Duncan Key Quotes

The key to evil? Freedom. The key to freedom? Money. For you, my darlings, freedom to do what you like to do makes you. Not that that stops you doing what you like, since you like doing what you like more than you like liking what you do . . .

We're free agents. We can do what we want." Free agents. When my mother used those words she'd wave her keys. "We're like two bachelorettes," she'd say as we backed out of the drive. The road she took was always by the sea. Floods never put her off. "It'll pass" she'd say when I braced myself in the seat. If a wave hit the car, she'd drive on, floating sometimes for seconds. The wipers could clear off the sand and small stones. Seaweed was the problem. Not the one with poppers. That landed with a thud and rolled like a body off the windscreens. No, the problem was the smaller stuff, bright green and fine that wrapped itself like a feather boa around the side mirror. Usually, with one hand, she could throw it off. But sometimes, it took both her hands as if it were a scarf around Isadora Duncan's neck.

When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness. The life coach Martha Beck asks new potential clients, "Is there anything you do regularly that makes you forget what time it is?" That forgetting -- that pure absorption -- is what the psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi calls "flow" or optimal experience. In an interview with Wired magazine, he described flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." In a typical day that teeters between anxiety and boredom, flow experiences are those flashes of intense living -- bright against the dull. These optimal experiences can happen when we're engaged in work paid and unpaid, in sports, in music, in art. The researchers Maria Allison and Margaret Duncan have studied the role of flow in women's lives and looked at factors that contributed to what they call "antiflow." Antiflow was associated with repetitive household tasks, repetitive tasks at work, unchallenging tasks, and work we see as meaningless. But there's an element of chaos when it comes to flow. Even if we're doing meaningful and challenging work, that sense of total absoprtion can elude us. We might get completely and beautifully lost in something today, and, try as we might to re-create the same conditions tomorrow, our task might jsut feel like, well, work. In A Life of One's Own, Marion Milner described her effort to re-create teh conditions of her own recorded moments of happiness, saying, "Often when I felt certain that I had discovered the little mental act which produced the change I walked on air, exulting that I had found the key to my garden of delight and could slip through the door whenever I wished. But most often when I came again the place seemed different, the door overgrown with thorns and my key stuck in the lock. It was as if the first time I had said 'abracadabra' the door had opened, but the next time I must use a different word. (123-124).

PRONUNCIATION GUIDE: Ailith: A-lith ("noble war"; "ascending, rising") Andriana: An-dree-ana, or Dree, for "Dri" ("warrior") Asher: Ash-er ("happy one") Azarel: Ah-zah-rell ("helper") Bellona: Bell-oh-na ("warlike") Chaza'el: Chazah-ell ("one who sees") Kapriel: Kah-pree-ell (variant of "warrior") Keallach: Key-lock ("battle") Killian: Kill-ee-un ("little warrior"--though he's not so little in my novel!) Raniero: Rah-near-oh ("wise warrior") Ronan: Row-nun ("little seal"; I know. Not as cool, right? But he was named Duncan at first draft and I had to change it due to publisher request, and "Ronan" sounded like a medieval, cool warrior name to me. I overlooked the real translation in favor of the man he became in my story. And that guy, to my mind, is more like a warrior, with the spray of the sea upon his face as he takes on the storm--which is like a seal!) Tressa: Tre-sah ("late summer") Vidar: Vee-dar ("forest warrior")

She’s keyed up,” Duncan said as Eve pulled up to the driveway. “You better talk to her, woman-to-woman.” “Good idea, because you know we don’t even have to speak to each other,” Eve said, putting the car into park. “Our uteruses can communicate telepathically.

I got your flowers. They’re beautiful, thank you.” A gorgeous riot of Gerber daisies and lilies in a rainbow of reds, pinks, yellows and oranges. “Welcome. Bet Duncan loved sending one of his guys out to pick them up for me.” She could hear the smile in his voice, imagined the devilish twinkle in his eyes. “Oh, he did. Said it’s probably the first time in the history of WITSEC that a U.S. Marshal delivered flowers to one of their witnesses.” A low chuckle. “Well, this was a special circumstance, so they helped me out.” “I loved the card you sent with them the best though.” Proud of you. Give ‘em hell tomorrow. He’d signed it Nathan rather than Nate, which had made her smile. “I had no idea you were romantic,” she continued. “All these interesting things I’m learning about you.” She hadn’t been able to wipe the silly smile off her face after one of the security team members had knocked on her door and handed them to her with a goofy smile and a, “special delivery”. “Baby, you haven’t seen anything yet. When the trial’s done you’re gonna get all the romance you can handle, and then some.” “Really?” Now that was something for a girl to look forward to, and it sure as hell did the trick in taking her mind off her worries. “Well I’m all intrigued, because it’s been forever since I was romanced. What do you have in mind? Candlelit dinners? Going to the movies? Long walks? Lazy afternoon picnics?” “Not gonna give away my hand this early on, but I’ll take those into consideration.” “And what’s the key to your heart, by the way? I mean, other than the thing I did to you this morning.” “What thing is that? Refresh my memory,” he said, a teasing note in his voice. She smiled, enjoying the light banter. It felt good to let her worry about tomorrow go and focus on what she had to look forward to when this was all done. Being with him again, seeing her family, getting back to her life. A life that would hopefully include Nathan in a romantic capacity. “Waking you up with my mouth.” He gave a low groan. “I loved every second of it. But think simpler.” Simpler than sex? For a guy like him? “Food, then. I bet you’re a sucker for a home-cooked meal. Am I right?” He chuckled. “That works too, but it’s still not the key.” “Then what?” “You.” She blinked, her heart squeezing at the conviction behind his answer. “Me?” “Yeah, just you. And maybe bacon,” he added, a smile in his voice. He was so freaking adorable. “So you’re saying if I made and served you a BLT, you’d be putty in my hands?” Seemed hard to imagine, but okay. A masculine rumble filled her ears. “God, yeah.” She couldn’t help the sappy smile that spread across her face. “Wow, you are easy. And I can definitely arrange that.” “I can hardly wait. Will you serve it to me naked? Or maybe wearing just a frilly little apron and heels?” She smothered a laugh, but a clear image of her doing just that popped into her head, serving him the sandwich in that sexy outfit while watching his eyes go all heated. “Depends on how good you are.” “Oh, baby, I’ll be so good to you, you have no idea.

With the lens of Jobs to Be Done, the Medtronic team and Innosight (including my coauthor David Duncan) started research afresh in India. The team visited hospitals and care facilities, interviewing more than a hundred physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, and patients across the country. The research turned up four key barriers preventing patients from receiving much-needed cardiac care: Lack of patient awareness of health and medical needs Lack of proper diagnostics Inability of patients to navigate the care pathway Affordability While there were competitors making some progress in India, the biggest competition was nonconsumption because of the challenges the Medtronic team identified. From a traditional perspective, Medtronic might have doubled down on doctors, asking them about priorities and tradeoffs in the product. What features would they value more, or less? Asking patients what they wanted would not have been top of the list of considerations from a marketing perspective. But when Medtronic revisited the problem through the lens of Jobs to Be Done, Monson says, the team realized that the picture was far more complex—and not one that Medtronic executives could have figured out from pouring over statistics of Indian heart disease or asking cardiologists how to make the pacemaker better. Medtronic has missed a critical component of the Job to Be Done.

the Telegraph group noted that four key skills for their reporters would be ‘social, video, analytics and search engine optimisation’. What about ‘journalism

Today, we have a Christianity made easy as an accommodation to an age that is unwilling to face the implication of Calvary, and the gospel of “simply believism” has produced a harvest of professions which have done untold harm to the cause of Christ. —DUNCAN CAMPBELL Do you have a hunger for God? If we don’t feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because we have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because we have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Our soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great. —JOHN PIPER The world has lost the power to blush over its vice; the Church has lost her power to weep over it. —LEONARD RAVENHILL

To give you an example of a referral process template in a more general sense, let’s look at a fictional financial advisor using the S.O.N.A.R. process a concept adapted from the book How to Get Your Competition Fired by Randy Schwantz. The process follows five steps as you speak with an existing client and keys off the Contrast Principle, with a focus on positioning that encourages the client to suggest they refer you to a friend, rather than you asking for a referral.

The key pathology of our time, which seduces us all, is the reduction of imagination so that we are too numbed, satiated, and co-opted to do serious imaginative work

What did you do?” “I told him to leave me—and when he would not go, I simply walked into my bathroom and locked the door.” “But what happened the next time he came? Martin went in to see you every day, didn’t he?” “He did. But he talked to me through the bathroom door. Just as soon as I heard the key turn in the lock I’d hop in there.” The man she had been talking about must have been listening just outside in the hall, for now he strode into the room and up to Dorothy. “That,” he said menacingly, “is a deliberate lie, Miss Janet Jordan!

APPENDIX KEY POINTS IN THE BOOK

Most folks aren’t actively racist. But you are passively participating in the spiritual and economic enslavement of every person of color in this church. You have handed the keys to our executioners unknowingly. Systemic racism is embedded in nearly every fiber of church life—from liturgical colors to the way we discuss Advent. And the same is true for the fiber of the broader culture. You don’t have to look much further than the shows and music we consume for entertainment to see this is true. Black people are plot devices, criminals, sassy aunts, or hip-hop culture for you to emulate at home while clutching your purse when you pass us on the streets.

Before concluding the discussion on Partridge’s connection to the Stoic tradition, I present what is probably the greatest proof Partridge was a Stoic: he suffered the public doom of one. Ironically, Partridge may have missed a powerful warning about his own fate within one of the key texts he used in his academies. A footnote within William Duncan’s translation of Cicero’s orations recalls the ill fortune of Quintus Aelius Tubero in the eyes of the people of Rome caused by his Stoic behavior at the funeral of Scipio Africanus: "[It was the same from the study of Tubero] Cicero here ridicules the doctrine of the Stoics, shows the absurdities into which it may betray a man and paints the ill consequences that often arise from it. [Quintus Aelius] Tubero, of whom he speaks here had professed himself a Stoic and resolved to regulate his conduct by the tenets of that sect. Accordingly, in an entertainment he gave the Roman people on occasion of the death of the great Scipio Africanus he made use of plain wooden beds, goat skin covers, and earthen dishes. But this ill-timed parsimony was so displeasing to the Roman people that when he afterwards stood for the prætorship they refused him their suffrages though a man of illustrious birth and the most distinguished virtue." Is there a passage more fitting for the legacy of Partridge and his Stoic behavior? Even when Partridge had built an ideal model for educating a complete virtue-driven citizen worthy of the Republic, few would find the lifestyle required appealing. Being a virtuous man with a sufficient plan for American education was not enough to guarantee his acceptance among the masses.

She’s keyed up,” Duncan said as Eve pulled up to the driveway. “You better talk to her, woman-to-woman.” “Good idea, because you know we don’t even have to speak to each other,” Eve said, putting the car into park. “Our uteruses can communicate telepathically.” “I think the correct term is ‘uteri.