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Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.
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Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love)
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You could not arrive at excellence by the average of these people. Excellence was an individual quest, not a group effort.
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Brandon Sanderson (Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive, #3))
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And the excellent thing about success is that it always comes down to one simple thing: the decision to keep going until you’ve reached your goal.
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Jen Sincero (You Are a Badass Every Day: How to Keep Your Motivation Strong, Your Vibe High, and Your Quest for Transformation Unstoppable)
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The university classroom is neither a shopping mall whose existence depends on disseminating the latest, sexiest critical approach, nor a museum, where ideas are valued because of tradition alone and where you can look but never touch. Instead, the classroom is a place of joy fueled by the quest for excellence and the productive fear generated by the awesomeness of our ignorance and our inability to transform human reason into wisdom on its own terms, when it is unhinged from a living God.
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Rosaria Champagne Butterfield (The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor's Journey Into Christian Faith)
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The difficult pastoral art is to encourage people to grow in excellence and to live selflessly, at one and the same time to lose the self and find the self. It is paradoxical, but it is not impossible.
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Eugene H. Peterson (Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best)
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A Persian fairy tale tells of the Three Princes of Serendip, who “were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”7 Creativity in the wild operates much like that.
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Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
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The quest for self improvement and personal growth is now an integral part of my life. I’m always looking for ways to increase my capacity to grow, develop and achieve more.
And that means, I’m willing to read, observe, listen, discuss, research and do whatever it takes to become a better improved me. I hope you are too.
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Murali Murthy (The ACE Principle: 15 Success Principles To Absorb Comprehend Excel In Every Area Of Life)
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It is a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that again and again ends up explaining excellence.
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Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love)
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Did you see how she stood and faced them down? I demanded with pride. A most excellent bitch, Nighteyes agreed.
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Robin Hobb (Assassin's Quest (Farseer Trilogy, #3))
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The distinctive conditions that generated Western excellence are set to continue deteriorating so long as selection does not favor heroes, geniuses, and saints, but rather “Last Men” whose quest for personal happiness likely cannot sustain a civilization in the long run.
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Michael A Woodley of Menie (Modernity and Cultural Decline: A Biobehavioral Perspective)
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Bob Kegan called Bridgewater “a form of proof that the quest for business excellence and the search for personal realization need not be mutually exclusive—and can, in fact, be essential to each other.
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Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
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An important United Nations environmental conference went past 6:00 in the evening when the interpreters' contracted working conditions said they could leave. They left, abandoning the delegates unable to talk to each other in their native languages. The French head of the committee, who had insisted on speaking only in French throughout the week suddenly demonstrated the ability to speak excellent English with English-speaking delegates.
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Daniel Yergin (The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World)
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...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, that’s not one you’ll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its tent in the medieval campground for the very reason that we even bother to write stories about things that never happened in the first place: because it says something subtle and true about our own world, something it is difficult to say straight out, with a straight face. Something you need tools to say, you need cheat codes for the human brain--a candy princess or a sugar-coated unicorn to wash down the sour taste of how bad things can really get.
See, I think our culture has a slash running through the middle of it, too. Past/Future, Conservative/Liberal, Online/Offline. Virgin/Whore. And yes: Classical/Medieval. I think we’re torn between the Classical Narrative of Self and the Medieval Narrative of Self, between the choice of Achilles and Keep Calm and Carry On.
The Classical internal monologue goes like this: do anything, anything, only don’t be forgotten. Yes, this one sacrificed his daughter on a slab at Aulis, that one married his mother and tore out his eyes, and oh that guy ate his kids in a pie. But you remember their names, don’t you? So it’s all good in the end. Give a Greek soul a choice between a short life full of glory and a name echoing down the halls of time and a long, gentle life full of children and a quiet sort of virtue, and he’ll always go down in flames. That’s what the Iliad is all about, and the Odyssey too. When you get to Hades, you gotta have a story to tell, because the rest of eternity is just forgetting and hoping some mortal shows up on a quest and lets you drink blood from a bowl so you can remember who you were for one hour.
And every bit of cultural narrative in America says that we are all Odysseus, we are all Agamemnon, all Atreus, all Achilles. That we as a nation made that choice and chose glory and personal valor, and woe betide any inconvenient “other people” who get in our way. We tell the tales around the campfire of men who came from nothing to run dotcom empires, of a million dollars made overnight, of an actress marrying a prince from Monaco, of athletes and stars and artists and cowboys and gangsters and bootleggers and talk show hosts who hitched up their bootstraps and bent the world to their will. Whose names you all know. And we say: that can be each and every one of us and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. You didn’t have the excellence for it. You didn’t work hard enough. The story wasn’t about you, and the only good stories are the kind that have big, unignorable, undeniable heroes.
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Catherynne M. Valente
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But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that man does nothing but seek that mathematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacrifices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, dreads, I assure you. He feels that when he has found it there will be nothing for him to look for. When workmen have finished their work they do at least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to the police-station–and there is occupation for a week. But where can man go? Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about him when he has attained such objects. He loves the process of attaining, but does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very absurd. In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all. But yet mathematical certainty is after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead)
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But … that law was the product of the many. Szeth had been exiled because of the consensus of the many. He had served master after master, most of them using him to attain terrible or at least selfish goals. You could not arrive at excellence by the average of these people. Excellence was an individual quest, not a group effort.
”
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Brandon Sanderson (Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive, #3))
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Millennials as a generation just don’t seem that interested in grand projects, unless of course you count wired interconnectivity, at which they excel.
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Tyler Cowen (The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream)
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Therefore, the essence of our work as humans must be that it is done in conscious reliance on God’s power, and in conscious quest of God’s pattern of excellence, and in deliberate aim to reflect God’s glory.
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John Piper (Don't Waste Your Life)
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Often, our relationships become an unrealized quest for what is perfect, unfettered, and free of flaws. We expect our partners, spouses, and our friends to avoid missteps and to be magical mind readers. These secret expectations play a sinister part in many of the great tragedies of our lives: failed marriages, dissipated dreams, abandoned careers, outcast family, deserted children, and discarded friendships.
We readily forget what we once knew as children: our flaws are not only natural but integral to our beings. They are interwoven into our soul’s DNA and yet we continually reject the crooked, wrinkled, mushy parts of our life rather than embrace them as the very essence of our beings.
I once believed that aiming for perfection would land me in the realm of excellence. This, however, may not be the trajectory of how things happen. In fact, the pursuit of perfection may be the biggest obstacle to becoming whole.
It seems essential to value hard work and determination and yet recognize that the road to excellence is littered with mistakes and subsequent lessons. Imperfection and excellence are intertwined. There is joy in our pain, strength in weakness, courage in compassion, and power in forgiveness.
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Ann Brasco
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because in their quest for power, they needed to have those they'd have power over, and those people are us. And they have taught this lesson of power to the boys and men of Molotschna, and the boys and men of Molotschna have been excellent students in that regard.
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Miriam Toews (Women Talking)
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Her pretty name of Adina seemed to me to have somehow a mystic fitness to her personality.
Behind a cold shyness, there seemed to lurk a tremulous promise to be franker when she knew you better.
Adina is a strange child; she is fanciful without being capricious.
She was stout and fresh-coloured, she laughed and talked rather loud, and generally, in galleries and temples, caused a good many stiff British necks to turn round.
She had a mania for excursions, and at Frascati and Tivoli she inflicted her good-humoured ponderosity on diminutive donkeys with a relish which seemed to prove that a passion for scenery, like all our passions, is capable of making the best of us pitiless.
Adina may not have the shoulders of the Venus of Milo...but I hope it will take more than a bauble like this to make her stoop.
Adina espied the first violet of the year glimmering at the root of a cypress. She made haste to rise and gather it, and then wandered further, in the hope of giving it a few companions. Scrope sat and watched her as she moved slowly away, trailing her long shadow on the grass and drooping her head from side to side in her charming quest. It was not, I know, that he felt no impulse to join her; but that he was in love, for the moment, with looking at her from where he sat. Her search carried her some distance and at last she passed out of sight behind a bend in the villa wall.
I don't pretend to be sure that I was particularly struck, from this time forward, with something strange in our quiet Adina. She had always seemed to me vaguely, innocently strange; it was part of her charm that in the daily noiseless movement of her life a mystic undertone seemed to murmur "You don't half know me! Perhaps we three prosaic mortals were not quite worthy to know her: yet I believe that if a practised man of the world had whispered to me, one day, over his wine, after Miss Waddington had rustled away from the table, that there was a young lady who, sooner or later, would treat her friends to a first class surprise, I should have laid my finger on his sleeve and told him with a smile that he phrased my own thought. .."That beautiful girl," I said, "seems to me agitated and preoccupied."
"That beautiful girl is a puzzle. I don't know what's the matter with her; it's all very painful; she's a very strange creature. I never dreamed there was an obstacle to our happiness--to our union. She has never protested and promised; it's not her way, nor her nature; she is always humble, passive, gentle; but always extremely grateful for every sign of tenderness. Till within three or four days ago, she seemed to me more so than ever; her habitual gentleness took the form of a sort of shrinking, almost suffering, deprecation of my attentions, my petits soins, my lovers nonsense. It was as if they oppressed and mortified her--and she would have liked me to bear more lightly. I did not see directly that it was not the excess of my devotion, but my devotion itself--the very fact of my love and her engagement that pained her. When I did it was a blow in the face. I don't know what under heaven I've done! Women are fathomless creatures. And yet Adina is not capricious, in the common sense...
.So these are peines d'amour?" he went on, after brooding a moment. "I didn't know how fiercely I was in love!"
Scrope stood staring at her as she thrust out the crumpled note: that she meant that Adina--that Adina had left us in the night--was too large a horror for his unprepared sense...."Good-bye to everything! Think me crazy if you will. I could never explain. Only forget me and believe that I am happy, happy, happy! Adina Beati."...
Love is said to be par excellence the egotistical passion; if so Adina was far gone. "I can't promise to forget you," I said; "you and my friend here deserve to be remembered!
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Henry James (Adina)
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An aspiring writer could be forgiven for thinking that learning to write is like negotiating an obstacle course in boot camp, with a sergeant barking at you for every errant footfall. Why not think of it instead as a form of pleasurable mastery, like cooking or photography? Perfecting the craft is a lifelong calling, and mistakes are part of the game. Though the quest for improvement may be informed by lessons and honed by practice, it must first be kindled by a delight in the best work of the masters and a desire to approach their excellence.
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Steven Pinker (The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century)
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The truth was that a complex murder case attracted his attention and curiosity like nothing else on earth. He could make up reasons for it. He could say it was all about justice. About rectifying an imbalance in the scheme of things. About standing up for those who had been struck down. About a quest for truth. But there were other times when he considered it nothing but high-stakes puzzle-solving, an obsessive-compulsive drive to fit all the loose pieces together. An intellectual game, a contest of mind and will. A playing field on which he could excel.
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John Verdon (Peter Pan Must Die (Dave Gurney, #4))
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During her lifetime, people across the globe furiously debated whether [Blavatsky] was a genius, a consummate fraud, or simply a lunatic. By that time, an excellent case could have been made for any of the three. Born in Russia in 1831, Blavatsky was short and fat with bulging eyes and folds of skin falling from her multiple chins. Her face was so broad that some people suspected she was a man. She professed to be a virgin; in fact, she had two husbands and an illegitimate son, and an apostle of asceticism. She smoked up to 200 cigarettes a day and swore like a solider.
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David Grann (The Lost City of Z: A Legendary British Explorer's Deadly Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon)
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The core flaw of hyper-individualism is that it leads to a degradation and a pulverization of the human person. It is a system built upon the egoistic drives within each of us. These are the self-interested drives—the desire to excel; to make a mark in the world; to rise in wealth, power, and status; to win victories and be better than others. Hyper-individualism does not emphasize and eventually does not even see the other drives—the deeper and more elusive motivations that seek connection, fusion, service, and care. These are not the desires of the ego, but the longings of the heart and soul: the desire to live in loving interdependence with others, the yearning to live in service of some ideal, the yearning to surrender to a greater good. Hyper-individualism numbs these deepest longings. Eventually, hyper-individualism creates isolated, self-interested monads who sense that something is missing in their lives but cannot even name what it is.
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David Brooks (The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life)
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No adventure ever came to one for the asking. He who starts on a deliberate quest of adventure goes forth but to gather dead-sea fruit, unless, indeed, he be beloved of the gods and great amongst heroes, like that most excellent cavalier Don Quixote de la Mancha. By us ordinary mortals of a mediocre animus that is only too anxious to pass by wicked giants for so many honest windmills, adventures are entertained like visiting angels. They come upon our complacency unawares. As unbidden guests are apt to do, they often come at inconvenient times. And we are glad to let them go unrecognised, without any acknowledgment of so high a favour. After many years, on looking back from the middle turn of life’s way at the events of the past, which, like a friendly crowd, seem to gaze sadly after us hastening towards the Cimmerian shore, we may see here and there, in the gray throng, some figure glowing with a faint radiance, as though it had caught all the light of our already crepuscular sky. And by this glow we may recognise the faces of our true adventures, of the once unbidden guests entertained unawares in our young days.
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Joseph Conrad (The Mirror of the Sea)
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Convergent intelligence focuses on one line of thought, ignoring the more complex “divergent” form of intelligence, which involves measuring differing factors. For example, during World War II, the U.S. Army Air Forces asked scientists to devise a psychological exam that would measure a pilot’s intelligence and ability to handle difficult, unexpected situations. One question was: If you are shot down deep in enemy territory and must somehow make it back to friendly lines, what do you do? The results contradicted conventional thinking. Most psychologists expected that the air force study would show that pilots with high IQs would score highly on this test as well. Actually, the reverse was true. The pilots who scored highest were the ones with higher levels of divergent thinking, who could see through many different lines of thought. Pilots who excelled at this, for example, were able to think up a variety of unorthodox and imaginative methods to escape after they were captured behind enemy lines. The difference between convergent and divergent thinking is also reflected in studies on split-brain patients, which clearly show that each hemisphere of the brain is principally hardwired for one or the other. Dr. Ulrich Kraft of Fulda, Germany, writes, “The left hemisphere is responsible for convergent thinking and the right hemisphere for divergent thinking. The left side examines details and processes them logically and analytically but lacks a sense of overriding, abstract connections. The right side is more imaginative and intuitive and tends to work holistically, integrating pieces of an informational puzzle into a whole.” In this book, I take the position that human consciousness involves the ability to create a model of the world and then simulate the model into the future, in order to attain a goal.
”
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Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
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ROUND UP A lot more can be said, but finally, this is your last lesson in this epic 30 -day quest to become a successful conversationalist. For the past 29 days, you’ve been tutored about different techniques to make things happen, and today you’ll kick start a conversation with more confidence and organization, because you are now a professional in the communication world. There are takeaways that you should not forget as you go forth as a small talk professional. You have learnt and practiced many truths about the nature and composition of small talk, but there are certain ones that should be placed next to your heart: Small talk may be seen as a waste of time, but it is actually time well spent; take note of this important point, people might want to convince and confuse you. Small talk with personal meaning orientation will scratch business shop talk off any time. Small talk should now be seen as an effective tool that is available right next to you and can be a gateway to success. You still have the chance to go back to the previous chapters you struggled with, this way, you’ll review and assimilate the important points, no one is an island of knowledge, and so I don’t expect you to have everything registered in your brain already, constant practices will bring out the best in you. Identifying your weakness is just as important as acknowledging your strength. I want to assure you that you’ll definitely excel since you’ve been able to lay hands on this book, and this how you can help others who are still in the position that you were when you started in day one. You’ve been instructed about many secrets of success, as well as the things to exploit and avoid. It’s up to you to make this permanent, and this can only be achieved if you keep following these instructions. You have to make the decision now; whether you would make use of this manual or not, but I would advise that you want it again and again as this is the only way to dedicate your spirit, soul and body to constant improvement. You definitely would have noticed some changes in you, you’re not the same person any more. One important thing is that you shouldn’t give up; try to redouble your efforts and realize that you know everything you’re supposed to know. This shouldn’t end here, endeavour to spread the word to make sure that you impact at least three people per day, this means that you would have impacted about 90 people at the end of the next 30 days and close to about 120 people in just two months. Now, you see how you can make the world a better place? It’s up to you to decide what you want and how you want it to be. Don’t waste this golden opportunity of becoming a professional in communication, you’ll go a long way and definitely be surprised at the rate at which you’ve gone in such a small time. Take time to attend to things that need attention, don’t be too hard on yourself, and don’t go too soft on yourself, you’re one vessel that can’t be manipulated, so you have to be careful and sure about your status on communication skills. On the final note, I would like to congratulate you for reading this to the end, you’ve taken this course because you believe in the powers of small talks, so this shouldn’t be the last time I’m hearing from you. I would look forward to seeing your questions about any confusing aspect in the future. Till then, remain the professional that you are!
”
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Jack Steel (Communication: Critical Conversation: 30 Days To Master Small Talk With Anyone: Build Unbreakable Confidence, Eliminate Your Fears And Become A Social Powerhouse – PERMANENTLY)
“
And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving
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lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that man does nothing but seek that math- ematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacri ces his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to nd it, dreads, I assure you. He feels that when he has found it there will be noth- ing for him to look for. When workmen have nished their work they do at least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to the police-station—and there is oc- cupation for a week. But where can man go? Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about him when he has attained such objects. He loves the process of attaining, but does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very absurd. In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all. But yet mathematical certainty is a er all, something insu erable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo bar- ring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes ve is sometimes a very charming thing too.
And why are you so rmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive—in other words, only what is conducive to welfare—is for the advantage of man?
Notes from the Underground
Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of su ering? Perhaps su ering is just as great a bene t to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraor- dinarily, passionately, in love with su ering, and that is a fact. ere is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. I hold no brief for su ering nor for well-being either. I am standing for ... my caprice, and for its being guaran- teed to me when necessary. Su ering would be out of place in vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the ‘Palace of Crystal’ it is unthinkable; su ering means doubt, negation, and what would be the good of a ‘palace of crystal’ if there could be any doubt about it? And yet I think man will never renounce real su ering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, su ering is the sole origin of consciousness. ough I did lay it down at the beginning that consciousness is the great- est misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes it and would not give it up for any satisfaction. Consciousness, for in- stance, is in nitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing le to do or to understand. ere will be nothing le but to bottle up your ve senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least og yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal
punishment is better than nothing.
”
”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“
What’s your name, son?” “Soot, Your Excellentness,” said the goblin. “Though I’ve always rather liked ‘Horatio.
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Annie Bellet (Once Upon A Quest)
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I called you to live at your best, to pursue righteousness, to sustain a drive toward excellence.
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Eugene H. Peterson (Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best)
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Winning coaches demand a quest for excellence rather than short-term successes. But excellence requires patience, and many parents and coaches don’t have the patience to achieve excellence.
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John O'Sullivan (Changing the Game: The Parent's Guide to Raising Happy, High-Performing Athletes and Giving Youth Sports Back to Our Kids)
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But … that law was the product of the many. Szeth had been exiled because of the consensus of the many. He had served master after master, most of them using him to attain terrible or at least selfish goals. You could not arrive at excellence by the average of these people. Excellence was an individual quest, not a group effort.
”
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Brandon Sanderson (Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive, #3))
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BOOKS RECOMMENDED BY KATHLEEN MCGOWAN The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christianity, Jeffrey J. Butz Excellent account of early Christianity and its factions. Rev. Jeff’s understanding of Greek translations was a revelation for me. A rare scholarly work that is entirely readable and entertaining. The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, Margaret Starbird A pioneering book in Magdalene research, Starbird was one of the first to assert the theory of Magdalene as bride. Mary Magdalen, Myth and Metaphor, Susan Haskins The definitive Magdalene reference book. Massacre at Montsegur, Zoé Oldenbourg Classic, scholarly account of the final days of the Cathars. The Perfect Heresy, by Stephen O’Shea A very readable book on Cathar history. Chasing the Heretics, Rion Klawinski A history-filled memoir of traveling through Cathar country. Key to the Sacred Pattern, Henry Lincoln Fascinating theories on the sacred geometry of Rennes-le-Château and the Languedoc by one of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Relics of Repentance, James F. Forcucci Contains the letters of Claudia Procula, the wife of Pontius Pilate. The Church of Mary Magdalene, Jean Markale Poet and philosopher Jean Markale’s quest for the sacred feminine in Rennes-le-Château. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene and The Gospel of Philip, Jean-Yves Leloup Highly readable French scholarly analyses of important Gnostic material. Nostradamus and the Lost Templar Legacy, Rudy Cambier Professor Cambier explores the prophecies of the Expected One from another angle. Who Wrote the Gospels?, Randel McCraw Helms Fascinating theories from a noted scholar on the authorship of the Gospels. Jesus and the Lost Goddess, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy Well-researched alternative theories, also provides excellent resource list. Botticelli, Frank Zollner The ultimate coffee table book, with gorgeous reproductions of the art and great analysis of Sandro’s life and career.
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Kathleen McGowan (The Expected One (Magdalene Line Trilogy, #1))
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It’s not easy. But all that attention, that care, the quest for perfection—they’ll raise the team’s own standards. What they expect of themselves. After a while, they’ll work incredibly hard not just to make you happy, but because they know how much pride they feel when they do world-class work. The entire culture will evolve to expect excellence from each other. So your job is to care.
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Tony Fadell (Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making)
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Perfection? More like a unicorn – elusive, mythical, and probably doesn’t exist. Why chase after something that’s as real as fairy dust? Embrace the quirks, the imperfections, the beautifully messy bits that make life interesting. After all, it’s the wobbly lines and smudges on the canvas that give the masterpiece its character. So, let go of the quest for perfection and dive headfirst into the messy, chaotic, wonderfully imperfect journey called life. Trust me, it’s way more fun this way!
”
”
Life is Positive
“
Be stimulated to become significant. This might be your back-slap moment. New-born babies born with weak signs of life are given a slap on the back to “stimulate” them. It is a knock to wake them up to the reality that they must now take charge. In this world, they have to do their own breathing and their own eating otherwise they will not survive. It’s the same in your adulthood and your quest for success, you must take charge because no one will wake up every day to do things for you and make a success out of a life of excuses and laziness.
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Archibald Marwizi (Making Success Deliberate)
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Never make a promise we will not keep. Make meaningful promises, resolutions and commitments to do better and to be better—and share these with a loved one. Use self-knowledge and be very selective about the promises we make. Consider promises as a measure of our integrity and faith in ourselves. Remember that our personal integrity or self-mastery is the basis for our success with others. One simple practice can propel you forward in your long-term quest for excellence and in your struggle for true maturity (courage balanced with consideration) and for integrity. It is this: Before every test of your new habit or
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Stephen R. Covey (Principle-Centered Leadership)
“
Positive belief leaves no room for excuses; it questions why the feats and quests cannot be attained. When your beliefs are strong enough, you will not define yourself on the basis of past and present limitations or life events. Your success can only be as big as the size of your beliefs, for it is the size of your beliefs that will either limit your dream or allow it to explode.
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Archibald Marwizi (Making Success Deliberate)
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Prize fighting glorifies violence, exploits the poor, exalts force over reason, glamorizes atavism. It is these very horrors, however, so reprehensible by themselves, which highlight all that is noble in the ring. Courage, the quest for excellence, the overcoming of fear, dreams of transcending one’s social and physical handicaps, boxers’ poetic harmony of mind and body, their competitive strivings past all reasonable human limits - the ring’s dark barbarism makes such qualities glow like fireflies on a Southern night.
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Elliott J. Gorn (The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America)
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Moses died years earlier at the age of one hundred and twenty while Israel prepared to leave the desert. God buried him so the people would not try to make a pyramid for him, as the Pharaohs had. Moses’s Staff was left to Joshua. Joshua left Achsah in charge of the staff. She hid it well. It was not found until the twenty-first century. Before dying, Moses turned the leadership of the nation over to Joshua, reminding him to give Caleb an excellent portion of the new land, which Joshua did.
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Summer Lee (Quests of the Heart: Six Christian Novels)
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P R E S I D E N T Y O S H I D A’S T E N S P A R T A N R UlE S Hideo Yoshida’s quest for management excellence was no doubt driven by his visions for Japanese marketing and media, but also by an overall worry about Japan’s economic prospects after World War II. As a result, he developed a set of business and work principles, or rules, which he called the “Ten Spartan Rules”: difficult work.5. Once you begin a task, complete it. Never give up.6. Lead and set an example for your fellow workers.7. Set goals for yourself to ensure a constant sense of purpose.8. Move with confidence. It gives your work force and substance.9. At all times, challenge yourself to think creatively and find new solutions.10. When confrontation is necessary, don’t shy away from it. Confrontation is often necessary to achieve progress. These traditional work rules still guide Dentsu’s employees, and are carried around in their notebooks
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Anonymous
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deliberate practice” to describe this style of serious study, defining it formally as an “activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.”4 As hundreds of follow-up studies have since shown, deliberate practice provides the key to excellence in a diverse array of fields, among which are chess, medicine, auditing, computer programming, bridge, physics, sports, typing, juggling, dance, and music.
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Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love)
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This quest to take a problem and see what happens in different situations is called generalizing, and it is this force that drives mathematics forward. Mathematicians constantly want to find solutions and patterns which apply to as many situations as possible, i.e. are as general as possible. A maths puzzle is not complete when you merely find an answer, a maths puzzle is complete when you've then tried to generalize it to other situations as well-and minds including Leonard Euler and Lord Kelvin have excelled in mathematics by displaying just this kind of curiosity. Because mathematicians like the puzzles which work on the pure number rather than the symbolic digit and the system we happen to be writing our numbers down in, there is a sense that, when a puzzle works only in one given base, there is something rather, well, 'secind class' about it. Mathematicians do not like things which work only in base-10; it is only because we have ten fingers that we find that system interesting at all. Mathematics is the search for universal, not base-specific, truth.
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Matt Parker (Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension)
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On her end, Mommy had no model for raising us other than the experience of her own Orthodox Jewish family, which despite the seeming flaws—an unbending nature, a stridency, a focus on money, a deep distrust of all outsiders, not to mention her father’s tyranny—represented the best and worst of the immigrant mentality: hard work, no nonsense, quest for excellence, distrust of authority figures, and a deep belief in God and education. My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.
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James McBride (The Color of Water)
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That team might have been badly lacking, but they had the desire to make something of themselves, and that was all I needed. What I'm always looking for is effort, people who are driven to excellence and who will be tireless in their quest to achieve. It is not a sin not to know, as long as I can see that you're willing to learn; I will give you all the guidance you need as long as you'll do what it takes to be prepared. We didn't have strong offensive skills or a lot of talent, but building a strong defense just requires a tremendous amount of hard work, and that was something I could count on from this team.
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C. Vivian Stringer (Standing Tall: A Memoir of Tragedy and Triumph)
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This was my dream right from the time I got into medical school 6 years back. The enthusiasm for learning, the zeal for finding the answer, the quest for the best of the best materials, and the devotion to excellence was a never-ending journey. This all started in the first year of medical school when I started creating study materials and solutions along with my study for students in my medical school. This left a trail of meaning and I received countless feedbacks on the same. While I am on the other side of the road, helping my fellow medical students in any way possible was a no-brainer.
NMCLE has been a result of heartbreak for many new doctors. After I completed my MBBS and licensing examination, I felt an irresistible urge to convert all my quest for excellence into a single book. This book is a result of my 6 years of struggle in medical school.
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Dr. Aryan (NMCLE in a Nutshell)
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Epic Little Quests await!
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Ben Hay (The Excellent Adventures of Sassy and Tumble)
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He would protect your cub as his own, he pointed out quietly. That is pack.
He meant the words for comfort. I did not need them. Instead I reached to rest a hand on his ruff. Did you see how she stood and faced them down? I demanded with pride.
A most excellent bitch, Nighteyes agreed.
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Robin Hobb (Assassin's Quest (Farseer Trilogy, #3))
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Sacrifice demands purity, and isn’t worth as much without it. This is why people get so pissed off when athletes get busted for performance-enhancing drugs. If sport were merely a competitive quest for excellence, pharmaceutical augmentations would be considered an innovation, and their side effects would be considered the price of doing business. We would feel the same way about doped-up athletes that we do about doped-up musicians: it might make them better at what they do. It’s part of the world they live in, although it’s a shame when they overdose or die. But if deep down, we know that sport is the sacrifice of a hunter’s energy, then doping destroys the purity of the ritual, and that’s what leaves us feeling robbed. It also spurs people to cheer for younger elite cyclists like Taylor Phinney, who conspicuously eschew not only banned substances but milder performing-enhancing measures like “finish bottles,” the crushed-up caffeine pills and painkillers that riders gulp down in the home stretch.5 The nutritional taboos of the Paleo Diet mesh perfectly with this mythos. The living root of sport is why Jerry Hill does one-legged box jumps in the Games, coaching from the floor of the arena: no excuses. And it’s why, when we see Chris Spealler carrying a 150-pound ball across the stadium, it seems like one of the great, for-the-ages moments in sport.
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J.C. Herz (Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness)
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Brilliant. And how do you know he’s a saint?” “He’s got a halo?” “Excellent, and does that golden halo remind you of anything?” Hitzrot broke into a smile. “Yeah! Those Egyptian things we studied last term. Those . . . um . . . sun disks!” “Thank you, Hitzrot. Go back to sleep.” Langdon turned back to the class. “Halos, like much of Christian symbology, were borrowed from the ancient Egyptian religion of sun worship. Christianity is filled with examples of sun worship.” “Excuse me?” the girl in front said. “I go to church all the time, and I don’t see much sun worshiping going on!” “Really? What do you celebrate on December twenty-fifth?” “Christmas. The birth of Jesus Christ.” “And yet according to the Bible, Christ was born in March, so what are we doing celebrating in late December?” Silence. Langdon smiled. “December twenty-fifth, my friends, is the ancient pagan holiday of sol invictus—Unconquered Sun—coinciding with the winter solstice. It’s that wonderful time of year when the sun returns, and the days start getting longer.” Langdon took another bite of apple. “Conquering religions,” he continued, “often adopt existing holidays to make conversion less shocking. It’s called transmutation. It helps people acclimatize to the new faith. Worshipers keep the same holy dates, pray in the same sacred locations, use a similar symbology . . . and they simply substitute a different god.” Now the girl in front looked furious. “You’re implying Christianity is just some kind of . . . repackaged sun worship!” “Not at all. Christianity did not borrow only from sun worship. The ritual of Christian canonization is taken from the ancient ‘god-making’ rite of Euhemerus. The practice of ‘god-eating’—that is, Holy Communion—was borrowed from the Aztecs. Even the concept of Christ dying for our sins is arguably not exclusively Christian; the self-sacrifice of a young man to absolve the sins of his people appears in the earliest tradition of the Quetzalcoatl.” The girl glared. “So, is anything in Christianity original?” “Very little in any organized faith is truly original. Religions are not born from scratch. They grow from one another. Modern religion is a collage . . . an assimilated historical record of man’s quest to understand the divine.
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Dan Brown (Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon #1))
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The buy-out had been rather amicable, however, with most of Synapse's employees honored to become members of the great pioneer of computer games. And Madre had no interest in destroying the company. What Madre Games Entertainment really cared about was making good games. Incorporating Synapse was an excellent way to not only bolster Synapse's success, but to make that success part of Madre's own...and, most importantly, help them keep their jobs. Synapse management was very pleased with the deal. They basically retained their own management structure and autonomy, and had creative and financial control of their organization, even got to put their own name on their products. Only, now they were part of the Madre network with more resources at their disposal. Sure, they had to justify everything to Will at the end of the day...but as long as they made good games and didn't lose loads of money, they basically remained their own organization.
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Leopold McGinnis (Game Quest)
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Ultimately, Type I behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Type I behavior is self-directed. It is devoted to becoming better and better at something that matters. And it connects that quest for excellence to a larger purpose.
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Daniel H. Pink (Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us)
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As human beings, the quest to seeking wealth is an ongoing project and a life time endeavor; it should not be taken as a destination but rather a journey, not an event but a process. Striving for excellence and higher levels of satisfaction should be our mantra and motto, and keeping ourselves challenged to do better make life even more fulfilling and satisfying
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Lucas D. Shallua
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What is the Ultimate Goal of Life?
If we look around, different people have different goals. Some people just want to be rich, others crave for power, and still others seek contentment and fulfillment. If we look deeper, people pursue different things to ultimately get to Destination Happiness. 80% of the world is trying to climb the first peak of Achievement, while the rest are trying to go further towards the second peak of Fulfillment. The achiever may want to excel in sports, politics or business, amongst the various other fields that are mushrooming in the world today. The ones who are content and fulfilled are trying to escape the rat race. For them, happiness doesn’t come from achieving more, but rather from desiring less. The former, who climb the first peak of happiness, depend on pleasure to achieve happiness, while the latter believe that peace is the foundation of happiness.
99% of humanity falls under these two categories. Does it mean that the remaining 1% doesn’t seek happiness? Of course not! Everybody alive on earth seeks happiness. The 1% whose happiness doesn’t depend on pleasure from achievement or peace from fulfillment seek happiness that comes from finding the true purpose of life. This tiny minority goes on a Quest, on a Search, but ultimately, even they want happiness.
Everyone seeks Happiness!
Therefore, what is wrong in saying that the goal of humanity is happiness? There is nothing wrong, except that ultimate happiness is neither on the first peak of Achievement, nor on the second peak of Fulfillment. We are, unfortunately, looking for it in the wrong place.
We are like the musk deer that searches for the musk everywhere, not realizing that the musk it is looking for is inside its own navel. We also do not realize that happiness is within us. We are the very happiness that we are seeking!
While 1% of humanity goes on a Quest, a Search within, trying to find a purpose, and realize the truth, all are not fortunate enough to find this purpose and meaning. A very small fraction of the seekers attain self-realization. They realize that they are neither the body that will die, nor the mind that doesn’t exist. They ultimately realize that they are the Divine Energy or Consciousness that gives them life.
The Ultimate Happiness!
While this realization leads to liberation, it inadvertently gives ultimate joy, peace and bliss. It frees the realized ones from the prisons of misery and sorrow as they escape from the darkness of the ignorance they live in.
Probably, less than 0.00001% of humanity attains self-realization and ultimate, eternal, everlasting joy, bliss, peace and happiness with it. These fortunate souls escape from the cycle of death and rebirth. They are liberated from the body and the myth that they are the mind that is reborn based on their past actions. This realization is the ultimate goal of life which is also called Moksha, Nirvana, Enlightenment or Salvation.
Whatever you may call it, the goal of life is liberation from misery and suffering. And this is possible only if we realize the truth. We should realize we are not the body that suffers and dies. We should realize that we are not the mind that has to be reborn again and again. We are energy – the energy that gives Consciousness to the body and mind while it experiences life on earth. This is self-realization. The ultimate goal is self-realization because realization of the truth liberates us from the prisons of misery and sorrow that are experienced being the ego, mind and body, which we are not.
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Atman in Ravi
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Expertise is about qualification and experience. Excellence is about quality of mind and awareness. Where expertise fails, the quest for excellence begins. Excellence often begins with examination of our own minds. Professional excellence is a result of developing a quality mind through constant awareness. Experts tend to think of themselves as those who have finally reached their goal. Those in pursuit of excellence are always beginners. Excellence is a journey without a finish line. It begins every day with a new awakening and a new insight that enriches the mind. Come, let’s begin!
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Debashis Chatterjee (Can You Teach A Zebra Some Algebra?)
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Something died in the American people on November 22, 1963—call it idealism, innocence or the quest for moral excellence. It is the transformation of human beings which is the authentic reason and motive for the Kennedy murder.
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James Shelby Downard (King-Kill/33)
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Excellence was an individual quest, not a group effort.
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Brandon Sanderson (Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive, #3))
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One simple practice can propel you forward in your long-term quest for excellence and in your struggle for true maturity (courage balanced with consideration) and for integrity. It is this: Before every test of your new habit or desired behavior, stop and get control. Plumb and rally your resources. Set your mind and heart. Choose your mood. Proactively choose your response. Ask, “How can I best respond to this situation?” Choose to be your best self, and that choice will arrest your ambivalence and renew your determination.
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Stephen R. Covey (Principle-Centered Leadership)
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INTPs can quickly locate inconsistencies or logical shortcomings in a given theory or argument. They excel in pinpointing exceptions or imagining scenarios in which a proposed explanation might breakdown. Due to their acute sensitivity to theoretical exceptions, they can be quick (sometimes too quick) to discard entire theories, throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater.
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A.J. Drenth (The INTP: Personality, Careers, Relationships, & the Quest for Truth and Meaning)
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It would be logical for any group whose only sense of identity is the negative one of wickedness and oppression to dilute its wickedness by mixing with more virtuous groups. This is, upon reflection, exactly what celebrating diversity implies. James Carignan, a city councilor in Lewiston, Maine, encouraged the city to welcome refugees from the West African country of Togo, writing, “We are too homogeneous at present. We desperately need diversity.” He said the Togolese—of whom it was not known whether they were literate, spoke English, or were employable—“will bring us the diversity that is essential to our quest for excellence.”
Likewise in Maine, long-serving state’s attorney James Tierney wrote of racial diversity in the state: “This is not a burden. This is essential.” An overly white population is a handicap.
Gwynne Dyer, a London-based Canadian journalist, also believes whites must be leavened with non-whites in a process he calls “ethnic diversification.” He noted, however, that when Canada and Australia opened their borders to non-white immigration, they had to “do good by stealth” and not explain openly that the process would reduce whites to a minority: “Let the magic do its work, but don’t talk about it in front of the children. They’ll just get cross and spoil it all.” Mr. Dyer looked forward to the day when politicians could be more open about their intentions of thinning out whites. President Bill Clinton was open about it. In his 2000 State of the Union speech, he welcomed predictions that whites would become a minority by mid-century, saying, “this diversity can be our greatest strength.”
In 2009, before a gathering of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, he again brought up forecasts that whites will become a minority, adding that “this is a very positive thing.”
[...]
Harvard University professor Robert Putnam says immigrants should not assimilate. “What we shouldn’t do is to say that they should be more like us,” he says. “We should construct a new us.”
When Marty Markowitz became the new Brooklyn borough president in 2002, he took down the portrait of George Washington that had hung in the president’s office for many years. He said he would hang a picture of a black or a woman because Washington was an “old white man.”
[...]
In 2000, John Sharp, a former Texas comptroller and senator told the state Democratic Hispanic Caucus that whites must step aside and let Hispanics govern, “and if that means that some of us gringos are going to have to give up some life-long dreams, then we’ve got to do that.”
When Robert Dornan of California was still in Congress, he welcomed the changing demographics of his Orange County district. “I want to see America stay a nation of immigrants,” he said. “And if we lose our Northern European stock—your coloring and mine, blue eyes and fair hair—tough!”
Frank Rich, columnist for the New York Times, appears happy to become a minority. He wrote this about Sonya Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearings: “[T]his particular wise Latina, with the richness of her experiences, would far more often than not reach a better [judicial] conclusion than the individual white males she faced in that Senate hearing room. Even those viewers who watched the Sotomayor show for only a few minutes could see that her America is our future and theirs is the rapidly receding past.”
It is impossible to imagine people of any other race speaking of themselves this way.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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Are you going to live cautiously or courageously? I called you to live at your best, to pursue righteousness, to sustain a drive toward excellence. It is easier, I know, to be neurotic. It is easier to be parasitic. It is easier to relax in the embracing arms of The Average. Easier, but not better. Easier, but not more significant. Easier, but not more fulfilling. I called you to a life of purpose far beyond what you think yourself capable of living and promised you adequate strength to fulfill your destiny.
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Eugene H. Peterson (Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best)
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The basis for winning competitive warfare consists, essentially, in the achievement of one condition - competitors with a relatively high risk of poor performance.
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Victor A. Elias (The Quest for Ascendant Quality: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy and Methods for Strategically Orchestrating the Transformation Towards & Beyond Quality Excellence in Everything you do)
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Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not a choice but a habit.
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August Turak (Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks: One CEO's Quest for Meaning and Authenticity)
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