Retention Quotes

I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.

Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it.

Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.

You can’t have trust without fairness

To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.

It’s exceedingly difficult for employees to have the company’s back when they can’t trust the company to have theirs. Actually, it’s impossible.

How power is used in organizations determines whether it unites us with trust or divides us with fear

Fairness isn’t about charity. It’s smart business.

Employees are savvy. They know the difference between disguising and remedying unfairness at work

Bias in the workplace is a form of tribalism – you’re either in or out

Fairness is a leadership superpower. 

Low employee engagement is a symptom of a suboptimal workplace culture

The imbalance of power in the employee-employer relationship puts the onus on leaders to address fairness at work

Perceptions of unfairness operate on a continuum

Real leadership is treating your least favorite employee the same as your favorite

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

People assume it’s a matter of personality, the difference between optimists and pessimists. But I believe it all comes down to an inability to forget. The greater your powers of retention, the slimmer your chances at optimism.

Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.

A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.

Soon, however, she began to reason with herself, and try to be feeling less. Eight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up. How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness! What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals,--all, all must be comprised in it; and oblivion of the past--how natural, how certain too! It included nearly a third part of her own life. Alas! with all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing.

Serge's attention-deficit disorder was the first of many hyphens. Obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive, anal-retentive, paranoid-schizophrenic. He was believed to be the only self-inflicted case of shaken-baby syndrome.

Practice that’s spaced out, interleaved with other learning, and varied produces better mastery, longer retention, and more versatility. But these benefits come at a price: when practice is spaced, interleaved, and varied, it requires more effort. You feel the increased effort, but not the benefits the effort produces. Learning feels slower from this kind of practice, and you don’t get the rapid improvements and affirmations you’re accustomed to seeing from massed practice.

Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, origin of all being, graciously let a ray of your light penetrate the darkness of my understanding. Take from me the double darkness in which I have been born, an obscurity of sin and ignorance. Give me a keen understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally. Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm. Point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in the completion.

Think of the most fussy science teacher you ever had. The one who docked your grade if the sixth decimal place in your answer was rounded incorrectly; who tucked in his periodic table T-shirt, corrected every student who said "weight" when he or she meant "mass", and made everyone, including himself, wear goggles even while mixing sugar water. Now try to imagine someone whom your teacher would hate for being anal-retentive. That is the kind of person who works for a bureau of standards and measurement.

Alas! with all her reasoning, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.

If I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retentiveness.

Cal: “I’m not presuming. I know exactly what you think about me. You think I’m an anal-retentive Armrest Nazi . . . an arrogant Modelizer. You can’t stand the way I talk, any of the subjects I choose to talk about, the imperious manner I order food in restaurants or tell cab drivers how much we owe them. You find my taste in women odious, the fact that I don’t own a television an unforgivable sin, and the fact that I would choose to write a book about Saudi Arabia completely unfathomable. And you’re also totally in love with me. If you weren’t you wouldn’t have pushed me into the pool earlier today when you saw Grazi walk in.” Every Boy's Got One

mentioned only in the two lists and his duties are not spelt out anywhere. It is possible that this designation is a retention from earlier texts and, in the Arthashastra, is used only to represent a higher grade for salary and

With the industrial proliferation of visual and audiovisual prostheses and unrestrained use of instantaneous-transmission equipment from earliest childhood onwards, we now routinely see the encoding of increasingly elaborate mental images together with a steady decline in retention rates and recall. In other words we are looking at the rapid collapse of mnemonic consolidation. This collapse seems only natural, if one remembers a contrario that seeing, and its spatio-temporal organization, precede gesture and speech and their coordination in knowing, recognizing, making known (as images of our thoughts), our thoughts themselves and cognitive functions, which are never ever passive.

Maybe—and I just want you to think about it for the future—you should consider what other factors are important in employee retention. You know, like making people feel appreciated, giving them a reason to stay loyal to you. It isn’t just about a paycheck,” I replied as gently as I could, even though I knew damn well he didn’t exactly deserve to get handled with kid gloves. “You’ll find someone. It’s just not going to be me.

I'm anal retentive. I'm a workaholic. I have insomnia. And I'm a control freak. That's why I'm not married. Who could stand me?

William James wrote (in Principles of Psychology in 1890): "In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units..." Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.

Studies show that the IQ range of most creative people is surprisingly narrow, around 120 to 130. Higher IQs can perform certain kinds of tasks better--logic, feats of memory, and so on. But if the IQ is much higher or lower than that, the window of creativity closes. Nonetheless, for some reason we believe more is better, so people yearn for tip-top IQs, and that calls for bigger memories. A fast, retentive memory is handy, but no skeleton key for survival.

Your Brain on drugs is a terrible sight, but Mr Tulip was living proof of the fact that so was Your Brain on a a cocktail of horse liniment, sherbet, and powdered water-retention pills.

Monks understand that routine frees your mind, but the biggest threat to that freedom is monotony. People complain about their poor memories, but I’ve heard it said that we don’t have a retention problem, we have an attention problem.

Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty.

Closure /klōZHər/ Noun 1. The thing women tell you what they want, but secretly they really want you to tell them why you don’t want them again, so they can try one last time to convince you that you were wrong. 2. The warped mentality that having someone tell you honestly why they don’t want you is going to somehow make you feel peace, so you can move on. 3. The neat packaging of finishing conversations because you have been stewing over it insecurely about the length of what a stalker does. 4. The one thing women don’t give themselves because if they didn’t care about the jerk they wouldn’t still be hanging onto another conversation that tells them what they already know: He just isn’t that interested in you. 5. The anal retentive art of perfecting every ending with meaning, rather than just excepting you went through something rather sucky and he doesn’t care. 6. The act of closing something with someone, when in reality you should slam the door.

In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.

Two things happen when your objectives are too broad—you don’t achieve the right results and you lose a lot of your resources. You want to avoid both of those.

If your objectives are too broad, they can dilute your project.

Discovering a cure for a disease is one thing, but making that cure available to everyone so it can actually be used to eradicate the problem is another thing.

In another surprise, when letters are omitted from words in a text, requiring the reader to supply them, reading is slowed, and retention improves.

Answering does not only measure what you remember, it increases overall retention.

Power… transforms individual psychology such that the powerful think and act in ways that lead to the retention and acquisition of power,

Learn to practise peace because if you have no attention you have no retention.

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient - at others, so bewildered and so weak - and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond controul! - We are to be sure a miracle every way - but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.

To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet. We look for this security by fortifying and enclosing ourselves in innumerable ways. We want the protection of being “exclusive” and “special,” seeking to belong to the safest church, the best nation, the highest class, the right set, and the “nice” people. These defenses lead to divisions between us, and so to more insecurity demanding more defenses. Of course it is all done in the sincere belief that we are trying to do the right things and live in the best way; but this, too, is a contradiction.

When you send out a feedback form to your customers and they share their opinions with you, don’t just ignore them. It’s time for you to make a decision based on what your customers have just shared with you.

What the hell is on my wedding dress?” The fastest way to get demoted from bridesmaid to dishonored guest is to vomit on the bride’s wedding gown. But if you do ever vomit on a wedding gown, make sure the bride is the perfect mix of anal-retentive, hyper planner, and fairy-tale whimsical.

Therein, ye gods, ye make the weak most strong; Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat. Nor stony wall, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit: But life being weary of these worldly bars Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

If the research is done for brand awareness and the results don't show any rosy picture, then maybe you want to share those results with your marketing head who can include more brand awareness strategies in her marketing plan.

The job of any doctor, Bludau later told me, is to support quality of life, by which he meant two things: as much freedom from the ravages of disease as possible and the retention of enough function for active engagement in the world.

I spilled my cup of coffee straight onto my crotch. Superior heat retention has its drawbacks. I grimaced as the scalding liquid reached ground zero, but as I did my best to angle my jeans away from the Resnick family's last hope, my seatmate decided to dispose of her hoodie. I juggled two pressing needs: 1) Protect the nethers. 2) Leer

Neoteny is more than retaining a youthful appearance, although that is often part of it. Neoteny is the retention of all those wonderful qualities that we associate with youth: curiosity, playfulness, eagerness, fearlessness, warmth, energy. Unlike those defeated by time and age, our geezers have remained much like our geeks – open, willing to take risks, hungry for knowledge and experience, courageous, eager to see what the new day brings. Time and lost steal the zest from the unlucky, and leave them looking longingly at the past. Neoteny is a metaphor for the quality – and the gift – that keeps the fortunate of whatever age focused on all marvelous undiscovered things to come.

Information is a significant component of most organizations’ competitive strategy either by the direct collection, management, and interpretation of business information or the retention of information for day-to-day business processing. Some of the more obvious results of IS failures include reputational damage, placing the organization at a competitive disadvantage, and contractual noncompliance. These impacts should not be underestimated.

Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation and with greater cruelty.

The wise treat horniness like a hiccup; the foolish, like an asthma attack.

Sex is often an attempt to entertain oneself through one’s own genitals, through the use of someone else’s genitals.

Nothing is as engaged as a retentive human brain as uncounted events is inhibited in it

Call me anal retentive, but I like nothing more than trying to solve life’s problems with a good spreadsheet.

Finally, three smashing chords to finish, obviously intended to set off a roar of applause. I start to clap, but the man with the score glares again. One does not applaud in the midst of greatly great great music, even if the composer wants one to! Coughing, squirming, whispering, the crowd suppresses its urge to express pleasure. It’s like mass anal retention.

You can argue that it expresses a degree of difference between He closed the door and He slammed the door, and you’ll get no argument from me  . . . . but what about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before He closed the door firmly? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, isn’t firmly an extra word? Isn’t it redundant? Someone out there is now accusing me of being tiresome and anal-retentive. I deny it. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

If we lived in a culture with a higher tolerance for ambiguity, rather than obsession with measurement, fixed identity, and knowability, transition wouldn't be so confounding to people, and the process might be more normal. Epistemologically, we are anal retentive, Not rigorous, just stressed out. We need to know what a trans girl is. What are you, trans people get asked. Where are you from, people of color get asked. White supremacist capitalism wants to make a map of everything and then monetize the ways that things move around on the map. Basically literally, the museum.

An ejaculation is a waste of nutrients, unless it leads to pregnancy … and intentionally.

Horniness pretty much always oversells an orgasm.

Imagination is all too often wasted on masturbation.

This has been done by masters of the trade and Garcia had taken in every stock situation with amazing powers of retention, but he had not put things together right and had used extraordinary discernment in not adding one single touch of originality.

The idea is that people remember two things about an experience: the peak, and the end. In a poker game, when people think about another player they'll mostly remember any really good hands that the player got, and how he was doing at the end of the game. You took care to win only on believable hands and to leave on a losing streak—you completely blanked their peak-end retention.

...the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them, even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness. To be deprived of it is to be de-humanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness, and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased... [They] learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people: Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point in which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty... degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.

My point in setting these two descriptions up in this way is simply this: the nature of creative activity itself – what the brain does, and the social and psychic conditions needed for its nurture – has remained essentially the same between Thomas’s time and our own. Human beings did not suddenly acquire imagination and intuition with Coleridge, having previously been poor clods. The difference is that whereas now geniuses are said to have creative imagination which they express in intricate reasoning and original discovery, in earlier times they were said to have richly retentive memories, which they expressed in intricate reasoning and original discovery.

It was the kind of thing brands had started posting recently, as if they were moral entities instead of capitalist enterprises, as if they had values beyond customer retention and profit margin. We’d come to expect this from them—they were now our legislators, our educators, and, most importantly, our friends. As people began to think of themselves more and more as brands, brands started to feel more and more like people.

It’s really simple. People what to be where they feel valued and where they have the full capacity to provide value. When people have that, they stay. When they don’t, they leave. Companies that provide this to employees experience retention. Companies that don’t, experience attrition.

To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet. We look for this security by fortifying and enclosing ourselves in innumerable ways. We want the protection of being “exclusive” and “special,” seeking to belong to the safest church, the best nation, the highest class, the right set, and the “nice” people. These defenses lead to divisions between us, and so to more insecurity demanding more defenses. Of course it is all done in the sincere belief that we are trying to do the right things and live in the best way; but this, too, is a contradiction. I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good “I” who is going to improve the bad “me.” “I,” who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward “me,” and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently “I” will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make “me” behave so badly.

How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind! If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient -- at others, so bewildered and so weak -- and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond controul! We are to be sure a miracle every way -- but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.

In the morning this light breasts your windowpane and, having pried your eye open like a shell, runs ahead of you, strumming its lengthy rays - like a hot-footed schoolboy running his stick along the iron grate of the park or garden - along arcades, colonnades, red-brick chimneys, saints and lions. "Depict! Depict!" it cries to you, either mistaking you for some Canaletto or Carpaccio or Guardi, or because it doesn't trust your retina's ability to retain what it makes available, not to mention your brain's capacity to absorb it. Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations. At any rate, you obey the command and grab your camera, supplementing both your brain cells and your pupil. Should this city ever be short of cash, it can go straight to Kodak for assistance - or else tax its products savagely. By the same token, as long as this place exists, as long as winter light shines upon it, Kodak shares are the best investment.

When society was patriarchal, as it was in the New Testament context and as it has been everywhere in the world except in modern society in our day, the church avoided scandal by going along with it - fundamentally evil as patriarchy was and is. Now, however, that modern society is at least officially egalitarian, the scandal is that the church is NOT going along with society, not rejoicing in the unprecedented freedom to let women and men serve according to gift and call without an arbitrary gender line. This scandal impedes both the evangelism of others and the edification - the retention and development of faith - of those already converted.

I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention. This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention. Why? For many products, metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance. In contrast, the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool. As a result, many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience. This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product.

One of the worst results of the retention of the Keynesian myths is that it not only promotes greater and greater inflation, but that it systematically diverts attention from the real causes of our unemployment, such as excessive union wage-rates, minimum wage laws, excessive and prolonged unemployment insurance, and overgenerous relief payments.

In Northamptonshire dialect 'to thaw' is 'to ungive.' The beauty of this variant I find hard to articulate, but it surely has to do with the paradox of thaw figured as restraint or retention, and the wintry notion that cold, frost and snow might themselves be a form of gift -- an addition to the landscape that will in time be subtracted by warmth.

There are millions of instances where a female is sleeping with at least one male she does not even like, because he lives in a house, and/or drives a car, she loves.

The brain is like a muscle,” he said, and memory training is a form of mental workout. Over time, like any form of exercise, it’ll make the brain fitter, quicker, and more nimble. It’s an idea that dates back to the very origins of memory training. Roman orators argued that the art of memory—the proper retention and ordering of knowledge—was a vital instrument for the invention of new ideas.

On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people. Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.

In the Ebbinghaus curve, or forgetting curve, R stands for memory retention, s is the relative strength of memory and t is time. The power of a memory can be built through repetition, but it is the memory we are recalling when we speak, not the event. And stories are annealed in the telling, edited by turns each time they are recalled...People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived.

Our mind is nothing but accumulated thoughts-good or evil recorded from the day the child is born. For memory or thought to work, a brain is needed. Software cannot work without a hardware. When a computer is damaged can we believe that its software is still somewhere in the sky? How can memory or thinking faculty exist outside brain? The neurotransmitters are responsible for the thought process and memory retention and retrival. All are elecrochemical impulses which cannot travel to sky. Our personality, individuality etc. are result of the accumulated thoughts in our brain. It is quality and nature of accumulated thoughts which decides if one is to become a scientist,poet or a terrorist. A guitar in the hands of a layman does not make any sense. If it is in the hands of a musician melodious tunes can come out. A child in the hands of lovable and intelligent parents go to heights.

Some of the test subjects were given cards that had both words printed in full, like this: Hot: Cold Others used cards that showed only the first letter of the second word, like this: Hot: C The people who used the cards with the missing letters performed much better in a subsequent test measuring how well they remembered the word pairs. Simply forcing their minds to fill in a blank, to act rather than observe, led to stronger retention of information.

Sigils are the means of guiding and uniting the partially free belief[27] with an organic desire, its carriage and retention till its purpose served in the sub-conscious self, and its means of reincarnation in the Ego. All thought can be expressed by form in true relation. Sigils are monograms of thought, for the government of energy (all heraldry, crests, monograms, are Sigils and the Karmas they govern), relating to Karma; a mathematical means of symbolising desire and giving it form that has the virtue of preventing any thought and association on that particular desire (at the magical time), escaping the detection of the Ego, so that it does not restrain or attach such desire to its own transitory images, memories and worries, but allows it free passage to the sub-consciousness.

But human memories change each time they are recalled, Jon. This is known as memory reconsolidation. It’s part of a natural updating mechanism that imbues even old memories with current information as you recall them. Thus, human memory does not so much record the past as hold knowledge likely to be useful in the future. That’s why forgetting is a human’s default state. By contrast, remembering requires a complex cascade of chemistry. Were I to increase the concentration of protein kinase C at your synapses, your memory retention would double.

The world never slows down so that we can better grasp the story, so that we can form study groups and drill each other on the recent past until we have total retention. We have exactly one second to carve a memory of that second, to sort and file and prioritize in some attempt at preservation. But then the next second has arrived, the next breeze to distract us, the next plane slicing through the sky, the next funny skip from the next funny toddler, the next squirrel fracas, and the next falling leaf. Our imaginations are busy enough capturing now that it is easy to lose just then.

In a traditional business, the only consideration that really matters is the accumulation of profit. All else is subordinated to this goal. In a co-op, the dominant consideration is whatever the workforce wants it to be, for example the maintenance of steady employment, service to the community, or the accumulation of profit (to be allocated as the members decide). We’ll see below that, as a rule, workers prefer the continued employment of as much of the workforce as possible to the retention of high revenues, which in hard times means that they accept pay cuts in order to avoid layoffs.

When practice conditions are varied or retrieval is interleaved with the practice of other material, we increase our abilities of discrimination and induction and the versatility with which we can apply the learning in new settings at a later date. Interleaving and variation build new connections, expanding and more firmly entrenching knowledge in memory and increasing the number of cues for retrieval. Trying to come up with an answer rather than having it presented to you, or trying to solve a problem before being shown the solution, leads to better learning and longer retention of the correct answer or solution, even when your attempted response is wrong, so long as corrective feedback is provided.

Napping is sleep, too. In a series of experiments over the past decade, Sara Mednick of the University of California, San Diego, has found that naps of an hour to an hour and half often contain slow-wave deep sleep and REM. People who study in the morning—whether it’s words or pattern recognition games, straight retention or comprehension of deeper structure—do about 30 percent better on an evening test if they’ve had an hour-long nap than if they haven’t. “It’s changed the way I work, doing these studies,” Mednick told me. “It’s changed the way I live. With naps of an hour to an hour and half, we’ve found in some experiments that you get close to the same benefits in learning consolidation that you would from a full eighthour night’s sleep.

This brings us in another fashion to the subject of the last chapter, and to another reason for the great memories of genius. The more significant a man is, the more different personalities he unites in himself, the more interests that are contained in him, the more wide his memory must be. All men have practically the same opportunities of perception, but the vast majority of men apprehend only an infinitesimal part of what they have perceived. The ideal genius is one in whom perception and apprehension are identical in their field. Of course no such being actually exists. On the other hand, there is no man who has apprehended nothing that he has perceived. In this way we may take it that all degrees of genius (not talent) exist; no male is quite without a trace of genius. Complete genius is an ideal; no man is absolutely without the quality, and no man possesses it completely. Apprehension or absorption, and memory or retention, vary together in their extent and their permanence. There is an uninterrupted gradation from the man whose mentality is unconnected from moment to moment, and to whom no incidents can signify anything because there is within him nothing to compare them with (such an extreme, of course, does not exist) to the fully developed minds for which everything is unforgettable, because of the firm impressions made and the sureness with which they are absorbed. The extreme genius also does not exist, because even the greatest genius is not wholly a genius at every moment of his life.

This could seem counterintuitive for many dictators running communist or socialist single-party states, but a thriving private tech industry can contribute invaluable tools to help you implement a controllable internet. The reason is fairly simple: the technologies that transform internet applications into more personalized, efficient and enjoyable experiences are usually the same ones that increase the capacity to monitor its users.

Globoforce worked with Cisco to use recognition to boost employee engagement by 5 percent, and with Intuit to achieve and sustain a double-digit increase in employee engagement over a large employee base that spans six countries. Hershey’s recognition approach helped increase employee satisfaction by 11 percent. And for LinkedIn, retention rates are nearly 10 percentage points higher for new hires who are recognized four or more times. Whether we’re leading a group or a member of the team, whether we’re working in a formal or informal recognition program, it is our responsibility to say to the people who work alongside us: “We’ve got to stop and celebrate one another and our victories, no matter how small. Yes, there’s more work to be done, and things could go sideways in an hour, but that will never take away from the fact that we need to celebrate an accomplishment right now.

Chang-bo took to his bed, or rather to the quilts on the floor that was all they had left. His legs swelled up like balloons with what Mrs. Song had come to recognize as edema — fluid retention brought on by starvation. He talked incessantly about food. He spoke of the tofu soups his mother made him as a child and an unusually delicious meal of steamed crab with ginger that Mrs. Song had cooked for him when they were newlyweds. He had an uncanny ability to remember details of dishes she had cooked decades earlier. He was sweetly sentimental, even romantic, when he spoke about their meals together. He would take her hand in his own, his eyes wet and cloudy with the mist of his memories. “Come, darling. Let’s go to a good restaurant and order a nice bottle of wine,” he told his wife one morning when they were stirring on the blankets. They hadn’t eaten in three days. Mrs. Song looked at her husband with alarm, worried that he was hallucinating. She ran out the door to the market, moving fast and forgetting all about the pain in her back. She was determined to steal, beg — whatever it took — to get some food for her husband. She spotted her older sister selling noodles. Her sister wasn’t faring well — her skin was flaked just like Chang-bo’s from malnutrition — so Mrs. Song had resisted asking her for help, but now she was desperate, and of course, her sister couldn’t refuse. “I’ll pay you back,” Mrs. Song promised as she ran back home, the adrenaline pumping her legs. Chang-bo was curled up on his side under the blanket. Mrs. Song called his name. When he didn’t respond, she went to turn him over — it wasn’t diffcult now that he had lost so much weight, but his legs and arms were stiff and got in the way. Mrs. Song pounded and pounded on his chest, screaming for help even as she knew it was too late.

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives. William James first wrote about the curious warping and foreshortening of psychological time in his Principles of Psychology in 1890: “In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out,” he wrote. “But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.” Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. “If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human,” said Ed.

Metalearning: First Draw a Map. Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle. Discover how to do good research and how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills more easily. Focus: Sharpen Your Knife. Cultivate the ability to concentrate. Carve out chunks of time when you can focus on learning, and make it easy to just do it. Directness: Go Straight Ahead. Learn by doing the thing you want to become good at. Don’t trade it off for other tasks, just because those are more convenient or comfortable. Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point. Be ruthless in improving your weakest points. Break down complex skills into small parts; then master those parts and build them back together again. Retrieval: Test to Learn. Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating it. Test yourself before you feel confident, and push yourself to actively recall information rather than passively review it. Feedback: Don’t Dodge the Punches. Feedback is harsh and uncomfortable. Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way. Extract the signal from the noise, so you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket. Understand what you forget and why. Learn to remember things not just for now but forever. Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up. Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts and skills. Understand how understanding works, and don’t recourse to cheap tricks of memorization to avoid deeply knowing things. Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone. All of these principles are only starting points. True mastery comes not just from following the path trodden by others but from exploring possibilities they haven’t yet imagined.

Not moderation, but elimination is the ideal in regard to evolution-retarding habits. In a sanitarium for dope-addicts it may be advisable to allow patients temporarily a restricted — but at the same time gradually diminishing — use of narcotics. Similarly it may be advisable to condone that sex-addicts (that is to say: all those who have habituated themselves to sexual acts) do not suddenly break their habit, provided they will gradually overcome it. But no sane person can opine that a continuous use of drugs should be prescribed for the dope-addicted patients — not even in a so-called moderate degree. Still less that it should also be recommended for those who are free from the addiction. As little reasonable is it to claim that quasi moderate sexual activity must continually be indulged in by those who are addicted to such acts, and that also it should be recommended for all who are not so addicted.

Man is the first product of evolution to be capable of controlling evolutionary destiny.'" Endowed as he is with reasoning powers, he must independently decide up on his own behavior, without the compelling guidance by instinct. Supplied with mind, he is expected to cooperate consciously with nature in her further evolutionary program. Unfortunately humanity has arrantly failed to make a serious effort to promote its own further progress. Instead of using the power of the mind to understand the responsibilities which freedom from blind obedience to instinct entails, mankind has refused to listen whenever it was reminded of the requirements of the evolutionary law. It was so much easier to lend an ear to the promptings of desire, which was an unknown element up to the human stage. It must have been very soon after the acquisition of mental self-consciousness and his becoming aware of stirrings of primitive impulses, that man began to use the mind to stimulate the desires of the body. In this way he has indulged the almost negligible sexual impulse which he inherited from the animal kingdom, until it has become a desire so strong that he has difficulty to control it. Overstimulated by this unnaturally strong desire of his own making, man has looked for arbitrary ways in which to gratify it. Although reducing actual reproduction, he has discovered ways of unreproductive sexual action. But every such act, whatever form it takes, is a misuse of sex and uses up some of the life force that should be utilized for the support and the development of higher faculties. "The record of our race progress clearly shows how our upward movement has been checked ... by that misuse.