Readers Tribe Quotes

From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility.

The tribes were Berkeley, North Beach, Big Sur, Marin County, Los Angeles, and the host, Haight-Ashbury.

Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade. We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off. And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.

It is not possible to understand the NT concept of the church if we overlook the numerous metaphors used to portray it. The church is Christ's body, a temple, a family, a royal priesthood, twelve tribes, the chosen race, Abraham's children, the new creation, the bride of Christ, and so on. Bible readers should be careful not to construct their theology of the church on a single metaphor.

As a form of body language, when the mind is receptive to the sensory experience, writing speaks the truth about all thoughts and feelings. Now I don’t want to be misunderstood here because this isn’t a special talent or skill. It’s present in all of us. The trick is to discover it, cultivate it and translate it from an internal state to an expressive sensuality. It is truly a creative impulse that unconsciously expresses emotions and can also arouse emotion in the person reading the book. The beauty and harmony of the writer never gets old and there are as many new things to learn each day, as there are varieties of adjectives, nouns and verbs in the world. It is the ultimate way to communicate with your reader.

This summer, a lot of what I was teaching was against Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, very broadly speaking, this anxiety of sounding too much like another poet, especially a firmly established poet, for fear of not sounding original. I kept telling my students, “Why wouldn’t you want to be influence by these poets! Why wouldn’t you want to sound like Keats or Robert Hayden?” Pound and Eliot were influenced by Browning, and they influenced one another. James Wright—when he came on the scene, many of us were consciously imitating him, trying to do do what he so gloriously did.... I tell them not to worry about influence or imitation as long as you’re emulating the best work, the work you love. How much imitation is too much? You’ll know it when you see it. . . .And that’s just a huge problem in general, especially in America. We’re individuals. we’re the one, not the many. We want to stand out from the crowd. Everyone is trying to differentiate themselves. The fact is we are one big organism. We belong together. We are a tribe. Not one of us can do something that doesn’t affect the other, past or present.

Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth. To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen.

There is a way to read a poem, and then there is a way to allow the poem to exit the body and be read by everyone in the room. The way you, with impeccable rhythm, hung each bit of language from the lights in that room and let me see them, even with my eyes closed. There are beats that happen in between the breaks of words that I think most poets don’t tend to understand. There is a way for a reader to manipulate silence so that it is no longer silence but something drawing a listener toward a brief and breathless anticipation that, too, is a type of beat. We know how to read our poems, if nothing else. I say we and mean black people, sure. People who have, at some point, clapped on the two and the four. But you, especially, are carrying songs to the people.

Williams, having awarded Orwell the title of exile, immediately replaces it with the description ‘vagrant’. A vagrant will, for example, not be reassured or comforted by Williams’s not-very-consoling insistence that '"totalitarian" describes a certain kind of repressive social control, but, also, any real society, any adequate community, is necessarily a totality. To belong to a community is to be a part of a whole, and, necessarily, to accept, while helping to define, its disciplines.’ In other words, Williams is inviting Orwell and all of us to step back inside the whale! Remember your roots, observe the customs of the tribe, recognise your responsibilities. The life of the vagrant or exile is unwholesome, even dangerous or deluded. The warmth of the family and the people is there for you; so is the life of the ‘movement.’ If you must criticize, do so from within and make sure that your criticisms are constructive. This rather peculiar attempt to bring Orwell back into the fold is reinforced by this extraordinary sentence: ‘The principle he chose was socialism, and Homage to Catalonia is still a moving book (quite apart from the political controversy it involves) because it is a record of the most deliberate attempt he ever made to become part of a believing community.’ I leave it to any reader of those pages to find evidence for such a proposition; it is true that Orwell was very moved by the Catalan struggle and by the friends he made in the course of it. But he wasn’t exactly deracinated before he went, and the ‘believing community’ of which, in the aftermath, he formed a part was a community of revolutionary sympathisers who had felt the shared experience of betrayal at the hands of Stalin. And of Stalin’s ‘community’, at that epoch, Williams formed an organic part. Nor, by the time he wrote Culture and Society, had he entirely separated from it.

Those reporters, writers, photographers, and editors are the best Americans I know. They cherish the ideals of their imperfect profession and of the Republic whose freedoms, equally imperfect in practice have so often made those ideals real. They want desperately to do good, honorable work. In spite of long hours and low pay, they are insistently professional. They are also brave. I can't ever forget that in Indochina 65 journalists were killed in the course of recording the truth about that war. . . .Reporters and photographers did not stop dying when Vietnam was over. They have been killed in Lebanon and Nicaragua, in Bosnia and Peru, and in a lot of other places where hard rain falls. I can't believe that these good men and women died for nothing. I know they didn't. They died because they were the people chosen by the tribe to carry the torch to the back of the cave and tell the others what is there in the darkness. They died because they were serious about the craft they practiced. They died because they believed in the fundamental social need for what they did with a pen, a notebook, a typewriter, or a camera. They didn't die to increase profits for the stockholders. They didn't die to obtain an invitation to some White House dinner for a social-climbing publisher. They died for us. As readers or journalists, we honor them when we remember that their dying was not part of a plan to make the world cheaper, baser, or dumber. They died to bring us the truth.

I will not delay the reader with lengthy quotations from the very many Taiwanese flood myths that were collected from amongst the indigenous population, primarily by Japanese scholars, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Typically they tell a story of a warning from the gods, the sound of thunder in the sky, terrifying earthquakes, the pouring down of a wall of water which engulfs mankind, and the survival of a remnant who had either fled to mountain tops or who floated to safety on some sort of improvised vessel. To provide just one example (from the Ami tribe of central Taiwan), we hear how the four gods of the sea conspired with two gods of the land, Kabitt and Aka, to destroy mankind. The gods of the sea warned Kabitt and Aka: 'In five days when the round moon appears, the sea will make a booming sound: then escape to a mountain where there are stars.' Kabitt and Aka heeded the warning immediately and fled to the mountain and 'when they reached the summit, the sea suddenly began to make the sound and rose higher and higher'. All the lowland settlements were inundated but two children, Sura and Nakao, were not drowned: 'For when the flood overtook them, they embarked in a wooden mortar, which chanced to be lying in the yard of their house, and in that frail vessel they floated safely to the Ragasan mountain.' So here, handed down since time immemorial by Taiwanese headhunters, we have the essence of the story of Noah's Ark, which is also the story of Manu and the story of Zisudra and (with astonishingly minor variations) the story of all the deluge escapees and survivors in all the world. At some point a real investigation should be mounted into why it is that furious tribes of archaeologists, ethnologists and anthropologists continue to describe the similarities amongst these myths of earth-destroying floods as coincidental, rooted in exaggeration, etc., and thus irrelevant as historical testimony. This is contrary to reason when we know that over a period of roughly 10,000 years between 17,000 and 7000 years ago more than 25 million square kilometres of the earth's surface were inundated. The flood epoch was a reality and in my opinion, since our ancestors went through it, it is not surprising that they told stories and bequeathed to us their shared memories of it. As well as continuing to unveil it through sciences like inundation mapping and palaeo-climatology, therefore, I suggest that if we want to learn what the world was really like during the meltdown we should LISTEN TO THE MYTHS.

Belief in the Divinity of Haile Selassie Chevannes (1998a) observed that the most important belief of the Rastafari is that Haile Selassie, the late Emperor of Ethiopia, is God, thus leading to the Rastafari claim that God is Black. In the same vein, Henry observed that the foundation of Rastafari theology is the mystical knowledge of the divinity of Haile Selassie (1997, 160). However, there appears to be divergent views among Rastafari regarding the divinity of Haile Selassie. Thus, Barnett (2005) claims that the original Twelve Tribes of Israel teachings hold that Jesus Christ was manifested in his second coming in the person of Haile Selassie; the Bobo Shanti hold that Haile Selassie is the father of Jesus Christ (who is Prince Emmanuel, the founder of the house, so far as the Bobo Shanti are concerned); and the Nyahbinghi Order holds that Haile Selaisse is the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost). The Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church (a mansion that occupies a marginal status in the movement) does not accept the divinity of Haile Selassie I, although they still believe that he is of the Solomonic dynasty, thereby linking him with King David and therefore to Christ (Barnett 2005).

By focusing inward on yourself as a writer instead of outward on what you think readers will want to read, you’ll end up creating the best and most original work, and that one-in-a-thousand person who happens to love it will end up finding their way to you.

An old chief of the Crow tribe from Montana was once asked to describe the difference between his tribe and the whites who lived nearby. Pausing slightly and drawing his conclusions, he remarked that the white man has ideas, the Indian has visions. The

Gilder G, 1996. The Moral Sources of Capitalism. In: Gerson M (ed.), The Essential Neo-Conservative Reader. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., pp. 151-159 Quoting page 154: The next step above potlatching was the use of real money. The invention of money enabled the pattern of giving to be extended as far as the reach of faith and trust from the mumi’s tribe to the world economy. Among the most important transitional devices was the Chinese Hui. This became the key mode of capital formation for the overseas Chinese in their phenomenal success as tradesmen and retailers everywhere they went, from San Francisco to Singapore. A more sophisticated and purposeful development of the potlatching principle, the Hui began when the organizer needed money for an investment. He would raise it from a group of kin and friends and commit himself to give a series of ten feasts for them. At each feast a similar amount of money would be convivially raised and given by lot or by secret bidding to one of the other members. The rotating distribution would continue until every member had won a collection. Similar systems, called the Ko or Tanamoshi, created saving for the Japanese; and the West African Susu device of the Yoruba, when transplanted to the West Indies, provided the capital base for Caribbean retailing. This mode of capital formation also emerged prosperously among West Indians when they migrated to American cities. All these arrangements required entrusting money or property to others and awaiting returns in the uncertain future.

Language is one way of determining relationships among American Indian nations. The Missouria are of the Siouan-language family, speaking a dialect known as the Chiwere. Other tribes speaking this dialect were the Ho Chunk (Winnebago), the Wahtohtana (Otoe, and the Baxoje (Ioway). William Clark said these tribes spoke the same language and correctly surmised they were "once one great nation.

First, let us take a quick pass of the 11 questions. Some of them might seem trite or useless at first glance. . . . But lo! Things are not always what they appear. What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)? My readers love specifics like brand and model, where you found it, etc. How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours? If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it—metaphorically speaking, getting a message out to millions or billions—what would it say and why? It could be a few words or a paragraph. (If helpful, it can be someone else’s quote: Are there any quotes you think of often or live your life by?) What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made? (Could be an investment of money, time, energy, etc.) What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love? In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life? What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? What advice should they ignore? What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to (distractions, invitations, etc.)? What new realizations and/or approaches helped? Any other tips? When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, or have lost your focus temporarily, what do you do? (If helpful: What questions do you ask yourself?)

Thus Christ appeared at the same time, and in the same act, as both a lion and a lamb. He appeared as a lamb in the hands of his cruel enemies; as a lamb in the paws, and between the devouring jaws of a roaring lion; yea, he was a lamb actually slain by this lion: and yet at the same time, as “the Lion of the tribe of Judah,” he conquers and triumphs over Satan, destroying his own devourer; as Samson did the lion that roared upon him, when he rent him as he would a kid. And in nothing has Christ appeared so much as a lion, in glorious strength destroying his enemies, as when he was brought as a lamb to the slaughter: in his greatest weakness, he was most strong; and when he suffered most from his enemies, he brought the greatest confusion on his enemies. Thus this admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies was manifest in Christ, in his offering up himself to God in his last sufferings.

2:1 This verse might seem at first glance to provide only incidental and minor information to the reader, but it does more. It demonstrates that Moses was a chosen child from the only proper tribe for his future calling, fully in compliance with the law that God had not yet revealed to Israel but would reveal within Moses' lifetime. In other words, the verse assures the reader that Moses was prequalified for the service God later gave him, even in advance of the revelation that would make that qualification necessary. The verse pointedly tells the reader that Moses was fully a Levite, that is, from Levite stock on both his father's and his mother's side. This means that he was unquestionably of the tribe that would soon be specially designated by God to provide the religious and spiritual leadership for the people of Israel (Exod 32:26–29; Num 3:12; 8:6–26; Deut 10:8–9)—the tribe that showed itself readily loyal to Yahweh (e.g., Exod 32:26), the tribe that would supply the priests to bridge the holiness gap between God and Israel (Exod 28–30) and the tribe selected to provide most of Israel's regular court judges (Deut 21:5).

Perhaps the belief that the Indians were destined to vanish originated in early colonial times as a means of justifying the massacres of Indians by the Puritans. If, as the New England colonists believed, Indians were under a cosmic curse and in a state of rapid decline, killing a few was not really a criminal act and in some instances might actually be doing the Lord’s work. It was not all Thanksgiving dinners in those early days. No one questions that the Indian population in the East did decline precipitiously as whites settled the New England area. Many Ind­ians were killed, others hid in obscure places, and still other Indians moved west before the American Revolution. Many eastern Indians were allies of Great Britain in both the Revolution and the War of 1812. Believing they should not stay behind in the United States when their English friends fled to Canada after the Revolution, they left with the departing British troops, vanishing from the United States but remaining very much a part of things north of the border. The virtual disappearance of Indians east of the Mississippi can be traced directly to Andrew Jackson’s policy of removing the tribes of that region to Oklahoma and Kansas, not to some cosmic decree commanding their inevitable extinction. Even then only the largest and most threatening tribes were removed. Smaller tribal groups simply remained in the backwaters of the eastern United States where they had always lived.

The Five Tribes not only physically displaced other Indian nations in Indian Territory; they erased the history of southern Plains people and drafted a new history of Indian Territory. For example, in 1955, the Chickasaws built their council house, a sixteen-by-twenty-five-foot log house. Here, the Chickasaws rewrote their constitution and took their first actions as a sovereign legislature, under the first Chickasaw governor, Cyrus Harris. Although the log house was quickly replaced (within the next year or so) by a brick iteration, the log house serves a particular purpose in the pantheon of Chickasaw public history. In 1911, the Wapanucka Press, an Oklahoma-based newspaper, interviewed someone (presumably a representative of the Chickasaw Nation) about the story of the log house’s origins. The paper reported, ‘Slaves of the Chickasaws toiled in the dense oak forests cutting down the finest trees and hewing them into shape…Thick undergrowth was cleared from a knoll…paths were cut from bottom meadows.’ Rough-hewn and surrounded by overgrown foliage, the log house is meant to evoke the idea that the Chickasaws encountered a ‘wilderness’ in early Indian Territory. The reader is meant to believe that, as civilizers, the Chickasaws shaped this wilderness into the modern space that it became. This idea of ‘civilization’ is based on Euro-American colonizer’ ideas of advanced societies. The Cherokee Nation alleges on its website that ‘upon earliest contact with European explorers in the 1500s, Cherokee Nation was identified as one of the most advanced among Native American tribes.’ Although the Cherokees were asserting their longevity as a people and their pride in their culture, here they use a European measurement of their merit. In the nineteenth century, the Five Tribes succeeded at crafting a perception of difference. The western Indians certainly saw them as settlers. The special agent to the Comanches reported that they were angry that tribes such as the Creeks and Choctaws ‘have extended their occupation and improvements to the country heretofore used by themselves as a hunting ground,’ expressing that they saw the Five tribes as unlawful settlers, just like whites, and themselves as the dispossessed indigenous peoples of the region.

When the common thought was “Funny thing about killing a man, you take away all he has and all he’s ever going to be.” It has now mutated to “Funny thing about an accusation, you take away all he has and all he’s ever going to be.” We will also attempt to look at how political events directly affect us or how life goes on in spite of those events. Reading this book will encourage one to not take things so seriously in this crazy world and, at the same time, take issues on a case-by-case basis. Maybe changing the view from tribalism to do-what’s-best-for-me-ism. It’s okay to disagree with your tribe; tribes are not sports teams. This book will give readers insight into how my brain works and my thought processes—where common sense and life experience come into play and not what side of the fence I live on.

Those of us troubled by language about the “extermination” of Canaanite populations may find some comfort in the fact that scholars and archaeologists doubt the early skirmishes of Israel’s history actually resulted in genocide. It was common for warring tribes in ancient Mesopotamia to refer to decisive victories as “complete annihilation” or “total destruction,” even when their enemies lived to fight another day. (The Moabites, for example, claimed in an extrabiblical text that after their victory in a battle against an Israelite army, the nation of Israel “utterly perished for always,” which obviously isn’t the case. And even in Scripture itself, stories of conflicts with Canaanite tribes persist through the book of Judges and into Israel’s monarchy, which would suggest Joshua’s armies did not in fact wipe them from the face of the earth, at least not in a literal sense.)9 Theologian Paul Copan called it “the language of conventional warfare rhetoric,” which “the knowing ancient Near Eastern reader recognized as hyperbole.”10 Pastor and author of The Skeletons in God’s Closet, Joshua Ryan Butler, dubbed it “ancient trash talk.”11

Harro could not only perform complex mathematical operations in his head, he was an avid reader who had a vivid and original way of talking about things. Asked to compare the words fly and butterfly, he launched into an etymological reverie: “The butterfly is colorful and the fly is black. The butterfly has big wings so that two flies could go underneath one wing. But the fly is much more skillful and can walk up the slippery glass and up the wall . . . The microscope explains how the fly can walk up the wall: just yesterday I saw it has teeny weeny claws on the feet and at the ends tiny little hooks.” But Harro was failing in school, because he was very disruptive in class, like Fritz. He would crawl around on all fours and announce that a lesson was “far too stupid” for him. He rarely did his homework, and if a teacher gave him a makeup assignment, he would sneer, “I wouldn’t dream of doing this.” He spent his days immersed in the books he loved, a stranger to the children around him.

Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe. It transforms a personal quest into a shared one. Previously, you were on your own. Your identity was singular. You are a reader. You are a musician. You are an athlete. When you join a book club or a band or a cycling group, your identity becomes linked to those around you. Growth and change is no longer an individual pursuit. We are readers. We are musicians. We are cyclists. The shared identity begins to reinforce your personal identity. This is why remaining part of a group after achieving a goal is crucial to maintaining your habits. It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.

Knowing the ancient story, Matthew’s readers can anticipate that the second Joseph, son of Jacob, will dream dreams, take his family to Egypt to protect them, and return to the land of Israel. Since that original Joseph is the father of Ephraim, the eponymous ancestor of the main Northern tribe, we readers can even expect this second Joseph to relocate north, to Galilee.

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)? My readers love specifics like brand and model, where you found it, etc. How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours? If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it—metaphorically speaking, getting a message out to millions or billions—what would it say and why? It could be a few words or a paragraph. (If helpful, it can be someone else’s quote: Are there any quotes you think of often or live your life by?) What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made? (Could be an investment of money, time, energy, etc.) What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love? In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life? What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? What advice should they ignore? What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to (distractions, invitations, etc.)? What new realizations and/or approaches helped? Any other tips? When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, or have lost your focus temporarily, what do you do? (If helpful: What questions do you ask yourself?)

An Offer. This is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. You have to establish a price and make an offer. Don’t sell yourself short. I price-tested my e-books at $9.99, $19.99, and $29.99. I actually sold more at $19.99 than $9.99. I think this is partly due to the fact people impute value based on price. If you charge more (within reason), they assume the product is worth more. 7. Call to Action. You must ask for the sale. This is known as a call to action. It must be clear, unequivocal, and positioned in a prominent place. I suggest the upper-right-hand corner of the page. Ask yourself, What is the single action I want visitors to this page to take as a result of reading my copy? I indicate my call to action with a big red button. If you are launching a new product, service, or cause, you need a landing page that delivers results. This is essential if you are going to convert readers to customers and, from there, to tribe members. 114 THIRTY-ONE

Don Miller Readers. His first book, Blue Like Jazz,2 was on the New York Times best-sellers list for months. He tried to make a movie based on the book but couldn’t raise the money. But his tribe wouldn’t let it die. They raised the money themselves.

She raised her glass of Chablis. “To all readers everywhere, may their tribe increase.

This book weaves together a few big ideas, which, taken together, form an irresistible argument. With tribes flourishing everywhere, there’s a vast shortage of leaders. We need you. My thesis: • For the first time ever, everyone in an organization—not just the boss—is expected to lead. • The very structure of today’s workplace means that it’s easier than ever to change things and that individuals have more leverage than ever before. • The marketplace is rewarding organizations and individuals who change things and create remarkable products and services. • It’s engaging, thrilling, profitable, and fun. • Most of all, there is a tribe of fellow employees or customers or investors or believers or hobbyists or readers just waiting for you to connect them to one another and lead them where they want to go.

Don’t underestimate your tribe. It’s always best to nurture your existing readers than it is to go out and find new ones. Yes, you always want to expand your reach, but it’s more important to love the ones you’re with and let them help you to grow, and to spend most of your time focused on them, not new people.