Look Closely....... Successes Quotes

You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.

I am Me. In all the world, there is no one else exactly like me. Everything that comes out of me is authentically mine, because I alone chose it -- I own everything about me: my body, my feelings, my mouth, my voice, all my actions, whether they be to others or myself. I own my fantasies, my dreams, my hopes, my fears. I own my triumphs and successes, all my failures and mistakes. Because I own all of me, I can become intimately acquainted with me. By so doing, I can love me and be friendly with all my parts. I know there are aspects about myself that puzzle me, and other aspects that I do not know -- but as long as I am friendly and loving to myself, I can courageously and hopefully look for solutions to the puzzles and ways to find out more about me. However I look and sound, whatever I say and do, and whatever I think and feel at a given moment in time is authentically me. If later some parts of how I looked, sounded, thought, and felt turn out to be unfitting, I can discard that which is unfitting, keep the rest, and invent something new for that which I discarded. I can see, hear, feel, think, say, and do. I have the tools to survive, to be close to others, to be productive, and to make sense and order out of the world of people and things outside of me. I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me. I am me, and I am Okay.

Pixar is seen by a lot of folks as an overnight success, but if you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing." A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to "get through it," rise to the occasion, exhibit the "strength" that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves the for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief was we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

I stand there for a while, then sit cross-legged before it and bow my head. "Hi, Metias," I say in a soft voice. "Today's my birthday. Do you know how old I am now?" I close me eyes, and through the silence surrounding me I think I can sense a ghostly hand on my shoulder, my brother's gentle presence that I'm able to feel every now and then, in these quiet moments. I imagine him smiling down at me, his expression relaxed and free. "I'm twenty-seven today," I continue in a whisper. My voice catches for a moment. "We're the same age now." For the first tine in my life, I am no longer his little sister. Next year I will step across the line and he will still be in the same place. From now on, I will be older than he ever was. I try to move on to other thoughts, so I tell my brother's ghost about my year, my struggles and successes in commanding my own patrols, my hectic workweeks. I tell him, as I always do, that I miss him. And as always, I can hear the whisper of his ghost against my ear, his gentle reply that he misses me too. That he's looking out for me, from wherever he is.

If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.

And this, too, affords no small occasion for anxieties - if you are bent on assuming a pose and never reveal yourself to anyone frankly, in the fashion of many who live a false life that is all made up for show; for it is torturous to be constantly watching oneself and be fearful of being caught out of our usual role. And we are never free from concern if we think that every time anyone looks at us he is always taking-our measure; for many things happen that strip off our pretence against our will, and, though all this attention to self is successful, yet the life of those who live under a mask cannot be happy and without anxiety. But how much pleasure there is in simplicity that is pure, in itself unadorned, and veils no part of its character!{PlainDealer+} Yet even such a life as this does run some risk of scorn, if everything lies open to everybody; for there are those who disdain whatever has become too familiar. But neither does virtue run any risk of being despised when she is brought close to the eyes, and it is better to be scorned by reason of simplicity than tortured by perpetual pretence.

When one door of happiness closes, another opens: but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened before us.

From the molten basements of the world, two hundred miles down, it comes. One crystal in a seam of others. Pure carbon, each atom linked to four equidistant neighbors, perfectly knit, octahedral, unsurpassed in hardness. Already it is old: unfathomably so. Incalculable eons tumble past. The earth shifts, shrugs, stretches. One year, one day, one hour, a great upflow of magma gathers a seam of crystals and drives it toward the surface, mile after burning mile; it cools inside a huge, smoking xenolith of kimberlite, and there it waits. Century after century. Rain, wind, cubic miles of ice. Bedrock becomes boulders, boulders become stones; the ice retreats, a lake forms, and galaxies of freshwater clams flap their million shells at the sun and close and die and the lake seeps away. Stands of prehistoric trees rise and fall and rise again in succession. Until another year, another day, another hour, when a storm claws one particular stone out of a canyon and sends it into a clattering flow of alluvium, where eventually it finds, one evening, the attention of a prince who knows what he is looking for.

Good stories are never about a string of successes but about spectacular defeats,” Støp had said. “Even though Roald Amundsen won the race to the South Pole, it’s Robert Scott the world outside Norway remembers. None of Napoleon’s victories is remembered like the defeat at Waterloo. Serbia’s national pride is based on the battle against the Turks at Kosovo Polje in 1389, a battle the Serbs lost resoundingly. And look at Jesus! The symbol of the man who is claimed to have triumphed over death ought to be a man standing outside the tomb with his hands in the air. Instead, throughout time Christians have preferred the spectacular defeat: when he was hanging on the cross and close to giving up. Because it’s always the story of the defeat that moves us most.

Dale turned back to slander the bitter hippie who was wearing a tie-dye shirt with colorful text that read ACID BATH. “Looks like someone forgot to take their micro-dose of acid today, or maybe you mistakenly consumed too much gluten for breakfast. Or perhaps you’re resentful for having woken up today realizing the world revolves around money instead of love and sexually transmitted diseases.” An eccentric expression crept onto the hippie’s face while he half-lifted his arms in surrender. “Hey man, crimson and clover, over and over.” Dale hadn’t the slightest idea what the man was talking about, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t talking about colors and flowers. Or was clover a weed? Well, if he spotted these hippies in his backyard, he’d definitely remove them like weeds, even if their tie-dye shirts were colorful enough to deceitfully pass as flowers. Getting up close to them to smell their pungent odor, instead of a flower’s fragrance, would most surely be enough evidence to classify them as weeds. Stubborn weeds that attempted to buck the system by creeping up between logically placed cemented sidewalks that paved the way to buildings of high finance. He had crushed many of their kind under his polished shoes as he made his way toward the office. They were the dying remnants of a generation who thought pervasive love could spark a peaceful revolution. What they weren’t aware of was that love wasn’t more powerful than fucking. The honorable elite factions who hold the reins of an ordered society continually raped the hippie’s love movement until it was nothing more than acid flashbacks and bad hygiene, which conveyed the power of fucking over love.

Mitchell Maxwell’s Maxims • You have to create your own professional path. There’s no longer a roadmap for an artistic career. • Follow your heart and the money will follow. • Create a benchmark of your own progress. If you never look down while you’re climbing the ladder you won’t know how far you’ve come. • Don’t define success by net worth, define it by character. Success, as it’s measured by society, is a fleeting condition. • Affirm your value. Tell the world “I am an artist,” not “I want to be an artist.” • You must actively live your dream. Wishing and hoping for someday doesn’t make it happen. Get out there and get involved. • When you look into the abyss you find your character. • Young people too often let the fear of failure keep them from trying. You have to get bloody, sweaty and rejected in order to succeed. • Get your face out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Close your e-mail and pick up the phone. Personal contact still speaks loudest. • No one is entitled to act entitled. Be willing to work hard. • If you’re going to buck the norm you’re going to have to embrace the challenges. • You have to love the journey if you’re going to work in the arts. • Only listen to people who agree with your vision. • A little anxiety is good but don’t let it become fear, fear makes you inert. • Find your own unique voice. Leave your individual imprint on the world, not a copy of someone else. • Draw strength from your mistakes; they can be your best teacher.

Richard looked up at the beautiful, big pines spreading over them, illuminated in the firelight. A spark of understanding lit in his mind. He saw the branches stretched out with murderous intent in a years-long struggle to reach the sunlight and dispatch its neighbors with its shade. Success would give space for its offspring, many of which would also shrivel in the shade of the parent. Several close neighbors of the big pine were withered and weak, victims all. It was true. The design of nature was success by murder.

Actually, when you look more closely at the sentence, it contains three separate cues: 1. You are part of this group. 2. This group is special; we have high standards here. 3. I believe you can reach those standards. These signals provide a clear message that lights up the unconscious brain: Here is a safe place to give effort.

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.  - Alexander Graham Bell

You,” he snarled, closing his fingers around the front of her jacket again, pulling her against his body and up onto her toes, holding her there as he lowered his mouth to hers. But Sid wasn’t ready to kiss and make up, so she bit his lip angrily. “Look,” she snapped, trying without success to push him away. “I get the whole alpha male, vampire lord-of-all-he-surveys thing, okay? I kind of even like it in the bedroom. But out in the real world, you are not the boss of me. I don’t forfeit my brain just because we have sex. And I’ll do whatever I think necessary to get my story. Besides, it’s not like most of what I do is dangerous. I’m not exactly Woodward and Bernstein material. But I’m not stupid either. I don’t take unnecessary risks, and I’m careful with the risks I do take.” Aden was eyeing her with very little expression on his face, which made it difficult to tell how he was receiving her liberated woman speech. Whatever his reaction was, however, it didn’t extend to his body which was hard and ready to fuck, and no question about it. “Kind of like it?” he asked finally, a corner of his mouth curling upward with amusement as he focused on the one part of her speech that she’d thought he’d have no problem with. “I think I can do better than that.

People treat the present moment as if it is just a stopping point on the way to some great goal that will happen in the future, and then they are surprised that the long day closes; they look back on their life and see that the things they let go by so unregarded, the small pleasures they dismissed so easily were in fact the true significance of their lives- all the time these things were the great and wonderful successes and purpose of their existence.

And the mainstreaming of the sex industry reflects that inequality. It is still women who are dieting or undergoing surgery on their bodies; still women stripping in the clubs while the men chant and cheer; still women, not men, who believe that their ability to reach for fame and success will be defined by how closely they conform to one narrow image of sexuality. If this is the new sexual liberation, it looks too uncannily like the old sexism to convince many of us that this is the freedom we have sought.

The problem is, the phrase is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20–20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. While we know more about a past event than a future one, our understanding of the factors that shaped it is severely limited. Not only that, because we think we see what happened clearly—hindsight being 20–20 and all—we often aren’t open to knowing more. “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there,” as Mark Twain once said, “lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” The cat’s hindsight, in other words, distorts her view. The past should be our teacher, not our master.

You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged. To set up a healthy feedback system, you must remove power dynamics from the equation—you must enable yourself, in other words, to focus on the problem, not the person.

In 1908, in a wild and remote area of the North Caucasus, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was the guest of a tribal chief “living far away from civilized life in the mountains.” Gathering his family and neighbors, the chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for hours with tales of Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock….His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.” “I looked at them,” Tolstoy recalled, “and saw their faces all aglow, while their eyes were burning. I saw that those rude barbarians were really interested in a man whose name and deeds had already become a legend.” He told them everything he knew about Lincoln’s “home life and youth…his habits, his influence upon the people and his physical strength.” When he finished, they were so grateful for the story that they presented him with “a wonderful Arabian horse.” The next morning, as Tolstoy prepared to leave, they asked if he could possibly acquire for them a picture of Lincoln. Thinking that he might find one at a friend’s house in the neighboring town, Tolstoy asked one of the riders to accompany him. “I was successful in getting a large photograph from my friend,” recalled Tolstoy. As he handed it to the rider, he noted that the man’s hand trembled as he took it. “He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer, his eyes filled with tears.” Tolstoy went on to observe, “This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skilful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character. “Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together. “We are still too near to his greatness,” Tolstoy concluded, “but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.

15. For if you look closely At the so called idols of the world They have something in common. They were ignorant They ignored the noise They created their own path.

Well with a success like Death of a Salesman you get feelings of omnipotence. A little touch of it, you know. You think you can do anything. You inevitably begin to feel a kind of impact of power, which is sexual, it is financial, it is everything. You begin to shift and change if you’re not careful, which I wasn’t. People now were talking to me differently. Women, men. They were looking at me like an icon of some kind. Well then, I felt with my wife then, that we were… it wasn’t enough for me, suddenly. I thought I… I had a feeling that we were not close, that we were not one.

Well with a success like Death of a Salesman you get feelings of omnipotence. A little touch of it, you know. You think you can do anything. You inevitably begin to feel a kind of impact of power, which is sexual, it is financial, it is everything. You begin to shift and change if you’re not careful, which I wasn’t. People now were talking to me differently. Women, men. They were looking at me like an icon of some kind. Well then, I felt with my wife then, that we were… it wasn’t enough for me, suddenly. I thought I… I had a feeling that we were not close, that we were not one.

If you are alive—whether of blood or bark—you will be struck by pain, love, longing, fear, anger, and the particular ache of sadness. There will be joys that quiver your leaves and betrayals that will sever your roots, poisoning the water you pull. These are the varying notes in the music of living. Look up, to close your eyes is to stagnate. To rot and stop the song. My gift to you is to know that we are here, all around you, talking to one another and dreaming of your success. Sorcery is everywhere, in the silver stroll of a slug and lighting up the very veins of you. Open those beautiful eyes to a world who is a mosaic of magic. She is just waiting for you to notice.

I have learned over the years that whenever one door seemingly closes, another door opens. You just have to keep positive, stay aware, and look to see what it is. Instead of getting upset when things don’t unfold as you anticipated, always ask yourself the question “What’s the possibility that this is?

What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus. This, too, contradicts some of the most ingrained assumptions we hold about ourselves and each other. We like to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner-directed, that who we are and how we act is something permanently set by our genes and our temperament. But if you add up the examples of Salesmen and Connectors, of Paul Revere's ride and Blue's Clues, and the Rule of 150 and the New York subway cleanup and the Fundamental Attribution Error, they amount to a very different conclusion about what it means to be human. We are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us. Taking the graffiti off the walls of New York's subways turned New Yorkers into better citizens. Telling seminarians to hurry turned them into bad citizens. The suicide of a charismatic young Micronesian set off an epidemic of suicides that lasted for a decade. Putting a little gold box in the corner of a Columbia Record Club advertisement suddenly made record buying by mail seem irresistible. To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are to even the smallest details of everyday life. That's why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.

Things I've Learned in 18 Years of Life   1) True love is not something found, rather [sic] something encountered. You can’t go out and look for it. The person you marry and the person you love could easily be two different people. So have a beautiful life while waiting for God to bring along your once-in-a-lifetime love. Don't allow yourself to settle for anything less than them. Stop worrying about who you're going to marry because God's already on the front porch watching your grandchildren play.   2) God WILL give you more than you can handle, so you can learn to lean on him in times of need. He won't tempt you more than you can handle, though. So don't lose hope. Hope anchors the soul.   3) Remember who you are and where you came from. Remember that you are not from this earth. You are a child of heaven, you're invaluable, you are beautiful. Carry yourself that way.   4) Don't put your faith in humanity, humanity is inherently flawed. We are all imperfect people created and loved by a perfect God. Perfect. So put your faith in Him.   5) I fail daily, and that is why I succeed.   6) Time passes, and nothing and everything changes. Don't live life half asleep. Don't drag your soul through the days. Feel everything you do. Be there physically and mentally. Do things that make you feel this way as well.   7) Live for beauty. We all need beauty, get it where you can find it. Clothing, paintings, sculptures, music, tattoos, nature, literature, makeup. It's all art and it's what makes us human. Same as feeling the things we do. Stay human.   8) If someone makes you think, keep them. If someone makes you feel, keep them.   9) There is nothing the human brain cannot do. You can change anything about yourself that you want to. Fight for it. It's all a mental game.   10) God didn’t break our chains for us to be bound again. Alcohol, drugs, depression, addiction, toxic relationships, monotony and repetition, they bind us. Break those chains. Destroy your past and give yourself new life like God has given you.   11) This is your life. Your struggle, your happiness, your sorrow, and your success. You do not need to justify yourself to anyone. You owe no one an explanation for the choices that you make and the position you are in. In the same vein, respect yourself by not comparing your journey to anyone else's.   12) There is no wrong way to feel.   13) Knowledge is everywhere, keep your eyes open. Look at how diverse and wonderful this world is. Are you going to miss out on beautiful people, places, experiences, and ideas because you are close-minded? I sure hope not.   14) Selfless actions always benefit you more than the recipient.   15) There is really no room for regret in this life. Everything happens for a reason. If you can't find that reason, accept there is one and move on.   16) There is room, however, for guilt. Resolve everything when it first comes up. That's not only having integrity, but also taking care of your emotional well-being.   17) If the question is ‘Am I strong enough for this?’ The answer is always, ‘Yes, but not on your own.’   18) Mental health and sanity above all.   19) We love because He first loved us. The capacity to love is the ultimate gift, the ultimate passion, euphoria, and satisfaction. We have all of that because He first loved us. If you think about it in those terms, it is easy to love Him. Just by thinking of how much He loves us.   20) From destruction comes creation. Beauty will rise from the ashes.   21) Many things can cause depression. Such as knowing you aren't becoming the person you have the potential to become. Choose happiness and change. The sooner the better, and the easier.   22) Half of happiness is as simple as eating right and exercising. You are one big chemical reaction. So are your emotions. Give your body the right reactants to work with and you'll be satisfied with the products.

I am me In all the world, there is no one else exactly like me Everything that comes out of me is authentically me Because I alone chose it – I own everything about me My body, my feelings, my mouth, my voice, all my actions, Whether they be to others or to myself – I own my fantasies, My dreams, my hopes, my fears – I own all my triumphs and Successes, all my failures and mistakes Because I own all of Me, I can become intimately acquainted with me – by so doing I can love me and be friendly with me in all my parts – I know There are aspects about myself that puzzle me, and other Aspects that I do not know – but as long as I am Friendly and loving to myself, I can courageously And hopefully look for solutions to the puzzles And for ways to find out more about me – However I Look and sound, whatever I say and do, and whatever I think and feel at a given moment in time is authentically Me – If later some parts of how I looked, sounded, thought And felt turn out to be unfitting, I can discard that which is Unfitting, keep the rest, and invent something new for that Which I discarded – I can see, hear, feel, think, say, and do I have the tools to survive, to be close to others, to be Productive to make sense and order out of the world of People and things outside of me – I own me, and therefore I can engineer me – I am me and I AM OKAY

Thus called upon, he took courage: the sursum corda of an extravagant belch straightened him upright, and he answered, — Whfffck? Whether this was an approach to discussion he had devised himself, or a subtle adaptation of the Socratic method of questioning perfected in the local athenaeums which he attended until closing time, was not to be known; for the answer was, — Stand aside. — Here, don't goway. Here, how do youfffk. . He licked a lip and commenced again, putting out a hand. — My name Boyma. . he managed, summoning himself for the challenge of recognition. — And you must be Gro… go… raggly! He seemed to have struggled up on that word from behind; and he finished with the triumph of having knocked it over the head. He did in fact look down, as though it might be lying there at his feet. It was such a successful combat that he decided to renew it. — Go. . gro. . gorag… His hand found a wrist, and closed thereon. Bells sounded, from a church somewhere near. — Go. . ro. . grag. . But the sharp heel of a hand delivered to the side of his head stopped him, and he dropped against the wall with no exclamation of surprise whatever.

IN THINKING ABOUT this chapter and about the limits of our perception, a familiar, oft-repeated phrase kept popping into my head: “Hindsight is 20–20.” When we hear it, we normally just nod in agreement—yes, of course—accepting that we can look back on what happened, see it with total clarity, learn from it, and draw the right conclusions. The problem is, the phrase is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20–20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. While we know more about a past event than a future one, our understanding of the factors that shaped it is severely limited. Not only that, because we think we see what happened clearly—hindsight being 20–20 and all—we often aren’t open to knowing more. “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there,” as Mark Twain once said, “lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” The cat’s hindsight, in other words, distorts her view. The past should be our teacher, not our master.

Antidepression medication is temperamental. Somewhere around fifty-nine or sixty I noticed the drug I’d been taking seemed to have stopped working. This is not unusual. The drugs interact with your body chemistry in different ways over time and often need to be tweaked. After the death of Dr. Myers, my therapist of twenty-five years, I’d been seeing a new doctor whom I’d been having great success with. Together we decided to stop the medication I’d been on for five years and see what would happen... DEATH TO MY HOMETOWN!! I nose-dived like the diving horse at the old Atlantic City steel pier into a sloshing tub of grief and tears the likes of which I’d never experienced before. Even when this happens to me, not wanting to look too needy, I can be pretty good at hiding the severity of my feelings from most of the folks around me, even my doctor. I was succeeding well with this for a while except for one strange thing: TEARS! Buckets of ’em, oceans of ’em, cold, black tears pouring down my face like tidewater rushing over Niagara during any and all hours of the day. What was this about? It was like somebody opened the floodgates and ran off with the key. There was NO stopping it. 'Bambi' tears... 'Old Yeller' tears... 'Fried Green Tomatoes' tears... rain... tears... sun... tears... I can’t find my keys... tears. Every mundane daily event, any bump in the sentimental road, became a cause to let it all hang out. It would’ve been funny except it wasn’t. Every meaningless thing became the subject of a world-shattering existential crisis filling me with an awful profound foreboding and sadness. All was lost. All... everything... the future was grim... and the only thing that would lift the burden was one-hundred-plus on two wheels or other distressing things. I would be reckless with myself. Extreme physical exertion was the order of the day and one of the few things that helped. I hit the weights harder than ever and paddleboarded the equivalent of the Atlantic, all for a few moments of respite. I would do anything to get Churchill’s black dog’s teeth out of my ass. Through much of this I wasn’t touring. I’d taken off the last year and a half of my youngest son’s high school years to stay close to family and home. It worked and we became closer than ever. But that meant my trustiest form of self-medication, touring, was not at hand. I remember one September day paddleboarding from Sea Bright to Long Branch and back in choppy Atlantic seas. I called Jon and said, “Mr. Landau, book me anywhere, please.” I then of course broke down in tears. Whaaaaaaaaaa. I’m surprised they didn’t hear me in lower Manhattan. A kindly elderly woman walking her dog along the beach on this beautiful fall day saw my distress and came up to see if there was anything she could do. Whaaaaaaaaaa. How kind. I offered her tickets to the show. I’d seen this symptom before in my father after he had a stroke. He’d often mist up. The old man was usually as cool as Robert Mitchum his whole life, so his crying was something I loved and welcomed. He’d cry when I’d arrive. He’d cry when I left. He’d cry when I mentioned our old dog. I thought, “Now it’s me.” I told my doc I could not live like this. I earned my living doing shows, giving interviews and being closely observed. And as soon as someone said “Clarence,” it was going to be all over. So, wisely, off to the psychopharmacologist he sent me. Patti and I walked in and met a vibrant, white-haired, welcoming but professional gentleman in his sixties or so. I sat down and of course, I broke into tears. I motioned to him with my hand; this is it. This is why I’m here. I can’t stop crying! He looked at me and said, “We can fix this.” Three days and a pill later the waterworks stopped, on a dime. Unbelievable. I returned to myself. I no longer needed to paddle, pump, play or challenge fate. I didn’t need to tour. I felt normal.

The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started - it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place then, for a creator?

In 1917 I went to Russia. I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war. The reader will know that my efforts did not meet with success. I went to Petrograd from Vladivostok, .One day, on the way through Siberia, the train stopped at some station and the passengers as usual got out, some to fetch water to make tea, some to buy food and others to stretch their legs. A blind soldier was sitting on a bench. Other soldiers sat beside him and more stood behind. There were from twenty to thirty.Their uniforms were torn and stained. The blind soldier, a big vigorous fellow, was quite young. On his cheeks was the soft, pale down of a beard that has never been shaved. I daresay he wasn't eighteen. He had a broad face, with flat, wide features, and on his forehead was a great scar of the wound that had lost him his sight. His closed eyes gave him a strangely vacant look. He began to sing. His voice was strong and sweet. He accompanied himself on an accordion. The train waited and he sang song after song. I could not understand his words, but through his singing, wild and melancholy, I seemed to hear the cry of the oppressed: I felt the lonely steppes and the interminable forests, the flow of the broad Russian rivers and all the toil of the countryside, the ploughing of the land and the reaping of the wild corn, the sighing of the wind in the birch trees, the long months of dark winter; and then the dancing of the women in the villages and the youths bathing in shallow streams on summer evenings; I felt the horror of war, the bitter nights in the trenches, the long marches on muddy roads, the battlefield with its terror and anguish and death. It was horrible and deeply moving. A cap lay at the singer's feet and the passengers filled it full of money; the same emotion had seized them all, of boundless compassion and of vague horror, for there was something in that blind, scarred face that was terrifying; you felt that this was a being apart, sundered from the joy of this enchanting world. He did not seem quite human. The soldiers stood silent and hostile. Their attitude seemed to claim as a right the alms of the travelling herd. There was a disdainful anger on their side and unmeasurable pity on ours; but no glimmering of a sense that there was but one way to compensate that helpless man for all his pain.

In reality, when you look closely at the graph for most successful people, there are always ups and downs. When viewed over a longer period of time, however, the line generally moves up and to the right. When you’re in a down cycle, it’s sometimes hard to see that the temporary dip is actually a setup for the next rise. In fact, the slope of the upward line is often steeper after a down cycle, meaning you’re really achieving more than if you had stayed on a steady, predictable path.

Coriolanus acted engrossed in the show as 8, 6, and 11 called their tributes, but his brain spun with the repercussions of landing Lucy Gray Baird. She was a gift, he knew it, and he must treat her as such. But how best to exploit her showstopping entrance? How to wrangle some success from a dress, a snake, a song? The tributes would be given precious little time with the audience before the Games began. How could he get the audience to invest in her and, by extension, him, in just an interview? He half registered the other tributes, mostly pitiful creatures, and took note of the stronger ones. Sejanus got a towering fellow from District 2, and Livia’s District 1 boy looked like he could be a contender as well. Coriolanus’s girl seemed fairly healthy, but her slight build was more suited to dancing than hand-to-hand combat. He bet she could run fast enough, though, and that was important. As the reaping drew to a close, the smell of food from the buffet wafted over the audience

Lots of people do not feel and do not care, deeply. They're the sea creatures who were born to swim in the shallows. And I think that they look at those of us who come from the parts of the ocean that's pitch black and deeper than the core of the planet and they feel fascinated. They're fascinated in the way we are fascinated with eagles or with vampires. They think we're unabashedly deep and beautiful and they feel like they want to try being that way, too. It's like a fascination for a mystical creature. But I have watched these kinds of people burn out before they ever reach that depth (not even close). They burn out because they just get so exhausted! You only have the set of lungs designed for the depths of the ocean, if you are the type of creature who was born in those depths. It's not a regimen, it's not a list of rules, it's not a succession of steps to get there. It's about anatomy. There are creatures for the shallows and creatures for the deep. It is nature's designer plan. And when these people burn out, they will have these outbursts wherein they lash out at you, as if they are exasperated at why you're a mermaid in the black of the seas, and if they could, they'd drag you into a glass tank and chain you up because they don't want that kind of beauty around them, outshining them. Feeling and living in the depths of life (caring so much it hurts, feeling so much it becomes painful) is a mystical, beautiful thing but it cannot be copied and it shouldn't be copied. Everyone has their place and you are going to drown if you can't breathe underwater.

in Howard was in one of those moods during which crazy ideas sound perfectly sensible. A bullish, handsome man with decisive eyebrows and more hair than he could find use for, Lin had a great deal of money and a habit of having things go his way. So many things in his life had gone his way that it no longer occurred to him not to be in a festive mood, and he spent much of his time celebrating the general goodness of things and sitting with old friends telling fat happy lies. But things had not gone Lin’s way lately, and he was not accustomed to the feeling. Lin wanted in the worst way to whip his father at racing, to knock his Seabiscuit down a peg or two, and he believed he had the horse to do it in Ligaroti.1 He was sure enough about it to have made some account-closing bets on the horse, at least one as a side wager with his father, and he was a great deal poorer for it. The last race really ate at him. Ligaroti had been at Seabiscuit’s throat in the Hollywood Gold Cup when another horse had bumped him right out of his game. He had streaked down the stretch to finish fourth and had come back a week later to score a smashing victory over Whichcee in a Hollywood stakes race, firmly establishing himself as the second-best horse in the West. Bing Crosby and Lin were certain that with a weight break and a clean trip, Ligaroti had Seabiscuit’s measure. Charles Howard didn’t see it that way. Since the race, he had been going around with pockets full of clippings about Seabiscuit. Anytime anyone came near him, he would wave the articles around and start gushing, like a new father. The senior Howard probably didn’t hold back when Lin was around. He was immensely proud of Lin’s success with Ligaroti, but he enjoyed tweaking his son, and he was good at it. He had once given Lin a book for Christmas entitled What You Know About Horses. The pages were blank. One night shortly after the Hollywood Gold Cup, Lin was sitting at a restaurant table across from his father and Bing Crosby. They were apparently talking about the Gold Cup, and Lin was sitting there looking at his father and doing a slow burn.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert talks about this phenomenon in his 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. “The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real,” he writes. “The frontal lobe—the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age—is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens.” This time travel into the future—otherwise known as anticipation—accounts for a big chunk of the happiness gleaned from any event. As you look forward to something good that is about to happen, you experience some of the same joy you would in the moment. The major difference is that the joy can last much longer. Consider that ritual of opening presents on Christmas morning. The reality of it seldom takes more than an hour, but the anticipation of seeing the presents under the tree can stretch out the joy for weeks. One study by several Dutch researchers, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life in 2010, found that vacationers were happier than people who didn’t take holiday trips. That finding is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the timing of the happiness boost. It didn’t come after the vacations, with tourists bathing in their post-trip glow. It didn’t even come through that strongly during the trips, as the joy of travel mingled with the stress of travel: jet lag, stomach woes, and train conductors giving garbled instructions over the loudspeaker. The happiness boost came before the trips, stretching out for as much as two months beforehand as the holiday goers imagined their excursions. A vision of little umbrella-sporting drinks can create the happiness rush of a mini vacation even in the midst of a rainy commute. On some level, people instinctively know this. In one study that Gilbert writes about, people were told they’d won a free dinner at a fancy French restaurant. When asked when they’d like to schedule the dinner, most people didn’t want to head over right then. They wanted to wait, on average, over a week—to savor the anticipation of their fine fare and to optimize their pleasure. The experiencing self seldom encounters pure bliss, but the anticipating self never has to go to the bathroom in the middle of a favorite band’s concert and is never cold from too much air conditioning in that theater showing the sequel to a favorite flick. Planning a few anchor events for a weekend guarantees you pleasure because—even if all goes wrong in the moment—you still will have derived some pleasure from the anticipation. I love spontaneity and embrace it when it happens, but I cannot bank my pleasure solely on it. If you wait until Saturday morning to make your plans for the weekend, you will spend a chunk of your Saturday working on such plans, rather than anticipating your fun. Hitting the weekend without a plan means you may not get to do what you want. You’ll use up energy in negotiations with other family members. You’ll start late and the museum will close when you’ve only been there an hour. Your favorite restaurant will be booked up—and even if, miraculously, you score a table, think of how much more you would have enjoyed the last few days knowing that you’d be eating those seared scallops on Saturday night!

What, then, can Shakespearean tragedy, on this brief view, tell us about human time in an eternal world? It offers imagery of crisis, of futures equivocally offered, by prediction and by action, as actualities; as a confrontation of human time with other orders, and the disastrous attempt to impose limited designs upon the time of the world. What emerges from Hamlet is--after much futile, illusory action--the need of patience and readiness. The 'bloody period' of Othello is the end of a life ruined by unseasonable curiosity. The millennial ending of Macbeth, the broken apocalypse of Lear, are false endings, human periods in an eternal world. They are researches into death in an age too late for apocalypse, too critical for prophecy; an age more aware that its fictions are themselves models of the human design on the world. But it was still an age which felt the human need for ends consonant with the past, the kind of end Othello tries to achieve by his final speech; complete, concordant. As usual, Shakespeare allows him his tock; but he will not pretend that the clock does not go forward. The human perpetuity which Spenser set against our imagery of the end is represented here also by the kingly announcements of Malcolm, the election of Fortinbras, the bleak resolution of Edgar. In apocalypse there are two orders of time, and the earthly runs to a stop; the cry of woe to the inhabitants of the earth means the end of their time; henceforth 'time shall be no more.' In tragedy the cry of woe does not end succession; the great crises and ends of human life do not stop time. And if we want them to serve our needs as we stand in the middest we must give them patterns, understood relations as Macbeth calls them, that defy time. The concords of past, present, and future towards which the soul extends itself are out of time, and belong to the duration which was invented for angels when it seemed difficult to deny that the world in which men suffer their ends is dissonant in being eternal. To close that great gap we use fictions of complementarity. They may now be novels or philosophical poems, as they once were tragedies, and before that, angels. What the gap looked like in more modern times, and how more modern men have closed it, is the preoccupation of the second half of this series.

Gather close, and let us speak of nasty little shits. Oh, come now, we are no strangers to the vicious demons in placid disguises, innocent eyes so wide, hidden minds so dark. Does evil exist? Is it a force, some deadly possession that slips into the unwary? Is it a thing separate and thus subject to accusation and blame, distinct from the one it has used? Does it flit from soul to soul, weaving its diabolical scheme in all the unseen places, snarling into knots tremulous fears and appalling opportunity, stark terrors and brutal self-interest? Or is the dread word nothing more than a quaint and oh so convenient encapsulation of all those traits distinctly lacking moral context, a sweeping generalization embracing all things depraved and breath takingly cruel, a word to define that peculiar glint in the eye—the voyeur to one’s own delivery of horror, of pain and anguish and impossible grief? Give the demon crimson scales, slashing talons. Tentacles and dripping poison. Three eyes and six slithering tongues. As it crouches there in the soul, its latest abode in an eternal succession of abodes, may every god kneel in prayer. But really. Evil is nothing but a word, an objectification where no objectification is necessary. Cast aside this notion of some external agency as the source of inconceivable inhumanity—the sad truth is our possession of an innate proclivity towards indifference, towards deliberate denial of mercy, towards disengaging all that is moral within us. But if that is too dire, let’s call it evil. And paint it with fire and venom. There are extremities of behaviour that seem, at the time, perfectly natural, indeed reasonable. They are arrived at suddenly, or so it might seem, but if one looks the progression reveals itself, step by step, and that is a most sad truth.

Lena?" He glanced at the dictionary. "Are you 'pleased, contented, joyful, delighted'? Do you feel 'Lucky, fortunate'? Are things 'clever and fitting,' 'successful and suitable' for you?" Lena stopped slicing vegetables and closed her eyes. "Read me the list again, please," she said. He shut the book. "What have I done, you got to stop and think an hour before you can tell me. All I ask is a simple yes or no! You're not contented, delighted, joyful?" "Cows are contented, babies and old people in second childhood are delighted, God help them," she said. "As for 'joyful,' Lee? Look how I laugh scrubbing out the sink . . ." He peered closely at her and his face relaxed. "Lena, it's true. A man doesn't appreciate. Next month, maybe, we'll get away." "I'm not complaining!" she cried. "I'm not the one comes in with a list saying/stick out your tongue. Lee, do you ask what makes your heart beat all night? No! Next will you ask, What's marriage? Who knows, Lee? Don't ask. A man who thinks like that, how it runs, how things work, falls off the trapeze in the circus, chokes wondering how the muscles work in the throat. Eat, sleep, breathe, Lee, and stop staring at me like I'm something new in the house!

I happened to mention this to a hypnotist I saw many years ago, and he looked at me very nicely. At first I thought he was feeling around on the floor for the silent alarm button, but then he gave me the following exercise, which I still use to this day. Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And so on. Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head. Then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won’t do what they want—won’t give them more money, won’t be more successful, won’t see them more often. Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices. Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you. Leave it down, and get back to your shitty first draft.

From the perspective of my old laptop, I am a numbers man, something like that every instruction he gives me is a one or a zero I remember well I have information about him before he left for his new toy thinner, younger, able to keep up with him, I have information about him may 15th 2008, he listened to a song five times in succession it was titled Everybody, open parenthesis, Backstreet's Back, close parenthesis it included the lyric 'Am I sexual, yeaaaaah' He said once, computers like a sense of finality to them when I write something I don't want to be able to run from it this was a lie he was addicted to my ability to keep his secrets I am a numbers man, every instruction he gives me is a one, or a zero I remember well January, 7th 2007 I was young just two week awake he gave me, a new series of one's and zeros the most sublime sequence I have ever seen it had curves, and shadow, it was him he gave his face in numbers and trusted me to be the artist, and I was do not laugh I have read about your God you kill each other over your grand fathers memory of him I still remember the fingertips of my God dancing across my body After I learnt to draw him he trusted with more art rubric jpeg 1063 was his favourite Him, and that woman, resting her head in the curve of his nick I read his correspondence she hasn't written him back in years but he asks for it, constantly, jpeg 1063, jpeg 1063, jpeg 1063 it was my master piece it looked so, .., life like I wanted to tell him That's not her that is me that is not her face those are my ones and zeros waltzing in space for you she is nothing more than my shadow puppet you do not miss her, you miss me, I am a numbers man, every instruction he gives is a one or a zero I remember well but he taught me to be a Da Vinci and I sit here, with his portraits waiting for him to return I do not think he will Is that what it means to be human to be all powerful, to build a temple to yourself and leave only the walls to pray

Maxims If you work harder and look more closely, there's always something you can whittle away. It's when you get to the essence of your idea that you'll have something to be proud of. 196 Blunt is Simplicity. Meandering is Complexity. 13 The simplest way isn't always the easiest. 2 You can't let yourself be talked into going along with something when you know there's something better. Ever. 15 Apple encourages big thinking but small everything else. 25 Simplicity's best friend: Small groups of smart people. 26 Great ideas travel with a degree of risk. 39 Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff. ~ Steve Jobs's advice to Nike. 51 The less the merrier. 54 Simplicity never stands till. 70 To accomplish great things two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time. ~ Leonard Bernstein, 72 Aim realistically high. 72 Never stop moving. 73 As long as you've got new ideas to share, you are free to re-present the old ones. 110 Simplicity gains power through brevity. 133 Simplicity is in a hurry. 134 Simplicity has universal appeal. 161 It's really hard to design things by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. ~ Steve Jobs, 164 Take advice, not orders. 166 So it must become your nature never to relent. You never want to come out even, because in this game a tie goes to Complexity. 192

Thus the no boundary proposal is a good scientific theory in the sense of Karl Popper: it could have been falsified by observations but instead its predictions have been confirmed. In an expanding universe in which the density of matter varied slightly from place to place, gravity would have caused the denser regions to slow down their expansion and start contracting. This would lead to the formation of galaxies, stars, and eventually even insignificant creatures like ourselves. Thus all the complicated structures that we see in the universe might be explained by the no boundary condition for the universe together with the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started – it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

Thus the no boundary proposal is a good scientific theory in the sense of Karl Popper: it could have been falsified by observations but instead its predictions have been confirmed. In an expanding universe in which the density of matter varied slightly from place to place, gravity would have caused the denser regions to slow down their expansion and start contracting. This would lead to the formation of galaxies, stars, and eventually even insignificant creatures like ourselves. Thus all the complicated structures that we see in the universe might be explained by the no boundary condition for the universe together with the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started – it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

Let’s take a look at one couple. Carol and Jim have a long-running quarrel over his being late to engagements. In a session in my office, Carol carps at Jim over his latest transgression: he didn’t show up on time for their scheduled movie night. “How come you are always late?” she challenges. “Doesn’t it matter to you that we have a date, that I am waiting, that you always let me down?” Jim reacts coolly: “I got held up. But if you are going to start off nagging again, maybe we should just go home and forget the date.” Carol retaliates by listing all the other times Jim has been late. Jim starts to dispute her “list,” then breaks off and retreats into stony silence. In this never-ending dispute, Jim and Carol are caught up in the content of their fights. When was the last time Jim was late? Was it only last week or was it months ago? They careen down the two dead ends of “what really happened”—whose story is more “accurate” and who is most “at fault.” They are convinced that the problem has to be either his irresponsibility or her nagging. In truth, though, it doesn’t matter what they’re fighting about. In another session in my office, Carol and Jim begin to bicker about Jim’s reluctance to talk about their relationship. “Talking about this stuff just gets us into fights,” Jim declares. “What’s the point of that? We go round and round. It just gets frustrating. And anyway, it’s all about my ‘flaws’ in the end. I feel closer when we make love.” Carol shakes her head. “I don’t want sex when we are not even talking!” What’s happened here? Carol and Jim’s attack-withdraw way of dealing with the “lateness” issue has spilled over into two more issues: “we don’t talk” and “we don’t have sex.” They’re caught in a terrible loop, their responses generating more negative responses and emotions in each other. The more Carol blames Jim, the more he withdraws. And the more he withdraws, the more frantic and cutting become her attacks. Eventually, the what of any fight won’t matter at all. When couples reach this point, their entire relationship becomes marked by resentment, caution, and distance. They will see every difference, every disagreement, through a negative filter. They will listen to idle words and hear a threat. They will see an ambiguous action and assume the worst. They will be consumed by catastrophic fears and doubts, be constantly on guard and defensive. Even if they want to come close, they can’t. Jim’s experience is defined perfectly by the title of a Notorious Cherry Bombs song, “It’s Hard to Kiss the Lips at Night that Chew Your Ass Out All Day Long.

Ask no questions and you'll be told no lies.'' ''Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.'' ''Miss Havisham: ''I'll tell you'', said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, ''what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter-as I did! '' '' ''Do you reproach me for being cold? You? You should know , I am what you have made me. Take all the praise, take all the blame, take all the success, take all the failure; in short, take me!'' ''Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule!'' ''The death close before me was terrible, but far more terrible than death was the dread of being misremembered after death!

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to “get through it,” rise to the occasion, exhibit the “strength” that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.           A

Rob’s entire life was successfully laid out, his attributes taking center stage, his accolades only a few seconds shy of the next brilliant offer, and the next rave review. Our family life seemed happy, at least from the outside looking in, and why wouldn’t it? I was the dutiful little housewife, he was the brilliant plastic surgeon, and his daughters closed the circle of the perfect family. When he was gone, working late, patching people up, consulting on emergencies, with the children long asleep, I would often stare at myself in the mirror, and wonder how my life had gotten so far left of where I was once headed. My face, without makeup, was burdened with secrets, lines that threatened to one day reveal themselves like a roadmap of my unhappiness. But for all Rob’s planning, he couldn’t have anticipated that on the second day of August, at 5:45 a.m., his life was about to become completely and forever irreparably changed.

Where to stash your organizational risk? Lately, I’m increasingly hearing folks reference the idea of organizational debt. This is the organizational sibling of technical debt, and it represents things like biased interview processes and inequitable compensation mechanisms. These are systemic problems that are preventing your organization from reaching its potential. Like technical debt, these risks linger because they are never the most pressing problem. Until that one fateful moment when they are. Within organizational debt, there is a volatile subset most likely to come abruptly due, and I call that subset organizational risk. Some good examples might be a toxic team culture, a toilsome fire drill, or a struggling leader. These problems bubble up from your peers, skip-level one-on-ones,16 and organizational health surveys. If you care and are listening, these are hard to miss. But they are slow to fix. And, oh, do they accumulate! The larger and older your organization is, the more you’ll find perched on your capable shoulders. How you respond to this is, in my opinion, the core challenge of leading a large organization. How do you continue to remain emotionally engaged with the challenges faced by individuals you’re responsible to help, when their problem is low in your problems queue? In that moment, do you shrug off the responsibility, either by changing roles or picking powerlessness? Hide in indifference? Become so hard on yourself that you collapse inward? I’ve tried all of these! They weren’t very satisfying. What I’ve found most successful is to identify a few areas to improve, ensure you’re making progress on those, and give yourself permission to do the rest poorly. Work with your manager to write this up as an explicit plan and agree on what reasonable progress looks like. These issues are still stored with your other bags of risk and responsibility, but you’ve agreed on expectations. Now you have a set of organizational risks that you’re pretty confident will get fixed, and then you have all the others: known problems, likely to go sideways, that you don’t believe you’re able to address quickly. What do you do about those? I like to keep them close. Typically, my organizational philosophy is to stabilize team-by-team and organization-by-organization. Ensuring any given area is well on the path to health before moving my focus. I try not to push risks onto teams that are functioning well. You do need to delegate some risks, but generally I think it’s best to only delegate solvable risk. If something simply isn’t likely to go well, I think it’s best to hold the bag yourself. You may be the best suited to manage the risk, but you’re almost certainly the best positioned to take responsibility. As an organizational leader, you’ll always have a portfolio of risk, and you’ll always be doing very badly at some things that are important to you. That’s not only okay, it’s unavoidable.

Attempting to indirectly get validation, reassurance, and other psychological fulfillment from sex - especially if we don't admit our agenda to ourselves or inform our partner - makes sex complicated, unpredictable, and a lot of work. We make it even harder on ourselves by creating narrow, rigid definitions of the satisfactions we seek; if "manliness" means always being erect regardless of fatigue, for instance, or "competent" means climaxing every time, sexual "success" will be frustratingly elusive. Perhaps this helps explain why you aren't focused on pleasure and closeness during sex. It's because you're also looking for something else, whether you know it or not. This also helps explain why so many people are sexually dissatisfied - because sex isn't delivering what they really want, in fact can't deliver what they want through genital excellence. And any psychological satisfaction you accidentally get doesn't stick to you ribs because it's indirect, unacknowledged, and fleeting.

It's ironic that Juanita has come into this place in a low-tech, black-and-white avatar. She was the one who figured out a way to make avatars show something close to real emotion. That is a fact Hiro has never forgotten, because she did most of her work when they were together, and whenever an avatar looks surprised or angry or passionate in the Metaverse, he sees an echo of himself or Juanita - - the Adam and Eve of the Metaverse. Makes it hard to forget. Shortly after Juanita and Da5id got divorced, The Black Sun really took off. And once they got done counting their money, marketing the spinoffs, soaking up the adulation of others in the hacker community, they all came to the realization that what made this place a success was not the collision-avoidance algorithms or the bouncer daemons or any of that other stuff. It was Juanita's faces. Just ask the businessmen in the Nipponese Quadrant. They come here to talk turkey with suits from around the world, and they consider it just as good as a face-to-face. They more or less ignore what is being said -- a lot gets lost in translation, after all. They pay attention to the facial expressions and body language of the people they are talking to. And that's how they know what's going on inside a person's head-by condensing fact from the vapor of nuance. Juanita refused to analyze this process, insisted that it was something ineffable, something you couldn't explain with words. A radical, rosary-toting Catholic, she has no problem with that kind of thing. But the bitheads didn't like it. Said it was irrational mysticism. So she quit and took a job with some Nipponese company. They don't have any problem with irrational mysticism as long as it makes money. But Juanita never comes to The Black Sun anymore. Partly, she's pissed at Da5id and the other hackers who never appreciated her work. But she has also decided that the whole thing is bogus. That no matter how good it is, the Metaverse is distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants no such distortion in her relationships.

The quality of the people involved in the company was just as critical. I use the word quality to encompass two quite different characteristics. One of these is business ability. Business ability can be further broken down into two very different types of skills. One of these is handling the day-to-day tasks of business with above-average efficiency. In the day-to-day tasks, I include a hundred and one matters, varying all the way from constantly seeking and finding better ways to produce more efficiently to watching receivables with sufficient closeness. In other words, operating skill implies above-average handling of the many things that have to do with the near-term operation of the business. However, in the business world, top-notch managerial ability also calls for another skill that is quite different. This is the ability to look ahead and make long-range plans that will produce significant future growth for the business without at the same time running financial risks that may invite disaster. Many companies contain managements that are very good at one or the other of these skills. However, for real success, both are necessary.

In North America, there is no nostalgia for the postwar period, quite simply because the Trente Glorieuses never existed there: per capita output grew at roughly the same rate of 1.5–2 percent per year throughout the period 1820–2012. To be sure, growth slowed a bit between 1930 and 1950 to just over 1.5 percent, then increased again to just over 2 percent between 1950 and 1970, and then slowed to less than 1.5 percent between 1990 and 2012. In Western Europe, which suffered much more from the two world wars, the variations are considerably greater: per capita output stagnated between 1913 and 1950 (with a growth rate of just over 0.5 percent) and then leapt ahead to more than 4 percent from 1950 to 1970, before falling sharply to just slightly above US levels (a little more than 2 percent) in the period 1970–1990 and to barely 1.5 percent between 1990 and 2012. Western Europe experienced a golden age of growth between 1950 and 1970, only to see its growth rate diminish to one-half or even one-third of its peak level during the decades that followed. [...] If we looked only at continental Europe, we would find an average per capita output growth rate of 5 percent between 1950 and 1970—a level well beyond that achieved in other advanced countries over the past two centuries. These very different collective experiences of growth in the twentieth century largely explain why public opinion in different countries varies so widely in regard to commercial and financial globalization and indeed to capitalism in general. In continental Europe and especially France, people quite naturally continue to look on the first three postwar decades—a period of strong state intervention in the economy—as a period blessed with rapid growth, and many regard the liberalization of the economy that began around 1980 as the cause of a slowdown. In Great Britain and the United States, postwar history is interpreted quite differently. Between 1950 and 1980, the gap between the English-speaking countries and the countries that had lost the war closed rapidly. By the late 1970s, US magazine covers often denounced the decline of the United States and the success of German and Japanese industry. In Britain, GDP per capita fell below the level of Germany, France, Japan, and even Italy. It may even be the case that this sense of being rivaled (or even overtaken in the case of Britain) played an important part in the “conservative revolution.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States promised to “roll back the welfare state” that had allegedly sapped the animal spirits of Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurs and thus to return to pure nineteenth-century capitalism, which would allow the United States and Britain to regain the upper hand. Even today, many people in both countries believe that the conservative revolution was remarkably successful, because their growth rates once again matched continental European and Japanese levels. In fact, neither the economic liberalization that began around 1980 nor the state interventionism that began in 1945 deserves such praise or blame. France, Germany, and Japan would very likely have caught up with Britain and the United States following their collapse of 1914–1945 regardless of what policies they had adopted (I say this with only slight exaggeration). The most one can say is that state intervention did no harm. Similarly, once these countries had attained the global technological frontier, it is hardly surprising that they ceased to grow more rapidly than Britain and the United States or that growth rates in all of these wealthy countries more or less equalized [...] Broadly speaking, the US and British policies of economic liberalization appear to have had little effect on this simple reality, since they neither increased growth nor decreased it.

In your journal, note which of the following statements describe one or both of your parents (Gibson 2015). My parent often overreacted to relatively minor things. My parent didn’t express much empathy or awareness of my feelings. When it came to deeper feelings and emotional closeness, my parent seemed uncomfortable and didn’t go there. My parent was often irritated by individual differences or different points of view. When I was growing up, my parent used me as a confidant but wasn’t a confidant for me. My parent often said and did things without thinking about people’s feelings. I didn’t get much attention or sympathy from my parent, except maybe when I was really sick. My parent was inconsistent—sometimes wise, sometimes unreasonable. Conversations mostly centered on my parent’s interests. If I became upset, my parent either said something superficial and unhelpful or got angry and sarcastic. Even polite disagreement could make my parent very defensive. It was deflating to tell my parent about my successes because it didn’t seem to matter. I frequently felt guilty for not doing enough or not caring enough for them. Facts and logic were no match for my parent’s opinions. My parent wasn’t self-reflective and rarely looked at their part in a problem. My parent tended to be a black-and-white thinker, unreceptive to new ideas.

From the molten basements of the world, two hundred miles down, it comes. One crystal in a seam of others. Pure carbon, each atom linked to four equidistant neighbors, perfectly knit, tetrahedral, unsurpassed in hardness. Already it is old: unfathomably so. Incalculable eons tumble past. The earth shifts, shrugs, stretches. One year, one day, one hour, a great upflow of magma gathers a seam of crystals and drives it toward the surface, mile after burning mile; it cools inside a huge, smoking xenolith of kimberlite, and there it waits. Century after century. Rain, wind, cubic miles of ice. Bedrock becomes boulders, boulders become stones; the ice retreats, a lake forms, and galaxies of freshwater clams flap their million shells at the sun and close and die and the lake seeps away. Stands of prehistoric trees rise and fall and rise again in succession. Until another year, another day, another hour, when a storm claws one particular stone out of a canyon and sends it into a clattering flow of alluvium, where eventually it finds, one evening, the attention of a prince who knows what he is looking for. It is cut, polished; for a breath, it passes between the hands of men. Another hour, another day, another year. Lump of carbon no larger than a chestnut. Mantled with algae, bedecked with barnacles. Crawled over by snails. It stirs among the pebbles.

So what kind of woman are you looking for? Let me guess. Professional. Sophisticated. Classy. Intelligent. Basically, Lucia but younger, or do you like a little Mrs. Robinson between the sheets?" She took another bite of her hot dog. Was there any better food? "My relationship with Lucia is strictly professional, but yes, I'd be interested in someone similar." "So, you want a mini-me," she teased. "I mean a mini-you. Not me. Obviously. Lucia is pretty much the opposite of me, which is another reason I knew that job wouldn't work out." "You have ketchup on your cheek." He took a napkin and gently dabbed it at the corner of her mouth. Desire flooded her veins followed by a wave of desolation. She could easily fall for a man like Jay. Smart, handsome, ambitious, successful, and yet she sensed a longing in him, a secret Jay waiting to be free. "Is it gone?" Her voice came out in a whisper. He leaned in and studied her with a serious intensity that took her breath away. He was so close she could see the gentle dip of his chin, the dark stubble of his five-o'clock shadow even though it couldn't be much past four o'clock. His lips were firm and soft, his mouth the perfect size for kissing. She drew in his scent: pine and mountains and the rich, earthy scent of the soil she'd turned in the garden when her family was whole and she never had to wonder whose house she was in when she woke up in the morning.

Dressed for Success" Yeah, yeah, yeah Tried to make it little by little Tried to make it bit by bit on my own Quit the job the gray believers Another town where I get close to the bone Whatcha gonna tell your brother? Oh, oh, oh Whatcha gonna tell your father? I don't know Whatcha gonna tell your mother? Let me go I'm gonna get dressed for success Shaping me up for the big time, baby Get dressed for success Shaping it up for your love For your love, yeah, yeah, yeah I'm not afraid, a trembling flower I'll feed your heart and blow the dust from your eyes, oh, oh, oh And in the dark things happen faster I love the way you sway your hips next to mine Whatcha gonna tell your brother? Oh, oh, oh Whatcha gonna tell your father? I don't know Whatcha gonna tell your mother? Let me go I'm gonna get dressed for success Shaping me up for the big time baby Get dressed for success Shaping it up for your love, yeah (Look sharp) Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh, oh Whatcha gonna tell your brother? Oh, oh, oh Whatcha gonna tell your father? I don't know Whatcha gonna tell your mother? Let me go (Dressed for success) I'm gonna get (Dressed for success) I'm gonna get dressed for success Hitting a spot for the big time, baby Get dressed for success Shaping it up for your love For your love, yeah, yeah, yeah For your love, yeah, yeah, yeah For your love, yeah, yeah, yeah For your love, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah

They seemed so right together-both of them sophisticated, dark-haired, and striking; no doubt they had much in common, she thought a little dismally as she picked up her knife and fork and went to work on her lobster. Beside her, Lord Howard leaned close and teased, “It’s dead, you know.” Elizabeth glanced blankly at him, and he nodded to the lobster she was still sawing needlessly upon. “It’s dead,” he repeated. “There’s no need to try to kill it twice.” Mortified, Elizabeth smiled and sighed and thereafter made an all-out effort to ingratiate herself with the rest of the party at their table. As Lord Howard had forewarned the gentlemen, who by now had all seen or heard about her escapade in the card room, were noticeably cooler, and so Elizabeth tried ever harder to be her most engaging self. It was only the second time in her life she’d actually used the feminine wiles she was born with-the first time being her first encounter with Ian Thornton in the garden-and she was a little amazed by her easy success. One by one the men at the table unbent enough to talk and laugh with her. During that long, trying hour Elizabeth repeatedly had the strange feeling that Ian was watching her, and toward the end, when she could endure it no longer, she did glance at the place where he was seated. His narrowed amber eyes were leveled on her face, and Elizabeth couldn’t tell whether he disapproved of this flirtatious side of her or whether he was puzzled by it. “Would you permit me to offer to stand in for my cousin tomorrow,” Lord Howard said as the endless meal came to an end and the guests began to arise, “and escort you to the village?” It was the moment of reckoning, the moment when Elizabeth had to decide whether she was going to meet Ian at the cottage or not. Actually, there was no real decision to make, and she knew it. With a bright, artificial smile Elizabeth said, “Thank you.” “We’re to leave at half past ten, and I understand there are to be the usual entertainments-sopping and a late luncheon at the local inn, followed by a ride to enjoy the various prospects of the local countryside.” It sounded horribly dull to Elizabeth at that moment. “It sounds lovely,” she exclaimed with such fervor that Lord Howard shot her a startled look. “Are you feeling well?” he asked, his worried gaze taking in her flushed cheeks and overbright eyes. “I’ve never felt better,” she said, her mind on getting away-upstairs to the sanity and quiet of her bedchamber. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have the headache and should like to retire,” she said, leaving behind her a baffled Lord Howard. She was partway up the stairs before it dawned on her what she’d actually said. She stopped in midstep, then gave her head a shake and slowly continued on. She didn’t particularly care what Lord Howard-her fiance’s own cousin-thought. And she was too miserable to stop and consider how very odd that was.

It's necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure. T. Edison Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits. T. Edison There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. Buckminster Fuller Be alone: that is the secret of invention. Be alone: that is when ideas are born. N.Tesla Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. Steve Jobs Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you, because bad news is a headline and gradual improvement is now. Bill Gates If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time. Steve Jobs Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing that we see too late the one that is open. A.G.Bell An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. B. Franklin The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. A.Einstein That's been one of my mantras: focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean, to make it simple. But is's worth it in the end, because once you get there, you can move mountains. Steve Jobs We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work. T. Edison Let's go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday. Steve Jobs

The Belt and Road is global in nature. Its ruling principle is interdependence, a close network of common interests by which every country’s development is affected by the development path in other countries. In his Jakarta speech, Xi called it a “community of shared destiny.” The expression featured in Chinese official pronouncements since at least 2007, when it was used to describe relations between Taiwan and the Mainland. Applied to relations outside China’s borders, it was a reformulation—a modern version—of the traditional concept of Tianxia (天下), which scholars such as Zhao Tingyang had been popularizing with extraordinary success. Zhao argued that the most important fact about the world today is that it has not become a zone of political unity, but remains a Hobbesian stage of chaos, conflict, noncooperation and anarchy.16 Looking for a way to frame new political concepts distinct from Western ideas of world order, the Chinese authorities quickly appropriated Tianxia—a notion that originated about three thousand years ago—and made it the cornerstone of their most ambitious geopolitical initiative. The idea of a community of shared destiny and the Belt and Road develop the two sides of every human action. Both have their own emphasis: the former belongs to the idea, the concept or type, the latter is aimed at practice. Together they form the “dialectical unity of theory and practice, goals and paths, value rationality and instrumental rationality.”17

Really, was everyone aboard this ship slightly mad? Much of Arsenic's initial conversation with the decklings was beginning to make sense. All the crew seemed, in a word, eccentric. Mr. Tarabotti smiled. "Too late, little cousin. I stay here. You done almost? You maybe do not wish late, no? Your father, he will throw a fop." Miss Tunstell said, "Throw a fit, I think you mean, Rodrigo." "Si?" "Yes. He is a fop, but he throws a fit." The captain interrupted, "Yes yes. Soon. But this is more important." "Si?" Mr Tarabotti shrugged and left. He said something in Italian to someone waiting in the hallway as he closed the door. Arsenic turned to look curiously at the cheerful captain. "He tried to kill you?" "Obviously he wasn't successful." Arsenic nodded. Obviously. "My mother would say that shows a lack of follow-through." The captain grinned. "Your mother sounds logical." Miss Tunstell added, although not critically, "And a little bloodthirsty." It was a fair assessment. "You've no idea," replied Arsenic, because it seemed they really didn't. The captain wrinkled her nose. "Old cousin Roddy there is not so bad. He's been reformed through excessive reading. Percy was in charge of extensive literary recuperation efforts." Arsenic smiled at Professor Tunstell, not quite sure what to make of this explanation, but knowing that books could be good medicine. The man dipped his head and blushed. The two ladies looked at him as if he'd done the most unusual thing ever.

In the Metro, one evening, I looked closely around me: everyone had come from somewhere else . . . Among us, though, two or three faces from here, embarrassed silhouettes that seemed to be apologising for their presence. The same spectacle in London. Today’s migrations are no longer made by compact displacements but by successive infiltrations: little by little, individuals insinuate themselves among the “natives,” to anaemic and too distinguished to stoop to the notion of a “territory.” After a thousand years of vigilance, we open the gates . . . When one thinks of the long rivalries between the French and the English, then between the French and the Germans, it seems as if each nation, by weakening one another, had as its task to speed the hour of the common downfall so that other specimens of humanity may relay them. Like its predecessor, the new Völkerwanderung will provoke an ethnic confusion whose phases cannot be distinctly foreseen. Confronted with these disparate profiles, the notion of a community homogeneous to whatever degree is inconceivable. The very possibility of so heteroclite a crowd suggests that in the space it occupies there no longer existed, among the indigenous, any desire to safeguard even the shadow of an identity. At Rome, in the third century of our era, out of a million inhabitants, only sixty thousand were of Latin stock. Once a people has fulfilled the historical idea which was its mission to incarnate, it no longer has any excuse to preserve its difference, to cherish its singularity, to safeguard its features amidst a chaos of faces.

The next day, I went into my dad’s shop, where he was boring barrels for duck calls. “Hey, you want to hear my duck call?” I asked him. I was a little bit nervous because I’d never blown a call in front of him before. “Yeah, let me hear it,” he said. I blew on the duck call. “You sound like a gadwall,” he said. A gadwall hen sounds like a mallard hen, except her cadence is a little shorter and sounds scratchier. But they’re pretty close. I didn’t know if he was complimenting me or criticizing me! “Hey, look on the bright side,” he said. “If the sperm count had been lower, you might have come out as a shoveler.” Shovelers are pretty much trash ducks and aren’t very good to eat. But after Phil told me I sounded like a gadwall, I’ve always had a special place for them in my heart. Several years later, I actually invented the first gadwall drake call. Gadwalls are unique in that the hen very rarely makes a sound. One day, we were working the ducks, and I had a mallard hen call in one hand and our six-in-one whistle in the other because we were working pintails. I blew the hen call and then the whistle. One time, I blew them at the same time and stopped. That sounds like a gadwall drake, I thought to myself. I started blowing them simultaneously so my dad could hear them. “Hey, you might be onto something,” he said. “Why don’t we try that? We’ll get the gadwall decoys and try it on ’em. If it gets them into the decoys, we’ll figure out a way to build them.” It was amazing how many gadwalls responded to my drake call. We ended up building the call, and no one has successfully duplicated it. It isn’t the prettiest of duck calls, but it’s effective.

Suppose that you need to hire a sales representative for your firm. If you are serious about hiring the best possible person for the job, this is what you should do. First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in this position (technical proficiency, engaging personality, reliability, and so on). Don’t overdo it—six dimensions is a good number. The traits you choose should be as independent as possible from each other, and you should feel that you can assess them reliably by asking a few factual questions. Next, make a list of those questions for each trait and think about how you will score it, say on a 1–5 scale. You should have an idea of what you will call “very weak” or “very strong.” These preparations should take you half an hour or so, a small investment that can make a significant difference in the quality of the people you hire. To avoid halo effects, you must collect the information on one trait at a time, scoring each before you move on to the next one. Do not skip around. To evaluate each candidate, add up the six scores. Because you are in charge of the final decision, you should not do a “close your eyes.” Firmly resolve that you will hire the candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better—try to resist your wish to invent broken legs to change the ranking. A vast amount of research offers a promise: you are much more likely to find the best candidate if you use this procedure than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and to make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as “I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw.

The blonde was staring at herself in the mirror, taking on a thoughtful, reflective tone. “Well, it isn’t easy. And his mood changes in an instant. But he collects different girls for different flavors – so one girl doesn’t have to be everybody and everything.” “Oh.” I splashed water on my face and stared for a moment at the mask in the mirror. “You’re just his type, totally. With all the tattoos, you are utterly monstrous, if you don’t mind my saying so. Punk-Goth gone mad.” She swung around to take a close, direct look. “I never saw the point of tattoos, mind you, just fad and fashion. But,” she focused on me, stared, grinned, and rolled her eyes. “My God, darling, you really are perfect! How could you do that to yourself?” She licked her lips. “I think you will be a success. As I said, Sergei loves tattoos. He’s totally into the weird and the monstrous. He adores freaks – and kid, you are about as freakish as they come.” “You think so.” I turned my mask towards her and gave her an extra big smile – I was even more grotesque, Martine told me, when I smiled. “Oh, Gwen, how totally utterly horrible!” she declared and then kissed me to console me for having become a monster. As I grinned at Sergei’s girl, the metal rings in my ears clanked against each other. I could feel the large ring nose, warm, smooth steel, against my curled upper lip. “Yes, you look like a masterpiece of self-loathing.” “It’s called body art,” I said, “It’s a statement.” “A statement?” “Absolutely,” I hiccupped. Everything was fuzzy; I forced myself to focus. “Whatever it is, you’ll be a big success. Sergei collects waifs who suffer from extreme self-hatred. Self-destructive and self-hating girls are one of his hobbies. You can do so much with them.

One day in the dojo (the martial-arts studio) before our karate class began, I witnessed the power of a concentrated focus unlike anything that I’d ever seen growing up in the heartland of northern Missouri. On that day, our instructor walked into the room and asked us to do something very different from the form and movement practices that were familiar to us. He explained that he would seat himself in the center of the thick mat where we honed our skills, close his eyes, and go into a meditation. During this exercise, he would stretch his arms out on either side of his body, with his palms open and facedown. He asked us to give him a couple of minutes to “anchor” himself in this T position and then invited us to do anything that we could to move him from his place. The men in our class outnumbered the women by about two to one, and there had always been a friendly competition between the sexes. On that day, however, there was no such division. Together, we all sat close to our instructor, silent and motionless. We watched as he simply walked to the center of the mat, sat down with his legs crossed, closed his eyes, held out his arms, and changed his breathing pattern. I remember that I was fascinated and observed closely as his chest swelled and shrank, slower and slower with each breath until it was hard to tell that he was breathing at all. With a nod of agreement, we moved closer and tried to move our instructor from his place. At first, we thought that this was going to be an easy exercise, and only a few of us tried. As we grabbed his arms and legs, we pushed and pulled in different directions with absolutely no success. Amazed, we changed our strategy and gathered on one side of him to use our combined weight to force him in the opposite direction. Still, we couldn’t even budge his arms or the fingers on his hands! After a few moments, he took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and with the gentle humor we’d come to respect, he asked, “What happened? How come I’m still sitting here?” After a big laugh that eased the tension and with a familiar gleam in his eyes, he explained what had just happened. “When I closed my eyes,” he said, “I had a vision that was like a dream, and that dream became my reality. I pictured two mountains, one on either side of my body, and myself on the ground between the peaks.” As he spoke, I immediately saw the image in my mind’s eye and felt that he was somehow imbuing us with a direct experience of his vision. “Attached to each of my arms,” he continued, “I saw a chain that bound me to the top of each mountain. As long as the chains were there, I was connected to the mountains in a way that nothing could change.” Our instructor looked around at the faces that were riveted on each word he was sharing. With a big grin, he concluded, “Not even a classroom full of my best students could change my dream.” Through a brief demonstration in a martial-arts classroom, this beautiful man had just given each of us a direct sense of the power to redefine our relationship to the world. The lesson was less about reacting to what the world was showing us and more about creating our own rules for what we choose to experience. The secret here is that our instructor was experiencing himself from the perspective that he was already fixed in one place on that mat. In those moments, he was living from the outcome of his meditation. Until he chose to break the chains in his imagination, nothing could move him. And that’s precisely what we found out.

Comparative religion is very comparative indeed. That is, it is so much a matter of degree and distance and difference that it is only comparatively successful when it tries to compare. When we come to look at it closely we find it comparing things that are really quite incomparable.We are accustomed to see a table or catalogue of the world's great religions in parallel columns, until we fancy they are really parallel. We are accustomed to see the names of the great religious founders all in a row: Christ; Mahomet; Buddha; Confucius. But in truth this is only a trick, another of these optical illusions by which any objects may be put into a particular relation by shifting to a particular point of sight. Those religions and religious founders, or rather those whom we choose to lump together as religions and religious founders, do not really show any common character. The illusion is partly produced by Islam coming immediately after Christianity in the list; as Islam did come after Christianity and was largely an imitation of Christianity. But the other eastern religions, or what we call religions, not only do not resemble the Church but do not resemble each other. When we come to Confucianism at the end of the list, we come to something in a totally different world of thought. To compare the Christian and Confucian religions is like comparing a theist with an English squire or asking whether a man is a believer in immortality or a hundred-per-cent American. Confucianism may be a civilisation but it is not a religion. In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique. For most popular and easy proof is by parallel; and here there is no parallel. It is not easy, therefore, to expose the fallacy by which a false classification is created to swamp a unique thing, when it really is a unique thing. As there is nowhere else exactly the same fact, so there is nowhere else exactly the same fallacy.

Now I’m not trying to sound big-headed or anything but my sensuality has benefited a lot of people in more ways than I can quantify. It has served people not only in romantic relationships but in businesses, organizations and professional lives as well. (People got big promotions at work and major business deals). This was brought to my attention recently by a very close friend of mine in a conversation we had while we were sitting in a coffee shop. She said, “Lebo, have you noticed how so many people who got close to you either through work or relationship have had major transformations in their personal lives within the shortest space of time, that includes myself?” I paused for a moment and remembered the same words being said by one ex of mine, another lady I helped on her project not so long ago echoed the same notion. To some of you this might seem like... c’mon Lebo, anything could have led to any of those transformations. To even associate it with my sensuality seems utterly absurd, it’s like I’m trying to bolster my significance, but I know better now. I know the value I’m bringing into people’s lives whether they acknowledge it or not. Our conversation also made me recall how I had been exploited by others who saw value in me which I, at the time, was still oblivious of. The thing about human beings is that, usually they won’t show you your true value from which they’re secretly benefiting because they know that once you wake up and start realizing it, you won’t supply it for free anymore. So after I had woken up to my true value I decided to start making my sensuality EXCLUSIVE. Now when you make your sensuality exclusive it automatically makes your company highly priced. Consequently, it makes you highly sought after BY PEOPLE WHO SEEK TRUE VALUE AND KNOW WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE. When you make your sensuality exclusive, it increases your value exponentially as well as your desirability, not to everyone, but only TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE. You become the catch. Now I’m saying this to show you the hidden power of the world of sensuality that most people aren’t aware of. Almost every successful luxury industry in the world essentially thrives on sensual principles whether they’re aware of it or not.

The successful individual sales producer wins by being as selfish as possible with her time. The more often the salesperson stays away from team members and distractions, puts her phone on Do Not Disturb (DND), closes her door, or chooses to work for a few hours from the local Panera Bread café, the more productive she’ll likely be. In general, top producers in sales tend to exhibit a characteristic I’ve come to describe as being selfishly productive. The seller who best blocks out the rest of the world, who maintains obsessive control of her calendar, who masters focusing solely on her own highest-value revenue-producing activities, who isn’t known for being a “team player,” and who is not interested in playing good corporate citizen or helping everyone around her, is typically a highly effective seller who ends up on top of the sales rankings. Contrary to popular opinion, being selfish is not bad at all. In fact, for an individual contributor salesperson, it is a highly desirable trait and a survival skill, particularly in today’s crazed corporate environment where everyone is looking to put meetings on your calendar and take you away from your primary responsibilities! Now let’s switch gears and look at the sales manager’s role and responsibilities. How well would it work to have a sales manager who kept her office phone on DND and declined almost every incoming call to her mobile phone? Do we want a sales manager who closes her office door, is concerned only about herself, and is for the most part inaccessible? No, of course not. The successful sales manager doesn’t win on her own; she wins through her people by helping them succeed. Think about other key sales management responsibilities: Leading team meetings. Developing talent. Encouraging hearts. Removing obstacles. Coaching others. Challenging data, false assumptions, wrong attitudes, and complacency. Pushing for more. Putting the needs of your team members ahead of your own. Hmmm. Just reading that list again reminds me why it is often so difficult to transition from being a top producer in sales into a sales management role. Aside from the word sales, there is truly almost nothing similar about the positions. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on corporate responsibilities like participating on the executive committee, dealing with human resources compliance issues, expense management, recruiting, and all the other burdens placed on the sales manager. Again,

I had the most powerful magic, and the need to use it.  Lifting my right hand, I summoned forth my Mana, converted it into magic, and spoke my own word of power.  Much to her surprise, I could still cast with my right hand, despite its missing digits.   “You aren’t really going to do this, are you?” Shart asked.  He was making his way over to me with only the barest hint of floundering. “Hoopie!” The spell pierced her barrier, turning the now useless boundary a bright blue.  Her expression was a mix of terror and amazement as the spell bypassed her defenses and impacted her.  Her ass exploded in an echoing cacophony of flatulence. It was literally the loudest fart I’d ever heard.  As someone whose mother-in-law used to regularly drive people from the room with her anal symphonies, I considered myself an expert.  I highly suspected Bashara was the kind of lady who didn’t fart in public; she must have been saving that one up all day.  She blinked several times, as she checked her status log.  It was time to execute the second part of my plan. Grabbing Shart, amidst his squawking protests, I yelled my battlecry. “Poke-Shart, Go!” Then, I flung the invisible demon straight at her head. Shart only weighed thirty pounds or so; I was more than strong enough to fling him at a pretty good clip.  His cry of “you bastard” slowly faded the further he flew.     I had hoped that being hit in the face would knock her off balance.  That would have given me a moment to pick up my sword and close.  Actually, I hoped it was possible to hit her at all; despite Shart’s ability to fly, he wasn’t very aerodynamic.  I couldn’t win a spell duel, considering I had only one good hand and didn’t know any good spells.  I was going to have to engage her in combat.  I sincerely hoped that my invisible familiar would give me an advantage. I hadn’t calculated on hitting the top of her head with Shart’s Belly Button of Holding.  Her head disappeared, completely buried down to the top of her shoulders.  Her body, however, still worked.  She was careening around, her hands furiously pushing on the demon.  The remaining bandit, coincidentally, looked at Bashara just as her head vanished.  Incorrectly assuming that I had some sort of head vanishing spell, he tried to break and run.   You can’t run away from a homicidal badger.   I managed to get within arms’ reach of Bashara, just as she had successfully begun pushing Shart off her head. She had freed her mouth and was screaming.  As she continued pushing, her nose popped free.  I felt only slightly bad when I grabbed the demon and pushed him all the way down.  In seconds, only her feet were exposed.  Then, I pushed those in as well.

As their uncle, Earl Spencer, says their characters are very different from the public image. “The press have always written up William as the terror and Harry as a rather quiet second son. In fact William is a very self-possessed, intelligent and mature boy and quite shy. He is quite formal and stiff, sounding older than his years when he answers the phone.” It is Harry who is the mischievous imp of the family. Harry’s puckish character manifested itself to his uncle during the return flight from Necker, the Caribbean island owned by Virgin airline boss Richard Branson. He recalls: “Harry was presented with his breakfast. He had his headphones on and a computer game in front of him but he was determined to eat his croissant. It took him about five minutes to manoeuvre all his electronic gear, his knife, his croissant and his butter. When he eventually managed to get a mouthful there was a look of such complete satisfaction on his face. It was a really wonderful moment.” His godparent Carolyn Bartholomew says, without an ounce of prejudice, that Harry is “the most affectionate, demonstrative and huggable little boy” while William is very much like his mother, “intuitive, switched on and highly perceptive.” At first she thought the future king was a “little terror.” “He was naughty and had tantrums,” she recalls. “But when I had my two children I realized that they are all like that at some point. In fact William is kind-hearted, very much like Diana. He would give you his last Rolo sweet. In fact he did on one occasion. He was longing for this sweet, he only had one left and he gave it to me.” Further evidence of his generous heart occurred when he gathered together all his pocket money, which only amounted to a few pence, and solemnly handed it over to her. But he is no angel as Carolyn saw when she visited Highgrove. Diana had just finished a swim in the open air pool and had changed into a white toweling dressing gown as she waited for William to follow her. Instead he splashed about as though he were drowning and slowly sank to the bottom. His mother, not knowing whether it was a fake or not, struggled to get out of her robe. Then, realizing the urgency, she dived in still in her dressing gown. At that moment he resurfaced, shouting and laughing at the success of his ruse. Diana was not amused. Generally William is a youngster who displays qualities of responsibility and thoughtfulness beyond his years and enjoys a close rapport with his younger brother whom friends believe will make an admirable adviser behind the scenes when William eventually becomes king. Diana feels that it is a sign that in some way they will share the burdens of monarchy in the years to come. Her approach is conditioned by her firmly held belief that she will never become queen and that her husband will never become King Charles III.

always close my books with my 10 Commandments for Looking Young and Feeling Great. 1. Thou shalt love thyself. Self-love is essential to survival. There is no successful, authentic relationship with others without self-love. We cannot water the land from a dry well. Self-love is not selfish or self-indulgent. We have to take care of our needs first so we can give to others from abundance. 2. Thou shalt take responsibility for thine own health and well-being. If you want to be healthy, have more energy, and feel great, you must take the time to learn what is involved and apply it to your own life. You have to watch what goes into your mouth, how much exercise and physical activity you get, and what thoughts you’re thinking throughout the day. 3. Thou shalt sleep. Sleep and rest is the body’s way of recharging the system. Sleep is the easiest yet most underrated activity for healing the body. Lack of sleep definitely saps your glow and instantly ages you, giving you puffy red eyes with dark circles under them. 4.Thou shalt detoxify and cleanse the body. Detoxifying the body means ridding the body of wastes and toxins so that you can speed up weight loss and restore great health. Releasing toxins releases weight. 5. Thou shalt remember that a healthy body is a sexy body. Real women’s bodies look beautiful! A healthy body is a beautiful body. It’s about getting healthy and having style and confidence and wearing clothes that match your body type. 6. Thou shalt eat healthy, natural, whole foods. Healthy eating can turn back the hands of time and return the body to a more youthful state. When you eat natural foods, you simply look and feel better. You keep the body clean at the cellular level and look radiant despite your age. Eating healthy should be part of your “beauty regimen.” 7. Thou shalt embrace healthy aging. The goal is not to stop the aging process but to embrace it. Healthy aging is staying healthy as you age, which is looking and feeling great despite your age. 8. Thou shalt commit to a lifestyle change. Losing weight permanently requires a commitment to changes . . . in your thinking, your lifestyle, your mind-set. It requires gaining knowledge and making permanent changes in your life for the better! 9. Thou shalt embrace the journey. This is a journey that will change your life; it’s not a diet but a lifestyle! Be kind and supportive to yourself. Learn to applaud yourself for the smallest accomplishment. And when you slip up sometimes, know that it is okay; it is called being human. 10. Thou shalt live, love, and laugh. Laughter is still good for the soul. Live your life with passion! Never give up on your dreams! And most important . . . love! Remember that love never fails! Now that you have experienced the power of healthy living, be sure to share your success story with others and help them to reclaim their health and vitality.

Derian pulled the blanket snug around himself. “This is my added assurance.” Eena wrinkled her nose as if she thought his answer was odder than his actions. “It’s your what?” “If you recall the last time we were here standing in this very spot, you pelted me with neumberries.” He held up a single berry before popping it into his mouth. “I doubt you would risk soiling your blanket, so I figure wrapping it around me this way I’m pretty much assured safety from any potential attack.” He winked playfully, and she laughed out loud. “I’m afraid you don’t know me half as well as you think,” she announced. Aiming low, she flung a sizable berry at his calf. It hit its mark. “Whoa, whoa!” He lowered the blanket to cover his legs. “You can’t hide yourself entirely, Derian,” she said, aiming for his face. He ducked, raising the blanket like a shield in the process. Another round of ammunition pelted his ankles before he decided it was time to fight back. Eena found herself bound up in her own blanket, arms wrapped securely at her sides. She laughed nonstop, unable to move within his strong hold. Derian leaned forward until their noses touched, and then he kissed her giggles silent. He kept her in the blanket, snug and close to him, but Eena managed to wriggle an arm free and drape it around his neck, holding his lips in reach. She uttered a quick count in between kisses. “Seven,” she breathed. Derian paused, his mouth a whisper away from hers. It tickled when he spoke. “No, no, Eena.” “No what?” “No counting. Not today. No ground rules.” She barely uttered a partial “’kay” before his mouth covered hers again. His hot breath tasted like breakfast. He fixed his hands on each side of her face, and the blanket fell to the ground. As the intensity of their kisses grew hungry, he gripped her cheeks more securely. Eena could feel the air electrifying around them. Her heartbeat drummed—excited and anxious. “Derian…” she breathed. But he didn’t stop. She felt his hand move to support her neck while the other slid down her back, urging her closer. She brought her arms together and pressed against his chest, somewhat objecting to the intimacy. “Derian…” she tried again. But he covered her mouth with his own. She pushed more firmly against him without success. Her protest weakened as his kisses softened. The fervor subsided, and she could feel her wild pulse even out. Amidst a string of supple kisses, Derian’s breathing slowed. He planted his lips on her forehead for a moment before squeezing her tenderly. She snuggled up against his warm chest. “One ground rule,” he whispered in her ear. “We stop when you say ‘when.’” “When,” she uttered. “Okay,” he agreed. Then, as if the thought had just occurred to her, she stepped back to look up questioningly at the captain. “Wasn’t there a leftover sandwich in that basket from last night?” His lips formed a guilty smile as he confessed, “Yes—and it was delicious.

ROUND UP A lot more can be said, but finally, this is your last lesson in this epic 30 -day quest to become a successful conversationalist. For the past 29 days, you’ve been tutored about different techniques to make things happen, and today you’ll kick start a conversation with more confidence and organization, because you are now a professional in the communication world. There are takeaways that you should not forget as you go forth as a small talk professional. You have learnt and practiced many truths about the nature and composition of small talk, but there are certain ones that should be placed next to your heart: Small talk may be seen as a waste of time, but it is actually time well spent; take note of this important point, people might want to convince and confuse you. Small talk with personal meaning orientation will scratch business shop talk off any time. Small talk should now be seen as an effective tool that is available right next to you and can be a gateway to success. You still have the chance to go back to the previous chapters you struggled with, this way, you’ll review and assimilate the important points, no one is an island of knowledge, and so I don’t expect you to have everything registered in your brain already, constant practices will bring out the best in you. Identifying your weakness is just as important as acknowledging your strength. I want to assure you that you’ll definitely excel since you’ve been able to lay hands on this book, and this how you can help others who are still in the position that you were when you started in day one. You’ve been instructed about many secrets of success, as well as the things to exploit and avoid. It’s up to you to make this permanent, and this can only be achieved if you keep following these instructions. You have to make the decision now; whether you would make use of this manual or not, but I would advise that you want it again and again as this is the only way to dedicate your spirit, soul and body to constant improvement. You definitely would have noticed some changes in you, you’re not the same person any more. One important thing is that you shouldn’t give up; try to redouble your efforts and realize that you know everything you’re supposed to know. This shouldn’t end here, endeavour to spread the word to make sure that you impact at least three people per day, this means that you would have impacted about 90 people at the end of the next 30 days and close to about 120 people in just two months. Now, you see how you can make the world a better place? It’s up to you to decide what you want and how you want it to be. Don’t waste this golden opportunity of becoming a professional in communication, you’ll go a long way and definitely be surprised at the rate at which you’ve gone in such a small time. Take time to attend to things that need attention, don’t be too hard on yourself, and don’t go too soft on yourself, you’re one vessel that can’t be manipulated, so you have to be careful and sure about your status on communication skills. On the final note, I would like to congratulate you for reading this to the end, you’ve taken this course because you believe in the powers of small talks, so this shouldn’t be the last time I’m hearing from you. I would look forward to seeing your questions about any confusing aspect in the future. Till then, remain the professional that you are!

you'll wonder again, later, why so many psychologists remain so vocal about having more and better training than anyone else in the field when every psychologist you've ever met but one will also have lacked these identification skills entirely when it seems nearly every psychologist you meet has no real ability to detect deception. You will wonder, later, why the assessment training appears to have been reserved for the CIA and the FBI is it because we as a society don't want to imagine that any other professionals will need the skills? And what about attorneys? What about training programs for guardian ad litems or anyone involved in approving care for all the already traumatized and marginalized children? You'll have met enough of those children after they grow up to know that when a small girl experiences repeated rapes in a series of households throughout her childhood, then that little girl is pretty likely to have some sort of "dysfunction" when she grows up. And you won't have any tolerance for the people who point their fingers at her and demand that she be as capable as they are it is, after all, a free country. We all get the same opportunities. You'll want to scream at all those equality people that you can't ignore the rights of this nation's children you can't ignore them and then get pissed when any raped and beaten little girls and boys grow up to be traumatized and perhaps hurtful or addicted adults. No more pointing fingers only a few random traumatized people stand up later as some miraculous example of perfectly acceptable societal success and if every judgmental person imagines that I would be like that I would be the one to break through the barriers then all those judgmental people need to go back in time and prove it, prove to everyone that life is a choice and we all get equal chances. You'll want anyone who talks about equal chances to go back and be born addicted to drugs in complete poverty and then to be dropped into a foster system that's designed for good but exploited by people who lack a conscience by people who rape and molest and whip and beat tiny little six year olds and then you will want all those people to come out of all that still talking about equal chances and their personal tremendous success. Thank you, dear God, for writing my name on the palm of your hand. You will be angry and yet you still won't understand the concept of evil. You'll learn enough to know that it's not politically correct to call anyone evil, especially when many terrible acts might actually stem from a physiological deficit I would never use the word evil, it's not professional but you will certainly come to understand that many of the very worst crimes are committed by people who lack the capacity to feel remorse for what they've done on any level. But when you gain that understanding, you still will not have learned that these individuals are more likable than most people that they aren't cool and distant that they aren't just a select few creepy murderers or high-profile con artists you won't know how to look for a lack of conscience in noncriminal and quite normal looking populations no clinical professors will have warned you about people who exude charm and talk excessively about protecting the family or protecting the community or protecting our way of life and you won't know that these types would ever stick around to raise kids you will have falsely believed that if they can't form real attachments, they won't bother with raising children and besides most of them will end up in prison you will not know that your assumptions are completely erroneous you won't understand that many who lack a conscience keep their kids close and tight for their own purposes.

THE VISION EXERCISE Create your future from your future, not your past. WERNER ERHARD Erhard Founder of EST training and the Landmark Forum The following exercise is designed to help you clarify your vision. Start by putting on some relaxing music and sitting quietly in a comfortable environment where you won’t be disturbed. Then, close your eyes and ask your subconscious mind to give you images of what your ideal life would look like if you could have it exactly the way you want it, in each of the following categories: 1. First, focus on the financial area of your life. What is your ideal annual income and monthly cash flow? How much money do you have in savings and investments? What is your total net worth? Next . . . what does your home look like? Where is it located? Does it have a view? What kind of yard and landscaping does it have? Is there a pool or a stable for horses? What does the furniture look like? Are there paintings hanging in the rooms? Walk through your perfect house, filling in all of the details. At this point, don’t worry about how you’ll get that house. Don’t sabotage yourself by saying, “I can’t live in Malibu because I don’t make enough money.” Once you give your mind’s eye the picture, your mind will solve the “not enough money” challenge. Next, visualize what kind of car you are driving and any other important possessions your finances have provided. 2. Next, visualize your ideal job or career. Where are you working? What are you doing? With whom are you working? What kind of clients or customers do you have? What is your compensation like? Is it your own business? 3. Then, focus on your free time, your recreation time. What are you doing with your family and friends in the free time you’ve created for yourself? What hobbies are you pursuing? What kinds of vacations do you take? What do you do for fun? 4. Next, what is your ideal vision of your body and your physical health? Are you free of all disease? Are you pain free? How long do you live? Are you open, relaxed, in an ecstatic state of bliss all day long? Are you full of vitality? Are you flexible as well as strong? Do you exercise, eat good food, and drink lots of water? How much do you weigh? 5. Then, move on to your ideal vision of your relationships with your family and friends. What is your relationship with your spouse and family like? Who are your friends? What do those friendships feel like? Are those relationships loving, supportive, empowering? What kinds of things do you do together? 6. What about the personal arena of your life? Do you see yourself going back to school, getting training, attending personal growth workshops, seeking therapy for a past hurt, or growing spiritually? Do you meditate or go on spiritual retreats with your church? Do you want to learn to play an instrument or write your autobiography? Do you want to run a marathon or take an art class? Do you want to travel to other countries? 7. Finally, focus on the community you’ve chosen to live in. What does it look like when it is operating perfectly? What kinds of community activities take place there? What charitable, philanthropic, or volunteer work? What do you do to help others and make a difference? How often do you participate in these activities? Who are you helping? You can write down your answers as you go, or you can do the whole exercise first and then open your eyes and write them down. In either case, make sure you capture everything in writing as soon as you complete the exercise. Every day, review the vision you have written down. This will keep your conscious and subconscious minds focused on your vision, and as you apply the other principles in this book, you will begin to manifest all the different aspects of your vision.

• No matter how open we as a society are about formerly private matters, the stigma around our emotional struggles remains formidable. We will talk about almost anyone about our physical health, even our sex lives, but bring depression, anxiety or grief , and the expression on the other person would probably be "get me out of this conversation" • We can distract our feelings with too much wine, food or surfing the internet, • Therapy is far from one-sided; it happens in a parallel process. Everyday patients are opening up questions that we have to think about for ourselves, • "The only way out is through" the only way to get out of the tunnel is to go through, not around it • Study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of your treatment is your relationship with the therapist, your experience of "feeling felt" • Attachment styles are formed early in childhood based on our interactions with our caregivers. Attachment styles are significant because they play out in peoples relationships too, influencing the kind of partners they pick, (stable or less stable), how they behave in a relationship (needy, distant, or volatile) and how the relationship tend to end (wistfully, amiably, or with an explosion) • The presenting problem, the issue somebody comes with, is often just one aspect of a larger problem, if not a red herring entirely. • "Help me understand more about the relationship" Here, here's trying to establish what’s known as a therapeutic alliance, trust that has to develop before any work can get done. • In early sessions is always more important for patients to feel understood than it is for them to gain any insight or make changes. • We can complain for free with a friend or family member, People make faulty narratives to make themselves feel better or look better in the moment, even thought it makes them feel worse over time, and that sometimes they need somebody else to read between the lines. • Here-and-now, it is when we work on what’s happening in the room, rather than focusing on patient's stories. • She didn't call him on his bullshit, which this makes patients feel unsafe, like children's whose parent's don’t hold them accountable • What is this going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to? • Neuroscientists discovered that humans have brain cells called mirror neurons, that cause them to mimic others, and when people are in a heightened state of emotion, a soothing voice can calm their nervous system and help them stay present • Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth. • The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at • How easy it is, I thought, to break someone’s heart, even when you take great care not to. • The purpose on inquiring about people's parent s is not to join them in blaming, judging or criticizing their parents. In fact it is not about their parents at all. It is solely about understanding how their early experiences informed who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present (and not wear psychological clothing that no longer fits) • But personality disorders lie on a spectrum. People with borderline personality disorder are terrified of abandonment, but for some that might mean feeling anxious when their partners don’t respond to texts right away; for others that may mean choosing to stay in volatile, dysfunctional relationships rather than being alone. • In therapy we aim for self compassion (am I a human?) versus self esteem (Am I good or bad: a judgment) • The techniques we use are a bit like the type of brain surgery in which the patient remains awake throughout the procedure, as the surgeons operate, they keep checking in with the patient: can you feel this? can you say this words? They are constantly calibrating how close they are to sensitive regions of the brain, and if they hit one, they back up so as not to damage it.

In 2008, Donald Trump published a book with Meredith McIver titled Never Give Up. In it he compiled what he labeled his “Top 10 List for Success.” The items on his list are so close to Peale’s prescriptions that it worth listing them as they are deeply built into Trump’s self-psychology. Despite being written over ten years ago, one can see all these elements of Trump’s current rhetoric and conduct. Trump’s ten rules include: 1. Never give up! Do not settle for remaining in your comfort zone. Remaining complacent is a good way to get nowhere. 2. Be passionate! If you love what you’re doing, it will never seem like work. 3. Be focused! Ask yourself: What should I be thinking about right now? Shut out interference. In this age of multitasking, this is a valuable technique to acquire. 4. Keep your momentum! Listen, apply, and move forward. Do not procrastinate. 5. See yourself as victorious! That will focus you in the right direction. 6. Be tenacious! Being stubborn can work wonders. 7. Be lucky! The old saying: ‘The harder I work, the luckier I get’ is absolutely right on. 8. Believe in yourself! If you don’t, no one else will either. Think of yourself as a one-man army. 9. Ask yourself: What am I pretending not to see? There may be some great opportunities right around you, even if things aren’t looking so great. Great adversity can turn into a great victory. 10. Look at the solution, not the problem. And never give up! Never, never, never give up.

Many young nations around the world are actively forgoing their cultural collectivist norms in the hopes of successfully mimicking these ‘First-World countries’ yet when we look closely and delve deeper into the nature of a nation which has nurtured people through severing human bonds and tightening social circles, we see that when faced with collective suffering, we cannot expect to face it by individual healing.

Theo’s freedom from the illusion that someone else will meet all or most of his emotional needs emphasises a crucial point.When you limit yourself along gender lines you have to look to the so-called opposite sex to take up the slack, whether this is expressed unconsciously (Who will feel my feelings for me?) or openly (Who will fix the bathroom shelf for me?). And that is often a fruitless search, or a search that insists the other person provides those aspects you do not want to develop or recognise in yourself. No matter how difficult it may be, it is infinitely more vitalising to attempt to develop in yourself the qualities you need in other people. Even partial success will mean you are taking responsibility for your own self, and gaining greater knowledge of your own self. It will also mean that you can approach others on steady feet, rather than as someone lurching towards the crutch held out by a potential or actual ‘other half’. This

1. Judges self harshly. 2. Fears criticism and judgment, but driven to be critical and judgmental of others. 3. Feels a sense of urgency; impulsive; impatient; compelled to seek immediate rather than delayed gratification. 4. Fears failure but unconsciously sabotages own success. 5. Fears disapproval and rejection, so unknowingly creates characteristics acceptable to others. 6. Fears commitment. 7. Feels inadequate/low self-esteem. Sometimes has to compensate by appearing superior. 8. Fears discovery of real self will cause rejection. 9. Fears intimacy. Unable to form close, loving, intimate relationships. 10. Fears loving and being loved. 11. Fears dependency on anyone or anything, yet are dependent personalities. 12. Fears abandonment but compelled to become involved with compulsive personalities that play out this fear. 13. Frightened of angry people. 14. Afraid to trust due to lack of trust in self. 15. Afraid to reveal inner secrets for fear of rejection or disapproval.  16. Afraid of people and authority figures. 17. Feels different/separated from others due to own feelings, which leads to depression. Isolates self. 18. Assumes responsibility for others’ feelings and behavior. 19. Grieves for the family they never had. 20. Unable to identify or ask for own wants and needs. Unconsciously denies them, for experience has taught that they will not be met. 21. Feels guilty when standing up for self, therefore has to give in to others. 22. Unable to feel or express true feelings as adults, because to feel at all is unbearably painful. In “denial.” 23. Unknowingly driven to build up barriers to protect self from own insecurities.  24. Unable or doesn’t know how to let go, relax, play or have fun. 25. Learns to criticize and blame self and others. 26. Has to make excuses for others’ weaknesses;  has unreasonable expectations of self and others. 27. Tries to find own identity in doing things, but finds it difficult to accept honest praise. 28. Desperately wants control and yet over-reacts to changes they can’t control. 29. Continually seeks outside approval by doing. 30. Takes things literally; it’s either right or wrong, black or white. 31. Takes self very seriously. 32. Distorted sense of responsibility. Concerned more for others than self. (Keeps one from the pain of looking too closely at self and own problems.) 33. Tends to repeat relationship patterns. 34. Has a need to help and seeks people who are victims. Are attracted by that weakness in love and friendship relationships. 35. Doesn’t know self or innate rights. Doesn’t realize it’s all right to make mistakes.  36. Craves validation of self-worth from others, not received as child. 37. Extremely loyal, even when loyalty is unjustified or even harmful. 38. Guesses at what normal or appropriate is. 39. Tends to be a perfectionist. 40. Unable to trust loved ones, authority figures or peers.

We need to work hard to fend off our natural tendency to view what happened as having been inevitable. Our minds simply want to explain what happened and close the case, but the world followed but one path among many possible ones. If we do the Rain Dance and it rains, then to the human brain, it looks like the dance caused the rain. In the more rational part of our brain, we know it's not true. Yet we dance on.

Jim, please don’t misconstrue my enthusiasm for pressure; it’s just that I know that this truly is a perfect fit for you …,” and now you have two options. Option one is to use this as an opportunity to loop back into the sale, yet again, and give it one more shot—paying very close attention to your tonality and body language as well as the tonality and body language of your prospect. In your case, you want steer clear of any unconscious communication that speaks of either absolute certainty or bottled enthusiasm, and focus on utter sincerity and “I feel your pain.” In the case of your prospect, you want to focus on both their conscious and unconscious communication, and if either one signals that they’re feeling pressured or perturbed in the slightest way, then I would immediately transition to option number two. Option two is to use this as an opportunity to get back into rapport with your prospect so you can end the encounter on a high note, while also setting up the possibility for a callback. In this case, you would say something like: “Jim, please don’t misconstrue my enthusiasm for pressure; it’s just that I know that this truly is a perfect fit for you.” Then you’d change your tonality to one of utter sincerity, and add: “So, why don’t we do this: let me email you the information you’re looking for”—or whatever the prospect’s last objection was—“and then give you a few days to look through everything and also to discuss it with your wife”—or whatever their secondary objection was; if there was none, then you’d just omit this—“and

Pixar’s seen by a lot of folks as an overnight success, but if you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.

The next time you go to the supermarket, look closely at a can of peas. Think about all the work that went into it—the farmers, truckers, and supermarket employees, the miners and metalworkers who made the can—and think how miraculous it is that you can buy this can for under a dollar. At every step of the way, competition among suppliers rewarded those whose innovations shaved a penny off the cost of getting that can to you. If God is commonly thought to have created the world and then arranged it for our benefit, then the free market (and its invisible hand) is a pretty good candidate for being a god. You can begin to understand why libertarians sometimes have a quasi-religious faith in free markets. Now let’s do the devil’s work and spread chaos throughout the marketplace. Suppose that one day all prices are removed from all products in the supermarket. All labels too, beyond a simple description of the contents, so you can’t compare products from different companies. You just take whatever you want, as much as you want, and you bring it up to the register. The checkout clerk scans in your food insurance card and helps you fill out your itemized claim. You pay a flat fee of $10 and go home with your groceries. A month later you get a bill informing you that your food insurance company will pay the supermarket for most of the remaining cost, but you’ll have to send in a check for an additional $15. It might sound like a bargain to get a cartload of food for $25, but you’re really paying your grocery bill every month when you fork over $2,000 for your food insurance premium. Under such a system, there is little incentive for anyone to find innovative ways to reduce the cost of food or increase its quality. The supermarkets get paid by the insurers, and the insurers get their premiums from you. The cost of food insurance begins to rise as supermarkets stock only the foods that net them the highest insurance payments, not the foods that deliver value to you. As the cost of food insurance rises, many people can no longer afford it. Liberals (motivated by Care) push for a new government program to buy food insurance for the poor and the elderly. But once the government becomes the major purchaser of food, then success in the supermarket and food insurance industries depends primarily on maximizing yield from government payouts. Before you know it, that can of peas costs the government $30, and all of us are paying 25 percent of our paychecks in taxes just to cover the cost of buying groceries for each other at hugely inflated costs. That, says Goldhill, is what we’ve done to ourselves. As long as consumers are spared from taking price into account—that is, as long as someone else is always paying for your choices—things will get worse.

When failure comes about through devoting precious hours to time-killing pursuits, we can all see that energy is being diverted from its proper channel. But there are ways of killing time which do not look like dissipation. They can seem, on the contrary, like conscientious and dutiful hard work, they often draw praise and approval from onlookers, and arouse a sense of complacency in us. It is only by looking more closely, by discovering that this work gets us nowhere, that it both tires us and leaves us unsatisfied, that we see here again energy is being devoted to the pursuit of failure.

They base their behavior on fear of both criticism and rejection. However, they also want to relate. We see them placing their weight on one side of the teeter-totter and then the other. This occurs in most aspects of their lives. On one side, they will strive to look and act close to perfect, in order to establish connections. Then, they will do things to keep others away. They consciously or unconsciously set themselves up to be the first to reject. Others will then respond with the desired rejection or criticism. The dynamic is one of success to failure, failure to success.

At the moments when you’re leveling up—say, you’re accepting a promotion or you’re on an extravagant vacation you can finally afford or you’re at the Grammys—take a look at who is surrounding you. You cannot be surrounded by people you’ve known for only two years. It was an exhortation to bring your people along for the ride. The people who know where you come from. The people who know what values you hold. The people who give you the gut checks you need. These are the people who will help you make the best decisions with the power and resources you have. They are also the people with whom you will want to enjoy your newfound success.

Startled the man falls but catches himself. He turns around to find a woman appearing out of the forest. This woman’s presence is not interesting or perplexing to the man. She approaches the man and says hello and asks him what he’s doing. “I’m going to jump”, says the man. “Why?”, asks the woman. “It’s a waste being alive, isn’t it? There’s nothing to do, everything is easy and boring. I want to feel but there’s nothing to feel”, answers the man. “Well, what life would you not want to jump from?”, asks the woman. “A life that’s interesting and exciting and actually has feeling obviously”, replies the man. “Well, what makes a life that way?”, asks the woman. “I don’t know, one where some stuff is beautiful, but not everything. Or perhaps everything is beautiful, but at least you don’t always notice it so you can actually appreciate it when you do. A life when you’re happy some of the time, but not all the time, and some of the time you actually feel really sad, so you can tell the difference. One where everyone doesn’t love each other and some people aren’t really that nice at all so that you can actually feel special about certain people. One where bad stuff happens once in a while, one where things are actually kind of hard, and finding success and meaning requires some thought, effort, and creativity, so it actually feels important when you find it. One where nothing is ever perfect, but some stuff can get really close if you try hard enough. I’d never want o leave that life. Doesn’t it sound wonderful?”, asks the man. “Yes”, says the woman. “It does”. The man turns around to look at the landscape over the cliff and tries to imagine a life like that. The woman leans in and pushes him softly on the back. He falls forwards off the cliff. “Hope you see it this time”, the woman says to herself.

During this dizzying period of expansion [the 1950s], the Southern Cone began to look more like Europe and North America than the rest of Latina America or other parts of the Third World. The workers in the new factories formed powerful unions that negotiated middle-class salraies, and their children were sent off to study at newly build public universities, The yawning gap between the region's polo-club elite and its peasant masses began to narrow. By the 1950s, Argentina had the largest middle class on the continent, and next-door Uruguay had a literacy rate of 95 percent and offered free health care for all citizens. Developmentalism was so staggeringly successful for a time that the Southern Cone of Latin America became a potent symbol for poor countries around the world: here was proof that with smart, practical policies, aggressively implemented, the class divide between the First and Third World could actually be closed.

On an early morning scouting trip in the foothills north of Los Angeles, two van-loads of crew people fan out over an area that the production designer wants to make into a guerrilla army encampment. I stay close to the vans, keeping an overview of the area and waiting for the director to emerge. It’s a warm sunny day. Most of the crew is wearing shorts and running shoes. The director is another story. He climbs out of his van wearing a location-specific hunter-outdoorsman khaki outfit complete with an impressive pair of lug-sole hiking boots and walks off in the general direction the crew has taken, thumbing through some script notes. A few seconds later he steps squarely into a pile of dog-doo that everyone else has successfully navigated. I watch, transfixed, as he leaps back in horror and freezes. He does not spot me as he quickly looks around to see if anyone has noticed his predicament. No one else has. He hurriedly examines the bottom of his now-disgusting hiking boot. I take a deep breath and step from beside the van, pretending I am deeply involved in a conversation on my walkie-talkie. As I walk toward him, I pull a little folding penknife from my pocket and flip the blade open. I hand it to him without a word as I pass and continue on toward the location, still pretending to be talking into the radio. I round the corner of a building and find a vantage point. The director is hopping up and down on one foot, hurriedly scraping the bottom of his boot with the tiny knife. He finishes the messy job, pulls himself together, and strides purposefully around the building and toward a clearing where the crew has gathered, waiting for his comments. I quickly take my place as the director approaches. He walks briskly past me and without looking, hands the little knife back to me with the dog-doo-covered blade still open. He continues on to the front of the group and with complete authority runs through his ideas for the scene. Over the next few months of filming, neither of us ever mentions the incident.

Visualization As you hone and create your identity and new narrative, being able to picture yourself moving through this new life actually helps it become your reality. As you use imagery as a tool, be aware that there is a huge difference between fantasizing and visualizing. It’s like the saying “If you write it down, it’s a plan; if you don’t, it’s a wish.” Fantasizing is the activity of imagining scenarios that satisfy your desire for gratification and vengeance. Fantasizing is wishing, which is not a bad place to start. Fantasy often uses a third-person POV, like watching yourself in the best movie ever, starring you. It might be fun to fantasize, but as a psychological tool that enables you to get what you want in life, it’s more or less useless. Fantasy is usually about outcome. You imagine yourself being respected or thin, in a sexual or romantic relationship, or on the beach, but you are no closer to realizing those dreams than you were before you fantasized about them. Visualizing is like writing it down to make a plan; more specifically, it is making a model in your mind of the process leading to the desired result. Visualizing is a scientific methodology for rehearsing different reality-based scenarios in your head before an important event or interaction. If you learn to visualize effectively, you can condition yourself to succeed, even in stressful, anxious situations. To visualize for success: First, use the third-person POV to see yourself showing up as required in your life, on task, and with the performance you desire. Next, use the first-person POV, where you enter into the scene and you see and feel the experience. Go over the specifics of a job interview and see yourself being assertive. Feel your steady heart rate. Smell the confidence. Train your brain to associate walking into that interview with assurance and calm. Visualize every sensation and step. The coldness of the doorknob, the plush carpet under your shoes, the overhead lighting, the sound of the copy machine down the hall. Immerse yourself in detail. Script the scene with positive, powerful phrases, like I can and I am. I can get the job done. I am the person you’re looking for. Repeat the scenario. During the week before the specific event or interaction is to take place, practice daily. Later on, when it’s all over, examine how close your visualization was to reality. Even if the two look completely different, you’ll be glad you did all you could to be prepared and to succeed. This is a tried-and-true method of practicing for success. Athletic coaches on the sports field and personal life coaches advocate and outright require this kind of thorough mental preparation. There is no substitute except to rely on luck, which is not really a plan. Prepare, prepare, prepare, and remember what Louis Pasteur said: “Chance seems to favor the prepared mind.

Has your perception of being gay changed? One hundred percent. I now think it’s the biggest blessing. I feel bad for my straight friends. For example, they have to deal with the expectation of marriage and kids by a certain age. To some degree, they probably have to continue to adhere to those expectations I’ve held myself to—of being a professional of a certain kind. Achieving a certain kind of success as externally defined, rather than internally defined. Which, when you come out, you unshackle yourself from. Straight men are wonderful, but a lot of them keep each other at arm’s length. They don’t get too close, aren’t that friendly, feel they’ve got to be a certain idea of what it means to be “macho” and a “man.” And a man is solid and not that nice. If they have an emotion, it’s anger and no other emotions besides that. Being gay has helped me understand that, no, being friendly is great. You should be friendly to everybody, you should make relationships with people: straight men, women, nonbinary people, whomever. It’s helped me understand how to not be judgmental. It’s helped me understand how to try to make my own way in life and not to find success according to money or a title, but according to fulfillment. Empirically speaking, when I look at straight men in the world, so many of them seem boxed in by toxic masculinity and this idea of being strong, tough, and not vulnerable. And that’s bullshit. Being gay helps you get out of that toxic masculine vortex and start thinking, What are my values? What kind of person do I want to be? For most, that helps us be friendlier, more open, more positive, more inclined to be supportive of people, and less inclined to judge. Being gay has shaped who I am in a huge way and made me a more positive and optimistic person; someone who can deal with people better, who can be more mature, and more self-confident. I am also a white guy though. I am a beneficiary of that privilege, too, and it behooves me not to put this all on homosexuality as if I get to claim minority status and not recognize the rest of my privilege.

Finishing the Painting At this point in your painting, you have the opportunity to work on your brushwork. The painting is essentially finished and, if you just don't have any more energy or time left, you could call it "done". But if you have the time and energy, make your painting dazzle and sparkle with brushwork that satisfies the soul. Your painting ought to look great from across the room, of course, but when the viewer gets up close, you want to take their breath away and that, dear artistic friend, is success. Here’s your final checklist: add variations of colors sharpen the focus, soften the secondary add interesting brushwork, surface textures add final details and sparkles walk away, come back with fresh eyes sign it

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Rent creates new possibilities for characters’ sexualities in musicals by representing multiple gay and lesbian characters with frank and casual openness. Rent is peopled with a gay male couple (Angel and Collins) and a lesbian couple (Maureen and Joanne) and it takes those sexualities for granted in the musical’s world of NYC’s East Village circa 1990. Rent’s structure—a single protagonist, Mark, surrounded by a close-knit community—borrows formal conventions of ensemble musicals of the late 1960s and 1970s, including Hair, Company, Godspell, and A Chorus Line. This structure enables the musical to nod to nonheterosexual identities and relationships, an ideological gesture that speaks to its (successful) intention to address musical theater’s wide range of spectators and even make them feel politically progressive. This device of including a few gay characters in a community-based story is repeated with the gay male couples in Avenue Q and Spring Awakening, and perhaps foretells a musical theater future with a more consistent nod to gay people (or gay men, at least).14 Still, both Rent and Spring Awakening ultimately use gay characters to bolster heteronormativity. Angel serves as the emotional touchstone of Rent, endlessly generous and hopeful, caring and sensitive. All mourn his death, which compels the other characters to look at their lives and choices. That Angel’s death enables the other characters to learn about themselves replicates a typical (tired) trope in which an Other (usually a person of color or a person with a disability) aids in the self-actualization of the principal character. Also, Collins and Angel have the most loving and healthy relationship, which the musical needs to eliminate so as not to valorize the gay male couple above all else. In addition, Joanne and Maureen sing a lively number, “Take Me or Leave Me,” but the musical doesn’t take their relationship seriously. Maureen is presented as a fickle, emotionally abusive, yet irresistible lover (Joanne and Mark’s duet, “The Tango Maureen”) and a less-than-accomplished artist (her “The Cow Jumped over the Moon” is a parody of performance art).15 In contrast, Mimi

or trepidation, like they wanted to run away as fast as they could once the photo was taken. But Manfred Lange appeared happy to be photographed. His occupation was listed as art historian, and his date of birth as 29 June 1871. All consistent with what Anna knew about him. She flipped the little cardboard folder of his work permit over. Underneath was a membership card to the NSDAP, the Nazi Party. Again, his unapologetic face stared out at her. Member number 149578. So he had been a party member. Anna twinged a little. Had he told her he had been a party member? People with important jobs usually had to be, and it didn’t necessarily mean they were true believers, or even sympathizers. Still, it bothered her. She scanned the room trying not to appear furtive but failing. She quickly flipped pages to see if she could find his Fragebogen, the questionnaire the Americans would have made him complete. But it wasn’t there, of course, because these were the Germans’ files, not the Americans’. Deeply uncomfortable, she flipped back to the party membership card. The date of issue was 20 April 1933. Hitler’s birthday. Manfred Lange had been what the Germans called a March Violet—a late bloomer. March Violets were those who joined the party right after Hitler had seized full authority in March of 1933. Many with elite jobs and who considered themselves to have standing in society, rushed to join the party in order to be on the right side of the power grab. Probably that’s what Manfred Lange had done, too, like millions of others. She closed the folder indicating she was ready to go. She wanted to be out of the building and far away. “Find anything we should know about?” Bender asked, as he held the door for her. “No,” she lied. “Okay. I’ll take your word for it,” he said, climbing into the driver’s seat. The air had turned colder and the sky was socked in with dense clouds. “Looks like we’re in the clear for now. At least with the folks working for us.” He shot her a look. “Should you have let me see Herr Lange’s information?” Anna retaliated to deflect any further line of questioning. He smiled as he started the engine. “Probably not,” he said, “but I can’t help it. I’m so nosy.” Six “Where were you? I couldn’t find you at all yesterday.” Cooper was flustered and irritated but a smile appeared when Anna looked up at him from her desk. Things had piled up while she was out with Bender, so she had come in early to catch up. Anna honestly couldn’t remember if Manfred Lange had mentioned being a party member; she could only recall that he was very against the Nazis’ attitude toward art and free speech to the point where the memories had upset him. She hated that these misgivings lived on and probably would forever. One day, Amalia would ask her what she had done in the war. “I went with Bender to Darmstadt. I thought you knew about that,” she said. “He told me he had checked with you.” “That’s right. Of course. Was it a successful trip?” He sat down in the chair next to her table, intent on something. “I think so. He asked me to help him translate some paperwork. He was checking on some personnel? I didn’t find anything.” “Sounds like good news. For us, anyway. We already had to fire some people when their past caught up with them.” “Because they were party members?” “Or worse. Makes sense, but we had to let some very qualified people go. And with all these government types breathing down our necks, we can’t afford a single screw up. Washington is just waiting for something to go wrong so they can scrap this whole operation.” His face sank back into the shadows it had carried for the past weeks. He leaned forward and dropped his face into his hands. Anna felt sorry for him. “That won’t happen,” she said. “You will make sure of it.” She placed a hand on his shoulder. Without looking at her, Cooper took her hand in his and held it in place, his

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(1) The Mindset of Strategy and Positioning (心持ちの事　付　座之次第) ◎ With regards to mindset as you engage in a contest, be calmer than normal and try to see into your opponent’s mind. The enemy whose voice becomes higher in pitch, eyes widen, face reddens, muscles bulge and face grimaces is basically incompetent and will [clumsily] hit through to the ground. When faced with a [second-rate] adversary such as this, maintain serenity of mind and observe his face dispassionately so as not to provoke him. Then, taking hold of your sword, smile and assume a position lower than the upper stance (jōdan). Coolly evade his blow as he tries to attack you. When the enemy appears somewhat perturbed by your unusual attitude, this is the time to strike. Also, if your opponent is quiet, eyes narrowed, body at ease, and he is holding his sword in a relaxed manner as if his fingers are floating on the hilt, assume that he is an expert. Do not saunter carelessly into his range. You must seize the initiative and assail him skillfully, driving him back and striking in quick succession. If you are nonchalant with such a competent opponent, he will force you back. It is crucial to ascertain how capable your enemy is. In terms of where you should position yourself, the same conditions apply in both spacious or cramped locations. Step in so that walls will not impede your sword swings from either side. Take an approximate stance with the long sword and nimbly close in on your foe. If your sword should collide with some barrier, the enemy will become emboldened and will hem you in. If your sword looks as if it might scrape the ceiling, determine the actual height with the tip and be mindful thereafter. You can employ either sword for this, as long as it is the one that cannot be used [in attack while you do this]. Keep the light behind you. With your usual training, be prepared to freely apply any kind of technique with a relaxed mind, but always execute with urgency. It is important to adapt according to the circumstances. (2) About Gaze (目付之事) ◎ Direct your eyes on the enemy’s face. Do not focus on anything else. Since the mind is projected in [facial] expressions, there is no place more revealing than the face to fix one’s gaze. The way of observing the enemy’s face is the same as looking through the mist at trees and rocks on an island two and a half miles [4 km] in the distance. It is the same as peering at [and identifying] birds perched atop a shanty 100 yards [91 meters] away through the falling sleet. It is also akin to beholding a decorative wooden board used to cover the ridge and purlin ends of a roof gable or the tiles on a hut. Calmly focus your gaze [to take everything in].

Shh,” I murmur, taking care to keep my voice low. “It is only a dream. You’re safe. I’ve got you.” [...] "A dream,” she repeats, pupils dilated as she stares up at me. She licks her lips, and I follow the movement with my eyes, a heat pulsing low at the base of my spine. “It was just a dream.” I nod, trying to angle my hips away from her in a futile attempt to hide my thickening cock. But her body is pressed close to mine, tucked beside me under my and Jadi’s wool traveling blankets. I see the moment she realizes, my preternatural vision able to take in the details of her shock. I see the way her pale eyes go wide, cheeks flushing pink. Hear her breath hitch in surprise. I feel my own cheeks heat in response, a flush of shame tightening in my chest. Shame at how much I want her. At how I’ve treated her. Shame at how jealously I guarded Jadi’s affections. At the way I cruelly tried to drive him away from her. “Asterion?” My name is barely a whisper on her lips, but she doesn’t pull away from me. Instead, her thigh presses against my hardening length. Almost like she’s seeking me out. But of course, that can’t be right. No woman would seek me out. Not after the way I’ve treated her. “Yes?” My voice catches in my throat, but I don’t dare look away. “Do you – are you…” her voice trails off, but she keeps her eyes locked on mine. Guilt tightens its hold behind my ribs, but I nod. There’s no point in denying it. No point in lying to her. Not when she can feel the proof of my attraction to her pressing against her. “I’m sorry,” I grit out, pulling my hand away from her face. “I don’t mean to… Please, just ignore it.” I roll away until I’m lying on my back, my erection almost painful as it pushes against the weight of the blankets. “Because of Jadi?” she asks, her voice thready and uncertain. I furrow my brow, glaring with irritation into the darkness. “Jadi? What does Jadi have to do with it?” “I mean – just that you and Jadi are together. Lovers? I not know word,” she babbles. “And I know that. Respect that. I not want come between you and Jadi. At party, he asked if he could court me,” she confesses. “I sorry if I…” I cut her off with a frustrated hiss, hating myself even more for this proof of how I’ve hurt Jadi. How successfully I have pushed her away from him. “You have nothing to apologize for,” I grind out. “Jadi has every right to court you. Every right. The only one who could deny him that is you.” “But you and Jadi…” “Are lovers? Intertwined as closely as two threads woven into the same cloth? Yes.” I bark out a bitter, mirthless laugh. “Which makes my treatment of him – of you – even worse.” The words are spilling out now, like water into the hull of a ship once the wood has cracked. Now that I’ve started, there is no stopping it. “I’ve known for moon cycles that he cares for you, and I hurt him for it. I was cruel to him and tried to chase you away. Because I was afraid you would steal him away from me, and he’s all I have. He’s everything to me. He’s my heart. My heart.” I clutch my fist against my chest in emphasis, still staring at the ceiling, not daring to turn and meet her eyes with my own. “I was jealous, and it was wrong, and now the gods are probably laughing at me. Because I want you. I want you. After trying to drive Jadi away from you, now I want you for myself. But I don’t deserve you. Not after the way I’ve treated you. And even then, even if I hadn’t…” [...] “I want you too.” Her words are no more than a whisper, and I tense, my first instinct to dismiss them the moment I register what she’s said. “I want you. And Jadi,” she admits, and there’s a raw vulnerability in those simple words that I don’t understand. “I shouldn’t, should I? Want you both, I mean? Like that?” I roll to my side to stare at her in disbelief.

Have you ever seen someone buy a piece of furniture or clothing from New York, Chicago or London? Even though the exact same product was available right down the street at a local retailer for a fraction of the cost? This kind of phenomenon is referred to as ‘The expert from afar’ enticement that enraptures the naïve with the idea that things distant and far removed have more value because of the popularity of their location or the pedigree of the presenter. They often neglect to seek resources locally that offer the same product or practical wisdom, and do not employ the benefits of direct first hand observation to test the efficacy of what can be found close by within arm’s length. Instead they venture afar without looking at what is often right in front of them, invisible because of proximity. However, invisibility has its own value too. It allows one to carry on unnoticed, and go merrily about your own successful way.

For if you look closely At the so called idols of the world They have something in common. They were ignorant They ignored the noise They created their own path.

well as illiterate, unhealthy and bloody. I admire contemporary social scientific work that distinguishes between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ sets of institutions,18 but as an historian I find that distinction too simplistic. For one of the puzzles of modern history is that successful societies – like eighteenth-century England – often had institutions that today most people would be inclined to condemn. Already by the time of the Victorians, Hanoverian England looked shockingly corrupt in retrospect. And even in the 1850s, to Dickens, England’s rule of law was still an object of derision, not admiration. Moreover, the historical

Maintaining a close relationship with the Savior is the only goal Paul would set. He wasn’t perfect at it, but he singlemindedly pursued it. And he encourages us to do so today. Life is much simpler when we choose to pursue only one thing—the race before us. Don’t look back. Heavenly Father, keep our eyes on the goal, forgetting the successes and failures of this past year.

Prayer: Father God, as I look upon the everyday drudgeries of life, may I recognize my commitment to You. May I see the eternal light in these tasks so that I can recognize that You are building eternal character in my life. Amen.   Action: Examine two or three of your drudgeries to see how God can make these into opportunities for character building.   Today’s Wisdom: When things go wrong, as they sometimes will, When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill, When the funds are low and the debts are high, And you want to smile, but you have to sigh, When care is pressing you down a bit, Rest, if you must—but don’t you quit. Life is queer with its twists and turns, As every one of us sometimes learns, And many a failure turns about When he might have won had he stuck it out; Don’t give up, though the pace seems slow— You might succeed with another blow. Often the goal is nearer than It seems to a faint and faltering man, Often the struggler has given up When he might have captured the victor’s cup, And he learned too late, when the night slipped down, How close he was to the golden crown. Success is failure turned inside out— The silver tint of the clouds of doubt— And you never can tell how close you are, It may be near when it seems afar; So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit— It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.

Only One Thing One thing I do [it is my one aspiration]: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the [supreme and heavenly] prize to which God in Christ Jesus is calling us upward. PHILIPPIANS 3:13-14 AMP The start of a new year is filled with anticipation of what is ahead—a sense of getting to start over, make a fresh start—and with relief that some things are best left behind. Some make resolutions, only to break them within a few days or hours. Some set goals, both realistic and unrealistic. Many stay up New Year’s Eve in order to welcome in the New Year; others value their sleep more and really couldn’t care less. Luke records a story in his Gospel illustrating our need to resolve to do only one thing. Jesus and His disciples came to Bethany and were invited to stay with Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. When Martha came to Jesus, complaining that her sister Mary wasn’t helping her, Jesus spoke to her in loving concern: “There is only one thing worth being concerned about. Mary has discovered it, and it will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42 NLT). Maintaining a close relationship with the Savior is the only goal Paul would set. He wasn’t perfect at it, but he singlemindedly pursued it. And he encourages us to do so today. Life is much simpler when we choose to pursue only one thing—the race before us. Don’t look back. Heavenly Father, keep our eyes on the goal, forgetting the successes and failures of this past year.

Piers Morgan Piers Morgan is a British journalist best known for his editorial work for the Daily Mirror from 1995 through 2004. He is also a successful author and television personality whose recent credits include a recurring role as a judge on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. A controversial member of the tabloid press during Diana’s lifetime, Piers Morgan established a uniquely close relationship with the Princess during the 1990s. Lunch with Diana. A big day--a massive, humongous day, in fact. I got there ten minutes early, feeling decidedly nervous. The Kensington Palace front door was opened by her beaming butler. He walked me up the stairs, chatting cheerfully about the weather and my journey, as if a tabloid editor prowling around Diana’s home was a perfectly normal occurrence. He said that the “Boss” was running a bit late, joking that “she’ll be furious you are here first!” and invited me to have a drink. “What does she have?” I asked. “Water, usually,” he replied, “but wouldn’t you rather have a nice glass of wine? She won’t mind in the slightest.” I readily agreed, if only to calm my racing heartbeat. He then left me alone in the suitably regal sitting room. Diana had a perfectly normal piano covered in perfectly normal family snaps. It’s just that this family was the most photographed on the planet. Lots of pictures of her boys, the young heirs, perhaps the men who will kill off, or secure, the very future of the monarchy. To us, they were just soap opera stars, semi-real figments of tabloid headlines and the occasional palace balcony wave. But here they were, her boys, in picture frames, like any other adored sons. Just sitting in her private room was fascinating. Her magazines lay on the table, from Vogue to Hello, as well as her newspapers--the Daily Mail at the top of the pile, obviously, if distressingly. After I had spent ten minutes on my own, she swept in, gushing: “I’m so sorry to have kept you, Piers. I hope Paul has been looking after you all right.” And then came what was surely one of the most needless requests of all time: “Would you mind awfully if William joins us for lunch? He’s on an exeat from Eton, and I just thought that given you are a bit younger than most editors, it might be good for both of you to get to know each other.” “I’m sorry, but that would be terribly inconvenient,” I replied sternly. Diana blushed slightly and started a stuttering “Yes, of course, I’m so sorry…” apology, when I burst out laughing. “Yes, ma’am, I think I can stretch to allowing the future king to join us for lunch.” The absurdity of this conversation held no apparent bounds.

Piers Morgan Piers Morgan is a British journalist best known for his editorial work for the Daily Mirror from 1995 through 2004. He is also a successful author and television personality whose recent credits include a recurring role as a judge on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. A controversial member of the tabloid press during Diana’s lifetime, Piers Morgan established a uniquely close relationship with the Princess during the 1990s. Just sitting in her private room was fascinating. Her magazines lay on the table, from Vogue to Hello, as well as her newspapers--the Daily Mail at the top of the pile, obviously, if distressingly. After I had spent ten minutes on my own, she swept in, gushing: “I’m so sorry to have kept you, Piers. I hope Paul has been looking after you all right.” And then came what was surely one of the most needless requests of all time: “Would you mind awfully if William joins us for lunch? He’s on an exeat from Eton, and I just thought that given you are a bit younger than most editors, it might be good for both of you to get to know each other.” “I’m sorry, but that would be terribly inconvenient,” I replied sternly. Diana blushed slightly and started a stuttering “Yes, of course, I’m so sorry…” apology, when I burst out laughing. “Yes, ma’am, I think I can stretch to allowing the future king to join us for lunch.” The absurdity of this conversation held no apparent bounds. But before he joined us, Diana wanted a little chat. “How’s your circulation?” she asked. Bloody rampant, I thought, as she nestled into her sofa, radiating a surprisingly high degree of sexual allure. “Oh very healthy, ma’am, thanks to you.” She laughed, a tad insincerely. We discussed her mate Fergie. “Can’t you go a bit easier on her?” Diana pleaded, with genuine concern in those extraordinarily big, expressively deep, blue eyes. “Well, she’s her own worst enemy,” I replied. “Look at this morning’s front pages--I mean, who the hell takes the Concorde the day after the papers reveal she’s 3 million in debt?” “I know, I know,” sighed the Princess, “but she means well; she has a big heart. It’s not easy for her.” We debated the merits of Fergie, or even Diana herself, emigrating away from the media firestorm. “Yes, but to where? I’ve thought about it often, but somebody would find me wherever I went.” And then I saw a flash of real sadness in her face, a desperation almost to have her anonymity back, but knowing it is gone forever. I asked what it was like “being Diana.” “Oh God, let’s face it, even I have had enough of Diana now--and I am Diana.” She screeched with laughter, and I saw her chameleon side. Able to switch so easily from misery to hilarity. “It’s been ridiculous recently, just one thing after another. But I can’t stop the press writing about me, can I? You are hardly going to say ‘Oh, okay then, we’ll leave you alone.’ I would like to have a good break. I meet a lot of ordinary people, and they are always so kind to me. They shout out things like ‘Eh, Di, I know what you’re going through, luv,’ and I laughed and think: ‘If only you really knew. He’s worrying about his allotment or whatever, and I’ve got things like the future of the monarchy on my mind.’” More screeches--she has a great laugh. A really earthy infectious cackle. Like a Sloaney Barbara Windsor.

Piers Morgan Piers Morgan is a British journalist best known for his editorial work for the Daily Mirror from 1995 through 2004. He is also a successful author and television personality whose recent credits include a recurring role as a judge on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. A controversial member of the tabloid press during Diana’s lifetime, Piers Morgan established a uniquely close relationship with the Princess during the 1990s. William arrived at 1 p.m., age thirteen and a half, with braces on his teeth. Tall, shy, and clearly rather bemused to be here, he nodded, rather embarrassed, in my direction. “Hello, sir,” I said, totally unsure of what to call him. “Hello,” he replied, preferring not to call me anything. Jane Atkinson made up the four. We went through to a small but very pleasant little dining room to eat. William asked Diana if she’d seen the portrait of the Queen in yesterday’s papers. “Her hands looked like she’d been in the garden all day; they were all big and dirty,” he laughed. Diana giggled instinctively, then stopped herself. “William, please, don’t say that.” “Sorry, Mummy, but it’s true: Granny did look really funny.” Granny. How odd it sounded. “Can I have some wine, Mummy?” “No, William! Whatever are you thinking?” “But Mummy, I drink it all the time.” “Erm, no, you don’t actually, and, well, you can’t have any.” “Yes, I can,” he replied with a mischievous but determined grin. And he did. A small but interesting piece of power play to observe. William knew what he wanted, and Diana was a soft touch with her boys. Both facts seemed quite good news to me.

Piers Morgan Piers Morgan is a British journalist best known for his editorial work for the Daily Mirror from 1995 through 2004. He is also a successful author and television personality whose recent credits include a recurring role as a judge on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. A controversial member of the tabloid press during Diana’s lifetime, Piers Morgan established a uniquely close relationship with the Princess during the 1990s. Just sitting in her private room was fascinating. Her magazines lay on the table, from Vogue to Hello, as well as her newspapers--the Daily Mail at the top of the pile, obviously, if distressingly. After I had spent ten minutes on my own, she swept in, gushing: “I’m so sorry to have kept you, Piers. I hope Paul has been looking after you all right.” And then came what was surely one of the most needless requests of all time: “Would you mind awfully if William joins us for lunch? He’s on an exeat from Eton, and I just thought that given you are a bit younger than most editors, it might be good for both of you to get to know each other.” “I’m sorry, but that would be terribly inconvenient,” I replied sternly. Diana blushed slightly and started a stuttering “Yes, of course, I’m so sorry…” apology, when I burst out laughing. “Yes, ma’am, I think I can stretch to allowing the future king to join us for lunch.” The absurdity of this conversation held no apparent bounds. But before he joined us, Diana wanted a little chat. “How’s your circulation?” she asked. Bloody rampant, I thought, as she nestled into her sofa, radiating a surprisingly high degree of sexual allure. “Oh very healthy, ma’am, thanks to you.” She laughed, a tad insincerely. We discussed her mate Fergie. “Can’t you go a bit easier on her?” Diana pleaded, with genuine concern in those extraordinarily big, expressively deep, blue eyes. “Well, she’s her own worst enemy,” I replied. “Look at this morning’s front pages--I mean, who the hell takes the Concorde the day after the papers reveal she’s £3 million in debt?” “I know, I know,” sighed the Princess, “but she means well; she has a big heart. It’s not easy for her.” We debated the merits of Fergie, or even Diana herself, emigrating away from the media firestorm. “Yes, but to where? I’ve thought about it often, but somebody would find me wherever I went.” And then I saw a flash of real sadness in her face, a desperation almost to have her anonymity back, but knowing it is gone forever. I asked what it was like “being Diana.” “Oh God, let’s face it, even I have had enough of Diana now--and I am Diana.” She screeched with laughter, and I saw her chameleon side. Able to switch so easily from misery to hilarity. “It’s been ridiculous recently, just one thing after another. But I can’t stop the press writing about me, can I? You are hardly going to say ‘Oh, okay then, we’ll leave you alone.’ I would like to have a good break. I meet a lot of ordinary people, and they are always so kind to me. They shout out things like ‘Eh, Di, I know what you’re going through, luv,’ and I laughed and think: ‘If only you really knew. He’s worrying about his allotment or whatever, and I’ve got things like the future of the monarchy on my mind.’” More screeches--she has a great laugh. A really earthy infectious cackle. Like a Sloaney Barbara Windsor.

The level of success you will experience can be predicted by looking closely at the sacrifices you are willing to make.

Your habits can guide you in the direction of your dreams or hold you back from achieving them. Look closely at your daily habits and you can predict your future with accuracy.

St. Lawrence River May 1705 Temperature 48 degrees During the march, when Mercy was finding the Mohawk language such a challenge and a pleasure to learn, Ruth had said to Eben, “I know why the powwow’s magic is successful. The children arrive ready.” The ceremony took place at the edge of the St. Francis river, smaller than the St. Lawrence but still impressive. The spray of river against rock, of ice met smashing into shore, leaped up to meet the rain. Sacraments must occur in the presence of water, under the sky and in the arms of the wind. There was no Catholic priest. There were no French. Only the language of the people was spoken, and the powwow and the chief preceded each prayer and cry with the rocking refrain Listen, listen, listen. Joanna tugged at Mercy’s clothes. “Can you see yet?” she whispered. “Who is it? Is he from Deerfield?” They were leading the boy forward. Mercy blinked away her tears and looked hard. “I don’t recognize him,” she said finally. “He looks about fourteen. Light red hair. Freckles. He’s tall, but thin.” “Hungry thin?” worried Joanna. “No. I think he hasn’t got his growth yet. He looks to be in good health. He’s handsomely made. He is not looking in our direction. He’s holding himself very still. It isn’t natural for him, the way it is for the Indians. He has to work at it.” “He’s scared then, isn’t he?” said Joanna. “I will pray for him.” In Mercy’s mind, the Lord’s Prayer formed, and she had the odd experience of feeling the words doubly: “Our Father” in English, “Pater Noster” in Latin. But Joanna prayed in Mohawk. Mercy climbed up out of the prayers, saying only to the Lord that she trusted Him; that He must be present for John. Then she listened. This tribe spoke Abenaki, not Mohawk, and she could follow little of it. But often at Mass, when Father Meriel spoke Latin, she could follow none of it. It was no less meaningful for that. The magic of the powwow’s chants seeped through Mercy’s soul. When the prayers ended, the women of John’s family scrubbed him in sand so clean and pale that they must have put it through sieves to remove mud and shells and impurities. They scoured him until his skin was raw, pushing him under the rough water to rinse off his whiteness. He tried to grab a lungful of air before they dunked him, but more than once he rose sputtering and gasping. The watchers were smiling tenderly, as one smiles at a new baby or a newly married couple. At last his mother and aunts and sisters hauled him to shore, where they painted his face and put new clothing, embroidered and heavily fringed, on his body. As every piece touched his new Indian skin, the people cheered. They have forgiven him for being white, thought Mercy. But has he forgiven them for being red? The rain came down harder. Most people lowered their faces or pulled up their blankets and cloaks for protection, but Mercy lifted her face into the rain, so it pounded on her closed eyes and matched the pounding of her heart. O Ruth! she thought. O Mother. Father. God. I have forgiven.

So, of the three major risk areas, execution risk remains the only real issue in building a company. How will the enterprise organize itself to maximize performance from its founders and management team? How will it leverage technology and information to create a unique and sustainable advantage and business model? Answering these questions correctly is the key to building a successful Exponential Organization. For this reason, we need to look more closely at each of the steps in building a powerful and effective team.

Nate felt smug. Stage One was a success. He wanted Rose to be aware of him and now she was. He had flattered her and he had touched her, so she noticed him. He had been fully aware that the hairs on the back of her arm had gone up when he’d intimately stroked the inside of her wrist. Not too much, not to draw attention, just enough to confuse her. He concentrated on Alex and tried not to look too pleased with himself. A few more moments like that and he would have her where he wanted her. His second opportunity came at the bar. Rose was helping carry out drinks. He put one hand on the small of her back, leaned in close behind her and curved his arm around her to reach for his drink. She jumped and came right up against him. He smiled at her and didn’t step back. She blushed yet again. It was quite endearing really. This was going to be easy. At dinner that evening, Alex suggested that Nate join them on the West Tower table. There were assigned house tables, but students were free to sit anywhere. The Headmistress was a fan of house integration and tried to get them to all mix as much as possible. Nate accepted the invitation, much to the obvious confusion of his friends watching from the North Tower table as he walked in with Alex and went over to the West Tower table instead. He caught the eye of his best friend, Gabriel, who was frowning at him with a look of disapproval. He gave a subtle wink and Gabe acknowledged it and nodded. They had been friends a long time and he didn’t need to do more than wink. He hadn’t told Gabe what he was doing, but his friend would know he was up to something.

Aeryn was confused. "On three," he said. "One, two, three." He let the scalpel slip from his fingers. As it fell, Aeryn did all she could to move her leg. She tried to tense the muscle, tried to pull away. When she felt the sting of the blade striking her skin, she knew she had failed. "At least now he’ll know that’s not me. No one would let themselves get stabbed," she thought. He sat across from Aeryn and shined a light in her eyes. He looked closely, then leaned back and removed the blade from her skin. He took out a suture kit and tied two small stitches. "I’m pleased to inform you that the transfer is complete," he said. "What?" Aeryn thought. "When will she be gone?" NIA asked. The doctor leaned back in his chair and ran his hands through his hair. As he did, Aeryn caught a glimpse of a flashing light behind his ear. She hadn’t known that he was augmented. "In time.  As your network continues to become stronger than hers, the mind will reject the old personality.  It took almost a year for the original Dr. Barnes to shut up. But luckily we now have a code that we can update you with to silence her." Aeryn felt panicked.  She wanted to claw her way out of her head, but she had no means to do so.  "I almost feel bad for her," NIA said.  "But she knew that she was handing over control of her body. She just didn’t realize it’d be permanent.  Maybe she didn’t care.  She gave me more and more control before she gave it completely. While she exercised, while she thought she was sleeping, while she was writing or relaxing. She was always retreating inside of herself. It was like she didn’t even want this body." "How is Aeryn 2.0 coming along?" "Copulation was easy at first.  With Aeryn’s loose instructions of ‘burn some calories’ I was able to take her body and use it for attempted reproduction.  So far, it has been a failure. The neglect of the body has made finding partners more difficult." Aeryn shuddered at the realization that the dreams weren’t dreams, they were repressed memories. "Well, you’d better start taking care of that body. It’s the only one you’ve got until you get it to reproduce.  I believe that it’ll be easier to appropriate a child’s mind, seeing as how their personalities are not fully formed yet." Aeryn felt sick at the idea.  As if stealing people’s bodies wasn’t enough, these artificial intelligences were going for immortality by passing themselves along to their host’s offspring. "I’m glad we’ve had another success," Dr. Barnes said. "And with such a quick turn around." "As I said, she was willing." Aeryn watched in disbelief as the two finished up.  She wondered how much time she had left and tried to imagine any situation that didn’t end in her death.  She couldn’t think of a way out.  She wanted to flinch as NIA shook the doctor’s hand, but couldn’t.  She loathed him for convincing her to get the technology, she hated NIA for tricking her, but mostly, she hated herself.  For as much as she didn’t want to admit it, her Assistant had a point. She had handed her life over to technology long before she received the implant. Now, she had lost herself to it.     *

In the cloudy swirl of misleading ideas surrounding public discussion of addiction, there’s one that stands out: the misconception that drug taking by itself will lead to addiction — in other words, that the cause of addiction resides in the power of the drug over the human brain. It is one of the bedrock fables sustaining the so-called “War on Drugs.” It also obscures the existence of a basic addiction process of which drugs are only one possible object, among many. Compulsive gambling, for example, is widely considered to be a form of addiction without anyone arguing that it’s caused by a deck of cards. The notion that addiction is drug-induced is often reinforced. Clearly, if drugs by themselves could cause addiction, we would not be safe offering narcotics to anyone. Medical evidence has repeatedly shown that opioids prescribed for cancer pain, even for long periods of time, do not lead to addiction except in a minority of susceptible people. During my years working on a palliative care ward I sometimes treated terminally ill cancer patients with extraordinarily high doses of narcotics — doses that my hardcore addict clients could only dream of. If the pain was alleviated by other means — for example, when patient was successfully given a nerve block for bone pain due to malignant deposits in the spine — the morphine could be rapidly discontinued. Yet if anyone had reason to seek oblivion through narcotic addiction, it would have been these terminally ill human beings. An article in the Canadian Journal of Medicine in 2006 reviewed international research covering over six thousand people who had received narcotics for chronic pain that was not cancerous in origin. There was no significant risk of addiction, a finding common to all studies that examine the relationship between addiction and the use of narcotics for pain relief. “Doubts or concerns about opioid efficacy, toxicity, tolerance, and abuse or addiction should no longer be used to justify withholding opioids,” concluded a large study of patients with chronic pain due to rheumatic disease. We can never understand addiction if we look for its sources exclusively in the actions of chemicals, no matter how powerful they are.

You say romantic, I say stalker,” Kerry grumbled to Fiona as they pushed their way into the Rusty Puffin. “Please,” Fiona retorted, adding an eye roll for good measure. She was a master of those. “Mr. Dead Sexy From Down Under, a hardworking, successful man you greatly admired, with a family you apparently adored, flies halfway around the world to propose to you? Take a poll. That’s off-the-charts romantic.” “Right,” Kerry said, turning toward her as the heavy door swung closed behind them. “And then I turned him down and he’s still here, hounding me. Stalker.” “I hardly think asking you to lunch--a lunch you said yes to, by the way--then hiring a sailboat to take you out on the bay could be considered hounding, much less stalking. That’s still firmly in the romantic category. I mean, if you really meant no, I’m sure he’d be on the next plane back to Oz.” Kerry stopped completely, fists on her hips now. “What makes you think I didn’t really mean no?” “Well, for one, you’re awfully worked up over the guy. In that she-doth-protest-too-much kind of way. And secondly, Logan said Cooper told him you two had agreed on him staying the full month he’d taken off from the cattle station, to give you both time to figure out if there was something worth pursuing together.” “He said that? To Logan?” At Fiona’s smug nod, Kerry’s eyebrows drew together. “What else did Cooper tell him? And how could you even know that? We left the docks together before Cooper came back. We didn’t talk to him again, or Logan.” Fiona turned her phone around so the screen faced Kerry. “It’s called texting. Maybe they don’t have that in Tanzania or on deserted South Pacific atolls, but here in America, we--” “Okay, okay,” Kerry said, waving her hands, still disgruntled. “It doesn’t matter. For the record, I said yes to lunch just to keep him from showing up every time my back is turned.” She sent a pointed look at her sister. “You know, like a stalker. I didn’t agree to an entire afternoon out on the bay with him.” “You didn’t agree to that lollapalooza of a kiss either. But that happens and suddenly he’s not on the next plane home. Just saying, Ms. Protests Too Much.” Kerry opened her mouth, then closed it again, then folded her arms across her chest. “I never should have told you about that.” Fiona grinned. “I know.

We’ve got things under control here.” “‘We’?” Kerry repeated. “Shouldn’t you be out sampling cake or agonizing over invitation fonts? Assuming you don’t have clients to design interiors for.” “I have clients,” Fiona replied easily, honest joy beaming from her every pore. “Very happy ones. Trust me, after running McCrae Interiors, I can juggle Fiona’s Finds and planning a wedding at the same time with my eyes closed.” Kerry gave her sister a hard time--it was what they did--but she was truly happy for Fiona, with both her new business success and her lovely and loving relationship with their longtime family friend, Ben Campbell. Fiona had sold a successful business in Manhattan to return home and start over. She’d just opened a small design studio in a converted cottage near the harbor, focusing on recycling and repurposing antique and vintage items into something fresh and new. Her designs were both eco-friendly and wallet friendly, and the Cove had embraced her return home and her new business with equal enthusiasm. “Remember you said that,” Kerry commented. “When it’s go time on the big aisle walk and you’re still running around like a crazy person trying to pull everything together at the last second, I don’t want to hear about it.” Fiona batted her eyelashes again as she took an extralong sip on the straw in her glass of lemon water. “I’m the epitome of a happy, relaxed bride. McCrae girls don’t do bridezilla. Well, Hannah didn’t, Alex was lovely, and I’m charming of course.” She looked at Kerry over the tip of her straw, smiling sweetly. “We’ll reserve final judgment until it’s your turn.” “Har, har,” Kerry said, but Fiona was high on wedding crack again so she let her run with it. “Besides, after handling weddings for Logan, Hannah, and the Grace-Delia double do out on that island, this will be a cakewalk. Ha!” Fiona went on, then laughed. “Cakewalk.” “You’re a designer? And you do weddings?” Maddy turned on her stool and spun Fiona on hers until they were facing each other. She gripped Fiona’s forearms and grinned. “Hello, my new best and dearest friend.” “Oh, brother.” Kerry surrendered, tossing her towel on the bar.

Do you like sandwiches?" he asked. "At this point, I think I'd eat anything. Other than rabbit. I'm not excessively fond of rabbit." "Or anything with eyes," he said, charming her by remembering. "I've an appetite for beef, some bread, mustard, and ale." At her look, he smiled. "I have a schoolboy's tastes. It's what I lived on in England. I still crave it from time to time." Hustle's staff must have been prepared for his cravings because within a quarter hour they were seated in his sitting room with a large tray on the table between them. She was dressed in one of his blue dressing gowns and he wore a black patterned one. She tucked her feet beneath her as, one by one, he took the domed lids from a succession of plates, each smelling better than the one before. When he came to the cake, a delicious looking confection filled with nuts and fruit, she glanced up at him. "I want cake," she said. "Before anything healthful or beneficial." "Cake it is, then," he said, cutting a piece and handing it to her. She closed her eyes after the first forkful. The taste was heavenly, light and airy yet filled with nuts and chopped apricots. When she opened her eyes, it was to find him watching her. "I love cake," she said, embarrassed. "I love sweets." "What about rabbit cake?" "Oh, that would pose a problem for me." He smiled and she felt it down to her toes.

You should focus on what you can change, not what you cannot change. What’s done is done. If somebody offended you, mistreated you, or disappointed you, the hurts can’t be undone. You can get bitter--pack it in a bag and carry it around and let it weigh you down--or you can forgive those who hurt you and go on. If you lost your temper yesterday, you can beat yourself up--put the guilt and condemnation in a bag--or you can ask for forgiveness, receive God’s mercy, and do better today. If you didn’t get a promotion you wanted, you can get sour and go around with a chip on your shoulder, or you can shake it off, knowing that God has something better in store. No matter what happens, big or small, if you make the choice to let it go and move forward, you won’t let the past poison your future. A woman I know went through a divorce years ago. We prayed several times in our services, asking God to bring a good man into her life. One day she met a fine Godly man, who was very successful. She was so happy, but she made the mistake of carrying all her negative baggage from her divorce into the new relationship. She was constantly talking about what she had been through and how she was so mistreated. She had a victim mentality. The man told me later that she was so focused on her past and so caught up in what she had been through that he just couldn’t deal with it. He moved on. That’s what happens when we hold on to the hurts and pains of the past. It will poison you wherever you go. You can’t drag around all the personal baggage from yesterday and expect to have good relationships. You’ve got to let it go. Quit looking at the little rearview mirror and start looking out the great big windshield in front of you. You may have had some bad breaks, but that didn’t stop God’s plan for your life. He still has amazing things in your future. When one door closes, stay in faith and God will open another door. If a dream dies, don’t sit around in self-pity talking about what you lost, move forward and dream another dream. Your life is not over because you lost a loved one, went through a divorce, lost a job, or didn’t get the house you wanted. You would not be alive unless God had another victory in front of you.

She ran her hands into Smith's wet hair, and he-- But why always Smith? Was it necessarily true, that because she seemed to HIM to be the ripe, round, straightforward antidote to the complications of his hopes, the scene looked as simple through her eyes? Was she not taking the greater risk here? Did she not have to set aside cautions, sorrows, hopes, fears, loyalties, to permit herself the role of the plump and ready siren in the steam-room? Have we not heard enough already of Mr. Smith's desire, and seen Mrs. Tomlinson quite sufficiently as he did? Should we not, at least, pay a little attention to Terpie's view of him, lounging like a freckly satyr on the wooden benches, grinning at her with a young man's lazy sense of entitlement now the surprise of her gift had faded; grown almost all the way into his strength but still long-limbed, with the knots of bone at his knees and his elbows giving him the lingering gawkiness of a foal; with the film of sweat on his chest, and his curls thickened to dark emphatic coils with water drops at the end; with the last unremoved traces of the paint around his eyes rimming his gaze in black depravity; with his wide mouth laughing, and his cock lolling? No, not lolling any more. Stirring, as she filled her hands with him, to her pleasure and his. The reader may imagine the occasional mismatches of desire or of endurance caused by their different ages. By the differences, at times in what followed, between twenty-four-year-old impetuousness and forty-six-year-old guile; between twenty-four-year-old muscles and forty-six-year-old backache. The reader may imagine, as she knelt on the bench en levrette--a technical term Terpie had learnt from a French gentleman, meaning with your bum in the air--that the pleasure of a boyish lover's deep wet rooting inside her did not entirely cancel the pinching of the skin of her knees between the wooden slats. And yet the two of them made for themselves, successfully, that little encompassing sphere of sensation which seems while it lasts to be, if not a home in the great world to be relied upon, at least a little world in itself, outside which not much matters, for a while. And yet, they arrived together, if not at rapture, then at those melting convulsions which come as close to it as you may, where gratitude and mutual greed are all you have to furnish the place of trust.

Marita Lorenz, was born on August 18, 1939, in Bremen, Germany. In January of 1960 Marita, described as an attractive “curvy, black-haired young lady was named American’s “Mata Hari” by New York Daily News reporter Paul Meskil. Having had an affair with Fidel Castro that turned sour, she now returned to Havana where she attempted to take part in an assassination attempt, supposedly orchestrated by the Mafia and the CIA. Marita brought along poison pills in her cold cream jar, which predictably melted in the tropical heat. Besides, she later said that she really did not have the stomach for killing her former lover. Apparently Castro aware of why she returned to Cuba, handed her his pistol with a dare for her to use it. Even after knowing the truth regarding her visit, he allowed her to safely leave Cuba. Returning to Miami, Marita said that Frank Sturgis, presumably a CIA operative, was involved in this attempt, however it was his close associate, Alex Rorke, who was responsible for orchestrating the plan to poison Castro. Sturgis was extremely angry when she returned and rebuked her for putting the pills into the warm cold cream, calling her stupid, over and over again. For a few years after leaving the island, Marita was looked after and protected by a mobster named Ed Levi. It was his job to protect her from, what was considered, a likely attempt on her life by “Cuban Intelligence Operatives.” In 1961, Marita met Marcos Pérez Jiménez, the former President of Venezuela, in Miami. Marcos told her that he was anxious to meet her because he knew she was “Fidel's girl." He successfully pursued Marita, and when she gave in, they had an affair that resulted in the birth of a daughter.

There was but one man at the station, and he informed us that Mosby had crossed a few minutes before at full speed in pursuit of Federal cavalry. Had he seen our train coming, no doubt he would have let his prisoners escape to capture the train. I was on a special train, if I remember correctly, without any guard. Since the close of the war I have come to know Colonel Mosby personally, and somewhat intimately. He is a different man entirely from what I had supposed. He is slender, not tall, wiry, and looks as if he could endure any amount of physical exercise. He is able, and thoroughly honest and truthful. There were probably but few men in the South who could have commanded successfully a separate detachment in the rear of an opposing army, and so near the border of hostilities, as long as he did without losing his entire command.

The Director’s Chair is with Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, etc.), and Robert refers later to this quote from Francis: “Failure is not necessarily durable. Remember that the things that they fire you for when you are young are the same things that they give lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.” ROBERT: “Even if I didn’t sell Mariachi, I would have learned so much by doing that project. That was the idea—I’m there to learn. I’m not there to win; I’m there to learn, because then I’ll win, eventually. . . . “You’ve got to be able to look at your failures and know that there’s a key to success in every failure. If you look through the ashes long enough, you’ll find something. I’ll give you one. Quentin [Tarantino] asked me, ‘Do you want to do one of these short films called Four Rooms [where each director can create the film of their choosing, but it has to be limited to a single hotel room, and include New Year’s Eve and a bellhop]?’ and my hand went up right away, instinctively. . . . “The movie bombed. In the ashes of that failure, I can find at least two keys of success. On the set when I was doing it, I had cast Antonio Banderas as the dad and had this cool little Mexican as his son. They looked really close together. Then I found the best actress I could find, this little half-Asian girl. She was amazing. I needed an Asian mom. I really wanted them to look like a family. It’s New Year’s Eve, because [it] was dictated by the script, so they’re all dressed in tuxedos. I was looking at Antonio and his Asian wife and thinking, ‘Wow, they look like this really cool, international spy couple. What if they were spies, and these two little kids, who can barely tie their shoes, didn’t know they were spies?’ I thought of that on the set of Four Rooms. There are four of those [Spy Kids movies] now and a TV series coming. “So that’s one. The other one was, after [Four Rooms] failed, I thought, ‘I still love short films.’ Anthologies never work. We shouldn’t have had four stories; it should have been three stories because that’s probably three acts, and it should just be the same director instead of different directors because we didn’t know what each person was doing. I’m going to try it again. Why on earth would I try it again, if I knew they didn’t work? Because you figured something out when you’re doing it the first time, and [the second attempt] was Sin City.” TIM: “Amazing.

Look for all of the possible missteps in the following scenario. My friend Amy arrived at a consultation with her Hispanic business partner. The African American woman to whom they were delivering their presentation was a long-time friend of her partner’s. Her partner was greeted with a hug and Amy was greeted with a handshake. The meeting was a great success. As it came to a close, the two friends hugged. With enthusiastic affection, Amy went to hug the African American client. The woman took a step, turned her shoulder to block the hug, and looked at Amy with dismissive anger. It was almost a defensive move. Her partner, recognizing this, put her arm around Amy to soften the situation and make light of the inappropriate gesture. Everything turned out fine, but Amy was baffled by the barrier. She was confused by the woman’s reaction since their interaction had been cordial and positive. She wondered if she had been socially insensitive or culturally inappropriate. After much reflection, however, she realized that she had simply been too quick to assume familiarity. Thankfully, she earned and learned the lesson quickly to become more aware. Amy eventually earned the trust of her client and secured her valuable business.

Looked at with the benefit of hindsight, his life, which at time had felt like a series of ingenious escapes, resembled rather more closely a succession of nooses, most of them self-tied. The self-tied ones will still hang you, though.

She wanted the kids to have a small taste of success, to be the center of attention, something rare when their siblings’ illnesses consumed such a large part of their lives. She closed her eyes, afraid to look. “You’re going to want to see this,” he said. Ellie opened her eyes, gasped,

She wanted the kids to have a small taste of success, to be the center of attention, something rare when their siblings’ illnesses consumed such a large part of their lives. She closed her eyes, afraid to look. “You’re going to want to see this,” he said. Ellie opened her eyes, gasped, burst with pride. “First place!

Now look,” he said. He felt the back collar of his shirt and jacket clutched in an iron grip and he whirled on the giant, hitting him square in the jaw with his fist. He suspected he’d broken his hand, but no way was he letting on. He did wince in pain, however, while the very large man merely turned his brick of a face to the side. “You shouldn’t’a done that, little man,” the guy said. It took him roughly one second to draw back his fist and plaster Sean in the face hard enough to send him reeling into the melons. Then to the floor. Sean saw a lot of stars and was aware of the melons as they began to bounce around the produce section. And there was blood—he wasn’t sure where from since his entire face felt as if it had been through a meat grinder. “Hey!” Franci shouted. “What’s the matter with you? I told you to leave it alone, he’s harmless!” “No good deed goes unpunished, I guess,” the big man said. “It looked like you needed help. Maybe you like being grabbed like that in the grocery store, huh, babe?” Sean muttered something about not being harmless and tried to get to his feet, without success. The big man said, “Just stay down where you are, buster.” But Sean was intent on getting up and he’d just about made it to his feet when the man took two giant steps in his direction. That was all it took for Franci to launch herself on the lumberjack with a cry of outrage. She had her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist and screamed bloody murder while pummeling him on the back. “I. Told. You. To. Leave. Him. Alone!” she shrieked. Paul Bunyan whirled around and around, trying to shake her loose, but she was on him like a tick on a hound. Then the scene got a lot more interesting. “No! No! No! No! No!” screamed a store manager, running up to them, followed closely by another man and a couple of young bag boys. A crowd gathered and the grocery employees peeled Franci off the lumberjack, but she was kicking her heart out the whole time. “The police are coming!” the store manager yelled. “Stop this at once! Stop!” And Sean absently thought, This really isn’t going how I planned. Right

As it got away from its founders, chaos magic came to mean ‘doing whatever you want’ in popular parlance, which is probably close to the opposite of its original formulation. In the modern world, ‘doing whatever you want’ leads to Type II diabetes and very public bankruptcies. But the supposed freedom that chaos magic offers -the apple in its garden- is a stark one. Chaos magic is not ‘doing whatever you want’, it is ‘trialling a lot of things and retaining those that work’. It is entirely unforgiving of failure or –more specifically- excuses for failure. Chaos magic lacks any certificates of participation. You achieve what you set out to do or you have failed. Success could be lasting apotheosis or it could be bedding your secretary. This only looks like elitism to failures. To scientists, it looks like science.

We sailed from Coquimbo with a strong northerly wind, and passed the latitude of Cape Horn in ten or twelve days from port, when, taking a strong, westerly gale, we scudded past under a close-reefed main topsail, and reefed foresail, with a fearful sea sweeping after, every wave having a most ominous look as it rose high above the taffrail, but our good barque seemed to realize the danger, and rose to each mountain of water as light and graceful as a bird. Squalls of snow and hail, beating fiercely upon us, followed each other in rapid succession, while two men at the wheel had all the work they could do to keep the barque before it, yet she was not a hard-steering craft.

PERSONAL PROFILE FOR EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION Consider the following list of twelve characteristics that are central to communicating both in an interview and on the job. If you feel you are lacking in a particular category, you can use the explanations and suggestions given to enhance your interactive ability in the workplace. 1. Activation of PMA. Use positive thinking techniques such as internal coaching. 2. Physical appearance. Make sure to dress appropriately for the event. In most interviews, business attire (a suit or sport coat and tie for men; a suit, dress, or tailored pants for women) is recommended. What you wear to the interview communicates not only how important the event is to you but your ability to assess a situation and how you should behave in it. Appropriate grooming is essential, both in an interview and on the job. 3. Posture. Carry yourself with confidence. Let your posture communicate that you are a winner. Keep your face on a vertical plane, spine straight, shoulders comfortably back. By simply straightening up and using the diaphragmatic breathing you learned in Chapter 6 (which proper posture encourages), you will feel much better about yourself. Others will perceive you in a more positive light as well. 4. Rate of speech. Your rate of speech ought to be appropriate for the specific situation and person or persons it is intended for. Too fast is annoying, and too slow is boring. A good way to pace your speech is to speak at close to the rate of the person who is talking to you. 5. Eye contact. Absolutely essential for successful communication. Occasionally, you should avert your gaze briefly in order to avoid staring. But try not to look down at your lap or let your eyes wander all around the room as you speak. This suggests a lack of confidence and an inability to stay on track. 6. Facial expressions. You gain more credibility when you are open and expressive. The warmer personality will seem stronger and more confident. And perhaps most important, remember to smile in conversation. If you seem interested and enthusiastic, it will enhance the chemistry between you and the interviewer or your supervisor. You can develop the ability to use facial expressions to your advantage through a kind of biofeedback that makes use of the mirror and continuously experimenting in real life. Look at your reflection for several minutes. Practice being relaxed and create the expressions that are appropriate. Do you look interested? Alert? Motivated? Practice responding to an interviewer. Impress the “muscle memory” of these expressions into your mind.

A CHANGING SOCIETY What does today’s high incidence of social anxiety tell us about modern society? As we’ve seen, social anxiety is connected to a person’s drive for self-preservation and a feeling of safety. It is natural to withdraw from situations that we expect will lead to pain. Avoidance—while not necessarily healthy—is logical. Because the negative social experience of a growing number of people has caused them emotional pain and suffering, the number of individuals who choose to avoid socializing is increasing at an alarming rate. The sometimes wide distance among family members these days only adds to isolation. And the anonymity of large cities creates a vacuum in which many lonely people co-exist, often leading solitary lives in which they pursue their interests and activities alone. We live in a society in which social fears are perhaps not unjustified. As cities become denser, isolation seems to be the best way to counter urban decay. Consider the dangers of the outside world: Crime rates are soaring. Caution—and its companion, fear—are in the air. As the twentieth century draws to a close, we find ourselves in a society where meeting people can be difficult. These larger forces can combine to create a further sense of distance among people. Particularly significant is the change that has taken place as the social organization of the smaller-scale community gives way to that of the larger, increasingly fragmented city. In a “hometown” setting, the character of daily life is largely composed of face-to-face relations with friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family members. But in the hustle and bustle of today’s cities, whose urban sprawls extend to what author Joel Garreau has called Edge Cities—creating light industrial suburbs even larger than the cities they surround—the individual can get lost. It is common in these areas for people to focus solely on themselves, seldom getting to know their neighbors, and rarely living close to family. We may call these places home, but they are a far cry from the destination of that word as we knew it when we were children. Today’s cities are hotbeds of competition on all levels, from the professional to the social. It often seems as if only the most sophisticated “win.” To be ready for this constant challenge, you have to be able to manage in a stressful environment, relying on a whole repertoire of social skills just to stay afloat. This competitive environment can be terrifying for the socially anxious person. The 1980s were a consumer decade in which picture-perfect images on television and in magazines caused many of us to cast our lots with either the haves or the have-nots. Pressure to succeed grew to an all-time high. For those who felt they could not measure up, the challenge seemed daunting. I think the escalating crime rate in today’s urban centers—drugs, burglary, rape, and murder—ties into this trend and society’s response to the pressure. In looking at the forces that influence the social context of modern life, it is clear that feelings of frustration at not “making it” socially and financially are a component in many people’s choosing a life of crime. Interactive ability determines success in establishing a rewarding career, in experiencing relationships. Without these prospects, crime can appear to be a quick fix for a lifelong problem.

She adores me. Said almost as much in plain English.” Saying the words out loud sent warmth cascading through Elijah’s chest. He studied his work more closely, relieved to find that even on a deliberate critical inspection, the sketch still struck him as having that ineffable something that made an image art, and an accurate likeness a portrait. The boys were the dominant elements of the sketch, and yet, there was Genevieve Windham in all her beauty at the center of it. Her words came back to him as he noted details he didn’t recall sketching. You’ve caught the love. Like he’d contracted a rare, untreatable condition. Which… he… had. His first commission of a juvenile portrait was going to be a resounding success because he’d caught the love. Lady Genevieve adored his work, him, and the pleasure they could share, and looking at the image he’d rendered of her, Elijah realized he adored her right back. Alas

A different kind of list entirely is Colleges That Change Lives, a short list bearing the names of only forty very small schools utterly focused on building the kind of living and learning communities in which undergraduates engage in rigorous work done in close contact with faculty and with one another, and emerge well prepared for the world of work, and to be an engaged citizen of the world.15 The list was originally compiled by Loren Pope, a former education editor at the New York Times who became one of the nation’s first experts on college admission with the publication in 1990 of his best-selling book Looking Beyond the Ivy League: Finding the College That’s Right for You,

I’m in public, in a club in Florence, snogging a boy who I met only a couple of hours ago, so madly that I’m weak at the knees…in full view, if they looked over, of his friends and two girls I barely know… My eyes snap open, and I drag my mouth away from Luca’s, gasping for breath. I find my feet under me, pull back from him, and promptly grab the edge of the table to steady myself. My hair’s fallen down again; I can feel it tumbling down my back. My lips are wet. I raise a hand to wipe them dry, aware that my eyes are stretched wide with shock. I literally cannot believe what just happened. I feel like someone just gave me a violent electric shock. Luca looks equally disheveled. His hair’s tumbling forward in straight black lines, his blue eyes wide, his lips redder from kissing me so hard. He looks as amazed as I am. “Ammazzati,” he mutters. I’m still too close to him. I can feel the force field between us. I take another step back, still gripping the table’s edge, because I see his expression change unexpectedly. His blue eyes darken, and his mouth twists cynically. “So,” he says, his tone sarcastic, almost bitter, “you are a success in Italy, Violetta. Congratulazioni. You spend only one day here and already you are kissed by a boy! Your friends will be envious.

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Let’s live in a way that teaches our children the importance of loving our neighbors and that peers aren’t our competition. When we begin to see our own value, we realize that no one else’s successes or accomplishments diminish our own but rather we see that God has a unique path for each of us. Sometimes a closed door is the very thing that leads us to our calling. We can walk our road without worrying if someone else’s road looks better. The comparison trap is an endless vortex of nothingness that serves only to make us feel insecure and discontented because we are measuring our insides against someone else’s outside.

In the Metro, one evening, I looked closely around me: everyone had come from somewhere else . . . Among us, though, two or three faces from here, embarrassed silhouettes that seemed to be apologising for their presence. The same spectacle in London. Today’s migrations are no longer made by compact displacements but by successive infiltrations: little by little, individuals insinuate themselves among the “natives,” too anaemic and too distinguished to stoop to the notion of a “territory.” After a thousand years of vigilance, we open the gates . . . When one thinks of the long rivalries between the French and the English, then between the French and the Germans, it seems as if each nation, by weakening one another, had as its task to speed the hour of the common downfall so that other specimens of humanity may relay them. Like its predecessor, the new Völkerwanderung will provoke an ethnic confusion whose phases cannot be distinctly foreseen. Confronted with these disparate profiles, the notion of a community homogeneous to whatever degree is inconceivable. The very possibility of so heteroclite a crowd suggests that in the space it occupies there no longer existed, among the indigenous, any desire to safeguard even the shadow of an identity. At Rome, in the third century of our era, out of a million inhabitants, only sixty thousand were of Latin stock. Once a people has fulfilled the historical idea which was its mission to incarnate, it no longer has any excuse to preserve its difference, to cherish its singularity, to safeguard its features amidst a chaos of faces.

If our mental models are mere approximations of reality, then, the conclusions we draw cannot help but be prone to error. A few words uttered by someone close to us can carry enormous weight, for example, whereas the same words uttered by a stranger won’t resonate at all. At our jobs, we may interpret not being invited to a meeting as a threat to us or to our projects, even when no threat is intended. But because we often don’t see the flaws in our reasoning—or our biases—it’s easy to be deluded while being quite convinced that we are the only sane ones around.

Let us look a little more closely at what is implied by change. It means that the being which is subject to it is never at any moment the whole of itself: it possesses its being successively, as the philosophers say. You, for instance, are never at any moment the whole of yourself. What you were last year, what you will be next year, all belongs to the totality called you. But last year has gone, and next year has not arrived. It is obviously an overwhelming limitation that one never wholly possesses one’s self, that one possesses one’s being in successive moments and not simply in one act of being, that one is never wholly there. There is no such limitation in God. He possesses Himself wholly in one act of being. This is what we call His eternity. Thus eternity does’ not mean time open at both ends, time stretching away back into the past with no beginning, stretching away forward into the future with no ending. In fact we are back at our earlier principle: that infinity means not only the absence of external limits, but of internal divisions as well. Just as space has parts lying alongside one another, time has parts following one another. The Infinite has no parts, of either (or any other conceivable) sort. Eternity is not time, however much we may try to glorify the concept of time. The philosophic definition of eternity is in two Latin words, tota simul,1 which may be roughly translated as “all at once”. God’s eternity means that He possesses the totality of what He is, not in successive acts as we do, but in one single act.

There can be little dispute about purchasing luxury real estate miami investing. If you are one of the latter, this post is meant for you. You need to set up either an LLC or a comparable entity as soon as you think you're going to get into genuine estate investing. This shields you and expertly. It can likewise assist you with specific tax concerns. Constantly look for out exactly what the regional values. Discovering the next-door neighbors are and whether they have or lease can inform you more about a house's value than the monetary statements. Discover individuals included in genuine estate investing and find out from them. There are a lot of individuals interested in genuine estate. Get to understand various other financiers in genuine estate. It pays to have a lot about genuine estate financier buddies. Issues with renters can squander a lot of time. If you envisioning to lease a home, display your prospective renters very carefully. If they cannot get their cash together at this time, they aren't a reputable bet for you. When thinking about exactly how much a home is worth, think about rental values as you identify exactly how much you'll make off of lease. This can permit you a lot of dollars throughout the course of the year from individuals who are remaining in your location. When you're all set and make a substantially bigger gross earnings, you can still offer the house. Do not purchase homes in an area that's bad. A great offer might suggest that it's in a bad location. It might take a longer time than you expected for your first great genuine estate offer. Do not fret; simply bide your time and the best situations. Area is the critical part of realty. Consider the future and the place. If you understand the area, this will be advantageous to you. Since it will be in the location, you will not be stressing about some faraway rental home. If you live close by, you will have much better control of your financial investment. You might discover it simple to cut corners when it comes to accounting, particularly when you initially get begun. You will conserve yourself a lot of headache later on if you begin developing great accounting routines. Do some study on the city's government prior to you invest in genuine estate. Many towns have a main site that can be discovered with an easy search. If you wish to make money from the amazing world of realty investing, why not start today? Now that you're more notified, you can begin investing! Keep this details useful and begin the trip to success. When you think you're going to get into genuine estate investing, you must set up either an LLC or a comparable entity. Get to understand various other financiers in genuine estate. It pays to have a lot about genuine estate financier pals. It might take a longer time than you expected for your first excellent genuine estate offer. If you want to benefit from the incredible world of genuine estate investing, why not get begun today?

-The provisions you need to fulfill you ministry or mission is locked up in the open doors of utterance, faith and call -During your waiting time look inward to yourself, upward to God, then outward to ur environ

His name is C. J. Skender, and he is a living legend. Skender teaches accounting, but to call him an accounting professor doesn’t do him justice. He’s a unique character, known for his trademark bow ties and his ability to recite the words to thousands of songs and movies on command. He may well be the only fifty-eight-year-old man with fair skin and white hair who displays a poster of the rapper 50 Cent in his office. And while he’s a genuine numbers whiz, his impact in the classroom is impossible to quantify. Skender is one of a few professors for whom Duke University and the University of North Carolina look past their rivalry to cooperate: he is in such high demand that he has permission to teach simultaneously at both schools. He has earned more than two dozen major teaching awards, including fourteen at UNC, six at Duke, and five at North Carolina State. Across his career, he has now taught close to six hundred classes and evaluated more than thirty-five thousand students. Because of the time that he invests in his students, he has developed what may be his single most impressive skill: a remarkable eye for talent. In 2004, Reggie Love enrolled in C. J. Skender’s accounting class at Duke. It was a summer course that Love needed to graduate, and while many professors would have written him off as a jock, Skender recognized Love’s potential beyond athletics. “For some reason, Duke football players have never flocked to my class,” Skender explains, “but I knew Reggie had what it took to succeed.” Skender went out of his way to engage Love in class, and his intuition was right that it would pay dividends. “I knew nothing about accounting before I took C. J.’s class,” Love says, “and the fundamental base of knowledge from that course helped guide me down the road to the White House.” In Obama’s mailroom, Love used the knowledge of inventory that he learned in Skender’s class to develop a more efficient process for organizing and digitizing a huge backlog of mail. “It was the number-one thing I implemented,” Love says, and it impressed Obama’s chief of staff, putting Love on the radar. In 2011, Love left the White House to study at Wharton. He sent a note to Skender: “I’m on the train to Philly to start the executive MBA program and one of the first classes is financial accounting—and I just wanted to say thanks for sticking with me when I was in your class.

To the Teachers in Our Schools My Dear Brethren and Sisters: The Lord will work in behalf of all who will walk humbly with Him. He has placed you in a position of trust. Walk carefully before Him. God’s hand is on the wheel. He will guide the ship past the rocks into the haven. He will take the weak things of this world to confound the things that are mighty. I pray that you will make God your Counselor. You are not amenable to any man, but are under God’s direction. Keep close to Him. Do not take worldly ideas as your criterion. Let there be no departure from the Lord’s methods of working. Use not common fire, but the sacred fire of the Lord’s kindling. Be of good courage in your work. For many years I have kept before our people the need, in the education of the youth, of an equal taxation of the physical and mental powers. But for those who have never proved the value of the instruction given to combine manual training with the study of books, it is hard to understand and carry out the directions given. Do your best to impart to your students the blessings God has given you. With a deep, earnest desire to help them, carry them over the ground of knowledge. Come close to them. Unless teachers have the love and gentleness of Christ abounding in their hearts, they will manifest too much of the spirit of a harsh, domineering master. The Lord wishes you to learn how to use the gospel net. That you may be successful in your work, the meshes of your net must be close. The application of the Scriptures must be such that the meaning shall be easily discerned. Then make the most of drawing in [268] the net. Come right to the point. However great a man’s knowledge, it is of no avail unless he is able to communicate it to others. Let the pathos of your voice, its deep feeling, make an impression on hearts. Urge your students to surrender themselves to God. “Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. And of some have compassion, making a difference: and others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.” Jude 1:21-23. As you follow Christ’s example you will have the precious reward of seeing your students won to Him.

Before wrapping up this chapter, let us look at one of the deadly scams in the Indian primary market history. There was company named ‘MS shoes east’. Shares of this company traded in Rs 150-200 range throughout the year 1994. But towards December 1994 it spurted to Rs 500 without any justifiable rationale behind the raise. Its promoter Pavan Sachedeva and his broker artificially manipulated the stock price to this level.   By February 1995, the company devised an expansion plan for an estimated expense Rs 700 crores. It proposed to raise around Rs 428 crores by means of Fully convertible bonds. These bonds were to be sold at Rs 199 each through public issue. The idea was to provoke people to subscribe the issue with a hope of converting this bond of Rs 199 to a share of Rs 500.   Well, his brokers was constantly buying the stocks from the open market to maintain the price at that high level. But the situation had already worsened. He had bought too much and had too little money at hand that he could not pay the stock exchange for all the purchases he made. BSE could not give money to the sellers of that security. Things turned out to be serious. You may find it hard to believe  - the BSE was shut down for three consecutive days without any business.   Before this drama came to light, FCD ('Fully Convertible Debenture) public issue was a big success and it almost stole the show. Delighted by the overwhelming response from the investing community, MS Shoes had announced to close the public issues few days before the stipulated time. The world came to know that the cruel plan of manipulating the stock price was only to push the bond issue successfully. Even the authorities woke up to the problem. The company was issued a notice. And also it allowed the investors to take back their FCD application. Almost all the investors took back. Even the underwriter refused to buy the unsold portion of the issue because the company had voluntarily announced to close the issue before the end date. The ruling was in favor the underwriter. Sachedeva declared himself to be innocent. MS shoes office resembled a mourning house with  deserted look.   There was one Sachedeva who came to light. There were and probably still are more of them out there.

1: Take 10 to 60 seconds to prepare before walking over to the other person to significantly boost your chances of success. If you’re in a setting where you feel comfortable closing your eyes, I recommend that. If you’re not, pretend to use your cell phone for 10 to 60 seconds while visualizing yourself in action. (Keep in mind that you DO NOT want to look at the other person for more than a few seconds, because then you will likely begin to feel anxious and not want to approach.)   Next, imagine or visualize yourself walking toward the other person, and picture the facial expressions of both yourself and the other person. Are you smiling or excited to meet the person? What is his or her face saying to you? If it’s not how you want it, then erase that image and shift it to a desirable image–but start from the beginning again. Once it’s the way you want it, you’ve completed the first step.

Among the handful of companies that were trying to solve these problems, most embraced a culture of strictly enforced, even CIA-like secrecy. We were in a race, after all, to be the first to make a computer-animated feature film, so many who were pursuing this technology held their discoveries close to their vests. After talking about it, however, Alvy and I decided to do the opposite—to share our work with the outside world. My view was that we were all so far from achieving our goal that to hoard ideas only impeded our ability to get to the finish line. Instead, NYIT engaged with the computer graphics community, publishing everything we discovered, participating in committees to review papers written by all manner of researchers, and taking active roles at all the major academic conferences. The benefit of this transparency was not immediately felt (and, notably, when we decided upon it, we weren’t even counting on a payoff; it just seemed like the right thing to do). But the relationships and connections we formed, over time, proved far more valuable than we could have imagined, fueling our technical innovation and our understanding of creativity in general.

Pete has a few methods he uses to help manage people through the fears brought on by pre-production chaos. “Sometimes in meetings, I sense people seizing up, not wanting to even talk about changes,” he says. “So I try to trick them. I’ll say, ‘This would be a big change if we were really going to do it, but just as a thought exercise, what if …’ Or, ‘I’m not actually suggesting this, but go with me for a minute …’ If people anticipate the production pressures, they’ll close the door to new ideas—so you have to pretend you’re not actually going to do anything, we’re just talking, just playing around. Then if you hit upon some new idea that clearly works, people are excited about it and are happier to act on the change.” Another trick is to encourage people to play. “Some of the best ideas come out of joking around, which only comes when you (or the boss) give yourself permission to do it,” Pete says. “It can feel like a waste of time to watch YouTube videos or to tell stories of what happened last weekend, but it can actually be very productive in the long run. I’ve heard some people describe creativity as ‘unexpected connections between unrelated concepts or ideas.’ If that’s at all true, you have to be in a certain mindset to make those connections. So when I sense we’re getting nowhere, I just shut things down. We all go off to something else. Later, once the mood has shifted, I’ll attack the problem again.” This idea—that change is our friend because only from struggle does clarity emerge—makes many people uncomfortable, and I understand why. Whether you’re coming up with a fashion line or an ad campaign or a car design, the creative process is an expensive undertaking, and blind alleys and unforeseen snafus inevitably drive up your costs. The stakes are so high, and the crises that pop up can be so unpredictable, that we try to exert control. The potential cost of failure appears far more damaging than that of micromanaging. But if we shun such necessary investment—tightening up controls because we fear the risk of being exposed for having made a bad bet—we become the kind of rigid thinkers and managers who impede creativity.

My conclusion at the time was that finalizing the story before production began was still a worthy goal—we just hadn’t achieved it yet. As we continued to make films, however, I came to believe that my goal was not just impractical but naïve. By insisting on the importance of getting our ducks in a row early, we had come perilously close to embracing a fallacy. Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on—but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal. I see this over and over again in other companies: A subversion takes place in which streamlining the process or increasing production supplants the ultimate goal, with each person or group thinking they’re doing the right thing—when, in fact, they have strayed off course. When efficiency or consistency of workflow are not balanced by other equally strong countervailing forces, the result is that new ideas—our ugly babies—aren’t afforded the attention and protection they need to shine and mature. They are abandoned or never conceived of in the first place. Emphasis is placed on doing safer projects that mimic proven money-makers just to keep something—anything!—moving through the pipeline (see The Lion King 1½, a direct-to-video effort that came out in 2004, six years after The Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride). This kind of thinking yields predictable, unoriginal fare because it prevents the kind of organic ferment that fuels true inspiration. But it does feed the Beast.

Perhaps the most common device for giving people focus and direction is goal setting, but goals, as often as they are used, have their pros and cons. Sure, if you can convince everybody that profits must increase 20% next quarter or we’re going out of business, people will hurry around looking for ways to hype profits by 20%. When discussing “mission” I assigned Susan a goal of 25% improvement in sales, based on what I calculated was needed to avoid closing the factory and on what I felt her district could reasonably provide. It was not a number pulled from the ether, and I went to some length to explain this to her. Short of any such basis in reality, people will often do the easiest things, such as firing 20% of the workforce, canceling vital R&D programs, or simply not making any payments to suppliers. In other words, they will take achieving the goal as seriously as they feel you were in setting it; they will sense whether you have positioned yourself at the Schwerpunkt. Goals, as we all know, can be motivators. Cypress Semiconductor, a communications-oriented company founded in 1982, used to have a computer that tracked the thousands of self-imposed goals that its people fed into the system. Cypress founder T. J. Rodgers identified this automated goal tending system as the heart of his management style and a big factor in the company’s early success.136 Frankly, I find this philosophy depressing, not to mention a temptation to focus inward: If the boss places great importance on entering and tracking goals, as he obviously does, then that is what the other employees are going to consider important.137 In any case, what’s the big deal about meeting or missing a goal? A goal is an intention at a point in time. It is, to a large extent, an arbitrary target, whether you set it or someone above you assigns it. And we all know that numerical goals can be gamed, like banking (delaying) sales that we could have made this quarter to help us make quota next quarter. Unlike a Schwerpunkt, which gives focus and direction for chaotic and uncertain situations, what does a goal tell you? Just keep your head down and continue plugging away?

Paul suffered and struggled mightily in the service of his faith. Perhaps you could argue that he simply wasn’t the best example after which to model our own behavior. What if we look at the ultimate example of a Christian teacher and expositor, Christ Himself? Surely then we’ll see how to handle this unappealing message of a crucified Savior whom only the dregs of society preached. Surely at last we’ll see a glimmer of success. But by worldly standards, when Jesus began preaching His own gospel in His own hometown, He was an even more spectacular failure than Paul! This episode in Jesus’ life is one of the most gripping and powerful portions of the Bible. His words in Scripture capture the shock and emotion of the moment, and they still stun us with their power and their force. The riveting drama begins in Luke 4, verses 16 through 21: So He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. And as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up to read. And He was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when He had opened the book, He found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me, Because He anointed Me To preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to the captives And recovery of sight to the blind, To set at liberty those who are oppressed; To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD.” Then He closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Imagine going to church next Sunday, expecting to hear your pastor preaching, and having the Lord Jesus Christ appear in person to tell you that He had come to fulfill all the prophecies of His second coming—all the prophecies of the glory of His kingdom of salvation on earth! Imagine that you had gone that morning, and Jesus was standing in the pulpit to tell you that the time was now for the fulfillment of all divine promises connected to His return. Well, that’s something like what the Jews in the Nazareth synagogue experienced that day. They had attended that synagogue all their lives, and they had heard reading after reading of the Torah, the Law, and the Haftarah, the prophets, and sermon after sermon on Sabbath after Sabbath throughout their lifetimes. They had heard much teaching about the Messiah, and they had been reading many Scriptures about His coming and kingdom. But all of a sudden, on this Sabbath in the year A.D. 28, in an obscure synagogue in a nothing blue-collar town called Nazareth, He was there!

Trust Beats Control and Open Beats Closed As we saw with Valve software, autonomy can be a powerful motivator in the age of the Exponential Organization. The Millennial generation is naturally independent, digitally native and resistant to top-down control and hierarchies. To take full advantage of this new workforce and hang on to top talent, companies must embrace an open environment. Google has done just that. As we outlined in Chapter Four, its Objectives and Key Results (OKR) system is fully transparent across the company. Any Googler can look up the OKRs of other colleagues and teams to see what they’re trying to achieve and how successful they’ve been in the past. Such transparency takes a considerable amount of cultural and organizational courage, but Google has found that the openness it engenders is worth any discomfort.

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.  - Alexander Graham Bell     Good

He grabbed her, laughing, into his arms and whirled her around with abandon, and whenever the tempo allowed, pressed his cheek close against hers, whispering in conspiratorial amusement, “Your brother is frowning at us.” “I wonder why that is.” She laughed. “I don’t think he wants you near a man so like himself,” Mike speculated. That seemed to amuse her a great deal. She tipped her head back and laughed a little wildly. “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said. “It has nothing to do with your great success with women. You’re a man, near his baby sister. That’s enough.” “You’re no baby,” he said, pulling her closer. “And I think you’re having too much fun with this, getting him riled up. Don’t you realize he has a dangerous temper?” Unmistakably, she held him tighter. “Not toward me,” she whispered. “There’s a devil in you,” he said, and looked death in the face by kissing her neck. “There’s a fool in you,” she said, tilting her head just slightly to give him more of her neck. In years gone by he would have found a way to get her alone, seduced her, made love to her in ways she’d dream about later. But three bullets had decided a few things. Even if he could spirit her away from her brother’s protective stare, he wouldn’t be able to perform. So he said, “You’re trying to get me shot again.” “Oh, I doubt he’d actually shoot you. But I haven’t been to a good old-fashioned wedding brawl in ages.” When they’d said goodbye he had hugged her briefly, her sweet scent like a cinch around his mind, feeling her cheek against his, his arms around her waist, pulling her close. A bit more than just a friendly gesture—a suggestive one, which she returned. He assumed she was having fun with the flirtation, stirring things up a little bit, but it meant far more than that to him. Brie held his thoughts in a disturbing way that suggested if he were capable of giving her love, she would capture his heart and mind in that powerful way that wipes all other women out of the past. He really didn’t have that to offer anymore. Although that didn’t keep him from thinking about her, wanting her. He

The Chicago boys and their mentors had the good sense to maintain the highly efficient, nationalized copper producer Codelco, the world’s largest. That’s, of course, a radical violation of market principles, of neoliberal principles, but worthwhile since the company was the source of much of Chile’s export earnings and the basis of the state’s fiscal revenues. In general, it was close to a perfect experiment. It looked like a great success, if you ignored the human costs. In 1982, Friedman published the second edition of his manifesto, Capitalism and Freedom, celebrating the triumph of the cause. The timing was auspicious. In 1982 the Chilean economy crashed and had to be bailed out by state intervention. The state then controlled more of the economy than it had under Allende. Analysts who had their eyes open called it “the Chicago road to socialism.” The prominent OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) economist Javier Santiso described the “paradox [that] able economists committed to laissez-faire showed the world yet another road to a de facto socialized banking system

He held many of them in his arms as they whispered their final words and breathed their last breaths. The pages of his book and journals reveal a profound sense of caring and humanity, a deep responsibility for those he was destined to lead. The dedication he wrote at the beginning of his book offers insight into the man, and it seems fitting to close this book with that same dedication, to serve as a reminder of what grace looks like: To the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition These volumes are dedicated: To its dead who suffered much— To its living who suffered more. Their energy accomplished Farthest North Their fidelity wrought out success; Their courage faced death undauntedly; Their loyalty and discipline in all the dark days Ensured that this record Of their services should be given to the world.

The in-house lawyer is the lawyer with the strength, determination, and courage to work shoulder to shoulder with clients, to be accountable for decisions and advice, to look a client in the eye when delivering hard or unwanted advice, and to have the strength of character and reputation to be willing to act as the moral compass for an organization. In-house lawyers are not those who couldn’t “cut it” in private practice. Quite the contrary. Rather, in-house lawyers can be viewed as the lawyers who answered a higher calling to work more closely with their clients.

As he makes his way toward us, smiling nervously, I notice a slight thoracic scoliosis, a hint of jaundice in his eyes. I’m trying to break the diagnostic habit now that Sasha and I are in our mid-fifties. Friends and acquaintances have begun to be unlucky, and I’ve learned the hard way that detecting illness early puts me in a bind. “You saying I look like shit, Doc?” I’ve been asked, only half in jest. And there was my close friend and tennis partner, Chester, who was treated successfully for a lymphoma I suspected before anyone else. But for reasons I can’t comprehend, our friendship suffered. Chester avoids me now and plays tennis with other people.

Just remember, to successfully negotiate it is critical to prepare. Which is why in the Appendix you’ll find an invaluable tool I use with all my students and clients called the Negotiation One Sheet: a concise primer of nearly all our tactics and strategies for you to think through and customize for whatever kind of deal you’re looking to close.

Line 4 - Sales (Director) Throughout the Golden Path Program we have gotten to know the 4th line as the great ‘friendmaker’. This gift comes from a truly genuine heart, and an easy warmth with people and community. This is the kind of person that emerges through the Venus Sequence, as those 4th lines release some of their inner restrictions and fears. To have a 4th line Vocation is to be a spokesperson. Such gifts are given to us to serve the whole, and although the 4th line wound may feel reluctant to engage at this level, they do have to overcome the fear that they inherited in their very early years. When we say that the 4th line is the most natural salesperson of all the lines, it does not mean only in business. The open 4th line is always selling their heart. They are here to create more openness, to help others overcome their fears, and to be examples of open-hearted communication. Like the 4th line, the 3rd line can be hugely successful in a business context. However, the role and style of the 4th line is very different. Their role is more like the director of the movie. They have to work closely with people, which involves diplomacy, conviction, and focus. The 4th line knows what the movie should look like, and their one-pointed drive will ensure that everyone else comes into harmony around that direction. The 4th line is comfortable taking control and guiding others to work towards a collective vision or ideal. This is where the notion of sales comes in - the 4th line can diffuse difficulties through the sheer strength and goodwill of its character. The 4th line also has a strong theme of aloneness as a counterbalance to its communal warmth. The inner strength and commitment of these people is rooted in this ability to stand alone and remain committed to one’s ideal, despite the odds. If you have a 4th line Vocation, then you are here to influence humanity. You are here to use your considerable gifts to open people’s hearts. If you happen to be selling a specific idea or product, then at the deepest level it is really an excuse to share your spirit with others. Sometimes you may also be here to deliver a rousing message that shakes people out of their comfort zones, and brings them to a new place inside themselves. Since the 4th line is so good at convincing people about things, it is for a very good reason. When this reason is for a higher purpose, then your whole life moves onto a higher level. There is nothing more powerful or authentic than when one of us stands alone in the world and expresses the love in our heart - whatever creative form that may take.

Whether or not alcoholism, the obvious “iceberg” the writer could not escape, drowned some more private and secret suffering related to sexual desire or even gender identity, Robertson clearly wanted fate to absolve him for some compulsion that he feared was a choice, and perhaps also give him the ability to free himself from that compulsion—an impossible, contradictory, ambivalent wish. His precognitive habit seems to have answered both needs. Eisenbud makes a very key observation in this regard, one that goes well beyond Robertson in its implications: “With such an ambivalent attitude toward fate,” he writes, “all one would need, it might seem, would be heads and tails on the same throw. But any good precognitive event provides just this, since … the metaphysical significance of such an occurrence is sufficiently in question to satisfy both schools.”24 There was surely no better “precognitive event” than reading a New York Times headline about a sea disaster you had written a novel about 14 years earlier. The psychoanalytic rule of thumb is that nothing is ever an accident.25 The disasters and misfortunes that repeat themselves over and over in the lives of neurotics like Robertson look for all the world as though some higher power or cosmic theater director is testing them or just being cruel, but these situations are actually elicited by the neurotic in deviously subtle ways. For Freudians, the thematic consistency of the neurotic’s failures is always assumed to represent unresolved past situations confusedly haunting the neurotic’s present reality, governed by the repetition-compulsion beyond the pleasure principle. Instead of seeing things as they are, the neurotic sees replays of situations from early life and reacts accordingly, with predictably disappointing outcomes—the idiomatic “carrying baggage.” The alternative possibility that a case like Robertson’s suggests is that some of our baggage comes from our future. Robertson seems all his life to have been confusedly presponding to a future upheaval, even a kind of near miss or close call (since, having written about it beforehand, the Titanic disaster was in some sense “his” disaster), but treating it again and again as a present reality, a disaster that had already occurred or was in the process of occurring. By the time the real thing happened, he himself was already sunk, “washed up,” and could not even successfully capitalize on what might have been the perfect advertisement for his precognitive gift. What if something like this is true of many neurotics? What portion of ordinary human floundering and failure might really be attributable to misrecognized precognition, a kind of maladaptive prematurity of feeling and thought? We now turn to another deeply neurotic writer whose life even more clearly illustrates the painful temporal out-of-synch-ness of the strongly precognitive soul.

-What is the mind’s physical reaction to the injection process? – Sometimes its reaction is by making a feeling of headache and numbness in the head, or the desire to sleep, confusion, and of course the memories, but we cannot rely on them. Even if it was not subjected to an injection. In any case, the successful injection process must be done without the mind knowing, and pass without being aware of it. -How many failed brainwashing have you done? -Zero. -How many successful operations? -Zero. A long moment of silence. The psychiatrist looked into his eyes! She knows that he succeeded in all his operations! Unexpected answer. -Why do you say that you failed in all operations? -I did not say that I failed, I said that I succeeded in zero operations -What is the difference? – They are all still alive, as far as I know, the operation is done, but I do not know which of them might discover the trick at the last moment of my life. – Anything new in your private life? women? Friends maybe? -No, they are all superficial relationships, except for Katrina -Why do you refuse to let someone close into your life? -They ask a lot, and I do not like to give answers, you are an exception, of course -What is on your mind the most right now? -Do things happen because I think of them, or do I think of them because they will happen? -Why? -Because for a week I have been thinking that you will come to meet me, did my thoughts bring you here, or did I somehow sense your presence? -What is the Sixth Sense? -It does not exist, our five senses receive an enormous number of notes, and details daily, our conscious mind cannot prevent their reception, but it can ignore them, stores them very far away without alerting us to them, to relieve itself from the trouble of dealing with them, and when we feel that something is going to happen, it is caused by it. Our subconscious mind analyzes and elicits billions of billions of details stored in it, giving us the result in the form of a feeling, to be able to transcend the power of our conscious mind, we have to take these feelings seriously and force our conscious mind to explain their cause, and return to memory and prove it. -What are the conscious mind and the subconscious mind? -The names are incorrect, but they are customary to call them like this. I prefer to call the conscious mind the mechanical mind or the brain, and the subconscious mind with consciousness, for the brain is nothing but a mechanical machine, while the subconscious mind, in fact, is consciousness itself, perhaps the soul. -Why do you talk about the brain, the subconscious mind, the soul, and you, as if you are different entities from each other? – I do not believe that I am this body, I am something inside it, perhaps I am condemned from another world to imprisonment in it, as a punishment for a sin I committed there, and perhaps with my death, my sentence ends. -So, you see that you are something different from spirit and consciousness? -No, we are all one, we cannot be separated, I am the soul, and the subconscious mind is consciousness, and it is mine, while the brain is the property of the body, or the body is its property. -What is the most frightening thing about death? – Everyone lies, the religious, and the non-religious, they all lie about their greatest fear of death, Muslims fear Hell and its torment, this is true, but if their choice is between eternity in Hell under torment, or total annihilation, nothing, they will choose the first option. That what frightens us most in Death is complete unconsciousness, becoming nothing, as if we did not exist, simply disappearing and having no awareness, any sense of anything, forever. -Why would you choose torment over annihilation? -Because I will somehow adapt to it, we humans are able to adapt in all circumstances, and always have enough hope to be patient with them.

The “feeling of being stared at” is the focus of a subset of distant-mental-interaction studies. This is a particularly interesting belief to investigate because it is related to one of the oldest known superstitions in the Western world, the “evil eye,” and to one of the oldest known blessings in the Eastern world, the darshan, or gaze of an enlightened master. Most ancient peoples feared the evil eye and took measures to deflect the attraction of the eye, often by wearing shiny or attractive amulets around the neck. Today, most fears about the evil eye have subsided, at least among educated peoples. And yet many people still report the “feeling of being stared at” from a distance. Is this visceral feeling what it appears to be—a distant mental influence of the nervous system—or can it be better understood in more prosaic ways? In the laboratory today, the question is studied by separating two people and monitoring the first person’s nervous system (usually electrodermal activity) while the second person stares at the first at random times over a one-way closed-circuit video system. The stared-at person has no idea when the starer is looking at him or her. Figure 9.2. Effect sizes for studies testing the “feeling of being stared at,” where 50 percent is chance expectation. Confidence intervals are 95 percent. Figure 9.2 shows the results for staring studies conducted over eight decades.34 Similar to William Braud’s electrodermal studies but conducted in a context that more closely matched common descriptions of “feeling stared at,” these studies resulted in an overall effect of 63 percent where chance expectation is 50 percent. This is remarkably robust for a phenomenon that—according to conventional scientific models—is not supposed to exist. The combined studies result in odds against chance of 3.8 million to 1. Summary Given the evidence for psi perception and mind-matter interaction effects discussed so far, we could have expected that experiments involving living systems would also be successful. The studies discussed here show that our expectations are confirmed. The implications for distant healing are clear. All the experiments discussed so far have been replicated in the laboratory dozens to hundreds of times. They demonstrate that some of the “psychic” experiences people report probably do involve genuine psi. Now we move outside the laboratory to examine a new type of experiment, one that explores mind-matter interaction effects apparently associated with the collective attention of groups.

KEEP IT SIMPLE Offering to close a story loop is much more simple than you think. Even the inclusion of smiley, happy people on your website is a strong way to offer the closing of a story loop. People want to be happy, and those images promise your product will deliver. If you sell rugs, a successful resolution might be a beautiful floor or a room that finally feels finished. If you sell ice cream, a successful resolution might be a rich, creamy taste of heaven. Camping gear? An adventure to remember. While I’ve been slightly philosophical in this chapter, try not to overthink it. What problem are you resolving in your customer’s life, and what does that resolution look like? Stick to basic answers because basic answers really do work. Then, when you get good, start diving deeper into the levels of problems your brand resolves. The important idea in this section is that we need to show repeatedly how our product or service can make somebody’s life better. If we don’t tell people where we’re taking them, they won’t follow. A story has to go somewhere. Have you told your customers where you want to take them?

We are the only nation that goes to school, college, university to come back and brag about It, to the people who couldn’t afford the opportunity, Instead of helping them . We will end up being people with money, not rich or wealthy, because we have poor mentality by looking down onto others who are less fortunate. We are raised on values that you respect, love and honor someone based on what they have, not on who they are. Then we wonder why everyone has depression, forgetting we grew up competing to each to other. Instead of helping and educating one another. If education Is the key. Why are you closing doors for others.

closely guarded secret in this country's military history. The function of SOE is to help facilitate that invasion and contribute towards its success.” It was quite a rousing little speech, and we all responded with a cheer of approval. I realised I hadn’t reasoned it through before. I thought agents worked individually to cause disruption and hinder the German war machine. I didn’t realise we were to be part of a coordinated invasion of Europe. Quite what my role might be, I hadn’t worked out yet. I suspect if I’d seriously thought about it, my confidence would have been dented enormously. Everything we had learned so far required fluent French, and try as I might, that was not going to be me. In the afternoon, we moved back outside again and quickly found ourselves standing in the firing range. Here we were introduced to weapons and explosives. If I tried to imagine a weapons expert, he wouldn’t have looked remotely like the instructor who met us. A grey-haired bespectacled man in his late fifties greeted us with a warm smile and a kind word. His soft voice belied the fact that anything he didn’t know about weapons, was not something worth knowing. He introduced us to the MK II Sten Gun. “Should any of you find yourself in a serious confrontation with the enemy, this is your weapon of choice. This is the MK II Sten Gun. This is a submachine gun, it fires a 9mm cartridge, and in the right hands it can fire 500 rounds a minute. As you can see, it is not a sophisticated weapon; it comes with many advantages as well as some disadvantages. Its light, compact design combined with the folding stock, make it ideal for subversive activities. It is also very cheap to produce, this

The next time you spot failure, touch it. Sniff it. Hold it in your hand. Look closely. You might find within it a speck of success.

Life is a game of chance, each passing day becomes another flip of the coin. Nothing is unique. Everything I’ve experienced even for the first time has been identified and photographed a million times, the curve of a woman’s hips, the tropical sunset, the tower on the hill, a close up of a celebrity, captured by minds similar to mine and littered in the annexes of the psyches of people I don’t know. I am an understudy in my own life, I don’t know what will happen and in my mind anything can happen at anytime. I am an emotional fossil, i have picked apart every fibre of my thoughts, feelings and emotions apart with caliper and forceps, as i ponder sometimes with great anxiety over my looming and inexorable future. That doom follows me like a hovering presence outside the windows and hallways of my life, i don’t have a map of where i am heading or master key to open doors or gateways to my success- i am still even on the sunniest days, feeling around in the dark. You cannot study me, you are bound to fail for somedays you will feel as if you are peeping through a keyhole at my life. You know you don’t know everything, for i have hallways you cannot unlock, attics and stairways you cannot access and even when you stare through that keyhole, you aren’t sure if you are looking in or looking out. My mind and feelings have built up over time like a strong fortress, my love life remaining but the only, for some, psychological entryway.

What would you say to people who think you wouldn’t be where you are now if it wasn’t for Rhyson Gray?” Luke clears his throat and begins to speak before I can. “I think Kai—” “It’s okay, Luke,” I hold up a hand, eyes never leaving Randy’s. “I’d love to answer this question.” I lick my suddenly dry lips before going in. “I would tell them that no one finds success without the help of others along the way.” I look down at the hands in my lap for a second before looking back up. “I wouldn’t be here without my mother, who sacrificed all my life to make sure I had dancing and singing lessons. I wouldn’t be here without my best friend, Santos, who dragged me out to LA to pursue my dreams. I wouldn’t be here without my vocal coach, Grady, who took me under his wing in a strange new city.” I pause, swallowing back unexpected emotion I hope I’m hiding well. “And, yes, I wouldn’t be here without Rhyson, whose music and work ethic inspired me years before I even met him when I was just a fan. So in that sense, they’re right.” I lean forward, elbows propped on the table, lips pressed close to the mic like the producer told me to. “But I would also invite those people out to see me on the road because, though so many have helped me, I’m the one who has to perform night in, night out, and no one does that for me. I’d offer them a ticket, but my shows are all sold out.” Randy’s mouth hangs open a little.

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My parents did their best to feed their children’s bodies, minds, and hearts, every day, whether they felt like it or not. Now that I have had children, I am in awe of how consistently they did this at such a young age, without complaint. They made a commitment to each other and to my brother and myself, and they kept it. I do not know what this cost them. I may never know. But having had children of my own, I know how hard it is some days to do what has to be done. Many of my parents’ generation were raised with a belief that was both curse and blessing: commitments were to be fulfilled, duties carried out. There was no choice. When we are convinced there is no choice, we waste less energy on wondering what to do and railing against that which needs to be done. This is the blessing we have when the rules are clear, the duties delineated. But there is another side to the ease we feel when our duty is laid out for us. If the strict parameters of what is expected do not fit us, we must shape ourselves to meet them, regardless of the costs. My mother, if she did not by nature fit the role of full-time homemaker, successfully managed the Herculean task of bending to meet it, without losing her enthusiasm for life, her ability to experience joy. Other women and their children were not so fortunate. Behind closed doors, within spotless rooms, many of my friends mothers drowned the pain of not living who they were with alcohol and prescription drugs, and they sometimes descended into illness and suicide. Many of the women of my generation are torn apart daily by the choices available to us, choices I am nevertheless grateful to have. When I went to work, I felt worried and guilty about leaving my children at daycare. When I stayed home I thought I would go out of my mind with the mental boredom, the struggle to live without enough money, and the worry that I would never be able to go back into the workplace and make a living. I had inherited my parents’ values in a world with so many more choices and demands, plus my own expectations that I could, and should, develop my own interests and talents. So, I tried to do it all - to keep a house and care for my children according to the standards required of a full-time homemaker, to attend classes to develop my skills, and to work to provide money and financial security. And I got sick – very, very sick. One of the gifts of lying on the floor too ill to get up with two young children to look after is the ease and clarity with which you know what really does have to be done. No, when I work with men and women who are worn out with too much work and worry, you tell me all the things they have to do, I tell them, “You know, very little actually has to be done.” I found out when I was ill that cookies do not have to be baked, floors do not have to be spotless, PTA meetings do not have to be attended, the dish drainer does not have to be emptied, meals do not have to be exotic and innovative. Too ill to do anything that did not have to be done, I did the impossible: I lowered my standards.

What greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished; that we are strong enough to be self-critical that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?

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When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.

Narian was walking restlessly around his parlor when I entered, and my worry increased tenfold. Was he moving about because he was in pain? I glanced around the room, noticing an empty wineglass and a half-eaten bowl of soup. “You’re out of breath, Alera,” he said with a smile. “I hope that means your conversation with Nantilam went well.” I hesitated, unsure how to begin, unsure how to tell him what she was demanding, what she had done to him. Unsure how to tell him she had meted out one last betrayal. “How are you feeling?” I blurted, and he laughed. “I’m fine, but you don’t seem to be. Come and talk to me.” He took my hand and led me to the sofa, pulling me down to sit beside him. He winced as he did so, an indication he was experiencing some discomfort. I brushed his hair off his forehead, subtly checking for a fever, then told him of the High Priestess’s desires. “The terms of the actual treaty are not a problem, Narian, but Nantilam won’t enter into it unless you agree to make Cokyri your home. She wants to control your power, now and in the future, even to the point of progeny.” “Alera,” he calmly said, taking both my hands in his. “Those decisions are not hers to make. Besides, she’s a little late.” “I don’t understand.” He looked at me, bemused, then rolled up his right shirtsleeve, revealing an intricate tattoo encircling his forearm just below the elbow--the Cokyrian symbol that a man was voluntarily bound to a woman. I stared at it; I stared at him; and I burst into tears. His eyebrows rose in surprise, but he nonetheless took me into his arms. “That’s not the reaction I expected,” he drolly commented, “but it’s convinced me something is wrong.” “How….are…you…feeling?” I managed between sobs. “You’ve already asked me that, and I’m fine.” When I finally had my weeping under control, words tumbled from my mouth. “Even if the revolt has been successful, the High Priestess won’t enter into a treaty unless you stay in Cokyri. Otherwise, she’ll attack Hytanica again, and this time she will kill all of our military leaders and enslave my people. And she wants you to bind yourself to a woman of her choosing because if your powers pass to a child, she wants the child to be Cokyrian.” “That’s all well and good, but this time, she won’t be able to have things her way. There’s no need for you to worry about this. We are strong enough to take her on, Alera.” “But we’re not.” I glanced once more toward the food he had been given, and a flicker of understanding appeared in his eyes. “We have no choice, Narian, because she’s poisoned your food and drink and only she can heal you. And I don’t know what to do, only that I cannot let you die!” “Shhh,” he soothed, holding me close, and I couldn’t understand how he could be so calm. Not when panic rose higher inside me with each passing moment. When I had quieted, resting with my head cradled against his chest, he tried to sort through the things I had said. “So Nantilam, in her wisdom, has linked Hytanican’s freedom to my willingness to stay in Cokyri, and she has effectively taken me out of the fighting by poisoning my food?” I shudder, then nodded. “If I stay here, she is willing to sign a treaty, but if I’m not, she will never relinquish Hytanica and I won’t be around to prevent it.” “Yes,” I murmured. “So she is tearing us apart, dictating the rest of my life and we have to go along with it or she will destroy Hytanica?” “Yes. And we’re running out of time.” He shook his head in awe. “I have to hand it to her, Alera. She’s ruthless in pursuing what she wants.” “This is serious, Narian.” I found his attitude almost irritating. He obviously understood the direness of his situation, yet was acting like it was only a game. “I know it’s serious, but there is only one choice as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want to live without you, Alera. I won’t live without you.

A physician whom I was treating for depression had guided his life by traditional rules and conformed to the roles he felt he was expected to play in life. He had learned at an early age to submerge his own desires as he tried to earn approval and love from his parents. His father, especially, had expressed definite ideas about the career his son should pursue and essentially had planned his son’s life. In doing everything “right,” in becoming what his parents wanted, this man had never developed a strong identity of his own. In retrospect, it seemed to him that he had spent the major part of his life giving up activities at the “appropriate age.” For instance, he had been a fine athlete and had loved sports, yet he had stopped actively participating in his late twenties and was now only a spectator. He and his wife kept close watch over each other’s health and physical endeavors by helpful reminders such as, “Remember your back, dear.” The couple had once been avid theatergoers, but lately were content to “stay at home and watch television.” Whenever he threatened to step out of this mold and become more involved in a project that was physically taxing, he became anxious about the possible consequences and frequently discontinued the activity. At forty-eight, this man looked 10 years older than his actual age and had successfully deadened himself to most of the activities that had once excited him. His friends and associates supported his withdrawal from life by their own retreat. They, too, had stopped doing many of the things they had once enjoyed, yet they all accepted this condition as the normal course of events.

These words of Sullenberger are worth reflecting upon because they offer the chance to radically reimagine failure. The idea that the successful safety record in aviation has emerged from the rubble of real-world accidents is vivid, paradoxical, and profound. It is also revelatory. For if one looks closely enough it is an insight echoed across almost every branch of human endeavor.

Just about the only serious argument anyone tries to make in favor of diversity echoes Jonathan Alger, a lawyer who has argued before the Supreme Court in favor of racial preferences: “Corporations have to compete internationally,” he says, and “cross-cultural competency is a key skill in the work force.” This argument assumes that people get along best with people like themselves, that Koreans, for example, can do business most effectively with other Koreans. Presumably, if the United States has a large population of Koreans they will be a bridge between Korea and the United States. For that to work, however, Korean-Americans should not fully assimilate because if they do, they will lose the qualities that make them an asset. America should give up the ideal of Americanization that, in a few generations, made Englishmen, Dutchmen, Germans, Swedes, the Irish, and all other Europeans essentially indistinguishable. Do we really want to give up the idea of assimilation? Or should only racial minorities give up on assimilation? More to the point, is a diverse population really an advantage in trade or international affairs? Japan is one of the most racially homogeneous nations. It would be hard to find a country that so clearly practices the opposite of American-style diversity, but it is one of the most successful trading nations on earth. If diversity were a key advantage, Brazil, Indonesia, Sudan, Malaysia, and Lebanon would be world leaders in trade. Other great trading nations—Taiwan, Korea and China—are, if anything, even more closed and exclusionist than Japan. Germany is likewise a successful trading nation, but its trade surpluses cannot be attributed to cultural or racial diversity. Only since the 1960s has it had a large non-German minority of Turks who came as guest workers, and there is no evidence that Turks have helped Germany become more of a world presence or even a better trade partner with Turkey. The world’s consumers care about price and quality, not the race or nationality of the factory worker. American corporations boast about workforces that “look like America,” but they are often beaten in their own market by companies whose workforces look like Yokohama or Shanghai. If we really took seriously the idea that “cross-cultural competence” was crucially important, we would adjust the mix of immigrants accordingly. We might question the wisdom of Haitian immigration, for example, since Haiti is a small, poor country that is never likely to be an important trade partner. And do 32 million Mexican-Americans help our trade relations with the world—or even with Mexico? Canada is our number-one trading partner. Should we therefore encourage immigration from Canada? No one ever talks about immigration in these terms because at some level everyone understands that diversity has nothing to do with trade or influence in the world. The “cross-cultural competence” argument is artificial.

What super-sure looks like A multitude of fascinating factors come under the ‘looking confident ‘umbrella. There isn’t space here to explore the thousands of subtle signs that signal confidence. I cover them in my book How to Talk to Anyone. However, here are a few hints to tide you over. Self-assureds do the following things instinctively. You can do them consciously until they become second nature. 1. When you are at a gathering, do not stand close to the wall or by the snacks. Walk directly to the dead-centre of the room. That’s where all the important people instinctively stand. 2. When you are going through a large door or open double doors, don’t walk on one side. Walk straight through the middle. It signifies confidence. 3. At a restaurant, unless there is an established hierarchy, go for the seat at the end of the table facing the door. That is the power position. 4. Sit in the highest chair in a meeting or on the arm of the couch – but not higher than the boss! 5. Make larger, more fluid movements. Confident people’s bodies occupy more space. Shys take as little as possible, as if to say, ‘Excuse me for taking up this much of the earth.’ 6. Keep your hands away from your face and never fidget. 7. When you agree with someone, nod your head up from neutral (jaw parallel to the floor), not down. 8. When walking towards someone and passing, be the last person to break eye-contact. 9. For men: Don’t strut like a bantam rooster. But to look like a leader, swing your arms more significantly when you walk. When you are seated, put one arm up on the back of a chair. Occasionally lean back with your arms up and your hands behind your head. 10. For women: To seem self-assured, square your body towards the person you’re talking to and stand a tad closer. Naturally, give a big smile but let it come ever so slightly so it looks sincere, not nervous.

briefly how she had managed to unlock the back door and why she should have seemed so resentful of him. She had, he decided, been musing and had made her way to this particular room for that purpose. Her pose over there by the window had betrayed as much and his sudden appearance breaking into her reflections, had startled her, so that, in a sense, her anger had been counterfeit. He remained standing where she had stood, wondering if she would circle the west wing and appear at the crest of the drive, but when he heard or saw something of her he fell to thinking about women in general and his relations with them in the past. His experience with women had been limited but although technically still a virgin he was not altogether innocent. There had been a very forward fourteen-year-old called Cherry, who had lived in an adjoining house in Croydon, when he came home for school holidays and Cherry had succeeded in bewitching but ultimately terrifying him, for one day when they were larking about in the stable behind her house, she had hinted at the mysterious differences between the sexes and when, blushing, he had encouraged her to elaborate, she had promptly hoisted her skirt and pulled down her long cotton drawers, whereupon he had fled as though the Devil was after him and had never sought her company again, although he watched her closely in church on successive Sundays, expecting any moment to see forked lightning descend on her in the middle of ‘For all the Saints’. Then there had been a little clumsy cuddling at Christmas parties, and after that a flaxen-haired girl called Daphne whom he had mooned over as an adolescent and had thought of a good deal in the Transvaal but now he had almost forgotten what Daphne looked like and had not recalled her name until now. Finally there had been an abortive foray

Stewart Brand: In any community, new people show up, and they want to participate, and the old hands typically close ranks and sneer at the newbies. I should have known that would happen at The Well. We should have made it the case where part of your job as a member of The Well was to make new people feel welcome. We never did that. It was a part of what kept The Well from growing. Kevin Kelly: After Stewart left, everything started to kind of get really big. This was the era of ISPs, and you had Pipeline and Echo and AOL, and it was clear that this was going to stick around. Some of them were growing fast. And so why can’t we grow fast? The problem was we were a nonprofit. Who’s going to invest into this nonprofit? And so that was the issue. I looked at it in different ways. Do we want to sell it? Do we want to turn commercial? What’s the point of that? So in the end it was like, No, I think we can be more useful being who we are. We could grow and we could make a lot of money, but a lot of people are going to do that. And that might have been the wrong decision or the right decision to make, but it was my decision to keep it sort of experimental. Stewart Brand: It was never a commercial success. It may have paid its own way, just barely. What could be tried with this medium? That was the thing. Kevin Kelly: Eventually it was sold to Salon, but it was really too late at that point.

UNION AND CHANGE The third article was union. To those who were small and few against the wilderness, the success of liberty demanded the strength of union. Two centuries of change have made this true again. No longer need capitalist and worker, farmer and clerk, city and countryside, struggle to divide our bounty. By working shoulder to shoulder, together we can increase the bounty of all. We have discovered that every child who learns, every man who finds work, every sick body that is made whole--like a candle added to an altar--brightens the hope of all the faithful. So let us reject any among us who seek to reopen old wounds and to rekindle old hatreds. They stand in the way of a seeking nation. Let us now join reason to faith and action to experience, to transform our unity of interest into a unity of purpose. For the hour and the day and the time are here to achieve progress without strife, to achieve change without hatred--not without difference of opinion, but without the deep and abiding divisions which scar the union for generations. THE AMERICAN BELIEF Under this covenant of justice, liberty, and union we have become a nation--prosperous, great, and mighty. And we have kept our freedom. But we have no promise from God that our greatness will endure. We have been allowed by Him to seek greatness with the sweat of our hands and the strength of our spirit. I do not believe that the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of the ants. It is the excitement of becoming--always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting, and trying again--but always trying and always gaining. In each generation, with toil and tears, we have had to earn our heritage again. If we fail now, we shall have forgotten in abundance what we learned in hardship: that democracy rests on faith, that freedom asks more than it gives, and that the judgment of God is harshest on those who are most favored. If we succeed, it will not be because of what we have, but it will be because of what we are; not because of what we own, but, rather because of what we believe. For we are a nation of believers. Underneath the clamor of building and the rush of our day's pursuits, we are believers in justice and liberty and union, and in our own Union. We believe that every man must someday be free. And we believe in ourselves. Our enemies have always made the same mistake. In my lifetime--in depression and in war--they have awaited our defeat. Each time, from the secret places of the American heart, came forth the faith they could not see or that they could not even imagine. It brought us victory. And it will again. For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest sleeping in the unplowed ground. Is our world gone? We say "Farewell." Is a new world coming? We welcome it--and we will bend it to the hopes of man. To these trusted public servants and to my family and those close friends of mine who have followed me down a long, winding road, and to all the people of this Union and the world, I will repeat today what I said on that sorrowful day in November 1963: "I will lead and I will do the best I can." But you must look within your own hearts to the old promises and to the old dream. They will lead you best of all. For myself, I ask only, in the words of an ancient leader: "Give me now wisdom and knowledge, that I may go out and come in before this people: for who can judge this thy people, that is so great?

Most of the world’s most successful innovators see problems through a different lens from the rest of us. Why didn’t Hertz come up with a Zipcar-like product first? Kodak came close to creating a kind of Facebook product long before Mark Zuckerberg did. Major yogurt manufacturers understood that there might be a demand for Greek yogurt well before Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya launched what is now a $ 1 billion business. AT& T introduced a “picture phone” at the 1964 World’s Fair, decades before Apple’s iPhone. Instead of looking at the way the world is and assuming that’s the best predictor of the way the world will be, great innovators push themselves to look beyond entrenched assumptions to wonder if, perhaps, there was a better way. And there is.

___________ My parent often overreacted to relatively minor things. ___________ My parent didn’t express much empathy or emotional awareness. ___________ When it came to emotional closeness and feelings, my parent seemed uncomfortable and didn’t go there. ___________ My parent was often irritated by individual differences or different points of view. ___________ When I was growing up, my parent used me as a confidant but wasn’t a confidant for me. ___________ My parent often said and did things without thinking about people’s feelings. ___________ I didn’t get much attention or sympathy from my parent, except maybe when I was really sick. ___________ My parent was inconsistent—sometimes wise, sometimes unreasonable. ___________ If I became upset, my parent either said something superficial and unhelpful or got angry and sarcastic. ___________ Conversations mostly centered on my parent’s interests. ___________ Even polite disagreement could make my parent very defensive. ___________ It was deflating to tell my parent about my successes because it didn’t seem to matter. ___________ Facts and logic were no match for my parent’s opinions. ___________ My parent wasn’t self-reflective and rarely looked at his or her role in a problem. ___________ My parent tended to be a black-and-white thinker, and unreceptive to new ideas. How many of these statements describe your parent? Since all these items are potential signs of emotional immaturity, checking more than one suggests you very well may have been dealing with an emotionally immature parent.

Some Tomorrows Never Come. I opened my eyes. I cried. I walked. Then stumbled. Then walked some more. I learned to read. Did homework. Complained. Fought with my parents. Went to college after losing the fight. My friend Randy came to college with me. I did homework. Complained. Met Marcia. Smiled. Understood my parents had been right. Didn’t tell them. Marcia betrayed me. Randy betrayed me. I never actually said goodbye to either one. I figured they didn’t deserve even that. Dropped out of school. "For a while," I said. Cancer took Dad quickly. I never told him he had been right all along. I realized I should at least tell Mom. I didn’t. Went back to college. Graduated. Got a job. Got fired. My boss didn’t like me. There was nothing I could do. I wasted a year. I wanted to prove to them that I wouldn’t be affected by losing my job. I got another job. I left that job to start a business with Ed. We were successful. Ed never respected me like I deserved. I sold my share. His loss, I told myself. I married Pam. We were happy. Pam and I had Elisa. She was happy. I didn’t hurt for the need of money. But Pam still wanted me to go back to work. We weren’t happy. She didn’t respect me like I deserved. Pam and I divorced. She expected me to do all the work when it came to seeing Elisa. I resented her for it. I was not going to let her force me into things anymore. I didn’t see Elisa that often. Mom died. I never did have that conversation with her. I grew old. I didn’t have that much money anymore. Maybe Pam wasn’t entirely wrong. She seemed pretty happy with George. I heard Elisa call him “Dad” one day. Cancer came for me quickly. “I’m sorry, I can’t get over to the hospital after all, something came up. Maybe this weekend?” Elisa said. She had no idea how far away that weekend really was to me. It might as well have been an eternity. From a certain perspective, it was. She hung up without saying goodbye. Later, it was hard to breathe. I looked around the empty room. Oh, God, I wish I hadn’t carried the anger with me. I closed my eyes.

The Protest Polka is danced not just by lovers, but by parents and children and brothers and sisters, indeed by anyone with close emotional ties to another. Sometimes it is easier for us to see ourselves performing it with our siblings or our kids than with our spouse. Is it that the vulnerability is less obvious? I ask myself why my adolescent son, sighing and dismissing my comments about his being late, sends me over the edge into critical blaming, even when we have a loving bond between us. The answer is easy. Suddenly I hear a message that vibrates with attachment meanings. He rolls his eyes at me. His tone is contemptuous. I hear that my concerns or comments do not matter to him. I am irrelevant. So I turn up the music and I criticize him. He retreats and dismisses me again. We are off. The polka music plays on. But suddenly I recognize the music. So I step to the side and invite him to look at the dance. “Wait a minute. What is happening here? We are getting caught up in a silly fight and we are both getting hurt.” This is the first step in stopping the polka: recognize the music.