Projection Motivational Quotes

Create. Not for the money. Not for the fame. Not for the recognition. But for the pure joy of creating something and sharing it.

As I naturally go through a full range of emotions in my life, I mustn’t feel ashamed for feeling lost, for it is honest and human to feel such.

If you want to be free of the wars of the world, begin by resolving the wars within you. If you want to see the world at peace, create peace within your mind.

The universe and the law of attraction speak a language that knows no words, only discerning your intent through sacrifice and what you are willing to give up.

Do not desperately seek refuge in heaven and delve in blissful ignorance; discover the fires and infernos of hell that have sprung inside of you.

Love was never meant to be contained solely in our hearts, just as life in a seed was always meant to break through into the world and become beauty to be shared.

All is contained within the silence of death, the quietest and the loudest sound in the universe.

I didn’t know that the times we spent together on the weekends, the times that we laughed together, and the times you helped me out was your way of silently wishing me a beautiful goodbye.

With nowhere to go, we have everywhere else to go.

The drive, the ambition, the art; it all comes to me when I close my eyes and think about the sacrifices my Mom made for me.

Let the people talk, let people doubt, and let people question you, but never allow yourself to quit walking your path. Their path is their own and the path you walk is that of your own. Sweet child of mine, be the brave child of mine.

Sex is a powerful intent to create: the creation of pleasure, creation of love, and ultimately the creation of life. It connects and syncs two beings emotionally, physically, and mentally and is one of the strongest expressions of love that exists in this World.

Synchronize each breath with the present moment and become intertwined with happiness. Breathing in, we are grateful for the opportunities that are given to us; breathing out, we let go of the depression and anxiety that hold us back.

Without waiting for others acknowledge your purpose, remaining balanced when things don’t work out, and uncompromising in your effort; realize that you have a piece of the universe for which she cannot exist without.

Life was the gift that you were given the day you were born, and in turn you are the gift to life. Only in the moments of being alone in the darkness on the raft, will you have the space to speak, listen, and to act from the heart.

Your value and self-worth is not found in your former lover, not in the loving words of they spoke, not in the gentle ways that they held you, not in the sweetness of their kiss; but found in the love that you have for yourself.

Sometimes people come into our lives to make us a softer person, other times they come to teach us to let go, and occasionally the relationship wasn’t a lesson about the relationship ‘us’, but a lesson about the relationship you have with yourself.

We become so absorbed in our flaws and faults that we forget that it is better to be a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without. To have flaws is beauty in itself, a fact so frightening that we hurry to hide them from sight and tarnish the whole in the process of comparing ourselves to others.

Only in the moments of being alone in the darkness on the raft, will you have the space to speak, listen, and to act from the heart. Only in the moments of pain, do we begin to empathize with humankind. Only when you are lost, you will find new meaning. Float on.

The tallest and oldest trees that seemed to have just have casually always been there, hold the greatest love: as it nurtures love for others: providing shade for two lovers, becoming home for birds to build a nest, and giving food to the squirrels whom scurry upon it.

By creating an image of low self- esteem within ourselves, we bomb and terrorize our true self. When we refuse to forgive, we create an insensible war from old grudges. When we allow stress to impede our healthy flow of energy, we create the weapon of destruction that kills humanity.

Apples to oranges, the act of comparing your life to another’s is more like comparing an elephant to an apple, it makes no sense to compare someone’s life that you have no knowledge about to that of your own, of which in all earnest is not something that you completely understand yourself.

Whether between man and women, man and man, or woman and woman; look not towards any system that binds society created by man for guidance, but be guided by the principles of love. Love is the only law that commands this universe, and is the only language that is understood universally.

Wisdom comes from not only in the understanding that often times we say no to things too easily and quickly, but also in knowing that that ‘no’ for the sake of your physical and mental wellbeing can also be a reasonable and grounded decision for which you shouldn’t feel the need to feel guilty.

Some we proudly display on our arms, while others we shyly conceal. Tattoo the moments of sorrow as well as the moments of splendor and beauty. Tattoo in an acknowledgment and tribute to home, and tattooing your beliefs that define who you are. Whether we intended to or not, every moment of our lives are tattooed to our heart.

If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got.

Hell is not a place, but a state of mind born from stress. Hell holds our insecurities, our fears, and it is ultimately the domicile of the devil within. The devil breathes and thrives in the fragment of our hearts that we dare not visit; yet, we can only make peace with ourselves by diving into the pits of hell and having an honest conversation with the devil himself.

Give yourself freedom to grow through love, as love is the most natural direction for humans to grow, just as every tree grows upward towards the sky. Don’t try to control the way that love moves, as any attempt will be futile, for love grows like the branches, wildly growing by the laws of nature, rather than by human rational. Let love grow by her own nature.

Acknowledge and accept that there will be chaotic times while being on your raft from being lost in true freedom. Engulfed by darkness at sea, we are consumed by a great loneliness that has consistently existed even when people surrounded us, and that is when we must throw all that is heavy into the water, and float independently through to the present.

Plunging into the depths of hell, re-opening the gates to wounds and emotions that we have long tried to keep sealed and locked within, we discover that that the devil is not the Herculean ruler of darkness that we had imagined, but only a vulnerable and devastated child. With honesty and without judgment, we must muster the courage to meet this innocent child with whom we have come to label as the devil.

The Lotus in Buddhism is a sacred symbol that represents purity and resurrection as attributes that develop through a spiritual awakening of the self. With humble beginnings in swamplands, the Lotus flower exquisitely blooms, pure and untainted, from this murky world it thrives in. The Lotus flower represents a higher state of mind, a strong spirit cultivated far from the suffering and temptations of this muddied world that personifies beauty through the present moment.

Breathe in, breathe out. All the blessings of the universe that we may overlook are contained in the entirety of a breath. Breathe in, breathe out. Each breath is the sun flowering our earth, fresh water filling our oceans, and the blue skies clearing our minds. Infinite emotions are contained within every breath, and by the breath we can always realize the beauty within it all. Breathe in, breathe out.

Love is a seed that we diligently plant and requires tender care and watering in order for the tree to ever grow. Just as we cannot foresee the future and what is to become of this love later in life, the tree cannot tell what the weather will be like in the future. The strongest of winds and pouring rain may befall on the tree, however as long as the foundation and roots remains strong, love is able to exist.

The law of attraction is synonymous to the law of sacrifice, in which you get in return what you are decisively choose to give up. The universe in all her infinity beauty generously opens up gates that you had no idea existed when you close others, but she requires you to walk through the gates solely on your own will and strength, with the other doors that you have left behind often times being forever locked and eternally inaccessible.

Although at times you might want to detract from the path, realize that how you treat yourself becomes the foundation as to how you treat others; although we may want to resort to violence in words during conflict, understand that how you speak to others becomes the basis of how you speak to yourself; although we may want to give up; do not be fooled in the idea that ease and comfort is where your true path lies.

Sacrifice is a terribly difficult thing to do, of which you will be asked to do many times along your path. Only with genuine love will you be able to make these sacrifices because often times you will simply want to refuse the sacrifices that the universe asks of you to make. When you close one door, another opens; that is how the universe works and through sacrifice we are given the keys to the next door in life.

Without the fear of occasional gaffes, the willingness to be perfectly imperfect, and the heart of a child who creates chaos first thing in the morning for a parent; you are not allowing our inner child to grow. You grow in pain, not in years, and you must cross the bridge without knowing of the pain, the tears, or the trials and tribulations that you will come to have to face, but sweet child of mine, stay the happy child of mine.

Be a worthy worker and work will come.

In life hard times will befall you that will create doubt in yourself, and life will ask questions of the authenticity of the person you are. Carrying the lotus means being true to yourself and in the realization that you were always meant to grow above this mud. We are meant to grow, progress, and evolve in this relentless environment of the World and through it all achieve happiness with grace in letting go. Carry the Lotus within; grow and rise above from the harsh and remorseless world beneath you.

Breathe in, breathe out. Without the fire, the phoenix never rises from the ashes. Let the fire scorch the skin and burn the soul, allowing yourself to absorb the pain and understand the sincerity of the pain. Breathe in, you are not the past, you are not the future; breathe out, you are simply each breath, the present moment. As you breathe in and breathe out, acknowledge all the trials you have overcome thus far, and that you can continue to overcome all else without doubt. Breathe in, breathe out.

Not basing your principles of sex based on the judgment of other or on hearsay, uphold yourself to virtues that you believe in. Before any laws created by man, religion, and culture; the universe has always held us under the principles of love in all endeavors in life, and this applies to sex as well. Sex is a very personal experience and the morals you follow under this act are a personal notion that you create yourself for the sake of your personal happiness.

I wonder if the world’s fascination has less to do with the flower itself, and more with the muck that it flourishes in. The Lotus flower is of an unparalleled beauty in its elegance and grace, yet its’ origins are of an environment that is a stark contrast. We cannot help but ponder such strange juxtaposition. However, there is something telling in this natural contrast between the flower and its environment: we are meant to grow, like the Lotus, and not dirty our hands in the mud that surrounds us.

At times we will be asked to let go of things that we have always wanted to keep for ourselves, or things that we would never have thought that we would to have to let go of, such as the loss of a loved one or the betrayal of a dear friend. A tree never hesitates to shake off her leaves during fall, and so we must take another lesson given to us by the nature: let go when it is time. Although such losses can be difficult and painful, rise above this suffering. Focus within your mind, the image of the Lotus prospering above mud. We are the lotus; rise above.

Nobody thought it could be done, so nobody had tried before. Standing with one foot in the abyss and the other with a foothold in her dreams, she stood on the edge of a cliff. She took one look behind and with one last deep breath, she leapt with reckless certainty and decisive confidence. Blurring through the sky, for a moment she looked like she would fade into darkness, but in the very last moment when everyone else had given up on her, from her back spread wings. With a leap of faith, she learned to fly.

Freedom from stress, freedom from anxiety, freedom from depression; freedom is autonomy from all that stagnates growth in this ever complex and noisy world. By the fear of being in the unknown, we often overlook and forget the serene view of being on the raft: the glowing virgin stars, the gentle ways that the waves moves, and the endless possibilities that exist under the sun. The fundamental principle of freedom is to be lost and our state of mind never differs too far from this analogy of being stranded in the middle of the ocean.

A great tree develops over time and can tell stories not only those of happiness, but also those that contain pain from what it has seen over the years, and as a result is the wise ancient tree that it is today. As the seasons change, the tree naturally goes through changes as well: where the leaves turn yellow and orange in the fall, falling by the Winter, returning in the Spring, and with full set of new leafs by the Summer. Love is no different in that there will be times when we are fully naked in the Winter, and left to wonder about Spring when it seemed so easy to love, yet the wise tree knows that no winter will last forever no matter how cold it may be.

There is a specific feeling that comes about during the dying embers of a relationship. Different from the Monday morning quarrels before work because you two are tired, different from the “I’m not going to talk to you for a while because I am mad at you” silences. Breaks ups happen instantly, yet the process occurs over a gradual period of time, with tear by tear until what was once whole, rips into two. Breakups are the disappointment we feel when we wanted our lover to finish the story with an exclamation mark, but instead are left with a question mark.

What initially began as a couple of pieces that fitted together from first dates, slowly expands with time and for a moment the puzzle actually looks like it will be realized. Heartbreak is when the puzzle is nearly finished and you suddenly realize that pieces are missing. Perhaps they were never in the box in the first place or perhaps they went missing along the way; regardless, the puzzle remains undone. You frantically search the box and your surroundings, desperately trying to find the missing pieces, anxiously looking to fill the void, but you search for what cannot be found.

Your life is your artwork and you are to paint life as a beautiful struggle. With your brush, paint the colors of joy in vibrant shades of red. Color the sky a baby blue, a color as free as your heart. With rich, earthy tones shade the valleys that run deep into the ground where heaven meets hell. Life is as chaotic as the color black, a blend of all colors, and this makes life a beautiful struggle. Be grateful for the green that makes up the beautiful canvas, for nature has given you everything that you need to be happy. Most of all, don’t ever feel the need to fill the entire canvas with paint, for the places left blank are the most honest expressions of who you are.

Divorce = Rebirth: forget the past, replan your life, improve your appearance & REJUVENATE!

Morality and righteousness is based on intent, love, and in giving; yet, how is it that we as humans have come to view the act of sex with a different set of arbitrary laws? Specifically pigeonholed as an act between man and women, and with righteousness based on an unsystematic number of people we have slept with; as a civilization we have come to bind society with a set of laws largely advantageous to a specific sex, with the minority heavily antagonized and chastised. The universe knows not what sexual morality is, only what is right and wrong. The same principles that dictate morals also command the virtues of sex. Is it with the right intent? Is it based on love? Is it based on giving?

Do the things you like to be happier, stronger & more successful. Only so is hard work replaced by dedication.

If we could eliminate the concept of town and return to live in small villages, all world problems were solved.

Let it shine, the light in you. Oh, and that's delighting me! Various colors shining through. Elated, it fills my soul with ecstasy.

Don't spend your life believing a story about yourself that you didn't write that's been fed to you - that simply you've accepted, embedded and added to. Let the story go and there beneath is the real you...and your unique gifts, heart and path that await you.

Divorce is the start point for a brand new life. Don't lose the chance to redesign it upon your dreams!

Spinoza says that if a stone which has been projected through the air, had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own free will. I add this only, that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me, and what in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognise in myself as will, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognise as will.

Sometimes speakers need to talk about subjects that don't interest them much, especially at work. I believe this is harder for introverts, who have trouble projecting artificial enthusiasm. But there's a hidden advantage to this inflexibility: it can motivate us to make tough but worthwhile career changes if we find ourselves compelled to speak too often about topics that leave us cold. There is no one more courageous than the person who speaks with the courage of his convictions.

The Nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. ... The Nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the Government, contrary to the best calculations of policy. The Government sometimes participates in the national propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times, it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of Nations has been the victim.

Is your life story the truth? Yes, the chronological events are true. Is it the whole truth? No, you see and judge it through your conditioned eyes and mind - not of all involved - nor do you see the entire overview. Is it nothing but the truth? No, you select, share, delete, distort, subtract, assume and add what you want, need and choose to.

Expectation and disappointment are far from friends but they are close relations.

If you feel anxiety or depression, you are not in the present. You are either anxiously projecting the future or depressed and stuck in the past. The only thing you have any control over is the present moment; simple breathing exercises can make us calm and present instantly.

But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you? People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.

Every person is a project, God's project, I want to be the most profitable one.

We became the most successful advanced projects company in the world by hiring talented people, paying them top dollar, and motivating them into believing that they could produce a Mach 3 airplane like the Blackbird a generation or two ahead of anybody else.

Project a confident image through good body posture.

Let your projects be independent organisms. They will develop their own beautiful architecture.

True friends—those that want nothing for you but peace, harmony, and joy—sometimes more than you want it for yourself—will rise to the surface. Those are the ones to listen to and commune with. You will know their voice because it’s authentic as well, and it speaks with no ulterior motives or projections. It may not tell you pretty things, but it will always speak in love.

The way to be irreplaceable is to become a social innovator. Start projects that motivate you to save the world and simultaneously make you money (and create mindshare) for your company. Social innovation makes magic happen.

Whatever you do, don't wait to start those dreams.

No one has any right to tell you that the way you perceive yourself is wrong. Because by doing so, they also discourage the person you aspire to be.

Boredom is both a warning that we are not doing what we want to be doing and a ‘push’ that motivates us to switch goals and projects.

Your wealth will increase, your values will increase, your projection will increase, if you simply love to live, just love yourself and live yourself.

Parents can project into the future; their young children, anchored in the present, have a much harder time of it. This difference can be a formula for heartbreak for a small child. Toddlers cannot appreciate, as an adult can, that when they’re told to put their blocks away, they’ll be able to resume playing with them at some later date. They do not care, when told they can’t have another bag of potato chips, that life is long and teeming with potato chips. They want them now, because now is where they live. Yet somehow mothers and fathers believe that if only they could convey the logic of their decisions, their young children would understand it. That’s what their adult brains thrived on for all those years before their children came along: rational chitchat, in which motives were elucidated and careful analyses dutifully dispatched. But young children lead intensely emotional lives. Reasoned discussion does not have the same effect on them, and their brains are not yet optimized for it.

There is nothing so difficult to arrive at as the nature and personality of one's parents. Death, about which so much mystery is made,is perhaps no mystery at all. But the history of one's parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and characters guessed at, and the truth about them remains deeply buried, like a boulder that projects one small surface above the level of smooth lawn, and when you come to dig around it, it proves to be too large ever to move, though each year's frost forces it up a little higher.

If you are going to judge others it is wisest to do so individually not collectively and on your own direct experience of them personally. But first - and throughout - examine yourself closely. Blurred vision can often occur due to the lens, perspective and perceptions of the viewer projected onto the object that it sees. Be wary of taking to the judges seat. Above all meet at treat yourself and everyone else mindfully, compassionately with humanity.

Nonetheless the man (Hitler) had a remarkable ability to transform himself into something far more compelling, especially when speaking in public or during private meetings when some topic enraged him. He had a knack as well for projecting an aura of sincerity that blinded onlookers to his true motives and beliefs..

that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver.

Definite purpose, absolute commitment.

Many rookie software managers think that they can "motivate" their programmers to work faster by giving them nice, "tight" (unrealistically short) schedules. I think this kind of motivation is brain-dead. When I'm behind schedule, I feel doomed and depressed and unmotivated. When I'm working ahead of schedule, I'm cheerful and productive. The schedule is not the place to play psychological games.

Rewards can deliver a short-term boost—just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off—and, worse, can reduce a person’s longer-term motivation to continue the project.

...you have to believe in its principles. Anything is possible, as long as it's for the good of the world. Make the exception. Live exceptionally. And if you can't do that, maybe we should consider whether you're right for the project. Think about it, then let's talk tomorrow.

So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to day, and the only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account. Perhaps that was why he felt such a compulsion to tell them, not just about his own exploits in the wilderness, but those of his mentors.

Science" is itself one of the greatest utopian illusions ever created by humankind. I am by no means suggesting that we should take the path of antiscience—the utopia offered by science is complicated by the fact that science disguises itself as a value-neutral, objective endeavor. However, we now know that behind the practice of science lie ideological struggles, fights over power and authority, and the profit motive. The history of science is written and rewritten by the allocation and flow of capital, favors given to some projects but not others, and the needs of war.

For the Stoics, the realisation that we can often choose not to be distressed by events, even if we can’t choose events themselves, is the foundation of tranquility. For the Buddhists, a willingness to observe the ‘inner weather’ of your thoughts and emotions is the key to understanding that they need not dictate your actions. Each of these is a different way of resisting the ‘irritable reaching’ after better circumstances or better thoughts and feelings. But negative capability need not involve embracing an ancient philosophical or religious tradition. It is also the skill you’re exhibiting when you move forward with a project – or with life – in the absence of sharply defined goals; when you dare to inspect your failures; when you stop trying to eliminate feelings of insecurity; or when you put aside ‘motivational’ techniques in favour of actually getting things done.

There can be no question that Musk has mastered the art of getting the most out of his employees. Interview three dozen SpaceX engineers and each one of them will have picked up on a managerial nuance that Musk has used to get people to meet his deadlines. One example from Brogan: Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates. “He doesn’t say, ‘You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,’” Brogan said. “He says, ‘I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?’ Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You’re working hard for yourself. It’s a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work.” And by recruiting hundreds of bright, self-motivated people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together. The individual doesn’t have to hold meetings, reach a consensus, or bring other people up to speed on a project. He just keeps working and working and working. The ideal SpaceX employee is someone like Steve Davis, the director of advanced projects at SpaceX. “He’s been working sixteen hours a day every day for years,” Brogan said. “He gets more done than eleven people working together.

Giving respect means to do no harm; to allow others their rights in expressing themselves; and to honor the fact that their own thoughts, feelings, and actions are real and justifiable in their own minds, even if we see them as unimportant or wrong. Respect does not necessarily mean approval; one can respect another’s right to speak but not necessarily approve of what is spoken. Respect means that we see others as doing their best with what they have, who they are, and what hand they’ve been dealt, even if we find their efforts wanting in any way. It means seeing the divinity in others, and never inviting disrespect into our lives by projecting disrespect onto others.

Not long ago, having expressed some disagreements in print with an old comrade of long standing, I was sent a response that he had published in an obscure newspaper. This riposte referred to my opinions as ‘racist.’ I would obviously scorn to deny such an allegation on my own behalf. I would, rather, prefer to repudiate it on behalf of my former friend. He had known me for many years and cooperated with me on numerous projects, and I am quite confident that he would never have as a collaborator anyone he suspected of racial prejudice. But it does remind me, and not for the first time, that quarrels on the left have a tendency to become miniature treason trials, replete with all kinds of denunciation. There's a general tendency—not by any means confined to radicals but in some way specially associated with them—to believe that once the lowest motive for a dissenting position has been found, it must in some way be the real one.

if you want to set the tone or mood, make sure you get some of the first words in. Think about it, which meeting would you prefer to attend? One that starts with “Let’s get going because we have so much to do today and a lot of fires to put out” or one that starts with “I’m happy to see you all today—it’s great that we have such a strong team working on these exciting new projects”? Same reality but a very different outlook. Then sit back and watch how people’s engagement and motivation improve in response to your power lead. It’s one of the most effective tools in this book.

Parent and Teacher Actions: 1. Ask children what their role models would do. Children feel free to take initiative when they look at problems through the eyes of originals. Ask children what they would like to improve in their family or school. Then have them identify a real person or fictional character they admire for being unusually creative and inventive. What would that person do in this situation? 2. Link good behaviors to moral character. Many parents and teachers praise helpful actions, but children are more generous when they’re commended for being helpful people—it becomes part of their identity. If you see a child do something good, try saying, “You’re a good person because you ___.” Children are also more ethical when they’re asked to be moral people—they want to earn the identity. If you want a child to share a toy, instead of asking, “Will you share?” ask, “Will you be a sharer?” 3. Explain how bad behaviors have consequences for others. When children misbehave, help them see how their actions hurt other people. “How do you think this made her feel?” As they consider the negative impact on others, children begin to feel empathy and guilt, which strengthens their motivation to right the wrong—and to avoid the action in the future. 4. Emphasize values over rules. Rules set limits that teach children to adopt a fixed view of the world. Values encourage children to internalize principles for themselves. When you talk about standards, like the parents of the Holocaust rescuers, describe why certain ideals matter to you and ask children why they’re important. 5. Create novel niches for children to pursue. Just as laterborns sought out more original niches when conventional ones were closed to them, there are ways to help children carve out niches. One of my favorite techniques is the Jigsaw Classroom: bring students together for a group project, and assign each of them a unique part. For example, when writing a book report on Eleanor Roosevelt’s life, one student worked on her childhood, another on her teenage years, and a third on her role in the women’s movement. Research shows that this reduces prejudice—children learn to value each other’s distinctive strengths. It can also give them the space to consider original ideas instead of falling victim to groupthink. To further enhance the opportunity for novel thinking, ask children to consider a different frame of reference. How would Roosevelt’s childhood have been different if she grew up in China? What battles would she have chosen to fight there?

My archive project is a multiedged sword. It is something I love doing, but it raises some questions about my motives in doing it. A writer accused me of building my archives just to further my own legend, whatever that is. I hope you don't believe that. What a shallow existence that would be! I remember reading that article saying that about me. It pissed me off. It's my life, and I am a collector. I collect everything: cars, trains, manuscripts, photographs, tape recordings, records, memories and clothes, to name a few. The fact that I want to create a chronological history of my recordings and supporting work is proof positive that I am an incurable collector, confronted with an amazingly detailed array of creations that I have painstakingly rat-holed over the years.

Since then, several other conjectures have been resolved with the aid of computers (notably, in 1988, the nonexistence of a projective plane of order 10). Meanwhile, mathematicians have tidied up the Haken-Appel argument so that the computer part is much shorter, and some still hope that a traditional, elegant, and illuminating proof of the four-color theorem will someday be found. It was the desire for illumination, after all, that motivated so many to work on the problem, even to devote their lives to it, during its long history. (One mathematician had his bride color maps on their honeymoon.) Even if the four-color theorem is itself mathematically otiose, a lot of useful mathematics got created in failed attempts to prove it, and it has certainly made grist for philosophers in the last few decades. As for its having wider repercussions, I’m not so sure. When I looked at the map of the United States in the back of a huge dictionary that I once won in a spelling bee for New York journalists, I noticed with mild surprise that it was colored with precisely four colors. Sadly, though, the states of Arkansas and Louisiana, which share a border, were both blue.

We became the most successful advanced projects company in the world by hiring talented people, paying them top dollar, and motivating them into believing that they could produce a Mach 3 airplane like the Blackbird a generation or two ahead of anybody else. Our design engineers had the keen experience to conceive the whole airplane in their mind’s-eye, doing the trade-offs in their heads between aerodynamic needs and weapons requirements. We created a practical and open work environment for engineers and shop workers, forcing the guys behind the drawing boards onto the shop floor to see how their ideas were being translated into actual parts and to make any necessary changes on the spot. We made every shop worker who designed or handled a part responsible for quality control. Any worker—not just a supervisor or a manager—could send back a part that didn’t meet his or her standards. That way we reduced rework and scrap waste. We encouraged our people to work imaginatively, to improvise and try unconventional approaches to problem solving, and then got out of their way. By applying the most commonsense methods to develop new technologies, we saved tremendous amounts of time and money, while operating in an atmosphere of trust and cooperation both with our government customers and between our white-collar and blue-collar employees. In the end, Lockheed’s Skunk Works demonstrated the awesome capabilities of American inventiveness when free to operate under near ideal working conditions. That may be our most enduring legacy as well as our source of lasting pride.

99 Problems is almost a deliberate provocation to simpleminded listeners. If that sounds crazy, you have to understand: Being misunderstood is almost a badge of honor in rap. Growing up as a black kid from the projects, you can spend your whole life being misunderstood, followed around department stores, looked at funny, accused of crimes you didn't commit, accused of motivations you don't have, dehumanized -- until you realize, one day, it's not about you. It's the perceptions people had long before you even walked onto the scene. The joke's on them because they're really just fighting phantoms of their own creation. Once you realize that, things get interesting. It's like when we were kids. You'd start bopping hard and throwing the ice grill when you step into Macy's and laugh to yourself when security guards got nervous and started shadowing you. You might have a knot of cash in your pocket, but you boost something anyway, just for the sport of it. Fuck 'em. Sometimes the mask is to hide and sometimes it's to play at being something you're not so you can watch the reactions of people who believe the mask is real. Because that's when they reveal themselves. So many people can't see that every great rapper is a not just a documentarian, but a trickster -- that every great rapper has a little bit of Chuck and a little bit of Flav in them -- but that's not our problem, it's their failure: the failure, or unwillingness, to treat rap like art, instead of acting like it's a bunch of niggas reading out of their diaries. Art elevates and refines and transforms experience. And sometimes it just fucks with you for the fun of it.

The Crowd Follower: I don’t believe it? The Risk Taker: What exactly you don’t believe? The completion of the project or the process of completion. The Crowd Follower: I don’t believe this can be done this way. No one ever thought of such method, it is beyond my belief. The Risk Taker: Exactly! Your belief was in the failure, you believed its impossible, & when the work progressed, you started questioning the process? The Crowd Follower: I need to know how they made it possible? The Risk Taker: It’s very simple, unlike you. They started with a clean thought process & a missing ingredient, you know what was missing? The belief that it is impossible. They believed it’s possible, & they kept trying & improvising during the process. The absence of a dis-belief resulted in a new method. They discussed the set-backs/failures in a positive manner on making it more effective, and not to declare the project as failure & stop work. It’s the thought process which provides a positive or negative result, when you start negatively you are already working towards proving your point that it’s impossible, didn’t I tell you so? However positive thoughts generates a positive energy that produces improvisation & innovation required to succeed

This is always true of those men who have surrendered themselves to an overruling purpose. It does not so much impel them from without, nor even operate as a motive power within, but grows incorporate with all that they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else save that one principle. When such begins to be the predicament, it is not cowardice, but wisdom, to avoid these victims. They have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more readily, if you take the first step with them, and cannot take the second, and the third, and every other step of their terribly strait path. They have an idol to which they consecrate themselves high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious; and never once seem to suspect—so cunning has the Devil been with them—that this false deity, in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon the surrounding darkness. And the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.

Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul’s. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn’t always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to day, and the only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account.

Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion, and their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more, a landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not travel. […] You see it too in the small acts of everyday life, of the person who feels perfectly justified, of the person who doesn’t know he’s just committed harm, of the person who says something whose motives are clear to everyone but her, of the person who comes up with intricate rationales or just remains oblivious, of the person we’ve all been at one time or another. Taken to an extreme, it’s the mind-set of murder; enlarged in scale it’s war. Elaborate are the means to hide from yourself, the dissociations, projections, deceptions, forgetting, justifications, and other tools to detour around the obstruction of unbearable reality, the labyrinths in which we hide the minotaurs who have our faces.

When I was growing up it was still acceptable—not to me but in social terms—to say that one was not interested in science and did not see the point in bothering with it. This is no longer the case. Let me be clear. I am not promoting the idea that all young people should grow up to be scientists. I do not see that as an ideal situation, as the world needs people with a wide variety of skills. But I am advocating that all young people should be familiar with and confident around scientific subjects, whatever they choose to do. They need to be scientifically literate, and inspired to engage with developments in science and technology in order to learn more. A world where only a tiny super-elite are capable of understanding advanced science and technology and its applications would be, to my mind, a dangerous and limited one. I seriously doubt whether long-range beneficial projects such as cleaning up the oceans or curing diseases in the developing world would be given priority. Worse, we could find that technology is used against us and that we might have no power to stop it. I don’t believe in boundaries, either for what we can do in our personal lives or for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. We stand at a threshold of important discoveries in all areas of science. Without doubt, our world will change enormously in the next fifty years. We will find out what happened at the Big Bang. We will come to understand how life began on Earth. We may even discover whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. While the chances of communicating with an intelligent extra-terrestrial species may be slim, the importance of such a discovery means we must not give up trying. We will continue to explore our cosmic habitat, sending robots and humans into space. We cannot continue to look inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. Through scientific endeavour and technological innovation, we must look outwards to the wider universe, while also striving to fix the problems on Earth. And I am optimistic that we will ultimately create viable habitats for the human race on other planets. We will transcend the Earth and learn to exist in space. This is not the end of the story, but just the beginning of what I hope will be billions of years of life flourishing in the cosmos. And one final point—we never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be. So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.

The Coach’s head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes—they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach’s only distinctive feature—for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon’s beak. This snout—or beak, rather—was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man’s face, it almost appeared—due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue—that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another. 'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and people found me fearless,' the Coach remarked, enunciating each word carefully through the hollow clack-clacking sound of his beak, as its edges clapped together. 'I might have exchanged it for that of an ox and then thought better. A lizard goes best with scales, don’t you think?' Bunnu nodded as he quietly wondered how the Coach could manage to fit that phallic monstrosity of a beak into any kind of mask, unless, in fact, this disguise of which he spoke, had been specially designed for his face and divided into sections in such a way that they could be readily attached to different areas—as though one were assembling a new face—in overlapping layers, so as to veil, or perhaps even amplify certain distinguishable features. All the same, in doing so, one could only imagine this lizard mask to be enormous to the extent that it would be disproportionate with the rest of the Coach’s body. But then, there were ways to mask space, as well—to bend light, perhaps, to create the illusion that something was perceptibly larger or smaller, wider or narrower, rounder or more linear than it was in actuality. That is to say, any form of prosthesis designed for the purposes of affecting remedial space might, for example, have had the capability of creating the appearance of a gap of void in occupied space. An ornament hangs from the chin, let’s say, as an accessory meant to contour smoothly inward what might otherwise appear to be hanging jowls. This surely wouldn’t be the exact use that the Coach would have for such a device—as he had no jowls to speak of—though he could certainly see the benefit of the accessory’s ingenuity. This being said, the lizard mask might have appeared natural rather than disproportionate given the right set of circumstances. Whatever the case, there was no way of even knowing if the Coach wasn’t, in fact, already wearing a mask, at this very moment, rendering Bunnu’s initial appraisal of his character—as determined by a rudimentary physiognomic analysis of his features—a matter now subject to doubt. And thus, any conjecture that could be made with respect to the dimensions or components of a lizard mask—not to speak of the motives of its wearer—seemed not only impractical, but also irrelevant at this point in time.