Previous Job Quotes

A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .... enough money within her control to move out and rent a place of her own even if she never wants to or needs to... A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .... something perfect to wear if the employer or date of her dreams wants to see her in an hour... A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE ... a youth she's content to leave behind.... A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .... a past juicy enough that she's looking forward to retelling it in her old age.... A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE ..... a set of screwdrivers, a cordless drill, and a black lace bra... A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .... one friend who always makes her laugh... and one who lets her cry... A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .... a good piece of furniture not previously owned by anyone else in her family... A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .... eight matching plates, wine glasses with stems, and a recipe for a meal that will make her guests feel honored... A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .... a feeling of control over her destiny... EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... how to fall in love without losing herself.. EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... HOW TO QUIT A JOB, BREAK UP WITH A LOVER, AND CONFRONT A FRIEND WITHOUT RUINING THE FRIENDSHIP... EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... when to try harder... and WHEN TO WALK AWAY... EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... that she can't change the length of her calves, the width of her hips, or the nature of her parents.. EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... that her childhood may not have been perfect...but it's over... EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... what she would and wouldn't do for love or more... EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... how to live alone... even if she doesn't like it... EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... whom she can trust, whom she can't, and why she shouldn't take it personally... EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... where to go... be it to her best friend's kitchen table... or a charming inn in the woods... when her soul needs soothing... EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... what she can and can't accomplish in a day... a month...and a year...

Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

What was it about the country that kept everyone hostage to its fantasy? The previous month, on its own soil, an American man went to his job at a plant and gunned down fourteen coworkers, and last spring alone there were four different school shootings. A nation at war with itself, yet people still spoke of it as some kind of paradise.

My present self is formed almost completely of the people around me. I am currently made up of 30 percent Mrs. Izumi, 30 percent Sugawara, 20 percent the manager, and the rest absorbed from past colleagues such as Sasaki, who left six months ago, and Okasaki, who was our supervisor until a year ago. My speech is especially infected by everyone around me and is currently a mix of that of Mrs. Izumi and Sugawara. I think the same goes for most people. When some of Sugawara’s band members came into the store recently they all dressed and spoke just like her. After Mrs. Izumi came, Sasaki started sounding just like her when she said, “Good job, see you tomorrow!” Once a woman who had gotten on well with Mrs. Izumi at her previous store came to help out, and she dressed so much like Mrs. Izumi I almost mistook the two. And I probably infect others with the way I speak too. Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think.

In previous centuries, the Church was the great controller, dictating morality, stifling free expression and posing as conservator of all great art and music. Instead we have TV, doing just as good a job at dictating fashions, thoughts, attitudes, objectives as did the Church, using many of the same techniques but doing it so palatably that no one notices. Instead of ‘sins’ to keep people in line, we have fears of being judged unacceptable by our peers (by not wearing the right shoes, not drinking the right kind of beer, or wearing the wrong kind of deodorant). Coupled with that fear is imposed insecurity concerning our own identities. All answers and solutions to these fears come through the television, and only through television. Only through exposure to TV can the new sins of alienation and ostracism be absolved.

AI is taking over areas that we previously thought were too important to entrust to machines.

Imposter syndrome is a psychological pattern in which individuals doubt themselves and have a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud. Last year my friend Ingrid told me I had it. I had just told her that I didn’t feel like I belonged at my previous bookstore job. I told her that I didn’t really get 1984 and that I hate poetry — so I wasn’t sure if working at a bookstore was right for me. She told me, ‘You have a classic case of impostor syndrome.’ I told her that I’m not sure that’s a real syndrome. I said I wonder if everyone’s an impostor. What if beneath every lawyer’s suit and every stay-at-home-parent’s apron, everyone is just a baby who doesn’t know what they’re doing?

Everything I tell her reminds her of some cute anecdote about one of her previous jobs, or previous boyfriends, or previous lives, or her cat, Sparkles, who is mitten-toed and sleeps on her head and can't be trusted on catnip.

The wind nudged it for ninety-nine weeks in a row, and still nothing happened; the barn did not budge. But on the one hundredth week, the wind nudged the barn and the barn fell onto itself. It was not that the one hundredth week of nudging was any stronger than the previous weeks. It was not even that the one hundredth week of nudging was what had actually knocked the barn over. The ninety-nine weeks of nudging were what had truly done the job, but the one hundredth was the one around to take the credit.

Have you tried to find a job?" "Good God, that's brilliant!" I gasp, faux-astounded. "I had not previously considered this course of action!

This is the pattern of gun killings in big cities. Most homicides are not professional jobs, in felonious pursuits, but are committed by relatives, friends or neighbors, in the home or nearby. They are sparked by liquor, by lust, by jealousy, or greed, or a burning sense of injustice. And most are committed by people with no previous record of violence. It is these who will be restrained by stricter gun laws, who will find it much harder to go home, pick up a gun and shoot an adversary. The liquor will pass, the lust will die, reflection will replace passion if the instrument of death is not so readily available.

The process of learning someone’s hometown, college, names and ages of children, favorite hobbies, favorite restaurants, previous jobs, and long-range goals provides a raft of opportunities to connect with her over shared interests and keep up a dialogue.

Punching - 2 shillings Both eyes blacked - 4 shillings Nose and jaw broke - 10 shillings Jacked out (knocked out with a blackjack) - 15 shillings Ear chewed off - same as previous Leg or arm broke - 19 shillings Shot in leg - 25 shillings Stab - same as previous Doing the Big Job - 3 pounds and up

Postfeminism, as a term, suggests that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism, but that feminism is now irrelevant and even undesirable because it supposedly made millions of women unhappy, unfeminine, childless, hairy, lonely, bitter and prompted them to fill their closets with combat boots and really bad India print skirts. Supposedly women have gotten all they could out of feminism, are now "equal," and so can, by choice, embrace things we used to see as sexist, like a TV show in which some self-satisfied lunk samples the wares of twenty-five women before rejecting twenty-four and keeping the one he likes best, or like the notion that mothers should have primary responsibility for raising the kids. Postfeminism means that you can now work outside the home even in jobs previously restricted to men, go to graduate school, pump iron, and pump your own gas, as long as you remain fashion conscious, slim, nurturing, deferential to men, and become a doting, selfless mother.

As part of that administrative process, Butler decided to look at every single target in the SIOP, and for weeks he carefully scrutinized the thousands of desired ground zeros. He found bridges and railways and roads in the middle of nowhere targeted with multiple warheads, to assure their destruction. Hundreds of nuclear warheads would hit Moscow—dozens of them aimed at a single radar installation outside the city. During his previous job working for the Joint Chiefs, Butler had dealt with targeting issues and the damage criteria for nuclear weapons. He was hardly naive. But the days and weeks spent going through the SIOP, page by page, deeply affected him. For more than forty years, efforts to tame the SIOP, to limit it, reduce it, make it appear logical and reasonable, had failed. “With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” General Butler later recalled. “I came to fully appreciate the truth . . . we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.

Every month or so, Manock and Oyama would present a new iteration based on Jobs’s previous criticisms. The latest plaster model would be dramatically unveiled,

I’ve got a job for you,” Kaz said as he flipped through the previous day’s figures. Each sheet would go into his memory with barely a glance. “What would you say to four million kruge?” “Money like that is more curse than gift.” “My little Suli idealist. All you need is a full belly and an open road?” he said, the mockery clear in his voice. “And an easy heart, Kaz.” That was the difficult part. Now he laughed outright as he walked through the door to his tiny bedroom. “No hopes of that. I’d rather have the cash. Do you want the money or not?

Dear good guy I can hear your cries I can feel your pain I can smell your frustration I can see the confusion in your eyes Confused about how women see you In a land of women tired of being played They still take you as a joke and think you’re all games They play you like they were played They can’t see the seriousness in your eyes When you call her “Queen” and ask for her heart And you cry for commitment, they back out and shut down Treat you like the bad guys treated them It’s so ironic You hate seeing these ladies get their hearts stomped on Their minds toyed with It’s killing you because you’ve done it to women yourself you’ve seen other guys do it You want to save them from the destruction But like a child who refuses to obey their mother’s wisdom, until they are wise enough to understand through experience They won’t value you until they get burned playing with the fire of curiosity Some of them crave destruction They crave the fun that these fellas who will degrade them have to offer They are being guided by curiosity and their wisdom is foolishness Fight the urge to become like the men these ladies who lack understanding chase after Don’t let rejection consume your heart and cause you to crumble Being a promiscuous man who lacks self-respect and morals is overrated Find peace with being the underdog Your type is needed in this world, my good friend Hold on There are women out there who are in search for someone like you One of them will be the one who appreciates the detailed things about you the previous women called corny There are women out there who will value your honesty, your character, your loyalty Hold on, my friend Narrow is the right path You are on the right path, my friend Your time will come in due time You will not just be getting a girl, you will be getting a woman who will be willing to finish off this life’s journey with you You are not alone I am with you and I understand the hardships you face, the doubt, the anger I want you to know you are doing a great job at being you Do not give up Stand firm and continue to be different You will be an example to many although you are in the minority Corruption

According to a 2015 survey of thousands of US fast-food workers by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, 79 percent had been burned on the job in the previous year—most more than once.

There’s another trouble with meaning. We’ve been taught to believe it comes near the end. As if the job of all those sentences were to ferry us along to the place where meaning is enacted—to “the point,” Just before the conclusion, Which restates “the point.” This is especially true in the school model of writing. Remember the papers you wrote? Trying to save that one good idea till the very end? Hoping to create the illusion that it followed logically from the previous paragraphs? You were stalling until you had ten pages. Much of what’s taught under the name of expository writing could be called “The Anxiety of Sequence.” Its premise is this: To get where you’re going, you have to begin in just the right place And take the proper path, Which depends on knowing where you plan to conclude. This is like not knowing where to begin a journey Until you decide where you want it to end. Begin in the wrong place, make the wrong turn, And there’s no getting where you want to go. Why not begin where you already are?

The rule is simple: Any job that has defeated two or three men in succession, even though each had performed well in his previous assignments, must be assumed unfit for human beings. It must be redesigned.

The previous me—who’d never fallen in love or had sex, who’d never had a proper job—had sometimes been hard to read. But everything about the new me—the one who hd Shiraha living with her—was clear, even my future.

Dania gets huffy, and says that Kat's losing her job is a price for immoral behaviour in a previous life. Kat tells her to stuff it; anyway, she's done enough immoral behaviour in this life to account for the whole thing.

Job Trotter bowed low; and in spite of Mr. Weller's previous remonstrance, the tears again rose to his eyes. 'I never see such a feller,' said Sam. 'Blessed if I don't think he's got a main in his head as is always turned on.

When a woman had to seek work because her husband lost his job, this threatened the “modern” ideas of masculinity and marriage that most men had come to embrace over the previous two decades. Unemployed men often lost their sense of identity and became demoralized. Many turned to drink. Tempers flared at home. It is not surprising, then, that the experience of the Depression undercut the societal support for working women that had emerged in the early years of the twentieth century.

Previous presidents, and not just Clinton, have of course lacked scruples. What was, to many of the people who knew Trump well, much more confounding was that he had managed to win this election, and arrive at this ultimate accomplishment, wholly lacking what in some obvious sense must be the main requirement of the job, what neuroscientists would call executive function. He had somehow won the race for president, but his brain seemed incapable of performing what would be essential tasks in his new job. He had no ability to plan and organize and pay attention and switch focus; he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required. On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect.

We thought back to previous research we'd been involved in with so-called difficult clients. One conclusion was that there really are no such things—all clients are really doing the best they can—just doing their jobs coping in the only way they know how.

He was the first to admit that he had been singularly ill-qualified for all his previous jobs. Just a few months earlier, he had accepted the editorship of Gardening Magazine. ‘Nobody could know less about gardening than me,’ he said. But it didn't stop him dispensing advice for his readers. ‘I would solemnly give them my views on whether it were better to plant globe artichokes in September or March.’18 Now, at last, he had fallen into a job for which he was extremely well qualified, one in which the only seeds to be planted were those of wholescale destruction.

The morale of the Metropolitan Police Force had reached its lowest point during the Ripper murders of the previous year and had not yet recovered. The files of the Whitechapel murders had not been closed as the case was still ongoing, but nobody in London trusted the police to do their job.

This, not incidentally, is another perfect setting for deindividuation: on one side, the functionary behind a wall of security glass following a script laid out with the intention that it should be applied no matter what the specific human story may be, told to remain emotionally disinvested as far as possible so as to avoid preferential treatment of one person over another - and needing to follow that advice to avoid being swamped by empathy for fellow human beings in distress. The functionary becomes a mixture of Zimbardo's prison guards and the experimenter himself, under siege from without while at the same time following an inflexible rubric set down by those higher up the hierarchical chain, people whose job description makes them responsible, but who in turn see themselves as serving the general public as a non-specific entity and believe or have been told that only strict adherence to a system can produce impartial fairness. Fairness is supposed to be vested in the code: no human can or should make the system fairer by exercising judgement. In other words, the whole thing creates a collective responsibility culminating in a blameless loop. Everyone assumes that it's not their place to take direct personal responsibility for what happens; that level of vested individual power is part of the previous almost feudal version of responsibility. The deindividuation is actually to a certain extent the desired outcome, though its negative consequences are not.

Cixi’s lack of formal education was more than made up for by her intuitive intelligence, which she liked to use from her earliest years. In 1843, when she was seven, the empire had just finished its first war with the West, the Opium War, which had been started by Britain in reaction to Beijing clamping down on the illegal opium trade conducted by British merchants. China was defeated and had to pay a hefty indemnity. Desperate for funds, Emperor Daoguang (father of Cixi’s future husband) held back the traditional presents for his sons’ brides – gold necklaces with corals and pearls – and vetoed elaborate banquets for their weddings. New Year and birthday celebrations were scaled down, even cancelled, and minor royal concubines had to subsidise their reduced allowances by selling their embroidery on the market through eunuchs. The emperor himself even went on surprise raids of his concubines’ wardrobes, to check whether they were hiding extravagant clothes against his orders. As part of a determined drive to stamp out theft by officials, an investigation was conducted of the state coffer, which revealed that more “than nine million taels of silver had gone missing. Furious, the emperor ordered all the senior keepers and inspectors of the silver reserve for the previous forty-four years to pay fines to make up the loss – whether or not they were guilty. Cixi’s great-grandfather had served as one of the keepers and his share of the fine amounted to 43,200 taels – a colossal sum, next to which his official salary had been a pittance. As he had died a long time ago, his son, Cixi’s grandfather, was obliged to pay half the sum, even though he worked in the Ministry of Punishments and had nothing to do with the state coffer. After three years of futile struggle to raise money, he only managed to hand over 1,800 taels, and an edict signed by the emperor confined him to prison, only to be released if and when his son, Cixi’s father, delivered the balance. The life of the family was turned upside down. Cixi, then eleven years old, had to take in sewing jobs to earn extra money – which she would remember all her life and would later talk about to her ladies-in-waiting in the court. “As she was the eldest of two daughters and three sons, her father discussed the matter with her, and she rose to the occasion. Her ideas were carefully considered and practical: what possessions to sell, what valuables to pawn, whom to turn to for loans and how to approach them. Finally, the family raised 60 per cent of the sum, enough to get her grandfather out of prison. The young Cixi’s contribution to solving the crisis became a family legend, and her father paid her the ultimate compliment: ‘This daughter of mine is really more like a son!’ Treated like a son, Cixi was able to talk to her father about things that were normally closed areas for women. Inevitably their conversations touched on official business and state affairs, which helped form Cixi’s lifelong interest. Being consulted and having her views acted on, she acquired self-confidence and never accepted the com“common assumption that women’s brains were inferior to men’s. The crisis also helped shape her future method of rule. Having tasted the bitterness of arbitrary punishment, she would make an effort to be fair to her officials.

Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. This is because they operate on the curious principle of “defocused temporal perception.” In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators. Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. An impoverished hitchhiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators.

Sometimes authors do know better. As previously mentioned, in After the Fact, a book aimed at college history majors, James Davidson and Mark Lytle do a splendid job telling of the Indian plagues, demonstrating that they understand their geopolitical significance, their devastating impact on Indian culture and religion, and their effect on estimates of the precontact Indian population. In After the Fact, looking down from the Olympian heights of academe, Davidson and Lytle even write, “Textbooks have finally begun to take note of these large-scale epidemics.” Meanwhile, their own high school history textbooks leave them out.57

INT. DEFENSE AGAINST THE DARK ARTS CLASS—FOURTEEN YEARS PREVIOUSLY—DAY It is Boggart time. DUMBLEDORE supervises the line of teenagers advancing to try their luck. “Riddikulus”—“Riddikulus”—gusts of hilarity as a shark becomes a flotation device, a zombie’s head turns into a pumpkin, a vampire turns into a buck-toothed rabbit. DUMBLEDORE: All right, Newt. Be brave. 16-YEAR-OLD NEWT moves to the front of the queue. The Boggart turns into a Ministry desk. DUMBLEDORE: Mmm, that’s an unusual one. So Mr. Scamander fears what more than anything else in the world? 16-YEAR-OLD NEWT: Having to work in an office, sir. The class roars with laughter. DUMBLEDORE: Go ahead, Newt. 16-YEAR-OLD NEWT: Riddikulus! NEWT turns the desk into a gamboling wooden dragon and moves aside. DUMBLEDORE: Well done. Good job.

There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

It’s Groundhog Day,” said Max. “The new people come in and think that the previous administration and the civil service are lazy or stupid. Then they actually get to know the place they are managing. And when they leave they say, ‘This was a really hard job, and those are the best people I’ve ever worked with.’ This happens over and over and over.

The political stage revolves many times faster than the stage of our daily existence. Regimes change, governing parties and their leaders change, but man lives just as he previously had—he still does not have an apartment or a job; the houses are still shabby, and there are potholes in the roads; the arduous task of making ends meet still goes on from dawn to dusk.

had campaigned hard to the very end, but Barack had won and now it was time to support him. The causes and people I had campaigned for, the Americans who had lost jobs and health care, who couldn’t afford gas or groceries or college, who had felt invisible to their government for the previous seven years, now depended on his becoming the forty-fourth President of the United States.

Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

The path to a sustained victory in Afghanistan lies in improving their economy, creating jobs for the Afghanis, strengthening their government and national services, getting the provinces to trust each other and work together, and eliminating the opium trade. Previously, the United States' policy was to not get deeply involved in internal Afghani drug issues; now we've changed the policy and are actively working to eradicate the drugs. But nobody has yet to come up with a way to shut down the poppy fields and get the Afghani people back to work. Until that happens, the Taliban will inevitable creep back in.

Then, step by step, you start to understand the difference that it produces inside yourself. And in the end, you choose who you want to be from that moment on. And when you reach that state of mind and being, you cannot undo what you just did. And you change. You transform yourself from a caterpillar into a beautiful colorful butterfly. You start to love your new colors, your wings, and once that process begins, you may develop this desire to fly up, and from up there, you see yourself first, then your life, your family, your friends, your job, everything. You start to compare your previous caterpillar perception, with the new butterfly one. If you like the caterpillar view, you stick to it. If not, you will change it completely. But this is not an easy overnight process. It takes time, patience, and perseverance to live like a butterfly.

Sophie was expelled from Foxfire (don’t even get me started on that), but leave it to her to show up in the Healing Center anyway—with a plague-infested gnome, no less. (And Fitz.) SYMPTOMS/INJURIES: I insisted on doing a full checkup, and I could see signs of healed burns and previous light poisoning. But it looks like the “Sophie Survival Kit” and the list of “Crazy Messes That Sophie Will Find a Way to Get Herself Into” are doing their job!

The prison-industrial complex furnishes numerous examples of the persistence of slavery. There are those who believe that we have definitively triumphed in the struggle for civil rights. However, vast numbers of Black people are still deprived of the right to vote—especially if they are in prison or former felons. Moreover, even those who did acquire rights that were not previously available to them did not thereby achieve jobs, education, housing, and health care.

In a classic study of how names impact people’s experience on the job market, researchers show that, all other things being equal, job seekers with White-sounding first names received 50 percent more callbacks from employers than job seekers with Black-sounding names.5 They calculated that the racial gap was equivalent to eight years of relevant work experience, which White applicants did not actually have; and the gap persisted across occupations, industry, employer size – even when employers included the “equal opportunity” clause in their ads.6 With emerging technologies we might assume that racial bias will be more scientifically rooted out. Yet, rather than challenging or overcoming the cycles of inequity, technical fixes too often reinforce and even deepen the status quo. For example, a study by a team of computer scientists at Princeton examined whether a popular algorithm, trained on human writing online, would exhibit the same biased tendencies that psychologists have documented among humans. They found that the algorithm associated White-sounding names with “pleasant” words and Black-sounding names with “unpleasant” ones.7 Such findings demonstrate what I call “the New Jim Code”: the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era.

By the 1830s many of women’s traditional economic tasks were being taken over by the factory system. True, they were freed from some of their old oppressive jobs. Yet the incipient industrialization of the economy was simultaneously eroding women’s prestige in the home—a prestige based on their previously productive and absolutely essential domestic labor. Their social status began to deteriorate accordingly. An ideological consequence of industrial capitalism was the shaping of a more rigorous notion of female inferiority. It seemed, in fact, that the more women’s domestic duties shrank under the impact of industrialization, the more rigid became the assertion that “woman’s place is in the home.

At first glance, one might assume that a peacekeeping soldier from Pakistan, a diplomat from the United States, and a human rights advocate from Senegal would approach their jobs quite differently. Yet, while in Congo for a previous research project, I observed striking similarities in the ways that international interveners understand the situations they face and in the strategies they adopt, despite their otherwise extremely different national, professional, social, and economic backgrounds.

In one experiment, CA would show people on online panels pictures of simple bar graphs about uncontroversial things (e.g., the usage rates of mobile phones or sales of a car type) and the majority would be able to read the graph correctly. However, unbeknownst to the respondents, the data behind these graphs had actually been derived from politically controversial topics, such as income inequality, climate change, or deaths from gun violence. When the labels of the same graphs were later switched to their actual controversial topic, respondents who were made angry by identity threats were more likely to misread the relabeled graphs that they had previously understood. What CA observed was that when respondents were angry, their need for complete and rational explanations was also significantly reduced. In particular, anger put people in a frame of mind in which they were more indiscriminately punitive, particularly to out-groups. They would also underestimate the risk of negative outcomes. This led CA to discover that even if a hypothetical trade war with China or Mexico meant the loss of American jobs and profits, people primed with anger would tolerate that domestic economic damage if it meant they could use a trade war to punish immigrant groups and urban liberals.

good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

The generation born between 1995 and 2012, called iGen (or sometimes Gen Z), is very different from the Millennials, the generation that preceded it. According to Jean Twenge, an expert in the study of generational differences, one difference is that iGen is growing up more slowly. On average, eighteen-year-olds today have spent less time unsupervised and have hit fewer developmental milestones on the path to autonomy (such as getting a job or a driver's license), compared with eighteen-year-olds in previous generations.

I am a member of the “career-less generation.” Or the “screwed generation.” Unlike previous generations, the members of my generation won’t get jobs and respectable wages straight out of high school, let alone college. We don’t have the means to buy homes and start families in our twenties. We’re the first generation in a while who will be less well off and less secure than their parents’. Strangely, I seemed more okay with this than my parents. Not being able to afford an above-ground swimming pool and a kid wasn’t some heartbreaking tragedy to me.

One evening Wozniak, who had been floating into and out of Apple for the previous two years, wandered into the Macintosh building. Jobs grabbed him and said, “Come over here and look at this.” He pulled out a VCR and played the ad. “I was astounded,” Woz recalled. “I thought it was the most incredible thing.” When Jobs said the board had decided not to run it during the Super Bowl, Wozniak asked what the cost of the time slot was. Jobs told him $800,000. With his usual impulsive goodness, Wozniak immediately offered, “Well, I’ll pay half if you will.

As you become successful in your own field, your responsibilities may begin to change. Days become less and less about doing and more and more about making decisions. Such is the nature of leadership. This transition requires reevaluating and updating your identity. It requires a certain humility to put aside some of the more enjoyable or satisfying parts of your previous job. It means accepting that others might be more qualified or specialized in areas in which you considered yourself competent—or at least their time is better spent on them than yours.

Like all countries in Western Europe, Spain, engaged in a deadly process of increasing productivity, had gradually rid itself of all low-skilled jobs that had previously helped to keep life a little less unpleasant, and in doing so had condemned the majority of its population to mass unemployment.

Our lawsuit is saying, “Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.” Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products—Android, Google Docs—are shit. A few days after this rant, Jobs got a call from Schmidt, who had resigned from the Apple board the previous summer. He suggested they

I had no plans as to my future financial sustainability: I never wanted to earn money for doing anything. I'd had various minimum-wage jobs in previous summers—sending e-mails, making cold calls, things like that—and I expected to have more of them after I graduated. Though I knew that I would eventually have to enter full-time employment, I certainly never fantasized about a radiant future where I was paid to perform an economic role. Sometimes this felt like a failure to take an interest in my own life, which depressed me. On the other hand, I felt that my disinterest in wealth was ideologically healthy.

When some bigoted white people heard the message of Donald Trump and others in the GOP that their concerns mattered, that the fear generated by their own biases had a target in Mexican and Muslim immigrants, many embraced the GOP to their own detriment. We talk at length about the 53 percent of white women who supported the Republican candidate for president, but we tend to skim past the reality that many white voters had been overtly or passively supporting the same problematic candidates and policies for decades. Researchers point to anger and disappointment among some whites as a result of crises like rising death rates from suicide, drugs, and alcohol; the decline in available jobs for those who lack a college degree; and the ongoing myth that white people are unfairly treated by policies designed to level the playing field for other groups—policies like affirmative action. Other studies have pointed to the appeal of authoritarianism, or plain old racism and sexism. Political scientist Diana Mutz said in an interview in Pacific Standard magazine that some voters who switched parties to vote for Trump were motivated by the possibility of a fall in social status: “In short, they feared that they were in the process of losing their previously privileged positions.

What do you mean by manipulated?” “Well, first they asked us to name and list all our close relatives like uncles and grandparents. Then, a few days later we were instructed to write essays about their jobs and about their discussions and the discussions your parents had at home. If you failed to write about some relative whom you had previously mentioned, you were questioned about him.” Harold adjusted his belt buckle and Karl noticed that his friend had lost some weight. “I don’t understand why your teachers would be interested in your parents’ discussions. It sounds like as if they wanted to learn from you, while it should be the other way around.

An even more astonishing revelation occurred when Jandali was describing the previous restaurants that he had run. There had been some nice ones, he insisted, fancier than the Sacramento joint they were then sitting in. He told her, somewhat emotionally, that he wished she could have seen him when he was managing a Mediterranean restaurant north of San Jose. “That was a wonderful place,” he said. “All of the successful technology people used to come there. Even Steve Jobs.” Simpson was stunned. “Oh, yeah, he used to come in, and he was a sweet guy, and a big tipper,” her father added. Mona was able to refrain from blurting out, Steve Jobs is your son!

Over the years I have read many, many books about the future, my ‘we’re all doomed’ books, as Connie liked to call them. ‘All the books you read are either about how grim the past was or how gruesome the future will be. It might not be that way, Douglas. Things might turn out all right.’ But these were well-researched, plausible studies, their conclusions highly persuasive, and I could become quite voluble on the subject. Take, for instance, the fate of the middle-class, into which Albie and I were born and to which Connie now belongs, albeit with some protest. In book after book I read that the middle-class are doomed. Globalisation and technology have already cut a swathe through previously secure professions, and 3D printing technology will soon wipe out the last of the manufacturing industries. The internet won’t replace those jobs, and what place for the middle-classes if twelve people can run a giant corporation? I’m no communist firebrand, but even the most rabid free-marketeer would concede that market-forces capitalism, instead of spreading wealth and security throughout the population, has grotesquely magnified the gulf between rich and poor, forcing a global workforce into dangerous, unregulated, insecure low-paid labour while rewarding only a tiny elite of businessmen and technocrats. So-called ‘secure’ professions seem less and less so; first it was the miners and the ship- and steel-workers, soon it will be the bank clerks, the librarians, the teachers, the shop-owners, the supermarket check-out staff. The scientists might survive if it’s the right type of science, but where do all the taxi-drivers in the world go when the taxis drive themselves? How do they feed their children or heat their homes and what happens when frustration turns to anger? Throw in terrorism, the seemingly insoluble problem of religious fundamentalism, the rise of the extreme right-wing, under-employed youth and the under-pensioned elderly, fragile and corrupt banking systems, the inadequacy of the health and care systems to cope with vast numbers of the sick and old, the environmental repercussions of unprecedented factory-farming, the battle for finite resources of food, water, gas and oil, the changing course of the Gulf Stream, destruction of the biosphere and the statistical probability of a global pandemic, and there really is no reason why anyone should sleep soundly ever again. By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, overcrowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to barely be remarked upon. Meanwhile, in literally gilded towers miles above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepreneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept cocktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.

There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas come quite literally out of nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: to previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't too find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

Why did you leave your last job?” Not the most original question, but the answer matters. I’m looking for a crisp, clear story. If they complain about a bad manager or being the victim of politics, I ask what they did about it. Why didn’t they fight harder? And did they leave a mess behind them? What did they do to make sure they left in the right way? [See also: Chapter 2.4: I Quit.] And why do they want to join this company? That reason had better be completely different from why they left their previous job. They should have a new story, a compelling story, about what they’re excited about, who they want to work with, and how they want to grow and develop.

Her problem was that she thought too much- “toxic thinking” and so forth- so she tried to stop, but a physical sensation of exertion remained. Was it her fault that her husband made more money? That it made more sense for her to quit her job than for him to quit his? Was it her fault that he was always gone, rendering her a de facto single mom for the majority of the week? Was it her fault that she found playing trains really, really boring? That she longed for even the smallest bit of mental stimulation, for a return to her piles of books, to her long-abandoned closet of half-formed projects, to one entire afternoon of solitude and silence? Was it her fault that, though she longed for mental stimulation, she still found herself unable to concoct a single, original thought or opinion? She did not actually care about anything anymore. Politics, art, philosophy, film: all boring. She craved gossip and reality TV. Was it her fault that she hated herself for her preference for reality TV? Was it her fault that she had bought into the popular societal myth that if a young woman merely secured a top-notch education she could then free herself from the historical constraints of motherhood, that if she simply had a career she could easily return to work after having a baby and sidestep the drudgery of previous generations, even though having a baby did not, in any way, represent a departure from work to which a woman might, theoretically, one day return. It actually, instead, marked an immersion in work, and unimaginable weight of work, a multiplication of work exponential in its scope, staggering, so staggering, both physically and psychically (especially psychically), that even the most mentally well person might be brought to her knees beneath such a load, a load that pitted ambition against biology, careerism against instinct, that bade the modern mother be less of an animal in order to be happy, because- come on, now- we’re evolved and civilized, and, really, what is your problem? Pull it together. This is embarrassing.

Lenin arrived a stranger to Russia. Apart from a six-month stay in 1905-6, he had spent the previous seventeen years in exile abroad. Most of the workers who turned out to meet him at the Finland Station could never have seen him before.'I know very little of Russia,' Lenin once told Gorky. 'Simbirsk, Kazan, Petersburg, exile - that is all I know." During 1917 he would often claim that the mass of the ordinary people were even further to the Left than the Bolsheviks. Yet he had no experience of them, and knew only what his party agents told him (which was often what he wanted to hear). Between 5 July and the October seizure of power Lenin did not make a single public appearance. He barely set foot in the provinces. The man who was set to become the dictator of Russia had almost no direct knowledge of the way its people lived. Apart from two years as a lawyer, he had never even had a job. He was a "professional revolutionary', living apart from society and supporting himself from the party's funds and from the income of him mother's estate (which he continued to draw until her death in 1916). According to Gorky, it was this ignorance of everyday work, and the human suffering which it entailed, which had bred in Lenin a 'pitiless contempt, worthy of a nobleman, for the lives of the ordinary people...Life in all its complexity us unknown to Lenin. He does not know the ordinary people. He has never lived among them.

More than 754,000 Danes aged between fifteen and sixty-four—over 20 percent of the working population—do no work whatsoever and are supported by generous unemployment or disability benefits. The New York Times has called Denmark “The best place on earth to be laid off,” with unemployment benefits of up to 90 percent of previous wages for up to two years (until recent reforms, it was eleven years). The Danes call their system flexicurity, a neologism blending the flexibility Danish companies enjoy to fire people with short notice and little compensation (compared with Sweden, where jobs can still be for life) with the security the labor market enjoys knowing that there will be ample support in times of unemployment

We've reached a point in human history where higher education no longer works. As a result of technology, higher education in its traditional college setting no longer works. It will never be effective or progressive enough to keep up with the growing needs of employers who look to college institutions for their future employees. I can appreciate the good intent the college system set out to achieve. For previous generations, the formula actually worked. Students enrolled into universities that were affordable, they gained marketable skills and they earned good jobs. Since there was a proven track record of success, parents instilled the value of college in their children thinking they would achieve the same success story they did, but unfortunately Wall Street was watching. Wall Street, the federal government and the college system ganged up and skyrocketed the cost of tuition to record highs. This was easy to do because not only did they have posters blanketing high schools showing kids what a loser they would be if they didn't go to college, they also had Mom and Dad at home telling them the same thing. This system - spending 4+ years pursuing a college education when the world is changing at the speed of light - no longer works and it's not fixable. We now have the biggest employer's market in human history, where employers have their pick of the litter, and because of this employees will get paid less and less and benefits will continue to erode.

Imaginary Lives Imaginary Lives is a thought experiment I have adapted from two important career-change thinkers, Julia Cameron and John Williams, which aims to take your ideas a stage closer towards specific job options.55 It’s simple but potentially powerful. • Imagine five parallel universes, in each of which you could have a whole year off to pursue absolutely any career you desired. Now think of five different jobs you might want to try out in each of these universes. Be bold in your thinking, have fun with your ideas and your multiple selves. Your five choices might be food photographer, member of parliament, tai chi instructor, social entrepreneur running a youth education project, and wide-achieving Renaissance generalist. One person I know who did this activity – a documentary film maker who was having doubts about her career – listed massage therapist, sculptor, cellist, screen-play writer, and owner of her own bar on a tiny, old-fashioned Canarian island. Now come back down to earth and look hard at your five choices. Write down what it is about them that attracts you. Then look at them again, and think about this question: • How does each career measure up against the two motivations in the previous activity that you chose to prioritize in the future? If you decided, for instance, that you want a combination of making a difference and high status, check whether your five imaginary careers might provide them. The point is to help you think more deeply about exactly what you are looking for in a career, the kind of experiences that you truly desire.

Thirty years ago, travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, salesclerks helped us find what we were looking for in stores, and professional typists or secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves. The information age has off-loaded a great deal of the work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us. We are doing the jobs of ten different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows. It’s no wonder that sometimes one memory gets confounded with another, leading us to show up in the right place but on the wrong day, or to forget something as simple as where we last put our glasses or the remote.

submit reports written in invisible ink, which now fell almost exclusively on Tallmadge to reveal and decipher. The job had previously belonged to Washington’s aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton, while Tallmadge was in charge of making sense of the general intelligence and summary reports Woodhull, Roe, and Brewster compiled. But recently Tallmadge had been tasked with the white-ink letters—perhaps after Washington recognized the urgency of the

Remember, mind has no interest in what’s true—its job is to keep you alive while maintaining an identifiable sense of self. To do this, it not only creates and identifies with physical and mental-emotional activities, it also builds on past experience and any previously established conceptual identity. You’re still alive and you’re still you, so mind will naturally protect and promote all the beliefs behind the activities that keep you that way.

It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repair person, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.

So what are you scared of?' he asks me at our last appointment. 'I mean really scared of.' I try to think about it. 'I'm scared that if I can't even handle this right now, how will I be able to handle bigger things in the future?' He nods. He scrapes his moustache against his thumbs. 'Bigger things in the future. What's bigger than this? Your mother dies suddenly. It echoes her previous abandonment of you thus making her death a double whammy. Your father proved to be incapable of being your father. You owe money to several large corporations who will squeeze you indefinitely. You spent six years writing a novel that may or may not get published. You got fired from your job. You say you want a family of your own but there doesn't seem to be a man in your life, and you may have fertility problems. I don't know, my friend. This is not nothing.' Of all his strange responses, this is the one that helps me the most. This is not nothing.

The storyteller gave me a sideways look. “Miss Lea, it doesn’t do to get attached to these secondary characters. It’s not their story. They come, they go, and when they go they’re gone for good. That’s all there is to it.” I slid my pencil into the spiral binding of my notebook and walked to the door, but when I got there, I turned back. “Where did she come from, then?” “For goodness’ sake! She was only a governess! She is irrelevant, I tell you.” “She must have had references. A previous job. Or else a letter of application with a home address. Perhaps she came from an agency?” Miss Winter closed her eyes and a long-suffering expression appeared on her face. “Mr. Lomax, the Angelfield family solicitor, will have all the details I’m sure. Not that they’ll do you any good. It’s my story. I should know. His office is in Market Street, Banbury. I will instruct him to answer any inquiries you choose to make.” I wrote to Mr. Lomax that night.

I had no idea, when I was first asked by my agents to audition for a film called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, that it would be any different in terms of scale to the jobs I’d done previously. In my mind it was another Borrowers: a relatively high-budget film with lots of children and, if I played my cards right, a part for me. But if I didn’t get a part? That was okay too. It wasn’t the be-all and end-all. There was a good chance something else would come along.

When we use silence, we know exactly what’s going on in our minds and just don’t share it, but others don’t know what we hide at that moment. We know how we feel and think, but we refuse to share these thoughts. If you have a certain belief, you identify as this certain box they have created to fit you in along with other people who share similar beliefs. The mind does not like complexity and wants to keep receiving information simple. When you remain silent, this quick and simple process that the mind does becomes complex, because it needs more data. Silence requires more analytical thinking which is difficult for a mind that is preoccupied with thousands of tasks and projects to come across daily. That’s the easiest job the mind can do. Based on previous experiences and personality samples that match yours, they will assume that you identify as a certain type, have certain beliefs or share similar thoughts to other people of that sample.

One day, UD officers met to review events at their respective posts. A bewildered new officer arrived. “Hey, you’ll never believe it, but I passed the First Lady, and she told me to go to hell!” A second young officer responded, “You think that’s bad? I passed her on the West Colonnade, and all I said was ‘Good morning, First Lady.’ She told me, ‘Go f—yourself.’” “Are you serious?” “‘Go f—yourself’!” He imitated her, pointing a finger. We were stunned but not all of us were surprised. Our sergeant challenged him, but another officer soon corroborated his story. Our sergeant was speechless. We assured the rookie that this wasn’t the job’s normal atmosphere—at least, not under the previous administration. The sergeant fumed and called the watch commander, who pushed things up the Secret Service chain of command, who said they’d forward it to Chief of Staff Leon Panetta. The Service circulated a memo reminding everyone to report any “unusual” First Family interaction to their supervisors.

Imagine that seven out of ten working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they all do? It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repair person, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined. It

The information age has off-loaded a great deal of the work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us. We are doing the jobs of ten different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows. It’s no wonder that sometimes one memory gets confounded with another, leading us to show up in the right place but on the wrong day, or to forget something as simple as where we last put our glasses or the remote.

Question 2: How Do You Want to Grow? When you watch how young children soak up information, you realize how deeply wired we are to learn and grow. Personal growth can and should happen throughout life, not just when we’re children. In this section, you’re essentially asking yourself: In order to have the experiences above, how do I have to grow? What sort of man or woman do I need to evolve into? Notice how this question ties to the previous one? Now, consider these four categories from the Twelve Areas of Balance: 5.​YOUR HEALTH AND FITNESS. Describe how you want to feel and look every day. What about five, ten, or twenty years from now? What eating and fitness systems would you like to have? What health or fitness systems would you like to explore, not because you think you ought to but because you’re curious and want to? Are there fitness goals you’d like to achieve purely for the thrill of knowing you accomplished them (whether it’s hiking a mountain, learning to tap dance, or getting in a routine of going to the gym)? 6.​YOUR INTELLECTUAL LIFE. What do you need to learn in order to have the experiences you listed above? What would you love to learn? What books and movies would stretch your mind and tastes? What kinds of art, music, or theater would you like to know more about? Are there languages you want to master? Remember to focus on end goals—choosing learning opportunities where the joy is in the learning itself, and the learning is not merely a means to an end, such as a diploma. 7.​YOUR SKILLS. What skills would help you thrive at your job and would you enjoy mastering? If you’d love to switch gears professionally, what skills would it take to do that? What are some skills you want to learn just for fun? What would make you happy and proud to know how to do? If you could go back to school to learn anything you wanted just for the joy of it, what would that be? 8.​YOUR SPIRITUAL LIFE. Where are you now spiritually, and where would you like to be? Would you like to move deeper into the spiritual practice you already have or try out others? What is your highest aspiration for your spiritual practice? Would you like to learn things like lucid dreaming, deep states of meditation, or ways to overcome fear, worry, or stress?

Bigotry disturbs me, too," I said, "but prejudice and segregation alone do not constitute the root of all evil. There are many nonracial elements common to humanity as a whole that create problems from the cradle to the grave regardless of race, creed, color, or previous condition of servitude." "But when you add a black face to all that," said Simple, "you have problem's mammy. White folks may be unemployed in this American country, but they get the first chance at the first jobs that open up. Besides, they get seniority. Maybe some white folks cannot read or write, but if they want to go to Ole Miss to learn to read or write, they can go without the President calling up the United States Army to protect them. Sure, white folks gets sick, but they don't have to creep in the back door of the hospital down South for treatment like we does. And when they get old, white folks have got more well-off sons and daughters to take care of them than colored folks have. Most old white folks when they get sick can suffer in comfort, and when they die they can get buried without going in debt. Colored folks, most in generally, do not have it so easy. I know because I am one.

natural personality, or maybe he was simply capable of greater perspective than everyone else. Maybe he wasn’t quite as addled by drugs and alcohol. For whatever reason, Michael stayed on the sidelines as the rest of the band fought like a pack of starving wolves who have come across a carcass in the wilderness. Previous tours, especially in the first couple of years, had always featured a fair amount of ball-busting and the occasional argument that was required simply to clear the air. For the most part, though, we had a blast on the road. It was a nonstop party punctuated by spectacularly energetic concerts. There had been a lightness to it all, a sense of being part of something special, and of wanting to enjoy every minute. But now the levity was gone. Even though they spent hardly any time together offstage, the boys were at each other’s throats constantly, either directly or through a conduit—usually me. Two more quick stories, both involving Al. We were all sitting outside by the hotel pool one day. A guy named Mike had been flown in for a couple days to take care of the boys’ grooming needs. Mike was a hairdresser or stylist or whatever you want to call him. Point is, he was really good at his job, an artistic

I later became more interested in equal rights for women in the work place because of what was happening at IBM. One of the women at Remington Rand had previously been a system service girl for IBM during the war. After a system was installed, a system service girl would go out and show the users how it worked. She was the liaison between the users and the computer company. She was married and had been fired to make room for a returning veteran. When the war ended, IBM rehired all of its former employees who had left to join the military, then fired all of the married women with jobs that could be filled by men.

Every entry, whether revised or reviewed, goes through multiple editing passes. The definer starts the job, then it’s passed to a copy editor who cleans up the definer’s work, then to a bunch of specialty editors: cross-reference editors, who make sure the definer hasn’t used any word in the entry that isn’t entered in that dictionary; etymologists, to review or write the word history; dating editors, who research and add the dates of first written use; pronunciation editors, who handle all the pronunciations in the book. Then eventually it’s back to a copy editor (usually a different one from the first round, just to be safe), who will make any additional changes to the entry that cross-reference turned up, then to the final reader, who is, as the name suggests, the last person who can make editorial changes to the entry, and then off to the proofreader (who ends up, again, being a different editor from the definer and the two previous copy editors). After the proofreaders are done slogging through two thousand pages of four-point type, the production editors send it off to the printer or the data preparation folks, and then we get another set of dictionary pages (called page proofs) to proofread. This process happens continuously as we work through a dictionary, so a definer may be working on batches in C, cross-reference might be in W, etymology in T, dating and pronunciation in the second half of S, copy editors in P (first pass) and Q and R (second pass), while the final reader is closing out batches in N and O, proofreaders are working on M, and production has given the second set of page proofs to another set of proofreaders for the letter L. We all stagger our way through the alphabet until the last batch, which is inevitably somewhere near G, is closed. By the time a word is put in print either on the page or online, it’s generally been seen by a minimum of ten editors. Now consider that when it came to writing the Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, we had a staff of about twenty editors working on it: twenty editors to review about 220,000 existing definitions, write about 10,000 new definitions, and make over 100,000 editorial changes (typos, new dates, revisions) for the new edition. Now remember that the 110,000-odd changes made were each reviewed about a dozen times and by a minimum of ten editors. The time given to us to complete the revision of the Tenth Edition into the Eleventh Edition so production could begin on the new book? Eighteen months.

To Greg, who had suffered from bouts of depression throughout his life, this seemed like a terrible approach. In seeking treatment for his depression, he—along with millions of others around the world—had found that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was the most effective solution. CBT teaches you to notice when you are engaging in various “cognitive distortions,” such as “catastrophizing” (If I fail this quiz, I’ll fail the class and be kicked out of school, and then I’ll never get a job . . .) and “negative filtering” (only paying attention to negative feedback instead of noticing praise as well). These distorted and irrational thought patterns are hallmarks of depression and anxiety disorders. We are not saying that students are never in real physical danger, or that their claims about injustice are usually cognitive distortions. We are saying that even when students are reacting to real problems, they are more likely than previous generations to engage in thought patterns that make those problems seem more threatening, which makes them harder to solve. An important discovery by early CBT researchers was that if people learn to stop thinking this way, their depression and anxiety usually subside. For this reason, Greg was troubled when he noticed that some students’ reactions to speech on college campuses exhibited exactly the same distortions that he had learned to rebut in his own therapy. Where had students learned these bad mental habits? Wouldn’t these cognitive distortions make students more anxious and depressed?

We thought we should list all legendary animals," Nigel explained – apparently without realizing it – why they had visa problems. "Can't hurt to ask. Dragons are real, right?" "Elves say they are." Jane desperately wanted a scotch but if she had one, Hal couldn't resist needing one, and she didn't want go back down that road. "This list is suicidal if you're not willing to defend yourself. This isn't Earth, where you can sit in your Jeep and take picture of lions, or go sit in the middle of a bunch of apes. Most of these things will peel open an SUV like it’s a can of sardines and make a snack of everything inside." "It would be amusing to watch but it would end badly for you," Hal murmured. It was hard to tell if he was making a play on his previous statement or if he didn't realize he was repeating himself. "The list is a starting point." Nigel leaned forward, face lighting up with inner fire. "To get us in the door. What we want is all of Elfhome. To revel in all that it has to offer. The virgin iron wood forest. The beautiful immortal elves. The strange and magical beasts. And the humans that live peacefully side by side with all this." Jane shook her head, trying to resist the power of a TV host beaming at her one-on-one. "Don't snow job me." "I've seen this kind of shit before," Taggart said with quiet intensity. "When a country goes dark, its means someone has something it's trying to hide. And often what they're hiding is horrible war crimes like mass graves and attempted genocide. Someone is keeping the media out of Pittsburgh.

Most people have heard of Mahatma Gandhi, the man who led India to independence from British rule. His life has been memorialized in books and film, and he is regarded as one of the great men in history. But did you know Gandhi did not start out as a great hero? He was born into a middle-class family. He had low self-esteem, and that made him reluctant to interact with others. He wasn’t a very good student, either, and he struggled just to finish high school. His first attempt at higher education ended in five months. His parents decided to send him to England to finish his education, hoping the new environment would motivate him. Gandhi became a lawyer. The problem when he returned to India was that he didn’t know much about Indian law and had trouble finding clients. So he migrated to South Africa and got a job as a clerk. Gandhi’s life changed one day while riding on a train in South Africa in the first-class section. Because of his dark skin, he was forced to move to a freight car. He refused, and they kicked him off the train. It was then he realized he was afraid of challenging authority, but that he suddenly wanted to help others overcome discrimination if he could. He created a new vision for himself that had value and purpose. He saw value in helping people free themselves from discrimination and injustice. He discovered purpose in life where none had existed previously, and that sense of purpose pulled him forward and motivated him to do what best-selling author and motivational speaker Andy Andrews calls “persist without exception.” His purpose and value turned him into the winner he was born to be,

If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother. If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods. If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children. If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location. If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere. If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished. If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities. Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.

The strongest evidence yet was published in 2010. In a painstaking long-term study, much larger and more thorough than anything done previously, an international team of researchers tracked one thousand children in New Zealand from birth until the age of thirty-two. Each child’s self-control was rated in a variety of ways (through observations by researchers as well as in reports of problems from parents, teachers, and the children themselves). This produced an especially reliable measure of children’s self-control, and the researchers were able to check it against an extraordinarily wide array of outcomes through adolescence and into adulthood. The children with high self-control grew up into adults who had better physical health, including lower rates of obesity, fewer sexually transmitted diseases, and even healthier teeth. (Apparently, good self-control includes brushing and flossing.) Self-control was irrelevant to adult depression, but its lack made people more prone to alcohol and drug problems. The children with poor self-control tended to wind up poorer financially. They worked in relatively low-paying jobs, had little money in the bank, and were less likely to own a home or have money set aside for retirement. They also grew up to have more children being raised in single-parent households, presumably because they had a harder time adapting to the discipline required for a long-term relationship. The children with good self-control were much more likely to wind up in a stable marriage and raise children in a two-parent home. Last, but certainly not least, the children with poor self-control were more likely to end up in prison. Among those with the lowest levels of self-control, more than 40 percent had a criminal conviction by the age of thirty-two, compared with just 12 percent of the people who had been toward the high end of the self-control distribution in their youth.

Did you ever tell your previous employer any of your thoughts on ways they could improve?” If he says “Yes, but they never listened to anyone,” or “Yeah, but they just said ‘Mind your own business,’” this may tell more about the style of his approach than about managers at his last job. Most employers react well to suggestions that are offered in a constructive way, regardless of whether or not they follow them. Another unfavorable response is, “What’s the use of making suggestions? Nothing ever changes anyway.” Some applicants will accuse former employers of stealing their ideas. Others will tell war stories about efforts to get a former employer to follow suggestions. If so, ask if this was a one-man undertaking or in concert with his coworkers. Sometimes an applicant will say his co-workers “didn’t have the guts to confront management like I did.” “What are some of the things your last employer could have done to keep you?” Some applicants will give a reasonable answer (slightly more pay, better schedule, etc.), but others will provide a list of demands that demonstrate unreasonable expectations (e.g., “They could have doubled my salary, promoted me to vice president, and given me Fridays off”). “How do you go about solving problems at work?” Good answers are that he consults with others, weighs all points of view, discusses them with involved parties, etc. Unfavorable answers contain a theme of confrontation (e.g., “I tell the source of the problem he’d better straighten up,” or “I go right to the man in charge and lay it on the line”). Another bad answer is that he does nothing to resolve problems, saying, “Nothing ever changes anyway.” “Describe a problem you had in your life where someone else’s help was very important to you.” Is he able to recall such a situation? If so, does he give credit or express appreciation about the help? “Who is your best friend and how would you describe your friendship?” Believe it or not, there are plenty of people who cannot come up with a single name in response to this question. If they give a name that was not listed as a reference, ask why. Then ask if you can call that friend as a reference.

Easing Your Worries I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? —MATTHEW 6:25     I don’t know how things are in your world, but I can tell you that in Southern California we live in an age of anxiety. My neighbors and I have it much easier than our parents, but we certainly are much uneasier than our parents were. We seem to be anxious about temporal things, more so than past generations. They never worried about whether they were eating at the new vogue eatery, vacationing at the best island hotel with the largest pool, wearing the most prestigious label, or keeping their abs in shape. I watched the previous generation closely; they wanted a home for their families, a car that ran efficiently, and a job that provided for their basic needs. It seems our main concerns and drives today are physical and earth possessed. A large number of people actually believe that if they have the best food, clothing, education, house, and trainer, they have arrived. What else could one want for a perfect life? Our culture actually places more importance on the body and what we do with it than ever before in modern history. Thus we have created a mind set that causes us as women to be more concerned with life’s accommodations along life’s journey than with our final destination. Many women are going through their lives with a vast vacuum on the inside. In fact, the woman that you might sometimes envy because of her finely dressed family and newly remodeled kitchen is probably spending most of her day anxious and unsatisfied. Maybe that woman is you? This thing called life is more important than food, and the body is more important than what we wear. All the tangible distractions don’t satisfy the soul; they have become cheap substitutes for our spiritual wholeness and well-being. Let Christ help you overcome the anxieties of life. • Stop chasing the temporal things of life. Seek the kingdom of God as it is revealed in Jesus. Cast all your cares on Him. • Take your eyes off yourself and focus them on God first. Much of our anxieties are rooted in our self-centeredness. • Spend most of your prayer time praying for others.

But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think-this will maybe sound weird-it's like the corporate world's full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I've had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia's no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts." "I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite -" "I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that." "You don't think he likes his job, then." "Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realises it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.” What was it in this statement that made Clark want to weep" He was nodding, taking down as much as he could. "Do you think he'd describe himself as unhappy in his work?" "No," Dahlia said, "because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You know what I mean? "No please elaborate." "Okay, say you go into the break room," she said, "and a couple people you like are there, say someone's telling a funny story, you laugh a little, you feel included, everyone's so funny, you go back to your desk with a sort of , I don't know, I guess afterglow would be the word? You go back to your desk with an afterglow, but then by four or five o'clock the day's just turned into yet another day, and you go on like that, looking forward to five o'clock and then the weekend and then your two or three annual weeks of paid vacation time, day in day out, and that's what happens in your life." "Right," Clark said. He was filed in the moment with an inexpressible longing. The previous day he'd gone into the break roman spent five minutes laughing at a colleague's impression of a Daily Show bit. "That's what passes for a life, I should say. That's what passes for happiness, for most people. Guys like Dan, they're like sleepwalkers," she said, "and nothing ever jolts them awake.

Come on, show me what you got” Shelby said throwing a set of gear to wing before pulling on a pair of gloves herself “I'll try not to hurt you too badly” “how reassuring” Wing said pulling on his gloves he had been giving Shelby hand-to-hand combat training for some time back at H.I.V.E And what she lacked in technique she made up for in speed and cunning. “Bring it” Shelby said with a grin raising both gloves in a defensive stance and beckoning him towards her “It will be brought” Wing replied. He feinted to her left and she went to block as he simultaneously swung a low blow into her other side, carefully pulling his punch so that he just tapped her. “Two perhaps three broken ribs” Wing said matter of factly “maintain your guard” Shelby nodded and took a quick jab at his jaw which wing blocked effortlessly “Try not to look where you are striking you betray your intentions” They went on like that for a couple more minutes just as in their previous sparring sessions Wing noticed that once they began Shelby became totally focused. There were none of this smart comments or sarcasm that she'd normally used - she was suddenly deadly serious. “Broken job possible unconsciousness” Wing said calmly as he struck her passed her guard stopping his fist millimetres from her chin. “Oh my God” Shelby gasped suddenly, staring in shock at something over wings shoulder. He spun around, his guard raised. Shelby dropped low swinging her leg out, sweeping Wing's feet out from under him and sending him crashing to the floor. “Wounded pride, possible humiliation” Shelby said with a grin offering her hand to Wing and pulling him up off the floor. “and so ends today's lesson” she said pulling off her head guard. “an unconventional tactic” Wing said with a nod, taking off his own helmet. “but a successful one none the less” “ I kinda like unconventional tactics” Shelby said stepping towards him. “never underestimate the power of surprise” She grabbed the back of his neck and kissed him for a few long seconds. “what was that about maintaining your guard?” she said with a smile as she pulled away from him. “sometimes one should let ones guard down” Wing said staring at her for a moment before drawing her towards him and kissed her back. “Er...guys?” a familiar voice said causing Wing and Shelby to spring apart. “Dr Nero wants you to report to the briefing room” Wing winced slightly as he saw Nigel and Franz standing in the doorway. Nigel was looking pointedly at the floor and Franz was staring at him and Shelby, his mouth hanging open in surprise. “come on big guy - no rest for the wicked” Shelby said to Wing with a grin, taking his hand and dragging him out of the room past Nigel and the stunned looking Franz.

lawyer married a woman who had previously divorced ten husbands. On their wedding night, she told her new husband, "Please be gentle, I'm still a virgin." "What?" said the puzzled groom. "How can that be if you've been married ten times?" "Well, Husband #1 was a sales representative. He kept telling me how great it was going to be. Husband #2 was in software services. He was never really sure how it was supposed to function, but he said he'd look into it and get back to me. Husband #3 was from field services. He said everything checked out diagnostically, but he just couldn't get the system up. Husband #4 was in telemarketing. Even though he knew he had the order, he didn't know when he would be able to deliver. Husband #5 was an engineer. He understood the basic process, but wanted three years to research, implement, and design a new state-of-the-art method. Husband #6 was from finance and administration. He thought he knew how, but he wasn't sure whether it was his job or not. Husband #7 was in marketing. Although he had a nice product, he was never sure how to position it. Husband #8 was a psychologist. All he ever did was talk about it. Husband #9 was a gynecologist. All he did was look at it. Husband #10 was a stamp collector. All he ever did was...God, I miss him! But now that I've married you, I'm really excited!" "Good," said the new husband, "but, why?" "You're a lawyer. This time I know I'm going to get really screwed! ♦◊♦◊♦◊♦

A little deeper was a fear of falling in love without reservation, of committing herself to someone who might then be snatched from her. Or simply leave her. But if you never really fall in love, you can never really miss it. (She did not dwell on this sentiment, dimly aware that it did not ring quite true.) Also, if she never really fell in love with someone, she could never really betray him, as in her heart of hearts she felt that her mother had betrayed her long-dead father. She still missed him terribly. With Ken it seemed to be different. Or had her expectations been gradually compromised over the years? Unlike many other men she could think of, when challenged or stressed Ken displayed a gentler, more compassionate side. His tendency to compromise and his skill in scientific politics were part of the accoutrements of his job; but underneath she felt she had glimpsed something solid. She respected him for the way he had integrated science into the whole of his life, and for the courageous support for science that he had tried to inculcate into two administrations. They had, as discreetly as possible, been staying together, more or less, in her small apartment at Argus. Their conversations were a joy, with ideas flying back and forth like shuttlecocks. Sometimes they responded to each other’s uncompleted thoughts with almost perfect foreknowledge. He was a considerate and inventive lover. And anyway, she liked his pheromones. She was sometimes amazed at what she was able to do and say in his presence, because of their love. She came to admire him so much that his love for her affected her own self-esteem: She liked herself better because of him. And since he clearly felt the same, there was a kind of infinite regress of love and respect underlying their relationship. At least, that was how she described it to herself. In the presence of so many of her friends, she had felt an undercurrent of loneliness. With Ken, it was gone. She was comfortable describing to him her reveries, snatches of memories, childhood embarrassments. And he was not merely interested but fascinated. He would question her for hours about her childhood. His questions were always direct, sometimes probing, but without exception gentle. She began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the one-year-old, the five-year-old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship. With her previous partners, it seemed, at most one of these selves was able to find a compatible opposite number; the other personas were grumpy hangers-on.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.

Remarkably, we still have a ‘wild’ Indian’s account of his capture and incarceration. In 1878, when he was an old man, a Kamia called Janitin told an interviewer: I and two of my relatives went down ... to the beach ... we did no harm to anyone on the road, and ... we thought of nothing more than catching and drying clams in order to carry them to our village. While we were doing this, we saw two men on horseback coming rapidly towards us; my relatives were immediately afraid and they fled with all speed, hiding themselves in a very dense willow grove ... As soon as I saw myself alone, I also became afraid ... and ran to the forest ... but already it was too late, because in a moment they overtook me and lassoed and dragged me for a long distance, wounding me much with the branches over which they dragged me, pulling me lassoed as I was with their horses running; after this they roped me with my arms behind and carried me off to the Mission of San Miguel, making me travel almost at a run in order to keep up with their horses, and when I stopped a little to catch my wind, they lashed me with the lariats that they carried, making me understand by signs that I should hurry; after much travelling in this manner, they diminished the pace and lashed me in order that I would always travel at the pace of the horses. When we arrived at the mission, they locked me in a room for a week; the father [a Dominican priest] made me go to his habitation and he talked to me by means of an interpreter, telling me that he would make me a Christian, and he told me many things that I did not understand, and Cunnur, the interpreter, told me that I should do as the father told me, because now I was not going to be set free, and it would go very bad with me if I did not consent in it. They gave me atole de mayz[corn gruel] to eat which I did not like because I was not accustomed to that food; but there was nothing else to eat. One day they threw water on my head and gave me salt to eat, and with this the interpreter told me that I was now Christian and that I was called Jesús: I knew nothing of this, and I tolerated it all because in the end I was a poor Indian and did not have recourse but to conform myself and tolerate the things they did with me. The following day after my baptism, they took me to work with the other Indians, and they put me to cleaning a milpa [cornfield] of maize; since I did not know how to manage the hoe that they gave me, after hoeing a little, I cut my foot and could not continue working with it, but I was put to pulling out the weeds by hand, and in this manner I did not finish the task that they gave me. In the afternoon they lashed me for not finishing the job, and the following day the same thing happened as on the previous day. Every day they lashed me unjustly because I did not finish what I did not know how to do, and thus I existed for many days until I found a way to escape; but I was tracked and they caught me like a fox; there they seized me by lasso as on the first occasion, and they carried me off to the mission torturing me on the road. After we arrived, the father passed along the corridor of the house, and he ordered that they fasten me to the stake and castigate me; they lashed me until I lost consciousness, and I did not regain consciousness for many hours afterwards. For several days I could not raise myself from the floor where they had laid me, and I still have on my shoulders the marks of the lashes which they gave me then.

gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.

Each purpose, each mission, is meant to be fully lived to the point where it becomes empty, boring, and useless. Then it should be discarded. This is a sign of growth, but you may mistake it for a sign of failure. For instance, you may take on a business project, work at it for several years, and then suddenly find yourself totally disinterested. You know that if you stayed with it for another few years you would reap much greater financial reward than if you left the project now. But the project no longer calls you. You no longer feel interested in the project. You have developed skills over the last few years working on the project, but it hasn’t yet come to fruition. You may wonder, now that you have the skills, should you stick with it and bring the project to fruition, even though the work feels empty to you? Well, maybe you should stick with it. Maybe you are bailing out too soon, afraid of success or failure, or just too lazy to persevere. This is one possibility. Ask your close men friends if they feel you are simply losing steam, wimping out, or afraid to bring your project to completion. If they feel you are bailing out too soon, stick with it. However, there is also the possibility that you have completed your karma in this area. It is possible that this was one layer of purpose, which you have now fulfilled, on the way to another layer of purpose, closer to your deepest purpose. Among the signs of fulfilling or completing a layer of purpose are these: 1. You suddenly have no interest whatsoever in a project or mission that, just previously, motivated you highly. 2. You feel surprisingly free of any regrets whatsoever, for starting the project or for ending it. 3. Even though you may not have the slightest idea of what you are going to do next, you feel clear, unconfused, and, especially, unburdened. 4. You feel an increase in energy at the prospect of ceasing your involvement with the project. 5. The project seems almost silly, like collecting shoelaces or wallpapering your house with gas station receipts. Sure, you could do it, but why would you want to? If you experience these signs, it is probably time to stop working on this project. You must end your involvement impeccably, however, making sure there are no loose ends and that you do not burden anybody’s life by stopping your involvement. This might take some time, but it is important that this layer of your purpose ends cleanly and does not create any new karma, or obligation, that will burden you or others in the future. The next layer of your unfolding purpose may make itself clear immediately. More often, however, it does not. After completing one layer of purpose, you might not know what to do with your life. You know that the old project is over for you, but you are not sure of what is next. At this point, you must wait for a vision. There is no way to rush this process. You may need to get an intermediary job to hold you over until the next layer of purpose makes itself clear. Or, perhaps you have enough money to simply wait. But in any case, it is important to open yourself to a vision of what is next. You stay open to a vision of your deeper purpose by not filling your time with distractions. Don’t watch TV or play computer games. Don’t go out drinking beer with your friends every night or start dating a bunch of women. Simply wait. You may wish to go on a retreat in a remote area and be by yourself. Whatever it is you decide to do, consciously keep yourself open and available to receiving a vision of what is next. It will come.

All the many successes and extraordinary accomplishments of the Gemini still left NASA’s leadership in a quandary. The question voiced in various expressions cut to the heart of the problem: “How can we send men to the moon, no matter how well they fly their ships, if they’re pretty helpless when they get there? We’ve racked up rendezvous, docking, double-teaming the spacecraft, starting, stopping, and restarting engines; we’ve done all that. But these guys simply cannot work outside their ships without exhausting themselves and risking both their lives and their mission. We’ve got to come up with a solution, and quick!” One manned Gemini mission remained on the flight schedule. Veteran Jim Lovell would command the Gemini 12, and his space-walking pilot would be Buzz Aldrin, who built on the experience of the others to address all problems with incredible depth and finesse. He took along with him on his mission special devices like a wrist tether and a tether constructed in the same fashion as one that window washers use to keep from falling off ledges. The ruby slippers of Dorothy of Oz couldn’t compare with the “golden slippers” Aldrin wore in space—foot restraints, resembling wooden Dutch shoes, that he could bolt to a work station in the Gemini equipment bay. One of his neatest tricks was to bring along portable handholds he could slap onto either the Gemini or the Agena to keep his body under control. A variety of space tools went into his pressure suit to go along with him once he exited the cabin. On November 11, 1966, the Gemini 12, the last of its breed, left earth and captured its Agena quarry. Then Buzz Aldrin, once and for all, banished the gremlins of spacewalking. He proved so much a master at it that he seemed more to be taking a leisurely stroll through space than attacking the problems that had frustrated, endangered, and maddened three previous astronauts and brought grave doubts to NASA leadership about the possible success of the manned lunar program. Aldrin moved down the nose of the Gemini to the Agena like a weightless swimmer, working his way almost effortlessly along a six-foot rail he had locked into place once he was outside. Next came looping the end of a hundred-foot line from the Agena to the Gemini for a later experiment, the job that had left Dick Gordon in a sweatbox of exhaustion. Aldrin didn’t show even a hint of heavy breathing, perspiration, or an increased heartbeat. When he spoke, his voice was crisp, sharp, clear. What he did seemed incredibly easy, but it was the direct result of his incisive study of the problems and the equipment he’d brought from earth. He also made sure to move in carefully timed periods, resting between major tasks, and keeping his physical exertion to a minimum. When he reached the workstation in the rear of the Gemini, he mounted his feet and secured his body to the ship with the waist tether. He hooked different equipment to the ship, dismounted other equipment, shifted them about, and reattached them. He used a unique “space wrench” to loosen and tighten bolts with effortless skill. He snipped wires, reconnected wires, and connected a series of tubes. Mission Control hung on every word exchanged between the two astronauts high above earth. “Buzz, how do those slippers work?” Aldrin’s enthusiastic voice came back like music. “They’re great. Great! I don’t have any trouble positioning my body at all.” And so it went, a monumental achievement right at the end of the Gemini program. Project planners had reached all the way to the last inch with one crucial problem still unsolved, and the man named Aldrin had whipped it in spectacular fashion on the final flight. Project Gemini was

She told him the origins of the “buck dance,” when “white people would come up and say ‘N____r, dance’, and then start shooting around the feet of blacks so that they would dance like everything.” 45 Big Ma was an important presence in Jimmy’s childhood and adolescence, and he credited her with giving him a unique and powerful sense of historical change. “When she talked about slavery,” he recalled, “she always talked not about how they freed the slaves, but about how [slaveholders] surrendered. There was a big difference. She saw the change as something that had been won by somebody, not something that had been given. She realized that there had been a struggle and that somebody had to lose.” 46 It would not take much for young Jimmy to see a historical connection and a continuity in struggle between these two moments—the buck dance that Big Ma witnessed in her childhood and the marauding Selma sheriff who came to town “shooting and raising Cain to see the colored folks run” during his childhood. Big Ma lived until the mid-1930s, when Jimmy was in his teens. By this time he could see new spaces of struggle emerging from shifts in the region’s economy and black people’s employment patterns. These shifts had impacted his family, specifically through his father’s work opportunities, and would shape his own prospects. Cotton continued to be an important part of the economy, both in the state and in the Black Belt region, but its significance declined relative to Alabama’s growing industrial economy. African Americans saw expanded employment opportunities, as labor shortages, strikes, and union organizing during the first two decades of the century led companies to open up jobs previously unavailable to black workers. The steel industry, which had previously satisfied its need for cheap labor with immigrant workers, came to rely heavily on black labor after World War I. 47

The rose is a symbol of the inner mysteries of Witchcraft. A red rose symbolizes the mysteries as they reside in Nature, within the living things. The white rose symbolizes the Otherworld and the mysteries hidden in secret places. When a single rose appears with white petals in the center of red petals, this represents the mysteries joined together within one reality. Thorns appearing with the rose represent challenges and the dedication required to fully grasp the enlightenment of the rose. One of the symbolisms associated with the rose reveals the covenant between the Witch and the Faery. In this, we find that both are stewards of the portal that opens to the inner mysteries. The Faery holds the celestial key, and the Witch bears the terrestrial key. When the two are joined together, they form an X—the sign of the crossroads. In this formation, where the keys cross we find a third point, the in-between place at the center. This is where the portal exists, and this is where it opens between the worlds. Look at the shape of the X and you can see four pointed tip markers (the V shapes). The upper half of the X points down, and the lower half points up. On the sides of the X, you can see that the left and right halves point to the center. This shows us that when the celestial and terrestrial realms join, they pull together the left ways and the right ways. These are occult terms for esoteric and exoteric modes of consciousness. In the fusion, everything briefly loses its distinction, its ability to mask the opposite reality, and in doing so, the secret third reality emerges in the center of it all. If this sounds confusing or nonsensical, then the guardian of that portal is doing its job well. The material in this book will connect you with an entity connected to the rose and its mystery. This is the previously mentioned She of the Thorn-Blooded Rose. With her guidance, you can be directed to the portal, and through it you can meet a variety of beings and entities. However, her primary task is to connect you with the Greenwood Realm and the plant spirits within it. In your journey to encounter these spirits, you will pass through the organic memory of the earth. You'll walk upon roads of mystical concepts and be accompanied by the Old Ones of