Job Applicants Quotes

I figured the Nightingale Investigations job application form had the question "Are you hot? Yes. No. If you answered no, please exit the building.

Pilots used to fly planes manually, but now they operate a dashboard with the help of computers. This has made flying safer and improved the industry. Healthcare can benefit from the same type of approach, with physicians practicing medicine with the help of data, dashboards, and AI. This will improve the quality of care they provide and make their jobs easier and more efficient

Her parents wanted her to find her own way in life. That’s what they’d said countless times in the past. Of course, they’d been referring to school subjects and college applications and job prospects. Presumably, at no stage did they factor living skeletons and magic underworlds into their considerations. If they had, their advice would probably have been very different.

Dude. Post-apocalyptic world. Who does job applications anymore?” “I do.” I squint at it, then him. “What are you paying me?” I angle. “Dude. Post-apocalyptic world. Who does money anymore.” I snicker. First sign of any sense of humor he’s shown. Then I remember where I am and why. I wad it up and throw it at him. It bounces off his chest.

What grinds me the most is we're sending kids out into the world who don't know how to balance a checkbook, don't know how to apply for a loan, don't even know how to properly fill out a job application, but because they know the quadratic formula we consider them prepared for the world` With that said, I'll admit even I can see how looking at the equation x -3 = 19 and knowing x =22 can be useful. I'll even say knowing x =7 and y= 8 in a problem like 9x - 6y= 15 can be helpful. But seriously, do we all need to know how to simplify (x-3)(x-3i)?? And the joke is, no one can continue their education unless they do. A student living in California cannot get into a four-year college unless they pass Algebra 2 in high school. A future psychologist can't become a psychologist, a future lawyer can't become a lawyer, and I can't become a journalist unless each of us has a basic understanding of engineering. Of course, engineers and scientists use this shit all the time, and I applaud them! But they don't take years of theater arts appreciation courses, because a scientist or an engineer doesn't need to know that 'The Phantom of the Opoera' was the longest-running Broadway musical of all time. Get my point?

What grinds me the most is that we’re sending kids out into the world who don’t know how to balance a checkbook, don’t know how to apply for a loan, don’t even know how to properly fill out a job application, but because they know the quadratic formula we consider them prepared for the world?

Jon Spiro had not hired Pex and Chips for their debating sills. In the job interview, they had only been set one task. A hundred applicants were handed a walnut and asked to smash it however they could. Only two succeeded. Pex had shouted at the walnut for a few minutes, then flattened it between his giant palms. Chips had opted for a more controversial method. He placed the walnut on the table, grabbed is interviewer by the ponytail, and used the man's forehead to smash the nut. Both men were hired on the spot. They quickly established themselves as Arno Blunt's most reliable leiutenants for in-house work. They were not allowed outside Chicago, as this could involve map reading, something Pex and Chips were not very good at.

We were excited about getting jobs; we hardly went anywhere without filling out an application. But once we were hired - as furniture sanders - we could not believe this was really what people did all day. Everything we had thought of as The World was actually the result of someone's job. Each line on the sidewalk, each saltine. Everyone had a rotting carpet and a door to pay for. Aghast, we quit. There had to be a more dignified way to live. We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and set it to music. Something That Needs Nothing

Marriage is a full-time job; wooing is your application, courtship your interview, engagement your job offer, and honeymoon, your orientation.

People think the decisions you make that change the course of your life are the big ones. Marriage proposals. House moves. Job applications. But she knows it's the little ones, the tiny moments, that really plot the course. Moments like this.

Never allow two people to do a job which one could do. George Washington observed, ‘Whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty by close application thereto, it is worse executed by two persons, and scarcely done at all if three or more are employed therein.

The most frequent reasons we get turned down as romantic prospects (or as job applicants) are because of a lack of general chemistry, because we don’t match the person’s or company’s specific needs at that time, or because we don’t fit the narrow definition of who they’re looking for—not because of any critical missteps we might have made nor because we have any fatal character flaws.

There is no one unique method to learn programming, but there are many best ways to deal with it. The one word that is frequently heard whenever it is asked about the best way to learn and be a good programmer is: ‘Practice.

Effective scaling requires clear strategy. Nature has provided us with a portfolio of growth applications to learn from and our job as business leaders is to be strategic with that.

Colleges and universities, meanwhile, have no such qualms about torturing their applicants. Think about how much work a high-school student must do to even be considered for a spot at a decent college. The difference in college and job applications is especially striking when you consider that a job applicant will be getting paid upon acceptance while a college applicant will be paying for the privilege to attend.

When a job applicant starts telling me how Pacific Rim-job cuisine turns him on and inspires him, I see trouble coming. Send me another Mexican dishwasher anytime. I can teach him to cook. I can't teach character. Show up at work on time six months in a row and we'll talk about red curry paste and lemon grass. Until then, I have four words for you: 'Shut the fuck up.

...why don't you take a picture of yourself next to a fucking job application? How about that?

Question for job applicants: What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

One of the first things many clerks hear from RBG is that the most important job requirement is that they treat her two secretaries well. ‘There was one law clerk applicant who came to interview with me—top rating at Harvard—who treated my secretaries with disdain,’ RBG recalled. ‘As if they were just minions. So that is one very important thing—how you deal with my secretaries. They are not hired help. As I tell my clerks, ‘if push came to shove, I could do your work—but I can’t do without my secretaries.

On his next job application there was going to be the question “What did your father do for a living?” and if an applicant filled in “Marine,” “Police Officer” or “Commando,” he was shredding it.

he’d felt desperate, always clawing for just enough money to pay rent and eat, running the endless treadmill of job applications and rejections, and feeling that homelessness was always just a misstep away.

In desperation, I’d tried to find a part-time after-school job, just to earn some walking-around money. I applied for dozens of tech support and programming jobs (mostly grunt construction work, coding parts of OASIS malls and office buildings), but it was completely hopeless. Millions of college-educated adults couldn’t get one of those jobs. The Great Recession was now entering its third decade, and unemployment was still at a record high. Even the fast-food joints in my neighborhood had a two-year waiting list for job applicants. So I remained stuck at school. I felt like a kid standing in the world’s greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.

The courtroom oath--"to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"--is applicable only to witnesses. Defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges don't take this oath--they couldn't! Indeed, it is fair to say the American justice system is built on the foundation of not telling the whole truth. It is the job of the defense attorney--especially when representing the guilty--to prevent, by all lawful means, the "whole truth" from coming out.

Style still matters, for at least three reasons. First, it ensures that writers will get their message across, sparing readers from squandering their precious moments on earth deciphering opaque prose. When the effort fails, the result can be calamitous-as Strunk and White put it, "death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram." Governments and corporations have found that small improvements in clarity can prevent vast amounts of error, frustration, and waste, and many countries have recently made clear language the law of the land. Second, style earns trust. If readers can see that a writer cares about consistency and accuracy in her prose, they will be reassured that the writer cares about those virtues in conduct they cannot see as easily. Here is how one technology executive explains why he rejects job applications filled with errors of grammar and punctuation: "If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use it's, then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with." And if that isn't enough to get you to brush up your prose, consider the discovery of the dating site OkCupid that sloppy grammar and spelling in a profile are "huge turn-offs." As one client said, "If you're trying to date a woman, I don't expect flowery Jane Austen prose. But aren't you trying to put your best foot forward?" Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures. And as we shall see in the first chapter, this thoroughly impractical virtue of good writing is where the practical effort of mastering good writing must begin.

We were anxious to begin our life as people who had no people. And it was easy to find an apartment because we had no standards; we were just amazed that it was *our* door, *our* rotting carpet, *our* cockroach infestation... We were excited about getting jobs; we hardly went anywhere without filling out an application. But once we were hired—as furniture sanders—we could hardly believe this was really what people did all day. Everything we had thought of as The World was actually the result of someone's job. Each line on the sidewalk, each saltine. Everyone had rotting carpet and a door to pay for. Aghast, we quit. There had to be a more dignified way to live. We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and to set it to music.

You were a town with one pay phone and someone else was using it. You were an ATM temporarily unable to dispense cash. You were an outdated link and the server was down. You were invisible to the naked eye. You were the two insect parts per million allowed in peanut butter. You were a car wash that me as dirty as when I pulled in. You were twenty rotting bags of rice in the hold of a cargo plane sitting on the runway in a drought-riddled country. You were one job opening for two hundred applicants and you paid minimum wage. You were grateful for my submission but you just couldn't use it. You weren't a Preferred Provider. You weren't giving any refunds. You weren't available for comment. Your grave wasn't marked so I wandered the cementary for hours, part of the grass, part of the crumbling stones.

On any job application I ever do, if they want my references, I always list the Bible.

I came across an article recently that reported how growing numbers of employers today complain that many young job applicants exhibit all thesigns of having been -- there's no other word for it-- SPOILED. These young people feel entitled to jobs and salaries they haven't earned. They have unrealistic views of their own capabilities. They don't take criticism well, and they demand lots of attention and guidance from their employres. They "were raised with so much affirmation and positive reinforcement that they come into the workplace needy for more," said one manager.

The Great Recession was now entering its third decade, and unemployment was still at a record high. Even the fast-food joints in my neighborhood had a two-year waiting list for job applicants.

By the end of medical school, most students tended to focus on "lifestyle" specialities - those with more humane hours, higher salaries, and lower pressures - the idealism of their med school application essays tempered or lost. As graduation neared and we sat down, in a Yale tradition, to re-write our commencement oath - a melding of the words of Hippocrates, Maimonides, Osler, along with a few other great medical forefathers - several students argued for the removal of language insisting that we place our patients' interests above our own. (The rest of us didn't allow this discussion to continue for long. The words stayed. This kind of egotism struck me as antithetical to medicine and, it should be noted, entirely reasonable. Indeed, this is how 99 percent of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But thats the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job - not a calling).

There's a liberal story that limited opportunities, and barriers, lead to employment problems and criminal records, but then there's another story that has to do with norms, behaviors, and oppositional culture. You can't prove the latter statistically, but it still might be true.' Holzer thinks that both arguments contain truth and that one doesn't preclude the other. Fair enough. Suffice it to say, though, that the evidence supporting structural inequality is compelling. In 2001, a researcher sent out black and white job applicants in Milwaukee, randomly assigning them a criminal record. The researcher concluded that a white man with a criminal record had about the same chance of getting a job as a black man without one. Three years later, researchers produced the same results in New York under more rigorous conditions.

Broad-Based Education: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.… It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. —Commencement address, Stanford University, June 12, 2005

People do not buy fortune cookies because they taste better than every other cookie on the shelf. They buy them for the delight they deliver at the end of a meal. Marketers spend most of their time selling the cookie, when what they should be doing is finding a way to create a better fortune. Of course your job is to bake a good cookie, the very best that you can, but you must also spend time figuring out how to tell a great story.

Hopefully not another employee stealing credit cards, Brooke mused. Or any sort of headache-inducing “oops moment,” like the time one of the restaurant managers called to ask if he could fire a line cook after discovering that the man was a convicted murderer. “Jeez. How’d you learn that?” Brooke had asked. “He made a joke to one of the waiters about honing his cooking skills in prison. The waiter asked what he’d been serving time for, and he said, ‘Murder.’” “I bet that put an end to the conversation real fast. And yes, you can fire him,” Brooke had said. “Obviously, he lied on his employment application.” All of Sterling’s employees, regardless of job position, were required to answer whether they’d ever been convicted of a crime involving “violence, deceit, or theft.” Pretty safe to say that murder qualified. Ten minutes later, the manager had called her back. “Um . . . what if he didn’t exactly lie? I just double-checked his application, and as it turns out, he did check the box for having been convicted of a crime.” Brooke had paused at that. “And then the next question, where we ask what crime he’d been convicted for, what did he write?” “Uh . . . ‘second-degree murder.’” “I see. Just a crazy suggestion here, Cory, but you might want to start reading these applications a little more closely before making employment offers.” “Please don’t fire me.

About a third of adults have a low level of literacy, which means they can’t fill out job applications; they can’t read directions or know which stop along the “L” track is theirs. They can’t help their children with their homework.

The highest paid Americans read an average of two to three hours per day. The lowest paid Americans don't read at all... ...58% of adults never read another book after they leave high school—including 42% of university graduates... ...43.6% of American adults read below the 7th grade level... they are functionally illiterate... fully 50% of high school graduates cannot read their graduation diplomas, nor fill out an application form for a job at McDonald’s...

No longer are job applicants to Wall Street firms asked, “When you meet a woman, what interests you most about her?” as applicants to Merrill Lynch’s 1972 brokerage trainee class were. (The answer the bank was looking for was “her beauty.”)

A member of one group told me that if i was really concerned about the liberation of Black people, i should quit school and get a job n a factory, that if i wanted to get rid of the system i would have to work at the factory and organize the workers. When i asked him why he wasn't working in a factory and organizing the workers, he told me that he was staying in school in order to organize the students. I told him i was working to organize the students too and that i felt perfectly certain that the workers could organize themselves without any college student doing it for them. Some of these groups would come up with abstract intellectual theories, totally devoid of practical application, and swear they had the answers to the problems of the world. They attacked the Vietnamese for participating in the Paris peace talks, claiming that by negotiating the Viet Cong were selling out to the U.S. I think they got insulted when i asked them how a group of flabby white boys who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag had the nerve to think they could tell the Viet Cong how to run their show.

The Troll Patrol was an institution unique to Dun Hythe. Long ago, the city leaders had recognized the need to control and direct the heavy wagon traffic that flowed to and from the port area. They organized a patrol of citizens for this purpose and all went well for a while. No one knows who allowed the first troll to join up, but word immediately spread throughout the troll community that one of their number had a paying job with unlimited donuts. Soon after that, every opening in the patrol attracted dozens of trolls who brazenly persuaded non-trolls to withdraw their applications. Within a few years, trolls had taken over the organization. Trolls proved to be particularly inept at traffic control. A member of the Troll Patrol could station himself in the middle of a deserted intersection and, within minutes, he would create a traffic-snarling mess. To keep the enraged wagon drivers under control, the trolls relied upon truncheons. A whack or two in the head always knocked a driver groggy and made him a lot less noisy.

Discovering a note in the mending basket, Phoebe plucked it out and unfolded it. She instantly recognized West's handwriting. Unemployed Feline Seeking Household Position To Whom It May Concern, I hereby offer my services as an experienced mouser and personal companion. References from a reputable family to be provided upon request. Willing to accept room and board in lieu of pay. Indoor lodgings preferred. Your servant, Galoshes the Cat Glancing up from the note, Phoebe found her parents' questioning gazes on her. "Job application," she explained sourly. "From the cat." "How charming," Seraphina exclaimed, reading over her shoulder. "'Personal companion,' my foot," Phoebe muttered. "This is a semi-feral animal who has lived in outbuildings and fed on vermin." "I wonder," Seraphina said thoughtfully. "If she were truly feral, she wouldn't want any contact with humans. With time and patience, she might become domesticated." Phoebe rolled her eyes. "It seems we'll find out." The boys returned from the dining car with a bowl of water and a tray of refreshments. Galoshes descended to the floor long enough to devour a boiled egg, an anchovy canapé, and a spoonful of black caviar from a silver dish on ice. Licking her lips and purring, the cat jumped back into Phoebe's lap and curled up with a sigh. "I'd say she's adjusting quite well," Seraphina commented with a grin, and elbowed Phoebe gently. "One never knows who might rise above their disreputable past.

In a recent study,4 Columbia Business School psychologists found that job applicants who named a range received significantly higher overall salaries than those who offered a number, especially if their range was a “bolstering range,” in which the low number in the range was what they actually wanted.

The explosion of paperwork, in turn, is a direct result of the introduction of corporate management techniques, which are always justified as ways of increasing efficiency, by introducing competition at every level. What these management techniques invariably end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell each other things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of our students’ job and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors, institutes, conference workshops, and universities themselves, which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors. Marketing and PR thus come to engulf every aspect of university life.

Wherever the shadow of economic growth touches us, we are left useless unless employed on a job or engaged in consumption...We lose sight of our resources, lose control over the environmental conditions which make these resources applicable, lose taste for self-reliant coping with challenges from without and anxiety from within.

no simple mechanism could do the job as well or better. It might simply be that nobody has yet found the simpler alternative. The Ptolemaic system (with the Earth in the center, orbited by the Sun, the Moon, planets, and stars) represented the state of the art in astronomy for over a thousand years, and its predictive accuracy was improved over the centuries by progressively complicating the model: adding epicycles upon epicycles to the postulated celestial motions. Then the entire system was overthrown by the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, which was simpler and—though only after further elaboration by Kepler—more predictively accurate.63 Artificial intelligence methods are now used in more areas than it would make sense to review here, but mentioning a sampling of them will give an idea of the breadth of applications. Aside from the game AIs

You know, Piggly Wiggly never could hang on to a night stock manager. Your math skills would be a plus, maybe even your Spanish, and you don't mind staying up late." "Piggly Wiggly, wow. I hadn't thought about that. I'll swing by, pick up an application tomorrow. But if it doesn't pan out maybe ... Never mind, it's a crazy idea." "No, tell me. I want to hear it." "Well, just as a backup plan, I did hear that Sony has an opening. They're, um, they're looking for a rock star. The hours suck, but it's no worse than night stock manager at Pigs. I bet it pays better too." Isabel stopped in her tracks, playfully slapping his arm. "Aidan, that's genius! That's what you should do! I've heard you sing, you can carry a decent tune." She looked him up and down. "With a little work, you can probably pull off the image." He tugged on her arms until she was in his. "Only if you're sure. Only if it's what we want." "Aidan, it's who you are. I've known it since the day we brought that first guitar here. I'd never want to take that away.

Career isn't about making money as everyone makes something. Rather it's a way of living that would create memorable memories to look back and smile

An applicant for a job who disagrees with his prospective employer is either a fool or he has convictions, and there was nothing to suggest to me that your husband was a fool.

It was the most improbably wise move any aristocrat has ever made. Paxton leaped into the job with levels of energy and application that simply dazzled. He

So starting in 1999 Apple began to produce application software for the Mac, with a focus

Preparation, application and determination are three of the most important factors that enable you to regain your sparkle and shine like never before.

McDonald’s almost hired me one time, and I only applied for the job to meet younger girls. Black girls, Hispanic, white, and Chinese girls, it says right on the job application how McDonald’s hires different races and ethnic backgrounds. It’s girls, girls, girls, buffet-style. Also on the application McDonald’s says if you have any of the following diseases: Hepatitis A, Salmonella, Shigella, Staphylococcus, Giardia, or Campylobacter, then you may not work there. This is more of a guarantee than you get meeting girls on the street. You can’t be too careful. Al least at McDonald’s she’s gone on the record saying she’s clean. Plus, there’s a very good chance she’s going to be young. Pimple young. Giggling young. Silly young and as stupid as me.

Education can provide bread and training can provide butter for the bread – that is going to soften from inside to help in looking at the perspective, change behavior and change perception

But everywhere, managerial feudalism ensures that thousands of hours of creative effort will literally come to nothing. Take the domain of scientific research, or higher education once again. If a grant agency funds only 10 percent of all applications, that means that 90 percent of the work that went into preparing applications was just as pointless as the work that went into making the promo video for Apollonia’s doomed reality TV show Too Fat to Fuck. (Even more so, really, since one can rarely make such an amusing anecdote out of it afterward.) This is an extraordinary squandering of human creative energy.

If you can deny your talents, if you can conceal them from others or, even better, persuade yourself that they weren’t even given to you, you’re off the hook. And being off the hook is a key element of the industrialized school’s promise. It lets parents off the hook, certainly, since the institution takes over the teaching. It lets teachers off the hook, since the curriculum is preordained and the results are tested. And it lets students off the hook, because the road is clearly marked and the map is handed to everyone. If you stay on the path, do your college applications through the guidance office and your job hunting at the placement office, the future is not your fault. That’s the refrain we hear often from frustrated job seekers, frustrated workers with stuck careers, and frustrated students in too much debt. 'I did what they told me to do and now I’m stuck and it’s not my fault.' What they’ve exchanged for that deniability is their dreams, their chance for greatness. To go off the path is to claim responsibility for what happens next.

In recent decades, our welfare states have come to look increasingly like surveillance states. Using Big Brother tactics, Big Government is forcing us into a Big Society. Lately, developed nations have been doubling down on this sort of “activating” policy for the jobless, which runs the gamut from job-application workshops to stints picking up trash, and from talk therapy to LinkedIn training. No matter if there are ten applicants for every job, the problem is consistently attributed not to demand, but to supply. That is to say, to the unemployed, who haven’t developed their “employment skills” or simply haven’t given it their best shot.

The phrases, “on the level” and, “third degree” are familiar to us all, but few of us have stopped to think of their origins. They are, in fact, overt references to the Craft of Freemasonry. In fact, every time a judge or chairperson pounds his or her gavel; every time an unworthy job applicant is blackballed; every time we refer to a faithful friend as being true blue—even when we shake hands to seal a deal—we are echoing Masonic traditions. The

Susan’s and Jennifer’s job searches are likely made harder by the color of their skin. In the early 2000s, researchers in Chicago and Boston mailed out fake résumés to hundreds of employers, varying only the names of the applicants, but choosing names that would be seen as identifiably black or white. Strikingly, “Emily” and “Brendan” were 50 percent more likely to get called for an interview than “Lakisha” and “Jamal.” A few years later, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin conducted a similar study in Milwaukee, but with a unique twist. She recruited two black and two white actors (college students, posing as high school graduates) who were as similar as possible in every way. She sent these “job applicants” out in pairs, with virtually identical fake résumés, to apply for entry-level jobs. Her twist was to instruct one of the white and one of the black applicants to tell employers that they had a felony conviction and had just been released from prison the month before. Even the researcher was surprised by what she found: the white applicant with a felony conviction was more likely to get a positive response from a prospective employer than the black applicant with no criminal record. When the study was replicated in New York City a few years later, she and her colleagues saw similar results for Latino applicants relative to whites.

The Job Application Esteemed gentlemen, I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. I know that your good firm is large, proud, old, and rich, thus I may yield to the pleasing supposition that a nice, easy, pretty little place would be available, into which, as into a kind of warm cubbyhole, I can slip. I am excellently suited, you should know, to occupy just such a modest haven, for my nature is altogether delicate, and I am essentially a quiet, polite, and dreamy child, who is made to feel cheerful by people thinking of him that he does not ask for much, and allowing him to take possession of a very, very small patch of existence, where he can be useful in his own way and thus feel at ease. A quiet, sweet, small place in the shade has always been the tender substance of all my dreams, and if now the illusions I have about you grow so intense as to make me hope that my dream, young and old, might be transformed into delicious, vivid reality, then you have, in me, the most zealous and most loyal servitor, who will take it as a matter of conscience to discharge precisely and punctually all his duties. Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-ranging sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and foremost I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. I am a dreamer rather than a thinker, a zero rather than a force, dim rather than sharp. Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in a dream? --I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid. I know only the need to feel at my ease, so that each day I can thank God for life's boon, with all its blessings. The passion to go far in the world is unknown to me. Africa with its deserts is to me not more foreign. Well, so now you know what sort of a person I am.--I write, as you see, a graceful and fluent hand, and you need not imagine me to be entirely without intelligence. My mind is clear, but it refuses to grasp things that are many, or too many by far, shunning them. I am sincere and honest, and I am aware that this signifies precious little in the world in which we live, so I shall be waiting, esteemed gentlemen, to see what it will be your pleasure to reply to your respectful servant, positively drowning in obedience. Wenzel

...cannot possibly know who you are, you imagine that she is suspicious of all young people-as a matter of principle- and therefore what she sees when she looks at you is not you as yourself but you as yet one more querrilla fighter in the war against authority, an unruly insurrectionist who has no business barging into the sanctum of her library and asking for work. Such are the times you live in,the times you both live in. She instructs you to put the cards in order, and you can sense how deeply she wants you to fail, how happy it will make her to reject your application, and because you want the job just as much as she doesn't want you to have it, you make sure that you don't fail.

Another statistical fact came to him then, a fact which he knew would be ridiculously melodramatic to put into an application for a job at the United Broadcasting Corporation, or to think about at all. He hadn’t thought about this for a long while. It wasn’t a thing he had deliberately tried to forget – he simply hadn’t thought about it for quite a few years. It was the unreal-sounding, probably irrelevant, but quite accurate fact that he had killed seventeen men.

During a job interview, I expect applicants to be nervous initially and for that nervousness to dissipate. If it shows up again when I ask specific questions, then I have to wonder why these nervous behaviors have suddenly presented again.

The cover letter is all about what you want. Nasty Gal gets so many cover letters that detail a “passion for fashion” and then proceed to talk about how this job will help the applicant pursue her interests, gain more experience, and explore new avenues. If a cover letter starts out like this, I usually end up reading the first couple of sentences before hitting the delete button. Why? Because I don’t care about what a job will do for you and your personal development. I know that sounds harsh, but I don’t know you, so the fact that you want to work for my company does not automatically mean that I have an interest in helping you grow your career. I have a business that is growing by the day, so I want to know what you can do for me. It’s as simple as that.

The "whites only" signs may be gone, but new signs have gone up - notices placed in job applications, rental agreements, loan applications, forms for welfare benefits, school applications, and petitions for licenses, informing the general public that "felons" are not wanted here. A criminal record today authorizes precisely the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind - discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service. Those labeled criminals are even denied the right to vote.

PROLOGUE   Zoey “Wow, Z, this is a seriously awesome turnout. There are more humans here than fleas on an old dog!” Stevie Rae shielded her eyes with her hand as she looked around at the newly lit-up campus. Dallas was a total jerk, but we all admitted that the twinkling lights he’d wrapped around the trunks and limbs of the old oaks gave the entire campus a magickal, fairy-like glow. “That is one of your more disgusting bumpkin analogies,” Aphrodite said. “Though it’s accurate. Especially since there are a bunch of city politicians here. Total parasites.” “Try to be nice,” I said. “Or at least try to be quiet.” “Does that mean your daddy, the mayor, is here?” Stevie Rae’s already gawking eyes got even wider. “I suppose it does. I caught a glimpse of Cruella De Vil, a.k.a. She Who Bore Me, not long ago.” Aphrodite paused and her brows went up. “We should probably keep an eye on the Street Cats kittens. I saw some cute little black and white ones with especially fluffy fur.” Stevie Rae sucked air. “Ohmygoodness, your mamma wouldn’t really make a kitten fur coat, would she?” “Faster than you can say Bubba’s drinkin’ and drivin’ again,” Aphrodite mimicked Stevie Rae’s Okie twang. “Stevie Rae—she’s kidding. Tell her the truth,” I nudged Aphrodite. “Fine. She doesn’t skin kittens. Or puppies. Just baby seals and democrats.” Stevie Rae’s brow furrowed. “See, everything is fine. Plus, Damien’s at the Street Cats booth, and you know he’d never let one little kitten whisker be hurt—let alone a whole coat,” I assured my BFF, refusing to let Aphrodite mess up our good mood. “Actually, everything is more than fine. Check out what we managed to pull off in a little over a week.” I sighed in relief at the success of our event and let my gaze wander around the packed school grounds. Stevie Rae, Shaylin, Shaunee, Aphrodite, and I were manning the bake sale booth (while Stevie Rae’s mom and a bunch of her PTA friends moved through the crowd with samples of the chocolate chip cookies we were selling, like, zillions of). From our position near Nyx’s statue, we had a great view of the whole campus. I could see a long line at Grandma’s lavender booth. That made me smile. Not far from Grandma, Thanatos had set up a job application area, and there were a bunch of humans filling out paperwork there. In the center of the grounds there were two huge silver and white tents draped with more of Dallas’s twinkling lights. In one tent Stark and Darius and the Sons of Erebus Warriors were demonstrating weaponry. I watched as Stark was showing a young boy how to hold a bow. Stark’s gaze lifted from the kid and met mine. We shared a quick, intimate smile

Imagine a hypothetical job applicant. He can't spell the simplest words, such as "heal" and "tap". Confused by geography, he thinks there's an African country called "Nambia". As for American history, he's under the impression that Andrew Jackson, who died in 1845, was angry about the Civil War, and that Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895, is still alive. Given the alarming state of his knowledge, you might wonder what job he could get. Unfortunately, he's not hypothetical, and the job he got, in 2016, was president of the United States.

Much of what bureaucrats do, after all, is evaluate things. They are continually assessing, auditing, measuring, weighing the relative merits of different plans, proposals, applications, courses of action, or candidates for promotion. Market reforms only reinforce this tendency. This happens on every level. It is felt most cruelly by the poor, who are constantly monitored by an intrusive army of moralistic box-tickers assessing their child-rearing skills, inspecting their food cabinets to see if they are really cohabiting with their partners, determining whether they have been trying hard enough to find a job, or whether their medical conditions are really sufficiently sever to disqualify them from physical labor. All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves. (p. 41)

Since one could virtually open the Bible to any page and likely find something that speaks to his particular situation, is it fair to attribute this to the voice of God? After all, the Bible is not the only relevant book in existence. There are other religions with other scriptural texts which could do the same job. In fact, the text need not even be “scriptural.” I could select Sartre’s “Existentialism and Humanism” off the shelf, randomly flip to any page, and likely find something applicable to my life. Does this mean God is speaking through the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, a man who was by no means considered a friend to Christian thought? If the answer is yes, then who really needs to read the Bible? If this God is capable of turning anything into his “word” at any time, then you could theoretically receive a message from him in your Alpha-Bits.

So Apple needed a partner, one that could make a stable operating system, preferably one that was UNIX-like and had an object-oriented application layer. There was one company that could obviously supply such software—NeXT—but it would take a while for Apple to focus on it. Apple first homed in on

Take for example job applications. In the 21st century the decision wherever to hire somebody for a job while increasingly be made by algorithms. We cannot rely on the machines to set the relevant ethical standards, humans will still need to do that, but once we decide on an ethical standard in the job market, that it is wrong to discriminate against blacks or against women for example, we can rely on machines to implement and maintain these standards better than humans. A human manager may know and even agree that is unethical to discriminate against blacks and women but then when a black woman applies for a job the manager subconsciously discriminate against her and decides not to hire her. If we allow a computer to evaluate job applications and program computers to completely ignore race and gender we can be certain that the computer will indeed ignore these factors because computers do not have a subconscious. Of course it won't be easy to write code for evaluating job applications and there is always the danger that the engineers will somehow program their own subconscious biases into the software, yet once we discover such mistakes it would probably be far easier to debug the software than to get rid humans of their racist and misogynist biases.

Lie Test: Do you want to check if your present role is a dream job? The following thought should answer your dilemma - "If you are truly involved in your tasks at work, eight hours can make you feel few minutes; otherwise one would feel few minutes as eight hours" Your mind can never lie! What did your test telling you?

In a similar study conducted at Yale University, undergraduate participants were offered the opportunity to use the same kind of casuistry to maintain the occupational status quo. The students evaluated one of two applicants (Michael or Michelle) for the position of police chief. One applicant was streetwise, a tough risk-taker, popular with other officers, but poorly educated. By contrast, the educated applicant was well schooled, media savvy, and family oriented, but lacked street experience and was less popular with the other officers. The undergraduate participants judged the job applicant on various streetwise and education criteria, and then rated the importance of each criterion for success as a police chief. Participants who rated Michael inflated the importance of being an educated, media-savvy family man when these were qualities Michael possessed, but devalued these qualities when he happened to lack them. No such helpful shifting of criteria took place for Michelle. As a consequence, regardless of whether he was streetwise or educated, the demands of the social world were shaped to ensure that Michael had more of what it took to be a successful police chief. As the authors put it, participants may have ‘felt that they had chosen the right man for the job, when in fact they had chosen the right job criteria for the man.’21 Ironically, the people who were most convinced of their own objectivity discriminated the most.

All through our education we are being taught a kind of reverse mindfulness. A kind of Future Studies where- via the guise of mathematics, or literature, or history, or computer programming, or French- we are being taught to think of a time different to the time we are in. Exam time. Job time. When-we-are-grown-up time. To see the act of learning as something not for its own sake but because of what it will get you reduces the wonder of humanity. We are thinking, feeling, art-making, knowledge-hungry, marvelous animals, who understand ourselves and our world through the act of learning. It is an end in itself. It has far more to offer than the things it lets us write on application forms. It is a way to love living right now.

We only hire applicants for jobs once we've determined they are a perfect fit. We only assign tasks to those who have already demonstrated they can perform that same exact task. We treat risk not as a noble venture, a dance with the universe, but as something to be avoided at all costs, or at least reduced to a decimal point. And we wonder why we're not living in another renaissance?

Careful in what and how you are learning. Professors specialize in “teaching” knowledge – They do not specialize in organization and application of knowledge. This is often why modern education includes “job placement” for real-world understanding and immersion of what you learn. Listen, you can grow up in Saudi Arabia, or in Kenya, or Bolivia – and study every book available on-line about hockey. But that will NEVER, by itself, lead you to become an adept hockey player or Hockey Coach. Yet, this is exactly the kind of thing going on all across the Fitness Industry, with ‘weekend certifications’ and the like. Knowledge is more than information gathering– and knowledge is NOT power in and of itself. Knowledge and access to it, is merely the “potential for proper and expert application.

He had plans, but his hopes for higher education, like all his others, were built on “mights.” He might go hang out somewhere, with someone. He might get a job and earn some money. He might go to college, a really old school with gray stone buildings and an enormous library. He was thinking of applying next year. Maybe the year after. He wasn’t thinking about application deadlines. That sort of detail wasn’t a part of his plan. Not at the moment. And why tell his mother about this anyway? It would rekindle her expectations, and she’d only start riding him again. Better to let it be. When his dad came home, they’d sort it out together. His mother retreated into her world, Silas into his. What a family, his mother would say, but until now, Silas had never realized that they weren’t really much of one. The names of the days retreated from them both, and soon after the school term ended, Silas was no longer sure what day of the week it was. Every morning when he woke up, he missed his father more keenly than the night before, but the details and differences of each day blurred and eventually vanished. For Silas, the passage of time became a longing ache in his heart that grew daily worse.

True, the number of functional managers should always be kept at a minimum, and there should be the largest possible number of ‘general’ managers who manage an integrated business and are directly responsible for its performance and results. Even with the utmost application of this principle the great bulk of managers will remain in functional jobs, however. This is particularly true of the younger people. A

The hiring rules are strictly followed, no matter who the applicant. Not long after she graduated from Harvard, Molly Munger applied at Munger, Tolles for an associate's position. She interviewed with Carla Hills, but Hills did not offer her a job, allegedly because Molly had not made the Harvard Law Review. Apparently in Hills estimation, that meant Molly's credentials weren't quite up to Munger, Tolles's standards.4

I am overwhelmed by the rigmarole of bureaucratic paperwork. I can't keep it all straight — the unemployment forms, the food-stamp applications, the drastically increasing number of ID cards that I am being forced to carry around with me. Being poor is a full-time job. Every minute, the government demands that you prove your current economic status, leaving absolutely no time to improve it. I have to schedule job interviews between all my other red-tape appointments.

...having an arrest record was an inescapable censure that permanently destabilized the lives of working-class people. Arrested for being poor, the criminal legal system did its best to ensure they stayed poor forever. Regardless of whether they were convicted, for the rest of their lives they would face questions about their arrests in job interviews, on applications for government assistance, and while trying to get career licenses or join professional organizations.

Once companies amass troves of data on employees’ health, what will stop them from developing health scores and wielding them to sift through job candidates? Much of the proxy data collected, whether step counts or sleeping patterns, is not protected by law, so it would theoretically be perfectly legal. And it would make sense. As we’ve seen, they routinely reject applicants on the basis of credit scores and personality tests. Health scores represent a natural—and frightening—next step.

So, absent the chance to make every job applicant work as hard as a college applicant, is there some quick, clever, cheap way of weeding out bad employees before they are hired? Zappos has come up with one such trick. You will recall from the last chapter that Zappos, the online shoe store, has a variety of unorthodox ideas about how a business can be run. You may also recall that its customer-service reps are central to the firm’s success. So even though the job might pay only $11 an hour, Zappos wants to know that each new employee is fully committed to the company’s ethos. That’s where “The Offer” comes in. When new employees are in the onboarding period—they’ve already been screened, offered a job, and completed a few weeks of training—Zappos offers them a chance to quit. Even better, quitters will be paid for their training time and also get a bonus representing their first month’s salary—roughly $2,000—just for quitting! All they have to do is go through an exit interview and surrender their eligibility to be rehired at Zappos. Doesn’t that sound nuts? What kind of company would offer a new employee $2,000 to not work? A clever company. “It’s really putting the employee in the position of ‘Do you care more about money or do you care more about this culture and the company?’ ” says Tony Hsieh, the company’s CEO. “And if they care more about the easy money, then we probably aren’t the right fit for them.” Hsieh figured that any worker who would take the easy $2,000 was the kind of worker who would end up costing Zappos a lot more in the long run. By one industry estimate, it costs an average of roughly $4,000 to replace a single employee, and one recent survey of 2,500 companies found that a single bad hire can cost more than $25,000 in lost productivity, lower morale, and the like. So Zappos decided to pay a measly $2,000 up front and let the bad hires weed themselves out before they took root. As of this writing, fewer than 1 percent of new hires at Zappos accept “The Offer.

He turned over the application, and Lauren watched him scanning it, his gaze nearing the bottom where she had listed her job preferences. She knew the exact instant he spotted what she had written. "What the...!" he said, astonished, and then he burst out laughing. "Weatherby and I are going to have to be careful. Which of our jobs do you want most?" "Neither," Lauren said shortly. "I did that because on my way to the interview at Sinco,I decided I didn't want to work there after all." "So you purposely flunked your tests,is that it?" "That's it." "Lauren..." he began in a soft seductive voice that instantly put her on guard. "I've had the dubious pleasure of reading through your file," she clarified, at his stunned look. "I know all about Bebe Leonardos and the French movie star.I even saw the picture of you that was taken with Ericka Moran the day after you sent me away because a "business aquaintance' was coming to see you." "And," he concluded evenly, "you were hurt." "I was disgusted," Lauren shot back, refusing to admit to any of the anguish she'd felt.

[There is] no direct relationship between IQ and economic opportunity. In the supposed interests of fairness and “social justice”, the natural relationship has been all but obliterated. Consider the first necessity of employment, filling out a job application. A generic job application does not ask for information on IQ. If such information is volunteered, this is likely to be interpreted as boastful exaggeration, narcissism, excessive entitlement, exceptionalism [...] and/or a lack of team spirit. None of these interpretations is likely to get you hired. Instead, the application contains questions about job experience and educational background, neither of which necessarily has anything to do with IQ. Universities are in business for profit; they are run like companies, seek as many paying clients as they can get, and therefore routinely accept people with lukewarm IQ’s, especially if they fill a slot in some quota system (in which case they will often be allowed to stay despite substandard performance). Regarding the quotas themselves, these may in fact turn the tables, advantaging members of groups with lower mean IQ’s than other groups [...] sometimes, people with lower IQ’s are expressly advantaged in more ways than one. These days, most decent jobs require a college education. Academia has worked relentlessly to bring this about, as it gains money and power by monopolizing the employment market across the spectrum. Because there is a glut of college-educated applicants for high-paying jobs, there is usually no need for an employer to deviate from general policy and hire an applicant with no degree. What about the civil service? While the civil service was once mostly open to people without college educations, this is no longer the case, and quotas make a very big difference in who gets hired. Back when I was in the New York job market, “minorities” (actually, worldwide majorities) were being spotted 30 (thirty) points on the civil service exam; for example, a Black person with a score as low as 70 was hired ahead of a White person with a score of 100. Obviously, any prior positive correlation between IQ and civil service employment has been reversed. Add to this the fact that many people, including employers, resent or feel threatened by intelligent people [...] and the IQ-parameterized employment function is no longer what it was once cracked up to be. If you doubt it, just look at the people running things these days. They may run a little above average, but you’d better not be expecting to find any Aristotles or Newtons among them. Intelligence has been replaced in the job market with an increasingly poor substitute, possession of a college degree, and given that education has steadily given way to indoctrination and socialization as academic priorities, it would be naive to suppose that this is not dragging down the overall efficiency of society. In short, there are presently many highly intelligent people working very “dumb” jobs, and conversely, many less intelligent people working jobs that would once have been filled by their intellectual superiors. Those sad stories about physics PhD’s flipping burgers at McDonald's are no longer so exceptional. Sorry, folks, but this is not your grandfather’s meritocracy any more.

Streamline Your Focus Instead of Jumping From Unfinished Project to Unfinished Project Although it seems contradictory, anxiety-related perfectionism can cause people to persist too long on some tasks and leave other projects unfinished. Perfectionists who are intolerant of uncertainty often jump from project to project. They might start multiple business plans, grant proposals, job applications, movie scripts, stand-up routines, craft projects, or novels, and not finish any of them. They may sour quickly on an idea when their self-doubt starts to creep in rather than stay with the idea long enough to realistically judge it’s potential. If you bounce from idea to idea, it could very well be because it’s hard for you to tolerate your uncertainty about whether the idea you’re working on is going to pan out. If you have a habit of not finishing things, you’re likely to be better off sticking with a project and finishing it, instead of jumping to another project when you start to feel unsure. To help you be less tempted to jump around, reduce your exposure to excessive information and alternatives.

Fitza estimates than in addition to these uncontrollable elements, about 70 percent of a company’s performance, for which the CEO normally gets credit and blame, is a matter of pure random chance. When a corporation sets out to find a new chief executive, it often hires headhunters and consulting firms, spending months of work and millions of dollars to pick just the right candidate. Fitza’s research suggests that they might as well have identified a pool of applicants with the general qualifications required for the job, and then just pulled names out of a hat.

[Stoner] said you don't kill two women and just stop there. I disagreed. I told Bill he was unduly tied to cop empiricism. I said the San Gabriel Valley was this deus ex machina. The people who flocked there flocked there for unconscious reasons that superseded conscious application of logic and made anything possible. The region defined the crime. The region was the crime...The region explained it all. The unconscious San Gabriel Valley migration explained every absurd and murderous act that went down there. Our job was to pin point three people within that migration.

Does affirmative action place minority students in colleges where they're likely to fail while depriving other applicants of the chance to attend the most challenging schools where they are capable of succeeding? Does rent control drive up the cost of housing, depriving property owners of the same opportunity to profit as any other investor while driving down the quality and quantity of the housing stock? Do minimum wage laws reduce the number of entry-level jobs, making it harder to escape from poverty? Because compassion, by its nature, subordinates doing good to feeling good, these are questions the warm-hearted rarely pursue.

How did you get hired?” “I checked the box on the application that said “descendant” by mistake. I’m dyslexic and I thought it said something else.” “Okay,” I said, thinking that was the worst employment application mistake ever. “And they all believe him to be the true ruler of Fallen?” “All the Mei-Bettys do. They’re, like, obsessed with it. It’s a little like restaurant-of-the-body-snatchers, you know?” “Then why do you work there?” I asked. “Clearly, you figured out something was wrong with them.” “Duh, but it pays well and they provide room and board. I sorta needed the job and a place to stay. It’s got free wifi,” she said, as if that explained everything.

In a classic study of how names impact people’s experience on the job market, researchers show that, all other things being equal, job seekers with White-sounding first names received 50 percent more callbacks from employers than job seekers with Black-sounding names.5 They calculated that the racial gap was equivalent to eight years of relevant work experience, which White applicants did not actually have; and the gap persisted across occupations, industry, employer size – even when employers included the “equal opportunity” clause in their ads.6 With emerging technologies we might assume that racial bias will be more scientifically rooted out. Yet, rather than challenging or overcoming the cycles of inequity, technical fixes too often reinforce and even deepen the status quo. For example, a study by a team of computer scientists at Princeton examined whether a popular algorithm, trained on human writing online, would exhibit the same biased tendencies that psychologists have documented among humans. They found that the algorithm associated White-sounding names with “pleasant” words and Black-sounding names with “unpleasant” ones.7 Such findings demonstrate what I call “the New Jim Code”: the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era.

the lower South, its meaning was settled by the overtly discriminatory Black Codes. These codes, described by Kenneth Stampp as “a twilight zone between slavery and freedom,”12 restricted Blacks by, for instance, requiring them to sign labor contracts and prohibiting them from taking any job other than farmer or servant without receiving a license and paying a tax.13 Extensive regulation of the “employment” relationship made it resemble slavery, with “masters” allowed to whip “servants.” Breaching or not entering into a contract could trigger the application of vagrancy laws, which took advantage of the Thirteenth Amendment back door: Blacks convicted of vagrancy could be sentenced to work or leased out while prisoners.

Bodean James Gazzer had spent thirty-one years perfecting the art of assigning blame. His personal credo - everything bad that happens is someone else's fault - could, with imagination, be stretched to fit any circumstance. Bode stretched it. The intestinal unrest that occasionally afflicted him surely was the result of drinking milk taken from secretly radiated cows. The roaches in his apartment were planted by his filthy immigrant next-door neighbors. His dire financial plight was caused by runaway bank computers and conniving Wall Street Zionists; his bad luck in the South Florida job market, prejudice against English-speaking applicants. Even the lousy weather had a culprit: air pollution from Canada, diluting the ozone and derailing the jet stream

When these children grew older and applied to college and later for their first jobs, they faced the same standards of gregariousness. University admissions officers looked not for the most exceptional candidates, but for the most extroverted. Harvard’s provost Paul Buck declared in the late 1940s that Harvard should reject the “sensitive, neurotic” type and the “intellectually over-stimulated” in favor of boys of the “healthy extrovert kind.” In 1950, Yale’s president, Alfred Whitney Griswold, declared that the ideal Yalie was not a “beetle-browed, highly specialized intellectual, but a well-rounded man.” Another dean told Whyte that “in screening applications from secondary schools he felt it was only common sense to take into account not only what the college wanted, but what, four years later, corporations’ recruiters would want. ‘They like a pretty gregarious, active type,’ he said. ‘So we find that the best man is the one who’s had an 80 or 85 average in school and plenty of extracurricular activity. We see little use for the “brilliant” introvert.’ 

looking for people to design the graphical interface for Apple’s new operating system, Jobs got an email from a young man and invited him in. The applicant was nervous, and the meeting did not go well. Later that day Jobs bumped into him, dejected, sitting in the lobby. The guy asked if he could just show him one of his ideas, so Jobs looked over his shoulder and saw a little demo, using Adobe Director, of a way to fit more icons in the dock at the bottom of a screen. When the guy moved the cursor over the icons crammed into the dock, the cursor mimicked a magnifying glass and made each icon balloon bigger. “I said, ‘My God,’ and hired him on the spot,” Jobs recalled. The feature became a lovable part of Mac OSX, and the designer went on to design such things as inertial scrolling for multi-touch screens (the delightful feature that makes the screen keep gliding for a moment after you’ve finished swiping). Jobs’s experiences at NeXT had matured him, but they had not mellowed him much. He still had no license plate on his Mercedes, and he still parked in the handicapped spaces next to the front door, sometimes straddling two slots. It became a running

Cash was running low, so I'd applied for a job as an administrative assistant for a nonprofit arts group. Without question, my organizational skills were as sharp as my vision, and I had no office experience to speak of. Luckily for me, none of this surfaced during the interview. 'Ryan, pretend it's a rough morning for a sec. Handle this situation for me. When you arrive at work to open the arts resource centre, several people are already at the door. Two clients want immediate help with grant applications - you know those artists, they just can't wait! - and a third wants to use our library, which isn't open till noon. Entering the office, you hear the phone is ringing and see the message light is blinking. The fax machine looks jammed again, and we're expecting an important document. Among the people waiting is a courier with a package you need to sign for. Think about it, though. The lights haven't been turned on yet, and the sign put out front. The alarm needs the code within a minute, too. So, wow, rough morning. I'd like to know what you'd do first.' 'First I'd tell everybody how weird this is. I'm in the same test situation from my job interview. What are the chances?' I started the next day.

Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole of society. But while it contains substantial grains of truth, as a whole it is a seductive mistake. . . . The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. . . . Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. . . . So even if the libertarian principle of “an it harm none, do as thou wilt,” is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it. . . . There is no need to embrace outright libertarianism just because we want a healthy portion of freedom, and the alternative to libertarianism is not the USSR, it is America’s traditional liberties. . . . Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians. The political corollary of this is that since no electorate will support libertarianism, a libertarian government could never be achieved democratically but would have to be imposed by some kind of authoritarian state, which rather puts the lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best for other people impose their values on the rest of us. . . . Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more. This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom. Conservatives should know better.

the list was a smoke screen: ten applications would be made on the pretense of this being a meritocratic process. But the first-choice school would have opened a file on the child once his PSATs were posted. The result was already assured. For Anne, much of the work lay in managing these lists. How to carve, from the great shared dream of college destiny, a range to fairly suit each child? And how then to help bring round the parents, in their bafflement and their shame? More accurately, how to awaken these families from a fantasy that held colleges up bright and shining and implacably steady in character, to reveal each as just what it was—a living, breathing institution—struggling to serve young minds weaned on ambition and fear and heading into a job market that matched conscription to greed and made interns of all the rest? Take Middlebury: one thought immediately of all the blond kids with a green streak, the vegans, the skiers. Take the Ivies: the Euro kids wanted Brown. Jews, Yale or Penn. WASPs wanted Princeton. Cold athletes Dartmouth. Hot athletes, Stanford. Cornell was big and seemed possible but Ithaca was a high price to pay. Columbia for the city kids. Everyone wanted Harvard, if only to say they got in. Then the cult schools. Tufts, Georgetown, Duke. Big

Another important slide shows how the Blitzkrieg—or maneuver conflict—is the perfect tactical application of the OODA Loop. Boyd asks: How does a commander harmonize the numerous individual thrusts of a Blitzkrieg attack and maintain the cohesion of his larger effort? The answer is that the Blitzkrieg is far more than the lightning thrusts that most people think of when they hear the term; rather it was all about high operational tempo and the rapid exploitation of opportunity. In a Blitzkrieg situation, the commander is able to maintain a high operational tempo and rapidly exploit opportunity because he makes sure his subordinates know his intent, his Schwerpunkt. They are not micromanaged, that is, they are not told to seize and hold a certain hill; instead they are given “mission orders.” This means that they understand their commander’s overall intent and they know their job is to do whatever is necessary to fulfill that intent. The subordinate and the commander share a common outlook. They trust each other, and this trust is the glue that holds the apparently formless effort together. Trust emphasizes implicit over explicit communications. Trust is the unifying concept. This gives the subordinate great freedom of action. Trust is an example of a moral force that helps bind groups together in what Boyd called an “organic whole.

Bush’s description of how basic research provides the seed corn for practical inventions became known as the “linear model of innovation.” Although subsequent waves of science historians sought to debunk the linear model for ignoring the complex interplay between theoretical research and practical applications, it had a popular appeal as well as an underlying truth. The war, Bush wrote, had made it “clear beyond all doubt” that basic science—discovering the fundamentals of nuclear physics, lasers, computer science, radar—“is absolutely essential to national security.” It was also, he added, crucial for America’s economic security. “New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science. A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade.” By the end of his report, Bush had reached poetic heights in extolling the practical payoffs of basic scientific research: “Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for past ages.”9 Based on this report, Congress established the National Science Foundation.

John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist who backed Netscape, Google, and Amazon, doesn’t remember the exact day anymore; all he remembers is that it was shortly before Steve Jobs took the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on January 9, 2007, to announce that Apple had reinvented the mobile phone. Doerr will never forget, though, the moment he first laid eyes on that phone. He and Jobs, his friend and neighbor, were watching a soccer match that Jobs’s daughter was playing in at a school near their homes in Palo Alto. As play dragged on, Jobs told Doerr that he wanted to show him something. “Steve reached into the top pocket of his jeans and pulled out the first iPhone,” Doerr recalled for me, “and he said, ‘John, this device nearly broke the company. It is the hardest thing we’ve ever done.’ So I asked for the specs. Steve said that it had five radios in different bands, it had so much processing power, so much RAM [random access memory], and so many gigabits of flash memory. I had never heard of so much flash memory in such a small device. He also said it had no buttons—it would use software to do everything—and that in one device ‘we will have the world’s best media player, world’s best telephone, and world’s best way to get to the Web—all three in one.’” Doerr immediately volunteered to start a fund that would support creation of applications for this device by third-party developers, but Jobs wasn’t interested at the time. He didn’t want outsiders messing with his elegant phone. Apple would do the apps. A year later, though, he changed his mind; that fund was launched, and the mobile phone app industry exploded. The moment that Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone turns out to have been a pivotal junction in the history of technology—and the world.

The process of receiving teaching depends upon the student giving something in return; some kind of psychological surrender is necessary, a gift of some sort. This is why we must discuss surrendering, opening, giving up expectations, before we can speak of the relationship between teacher and student. It is essential to surrender, to open yourself, to present whatever you are to the guru, rather than trying to present yourself as a worthwhile student. It does not matter how much you are willing to pay, how correctly you behave, how clever you are at saying the right thing to your teacher. It is not like having an interview for a job or buying a new car. Whether or not you will get the job depends upon your credentials, how well you are dressed, how beautifully your shoes are polished, how well you speak, how good your manners are. If you are buying a car, it is a matter of how much money you have and how good your credit is. But when it comes to spirituality, something more is required. It is not a matter of applying for a job, of dressing up to impress our potential employer. Such deception does not apply to an interview with a guru, because he sees right through us. He is amused if we dress up especially for the interview. Making ingratiating gestures is not applicable in this situation; in fact it is futile. We must make a real commitment to being open with our teacher; we must be willing to give up all our preconceptions. Milarepa expected Marpa to be a great scholar and a saintly person, dressed in yogic costume with beads, reciting mantras, meditating. Instead he found Marpa working on his farm, directing the laborers and plowing his land. I am afraid the word guru is overused in the West. It would be better to speak of one’s “spiritual friend,” because the teachings emphasize a mutual meeting of two minds. It is a matter of mutual communication, rather than a master-servant relationship between a highly evolved being and a miserable, confused one. In the master-servant relationship the highly evolved being may appear not even to be sitting on his seat but may seem to be floating, levitating, looking down at us. His voice is penetrating, pervading space. Every word, every cough, every movement that he makes is a gesture of wisdom. But this is a dream. A guru should be a spiritual friend who communicates and presents his qualities to us, as Marpa did with Milarepa and Naropa with Marpa. Marpa presented his quality of being a farmer-yogi. He happened to have seven children and a wife, and he looked after his farm, cultivating the land and supporting himself and his family. But these activities were just an ordinary part of his life. He cared for his students as he cared for his crops and family. He was so thorough, paying attention to every detail of his life, that he was able to be a competent teacher as well as a competent father and farmer. There was no physical or spiritual materialism in Marpa’s lifestyle at all. He did not emphasize spirituality and ignore his family or his physical relationship to the earth. If you are not involved with materialism, either spiritually or physically, then there is no emphasis made on any extreme. Nor is it helpful to choose someone for your guru simply because he is famous, someone who is renowned for having published stacks of books and converted thousands or millions of people. Instead the guideline is whether or not you are able actually to communicate with the person, directly and thoroughly. How much self-deception are you involved in? If you really open yourself to your spiritual friend, then you are bound to work together. Are you able to talk to him thoroughly and properly? Does he know anything about you? Does he know anything about himself, for that matter? Is the guru really able to see through your masks, communicate with you properly, directly? In searching for a teacher, this seems to be the guideline rather than fame or wisdom.