land of small countries, wedged between great powers. . . It is a place that has long been dominated by empires. but it has not, for the most part, inherited an imperial frame of mind. Since the close of the nineteenth century, its politics have been dominated by nationalism of various stripes. Its history, by contrast, has been shaped most by the clash of feuding ideologies. But that is only the story of the past hundred years or so. Eastern Europe has a longer history and older traditions to draw on in formulating its future. Largely neglected by historians, there was an Eastern Europe that existed alongside the structures imposed by empire and independent of the hopes fostered by nationalism. This was a world of multiple faiths and languages, in which many parallel truths lived beside on another. It was a place of shared saints and intersecting stories, where folk cures and prophecies passed among neighbors, and sacred heroes donned one another's clothes. It coalesced gradually in the centuries following the introduction of monotheism -- the three great religions of the Book -- and the decline of paganism, which itself never disappeared completely but simply refashioned itself as the background of all later folk belief. This Eastern Europe was not a conscious creation, but the product of open spaces and centuries of benign neglect. This was not a place where different people deliberately chose to live side by side, but where they did so out of long and practiced habit, enshrined more by custom than by law. Inequality -- especially of class -- was part of the bedrock below its foundation. But despite its not being built around principles of universal rights, this order did have its own considerable advantages. Chief among them were plurality and multiplicity -- truly impressive virtues, especially if one knows what followed in their wake.

For most of us, when we encounter a problem, we simply want to solve it. This desire comes from a place of good intent. We like to help people. However, this instinct often gets us into trouble. We don’t always remember to question the framing of the problem. We tend to fall in love with our first solution. We forget to ask, “How else might we solve this problem?” These problems get compounded when working in teams. When we hear a problem, we each individually jump to a fast solution. When we disagree, we engage in fruitless opinion battles. These opinion battles encourage us to fall back on our organizational roles and claim decision authority (e.g., the product manager has the final say), instead of collaborating as a cross-functional team. When a team takes the time to visualize their options, they build a shared understanding of how they might reach their desired outcome. If they maintain this visual as they learn week over week, they maintain that shared understanding, allowing them to collaborate over time. We know this collaboration is critical to product success.

Fish and the old woman An old woman, selling fish, Crying at all those who passed by, “Try my fish that you shall relish,” Most of them ignored her calls but many asked why? She answered all whys, all ifs, all questions, As long as you were someone she thought would buy, And I stood there listening to her witty quotations, That addressed all doubts and answered every why, Her greasy hands often patted and placed the fish in order, In the round wicker basket that was wet but clean, And in this fish market she looked much wiser and older, Her face was round, her eyes sharp, with a body frame that was lean, Few minutes passed, unlike the fish she was unable to catch a reliable prospect, Then a man stopped and looked at her basket full of fish, And she had found her much needed suspect, The providence had granted her her wish, She turned the fish around and showed him the best ones, Her greasy hands held them with twin feelings, A feeling that still wanted to retain the best ones, And a feeling that was willing to let go of the few in her commercial dealings, And there was her struggle, and her eyes revealed it clearly, She shuffled the best ones around and then mixed them with the rest, And she did this with a professional dexterity, Creating a mix of the good fish and the best, Because to her all customers are the same, They all deserve to savour the fish that she thinks are the finest, So she had to indulge in this necessary hypnotic game, And she performed it in ways sharp and tidiest, She scrubbed off the scales carefully, And cleaned them with a unique fondness, And when ready she handed them to the man lovingly, He held them with a sense of quickness, And walked away, leaving behind the old woman and her basket full of fish, Who once again shouted in her typical melody, “Try my fish that you shall relish, The fish that will make the tastiest dish, The fish from the lake that breeds the best fish!” While I watched her and her teary eyes, Because she missed the fish that were being taken away, Away from her everyday, with her daily lot gone a part of her in that basket dies, But she does not let her feelings give in or sway, Because this is who she is, the seller of life and joy, Who shouts on the bridge on a cold November day, For she too has a home, where she has to feed her girl and her always waiting boy, It has been so for many decades, and was so today, In the evening when the wicker basket is dry with no fish left in it, She lifts the basket, mops the floor, and places it on her head, Well I guess not all of us can do it, Because she carries the physical load over the head that with a million thoughts is also fed, Yet she walks with a smile and vivaciousness that is radiant, Because she sells the fish that are the best, And in the wicker basket they look magnificent and brilliant, I guess for her, the fish and the basket are her test, Where fate pushes her to the extreme every day, But she never gets tired to shout and say, “Try my fish that you shall relish anyday, Why not let that day be today, your luckiest day!” With the old woman gone, the bridge is still crowded but the spot is empty, So, I turn around and look at it, and I hear her echoes, And I feel a wave of humility induced by my realistaion of her piety, Towards a different God, the God she invokes often in her melody that resides there in the form of her echoes, I may never see her again, or maybe I will, Whenever I cross the bridge, the bridge that leads people to their destinations, But for me it begins there and it ends there too, there time holds still, Because we all respect her courage and we love her melodious incantations!

Fish and the old woman An old woman, selling fish, Crying at all those who passed by, “Try my fish that you shall relish,” Most of them ignored her calls but many asked why? She answered all whys, all ifs, all questions, As long as you were someone she thought would buy, And I stood there listening to her witty quotations, That addressed all doubts and answered every why, Her greasy hands often patted and placed the fish in order, In the round wicker basket that was wet but clean, And in this fish market she looked much wiser and older, Her face was round, her eyes sharp, with a body frame that was lean, Few minutes passed, unlike the fish she was unable to catch a reliable prospect, Then a man stopped and looked at her basket full of fish, And she had found her much needed suspect, The providence had granted her her wish, She turned the fish around and showed him the best ones, Her greasy hands held them with twin feelings, A feeling that still wanted to retain the best ones, And a feeling that was willing to let go of the few in her commercial dealings, And there was her struggle, and her eyes revealed it clearly, She shuffled the best ones around and then mixed them with the rest, And she did this with a professional dexterity, Creating a mix of the good fish and the best, Because to her all customers are the same, They all deserve to savour the fish that she thinks are the finest, So she had to indulge in this necessary hypnotic game, And she performed it in ways sharp and tidiest, She scrubbed off the scales carefully, And cleaned them with a unique fondness, And when ready she handed them to the man lovingly, He held them with a sense of quickness, And walked away, leaving behind the old woman and her basket full of fish, Who once again shouted in her typical melody, “Try my fish that you shall relish, The fish that will make the tastiest dish, The fish from the lake that breeds the best fish!” While I watched her and her teary eyes, Because she missed the fish that were being taken away, Away from her everyday, with her daily lot gone a part of her in that basket dies, But she does not let her feelings give in or sway, Because this is who she is, the seller of life and joy, Who shouts on the bridge on a cold November day, For she too has a home, where she has to feed her girl and her always waiting boy, It has been so for many decades, and was so today, In the evening when the wicker basket is dry with no fish left in it, She lifts the basket, mops the floor, and places it on her head, Well I guess not all of us can do it, Because she carries the physical load over the head that with a million thoughts is also fed, Yet she walks with a smile and vivaciousness that is radiant, Because she sells the fish that are the best, And in the wicker basket they look magnificent and brilliant, I guess for her, the fish and the basket are her test, Where fate pushes her to the extreme every day, But she never gets tired to shout and say, “Try my fish that you shall relish any day, Why not let that day be today, your luckiest day!” With the old woman gone, the bridge is still crowded but the spot is empty, So, I turn around and look at it, and I hear her echoes, And I feel a wave of humility induced by my realisation of her piety, Towards a different God, the God she invokes often in her melody that resides there in the form of her echoes, I may never see her again, or maybe I will, Whenever I cross the bridge, the bridge that leads people to their destinations, But for me it begins there and it ends there too, there time holds still, Because we all respect her courage and we love her melodious incantations!

Employees had the freedom to use their interests and strengths to contribute to the team, but they needed to learn how to use this freedom within the frame of customer commitments and legal regulations. Experimenting is essential to innovation and agility, but it is not possible to predict in advance all the places where the freedom will rub up against the frame.

Demand-side sales is like having night vision goggles. People think sales is just a numbers game of percentages and probability. If you bring in enough people, cars will sell. They’re not taking the time to understand why people buy. They don’t ask questions: What do you like? What don’t you like? Why are you buying a new car? They don’t talk about car loans. If they were paying attention, they’d help. They’d know the customer’s requirements, show them contrasting options, and frame their tradeoffs. They’d help them frame it out then use a time wall to force a decision. When you do this, selling becomes serving.

Maturity ushered in a desire to replace a dorm room's cinderblock walls with custom paint and expensive frames. Heartbreak always ushered in a craving for bigger beds and personal space.

Solvay Business School Professor Paul Verdin and I developed a perspective that frames an organization's strategy as a hypothesis rather than a plan.62 Like all hypotheses, it starts with situation assessment and analysis –strategy's classic tools. Also, like all hypotheses, it must be tested through action. When strategy is seen as a hypothesis to be continually tested, encounters with customers provide valuable data of ongoing interest to senior executives.

Comparison -He continued: Comparison exists in everything material and immaterial, when you stand in front of the library shelf to buy a book on a subject, you look at the author’s name first, to compare the quality of his presentation with the fame of his writer. When you enter a café, you look at the people in it, associating its importance with the importance of the customers, their looks, their clothing brand, and their watches. I know a café in Vienna, that you are not allowed to enter unless you wear specific clothing brands, and its prices are very high, although the coffee in it tastes bad, yet everyone sees it as an excellent coffee. These two papers are of the same color, you will not see them, not because they do not reflect light, or because they are colorless, but because there is no frame of reference on which the mind can rely to distinguish between them. He bent the little one to stick out its tip: but now, you have another frame of reference, this bend exposed it. Just because you see something when you do not have a proper frame of reference to base it on does not mean it does not exist. He smiled and looked him straight in the eye: just as you did not see that Roman worker on the bridge, it does not mean he does not exist.

When it comes to customer experience, almost no detail is too small to measure. To determine how long it took a salesperson to enter every bit of information when a customer was buying glasses at one of its stores, Warby Parker used timers to calculate which steps could be speeded up. “Trying on glasses can be fun, because that’s a social experience. Checking out is not fun. Once you’ve made your decision, it’s time to get the fuck out of there,” Blumenthal notes. “But we need to know your address, your email address, your billing information, what have you. I call these low-value interactions, whereas finding the right frame for you is a high-value interaction.” In examining the data, Warby Parker zeroed in on something that took several seconds longer than necessary: entering the person’s email address. “It’s a real obvious one,” says Blumenthal. “Why don’t we create a button, so that instead of doing @-g-m-a-i-l, we just created one button for @gmail.com. It’s super, super simple and easy, right? Is that going to turn us into a $100 billion company? No. But if we do a billion of those things, it will.

Utilize our cutting-edge technology to provide your customers with the highest quality canvas, frames and prints without having to invest in any additional tools or skills.

Colonization has changed everything about the way we live our lives. Our nations were made up of strong families that supported each other by intense extended affiliations and supportive networks of clans. Our people put a priority on knowledge and indigenous intelligence; there were always thinking and constantly assessing the possibilities of growth and adaptation to new realities. They possessed spiritual power and were guided in the conduct of their lives by their indigenous customs and religious beliefs. They were unified in their communities and interactions. This sense of unity was especially important to them because they understood the disunity degraded not only their existence as collectives but also their spiritual power as persons. Reciprocity and mutual obligation were the foundations of human interactions and of relationships with other elements of creation. This created the kind of solidarity that allowed them to withstand the challenges of survival in hard physical environments and against evil forces—that allowed them to survive intact as those nations. Most clearly different from the way we live our lives, our ancestors lived in a culture and society of warriors; there was social pressure for men to walk the warrior’s path, and women's roles were defined in accordance with their power and responsibility to maintain the culture and care for the families and to enable the men to defend the nation. … we cannot hold on to a concept of the warrior that is gendered in the way it once was and that is located in an obsolete view of men's and women's roles. The battles we are fighting are no longer primarily physical; thus, any idea of the indigenous warrior framed solely in masculine terms is outdated and must be rethought and recast from the solely masculine view of the old traditional ways to a new concept of the warrior that is freed from colonial gender constructions and articulated instead with reference to what really counts in our struggles: the qualities and the actions of a person, man or woman, in battle.

Much of the work when tackling an ill-structured problem is framing the problem itself.5 How we frame a problem has a big impact on how we might solve it.

Seizing Situational Status Here are the steps involved in elevating your status in any situation. You will recognize some of these actions from framing, and for good reason. Frame control and status are closely related, as are the pitch techniques you will learn in Chapter 4.        1. Politely ignore power rituals and avoid beta traps.        2. Be unaffected by your customer’s global status (meaning the customer’s status inside and outside the business environment).        3. Look for opportunities to perpetrate small denials and defiances that strengthen your frame and elevate your status.        4. As soon as you take power, quickly move the discussion into an area where you are the domain expert, where your knowledge and information are unassailable by your audience.        5. Apply a prize frame by positioning yourself as the reward for making the decision to do business with you.        6. Confirm your alpha status by making your customer, who now temporarily occupies a beta position, make a statement that qualifies your higher status.

The future-driven IT organizations step out of the traditional IT box, to understand the business and customers better via longer time frame.

We’re all “storytellers.” We don’t call ourselves storytellers, but it’s what we do every day. Although we’ve been sharing stories for thousands of years, the skills we needed to succeed in the industrial age were very different from those required today. The ability to sell our ideas in the form of story is more important than ever. Ideas are the currency of the twenty-first century. In the information age, the knowledge economy, you are only as valuable as your ideas. Story is the means by which we transfer those ideas to one another. Your ability to package your ideas with emotion, context, and relevancy is the one skill that will make you more valuable in the next decade. Storytelling is the act of framing an idea as a narrative to inform, illuminate, and inspire. The Storyteller’s Secret is about the stories you tell to advance your career, build a company, pitch an idea, and to take your dreams from imagination to reality. When you pitch your product or service to a new customer, you’re telling a story. When you deliver instructions to a team or educate a class, you’re telling a story. When you build a PowerPoint presentation for your next sales meeting, you’re telling a story. When you sit down for a job interview and the recruiter asks about your previous experience, you’re telling a story. When you craft an e-mail, write a blog or Facebook post, or record a video for your company’s YouTube channel, you’re telling a story. But there’s a difference between a story, a good story, and a transformative story that builds trust, boosts sales, and inspires people to dream bigger.

To understand, however, how the received form of the Bible frames and presents them, we do well to refer to the way I introduced them in chapter 1: the laws are, first and foremost, treaty stipulations. They are the conditions and mandates set down by the sovereign king YHWH for His treaty with the vassal Israel.12 As such, they are prescriptive in nature, and are meant to be binding on the members of the covenantal community. It is on the basis of the fulfillment of these stipulations that Israel the vassal will be judged by the heavenly sovereign king, just as earthly sovereigns judged their vassals on the basis of their compliance with the treaty stipulations. It may well be, additionally, that Scripture intends that judges make quasi-statutory, analogical, or referential uses of some of these laws.13 At the same time, it is clear that judges, perforce, must have also engaged a comprehensive oral law, or set of unwritten norms and social customs. The

I had to smuggle an early Nokia camera cell phone into the country from Bahrain in 2004. There was a large black market for these banned phones, with smugglers hiding them inside car bumpers or car door frames, while customs officials and police used ultrasound devices to ferret them out.)

On a visit to the Steinway showroom in New York, I saw Henry Steinway, the last member of the family to be connected with the company, take out a felt-tip pen and sign the painted metal frame of a piano for an enthusiastic customer. It was like watching a baseball player sign a ball, or an author his book, and seemed in keeping with our age of celebrity.

As an information architect, framing is a vital part of my work, but it’s not what organizations ask me to do. For example, the National Cancer Institute hired me to fix the usability of their website by reorganizing its navigation. The goal was to reduce the number of clicks from the home page to content. But I soon discovered a bigger problem. Most folks searching for answers about specific types of cancer never reached cancer.gov due to poor findability via Google. I only saw this problem because I knew how to solve it. I explained to my client that by aligning the information architecture with search engine optimization, we could improve usability and findability. Together, we were able to reframe the goals. The site went on to win awards and rise to the top of the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

But if men will not forego all pre-imbibed opinions, prejudices, and conceptions of mind, however rivetted into them by traditions, custom, veneration of elders, and secular advantages, to hearken unto and receive whatever he shall speak unto them, and that with a humble, lowly frame of heart, they will never learn the truth, nor attain a “full assurance of understanding” in the mysteries of God.

Framing our products as a resolution to both external and internal problems increases the perceived value (and I would argue, actual value) of those products.

If we really want our business to grow, we should position our products as the resolution to an external, internal, and philosophical problem and frame the “Buy Now” button as the action a customer must take to create closure in their story.

Do you have a fleeting glimpse that may become a goal? How can you make framing more social? There are more ways than stars in the universe. Most require that we also make framing more tangible. For instance, Jeff Bezos has created a culture at Amazon in which “working backwards” is an assumption. For any new initiative, employees begin by writing a press release and FAQ that explain the finished product to the customer. [65] No product is built without conversations and iterations around these tangible artifacts of a customer-centered frame.

I really am trying to understand your way of life, Mikhail, but I don’t think my heart can take it yet.” She tried to be truthful. “I know nothing of your laws or your customs. I don’t even know exactly what you are, what I am. I think of myself as human. We’re not even married in the eyes of God or man.” This time Mikhail threw back his head and laughed loudly, heartily. “You think the pale ceremony of humans is a deeper binding than that of a true Carpathian ritual? You do have much to learn of our ways.” Her small white teeth scraped at her lower lip. “Has it occurred to you that I might not feel bound by Carpathian laws and rituals? You have so little regard for things I consider sacred.” “Raven!” He was shocked, and it showed. “Is that what you think? I have no regard for your beliefs? That is not so.” She ducked her head so that her silky fair fell around her face, hiding her expression. “We know so little about one another. I know nothing about who I’ve become. How can I fulfill your needs, or you mine, if I don’t even know what or who I am?” He was silent, his dark, fathomless eyes studying her sad face, the sorrow in her eyes. “Perhaps there is some truth in your words, little one.” His hands followed the contours of her body, shaped her narrow rib cage, her small waist, moved up to frame her face. “I look at you and know what a miracle you are. The feel of your skin, soft and inviting, the way you move, like water flowing, the brush of your hair like silk, the feel of your body surrounding mine, completing me, giving me the strength I need to continue a task that seems so hopeless, but so necessary. I look at the way you are made, so beautiful, your body so perfect, made for mine.

We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with over the years,” said Jeff Bezos. “Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.” Another favorite Bezos quote: “I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.” The Amazon versus Walmart battle has been framed as ecommerce versus traditional retail, but that’s always been a false dichotomy. It’s about starting with the customer instead of the product. It’s about establishing ongoing relationships. It’s about flipping the script—starting with the digital experience, and then building the store.

and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way. Jeff Bezos Amazon’s internal customs are deeply idiosyncratic. PowerPoint decks or slide presentations are never used in meetings. Instead, employees are required to write six-page narratives laying out their points in prose, because Bezos believes doing so fosters critical thinking. For each new product, they craft their documents in the style of a press release. The goal is to frame a proposed initiative in the way a customer might hear about it for the first time. Each meeting begins with everyone silently reading the document, and discussion commences afterward—just like the productive-thinking exercise in the principal’s office at River Oaks Elementary. For my initial meeting with Bezos to discuss this project, I decided to observe Amazon’s customs and prepare my own Amazon-style narrative, a fictional press release on behalf of the book. Bezos met me in an eighth-floor conference room and we sat down at a large table made of half a dozen door-desks, the same kind of blond wood that Bezos used twenty years ago when he was building Amazon from scratch in his garage. The door-desks are often held up as a symbol of the company’s enduring frugality. When I first interviewed Bezos, back in 2000, a few years of unrelenting international travel had taken their toll

Brand storytelling is about standing for something and striving for excellence in everything your business does. It’s about framing your scarcity and dictating your value. It’s about thinking beyond the functionality of products and services and creating a sense of loyalty and meaningful bonds with your customers.

In fact, Hitler was the beneficiary of kindness from Jewish Viennese…The Jewish owner of a frame and window store, Samuel Morgenstern, became the buyer of Hitler’s drawings and watercolors. Morgenstern, a kind, entirely self-made man, felt sorry for Hitler and managed to interest his customers in Hitler’s mediocre architectural scenes…

If your team is setting their own outcome with no input from the product leader, try these tips to shift to a two-way negotiation: Before you set your own outcome, ask your product leader for more business context. Try these questions: What’s most important to the business right now? Try to frame this conversation in terms of business outcomes. Is there a customer segment that is more important than other customer segments? Are there strategic initiatives we should know about? Use the information you gain to map out the most important business outcomes and what product outcomes might drive those business outcomes. Get feedback from your leader. Choose a product outcome that your team has the most influence over.

The process before, during and after the meeting: If you haven’t yet, choose a focused, findable segment With your team, decide your big 3 learning goals If relevant, decide on ideal next steps and commitments If conversations are the right tool, figure out who to talk to Create a series of your best guesses about what the person cares about If a question could be answered via desk research, do that first Frame the conversation Keep it casual Ask good questions which pass The Mom Test Deflect compliments, anchor fluff, and dig beneath signals Take good notes If relevant, press for commitment and next steps With your team, review your notes and key customer quotes If relevant, transfer notes into permanent storage Update your beliefs and plans Decide on the next 3 big questions

Results of a good meeting: Facts — concrete, specific facts about what they do and why they do it (as opposed to the bad data of compliments, fluff, and opinions) Commitment — They are showing they’re serious by giving up something they value such as meaningful amounts of time, reputation risk, or money Advancement — They are moving to the next step of your real-world funnel and getting closer to a sale Signs you’re just going through the motions: You’re talking more than they are They are complimenting you or your idea You told them about your idea and don’t have next steps You don’t have notes You haven’t looked through your notes with your team You got an unexpected answer and it didn’t change your idea You weren’t scared of any of the questions you asked You aren’t sure which big question you’re trying to answer You aren’t sure why you’re having the meeting Writing it down — signal symbols: :)Excited :( Angry :|Embarrassed ☇ Pain or problem (symbol is a lightning bolt) ⨅ Goal or job-to-be-done (symbol is a soccer/football goal) ☐ Obstacle ⤴Workaround ^Background or context (symbol is a distant mountain) ☑ Feature request or purchasing criteria ＄Money or budgets or purchasing process ♀ Mentioned a specific person or company ☆ Follow-up task Signs you aren’t pushing for commitment and advancement: A pipeline of zombie leads Ending product meetings with a compliment Ending product meetings with no clear next steps Meetings which “went well” They haven’t given up anything of value Asking for and framing the meeting: Vision — half-sentence of how you’re making the world better Framing — where you’re at and what you’re looking for Weakness — where you’re stuck and how you can be helped Pedestal — show that they, in particular, can provide that help Ask — ask for help The big prep question: “What do we want to learn from these guys?

Key skills: Asking good questions (Chapters 1 & 3) Avoiding bad data (Chapter 2) Keeping it casual (Chapter 4) Pushing for commitment & advancement (Chapter 5) Framing the meeting (Chapter 6) Customer segmentation (Chapter 7) Prepping & reviewing (Chapter 8) Taking notes (Chapter 8)