Hang In There Motivational Quotes

If you hang out with chickens, you're going to cluck and if you hang out with eagles, you're going to fly.

Life is like a game of chess. To win you have to make a move. Knowing which move to make comes with IN-SIGHT and knowledge, and by learning the lessons that are acculated along the way. We become each and every piece within the game called life!

Life is like a sandwich! Birth as one slice, and death as the other. What you put in-between the slices is up to you. Is your sandwich tasty or sour? Allan Rufus.org

I advise you to stop sharing your dreams with people who try to hold you back, even if they're your parents. Because, if you're the kind of person who senses there's something out there for you beyond whatever it is you're expected to do - if you want to be EXTRA-ordinary- you will not get there by hanging around a bunch of people who tell you you're not extraordinary. Instead, you will probably become as ordinary as they expect you to be.

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.

We love being mentally strong, but we hate situations that allow us to put our mental strength to good use.

Hard work does not go unnoticed, and someday the rewards will follow

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

You can't hang around waiting for somebody else to pull your strings. Destiny's what you make of it. You have to face whatever life throws at you. And if it throws more than you'd like, more than you think you can handle? Well then you just have to find the heroism within yourself and play out the hand you've been dealt. The universe never sets a challenge that can't be met. You just need to believe in yourself in order to find the strength to face it.

The most incredible architecture Is the architecture of Self, which is ever changing, evolving, revolving and has unlimited beauty and light inside which radiates outwards for everyone to see and feel. With every in breathe you are adding to your life and every out breathe you are releasing what is not contributing to your life. Every breathe is a re-birth.

Unless we take that first step into the unknown, we will never know our own potential!

Note and Quote to Self – What you think, say and do! Your life mainly consists of 3 things! What you think, What you say and What you do! So always be very conscious of what you are co-creating!

NOTE TO SELF – BOOMERANG EFFECT My words, thoughts and deeds have a boomerang effect. So be-careful what you send out!

At the very moment when people underestimate you is when you can make a breakthrough.

Don't give up when dark times come. The more storms you face in life, the stronger you'll be. Hold on. Your greater is coming.

Don't hang out with people who are: Ungrateful Unhelpful Unruly Unkindly Unloving Unambitious Unmotivated or make you feel... Uncomfortable

Quotes and notes to self – Find your inner peace! Don’t be caught up in your outer world. Pay greater attention to your inner world

The wish of death had been palpably hanging over this otherwise idyllic paradise for a good many years. All business and politics is personal in the Philippines. If it wasn't for the cheap beer and lovely girls one of us would spend an hour in this dump. They [Jehovah's Witnesses] get some kind of frequent flyer points for each person who signs on. I'm not lazy. I'm just motivationally challenged. I'm not fat. I just have lots of stored energy. You don't get it do you? What people think of you matters more than the reality. Marilyn. Despite standing firm at the final hurdle Marilyn was always ready to run the race. After answering the question the woman bent down behind the stand out of sight of all, and crossed herself. It is amazing what you can learn in prison. Merely through casual conversation Rick had acquired the fundamentals of embezzlement, fraud and armed hold up. He wondered at the price of honesty in a grey world whose half tones changed faster than the weather. The banality of truth somehow always surprises the news media before they tart it up. You've ridden jeepneys in peak hour. Where else can you feel up a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl without even trying? [Ralph Winton on the Philippines finer points] Life has no bottom. No matter how bad things are or how far one has sunk things can always get worse. You could call the Oval Office an information rain shadow. In the Philippines, a whole layer of criminals exists who consider that it is their right to rob you unhindered. If you thwart their wicked desires, to their way of thinking you have stolen from them and are evil. There's honest and dishonest corruption in this country. Don't enjoy it too much for it's what we love that usually kills us. The good guys don't always win wars but the winners always make sure that they go down in history as the good guys. The Philippines is like a woman. You love her and hate her at the same time. I never believed in all my born days that ideas of truth and justice were only pretty words to brighten a much darker and more ubiquitous reality. The girl was experiencing the first flushes of love while Rick was at least feeling the methadone equivalent. Although selfishness and greed are more ephemeral than the real values of life their effects on the world often outlive their origins. Miriam's a meteor job. Somewhere out there in space there must be a meteor with her name on it. Tsismis or rumours grow in this land like tropical weeds. Surprises are so common here that nothing is surprising. A crooked leader who can lead is better than a crooked one who can't. Although I always followed the politics of Hitler I emulate the drinking habits of Churchill. It [Australia] is the country that does the least with the most. Rereading the brief lines that told the story in the manner of Fox News reporting the death of a leftist Rick's dark imagination took hold. Didn't your mother ever tell you never to trust a man who doesn't drink? She must have been around twenty years old, was tall for a Filipina and possessed long black hair framing her smooth olive face. This specter of loveliness walked with the assurance of the knowingly beautiful. Her crisp and starched white uniform dazzled in the late-afternoon light and highlighted the natural tan of her skin. Everything about her was in perfect order. In short, she was dressed up like a pox doctor’s clerk. Suddenly, she stopped, turned her head to one side and spat comprehensively into the street. The tiny putrescent puddle contrasted strongly with the studied aplomb of its all-too-recent owner, suggesting all manner of disease and decay.

Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people. Worse, it can drive away the best people. Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated.

No matter how dysfunctional your background, how broke or broken you are, where you are today, or what anyone else says, YOU MATTER, and your life matters!

You're going to make it; You're going to be at peace; You're going to create, and love, and laugh, and live; You're going to do great things.

Our opportunities to give of ourselves are indeed limitless, but they are also perishable. There are hearts to gladden. There are kind words to say. There are gifts to be given. There are deeds to be done. There are souls to be saved. As we remember that “when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God,” (Mosiah 2:17) we will not find ourselves in the unenviable position of Jacob Marley’s ghost, who spoke to Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s immortal "Christmas Carol." Marley spoke sadly of opportunities lost. Said he: 'Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!' Marley added: 'Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode? Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!' Fortunately, as we know, Ebenezer Scrooge changed his life for the better. I love his line, 'I am not the man I was.' Why is Dickens’ "Christmas Carol" so popular? Why is it ever new? I personally feel it is inspired of God. It brings out the best within human nature. It gives hope. It motivates change. We can turn from the paths which would lead us down and, with a song in our hearts, follow a star and walk toward the light. We can quicken our step, bolster our courage, and bask in the sunlight of truth. We can hear more clearly the laughter of little children. We can dry the tear of the weeping. We can comfort the dying by sharing the promise of eternal life. If we lift one weary hand which hangs down, if we bring peace to one struggling soul, if we give as did the Master, we can—by showing the way—become a guiding star for some lost mariner.

With God, you are stronger than your struggles and more fierce than your fears. God provides comfort and strength to those who trust in Him. Be encouraged, keep standing, and know that everything's going to be alright.

Don’t hang onto anything too tightly – all things must change and you have to allow room for them to grow and blossom.

Enlightenment is the Goal - Love is the Game - Taking steps are the rules! - Allan Rufus

Note to Self – Thoughts design my energy! My thoughts WILL design the energy that moves me!

I think I need to become perfect all at once, so I keep getting overwhelmed and putting it off. I can't remember the last time that I didn't have something hanging over my head. There are usually about thirty to eighty things. Is that normal? Don't tell me. If it's not, I'm a jerk. If it is, that's super-depressing, and I know I'll just use 'this is normal' as an excuse to procrastinate even more.

Never give up. Things may be hard, but if you quit trying they'll never get better. Stop worrying and start trusting God. It will be worth it.

I wish you all an ego free driven day!

Transformation isn't a butterfly. It's the thing before you get to be a pretty bug flying away. It's huddling in the dark cocoon and then pushing your way out. It's the messy work of making sense of your fortunes and misfortunes, desires and doubts, hang-ups and sorrows, actions and accidents, mistakes and successes, so you can go on and become the person you must next become.

To everyone battling a difficulty or under attack right now, smile, keep your head up, keep moving and stay positive, you'll get through it.

Side benefit of dating me: free motivational speeches. It's like friends with benefits where the benefits are inspirational.

A man worth being with is one… That never lies to you Is kind to people that have hurt him A person that respects another’s life That has manners and shows people respect That goes out of his way to help people That feels every person, no matter how difficult, deserves compassion Who believes you are the most beautiful person he has ever met Who brags about your accomplishments with pride Who talks to you about anything and everything because no bad news will make him love you less That is a peacemaker That will see you through illness Who keeps his promises Who doesn’t blame others, but finds the good in them That raises you up and motivates you to reach for the stars That doesn’t need fame, money or anything materialistic to be happy That is gentle and patient with children Who won’t let you lie to yourself; he tells you what you need to hear, in order to help you grow Who lives what he says he believes in Who doesn’t hold a grudge or hold onto the past Who doesn’t ask his family members to deliberately hurt people that have hurt him Who will run with your dreams That makes you laugh at the world and yourself Who forgives and is quick to apologize Who doesn’t betray you by having inappropriate conversations with other women Who doesn’t react when he is angry, decides when he is sad or keep promises he doesn’t plan to keep Who takes his children’s spiritual life very seriously and teaches by example Who never seeks revenge or would ever put another person down Who communicates to solve problems Who doesn’t play games or passive aggressively ignores people to hurt them Who is real and doesn’t pretend to be something he is not Who has the power to free you from yourself through his positive outlook Who has a deep respect for women and treats them like a daughter of God Who doesn’t have an ego or believes he is better than anyone Who is labeled constantly by people as the nicest person they have ever met Who works hard to provide for the family Who doesn’t feel the need to drink alcohol to have a good time, smoke or do drugs Who doesn't have to hang out a bar with his friends, but would rather spend his time with his family Who is morally free from sin Who sees your potential to be great Who doesn't think a woman's place has to be in the home; he supports your life mission, where ever that takes you Who is a gentleman Who is honest and lives with integrity Who never discusses your private business with anyone Who will protect his family Who forgives, forgets, repairs and restores When you find a man that possesses these traits then all the little things you don’t have in common don’t matter. This is the type of man worth being grateful for.

Quotes and notes to self- Divine and Unique Power Find out what my Individual Divine and Unique Power IS and offer it outwards in harmony with all life!

If you want to be happy you have to study people who are happy. You have to hang out with people that are happy. Life won't go in the direction you want, by simply trying to stay positive in a life you're not happy with. You have to know what you want and why you truly want it so badly. When you figure that out then you need to change your current identity, in order to fit the type of person you envision would make those dreams come true. Happiness is not reliant on the actions or inactions of other people. It is your “courage in motion” toward your dreams.

I wonder, with all the flowers in the garden, how many of them ever think of hanging themselves with the garden hose, if ever they can.

In the midst of the turbulence, we hang onto hope.

Power does not pardon, power punishes.

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves. And yet after such a great number of years, no one without faith has reached the point to which all continually look. All complain, princes and subjects, noblemen and commoners, old and young, strong and weak, learned and ignorant, healthy and sick, of all countries, all time, all ages, and all conditions. A trial so long, so continuous, and so uniform should certainly convince us of our inability to reach the good by our own efforts.... What is it then that this desire and this inability proclaim to us, but that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remains to him only; the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable Object, that is to say, only by God Himself.

Hang on! Don’t give up.

Do not quit. Hang on the wings of hope.

When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot and use it to hang your troubles.

One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you’d opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are “pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours.” Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along.

That night, I continued my on-going chat with God. “Did Pam’s prayer count? I love her. And I understand her wanting a ticket to heaven, but her prayer seemed more like fire insurance against hell than a heartfelt desire to hang out with You.”    “Don’t worry.” God smiled. “No one comes to me with pure motives.”    Wow! I thought for a minute. “You really do love us, don’t You?”    “I do.

Even if you did drop into someone's consciousness, you'd have all their memories and desires and hang-ups right there in front of you. And as you say, in an eternity you'd get the chance to know everything once enough time had passed. You'd become unable to judge anyone.' 'You'd end up being completely compassionate,' I said. 'You wouldn't be able to judge someone once you understood them and their motivations. You'd become them, like Rowan said, and so it would be like judging yourself.

It happened to me just this year with a beautiful boy I started hanging out with. Call me a hormonal teenager if you want, but evidently I haven’t grown out of this experience. His name, his voice, his face, his laugh - anything was enough to make my heart start beating faster. It’s the spark.

An old advertising maxim says you've got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don't buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children's pictures.

Hope is what keeps us hanging on when we feel our rope wearing out. A positive attitude is often the natural result of maintaining that hope.

In the storm, our only anchor is hope.

The slogans “hang on” and “press on” have solved and will continue to solve the problems of humanity.

When the Parent Dragons are triggered, you feel like you’ve done something wrong, you are not good enough or supported, and you are motivated to work harder.

In the end, the pain will end. Hang in there!

Do not cover your sins nor hang yourself for the wrong done. Flee to the grace of God at the cross in the faith of confession. The mercy of God will grant you the power to forsake evil ways.

The error I found in the philosophy of Henry George was its cocksureness, its simplicity, and the small value that it placed upon the selfish motives of men. The doctrine was a hang-over from the seventeenth century in France, when the philosophers had given up the idea of God, but still thought that there must be some immovable basis for man’s conduct and ideals. In this dilemma they evolved the theory of natural rights. If ‘natural rights’ means anything it means that the individual rights are to be determined by the conduct of Nature. But Nature knows nothing about rights in the sense of human conception.

I can create a new business within three months: raise the money, assemble a team, and launch it. It’s fun for me. It’s really cool to see what can I put together. It makes money almost as a side effect. Creating businesses is the game I became good at. It’s just my motivation has shifted from being goal-oriented to being artistic. Ironically, I think I’m much better at it now. [74] Even when I invest, it’s because I like the people involved, I like hanging out with them, I learn from them, I think the product is really cool. These days, I will pass on great investments because I don’t find the products interesting.

Sometimes the fact that you can't sense God isn't an indication that He is not there. It is just an indication that you are hanging out in the wrong place.The cave is not a physical location, it is a state of mind.

One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you’d opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are ‘pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours.’ Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along.

Fear is not something easily shrugged off; it hangs on its prey like a heavy cloak threatening to choke and weigh down the wearer. Despite fear’s awful hindering effects, we must dare to behave boldly in its presence. For boldness is one of the few weapons that can convince fear to loosen its grip.

Something big and bad suddenly happening motivates us more than do slowly developing problems, and also more than the prospect of something big and bad happening in the future. I’m reminded of Samuel Johnson’s saying: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

As Christians we face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. If the church loses the intellectual battle in one generation, then evangelism will become immeasurably more difficult in the next. The war is not yet lost, and it is one which we must not lose: souls of men and women hang in the balance. For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. Thinking about your faith is indeed a virtue, for it helps you to better understand and defend your faith. But thinking about your faith is not equivalent to doubting your faith. Doubt is never a purely intellectual problem. There is a spiritual dimension to the problem that must be recognized. Never lose sight of the fact that you are involved in spiritual warfare and there is an enemy of your soul who hates you intensely, whose goal is your destruction, and who will stop at nothing to destroy you. Reason can be used to defend our faith by formulating arguments for the existence of God or by refuting objections. But though the arguments so developed serve to confirm the truth of our faith, they are not properly the basis of our faith, for that is supplied by the witness of the Holy Spirit Himself. Even if there were no arguments in defense of the faith, our faith would still have its firm foundation. The more I learn, the more desperately ignorant I feel. Further study only serves to open up to one's consciousness all the endless vistas of knowledge, even in one's own field, about which one knows absolutely nothing. Don't let your doubts just sit there: pursue them and keep after them until you drive them into the ground. We should be cautious, indeed, about thinking that we have come upon the decisive disproof of our faith. It is pretty unlikely that we have found the irrefutable objection. The history of philosophy is littered with the wrecks of such objections. Given the confidence that the Holy Spirit inspires, we should esteem lightly the arguments and objections that generate our doubts. These, then, are some of the obstacles to answered prayer: sin in our lives, wrong motives, lack of faith, lack of earnestness, lack of perseverance, lack of accordance with God’s will. If any of those obstacles hinders our prayers, then we cannot claim with confidence Jesus’ promise, “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it”. And so I was led to what was for me a radical new insight into the will of God, namely, that God’s will for our lives can include failure. In other words, God’s will may be that you fail, and He may lead you into failure! For there are things that God has to teach you through failure that He could never teach you through success. So many in our day seem to have been distracted from what was, is and always will be the true priority for every human being — that is, learning to know God in Christ. My greatest fear is that I should some day stand before the Lord and see all my works go up in smoke like so much “wood, hay, and stubble”. The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but knowledge of God. People tend naturally to assume that if God exists, then His purpose for human life is happiness in this life. God’s role is to provide a comfortable environment for His human pets. But on the Christian view, this is false. We are not God’s pets, and the goal of human life is not happiness per se, but the knowledge of God—which in the end will bring true and everlasting human fulfilment. Many evils occur in life which may be utterly pointless with respect to the goal of producing human happiness; but they may not be pointless with respect to producing a deeper knowledge of God.

Now I was laughing. I was still scared, but it was somehow comforting to think that maybe stage fright was a trait [even my parents had]... "But seriously, how do you get over the jitters?" Dad was still smiling, but I could tell he had turned serious because he slowed down his speech. "You don't. You just work through it. You hang in there." So I went on.

All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However different the means they may employ, they all strive towards this goal. The reason why some go to war and some do not is the same desire in both, but interpreted in two different ways. The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is the motive of every act of every man, including those who go and hang themselves.

Hate is such a heavy burden to carry. There are those who can't even sleep. They can't wait to log on to their social media accounts, so they can plant the seed of hate to others. Every time you say something . Know you are planting a seed. The question is ,what seed are you planting with your social account? What are you planting when you speak to other people or what seed is planted to you by the people you follow, or the people hang around with. Luke 8: 5-18

About Donne there hangs the shadow of the impure motive ; and impure motives lend their aid to a facile success. He is a little of the religious spellbinder, the Reverend Billy Sunday of his time, the flesh-creeper, the sorcerer of emotional orgy. We emphasize this aspect to the point of the grotesque. Donne had a trained mind; but without belittling the intensity or the profundity of his experience, we can suggest that this experience was not perfectly controlled, and that he lacked spiritual discipline.

Life is about choices. You must choose what you want. If you don’t choose. People, your friends, family and life will choose for you, and they won’t choose what is best for you. Choose your friends , who do you vibe and hang around with carefully. Choose do you entertain, sleep with or tell your secrets or plans. Always choose to do the right things and never break the law or people's heart. If you make wrong choices, you will suffer, get hurt or die. if you make right choices, you will live longer and prosper.

When are we going to wake up and call it what it is? They degrade blacks; instead of getting sprayed by a water hose, we are now getting sprayed with bullets! Instead of getting a peaceful night’s rest, our doors are getting kicked in! Oh, and instead of suffocating us with their white sheets or tying a noose around our necks and hanging us from a tree, they suffocate us by putting their knee on our neck instead. Let’s keep it real here. Who are we fooling? Racism has still has a heartbeat, and I do not see it dying anytime soon.

81. “When are we going to wake up and call it what it is? They degrade blacks; instead of getting sprayed by a water hose, we are now getting sprayed with bullets! Instead of getting a peaceful night’s rest, our doors are getting kicked in! Oh, and instead of suffocating us with their white sheets or tying a noose around our necks and hanging us from a tree, they suffocate us by putting their knee on our neck instead. Let’s keep it real here. Who are we fooling? Racism has still has a heartbeat, and I do not see it dying anytime soon.

WAKE UP OR PERISH The world’s problems are, by and large, human problems—the unavoidable consequence of egoic sleepwalking. If we care to look, all the signs are present to suggest that we are not only sleepwalking, but at times borderline insane as well. In a manner of speaking, we have lost (or at the very least forgotten) our souls, and we try very, very hard not to notice, because we don’t want to see how asleep we are, how desolate our condition really is. So we blindly carry on, driven by forces we do not recognize or understand, or even acknowledge. We are no doubt at a very critical point in time. Our world hangs in the balance, and a precarious balance it is. Awakening to Reality is no longer a possibility; it is an imperative. We have sailed the ship of delusion about as far as she can carry us. We have run her ashore and now find ourselves shipwrecked on an increasingly desolate land. Our options have imploded. “Wake up or perish” is the spiritual call of our times. Did we ever need more motivation than this? And yet all is eternally well, and more well than can be imagined.

Declaring that we will master our fears is the first great leap toward freedom. Our vitality, growth, and destiny all demand that we can topple fear. As so much hangs in the balance, let us better understand what fear really is. Fear is the human motive of aversion. Fear doesn’t help us commit to higher aims. It doesn’t help us imagine greatness. Its sole aim is immediate release from threat, strain, or pain. It often becomes a by-all-means-necessary approach to controlling any given situation so that the body—but most often the ego—can feel safe and unchallenged.

It may seem strange to conceive of friendship as principally about cooperation rather than, say, hanging out and having fun, but appearances can be misleading. First, nature’s purposes need not be revealed in our experience. Sex, for example, is primarily about making babies, but that’s not necessarily what motivates people to do the deed. Likewise, friendship may ultimately be about things that are far from our minds when we’re being friendly. Indeed, if you’re constantly thinking about the material advantages of your friendship, that’s a sign that you’re not really a friend.

It is the punisher’s mind-set where everything must be changed. The difficulty of this is explored in the superb book The Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury (2014) by Morris Hoffman, a practicing judge and legal scholar.31 He reviews the reasons for punishment: As we see from game theory studies, because punishment fosters cooperation. Because it is in the fabric of the evolution of sociality. And most important, because it can feel good to punish, to be part of a righteous and self-righteous crowd at a public hanging, knowing that justice is being served. This is a deep, atavistic pleasure. Put people in brain scanners, give them scenarios of norm violations. Decision making about culpability for the violation correlates with activity in the cognitive dlPFC. But decision making about appropriate punishment activates the emotional vmPFC, along with the amygdala and insula; the more activation, the more punishment.32 The decision to punish, the passionate motivation to do so, is a frothy limbic state. As are the consequences of punishing—when subjects punish someone for making a lousy offer in an economic game, there’s activation of dopaminergic reward systems. Punishment that feels just feels good.

The person you received word from,” I said after a while. “You love one of them, don’t you?” Gauri started, a protest on the tip of her lips. “I…,” she began before weakly trailing off. She quickly regained composure and her eyes narrowed. “That’s none of your concern.” You are my concern, I wanted to say. You are my sister. But I said nothing. I just let her words hang in the air. “The best motivation is love,” I offered. Beside me, Kamala nodded vigorously. “And food!” Gauri’s eyes widened. Like a ghost of sound laid atop the other, I heard what Gauri did--a sort of mangled neighing. “Your horse is rather strange.” Kamala nodded again.

Fly with those who lift you up and thrust you forward A pilot friend of mine told me there are four main principles to master when flying airplanes: lift, thrust, weight, and drag. You have to take all these into account to make sure the plane will fly. It struck me that these same principles apply to specific types of people. There are some who lift you, brighten your day, cheer you up, and make you feel better about yourself. You meet them and you have a spring in your step. They’re a lift. Then there are people who thrust you. They inspire you, motivate you, challenge you to move forward and pursue your dreams. The third group are weights. They pull you down, dump their problems on you, so that you leave feeling heavier, negative, discouraged, and worse than you did before. Finally, there are those who are a drag. They’ve always got a sad song. The dishwasher broke. The goldfish died. They didn’t get invited to a party. They’re stuck in a pit. They expect you to cheer them up, fix their problems, and carry their loads. We all encounter people from each of these four groups. You have to make sure you’re spending the majority of your time with lifters and thrusters. If you’re only hanging out with weights and drags, it will keep you from becoming everything you were created to be.

The Coach’s head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes—they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach’s only distinctive feature—for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon’s beak. This snout—or beak, rather—was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man’s face, it almost appeared—due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue—that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another. 'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and people found me fearless,' the Coach remarked, enunciating each word carefully through the hollow clack-clacking sound of his beak, as its edges clapped together. 'I might have exchanged it for that of an ox and then thought better. A lizard goes best with scales, don’t you think?' Bunnu nodded as he quietly wondered how the Coach could manage to fit that phallic monstrosity of a beak into any kind of mask, unless, in fact, this disguise of which he spoke, had been specially designed for his face and divided into sections in such a way that they could be readily attached to different areas—as though one were assembling a new face—in overlapping layers, so as to veil, or perhaps even amplify certain distinguishable features. All the same, in doing so, one could only imagine this lizard mask to be enormous to the extent that it would be disproportionate with the rest of the Coach’s body. But then, there were ways to mask space, as well—to bend light, perhaps, to create the illusion that something was perceptibly larger or smaller, wider or narrower, rounder or more linear than it was in actuality. That is to say, any form of prosthesis designed for the purposes of affecting remedial space might, for example, have had the capability of creating the appearance of a gap of void in occupied space. An ornament hangs from the chin, let’s say, as an accessory meant to contour smoothly inward what might otherwise appear to be hanging jowls. This surely wouldn’t be the exact use that the Coach would have for such a device—as he had no jowls to speak of—though he could certainly see the benefit of the accessory’s ingenuity. This being said, the lizard mask might have appeared natural rather than disproportionate given the right set of circumstances. Whatever the case, there was no way of even knowing if the Coach wasn’t, in fact, already wearing a mask, at this very moment, rendering Bunnu’s initial appraisal of his character—as determined by a rudimentary physiognomic analysis of his features—a matter now subject to doubt. And thus, any conjecture that could be made with respect to the dimensions or components of a lizard mask—not to speak of the motives of its wearer—seemed not only impractical, but also irrelevant at this point in time.

Have you ever wanted something very badly-something that was within your grasp-and yet you were afraid to reach out for it? That night he had answered no. Tonight he would have said yes. Among other things, he wanted to know where she was; a month ago he’d told himself it was because he wanted the divorce petition served. Tonight he was too exhausted from his long internal battle to bother lying to himself anymore. He wanted to know where she was because he needed to know. His grandfather claimed not to know; his uncle and Alexandra both know, but they’d both refused to tell him, and he hadn’t pressed them. Wearily, Ian leaned his head against the back of his chair and closed his eyes, but he wouldn’t sleep, and he knew it, even though it was three o’clock in the morning. He never slept anymore unless he’d either had a day of grueling physical activity or drunk enough brandy to knock himself out. And even when he did, he laid awake, wanting her, and knowing-because she’d told him-that she was somewhere out there, lying awake, wanting him. A faint smile touched his lips as he remembered her standing in the witness box, looking heartbreakingly young and beautiful, first trying logically to explain to everyone what had happened-and when that failed, playing the part of an incorrigible henwit. Ian chuckled, as he’d been doing whenever he thought of her that day. Only Elizabeth would have dared to take on the entire House of Lords-and when she couldn’t sway them with intelligent logic, she had changed tack and used their own stupidity and arrogance to defeat them. If he hadn’t felt so furious and betrayed that day, he’d have stood up and given her the applause she deserved! It was exactly the same tactic she’d used the night he’d been accused of cheating at cards. When she couldn’t convince Everly to withdraw from the duel because Ian was innocent, she’d turned on the hapless youth and outrageously taken him to task because he’d already engaged himself to her the next day. Despite his accusation that her performance in the House of Lords had been motivated by self-interest, he knew it hadn’t. She’d come to save him, she thought, from hanging.

[A Tibetan Legend] "There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. Barbarian powers have arisen. Although they waste their wealth in preparations to annihilate each other, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable devastation and technologies that lay waste the world. It is now, when the future of all beings hangs by the frailest of threads, that the kingdom of Shambhala emerges. "You cannot go there, for it is not a place. It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors. But you cannot recognize a Shambhala warrior by sight, for there is no uniform or insignia, there are no banners. And there are no barricades from which to threaten the enemy, for the Shambhala warriors have no land of their own. Always they move on the terrain of the barbarians themselves. "Now comes the time when great courage is required of the Shambhala warriors, moral and physical courage. For they must go into the very heart of the barbarian power and dismantle the weapons. To remove these weapons, in every sense of the word, they must go into the corridors of power where the decisions are made. "The Shambhala warriors know they can do this because the weapons are manomaya, mind-made. This is very important to remember, Joanna. These weapons are made by the human mind. So they can be unmade by the human mind! The Shambhala warriors know that the dangers that threaten life on Earth do not come from evil deities or extraterrestrial powers. They arise from our own choices and relationships. So, now, the Shambhala warriors must go into training. "How do they train?" I asked. "They train in the use of two weapons." "The weapons are compassion and insight. Both are necessary. We need this first one," he said, lifting his right hand, "because it provides us the fuel, it moves us out to act on behalf of other beings. But by itself it can burn us out. So we need the second as well, which is insight into the dependent co-arising of all things. It lets us see that the battle is not between good people and bad people, for the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. We realize that we are interconnected, as in a web, and that each act with pure motivation affects the entire web, bringing consequences we cannot measure or even see. "But insight alone," he said, "can seem too cool to keep us going. So we need as well the heat of compassion, our openness to the world's pain. Both weapons or tools are necessary to the Shambhala warrior.

People who don't empower your goals are human headwind bloviators. They add friction to the journey. When you spout excitement over actions or ideas, bloviators react with doubt and disbelief and use conditioned talking points such as, “Oh that won't work,” “Someone is already doing it,” and “Why bother?” In motivational circles, they call them “dream stealers.” You must turn your back on them. Every entrepreneur has bloviators in their life. Network marketers consider me a bloviator. These people are normal obstacles to the Fastlane road trip. Remember, these people have been socially conditioned to believe in the preordained path. They don't know about The Fastlane, nor do they believe it. Anything outside of that box is foreign, and when you talk Fastlane, you may as well be speaking Klingon. As a producer, you are the minority, while consumers are the rest. To be unlike “everyone” (who isn't rich), you (who will be rich) require a strong defense; otherwise, their toxicity infects your mindset. Commiserating with habitual, negative, limited thinkers is treasonous. Uncontrolled, these headwinds lead directly to the couch and the video game console. Yes, the old, “If you hang out with dogs, you get fleas.” This dichotomy[…]

Critics are also overwhelmingly male—one survey of film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes found only 22 percent of the critics afforded “top critic” status were female.14 More recently, of course, we have become accustomed to a second set of gatekeepers: our friends and family and even random strangers we’ve decided to follow on social media, as well as “peer” reviewers on sites like Goodreads and IMDb. But peer review sites are easily skewed by a motivated minority with a mission (see the Ghostbusters reboot and the handful of manbabies dedicated to its ruination) or by more stubborn and pervasive implicit biases, which most users aren’t even aware they have. (The data crunchers at FiveThirtyEight.com found that male peer reviewers regularly drag down aggregate review scores for TV shows aimed at women, but the reverse isn’t true.)15 As for the social networks we choose? They’re usually plagued by homophily, which is a fancy way to say that it’s human nature to want to hang out with people who make us feel comfortable, and usually those are people who remind us of us. Without active and careful intervention on our part, we can easily be left with an online life that tells us only things we already agree with and recommends media to us that doesn’t challenge our existing worldview.

I gesture with the jacket. “Do you want me to leave this somewhere?” I only ask it because it’s polite. I don’t want him to say yes. I don’t know what exactly it is I want him to say, only for it to be something that gives me an excuse to stay here watching him for a few more minutes. Admitting this to myself is a sharp blow to my pride, as, with the exception of my six-year-old self’s desire to marry Dr. Halsal, I’d always thought I was above being fascinated by anyone but myself. On the other side of the stall door, Sean looks up and down the aisle, as if he’s scouting for a place for me to hang the jacket, but then he frowns at me as if that wasn’t what he was looking for at all. “I’m nearly done. Can you wait?” I try not to stare at where his hand rests on the red stallion’s neck. It’s a warning, the way his fingers lean into his skin, telling Corr to keep his distance, but it’s a comfort as well, the way that I would touch Dove to remind her just that I’m there. The difference, though, is that Corr killed a man yesterday morning. I say, “I suppose I have one minute or two to put together.” Sean does the sweep of his eyes that he does, the one that goes from my head to my toes and back again and makes me feel that he’s scanning the depths of my soul and teasing out my motivations and sins. It’s worse than confession with Father Mooneyham. At the end of it, he says, “If you help, this will go faster.” There is a little narrowing to his eyes at the end of it that makes me understand that this is a test. Whether or not I’m brave enough to go into the stall with Corr after yesterday morning, after I’ve had time to think about what happened. The thought of it makes my pulse trip. The question is not if I trust Corr. The question is if I trust Sean. “What would helping look like?” I answer, and Sean’s face clears like a fair day over Skarmouth. He spits on his fingers again and pushes Corr toward the back wall of the stall to give me room to open the door. I stand inside the stall.

These are things to have under your belt in order to make and strengthen boundaries: Educate them. To be blunt, narcissists aren’t exactly in tune with their interpersonal or communication skills. Try using incentives or other motivators to get them to pay attention to how their behavior affects others. They may not empathize or seem to get what you’re saying, but at least you can say you tried to look at it from your point of view. Understand your personal rights. In order to demand being treated fairly and with respect, it’s important to know what your rights are. You’re allowed to say no, you have a right to your feelings, you are allowed privacy—and there are no wedding or relationship vows that say you are at the beck and call of your partner. When a person has been abused for a long time, they may lack the confidence or self-esteem to take a stand on their rights. The more power they take back, though, the less the abuser has. Be assertive. This is something that depends on confidence, and will take practice, but it’s worth it. Being assertive means standing up for yourself and exuding pride in who you are. Put your strategies into play. After the information you’ve absorbed so far, you have an advantage in that you are aware of your wants, what the narcissist demands, what you are able to do and those secret tiny areas you may have power over. Tap into these areas to put together your own strategies. Re-set your boundaries. A boundary is an unseen line in the sand. It determines the point you won’t allow others to cross over or they’ll hurt you. These are non-negotiable and others must be aware of them and respect them. But you have to know what those lines are before making them clear to others. Have consequences. As an extension of the above point, if a person tries ignoring your boundaries, make sure you give a consequence. There doesn't need to be a threat, but more saying, “If you ________, we can’t hang out/date/talk/etc.” You’re just saying that crossing the boundary hurts you so if they choose to disregard it, you choose not to accept that treatment. The narcissist will not tolerate you standing up for yourself, but it’s still important. The act of advocating for yourself will increase your self-confidence, self-esteem and self-worth. Then you’ll be ready to recover and heal.

gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.

Be careful who you choose to allow into your circle, our behaviour and thought patterns mirror those we hang around with.

He's really so adorable. The dog, I mean. Did you know he's a rescue beagle?" I'd remembered Frank and Sam had used the term the day I'd first encountered Bandit, but I'd just assumed it meant that he'd come from the pound. Rachel had set me straight. "They use them to experiment on. You know, in laboratories. Sam says they use beagles because they're so gentle and sweet-tempered they won't even bite you when you're hurting them. And after a few years when they 'retire' the dogs, some labs give them to rescue groups who try to find them homes. Sam says that Bandit didn't even know what grass was when he got him. It's his second rescue beagle. He had one before, a girl dog, but she ended up with cancer and he had to put her down. So he got Bandit." "Beagles," Sam said now, as he stood squarely on the scaffolding, "don't like to be alone. So she'll be doing me a favor." "What about the doggie day-care place?" "Nah. There's a Labradoodle there that's always picking on him. He'll be better hanging out with Rachel." I was not completely fooled. I knew he'd talked to Rachel for a while, because she'd told me that he had. "He's really nice," she'd said. "He listens." So I knew he knew that Rachel wasn't finding this an easy time, and I suspected Sam just figured she and Bandit were a lot alike in needing some companionship from somebody who understood and didn't push their boundaries. Whatever his true motivations, it was an inspired move.

A cute example from Rich Burlew’s online comic The Order of the Stick: a girl allied with the bad guys explains why she hangs out with the undead: Look, everyone knows that the undead are the antithesis of life, right? Except people are jerks. Lying, untrustworthy jackasses, every one of them. Everyone knows this, too. So logically, undead must be the opposite of that: caring, sensitive honest souls who are oppressed by the living majority and their negative stereotypes. It’s not deep— she is a comic strip character— but she has a reasonable motivation, something we can sympathize with.

There were certainly multiple factors contributing to these men’s post-moonwalk slump, but the question What do you do after walking on the moon? became a gigantic speed bump. The trouble with moonwalkers and billionaires is when they arrive at the top, their momentum often stops. If they don’t manage to find something to parlay, they turn into the kid on the jungle gym who just hangs from the ring. Not coincidentally, this is the same reason that only one-third of Americans are happy at their jobs. When there’s no forward momentum in our careers, we get depressed, too. As Newton pointed out, an object at rest tends to stay at rest. So how does one avoid billionaire’s depression? Or regular person’s stuck-in-a-dead-end-job, lack-of-momentum-fueled depression? Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile took on the question in the mid-2000s in a research study of white-collar employees. She tasked 238 pencil pushers in various industries to keep daily work diaries. The workers answered open-ended questions about how they felt, what events in their days stood out. Amabile and her fellow researchers then dissected the 12,000 resulting entries, searching for patterns in what affects people’s “inner” work lives the most dramatically. The answer, it turned out, is simply progress. A sense of forward motion. Regardless how small. And that’s the interesting part. Amabile found that minor victories at work were nearly as psychologically powerful as major breakthroughs. To motivate stuck employees, as Amabile and her colleague Steven J. Kramer suggest in their book, The Progress Principle, businesses need to help their workers experience lots of tiny wins. (And as we learned from the bored BYU students in chapter 1, breaking up big challenges into tiny ones also speeds up progress.) This is helpful to know when motivating employees. But it also hints at what billionaires and astronauts can do to stave off the depression that follows the high of getting to the top. To get out of the funk, say Joan DiFuria and Stephen Goldbart, cofounders of the Money, Meaning & Choices Institute, depressed successes simply have to start the Olympic rings over. Some use their money to create new businesses. Others parlay sideways and get into philanthropy. And others simply pick up hobbies that take time to master. Even if the subsequent endeavors are smaller than their previous ones, the depression dissipates as they make progress.

James is “helping motivate kids in trouble to get jobs and not hang on the streets. I never wanted to make it to prison. The question is, do I want to change?” And then, answering his own question, Tim added, “My answer is yes because it’s time to let my light shine.

...I conducted a number of experiments to get in touch with my future self. Here are my favorite three: • Fire up AgingBooth. While hiring a programmer to create a 3-D virtual reality simulator is probably out of your price range, I personally love an app called AgingBooth, which transforms a picture of your face into what you will look like in several decades. There are also other apps like it, like Merrill Edge’s web app that shows you a live avatar of what you’ll look like at retirement (faceretirement.merilledge.com). AgingBooth is my favorite of them all, and it’s available for both Android and iOS, and it’s free. On the website for this book (productivityprojectbook.com), you can see what to expect out of the app—I’ve framed a picture of myself that hangs above my computer in my office, where I see it every day. Visitors are usually freaked out. • Send a letter to your future self. Like the letter I wrote at camp, writing and sending a letter to yourself in the future is a great way to bridge the gap between you and your future self. I frequently use FutureMe.org to send emails to myself in the future, particularly when I see myself being unfair to future me. • Create a future memory. I’m not a fan of hocus-pocus visualizations, so I hope this doesn’t sound like one. In her brilliant book The Wallpaper Instinct, Kelly McGonigal recommends creating a memory of yourself in the future—like one where you don’t put off a report you’re procrastinating on, or one where you read ten interesting books because you staved off the temptation of binge-watching three seasons of House of Cards on Netflix. Simply imagining a better, more productive version of yourself down the line has been shown to be enough to motivate you to act in ways that are helpful for your future self.

We perish, when we lose hope.

Mary Kay Ash, the founder of the Mary Kay Cosmetic empire, taught her teams that most people have a sign hanging around their necks that says, “Make me feel special.” Answer that need in others through nurturing words, deeds, and actions, and you will be amazed by the ease with which people respond to you. What can you do to make other people feel special?

If you wouldn’t want to hang out with someone who was constantly bashing you with a barrage of belittling insults, why would you allow them to live in your head?

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging of an uncompleted task. ~ William James ~

You don’t like possessive people then?’ ‘It isn’t that I don’t like them, I cannot understand what motivates them, unless it is an inadequacy in themselves, some deep want, and in order to alleviate it in some way, they hang on to another human being. It’s a sort of desire for power. Those who run businesses are possessed in a similar way. They have power over people; and very often, on their whims depends a man’s livelihood.

Hold on, hang in there but hope in the Lord your God.

They think they can keep me out, but it does not matter how many locks they hang at the entrance. There is always another door. — The Thief Who Stole the Stars, by Tristan Chirsley

Imagine yourself in a situation where you have recently been overly anxious. Now take a minute and imagine yourself back in that situation but this time in a calm frame of mind. See yourself calm and in control, feel yourself relaxed and at ease. Would you be happier? Would you do anything differently in that situation if you didn’t have anxiety? Take your time and use all of your senses to imagine this scenario. How much better will your life be when you can approach life in this calm way? 2. Imagine the things you would do if you didn’t have anxiety or panic attacks. Take a while to think about this, because this will be your motivation. It doesn’t have to be anything monumental. It could just be walking in the park or getting your groceries. Maybe going to the movies, hanging out with your friends, travelling to the city you’ve always dreamed of. My motivation was just to feel safe being alone and not having my phone with me – as simple as that. It can really help if you know why you are doing this and why you want to get better.

In order for you to cross the threshold of your initiation, a loss of lower vibrational relationships is required. Releasing this dead weight will allow you to rise to newer heights. Remember, history is not an excuse to hang on to a connection that has withered out and long expired.

Camaraderie is priceless. Hang out with people who take risks and challenge themselves. Stay driven, have a vision, and you will naturally attract like-minded people to you.

Don't just hang on the cliff jump because on the other side is a success.

Faith will not always bring instant miracles. But it will give you the patience to hang in there until you receive your miracle.

A confused person, confuses everyone around them. When someone is lost. Whoever follows them becomes lost too. They find each other but they are lost together. Choose careful the people or leaders you follow. Choose carefully the people or friends you hang around with.