“
In my experience, those who have the greatest respect for the rules also take the most enjoyment in breaking them.
”
”
Lucy Foley (The Guest List)
“
We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.
”
”
Jeff Bezos
“
A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling. We storytellers are all ancient mariners, and none of us is justified in stopping wedding guests, unless he has something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experiences of every average man and woman.
”
”
Thomas Hardy
“
This is what I would later call the Rule of 95/5: Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent “foolishly.” It sounds irresponsible; in fact, it’s anything but. Because that last 5 percent has an outsize impact on the guest experience, it’s some of the smartest money you’ll ever spend.
”
”
Will Guidara (Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect)
“
We can make room for more experiences of radiance, peace, and beauty; and when we do, they arrive. When we make an intention to experience peace, when we value it enough to make room for it and invite it into our busy lives, it arrives bearing gifts. We make room for this guest, not by doing anything, but by just being, just allowing ourselves to rest, once and for all, in this sweet moment with no agenda, no purpose, no reason, but just to experience the moment as it is. We make room for peace and happiness by just noticing them. We notice that they are already here, and noticing them brings them more strongly into focus. Peace and happiness are always here, but they often go unnoticed.
”
”
Gina Lake (What About Now?: Reminders for Being in the Moment)
“
Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think... and think... while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time
before death.
If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will rejoin with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten--
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the
City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next
life you will have the face of satisfied desire.
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that
does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.
”
”
Robert Bly
“
But maybe some things could never be erased. Maybe they tinted some cellular level of your experience, and even if you scraped away whatever part was on the surface, the rot had already gotten beneath.
”
”
Emma Cline (The Guest)
“
A western buckaroo, I share his scorn for people who go camping by the book, relying on the authority of some half-assed assistant scoutmaster whose total experience outdoors probably consists of two overnight hikes and a weekend in the Catskills. But we have just had that confrontation. The one who goes by Pritchard's book is Sid's wife, and I am wary. It is not my expedition. I am a guest here.
”
”
Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
“
If your events don’t smell like anything other than a meal, then you’re missing a huge opportunity to create positive, memorable experiences for your guests.
”
”
Andrea Driessen (The Non-Obvious Guide to Event Planning: For Kick-Ass Gatherings that Inspire People)
“
One of Richard Coraine’s most often repeated sayings was “One size fits one.” He was referring to the hospitality experience: some guests love it when you hang out at the table and schmooze, while others want you to take their order and disappear. It’s your job to read the guest and to serve them how they want to be served.
”
”
Will Guidara (Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect)
“
These men are ex–public schoolboys. They’ve spent much of their lives being forced to follow a strict set of rules that probably didn’t end with their leaving school: choices around what university to attend, what job to do, what sort of house to live in. In my experience those who have the greatest respect for the rules also take the most enjoyment in breaking them.
”
”
Lucy Foley (The Guest List)
“
Aside from wanting to write cracking good books that turn children into lifelong readers, I really want to create stories that enable kids to LOOK at the world around them. To see it for what it is, with wide open, wondering eyes. Our mass media is so horribly skewed. It presents this idea of 'normalcy' which excludes and marginalises so many for an idea of commercial viability which is really nothing but blinkered prejudice. People who are black and Asian and Middle Eastern and Hispanic, people who are gay or transgendered or genderqueer, people who have disabilities, disfigurements or illnesses - all have this vision of a world which does not include them shoved down their throats almost 24-7, and they're told 'No one wants to see stories about people like you. Films and TV shows about people like you won't make money. Stories about straight, white, cisgendered, able-bodied people are universal and everyone likes them. You are small and useless and unattractive and you don't matter.'
My worry is that this warped version of 'normal' eventually forms those very same blinkers on children's eyes, depriving them of their ability to see anyone who isn't the same as them, preventing them from developing the ability to empathise with and appreciate and take joy in the lives and experiences of people who are different from them. If Shadows on the Moon - or anything I write - causes a young person to look at their own life, or the life of another, and think, 'Maybe being different is cool' I will die a happy writer.
-Guest blog - what diversity means to me
”
”
Zoë Marriott
“
Nobody in the world welcomes us quite like our parents do. The reception, if we're lucky, is a simultaneous cosseting and taking for granted. An experience that's, at best, comforting and exasperating in equal measure, unique in its loaded history of give andtake, its private parameters of permission and expection.
”
”
Priya Basil (Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community and the Meaning of Generosity)
“
Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think . . . and think . . . while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time before death . . . .
Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the guest that does all the work . . .
”
”
Kabir
“
Pema Chödrön did not become one of my teachers until I had almost finished writing, but she diagnosed the problem so well that I can no longer say it without her help. We are all so busy constructing zones of safety that keep breaking down, she says, that we hardly notice where all the suffering is coming from. We keep thinking that the problem is out there, in the things that scare us: dark nights, dark thoughts, dark guests, dark emotions. If we could just defend ourselves better against those things, we think, then surely we would feel more solid and secure. But of course we are wrong about that, as experience proves again and again. The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there. The suffering comes from our reluctance to learn to walk in the dark.1
”
”
Barbara Brown Taylor (Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night)
“
The Idiot. I have read it once, and find that I don't remember the events of the book very well--or even all the principal characters. But mostly the 'portrait of a truly beautiful person' that dostoevsky supposedly set out to write in that book. And I remember how Myshkin seemed so simple when I began the book, but by the end, I realized how I didn't understand him at all. the things he did. Maybe when I read it again it will be different. But the plot of these dostoevsky books can hold such twists and turns for the first-time reader-- I guess that's b/c he was writing most of these books as serials that had to have cliffhangers and such.
But I make marks in my books, mostly at parts where I see the author's philosophical points standing in the most stark relief. My copy of Moby Dick is positively full of these marks. The Idiot, I find has a few...
Part 3, Section 5. The sickly Ippolit is reading from his 'Explanation' or whatever its called. He says his convictions are not tied to him being condemned to death. It's important for him to describe, of happiness: "you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it." That it's the process of life--not the end or accomplished goals in it--that matter. Well. Easier said than lived!
Part 3, Section 6. more of Ippolit talking--about a christian mindset. He references Jesus's parable of The Word as seeds that grow in men, couched in a description of how people are interrelated over time; its a picture of a multiplicity.
Later in this section, he relates looking at a painting of Christ being taken down from the cross, at Rogozhin's house. The painting produced in him an intricate metaphor of despair over death "in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has aimlessly clutched, crushed, and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was created perhaps solely for the sake of the advent of this Being." The way Ippolit's ideas are configured, here, reminds me of the writings of Gilles Deleuze. And the phrasing just sort of remidns me of the way everyone feels--many people feel crushed by the incomprehensible machine, in life. Many people feel martyred in their very minor ways. And it makes me think of the concept that a narrative religion like Christianity uniquely allows for a kind of socialized or externalized, shared experience of subjectivity. Like, we all know the story of this man--and it feels like our own stories at the same time.
Part 4, Section 7. Myshkin's excitement (leading to a seizure) among the Epanchin's dignitary guests when he talks about what the nobility needs to become ("servants in order to be leaders"). I'm drawn to things like this because it's affirming, I guess, for me: "it really is true that we're absurd, that we're shallow, have bad habits, that we're bored, that we don't know how to look at things, that we can't understand; we're all like that." And of course he finds a way to make that into a good thing. which, it's pointed out by scholars, is very important to Dostoevsky philosophy--don't deny the earthly passions and problems in yourself, but accept them and incorporate them into your whole person. Me, I'm still working on that one.
”
”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“
A daughter of immigrants is the daughter of guests, is a part-time guest herself, and the best kind of guest goes with the flow. She stays in a guesthouse.
”
”
Weike Wang (Joan Is Okay)
“
I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It frightened me for Claire to bare her needs so openly. If a person needed something badly, it was my experience that it would surely be taken away. I didn’t need to put mirrors on the roof to know that.
”
”
Janet Fitch (White Oleander)
“
I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West's technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be. I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views. I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing.
Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations. Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Westerner as pleasure.
I was aghast. Did he not know that repression was at its worst when there was no complaint? A hundred times more so when the victim actually presented a smiling face? Could he not see to what a pathetic condition these professors had been reduced, and what horror must have been involved to degrade them so? I did not realize that the acting that the Chinese were putting on was something to which Westerners were unaccustomed, and which they could not always decode.
I did not appreciate either that information about China was not easily available, or was largely misunderstood, in the West, and that people with no experience of a regime like China's could take its propaganda and rhetoric at face value. As a result, I assumed that these eulogies were dishonest. My friends and I would joke that they had been bought by our government's 'hospitality." When foreigners were allowed into certain restricted places in China following Nixon's visit, wherever they went the authorities immediately cordoned off enclaves even within these enclaves. The best transport facilities, shops, restaurants, guest houses and scenic spots were reserved for them, with signs reading "For Foreign Guests Only." Mao-tai, the most sought-after liquor, was totally unavailable to ordinary Chinese, but freely available to foreigners. The best food was saved for foreigners. The newspapers proudly reported that Henry Kissinger had said his waistline had expanded as a result of the many twelve-course banquets he enjoyed during his visits to China. This was at a time when in Sichuan, "Heaven's Granary," our meat ration was half a pound per month, and the streets of Chengdu were full of homeless peasants who had fled there from famine in the north, and were living as beggars. There was great resentment among the population about how the foreigners were treated like lords. My friends and I began saying among ourselves: "Why do we attack the Kuomintang for allowing signs saying "No Chinese or Dogs" aren't we doing the same?
Getting hold of information became an obsession. I benefited enormously from my ability to read English, as although the university library had been looted during the Cultural Revolution, most of the books it had lost had been in Chinese. Its extensive English-language collection had been turned upside down, but was still largely intact.
”
”
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
“
You and your husband have, I think, been very fortunate to know so little, by experience, in your own case or in that of your friends, of the wicked recklessness with which people repeat things to the disadvantage of others, without a thought as to whether they have grounds for asserting what they say. I have met with a good deal of utter misrepresentation of that kind. And another result of my experience is the conviction that the opinion of "people" in general is absolutely worthless as a test of right and wrong. The only two tests I now apply to such a question as the having some particular girl-friend as a guest are, first, my own conscience, to settle whether I feel it to be entirely innocent and right, in the sight of God; secondly, the parents of my friend, to settle whether I have their full approval for what I do. You need not be shocked at my being spoken against. Anybody, who is spoken about at all, is sure to be spoken against by somebody: and any action, however innocent in itself, is liable, and not at all unlikely, to be blamed by somebody. If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much
”
”
Lewis Carroll (The Letters of Lewis Carroll)
“
it deeply important to accept that we are not the masters of this place. we are her visitors. and like guests let’s enjoy this place like a garden. let us treat it with a gentle hand. so the ones after us can experience it too. let’s find our own sun. grow our own flowers. the universe delivered us with the light and the seeds. we might not hear it at times but the music is always on. it just needs to be turned louder. for as long as there is breath in our lungs—we must keep dancing.
”
”
Rupi Kaur (The Sun and Her Flowers)
“
there are so many turquoise bodies of water left for us to dive in. there is family. blood or chosen. the possibility of falling in love. with people and places. hills high as the moon. valleys that roll into new worlds. and road trips. i find it deeply important to accept that we are not the masters of this place. we are her visitors. and like guests let’s enjoy this place like a garden. let us treat it with a gentle hand. so the ones after us can experience it too. let’s find our own sun. grow our own flowers. the universe delivered us with the light and the seeds. we might not hear it at times but the music is always on. it just needs to be turned louder. for as long as there is breath in our lungs — we must keep dancing.
”
”
Rupi Kaur (The sun and her flowers)
“
To transform the biological necessity of feeding into a flow experience, one must begin by paying attention to what one eats. It is astonishing—as well as discouraging—when guests swallow lovingly prepared food without any sign of having noticed its virtues. What
”
”
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience)
“
Hostel is one phase in a man's life that teaches him what Indian mothers fail to teach their children despite the use of potential weapons like rolling pin,broom stick, wiper so on and henceforth. Who knows if you are luckier, you might just experience your bachelorhood as a paying guest.
”
”
Parul Wadhwa (The Masquerade)
“
We who are here to-night are here as the servants of the guests of a great University, a University of knowledge, scholarship, and intellect. You do well to be proud of it. But I have wondered whether there may not be colleges and faculties of other experiences than yours, and whether even now in the far corners of the continents powers not yours are being brought to fruition. I have myself been something of a traveller, and every time I return to England I wonder whether the games of those children do not hold more intense life than the talk of your learned men-- a more intense passion for discovery, a greater power of exploration, new raptures, unknown paths of glorious knowledge; whether you may not yet sit at the feet of the natives of the Amazon or the Zambesi: whether the fakirs and the herdsmen, the witch-doctors may not enter the kingdom of man before you
”
”
Charles Williams (Shadows of Ecstasy)
“
Perhaps because of this, he felt he always knew who and what he was, which is why, as he moved farther and then further away from the ranch and his childhood, he felt very little pressure to change or reinvent himself. He was a guest at college, a guest in graduate school, and now he was a guest in New York, a guest in the lives of the beautiful and thhe rich.He would never try to pretend he was born to such things, because he knew he wasn't; he was a ranch hand's son from western Wyoming, and his leaving didn't mean that everything he had once been was erased, written over by time and experiences and the proximity of money.
”
”
Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
“
It was all in the wake of that realization that life is pain, that everything you love can and will be taken away from you, that the only way to keep going is to accept that that big black grief is going to fester there in your stomach forever - that it's never going to get better"
This is what made me realize that I am lucky.
...
I know that this is selfish, this solace in the fact that my loved ones will miss me and thus have to experience pain that I never will.
...
I get to go first . I get to leave before grief ever becomes the house guest that never leaves.
how lucky, not having to live with the ache of saying goodbye.
”
”
Will Leitch (How Lucky)
“
and then there are days when the simple act of breathing leaves you exhausted. it seems easier to give up on this life. the thought of disappearing brings you peace. for so long i was lost in a place where there was no sun. where there grew no flowers. but every once in a while out of the darkness something i loved would emerge and bring me to life again. witnessing a starry sky. the lightness of laughing with old friends. a reader who told me the poems had saved their life. yet there i was struggling to save my own. my darlings. living is difficult. it is difficult for everybody. and it is at that moment when living feels like crawling through a pin-sized hole. that we must resist the urge of succumbing to bad memories. refuse to bow before bad months or bad years. cause our eyes are starving to feast on this world. there are so many turquoise bodies of water left for us to dive in. there is family. blood or chosen. the possibility of falling in love. with people and places. hills high as the moon. valleys that roll into new worlds. and road trips. i find it deeply important to accept that we are not the masters of this place. we are her visitors. and like guests let’s enjoy this place like a garden. let us treat it with a gentle hand. so the ones after us can experience it too. let’s find our own sun. grow our own flowers. the universe delivered us with the light and the seeds. we might not hear it at times but the music is always on. it just needs to be turned louder. for as long as there is breath in our lungs—we must keep dancing.
”
”
Rupi Kaur (The sun and her flowers)
“
If guests often bring their stump rather than sprout speeches to events, if they often talk of their theories rather than their experiences, then organizers can succumb to their own kind of phoniness. They insist on keeping gatherings positive, especially when choosing themes. The meaningful gatherer doesn’t fear negativity, though, and in fact creates space for the dark and the dangerous.
”
”
Priya Parker (The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters)
“
He was a guest at his college, a guest in graduate school, and now he was a guest in New York, a guest in the lives of the beautiful and the rich. He would never try to pretend he was born to such things, because he knew he wasn’t; he was a ranch hand’s son from western Wyoming, and his leaving didn’t mean that everything he had once been was erased, written over by time and experiences and the proximity to money.
”
”
Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
“
Meditation is the way to be with ourselves and to learn to accept our own aloneness. In aloneness, I experiment with being consciously alone as a door to be egoless. In conscious aloneness, the ego can not function. In aloneness, you are not.
I have always been comfortable with my own aloneness as an inner source of love, joy, truth, silence and wholeness.
When we depend on other people, it becomes a bondage - instead of a freedom. I took this sunday as a meditation to be consciously alone, and to accept all feelings of pain, of not being loved and the fear of being nobody that would come up during the meditation. This meditation goes up and down during the day: at certain moments, I can totally accept my aloneness. It feels fine to accept that I am alone and that I am nobody. At other moments, I feel the pain of not being loved, when the meditation brings up how dependence on other people is a barrier to totally accept my aloneness.
I take a coffee at a restaurant. I am the only person that sits alone in the restaurant, while the other guests are couples and families eating sunday dinner. It brings up painful feelings of not being loved and wanting to be needed by other people, when I see how much people cling to each other in the couples and the families.
Escaping your aloneness through relationships and needing other people's attention through being a teacher, a politician or by being rich or famous, are ways of escaping the pain of aloneness. But then the relationships are not really love. Only when you are capable of being alone, you can really love.
When we can be alone, we discover the inner source of love, which is our true nature. When we can be alone, it open the door to be one with the Whole.
”
”
Swami Dhyan Giten (Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being)
“
Humanistic propaganda screams at us everywhere we go. “You deserve better.” “There’s no one like you.” “Stand up for yourself.” And after a while we start believing the mantra. The most influential culture-shaping document in American history is the Declaration of Independence. And built into the ethos of American society are three inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I think the wording is ironic: the pursuit of happiness. It’s almost like the architects of modern democracy said, “We guarantee you life, and we promise you liberty. But happiness? Good luck.” America is a social experiment founded on the pursuit of happiness. Hundreds of millions of Americans are chasing down happiness. Money, materialism, sex, romance, religion, family, and fame are all pursuits of the same human craving—joy. But apart from Jesus, we never get there. People spend decades searching high and low for happiness and never land at joy. In an odd twist of fate, America, for all her life and liberty, is one of the most depressed nations in the world. And many of us are mad at God. Somehow we think God owes us. We deserve happiness. We deserve a good, comfortable life, free from pain and suffering. We have rights! Right? The scriptures present a totally different worldview that stands against the humanism of Western Europe. It is written, “By grace you have been saved.”[17] The word grace is (charis) in the Greek, which can be translated as “gift.” All of life is grace. All of life is a gift. Humans have no rights. Everything is a gift. Food, shelter, the clothes on our backs, the oxygen in our lungs—it’s all grace. The entire planet, the sky above us and the ground beneath our feet, is all on loan from the Creator God. We live under his roof, eat his food, and drink his water. We are guests. And we are blessed. A reporter once asked Bob Dylan if he was happy. Dylan’s response was, “These are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It’s not happiness or unhappiness. It’s either blessed or unblessed.”[18] I like that. We are blessed. When you reorient yourself to a biblical worldview, the only posture left to take is gratitude. If all of life is a gift, how could we help but thank God?
”
”
John Mark Comer (My Name is Hope: Anxiety, depression, and life after melancholy)
“
Our guests in Caiette want to come to the wilderness, but they don’t want to be in the wilderness. They just want to look at it, ideally through the window of a luxury hotel. They want to be wilderness-adjacent. The point here”—he touched the white star with one finger, and Walter admired his manicure—“is extraordinary luxury in an unexpected setting. There’s an element of surrealism to it, frankly. It’s a five-star experience in a place where your cell phone doesn’t work.
”
”
Emily St. John Mandel (The Glass Hotel)
“
I thought of Atargatis, the First, frightening and beautiful. The mermaid goddess who lived on in the soul of every woman who'd ever fallen in love with the ocean.
I thought of Sebastian, my little mermaid queen, how happy he was the day of the parade, just getting the chance to express himself, to be himself.
I thought of Vanessa, the story about how she and her girlfriends became feminist killjoys to get a women's literature core in their school, the way she'd accepted me this summer without question, gently pushed me out of my self-imposed shell. Of her mother, Mrs. James, how she'd grabbed that bullhorn at the parade and paved the way for Sebastian's joy.
I thought of Lemon, so wise, so comfortable in her own skin, full of enough love to raise a daughter as a single mom and still have room for me, for her friends, for everyone whose lives she touched with her art.
I thought of Kirby, her fierce loyalty, her patience and grace, her energy, what a good friend and sister she'd become, even when I'd tried to shut her out. I thought of all the new things I wanted to share with her now, all the things I hoped she'd share with me.
I thought of my mother, a woman I'd never known, but one whose ultimate sacrifice gave me life.
I thought of Granna, stepping in to raise her six granddaughters when my mom died, never once making us feel like a burden or a curse. She'd managed the cocoa estate with her son, personally saw to the comforts of every resort guest, and still had time to tell us bedtime stories, always reminding us how much she treasured us.
I thought of my sisters. Juliette, Martine, and Hazel, their adventures to faraway lands, new experiences. Gabrielle with her island-hopping, her ultimate choice to follow her heart home.
And Natalie, my twin. My mirror image, my dream sharer. I knew I hadn't been fair to her this summer—she'd saved my life, done the best she could. And I wanted to thank her for that, because as long as it had taken me to realize it, I was thankful. Thankful for her. Thankful to be alive. To breathe.
”
”
Sarah Ockler (The Summer of Chasing Mermaids)
“
Love is metaphysical gravity.” By Gary Zukav GUEST COMMENTATOR Bucky said, “Love is metaphysical gravity.” I agree. What else could it be? Without gravity you would float like an astronaut in a spacecraft. Up and down would mean nothing to you. Your slightest motion would send you tumbling head over feet or rolling uncontrollably. If you pushed hard against a wall, you would shoot backward fast until you hit another wall. If the lights in the spacecraft went out, you would have no way at all of orienting yourself. Without love the same thing happens. Every experience of anger, jealousy, resentment, and fear sends you spinning out of control. You have no way of knowing up from down except what your anger shows you, and it always shows you that you are right and someone else is wrong, that you are a victim and someone else is a villain. The more you act in anger, jealousy, resentment, or fear, the more painful consequences you create. You careen helplessly, spinning, rolling, hitting walls you can’t avoid and colliding with others. Love grounds you. It orients you. Love brings your awareness to others and yourself. Love opens your mind and heart to others and yourself. Love settles you and gives you balance. When you choose to become sensitive and caring instead of frightened and selfish, your anger turns to appreciation, your jealousy to gratitude, and your resentment to caring. You cannot loose your orientation: When your deeds harm others, you are in fear, and when you create harmony, cooperation, sharing, and reverence for Life, you are in love. The ground beneath you is always solid.
”
”
L. Steven Sieden (A Fuller View: Buckminster Fuller's Vision of Hope and Abundance for All)
“
An 87 on the left, an 87 on the right. If a guest is dissatisfied with an elevator operator he can note the number and report him to the nearest starter. 'That 87 is a son-of-a-bitch, that 87 took me four floors too high, 87 87 87, I wasted two minutes in this box, that goddam son-of-a-bitch 87!' It's fun to berate a number. It's fun to use numbers. 24,035 deported to Siberia. Fun. Forty-seven dead in an airplane crash. Fun. 7,038,456 needles sold. Fun. Tonight Mister X got lucky three times. Fun. Today Miss Y died once. Fun. Right now I'm alone and I'll take a pill and have more fun.
”
”
Antanas Škėma (Balta drobulė)
“
The painter knows, sadly enough, that experience does not suffice unto itself, has no proportion, dimension, perspective, mournfully he eats his life but is not allowed to digest it, this being reserved for others, not knowing, but who must somehow, at any sacrifice be made to know, then punished for the sight of this knowledge, by aiding it on its journey from brain to brain.
It does not seem unreasonable that we invent colors, lines, shapes, capable of being, representative of existence, therefore it is not unreasonable that they, in turn, later, invent us, our ideas, directions, motivations, with great audacity, since we, ourselves having them upon our walls. What rude guests they prove to be, indeed: although paintings differ from life by energy a painter can never be a substitute for his paintings, so complete so independent as reality are they. Imagine the please they enjoy at this.
They by conversion into an idea of the person, do, instantaneously destroy him. A tragic gesture that actually leads to tragedy but diabolically exists only in an absence of tragedy, nevertheless procreating it, however, they are unreasonably enough, insufficient, because they are not made of ideas, they are made of paint, all else is really us.
Paintings are metaphors for reality, but instead of being an aid to realisation obscure the reality which is far more profound. The only way to circumvent painting is by absolute death.
”
”
William Gaddis (The Recognitions)
“
...As the evening wore on (the supper did not end until seven in the morning), the public were admitted to watch the festivities from the balustrade, and were offered biscuits and refreshments to keep them going through the night.
...One of the lawyers was so upset by the evening that he got up to leave, proclaiming: 'They will send you to the madhouse and strike you from the list of members of the Bar.' Grimod responded by locking the doors to the apartment and preventing any further guests from leaving. Coffee and liquers were taken in an adjoining room lit by 130 candles while the guests were entertained by a magic-lantern show and some experiments with electricity performed by the Italian physicist Castanio. M Rival tells us that many of the guests fell asleep.
”
”
Giles MacDonogh (Palate In Revolution Grimod De La Reynie)
“
Running a restaurant means setting a stage. The believability hinges on the details. We control how they experience the world: sight, sound, taste, smell, touch. That starts at the door, with the host and the flowers.” And then, the bar. Timeless: long, dark mahogany, with stools high enough to make you feel like you were afloat. The bar had soft music, dim lighting, tinkling layers of noise, the bumps of a neighbor’s knee, the reach of someone’s arm by your face to take a glittering martini, the tap of a hostess as she escorted guests behind your back, the blur of plates being passed, the rattle of drinks, the virtuoso performance of bartenders slapping bottles into the back bar while also delivering bread, while also taking an order with the requisite substitutions and complications. All the best regulars came in and greeted the hostess saying, Any space at the bar tonight?
”
”
Stephanie Danler (Sweetbitter)
“
Little Brother, an aspiring painter, saved up all his money and went to France, to surround himself with beauty and inspiration. He lived on the cheap, painted every day, visited museums, traveled to picturesque locations, bravely spoke to everyone he met, and showed his work to anyone who would look at it. One afternoon, Little Brother struck up a conversation in a café with a group of charming young people, who turned out to be some species of fancy aristocrats. The charming young aristocrats took a liking to Little Brother and invited him to a party that weekend in a castle in the Loire Valley. They promised Little Brother that this was going to be the most fabulous party of the year. It would be attended by the rich, by the famous, and by several crowned heads of Europe. Best of all, it was to be a masquerade ball, where nobody skimped on the costumes. It was not to be missed. Dress up, they said, and join us! Excited, Little Brother worked all week on a costume that he was certain would be a showstopper. He scoured Paris for materials and held back neither on the details nor the audacity of his creation. Then he rented a car and drove to the castle, three hours from Paris. He changed into his costume in the car and ascended the castle steps. He gave his name to the butler, who found him on the guest list and politely welcomed him in. Little Brother entered the ballroom, head held high. Upon which he immediately realized his mistake. This was indeed a costume party—his new friends had not misled him there—but he had missed one detail in translation: This was a themed costume party. The theme was “a medieval court.” And Little Brother was dressed as a lobster. All around him, the wealthiest and most beautiful people of Europe were attired in gilded finery and elaborate period gowns, draped in heirloom jewels, sparkling with elegance as they waltzed to a fine orchestra. Little Brother, on the other hand, was wearing a red leotard, red tights, red ballet slippers, and giant red foam claws. Also, his face was painted red. This is the part of the story where I must tell you that Little Brother was over six feet tall and quite skinny—but with the long waving antennae on his head, he appeared even taller. He was also, of course, the only American in the room. He stood at the top of the steps for one long, ghastly moment. He almost ran away in shame. Running away in shame seemed like the most dignified response to the situation. But he didn’t run. Somehow, he found his resolve. He’d come this far, after all. He’d worked tremendously hard to make this costume, and he was proud of it. He took a deep breath and walked onto the dance floor. He reported later that it was only his experience as an aspiring artist that gave him the courage and the license to be so vulnerable and absurd. Something in life had already taught him to just put it out there, whatever “it” is. That costume was what he had made, after all, so that’s what he was bringing to the party. It was the best he had. It was all he had. So he decided to trust in himself, to trust in his costume, to trust in the circumstances. As he moved into the crowd of aristocrats, a silence fell. The dancing stopped. The orchestra stuttered to a stop. The other guests gathered around Little Brother. Finally, someone asked him what on earth he was. Little Brother bowed deeply and announced, “I am the court lobster.” Then: laughter. Not ridicule—just joy. They loved him. They loved his sweetness, his weirdness, his giant red claws, his skinny ass in his bright spandex tights. He was the trickster among them, and so he made the party. Little Brother even ended up dancing that night with the Queen of Belgium. This is how you must do it, people.
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)
“
Cultivating loyalty is a tricky business. It requires maintaining a rigorous level of consistency while constantly adding newness and a little surprise—freshening the guest experience without changing its core identity.” Lifetime Network Value Concerns about brand fickleness in the new generation of customers can be troubling partly because the idea of lifetime customer value has been such a cornerstone of business for so long. But while you’re fretting over the occasional straying of a customer due to how easy it is to switch brands today, don’t overlook a more important positive change in today’s landscape: the extent to which social media and Internet reviews have amplified the reach of customers’ word-of-mouth. Never before have customers enjoyed such powerful platforms to share and broadcast their opinions of products and services. This is true today of every generation—even some Silent Generation customers share on Facebook and post reviews on TripAdvisor and Amazon. But millennials, thanks to their lifetime of technology use and their growing buying power, perhaps make the best, most active spokespeople a company can have. Boston Consulting Group, with grand understatement, says that “the vast majority” of millennials report socially sharing and promoting their brand preferences. Millennials are talking about your business when they’re considering making a purchase, awaiting assistance, trying something on, paying for it and when they get home. If, for example, you own a restaurant, the value of a single guest today goes further than the amount of the check. The added value comes from a process that Chef O’Connell calls competitive dining, the phenomenon of guests “comparing and rating dishes, photographing everything they eat, and tweeting and emailing the details of all their dining adventures.” It’s easy to underestimate the commercial power that today’s younger customers have, particularly when the network value of these buyers doesn’t immediately translate into sales. Be careful not to sell their potential short and let that assumption drive you headlong into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remember that younger customers are experimenting right now as they begin to form preferences they may keep for a lifetime. And whether their proverbial Winstons will taste good to them in the future depends on what they taste like presently.
”
”
Micah Solomon (Your Customer Is The Star: How To Make Millennials, Boomers And Everyone Else Love Your Business)
“
The American dinner-table, in truth, becomes a monument to the defective technic of the American housewife. The guest who respects his oesophagus, invited to feed upon its discordant and ill-prepared victuals, evades the experience as long and as often as he can, and resigns himself to it as he might resign himself to being shaved by a paralytic. Nowhere else in the world have women more leisure and freedom to improve their minds, and nowhere else do they show a higher level of intelligence, or take part more effectively in affairs of the first importance. But nowhere else is there worse cooking in the home, or a more inept handling of the whole domestic economy, or a larger dependence upon the aid of external substitutes, by men provided, for the skill that is wanting where it theoretically exists. It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready-made. And nowhere else is there more striking tendency to throw the whole business of training the minds of children upon professional teachers, and the whole business of instructing them in morals and religion upon so-called Sunday-schools, and the whole business of developing and caring for their bodies upon playground experts, sex hygienists and other such professionals, most of them mountebanks.
”
”
H.L. Mencken (In Defense of Women)
“
The painter knows, sadly enough, that experience does not suffice unto itself, has no proportion, dimension, perspective, mournfully he eats his life but is not allowed to digest it, this being reserved for others, not knowing, but who must somehow, at any sacrifice be made to know, then punished for the sight of this knowledge, by aiding it on its journey from brain to brain.
It does not seem unreasonable that we invent colors, lines, shapes, capable of being, representative of existence, therefore it is not unreasonable that they, in turn, later, invent us, our ideas, directions, motivations, with great audacity, since we, ourselves having them upon our walls. What rude guests they prove to be, indeed: although paintings differ from life by energy a painter can never be a substitute for his paintings, so complete so independent as reality are they. Imagine the pleasure they enjoy at this.
They by conversion into an idea of the person, do, instantaneously destroy him. A tragic gesture that actually leads to tragedy but diabolically exists only in an absence of tragedy, nevertheless procreating it, however, they are unreasonably enough, insufficient, because they are not made of ideas, they are made of paint, all else is really us.
Paintings are metaphors for reality, but instead of being an aid to realization obscure the reality which is far more profound. The only way to circumvent painting is by absolute death.
”
”
William Gaddis (The Recognitions)
“
HEART OF TEA DEVOTION
rc t c//'VI/~ L tLP /'V to/ a
My dear, ifyou couldgive me a cup of tea to clear my muddle of a head I should better understand your affairs.
CHARLES DICKENS
If teacups could talk, my house would be full of conversation ... because my house is full of teacups. My collection of china cups-begun many years ago, when I set up housekeeping as a child bride-has long since outgrown its home in the glass-front armoire and spread out to occupy side tables and shelves and hooks in the kitchen or find safe harbor in the dining-room hutch.
Some of these cups I inherited from women I love-my mother and my aunties. Some are gifts from my husband, Bob, or from my children or from special friends. A few are delightful finds from elegant boutiques or dusty antique shops.
One cup bears telltale cracks and scars; it was the only one I could salvage when a shelf slipped and 14 cups fell and shattered.
Three other cups stand out for their intense color-my aunt was always attracted to that kind of dramatic decoration.
Yet another cup, a gift, is of a style I've never much cared for, but now it makes me smile as I remember the houseguest who "rescued" it from a dark corner of the armoire because it looked "lonely."
Each one of my teacups has a history, and each one is precious to me. I have gladly shared them with guests and told their stories to many people.
Recently, however, I have been more inclined to listen.
I've been wondering what all those cups, with their history and long experience, are trying to say to me.
What I hear from them, over and over, is an invitation-one I want to extend to you: When did you last have a tea party? When was the last time you enjoyed a cup of tea with someone you care about? Isn't it time you did it again?
”
”
Emilie Barnes (The Tea Lover's Devotional)
“
The only point that everyone I spoke with in Rome agrees upon is that Armando al Pantheon is one of the city's last true trattorie.
Given the location, Claudio and his family could have gone the way of the rest of the neighborhood a long time ago and mailed it in with a handful of fresh mozzarella and prosciutto. But he's chosen the opposite path, an unwavering dedication to the details- the extra steps that make the oxtail more succulent, the pasta more perfectly toothsome, the artichokes and favas and squash blossoms more poetic in their expression of the Roman seasons.
"I experiment in my own small ways. I want to make something new, but I also want my guests to think of their mothers and grandmothers. I want them to taste their infancy, to taste their memories. Like that great scene in Ratatouille."
I didn't grow up on amatriciana and offal, but when I eat them here, they taste like a memory I never knew I had. I keep coming back. For the cacio e pepe, which sings that salty-spicy duet with unrivaled clarity, thanks to the depth charge of toasted Malaysian peppercorns Claudio employs. For his coda alla vaccinara, as Roman as the Colosseum, a masterpiece of quinto quarto cookery: the oxtail cooked to the point of collapse, bathed in a tomato sauce with a gentle green undertow of celery, one of Rome's unsung heroes. For the vegetables: one day a crostini of stewed favas and pork cheek, the next a tumble of bitter puntarelle greens bound in a bracing anchovy vinaigrette. And always the artichokes. If Roman artichokes are drugs, Claudio's are pure poppy, a vegetable so deeply addictive that I find myself thinking about it at the most inappropriate times. Whether fried into a crisp, juicy flower or braised into tender, melting submission, it makes you wonder what the rest of the world is doing with their thistles.
”
”
Matt Goulding (Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture (Roads & Kingdoms Presents))
“
The President is the King's father. He is an erect, strongly built, massive featured, white-haired, tawny old gentleman of eighty years of age or thereabouts. He was simply but well dressed, in a blue cloth coat and white vest, and white pantaloons, without spot, dust or blemish upon them. He bears himself with a calm, stately dignity, and is a man of noble presence. He was a young man and a distinguished warrior under that terrific fighter, Kamehameha I., more than half a century ago. A knowledge of his career suggested some such thought as this: "This man, naked as the day he was born, and war-club and spear in hand, has charged at the head of a horde of savages against other hordes of savages more than a generation and a half ago, and reveled in slaughter and carnage; has worshipped wooden images on his devout knees; has seen hundreds of his race offered up in heathen temples as sacrifices to wooden idols, at a time when no missionary's foot had ever pressed this soil, and he had never heard of the white man's God; has believed his enemy could secretly pray him to death; has seen the day, in his childhood, when it was a crime punishable by death for a man to eat with his wife, or for a plebeian to let his shadow fall upon the King—and now look at him; an educated Christian; neatly and handsomely dressed; a high-minded, elegant gentleman; a traveler, in some degree, and one who has been the honored guest of royalty in Europe; a man practiced in holding the reins of an enlightened government, and well versed in the politics of his country and in general, practical information. Look at him, sitting there presiding over the deliberations of a legislative body, among whom are white men—a grave, dignified, statesmanlike personage, and as seemingly natural and fitted to the place as if he had been born in it and had never been out of it in his life time. How the experiences of this old man's eventful life shame the cheap inventions of romance!
”
”
Mark Twain (Roughing It)
“
In Classical mythology, righteous wrath was the province of old women. Three very specific old women, in fact: the Furies (or the Erinyes, in Greek). Fragments of myth featuring the Furies are found in the earliest records of ancient Greek culture. These sisters were much more ancient than any of the Olympian deities, indicating the persistence of an older, female-dominated tradition which endured here and there even when later, more patriarchal, mythologies set in. The role of the Furies was to preside over complaints brought to them by humans about behavior that was thought to be intolerable: from lesser misdemeanors such as the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests — to crimes that were very much worse. It was their role to punish such crimes by relentlessly hounding their perpetrators. The Greek poet Hesiod names the three sisters as Alecto — “unceasing in anger,” the punisher of moral crimes; Megaera — “jealous one,” the punisher of infidelity, oath-breaking, and theft; and Tisiphone — “avenger of murder.” They were, he said, the daughters of Gaea (the goddess who personified the Earth), who conceived them from the blood of her spouse, Uranus, after he had been castrated by his son, Cronos. They lived in the Underworld, and like other chthonic deities, like seeds that lie buried beneath the Earth, they were also identified with its fertility. The wrath of the Furies manifested itself in a number of ways: a tormenting madness would be inflicted on the perpetrator of a patricide or matricide; murderers usually suffered a dire disease, and nations which harbored such criminals could be stricken with famine and plague. The Furies could only be placated with ritual purification, and the completion of a task specifically assigned by them for atonement. It’s important to understand that although the Furies were feared, they were also respected and perceived to be necessary: they represented justice, and were seen to be defenders of moral and legal order. The Furies were portrayed as the foul-smelling, decidedly haggish possessors of bat-like wings, with black snakes adorning their hair, arms, and waists, and blood dripping from their eyes. And they carried brass-studded scourges in their hands. In my menopausal years, I certainly had days when I could have gone with that look. I’m happy to admit that the existence of seriously not-to-be-messed-with elder women like the Furies in our oldest European mythology gives me great pleasure. And it’s difficult not to see them as the perfect menopausal role models, because sudden upwellings of (mostly righteous) anger are a feature of many women’s experience of menopause
”
”
Sharon Blackie (Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life)
“
A few years ago, a couple of young men from my church came to our home for dinner. During the course of the dinner, the conversation turned from religion to various world mythologies and we began to play the game of ‘Name That Character.” To play this game, you pick a category such as famous actors, superheroes or historical characters. In turn, each person describes events in a famous character’s life while everyone else tries to guess who the character is. Strategically you try to describe the deeds of a character in such a way that it might fit any number of characters in that category. After three guesses, if no one knows who your character is, then you win.
Choosing the category of Bible Characters, we played a couple of fairly easy rounds with the typical figures, then it was my turn. Now, knowing these well meaning young men had very little religious experience or understanding outside of their own religion, I posed a trick question. I said, “Now my character may seem obvious, but please wait until the end of my description to answer.” I took a long breath for dramatic effect, and began, “My character was the son of the King of Heaven and a mortal woman.” Immediately both young men smiled knowingly, but I raised a finger asking them to wait to give their responses.
I continued, “While he was just a baby, a jealous rival attempted to kill him and he was forced into hiding for several years. As he grew older, he developed amazing powers. Among these were the ability to turn water into wine and to control the mental health of other people. He became a great leader and inspired an entire religious movement. Eventually he ascended into heaven and sat with his father as a ruler in heaven.”
Certain they knew who I was describing, my two guests were eager to give the winning answer. However, I held them off and continued, “Now I know adding these last parts will seem like overkill, but I simply cannot describe this character without mentioning them. This person’s birthday is celebrated on December 25th and he is worshipped in a spring festival. He defied death, journeyed to the underworld to raise his loved ones from the dead and was resurrected. He was granted immortality by his Father, the king of the gods, and was worshipped as a savior god by entire cultures.”
The two young men were practically climbing out of their seats, their faces beaming with the kind of smile only supreme confidence can produce. Deciding to end the charade I said, “I think we all know the answer, but to make it fair, on the count of three just yell out the answer. One. Two. Three.”
“Jesus Christ” they both exclaimed in unison – was that your answer as well?
Both young men sat back completely satisfied with their answer, confident it was the right one…, but I remained silent. Five seconds ticked away without a response, then ten. The confidence of my two young friends clearly began to drain away. It was about this time that my wife began to shake her head and smile to herself. Finally, one of them asked, “It is Jesus Christ, right? It has to be!”
Shaking my head, I said, “Actually, I was describing the Greek god Dionysus.
”
”
Jedediah McClure (Myths of Christianity: A Five Thousand Year Journey to Find the Son of God)
“
For many, it's a once-in-a-lifetime, long-dreamed-of and long-saved-for trip. Pennies have been pinced and sacrifices made to make the vacation a reality. All Guests' wallets will be separated from a great deal of money, like trout expertly filleted, but it will be a curiously painless experience, for all but a few, the trip will be transcendently and sublimely worth every sacrifice and every penny.
”
”
Leslie LeMon
“
For many, it's a once-in-a-lifetime, long dreamed-of and longed-saved-for trip. Pennies have been pinched and sacrifices made to make the vacation a reality. All Guests' wallets will be separated from a great deal of money, like trout expertly filleted, but it will be a curious;y painless experience, for all but a few, the trip will be transcendently and sublimely worth every sacrifice and penny.
”
”
Leslie Le Mon (The Disneyland Book of Secrets 2014 - DCA: One Local's Unauthorized, Rapturous and Indispensable Guide to the Happiest Place on Earth)
“
Everything at Airbnb is a continuation of what it’s like to be a guest in somebody’s house.
”
”
Jeanne Meister (The Future Workplace Experience: 10 Rules For Mastering Disruption in Recruiting and Engaging Employees)
“
At massage parlour London each healing begins with a private therapist consultation in order to determine every individual’s personal and current state of well-being. The treatment and oils are then tailored to every guest in order to leave the body, mind, and spirit in perfect concord. We encourage our customers to stay calm and let out sexy expert massage girls show up you a pleasurable, stress-free, experience.
”
”
alexhaydenweb
“
Brian Chesky sends to all Airbnb employees is a powerful one. “You have to continue to repeat things” Brian told our class at Stanford. “Culture is about repeating, over and over again, the things that really matter for your company.” Airbnb reinforces these verbal messages with visual impact as well. Brian hired an artist from Pixar to create a storyboard of the entire experience of an Airbnb guest, from start to finish, emphasizing the customer-centered design thinking that is a hallmark of its culture. Even Airbnb conference rooms tell a story; each one is a replica of a room that’s available for rent on the service. Every time Airbnb team members hold a meeting in one of those rooms, they are reminded of how guests feel when they stay there. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos famously bans PowerPoint decks and insists on written memos, which are read in silence at the beginning of each meeting. This memo policy is one of the ways that Amazon encourages a culture of truth telling. Memos have to be specific and comprehensive, and those who read the memos have to respond in kind rather than simply sit through some broad bullet points on a PowerPoint deck and nod vague agreement. Bezos believes that memos encourage smarter questions and deeper thinking. Plus, because they’re self-contained (rather than requiring a person to present a deck), they are more easily distributed and consumed by a wider population within Amazon. The late Steve Jobs used architecture as a core part of his deliberate communications strategy at Pixar. He designed Pixar headquarters so that the front doors, main stairs, main theater, and screening rooms all led to the atrium, which contained the café and mailboxes, ensuring that employees from all departments and specialties would see people from other groups on a regular basis, thus reinforcing Pixar’s collaborative, inclusive culture.
”
”
Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
“
Moving away from traditional hotel loyalty programs' model and offering a good mix of instant gratifications and long-term rewards based on the guest type is crucial to creating sustainable and scalable programs. And if it is unlikely that the industry will ever entirely move away from the points-for-stay model, most hotel brands are already integrating guest experience, recognition and service personalization as part of their loyalty programs, realizing that the in-house financial value of their guests is as important as their stay frequency.
”
”
Simone Puorto
“
A multitude of design trends has come and passed over the years, often conditioned by external technology innovations, such as the birth of social media or the first iPhone. From the 90’s guest counters and solitary guestbooks to skeuomorphism, from flat design to parallax scrolling, the core of any good website has always been and will always be the user experience.
”
”
Simone Puorto
“
I was unable to leave immediately for another reason: this was that the lavishness (unknown to the Courvoisiers) for which the Guermantes, whether opulent or practically ruined, were famous when they entertained their friends, was not only lavishness in material terms but also, as I had often experienced with Robert de Saint-Loup, a lavishness of charming words, courteous gestures, a whole gamut of verbal elegance nourished by real intensity of feeling. But as this last, in the idleness of fashionable existence, finds no outlet, it poured forth at times, seeking some channel of expression in a kind of fleeting effusiveness, which was all the more anxiously solicitous, and which might, on the part of Mme de Guermantes, have been mistaken for affection. She did in fact feel it at the moment she let it overflow, for she discovered then, in the company of the friend, man or woman, she was with at the time, a sense of intoxication, in no way sensual, similar to that which music induces in certain people; she would find herself picking a flower from her bodice, or a medallion, and giving it to someone with whom she would have liked to prolong the evening, yet with the melancholy feeling that to prolong it would have led to nothing but idle chatter, which would have absorbed nothing of the nervous pleasure, the fleeting emotion of the experience, and which would have been reminiscent in this respect of the impression of lassitude and regret that follow the first warm days of spring. And as far as the friend was concerned, it was important that he was not too taken in by the promises, more thrilling than any he had ever heard, proffered by these women, who, because they are particularly susceptible to the sweetness of a moment, turn it, with a delicacy, a nobility not granted to ordinary creatures, into a masterpiece of endearment and kindness, and no longer have anything of themselves left to give in the moment that follows. Their affection does not outlive the moment of elation that dictated it; and the subtlety of mind which had led them at that point to intuit all the things that you wished to hear, and to say them to you, will enable them, a few days later, to pinpoint your foibles and use them to entertain another of their guests with whom they will in turn be enjoying one of these moments musicaux which are so short-lived.
”
”
Marcel Proust
“
CAST: Gertrude Berg as Bessie Glass, operator of a hotel in the Catskill Mountains. Joseph Greenwald (1935) as Barney Glass, her husband. Josef Buloff as Barney, 1953–54. WRITER: Gertrude Berg. House of Glass was quickly created by Gertrude Berg after the initial cancellation of her popular serial, The Goldbergs. She took the setting and characters from her own life: her father had run such a place in the teens, giving her experiences with waiters, bellboys, cooks, and guests from all walks of life. The character of Barney Glass was an almost literal lift from her father. The stories she wrote were the stories she remembered, and “where there were unhappy endings I added happy ones. … The radio hotel always solved its problems with a laugh.” But it couldn’t beat Burns and Allen, its competition on CBS, and it faded after eight months.
”
”
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
“
Meeting and Greeting
1. Use eye contact and smiling as your first contact with others. In doing so, you can scout out the friendly, approachable strangers in the room and feel immediately more at ease.
2. Be the first to say hello. Stay calm if you are left alone to mingle—large parties, forgetful hosts, and friendly guests make this situation inevitable.
3. Introduce yourself to others. Offer your hand and say: “Hello. My name is . . .”
4. As you shake hands, repeat the person’s name. “Nice to meet you, Jack.” This will help imprint the name in your own mind.
5. Make an extra effort to remember names and use them in conversation: “Don’t you agree, Jim?” This makes people feel special.
6. Go out of your way to meet new people. They may feel as out of place as you do: “Hi, I don’t believe we’ve met yet, I’m . . . “ or “I don’t know a soul.”
7. Ask neutral questions that are easy to answer to convey the message that you’d like to get to know this person better.
8. Be prepared to say something interesting about what you do—but in small doses. No one wants to hear you talk exclusively about yourself.
9. Communicate a sense of enthusiasm about the event at hand or life in general. Focus on the positive.
10. Look for passing comments that could open up a whole topic of conversation. “The New York subways were a real experience for this country boy” could lead to a discussion of childhood on the farm, adjusting to city life, public transportation. . . . Clothes, jewelry, and accessories also make excellent conversation pieces. It’s up to you to take the conversational ball and run with it, but be sure to pass it back to your teammate from time to time.
”
”
Jonathan Berent
“
African Safari Group (africansafarigroup.com), a Premier Inbound Travel Agent, covering both Southern and East Africa’s best safari experiences and luxury accommodation.
African Safari Group offers day tours in and around Cape Town and the Cape Winelands. We further custom-make individual longer itineraries for discerning guests seeking to explore Southern Africa.
Our understanding of our guest’s needs, combined with extensive product and destination knowledge, makes us specialists in building tailor-made itineraries that accurately match customer expectation, delivering stress & hassle-free experiences.
”
”
African Safari Group
“
In Silver’s model this injured filter system, which is regulated by the catecholamines, doesn’t screen out irrelevant information and sensory stimuli as efficiently as it should, thereby letting everything that registers at the desk of the reticular activating system arrive in the rooms of the frontal regions of the brain. The individual is bombarded, taking care of ten thousand guests in a hotel built for one thousand, on overload all the time, receiving messages about every minute aspect of his or her experience. It is no wonder, then, that the individual would be distractible or, as Silver would argue, inclined to withdraw from it all and shut the damned hotel down.
”
”
Edward M. Hallowell (Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder)
“
James Young Simpson studied medicine in Edinburgh, Scotland, graduating in 1832. By the mid-1840s, Simpson had climbed the ranks to become a professor of midwifery in Edinburgh, relieving the pain of childbirth with ether, like his American colleagues. But Simpson wasn’t satisfied. He wanted a more potent agent, one that was pleasant to inhale, worked quicker, and didn’t cause vomiting upon awakening. He settled on chloroform, a combination of hydrogen, carbon, and chlorine. On November 4, 1847, Simpson invited two of his assistants, James Duncan and George Keith, and some of his friends, including a Ms. Petrie, to a dinner party. When the dinner was over, he asked his guests to sniff a variety of volatile gases, including chloroform. Duncan and Keith immediately lost consciousness, falling under the table. Ms. Petrie also lost consciousness, but not before declaring, “I’m an angel! I’m an angel! Oh, I’m an angel!” The next day, without animal studies, clinical trials, or federal approval, Simpson administered chloroform to a woman during a particularly painful delivery. “I placed her under the influence of chloroform,” recalled Simpson, “by moistening half a teaspoon of the liquid onto a pocket handkerchief [and placing it] over her mouth and nostrils. The child was expelled in about twenty minutes. When she awoke, [the mother] observed to me that she had enjoyed a very comfortable sleep.” The parents were so elated that they named their daughter Anesthesia. On November 10, 1847, Simpson told a group of colleagues what he had done. Ten days later, he described his experience in a medical journal, claiming that chloroform was more potent and easier to administer than nitrous oxide, and quicker to induce unconsciousness and less flammable than ether. Now the entire medical world knew about it.
”
”
Paul A. Offit (You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation)
“
I was watching a documentary that described a night at Thomas Jefferson’s house Monticello. After the meal each night the family, with their guests, would retire into the parlor to drink tea and spend 3-4 hours discussing things they learned or were pondering lately. Without the television or other individualistic electronic means of entertainment I think we’d still do this to avoid boredom. When I first heard about this practice my first thought was, “Oh, that’s what a family does.” I grew up in an age where it was natural to entertain myself or go off with friends but it makes sense that, in the absence of these things, a family would need to learn to interact and really enjoy each other’s company. So 3-4 times per week we have an informal meal followed by what we simply call “family time.” This can be done around the dining room table or the coffee table but it’s been an amazing experience. I begin by asking if anyone learned or had any ideas or questions they’ve been pondering about God. We move from that topic into a more general question like, “Did anyone learn anything today or have something they want to discuss?” We share stories from the day, passages of things we’ve read, watch funny videos or play a family game. At the end we often talk about what’s in store for tomorrow and pray together.
”
”
Jeremy Pryor (Family Revision: How Ancient Wisdom Can Heal the Modern Family)
“
My whole life up to this point, I've never lost anyone. Not Mom. Not Travis. Not Kim, really. Not Marjani. And I am blessed. I am blessed because I am going to go long before any of them do. I am not going to have to grieve for them, because they are going to grieve for me.
I know that this is selfish, this solace in the fact that my loved ones will miss me and thus have to experience pain that I never will. But I cannot deny that it is true.
I am the lucky one in this regard. I get to go first. I get to leave before grief ever ecome the house guest that never leaves. I get to prance around this world, how lucky, not having to live with the ache of saying goodbye. That's for them. I'm sad for them that they'll grieve when I die. But I'm glad I won't. I'm lucky. I'm lucky I'll leave before the grief gets here. I'm lucky to get to go alone. I'm lucky, I'm lucky, I'm so lucky.
”
”
Will Leitch (How Lucky)
“
My whole life up to this point, I've never lost anyone. Not Mom. Not Travis. Not Kim, really. Not Marjani. And I am blessed. I am blessed because I am going to go long before any of them do. I am not going to have to grieve for them, because they are going to grieve for me.
I know that this is selfish, this solace in the fact that my loved ones will miss me and thus have to experience pain that I never will. But I cannot deny that it is true.
I am the lucky one in this regard. I get to go first. I get to leave before grief ever becomes the house guest that never leaves. I get to prance around this world, how lucky, not having to live with the ache of saying goodbye. That's for them. I'm sad for them that they'll grieve when I die. But I'm glad I won't. I'm lucky. I'm lucky I'll leave before the grief gets here. I'm lucky to get to go alone. I'm lucky, I'm lucky, I'm so lucky.
”
”
Will Leitch (How Lucky)
“
Delta Airlines Contact Number +1(855) 653-615
Travelling with Delta Airlines is going to be a worthwhile experience for you owing to the amenities and facilities you will be offered online. You will be treated with customized and exclusive boarding experience, free entertainment, complimentary snacks, spacious seats, and much more. Let’s explore these incredible services.
On most of Delta Airlines flights, you are allowed to stream TV shows, music, movies, and more to your phone, tablet, and laptop. You are not even required to purchase the on-board Wi-Fi, just download the Delta Airlines mobile app on your device. Go for Delta Airlines flight reservations and leave all your boredom away. American keeps updating its entertainment content in different languages and genres.
If you are a guest of First Class, then you have access to various unparalleled amenities such as amenity kit, more privacy, fully-flat bed, flagship lounge, and much more.
The airline offers different travel classes so passengers can choose as per their budget.
In addition to these in-flight amenities, some other facilities are also offered on ground like easy check-in, 24/7 available customer service, hassle-free booking procedure, etc. You can anytime call on the American Airlines booking phone number +1-855-653-0615 to seek guidance related to the airline services.
Passengers who are going to travel with American Airlines will definitely have a pure blissful flying experience. The airline is an epitome of sheer luxury; choose it as your travel partner and have an enjoyable flight.
”
”
XODEV S
“
PK SEO has been in the SEO Industry for approximately 20 plus years now and we have evolved largely together with Google and improve the user experience through better SEO services and web development. When it comes to search engine optimisation, there is not much that escapes us from improving rankings on Google and ROI for clients and in establishing their brand on the web. From on-page SEO to off-page SEO, we do it all from guest posts, to authority link building from Guest post services. Our SEO Services is about as white hat as you can get. 20 plus years in SEO spells experience in the online marketing game and you can trust PK SEO specialists when it comes to SEO and effective rankings.
”
”
PK SEO Services
“
To India has been given her problem from the beginning of history—it is the race problem. Races ethnologically different have in this country come into close contact. This fact has been and still continues to be the most important one in our history. It is our mission to face it and prove our humanity by dealing with it in the fullest truth. Until we fulfil our mission all other benefits will be denied us. There are other peoples in the world who have to overcome obstacles in their physical surroundings, or the menace of their powerful neighbours. They have organized their power till they are not only reasonably free from the tyranny of Nature and human neighbours, but have a surplus of it left in their hands to employ against others. But in India, our difficulties being internal, our history has been the history of continual social adjustment and not that of organized power for defence and aggression. Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history. And India has been trying to accomplish her task through social regulation of differences, on the one hand, and the spiritual recognition of unity on the other. She has made grave errors in setting up the boundary walls too rigidly between races, in perpetuating in her classifications the results of inferiority; often she has crippled her children's minds and narrowed their lives in order to fit them into her social forms; but for centuries new experiments have been made and adjustments carried out. Her mission has been like that of a hostess who has to provide proper accommodation for numerous guests, whose habits and requirements are different from one another.
”
”
Rabindranath Tagore (Nationalism: Reimagining Patriotism: Challenging National Identity Through Poetry and Reflection)
“
For even as the weeks begin racing by in a blur for us, they are making the greatest of impressions upon our children. When one turns seventeen and begins to experience that first period of real independence, one’s senses are so alert, one’s sentiments so finely attuned that every conversation, every look, every laugh may be writ indelibly upon one’s memory. And the friends that one happens to make in those impressionable years? One will meet them forever after with a welling of affection.” Having expressed this paradox, the Count happened to look across the lobby, where Grisha was lugging the luggage of one guest toward the front desk as Genya lugged the luggage of another toward the door. “Perhaps it is a matter of celestial balance,” he reflected. “A sort of cosmic equilibrium. Perhaps the aggregate experience of Time is a constant and thus for our children to establish such vivid impressions of this particular June, we must relinquish our claims upon it.” “So that they might remember, we must forget,” Vasily summed up. “Exactly!” said the Count. “So that they might remember, we must forget. But should we take umbrage at the fact? Should we feel shortchanged by the notion that their experiences for the moment may be richer than ours? I think not. For it is hardly our purpose at this late stage to log a new portfolio of lasting memories. Rather, we should be dedicating ourselves to ensuring that they taste freely of experience. And we must do so without trepidation. Rather than tucking in blankets and buttoning up coats, we must have faith in them to tuck and button on their own. And if they fumble with their newfound liberty, we must remain composed, generous, judicious. We must encourage them to venture out from under our watchful gaze, and then sigh with pride when they pass at last through the revolving doors of life. . . .
”
”
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
“
If your customers are curious to see how your products and services are created, a well-crafted behind-the-scenes look may be just the ticket to improve their service experience.
”
”
Walt Disney Company (Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service)
“
you unpack and settle in.” The program proved a major source of learning about the small, irritating “workarounds” that hotel customers faced, such as having to place the suitcase of a traveling companion on the floor because the hotel only provided one luggage rack, having to unplug and find a place for hotel-provided hair dryers when guests bring their own, and much more. By “listening with their eyes,” hotel employees found ways to enhance the customer experience that guests may never have suggested on comment cards.
”
”
Chip R. Bell (Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service)
“
Here’s how the Ritz looks at touchpoints, as written in the company’s credo: “The Ritz-Carlton experience enlivens the senses, instills well-being, and fulfills even the unexpressed wishes and needs of our guests.
”
”
Marty Neumeier (Brand Flip, The: Why customers now run companies and how to profit from it (Voices That Matter))
“
Walt’s fundamentals for success still ring true. You build the best product you can. You give people effective training to support the delivery of exceptional service. You learn from your experiences. And you celebrate success. You never stop growing. You never stop believing.
”
”
Walt Disney Company (Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service)
“
John Cage once climbed into a sensory deprivation tank and came out later announcing that there's no such thing as true silence as long as you're alive, because you can always hear your own heartbeat. To experience absolute silence, you'd need to be dead.
”
”
Martin Riker (The Guest Lecture)
“
Experience the pinnacle of adult entertainment at Spearmint Rhino Pittsburgh, the leading strip club in the Three Rivers Area. Opening at 7pm daily, it offers an elite experience with the most seductive entertainers, the best in local food and drinks, VIP bottle service, and private suites. Plus, enjoy guest appearances by top adult stars. Perfect for a premium night out, Spearmint Rhino ensures a memorable experience with luxurious amenities and unparalleled service.
”
”
Spearmint Rhino Pittsburgh
“
The word chivalry has meant at different times a good many different things--from heavy cavalry to giving a woman a seat
in a train. But if we want to understand chivalry as an ideal distinct from other ideals--if we want to isolate that particular
conception of the man, comme il faut (as it should be), which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our
culture--we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory's Morte D'arthur. 'Thou wert the meekest man', says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. 'Thou were the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.'
The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced
the best knight in the world, 'he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten'...The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. In so doing, the Middle Ages fixed on the one hope of the world. It may or may not be possible to produce by the thousand men who combine the two sides of Launcelot's character. But if it is not possible, then all talk of any lasting happiness or dignity in human society is pure moonshine.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays)
“
The word chivalry has meant at different times a good many different things, from heavy cavalry to giving a woman a seat
in a train. But if we want to understand chivalry as an ideal distinct from other ideals, if we want to isolate that particular conception of the man, comme il faut (as it should be), which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our culture--we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory's Morte D'arthur. 'Thou wert the meekest man', says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. 'Thou were the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.'
The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced
the best knight in the world, 'he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten'...The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. In so doing, the Middle Ages fixed on the one hope of the world. It may or may not be possible to produce by the thousand men who combine the two sides of Launcelot's character. But if it is not possible, then all talk of any lasting happiness or dignity in human society is pure moonshine.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays)
“
High-quality photo and video experiences for your events in DC, Virginia, and Maryland. Winks Photo Booth’s range of incredible photo booth rentals can create long-lasting memories for both you and your guests. We are full of experiences from digital drop-off booths, 360 video, brand activations, GIFs, boomerangs, glam, vogue and so much more. We've been in business since 2018 and we've assembled an incredibly professional team who can create high-quality and immersive experiences.
”
”
Winks Photo Booth
“
The word chivalry has meant at different times a good many different things, from heavy cavalry to giving a woman a seat in a train. But if we want to understand chivalry as an ideal distinct from other ideals, if we want to isolate that particular conception of the man, comme il faut (as it should be), which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our culture, we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory's Morte D'arthur. 'Thou wert the meekest man', says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. 'Thou were the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.' The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced
the best knight in the world, 'he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten'...The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. In so doing, the Middle Ages fixed on the one hope of the world. It may or may not be possible to produce by the thousand men who combine the two sides of Launcelot's character. But if it is not possible, then all talk of any lasting happiness or dignity in human society is pure moonshine.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays)
“
The word chivalry has meant at different times a good many different things, from heavy cavalry to giving a woman a seat in a train. But if we want to understand chivalry as an ideal distinct from other ideals, if we want to isolate that particular conception of the man, comme il faut (as it should be), which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our culture, we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory's Morte D'arthur. 'Thou wert the meekest man', says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. 'Thou were the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.' The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced the best knight in the world, 'he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten'...The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. In so doing, the Middle Ages fixed on the one hope of the world. It may or may not be possible to produce by the thousand men who combine the two sides of Launcelot's character. But if it is not possible, then all talk of any lasting happiness or dignity in human society is pure moonshine.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays)
“
The word chivalry has meant at different times a good many different things, from heavy cavalry to giving a woman a seat
in a train. But if we want to understand chivalry as an ideal distinct from other ideals, if we want to isolate that particular conception of the man, comme il faut (as it should be), which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our culture, we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory's Morte D'arthur. 'Thou wert the meekest man', says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. 'Thou were the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.' The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced
the best knight in the world, 'he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten'...The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. In so doing, the Middle Ages fixed on the one hope of the world. It may or may not be possible to produce by the thousand men who combine the two sides of Launcelot's character. But if it is not possible, then all talk of any lasting happiness or dignity in human society is pure moonshine.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays)
“
Rule of 95/5: Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent “foolishly.” It sounds irresponsible; in fact, it’s anything but. Because that last 5 percent has an outsize impact on the guest experience, it’s some of the smartest money you’ll ever spend. This was affirmed for me one afternoon when I watched Glenn Lowry, the head of the museum, buy gelato for a group of visiting curators. Every single one of them spent a second or two admiring the spoons. I’d like to think some museumgoers went back to the cart for seconds, just because they loved that spoon. The Rule of 95/5 would turn out to be one of my central operating principles at Eleven Madison Park. Wine
”
”
Will Guidara (Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect)
“
It was on that call that he introduced me to the concept of restaurant-smart vs. corporate-smart. He described the distinction between the two. In the simplest terms: Where do the highest-paid people in the company work? In the restaurants themselves, or in the corporate offices? That says a lot about how the company is run. In restaurant-smart companies, members of the team have more autonomy and creative latitude. Because they tend to feel a greater sense of ownership, they give more of themselves to the job. They can often offer better hospitality because they’re nimble; there aren’t a lot of rules and systems getting in the way of human connection. But those restaurants tend not to have a lot of corporate support or oversight—the systems that make great businesses. Corporate-smart companies, on the other hand, have all the back-end systems and controls in areas like accounting, purchasing, and human resources that are needed to make them great businesses, and they’re often more profitable as a result. But systems are, by definition, controls—and the more control you take away from the people on the ground, the less creative they can be, and guests can feel that. Restaurant-smart companies can be great businesses, and corporate-smart companies can deliver great hospitality. But their priorities are different, in ways that fundamentally affect the guests’ experience.
”
”
Will Guidara (Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect)
“
Your youngster looks like he knows his way around a deck. When you think he’s ready to try a term under a different captain, he’d be welcome aboard Tarman. Things are a bit more rustic and he’s be sleeping in the deckhouse with the crew, but I’d be glad to foster him for a trip or two.”
Brashen and Althea exchanged a look, but it was not his mother who said, “Not quite old enough yet. But I’ll take you up on that offer when he is. I know he’d like to see his aunt and uncle soon. Not to mention his cousin Ephron.” Brashen smiled as he attempted to change the subject. “When do you think Malta and Reyn might be bringing the baby downriver for a visit?”
“You’d take Boy-o off my decks?” Paragon was appalled.
“Only for a short time, ship. I know he’s yours as much as ours,” Brashen replied placatingly. “But a slightly wider circulation of experience wouldn’t hurt him.”
“Hmph.” The figurehead crossed his arms on his carved chest. His mouth went to a flat line. “Perhaps when Ephron is old enough to take his place here for a time. An exchange of hostages, as it were.”
Brashen rolled his eyes at them. “He’s in a mood today,” he said in a low voice.
“I am not in a mood! Merely pointing out that you are a liveship family, and that you should think well before letting one of your own go off on another liveship, with no guarantees that he will be returned. Ideally, the exchange should be a member of Tarman's family.” He turned his gaze to Leftrin and Alise. “Do you expect to breed soon?”
Leftrin choked on his tea.
“Not that I'm aware,” Alise replied demurely.
“A pity. It might be productive for you just now.”Paragon was politely enthused.
“Can we please just not?” Althea asked him, almost sharply. “It's bad enough to have you offering Brashen and me your helpful insights into productive breeding without you extending your wisdom to our guests.”
Alise could not tell if Brashen were embarrassed or red from suppressing laughter.
“It was Tarman’s suggestion that they might find such information helpful, as so far they have enjoyed breeding, but fruitlessly. That’s all.” Paragon was unflustered.
Brashen cleared his throat suddenly. “Well, speaking of hostages—”
“Were we?” his ship interjected curiosity.
“We were. Speaking of hostages, how did all that work out? There were rumors in Bingtown, but we left to go south and pick up your stock, and then returned right up the river. So wr haven’t heard much of that.
”
”
Robin Hobb (Blood of Dragons (Rain Wild Chronicles, #4))
“
207, 2nd Floor, 3rd Main Rd, Chamrajpet,
Bengaluru, Karnataka 560018
Call – +91 7022122121
Kannada Books Purchase: Veeraloka Books: Find the Universe of Writing
At the core of Karnataka's dynamic scholarly practice are its rich social legacy. Veeraloka Books offers an entryway to this universe of writing through its wide assortment of Kannada books. Whether you are an ardent peruser or somebody hoping to investigate the domain of Kannada writing, Veeraloka Books gives an amazing chance to dig into the different abstract scene of Karnataka.
Veeraloka Books invests wholeheartedly in organizing a determination of Kannada books that envelops different types, including fiction, genuine, verse, show, from there, the sky is the limit. From exemplary works that have endured for an extremely long period to contemporary compositions that encapsulate present day Karnataka, the book shop offers a far reaching scope of scholarly works for perusers of all preferences and inclinations.
For those keen on digging into the rich social legacy of Karnataka, Veeraloka Books' assortment incorporates works that praise the state's customs, fables, history, and ethos. Perusers can investigate stories that offer experiences into Karnataka's past, present, and future, giving a nuanced comprehension of the state's social embroidery.
Veeraloka Books isn't simply a stage for Kannada Books Purchase; a social center cultivates a profound appreciation for the scholarly fortunes of Karnataka. The book shop effectively advances Kannada writing and energizes discourse around crafted by Kannada writers, both laid out and arising. Through book dispatches, writer occasions, and scholarly conversations, Veeraloka Books makes an energetic local area of artistic fans who share an energy for Kannada writing.
Notwithstanding its actual store, Veeraloka Books likewise gives a web-based stage, empowering perusers from across the world to access and buy Kannada books effortlessly. The book shop's site offers an easy to understand interface, permitting guests to peruse its assortment, read book depictions, and make buys from the solace of their homes. This openness guarantees that Kannada writing contacts a worldwide crowd, rising above topographical limits and language obstructions.
Besides, Veeraloka Books endeavors to help neighborhood writers and distributers, assuming a urgent part in advancing the development of Kannada writing. By giving a stage to arising scholars to feature their works and arrive at a more extensive readership, the book shop adds to the improvement and development of the Kannada abstract scene.
Whether you are a Kannada writing lover, an understudy investigating Karnataka's social legacy, or a peruser enthusiastic about finding new scholarly voices, Veeraloka Books offers a vivid encounter that commends the universe of Kannada writing. With its obligation to safeguarding and advancing the rich scholarly customs of Karnataka, Veeraloka Books remains as a guide for those enthusiastic about embracing the composed word in Kannada.
All in all, Veeraloka Books fills in as an extension among perusers and the enthralling domain of Kannada writing, welcoming people to leave on an excursion of investigation, revelation, and appreciation for the different stories that structure the embodiment of Karnataka's scholarly legacy.
”
”
Kannada Books Purchase
“
BARTON CENTRE, 912, 9th Floor, Mahatma Gandhi Rd,
Bengaluru, Karnataka - 560 001
Phone Number
+91 8884400919
Set out on an excursion to the charming island of Sri Lanka with a tailor-made visit Sri Lanka Tour Package From Bangalore, known for its rich history, different scenes, and warm friendliness, offers an extraordinary travel insight for guests. In this article, we will direct you through arranging the ideal Sri Lanka visit from Bangalore, investigating top attractions, picking the right visit bundle to suit your spending plan, and giving fundamental travel tips to a smooth and significant excursion.
1. Prologue to Sri Lanka Visit Bundles
Investigating the Magnificence of Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka, the tear molded island in the Indian Sea, is a heaven ready to be investigated. From rich tea manors to immaculate sea shores, old remnants to dynamic culture, a Sri Lanka visit bundle offers a different and extraordinary experience for explorers.
2. Arranging Your Sri Lanka Visit from Bangalore
Investigating and Choosing the Right Visit Bundle
While arranging your Sri Lanka Tour Package From Bangalore, it's crucial for research and pick the right visit bundle that suits your inclinations and spending plan. Whether you're searching for a social campaign, a loosening up ocean side escape, or an undertaking filled trip, there are different choices accessible to take special care of your inclinations.
Understanding Visa Prerequisites and Travel Records
Prior to setting out on your Sri Lanka experience, make a point to check and satisfy the visa prerequisites and have all the important travel records all together. This incorporates getting a substantial visa, guaranteeing your identification has sufficient legitimacy, and setting up some other required desk work for a smooth and bother free excursion.
3. Top Attractions and Exercises in Sri Lanka
Finding Authentic Destinations and Social Milestones
Sri Lanka is wealthy in history and culture, with a plenty of verifiable destinations and social milestones ready to be investigated. From the old city of Sigiriya to the consecrated city of Kandy, each side of the island has a story to tell, giving you a brief look into its captivating past.
Appreciating Ocean side Exercises and Water Sports
With its staggering shoreline and perfectly clear waters, Sri Lanka is a heaven for ocean side sweethearts and water sports fans. Whether you're hoping to loosen up on the sandy shores, take a shot at surfing, or investigate the submerged world through swimming or plunging, the sea shores of Sri Lanka offer vast opportunities for no particular reason and unwinding.
4. Picking the Right Visit Bundle for Your Spending plan
Looking at Changed Visit Bundles and Incorporations
While picking a Sri Lanka Tour Package From Bangalore, it means quite a bit to contrast various choices and their considerations with track down one that accommodates your spending plan and inclinations. Search for bundles that offer a decent equilibrium of touring, convenience, transportation, and different administrations to guarantee a balanced and pleasant experience.
Ways to get a good deal on Your Sri Lanka Visit
Going on a tight spending plan? Just sit back and relax! There are a lot of effective cash saving tips for your Sri Lanka visit. Consider going during the off-top season, booking ahead of time for arrangements and limits, choosing nearby transportation and diners, and investigating free or minimal expense attractions to take advantage of your movement financial plan. With a touch of arranging and sagacious decisions, you can partake in a fabulous Sri Lanka experience without breaking the bank.### 5. Convenience and Feasting Choices in Sri Lanka
#### Sorts of Facilities Accessible in Sri Lanka
With regards to facilities in Sri Lanka, you'll be ruined for decision.
”
”
Sri Lanka Tour Package From Bangalore
“
BARTON CENTRE, 912, 9th Floor,
Mahatma Gandhi Rd,
Bengaluru, Karnataka - 560 001
Phone Number
+91 8884400919
Find the excellence of Mauritius Tour Package From Bangalore! Luxurious resorts, pristine beaches, and thrilling adventures await. Today is the perfect time to book your dream vacation, which includes flights, lodging, and guided tours. Investigate turquoise waters, lively coral reefs, and dazzling scenes. ideal for couples, families, and individuals traveling alone. A trip to the tropical islands that includes cultural experiences, water sports, and island hopping is not to be missed. Get in touch with us now for modified bundles at great costs!
**With SurfNxt, Explore the Cultural Mosaic of Mauritius** Mauritius is a must-visit travel destination that combines stunning natural beauty with a rich tapestry of cultures. SurfNxt has fantastic tour packages that can turn your ideal vacation into a reality for those in Bangalore who have been longing to visit this picturesque island.
Not only is Mauritius a tropical paradise, it's a dynamic mix of societies. Over the course of its history, the island has been shaped by Indian, African, Chinese, and European cultures. This conjunction makes a remarkable social scene that is reflected in the island's music, food, celebrations, and day to day existence.
**The Social Impact of India**
Perhaps of the most unmistakable effect on the island is that of the Indian people group. Indian laborers were brought in to work in the sugarcane fields after slavery ended in the 19th century, resulting in a significant demographic shift. Today, approximately 68% of the population is Indian, and this heritage is ingrained in the culture of the area. Guests can encounter Indian celebrations like Diwali and Holi, where the roads wake up with lively varieties and glad festivals.
Mauritian food is vigorously enlivened by Indian flavors. Test dishes, for example, dholl puri, samosas, and biryanis, which are tasty as well as mirror the well established customs of Indian cooking. Bollywood music can be heard echoing from shops and homes in a variety of towns, further demonstrating the seamless integration of cultures.
**African and Creole Influences** In addition to its Indian heritage, Mauritius has a remarkable amount of African influence. The island's diverse cultural heritage is enriched by the descendants of African slaves who were brought there. In Mauritius, Creole culture, a result of blending African and French influences, is an essential part of daily life. A thrilling experience is provided by the spirited music, similar to Sega, a traditional dance and music style. Attending a Sega performance is a must if you want to truly experience the island's spirit.
**Influence of the Chinese] Another important part of the island's culture is the Chinese community. The Chinese have enriched Mauritian life with their culinary traditions, despite their primary involvement in commerce. Cafés serving delightful Chinese dishes coincide close by Indian diners. Try not to miss attempting neighborhood claims to fame like stew chicken and broiled noodles, which keep up with their exceptional Mauritian curve.
**Exploring Culture While Traveling** When you book a Mauritius Tour Package From Bangalore, SurfNxt makes sure that you see the island's cultural highlights. You can partake in nearby celebrations, visit noteworthy sanctuaries, and investigate clamoring markets. Each experience furnishes a chance to draw in with the neighborhood local area, become familiar with their traditions, and value their lifestyle.
Conclusion: Mauritius is much more than just a lovely place to go to the beach; a mixture of societies vows to have an enduring effect. The combination of Indian, African, Chinese, and European influences results in a travel experience that is extremely enriching.
”
”
Mauritius Tour Package From Bangalore
“
Still, the experience most certainly took its toll. It underscored just how hazardous a maid's work can be. It's not the backbreaking labor, the demanding guests, or the cleaning chemicals that present the greatest danger. It's the assumption that maids are delinquents, murderers, and thieves: the maid is always to blame.
”
”
Nita Prose (The Mystery Guest (Molly the Maid, #2))
“
In front of the restaurant, on the side walk, just like in the movie, someone outlined a heart when the cement was wet and there are two sets of dog paws. To the left of the restaurant is a sign for the Chapeau shop that features a hat box exactly like the one that little Lady was in at the beginning of the film. Details like these enhance the overall experience for sharp-eyed guests.
”
”
Jim Korkis (Secret Stories of Walt Disney World: Things You Never Knew You Never Knew)
“
Right up to this very moment, white people as a group have not wanted to share or relinquish anything meaningful to Black people in terms of power, money, or social status. The most we might say is that we “accept” or “like” them, as long as they “like” us and are nice to us. I put those words in quotation marks because i wonder: how can you like someone if deep down you believe they should be stuck in a perpetually inferior political, economic and social position? How can whites truly accept people—that is, welcome them into our sphere of affairs—when we think they have had nothing to offer but their meagre existence? This is like forcing someone to make a great big meal for our party, and after they’ve cooked in the kitchen for hours and hours, we start to think it might be nice if they would come to our party; but then we think their presence might make us feel uncomfortable because we know we wouldn’t have asked or forced one of our party guests to cook all those hours as we did with this person. We might be looking at all that food and wondering how this tired person feels being invited to share a meal that they prepared in the first place.
”
”
Samantha Foster (an experiment in revolutionary expression: by samantha j foster)
“
We made this a common experience by setting up, early on—far ahead of other hotel companies—what we called a guest-history system. The first time guests stayed with us, we computerized their preferences—in rooms, food, drink, and anything else our employees noted—so that when they returned, we could give them, without their having to ask, whatever they wanted and liked best. And these files, as we added to them, kept us abreast of changing tastes.
”
”
Isadore Sharp (Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy)
“
There is a story that one of the Seven Sages, a man named Liu Ling (ca. 221-330), habitually received guests while completely naked. His response to adverse comment was to declare, "I take the whole universe as my house and my own room as my clothing. Why, then, do you enter here into my trousers."14
”
”
Thomas Hoover (The Zen Experience)
“
Appreciate the comfortable (responsibly). Producing in the evening can be an experience like no other. With the comfortable, ongoing hum of the engine and the nights your atmosphere, generating can be almost like traveling through place. Producing in the evening seems unusual, fun, and even exciting — for some people, it’s one of life’s simplest yet most excessive entertainment. It’s definitely outstanding have fun with a evening produce, but don’t neglect to focus on what’s most important of all — your security and the security of other drivers. Always keep in ideas that getting sent straight while generating can be dangerous (especially at night), so keep your interest on the road. If you’re confident in your secured generating workouts, you’ll be able to successfully relax, notice in, and revel in your ride!
Put your returning viewpoint reflection in its “flipped down” or “night” strategy to reduce returning front aspect part aspect lighting glare.
Check all your car lighting constantly, especially if upcoming winter year time mean that you will be doing more generating after dark. To make the process simpler, you can take changes with a friend working the lighting and watching to see that they all come on, or you can notice your own reflection in the ms ms ms ms windows of a glass-fronted developing. You have purchased some car parts and accessories.
Block out interruptions while generating, but don’t focus definitely on the road. Doing so may put you in a situation of hypnosis and you may even mentally “blank” for a few a few several weeks. Keep your viewpoint moving around the car and landscapes. Some car gadgets should be set progressively.
Always use a car car car car seatbelt and encourage your guests to do the same.Do not produce drunk.
Never produce without a legal drivers’ certification approved in your name.
Don’t believe the town story that sunglasses with yellow-colored or bright orange sketchy connections help you see better in the evening. Wearing them in the evening may make aspects seem less heavy.
Always carry around your drivers’ certification to prevent police from getting suspicious of a situation that isn’t there.
Do not produce when you are tired. In some countries, generating while feeling sleepy issues as impacted generating. Regardless of the law, it’s dangerous.
”
”
angeladong
“
What troubles me most about my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience. Other people now have to accommodate me, and I find this uncomfortable: My new dietary restrictions throw a big wrench into the basic host-guest relationship. As a guest, if I neglect to tell my host in advance that I don’t eat meat, she feels bad, and if I do tell her, she’ll make something special for me, in which case I’ll feel bad. On this matter I’m inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners. Even if the vegetarian is a more highly evolved human being, it seems to me he has lost something along the way, something I’m not prepared to dismiss as trivial. Healthy and virtuous as I may feel these days, I also feel alienated from traditions I value: cultural traditions like the Thanksgiving turkey, or even franks at the ballpark, and family traditions like my mother’s beef brisket at Passover. These ritual meals link us to our history along multiple lines—family, religion, landscape, nation, and, if you want to go back much further, biology. For although humans no longer need meat in order to survive (now that we can get our B-12 from fermented foods or supplements), we have been meat eaters for most of our time on earth. This fact of evolutionary history is reflected in the design of our teeth, the structure of our digestion, and, quite possibly, in the way my mouth still waters at the sight of a steak cooked medium rare. Meat eating helped make us what we are in a physical as well as a social sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, anthropologists tell us, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the hearth where the spoils of the hunt were cooked and then apportioned, human culture first flourished. This isn’t to say we can’t or shouldn’t transcend our inheritance, only that it is our inheritance; whatever else may be gained by giving up meat, this much at least is lost. The notion of granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal, amoral world of eater and eaten—of predation—but along the way it will entail the sacrifice, or sublimation, of part of our identity—of our own animality. (This is one of the odder ironies of animal rights: It asks us to acknowledge all we share with animals, and then to act toward them in a most unanimalistic way.) Not that the sacrifice of our animality is necessarily regrettable; no one regrets our giving up raping and pillaging, also part of our inheritance. But we should at least acknowledge that the human desire to eat meat is not, as the animal rightists would have it, a trivial matter, a mere gastronomic preference. By the same token we might call sex—also now technically unnecessary for reproduction—a mere recreational preference. Rather, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.
”
”
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
“
We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” ― Jeff Bezos
”
”
Sarah Hatter (The Customer Support Handbook: How to Create the Ultimate Customer Experience For Your Brand)
“
I’ve always felt that spiritual experience is dropping the illusion that we’re not. Growing up at Londolozi nourished that sense in me from my earliest years. Mom and Dad often had to visit with the guests in
”
”
Boyd Varty (Cathedral of the Wild: An African Journey Home)
“
However, while the work of the experience stager perishes upon its performance (precisely the right word), the value of the experience lingers in the memory of any individual who was engaged by the event.” Sounds a lot like practical magic, doesn’t it? They went on to use Disney as an example of a notable experience stager. “Most parents,” they wrote, “don’t take their kids to Walt Disney World just for the event itself but rather to make the shared experience part of the everyday family conversation for months, and even years, afterward.” 5
”
”
Walt Disney Company (Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service)
“
The Invitational Church In the invitational church, the focus is on growth. The goal of the church is to reach out and gather people into the church. Therefore, the church is designed as a consumer-oriented place that takes special care to make sure the red carpet is rolled out for visitors and guests. A highly trained staff puts forth great effort to ensure the very best experience for everyone who comes to the church, with special attention paid to visitors. Invitational churches are often successful at growth because this is a large part of their goal and focus. There are many wonderful aspects of the invitational church. I believe God sovereignly birthed the church growth and seeker movements to help the institutional church get beyond itself and start caring about the millions of people trying to find God who were unable to fit into the institutional church. I deeply appreciate and value invitational churches, because they have come up with a way to re-create a modern day “Court Of The Gentiles” aspect of the temple, a place where God-seekers can come and find God. They have unselfishly set aside their desire for church to be about themselves, and they have designed church services for lost people and seekers. What a refreshing change when invitational churches hit the scene! They have really harvested many people for Jesus and helped thousands of churches become outward-focused. This is a good thing! The difficulty with the invitational church is that the individual is essentially irrelevant. What I mean is, when most people walk into an invitational church, it really doesn’t matter whether or not they show up. Why is this true? Because the invitational church has, by default, set the bar very low to make sure that whosoever will may come. However, the inadvertent message is that the individual is not really needed. Little is asked or required of people, and it is very clear that if they aren’t part of the overall goal to facilitate growth, their gifts may not be needed. To prove the point: where do many of the people who have left institutional churches go? They often sit in the back of invitational churches where they can go unnoticed and where they can have very little asked of them. The invitational church is a great place to recover from the institutional church. Some go on and become involved in meaningful ways. But often over time, two negative things happen to believers who have been in invitational churches. One, they become sedentary, consumer-oriented Christians. Those who joined the institutional church and who wanted to make a difference have all but lost their initial fire. Often they no longer burn with zeal for God and His purposes. Instead, they unwittingly adopt the culture of the invitational church into their Christianity, and they, too, lower the bar to the point where, for all intents and purposes, they are now just showing up at a weekend service. Or two, they begin to feel the need for a more personal, relational church, and they move on to something more personal and meaningful to them.
”
”
Mark Perry (Kingdom Churches: New Strategies For A Revival Generation)
“
In spite of Deborah’s reassurance, Rita had known somehow that I was right in the middle of things and in grave danger, and she responded like a true champion. She was waiting for me at the door in a state of ditherhood that was unmatched in my experience. “Oh, Dexter,” she sniffled as she half-drowned me in hugs and kisses. “We were so—It was on the news, and I saw you there, but even after Deborah called,” she said, and kissed me again. “The children were watching TV, and Cody said, ‘It’s Dexter,’ and I looked—It was a newsbreak,” she said, I suppose reassuring me that I had not made a surprise guest appearance on SpongeBob. “Oh, my God,” she went on, pausing to shudder and then hug me, burying her head up to the shoulders in my neck. “You shouldn’t have to do those things,” she said, with a great deal of justice. “You’re supposed to do forensics and—You don’t even have a gun, and it isn’t—How can they—But your sister said, and on TV they said it was the cannibals and they had you, and at least you found that girl, which I know was very important, but oh, my God, cannibals, I can’t even think how—And they had you, and they could have—” And she finally broke off, possibly from oxygen deprivation, and concentrated on snuffling into my shirt for a minute. I
”
”
Jeff Lindsay (Dexter is Delicious (Dexter, #5))
“
I lost my parents during adolescence. I know what you're going through," he says, as the bartender arrives with the coffees. Andrea freezes. How does he know? They start drinking, in silence. Ian is disarmingly slow while Andrea, leaning back on the counter, finishes his in two quick sips. "And what am I going through Ian?" he challenges him, leaning his elbow next to the small cup and looking at him. Ian takes his last sip and gets off the stool. "You’re broken and experience moments of perfect chaos: one moment you're happy and the next moment you want to cut your veins," he says seriously. "You fluctuate in everyday life, hoping to create your own, new balance with small rituals. You organize your time in such a way that you don’t stand still, because if you stand still, you think. And if you think, you suffer. You're unstable, restless." He pauses. "Am I close?" "Quite." "And you’re looking for something that will make you feel better." He raises an eyebrow. "Or, maybe, fix you." He nods. "Yes." "And you've found it, too." He steps towards the cash till. "But you haven’t made it yours yet." "You’re right," says Andrea, taking his wallet. "You’re my guest," replies Ian, lifting his hand. "Thanks." The
”
”
Key Genius (Heart of flesh)
“
Horst Schulze, cofounder and past president of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, shares the origin of the Motto: “I started in the hotel business when I was 14 years old as a busboy. When my mother took me to the hotel to work for the first time, she said, ’We could never go to this hotel. This is only for important people. For important, fine people. So you’re lucky. Behave yourself. Wash your hands.’ She was a typical mother. I went to the hotel and the general manager talked to my mother and me for 15 minutes and told us we could never be like the guests who came to his hotel. ’So don’t ever get jealous. This is for Ladies and Gentlemen—very important people.’ “By the time I started working in the restaurant, I knew the guests were very important. But a few months later I realized that the maître d’ I watched every day was just as important because every guest was proud when he talked to them. Why? Because he was a first-class professional. He was somebody special—because of the excellence he created for the guests. So when I went to hotel school about a year and a half later, the teacher asked me to write a story describing what I felt about the business. And I wrote about the maître d’ at my hotel. I titled it, ’Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen.’ I wrote we could be excellent like he was. . .absolute excellence. When you walked into a room, you knew he was there. In any moment all of us who serve can be Ladies and Gentlemen, just like the guests. I think it’s a powerful thing that shouldn’t be missed by the wonderful people in this industry. They should understand that.
”
”
Joseph A. Michelli (The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company)