Ideas For Graduation Quotes

There's a lot for you to live for. Good things are definitely in your future, Leonard. I'm sure of it. You have no idea how many interesting people you'll meet after high school's over. Your life partner, your best friend, the most wonderful person you'll ever know is sitting in some high school right now waiting to graduate and walk into your life - maybe even feeling all the same things you are, maybe even wondering about you, hoping that you're strong enough to make it to the future where you'll meet.

In a word, learning is decontextualized. We break ideas down into tiny pieces that bear no relation to the whole. We give students a brick of information, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, until they are graduated, at which point we assume they have a house. What they have is a pile of bricks, and they don't have it for long.

Nothing can fill you up,” she stated. “Nope,” he agreed again. “You won’t let it.” “Barrel’s got a hole in the bottom, buddy, everything leaks out no matter how much you pour in.” She was silent a moment then she whispered, “Right.” She turned to the door and his hand gripped his bourbon so hard he had to focus everything on loosening his grip or the glass would shatter. Before she opened it, she turned back. “You don’t know, Cal, you have no idea. You’ve shut yourself up for so long in this fucking house with your tragic memories, you have no idea what’s about to walk out your door. Kate, Keira and me, we could have plugged that hole. We could have filled you so full, you’d be bursting. We would have loved that chance. We’d have given it everything we had, no matter the time that slid by, graduations, weddings, grandbabies, you’d have been a part of us and we’d have given everything we had to keep you so full, you’d be bursting.” Cal didn’t reply. “Joe,” she whispered, “you let me walk out this door, you’ll lose your chance.” Cal didn’t move. Vi waited. Cal stayed seated.

Q: Do you feel concerned that after all this work, people won't treat [Starship Titanic] with the gravity of, say, a movie or a book? That they won't treat it as an art form? D.A.: I hope that's the case, yes. I get very worried about this idea of art. Having been an English literary graduate, I've been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity. ... [I]f somebody wants to come along and say, "Oh, it's art," that's as may be. I don't really mind that much. But I think that's for other people to decide after the fact. It isn't what you should be aiming to do. There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, "Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth." ... I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don't think they're doing art, but merely practicing a craft, and working as good craftsmen. ... I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

I snicker, but the idea is momentarily appealing. Part of me is scared of leaving school. Part of me wants to go desperately. Tension of opposites.

In the United States we have concentrated tremendous sums of money on the educational plant, seemingly with the idea that the right number of buildings will turn out the right number of graduates. Yet the teachers who actually instruct the future citizens of our country are more often than not miserably paid. If in the future we find ourselves with a lot of fourth-rate citizens, we have only ourselves to blame.

I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what to do – I couldn’t keep staring at the wall forever, I told myself. But even that admonition didn’t work. A faculty advisor reviewing a graduation thesis would have had the perfect comment: you write well, you argue clearly, but you don’t have anything to say.

In a now famous commencement speech at Stanford University, Steve Jobs urged the graduating class to “stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Never let go of your appetite to go after new ideas, new experiences, and new adventures. Compete with yourself, not with others. Judge yourself on what is your personal best and you’ll accomplish more than you could ever have imagined. Life stops for no one, so keep moving. Stay awake and stay alive.

The main function of a university is not to grant degrees and diplomas, but to develop the university spirit and advance learning. The former is impossible without corporate life, the latter without honours and post-graduate

You don't have to be a college graduate to murder someone.” “Thank you for making the jury aware of that, Lieutenant. I'm sure they had no idea.

A university is a city of ideas, and we're grateful you became citizens of our city.

Most choose to pretend they’re ignorant of the facts because the system works. The idea of changing it scares them more than giving it their tacit approval.

I don't know," I admit. "I guess I'm just nervous about graduating and things changing. And I've had a shit week with the kids at school calling me a slutty prude." "Slutty prude?" He repeats. "How is that even a thing?" I throw my hands up. "I have no idea! Leave it to me to create some new form of loser. It's been total hell.

One semester later I did, indeed, graduate with a 4.0. I had done it. And after that, my GPA did . . . Nothing. I never planned on going to graduate school. I wasn’t applying for jobs that used grades as a measurement. I didn’t need that GPA for any single reason other than to SAY I had it and impress people. I could turn this into an argument for “Let’s reward a high GPA after college in LIFE! Can we get priority seating on Southwest? A free monthly refill at Starbucks? SOMETHING to make four years of my life chasing this arbitrary number WORTH it?!” (Great idea. Never gonna happen.) Or I could argue that if I’d been easier on myself and gotten 10 percent worse grades I could have had 50 percent more friendships and fun. If someone’s takeaway from this story is “Felicia Day said don’t study!,” I’ll punch you in the face. But I AM saying don’t chase perfection for perfection’s sake, or for anyone else’s sake at all. If you strive for something, make sure it’s for the right reasons. And if you fail, that will be a better lesson for you than any success you’ll ever have. Because you learn a lot from screwing up. Being perfect . . . not so much.

It's been well-documented that there is a growing sense of entitlement among young people. I have certainly seen that in my classrooms. So many graduating seniors have this notion that they should get hired because of their creative brilliance. Too many are unhappy with the idea of starting at the bottom. My advice has always been: 'You ought to be thrilled you got a job in the mailroom. And when you get there, here's what you do: Be really great at sorting mail.' No one wants to hear someone say: 'I'm not good at sorting mail because the job is beneath me.' No job should be beneath us. And if you can't (or won't) sort mail, where is the proof that you can do anything?

You have no idea how many men are spoiled by what is called education. For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed. If Shakespeare had graduated at Oxford, he might have been a quibbling attorney, or a hypocritical parson.

Arthur Compton became my graduate advisor. He was the ideal graduate advisor for me: he came into my research room only once during my graduate career and usually had no idea how I was spending my time.

I thought the country I'd just described to them - a hopeful, generous, courageous America, an America that was open to everyone. At about the same age as the graduates were now, I'd seized on that idea and clung to it for dear life. For their sake more than mine, I badly wanted it to be true.

When I say us, what I mean is them. I felt fine. No; I felt like I’d woken up after a long sleep and had a good workout in the fresh air and a really nice stretch and was now contemplating with interest the idea of a hearty lunch. Sitting on edge in a classroom for hours surrounded by fluffy peeping freshmen waiting for one mal to pop out at me: nightmarish. Summoning a river of magma to instantly vaporize twenty-seven carefully designed attacks at once: nothing to it.

They’re freaked out about Orion.” “After you’ve only been dating two months?” “We’re not dating!” Aadhya made a dramatic show of rolling her eyes heavenwards. “After you’ve been doing whatever you’re doing that is not dating but looks like dating to everyone else, for only two months.” “Thanks ever so,” I said dryly. “As far as I can tell, they’re shocked that he’s talking to another human being at all.” “To be fair, you’re the only person I’ve ever met who’d come up with the idea of being wildly rude and hostile to the guy who saved your life twenty times,” Aadhya said. I glared at her. “Thirteen times! And I’ve saved his life at least twice.” “Catch up already, girl,” she said unrepentantly.

Pudge/Colonel: "I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself. But then even after I wasn't mad anymore, I still didn't say anything, and I don't even really know why. Pudge had that kiss, I guess. And I had this secret. You've mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night, I'd stayed up late with Lara and some people, and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my back window. It was like 3:15 that morning, maybe, amd I walked out there and saw her walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me that her mother was dead eight years that day, and that she always put flowers on her mother's grave on the anniversary but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for flowers, but it was too early-too wintry. That's how I knew about January 10. I still have no idea whether it was suicide. She was so sad, and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn"t. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk just trashed drunk, and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would just cry herself to sleep and then drive to visit her mom the next day or something. She walked away, and then I heard a car start. I don't know what I was thinking. So I let her go too. And I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to." Takumi

I also have no idea how to be a girlfriend. I love sleeping alone and I avoid sick people at all costs. I don't even cook for myself, so I need someone who appreciates a lovingly baked frozen pizza.

So it is not too much to ask of Americans that they not be censors, that they run the risk of being deeply wounded by ideas so that we may all be free. If we are wounded by an ugly idea, we must count it as part of the cost of freedom and, like American heroes in the days gone by, bravely carry on.

While it is easy to see how this way of thinking, when brought to a college campus, could lead to requests for safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggression training, and bias response teams, it is difficult to see how this way of thinking could produce well-educated, bold, and open-minded college graduates.

We recently graduated from school, and the mayor gave us one last little school assignment. We had to write about our chosen profession. Twenty pages, too. Now, I love my village and all, and have absolutely zero regrets about becoming a warrior, but dude, c'mon. Who wants to write twenty pages about anything? Luckily, Runt thought of a way for us to avoid writing so much without breaking the rules, and every other student copied Runt's idea. Needless to say, the mayor wasn't too thrilled about that. Guess that's why Runt is back to crafting potato-based food items." Resisting the urge to ask 'What's a potato?', I nodded. "Hmm. Do you think I'll be able to speak with him?" "Probably,

To be fair, you’re the only person I’ve ever met who’d come up with the idea of being wildly rude and hostile to the guy who saved your life twenty times,” Aadhya said. I glared at her. “Thirteen times! And I’ve saved his life at least twice.” “Catch up already, girl,” she said, unrepentantly.

It's cool because business has no minimum age. If you're 13 years old and you have a great business idea, you don't have to wait until you reach a certain age or until you graduate high school or anything like that. You can be in business right now and be successful at it. Growth takes time, but it's never too early to get started.

Lincoln never finished his education. To the night of his death he was a pupil, a learner, an inquirer, a seeker after knowledge. You have no idea how many men are spoiled by what is called education. For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed. If Shakespeare had graduated at Oxford, he might

The ideas and ideals that we have in our 18 year old heads when we graduate from high school are hardly realistic.

Don't you kids get any ideas about dragging a trailer into the backyard. after you graduate from high school, i don't want to see you again.

Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have had so far. Perhaps we will get another good idea by and by—and then we will have two good ideas.

A good idea is like a magnet, which will attract the right investor.

I graduated in 2004 with an English degree and a case of imposter syndrome so intense that I convinced myself I “didn’t have enough ideas” to become a writer of any kind.

By the time they had graduated, he had fallen for Shaker Heights as well, the way Elena described it: the first planned community, the most progressive community, the perfect place for young idealists. In his own little hometown, they'd been suspicious of ideas: he'd grown up surrounded by a kind of resigned cynicism, though he'd been sure the world could be better.

Even in the moment, whatever we'd been about to do had seemed like a bad idea, and thankfully I wasn't in the moment anymore. I'd never been in a moment with anyone before and I didn't like it at all. What business did my brain have coming up with a patently stupid idea like kissing Orion Lake in the stacks instead of doing my classwork? It felt like nothing more than the symptoms of a mindworm infestation, per the description in the sophomore maleficaria textbook: mysterious and uncharacteristic foreign thoughts inserting themselves at unwanted and unpredictable times. If only I had a mindworm infestation. All I had was Orion sitting next to me in his too-small t-shirt from sophomore year that was the only clean one he had left this week and his arm about four inches away from mine.

He had never graduated from any college or university because he found them too slow for him, and too rigid in their approach to education. He could not get used to the idea that perhaps his professors knew what they were talking about.

It was raining and we sat huddled on the front steps of our porch and drank and laughed about how we had no idea what we were doing with our lives but we had ten more months to figure it out. Those were the days, my friend! We had it so good!

The teachers introduced a program that explicitly trained the students to construct coherent arguments, with a focus on the connections between successive ideas. It was a radical shift from the kind of assignment that dominates high school writing instruction today, in which students are asked to write memoirs and personal reflections. The students showed dramatic improvements in their test scores in several subjects, and many more of them graduated from high school and applied to college. It’s no coincidence that

Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth. If they don’t go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers. And once they arrive at Goldman, they find that even inside finance, everything is indefinite. It’s still optimistic—you wouldn’t play in the markets if you expected to lose—but the fundamental tenet is that the market is random; you can’t know anything specific or substantive; diversification becomes supremely important.

One of Hess’s findings especially captured my attention. He had noticed that the pupils are sensitive indicators of mental effort—they dilate substantially when people multiply two-digit numbers, and they dilate more if the problems are hard than if they are easy. His observations indicated that the response to mental effort is distinct from emotional arousal. Hess’s work did not have much to do with hypnosis, but I concluded that the idea of a visible indication of mental effort had promise as a research topic. A graduate student in the lab, Jackson Beatty, shared my enthusiasm and we got to work.

A successfully chosen name is a bridge between scientific knowledge and common sense, between new experience and old habits. The conceptual foundation of any science consists of a complicated network of names of things, names of ideas, and names of names. It evolves itself, and its projection on reality changes.

So many graduating seniors have this notion that they should be hired because of their creative brilliance. Too many are unhappy with the idea of starting at the bottom. My advice has always been: "You ought to be thrilled you get a job in the mailroom. And when you get there, here's what you do: Be really great at sorting mail.

My father scowled, warning that going to graduate school was a crazy idea for a woman. “If you’d been admitted,” he warned, “you’d never get married—you’ll turn into one of those lonely women who carry a briefcase and go to the movies alone! No, do something that really makes sense: take typing and become a secretary, or teach in an elementary school.

Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile. Like the Warby Parker crew, the entrepreneurs whose companies topped Fast Company’s recent most innovative lists typically stayed in their day jobs even after they launched. Former track star Phil Knight started selling running shoes out of the trunk of his car in 1964, yet kept working as an accountant until 1969. After inventing the original Apple I computer, Steve Wozniak started the company with Steve Jobs in 1976 but continued working full time in his engineering job at Hewlett-Packard until 1977. And although Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured out how to dramatically improve internet searches in 1996, they didn’t go on leave from their graduate studies at Stanford until 1998. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page says, because we “were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program.” In 1997, concerned that their fledgling search engine was distracting them from their research, they tried to sell Google for less than $2 million in cash and stock. Luckily for them, the potential buyer rejected the offer. This habit of keeping one’s day job isn’t limited to successful entrepreneurs. Many influential creative minds have stayed in full-time employment or education even after earning income from major projects. Selma director Ava DuVernay made her first three films while working in her day job as a publicist, only pursuing filmmaking full time after working at it for four years and winning multiple awards. Brian May was in the middle of doctoral studies in astrophysics when he started playing guitar in a new band, but he didn’t drop out until several years later to go all in with Queen. Soon thereafter he wrote “We Will Rock You.” Grammy winner John Legend released his first album in 2000 but kept working as a management consultant until 2002, preparing PowerPoint presentations by day while performing at night. Thriller master Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, and gas station attendant for seven years after writing his first story, only quitting a year after his first novel, Carrie, was published. Dilbert author Scott Adams worked at Pacific Bell for seven years after his first comic strip hit newspapers. Why did all these originals play it safe instead of risking it all?

{Recalling Professor Ira Remsen's remarks (1895) to a group of his graduate students about to go out with their degrees into the world beyond the university:} He talked to us for an hour on what was ahead of us; cautioned us against giving up the desire to push ahead by continued study and work. He warned us against allowing our present accomplishments to be the high spot in our lives. He urged us not to wait for a brilliant idea before beginning independent research, and emphasized the fact the Lavoisier's first contribution to chemistry was the analysis of a sample of gypsum. He told us that the fields in which the great masters had worked were still fruitful; the ground had only been scratched and the gleaner could be sure of ample reward.

And the concept of an extraordinary means of preserving life, or a risky, optional treatment that doctors don't recommend, is one I studied in graduate school and fascinates me to this day. It's the idea that the patient ultimately controls their own fate, and that is the greatest freedom you can have within a system that sees patients as their diagnosis rather than as people

My father was a graduate student in physics and my mother noticed him around campus, always wearing mismatched socks. She wanted to know if it was a fashion choice above her station or the mark of someone with more important things on his mind. One day, she walked up and handed him a gift—a box of one hundred identical socks. He had no idea who she was. They were married within a year

Well,” I said, trying to keep my tone light as I walked over to put my arms around his neck, though I had to stand on my toes to do so. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? You told me something about yourself that I didn’t know before-that you didn’t, er, care for your family, except for your mother. But that didn’t make me hate you…it made me love you a bit more, because now I know we have even more in common.” He stared down at him, a wary look in his eyes. “If you knew the truth,” he said, “you wouldn’t be saying that. You’d be running.” “Where would I go?” I asked, with a laugh I hoped didn’t sound as nervous to him as it did to me. “You bolted all the doors, remember? Now, since you shared something I didn’t know about you, may I share something you don’t know about me?” Those dark eyebrows rose as he pulled me close. “I can’t even begin to imagine what this could be.” “It’s just,” I said, “that I’m a little worried about rushing into this consort thing…especially the cohabitation part.” “Cohabitation?” he echoed. He was clearly unfamiliar with the word. “Cohabitation means living together,” I explained, feeling my cheeks heat up. “Like married people.” “You said last night that these days no one your age thinks of getting married,” he said, holding me even closer and suddenly looking much more eager to stick around for the conversation, even though I heard the marina horn blow again. “And that your father would never approve it. But if you’ve changed your mind, I’m sure I could convince Mr. Smith to perform the ceremony-“ “No,” I said hastily. Of course Mr. Smith was somehow authorized to marry people in the state of Florida. Why not? I decided not to think about that right now, or how John had come across this piece of information. “That isn’t what I meant. My mom would kill me if I got married before I graduated from high school.” Not, of course, that my mom was going to know about any of this. Which was probably just as well, since her head would explode at the idea of my moving in with a guy before I’d even applied to college, let alone at the fact that I most likely wasn’t going to college. Not that there was any school that would have accepted me with my grades, not to mention my disciplinary record. “What I meant was that maybe we should take it more slowly,” I explained. “The past couple years, while all my friends were going out with boys, I was home, trying to figure out how this necklace you gave me worked. I wasn’t exactly dating.” “Pierce,” he said. He wore a slightly quizzical expression on his face. “Is this the thing you think I didn’t know about you? Because for one thing, I do know it, and for another, I don’t understand why you think I’d have a problem with it.” I’d forgotten he’d been born in the eighteen hundreds, when the only time proper ladies and gentlemen ever spent together before they were married was at heavily chaperoned balls…and that for most of the past two centuries, he’d been hanging out in a cemetery. Did he even know that these days, a lot of people hooked up on first dates, or that the average age at which girls-and boys as well-lost their virginity in the United States was seventeen…my age? Apparently not. “What I’m trying to say,” I said, my cheeks burning brighter, “is that I’m not very experienced with men. So this morning when I woke up and found you in bed beside me, while it was really, super nice-don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it very much-it kind of freaked me out. Because I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of thing yet.” Or maybe the problem was that I wasn’t prepared for how ready I was…

And that was mostly my life—arguing with my brother, eating shitty food, generally having no idea what to do next. I thought about Poppy constantly, whether I was researching graduate programs or whether I was with my parents, who were supportive but tentative, as if afraid that saying the wrong word would make me have a Vietnam flashback and start crawling on the floor with a knife between my teeth.

The real purpose of this training,” Mr. Dinnen told me, “is to teach our students that they can trust God to do what He has said He would do. We don’t go from here into the traditional missionary fields, but into new territory. Our graduates are on their own. They cannot be effective if they are afraid or if they doubt that God really means what He says in His Word. So here we teach not so much ideas as trusting.

So, Mr. Graduate, how are you? Denis said cheerfully. He wasn't upset about the graduation business. He had learned to respect the chasm Mattia had dug around himself. Years previously he had tried to jump over the chasm, and had fallen into it. Now he contented himself with sitting on the edge, his legs dangling into the void. Mattia's voice no longer stirred anything in his stomach, but he was aware of the idea of him and would always be, as the only true benchmark for everything that had come afterward.

One of my greatest concerns for the young women of the Church is that they will sell themselves short in dating and marriage by forgetting who they really are--daughters of a loving Heavenly Father. . . . Unfortunately, a young woman who lowers her standards far enough can always find temporary acceptance from immature and unworthy young men. . . . At their best, daughters of God are loving, caring, understanding, and sympathetic. This does not mean they are also gullible, unrealistic, or easily manipulated. If a young man does not measure up to the standards a young woman has set, he may promise her that he will change if she will marry him first. Wise daughters of God will insist that young men who seek their hand in marriage change before the wedding, not after. (I am referring here to the kind of change that will be part of the lifelong growth of every disciple.) He may argue that she doesn't really believe in repentance and forgiveness. But one of the hallmarks of repentance is forsaking sin. Especially when the sin involves addictive behaviors or a pattern of transgression, wise daughters of God insist on seeing a sustained effort to forsake sin over a long period of time as true evidence of repentance. They do not marry someone because they believe they can change him. Young women, please do not settle for someone unworthy of your gospel standards. On the other hand, young women should not refuse to settle down. There is no right age for young men or young women to marry, but there is a right attitude for them to have about marriage: "Thy will be done" . . . . The time to marry is when we are prepared to meet a suitable mate, not after we have done all the enjoyable things in life we hoped to do while we were single. . . . When I hear some young men and young women set plans in stone which do not include marriage until after age twenty-five or thirty or until a graduate degree has been obtained, I recall Jacob's warning, "Seek not to counsel the Lord, but to take counsel from his hand" (Jacob 4:10). . . . How we conduct ourselves in dating relationships is a good indication of how we will conduct ourselves in a marriage relationship. . . . Individuals considering marriage would be wise to conduct their own prayerful due diligence--long before they set their hearts on marriage. There is nothing wrong with making a T-square diagram and on either side of the vertical line listing the relative strengths and weaknesses of a potential mate. I sometimes wonder whether doing more homework when it comes to this critical decision would spare some Church members needless heartache. I fear too many fall in love with each other or even with the idea of marriage before doing the background research necessary to make a good decision. It is sad when a person who wants to be married never has the opportunity to marry. But it is much, much sadder to be married to the wrong person. If you do not believe me, talk with someone who has made that mistake. Think carefully about the person you are considering marrying, because marriage should last for time and for all eternity.

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

At the time, about to graduate from college, I was operating mainly on impulse, like a salmon swimming blindly upstream toward the site of his own conception. In class and seminars I would dress up these impulses in the slogans and theories that I'd discovered in books., thinking - falsely - that the slogans meant something, that they somehow made what I felt more amenable to proof. But at night, lying in bed, I would let the slogans drift away, to be replaced with a series of images, romantic images, of a past I'd never known. ... Such images became a form of prayer for me, bolstering my spirits, channeling my emotions in a way that words never could. They told me (although even this much understanding may have come later, is also a construct, containing its own falsehoods) that I wasn't alone in my particular struggles, and that communities had never been a given in this country, at least not for blacks. Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men... Through organising, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because membership was earned... I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my life. That was my idea of organising. It was a promise of redemption.

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

No one in their right mind would argue that passion and perseverance are unimportant, or that a bad day is a cue to quit. But the idea that a change of interest, or a recalibration of focus, is an imperfection and competitive disadvantage leads to a simple, one-size-fits-all Tiger story: pick and stick, as soon as possible. Responding to lived experience with a change of direction, like Van Gogh did habitually, like West Point graduates have been doing since the dawn of the knowledge economy, is less tidy but no less important. It involves a particular behavior that improves your chances of finding the best match, but that at first blush sounds like a terrible life strategy: short-term planning.

We have to do a far better job of teaching our teachers. The great teachers—the teachers who influence you, who change your lives—almost always, I’m sure, are the teachers who love what they are teaching. It is that wonderful teacher who says, “Come over here and look in this microscope, you’re really going to get a kick out of this.” There was a wonderful professor of child psychology at the University of Pittsburgh named Margaret McFarland. I wish her ideas were better known. She said that attitudes aren’t taught, they’re caught. If the teacher has enthusiasm for the subject at hand, the student catches that, be it in second grade or graduate school. She said, “Show them what you love.” Also, if the teachers know what they

He graduated from Morehouse at nineteen, and by the time he was twenty-three years old he held a doctorate in divinity from Boston College and a degree in divinity from Crozer Theological Seminary. He never forgot his purpose or his people in his work, and he used the mandates of graduate research to begin developing his own brand of social gospel. In his quest, he made it a point to study the work of all the major theologians and philosophers who might have had any bearing on his thesis. He also branched out beyond his comfort zone, as any credible scholar would, to study influential ideas of the time that were antithetical to his beliefs, like the work of Marx, Lenin, and Nietzsche. He examined every possible angle to find the theological answers to the questions he was asking, and he emerged in his study as a notable student and a compelling scholar.

Our entrenched cultural ideas associate men with leadership qualities and women with nurturing qualities and put women in a double bind,” she said. “We believe not only that women are nurturing, but that they should be nurturing above all else. When a woman does anything that signals she might not be nice first and foremost, it creates a negative impression and makes us uncomfortable.”7 If a woman is competent, she does not seem nice enough. If a woman seems really nice, she is considered more nice than competent. Since people want to hire and promote those who are both competent and nice, this creates a huge stumbling block for women. Acting in stereotypically feminine ways makes it difficult for women to reach for the same opportunities as men, but defying expectations and reaching for those opportunities leads to being judged as undeserving and selfish.

The uninitiated often assumed that undergraduate students were at the bottom rung, but undergrads were the paying customers, or at least their parents were. And paying customers needed to be kept happy. Grad students worked for the school as teaching and research assistants--TAs and RAs--but weren't really proper employees, and as such they weren't entitled to the benefits that, say, a cataloger in the Coffey Library received. Then there was the fact that they had to learn to leave behind passive studying and test taking, which was what most of them had been taught in their school careers up to that point, and learn how to actively attack research problems and come up with new ideas, all while being poorly paid. Like Helen had said, a not insignificant number of grad students left after a year instead of sticking around to work on obtaining their PhDs. Who could blame them? Industry paid more and had better benefits.

Two seconds went by before I got a response. Lenny: The offer stands, bish. Lenny: You’re the best person I know, fyi. I smiled down at my phone. Me: I love you too Lenny: [eye rolling emoji] Lenny: I was texting you because Grandpa G is making margaritas and he was asking where you were. Me: Tell him I love him. Lenny: I will. You find Rip? Me: I’m watching him. Lenny: Stalker Me: He’s standing in front of me, I can’t help it. Lenny: Pretty sure that’s what every stalker thinks. I chanced another glance at the man and held back a sigh. Me: Sometimes I don’t understand why him. Lenny: Because he looks like he’s been in jail and that’s about as far away from what every jackass you’ve ever dated looks like? Lenny: Grandpa G says he loves you too and to come over and bring the girl with you if she’s around. I didn’t tell him you’re at the bar, otherwise he’d want to invite himself. You know how that man gets in public. I almost laughed at the first comment and definitely laughed at the second one. Rip did look like he’d done time. That was unfair, but it was the truth. For all I knew, he probably had. Then again, I was probably judging him by a face he had no say in. For all I knew, he had a marshmallow heart and rescued and rehabilitated small animals when he wasn’t at work. Deep down, he might have a caring and loving disposition that he only shared around very few people—people who had won his trust. You never knew. The idea of that put a small smile on my face and kept it there as I typed a message back, leaving the first comment alone. Me: I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here, but if I leave soon, I’ll drop by. Tell Grandpa G that the girl is working tonight. You’re all coming for the graduation, right? Lenny: Yes. I’m legit ready to cry this Saturday. Lenny: I’ve got the blow horn ready by the way. TOOT TOOT, bish. She wasn’t the only one preparing herself to cry this weekend, and that made me happy for some reason.

Arnold had never given much thought to whether or not he loved America—but now it seemed pretty obvious to him that he didn’t. Not in the way Nathan Hale had loved America. Or even in the way his late father, a Dutch-Jewish refugee, had loved America. In fact, he found the idea of sacrificing his life for his country somewhat abhorrent. Moreover, it wasn’t that he disliked abstract loyalties in general. He loved New York, for instance: Senegalese takeout at three a.m., and strolling through the Botanical Gardens on the first crisp day of autumn, and feeding the peacocks at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. If Manhattan were invaded—if New Jersey were to send an expeditionary force of militiamen across the Hudson River—he’d willingly take up arms to defend his city. He also loved Sandpiper Key in Florida, where they owned a time-share, and maybe Brown University, where he’d spent five years of graduate school. But the United States? No one could mistake his qualified praise for love.

What led you to write a graduate thesis on the subject of the imagination? SARTRE: I suppose that at that period of my life I had some ideas about the image I refer to the time when I was at L'Ecole normale—and later I had the feeling that that was the first thing I ought to do. The idea that sensation was not identical to the image, that the image was not sensation renewed. That was something I felt in myself. It is bound up with the freedom of consciousness since, when the conscious mind imagines, it disengages itself from what is real in order to look for something that isn't there or that doesn't exist. And it was this passage into the imaginary that helped me understand what freedom is. For instance, if one person asks another: "Where is your friend Pierre?" and it turns out that he's in Berlin, for example, that person will picture where his friend Pierre is. There is a disconnection of thought that cannot be explained by determinism. Determinism cannot move to the plane of the imaginary. If it's a fact, it will create a fact.

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

I met with a group of a hundred or so fifth graders from a poor neighborhood at a school in Houston, Texas. Most of them were on a track that would never get them to college. So I decided then and there to make a contract with them. I would pay for their four-year college education if they kept a B average and stayed out of trouble. I made it clear that with focus, anyone could be above average, and I would provide mentoring support to them. I had a couple of key criteria: They had to stay out of jail. They couldn't get pregnant before graduating high school. Most importantly, they needed to contribute 20 hours of service per year to some organization in their community. Why did I add this? College is wonderful, but what was even more important to me was to teach them they had something to give, not just something to get in life. I had no idea how I was going to pay for it in the long run, but I was completely committed, and I signed a legally binding contract requiring me to deliver the funds. It's funny how motivating it can be when you have no choice but to move forward. I always say, if you want to take the island, you have to burn your boats! So I signed those contracts. Twenty-three of those kids worked with me from the fifth grade all the way to college. Several went on to graduate school, including law school! I call them my champions. Today they are social workers, business owners, and parents. Just a few years ago, we had a reunion, and I got to hear the magnificent stories of how early-in-life giving to others had become a lifelong pattern. How it caused them to believe they had real worth in life. How it gave them such joy to give, and how many of them now are teaching this to their own children.

Arthur Schopenhauer, 1844 The World as Will and Idea "We can surely never arrive at the nature of things from without." 'THE world is my idea' is true for every living creature, though only man contemplates it, and so attains philosophical wisdom. This idea is found in Descartes, Indian Vedanta and Berkeley, though Kant erred by ignoring it. Idea consists of the object, (in time and space), and the subject, (existing in every reflecting being). Without perception, the whole world as idea would disappear. The connection between subject and object is not one of cause and effect - object and idea are identical. Is this world is nothing more than a mere idea, or something more substantial? We can surely never arrive at the nature of things from without. No matter how assiduous our researches may be, we can never reach anything beyond images and names. Man's knowledge all comes through his body. Every impression on the body is also an impression on the will. When it is opposed to the will it is called pain, and when consonant with the will, pleasure. My body is the objectivity of my will. Human nature tends to relate everything to action. The world as idea is the perfect mirror of the will, a shadow the body, in which it recognizes itself in graduating scales of distinctness and completeness. Man has the will to live, but neither the will, nor the subject of cognition, is at all affected by birth or death. It is not the individual, but only the species, that nature cares for. The Will is only the present, not the future nor the past. No man ever lived in the past, no man will live in the future. Time is like a perpetually revolving globe or a running river, and the present is a rock. Therefore we should simply seek to know the present. Our spirit is of a totally indestructible nature, whose energy endures from eternity to eternity. The Will knows no necessity, therefore it is free. But the person is never free, he is already the determined phenomenon of the free volition of this will.

Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos. Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep. Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved. Ambiguous use of pronouns. Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.” Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs. Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.” Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.” Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.” The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.” The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.” False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.” Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.” Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.” The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.” Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.” Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.” Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest. Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness. Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its. Of all blunders, there is hardly one which might not be avoided through diligent study of simple textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, intelligent perusal of the best authors, and care and forethought in composition. Almost no excuse exists for their persistent occurrence, since the sources of correction are so numerous and so available.

recalled Stephen Crocker, a graduate student on the UCLA team who had driven up with his best friend and colleague, Vint Cerf. So they decided to meet regularly, rotating among their sites. The polite and deferential Crocker, with his big face and bigger smile, had just the right personality to be the coordinator of what became one of the digital age’s archetypical collaborative processes. Unlike Kleinrock, Crocker rarely used the pronoun I; he was more interested in distributing credit than claiming it. His sensitivity toward others gave him an intuitive feel for how to coordinate a group without trying to centralize control or authority, which was well suited to the network model they were trying to invent. Months passed, and the graduate students kept meeting and sharing ideas while they waited for some Powerful Official to descend upon them and give them marching orders. They assumed that at some point the authorities from the East Coast would appear with the rules and regulations and protocols engraved on tablets to be obeyed by the mere managers of the host computer sites. “We were nothing more than a self-appointed bunch of graduate students, and I was convinced that a corps of authority figures or grownups from Washington or Cambridge would descend at any moment and tell us what the rules were,” Crocker recalled. But this was a new age. The network was supposed to be distributed, and so was the authority over it. Its invention and rules would be user-generated. The process would be open. Though it was funded partly to facilitate military command and control, it would do so by being resistant to centralized command and control. The colonels had ceded authority to the hackers and academics. So after an especially fun gathering in Utah in early April 1967, this gaggle of graduate students, having named itself the Network Working Group, decided that it would be useful to write down some of what they had conjured up.95 And Crocker, who with his polite lack of pretense could charm a herd of hackers into consensus, was tapped for the task. He was anxious to find an approach that did not seem presumptuous. “I realized that the mere act of writing down what we were talking about could be seen as a presumption of authority and someone was going to come and yell at us—presumably some adult out of the east.

Keep Your Ego at Bay; Stay Humble   Have you felt that urgent desire to feel important, to feel special and to feel way above over other people? As a graduate, do you think you have the best education and do you think you deserve that job opening more over the other guy? Do you think you have accomplished so much in life that you deserve better than your peers? If so, maybe your ego is getting the best of you. When you act based on your ego, there is a great chance that you will be at odds with the world and the people around you. You feel that you are more special than others because of your accomplishments, your education, your work and your possession. Because of that, you are failing to see others’ worth and importance. You only act based on what you think, because your opinion is the only one that matters. You barely admit mistakes; hence, you are depriving yourself of the opportunity to grow because you believe that you got everything you need. You are tarnishing your relationship with others by alienating them with your attitude. Ultimately, you are missing a lot in life! Dr. Dryer preaches about a life of humility and respect for one’s self and others. He always reminds his readers, students and followers to keep their ego at bay and stay humble. He believes in the universal truth that individuals are more common than different with each other; that no one is above someone or more special than others. He believes in the perfect being, the invisible force that created all of us, and so we are one and the same, just performing our own duty in this universe. Our ego stems from our desire to gain recognition from our achievements and hard work. There is nothing wrong with that. Humans crave to be recognized because it is one of the best feelings in the world. However, when you become overly attached to that idea and your entitlement, that is where ego comes in and it does more bad than good to you. The best way to be recognized is to stay humble and modest of your accomplishments. Your achievements sound the loudest when you are not telling it to everyone. You can only earn the highest of respect when you give the same amount of respect to others and to yourself. You can only feel truly special when you are not trying to be over someone else’s head, but rather carry others on your back to lift them up. That is what matters the most.

I awake with a start, shaking the cobwebs of sleep from my mind. It’s pitch-dark out, the wind howling. It takes a couple seconds to get my bearings, to realize I’m in my parents’ bed, Ryder beside me, on his side, facing me. Our hands are still joined, though our fingers are slack now. “Hey, you,” he says sleepily. “That one was loud, huh?” “What was?” “Thunder. Rattled the windows pretty bad.” “What time is it?” “Middle of the night, I’d say.” I could check my phone, but that would require sitting up and letting go of his hand. Right now, I don’t want to do that. I’m too comfortable. “Have you gotten any sleep at all?” I ask him, my mouth dry and cottony. “I think I drifted off for a little bit. Till…you know…the thunder started up again.” “Oh. Sorry.” “It should calm down some when the eye moves through.” “If there’s still an eye by the time it gets here. The center of circulation usually starts breaking up once it goes inland.” Yeah, all those hours watching the Weather Channel occasionally come in handy. He gives my hand a gentle squeeze. “Wow, maybe you should consider studying meteorology. You know, if the whole film-school thing doesn’t work out for you.” “I could double major,” I shoot back. “I bet you could.” “What are you going to study?” I ask, curious now. “I mean, besides football. You’ve got to major in something, don’t you?” He doesn’t answer right away. I wonder what’s going through his head--why he’s hesitating. “Astrophysics,” he says at last. “Yeah, right.” I roll my eyes. “Fine, if you don’t want to tell me…” “I’m serious. Astrophysics for undergrad. And then maybe…astronomy.” “What, you mean in graduate school?” He just nods. “You’re serious? You’re going to major in something that tough? I mean, most football players major in something like phys ed or underwater basket weaving, don’t they?” “Greg McElroy majored in business marketing,” he says with a shrug, ignoring my jab. “Yeah, but…astrophysics? What’s the point, if you’re just going to play pro football after you graduate anyway?” “Who says I want to play pro football?” he asks, releasing my hand. “Are you kidding me?” I sit up, staring at him in disbelief. He’s the best quarterback in the state of Mississippi. I mean, football is what he does…It’s his life. Why wouldn’t he play pro ball? He rolls over onto his back, staring at the ceiling, his arms folded behind his head. “Right, I’m just some dumb jock.” “Oh, please. Everyone knows you’re the smartest kid in our class. You always have been. I’d give anything for it to come as easily to me as it does to you.” He sits up abruptly, facing me. “You think it’s easy for me? I work my ass off. You have no idea what I’m working toward. Or what I’m up against,” he adds, shaking his head. “Probably not,” I concede. “Anyway, if anyone can major in astrophysics and play SEC ball at the same time, you can. But you might want to lose the attitude.” He drops his head into his hands. “I’m sorry, Jem. It’s just…everyone has all these expectations. My parents, the football coach--” “You think I don’t get that? Trust me. I get it better than just about anyone.” He lets out a sigh. “I guess our families have pretty much planned out our lives for us, haven’t they?” “They think they have, that’s for sure,” I say.

Knowing what you’re aiming for is essential. In a famous study of Yale University students, researchers found that only 3% had written goals with plans for their achievement. Twenty years later researchers interviewed the surviving graduates and found that those 3% were worth more financially than the other 97% combined.

As Sharon Poczter, professor of economics at Cornell, explains, “The antiquated rhetoric of ‘having it all’ disregards the basis of every economic relationship: the idea of trade-offs. All of us are dealing with the constrained optimization that is life, attempting to maximize our utility based on parameters like career, kids, relationships, etc., doing our best to allocate the resource of time. Due to the scarcity of this resource, therefore, none of us can ‘have it all,’ and those who claim to are most likely lying.

Where I live, on the West Coast, most churches tend to be small and to have little influence in the culture. Stark and Finke explain, “A major reason for the lack of church membership in the West is high rates of mobility, which decrease the ability of all voluntary organizations, not just churches, to maintain membership. That is, people move so often that they lack the social ties needed to affiliate with churches.”25 To address this problem, one of the most effective church-planting networks in the United States began in Tacoma, Washington, by using a method of developing intensive community in neighborhoods. Soma Communities fosters deep and intense relationships by teaching church planters to get closely involved in their neighborhoods, opening their homes to neighbors, gathering friends together on a regular basis, and forming “missional communities” focused on discovering and meeting the needs of neighbors and the community. It is these relational bonds that make someone unfamiliar with Christianity want to try it out. Rick Richardson, who directs the evangelism and leadership program at Wheaton College Graduate School, argues that “belonging comes before believing.” He contrasts older methods of evangelism that focused on asking individuals to make a set of commitments. Today, asserts Richardson, presenting four spiritual laws and inviting people to make decisions for Christ is less effective. “Evangelism is about helping people belong so that they can come to believe. So our communities need to be places where people can connect before they have to commit.”26 The idea is held up by social science research showing that converts tend to sign on to a new faith only after their social ties become stronger to those in the new faith than to others outside it. “This often occurs before a convert knows much about what the group believes.

And Oswaldo understood now with a clarity he'd never had before that all of Rob's troubles were self-inflicted––that on Yale graduation day Rob had stood within reach of everything he now didn't have. Maybe Yale hadn't guaranteed fame and wealth and general greatness, but it had ensured, at the very least, stability. Oswaldo had never been as smart as his friend, but he'd sorted his life out with the same odds against him. He was six months from earning an MD and had a probable job waiting for him near Boston counseling abused youths. He'd figured it out. And Rob was still, clinging, after all these years, to the idea of being the Man.

Rather than running around to a series of different offices to qualify for and collect benefits, individuals will get a dedicated case manager or counselor who will help them put together a plan for getting back on their feet with measurable goals, including ultimately graduating from the program and into self-sufficiency.

Consider too that to be eligible for these programs you must be enduring what the programs define as significant “financial hardship.” Do law schools really want to promote the idea that getting a law degree is likely to make many of their graduates eligible for what are in effect federal welfare programs?).

Economics graduate students are far more likely to free-ride than other students.

Everyone knew Sonja was destined for great things, but no one knew what to do with her until then. Even in academia, her natural habitat, she was an exotic species. Though her Russianness gave her certain dispensations, the idea that a young woman of any ethnicity could so excel in the hard sciences was a far-fetched fantasy. Their parents encouraged her at a distance. Neither understood the molecular formulas, electromagnetic fields, or anatomical minutiae that so captivated her, and so their support came by way of well-intentioned, inadequate generalities. Even after Sonja graduated secondary school at the top of her class and matriculated to the city university biology department, their parents found more to love in Natasha. Sonja’s gifts were too complex to be understood, and therefore less desirable. Natasha was beautiful and charming. They didn’t need MDs to know how to be proud of her.

From the Bridge” by Captain Hank Bracker Behind “The Exciting Story of Cuba” It was on a rainy evening in January of 2013, after Captain Hank and his wife Ursula returned by ship from a cruise in the Mediterranean, that Captain Hank was pondering on how to market his book, Seawater One. Some years prior he had published the book “Suppressed I Rise.” But lacking a good marketing plan the book floundered. Locally it was well received and the newspapers gave it great reviews, but Ursula was battling allergies and, unfortunately, the timing was off, as was the economy. Captain Hank has the ability to see sunshine when it’s raining and he’s not one easily deterred. Perhaps the timing was off for a novel or a textbook, like the Scramble Book he wrote years before computers made the scene. The history of West Africa was an option, however such a book would have limited public interest and besides, he had written a section regarding this topic for the second Seawater book. No, what he was embarking on would have to be steeped in history and be intertwined with true-life adventures that people could identify with. Out of the blue, his friend Jorge suggested that he write about Cuba. “You were there prior to the Revolution when Fidel Castro was in jail,” he ventured. Laughing, Captain Hank told a story of Mardi Gras in Havana. “Half of the Miami Police Department was there and the Coca-Cola cost more than the rum. Havana was one hell of a place!” Hank said. “I’ll tell you what I could do. I could write a pamphlet about the history of the island. It doesn’t have to be very long… 25 to 30 pages would do it.” His idea was to test the waters for public interest and then later add it to his book Seawater One. Writing is a passion surpassed only by his love for telling stories. It is true that Captain Hank had visited Cuba prior to the Revolution, but back then he was interested more in the beauty of the Latino girls than the history or politics of the country. “You don’t have to be Greek to appreciate Greek history,” Hank once said. “History is not owned solely by historians. It is a part of everyone’s heritage.” And so it was that he started to write about Cuba. When asked about why he wasn’t footnoting his work, he replied that the pamphlet, which grew into a book over 600 pages long, was a book for the people. “I’m not writing this to be a history book or an academic paper. I’m writing this book, so that by knowing Cuba’s past, people would understand it’s present.” He added that unless you lived it, you got it from somewhere else anyway, and footnoting just identifies where it came from. Aside from having been a ship’s captain and harbor pilot, Captain Hank was a high school math and science teacher and was once awarded the status of “Teacher of the Month” by the Connecticut State Board of Education. He has done extensive graduate work, was a union leader and the attendance officer at a vocational technical school. He was also an officer in the Naval Reserve and an officer in the U.S. Army for a total of over 40 years. He once said that “Life is to be lived,” and he certainly has. Active with Military Intelligence he returned to Europe, and when I asked what he did there, he jokingly said that if he had told me he would have to kill me. The Exciting Story of Cuba has the exhilaration of a novel. It is packed full of interesting details and, with the normalizing of the United States and Cuba, it belongs on everyone’s bookshelf, or at least in the bathroom if that’s where you do your reading. Captain Hank is not someone you can hold down and after having read a Proof Copy I know that it will be universally received as the book to go to, if you want to know anything about Cuba! Excerpts from a conversation with Chief Warrant Officer Peter Rommel, USA Retired, Military Intelligence Corps, Winter of 2014.

If a stranger saying we are "dependable" activates the reward system, imagine what praise from a boss, a parent, or even an unaccomplished slightly older graduate student will do. Of course, we all know that praise is a good thing, as long as it isn't too unconditional, but until very recently, we had no idea that praise taps into the same reinforcement system in the brain that enables cheese to help rats learn to solve mazes. And positive social regard is a renewable resource. Rather than having less of something after using it, when we let others know we value them, both parties have more.

But I never really considered going public. I instinctively knew that letting my academic performance become known was a bad idea. Years later, when I learned about the Heidi/Howard case study, I understood the reason why. Being at the top of the class may have made life easier for my male peers, but it would have made my life harder. I

Experienced workers were defined as those age 30 to 54; recent graduates were those age 22 to 26. Graduate degree holders were limited to those age 30 to 54. No field rivals engineering for average earnings, according to the study. Computers and mathematics comes closest, but graduate engineers make fully ten percent more than graduate degree holders from computers and mathematics. The data suggest that there are big economic differences among these various fields. You—and your children—should choose wisely.

The drama of what has happened to the President's speech, having been thoroughly politically analysed and the winners and losers fully identified, it is time to give it another perspective. Many of us, graduates may not really appreciate the meaning of the word 'plagiarism' aside what the dictionary has to offer about it (no grandstanding intended). Plagiarism is really a huge concept and theory which requires mastery of its rules by every literate user of words and ideas. The occasion of Mr. President's goofy act (if you like) is a chance for book lovers and lovers of intellectualism to pick up the topic and critically examine it. At the end, it may occur to you that you are a plagiarist all along. And to be serious, most of the thesis submitted for our undergraduate assessment is nothing close to original and wear garbs sewn in PLAGIARISM. Comment on the inclusion of a paragraph of President Obama's Speech in 2008 in the speech delivered by the Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari

Yet, as Brandon explained with a mixture of bitterness and regret, college proved to be the start of a long series of disappointments. Unable to pass calculus or physics, he switched his major from engineering to criminal justice. Still optimistic, he applied to several police departments upon graduation, excited about a future of “catching crooks.” The first department used a bewildering lottery system for hiring, and he didn’t make the cut. The second informed him that he had failed a mandatory spelling test (“I had a degree!”) and refused to consider his application. Finally, he became “completely turned off to this idea” when the third department disqualified him because of a minor incident in college in which he and his roommate “borrowed” a school-owned buffing machine as a harmless prank. Because he “could have been charged with a felony,” the department informed him, he was ineligible for police duty. Regrettably, his college had no record of the incident. Brandon had volunteered the information out of a desire to illustrate his honest and upstanding character and improve his odds of getting the job. With “two dreams deferred,”2 Brandon took a job as the nightshift manager of a clothing chain, hoping it would be temporary. Eleven years later, he describes his typical day, which consists of unloading shipments, steaming and pricing garments, and restocking the floor, as “not challenging at all. I don’t get to solve problems or be creative. I don’t get to work with numbers, and I am a numbers guy. I basically babysit a team and deal with personnel.” When his loans came out of deferment, he couldn’t afford the monthly payments and decided to get a master’s degree—partly to increase his earning potential and partly to put his loans back into deferment. After all, it had been “hammered into his head” that higher education was the key to success. He put on twenty-five pounds while working and going to school full-time for three years. He finally earned a master’s degree in government, paid for with more loans from “that mean lady Sallie Mae.”3 So far, Brandon has still not found a job that will pay him enough to cover his monthly loan and living expenses. He has managed to keep the loans in deferment by continually consolidating—a strategy that costs him $5,000 a year in interest. Taking

In 2000 Martin Seligman took on the presidency of the American Psychological Association. For his presidential address he challenged the profession to shift its focus away from simply describing, studying, and diagnosing the negative aspects of the human condition and to begin devoting more attention to the positive aspects of what it means to be human. Of course, his message was simply a more mainstream embodiment of Abraham Maslow’s ideas from the mid-twentieth century of personal fulfillment as the richest arena of psychology. But since Seligman’s call to action, positive psychology has blossomed into a full-fledged component of the field. The research generated by this change in perspective has been conducted at both the basic and applied levels. It has added to our understanding of a myriad of psychological constructs and has been used to improve the lives of many. Positive psychology is a vast discipline, but a sampling of its relevant aspects includes happiness, psychological well-being, flow/optimal experience, meaning, passion, purpose, authentic leadership, strengths, values, character, and virtue. Graduate education programs in these areas have emerged across the world and continue to expand. How

The plan that was set up by GOD and the Godforce to remedy this descent into forgetfulness and Spiritual sleep was “Reincarnation”! GOD and the Godforce created five races on the five continents on the Earth! A white, black, brown, yellow and red race! The different skin colors were not because one was better than another, but was because of the different climate conditions! The plan that was created was that all those souls who had fallen asleep would reincarnate over and over again until the seven levels of initiation were completed in a balanced and integrated manner so liberation from the wheel of rebirth and/or graduation would be achieved! The idea was that having time on the inner plane between lives would give souls time to remember who they were, and give them time to introspect and reflect before incarnating again!

Wednesday Bad News: This isn’t a dream. More Bad News: There are MONSTERS!   Maybe hiding and writing in this journal is a GREAT idea. Maybe the BEST idea! Maybe that’s the best way to survive in this world. Who cares if Dirk the Jerk mocks me until we graduate from high school? I’m sure I can survive THAT better than monsters here!   Last night went on FOREVER! Let me fill you in on the highlights...   I heard a big commotion outside. When I opened the door to see what was going on, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I saw people being chased by MONSTERS, and racing into their homes! I only caught a quick glimpse of green monsters pounding on doors, and glowing purple eyes in the distance before I slammed my door shut! I had no idea what had purple glowing eyes, but I knew it wasn’t a good thing!   I grabbed the first thing I could find, some weird block table, and shoved it in front of the door. I spent the rest of the night standing in the corner, as far away from the door as I could get. And let me tell you, THAT was no fun.     And I thought being stuck with morons in middle school was bad.

environmental science be worth my while? Do I have a chance to get a good grade?” The answers to these questions depend, to a large extent, on you and how you decide to apply yourself. Expecting to be interested and to do either well or poorly in your classes often turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Henry Ford once said, “If you think you can do a thing, or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.” Cultivating good study skills can help you to reach your goals and make your experience in environmental science a satisfying and rewarding one. The purpose of this introduction is to give you some tips to help you get off to a good start in studying. You’ll find that many of these techniques are also useful in other courses and after you graduate, as well. Environmental science, as you can see by skimming through the table of contents of this book, is a complex, transdisciplinary field that draws from many academic specialties. It is loaded with facts, ideas, theories, and confusing data. It is also a dynamic, highly contested subject. Topics such as environmental contributions to cancer rates, potential dangers of pesticides, or when and how much global warming may be caused by human activities are widely disputed. Often you will find distinguished and persuasive experts who take completely opposite positions on any particular question. It will take an active, organized approach on your part to make sense of the vast amount of information you’ll encounter here. And it will take critical, thoughtful reasoning to formulate your own position on the many controversial theories and

ran—at separate times—a boutique investment banking firm and a small mortgage company. He served as the Treasurer for the multinational vitamin manufacturer USANA Health Sciences years before becoming CFO for MonaVie. Devin squeezed in two brief stints in government, including two years working for Jake Garn on the U.S. Senate Banking Committee Staff and another year working for an independent state agency called USTAR, where he helped foster technology entrepreneurship during Governor Jon Huntsman’s administration. Devin is proud to be a Ute, having graduated from the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business, which recognized him as a Distinguished Alum in 2006. He also earned an MBA at Cornell University where he ran the student newspaper, Cornell Business.

Gary’s love of practical jokes was legendary. Not his skill in executing them, just his love of them. Before discovering magic, his idea of a great joke was placing a flaming bag of dog poop on someone’s doorstep. After discovering magic, he graduated to transporting the flaming bag of dog poop into the house. Thus, whenever something happened that was simultaneously inexplicable and not at all funny, all eyes turned to him.

When I was graduating, my thesis advisor, Larry Summers, suggested that I apply for international fellowships. I rejected the idea on the grounds that a foreign country was not a likely place to turn a date into a husband. Instead, I moved to Washington, D.C., which was full of eligible men. It worked. My first year out of college, I met a man who was not just eligible, but also wonderful, so I married him. I was twenty-four and convinced that marriage was the first—and necessary—step to a happy and productive life. It didn’t work out that way. I was just not mature enough to have made this lifelong decision, and the relationship quickly unraveled. By the age of twenty-five, I had managed to get married … and also divorced. At the time, this felt like a massive personal and public failure. For many years, I felt that no matter what I accomplished professionally, it paled in comparison to the scarlet letter D stitched on my chest. (Almost ten years later, I learned that the “good ones” were not all taken, and I wisely and very happily married Dave Goldberg.)

Roper shrugged, cleared his throat and then swallowed the phlegm. ‘Never liked fish anyway.’ ‘Just pick it up,’ she muttered. ‘Throw it in a damn bin.’ He looked at her for a few seconds, licked his bottom lip, and then turned towards the river and walked away, leaving it there. Jamie stared at it, weighing up whether to pick it up and prove Roper right, or to leave it and admit to herself that it wasn’t that important. She didn’t like the idea of touching something that had been in his mouth, so she left it and followed him. This morning, they did have bigger fish to fry. Whether Roper liked them or not. There was a police cordon set up around the area and three squad cars and an ambulance parked at odd angles on the street. It ran parallel to the water, with a pavement separating the road from the grassy bank that led down to the body.  A bridge stretched overhead and iron grates spanned the space between the support struts, stopping debris from washing into the Thames. It looked like the body had got caught on one and then dragged to shore.  Some bystanders had gathered on the bridge and were looking down, at a loss for anything else to do than hang around, hoping for a look at a corpse.  Jamie dragged her eyes away from them and looked around. The buildings lining the river were mostly residential. Blocks of apartments. No wonder the body had been seen quickly.  There were six uniformed officers on scene, two of whom were standing guard in front of the privacy tent that had been set up on the bank. It looked like they’d fished the body out onto the grass. Jamie was a little glad she didn’t have to wade into the water.  To the right, a man in his sixties was being interviewed by one of the officers. He was wrapped in a foil blanket and his khaki trousers were still soaked through. Had he been the one to pull the body out? It took a certain kind of person to jump into a river to help someone rather than call it in. Especially in November. That made three officers. She continued to search. She could see another two in the distance, checking the river and talking to pedestrians. The conversations were mostly comprised of them saying the words, ‘I can’t tell you that, sorry,’ to people who kept asking what had happened in a hundred different ways. Jamie was glad her days of crowd control were over. She’d been a uniformed officer for seven years. The day she’d graduated to plainclothes was one of the happiest of her life. For all the shit her father did, he was one hell of a detective, and she’d always wanted to be one — minus the liver cirrhosis and gonorrhoea, of course. She was teetotal. The sixth officer was filling out a report and talking to the paramedics. If the victim had washed up in the river in November then there would have been nothing they could do.

Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don’t need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It’s doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.

I had a whimsical idea: I thought of calling the secretary of the treasury, Kermit Winkler, a man who had graduated from Harvard two years after me, and saying this to him: “I just tried out two of your dimes on Times Square, and they worked like a dream. It looks like another great day for the coinage!

What this reveals about our universities is the operation of a pathological element. One need not ban the American flag from most of our campuses. It is more useful to deceive the world by allowing that flag to fly in a place where, all things being equal, its meaning and spirit has been abolished. In the Humanities and Social Science departments, where freedom of thought is of central importance, the American flag is more hated than loved by the faculty and the graduate students. I know this from firsthand because I was a graduate student at UC Irvine from 1986-1989. Professors there promoted Marxism, engaged in active recruitment of students amenable to Marxist ideas, and damaged the careers of those who were anti-Marxist. In those days it was done very quietly, administratively. If you dared speak up for America or economic freedom, you were persecuted. Your reputation was ruined. It is preferable to avert one’s eyes from such a situation, and very unpleasant to experience it directly; that is why those singled out for persecution were never defended. They were hung out to dry, and nobody dared interfere. Who, after all, wants trouble? This is the beauty of a quiet and selective intimidation.

Yet even with a voting rights bill, the United States would not be finished, President Johnson had the courage to declare in his commencement address to Howard University graduates in June. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains[,] and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

the moment, INSEAD is in the top three schools in the world graduating women per year. Still,

… no technical skill is worth more than knowing how to select exciting research projects. Regrettably, this vital ability is almost never taught. When I signed on with a research adviser in my first year of graduate school, I was thrilled to be given a problem to work in the physics of the upper atmosphere. That I had no idea what motivated the problem did not prevent me from carrying out an analysis, on a supercomputer of the day, and publishing my first paper at the age of 22… I found myself assimilating technical skills without ever grasping the significance of the problem, without understanding how or whether it was at the cutting edge of science. This way of working became a habit, one that seriously threatened my career… I relied on a senior scientist to tell me what would be an interesting problem to work on; then I would carry out the task… Four years and two postdoctoral positions after earning a PhD—still having little sense of what I wanted to learn as a scientist—I was on the job market.

No put downs . . . only lift ups.” Words. Our words are powerful indicators of who we are and what we believe. Marjorie, more than any other person we know, lives this idea. The words of this text are a true testament to the woman she is, how she has chosen to live her life, and the ways in which she teaches her undergraduate and graduate college students.

They are probably right. It is entirely rational for conservatives to flock to jobs that reward competition, aggression and victory at the expense of others. So it should not be surprising that liberals gravitate to professions—such as academics, journalism, social work and the arts—that emphasize inquiry, objectivity and the free exchange of ideas. After all, teachers at all levels—from nursery school to graduate school—tend to be Democrats.