Routine And Consistency Quotes

It hit her like a sledgehammer, and it was then that she knew what to feel. A liquid trail of hate flooded her chest. Knowing that she would hate him long and well filled her with pleasant anticipation, like when you know you are going to fall in love with someone and you wait for the happy signs. Hating BoyBoy, she could get on with it, and have the safety, the thrill, the consistency of that hatred as long as she wanted or needed it to define and strengthen her or protect her from routine vulnerabilities.

Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van’s arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: "real things" which were unfrequent and priceless, simply "things" which formed the routine stuff of life; and "ghost things," also called "fogs," such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a "tower," or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a "bridge." "Real towers" and "real bridges" were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral "thing" might look or even actually become "real" or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid "fog." When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with "ruined towers" and "broken bridges.

The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.” —Lin Yutang

We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period, provided we work slowly and consistently.

it’s true that frequency doesn’t have to be a daily frequency; what’s most important is consistency. The more widely spaced your work times, however, the less you reap all of these benefits.

Habit, routine, and too much consistency numb our minds and pave the road for us to sleepwalk through our lives. Nothing stays the same. Everything passes, and everything changes. However, do not move too much. As an apple tree cannot bear fruit if it is too often transplanted, neither will a knight who is always building a new castle.

Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.

At the end of the day—or, really, from the beginning—building a routine is all about persistence and consistency. Don’t wait for inspiration; create a framework for it.

People get sick, take vacations, and have emergencies. We’re not aiming for perfection here, only consistency. Keeping the habit alive means keeping it rooted in your routine no matter how tiny it is.

Most people live in their childhood homes for a while. It softens the edges on the memories and gives them a comforting wash, a kind of afterglow, set against routine and consistency. For kids like me for whom every experience is set against a different visual and intense circumstance, it’s really easy to remember details of an early life. I see this now as a priceless gift…but it isn’t one I’d give to my kids.

If you do a little bit each day, you can get a lot done over the course of months and years (see above). Also, it’s true that frequency doesn’t have to be a daily frequency; what’s most important is consistency.

While everybody tries to be as close as possible to the rest, everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the deep sense of insecurity, anxiety and guilt which always results when human separateness cannot be overcome. Our civilization offers many palliatives which help people to be consciously unaware of this aloneness: first of all the strict routine of bureaucratized, mechanical work, which helps people to remain unaware of their most fundamental human desires, of the longing for transcendence and unity. Inasmuch as the routine alone does not succeed in this, man overcomes his unconscious despair by the routine of amusement, the passive consumption of sounds and sights offered by the amusement industry; furthermore by the satisfaction of buying ever new things, and soon exchanging them for others. Modern man is actually close to the picture Huxley describes in his Brave New World: well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, yet without self, without any except the most superficial contact with his fellow men, guided by the slogans which Huxley formulated so succinctly, such as: “When the individual feels, the community reels”; or “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today,” or, as the crowning statement: “Everybody is happy nowadays.” Man’s happiness today consists in “having fun.” Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and “taking in” commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swallowed.

It’s important to be able to recognise and seize crux moments when they do appear, but much of the time one is faced with quotidian tasks and routines. There’s an art and a science to these things; the art consists in trying to improvise more inventive means of breaking a silence and the science consists in trying to make the periods of silence bearable.

It is believed by many that the military life is one of adventure and excitement. In truth, that life more often consists of long periods of routine, even boredom, with only brief intervals of challenge and danger. Enemies seldom seek out their opponents. The warrior must become a hunter, searching and stalking with craft and patience. Successes are often achieved by a confluence of small things: stray facts, unwary or overheard conversations, logistical vectors. If the hunter is persistent, the pattern will become visible, and the enemy will be found. Only then will the routine be broken by combat. It's not supervising, therefore, that those seeking sometimes weary of long and arduous pursuits. They are relieved when the enemy appears of his own accord, standing firm and issuing a challenge.

I genuinely believe that relationships with family and close friends are one of the greatest sources of happiness in life. It sounds simple, but like any important investment, these relationships need consistent attention and care. But there are two forces that will be constantly working against this happening. First, you’ll be routinely tempted to invest your resources elsewhere—in things that will provide you with a more immediate payoff. And second, your family and friends rarely shout the loudest to demand your attention. They love you and they want to support your career, too. That can add up to neglecting the people you care about most in the world. The theory of good money, bad money explains that the clock of building a fulfilling relationship is ticking from the start. If you don’t nurture and develop those relationships, they won’t be there to support you if you find yourself traversing some of the more challenging stretches of life, or as one of the most important sources of happiness in your life.

People have no idea the level of stress you internalize when your daily routine consists of navigating a minefield of nonsense not of your own making.

The average person wastes his life. He has a great deal of energy but he wastes it. The life of an average person seems at the end utterly meaningless…without significance. When he looks back…what has he done? MIND The mind creates routine for its own safety and convenience. Tradition becomes our security. But when the mind is secure it is in decay. We all want to be famous people…and the moment we want to be something…we are no longer free. Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential…the what is. It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything new…and in that there’s joy. To awaken this capacity in oneself and in others is real education. SOCIETY It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals…whereas culture has invented a single mold to which we must conform. A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person because he conforms to a pattern. He repeats phrases and thinks in a groove. What happens to your heart and your mind when you are merely imitative, naturally they wither, do they not? The great enemy of mankind is superstition and belief which is the same thing. When you separate yourself by belief tradition by nationally it breeds violence. Despots are only the spokesmen for the attitude of domination and craving for power which is in the heart of almost everyone. Until the source is cleared there will be confusion and classes…hate and wars. A man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country to any religion to any political party. He is concerned with the understanding of mankind. FEAR You have religion. Yet the constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear. You can only be afraid of what you think you know. One is never afraid of the unknown…one is afraid of the known coming to an end. A man who is not afraid is not aggressive. A man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free and peaceful mind. You want to be loved because you do not love…but the moment you really love, it is finished. You are no longer inquiring whether someone loves you or not. MEDITATION The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence. In meditation you will discover the whisperings of your own prejudices…your own noises…the monkey mind. You have to be your own teacher…truth is a pathless land. The beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are…where you are going…what the end is. Down deep we all understand that it is truth that liberates…not your effort to be free. The idea of ourselves…our real selves…is your escape from the fact of what you really are. Here we are talking of something entirely different….not of self improvement…but the cessation of self. ADVICE Take a break with the past and see what happens. Release attachment to outcomes…inside you will feel good no matter what. Eventually you will find that you don’t mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom…it is timeless spiritual truth. If you can really understand the problem the answer will come out of it. The answer is not separate from the problem. Suffer and understand…for all of that is part of life. Understanding and detachment…this is the secret. DEATH There is hope in people…not in societies not in systems but only in you and me. The man who lives without conflict…who lives with beauty and love…is not frightened by death…because to love is to die.

The tiger incorporates meditation and running as a natural part of the daily routine, for these endeavors can bring health of body and mind only if we are consistent in practicing them.

But the point is not to do one thing. The point is to master the habit of showing up. The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved. If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details. Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis. You have to standardize before you can optimize. As you master the art of showing up, the first two minutes simply become a ritual at the beginning of a larger routine. This is not merely a hack to make habits easier but actually the ideal way to master a difficult skill. The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things. By doing the same warm-up before every workout, you make it easier to get into a state of peak performance. By following the same creative ritual, you make it easier to get into the hard work of creating. By developing a consistent power-down habit, you make it easier to get to bed at a reasonable time each night.

Misplaced effort in the spiritual life often consists in stubbornly insisting upon compulsive routines which seem to us to be necessary because they accord with our own short-sighted notions.

Your daily routine should be consisting of, including, or involving some form of momentum. Your mission is to accept where you are, take responsibility for your life, and make progress everyday.   

Success isn't a destination, it's a journey. Every small action you take in your daily routine is like a stepping stone towards your goals. Embrace the process, stay consistent, and you'll be amazed at what you can achieve

He has a really consistent routine. He comes in in the morning at around 8:30. He reads five newspapers. He reads The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Omaha World Herald. Then he has a stack of reports on his desk from the companies Berkshire owns, and some trade press like American Banker or oil and gas journals, and through the rest of the day, he alternates between flipping through this stuff and then talking on the phone to people either who call him or who he calls. He never calls his managers; they can call him. He is really accessible, but he leaves them alone. Then he has CNBC on all day long with the crawl, with the sound muted and if he sees his name cross along the bottom and they are talking about him, he will turn the sound on to find out what they are saying. That is his day. He doesn't do meetings -- there are no meetings.

Your routine could be traveling to a different country every month. It could be being routinely un-routine. The point is not what the routine consists of, but how steady and safe your subconscious mind is made through repetitive motions and expected outcomes.

Failure to use tax money to finance things not liked by the taxpaying public is routinely called ‘censorship.’ If such terminology were used consistently, virtually all of life would be just one long, unending censorship, as individuals choose whether to buy apples instead of oranges, vacations rather than violins, furniture rather than mutual funds. But of course no such consistency is intended. This strained use of the word ‘censorship’ appears only selectively, to describe public choices and values at variance with the choices and values of the anointed.

Find some time every morning to work on your own, personal goals. We are (or can be) the most effective in the hours in the morning, so use that time to work on yourself. You might not be able to find a lot of time, but consistent, targeted progress will quickly build up to massive results.

There are some people about whom it is difficult to say anything which would describe them immediately and fully in their most typical and characteristic aspects; these are the people who are usually called "ordinary" and accounted as "the majority," and who actually do make up the great majority of society. In their novels and stories writers most often try to choose and present vividly and artistically social types which are extremely seldom encountered in real life, and which are nevertheless more real than real life itself. Podkolyosin, viewed as a type, in perhaps exaggerated, but he is hardly unknown. How many clever people having learned from Gogol about Podkolyosin at once discover that great numbers of their friends bear a terrific resemblance to Podkolyosin. They knew before Gogol that their friends were like Podkolyosin, except they did not know yet that that was their name... Nevertheless the question remains before us: what is the novelist to do with the absolutely "ordinary" people, and how can he present them to readers so that they are at all interesting? To leave them out of a story completely is not possible, because ordinary people are at every moment, by and large, the necessary links in the chain of human affairs; leaving them out, therefore, means to destroy credibility. To fill a novel entirely with types or, simply for the sake of interest, strange and unheard-of people, would be improbable and most likely not even interesting. In our opinion the writer must try to find interesting and informative touches even among commonplace people. When, for example, the very nature of certain ordinary persons consists precisely of their perpetual and unvarying ordinariness, or, better still, when in spite of their most strenuous efforts to life themselves out of the rut of ordinariness and routine, then such persons acquire a certain character of their own-the typical character of mediocrity which refuses to remain what it is and desires at all costs to become original and independent, without having the slightest capacity for independence.

At night, as beneath him his parents completed their routines, the banging of the old pipes as they washed their faces and the sudden thunk into silence as they turned down the living-room radiators better than any clock at indicating that was eleven, eleven thirty, midnight, he made lists of what he needed to resolve, and fast, in the following year: his work (at a standstill), his love life (nonexistent), his sexuality (unresolved), his future (uncertain). The four items were always the same, although sometimes their order of priority changed. Also consistent was his ability to precisely diagnose their status, coupled with his utter inability to provide any solutions.

OPEN YOURSELF TO SERENDIPITY Chance encounters can also provide enormous benefits for your projects—and your life. Being friendly while standing in line for coffee at a conference might lead to a conversation, a business card exchange, and the first investment in your company a few months later. The person sitting next to you at a concert who chats you up during intermission might end up becoming your largest customer. Or, two strangers sitting in a nail salon exchanging stories about their families might lead to a blind date, which might lead to a marriage. (This is how I met my wife. Lucky for me, neither stranger had a smartphone, so they resorted to matchmaking.) I am consistently humbled and amazed by just how much creation and realization is the product of serendipity. Of course, these chance opportunities must be noticed and pursued for them to have any value. It makes you wonder how much we regularly miss. As we tune in to our devices during every moment of transition, we are letting the incredible potential of serendipity pass us by. The greatest value of any experience is often found in its seams. The primary benefits of a conference often have nothing to do with what happens onstage. The true reward of a trip to the nail salon may be more than the manicure. When you value the power of serendipity, you start noticing it at work right away. Try leaving the smartphone in your pocket the next time you’re in line or in a crowd. Notice one source of unexpected value on every such occasion. Develop the discipline to allow for serendipity.

Thieving was not a sheer absurdity. It was a form of human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in an industrious world; it was work undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries, in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops. It was labour, whose practical difference from the other forms of labour consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or gritty dust, but in what may be briefly defined in its own special phraseology as "Seven years' hard". Chief Inspector Heat was, of course, not insensible to the gravity of moral differences. But neither were the thieves he had been looking after. They submitted to the severe sanction of a morality familiar to Chief Inspector Heat with a certain resignation. They were his fellow citizens gone wrong because of imperfect education, Chief Inspector Heat believed; but allowing for that difference, he could understand the mind of a burglar, because, as a matter of fact, the mind and the instincts of a burglar are of the same kind as the mind and the instincts of a police officer. Both recognize the same conventions, and have a working knowledge of each other's methods and of the routine of their respective trades. They understand each other, which is advantageous to both, and establishes a sort of amenity in their relations. Products of the same machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious, they take the machine for granted in different ways, but with a seriousness essentially the same. The mind of Chief Inspector Heat was inaccessible to ideas of revolt. But his thieves were not rebels. His bodily vigour, his cool, inflexible manner, his courage, and his fairness, had secured for him much respect and some adulation in the sphere of his early successes. He had felt himself revered and admired. And Chief Inspector Heat, arrested within six paces of the anarchist nicknamed the Professor, gave a thought of regret to the world of thieves--sane, without morbid ideals, working by routine, respectful of constituted authorities, free from all taint of hate and despair.

It is for such reasons that I always ask my clinical clients first about sleep. Do they wake up in the morning at approximately the time the typical person wakes up, and at the same time every day? If the answer is no, fixing that is the first thing I recommend. It doesn’t matter so much if they go to bed at the same time each evening, but waking up at a consistent hour is a necessity. Anxiety and depression cannot be easily treated if the sufferer has unpredictable daily routines. The systems that mediate negative emotion are tightly tied to the properly cyclical circadian rhythms. The next thing I ask about is breakfast. I counsel my clients to eat a fat and protein-heavy breakfast as soon as possible after they awaken (no simple carbohydrates, no sugars, as they are digested too rapidly, and produce a blood-sugar spike and rapid dip). This is because anxious and depressed people are already stressed, particularly if their lives have not been under control for a good while. Their bodies are therefore primed to hypersecrete insulin, if they engage in any complex or demanding activity. If they do so after fasting all night and before eating, the excess insulin in their bloodstream will mop up all their blood sugar. Then they become hypoglycemic and psych​ophys​iologi​cally unstable.

It’s not until situations are difficult, when problems come up and temptation is great, that you get to prove your worthiness for progress. As Jim Rohn would say, “Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.” When you hit the wall in your disciplines, routines, rhythms, and consistency, realize that’s when you are separating yourself from your old self, scaling that wall, and finding your new powerful, triumphant, and victorious self.

Research over the last forty years has consistently found that in comparison to children with less-involved fathers, children with involved and loving fathers have higher levels of psychological well-being and better cognitive abilities.14 When fathers provide even just routine child care, children have higher levels of educational and economic achievement and lower delinquency rates.15 Their children even tend to be more empathetic and socially competent.16 These findings hold true for children from all socioeconomic backgrounds, whether or not the mother is highly involved. We all need to encourage men to lean in to their families.

You can write great books," the great man continued. "Or you can have kids. It's up to you." [...] Writing was a practice. The more you wrote, the better a writer you became, and the more books you produced. Excellence plus productivity, that was the formula for sustained success, and time was the coefficient of both. Children, the great man said, were notorious thieves of time. [...] Writers need to be irresponsible, ultimately, to everything but the writing, free of commitments to everything but the daily word count. Children, by contrast, needed stability, consistency, routine, and above all, commitment. In short, he was saying, children are the opposite of writing.

As you’ll read in this book, the keys to preparation are clarity, commitment, and composure. These are necessary for developing a sound, consistent routine. The ideal state of mind for action is feeling confident, focused, and in the flow, with body and mind synchronized in the present moment. This allows you to execute a shot free from the interference of mental chatter or paralysis from analysis. The best response to results is one that enhances future performance. You’ll be introduced to a unique “post-shot routine.” This special way of relating to the outcome of a shot is highly effective in fostering confidence by building on success and learning from mistakes without negativity.

Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, "normal" families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children. Such families should have a specific authority structure, namely, a father-head earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and children. Idealizing the traditional family as a private haven from a public world, family is seen as being held together through primary emotional bonds of love and caring. assuming a relatively fixed sexual division of labor, wherein women's roles are defined as primarily in the home with men's in the public world of work, the traditional family ideal also assumes the separation of work and family. Defined as a natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, instead this monolithic family type is actually supported by government policy. It is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born in this family. In general, everything the imagined traditional family ideal is thought to be, African-American families are not. Two elements of the traditional family ideal are especially problematic for African-American women. First, the assumed split between the "public" sphere of paid employment and the "private" sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for U.S. Black women. Under slavery, U.S. Black women worked without pay in the allegedly public sphere of Southern agriculture and had their family privacy routinely violated. Second, the public/private binary separating the family households from the paid labor market is fundamental in explaining U.S. gender ideology. If one assumes that real men work and real women take care of families, then African-Americans suffer from deficient ideas concerning gender. in particular, Black women become less "feminine," because they work outside the home, work for pay and thus compete with men, and their work takes them away from their children. Framed through this prism of an imagined traditional family ideal, U.S. Black women's experiences and those of other women of color are typically deemed deficient. Rather than trying to explain why Black women's work and family patterns deviate from the seeming normality of the traditional family ideal, a more fruitful approach lies in challenging the very constructs of work and family themselves. Understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions.

Woody Allen once said that 80 percent of success is showing up. Having written and directed fifty films in almost as many years, Allen clearly knows something about accomplishment. How, when, and where you show up is the single most important factor in executing on your ideas. That’s why so many creative visionaries stick to a daily routine. Choreographer Twyla Tharp gets up at the crack of dawn every day and hails a cab to go to the gym—a ritual she calls her “trigger moment.” Painter Ross Bleckner reads the paper, meditates, and then gets to the studio by 8 a.m. so that he can work in the calm quiet of the early morning. Writer Ernest Hemingway wrote five hundred words a day, come hell or high water. Truly great creative achievements require hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of work, and we have to make time every single day to put in those hours. Routines help us do this by setting expectations about availability, aligning our workflow with our energy levels, and getting our minds into a regular rhythm of creating. At the end of the day—or, really, from the beginning—building a routine is all about persistence and consistency. Don’t wait for inspiration; create a framework for it.

Before I knew it, the first animal had entered the chute. Various cowboys were at different positions around the animal and began carrying out their respective duties. Tim looked at me and yelled, “Stick it in!” With utter trepidation, I slid the wand deep into the steer’s rectum. This wasn’t natural. This wasn’t normal. At least it wasn’t for me. This was definitely against God’s plan. I was supposed to check the monitor and announce if the temperature was above ninety-degrees. The first one was fine. But before I had a chance to remove the probe, Tim set the hot branding iron against the steer’s left hip. The animal let out a guttural Mooooooooooooo!, and as he did, the contents of its large intestine emptied all over my hand and forearm. Tim said, “Okay, Ree, you can take it out now.” I did. I didn’t know what to do. My arm was covered in runny, stinky cow crap. Was this supposed to happen? Should I say anything? I glanced at my sister, who was looking at me, completely horrified. The second animal entered the chute. The routine began again. I stuck it in. Tim branded. The steer bellowed. The crap squirted out. I was amazed at how consistent and predictable the whole nasty process was, and how nonchalant everyone--excluding my sister--was acting. But then slowly…surely…I began to notice something. On about the twentieth animal, I began inserting the thermometer. Tim removed his branding iron from the fire and brought it toward the steer’s hip. At the last second, however, I fumbled with my device and had to stop for a moment. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that when I paused, Tim did, too. It appeared he was actually waiting until I had the thermometer fully inserted before he branded the animal, ensuring that I’d be right in the line of fire when everything came pouring out. He had planned this all along, the dirty dog. Seventy-eight steers later, we were finished. I was a sight. Layer upon layer of manure covered my arm. I’m sure I was pale and in shock. The cowboys grinned politely. Tim directed me to an outdoor faucet where I could clean my arm. Marlboro Man watched as he gathered up the tools and the gear…and he chuckled. As my sister and I pulled away in the car later that day, she could only say, “Oh. My. God.” She made me promise never to return to that awful place. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d found out later that this, from Tim’s perspective, was my initiation. It was his sick, twisted way of measuring my worth.

But if it is true that people have known for thousands of years what it takes to become free and in control of one’s life, why haven’t we made more progress in this direction? Why are we as helpless, or more so, than our ancestors were in facing the chaos that interferes with happiness? There are at least two good explanations for this failure. In the first place, the kind of knowledge—or wisdom—one needs for emancipating consciousness is not cumulative. It cannot be condensed into a formula; it cannot be memorized and then routinely applied. Like other complex forms of expertise, such as a mature political judgment or a refined aesthetic sense, it must be earned through trial-and-error experience by each individual, generation after generation. Control over consciousness is not simply a cognitive skill. At least as much as intelligence, it requires the commitment of emotions and will. It is not enough to know how to do it; one must do it, consistently, in the same way as athletes or musicians who must keep practicing what they know in theory. And this is never easy. Progress is relatively fast in fields that apply knowledge to the material world, such as physics or genetics. But it is painfully slow when knowledge is to be applied to modify our own habits and desires.

Processing Change One of the ways people fundamentally differ from one another is that individuals vary in how much emotional energy it takes for them to process change or the idea of change. For example, some people may find it incredibly jarring when they have to deal with last-minute changes in plans or they have to work with different people from those they usually work with. People who need time and psychological space to adjust to change won’t necessarily be anxious. However, they’ll tend to develop anxiety if they aren’t allowed, or don’t allow themselves, the time they need to adjust to change, or if they don’t have any emotional energy in their tank to cope with small changes in plans. Are folks who require more energy to process change always rigid and unadaptable? No. They can still be very good at adapting—if they have the self-knowledge to navigate changes in a way that works for their nature. They will generally function best if they have habits, routines, and relationships in their life that give them a base level of consistency and familiarity. This could be as simple as eating the same thing for breakfast every day, having stable long-term relationships, or having particular routines for what they like to do on the weekend. Having some stable, familiar elements to life can help people tolerate changes in other areas.

Eichmann remembered this because it was unusual for him to receive social invitations from members of governments; it was an honor. Mach, as Eichmann recalled, was a nice, easygoing fellow who invited him to bowl with him. Did he really have no other business in Bratislava in the middle of the war than to go bowling with the Minister of the Interior? No, absolutely no other business; he remembered it all very well, how they bowled, and how drinks were served just before the news of the attempt on Heydrich’s life arrived. Four months and fifty-five tapes later, Captain Less, the Israeli examiner, came back to this point, and Eichmann told the same story in nearly identical words, adding that this day had been “unforgettable,” because his “superior had been assassinated.” This time, however, he was confronted with a document that said he had been sent to Bratislava to talk over “the current evacuation action against Jews from Slovakia.” He admitted his error at once: “Clear, clear, that was an order from Berlin, they did not send me there to go bowling.” Had he lied twice, with great consistency? Hardly. To evacuate and deport Jews had become routine business; what stuck in his mind was bowling, being the guest of a Minister, and hearing of the attack on Heydrich. And it was characteristic of his kind of memory that he could absolutely not recall the year in which this memorable day fell, on which “the hangman” was shot by Czech patriots.

There is a third premise of the recovery movement that I do endorse enthusiastically: The patterns of problems in childhood that recur into adulthood are significant. They can be found by exploring your past, by looking into the corners of your childhood. Coming to grips with your childhood will not yield insight into how you became the adult you are: The causal links between childhood events and what you have now become are simply too weak. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make your adult problems go away: Working through the past does not seem to be any sort of cure for troubles. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make you feel any better for long, nor will it raise your self-esteem. Coming to grips with childhood is a different and special voyage. The sages urged us to know ourselves, and Plato warned us that the unexamined life is not worth living. Knowledge acquired on this voyage is about patterns, about the tapestry that we have woven. It is not knowledge about causes. Are there consistent mistakes we have made and still make? In the flush of victory, do I forget my friends—in the Little League and when I got that last big raise? (People have always told me I'm a good loser but a bad winner.) Do I usually succeed in one domain but fail in another? (I wish I could get along with the people I really love as well as I do with my employers.) Does a surprising emotion arise again and again? (I always pick fights with people I love right before they have to go away.) Does my body often betray me? (I get a lot of colds when big projects are due.) You probably want to know why you are a bad winner, why you get colds when others expect a lot of you, and why you react to abandonment with anger. You will not find out. As important and magnetic as the “why” questions are, they are questions that psychology cannot now answer. One of the two clearest findings of one hundred years of therapy is that satisfactory answers to the great “why” questions are not easily found; maybe in fifty years things will be different; maybe never. When purveyors of the evils of “toxic shame” tell you that they know it comes from parental abuse, don't believe them. No one knows any such thing. Be skeptical even of your own “Aha!” experiences: When you unearth the fury you felt that first kindergarten day, do not assume that you have found the source of your lifelong terror of abandonment. The causal links may be illusions, and humility is in order here. The other clearest finding of the whole therapeutic endeavor, however, is that change is within our grasp, almost routine, throughout adult life. So even if why we are what we are is a mystery, how to change ourselves is not. Mind the pattern. A pattern of mistakes is a call to change your life. The rest of the tapestry is not determined by what has been woven before. The weaver herself, blessed with knowledge and with freedom, can change—if not the material she must work with—the design of what comes next.

... - the Age of Anxiety, dating from around August 1945, is twenty three years old this very month - and her daily life is in essence a sandbagging operation against its seas and their tides. But this is worry and it is a little different from anxirty: Particular rather than pervasive, it arrives unannounced, without anxiety's harbingers, dread and forboding, the fearful tea in which we steep awaiting oblivion. Instead, worry turns up on the door step, the overbearing, passive aggressive out-of-town relative who insists he "won't be any trouble" even as he displaces every known routine and custom of the house for days and weeks on end; as he expropriates the sofa, the bathroom, the contents of the liqour cabinet and cigarette carton, and monopolises the telephone and the ear of anyone within shouting distance. Worry displaces the entire mood, the entire ethos of the house - even if that mood hitherto consisted largely of anxiety - and replaces it with something more substantive, more real than mere mood. You would be mightily pleased to have ordinary anxiety back in residence, for under worry there is no peace whatsoever, not even the peace of cynicism, pessimism or despair. Even when the rest of the world is abed, worry is awake, plundering the kitchen cupboards, raiding the refrigerator, playing the hifi, watching the late show until the national anthem closes the broadcast day; then noisily treading the halls, standing in your bedroom door, wondering if by any chance you are still up (knowing that of course you are), breathing and casting its shadow upon you, the silhouette of its slope-shouldered hulk and towering black wings.

Why are we as helpless, or more so, than our ancestors were in facing the chaos that interferes with happiness? There are at least two good explanations for this failure. In the first place, the kind of knowledge—or wisdom—one needs for emancipating consciousness is not cumulative. It cannot be condensed into a formula; it cannot be memorized and then routinely applied. Like other complex forms of expertise, such as a mature political judgment or a refined aesthetic sense, it must be earned through trial-and-error experience by each individual, generation after generation. Control over consciousness is not simply a cognitive skill. At least as much as intelligence, it requires the commitment of emotions and will. It is not enough to know how to do it; one must do it, consistently, in the same way as athletes or musicians who must keep practicing what they know in theory. And this is never easy. Progress is relatively fast in fields that apply knowledge to the material world, such as physics or genetics. But it is painfully slow when knowledge is to be applied to modify our own habits and desires. Second, the knowledge of how to control consciousness must be reformulated every time the cultural context changes. The wisdom of the mystics, of the Sufi, of the great yogis, or of the Zen masters might have been excellent in their own time—and might still be the best, if we lived in those times and in those cultures. But when transplanted to contemporary California those systems lose quite a bit of their original power. They contain elements that are specific to their original contexts, and when these accidental components are not distinguished from what is essential, the path to freedom gets overgrown by brambles of meaningless mumbo jumbo. Ritual form wins over substance, and

What to Do Tonight Tell your child, “You’re the expert on you. Nobody really knows you better than you know yourself, because nobody really knows what it feels like to be you.” Give your child a choice about something you may have previously decided for her. Or ask her opinion about something. (If they’re young, you can frame it as, “Do you think we should do it this way or that way?”) Have a family meeting where you problem solve together about what chores need to be done and who should do them. Give them options. Could they walk the dog instead of doing the dinner dishes? Take out the trash instead of cleaning the toilet? Do they want to do it each Sunday or each Wednesday? Morning or night? Keep a consistent schedule, but let them choose that schedule. Make a list of things your child would like to be in charge of, and make a plan to shift responsibility for some of these things from you to him or her. Ask your child whether something in his life isn’t working for him (his homework routine, bedtime, management of electronics) and if he has any ideas about how to make it work better. Do a cost-benefit analysis of any decision you make for your child that she sees differently. Tell your child about decisions you’ve made that, in retrospect, were not the best decisions—and how you were able to learn and grow from them. Have a talk in which you point out that your kid has got a good mind. Recall some times when he’s made a good decision or felt strongly about something and turned out to be right. If he’ll let you, make a list together of the things he’s decided for himself that have worked well. Tell your teen you want him to have lots of practice running his own life before he goes off to college—and that you want to see that he can run his life without running it into the ground before he goes away. Emphasize logical and natural consequences, and encourage the use of family meetings to discuss family rules or family policies more generally (e.g., no gaming during the week).

One way to try to answer the question “What makes us human?” is to ask “What makes us different from great apes?” or, to be more precise, from nonhuman apes, since, of course, humans are apes. As just about every human by now knows—and as the experiments with Dokana once again confirm—nonhuman apes are extremely clever. They’re capable of making inferences, of solving complex puzzles, and of understanding what other apes are (and are not) likely to know. When researchers from Leipzig performed a battery of tests on chimpanzees, orangutans, and two-and-a-half-year-old children, they found that the chimps, the orangutans, and the kids performed comparably on a wide range of tasks that involved understanding of the physical world. For example, if an experimenter placed a reward inside one of three cups, and then moved the cups around, the apes found the goody just as often as the kids—indeed, in the case of chimps, more often. The apes seemed to grasp quantity as well as the kids did—they consistently chose the dish containing more treats, even when the choice involved using what might loosely be called math—and also seemed to have just as good a grasp of causality. (The apes, for instance, understood that a cup that rattled when shaken was more likely to contain food than one that did not.) And they were equally skillful at manipulating simple tools. Where the kids routinely outscored the apes was in tasks that involved reading social cues. When the children were given a hint about where to find a reward—someone pointing to or looking at the right container—they took it. The apes either didn’t understand that they were being offered help or couldn’t follow the cue. Similarly, when the children were shown how to obtain a reward, by, say, ripping open a box, they had no trouble grasping the point and imitating the behavior. The apes, once again, were flummoxed. Admittedly, the kids had a big advantage in the social realm, since the experimenters belonged to their own species. But, in general, apes seem to lack the impulse toward collective problem-solving that’s so central to human society. “Chimps do a lot of incredibly smart things,” Michael Tomasello, who heads the institute’s department of developmental and comparative psychology, told me. “But the main difference we’ve seen is 'putting our heads together.' If you were at the zoo today, you would never have seen two chimps carry something heavy together. They don’t have this kind of collaborative project.

unless we’re missing our guess, your life and the gospel probably haven’t always felt in sync on a lot of days, in most of the years since. After the emotional scene with the trembling chin and the wadded-up Kleenexes, where you truly felt the weight of your own sin and the Spirit’s conviction, you’ve had a hard time consistently enjoying and experiencing what God’s supposedly done to remedy this self-defeating situation. Even on those repeat occasions when you’ve crashed and burned and resolved to do better, you’ve typically only been able, for a little while, to sit on your hands, trying to stay in control of yourself by rugged determination and brute sacrifice (which you sure hope God is noticing and adding to your score). But you’ll admit, it’s not exactly a feeling of freedom and victory. And anytime the wheels come off again, as they often do, it just feels like the same old condemnation as before. Devastating that you can’t crack the code on this thing, huh? You were pretty sure that being a Christian was supposed to change you—and it has. Some. But man, there’s still so much more that needs changing. Drastic things. Daily things. Changes in your habits, your routines, in your choices and decisions, changes to the stuff you just never stop hating about yourself, changes in what you do and don’t do . . . and don’t ever want to do again! Changes in how you think, how you cope, how you ride out the guilt and shame when you’ve blown it again. How you shoot down those old trigger responses—the ones you can’t seem to keep from reacting badly to, even after you keep telling yourself to be extra careful, knowing how predictably they set you off. Changes in your closest relationships, changes in your work habits, changes that have just never happened for you before, the kind of changes that—if you can ever get it together—might finally start piling up, you think, rolling forward, fueling some fresh momentum for you, keeping you moving in the right direction. But then—stop us if you’ve heard this one before . . . You barely if ever change. And come on, shouldn’t you be more transformed by now? This is around the point where, when what you’ve always thought or expected of God is no longer squaring with what you’re feeling, that you start creating your own cover versions of the gospel, piecing together things you’ve heard and believed and experimented with—some from the past, some from the present. You lay down new tracks with a gospel feel but, sadly, not always a lot of gospel truth.

When the routines and circumstances of your life are set up so that your lifestyle is a good fit for your natural preferences, it can give you a feeling of being in equilibrium. This will help prevent you from getting overwhelmed by anxiety on a regular basis. And by arranging your life to suit your temperament, you’ll have the time to process and calm down from life events that make you feel anxious. Some areas in which you can set up your life to fit your temperament are: --Have the right level of busyness in your life. For example, have enough after-work or weekend activities to keep you feeling calmly stimulated but not overstimulated and scattered. Note that being understimulated (for example, having too few enjoyable activities to look forward to) can be as much of a problem as being overstimulated. --Pick the physical activity level that’s right for you. Fine-tuning your physical activity level could be as simple as getting up from your desk and taking a walk periodically to keep yourself feeling calm and alert. Lifting things (such as carrying shopping bags up stairs) can also increase feelings of alertness and energy. Having pleasurable activities to look forward to and enough physical activity will help protect you against depression. --Have the right level of social contact in your life, and have routines that put this on autopilot. For example, a routine of having drinks after work on a Friday with friends, or attending a weekly class with your sister. Achieving the right level of social contact might also include putting mechanisms in place to avoid too much social interruption, like having office hours rather than an open-door policy. --Keep a balance of change and routine in your life. For example, alternate going somewhere new for your vacation vs. returning to somewhere you know you like. What the right balance of change and routine is for you will depend on your natural temperament and how much change vs. stability feels good to you. --Allow yourself the right amount of mental space to work up to doing something—enough time that you can do some mulling over the prospect of getting started but not so much time that it starts to feel like avoidance of getting started. --If coping with change sucks up a lot of energy for you, be patient with yourself, especially if you’re feeling stirred up by change or a disruption to your routines or plans. As mentioned in Chapter 2, keep some habits and relationships consistent when you’re exploring change in other areas. --Have self-knowledge of what types of stress you find most difficult to process. Don’t voluntarily expose yourself to those types without considering alternatives. For example, if you want a new house and you know you get stressed out by making lots of decisions, then you might choose to buy a house that’s already built, rather than building your own home. If you know making home-improvement decisions is anxiety provoking for you, you might choose to move to a house that’s new or recently renovated, rather than doing any major work on your current home or buying a fixer-upper. There’s always a balance with avoidance coping, where some avoidance of the types of stress that you find most taxing can be very helpful.

Company Team Buildingis a tool that can help inside inspiring a team for that satisfaction associated with organizational objectives. Today?azines multi-cultural society calls for working in a harmonious relationship with assorted personas, particularly in global as well as multi-location companies. Business team building events strategies is a way by which team members tend to be met towards the requirements of the firm. They help achieve objectives together instead of working on their particular. Which are the benefits of company team building events? Team building events methods enhance conversation among co-workers. The huge benefits include improved upon morality as well as management skills, capacity to handle difficulties, and much better understanding of work environment. Additional positive aspects would be the improvements inside conversation, concentration, decision making, party problem-solving, and also reducing stress. What are the usual signs that reveal the need for team building? The common signs consist of discord or even hostility between people, elevated competitors organizations between staff, lack of function involvement, poor decision making abilities, lowered efficiency, as well as poor quality associated with customer care. Describe different methods of business team development? Company team development experts as well as person programs on ?working collaboratively? can supply different ways of business team building. An important method of business team building is actually enjoyment routines that want communication between the members. The favored activities are fly-fishing, sailing regattas, highway rallies, snow boarding, interactive workshops, polls, puzzle game titles, and so forth. Each one of these routines would help workers be competitive and hone their own side considering abilities. Just what services are offered by the team building events trainers? The majority of the coaches offer you enjoyable functions, coming from accommodation to be able to dishes and much more. The actual packages include holiday packages, rope courses, on-going business office video games, and also ice-breakers. Coaching fees would depend on location, number of downline, classes, and sophistication periods. Special discounts are available for long-term deals of course, if the quantity of associates will be higher. Name some well-known corporate team development event providers within the U.Utes. Several well-liked companies are Accel-Team, Encounter Based Studying Inc, Performance Supervision Organization, Team development Productions, The education Haven Incorporated, Enterprise Upwards, Group Contractors In addition, and Team development USA.If you want to find out more details, make sure you Clicking Here

Every McDonald’s, for instance, looks the same—the company deliberately tries to standardize stores’ architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines.

The hit to men's self-esteem is made worse because men consistently view themselves as smarter and more competent than they actually are. One study found that men routinely overestimate their IQ by five points, while women underestimate theirs by the same amount.....Let's be absolutely clear on this: The men weren't lying. They truly believed that they performed better than they actually did. They were quite confident that their performance was superior. It can be devastating, then, to be faced with a woman who is more successful--implicitly suggesting the man has failed.

Truly great creative achievements require hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of work, and we have to make time every single day to put in those hours. Routines help us do this by setting expectations about availability, aligning our workflow with our energy levels, and getting our minds into a regular rhythm of creating. At the end of the day—or, really, from the beginning—building a routine is all about persistence and consistency. Don’t wait for inspiration; create a framework for it.

The foundation of consistency is a sound preshot routine.

The first is that habits require a cue or a trigger (going to the cinema). The second is that habits require a ‘routine’, the act that is performed (buying and eating the popcorn). Third, and most important, the routine needs then to be repeated in a consistent context, and it is this repetition that starts to create an automatic link between the situation that you encounter and the behaviour you perform.

A vast body of social psychological research reveals that, as people go about their daily lives, they tend to interpret the situations they encounter and the events they experience in a decidedly self-centered, self-aggrandizing, and self-justifying way [...] the majority of men and women possess unrealistically positive self-views — they judge positive traits as overwhelmingly more characteristic of themselves than negative traits; dismiss any unfavorable attributes they may have as inconsequential while at the same time emphasizing the uniqueness and importance of their favorable attributes; recall personal successes more readily than failures; take credit for positive outcomes while steadfastly denying responsibility for negative ones; and generally view themselves as “better” than the average person [...] In addition, people often fall prey to an illusion of control consisting of exaggerated perceptions of their own ability to master and control events and situations that are solely or primarily determined by chance [...] Moreover, most individuals are unrealistically optimistic about the future, firmly believing that positive life events are more likely (and negative events are less likely) to happen to them than to others […] These cognitive processes, collectively known as self-serving biases or self-enhancement biases, not only function to protect and enhance people’s self-esteem [...] but also color perceptions of the events that occur in their closest and most intimate relationships. [...] married individuals routinely overestimate the extent of their own contributions, relative to their spouses, to a variety of joint marital activities [...] People not only perceive their own attributes, behaviors, and future outcomes in an overly positive manner, but they also tend to idealize the characteristics of their intimate partners and relationships.

Ray credits this success to their highly disciplined focus on profitability. He has led the company as CEO for thirty-five years, and throughout that period Ray has followed an extraordinarily consistent routine. He wakes up at 5:30 A.M. every single morning, including Saturday and Sunday (as he’s done for more than fifty years). He then exercises for an hour. He eats breakfast at 7:30 A.M. and arrives at work at 8:15 A.M. Dinner is at 6:30 P.M. with his family. Bedtime is 10:00 P.M. But what really enables Ray to operate at his highest level of contribution is that throughout the day, his routine is governed by a single rule: “Focus on the hardest thing first.” After all, as Ray said to me: “We already have too

from the beginning—building a routine is all about persistence and consistency. Don’t wait for inspiration; create a framework for it.

Remember:  One must consistently practice mental skills and pre-game routines in order to tap one’s full potential.

1. Making new choices based on your goals and core values 2. Putting those choices to work through new positive behaviors 3. Repeating those healthy actions long enough to establish new habits 4. Building routines and rhythms into your daily disciplines 5. Staying consistent over a long enough period of time

When you hit the wall in your disciplines, routines, rhythms, and consistency, realize that’s when you are separating yourself from your old self, scaling that wall, and finding your new powerful, triumphant, and victorious self.

One of the most striking properties of the visible universe is the preponderance of matter over antimatter. Although particle accelerators produce matter and antimatter in equal abundances quite routinely and there is a democratic relationship between the two, we see no antiplanets, no antistars, no antigalaxies, and there is no evidence of any antimatter in the cosmic rays that come from outside our solar system. Nor do we see any evidence of the wholesale annihilation of matter and antimatter which would erupt anywhere in the Universe where the two came into contact. Thus, for some mysterious reason, there exists a form of cosmic favouritism. The observable universe is made of matter rather than antimatter. The other thing that it most obviously consists of is radiation. Indeed, on a straight count the photons have it; for there are on the average about two billion photons of light to be found for every proton in the Universe. Since every time a proton meets an antiproton and annihilates, two photons of light are produced, we can see that a universe such as ours, possessing about two billion photons for every proton, needs to have arisen from a hot dense state in which there were on average a billion and one protons for every billion antiprotons. A billion antiprotons knock out a billion protons producing two billion photons for every left-over proton. But why should the early Universe possess such a weird skewness of matter over antimatter to start off with?

Elder Holland: “Life isn’t calm or consistent . . . we all get tired. This is why we all need sleep, we all need a break from our routines, we all need a vacation, however brief or inexpensive it might be. Certainly this is the reason God ordained a Sabbath.

In many ways, the treatment of animal homosexuality in the scientific discourse has closely parallelled the discussion of human homosexuality in society at large. Homosexuality in both animals and people has been considered, at various times, to be a pathological condition; a social aberration; an "immoral", "sinful", or "criminal" perversion; an artificial product of confinement or the unavailability of the opposite sex; a reversal or "inversion" of heterosexual "roles"; a "phase" that younger animals go through on the path to heterosexuality; an exceptional but unimportant activity; a useless and puzzling curiosity; and a functional behavior that "stimulates" or "contributes to" heterosexuality. In many other respects, however, the outright hostility to animal homosexuality has transcended all historical trends. One need only look at the litany of derogatory terms, which have remained essentially constant from the late 1800s to the present day, used to describe this behavior: words such as strange, bizarre, perverse, aberrant, deviant, abnormal, anomalous, and unnatural have all been used routinely in "objective" scientific descriptions of the phenomenon and continue to be used (one of the most recent examples is from 1997). In addition, heterosexual behavior is consistently defined in numerous scientific accounts as "normal" in contrast to homosexual activity... In a direct carryover from attitudes toward human homosexuality, same-sex activity is routinely described as being "forced" on other animals when there is no evidence that it is, and a whole range of "distressful" emotions are projected onto the individual who experiences such "unwanted advances"... In other cases, zoologists have problematized homosexual activity or imputed an inherent inadequacy, instability, or incompetence to same-sex relations, when the supporting evidence for this is scanty or questionable at best and nonexistent at worst.

How to Say “No” When It Matters Most “The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.” —Lin Yutang “Discipline equals freedom.” —Jocko Willink (page 412)

An inadvertent consequence of having a routine is that you consistently focus on the process of achieving your goals.

Lessons Learned Our past only exists in our brain and body, where we make and store our memories. If we live in the past, our energy is also trapped in it. We're unable to create new energy and a new future. The key to successfully modifying our future is to understand the different brain wave frequencies. We are capable of reconstructing our genes to allow growth and repair. Issues What are the things you do consistently every day that has turned into habits and an automatic routine? Do you think you're capable of breaking the cycle? Analyze how your life is right now. Do you think you have positive or negative energy? Why? Dr. Joe teaches us that when we create our new future, we can lose a few people only because they have no part in it. Are you willing to accept that? Goals Understand the different brain frequencies and how they affect the energy we have in our bodies. Meditate to forget the anticipated future and known reality. Action Steps Make a list of the things you routinely do daily. The next day, try to do things differently from how you usually do them. Meditate and try to forget reality as you know it. Liberate yourself from things that link you to the present. Checklist While meditating, accept that it's normal to sometimes slip into the known reality. Claim that you're capable of entering the optimal spot of the generous present.

It really is a monstrous house,’ she thought, and recognized this to be what Dr Sedum had described in one of his ’talks’ as a mechanical pattern reaction – something to be avoided if one was to evolve. But later on in the same talk he had said that we were all liars because we were incapable of responding consistently to our environment, and then she didn’t know what to think. When she had asked Lavinia after the Time, as meetings were called in the League, Lavinia had said that one could not start at all, until one had perceived the Paradox. She had only been to one Time, and when Lavinia had said that she must not try to walk before she could fly, she realized that she had a long way to go. The moment she got into the kitchen, Claude hoisted himself wearily out of the vegetable trug by the Aga and set about his usual process of tripping her up until she had provided him with his early morning milk. This morning, she gave in to him at once; she wanted nothing to interfere with the clockwork routine which was to conclude with Herbert catching his train to London. She had told him she was having a cousin to lunch several days ago, but he had been deep in some gardening manual, and she had not been sure whether he had heard. Two hours later she waved to Herbert as he lurched down the drive in the old Wolseley. Alice had washed the car once a week before she had married, but it was one more of those things which May simply didn’t seem to get time to do. A final wave – he would not have seen her, but he liked all his expeditions to be taken seriously – and she heaved at the huge iron-studded front door until it shut with a prison-like click. There was a terrific amount to do before Dr Sedum and Lavinia arrived, but she was so exhausted with anxiety and the feeling that she was doing something exciting and momentous behind Herbert’s back that she fled to the kitchen for a cup of coffee and a cigarette (Herbert did not like her to smoke in the mornings). ‘I’ll make a list,’ she thought. She always resorted to lists: they proved that she had a great deal to do, and to some extent, as she crossed things off, they proved that she was doing them. Mrs

Maintaining a consistent bedtime routine is also important, as it primes your body to enter the parasympathetic state in the lead-up to actually getting into bed.

He needed certainty and routine, craving the sense of calm and organization it brought him. But loving Dani was akin to setting a bull loose in the china shop of his life. Sure, he could try to stop it, but it would be useless. Instead, he gave in to it, his anxiety soothed and repaired by the consistency of her affection. No matter the craziness they would have to deal with—and given the nature of their lives there would be a lot—he knew they'd get through it together. Because she'd earned his trust.

For those just encountering Baldwin now, those who did not live through Jim Crow, it may be difficult to comprehend what his witness meant to us in the mid-twentieth century. When assumptions about Black inferiority were universal; when Black people were consistently treated as social pariahs and had that status confirmed by de jure and de facto segregation; when virtually every public image of Black people was a debilitating stereotype; when our humanity was routinely debated and then summarily erased, how much James Baldwin mattered was incalculable. His genius embodied the race’s genius, and he unleashed that genius on the entire world. He fought for us with his ideas and his miraculous language. He was heroic.

Think about your health, work, and relationships. Where do you find the biggest gap between your desired identity and your behavior? If you were to define your best-self identity in each of the three domains, what words would you use? List a champion proof for each best-self identity to know you’ve stepped into that identity every day. What does your ideal day look like? What does your ideal morning routine consist of? How can you restructure your days to better manage your energy and time? Remember to be creative before reactive. What is a massive goal you can set to force yourself to take massive action in your life? Don’t be afraid to dream. Commit before you’re ready. What is one thing in your life you can 80/20? Zero in on the 20% of effort that would create 80% of the results. Could you benefit from the power of single-tasking? Consider creating a timesheet to record how much time you spend on each task everyday and notice how much task-switching is costing you. What is one stat in your life you can begin to monitor to help you stay on track and feel encouraged as you see your progress? Implement a weekly review. Note your big wins, progress on your Top 3 objectives, what went well, and what didn’t. Look ahead to your appointments for next week, review your Top 3 objectives, and mark time on your calendar to do them. Which of the antifragility concepts most resonated with you? Is there a situation where you can apply that concept in your daily life?

[F]orgetting takes multiple guises and sometimes infuses life in the most subtle and taken-for-granted ways. Therefore, forgetting consists not only of markers that indicate the erasure of knowledge, but also the habits, routines, and physical movements that lead one to present and practice detachment and hiding. It includes hiding the outward indicators of one’s religion. It is taking care when choosing one’s words in public, or even when speaking among family, so that the children will not learn what is supposed to be forgotten. Practicing these habits until they become ingrained and no longer require conscious attention makes forgetting a part of everyday life… In Ulaanbaatar (and the next-biggest city, Darkhan) the state built wedding palaces, thus making marriages and the establishment of families matters that came under state control. The alphabet, personal names, food, hairstyles, consumer goods, clothing, and fashions also changed due to the revolution. All this meant that the younger generations had little reference in everyday life from which to inquire about the past. When the memories of those belonging to an older generation contradicted the national narrative, there was little chance they would be heard by succeeding generations, whose ideological training and values conflicted with those of the past. “The erasure of socio-political context . . . allowed for the absorption of the particular (memories) into the general” (Steedly 1993:131), and furthered the homogenization of history and the nation. In a homogenizing society, to be a misfit, a reactionary, was not only a source of shame and public alienation, but also invited the threat of state intervention… Those of the next generation were born in the 1940s and 1950s, after most of the political massacres had been carried out. They grew up with socialist propaganda and were removed from the past, owing to the silencing of their parents’ memories and the dominance of the state’s narrative. The past seeped through to them accidentally, against the will of their parents… Often silences are a sign of powerlessness, not of the lack of a story to tell. As Tsing (1990:122) argues, power consists, at least in part, of the ability to convene an audience. According to Steedly (1993:198), this ability requires telling a compelling story that is strategically designed to meet the interests of the listeners.

REMEMBER THIS •​Identity greatly influences our behavior. People tend to align their actions with how they see themselves. •​An identity pact is a precommitment to a self-image. You can prevent distraction by acting in line with your identity. •​Become a noun. By assigning yourself a moniker, you increase the likelihood of following through with behaviors consistent with what you call yourself. Call yourself “indistractable.” •​Share with others. Teaching others solidifies your commitment, even if you’re still struggling. A great way to be indistractable is to tell friends about what you learned in this book and the changes you’re making in your life. •​Adopt rituals. Repeating mantras, keeping a timeboxed schedule, or performing other routines reinforces your identity and influences your future actions.

Seek clarity on who you want to be, how you want to interact with others, what you want, and what will bring you the greatest meaning. As every project or major initiative begins, you ask questions such as “What kind of person do I want to be while I’m doing this?” “How should I treat others?” “What are my intentions and objectives?” “What can I focus on that will bring me a sense of connection and fulfillment?” High performers ask these types of questions not only at the beginning of an endeavor but consistently throughout. They don’t just “get clarity” once and develop a mission statement that lasts the test of time; they consistently seek clarity again and again as times change and as they take on new projects or enter new social situations. This kind of routine self-monitoring is one of the hallmarks of their success. Generate energy so that you can maintain focus, effort, and wellbeing. To stay on your A game, you’ll need to actively care for your mental stamina, physical energy, and positive emotions in very specific ways. Raise the necessity for exceptional performance. This means actively tapping into the reasons you absolutely must perform well. This necessity is based on a mix of your internal standards (e.g., your identity, beliefs, values, or expectations for excellence) and external demands (e.g., social obligations, competition, public commitments, deadlines). It’s about always knowing your why and stoking that fire all the time so you feel the needed drive or pressure to get at it. Increase productivity in your primary field of interest. Specifically, focus on prolific quality output (PQO) in the area in which you want to be known and to drive impact. You’ll also have to minimize distractions (including opportunities) that steal your attention from creating PQO. Develop influence with those around you. It will make you better at getting people to believe in and support your efforts and ambitions. Unless you consciously develop a positive support network, major achievements over the long haul are all but impossible. Demonstrate courage by expressing your ideas, taking bold action, and standing up for yourself and others, even in the face of fear, uncertainty, threat, or changing conditions. Courage is not an occasional act, but a trait of choice and will.

In a culture of cyber-zombies, addicted to distraction and afflicted with interruption, the wisest way to guarantee that you consistently produce mastery-level results in the most important areas of your professional and personal life is to install a world-class morning routine. Winning starts at your beginning. And your first hours are when heroes are made. Wage a war against weakness and launch a campaign against fearfulness. You truly can get up early. And doing so is a necessity in your awesome pursuit toward legendary. Take excellent care of the front end of your day, and the rest of your day will pretty much take care of itself. Own your morning. Elevate your life.

What’s more, for some people, much of what they do all day consists of these routine, not terribly captivating, tasks. In these situations, it’s best to try to unleash the positive side of the Sawyer Effect by attempting to turn work into play—to increase the task’s variety, to make it more like a game, or to use it to help master other skills. Alas, that’s not always possible. And this means that sometimes, even “if-then” rewards are an option.

My usual morning routine at the moment consists of scrolling through social media and upsetting myself with all the terrible things people are saying about me and my family.

You feel content because routine consistently reaffirms a decision you already made.

Keep moving forward. And never stand in the way of momentum. A constantly renewing, self-sustaining propulsion system, it’s your best friend. It’s why going to the gym is effortless when you’ve been hitting it consistently, and so challenging to resume when you’ve suspended your routine by taking a break. So don’t let the impulse to coast interrupt your flow. Protect momentum. Respect it. Then harness that powerful wave, ride it with all your might, and never let go.

Given that dogs thrive on steadiness, it’s important to make an effort to feed your dog breakfast, snacks, and dinner around the same times every day. Similarly, go on walks, have playtime and snuggle time, and take potty breaks at regular times, during the day and evening. This kind of consistency will reduce your dog’s stress level and provide a sense of predictability and stability that will help your pup feel secure. And if you’re the person providing this routine, your dog will learn that you are someone to trust and someone who makes them feel better.

You feel content because routine consistently reaffirms a decision you already made. If said decision is that you want to write a book—and you commit to doing three pages each night for however long it takes to complete it—you affirm not only your choice to begin, but your ability to do it. It’s honestly the healthiest way to feel validated. — Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. 2008. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Quote sourced from 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think by Brianna Wiest

Providing structure and predictability Toddlers are reassured by familiar routines, regardless of their nature. When the environment prior to placement is a healthy one, the use of transition objects that link the former caregiver’s style and schedule to the present provides the sense of structure that is important to the toddler’s developing sense of security in her new home. A consistent schedule is also important to the child who is experiencing separation anxiety. Parents should be absolutely reliable about returning when expected. It is important to help children anticipate their schedules by talking through the day’s routine. Because toddlers cannot tell time, use concrete, regularly scheduled events to help them mark time such as mealtimes or the timing of a favorite television program such as Sesame Street. Parents should make every effort to delay making additional major life changes following a toddler adoption such as moving to a new home, adding another family member, divorce, or marriage until new routines are firm and secure.

About 90 percent of those sentenced to prison for a drug offense in Illinois are African American.18 White drug offenders are rarely arrested, and when they are, they are treated more favorably at every stage of the criminal justice process, including plea bargaining and sentencing.19 Whites are consistently more likely to avoid prison and felony charges, even when they are repeat offenders.20 Black offenders, by contrast, are routinely labeled felons and released into a permanent racial undercaste.

It is not courtesy, but civility that our uniform forces should cultivate, while the actual extent of civil rights violations and third degree practices is largely irrelevant so long as they do exist and are popularly believed to be both frequent and general. That belief will persist until the fully equal and lawful enforcement of the law is freely accepted by police as their standard of performance and is consistently applied, year in and year out, as a matter of core discipline and administrative routine. 6

When researchers at the University of North Texas and Yale tried to understand why families gradually increased their fast food consumption, they found a series of cues and rewards that most customers never knew were influencing their behaviors.1.24 They discovered the habit loop. Every McDonald’s, for instance, looks the same—the company deliberately tries to standardize stores’ architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines. The foods at some chains are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards—the fries, for instance, are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your tongue, in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as fast as possible, causing your pleasure centers to light up and your brain to lock in the pattern. All the better for tightening the habit loop.1.25

Think of consistency as a framework for the child’s day. A frame of “usually, we do things this way.” But not always, and even within daily routines, details can vary. If, most of the time, children are organized by routines, are made to feel safe, secure, and loved, then they are much more likely to roll with the punches when routines are broken.

The key ideas are simple. Find your own signature and stick to it, and follow a consistent routine. Feel it instead of trying to do it. Improve your visual interpretation of the speed and line of your putt, and roll the ball without wasting too much time and letting that visualization deteriorate.

Predictable, consistent, and shared procedures for arriving at and starting class, distributing materials, and accomplishing daily routines lower stress and provide a comfortable environment. If we can set up routines and procedures so that the brain does not have to resort to the fight, flight, or freeze response, we will alleviate a lot of stress and distraction.

Make interfaces programmatic rather than semantic when possible. Each interface consists of a programmatic part and a semantic part. The programmatic part consists of the data types and other attributes of the interface that can be enforced by the compiler. The semantic part of the interface consists of the assumptions about how the interface will be used, which cannot be enforced by the compiler. The semantic interface includes considerations such as "RoutineA must be called before RoutineB" or "RoutineA will crash if dataMember1 isn't initialized before it's passed to RoutineA." The semantic interface should be documented in comments, but try to keep interfaces minimally dependent on documentation. Any aspect of an interface that can't be enforced by the compiler is an aspect that's likely to be misused. Look for ways to convert semantic interface elements to programmatic interface elements by using Asserts or other techniques.

Class Quality Abstract Data Types Have you thought of the classes in your program as abstract data types and evaluated their interfaces from that point of view? Abstraction Does the class have a central purpose? Is the class well named, and does its name describe its central purpose? Does the class's interface present a consistent abstraction? Does the class's interface make obvious how you should use the class? Is the class's interface abstract enough that you don't have to think about how its services are implemented? Can you treat the class as a black box? Are the class's services complete enough that other classes don't have to meddle with its internal data? Has unrelated information been moved out of the class? Have you thought about subdividing the class into component classes, and have you subdivided it as much as you can? Are you preserving the integrity of the class's interface as you modify the class? Encapsulation Does the class minimize accessibility to its members? Does the class avoid exposing member data? Does the class hide its implementation details from other classes as much as the programming language permits? Does the class avoid making assumptions about its users, including its derived classes? Is the class independent of other classes? Is it loosely coupled? Inheritance Is inheritance used only to model "is a" relationships—that is, do derived classes adhere to the Liskov Substitution Principle? Does the class documentation describe the inheritance strategy? Do derived classes avoid "overriding" non-overridable routines? Are common interfaces, data, and behavior as high as possible in the inheritance tree? Are inheritance trees fairly shallow? Are all data members in the base class private rather than protected? Other Implementation Issues Does the class contain about seven data members or fewer? Does the class minimize direct and indirect routine calls to other classes? Does the class collaborate with other classes only to the extent absolutely necessary? Is all member data initialized in the constructor? Is the class designed to be used as deep copies rather than shallow copies unless there's a measured reason to create shallow copies?

When the first author began his graduate studies in policing, he was consistently surprised by the almost complete lack of rigorous empirical validation (i.e., scientific research) relating to police tactics. He had assumed that police tactics had been well studied; yet, time and time again, he found that validation was lacking despite frequent calls for criminal justice policy and procedures to be rooted in science (Sherman, 1998; Sherman, Farrington, Welsh, & Mackenzie, 2002; Weisburd et al., 2005). Some areas of police practice have, of course, received attention (e.g., routine patrol, hot spots policing, eyewitness identification, and interviewing), but many areas of police practice remain largely untouched.

Accountability is key. The child should have the responsibility to clean up and return each work station to the condition that it was in when they found it before moving on to the next activity. If you have a child that likes to jump from one thing to another, being consistent on clean up routines can help to curb some of that extra energy. Realizing that they have a responsibility to clean up first, rather than just going on to the next activity will help them make decisions about the rewards of actually finishing the chosen activity. Oftentimes, a complete activity is easier to clean up than one that is in mid progress. For younger children teaching accountability takes repeated effort and patience.

The best traders have trading habits, daily routines they repeat day after day.

it’s nice to know that when you get started each day seems to matter less than learning how to get started consistently, however

Consider fast food, for instance. It makes sense—when the kids are starving and you’re driving home after a long day—to stop, just this once, at McDonald’s or Burger King. The meals are inexpensive. It tastes so good. After all, one dose of processed meat, salty fries, and sugary soda poses a relatively small health risk, right? It’s not like you do it all the time. But habits emerge without our permission. Studies indicate that families usually don’t intend to eat fast food on a regular basis. What happens is that a once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week, and then twice a week—as the cues and rewards create a habit—until the kids are consuming an unhealthy amount of hamburgers and fries. When researchers at the University of North Texas and Yale tried to understand why families gradually increased their fast food consumption, they found a series of cues and rewards that most customers never knew were influencing their behaviors.1.24 They discovered the habit loop. Every McDonald’s, for instance, looks the same—the company deliberately tries to standardize stores’ architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines. The foods at some chains are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards—the fries, for instance, are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your tongue, in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as fast as possible, causing your pleasure centers to light up and your brain to lock in the pattern. All the better for tightening the habit loop.1.25 However, even these habits are delicate. When a fast food restaurant closes down, the families that previously ate there will often start having dinner at home, rather than seek out an alternative location. Even small shifts can end the pattern. But since we often don’t recognize these habit loops as they grow, we are blind to our ability to control them. By learning to observe the cues and rewards, though, we can change the routines.

The best way to truly live a consistent life of passion is to formulate daily habits and a daily routine that engages you and makes you feel more passionate about life

Habits The word “habit” comes from the Old French abit, habit, from Latin habitus “condition, appearance,” from habere “have, consist of.” The term originally meant “dress, attire,” and the noun “habit” meant a monk’s outfit. The habit was an external sign of a monk’s internal constitution, which defined their whole life. Later the meaning of this word drifted to denote physical or mental constitution. Constitution, consisting of, consistency. Habits just scream consistency.[iv] Habits get things done because your mind does not have to focus as much on semiautomatic routines and can therefore conserve energy. It also will spend less time debating with itself about whether to do something. When routines turn into habits, they become the “status quo,” and the rightness of them isn’t debated any more. On the other hand, one-off activities easily generate excuses because it is easier not to do something new than it is to do it. Your mind will think of many reasons for inactivity: Listen to what it is saying . . . • It’s hard, don’t tire yourself. • It’s new, you don’t know the effect or result, so better not risk something bad. • You’ll make a jerk out of yourself, better stay low and enjoy what you’ve got so far. • It’s a lot of fuss, why don’t drink a glass of whisky/play the computer/eat pizza instead? • You have no chance to achieve anything meaningful in a reasonable time (a few minutes); give up, stop wasting the energy. • What? Do you want to do it for years, with no guarantee of success? Are you out of your mind? That’s a lot of energy to commit! • Hey, I love the couch and the TV and there will be less time for that if you commit to this new venture. I protest! You do not consciously think about habits. They are just a part of your constitution. And your mind cannot abandon them once they are a part of you. Any time you install a new activity into your life in the form of a habit, your mind not only accepts it but becomes its guard. Whenever the time or circumstances indicate that the habit should be done, your mind reminds you about it, gently or otherwise.

tips on staying motivated daily: read for an hour a day (business or personal development books) watch YouTube videos on network marketing and motivation listen to business and network marketing podcasts work out and eat healthy have a daily routine and schedule and stay consistent set goals and do the work make a to do list every night before bed read positive affirmations in the mirror create a vision board put a note or picture of the lifestyle you want to live on your laptop

15.   Baby is not being exposed to adequate amounts of daylight. Explanation/Recommendation: Natural light is important to help babies regulate their circadian clock. This is the inner clock, the biological time-keeping system that regulates daily activities, such as sleep and wake cycles. We recommend that, as soon as your baby awakens in the morning, you take him to a room filled with daylight (although he does not need to be in direct sunlight). Natural light, along with the first feeding of the day, will help establish his circadian rhythm and keep them consistent. Routine helps facilitate this amazing function possessed by all humans.

Human beings are consistently, routinely, and profoundly biased. We not only are profoundly biased, but we also almost never know we are being biased. The fact that we don’t know it results in behaviors that not only include the ones described previously, but, as we’ll