Joining Competition Quotes

If you join the rat race — you're in the race of rats.

Isabel dug her hands into the bin of Legos next to her. “We should have a ship-building competition.” “Yes,” Gabriel said. “I am the King of Legos.” “Is that a self-proclaimed title or one that was appointed?” I asked. Isabel laughed. Gabriel acted offended. “Appointed, of course.” He joined us on the floor and scooped out a handful of Legos. “By my father.

Wait long enough, and what was once mainstream will fall into obscurity. When that happens, it will become valuable again to those looking for authenticity or irony or cleverness. The value, then, is not intrinsic. The thing itself doesn’t have as much value as the perception of how it was obtained or why it is possessed. Once enough people join in, like with oversized glasses frames or slap bracelets, the status gained from owning the item or being a fan of the band is lost, and the search begins again. You would compete like this no matter how society was constructed. Competition for status is built into the human experience at the biological level. Poor people compete with resources. The middle class competes with selection. The wealthy compete with possessions. You sold out long ago in one way or another. The specifics of who you sell to and how much you make—those are only details.

The key to success is massive failure. Your goal is to out-fail your competition.

He had judged the Holly situation and knew how to join in the fun like a girl on the playground jumping into a double Dutch competition.

Winslow bounced over on the balls of his feet, clearly not experiencing any sort of crash. 'Aren't your guys nervous? I'm nervous as all hell.' 'There's nothing to be nervous about,' Beck said, joining them. 'Nerves are only useful when they can spur you on to work harder, faster, better. Once the work is done, they become pointless.

Thank you," he said. "Welcome. Welcome especially to Mr. Coyle Mathis and the other men and women of Forster Hollow who are going to be employed at this rather strikingly energy-inefficient plant. It's a long way from Forster Hollow, isn't it?" "So, yes, welcome," he said. "Welcome to the middle class! That's what I want to say. Although, quickly, before I go any further, I also want to say to Mr. Mathis here in the front row: I know you don't like me. And I don't like you. But, you know, back when you were refusing to have anything to do with us, I respected that. I didn't like it, but I had respect for your position. For your independence. You see, because I actually came from a place a little bit like Forster Hollow myself, before I joined the middle class. And, now you're middle-class, too, and I want to welcome you all, because it's a wonderful thing, our American middle class. It's the mainstay of economies all around the globe!" "And now that you've got these jobs at this body-armor plant," he continued, "You're going to be able to participate in those economies. You, too, can help denude every last scrap of native habitat in Asia, Africa, and South America! You, too, can buy six-foot-wide plasma TV screens that consume unbelievable amounts of energy, even when they're not turned on! But that's OK, because that's why we threw you out of your homes in the first places, so we could strip-mine your ancestral hills and feed the coal-fired generators that are the number-one cause of global warming and other excellent things like acid rain. It's a perfect world, isn't it? It's a perfect system, because as long as you've got your six-foot-wide plasma TV, and the electricity to run it, you don't have to think about any of the ugly consequences. You can watch Survivor: Indonesia till there's no more Indonesia!" "Just quickly, here," he continued, "because I want to keep my remarks brief. Just a few more remarks about this perfect world. I want to mention those big new eight-miles-per-gallon vehicles you're going to be able to buy and drive as much as you want, now that you've joined me as a member of the middle class. The reason this country needs so much body armor is that certain people in certain parts of the world don't want us stealing all their oil to run your vehicles. And so the more you drive your vehicles, the more secure your jobs at this body-armor plant are going to be! Isn't that perfect?" "Just a couple more things!" Walter cried, wresting the mike from its holder and dancing away with it. "I want to welcome you all to working for one of the most corrupt and savage corporations in the world! Do you hear me? LBI doesn't give a shit about your sons and daughters bleeding in Iraq, as long as they get their thousand-percent profit! I know this for a fact! I have the facts to prove it! That's part of the perfect middle-class world you're joining! Now that you're working for LBI, you can finally make enough money to keep your kids from joining the Army and dying in LBI's broken-down trucks and shoddy body armor!" The mike had gone dead, and Walter skittered backwards, away from the mob that was forming. "And MEANWHILE," he shouted, "WE ARE ADDING THIRTEEN MILLION HUMAN BEINGS TO THE POPULATION EVERY MONTH! THIRTEEN MILLION MORE PEOPLE TO KILL EACH OTHER IN COMPETITION OVER FINITE RESOURCES! AND WIPE OUT EVERY OTHER LIVING THING ALONG THE WAY! IT IS A PERFECT FUCKING WORLD AS LONG AS YOU DON'T COUNT EVERY OTHER SPECIES IN IT! WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANT! A CANCER ON THE PLANET!

That was unkind," Sorasa said in a flat voice, without judgement. A simple statement of fact. Sigil shrugged. "No one pays me to be kind." At Corayne's shoulder, Andry leaned, closing the distance between them. "She might be harsher than Sorasa," he said out of the corner of his mouth. At the rear of their line, Dom scoffed. "I did not realize there was a competition for worst personality," he crowed. Sorasa didn't hesitate. "It's not a competition with you around, Elder." On the road, Charlie jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, his discomfort forgotten. "Do all immortals have sticks up their asses or just him?" Their joined laughter carried through the Larsian fields, rustling the tall grass. To Corayne's delight, even Dom's lips twitched, betraying a smile.

In every competition, it's not just a great deal of talent that you need. Everyone who joins have that or else they would not be so confident to be in the race. Focus though is the one thing that most people don't have. So you have to stay the most focused. Do not stray from your goal. If you want to win the game, you have to be in the game.

CEO Gil Amelio stumbled. Ellison may have been baffled when Jobs insisted that he was not motivated by money, but it was partly true. He had neither Ellison’s conspicuous consumption needs nor Gates’s philanthropic impulses nor the competitive urge to see how high on the Forbes list he could get. Instead his ego needs and personal drives led him to seek fulfillment by creating a legacy that would awe people. A dual legacy, actually: building innovative products and building a lasting company. He wanted to be in the pantheon with, indeed a notch above, people like Edwin Land, Bill Hewlett, and David Packard. And the best way to achieve all this was to return to Apple and reclaim his kingdom. And yet when the cup of power neared his lips, he became strangely hesitant, reluctant, perhaps coy. He returned to Apple officially in January 1997 as a part-time advisor, as he had told Amelio he would. He began to assert himself in some personnel areas, especially in protecting his people who had made the transition from NeXT. But in most other ways he was unusually passive. The decision not to ask him to join the board offended him, and he felt demeaned

It wasn’t until 1959 that the Red Sox finally joined the rest of the major leagues and brought up a black player from the minors to play in Boston. This tardiness on race and its lingering effects put the team at a competitive disadvantage for years and was far more responsible for the extended World Series drought in Boston than the 1919 sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees—the so-called Curse of the Bambino. As

Lady Wisdom has built a house, prepared a feast, and now invites the young, the simple, and the naive to come to her party. She wants her house full of guests and spilling over with life, yet hers is not the only invitation. There is competition in the streets. Another woman vies for the attention of the young and impressionable. She, too, wants her house full, but of deceit and seduction; and when it is, death and misery join the revelry.

in today’s market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol . . . And the list goes on: virtual sex as sex without sex, the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its disturbing Otherness. Los Prisonieros add another key figure from our cultural space to this series: the decaffeinated protester. This is a protester who says (or sings) all the right things, but somehow deprives them of their critical edge. He is horrified by global warming, he fights sexism and racism, he demands radical social change, and everyone is invited to join in the big sentiment of global solidarity—but all of this only adds up to mean that he is not required to change his life (maybe just to give to charity here and there). He goes on with his career, he is ruthlessly competitive, but he is on the right side.

At least she was good at archaeology, she mused, even if she was a dismal failure as a woman in Tate’s eyes. “She’s been broody ever since we got here,” Leta said with pursed lips as she glanced from Tate to Cecily. “You two had a blowup, huh?” she asked, pretending innocence. Tate drew in a short breath. “She poured crab bisque on me in front of television cameras.” Cecily drew herself up to her full height. “Pity it wasn’t flaming shish kebab!” she returned fiercely. Leta moved between them. “The Sioux wars are over,” she announced. “That’s what you think,” Cecily muttered, glaring around her at the tall man. Tate’s dark eyes began to twinkle. He’d missed her in his life. Even in a temper, she was refreshing, invigorating. She averted her eyes to the large grass circle outlined by thick corded string. All around it were make-shift shelters on poles, some with canvas tops, with bales of hay to make seats for spectators. The first competition of the day was over and the winners were being announced. A woman-only dance came next, and Leta grimaced as she glanced from one warring face to the other. If she left, there was no telling what might happen. “That’s me,” she said reluctantly, adjusting the number on her back. “Got to run. Wish me luck.” “You know I do,” Cecily said, smiling at her. “Don’t disgrace us,” Tate added with laughter in his eyes. Leta made a face at him, but smiled. “No fighting,” she said, shaking a finger at them as she went to join the other competitors. Tate’s granitelike face had softened as he watched his mother. Whatever his faults, he was a good son.

The Mongols loved competitions of all sorts, and they organized debates among rival religions the same way they organized wrestling matches. It began on a specific date with a panel of judges to oversee it. In this case Mongke Khan ordered them to debate before three judges: a Christian, a Muslim, and a Buddhist. A large audience assembled to watch the affair, which began with great seriousness and formality. An official lay down the strict rules by which Mongke wanted the debate to proceed: on pain of death “no one shall dare to speak words of contention.” Rubruck and the other Christians joined together in one team with the Muslims in an effort to refute the Buddhist doctrines. As these men gathered together in all their robes and regalia in the tents on the dusty plains of Mongolia, they were doing something that no other set of scholars or theologians had ever done in history. It is doubtful that representatives of so many types of Christianity had come to a single meeting, and certainly they had not debated, as equals, with representatives of the various Muslim and Buddhist faiths. The religious scholars had to compete on the basis of their beliefs and ideas, using no weapons or the authority of any ruler or army behind them. They could use only words and logic to test the ability of their ideas to persuade. In the initial round, Rubruck faced a Buddhist from North China who began by asking how the world was made and what happened to the soul after death. Rubruck countered that the Buddhist monk was asking the wrong questions; the first issue should be about God from whom all things flow. The umpires awarded the first points to Rubruck. Their debate ranged back and forth over the topics of evil versus good, God’s nature, what happens to the souls of animals, the existence of reincarnation, and whether God had created evil. As they debated, the clerics formed shifting coalitions among the various religions according to the topic. Between each round of wrestling, Mongol athletes would drink fermented mare’s milk; in keeping with that tradition, after each round of the debate, the learned men paused to drink deeply in preparation for the next match. No side seemed to convince the other of anything. Finally, as the effects of the alcohol became stronger, the Christians gave up trying to persuade anyone with logical arguments, and resorted to singing. The Muslims, who did not sing, responded by loudly reciting the Koran in an effort to drown out the Christians, and the Buddhists retreated into silent meditation. At the end of the debate, unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations concluded, with everyone simply too drunk to continue.

Competition is the spice of sports; but if you make spice the whole meal you'll be sick. The simplest single-celled organism oscillates to a number of different frequencies, at the atomic, molecular, sub-cellular, and cellular levels. Microscopic movies of these organisms are striking for the ceaseless, rhythmic pulsation that is revealed. In an organism as complex as a human being, the frequencies of oscillation and the interactions between those frequencies are multitudinous. -George Leonard Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it…the upward spurts vary; the plateaus have their own dips and rises along the way…To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so–and this is the inexorable–fact of the journey–you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere. (Mastery, p. 14-15). Backsliding is a universal experience. Every one of us resists significant change, no matter whether it’s for the worse or for the better. Our body, brain and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed…Be aware of the way homeostasis works…Expect resistance and backlash. Realize that when the alarm bells start ringing, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re sick or crazy or lazy or that you’ve made a bad decision in embarking on the journey of mastery. In fact, you might take these signals as an indication that your life is definitely changing–just what you’ve wanted….Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change. Our preoccupation with goals, results, and the quick fix has separated us from our own experiences…there are all of those chores that most of us can’t avoid: cleaning, straightening, raking leaves, shopping for groceries, driving the children to various activities, preparing food, washing dishes, washing the car, commuting, performing the routine, repetitive aspects of our jobs….Take driving, for instance. Say you need to drive ten miles to visit a friend. You might consider the trip itself as in-between-time, something to get over with. Or you could take it as an opportunity for the practice of mastery. In that case, you would approach your car in a state of full awareness…Take a moment to walk around the car and check its external condition, especially that of the tires…Open the door and get in the driver’s seat, performing the next series of actions as a ritual: fastening the seatbelt, adjusting the seat and the rearview mirror…As you begin moving, make a silent affirmation that you’ll take responsibility for the space all around your vehicle at all times…We tend to downgrade driving as a skill simply because it’s so common. Actually maneuvering a car through varying conditions of weather, traffic, and road surface calls for an extremely high level of perception, concentration, coordination, and judgement…Driving can be high art…Ultimately, nothing in this life is “commonplace,” nothing is “in between.” The threads that join your every act, your every thought, are infinite. All paths of mastery eventually merge. [Each person has a] vantage point that offers a truth of its own. We are the architects of creation and all things are connected through us. The Universe is continually at its work of restructuring itself at a higher, more complex, more elegant level . . . The intention of the universe is evolution. We exist as a locus of waves that spreads its influence to the ends of space and time. The whole of a thing is contained in each of its parts. We are completely, firmly, absolutely connected with all of existence. We are indeed in relationship to all that is.

Men like my father, and men like him who attend Trump rallies, join misogynistic subcultures, populate some of the most hateful groups in the world, and are prisoners of toxic masculinity, an artificial construct whose expectancies are unattainable, thus making them exceedingly fragile and injurious to others, not to mention themselves. The illusion convinces them from an early age that men deserve to be privileged and entitled, that women and men who don’t conform to traditional standards are second-class persons, are weak and thus detestable. This creates a tyrannical patriarchal system that tilts the world further in favor of men, and, as a side effect, accounts for a great deal of crimes, including harassment, physical and emotional abuse, rape, and even murder. These men, and the boys following in their footsteps, were socialized in childhood to exhibit the ideal masculine traits, including stoicism, aggressiveness, extreme self-confidence, and an unending competitiveness. Those who do not conform are punished by their fathers in the form of physical and emotional abuse, and then further socialized by the boys in their school and community who have been enduring their own abuse at home. If that isn’t enough, our culture then reflects those expectations in its television shows, movies, music, and especially in advertising, where products like construction-site-quality trucks, power tools, beer, gendered deodorant, and even yogurt promise to bestow masculinity for the right price. The masculinity that’s being sold, that’s being installed via systemic abuse, is fragile because, again, it is unattainable. Humans are not intended to suppress their emotions indefinitely, to always be confident and unflinching. Traditional masculinity, as we know it, is an unnatural state, and, as a consequence, men are constantly at war with themselves and the world around them.

Emmanuel Frimpong at work in Toms Creek, June 2020. Ecologists who study relationships among species have traditionally focused on competition and predation—because of their established importance to evolution, and because they are often more obvious and easier to document than cooperation. Researchers have paid relatively less attention to mutually beneficial relationships, called mutualisms, and reports of them have sometimes been met with the same kind of skepticism that greeted Elinor Ostrom’s work on human cooperation. On and around the bluehead chub nests of Toms Creek, however, Frimpong and his students found that while fish of different species often challenge one another on first encounter, they quickly settle into a détente, joining a collective that serves at least ten of the creek’s fish species.

The competition for accumulation requires that the capitalists inflict a daily violence upon the working class in the work place. The intensity of that violence is not under individual capitalists' control, particularly if competition is unregulated. The restless search for relative surplus value raises the productivity of labour at the same time as it devalues and depreciates labour power, to say nothing of the loss of dignity, of sense of control over the work process of the perpetual harassment by overseers and the necessity to conform to the dictates of the machine. As individuals, workers are scarcely in a position to resist, most particularly since a rising productivity has the habit of 'freeing' a certain number of them into the ranks of the unemployed. Workers can develop the power to resist only by class action of some kind — either spontaneous acts of violence (the machine-breakings, burnings and mob fury of earlier eras, which have by no means disappeared) or the creation of organizations (such as the unions) capable of waging a collective class struggle. The capitalists' compulsion to capture ever more relative surplus value does not pass unchallenged. The battle is joined once more, and the main lines of class struggle form around questions such as the application of machinery, the speed and intensity of the labour process, the employment of women and children, the conditions of labour and the rights of the worker in the work place. The fact that struggles over such issues are a part of daily life in capitalist society attests to the fact that the quest for relative surplus value is omnipresent and that the necessary violence that that quest implies is bound to provoke some kind of class response on the part of the workers.

That? It's nothing. A stupid mutation. A standard outcome. We used to see them in our labs. Junk." "Then why haven't we ever seen it before?" Gibbons makes a face of impatience. "You don't culture death the way we do. You don't tinker with the building blocks of nature." Interest and passion flicker briefly in the old man's eyes. Mischief and predatory interests. "You have no idea what things we succeeded in creating in our labs. This stuff is hardly worth my time. I hoped you were bringing me a challenge. Something from Drs. Ping and Raymond. Or perhaps Mahmoud Sonthalia. Those are challenges." For a moment, his eyes lose their cynicism. He becomes entranced. "Ah. Now those are worthy opponents." We are in the hands of a gamesman. In a flash of insight, Kanya understands the doctor entirely. A fierce intellect. A man who reached the pinnacle of his field. A jealous and competitive man. A man who found his competition too lacking, and so switched sides and joined the Thai Kingdom for the stimulation it might provide. An intellectual exercise for him. As if Jaidee had decided to fight a muay thai match with his hands tied behind his back to see if he could win with kicks alone. We rest in the hands of a fickle god. He plays on our behalf only for entertainment, and he will close his eyes and sleep if we fail to engage his intellect. A horrifying thought. The man exists only for competition, the chess match of evolution, fought on a global scale. An exercise in ego, a single giant fending off the attacks of dozens of others, a giant swatting them from the sky and laughing. But all giants must fall, and then what must the Kingdom look forward to?

In 2000, for instance, two statisticians were hired by the YMCA—one of the nation’s largest nonprofit organizations—to use the powers of data-driven fortune-telling to make the world a healthier place. The YMCA has more than 2,600 branches in the United States, most of them gyms and community centers. About a decade ago, the organization’s leaders began worrying about how to stay competitive. They asked a social scientist and a mathematician—Bill Lazarus and Dean Abbott—for help. The two men gathered data from more than 150,000 YMCA member satisfaction surveys that had been collected over the years and started looking for patterns. At that point, the accepted wisdom among YMCA executives was that people wanted fancy exercise equipment and sparkling, modern facilities. The YMCA had spent millions of dollars building weight rooms and yoga studios. When the surveys were analyzed, however, it turned out that while a facility’s attractiveness and the availability of workout machines might have caused people to join in the first place, what got them to stay was something else. Retention, the data said, was driven by emotional factors, such as whether employees knew members’ names or said hello when they walked in. People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. If a member made a friend at the YMCA, they were much more likely to show up for workout sessions. In other words, people who join the YMCA have certain social habits. If the YMCA satisfied them, members were happy. So if the YMCA wanted to encourage people to exercise, it needed to take advantage of patterns that already existed, and teach employees to remember visitors’ names.

Suppose you entered a boat race. One hundred rowers, each in a separate rowboat, set out on a ten-mile race along a wide and slow-moving river. The first to cross the finish line will win $10,000. Halfway into the race, you’re in the lead. But then, from out of nowhere, you’re passed by a boat with two rowers, each pulling just one oar. No fair! Two rowers joined together into one boat! And then, stranger still, you watch as that rowboat is overtaken by a train of three such rowboats, all tied together to form a single long boat. The rowers are identical septuplets. Six of them row in perfect synchrony while the seventh is the coxswain, steering the boat and calling out the beat for the rowers. But those cheaters are deprived of victory just before they cross the finish line, for they in turn are passed by an enterprising group of twenty-four sisters who rented a motorboat. It turns out that there are no rules in this race about what kinds of vehicles are allowed. That was a metaphorical history of life on Earth. For the first billion years or so of life, the only organisms were prokaryotic cells (such as bacteria). Each was a solo operation, competing with others and reproducing copies of itself. But then, around 2 billion years ago, two bacteria somehow joined together inside a single membrane, which explains why mitochondria have their own DNA, unrelated to the DNA in the nucleus.35 These are the two-person rowboats in my example. Cells that had internal organelles could reap the benefits of cooperation and the division of labor (see Adam Smith). There was no longer any competition between these organelles, for they could reproduce only when the entire cell reproduced, so it was “one for all, all for one.” Life on Earth underwent what biologists call a “major transition.”36 Natural selection went on as it always had, but now there was a radically new kind of creature to be selected. There was a new kind of vehicle by which selfish genes could replicate themselves. Single-celled eukaryotes were wildly successful and spread throughout the oceans.

Success comes with an inevitable problem: market saturation. New products initially grow just by adding more customers—to grow a network, add more nodes. Eventually this stops working because nearly everyone in the target market has joined the network, and there are not enough potential customers left. From here, the focus has to shift from adding new customers to layering on more services and revenue opportunities with existing ones. eBay had this problem in its early years, and had to figure its way out. My colleague at a16z, Jeff Jordan, experienced this himself, and would often write and speak about his first month as the general manager of eBay’s US business. It was in 2000, and for the first time ever, eBay’s US business failed to grow on a month-over-month basis. This was critical for eBay because nearly all the revenue and profit for the company came from the US unit—without growth in the United States, the entire business would stagnate. Something had to be done quickly. It’s tempting to just optimize the core business. After all, increasing a big revenue base even a little bit often looks more appealing than starting at zero. Bolder bets are risky. Yet because of the dynamics of market saturation, a product’s growth tends to slow down and not speed up. There’s no way around maintaining a high growth rate besides continuing to innovate. Jeff shared what the team did to find the next phase of growth for the company: eBay.com at the time enabled the community to buy and sell solely through online auctions. But auctions intimidated many prospective users who expressed preference for the ease and simplicity of fixed price formats. Interestingly, our research suggested that our online auction users were biased towards men, who relished the competitive aspect of the auction. So the first major innovation we pursued was to implement the (revolutionary!) concept of offering items for a fixed price on ebay.com, which we termed “buy-it-now.” Buy-it-now was surprisingly controversial to many in both the eBay community and in eBay headquarters. But we swallowed hard, took the risk and launched the feature . . . and it paid off big. These days, the buy-it-now format represents over $40 billion of annual Gross Merchandise Volume for eBay, 62% of their total.65

told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost. We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA. Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits. But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks. “Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them. “Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups. I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better. There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing.

Watson demanded total loyalty to the corporation from everybody it employed. ‘Joining a company,’ he would tell his staff, ‘is an act that calls for absolute loyalty in big matters and little ones.’ His message was that the company was the employee’s ‘friend’ and that a ‘family spirit’ combined with ‘vision and faith’, was as important for its success as an array of products that knocked the competition for six. He insisted that no drinking took place during business hours.

The family moved on to Topanga Canyon and settled in a wreck of a house called the Spiral Staircase, famous for being a community center of sorts for the area’s spiritual gurus and minor cults. The Spiral Staircase was a hang-out for L.A.’s rich and famous icons of counter-culture. Jim Morrison, members of the Mamas and the Papas, and Jay Sebring were all said to get high at the Spiral Staircase, and Manson was drawn by the place’s starry reputation. However, the Manson Family stayed at Spiral Staircase for just two months. Manson didn’t like the other gurus who represented competition for his girls’ affection and pulled away from the satanic and sex fetish elements of what went on at Spiral Staircase. Manson piled his family back into the school bus and, with the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour as their soundtrack, drove them through the Mojave Desert. In the winter of 1967, Manson attracted a new follower. Fourteen-year-old Diane Lake had grown up on a commune called Hog Farm and had her parents’ permission when she joined the Manson Family. Diane was Manson’s favorite for the first year she was with him, and while he continued to have sex with all of his girls, he chose Diane most often. It’s unclear how long Manson had been physically abusing Mary, the mother of his child and ostensibly the very first Manson girl, but once Diane was on the scene it seems Manson took out his frustration on Mary more often. Mary could often be seen sporting a black eye, and it was Manson’s brutalizing of Mary that

The family moved on to Topanga Canyon and settled in a wreck of a house called the Spiral Staircase, famous for being a community center of sorts for the area’s spiritual gurus and minor cults. The Spiral Staircase was a hang-out for L.A.’s rich and famous icons of counter-culture. Jim Morrison, members of the Mamas and the Papas, and Jay Sebring were all said to get high at the Spiral Staircase, and Manson was drawn by the place’s starry reputation. However, the Manson Family stayed at Spiral Staircase for just two months. Manson didn’t like the other gurus who represented competition for his girls’ affection and pulled away from the satanic and sex fetish elements of what went on at Spiral Staircase. Manson piled his family back into the school bus and, with the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour as their soundtrack, drove them through the Mojave Desert. In the winter of 1967, Manson attracted a new follower. Fourteen-year-old Diane Lake had grown up on a commune called Hog Farm and had her parents’ permission when she joined the Manson Family. Diane was Manson’s favorite for the first year she was with him, and while he continued to have sex with all of his girls, he chose Diane most often. It’s unclear how long Manson had been physically abusing Mary, the mother of his child and ostensibly the very first Manson girl, but once Diane was on the scene it seems Manson took out his frustration on Mary more often. Mary could often be seen sporting a black eye, and it was Manson’s brutalizing of Mary that left the other girls afraid of his temper.

To deepen alignment across specialties, the Apple organizational structure was very different from that of most other firms. There were no product divisions that were their own profit centers. “We run one P&L for the company,” said operations head Tim Cook (who became CEO after Jobs’s death).8 Thus, divisions did not compete against each other for customers or worry about "cannibalization.” This proved a huge competitive advantage when Apple introduced the iPod and iTunes. Rival Sony, rich in assets that could have given Apple a run for its money, was undermined by their organization structure, which was divided into profit centers that drove focus on product lines but hampered collaboration across these lines. Sony’s music division and their consumer electronics division were never able to successfully join forces to compete against Apple. Conversely, at Apple, all departments could celebrate a sale, whether a consumer chose to download music through their iPod or iPhone, or send emails using an iPad or MacBook.

Wildly Popular House Buying Strategy In A Competitive Environment It is important for the success of any real estate consulting company to have customers who are happy with their services. Customers who are unhappy with your real estate services business will stop buying your goods and will supply your business with a bad name. To guarantee that your business receives positive reviews, be certain to give your customers the best quality service. We've great ideas about how to create potential customers and keeping current ones satisfied. Each new employee you bring into your real estate services business could have long-lasting repercussions, so choose them carefully. Prior to inviting someone to join you, be certain that he or she's going to be capable of performing the duties the job will require, and that he or she's certified in any way needed. Whenever a new employee joins your business, you should see that they receive thorough training and could complete the tasks assigned to them. Successful companies have happy staff members that need to help you succeed; they tend to be the product of ongoing training. A real estate services business that hopes to be competitive in today's business world should have a professionally designed website. As a responsible business owner, you have to hire a professional website designer to build your site if you don't have the necessary skills to do it yourself. The appearance of your website is vital to its success, so be sure to use visually appealing templates and images that support your content. Never discount the importance of virtual retailing to your real estate consulting company's success; today's business climate requires that all companies establish and maintain a strong and authoritative web presence. Don't give in to complacency, even though your real estate consulting company is doing well. House buying experts universally believe that the very best time to expand your company is when you are gaining momentum. When you have dedication to the project, you could build a successful company. If your company could learn to embrace changes in the marketplace and always strive for something better, you will get through a lot of tough times.

Join Eii one of the best institute for SSC JE Coaching. We provide coaching for all subjects including civil, mechanical, electrical etc. Our selections ratio in Junior Engineer Examination and other examinations is far ahead than others such institute as we are the only coaching in Delhi which has secured All India First Rank several times and achieved excellent result in all competitive exams. Eii is the most prominent result producing coaching institute for offering excellent classroom programs.

make a theory go away?  There’s only one way.  You need to find a theory that’s better.  Once you do, you can trot your new theory out and show it to people, they can then look at how your theory fits the data, and if your theory fits better, it will eclipse the old theory and the old theory will probably be replaced by your new one (Yay!).  If your theory fits equally well, it will join the other theory as a competitive theory.   If your theory doesn’t fit the data as well as the previous theory, it’s doomed, even if you like it or its implications better than the previous theory.

Is Threads a threat to Twitter? Threads on Twitter refer to the ability to connect multiple tweets together in a continuous conversation. By simply replying to one's own tweets, users can create a chain of related messages, providing a coherent and concise narrative. The feature was rolled out to enable users to share longer stories, thoughts, or discussions without having to break them down into individual tweets. Threads also allows longer videos and does not use hashtags, unlike Twitter. The app requires an Instagram account and has gained immense popularity, with millions of users joining within hours of its launch. As Threads continues to evolve, it remains to be seen how Twitter, under Elon Musk’s ownership, will respond to this competition.

Bloodline by Stewart Stafford Stuart Richards, 5,001st in line to the British throne, A distant cousin of the king but hitherto unknown, He dreamt of the crown and his fair queen's hand, But there was no baiting the hook unless he had a plan. He chose to eliminate the competition, stood before him, Through a dark celebration, they'd never know what hit them, He sent out invitations to the 5, 000 heirs, Promising vast feasting, with music and fanfare He built a fake house front with a door and a sign, That said: "Welcome to the party. Now, kindly form a line." Behind the door, there awaited a cliff face and a fall, A master of deception, his warm smile greeted them all. He stood at the front door with a charming bow, And, welcoming each guest, he said: "In you go now!" He watched them disappear as they stepped through the door, Counting steps to ascension, lemmings queued up for more. Backslapping himself, inner cackling at his scheme, Imagining himself as king - glory rained down, it seemed, But his Machiavellian plotting had a monstrous flaw, One thing he'd forgotten that greedy eyes never saw. The king was still alive, and he was not amused, He got wind of this plot and responded unconfused, He sent his guards to arrest him for sedition in a fury, They swept him off his feet, planting him before a jury. Put on trial for treason - the verdict was most guilty, Execution set, he had the neck to beg for mercy, But the king was not budging and barked: "Off with his head!" An Axeman's reverse coronation, he joined the fallen dead. Halting 2,986th in line to the British throne, A distant cousin of the king, headless spirit flown, In jealous craving, dispossessed as ruler of the land, Crowned pride came before a fallen plan. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

Let me describe how that same thought applies to the world of education. I recently joined a federal committee on incentives and accountability in public education. This is one aspect of social and market norms that I would like to explore in the years to come. Our task is to reexamine the “No Child Left Behind” policy, and to help find ways to motivate students, teachers, administrators, and parents. My feeling so far is that standardized testing and performance-based salaries are likely to push education from social norms to market norms. The United States already spends more money per student than any other Western society. Would it be wise to add more money? The same consideration applies to testing: we are already testing very frequently, and more testing is unlikely to improve the quality of education. I suspect that one answer lies in the realm of social norms. As we learned in our experiments, cash will take you only so far—social norms are the forces that can make a difference in the long run. Instead of focusing the attention of the teachers, parents, and kids on test scores, salaries, and competition, it might be better to instill in all of us a sense of purpose, mission, and pride in education. To do this we certainly can't take the path of market norms. The Beatles proclaimed some time ago that you “Can't Buy Me Love” and this also applies to the love of learning—you can't buy it; and if you try, you might chase it away. So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society. This way the students, teachers, and parents might see the larger point in education and become more enthusiastic and motivated about it. We should also work hard on making education a goal in itself, and stop confusing the number of hours students spend in school with the quality of the education they get. Kids can get excited about many things (baseball, for example), and it is our challenge as a society to make them want to know as much about Nobel laureates as they now know about baseball players. I am not suggesting that igniting a social passion for education is simple; but if we succeed in doing so, the value could be immense.

There are two ways to get rid of your competition: kill them, or join them.

•  Join a sports team (a structured activity, yes, but better than nothing!), or take a fun exercise class like pole dancing, trampoline, or trapeze.         •  Engage in games that are fun for you. It could be board or card games, crosswords, or darts. Perhaps you love putting together model airplanes or building with Legos. Consider buying a Ping-Pong or pool table . . . and be careful not to turn that table into another place for competition and über-focus.         •  Find a play partner. Animals and children are always ready to play and laugh. Find opportunities to play with your own children or pets or those of friends and family. Finding

Part of what makes credit cards work is that they simplify transactions for both buyers and sellers. Concentrating on just a few cards further simplifies matters on both sides of the market. Thus ever since the big shakeout, no new credit cards have joined the ranks of the majors; the barrier to market entry has proved to be too great. That said, in recent years the Internet revolution has opened the door to competition from wholly new directions—including new kinds of payment services, such as PayPal; an international network of automatic teller machines to challenge old standbys such as traveler’s checks; and maybe even new types of “virtual money” such as Bitcoin. As I write this in 2014, Apple has announced a new payment system on the latest iPhones, and we can reasonably expect that it and/or other new payment systems that make use of mobile devices will become commonplace.

Glenn Hammond Curtiss was a bicycle enthusiast before he started building motorcycles. Although he only attended grammar school to the 8th grade, his interests motivated him to move on to greater things. In 1904, as a self-taught engineer, he began to manufacture engines for airships. During this time, Curtiss became known for having won a number of international air races and for making the first long-distance flight in the United States. On September 30, 1907, Curtiss was invited to join a non-profit pioneering research program named the “Aerial Experimental Association,” founded under the leadership of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, to develop flying machines. The organization was established having a fixed time period, which ended in March of 1909. During this time, the members produced several different aircraft in a cooperative, rather than a competitive, spirit.

Today, there aren’t any doors. You don’t need permission from anyone. You just need an internet connection and a computer. Here’s the new paradigm: It’s no longer what you know, or who you know. It’s what you create. This fundamental shift has been brought on by technologies (mainly the internet) that have made it insanely easy to create all kinds of awesome stuff. Want to become a published author? Go for it. You don’t need a publisher. Just write your book and publish it on Amazon. I did this, and now I’m a bestselling author, selling more books than most authors would have dreamed of twenty years ago. Want to sell a product? Go for it. You don’t need a warehouse, or manufacturing equipment, or a storefront, or a bank to finance everything. Raise money on KickStarter, use Google to find a cheap manufacturer in China, and ship your product to customers all over the world on Amazon, or through your own ecommerce store. Want to learn how to start a company? You don’t need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars getting an MBA. Take a course on Udemy. Or, join a startup accelerator program―and they’ll pay you. Here’s the thing. Even if you’re not doing this stuff, other hustlers are. The trend is happening whether you like it or not. When new resources become readily available, a sliver of society inevitably flocks to those resources and uses them to their advantage, often reaping astronomically high rewards in the process. The competitive advantage has shifted from connections to creations. Knowing important people is still important, but the means of meeting them has changed. The order is now reversed. You don’t connect and then create. You create and then connect.

Her theory of endosymbiosis, controversial at first and now enshrined in biology textbooks, showed that in evolution, radical cooperation is just as potent a force as deathly competition. One great example involves mitochondria, the tiny micron-size power plants inside our cells. According to endosymbiotic theory, these used to be freely living bacteria that joined our ancestral cells in a mutually beneficial, symbiotic, relationship. The association became so tight that eventually the partners joined together to form a new kind of organism.

There was never a doubt in my mind that I’d keep working toward stopping the destruction of our environment and wildlife that was spiraling out of control. There were so many triumphs that Steve had already worked so hard for. I sat down with Wes. “First, we’re going to work on everything Steve wanted to achieve,” I said. “Then we’ll move on to everything that we were collectively working toward. And finally, I want to continue with my own goals, in terms of our conservation work.” We strategized about the expansion of the zoo. I didn’t want to just maintain the zoo as it was, I wanted to follow Steve’s plans for the future. I felt that I was still having this wonderful, cheeky, competitive relationship with Steve. Wes and I took the stacks of plans, blueprints, and manila folders from Steve’s desk. I assembled them and laid them out on a conference table. “This was Steve’s plan for Australia Zoo over the next ten years,” I said. “I want to do it in five.” We would secure more land. I remember the first two acres we ever bought to enlarge the zoo, how Steve and I sat with our arms around each other, looking at the property next door and dreaming. Now we were negotiating for an additional five hundred acres of forestry land. This tract would join the existing zoo property with the five hundred acres of our conservation property, bringing our total to fifteen hundred acres at Australia Zoo. This winter we christened Steve’s Whale One, a whale-watching excursion boat that will realize another of his long-held dreams. He always wanted to expand the experience of the zoo to include whales. Steve’s Whale One is a way for people to see firsthand some of the most amazing creatures on earth. The humpbacks in Australian waters approach whale-watching boats with curiosity and openness. It is a delightful experience, and one that I am confident will work to help inspire people and end the inhumane practice of whaling.

Because of the constant media surveillance, I could not venture out to see the countless tributes that mourners laid down in front of the zoo. But all the items were collected and stored safely, and we now display a lovely memorial selection. The public response to Steve’s death would have overwhelmed him most of all--the kind thoughts, prayers, sympathy, and tears. I wasn’t facing this grief on my own. So many people from around the world were trying to come to terms with it as well. The process seemed particularly difficult for children who had not had the opportunity to experience the circle of life as Bindi had. I felt it was important to get a message out to them. When your hero dies, everything he stood for does not end. Everything he stood for must continue. There was never a doubt in my mind that I’d keep working toward stopping the destruction of our environment and wildlife that was spiraling out of control. There were so many triumphs that Steve had already worked so hard for. I sat down with Wes. “First, we’re going to work on everything Steve wanted to achieve,” I said. “Then we’ll move on to everything that we were collectively working toward. And finally, I want to continue with my own goals, in terms of our conservation work.” We strategized about the expansion of the zoo. I didn’t want to just maintain the zoo as it was, I wanted to follow Steve’s plans for the future. I felt that I was still having this wonderful, cheeky, competitive relationship with Steve. Wes and I took the stacks of plans, blueprints, and manila folders from Steve’s desk. I assembled them and laid them out on a conference table. “This was Steve’s plan for Australia Zoo over the next ten years,” I said. “I want to do it in five.” We would secure more land. I remember the first two acres we ever bought to enlarge the zoo, how Steve and I sat with our arms around each other, looking at the property next door and dreaming. Now we were negotiating for an additional five hundred acres of forestry land. This tract would join the existing zoo property with the five hundred acres of our conservation property, bringing our total to fifteen hundred acres at Australia Zoo. This winter we christened Steve’s Whale One, a whale-watching excursion boat that will realize another of his long-held dreams. He always wanted to expand the experience of the zoo to include whales. Steve’s Whale One is a way for people to see firsthand some of the most amazing creatures on earth. The humpbacks in Australian waters approach whale-watching boats with curiosity and openness. It is a delightful experience, and one that I am confident will work to help inspire people and end the inhumane practice of whaling.

I made myself listen to the music I loved as I worked. I would not be a coward anymore. If I acted like a lunatic, so be it! In my mind I raged and I vowed that Samuel’s leaving would not make me resort to musical holocaust. I was done with that nonsense! I played Grieg until my fingers were stiff, and I worked with the frenzy of Balakirev’s ‘Islamey’ pounding out of the loud speakers. My dad came inside during that one and turned around and walked right back out again. On day 15, I made a chocolate cake worthy of the record books. It was disgustingly rich and fattening, teetering several stories high, weighing more than I did, laden with thick cream cheese frosting, and sprinkled liberally with chocolate shavings. I sat down to eat it with a big fork and no bib. I dug in with a gusto seen only at those highly competitive hotdog eating contests where the tiny Asian girl kicks all the fat boys’ butts. “JOSIE JO JENSEN!” Louise and Tara stood at the kitchen door, shock and revulsion, and maybe just a little envy in their faces. Brahms ‘Rhapsodie No. 2 in G Minor’ was making my little kitchen shake. Eating cake to Brahms was a new experience for me. I liked it. I dug back in, ignoring them. “Well Mom,” I heard Tara say, “what should we do?!” My Aunt Louise was a very practical woman. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!” She quoted cheerfully. Before I knew it, Tara and Louise both had forks, too. They didn’t seem to need bibs either. We ate, increasing our tempo as the music intensified. “ENOUGH!” My dad stood in the doorway. He was good and mad, too. His sun-browned face was as ruddy as my favorite high heels. “I sent you two in for an intervention! What is this?! Eater’s Anonymous Gone Wild?” “Aww, Daddy. Get a fork,” I replied, barely breaking rhythm. My dad strode over, took the fork from my hand and threw it, tines first, right into the wall. It stuck there, embedded and twanging like a sword at a medieval tournament. He pulled out my chair and grabbed me under the arms, pushing me out of the kitchen. I tried to take one last swipe at my cake, but he let out this inhuman roar, and I abandoned all hope of making myself well and truly sick. “Tara! Aunt Louise!” I shouted frantically. “I want you gone!!! That’s my cake! You can’t have any more without me!” My dad pushed me through the front door and out onto the porch, the screen banging behind him. I sunk to the porch swing, sullenly wiping chocolate crumbs from my mouth. My dad stomped back inside the house and suddenly the music pouring from every nook and cranny stopped abruptly. I heard him tell Louise he’d call her later, and then the kitchen door banged, indicating my aunt’s and Tara’s departure. Good. They would have eaten that whole cake. I saw the way they were shoveling it in.

There are lots of people who aren't going to like this book, whether they are into morals or not. I figure there are three distinct groups of people who'll hate this thing. Hate group number one consists of most of the people who are mentioned in the book. Hate group number two consists of all the people who aren't mentioned in the book and are pissed at not being able to join hate group number one. Hate group number three doesn't give a damn about the other two hate groups and will just hate the book because somewhere I write that object-oriented programming was invented in Norway in 1967, when they know it was invented in Bergen, Norway, on a rainy afternoon in late 1966. I never have been able to please these folks, who are mainly programmers and engineers, but I take some consolation in knowing that there are only a couple hundred thousand of them. My guess is that most people won't hate this book, but if they do, I can take it. That's my job.

was babbling about, Maura could only guess. What she did know was that every second that passed made the air hotter, the smoke thicker, and their chances of a safe escape even more remote. “Uncle Don,” she continued, her voice as meek as she could force, “Would you put down your gun please? I’m afraid, too.” There was no response other than the pained sobbing of a man whose mind had lost control of his emotions. A wave of guilt spread over her. The signs had all been there. If she’d only been paying attention. But she hadn’t, because she was too close. She’d lost her objectivity, and now she was paying the price. She reached down and gently touched the hand that cradled the pistol. But Mellman’s wide fingers only clutched it tighter, and he looked at her, more lucid. “I can’t face it, Maura. I can’t. You go on. It’s all over for me, anyway.” The smoke curling up from around the attic floorboards joined that wafting up the stairwell, the two swirling in concert to increase the sinister haze above. Maura dropped to her knees, coughing. “No. It’s not over. You didn’t do anything wrong. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows what a good police chief you are.” Mellman turned red-rimmed eyes to her and talked through a wheezing cough. “You think so?” “Of course!” she swallowed. “My dad was the greatest, but you’re giving him some stiff competition.

The game is a thread, microscopic in breadth, a hint of gossamer drawing unsuspecting souls together in simple competition to the exclusion of all else, from a mother and her infant playing peekaboo to two old men hunched over a chessboard and everything in between. The game unifies, joining father and son pitching baseballs at night after a long day at the office, pitches pounding the mitt or skipping past, one time even knocking the coffee cup handle clean off and the boy scampering off to retrieve a wild one as the dad sips and ponders. The game allows brothers to bond even when the age gap is too great for real competition, their mutual effort to fashion a bridge between disparate age and ability forming a bond of trust and respect. And finally, it is the game’s presence and past and its memory that inspires each of us to forgive time and aging and their inevitable accompanying attrition because the gray and hobbled old man before me was once lean and powerful and magnificent and some of what became of him was due to the investment he made in me and after all the batting practice he threw and grounders he hit, his shoulder aches and his knees need replacement. Even though youth masks it so you don't realize it all when you’re a kid, someday it happens to you and suddenly you realize you are him and you are left wishing you could go back and tell him what you now know and perhaps thank him for what he gave up. You imagine him back then receiving nothing in return except the knowledge that you would someday understand but he could not hasten that day or that revelation and he abided it all so graciously knowing that your realization might be too late for him. So you console yourself that in the absence of your gratitude he clung to hope and conviction and the future. Turn the page and you find yourself staring out at the new generation and you wince as his pitches bruise your palm and crack your thumb and realize that today the game is growth and achievement and tomorrow it will be love and memories. The game is a gift.

Rockets, in general, had come on in leaps and bounds since the market had become competitive in the early twenty-first century. Initially, Spacex and Virgin grabbed the headlines, but when Amazon and Trader Joe’s joined in, the prices plummeted. So

You mind if I join you?” he asked. She straightened and her eyes immediately cleared and narrowed. She was one tough customer. “Knock yourself out,” she said coolly. He pulled out a chair and set his coffee cup in front of him. “You seem upset, Ellie. Was it something I said?” “It was something you didn’t say,” she replied. “Oh? What was that?” “You’re hired,” she said. “I thought I should give all the applicants a fair shot.” “Are you kidding me? I sat in my car outside waiting for my turn. I saw the other applicants—all two of them. One could barely get up the stairs; not a good bet for moving furniture. The other one had such a mean schnobble, she could break glass with her face.” “Schnobble?” he asked. “What my gramma used to call a sourpuss. Now, that’s a church lady, all right—if you’re looking for one as mean as a junkyard dog.” He laughed before he could reel it in. “Who knew you were checking out the competition.” Jack brought the pie, put it in front of them and got the heck out of there. Noah lifted a fork. “Pretty accurate, too. But I told you I’d get in touch.” “If you do, it’ll be to say I didn’t get the job.” He was quiet a moment, then he said, “Have some pie. Nobody makes pie like Preacher.” “Preacher? You made the pie?” “No, the cook—he goes by the nickname Preacher. That could lead to problems.” He nodded toward the plate. “Try it.” “Thanks,” she said. “I’m not hungry.” “Give it a chance, you’ll be amazed. And between bites, tell me why I don’t get the benefit of the doubt.” Slowly,

is driven more by fear of not being a success than by a concrete desire to do anything in particular.” The postcollege choices of Ivy League students, he explained, “are motivated by two main decision rules: (1) close down as few options as possible; and (2) only do things that increase the possibility of future overachievement.” Recruiters for investment banks and consulting firms understand this psychology, and they exploit it perfectly: the jobs are competitive and high status, but the process of applying and being accepted is regimented and predictable. The recruiters also make the argument to college seniors that if they join Goldman Sachs or McKinsey and Company or any similar firm, they’re not really choosing anything—they’re just going to spend a couple of years making money and, perhaps, recruiters suggest, doing some good in the world, and then at some point in the future they’ll make the real decision about what they want to do and who they want to be. “For people who don’t know how to get a job in the open economy,” Kwak wrote, “and who have ended each phase of their lives by taking the test to do the most prestigious thing possible in the next phase, all of this comes naturally.

In my twenties I was in Austin, Texas, finishing up yet another degree. I’d always loved hiking and, sick of the sedentary life of academia, I’d joined the orienteering club at the university. The sport, which originated in Sweden, is a competition in which you use a special map and a compass to navigate through wilderness you’ve never seen before, stopping at checkpoints to have a control card physically or electronically stamped. The first competitor to hit the “double circle”—the end of the route on the orienteering map—is the winner. I

The level of competition is thus fiercest for “realistic” goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy-consuming.

Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.

Prior to the establishment of the Negro leagues, black baseball players had discovered how to earn winter income playing ball in Florida. The better Negro players joined local teams, which were special aggregations created to entertain the winter tourists. In the late teens Foster's Chicago American Giants and Nat C. Strong's Lincoln Giants represented the Royal Poinciana and Breakers, respectively. The players slept in barracks, worked as bellhops and cooks for extra money, and played games whenever they could, reserving Saturdays for a highly competitive game between themselves. Mayor John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald of Boston was so delighted with the Breakers team that he participated himself in their pre-game amusements of egg tosses and gunnysack races.

We have been a conservative and non-competitive organization. We engineer for high quality service, with long life, low maintenance costs, [and a] high factor of reliability as basic elements in our philosophy of design and manufacture. But our basic technology is becoming increasingly similar to that of a high volume, annual model, highly competitive, young, vigorous and growing industry.”32 In other words, there would soon be a revolution in electronics. And as he saw it, Bell Labs would need to lead it rather than join it. Kelly wanted his old team back—the team he had handpicked in the late 1930s.

There are disadvantages.You shouldn’t join a star venture if you are lazy, a loner, in poor health, don’t want to be committed, tired of life or in a relationship that is already shaky - it would not survive the competition! Otherwise, it’s a ‘no-brainer’.

Many of us have joined a swim team at one time or another, and there is a shared foundational experience here that’s worth examining. Battle past the desperate life-or-death phase of swimming, and you begin to appreciate how good the water feels. Join a team, and you begin to appreciate the company you keep. Competition happens when you get good enough at swimming to want to be better.

When people are ripe for a mass movement, they are usually ripe for any effective movement, and not solely for one with a particular doctrine or program. In pre-Hitlerian Germany it was often a toss up whether a restless youth would join the Communists or the Nazis….This receptivity to all movements does not always cease even after the potential true believer has become the ardent convert of a specific movement. Where mass movements are in violent competition with each other, there are not infrequent instances of converts-even the most zealous-shifting their allegiance from one to the other.

I think the jury is in on capitalism: it lights up our most uncaring, competitive parts and is failing us on every front that matters. What we need are systems that light up our better selves, the parts of ourselves that want to look outward at a world in crisis and join the work of repair. Systems that make it easier, in ways big and small, for care to win the battle over uncare.

Consider the possibility of a world wherein every government develops incentive programs that encourage citizens to set worthy goals, join the workforce, take pride in personal achievement, and break the chains of poverty and government assistance. William G. Alston

You need a resume to join a team, but you don't need one to be competition.

The three Baltic republics of the former Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, declined to join Russia in the successor Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and became EU members in 2004. Among the states that stayed with the CIS, six could claim to be European: Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia itself. They could therefore, if they came to fulfil the conditions of stable democracy and competitive market economy, apply for membership of the EU.

What if you’re like Patrick, and never compete?” Ryan asked before Brandon could go on. “Please don’t single anyone out like that. We’re a team, and I bet Patrick will join us for the next competition.” Patrick sat, holding his knees close to his body, rocking back and forth. “Would he get ‘perseverance’ for continually not playing?” Ryan spurted. “No, it doesn’t work that way…” “Would he get ‘love’ for hith love of hatred?” Sammy chimed. “Or, uh, ‘attitude’ because he has a pretty awesome bad one?” Ryan spurted again. “STOP! Wow, okay! I will call on you to talk. Otherwise,

Fechheimer is exactly the sort of business we like to buy. Its economic record is superb. . . . You may be amused to know that neither Charlie nor I have been to Cincinnati, headquarters for Fechheimer, to see their operation. . . . If our success were to depend upon insights we developed through plant inspections, Berkshire would be in big trouble. Rather, in considering an acquisition, we attempt to evaluate the economic characteristics of the business—its competitive strengths and weaknesses—and the quality of people we will be joining. Warren Buffett, annual letter to shareholders, 1985

These jobs are new—direct creations of meritocracy. Historically, the private sector did not value managerial and professional skills, and the state (which required such skills) faced effectively no private competition for elite labor. Into the early twentieth century, top civil servants were paid ten or even twenty times the median wage. And even at midcentury, elite government incomes remained roughly equivalent to their private-sector counterparts. In 1969, a congressperson was paid more than he might make as a lobbyist, a federal judge received perhaps half what he might have commanded at a law firm, and the secretary of the treasury was paid a salary that was smaller than but broadly comparable to what he might have made in finance. The best-educated and most skilled workers therefore naturally gravitated toward government or other public jobs (as when subsequent sons, deprived by primogeniture of inherited lands, joined the military or the clergy), simply because they had no better (or even credible) private alternatives. This kept regulators ahead of the people whom they regulated and helped the state effectively to govern even its richest subjects.

A half hour passed with no sign of Hana. Marcena tried her cell phone, the school secretary paged her. I don’t know what made me go back to the auditorium, except some obscure thought she might have tripped on the backstage cables on her way to join us. Lights were kept on during the school day, but I still almost missed her: she was sprawled across a book cart that had been wheeled behind the school orchestra’s drum set. As nearly as I could tell, she’d been shot twice at close range. My first, illogical thought was that Marcena had shot her to protect her precious Edge competition. My next thought was that Hana Milcek looked young and innocent in death.

One possibility is that Homo sapiens drove them to extinction. Imagine a Sapiens band reaching a Balkan valley where Neanderthals had lived for hundreds of thousands of years. The newcomers began to hunt the deer and gather the nuts and berries that were the Neanderthals’ traditional staples. Sapiens were more proficient hunters and gatherers – thanks to better technology and superior social skills – so they multiplied and spread. The less resourceful Neanderthals found it increasingly difficult to feed themselves. Their population dwindled and they slowly died out, except perhaps for one or two members who joined their Sapiens neighbours. Another possibility is that competition for resources flared up into violence and genocide. Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species? It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.

● Developing your first-ever leadership strategy and don't know where to start? ● Are you stuck with a particular phase of leadership strategy? ● Having a tough time achieving corporational milestones with your robust strategy? If you're facing these questions and confused regarding canvassing a robust leadership strategy, this article can help you solve these queries. Several factors affect the development of a leadership strategy, such as the influence of decision-making processes for leadership/management, the personnel brought on board for strategy development and the resources involved. There are specific "keys" to effective leadership that help in efficient development and deployment of strategies. Professionals who want to develop robust strategies and move up in their leadership career can opt for online strategy courses. These courses aim to build concepts from the grass-root level, such as what defines a strategy leadership and others. What is a Leadership Strategy? Leadership is required for leading organisational growth by optimising the resources and making the company's procedures more efficient. A leadership strategy explicitly enlists the number of leaders required, the tasks they need to perform, the number of employees, team members and other stakeholders required, and the deadlines for achieving each task. Young leaders who have recently joined the work-force can take help of programs offered by reputable institutes for deepening their knowledge about leadership and convocating successful strategies. Various XLRI leadership and management courses aim to equip new leaders with a guided step-by-step pedagogy to canvass robust leadership strategies. What it Takes to Build a Robust Leadership Strategy: Guided Step-By-Step Pedagogy The following steps go into developing an effective and thriving leadership strategy:- ● Step 1 = Identify Key Business Drivers The first step involves meeting with the senior leaders and executives and identifying the business's critical drivers. Determining business carriers is essential for influencing the outcome of strategies. ● Step 2 = Identifying the Different Leadership Phases Required This step revolves around determining the various leadership processes and phases. Choosing the right techniques from hiring and selection, succession planning, training patterns and others is key for putting together a robust strategy. ● Step 3 = Perform Analysis and Research Researching about the company's different leadership strategies and analysing them with the past and present plans is vital for implementing future strategies. ● Step 4 = Reviewing and Updating Leadership Strategic Plan Fourth step includes reviewing and updating the strategic plan in accordance with recent developments and requirements. Furthermore, performing an environmental scan to analyse the practices that can make strategies long-lasting and render a competitive advantage. All it Takes for Building a Robust Leadership Strategy The above-mentioned step by step approach helps in auguring a leadership strategy model that is sustainable and helps businesses maximise their profits. Therefore, upcoming leaders need to understand the core concepts of strategic leadership through online strategy courses. Moreover, receiving sound knowledge about developing strategies from XLRI leadership and management courses can help aspiring leaders in their careers.

The first American woman to win an Olympic gold medal won it by accident. Margaret Abbott joined in a competition and won. She was never knew it was for the Olympics and was never told

A signpost stands at a fork in the road. Pointing in one direction the sign says "Victory." Pointing in another direction, the sign says "Fulfillment." We must pick a direction. Which one will we choose? If we choose the path to Victory, the goal is to win! We will experience the thrill of competition as we rush toward the finish line. Crowds gather to cheer for us. And then it's over. And everyone goes home. (Hopefully we can do it again.) If we choose the path to Fulfillment, the journey will be long. There will be times in which we must watch our step. There will be times we can stop to enjoy the view. We keep going. We keep going. Crowds gather to join us on the journey. And when our lives are over, those who joined us on the path to fulfillment will keep going without us and inspire others to join them too.

They will rally the other children or other stakeholders in the family system against the child, and siblings may join in to create a stronger alliance with them, because these siblings too may feel competitive or jealous of the child or fear the narcissistic parent.

When you create enriched environments of positive stress and high demand, your motivation to succeed is sky-high without any conscious effort on your part. You are not in conflict with your environment but being pulled forward by it. The specific strategies detailed in this chapter for outsourcing your motivation to enriched environments included: Installing several layers of external pressure and accountability; Making your goals public; Setting high expectations for customers and fans; Investing up front on your projects and scheduling them in advance; Surrounding yourself with people who have higher personal standards than you have; Competing with people who have a much higher skill level than you do by viewing competition as a form of collaboration; Making a commitment and then practicing or performing these in public settings. The external pressure of performing for others only heightens your internal pressure to succeed; Getting enough clarity to move forward a few steps toward your goal; Hiring a mentor who is world-class at what you want to do; and Joining a mastermind group filled with role models and people who will help you elevate your life.

But the rapid industrializers did not industrialize as the G7 nations had done. They did not build up domestic know-how and put together domestic supply chains to become competitive. The I6 became competitive abroad by joining regional production networks.3

This means I can call up a client and say, “The bad news is that your buyer backed out because he decided to join a competitive curling team in Moscow. But! The good news is I got you another offer!” The bad news is instantly replaced by the good news. For people who sell other things, this could mean that a product won’t be ready on time or an order was placed incorrectly. Instead of calling up your customer and dropping the bad news, take time to think about what little surprise you can add to remedy the situation and maintain the relationship. “I’m so sorry that your order won’t be received on time. Please know that I’ve reduced my commission to make this a better deal for you, you get free shipping, and 20 percent off your next order.” Sometimes surprise comes in the simple form of exceeded expectations.

While China's Communist leaders have shown little or no inclination to move towards democracy in a Western sense, they have thought seriously about changing their political terminology as well as their Maoist inheritance. It is a little-known fact that the Chinese Communist leadership, having sidelined the notion of 'communism' in the utopian sense, came close even to jettisoning the name 'Communist.' In the earliest years of this century, serious consideration was given to the top leadership of the CCP to changing the name of their party, removing the word 'Communist' because it did not go down well in the rest of the world. In the end, a name-change was rejected. The argument against the change which carried most weight was not based either on ideology or on tradition - fealty to the doctrine developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. It was the practical argument that some (perhaps many) members would say that this was not the party they had joined. The fear was that they would, therefore, set about establishing an alternative Communist Party. Thus, inadvertently, a competitive party system would have been created. The need for political control by a single party was the paramount consideration. The CCP leadership had no intention of embracing political pluralism, and the party's name remained the same. The contours of democratic centralism, though, are less tightly restrictive in contemporary China than they have often been in the past. There is discussion of what kind of reform China needs, and a lot of attention has been devoted to the lessons to be drawn from the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The former head of the CCP propaganda department, Wang Renzhi, was by no means the only contributor to the intra-party debate to conclude that to follow 'the path of European democratic socialism' would be a step down 'the slippery slope to political extinction for the CCP.

Here’s another fascinating example of Amazon enabling and anticipating customer needs despite traditional views of competition. As this book was going to press, Amazon announced on September 24, 2019 that it was joining 30 different companies in the “Voice Interoperability Initiative” to ensure as many devices as possible will work with digital assistants from different companies. Amazon is pulling together with its competitors to create an industry standard for voice assistant software and hardware. Notably, Google, Apple, and Samsung are so far sitting out the initiative. “As much as people would like the headline that there’s going to be one voice assistant that rules them all, we don’t agree,” says Amazon’s SVP of devices and services Dave Limp in The Verge. “This isn’t a sporting event. There’s not going to be one winner.” “The

Must we relearn everything you were ever taught about biology and history? Clownfish are the answer. Intersex people are cited to prove that you can change sex. But you know that your child isn’t a clownfish and is not intersex. You learn that your child was “assigned” a sex at birth. The nurses and doctors just decided for reasons unknown and possibly nefarious, what gender your child was. The DNA tests and ultrasounds are wrong as well, as science no longer exists. You learn there are forty-seven genders and that genders can change all the time. Sex is dead. It has no meaning and is just used as an excuse to discriminate against trans people and all the other-gendered people. You soon discover that yes, even the Holocaust was the source of suffering for no, not the Jewish people, but primarily transgender people. And of course, you are probably a Nazi yourself if you think differently. Historical figures, mostly women, it seems, are also now being reclaimed with their rightful trans identity. Joan of Arc and Louisa May Alcott were not feminist heroes but trans men. Trans women are literally women, you learn. That’s it. A fact. Women now have penises. Women are now committing rape and murder at higher rates than ever recorded throughout history. Trans women are also miraculously better at sports than natal women for reasons no one can discern. When competing against women, now known as uterus havers, trans women win all the competitions and titles. Any “cis” women objecting to this are just sore losers. “Cis” is the new label you must go by if you don’t despise the body you were born with and want to alter it. You are told this is a great privilege to be “cis” and that trans women suffer much more than any cis woman ever could or ever will, no matter what has happened to you as a “cis” woman. You go underground. You join groups that vet members. Here you can speak freely because all members know what you are going through and share your horror of the gender party.

If we join the Resistance, we may lose our lives.’ ‘And if we do not,’ Bartek replied, ‘we may lose our souls.’ It was no competition. Together they bowed their heads to God and swore themselves to the fight against evil.

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