Default Best Quotes

In other words, the default state is to trust, and what the amygdala does is learn vigilance and distrust.

Silence has always been my default mode—my best defense against the rest of the world.

In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. In fact, the need to make up a story, especially when we are hurt, is part of our most primitive survival wiring. Mean making is in our biology, and our default is often to come up with a story that makes sense, feels familiar, and offers us insight into how best to self-protect.

It’s interesting-most people think about therapy as something that involves going in and undoing what’s happened. But whatever your past experiences created in your brain, the associations exist and you can’t just delete them. You can’t get rid of the past. Therapy is more about building new associations, making new, healthier default pathways. It is almost as if therapy is taking your two-lane dirt road and building a four-lane freeway alongside it. The old road stays, but you don’t use it much anymore. Therapy is building a better alternative, a new default. And that takes repetition, and time, honestly, it works best if someone understands how the brain changes. This is why understanding how trauma impacts our health is essential for everyone.

The best way to stop overthinking is conscious micro action meditation ( laghu jnana kriya).

People do more for their fellows than return favors and punish cheaters. They often perform generous acts without the slightest hope for payback ranging from leaving a tip in a restaurant they will never visit again to throwing themselves on a live grenade to save their brothers in arms. [Robert] Trivers together with the economists Robert Frank and Jack Hirshleifer has pointed out that pure magnanimity can evolve in an environment of people seeking to discriminate fair weather friends from loyal allies. Signs of heartfelt loyalty and generosity serve as guarantors of one s promises reducing a partner s worry that you will default on them. The best way to convince a skeptic that you are trustworthy and generous is to be trustworthy and generous.

The best possible account of the data provides bad news: tired and hungry judges tend to fall back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole. Both fatigue and hunger probably play a role.

It occurs to me that she is not unique--that all women compare lives. We are aware of whose husband works more, who helps more around the house, who makes more money, who is having more sex. We compare our children, taking note of who is sleeping through the night, eating their vegetables, minding their manners, getting into the right schools. We know who keeps the best house, throws the best parties, cooks the best meals, has the best tennis game. We know who among us is the smartest, has the fewest lines around her eyes, has the best figure--whether naturally or artificially. We are aware of who works full-time, who stays at home with the kids, who manages to do it all and make it look easy, who shops and lunches while the nanny does it all. We digest it all and then discuss with our friends. Comparing and then confiding; it is what women do. The difference, I think, lies in why we do it. Are we doing it to gauge our own life and reassure ourselves that we fall within the realm of normal? Or are we being competitive, relishing others' shortcomings so that we can win, if only by default?

Bourdieu's interpretation was that tastes were serving as strategic tools. While working-class tastes seemed mainly a default (serving at best to express group belongingness and solidarity), for everyone else taste was not only a product of economic and educational background but, as it developed through life, a force mobilized as part of their quest for social status (or what Bourdieu called symbolic power). What we have agreed to call tastes, he said, is an array of symbolic associations we use to set ourselves apart from those whose social ranking is beneath us, and to take aim at the status we think we deserve. Taste is a means of distinguishing ourselves from others, the pursuit of distinction. And its end product is to perpetuate and reproduce the class structure.

I’m a hustler and I work hard, but being a lazy person is my default. It’s what I do best. I’m a champion napper—I’ve even taken a nap in the Louvre among other weird places. I love chilling and day drinking and taking it fucking easy. But as it turns out, I’m not retired just yet, so I try my best to go against the lazy grain, which is why I always have multiple to-do lists going. Otherwise, I’ll to-don’t with everything and take a nap instead.

In the days when money was backed by its face value in silver or gold, there were limits to how much wealth could flow around the world. Today, it's virtual money that the bank lends into existence on a computer screen. "And unless the economy continually expands, there is no new flow of money to pay back that money, plus interest." . . . "As it stands now, if banks start loaning money more slowly than they collect debts, the quantity of money in the economy goes down, and it's impossible to pay back debts. So we get defaults on houses . . . our economy plunges into misery and unemployment. Under our current monetary system, the only alternative to that is endless growth. So one absolute thing we have to change is the whole nature of the monetary system. . . . we deny banks the right to create money." . . . There's a challenge with that solution, he admits. "You're trying to take the right to create wealth away from some of the wealthiest people on the planet.

I fear that, although white feminism is palatable to those in power, when it has won, things will look very much the same. Injustice will thrive, but there will be more women in charge of it. Feminism is not about equality, and certainly not about silently slipping into a world of work created by and for men. Feminism, at its best, is a movement that works to liberate all people who have been economically, socially and culturally marginalized by an ideological system that has been deigned for them to fail. That means disabled people, black people, trans people, women and non-binary people, LGB people and working-class people. The idea of campaigning for equality must be complicated if we are to untangle the situation we're in. Feminism will have won when we have ended poverty. It will have won when women are no longer expected to work two jobs (the care and emotional labour for their families as well as their day jobs) by default.

The problems on campus life today are not about free speech. They are about how the students have absolutely nothing to do with their lives but sit and listen to lectures, find the best parties to attend, and otherwise discover first-world problems to stew about and protest. That's the root of the problem. This is not a commercial environment where people are incentivized to find value in each other. Campuses have become completely artificial 4-year holding tanks for infantilized kids with zero experience in actual life in which people find ways to get along. These students are not serving each other in a market exchange, and very few have worked at day in their lives, so their default is to find some offense and protest. It's all they've been taught to do and all they know how to do. Idle hands and parents' money = trouble.

The interview started. Hearing a friend tell an old story about you is not an exciting activity, and hearing someone praise you is always awkward. I picked up something to read and my attention drifted— until I heard Danny say: “Oh, the best thing about Thaler, what really makes him special, is that he is lazy.” What? Really? I would never deny being lazy, but did Danny think that my laziness was my single best quality? I started waving my hands and shaking my head madly but Danny continued, extolling the virtues of my sloth. To this day, Danny insists it was a high compliment. My laziness, he claims, means I only work on questions that are intriguing enough to overcome this default tendency of avoiding work. Only Danny could turn my laziness into an asset.

So many great people live lives absent of greatness because they live by default and not by design.

No one messes with my best friend." "Best friend, eh?" "You’re my only friend, Jess. You win the best title by default.

It was only through default that the best professor I ever had became a teacher.

Its best to design your own life than living the default one.

The thing you're doing by default is rarely the best possible version of the thing.

Over time, and sentence uttered long and loud enough becomes fixed. Becomes a truth. Provided, of course, you can outlast the dissent and silence your opponents. But should you succeed - and remove all challengers - then what remains is, by default, now true. Is it truth in some objective sense? No. But how does one ever achieve an objective point of view? The answer is you don't. It is literally, physically impossible. There are too many variables. Too many fields and formulae to consider. We can try, of course. We can inch closer and closer to a revelation. But we'll never reach it. Not ever . . . And so I have realized, that so long as The Templar exist, they will attempt to bend reality to their will. They recognize there is no such thing as an absolutely truth - or if there is - we are hopelessly underequipped to recognize it. And so in its place, they seek to create their own explanation. It is the guiding principle of their so-named "New World Order"; To reshape existence in their own image. It is not about artifacts. Not about men. These are merely tools. It's about concepts. Clever of them. For how does one wage war against a concept? It is the perfect weapon. It lacks a physical form yet can alter the world around us in numerous, often violent ways. You cannot kill a creed. Even if you kill all of its adherents, destroy all of its writings - these are a reprieve at best. Some one, some day, will rediscover it. Reinvent it. I believe that even we, the Assassins, have simple re-discovered an Order that predates the Old Man himself . . .

If everyone were invariably honest, able, wise, and kind, there should be no occasion for government. Everyone would readily understand what is desirable and what is possible in given circumstances, all would concur upon the best means toward their purpose and for equitable participation in the ensuing benefits, and would act without compulsion or default. The maximum production was certainly obtained from such voluntary action arising from personal initiative. But since human beings will sometimes lie, shirk, break promises, fail to improve their faculties, act imprudently, seize by violence the goods of others, and even kill one another in anger or greed, government might be defined as the police organization. In that case, it must be described as a necessary evil. It would have no existence as a separate entity, and no intrinsic authority; it could not be justly empowered to act excepting as individuals infringed one another's rights, when it should enforce prescribed penalties. Generally, it would stand in the relation of a witness to contract, holding a forfeit for the parties. As such, the least practicable measure of government must be the best. Anything beyond the minimum must be oppression.

The only two approaches to dealing with uncertainty are design and default. When you operate by default, your biology, which is wired for comfort, wins out and you almost always end up squarely in the gray zone.

The secret of TIT FOR TAT’s success lay as much in its ruthless dark side as it did in its default sunny side; in the fact that when the going got tough it was able to step up to the plate and mix it with the best of them.

When our minds wander, we activate something called the “default mode,” the mental place where we solve problems and generate our best ideas, and engage in what’s known as “autobiographical planning,” which is how we make sense of our world and our lives and set future goals.

The idea that he’d be entering this world involuntarily—the enhancers’ realm, the political imbroglio—disturbed him. That he’d have to claim a stance, take a side, defend the technological advances by virtue of their medical purpose. Be grouped with the believers by default. He

My best advice about writer’s block is: the reason you’re having a hard time writing is because of a conflict between the GOAL of writing well and the FEAR of writing badly. By default, our instinct is to conquer the fear, but our feelings are much, much, less within our control than the goals we set, and since it’s the conflict BETWEEN the two forces blocking you, if you simply change your goal from “writing well” to “writing badly,” you will be a veritable fucking fountain of material, because guess what, man, we don’t like to admit it, because we’re raised to think lack of confidence is synonymous with paralysis, but, let’s just be honest with ourselves and each other: we can only hope to be good writers. We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that’s a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck. We are terrified we suck, and that terror is oppressive and pervasive because we can VERY WELL see the possibility that we suck. We are well acquainted with it. We know how we suck like the backs of our shitty, untalented hands. We could write a fucking book on how bad a book would be if we just wrote one instead of sitting at a desk scratching our dumb heads trying to figure out how, by some miracle, the next thing we type is going to be brilliant. It isn’t going to be brilliant. You stink. Prove it. It will go faster. And then, after you write something incredibly shitty in about six hours, it’s no problem making it better in passes, because in addition to being absolutely untalented, you are also a mean, petty CRITIC. You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you’re an asshole. So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team “I will one day write something good” to team “I have no choice but to write a piece of shit” and then take off your “bad writer” hat and replace it with a “petty critic” hat and go to town on that poor hack’s draft and that’s your second draft. Fifteen drafts later, or whenever someone paying you starts yelling at you, who knows, maybe the piece of shit will be good enough or maybe everyone in the world will turn out to be so hopelessly stupid that they think bad things are good and in any case, you get to spend so much less time at a keyboard and so much more at a bar where you really belong because medicine because childhood trauma because the Supreme Court didn’t make abortion an option until your unwanted ass was in its third trimester. Happy hunting and pecking!

External motivators for behavior such as rewards and punishments may destroy the precious internal motivation to be good, making leverage by such artificial means necessary by default. As an investment in easy parenting, trusting in a child's desire to be good for us is one of the best.

What will you do?" Eva would ask him. "I don't know," he would say. He ruled out law, because he didn't like lawyers, and he ruled out medicine because he couldn't take the sight of blood. "What will you do?" It was only through default that the best professor I ever had became a teacher.

Rather than being fearful of not detecting disease, both patients and doctors should fear healthcare. The best way to avoid medical errors is to avoid medical care. The default should be: I am well. The way to stay that way is to keep making good choices - not to have my doctor look for problems.

An aggressive mind-set should be the default setting of any leader. Default: Aggressive. This means that the best leaders, the best teams, don’t wait to act. Instead, understanding the strategic vision (or commander’s intent), they aggressively execute to overcome obstacles, capitalize on immediate opportunities, accomplish the mission, and win.

I do three weeks at the Hall of Justice Jail. It's a potent crime primer. I'm the geek that all the pro thugs disdain. I observe them up close. It's the '60s. It's social-grievance-as-justification-for-bad-actions time. My cellmates have sadness raps down. I gain a notch on my crime-as-continuing-circumstance notion. Crime is large-scale individual moral default. That means you, motherfucker.

On the road to change, whenever you fall prey to bad habits, you can expect the brain to default to voices of inadequacy and unworthiness. The best strategy is to forgive yourself for going astray—it’s expected. In this space of awareness, investigate and learn from the distraction and then invite yourself to make the choice to start again. Make Forgive and Invite a practice and keep beginning again and again.

Average” is what failures claim to be when their friends ask them why they are not more successful. “Average” is the top of the bottom, the best of the worst, the bottom of the top, the worst of the top. Which of these are you? “Average” means being run-of-the-mill, mediocre, insignificant, an also-ran, a non-entity. Being “average” is the lazy person’s cop-out; it’s lacking guts to take a stand in life; it’s living by default.

We could start by no longer penalizing one another for defaulting to truth. If you are a parent whose child was abused by a stranger—even if you were in the room—that does not make you a bad parent. And if you are a university president and you do not jump to the worst-case scenario when given a murky report about one of your employees, that doesn’t make you a criminal. To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society.

As long as you are forced to be a woman first instead of a person, by default, you need to be a feminist. That’s it. Men are people, women are women? Screw that. Screw that. I am sick of having words aimed to shut me up. I am sick of having to be anything other than a person first. Zounds! I enjoy being a girl, whatever that means. For me, that meant Star Wars figurines, mounds of books, skirts and flats. It meant Civil War reenacting and best girlfriends I’d give a kidney to and best guy friends I’d ruin a liver with and making messes and cleaning up some of them and still not knowing how to apply eye shadow. That’s being a girl. That’s being a person. It’s the same damn thing. I wish Rush had just called me an idiot. I’m happy to be called an idiot! On the day when someone on the Internet calls me an idiot first and ugly second, I will set down my feminist battle flag and heave a great sigh. Then I will pick it back up and keep climbing. There are many more mountains to overcome.

Instead, these findings suggest that the amygdala injects implicit distrust and vigilance into social decision making.23 All thanks to learning. In the words of the authors of the study, “The generosity in the trust game of our BLA-damaged subjects might be considered pathological altruism, in the sense that inborn altruistic behaviors have not, due to BLA damage, been un-learned through negative social experience.” In other words, the default state is to trust, and what the amygdala does is learn vigilance and distrust.

Trauma isn’t always caused by one specific incident. It can also emerge in response to persistent distress or ongoing abuse, like a relationship where sex is unwanted, though it may be technically “consensual” because the targeted person says yes in order to avoid being hurt or feels trapped in the relationship or is otherwise coerced. In that context, a survivor’s body gradually learns that it can’t escape and it can’t fight; freeze becomes the default stress response because of the learned pattern of shutdown as the best way to guarantee survival.

I made a proposal to Peepy, in default of being able to do anything better for him, that he should let me wash him and afterwards lay him down on my bed again. To this he submitted with the best grace possible, staring at me during the whole operation as if he never had been, and never could again be, so astonished in his life — looking very miserable also, certainly, but making no complaint, and going snugly to sleep as soon as it was over. At first I was in two minds about taking such a liberty, but I soon reflected that nobody in the house was likely to notice it.

We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we can’t. What should we do? We could start by no longer penalizing one another for defaulting to truth. If you are a parent whose child was abused by a stranger—even if you were in the room—that does not make you a bad parent. And if you are a university president and you do not jump to the worst-case scenario when given a murky report about one of your employees, that doesn’t make you a criminal. To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society.

A disturbing demonstration of depletion effects in judgment was recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The unwitting participants in the study were eight parole judges in Israel. They spend entire days reviewing applications for parole. The cases are presented in random order, and the judges spend little time on each one, an average of 6 minutes. (The default decision is denial of parole; only 35% of requests are approved. The exact time of each decision is recorded, and the times of the judges’ three food breaks—morning break, lunch, and afternoon break—during the day are recorded as well.) The authors of the study plotted the proportion of approved requests against the time since the last food break. The proportion spikes after each meal, when about 65% of requests are granted. During the two hours or so until the judges’ next feeding, the approval rate drops steadily, to about zero just before the meal. As you might expect, this is an unwelcome result and the authors carefully checked many alternative explanations. The best possible account of the data provides bad news: tired and hungry judges tend to fall back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole. Both

All my best decisions in life have come when I tuned into what felt like the best moves for me. I’d spent much of my life looking to others for answers, allowing their opinions to drown out my instincts. My default was to substitute others desires for my own. In fact, I’d done that so much that it became a habit, one I’m still unlearning. I’ve needed a lot of practice at putting my own ideas and intuition at the forefront and Oprah was encouraging me to again rehearse. ... That afternoon Oprah articulated the lesson to me in a way that turned on the lights. “You know what a resounding ‘yes’ feels like,” she said, “it’s undeniable. Nothing’s going stop you from doing it. You’re excited. You don’t have to convince yourself to move forward. You simply know this is the right thing.” And that is what I live by. I’ve made a lot of decisions from my head. I’ve chosen to go in this direction or that one based on finances, or because something seems like a great opportunity, or because I don’t want to hurt peoples feelings or disappoint them, or because someone is pushing me toward an agenda that serves them. But when I’ve listened to my heart, when I’ve trusted what my spirit is telling me, that ‘yes’ has always steered my right.

There’s a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there’s no Evil Book about evil and how to be bad. The Devil has no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folk-lore about evil people. All we have is the living example of the people who are least good, or our own intuition. ‘So,’ continued Bond, warming to his argument, ‘Le Chiffre was serving a wonderful purpose, a really vital purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of all. By his evil existence, which foolishly I have helped to destroy, he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist. We were privileged, in our short knowledge of him, to see and estimate his wickedness and we emerge from the acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men.’ ‘Bravo,’ said Mathis. ‘I’m proud of you. You ought to be tortured every day. I really must remember to do something evil this evening. I must start at once. I have a few marks in my favour – only small ones, alas,’ he added ruefully – ‘but I shall work fast now that I have seen the light. What a splendid time I’m going to have. Now, let’s see, where shall I start, murder, arson, rape? But no, these are peccadilloes. I must really consult the good Marquis de Sade. I am a child, an absolute child in these matters.’ His face fell. ‘Ah, but our conscience, my dear Bond. What shall we do with him while we are committing some juicy sin? That is a problem. He is a crafty person this conscience and very old, as old as the first family of apes which gave birth to him. We must give that problem really careful thought or we shall spoil our enjoyment. Of course, we should murder him first, but he is a tough bird. It will be difficult, but if we succeed, we could be worse even than Le Chiffre.

Rape has been described by victim advocate and former police officer Tom Tremblay as “the most violent crime a person can survive.”10 Those who have not been sexually assaulted can perhaps most clearly understand the experience of a survivor by thinking of them as having survived an attempted murder that used sex as the weapon. Sexual violence often doesn’t look like what we think of as “violence”—only rarely is there a gun or knife; often there isn’t even “aggression” as we typically think of it. There is coercion and the removal of the targeted person’s choice about what will happen next. Survivors don’t “fight” because the threat is too immediate and inescapable; their bodies choose “freeze” because it’s the stress response that maximizes the chances of staying alive . . . or of dying without pain. Trauma isn’t always caused by one specific incident. It can also emerge in response to persistent distress or ongoing abuse, like a relationship where sex is unwanted, though it may be technically “consensual” because the targeted person says yes in order to avoid being hurt or feels trapped in the relationship or is otherwise coerced. In that context, a survivor’s body gradually learns that it can’t escape and it can’t fight; freeze becomes the default stress response because of the learned pattern of shutdown as the best way to guarantee survival. Each person’s experience of survival is unique, but it often includes a kind of disengaged unreality. And afterward, that illusion of unreality gradually degrades, disintegrating under the weight of physical existence and burdened memory. The tentative recognition that this thing has actually happened incrementally unlocks the panic and rage that couldn’t find their way to the surface before, buried as they were under the overmastering mandate to survive. But survival is not recovery; survival happens automatically, sometimes even against the survivor’s will. Recovery requires an environment of relative security and the ability to separate the physiology of freeze from the experience of fear, so that the panic and the rage can discharge, completing their cycles at last.

Many of those who have experienced trauma in early childhood grow up to become adults with dysfunctional lives and dysfunctional relationships, never being able to solve such issues within themselves, not even with the help of the best therapists in the world, because the root cause of it has been removed by the institutions in control of mental health training programs, mainstream media and public opinion. And the root cause of all evil, including self-inflicted evil, lays on the capacity to differentiate good from evil, which has helped us survive as a society and as individuals throughout the entirety of human history and up to this day. Once you remove this natural ability from anyone's awareness, no theory, despite the amount of logic and common sense in it, will ever work. As a matter of fact, not many people know what serves their best interest, because they don't even know what is good or evil. They relativize their ignorance to justify their stupidity. And this constitutes a thicker layer on top of their innate capacity to perceive reality. Many problems, including those related to self-esteem, could easily be solved, if one was able of properly differentiating what promotes survival from what leads to death. Whenever a large group of people lacks such capacity, they are promoting a dysfunctional society by default, and in doing so, replicating the same traumas that made them themselves dysfunctional as humans. And that’s how an overall mindset rooted on victimization and justification promotes the power of those in control. One cannot ever be free unless he rebels against his own status quo and towards a higher level of individualization, risking that which he depends the most upon — the respect and acceptance of friends and family. The battle of ego and social validation against ethics, has made many souls captive to a world created to weaken them and blind them. Indeed, it is interesting to see how humanity replicates the tortures of medieval times with more sophisticated weapons, and how wars developed towards a higher degree of abstraction, in order to nullify any resistance, or the mere level of awareness justifying it.

The Invitational Church In the invitational church, the focus is on growth. The goal of the church is to reach out and gather people into the church. Therefore, the church is designed as a consumer-oriented place that takes special care to make sure the red carpet is rolled out for visitors and guests. A highly trained staff puts forth great effort to ensure the very best experience for everyone who comes to the church, with special attention paid to visitors. Invitational churches are often successful at growth because this is a large part of their goal and focus. There are many wonderful aspects of the invitational church. I believe God sovereignly birthed the church growth and seeker movements to help the institutional church get beyond itself and start caring about the millions of people trying to find God who were unable to fit into the institutional church. I deeply appreciate and value invitational churches, because they have come up with a way to re-create a modern day “Court Of The Gentiles” aspect of the temple, a place where God-seekers can come and find God. They have unselfishly set aside their desire for church to be about themselves, and they have designed church services for lost people and seekers. What a refreshing change when invitational churches hit the scene! They have really harvested many people for Jesus and helped thousands of churches become outward-focused. This is a good thing! The difficulty with the invitational church is that the individual is essentially irrelevant. What I mean is, when most people walk into an invitational church, it really doesn’t matter whether or not they show up. Why is this true? Because the invitational church has, by default, set the bar very low to make sure that whosoever will may come. However, the inadvertent message is that the individual is not really needed. Little is asked or required of people, and it is very clear that if they aren’t part of the overall goal to facilitate growth, their gifts may not be needed. To prove the point: where do many of the people who have left institutional churches go? They often sit in the back of invitational churches where they can go unnoticed and where they can have very little asked of them. The invitational church is a great place to recover from the institutional church. Some go on and become involved in meaningful ways. But often over time, two negative things happen to believers who have been in invitational churches. One, they become sedentary, consumer-oriented Christians. Those who joined the institutional church and who wanted to make a difference have all but lost their initial fire. Often they no longer burn with zeal for God and His purposes. Instead, they unwittingly adopt the culture of the invitational church into their Christianity, and they, too, lower the bar to the point where, for all intents and purposes, they are now just showing up at a weekend service. Or two, they begin to feel the need for a more personal, relational church, and they move on to something more personal and meaningful to them.

On the third, we got into troubles. Baz Jesek had gotten more and more involved with equipment and maintenance—he is a good engineer, I’ll give him that—I was tactical commander, and Oser—I thought by default, but now I think design—took up the administrative slack. Could have been good, each doing what he did best, if Oser’d been working with and not against us. In the same situation, I’d have sent assassins. Oser employed guerilla accountants.

One thing the prep for the movie made me realize: Chris and I had gone through a lot in our short time on earth. We’d known war, we’d known the joys of birth--and the tremendous hurt of death. Hard times, defaults, large checks, big taxes, and fame. We’d run the gamut. And we’d been in love the whole time. The last month of his life was the best of our marriage. The year leading up to it was the best we’d ever had, outside of our first. We’d started on a high level and moved up. How many people can say that? I’m not saying the good times would have gone on forever. I’m sure there would have been difficulties and other trials, dark clouds. But to have had those moments of seemingly perfect love and happiness--I was truly blessed.

Don’t follow competition We are constantly amazed by how much business leaders obsess about their competition. When you get in a room with a bunch of senior execs from large companies, their attention can often wander as they check smartphones and think about the rest of their day, but bring up the topic of their competition and suddenly you’ll have everyone’s full attention. It’s as if, once you get to a particular level in an organization, you worry as much about what your competition is doing as how your own organization is performing. At the highest echelons of business, the default mentality is, too often, siege. This fixation leads to a never-ending spiral into mediocrity. Business leaders spend much of their time watching and copying the competition, and when they do finally break away and try something new, they are careful risk-takers, developing only incremental, low-impact changes. Being close to your competition offers comfort; it’s like covering tactics in match race sailing, when the lead boat tacks whenever the follower does, to ensure that the follower doesn’t go off in a different direction and find stronger wind. Incumbents clump together so that no one finds a fresher breeze elsewhere. But as Larry Page says, how exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?85 If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative. While you and your competitors

Finally, I said, “You would get your feelings hurt and cry?” Laura reluctantly responded, “Yes. Why?” “Well …,” I hesitated, “I’m thinking that crying and getting my feelings hurt would be the brave option for me.” Laura sounded surprised. “What do you mean?” I explained the best I could. “Mean and nasty is my default setting. It doesn’t take courage for me to be shaming back. I can use my shame superpowers for evil in a split second. Letting myself feel hurt—that’s a totally different story. I think your default is my courage.

Tragant (2006: 239) sums up the evidence: ‘When FL (foreign language) instruction starts early in primary school there seems to be a decline in the learners’ attitudes around the age of ten to eleven; when most students start a foreign language or enter immersion programmes in secondary school, their initial attitudes are positive but their interest soon wanes.’ This may, of course, have a lot to do with the kind of teaching the children are subject to. If teachers are untrained in foreign language instruction for young learners, it’s unlikely that even the small amount of time available will be used to best effect. This is especially the case if instruction mimics the kind of teacher-fronted, transmissive, grammar-focused instruction that characterizes language teaching at secondary and tertiary level. And a transmissive approach is typically the default choice in large classes of (potentially) unruly children.

Returning to the top panel, you have an opportunity to list links to your website or blog. Don’t settle for LinkedIn’s default language of “company website” or “blog” (instructions on how to do this are below). Instead, use your blog title or the name of your book, and include links to your blog, Amazon, iTunes, or wherever people can purchase your book.

Annihilating nihilism is a peculiar phenomenon – the product of financial capitalism. In the sphere of financial capitalism, destroying concrete wealth is the easiest way to accumulate abstract value. The credit default swap (CDS) is the best example of this transformation of life, resources and language into nihil. The CDS is a contract in which the buyer of the CDS makes a series of payments to the seller and, in exchange, receives a pay-off if an instrument – typically a bond or loan – goes into default (fails to pay). Less commonly, the credit event that triggers the pay-off can be the restructuring or bankruptcy of a company, or even simply the downgrading of its credit rating. If the financial game is based on the premise that the value of money invested will increase as things are annihilated (if factories are dismantled, jobs are destroyed, people die, cities crumble, and so on), this type of financial profiteering is essentially constructed upon a bet on the degradation of the world.

Given the reality of limited time and resources, best practices provide a valuable, low risk, default starting point.

Executives, being executives, have a natural prioritization of how best to use their time and brains during meetings. Unless told otherwise, their default mode is decision making. When I want the people I am presenting to in that mode, I start my bullet with “Approve…,” “Adopt…,” or “Authorize…” The second mode executives operate in is problem-solving mode. If you start a bullet with “Problem solve…,” “Explore…,” or “Brainstorm…,” your audience knows you are seeking thoughtful input rather than a quick decision. Finally, the third mode in which executives operate is the passive listening one. Spend the least time in this final mode because it is not an effective use of senior leaders’ time. I begin agenda bullets with “Review…” or “Evaluate…” to signal to my audience that I am about to share information.

In the early part of the 21st century, something extraordinary is occurring: After decades of collective awe of modern medicine and its purveyors, a strong undercurrent of disillusionment has begun to appear. With it came the beginnings of a philosophical revolution that is leading health science in a promising new direction. This new direction centers on the realization that health and healing are best supported when the biological roots of our nature are better understood and respected. This philosophical approach is based on the awareness that health and healing are natural processes, and that the body seeks to be healthy by default as long as we provide it with what it requires.

This systemic risk problem is what drew Blythe Masters, one of the key figures behind blockchain innovation on Wall Street, into digital ledger technology; she joined Digital Asset Holdings, a blockchain service provider for the financial system’s back-office processing tasks, as CEO in 2014. Masters is best known for one of the most contentious financial innovations of our time, the credit default swap (CDS), a financial derivative contract in which one institution agrees to pay another if a particular bond or loan goes into default. At the age of just twenty-five, and as part of a crack team at J.P. Morgan, she conceived of CDSs as a way for investors to buy insurance against the risk they bear on their balance sheets—and thus to unlock capital hitherto tied up against that risk—as well as for other investors, the banks, and other institutions that issue the CDS to place a bet on the underlying asset without actually owning it.

The default outcome is the outcome supplied by generally applicable law unless the contract provides otherwise.

Yeah I'm one broken mofo. I still care for myself tho. Keep it tidy. Still fit. No one does blip for me. I still eat and mingle with nature. Still recovering. Depression is a bear. It doesn't help that my ever best friend spits bullets. I asked one innocent thing. I begged to drop g's no strings attached. I knew we'd hit it off, maybe for life. I ached for it. Your gift, my trampoline. A hug. Some fun. Some delightful brain food. A happy that would last ages. It's a catch-22 scenario. I begin in the negative to someday find happiness, but I need happiness to get me out of the negative. What am I supposed to do? Take drugs? I teemed for 24 hours anticipating you. That was quite a drug. You call it a conversation? Nah, we be flingin. It's something; a dash of hope. You guesser, judge, jury, executioner. Thinkin I'm some monster by default. Guesser of what I meant. Guessed wrong. It's a choice. You could help pull out the knife or stick it in deeper and twist it around. You do what you enjoy killa. For years I was the only one with a stable income. They told me I was too stupid for school. Instead, I worked to support my family. I worked near 24/7. Then wham, catastrophe. Eugenics at play. Without a support system or tools to defend, you're tossed. I had a lawsuit but I failed to act in time. From zero and stranded in the sticks, I failed lots, threw away lots, I managed to make some money with my skills. Eventually I helped get a house in a decent neighborhood. They let a drug addicted hooker in. I fought the drug fiends. I paid the mortgage debt, several months behind, to save the place, but in the end, I couldn't win. They insisted on moving here. I was the only one with money. I came with to battle the new crisis and to recoup my losses until I figured out what to do next. Couldn't just abandon the kids. Over time the situation improved. Drugs were defeated. I didn't intend to stay. This place got to me. I am ashamed and battered by it all. No, I don't mess with drugs. I found the landscape of my field where most of the jobs are at has changed extensively over the years. I wasn't concentrated on that area. I'm obsolete. Without a degree, you're auto discarded. Still ways in, but I need to be on my A-game. Not going anywhere without exuding confidence. I'm all twisted up inside. Loneliness eating at me. Cold cruel world. My best friend dodgin me. All work, all alone, as it's always been. Can't do it all alone. In the end, what do I get? A hostile mob? Walked in for a chat. What I got was wacked.

Begin training yourself to put Hall Time between every meeting on your calendar, including conference calls, video calls, and one-on-ones. If you’re implementing Hall Time on your own, you can telegraph these gaps by scheduling meetings with the calendar default of 45–50 minutes and 20–25 minutes, respectively, for 60- and 30-minute expectations

Unfortunately, the same forces of speed and change that demand flexibility conspire to keep us rigid. We have so much information coming at us, and so many decisions to make, that we can quickly default to the first, best guess, which usually involves black-and-white thinking. And with little time to interact, we often reduce our relationships to transactions. With three hundred emails in your in-box demanding a response, we can all too easily default to a quick “reply” to our colleague, never thinking to ask about his child who has cancer.

In 2013, on the auspicious date of April 1, I received an email from Tetlock inviting me to join what he described as “a major new research program funded in part by Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, an agency within the U.S. intelligence community.” The core of the program, which had been running since 2011, was a collection of quantifiable forecasts much like Tetlock’s long-running study. The forecasts would be of economic and geopolitical events, “real and pressing matters of the sort that concern the intelligence community—whether Greece will default, whether there will be a military strike on Iran, etc.” These forecasts took the form of a tournament with thousands of contestants; the tournament ran for four annual seasons. “You would simply log on to a website,” Tetlock’s email continued, “give your best judgment about matters you may be following anyway, and update that judgment if and when you feel it should be. When time passes and forecasts are judged, you could compare your results with those of others.” I did not participate. I told myself I was too busy; perhaps I was too much of a coward as well. But the truth is that I did not participate because, largely thanks to Tetlock’s work, I had concluded that the forecasting task was impossible. Still, more than 20,000 people embraced the idea. Some could reasonably be described as having some professional standing, with experience in intelligence analysis, think tanks, or academia. Others were pure amateurs. Tetlock and two other psychologists, Barbara Mellers (Mellers and Tetlock are married) and Don Moore, ran experiments with the cooperation of this army of volunteers. Some were given training in some basic statistical techniques (more on this in a moment); some were assembled into teams; some were given information about other forecasts; and others operated in isolation. The entire exercise was given the name Good Judgment Project, and the aim was to find better ways to see into the future. This vast project has produced a number of insights, but the most striking is that there was a select group of people whose forecasts, while they were by no means perfect, were vastly better than the dart-throwing-chimp standard reached by the typical prognosticator. What is more, they got better over time rather than fading away as their luck changed. Tetlock, with an uncharacteristic touch of hyperbole, called this group “superforecasters.” The cynics were too hasty: it is possible to see into the future after all. What makes a superforecaster? Not subject-matter expertise: professors were no better than well-informed amateurs. Nor was it a matter of intelligence; otherwise Irving Fisher would have been just fine. But there were a few common traits among the better forecasters.

market. I want to leave you with some key takeaways: Any product can be positioned in multiple markets. Your product is not doomed to languish in a market where nobody understands how awesome it is. Great positioning rarely comes by default. If you want to succeed, you have to determine the best way to position your product. Deliberate, try, fail, test and try again. Understanding what your best customers see as true alternatives to your solution will lead you to your differentiators. Position yourself in a market that makes your strengths obvious to the folks you want to sell to. Use trends to make your product more interesting to customers right now, but be very cautious. Don’t layer on a trend just for the sake of being trendy—it’s better to be successful and boring, rather than fashionable and bewildering. Knowing how to do something is not the same as understanding how to teach someone else how to do it. As leaders, we often become very good at doing things that we have a very hard time explaining to the teams that work with us. This book is my attempt to codify and teach one of the most complicated processes I’ve learned to do in my career. I sincerely hope it offers you a shortcut to better position your products to succeed.

The common failure in both of these traps is not deliberately positioning the product. We stick with a “default” positioning, even when the product changes or the market changes. I believe this happens because we haven’t been taught that every product can be positioned in multiple ways and often the best position for a product is not the default. We have never been taught that positioning is a deliberate business choice that requires time, attention and, importantly, a systematic process.

Data sources All these components give you feedback and insight into how best to configure your campaigns, although the data sources are often spread around in different places and sometimes difficult to find and interpret. Campaign types Search & Partner Dynamic Search Display Network Remarketing & Dynamic Remarketing Google Shopping for eCommerce Google Merchant Center Data feeds Google Shopping Campaigns Device selection PC / Tablets Mobiles & Smartphones Location Targets & Exclusions Country Metro State City Custom and Radius Daily Budgets Manual CPC Enhanced CPC Flexible Bidding strategies Conversion Optimizer (CPA) Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) Conversion Tracking Setup and configuration Transaction-Specific Conversion Tracking Offline Conversion import Phone call tracking - website call conversions Conversion Rates Conversion Costs Conversion Values Ad Groups Default Bids Keyword Themes Ads Ad Messaging & Demographics Creative Text & Formatting Images* Display Ad Builder* Ad Preview and Diagnosis Account, Campaign and Ad Group Ad Extensions Sitelinks Locations Calls Reviews Apps Callouts Ad Rotation & Frequency Capping Rotate Optimise for Clicks Optimise for Conversions Keywords Bids Broad Modified Broad Phrase Exact Destination urls Keyword Diagnosis User Search Queries Keyword Opportunities Negative Keywords & Match Types Shared Library Shared Budgets* Automated Rules Flexible Bid Strategies Audiences & Exclusions* Campaign Negative Keywords Display Campaign Placement Exclusions* NEW! Business Data and Ad Customizers Advanced Delivery Methods Standard Accelerated Impression Share Lost IS (Budget) Lost IS (Rank) Search Funnels Assisted Impressions & Clicks Assisted Conversions Segmentation Analysis Device performance Network performance Top vs Other position performance Dimension Analysis Days & Times Shopping Geographic User Locations & Distance Search Terms Automatic Placements* Call Details (Call Extensions) Tools Change history Keyword Planner* Display Planner* Opportunities* Scheduling & Day Parting Automated Rules Competitor Ad Auction Insights Reporting* AdWords Campaign Experiments* Browser Languages* *indicates an item not covered in this version of the book

Instead of calls to action, the most innovative user experiences may be calls to inaction. (Design of default options is exceedingly important and superbly discussed in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s excellent Nudge.21) Web usability guru Steve Krug provocatively articulates this design sensibility in his heuristic, “Don’t Make Me Think.” Often the best way to get customers to appreciate an innovation experience is by not making demands on them. Don’t get in the way by offering to help. Engagement sometimes undermines a quality user experience. Eliminating choice frequently proves to be the best possible design choice. Because customers often prefer “mindless choices,” says Krug, minimalism is a virtue.

When our minds wander, we activate something called the “default mode,” the mental place where we solve problems and generate our best ideas, and engage in what’s known as “autobiographical planning,” which is how we make sense of our world and our lives and set future goals. The default mode is also involved in how we try to understand and empathize with other people, and make moral judgments.

In my experience, triggers are the prime reason that men and women end up retreating to gender silos, narrowing their experience and depriving themselves of useful connections. That’s what happened when Jen enlisted Chantal to commiserate with her after the meeting in which Mark received credit for her idea. Sharing her resentment with a female colleague may have temporarily relieved the emotional distress Jen felt at being disregarded. But venting her feelings only reinforced the story she was telling herself to explain what had happened: “Men just can’t listen to women!” This increased the likelihood of her remaining stuck in a negative groove. It’s the stories we tell ourselves when we feel triggered that keep us dug in and limit our ability to frame an effective response. Here’s how the process works: First, the trigger kicks off an emotional reaction that blindsides us. We feel a rush of adrenaline, a sinking in the pit of our stomach, a recoil, a blinding rage, or a snide “of course.” Or we may simply feel confusion. Our immediate impulse may be to lash out. But if we’re in a work situation, we fear what this could cost us, so we try to suppress our feelings and move on. When this doesn’t succeed, we may grab the first opportunity to complain to a sympathetic colleague, which is why so much time at work gets consumed in gripe sessions and unproductive gossip. In this way, our response to triggers plays a role in shaping toxic cultures that set us against one another, justify sniping, and waste everybody’s time. But whether we suffer in silence or indulge the urge to vent, the one thing we almost always do when triggered is try to put what happened in some kind of context. This is where storytelling enters the picture. We craft a narrative based on past experience or perceptions in a way that assigns blame, exonerates us, and magnifies impact. Because these stories make us feel better, we may not stop to question whether they are either accurate or useful. Yet the truth is that our go-to stories rarely serve us well. They are especially damaging when they operate across divides: gender, of course (“Men can’t, women just refuse”), but also race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age (“They always, they seem incapable of…”). Because these default stories rely on generalizations and stereotypes, they reinforce any biases we may have. This makes it difficult for us to see others in their particularity; instead, they appear to us as members of a group. In addition, because our go-to stories usually emphasize our own innocence (“I had no idea!” “I never guessed he would…”), they often reinforce our feelings of being aggrieved or victimized—an increasing hazard for men as well as women. Since we can’t control other people, our best path is to acknowledge the emotional and mental impact a trigger has on us. This necessary first step can then enable us to choose a response that enhances our dignity and serves our interests.

The researchers also identified which words or phrases best differentiated between repayers and defaulters. Repayers were more likely to use words and phrases related to their financial situation (e.g., “interest” and “tax”) or improvements in financial ability (e.g., “graduate” and “promote”). They also used words and phrases that indicated their financial literacy (e.g., “reinvest” and “minimum payment”) and were more likely to discuss topics such as employment and school, interest rate reductions, and monthly payments. Defaulters, on the other hand, used distinctly different language. They were more likely to mention words or phrases related to financial hardships (e.g., “payday loan” or “refinance”), for example, or hardship more generally (e.g., “stress” or “divorce”), as well as words and phrases that tried to explain their situation (e.g., “explain why”) or discuss their work state (e.g., “hard work” or “worker”). Similarly, they were more likely to plead for help (e.g., “need help” or “please help”) or touch on religion. In fact, while people who used the word “reinvest” were almost 5 times more likely to repay their loan in full, those who used the word “God” were almost 2 times more likely to default.

To determine our essentials, we need to start with this foundational question because, without it, we will continue living our lives by default. We can implement the Time-Blocking Method all we want, but without a sense of purpose and intentionality, we will only be achieving productivity for productivity’s sake. Not only that, but the sheer ability to get a lot of stuff done is not ultimately going to provide you with the motivation you need to keep moving forward. You need to answer the question for yourself, “Why am I even doing any of this?” so that at the end of your productivity journey, you can look back and see that it was all for something bigger than yourself. I recognize this is no small question, and for those who have never pondered it before, I wouldn’t expect you to have an answer now; but I hope you will start on a journey to learn your purpose. Often connected with this larger question, is the question of, What are the things that you value most? Right now, most of us could easily articulate that we value things like family, relationships, creativity, hard work, making money, self-care, God, religion, giving back, or enjoying life. But these concepts, unfortunately, are way too vague, and ultimately, unhelpful to provide any real direction in your life. These so-called “values” could be applied to anyone and everyone. They are not specific enough to you. For instance, if you say you value relationships, what do you mean? Relationships with whom? Everyone you meet on the street? Your coworkers? Your spouse? All of your Facebook friends? Your best friend? The truth is you don’t actually value all relationships. My guess is, when you say you value relationships, you have a select few people in mind. You know that trying to build a friendship with everyone you meet would be unrealistic. For the most outgoing person, it would be impossible, even if you tried. That’s because if you invested an equal amount of energy into every person you know, then all of your relationships—especially your closest ones—would suffer. By making every relationship in your life important, you make none of them important. So, you have to get specific about the thing in which you value. Again, you most likely already know, but I would encourage you take a moment to articulate those specifics and write them down. But let’s take it a step deeper. You may say that you value your relationship with your spouse or significant other. That’s great! But if you never go on dates with them, buy them gifts, or say nice things to them, one might question how much you really value that relationship.

There is a wonderful story of a group of American car executives who went to Japan to see a Japanese assembly line. At the end of the line, the doors were put on the hinges, the same as in America. But something was missing. In the United States, a line worker would take a rubber mallet and tap the edges of the door to ensure that it fit perfectly. In Japan, that job didn’t seem to exist. Confused, the American auto executives asked at what point they made sure the door fit perfectly. Their Japanese guide looked at them and smiled sheepishly. “We make sure it fits when we design it.” In the Japanese auto plant, they didn’t examine the problem and accumulate data to figure out the best solution—they engineered the outcome they wanted from the beginning. If they didn’t achieve their desired outcome, they understood it was because of a decision they made at the start of the process. At the end of the day, the doors on the American-made and Japanese-made cars appeared to fit when each rolled off the assembly line. Except the Japanese didn’t need to employ someone to hammer doors, nor did they need to buy any mallets. More importantly, the Japanese doors are likely to last longer and maybe even be more structurally sound in an accident. All this for no other reason than they ensured the pieces fit from the start. What the American automakers did with their rubber mallets is a metaphor for how so many people and organizations lead. When faced with a result that doesn’t go according to plan, a series of perfectly effective short-term tactics are used until the desired outcome is achieved. But how structurally sound are those solutions? So many organizations function in a world of tangible goals and the mallets to achieve them. The ones that achieve more, the ones that get more out of fewer people and fewer resources, the ones with an outsized amount of influence, however, build products and companies and even recruit people that all fit based on the original intention. Even though the outcome may look the same, great leaders understand the value in the things we cannot see. Every instruction we give, every course of action we set, every result we desire, starts with the same thing: a decision. There are those who decide to manipulate the door to fit to achieve the desired result and there are those who start from somewhere very different. Though both courses of action may yield similar short-term results, it is what we can’t see that makes long-term success more predictable for only one. The one that understood why the doors need to fit by design and not by default.

I read a joke somewhere about how Bollywood movies exaggerating about people getting heart attacks as a result of being humiliated was nonsense, because if that were the case, then everyone working in toxic jobs would get one every week. Reading that “joke” actually made me pretty sad about the kind of lives many are being forced to lead. Obviously, people will say they have no choice. Because they need to put food on the table. This is a valid reason. But it’s not just food but also expensive clothes, gadgets, jewelery and accessories. And they need expensive furniture in an expensive house. And then they need an expensive car outside, or maybe two. The more the better The best part, they buy almost all of that using bank loans. Congratulations, now you are a slave till every single one of your debts is paid off, which is probably the next 30 years. Now you just need to choose whom you prefer to make your life hell - Your toxic workplace or the "friendly" people from the collection agency when you default on the loan? What a beautiful life indeed!

When you accept optimism as a default, you can assess your circumstances quite candidly and work toward the best outcome. Pessimism, after all, is no more than acceptance of the worst. Optimism means you have to work for the best.

Where are you defaulting to the worst-case scenario? How would it feel to release that mindset and imagine only the best things happening for you? Write your best-case scenario fantasy.

teams facing significant performance pressure tend to default to high-status members at the expense of the most knowledgeable of the team members.

Dad: Why have your grades gone down so much during this school term, son? Son: Because they moved my friend Dexter to the next classroom! *** A gang of default computer fonts walk into a bar.

In many contexts defaults have some extra nudging power because consumers may feel, rightly or wrongly, that default options come with an implicit endorsement from the default setter, be it the employer, government, or TV scheduler. For this and other reasons, setting the best possible defaults will be a theme we explore often in the course of this book.

them out if they make dumb choices. Let them struggle; let them learn; let them take responsibility. They need to figure out the importance of working hard, saving money, being smart. For God’s sake, don’t be a damned fool and then go begging the government to save you.” This is not a stupid argument. I come at the issues differently, of course, as someone who supports a strong social safety net. But this more conservative view represents a considered and consistent position, worthy of respect. Lower-income conservatives are making the same kind of argument that rich liberals are making. They are willing to make monetary sacrifices to answer the call of their fundamental values. For liberals, those values are more about the common good and enlightened self-interest. For conservatives, those values are more about the importance of independence and personal responsibility. But both sides rightfully see their voting behavior as needing to reflect more than just a vulgar calculation about their immediate pocketbook needs. If one side deserves respect, then so does the other.*1 Of course, respecting our opponent’s argument doesn’t mean we have to just accept it and give in. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t argue passionately about the best approach to taxes or spending—especially in a society as complex as ours, with the stakes as high as they are. In fact, we should disagree and debate. Debate is the lifeblood of democracy, after all. Disagreement is a good thing—even heated disagreement. Only in a dictatorship does everybody have to agree. In a democracy, nobody has to agree. That’s called freedom. It’s the whole point of America. But at the base of too many of our public discussions sits the same destructive assumption: I’m right. And you’re wrong. We proceed on both sides as if our side is grounded in “the Truth” and the other side is always insane and delusional. And some version of this flawed concept has become the default setting throughout American political discourse. It is one thing to say, “I disagree with you because we have different values and priorities.” It’s quite another to say, “I disagree with you because you are an uneducated idiot—a pawn—and a dupe.” The prevalence of the latter set of arguments is why the Democratic Party stinks of elitism. Here’s another liberal favorite: “How can we argue with conservatives? They don’t believe in facts anymore—only ‘alternative facts.’ At least, liberals believe in science. Right-wingers don’t!” I understand the source of liberal exasperation here. Even though any high school student can reproduce the greenhouse-gas effect in a laboratory beaker,

What do you do? It’s amazing how people will qualify, quantify, judge, assess, and form complete opinions about you based on that one age-old question. It is a boring, uncreative default setting for attempting to engage a new person. Spice it up and try something new. Instead, ask "What do you do for fun?” Your creativity will make you more memorable and help you stand apart from the crowd.

When all else fails, Mother Nature has provided you with a great social default for finding commonality with others. Since weather is a universally shared experience, it enables you to jump into a conversation with anybody and everybody. While discussing the weather may sound boring, trite, and predictable, it is a safe and the certain ice-breaker that can help you build commonality regardless of who you are addressing. As I write this, we have icy rain! It's never a boring topic.

Mornings are the best chance we get, every day, to recall our solitude. They are brief glimpses into a default mindset that arises before the world pours too much noise into our eyes and ears.

default position, synagogues need to take what they do best—if they can indeed do them better than any other institution in the Jewish landscape—and locate their “brand” in the broader community. Synagogues need to be open to those issues that are engaging people in contexts outside the synagogues. For example, there is a growing interest in food justice issues, particularly among millennials, yet few synagogues have built their programs around this issue.

Feminism, at its best, is a movement that works to liberate all people who have been economically, socially and culturally marginalised by an ideological system that has been designed for them to fail. That means disabled people, black people, trans people, women and non-binary people, LGB people and working-class people. The idea of campaigning for equality must be complicated if we are to untangle the situation we’re in. Feminism will have won when we have ended poverty. It will have won when women are no longer expected to work two jobs (the care and emotional labour for their families as well as their day jobs) by default.

You uncover the best research and study the highest achievers. Anytime you don’t know the answer, your answer is to go find your answer. In other words, by default, your first ONE Thing is to search for clues and role models to point you in the right direction. The first thing to do is ask, “Has anyone else studied or accomplished this or something like it?” The answer is almost always yes, so your investigation begins by finding out what others have learned. One of the reasons I’ve amassed a large library of books over the years is because books are a great go-to resource. Short of having a conversation with someone who has accomplished what you hope to achieve, in my experience books and published works offer the most in terms of documented research and role models for success. The Internet has quickly become an invaluable tool as well. Whether offline or online, you’re trying to find people who have already gone down the road you’re traveling, so you can research, model, benchmark, and trend their experience. A college professor once told me, “Gary, you’re smart, but people have lived before you. You’re not the first person to dream big, so you’d be wise to study what others have learned first, and then build your actions on the back of their lessons.” He was so right. And he was talking to you too. The research and experience of others is the best place to start when looking for your answer.

Concluding remarks In this chapter, I have considered and rejected most forms of argument for atheism. I do not accept that atheism is the default position. I do not accept that theism is meaningless. I do not accept that best theistic worldviews are logically inconsistent. I do not accept that best theistic big pictures are logically inconsistent. And, while I do think that best atheistic big pictures are more theoretically virtuous than best theistic big pictures, I am sceptical that anyone will ever be able to write down an argument that succeeds in establishing, to the satisfaction of all interested parties, that this is the case.

It is possible that some people have been so mauled by life in this society that such a semi-suicide is the best alternative to real suicide for them. Curiously, a hell of a lot of M.D.s are using the same logic in relentlessly over-prescribing tranquilizers, many of which are quite habit forming (e.g., Librium) and some of which (e.g. Tofranil), are definitely linked with impotence according to psycho-pharmacologists. As Dr. Lawrence Kolb told a Congressional committee way back in 1925, “There is . . . a certain type of shrinking neurotic individual who can’t meet the demands of life, is afraid to meet people, has anxieties and fears, who if they took small amounts of narcotics – and I have examined quite a few of them – would be better and more efficient people than they would be without it.” Dr. Kolb also described two physicians who were opiate addicts and practiced successfully until they managed to “kick the habit,” after which they became hopeless problems to themselves and their families. “These two physicians that I am talking about didn’t get cured," Dr. Kolb said scornfully, “they should have had it (the drug) forever, because it (the cure) would not mean anything but an insane asylum for them, and they were doing a pretty good job of work as physicians when they were on the drug and regularly taking it.” American society has ignored Dr. Kolb’s pragmatic approach for decades and has struggled heroically to get all these lost souls off their depressant drugs. Or has it? The “war against heroin” continues; but in New York, the state has abandoned the hope of real “cure” and is satisfied just to get the junkies off an addicting drug it has made illegal – heroin – and onto an equally addicting drug it has made legal – methadone; and in the nation at large, prescriptions for central nervous system depressants are said to run into the tens of millions every year. The official attitude, by default, now appears to be, “If you can’t bear our society without being half-asleep, let us at least control which drug you choose to be half-asleep on.” This is not a formula for a non-addicted nation. It is a face-saving game to allow those bureaucrats whom William S. Burroughs calls “control addicts” to continue to believe that they are, by God, controlling everybody they want to control.

a close network of supportive law school friends is invaluable to your success and well-being. Because all 1Ls are in the same overcrowded lifeboat, most people jump at the chance to make friends in these early days. When all is said and done, the friends you make in law school will be one of the best features of your entire experience. If you spot someone at one of these events who you know is going to be one of your first-year professors (they’ll usually be wearing name tags), go up and introduce yourself. This is hard for a lot of people to do, but as elaborated on in Chapter 9, there is value in getting to know and being known by your professors. The fact that they’re attending the event (most profs don’t) means that they’re probably approachable people. Many law professors are shy, introverted types who are not good at “making the rounds,” so don’t wait for them to approach you. Don’t worry. They’re not going to ask you deep legal questions, but they may default to asking the classic introductory question, “What made you decide to come to law school?”, which is the law professor

I learned a lot from the party business—it’s great training for running a business in general. Among the lessons I learned: •  The default number of attendees is zero. You get out what you put in. •  The personal touch is always best. If you write or call people individually they’ll come. •  Don’t throw parties on Mondays or Tuesdays. •  Choose your partners wisely. •  The best way to get others to come to your party is to go to their parties. Reciprocity rules.* •  It’s way easier to invite someone to a party and get them to come than it is to get a date with them. •  Don’t save free drink tickets until the end of the night. Use them as soon as possible. •  Nothing makes someone happier than skipping a line. •  If a party gets too crowded, some people will leave. •  When presented with an opportunity to be a jerk or let it go, let it go. •  People get irrationally possessive and touchy about free gift bags. •  If no one has shown up in the first hour, don’t worry—they’ll show. I got a great education and had some amazing times. If you want to throw a big party, give this a try—find a few people you like and respect but that you’re not that close friends with—people who have networks that are different from the ones you have. Convince them to cohost a party with you. If that works, you’ll be off to the races.

Wage Garnishment Majority of students complete their education with student loan debt. Once you have graduated from college and stepinto the real world, you realize it isn’t as easy as it seemed. Student loan is one of the most difficult loans to repay and it also cannot be discharged into bankruptcy. Thus it has to be repaid!One thing that should always be kept in mind is to never skip your loan payments. If this happens and happens consecutively for months it will open doors to many other problems. It will put your loan in default; your entire loan amount and interest will become due immediately. It will adversely impact your credit score. We discuss Wage Garnishment with The Student Loan Help Center team, let’s see what they said about it. So What is wage garnishment? Wage garnishment happens when your loan is in default (you can consult The Student Loan help center if you want) i.e you have not paid the loan for consecutive 270 days. Now Wage garnishment is one of the legal consequences of going into default. Through this method the government starts deducting 15% of your income. That means you in hand income willreduce with only 85% coming in your bank account. However the amount of wage that can be garnished for private loandiffers from state to state since every state is not allowed to garnish the wages. How to avoid? As discussed before, wage garnishment happens only when your loan is in default. The department of education sends you one letter when you are in default. The best way to avoid this problem is to avoid going to default. There are numerous measures you can adopt right from very beginning to keep your loan repayment on track. For eg, starting to pay interest in your grace period, automating the process of monthly payments to get some discount from bank etc. Now what if you are in default or going in default, then the best option would be to consider forbearance or deferment which will stop your wages from being garnished. How can it be challenged? If you have just received the notice from Department of Education then you are given one opportunity to get a hearing and object to wage garnishment. You can challenge wage garnishment on following grounds: Your income Your employment Procedures followed to start the garnishment etc Also your wage garnishment cannot begin before the notice of 30 days. During this time period you request a hearing garnishment will be put on hold and if 30 days are over garnishment will not stop if you have won the hearing. One of the Best Student Loan consolidation services in USA is The Student Loan Help Center in Florida for all kind of Student Loan consultation you can contact any time.

Just so you know, if you need a partner to kick city boy’s ass into next year, I’m your man,” Garth said over the dimming fire. “No one messes with my best friend.” “Best friend, eh?” I glanced over at him. He was still curled up, eyes closed and expressionless. Showing physical emotion was toxic to Garth. “You’re my only friend, Jess. You win the best title by default.

As much as I loved Toby, he was not you and never would be. I had unconsciously fallen into a relationship through default, using Toby as your replacement. Although our sexual rapport was excellent, our relationship did not touch the soul-to-soul level I shared with you. At twenty-two, there were many things I did not understand about love. I thought I knew it all. I plunged full steam ahead, and, soon after we met, I found myself sharing a home with Toby. Our lives together came crashing down a year later. I concluded that there wasn’t anyone who could replace you in my heart. It was best for Toby and me to separate. He realized that I could not provide the love he so desired. You, Young, are the boy I’ve been trying to replace, all these years. You are an ever-present apparition who never leaves me. Images of you continue to follow me everywhere I go. You are my shadow…

In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. It’s how we are wired. Meaning making is in our biology, and when we’re in struggle, our default is often to come up with a story that makes sense of what’s happening and gives our brain information on how best to selfprotect.

To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children . . . to leave the world a bit better . . . to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson “Some men see things as they are and say ‘why?’ I dream of things that never were and say ‘why not?’”—Robert Kennedy “Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another: ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’”—C. S. Lewis “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case you fail by default.”—J. K. Rowling

Work-life balance” seems to have become the best excuse for many people not to take responsibility for their professional and personal growth. But this “balance” that all of us love to talk about is not something conceptual. It is achieved by strategic, focused, hard work. It doesn’t come by default or when we say the magic words. That’s why many of us are leading lives far from our potential for success and fulfillment — because we wait for balance to happen, and it never does. I’ve been there, and it sucks. Most of us haven’t taken a single hour of our lives to think about what work-life balance means to us. Needless to say, we put zero effort into planning about it, working for it, living it. Open your calendar and show me what your work-life balance looks like. In 99 percent of cases, it’s not there — it’s nowhere to be found.

Heroism is not something you occupy day to day. It's a moment, at best. You get something right, almost by accident, and then you go back to your bumbling, myopic default setting. So I think about this-about how the vast majority of our lives are passed in a decidedly unheroic way- and I wonder, is heroism measured then, by account balances?

The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–08 represented the greatest financial downswing of my lifetime, and consequently it presents the best opportunity to observe, reflect and learn. The scene was set for its occurrence by a number of developments. Here’s a partial list: Government policies supported an expansion of home ownership—which by definition meant the inclusion of people who historically couldn’t afford to buy homes—at a time when home prices were soaring; The Fed pushed interest rates down, causing the demand for higher-yielding instruments such as structured/levered mortgage securities to increase; There was a rising trend among banks to make mortgage loans, package them and sell them onward (as opposed to retaining them); Decisions to lend, structure, assign credit ratings and invest were made on the basis of unquestioning extrapolation of low historic mortgage default rates; The above four points resulted in an increased eagerness to extend mortgage loans, with an accompanying decline in lending standards; Novel and untested mortgage backed securities were developed that promised high returns with low risk, something that has great appeal in non-skeptical times; Protective laws and regulations were relaxed, such as the Glass-Steagall Act (which prohibited the creation of financial conglomerates), the uptick rule (which prevented traders who had bet against stocks from forcing them down through non-stop short selling), and the rules that limited banks’ leverage, permitting it to nearly triple; Finally, the media ran articles stating that risk had been eliminated by the combination of: the adroit Fed, which could be counted on to inject stimulus whenever economic sluggishness developed, confidence that the excess liquidity flowing to China for its exports and to oil producers would never fail to be recycled back into our markets, buoying asset prices, and the new Wall Street innovations, which “sliced and diced” risk so finely, spread it so widely and placed it with those best suited to bear it.

I’m a hustler and I work hard, but being a lazy person is my default. It’s what I do best. I’m a champion napper—I’ve even taken a nap in the Louvre among other weird places. I love chilling and day drinking and taking it fucking easy. But as it turns out, I’m not retired just yet, so I try my best to go against the lazy grain, which is why I always have multiple to-do lists going. Otherwise, I’ll to-don’t with everything and take a nap instead

Reacher defaulted to his instinctive position, which was to hope for the best, but plan for the worst.

Organic culture is developed over time as an answer to the needs of the soul of a particular cohesive group of people. It is sacred and graceful by default, while pop culture is disingenuous at best.

When you are not contributing enough to the team’s cause, never lose the belief & the work ethic. Remember, player of the match award by default is not given to star performers but someone who have outperformed other players on a given day, and it could be anyone who believes in being the best.

When you launch an AWS resource like an Amazon EC2 instance or Amazon Relational Database (Amazon RDS) DB instance, you start with a default configuration. You can then execute automated bootstrapping actions. That is, scripts that install software or copy data to bring that resource to a particular state.