Examination Success Quotes

Mistakes should be examined, learned from, and discarded; not dwelled upon and stored.

Meditation is a journey to know yourself. Knowing yourself has many layers. Start knowing your bodily discomforts. Know your success, know your failures. Know your fears. Know your irritations. Know your pleasures, joy and happiness. Know your mental wounds. Go deeper and examine every feeling you have.

If you fail an examination, it means you have not yet master the subject. With diligent study and understanding, you will succeed in passing the exams.

After examining the philosophies, the theories, and the practiced methods of influencing human behavior, I was shocked to learn the simplicity of that one small fact: You will become what you think about most; your success or failure in anything, large or small, will depend on your programming - what you accept from others, and what you say when you talk to yourself. It is no longer a success theory; it is a simple but powerful fact. Neither luck nor desire has the slightest thing to do with it. It makes no difference whether we believe it or not. The brain simply believes what you tell it most. And what you tell it about you, it will create. It has no choice.

Rachel and I, we’d been raised to do what we wanted to do, and we had; we’d been successful, and we’d shown everyone. We didn’t need to wear apocryphal T-shirts because we already knew the secret, which was this: that when you did succeed, when you did outearn and outpace, when you did exceed all expectations, nothing around you really shifted. You still had to tiptoe around the fragility of a man, which was okay for the women who got to shop and drink martinis all day—this was their compensation; they had done their own negotiations—but was absolutely intolerable for anyone who was out there working and getting respect and becoming the person that others had to tiptoe around. That these men could be so delicate, that they could lack any inkling of self-examination when it came time to try to figure out why their women didn’t seem to be batshit enthusiastic over another night of bolstering and patting and fellating every insecurity out of them—this was the thing we’d find intolerable.

Loving relationships, though necessary for life, health, and growth, are among the most complicated skills. Before we can be successful at achieving relationships, it is necessary that we broaden our understanding of how they work, what they mean and how what we do and believe can enhance or destroy them. We can accomplish this only if we are willing to put in the energy and take the time to study failed relationships as well as examine successful ones. Loving relationships cannot be taken lightly. Unless we are looking for pain, they must not be forever approached in a trial and error fashion. Too many of us have experienced the cost of these lackadaisical approaches in terms of tears, confusion and guilt.

Julia's unhappy relationship with the Inland Revenue was due to her omission, during four years of modestly successful practice at the Bar, to pay any income tax. The truth is, I think, that she did not, in her heart of hearts, really believe in income tax. It was a subject which she had studied for examinations and on which she had thereafter advised a number of clients: she naturally did not suppose, in these circumstances, that it had anything to do with real life.

When you examine the genesis of great works of art, successful start-ups, and revolutionary shifts in politics, you can always trace back a history of monetary and nonmonetary exchange, the hidden patrons and underlying favors.

Men credited with all kinds of ability, talent, brains and know how, including the ability to see into the future, frequently have nothing more than the courage to keep everlastingly at what they set out to do. They have that one great quality that is worth more than all the rest put together. They simply will not give up! When a man makes up his mind to do something then it's only a matter of time. Staying with time take bulldog persistence. This seems to be the entrance examination to success - lasting success -- of any kind!

Morrowseer shook his head. “Some NightWings think so, but none of our scientists have been able to find any when they examine our tribe’s corpses. Nor have we had any success replicating RainWing venom shooting.” He scowled at the bird and abruptly ripped off one if its wings. “You may have this,” he said ungenerously, tossing it at Starflight. Starflight

It was the general opinion of ancient nations, that the divinity alone was adequate to the important office of giving laws to men... and modern nations, in the consecrations of kings, and in several superstitious chimeras of divine rights in princes and nobles, are nearly unanimous in preserving remnants of it... Is the jealousy of power, and the envy of superiority, so strong in all men, that no considerations of public or private utility are sufficient to engage their submission to rules for their own happiness? Or is the disposition to imposture so prevalent in men of experience, that their private views of ambition and avarice can be accomplished only by artifice? — … There is nothing in which mankind have been more unanimous; yet nothing can be inferred from it more than this, that the multitude have always been credulous, and the few artful. The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature: and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven, any more than those at work upon ships or houses, or labouring in merchandize or agriculture: it will for ever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses. As Copley painted Chatham, West, Wolf, and Trumbull, Warren and Montgomery; as Dwight, Barlow, Trumbull, and Humphries composed their verse, and Belknap and Ramzay history; as Godfrey invented his quadrant, and Rittenhouse his planetarium; as Boylston practised inoculation, and Franklin electricity; as Paine exposed the mistakes of Raynal, and Jefferson those of Buffon, so unphilosophically borrowed from the Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains those despicable dreams of de Pauw — neither the people, nor their conventions, committees, or sub-committees, considered legislation in any other light than ordinary arts and sciences, only as of more importance. Called without expectation, and compelled without previous inclination, though undoubtedly at the best period of time both for England and America, to erect suddenly new systems of laws for their future government, they adopted the method of a wise architect, in erecting a new palace for the residence of his sovereign. They determined to consult Vitruvius, Palladio, and all other writers of reputation in the art; to examine the most celebrated buildings, whether they remain entire or in ruins; compare these with the principles of writers; and enquire how far both the theories and models were founded in nature, or created by fancy: and, when this should be done, as far as their circumstances would allow, to adopt the advantages, and reject the inconveniences, of all. Unembarrassed by attachments to noble families, hereditary lines and successions, or any considerations of royal blood, even the pious mystery of holy oil had no more influence than that other of holy water: the people universally were too enlightened to be imposed on by artifice; and their leaders, or more properly followers, were men of too much honour to attempt it. Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind. [Preface to 'A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America', 1787]

You see, we are so afraid to fail, to make mistakes, not only in examinations but in life. To make a mistake is considered terrible because we will be criticized for it, somebody will scold us. But, after all, why should you not make a mistake? Are not all the people in the world making mistakes? And would the world cease to be in this horrible mess if you were never to make a mistake? If you are afraid of making mistakes you will never learn. The older people are making mistakes all the time, but they don’t want you to make mistakes, and thereby they smother your initiative. Why? Because they are afraid that by observing and questioning everything, by experimenting and making mistakes you may find out something for yourself and break away from the authority of your parents, of society, of tradition. That is why the ideal of success is held up for you to follow; and success, you will notice, is always in terms of respectability.

Many people excuse their own faults but judge other persons harshly. We should reverse this attitude by excusing others’ shortcomings and by harshly examining our own.

I succeeded in teaching a number of the idiots from the asylums both to read and to write so well that I was able to present them at a public school for an examination together with normal children. And they passed the examination successfully.

Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need. Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers.

Nothing will make us so charitable and tender to the faults of others, as, by self-examination, thoroughly to know our own.

A student who memorizes all the mark schemes from past papers and expects the next examination to have the same answers is akin to someone who dreams of a perfect, easy life and unicorns

People hate thinking systematically about how to optimize their relationships. It is normal to hear someone say: “I will just wait for something to happen naturally” when talking about one of the most important aspects of their life while genuinely believing that this approach has reasonable odds of success. Imagine if people said the same thing about their careers. It would sound truly bizarre for someone to expect a successful career to “just happen naturally” and yet it is entirely normalized to expect that good relationships will. People pay tens of thousands of dollars to receive degrees in computer science, marketing, and neuroscience. They make tough sacrifices with the understanding that the skills and knowledge they build in these domains will dramatically affect their quality of life. Ironically, people spend very little time systematically examining mating strategies—despite the fact that a robust understanding of the subject can dramatically affect quality of life. We will happily argue that your sexual and relationship skills matter more than your career skills. If you want to be wealthy, the fastest way to become so is to marry rich. Nothing makes happiness easier than a loving, supportive relationship, while one of the best ways to ensure you are never happy is to enter or fail to recognize and escape toxic relationships. If you want to change the world, a great partner can serve as a force multiplier. A draft horse can pull 8000 pounds, while two working together can pull 24,000 pounds. When you have a partner with whom you can synergize, you gain reach and speed that neither you nor your partner could muster individually. Heck, even if you are the type of person to judge your self-worth by the number of people with whom you have slept, a solid grasp of mating strategies will help you more than a lifetime of hitting the gym (and we say this with full acknowledgment that hitting the gym absolutely helps). A great romantic relationship will even positively impact your health (a 2018 paper in Psychophysiology found that the presence of a partner in a room lowered participants’ blood pressure) and increase your lifespan (a 2019 paper in the journal Health Psychology showed individuals in happy marriages died young at a 20% lower rate). 

The "culture of honor" hypothesis says that it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact. It's just the beginning, though, because upon closer examination, cultural legacies turn out to be even stranger and more powerful than that.

A certain amount of native skill and training can allow many individuals to be fairly successful magicians, achieving a surprisingly high ratio of positive results through sorcery.(...) These outer changes, no matter how dramatic, will not necessarily have a deep impact on the deepest levels of your psyche, which is where the process of initiation most meaningfully manifests.' --Zeena Schreck for “Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,” University of Stockholm, Malin Fitger 2004

The particular aspect of history which both attracts and benefits its readers is the examination of causes and the capacity, which is the reward of this study, to decide in each case the best policy to follow. Now in all political situations we must understand that the principle factor which makes for success or failure is the form of a state's constitution: it is from this source, as if from a fountainhead, that all designs and plans of action not only originate but reach their fulfillment.

As I developed as a CEO, I found two key techniques to be useful in minimizing politics. 1. Hire people with the right kind of ambition. The cases that I described above might involve people who are ambitious but not necessarily inherently political. All cases are not like this. The surest way to turn your company into the political equivalent of the U.S. Senate is to hire people with the wrong kind of ambition. As defined by Andy Grove, the right kind of ambition is ambition for the company’s success with the executive’s own success only coming as a by-product of the company’s victory. The wrong kind of ambition is ambition for the executive’s personal success regardless of the company’s outcome. 2. Build strict processes for potentially political issues and do not deviate. Certain activities attract political behavior. These activities include:   Performance evaluation and compensation   Organizational design and territory   Promotions Let’s examine each case and how you might build and execute a process that insulates the company from bad behavior and politically motivated outcomes.

It is better to be wise for one day than to be intelligent for a thousand. It is better to know yourself than to understand your enemies. It is better to find yourself than to find a thousand pots of gold. It is better to rule your mind than to rule the world. It is better to fight for justice than to give into tyranny. It is better to live in a pure mind than to reside in a darkened soul. It is better to be remembered as a coward than as a fool. It is better to study yourself than to examine your enemies. It is better to teach young children than to instruct old fools. It is better to strengthen your weaknesses than to celebrate your strengths. It is better to fight your fears than to harbour your anxieties. It is better to win hearts than to ruin souls. It is better to think your highest than to act your lowest. It is better to learn from fools than to ignore the wise. It is better to learn from your mistakes than to celebrate your success. It is better to think for yourself than to allow intellectuals to think for you. It is better to be wise and poor than to be rich and ignorant.  It is better to learn from children than to teach the wise. It is better to learn truth from your enemies than lies from your friends. It is better to be ostracized for who you are than to be embraced for who you are not. It is better to be hated for your virtues than to be loved for your vices. It is better to learn from the wise than to teach the foolish. It is better to discover your weaknesses than to glorify your strengths. It is better to heal yourself than to harm your enemies. It is better to love your enemies than to harm your friends. It is better to help the weak than to conquer the strong.

The halo effect and outcome bias combine to explain the extraordinary appeal of books that seek to draw operational morals from systematic examination of successful businesses.

when we deny our mistakes, we are less likely to examine them and gain any true understanding or lessons from them, making us more susceptible to repeating them in the future.

To get to know yourself better, examine what you really want from life and become true to yourself, Be clear and honest and work hard to make it.

We often try to get to clarity while standing still. It just doesn’t work that way. Clarity comes from movement. You must try, test, attempt, launch, prove and examine before you get to clarity.

Bruner discusses the need for teachers to understand that children should want to study for study's own sake, for learnings's sake, not for the sake of good grades or examination success. The curriculum should, in other words, be interesting. (Yes, it sounds too obvious even to say, but sometimes the emphasis on content has trumped all other considerations, including that of making learning interesting.)

This is your success and this is the magic hour, the golden time before the time. Just be in it. You earned it. Don't spread it and don't pull on it and don't push it and don't share it and don't examine it. This is it.

Finally, another large-scale study [of false rape allegations] was conducted in Australia, with the 850 rapes reported to the Victoria police between 2000 and 2003 (Heenan & Murray, 2006). Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, the researchers examined 812 cases with sufficient information to make an appropriate determination, and found that only 2.1% of these were classified as false reports. All of these complainants were then charged or threatened with charges for filing a false police report." Lonsway, K. A., Archambault, J., & Lisak, D. (2009). False reports: Moving beyond the issue to successfully investigate and prosecute non-stranger sexual assault. The Voice, 3(1), 1-11.

I stood in silence where I was, for I did not know what to do. Of bell or knocker there was no sign; through these frowning walls and dark window openings it was not likely that my voice could penetrate. The time I waited seemed endless, and I felt doubts and fears crowding upon me. What sort of place had I come to, and among what kind of people? What sort of grim adventure was it on which I had embarked? Was this a customary incident in the life of a solicitor’s clerk sent out to explain the purchase of a London estate to a foreigner? Solicitor’s clerk! Mina would not like that. Solicitor—for just before leaving London I got word that my examination was successful; and I am now a full-blown solicitor! I began to rub my eyes and pinch myself to see if I were awake.

I began at that point the emotional examination to note how far my convalescence had gone — I was taller, bigger generally in relation to these stairs, I had more money and success and “security” than in the days when specters seemed to go up and down with me.

There is scarcely a quality which so much dignifies human nature as consistency of conduct -- and no weakness more deplorable than that of instability. Examine, choose, compare, reject, but having once made your selection of profession, stand by your decision. Difficulties, and privations, and hardships, must be encountered; but determination will overcome them all. And not only sloth and folly, but even genius will be outdone by perseverance. It often is the case that he who can endure the most is in the end the most successful.

William was deeply humiliated. I tried to comfort him; I told him that for three days he had been looking for a text in Greek and it was natural in the course of his examination for him to discard all books not in Greek. And he answered that it is certainly human to make mistakes, but there are some human beings who make more than others, and they are called fools, and he was one of them, and he wondered whether it was worth the effort to study in Paris and Oxford if one was then incapable of thinking that manuscripts are also bound in groups, a fact even novices know, except stupid ones like me, and a pair of clowns like the two of us would be a great success at fairs, and that was what we should do instead of trying to solve mysteries, especially when we were up against people far more clever than we.

And by way of concluding our study of natural atheology: none of the arguments we've examined has prospects for success; all are unacceptable. There are arguments we haven't considered, of course; but so far the indicated conclusion is that natural atheology doesn't work.

William James said, “You cannot travel without until you have travelled within.” Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” People who discover their sweet spot are people who take the inward journey and examine themselves. They make the choice to live until they die.

The human mind is an incredible thing. It can conceive of the magnificence of the heavens and the intricacies of the basic components of matter. Yet for each mind to achieve its full potential, it needs a spark. The spark of enquiry and wonder. Often that spark comes from a teacher. Allow me to explain. I wasn’t the easiest person to teach, I was slow to learn to read and my handwriting was untidy. But when I was fourteen my teacher at my school in St Albans, Dikran Tahta, showed me how to harness my energy and encouraged me to think creatively about mathematics. He opened my eyes to maths as the blueprint of the universe itself. If you look behind every exceptional person there is an exceptional teacher. When each of us thinks about what we can do in life, chances are we can do it because of a teacher. [...] The basis for the future of education must lie in schools and inspiring teachers. But schools can only offer an elementary framework where sometimes rote-learning, equations and examinations can alienate children from science. Most people respond to a qualitative, rather than a quantitative, understanding, without the need for complicated equations. Popular science books and articles can also put across ideas about the way we live. However, only a small percentage of the population read even the most successful books. Science documentaries and films reach a mass audience, but it is only one-way communication.

In everyday life, if people intend to reach a true assessment of someone, to decide whether he is bad or good, they do not base the investigation on those periods of his life when he was untroubled by external circumstances; they look at how he behaved when he was afflicted by misfortune or blessed by success, because they think that the only way to tell whether a man is fully qualified is to see whether or not he is capable of enduring total changes of fortune with courage and without compromising his principles. This is how one should examine a system of government as well...

Nowadays, the work of Alfred Hitchcock is admired all over the world. Young people who are just discovering his art through the current rerelease of Rear Window and Vertigo, or through North by Northwest, may assume his prestige has always been recognized, but this is far from being the case. In the fifties and sixties, Hitchcock was at the height of his creativity and popularity. He was, of course, famous due to the publicity masterminded by producer David O. Selznick during the six or seven years of their collaboration on such films as Rebecca, Notorious, Spellbound, and The Paradine Case. His fame had spread further throughout the world via the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the mid-fifties. But American and European critics made him pay for his commercial success by reviewing his work with condescension, and by belittling each new film. (...) In examining his films, it was obvious that he had given more thought to the potential of his art than any of his colleagues. It occurred to me that if he would, for the first time, agree to respond seriously to a systematic questionnaire, the resulting document might modify the American critics’ approach to Hitchcock. That is what this book is all about.

Stop Looking for Occasions to Be Offended When you live at or below ordinary levels of awareness, you spend a great deal of time and energy finding opportunities to be offended. Today we’re going to examine how you can stop allowing yourself to be offended by others and instead respond positively with love and forgiveness. A news report, an economic downturn, a rude stranger, a fashion miscue, someone cursing, a sneeze, a black cloud, any cloud, an absence of clouds—just about anything will do if you’re looking for an occasion to be offended. Along the extra mile, you’ll never find anyone engaging in such absurdities. Become a person who refuses to be offended by anyone, any thing, or any set of circumstances. If something takes place and you disapprove, by all means state what you feel from your heart; and if possible, work to eliminate it and then let it go. Most people operate from the ego and really need to be right. So, when you encounter someone saying things that you find inappropriate, or when you know they’re wrong, wrong, wrong, forget your need to be right and instead say, “You’re right about that!” Those words will end potential conflict and free you from being offended. Your desire is to be peaceful—not to be right, hurt, angry, or resentful. If you have enough faith in your own beliefs, you’ll find that it’s impossible to be offended by the beliefs and conduct of others. Not being offended is a way of saying, “I have control over how I’m going to feel, and I choose to feel peaceful regardless of what I observe going

Many successful people have a morning ritual. For some, it’s meditation. For others, it’s exercise. For many, it’s journaling—just a few pages where they write down their thoughts, fears, hopes. In these cases, the point is not so much the activity itself as it is the ritualized reflection. The idea is to take some time to look inward and examine.

I was chiefly disgusted with modern history. For having strictly examined all the persons of greatest name in the courts of princes, for a hundred years past, I found how the world had been misled by prostitute writers, to ascribe the greatest exploits in war, to cowards; the wisest counsel, to fools; sincerity, to flatterers; Roman virtue, to betrayers of their country; piety, to atheists; chastity, to sodomites; truth, to informers: how many innocent and excellent persons had been condemned to death or banishment by the practising of great ministers upon the corruption of judges, and the malice of factions: how many villains had been exalted to the highest places of trust, power, dignity, and profit: how great a share in the motions and events of courts, councils, and senates might be challenged by bawds, whores, pimps, parasites, and buffoons. How low an opinion I had of human wisdom and integrity, when I was truly informed of the springs and motives of great enterprises and revolutions in the world, and of the contemptible accidents to which they owed their success.

This can be an important part of learning from failure. If you keep those feelings inside, you may not examine everything that happened and learn from it. Often, talking through challenges with someone else can shed new light on the situation, which is necessary for you to learn and move forward successfully. SEE THE OPPORTUNITY IN FAILURE Toddlers approach potential failure with curiosity.

It is successful charter schools that are the real threat to the traditional unionized public schools. No charter school network examined here has been more successful educationally than the Success Academy charter schools in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, the South Bronx and other low-income minority neighborhoods in New York City—and none has been more often or more bitterly attacked in words and deeds.

That’s partly because, as social psychologists have found in decades’ worth of studies, high achievers usually take too much credit for their successes and assign too much external blame for their failures. It’s a type of attribution bias that protects self-esteem but also prevents learning and growth. People focus on situational factors or company politics instead of examining their own role in the problem.

It’s not in the nature of experienced and intelligent people to precipitately form an opinion in the instant that they are faced with something.  They examine the object or the problem in depth, looking at it from this side and that before proclaiming its faults or its advantages.  However, there is another type of persons who act exactly in the opposite way, they do not have the patience to think for very long about anything.  No sooner that something comes into their ken, they know instantly that it is good or it is bad, scrutiny is too much of an effort for them, and logic is replaced with a sort of blind faith.  For these people, if fate is kind, the highest success is theirs; if luck is against them, they descend to the darkest depths of life, and there they lie like stones, blind to light and hope. To this latter class of people belonged Devdas.

White America’s trust in the system and related belief in its own merit pose a frequent roadblock in racial reconciliation. Many Whites in these settings are fine with discussing White supremacy as an abstract principle, or a historical artifact, or even as an ongoing reality in the lives of people of color. But they are highly resistant to examining their own privilege or to the suggestion that any element of their success may be the product of racial privilege.

If aspirations are to be achieved, capabilities developed, and management systems created, progress needs to be measured. Measurement provides focus and feedback. Focus comes from an awareness that outcomes will be examined, and success or failure noted, creating a personal incentive to perform well. Feedback comes from the fact that measurement allows the comparison of expected outcomes with actual outcomes and enables you to adjust strategic choices accordingly.

...he had also acquired a peculiar academic quirk. During exams, he knew all the answers but wasn’t able to successfully map his answers to the right questions. So as soon as an exam started, he simply started putting his answers in the order in which he remembered them. Every time he moved to a new class, his parents made the new teachers aware of this snag. The teachers acknowledged it and reassured the parents that they’d match his answers against the appropriate questions.

Rachel and I, we’d been raised to do what we wanted to do, and we had; we’d been successful, and we’d shown everyone. We didn’t need to wear apocryphal T-shirts because we already knew the secret, which was this: that when you did succeed, when you did outearn and outpace, when you did exceed all expectations, nothing around you really shifted. You still had to tiptoe around the fragility of a man, which was okay for the women who got to shop and drink martinis all day—this was their compensation; they had done their own negotiations—but was absolutely intolerable for anyone who was out there working and getting respect and becoming the person that others had to tiptoe around. That these men could be so delicate, that they could lack any inkling of self-examination when it came time to try to figure out why their women didn’t seem to be batshit enthusiastic over another night of bolstering and patting and fellating every insecurity out of them—this was the thing we’d find intolerable. I

A civilization begins by myth and ends in doubt; a theoretical doubt which, once it turns against itself, becomes quite practical. No civilization can begin by questioning values it has not yet created; once produced, it wearies of them and weans itself away, examines and weighs them with a devastating detachment. For the various beliefs it had engendered and which now break adrift, it substitutes a system of uncertainties, it organizes its metaphysical shipwreck with amazing success when a Sextus is on hand to help.

Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, says it best:     It’s hard work. I’m not going to lie. Anyone who tells you that it’s really easy to build a content business is not telling you the truth. You have to accept the fact that this is going to be grueling, difficult, time consuming, and laborious work. But if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and get dirty, and are willing to constantly analyze what you’re doing and scrap what doesn’t work and continue what does work, and keep at it, you can be very, very successful.

The average Christian is not supposed to know that Jesus’ home town of Nazareth did not actually exist, or that key places mentioned in the Bible did not physically exist in the so-called “Holy Land.” He is not meant to know that scholars have had greater success matching Biblical events and places with events and places in Britain rather than in Palestine. It is a point of contention whether the settlement of Nazareth existed at all during Jesus' lifetime. It does not appear on contemporary maps, neither in any books, documents, chronicles or military records of the period, whether of Roman or Jewish compilation. The Jewish Encyclopedia identifies that Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old Testament, neither in the works of Josephus, nor in the Hebrew Talmud – Laurence Gardner (The Grail Enigma) As far back as 1640, the German traveller Korte, after a complete topographical examination of the present Jerusalem, decided that it failed to coincide in any way with the city described by Josephus and the Scriptures. Claims that the tombs of patriarchs Ab’Ram, Isaac, and Jacob are buried under a mosque in Hebron possess no shred of evidence. The rock-cut sepulchres in the valleys of Jehoshaphat and Hinnom are of Roman period with late Greek inscriptions, and there exists nothing in groups of ruins at Petra, Sebaste, Baalbec, Palmyra or Damascus, or among the stone cities of the Haran, that are pre-Roman. Nothing in Jerusalem itself can be related to the Jews – Comyns Beaumont (Britain: Key to World’s History) The Jerusalem of modern times is not the city of the Scriptures. Mt. Calvary, now nearly in the centre of the city, was without walls at the time of the Crucifixion, and the greater part of Mt. Zion, which is not without, was within the ancient city. The holy places are for the most part the fanciful dreams of monkish enthusiasts to increase the veneration of the pilgrims – Rev. J. P. Lawson (quoted in Beaumont’s Britain: Key to World’s History)

Why . . . I want to hear about it. That’s all. That’s all I want. Really.” “Hear about it?” Dussander echoed. He looked utterly perplexed. Todd leaned forward, tanned elbows on bluejeaned knees. “Sure. The firing squads. The gas chambers. The ovens. The guys who had to dig their own graves and then stand on the ends so they’d fall into them. The . . .” His tongue came out and wetted his lips. “The examinations. The experiments. Everything. All the gooshy stuff.” Dussander stared at him with a certain amazed detachment, the way a veterinarian might stare at a cat who was giving birth to a succession of two-headed kittens. “You are a monster,” he said softly.

The stating and solving of the problem are here very close to being equivalent; the truly great problems are set forth only when they are solved. But many little problems are in the same position. I open an elementary treatise on philosophy. One of the first chapters deals with pleasure and pain. There the student is asked a question such as this: “Is pleasure happiness, or not?” But first one must know if pleasure and happiness are genera corresponding to a natural division of things into sections. Strictly speaking the phrase could signify simply: “Given the ordinary meaning of the terms pleasure and happiness should one say that happiness consists in a succession of pleasures?” It is then a question of vocabulary that is being raised; it can be solved only by finding out how the words “pleasure” and “happiness” have been used by the writers who have best handled the language. One will moreover have done a useful piece of work; one will have more accurately defined two ordinary terms, that is, two social habitudes. But if one claims to be doing more, to be grasping realities and not to be re-examining conventions, why should one expect terms, which are perhaps artificial (whether they are or not is not yet known since the object has not been studied), to state a problem which concerns the very nature of things?

Success-minded people have no trouble at all following proven instructions. We all would be happy to follow a map if the map came with a guarantee. There is no guarantee, though. There are no maps. They’ve all been taken, and their value is not what it used to be, because your competitors have maps, too. The opportunity lies in pursuing your curiosity instead. Curiosity is not allergic to failure. Curiosity drives us to the haunted house because the thrills lie in what we don’t expect, not in what’s safe. Curiosity can start us down the path to shipping, to bringing things to the world, to examining them, refining them, and repeating the process again (and again).

In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons. Hogarth noted a famous New York City physician renowned for his skill as a diagnostician. The man’s particular specialty was typhoid fever, and he examined patients for it by feeling around their tongues with his hands. Again and again, his testing yielded a positive diagnosis before the patient displayed a single symptom. And over and over, his diagnosis turned out to be correct. As another physician later pointed out, “He was a more productive carrier, using only his hands, than Typhoid Mary.” Repetitive success, it turned out, taught him the worst possible lesson.

Before embarking on this intellectual journey, I would like to highlight one crucial point. In much of this book I discuss the shortcomings of the liberal worldview and the democratic system. I do so not because I believe liberal democracy is uniquely problematic but rather because I think it is the most successful and most versatile political model humans have so far developed for dealing with the challenges of the modern world. While it might not be appropriate for every society in every stage of development, it has proven its worth in more societies and in more situations than any of its alternatives. So when we are examining the new challenges that lie ahead of us, it is necessary to understand the limitations of liberal democracy and to explore how we can adapt and improve its current institutions. Unfortunately, in the present political climate any critical thinking about liberalism and democracy might be hijacked by autocrats and various illiberal movements, whose sole interest is to discredit liberal democracy rather than to engage in an open discussion about the future of humanity. While they are more than happy to debate the problems of liberal democracy, they have almost no tolerance of any criticism directed at them. As an author, I was therefore required to make a difficult choice. Should I speak my mind openly and risk that my words might be taken out of context and used to justify burgeoning autocracies? Or should I censor myself? It is a mark of illiberal regimes that they make free speech more difficult even outside their borders. Due to the spread of such regimes, it is becoming increasingly dangerous to think critically about the future of our species. After some soul-searching, I chose free discussion over self-censorship. Without criticizing the liberal model, we cannot repair its faults or move beyond it. But please note that this book could have been written only when people are still relatively free to think what they like and to express themselves as they wish. If you value this book, you should also value the freedom of expression.

Her great resentment was that she had had no education. When she was seventeen, she had announced that she was going to university—whereupon everyone had laughed at her. It turned out that you had to come from a good school, and pass examinations, before they would let you in. Maud had never been to school, and even though she could discuss politics with the great men of the land, a succession of governesses and tutors had completely failed to equip her to pass any sort of exam. She had cried and raged for days, and even now thinking about it could still put her in a foul mood. This was what made her a suffragette: she knew girls would never get a decent education until women had the vote.

In much of this book I discuss the shortcomings of the liberal worldview and the democratic system. I do so not because I believe liberal democracy is uniquely problematic but rather because I think it is the most successful and most versatile political model humans have so far developed for dealing with the challenges of the modern world. While it might not be appropriate for every society in every stage of development, it has proven its worth in more societies and in more situations than any of its alternatives. So when we are examining the new challenges that lie ahead of us, it is necessary to understand the limitations of liberal democracy and to explore how we can adapt and improve its current institutions.

POLLARD had known better, but instead of pulling rank and insisting that his officers carry out his proposal to sail for the Society Islands, he embraced a more democratic style of command. Modern survival psychologists have determined that this “social”—as opposed to “authoritarian”—form of leadership is ill suited to the early stages of a disaster, when decisions must be made quickly and firmly. Only later, as the ordeal drags on and it is necessary to maintain morale, do social leadership skills become important. Whalemen in the nineteenth century had a clear understanding of these two approaches. The captain was expected to be the authoritarian, what Nantucketers called a fishy man. A fishy man loved to kill whales and lacked the tendency toward self-doubt and self-examination that could get in the way of making a quick decision. To be called “fishy to the backbone” was the ultimate compliment a Nantucketer could receive and meant that he was destined to become, if he wasn’t already, a captain. Mates, however, were expected to temper their fishiness with a more personal, even outgoing, approach. After breaking in the green hands at the onset of the voyage—when they gained their well-deserved reputations as “spit-fires”—mates worked to instill a sense of cooperation among the men. This required them to remain sensitive to the crew’s changeable moods and to keep the lines of communication open. Nantucketers recognized that the positions of captain and first mate required contrasting personalities. Not all mates had the necessary edge to become captains, and there were many future captains who did not have the patience to be successful mates. There was a saying on the island: “[I]t is a pity to spoil a good mate by making him a master.” Pollard’s behavior, after both the knockdown and the whale attack, indicates that he lacked the resolve to overrule his two younger and less experienced officers. In his deference to others, Pollard was conducting himself less like a captain and more like the veteran mate described by the Nantucketer William H. Macy: “[H]e had no lungs to blow his own trumpet, and sometimes distrusted his own powers, though generally found equal to any emergency after it arose. This want of confidence sometimes led him to hesitate, where a more impulsive or less thoughtful man would act at once. In the course of his career he had seen many ‘fishy’ young men lifted over his head.” Shipowners hoped to combine a fishy, hard-driving captain with an approachable and steady mate. But in the labor-starved frenzy of Nantucket in 1819, the Essex had ended up with a captain who had the instincts and soul of a mate, and a mate who had the ambition and fire of a captain. Instead of giving an order and sticking with it, Pollard indulged his matelike tendency to listen to others. This provided Chase—who had no qualms about speaking up—with the opportunity to impose his own will. For better or worse, the men of the Essex were sailing toward a destiny that would be determined, in large part, not by their unassertive captain but by their forceful and fishy mate.

According to Petroski, real knowledge from real failure is the most powerful source of progress we have, provided we have the courage to carefully examine what happened. Perhaps this is why The Boeing Company, one of the largest airplane design and engineering firms in the world, keeps a black book of lessons it has learned from design and engineering failures.[4] Boeing has kept this document since the company was formed, and it uses it to help modern designers learn from past attempts. Any organization that manages to do this not only increases its chances for successful projects, but also helps create an environment that can discuss and confront failure openly, instead of denying and hiding from it. It seems that software developers need to keep black books of their own.

When researchers with the National Weight Control Registry examined the tactics used by successful dieters, they found that two characteristics, in particular, stood out. People who successfully maintain weight loss typically eat breakfast every morning. They also weigh themselves each day. Part of the reason why these habits matter is practical: Eating a healthy breakfast makes it less likely you will snack later in the day, according to studies. And frequently measuring your weight allows us—sometimes almost subconsciously—to see how changing our diets influences the pounds lost. But just as important is the mental boost that daily, incremental weight loss provides. The small win of dropping even half a pound can provide the dose of momentum we need to stick with a diet. We need to see small victories to believe a long battle will be won.

Actually, very few topics of scientific research can be studied with controlled experiments. There are many fields that everyone accepts as science, even though laboratory experiments are difficult if not impossible—fields like astronomy, evolutionary biology, geology, and paleontology. The prestigious British Medical Journal published a tongue-in-cheek article claiming to examine whether parachutes help prevent deaths in people who jump out of airplanes. The authors had eliminated anecdotal evidence from consideration, including in their review only randomized controlled trials. Of course, they couldn’t find a single experiment in which people were randomly assigned to jump out of an airplane either with or without a parachute. They concluded: “The perception that parachutes are a successful intervention is based largely on anecdotal evidence.

Some historical revisionists have also attempted to diminish the role of God and religion in our nation’s past. A careful examination of the records, however, makes it quite clear that religion was a very important factor in the development of our nation. In 1831 when Alexis de Tocqueville came to America to try to unravel the secrets to the success of a fledgling nation that was already competing with the powers of Europe on virtually every level, he discovered that we had a fantastic public educational system that rendered anyone who had finished the second grade completely literate. He was more astonished to discover that the Bible was an important tool used to teach moral principles in our public schools. No particular religious denomination was revered, but rather commonly accepted biblical truths became the backbone of our social structure.

Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities, and at this point, after examining the lives of Bill Joy and Bill Gates, pro hockey players and geniuses, and Joe Flom, the Janklows, and the Borgenichts, it shouldn't tbe hard to figure out where the perfect lawyer comes from. This person will have been born in a demographic trough, so as to have had the best of New York's public schools and the easiest time in the job market. He will be Jewish, of course, and so, locked out of the old-line downtown law firms on account of his "antecedents". This person's parents will have done meaningful work in the garment business, passing on to their children autonomy and complexity and the connection between effort and reward. A good school -- although it doesn't have to be a great school -- will have been attended. He need not have been the smartest in the class, only smart enough.

Despite the great wealth of words which European languages possess, the thinker finds himself often at a loss for an expression exactly suited to his conception, for want of which he is unable to make himself intelligible either to others or to himself. To coin new words is a pretension to legislation in language which is seldom successful; and, before recourse is taken to so desperate an expedient, it is advisable to examine the dead and learned languages, with the hope and the probability that we may there meet with some adequate expression of the notion we have in our minds. In this case, even if the original meaning of the word has become somewhat uncertain, from carelessness or want of caution on the part of the authors of it, it is always better to adhere to and confirm its proper meaning– even although it may be doubtful whether it was formerly used in exactly this sense– than to make our labour vain by want of sufficient care to render ourselves intelligible.

Dr. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing PCR, stated publicly numerous times that his invention should never be used for the diagnosis of infectious diseases. In July of 1997, during an event called Corporate Greed and AIDS in Santa Monica CA, Dr. Mullis explained on video, “With PCR you can find almost anything in anybody. It starts making you believe in the sort of Buddhist notion that everything is contained in everything else, right? I mean, because if you can model amplify one single molecule up to something that you can really measure, which PCR can do, then there’s just very few molecules that you don’t have at least one single one of them in your body. Okay? So that could be thought of as a misuse of it, just to claim that it’s meaningful.” Mikki explained, “The major issue with PCR is that it’s easily manipulated. It functions through a cyclical process whereby each revolution amplifies magnification. On a molecular level, most of us already have trace amounts of genetic fragments similar to coronavirus within us. By simply over-cycling the process, a negative result can be flipped to a positive. Governing bodies such as the CDC and the WHO can control the number of cases by simply advising the medical industry to increase or decrease the cycle threshold (CT).” In August of 2020, the New York Times reported that “a CT beyond 34 revolutions very rarely detect live virus, but most often, dead nucleotides that are not even contagious. In compliance with guidance from the CDC and the WHO, many top US labs have been conducting tests at cycle thresholds of 40 or more. NYT examined data from Massachusetts, New York, and Nevada and determined that up to 90 percent of the individuals who tested positive carried barely any virus.”17 90 percent! In May of 2021, CDC changed the PCR cycle threshold from 40 to 28 or lower for those who have been vaccinated. This one adjustment of the numbers allowed the vaccine pushers to praise the vaccines as a big success.

They’re checking IDs,” he says, craning his neck to see what’s holding us up. I pull mine out of my pocket, and he tilts his head to see the picture on it. “You look different.” “It’s two years old.” I start to lower my arm, and he puts his hand on mine to stop me. “That’s how you used to wear your hair,” he says, still examining it, holding my wrist to keep it where he can see it. “The bangs . . . I always liked the bangs. I was surprised you didn’t have them anymore.” I flush. “I grew them out a couple of summers ago.” He releases my arm. “Did you get a good essay out of it? ‘What I Did Last Summer’?” “I’m saving it for my college essay. ‘How Growing Out My Bangs Taught Me Compassion.’” “Work a third-world country in there somehow,” he says. “Colleges like to see some global awareness.” The line takes us through the front door. “Progress,” Finn says. “Look.” I point to a kid who’s clutching some beads and murmuring to himself. “Is he actually praying right now?” “There are no atheists in the SAT line.” “Remind me to ask him in a few weeks if it helped.” “I’m guessing the success of his prayers will correspond to the number of hours he spent studying.

But, without preaching, the truth may surely be borne in mind, that the bustle, and triumph, and laughter, and gaiety which Vanity Fair exhibits in public, do not always pursue the performer into private life, and that the most dreary depression of spirits and dismal repentances sometimes overcome him. Recollection of the best ordained banquets will scarcely cheer sick epicures. Reminiscences of the most becoming dresses and brilliant ball triumphs will go very little way to console faded beauties. Perhaps statesmen, at a particular period of existence, are not much gratified at thinking over the most triumphant divisions; and the success or the pleasure of yesterday becomes of very small account when a certain (albeit uncertain) morrow is in view, about which all of us must some day or other be speculating. O brother wearers of motley! Are there not moments when one grows sick of grinning and tumbling, and the jingling of cap and bells? This, dear friends and companions, is my amiable object--to walk with you through the Fair, to examine the shops and the shows there; and that we should all come home after the flare, and the noise, and the gaiety, and be perfectly miserable in private.

For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of … We don’t have enough exercise. We don’t have enough work. We don’t have enough profits. We don’t have enough power. We don’t have enough wilderness. We don’t have enough weekends. Of course, we don’t have enough money—ever. We’re not thin enough, we’re not smart enough, we’re not pretty enough or fit enough or educated or successful enough, or rich enough—ever. Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds race with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to the reverie of lack … What begins as a simple expression of the hurried life, or even the challenged life, grows into the great justification for an unfulfilled life.2

When we get down to potential versus reality in relationships, we often see disappointment, not successful achievement. In the Church, if someone creates nuclear fallout in a calling, they are often released or reassigned quickly. Unfortunately, we do not have that luxury when we marry. So many of us have experienced this sad realization in the first weeks of our marriages. For example, we realized that our partner was not going to live up to his/her potential and give generously to the partnership. While fighting the mounting feelings of betrayal, we watched our new spouses claim a right to behave any way they desired, often at our expense. Most of us made the "best" of a truly awful situation but felt like a rat trapped in maze. We raised a family, played our role, and hoped that someday things would change if we did our part. It didn't happen, but we were not allowed the luxury of reassigning or releasing our mates from poor stewardship as a spouse or parent. We were stuck until we lost all hope and reached for the unthinkable: divorce. Reality is simple for some. Those who stay happily married (the key word here is happily are the ones who grew and felt companionship from the first days of marriage. Both had the integrity and dedication to insure its success. For those of us who are divorced, tracing back to those same early days, potential disappeared and reality reared its ugly head. All we could feel, after a sealing for "time and all eternity," was bound in an unholy snare. Take the time to examine the reality of who your sweetheart really is. What do they accomplish by natural instinct and ability? What do you like/dislike about them? Can you live with all the collective weaknesses and create a happy, viable union? Are you both committed to making each other happy? Do you respect each other's agency, and are you both encouraging and eager to see the two of you grow as individuals and as a team? Do you both talk-the-talk and walk-the-walk? Or do you love them and hope they'll change once you're married to them? Chances are that if the answer to any of these questions are "sorta," you are embracing their potential and not their reality. You may also be embracing your own potential to endure issues that may not be appropriate sacrifices at this stage in your life. No one changes without the internal impetus and drive to do so. Not for love or money. . . . We are complex creatures, and although we are trained to see the "good" in everyone, it is to our benefit to embrace realism when it comes to finding our "soul mate." It won't get much better than what you have in your relationship right now.

The symposium was a closed-doors, synod-style assembly of people who would never have mixed otherwise. My first surprise was to discover that the military people there thought, behaved, and acted like philosophers—far more so than the philosophers we will see splitting hairs in their weekly colloquium in Part Three. They thought out of the box, like traders, except much better and without fear of introspection. An assistant secretary of defence was among us, but had I not known his profession I would have thought he was a practitioner of skeptical empiricism. Even an engineering investigator who had examined the cause of a space shuttle explosion was thoughtful and open-minded. I came out of the meeting realising that only military people deal with randomness with genuine, introspective intellectual honesty—unlike academics and corporate executives using other people's money. This does not show in war movies, where they are usually portrayed as war-hungry autocrats. The people in front of me were not the people who initiate wars. Indeed, for many, the successful defence policy is the one that manages to eliminate potential dangers without war, such as the strategy of bankrupting the Russians through the escalation in defence spending. When I expressed my amazement to Laurence, another finance person who was sitting next to me, he told me that the military collected more genuine intellects and risk thinkers than most if not all other professions. Defence people wanted to understand the epistemology of risk.

The largest and most rigorous study that is currently available in this area is the third one commissioned by the British Home Office (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005). The analysis was based on the 2,643 sexual assault cases (where the outcome was known) that were reported to British police over a 15-year period of time. Of these, 8% were classified by the police department as false reports. Yet the researchers noted that some of these classifications were based simply on the personal judgments of the police investigators, based on the victim’s mental illness, inconsistent statements, drinking or drug use. These classifications were thus made in violation of the explicit policies of their own police agencies. There searchers therefore supplemented the information contained in the police files by collecting many different types of additional data, including: reports from forensic examiners, questionnaires completed by police investigators, interviews with victims and victim service providers, and content analyses of the statements made by victims and witnesses. They then proceeded to evaluate each case using the official criteria for establishing a false allegation, which was that there must be either “a clear and credible admission by the complainant” or “strong evidential grounds” (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan,2005). On the basis of this analysis, the percentage of false reports dropped to 2.5%." Lonsway, Kimberly A., Joanne Archambault, and David Lisak. "False reports: Moving beyond the issue to successfully investigate and prosecute non-stranger sexual assault." The Voice 3.1 (2009): 1-11.

The first obstacle [to liberal education] is the learning situation itself. What is the ideal learning situation? It is the more or less continuous contact between a student and his teacher, who is another student, more advanced in many ways, but still learning himself. This situation usually does not prevail; in fact, it is extremely rare. Since the immemorial, institutions of learning, especially higher learning, have been established, called „schools“ — and the ambiguity of the term becomes immediately apparent. Institutionalization means ordering activities into certain patters; in the case of learning activities, into classes, schedules, courses, curriculums, examinations, degress, and all the venerable and sometimes ridiculous paraphernalia of academic life. The point is that such institutionalization cannot be avoided: both the gregarious and the rational character of man compel him to impose upon himself laws and regulations. Moreover, the discipline of learning itself seems to require an orderly and planned procedure. And yet we all know how this schedule routine can interfere with the spontaneity of questioning and of leaning and the occurrence of genuine wonderment. A student may even never become aware that there is the possibility of spontaneous learning which depends merely on himself and on nobody and nothing else. Once the institutional character of learning tends to prevail, the goal of liberal education may be completely lost sight of, whatever other goals may be successfully reached. And I repeat, this obstacle is not extraneous to learning. It is prefigured in the methodical and systematic character of exploratory questioning. It has to be faced over and over again.

I have seen and heard of expression of discontent in the public journals at the result of the expedition. I do not know how far this feeling extends in the army. My brother officers have been too kind to report it, and so far the troops have been too generous to exhibit it. It is fair, however, to suppose that it does exist, and success is so necessary to us that nothing should be risked to secure it. I therefore, in all sincerity, request Your Excellency to take measures to supply my place. I do this with the more earnestness because no one is more aware than myself of my inability for the duties of my position. I cannot even accomplish what I myself desire. How can I fulfill the expectations of others? In addition I sensibly feel the growing failure of my bodily strength. I have not yet recovered from the attack I experienced the past spring. I am becoming more and more incapable of exertion, and am thus prevented from making the personal examinations and giving the personal supervision to the operations in the field which I feel to be necessary. I am so dull that in making use of the eyes of others I am frequently misled. Everything, therefore, points to the advantages to be derived from a new commander, and I the more anxiously urge the matter upon Your Excellency from my belief that a younger and abler man than myself can readily be obtained.… I have no complaints to make of anyone but myself. I have received nothing but kindness from those above me, and the most considerate attention from my comrades and companions at arms. To Your Excellency I am specially indebted for uniform kindness and consideration. You have done everything in your power to aid me in the work committed to my charge, without omitting anything to promote the general welfare. I pray that your efforts may at length be crowned with success, and that you may long live to enjoy the thanks of a grateful people. With sentiments of great esteem, I am very respectfully and truly yours, R. E. LEE, General

The parallel between scientific experiments and mystical (read spiritual) experiences may seem surprising in view of the very different nature of these acts of observation. Physics perform experiments involving an elaborate teamwork and a highly sophisticated technology, whereas mystics obtain their knowledge purely through introspection, without any machinery, in the privacy of meditation. Scientific experiments, furthermore, seem repeatable any time and by anybody, whereas mystical experiences seem to be reserved for a few individuals at special occasions. A closer examination shows, however that the differences between the two kinds of observation lie only in their approach and not in their reliability or complexity. Anybody who wants to repeat an experiment in modern subatomic physics has to undergo many years of training. Only then will he or she be able to ask nature a specific question through the experiment and to understand the answer. Similarly, a deep mystical experience requires, generally, many years of training under an experienced master and, as in the scientific training, the dedicated time does not alone guarantee success. If the student is successful, however, he or she will be able to 'repeat the experiment'. The repeatability of the experience is, in fact, essential to every mystical training and is the very aim of the mystic's spiritual instruction. A mystical experience, therefore, is not any more unique than a modern experiment in physics. On the other hand, it is not less sophisticated either, although its sophistication is of a very different kind. The complexity and efficiency of the physicist's technical apparatus is matched, if not surpassed, by that of the mystics consciousness - both physics and spiritual - in deep meditation. The scientists and the mystics then, have developed highly sophisticated methods of observing nature which are inaccessible to the layperson. A [Page from a journal of modern experimental physics will be as mysterious to the uninitiated as the Tibetan mandala. Both are records of enquires into the nature of the universe.

In contemporary Western society, buying a magazine on astrology - at a newsstand, say - is easy; it is much harder to find one on astronomy. Virtually every newspaper in America has a daily column on astrology; there are hardly any that have even a weekly column on astronomy. There are ten times more astrologers in the United States than astronomers. At parties, when I meet people that do not know I’m a scientist, I am sometimes asked “Are you a Gemini?” (chances of success, one in twelve), or “What sign are you?” Much more rarely am I asked “Have you heard that gold is made in supernova explosions?” or “When do you think Congress will approve a Mars Rover?” (...) And personal astrology is with us still: consider two different newspaper astrology columns published in the same city on the same day. For example, we can examine The New York Post and the New York Daily News on September 21, 1979. Suppose you are a Libra - that is, born between September 23 and October 22. According to the astrologer for the Post, ‘a compromise will help ease tension’; useful, perhaps, but somewhat vague. According to the Daily News’ astrologer, you must ‘demand more of yourself’, an admonition that is also vague but also different. These ‘predictions’ are not predictions; rather they are pieces of advice - they tell you what to do, not what will happen. Deliberately, they are phrased so generally that they could apply to anyone. And they display major mutual inconsistencies. Why are they published as unapologetically as sport statistics and stock market reports? Astrology can be tested by the lives of twins. There are many cases in which one twin is killed in childhood, in a riding accident, say, or is struck by lightning, while the other lives to a prosperous old age. Each was born in precisely the same place and within minutes of the other. Exactly the same planets were rising at their births. If astrology were valid, how could two such twins have such profoundly different fates? It also turns out that astrologers cannot even agree among themselves on what a given horoscope means. In careful tests, they are unable to predict the character and future of people they knew nothing about except their time and place of birth.

Roughly 25 percent of humanity is Muslim. For every Jew, there are roughly one hundred twenty-five Muslims. Judaism is about 2500 years older than Islam, and yet it has not been able to attract nearly as many followers. If we construe religions as memeplexes (a collection of interconnected memes), to borrow Richard Dawkin's term, the Islamic memeplex has been extraordinarily more successful than its Jewish counterpart (from an epidemiological perspective, that is). Why is that? To answer this important question, we must look at the contents of the two respective memeplexes to examine why one is more "infectious" than the other. Let us explore the rules for converting into the two religions and apostatizing out of them. In Judaism, the religious process for conversion is onerous, requiring several years of commitment and an absence of ulterior motive. (For example, converting to Judaism because you are marrying a Jewish person is considered an ulterior motive). Not surprisingly, given the barriers to entry, relatively few people convert to Judaism. On the other hand, to convert to Islam simply requires that one proclaim openly the sentence, the shahada (the testimony): "There is no true god but Allah, and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah." It does not require a sophisticated epidemiological model to predict which memeplex will spread more rapidly. Let us now suppose that one wishes to leave the religion. While the Old Testament does mention the death penalty for apostasy, it has seldom been applied throughout Jewish history, whereas to this day apostasy from Islam does lead to the death penalty in several Islamic countries. But perhaps the most important difference is that Judaism does not promote or encourage proselytizing, whereas it is a central religious obligation in Islam. According to Islam, the world is divided into dar al-hard (the house of war) and dar al-Islam (the house of Islam). Peace will arrive when the entire world is united under the flag of Allah. Hence, it is imperative to Islamize the nations within dar al-harb. There is only one Jewish country in the world, Israel, and it has a sizeable non-Jewish minority. But there are fifty-seven member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

The Delusion of Lasting Success promises that building an enduring company is not only achievable but a worthwhile objective. Yet companies that have outperformed the market for long periods of time are not just rare, they are statistical artifacts that are observable only in retrospect. Companies that achieved lasting success may be best understood as having strung together many short-term successes. Pursuing a dream of enduring greatness may divert attention from the pressing need to win immediate battles. The Delusion of Absolute Performance diverts our attention from the fact that success and failure always take place in a competitive environment. It may be comforting to believe that our success is entirely up to us, but as the example of Kmart demonstrated, a company can improve in absolute terms and still fall further behind in relative terms. Success in business means doing things better than rivals, not just doing things well. Believing that performance is absolute can cause us to take our eye off rivals and to avoid decisions that, while risky, may be essential for survival given the particular context of our industry and its competitive dynamics. The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick lets us confuse causes and effects, actions and outcomes. We may look at a handful of extraordinarily successful companies and imagine that doing what they did can lead to success — when it might in fact lead mainly to higher volatility and a lower overall chance of success. Unless we start with the full population of companies and examine what they all did — and how they all fared — we have an incomplete and indeed biased set of information. The Delusion of Organizational Physics implies that the business world offers predictable results, that it conforms to precise laws. It fuels a belief that a given set of actions can work in all settings and ignores the need to adapt to different conditions: intensity of competition, rate of growth, size of competitors, market concentration, regulation, global dispersion of activities, and much more. Claiming that one approach can work everywhere, at all times, for all companies, has a simplistic appeal but doesn’t do justice to the complexities of business. These points, taken together, expose the principal fiction at the heart of so many business books — that a company can choose to be great, that following a few key steps will predictably lead to greatness, that its success is entirely of its own making and not dependent on factors outside its control.

In 2009, Kahneman and Klein took the unusual step of coauthoring a paper in which they laid out their views and sought common ground. And they found it. Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform. The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid. In golf or chess, a ball or piece is moved according to rules and within defined boundaries, a consequence is quickly apparent, and similar challenges occur repeatedly. Drive a golf ball, and it either goes too far or not far enough; it slices, hooks, or flies straight. The player observes what happened, attempts to correct the error, tries again, and repeats for years. That is the very definition of deliberate practice, the type identified with both the ten-thousand-hours rule and the rush to early specialization in technical training. The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better. Kahneman was focused on the flip side of kind learning environments; Hogarth called them “wicked.” In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both. In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons. Hogarth noted a famous New York City physician renowned for his skill as a diagnostician. The man’s particular specialty was typhoid fever, and he examined patients for it by feeling around their tongues with his hands. Again and again, his testing yielded a positive diagnosis before the patient displayed a single symptom. And over and over, his diagnosis turned out to be correct. As another physician later pointed out, “He was a more productive carrier, using only his hands, than Typhoid Mary.” Repetitive success, it turned out, taught him the worst possible lesson. Few learning environments are that wicked, but it doesn’t take much to throw experienced pros off course. Expert firefighters, when faced with a new situation, like a fire in a skyscraper, can find themselves suddenly deprived of the intuition formed in years of house fires, and prone to poor decisions. With a change of the status quo, chess masters too can find that the skill they took years to build is suddenly obsolete.

No sound strategy for studying fascism can fail to examine the entire context in which it was formed and grew. Some approaches to fascism start with the crisis to which fascism was a response, at the risk of making the crisis into a cause. A crisis of capitalism, according to Marxists, gave birth to fascism. Unable to assure ever-expanding markets, ever-widening access to raw materials, and ever-willing cheap labor through the normal operation of constitutional regimes and free markets, capitalists were obliged, Marxists say, to find some new way to attain these ends by force. Others perceive the founding crisis as the inadequacy of liberal state and society (in the laissez-faire meaning of liberalism current at that time) to deal with the challenges of the post-1914 world. Wars and revolutions produced problems that parliament and the market—the main liberal solutions—appeared incapable of handling: the distortions of wartime command economies and the mass unemployment attendant upon demobilization; runaway inflation; increased social tensions and a rush toward social revolution; extension of the vote to masses of poorly educated citizens with no experience of civic responsibility; passions heightened by wartime propaganda; distortions of international trade and exchange by war debts and currency fluctuations. Fascism came forward with new solutions for these challenges. Fascists hated liberals as much as they hated socialists, but for different reasons. For fascists, the internationalist, socialist Left was the enemy and the liberals were the enemies’ accomplices. With their hands-off government, their trust in open discussion, their weak hold over mass opinion, and their reluctance to use force, liberals were, in fascist eyes, culpably incompetent guardians of the nation against the class warfare waged by the socialists. As for beleaguered middle-class liberals themselves, fearful of a rising Left, lacking the secret of mass appeal, facing the unpalatable choices offered them by the twentieth century, they have sometimes been as ready as conservatives to cooperate with fascists. Every strategy for understanding fascism must come to terms with the wide diversity of its national cases. The major question here is whether fascisms are more disparate than the other “isms.” This book takes the position that they are, because they reject any universal value other than the success of chosen peoples in a Darwinian struggle for primacy. The community comes before humankind in fascist values, and respecting individual rights or due process gave way to serving the destiny of the Volk or razza. Therefore each individual national fascist movement gives full expression to its own cultural particularism. Fascism, unlike the other “isms,” is not for export: each movement jealously guards its own recipe for national revival, and fascist leaders seem to feel little or no kinship with their foreign cousins. It has proved impossible to make any fascist “international” work.

If asked what manner of beast fascism is, most people would answer, without hesitation, "fascism is an ideology." The fascist leaders themselves never stopped saying that they were prophets of an idea, unlike the materialist liberals and socialists. Hitler talked ceaselessly of Weltanschauung, or "worldview," an uncomely word he successfully forced on the attention of the whole world. Mussolini vaunted the power of the Fascist creed. A fascist, by this approach, is someone who espouses fascist ideology - an ideology being more than just ideas, but a total system of thought harnessed to a world-shaping project... It would seem to follow that we should "start by examining the programs, doctrines, and propaganda in some of the main fascist movements and then proceed to the actual policies and performance of the only two noteworthy fascist regimes." Putting programs first rests on the unstated assumption that fascism was an "ism" like the other great political systems of the modern world: conservatism, liberalism, socialism. Usually taken for granted, that assumption is worth scrutinizing. The other "isms" were created in an era when politics was a gentleman's business, conducted through protracted and learned parliamentary debate among educated men who appealed to each other's reasons as well as their sentiments. The classical "isms" rested upon coherent philosophical systems laid out in the works of systematic thinkers. It seems only natural to explain them by examining their programs and the philosophy that underpinned them. Fascism, by contrast, was a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics. It sought to appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremonies, and intensely charged rhetoric. The role programs and doctrine play in it is, on closer inspection, fundamentally unlike the role they play in conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples. It has not been given intellectual underpinnings by any system builder, like Marx, or by any major critical intelligence, like Mill, Burke, or Tocqueville. In a way utterly unlike the classical "isms," the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is "true" insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle, and not in the light of some abstract and universal reason. The first fascists were entirely frank about this. "We [Fascists] don't think ideology is a problem that is resolved in such a way that truth is seated on a throne. But, in that case, does fighting for an ideology mean fighting for mere appearances? No doubt, unless one considers it according to its unique and efficacious psychological-historical value. The truth of an ideology lies in its capacity to set in motion our capacity for ideals and action. Its truth is absolute insofar as, living within us, it suffices to exhaust those capacities." The truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.

In short, it was entirely natural that the newts stopped being a sensation, even though there were now as many as a hundred million of them; the public interest they had excited had been the interest of a novelty. They still appeared now and then in films (Sally and Andy, the Two Good Salamanders) and on the cabaret stage where singers endowed with an especially bad voice came on in the role of newts with rasping voices and atrocious grammar, but as soon as the newts had become a familiar and large-scale phenomenon the problems they presented, so to speak, were of a different character. (13) Although the great newt sensation quickly evaporated it was replaced with something that was somewhat more solid - the Newt Question. Not for the first time in the history of mankind, the most vigorous activist in the Newt Question was of course a woman. This was Mme. Louise Zimmermann, the manager of a guest house for girls in Lausanne, who, with exceptional and boundless energy, propagated this noble maxim around the world: Give the newts a proper education! She would tirelessly draw attention both to the newts' natural abilities and to the danger that might arise for human civilisation if the salamanders weren't carefully taught to reason and to understand morals, but it was long before she met with anything but incomprehension from the public. (14) "Just as the Roman culture disappeared under the onslaught of the barbarians our own educated civilisation will disappear if it is allowed to become no more than an island in a sea of beings that are spiritually enslaved, our noble ideals cannot be allowed to become dependent on them," she prophesied at six thousand three hundred and fifty seven lectures that she delivered at women's institutes all over Europe, America, Japan, China, Turkey and elsewhere. "If our culture is to survive there must be education for all. We cannot have any peace to enjoy the gifts of our civilisation nor the fruits of our culture while all around us there are millions and millions of wretched and inferior beings artificially held down in the state of animals. Just as the slogan of the nineteenth century was 'Freedom for Women', so the slogan of our own age must be 'GIVE THE NEWTS A PROPER EDUCATION!'" And on she went. Thanks to her eloquence and her incredible persistence, Mme. Louise Zimmermann mobilised women all round the world and gathered sufficient funds to enable her to found the First Newt Lyceum at Beaulieu (near Nice), where the tadpoles of salamanders working in Marseilles and Toulon were instructed in French language and literature, rhetoric, public behaviour, mathematics and cultural history. (15) The Girls' School for Newts in Menton was slightly less successful, as the staple courses in music, diet and cookery and fine handwork (which Mme. Zimmermann insisted on for primarily pedagogical reasons) met with a remarkable lack of enthusiasm, if not with a stubborn hostility among its young students. In contrast with this, though, the first public examinations for young newts was such an instant and startling success that they were quickly followed by the establishment of the Marine Polytechnic for Newts at Cannes and the Newts' University at Marseilles with the support of the society for the care and protection of animals; it was at this university that the first newt was awarded a doctorate of law.

PATTERNS OF THE “SHY” What else is common among people who identify themselves as “shy?” Below are the results of a survey that was administered to 150 of my program’s participants. The results of this informal survey reveal certain facts and attitudes common among the socially anxious. Let me point out that these are the subjective answers of the clients themselves—not the professional opinions of the therapists. The average length of time in the program for all who responded was eight months. The average age was twenty-eight. (Some of the answers are based on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being the lowest.) -Most clients considered shyness to be a serious problem at some point in their lives. Almost everyone rated the seriousness of their problem at level 5, which makes sense, considering that all who responded were seeking help for their problem. -60 percent of the respondents said that “shyness” first became enough of a problem that it held them back from things they wanted during adolescence; 35 percent reported the problem began in childhood; and 5 percent said not until adulthood. This answer reveals when clients were first aware of social anxiety as an inhibiting force. -The respondents perceived the average degree of “sociability” of their parents was a 2.7, which translates to “fair”; 60 percent of the respondents reported that no other member of the family had a problem with “shyness”; and 40 percent said there was at least one other family member who had a problem with “shyness.” -50 percent were aware of rejection by their peers during childhood. -66 percent had physical symptoms of discomfort during social interaction that they believed were related to social anxiety. -55 percent reported that they had experienced panic attacks. -85 percent do not use any medication for anxiety; 15 percent do. -90 percent said they avoid opportunities to meet new people; 75 percent acknowledged that they often stay home because of social fears, rather than going out. -80 percent identified feelings of depression that they connected to social fears. -70 percent said they had difficulty with social skills. -75 percent felt that before they started the program it was impossible to control their social fears; 80 percent said they now believed it was possible to control their fears. -50 percent said they believed they might have a learning disability. -70 percent felt that they were “too dependent on their parents”; 75 percent felt their parents were overprotective; 50 percent reported that they would not have sought professional help if not for their parents’ urging. -10 percent of respondents were the only child in their families; 40 percent had one sibling; 30 percent had two siblings; 10 percent had three; and 10 percent had four or more. Experts can play many games with statistics. Of importance here are the general attitudes and patterns of a population of socially anxious individuals who were in a therapy program designed to combat their problem. Of primary significance is the high percentage of people who first thought that “shyness” was uncontrollable, but then later changed their minds, once they realized that anxiety is a habit that can be broken—without medication. Also significant is that 50 percent of the participants recognized that their parents were the catalyst for their seeking help. Consider these statistics and think about where you fit into them. Do you identify with this profile? Look back on it in the coming months and examine the ways in which your sociability changes. Give yourself credit for successful breakthroughs, and keep in mind that you are not alone!

10 Practical Strategies to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills and Unleash Your Creativity In today's rapidly changing world, the ability to think critically and creatively has become more important than ever. Whether you're a student looking to excel academically, a professional striving for success in your career, or simply someone who wants to navigate life's challenges with confidence, developing strong critical thinking skills is crucial. In this blog post, we will explore ten practical strategies to help you improve your critical thinking abilities and unleash your creative potential. 1. Embrace open-mindedness: One of the cornerstones of critical thinking is being open to different viewpoints and perspectives. Cultivate a willingness to listen to others, consider alternative opinions, and challenge your own beliefs. This practice expands your thinking and encourages creative problem-solving. 2. Ask thought-provoking questions: Asking insightful questions is a powerful way to stimulate critical thinking. By questioning assumptions, seeking clarity, and exploring deeper meanings, you can uncover new insights and perspectives. Challenge yourself to ask thought-provoking questions regularly. 3. Practice active listening: Listening actively involves not just hearing, but also understanding, interpreting, and empathizing with the speaker. By honing your active listening skills, you can better grasp complex ideas, identify underlying assumptions, and engage in more meaningful discussions. 4. Seek diverse sources of information: Expand your knowledge base by seeking information from a wide range of sources. Engage with diverse perspectives, opinions, and ideas through books, articles, podcasts, and documentaries. This habit broadens your understanding and encourages critical thinking by exposing you to different viewpoints. 5. Develop analytical thinking skills: Analytical thinking involves breaking down complex problems into smaller components, examining relationships and patterns, and drawing logical conclusions. Enhance your analytical skills by practicing activities like puzzles, riddles, and brain teasers. This will sharpen your ability to analyze information and think critically. 6. Foster a growth mindset: A growth mindset is the belief that your abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. Embracing this mindset encourages you to view challenges as opportunities for growth, rather than obstacles. By persisting through difficulties, you build resilience and enhance your critical thinking abilities. 7. Engage in collaborative problem-solving: Collaborating with others on problem-solving tasks can spark creativity and strengthen critical thinking skills. Seek out group projects, brainstorming sessions, or online forums where you can exchange ideas, challenge each other's thinking, and find innovative solutions together. 8. Practice reflective thinking: Taking time to reflect on your thoughts, actions, and experiences allows you to gain deeper insights and learn from past mistakes. Regularly engage in activities like journaling, meditation, or self-reflection exercises to develop your reflective thinking skills. This practice enhances your critical thinking abilities by promoting self-awareness and self-improvement. 9. Encourage creativity through experimentation: Creativity and critical thinking often go hand in hand. Give yourself permission to experiment and explore new ideas without fear of failure. Embrace a "what if" mindset and push the boundaries of your thinking. This willingness to take risks and think outside the box can lead to breakthroughs in critical thinking. 10. Continuously learn and adapt: Critical thinking is a skill that can be honed throughout your life. Commit to lifelong learning and seek opportunities to expand your knowledge and skills. Stay curious, be open to new experiences, and embrace change.

Narrative: telling stories about the topic and the people involved with it (e.g., the story of Charles Darwin for evolution or of Anne Frank for the Holocaust) 2.  Quantitative: using examples connected to the topic (e.g., the puzzle of different numbers and varieties of finches spread across a dozen islands in the Galapagos) 3.  Logic: identifying the key elements or units and exploring their logical connections (e.g., how Malthus’s argument about human survival in the face of insufficient resources can be applied to competition among biological species) 4.  Existential: addressing big questions, such as the nature of truth or beauty, life and death 5.  Aesthetic: examining instances in terms of their artistic properties or capturing the examples themselves in works of art (e.g., observing the diverse shapes of the beaks of finches; analyzing the expressive elements in the trio) 6.  Hands-on: working directly with tangible examples (e.g., performing the Figaro trio, breeding fruit flies to observe how traits change over the generations) 7.  Cooperative or social: engaging in projects with others where each makes a distinctive contribution to successful execution

Apparently England is ever forgetting that she is at present the greatest Mohammedan empire in the world. Of late years she has systematically neglected Arabism and, indeed, actively discouraged it in examinations for the Indian Civil Service, where it is incomparably more valuable than Greek and Latin. Hence, when suddenly compelled to assume the reins of government in Moslem lands, as Afghanistan in times past and Egypt at present, she fails after a fashion which scandalises her few (very few) friends; and her crass ignorance concerning the Oriental peoples which should most interest her, exposes her to the contempt of Europe as well as of the Eastern world. When the regrettable raids of 1883-84, culminating in the miserable affairs of Tokar, Teb and Tamasi, were made upon the gallant Sudani negroids, the Bisharin outlying Sawakin, who were battling for the holy cause of liberty and religion and for escape from Turkish task-masters and Egyptian tax-gatherers, not an English official in camp, after the death of the gallant and lamented Major Morice, was capable of speaking Arabic. Now Moslems are not to be ruled by raw youths who should be at school and college instead of holding positions of trust and emolument. He who would deal with them successfully must be, firstly, honest and truthful and, secondly, familiar with and favourably inclined to their manners and customs if not to their law and religion.

Many of us think of clichés as something we learned all about in school. The fact is that some of the best-educated writers fall back on clichés both in their speech and work much more often than they realize. For a fiction writer, learning to avoid them and finding those that slip in are important steps toward learning one of the most important aspects of original creative work: examining each word for its precise meaning and the likely effect of every group of words on the emotions of the reader.

In 1895, Dr. William Mayo addressed the graduating class of the medical department of the Minnesota State University on the importance of thoroughness in medicine: Above all things let me urge upon you the absolute necessity of careful examinations for the purpose of diagnosis. My own experience has been that the public will forgive you an error in treatment more readily than one in diagnosis, and I fully believe that more than one-half of the failures in diagnosis are due to hasty or unmethodical examinations. Say to yourselves that you will not jump at a conclusion, but in each instance will make a thorough and painstaking physical examination, free from prejudice, and your success is assured. 14

The above comments are intended to justify the emphasis in our discussion on the ways in which scientists produce order. This necessarily involves an examination of the methodical way in which observations and experiences are organised so that sense can be made of them. As already noted, we have every reason to believe that the accomplishment of this kind of task is no mean feat, as is clear from a consideration of the corresponding task faced by the observer when confronted by his field notes. The observer’s task is to transform notes of the kind presented at the beginning of this chapter into an ordered account. But exactly how and where should the observer begin this transformation? It is clear that when seen through the eyes of a total newcomer, the daily comings and goings of the laboratory take on an alien quality. The observer initially encounters a mysterious and apparently unconnected sequence of events. In order to make sense of his observations, the observer normally adopts some kind of theme by which he hopes to be able to construct a pattern. If he can successfully use a theme to convince others of the existence of a pattern, he can be said, at least according to relatively weak criteria, to have “explained’’ his observations. Of course, the selection and adoption of “themes” is highly problematic. For example, the way in which the theme is selected can be held to bear upon the validity of his explanation; the observer’s selection of a theme constitutes his method for which he is accountable. It is not enough simply to fabricate order out of an initially chaotic collection of observations; the observer needs to be able to demonstrate that this fabrication has been done correctly, or, in short, that his method is valid.

In other words, when buying, these expert investors were trying to find positions that would be a good bet going forward. When selling, it appears that they were not doing as much, if any, of that work, either in the timing of taking off positions or the future prospects of those positions. The best quitting strategy would be to examine all your holdings, not just the ones at the tails of your portfolio, and decide which were going to generate the least value going forward and sell those. That would maximize the value of the portfolio as a whole. This is, after all, their buying strategy, and they execute it with skill and success, by using amazing data-driven strategies to generate excess returns.

The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a silver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions-nursing homes and intensive care units-where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need. Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers.

members of certain traditional, rural communities do enjoy a greater harmony and tranquillity than those settled in our modern cities. My impression is that those living in the materially developed countries, for all their industry, are in some ways less satisfied, are less happy, and to some extent suffer more than those living in the least developed countries. Indeed, if we compare the rich with the poor, it often seems that those with less are often less anxious. As for the rich . . . they are so caught up with the idea of acquiring more that they make no room for anything else in their lives. As a result, they are constantly plagued by mental and emotional suffering — even though outwardly they may appear to be leading entirely successful and comfortable lives. This is suggested by the disturbing prevalence among the populations of materially developed countries of anxiety, discontent, frustration, uncertainty, and depression.” 5 In considering these issues, I would like to devote this chapter to an examination of some of the factors that are inhibiting or preventing people from realizing their full potential and sensing fullness of being. Other contributory trends might have been included, and my picture is, of necessity, subjectively biased and incomplete. Nonetheless it must serve as a sampler of prevalent contemporary trends. For the sake of simplicity I have organized this chapter into four parts. Firstly I consider the fallacy that money can purchase happiness; second, the influence of living in a mass society; third, mass leisure and consumption; and finally, life in the cities. Of course no culture can be separated in this way; no single part can be considered in isolation from the rest. With the light come the shadows, and with everything

What if it is somehow our misunderstood, unacknowledged, looping relationship to our future that makes us ill—or at least, that contributes to our suffering—and not our failure to connect appropriately to our past? Could some neuroses be time loops misrecognized and denied, the way we haunt ourselves from our futures and struggle to reframe it as being about our past history? The next two chapters will examine this question through the lives of two famously precognitive and neurotic writers. Both show strikingly how creativity may travel together with trauma and suffering along the resonating string that connects us to the Not Yet. 12 Fate, Free Will, and Futility — Morgan Robertson’s Tiresias Complex Who can tell us of the power which events possess … Are their workings in the past or in the future; and are the more powerful of them those that are no longer, or those that are not yet? Is it to-day or to-morrow that moulds us? Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass? — Maurice Maeterlinck, “The Pre-Destined” (1914) The monkey wrench precognition appears to throw into the problem of free will is an important part of the force field inhibiting serious consideration of it by many people in our culture. It may have been a fear of the inevitability of things prophesied that made the whole subject so anathema to Freud, for example. In a society that places priority on success and the individual’s responsibility for its attainment, it is both taken for granted and a point of fierce conviction that we choose and that our choices are not completely made for us by the inexorable clockwork of matter—the Newtonian inertia that brought the Titanic and the Iceberg, mere inert objects, together. Scientists may pay lip service to determinism—Freud himself did—but the inevitability of material processes due to causes “pushing” from the past somehow feels less restrictive than a block universe in which our fate is already set. The radical predestination implied by time loops may rob “great men” of their ability to claim credit for their successes.

his book Thresholds of the Mind, Bill Harris examines

I had never examined this fear of Trinidad. I had never wished to. In my novels I had only expressed this fear; and it is only now, at the moment of writing, that I am able to attempt to examine it. I knew Trinidad to be unimportant, uncreative, cynical. The only professions were those of law and medicine, because there was no need for any other; and the most successful people were commission agents, bank managers and members of the distributive trades. Power was recognized, but dignity was allowed to no one. Every person of eminence was held to be crooked and contemptible. We lived in a society which denied itself heroes.

For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is "I didn't get enough sleep." The next one is "I don't have enough time." Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we ever think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don't have enough of... We don't have enough exercise. We don't have enough work. We don't have enough profits. We don't have enough power. We don't have enough wilderness. We don't have enough weekends. Of course, we don't have enough money -- ever. We're not thin enough, we're not smart enough, we're not pretty enough or fit enough or educated or successful enough, or rich enough -- ever. Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds race with a litany of what we didn't get, or didn't get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to the reverie of lack... What begins as a simple expression of the hurried life, or even the challenged life, grows into the great justification for an unfulfilled life.

The successive layers of occupation are known as ‘strata’. The careful digging of trenches or, more frequently recently, square ‘sections’ enables the successive strata of an occupied site to be examined and a relative chronology produced. The careful preservation of the baulks (the soil left between trenches or sections) allows the charting of the vertical ‘wall’ and the checking of the stratigraphy. (The development of this technique is associated particularly with Kathleen Kenyon.)

It is possible that some people have been so mauled by life in this society that such a semi-suicide is the best alternative to real suicide for them. Curiously, a hell of a lot of M.D.s are using the same logic in relentlessly over-prescribing tranquilizers, many of which are quite habit forming (e.g., Librium) and some of which (e.g. Tofranil), are definitely linked with impotence according to psycho-pharmacologists. As Dr. Lawrence Kolb told a Congressional committee way back in 1925, “There is . . . a certain type of shrinking neurotic individual who can’t meet the demands of life, is afraid to meet people, has anxieties and fears, who if they took small amounts of narcotics – and I have examined quite a few of them – would be better and more efficient people than they would be without it.” Dr. Kolb also described two physicians who were opiate addicts and practiced successfully until they managed to “kick the habit,” after which they became hopeless problems to themselves and their families. “These two physicians that I am talking about didn’t get cured," Dr. Kolb said scornfully, “they should have had it (the drug) forever, because it (the cure) would not mean anything but an insane asylum for them, and they were doing a pretty good job of work as physicians when they were on the drug and regularly taking it.” American society has ignored Dr. Kolb’s pragmatic approach for decades and has struggled heroically to get all these lost souls off their depressant drugs. Or has it? The “war against heroin” continues; but in New York, the state has abandoned the hope of real “cure” and is satisfied just to get the junkies off an addicting drug it has made illegal – heroin – and onto an equally addicting drug it has made legal – methadone; and in the nation at large, prescriptions for central nervous system depressants are said to run into the tens of millions every year. The official attitude, by default, now appears to be, “If you can’t bear our society without being half-asleep, let us at least control which drug you choose to be half-asleep on.” This is not a formula for a non-addicted nation. It is a face-saving game to allow those bureaucrats whom William S. Burroughs calls “control addicts” to continue to believe that they are, by God, controlling everybody they want to control.

The Chariot Cometh by Stewart Stafford O gleaming chariot of restoration, Ferrying that tortuous animal, Man, Ministering as Gods to mortals, Dispensing the miracle of rebirth. Woe to that lost, delinquent essedum, Neglecting and failing malcontents, Memories fade in mind, not in heart, Angel of mercy now a spirit of vengeance. Grief stalks the mad and jealous soul, Juggling coals of rectitude and retribution, Scalded palms scant refuge from pain, Let savagery flee to its depths, be free. Examine the formidable hand-me-downs, And transform them into life's armour, Or be an infant in hanging father's flesh, Abdicating the procession of succession. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

When examined through the lens of Meerkat’s Law and the central framework of this book, it is obvious why the resulting networks generated by big launches are weak. You’d rather have a smaller set of atomic networks that are denser and more engaged than a large number of networks that aren’t there. When a networked product depends on having other people in order to be useful, it’s better to ignore the top-line aggregate numbers. Instead, the quality of the traction can only be seen when you zoom all the way into the perspective of an individual user within the network. Does a new person who joins the product see value based on how many other users are already on it? You might as well ignore the aggregate numbers, and in particular the spike of users that a new product might see in its first days. As Eric Ries describes in his book The Lean Startup, these are “vanity metrics.” The numbers might make you feel good, especially when they are going up, but it doesn’t matter if you have a hundred million users if they are churning out at a high rate, due to a lack of other users engaging. When networks are built bottom-up, they are more likely to be densely interconnected, and thus healthier and more engaged. There are multiple reasons for this: A new product is often incubated within a subcommunity, whether that’s a college campus, San Francisco techies, gamers, or freelancers—as recent tech successes have shown. It will grow within this group before spreading into other verticals, allowing time for its developers to tune features like inviting or sharing, while honing the core value proposition. Once a new networked product is spreading via word of mouth, then each user is likely to know at least one other user already on the network. By the time it reaches the broader consciousness, it will be seen as a phenomenon, and top-down efforts can always be added on to scale a network that’s already big and engaged. If Big Bang Launches work so poorly in general, why do they work for Apple? This type of launch works for Apple because their core offerings can stand alone as premium, high-utility products that generally don’t need to construct new networks to function. At most, they tap into existing networks like email and SMS. Famously, Apple has not succeeded with social offerings like the now-defunct Game Center and Ping. The closest new networked product they’ve launched is arguably the App Store, but even that was initially not in Steve Jobs’s vision for the phone.87 Most important, though, you aren’t Apple. So don’t try to copy them without having their kinds of products.

December 3 Only one who continually reexamines himself and corrects his faults will grow. The Hagakure Anyone seeking to perfect his character has to continually examine himself in order to correct the things in his life that need to be corrected. All men have faults. Every man has his own personal shortcomings, yes, even the best trained warriors and men of honor have faults that they need to continually keep in check and correct. This is just part of being human. One of the differences between the warrior and other men is that he continually tries to correct his faults, instead of just ignoring them. He is not satisfied allowing them to control his life or parts of his life. He continually examines himself and molds his life in the way that he knows he should live. Every morning, recall the code that you strive to live by, and every night reflect on whether or not you have been successful in living up to your code of honor. Look for ways in which you have fallen short in your quest and determine what you should have done differently, and know that you will handle that situation differently the next time. Strive to improve your life and your character every day. Little by little your character will be perfected, just as drop by drop the water wears away the stone. Be patient with yourself and continue with your quest. Successes, whether in the warrior lifestyle or any other endeavor, consist of not giving up. Don’t quit, just continue to press on with each new day. Every day is a new chance to start with a clean slate. I reexamine myself regularly and correct my faults.

Children who feel that they have to be compliant to the extent of partially denying or repressing their true natures are bound to remain dependent on external sources for the maintenance of self-esteem. Such a child will develop into an adult who will continue to feel that he has to be successful, or good, or approved of by everyone, if he is to retain any sense of his own value. This necessarily makes him especially vulnerable to the reverses in life which we all have to endure: to failure in an examination or in competition for a job; to rejection by an actual or potential lover; to bereavement or to any other form of loss. Such unpleasant events make all of us temporarily resentful or low-spirited or both; but, in the case of those who possess little or no built-in self-esteem, may precipitate a devastating plunge into the hell of severe depression. People who react to disapproval, failure, or loss by becoming so severely depressed that they are clearly ‘ill’, seem to lack any inner resources to which they may turn in the face of misfortune. For them, hazards which to others are challenges precipitate feelings of total hopelessness and helplessness. Some business men who become bankrupt set to and start a new enterprise. Others cast themselves from a window on the thirtieth floor. The latter variety behave as though there were no second chances in life; as though they were entirely dependent for maintaining their self-esteem upon the success of whatever enterprise was currently engaging them, without taking into account past blessings or future possibilities. It is as if any love or recognition which they had won in the past counted for nothing; as if there were nothing inside themselves to which to turn, no sense of being intrinsically worthwhile.

A daily self-examination that I've landed on in the past couple of months is, "Did I give God my faithful act of service today?"... it is so tempting to evaluate the success of the meeting by attendance, or enthusiasm, or my own reaction to the discussion.

A couple recently came to my office. Let’s call them Mark and Elizabeth Schuler. They came in for a consultation at Elizabeth’s request. Mark’s best friend was a stockbroker who had handled the couple’s investment portfolio for decades. All they wanted from me was a second opinion. If all went well, they planned to stop working within five years. After a quick chat about their goals, I organized the mess of financial paperwork they’d brought and set about assessing their situation. As my team and I prepared their “Retirement Map Review,” it was immediately apparent the Schulers were carrying significant market risk. We scheduled a follow-up appointment for two weeks later. When they returned, I asked them to estimate their comfortable risk tolerance. In other words, how much of their savings could they comfortably afford to have exposed to stock market losses? Elizabeth laughed at the question. “We’re not comfortable losing any of it,” she said. I had to laugh too. Of course, no one wants to lose any of their money. But with assets housed in mutual funds, 401(k)s, and stocks, there’s always going to be some measure of risk, not to mention fees to maintain such accounts. We always stand to lose something. So how much could they tolerate losing and still be okay to retire? The Schulers had to think about that for a while. After some quick calculations and hurried deliberation, they finally came up with a number. “I guess if we’re just roughly estimating,” Mark said, “I could see us subjecting about 10 percent of our retirement savings to the market’s ups and downs and still being all right.” Can you guess what percentage of their assets were at risk? After a careful examination of the Schulers’ portfolio, my team and I discovered 100 percent of their portfolio was actually invested in individual stocks—an investment option with very high risk! In fact, a large chunk of the Schulers’ money was invested in Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), a utility company that has been around for over one hundred years. Does that name sound familiar? When I met with the Schulers, PG&E stock was soaring. But you may remember the company name from several 2019 news headlines in which the electric and natural gas giant was accused of negligence that contributed to 30 billion dollars’ worth of damage caused by California wild fires. In the wake of that disaster, the company’s stock dropped by more than 60 percent in a matter of months. That’s how volatile individual stocks can be.

Aside from this, there are even grave errors in the core belief of most Christians about God and His purposes for us in this world, based on ideas that are not Biblical although assumed to be Biblical. As a result, the devil has quite successfully distracted and neutralized Christians from being engaged in God’s Kingdom advance in the world. Before we go on to examine what these false ideas, wrong assumptions and half-truths are, and their consequences, let’s consider the concept of worldview from which all ideas arise.

With the false claim that the Germans murdered six million Jews, mostly in gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland during WWII, since the end of WWII, the world has been saturated with films, documentaries and books on the Holocaust. Anyone worldwide who dares to investigate the Jewish Holocaust claims, is branded an Anti-Semite and Holocaust Denier. In our democratic world, a person who is accused of a crime is deemed innocent until irrefutable evidence proves them guilty. What has happened to democracy in Germany, Poland, France and Switzerland where people accused of Holocaust Denial are not allowed to provide any evidence that would prove that they are not guilty? In the Middle Ages, people accused of being witches, were also allowed no defence and were burned at the stake. As burning at the stake and crucifiction is not allowed in today's world, the best that the Jewish leaders and holocaust promoters can achieve is incarceration where no one can hear claims backed by years of very thorough research. The Jewish success in blocking my book "The Answer Justice", their failed attempts to stop the book "Chutzpah" written by Norman Finkelstein whose mother and father were held in German concentration camps, the incarceration of revisionists Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudolf in Germany and David Irving in Austria: these are all desperate attempts to end what they call Holocaust Denial. The English historian David Irving was refused entry to Australia in 2003 at the behest of the Jewish community (representing only 0.4% of the Australian population) thus denying the right of the other 99.6% to hear what David Irving has to say. Proof of Jewish power was the blocking of the public viewing of David Irving's film. The Jewish owners of the building locked the film presentation out which resulted in the headline in the "Australian" newspaper of: " Outrage at Jewish bid to stop the film by David Irving called "The Search For Truth in History" . Sir Zelman Cowan who was Governor General of Australia and a man much reverred in the Jewish community, has stated in the Jewish Chronicle (London) that "The way to deal with people who claim the holocaust never happened, is to produce irrefutable evidence that it did happen". I agree 100% with Sir Zelman Cowan. I am quite certain that he and other Zionist Jewish (Ashkenazim) world leaders are aware that a United Nations or International forensic examination of the alleged gas chamber at No. 2 Crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, would irrefutably prove the truth to the world that xyclon B cyanide has never been used as alleged by world Jewry to kill Jews. In 1979 Professor W.D. Rubenstein stated: "If the Holocaust can be shown to be a Zionist myth, the strongest of all weapons in Israels's propaganda armory collapses. The Falsification of history by Zionist Jews in claiming the murder of six million Jews by Germany, constitutes the GREATEST ORGANISED CRIME that the world has known.

For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of. We don’t have enough exercise. We don’t have enough work. We don’t have enough profits. We don’t have enough power. We don’t have enough wilderness. We don’t have enough weekends. Of course, we don’t have enough money—ever. We’re not thin enough, we’re not smart enough, we’re not pretty enough or fit enough or educated or successful enough, or rich enough —ever. Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack. ... What begins as a simple expression of the hurried life, or even the challenged life, grows into the great justification for an unfulfilled l i f e. We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mindset of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don’t mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn’t a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough. Sufficiency resides inside of each of us, and we can call it forward. It is a consciousness, an attention, an intentional choosing of the way we think about our circumstances.

When condominiums don’t meet government-backed lenders’ standards they become non-warrantable. This means that buyers cannot get standard loans for these properties. They will have to pay cash or pay exorbitant rates through private lenders. When a building is full of non-warrantable condos, the pool of buyers shrinks and lowers the condo’s value. One might think that newer projects would have lower maintenance costs than older projects. But this isn’t always true. Some builders set monthly fees low while they advertise the project. This attracts bargain buyers, but owners soon discover they have inadequate reserves. The monthly fees then skyrocket. Even if the homeowners successfully sue the builder, it is hard to sell any properties while litigation is pending, and values drop. Most states have specific forms for condominium transactions in which the association discloses finances and reserves. Buyers must sign and verify they have examined the financial condition of the project. Pay attention to past history. How old is the roof? When were improvements last made? How often do association dues increase? Even though many people don’t investigate these issues, a home’s value depends on them. CHAPTER 7 BANK FINANCING Banks have a new image. Now you have ‘a friend,’ your friendly banker. If the banks are so friendly, how come they chain down the pens? — Alan King Bank lending standards and terms change daily. This chapter provides general principles that should prove useful over the long term. We will examine how to borrow from banks to acquire or refinance a home. Please note the term “banks” as used here includes credit unions and other major financial institutions. There’s another chapter on non-bank lending to help those who don’t meet the criteria set by major lending institutions.

Although Habit 2 applies to many different circumstances and levels of life, the most fundamental application of “begin with the end in mind” is to begin today with the image, picture, or paradigm of the end of your life as your frame of reference or the criterion by which everything else is examined. Each part of your life—today’s behavior, tomorrow’s behavior, next week’s behavior, next month’s behavior—can be examined in the context of the whole, of what really matters most to you. By keeping that end clearly in mind, you can make certain that whatever you do on any particular day does not violate the criteria you have defined as supremely important, and that each day of your life contributes in a meaningful way to the vision you have of your life as a whole. To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction. It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busyness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall. It is possible to be busy—very busy—without being very effective. People often find themselves achieving victories that are empty, successes that have come at the expense of things they suddenly realize were far more valuable to them. People from every walk of life—doctors, academicians,

in examining the lives of the remarkable among us—the skilled, the talented, and the driven—I will argue that there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.

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As he goes on striving along the path of concentration, his exertion activates five mental factors which come to his aid. These factors are intermittently present in ordinary undirected consciousness, but there they lack a unifying bond and thus do not play any special role. However, when activated by the work of meditation, these five factors pick up power, link up with one another, and steer the mind towards samādhi, which they will govern as the “jhāna factors,” the factors of absorption (jhānanga). Stated in their usual order the five are: initial application of mind (vitakka), sustained application of mind (vicāra), rapture (pīti), happiness (sukha), and one-pointedness (ekaggatā). Initial application of mind does the work of directing the mind to the object. It takes the mind, lifts it up, and drives it into the object the way one drives a nail through a block of wood. This done, sustained application of mind anchors the mind on the object, keeping it there through its function of examination. To clarify the difference between these two factors, initial application is compared to the striking of a bell, sustained application to the bell’s reverberations. Rapture, the third factor, is the delight and joy that accompany a favourable interest in the object, while happiness, the fourth factor, is the pleasant feeling that accompanies successful concentration. Since rapture and happiness share similar qualities they tend to be confused with each other, but the two are not identical. The difference between them is illustrated by comparing rapture to the joy of a weary desert-farer who sees an oasis in the distance, happiness to his pleasure when drinking from the pond and resting in the shade. The fifth and final factor of absorption is one-pointedness, which has the pivotal function of unifying the mind on the object.2 When concentration is developed, these five factors spring up and counteract the five hindrances. Each absorption factor opposes a particular hindrance. Initial application of mind, through its work of lifting the mind up to the object, counters dullness and drowsiness. Sustained application, by anchoring the mind on the object, drives away doubt. Rapture shuts out ill will, happiness excludes restlessness and worry, and one-pointedness counters sensual desire, the most alluring inducement to distraction. Thus, with the strengthening of the absorption factors, the hindrances fade out and subside. They are not yet eradicated—eradication can only be effected by wisdom, the third division of the path—but they have been reduced to a state of quiescence where they cannot disrupt the forward movement of concentration.

Your teams need the ability—and the manpower—to relentlessly pursue a specific objective; asking a team to split its time between two different business lines is likely to result in the failure of both. This is especially true when the main thread is a business line that has matured. In their Harvard Business Review article “The Ambidextrous Organization,” Charles A. O’Reilly III and Michael L. Tushman draw the distinction between “exploiting” and “exploring.” Mature business lines focus on incremental innovations that help them exploit a well-known market, whereas new threads focus on more radical innovations and exploring a new market opportunity. They examined thirty-five attempts to spin up new threads, across nine different industries. What they found was that these efforts were most likely to be successful in “ambidextrous” organizations, where the new threads were organized as structurally independent units but integrated into the existing management structure. In other words, the leaders of the new threads not only have the freedom to innovate but also the ability to coordinate with senior leadership to leverage existing resources and expertise from more mature threads.

Each life has numerous crossroads, paths taken and paths avoided. After each such crux-point, one should examine the thought processes that went into the significant decisions, the opportunities grasped, the successes and failures. The same is true with personal relationships. All important things in life can be distilled down to personal relationships. —Old Earth philosopher (name unknown)

In a study that examined clothing and athletic performance, researchers found that athletes who wore red clothing in the 2004 Olympic Games won more events than those athletes who wore blue.

In another surprising study published in 2010 in the journal Psychological Science, researchers Ernest Abel and Michael Kruger of Wayne State University examined vintage photos of 230 major league baseball players from the 1952 season, comparing the lifespans of the 184 players who had already died. Of the players’ photos in the baseball cards, 40% showed no smile, 42% showed a partial smile, and 18% had a full smile. Those players who had no smiles lived an average of 72.9 years, while those with partial smiles had a lifespan of 75 years. However, those with big authentic grins lived to be 79.9 years on average, approximately 10% longer than those who did not smile in their photographs. The researchers could not confirm whether any of the players were prompted by the photographer to smile for their photos or if they smiled spontaneously. At the same time, the data seems to suggest that distributed images of smiling people result in a longer, happier life. So smile in your photos!

Other studies reveal that when we wear black, aggression increases...and that feels powerful. Researchers examined the statistics of more than 52,000 National Hockey League games and discovered that teams were penalized 10.2% more for aggression when wearing their black uniforms. In hockey, teams usually have two colors of jerseys and switch them for home and away games. When the teams wore a different color other than black, their penalties dropped overall.

A Girl with Game doesn’t belittle another female who is succeeding, even if it’s in an area she is lacking. Instead, a Girl with Game examines what strategies the woman uses so she can become successful too. A Girl with Game knows insulting another female is condoning the message that disrespecting women is okay. And she is definitely not okay with that.

at the executive level, your job is to reward initiative in your junior officers and NCOs and facilitate their success. When they make mistakes while doing their best to carry out your intent, stand by them. Examine your coaching and how well you articulate your intent. Remember the bottom line: imbue in them a strong bias for action.

Having reached a point where I was successfully completing a number of desired goals, I was experiencing both a “void” and undergoing the kind of critical self-examination that brought about a crisis in meaning. It was a time for me to re-vision my life and chart new and different journeys. I think it’s very hard for successful black women (and black men) to turn away from achievements, high-status positions with visibility, that may no longer be meeting our growth needs.

Many students fail examinations not because they don't know anything but because they lack confidence to prove that they know anything or everything.

For a long while I contorted myself to live according to a set of old memos I'd been issued about how to become a successful woman and build a strong family, career, and faith. I thought those memos were universal Truth, so I abandoned myself to honor them without even unearthing and examining them. When I finally pulled them our of my subconscious and looked hard at them: I learned that these memos had never been Truth at all-just my particular culture's arbitrary expectations. hustling to comply with my memos, I was flying on autopilot, routed to a destination I never chose.

The more success you've had in the past, the less critically you examine your own assumptions

Success, to Brando, meant “understanding yourself.” Success, as it was defined by Hollywood, held no appeal to him. This was a man who was hailed as the greatest in his field, a two-time Oscar winner, a box-office champ, the first actor to get a million dollars a picture. He made it to the top of the heap—and when he got there, he found success didn’t have “the fiber,” as he told talk show host David Susskind. He spent his life searching for things that did have the fiber, those permanently true things for which he could lay down his life. He wanted to feel as if he were—to play on his famous line from On the Waterfront—a “contender,” someone who mattered, someone who had fought the good fight. He wanted to feel as if he had made a difference, left a mark, and not just on acting. What he did not want to be was an “unthinker,” the way he described those people who never examined themselves or their place in the world.

Each of us, usually by late adolescence, has a mass of knowledge about himself, which—if we took the counsel “Know thyself” seriously—could be examined and considered until the individual’s ideal of the good life would emerge from it plainly. It ought to be part of education to see that each child should understand the necessity of finding this clue to his future, and be shown that it is sometimes thrown into confusion by hero-worship, or by the erroneous notion that what is an item in the success of one must be present in the success of each of us. Still, in spite of confusion, false starts, the taking over of the ambitions of a parent or teacher for ourselves instead of finding our own, most of us do arrive in the early twenties knowing what we are best fitted to do, or could do best if we had the training and opportunity.

So, then, what is day trading? In reality, day trading is a profession, very much like medicine, law and engineering. Day trading requires the right tools and software, education, patience and practice. In order to learn how to trade with real money, you will have to dedicate countless hours to reading about trading styles, observing experienced traders, and practicing in simulator accounts. An average successful day trader can make between $500 and $1,000 every day. That’s equal to $10,000 to $20,000 a month (based on about twenty trading days in a month), and that equals some $120,000 to $240,000 a year. Why would anyone expect a job that pays this well to be easy? Doctors, attorneys, engineers and many other professionals go through years of school, practice, hard work and examinations to earn a similar income. Why should day trading be any different?

If we want to be successful, “we need to train our powers of observation, to cultivate that attitude of mind of being constantly on the look-out for the unexpected and make a habit of examining every clue that chance presents.

I have engaged my students in the quest as well. In my MBA course, Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise, we study theories regarding the various dimensions of the job of general managers. These theories are statements of what causes things to happen—and why. When the students understand these theories, we put them “on”—like a set of lenses—to examine a case about a company. We discuss what each of the theories can tell us about why and how the problems and opportunities emerged in the company. We then use the theories to predict what problems and opportunities are likely to occur in the future for that company, and we use the theories to predict what actions the managers will need to take to address them.

D. V. Day and Lord (1988) reviewed a number of executive succession studies to assess the effects of new leaders on organizational effectiveness. They reported that the ascent of a new leader explained between 5.6% and 24.2% of the variance in organizational performance indices across multiple studies. N. Weiner and Mahoney (1981) examined such succession effects in 193 companies across a 19-year time span. They found that leadership accounted for 44% to 47% of the variance in organizational performance indices.

The connection between the changing role of the police in American society and efforts to control culturally subversive groups is illustrated in the backgrounds of some of the most well-known of the “occult cops.” Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedecker’s examination of these usually low-ranking detectives found that many of them “had spied on groups opposing racism or the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.” Before morphing into “occult experts” they traveled the “small town lecture circuit” warning mainly white, middle-class audiences about the danger of “Moonies” and other alternative religious movements. The role of the police in the satanic panic of the 1980s appears to be symptomatic of a much larger problem. Rather than asking its police to prevent and prosecute crimes against person and property, white America asked it to crusade against evil, to slay monsters and demons. In an urban America prostrated by the growing economic inequality of the 1980s and the consequent deadly mix of entrepreneurialism and despair that constituted the crack epidemic, politicians gravitated to the “tough on crime” rhetoric that became such an important part of the successful campaigns of Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Meanwhile, the leadership of the evangelical and Charismatic worlds adopted a very similar rhetoric in which their followers were asked to engage in an unrelenting war on the forces of darkness threatening their homes, children, churches, and communities.

Self-examination is an ambiguous topic by nature, albeit an important one for anyone who is seriously looking to hit their goals. Listen to our latest episode to learn how you can successfully evaluate your own performance and use this to stretch yourself to new heights!

ChiroCynergy - Dr. Matthew Bradshaw, Dr. Hilary Rutledge - Chiropractor Leland, NC The road to better health starts with ChiroCynergy the best Chiropractors in Leland, NC. Why choose us? ChiroCynergy is dedicated to improving the health and wellness of the Cape Fear Region….naturally. What we treat? If you suffer from back, neck, arm, leg or other musculoskeletal pain, we can help alleviate it through chiropractic care. At ChiroCynergy Leland, NC Location, our doctors first consult and then examine patients one-on-one to determine their injuries. We then embark on a specific course of state-of-the-art treatment based on those injuries. The goal is to get the patient out of pain and back to optimal function as quickly as possible – simple as that. Of course, some injuries take longer than others, and we use predetermined milestones to evaluate our success and the patient’s success with treatment. We are a patient-centric office, meaning that everything we do is for your benefit. Our mission remains: “Reintroduce our patients to the pain-free life they have been missing.” ChiroCynergy - Leland, NC location has two female chiropractors. Call us: (910) 368-1528

So the working out, however laborious, of an original technique is worth the time expended, the loneliness entailed. With that well in mind, let us consider those times when advice should be taken. You have a genuine problem. The first step, then, should be to write it out, or to formulate it verbally with exactness, so that you can see just what it is that is troubling you. If you simply let the problem wash around in your mind, it will seem greater, and much vaguer, than it will appear on close examination. Then find your expert, whether friend or stranger, but make every effort to find one whose views seem to be congenial to you, since that usually implies similar or congenial mental processes. To do so earlier will mean that you are wasting both your time and his by making him the audience of part of your self-examination. If you are successful in getting an interview, make that as short and concise as possible while still covering all your points. Then follow the advice you are given until you see definite results. If you are tempted to say “Oh, that won’t work for me,” then you should suspect your own motives. Such a rejection implies that you already had a course of action in mind, and were more than half-hoping that you would be advised to follow it. Watching an example of the wrong attitude towards advice and instruction here may be more illuminating than any positive example.

If we are intent upon answering our most serious questions, from climate change to poverty, and curing diseases to designing new products, we need to work with people who think differently, not just accurately. And this requires us to take a step back and view performance from a fundamentally different vantage point. Consider an irony in the way we traditionally think about success. If you look at science or, indeed, popular literature, the focus is on individuals. How can we improve the knowledge or perceptiveness of ourselves or our colleagues? Fine books such as Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Sources of Power by Gary Klein and Mindset by Carol Dweck have become bestsellers. All examine, in their different ways, how we can improve individual abilities through time.

And yet, when we examine matters closely, busy lives turn out to have certain strikingly high incidental costs that we are nevertheless collectively committed to ignoring. Visible success brings us up against the envy and competitiveness of strangers.

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팔팔정구매 ✹ 홈피 : via3.co.to ✹ 카톡 : ppt33 ✹ 라인 : pxp32 ✹ Almost every child will complain about their parents sometimes. It is natural, because when people stay together for a long time, they will start to have argument. But ignore about the unhappy time, our parents love us all the time. No matter what happen to us, they will stand by our sides. We should be grateful to them and try to understand them. 팔팔정구입방법 팔팔정구매방법 팔팔정판매 팔팔정복용법 팔팔정부작용 팔팔정약효 팔팔정효과 팔팔정후기 팔팔정가격 팔팔정구입하는곳 팔팔정구매하는곳 팔팔정판매하는곳 Your negative emotions can also be controlled and directed. PMA and self-discipline can remove their harmful effects and make them serve constructive purposes. Sometimes fear and anger will inspire intense action. But you must always submit your negative emotions--and you positive ones--to the examination of your reason before releasing them. Emotion without reason is a dreadful enemy. love everyone who walks into our life.It must be fate to get acquainted in a huge crowd of people... I feel, the love that Osho talks about, maybe is a kind of pure love beyond the mundane world, which is full of divinity and caritas, and overflows with Buddhist allegorical words and gestures, but, it seems that I cannot see through its true meaning forever... Here are several reasons why you should train yourself for success like a champion boxer!

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

Von Braun told Rosin that there would be a succession of “enemies.” “First it will be the communists, then it will be the terrorists, and after that it will be the extraterrestrials.”5 As the succession of “enemies” appears to be coming on stage exactly as planned, I should like to examine each one in somewhat greater depth than I have done before.

As per the faith of Islam, human beings are created for a test by Allah and we live in His universe under finely tuned life-supporting systems. Our success in this test depends on moral excellence in matters involving free will. The nature of the test examines human actions made with free will. The wish to see absolute justice around us and to achieve everlasting happiness would be possible in afterlife provided we use our free will in choosing moral actions in this life. Success in this test is possible even for those who suffered injustice throughout their lives. Failure is also possible for the richest, powerful and outlaws who nonetheless might be able to evade law enforcement all their lives in this world.

Eighty percent of those she examined were found to have periods of “email apnea.

The task of the economist is not merely, as in equilibrium theory, to examine the logical consistency of various modes of action, but to make human action intelligible, to let us understand the nature of the logical structure called "plans," to exhibit the successive modes of thought which give rise to successive modes of action. In other words, all true economics is not "functional" but "causal-genetic.

From his earliest school days the Chinese boy is taught that men without education are but horses or cows in coats and trousers, and that success at the public examinations is the greatest prize this world has to offer.

(4151)GNP(4151) an examiner in the 3 phase review of the OECD Working Group on Bribery on New Zealand at the OECD Working Group on Bribery in October 2013. The ACRC successfully responded to the review by establishing a cooperative system with the

One of the reasons for its success is that science has built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. Every time a scientific paper presents a bit of data, it's accompanied by an error bar - a quiet but insistent reminder that no knowledge is complete or perfect. It's a calibration of how much we trust what we think we know. If the error bars are small, the accuracy of our empirical knowledge is high; if the error bars are large, then so is the uncertainty in our knowledge. Except in pure mathematics nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false). Moreover, scientists are usually careful to characterize the veridical status of.their attempts to understand the world - ranging from conjectures and hypotheses, which are highly tentative, all the way up to laws of Nature which are repeatedly and systemati­cally confirmed through many interrogations of how the world works. But even laws of Nature are not absolutely certain. There may be new circumstances never before examined - inside black holes, say, or within the electron, or close to the speed of light -where even our vaunted laws of Nature break down and, however valid they may be in ordinary circumstances, need correction. Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a pervasive, visible self-assessment of the reliability of our knowledge.

self-awareness depends on being able to see ourselves objectively, and that requires the ability to examine our thoughts and emotions from a third-person perspective, not getting swept up in the emotion, not identifying with it, but just seeing it clearly and objectively.

Hoshin Kanri Business Methodology The balanced scorecard had its origins in Hoshin Kanri, so it is appropriate to examine this business methodology. As I understand it, translated, the term means a business methodology for direction and alignment. This approach was developed in a complex Japanese multinational where it is necessary to achieve an organization-wide collaborative effort in key areas. One tenet behind Hoshin Kanri is that all employees should incorporate into their daily routines a contribution to the key corporate objectives. In other words, staff members need to be made aware of the critical success factors and then prioritize their daily activities to maximize their positive contribution in these areas.

Mind, when long deprived of its natural food of truth and freedom of growth, develops an unnatural craving for success; and our students have fallen victims to the mania for success in examinations.

it is clear that in the study of beings this aim can be fulfilled by us perfectly only through successive examinations of them by one man after another,41 the later ones seeking the help of the earlier in that task, on the model of what has happened in the mathematical sciences. For if we suppose that the art of geometry did not exist in this age of ours, and likewise the art of astronomy, and a single person wanted to ascertain by himself the sizes of the 15 heavenly bodies, their shapes, and their distances from each other, that would not be possible for him—e.g. to know the proportion of the sun to the earth or other facts about the sizes of the stars—even though he were the most intelligent of men by nature, unless by a revelation or something resembling revelation.42 Indeed if he were told that the sun is about 150 or 160 times43 as great as the earth, he would think this statement madness on the part of the speaker, although this is a fact which has been demonstrated in 20 astronomy so surely that no one who has mastered that science doubts it.

With humility, you are better able to enjoy and understand success, and you are better able to examine and handle failure.

The worst performers and the best performers are givers; takers and matchers are more likely to land in the middle. This pattern holds up across the board. The Belgian medical students with the lowest grades have unusually high giver scores, but so do the students with the highest grades. Over the course of medical school, being a giver accounts for 11 percent higher grades. Even in sales, I found that the least productive salespeople had 25 percent higher giver scores than average performers—but so did the most productive salespeople. The top performers were givers, and they averaged 50 percent more annual revenue than the takers and matchers. Givers dominate the bottom and the top of the success ladder. Across occupations, if you examine the link between reciprocity styles and success, the givers are more likely to become champs—not only chumps.

But this argument is found to be defective when examined in its effects and consequences.

there are clear reasons that boys might continue to disengage and that necessary adjustments are not made. • Boys and girls in class together may elicit different and even contradictory teacher responses, resulting in muddy, only partially successful lessons. • State- or school-mandated protocols may not allow teachers flexibility to adjust their teaching to more effective practices. • There may be insufficient openness on the part of teachers or whole schools to examine actual student-teacher dynamics. • Teachers may lack the empathy or the openness to consider the variety of student responses and instead proceed according to a prescribed method or an eccentrically established personal approach. • Other conditions bearing on students’ lives—troubled homes or a lack of physical or emotional safety—may make their engagement in scholastic activity impossible.

You are only as authentic as the substance you have inside you. Having others take your examinations or doing your assignments and projects is to reduce the level of authenticity of your qualification as well as your personal brand. Master your chosen area of study to the highest level and demonstrate that you have full knowledge as a specialist. Let the depth of your knowledge make you sought after and respected. Define yourself and be authentic.

Seek to develop your skill and talent to a level of relevance. Create a platform to shine and make sure you are bringing a difference to the areas that require your expertise. A pastor who does not teach or pray for people, a football player always playing pool, a body builder who doesn’t eat but sleeps all day, a student who studies only towards examinations, a politician without a cause and a business without a customer service culture all have one thing in common – sooner or later they will all become irrelevant. Never miss the chance to practice the call of your mission, even if you are not getting paid for it.

Remedies exist for correcting substantial departures from normality, but these remedies may make matters worse when departures from normality are minimal. The first course of action is to identify and remove any outliers that may affect the mean and standard deviation. The second course of action is variable transformation, which involves transforming the variable, often by taking log(x), of each observation, and then testing the transformed variable for normality. Variable transformation may address excessive skewness by adjusting the measurement scale, thereby helping variables to better approximate normality.8 Substantively, we strongly prefer to make conclusions that satisfy test assumptions, regardless of which measurement scale is chosen.9 Keep in mind that when variables are transformed, the units in which results are expressed are transformed, as well. An example of variable transformation is provided in the second working example. Typically, analysts have different ways to address test violations. Examination of the causes of assumption violations often helps analysts to better understand their data. Different approaches may be successful for addressing test assumptions. Analysts should not merely go by the result of one approach that supports their case, ignoring others that perhaps do not. Rather, analysts should rely on the weight of robust, converging results to support their final test conclusions. Working Example 1 Earlier we discussed efforts to reduce high school violence by enrolling violence-prone students into classes that address anger management. Now, after some time, administrators and managers want to know whether the program is effective. As part of this assessment, students are asked to report their perception of safety at school. An index variable is constructed from different items measuring safety (see Chapter 3). Each item is measured on a seven-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree), and the index is constructed such that a high value indicates that students feel safe.10 The survey was initially administered at the beginning of the program. Now, almost a year later, the survey is implemented again.11 Administrators want to know whether students who did not participate in the anger management program feel that the climate is now safer. The analysis included here focuses on 10th graders. For practical purposes, the samples of 10th graders at the beginning of the program and one year later are regarded as independent samples; the subjects are not matched. Descriptive analysis shows that the mean perception of

We’ll examine the results achieved by Virtuoso leaders, CEOs whose workforce ratings place them at the top of the Character Curve etched by integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion—principles that we discovered to be the Keystone Character Habits of leadership. And we’ll compare their organizational results with those of the Self-Focused leaders who fall at the other end of the curve. The stories of how the low-character leaders undermine the success of even the best business plan put to rest the “greed is good” myth.

HISTORY OF NIGERIA Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country and the world’s eighth largest oil producer, but its success has been undermined in recent decades by ethnic and religious conflict, political instability, rampant official corruption, and an ailing economy. Toyin Falola, a leading historian intimately acquainted with the region, and Matthew Heaton, who has worked extensively on African science and culture, combine their expertise to explain the context to Nigeria’s recent troubles, through an exploration of its pre-colonial and colonial past and its journey from independence to statehood. By examining key themes such as colonialism, religion, slavery, nationalism, and the economy, the authors show how Nigeria’s history has been swayed by the vicissitudes of the world around it, and how Nigerians have adapted to meet these challenges. This book offers a unique portrayal of a resilient people living in a country with immense, but unrealized, potential. TOYIN FALOLA is the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include The Power of African Cultures (2003), Economic Reforms and Modernization in Nigeria, 1945–1965 (2004), and A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir (2004). MATTHEW M. HEATON is a Patrice Lumumba Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He has co-edited multiple volumes on health and illness in Africa with Toyin Falola, including HIV/AIDS, Illness and African Well-Being (2007) and Health Knowledge and Belief Systems in Africa (2007). A HISTORY OF NIGERIA

Don't let things that you cannot do discourage you and hold you back from things that you can do. It would be irrational to think that one can do everything; in this line of logic, self-analysis is crucial, meaning every person must analyze his/her true capacity, examine the current skills, and determine any essential future requirements.

Goals are the result of bringing your dreams, ideas, and ideals into a real and examinable form by giving them permanence in written form.

the right words. In 2014, researchers at Georgia Tech published a study in which they examined over nine million words and phrases used on Kickstarter to determine which language leads to success.25 The most important lesson is that the words and phrases associated with reciprocity and authority produce the best responses, while projects that focus too much on the need for funds fail. The most successful

In the cloudy swirl of misleading ideas surrounding public discussion of addiction, there’s one that stands out: the misconception that drug taking by itself will lead to addiction — in other words, that the cause of addiction resides in the power of the drug over the human brain. It is one of the bedrock fables sustaining the so-called “War on Drugs.” It also obscures the existence of a basic addiction process of which drugs are only one possible object, among many. Compulsive gambling, for example, is widely considered to be a form of addiction without anyone arguing that it’s caused by a deck of cards. The notion that addiction is drug-induced is often reinforced. Clearly, if drugs by themselves could cause addiction, we would not be safe offering narcotics to anyone. Medical evidence has repeatedly shown that opioids prescribed for cancer pain, even for long periods of time, do not lead to addiction except in a minority of susceptible people. During my years working on a palliative care ward I sometimes treated terminally ill cancer patients with extraordinarily high doses of narcotics — doses that my hardcore addict clients could only dream of. If the pain was alleviated by other means — for example, when patient was successfully given a nerve block for bone pain due to malignant deposits in the spine — the morphine could be rapidly discontinued. Yet if anyone had reason to seek oblivion through narcotic addiction, it would have been these terminally ill human beings. An article in the Canadian Journal of Medicine in 2006 reviewed international research covering over six thousand people who had received narcotics for chronic pain that was not cancerous in origin. There was no significant risk of addiction, a finding common to all studies that examine the relationship between addiction and the use of narcotics for pain relief. “Doubts or concerns about opioid efficacy, toxicity, tolerance, and abuse or addiction should no longer be used to justify withholding opioids,” concluded a large study of patients with chronic pain due to rheumatic disease. We can never understand addiction if we look for its sources exclusively in the actions of chemicals, no matter how powerful they are.

AlphaPoint Completes Blockchain Trial Together with Scotiabank AlphaPoint, a fintech company, devoted to blockchain technological innovation, has accomplished a successful proof technology together with Scotiabank, a major international bank based in Barcelone, Canada. From the trial, Scotiabank sought to learn and examine how the AlphaPoint Distributed Journal Platform could be leveraged inside across a selection of use situations. When questioned if AlphaPoint and Scotiabank intended to further build this job, Igor Telyatnikov, president and also COO regarding AlphaPoint, advised Bitcoin Journal that he was not able to comment especially on the subsequent steps in the particular Scotiabank-AlphaPoint effort. He performed, however, suggest that AlphaPoint is about to reveal several additional media shortly. “We have a couple of other significant announcements that is to be announced inside the coming calendar month, including a generation launch using a systemically crucial financial institution, ” said Telyatnikov. “2017 will be shaping around be an unbelievable year for that distributed journal technology market as a whole and then for AlphaPoint also. ” Within the multi-month venture, trade studies were published upon deployment of the AlphaPoint Distributed Journal Platform, which usually ran concurrently on Microsoft’s Azure impair and AlphaPoint hardware. Inside real-time, typically the blockchain community converted FIXML messages to be able to smart deals and produced an immutable “single truth” across the complete network. The particular Financial Details eXchange (FIX) is a sector protocol used for communicating stock options information inside specific digital messages. Including information about getting rates, market info and buy and sell orders. Using trillions involving dollars bought and sold annually around the Nasdaq only, financial providers entities are usually investing seriously in maximizing electronic buying and selling to increase their particular speed monetary markets and decrease costs. Blockchain technology may help them help save $8-12 million per annum, which includes savings up to 70 percent throughout reporting, 50 % in post-trade and 50 % in consent, according to a report by Accenture and McLagan.

When Huckman and Pisano examined the data, they discovered a remarkable pattern. Overall, the surgeons didn’t get better with practice.

Dawkins recognizes the power irreducible complexity has to falsify naturalistic explanations (like any combination of chance, natural law, or natural selection). Even Charles Darwin acknowledged this dilemma when he wrote On the Origin of Species: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”19

When the superior man has free course with his principles, that is what we call his success; when such course is denied, that is what we call his failure. Now I hold in my embrace the principles of righteousness and benevolence, and with them meet the evils of a disordered age; where is the proof of my being in extreme distress? Therefore, looking inwards and examining myself, I have no difficulties about my principles; though I encounter such difficulties (as the present), I do not lose my virtue. It is when winter's cold is come, and the hoar-frost and snow are falling, that we know the vegetative power of the pine and cypress.

The first step in getting unstuck and moving forward is to examine what is holding you back from taking action. The power is yours to set your intention and take the action needed to create the life you desire. You are in control of your initiative—be proactive.

Curious about what separated the successful companies from those that failed, we examined dozens of cases and found that the failures mostly relied on price or brand effects. By contrast, the successes hit on an idea that really worked—driving traffic from one user group in order to drive profits from another user group. We described our findings in a paper that analyzed the mathematics of two-sided network effects.10 Today, such successful platform businesses as eBay, Uber, Airbnb, Upwork, PayPal, and Google exhibit this model extensively.11

Are valedictorians successful a decade and a half after high school? Yes is the simple answer to this straightforward question…Yet the answer becomes infinitely less simple when we examine what society and the valedictorians themselves mean by “success.

After the publication of a report in 1967 by Bridget Plowden, an amateur educationalist, describing primary schooling, Britain’s education system had become an ideological battleground. Masked by a scattering of platitudes about improving schools, Plowden recommended the destruction of traditional education. Children, she wrote, should no longer sit in rows of desks but instead gather in groups around tables to encourage self-learning. She also recommended that the eleven-plus examination, a three-part test (English, maths and intelligence) taken in one day that irrevocably determined a child’s educational fate – either to blossom in a grammar school or be consigned to failure in a secondary modern school – should be abandoned. Grammar schools should be replaced by non-selective comprehensives that mixed children of all standards. With cross-party support, successive Labour and Conservative governments implemented her recommendations.

Street Advisors, a highly regarded research firm that concentrates on publicly traded real estate securities, routinely examines discrepancies between market price and fair value. The

Southern planters visiting Newport before the Civil War would frequently pass in their drives an odd-looking man building a stone wall by the roadside. Aside from his strange costume, there was something which attracted attention in the earnest but rapid examination which he gave to each stone before laying it upon the wall. "Are you hunting for possible gold nuggets in that rock?" asked an amused planter one day, “or what do you expect to find?" "I am looking for its individuality," replied the laborer; "every stone, like every human being, has certain peculiarities which adapt it thoroughly for certain purposes, but less perfectly for others. He who would build a wall as it should be, must get acquainted with every stone he handles, and place it just where it was intended to go.

However, if an attempt to harmonize Covenant Theology with Dispensationalism has ever had inklings of success, it is that of Progressive Dispensationalism. This

Before examining the many powerful changes in the investment climate, let’s remind ourselves that active investing is, at the margin, always a negative-sum game. Trading investments among investors would by itself be a zero-sum game, except that the large costs of management fees and expenses plus commissions and market impact must be deducted. These costs total in the billions every year. Net result: Active investing is a seriously negative-sum game. To

The dependent origination, or structure of conditions, appears as a flexible formula with the intention of describing the ordinary human situation of a man in his world (or indeed any conscious event where ignorance and craving have not entirely ceased). That situation is always complex, since it is implicit that consciousness with no object, or being ( bhava— becoming, or however rendered) without consciousness (of it), is impossible except as an artificial abstraction. The dependent origination, being designed to portray the essentials of that situation in the limited dimensions of words and using only elements recognizable in experience, is not a logical proposition (Descartes’ cogito is not a logical proposition). Nor is it a temporal cause-and-effect chain: each member has to be examined as to its nature in order to determine what its relations to the others are (e.g. whether successive in time or conascent, positive or negative, etc., etc.). A purely cause-and-effect chain would not represent the pattern of a situation that is always complex, always subjective-objective, static-dynamic, positive-negative, and so on. Again, there is no evidence of any historical development in the various forms given within the limit of the Sutta Piþaka (leaving aside the Paþisambhidámagga), and historical treatment within that particular limit is likely to mislead, if it is hypothesis with no foundation. Parallels with European thought have been avoided in this translation. But perhaps an exception can be made here, with due caution, in the case of Descartes. The revolution in European thought started by his formula cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) is not yet ended. Now, it will perhaps not escape notice that the two elements, “I think” and “I am,” in what is not a logical proposition parallel to some extent the two members of the dependent origination, consciousness and being (becoming). In other words, consciousness activated by craving and clinging as the dynamic factory, guided and blinkered by ignorance (“I think” or “consciousness with the conceit ‘I am’”), conditions being (“therefore I am”) in a complex relationship with other factors relating subject and object (not accounted for by Descartes). The parallel should not be pushed too far. In fact it is only introduced because in Europe the dependent origination seems to be very largely misunderstood with many strange interpretations placed upon it, and because the cogito does seem to offer some sort of reasonable approach.

One of the masters of trendspotting is Rohit Bhargava, author of Non-Obvious. He curates the biggest trends each year and packages them up into a book. Then he explains how people and businesses can take advantage of these trends to improve their position in the marketplace. Thinking deliberately about trends is a secret sauce for most successful hustlers, because it creates an unfair advantage. When Evan Spiegel built Snapchat, he was capitalizing on a trend. He saw people using Facebook and their phones to share photos, but noticed they felt inhibited by the fact that the images were either permanent, or public. By reversing those two elements―making image-sharing ephemeral and private, he solved a big problem. Snapchat exploded across the younger demographics and quickly became a multibillion-dollar business. Another example is Kik, a popular messaging app. When Kik launched, plenty of messaging services already existed. In fact, the ultimate messaging services seemed to be the ones already  built into everyone's phones. Apple had a messaging app, and so did Android. So, why reinvent the wheel? Ted Livingston, the founder of Kik, had other ideas. Why? Because he had identified a trend. Consumers were clearly upset with the built-in messaging services. First, the telecom companies were charging per message sent and received, which was a horrible experience. It felt like classic, capitalistic highway robbery. Second―and this was a big problem for teens: You could only exchange messages by giving out your phone number. Livingston noticed that teens wanted to chat with other people they met online, but had no safe way of doing that without giving out their number. So he created Kik, which allows people to create a username instead. Kiksters can then share their username to start chatting, while keeping their digits private. But even better, messaging is unlimited, and completely free. By examining the trends happening in the messaging market, Livingston was able to build a product that rivaled the multi-billion dollar incumbents. Now his company is valued at over a billion.   

research validating Tom’s instincts. When researchers with the National Weight Control Registry examined the tactics used by successful dieters, they found that two characteristics, in particular, stood out. People who successfully maintain weight loss typically eat breakfast every morning. They also weigh themselves each day. Part of the reason why these habits matter is practical: Eating a healthy breakfast makes it less likely you will snack later in the day, according to studies. And frequently measuring your weight allows us—sometimes almost subconsciously—to see how changing our diets influences the pounds lost. But just as important is the mental boost that daily, incremental weight loss provides. The small win of dropping even half a pound can provide the dose of momentum we need to stick with a diet. We need to see small victories to believe a long battle will be won.

He looked out over the landscape of baking earth and bleak iron huts towards the Scobies' house as though he were examining the scene of a battle after the defeat. He wondered how all that dreary scene would have appeared if he had been victorious, but in human love there is never such a thing as victory: only a few minor tactical successes before the final defeat of death or indifference.

The difference between men who are successful and men who are not is that successful men examine their hearts, realize there is something they care deeply about and desire, and take decisive steps toward it.

Let the thoughts emerge spontaneously in your mind. Think about the thoughts, examine the thoughts and slowly build on these thoughts. This is the time when your subconscious is interacting with your conscious thoughts. Your subconscious is feeding your thoughts, and simultaneously it is fed by the thoughts. In this state, you are neither fully conscious nor asleep. You are not dreaming because you are aware of your thoughts. Creative visualization should last about ten minutes daily. Develop a routine in which your meditation practice is followed by creative visualization. Do not expect instant results. The combined practice will slowly dissolve the clutter in your mind, and slowly you will discover the positive effects.  You can't dig through the clutter in a hurry. There is no shortcut, but the process which has been described here will certainly direct your life to spectacular success.

Writing is a joint enterprise of the mind and body. Writing requires application of mental discipline and demands great personal patience. Writing is an educational process that other persons successfully deployed to explore the external cultural milieu and probe their inner landscape. Writing is the hand-wielded tool that I opt to employ in order to ferret out myself and discern my place in the world. I will use the writer’s tools to analyze my reprehensive personal behavior, using of a lever of words in an attempt mentally to manipulate my internal intellectual gears. Documentation of the arched calligraphy of the landscape demarking my physical journey in life and scripting the final configuration of my intellectual intertexture is the goal of this multifaceted writing venture.

The picture of the Pythia breathing in vapors from a chasm below her tripod has always been the dominant model for understanding how the oracle at Delphi functioned. To such an extent that finding the mechanism of the vapors was originally regarded as the litmus test for successful archaeological investigation at Delphi. The original excavators of the site were extremely disappointed not to find a chasm below the temple—they felt almost cheated by the “deception” of the literary sources. The stakes were understandably high: at the time of Delphi’s excavation in the 1890s, interest in the oracle, and in psychic research more generally, could not have been stronger. In 1891 the burlesque opera Apollo, or The Oracle at Delphi played to great acclaim on Broadway. In the same year, John Collier painted his famous Priestess of Delphi in which a sensual priestess breathes in vapors from her tripod over a chasm (see plate 4), and the Society of Psychical Research was started by Cambridge academics and published its first volume examining the oracle at Delphi. In the wake of the disappointing excavations, thus, there was a feeling that the ancient sources had lied. The scholar A. P. Oppé in 1904 in the Journal of Hellenic Studies argued that the entire practice at Delphi was a farce, a sham, put on by the priests of Apollo, tricking the ancient world. Others sought different explanations for the Pythia’s madness: they focused on the laurel leaves, and suggested the Pythia had been high from eating laurel. One German scholar, Professor Oesterreich, even ate laurel leaves to test the theory, remarking disappointedly that he felt no different. Others opined that the answer relied not in some form of drug, but in psychology. Herbert Parke and Donald Wormell argued in the 1950s that the Pythia, in the heat of the moment after so much preparation on the particular day of consultation, and after so many years perhaps involved with the temple as one of the women guarding the sacred flame, would have found herself in an emotionally intense relationship with the god, and could easily have fallen victim to self-induced hypnosis. More recently, scholars have employed a series of anthropological approaches to understand belief in spirit possession, and applied these to how the Pythia may have functioned.

Every baby is a brand-new creation from the hand of God—uniquely created to accomplish a unique purpose. Peter affirmed this when he wrote, “God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another. . . . Then everything you do will bring glory to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 4:10–11 NLT). If you are going to have an extraordinary life—a life of significance—then you must discover your special purpose. But before we learn ways to uncover it, let’s examine some of the benefits of understanding your purpose

Some may find this novel to be a cautionary tale. Perhaps it is. Upon reflection, it is both a tribute to the guts and will power required to put everything on the line and an examination of the cost of success.” 

The first of these four parts of the self, and the only one made of solid matter, was the hamr. Hamr literally meant "skin" or "hide," but was essentially the same as what we today would call the "body." It was the visible part of the self that housed the invisible parts... ...One of the three invisible, spiritual parts of the self was the hugr. The hugr was someone's personality or mind, the intangible part that corresponds most closely to what we mean when we speak of someone's "inner self." It encompassed thought, desire, intuition (the Old Norse word for "foreboding" was hugboð), and a person's presence" - the feeling others get when they're around the person... ...The second of the spiritual parts of the self was the fylgja (plural fylgjur). The verb fylgja meant "to accompany," "to help," "to side with," "to belong to," "to follow," "to lead," "to guide," or "to pursue" depending on the context. The fylgja spirit did all of those many things, and the best translation of the noun fylgja is probably "attendant spirit," in both senses of the word "attendant" - one who accompanies and one who helps... ...The final part of the Viking self we'll examine here is the hamingja, "luck" or "fortune" (plural harningjur). In the words of Old Norse scholar Bettina Sommer, "luck was a quality inherent in the man and his lineage, a part of his personality similar to his strength, intelligence, or skill with weapons, at once both the cause and the expression of the success, wealth, and power of a family." The surest test of the strength of a person's hamingja was his or her fortune in battle.

Are you experiencing success right now? If you are not, take some time to re-examine your concept of success. Where does your definition come

Probably the most daunting challenge in delivering growth is that if you fail once to deliver it, the odds that you ever will be able to deliver in the future are very low. This is the conclusion of a remarkable study, Stall Points, that the Corporate Strategy Board published in 1998.8 It examined the 172 companies that had spent time on Fortune’s list of the 50 largest companies between 1955 and 1995. Only 5 percent of these companies were able to sustain a real, inflation-adjusted growth rate of more than 6 percent across their entire tenure in this group. The other 95 percent reached a point at which their growth simply stalled, to rates at or below the rate of growth of the gross national product (GNP). Stalling is understandable, given our expectations that all growth markets become saturated and mature. What is scary is that of all these companies whose growth had stalled, only 4 percent were able to successfully reignite their growth even to a rate of 1 percent above GNP growth. Once growth had stalled, in other words, it proved nearly impossible to restart it.

I have argued elsewhere that DWYL is an essentially narcissistic schema, facilitating willful ignorance of working conditions of others by encouraging continuous self-gratification. I have also argued that DWYL exposes its adherents to exploitation, justifying unpaid or underpaid work by throwing workers’ motivations back at them; when passion becomes the socially accepted motivation for working, talk of wages or reasonable scheduling becomes crass. This book examines the many expectations about what work can provide under the DWYL creed, and the sacrifices that workers make in order to meet those expectations.

Already uneasy over the foundations of their subject, mathematicians got a solid dose of ridicule from a clergyman, Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753). Bishop Berkeley, in his caustic essay 'The Analyst, or a Discourse addressed to an Infidel Mathematician,' derided those mathematicians who were ever ready to criticize theology as being based upon unsubstantiated faith, yet who embraced the calculus in spite of its foundational weaknesses. Berkeley could not resist letting them have it: 'All these points [of mathematics], I say, are supposed and believed by certain rigorous exactors of evidence in religion, men who pretend to believe no further than they can see... But he who can digest a second or third fluxion, a second or third differential, need not, methinks, be squeamish about any point in divinity.' As if that were not devastating enough, Berkeley added the wonderfully barbed comment: 'And what are these fluxions? The velocities of evanescent increments. And what are these same evanescent increments? They are neither finite quantities, nor quantities infinitely small, not yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities...?' Sadly, the foundations of the calculus had come to this - to 'ghosts of departed quantities.' One imagines hundreds of mathematicians squirming restlessly under this sarcastic phrase. Gradually the mathematical community had to address this vexing problem. Throughout much of the eighteenth century, they had simply been having too much success - and too much fun - in exploiting the calculus to stop and examine its underlying principles. But growing internal concerns, along with Berkeley's external sniping, left them little choice. The matter had to be resolved. Thus we find a string of gifted mathematicians working on the foundational questions. The process of refining the idea of 'limit' was an excruciating one, for the concept is inherently quite deep, requiring a precision of thought and an appreciation of the nature of the real number system that is by no means easy to come by. Gradually, though, mathematicians chipped away at this idea. By 1821, the Frenchman Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789-1857) had proposed this definition: 'When the values successively attributed to a particular variable approach indefinitely a fixed value, so as to end by differing from it by as little as one wishes, this latter is called the limit of all the others.

You must not end your life because you failed an examination. Failing an examination or making a mistake does not make you a failure at life. The context of life is broader than that.

Prayer: Father God, as I look upon the everyday drudgeries of life, may I recognize my commitment to You. May I see the eternal light in these tasks so that I can recognize that You are building eternal character in my life. Amen.   Action: Examine two or three of your drudgeries to see how God can make these into opportunities for character building.   Today’s Wisdom: When things go wrong, as they sometimes will, When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill, When the funds are low and the debts are high, And you want to smile, but you have to sigh, When care is pressing you down a bit, Rest, if you must—but don’t you quit. Life is queer with its twists and turns, As every one of us sometimes learns, And many a failure turns about When he might have won had he stuck it out; Don’t give up, though the pace seems slow— You might succeed with another blow. Often the goal is nearer than It seems to a faint and faltering man, Often the struggler has given up When he might have captured the victor’s cup, And he learned too late, when the night slipped down, How close he was to the golden crown. Success is failure turned inside out— The silver tint of the clouds of doubt— And you never can tell how close you are, It may be near when it seems afar; So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit— It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.

The crucial lesson to remember is that if someone has confidence that something will succeed, grounded in a realistic estimation of the risks involved, then fear is just another obstacle to success. Taking risks without anticipating the consequences is foolish, of course, but if you have examined a situation thoroughly and still believe that there is a way through it, it may be worth the risk involved after all.

Instead the attitude of the medical profession has been that miracle cures are nonexistent, that the disease of which a person was cured did not exist in the first place, either because it was an imaginary disorder, such as a hysterical conversion reaction, or else because it was a misdiagnosis. Fortunately, however, a few serious scientists, physicians and religious truth-seekers are currently in the process of beginning to examine the nature of such phenomena as spontaneous remissions in cancer patients and apparently successful examples of psychic healing. Fifteen

The cause of Communism's bloodthirsty history may be found in the grandiosity of Communism as an idea, and the grandiose self-conception of the Communist as an agent of that idea. The successful strata of Communist revolutionaries suffer from an enormous, bloated egotism. One has merely to examine the psychology of a Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. Such are the special pampered children of history, magnificent in their own eyes, epic heroes, supreme and god-like agents of history's splendid drama. Here one finds no sense of self-limitation. There is only self-expansion. Unlike the well-adjusted human being, the aspiring Communist dictator is soaked in arrogance. From all of this flows the bloodthirstiness of the mass murderer. Identifying himself with the forces of history, the Communist leader puts himself in God's shoes. Here is a narcissism so pathological, an emptiness so profound, that nothing may come of it except monstrous crime.

We will look beneath the surface and examine the underlying processes through which humans learn, innovate, and become more creative: whether in business, politics, or in our own lives. And we will find that in all these instances the explanation for success hinges, in powerful and often counterintuitive ways, on how we react to failure.

Like many other people, Mrs. Marshall imagined that business in the criminal courts was a succession of breath-taking thrills, that every case was a drama, every counsel a cross-examiner of genius “who could get anything out of you if he tried”, every speech a torrent of eloquence, every Judge a Solon.

For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of … We don’t have enough exercise. We don’t have enough work. We don’t have enough profits. We don’t have enough power. We don’t have enough wilderness. We don’t have enough weekends. Of course, we don’t have enough money—ever. We’re not thin enough, we’re not smart enough, we’re not pretty enough or fit enough or educated or successful enough, or rich enough—ever. Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds race with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to the reverie of lack … What begins as a simple expression of the hurried life, or even the challenged life, grows into the great justification for an unfulfilled life.2 As I read this passage, it makes total sense to me why we’re a nation hungry for more joy: Because we’re starving from a lack of gratitude. Lynne says that addressing scarcity doesn’t mean searching for abundance but rather choosing a mind-set of sufficiency:

Why is it that there is so much apparent religious working, and yet so little result in positive conversions to God--so many sermons, and so few souls saved--so much machinery, and so little effect produced--so much running here and there, and yet so few brought to Christ? Why is all this? The reply is short and simple. There is not enough private prayer. The cause of Christ does not need less working, but it does need among the workers more praying. Let us each examine ourselves, and amend our ways. The most successful workmen in the Lord's vineyard, are those who are like their Master, often and much upon their knees.