Futures Options Quotes

I hate how my past actions keep messing up my future options, Seth muttered. Then you've started down the road to wisdom, Grandpa replied.

When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. ‘This is my last experiment,’ wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. ‘If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I’ll have to be shown.

The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning: The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.

Advice to my younger self: 1 Start where you are with what you have 2 Try not to hurt other people 3 Take more chances 4 If you fail, keep trying

A strong business idea with a profitable future will no doubt attract better financing rather than the other options.

Less ego, more wealth. Saving money is the gap between your ego and your income, and wealth is what you don’t see. So wealth is created by suppressing what you could buy today in order to have more stuff or more options in the future. No matter how much you earn, you will never build wealth unless you can put a lid on how much fun you can have with your money right now, today.

The job facing American voters… in the days and years to come is to determine which hearts, minds and souls command those qualities best suited to unify a country rather than further divide it, to heal the wounds of a nation as opposed to aggravate its injuries, and to secure for the next generation a legacy of choices based on informed awareness rather than one of reactions based on unknowing fear.

Love doesn't keep a score of wrongs. Love doesn't bring up past failures. None of us is perfect. In marriage we do not always do the right thing. We have sometimes done and said hurtful things to our spouses. We cannot erase the past. We can only confess it and agree that it was wrong. We can ask for forgiveness and try to act differently in the future. Having confessed my failure and asked forgiveness, I can do nothing more to mitigate the hurt it may have caused my spouse. When I have been wronged by my spouse and she has painfully confessed it and requested forgiveness, I have the option of justice or forgiveness. If I choose justice and seek to pay her back or make her pay for her wrongdoing, I am making myself the judge and her the felon. Intimacy becomes impossible. If, however, I choose to forgive, intimacy can be restored. Forgiveness is the way of love.

Forget the past, think of future, remember God's goodness and His power and ability to take you to where you ought to be and establish you.

The hardest part of letting go is the "uncertainty"--when you are afraid that the moment you let go of someone you will hate yourself when you find out how close you were to winning their affection. Every time you give yourself hope you steal away a part of your time, happiness and future. However, once in a while you wake up to this realization and you have to hold on tightly to this truth because your heart will tear away the foundation of your logic, by making excuses for why this person doesn't try as much as you. The truth is this: Real love is simple. We are the ones that make it complicated. A part of disconnecting is recognizing the difference between being desired and being valued. When someone loves you they will never keep you waiting, give their attention and affection away to others, allow you to continue hurting, or ignore what you have gone through for them. On the other hand, a person that desires you can't see your pain, only what they can get from you with minimal effort in return. They let you risk everything, while they guard their heart and reap the benefits of your feelings. We make so many excuses for the people we fall in love with and they make up even more to remain one foot in the door. However, the truth is God didn't create you to be treated as an option or to be disrespected repeatedly. He wants you to close the door. If someone loves you and wants to be in your life no obstacle will keep them from you. Remember, you are royalty, not a beggar.

Eventually, it becomes a matter of scale. When the good outweighs the bad, you stay. When the bad is the only thing you notice anymore, you think about your future, or what’s left of it, consider options.

A goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don't sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, its a system. If you're waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it's a goal. If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure. All I'm suggesting is that thinking of goals and systems as very different concepts has power. Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good everytime they apply their system. That's a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.

I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.

Mara,” his arms gave me a squeeze, “baby, you’ve got to live in the now. Not in your head. Not controlled by your fears. You can’t live for what might happen five months in the future. You got issues you gotta face today. You gotta deal with them now. You got two kids who count on you and their lives aren’t gonna go perfect every day because you weigh every decision you make and tread cautiously. Those options are no longer available to you. You’re gonna have to live day to day and make decisions on the fly. And I’m tellin’ you I’m here to help. You need it and they need it. Are you honestly gonna say no?

Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.

Change Blindness is a condition, where people cling to an old belief without considering the future or better options

Sometimes all you need is one person with a guilty conscience to come forward and do the right thing. Often, the miracle you need resides inside of yourself, when you humbly ask for forgiveness.

We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.

Most good decisions will involve these steps: Figure out your goal or goals. Evaluate the importance of each goal. Array the options. Evaluate how likely each of the options is to meet your goals. Pick the winning option. Later use the consequences of your choice to modify your goals, the importance you assign them, and the way you evaluate future possibilities.

Strength comes from giving yourself to another. It comes from deep in your heart, the very thing you share with that other person. It comes from knowing that fear isn’t an option where a future is so certain.

Freewill at the level of mind is an illusion. The options you see, the thoughts you get and the option you choose is all part of hard script. The real freewill is at the soul level and you exercise it only in the moments when your soul is awake.

The choice is yours. Don't let your pronouncements destroy your destiny rather let them build your future up!

Stop letting the past taint the future. If someone shows you who they are… believe them.

The word on the street was that I had two options when it came to caring for my future baby: I could either eat, sleep, drink, bathe, walk, and work with my baby permanently affixed to my body until the two of us meld into one, or I could leave my baby out naked on a cold millstone to cry, refusing to hold or feed her until the schedule allowed. Apparently, there was no in between.

If you believe our cause so hopeless, why join us?" "Because you offered something I had forgotten could be offered, a choice. And I choose to die free.

Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options.

I always started studying with the best intentions, telling myself that today just might be the day it all fell into place, and everything would be different. But more often than not, though, after a couple of pages of practice problems, I'd find myself spiraling into an all-out depression. When it was really bad, I'd put my head down on my book and contemplate alternate options for my future. "whoa," I heard a voice say. It was muffled slightly by my hair, and my arm, which I locked around my head in an effort to keep my brain from seeping out.

Every time we are faced with a choice, and we are faced with them every minute of every day, we make a decision to follow its course into the future. But what of the abandoned options? Are they like unopened doors? Do alternative futures lie beyond them? How far would we wander from the course we have steered were we to go back and, just once, open Door A instead of Door B?

Singing what's in your heart? Naming the things you love and loathe? You can get hurt that way. Hell, you will get hurt that way. But you'll get hurt trying to hide away in all that silence and leave your life unsung. There's no future without tears. Are you really setting your hopes on not getting hurt at all? You think that's an option? You clearly aren't listening to enough Morrissey songs.

Here is an all-too-brief summary of Buffett’s approach: He looks for what he calls “franchise” companies with strong consumer brands, easily understandable businesses, robust financial health, and near-monopolies in their markets, like H & R Block, Gillette, and the Washington Post Co. Buffett likes to snap up a stock when a scandal, big loss, or other bad news passes over it like a storm cloud—as when he bought Coca-Cola soon after its disastrous rollout of “New Coke” and the market crash of 1987. He also wants to see managers who set and meet realistic goals; build their businesses from within rather than through acquisition; allocate capital wisely; and do not pay themselves hundred-million-dollar jackpots of stock options. Buffett insists on steady and sustainable growth in earnings, so the company will be worth more in the future than it is today.

So that's it?" asked the expendable. "Final decision," said Ram. "And it's the right one." "Why do you think so?" "Because we live or die, we'll learn something important from jumping into the fold. Thousands of future travelers will either follow us or not. But if we don't make the jump, we'll learn nothing, have no new options." "A lovely speech. It has been sent back to Earth. It will inspire millions." "Shut up," said Ram.

If I don't keep this job, then my only future career-options are working in Argos, or being a prostitute,' I say, wildly. 'Maybe you could work in Argos as a prostitute,' my mother says, merrily. She appears to be enjoying this conversation. 'They could list you in the catalogue, and people could queue up, and wait for you to come down the conveyor belt.

Our use of mass entertainment is "optional": No law requires us to watch television, listen to the radio, read magazines. Yet mass entertainment is a means of escape and stress-reduction on which most of us have become dependent.

I consider it completely irresponsible that public schools offer sex education but no systematic guidance to adolescent girls, who should be thinking about how they want to structure their future lives: do they want children, and if so, when should that be scheduled, with the advantages and disadvantages of each option laid out. Because of the stubborn biological burden of pregnancy and childbirth, these are issues that will always affect women more profoundly than men. Starting a family early has its price for an ambitions young woman, a career hiatus that may be difficult to overcome. On the other hand, the reward of being with one's children in their formative years, instead of farming out that fleeting and irreplaceable experience to day care centres or nannies, has an inherent emotional and perhaps spiritual value that has been lamentable ignored by second-wave feminism.

This important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.

Keeping your options open” is frequently more of a risk than committing to a plan of action.

The point, however, is not where you reside but where you dwell.

Rhea followed, because when your future husband is a mad sorcerer, following a hedgehog sometimes seems like a good option.

Knowing who you are and who you can become impacts how you view your options for the future.

I hate how my past actions keep messing up my future options,” Seth muttered.

For them, the last option was to have brain surgery, which involved removing parts of the skull and exposing the brain. (Since the brain has no pain sensors, a person can be conscious during this entire procedure, so Dr. Penfield used only a local anesthetic during the operation.)

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.

Determining whether a decision is good or bad means examining the quality of the beliefs informing the decision, the available options, and how the future might turn out given any choice you make.

Don't make feeling better an option for yourself—make it your big dream. Don't make self-care an option; make it your daily lifetime commitment. Don't make becoming who you want to be—and loving who you are—goals for the future; start right now.

Self-compassion often coexists with remorse. It does not mean shirking responsibility for our past. It’s about making sure that we don’t beat ourselves up so badly that we damage our future. It helps us realize that doing a bad thing does not necessarily make us a bad person. Instead of thinking “if only I weren’t,” we can think “if only I hadn’t.” This is why confession in the Catholic religion begins with “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” not “Forgive me, Father, for I am a sinner.

For people like us, looking towards the future can feel daunting. It can literally make us feel sick to the stomach and often induces panic attacks. Trust me, I’ve been there; I get it. That’s why the far-future should never be at the top of our “to-plan” list. It’s alright to have goals but to stress ourselves out with plans and options and worries of the future is a good way to drive us crazy. However, there is one time when I want you to consider the future. Always have something to look forward to.

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn’t want us to imagine. By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape – and we can begin to think and dream differently. Studying history will not tell us what to choose, but at least it gives us more options. Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future. Whether you want workers to go on a general strike, women to take possession of their bodies, or oppressed minorities to demand political rights – the first step is to retell their history. The new history will explain that ‘our present situation is neither natural nor eternal. Things were different once. Only a string of chance events created the unjust world we know today. If we act wisely, we can change that world, and create a much better one.’ This is why Marxists recount the history of capitalism; why feminists study the formation of patriarchal societies; and why African Americans commemorate the horrors of the slave trade. They aim not to perpetuate the past, but rather to be liberated from it.

The week before the wedding, I had heard Dad speaking to the wedding officiant on the phone. “Hmmph,” he said when he hung up, “they want me to decide between ‘I will’ and ‘I do.’ I didn’t know there was even an option. Which do you prefer, kid?” “Pretty much everybody says ‘I do,’ right?” I said. Dad nodded. “That’s what I thought.” “But then again, maybe ‘I will’ is nicer. It has the future in it. ‘I do’ just has the present.

Perhaps future generations will hack the system, move at will between storytelling technologies. As for me, I was retreating from the social option. I began taking myself to the water’s edge in order to read—away from the phone and the terrible Cyclops eye of my modem. On the seawall, bundled against wind and propped up with a sweater for a seat, I rediscovered a frame of mind that I was in danger of forgetting—real, trance-like reading that obliterated my anxieties, my fussing daily life.

The university ripped us from our homes and made us believe our futures could only consist of serving the Crown,' said Robin. 'The university tells us we are special, chosen, selected, when really we are severed from our motherlands and raised within spitting distance of a class we can never truly become a part of. The university turned us against our own and made us believe our only options were complicity or the streets. That was no favour, Sterling. It was cruelty. Don't ask me to love my master.

She turns to glance at me over her shoulder and I see that she has her capable face on, the face she wore on my two emergency-room visits, the face of packing the car for a vacation, the face I saw during Glen’s idiotic affair, the face of Thanksgiving dinner preparations for thirty people and the face of teacher’s conferences. It is the face that got me into college and the face that got Glen out of jail after many an arrest during protests. The face of I’ll take care of it. The face of failure is not an option.

She loves me. And I love her. I can’t stop loving her. No matter what she’s done to me, no matter what she might do in the future, I can never stop. I would cut off my hands for this woman. Strip the flesh off my bones for her. I can’t live without her, and I don’t want to try. Forgiving her isn’t optional. I have to do it. I can’t exist without it.

An aim reduces anxiety, because if you have no aim everything can mean anything or nothing, and neither of those two options makes for a tranquil spirit. Thus, we have to think, and plan, and limit, and posit, in order to live at all. How then to envision the future, and establish our direction, without falling prey to the temptation of totalitarian certainty?

I feel confident in saying that a climate-disrupted future is a bleak and an austere future, one capable of turning all our material possessions into rubble or ash with terrifying speed. We can pretend that extending the status quo into the future, unchanged, is one of the options available to us. But that is a fantasy. Change is coming one way or another. Our choice is whether we try to shape that change to the maximum benefit of all or wait passively as the forces of climate disaster, scarcity, and fear of the "other" fundamentally reshape us.

The Creed for the Sociopathic Obsessive Compulsive (Peter's Laws) 1. If anything can go wrong, Fix it!!! (To hell with Murphy!!) 2. When given a choice - Take Both!! 3. Multiple projects lead to multiple successes. 4. Start at the top, then work your way up. 5. Do it by the book... but be the author! 6. When forced to compromise, ask for more. 7. If you can't beat them, join them, then beat them. 8. If it's worth doing, it's got to be done right now. 9. If you can't win, change the rules. 10. If you can't change the rules, then ignore them. 11. Perfection is not optional. 12. When faced without a challenge, make one. 13. "No" simply means begin again at one level higher. 14. Don't walk when you can run. 15. Bureaucracy is a challenge to be conquered with a righteous attitude, a tolerance for stupidity, and a bulldozer when necessary. 16. When in doubt: THINK! 17. Patience is a virtue, but persistence to the point of success is a blessing. 18. The squeaky wheel gets replaced. 19. The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live. 20. The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself!!

Sometimes our blessings are limited. There is a tangible poverty that surrounds us. We are not offered an obvious tapestry of choices. Still, even when the choices seem bleak between a tiger’s teeth or deadly fall -- every moment offers up some third options (the true potentiality within the situation), and it is in our choices (conscious or not) that a future harvest depends.

It is true that humanity is faced with many problems. It always has been but perhaps not always with such keen awareness of them as we have today. We might be more optimistic if we recognized that we do not have to solve all of these problems. Our essential task—a big enough one to be sure—is simply to keep open the options for the future or perhaps even to broaden them a bit by creating new variety and new niches. Our grandchildren cannot ask more of us than that we offer to them the same chance for adventure, for the pursuit of new and interesting designs, that we have had.

The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unloved life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not. What we fantasize about, what we long for, are the experiences, the things and the people that are absent. It is the absence of what we need that makes us think, that makes us cross and sad. We have to be aware of what is missing in our lives - even if this often obscures both what we already have and what is actually available - because we can survive only if our appetites more or less work for us. Indeed, we have to survive our appetites by making people cooperate with our wanting. We pressurize the world to be there for our benefit. And yet we quickly notice as children - it is, perhaps, the first thing we do notice - that our needs, like our wishes, are always potentially unmet. Because we are always shadowed by the possibility of not getting what we want, we lean, at best, to ironize our wishes - that is, to call our wants wishes: a wish is only a wish until, as we say, it comes true - and, at worst, to hate our needs. But we also learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like.(…) There is always what will turn out to be the life we led, and the life that accompanied it, the parallel life (or lives) that never actually happened, that we lived in our minds, the wished-for life (or lives): the risks untaken and the opportunities avoided or unprovided. We refer to them as our unloved lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason - and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason - they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives. Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are. As we know more now than ever before about the kinds of lives it is possible to live - and affluence has allowed more people than ever before to think of their lives in terms of choices and options - we are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do. So when we are not thinking, like the character in Randall Jarrell's poem, that "The ways we miss our lives is life", we are grieving or regretting or resenting our failure to be ourselves as we imagine we could be. We share our lives with the people we have failed to be. We discover these unloved lives most obviously in our envy of other people, and in the conscious 9and unconscious) demands we make on our children to become something that was beyond us. And, of course, in our daily frustrations. Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken. The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continual and continuing loss, a sustained and sometimes sustaining rage; though at its best it lures us into the future, but without letting us wonder why such lures are required (we become promising through the promises made to us). The myth of potential makes mourning and complaining feel like the realest things we eve do; and makes of our frustration a secret life of grudges. Even if we set aside the inevitable questions - How would we know if we had realized our potential? If we don't have potential what do we have? - we can't imagine our lives without the unloved lives they contain. We have an abiding sense, however obscure and obscured, that the lives we do lead are informed by the lives that escape us. That our lives are defined by loss, but loss of what might have been; loss, that is, of things never experienced.

1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort? Pursuing the life projects that matter to you the most will almost always entail not feeling fully in control of your time, immune to the painful assaults of reality, or confident about the future. It means embarking on ventures that might fail, perhaps because you’ll find you lacked sufficient talent; it means risking embarrassment, holding difficult conversations, disappointing others, and getting so deep into relationships that additional suffering—when bad things happen to those you care about—is all but guaranteed. And so we naturally tend to make decisions about our daily use of time that prioritize anxiety-avoidance instead. Procrastination, distraction, commitment-phobia, clearing the decks, and taking on too many projects at once are all ways of trying to maintain the illusion that you’re in charge of things. In a subtler way, so too is compulsive worrying, which offers its own gloomy but comforting sense that you’re doing something constructive to try to stay in control. James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?” The question circumvents the urge to make decisions in the service of alleviating anxiety and instead helps you make contact with your deeper intentions for your time. If you’re trying to decide whether to leave a given job or relationship, say, or to redouble your commitment to it, asking what would make you happiest is likely to lure you toward the most comfortable option, or else leave you paralyzed by indecision. But you usually know, intuitively, whether remaining in a relationship or job would present the kind of challenges that will help you grow as a person (enlargement) or the kind that will cause your soul to shrivel with every passing week (diminishment). Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.

If you drop assumptions, and can anticipate the possibilities, you can master the art of strategy. However, if you can only manipulate probability, you can only create a path to victory. But remember, plans can break down. The future is always a step ahead of you. The key is being able to manipulate probability and plan for uncertainty. This way, you don't have to create a path to victory, but manipulate all options so that all paths lead to a victory.

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn’t want us to imagine. By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape — and we can begin to think and dream differently. Studying history will not tell us what to choose, but at least it gives us more options.

THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE life lessons that I learned as a result of walking on the Moon and the preparation that took us there—the guiding principles that have helped keep me going since returning to Earth. • The sky is not the limit … there are footprints on the Moon! • Keep your mind open to possibilities. • Show me your friends, and I will show you your future. • Second comes right after first. • Write your own epitaph. • Maintain your spirit of adventure. • Failure is always an option. • Practice respect for all people. • Do what you believe is right even when others choose otherwise. • Trust your gut … and your instruments. • Laugh … a lot! • Keep a young mind-set at every age. • Help others go beyond where you have gone. I hope these lessons will be as helpful to you as they have been to me. Take it from a man who has walked on the Moon: Be careful what you dream—it just might come to pass, so be prepared. Apollo is the story of people at their best, working together for a common goal. We started with a dream, and we can do these kinds of things again. With a united effort and a great team, you too can achieve great things. I know, because I am living proof that no dream is too high!

The options also were a way of shifting enormous risk from Renaissance to the banks. Because the lenders technically owned the underlying securities in the basket-options transactions, the most Medallion could lose in the event of a sudden collapse was the premium it had paid for the options and the collateral held by the banks. That amounted to several hundred million dollars. By contrast, the banks faced billions of dollars of potential losses if Medallion were to experience deep troubles. In the words of a banker involved in the lending arrangement, the options allowed Medallion to “ring-fence” its stock portfolios, protecting other parts of the firm, including Laufer’s still-thriving futures trading, and ensuring Renaissance’s survival in the event something unforeseen took place. One staffer was so shocked by the terms of the financing that he shifted most of his life savings into Medallion, realizing the most he could lose was about 20 percent of his money.

You make plans and decisions assuming randomness and chaos are for chumps. The illusion of control is a peculiar thing because it often leads to high self-esteem and a belief your destiny is yours for the making more than it really is. This over-optimistic view can translate into actual action, rolling with the punches and moving ahead no matter what. Often, this attitude helps lead to success. Eventually, though, most people get punched in the stomach by life. Sometimes, the gut-punch doesn’t come until after a long chain of wins, until you’ve accumulated enough power to do some serious damage. This is when wars go awry, stock markets crash, and political scandals spill out into the media. Power breeds certainty, and certainty has no clout against the unpredictable, whether you are playing poker or running a country. Psychologists point out these findings do not suggest you should throw up your hands and give up. Those who are not grounded in reality, oddly enough, often achieve a lot in life simply because they believe they can and try harder than others. If you focus too long on your lack of power, you can slip into a state of learned helplessness that will whirl you into a negative feedback loop of depression. Some control is necessary or else you give up altogether. Langer proved this when studying nursing homes where some patients were allowed to arrange their furniture and water plants—they lived longer than those who had had those tasks performed by others. Knowing about the illusion of control shouldn’t discourage you from attempting to carve a space for yourself out of whatever field you want to tackle. After all, doing nothing guarantees no results. But as you do so, remember most of the future is unforeseeable. Learn to coexist with chaos. Factor it into your plans. Accept that failure is always a possibility, even if you are one of the good guys; those who believe failure is not an option never plan for it. Some things are predictable and manageable, but the farther away in time an event occurs, the less power you have over it. The farther away from your body and the more people involved, the less agency you wield. Like a billion rolls of a trillion dice, the factors at play are too complex, too random to truly manage. You can no more predict the course of your life than you could the shape of a cloud. So seek to control the small things, the things that matter, and let them pile up into a heap of happiness. In the bigger picture, control is an illusion anyway.

Another blatant case of regress as part of the capitalist progress is the enormous rise of precarious work. Precarious work deprives workers of a whole series of rights that, till recently, were taken as self-evident in any country which perceived itself as a welfare state: precarious workers have to take care themselves of their health insurance and retirement options; there is no paid leave; the future becomes much more uncertain. Precarious work also generates an antagonism within the working class, between permanently employed and precarious workers (trade unions tend to privilege permanent workers; it is very difficult for precarious workers even to organize themselves into a union or to establish other forms of collective self-organization). One would have expected that this increasing exploitation would also strengthen workers’ resistance, but it renders resistance even more difficult, and the main reason for this is ideological: precarious work is presented (and up to a point even effectively experienced) as a new form of freedom – I am no longer just a cog in a complex enterprise but an entrepreneur-of-the-self, I am a boss of myself who freely manages my employment, free to choose new options, to explore different aspects of my creative potential, to choose my priorities

It is unfathomable that black parents would continue to put their children’s future at risk by pledging allegiance to abysmal public schools when the option to drastically improve their educational circumstances sits before them. It is even more unfathomable that liberals would ask them to. Is it not ironic that the same people who claim the American workforce is racist and that black Americans have a harder time securing jobs and moving up the corporate ladder would at the same time do all they can to prevent workplace preparedness by advocating against the best available paths for education? It is too often the case that those with the loudest voices against school choice are the very same Democrats who send their own kids to private schools. Their astounding hypocrisy is evidence of a more sinister intention, I believe. Perhaps Democrats simply understand that uneducated black children transform into uneducated adults, and uneducated adults are far more easily controlled by mass propaganda than those who think critically for themselves.

You all know and lived the 'secrets' to De La Salle's success-love, brotherhood, sacrifice, discipline, heart, courage, passion, honesty. These are not just 'catch words' we throw around to impress others or justify our existence. We know what these mean because we created it and lived it. Understand that with that knowledge there is no turning back for us-ignorance is not an option. It is your future duty, no matter where you end up, to create the environment you have created here by bringing your best selves to the table.

the parts of the brain corresponding to the limbic system (thought to respond only to more visceral, immediate rewards) were activated only when the decision involved comparing a reward today with one in the future. In contrast, the lateral prefrontal cortex (a more “calculating” part of the brain) responded with a similar intensity to all decisions, regardless of the timing of the options. Brains that work like this would produce a lot of failed good intentions. And indeed, we do see a lot of those, from New Year’s resolutions to gym memberships that lie unused.

Restating Kierkegaard, the cultural historian Louis Menand noted, “Anxiety is the price tag on human freedom.”2 Kierkegaard believed that we are free to choose our future actions, and this defines who we are.3 But modern science has concluded that our freedom is often more illusory than we think.4 Regardless of how free our will really is, though, the fact that we believe it is free makes us anxious when we perceive that we do not actually have control, when we face risky options in situations of uncertainty, or when we ruminate over how the present and future might be different if we had acted differently in the past.

Typically their parents, teachers, and others who recognized their strong potential and wanted to help them fulfill it would urge, cajole, and pressure them to exercise “willpower” to show the same strength, effort, and success in those other domains that could significantly improve their future options in life. Most often, those with ADHD joined in criticizing themselves for continuing failure to “just make myself do it.” Both the well-intentioned critics and the guilt-ridden criticized shared the erroneous assumption that symptoms of ADHD could be overcome with sufficient determination and continuing exercise of presumably available willpower.

I’d love to be able to tell you a story about the future, but I’d rather tell you a story that counts. I’d rather give you a sense of where you might come from, because you need to know where you’ve been to know where to go. The future is your story to tell. And maybe you have more options for the future than you thought. Maybe there are different ways to see what comes next. Wear your iron goggles and walk down Dark Lane at night to see what you can see. Stand by the weir and look at the river of time. Understand that you are part of something very old and yet constantly renewed. And that you may think you can forget history, but history will certainly not forget you. We all need a cunning plan. So be cunning.

Some people save money for a downpayment on a house, or a new car, or for retirement. That’s great, of course. But saving does not require a goal of purchasing something specific. You can save just for saving’s sake. And indeed you should. Only saving for a specific goal makes sense in a predictable world. But ours isn’t. Saving is a hedge against life’s inevitable ability to surprise the hell out of you at the worst possible moment. Savings without a spending goal gives you options and flexibility, the ability to wait and the opportunity to pounce. It gives you time to think. It lets you change course on your own terms. Every bit of savings is like taking a point in the future that would have been owned by someone else and giving it back to yourself.

Many of us get anxious in test-taking situations regardless of our intelligence, preparation, or familiarity with the material. One of the reasons test anxiety is so common is that it is relatively easy to trigger. Even one episode of heightened anxiety is sufficient for us to feel intensely anxious when facing a similar situation in the future. Test anxiety is especially problematic because it causes massive disruptions to our concentration, our focus, and our ability to think clearly, all of which have a huge impact on our performance. As a rule, anxiety tends to be extremely greedy when it comes to our concentration and attention. The visceral discomfort it creates can be so distracting, and the intellectual resources it hogs so critical, that we might struggle to comprehend the nuances of questions, retrieve the relevant information from our memory, formulate answers coherently, or choose the best option from a multiple-choice list. As an illustration of how dramatic its effects are, anxiety can cause us to score fifteen points lower than we would otherwise on a basic IQ test—a hugely significant margin that can drop a score from the Superior to the Average range.

Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and therefore existential nausea must be to a certain extent a universal experience, and something that must be dealt with by one mental strategy or another. Most people appear to learn to ignore it, as if it were some low chronic pain that has to be endured.

There is an Iroquois myth that describes a choice the nation was once forced to make. The myth has various forms. This is the simplest version. A council of the tribes was called to decide where to move on for the next hunting season. What the council had not known, however, was that the place they eventually chose was a place inhabited by wolves. Accordingly, the Iroquois became subject to repeated attacks, during which the wolves gradually whittled down their numbers. They were faced with a choice: to move somewhere else or to kill the wolves. The latter option, they realized, would diminish them. It would make them the sort of people they did not want to be. And so they moved on. To avoid repetition of their earlier mistake, they decided that in all future council meetings someone should be appointed to represent the wolf. Their contribution would be invited with the question, ‘Who speaks for wolf?

It was the Law of Attraction that she was referring to, and it was something I had always understood on a certain, nebulous level but rarely had paid attention to until a situation got so extreme that I had no other choice but to listen because I was out of other options. Like attracts like. Positive attracts positive, negative attracts negative. Change your outlook, change your day-to-day experience, change your future, change your world. Now that I was more conscious of it, I was working to enact it more into my life by making better choices and opening myself to the change that appeared for me to reach out and experience. That was key, too--being open to the change and allowing it to happen. Not being too afraid to experience something efferent and unfamiliar. Allowing yourself to stretch and grow in new ways of being. Change was scary, but it was exciting, too. It all comes back to you and your outlook.

Quantum physics tells us that no matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. The universe, according to quantum physics, has no single past, or history. The fact that the past takes no definite form means that observations you make on a system in the present affect its past. That is underlined rather dramatically by a type of experiment thought up by physicist John Wheeler, called a delayed-choice experiment. Schematically, a delayed-choice experiment is like the double-slit experiment we just described, in which you have the option of observing the path that the particle takes, except in the delayed-choice experiment you postpone your decision about whether or not to observe the path until just before the particle hits the detection screen. Delayed-choice experiments result in data identical to those we get when we choose to observe (or not observe) the which-path information by watching the slits themselves. But in this case the path each particle takes—that is, its past—is determined long after it passed through the slits and presumably had to “decide” whether to travel through just one slit, which does not produce interference, or both slits, which does. Wheeler even considered a cosmic version of the experiment, in which the particles involved are photons emitted by powerful quasars billions of light-years away. Such light could be split into two paths and refocused toward earth by the gravitational lensing of an intervening galaxy. Though the experiment is beyond the reach of current technology, if we could collect enough photons from this light, they ought to form an interference pattern. Yet if we place a device to measure which-path information shortly before detection, that pattern should disappear. The choice whether to take one or both paths in this case would have been made billions of years ago, before the earth or perhaps even our sun was formed, and yet with our observation in the laboratory we will be affecting that choice. In

Let’s step back. Every year between 1950 and 2000, Americans increased their productivity about 1 to 4 percent.1 Since 2005, however, this growth has slowed in advanced economies, with a productivity decrease recorded in the United States in 2016.2 Maybe our rapidly evolving technology that promises us near-limitless options to keep us busy is not, in fact, making us more productive? One possible explanation for our productivity slowdown is that we’re paralyzed by information overload. As Daniel Levitin writes in The Organized Mind, information overload is worse for our focus than exhaustion or smoking marijuana.3 It stands to reason, then, that to be more productive we need a way to stem the tide of digital distractions. Enter the Bullet Journal, an analog solution that provides the offline space needed to process, to think, and to focus. When you open your notebook, you automatically unplug. It momentarily pauses the influx of information so your mind can catch up. Things become less of a blur, and you can finally examine your life with greater clarity.

You were born with your head in the clouds, your future wide open, feeling almost weightless. Almost. Kudoclasm. You had dreams even before you had memories: a cloud of fantasies and ambitions of secret plans and hidden potential, visions of who you are, and what your life will be. They keep your spirits high, floating somewhere above your life, where the world looks faintly hypothetical, almost translucent. But every time you reach for the sky and come away with nothing, you start to wonder what’s holding them up. “Surely it would have happened by now?!” You feel time starting to slip, pulling you back down to earth. even as you tell yourself, don’t look down. You don’t have the luxury of floating through life, because you may not have the time. The future is already rushing toward you, and it’s not as far away as you think. It feels like your life is flashing before your eyes, but it’s actually just the opposite: you’re thinking forward, to everything you still haven’t done, the places you had intended to visit, the life goals you’d eventually get around to, some day in the future. You start dropping your delusions one by one, like tossing ballast overboard. And soon the fog lifts, and everything becomes clear— right until the moment your feet touch the ground. And there it is, “the real world.” As if you’ve finally grown up, steeped in reality, your eyes adjusting to the darkness, seeing the world for what it is. But in truth, you don’t belong there. We dream to survive— no more optional than breathing. Maybe “the real world” is just another fantasy, something heavy to push back against, and launch ourselves still higher. We’re all afraid to let go, of falling into a bottomless future. But maybe we belong in the air, tumbling in the wind. Maybe it’s only when you dive in that you pick up enough speed to shape the flow of reality, and choose your own course, flying not too high, and not too low, but gliding from one to the other in long playful loops. To dream big, and bounce ideas against the world and rise again. Moving so fast, you can’t tell where the dream ends and where the world begins.

When it comes to government as it is – and all that government ever could be – we are never really talking about two sides of the table. You get a letter in the mail informing you that your property taxes are going to increase 5% – there is no negotiation; no one offers you an alternative; your opinion is not consulted beforehand, and your approval is not required afterwards, because if you do not pay the increased tax, you will, after a fairly lengthy sequence of letters and phone calls, end up without a house. It is certainly true that your local cable company may also send you a notice that they’re going to increase their charges by 5%, but that is still a negotiation! You can switch to satellite, or give up on cable and rent DVDs of movies or television shows, or reduce some of the extra features that you have, or just decide to get rid of your television and read and talk instead. None of these options are available with the government – with the government, you either pay them, give up your house, go to jail, or move to some other country, where the exact same process will start all over again.

The great majority of those who, like Frankl, were liberated from Nazi concentration camps chose to leave for other countries rather than return to their former homes, where far too many neighbors had turned murderous. But Viktor Frankl chose to stay in his native Vienna after being freed and became head of neurology at a main hospital in Vienna. The Austrians he lived among often perplexed Frankl by saying they did not know a thing about the horrors of the camps he had barely survived. For Frankl, though, this alibi seemed flimsy. These people, he felt, had chosen not to know. Another survivor of the Nazis, the social psychologist Ervin Staub, was saved from a certain death by Raoul Wallenberg, the diplomat who made Swedish passports for thousands of desperate Hungarians, keeping them safe from the Nazis. Staub studied cruelty and hatred, and he found one of the roots of such evil to be the turning away, choosing not to see or know, of bystanders. That not-knowing was read by perpetrators as a tacit approval. But if instead witnesses spoke up in protest of evil, Staub saw, it made such acts more difficult for the evildoers. For Frankl, the “not-knowing” he encountered in postwar Vienna was regarding the Nazi death camps scattered throughout that short-lived empire, and the obliviousness of Viennese citizens to the fate of their own neighbors who were imprisoned and died in those camps. The underlying motive for not-knowing, he points out, is to escape any sense of responsibility or guilt for those crimes. People in general, he saw, had been encouraged by their authoritarian rulers not to know—a fact of life today as well. That same plea of innocence, I had no idea, has contemporary resonance in the emergence of an intergenerational tension. Young people around the world are angry at older generations for leaving as a legacy to them a ruined planet, one where the momentum of environmental destruction will go on for decades, if not centuries. This environmental not-knowing has gone on for centuries, since the Industrial Revolution. Since then we have seen the invention of countless manufacturing platforms and processes, most all of which came to be in an era when we had no idea of their ecological impacts. Advances in science and technology are making ecological impacts more transparent, and so creating options that address the climate crisis and, hopefully, will be pursued across the globe and over generations. Such disruptive, truly “green” alternatives are one way to lessen the bleakness of Earth 2.0—the planet in future decades—a compelling fact of life for today’s young. Were Frankl with us today (he died in 1997), he would no doubt be pleased that so many of today’s younger people are choosing to know and are finding purpose and meaning in surfacing environmental facts and acting on them.

She realized at once that he expected trouble and that he was used to handling deadly situations. It was the first time she’d actually seen him do it, despite their long history. It gave her a new, adult perspective on his lifestyle. No wonder he couldn’t settle down and become a family man. She’d been crazy to expect it, even in her fantasies. He was used to danger and he enjoyed the challenges it presented. It would be like housing a tiger in an apartment. She sighed as she saw the last tattered dream of a future with him going up in smoke. Tate looked through the tiny peephole and took his hand away from the pistol. He glanced at Cecily with an expression she couldn’t define before he abruptly opened the door. Colby Lane walked in, eyebrows raised, new scars on his face and bone weariness making new lines in it. “Colby!” Cecily exclaimed with exaggerated delight. “Welcome home!” Tate’s face contracted as if he’d been hit. Colby noticed that, and smiled at Cecily. “Am I interrupting something?” he asked, looking from one tense face to the other. “No,” Tate said coolly as he reholstered his pistol. “We were discussing security options, but if you’re going to be around, they won’t be necessary.” “What?” “I’m fairly certain that the gambling syndicate tried to kill her,” Tate said somberly, nodding toward Cecily. “A car almost ran her down in her own parking lot. She ended up in the hospital. And decided not to tell anyone about it,” he added with a vicious glare in her direction. “Way to go, Cecily,” Colby said glumly. “You could have ended up floating in the Potomac. I told you before I left to be careful. Didn’t you listen?” She shot him a glare. “I’m not an idiot. I can call 911,” she said, insulted. Colby was still staring at Tate. “You’ve cut your hair.” “I got tired of braids,” came the short reply. “I have to get back to work. If you need me, I’ll be around.” He paused at the doorway. “Keep an eye on her,” Tate told Colby. “She takes risks.” “I don’t need a big strong man to look out for me. I can keep myself out of trouble, thank you very much,” she informed Tate. He gave her a long, pained last look and closed the door behind him. As he walked down the staircase from her apartment, he couldn’t shake off the way she looked and acted. Something was definitely wrong with her, and he was going to find out what.

Never, not in her wildest dreams, had she dared to imagine that she'd be that important to someone. As if she was air and without her, he couldn't breathe. "I love you too," she whispered. "And I forgive future Sailor for being a dumbass." Linking her arms around his neck, she spoke through the storm inside her. "In fact, I think future Sailor is going to be an incredible man I'll adore more with each and every day." "Yeah?" His lips kicked up in that familiar smile, but there was a question in his eyes, a quiet hunger. "What's he going to do?" Ísa knew what he was asking her, what he needed her to tell him. "He's going to be a man who works hard but who has time for the people he loves. And he definitely has time to get up to wicked things with a certain redhead." "I like this guy's priorities already." "He's also the kind of father who takes a turn doing the school run because he enjoys spending time with his child." It was scary doing this, laying out her dreams, but Sailor had given her everything. Ísa would be brave enough to give him the same back. "He has time to play with his baby, and to kiss his wife, and even if he forgets things now and then, or if he gets a little busy for a while, it's all right because his wife and child and all the members of his family know they're loved beyond measure." Perfection had never been what Ísa wanted. "Because when it matters, he's there. He sees the people who love him." Demon-blue eyes solemn, Sailor said, "I can do that." It was a vow. "I can be that guy." "You already are." Ísa whispered. "You're my dream, Sailor." But Sailor shook his head. "You ain't seen nothing yet, spitfire. I'm going to court the hell out of you." After a meditative pause, he added, "Nakedness during said courting is optional but highly encouraged." He was wonderful. And he was hers.

In conclusion, I return to Einstein. If we find a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, its image, captured by a camera travelling at a fifth of light speed, will be slightly distorted due to the effects of special relativity. It would be the first time a spacecraft has flown fast enough to see such effects. In fact, Einstein’s theory is central to the whole mission. Without it we would have neither lasers nor the ability to perform the calculations necessary for guidance, imaging and data transmission over twenty-five trillion miles at a fifth of light speed. We can see a pathway between that sixteen-year-old boy dreaming of riding on a light beam and our own dream, which we are planning to turn into a reality, of riding our own light beam to the stars. We are standing at the threshold of a new era. Human colonisation on other planets is no longer science fiction. It can be science fact. The human race has existed as a separate species for about two million years. Civilisation began about 10,000 years ago, and the rate of development has been steadily increasing. If humanity is to continue for another million years, our future lies in boldly going where no one else has gone before. I hope for the best. I have to. We have no other option.

Note: I won’t be considering any theologically based Judeo-Christian views about these subjects beyond this broad summary here. As far as I can tell, most of the theological discussions center around omniscience—if God’s all-knowingness includes knowing the future, how can we ever freely, willingly choose between two options (let alone be judged for our choice)? Amid the numerous takes on this, one answer is that God is outside of time, such that past, present, and future are meaningless concepts (implying, among other things, that God could never relax by going to a movie and being pleasantly surprised by a plot turn—He always knows that the butler didn’t do it). Another answer is one of the limited God, something explored by Aquinas—God cannot sin, cannot make a boulder too heavy for Him to lift, cannot make a square circle (or, as another example that I’ve seen offered by a surprising number of male but not female theologians, even God cannot make a married bachelor). In other words, God cannot do everything, He can just do whatever is possible, and foreseeing whether someone will choose good or evil is not knowable, even for Him. Related to this all, Sam Harris mordantly notes that even if we each have a soul, we sure didn’t get to pick it.

But it was while discussing SpaceX’s grandest missions that Shotwell really came into her own and seemed to inspire the interns. Some of them clearly dreamed of becoming astronauts, and Shotwell said that working at SpaceX was almost certainly their best chance to get to space now that NASA’s astronaut corps had dwindled. Musk had made designing cool-looking, “non–Stay Puft” spacesuits a personal priority. “They can’t be clunky and nasty,” Shotwell said. “You have to do better than that.” As for where the astronauts would go: well, there were the space habitats, the moon, and, of course, Mars as options. SpaceX has already started testing a giant rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, that will take it much farther into space than the Falcon 9, and it has another, even larger spaceship on the way. “Our Falcon Heavy rocket will not take a busload of people to Mars,” she said. “So, there’s something after Heavy. We’re working on it.” To make something like that vehicle happen, she said, the SpaceX employees needed to be effective and pushy. “Make sure your output is high,” Shotwell said. “If we’re throwing a bunch of shit in your way, you need to be mouthy about it. That’s not a quality that’s widely accepted elsewhere, but it is at SpaceX.” And, if that sounded harsh, so be it. As Shotwell saw it, the commercial space race was coming down to SpaceX and China and that’s it. And in the bigger picture, the race was on to ensure man’s survival. “If you hate people and think human extinction is okay, then fuck it,” Shotwell said. “Don’t go to space. If you think it is worth humans doing some risk management and finding a second place to go live, then you should be focused on this issue and willing to spend some money. I am pretty sure we will be selected by NASA to drop landers and rovers off on Mars. Then the first SpaceX mission will be to drop off a bunch of supplies, so that once people get there, there will be places to live and food to eat and stuff for them to do.

Paul Graham, computer scientist and cofounder of Y Combinator—the start-up funder of Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Twitch—encapsulated Ibarra’s tenets in a high school graduation speech he wrote, but never delivered: It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it’s hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. . . . Most of the work I’ve done in the last ten years didn’t exist when I was in high school. . . . In such a world it’s not a good idea to have fixed plans. And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don’t give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you’re supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. . . . . . . Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway. In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.

It was a wake-up call to me to learn that Airbnb was by no means unique: Instagram started as a location-based social network called Burbn (which had an optional photo feature). It attracted a core group of users and more than $500,000 in funding. And yet the founders realized that its users were flocking to only one part of the app—the photos and filters. They had a meeting, which one of the founders recounts like this: “We sat down and said, ‘What are we going to work on next? How are we going to evolve this product into something millions of people will want to use? What is the one thing that makes this product unique and interesting?’”7 The service soon retooled to become Instagram as we know it: a mobile app for posting photos with filters. The result? One hundred thousand users within a week of relaunching. Within eighteen months, the founders sold Instagram to Facebook for $1 billion. I know that seems simple, that the marketing lesson from Instragram is that they made a product that was just awesome. But that’s good news for you—it means there’s no secret sauce, and the second your product gets to be that awesome, you can see similar results. Just look at Snapchat, which essentially followed the same playbook by innovating in the mobile photo app space, blew up with young people, and skyrocketed to a $3.5-billion-dollar valuation with next-to-no marketing.

Love doesn’t keep a score of wrongs. Love doesn’t bring up past failures. None of us is perfect. In marriage we do not always do the best or right thing. We have sometimes done and said hurtful things to our spouses. We cannot erase the past. We can only confess it and agree that it was wrong. We can ask for forgiveness and try to act differently in the future. Having confessed my failure and asked forgiveness, I can do nothing more to mitigate the hurt it may have caused my spouse. When I have been wronged by my spouse and she has painfully confessed it and requested forgiveness, I have the option of justice or forgiveness. If I choose justice and seek to pay her back or make her pay for her wrongdoing, I am making myself the judge and she the felon.

Peter’s Laws™ The Creed of the Persistent and Passionate Mind 1. If anything can go wrong, fix it! (To hell with Murphy!) 2. When given a choice—take both! 3. Multiple projects lead to multiple successes. 4. Start at the top, then work your way up. 5. Do it by the book . . . but be the author! 6. When forced to compromise, ask for more. 7. If you can’t win, change the rules. 8. If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them. 9. Perfection is not optional. 10. When faced without a challenge—make one. 11. No simply means begin one level higher. 12. Don’t walk when you can run. 13. When in doubt: THINK! 14. Patience is a virtue, but persistence to the point of success is a blessing. 15. The squeaky wheel gets replaced. 16. The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live. 17. The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself! 18. The ratio of something to nothing is infinite. 19. You get what you incentivize. 20. If you think it is impossible, then it is for you. 21. An expert is someone who can tell you exactly how something can’t be done. 22. The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. 23. If it was easy, it would have been done already. 24. Without a target you’ll miss it every time. 25. Fail early, fail often, fail forward! 26. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. 27. The world’s most precious resource is the persistent and passionate human mind. 28. Bureaucracy is an obstacle to be conquered with persistence, confidence, and a bulldozer when necessary.

Imaginary Lives Imaginary Lives is a thought experiment I have adapted from two important career-change thinkers, Julia Cameron and John Williams, which aims to take your ideas a stage closer towards specific job options.55 It’s simple but potentially powerful. • Imagine five parallel universes, in each of which you could have a whole year off to pursue absolutely any career you desired. Now think of five different jobs you might want to try out in each of these universes. Be bold in your thinking, have fun with your ideas and your multiple selves. Your five choices might be food photographer, member of parliament, tai chi instructor, social entrepreneur running a youth education project, and wide-achieving Renaissance generalist. One person I know who did this activity – a documentary film maker who was having doubts about her career – listed massage therapist, sculptor, cellist, screen-play writer, and owner of her own bar on a tiny, old-fashioned Canarian island. Now come back down to earth and look hard at your five choices. Write down what it is about them that attracts you. Then look at them again, and think about this question: • How does each career measure up against the two motivations in the previous activity that you chose to prioritize in the future? If you decided, for instance, that you want a combination of making a difference and high status, check whether your five imaginary careers might provide them. The point is to help you think more deeply about exactly what you are looking for in a career, the kind of experiences that you truly desire.

To be ridiculously sweeping: baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lowercase gods of our private devising. We are concerned with leading less a good life than the good life. In contrast to our predecessors, we seldom ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask ourselves if we are happy. We shun self-sacrifice and duty as the soft spots of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and we’re not especially bothered by what happens once we’re dead. As we age—oh, so reluctantly!—we are apt to look back on our pasts and question not did I serve family, God and country, but did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat? We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun. If that package sounds like one big moral step backward, the Be Here Now mentality that has converted from sixties catchphrase to entrenched gestalt has its upsides. There has to be some value in living for today, since at any given time today is all you’ve got. We justly cherish characters capable of living “in the moment.”…We admire go-getters determined to pack their lives with as much various experience as time and money provide, who never stop learning, engaging, and savoring what every day offers—in contrast to the dour killjoys who are bitter and begrudging in the ceaseless fulfillment of obligation. For the role of humble server, helpmate, and facilitator no longer to constitute the sole model of womanhood surely represents progress for which I am personally grateful. Furthermore, prosperity may naturally lead any well-off citizenry to the final frontier: the self, whose borders are as narrow or infinite as we make them. Yet the biggest social casualty of Be Here Now is children, who have converted from requirement to option, like heated seats for your car. In deciding what in times past never used to be a choice, we don’t consider the importance of raising another generation of our own people, however we might choose to define them. The question is whether kids will make us happy.

Future Europe’s problems are many, but four stand out. The first is energy: The Europeans are more dependent upon energy imports than the Asians, and no two major European countries think that problem can be solved the same way. The Germans fear that not having a deal with the Russians means war. The Poles want a deal with anyone but Russia. The Spanish know the only solution is in the Western Hemisphere. The Italians fear they must occupy Libya. The French want to force a deal on Algeria. The Brits are eyeing West Africa. Everyone is right. Everyone is wrong. The second is demographic: The European countries long ago aged past the point of even theoretical repopulation, meaning that the European Union is now functionally an export union. Without the American-led Order, the Europeans lose any possibility of exporting goods, which eliminates the possibility of maintaining European society in its current form. The third is economic preference: Perhaps it is mostly subconscious these days, but the Europeans are aware of their bloody history. A large number of conscious decisions were made by European leaders to remodel their systems with a socialist bent so their populations would be vested within their collective systems. This worked. This worked well. But only in the context of the Order with the Americans paying for the bulk of defense costs and enabling growth that the Europeans could have never fostered themselves. Deglobalize and Europe’s demographics and lack of global reach suggest that permanent recession is among the better interpretations of the geopolitical tea leaves. I do not see a path forward in which the core of the European socialist-democratic model can survive. The fourth and final problem: Not all European states are created equal. For every British heavyweight, there is a Greek basket case. For every insulated France, there is a vulnerable Latvia. Some countries are secure or rich or have a tradition of power projection. Others are vulnerable or poor or are little more than historical doormats. Perhaps worst of all, the biggest economic player (Germany) is the one with no options but to be the center weight of everything, while the two countries with the greatest capacity to go solo (France and the United Kingdom) hedged their bets and never really integrated with the rest of Europe. There’s little reason to expect the French to use their reach to benefit Europe, and there’s no reason to expect assistance from the British, who formally seceded from the European Union in 2020. History,

The past is gone and the future is still to happen. Only the present moment is real. I believe we all know this very well. As for me, I have been practising the art of being in the here and now for three decades. I have used many techniques aimed at focusing the attention on the present, while releasing attachment to past and future. There are also many courses and workshops on the topic. And I can provide details, if you are interested. Yet, I warn you, learning to be in the present requires lots of hard work, time and money. Yet there is one circumstance when results are immediate, with no effort and also free of charge. This is when both looking ahead or backwards is so painful and horrible, that the only option is looking straight into the present. Hence, if it is the case for you now, rejoice, this may be your greatest chance, and you are in good company!

Does God get what God wants? That’s a good question. An interesting question. And it’s an important question that has given us much to discuss. But there’s a better question. One that we actually can answer. One that takes all of the speculation about the future, which no one has been to and returned with hard empirical evidence, and brings it back to one absolute we can depend on in the midst of all of this which turns out to be another question. It’s not, “Does God get what God wants?” but “Do we get what we want?” and the answer to that is a resounding, affirming, sure and certain yes. Yes, we get what we want, God is that loving. If we want isolation, despair, and the right to be our own god, God graciously grants us that option. If we insist on using our God-given power and strength to make the world in our own image, God allows us that freedom and we have that kind of license to do that. If we want nothing to do with light, love, hope, grace, and peace God respects that desire on our part and we are given a life free from any of those realities. The more we want nothing to do with what God is, the more distance and space is created. If we want nothing to do with love, we are given a reality free from love. If, however, we crave light, we’re drawn to truth, we’re desperate for grace, we’ve come to the end of our plots and schemes and we want someone else’s path, God gives us what we want. If we have this sense that we have wandered far from home and we want to return, God is there standing in the driveway arms open, ready to invite us in. If we thirst for Shalom and we long for the peace that transcends all understanding, God doesn’t just give, they are poured out on us lavishly, heaped until we are overwhelmed. It’s like a feast where the food and wine do not run out. These desires can start with the planting of an infinitesimally small seed in our heart, or a yearning for life to be better, or a gnawing sense that we are missing out, or an awareness that beyond the routine and grind of life there is something more, or the quiet hunch that this isn’t all there is. It often has it’s birth in the most unexpected ways, arising out of our need for something we know we do not have, for someone we know we are not. And to that, that impulse, craving, yearning, longing, desire God says, “Yes!”. Yes there is water for that thirst, food for that hunger, light for that darkness, relief for that burden. If we want hell, if we want heaven then they are ours. that’s how love works, it can’t be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide. God says, “yes”, we can have what we want because love wins.

Jane, I don’t care what capacity you let me have in your life. I just want to be there. And if that means I have to keep my distance, I’ll do that.” I sighed. If ever there was a time for me to lay all my cards on the table, this was it. Naked, wounded, and vulnerable. “So, here’s my basic problem with us, the reason I can’t seem to relax into a relationship with you, the reason I find problems where none exist and I push you away. I—I can’t figure out why you’re with me!” I exclaimed, clapping my hand over my mouth. I hadn’t meant for that part to come out. I had meant to say, “You lie and hide things from me.” Gabriel pried my fingers away from my lips. My hands trembled as stuff I’d been feeling for months tumbled from my tongue. “I know that makes me neurotic and sad, but I can’t figure out why you want to be with me. Every other woman in your life is exotic and beautiful and has all this history. And I’m just some drunk girl you followed home from a bar, some pathetic human you felt your usual need to protect, and you got stuck with a lifetime tie to her because she was dumb enough to get shot. I can’t stand the idea that you feel obligated to me. I know I’m insecure and pushy and spastic, desperately inappropriate at times and just plain odd at others. And I can’t help but wonder why you would want that when there are obviously so many other options. I can’t help but feel that I’m keeping you from someone better.” I let out a loud, long breath. It felt as if some tremendous weight on my chest had wiggled loose and then dropped away. No more running. No more floating along and waiting. My cards were on the table. If Gabriel and I couldn’t have a future after this, it wasn’t because I held back from him. Now I could only hope it didn’t blow up in my face in some horrible way. I wasn’t sure my face could handle much more. Gabriel sighed and cupped my chin, forcing me to look him in the eye. “I didn’t follow you that night because I wanted to protect you. I followed you that night because you were one of the most interesting people I’d met in decades. You had this light about you, this sweetness, this biting humor. After I’d only known you for an hour, you made me laugh harder than I had since before I was turned. You made me feel normal, at peace, for the first time in years. And I didn’t want to lose that yet. Even if it was just watching over you from a mile away, I didn’t want to leave your presence. I followed you because I didn’t want to let you go. Even then, I saw you were one of the most extraordinary, fascinating, maddening people I would ever know. Even then, I think I knew that I would love you. If you don’t love me, that’s one thing. But if you do, just stop arguing with me about it. It’s annoying. ” “Fair enough,” I conceded. “Why the hell couldn’t you have told me this a year ago?” “I’ve wanted to. You weren’t ready to hear it.

breaking things off, convinced that our partner’s psychological issues are making things impossible, or that we’re not as compatible as we’d believed. Either of these might conceivably be true in certain cases; people are sometimes guilty of spectacularly bad choices in love, and in other domains as well. But more often, the real problem is just that the other person is one other person. In other words, the cause of your difficulties isn’t that your partner is especially flawed, or that the two of you are especially incompatible, but that you’re finally noticing all the ways in which your partner is (inevitably) finite, and thus deeply disappointing by comparison with the world of your fantasy, where the limiting rules of reality don’t apply. The point that Bergson made about the future—that it’s more appealing than the present because you get to indulge in all your hopes for it, even if they contradict each other—is no less true of fantasy romantic partners, who can easily exhibit a range of characteristics that simply couldn’t coexist in one person in the real world. It’s common, for example, to enter a relationship unconsciously hoping that your partner will provide both an unlimited sense of stability and an unlimited sense of excitement—and then, when that’s not what transpires, to assume that the problem is your partner and that these qualities might coexist in someone else, whom you should therefore set off to find. The reality is that the demands are contradictory. The qualities that make someone a dependable source of excitement are generally the opposite of those that make him or her a dependable source of stability. Seeking both in one real human isn’t much less absurd than dreaming of a partner who’s both six and five feet tall. And not only should you settle; ideally, you should settle in a way that makes it harder to back out, such as moving in together, or getting married, or having a child. The great irony of all our efforts to avoid facing finitude—to carry on believing that it might be possible not to have to choose between mutually exclusive options—is that when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result.

One of the things that I’ve always felt missing from funerals and services is the voice of the man or woman who was the deceased’s partner in life. I’ve always wanted to hear from the person who’d loved them more than anyone. Biblically, the two become one flesh--the spouse is their other half. It has always seemed to me that his or her voice was critical to truly understanding who the deceased was in life. I also felt that American Sniper had told only part of Chris’s story--an angry part in much of it. There was so much more to him that I wanted the world to know. People said Chris was blessed that I hung in there during his service to our country; in fact, I was the one who was blessed. I wanted everyone to hear me say that. Beforehand, a friend suggested I have a backup in case I couldn’t finish reading my speech--a “highway option,” as Chris used to call it: the way out if things didn’t go as planned. I refused. I didn’t want a way out. It wasn’t supposed to be easy. Knowing that I had to go through with it, that I had to finish--that was my motivator. That was my guarantee that I would finish, that I would keep moving into the future, as painful as it surely would be. When you think you cannot do something, think again. Chris always said, “The body will do whatever the mind tells it to.” I am counting on that now. I stand before you a broken woman, but I am now and always will be the wife of a man who is a warrior both on the battlefield and off. Some people along the way told Chris that through it all, he was lucky I stayed with him. I am standing before you now to set the record straight. Remember this: I am the one who is literally, in every sense of the word, blessed that Chris stayed with me. I feel compelled to tell you that I am not a fan of people romanticizing their loved ones in death. I don’t need to romanticize Chris, because our reality is messy, passionate, full of every extreme emotion known to man, including fear, compassion, anger, pain, laughing so hard we doubled over and hugged it out, laughing when we were irritated with each other and laughing when we were so in love it felt like someone hung the moon for only us… I looked at the kids as I neared the end, talking to them and only them. Tears ran from their faces. Bubba’s head hung down. It broke my heart. I kept reading. Then I was done.

Ellie goes back to the kitchen . . . and screams bloody murder. “Nooooooo!” Adrenaline spikes through me and I dart to the kitchen, ready to fight. Until I see the cause of her screaming. “Bosco, noooooo!” It’s the rodent-dog. He got into the kitchen, somehow managed to hoist himself up onto the counter, and is in the process of demolishing his fourth pie. Fucking Christ, it’s impressive how fast he ate them. That a mutt his size could even eat that many. His stomach bulges with his ill-gotten gains—like a snake that ingested a monkey. A big one. “Thieving little bastard!” I yell. Ellie scoops him off the counter and I point my finger in his face. “Bad dog.” The little twat just snarls back. Ellie tosses the mongrel on the steps that lead up to the apartment and slams the door. Then we both turn and assess the damage. Two apple and a cherry are completely devoured, he nibbled at the edge of a peach and apple crumb and left tiny paw-prints in two lemon meringues. “We’re going to have re-bake all seven,” Ellie says. I fold my arms across my chest. “Looks that way.” “It’ll take hours,” she says. “Yeah.” “But we have to. There isn’t any other choice.” Silence follows. Heavy, meaningful silence. I glance sideways at Ellie, and she’s already peeking over at me. “Or . . . is there?” she asks slyly. I look at what remains of the damaged pastries, considering all the options. “If we slice off the chewed bits . . .” “And smooth out the meringue . . .” “Put the licked ones in the oven to dry out . . .” “Are you two out of your motherfucking minds?” I swing around to find Marty standing in the alley doorway behind us. Eavesdropping and horrified. Ellie tries to cover for us. But she’s bad at it. “Marty! When did you get here? We weren’t gonna do anything wrong.” Covert ops are not in her future. “Not anything wrong?” he mimics, stomping into the room. “Like getting us shut down by the goddamn health department? Like feeding people dog-drool pies—have you no couth?” “It was just a thought,” Ellie swears—starting to laugh. “A momentary lapse in judgment,” I say, backing her up. “We’re just really tired and—” “And you’ve been in this kitchen too long.” He points to the door. “Out you go.” When we don’t move, he goes for the broom. “Go on—get!” Ellie grabs her knapsack and I guide her out the back door as Marty sweeps at us like we’re vermin

As Allied forces moved into Hitler’s Fortress Europe, Roosevelt and his circle were confronted with new evidence of the Holocaust. In early 1942, he had been given information that Adolf Hitler was quietly fulfilling his threat to “annihilate the Jewish race.” Rabbi Stephen Wise asked the President that December 1942 to inform the world about “the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history” and “try to stop it.” Although he was willing to warn the world about the impending catastrophe and insisted that there be war crimes commissions when the conflict was over, Roosevelt told Wise that punishment for such crimes would probably have to await the end of the fighting, so his own solution was to “win the war.” The problem with this approach was that by the time of an Allied victory, much of world Jewry might have been annihilated. By June 1944, the Germans had removed more than half of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews, and some Jewish leaders were asking the Allies to bomb railways from Hungary to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In response, Churchill told his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, that the murder of the Jews was “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,” and ordered him to get “everything” he could out of the British Air Force. But the Prime Minister was told that American bombers were better positioned to do the job. At the Pentagon, Stimson consulted John McCloy, who later insisted, for decades, that he had “never talked” with Roosevelt about the option of bombing the railroad lines or death camps. But in 1986, McCloy changed his story during a taped conversation with Henry Morgenthau’s son, Henry III, who was researching a family history. The ninety-one-year-old McCloy insisted that he had indeed raised the idea with the President, and that Roosevelt became “irate” and “made it very clear” that bombing Auschwitz “wouldn’t have done any good.” By McCloy’s new account, Roosevelt “took it out of my hands” and warned that “if it’s successful, it’ll be more provocative” and “we’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business,” as well as “bombing innocent people.” McCloy went on, “I didn’t want to bomb Auschwitz,” adding that “it seemed to be a bunch of fanatic Jews who seemed to think that if you didn’t bomb, it was an indication of lack of venom against Hitler.” If McCloy’s memory was reliable, then, just as with the Japanese internment, Roosevelt had used the discreet younger man to discuss a decision for which he knew he might be criticized by history, and which might conceivably have become an issue in the 1944 campaign. This approach to the possible bombing of the camps would allow the President to explain, if it became necessary, that the issue had been resolved at a lower level by the military. In retrospect, the President should have considered the bombing proposal more seriously. Approving it might have required him to slightly revise his insistence that the Allies’ sole aim should be winning the war, as he did on at least a few other occasions. But such a decision might have saved lives and shown future generations that, like Churchill, he understood the importance of the Holocaust as a crime unparalleled in world history.*