Leap Test Quotes

Beasts bounding through time. Van Gogh writing his brother for paints Hemingway testing his shotgun Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine the impossibility of being human Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town the impossibility of being human Burroughs killing his wife with a gun Mailer stabbing his the impossibility of being human Maupassant going mad in a rowboat Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller the impossibility Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops the impossibility Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench Chatterton drinking rat poison Shakespeare a plagiarist Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness the impossibility the impossibility Nietzsche gone totally mad the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing in and out out and in these punks these cowards these champions these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light toward us impossibly

Scientists at first were skeptical that a kitten-type being could exist in the rare Martian atmosphere. As a test, two Earth kittens were put in a chamber that simulated the Martian air. The diary of this experiment is fascinating: 6:00 A.M.: Kittens appear to sleep. 7:02 A.M.: Kitten wakes, darts from one end of cage to another for no apparent reason. 7:14 A.M.: Kitten runs up wall of cage, leaps onto other kitten for no apparent reason. 7:22 A.M.: Kitten lies on back and punches other kitten for no apparent reason. 7:30 A.M.: Kitten leaps, stops, darts left, abruptly stops, climbs wall, clings for two seconds, falls on head, darts right for no apparent reason. 7:51 A.M.: Kitten parses first sentence of daily newspaper that is at bottom of chamber. With the exception of the parsing, all behavior is typical of Earth kitten behavior. The parsing activity, which was done with a small ball-point pen, was an anomaly.

It’s the war between what’s the right thing to do and what you feel is right? It’s the battle between who you were and now where you’re headed It’s the leap of faith that you need to take to get through the rough paths, It’s the fear that you need to leave behind to do the daring things, And you stay stuck wondering, What to do? Where to go? Why does life get challenging? Would I be ever able to make it? Queries eat you up alive, Answers seem not to care, And at that moment, miracles happen out of nowhere, Just open your eyes and see the turned tables, You're given a reward after being tested.

That goes a step too far, I think. Leonardo did not invent the scientific method, nor did Aristotle or Alhazen or Galileo or any Bacon. But his uncanny abilities to engage in the dialogue between experience and theory made him a prime example of how acute observations, fanatic curiosity, experimental testing, a willingness to question dogma, and the ability to discern patterns across disciplines can lead to great leaps in human understanding.

The real flight of this hawk is impending. Still,this bird is yet to be tested for real. Though I have leaped over the seas, well,the entire sky is still remaining to fly. And make sure that ,i am gonna do it with all my heart and all my soul. #loveyoourlife #liveyourlife #hvFUN

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints Hemingway testing his shotgun Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine the impossibility of being human Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town the impossibility of being human Burroughs killing his wife with a gun Mailer stabbing his the impossibility of being human Maupassant going mad in a rowboat Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller the impossibility Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops the impossibility Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench Chatterton drinking rat poison Shakespeare a plagiarist Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness the impossibility the impossibility Nietzsche gone totally mad the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing in and out out and in these punks these cowards these champions these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light toward us impossibly.

Sometimes we can make our own opportunities, sometimes we can see them coming, but more often than not they are like pop quizzes, they are sprung on you like a challenge to test your skills, almost like a dare to see if you can take that leap of faith to make whatever it is a success. Wait too long, and an excellent opportunity might slip away.

Over the sea there dwelt a queen whose like was never known, for she was of vast strength and surpassing beauty. With her love as the prize, she vied with brave warriors at throwing the javelin, and the noble lady also hurled the weight to a great distance and followed with a long leap; and whoever aspired to her love had, without fail, to win these three tests against her, or else, if he lost but one, he forfeited his head.

A book isn't a single, static thing with one unarguable meaning. Each reader who comes to it brings his own special knowledge, habits and attitudes. Each reader reads a different book. Each reader imagines a different story. A few years ago, for instance, a friend of my mother's sent me a copy of a test on Rite of Passage that she had given her students. The first question read: "True or False? The theme of Rite of Passage is..." I can't tell you what the presumed themed was, but I can tell you that I didn't recognize it. Beads of sweat leaped out of my forehead. After two more questions, I had to put the test aside. I didn't know the "right" answers.

Within the next couple of years, whatever your job, you will be able to consult an on-demand expert, ask it about your latest ad campaign or product design, quiz it on the specifics of a legal dilemma, isolate the most effective elements of a pitch, solve a thorny logistical question, get a second opinion on a diagnosis, keep probing and testing, getting ever more detailed answers grounded in the very cutting edge of knowledge, delivered with exceptional nuance. All of the world’s knowledge, best practices, precedent, and computational power will be available, tailored to you, to your specific needs and circumstances, instantaneously and effortlessly. It is a leap in cognitive potential at least as great as the introduction of the internet. And that is before you even get into the implications of something like ACI and the Modern Turing Test.

When I first read The Rebel, this splendid line came leaping from the page like a dolphin from a wave. I memorized it instantly, and from then on Camus was my man. I wanted to write like that, in a prose that sang like poetry. I wanted to look like him. I wanted to wear a Bogart-style trench coat with the collar turned up, have an untipped Gauloise dangling from my lower lip, and die romantically in a car crash. At the time, the crash had only just happened. The wheels of the wrecked Facel Vega were practically still spinning, and at Sydney University I knew exiled French students, spiritually scarred by service in Indochina, who had met Camus in Paris: one of them claimed to have shared a girl with him. Later on, in London, I was able to arrange the trench coat and the Gauloise, although I decided to forgo the car crash until a more propitious moment. Much later, long after having realized that smoking French cigarettes was just an expensive way of inhaling nationalized industrial waste, I learned from Olivier Todd's excellent biography of Camus that the trench coat had been a gift from Arthur Koestler's wife and that the Bogart connection had been, as the academics say, no accident. Camus had wanted to look like Bogart, and Mrs. Koestler knew where to get the kit. Camus was a bit of an actor--he though, in fact, that he was a lot of an actor, although his histrionic talent was the weakest item of his theatrical equipment--and, being a bit of an actor, he was preoccupied by questions of authenticity, as truly authentic people seldom are. But under the posturing agonies about authenticity there was something better than authentic: there was something genuine. He was genuinely poetic. Being that, he could apply two tests simultaneously to his own language: the test of expressiveness, and the test of truth to life. To put it another way, he couldn't not apply them.

... he slipped in and out of himself, testing which disguise to use. He knew it had to be his most clever. The Sisters were too astute for his usual chicanery. He flapped his wings, then soared. The shape of an eagle, useful for fast travel across worlds, but only temporary. Not convincing enough to hide his true identity. ... He pushed out of the eagle skin and leaped away from the horde of birds, springing into the sky. Into nothingness. Instead of transforming into another creature, he hovered in between. Dangling on the mouth of wind. He rumbled with pleasure, at his own cleverness, born out of accident and indecision: he had become pure air. Without effort, he whooshed past the threshold into the cave, into the bark of the Great Tree, winding cleverly under and over and through a maze of roots and rough stone, past every trick and trap the Sisters had set. He delighted at the speed at which he travelled, catching himself just in time, before his enthusiasm revealed the disguise. Slowing impulse to a mere draft, sucking into himself, he reached the very heart of the Norns’ lair. The Great Hall of Time.

When I look up, he is still dead. This wasn’t right. I thought the Society only played games with its slaves. Wrong. Julian didn’t score like I did on the tests. He wasn’t as physically capable as me. So he was a sacrificial lamb. One hundred students per House and the bottom fifty are only here to be killed by the top fifty. This is just a bloodydamn test … for me. Even the Bellona Family, powerful as they are, could not protect their less capable son. And that is the point. I hate myself. I know they made me do this, yet it still feels like a choice. Like when I pulled Eo’s legs and felt the snap of her small spine. My choice. But what other choice was there with her? With Julian? They do this to make us wear the guilt. There’s nowhere to wipe the blood, only stone and two na**d bodies. This is not who I am, who I want to be. I want to be a father, a husband, a dancer. Let me dig in the earth. Let me sing the songs of my people and leap and spin and run along the walls. I would never sing the forbidden song. I would work. I would bow. Let me wash dirt from my hands instead of blood. I want only to live with my family. We were happy enough. Freedom costs too much. But Eo disagreed. Damn her.

He did another experiment, the Startle Reflex Test, in which psychopaths and non-psychopaths were invited to look at grotesque images, like crime-scene photographs of blown-apart faces, and then when they least expected it, Bob would let off an incredibly loud noise in their ear. The non-psychopaths would leap with astonishment. The psychopaths would remain comparatively serene. Bob

This is just a form letter,” Jules pointed out. “And as for the test, maybe she went in for a checkup. Women are supposed to do that once a year, right? She’d been in Kenya, and suddenly here she was going to this health clinic with Molly, so she figured, what the heck. Maybe this place gives pregnancy tests as part of their regular annual exam.” “Yeah,” Max said. “Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced. “Okay. Let’s run with the worst-case scenario. She is pregnant. I know it’s not like her to have a one-night stand, but . . .” Jules said, but then stopped. His words were meant to help, but, Hey, good news—the woman you love may have gotten knocked up from a night of casual sex with a stranger were not going to provide a whole hell of a lot of comfort. It didn’t matter that the idea was less awful than the terrible alternative—that Paul Jimmo had continued to pressure Gina. And he hadn’t taken no for an answer. Which was obviously what Max was thinking, considering the way he was working to grind down his few remaining back teeth. “So,” Jules said. “Looks like our little talk didn’t exactly succeed at putting you in a better place.” It was clear, when Max didn’t respond, that he was concentrating on not leaping through the window and flying—using his rage as a form of propulsion, across the street and blasting a body-shaped hole in the wall of that building where Gina and Molly were being held prisoner—please, heavenly father, let them be in there. And Jules knew that if it turned out that Paul Jimmo had so much as touched Gina without her consent, Max would find his grave, dig up his body, bring him back to life, and then kill the son of a bitch all over again.

Are you in law enforcement?' he said. 'No,' said Bernie, 'Why do you ask?' 'Because of your companion here,' Mason said. 'If he's not in the K-nine corps he should be.' Oh, Mason! You don't know the half of it, whatever that might mean. I flunked out on the very last day! The leaping test, Mason! And leaping's my very best thing! Was this a good time for a demonstration? Perhaps a quick leap right over Mason's head and then scurrying back to where I was, no time wasted?... Bernie turned to me. 'K-nine. That would be like Sherlock Holmes walking a beat.' A complete puzzler. I couldn't make anything out of it. Bernie laughed and gave me a quick scratch between the ears. 'Which makes me Dr. Watson.

When she finally reached it, she bent forward and looked through the peephole. Jay was grinning back at her from outside. Her heart leaped for a completely different reason. She set aside her crutches and quickly unbolted the door to open it. "What took you so long?" Her knee was bent and her ankle pulled up off the ground. She balanced against the doorjamb. "What d'you think, dumbass?" she retorted smartly, keeping her voice down so she wouldn't alert her parents. "You scared the crap out of me, by the way. My parents are already in bed, and I was all alone down here." "Good!" he exclaimed as he reached in and grabbed her around the waist, dragging her up against him and wrapping his arms around her. She giggled while he held her there, enjoying everything about the feel of him against her. "What are you doing here? I thought I wouldn't see you till tomorrow." "I wanted to show you something!" He beamed at her, and his enthusiasm reached out to capture her in its grip. She couldn't help smiling back excitedly. "What is it?" she asked breathlessly. He didn't release her; he just turned, still holding her gently in his arms, so that she could see out into the driveway. The first thing she noticed was the officer in his car, alert now as he kept a watchful eye on the two of them. Violet realized that it was late, already past eleven, and from the look on his face, she thought he must have been hoping for a quiet, uneventful evening out there. And then she saw the car. It was beautiful and sleek, painted a glossy black that, even in the dark, reflected the light like a polished mirror. Violet recognized the Acura insignia on the front of the hood, and even though she could tell it wasn't brand-new, it looked like it had been well taken care of. "Whose is it?" she asked admiringly. It was way better than her crappy little Honda. Jay grinned again, his face glowing with enthusiasm. "It's mine. I got it tonight. That's why I had to go. My mom had the night off, and I wanted to get it before..." He smiled down at her. "I didn't want to borrow your car to take you to the dance." "Really?" she breathed. "How...? I didn't even know you were..." She couldn't seem to find the right words; she was envious and excited for him all at the same time. "I know right?" he answered, as if she'd actually asked coherent questions. "I've been saving for...for forever, really. What do you think?" Violet smiled at him, thinking that he was entirely too perfect for her. "I think it's beautiful," she said with more meaning than he understood. And then she glanced back at the car. "I had no idea that you were getting a car. I love it, Jay," she insisted, wrapping her arms around his neck as he hoisted her up, cradling her like a small child." "I'd offer to take you for a test-drive, but I'm afraid that Supercop over there would probably Taser me with his stun gun. So you'll have to wait until tomorrow," he said, and without waiting for an invitation he carried her inside, dead bolting the door behind him. He settled down on the couch, where she'd been sitting by herself just moments before, without letting her go. There was a movie on the television, but neither of them paid any attention to it as Jay reclined, stretching out and drawing her down into the circle of his arms. They spent the rest of the night like that, cradled together, their bodies fitting each other perfectly, as they kissed and whispered and laughed quietly in the darkness. At some point Violet was aware that she was drifting into sleep, as her thoughts turned dreamlike, becoming disjointed and fuzzy and hard to hold on to. She didn't fight it; she enjoyed the lazy, drifting feeling, along with the warmth created by the cocoon of Jay's body wrapped protectively around her. It was the safest she'd felt in days...maybe weeks... And for the first time since she'd been chased by the man in the woods, her dreams were free from monsters.

The New York Times tells us change is necessary and protest desirable, but within limits. Poverty should be protested, but the laws should not be broken. Hence, the Poor People’s Campaign, occupying tents in Washington in the spring of 1968, is praiseworthy; but its leader, Ralph Abernathy, is deservedly jailed for violating an ordinance against demonstrating near the Capitol. The Vietnam war is wrong, but if Dr. Spock is found by a jury and judge to have violated the draft law, he must accept his punishment as right because that is the rule of the game. Thus, exactly at that moment when we have begun to suspect that law is congealed injustice, that the existing order hides an everyday violence against body and spirit, that our political structure is fossilized, and that the noise of change—however scary—may be necessary, a cry rises for “law and order.” Such a moment becomes a crucial test of whether the society will sink back to a spurious safety or leap forward to its own freshening. We

Where is Florence’s imagination? He identified the most common and most functional uses for bricks and blankets and simply stopped. Florence’s IQ is higher than Poole’s. But that means little, since both students are above the threshold. What is more interesting is that Poole’s mind can leap from violent imagery to sex to people jumping out of buildings without missing a beat, and Florence’s mind can’t. Now which of these two students do you think is better suited to do the kind of brilliant, imaginative work that wins Nobel Prizes? That’s the second reason Nobel Prize winners come from Holy Cross as well as Harvard, because Harvard isn’t selecting its students on the basis of how well they do on the “uses of a brick” test—and maybe “uses of a brick” is a better predictor of Nobel Prize ability. It’s also the second reason Michigan Law School couldn’t find a difference between its affirmative action graduates and the rest of its alumni. Being a successful lawyer is about a lot more than IQ. It involves having the kind of fertile mind that Poole had. And just because Michigan’s minority students have lower scores on convergence tests doesn’t mean they don’t have that other critical trait in abundance.

You could tell the quality of his thinking by what he chose to ask (questions being the true measure of a man), and after I successfully explained my thesis on symbiogenesis, we began conversing more openly and freely, and I got the chance to peer inside his head. He asked me if I’d heard of Turing’s oracle machines. In time, I have come to regard that simple question as a test. Luckily for me, I knew that Turing had written about oracle machines in his PhD thesis when he was just twenty-six years old: these were regular computers that worked, like all modern devices, following a precise set of sequential instructions. But Turing knew—from his study of Gödel and the halting problem—that all such devices would suffer from inescapable limitations, and that many problems would forever remain beyond their ability to solve. That weakness tortured the grandfather of computers: Turing longed for something different, a machine that could look beyond logic and behave in a manner more akin to humans, who possess not only intelligence but also intuition. So he dreamed up a computer capable of taking the machine equivalent of a wild guess: just like the Sibyl in her ecstatic drunkenness, his device would, at a certain point in its operations, make a nondeterministic leap.

The book of Job, based on an ancient folktale, may have been written during the exile. One day, Yahweh made an interesting wager in the divine assembly with Satan, who was not yet a figure of towering evil but simply one of the “sons of God,” the legal “adversary” of the council.19 Satan pointed out that Job, Yahweh’s favorite human being, had never been truly tested but was good only because Yahweh had protected him and allowed him to prosper. If he lost all his possessions, he would soon curse Yahweh to his face. “Very well,” Yahweh replied, “all that he has is in your power.”20 Satan promptly destroyed Job’s oxen, sheep, camels, servants, and children, and Job was struck down by a series of foul diseases. He did indeed turn against God, and Satan won his bet. At this point, however, in a series of long poems and discourses, the author tried to square the suffering of humanity with the notion of a just, benevolent, and omnipotent god. Four of Job’s friends attempted to console him, using all the traditional arguments: Yahweh only ever punished the wicked; we could not fathom his plans; he was utterly righteous, and Job must therefore be guilty of some misdemeanor. These glib, facile platitudes simply enraged Job, who accused his comforters of behaving like God and persecuting him cruelly. As for Yahweh, it was impossible to have a sensible dialogue with a deity who was invisible, omnipotent, arbitrary, and unjust—at one and the same time prosecutor, judge, and executioner. When Yahweh finally deigned to respond to Job, he showed no compassion for the man he had treated so cruelly, but simply uttered a long speech about his own splendid accomplishments. Where had Job been while he laid the earth’s foundations, and pent up the sea behind closed doors? Could Job catch Leviathan with a fishhook, make a horse leap like a grasshopper, or guide the constellations on their course? The poetry was magnificent, but irrelevant. This long, boastful tirade did not even touch upon the real issue: Why did innocent people suffer at the hands of a supposedly loving God? And unlike Job, the reader knows that Job’s pain had nothing to do with the transcendent wisdom of Yahweh, but was simply the result of a frivolous bet. At the end of the poem, when Job—utterly defeated by Yahweh’s bombastic display of power—retracted all his complaints and repented in dust and ashes, God restored Job’s health and fortune. But he did not bring to life the children and servants who had been killed in the first chapter. There was no justice or recompense for them.

Reviewing the records of two million recruits, Feyrer and his colleagues also checked the natural iodine levels in their hometowns. Nationwide, the researchers found, the introduction of iodine raised the average IQ by an estimated 3.5 points. And in the parts of the country where natural iodine levels were lowest, Feyrer and his colleagues estimated that scores leaped 15 points. It may be hard to believe that such a straightforward change in people’s diets could have such a tremendous effect on intelligence. But as public health workers continue to bring iodine to more of the world, the same jumps happen. In 1990, Robert DeLong, an expert on iodine at Duke University, traveled to the Taklamakan Desert in western China. The region has extremely low levels of iodine in the soil, and the people in the region have resisted attempts to introduce iodized salt. It didn’t help that the people of the region, the Uyghurs, distrusted the government in Beijing. Rumors spread that government-issued iodized salt had contraceptives in it, as a way to wipe out the community. DeLong and his Chinese medical colleagues approached local officials with a different idea: They would put iodine in the irrigation canals. Crops would absorb it in their water, and people in the Taklamakan region would eat it in their food. The officials agreed to the plan, and when DeLong later gave children from the region IQ tests, their average score jumped 16 points.

O My children, there is the sound of the turtledove echoing throughout the land. It is the voice of the Bridegroom calling His Bride. It is the wooing of the Spirit bringing forth a people for His Name. It is the Lord of Glory, Jesus Christ Himself, drawing together those who are His. It is the call of love, and those who truly love Him will respond. Like attracts like; and love has always been the test of true discipleship. Those whose hearts are fixed on things above will not be held by worldly entanglements (even though they may be within the organized church). Those who are listening to the voice of their Beloved will not be deafened by the cries of men. In a world filled with noises, each demanding attention, they will hear Him. Yes, they shall even hear the tender cooing of the turtledove! Another stands beside them and hears only the voice of the preacher. Another may be giving attention to the opinions and arguments of men. In the words of the beloved hymn writer: “The love of Jesus, what it is, none but His loved ones know.” You need not fear that you will miss it. Be it ever so soft, you shall hear. Your heart shall hear, and your heart shall leap with joy. You will be like Elizabeth when she was greeted by Mary. The response was immediate—an inner, involuntary response to the nearness of the Christ, even while He was yet unborn and unseen by the world. I tell you, there shall be a revelation of My nearness given to My dear ones before My second coming. Anticipate Me. Watch for Me. Your heart will listen, and your heart shall hear. I am not far off. I am looking through the lattice (see Song of Solomon 2:9). You shall see Me—you shall know—you shall rejoice.

As in everything, nature is the best instructor, even as regards selection. One couldn't imagine a better activity on nature's part than that which consists in deciding the supremacy of one creature over another by means of a constant struggle. While we're on the subject, it's somewhat interesting to observe that our upper classes, who've never bothered about the hundreds of thousands of German emigrants or their poverty, give way to a feeling of compassion regarding the fate of the Jews whom we claim the right to expel. Our compatriots forget too easily that the Jews have accomplices all over the world, and that no beings have greater powers of resistance as regards adaptation to climate. Jews can prosper anywhere, even in Lapland and Siberia. All that love and sympathy, since our ruling class is capable of such sentiments, would by rights be applied exclusively—if that class were not corrupt—to the members of our national community. Here Christianity sets the example. What could be more fanatical, more exclusive and more intolerant than this religion which bases everything on the love of the one and only God whom it reveals? The affection that the German ruling class should devote to the good fellow-citizen who faithfully and courageously does his duty to the benefit of the community, why is it not just as fanatical, just as exclusive and just as intolerant? My attachment and sympathy belong in the first place to the front-line German soldier, who has had to overcome the rigours of the past winter. If there is a question of choosing men to rule us, it must not be forgotten that war is also a manifestation of life, that it is even life's most potent and most characteristic expression. Consequently, I consider that the only men suited to become rulers are those who have valiantly proved themselves in a war. In my eyes, firmness of character is more precious than any other quality. A well toughened character can be the characteristic of a man who, in other respects, is quite ignorant. In my view, the men who should be set at the head of an army are the toughest, bravest, boldest, and, above all, the most stubborn and hardest to wear down. The same men are also the best chosen for posts at the head of the State—otherwise the pen ends by rotting away what the sword has conquered. I shall go so far as to say that, in his own sphere, the statesman must be even more courageous than the soldier who leaps from his trench to face the enemy. There are cases, in fact, in which the courageous decision of a single statesman can save the lives of a great number of soldiers. That's why pessimism is a plague amongst statesmen. One should be able to weed out all the pessimists, so that at the decisive moment these men's knowledge may not inhibit their capacity for action. This last winter was a case in point. It supplied a test for the type of man who has extensive knowledge, for all the bookworms who become preoccupied by a situation's analogies, and are sensitive to the generally disastrous epilogue of the examples they invoke. Agreed, those who were capable of resisting the trend needed a hefty dose of optimism. One conclusion is inescapable: in times of crisis, the bookworms are too easily inclined to switch from the positive to the negative. They're waverers who find in public opinion additional encouragement for their wavering. By contrast, the courageous and energetic optimist—even although he has no wide knowledge— will always end, guided by his subconscious or by mere commonsense, in finding a way out.

Is a Can Opener a Can Opener . . . ? As we explain in The Shaping of Things to Come,[157] one of the “trick questions” we use to get group discussion going around the idea of purpose is, “Is a can opener a can opener if it can’t open cans anymore?” This usually initiates a lively discussion around the idea of essence versus function. When the discussion turns to the application to the idea of church, it generates insight into the issue of purpose of the church. Is the church simply a church because it confesses Christ, or is there some functional test that must be applied? When answering the question, “What do you do with a can opener that doesn’t open cans anymore?” most people will say that unless it is fixable, it is not fulfilling that which it was designed for and it should be thrown away. Without getting too heavy about it, and recognizing that we do live by the grace and love of God, we must recognize that in the Hebraic worldview, fruitfulness and functionality are very important and tend to trump the concept of “essence,” which derives largely from Platonic idealism and Greek philosophy. (Idealism basically states that concepts and ideas are real in themselves and are the essence of reality, and forms are just expressions of preexisting ideas.) This is why Jesus always applies the very Hebraic test of fruitfulness to any claims of belief (e.g., Matt. 7:16–20; 12:33; 21:19; Luke 3:8; 13:6–9; John 15; Rev. 2–3). The ultimate test of faithfulness in the Scriptures is not correct intellectual belief (e.g., Matt. 25; Luke 6:46; James 2:12, 21–26) but rather an ethical-functional one—in 1 John it is whether we love or fail in love; in James it is faith with works, about how we care for widows and orphans; in the letters of Peter it is our capacity to suffer in our witness for Jesus; in Hebrews to stay true to the journey. And as politically incorrect as it is to say it, judgment regarding fruitfulness is a vital aspect of the revelation of God in the Scriptures (e.g., John 15; Rev. 2–3; as well as the many parables of judgment that lace Jesus’s teachings).

What are these substances? Medicines or drugs or sacramental foods? It is easier to say what they are not. They are not narcotics, nor intoxicants, nor energizers, nor anaesthetics, nor tranquilizers. They are, rather, biochemical keys which unlock experiences shatteringly new to most Westerners. For the last two years, staff members of the Center for Research in Personality at Harvard University have engaged in systematic experiments with these substances. Our first inquiry into the biochemical expansion of consciousness has been a study of the reactions of Americans in a supportive, comfortable naturalistic setting. We have had the opportunity of participating in over one thousand individual administrations. From our observations, from interviews and reports, from analysis of questionnaire data, and from pre- and postexperimental differences in personality test results, certain conclusions have emerged. (1) These substances do alter consciousness. There is no dispute on this score. (2) It is meaningless to talk more specifically about the “effect of the drug.” Set and setting, expectation, and atmosphere account for all specificity of reaction. There is no “drug reaction” but always setting-plus-drug. (3) In talking about potentialities it is useful to consider not just the setting-plus-drug but rather the potentialities of the human cortex to create images and experiences far beyond the narrow limitations of words and concepts. Those of us on this research project spend a good share of our working hours listening to people talk about the effect and use of consciousness-altering drugs. If we substitute the words human cortex for drug we can then agree with any statement made about the potentialities—for good or evil, for helping or hurting, for loving or fearing. Potentialities of the cortex, not of the drug. The drug is just an instrument. In analyzing and interpreting the results of our studies we looked first to the conventional models of modern psychology—psychoanalytic, behavioristic—and found these concepts quite inadequate to map the richness and breadth of expanded consciousness. To understand our findings we have finally been forced back on a language and point of view quite alien to us who are trained in the traditions of mechanistic objective psychology. We have had to return again and again to the nondualistic conceptions of Eastern philosophy, a theory of mind made more explicit and familiar in our Western world by Bergson, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Watts. In the first part of this book Mr. Watts presents with beautiful clarity this theory of consciousness, which we have seen confirmed in the accounts of our research subjects—philosophers, unlettered convicts, housewives, intellectuals, alcoholics. The leap across entangling thickets of the verbal, to identify with the totality of the experienced, is a phenomenon reported over and over by these persons.

Had she witnessed his swim? He didn’t see how she could have missed it if she’d indeed been lunching by the water. The more intriguing question was, had she liked what she’d seen? Ever the scientist, Darius couldn’t let the hypothesis go unchallenged. Ignoring his boots where they lay in the grass at the edge of the landing, he strode barefoot toward his quarry. “So I’m to understand that you lunch by the pond every day, Miss Greyson?” he asked as he stalked her through the shin-high grass. Her chin wobbled just a bit, and she took a nearly imperceptible step back. He’d probably not have noticed it if he hadn’t been observing her so closely. But what kind of scientist would he be if he didn’t attend to the tiniest of details? “Every day,” she confirmed, her voice impressively free of tremors. The lady knew how to put up a strong front. “After working indoors for several hours, it’s nice to have the benefits of fresh air and a change of scenery. The pond offers both.” He halted his advance about a foot away from her. “I imagine the scenery changed a little more than you were expecting today.” His lighthearted tone surprised him nearly as much as it did her. Her brow puckered as if he were an equation she couldn’t quite decipher. Well, that was only fair, since he didn’t have a clue about what he was trying to do, either. Surely not flirt with the woman. He didn’t have time for such vain endeavors. He needed to extricate himself from this situation. At once. Not knowing what else to do, Darius sketched a short bow and begged her pardon as if he were a gentleman in his mother’s drawing room instead of a soggy scientist dripping all over the vegetation. “I apologize for intruding on your solitude, Miss Greyson, and I hope I have not offended you with my . . . ah . . .” He glanced helplessly down at his wet clothing. “Dampness?” The amusement in his secretary’s voice brought his head up. “My father used to be a seaman, Mr. Thornton, and I grew up swimming in the Gulf. You aren’t the first man I’ve seen take a swim.” Though the way her gaze dipped again to his chest and the slow swallowing motion of her throat that followed seemed to indicate that she hadn’t been as unmoved by the sight as she would have him believe. That thought pleased him far more than it should have. “Be that as it may, I’ll take special care not to avail myself of the pond during the midday hours in the future.” He expected her to murmur some polite form of thanks for his consideration, but she didn’t. No, she stared at him instead. Long enough that he had to fight the urge to squirm under her perusal. “You know, Mr. Thornton,” she said with a cock of her head that gave him the distinct impression she was testing her own hypothesis. “I believe your . . . dampness has restored your ability to converse with genteel manners.” Her lips curved in a saucy grin that had his pulse leaping in response. “Perhaps you should swim more often.

Taking the leap is just the first step. Then you must cross the desert. And make no mistake — that journey will be hell.” “Will it be worth it?” he asked. “You tell me,” the old man responded. “How worthy is your goal? And how big is your why?” “I can’t imagine anything better,” he affirmed. “Then yes, it will be worth it. You see, everyone who stands at the edge of this cliff sees something different on the other side. What you see on the other side is your particular goal, and that is unique to you. “But there’s a reason why you have not achieved that goal yet — you are not worthy of it. You have not become who you need to become to deserve it. “As you cross the desert to your promised land, you will endure tests and trials specific to you and your goal. If you persist, those test and trials will transform you into who you need to be to be worthy of your goal. “You can’t achieve your highest, noblest goals as the same person you are today. To get from where you are to where you want to be you have to change who you are. “And that is why no one can escape that journey — it is what transforms you into a person worthy of your goal. The bad news is that that journey is hell. The good news is that you get to pick your hell.” “Pick my hell?” he asked. “What do you mean?” “Because of your natural gifts and interests, your inborn passion and purpose, there are some hells that are more tolerable to you than others. “For example, some men can endure hard physical labor because their purpose lies in such fields as construction or mechanics, while other men could not even dream of enduring that hell. “I’ve met people who knew they were born to be writers. Their desert to cross, their hell to endure was writing every day for years without being paid or being recognized and appreciated. But in spite of their hell, they were happy because they were writing. Though they still had to earn their way to the valley of their ultimate goal, they were doing what they were born to do. “Ever read the book Getting Rich Your Own Way by Scrully Blotnick?” He shook his head. “That book reveals the results on a two-decade study performed by Mr. Blotnick and his team of researchers on 1,500 people representing a cross-section of middle-class America. Throughout the study, they lost almost a third of participants due to deaths, moves, or other factors. “Of the 1,057 that remained, 83 had become millionaires. They interviewed each millionaire to identify the common threads they shared. They found five specific commonalities, including that 1) they were persistent, 2), they were patient, and 3) they were willing to handle both the ‘nobler and the pettier’ aspects of their job. “In other words, they were able to endure their particular hell because they were in the right field, they had chosen the right career that coincided with their gifts, passions, and purpose. “Here is the inescapable reality: No matter what you pick as your greatest goal, achieving it will stretch you in ways you can’t imagine right now. You will have to get out of your comfort zone. You will have to become a different person than you are right now to become worthy of your goal. You must cross that hellacious desert to get to your awe-inspiring goal. “But I get to pick my hell?” he asked. “You get to pick your hell.

Last Wednesday Vince Cable, the UK business secretary, invited British cities to express their interest in being used as testing grounds for driverless cars. The hope is that the UK will gain an edge in this promising new industry. (German autonomous cars were being tested on German, French and Danish public roads 20 years ago, so the time is surely ripe for the UK to leap into a position of technological leadership.)

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to shift a person’s motivation. In the short term, in fact, it can be surprisingly easy. Let’s stay in the candy aisle for a bit longer and consider a couple of experiments done decades ago involving IQ and M&M’s. In the first test, conducted in northern California in the late 1960s, a researcher named Calvin Edlund selected seventy-nine children between the ages of five and seven, all from “low-middle class and lower-class homes.” The children were randomly divided into an experimental group and a control group. First, they all took a standard version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Seven weeks later, they took a similar test, but this time the kids in the experimental group were given one M&M for each correct answer. On the first test, the two groups were evenly matched on IQ. On the second test, the IQ of the M&M group went up an average of twelve points—a huge leap.

There is an ongoing debate in the political, scientific, and business worlds about whether to focus on the bold leaps that lead to new conceptual terrain, or on the marginal gains that help to optimize one’s existing fundamental assumptions. Is it about testing small assumptions or big ones; is it about transforming the world or tweaking it; is it about considering the big picture (the so-called gestalt) or the fine detail (the margins)? The simple answer, however, is that it has to be both. At the level of the system and, increasingly, at the level of the organization, success is about developing the capacity to think big and small, to be both imaginative and disciplined, to immerse oneself in the minutiae of a problem and to stand beyond it in order to glimpse the wider vista.

Taking trips tore all of us up inside, for they seemed, each journey away from home, something that might have been less selfishly undertaken, or something that would test us, or something that had better be momentous, to justify such a leap into the dark. The torment and guilt - the torment of having the loved one go, the guilt of being the loved one gone - comes into my fiction as it did and does in my life. And most of all the guilt then was because it was true: I had left to arrive at some future and secret joy, at what was unknown, and what was no in New York, waiting to be discovered. My joy was connected with my writing; that was as much as I knew.

Beasts Bounding Through Time Van Gogh writing his brother for paints Hemingway testing his shotgun Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine the impossibility of being human Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town the impossibility of being human Burroughs killing his wife with a gun Mailer stabbing his the impossibility of being human Maupassant going mad in a rowboat Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller the impossibility Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops the impossibility Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench Chatterton drinking rat poison Shakespeare a plagiarist Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness the impossibility the impossibility Nietzsche gone totally mad the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing in and out out and in these punks these cowards these champions these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light toward us impossibly.

The dolphins spent far more time near the mirror, inspecting their reflection, when they had been visibly marked than when they had been sham marked. They seemed to recognize that the mark they saw in the mirror had been put on their own body. Since they hardly paid any attention to marks on other dolphins, it was not as if they were obsessed with marks in general. They were specifically interested in the ones on themselves. Critics complained that the dolphins in this study failed to touch their own body. or rub off the mark, as humans or apes do, but I’m not sure we should hold the absence of self-touching against an animal that lacks the anatomy for it. Until better tests have been designed, it seems safe to let dolphins join the cognitive elite of animals that recognize themselves in a mirror. Dolphins possess large brains (larger than humans, in fact), and show every sign of high intelligence. Each individual produces its own unique whistle sound by which the others recognize him or her, and there are even indications that they use these sounds to call each other “by name,” so to speak. They enjoy lifelong bonds, and reconcile after fights by means of sexy petting (much like bonobos), while males form power-seeking coalitions. They may encircle a school of herring to drive them together in a compact ball, releasing bubbles to keep them in place, after which they pick their food like fruit from a tree. With regard to the co-emergence hypothesis, it is important to note the level of dolphin altruism. Does self-awareness go hand in hand with perspective-taking, and do dolphins show the sort of targeted helping known of humans and apes? One of the oldest reports in the scientific literature concerns an incident on October 30, 1954, off the coast of Florida. During a capture expedition for a public aquarium, a stick of dynamite was set off underwater near a pod of bottlenose dolphins. As soon as one stunned victim surfaced, heavily listing, two other dolphins came to its aid: “One came up from below on each side, and placing the upper lateral part of their heads approximately beneath the pectoral fins of the injured one, they buoyed it to the surface in an apparent effort to allow it to breathe while it remained partially stunned.” The two helpers were submerged, which meant that they couldn’t breathe during their effort. The entire pod remained nearby (whereas normally they’d take off immediately after an explosion), and waited until their companion had recovered. They then all fled in a hurry, making tremendous leaps. The scientists reporting this incident added: “There is no doubt in our minds that the cooperative assistance displayed for their own species was real and deliberate.

The iterative approach begins with a goal and almost immediately leaps into concept designs, bench tests, and prototypes. The mantra with this approach is build and test early, find failures, and adapt. This is what SpaceX engineers and technicians did on the factory floor in El Segundo, and it allowed them to capture basic flaws with early prototypes, fix their designs, and build successively more “finished” iterations.

the financial statements, rather than being a driver or goal of the business creation process, become simply the by-product of clear and disciplined strategic thinking. Analogs, antilogs, the leaps of faith that follow from them, and the well thought out dashboards that measure the outcomes of the hypothesis tests are what make this process happen. And the business model that results—a revenue model, gross margin model, and all the rest—is the output of the process.

It’s almost always better, as an entrepreneur, to have proven some leaps of faith before raising major money, because doing so cuts your and your investors’ risk. In turn, that means you get to keep more of your company’s equity than you would if you need investors’ capital for the earliest tests.

In addition, telepathy lent itself to controlled laboratory investigation, whereas survival research did not. It was eventually discovered that psi performance in telepathy tests did not diminish when there was no “sender.” It also proved to be nearly impossible to create a test for “pure” telepathy that could not also be explained as clairvoyance. So most researchers began to focus on clairvoyance. It may seem odd that it took any time at all to go from systematic research on survival phenomena, to telepathy research, and then to clairvoyance, before it was realized that the fundamental issue in all cases was the nature of psi perception. But this just illustrates how difficult this topic is to study. Some researchers made these leaps in short order. Others took years. Collectively it took about a half-century to come to what we now see as a “reasonable” approach. Fifty years from now, entirely new “reasonable” ideas may have evolved.

We can indeed live as though there is a God or no God, as though there are norms or no norms, but ultimately we will want to know [weten] whether that great as though that we base our lives on can withstand the test of objective judgment. That is no game; it is not a hobby. It is alarming in its inevitability because otherwise, everything, our life itself, is a leap into the abyss. A certain self-denial is found in all philosophical thinking—the self-denial of a person who feels that the worldvision that his life’s practice is built on and that is connected to his nature and character could indeed be wrong. Therein lies honesty, depth, and majesty.

The first question you should ask yourself is the most basic one: does your business actually need outside money right now? For many early pre-seed-stage startups, the answer is “no” surprisingly often. If you’re still researching, still testing things out, making sure your idea has legs, then you don’t need to immediately leap to financing. Take your time. Get comfortable with delayed intuition

Well, where does that leave us with regard to social action and practice? The answer is very far away. There still remains an enormous gap between what we have to grasp in order to ground moral action, to choose a course of action on moral grounds. An enormous gap between that and what we, in fact, understand about human nature and the human needs that derive from it, and the human rights that derive from it. Big gap. So, we are left where we were, with the need to make an intuitive leap and to posit some judgment about what real, intrinsic human nature is. In a sense, you're staking your faith in what you think or hope human beings may be. Now, if you take as your faith that of, say, the classical liberal doctrine, you will conclude that there is no justification, there's no moral justification for the commissar, the central committee, or the cultural or corporate manager, or any of the others who control and coerce us on species grounds. The actual classical liberal view, which is very different from what is known with its deep innatist roots, is very subversive and radical because it challenges the existence of any form of authority and requires that it be justified, which can rarely be done. It's not too surprising, I think, that the actual ideas of the Enlightenment have been subjected to such a broad-ranging attack. They are radical and subversive because of the faith that they express in human capacity, and human rights, and human needs, and their richness. And that's a deeply upsetting view from the point of view of any institutional structure which is concerned with control and manipulation, or any of the people who operate within those institutional structures. Well, if one takes this position, the next thing to do is to make the intuitive leap and turn to the concrete substantive questions of acting as a moral agent, choosing a course of action. And here what you do is seek out structures of authority and domination. Often we don't see them, so you have to try to find them even though they're there. Once you notice them, you see them and seek them out. Ask the question as to whether they, in fact, are legitimate for some contingent reason, say, self-defense or whatever argument is put forth. And if they fail that test, as they almost invariably do, to move forward to dismantle them, which means solidarity, organization, and so on. That's a hard task. But there are achievements. There are real achievements. For most of human history, for example, literal human slavery was considered legitimate. In fact, considered quite praiseworthy. It was for the benefit of these depraved creatures who shouldn't be left on their own. It's only a little tiny period of human history where this is considered a total obscenity. And the fact that it is considered a total obscenity is an achievement. In the 18th century, it was pointed out that wage slavery is fundamentally not very different from slavery. If people are compelled to rent themselves in order to survive, it's not very different than selling yourself in order to survive. That's an insight that has yet to be recovered, but it's a valid one. And, in fact, notice that it grows from these same conceptions of human nature. But, at least, literal human slavery would no longer be justified by, I suppose, almost anyone. That's an achievement. It's a moral achievement. It's a moral advance. Just in our own lifetimes, the questions of the legitimacy of sexist oppression have come to the fore. It's not like anybody noticed before, but there's been a sustained and committed effort to bring them to consciousness. And it's not long ago, anybody my age will know, that it's not long ago they just didn't see it, notice it. It was just part of the background. Now, at least you see it. The problems are there, but it's a moral advance that the problems are recognized to be there. There's some effort to come to terms with them.

The other rule, however, balancing the first, is that as long as a decision meets that litmus test, it can be as tiny a decision as you like. Grand gestures aren’t required. There’s no need to leap directly from thinking about a career change to marching into your manager’s office to quit. Baby steps are fine; they just have to be real ones. (What the novelist E. L. Doctorow said about novel-writing applies to everything else, too: it’s ‘like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’)

leaving the South was not always a direct path but one of testing and checking of facts with those who had left ahead of them, before making the great leap themselves.

Students can make huge leaps on the Logic Games, but only if they focus on accuracy ahead of speed.

To pass the time they invented a number of games including Knattleik, a ball game similar to hockey, which attracted both large crowds and frequent injuries. Several less violent board games did exist, but the Vikings primarily valued physical fitness.8 Their most popular activities were usually tests of strength – wrestling, sword fighting, and trying to dunk each other; endurance – climbing fjords, skiing, skating and distance swimming; or agility – throwing spears with both hands at the same time, or leaping from oar to oar outside the railing of a ship while it was being rowed.

There is an ongoing debate in the political, scientific and business world about whether to focus on the bold leaps that lead to new conceptual terrain, or on the marginal gains that help to optimise one’s existing fundamental assumptions. Is it about testing small assumptions or big ones; is it about transforming the world or tweaking it; is it about considering the big picture (the so-called gestalt) or the fine detail (the margins)?

In the mid-1990s, while serving as senior editor for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, I proposed a thought experiment to test whether Buddhism could spread around the globe. That test consisted of a single question: Did Buddhism have a teaching that was so universal it could pass quickly from person to person without getting stopped in its tracks, leaping across national, ethnic, economic, and even religious boundaries?

We've seen that the theories of the Core forces, each deeply based on symmetry, can be combined. The three separate Core symmetries can be realized as parts of a single, all-encompassing symmetry. Moreover, that encompassing symmetry brings unity and coherence to the clusters of the Core. From a motley six, we assemble the faultless Charge Account. We also discover that once we correct for the distorting effect of Grid fluctuations-and after upping the ante to include SUSY-the different powers of the Core forces derive from a common value at short distances. Even gravity, that hopelessly feeble misfit, comes into the field. To reach this clear and lofty perspective, we made some hopeful leaps of imagination. We assumed that the Grid-the entity that in everyday life we consider empty space-is a multilayered, multicolored superconductor. We assumed that the world contains the extra quantum dimensions required to support super-symmetry. And we boldly took the laws of physics, supplemented with these two "super" assumptions, up to energies and down to distances far beyond where we've tested them directly. From the intellectual success so far achieved-from the clarity and coherence of this vision of unification-we are tempted to believe that our assumptions correspond to reality. But in science, Mother Nature is the ultimate judge. After the solar expedition of 1919 confirmed his prediction for the bending of light by the Sun, a reporter asked Albert Einstein what it would have meant if the result had been otherwise. He replied, "Then God would have missed a great opportunity." Nature doesn't miss such opportunities. I anticipated that Nature's verdicts in favor of our "super" ideas will inaugurate a new golden age in fundamental physics.

In the midst of this heroic, saintly pilgrimage for peace, Gandhi was conducting the strangest of his experiments with (as he had it) ‘truth’. The goal of the experiment was his old, continuing, obsession with brahmacharya—the instrument, his grand-niece Manu. Sometime in late December 1946, Gandhi asked Manu to join him in the bed he slept in. He was seeking to test, or perhaps further test, his conquest of sexual desire. Somehow, the idea had entered his mind that the rise of religious violence was connected to his own failure to become a perfect brahmachari. The connection was a leap of faith, an abdication of reason, and perhaps also an expression of egotism. He had come round to the view that the violence around him was in part a product or consequence of the imperfections within him.

You’ll find this ridiculous, but I believe that God made us all, and that He knew what He was doing. He’s testing us, individually and as a people. And I don’t believe that He would make us the way we are, just to then turn His back on us. It’s people who invented a god that cruel, to torture one another.

Leonardo did not invent the scientific method, nor did Aristotle or Alhazen or Galileo or any Bacon. But his uncanny abilities to engage in the dialogue between experience and theory made him a prime example of how acute observations, fanatic curiosity, experimental testing, a willingness to question dogma, and the ability to discern patterns across disciplines can lead to great leaps in human understanding.

In school, we’re given the false impression that scientists took a straight path to the light switch. There’s one curriculum, one right way to study science, and one right formula that spits out the correct answer on a standardized test. Textbooks with lofty titles like The Principles of Physics magically reveal “the principles” in three hundred pages. An authority figure then steps up to the lectern to feed us “the truth.” Textbooks, explained theoretical physicist David Gross in his Nobel lecture, “often ignore the many alternate paths that people wandered down, the many false clues they followed, the many misconceptions they had.”15 We learn about Newton’s “laws”—as if they arrived by a grand divine visitation or a stroke of genius—but not the years he spent exploring, revising, and tweaking them. The laws that Newton failed to establish—most notably his experiments in alchemy, which attempted, and spectacularly failed, to turn lead into gold—don’t make the

When we speak of the tests Prophets were put through, we must also remember when their reward came, it was in leaps and bounds. This helps regain balance. Personally, this thought helped me evolve. When I remind myself that this life is a test, it’s not in a hopeless form where I’m doomed, but it is to look at it positively. Allah promised that with every hardship is ease, He repeated this twice. Ever since I read the hadith thatb - on the day of judgment the people who were not tested in this dunya will wish their skins were cut up when they see the rewards for those who were tested - I stopped viewing my trials as rivals against me, and began considering them as opportunities for me.

Wonder likes to test out new ways of being and doing, rebounding off the constraints of current knowledge.

We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it. When doctors are faced with a difficult diagnosis, they order more tests, and when we are uncertain about what we hear, we ask for a second opinion. And what do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don’t judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation. We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world. The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

Then there is the extraordinary marriage of observation and mathematics. Mankind, and for some perhaps sociological reason it has been mostly man kind, has developed a sinewy language of the utmost rigour and austerity that has proved to be the perfect tool for teasing out objectively the consequences of an imaginative qualitative leap or of adding spine to a whim so that it can stand up to the harshness of quantitative comparison of prediction with observation. I hasten to add that mathematics does not appear explicitly in this book, but it does lie as a hidden deep foundation beneath it.

Market research is the business equivalent of “Look before you leap.” Books like The New Business Road Test by John Mullins can help you identify promising markets from the outset, increasing the probability that your new venture will be a success.

THERE’S A DIFFERENCE, as Morpheus said, between knowing the path and walking the path. Once you’ve stress-tested your ideas by trying to prove yourself wrong, it’s now time to collide those ideas with reality in tests and experiments.

Well, then I started to find out that it wasn’t all paranoid. The Illuminati really was a very influential organization in its time. I am extremely skeptical that it still exists. But it did play a much larger role in the 18th century than most conventional historians realize. The more you look at it, the more intriguing connections leap out at you.

Seamus told that story many times after he returned to Ireland and lived in the Burren. He told how he had met General Washington in a pub in Philadelphia and leaped at the chance to fight the Brits. He never mentioned that Washington had gotten him blind drunk before he made that patriotic decision, and that, while sober, he had been firmly convinced he wanted no part of any war in inches or feet or miles anywhere at any time for any cause.

The Portuguese explorers, astronauts of another time, used these winds and some educated guesswork to push European dominion out of the Mediterranean and into the world beyond. For the mahrineros of Lisbon, it was simple work on most days to sail south to places like Madeira and the Canary Islands, the first non-European stepping-stones of Iberian conquest. Getting home was harder, until someone took a gamble and found that if a sailor put his back to the land and sailed off far enough to the northwest, he might eventually make his way up into westerly winds and back to Portugal before the food ran out. Known to sailors as the volta do mar (return from the sea), this discovery—rather like the splitting of the atom five centuries later—would have irreversible consequences for all that came afterwards. Christopher Columbus used an expanded version of the volta to get his fleet from Spain to America and home again, but credit for a bolder leap goes to Bartolomeu Dias, who tested the concept on a global scale.

To address your leaps of faith, you’ll have to leap! That is to say, you must experiment. That may mean opening a smaller shop than you aspire to operate, just to see how customers respond. It may mean trying different prices for your newly developed gadget to see which price makes sales pop. By identifying your leaps of faith early and devising ways to test hypotheses that will prove or refute them, you are in a position to learn whether or not your Plan A will work before you waste too much of your time, and your and your investors’ money.

Your dashboard serves four key roles. 1. It forces you to think strategically about the most crucial issues presently on the table that can—quickly and inexpensively—answer the all-important question, “Why won’t this work?” 2. It forces you to think rigorously about how you can examine your leaps of faith by testing hypotheses whose results can be measured quantitatively, wherever possible. Numbers are more persuasive than naïve hopes or dreams. 3. If one or more of your leaps of faith are refuted by the evidence you collect, the results displayed on your dashboard are visible and dramatic indicators of the need to alter your Plan A and move toward Plan B. 4. A dashboard is a powerful tool for convincing others—whether members of your management team, investors or others, even yourself—of the need to move from Plan A to Plan B. If your tenacity or perseverance is questioned, you can show the evidence to support the move toward Plan B. You are not being erratic or flighty. You are systematically testing hypotheses to prove or refute your leaps of faith, and you are listening to what the data tell you.

We each need the dignity and freedom to be able to test new ideas and finetune them to see how they might best work for us.

I didn’t think it was possible to love a person the way I love Burke. My love for him is something…wild,” she whispered, feeling the way her heart quickened. “With Burke, I feel so free. In loving him, I have set my soul free. It scares me. It thrills me. He makes love feel like a leap of faith, and every day I get a little braver, a little more ready to test my wings.

Here’s an example from the test Marty and his students developed to distinguish optimists from pessimists: Imagine: You can’t get all the work done that others expect of you. Now imagine one major cause for this event. What leaps to mind? After you read that hypothetical scenario, you write down your response, and then, after you’re offered more scenarios, your responses are rated for how temporary (versus permanent) and how specific (versus pervasive) they are. If you’re a pessimist, you might say, I screw up everything. Or: I’m a loser. These explanations are all permanent; there’s not much you can do to change them. They’re also pervasive; they’re likely to influence lots of life situations, not just your job performance. Permanent and pervasive explanations for adversity turn minor complications into major catastrophes. They make it seem logical to give up. If, on the other hand, you’re an optimist, you might say, I mismanaged my time. Or: I didn’t work efficiently because of distractions. These explanations are all temporary and specific; their “fixability” motivates you to start clearing them away as problems. Using this test, Marty confirmed that, compared to optimists, pessimists are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. What’s more, optimists fare better in domains not directly related to mental health. For instance, optimistic undergraduates tend to earn higher grades and are less likely to drop out of school. Optimistic young adults stay healthier throughout middle age and, ultimately, live longer than pessimists. Optimists are more satisfied with their marriages. A one-year field study of MetLife insurance agents found that optimists are twice as likely to stay in their jobs, and that they sell about 25 percent more insurance than their pessimistic colleagues. Likewise, studies of salespeople in telecommunications, real estate, office products, car sales, banking, and other industries have shown that optimists outsell pessimists by 20 to 40 percent.

Are you around next Sunday?” Mr. Newton encourages. “We’ve business in Southampton this week, but perhaps we might meet up after.” When no one says anything, he prompts with obvious emphasis, “Monty? What do you think?” Henry—Monty—I sincerely have no idea what his name is—looks as though he’s been asked to select a date for his execution. “Must we?” “Don’t,” Mr. Newton says quietly, and they stare at each other for a moment. I can sense some unspoken conversation passing through the air between them. When Henry says nothing more, Mr. Newton turns to me. His smile is truly starting to test the limits of his face. “Brilliant. We’ll see you back here then.” He reaches out a hand to me again and starts to say, “It was so lovely to meet—” But I leap to my feet, strangling the spyglass lenses, and dismiss myself before I am forced to shake hands with a man who is not my brother.

To change, you must act. Test and learn. Be bold. This will be a series of messy experiments, filled with learning in the guise of mistakes.

It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led... Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined. For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth." He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag. p237

It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led... Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined. For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth." He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag... His conditioning was clearly off the charts, and I'm not talking about the physical aspect alone. Being a physical specimen is one thing, but it takes so much more energy to stay mentally prepared enough to arrive every day at a place like Air Assault School on a mission to dominate. The fact that he was able to do that told me it couldn't possibly have been a one-time thing. It had to be the result of countless lonely hours in the gym, on the trails, and in the books. Most of his work was hidden, but it is within that unseen work that self-leaders are made. I suspect the reason he was capable of exceeding any and all standards consistently was because he was dedicated at a level most people cannot fathom in order to stay ready for any and all opportunities. p237

Thus, for entrepreneurs, asking for £25 million up front, as Cassani did, is usually a bad idea. Why? All the risks lie ahead of you, and your investors will want to be compensated for those risks through a larger stake in your company. Staging your investment so that more capital comes in after key leaps of faith are tested and milestones met will probably leave you and your team with a larger share of the company than if you ask for too much cash too early. Perhaps more important, if Plan A does not work and you must move on to Plan B, you’ll have a better chance of raising more capital if you’ve not already burned too much of it. Who wants to give money to someone who goes through capital like it’s water?

At the end of the day, there are neither “right” nor “wrong” analogs—or antilogs—until they are proved in the marketplace. Thus, in most cases, the customer—as well as the cash flow—is the final arbiter of whether you have chosen them well and followed their advice appropriately for your situation. It’s a hard, cold world out there, and you won’t always be right. But being “wrong”—whether about an analog, an antilog, or a leap of faith you test—is OK, as we’ve noted above, as you can then move forward more knowledgeably to Plan B. So, don’t worry too much about what’s right and what’s wrong. Get on with the process and let your learning begin.

The Cycle's Whisper by Stewart Stafford A crisp mountain breeze, Whispers on verdant meadows, In the starlings' murmuration, Bodies flutter as the wind blows. River salmon leap upstream, To the places of their siring, All the tests of life in the flesh, With thrashing bodies expiring. Starving bears lie in wait to Shorten the fading quest, Or a moribund swim home, To a watery boneyard's rest. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

Further, unlike traditional retailers for which rent typically had a fixed cost component regardless of sales, Zoom proposed a profit-sharing model, paying the property owner a portion of the revenues (between 5 and 10 percent) for the physical space it used.39 While the profit-sharing model didn’t necessarily decrease Zoom’s operating costs, it did lessen Zoom’s risk and its breakeven point. By moving a potential fixed cost (rent) to variable cost (the landlord’s share of revenue) Zoom reduced the costs of testing its leaps of faith too. If the Zoom store didn’t generate enough revenue, Zoom could simply move it to a more promising location.

Let’s revisit our analog and antilog process. At some point, we exhausted our ability to learn from other companies. Their examples would have given us “good enough” answers to some of our questions, and we could move on. But when analogs and antilogs reach the limit of what they can tell us, we are left with leaps of faith, each driven by a burning question that we cannot answer without some real-world data. So, as we saw in chapter 1, we draw from our leaps of faith a few hypotheses that state what we hope and believe to be true, and we then test them in some way, as quickly and cheaply as possible, and we measure the results. This process—systematically recording our leaps of faith, the hypotheses that grow out of them, and the results of our hypothesis tests—is what we call dashboarding. Scientists do this in their sleep. They begin with a small set of critical leaps of faith, generate hypotheses with which to address them, and determine metrics to measure the results.

Johnny’s is a simple but prototypical dashboard that illustrates the key building blocks of the dashboarding process that we hope you will follow: • Your leaps of faith • The hypotheses you will test • The metrics you will use to measure your results • The results of your hypothesis tests over one or more periods • The insights you draw for decision-making, based on the results you’ve obtained

A key theme of this book is that, most often, it is necessary to constantly iterate to find a path that will work—for your would-be customers, for you, and for your prospective investors. If all goes well as you iterate, identifying still more leaps of faith and testing hypotheses to address them, you’ll eventually find your way to a Plan B or C or Z that will deliver you the kind of success you seek.

All is not lost when your leaps of faith don’t all work out. Instead, Biyani’s experimental mind-set paid Pantaloon huge dividends, as he tested hypothesis after hypothesis about what his analogs could not convincingly tell him.

Analogs, antilogs, and the testing of hypotheses to prove or refute your most crucial leaps of faith can inform all kinds of decisions, including operational and marketing plans, without breaking your piggy bank. And they can provide insights into issues much broader than whether your customer will buy. There’s another role, too, that’s probably even more important, because walking before you decide to run is a very good idea. Testing your leaps of faith early and often helps safeguard your company against risk. Thus, doing so deserves focused managerial attention until the questions you pose and the untested beliefs you hold are convincingly resolved, either proved or refuted.

In the end, it’s often the gaps in the analogs and antilogs, the leaps of faith—and the testing thereof—that are crucial, that make the difference between failure, mediocrity, or slam-bang success. As we’ll see in later chapters, some of the most noteworthy successes in business history have arisen when a new kind of business model—mixing lessons from an analog here, an antilog there, and some insightful leaps of faith that turn out favorably—is concocted.

In the end, it’s often the gaps in the analogs and antilogs, the leaps of faith—and the testing thereof—that are crucial, that make the difference between failure, mediocrity, or slam-bang success. As we’ll see in later chapters, some of the most noteworthy successes in business history have arisen when a new kind of business model—mixing lessons from an analog here, an antilog there, and some insightful leaps of faith that turn out favorably—is concocted. Sometimes, these new recipes create a Plan B not just for the company, as was the case for Apple, but for the industry.

The findings that were deemed believable enough to be published, however, revolutionized ethologists’ thinking. Ethologists began to speak less often of a chasm between man and ape; they began to speak instead of a dividing “line.” And it was a line that, in the words of Harvard primatologist Irven De Vore, was “a good deal less clear than one would ever have expected.” What makes up this line between us and our fellow primates? No longer can it be claimed to be tool use. Is it the ability to reason? Wolfgang Kohler once tested captive chimps’ reasoning ability by placing several boxes and a stick in an enclosure and hanging a banana from the high ceiling by a string. The animals quickly figured out that they could get to the banana by stacking the boxes one atop the other and then reaching to swat at the banana with a stick. (Once Geza Teleki found himself in exactly this position at Gombe. He had followed the chimpanzees down into a valley and around noon discovered he had forgotten to bring his lunch. The chimps were feeding on fruit in the trees at the time, and he decided to try to knock some fruit from nearby vines with a stick. For about ten minutes he leaped and swatted with his stick but didn’t manage to knock down any fruit. Finally an adolescent male named Sniff collected a handful of fruit, came down the tree, and dropped the fruit into Geza’s hands.) Some say language is the line that separates man from ape. But this, too, is being questioned. Captive chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans have been taught not only to comprehend, but also to produce language. They have been taught American Sign Language (ASL), the language of the deaf, as well as languages that use plastic chips in place of words and computer languages. One signing chimp, Washoe, often combined known signs in novel and creative ways: she had not been taught the word for swan, but upon seeing one, she signed “water-bird.” Another signing chimp, Lucy, seeing and tasting a watermelon for the first time, called it a “candy-drink”; the acidic radish she named “hurt-cry-food.” Lucy would play with toys and sign to them, much as human children talk to their dolls. Koko, the gorilla protegee of Penny Patterson, used sign language to make jokes, escape blame, describe her surroundings, tell stories, even tell lies. One of Biruté’s ex-captives, a female orangutan named Princess, was taught a number of ASL signs by Gary Shapiro. Princess used only the signs she knew would bring her food; because she was not a captive, she could not be coerced into using sign language to any ends other than those she found personally useful. Today dolphins, sea lions, harbor seals, and even pigeons are being taught artificial languages, complete with a primitive grammar or syntax. An African grey parrot named Alex mastered the correct use of more than one hundred spoken English words, using them in proper order to answer questions, make requests, do math, and offer friends and visitors spontaneous, meaningful comments until his untimely death at age 31 in 2007. One leading researcher, Ronald Schusterman, is convinced that “the components for language are present probably in all vertebrates, certainly in mammals and birds.” Arguing over semantics and syntax, psychologists and ethologists and linguists are still debating the definitions of the line. Louis Leakey remarked about Jane’s discovery of chimps’ use of tools that we must “change the definition of man, the definition of tool, or accept chimps as man.” Now some linguists have actually proposed, in the face of the ape language experiments, changing the definition of language to exclude the apes from a domain we had considered uniquely ours. The line separating man from the apes may well be defined less by human measurement than by the limits of Western imagination. It may be less like a boundary between land and water and more like the lines we draw on maps separating the domains of nations.

Those afflicted with BPD suffer from emotional instability—in Katherine’s case, almost always caused by feelings of rejection or abandonment. They suffer from cognitive distortions, where they see the world in black and white, with anyone who isn’t actively ‘with them’ being considered an enemy. They are also prone to catastrophising, where they make logical leaps from minor impediments in their plans to assumptions of absolute ruin. BPD is often characterised by extremely intense but unstable relationships, as the sufferer gives everything that they can to a relationship in their attempts to ensure their partner never leaves but instead end up burning themselves out and blaming that same partner for the emotional toll that it takes on them. The final trait of BPD is impulsive behaviour, often characterised as self-destructive behaviour. In Katherine’s case, this almost always manifested itself in her hair-trigger temper. When she was enraged, it was like she lost all rational control over her actions, seeing everyone else as her enemies. This manifested itself in the ridiculous bullying she conducted at school, in her lashing out when she failed her test and in the vengeance that she took on her sexual abusers. It is likely that she inherited this disorder from her mother, who showed many of the same symptoms, and that they were exacerbated by her chaotic home life and the lack of healthy relationships in the adults around her that she might have modelled herself after. With Katherine, it was like a Jekyll and Hyde switch took place when her temper was raised. The charming, eager-to-please girl who usually occupied her body was replaced with a furious, foul-mouthed hellion bent on exacting her revenge no matter what the cost. In itself, this could have been an excellent excuse for almost everything that she did wrong in her life, up to and including the crimes that she would later be accused of. Unfortunately, this sort of ‘flipped switch’ argument doesn’t hold up when you consider that her choice to arm herself with a lethal weapon was premeditated. Part of this may certainly have been the cognitive distortion that Katherine experienced, telling her that everyone else was out to get her and that she had to defend herself, but ultimately, she was choosing to give a weapon to a person who would use it to end lives, if she had the opportunity. Assuming that this division of personalities actually existed, then ‘good’ Katherine was an accomplice to ‘bad’ Katherine, giving her the material support and planning that she needed to commit her vicious attacks.

Boone’s secret is the same as any self-respecting astronaut: test as you fly. Train in the same environment you’ll experience on race day—while your competition trains from the comfort of a gym because it happens to be raining outside. “You don’t race on a treadmill with Netflix in front of you,

Since the launch of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928, tens of thousands of their comrades in the urban centers had been working tirelessly to build power stations, steel mills, and manufacturing plants for heavy machinery. As this historic effort unfolded, it would be essential for the country’s grain-producing regions to do their part—by meeting the increased demand for bread in the cities with leaps in agricultural production. But to pave the way for this ambitious effort, it was deemed necessary to exile a million kulaks—those profiteers and enemies of the common good, who also happened to be the regions’ most capable farmers. The remaining peasants, who viewed newly introduced approaches to agriculture with resentment and suspicion, proved antagonistic to even the smallest efforts at innovation. Tractors, which were meant to usher in the new era by the fleet, ended up being in short supply. These challenges were compounded by uncooperative weather resulting in a collapse of agricultural output. But given the imperative of feeding the cities, the precipitous decline in the harvest was met with increased quotas and requisitions enforced at gunpoint. In 1932, the combination of these intractable forces would result in widespread hardship for the agricultural provinces of old Russia, and death by starvation for millions of peasants in Ukraine. (While many of the young loyalists (like Nina) who joined the udarniks in the countryside would have their faith in the Party tested by what they witnessed, most of Russia, and for that matter the world, would be spared the spectacle of this man-made disaster. For just as peasants from the countryside were forbidden to enter the cities, journalists from the cities were forbidden to enter the countryside; delivery of personal mail was suspended; and the windows of passenger trains were blackened. In fact, so successful was the campaign to contain awareness of the crisis, when word leaked out that millions were starving in Ukraine, Walter Duranty, the lead correspondent for The New York Times in Russia (and one of the ringleaders in the Shalyapin Bar), would report that these rumors of famine were grossly exaggerated and had probably originated with anti-Soviet propagandists. Thus, the world would shrug. And even as the crime unfolded, Duranty would win the Pulitzer Prize.)

Her hands wandered lower, moved across his flat belly, dipped over the ridge of his hipbones. Raven felt his swift intake of breath, the tensing of every muscle. A low growl rumbled deep in his throat, sent darts of fire leaping in her blood. Her fingers sought the hard evidence of his arousal, teased and enticed, her fingertips dancing intriguingly, her palm sliding, and gripping, testing the weight of him. He groaned at the effort it took to control himself. This time she was going to participate in the ritual. There would be no way she could argue that she had not known what she was doing. He spread his legs wider to support his trembling body as she touched his shoulder with her tongue, followed a droplet of water that ran in a bead from his neck to his chest. Raven’s body clenched, grew heavy, ached, and burned. Her tongue slid over his heart in a lazy, sensual pattern. Her blood leaped and sang to match his. All the time her hands caressed, teased, promised. Her long hair, masses of silk, brushed his body as she followed little beads of water, lower, lower still. She felt him shudder as she tasted him, his body thrusting to meet her silken mouth. The feeling of power was incredible. His hands bunched in her hair; low, aggressive growls escaped from deep in his throat. She found his thighs with her nails, raking lightly, driving him wild, wanting him crazy for her, wanting him mindless with passion. Mikhail dragged her up, closer. His hands found the firm muscles of her bottom, cupped, massaged. “I claim you as my lifemate.

It is perfectly true that many cases of subnormal energy can be helped by the proper glandular dosage, but how many of those who have spoken to you of being probably hypo-thyroid* ever went through the simple process of having a basal metabolism test to see if that were really the trouble? Of course they can claim that the situation is so grave that they cannot even get up energy to start being cured; there’s no answer to that one. But if you are really seriously handicapped by lethargy, you can take your first successward step by consulting a good diagnostician, if necessary. If necessary, mind; for there is a fact which makes a good deal of the talk about glandular insufficiency look like the alibi it too often is, and which will be confirmed for you by specialists in glandular therapy if you ask them: that if those who complain of lethargy increase their habitual activity little by little the glands respond by increased secretion. In short, very often this condition can be cured by starting at the other end! You may rest assured that you will have no consequent breakdown in following this advice unless you deliberately (and with intent to cripple yourself) leap from a practically comatose state to one of manic activity.

Dropbox needed to test its leap-of-faith question: if we can provide a superior customer experience, will people give our product a try? They believed—rightly, as it turned out—that file synchronization was a problem that most people didn’t know they had. Once you experience the solution, you can’t imagine how you ever lived without it.

We did not begin this project with a theory to test or prove. We sought to build a theory from the ground up, derived directly from the evidence.

Think about the impact of the new wave of AI systems. Large language models enable you to have a useful conversation with an AI about any topic in fluent, natural language. Within the next couple of years, whatever your job, you will be able to consult an on-demand expert, ask it about your latest ad campaign or product design, quiz it on the specifics of a legal dilemma, isolate the most effective elements of a pitch, solve a thorny logistical question, get a second opinion on a diagnosis, keep probing and testing, getting ever more detailed answers grounded in the very cutting edge of knowledge, delivered with exceptional nuance. All of the world’s knowledge, best practices, precedent, and computational power will be available, tailored to you, to your specific needs and circumstances, instantaneously and effortlessly. It is a leap in cognitive potential at least as great as the introduction of the internet.

a startup idea from its initial leaps of faith, tested it with a minimum viable product, used innovation accounting and actionable metrics to evaluate the results, and made the decision to pivot or persevere.