Recruit Training Quotes

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This is tough but CHERUB's are tougher
Robert Muchamore (The Recruit (Cherub, #1))
We recruit for attitude and train for skill,
Atul Gawande
Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.
Thomas Henry Huxley
recruit for attitude and train for skills.
Jim Mattis (Call Sign Chaos)
The reason for the shaved heads and plain olive drab uniforms when you are recruited into the military is to immediately begin training “you”, the individual, to think as “us” the team.
Michael Zboray (Teenagers War: Vietnam 1969)
Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn. The trouble with learning the backgrounds is that you end up wanting to deck somebody, possibly Bettina Cook and the horse she rode in on. (Not happening. Her dad being head of the football boosters and major donor.) Once upon a time we had our honest living that was God and country. Then the world turns and there’s no God anymore, no country, but it’s still in your blood that coal is God’s gift and you want to believe. Because otherwise it was one more scam in the fuck-train that’s railroaded over these mountains since George Washington rode in and set his crew to cutting down our trees. Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There’s no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.
Barbara Kingsolver (Demon Copperhead)
The Army's new pitch was simple. Good pay, good benefits, a manageable amount of adventure... but don't worry, we're not looking to pick fights these days. For a country that had paid so dear a price for its recent military buccaneering, the message was comforting. We still had the largest and most technologically advanced standing army in the world, the most nuclear weapons, the best and most powerful conventional weapons systems, the biggest navy. At the same time, to the average recruit the promise wasn't some imminent and dangerous combat deployment; it was 288 bucks a month (every month), training, travel, and experience. Selling the post-Vietnam military as a career choice meant selling the idea of peacetime service. It meant selling the idea of peacetime. Barf.
Rachel Maddow (Drift)
My name is Amy Gumm—and I'm the other girl from Kansas. I've been recruited by the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked. I've been trained to fight. And I have a mission: Remove the Tin Woodman's heart. Steal the Scarecrow's brain. Take the Lion's courage. And—Dorothy must die.
Danielle Paige (Dorothy Must Die (Dorothy Must Die, #1))
In my younger days dodging the draft, I somehow wound up in the Marine Corps. There's a myth that Marine training turns baby-faced recruits into bloodthirsty killers. Trust me, the Marine Corps is not that efficient. What it does teach, however, is a lot more useful. The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for an artist. Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swab jockeys, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because these candy-asses don't know how to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell." Page 68
Steven Pressfield (The War of Art)
They recruited the most supple and athletic of the cops to train as mounted policemen, and a small kid could be mesmerized just watching one who’d been lazing majestically down the street stop to write a parking ticket and then lean way over in the saddle so as to place the ticket under the car’s windshield wiper, a physical gesture, if ever there was one, of magnificent condescension to the machine age.
Philip Roth (The Plot Against America)
Four specific missions were assigned: to spy on the nguy and American forces in the city; to recruit civilians to join the uprising and provide support; to train them with weapons and tactics; and to build a committed core who, when the battle began, would carry the wounded to medical stations in the rear and help feed the army. Weapons, ammo, food, and medical provisions all would be smuggled, stockpiled, and made ready.
Mark Bowden (Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam)
I may be drunk by morning but that will not do any good. I shall take the train to Paris anyway. The train will be the same, the people, struggling for comfort and, even, dignity on the straight-backed, wooden, third-class seats will be the same, and I will be the same. We will ride through the same changing countryside northward, leaving behind the olive trees and the sea and all of the glory of the stormy southern sky, into the mist and rain of Paris. Someone will offer to share a sandwich with me, someone will offer me a sip of wine, someone will ask me for a match. People will be roaming the corridors outside, looking out of windows, looking in at us. At each stop, recruits in their baggy brown uniforms and colored hats will open the compartment door to ask Complet? We will all nod Yes, like conspirators, smiling faintly at each other as they continue through the train. Two or three of them will end up before our compartment door, shouting at each other in their heavy, ribald voices, smoking their dreadful army cigarettes. There will be a girl sitting opposite me who will wonder why I have not been flirting with her, who will be set on edge by the presence of the recruits. It will all be the same, only I will be stiller.
James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
Each man in his own way had gone through what Richard Winters experienced: a realization that doing his best was a better way of getting through the Army than hanging around with the sad excuses for soldiers they met in the recruiting depots or basic training. They wanted to make their Army time positive, a learning and maturing and challenging experience.
Stephen E. Ambrose (Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest)
Al Qaeda” didn’t translate to “the base,” as most Western media outlets had so ignorantly reported, but rather, “the database.” It referred to the original computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with the help of the CIA to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan.
Brad Thor (The First Commandment (Scot Harvath, #6))
The most important skill for a new recruit from university will be the ability to learn.
Robin Hoyle (Complete Training: From Recruitment to Retirement)
The cost of a range of appropriate courses and training activities is much less than the cost of incompetence.
Robin Hoyle (Complete Training: From Recruitment to Retirement)
There is a distressing tendency of the L&D profession to latch on to half read and barely understood concepts.
Robin Hoyle (Complete Training: From Recruitment to Retirement)
Apparently, some people in the department made the brilliant connection that if you kill all your recruits before you have time to train them, you’ll soon run out of recruits.” I
Brandon Sanderson (Starsight (Skyward, #2))
I run Venture for America, a nonprofit organization that recruits dozens of our country’s top graduates each year and places them in startups and growth companies in Detroit, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Providence, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and other cities around the country. Our goal is to help create 100,000 new US jobs by 2025. We supply talent to early-stage companies so that they can expand and hire more people. And we train a critical mass of our best and brightest graduates to build enterprises and create new opportunities for themselves and others.
Andrew Yang (Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America)
If you don’t use your new knowledge and skills within a relatively short space of time, then it may have been better never to have had the tantalising prospect of change for the better placed in front of you.
Robin Hoyle (Complete Training: From Recruitment to Retirement)
Consider the parable of the Chinese farmer. One day, the farmer’s horse ran away. That evening, the neighbors stopped by to offer their sympathies. “So sorry to hear your horse ran away,” they said. “That’s too bad.” “Maybe,” the farmer said. “Maybe not.” The next day the horse returned, bringing seven wild horses with it. “Oh, isn’t that lucky,” said the neighbors. “Now you have eight horses. What a great turn of events.” “Maybe,” said the farmer. “Maybe not.” The next day the farmer’s son was training one of these horses when he was thrown and broke his leg. “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” said the neighbors. “Maybe,” said the farmer. “Maybe not.” The following day, conscription officers came to the village to recruit young men for the army, but they rejected the farmer’s son because he had a broken leg. And all the neighbors said, “Isn’t that great!” “Maybe,” said the farmer. “Maybe not.” We lead telephoto lives in a wide-angle world. We never see the big picture. The only sane response is, like the Chinese farmer, to adopt a philosophy of maybe-ism.
Eric Weiner (The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers)
We decided to compare our sprint-training program with a strenuous regimen of moderate-intensity endurance training based on the typical physical-activity guidelines. We recruited twenty people and divided them into two groups, with five men and five women in each group.
Martin Gibala (The One-Minute Workout: Science Shows a Way to Get Fit That's Smarter, Faster, Shorter)
I was sorting stamps in the slotted drawer at the post office when Garnelle Fielding came in to send a little package to Wilbur. She said she’d gone and signed up for the WAFS, and her mother and daddy drove her down to Sweetwater to take a test at Avenger Field, where the government was training hundreds and hundreds of women to be pilots. Trouble was, she didn’t pass her physical because they said she was too short and too thin for the service. Her mother rushed her to a doctor in Toullange the next day and tried to get him to write her a letter so she could join the navy instead, but he wouldn’t do it. He told her the service was no place for a girl, and she’d be better off to wait home for someone brave to come marry her. Garnelle hung around until four o’clock when my hours were up, then walked with me to my house. “You should have seen my mother,” she said. “Better yet, you should have heard her. She fussed and fumed the whole way home about how women in her family had fought in every war this country has ever had, right up from loading muskets in the Revolution to she herself driving a staff car in North Carolina during the Great War. I tell you, she would have made a better recruiter than any of those movie star speeches I’ve ever heard. My mother doesn’t sell kisses in a low-cut basque. She preaches pure patriotism like an evangelist in a tent revival. If she’d had a tambourine, we could have stopped the car and held a meeting.” We laughed. “I’m still mad, though,” she said.
Nancy E. Turner (The Water and the Blood)
Adopting and extending the existing system of mamluk recruitment, he purchased thousands of young male slaves, drawn from Kipchak Turkish and, later, Caucasian stock. These boys were trained and indoctrinated as mamluk troops, and then at the age of eighteen freed to serve their masters within the Mamluk sultanate. This approach created a constantly self-rejuvenating military force–what one modern historian has called a ‘one-generation nobility’–because children born of mamluks were not regarded as being part of the martial elite, although they were permitted to enrol in the army’s second-tier halqa reserves.
Thomas Asbridge (The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land)
Ah, they are here for training… but not for my kind of training,” said the knight-captain. “What do you mean?” “We want to be rogues, sir,” the recruits said. “Oh! Then you want to be at Shadow’s dojo.” Devlin nodded. “I didn’t know how to get there, so…” “I see. I got it from here.” “Okay, back to class, then.
Steve the Noob (Diary of Steve the Noob 25 (An Unofficial Minecraft Book) (Diary of Steve the Noob Collection))
Training takes place in a tiny room, where for two weeks I sit shoulder to shoulder with twenty other new recruits, listening to pep talks that start to sound like the brainwashing you get when you join a cult. It’s amazing, and hilarious. It’s everything I ever imagined might take place inside a tech company, only even better.
Dan Lyons (Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble)
It was Buddhist and Shinto priests who were recruiting and training the suicide bombers, or Kamikaze ("Divine Wind"), fanatics, assuring them the emperor was a "Golden Wheel-Turning Sacred King," one indeed of the four manifestations of the ideal Buddhist monarch and a Tathagata, or "fully enlightened being," of the material world.
Christopher Hitchens
The Nazi invasion didn’t happen by the end of 1939 after all. The German seizure of the Low Countries—Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg—didn’t occur until May of 1940, and Jacob was grateful for the extra months of training and conditioning. Maurice, Avi, and Jacob used the time to recruit and assemble the rest of their team of young Jewish insurgents.
Joel C. Rosenberg (The Auschwitz Escape)
Also like child support agents, child protection officials are recruited largely from the ranks of divorced women and from graduates of social work and “women’s studies” programs, where they are trained in feminist ideology that is hostile to parents and especially fathers. It appears that homosexuals are also entering the social work profession in large numbers.
Stephen Baskerville
In my younger days dodging the draft, I somehow wound up in the Marine Corps. There's a myth that Marine training turns baby-faced recruits into bloodthirsty killers. Trust me, the Marine Corps is not that efficient. What it does teach, however, is a lot more useful. The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for an artist. Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction from having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swab jockeys or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because these candy-asses don't know how to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.
Steven Pressfield (The War of Art)
Back in 1943, Prince Mikasa Takahito, the youngest brother of Emperor Hirohito, spent a year as a staff officer at the Nanking headquarters of the Japanese Imperial Army’s expeditionary force in China, where he heard a young officer speak of using Chinese prisoners for live bayonet practice in order to train new recruits. “It helps them acquire guts,” the officer told the prince.
Iris Chang (The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II)
agents shall be recruited from orphans. They shall be trained in the following techniques: interpretation of signs and marks, palmistry and similar techniques of interpreting body marks, magic and illusions, the duties of the ashramas, the stages of life, and the science of omens and augury. Alternatively, they can be trained in physiology and sociology, the art of men and society.
Tarquin Hall (The Case of the Missing Servant (Vish Puri, #1))
for. As Napoleon continued, the full extent of his intentions gradually became clearer: having conquered Egypt, he would then mount an expedition to India, where he would attack the British. This force would require 60,000 men, 30,000 of whom would be recruited and trained from amongst the Egyptians; it would take 10,000 horses and 50,000 camels, sufficient to carry supplies for sixty days and water for six. Other provisions would be sequestered on the march, which would take four months to reach the Indus. In India he would link up with the forces of Tippoo Sahib, the ruler of Mysore who had risen against the British and sworn allegiance to French revolutionary ideals. Napoleon concluded by announcing that the entire expedition would cost between eight and nine million francs.
Paul Strathern (Napoleon in Egypt)
the platoon moves out to the rifle range barracks for basic rifle training . The gospel according to Parris Island is that shooting accurately is a matter of discipline: Even the clumsiest recruit can do it well if he follows the prescribed steps, from sighting and aiming, to proper positioning, to trigger control and sight adjustment. “Any person in the world can be a marksman if he applies himself,
Thomas E. Ricks (Making the Corps)
PEACETIME CEO/WARTIME CEO Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win. Peacetime CEO focuses on the big picture and empowers her people to make detailed decisions. Wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive. Peacetime CEO builds scalable, high-volume recruiting machines. Wartime CEO does that, but also builds HR organizations that can execute layoffs. Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture. Peacetime CEO always has a contingency plan. Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six. Peacetime CEO knows what to do with a big advantage. Wartime CEO is paranoid. Peacetime CEO strives not to use profanity. Wartime CEO sometimes uses profanity purposefully. Peacetime CEO thinks of the competition as other ships in a big ocean that may never engage. Wartime CEO thinks the competition is sneaking into her house and trying to kidnap her children. Peacetime CEO aims to expand the market. Wartime CEO aims to win the market. Peacetime CEO strives to tolerate deviations from the plan when coupled with effort and creativity. Wartime CEO is completely intolerant. Peacetime CEO does not raise her voice. Wartime CEO rarely speaks in a normal tone. Peacetime CEO works to minimize conflict. Wartime CEO heightens the contradictions. Peacetime CEO strives for broad-based buy-in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements. Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy, audacious goals. Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand. Peacetime CEO trains her employees to ensure satisfaction and career development. Wartime CEO trains her employees so they don’t get their asses shot off in the battle. Peacetime CEO has rules like “We’re going to exit all businesses where we’re not number one or two.” Wartime CEO often has no businesses that are number one or two and therefore does not have the luxury of following that rule.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
your team. From among those recruited, select exceptional people and ensure their faster growth according to their mental potential, as defined by Maslow(4) (see Chapter 10) (a few exceptional people make a great difference in an organization) (see item 10.2). Participate in the various forms of your team's training, even assuming a teaching role in some cases. Establish and continuously improve a special training program for exceptional people.
Vicente Falconi (TRUE POWER)
Unlike in World War II, when soldiers had trained together in platoons and went to war alongside men with whom they’d trained, these new recruits came alone and were dropped in wherever they were needed, without the support of a platoon, without men they knew they could depend on. Army Basic Training had been shortened to get the men in combat sooner; Frankie wondered who in the hell decided that less training for war was a good idea, but no one had asked her opinion.
Kristin Hannah (The Women)
Because your managers don’t simply manage people; your managers manage the System by which your business, All About Pies, achieves its objectives. “The System produces the results; your people manage the system. “And there is a Hierarchy of Systems in your business. “This Hierarchy is composed of four distinct components: “The first is, How We Do It Here. “The second is, How We Recruit, Hire, and Train People to Do It Here. “The Third is, How We Manage It Here. “The Fourth is, How We Change It Here.
Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
On 20 March 1982, on the occasion of the Iranian new year, Khomeini announced that ‘as a special favour’ schoolboys between the ages of 12 and 18 years would be allowed to join the Basij and to fight for their country. Consequently scores of youths volunteered for action and were hastily recruited and provided with ‘Passports to Paradise’, as the admission forms were called. They were then given rudimentary military training, of a week or so, by the Pasdaran, and sent to the front where many of them ‘martyred’ themselves.
Efraim Karsh (The Iran–Iraq War 1980–1988 (Essential Histories series Book 20))
Or, as the united Buddhist leadership phrased it at the time: In order to establish eternal peace in East Asia, arousing the great benevolence and compassion of Buddhism, we are sometimes accepting and sometimes forceful. We now have no choice but to exercise the benevolent forcefulness of “killing one in order that many may live” (issatsu tasho). This is something which Mahayana Buddhism approves of only with the greatest of seriousness. No “holy war” or “Crusade” advocate could have put it better. The “eternal peace” bit is particularly excellent. By the end of the dreadful conflict that Japan had started, it was Buddhist and Shinto priests who were recruiting and training the suicide bombers, or Kamikaze (“Divine Wind”), fanatics, assuring them that the emperor was a “Golden Wheel-Turning Sacred King,” one indeed of the four manifestations of the ideal Buddhist monarch and a Tathagata, or “fully enlightened being,” of the material world. And since “Zen treats life and death indifferently,” why not abandon the cares of this world and adopt a policy of prostration at the feet of a homicidal dictator? This
Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)
During the 1950s, American cold warriors in West Germany instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw that country’s economic and administrative machinery out of gear. The CIA and other US intelligence and military services recruited, equipped, trained, and financed German activist groups and individuals, of West and East, to carry out actions which ran the spectrum from juvenile delinquency to terrorism; anything to make life difficult for the East German people and weaken their support for the government; anything to make the commies look bad.
William Blum (America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else)
Why can’t Jews own guns?” Avi asked. “Because der Führer forbade it.” “Yes, but why?” Avi pressed. Jacob had no answer. Avi did. “To make us passive, Jacob. To make us helpless. How can we resist Herr Hitler and the SS and the Gestapo if we cannot fight back? And how can we fight back without weapons and ammunition?” Jacob was silent. “Last time you were here, I had five rifles,” Avi said. “Now, under these very floorboards, I have almost a hundred. For the past few months, I’ve been recruiting a network of trusted operatives—men of various ages, professions, and skills. Quietly, in the shadows, we’ve been training.
Joel C. Rosenberg (The Auschwitz Escape)
Our employees are so enthusiastic about The Container Store, in fact, that they’re also our best recruiters. We only have a few “official” full-time employees in our recruiting department in our Dallas headquarters, mostly to fill specialized job openings. Instead, we train every employee in the company in how to recruit new members of our team, and we offer constant reminders about the importance of always being on the lookout for talent. It’s not the recruiting department’s job to recruit. It’s the recruiting department’s job to make sure everyone takes on the personal responsibility of recruiting—that we all do it.
Kip Tindell (Uncontainable: How Passion, Commitment, and Conscious Capitalism Built a Business Where Everyone Thrives)
MY FIRST ASSIGNMENT AFTER BEING ORDAINED as a pastor almost finished me. I was called to be the assistant pastor in a large and affluent suburban church. I was glad to be part of such an obviously winning organization. After I had been there a short time, a few people came to me and asked that I lead them in a Bible study. “Of course,” I said, “there is nothing I would rather do.” We met on Monday evenings. There weren’t many—eight or nine men and women—but even so that was triple the two or three that Jesus defined as a quorum. They were eager and attentive; I was full of enthusiasm. After a few weeks the senior pastor, my boss, asked me what I was doing on Monday evenings. I told him. He asked me how many people were there. I told him. He told me that I would have to stop. “Why?” I asked. “It is not cost-effective. That is too few people to spend your time on.” I was told then how I should spend my time. I was introduced to the principles of successful church administration: crowds are important, individuals are expendable; the positive must always be accented, the negative must be suppressed. Don’t expect too much of people—your job is to make them feel good about themselves and about the church. Don’t talk too much about abstractions like God and sin—deal with practical issues. We had an elaborate music program, expensively and brilliantly executed. The sermons were seven minutes long and of the sort that Father Taylor (the sailor-preacher in Boston who was the model for Father Mapple in Melville’s Moby Dick) complained of in the transcendentalists of the last century: that a person could no more be converted listening to sermons like that than get intoxicated drinking skim milk.[2] It was soon apparent that I didn’t fit. I had supposed that I was there to be a pastor: to proclaim and interpret Scripture, to guide people into a life of prayer, to encourage faith, to represent the mercy and forgiveness of Christ at special times of need, to train people to live as disciples in their families, in their communities and in their work. In fact I had been hired to help run a church and do it as efficiently as possible: to be a cheerleader to this dynamic organization, to recruit members, to lend the dignity of my office to certain ceremonial occasions, to promote the image of a prestigious religious institution. I got out of there as quickly as I could decently manage it. At the time I thought I had just been unlucky. Later I came to realize that what I experienced was not at all uncommon.
Eugene H. Peterson (Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best)
While military life was demanding, my efforts paid off. Many people say that to do something difficult and worthwhile, they need to be “motivated.” Or that the reason they are not sticking to their goals is because they “lack motivation.” But the military taught me that people don’t need motivation; they need self-discipline. Motivation is just a feeling. Self-discipline is: “I’m going to do this regardless of how I feel.” Seldom do people relish doing something hard. Often, what divides successful from unsuccessful people is doing what you don’t feel motivated to do. Back in basic training, our instructor announced that there are only two reasons new recruits don’t fulfill their duties: “Either you don’t know what’s expected of you, or you don’t care to do it. That’s it.
Rob Henderson (Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class)
attending surgeons say that what’s most important to them is finding people who are conscientious, industrious, and boneheaded enough to stick at practicing this one difficult thing day and night for years on end. As one professor of surgery put it to me, given a choice between a Ph.D. who had painstakingly cloned a gene and a talented sculptor, he’d pick the Ph.D. every time. Sure, he said, he’d bet on the sculptor being more physically talented; but he’d bet on the Ph.D. being less “flaky.” And in the end that matters more. Skill, surgeons believe, can be taught; tenacity cannot. It’s an odd approach to recruitment, but it continues all the way up the ranks, even in top surgery departments. They take minions with no experience in surgery, spend years training them, and then take most of their faculty from these same homegrown ranks. And it works.
Atul Gawande (Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science)
Not many of us will be able to go, because a crowd that large would draw too much attention. Evelyn won’t let us leave without a fight, so I thought it would be best to recruit people who I know to be experienced with surviving danger.” I glance at Tobias. We certainly are experienced with danger. “Christina, Tris, Tobias, Tori, Zeke, and Peter are my selections,” Cara says. “You have all proven your skills to me in one way or another, and it’s for that reason that I’d like to ask you to come with me outside the city. You are under no obligation to agree, of course.” “Peter?” I demand, without thinking. I can’t imagine what Peter could have done to “prove his skills” to Cara. “He kept the Erudite from killing you,” Cara says mildly. “Who do you think provided him with the technology to fake your death?” I raise my eyebrows. I had never thought about it before--too much happened after my failed execution for me to dwell on the details of my rescue. But of course, Cara was the only well-known defector from Erudite at that time, the only person Peter would have known to ask for help. Who else could have helped him? Who else would have known how? I don’t raise another objection. I don’t want to leave this city with Peter, but I’m too desperate to leave to make a fuss about it. “That’s a lot of Dauntless,” a girl at the side of the room says, looking skeptical. She has thick eyebrows that don’t stop growing in the middle, and pale skin. When she turns her head, I see black ink right behind her ear. A Dauntless transfer to Erudite, no doubt. “True,” Cara says. “But what we need right now are people with the skills to get out of the city unscathed, and I think Dauntless training makes them highly qualified for that task.” “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can go,” Zeke says. “I couldn’t leave Shauna here. Not after her sister just…well, you know.” “I’ll go,” Uriah says, his hand popping up. “I’m Dauntless. I’m a good shot. And I provide much-needed eye candy.” I laugh. Cara does not seem to be amused, but she nods. “Thank you.
Veronica Roth (Allegiant (Divergent, #3))
In the nineteenth century, scientists described brains and minds as if they were steam engines. Why steam engines? Because that was the leading technology of the day, which powered trains, ships and factories, so when humans tried to explain life, they assumed it must work according to analogous principles. Mind and body are made of pipes, cylinders, valves and pistons that build and release pressure, thereby producing movements and actions. Such thinking had a deep influence even on Freudian psychology, which is why much of our psychological jargon is still replete with concepts borrowed from mechanical engineering. Consider, for example, the following Freudian argument: ‘Armies harness the sex drive to fuel military aggression. The army recruits young men just when their sexual drive is at its peak. The army limits the soldiers’ opportunities of actually having sex and releasing all that pressure, which consequently accumulates inside them. The army then redirects this pent-up pressure and allows it to be released in the form of military aggression.’ This is exactly how a steam engine works.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
As we’ve seen, one of the most frequently pursued paths for achievement-minded college seniors is to spend several years advancing professionally and getting trained and paid by an investment bank, consulting firm, or law firm. Then, the thought process goes, they can set out to do something else with some exposure and experience under their belts. People are generally not making lifelong commitments to the field in their own minds. They’re “getting some skills” and making some connections before figuring out what they really want to do. I subscribed to a version of this mind-set when I graduated from Brown. In my case, I went to law school thinking I’d practice for a few years (and pay down my law school debt) before lining up another opportunity. It’s clear why this is such an attractive approach. There are some immensely constructive things about spending several years in professional services after graduating from college. Professional service firms are designed to train large groups of recruits annually, and they do so very successfully. After even just a year or two in a high-level bank or consulting firm, you emerge with a set of skills that can be applied in other contexts (financial modeling in Excel if you’re a financial analyst, PowerPoint and data organization and presentation if you’re a consultant, and editing and issue spotting if you’re a lawyer). This is very appealing to most any recent graduate who may not yet feel equipped with practical skills coming right out of college. Even more than the professional skill you gain, if you spend time at a bank, consultancy, or law firm, you will become excellent at producing world-class work. Every model, report, presentation, or contract needs to be sophisticated, well done, and error free, in large part because that’s one of the core value propositions of your organization. The people above you will push you to become more rigorous and disciplined, and your work product will improve across the board as a result. You’ll get used to dressing professionally, preparing for meetings, speaking appropriately, showing up on time, writing official correspondence, and so forth. You will be able to speak the corporate language. You’ll become accustomed to working very long hours doing detail-intensive work. These attributes are transferable to and helpful in many other contexts.
Andrew Yang (Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America)
A drone is often preferred for missions that are too "dull, dirty, or dangerous" for manned aircraft.” PROLOGUE The graffiti was in Spanish, neon colors highlighting the varicose cracks in the wall. It smelled of urine and pot. The front door was metal with four bolt locks and the windows were frosted glass, embedded with chicken wire. They swung out and up like big fake eye-lashes held up with a notched adjustment bar. This was a factory building on the near west side of Cleveland in an industrial area on the Cuyahoga River known in Ohio as The Flats. First a sweatshop garment factory, then a warehouse for imported cheeses then a crack den for teenage potheads. It was now headquarters for Magic Slim, the only pimp in Cleveland with his own film studio and training facility. Her name was Cosita, she was eighteen looking like fourteen. One of nine children from El Chorillo. a dangerous poverty stricken barrio on the outskirts of Panama City. Her brother, Javier, had been snatched from the streets six months ago, he was thirteen and beautiful. Cosita had a high school education but earned here degree on the streets of Panama. Interpol, the world's largest international police organization, had recruited Cosita at seventeen. She was smart, street savvy, motivated and very pretty. Just what Interpol was looking for. Cosita would become a Drone!
Nick Hahn
Hence the term “voluntary muscle” is in many ways a figure of speech. I can consciously command a movement, but I cannot consciously command the recruitment of every muscle fiber which must be used, nor the precise order of their contractions and lengthenings which actually produce the desired effect. This is to say that every consciously willed movement is always conditioned by two things: genetically established organization and habitual usage. Our genetic organization is quite plastic, open-ended, filled with potential variations in behavior; on the other hand, habitual usage can become just as limiting as it is convenient, and can become a tyrant to exactly the degree that it becomes practiced, automatic, unconscious. We are free to train ourselves to act differently, but it is very difficult to suddenly act differently than we have been trained. The tendencies in our motor behavior created by genetically determined patterns and by habitual usage do not lie within the muscle cells, nor even in the motor neurons that unite them into motor units. The search for the organizational factors of purposeful muscular control—whether it be action or relaxation—takes us deeper and deeper into the central nervous system, where we find that every muscular response is built up, selected, and colored by the totality of our neural activity, both conscious and unconscious.
Deane Juhan (Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork)
For centuries, even millennia, generals and governors, artists and poets had taken it for granted that soldiers fight. That if there’s one thing that brings out the hunter in us, it’s war. War is when we humans get to do what we’re so good at. War is when we shoot to kill. But as Colonel Samuel Marshall continued to interview groups of servicemen, in the Pacific and later in the European theatre, he found that only 15 to 25 per cent of them had actually fired their weapons. At the critical moment, the vast majority balked. One frustrated officer related how he had gone up and down the lines yelling, ‘Goddammit! Start shooting!’ Yet, ‘they fired only while I watched them or while some other officer stood over them’.14 The situation on Makin that night had been do-or-die, when you would expect everyone to fight for their lives. But in his battalion of more than three hundred soldiers, Marshall could identify only thirty-six who actually pulled the trigger. Was it a lack of experience? Nope. There didn’t seem to be any difference between new recruits and experienced pros when it came to willingness to shoot. And many of the men who didn’t fire had been crack shots in training. Maybe they just chickened out? Hardly. Soldiers who didn’t fire stayed at their posts, which meant they ran as much of a risk. To a man, they were courageous, loyal patriots, prepared to sacrifice their lives for their comrades. And yet, when it came down to it, they shirked their duty. They failed to shoot.
Rutger Bregman (Humankind: A Hopeful History)
On my next weekend without the kids I went to Nashville to visit her. We had a great weekend. On Monday morning she kissed me goodbye and left for work. I would drive home while she was at work. Only I didn’t go straight home. I went and paid her recruiting officer a little visit. I walked in wearing shorts and a T-shirt so my injuries were fully visible. The two recruiters couldn’t hide the surprise on their faces. I clearly looked like an injured veteran. Not their typical visitor. “I’m here about Jamie Boyd,” I said. One of the recruiters stood up and said, “Yes, I’m working with Jamie Boyd. How can I help you?” I walked to the center of the room between him and the female recruiter who was still seated at her desk and said, “Jamie Boyd is not going to be active duty. She is not going to be a truck driver. She wants to change her MOS and you’re not going to treat her like some high school student. She has a degree. She is a young professional and you will treat her as such.” “Yes, sir, yes, sir. We hold ourselves to a higher standard. We’ll do better. I’m sorry,” he stammered. “You convinced her she can’t change anything. That’s a lie. It’s paperwork. Make it happen.” “Yes, sir, yes, sir.” That afternoon Jamie had an appointment at the recruitment center anyway for more paperwork. Afterward, she called me, and as soon as I answered, without even a hello, she said, “What have you done?” “How were they acting?” I asked, sounding really pleased with myself. “Like I can have whatever I want,” she answered. “You’re welcome. Find a better job.” She wasn’t mad about it. She just laughed and said, “You’re crazy.” “I will always protect you. You were getting screwed over. And I’m sorry you didn’t know about it, but you wouldn’t have let me go if I had told you ahead of time.” “You’re right, but I’m glad you did.” Jamie ended up choosing MP, military police, as her MOS because they offered her a huge signing bonus. We made our reunion official and she quit her job in Nashville to move back to Birmingham. She had a while before basic training, so she moved back in with me. We were both very happy, and as it turned out, some very big changes were about to happen beyond basic training.
Noah Galloway (Living with No Excuses: The Remarkable Rebirth of an American Soldier)
Navy Seals Stress Relief Tactics (As printed in O Online Magazine, Sept. 8, 2014) Prep for Battle: Instead of wasting energy by catastrophizing about stressful situations, SEALs spend hours in mental dress rehearsals before springing into action, says Lu Lastra, director of mentorship for Naval Special Warfare and a former SEAL command master chief.  He calls it mental loading and says you can practice it, too.  When your boss calls you into her office, take a few minutes first to run through a handful of likely scenarios and envision yourself navigating each one in the best possible way.  The extra prep can ease anxiety and give you the confidence to react calmly to whatever situation arises. Talk Yourself Up: Positive self-talk is quite possibly the most important skill these warriors learn during their 15-month training, says Lastra.  The most successful SEALs may not have the biggest biceps or the fastest mile, but they know how to turn their negative thoughts around.  Lastra recommends coming up with your own mantra to remind yourself that you’ve got the grit and talent to persevere during tough times. Embrace the Suck: “When the weather is foul and nothing is going right, that’s when I think, now we’re getting someplace!” says Lastra, who encourages recruits to power through the times when they’re freezing, exhausted or discouraged.  Why?  Lastra says, “The, suckiest moments are when most people give up; the resilient ones spot a golden opportunity to surpass their competitors.  It’s one thing to be an excellent athlete when the conditions are perfect,” he says.  “But when the circumstances aren’t so favorable, those who have stronger wills are more likely to rise to victory.” Take a Deep Breath: “Meditation and deep breathing help slow the cognitive process and open us up to our more intuitive thoughts,” says retired SEAL commander Mark Divine, who developed SEALFit, a demanding training program for civilians that incorporates yoga, mindfulness and breathing techniques.  He says some of his fellow SEALs became so tuned-in, they were able to sense the presence of nearby roadside bombs.  Who doesn’t want that kind of Jedi mind power?  A good place to start: Practice what the SEALs call 4 x 4 x 4 breathing.  Inhale deeply for four counts, then exhale for four counts and repeat the cycle for four minutes several times a day.  You’re guaranteed to feel calmer on any battleground. Learn to value yourself, which means to fight for your happiness. ---Ayn Rand
Lyn Kelley (The Magic of Detachment: How to Let Go of Other People and Their Problems)
The best way not to have to use your military power is to make sure that power is visible. When people know that we will use force if necessary and that we really mean it, we’ll be treated differently. With respect. Right now, no one believes us because we’ve been so weak with our approach to military policy in the Middle East and elsewhere. Building up our military is cheap when you consider the alternative. We’re buying peace and we’re locking in our national security. Right now we are in bad shape militarily. We’re decreasing the size of our forces and we’re not giving them the best equipment. Recruiting the best people has fallen off, and we can’t get the people we have trained to the level they need to be. There are a lot of questions about the state of our nuclear weapons. When I read reports of what is going on, I’m shocked. It’s no wonder nobody respects us. It’s no surprise that we never win. Spending money on our military is also smart business. Who do people think build our airplanes and ships, and all the equipment that our troops should have? American workers, that’s who. So building up our military also makes economic sense because it allows us to put real money into the system and put thousands of people back to work. There is another way to pay to modernize our military forces. If other countries are depending on us to protect them, shouldn’t they be willing to make sure we have the capability to do it? Shouldn’t they be willing to pay for the servicemen and servicewomen and the equipment we’re providing? Depending on the price of oil, Saudi Arabia earns somewhere between half a billion and a billion dollars every day. They wouldn’t exist, let alone have that wealth, without our protection. We get nothing from them. Nothing. We defend Germany. We defend Japan. We defend South Korea. These are powerful and wealthy countries. We get nothing from them. It’s time to change all that. It’s time to win again. We’ve got 28,500 wonderful American soldiers on South Korea’s border with North Korea. They’re in harm’s way every single day. They’re the only thing that is protecting South Korea. And what do we get from South Korea for it? They sell us products—at a nice profit. They compete with us. We spent two trillion dollars doing whatever we did in Iraq. I still don’t know why we did it, but we did. Iraq is sitting on an ocean of oil. Is it out of line to suggest that they should contribute to their own future? And after the blood and the money we spent trying to bring some semblance of stability to the Iraqi people, maybe they should be willing to make sure we can rebuild the army that fought for them. When Kuwait was attacked by Saddam Hussein, all the wealthy Kuwaitis ran to Paris. They didn’t just rent suites—they took up whole buildings, entire hotels. They lived like kings while their country was occupied. Who did they turn to for help? Who else? Uncle Sucker. That’s us. We
Donald J. Trump (Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America)
The following is an advertisement for The Marine Corps(e): Join The Marine Corps(e)! Thousands of new positions are available because all our current recruits are "on leave" while we order their prosthetic limbs. After one hour in our coffee and donuts lounge, we put you and any other sign-on recruits into our helicopter out back, and fly you straight to the Middle East. If you survive one week, without weapons, in the heart of recent terrorist activity, your training is done. Compensation: You will be paid on commission every February 29th. The main benefit of being paid once every 4 years is... 4 years of saving! Imagine how happy your family will be when you come home with every dime you earned! And if you really love them, why not try your luck with our on-base casinos. DOUBLE OR NOTHING BABY!
Mike Sov (I Like Poop)
Gatekeeper between mortal and spirit worlds, but her problems are just beginning. The source of her magic remains as shrouded in mystery as her family's past, while the necromancers are keen to recruit her as one of their own. And then there's River, the tempting faerie-necromancer, placed in charge of her training. Keeping her abilities quiet seems impossible with wraiths haunting her every step, let alone an estranged family member with a secret of his own appearing on the doorstep. When a dark evil sets its sights on her family, it'll take everything Ilsa has to lay the spirit to rest before she ends up six feet under—
Emma L. Adams (Hereditary Curse (The Gatekeeper's Curse #2))
The new boats created unprecedented career opportunities for those already in the elite nuclear submarine force and gave migraines to personnel specialists who had to find trained crewmen. During the Scorpion's first seven years, the navy constructed and commissioned twenty-five nuclear attack submarines and thirty-nine Polaris missile boats. Each Polaris submarine had two crews of seventeen officers and 128 enlisted men. The math was brutal: The navy had to recruit and train 103 additional submarine crews during the eighty-four-month period that the shipyards were cranking out Polaris missile submarines and nuclear attack boats.
Ed Offley (Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion)
I will never forget the day I finally passed SAS selection. At the end of the long, grueling process of elimination, where 140 recruits had steadily been whittled down to only four of us, I finally found myself preparing to get ‘badged.’ Yet it was the most low-key event you could ever imagine. No fanfare, no bugler, no parade. Just the four of us that remained, standing in a small, nondescript outbuilding on the edge of the Hereford training camp; we were battered, exhausted, bruised and spent, yet our hearts were bursting with pride. The commanding officer of the regiment walked in, stood in front of us and said these words - I have never forgotten them: From this day on, you are part of a family. I know what you have had to give to earn the right to be here. The difference between the four of you and the rest of those who have failed is very simple: it is the ability to give that little bit extra when it hurts. You see, the difference between ordinary and extraordinary is often just that little word extra.’ He then added: ‘The work I am going to ask you to do now will continue to be arduous, even more so, in fact, but what makes our work here special is your ability to give that little bit extra when most simply give up. ‘You gave more when others gave up. That’s the difference.’ That short speech made a huge impact on me, and I never forgot it. The words were simple, yet for a young soldier, and one without a huge amount of confidence, they gave me something to hold on to. And I have done that ever since, through so many hard times in jungles, deserts, mountains and life. That little bit extra. Reaching our summits only requires us to hold on that little bit longer than most people are prepared to endure. Just that little bit extra, just that nose-length more.
Bear Grylls (A Survival Guide for Life: How to Achieve Your Goals, Thrive in Adversity, and Grow in Character)
68. Cheerfulness In Adversity The Royal Marine Commandos, with whom I worked a lot in my military days, have the phrase ‘Cheerfulness in Adversity’ as one of their founding principles - and it is a great one to live by. It is easy to be cheerful when everything is going like a song, but the real time to be cheerful is when everything is going dead wrong! I remember in the North African desert once, when we were training with the French Foreign Legionnaires, that we had a particularly unpleasant night. The corporals took shifts to ensure that we were woken up every 15 minutes until down. They would burst in and throw our kit all around and out of the windows, turn the beds upside down, empty the lockers into the desert sand, only to do it all over again as soon as we had tidied up. It was a real ball-breaker of a night. But I will never forget one of the recruits, Bobby. At 4:30 a.m., during our darkest, most exhausting hour, when the corporals were in full swing and we had been up all night in the face of this mindless, sleep-defying beasting, Bobby looked at us, smiled and said: ‘Breakfast is comin’!’ There was something about the way he said it, with a wry grin as he set about retrieving his pile of kit from the rafters of the barrack block, that lifted all our spirits like nothing you could imagine. From then on, whenever something has got really tough, I say to myself: ‘Don’t worry- breakfast is comin’!’ And it always makes me smile. You see, Bobby knew that when it gets hard we all have two responses to choose from: to moan, or to put our heads down, smile and get on with it.
Bear Grylls (A Survival Guide for Life: How to Achieve Your Goals, Thrive in Adversity, and Grow in Character)
All of the recruits, male and female alike, are already highly trained in the art of battle. They have already received that part of their training from the regular army. But none of that will count for anything, if they are unable to wield a blessed weapon due to their lack of faith. You are now their commanding officer. Their Praefectus. It’s your duty to do whatever you can to help them find the faith they will need, or strengthen what they already have. Just as I saw Aysha put her faith in you, so do I. And I have no doubt, that they all shall too.
Dean Cadman (Lusam: The Dragon Mage Wars Book Four)
Southern girls know their four seasons… Recruiting Spring Training Practice Football
Deborah Ford (Grits (Girls Raised in the South) Guide to Life)
The three key goal areas you will always have to address regarding your people are: 1. Recruiting—What people needs do I have? a. Who do I need and what do I need them to do? b. Where will I find them? 2. Training—What training needs do I have? a. Now that I have someone, how and when will I teach them what to do and how to do it well? 3. Consulting—What performance or accountability issues do I have? a. Now that my people are in the job and trained, what/how/when will they be supported and held accountable so they can excel?
Gary Keller (The millionaire real estate agent)
The recruiter is confident that the transformation will take place. He can cast a wide net because of his faith in the best training in the world.
Dan Carrison (Semper Fi: Business Leadership the Marine Corps Way)
By emphasizing its screening procedures, instead of its training, management rarely experiences that pleasant surprise of watching a leader emerge from an unlikely recruit.
Dan Carrison (Semper Fi: Business Leadership the Marine Corps Way)
Page 178-179: It was not only unnecessary but imprudent to recruit Burmese [during the time Burma was part of the British Empire]. There could be little reliance on troops raised from among a people with no divisions of caste but united in religion, race and national sentiment … Obviously security required that the Burmese should be disarmed and debarred from military service. The Karens and other minor tribes, however, might be expected to side with the British, and these have been recruited, even when an initial reluctance had to be dispelled, but it has always been easy to find reasons for withholding military training, even as volunteer cadets, from the great mass of the people.
J.S. Furnivall (Colonial Policy And Practice)
Granted, employees are a very different type of customer, one that falls outside of the traditional definition. After all, instead of them paying you, you’re paying them. Yet regardless of the direction the money flows, one thing is clear: employees, just like other types of customers, want to derive value from their relationship with the organization. Not just monetary value, but experiential value, too: skill augmentation, career development, camaraderie, meaningful work, a sense of purpose, and so on. If a company or an individual leader fails to deliver the requisite value to an employee, then—just like a customer, they’ll defect. They’ll quit, driving up turnover, inflating recruiting/training expenses, undermining product/service quality, and creating a whole lot of unnecessary stress on the organization. So even though a company pays its employees, it should still provide them with a value-rich employment experience that cultivates loyalty. And that’s why it’s prudent to view both current and prospective employees as a type of customer. The argument goes beyond employee engagement, though. There’s a whole other reason why organizational leaders have a lot to gain by viewing their staff as a type of customer. That’s because, by doing so, they can personally model the customer-oriented behaviors that they seek to encourage among their workforce. How better to demonstrate what a great customer experience looks like than to deliver it to your own team? After all, how a leader serves their staff influences how the staff serves their customers. Want your team to be super-responsive to the people they serve? Show them what that looks like by being super-responsive to your team. Want them to communicate clearly with customers? Show them what that looks like by being crystal clear in your own written and verbal communications. There are innumerable ways for organizational leaders to model the customer experience behaviors they seek to promote among their staff. It has to start, however, by viewing those in your charge as a type of customer you’re trying to serve. Of course, viewing staff as customers doesn’t mean that leaders should cater to every employee whim or that they should consent to do whatever employees want. Leaders sometimes have to make tough decisions for the greater good. In those situations, effectively serving employees means showing respect for their concerns and interests, and thoughtfully explaining the rationale behind what might be an unpopular decision. The key point is simply this: with every interaction in the workplace, leaders have an opportunity to show their staff what a great customer experience looks like. Whether you’re a C-suite executive or a frontline supervisor, that opportunity must not be squandered.
Jon Picoult (From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans)
Good one! Either hire the right person for the job and use their services or hire anyone and train them to do your bidding and that may not necessarily be the right one or the smart one. Bureaucratic-automated work culture festers poor leadership that exhibits the lack of routed efforts towards identifying the right person for the right job through the myriad nuances and subtleties of employee profiles/candidature, resulting in a manifest crack in organizational competence and dislodges itself from organizational goals.
Henrietta Newton Martin, Author - Strategic Human Resource Management -A Primer
HOW TO BE MISERABLE In my younger days dodging the draft, I somehow wound up in the Marine Corps. There’s a myth that Marine training turns baby-faced recruits into bloodthirsty killers. Trust me, the Marine Corps is not that efficient. What it does teach, however, is a lot more useful. The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for an artist. Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction from having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swab jockeys or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because these candy-asses don’t know how to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.
Steven Pressfield (The War of Art)
Upon assuming the presidency, Reagan halted economic aid to Nicaragua, citing the Sandinistas’ support of a leftist uprising in El Salvador. Then, in November 1982, he signed the top-secret National Security Decision Directive 17. The document authorized $19 million for the CIA to recruit, train, and arm a five-hundred-man force of Nicaraguan rebels to conduct covert actions against the new Sandinista regime.
Donovan X. Ramsey (When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era)
he also had been trained in the ultimate military sense: You trained a recruit to train a weapon, to aim the weapon correctly.
Frank Herbert (Heretics of Dune (Dune, #5))
Neural mechanisms (mind-muscle connections) are actually more important for women’s adaptations to strength training than they are for men’s. So by doing power moves and low-rep, high-weight strength training, you enhance the number of fibers recruited for a contraction but don’t really grow the size of your muscles very much. The short of it is that you end up with a stronger, more powerful contraction with less muscle bulk.
Stacy T. Sims (Roar: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life)
The following day, I went to see Ho-chol. I’d decided to take him back home with me to Hamhung City. I told him how I’d tried to get him signed up at the recruitment center, but to no avail. His best chance would be to get away for a while and lie low until they forgot about him. Some young men wearing military uniforms stood in front of the station as we waited to board the train. They were new recruits, smiling and holding hands with their parents, looking very content with themselves. Some of them were taking souvenir photographs. I could picture the inscription, THE DAY OUR SON JOINED THE MILITARY. A happy memory. My son began to weep, but not tears of joy. The sight of him brought tears to my eyes as well. “Father! Please don’t cry too! You’ve done so much for me ever since I was born. I know that, and people in the village have told me as well. You’ve made it through so many hard times; I know you did everything you could.” At that, I broke down completely. I hugged him and started sobbing loudly, even though the station was full of people. The new recruits started walking proudly onto the platform. Suddenly, I had an idea. I told my son to get on the same train. I thought that maybe he could get swept along with them and end up in training with them. It also struck me that I might never see him again. I wanted to take a photograph with him, but of course that was impossible. I gave him ten won. It was all I had. “Look after yourself. I think the police will forget about you after a while, so try to make the best of it until then,” I said.
Masaji Ishikawa (A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea)
Kettlebell deadlift. The kettlebell deadlift primarily targets the posterior chain (lower back, glutes, and hamstrings). It is an excellent companion to the kettlebell box squat and additionally helps teach proper hip-creasing mechanics, creating an important foundation for the classical kettlebell exercises (e.g., swing, clean, snatch). With the kettlebell on the ground, stand with your feet shoulder-width apart with the kettlebell just in front of you (see figure 7.9a). Keep your chest lifted as you sit back with your hips until your hands can reach the handle (see figure 7.9b). Grab the handle with both hands and stand up by pressing your feet into the ground until your body is fully upright (see figure 7.9c). Repeat by sitting back to lightly touch the kettlebell to the ground. Do 10 controlled repetitions with a light weight and then repeat with a more challenging weight (e.g., women start with 8 kg [18 lb] for 10 repetitions and then use 12 kg [26 lb] for 10 repetitions; men start with 16 kg [35 lb] for 10 repetitions and then use 24 kg [53 lb] for 10 repetitions). This basic exercise teaches you to keep your center of gravity aligned vertically over your base of support. It is important to have control over your center of mass because kettlebell training involves such dynamic movements. A strong and stable base will keep you safe when swinging the kettlebell. KEY PRINCIPLES Crease at the hips instead of bending at the waist. Maintain a neutral spine and slightly arched lower back. Legs can be bent or straight depending on the desired training effect. Straight legs will recruit the hamstrings more and bent legs will recruit the quadriceps more.
Steve Cotter (Kettlebell Training)
Agniveer Army symbolizes a formidable force committed to upholding the ideals of valor, discipline, and patriotism. Rooted in the Agniveer Scheme, it attracts and raises dedicated individuals aspiring to serve in the Indian Armed Forces. With a focus on rigorous training and character building, Agniveer Army stands as an indication to the unwavering spirit of those who aspire to safeguard the nation. Join the Agniveer Army and become a proud defender of our independence and values.
Agniveer Online
It is my firm conviction that an executive or business owner should pack a team with 51 percenters, because training them in the technical aspects will then come far more easily. Hiring 51 percenters today will save training time and dollars tomorrow. And they are commonly the best recruiters for others with strong emotional skills. Nice people love the idea of working with other nice people.
Danny Meyer (Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business)
British colonial disdain for human rights even left its mark on the English language. The word “coolie” was borrowed from a Chinese word that literally means “bitter labor.” The Romanized first syllable coo means “bitter” and the second syllable lie mimics the pronunciation of the Chinese logograph that means “labor.” This Chinese word sprang into existence shortly after the Opium War in the nineteenth century when Britain annexed several territories along the eastern seaboard of China. Those territories included Hong Kong, parts of Shanghai, Canton city (Guangzhou) and parts of Tianjin, a seaport near Beijing. In those newly acquired territories, the British employed a vast number of manual laborers who served as beasts of burden on the waterfront in factories and at train stations. The coolies’ compensation was opium, not money. The British agency and officers that conceived this unusual scheme of compensation—opium for back-breaking hard labor—were as pernicious and ruthless as they were clever and calculating. Opium is a palliative drug. An addict becomes docile and inured to pain. He has no appetite and only craves the next fix. In the British colonies and concessions, the colonizers, by paying opium to the laborers for their long hours of inhumane, harsh labor, created a situation in which the Chinese laborers toiled obediently and never complained about the excessive workload or the physical devastation. Most important of all, the practice cost the employers next to nothing to feed and house the laborers, since opium suppressed the appetite of the addicts and made them oblivious to pain and discomfort. What could be better or more expedient for the British colonialists whose goal was to make a quick fortune? They had invented the most efficient and effective way to accumulate capital at a negligible cost in a colony. The only consequence was the loss of lives among the colonial subjects—an irrelevant issue to the colonialists. In addition to the advantages of this colonial practice, the British paid a pittance for the opium. In those days, opium was mostly produced in another British colony, Burma, not far from China. The exploitation of farmhands in one colony lubricated the wheels of commerce in another colony. On average, a coolie survived only a few months of the grim regime of harsh labor and opium addiction. Towards the end, as his body began to break down from malnutrition and overexertion, he was prone to cardiac arrest and sudden death. If, before his death, a coolie stumbled and hurt his back or broke a limb, he became unemployed. The employer simply recruited a replacement. The death of coolies in Canton, Hong Kong, Shanghai and other coastal cities where the British had established their extraterritorial jurisdiction during the late 19th century was so common that the Chinese accepted the phenomenon as a routine matter of semi-colonial life. Neither injury nor death of a coolie triggered any compensation to his family. The impoverished Chinese accepted injury and sudden death as part of the occupational hazard of a coolie, the “bitter labor.” “Bitter” because the labor and the opium sucked the life out of a laborer in a short span of time. Once, a 19th-century British colonial officer, commenting on the sudden death syndrome among the coolies, remarked casually in his Queen’s English, “Yes, it is unfortunate, but the coolies are Chinese, and by God, there are so many of them.” Today, the word “coolie” remains in the English language, designating an over-exploited or abused unskilled laborer.
Charles N. Li (The Turbulent Sea: Passage to a New World)
Are we caring for our volunteers properly? Are we providing the right training? Is there a better way we could recruit? What are the faithful volunteers in our church actually experiencing? Are they growing spiritually? Do they feel like an integral part of a team?
Bill Hybels (The Volunteer Revolution: Unleashing the Power of Everybody)
WHAT IS IT? The one-firm firm approach is not simply a loose term to describe a "culture." It refers to a set of concrete management practices consciously chosen to maximize the trust and loyalty that members of the firm feel both to the institution and to each other. In 1985, the elements of the one-firm firm approach were given as: •Highly selective recruitment •A "grow your own" people strategy as opposed to heavy use of laterals, growing only as fast as people could be devel-1 oped and assimilated •Intensive use of training as a socialization process •Rejection of a "star system" and related individualistic behavior •Avoidance of mergers, in order to sustain the collaborative culture A set of concrete management practices consciously chosen to maximize the trust and loyalty that members of the firm feel both to the institution and to each other. • Selective choice of services and markets, so as to win through significant investments in focused areas rather than many small initiatives •Active outplacement and alumni management, so that those who leave remain loyal to the firm •Compensation based mostly on group performance, not individual performance •High investments in research and development •Extensive intra-firm communication, with broad use of consensus-building approaches The one-firm firm approach is similar in many ways to the U. S. Marine Corps (in which Jack Walker served). Both are designed to achieve the highest levels of internal collaboration and encourage mutual commitment to pursuing ambitious goals.
David H. Maister (Strategy and the Fat Smoker; Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy)
Today, when a U.S. Marine recruit at Parris Island is forced to climb rope walls and scamper over obstacles, he is following a training regimen first devised for the fierce Algerian fighters.
Brent Nosworthy (The Bloody Crucible of Courage: Fighting Methods and Combat Experience of the Civil War)
We need greater amounts of force in order to convince our bodies to recruit the big, powerful, type 2 muscle fibers. In order to increase force we can manipulate two factors, either mass (the amount of weight you are lifting) or acceleration (how fast you are lifting that weight). We also know that the bigger muscle groups can produce more force by working together than in isolation.
Alexx Leyva (Weight Training: Muscle by Science: Your Simple Guide to Building a Muscular and Powerful Body (Build Muscle, Get Stronger, Workout, Gain Mass, Build Size, Gym, Weight Lifting, Exercise, Fitness))
We will push the climate change agenda. The EPA and Energy Department will recruit scientists who will provide data nobody else can understand that says our side is right about humans, cars, trains, planes, and even industrial factories are causing damage to our atmosphere, and that it needs to stop before Earth is turned into a wasteland. If people point out that it’s the sun, the natural cycle of things, and that twenty years ago there were warnings of global cooling, call those people uneducated skeptics and even racists, because we’ll claim that climate change harms poor minorities the most. The EPA will work to find the smallest creatures and say they’re endangered to prevent farmers and builders from just building or planting wherever they want.
Cliff Ball (Times of Turmoil)
Alignment of vision, mission, values and attitudes need to be matched between you and those you choose to surround yourself with. The cost of training or replacing will be very minimal and less painful if recruitment, selection and positioning are done well. This applies even to general employment processes, whether at leadership or staff levels.
Archibald Marwizi (Making Success Deliberate)
Introduction Part I - Recruitment Death War The White Knight Pestilence Part II – The Academy Hellenica Training The Pledge The Banshee The First Class The Legged Snake The Amazon Demon
Jonathan Maas (Hellenica (City of Gods, #1))
It turned out that when you accounted for turnover rates and the cost of recruiting and training, Cary, North Carolina, engineers were cheaper to hire than Bangalore, India, engineers.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
The Marine Corps recruits people who share the corps’ values, then provides them with the training required to
Jim Collins (Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't)
I know the way, my lord,” she said, glaring at him. “There is no need for this display.” “You are going to be responsible for Winnie’s first efforts to acquire a sense of decorum and reserve, Miss Farnum.” He picked up her hand and deposited it back on his forearm, then led her down the steps. “You must begin as you intend to go on and set a sincere example for the child. She’ll spot fraud at fifty paces, and even my authority won’t be able to salvage your efforts then. A lady graciously accepts appropriate escort.” “Is this how you trained recruits when you were soldiering?” She stomped along beside him, ignoring the beauty of the full moon and the fragrances of the summer night. “You box them in, reason with them, tease, argue, taunt, and twist until you get what you want?” “You are upset. If I have given offense, I apologize.
Grace Burrowes (The Soldier (Duke's Obsession, #2; Windham, #2))
Quote from Deadly Deception: Now, reflecting on his own covert training, he knew the recruiters error in judgement; you could never take a simple look at anyone and no either how smart they were, or how deadly. Eric
Eric Redmon (Deadly Deception)
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated . . . In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.62
Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
The military could get by with fewer recruits because more in the ranks reenlisted. The quality of the volunteers turned out to be good, because the services insisted on drug-free high-school graduates with clean criminal records, criteria that ruled out 70 percent of American youth. (There is an unfortunate message in that statistic.) Smarter, tougher, and willing, volunteers trained and worked to their limits.
Daniel P. Bolger (Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars)