Efforts Are Better Than Promises Quotes

Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more willpower or drive, but because they know productivity is a game played against a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty that can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push-ups.

For the first time, I was glad that Finn had badgered me into buying the Aston, because the car purred into high gear with no visible effort and hugged the road better than a creepy old uncle at Christmas, not wanting to let go of his pretty young relatives.

Tell the world what scares you the most” says Brandy. She gives us each an Aubergine Dreams eyebrow pencil and says “Save the world with some advice from the future” Seth writes on the back of a card and hands the card to Brandy for her to read. On game shows, Brandy reads, some people will take the trip to France, but most people will take the washer dryer pair.” Brandy puts a big Plumbago kiss in the little square for the stamp and lets the wind lift and card and sail it off toward the towers of downtown Seattle. Seth hands her another, and Brandy reads: Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random useless facts that are all we have left from our education” A kiss and the card’s on it’s way toward Lake Washington. From Seth: When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?” A kiss and it’s off on the wind toward Ballard. Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another. We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.” Interstate 5 snakes by in the distance. From high atop the Space Needle, the southbound lanes are red chase lights, and the northbound lanes are white chase lights. I take a card and write: I love Seth Thomas so much I have to destroy him. I overcompensate by worshipping the queen supreme. Seth will never love me. No one will ever love me ever again. Beandy is waiting to rake the card and read it out loud. Brandy’s waiting to read my worst fears to the world, but I don’t give her the card. I kiss it myself with the lips I don’t have and let the wind take it out of my hand. The card flies up, up, up to the stars and then falls down to land in the suicide net. While I watch my future trapped in the suicide net Brandy reads another card from Seth. We are all self-composting” I write another card from the future and Brandy reads it: When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves” An updraft lifts up my worst fears from the suicide net and lifts them away. Seth writes and Brandy reads. You have to keep recycling yourself”. I write and Brandy reads. Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known.” I write and Brandy reads. The one you love and the one who loves you are never ever the same person.

At this point there's something I should explain about myself, which is that I don't talk much, probably too little, and I think this has been detrimental to my social life. It's not that I have trouble expressing myself, or no more than people generally have when they're trying to put something complex into words. I'd even say I have less trouble than most because my long involvement with literature has given me a better-than-average capacity for handling language. But I have no gift for small talk, and there's no point trying to learn or pretend; it wouldn't be convincing. My conversational style is spasmodic (someone once described it as "hollowing"). Every sentence opens up gaps, which require new beginnings. I can't maintain any continuity. In short, I speak when I have something to say. My problem, I suppose - and this may be an effect of involvement with literature - is that I attribute too much importance to the subject. For me, it's never simply a question of "talking" but always a question of "what to talk about". And the effort of weighing up potential subjects kills the spontaneity of dialogue. In other words, when everything you say has to be "worth the effort", it's too much effort to go on talking. I envy people who can launch into a conversation with gusto and energy, and keep it going. I envy them that human contact, so full of promise, a living reality from which, in my mute isolation, I feel excluded. "But what do they talk about?" I wonder, which is obviously the wrong question to ask. The crabbed awkwardness of my social interactions is a result of this failing on my part. Looking back, I can see that it was responsible for most of my missed opportunities and almost all the woes of solitude. The older I get, the more convinced I am that this is a mutilation, for which my professional success cannot compensate, much less my "rich inner life." And I've never been able to resolve the conundrum that conversationalists pose for me: how do they keep coming up with things to talk about? I don't even wonder about it anymore, perhaps because I know there's no answer.

Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push-ups.

Efforts are always better than promises.

The entire virtue of religious practices can be conceived from the Buddhist tradition concerning the recitation of the name of the Lord. It is said that the Buddha made a vow to raise up to himself all those who recite his name with the desire to be saved by him, into the Land of Purity; and that because of this vow the recitation of the name of the Lord really has the virtue of transforming the soul. Religion is nothing else but this promise of God. Every religious practice, every rite, every liturgy is a form of the recitation of the name of the Lord, and must in principle really have virtue, the virtue of saving anyone devoted to it with desire. Every religion pronounces the name of the Lord in its own language. Most often, it is better for people to name God in their own native language rather than in a foreign language. Apart from exceptions, the soul is incapable of completely abandoning itself in the moment if it must impose on itself even a minor effort in searching for words in a strange language, even when they know it well . . . A change of the religion is for the soul like a change of language for the writer. Not every religion, it is true, is equally apt for the correct recitation of the name of the Lord. Certain ones, without a doubt, are very imperfect intermediaries. The religion of Israel, for example, must have truly been a very imperfect intermediary for having crucified Christ. The Roman religion scarcely even deserves the name of religion. But in a general, the hierarchy of religions is a very difficult thing to discern, nearly impossible, perhaps completely impossible. For a religion is known from the inside.

We discussed what we want from you now,...you who had power and used it to burn the world. You burned a lot. You didn't just burn trees and cities and each other. You burned our admiration for the governments we grew up respecting. You burned our sense of safety in your care. You burned our patience, our ability to believe that the great things in this world you promised to protect will still be there for us and future generations. You burned our trust as you misused the data and surveillance we let you collect, first for O.S. and the Canner Device, then for the war, its propaganda and its lies. You burned our self-trust, too, since we know we are infused with your values, values we thought made both you and us people who would never do what you just did. We have to be afraid of ourselves now, vigilant against what you've taught us to be, since now we know we are something to be afraid and ashamed of. And even if you didn't personally kill in the war, if you carried arms, if you participated, you helped burn what nothing can bring back. No sentence can repair any of that. So, we want you to repair what you can. That's our sentence. We want you to rebuild the cities, replant the trees, replace the art, relaunch the satellites, fix the bridges you can fix to make up for the ones you can't. We want you to rebuild the system, too, fixing the holes this has exposed and making more safeguards so no one can misuse the cars and data and surveillance and trackers and such again. We want you to build it all back but better than it was, and faster than any past war has rebuilt. You weren't as good at peace as you thought you were, but maybe you can be as good at rebuilding. Everyone, even Minors like Tribune MASON who took part, if in your heart you know you were complicit, then build back what you burned with your own hours, your own efforts, your own hands. That's our sentence.

Mr. President, Dr. Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr. Emhoff, Americans and the world, when day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry asea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace. In the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice. And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished. We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one. And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect. We are striving to forge our union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none and harmony for all. Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true. That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped. That even as we tired, we tried that will forever be tied together victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division. Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid. If we’re to live up to her own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made. That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare. It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit. It’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a forest that would shatter our nation rather than share it. Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. This effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated. In this truth, in this faith we trust for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us. This is the era of just redemption. We feared it at its inception. We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves so while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us? We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be a country that is bruised, but whole, benevolent, but bold, fierce, and free. We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. Our blunders become their burdens. But one thing is certain, if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright. So let us leave behind a country better than one we were left with. Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one. We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the West. We will rise from the wind-swept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution. We will rise from the Lake Rim cities of the Midwestern states. We will rise from the sun-baked South. We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful. When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light. If only we’re brave enough.

Being capable and productive feels somewhat beside the point these days. Either you're popular, and therefore exciting and successful and a winner, or you're unpopular, and therefore unimportant and invisible and devoid of redeeming value. Being capable was much more celebrated in the 1970s when I was growing up. People had real jobs that lasted a lifetime back then, and many workers seemed to embrace the promise that if you worked steadily and capably for years, you would be rewarded for it. Even without those rewards, working hard and knowing how to do things seemed like worthwhile enterprises in themselves. "Can she back a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" my mom used to sing while rolling out pie crust with her swift, dexterous hands. Sexist as its message may have been, the modern version of that song might be worse. It would center around taking carefully staged and filtered photos of your pretty face next to a piece of cherry pie and posting it to your Instagram account, to be rewarded with two thousand red hearts for your efforts. Making food, tasting it, sharing it, understanding yourself as a human who can do things - all of this is flattened down to nothing, now, since only one or two people would ever know about it. Better to feed two thousand strangers an illusion than engage in real work to limited ends.

Ronan's trying to wake up the world. I'm trying to think of how to talk him out of it, but what he's talking about is a world where she never fell asleep. A world where Matthew's just a kid. A world where it doesn't matter what Hennessy does, if something happens to her. A level playing field. I don't think it's a good idea, but it's not like I can't see the appeal, because now I'm biased, I'm too biased to be clear." Declan shook his head a little. "I said I would never become my father, anything like him. And now look at me. At us." Ah, there it was. It took no effort to remember the way he'd looked at her the first moment he realized she was a dream. "I'm a dream," Jordan said. "I'm not your dream." Declan put his chin in his hand and looked back out the window; that, too, would be a good portrait. Perhaps it was just because she liked looking at him that she thought each pose would make a good one. A series. What a future that idea promised, nights upon nights like this, him sitting there, her standing here. "By the time we're married," Declan said eventually, "I want you to have applied for a different studio in this place because this man's paintings are very ugly." Her pulse gently skipped two beats before continuing on as before. "I don't have a social security number of my own, Pozzi." "I'll buy you one," Declan said. "You can wear it in place of a ring." The two of them looked at each other past the canvas on her easel. Finally, he said, voice soft, "I should see the painting now." "Are you sure?" "It's time, Jordan." Putting his jacket to the side, he stood. He waited. He would not come around to look without an invite. It's time, Jordan. Jordan had never been truly honest with anyone who didn't wear Hennessy's face. Showing him this painting, this original, felt like being more honest than she had ever been in her life. She stepped back to give him room. Declan took it in. His eyes flickered to and from the likeness, from the jacket on Portrait Declan's leg to the real jacket he'd left behind on the chair. She watched his gaze follow the line edge she had taken such care to paint, that subtle electricity of complementary colors at the edge of his form. "It's very good," Declan muttered. "Jordan, it's very good." "I thought it might be." "I don't know if it's a sweetmetal. But you're very good." "I thought I might be." "The next one will be even better." "I think it might be." "And in ten years your scandalous masterpiece will get you thrown out of France, too," he said. "And later you can triumphantly sell it to the Met. Children will write papers about you. People like me will tell stories about you to their dates at museums to make them think they're interesting." She kissed him. He kissed her. And this kiss, too, got all wrapped up in the art-making of the portrait sitting on the easel beside them, getting all mixed in with all the other sights and sounds and feelings that had become part of the process. It was very good.

Promises, schedules, and estimates are necessary and important instruments in a well-ordered business. Many fail to realize this, or habitually try to dodge the responsibility for making commitments. You must make promises based upon your own estimates for the part of the job for which you are responsible, together with estimates obtained from contributing departments for their parts. No one should be allowed to avoid the issue by the old formula, “I can’t give a promise because it depends upon so many uncertain factors.” Consider the “uncertain factors” confronting a department head who must make up a budget for an entire department a year in advance! Even the most uncertain case can be narrowed down by first asking, “Will it be done in a matter of a few hours or a few months, a few days or a few weeks?” If it cannot be done in less than three weeks and surely will not require more than five, you’d better say four weeks. This allows one week for contingencies and sets you a reasonable miss under the comfortable figure of five weeks. Both extremes are bad; good businesspeople set schedules that they can meet with energetic effort at a pace commensurate with the significance of the job. As a corollary of the foregoing, you have a right to insist upon having estimates from responsible representatives of other departments. But in accepting promises, or statements of facts, it is frequently important to make sure that you are dealing with a properly qualified representative. Also bear in mind that when you ignore or discount other promises you dismiss their responsibility and incur the extra liability yourself. Of course this is sometimes necessary, but be sure that you do it advisedly. Ideally, other people’s promises should be reliable instruments in compiling estimates.

Today there is much talk about democratic ideals in the outside world. But not in Germany! For here in Germany we had more than enough time-fifteen years-to acquaint ourselves with these democratic ideals. And we ourselves had to pick up the legacy left behind by this democracy. Now we are being credited with many a truly astounding war aim, especially by the English. After all, England is quite experienced in issuing proclamations of objectives in warfare as it has waged the greatest number of wars the world over. Truly astounding are the war aims announced to us today. A new Europe will arise. This Europe will be characterized by justice. This justice will render armament obsolete. This will lead to disarmament at last. This disarmament in turn will bring about an economic blossoming. Change and trade will spring up-much trade-free trade. And with the sponsorship of this trade, culture shall once more blossom, and not only culture will benefit, but religion will also prosper. In other words: we are heading towards a golden age! Well, we have heard of this golden age before. Many times precisely the same people attempted to illustrate its virtues to us who are now flooding us with descriptions of its benefits. The records are old ones, played once too often. We can only pity these gentlemen who cannot even come up with a new idea to trap a great people. For all this they had already promised us in 1918. Then, too, England’s objectives in the war were the creation of this “new Europe,” the establishment of a “new justice,” of which the “right to selfdetermination of the peoples” was to form an integral part. Back then already they promised us justice to render obsolete-for all time-the bearing of any sort of weaponry. Back then already they submitted to us a program for disarmament-one for global disarmament. To make this disarmament more evident, it was to be crowned by the establishment of an association of nations bearing no arms. These were to settle their differences in the future-for even back then there was no doubt that differences would still arise-by talking them to death in discussion and debate, just as is the custom in democratic states. There would be no more shooting under any circumstances! In 1918, they declared a blessed and pious age to come! What came to pass in its stead we all lived to see: the old states were destroyed without even as much as asking their citizenry. Historic, ancient structures were severed, not only state bodies but grown economic structures as well, without anything better to take their place. In total disregard of the principle of the right to self-determination of the peoples, the European peoples were hacked to pieces, torn apart. Great states were dissolved. Nations were robbed of their rights, first rendered utterly defenseless and then subjected to a division which left only victors and vanquished in this world. And then there was no more talk of disarmament. To the contrary, armament went on. Nor did any efforts materialize to settle conflicts peacefully. The armed states waged wars just as before. Yet those who had been disarmed were no longer in a position to ward off the aggressions of those well armed. Naturally, this did not herald economic prosperity but, to the contrary, produced a network of lunatic reparations payments which led to increasing destitution for not only the vanquished, but also the so-called victors themselves. The consequences of this economic destitution were felt most acutely by the German Volk. International finance remained brutal and squeezed our Volk ruthlessly. Adolf Hitler – speech in the Sportpalast Berlin, January 30, 1940

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

a young Goldman Sachs banker named Joseph Park was sitting in his apartment, frustrated at the effort required to get access to entertainment. Why should he trek all the way to Blockbuster to rent a movie? He should just be able to open a website, pick out a movie, and have it delivered to his door. Despite raising around $250 million, Kozmo, the company Park founded, went bankrupt in 2001. His biggest mistake was making a brash promise for one-hour delivery of virtually anything, and investing in building national operations to support growth that never happened. One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support. Had Park proceeded more slowly, he might have noticed that with the current technology available, one-hour delivery was an impractical and low-margin business. There was, however, a tremendous demand for online movie rentals. Netflix was just then getting off the ground, and Kozmo might have been able to compete in the area of mail-order rentals and then online movie streaming. Later, he might have been able to capitalize on technological changes that made it possible for Instacart to build a logistics operation that made one-hour grocery delivery scalable and profitable. Since the market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place. “Wouldn’t you rather be second or third and see how the guy in first did, and then . . . improve it?” Malcolm Gladwell asked in an interview. “When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked. “Most good things, it takes a long time to figure them out.”* Second, there’s reason to believe that the kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions. Meanwhile, more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering. In a study of software startups, strategy researchers Elizabeth Pontikes and William Barnett find that when entrepreneurs rush to follow the crowd into hyped markets, their startups are less likely to survive and grow. When entrepreneurs wait for the market to cool down, they have higher odds of success: “Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.” Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified. Settlers also have the luxury of waiting for the market to be ready. When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.

Sometimes we think we are not capable of doing certain things. I hear comments from my students such as, “My brain isn’t wired to do math,” or “I am not good at math.” It is true that there are people who are better at math than you, but that does not mean you can’t do it. This just means you need to put in more effort than others do. Focusing on our weaknesses may hinder our progress. We may think that we must be born with certain skills and abilities; they must be in our genes. This is not the case. Do you think Nephi could build a ship? Could the brother of Jared have caused light to come into dark barges? Do you think Noah could have built an ark that would hold two of every animal species on the earth? Do you think Moses had the power to part a sea? Actually, no. None of these men had the power to do any of these things. However, they all had something in common. They all knew how to tap into the power of someone who could—the Savior’s power. It is so important that we learn how to tap into that power. The Atonement literally means “at-one-ment,” or becoming one with God. The Savior gave us the power to become gods. He enabled us so we would be able to perform miracles through Him. But we must understand that this kind of power is not free. There is only one thing that the Savior, through His Atonement, gave us for free and that is the power to overcome death. Everything else that He offers must come “after all we can do.” [2] For example, Jesus Christ promises us eternal life, but only after we have faith in Him, obey His commandments, and endure to the end. Similarly, He gives us power to move mountains, but only after doing all we can and having trust in Him. The power to change our lives, change the world, and perform miracles is within each of us. However, we need to have enough humility to realize that, in the end, we are not the ones performing the miracles—He is. Occasionally, I have a student who does not do their homework, rarely comes to class, and then comes at the end of the semester and asks, “Sister Qumsiyeh, is there anything I can do to pass? Do you offer any extra credit?” I know some of you are smiling right now because you know you have done this to your teachers. This is what I wish I could say to the student who asks that question: “You need to invent a time machine and go back and do what you should have done this semester. You failed because you did not try your best. It is too late.” Do we all really hope to stand before the Savior at the Judgement Day and expect Him to save us without us doing our part? Do we really expect Him to allow us into the celestial kingdom and to just save us? No, that is not how the Atonement works. It does not work without us having tried our best. Of course, our best may not be enough. In fact, it hardly ever is. But if we do our best and have faith in Him, He magnifies our efforts. The brother of Jared could not make the 16 stones shine, but he spent hours preparing them and then humbly took them to the Lord and basically said, “Here is my small effort; magnify it.” This the Lord did. [3] Elder David A. Bednar said, “The power of the Atonement makes repentance possible and quells the despair caused by sin; it also strengthens us to see, do, and become good in ways that we could never recognize or accomplish with our limited mortal capacity.

I had always liked darkness. When I was small I was afraid of it if I was alone, but when I was with others I loved it and the change to the world it brought. Running around in the forest or between houses was different in the darkness, the world was enchanted, and we, we were breathless adventurers with blinking eyes and pounding hearts. When I was older there was little I liked better than to stay up at night, the silence and the darkness had an allure, they carried a promise of something immense. And autumn was my favorite season, wandering along the road by the river in the dark and the rain, not much could beat that. But this darkness was different. This darkness rendered everything lifeless. It was static, it was the same whether you were awake or asleep, and it became harder and harder to motivate yourself to get up in the morning. I succeeded, and five minutes later I was standing in front of my desk again, but what happened there was also rendered lifeless. It felt as though I was getting nothing back from what I was doing. However much effort I put in, nothing came back. Everything vanished, everything dissolved into the great darkness in which we lived. I might as well say this as that, do this as that, nothing made any difference.

Five years later, the legacy of Trump’s presidency and his promises can be addressed. There never was an infrastructure bill. Trump’s budgets consistently proposed cuts to the social programs he vowed not to touch. He did little to combat the opioid epidemic he promised to end, with deaths rising by the end of his tenure. The national debt Trump promised to erase has ballooned by almost $7.8 trillion. Trump’s failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with nothing remains the nadir of his public approval, surpassing even the days following his incitement of an armed attack on the Capitol building in an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss. Trump has the worst jobs record of any president since 1939, with more than three million lost. He is, in fact, the worst jobs president “god ever created,” despite inheriting an economy that had finally begun to boom in the later years of the Obama administration. The promises of better healthcare didn’t materialize, and the job and wage growth from the economy he inherited were crushed by the pandemic he refused to address. Those were not the promises Trump kept.

I have agreed to walk with my mother late in the day but I’ve come uptown early to wander by myself, feel the sun, take in the streets, be in the world without the interceding interpretations of a companion as voluble as she. At Seventy-third Street I turn off Lexington and head for the Whitney, wanting a last look at a visiting collection. As I approach the museum some German Expressionist drawings in a gallery window catch my eye. I walk through the door, turn to the wall nearest me, and come face to face with two large Nolde watercolors, the famous flowers. I’ve looked often at Nolde’s flowers, but now it’s as though I am seeing them for the first time: that hot lush diffusion of his outlined, I suddenly realize, in intent. I see the burning quality of Nolde’s intention, the serious patience with which the flowers absorb him, the clear, stubborn concentration of the artist on his subject. I see it. And I think, It’s the concentration that gives the work its power. The space inside me enlarges. That rectangle of light and air inside, where thought clarifies and language grows and response is made intelligent, that famous space surrounded by loneliness, anxiety, self-pity, it opens wide as I look at Nolde’s flowers. In the museum lobby I stop at the permanent exhibit of Alexander Calder’s circus. As usual, a crowd is gathered, laughing and gaping at the wonderfulness of Calder’s sighing, weeping, triumphing bits of cloth and wire. Beside me stand two women. I look at their faces and I dismiss them: middle-aged Midwestern blondes, blue-eyed and moony. Then one of them says, “It’s like second childhood,” and the other one replies tartly, “Better than anyone’s first.” I’m startled, pleasured, embarrassed. I think, What a damn fool you are to cut yourself off with your stupid amazement that she could have said that. Again, I feel the space inside widen unexpectedly. That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing. Today is promising, tremendously promising. Wherever I go, whatever I see, whatever my eye or ear touches, the space radiates expansion. I want to think. No, I mean today I really want to think. The desire announced itself with the word “concentration.” I go to meet my mother. I’m flying. Flying! I want to give her some of this shiningness bursting in me, siphon into her my immense happiness at being alive. Just because she is my oldest intimate and at this moment I love everybody, even her.

The lack of a functioning, trustful community also heightened the refugees’ fears of being abducted by the extremist organization Islamic State. Many initially refused to move to Azraq camp, and although the numbers have increased more recently, Azraq is still far below the 130,000 capacity for which it was built. It’s fitting then that this pop-up city, in real need of some functioning social capital, is now the scene of a radical experiment in new models of community governance, institution-building, and the management of resources. At the heart of that effort is blockchain technology, the decentralized ledger-keeping system that underpins the digital currency bitcoin and promises a more reliable, immediate way to trace transactions. The World Food Program (WFP), a UN agency that feeds 80 million people worldwide, is putting 10,000 Azraq refugees through a pilot that uses this system to better coordinate food distribution. In doing so, the WFP is tackling a giant administrative challenge: how to ensure, in an environment where theft is rampant and few people carry personal identifying documents, that everyone gets their fair share of food. Among those participating in this project was forty-three-year-old Najah Saleh Al-Mheimed, one of the more than 5 million Syrians forced to flee their homes as the brutal, ongoing civil war has all but destroyed their country. In early June 2015, with mounting food shortages and reports of girls being kidnapped by militias in nearby villages, Najah and her husband made the drastic decision to leave her hometown of Hasaka, where their families had lived for generations. “It was an ordeal that I pray to God no human will ever witness,” she said in an interview conducted on our behalf by WFP staffers working in the Azraq camp.

While yesterday is surely out of reach for everyone, today & tomorrow hold a promise for you. Make it count, if you really wish to reconnect (with someone) or if you’re determined to catch up (on work, hobbies etc.). So, Get Up & Go Get It – whether it’s nourishing your body, finding moments of peace, igniting joy in your heart or increasing your abundance & influence, make today count. Sweetheart, make up for lost time & start living your best life today! Darling listen – the key to best life lies in keeping your word, staying positive, making no assumptions & always giving your best effort. Always remember that! May you soon find yourself saying, “Wow, this is even better than I hoped!” Blessings!

Kirkus Review: Carroll Engelhardt, By the Sweat of His Brow: The R. M. Probstfield Family at Oakport Farm (FriesenPress January 5, 2023) “Engelhardt recounts a German family’s experience living in Minnesota’s Red River Valley in the late 19th century. In 1832, Randolph Michael Probstfield was born near Koblenz in the Prussian-controlled Rhineland in western Germany, the son of devoutly Catholic parents who encouraged him to enter the priesthood and were bitterly disappointed when he did not (Probstfield observed, “If I had promised to be a priest and kept my word, today I would be . . . a feted-up, high-living hypocrite in the so-called vineyard of the Lord, and not a farmer . . . earning his bread by the sweat of his brow”). Like many other Germans before him in search of a better life, he emigrated to the United States in 1852, traveled extensively, and worked a dizzying array of jobs before he finally settled in Minnesota in 1860, a time when Germans were the state’s dominant immigrant group. In an effort to assimilate, he altered the spelling of his last name, which was originally Probstfeld. For the rest of his life he would maintain a delicate balance between his enthusiastic loyalty to the United States and pride in his German ancestry. Eventually, Probstfield’s indefatigable work ethic paid off, and he bought Oakport Farm in the Red River Valley in the 1868. He would eventually purchase thousands of acres of land and enjoy the prosperity that came with a great agricultural boom at the end of the 19th century, a period depicted with a scrupulous exactitude by the author. Engelhardt delivers much more than a family history—his book is a granular account of frontier life in America, a life of punishing toil that also held the promise of wealth and freedom. Probstfield emerges as a fascinating patriarch of his family (he married Catherine Goodman, with whom he had 13 children); a rugged, secular individualist, he held progressive political and cultural views, including a great attraction to socialism. He was exceedingly active in local political life, a contentious milieu diligently reconstructed by the author. His extraordinary rigor can be a bit overwhelming—there are minutely detailed discussions of Oakport’s small-grain production, Probstfield’s horticultural experiments, and various meat-preservation methods. However, for the reader looking for a finely detailed treatment of this period in American history, this is an edifying study. A magisterially researched work in American History.

Dear Teachers, I hope your school year is going pretty well. I hope your classes are not causing you too much trouble and your families are doing well. You might be wondering why you are tagged to this post and what this is all about. It’s Teachers’ Day, the day for being thankful to our teachers. Some of you I had over a decade ago, some of you might not even remember who the heck I am. But if you’re reading this, this is my way of officially thanking you. For what? Let me explain. To the ones who made me love learning as a whole – If you are an elementary school teacher, this goes out to you. You are the reason I am where I am today. If it weren’t for your hard work and dedication to teaching me and every other student what you know, my future would not be as bright as it is now. I chose to go to college because somewhere along the line, you taught me that education is important and I have to strive to help others by educating myself. This is not always easy, but you helped me understand that willingness to learn is one of the most important aspects of a person. For that, I am forever grateful for you and everything you have done for me and so many others. To the ones who helped me find my passions– Writing, training, and helping people are what I love. No matter what I have been through in my life, everything goes back to the fact that in the future, I want to help people and I want to change the world. Writing and creating training programs are what make that happen. It made me realize that in the future, I don’t just want a shiny car, big bungalow, and other material items. I want something that sticks with people for all time – and what better way to do that than to become a writer and write for those who can't write for themselves? Shout out to those teachers who helped me find my passion, and maybe even made an effort to help me pursue it as well. To the ones who taught me more than the textbooks – you honestly saved me. You taught me that learning isn’t always about getting 100s on every test and being the perfect student. You helped me realize that a part of learning means making mistakes. You taught me that brushing yourself off, getting back up, and trying again is essential to get anywhere in this world. I grew up being the smart kid who never had to study and when the going got tough, I didn’t always know how to respond. You helped me with my problem solving skills and fixing things that needed fixing. This isn’t necessarily always talking about school, but life in general. You taught me that my value was not depicted by my score on a test, but rather who I was as a person. It is hard to put into words, but some of you honestly are the reason I am here today – succeeding in my first semester of college, off to university before I know it. Thank you so much. To the ones who didn’t know I could talk – I’m sorry I didn’t speak up more in your class. Many of you knew I had a lot to say, but knew I did not know how to say it or how to get the thoughts out. I promise you, even though you could not hear it, I am thankful for you - thankful that you did not force me out of my comfort zone. I know that may not sound like much, but when you have as much of a fear of speaking out as I do, that is such a big deal. Thank you for working with me and realizing that someone does not need to speak in order to have knowledge in their mind. Thank you for not basing my intelligence on my ability to present that information. It means a lot more than you will ever realize. To the ones who don’t know why you made this list – Congratulations. Somewhere along the way, you impacted me in a way I felt was worth acknowledging you for. Maybe you said something in class that resonated with me and changed my outlook on a situation, or life in general. Maybe you just asked me if I was okay after class one day. If you’re sitting there scratching your head, wondering how you changed my life, please just know you did.

You’re not responsible with what God gave you if you’re hanging out with time wasters who have no goals and no dreams. You have a destiny to fulfill. God has amazing things in your future. It’s critical that you surround yourself with the right people. If you’re the smartest one in your group, then your group is too small. You need to be around people who know more than you and have more talent than you. Don’t be intimidated by them; be inspired. If you take an oak tree seed and plant it in a five-gallon pot, that tree will never grow to the size it was created to be. Why? It’s restricted by the size of the pot. In the same way, God has created you to do great things. He’s put talent, ability, and skills on the inside. You don’t want to be restricted by your environment. It may be too small. Some of you are being restricted by your environment. It’s too small. The people you hang around are negative and drag you down. You need to get out of that little pot. God created you to soar. It’s fine to help people in need, but don’t spend all your time with them. You need talented and smart people in your life; winners who are farther along than you and can inspire you and challenge you to rise higher. My question for you is this: Are you doing anything strategic and intentional to keep growing? If not, you can start right now. Come up with a personal growth plan. It can be something like, “I will get up every morning and spend the first twenty minutes meditating on the scripture. I will listen to a teaching CD driving to work. I will read a book fifteen minutes every night before I go to bed. I will meet with my mentor twice a month. I will be in church every weekend.” That’s a definite plan. When you take responsibility for your growth, God will honor your efforts. Promotion, good breaks, businesses, books, and divine connections are in your future. But now is the time to prepare. Don’t get caught with destination disease. There is treasure in you, waiting to be developed. Redeem the time. Make a decision to grow in some way every day. If you keep sharpening your skills, and getting better, God promises your gifts will make room for you. Like David, because you are prepared, I believe and declare God is about to thrust you into the fullness of your destiny. He will open doors that no man can shut. You will go further than you could imagine and become the winner He’s created you to be.

Globalization is more than a process of corporate expansion, free trade, and instant communications; it is also about a radical ideology, a humanist religion, an effort to replace national sovereignty with global governance and deliver great wealth to the few elite. It is empowered by progressivism and other nefarious societal engines like Marxism, communism that promises utopia but results in massive vulnerabilities for most people and robs those citizens of their basic freedoms. Do you want to understand this sort of chaos that is now threatening every corner of our world? Then you better investigate globalization and all its prickly tentacles.

Bergson says that mystical experience need not wonder whether the source it puts us in contact with is God himself or his earthly delegation. It experiences the granted invasion of a being which 'can do immensely more than it can.' We must not even say an all-powerful being: Bergson says that the idea of the all is as empty as that of nothingness, and the possible for him remains the shadow of the real. Bergson's God is immense rather than infinite, or He is a qualitative infinite. He is the element of joy or love in the sense that water and fire are elements. Like sentient and human beings, He is a radiance, not an essence. Metaphysical attributes which seek to determine Him are, Bergson says, like all determinations, negations. Even if through some impossibility they became visible, no religious man would recognize the God he prays to in them. Bergson's God is, like the universe, a singular being, an immense this; and even in theology Bergson kept his promise of a philosophy fashioned for actual being and applying to it alone. If we indulge in imaginary computations we must admit, he says, that 'the whole could have been much better than it is.' No one can make someone's death a component of the best possible world. But not only are the solutions of classical theodicy false, the problems have no meaning in the order Bergson puts himself in--the order of radical contingency. Here it is not a question of the conceived world or a conceived God, but of the existing world and an existing God; and that within us which is acquainted with this order is beneath our opinions and our statements. No one will ever stop men from loving their life, no matter how miserable it may be. This vital judgment puts life and God on this side of arraignment as well as of justification. And if we insisted upon understanding how natura naturans had been able to produce a natura naturata in which it is not really realized, why creative effort has been at least provisionally arrested, what obstacle it has encountered and how an obstacle could be insurmountable for it, Bergson would agree that his philosophy does not answer this type of question. But he would also say that the reason why it does not is that it does not have to ask such questions. For in the last analysis his philosophy is not a genesis of the world--not even, as it narrowly missed being, 'integration and differentiation' of being--but the deliberately partial, discontinuous, almost empirical location of several foci of being.

What can explain this difference? On the surface, much appears to hinge on Richard’s programming feat, his software shim. Otherwise, his effort with Konqueror seems much like my struggles with Mozilla. Perhaps he was just a better programmer than me, and without his coding cleverness, there would be no story. That explanation is too simple. Richard made his shim only after determining he needed one last link in a chain of inspiration, intuition, reasoning, and estimation. His shim was a consequence of his overall plan. To show what I mean, here’s an accounting of what Richard did in his first couple of days at Apple. He began by quizzing us on the browser analysis we had done before his arrival, and after hearing it, he quickly discarded our effort with Mozilla as unlikely to bear fruit. By doing so, he demonstrated the self-confidence to skip any ingratiating display of deference to his new manager, a person who had years of experience in the technical field he was newly entering. Next, Richard resolved to produce a result on the shortest possible schedule. He downloaded an open source project that held genuine promise, the Konqueror code from KDE, a browser that might well serve as the basis for our long-term effort. In getting this code running on a Mac, he decided to make the closest possible approximation of a real browser that was feasible on his short schedule. He identified three features—loading web pages, clicking links, and going back to previous pages. He reasoned these alone would be sufficiently compelling proofs of concept. He then made his shortcuts, and these simplifying choices defined a set of nongoals: Perfect font rendering would be cast aside, as would full integration with the Mac’s native graphics system, same for using only the minimum source code from KDE. He reasoned that these shortcuts, while significant, would not substantially detract from the impact of seeing a browser surf web pages. He resolved to draw together these strands into a single demo that would show the potential of Konqueror. Then, finally, he worked through the technical details, which led him to develop his software shim, since that was the only thing standing between him and the realization of his plan. His thought process amplified his technical acumen. In contrast, Don and I were hoping Mozilla would pan out somehow. I was trying to get the open source behemoth to build on the Mac, with little thought beyond that. I had no comparable plan, goals, nongoals, tight schedule, or technical shortcuts.

Investment Counsel and Trust Services of Banks The truly professional investment advisers—that is, the well-established investment counsel firms, who charge substantial annual fees—are quite modest in their promises and pretentions. For the most part they place their clients’ funds in standard interest- and dividend-paying securities, and they rely mainly on normal investment experience for their overall results. In the typical case it is doubtful whether more than 10% of the total fund is ever invested in securities other than those of leading companies, plus government bonds (including state and municipal issues); nor do they make a serious effort to take advantage of swings in the general market. The leading investment-counsel firms make no claim to being brilliant; they do pride themselves on being careful, conservative, and competent. Their primary aim is to conserve the principal value over the years and produce a conservatively acceptable rate of income. Any accomplishment beyond that—and they do strive to better the goal—they regard in the nature of extra service rendered. Perhaps their chief value to their clients lies in shielding them from costly mistakes. They offer as much as the defensive investor has the right to expect from any counselor serving the general public. What we have said about the well-established investment-counsel firms applies generally to the trust and advisory services of the larger banks.