Efficient Home Quotes

We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter. . . Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp's half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer's task to say, "It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home." Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist – the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.

Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen. But you know what? That’s excellent news.

At home I am a man, at work I am a machine.

Music is one of the most efficient mood elevators we have. People in nursing homes, whether ambulatory or even bedridden, whether lucid or not, would be provided with great pleasure by your playing. Maybe they could even dream, return to the best times in their lives, when they were loved.

Multi-lateralism's dilemma: that the inclusion of more actors increases the legitimacy of a process or organization at the same time as it decreases its efficiency and utility.

But the kitchen will not come into its own again until it ceases to be a status symbol and becomes again a workshop. It may be pastel. It may be ginghamed as to curtains and shining with copper like a picture in a woman's magazine. But you and I will know it chiefly by its fragrances and its clutter. At the back of the stove will sit a soup kettle, gently bubbling, one into which every day are popped leftover bones and vegetables to make stock for sauces or soup for the family. Carrots and leeks will sprawl on counters, greens in a basket. There will be something sweet-smelling twirling in a bowl and something savory baking in the oven. Cabinet doors will gape ajar and colored surfaces are likely to be littered with salt and pepper and flour and herbs and cheesecloth and pot holders and long-handled forks. It won't be neat. It won't even look efficient. but when you enter it you will feel the pulse of life throbbing from every corner. The heart of the home will have begun once again to beat.

...we are changed as technology offers us substitutes for connecting with each other face-to-face. We are offered robots and a whole world of machine-mediated relationships on networked devices. As we instant-message, e-mail, text, and Twitter, technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude. We talk of getting “rid” of our e-mails, as though these notes are so much excess baggage. Teenagers avoid making telephone calls, fearful that they “reveal too much.” They would rather text than talk. Adults, too, choose keyboards over the human voice. It is more efficient, they say. Things that happen in “real time” take too much time. Tethered to technology, we are shaken when that world “unplugged” does not signify, does not satisfy. After an evening of avatar-to avatar talk in a networked game, we feel, at one moment, in possession of a full social life and, in the next, curiously isolated, in tenuous complicity with strangers. We build a following on Facebook or MySpace and wonder to what degree our followers are friends. We recreate ourselves as online personae and give ourselves new bodies, homes, jobs, and romances. Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone. As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves. Sometimes people experience no sense of having communicated after hours of connection. And they report feelings of closeness when they are paying little attention. In all of this, there is a nagging question: Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?

Bicycles are the most efficient vehicles on the planet, 50 times more efficient than cars, and twice as efficient as walking.

For first-time vagabonders, this can be one of the hardest travel lessons to grasp, since it will seem that there are so many amazing sights and experiences to squeeze in. You must keep in mind, however, that the whole point of long-term travel is having the time to move deliberately through the world. Vagabonding is about not merely reallotting a portion of your life for travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time. At home, you’re conditioned to get to the point and get things done, to favor goals and efficiency over moment-by-moment distinction. On the road, you learn to improvise your days, take a second look at everything you see, and not obsess over your schedule.

James Heron stepped from the personal transport as Herbert, the family’s outmoded android butler, opened the front door of Scrabo Farm. There were infinitely more efficient and newer model android servants available, but neither James Heron nor his sister Niamh L’Estrange would dream of scrapping the mechanical attendant that had served the family so well, and enlivened their childhood with its fussy care of them both. “Hello, Herbert, is my sister home?” Answering in the slightly mechanical voice that James had liked so much when he was a boy, Herbert said, “She is in her study, Captain. I have alerted her to your arrival.

Fourth of July picnic. And by the way, that picnic, like everything else in this land, is a model of efficiency: you drive at top speed, set up in a previously reserved space, spread out the baskets, bolt your food, kick the ball, and rush home to avoid the traffic. In Chile, a similar project would take three days.

One thing for sure, Muhammad Ali stood his ground and refused to go thousands of miles from home to kill people who never did him any harm—a heroic stand. For this stand, he, like others, was arrested and faced imprisonment. What the government wants is efficient, sterile killers in immoral wars who can be awarded medals and paraded before cheering audiences as great patriotic defenders of our liberty.

My childhood home in Coeur-de-Lune was now a vacation rental, managed by efficient strangers. I'd never gone back. But my mother kept a buzzing gossip line into her church women from town, and gave me sporadic updates on Casey's life. She always brought Casey up when I was lulled into complacency. When we'd had a surprisingly peaceful afternoon together. When we were outside on her balcony, or sharing a piece of her peach pie like other mothers and daughters did. Only then would she jab, a master fencer going for the unprotected sliver of my heart.

It is right that the influence of the Government should be known in every humble home as the guardian of frugal comfort and content, and a defense against unjust exactions, and the unearned tribute persistently coveted by the selfish and designing. It is right that efficiency and honesty in public service should not be sacrificed to partisan greed; and it is right that the suffrage of our people should be pure and free.

Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars. If phone companies want to operate in the “free market,” then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we’ll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let’s hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public’s rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can.

I think it is cruel to expect the constant presence of any one family member (to tend to the ill). Just as we have to breathe in and breathe out, people have to "recharge their batteries" outside the sickroom at times, live a normal life from time to time; we cannot function efficiently in the constant awareness of illness. I have heard many relatives complain that members of the family went on pleasure trips over weekends or continued to go to the theater or movie. They blamed them for enjoying things while someone at home was terminally ill. I think it is more meaningful for the patient and his family to see that the illness does not totally disrupt a household or completely deprive all members of any pleasurable activities; rather, the illness may allow for a gradual adjustment and change toward the kind of home it is going to be when the patient is no longer around...The family too has a need to deny or avoid the sad realities at times in order to face them better when their presence is really needed.

Increased efficiency means more of the most precious commodity: time. But time for what, exactly? Usually, to do more work.

The constant terror of our home turned Eve into a machine of efficiency, me, a person detached from their body, and Emmanuelle neurotic.

A home that nourishes life embraces the little moments and appreciates the rhythmic seasons of life, including the time necessary to cook real food from scratch...It doesn't have to take too much time, however, with efficient menu planning and wisely planned trips to the grocery store and farmers' market. The payoffs are astronomical - better health, good stewardship of our environment, and setting a good example for our children are just a few of the benefits. It also fosters an appreciation of the ebbs and flows of seasons because you'll be using fresh ingredients that are more readily available (and of higher quality) when they are in season. If you feel too busy to cook from scratch, then I argue that you're too busy, period. Reevaluate your priorities and commitments. If you want to live a healthy, long life and to pass the same luxury on to your children, then you MUST take the time to cook real food

The Strategic Bombing Survey estimates that “probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any [equivalent period of] time in the history of man.” The fire storm at Dresden may have killed more people but not in so short a space of time. More than 100,000 men, women and children died in Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945; a million were injured, at least 41,000 seriously; a million in all lost their homes. Two thousand tons of incendiaries delivered that punishment—in the modern notation, two kilotons. But the wind, not the weight of bombs alone, created the conflagration, and therefore the efficiency of the slaughter was in some sense still in part an act of God.

I envied the sons their life in the country. I wasn’t even jealous of how at home they were in the fields and woods and barns; of how they could do so many things I couldn’t, drive tractors, take apart and fix motors, pluck eggs from under a hen, shove their way into a stall with a stubborn horse pushing back: I just marveled at it all, and wanted it. They and the boys who lived on farms near them were also so enviably at ease in their bodies: what back in the city would be taken as a slouch of disinterest, here was an expression of physical grace. No need to be tense when everything so readily submitted to your efficiently minimal gestures: hoisting bales of hay into a loft, priming a recalcitrant pump … Something else there was as well, something more elusive: perhaps that they lived so much of the time in a world of wild, poignant odors—mown grass, the redolent pines, even the tang of manure and horse-piss-soaked hay. Just the thought of those sensory elations inflicted me with a feeling I still have to exert myself to repress that I was squandering my time, wasting what I knew already were irretrievable clutches of years, now hecatombs of years, trapped in my trivial, stifling life.

The rise of Autism has coincided with: 1. Color televisions. 2. Double glazing & window coatings. 3. Insulated homes that are abnormally quiet. 4. Cell phones. 5. Satellites. 6. Affordable Jet Travel. 7. Home computers & video games. 8. Energy efficient light bulbs. 9. Immunizations. 10. Global Pollution. 11. Processed foods. 12. Adoption of cars by the masses. 13. Radioactive smoke detectors in the home. 14. Increasing television screen sizes. 15. WiFi. 16. Energy Star homes that are sealed up and lacking external fresh air ventilation. 17. FM stereo radio.

In a mass society where obtaining credit is as easy as it is, there’s probably no way to efficiently collect on delinquent accounts by writing real affidavits, filing legitimate, error-free lawsuits, and serving legitimate summonses in each and every individual case. Without the shortcuts, it doesn’t work. So techniques like robo-signing and sewer service are essential to the profitability of the business. Plenty of people—consumers and merchants both—are probably glad that so much credit is available, but they don’t realize that systematic fraud is part of what makes it available. Legally, there’s absolutely no difference between a woman on welfare who falsely declares that her boyfriend no longer lives in the home and a bank that uses a robo-signer to cook up a document swearing that he has kept regular records of your credit card account. But morally and politically, they’re worlds apart. When the state brings a fraud case against a welfare mom, it brings it with disgust, with rage, because in addition to committing the legal crime, she’s committed the political crime of being needy and an eyesore. Banks commit the legal crime of fraud wholesale; they do so out in the open, have entire departments committed to it, and have employees who’ve spent years literally doing nothing but commit, over and over again, the same legal crime that some welfare mothers go to jail for doing once. But they’re not charged, because there’s no political crime. The system is not disgusted by the organized, mechanized search for profit. It’s more like it’s impressed by it.

Jo tried to think about her suspicion that Lynn liked her. She figured that Lynn was nice to her because she was a patient. Jo's mother had shown her what it meant to have a professional mask. The times Jo saw her mother at work in the lab, busy and efficient as she drew blood and marked vials. Nancy smiled warmly at the patients, ready with a sympathetic comment. If a patient or a doctor called Nancy at home, she immediately became the caring professional, no matter what had been happening before the phone rang. When Lynn hung up after an evening phone call from Missy, Jo suspected that Lynn resumed screaming at her husband or kids.

Music is one of the most efficient mood elevators we have. People in nursing homes, whether ambulatory or even bedridden, whether lucid or not, would be provided with great pleasure by your playing. Maybe they could even dream, return to the best times in their lives, when they were loved.” Tears filled Sophie’s eyes. “I’ve never heard you

The wise always use a number of ready-made phrases (at the moment I write ‘nobody’s business’ is the most common), popular adjectives (like ‘divine’ or ‘shy-making’), verbs that you only know the meaning of if you live in the right set (like ‘dunch’), which give a homely sparkle to small talk and avoid the necessity of thought. The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried this device to such perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.

United States and Australia, use more per person, whereas others, like Japan and Britain, use less. Americans drive bigger cars than Japanese do, and drive more rather than take trains, and they live in bigger homes that are kept warmer in winter and cooler in summer. Americans consequently emit more carbon pollution than do people in more energy-efficient countries.

The shopkeeper is very efficient, has an efficient home delivery system and knows the tastes and price considerations of his customers. But he is labelled ‘unorganized’ by our experts and national income data and his contribution thereby diminished. The footfalls in his shop cannot be measured using Western models [since there is no place to keep anybody’s foot inside his shop!] and so he is derided and abused. It is like clubbing housewives along with prostitutes in our Census data to show them that they are involved in ‘unproductive’ activities. These are economic constructs imposed by the west on the rest and it is a form of terminological terrorism which is mouthed ad-nauseam by our economists and policy planners without understanding their implications.

Because of my love of excessive efficiency, my former decluttering efforts went something like this: Oh, this goes in the master bathroom. I’ll make a master bathroom pile here. That goes in the playroom, so I’ll make a playroom pile. These nails should be in the garage, so here’s a garage pile. Six piles later, life happened. I left the decluttering project to go take care of life with every intention of coming back as soon as I could. But I didn’t. Either more life happened, or I forgot. When I finally returned to the project a few hours (or a few days or a few months) later, those totally logical little piles had morphed into one big pile that was no longer the least bit sorted. The clutter that once drove me crazy while it sat behind the cabinet door or inside the drawer? Now it was out in the open, outside the area I was decluttering. I’d created a bigger mess.

As lighting manufacturers developed new, more energy-efficient technologies, such as LEDs and fluorescents, suddenly a light bulb was not just a light bulb anymore. But no one told us light-bulb buyers. “People don’t know they should be looking for three thousand degrees Kelvin, or what we call warm light, so instead they come home with four thousand or five thousand degrees Kelvin, which is cool light.” This information is printed on packages, but most people don’t know to look for it.

Jane Addams, the urban reformer who founded Chicago’s Hull House, wrote, “Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.” The women sought work as typewriters, stenographers, seamstresses, and weavers. The men who hired them were for the most part moral citizens intent on efficiency and profit. But not always. On March 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of “our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances.” The

It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. Technical and scientific terms would add millions more. Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000). The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot distinguish between house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between “I wrote” and “I have written.” The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful thinking. In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care [all cited in The New York Times, June 18, 1989]. English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget’s Thesaurus. “Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist” [The Miracle of Language, page 54]. On the other hand, other languages have facilities we lack. Both French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition (respectively connaître and kennen) and knowledge that results from understanding (savoir and wissen). Portuguese has words that differentiate between an interior angle and an exterior one. All the Romance languages can distinguish between something that leaks into and something that leaks out of. The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. (Wouldn’t they just?) It’s sgriob. And we have nothing in English to match the Danish hygge (meaning “instantly satisfying and cozy”), the French sang-froid, the Russian glasnost, or the Spanish macho, so we must borrow the term from them or do without the sentiment. At the same time, some languages have words that we may be pleased to do without. The existence in German of a word like schadenfreude (taking delight in the misfortune of others) perhaps tells us as much about Teutonic sensitivity as it does about their neologistic versatility. Much the same could be said about the curious and monumentally unpronounceable Highland Scottish word sgiomlaireachd, which means “the habit of dropping in at mealtimes.” That surely conveys a world of information about the hazards of Highland life—not to mention the hazards of Highland orthography. Of

Then he said the funny thing was the old man himself had left home when he was a kid, after a fight with his own father. The father lit into him for using the wheelbarrow. "It was this way. They always carried the feed to the horses, pail by pail. In the winter, when the horses were in the stalls. So my father took the notion to carry it to them in the wheelbarrow. Naturally it was a lot quicker. But he got beat. For laziness. That was the way they were, you know. Any change of any kind was a bad thing. Efficiency was just laziness, to them. That's the peasant thinking for you.

Back in the 1980s, the original stated purpose of the mortgage-backed bond had been to redistribute the risk associated with home mortgage lending. Home mortgage loans could find their way to the bond market investors willing to pay the most for them. The interest rate paid by the homeowner would thus fall. The goal of the innovation, in short, was to make the financial markets more efficient. Now, somehow, the same innovative spirit was being put to the opposite purpose: to hide the risk by complicating it. The market was paying Goldman Sachs bond traders to make the market less efficient.

Mr. Beechman told us all about how taxes work the year we were doing percents in math. Instead of each individual paying for her own teacher and her own school, her own roads and her own sidewalks, her own books and her own wars, each individual pays taxes on her home, land, income, investments, and holdings, and that money goes to the government, and then the government buys one teacher and one school and one road and one sidewalk and one library, and everyone shares. The government hosts a war, and everyone just comes to that. This is called efficiency, and it means you cannot have your own war. You can only join someone else’s.

There was a shamefulness about the experience of Herbert's execution I couldn't shake. Everyone I saw at the prison seemed surrounded by a cloud of regret and remorse. The prison officials had pumped themselves up to carry out the execution with determination and resolve, but even they revealed extreme discomfort and some measure of shame. Maybe I was imagining it but it seemed that everyone recognized what was taking place was wrong. Abstractions about capital punishment were one thing, but the details of systematically killing someone who is not a threat are completely different. I couldn't stop thinking about it on the trip home. I thought about Herbert, about how desperately he wanted the American flag he earned through his military service in Vietnam. I thought about his family and about the victim's family and the tragedy the crime created for them. I thought about the visitation officer, the Department of Corrections officials, the men who were paid to shave Herbert's body so that he could be killed more efficiently. I thought about the officers who had strapped him into the chair. I kept thinking that no one could actually believe this was a good thing to do or even a necessary thing to do. The next day there were articles in the press about the execution. Some state officials expressed happiness and excitement that an execution had taken place, but I knew that none of them had actually dealt with the details of killing Herbert. In debates about the death penalty, I had started arguing that we would never think it was humane to pay someone to rape people convicted of rape or assault and abuse someone guilty of assault or abuse. Yet we were comfortable killing people who kill, in part because we think we can do it in a matter that doesn't implicate our own humanity, the way that raping or abusing someone would. I couldn't stop thinking that we don't spend much time contemplating the details of what killing someone actually involves.

Overall, Zinni’s rules read like an updating of how to apply the Marine Corps culture to today’s conflicts: Stay loose. Stay focused. Keep it simple. And be honest. Similar messages can be heard in many parts of the Corps, wherever there are good officers willing to seize the initiative—that is, who care more about their mission and their Marines than they do about their careers. This is how Major Davis at the Drill Instructors School summarizes the Marine Corps way of doing business: “Concentrate on doing a single task as simply as you can, execute it flawlessly, take care of your people, and go home.”That doesn’t leave a lot of room for the “doctrine”that the Army so loves to write and cite. But those four steps offer an efficient way to run any organization.

PANOTII LOOKS PUT OUT ABOUT BEING LEFT BEHIND AND dogs my steps as I stow his tack under the deep overhang on the south side of the wizard’s hovel. There’s plenty of grass here, water at the lake, and it’s not that cold yet, despite the shift in seasons. If the rains start before we get back, the horses can take shelter under the overhang. I’m not worried about them wandering off. Not one of them has stepped outside of the large makeshift corral of God Bolt pits since we got here. “You can’t come with us,” I tell him. “It’ll be cold and slippery. And big monsters will want to eat you.” He tosses his head, snorting. “Really big monsters. There might be Dragons. And the Hydra. And I can’t vouch for the friendliness of the Ipotane toward regular horses.” I blow gently into his nose. Panotii chuffs back. “You’ll be safe here, and if anyone tries to steal you, Grandpa Zeus will throw down a thunderbolt. Boom! No more horse thief.” “Zeus may have better things to do than babysit our horses,” Flynn says, stowing his own equine gear next to mine. I glance northward toward the Gods’ mountain home and speak loudly. “In that case, I’m announcing right now that I’ll make an Olympian stink if anything happens to my horse.” Flynn looks nervous and moves away from me like he’s expecting a God Bolt to come thundering down. “She’s not kidding.” Sunlight glints off Griffin’s windblown hair. Thick black stubble darkens his jaw. He flashes me a smile that brings out the slight hook in his nose, and something tightens in my belly. I turn back to Panotii and scratch under his jaw. “You’re in charge here.” His enormous ears flick my way. “You keep the others in line.” Panotii nods. I swear to the Gods, my horse nods. Brown Horse raises his head and pins me with a gimlet stare. I roll my eyes. “Fine. You can help. You’re both in charge.” Apparently satisfied, Griffin’s horse goes back to grazing, shearing the grass around him with neat, organized efficiency. Griffin and Brown Horse were made for each other. Panotii shoves his nose into my shoulder, knocking me back a step. Taking a handful of his chestnut mane, I stretch up on my toes to whisper into one of his donkey ears. “Seriously, you’re in charge. I’ll bet you can even rhyme.” Carver and Kato chuckle as they walk past. Griffin bands his arms around my waist from behind, surprising me. “I heard that.

These examinations and certificates and so on--what did they matter? And all this efficiency and up-to-dateness--what did that matter, either? Ralston was trying to run Brookfield like a factory--a factory for turning out a snob culture based on money and machines. The old gentlemanly traditions of family and broad acres were changing, as doubtless they were bound to; but instead of widening them to form a genuine inclusive democracy of duke and dustman, Ralston was narrowing them upon the single issue of a fat banking account. There never had been so many rich men's sons at Brookfield. The Speech Day Garden Party was like Ascot. Ralston met these wealthy fellows in London clubs and persuaded them that Brookfield was the coming school, and, since they couldn't buy their way into Eton or Harrow, they greedily swallowed the bait. Awful fellows, some of them--though others were decent enough. Financiers, company promoters, pill manufacturers. One of them gave his son five pounds a week pocket money. Vulgar . . . ostentatious . . . all the hectic rotten-ripeness of the age. . . . And once Chips had got into trouble because of some joke he had made about the name and ancestry of a boy named Isaacstein. The boy wrote home about it, and Isaacstein père sent an angry letter to Ralston. Touchy, no sense of humor, no sense of proportion--that was the matter with them, these new fellows. . . . No sense of proportion. And it was a sense of proportion, above all things, that Brookfield ought to teach--not so much Latin or Greek or Chemistry or Mechanics. And you couldn't expect to test that sense of proportion by setting papers and granting certificates...

One of the reasons that repetition is so important lies in your teenager’s brain development. One of the frontal lobes’ executive functions includes something called prospective memory, which is the ability to hold in your mind the intention to perform a certain action at a future time—for instance, remembering to return a phone call when you get home from work. Researchers have found not only that prospective memory is very much associated with the frontal lobes but also that it continues to develop and become more efficient specifically between the ages of six and ten, and then again in the twenties. Between the ages of ten and fourteen, however, studies reveal no significant improvement. It’s as if that part of the brain—the ability to remember to do something—is simply not keeping up with the rest of a teenager’s growth and development. The parietal lobes,

One of the triumphs of civilisation, Peter Walsh thought. It is one of the triumphs of civilisation, as the light high bell of the ambulance sounded. Swiftly, cleanly, the ambulance sped to the hospital, having picked up instantly, humanely, some poor devil; some one hit on the head, struck down by disease, knocked over perhaps a minute or so ago at one of these crossings, as might happen to oneself. That was civilisation. It struck him coming back from the East - the efficiency, the organisation, the communal spirit of London. Every cart or carriage of its own accord drew aside to let the ambulance pass. Perhaps it was morbid; or was it not touching rather, the respect which they showed this ambulance with its victim inside- busy men hurrying home, yet instantly bethinking them as it passed of some wife; or presumably how easily it might have been them there, stretched on a shelf with a doctor and a nurse.

Workaholism Our culture celebrates the idea of the workaholic. We hear about people burning the midnight oil. They pull all- nighters and sleep at the office. It’s considered a badge of honor to kill yourself over a project. No amount of work is too much work. Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it’s stupid. Working more doesn’t mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more. Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn’t sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes— and it will— it’ll hit that much harder. Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions. They even create crises. They don’t look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working overtime. They enjoy feeling like heroes. They create problems (often unwittingly) just so they can get off on working more. Workaholics make the people who don’t stay late feel inadequate for “merely” working reasonable hours. That leads to guilt and poor morale all around. Plus, it leads to an ass- in- seat mentality—people stay late out of obligation, even if they aren’t really being productive. If all you do is work, you’re unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what’s worth extra effort and what’s not. And you wind up just plain tired. No one makes sharp decisions when tired. In the end, workaholics don’t actually accomplish more than nonworkaholics. They may claim to be perfectionists, but that just means they’re wasting time fixating on inconsequential details instead of moving on to the next task. Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.

Dear Mr. Vermylen: Your company has been one of our good customers for fourteen years. Naturally, we are very grateful for your patronage and are eager to give you the speedy, efficient service you deserve. However, we regret to say that it isn’t possible for us to do that when your trucks bring us a large shipment late in the afternoon, as they did on November 10. Why? Because many other customers make late afternoon deliveries also. Naturally, that causes congestion. That means your trucks are held up unavoidably at the pier and sometimes even your freight is delayed. That’s bad, but it can be avoided. If you make your deliveries at the pier in the morning when possible, your trucks will be able to keep moving, your freight will get immediate attention, and our workers will get home early at night to enjoy a dinner of the delicious macaroni and noodles that you manufacture. Regardless of when your shipments arrive, we shall always cheerfully do all in our power to serve you promptly. You are busy. Please don’t trouble to answer this note.

The American idea was summed up in the most widely read pamphlet during the American Revolution, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. In it, Paine explained, “Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”30 Though animated by a deep distrust of authority, America’s Founding Fathers recognized nonetheless that society required a government. Otherwise, who would protect citizens from foreign threats, or violations of their rights by criminals at home? But they wrestled with a dilemma. A government powerful enough to perform its essential functions would tend toward tyranny. To manage this challenge, they designed, as Richard Neustadt taught us, a government of “separated institutions sharing power.”31 This deliberately produced constant struggle among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches that meant delay, gridlock, and even dysfunction. But it also provided checks and balances against abuse. As Justice Louis Brandeis explained eloquently, their purpose was “not to promote efficiency, but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary authority.”32

First, she must unequivocally say “no” to the housewife image. This does not mean, of course, that she must divorce her husband, abandon her children, give up her home. She does not have to choose between marriage and career; that was the mistaken choice of the feminine mystique. In actual fact, it is not as difficult as the feminine mystique implies, to combine marriage and motherhood and even the kind of lifelong personal purpose that once was called “career.” It merely takes a new life plan—in terms of one’s whole life as a woman. The first step in that plan is to see housework for what it is—not a career, but something that must be done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Once a woman stops trying to make cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, “something more,” she can say “no, I don’t want a stove with rounded corners, I don’t want four different kinds of soap.” She can say “no” to those mass daydreams of the women’s magazines and television, “no” to the depth researchers and manipulators who are trying to run her life. Then, she can use the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher and all the automatic appliances, and even the instant mashed potatoes for what they are truly worth—to save time that can be used in more creative ways.

Daily work in the field of online advertising, as Jack Goldenberg sees it, is still significantly different from what the trends are propagated by online promotions. Defining online budget According to Jack Goldenberg a vast majority of the budget for online advertising does not exceed $2,000 on a monthly basis, depending on the perception of the company as they can bring effects "online adventure", established budgets for online advertising move in value from $200 to $2,000 per month (with highest proportion of $200-$500). This does not mean that a number of companies gives less advertising - but even then it can not be called "creating the campaign." Goldenberg believes that in order to create an online advertising campaign there should be a budget of at least $500 for the use of different types of online advertising. Goldenberg explains this as: In an environment of such budget is not simply distribute the money "wisely" and that since it has obvious benefits through a variety of online advertising systems. Jack Goldenberg found out how most companies in the world and USA are oriented towards effects in relation to the funds that are made for advertising. In this type of company, regardless of what everyone knows to be used types of brand advertising (advertising through banners - display advertising) to create recognizable firms in certain target groups, the effects of such advertising are not directly comparable with respect to the effects of (price per click - CPC - Cost per click) with contextual advertising, which for years has given much more efficient (measurable) results in relation to advertising banners, concludes Mr. Goldenberg. According to Yoel Goldenberg it is good when there is an understanding in companies that brand advertising has a different type of effects in relation to the PPC (contextual) advertising, and that would be it "documented" in a certain way, it is necessary to constantly explore and find those web sites that deliver the best effects for optimum need of assets. The process of creating an online advertising campaigns, explained by Goldenberg, usually starts (or should start) finding individual Web sites on which to advertise a company could, possibly longer term. Unfortunately, says Goldenberg, in our country is not in all sectors (industries) simply find diverse Web sites from which to choose "pretenders" for online advertising. An even greater problem is the fact that long-term advertising on a Web site does not bring the desired effect, unless it is constantly not working to the content of advertising often changes with an emphasis on meeting the needs of potential clients.

The most celebrated germ expert in the world is almost certainly Dr. Charles P. Gerba of the University of Arizona, who is so devoted to the field that he gave one of his children the middle name Escherichia, after the bacterium Escherichia coli. Dr. Gerba established some years ago that household germs are not always most numerous where you would expect them to be. In one famous survey he measured bacterial content in different rooms in various houses and found that typically the cleanest surface of all in the average house was the toilet seat. That is because it is wiped down with disinfectant more often than any other surface. By contrast the average desktop has five times more bacteria living on it than the average toilet seat. The dirtiest area of all was the kitchen sink, closely followed by the kitchen counter, and the filthiest object was the kitchen washcloth. Most kitchen cloths are drenched in bacteria, and using them to wipe counters (or plates or breadboards or greasy chins or any other surface) merely transfers microbes from one place to another, affording them new chances to breed and proliferate. The second most efficient way of spreading germs, Gerba found, is to flush a toilet with the lid up. That spews billions of microbes into the air. Many stay in the air, floating like tiny soap bubbles, waiting to be inhaled, for up to two hours; others settle on things like your toothbrush. That is, of course, yet another good reason for putting the lid down.

My Future Self My future self and I become closer and closer as time goes by. I must admit that I neglected and ignored her until she punched me in the gut, grabbed me by the hair and turned my butt around to introduce herself. Well, at least that’s what it felt like every time I left the convalescent hospital after doing skills training for a certification I needed to help me start my residential care business. I was going to be providing specialized, 24/7 residential care and supervising direct care staff for non-verbal, non-ambulatory adult men in diapers! I ran to the Red Cross and took the certified nurse assistant class so I would at least know something about the job I would soon be hiring people to do and to make sure my clients received the best care. The training facility was a Medicaid hospital. I would drive home in tears after seeing what happens when people are not able to afford long-term medical care and the government has to provide that care. But it was seeing all the “young” patients that brought me to tears. And I had thought that only the elderly lived like this in convalescent hospitals…. I am fortunate to have good health but this experience showed me that there is the unexpected. So I drove home each day in tears, promising God out loud, over and over again, that I would take care of my health and take care of my finances. That is how I met my future self. She was like, don’t let this be us girlfriend and stop crying! But, according to studies, we humans have a hard time empathizing with our future selves. Could you even imagine your 30 or 40 year old self when you were in elementary or even high school? It’s like picturing a stranger. This difficulty explains why some people tend to favor short-term or immediate gratification over long-term planning and savings. Take time to picture the life you want to live in 5 years, 10 years, and 40 years, and create an emotional connection to your future self. Visualize the things you enjoy doing now, and think of retirement saving and planning as a way to continue doing those things and even more. However, research shows that people who interacted with their future selves were more willing to improve savings. Just hit me over the head, why don’t you! I do understand that some people can’t even pay attention or aren’t even interested in putting money away for their financial future because they have so much going on and so little to work with that they feel like they can’t even listen to or have a conversation about money. But there are things you’re doing that are not helping your financial position and could be trouble. You could be moving in the wrong direction. The goal is to get out of debt, increase your collateral capacity, use your own money in the most efficient manner and make financial decisions that will move you forward instead of backwards. Also make sure you are getting answers specific to your financial situation instead of blindly guessing! Contact us. We will be happy to help!

5. Move toward resistance and pain A. Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.

She could envision Shakespeare's sister. But she imagined a violent, an apocalyptic end for Shakespeare's sister, whereas I know that isn't what happened. You see, it isn't necessary. I know that lots of Chinese women, given in marriage to men they abhorred and lives they despised, killed themselves by throwing themselves down the family well. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm only saying that isn't what usually happens. It it were, we wouldn't be having a population problem. And there are so much easier ways to destroy a woman. You don't have to rape or kill her; you don't even have to beat her. You can just marry her. You don't even have to do that. You can just let her work in your office for thirty-five dollars a week. Shakespeare's sister did...follow her brother to London, but she never got there. She was raped the first night out, and bleeding and inwardly wounded, she stumbled for shelter into the next village she found. Realizing before too long that she was pregnant, she sought a way to keep herself and her child safe. She found some guy with the hots for her, realized he was credulous, and screwed him. When she announced her pregnancy to him, a couple months later, he dutifully married her. The child, born a bit early, makes him suspicious: they fight, he beats her, but in the end he submits. Because there is something in the situation that pleases him: he has all the comforts of home including something Mother didn't provide, and if he has to put up with a screaming kid he isn't sure is his, he feels now like one of the boys down at the village pub, none of whom is sure they are the children of the fathers or the fathers of their children. But Shakespeare's sister has learned the lesson all women learn: men are the ultimate enemy. At the same time she knows she cannot get along in the world without one. So she uses her genius, the genius she might have used to make plays and poems with, in speaking, not writing. She handles the man with language: she carps, cajoles, teases, seduces, calculates, and controls this creature to whom God saw fit to give power over her, this hulking idiot whom she despises because he is dense and fears because he can do her harm. So much for the natural relation between the sexes. But you see, he doesn't have to beat her much, he surely doesn't have to kill her: if he did, he'd lose his maidservant. The pounds and pence by themselves are a great weapon. They matter to men, of course, but they matter more to women, although their labor is generally unpaid. Because women, even unmarried ones, are required to do the same kind of labor regardless of their training or inclinations, and they can't get away from it without those glittering pounds and pence. Years spent scraping shit out of diapers with a kitchen knife, finding places where string beans are two cents less a pound, intelligence in figuring the most efficient, least time-consuming way to iron men's white shirts or to wash and wax the kitchen floor or take care of the house and kids and work at the same time and save money, hiding it from the boozer so the kid can go to college -- these not only take energy and courage and mind, but they may constitute the very essence of a life. They may, you say wearily, but who's interested?...Truthfully, I hate these grimy details as much as you do....They are always there in the back ground, like Time's winged chariot. But grimy details are not in the background of the lives of most women; they are the entire surface.

Michael Lewis, the author of The Blind Side, wrote about professional basketball player Shane Battier, who plays for the Houston Rockets, in an article titled “The No-Stats All-Star.” He describes Battier as follows: “Shane Battier is widely regarded inside the NBA as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win. [Because] Battier . . . seems to help the team in all sorts of subtle, hard-to-measure ways that appear to violate his personal interests.” Subtle, hard-to-measure ways. Lewis continues: Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse—often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He doesn’t shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots . . . On defense, although he routinely guards the NBA’s most prolific scorers, he significantly reduces shooting percentages. [We] call him Lego. When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together. Husbands, children, and coworkers may not understand what it is exactly that we do. Yet because of who we are and what we do, whether in our home, community, or workplace, things magically work. Like Shane Battier, our very presence seems to just make everything and everyone work better together. It’s hard to put your finger on it, but in my experience this “magic” of bringing people together and enhancing their strengths is a talent that many women seem to have. It’s one reason we are so good at being a safe haven and playing a supporting role, but it’s a talent that we can use for great good when we dust off our dreams and put on our Batman suit.

Homeostasis is necessary for life. It provides a stable home base, a resting place from which the body can respond to the surrounding world. . . In the service of homeostasis, addiction acts upon the human spirit like gravity upon a planetary body, seeking to hold it within a stable orbit against the planet’s own centrifugal striving for the stars. In this way, our most natural addictions safeguard the essentials of life. They are part of love, but they are pure function, unadulterated efficiency, nothing but inhibition. For the spirit seeking freedom of love, as for the planet seeking the stars, the gravity of addiction is a painful price to pay for safety. If homeostasis were the end of things, that end would surely be Sheol: stagnation and death. With no stretching, reaching, opening, or yearning to counteract our gravity, we would collapse in upon ourselves like stars becoming black holes. Often we do try to choose that option. We choose safety over freedom; we entrench ourselves in inertia. We dull and occupy ourselves so completely that we stifle our desire, anesthetize our yearning, restrict the energy of our passion. This does not remove us from the ongoing birth of creation, but it deadens us to it. . . We all opt for safety on occasion . . . Most of us choose it more than we would like to admit. Some of us choose it continually. . . . Love does not permit homeostasis to be the end of things. If we so choose, whatever stability we have can be the source of endless beginnings. Our equilibrium can be gestation rather than stagnation. Homeostasis can be the place where we wake up to our yearnings, however painful, and claim them as our own. . . We can say yes to the invitation of love and begin to open up and reach out again. Each time we say yes we upset our stability. We sacrifice our serenity. We risk our safety. We become vulnerable to being hurt. And creation shines more brightly. . . Each human yes contributes a priceless breath of freedom to the endlessly birthing universe.

The houses were left vacant on the land and the land was vacant because of this. Only the tractor sheds of corrugated iron, silver and gleaming were alive, and they were alive with metal and gasoline and oil, discs of the plows shining. The tractors had lights shining, for there is no day and night for a tractor, and the discs turn the earth in the darkness and they glitter in the daylight. And when a horse stops work and goes into the barn, there is a life and vitality left. There is a breathing and a warmth, and the feet shift on the straw, and the jaws champ on the hay, and the ears and the eyes are alive. There is a warmth of life in the barn and the heat and smell of life, but when the motor of a tractor stops it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like the living heat that leaves a corpse. Then the corrugated iron doors are closed and the tractor man drives home to town, perhaps twenty miles away, and he need not come back for weeks or months, for the tractor is dead. And this is easy and efficient. So easy, that the wonder goes out of work. So efficient, that the wonder goes out of land, the working of it, and with the wonder, the deep understanding and the relation. And in the tractor man the grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation, for nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates, and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt, water, nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more. And the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch, that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than it's analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love understands only chemistry, and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut he goes home, and his home is not the land.

Easing Your Worries I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? —MATTHEW 6:25     I don’t know how things are in your world, but I can tell you that in Southern California we live in an age of anxiety. My neighbors and I have it much easier than our parents, but we certainly are much uneasier than our parents were. We seem to be anxious about temporal things, more so than past generations. They never worried about whether they were eating at the new vogue eatery, vacationing at the best island hotel with the largest pool, wearing the most prestigious label, or keeping their abs in shape. I watched the previous generation closely; they wanted a home for their families, a car that ran efficiently, and a job that provided for their basic needs. It seems our main concerns and drives today are physical and earth possessed. A large number of people actually believe that if they have the best food, clothing, education, house, and trainer, they have arrived. What else could one want for a perfect life? Our culture actually places more importance on the body and what we do with it than ever before in modern history. Thus we have created a mind set that causes us as women to be more concerned with life’s accommodations along life’s journey than with our final destination. Many women are going through their lives with a vast vacuum on the inside. In fact, the woman that you might sometimes envy because of her finely dressed family and newly remodeled kitchen is probably spending most of her day anxious and unsatisfied. Maybe that woman is you? This thing called life is more important than food, and the body is more important than what we wear. All the tangible distractions don’t satisfy the soul; they have become cheap substitutes for our spiritual wholeness and well-being. Let Christ help you overcome the anxieties of life. • Stop chasing the temporal things of life. Seek the kingdom of God as it is revealed in Jesus. Cast all your cares on Him. • Take your eyes off yourself and focus them on God first. Much of our anxieties are rooted in our self-centeredness. • Spend most of your prayer time praying for others.

DRY SAUNA Numerous cultures use sweat lodges, steam baths, or saunas for cleansing and purification. Many health clubs and big apartment buildings have saunas and steam baths, and more and more people are building saunas in their own homes. Low-to-moderate-temperature saunas are one of the most important ways to detoxify from pesticide exposure. Head-to-toe perspiration through the skin, the largest organ of elimination, releases stored toxins and opens the pores. Fat that is close to the skin is heated, mobilized, and broken down, releasing toxins and breaking up cellulite. The heat increases metabolism, burns off calories, and gives the heart and circulation a workout. This is a boon if you don’t have the energy to exercise. It is well known in medicine that a fever is the body’s way of burning off an infection and stimulating the immune system. Fever therapy and sauna therapy are employed at alternative medicine healing centers to do just that. The controlled temperature in a sauna is excellent for relaxing muscular aches and pains and relieving sinus congestion. The only way I made it through my medical internship was by having regular saunas to reduce the daily stress. FAR-INFRARED (FIR) SAUNAS FIR saunas are inexpensive, convenient, and highly effective. Detox expert Dr. Sherry Rogers says that FIR is a proven and efficacious way of eliminating stored environmental toxins, and she thinks everyone should use one. There are one-person Sauna Domes that you lie under or more elaborate sauna boxes that seat several people. The far infrared provides a heat that increases the body temperature but the surrounding air is not overly heated. One advantage of the dome is that your head remains outside, which most people find more comfortable and less confining. Sweating begins within minutes of entering the dome and can be continued for thirty to sixty minutes. Besides the hundreds of toxins that can be removed through simple sweating, the heat of saunas creates a mild shock to the body, which researchers feel acts as a stimulus for the body’s cells to become more efficient. The outward signs are the production of sweat to help decrease the body temperature, but there is much more going on. Further research on sauna therapy is destined to make it an important medical therapy.

Hi Tim, Patience. Far too soon to expect strength improvements. Strength improvements [for a movement like this] take a minimum of 6 weeks. Any perceived improvements prior to that are simply the result of improved synaptic facilitation. In plain English, the central nervous system simply became more efficient at that particular movement with practice. This is, however, not to be confused with actual strength gains. Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence. In fact, it is essential and something that every single elite athlete has had to learn to deal with. If the pursuit of excellence was easy, everyone would do it. In fact, this impatience in dealing with frustration is the primary reason that most people fail to achieve their goals. Unreasonable expectations timewise, resulting in unnecessary frustration, due to a perceived feeling of failure. Achieving the extraordinary is not a linear process. The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home. A blue collar work ethic married to indomitable will. It is literally that simple. Nothing interferes. Nothing can sway you from your purpose. Once the decision is made, simply refuse to budge. Refuse to compromise. And accept that quality long-term results require quality long-term focus. No emotion. No drama. No beating yourself up over small bumps in the road. Learn to enjoy and appreciate the process. This is especially important because you are going to spend far more time on the actual journey than with those all too brief moments of triumph at the end. Certainly celebrate the moments of triumph when they occur. More importantly, learn from defeats when they happen. In fact, if you are not encountering defeat on a fairly regular basis, you are not trying hard enough. And absolutely refuse to accept less than your best. Throw out a timeline. It will take what it takes. If the commitment is to a long-term goal and not to a series of smaller intermediate goals, then only one decision needs to be made and adhered to. Clear, simple, straightforward. Much easier to maintain than having to make small decision after small decision to stay the course when dealing with each step along the way. This provides far too many opportunities to inadvertently drift from your chosen goal. The single decision is one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox. 2 Wealthy “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” —James Cameron

the military-industrial-scientific complex, because today’s wars are scientific productions. The world’s military forces initiate, fund and steer a large part of humanity’s scientific research and technological development. When World War One bogged down into interminable trench warfare, both sides called in the scientists to break the deadlock and save the nation. The men in white answered the call, and out of the laboratories rolled a constant stream of new wonder-weapons: combat aircraft, poison gas, tanks, submarines and ever more efficient machine guns, artillery pieces, rifles and bombs. 33. German V-2 rocket ready to launch. It didn’t defeat the Allies, but it kept the Germans hoping for a technological miracle until the very last days of the war. {© Ria Novosti/Science Photo Library.} Science played an even larger role in World War Two. By late 1944 Germany was losing the war and defeat was imminent. A year earlier, the Germans’ allies, the Italians, had toppled Mussolini and surrendered to the Allies. But Germany kept fighting on, even though the British, American and Soviet armies were closing in. One reason German soldiers and civilians thought not all was lost was that they believed German scientists were about to turn the tide with so-called miracle weapons such as the V-2 rocket and jet-powered aircraft. While the Germans were working on rockets and jets, the American Manhattan Project successfully developed atomic bombs. By the time the bomb was ready, in early August 1945, Germany had already surrendered, but Japan was fighting on. American forces were poised to invade its home islands. The Japanese vowed to resist the invasion and fight to the death, and there was every reason to believe that it was no idle threat. American generals told President Harry S. Truman that an invasion of Japan would cost the lives of a million American soldiers and would extend the war well into 1946. Truman decided to use the new bomb. Two weeks and two atom bombs later, Japan surrendered unconditionally and the war was over. But science is not just about offensive weapons. It plays a major role in our defences as well. Today many Americans believe that the solution to terrorism is technological rather than political. Just give millions more to the nanotechnology industry, they believe, and the United States could send bionic spy-flies into every Afghan cave, Yemenite redoubt and North African encampment. Once that’s done, Osama Bin Laden’s heirs will not be able to make a cup of coffee without a CIA spy-fly passing this vital information back to headquarters in Langley.

The US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. What country do you want to live in?

It's hard to know exactly how many empty houses there are...the census placed the figure, in the United States, in 2000, at about 10.5 million housing units (including apartments, counting duplexes as two, and so forth). For comparison: less than a quarter million people lived in homeless shelters in 2000.

Pantry Staples Our pantry is organized to stock a limited and set amount of jars, which contain either a permanent staple or rotational staple. Permanent staples will vary from family to family. Ours include: • Flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, cornstarch, baking powder, yeast, oatmeal, coffee, dry corn, powdered sugar • Jam, butter, peanut butter, honey, mustard, canned tomatoes, pickles, olives, capers • Olive oil, vegetable oil, apple cider vinegar, wine vinegar, tamari, vanilla extract • A selection of spices and herbs Rotational staples represent groups of foods that we used to buy in many different forms. In the past, our legume collection consisted of chickpeas, lentils, peas, red beans, fava beans, pinto beans, etc. Even though stocking many types of food appears to stimulate variety, the contrary is often the case. Similar to wardrobe items, pantry favorites get picked first while nonfavorites get pushed back and forgotten, take up space, and ultimately go bad (i.e., become rancid or bug infested). Today, instead of storing many versions of a staple, we have dedicated one specific jar and adopted a system of rotation. For example, our rotating jar of grain might be filled with rice one week, couscous another. Our rotating collection includes: • Grain • Pasta • Legume • Cereal • Cookie • Nut • Sweet snack • Savory snack • Tea This system has proved not only to maintain variety in our diet and free up storage space; it has also been efficient at keeping foods from going bad.

Go online and find the best Eco Air Conditioning Systems that work very efficiently. Save money on your power bills up to 20%-40% by dramatically improving the efficiency of their air conditioning unit.

Nothing should be overlooked. Get into the details of what you have. And if you end up keeping items “just to fill empty space” (yes, it happens!), then remove free-standing storage or shelves or consider moving to a smaller house with a smaller kitchen! Because to reach full efficiency, “fit” should marry “need.” Anything beyond that union will ultimately be a waste of

Christopher. It seemed the entire world stopped. Beatrix tried to compare the man standing before her with the cavalier rake he had once been. But it seemed impossible that he could be the same person. No longer a god descending from Olympus... now a warrior hardened by bitter experience. His complexion was a deep mixture of gold and copper, as if he had been slowly steeped in sun. The dark wheaten locks of his hair had been cut in efficiently short layers. His face was impassive, but something volatile was contained in the stillness. How bleak he looked. How alone. She wanted to run to him. She wanted to touch him. The effort of standing motionless caused her muscles to tremble in protest. She heard herself speak in a voice that wasn't quite steady. "Welcome home, Captain Phelan." He was silent, staring at her without apparent recognition. Dear Lord, those eyes... frost and fire, his gaze burning through her awareness. "I'm Beatrix Hathaway," she managed to say. "My family-" "I remember you." The rough velvet of his voice was a pleasure-stroke against her ears. Fascinated, bewildered, Beatrix stared at his guarded face. To Christopher Phelan, she was a stranger. But the memories of his letters were between them, even if he wasn't aware of it.

How to Write a Suggestion Letter No need to ramble on about your environmental concerns or the ideology behind your lifestyle. Keep your letter short and concise, your words tactful and courteous, and your content diplomatic and hopeful. In short, write a letter that you would like to receive. 1. Start with gratitude: state your appreciation for the company, such as the efficiency, affordability, or availability of their product or service. 2. Show understanding of the current practice employed. 3. Address the problem. 4. Propose up to three constructive solutions. 5. Support your solutions with working examples: how other companies have addressed the problem effectively. 6. Mention how the change would benefit your addressee, focusing on financial profit. 7. Gracefully conclude with a positive note.

Anything acquired without effort, and without cost is generally unappreciated, often discredited; perhaps this is why we get so little from our marvelous opportunity in public schools. The SELF-DISCIPLINE one receives from a definite programme of specialized study makes up to some extent, for the wasted opportunity when knowledge was available without cost. Correspondence schools are highly organized business institutions. Their tuition fees are so low that they are forced to insist upon prompt payments. Being asked to pay, whether the student makes good grades or poor, has the effect of causing one to follow through with the course when he would otherwise drop it. The correspondence schools have not stressed this point sufficiently, for the truth is that their collection departments constitute the very finest sort of training on DECISION, PROMPTNESS, ACTION and THE HABIT OF FINISHING THAT WHICH ONE BEGINS. I learned this from experience, more than twenty-five years ago. I enrolled for a home study course in Advertising. After completing eight or ten lessons I stopped studying, but the school did not stop sending me bills. Moreover, it insisted upon payment, whether I kept up my studies or not. I decided that if I had to pay for the course (which I had legally obligated myself to do), I should complete the lessons and get my money's worth. I felt, at the time, that the collection system of the school was somewhat too well organized, but I learned later in life that it was a valuable part of my training for which no charge had been made. Being forced to pay, I went ahead and completed the course. Later in life I discovered that the efficient collection system of that school had been worth much in the form of money earned, because of the training in advertising I had so reluctantly taken.

Anything acquired without effort, and without cost is generally unappreciated, often discredited; perhaps this is why we get so little from our marvelous opportunity in public schools. The SELF-DISCIPLINE one receives from a definite programme of specialized study makes up to some extent, for the wasted opportunity when knowledge was available without cost. Correspondence schools are highly organized business institutions. Their tuition fees are so low that they are forced to insist upon prompt payments. Being asked to pay, whether the student makes good grades or poor, has the effect of causing one to follow through with the course when he would otherwise drop it. The correspondence schools have not stressed this point sufficiently, for the truth is that their collection departments constitute the very finest sort of training on DECISION, PROMPTNESS, ACTION and THE HABIT OF FINISHING THAT WHICH ONE BEGINS. I learned this from experience, more than twenty-five years ago. I enrolled for a home study course in Advertising. After completing eight or ten lessons I stopped studying, but the school did not stop sending me bills. Moreover, it insisted upon payment, whether I kept up my studies or not. I decided that if I had to pay for the course (which I had legally obligated myself to do), I should complete the lessons and get my money's worth. I felt, at the time, that the collection system of the school was somewhat too well organized, but I learned later in life that it was a valuable part of my training for which no charge had been made. Being forced to pay, I went ahead and completed the course. Later in life I discovered that the efficient collection system of that school had been worth much in the form of money earned, because of the training in advertising I had so reluctantly taken. We have in this country what is said to be the greatest public school system in the world. We have invested fabulous sums for fine buildings, we have provided convenient transportation for children living in the rural districts, so they may attend the best schools, but there is one astounding weakness to this marvelous system-IT IS FREE! One of the strange things about human beings is that they value only that which has a price. The free schools of America, and the free public libraries, do not impress people because they are free. This is the

The reasons for cooperatives’ success should be obvious by now, but they are worth reiterating: “The major basis for cooperative success…has been superior labor productivity. Studies comparing square-foot output have repeatedly shown higher physical volume of output per hour, and others…show higher quality of product and also economy of material use.”118 Hendrik Thomas concludes from an analysis of Mondragon that “Productivity and profitability are higher for cooperatives than for capitalist firms. It makes little difference whether the Mondragon group is compared with the largest 500 companies, or with small- or medium-scale industries; in both comparisons the Mondragon group is more productive and more profitable.”119 As we have seen, recent research has arrived at the same conclusions. It is a truism by now that worker participation tends to increase productivity and profitability. Research conducted by Henk Thomas and Chris Logan corroborates these conclusions. “A frequent but unfounded criticism,” they observe, “of self-managed firms is that workers prefer to enjoy a high take-home pay rather than to invest in their own enterprises. This has been proven invalid…in the Mondragon case… A comparison of gross investment figures shows that the cooperatives invest on average four times as much as private enterprises.” After a detailed analysis they also conclude that “there can be no doubt that the [Mondragon] cooperatives have been more profitable than capitalist enterprises.”120 Recent data indicate the same thing.121 One particularly successful company, Irizar, which was mentioned earlier, has been awarded prizes for being the most efficient company in its sector; in Spain it has ten competitors, but its market share is 40 percent. The same level of achievement is true of its subsidiaries, for instance in Mexico, where it had a 45 percent market share in 2005, six years after entering the market. An author comments that “the basis for this increased efficiency appears to be linked directly to the organization’s unique participatory and democratic management structure.”122 A major reason for all these successes is Mondragon’s federated structure: the group of cooperatives has its own supply of banking, education, and technical support services. The enormous funds of the central credit union, the Caja Laboral Popular, have likewise been crucial to Mondragon’s expansion. It proves that if cooperatives have access to credit they are perfectly capable of being far more successful than private enterprises.

My mother would come home late a night, tired after a long day of teaching or clients, and look around for what wasn't working. With the final bit of energy she had, she fixed problems. Sometimes she yelled in frustration or anger. There was no time to enjoy what might be going on. Even today, my mother scans for problems. If something is done there is no acknowledgement, thanks, or praise; done means one less thing to worry about. It's the problems that draw her. Maybe she just needs to be useful. If something is going right it's no longer her concern. My mother's spent her life in triage, as if on a battle field. It's efficient, but it's a hard way to live. It's almost impossible to live with.

Jungle Book”, a sort of plant diary with handy plant-care tips and the botanical names of her plants. She takes notes about how her plants feel in certain spots in the home and when she moves them to another area. She also sticks to a certain day in the week for plant care – with these simple tricks plant care is much more efficient and definitely easier.

The good news is you can still make a difference, but the bad news is time is running out to do it. You can do things at home, like encouraging your parents to drive more fuel-efficient cars (which is by far the most effective way to cut down on your own impact on global warming) or trying to save energy around the house.

that come from wearing a uniform, another downfall is the need for a highly efficient laundry system at home. There are five days of school per week. So I have five shirts, five pants and five pairs of socks that fit me. The key here is the part about them fitting me. About half of my entire wardrobe is made up of school-related stuff. I have some shirts from last year that fit, but are a little too snug. I have pants that are the same way.

The home of the future is not as sci-fi as we imagine. Instead of whizbang gadgetry and the bells and whistles reminiscent of The Jetsons, the home of the future is all about sustainability, energy-efficient design, an expression of the individual, and a hotbed of creativity and inspiration.

Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it’s stupid. Working more doesn’t mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more. Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn’t sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes—and it will—it’ll hit that much harder. Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions. They even create crises. They don’t look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working overtime. They enjoy feeling like heroes. They create problems (often unwittingly) just so they can get off on working more. Workaholics make the people who don’t stay late feel inadequate for “merely” working reasonable hours. That leads to guilt and poor morale all around. Plus, it leads to an ass-in-seat mentality—people stay late out of obligation, even if they aren’t really being productive. If all you do is work, you’re unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what’s worth extra effort and what’s not. And you wind up just plain tired. No one makes sharp decisions when tired. In the end, workaholics don’t actually accomplish more than nonworkaholics. They may claim to be perfectionists, but that just means they’re wasting time fixating on inconsequential details instead of moving on to the next task. Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.

Eversby Priory was Theo’s childhood home,” Devon continued. “I’m sure it was painful for him to confront its decline.” Her face softened. “You’re confronting it, though, aren’t you? You’ve changed your entire life for it.” Devon shrugged casually. “It’s not as though I had something better to do.” “It’s not easy for you, however.” A faintly apologetic smile whisked across her lips. “I don’t always remember that.” Lowering her head, she resumed her work on the pencil. Devon watched, helplessly charmed by the sight of her scraping away like an industrious schoolgirl. “At this rate,” he said after a moment, “you’ll spend all day doing that. Why don’t you use a knife?” “Lord Berwick would never allow it--he said scissors were safer.” “Just the opposite. I’m surprised you never lost a finger. Here, set those down.” Devon reached across the desk to retrieve a silver penknife resting in the inkwell tray. He unfolded the blade and gave it to Kathleen handle first. “Hold the knife like this.” He rearranged her fingers, disregarding her protests. “Always direct the pencil away from your body as you sharpen it.” “Really, there’s no need…I’m better with scissors…” “Try. It’s more efficient. You can’t go through life doing this the wrong way. The wasted minutes could add up to days. Weeks.” An unexpected giggle escaped her, as if she were a young girl being teased. “I don’t use a pencil that often.

In a section titled “Performance Factors,” Clint had been asked to indicate areas in which I’d exhibited significant strengths, as well as any areas needing development. There were only two areas in which he felt I needed development—organization (probably because he’d ridden in my car) and working more closely with third parties—but he had indicated six major strengths. The first three were creativity, achievement of objectives, and quality of work. No surprises there. The next three strengths—adaptability, communication, and autonomy—seemed a bit ironic. I scrolled down and saw my overall score: Very Good. By definition, this score meant that I had “exceeded objectives in several areas and required only occasional supervision.” I didn’t appreciate the real irony of Clint’s assessment until I looked at my stakeholder map and considered how I might have scored had Kristen conducted a similar evaluation at home. What score would I have received for adaptability? The review form defined this as “being open to change with new circumstances.” Going with the flow. We had just begun to work on my openness to change at home, and I was still learning how to adjust to this new mind-set. Meanwhile, at work, I presented myself as nothing if not adaptable. “Sure, I’ll take a new position on the marketing team.” “Of course I can stay until midnight tonight. Whatever it takes.” “Certainly, Clint, I’ll travel to customers every week. Anything else?” At home, Kristen asked me to help fold laundry and my head almost exploded. I guessed that I would receive Needs Development for that one. How about autonomy and initiative? Clint seemed to think that I was bursting with it, but Kristen would have offered a different opinion. “Initiative? Please. How is me having to remind you to turn off the television and play with the kids initiative? I’ll put you down for a Needs Development,” I imagined her saying. Achievement of objectives would have gotten me a high mark with Kristen, until I scrolled down farther and read the definition, which included the phrase “gets things done efficiently and in a timely manner.” I thought of the Christmas decorations drooping from our eaves. I thought of the countless times Kristen and I had been late for an engagement and she’d found me standing in my boxers in front of the mirror making faces.

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After World War II, the Italians made tremendous efforts to rebuild their country’s industry and economy. During the 1950s and ‘60s, with the aid of the European Recovery Program, the country encouraged new industries and improved its agriculture. Today, Italy’s industries are thriving, bringing work and wealth to the country. Nearly all families have homes, are well-fed, and own cars, televisions, and other consumer goods. Industrial success has brought problems, however. Building new factories, power stations, and roads has meant less land for housing, and millions of people live in crowded high-rise apartment houses. Industrial waste has caused pollution problems, especially in the rivers and along the coast. On the positive side, the gap between the rich, industrial north and the poorer, agricultural south is narrowing. The Southern Italy Development Fund has helped to make farming more efficient and established new industries, such as making electronic goods, in the south. Tourism has increased greatly, and more care is now being taken to preserve the country’s wildlife, natural landscapes, historical buildings, and works of art.

A confused mind cannot direct deft hands and what is more confusing than a cluttered, disorderly place to work? What is more uninviting, too? The grateful appearance of order—this is the one important way women judge each other’s housekeeping. And every efficient housekeeper knows that in no room does it count for more than in the kitchen. —WOMAN’S HOME COMPANION,

Hank continued to look confused. “So, what’s she like otherwise? Is she a nice person?” Duane shrugged. “Not particularly. She’s businesslike, to the point. Cletus calls her efficient.” “Duane and Cletus would know.” I indicated to my brother with my chin. “She’ll talk to them, but she still doesn’t speak to me.” “So, Miss Too Pretty ignoring you has your boxers in a bunch?” Hank looked like he was stifling a laugh. “Like I said, it has nothing to do with her looks. And she can keep on ignoring me. I don’t care about that. But you’d be irritated too if someone you didn’t know told you your face was distorted.” “She didn’t say your face was distorted, dummy.” Duane rolled his eyes. I pointed at my brother. “She said yourface was perfectly symmetrical and myface was wonky. And that—plus I’m an idiot—is how she could tell us apart.” Hank barked a laugh. I glowered at my friend. “And I’m the one who needed to apologize?” “Now see, I don’t think you needed to apologize for mistaking her for a stripper. I think you needed to apologize for suggesting she take off her clothes. There’s the difference.” Duane nodded at his own words. “Technically, I didn’t suggest she take off her clothes. I suggested she keep them on.” Hank rubbed his chin. “You shouldn’t have made any reference to her clothes at all, especially since you’ll be working with her for the foreseeable future. That’s just unprofessional.” “Unprofessional?” I couldn’t believe the words out of my friend’s mouth, especially considering his practice of sending strippers to welcome me home was the cause of this mess in the first place. “Don’t look at me like that. I work in a strip club; you work in an auto shop. Of course I have to talk to my employees about their costumes and such.” Hank gave me a pointed look as he brought the beer bottle to his mouth and said before taking a sip, “The only stripping you should be discussing with this woman is salvaging for car parts.

This is how we progress as humans. We went from horseless carriages to self-driving, self-organizing transport in a hundred and fifty years. We went from powered flight to putting a man on the moon in sixty years. We’ve always progressed in leaps and bounds. It is our ability, no, our duty, to do what is efficient, and to do what is best, to evolve not just our vehicles and our cities and our homes, but also the social structures that hold us back

Our earliest ancestors were descended from primates who thrived for millions of years in a treetop environment, and who in the process had evolved one of the most remarkable visual systems in nature. To move quickly and efficiently in such a world, they developed extremely sophisticated eye and muscle coordination. Their eyes slowly evolved into a full-frontal position on the face, giving them binocular, stereoscopic vision. This system provides the brain a highly accurate three-dimensional and detailed perspective, but is rather narrow. Animals that possess such vision—as opposed to eyes on the side or half side—are generally efficient predators like owls or cats. They use this powerful sight to home in on prey in the distance. Tree-living primates evolved this vision for a different purpose—to navigate branches, and to spot fruits, berries, and insects with greater effectiveness. They also evolved elaborate color vision.

Hi Tim, Patience. Far too soon to expect strength improvements. Strength improvements [for a movement like this] take a minimum of 6 weeks. Any perceived improvements prior to that are simply the result of improved synaptic facilitation. In plain English, the central nervous system simply became more efficient at that particular movement with practice. This is, however, not to be confused with actual strength gains. Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence. In fact, it is essential and something that every single elite athlete has had to learn to deal with. If the pursuit of excellence was easy, everyone would do it. In fact, this impatience in dealing with frustration is the primary reason that most people fail to achieve their goals. Unreasonable expectations timewise, resulting in unnecessary frustration, due to a perceived feeling of failure. Achieving the extraordinary is not a linear process. The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home. A blue collar work ethic married to indomitable will. It is literally that simple. Nothing interferes. Nothing can sway you from your purpose. Once the decision is made, simply refuse to budge. Refuse to compromise. And accept that quality long-term results require quality long-term focus. No emotion. No drama. No beating yourself up over small bumps in the road. Learn to enjoy and appreciate the process. This is especially important because you are going to spend far more time on the actual journey than with those all too brief moments of triumph at the end. Certainly celebrate the moments of triumph when they occur. More importantly, learn from defeats when they happen. In fact, if you are not encountering defeat on a fairly regular basis, you are not trying hard enough. And absolutely refuse to accept less than your best. Throw out a timeline. It will take what it takes. If the commitment is to a long-term goal and not to a series of smaller intermediate goals, then only one decision needs to be made and adhered to. Clear, simple, straightforward. Much easier to maintain than having to make small decision after small decision to stay the course when dealing with each step along the way. This provides far too many opportunities to inadvertently drift from your chosen goal. The single decision is one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.

Internet servers worldwide would fill a small city, and the K (the world’s most powerful supercomputer) sucks up enough electricity to power 10,000 homes. The incredibly efficient brain sucks up less electricity than a dim lightbulb and fits nicely inside our head. The human genome, which grows our body and directs us through years of complex life, requires less data than a laptop operating system.” —Mark Fischetti, Computers vs. Brains Scientific American, November, 2011 1 Seth Rosenblatt paused on his way to the parking lot to take in his surroundings.

Whether we are able to attend to our capacity for reflection in this epoch is a matter of personal choice, with critical implications for us as both individuals and citizens. John Dunne saw the loss of this dimension as related to the rise of violence and conflict. I regard its gradual loss more as an outcome of our milieu’s unforeseen sequelae—the constant need for efficiency: “buying time” without knowing for what purpose; decreasing attention spans, pushed beyond their cognitive limits by a flotsam of distractions and information that will never become knowledge; and the increasingly manipulated and superficial uses of knowledge that will never become wisdom. In the first half of the twentieth century,

They feel excited in a Parisian café where pride in cooking and eating can be felt in the air. By contrast, eating at home tends to be quick, efficient, and routine. Fuel gets put into your stomach. Otherwise, there is no nourishment to the senses or the soul. The modernist architect Le Corbusier called a house “a machine for living,” which sounds rather bleak. It’s just as bleak when meals turn into pit stops for refueling. Your body isn’t looking for fuel the way a diesel truck is. It’s looking for a myriad of nutrients. The ones that work as fuel are few and easy to outline:

But instead of making us work efficiently - and, by extension less - all of this tech has mostly just made us work more.

the cult of efficiency in

Extensive background in public accounting. I can also stand on my head!" Too many E-numbers. "I perform my job with effortless efficiency, effectiveness, efficacy, and expertise." There are not too many of them about. "Personal: Married 20 years; own a home, along with a friendly mortgage company." The first rule of projects is: You don't talk about projects. "My intensity and focus are at inordinately high levels, and my ability to complete projects on time is unspeakable." Learning a language. "Exposure to German for two years, but many words are inappropriate for business." Congratulations! "Accomplishments: Completed 11 years of high school."  No really, how is your memory? "Excellent memory; strong math aptitude; excellent memory; effective management skills; and very good at math." I think bricks would work better personally, but hey go for it. "Personal Goal: To hand-build a classic cottage from the ground up using my father-in-law. To be fair the job on offer was to play Snow White in a Christmas production. "Thank you for your consideration. Hope to hear from you shorty!" . Very I would say. "Enclosed is a ruff draft of my resume." Delete. "I saw your ad on the information highway, and I came to a screeching halt." Then why attach it? "Please disregard the attached resume -- it is terribly out of date." Lone wolf. "It's best for employers that I not work with people.

One of the minimalist home values... was rest. Another minimalist home value is seemingly the opposite: work. But not frantic work. Peaceful, purposeful work. Efficient, effective work.

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The Victory Bike battle on the home front marked the first policy attempt to privilege one mode of transport over another on the basis of sustainability and efficiency.

I was not perpetually sad – that’s not what depression is. More than ever before, I was tired all the time. I had lost interest in most activities. I was eating whatever, whenever, drinking more and more. I was easily irritated. Despite wanting to do not much more than sleep, I couldn’t sleep. I had developed chronic back pain that even an MRI could not diagnose. These were the individual signs and symptoms of depression I had battled for decades, and now I was experiencing them all at the same time and they were not going away. I was no longer able to hide what I was dealing with from my family and those closest to me. More than anyone, my wife knew that, if she couldn’t find me in my home office, my work for the day was done and I was in our room binge-watching something on the television, anything to get away from the noise of life. On stage, in court, in public and on social media, I remained in character: high energy and high efficiency, just another terrific day. Backstage, away from where you could see me, where only my family and closest friends could see, nothing: an empty shell. That’s no way to exist and it certainly is not living.

Teams were involved in creating new technologies, processes, and systems. • Cross-functional teams were formed around new great ideas. • Customers were involved from the inception of each feature concept. It’s important to understand that the old approach did not lack customer feedback or customer involvement in the planning process. In the true spirit of genchi gembutsu, Intuit product managers (PMs) would do “follow-me-homes” with customers to identify problems to solve in the next release. However, the PMs were responsible for all the customer research. They would bring it back to the team and say, “This is the problem we want to solve, and here are ideas for how we could solve it.” Changing to a cross-functional way of working was not smooth sailing. Some team members were skeptical. For example, some product managers felt that it was a waste of time for engineers to spend time in front of customers. The PMs thought that their job was to figure out the customer issue and define what needed to be built. Thus, the reaction of some PMs to the change was: “What’s my job? What am I supposed to be doing?” Similarly, some on the engineering side just wanted to be told what to do; they didn’t want to talk to customers. As is typically the case in large-batch development, both groups had been willing to sacrifice the team’s ability to learn in order to work more “efficiently.

What to do to be an Expert in Freelancing? What is Freelancing? We already know that, Now let's see What to do to be an Expert in Freelancing - Things to do for Self Development: Get positive feedback from clients by practicing what you are good at, and finding work that matches your skills. This is the key to your improvement and the first step to success. When you start to succeed, choose the opportunities that work best for you. Use the time appropriately and fully. Some of the processes of Self-Presentation after Self-Development are discussed below - Process of Introducing Yourself: 1. Enhance your profile and build your portfolio with accurate information about yourself. 2. Create your own signature that will identify you in your work. 3. Always use your own photo and signature for original work. 4. Run your own campaign. For example: commenting on others' posts, making full use of social sites, keeping in touch with others, doing service work, teaching others, participating in various seminars, and distributing leaflets or posters. Showing Professionalism: How to express or calculate that you are a professional? There are many ways, by which you can easily express that you are a professional entrepreneur or employee. The ways are: 1. Professionals never work for free, so before starting a job, you must be sure about the remuneration. 2. Professionals don't work on balance, if you want to show professionalism you must pay in cash or promise to pay half in advance and the rest at the end of the job. 3. A professional never lacks any research or communication for his work. Win the Client's Heart: There are thousands of freelancers in front of a client for a job, but only one gets the job. The person who got the job got it because he presented himself in the client's mind. Mistakes to Avoid: Only humans are fallible. It is natural for people to make mistakes, but if people can't learn from those mistakes then it is better not to make such mistakes. The Mistakes are: 1. Failure to identify oneself. 2. Show Engagement. 3. Lack of communication with the client etc. Being Punctual: It is wise to do the work on time. Never leave work. Because if you leave work, the amount of work will increase and not decrease. Therefore, it is better to do the work of time in time and move towards the formation of life by being respectful of time. So, if the above tasks are done or followed correctly, achieving success as a freelancer is just a saying. To make yourself a successful and efficient freelancer, the importance and importance of the above topics is immense.

Since 2010, the price of electricity from utility-scale solar farms has fallen almost 90 percent. Onshore wind fell 60 percent in the same time. Advanced batteries, which power electric cars and are increasingly finding a role in balancing fluctuations on the electric grid, fell more than 80 percent. When highly efficient light bulbs made with light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, first came out just over a decade ago, you could easily pay $50 for one; nowadays they sell at Home Depot for $1.24 apiece, a decline of 97 percent.

I remember sitting on a park bench near my home in Brooklyn one winter morning in 2014, feeling even more anxious than usual about the volume of undone tasks, and suddenly realizing that none of this was ever going to work. I would never succeed in marshaling enough efficiency, self-discipline, and effort to force my way through to the feeling that I was on top of everything, that I was fulfilling all my obligations and had no need to worry about the future. Ironically, the realization that this had been a useless strategy for attaining peace of mind brought me some immediate peace of mind. (After all, once you become convinced that something you’ve been attempting is impossible, it’s a lot harder to keep on berating yourself for failing.)

FROM OTHER SOURCES Pre–race and Venue Homework Get hold of any history of past events at the venue, plus any information that the conducting club may have about weather and expected conditions. Go to the weather bureau and get history for the area. Speak to sailors from your class who have this venue as their home club or who have sailed there on a number of occasions. Boat, Sails, Gear Preparation Checklist Many times the outcome of a race is as dependent on what you have done prior to the race as to what you do out on the course. Sometimes no matter how good your tactics and strategy are a simple breakage could render all that useless. Hull – make sure that your hull is well sanded and polished, centreboard strips are in good condition, venturis if fitted are working efficiently, buoyancy tanks are dry and there are no extraneous pieces of kit in your boat which adds unwanted weight. Update any gear that looks tired or worn especially control lines. Mast, boom and poles – check that all halyards, stays and trapeze wires are not worn or damaged and that pins are secure, knots tight and that anything that can tear a sail or injure flesh is taped. Mark the full hoist position on all halyards. Deck hardware – check all cam cleats for spring tension and tape anything that may cause a sail tear or cut legs hands and arms. Check the length of all sheets and control lines and shorten anything that is too long. This not only reduces weight but also minimises clutter. Have marks on sheets and stick or draw numbers and reference scales for the jib tracks, outhaul and halyards so that you can easily duplicate settings that you know are fast in various conditions. Centreboard and rudder – ensure that all nicks and gouges are filled and sanded and the surfaces are polished and most importantly that rudder safety clips are working. Sails – select the correct battens for the day’s forecast. Write on the deck, with a china graph pencil, things like the starting sequence, courses, tide times and anything else that will remind you to sail fast. Tools and spares – carry a shackle key with screwdriver head on your person along with some spare shackles and short lengths of rope or different diameters. A tool like a Leatherman can be very useful to deal with unexpected breakages that can occur even in the best prepared boat.

Take a good look at your desk or office, both at home and at work. Ask yourself, “What kind of a person works in an environment like this?” The cleaner and neater your work environment, the more positive, productive, and confident you will feel. 2. Resolve today to clean up your desk and office completely so that you feel effective, efficient, and ready to get going each time you sit down to work.

Colorado was not far behind. Rocky Mountain Klansmen kidnapped two prominent attorneys—one a Jew who defended bootleggers, the other a Catholic whose crime was his faith—then clubbed them nearly to death. They tried to force a Black family out of their home in Grand Junction, warning that if they did not leave, their lives would be in danger. But the violence did nothing to curb popularity. The Klan mayor of Denver, elected in 1923, named fellow members of the Invisible Empire as police chief and city attorney. One night alone, the Klan set seven crosses ablaze throughout Denver. They would soon be “the largest and most cohesive, most efficiently organized political force in the state of Colorado,” wrote the Denver Post.

One of the most expensive commodities a nation can have is a cheap labor force. From this a host of consequences leaped forth as inevitable. —If you get labor for almost nothing, you have no incentive to buy expensive tools and the quality of your product will lag behind that of nations who do use the best tools on the market. —If you keep your labor occupied on menial tasks that are best suited to machines, your work force never develops those skills that would earn you more income. —If you employ ten to do the work of one, none of the ten will work to maximum efficiency because each will realize that what he or she does isn’t significant. —If you don’t pay your labor good wages, how can they ever afford to buy what you make? You limit your potential market by 50 percent at least, and if every employer in the region pays the same low wages, your market can vanish altogether. —A nation’s wealth is generated when the money from wages is quickly spread around because this causes more goods to be produced, and real wealth consists in the making and interchange of goods. And then I made the discovery: ‘Ricardo was wrong. There is no fixed quantum of money in the world, or in any nation. The rich man doesn’t suffer deprivation when labor gets a bigger share, for that larger amount means a bigger total for him.’” —Chapter VII, “Ideas”, page 257-258