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The early anatomists were dealing with a chronic shortage of bodies for dissection, and consequently were motivated to come up with ways to preserve the ones they managed to obtain. Blanchard’s textbook was the first to cover arterial embalming. He describes opening up an artery, flushing the blood out with water, and pumping in alcohol. I’ve been to frat parties like that.
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Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)
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The average gym junkie today is all about appearance, not ability. Flash, not function. These men may have big, artificially pumped up limbs, but all that the size is in the muscle tissue; their
tendons and joints are weak . Ask the average muscleman to do a deep one-leg squat-ass-to-floor-style-and his knee ligaments would probably snap in two. What strength most bodybuilders do have, they cannot use in a coordinated way; if you asked them to walk on their hands they'd fall flat on their faces.
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Paul Wade (Convict Conditioning: How to Bust Free of All Weakness Using the Lost Secrets of Supreme Survival Strength)
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The modern fitness scene is largely defined by the presence of pumped up, muscle-bound bodybuilders, expensive exercise machines, and steroids.
It's wasn't always this ways.
There was a time when men trained to become inhumanly strong using nothing but their own bodyweight. No weights. No machines. No drugs. Nothing
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Paul Wade (Convict Conditioning: How to Bust Free of All Weakness Using the Lost Secrets of Supreme Survival Strength)
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The worst possible way to build someone’s self-efficacy is to pump them up with you-can-do-it platitudes. At best, putative self-esteem–enhancing slogans and motivational talks do nothing. At worst, they actually further undermine resilience and effective coping. Why? Because self-esteem is the by-product of doing well in life—meeting challenges, solving problems, struggling and not giving up. You will feel good about yourself when you do well in the world. That is healthy self-esteem. Many people and many programs, however, try to bolster self-esteem directly by encouraging us to chant cheery phrases, to praise ourselves strongly and often, and to believe that we can do anything we set our mind to. The fatal flaw with this approach is that it is simply not true. We cannot do anything we want to in life, regardless of the number of times we tell ourselves how special and wonderful we are and regardless of how determined we are to make it
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Karen Reivich (The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life's Hurdles)
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As the other startups do at the end of their presentations, Shen offers to the batch the expertise of his team's members: "Kalvin and Randy are developers," he says, and as for himself, he knows how to stay motivated in the face of rejection. "I've gotten rejected thirty days in a row," he says, a reference to his putting himself through "Rejection Therapy," in which one must make unreasonable requests so that one is rejected by a different person, at least once, every single day- inuring one to the pain of rejection. (One example of Shen's first bid to be rejected: he asked a flight attendant if he could move up to first class for free. In another case, he saw an attractive woman on the train and decided he would ask her for her phone number, and when she would turn him down, he would have fulfilled the day's required quota of rejection. He sat near her, fell into a conversation, and when they got off the train and he asked for her number, she said, "Sure." He categorized this as "Failed Rejection.") "So if you need to get pumped up for your sales calls, talk to me. p121
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Randall E. Stross (The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups)
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The worst possible way to build someone’s self-efficacy is to pump them up with you-can-do-it platitudes. At best, putative self-esteem–enhancing slogans and motivational talks do nothing. At worst, they actually further undermine resilience and effective coping. Why? Because self-esteem is the by-product of doing well in life—meeting challenges, solving problems, struggling and not giving up. You will feel good about yourself when you do well in the world. That is healthy self-esteem. Many people and many programs, however, try to bolster self-esteem directly by encouraging us to chant cheery phrases, to praise ourselves strongly and often, and to believe that we can do anything we set our mind to. The fatal flaw with this approach is that it is simply not true.
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Karen Reivich (The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life's Hurdles)
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Humour sustains us during failure; more so after success, when we're prone to fail that much more, daring abyss, pumped up with success.
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Fakeer Ishavardas
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Trying to pump up your motivation to stick with a hard habit is like trying to force water through a bent hose. You can do it, but it requires a lot of effort and increases the tension in your life. Meanwhile, making your habits simple and easy is like removing the bend in the hose. Rather than trying to overcome the friction in your life, you reduce it.
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James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
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Next, Carnot proposes a hypothetical machine that does the same process in reverse—i.e., it uses up motive power to move heat from a cool place to a warmer one. In the modern world, we call such devices heat pumps or refrigerators.
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Paul Sen (Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe)
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Trying to pump up your motivation to stick with a hard habit is like trying to force water through a bent hose. You can do it, but it requires a lot of effort and increases the tension in your life. Meanwhile, making your habits simple and easy is like removing the bend in the hose. Rather than trying to overcome the friction in your life, you reduce it.
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James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones)
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Stress is a survival mechanism that serves an obvious evolutionary function. When we are anxious, our autonomic nervous system releases a cascade of chemicals (stress hormones), which give our body instructions on how to prepare to face danger. Our heart beats faster to pump more blood to the muscles, and our breathing becomes heavier to provide us with more oxygen. Muscles tense up to protect us from injury and to facilitate fighting or running. Sweating helps cool the body down. Our attention increases, and our reflexes become sharper, keeping us alert. Stress acts as motivation, helping us to focus on our goals and rise to meet our challenges, whether those involve studying for an exam, flying a fighter jet or scoring that match-winning goal. In short, stress serves a purpose. The problem, however, is that beyond certain threshold stress ceases to be useful.
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Dimitris Xygalatas (Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living)
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Faith is a gauge that measures how much you trust God. It is also a pump that fuels you up to trust Him more.
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Gift Gugu Mona (The Essence of Faith: Daily Inspirational Quotes)
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NASA engineers and technicians at the Cape were pushing themselves so hard in the final weeks people had to be ordered home to rest. It was a grueling time and yet the sort of interlude of adrenal exhilaration that men remember all their lives. It was an interlude of the dedication of body and soul to a cause such as men usually experience only during war. Well … this was war, even though no one had spelled it out in just that way. Without knowing it, they were caught up in the primordial spirit of single combat. Just days from now one of the lads would be up on top of the rocket for real. Everyone felt he had the life of the astronaut, whichever was chosen (only a few knew), in his hands. The MA–1 explosion here at the Cape nine months ago had been a chilling experience, even for veterans of flight test. The seven astronauts had been assembled for the event, partly to give them confidence in the new system. And their gullets had been stuck up toward the sky like everybody else’s, when the whole assembly blew to bits over their heads. In a few days one of those very lads would be lying on top of a rocket (albeit a Redstone, not an Atlas) when the candle was lit. Just about everybody here in NASA had seen the boys close up. NASA was like a family that way. Ever since the end of the Second World War the phrase “government bureaucracy” had invariably provoked sniggers. But a bureaucracy was nothing more than a machine for communal work, after all, and in those grueling and gorgeous weeks of the spring of 1961 the men and women of NASA’s Space Task Group for Project Mercury knew that bureaucracy, when coupled with a spiritual motivation, in this case true patriotism and profound concern for the life of the single-combat warrior himself—bureaucracy, poor gross hideously ridiculed twentieth-century bureaucracy, could take on the aura, even the ecstasy, of communion. The passion that now animated NASA spread out even into the surrounding community of Cocoa Beach. The grisliest down-home alligator-poaching crackers manning the gasoline pumps on Route A1A would say to the tourists, as the No-Knock flowed, “Well, that Atlas vehicle’s given us more fits than a June bug on a porch bulb, but we got real confidence in that Redstone, and I think we’re gonna make it.” Everyone who felt the spirit of NASA at that time wanted to be part of it. It took on a religious dimension that engineers, no less than pilots, would resist putting into words. But all felt it.
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Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff)
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Red eyes, clogged vessels, tanned cells and septum holes,
She came up to me with an ashtray, and a bunch of tobacco rolls,
I mean, how can I fill the gap that you've created??
How could I switch the clock back to the past, for the time I have wasted?
I have gone a sedate now; the heart has stopped pumping zeal into my head,
And for the hole in my heart, which is so dead now, which has run out of life now,
I carry the loads of moments that you've endowed.
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Nishikant (The Papery Onions)
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Exercise and get moving to pump up your endorphins and elevate your mood. Take an adult recess.
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Susan C. Young (The Art of Preparation: 8 Ways to Plan with Purpose & Intention for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #2))
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There are days when I just want to sod off the entire day and lie in bed bingeing on Netflix while eating crisps. But once I reach my Toon Cave my motivation usually kicks in, helped by the coffee and pumping up Spotify. I spend the first 30 minutes: Clearing out junk mail Reviewing real emails (not answering at this stage –just reviewing) Making my ‘to do’ list Posting in my Facebook groups Acknowledging shares and tags on social media And I do it all while standing up, having set my Tomato Timer for 25 minutes.
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Kate Toon (Confessions of a Misfit Entrepreneur: How to succeed in business despite yourself)
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The point is that this furnace will never lose any heat and the weight will go up and down in perpetuity. But—and this is an important but—this system won’t provide any usable motive power. The motive power produced by the forward engine is entirely consumed by the reverse engine. None is left over with which to do anything useful such as pump water.
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Paul Sen (Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe)
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Inspiration and Motivation Inspiration and motivation go hand in hand. These videos get the viewer pumped up and excited. They get people to think bigger or feel better about themselves. They add a boost to the viewer’s week.
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Sean Cannell (YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video Influencer)
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I woke up really early and just jumped right into it! I’m going to finish the trim in the hallway with Wyatt before I take a break. I’m feeling motivated!” Olivia pumped her fists in the air, making Callie laugh.
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Jenny Hale (The Summer House)
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Fortunately, that guy with the Ferrari has graciously agreed to put on a seminar to help you sell more crap nobody wants to people who will then try to sell more crap nobody wants to more people who will sell it . . . and so on. And at said seminar, most of the time is spent psyching you up with music and chants and creating an us-versus-them dichotomy (“Winners never give up! Losers believe it won’t work for them!”), and you come away from the seminar really motivated and pumped, but still with no idea how to sell anything, especially crap nobody wants. And instead of getting pissed off at the money-based religion you’ve bought into, you get pissed off at yourself.
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Mark Manson (Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope)