Didn't Get The Promotion Quotes

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience just becomes a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all.

The thing about the Lexington International Bank ladder was that it was very long, and climbing it was very exhausting, and so Andrew Brown didn't have a lot of time to think about whether he really wanted to get to the top of it—and besides, since so many other people were climbing too, the view from the top must be worth it. So he kept going. He worked hard. He put his heart and mind and soul into it. There was an opening for a position half a rung higher than he already was. With a promotion, he might get two hours a week of a secretary's time. He'd go to more important meetings, with more senior people, and have the opportunity to impress them, and if he did he might be promoted again and then... well, of course eventually he'd be running the whole office. It's important to have a dream: otherwise you might notice where you really are.

What’s amazing is that things like hashtag design—these essentially ad hoc experiments in digital architecture—have shaped so much of our political discourse. Our world would be different if Anonymous hadn’t been the default username on 4chan, or if every social media platform didn’t center on the personal profile, or if YouTube algorithms didn’t show viewers increasingly extreme content to retain their attention, or if hashtags and retweets simply didn’t exist. It’s because of the hashtag, the retweet, and the profile that solidarity on the internet gets inextricably tangled up with visibility, identity, and self-promotion. It’s telling that the most mainstream gestures of solidarity are pure representation, like viral reposts or avatar photos with cause-related filters, and meanwhile the actual mechanisms through which political solidarity is enacted, like strikes and boycotts, still exist on the fringe.

Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel. We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room. We want an equal share in government and we mean to get it. The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be the arrangement of your chromosomes. They used to give us a day--it was called International Women's Day. In 1975 they gave us a year, the Year of the Woman. Then from 1975 to 1985 they gave us a decade, the Decade of the Woman. I said at the time, who knows, if we behave they may let us into the whole thing. Well, we didn't behave and here we are.

So what's your doll's name?" Boo asked me. "Barbie," I said. "All their names are Barbie." "I see," she said. "Well, I'd think that would get boring, everyone having the same name." I thought about this, then said, "Okay, then her name is Sabrina." "Well, that's a very nice name," Boo said. I remember she was baking bread, kneading the dough between her thick fingers. "What does she do?" "Do?" I said. "Yes." She flipped the dough over and started in on it from the other side. "What does she do?" "She goes out with Ken," I said. "And what else?" "She goes to parties," I said slowly. "And shopping." "Oh," Boo said, nodding. "She can't work?" "She doesn't have to work," I said. "Why not?" "Because she's Barbie." "I hate to tell you, Caitlin, but somebody has to make payments on that town house and the Corvette," Boo said cheerfully. "Unless Barbie has a lot of family money." I considered this while I put on Ken's pants. Boo started pushing the dough into a pan, smoothing it with her hand over the top. "You know what I think, Caitlin?" Her voice was soft and nice, the way she always spoke to me. "What?" "I think your Barbie can go shopping, and go out with Ken, and also have a productive and satisfying career of her own." She opened the oven and slid in the bread pan, adjusting its position on the rack. "But what can she do?" My mother didn't work and spent her time cleaning the house and going to PTA. I couldn't imagine Barbie, whose most casual outfit had sequins and go-go boots, doing s.uch things. Boo came over and plopped right down beside me. I always remember her being on my level; she'd sit on the edge of the sandbox, or lie across her bed with me and Cass as we listened to the radio. "Well," she said thoughtfully, picking up Ken and examining his perfect physique. "What do you want to do when you grow up?" I remember this moment so well; I can still see Boo sitting there on the floor, cross- legged, holding my Ken and watching my face as she tried to make me see that between my mother's PTA and Boo's strange ways there was a middle ground that began here with my Barbie, Sab-rina, and led right to me. "Well," I said abruptly, "I want to be in advertising." I have no idea where this came from. "Advertising," Boo repeated, nodding. "Okay. Advertising it is. So Sabrina has to go to work every day, coming up with ideas for commercials and things like that." "She works in an office," I went on. "Sometimes she has to work late." "Sure she does," Boo said. "It's hard to get ahead. Even if you're Barbie." "Because she wants to get promoted," I added. "So she can pay off the town house. And the Corvette." "Very responsible of her," Boo said. "Can she be divorced?" I asked. "And famous for her commercials and ideas?" "She can be anything," Boo told me, and this is what I remember most, her freckled face so solemn, as if she knew she was the first to tell me. "And so can you.

You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn't maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a t-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide. (Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?) Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn't storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed- a succesful piece of instruction only if it occured by my own hand, preferrably ina foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as a teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people's screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other. In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars- news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they needed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, it foreshadowed a period of waiting. Either I'd return with a new language for them to speak or they'd seek a divine silence attendant to my own. I took a taxi past the cemetaries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. new York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel. Is there a tunnel?" he said.

Persistence trumps talent. What's the most powerful force in the universe? Compound interest. It builds on itself. Over time, a small amount of money becomes a large amount of money. Persistence is similar. A little bit improves performance, which encourages greater persistence which improves persistence even more. And on and on it goes. Lack of persistence works the same way -- only in the opposite direction. Of course talent is important, but the world is lit erred with talented people who didn't persist, who didn't put in the hours, who gave up too early, who thought they could ride on talent alone. Meanwhile, people who might have less talent pass them by. That's why intrinsic motivation is so important. Doing things not the get an external reward like money or a promotion, but because you simple like doing it. The more intrinsic motivation you have , the more likely you are to persist. The more you persist, the more likely you are to succeed.

It was time to confront everything I had hated about the Navy as I climbed up through its ranks, and fix it all. Though the goal was presumptuous, I told myself that it was important that I try to do this. I might never get promoted again, but I decided that the risk was worth it. I wanted a life I could be proud of. I wanted to have a positive effect on young people’s lives. I wanted to create the best organization I could. And I didn’t want to squander this leadership opportunity. I have learned over and over that once you squander an opportunity, you can never get it back.

This book is, in a way, a scrapbook of my writing life. From shopping the cathedral flea market in Barcelona with David Sedaris to having drinks at Cognac with Nora Ephron just months before she died. To the years of sporadic correspondence I had with Thom Jones and Ira Levin. I’ve stalked my share of mentors, asking for advice. Therefore, if you came back another day and asked me to teach you, I’d tell you that becoming an author involves more than talent and skill. I’ve known fantastic writers who never finished a project. And writers who launched incredible ideas, then never fully executed them. And I’ve seen writers who sold a single book and became so disillusioned by the process that they never wrote another. I’d paraphrase the writer Joy Williams, who says that writers must be smart enough to hatch a brilliant idea—but dull enough to research it, keyboard it, edit and re-edit it, market the manuscript, revise it, revise it, re-revise it, review the copy edit, proofread the typeset galleys, slog through the interviews and write the essays to promote it, and finally to show up in a dozen cities and autograph copies for thousands or tens of thousands of people… And then I’d tell you, “Now get off my porch.” But if you came back to me a third time, I’d say, “Kid…” I’d say, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Ah, but let’s consider Communion for a moment,” he replied. “What’s odd is that these early followers of Jesus didn’t get together to celebrate his teachings or how wonderful he was. They came together regularly to have a celebration meal for one reason: to remember that Jesus had been publicly slaughtered in a grotesque and humiliating way. “Think about this in modern terms. If a group of people loved John F. Kennedy, they might meet regularly to remember his confrontation with Russia, his promotion of civil rights, and his charismatic personality. But they’re not going to celebrate the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald murdered him!

I start to worry I’ve become the thing Calista once warned me about: someone who wants a promotion too much. “They can smell it on you, and if they can smell it, they won’t give it to you,” she said. “It’s not fair, but it’s true.” I need to pretend that external recognition is just a cute little extra bonus and that consistently delivering world-changing greatness for Amazon’s benefit is its own intrinsic reward. But everyone I know here is trying to get promoted. True, most of us grew up as hyper-achievers. Amazon didn’t create our yearning for recognition, but it exploits it for maximum return by holding the rat pellet just out of reach and then frowning on any rat who looks hungry.

soldiers serving in the Military Police and those serving in the Air Corps (the forerunner of the Air Force) about how good a job they thought their service did in recognizing and promoting people of ability. The answer was clear. Military Policemen had a far more positive view of their organization than did enlisted men in the Air Corps. On the face of it, that made no sense. The Military Police had one of the worst rates of promotion in all of the armed forces. The Air Corps had one of the best. The chance of an enlisted man rising to officer status in the Air Corps was twice that of a soldier in the Military Police. So, why on earth would the Military Policemen be more satisfied? The answer, Stouffer famously explained, is that Military Policemen compared themselves only to other Military Policemen. And if you got a promotion in the Military Police, that was such a rare event that you were very happy. And if you didn’t get promoted, you were in the same boat as most of your peers—so

For purposes of the state, colored people became the almost-whites. They were second-class citizens, denied the rights of white people but given special privileges black people didn't have, just to keep them holding out for more. Afrikaners used to cal them amperbaas: "the almost-boss." The almost-master. "You're almost there. You're so close. You're this close to being white. Pity your grandfather couldn't keep his hands off the chocolate, eh? But it's not your fault you're colored, so keep trying. Because if you work hard enough you can erase this taint from your bloodline. Keep on marrying lighter and whiter and don't touch the chocolate and maybe, maybe, someday, if you're lucky, you can become white." Which seems ridiculous, but it would happen. Every year under apartheid, some colored people would get promoted to white. It wasn't a myth, it was real. People could submit applications to the government. Your hair might become straight enough, your skin might become light enough, your accent might become polished enough--and you'd be reclassified as white. All you had to do was denounce your people, denounce your history, and leave your darker-skinned friends and family behind.

I purposely used a pretty cocky, abrasive writing style in Sex and Crime, to stir up some drama. My confrontational style quickly became the talk of the scene. Some of the things I wrote were so inflammatory, people had to vent about it on online forums. So suddenly everyone in the scene was talking about Sex and Crime, just as I had hoped. I enjoyed playing the role of agitator, and people from competing hacking crews didn't even realize that the more they bitched about the things I wrote, the more credibility and notoriety they were adding to my scene mag. Thanks to all the positive as well as negative feedback I was getting, the things I wrote actually mattered. Suddenly I was the most important opinion maker in the scene.

Taylor held a finger up to Val and Kate. “Hold that thought for a second while I get this.” As she headed into the living room, she overheard Kate mumble to Val, “Hold what thought? I haven’t understood a word she’s said yet.” Taylor unlocked her front door and opened it. Before she could react, Jason barreled right in, all fired up. “Where have you been?? I tried calling you—is your cell phone off? I need you to tell me who the hell I can sue. I just met with Marty—we got back the mock-ups for the new publicity posters the studio’s going to use to promote Inferno .” Jason stormed into the kitchen, so engrossed in his rant he didn’t notice Valerie and Kate. He opened Taylor’s fridge and helped himself to a bottled water. “And get this,” he fumed angrily, “the dumbasses who designed the posters have me pictured in this scene where I’m putting out a fire with all these other firemen. But if you look at the poster from the side, the water from the hose of one of the other firefighters looks like it’s shooting right out of my crotch. And the best part is, they want to put this poster over the theater entrance for the premiere. I can just see it—” He gestured grandly to the air. “ ‘Come see Inferno! Get pissed on by Jason Andrews!’” With that, he threw Taylor a wink. “It should be right up your alley.” Finished with his rant, Jason took a sip of water. Then he finally noticed Kate and Val. He smiled charmingly. “Oh. People. Hello.” Kate and Val sat in silence at the table. They stared at the sight of this god, this ideal man of modern time, standing before them in all his glory.

Paul Theroux on Blogging, Travel Writing, and Three Cups of Tea Speaking of books that contain an element of travel, Greg Mortenson's bestseller about Central Asia was in the news recently. Were you surprised by the allegations that Three Cups of Tea contained fabrications? No, I wasn't. One of the things The Tao of Travel shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them. For example, everyone loved John Steinbeck's book Travels With Charley. Turns out he didn't travel alone, his wife kept meeting him, yet she was never mentioned in the book. Steinbeck didn't go to all the places he mentioned, nor did he meet all the people he said he met. In other words, Travels With Charley is fiction, or at least half-fiction. As for Three Cups of Tea, I think that philanthropists and humanitarians are even less forthcoming about what they do. I guess this guy did build a couple of schools in Afghanistan, but a self-promoting humanitarian is not someone I have a great deal of trust or belief in. I lived for six years in Africa and I've been to Africa numerous times since then. People build schools for their own reasons—not to improve a country. The people I've known who've done great things of that type—you know, building hospitals, running schools—are very humble people. They give their lives to the project. Missionaries get a bad rap, but I've known missionaries in Africa who were very self-sacrificing and humble and who did great things. They ran schools, hospitals, libraries; they helped people. Some wrote dictionaries and translated languages that hadn't been written down. I saw a lot of missionaries in Africa that were doing that, and you would never know their names; they came and did their work, and now they're buried there. Are there travel books out there that feel especially honest to you? Many of the books I quote in The Tao of Travel feel honest. One of them, really the most heartfelt, is Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi. Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard is a very honest book. Jan Morris has written numerous books, and you can take what she says to the bank. But there are some that just don't feel right. Bruce Chatwin never rang true to me. Bill Bryson said that he would take a couple of people and make them into one composite character. Well, that's what novelists do. If you're a travel writer you have to stick to the facts.

MY FIRST ASSIGNMENT AFTER BEING ORDAINED as a pastor almost finished me. I was called to be the assistant pastor in a large and affluent suburban church. I was glad to be part of such an obviously winning organization. After I had been there a short time, a few people came to me and asked that I lead them in a Bible study. “Of course,” I said, “there is nothing I would rather do.” We met on Monday evenings. There weren’t many—eight or nine men and women—but even so that was triple the two or three that Jesus defined as a quorum. They were eager and attentive; I was full of enthusiasm. After a few weeks the senior pastor, my boss, asked me what I was doing on Monday evenings. I told him. He asked me how many people were there. I told him. He told me that I would have to stop. “Why?” I asked. “It is not cost-effective. That is too few people to spend your time on.” I was told then how I should spend my time. I was introduced to the principles of successful church administration: crowds are important, individuals are expendable; the positive must always be accented, the negative must be suppressed. Don’t expect too much of people—your job is to make them feel good about themselves and about the church. Don’t talk too much about abstractions like God and sin—deal with practical issues. We had an elaborate music program, expensively and brilliantly executed. The sermons were seven minutes long and of the sort that Father Taylor (the sailor-preacher in Boston who was the model for Father Mapple in Melville’s Moby Dick) complained of in the transcendentalists of the last century: that a person could no more be converted listening to sermons like that than get intoxicated drinking skim milk.[2] It was soon apparent that I didn’t fit. I had supposed that I was there to be a pastor: to proclaim and interpret Scripture, to guide people into a life of prayer, to encourage faith, to represent the mercy and forgiveness of Christ at special times of need, to train people to live as disciples in their families, in their communities and in their work. In fact I had been hired to help run a church and do it as efficiently as possible: to be a cheerleader to this dynamic organization, to recruit members, to lend the dignity of my office to certain ceremonial occasions, to promote the image of a prestigious religious institution. I got out of there as quickly as I could decently manage it. At the time I thought I had just been unlucky. Later I came to realize that what I experienced was not at all uncommon.

GET BEYOND THE ONE-MAN SHOW Great organizations are never one-man operations. There are 22 million licensed small businesses in America that have no employees. Forbes suggests 75 percent of all businesses operate with one person. And the average income of those companies is a sad $44,000. That’s not a business—that’s torture. That is a prison where you are both the warden and the prisoner. What makes a person start a business and then be the only person who works there? Are they committed to staying small? Or maybe an entrepreneur decides that because the talent pool is so poor, they can’t hire anyone who can do it as well as them, and they give up. My guess is the latter: Most people have just given up and said, “It’s easier if I just do it myself.” I know, because that’s what I did—and it was suicidal. Because my business was totally dependent on me and only me, I was barely able to survive, much less grow, for the first ten years. Instead I contracted another company to promote my seminars. When I hired just one person to assist me out of my home office, I thought I was so smart: Keep it small. Keep expenses low. Run a tight ship. Bigger isn’t always better. These were the things I told myself to justify not growing my business. I did this for years and even bragged about how well I was doing on my own. Then I started a second company with a partner, a consulting business that ran parallel to my seminar business. This consulting business quickly grew bigger than my first business because my partner hired people to work for us. But even then I resisted bringing other people into the company because I had this idea that I didn’t want the headaches and costs that come with managing people. My margins were monster when I had no employees, but I could never grow my revenue line without killing myself, and I have since learned that is where all my attention and effort should have gone. But with the efforts of one person and one contracted marketing company, I could expand only so much. I know that a lot of speakers and business gurus run their companies as one-man shows. Which means that while they are giving advice to others about how to grow a business, they may have never grown one themselves! Their one-man show is simply a guy or gal going out, collecting a fee, selling time and a few books. And when they are out speaking, the business terminates all activity. I started studying other people and companies that had made it big and discovered they all had lots of employees. The reality is you cannot have a great business if it’s just you. You need to add other people. If you don’t believe me, try to name one truly great business that is successful, ongoing, viable, and growing that doesn’t have many people making it happen. Good luck. Businesses are made of people, not just machines, automations, and technology. You need people around you to implement programs, to add passion to the technology, to serve customers, and ultimately to get you where you want to go. Consider the behemoth online company Amazon: It has more than 220,000 employees. Apple has more than 100,000; Microsoft has around the same number. Ernst & Young has more than 200,000 people. Apple calls the employees working in its stores “Geniuses.” Don’t you want to hire employees deserving of that title too? Think of how powerful they could make your business.

They did this at the bank I worked at. We all had to go on a course where bright, sparkly people with frightening smiles exhorted us to embrace change because those who can’t die out. I think they cited the dinosaurs.’ ‘So they weren’t killed by an asteroid at all, then?’ said Bashford, astonished. ‘Not according to the expensive people hired to tell us that our expertise, the working relationships we’d built up over the years, all our hard work was now utterly valueless – as would we be if we didn’t get with the new programme. According to them, it was their inability to adapt to this month’s new ideas and working practices that did for the dinosaurs and the asteroid had nothing to do with it. They were quite horrified at our lack of enthusiasm for massive redundancies while senior managers – reluctantly, of course – accepted promotions and pay rises with increased bonuses.

I want to make sure we understand in this reminder what duʿā’ is not? Duʿā’ is not placing an order at a restaurant. Duʿā’ is not placing an order for a product. When you place an order, you pay something and you get what you expected. You place an order for French fries; you’re not supposed to get a burger. You’re supposed to get French fries. When you place an order for a laptop, you’re not supposed to get a phone in the mail. You get what you ordered, and when you order something you obviously pay for it. You paid for it, so you’re expecting what you paid for. When you and I make duʿā’, we pay nothing. We pay nothing. When you pay nothing, then you have no expectations, you have no right to complain about what you get. You don’t get to say, ‘Hey! Wait, I asked for a hundred on my exam. I made duʿā’ last night. I still got a forty. What is this Allah? I placed the right order!’ You and I don’t get to do that. Allah is not here to serve you and me as customers. We’re used to customer service in this world. We are used to it so much that we think the way we are going to deal with Allah, is the same. Some of the young people today; unfortunately, their relationship with their parents has become like their parents are supposed to provide them customer service. ‘Mum, I asked you to buy me Grand Theft Auto! How come you didn’t get it yet?’, ‘I told you I’m going to do my homework!’ Like your homework is payment or something, right? Because we feel so entitled all the time, we bring this entitled attitude when we turn to Allah and we make duʿā’ to Him. ‘Yā Allāh, heal me.’ ‘Yā Allāh, get me a promotion.’ ‘Yā Allāh, do this for me or do that for me.’ And it doesn’t happen; and you’re like: ‘Forget this, I don’t need prayer. I even took the time out to pray and He didn’t give!

It would be a mistake, however, to think that Connectors are the only people who matter in a social epidemic. Roger Horchow sent out a dozen faxes promoting his daughter's friend's new restaurant. But he didn't discover that restaurant. Someone else did and told him about it. At some point in the rise of Hush Puppies, the shoes were discovered by Connectors, who broadcast the return of Hush Puppies far and wide. but who told the Connectors about Hush Puppies? It's possible that Connectors learn about new information by an entirely random process, that because they know so many people they get access to new things wherever they pop up. If you look closely at social epidemics, however, it becomes clear that just as there are people we rely upon to connect us to other people, there are also people we rely upon to connect us with new information. There are people specialists, and there are information specialists.

It was little things at first. Abby missed a phone call because she had an away game. Then one time Gretchen didn’t write back and never made up for the missing letter. They got busy with SATs and college applications, and even though they both applied to Georgetown, Gretchen didn’t get in, and Abby wound up going to George Washington anyways. At college they went to their computer labs and sent each other emails, sitting in front of black and green CRT screens and pecking them out one letter at a time. And they still wrote, but calling became a once-a-week thing. Gretchen was Abby’s maid of honor at her tiny courthouse wedding, but sometimes a month would go by and they wouldn’t speak. Then two months. Then three. They went through periods when they both made an effort to write more, but after a while that usually faded. It wasn’t anything serious, it was just life. The dance recitals, making the rent, first real jobs, pickups, dropoffs, the fights that seemed so important, the laundry, the promotions, the vacations taken, shoes bought, movies watched, lunches packed. It was a haze of the everyday that blurred the big things and made them feel distant and small.

Over the years, I’ve figured out that two of the biggest mistakes duck hunters make are choosing a poor position for their duck blinds and not properly camouflaging themselves from the ducks. It seems like every duck season, I’ll get at least one call at Duck Commander from a hunter somewhere in the world. The guy usually tells me, “Hey, I love your duck calls. They grab the ducks’ attention like nothing else, but they will not finish in my decoys. For some reason, the ducks always land two hundred yards from my blind. Do I need another type of duck call?” “Hey, save your money,” I tell him. “You need to move your duck blind two hundred yards to the other side of the lake! It’s not about the duck call. You’re in the wrong spot, buddy.” My boss and brother, Willie, is not fond of my advice because it doesn’t promote the sale of duck calls. I remember being reprimanded by him at a trade show about another response I gave to a potential customer. The guy asked me what the difference was between a forty-dollar duck call and one that cost one hundred and forty. My response was, “About a hundred dollars.” Obviously, Willie didn’t like my answer, even if I was only trying to be honest.

George Clooney spent his first years in Hollywood getting rejected at auditions. He wanted the producers and directors to like him, but they didn’t and it hurt and he blamed the system for not seeing how good he was. This perspective should sound familiar. It’s the dominant viewpoint for the rest of us on job interviews, when we pitch clients, or try to connect with an attractive stranger in a coffee shop. We subconsciously submit to what Seth Godin, author and entrepreneur, refers to as the “tyranny of being picked.” Everything changed for Clooney when he tried a new perspective. He realized that casting is an obstacle for producers, too—they need to find somebody, and they’re all hoping that the next person to walk in the room is the right somebody. Auditions were a chance to solve their problem, not his. From Clooney’s new perspective, he was that solution. He wasn’t going to be someone groveling for a shot. He was someone with something special to offer. He was the answer to their prayers, not the other way around. That was what he began projecting in his auditions—not exclusively his acting skills but that he was the man for the job. That he understood what the casting director and producers were looking for in a specific role and that he would deliver it in each and every situation, in preproduction, on camera, and during promotion. The

George Clooney spent his first years in Hollywood getting rejected at auditions. He wanted the producers and directors to like him, but they didn’t and it hurt and he blamed the system for not seeing how good he was. This perspective should sound familiar. It’s the dominant viewpoint for the rest of us on job interviews, when we pitch clients, or try to connect with an attractive stranger in a coffee shop. We subconsciously submit to what Seth Godin, author and entrepreneur, refers to as the “tyranny of being picked.” Everything changed for Clooney when he tried a new perspective. He realized that casting is an obstacle for producers, too—they need to find somebody, and they’re all hoping that the next person to walk in the room is the right somebody. Auditions were a chance to solve their problem, not his. From Clooney’s new perspective, he was that solution. He wasn’t going to be someone groveling for a shot. He was someone with something special to offer. He was the answer to their prayers, not the other way around. That was what he began projecting in his auditions—not exclusively his acting skills but that he was the man for the job. That he understood what the casting director and producers were looking for in a specific role and that he would deliver it in each and every situation, in preproduction, on camera, and during promotion. The difference between the right and the wrong perspective is everything.

The most common criticism of the spread was that it detached policy debate from the real world, that nobody used language the way that these debaters did, save perhaps for auctioneers. But even adolescents knew this wasn't true, that corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time: for they heard the spoken warnings at the end of the increasingly common television commercials for prescription drugs, when risk information was disclosed at a speed designed to make it difficult to comprehend; they heard the list of rules and caveats read rapid-fire at the end of promotions on the radio; they were at least vaguely familiar with the 'fine print' one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with these thousands of words was comprehend them. These types of disclosure were designed to conceal; they exposed you to information that, should you challenge the institution in question, would be treated like a 'dropped argument' in a fast round of debate - you have already conceded the validity of the point by failing to address it when it was presented. It's no excuse that you didn't have the time. Even before the twenty-four hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting 'spread' in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies.

PG: Who tends to have an interest in moé characters? HT: Clearly we are talking about those who are marginalized— Japanese men in particular, who seem to be getting weaker. After the Second World War, the value of men in Japan was determined by their productivity at work. The man who earned money was able to spend it, showing that he was a worthy mate. This then became the only way to be a man, the only way to be favorably appraised by women. I call this the era of love capitalism, meaning that dating and courtship were increasingly tied to consumption. Trendy dramas aired on television that promoted going to fancy restaurants or taking a ski vacation. So those men who failed or dropped out of the system looked for love elsewhere, for example in manga and anime. The situation got worse when the economy tanked in the 1990s, which made it harder to get that job and be that ideal man. There were a few men who had love and a lot of men who didn’t. I call this the love gap (ren’ai kakusa). Moé provides a low-cost, low-stress solution to this problem. It is love on our terms. Moé is a love revolution that challenges people’s commonsense notions about the world. You don’t need much capital to access moé, and you can do it in a way that suits you. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that everyone should give up on reality; I’m just pointing out that some of us find satisfaction with fictional characters. It’s not for everyone, but maybe more people would recognize this life choice if it wasn’t always belittled. Forcing people to live up to impossible ideals so that they can participate in so-called reality creates so-called losers, who in their despair might lash out at society. We don’t have to accept something just because people tell us that it is normal or right or better.

We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit. And if our bosses proved mean, why then we’d evoke their whole and genuine meanness afterward over vodka cranberries and small batch bourbons. And if our drinking companions proved to be sublime then we would stagger home at dawn over the Old City cobblestones, into hot showers and clean shirts, and press onward until dusk fell again. For the rest of the world, it seemed to us, had somewhat hastily concluded that it was the chief end of man to thank God it was Friday and pray that Netflix would never forsake them. Still we lived frantically, like hummingbirds; though our HR departments told us that our commitments were valuable and our feedback was appreciated, our raises would be held back another year. Like gnats we pestered Management— who didn’t know how to use the Internet, whose only use for us was to set up Facebook accounts so they could spy on their children, or to sync their iPhones to their Outlooks, or to explain what tweets were and more importantly, why— which even we didn’t know. Retire! we wanted to shout. We ha Get out of the way with your big thumbs and your senior moments and your nostalgia for 1976! We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them. Complexity, complexity, complexity! We said let our affairs be endless and convoluted; let our bank accounts be overdrawn and our benefits be reduced. Take our Social Security contributions and let it go bankrupt. We’d been bankrupt since we’d left home: we’d secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn’t believe in and that we expected yesterday. Instead of three meals a day, we’d drink coffee for breakfast and scavenge from empty conference rooms for lunch. We had plans for dinner. We’d go out and buy gummy pad thai and throat-scorching chicken vindaloo and bento boxes in chintzy, dark restaurants that were always about to go out of business. Those who were a little flush would cover those who were a little short, and we would promise them coffees in repayment. We still owed someone for a movie ticket last summer; they hadn’t forgotten. Complexity, complexity. In holiday seasons we gave each other spider plants in badly decoupaged pots and scarves we’d just learned how to knit and cuff links purchased with employee discounts. We followed the instructions on food and wine Web sites, but our soufflés sank and our baked bries burned and our basil ice creams froze solid. We called our mothers to get recipes for old favorites, but they never came out the same. We missed our families; we were sad to be rid of them. Why shouldn’t we live with such hurry and waste of life? We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to decrypt our neighbors’ Wi-Fi passwords and to never turn on the air-conditioning. We vowed to fall in love: headboard-clutching, desperate-texting, hearts-in-esophagi love. On the subways and at the park and on our fire escapes and in the break rooms, we turned pages, resolved to get to the ends of whatever we were reading. A couple of minutes were the day’s most valuable commodity. If only we could make more time, more money, more patience; have better sex, better coffee, boots that didn’t leak, umbrellas that didn’t involute at the slightest gust of wind. We were determined to make stupid bets. We were determined to be promoted or else to set the building on fire on our way out. We were determined to be out of our minds.

No, seriously," Mark continued. "Once you've been involved for a while, do your charity work in some third world toilet, they start letting you in on some of the bigger secrets to Responsivism, and how the knowledge will save you." "Go on," Juan said to indulge him. Murph might be flakey, but he had a topflight mind. "Ever heard of 'brane theory?" He'd already talked with Eric about it so only Stone didn't return a blank stare. "It's right up there with string theory as a way of unifying all four forces in the universe, something Einstein couldn't do. In a nutshell, it says our four-dimensional universe is a single membrane, and that there are others existing in higher orders of space. These are so close to ours that zero-point matter and energy can pass between them and that gravitation forces in our universe can leak out. It's all cutting-edge stuff." "I'll take your word for it," Cabrillo said. "Anyway, "brane theory started to get traction among theoreti cal physicists in the mid-nineties, and Lydell Cooper glommed on to it, too. He took it a step further, though. It wasn't just quantum particles passing in and out of our universe. He believed that an intelligence from another 'brane was affecting people here in our dimension. This intelligence, he said, shaped our day-to-day lives in ways we couldn't sense. It was the cause of all our suffering. Just before his death, Cooper started to teach techniques to limit this influence, ways to protect ourselves from the alien power." "And people bought this crap?" Max asked, sinking deeper into depression over his son. "Oh yeah. Think about it from their side for a second. It's not a believer's fault that he is unlucky or depressed or just plain stupid. His life is being messed with across dimensional membranes It's an alien influence that cost you that promotion or prevented you from dating the girl of your dreams. It's a cosmic force holding you back, not your own ineptitude. If you believe that, then you don't have to take responsibility for your life. And we all know nobody takes responsibility for himself anymore. Responsivism gives you a ready-made excuse for your poor life choices.

Think about it,” Obama said to us on the flight over. “The Republican Party is the only major party in the world that doesn’t even acknowledge that climate change is happening.” He was leaning over the seats where Susan and I sat. We chuckled. “Even the National Front believes in climate change,” I said, referring to the far-right party in France. “No, think about it,” he said. “That’s where it all began. Once you convince yourself that something like that isn’t true, then…” His voice trailed off, and he walked out of the room. For six years, Obama had been working to build what would become the Paris agreement, piece by piece. Because Congress wouldn’t act, he had to promote clean energy, and regulate fuel efficiency and emissions through executive action. With dozens of other nations, he made climate change an issue in our bilateral relationship, helping design their commitments. At international conferences, U.S. diplomats filled in the details of a framework. Since the breakthrough with China, and throughout 2015, things had been falling into place. When we got to Paris, the main holdout was India. We were scheduled to meet with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. Obama and a group of us waited outside the meeting room, when the Indian delegation showed up in advance of Modi. By all accounts, the Indian negotiators had been the most difficult. Obama asked to talk to them, and for the next twenty minutes, he stood in a hallway having an animated argument with two Indian men. I stood off to the side, glancing at my BlackBerry, while he went on about solar power. One guy from our climate team came over to me. “I can’t believe he’s doing this,” he whispered. “These guys are impossible.” “Are you kidding?” I said. “It’s an argument about science. He loves this.” Modi came around the corner with a look of concern on his face, wondering what his negotiators were arguing with Obama about. We moved into the meeting room, and a dynamic became clear. Modi’s team, which represented the institutional perspective of the Indian government, did not want to do what is necessary to reach an agreement. Modi, who had ambitions to be a transformative leader of India, and a person of global stature, was torn. This is one reason why we had done the deal with China; if India was alone, it was going to be hard for Modi to stay out. For nearly an hour, Modi kept underscoring the fact that he had three hundred million people with no electricity, and coal was the cheapest way to grow the Indian economy; he cared about the environment, but he had to worry about a lot of people mired in poverty. Obama went through arguments about a solar initiative we were building, the market shifts that would lower the price of clean energy. But he still hadn’t addressed a lingering sense of unfairness, the fact that nations like the United States had developed with coal, and were now demanding that India avoid doing the same thing. “Look,” Obama finally said, “I get that it’s unfair. I’m African American.” Modi smiled knowingly and looked down at his hands. He looked genuinely pained. “I know what it’s like to be in a system that’s unfair,” he went on. “I know what it’s like to start behind and to be asked to do more, to act like the injustice didn’t happen. But I can’t let that shape my choices, and neither should you.” I’d never heard him talk to another leader in quite that way. Modi seemed to appreciate it. He looked up and nodded.

SCANDALS AND MISMANAGEMENT If Secretary Clinton’s political career had ended with her defeat for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, her skills as a manager would have been judged by her disorganized and drama-filled campaign for the presidency and her disastrous Health Care Task Force as First Lady. President Obama, who defeated her calamitously run campaign, should have been wary of nominating Clinton to a post that was responsible for tens of thousands of federal employees throughout the world. While her tenure in Foggy Bottom didn’t have the highly publicized backstabbing element that tarnished her presidential campaign, Secretary Clinton’s deficiencies as a manager were no less evident. There was one department within State that Secretary Clinton oversaw with great care: the Global Partnerships Initiative (GPI), which was run by long-time Clinton family aide Kris Balderston. Balderston was known in political circles for creating a “hit list” that ranked members of Congress based on loyalty to the Clintons during the 2008 presidential primaries.[434] Balderston was brought to Foggy Bottom to “keep the Clinton political network humming at State.”[435] He focused his efforts on connecting CEOs and business interests—all potential Clinton 2016 donors—to State Department public/private partnerships. Balderston worked alongside Clinton’s long-time aide Huma Abedin, who was given a “special government employee” waiver, allowing her to work both as Secretary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, and for other private sector clients. With the arrangement, Abedin would serve as a consultant to the top Clinton allied firm, Teneo, in a role in which, as the New York Times reported, “the lines were blurred between Ms. Abedin’s work in the high echelons of one of the government’s most sensitive executive departments and her role as a Clinton family insider.”[436] Secretary Clinton and her allies have placed great emphasis on the secretary of state’s historic role in promoting American business interests overseas, dubbing the effort “economic statecraft.”[437] The efforts of the GPI, Abedin, and Balderston ensured that Secretary Clinton’s “economic statecraft” agenda would be rife with the potential for conflicts of interest reminiscent of the favor-trading scandals that emanated from her husband’s White House. While the political office and donor maintenance program was managed with extreme meticulousness, Secretary Clinton ignored her role as manager of the rest of the sprawling government agency.[438] When it came to these more mundane tasks, Secretary Clinton was not on top of what was really going on in the department she ran. While Secretary Clinton was preoccupied with being filmed and photographed all around the world, the State Department was plagued by chronic management problems and scandals, from visa programs to security contractors. And when Secretary Clinton did weigh in on management issues, it was almost always after a raft of bad press forced her to, and not from any proactive steps she took. In fact, she and her department’s first reaction in certain instances was to silence critics or intimidate whistleblowers, rather than get to the bottom of what was actually going on. The events that unfolded in Benghazi were the worst example of Secretary Clinton neglecting her managerial responsibilities. This pattern of behavior, which led to the tragedy, was characteristic of her management style throughout her four years at Foggy Bottom. “Economic Statecraft” A big part of Secretary Clinton’s record-breaking travel—112 countries visited—was her work as a salesperson for select U.S. business interests.[439] Today, her supporters would have us believe her “economic statecraft” agenda was a major accomplishment.[440] Yet, as always seems to be the case with the Clintons, there was one family that benefited more than any other from all this economic statecraft—the Clinton family.

His boss had just fired him from his high paying job as Director of Road Kill in Prince William County. After years of shoveling up hundreds of maggot-infested carcasses all over the back roads of Woodbridge and Occoquan, he had been promoted to director when his mentor, Mr. Harris, had passed away. None of his so-called friends had congratulated him on his promotion when the commissioner announced it. They were thoroughly pissed off they didn’t get chosen for the job.

For staying late and helping, a man was rated 14 percent more favorably than a woman. When both declined, a woman was rated 12 percent lower than a man. Over and over, after giving identical help, a man was significantly more likely to be recommended for promotions, important projects, raises and bonuses. A woman had to help just to get the same rating as a man who didn’t help.

Fairchild Parent rewarded Fairchild Child’s success the way all East Coast companies of the era did: it kept a sizable chunk of the profits to fund other company operations, and it promoted the people at the top of the division to a fancier position and a better salary for a job well done. Back in New Jersey, it didn’t cross anyone’s mind that this was exactly the wrong response to an egalitarian company that shared both risk and reward among all of its employees, whose executives had moved to California precisely to get away from the Old World of business, and which needed to plow most of its profits back into product development to stay ahead of the competition in a fast-moving take-no-prisoners industry.

began. A chief element in positioning the new Barbie was her promotion. In 1984, after a campaign that featured "Hey There, Barbie Girl" sung to the tune of "Georgy Girl," Mattel launched a startling series of ads that toyed with female empowerment. Its slogan was "We Girls Can Do Anything," and its launch commercial, driven by an irresistibly upbeat soundtrack, was a sort of feminist Chariots of Fire. Responding to the increased number of women with jobs, the ad opens at the end of a workday with a little girl rushing to meet her business-suited mother and carrying her mother's briefcase into the house. A female voice says, "You know it, and so does your little girl." Then a chorus sings, "We girls can do anything." The ad plays with the possibility of unconventional gender roles. A rough-looking Little Leaguer of uncertain gender swaggers onscreen. She yanks off her baseball cap, her long hair tumbles down, and—sigh of relief—she grabs a particularly frilly Barbie doll. (The message: Barbie is an amulet to prevent athletic girls from growing up into hulking, masculine women.) There are images of gymnasts executing complicated stunts and a toddler learning to tie her shoelaces. (The message: Even seemingly minor achievements are still achievements.) But the shot with the most radical message takes place in a laboratory where a frizzy-haired, myopic brunette peers into a microscope. Since the seventies, Barbie commercials had featured little girls of different races and hair colors, but they were always pretty. Of her days in acting school, Tracy Ullman remarked in TV Guide that she was the "ugly kid with the brown hair and the big nose who didn't get [cast in] the Barbie commercials." With "We Girls," however, Barbie extends her tiny hand to bookish ugly ducklings; no longer a snooty sorority rush chairman, she is "big-tent" Barbie.

And then something different happened. In the 1980s and ‘90s, more so than at any other time in American history, youth culture wasn’t challenging the status quo. Young people didn’t want to change the system – they wanted to game the system. They wanted money. The pursuit of the almighty dollar had always been the purview of soulless grown-ups and parents, but now kids – certainly not all kids, but youth culture overall – were promoting the idea that “getting paid” was cool. […] The goal was success that came from the ruthless pursuit of money for its own sake – in fact, often the more ruthless the pursuit, the cooler it was thought to be.

A similar method was used by the late Carnegie Mellon psychology professor Herbert Simon. He won the Nobel Prize in economics, was one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, and is widely regarded as among the most imaginative and productive behavioral scientists of all time. Simon didn’t read newspapers or watch television to get news. He said that when something important happened, people always told him, so it was a waste of time. Simon even made this point in a speech he gave to the National Association of Newspaper Editors, who were not amused. “I’ve saved an enormous amount of time since 1934, when I cast my first vote,” Simon told them, and he went on to say, it had left him more time to focus on his research.

command master chief, whom I’ll call Primo, was another top-notch commander. He didn’t give a flying fuck about promotions, about looking good, or covering his butt: he was all about successful missions and getting the job done. And he was a Texan—as you can tell, I’m a little partial—which meant he was a bad-ass.

Wait a minute. Will this get you in trouble with the operators’ school? To be seen with me?” She dropped her gaze to the sidewalk. “Not anymore.” His excitement crumbled. “No, it can’t be. Hannah, what happened?” She tried to maintain her somber expression, but a smile exploded on her face. “I graduated today. The first one in my class to be promoted to the real switchboard.” Lincoln grabbed her waist and hoisted her in the air. She squealed, and he lowered her back to the ground. One woman glared her disapproval, but an older couple approaching them chuckled. Hannah’s cheeks flamed, both from the public spectacle and from the electricity that surged through her at Lincoln’s touch. He, however, didn’t seem to notice her reaction or that of any onlookers. “We need to celebrate!” He slipped his fingers under her elbow and led her toward the car. “After we see the fire marshal, we’re going for ice cream, and I won’t take no for an answer this time.

I was a dog in my former life, a very good dog, and, thus, I was promoted to a human being. I liked being a dog. I worked for a poor farmer guarding and herding his sheep. Wolves and coyotes tried to get past me almost every night, and not once did I lose a sheep. the farmer rewarded me with good food, food from his table. He may have been poor, but he ate well. and his children played with me, when they weren’t in school or working in the field. I had all the love any dog could hope for. When I got old, they got a new dog, and I trained him in the tricks of the trade. He quickly learned, and the farmer brought me into the house to live with them. I brought the farmer his slippers in the morning, as he was getting old, too. I was dying slowly, a little bit at a time. The farmer knew this and would bring the new dog in to visit me from time to time. The new dog would entertain me with his flips and flops and nuzzles. And then one morning I just didn’t get up. They gave me a fine burial down by the stream under a shade tree. That was the end of my being a dog. Sometimes I miss it so I sit by the window and cry. I live in a high-rise that looks out at a bunch of other high-rises. At my job I work in a cubicle and barely speak to anyone all day. This is my reward for being a good dog. The human wolves don’t even see me. They fear me not.

Promoting that story—a story that fed not trust but resentment—had come to define the modern Republican Party. With varying degrees of subtlety and varying degrees of success, GOP candidates adopted it as their central theme, whether they were running for president or trying to get elected to the local school board. It became the template for Fox News and conservative radio, the foundational text for every think tank and PAC the Koch Brothers financed: The government was taking money, jobs, college slots, and status away from hardworking, deserving people like us and handing it all to people like them—those who didn’t share our values, who didn’t work as hard as we did, the kind of people whose problems were of their own making. The intensity of these convictions put Democrats on the defensive, making leaders less bold about proposing new initiatives, limiting the boundaries of political debate. A deep and suffocating cynicism took hold. Indeed, it became axiomatic among political consultants of both parties that restoring trust in the government or in any of our major institutions was a lost cause, and that the battle between Democrats and Republicans each election cycle now came down to whether America’s squeezed middle class was more likely to identify the wealthy and powerful or the poor and minorities as the reason they weren’t doing better.

I'll tell you a little bit about Lucy. Lucy runs an independent online business, by which I mean she loses money on the internet periodically. She is a Small Business Owner in the same way Andy is a Feminist, in that she declares it loudly, often, and she's the only one who believes it. I won't name the company because I don't want to get sued, but I recall her being promoted to Vice Executive Regional President (or something) a while back, along with about ten thousand others. An arbitrary title, unless of course it was referring to her own vice of badgering friends into buying shit they didn't need, in which case she was certainly presidential.

They expanded quickly without building the organizations and the support—such as distribution centers—needed to expand those companies. They didn’t get out into their stores to see what was going on. Then Kmart got their machine in gear and began to do it better and better. I remember going in their stores—I’ll bet I’ve been in more Kmarts than anybody—and I would really envy their merchandise mix and the way they presented it. So much about their stores was superior to ours back then that sometimes I felt like we couldn’t compete. Of course that didn’t stop us from trying. And Target came along and did a fine job, taking the whole idea a little more upscale. As these big operators became more organized, the competition grew a lot more difficult. That’s when all those guys who were failing to meet their customers’ needs and who didn’t build strong organizations—all those promoters—started to fall apart and, eventually, fall out.

Before, he had not realized what he actually wanted. Until today, when he saw how Cheng Yujin bade him farewell so easily, and how she began to talk happily about her and her future husband, Cheng Yuanjing finally understood what kind of answer he actually wanted to hear. He was not her uncle, nor was she his niece. What he wanted was for Cheng Yujin to see him as a man. He wanted her to give him an embroidery, make him pastries, and came to see him — as a man. Cheng Yuanjing had witnessed how Cheng Yujin very attentively cared for other men. Truly tasteless. Lin Qingyuan’s martial and literary skills weren’t as good as him. Her cousin brother was nothing more than a half-grown child. Why did Cheng Yujin so obsessed with them? Upon this inexplicable feeling, he deliberately revealed his identity. Later, Cheng Yujin’s attitude towards him indeed changed. Unfortunately, she still didn’t see him as a man. Since she knew his identity, Cheng Yujin always regarded him as a symbol, a tool that could promote her future husband and son’s position. Sometimes Cheng Yuanjing wanted to knock Cheng Yujin’s head and pried it open to have a look. Since she wanted to marry a wealthy and powerful husband, how could she put her sight on Xu Zhixian and Lin Qingyuan? As a crown prince, he had no shortage of money, property, power, and status. Moreover, he also currently occupied the identity of the Cheng family’s ninth son, which enabled her to get closer with him easily. Such conveniences, such good conditions, yet Cheng Yujin didn’t use it and still dared to talk about her future husband in front of him. For Cheng Yuanjing, Cheng Yujin was an oddity, truly the only one. The more he got closer to her, the more joyful and possessive Cheng Yuanjing became, and the more he couldn’t bear to hear about another man from her mouth.

In the 1930s, Dr John Brinkley sold a ‘miracle cure’ for impotence. It involved transplanting goat testicles into men’s scrotums. The procedure didn’t work. Brinkley would usually operate drunk, and maimed and killed a lot of his patients. His medical license was revoked, and the authorities took out full page advertisements in the Journal of the American Medical Association, warning the public not to deal with him. None of this stopped Brinkley from becoming — for a time — one of America’s wealthiest and most loved men. He was able to do this because he built an audience of his own, and nurtured it carefully with entertaining stories. You see, Brinkley’s patients did not read the Journal of the American Medical Association. What they did do was listen to the several radio stations that Brinkley controlled. Every day, he would take to the airwaves and speak for hours on end to promote his goat gonad treatments. He’d tell colourful stories that chided impotent men, and cajoled their wives into buying his procedure. (His story is told in the book Charlatan, if you’re interested.) When you have an audience and you have stories that people want to hear, it’s very difficult to stop you. With an audience of your own, you can change things, you can sell things, you can get people to give you money to put goat parts in their testicles. If people want to hear from you, good luck to anybody who gets in your way.

NWSL, Jeff Plush, who was there, never got up to speak. Instead, Garber spoke after de Blasio. MLS was one of the corporate sponsors that helped New York City pay for the parade, but representatives from Nike and EA Sports, who sponsored the parade as well, didn’t get up to speak. “Things just didn’t look right,” Solo says. “Everywhere we looked it was Don Garber, it was MLS, it was U.S. Soccer’s sponsors. It wasn’t necessarily about us when they were using our success to promote MLS and U.S. Soccer but not the women. It felt like they were using us.

Thus FDR, being a shrewd, smart sonofabitch now in his third term as President, knew that despite the cries of the isolationists who wanted Amer ica to have nothing to do with another world war it was only a matter of time before the country would be forced to shed its neutral status. And the best way to be prepared for that moment was to have the finest intelligence he could. And the best way to get that information, to get the facts that he trusted because he trusted the messenger, was to put another shrewd, smart sonofabitch in charge-his pal Wild Bill Donovan. The problem was not that intelligence wasn't being collected. The United States of America had vast organizations actively engaged in it-the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Military Intelligence Division chief among them. The problem was that the intelligence these organizations collected was, in the word of the old-school British spymasters, "coloured." That was to say, the intel tended first to serve to promote the respective branches. If, for example, ONI overstated the number of, say, German submarines, then the Navy brass could use that intelligence to justify its demands for more funds for sailors and ships to hunt down those U-boats. (Which, of course, played to everyone's natural fears as the U-boats were damn effec tive killing machines.) Likewise, if MID stated that it had found significantly more Axis troop amassing toward an Allied border than was previously thought, Army brass could argue that ground and/or air forces needed the money more than did the swabbies. Then there was the turf-fighting FBI. J. Edgar Hoover and Company didn't want any Allied spies snooping around in their backyard. It followed then that if the agencies had their own agendas, they were not prone to share with others the information that they collected. The argument, as might be expected, was that intelligence shared was intelli gence compromised. There was also the interagency fear, unspoken but there, as sure as God made little green apples, that some shared intel would be found to be want ing. If that should happen, it would make the particular agency that had de veloped it look bad. And that, fear of all fears, would result in the reduction of funds, of men, of weapons, et cetera, et cetera. In short, the loss of im portance of the agency in the eyes of the grand political scheme. Thus among the various agencies there continued the endless turf bat tles, the duplications of effort-even the instances, say, of undercover FB agents arresting undercover ONI agents snooping around Washington D.C., and New York City.

In movies, therapist silences have become a cliche, but it's only in silence that people can truly hear themselves. Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions. Being silent is like emptying the trash. When you stop tossing junk into the void- words, words, and more words- something important rises to the surface. And when the silence is a shared experience, it can be a gold mine for thoughts and feelings that the patient didn't even know existed. ... Even great joy is sometimes best expressed through silence, as when a patient comes in after landing a hard-won promotion or getting engaged and can't find the words to express the magnitude of what she's feeling. So we sit in silence together, beaming.

Why did Connex for QuickBooks Online succeed? Here are the reasons: I received free app store listings on Intuit’s website. My app was even on the first page of their store briefly. This drove large amounts of traffic to my site. I received free listings on many other sites before they started asking for a commission. I later pulled those listings, since the cost to advertise exceeded the revenue they brought to the company. These stores failed to show how many installs and conversions they generated. I had many positive and real reviews on my app store listings. I noticed competitors had hundreds of five-star reviews that mostly looked fake. QuickBooks Online had few integrations at the time. I was one of the first companies to get listed. For QuickBooks Canada and QuickBooks U.K., my app was one of the first system integrators. I had almost no competitors who serviced QuickBooks outside of the U.S. Shopify, BigCommerce, ShipStation and other companies had no native integration. Mine was one of the first. I recorded videos and added landing pages that ranked high on Google with minimal effort. Since I had a shoestring marketing budget, this was very important. The issue I had with other products was that they didn’t offer free promotion. Since my company was one of the first, we had ample time to add features and fix problems. We have a solution that is light years ahead of competitors. Why would someone want to compete with us? In the words of one of my partner companies, “We could build one, but yours would be a lot better.” My app required no desktop apps or website plugins to install. Since my audience was small business owners, the easier the install the better. Most business users have a limited understanding of websites. Asking them to change a bunch of settings or configure something on their own is daunting. We set up Connex for qualified users. Many competitors just let users go through a self-guided trial. We received feedback from many customers that they would purchase if they could make Connex work. I added a talk-to-sales component, and our conversion ratio increased. Connex was successful because I added a personal touch in a world where SaaS owners expect users to just “figure it out” on their own. Software that requires no support and maintenance is a pipe dream.

She was lonely, that was the truth, really lonely. Her working hours were so long she’d given up on the idea of having a family—she couldn’t even hold down a relationship—and when she went on an expedition, she was set apart from her male colleagues by problems they didn’t have to think about. Not only periods, or where to pee safely, not even the endless jokes about her physical strength. But the sense she was never really going to get what she wanted. More than a few times a colleague had reached out a hand when she didn’t need help, and squeezed too hard. She’d been talked down and talked over. She’d missed a couple of promotions she should have got. And yet, deep down, she knew she couldn’t really blame anyone else. Out of some strange mad desire not to upset the status quo, she’d become complicit. She had laughed when she should have been angry, or said nothing when she should have said a lot. She’d belittled her own achievements, calling them small or unformed or even lucky when they were none of those things. And it wasn’t simply opportunities at work she’d lost out on: she had—and, again, this was her own choice—missed the weddings of her closest friends, just as she’d missed their children’s christenings. Only a month ago her oldest friend had written, inviting her to Scotland for her godson’s birthday, “But I guess it will be difficult for you to get away.” And it was true. Some nights Freya worked so late, she took her sleeping bag out of her locker and slept on the floor under her desk. She actually kept a toothbrush there and a set of spare clothes.

If you really desire workplace change, such as a promotion or a job, you have to clear your physical energetic field of everyone or everything in the way. Start by decluttering, throwing away everything at home or at work that no longer describes who you are. Toss that old paperwork and applications for jobs you didn’t get. Ready to move forward? To attract workplace prosperity? Put red or purple objects in the southeast corner of your workspace.

He continued, “That’s what you always say. When something is wrong or going bad, you just look at me and say, ‘Good.’” And I said, “Well, I mean it. Because that is how I operate.” So I explained to him that when things are going bad, there’s going to be some good that will come from it. Oh, mission got cancelled? Good. We can focus on another one. Didn’t get the new high-speed gear we wanted? Good. We can keep it simple. Didn’t get promoted? Good. More time to get better. Didn’t get funded? Good. We own more of the company. Didn’t get the job you wanted? Good. Go out, gain more experience, and build a better résumé. Got injured? Good. Needed a break from training. Got tapped out? Good. It’s better to tap out in training than to tap out on the street. Got beat? Good. We learned. Unexpected problems? Good. We have the opportunity to figure out a solution.

And harder economic times strained civic trust. As the U.S. growth rate started to slow in the 1970s—as incomes then stagnated and good jobs declined for those without a college degree, as parents started worrying about their kids doing at least as well as they had done—the scope of people’s concerns narrowed. We became more sensitive to the possibility that someone else was getting something we weren’t and more receptive to the notion that the government couldn’t be trusted to be fair. Promoting that story—a story that fed not trust but resentment—had come to define the modern Republican Party. With varying degrees of subtlety and varying degrees of success, GOP candidates adopted it as their central theme, whether they were running for president or trying to get elected to the local school board. It became the template for Fox News and conservative radio, the foundational text for every think tank and PAC the Koch Brothers financed: The government was taking money, jobs, college slots, and status away from hardworking, deserving people like us and handing it all to people like them—those who didn’t share our values, who didn’t work as hard as we did, the kind of people whose problems were of their own making. The intensity of these convictions put Democrats on the defensive, making leaders less bold about proposing new initiatives, limiting the boundaries of political debate. A deep and suffocating cynicism took hold. Indeed, it became axiomatic among political consultants of both parties that restoring trust in the government or in any of our major institutions was a lost cause, and that the battle between Democrats and Republicans each election cycle now came down to whether America’s squeezed middle class was more likely to identify the wealthy and powerful or the poor and minorities as the reason they weren’t doing better.

Yeah, he was evil and all, but there are people who were a lot more evil than him who didn’t get promoted nearly as fast. Like the one guy who tried to blow up his own friend in an attempt to assassinate the president of the United States and get control of the entire US nuclear arsenal.” “That was you,” I said. “I know!” Murray exclaimed.

That was when The New York Times announced the appointment of a 30-year-old writer on tech issues to join the paper’s editorial board. Like all such appointments, Jeong’s promotion to such a position at a young age attracted a considerable amount of attention. And attention in the age of the internet obviously includes online rakings of everything the person has said. In Jeong’s case the raking turned up tweets with a particular focus – which was a sustained and pretty crude abuse of white people. Jeong’s tweets included ‘Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like grovelling goblins?’; ‘I dare you to go on Wikipedia and play “Things white people can definitely take credit for”, it’s really hard’; ‘White men are bullshit’; ‘CancelWhitePeople’ and in one stream of tweets ‘Have you ever tried to figure out all the things that white people are allowed to do that aren’t cultural appropriation? There’s literally nothing. Like skiing, maybe, and also golf . . . It must be so boring to be white.’43 It is fair to say that her Twitter feed showed an obsession with this theme. She even committed the basic error of comparing those people she didn’t like with animals. ‘Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.’44 Another tweet said, ‘Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.’45 Jeong

David shook his head in disbelief.  “Do you think I’m a fool or something?” “I didn’t say that,” Christopher replied. “Mr. Vance, I know you were up for that sales manager promotion at the dealership.  The same promotion that Larry ended up getting

They promoted me every few years like clockwork. I could get lost in the thousands of other employees. I was bored, stagnating. We both knew if I didn’t take this start-up job, I would never become anything other than what I already was.

Management becomes more complex, too, because the staff has to reach across the organization at a level and consistency you never had to before: different departments, groups, and business units. For example, analytics and business intelligence teams never had to have the sheer levels of interaction with IT or engineering. The IT organization never had to explain the data format to the operations team. From both the technical and the management perspectives, teams didn’t have to work together before with as high of a bandwidth connection. There may have been some level of coordination before, but not this high. Other organizations face the complexity of data as a product instead of software or APIs as the product. They’ve never had to promote or evangelize the data available in the organization. With data pipelines, the data teams may not even know or control who has access to the data products. Some teams are very siloed. With small data, they’ve been able to get by. There wasn’t ever the need to reach out, coordinate, or cooperate. Trying to work with these maverick teams can be a challenge unto itself. This is really where management is more complicated.

Small wonder that navigators didn’t get promoted. They were just duplicates of what gunners could do.

It was October 17th, 2084 and stupid opinions were illegal in the United States of America. Up until 2059 stupid opinions had been very legal, very common, and extremely monetized. You could make lots of money off stupid opinions back before 2059. Some people made zounds of money talking about how stupid the stupid opinions were. Other people made zounds of money defending stupid opinions and building a platform on the idea that—no matter how stupid an opinion was—it was each American’s right to have and promote stupid and dangerous opinions. Few people talked about worthwhile opinions then. Worthwhile opinions were not exciting. They did not get likes or views. If something didn’t get likes or views back then, it didn’t exist. But it was 2084. A stupid opinion had not been shared online for 25 years. The internet had atrophied. It was just a big store now. The big store mostly sold banana-flavored cigarettes. Almost everyone smoked banana-flavored cigarettes.

I waited to see if he’d say more, if he’d stop with the jokes. We were both quiet for a bit. Then John began counting. “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi …” He shot me an exasperated look. “How long are we going to sit here saying nothing?” I understood his frustration. In movies, therapist silences have become a cliché, but it’s only in silence that people can truly hear themselves. Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions. Being silent is like emptying the trash. When you stop tossing junk into the void—words, words, and more words—something important rises to the surface. And when the silence is a shared experience, it can be a gold mine for thoughts and feelings that the patient didn’t even know existed. It’s no wonder that I spent an entire session with Wendell saying virtually nothing and simply crying. Even great joy is sometimes best expressed through silence, as when a patient comes in after landing a hard-won promotion or getting engaged and can’t find the words to express the magnitude of what she’s feeling. So we sit in silence together, beaming.

I killed their father. You’ve barely promoted me from evil to very bad. Jason is good. He’s as close to a saint as people get. We’re taking them to him.” “But....” “Didn’t you promise to obey?” Hell. A wagon trip with a baby, two young girls, a milk cow, and an angry, not-speaking wife.

We didn’t evolve to be healthy, but instead we were selected to have as many offspring as possible under diverse, challenging conditions. As a consequence, we never evolved to make rational choices about what to eat or how to exercise in conditions of abundance and comfort. What’s more, interactions between the bodies we inherited, the environments we create, and the decisions we sometimes make have set in motion an insidious feedback loop. We get sick from chronic diseases by doing what we evolved to do but under conditions for which our bodies are poorly adapted, and we then pass on those same conditions to our children, who also then get sick. If we wish to halt this vicious circle then we need to figure out how to respectfully and sensibly nudge, push, and sometimes oblige ourselves to eat foods that promote health and to be more physically active. That,

Do you ever run into the grocery store for two or three things, and walk out with twenty? Somewhere between the milk and bananas, you discover a cartful of things you didn’t realize you “needed!” Supermarkets are designed to promote impulse buying. High-margin, brightly packaged items are cleverly displayed to catch your eye and empty your wallet. Avoid the temptation by making a shopping list at home, and sticking to it when you get to the store. Instead

These are not sketches.” “They’re not?” Before Jenny could grab the bag back, Louisa extracted a sheaf of letters. “Oh, good. Some are written in German, and I do enjoy German. This one’s Italian, and there are several in French. This must be… I didn’t know Elijah had a grasp of Russian.” “He spent a year in St. Petersburg. Let me see those.” Louisa handed over one, the first one in French, and watched while Jenny translated. “Oh, that dear, dratted, man. That dear, dear…” Rather than listen to Jenny prattle on, Louisa translated another of the French missives. “These are letters of introduction. Your dear, dratted man has written you letters of introduction all over the Continent. This one is written in French but addressed to some Polish count. This one is to some fellow on Sicily. Will I ever see you again?” “There are ruins on Sicily. Greek, Roman, Norman… Beautiful ruins.” What that had to do with anything mattered little compared to the ruins Louisa beheld in her sister’s eyes. “Was he trying to send you away?” Jenny handed Louisa the letter, watching with a hungry gaze as Louisa tucked the epistles back into their traveling bag. “I didn’t ask Elijah for those letters, and I won’t use them.” “Why in blazes not?” Blazes was not quite profanity. When a woman became responsible for small children, her vocabulary learned all manner of detours. “Because he’ll never get into the Academy if he’s seen promoting the career of a woman in the arts. The Academy has been his goal and his dream for years, and he’s given up years of time among his family to pursue it. There’s unfortunate history between one of the committee members and Elijah’s mother, and it will obstruct Elijah’s path if he’s seen to further my artistic interests. I would not jeopardize Elijah’s happiness for anything.” Elijah.

Every day we get to choose our attitudes. We can determine to be happy and look on the bright side--expecting good things, and believing we will accomplish our dreams--or we can elect to be negative by focusing on our problems, dwelling on what didn’t work out, and living worried and discouraged. These are the choices we all can make. Nobody can force you to have a certain attitude. Life will go so much better if you simply decide to be positive. When you wake up, choose to be happy. That is the fourth undeniable quality of a winner. Choose to be grateful for the day. Choose to look on the bright side. Choose to focus on the possibilities. A good attitude does not automatically come. If you don’t choose it, then more than likely you’ll default to a negative mind-set, thinking: “I don’t feel like going to work. I’ve got so many obstacles. Nothing good is in my future.” A negative attitude will limit your life. We all face difficulties. We all have tough times, but the right attitude is, “This is not permanent, it’s only temporary. In the meantime I’m going to enjoy my life.” Maybe you didn’t get the promotion you worked hard for, or you didn’t qualify for that house you wanted. You could easily live with a sour attitude. Instead, you should think: “That’s all right. I know something better is coming.” If you become caught in traffic, think positively: “I’m not going to be stressed. I know I’m at the right place at the right time.” If your medical report wasn’t good, you can choose to think: “I’m not worried. This too shall pass.” If your dream is taking longer than you thought, you can choose to think: “I’m not discouraged. I know the right people, and the right opportunities are already in my future, and at the right time it will come to pass.

Studies show that enthusiastic people get better breaks. They’re promoted more often, have higher incomes, and live happier lives. That’s not a coincidence. The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek word entheos. Theos is a term for “God.” When you’re enthusiastic, you are full of God. When you get up in the morning excited about life, recognizing that each day is a gift, you are motivated to pursue your goals. You will have a favor and blessing that will cause you to succeed. The eight undeniable quality of a winner is that they stay passionate throughout their lives. Too many people have lost their enthusiasm. At one time they were excited about their futures and passionate about their dreams, but along the way they hit some setbacks. They didn’t get the promotions they wanted, maybe a relationship didn’t work out, or they had health issues. Something took the wind out of their sails. They’re just going through the motions of life; getting up, going to work, and coming home. God didn’t breathe His life into us so we would drag through the day. He didn’t create us in His image, crown us with His favor, and equip us with His power so that we would have no enthusiasm. You may have had some setbacks. The wind may have been taken out of your sails, but this is a new day. God is breathing new life into you. If you shake off the blahs and get your passion back, then the winds will start blowing once again--not against you, but for you. When you get in agreement with God, He will cause things to shift in your favor. On January 15, 2009, Capt. Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger successfully landed a jet airplane in the Hudson River after the plane’s engines were disabled by multiple bird strikes. Despite the dangers of a massive passenger plane landing in icy waters, all 155 passengers and crew members survived. It’s known as the “Miracle on the Hudson.” Just after the successful emergency landing and rescue, a reporter asked a middle-aged male passenger what he thought about surviving that frightening event. Although he was shaken up, cold and wet, the passenger had a glow on his face, and excitement in his voice when he replied: “I was alive before, but now I’m really alive.” After facing a life-and-death situation, the survivor found that his perspective had changed. He recognized each moment as a gift and decided that instead of just living, he would start really living.

You should focus on what you can change, not what you cannot change. What’s done is done. If somebody offended you, mistreated you, or disappointed you, the hurts can’t be undone. You can get bitter--pack it in a bag and carry it around and let it weigh you down--or you can forgive those who hurt you and go on. If you lost your temper yesterday, you can beat yourself up--put the guilt and condemnation in a bag--or you can ask for forgiveness, receive God’s mercy, and do better today. If you didn’t get a promotion you wanted, you can get sour and go around with a chip on your shoulder, or you can shake it off, knowing that God has something better in store. No matter what happens, big or small, if you make the choice to let it go and move forward, you won’t let the past poison your future. A woman I know went through a divorce years ago. We prayed several times in our services, asking God to bring a good man into her life. One day she met a fine Godly man, who was very successful. She was so happy, but she made the mistake of carrying all her negative baggage from her divorce into the new relationship. She was constantly talking about what she had been through and how she was so mistreated. She had a victim mentality. The man told me later that she was so focused on her past and so caught up in what she had been through that he just couldn’t deal with it. He moved on. That’s what happens when we hold on to the hurts and pains of the past. It will poison you wherever you go. You can’t drag around all the personal baggage from yesterday and expect to have good relationships. You’ve got to let it go. Quit looking at the little rearview mirror and start looking out the great big windshield in front of you. You may have had some bad breaks, but that didn’t stop God’s plan for your life. He still has amazing things in your future. When one door closes, stay in faith and God will open another door. If a dream dies, don’t sit around in self-pity talking about what you lost, move forward and dream another dream. Your life is not over because you lost a loved one, went through a divorce, lost a job, or didn’t get the house you wanted. You would not be alive unless God had another victory in front of you.

Are you facing giants today? Does your problem look too big? Do your dreams seem impossible? You need to get your staff out. Instead of going around discouraged, and thinking it’s never going to work out, start dwelling on your victories. Start thinking about how you killed the lion and bear in your own life. Start remembering how far God has brought you. Rehearse all the times He opened doors, gave you promotions, healed your family members, and put you in the right places with the right people. Don’t forget your victories. On a regular basis go back over your memorial stones, and read the victories etched on your staff. When those negative memories come up, they come to all of us--the things that didn’t work out, your hurts, your failures, and your disappointments. Many people mistakenly stay on that channel and they end up stuck in a negative rut and do not expect anything good. Remember, that’s not the only channel--get your remote control and switch over to the victory channel. Expect breakthroughs. Expect problems to turn around. Expect to rise to new levels. You haven’t seen your greatest victories. You haven’t accomplished your greatest dreams. There are new mountains to climb, new horizons to explore. Don’t let past disappointments steal your passion. Don’t let the way somebody treated you sour you on life. God is still in control. It may not have happened in the past, but it can happen in the future. Draw a line in the sand and say, “That’s it. I’m done with low expectations. I’m not settling for mediocrity. I expect favor, increase, and promotion. I expect blessings to chase me down. I expect this year to be my best so far.” If you raise your level of expectancy, God will take you places you’ve never dreamed. He’ll open doors no man can shut. He will help you overcome obstacles that looked insurmountable, and you will see His goodness in amazing ways.

David said in the Psalms: “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.” In the past you may have had disappointments and setbacks following you around, but you need to let go of what didn’t work out. Let go of every mistake, and let go of every failure. Expect goodness and mercy to follow you wherever you go. It’s good to look back sometimes and just say, “Hey, goodness. Hey, mercy. How are you doing back there?” Some people don’t realize that they’re always looking for the next disaster, looking for the next failure, or looking for the next bad break. Change what you’re looking for. Start looking for goodness, mercy, favor, increase, and promotion. That’s what should be following you around. One definition of hope is “happy anticipation of something good.” If you’re anticipating something good, it’s going to bring you joy. It will give you enthusiasm. When you’re expecting your dreams to come to pass, you’ll go out each day with a spring in your step. But if you’re not anticipating anything good, then you’ll drag through life with no passion. I don’t say this arrogantly, but I expect people to like me. Maybe I’m naïve, but if I am, do me a favor and leave me in my ignorance. When I go somewhere, I don’t have all these walls up. I’m not defensive, insecure, intimidated, or thinking, “They’re not going to like me. They’re probably talking about me right now.” I expect people to be friendly. I believe that when people turn on my television program they can’t turn me off. I think when people see my book in the stores they’ll be drawn to it. I’m talking about having an attitude of expecting good things. You need to get your expecter out. Maybe you haven’t used it for six years. You need to start expecting greater things. There are new mountains to climb, and new horizons to explore. Expect to rise higher. Expect to overcome every obstacle. Expect doors to open. Expect favor at work, favor at home, favor at the grocery store, and favor in your relationships.

Suddenly, as I watched the powerful dynamics of the ocean, I saw a young boy and his sister trying to make their way around the front of the superstructure. Like me, they wanted to get a better view. It was just then that an exceptionally large wave struck, bringing the water crashing over the anchor windlass and the foredeck. The force swept the children off their feet and towards the railing. My first thought was that they were about to be carried overboard, into this unforgiving ocean. Fortunately, they managed to hold fast onto the lower rung of the railing, as the bulk of the water washed over the side or ended up in the scuppers. As the ship started to lift itself from the ocean’s grip, I ran across the foredeck and grabbed both children with one arm. Feeling the ship begin its slide into another trough, I grabbed hold of a stanchion with my free hand. Once more, the vessel shuddered and lifted, trying to break free of the raging ocean. In this wild roller coaster ride, we were all soaked in the cold salt water that flooded around us, but I managed to hold fast. It seemed like an eternity that I lay there trying to prevent the three of us from being washed over the side. Braced against the fishplate, my leg steadied us until the next convulsion lifted us high above the ocean again. At the right moment, we all got up and ran. Slipping and sliding we ran down the sloping deck to the relative safety of the leeward side. The Deck Officer on the Bridge, who had the watch, saw what had happened and recommended me for a “Life Saving award.” I didn’t think that I deserved an award for what I had done, but nevertheless I received one on our return voyage. And when the crew learned what had happened, I was promoted in their estimation from a greenhorn kid, to one of them.

You should get more sleep," he remarked. "You won't need so many chemicals." She raised an eyebrow. "This from the man with half his bloodstream registered in the patent office." Jovellanos hadn't had her shots yet. She didn't need them in her current position, but she was too good at her job to stay where she was much longer. Desjardins looked forward to the day when her righteous stance on the Sanctity of Free Will went head-to-head against the legal prerequisites for promotion. She'd probably take one look at the list of perks and the new salary, and cave. He had, anyway.

Charlie Chaplin exploited frustrations and fears about rapidly growing automation to make people laugh. It’s ironic that IBM once used his tramp character as an implied advertising testimonial for computers, because Chaplin’s character didn’t promote machines—he ridiculed them.

We spend the first couple of decades of our lives trying to figure out who the hell we are. Some people never find out. They keep searching and searching and searching. Or they’ll be different people with everyone. Never any consistent presentation of who they are. But if we can realize by our mid-twenties who we are, we have to ask ourselves this question: Do we like who we are? If the answer is yes, then we should spend the rest of our lives maintaining who we are. If you think about it, it’s that maintenance of self that is constantly attacked, challenged, or compromised on a day-to-day basis—not just in the business, but in life. It’s what gives you the hills and the valleys. But if you can maintain who you are, then you become a magnet of consistency to which all the inconsistent elements spinning around in your little hemisphere are drawn. Those elements—the clients, people in the office, your family—want to know who they are. Your consistency can bring the same to their lives, and if it does, they’re going to want to stick with you. It worked for me. After nineteen months I was promoted to agent. As for the people who didn’t work hard, they were still in the mailroom. I was right and they were wrong. What I try to give to trainees today is an understanding of the business and what it means to have power. There are two kinds of power. Your primary power is your character and your integrity. Your secondary power is your learned skills: your people skills, what you do to make a living, what you learned in college, what you’ve learned in dealing with other people. You must, in order to be totally successful, have control of both sets of power. If I ask the question “What does it mean to be thoughtfully political?” the answer, other than “Being kind,” is “To think.” Think about what you want. Then think about the people who are going to help get it for you. Then be political and figure out how to make those people happy about giving you what you want. That’s what it’s always been about for me. If you can do that, you can do anything. That is the whole secret to Sam Haskell. I don’t believe in the pursuit of power. When it is earned and deserved, it’s just there. It’s just got to happen as the result of other actions that you take. Whatever power I have is only because I’ve lived my life the right way, I’ve worked hard, I’ve had character and integrity in everything I do.

If you complain, you will remain. You’ll stay right there. If you become negative and soured on life, you won’t pass the test. There was promotion available. There was opportunity for new growth, but because you didn’t count it all joy, you missed out. The good news is this: God will give you another opportunity. He can still take you where you need to be. For instance, when someone offends you, your attitude should be, I won’t be upset. I’ll count it all joy. I know this is simply a test, and on the other side of this challenge I’ll be promoted. When business is slow, instead of griping, count it all joy. Tell yourself, This, too, shall pass. I know God is supplying all of my needs. Or when you face a disappointment, your negative emotions will tell you to be down and discouraged. You’ll feel self-pity trying to set in. But instead of submitting to those negative emotions, encourage yourself: Get up. Be strong. There are good days up ahead. That’s how you pass the test. That’s how you count it all joy.

Lemat's agent says to him: y duty to you, first and foremost, is make sure you have a career, a prosperous one. I know authors always want to pander to their more artistic leanings, but this is a business after all. You have to do something to pay the bills so you can keep on writing. If you wanted to be an author just for the sake of expressing your thoughts, you could have done that by staying self-published, am I correct? but that's not what you wanted. That's not why you penned Killing Jesus. You wanted to get out there and swim in a bigger pond, didn't you? Well, here you are. Welcome to the blooming ocean.

My duty to you, first and foremost, is make sure you have a career, a prosperous one. I know authors always want to pander to their more artistic leanings, but this is a business after all. You have to do something to pay the bills so you can keep on writing. If you wanted to be an author just for the sake of expressing your thoughts, you could have done that by staying self-published, am I correct? but that's not what you wanted. That's not why you penned Killing Jesus. You wanted to get out there and swim in a bigger pond, didn't you? Well, here you are. Welcome to the blooming ocean.

Promoting that story—a story that fed not trust but resentment—had come to define the modern Republican Party. With varying degrees of subtlety and varying degrees of success, GOP candidates adopted it as their central theme, whether they were running for president or trying to get elected to the local school board. It became the template for Fox News and conservative radio, the foundational text for every think tank and PAC the Koch Brothers financed: The government was taking money, jobs, college slots, and status away from hardworking, deserving people like us and handing it all to people like them—those who didn’t share our values, who didn’t work as hard as we did, the kind of people whose problems were of their own making.

Throughout our days, we might tell ourselves that life will be better when we get that promotion, leave our job, lose weight, finish this project, win that award—when we finally arrive. But the truth is that we never arrive. Not when we get that job, complete that project, find a partner, move into that house, make more money. Because even when we do achieve such things, we are always looking to the next thing, or lamenting the inevitable plateau of a specific ambition.

I come from the lower orders, that is understood by all. Not the lowest; you’d have to go back to my grandfather for the lowest. He was a night-soil remover, did you know that, Sam? One shilling per stinking cesspit. Did you know that they set me to working with him when I was a boy? One summer I chucked it, ran to the countryside, hid in a hay mow. Farmer found me in the morning, took pity, let me stay. Let me work with him and his dogs, tending his sheep. It was bliss. I never loved anything like I loved them dogs. Then my father showed up and dragged me home. Why? He didn’t want me. “Never mind. You could say my father’s rise to running his own public house was nothing short of a miracle, really. And then I went and edged up a rung from him, didn’t I, when I became a constable. Promoted to detective. Then chief of detectives. Still and all, I got about as high as I could possibly go, given what I come from. And that ain’t particular high. Just ask Sir Richard Mayne, commissioner of the Metropolitan, if you’re unsure of that.” Llewellyn sighed deeply and shook his head. “You seem impatient, Mr. Llewellyn. Am I keeping you?” Field poured the last of the whiskey into his glass. “Now, forget my old man. Forget the night-soil remover. Start over. Say I come from a monkey. And so did you. And Commissioner Mayne—him, too.” He looked around the tavern. “And so did every bleeding body on the whole earth come from monkeys, and those monkeys come from God knows what—fish? Worms? Who benefits, Sam? Who gets hurt? Who likes it, and who don’t?” Llewellyn shrugged. “I’ll tell you who don’t like it: the merchants who run the bleeding empire don’t like it, not one bit. It puts every man on the same level as them, see? The rich, the poor, the light-skinned, and the dark. The bishops don’t like it, nor the lords, because if Mr. Darwin has his way, where’s the control? Who’s in charge, who’s on top and who’s not? Bad for business, Mr. Darwin’s notions are. But for blokes like me and you? Well, even a policeman can dream, can’t he? It’s not flattering, perhaps, having an orangutan as your forefather, but there’s a kind of hope in it, don’t you see? Last I checked, there weren’t no quality monkeys, nor were there lower-class ones.” “And?” “Crash, boom, Mr. Darwin brings it all down. Rule Britannia and the lot. Brings it down harder and more thorough than Mr. Marx ever dreamt in his darkest revolutionary dream.

God is about to let loose resources, promotion, ideas, and opportunities for you. Have a vision for increase. See yourself as a son rising higher. You have seeds of greatness. You are not limited by how you were raised, by your family, by what you didn’t get. You’re not a slave to lack. You’re not a slave to depression. You’re not a slave to fear. The oppressor has been defeated. Your days of struggle, your days of sickness, your days of loneliness are coming to an end. God is about to do a new thing. He’s going to break bondages that have held you back. Negative things that have been in your family line for generations are about to turn in your favor.

Then came a rather surreal exchange about Joy Division T-shirts, with us proudly proclaiming we did not sell merchandise because we didn’t believe in self-promotion of any kind, preferring to let the music speak for itself. ‘Rubbish,’ boomed Scotty. ‘How come wherever I go I see Joy Division and New Order T-shirts, worn and for sale, eh?’ Now, we had no idea where he was going to see these things, but we were all speechless anyway. He continued, ‘I don’t believe you, and will be fining you accordingly.’ So we would get fined £10,000 for not doing our own T-shirts.

49. Go To Fiji…Every Day! He needed to do ten days’ worth of work in one. Early the next morning, before the sun came up, Mark was awake and downstairs, getting ready for his monster mission to get through his to-do list. He made a quick cup of tea, did a couple of stretches, then hit his desk with huge energy and total focus. He had to get through this and get to Fiji, and he had to do it today. That morning he worked like he had never worked before: he didn’t dodge the hard tasks or just pick the fun ones. No, not that day. Mark started at the top and refused to move on to the next item until each task was done, completed, filed and closed. He was like a rhino, attacking that list head-on with purpose. He had a holiday to go on. Any obstacle he came across on his list, he put his rhino horn down and charged through it, never taking no for an answer until he got the result he needed. By lunchtime he was halfway through his monster work pile. He was so focused he forgot about lunch, and by 4 p.m. he had completed everything. Done. He leant back and let out a big sigh of satisfaction, amazed at how he had managed to do two weeks’ worth of work in less than a day. One thought crossed his mind as he sat there enjoying the fruits of his hard work, and it changed everything for Mark from that day on… ‘Imagine if I had to go to Fiji every day!’ Imagine how much we could all do, how many goals we could charge down, people we could help, adventures we could have and promotions would be ours…if we could just set about them all with that Fiji attitude. That’s why I often say to myself when I have a lot on: It’s time to go to Fiji!

And colored people didn’t just get promoted to white. Sometimes colored people became Indian. Sometimes Indian people became colored. Sometimes blacks were promoted to colored, and sometimes coloreds were demoted to black. And of course whites could be demoted to colored as well. That was key. Those mixed bloodlines were always lurking, waiting to peek out, and fear of losing their status kept white people in line.

A few intermittent pounds were hardly enough, however, and – reluctantly – the comrades soon found themselves looking for jobs. It was the first and last time Eno would be driven to this unconscionable extreme. Eschewing his more outrageous garments and armed with his diploma, he wandered into the Camberwell Labour Exchange in the late summer and found himself a placement as an assistant paste-up artist with a local advertising free-sheet called the South Londoner. As he confessed to Lester Bangs, Eno took to the work surprisingly easily: ‘I didn’t hate it. I became very successful at it. I started off at the bottom, doing a very menial job, and in the four months I was there I got promoted again and again and again, and I ended up earning four or five times as much as I’d started with, and sort of running the office. And then I realized that I could carry on doing that and never do anything else, because I wasn’t doing anything else.’ The ‘anything else’ Eno was failing to do was music: ‘I kept saying to myself, “Oh well, I’ll do some music this weekend”, and then I wouldn’t, I’d be too tired and I’d say, “Oh, I’ll do it next weekend”, and then I wouldn’t do it, so I just gave it up after a while. It was exactly what I knew a job would be like – not horrible enough to make you want to get out, just well paying enough to make you comfortable and to keep putting things off.

NOT MANY PEOPLE think that their state of mind is a matter of choice. But I believe it is. Unfortunately, major branches of psychology and psychiatry during this century have helped promote the notion that we are all in some sense victims—victims of insensitive parents, victims of poverty, victims of abuse, victims of implacable genes. Our state of mind, therefore, is someone else’s responsibility. This kind of psychology is very appealing to many academics. It gives them endless opportunities to pretend they know what makes an individual miserable and unsuccessful. It appeals as well to a lot of unhappy people. It gives them an excuse for their misery. It permits them to evade the responsibility for their own lives. But I didn’t get into psychology through the normal academic route.

I agree with you. I can't do this anymore either." She stiffened against him and made to turn around, but he stopped her. "I owe you an apology," he began quietly. "I'm sorry I made you feel like you couldn't trust me. I know you have no reason to, not with my track record, but I want you to know you can. When I met you, my whole life changed. If I could, I would go back and tell you the truth about everything - my name, Erin, all of it. I had no idea you were going to be.. the one." This time when she tried to sit up, Josh didn't stop her. "What?" she asked with trembling lips. "You're the one, Nicole," he said softly, his eyes meeting hers. "When I woke up the next morning and you were gone. I went crazy trying to find you. I didn't even know where to begin to look And then, last month, when I came to your house? I couldn't believe my good fortune. I was getting a second chance. I should have been honest with you that first night when I came back and told you I loved you. I had been looking for you. Waiting for you. There is no other woman for me, Nicole. Not now. Not ever. It's you." Her eyes welled with tears. "I don't know how to believe you." The honest admission hurt for her to even say, and when she saw understanding in his eyes, she felt her first glimmer of hope. Taking her hands in his, he pulled her close. "Let me what I've been up to." he began. "First those meetings in RTP? Those were with real estate agents. I'm moving my business here." "But what about--?" "Shh," he interrupted. "After we spoke Monday night, I sort of went a little crazy. I knew I had already gotten the ball rolling with moving the business but I knew it wasn't enough. So I did a little restructuring and promoted two of my guys. They'll be handling most of the traveling from now on. I may still have to go to a job site from time to time, but if I do then I want you and Ellie with me." "Josh, that wasn't--" "Hear me out." He placed one finger on her lips. "I'd like to keep the house in Wilmington because it's right on the beach and I'd love for us to have a place to go just to get away, but if you'd like to pick one of your own, I can sell it." "What are you saying?" He smiled as he leaned forward and placed a gentle kiss on her forehead. "What I'm saying is I love you. I want a life with you. I want to be there every day for you and Ellie. I want us to have more babies, and I want to be there to see them grow. I love you Nicole." "Oh my..." "I didn't plan on doing this today," he said as he shifted and dropped to one knee on the floor in front of her. "And I don't have your ring with me; it's back at David's." He winked. "But, Nicole Taylor, I want you to be my wife. I love you, and i want to spend every day of my life with you. Will you marry me?" "I knew everything I needed to know about you three years ago. Coming here and finding you again and seeing the way you have loved and cared for our daughter? That just confirmed it all. You are everything I've ever wanted, all I ever needed." "Me?" she mouthed, unable to speak. He nodded. "Always.

As a leader, you should want those around you to be eager to rise up and take on more responsibility, as long as dreaming about the job they want doesn’t distract them from the job they have. You can’t let ambition get too far ahead of opportunity. I’ve seen a lot of people who had their sights set on a particular job or project, but the opportunity to actually get that thing was so slim. Their focus on the small thing in the distance became a problem. They grew impatient with where they were. They didn’t tend enough to the responsibilities they did have, because they were longing so much for something else, and so their ambition became counterproductive. It’s important to know how to find the balance—do the job you have well; be patient; look for opportunities to pitch in and expand and grow; and make yourself one of the people, through attitude and energy and focus, that your bosses feel they have to turn to when an opportunity arises. Conversely, if you’re a boss, these are the people to nurture—not the ones who are clamoring for promotions and complaining about not being utilized enough but the ones who are proving themselves to be indispensable day in and day out.

Three Best Ways to Start a Speech The third best way to start a speech is by using an ‘imagine’ scenario. ‘Imagine a big explosion as you climb up 3000 ft. Imagine a plane full of smoke. Imagine an engine going clack, clack, clack. It sounds scary. Well, I had a unique seat that day. I was sitting on 1D.’ This is how Ric Elias started his TED talk—‘3 Things I Learned While My Plane Crashed’1—on the Hudson river landing. This true story was captured in an award-winning film, Sully, starring Tom Hanks. The second is to start with a statistic or factoid that shocks. Jamie Oliver, a British celebrity chef, restauranteur and activist who promotes healthy eating among children, started his TED Talk—‘Teach Every Child about Food’2—with ‘Sadly, in the next eighteen minutes when I do our chat, four Americans that are alive will be dead through the food that they eat.’ Given that the audience here was mainly American, there is no way that it didn’t get their attention. The absolutely best way to start a speech—no points for guessing—is with a story, one that is inextricably linked with the topic you are speaking on. ‘I was only four years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the very first time in her life. That was a great day for her. My mother and father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine

Did you ever tell your previous employer any of your thoughts on ways they could improve?” If he says “Yes, but they never listened to anyone,” or “Yeah, but they just said ‘Mind your own business,’” this may tell more about the style of his approach than about managers at his last job. Most employers react well to suggestions that are offered in a constructive way, regardless of whether or not they follow them. Another unfavorable response is, “What’s the use of making suggestions? Nothing ever changes anyway.” Some applicants will accuse former employers of stealing their ideas. Others will tell war stories about efforts to get a former employer to follow suggestions. If so, ask if this was a one-man undertaking or in concert with his coworkers. Sometimes an applicant will say his co-workers “didn’t have the guts to confront management like I did.” “What are some of the things your last employer could have done to keep you?” Some applicants will give a reasonable answer (slightly more pay, better schedule, etc.), but others will provide a list of demands that demonstrate unreasonable expectations (e.g., “They could have doubled my salary, promoted me to vice president, and given me Fridays off”). “How do you go about solving problems at work?” Good answers are that he consults with others, weighs all points of view, discusses them with involved parties, etc. Unfavorable answers contain a theme of confrontation (e.g., “I tell the source of the problem he’d better straighten up,” or “I go right to the man in charge and lay it on the line”). Another bad answer is that he does nothing to resolve problems, saying, “Nothing ever changes anyway.” “Describe a problem you had in your life where someone else’s help was very important to you.” Is he able to recall such a situation? If so, does he give credit or express appreciation about the help? “Who is your best friend and how would you describe your friendship?” Believe it or not, there are plenty of people who cannot come up with a single name in response to this question. If they give a name that was not listed as a reference, ask why. Then ask if you can call that friend as a reference.

Our publicist, Andrew Bernstein, gave Steve one of his favorite compliments. “I’ve never seen anybody promote a movie harder,” he said, “except maybe Tom Cruise.” Steve and Andrew hit it off quite well, but Steve was concerned that Andrew was single and didn’t have a girlfriend. “Come out with me,” Steve said to Andrew one evening on the plane. “We can go clubbing, and I’ll make sure you have a great time.” Steve added with a laugh, “You know, Andrew, for some reason chicks really dig me. I don’t know why, since I’m such a big ugly bloke, but they will come up and talk to me. Mate, I can pull you chicks, no problem at all.” “Steve,” Andrew said as gently as he could, “I like women, but I don’t like women.” “Oh, don’t worry about it,” Steve blustered on, still not getting it. “We’ll have a great time.” Andrew got up to use the restroom on the plane. I leaned over to Steve. “Andrew is trying to tell you that he’s gay,” I said. Steve’s eyes got really big. As soon as Andrew stepped out of the restroom, Steve piped up, “Andrew, don’t worry about it, blokes love me. We’ll go out and I’ll get you blokes.” I just about died from embarrassment. But Andrew laughed, and then we all started laughing. Andrew and Steve ended up becoming fast friends.