Recognition Inspirational Quotes

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It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
Harry Truman
There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.
Ronald Reagan
Create. Not for the money. Not for the fame. Not for the recognition. But for the pure joy of creating something and sharing it.
Ernest Barbaric
Life is suffering Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated Truth is the handmaiden of love Dialogue is the pathway to truth Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and small So speech must be untrammeled So that dialogue can take place So that we can all humbly learn So that truth can serve love So that suffering can be ameliorated So that we can all stumble forward to the Kingdom of God
Jordan B. Peterson
Many people do not fall in love; they fall in love with the idea of themselves being in love. They never see the other person. I don't ask for much; I only ask to be seen.
C. JoyBell C.
We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.
William Gibson (Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1))
Emotion is ‘recognition’. When treasured moments are identified in the jungle of our personal history during a visual or aural encounter, we capture magic sparks from our past, arousing flashes of insight and revealing an inner flare. These instants of recognition may kindle enthralling emotion and fulfilling inspiration. (“Those journeys of love”)
Erik Pevernagie
I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.
W.H. Auden (Markings: Spiritual Poems and Meditations)
Service is a smile.  It is an acknowledging wave, a reaching handshake, a friendly wink, and a warm hug.   It's these simple acts that matter most, because the greatest service to a human soul has always been the kindness of recognition.
Richelle E. Goodrich (Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, and Grumblings for Every Day of the Year)
The true meaning of Christ's teaching consists in the recognition of love as the supreme law of life, and therefore not admitting any exceptions.
Leo Tolstoy
A soul connection is a resonance between two people who respond to the essential beauty of each other's individual natures, behind their facades, and who connect on this deeper level. This kind of mutual recognition provides the catalyst for a potent alchemy. It is a sacred alliance whose purpose is to help both partners discover and realize their deepest potentials. While a heart connection lets us appreciate those we love just as they are, a soul connection opens up a further dimension -- seeing and loving them for who they could be, and for who we could become under their influence. This means recognizing that we both have an important part to play in helping each other become more fully who we are....A soul connection not only inspires us to expand, but also forces us to confront whatever stands in the way of that expansion.
John Welwood
Respect cannot be inherited, respect is the result of right actions.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
We have the Noble Desire to help others and benefit the world, without expecting any return or recognition. What makes us great is not our knowledge, skill, money, or power. What makes us great is not our knowledge, skill, money, or power. What makes us truly great is this noble desire, this passion that transcends all separation, goes beyond one's limitations, and wants to hug others and embrace the whole world. This is not something that we need to learn, because we already have it. It just needs to be acknowledged and awakened.
Ilchi Lee (Change: Realizing Your Greatest Potential)
The particularity of our problems can be made bearable only through the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way.
Cheryl Strayed (Brave Enough: A Collection of Inspirational Quotes)
The lesson here is clear: If you want people to understand that you value their contributions and that they are important, the recognition and praise you provide must have meaning that is specific to each individual.
Tom Rath (How Full Is Your Bucket?)
Remember, nothing happens before it’s supposed to, so trust that, as you are striving for authenticity and personal excellence, the recognition of your life’s purpose is nearing closer.
Jennifer Elisabeth (Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl)
When people support you when you have done something wrong. It doesnt mean you are right, but it means those people are promoting their hate , bad behavior or living their bad lives through you.
D.J. Kyos
Change comes, even in the face of overwhelming odds. And the recognition of the changes we have already made, of what we have won, inspires us to fight even harder. When
Bernie Sanders (Outsider in the White House)
Without a clear recognition of your brand and a focus plan you can miss your mark in the middle of great success.
Areva Martin (Make It Rain!: How to Use the Media to Revolutionize Your Business & Brand)
Few teams sometimes fails miserably because team members wish to work in the team but they want to be recognized individualy.
Amit Kalantri
Patriotism is a thing difficult to put into words. It is neither precisely an emotion nor an opinion, nor a mandate, but a state of mind -- a reflection of our own personal sense of worth, and respect for our roots. Love of country plays a part, but it's not merely love. Neither is it pride, although pride too is one of the ingredients. Patriotism is a commitment to what is best inside us all. And it's a recognition of that wondrous common essence in our greater surroundings -- our school, team, city, state, our immediate society -- often ultimately delineated by our ethnic roots and borders... but not always. Indeed, these border lines are so fluid... And we do not pay allegiance as much as we resonate with a shared spirit. We all feel an undeniable bond with the land where we were born. And yet, if we leave it for another, we grow to feel a similar bond, often of a more complex nature. Both are forms of patriotism -- the first, involuntary, by birth, the second by choice. Neither is less worthy than the other. But one is earned.
Vera Nazarian (The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration)
What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition.
Harold Bloom (The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages)
Hero' is not an official status or designation, but if the world recognize you as a hero, it is the highest honor you will ever receive.
Amit Kalantri
So, I believe that what you are looking for, really looking for, is that one person who is capable of recognizing you no matter what. You know, that one person who is going to be able to see past what everybody else sees and even past what you yourself see or want to show, then be able to look at you and really recognize you and say "That's not you! This is you right over here! You just forgot yourself, but I see you! I will help you remember yourself, because I remember you!" And that's what everyone wants. No, actually, I don't know if that's what everyone wants; but I know that's what I want! Because I can put up so many damn walls and faces just to see who really knows me, who really recognizes me, who really remembers me, even more than I recognize and remember myself! Because if I don't get that, then I don't get anything, because I don't want anything less than that.
C. JoyBell C.
you never consider but might find amazing if you did, how the details of contact, the eye movement and hand waves, the smiles of recognition, the catch-up lives that propel the early dialogue—how this becomes an energy that moves among the guests like a circulating angel, inspiring stories, rumors, flirtations and misconstrued remarks, basically the makings of human history, even
Don DeLillo (Underworld)
The purpose of your life is the purpose you bring to it choice by choice and recognition by recognition.
Bryant McGill (Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life)
For all its accolades and celebrated recognition as sound guidance, I have personally noticed that sometimes, 'follow your heart,' is really bad advice.
Steve Maraboli
In some precious and personal moments there are brief, sudden surges of recognition of an immortal insight, a doctrinal deja vu. These flashes from the mirror of memory can remind us and inspire us, especially in the midst of life's taxing telestial traffic jams, which can otherwise cause us to grow weary and faint in our minds.
Neal A. Maxwell
Let go of a need for personal recognition. Heap kudos on others and they’ll perform even better next time. Leaders are only as good as those who follow them and followers are at their best when leaders are quick to give credit for successes.
Steve Goodier
Never justify someones wrong action, without them apologizing first & admitting their wrongs. If you do. You are not making them better, but you are making them worse on the bad things they do.
D.J. Kyos
We all like to think we’re open-minded and objective when it comes to evaluating situations and people. But are we? A huge body of research in physics, biochemistry, and psychology says we’re not.
Joseph Deitch (Elevate: An Essential Guide to Life)
The movie Koyaanisqatsi shows non-commented time-lapse footage and focuses our attention on the very rhythm of our civilized modern life and nature. A marijuana high can do something for a user similar to what this time-lapse footage does. The enhancement of episodic memory and the acceleration of associative streams of memories can alter and enhance our recognition of patterns in our lives in various ways. If we are presented with quick associative chains of past experiences, we can see a pattern in a body of information that is usually not at once presented to our “inner eye” as such.
Sebastian Marincolo
The left half of your brain deals with logic, language, calculation, and reason. This is the half people perceive as their personal identity. This is the conscious, rational, everyday basis of reality. The right side of your brain, is the center of your intuition, emotion, insight, and pattern recognition skills. Your subconscious. Your left brain is a scientist,. Your right brain is an artist. People live their lives out of the left half of their brains. It's only when someone is in extreme pain, or upset or sick, that their subconscious can slip into the conscious. When someone's injured or sick or mourning or depressed, the right brain can take over a flash, just an instant, and gives them access to divine inspiration. A flash inspiration. A moment of insight. According to German philosopher Carl Jung, this lets us connect to a universal body of knowledge. The wisdom all people over all time.
Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
Maya Angelou entered our lives at Virago in 1984, when we first published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. "Entered our lives" is too tame. She danced, sang, and laughed her way straight into our hearts. She brought us a best-seller, but more than that, she brought us a reminder that the human need for dignity and recognition is a gift easily given to one another, but also frighteningly easy to withhold.
Lennie Goodings
Then, what is sacrelige [sic]? If it is nothing more than a rebellion against dogma, it is eventually as meaningless as the dogma it defies, and they are both become hounds ranting in the high grass, never see the boar in the thicket. Only a religious person can perpetrate sacrelige: and if its blasphemy reaches the heart of the question; if it investigates deeply enough to unfold, not the pattern, but the materials of the pattern, and the necessity of a pattern; if it questions so deeply that the doubt it arouses is frightening and cannot be dismissed; then it has done its true sacreligious [sic] work, in the service of its adversary: the only service that nihilism can ever perform. (unused 1949 prefatory note to The Recognitions)
William Gaddis
I dont celebrate any friendship that was build on hate, because we share the common enemy.
D.J. Kyos
A desire for recognition emerges at the same time as a sense of inferiority.
Tom Butler-Bowdon (50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books (50 Classics))
You need to roar like thunder... to show your work... even if you shine like lightning!" ⚡
Vedant Khandelwal (Single Rule For Success)
Few moments are so special that they should be recognized by special expressions.
Amit Kalantri (One Bucket of Tears)
Oh great! I never recognized Sunshine shining me, within me.
Hasil Paudyal
Never pass on an opportunity to say thank you or give recognition for a job well done
Mark W. Boyer
Whatever one does, someone is always happy...then again, someone else is not pleased
ArLeaBelle
government should be elevated into a living moral force, capable of inspiring the people with a just recognition of the fundamental principles of society;
Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince)
Empowerment comes from self-realization and recognition of our internal gifts, which we already have.
Bryant McGill (Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life)
The extent, to which you are happy, is in direct proportion to your recognition of what you have to be thankful.
J.S. Felts (Ageless Wisdom: A Treasury of Quotes to Motivate & Inspire)
People need appreciation from more persons than they need love from one person.
Amit Kalantri
The purest joys are available to all of us, and they're unrelated to status, recognition, or material desires.
Adam Braun (The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change)
We must give the very thing that we want. That's worth repeating. We must give the very thing that we want. If you want money, give money. If you want love, give love. If you want recognition, give recognition. Whatever you have not, that's what you must give and contribute.
Robert Anthony
I think there is in friendship, an instant recognition – a kind of loving. It needs just a word, in passing, the touch of a hand – yet parting is loss and the tiny ache of regret stays with us always.
Helen Exley
Compassion grows in the recognition that we are all the same. If you can’t see some part of yourself in every single person you encounter, then you’re not looking closely enough, at the person or at yourself.
Scott Stabile
You will struggle. You will fall down. You will be hated. You will face many defeats. You will be mocked. You will be alone. The world will not give you recognition. The world will not give you, your due. Against all odds, if you still persist and create your art, it will be a victory! It will be your victory. Finally, you would win.
Avijeet Das
Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors (this was introduced in chapter 7). Build trust and take care of your people. Use your legacy for inspiration. Use guiding principles for decision criteria. Use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviors. Begin with the end in mind. Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience
L. David Marquet (Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders)
A desire for recognition emerges at the same time as a sense of inferiority. A good upbringing should be able to dissolve this sense of inferiority, and as a result the child will not develop an unbalanced need to win at the expense of others.
Tom Butler-Bowdon (50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books (50 Classics))
No matter how much people recognize you, or how popular you are with them, you will be unhappy unless you acknowledge yourself. True recognition does not only come from those around you or the world. It comes when you recognize and love yourself
Ilchi Lee (Living Tao: Timeless Principles for Everyday Enlightenment)
Use wisdom when developing relationships and establishing new alliances. There are people who do not have pure motives as it pertains to developing relationships. They only want to be seen with you because they want to establish association. These people want the recognition affiliated with your success but they are not willing to go through what you did to achieve it.
Karl A. Sterner
The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel and think. Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.
Gilles Deleuze
The reason I regard training that involves the ki energy as crucial is because ki energy is the bridge that links our body and mind. . . when you focus deeply inside on the ki energy, your mind becomes calm and serene. There's a feeling of peaceful comfort and safety that's hard to describe. Inside of that, there's no fear that you might lose something, there is no desperate need to control others, nor is there the desire for recognition or acceptance. There is only one self that is infinitely bright and peaceful and seems that for it anything would be possible.
Ilchi Lee (The Call of Sedona: Journey of the Heart)
An awfulness was deep inside me, and I couldn't fight it; forced into submission and taken hostage by it, I could only just lie there, let it wash over me, and let myself be consumed by it. If I cooperate, maybe it won't stay too long; maybe it'll let me go free. But if I fight it, it might stay longer just to spite me. So I decided to let The Feeling inhabit me as long as it desired, while I lay still, cautious not to incite me, secretly hoping it would leave me soon and bother someone else, but outwardly, pretending to be its gracious host. The most discouraging element of what I felt was my inability to understand it. Usually when I was filled with an unpleasant feeling, I could make it go away, or at least tame it, by watching a light-hearted film or reading a good book or listening to a feel good album. But this feeling was different. I knew non of those distractions could rid me of it. But I knew nothing else. I couldn't even describe it. Is this depression? Maybe once you ask someone to describe depression, he can't find the words. Maybe I'm part of the official club now. I imagined myself in a room full of people where someone in the crowd, also suffering from depression, immediately noticed me-as if he detected the scent of his own kind-walked over, and looked into my eyes. He knew that I had The Feeling inside me because he, too, da The Feeling inside him. He didn't ask me to talk about it, because he understood that our type of suffering was ineffable. He only nodded at me, and I nodded back; and then, during our moment of silence, we both shared a sad smile of recognition, knowing that we only had each other in a room filled with people who would never understand us, because they didn't have The Feeling inside them.
Nick Miller (Isn't It Pretty To Think So?)
True happiness that stands the taste of time comes by recognizing and appreciating what we do possess.
Ogwo David Emenike (Happiness Recipe: Eat and Stay Happy)
An applause is not just the recognition of good performance, but its proof of being different than the crowd.
Amit Kalantri
If you have influence on other people. Dont be influenced by their hate, money, jealousy, anger and popularity .
D.J. Kyos
When people fail to recognize your work just don't give up yet. Because it's not always about the recognition, sometimes it's about the "passion" that we hold onto..!!!
Gowtham Gurunath
Finding a hobby that you love is not only a lifesaver. It is a stress reliever and a blessing. It is something you solely do for your happiness. Not for money or any recognition.
Robin S. Baker
The left half of your brain deals with logic, language, calculation, and reason. This is the half people perceive as their personal identity. This is the conscious, rational, everyday basis of reality. The right side of your brain is the center of your intuition, emotion, insight, and pattern recognition skills. Your subconscious. Your left brain is a scientist,. Your right brain is an artist. People live their lives out of the left half of their brains. It's only when someone is in extreme pain, or upset or sick, that their subconscious can slip into the conscious. When someone's injured or sick or mourning or depressed, the right brain can take over a flash, just an instant, and gives them access to divine inspiration. A flash inspiration. A moment of insight. According to German philosopher Carl Jung, this lets us connect to a universal body of knowledge. The wisdom all people over all time.
Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
recognition skills. Your subconscious. Your left brain is a scientist. Your right brain is an artist. People live their lives out of the left half of their brains. It's only when someone is in extreme pain, or upset or sick, that their subconscious can slip into the conscious. When someone's injured or sick or mourning or depressed, the right brain can take over a flash, just an instant, and gives them access to divine inspiration. A flash inspiration. A moment of insight. According to German philosopher Carl Jung, this lets us connect to a universal body of knowledge. The wisdom all people over all time.
Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability. This could be achieved when the German steel barons were forced to deal with and to receive socially Hitler's the housepainter and self-admitted former derelict, as it could be with the crude and vulgar forgeries perpetrated by the totalitarian movements in all fields of intellectual life, insofar as they gathered all the subterranean, nonrespectable elements of European history into one consistent picture. From this viewpoint it was rather gratifying to see that Bolshevism and Nazism began even to eliminate those sources of their own ideologies which had already won some recognition in academic or other official quarters. Not Marx's dialectical materialism, but the conspiracy of 300 families; not the pompous scientificality of Gobineau and Chamberlain, but the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"; not the traceable influence of the Catholic Church and the role played by anti-clericalism in Latin countries, but the backstairs literature about the Jesuits and the Freemasons became the inspiration for the rewriters of history. The object of the most varied and variable constructions was always to reveal history as a joke, to demonstrate a sphere of secret influences of which the visible, traceable, and known historical reality was only the outward façade erected explicitly to fool the people. To this aversion of the intellectual elite for official historiography, to its conviction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as well be the playground of crackpots, must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition. Not Stalin’s and Hitler's skill in the art of lying but the fact that they were able to organize the masses into a collective unit to back up their lies with impressive magnificence, exerted the fascination. Simple forgeries from the viewpoint of scholarship appeared to receive the sanction of history itself when the whole marching reality of the movements stood behind them and pretended to draw from them the necessary inspiration for action.
Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence. But in that helter-skelter which we flatter by the name of civilization, the citizen performs the perilous business of government under the worst possible conditions. A faint recognition of this truth inspires the movement for a shorter work day, for longer vacations, for light, air, order, sunlight and dignity in factories and offices. But if the intellectual quality of our life is to be improved that is only the merest beginning. So long as so many jobs are an endless and, for the worker, an aimless routine, a kind of automatism using one set of muscles in one monotonous pattern, his whole life will tend towards an automatism using one set of muscles in one monotonous pattern, his whole life will tend towards an automatism in which nothing is particularly to be distinguished from anything else unless it is announced with a thunderclap. So long as he is physically imprisoned in crowds by day and even by night his attention will flicker and relax. It will not hold fast and define clearly where he is the victim of all sorts of pother, in a home which needs to be ventilated of its welter of drudgery, shrieking children, raucous assertions, indigestible food, bad air, and suffocating ornament. Occasionally perhaps we enter a building which is composed and spacious; we go to a theatre where modern stagecraft has cut away distraction, or go to sea, or into a quiet place, and we remember how cluttered, how capricious, how superfluous and clamorous is the ordinary urban life of our time. We learn to understand why our addled minds seize so little with precision, why they are caught up and tossed about in a kind of tarantella by headlines and catch-words, why so often they cannot tell things apart or discern identity in apparent differences.
Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion)
As we examine the stars, they often feel too far out of reach, yet we aren’t able to deny the sense of being touched by them in an intimate way beyond description. Do you feel as I do? That as you set your sight intently upon a star, it gazes right back at you in acknowledgement of recognition of you as well. To set our sights upon the stars is a feeling of being at home. It is a sense of belonging to something greater than us, yet a kindred sense of ourselves.
Mishi McCoy
The biggest mistake people make when trying to be authentic is just that: they try. They see these role models of what an "authentic" person is supposed to look like or act like, and they try to emulate that. Authenticity isn't about what things appear to be. It's about allowing things to be what they are. Authenticity is about getting away from hiding, from wearing a mask, from always asking, "How should I act? What should I say? What will people think?" That includes asking, "How should an authentic person act? What would a genuine person say?" Being authentic isn't about making yourself a certain way. It's not even about finding out what you "really" enjoy as opposed to what other people enjoy, or who you "really" are as opposed to who other people are. Authenticity is allowing your likes, dislikes, personality, appearance, hobbies, and beliefs to be fluid, to change, to evolve as you learn, grow, and experience the world. At its core, authenticity is the practice of surrendering the tiresome task of keeping up appearances and taking up of the lifetime work of allowing what is already within you to come out while you remove as many internal and external obstacles as possible. And who knows what will spill out of you if you just allow it to? Who knows what is within you awaiting recognition, awaiting permission to show itself to the world? Even you don’t know—until you try. Or, rather, until you stop trying. Until you become curious.
Vironika Tugaleva
Success is not a destination, but a journey. It's not measured by the amount of wealth or recognition you accumulate, but by the obstacles you overcome and the lessons you learn. To be successful, embrace failure as an opportunity to grow, stay focused on your goals, and never give up on your dreams.
hani hakkam
The Underground Railroad was, in many ways, a seminal movement in American history, one that deserves far more recognition than it has received. It was a kind of prelude to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and it offered lessons in social activism, political resistance, and moral courage that continue to inspire Americans today.
Fergus M. Bordewich (Bound For Canaan: The Epic Story Of The Underground Railroad, America's First Ci)
If your curiosity reaches a breaking point (compelled actually means that you only have the remaining choice to act on it, having tried all the other options before), and becomes fascination with mystery or truth, you find what you need. Maybe it’s a person, maybe it’s a tragedy, maybe it’s an explosive recognition that, “My God, I’m still alive.
Darrell Calkins (Re:)
I used to believe our subconscious recognition of our true helplessness in the face of cosmic forces was what explained the insane lust for power that makes so many into murderers, rapists, thieves, and raving-mad ideologues. For their kind, such mean control allows the illusion of greatness, inspires even the foolish hope of immortality on Earth.
Dean Koontz (Quicksilver)
The majestic whale travels the seven seas piping its unique song in the hopes of finding its tribe. The other whales in the sea can hear the solitary whale. But the song to them is foreign and unfamiliar. They’re not resonating on the same frequencies and so, it seems, there can be no reciprocity. The creature carries on, searching high and low for a sign of recognition and response.
Anaik Alcasas (Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas)
Inner Awareness is often gained in incremental steps at first. The distraction of the perceived physical world dictates this. However, once one realizes this process, a new skill in “awareness recognition” emerges… and like riding a bike for the first time, one peddles faster, gaining confidence in their new skill, a skill that will take them much farther than any distraction previously experienced
Gary Hopkins
Manly P. Hall states in his book The Mystical Christ: “Mysticism has been called the path of pain, not because its way is one of suffering, but because most are brought to recognition of realities by temporal or physical misfortunes. In the human experience, suffering nearly always resolves itself into a question. This uncertainty inspires a larger effort to discover the rules governing human activity.
Terry McBride (The Hell I Can't (Motivational Life Coach, Personal Development and Growth, Personal Growth Books, Self Development Guide))
They were a part of her own emotions; a part of her longing for simplicity and peace, a part of her curious craving for the normal. And although at this time Stephen did not know it, their happiness had sprung from her moments of joy; their sorrows from the sorrow she had known and still knew; their frustrations from her own bitter emptiness; their fulfillments from her longing to be fulfilled. These people had drawn life and strength from their creator. Like infants they had sucked at her breasts of inspiration, and drawn from them blood, waxing wonderfully strong; demanding, compelling thereby recognition. For surely thus only are fine books written, they must somehow partake of the miracle of blood--the strange and terrible miracle of blood, the giver of life, the purifier, the great final expiation.
Radclyffe Hall (The Well of Loneliness)
The left half of your brain deals with logic, language, calculation, and reason. This is the half people perceive as their personal identity. This is the conscious, rational, everyday basis of reality. The right side of your brain is the center of your intuition, emotion, insight, and pattern recognition skills. Your subconscious. Your left brain is a scientist. Your right brain is an artist. People live their lives out of the left half of their brains. It's only when someone is in extreme pain, or upset or sick, that their subconscious can slip into the conscious. When someone's injured or sick or mourning or depressed, the right brain can take over a flash, just an instant, and gives them access to divine inspiration. A flash inspiration. A moment of insight. According to German philosopher Carl Jung, this lets us connect to a universal body of knowledge. The wisdom all people over all time.
Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
The novel about the boy Maurice seems to have been abandoned, nor do I know what the short stories were about, although vaguely there is an impression of one that I called Fog, about a man and a woman leaning over the Thames embankment, who had loved each other once, and now met and talked without recognition. The last sentence ran, ‘The fog suddenly lifted’. Books read give little indication of the source of inspiration. It could hardly have been H. G. Wells’ Country of the Blind, but you never know.…
Daphne du Maurier (Myself When Young)
There are occult Esoteric Metaphysics (the secret and most confidential aspect of occult teachings) and Mystical Sciences practiced by mystical adepts, Living Grand Masters. This is the cosmological verdict of the Order of Astral and Terrestrial Hierarchy universal occult recognition. Exoteric is public occult teachings. An Adept uses the Technique of the Master. Hell is called After-Life-Hallucination. There are entities, spirits, demons, demi-gods, Archangels and other names for evil beings. A Guru is a spiritual Master.
COMPTON GAGE (Devil's Inception)
It has been said that the French revolution resulted from philosophy, and it is not without reason that philosophy has been called Weltweisheit [world wisdom]; for it is not only truth in and for itself, as the pure essence of things, but also truth in its living form as exhibited in the affairs of the world. We should not, therefore, contradict the assertion that the revolution received its first impulse from philosophy. Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around him had it been perceived that man's existence centres in his head, i.e. in thought, inspired by which he builds up the world of reality. Not until now had man advanced to the recognition of the principle that thought ought to govern spiritual reality. This was accordingly a glorious mental dawn. All thinking being shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men's minds at that time; a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the divine and the secular was now first accomplished.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Lectures on the Philosophy of World History)
Let’s stop trying to be so productive all the time and make an effort to be more curious. Do you want to look back on a life of items crossed off lists drawn up in response to the demands of others? Or do you want to hang on to, and repeat, and remember, the thrill of discovering things on your own? Todd B. Kashdan, a professor of psychology at George Mason University, refers to curiosity as “joyous exploration”—defined as “the recognition and desire to seek out new knowledge and information, and the subsequent joy of learning and growing.
Rob Walker (The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday)
Sometimes I wonder how much of our suffering we allow or impose on ourselves simply in search of our worthiness to accept our own respect and appreciation. I’d written before some years ago that we often cause suffering in another so that we can then love them, as in, “You have suffered for me, so I can love you now.” The eventual shock of realizing the sacrifice made for you destroys the walls of self-righteousness and protection. The suffering sacrifice of another creates the willingness and capacity to do the same. Finally, love and respect (respect is part of the body of love) come from the recognition of something else already given up for them. Within the individual, you or me, a similar process takes place toward oneself. It is as if we know some- where that we are not worthy of our own love or respect until we have earned the right to it, and that is mainly through some kind of suffering. That suffering may be generic, as in a life lived in which tragedy after tragedy accumulate, or it may be specific, as in the constant sacrifice of other easier things for a being or vision. Or, perhaps more correctly, it is either consciously chosen or not.
Darrell Calkins (Re:)
When I went to prison and came out, it was like another stripe being added to my shoulder—another notch of respect on my belt. On the streets, you cannot get a name until you do something. You have to prove who you are by doing something outrageous, like shooting someone from a rival gang. It allowed others to see what type of person you were, and established the fact that you were ready for anything. Back in the day, what we were looking for was for someone to have our backs. So every time I did something and was recognized for what I did, it gave me more nerves to continue. After the deed was all said and done, and we were hanging on the blocks, everyone is praising you and talking about what you did. You all should have been there. You should have seen how Taco rushed up on that fella and dealt with him. Those praises were like drugs that eventually poison the mind, and gave you more inspiration to do things to have more people talking about you. People recognizing you as one who isn’t scared, one who is ready to do whatever is needed. No one ever wants to go to prison. I never wanted to go to prison. I just wanted to be recognized as one willing and ready for a battle anytime. Troit Lynes, former death row inmate of Her Majesty Prison in the Bahamas
Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
Where do you get your ideas?' people are always asking authors they admire, which I’ve always thought was another way of asking, 'How did you get my ideas, which I didn’t know I had until you put words to them?' We are known, appreciated, even cherished by our favorite writers; every word of our favorite books seems to have been written for us. Within their sentences and paragraphs, those writers are forever available, forever patient, including us in their compassionate recognition of the impossible, exhausting complexity of being human (those “many thousand” selves), never ignoring us or abandoning us or finding us dull. It’s you, they whisper, as we turn their pages, you are the one I’ve been waiting to tell everything to.
Suzanne Berne
Shackleton was looking for those with something more. He was looking for a crew that belonged on such an expedition. His actual ad ran like this: “Men wanted for Hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.” The only people who applied for the job were those who read the ad and thought it sounded great. They loved insurmountable odds. The only people who applied for the job were survivors. Shackleton hired only people who believed what he believed. Their ability to survive was guaranteed. When employees belong, they will guarantee your success. And they won’t be working hard and looking for innovative solutions for you, they will be doing it for themselves.
Simon Sinek (Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action)
But in hallowing King we have hollowed him. From Montgomery to Chicago, along those streets named Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Highway and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, poverty and segregation rates remain much higher than the local and national averages, according to recent studies. In those schools named for King, and in almost every school in America, King's life and lessons and often smooth and polished beyond recognition. Young people hear his dream of brotherhood and his wish for children to be judged by the content of their character, but not his cry for an end to the triple evils of materialism, militarism, and racism. [...] Our simplified celebration of King comes at a cost. It saps the strength of his philosophical and intellectual contributions. It undercuts his power to inspire change.
Jonathan Eig (King: A Life)
The conduct of affairs, for the Rationalist, is a matter of solving problems, and in this no man can hope to be successful whose reason has become inflexible by surrender to habit or is clouded by the fumes of tradition. In this activity the character which the Rationalist claims for himself is the character of the engineer, whose mind (it is supposed) is controlled throughout by appropriate technique and whose first step is to dismiss from his attention everything not directly related to his specific intentions. The assimilation of politics to engineering is, indeed, what may be called the myth of rationalist politics. And it is, of course, a recurring theme in the literature of Rationalism. The politics it inspires may be called the politics of the felt need; for the Rationalist, politics are always charged with the feeling of the moment. He waits upon circumstance to provide him with his problems, but rejects its aid in their solution. That anything should be allowed to stand between a society and the satisfaction of the felt needs of each moment in its history must appear to the Rationalist a piece of mysticism and nonsense. And his politics are, in fact, the rational solution of those practical conundrums which the recognition of the sovereignty of the felt need perpetually creates in the life of a society. Thus, political life is resolved into a succession of crises, each to be surmounted by the application of "reason." Each generation, indeed, each administration, should see unrolled before it the blank sheet of infinite possibility. And if by chance this tablula vasa has been defaced by the irrational scribblings of tradition-ridden ancestors, then the first task of the Rationalist must be to scrub it clean; as Voltaire remarked, the only way to have good laws is to burn all existing laws and start afresh.
Michael Oakeshott (Rationalism in Politics and other essays)
Books are admitted to the canon by a compact which confesses their greatness in consideration of abrogating their meaning; so that the reverend rector can agree with the prophet Micah as to his inspired style without being committed to any complicity in Micah's furiously Radical opinions. Why, even I, as I force myself; pen in hand, into recognition and civility, find all the force of my onslaught destroyed by a simple policy of non-resistance. In vain do I redouble the violence of the language in which I proclaim my heterodoxies. I rail at the theistic credulity of Voltaire, the amoristic superstition of Shelley, the revival of tribal soothsaying and idolatrous rites which Huxley called Science and mistook for an advance on the Pentateuch, no less than at the welter of ecclesiastical and professional humbug which saves the face of the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry. Even atheists reproach me with infidelity and anarchists with nihilism because I cannot endure their moral tirades. And yet, instead of exclaiming "Send this inconceivable Satanist to the stake," the respectable newspapers pith me by announcing "another book by this brilliant and thoughtful writer." And the ordinary citizen, knowing that an author who is well spoken of by a respectable newspaper must be all right, reads me, as he reads Micah, with undisturbed edification from his own point of view. It is narrated that in the eighteen-seventies an old lady, a very devout Methodist, moved from Colchester to a house in the neighborhood of the City Road, in London, where, mistaking the Hall of Science for a chapel, she sat at the feet of Charles Bradlaugh for many years, entranced by his eloquence, without questioning his orthodoxy or moulting a feather of her faith. I fear I small be defrauded of my just martyrdom in the same way.
George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman)
Here's where it gets interesting,” the doctor's voice says. “According to split-brain physiology, your brain is divided like a walnut into two halves.” The left half of your brain deals with logic, language, calculation, and reason, he says. This is the half people perceive as their personal identity. This is the conscious, rational, everyday basis of our reality. The right side of your brain, the doctor tells her, is the center of your intuition, emotion, insight, and pattern recognition skills. Your subconscious. “Your left brain is a scientist,” the doctor says. “Your right brain is an artist.” He says people live their lives out of the left half of their brains. It's only when someone is in extreme pain, or upset or sick, that their subconscious can slip into their conscious. When someone's injured or sick or mourning or depressed, the right brain can take over for a flash, just an instant, and give them access to divine inspiration. A flash of inspiration. A moment of insight. The
Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
Woke is not merely a state of awareness; it is a force that dismantles the walls of ignorance and complacency. It is the unwavering commitment to truth, justice, and equality, igniting a flame within the hearts of those who seek a better world. To be woke is to rise above the shadows of indifference and confront the uncomfortable realities that permeate our society. It is to acknowledge the deep-rooted biases, systemic injustices, and the pervasive discrimination that persistently plague our communities. Woke is the courage to challenge the status quo, to question the narratives that uphold oppression, and to demand accountability from those who hold power. It is the unwavering belief that every voice matters, regardless of race, gender, or social standing. Woke is the realization that progress requires action, not just words. It is the recognition that the fight for justice extends beyond hashtags and viral trends. It is a constant pursuit of education, empathy, and empathy and the willingness to stand up for what is right, even in the face of adversity. Woke is a movement that refuses to be silenced. It is the collective power of individuals coming together to amplify marginalized voices, to challenge the systems that perpetuate inequality, and to build a future where everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive. Being woke is not an endpoint; it is a lifelong journey. It is the commitment to unlearn and relearn, to listen and understand, and to continuously evolve in the pursuit of a more inclusive and equitable world. So, let us embrace our woke-ness, not as a trend or a buzzword, but as a guiding principle in our lives. Let us use our awareness to foster meaningful change, to uplift the marginalized, and to build bridges where there were once divides. For in our collective awakening lies the power to reshape the world, to create a future where justice, compassion, and equality prevail. Let us be woke, let us be bold, and let us be the catalysts of a brighter tomorrow.
D.L. Lewis
The connection between economic interest and recognition was well understood by the founder of modern political economy, Adam Smith, in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Even in late-eighteenth-century Britain, he observed that the poor had basic necessities and did not suffer from gross material deprivation. They sought wealth for a different reason: To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it. It is the vanity, not the ease or the pleasure, which interests us. But vanity is always founded upon the belief of our being the object of attention and approbation. The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world, and that mankind are disposed to go along with him in all the agreeable emotions with which the advantages of his situation so readily inspire him … The poor man, on the contrary, is ashamed of his poverty. He feels that it either places him out of sight of mankind, or, that if they take any notice of him, they have, however, scarce any fellow-feeling with the misery and distress which he suffers.
Francis Fukuyama (Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment)
When Kate Middleton stepped onto the stage, the landscape had changed beyond recognition from the genteel tradition of portraiture of centuries past. News was no longer reported day by day on the front pages of newspapers, but minute by minute via websites and social media. Anyone, anywhere in the world, could discover what Kate was wearing within an hour of her stepping out, with dozens of images capturing every outing from all imaginable angles. In this unique combination of circumstances, the scene was set for the future Duchess of Cambridge - a sporty, middle class 'normal' girl from Berkshire - to become a new kind of royal style icon. Kate's normality was essential to conjuring her own brand of majestic magic. Her marriage to William saw her living a fairytale that many young girls had dreamed of for generations before her. This was not another aristocratic Sloane Ranger, but a girl who had been born to a flight attendant and flight dispatcher and was now destined to be Queen Consort one day. A decade on and Kate's effect on fashion is impossible to understate - she has had dresses named after her, set trends, inspired superfans around the world and has been credited with boosting the British fashion industry by up to 1 billion in a single year.
Bethan Holt (The Duchess of Cambridge: A Decade of Modern Royal Style)
Once I leave — once I start the car or catch the bus to the airport, by which the voyage is initiated — my brain starts to relax at the absence of my things, and thus the familiar thoughts that they inspire. And it is not just about the books and trinkets on my desk, because a real trip usually means leaving behind innumerable other forms of familiarity: the faces and the voices that we know well, and which cause their own cataracts of memories and associations through their long histories with us. There are the sounds we always hear, and the recognition of what caused them, like the scraping of the gate at the construction site across the square from my apartment, which arrives every morning at 7 a.m. There are the quotidian streets of daily life, lined with memories of events at each address. The shops and offices we visit most often; the foods we buy, with their familiar tastes as we eat them. But as we go away from these things, our own thoughts change, or grow into the space previously occupied by the familiar. The light itself becomes different once we start to travel, as we change setting, latitude, or geography. And with these changes, with the disappearance of the familiar and its many calls upon our thoughts, we finally begin to think differently, or even just begin to think at all.
Evan Rail (Why We Fly: The Meaning of Travel in a Hyperconnected Age (Kindle Single))
There are hundreds of examples of highly functioning commons around the world today. Some have been around for centuries, others have risen in response to economic and environmental crises, and still others have been inspired by the distributive bias of digital networks. From the seed-sharing commons of India to the Potato Park of Peru, indigenous populations have been maintaining their lands and managing biodiversity through a highly articulated set of rules about sharing and preservation. From informal rationing of parking spaces in Boston to Richard Stallman’s General Public License (GPL) for software, new commons are serving to reinstate the value of land and labor, as well as the ability of people to manage them better than markets can. In the 1990s, Elinor Ostrom, the American political scientist most responsible for reviving serious thought about commoning, studied what specifically makes a commons successful. She concluded that a commons must have an evolving set of rules about access and usage and that it must have a way of punishing transgressions. It must also respect the particular character of the resource being managed and the people who have worked with that resource the longest. Managing a fixed supply of minerals is different from managing a replenishing supply of timber. Finally, size and place matter. It’s easier for a town to manage its water supply than for the planet to establish water-sharing rules.78 In short, a commons must be bound by people, place, and rules. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, it’s not an anything-goes race to the bottom. It is simply a recognition of boundaries and limits. It’s pooled, multifaceted investment in pursuit of sustainable production. It is also an affront to the limitless expansion sought by pure capital. If anything, the notion of a commons’ becoming “enclosed” by privatization is a misnomer: privatizing a commons breaks the boundaries that protected its land and labor from pure market forces. For instance, the open-source seed-sharing networks of India promote biodiversity and fertilizer-free practices among farmers who can’t afford Western pesticides.79 They have sustained themselves over many generations by developing and adhering to a complex set of rules about how seed species are preserved, as well as how to mix crops on soil to recycle its nutrients over centuries of growing. Today, they are in battle with corporations claiming patents on these heirloom seeds and indigenous plants. So it’s not the seed commons that have been enclosed by the market at all; rather, the many-generations-old boundaries have been penetrated and dissolved by disingenuously argued free-market principles.
Douglas Rushkoff (Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity)
The great German philosopher Schopenhauer, in a magnificent essay on “The Foundation of Morality,” treats of this transcendental spiritual experience. How is it, he asks, that an individual can so forget himself and his own safety that he will put himself and his life in jeopardy to save another from death or pain—as though that other’s life were his own, that other’s danger his own? Such a one is then acting, Schopenhauer answers, out of an instinctive recognition of the truth that he and that other in fact are one. He has been moved not from the lesser, secondary knowledge of himself as separate from others, but from an immediate experience of the greater, truer truth, that we are all one in the ground of our being. Schopenhauer’s name for this motivation is “compassion,” Mitleid, and he identifies it as the one and only inspiration of inherently moral action. It is founded, in his view, in a metaphysically valid insight. For a moment one is selfless, boundless, without ego.3 And I have lately had occasion to think frequently of this word of Schopenhauer as I have watched on television newscasts those heroic helicopter rescues, under fire in Vietnam, of young men wounded in enemy territory: their fellows, forgetful of their own safety, putting their young lives in peril as though the lives to be rescued were their own. There, I would say—if we are looking truly for an example in our day—is an authentic rendition of the labor of Love.
Joseph Campbell (Myths to Live By)
The other strikingly modern feature of the type of poet which Euripides now introduced into the history of literature is his apparently voluntary refusal to take any part whatever in public life. Euripides was not a soldier as Aeschylus was, nor a priestly dignitary as Sophocles was, but, on the other hand, he is the very first poet who is reported to have possessed a library, and he appears to be also the first poet to lead the life of a scholar in complete retirement from the world. If the bust of him, with its tousled hair, its tired eyes and the embittered lines round the mouth, is a true portrait, and if we are right in seeing in it a discrepancy between body and spirit, and the expression of a restless and dissatisfied life, then we may say that Euripides was the first unhappy poet, the first whose poetry brought him suffering. The notion of genius in the modern sense is not merely completely strange to the ancient world; its poets and artists have nothing of the genius about them. The rational and craftsmanlike elements in art are far more important for them than the irrational and intuitive. Plato’s doctrine of enthusiasm emphasized, indeed, that poets owed their work to divine inspiration and not to mere technical ability, but this idea by no means leads to the exaltation of the poet; it only increases the gulf between him and his work, and makes of him a mere instrument of the divine purpose. It is, however, of the essence of the modern notion of genius that there is no gulf between the artist and his work, or, if such a gulf is admitted, that the genius is far greater than any of his works and can never be adequately expressed in them. So genius connotes for us a tragic loneliness and inability to make itself fully understood. But the ancient world knows nothing of this or of the other tragic feature of the modern artist—his lack of recognition by his own contemporaries and his despairing appeals to a remote posterity. There is not a trace of all this—at least before Euripides. Euripides’ lack of success was mainly due to the fact that there was nothing in classical times that could be called an educated middle class. The old aristocracy took no pleasure in his plays, owing to their different outlook on life, and the new bourgeois public could not enjoy them either, owing to its lack of education. With his philosophical radicalism, Euripides is a unique pheno menon, even among the poets of his age, for these are in general as conservative in their outlook as were those of the classical age —in spite of a naturalism of style which was derived from the urban and commercial society they lived in, and which had reached a point at which it was really incompatible with political conservatism. As politicians and partisans these poets hold to their conservative doctrines, but as artists they are swept along in the progressive stream of their times. This inner contradiction in their work is a completely new phenomenon in the social history of art.
Arnold Hauser (The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages)
The motor activities we take for granted—getting out of a chair and walking across a room, picking up a cup and drinking coffee,and so on—require integration of all the muscles and sensory organs working smoothly together to produce coordinated movements that we don't even have to think about. No one has ever explained how the simple code of impulses can do all that. Even more troublesome are the higher processes, such as sight—in which somehow we interpret a constantly changing scene made of innumerable bits of visual data—or the speech patterns, symbol recognition, and grammar of our languages.Heading the list of riddles is the "mind-brain problem" of consciousness, with its recognition, "I am real; I think; I am something special." Then there are abstract thought, memory, personality,creativity, and dreams. The story goes that Otto Loewi had wrestled with the problem of the synapse for a long time without result, when one night he had a dream in which the entire frog-heart experiment was revealed to him. When he awoke, he knew he'd had the dream, but he'd forgotten the details. The next night he had the same dream. This time he remembered the procedure, went to his lab in the morning, did the experiment, and solved the problem. The inspiration that seemed to banish neural electricity forever can't be explained by the theory it supported! How do you convert simple digital messages into these complex phenomena? Latter-day mechanists have simply postulated brain circuitry so intricate that we will probably never figure it out, but some scientists have said there must be other factors.
Robert O. Becker (The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life)
But there were problems. After the movie came out I couldn’t go to a tournament without being surrounded by fans asking for autographs. Instead of focusing on chess positions, I was pulled into the image of myself as a celebrity. Since childhood I had treasured the sublime study of chess, the swim through ever-deepening layers of complexity. I could spend hours at a chessboard and stand up from the experience on fire with insight about chess, basketball, the ocean, psychology, love, art. The game was exhilarating and also spiritually calming. It centered me. Chess was my friend. Then, suddenly, the game became alien and disquieting. I recall one tournament in Las Vegas: I was a young International Master in a field of a thousand competitors including twenty-six strong Grandmasters from around the world. As an up-and-coming player, I had huge respect for the great sages around me. I had studied their masterpieces for hundreds of hours and was awed by the artistry of these men. Before first-round play began I was seated at my board, deep in thought about my opening preparation, when the public address system announced that the subject of Searching for Bobby Fischer was at the event. A tournament director placed a poster of the movie next to my table, and immediately a sea of fans surged around the ropes separating the top boards from the audience. As the games progressed, when I rose to clear my mind young girls gave me their phone numbers and asked me to autograph their stomachs or legs. This might sound like a dream for a seventeen-year-old boy, and I won’t deny enjoying the attention, but professionally it was a nightmare. My game began to unravel. I caught myself thinking about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought. The Grandmasters, my elders, were ignored and scowled at me. Some of them treated me like a pariah. I had won eight national championships and had more fans, public support and recognition than I could dream of, but none of this was helping my search for excellence, let alone for happiness. At a young age I came to know that there is something profoundly hollow about the nature of fame. I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed sense of contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection. This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time. I missed just being a student of the game, but there was no escaping the spotlight. I found myself dreading chess, miserable before leaving for tournaments. I played without inspiration and was invited to appear on television shows. I smiled.
Josh Waitzkin (The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance)
SELF-MANAGEMENT Trust We relate to one another with an assumption of positive intent. Until we are proven wrong, trusting co-workers is our default means of engagement. Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin. Information and decision-making All business information is open to all. Every one of us is able to handle difficult and sensitive news. We believe in collective intelligence. Nobody is as smart as everybody. Therefore all decisions will be made with the advice process. Responsibility and accountability We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles. Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation. WHOLENESS Equal worth We are all of fundamental equal worth. At the same time, our community will be richest if we let all members contribute in their distinctive way, appreciating the differences in roles, education, backgrounds, interests, skills, characters, points of view, and so on. Safe and caring workplace Any situation can be approached from fear and separation, or from love and connection. We choose love and connection. We strive to create emotionally and spiritually safe environments, where each of us can behave authentically. We honor the moods of … [love, care, recognition, gratitude, curiosity, fun, playfulness …]. We are comfortable with vocabulary like care, love, service, purpose, soul … in the workplace. Overcoming separation We aim to have a workplace where we can honor all parts of us: the cognitive, physical, emotional, and spiritual; the rational and the intuitive; the feminine and the masculine. We recognize that we are all deeply interconnected, part of a bigger whole that includes nature and all forms of life. Learning Every problem is an invitation to learn and grow. We will always be learners. We have never arrived. Failure is always a possibility if we strive boldly for our purpose. We discuss our failures openly and learn from them. Hiding or neglecting to learn from failure is unacceptable. Feedback and respectful confrontation are gifts we share to help one another grow. We focus on strengths more than weaknesses, on opportunities more than problems. Relationships and conflict It’s impossible to change other people. We can only change ourselves. We take ownership for our thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions. We don’t spread rumors. We don’t talk behind someone’s back. We resolve disagreements one-on-one and don’t drag other people into the problem. We don’t blame problems on others. When we feel like blaming, we take it as an invitation to reflect on how we might be part of the problem (and the solution). PURPOSE Collective purpose We view the organization as having a soul and purpose of its own. We try to listen in to where the organization wants to go and beware of forcing a direction onto it. Individual purpose We have a duty to ourselves and to the organization to inquire into our personal sense of calling to see if and how it resonates with the organization’s purpose. We try to imbue our roles with our souls, not our egos. Planning the future Trying to predict and control the future is futile. We make forecasts only when a specific decision requires us to do so. Everything will unfold with more grace if we stop trying to control and instead choose to simply sense and respond. Profit In the long run, there are no trade-offs between purpose and profits. If we focus on purpose, profits will follow.
Frederic Laloux (Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness)