Never Take Shortcuts Quotes

Straight answers were beyond the powers of Rashid Khalifa, who would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available.

Death is a fascinating thing. The human mind continually returns and returns to death, to mortality, immortality, damnation, salvation. Some fear death, some seek it, but it is in our human nature to wonder at the limits of human life, at least. When you are sick like this you begin to wonder too much. Death is at your shoulder, death is your shadow, your scent, your waking and dreaming companion. You cannot help, when sleep begins to touch your eyes, but to wonder: What if? What if? And in that question, there is a longing, too much like the longing of a young girl in love. The sickness occupies your every thought, breath like a lover at your ear; the sickness stands at your shoulder in the mirror, absorbed with your body, each inch of skin and flesh, and you let it work you over, touch you with rough hands that thrill. Nothing will ever be so close to you again. You will never find a lover so careful, so attentive, so unconditionally present and concerned only with you. Some of us use the body to convey the things for which we cannot find words. Some of us decide to take a shortcut, decide the world is too much or too little, death is so easy, so smiling, so simple; and death is dramatic, a final fuck-you to the world.

Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm’s length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear. We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out “picture” is clear and accurate. But is it?

We simply do not allow space in our hearts, minds, or souls for darkness. Instead, we choose faith. Faith in ourselves and the power of hard work. Faith in our God whose overwhelming love sustains us every single day. That's what we choose. We choose love. Our love for our children. Our commitment to leaving them a better world. Our love for our country which has given us so many blessings and advantages. Our love for our fellow citizens: parents working hard to support their kids, men and women in uniform who risk everything to keep us safe, young people from the toughest background who never stop believing in their dreams, some people like so many of you. That's what we choose. And we choose excellence. We choose to tune out all the noise and strive for excellence in everything we do. No cutting corners, no taking shortcuts, no whining. We give 120% every single time. Because excellence is the most powerful answer you can give to the doubters and the haters. It's also the most powerful thing you can do for yourself. Because the process of striving, and struggling, and pushing yourself to new heights, that's how you develop your God-given talent. That's how you make yourself stronger, and smarter, and more able to make a difference for others.

Never, however, do I take shortcuts. There is not path of least resistance in my training. What I do equates to hard manual labor, disciplined grunt work. Once you permit yourself to compromise, you fail yourself. You might be able to fool some people, but you can never fool yourself. Your toughest critic is the one you face every morning in the mirror.

Online content and new media are changing our communities and changing the demand for and accessibility of that content. The discussion of representation is one that has been repeated over and over again, and the solution has always been that it’s up to us to support, promote, and create the images that we want to see. Ten years ago, making that suggestion would have required way more work than it does now, and my love of taking shortcuts probably wouldn’t allow me to make any dents on that front. But with ever-evolving, new accessible technologies, there are so many opportunities to reclaim our images. There’s no excuse not to, and I’ve never felt more purposeful in my quest to change the landscape of television.

You never get anywhere worthwhile taking shortcuts,

Seinfeld asked if McKinsey is funny. No, the magazine said. “Then I don’t need them,” he said. “If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micromanaged it—every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting.” If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. That is so counterintuitive. But I think it perfectly highlights the danger of shortcuts.

August 29th WANT NOTHING = HAVE EVERYTHING “No person has the power to have everything they want, but it is in their power not to want what they don’t have, and to cheerfully put to good use what they do have.” —SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 123.3 Is there a person so rich that there is literally nothing they can’t afford? Surely there isn’t. Even the richest people regularly fail in their attempts to buy elections, to purchase respect, class, love, and any number of other things that are not for sale. If obscene wealth will never get you everything you want, is that the end of it? Or is there another way to solve for that equation? To the Stoics, there is: by changing what it is that you want. By changing how you think, you’ll manage to get it. John D. Rockefeller, who was as rich as they come, believed that “a man’s wealth must be determined by the relation of his desires and expenditures to his income. If he feels rich on $10 and has everything he desires, he really is rich.” Today, you could try to increase your wealth, or you could take a shortcut and just want less.

As you wish. But I felt several personal items here while I was a guest at the house party, so if you don’t mind, I’ll fetch those before I leave.” That would give him an excuse to find her room and make her listen. “Very well.” As Jackson headed for the door, Stoneville called out, “Your room is in the west wing, isn’t it?” Jackson halted to eye him warily. “Yes. Why?” “You may not know that there’s a shortcut through the south wing.” The marguess stared steadily at him. The family resided in the south wing. “Indeed, I would love your opinion on a piece of art. I’m thinking of selling it, and you might know of a buyer. It’s a fine military painting by Goya hanging right next to Celia’s door, if you’d care to take a look on your way past.” He couldn’t believe it-Stoneville was telling him how to find Celia’s room. “Just remember,” Stoneville added, “if you should happen to run into anyone, explain that I wanted your opinion about some art.” “I appreciate your faith in my judgment, my lord,” he said. “I will certainly take a look at that painting.” Stoneville’s gaze hardened as he stood. “I trust that you’ll behave like a gentleman while you’re passing that way.” He bit back a hot retort-his lordship was one to talk. But the fact that the man was helping him with Celia was a small miracle, and he wasn’t about to ignore that. “Yes. A perfect gentleman.” “Good. I’ll hold you to that.

My novels are set in a global space and pace. However, I have never visited most of the places. I wrote my first book in London but the story took the reader to places in Mexico, Denmark and Russia, and carefully avoided London. I access these global locations with my feet planted in front of my computer. I will use my internet connection to carefully enter the streets of a foreign city and find out how long it will take my main character to get from the airport to the city center – and if there are any shortcuts on the way. I wanted to do something new. The world is becoming a global village and we have to understand these different cultures. There is a Danish culture, an Israeli culture and so on. So if you want to go to Denmark, then read the book.

They don’t rely on memorized conversational scripts, and they don’t have to carefully parse every single piece of data they encounter to make sense of it. They can wing it. Autistic people, on the flip side, don’t rely on knee-jerk assumptions or quick mental shortcuts to make our decisions. We process each element of our environment separately, and intentionally, taking very little for granted. If we’ve never been in a particular restaurant before, we may be slow to make sense of its layout or figure out how ordering works. We’ll need really clear-cut indications of whether it’s the kind of place where you sit down and get table service, or if you’re supposed to go to a counter to ask for what you like. (Many of us try to camouflage this fact by doing extensive research on a restaurant before setting foot inside.) Every single light, laugh, and smell in the place is taken in individually by our sensory system, rather than blended into a cohesive whole.

Just last year, Mrs. Clinton claimed that as secretary of state she didn’t carry a work phone. It was too cumbersome and inconvenient for her to carry two phones. She didn’t have room for them. Then we learned she carried an iPhone and BlackBerry, neither government issued nor encrypted. Then we learned she carried an iPad and an iPad mini. But she claimed she didn’t do email. Then we learned she had email—on a private server. But then she claimed her email was for personal correspondence, yoga, and wedding planning. Then we learned her email contained government business as well—lots of it. Listen, nobody transmits classified material on the Internet! Nobody! You transmit classified material via a closed-circuit, in-house intranet or even physically via courier. You can’t even photocopy classified data except on a machine specially designed for hush-hush material, and even then you still require permission from whatever agency and issuer the document originated. So the only way for that material to be transmitted over an email is for her or someone in her office to dictate, Photoshop, or white-out the classified material in question, to remove any letterhead, or to duplicate the material by rewriting it in an email. Government email accounts are never allowed to accept emails from nongovernment email accounts. We’re supposed to delete them right away. Exceptions exist for communications with private contractors, but those exceptions are built into the system. I repeat: To duplicate classified material without permission or to send it over an unsecured channel is completely illegal. That’s why every government agency employs burn bags, safes, and special folders for anything marked Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. People have lost their careers and gone to jail for far less. Yet Hillary Clinton transmitted classified material by the figurative ton. No one else can operate like that in government. But she takes her normal shortcuts and continues to lie about it. There is no greater example of double standards in leadership than First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Is it too inconvenient or cumbersome for her to follow the same rules that agents in the field have to follow? Maybe it would make morale too high? Clinton’s behavior harkens to the old motto: “The beatings will continue until morale improves.

The plot is simple: First, you take an urgent date-driven project, where the shipment date cannot be delayed because of external commitments made to Wall Street or customers. Then you add a bunch of developers who use up all the time in the schedule, leaving no time for testing or operations deployment. And because no one is willing to slip the deployment date, everyone after Development has to take outrageous and unacceptable shortcuts to hit the date. The results are never pretty. Usually, the software product is so unstable and unusable that even the people who were screaming for it end up saying that it’s not worth shipping. And it’s always IT Operations who still has to stay up all night, rebooting servers hourly to compensate for crappy code, doing whatever heroics are required to hide from the rest of the world just how bad things really are.

But are challenge and love enough? Not quite. All great teachers teach students how to reach the high standards. Collins and Esquith didn’t hand their students a reading list and wish them bon voyage. Collins’s students read and discussed every line of Macbeth in class. Esquith spent hours planning what chapters they would read in class. “I know which child will handle the challenge of the most difficult paragraphs, and carefully plan a passage for the shy youngster … who will begin his journey as a good reader. Nothing is left to chance.… It takes enormous energy, but to be in a room with young minds who hang on every word of a classic book and beg for more if I stop makes all the planning worthwhile.” What are they teaching the students en route? To love learning. To eventually learn and think for themselves. And to work hard on the fundamentals. Esquith’s class often met before school, after school, and on school vacations to master the fundamentals of English and math, especially as the work got harder. His motto: “There are no shortcuts.” Collins echoes that idea as she tells her class, “There is no magic here. Mrs. Collins is no miracle worker. I do not walk on water, I do not part the sea. I just love children and work harder than a lot of people, and so will you.” DeLay expected a lot from her students, but she, too, guided them there. Most students are intimidated by the idea of talent, and it keeps them in a fixed mindset. But DeLay demystified talent. One student was sure he couldn’t play a piece as fast as Itzhak Perlman. So she didn’t let him see the metronome until he had achieved it. “I know so surely that if he had been handling that metronome, as he approached that number he would have said to himself, I can never do this as fast as Itzhak Perlman, and he would have stopped himself.” Another student was intimidated by the beautiful sound made by talented violinists. “We were working on my sound, and there was this one note I played, and Miss DeLay stopped me and said, ‘Now that is a beautiful sound.’ ” She then explained how every note has to have a beautiful beginning, middle, and end, leading into the next note. And he thought, “Wow! If I can do it there, I can do it everywhere.” Suddenly the beautiful sound of Perlman made sense and was not just an overwhelming concept. When students don’t know how to do something and others do, the gap seems unbridgeable. Some educators try to reassure their students that they’re just fine as they are. Growth-minded teachers tell students the truth and then give them the tools to close the gap. As Marva Collins said to a boy who was clowning around in class, “You are in sixth grade and your reading score is 1.1. I don’t hide your scores in a folder. I tell them to you so you know what you have to do. Now your clowning days are over.” Then they got down to work.

Within a week of this call, my brother and I embarked on our 1-week book writing journey. We used this method to write our first book. The Result: We cranked out a 200+ page book in 1 week. What I am going to share with you in the next three chapters are the shortcuts that my mentor shared with me and the ones that helped me and my brother write our book in just 7 days. It is simple and super easy … but boy, oh, boy, is it effective. It’s so simple that I’m almost embarrassed so share it. Even though it works like crazy, this method is ignored by 99% of first-time authors. That’s why they never finish their books. I’m about to share it, but I need something from you first: Can you pinky promise you won’t laugh at how simple it is? I’m serious. Did you imaginary pinky promise me yet? I guess I’ll just have to take your word on it. In a nutshell, here’s the 3-step process he taught me: Mind map → Outline → Write

This is a city that gets born anew in the fresh eyes of every young person who arrives here for the first time. Coco Chanel is a gifted, ambitious, cunning, unloved, and hardworking eel of a woman. You should only buy gloves so beautiful that to lose one of them would break your heart. This is what flirtation is in its purest form—a conversation held without words. Flirtation is a series of silent questions that one person asks another person with their eyes. And the answer to those questions is always the same word: Maybe. You don’t become a real New Yorker until you can manage the city alone. History is not so busy shaping nations that it cannot take the time to shape the lives of two insignificant people. After a certain age, we are all walking around this world in bodies made of secrets and shame and sorrow and old, unhealed injuries. Our hearts grow sore and misshapen around all this pain—yet somehow, still, we carry on. Nothing will uproot your life more violently than true love—at least as far as I’ve always witnessed. Anyway, at some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is. Sex is so often a cheat—a shortcut of intimacy. A way to skip over knowing somebody’s heart by knowing, instead, their mere body. And in the geography of my imagination, a great many “neighborhoods” of intimacy were now also shuttered. There were certain subjects that I had only ever been able to talk about with him. There were places within me that he alone could reach with his listening—and I would never be able to reach those places on my own.

Viewed as a whole, climbing all fourteen 8,000ers would have seemed almost impossible, but I took it one day at a time, one step at a time. I was passionate about what I did, and I never gave up. “Whatever challenge you have before you can be accomplished in the same fashion—whether it takes a week, two months, or a year. If you look at the challenge as a whole, it may seem insuperable, but if you break it down into tangible steps, it can seem more reasonable, and ultimately achievable.” The model for that strategy comes from the way I learned to break up the “impossible” 4,000-foot climb to a summit into tiny, manageable pieces: just get to that rock outcrop there, then focus on the ice block up ahead, and so on. For

Legal You will learn that there are restrictions placed upon you in some areas. These restrictions are for your own protection. You will be prohibited from administering medications, recording sponge counts, or carrying out direct physician’s orders regarding treatment of a patient out of your scope of practice. As soon as you overstep your limitations and boundaries and perform any of these actions, you are placing yourself in legal jeopardy. Whether functioning under the supervision of a surgeon or a registered nurse, a CST is always part of the surgical team and you must carry out your responsibilities within the scope of your practice. Never try to do a task that does not fall within that realm. All counts are significant and have important legal ramifications. When performing a count, it is crucial to ensure that the count is correct for the patient’s well-being. When you are scrubbed, you count sponges while the registered nurse observes and records the count. At any given time during a surgical procedure, the CST may request a sponge, and possibly a sharps count to take place. If you are assisting the circulating nurse in a nonsterile role, you may assist with the counts as long as the nurse verifies it. In this scenario, the nurse is legally acting as the surgeon’s agent. It is the responsibility of the registered nurse to obtain the required medications for a case. The CST draws the drugs into syringes and mixes drugs when scrubbed; during this process, the proper sequence of medication verification and labeling must occur. In any phase of your responsibilities, there are possible grounds for legal breaches. Shortcuts may cause a patient to suffer tragic complications, even loss of life. Negligence must be avoided. Both as an employed CST and as a student, you carry the responsibility to do no harm. If you should become discouraged in your role or begin to feel this responsibility is overwhelming, it could simply mean that you need a change; it isn’t always the other team players or the place of employment that are at

Successful leaders are truthful about what they do because they know they can never succeed if they take shortcuts by lying to their followers.

The shortcut to fulfilment is to gradually let go of "reasons" and "conditions" that have to be met before being happy and aim directly for the feeling you would like to have. When waiting for outside circumstances to change you, rather than recognizing happiness within, you are a puppet of the world. Humans have created Billions of such dependencies. Needing all kinds of things to happen before you can be happy is a certain way of not moving up the scale. Practice feeling alright today rather than projecting happiness into some future that never really comes. Life is taking place today. Can you feel the Today-ness of Life?

So… you do dumb stuff and take shortcuts like the one I was taking now because maybe… just maybe… someone was gonna make it because I took another risk I couldn’t afford. Rolled the dice. Wrote checks I could only cash in death.

Try my favourite approach to avoiding small talk. Enter the date in media res. That’s Latin for “in the middle of things.” It’s a literary term that describes a story opening somewhere in the middle of the action, rather than at the beginning. (You can think of it as “coming in hot.”) When you walk into a date, instead of starting with the awkward “So, how’s your day going?” or “Where do you live?” jump right into the middle of things: “You’ll never guess what happened on my way over here!” or “I just got off the phone with my sister and she told me about this battles she’s in with her landlord over the recycling bins.” By skipping the getting-to-know you small talk and diving straight into the type of conversation that friends (or lovers!) might have, you take a shortcut to intimacy. Of course the conversation may reverse—you’ll eventually cover how your day is going, where you live, and so on, but at least you will have dipped your toes into the waters of real conversation.

Successful leaders are truthful about what they do, because they know they can never succeed if they take shortcuts by lying to their followers.

Focus on goals, take small steps, keep your targets in mind & never give up coz there is no shortcut to success!

So they went out for a walk. They went through narrow, lightless lanes, where houses that were silent but gave out smells of fish and boiled rice stood on either side of the road. There was not a single tree in sight; no breeze and no sound but the vaguely musical humming of mosquitoes. Once, an ancient taxi wheezed past, taking a short-cut through the lane into the main road, like a comic vintage car passing through a film-set showing the Twenties into the film-set of the present, passing from black and white into colour. But why did these houses – for instance, that one with the tall, ornate iron gates and a watchman dozing on a stool, which gave the impression that the family had valuables locked away inside, or that other one with the small porch and the painted door, which gave the impression that whenever there was a feast or a wedding all the relatives would be invited, and there would be so many relatives that some of them, probably the young men and women, would be sitting bunched together on the cramped porch because there would be no more space inside, talking eloquently about something that didn’t really require eloquence, laughing uproariously at a joke that wasn’t really very funny, or this next house with an old man relaxing in his easy-chair on the verandah, fanning himself with a local Sunday newspaper, or this small, shabby house with the girl Sandeep glimpsed through a window, sitting in a bare, ill-furnished room, memorising a text by candlelight, repeating suffixes and prefixes from a Bengali grammar over and over to herself – why did these houses seem to suggest that an infinitely interesting story might be woven around them? And yet the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer, like Sandeep, would be too caught up in jotting down the irrelevances and digressions that make up lives, and the life of a city, rather than a good story – till the reader would shout "Come to the point!" – and there would be no point, except the girl memorising the rules of grammar, the old man in the easy-chair fanning himself, and the house with the small, empty porch which was crowded, paradoxically, with many memories and possibilities. The "real" story, with its beginning, middle and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist.

Each day when we awaken from the bookmark of yesterday’s turmoil, we make choices of how to conduct our personal affairs. Each day we must decide if we will act humanely, ethically, and accord dignity to everyone whom we encounter. Each day of living, I fill out a personal diary. I must never be too afraid to wield the pen giving authorship to my own being. Each day is a test and with each day, we fill the pages of the novel that says who we are. Our acts and omissions mark our progress. Every action is a new sentence in our self-profile. Every failure to act is a blank page. We rightfully scorn the shallow author if he or she takes shortcuts and never attempts to gather a grain of personal enlightenment, if they brazenly fail to exhibit any sense dignity, or if they ignorantly lack any tincture of kindliness for other people. We all respond to someone whom loves other people, worships nature, and demonstrates that they know how to share their benevolence with other people.

Evolution, he explained, is a form of long-term, genetic optimization; the same process of trial and error takes place. And, as Darwin showed, in the great universal act of streamlining, even the errors are essential. If some ants weren’t error-prone, the ant trail would never straighten out. The scouts may be the genius architects who blaze the trails, but any rogue worker can be the one who stumbles upon a shortcut. Everyone optimizes, whether we are pioneering or perpetuating, making rules or breaking them, succeeding or screwing up.

Your best defense is to slow the pace of any relationship that begins with such idealization and intensity. Easier said than done when you believe you’ve met your soul mate. Keep it in mind anyway. Remember, it takes time to get to know another person’s true character. Some people are very different than who they first appear to be. We all believe we are good judges of character, but in truth we’re not. There is no shortcut; it takes time and observation. Take plenty of time—at least a year, preferably more—to observe a potential partner in a variety of situations. Judge them by their actions, never by their words. Maintain your goals, boundaries, activities, interests, and relationships with family and friends. If the person really loves you (and respects you), they won’t go anywhere.

She turned onto a quieter side street, listening for the sound of footfalls behind her. There was too much din from the tram bells and the hawkers on street corners, though, and she dared to take a shortcut through an alley. It was a strange, haphazard path that most vehicles couldn’t navigate without knocking a side mirror loose. A cobbled street where magic could still be felt when passing over certain thresholds or glancing at the shine of windows or stepping through a shadow that never faded, no matter how brilliant the sun burned overhead.

The reason it’s more beneficial to aim for quantity is because most of us are smart but lazy creatures who will find and take any available shortcut. If you commit to “getting better at songwriting,” you might noodle around on your guitar for twenty minutes here and there. If you commit to “writing a song every day from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m.,” you’ll write a lot more songs and they’ll be better. Also, what does it even look like to aim for quality? Sitting at your desk and declaring “Time to make something really good!” as you crack your knuckles? While there will always need to be space in your process for refining your work, the tendency for most is to get caught in a perfectionism spiral where things are never good enough and we’re spending forever on something we’re treating too preciously. By aiming for quantity, you force yourself to make bold decisions and move on. Quantity can be measured. You know when you’re hitting your goals. And usually, the more quantity there is, the more quality there will be.

Uh, Gary,” I venture hesitantly, my voice just above the tinny pattering of rain against the car roof. Gary glances at me quickly in the rearview mirror, and then his eyes fall back on the road ahead. “This isn’t the way to my house." I go on, a little more sharply now. "Maybe you should turn on the GPS. I don’t want you to get lost.” Gary snorts. “Relax. This is a shortcut. I take this way all the time to get to your home.” I furrow my brows, trying to think back to the last time I invited him over. I can't dredge up a memory of it. “I'm sorry, when have you been to my house?” His silence makes the short hairs on the back of my neck stand. “When have you been to my house?” I repeat. He only continues to stare forward. “Do you remember when you came to Visionaries to work for me?" He asks offhandedly, catching me off-guard. "I do. It was one of the best days of my life. You were so impressive during your interview. I knew I was going to hire you. And over the years, I never once regretted the decision. Not once.” I watch as the number on the speedometer increases from forty miles per hour to sixty. The click of the locks makes me jump in my seat, and I suddenly feel claustrophobic. I can't find any words to say, so I keep quiet. Gary doesn't seem to notice, because he keeps on without pause. “It didn’t take long for me to fall madly in love with you.” He chuckled harshly. “And you rejected me.” “I don’t date people I work with. It's a rule of mine...Besides, you’re my boss, and I’m not comfortable with that.” I wonder what happened to the traffic. I search the other lanes, but they're empty.