Outcomes Short Quotes

There are no coincidences in life. What person that wandered in and out of your life was there for some purpose, even if they caused you harm. Sometimes, it doesn’t make sense the short periods of time we get with people, or the outcomes from their choices. However, if you turn it over to God he promises that you will see the big picture in the hereafter. Nothing is too small to be a mistake.

Strength is Happiness. Strength is itself victory. In weakness and cowardice there is no happiness. When you wage a struggle, you might win or you might lose. But regardless of the short-term outcome, the very fact of your continuing to struggle is proof of your victory as a human being.

Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be so short-sighted as to not be able to see the outcome. The lover’s of God never run out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full. (9)

Willpower is just another name for the idea of choosing long-term outcomes rather than short-term ones.

But aren't all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos-- we know what's out there. It's what isn't that truly compels us. Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet lags-- four states and twelve hundred miles traversed in an afternoon-- but true quests aren't measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope. There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant-- sail for Asia and stumble on America-- and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along.

At that moment there opened a golden room holding all that had been and ever would be, every scene in the multiverse, every outcome, all fixed as in amber and ever awaiting choice. Their corporal selves but pale remnants on the recliners, Karger and Myla stood in this room of gold, eyeing each other. Possibilities lay before them, unending. Karger reached out his hand.

What do believers in the Absolute mean by saving that their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since in the Absolute finite evil is ‘overruled’ already, we may, therefore, whenever we wish, treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business.

kids who were able to overcome their desire for short-term reward in favor of a better outcome later weren’t smarter than the other kids, nor were they less gluttonous. They just had a better grasp of how to trick themselves into doing what was best for them.

Surveys have shown that ranking very close to the fear of death is the fear of public speaking. Why would someone feel profound fear, deep in his or her stomach, about public speaking, which is so far from death? Because it isn’t so far from death when we link it. Those who fear public speaking actually fear the loss of identity that attaches to performing badly, and that is firmly rooted in our survival needs. For all social animals, from ants to antelopes, identity is the pass card to inclusion, and inclusion is the key to survival. If a baby loses its identity as the child of his or her parents, a possible outcome is abandonment. For a human infant, that means death. As adults, without our identity as a member of the tribe or village, community or culture, a likely outcome is banishment and death. So the fear of getting up and addressing five hundred people at the annual convention of professionals in your field is not just the fear of embarrassment—it is linked to the fear of being perceived as incompetent, which is linked to the fear of loss of employment, loss of home, loss of family, your ability to contribute to society, your value, in short, your identity and your life. Linking an unwarranted fear to its ultimate terrible destination usually helps alleviate that fear. Though you may find that public speaking can link to death, you’ll see that it would be a long and unlikely trip.

courage was more important than confidence. When you are operating out of courage, you are saying that no matter how you feel about yourself or your opportunities or the outcome, you are going to take a risk and take a step toward what you want. You are not waiting for the confidence to mysteriously arrive. I now believe that confidence is achieved through repeated success at any endeavor.

Sometimes it doesn't make sense- the short periods of time we get with the best moments and with people, or their outcomes from their choices. However, if we turn it over to the golden light that flies around us. The breathing wind of the evening promises that we will see the big picture in the hereafter with a new dawn tomorrow. Nothing is too small to be a mistake.

Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course. It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly. It will not lengthen itself for a king’s command or a people’s favour. As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing or turning aside. What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that.

In short, critical theorists develop ways to “criticize” perceived structures and systems of oppression in order to bring about radical change. It offers a heuristic for understanding all human interaction through power dynamics between groups. When applied to race, concepts like white privilege, whiteness, and intersectionality purport to explain why there are disparities in outcomes among racial groups.

In short, lucky people are open-minded, upbeat, proactive, and always willing to try something new. While it’s good to be directed in your career, you’ll want to stay open and alert to unexpected possibilities. And when they show up, act on them. You never know what the outcome might be.

Thus, they were asking: do higher intelligence test scores from about age 20 predict better educational outcomes, higher social position, and arguably more pro-social behaviours in the thirties? The answer was: they did. They then asked if this was due to (confounded by) parental socio-economic status; it mostly wasn’t.

if you wish to end up as a moderately advanced, thinking society, you need to be at the right end of a very long chain of outcomes involving reasonable periods of stability interspersed with just the right amount of stress and challenge (ice ages appear to be especially helpful in this regard) and marked by a total absence of real cataclysm. As

If something is important enough, you should try. Even if the probable outcome is failure.

Her short path through life had been written and it was not her right to know the meaning, only the outcome.

Kettleburn retired to Hogsmeade but was unable, due to his physical infirmities, to take part in the Battle of Hogwarts. Determined to play his part, he clambered into his attic and threw his entire stock of Flobberworms out of the skylight at passing Death Eaters. While this may not have had much effect on the outcome of the battle, it was generally felt to show the right spirit.

I suspect that you cannot recall any truly significant action in your life that wasn’t governed by two very simple rules: staying away from something that would feed bad, or trying to accomplish something that would feel good. This law of approach and avoidance dictates most of human and animal behavior from a very early age. The forces that implement this law are positive and negative emotions. Emotions make us do things, as the name suggests (remove the first letter from the word). They motivate our remarkable achievements, incite us to try again when we fail, keep us safe from potential harm, urge us to accomplish rewarding and beneficial outcomes, and compel us to cultivate social and romantic relationships. In short, emotions in appropriate amounts make life worth living. They offer a healthy and vital existence, psychologically and biologically speaking. Take them away, and you face a sterile existence with no highs or lows to speak of. Emotionless, you will simply exist, rather than live.

Since the days of enslavement, African Americans have fought to gain access to quality education. Education can be transformative. It reshapes the health outcomes of a people; it breaks the cycle of poverty; it improves housing conditions; it raises the standard of living. Perhaps, most meaningfully, educational attainment significantly increases voter participation.135 In short, education strengthens a democracy. As

That news was enough to induce 900 Maori to sail to the Chathams. The outcome clearly illustrates how environments can affect economy, technology, political organization, and fighting skills within a short time.

One by one our skies go black. Stars are extinguished, collapsing into distances too great to breach. Soon, not even the memory of light will survive. Long ago, our manifold universes discovered futures would only expand. No arms of limit could hold or draw them back. Short of a miracle, they would continue to stretch, untangle and vanish – abandoned at long last to an unwitnessed dissolution. That dissolution is now. Final winks slipping over the horizons share what needs no sharing: There are no miracles. You might say that just to survive to such an end is a miracle in itself. We would agree. But we are not everyone. Even if you could imagine yourself billions of years hence, you would not begin to comprehend who we became and what we achieved. Yet left as you are, you will no more tremble before us than a butterfly on a windless day trembles before colluding skies, still calculating beyond one of your pacific horizons. Once we could move skies. We could transform them. We could make them sing. And when we fell into dreams our dreams asked questions and our skies, still singing, answered back. You are all we once were but the vastness of our strangeness exceeds all the light-years between our times. The frailty of your senses can no more recognize our reach than your thoughts can entertain even the vaguest outline of our knowledge. In ratios of quantity, a pulse of what we comprehend renders meaningless your entire history of discovery. We are on either side of history: yours just beginning, ours approaching a trillion years of ends. Yet even so, we still share a dyad of commonality. Two questions endure. Both without solution. What haunts us now will allways hunt you. The first reveals how the promise of all our postponements, ever longer, ever more secure – what we eventually mistook for immortality – was from the start a broken promise. Entropy suffers no reversals. Even now, here, on the edge of time’s end, where so many continue to vanish, we still have not pierced that veil of sentience undone. The first of our common horrors: Death. Yet we believe and accept that there is grace and finally truth in standing accountable before such an invisible unknown. But we are not everyone. Death, it turns out, is the mother of all conflicts. There are some who reject such an outcome. There are some who still fight for an alternate future. No matter the cost. Here then is the second of our common horrors. What not even all of time will end. What plagues us now and what will always plague you. War.

Fear-based cultures foster short-term thinking: you become defensive, seek to avoid confrontation or reprisal and focus on eliminating any threats instead of working together to deliver shared targets and outcomes.

When leaders become focused on the fruit instead of the root and worry about the outcome instead of the process of developing team members, they may survive in the short run, but they will not thrive in the long run.

The premise of the session is a short speech: “Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.

Whether or not you agree with the outcome, the tremendous amount that the Manhattan Project accomplished in such a short amount of time–just under three years–is astonishing. It makes you wonder what other kinds of things could be accomplished with that kind of determination, effort, and financial and political support. What if the kind of money, manpower, and resources that went into the Manhattan Project went into the fight against hunger? Cancer? Homelessness?

premortem. The procedure is simple: when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: “Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.

For thousands of years, civilization did not lend itself to peaceful equalization. Across a wide range of societies and different levels of development, stability favored economic inequality. This was as true of Pharaonic Egypt as it was of Victorian England, as true of the Roman Empire as of the United States. Violent shocks were of paramount importance in disrupting the established order, in compressing the distribution of income and wealth, in narrowing the gap between rich and poor. Throughout recorded history, the most powerful leveling invariably resulted from the most powerful shocks. Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics. I call these the Four Horsemen of Leveling. Just like their biblical counterparts, they went forth to “take peace from the earth” and “kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” Sometimes acting individually and sometimes in concert with one another, they produced outcomes that to contemporaries often seemed nothing short of apocalyptic. Hundreds of millions perished in their wake. And by the time the dust had settled, the gap between the haves and the have-nots had shrunk, sometimes dramatically.

Maybe it was being orphaned and alone all my life, but I always steeled for the worst outcome I could envision. That way I could shrug and be almost happy with anything that fell short of the worst. It was a peculiar life skill and one I had gotten damn good at.

This is great. But what I’m grasping at is an idea about a subtler goal. This thinking owes a lot to conversations with Manjula Waldron of Ohio State University, an engineering professor who also happens to be a hospital chaplain. This feels embarrassingly Zen-ish for me to spout, being a short, hypomanic guy with a Brooklyn accent, but here goes: Maybe the goal isn’t to maximize the contrast between a low baseline and a high level of activation. Maybe the idea is to have both simultaneously. Huh? Maybe the goal would be for your baseline to be something more than the mere absence of activation, a mere default, but to instead be an energized calm, a proactive choice. And for the ceiling to consist of some sort of equilibrium and equanimity threading through the crazed arousal. I have felt this a few times playing soccer, inept as I am at it, where there’s a moment when, successful outcome or not, every physiological system is going like mad, and my body does something that my mind didn’t even dream of, and the two seconds when that happened seemed to take a lot longer than it should have. But this business about the calm amid the arousal isn’t just another way of talking about “good stress” (a stimulating challenge, as opposed to a threat). Even when the stressor is bad and your heart is racing in crisis, the goal should be to somehow make the fraction of a second between each heartbeat into an instant that expands in time and allows you to regroup. There, I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I think there might be something important lurking there. Enough said.

in short, life would be maintained as it had gone on till then, in its achieved, perfect forms, without metamorphoses or additions with dubious outcome, and every individual would be able to develop his own nature, to arrive at the essence of himself and of all things.

Consciousness is an outcome of a recursively comparative memory in which previous self-nonself categorizations are continually related to ongoing present perceptual categorizations and their short term succession, before such categorizations have become part of that memory.

Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning – how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities of strengths of individual character had made the difference – the outcome seemed a little short of a miracle.

No one will bring back the years; no one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course. It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly. It will not lengthen itself for a king’s command or a people’s favour. As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing or turning aside. What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that.

Putting It into Practice: Neutralizing Negativity Use the techniques below anytime you’d like to lessen the effects of persistent negative thoughts. As you try each technique, pay attention to which ones work best for you and keep practicing them until they become instinctive. You may also discover some of your own that work just as well. ♦ Don’t assume your thoughts are accurate. Just because your mind comes up with something doesn’t necessarily mean it has any validity. Assume you’re missing a lot of elements, many of which could be positive. ♦ See your thoughts as graffiti on a wall or as little electrical impulses flickering around your brain. ♦ Assign a label to your negative experience: self-criticism, anger, anxiety, etc. Just naming what you are thinking and feeling can help you neutralize it. ♦ Depersonalize the experience. Rather than saying “I’m feeling ashamed,” try “There is shame being felt.” Imagine that you’re a scientist observing a phenomenon: “How interesting, there are self-critical thoughts arising.” ♦ Imagine seeing yourself from afar. Zoom out so far, you can see planet Earth hanging in space. Then zoom in to see your continent, then your country, your city, and finally the room you’re in. See your little self, electrical impulses whizzing across your brain. One little being having a particular experience at this particular moment. ♦ Imagine your mental chatter as coming from a radio; see if you can turn down the volume, or even just put the radio to the side and let it chatter away. ♦ Consider the worst-case outcome for your situation. Realize that whatever it is, you’ll survive. ♦ Think of all the previous times when you felt just like this—that you wouldn’t make it through—and yet clearly you did. We’re learning here to neutralize unhelpful thoughts. We want to avoid falling into the trap of arguing with them or trying to suppress them. This would only make matters worse. Consider this: if I ask you not to think of a white elephant—don’t picture a white elephant at all, please!—what’s the first thing your brain serves up? Right. Saying “No white elephants” leads to troops of white pachyderms marching through your mind. Steven Hayes and his colleagues studied our tendency to dwell on the forbidden by asking participants in controlled research studies to spend just a few minutes not thinking of a yellow jeep. For many people, the forbidden thought arose immediately, and with increasing frequency. For others, even if they were able to suppress the thought for a short period of time, at some point they broke down and yellow-jeep thoughts rose dramatically. Participants reported thinking about yellow jeeps with some frequency for days and sometimes weeks afterward. Because trying to suppress a self-critical thought only makes it more central to your thinking, it’s a far better strategy to simply aim to neutralize it. You’ve taken the first two steps in handling internal negativity: destigmatizing discomfort and neutralizing negativity. The third and final step will help you not just to lessen internal negativity but to actually replace it with a different internal reality.

Gravity on this view is no longer so much a thing as an outcome—“not a ‘force’ but a byproduct of the warping of spacetime,” in the words of the physicist Michio Kaku, who goes on: “In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.

It’s true that setting boundaries isn’t easy. Paralyzing fear about how someone might respond can easily hold us back. You might play out awkward interactions in your mind and prepare yourself for the worst possible outcome. But trust me: short-term discomfort for a long-term healthy relationship is worth it every time!

if we do nothing while we are feeling an emotion, there is no short- or long-term harm that can come to us. However, if we react to the emotion by making a DECISION, we may not only regret the immediate outcome, but we may also create a long-lasting pattern of DECISIONS that will continue to misguide us for a long time.

Those involved in the redesign process must know what they would do if they could do whatever they wanted. Such knowledge is essential if they are to set meaningful goals for the future. The outcome of such a design is idealized in the sense that the resulting system is ideal seeking, not ideal. It should be subject to continuous improvement with further experience and changing environments. The only certainty is that some of whatever we think we will want five or ten years from now will not be wanted then. Such a vision should be inspiring, a work of art. It should facilitate making short-run sacrifices for the sake of longer-run gains.

The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it. The model is constructed by associations that link ideas of circumstances, events, actions, and outcomes that co-occur with some regularity, either at the same time or within a relatively short interval.

We tend to overemphasize how a negative outcome will affect us. In reality, people are much more resilient than they realize, and “bad outcomes” often are not nearly as bad as people thought they would be. In short, we can take more risks knowing that our “mistakes” (if that’s even what they turn out to be) won’t be as negative as we imagine they will be.

at Dunkin’ Donuts, how did we move our anchor to Starbucks? This is where it gets really interesting. When Howard Shultz created Starbucks, he was as intuitive a businessman as Salvador Assael. He worked diligently to separate Starbucks from other coffee shops, not through price but through ambience. Accordingly, he designed Starbucks from the very beginning to feel like a continental coffeehouse. The early shops were fragrant with the smell of roasted beans (and better-quality roasted beans than those at Dunkin’ Donuts). They sold fancy French coffee presses. The showcases presented alluring snacks—almond croissants, biscotti, raspberry custard pastries, and others. Whereas Dunkin’ Donuts had small, medium, and large coffees, Starbucks offered Short, Tall, Grande, and Venti, as well as drinks with high-pedigree names like Caffè Americano, Caffè Misto, Macchiato, and Frappuccino. Starbucks did everything in its power, in other words, to make the experience feel different—so different that we would not use the prices at Dunkin’ Donuts as an anchor, but instead would be open to the new anchor that Starbucks was preparing for us. And that, to a great extent, is how Starbucks succeeded. GEORGE, DRAZEN, AND I were so excited with the experiments on coherent arbitrariness that we decided to push the idea one step farther. This time, we had a different twist to explore. Do you remember the famous episode in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the one in which Tom turned the whitewashing of Aunt Polly’s fence into an exercise in manipulating his friends? As I’m sure you recall, Tom applied the paint with gusto, pretending to enjoy the job. “Do you call this work?” Tom told his friends. “Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” Armed with this new “information,” his friends discovered the joys of whitewashing a fence. Before long, Tom’s friends were not only paying him for the privilege, but deriving real pleasure from the task—a win-win outcome if there ever was one. From our perspective, Tom transformed a negative experience to a positive one—he transformed a situation in which compensation was required to one in which people (Tom’s friends) would pay to get in on the fun. Could we do the same? We

continued. “The solution to almost every problem imaginable can be found in the outcome of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are life lessons disguised with colorful characters and situations. “‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf ’ teaches us the value of a good reputation and the power of honesty. ‘Cinderella’ shows us the rewards of having a good heart. ‘The Ugly Duckling’ teaches us the meaning of inner beauty.” Alex’s eyes were wide, and she nodded in agreement. She was a pretty girl with bright blue eyes and short strawberry-blonde hair that was always kept neatly out of her face with a headband. The way the other students stared at their teacher, as if the lesson being taught were in another language, was something Mrs. Peters had never grown accustomed to. So, Mrs. Peters would often direct entire lessons to the front row, where Alex sat. Mrs. Peters was a tall, thin woman who always wore dresses that resembled old, patterned sofas. Her hair was dark and curly and sat perfectly on the top of her head like a hat (and her students often thought it was). Through a pair of thick glasses, her eyes were permanently squinted from all the judgmental looks she had given her classes over the years. “Sadly, these timeless tales are no longer relevant in our society,” Mrs. Peters said. “We have traded their brilliant teachings for small-minded entertainment like television and video games. Parents now let obnoxious cartoons and violent movies influence their children. “The only exposure to the tales some children acquire are versions bastardized by film companies. Fairy

The first thing apparent was that this world and its people were often quite wrong. To conclude that others were wrong was as far as most of us ever got. The usual outcome was that people continued to wrong us and we stayed sore. Sometimes it was remorse and then we were sore at ourselves. But the more we fought and tried to have our own way, the worse matters got. As in war, the victor only seemed to win. Our moments of triumph were short-lived.

For example, an individual with BPII is more likely to have negative thoughts when stuck in traffic, such as My friend is going to be so mad at me because I will be late, and act in potentially unhealthy ways, such as driving recklessly or canceling the meeting, and thus feel more negatively (e.g., sad, angry, disappointed). In short, the biological tendencies of the individual with BPII are interacting with the situation to create a more negative outcome.

The short-termism among US policymakers has meant that the gains from globalization have been misallocated in a way that frustrated millions of Americans and spurred the populist reaction witnessed in 2016. As Alibaba founder Jack Ma pointed out at the Economic Forum in 2017, by choosing to spend $14.2 trillion fighting thirteen wars over three decades, rather than investing in America’s infrastructure, industry, and jobs, policymakers misallocated the wins from globalization. What was clear is that even thirty years ago, industrial jobs in the United States were already on the decline and exposing the economy to greater competition inherent in open international trade, further harming the American worker. The outcome was a missed opportunity to distribute the gains of globalization more widely (and in particular to America’s Rust Belt) and to fund a longer-term infrastructure investment strategy to galvanize the US economy.

In short, the problem is never the populist’s imperfect capacity to represent the people’s will; rather, it’s always the institutions that somehow produce the wrong outcomes. So even if they look properly democratic, there must be something going on behind the scenes that allows corrupt elites to continue to betray the people. Conspiracy theories are thus not a curious addition to populist rhetoric; they are rooted in and emerge from the very logic of populism itself.

the premortem. The procedure is simple: when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: “Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.

To bewail one’s lot is always despicable: it is always the outcome of weakness. Whether one ascribes one’s afflictions to others or to one’s self, it is all the same. The socialist does the former, the Christian, for instance, does the latter. That which is common to both attitudes, or rather that which is equally ignoble in them both, is the fact that somebody must be to blame if one suffers—in short, that the sufferer drugs himself with the honey of revenge to allay his anguish.

He labels his proposal the premortem. The procedure is simple: when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: “Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.

The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it. The model is constructed by associations that link ideas of circumstances, events, actions, and outcomes that co-occur with some regularity, either at the same time or within a relatively short interval. As these links are formed and strengthened, the pattern of associated ideas comes to represent the structure of events in your life, and it determines your interpretation of the present as well as your expectations of the future.

It's worth bearing that in mind when you make decisions and navigate your way through life. We can choose to bring out what's beautiful in ourselves. Human life is short. When we truly understand that, when we stop taking each other and what we have for granted, then we move through our own lives differently. We can't affect all possible outcomes or make everything come together exactly the way we want. But we can choose to act from our brightest intentions. We can take responsibility for the moral quality of our actions and our words. That's no small thing. It matters a great deal. And we can all do it.

There is something else I must confess about Tata Boanda: he's a sinner. Right in the plain sight of God he has two wives, a young and an old one. Why, they all come to church! Father says we're to pray for all three of them, but when you get down to the particulars it's hard to know exactly what outcome to pray for. He should drop one wife, I guess, but for sure he'd drop the older one, and she already looks sad enough as it is. The younger one has all the kids, and you can't just pray for a daddy to flat-out dump his babies, can you? I always believed any sin was easily rectified if only you let Jesus Christ into your heart, but here it gets complicated. Mama Boanda Number Two doesn't seem fazed by her situation. In fact, she looks like she's fixing to explode with satisfaction. She and her little girls all wear their hair in short spikes bursting out all over their heads, giving an effect similar to a pincushion (Rachel calls it the "haywire hairdo.") And Mama Boanda always wraps her pagne just so, with a huge pink starburst radiating across her wide rump. The women's long cloth skirts are printed so gaily with the oddest things: there is no telling when a raft of yellow umbrellas, or the calico cat and gingham dog, or an upside-down image of the Catholic Pope might just go sauntering across our yard.

Textbooks, however, being pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science, have to be rewritten in whole or in part whenever the language, problem-structure, or standards of normal science change. In short, they have to be rewritten in the aftermath of each scientific revolution, and, once rewritten, they inevitably disguise not only the role but the very existence of the revolutions that produced them. Unless he has personally experienced a revolution in his own lifetime, the historical sense either of the working scientist or of the lay reader of textbook literature extends only to the outcome of the most recent revolutions in the field. Textbooks

You ever choked? You know what I mean, fumbled at the goal line, stuck your foot in your mouth when you were trying to ask that girl on a date, had a brain freeze on the final exam you were totally prepared for, lipped out a three-foot putt to win the golf tournament, or been paralyzed by the feeling of “Oh my god life can’t get any better, do I really deserve this?” I have. What happens when we get that feeling? We clench up, get short of breath, self-conscious. We have an out-of-body experience where we observe ourselves in the third person, no longer present, now not doing well what we are there to do. We become voyeurs of our moment because we let it become bigger than us, and in doing so, we just became less involved in it and more impressed with it. Why does this happen? It happens because when we mentally give a person, place, or point in time more credit than ourselves, we then create a fictitious ceiling, a restriction, over the expectations we have of our own performance in that moment. We get tense, we focus on the outcome instead of the activity, and we miss the doing of the deed. We either think the world depends on the result, or it’s too good to be true. But it doesn’t, and it isn’t, and it’s not our right to believe it does or is. Don’t create imaginary constraints. A leading role, a blue ribbon, a winning score, a great

You’ve encountered it, I’m sure: friends who are obsessed by the need to get their children’s (or their own) teeth straightened, their thighs sculpted, their breasts or their backyards professionally redesigned … They want the perfect career trajectory, the perfect holiday, the perfect pesto, the perfect latte, the perfect eyebrow, the perfect orgasm … They yearn for perfect politicians (ha!), perfect banks, perfect cars, perfect shoes, perfect kitchens … our new angst springs from the discovery that our lives are falling short of some crazy ideal of perfection clogging our minds like a cancer … Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational.12

Shortly after the Gulf War in 1992 I happened to visit a July Fourth worship service at a certain megachurch. At center stage in this auditorium stood a large cross next to an equally large American flag. The congregation sang some praise choruses mixed with such patriotic hymns as “God Bless America.” The climax of the service centered on a video of a well-known Christian military general giving a patriotic speech about how God has blessed America and blessed its military troops, as evidenced by the speedy and almost “casualty-free” victory “he gave us” in the Gulf War (Iraqi deaths apparently weren’t counted as “casualties” worthy of notice). Triumphant military music played in the background as he spoke. The video closed with a scene of a silhouette of three crosses on a hill with an American flag waving in the background. Majestic, patriotic music now thundered. Suddenly, four fighter jets appeared on the horizon, flew over the crosses, and then split apart. As they roared over the camera, the words “God Bless America” appeared on the screen in front of the crosses. The congregation responded with roaring applause, catcalls, and a standing ovation. I saw several people wiping tears from their eyes. Indeed, as I remained frozen in my seat, I grew teary-eyed as well - but for entirely different reasons. I was struck with horrified grief. Thoughts raced through my mind: How could the cross and the sword have been so thoroughly fused without anyone seeming to notice? How could Jesus’ self-sacrificial death be linked with flying killing machines? How could Calvary be associated with bombs and missiles? How could Jesus’ people applaud tragic violence, regardless of why it happened and regardless of how they might benefit from its outcome? How could the kingdom of God be reduced to this sort of violent, nationalistic tribalism? Has the church progressed at all since the Crusades? Indeed, I wondered how this tribalistic, militaristic, religious celebration was any different from the one I had recently witnessed on television carried out by Taliban Muslims raising their guns as they joyfully praised Allah for the victories they believed “he had given them” in Afghanistan?

if, to take just one obvious instance, the dinosaurs hadn’t been wiped out by a meteor when they were—you might well be six inches long, with whiskers and a tail, and reading this in a burrow. We don’t really know for sure because we have nothing else to compare our own existence to, but it seems evident that if you wish to end up as a moderately advanced, thinking society, you need to be at the right end of a very long chain of outcomes involving reasonable periods of stability interspersed with just the right amount of stress and challenge (ice ages appear to be especially helpful in this regard) and marked by a total absence of real cataclysm. As we shall see in the pages that remain to us, we are very lucky to find ourselves in that position.

issue a statement attacking the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision. I announced that I would only nominate justices to the Supreme Court who publicly acknowledged their intention to overturn that terrible decision. I was glad to see Hillary Clinton make a similar statement a short time later. I also stated, “It is a national disgrace that billionaires and other extremely wealthy people are able to heavily influence the political process by making huge contributions. The Koch brothers alone will spend more than the Democratic and Republican parties to influence the outcome of next year’s elections. That’s not democracy, that’s oligarchy.” During this period, under the radar, our grassroots efforts were growing rapidly. Two examples come to mind:

One of the many inconveniences of real life is that it seldom gives you a complete story. Some incident has excited your interest, the people who are concerned in it are in the devil’s own muddle, and you wonder what on earth will happen next. Well, generally nothing happens. The inevitable catastrophe you foresaw wasn’t inevitable after all, and high tragedy, without any regard to artistic decency, dwindles into drawing-room comedy. Now, growing old has many disadvantages, but it has this compensation (among, let us admit, not a few others), that sometimes it gives you the opportunity of seeing what was the outcome of certain events you had witnessed long ago. You had given up the hope of ever knowing what was the end of the story, and then, when you least expected it, it is handed to you on a platter.

We noted in Section II that an increasing reliance on textbooks or their equivalent was an invariable concomitant of the emergence of a first paradigm in any field of science. The concluding section of this essay will argue that the domination of a mature science by such texts significantly differentiates its developmental pattern from that of other fields. For the moment let us simply take it for granted that, to an extent unprecedented in other fields, both the layman’s and the practitioner’s knowledge of science is based on textbooks and a few other types of literature derived from them. Textbooks, however, being pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science, have to be rewritten in whole or in part whenever the language, problem-structure, or standards of normal science change. In short, they have to be rewritten in the aftermath of each scientific revolution, and, once rewritten, they inevitably disguise not only the role but the very existence of the revolutions that produced them. Unless he has personally experienced a revolution in his own lifetime, the historical sense either of the working scientist or of the lay reader of textbook literature extends only to the outcome of the most recent revolutions in the field. Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated. Characteristically, textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an introductory chapter or, more often, in scattered references to the great heroes of an earlier age. From such references both students and professionals come to feel like participants in a long-standing historical tradition. Yet the textbook-derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is one that, in fact, never existed. For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the texts’ paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific. No wonder that textbooks and the historical tradition they imply have to be rewritten after each scientific revolution. And no wonder that, as they are rewritten, science once again comes to seem largely cumulative.

Suppose he really is in love. What about her? She never has anything good to say about him.” “Yet she blushes whenever he enters a room. And she stares at him a good deal. Or hadn’t you noticed that, either?” “As a matter of fact, I have.” Gazing up at him, she softened her tone. “But I do not want her hurt, Isaac. I must be sure she is desired for herself and not her fortune. Her siblings had a chance of not gaining their inheritance unless the others married, so I always knew that their mates loved them, but she…” She shook her head. “I had to find a way to remove her fortune from the equation.” “I still say you’re taking a big risk.” He glanced beyond her to where Celia was talking to the duke. “Do yo really think she’d be better off with Lyons?” But she doesn’t love him…If you’d just give her a chance- “I do not know,” Hetty said with a sigh. “I do not know anything anymore.” “Then you shouldn’t meddle. Because there’s another outcome you haven’t considered. If you try to manipulate matters to your satisfaction, she may balk entirely. Then you’ll find yourself in the sticky position of having to choose between disinheriting them all or backing down on your ultimatum. Personally, I think you should have given up that nonsense long ago, but I know only too well how stubborn you can be when you’ve got the bit between your teeth.” “Oh?” she said archly. “Have I been stubborn with you?” He gazed down at her. “You haven’t agreed to marry me yet.” Her heart flipped over in her chest. It was not the first time he had mentioned marriage, but she had refused to take him seriously. Until now. It was clear he would not be put off any longer. He looked solemnly in earnest. “Isaac…” “Are you worried that I am a fortune hunter?” “Do not be absurd.” “Because I’ve already told you that I’ll sign any marriage settlement you have your solicitor draw up. I don’t want your brewery or your vast fortune. I know it’s going to your grandchildren. I only want you.” The tender words made her sigh like a foolish girl. “I realize that. But why not merely continue as we have been?” His voice lowered. “Because I want to make you mine in every way.” A sweet shiver swept along her spine. “We do not need to marry for that.” “So all you want from me is an affair?” “No! But-“ “I want more than that. I want to go to sleep with you in my arms and wake with you in my bed. I want the right to be with you whenever I please, night or day.” His tone deepened. “I love you, Hetty. And when a man loves a woman, he wants to spend his life with her.” “But at our age, people will say-“ “Our age is an argument for marriage. We might not have much time left. Why not live it to the fullest, together, while we’re still in good health? Who cares about what people say? Life is too short to let other people dictate one’s choices.” She leaned heavily on his arm as they reached the steps leading up to the dais at the front of the ballroom. He did have a point. She had been balking at marrying him because she was sure people would think her a silly old fool. But then, she had always been out of step with everyone else. Why should this be any different? “I shall think about it,” she murmured as they headed to the center of the dais, where the family was gathering. “I suppose I’ll have to settle for that. For now.” He cast her a heated glance. “But later this evening, once we have the chance to be alone, I shall try more effective methods to persuade you. Because I’m not giving up on this. I can be as stubborn as you, my dear.” She bit back a smile. Thank God for that.

The US was forced to withdraw troops from Iraq after an extremely costly decade-long military occupation, leaving in place a regime more closely allied to Iran, the US’ regional adversary. The Iraq war depleted the economy, deprived American corporations of oil wealth, greatly enlarged Washington’s budget and trade deficits, and reduced the living standards of US citizens. The Afghanistan war had a similar outcome, with high external costs, military retreat, fragile clients, domestic disaffection, and no short or medium term transfers of wealth (imperial pillage) to the US Treasury or private corporations. The Libyan war led to the total destruction of a modern, oil-rich economy in North Africa, the total dissolution of state and civil society, and the emergence of armed tribal, fundamentalist militias opposed to US and EU client regimes in North and sub-Sahara Africa and beyond. Instead

21. Failure Isn’t Failure I try never to use the word ‘failure’. Because failure doesn’t really exist apart from in our mind. I call it something else: ‘an unsatisfactory outcome.’ Or even better: ‘a stepping stone to success’. People are often quick to label others a ‘failure’. There are many people who find it all too easy to point out loud and clear when others fall short of their dreams. But only little people belittle other people. Look at whom President Theodore Roosevelt so smartly gave the real credit to in life: It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly,…who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

If a one-state solution is a nonstarter, what are the prospects for a two-state solution? Put simply, they appear very bleak. Bleak primarily because the Palestinian Arabs, in the deepest fibers of their being, oppose such an outcome, demanding, as they did since the dawn of their national movement, all of Palestine as their patrimony. And I would hazard that, in the highly unlikely event that Israel and the PNA were in the coming years to sign a two-state agreement, it would in short order unravel. It would be subverted and overthrown by those forces in the Palestinian camp—probably representing Palestinian Arab majority opinion and certainly representing the historic will of the Palestinian national movement—bent on having all of Palestine. To judge from its past behavior, the PNA would be unwilling and, probably, incapable of reining in the more militant, expansionist factions—Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and so on—who would represent themselves as carrying on the patriotic, religious duty of resisting the Zionist invader. No Palestinian leader can fight them without being dubbed a “traitor” and losing his public’s support.

The combination of loss aversion and narrow framing is a costly curse. Individual investors can avoid that curse, achieving the emotional benefits of broad framing while also saving time and agony, by reducing the frequency with which they check how well their investments are doing. Closely following daily fluctuations is a losing proposition, because the pain of the frequent small losses exceeds the pleasure of the equally frequent small gains. Once a quarter is enough, and may be more than enough for individual investors. In addition to improving the emotional quality of life, the deliberate avoidance of exposure to short-term outcomes improves the quality of both decisions and outcomes. The typical short-term reaction to bad news is increased loss aversion. Investors who get aggregated feedback receive such news much less often and are likely to be less risk averse and to end up richer. You are also less prone to useless churning of your portfolio if you don’t know how every stock in it is doing every day (or every week or even every month). A commitment not to change one’s position for several periods (the equivalent of “locking in” an investment) improves financial performance.

[Nero] castrated the boy Sporus and actually tried to make a woman of him; and he married him with all the usual ceremonies, including a dowry and a bridal veil, took him to his house attended by a great throng, and treated him as his wife. This Sporus, decked out with the finery of the empresses and riding in a litter, he took with him to the assizes and marts of Greece, and later at Rome through the Street of the Images,​ fondly kissing him from time to time. That he even desired illicit relations with his own mother, and was kept from it by her enemies, who feared that such a help might give the reckless and insolent woman too great influence, was notorious, especially after he added to his concubines a courtesan who was said to look very like Agrippina. Even before that, so they say, whenever he rode in a litter with his mother, he had incestuous relations with her, which were betrayed by the stains on his clothing. He so prostituted his own chastity that after defiling almost every part of his body, he at last devised a kind of game, in which, covered with the skin of some wild animal, he was let loose from a cage and attacked the private parts of men and women, who were bound to stakes, and when he had sated his mad lust, was dispatched​ by his freedman Doryphorus; for he was even married to this man in the same way that he himself had married Sporus, going so far as to imitate the cries and lamentations of a maiden being deflowered. He made a palace extending all the way from the Palatine to the Esquiline, which at first he called the House of Passage, but when it was burned shortly after its completion and rebuilt, the Golden House. Its size and splendour will be sufficiently indicated by the following details. Its vestibule was large enough to contain a colossal statue of the emperor a hundred and twenty feet high; and it was so extensive that it had a triple colonnade​ a mile long. There was a pond too, like a sea, surrounded with buildings to represent cities,​ besides tracts of country, varied by tilled fields, vineyards, pastures and woods, with great numbers of wild and domestic animals. In the rest of the house all parts were overlaid with gold and adorned with gems and mother-of‑pearl. There were dining-rooms with fretted ceils of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and constantly revolved day and night, like the heavens. His mother offended him by too strict surveillance and criticism of his words and acts. At last terrified by her violence and threats, he determined to have her life, and after thrice attempting it by poison and finding that she had made herself immune by antidotes, he tampered with the ceiling of her bedroom, contriving a mechanical device for loosening its panels and dropping them upon her while she slept. When this leaked out through some of those connected with the plot, he devised a collapsible boat,​ to destroy her by shipwreck or by the falling in of its cabin. ...[He] offered her his contrivance, escorting her to it in high spirits and even kissing her breasts as they parted. The rest of the night he passed sleepless in intense anxiety, awaiting the outcome of his design. On learning that everything had gone wrong and that she had escaped by swimming, driven to desperation he secretly had a dagger thrown down beside her freedman Lucius Agermus, when he joyfully brought word that she was safe and sound, and then ordered that the freedman be seized and bound, on the charge of being hired to kill the emperor; that his mother be put to death, and the pretence made that she had escaped the consequences of her detected guilt by suicide.

We kept our fingers crossed and eagerly scanned the newspapers and magazines for news of an engagement between Diana and Charles. Then, late in the morning of February 24, I answered the telephone in my bedroom and heard the voice of a friend in London… “Mary, it’s Dena. Your girl made it!” I knew she meant that Diana’s engagement to Prince Charles had just been announced. I gave a big shout and literally jumped for joy, banging my head on the low dormer ceiling. I couldn’t have been prouder of Diana if I’d been her mother. I was so happy for her I could have burst! I knew how desperately she had wished for this outcome. The past fall, she had told me that she would “simply die” if the romance didn’t work out. How wonderful that her dream had come true. Almost immediately, a mischievous picture popped into my mind of the future and royal Diana, scheduled for an official day of handshaking, ribbon cutting, or tree planting and wishing she could have a friend call to cancel those tedious engagements. As Princess of Wales, she would not be able to cancel on short notice, if at all, as she had when she was baby-sitting for me. I wondered how the lively, spontaneous, and very young Diana would adjust to her official duties. I felt a bit sorry for her as I dimly realized how rigid and structured her new life might be.

As many speakers noted, this tool wasn’t particularly well suited for assessing outcomes of a psychiatric drug. How could a study of a neuroleptic possibly be “double-blind”? The psychiatrist would quickly see who was on the drug and who was not, and any patient given Thorazine would know he was on a medication as well. Then there was the problem of diagnosis: How would a researcher know if the patients randomized into a trial really had “schizophrenia”? The diagnostic boundaries of mental disorders were forever changing. Equally problematic, what defined a “good outcome”? Psychiatrists and hospital staff might want to see drug-induced behavioral changes that made the patient “more socially acceptable” but weren’t to the “ultimate benefit of the patient,” said one conference speaker.11 And how could outcomes be measured? In a study of a drug for a known disease, mortality rates or laboratory results could serve as objective measures of whether a treatment worked. For instance, to test whether a drug for tuberculosis was effective, an X-ray of the lung could show whether the bacillus that caused the disease was gone. What would be the measurable endpoint in a trial of a drug for schizophrenia? The problem, said NIMH physician Edward Evarts at the conference, was that “the goals of therapy in schizophrenia, short of getting the patient ‘well,’ have not been clearly defined.

The Covid-19 pandemic has made it clear that by several measures, the health status of Black Americans is on par with that of people living in far poorer nations, and that at every stage of life Black Americans have poorer health outcomes than white Americans and even, in most cases, than other ethnic groups. Racial health disparities show up at the beginning of life and cut lives short at the end. Black babies are more than twice as likely as white babies to die at birth or in the first year of life—a racial gap that adds up to thousands of lost lives every year.13 African American adults of all ages have elevated rates of conditions such as diabetes and hypertension that among white people are found more commonly at older ages. In the first half of 2020, owing to the pandemic, the Black-white gap in life expectancy increased to six years, from four in 2019.14 This inequality when it comes to the health of Black people’s bodies is rooted in false ideas about racial differences, developed and spread during slavery, and long challenged by Black medical practitioners and scholars, that still inform the way medical treatment is administered in America.15 To understand the racial divide in the health of our nation that was stripped bare by Covid-19, we must examine the roots of these myths. — In the 1787 manual A Treatise on Tropical Diseases; and on the Climate of the West-Indies, a British doctor, Benjamin Moseley, claimed that Black people could bear surgical operations much more easily than white people, noting that “what would be the cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard.

When you measure a single spiked wave, such as that in Figure 8.9, the device registers the spike's location. If it's spiked at Strawberry Fields, that's what the device reads; if you look at the result, your brain registers that location and you become aware of it. If it's spiked at Grant's Tomb, that's what the device registers; if you look, your brain registers that location and you become aware of it. When you measure the double spiked wave in Figure 8.10, Schrodinger's math tells you to combine the two results you just found. But, says Everett, be careful and precise when you combine them. The combined result, he argued, does not yield a meter and a mind each simultaneously registering two locations. That's sloppy thinking. Instead, proceeding slowly and literally, we find that the combined result is a device and a mind registering Strawberry Fields, and a device and a mind registering Grant's Tomb. And what does that mean? I'll use broad strokes in painting the general picture, which I'll refine shortly. To accommodate Everett's suggested outcome, the device and you and everything else must split upon measurement, yielding two devices, two yous, and two everything elses-the only difference between the two being that one device and one you registers Strawberry Fields, while the other device and the other you registers Grant's Tomb. As in Figure 8.12, this implies that we now have two parallel realities, two parallel worlds. To the you occupying each, the measurement and your mental impression of the result are sharp and unique and thus fell like life as usual. The peculiarity, of course, is that there are two of you who feel this way.

Why do families blame themselves? If so many of the family theories have been discredited why spend so much time on the issue here? Family theories in mental illness continue to exercise a remarkably powerful hold over us despite the evidence. And not just in schizophrenia but in depression, anorexia nervosa, personality disorder, drug and alcohol abuse, etc. Parents seem to have an endless capacity to blame themselves for what happens to their children (and perhaps children to blame their parents). This is probably because we need to believe it. Just as we need to believe in free will and our influence on the outside world, family members need to believe that they influence each other. If we didn’t why would we bother? The evolutionary psychologists would say that parents need to believe it to invest years and years bringing up their children. We’re biologically programmed to look after our children so we need some belief system to support it (just as they might say we’re biologically programmed to mate and need to believe in love to support it). It is proposed that such a belief is a mechanism for sustaining our attention to our biological task. The downside is, of course, guilt and blame. If we believe we have an influence we feel we have failed if things do not work out well. It is inescapable. Even in expressed emotion work where therapists insist emphatically that no one is to blame and that the aim is solely to find more effective coping strategies, families do feel blamed. ‘If only we weren’t so over-involved he would not have so many relapses.’ ‘Other families must have dealt with it better otherwise how would the therapist know what to advise?’ For some families feeling responsible, despite the guilt, is preferable. It implies the logical consequence that there must be something they can do to influence the outcome. Cultures which value resignation are less likely to blame themselves (high expressed emotion is less common in India than in Europe).

Modeling the evolution of modularity became significantly easier after a kind of genetic variation was discovered by quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping in the lab of James Cheverud at Washington University called 'relationship QTL' or r-QTL for short. An r-QTL is a genetic locus that affects the correlations between two quantitative traits (i.e. their variational relationship, and therefore, 'relationship' loci). Surprisingly, a large fraction of these so-mapped loci are also neutral with respect to the character mean. This means one can select on these 'neutral' r-QTLs without simultaneously changing the character mean in a certain way. It was easy to show that differential directional selection on a character could easily lead a decrease in genetic correlation between characters. Of course, it is not guaranteed that each and every population has the right kind of r-QTL polymorphisms, nor is it yet clear what kind of genetic architecture allows for the existence of an r-QTL. Nevertheless, these findings make it plausible that differential directional selection can enhance the genetic/variational individuality of traits and, thus, may play a role in the origin of evolutionary novelties by selecting for variational individuality. It must be added, though, that there has been relatively little research in this area and that we will need to see more to determine whether we understand what is going on here, if anything. In particular, one difficulty is the mathematical modeling of gene interaction (epistasis), because the details of an epistasis model determine the outcome of the evolution by natural selection. One result shows that natural selection increases or decreases mutational variance, depending on whether the average epistatic effects are positive or negative. This means that the genetic architecture is more determined by the genetic architecture that we start with than by the nature of the selection forces that act upon it. In other words, the evolution of a genetic architecture could be arbitrary with respect to selection.

Non-Tenure Writing Jobs The MLA session on the adjunct crisis indicates where higher education has come to in the Brave New World of the 21st century. Research by the MLA itself, by Gloria McMillan, by Eileen Schell and other colleagues, already confirm the deep replacement of tenure-track faculty with contingent adjuncts and others. This crisis is deepest in composition and in community colleges. Doug Hesse’s program at Denver Univ. is no solution; it will extend the subordination of composition through sub-faculty lines while rationalizing it as “good for students"(before research has even proved it so). But, sub-faculty writing lecturers will never be treated as “real” professors by their institutions and will never be accepted as colleagues by their tenure-track peers. Such sub-faculty plans will weaken the faculty as a whole in the academy by further dividing it into competing sub-groups. Neither will a sub-faculty plan benefit the 14 million undergraduates on campus, most who attend under-funded public colleges with no billion-dollar endowments or corporate angels to turn to. Community colleges, in particular, where about 6 million students are enrolled, can have up to 65% of classes taught by adjuncts. The sub-faculty plan is thus really a management tool available in the short-term to those colleges with deep pockets and deep readiness to entrench a lesser sub-faculty in their writing programs. Doug Hesse acknowledges such an outcome as a possibility. He is quoted in the IHE report saying he was disturbed by the degree of interest other WPAs took in DU’s new sub-faculty writing program, fearing that DU was installing a “Vichy"-type model(collaborating with the authorities desire to de-tenure faculty generally and to subordinate writing instructors particularly). But, Hesse is quoted as making peace with this because he feels that sub-faculty lines for writing teachers are at least good for writing students. Even if we knew for sure this was true, why must writing teachers be the only professionals in higher education called upon to make such sacrifices? A large private grant to finance Denver University’s program($10 million for Hesse’s project)is good fortune for one campus, but it offers no model for how we can solve the national disgrace of exploited adjuncts.

Of course, we suffer from bottomless avidity. Our lives are so precious to us, we are so watchful of waste. Or perhaps a better name for it would be the Sense of Personal Destiny. Yes, I think that is better than avidity. Shall my life by one-thousandth of an inch fall short of its ultimate possibility? It is a different thing to value oneself, and to prize oneself crazily. And then there are our plans, idealizations. These are dangerous, too. They can consume us like parasites, eat us, drink us, and leave us lifelessly prostrate. And yet we are always inviting the parasite, as if we were eager to be drained and eaten. It is because we have been taught there is no limit to what a man can be. Six hundred years ago, a man was what he was born to be Satan and the Church, representing God, did battle over him. He, by reason of his choice, partially decided the outcome. But whether, after life, he went to hell or to heaven, his place among other men was given. It could not be contested. But, since, the stage has been reset and human beings only walk on it, and, under this revision, we have, instead, history to answer to. We were important enough then for our souls to be fought over. Now, each of us is responsible for his own salvation, which is in his greatness. And that, that greatness, is the rock our hearts are abraded on. Great minds, great beauties, great lovers and criminals surround us. From the great sadness and desperation of Werthers and Don Juans we went to the great ruling images of Napoleons; from these to murderers who had that right over victims because they were greater than the victims; to men who felt privileged to approach others with a whip; to schoolboys and clerks who roared like revolutionary lions; to those pimps and subway creatures, debaters in midnight cafeterias who believed they could be great in treachery and catch the throats of those they felt were sound and well in the lassos of their morbidity; to dreams of greatly beautiful shadows embracing on a flawless screen. Because of these things we hate immoderately and punish ourselves and one another immoderately. The fear of lagging pursues and maddens us. The fear lies in us like a cloud. It makes an inner climate of darkness. And occasionally there is a storm and hate and wounding rain out of us.

On the one hand, I recognize the power of the placebo effect: if you believe it’s working, it may well work. If you think an object brings you luck, you are more confident. And yet what the Italian students in the “lucky” seats showed wasn’t confidence; it was overconfidence. They thought they were doing better, but the evidence didn’t actually back them up. And then there’s the flip side of the placebo, the nocebo effect: the belief in evil signs or bad luck. It turns out people can literally scare themselves to death. If you think you’ve been cursed or otherwise made ill, you may end up actually getting sick, failing to improve poor health, or, yes, dying altogether. In one medically documented instance, a man was given three months to live after a diagnosis of metastatic cancer of the esophagus. He died shortly after. When his body was autopsied, doctors realized that he had been misdiagnosed: he did indeed have cancer, but a tiny, non-metastatic tumor on his liver. Clinically speaking, it could not have killed him. But, it seems, being told he was dying of a fatal illness brought about that very outcome. In another case, a man thought he was hexed by a voodoo priest. He came close to death, only to recover miraculously after an enterprising doctor “reversed” the curse through a series of made-up words. In yet a third, a man almost died in the emergency room after overdosing on pills. He’d been in a drug trial for depression and decided to end his life with the antidepressants he’d been prescribed. His vitals were so bad when he was admitted that doctors didn’t think he would make it—until they discovered his blood was completely clear of any drugs. He’d been taking a placebo. Once he found out he had not in fact taken a life-threatening quantity of pills, he recovered quickly. The effect our mind has on our body makes for a scary proposition. Belief is a powerful thing. Our mental state is crucial to our performance. And ultimately, while some superstitions may give you a veneer of false confidence, they also have the power to destroy your mental equilibrium. I like to think of this as the black cat effect. You see one cross the parking lot as you walk to a tournament. You brood about the bad luck. Your game is thrown off. You blame the cat. You bust. You feel validated. Superstitions are false attributions, so they give you a false sense of your own abilities and in the end, impede learning.

The Delusion of Lasting Success promises that building an enduring company is not only achievable but a worthwhile objective. Yet companies that have outperformed the market for long periods of time are not just rare, they are statistical artifacts that are observable only in retrospect. Companies that achieved lasting success may be best understood as having strung together many short-term successes. Pursuing a dream of enduring greatness may divert attention from the pressing need to win immediate battles. The Delusion of Absolute Performance diverts our attention from the fact that success and failure always take place in a competitive environment. It may be comforting to believe that our success is entirely up to us, but as the example of Kmart demonstrated, a company can improve in absolute terms and still fall further behind in relative terms. Success in business means doing things better than rivals, not just doing things well. Believing that performance is absolute can cause us to take our eye off rivals and to avoid decisions that, while risky, may be essential for survival given the particular context of our industry and its competitive dynamics. The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick lets us confuse causes and effects, actions and outcomes. We may look at a handful of extraordinarily successful companies and imagine that doing what they did can lead to success — when it might in fact lead mainly to higher volatility and a lower overall chance of success. Unless we start with the full population of companies and examine what they all did — and how they all fared — we have an incomplete and indeed biased set of information. The Delusion of Organizational Physics implies that the business world offers predictable results, that it conforms to precise laws. It fuels a belief that a given set of actions can work in all settings and ignores the need to adapt to different conditions: intensity of competition, rate of growth, size of competitors, market concentration, regulation, global dispersion of activities, and much more. Claiming that one approach can work everywhere, at all times, for all companies, has a simplistic appeal but doesn’t do justice to the complexities of business. These points, taken together, expose the principal fiction at the heart of so many business books — that a company can choose to be great, that following a few key steps will predictably lead to greatness, that its success is entirely of its own making and not dependent on factors outside its control.

...the centrality of competitiveness as the key to growth is a recurrent EU motif. Two decades of EC directives on increasing competition in every area, from telecommunications to power generation to collateralizing wholesale funding markets for banks, all bear the same ordoliberal imprint. Similarly, the consistent focus on the periphery states’ loss of competitiveness and the need for deep wage and cost reductions therein, while the role of surplus countries in generating the crisis is utterly ignored, speaks to a deeply ordoliberal understanding of economic management. Savers, after all, cannot be sinners. Similarly, the most recent German innovation of a constitutional debt brake (Schuldenbremse) for all EU countries regardless of their business cycles or structural positions, coupled with a new rules-based fiscal treaty as the solution to the crisis, is simply an ever-tighter ordo by another name. If states have broken the rules, the only possible policy is a diet of strict austerity to bring them back into conformity with the rules, plus automatic sanctions for those who cannot stay within the rules. There are no fallacies of composition, only good and bad policies. And since states, from an ordoliberal viewpoint, cannot be relied upon to provide the necessary austerity because they are prone to capture, we must have rules and an independent monetary authority to ensure that states conform to the ordo imperative; hence, the ECB. Then, and only then, will growth return. In the case of Greece and Italy in 2011, if that meant deposing a few democratically elected governments, then so be it. The most remarkable thing about this ordoliberalization of Europe is how it replicates the same error often attributed to the Anglo-American economies: the insistence that all developing states follow their liberal instruction sheets to get rich, the so-called Washington Consensus approach to development that we shall discuss shortly. The basic objection made by late-developing states, such as the countries of East Asia, to the Washington Consensus/Anglo-American idea “liberalize and then growth follows” was twofold. First, this understanding mistakes the outcomes of growth, stable public finances, low inflation, cost competitiveness, and so on, for the causes of growth. Second, the liberal path to growth only makes sense if you are an early developer, since you have no competitors—pace the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century and the United States in the nineteenth century. Yet in the contemporary world, development is almost always state led.

Neoliberal ideology has radically altered our working lives, leaving us isolated and exposed. The ‘freedom and independence’ of the gig economy it celebrates, in which regular jobs are replaced by an illusion of self-employment, often translates into no job security, no unions, no health benefits, no overtime compensation, no safety net and no sense of community. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher said the following in a magazine interview: I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’, ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ And so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.8 As always, Thatcher was faithfully repeating the snake-oil remedies of neoliberalism. Precious few of the ideas attributed to her were her own. They were formulated by men like Hayek and Friedman, then spun by the think tanks and academic departments of the Neoliberal International. In this short quote, we see three of the ideology’s core tenets distilled: First, everyone is responsible for their own destiny, and if you fall through the cracks, the fault is yours and yours alone. Second, the state has no responsibility for those in economic distress, even those without a home. Third, there is no legitimate form of social organization beyond the individual and the family. There is genuine belief here. There is a long philosophical tradition, dating back to Thomas Hobbes,9 which sees humankind as engaged in a war of ‘every man against every man’. Hayek believed that this frantic competition delivered social benefits, generating the wealth which would eventually enrich us all. But there is also political calculation. Together we are powerful, alone we are powerless. As individual consumers, we can do almost nothing to change social or environmental outcomes. But as citizens, combining effectively with others to form political movements, there is almost nothing we cannot do. Those who govern on behalf of the rich have an incentive to persuade us we are alone in our struggle for survival, and that any attempts to solve our problems collectively – through trade unions, protest movements or even the mutual obligations of society – are illegitimate or even immoral. The strategy of political leaders such as Thatcher

As a child, Callum never sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecified drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation of it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely. The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that, either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Must they participate in the drudgery of it all for some interminable cause? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? Wanting anything—beauty, love, omnipotence, absolution—was the natural flaw in being human, but the choice to waste away for anything made the whole indigestible. A waste. Simple choices were what registered to Callum as most honestly, the truest truths: fairy-tale peasants need money for dying child, accepts whatever consequence follow. The rest of the story—about rewards of choosing good or the ill-fated outcomes of desperation and vice—we’re always too lofty, a pretty but undeniable lie. Cosmic justice wasn’t real. Betrayal was all too common. For better or worse, people did not get what they deserved. Callum had always tended toward the assassins in the stories, the dutiful soldiers, those driven by personal reaction rather than on some larger moral cause. Perhaps it was a small role to serve on the whole, but at least it was rational, comprehensible beyond fatalistic. Take the huntsman who failed to kill Snow White, for example. An assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether humanity as a whole won or lost as a result of his choice? Unimportant. He didn’t raise an army, didn’t fight for good, didn’t interfere much with the queen’s other evils. It wasn’t the whole world at stake; it was never about destiny. Callum admired that, the ability to take a moral stance and hold it. It was only about whether the huntsman could live with his decision—because however miserable or dull or uninspired, life was the only thing that mattered in the end. The truest truths: Mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn’t buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In terms of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself.

Dani declared that courage was more important than confidence. When you are operating out of courage, you are saying that no matter how you feel about yourself or your opportunities or the outcome, you are going to take a risk and take a step toward what you want.

It will be evident to the experienced reader that by omitting certain speculative and metaphysical elements and by elaborating incident, this book might have been reduced to a straightforward story. But I did not want to omit as much on this occasion. I do not see why I should always pander to the vulgar appetite for stark stories. And in short, I made it this. I explain all this in order to make it clear to the reader that, however queer this book appears at the first examination, it is the outcome of trial and deliberation, it is intended to be as it is. I am aiming throughout at a sort of shot-silk texture between philosophical discussion on the one hand and imaginative narrative on the other.

Double prehistory of good and evil. The concept of good and evil has a double prehistory: namely, first of all, in the soul of the ruling clans and castes. The man who has the power to requite goodness with goodness, evil with evil, and really does practice requital by being grateful and vengeful, is called "good." The man who is unpowerful and cannot requite is taken for bad. As a good man, one belongs to the "good," a community that has a communal feeling, because all the individuals are entwined together by their feeling for requital. As a bad man, one belongs to the "bad," to a mass of abject, powerless men who have no communal feeling. The good men are a caste; the bad men are a multitude, like particles of dust. Good and bad are for a time equivalent to noble and base, master and slave. Conversely, one does not regard the enemy as evil: he can requite. In Homer, both the Trojan and the Greek are good. Not the man who inflicts harm on us, but the man who is contemptible, is bad. In the community of the good, goodness is hereditary; it is impossible for a bad man to grow out of such good soil. Should one of the good men nevertheless do something unworthy of good men, one resorts to excuses; one blames God, for example, saying that he struck the good man with blindness and madness. Then, in the souls of oppressed, powerless men, every other man is taken for hostile, inconsiderate, exploitative, cruel, sly, whether he be noble or base. Evil is their epithet for man, indeed for every possible living being, even, for example, for a god; "human," "divine" mean the same as "devilish," "evil." Signs of goodness, helpfulness, pity are taken anxiously for malice, the prelude to a terrible outcome, bewilderment, and deception, in short, for refined evil. With such a state of mind in the individual, a community can scarcely come about at all--or at most in the crudest form; so that wherever this concept of good and evil predominates, the downfall of individuals, their clans and races, is near at hand. Our present morality has grown up on the ground of the ruling clans and castes.

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When, in Being and Time,Heidegger insists that death is the onlyevent which cannot be taken over by another subject for me—an-other cannot die for me, in my place—the obvious counterexampleis Christ himself: did he not, in the extreme gesture of interpassiv-ity, take over for us the ultimate passive experience of dying? Christdies so that we are given a chance to live forever....The problemhere is not only that, obviously, we don’tlive forever (the answer tothis is that it is the Holy Spirit, the community of believers, whichlives forever), but the subjective status of Christ: when he was dyingon the Cross, did he know about his Resurrection-to-come? If he didthen it was all a game, the supreme divine comedy, since Christ knewhis suffering was just a spectacle with a guaranteed good outcome—in short, Christ was faking despair in his “Father, why hast thou for-saken me?” If he didn’t, then in what precise sense was Christ (also)divine? Did God the Father limit the scope of knowledge of Christ’smind to that of a common human consciousness, so that Christ ac-tually thought he was dying abandoned by his father? Was Christ, ineffect, occupying the position of the son in the wonderful joke aboutthe rabbi who turns in despair to God, asking Him what he shoulddo with his bad son, who has deeply disappointed him; God calmlyanswers: “Do the same as I did: write a new testament!”What is crucial here is the radical ambiguity of the term “the faithof Jesus Christ,” which can be read as subjective or objectivegenitive: it can be either “the faith ofChrist” or “the faith / of us, be-lievers / inChrist.” Either we are redeemed because of Christ’s purefaith, or we are redeemed by our faith in Christ, if and insofar as webelieve in him. Perhaps there is a way to read the two meanings to-gether: what we are called to believe in is not Christ’s divinity as suchbut, rather, his faith, his sinless purity. What Christianity proposes isthe figure of Christ as our subject supposed to believe:in our ordinary lives,we never truly believe, but we can at least have the consolation thatthere is One who truly believes (the function of what Lacan, in hisseminar Encore,called y’a de l’un).The final twist here, however, is thaton the Cross, Christ himself has to suspend his belief momentarily.So maybe, at a deeper level, Christ is, rather, our (believers’) subject supposed NOTto believe: it is not our belief we transpose onto others, but,rather, our disbelief itself. Instead of doubting, mocking, and ques-tioning things while believing through the Other, we can also trans-pose onto the Other the nagging doubt, thus regaining the abilityto believe. (And is there not, in exactly the same way, also the func-tion of the subject supposed not to know? Ta ke little children who are sup-posed not to know the “facts of life,” and whose blessed ignorancewe, knowing adults, are supposed to protect by shielding them frombrutal reality; or the wife who is supposed not to know about herhusband’s secret affair, and willingly plays this role even if she re-ally knows all about it, like the young wife in The Age of Innocence;or, inacademia, the role we assume when we ask someone: “OK, I’ll pre-tend I don’t know anything about this topic—try to explain it to mefrom scratch!”) And, perhaps, the true communion with Christ, thetrue imitatio Christi,is to participate in Christ’s doubt and disbelief.There are two main interpretations of how Christ’s death dealswith sin: sacrificial and participatory.4In the first one, we humansare guilty of sin, the consequence of which is death; however, Godpresented Christ, the sinless one, as a sacrifice to die in our place—through the shedding of his blood, we may be forgiven and freedfrom condemnation. In the second one, human beings lived “inAdam,” in the sphere of sinful humanity, under the reign of sin anddeath. Christ became a human being, sharing the fate of those “inAdam” to the end (dying on the Cross), but...

And then there’s the flip side of the placebo, the nocebo effect: the belief in evil signs or bad luck. It turns out people can literally scare themselves to death. If you think you’ve been cursed or otherwise made ill, you may end up actually getting sick, failing to improve poor health, or, yes, dying altogether. In one medically documented instance, a man was given three months to live after a diagnosis of metastatic cancer of the esophagus. He died shortly after. When his body was autopsied, doctors realized that he had been misdiagnosed: he did indeed have cancer, but a tiny, non-metastatic tumor on his liver. Clinically speaking, it could not have killed him. But, it seems, being told he was dying of a fatal illness brought about that very outcome. In another case, a man thought he was hexed by a voodoo priest. He came close to death, only to recover miraculously after an enterprising doctor “reversed” the curse through a series of made‑up words. In yet a third, a man almost died in the emergency room after overdosing on pills. He’d been in a drug trial for depression and decided to end his life with the antidepressants he’d been prescribed. His vitals were so bad when he was admitted that doctors didn’t think he would make it—until they discovered his blood was completely clear of any drugs. He’d been taking a placebo. Once he found out he had not in fact taken a life-threatening quantity of pills, he recovered quickly. The effect our mind has on our body makes for a scary proposition.

A still more sobering social media example of a different kind, one so important that it could well have influenced the presidential election of 2016, was the cooperation between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm, was largely the creation of Steve Bannon and his billionaire sponsor, Robert Mercer. One former co-executive referred to Cambridge Analytica as “Bannon’s arsenal of weaponry to wage a culture war on America using military strategies.” Cambridge Analytica combined a particularly vicious version of traditional “dirty tricks” with cutting-edge social media savvy. The dirty tricks, according to its former CEO, Alexander Nix, included bribery, sting operations, the use of prostitutes, and “honey traps” (usually involving sexual behavior, sometimes even initiated for the purposes of obtaining compromising photographs) to discredit politicians on whom it conducted opposition research. The social media savvy included advanced methods developed by the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University. Aleksandr Kogan, a young Russian American psychologist working there, created an app that enabled him to gain access to elaborate private information on more than fifty million Facebook users, information specifically identifying personality traits that influenced behavior. Kogan had strong links to Facebook, which failed to block his harvesting of that massive data; he then passed the data along to Cambridge Analytica. Kogan also taught at the Saint Petersburg State University in Russia; and given the links between Cambridge Analytica and Russian groups, the material was undoubtedly made available to Russian intelligence. So extensive was Cambridge Analytica’s collection of data that Nix could boast, “Today in the United States we have somewhere close to 4 or 5 thousand data points on every individual…. So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.” Whatever his exaggeration, he was describing a new means of milieu control that was invisible and potentially manipulable in the extreme. Beyond Cambridge Analytica or Kogan, Russian penetration of American social media has come to be recognized as a vast enterprise involving extensive falsification and across-the-board anti-Clinton messages, with special attention given to African American men in order to discourage them from voting. The Russians apparently reached millions of people and surely had a considerable influence on the outcome of the election. More generally, one can say that social media platforms can now create a totality of their own, and can make themselves available to would-be owners of reality by means of massive deception, distortion, and promulgation of falsehoods. The technology itself promotes mystification and becomes central to creating and sustaining cultism. Trump is the first president to have available to him these developments in social media. His stance toward the wild conspiracism I have mentioned is to stop short of total allegiance to them, but at the same time to facilitate them and call them forth in his tweets and harbor their followers at his rallies. All of this suggests not only that Trump and the new social media are made for each other, but also that the problem will long outlive Trump’s brief, but all too long, moment on the historical stage.

I wonder how often I ended up on the short-end of the stick because I was climbing the wrong tree.

Instead, Dani declared that courage was more important than confidence. When you are operating out of courage, you are saying that no matter how you feel about yourself or your opportunities or the outcome, you are going to take a risk and take a step toward what you want. You are not waiting for the confidence to mysteriously arrive. I now believe that confidence is achieved through repeated success at any endeavor. The more you practice doing something, the better you will get at it, and your confidence will grow over time.

Since the days of enslavement, African Americans have fought to gain access to quality education. Education can be transformative. It reshapes the health outcomes of a people; it breaks the cycle of poverty; it improves housing conditions; it raises the standard of living. Perhaps, most meaningfully, educational attainment significantly increases voter participation.135 In short, education strengthens a democracy.

Do not judge whether you made the “right” or “wrong” decision based upon a short-term outcome.

Education can be transformative. It reshapes the health outcomes of a people; it breaks the cycle of poverty; it improves housing conditions; it raises the standard of living. Perhaps, most meaningfully, educational attainment significantly increases voter participation.135 In short, education strengthens a democracy.

I define failure as an outcome that deviates from desired results, whether that be failing to win a hoped-for gold medal, an oil tanker spilling thousands of tons of raw oil into the ocean instead of arriving safely in a harbor, a start-up that dives downward, or overcooking the fish meant for dinner. In short, failure is a lack of success. Next, I define errors (synonymous with mistakes) as unintended deviations from prespecified standards, such as procedures, rules, or policies.

There is a wonderful story of a group of American car executives who went to Japan to see a Japanese assembly line. At the end of the line, the doors were put on the hinges, the same as in America. But something was missing. In the United States, a line worker would take a rubber mallet and tap the edges of the door to ensure that it fit perfectly. In Japan, that job didn’t seem to exist. Confused, the American auto executives asked at what point they made sure the door fit perfectly. Their Japanese guide looked at them and smiled sheepishly. “We make sure it fits when we design it.” In the Japanese auto plant, they didn’t examine the problem and accumulate data to figure out the best solution—they engineered the outcome they wanted from the beginning. If they didn’t achieve their desired outcome, they understood it was because of a decision they made at the start of the process. At the end of the day, the doors on the American-made and Japanese-made cars appeared to fit when each rolled off the assembly line. Except the Japanese didn’t need to employ someone to hammer doors, nor did they need to buy any mallets. More importantly, the Japanese doors are likely to last longer and maybe even be more structurally sound in an accident. All this for no other reason than they ensured the pieces fit from the start. What the American automakers did with their rubber mallets is a metaphor for how so many people and organizations lead. When faced with a result that doesn’t go according to plan, a series of perfectly effective short-term tactics are used until the desired outcome is achieved. But how structurally sound are those solutions? So many organizations function in a world of tangible goals and the mallets to achieve them. The ones that achieve more, the ones that get more out of fewer people and fewer resources, the ones with an outsized amount of influence, however, build products and companies and even recruit people that all fit based on the original intention. Even though the outcome may look the same, great leaders understand the value in the things we cannot see. Every instruction we give, every course of action we set, every result we desire, starts with the same thing: a decision. There are those who decide to manipulate the door to fit to achieve the desired result and there are those who start from somewhere very different. Though both courses of action may yield similar short-term results, it is what we can’t see that makes long-term success more predictable for only one. The one that understood why the doors need to fit by design and not by default.

People speak of the profound injustice of the social arrangement, as it the fact that one man is born in favourable circumstances and that another is born in unfavourable ones—or that one should possess gifts the other has not, were on the face of it an injustice. Among the more honest of these opponents of society this is what is said: "We, with all the bad, morbid, criminal qualities which we acknowledge we possess, are only the inevitable result of the oppression for ages of the weak by the strong"; thus they insinuate their evil natures into the consciences of the ruling classes. They threaten and storm and curse. They become virtuous from sheer indignation—they don't want to have become bad men and canaille for nothing. The name for this attitude, which is an invention of the last century, is, if I am not mistaken, pessimism; and even that pessimism which is the outcome of indignation. It is in this attitude of mind that history is judged, that it is deprived of its inevitable fatality, and that responsibility and even guilt is discovered in it. For the great desideratum is to find guilty people in it. The botched and the bungled, the decadents of all kinds, are revolted at themselves, and require sacrifices in order that they may not slake their thirst for destruction upon themselves (which might, indeed, be the most reasonable procedure). But for this purpose they at least require a semblance of justification, i.e. a theory according to which the fact of their existence, and of their character, may be expiated by a scapegoat. This scapegoat may be God,—in Russia such resentful atheists are not wanting,—or the order of society, or education and upbringing, or the Jews, or the nobles, or, finally, the well-constituted of every kind. "It is a sin for a man to have been born in decent circumstances, for by so doing he disinherits the others, he pushes them aside, he imposes upon them the curse of vice and of work.... How can I be made answerable for my misery; surely some one must be responsible for it, or I could not bear to live."... In short, resentful pessimism discovers responsible parties in order to create a pleasurable sensation for itself—revenge.... "Sweeter than honey"—thus does even old Homer speak of revenge.

Question 1: What is the skill you wish to obtain or improve from the DTI? Question 2: What is the context or contexts in which this skill is to be used? Question 3: What is your outcome in doing the DTI? How will you know you have been successful? Question 4: Do you currently have 'blocks' or other negative associations with the skill to be learned, or the context in which it is to be applied? If so, what are these blocks? Question 5: What do you believe about your own abilities now within the context in which you want the change to take place? Question 6: Do you believe it is possible to achieve this outcome in this context? Question 7: Do you believe it is possible to significantly improve skills or performance using the DTI process? Do you believe you are capable of doing so? Do you believe you are capable of absorbing the skills and abilities of the model using DTI? Question 8: What is important to you about doing this DTI? What is important to you about having this skill in this context? And what is important about that? What will having this skill in this context do for you as a person? Question 9: Are you committed to following through with the DTI process? Remember you're going to have to not only absorb these skills, but apply them in a real-world context. In short, you will have to take action in the real-world; are you prepared to ‘just do it’ when the time comes? [Note for the hypnotist: Is the subject congruent in his response?] Question 10: What are your meta-programs in the context of the DTI? What are your meta-programs in the context in which you want to apply the skills gained in the DTI? Question 11: Check to make sure you are unconsciously aligned with the DTI process and with your own goals. What was the result? Question 12: What model is most appropriate for the DTI? Do you have sufficient information about the model, and if not where can you obtain more information? Question 13: What counter model is most appropriate for the DTI? Do you have sufficient information about the counter model, and if not where can you obtain more information about him?

Does Kurokawa feel that deep-time thinking in business is better than short-term thinking? He is an even-minded person, and I admit that I expected him to reply that both are important. Instead he said, "Of course." He offered one more history lesson: in 1915, Tokyo decided to commemorate their recently deceased emperor with a Shinto shrine and sacred forest. At the time, the area they selected was marshy farmland on the outskirts of the city. The forester planned out the project in stages, beginning with a hundred thousand young trees that would be planted around the few existing pines. Over a hundred years, a broad-leaf woods of oak, chinquapin and camphor trees would rise to become an untended forest. No one involved in the planning would live to see the final outcome. Today the mature forest covers a slow-rising hill alongside Harajuku subway station. It's a green respite, where a sense of calm prevails and there's clean air for your lungs-and it is surrounded to the horizon on every side by the megalopolis of Toyko. Kurokawa became speechless with awe at the brilliance of the deep-time vision. 'If you don't think that way,' he said at last, 'what kind of passion do you have for human life?

Alice Heath, a student of Richard’s at the Harvard Kennedy School and one of his current teaching assistants, experienced this maxim very clearly when she started working with state child welfare agencies, whose mission is to prevent child abuse and neglect. The children and families they work with face very tough circumstances. Unfortunately, there is often no policy choice that a child welfare agency’s leadership can make that is likely to completely prevent abuse or neglect. “Completely preventing abuse or neglect would likely require draconian measures that would not be good for anyone. The best an agency can do is make the choice that has a higher probability of a better outcome relative to the other choices. Even with the best decisions there will still, sadly, be a high chance that some children suffer abuse and neglect. I have seen state legislators and commentators fail to understand this idea over and over, reading every tragic incident as a decision-making failure rather than the result of a set of choices where the best option is not a good option. As a result, state child welfare directors too often have very short terms and agencies lack stable leadership, which only makes things worse for the children and families who need help.

In business studies, value is understood as being created inside the company by bringing together managerial expertise, strategic thinking and a dynamic (changing with circumstances) division of labour between workers.3 All this ignores the massive role of government in creating value, and taking risk in the process. In The Entrepreneurial State I argued that Silicon Valley itself is an outcome of such high-risk investments by the state, willing to take risks in the early stages of development of high-risk technologies which the private sector usually shies away from.4 This is the case with the investments that led to the internet, where a critical role was played by DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency inside the US Department of Defense – and also by CERN in Europe with its invention of the World Wide Web. Indeed, not only the internet but nearly every other technology that makes our smart products smart was funded by public actors, such as GPS (funded by the US Navy), Siri (also funded by DARPA) and touch-screen display (funded initially by the CIA). It is also true of the high-risk, early-stage investments made in the pharmaceutical industry by public actors like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – without which most blockbuster drugs would not have been developed. And the renewable energy industry has been greatly aided by investments made by public banks like the European Investment Bank or the KfW in Germany, with private finance often too risk-averse and focused on short-term returns.