Drawing Competition Quotes

Desire is both imitative (we like what others like) and competitive (we want to take away from others what they have). As children, we wanted to monopolize the attention of a parent, to draw it away from other siblings. This sense of rivalry... makes people compete for the attention.

Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.

Peeta,” I say lightly. “You said at the interview you’d had a crush on me forever. When did forever start?” “Oh, let’s see. I guess the first day of school. We were five. You had on a red plaid dress and your hair... it was in two braids instead of one. My father pointed you out when we were waiting to line up,” Peeta says. “Your father? Why?” I ask. “He said, ‘See that little girl? I wanted to marry her mother, but she ran off with a coal miner,’” Peeta says. “What? You’re making that up!” I exclaim. “No, true story,” Peeta says. “And I said, ‘A coal miner? Why did she want a coal miner if she could’ve had you?’ And he said, ‘Because when he sings... even the birds stop to listen.’” “That’s true. They do. I mean, they did,” I say. I’m stunned and surprisingly moved, thinking of the baker telling this to Peeta. It strikes me that my own reluctance to sing, my own dismissal of music might not really be that I think it’s a waste of time. It might be because it reminds me too much of my father. “So that day, in music assembly, the teacher asked who knew the valley song. Your hand shot right up in the air. She stood you up on a stool and had you sing it for us. And I swear, every bird outside the windows fell silent,” Peeta says. “Oh, please,” I say, laughing. “No, it happened. And right when your song ended, I knew—just like your mother—I was a goner,” Peeta says. “Then for the next eleven years, I tried to work up the nerve to talk to you.” “Without success,” I add. “Without success. So, in a way, my name being drawn in the reaping was a real piece of luck,” says Peeta. For a moment, I’m almost foolishly happy and then confusion sweeps over me. Because we’re supposed to be making up this stuff, playing at being in love not actually being in love. But Peeta’s story has a ring of truth to it. That part about my father and the birds. And I did sing the first day of school, although I don’t remember the song. And that red plaid dress... there was one, a hand-me-down to Prim that got washed to rags after my father’s death. It would explain another thing, too. Why Peeta took a beating to give me the bread on that awful hollow day. So, if those details are true... could it all be true? “You have a... remarkable memory,” I say haltingly. “I remember everything about you,” says Peeta, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “You’re the one who wasn’t paying attention.” “I am now,” I say. “Well, I don’t have much competition here,” he says. I want to draw away, to close those shutters again, but I know I can’t. It’s as if I can hear Haymitch whispering in my ear, “Say it! Say it!” I swallow hard and get the words out. “You don’t have much competition anywhere.” And this time, it’s me who leans in.

Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives. To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates. 'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic. They've served their purpose. Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.

I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on. I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives -- maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of anything and so on. That's what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions. The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tapdances on the coffee table like Fred Astair or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an 'exhibitionist.' How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, 'Wow! Were you ever _drunk_ last night!

Metalearning: First Draw a Map. Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle. Discover how to do good research and how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills more easily.

In the tenth century BC, the priests of India devised the Brahmodya competition, which would become a model of authentic theological discourse. The object was to find a verbal formula to define the Brahman, the ultimate and inexpressible reality beyond human understanding. The idea was to push language as far as it would go, until participants became aware of the ineffable. The challenger, drawing on his immense erudition, began the process by asking an enigmatic question and his opponents had to reply in a way that was apt but equally inscrutable. The winner was the contestant who reduced the others to silence. In that moment of silence, the Brahman was present - not in the ingenious verbal declarations but in the stunning realisation of the impotence of speech. Nearly all religious traditions have devised their own versions of this exercise. It was not a frustrating experience; the finale can, perhaps, be compared to the moment at the end of the symphony, when there is a full and pregnant beat of silence in the concert hall before the applause begins. The aim of good theology is to help the audience to live for a while in that silence.

We've already seen the attention merchant's basic modus operandi: draw attention with apparently free stuff and then resell it. but a consequence of that model is a total dependence on gaining and holding attention. This means that under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our ''automatic'' attention as opposed to our ''controlled'' attention, the kind we direct with intent. The race to a bottomless bottom, appealing to what one might call the audience's baser instincts, poses a fundamental, continual dilemma for the attention merchant-just how far will he go to get his harvest? If the history of attention capture teaches us anything, it is that the limits are often theoretical, and when real, rarely self-imposed.

Drawing a strategy canvas is never easy. Even identifying the key factors of competition is far from straightforward. As you will see, the final list is usually very different from the first draft

Often when working with others, different ideas are put forward and end up in competition. Based on experience, we may believe we can see what each person is imagining and what the result will be. It’s impossible, though, to know exactly what someone else is thinking. And if we can’t predict how our own ideas will work—and we can’t!—how can we draw conclusions about what someone else imagines?

The problem with romance is the occlusion. The tunnel vision, drawing your every gaze downstream, into those other eyes, the flotsam of your better self, your clearer self, along for the ride. It doesn't matter what secrets swirl and bob in the waters beneath you, as you float toward that lady at Delphi, who, you imagined, reading Mythology, must have been beautiful. It doesn't matter that Charybdis, with no body, with no form, with only a mouth-as-being, couldn't have been evil, because she lacked the brain for it. It doesn't matter that following the logical course of events, the natural course, always disadvantages someone else, because love, after all, is simply a competition for resources, made infinitely complex and unknowable when squared and cubed and raised to every other emotional exponent - and then layered with sex and society and a bad memory for what those resources were in the first place.

I was not concerned about the dancing—I was confident that I could draw on my experience from preparing for martial arts competitions, with the supplementary advantage of an optimum intake of alcohol, which for martial arts is not permitted.

Do you believe in a system where we draw lines to disenfranchise voters?’ Ask that question of the American people and the answer would be overwhelmingly no,” Lessig says. “This is not a theoretical problem! If you’re in one of these districts and you’re in the minority, you have no reason to be part of this democracy. Why would you? The democracy just doesn’t work. We have a country where there are ten states that are competitive in presidential elections. There are a few dozen seats where Congress is competitive. We have all these structures for making the voter irrelevant in the vast majority of America. Why would we do that?

That we can prescribe the terms of our own success, that we can live outside or in ignorance of the Great Economy are the greatest errors. They condemn us to a life without a standard, wavering in inescapable bewilderment from paltry self-satisfaction to paltry self-dissatisfaction. But since we have no place to live but in the Great Economy, whether or not we know that and act accordingly is the critical question, not about economy merely, but about human life itself. It is possible to make a little economy, such as our present one, that is so short-sighted and in which accounting is of so short a term as to give the impression that vices are necessary and practically justifiable. When we make our economy a little wheel turning in opposition to what we call “nature,” then we set up competitiveness as the ruling principle in our explanation of reality and in our understanding of economy; we make of it, willy-nilly, a virtue. But competitiveness, as a ruling principle and a virtue, imposes a logic that is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to control. That logic explains why our cars and our clothes are shoddily made, why our “wastes” are toxic, and why our “defensive” weapons are suicidal; it explains why it is so difficult for us to draw a line between “free enterprise” and crime. If our economic ideal is maximum profit with minimum responsibility, why should we be surprised to find our corporations so frequently in court and robbery on the increase? Why should we be surprised to find that medicine has become an exploitive industry, profitable in direct proportion to its hurry and its mechanical indifference? People who pay for shoddy products or careless services and people who are robbed outright are equally victims of theft, the only difference being that the robbers outright are not guilty of fraud.

Q:What is the proletariat? A:The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the 19th century

The unified field theory that best fits the currently known facts is what I call the “theory of competitive control.” This is the notion that nonstate armed groups, of many kinds, draw their strength and freedom of action primarily from their ability to manipulate and mobilize populations, and that they do this using a spectrum of methods from coercion to persuasion, by creating a normative system that makes people feel safe through the predictability and order that it generates.

There was a middle way between capitalism and socialism. ‘I do not want to see impaired the vigour of competition,’ Churchill told his Glasgow audience, ‘but we can do much to mitigate the consequences of failure. We want to draw a line below which we will not allow persons to live and labour, yet above which they may compete with all the strength of their manhood. We want to have free competition upwards; we decline to allow free competition to run downwards. We do not want to pull down the structures of science and civilisation; but to spread a net over the abyss.

Are your conversations a competition in which “the first person to draw breath is declared the listener"? Not many people are good listeners. Research has found that "75 percent of oral communication is ignored, misunderstood, or quickly forgotten." There is a huge difference between merely hearing and listening, Bolton notes. The word "listening" is derived from two Anglo Saxon words, hlystan ("hearing") and hlosnian ("waiting in suspense"). The act of listening therefore means more than just something physical, it is a psychological engagement with another person (p. 34).

I won’t dwell on other glamorous businesses that dramatically changed our lives but concurrently failed to deliver rewards to U.S. investors: the manufacture of radios and televisions, for example. But I will draw a lesson from these businesses: The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. The products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.

Competitive rowing is an undertaking of extraordinary beauty preceded by brutal punishment. Unlike most sports, which draw primarily on particular muscle groups, rowing makes heavy and repeated use of virtually every muscle in the body, despite the fact that a rower, as Al Ulbrickson liked to put it, “scrimmages on his posterior annex.” And rowing makes these muscular demands not at odd intervals but in rapid sequence, over a protracted period of time, repeatedly and without respite. On one occasion, after watching the Washington freshmen practice, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Royal Brougham marveled at the relentlessness of the

The relationship between the Sophotechs and the men as depicted in that tale made no sense. How could they be hostile to each other?” Diomedes said, “Aren’t men right to fear machines which can perform all tasks men can do, artistic, intellectual, technical, a thousand or a million times better than they can do? Men become redundant.” Phaethon shook his head, a look of distant distaste on his features, as if he were once again confronted with a falsehood that would not die no matter how often it was denounced. In a voice of painstaking patience, he said: “Efficiency does not harm the inefficient. Quite the opposite. That is simply not the way it works. Take me, for example. Look around: I employed partials to do the thought-box junction spotting when I built this ship. My employees were not as skilled as I was in junction spotting. It took them three hours to do the robopsychology checks and hierarchy links I could have done in one hour. But they were in no danger of competition from me. My time is too valuable. In that same hour it would have taken me to spot their thought-box junction, I can earn far more than their three-hour wages by writing supervision architecture thought flows. And it’s the same with me and the Sophotechs. “Any midlevel Sophotech could have written in one second the architecture it takes me, even with my implants, an hour to compose. But if, in that same one second of time, that Sophotech can produce something more valuable—exploring the depth of abstract mathematics, or inventing a new scientific miracle, anything at all (provided that it will earn more in that second than I earn in an hour)—then the competition is not making me redundant. The Sophotech still needs me and receives the benefit of my labor. Since I am going to get the benefit of every new invention and new miracle put out on the market, I want to free up as many of those seconds of Sophotech time as my humble labor can do. “And I get the lion’s share of the benefit from the swap. I only save him a second of time; he creates wonder upon wonder for me. No matter what my fear of or distaste for Sophotechs, the forces in the marketplace, our need for each other, draw us together. “So you see why I say that not a thing the Silent One said about Sophotechs made sense. I do not understand how they could have afforded to hate each other. Machines don’t make us redundant; they increase our efficiency in every way. And the bids of workers eager to compete for Sophotech time creates a market for merely human work, which it would not be efficient for Sophotechs to underbid.

Words pack power and these definitions are laden with values, often wildly idiosyncratic ones. Here’s an example, namely the ways I think about the word “competition”: (a) “competition”—your lab team races the Cambridge group to a discovery (exhilarating but embarrassing to admit to); (b) “competition”—playing pickup soccer (fine, as long as the best player shifts sides if the score becomes lopsided); (c) “competition”—your child’s teacher announces a prize for the best outlining-your-fingers Thanksgiving turkey drawing (silly and perhaps a red flag—if it keeps happening, maybe complain to the principal); (d) “competition”—whose deity is more worth killing for? (try to avoid).

Low inhibition and anxiety “There was no fear, no worry, no sense of reputation and competition, no envy, none of these things which in varying degrees have always been present in my work.” “A lowered sense of personal danger; I don’t feel threatened anymore, and there is no feeling of my reputation being at stake.” “Although doing well on these problems would be fine, failure to get ahead on them would have been threatening. However, as it turned out, on this afternoon the normal blocks in the way of progress seemed to be absent.” 2. Capacity to restructure problem in a larger context “Looking at the same problem with [psychedelic] materials, I was able to consider it in a much more basic way, because I could form and keep in mind a much broader picture.” “I could handle two or three different ideas at the same time and keep track of each.” “Normally I would overlook many more trivial points for the sake of expediency, but under the drug, time seemed unimportant. I faced every possible questionable issue square in the face.” “Ability to start from the broadest general basis in the beginning.” “I returned to the original problem…. I tried, I think consciously, to think of the problem in its totality, rather than through the devices I had used before.” 3. Enhanced fluency and flexibility of ideation “I began to work fast, almost feverishly, to keep up with the flow of ideas.” “I began to draw …my senses could not keep up with my images …my hand was not fast enough …my eyes were not keen enough…. I was impatient to record the picture (it has not faded one particle). I worked at a pace I would not have thought I was capable of.” “I was very impressed with the ease with which ideas appeared (it was virtually as if the world is made of ideas, and so it is only necessary to examine any part of the world to get an idea). I also got the feeling that creativity is an active process in which you limit yourself and have an objective, so there is a focus about which ideas can cluster and relate.” “I dismissed the original idea entirely, and started to approach the graphic problem in a radically different way. That was when things started to happen. All kinds of different possibilities came to mind….” “And the feeling during this period of profuse production was one of joy and exuberance…. It was the pure fun of doing, inventing, creating, and playing.

Metalearning: First Draw a Map. Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle. Discover how to do good research and how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills more easily. Focus: Sharpen Your Knife. Cultivate the ability to concentrate. Carve out chunks of time when you can focus on learning, and make it easy to just do it. Directness: Go Straight Ahead. Learn by doing the thing you want to become good at. Don’t trade it off for other tasks, just because those are more convenient or comfortable. Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point. Be ruthless in improving your weakest points. Break down complex skills into small parts; then master those parts and build them back together again. Retrieval: Test to Learn. Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating it. Test yourself before you feel confident, and push yourself to actively recall information rather than passively review it. Feedback: Don’t Dodge the Punches. Feedback is harsh and uncomfortable. Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way. Extract the signal from the noise, so you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket. Understand what you forget and why. Learn to remember things not just for now but forever. Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up. Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts and skills. Understand how understanding works, and don’t recourse to cheap tricks of memorization to avoid deeply knowing things. Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone. All of these principles are only starting points. True mastery comes not just from following the path trodden by others but from exploring possibilities they haven’t yet imagined.

Organized religion, to the Third Reich, was in direct competition with serving Germany, for who could pledge an equal allegiance to both the Führer and God? Instead of celebrating Christmas, for example, they celebrated the Winter Solstice. However, no child really chooses his religion; it is just the luck of the draw which blanket of beliefs you are wrapped in. When you are too young to think for yourself, you are baptized and taken to church and droned at by a priest and told that Jesus died for your sins, and since your parents nod and say this is true, why should you not believe them? Much the same was the message we were given by Herr Sollemach and the others who taught us. What is bad is harmful, we were told. What is good is useful. It truly was that simple. When our teachers would put a caricature of a Jew on the board for us to see, pointing at the traits that were associated with inferior species, we trusted them. They were our elders, surely they knew best? Which child does not want his country to be the best, the biggest, the strongest in the world?

Imagine, for instance, that all of Washington’s 100,000 lobbyists were to go on strike tomorrow.3 Or that every tax accountant in Manhattan decided to stay home. It seems unlikely the mayor would announce a state of emergency. In fact, it’s unlikely that either of these scenarios would do much damage. A strike by, say, social media consultants, telemarketers, or high-frequency traders might never even make the news at all. When it comes to garbage collectors, though, it’s different. Any way you look at it, they do a job we can’t do without. And the harsh truth is that an increasing number of people do jobs that we can do just fine without. Were they to suddenly stop working the world wouldn’t get any poorer, uglier, or in any way worse. Take the slick Wall Street traders who line their pockets at the expense of another retirement fund. Take the shrewd lawyers who can draw a corporate lawsuit out until the end of days. Or take the brilliant ad writer who pens the slogan of the year and puts the competition right out of business. Instead of creating wealth, these jobs mostly just shift it around.

Different form, same function. Many companies that create blue oceans attract customers from other industries who use a product or service that performs the same function or bears the same core utility as the new one but takes a very different physical form. In the case of Ford’s Model T, Ford looked to the horse-drawn carriage. The horse-drawn carriage had the same core utility as the car: transportation for individuals and families. But it had a very different form: a live animal versus a machine. Ford effectively converted the majority of noncustomers of the auto industry, namely customers of horse-drawn carriages, into customers of its own blue ocean by pricing its Model T against horse-drawn carriages and not the cars of other automakers. In the case of the school lunch catering industry, raising this question led to an interesting insight. Suddenly those parents who make their children’s lunches came into the equation. For many children, parents had the same function: making their child’s lunch. But they had a very different form: mom or dad versus a lunch line in the cafeteria. Different form and function, same objective. Some companies lure customers from even further away. Cirque du Soleil, for example, has diverted customers from a wide range of evening activities. Its growth came in part through drawing people away from other activities that differed in both form and function. For example, bars and restaurants have few physical features in common with a circus. They also serve a distinct function by providing conversational and gastronomical pleasure, a very different experience from the visual entertainment that a circus offers. Yet despite these differences in form and function, people have the same objective in undertaking these three activities: to enjoy a night out.

Come on, lovey, open up. These buckets is heavy.” The plea accompanied another tapping. “Patience, Molly.” Christopher paused for a brief moment, gathering the towel about him again. Then his muscles flexed, and if she had found the breath, Erienne would have shrieked as he lifted her and dumped her onto the bed. She half raised with her mouth open to hotly voice her objection to whatever he had in mind, but he flung the bedcovers over her head, squelching comment. “Lie still.” His whisper bore a tone of command that could prompt immediate obedience from even the most reluctant. Erienne froze, and with a smile Christopher reached across to turn down the other side of the bed to make it seem as if he had just left it. Frantic visions involving her possible fate flew through Erienne’s mind. She considered the horrible humiliation she would suffer if she were discovered in the man’s bed. Her fears burgeoned, her rage peaked, and she threw back the covers, intending to escape the trap he laid for her. In the next brief second she caught her breath sharply and snatched the covers back over her head again, for the sight of him standing stark naked beside the chair where his clothes were draped was too much for her virgin eyes to bear. It had been no more than a glimpse, but the vision of his tall, tanned, wide-shouldered form bathed in the pinkish light of the rising sun was forever branded in her brain. Christopher chuckled softly as Erienne curled into the bed and finally obeyed his warning. He slipped on his breeches, secured them, and moved across the room to unlock the door. Molly knew her trade and her competition, and the village of Mawbry suited her well, since there was an absolute lack of the latter. When Christopher opened the portal, she was through it in a trice and shrugging out of the yoke that bore the pails. Pressing herself tightly against the male form, she rubbed her fingers through the hair on his chest and fluttered her lashes. “Oh, lovey, ye are a wondrous sight for any girl to behold.” “I’ve already told you, Molly. I have no need of yer services,” Christopher stated bluntly. “I only want the water.” “Ah, come now, lovey,” she crooned. “I knows ye’ve been away ter sea and needs a li’l tussle in bed. Why, with such a man as yerself, I’d be more’n willin’ ter give ye all ye need without a hint o’ a coin.” Christopher swept his hand toward the mentioned furnishing, drawing the maid’s eyes to it. “I already have all I desire. Now be along with you.” Molly’s dark eyes widened in surprise as she turned to stare at the bed. Unable to mistake the curvaceous form hidden beneath the quilt, she straightened indignantly and with a swish of her skirts was gone from the room, slamming the door behind her. Erienne waited, not daring to come out from beneath the covering until Christopher tapped her on the shoulder. “ ’Tis safe now. You can come out.” “Are you dressed?” she asked cautiously, her voice muffled beneath the covers. Christopher chuckled. “I’ve got my breeches on, if that’s what you’re worried about." -Molly, Christopher, & Erienne

We chose not to discuss a world warmed beyond two degrees out of decency, perhaps; or simple fear; or fear of fearmongering; or technocratic faith, which is really market faith; or deference to partisan debates or even partisan priorities; or skepticism about the environmental Left of the kind I'd always had; or disinterest in the fates of distant ecosystems like I'd also always had. We felt confusion about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers, or at least an intuition that others would e easily confused about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers. we suffered from slowness apprehending the speed of change, or semi-conspiratorial confidence in the responsibility of global elites and their institutions, or obeisance toward those elites and their institutions, whatever we thought of them. Perhaps we felt unable to really trust scarier projections because we'd only just heard about warming, we thought, and things couldn't possibly have gotten that much worse just since the first Inconvenient Truth; or because we liked driving our cars and eating our beef and living as we did in every other way and didn't want to think too hard about that; or because we felt so "postindustrial" we couldn't believe we were still drawing material breaths from fossil fuel furnaces. Perhaps it was because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted "normal," or because we looked outside and things seemed still okay. Because we were bored with writing, or reading, the same story again and again, because climate was so global and therefore nontribal it suggested only the corniest politics, because we didn't yet appreciate how fully it would ravage our lives, and because, selfishly, we didn't mind destroying the planet for others living elsewhere on it or those not yet born who would inherit it from us, outraged. Because we had too much faith in the teleological shape of history and the arrow of human progress to countenance the idea that the arc of history would bend toward anything but environmental justice, too. Because when we were being really honest with ourselves we already thought of the world as a zero-sum resource competition and believed that whatever happened we were probably going to continue to be the victors, relatively speaking anyway, advantages of class being what they are and our own luck in the natalist lottery being what it was. Perhaps we were too panicked about our own jobs and industries to fret about the future of jobs and industry; or perhaps we were also really afraid of robots or were too busy looking at our new phones; or perhaps, however easy we found the apocalypse reflex in our culture and the path of panic in our politics, we truly had a good-news bias when it came to the big picture; or, really, who knows why-there are so many aspects to the climate kaleidoscope that transforms our intuitions about environmental devastation into n uncanny complacency that it can be hard to pull the whole picture of climate distortion into focus. But we simply wouldn't, or couldn't, or anyway didn't look squarely in the face of science.

The game is a thread, microscopic in breadth, a hint of gossamer drawing unsuspecting souls together in simple competition to the exclusion of all else, from a mother and her infant playing peekaboo to two old men hunched over a chessboard and everything in between. The game unifies, joining father and son pitching baseballs at night after a long day at the office, pitches pounding the mitt or skipping past, one time even knocking the coffee cup handle clean off and the boy scampering off to retrieve a wild one as the dad sips and ponders. The game allows brothers to bond even when the age gap is too great for real competition, their mutual effort to fashion a bridge between disparate age and ability forming a bond of trust and respect. And finally, it is the game’s presence and past and its memory that inspires each of us to forgive time and aging and their inevitable accompanying attrition because the gray and hobbled old man before me was once lean and powerful and magnificent and some of what became of him was due to the investment he made in me and after all the batting practice he threw and grounders he hit, his shoulder aches and his knees need replacement. Even though youth masks it so you don't realize it all when you’re a kid, someday it happens to you and suddenly you realize you are him and you are left wishing you could go back and tell him what you now know and perhaps thank him for what he gave up. You imagine him back then receiving nothing in return except the knowledge that you would someday understand but he could not hasten that day or that revelation and he abided it all so graciously knowing that your realization might be too late for him. So you console yourself that in the absence of your gratitude he clung to hope and conviction and the future. Turn the page and you find yourself staring out at the new generation and you wince as his pitches bruise your palm and crack your thumb and realize that today the game is growth and achievement and tomorrow it will be love and memories. The game is a gift.

Draw a line in the sand As you get going, keep in mind why you’re doing what you’re doing. Great businesses have a point of view, not just a product or service. You have to believe in something. You need to have a backbone. You need to know what you’re willing to fight for. And then you need to show the world. A strong stand is how you attract superfans. They point to you and defend you. And they spread the word further, wider, and more passionately than any advertising could. Strong opinions aren’t free. You’ll turn some people off. They’ll accuse you of being arrogant and aloof. That’s life. For everyone who loves you, there will be others who hate you. If no one’s upset by what you’re saying, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. (And you’re probably boring, too.) Lots of people hate us because our products do less than the competition’s. They’re insulted when we refuse to include their pet feature. But we’re just as proud of what our products don’t do as we are of what they do. We design them to be simple because we believe most software is too complex: too many features, too many buttons, too much confusion. So we build software that’s the opposite of that. If what we make isn’t right for everyone, that’s OK. We’re willing to lose some customers if it means that others love our products intensely. That’s our line in the sand. When you don’t know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious. For example, Whole Foods stands for selling the highest quality natural and organic products available. They don’t waste time deciding over and over again what’s appropriate. No one asks, “Should we sell this product that has artificial flavors?” There’s no debate. The answer is clear. That’s why you can’t buy a Coke or a Snickers there. This belief means the food is more expensive at Whole Foods. Some haters even call it Whole Paycheck and make fun of those who shop there. But so what? Whole Foods is doing pretty damn well. Another example is Vinnie’s Sub Shop, just down the street from our office in Chicago. They put this homemade basil oil on subs that’s just perfect. You better show up on time, though. Ask when they close and the woman behind the counter will respond, “We close when the bread runs out.” Really? “Yeah. We get our bread from the bakery down the street early in the morning, when it’s the freshest. Once we run out (usually around two or three p.m.), we close up shop. We could get more bread later in the day, but it’s not as good as the fresh-baked bread in the morning. There’s no point in selling a few more sandwiches if the bread isn’t good. A few bucks isn’t going to make up for selling food we can’t be proud of.” Wouldn’t you rather eat at a place like that instead of some generic sandwich chain?

Dear KDP Author, Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year. With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive. Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers. The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books. Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive. Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.

Recent works on the organization of advertising agencies in Britain and the US show that advertisers' self-understanding, expertise and practices are geared to the agencies' imperative for self-promotion in competitive markets (Cronin 2004; Soar 2000). Drawing on Bourdieu's observations on `cultural intermediaries', Matthew Soar's (2000) research also shows that the first audience which advertising `creatives' have in mind is themselves (see also Nixon 2003).

Competitive rowing is an undertaking of extraordinary beauty preceded by brutal punishment. Unlike most sports, which draw primarily on particular muscle groups, rowing makes heavy and repeated use of virtually every muscle in the body,

I simply am going to look you in the eye and say that if the United States hopes to remain a major player among nations, facing challenges such as poverty, inadequate education, and global market competition, we’re going to need to draw deeply from our entire talent pool, not just half of it.

are busy fighting over fractions of a market-share point, someone else who doesn’t care will come in and build a new platform that completely changes the game. Larry again: “Obviously we think about competition to some extent. But I feel my job is mostly getting people not to think about our competition. In general I think there’s a tendency for people to think about the things that exist. Our job is to think of the thing you haven’t thought of yet that you really need. And by definition, if our competitors knew that thing, they wouldn’t tell it to us or anybody else.”86 This isn’t to say you should ignore competition. Competition makes you better. It keeps you sharp. We are all human and subject to complacency, no matter how often we tell ourselves to stay on our toes. Nothing lights a fire like a competitor. When Microsoft launched the Bing search engine in 2009, we were concerned enough to kick off an all-hands-on-deck process to intensify our efforts on search. This planted seeds that led to new features such as Google Instant (search results as you type) and Image Search (drag an image into the search box and Google figures out what it is and uses it as the query). You can draw a line from the launch of Bing to these great new features. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra: “You must be proud of your enemy; then your enemy’s successes are also your successes.”87 Be proud of your competitors. Just don’t follow them.

Running had become more of a competition to draw out the best that was in him, as if he were plumbing the depths of his will.

respect for this, people don’t have respect for that. No manners these days.  She watched as the steam shot out of the spout and Cake lifted it gently off the heat, pouring the dark liquid into a cup that read Sweat is just your fat crying. She smiled a little and took it.  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘no pressure or anything, but there’s an open competition coming up and—’ Her phone started buzzing in her rucksack on the chair just inside the door, cutting him off. She put her coffee down, a little glad they didn’t have to have this conversation again. ‘Hold that thought,’ she said, unzipping it and fishing around under the hydration bladder. She pulled it out, held up a finger to signify that she’d just be a minute, and then took the call, stepping back into the gym. Behind her, Cake slurped on his coffee. ‘Roper,’ she said, lifting it to her ear, drawing in a lungful of stale sweat. ‘What is it?’ ‘Got a body,’ he said bluntly, the heavy night of drinking apparent in his gruff voice. No doubt he’d been woken up by a call from DCI Smith a few minutes before. He was grunting like he was trying to pull on a pair of trousers. ‘Washed up in the Lea this morning. Fresh one. Hour or two in the water at the most, supposedly.’ She pressed her lips together, rolling it over in her mind. ‘A body? Bit above our pay grade, isn’t it?’ Roper grumbled. He’d been a detective for years, but a few bad cases had him working larceny and assaults mostly. A body was usually reserved for the more senior investigators. ‘Maybe we’re moving up. Maybe it’s because Henley’s finally come to his senses and seen that we’re shining examples of what detectives should be in this goddamn city.’ ‘What’s the real reason?’ He sighed and she could almost smell the beer and whiskey on his breath. ‘It’s a homeless kid. Arms all tracked out. Drowned by the look of it.’ ‘So why’s this being kicked up to us and not being logged as accidental or—’ ‘Kid’s hands were zip-tied together and his fingernails have been ripped off.

Page 308 The Competitive Exclusion Principle. No two organisms that compete in every activity can coexist indefinitely in the same environment. To coexist in time, organisms that are potentially completely competitive must be geographically isolated from each other. Otherwise, the one that is the less efficient yields to the more efficient, no matter how slight the difference. When two competing organisms coexist in the same geographical region, close examination always shows that they are not complete competitors, that one of them draws on a resource of the environment that is not available to the other. The corollary of the principle is that where there is no geographical isolation of genetically and reproductively isolated populations, there must be as many ecological niches as there are populations. The necessary condition for geographical coexistence is ecological specialization.

Quoting from page 308: The Competitive Exclusion Principle. No two organisms that compete in every activity can coexist indefinitely in the same environment. To coexist in time, organisms that are potentially completely competitive must be geographically isolated from each other. Otherwise, the one that is the less efficient yields to the more efficient, no matter how slight the difference. When two competing organisms coexist in the same geographical region, close examination always shows that they are not complete competitors, that one of them draws on a resource of the environment that is not available to the other. The corollary of the principle is that where there is no geographical isolation of genetically and reproductively isolated populations, there must be as many ecological niches as there are populations. The necessary condition for geographical coexistence is ecological specialization. Quoting page 86: The Exclusion Principle in biology plays a role similar to that of the Newtonian laws of motion in physics. It is a prime guide to the discovery of facts. We use the principle coupled with an axiom that is equally fundamental but which is almost never explicitly stated. We may call this the Inequality Axiom, and it states: If two populations are distinguishable, they are competitively unequal. Quoting page 87: Because of the compound-interest effect, no difference between competing populations is trivial. The slightest difference--and our acceptance of the Inequality Axiom asserts that a difference always exists--will result in the eventual extinction of one population by another. Put in another way, the Exclusion Principle tells us that two distinguishable populations can coexist in the same geographical region only if they live in different ecological worlds (thus avoiding complete competition and strict coexistence). Quoting page 88-89: Recall now the sequence of development in the process of speciation. Initially, the freshly isolated populations are nearly the same genetically; as time goes on, they diverge more and more. When they are distinguishably different, but still capable of interbreeding (if put together), we may speak of them as races. Ultimately, if the physical isolation endures long enough, they become so different from each other that interbreeding is impossible; we then say that the two populations are reproductively isolated from each other, and we speak of them as distinct species. ... What are the various possible outcomes of the speciation process, and what their relative frequencies? In the light of our assumption, it is clear that, most often, the speciation process will go no further than the formation of races before the physical isolation comes to an end and the germ plasm of the two races is melded into one by interbreeding. If, however, the speciation process continues until separate species are formed before the physical barrier breaks down, then what happens? The outcome is plainly dependent on the extent to which ecological differentiation has occurred: Do the two species occupy the same ecological niche, or not--that is, are they completely competitive? It seems probable that the degree of ecological differentiation will also increase with time spent in physical isolation. On this assumption, we would predict that, more often than not, "sister species" will be incapable of coexistence: when the physical isolation is at an end, one sister species will extinguish the other. Quoting page 253: The example illustrates the general rule that as a species becomes increasingly "successful," its struggle for existence ceases to be one of struggle with the physical environment or with other species and come to be almost exclusively competition with its own kind. We call that species most successful that has made its own kind its worst enemy. Man enjoys this kind of success.

The Very Difference Between Game Design & 3D Game Development You Always Want to Know Getting into the gaming industry is a dream for many people. In addition to the fact that this area is always relevant, dynamic, alive and impenetrable for problems inherent in other areas, it will become a real paradise for those who love games. Turning your hobby into work is probably the best thing that can happen in your career. What is Game Designing? A 3D Game Designer is a creative person who dreams up the overall design of a video game. Game design is a large field, drawing from the fields of computer science/programming, creative writing, and graphic design. Game designers take the creative lead in imagining and bringing to life video game worlds. Game designers discuss the following issues: • the target audience; • genre; • main plot; • alternative scenarios; • maps; • levels; • characters; • game process; • user interface; • rules and restrictions; • the primary and secondary goals, etc Without this information, further work on the game is impossible. Once the concept has been chosen, the game designers work closely with the artists and developers to ensure that the overall picture of the game is harmonized and that the implementation is in line with the original ideas. As such, the skills of a game designer are drawn from the fields of computer science and programming, creative writing and graphic design. Game designers take the creative lead in imagining and bringing to life video game stories, characters, gameplay, rules, interfaces, dialogue and environments. A game designer's role on a game development outsourcing team differs from the specialized roles of graphic designers and programmers. Graphic designers and game programmers have specific tasks to accomplish in the division of labor that goes into creating a video game, international students can major in those specific disciplines if desired. The game designer generates ideas and concepts for games. They define the layout and overall functionality of the Game Animation Studio. In short, they are responsible for creating the vision for the game. These geniuses produce innovative ideas for games. Game designers should have a knack for extraordinary and creative vision so that their game may survive in the competitive market. The field of game design is always in need of artists of all types who may be drawn to multiple art forms, original game design and computer animation. The game designer is the artist who uses his/her talents to bring the characters and plot to life. Who is a Game Development? Games developers use their creative talent and skills to create the games that keep us glued to the screen for hours and even days or make us play them by erasing every other thought from our minds. They are responsible for turning the vision into a reality, i.e., they convert the ideas or design into the actual game. Thus, they convert all the layouts and sketches into the actual product. It may involve concept generation, design, build, test and release. While you create a game, it is important to think about the game mechanics, rewards, player engagement and level design. 3D Game development involves bringing these ideas to life. Developers take games from the conceptual phase, through *development*, and into reality. The Game Development Services side of games typically involves the programming, coding, rendering, engineering, and testing of the game (and all of its elements: sound, levels, characters, and other assets, etc.). Here are the following stages of 3D Game Development Service, and the best ways of learning game development (step by step). • High Concept • Pitch • Concept • Game Design Document • Prototype • Production • Design • Level Creation • Programming

Now let me tell you about Satori a Zen concept. Satori is the warriors state of being, it occurs at the moment when the mind is free of thought, pure awareness the body is active, sensitive, relaxed and the emotions are open and free, Satori is what you experience when the knife is flying towards you.” "You know, Soc, I've had that feeling many times, especially during competitions. Often I'm concentrating so hard, I can't even hear the applause." "Yes, that is the experience of satori. And now if you grasp what I say next you will learn the correct use of sports or painting or music or any other active or creative gateway to satori. You imagine that you love gymnastics but it is merely the wrapping for the gift within Satori. The right use of gymnastic is to focus your full attention and feeling on your actions; then you will achieve satori. Gymnastics draws you into the moment of truth, when your life is on the line, like a dueling samurai. It demands your full attention: satori or die!" "Like in the middle of a double somersault." "Yes, that's why gymnastics is a warrior's art, a way to train mind and emotions as well as the body; a doorway to satori. Your final step is to expand this clarity into daily life, then satori will become your reality your key to the gate.

The theatricality of property has, in fact, an elaborate structure that property owners must be at considerable labor to sustain. If property is to be persuasively emblematic, that is, if it is to draw attention to the owner’s titles in past victories, a double burden falls on its owners: First, they must show that the amount of their property corresponds to the difficulty they were under in winning title to it. Property must be seen as compensation. Second, they must show that the type of their property corresponds to the nature of the competition by which title to it was won. Property must be seen to be consumed.

Since The Great Recession, the global financial crash of 2008-09, the debt-fuelled post-recession recovery has been the weakest in the post-war era (since the end of World War Two). Whereas total outstanding credit in the US after the Wall Street Crash grew from 160% to 260% of GDP between 1929 and 1932, the figure rose from 365% in 2008 to 540% in 2010. (And this does not include derivatives, whose nominal outstanding value is at least four times GDP).[34] A long depression and rising right-wing populism have followed, including the stunning ascendency of property tycoon and TV celebrity demagogue Donald Trump as the President of the US in 2016.[35] The British public’s vote in June 2016 to leave the EU delivered another shock of global significance. A chronic drift towards trade wars and protectionism is accelerating and in January 2018, US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said that “great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of US national security”, putting Russia, China and – yes – Europe in the crosshairs of the world’s long-time dominant economic and military power. Adding to this age of anxiety is the accelerating automation revolution. What should be an emancipatory and utopian development only generates insecurity at the prospect of unprecedented mass unemployment. It can be no coincidence that all these crises are converging at exactly the same time. They cannot be explained away by cynical and shallow generalisations about ‘human nature’. In the course of this investigation we will see that in fact all of these crises have a common root cause: the decaying nature of capitalism and its tendency towards breakdown. Indeed, average Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates in the world’s richest countries have fallen in every decade since the 1960s and are clearly closing in on zero. Rates of profit, manufacturing costs and commodity prices are also trending towards zero. Drawing on Henryk Grossman’s vital clarification of Karl Marx’s methodology, we shall see that capitalism is heading inexorably towards a final, insurmountable breakdown that is destined to strike much earlier than a zero rate of profit. Indeed, we shall also see that the next, imminent economic crash will result in worldwide hyperinflation. We will also show that the economic crisis is intensifying competition between nation-states, forcing them into a situation which threatens the most destructive world war to date.

When you decide to take a step to the right, you expect all parts of your body to work in unity to take that step. Actually, you do not even expect it; it is just as natural a feature of our existence as drawing breath. You would be dumbfounded if not outright terrorized if your left leg suddenly moved in the opposite direction. While this is an everyday occurrence in the corporate world, with organizations aimlessly ambling about like zombies, the problem of moving in unity becomes even more urgent if we truly aim to achieve business agility. It is only when we can harmonize the decentralized decision making in the teams with the intent of senior leadership that we can achieve real business agility. Imagine your organization moved like your body: If there is an unexpected noise in your environment, your whole body turns in that direction to assess the situation and address possible threats that might come towards you. How great would it be if your organization did the same? Flexibly reacting to changes in the environment without friction, discussion, or delay, just a seamless and natural response — would that not be true agility?

Englishmen of Whiggish persuasion were convinced that, after decades and centuries of thought and travail, the British constitution had come to represent the best way to achieve that goal. Drawing heavily from Greek and Roman thinkers who had affirmed the need of mixed government in order to achieve balance and harmony among social classes, the English had achieved such a balance of social power among king, lords, and commons that a political balance of power would be counterpoised among these powerful estates. Social equilibrium in short would produce political equilibrium, which in turn would prevent the kind of immoderate government that might interfere in men’s liberties. This elaborate edifice was based on the theory that men, being naturally selfish, irrational, aggressive, greedy, and lustful, had to be not only protected in their liberty from government but protected from one another by government. The “Interest of Freedom,” Marchamont Nedham had written in the mid-1650s, “is a Virgin that everyone seeks to deflower.” Paine and his fellow radicals rejected this view of human nature and the Whiggish apparatus that went with it. Perhaps the people of the Old World, divided into unequal estates and corrupted by their rulers, were prone to depravity and unreason, they granted, but Americans were different. Farmers and mechanics and all others who wore “leathern aprons,” being more equal and fraternal and less grasping and competitive, were more reasonable and virtuous. Because of his faith in human nature and the perfectibility of man, as Eric Foner has said, “Paine could reject the need for governmental checks and balances.

In contrast to the conflictual and competitive logic of both capitalism and the discourses of “terror,” in which it is the unknown nature of the Other which provides the fertile soil for seeds of fear, Levinas and Derrida affirm and celebrate both the difference and the incomprehensibility of the Other. The Other, they argue, is not first and foremost one to be understood, but rather one whose ethical plight we are called to respond to. Drawing upon the Abrahamic religions which shape their own intellectual and cultural identity, Levinas and Derrida point to the practice of hospitality, the welcoming of the stranger, as the constitutive element of what it means to be human.

The world has changed and our reason and purpose for education must change. This model ensures students will effectively draw from their various disciplines collectively and apply them to whatever challenges the world throws at them. My goal is for them to become conscious life learners. In addition to your parents and teachers, mentors and coaches will be needed to help you reach your full potential. Your ability to identify and develop your competitive edge may prove to be your greatest asset.

A CHANGING SOCIETY What does today’s high incidence of social anxiety tell us about modern society? As we’ve seen, social anxiety is connected to a person’s drive for self-preservation and a feeling of safety. It is natural to withdraw from situations that we expect will lead to pain. Avoidance—while not necessarily healthy—is logical. Because the negative social experience of a growing number of people has caused them emotional pain and suffering, the number of individuals who choose to avoid socializing is increasing at an alarming rate. The sometimes wide distance among family members these days only adds to isolation. And the anonymity of large cities creates a vacuum in which many lonely people co-exist, often leading solitary lives in which they pursue their interests and activities alone. We live in a society in which social fears are perhaps not unjustified. As cities become denser, isolation seems to be the best way to counter urban decay. Consider the dangers of the outside world: Crime rates are soaring. Caution—and its companion, fear—are in the air. As the twentieth century draws to a close, we find ourselves in a society where meeting people can be difficult. These larger forces can combine to create a further sense of distance among people. Particularly significant is the change that has taken place as the social organization of the smaller-scale community gives way to that of the larger, increasingly fragmented city. In a “hometown” setting, the character of daily life is largely composed of face-to-face relations with friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family members. But in the hustle and bustle of today’s cities, whose urban sprawls extend to what author Joel Garreau has called Edge Cities—creating light industrial suburbs even larger than the cities they surround—the individual can get lost. It is common in these areas for people to focus solely on themselves, seldom getting to know their neighbors, and rarely living close to family. We may call these places home, but they are a far cry from the destination of that word as we knew it when we were children. Today’s cities are hotbeds of competition on all levels, from the professional to the social. It often seems as if only the most sophisticated “win.” To be ready for this constant challenge, you have to be able to manage in a stressful environment, relying on a whole repertoire of social skills just to stay afloat. This competitive environment can be terrifying for the socially anxious person. The 1980s were a consumer decade in which picture-perfect images on television and in magazines caused many of us to cast our lots with either the haves or the have-nots. Pressure to succeed grew to an all-time high. For those who felt they could not measure up, the challenge seemed daunting. I think the escalating crime rate in today’s urban centers—drugs, burglary, rape, and murder—ties into this trend and society’s response to the pressure. In looking at the forces that influence the social context of modern life, it is clear that feelings of frustration at not “making it” socially and financially are a component in many people’s choosing a life of crime. Interactive ability determines success in establishing a rewarding career, in experiencing relationships. Without these prospects, crime can appear to be a quick fix for a lifelong problem.

Behind the Jesus Is Here sign are too many narcissistic competitors in what has rightly been called “the worship wars,” a consumerist competition to draw a bigger audience into a fog of Jesus-lite entertainment. How long could Jesus remain on his feet when directed to sing fifteen consecutive worship choruses, each one only seven words long and repeated twenty-three times?

Jillian had charged into the bathroom on seven, but she just shot straight to ten. Her nature may be reserved, but she didn’t take shit off anybody. “Don’t patronize me. And don’t you dare come down here and judge us!” She pointed her finger directly at AJ. “We’re the ones doing the heavy lifting, so people like you can come along at the very end and ride along on our coattails. You can act tough all you want, but it’s just an act, AJ. You, with your expensive suits and shiny shoes,” she sneered. “You wouldn’t survive one minute out there on those streets. You’re weak.” Before she realized what was about to happen, AJ seized her by the shoulders and threw her against the wall. Pinning her with her own body, she pressed her index finger over Jillian’s lips. “That’s enough.” Those glittering green eyes warned Jillian not to say another word. The impact had completely knocked the breath out of her. AJ pressed her body tighter into hers, preventing Jillian from taking a replenishing breath, so she breathed short shallow breaths through her nose. Her heart pounded. What was happening? She wasn’t in control of the situation, and oddly enough, for once she didn’t want to be. She had just been manhandled, yet she had no desire to fight back. Instead, she wanted to hook her leg around AJ’s waist and draw her closer to where AJ’s heat seared her core.

The framework consists of four key components. I draw this framework as four distinct boxes, but you could quite easily redraw it as an issue tree with four branches: Customer Product Company Competition

When people feel a sense of belonging to a given social group, they absorb the doctrinal positions that the group advocates. However party and religious identification come about, once they take root in early adulthood, they often persist. Partisan identities are enduring features of citizens' self-conceptions. They do not merely come and go with election cycles and campaign ephemera. the public's interest in party politics climbs as elections draw near, but partisan self-conception remain intact during peaks and lulls in party competition.

The point of the Fourth Amendment which often is not grasped by zealous officers is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime.

Finding the Competitive Levers When there’s a battle between two networks, there are competitive levers that shift users from one into the other—what are they? The best place to focus in the rideshare market was the hard side of the network: drivers. More drivers meant that prices would be lower, attracting valuable high-frequency riders that often comparison shop for fares. Attract more riders, and it more efficiently fills the time of drivers, and vice versa. There was a double benefit to moving drivers from a competitor’s network to yours—it would push their network into surging prices while yours would lower in price. Uber’s competitive levers would combine financial incentives—paying up for more sign-ups, more hours—with product improvements to improve Acquisition, Engagement, and Economic forces. Drawing in more drivers through product improvements is straightforward—the better the experience of picking up riders and routing the car to their destination, the more the app would be used. Building a better product is one of the classic levers in the tech industry, but Uber focused much of its effort on targeted bonuses for drivers. Why bonuses? Because for drivers, that was their primary motivation for using the app, and improving their earnings would make them sticky. But these bonuses weren’t just any bonuses—they were targeted at quickly flipping over the most valuable drivers in the networks of Uber’s rivals, targeting so-called dual apping drivers that were active on multiple networks. They were given large, special bonuses that compelled them to stick to Uber, and every hour they drove was an hour that the other networks couldn’t utilize. There was a sophisticated effort to tag drivers as dual appers. Some of these efforts were just manual—Uber employees who took trips would just ask if the drivers drove for other services, and they could mark them manually in a special UI within the app. There were also behavioral signals when drivers were running two apps—they would often pause their Uber session for a few minutes while they drove for another company, then unpause it. On Android, there were direct APIs that could tell if someone was running Uber and Lyft at the same time. Eventually a large number of these signals were fed into a machine learning model where each driver would receive a score based on how likely they were to be a dual apper. It didn’t have to be perfect, just good enough to aid the targeting.

Reverse brands create a kind of tilt in the surface—of progress, of evolution, of expectation. They draw us down a divergent path by applying pressure in exactly the place where we least anticipate it.

The game is a thread, microscopic in breadth, a hint of gossamer drawing unsuspecting souls together in simple competition to the exclusion of all else, from a mother and infant playing peekaboo to two old men hunched over a chessboard and everything in between. And finally, it is the game's presence and past and its memory that inspires each of us to forgive time and aging and their inevitable accompanying attrition because the gray and hobbled old man before me was once lean and powerful and magnificent and some of what became of him was due to the investment he made in me...

As companies move toward distributed systems, Sybase and competing vendors—such as The ASK Group Inc., Informix Software Inc., and Oracle Corp.—are all offering products similar to System 10 . . . . Here we are in the “safe as milk” category, somewhat ironic in light of subsequent revelations about the limitations of Server 10. The innovations presented here are all continuous—performance, functionality, and capacity—and a number of other mainstream vendors are “all offering products similar” to it. Note the emphasis on company and market issues as opposed to product and technology. All of this speaks to mainstream positioning, either tornado or post-tornado. Since there is not a lot of emphasis on cutthroat competition, which one always expects with tornado products, the conclusion one would draw here is that Sybase 10 is on Main Street. Additional Indicators Beyond press coverage, a second source of clues to market status comes from the behavior of other companies in the infrastructure. Lew Platt at HP, for example, realized that their commercial Unix server business was in the tornado when software vendors were calling him rather than the other way around. Going further, when a tornado is under way, the easiest way to spot the gorilla is to look for the

Stiff as the competition is, the Church has the truth of God. It knows the beauty of biblical manhood, biblical womanhood, biblical marriage, biblical sexuality, and biblical creation order. We are not playing from behind or with a weak hand. We have the very mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16). Furthermore, as our culture and society grow increasingly evil, God will use that encroaching darkness to draw people to the light. He is a saving God, and He loves to turn evil purposes to divine ends.

What will your life look like when you have become your own champion? This is the key champion question. Take some time right now to imagine that a major performance breakthrough in your game and life has just occurred and that you have become a champion all day, every day. In your mind’s eye, work your way through a regular weekday, a practice or training session, and a future competition. Draw together as much detail as possible about what it will look like to be at a gold level, to be the best version of yourself consistently. What specific actions or behaviors do you see yourself doing better or differently?

For example, our concern with the “social” is not confined to those nontechnical observations amenable to the application of sociological concepts such as norms or competition. Instead, we regard the process of construction of sense implied by the application of sociological concepts as highly significant for our own approach. It is this process of construction of sense which forms the focus of our discussion. As a working definition, therefore, it could be said that we are concerned with the social construction of scientific knowledge in so far as this draws attention to the process by which scientists make sense of their observations.

French sociologist Robert Castel sees this as having a dual consequence for individuality.103 Drawing on Norbert Elias’s formulation, Castel sees us as living today in a pure ‘society of individuals’,104 in which there is increasing pressure to behave according to the postulates of competitive individuality. For many members of the middle class this is fine; they are able to take advantage of the opportunities arising and profit from this development, as for them liberation from collective arrangements actually does mean more autonomy and responsibility in the positive sense. They thus often develop an affirmative attitude toward liberalization, seeing themselves in solipsistic fashion as opportunity seekers,105 and thereby threatening to become narcissistic ‘excessive individuals’ (individus par excès).106 The large group of those who fail to keep up in the maelstrom of liberalization, who do not have the same resources at their disposal and often lack the basic preconditions for autonomy, become ‘mere individuals’ (individus par défaut). For them, liberalization and increased social uncertainty are actually threats.

before. I think the game of competitive life often requires maximizing the experience of the people who have the most aptitude and the most determination as learning machines. And if you want the very highest reaches of human achievement, that's where you have to go. You do not want to choose a brain surgeon for your child by drawing straws to select one of fifty applicants, all of whom take turns doing procedures.

The work of Dr. Hans Selye is credited with first drawing attention to how stress affects the body; his research and writing were prolific and stand as one of the major accomplishments of medicine in the twentieth century. Dr. Selye's definition of biological stress is "the nonspecific response of the body to any demand made upon it." Stress can be either external or internal to the individual. Examples of external stress are your job, financial problems, illness, change of job or home, caring for children or parents. However, the internal stressors appear to be more important in the production of tension. These are one's own personality attributes, like conscientiousness, perfectionism, the need to excel, and so forth. People often say that they have a very stressful job and that's why they're tense. But if they weren't conscientious about doing a good job, if they weren't trying to succeed, achieve, and excel, they wouldn't generate tension. Often such people are highly competitive and determined to get ahead. Typically, they are more critical of themselves than others are of them. (page 36)

The work of Dr. Hans Selye is credited with first drawing attention to how stress affects the body; his research and writing were prolific and stand as one of the major ac complishments of medicine in the twentieth century. Dr. Selye's definition of biological stress is "the nonspecific response of the body to any demand made upon it." Stress can be either external or internal to the individual. Examples of external stress are your job, financial problems, illness, change of job or home, caring for children or parents. However, the internal stressors appear to be more important in the production of tension. These are one's own personality attributes, like conscientiousness, perfectionism, the need to excel, and so forth. People often say that they have a very stressful job and that's why they're tense. But if they weren't conscientious about doing a good job, if they weren't trying to succeed, achieve, and excel, they wouldn't generate tension. Often such people are highly competitive and determined to get ahead. Typically, they are more critical of themselves than others are of them. (page 36)

Since he had figured out every conceivable way to restrain trade, rig markets, and suppress competition, all reform-minded legislators had to do was study his career to draw up a comprehensive antitrust agenda.

Religion is paradoxical. It emerged out of intergroup competition, yet it has a remarkable power to unite. It sets people apart from one another, yet can also draw vastly different people together. Long ago we envisioned relationship with spiritual beings. In one sense these relationships were very mundane -they served practical human needs. The practical side of these relationships is also the source of their power to divide us, to pit one group against another. The divine side is in their capacity to quietly but persistently call us to transcend ourselves and find common ground for trust.

Define the relevant industry by both its product scope and geographic scope. What’s in, what’s out? This step is trickier than most people realize, so give it some real thought. The five forces help you draw the boundaries, avoiding the common pitfall of defining the industry too narrowly or too broadly. Are you facing the same buyers, the same suppliers, the same entry barriers, and so forth?

This then is what it means to seek God perfectly: to withdraw from illusion and pleasure, from worldly anxieties and desires, from the works that God does not want, from a glory that is only human display; to keep my mind free from confusion in order that my liberty may be always at the disposal of His will; to entertain silence in my heart and listen for the voice of God; to cultivate an intellectual freedom from the images of created things in order to receive the secret contact of God in obscure love; to love all men as myself; to rest in humility and to find peace in withdrawal from conflict and competition with other men; to turn aside from controversy and put away heavy loads of judgment and censorship and criticism and the whole burden of opinions that I have no obligation to carry; to have a will that is always ready to fold back within itself and draw all the powers of the soul down from its deepest center to rest in silent expectancy for the coming of God, poised in tranquil and effortless concentration upon the point of my dependence on Him; to gather all that I am, and have all that I can possibly suffer or do or be, and abandon them all to God in the resignation of a perfect love and blind faith and pure trust in God, to do His will. And then to wait in peace and emptiness and oblivion of all things. Bonum est praestolari cum silentio salutare Dei. (“It is good to wait in silence for the salvation of God.”) 7

Through innumerable kinships, natures are knit together this way and that, until the world hangs in a web of frith. So man draws souls into his circle. For the present age, the war-cry is: rule. Be master of the earth, subdue creation is the watch-word running through our time, and it looks as if this commandment sympathetically strikes the heart-note of our culture and ever sets the pace not only for its actions but also for its speculations. All hypotheses anent past ages in the history of our race hinge on the assumption that man has made his way through an everlasting battle, and that civilization is the outcome of man's struggle for existence. But modern civilization with its cry for mastery and its view of life as a continuous strife is too narrow a base for hypotheses to make history intelligible. The evolutionary theory of an all-embracing struggle for food and survival is only an ætiological myth, as the ethnologists have it, a simple contrivance to explain modern European civilization by throwing our history, its competition and its exclusive interest in material progress back on the screen of the past. When ancient and primitive cultures are presented in the light of modern economical problems, all the proportions and perspectives are disturbed; some aspects are thrown into relief, other aspects are pushed into the shade, without regard to the harmony inherent in the moral and intellectual life of other peoples; and the view as a whole is far more falsified by such capricious playing of searchlights than by any wilful distorting of facts.

Why Should I Do Freelancing? Guidelines for Beginners Why do we do freelancing? People are doing nothing in the urge of life. Some are working, some are doing business, some are doing advocacy, and some are freelancing. Everyone has one goal behind doing all this, and that is to “make money”. As the days are changing, people's needs are also increasing. Earlier people did not have so many needs so they did not lack happiness. Everyone had their own land, from which crops, vegetables, and fruits were produced and earned a living. Slowly the days started to change, and the use of technology also started to increase, along with it the image and attitude of people started to change. The competitive spirit of who will get more than who, who will be ahead of who started, which continues till now. And that is why people are constantly looking for work, some inside the country and some outside the country. Everyone has almost the same goal, and that is to earn a lot of money, stand on their own feet, take responsibility for their family, build the future of their children, and much more! But does all work make satisfactory money? Of course not. If you are employed then you will get a certain amount of monthly income, if you are doing business then the income will be average with profit-loss-risk, and if you are freelancing then you will be able to control your income. You can earn money as you wish by working as you wish. So let's find out why you should do freelancing:- Why Do Freelancing? What is Freelancing? Freelancing is an independent profession. This profession allows you to work when you want, take vacations when you want, and quit when you want. You will never want to leave this profession though, because once you fall in love with freelancing, you never want to leave. There are many reasons for this. They are easy, self-reliance, freedom from slavery, self-king, having no limitations, etc. All of us have some latent talent. That talent often remains dormant, those of us who spend years waiting for a job can wake up our latent talent and stand on our own feet by expressing it through work. No need to run with a CV to any company or minister for this. Do you like to write? Can you be a content writer, can you draw good design? Can be a designer, do you know good coding? Can be a software engineer. There are also numerous other jobs that you can do through freelancing. You too can touch the door of success by freelancing, all you need is enthusiasm, courage, willpower, morale, self-confidence, and a lot of self-confidence. But these things are not available to buy in the market, so it will not cost you money. What will be spent is 'time' as the saying goes "The time is money and the money is equal to time". To make money you must put in the time. Guidelines for Beginners: As I have said before, if you think that you can suddenly start freelancing and earn lakhs of rupees and become a millionaire within a year, then I would say that bro, freelancing is not for you. Because the greed of money gets you before you can work, you can't go any further. If you are thinking of starting freelancing to utilize your talent then definitely take advice from someone senior to you, take tips from those who are in the sector, explore online, collect video tutorials, and take free courses if available. Still, if there is any problem or confusion which you are not able to solve, then you can visit the freelancing training center called “Bhairab ​​IT Zone”. Here students are trained professionally by experienced freelancers.

Why Should I Do Freelancing? Guidelines for Beginners Why do we do freelancing? People are doing nothing in the urge of life. Some are working, some are doing business, some are doing advocacy, and some are freelancing. Everyone has one goal behind doing all this, and that is to “make money”. As the days are changing, people's needs are also increasing. Earlier people did not have so many needs so they did not lack happiness. Everyone had their own land, from which crops, vegetables, and fruits were produced and earned a living. Slowly the days started to change, and the use of technology also started to increase, along with it the image and attitude of people started to change. The competitive spirit of who will get more than who, who will be ahead of who started, which continues till now. And that is why people are constantly looking for work, some inside the country and some outside the country. Everyone has almost the same goal, and that is to earn a lot of money, stand on their own feet, take responsibility for their family, build the future of their children, and much more! But does all work make satisfactory money? Of course not. If you are employed then you will get a certain amount of monthly income, if you are doing business then the income will be average with profit-loss-risk, and if you are freelancing then you will be able to control your income. You can earn money as you wish by working as you wish. So let's find out why you should do freelancing:- Why Do Freelancing? What is Freelancing? Freelancing is an independent profession. This profession allows you to work when you want, take vacations when you want, and quit when you want. You will never want to leave this profession though, because once you fall in love with freelancing, you never want to leave. There are many reasons for this. They are easy, self-reliance, freedom from slavery, self-king, having no limitations, etc. All of us have some latent talent. That talent often remains dormant, those of us who spend years waiting for a job can wake up our latent talent and stand on our own feet by expressing it through work. No need to run with a CV to any company or minister for this. Do you like to write? Can you be a content writer, can you draw good design? Can be a designer, do you know good coding? Can be a software engineer. There are also numerous other jobs that you can do through freelancing. You too can touch the door of success by freelancing, all you need is enthusiasm, courage, willpower, morale, self-confidence, and a lot of self-confidence. But these things are not available to buy in the market, so it will not cost you money. What will be spent is 'time' as the saying goes "The time is money and the money is equal to time". To make money you must put in the time. Guidelines for Beginners: As I have said before, if you think that you can suddenly start freelancing and earn lakhs of rupees and become a millionaire within a year, then I would say that bro, freelancing is not for you. Because the greed of money gets you before you can work, you can't go any further. If you are thinking of starting freelancing to utilize your talent then definitely take advice from someone senior to you, take tips from those who are in the sector, explore online, collect video tutorials, and take free courses if available. Still, if there is any problem or confusion which you are not able to solve, then you can visit the freelancing training center called “Bhairab ​​IT Zone”. Here students are trained professionally by experienced freelancers. If you want you can apply now for their free seminar from here, and learn about all the courses Please Visit Our Blogging Website to Read more Articles related to Freelancing and Outsourcing, Thank You.

FAT MARGINS DRAW STIFF COMPETITION

Planning and design starts with a full survey site visit to ensure we have a full understanding of your requirements. This also allows us to give sound professional advice and identify any risks that require specific attention. You will receive a competitive quote and where necessary we will instruct our chosen design house, who will attend and supply drawings detailing the correct materials and arrangements for the erection of scaffolding with minimal disruption.

Drawing up plans such as these diagrams is the easy part. I did it thousands of times. Creating a successful organization with people who execute the plans at a level of Competitive Greatness—now, that’s the challenge of leadership.

Similarly, in whatever enterprise you find yourself, practice predictability. Never impose your mood swings on your associates and customers. They should never be able to discover how your life is going. This is called being professional. Given two alternatives, most customers and clients would prefer working with someone who does not display an entirely new personality on each occasion. Needless to say, learning to present yourself as a predictable person to your world doesn’t mean developing a parallel insistence on all others doing the same in their interactions with you. Predictability is one of your competitive advantages. It will draw others to you but meanwhile you must remain flexible with others. One mark of a fine person is demanding far more of yourself than you do of others.

I am Sebastiano, and your name?” he asks. “Violet,” I say as we step over the threshold. “Violetta!” he says, throwing his arms wide. “English girl, Italian name!” And across the room, I see a dark head turn in our direction. That much taller than the rest of the boys, he stands out, his straight black silky hair falling over his face, his blue eyes as bright and cold as the water of the fjord next to my grandmother’s summer rental cottage. I was looking for him before and couldn’t see him anywhere; now that I’ve been distracted by dancing and a Chianti-drinking donkey, he’s spotted me. His gaze flicks like a knife between me and the boy, who’s at the gigantic wine bottle now, filling cups and handing me one. “Salute!” Sebastiano says, touching his cup to mine, and I glance up at Luca, seeing that he’s taking this in, too. A rush of confusion fills me as I toast. I’m glad that Luca’s seen me with someone else, that I haven’t been a wallflower at this party, that I’ve proved him wrong, even a little bit, because there’s a boy here who seems to like me, who’s talking to me, anyway, getting me a drink. In films, in books, flirting with a boy is a surefire way to get the one you actually like interested in you, draw him over to your side. They’re supposed to like competition, the challenge of going after a girl who’s popular. But maybe real life doesn’t quite work that way. Because Luca arches one black eyebrow, his mouth quirks up on one side in a sneer, and he turns pointedly away sliding a cigarette into his mouth, and lighting it with a flip of his Zippo. Disgusting habit, I think as firmly as I can. I’m glad he’s not coming over, smoking a nasty stinking cancer stick. It’s awful when you lie to yourself. I do think smoking is foul, but I’m also more than aware that if Luca strolled over to talk to me, with that cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, I wouldn’t walk away, complaining about the smoke; I’d stand there staring up at him, trying not to grin as widely as a five-year-old meeting Cinderella at Disneyland.

The mainstream of evolutionary thinking begins with the idea that all structures and manners of relating within the living realm must be the result of a kind of natural, self-organizing cost-benefit analysis. Competition has long been the undisputed dogma of the biological imagination. Mainstream evolutionary thinking aligns its analysis with these premises, instead of first observing the world and then drawing conclusions. It imposes onto reality the afflictions of a society in which uncalculated joy in life is at risk of being suffocated within a network of greed and oppression.

The cycling helps,” he explains, “I can go through lists in my mind.”5 He reads the dictionary, focusing exclusively on combinations of letters, ignoring definitions, tenses, and plurals. Then, drawing from memory, he repeats them over and over again as he cycles for hours.

When you are feeling hurt, anger, stress, jealousy, rage, competition, or frustration, on the other hand, the signal from the heart to the brain becomes incoherent, and this triggers the release of approximately 1,200 chemicals into the body equal to those feelings.17 This chemical dump lasts approximately 90 seconds to two minutes. In the short term, these stressful feelings are not harmful; in fact, if they’re resolved they improve your resilience. However, the long-term effects of unresolved survival emotions put the entire body into a state of incoherence, making you vulnerable to stress-related health challenges. These survival emotions draw from the field around your body, causing you to feel separate and materialistic because you are putting most of your focus and attention on matter, your body, the environment, time, and of course, the source of your problems.

Understanding the mindset factors crucial for underachievers is key in the reversal process. Negative underachievers are often influenced by failures and a competitive outlook, while positive underachievers draw inspiration from achievements and express their uniqueness. When working with underachievers, consider these factors to tailor your approach effectively.