Pea Motivational Quotes

[Greens] don't come through the back door the same as other groceries. They don't cower at the bottom of paper bags marked 'Liberty.' They wave over the top. They don't stop to be checked off the receipt. They spill out onto the counter. No going onto shelves with cans in orderly lines like school children waiting for recess. No waiting, sometimes for years beyond the blue sell by date, to be picked up and taken from the shelf. Greens don't stack or stand at attention. They aren't peas to be pushed around. Cans can't contain them. Boxed in they would burst free. Greens are wild. Plunging them into a pot took some doing. Only lobsters fight more. Either way, you have to use your hands. Then, retrieving them requires the longest of my mother's wooden spoons, the one with the burnt end. Swept onto a plate like the seaweed after a storm, greens sit tall, dark, and proud.

It’s only by shopping around and sampling a wide variety of art that we learn to appreciate which skills are common (banging two rocks together) and which are rare (elaborate rhythms). An unrefined palate won’t appreciate a Michelin-starred restaurant. An untrained ear can’t appreciate the genius of Bach. Only the princess, accustomed as she’d become to royal fineries, could feel the pea beneath 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds. In this way, discernment becomes important not only for differentiating high quality from low quality (and good artists from mediocre ones), but also as a fitness display unto itself. The fact that the princess could feel the pea, even under the mattresses (i.e., when handicapped), is itself an impressive feat, a mark of her high birth.

The Rhythm of Relationships It’s not a mystery that there are certain people with whom we "click" and others with whom we don’t. In the movie, Forrest Gump, Forrest proclaimed that he and Jenny got along like "peas and carrots." I once heard Tony Robbins say that if you are with the right person, a relationship does not take a lot of work. When relationships are in rhythm, everything is made easier.

THE MOTIVATION BEHIND behavior rarely includes the goals for which it evolved. These goals stay behind the veil of evolution. We evolved nurturant tendencies, for example, to raise our own biological children, but a cute puppy triggers these tendencies just as well. Whereas reproduction is the evolutionary goal of nurturance, it isn’t part of its motivation. After a mother dies, other adult primates often take care of her weaned juvenile. Humans, too, adopt on a large scale, often going through hellish bureaucratic procedures to add children to their families. Stranger yet is cross-species adoption, such as by Pea, a rescued ostrich at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya. Pea was beloved by all orphaned elephant calves at the trust and took special care of a baby named Jotto, who’d stay by her side and sleep with his head on her soft feathered body. The maternal instinct is remarkably generous.38 Some biological purists call such behavior a “mistake.” If adaptive goals are the measure, Pea was making a colossal error. As soon as we move from biology to psychology, however, the perspective changes. Our impulse to take care of vulnerable young is real and overwhelming even outside the family. Similarly, when human volunteers push a stranded whale back into the ocean, they employ empathic impulses that, I can assure you, didn’t evolve to take care of marine mammals. Human empathy arose for the sake of family and friends. But once a capacity exists, it takes on a life of its own. Rather than calling the saving of a whale a mistake, we should be glad that empathy isn’t tied down by what evolution intended it for. This is what makes our behavior as rich as it is. This line of thought can also be applied to sex.

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