Routine And Structure Quotes

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People need routines. It's like a theme in music. But it also restricts your thoughts and actions and limits your freedom. It structures your priorities and in some cases distorts your logic.
Haruki Murakami (1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3))
I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess that we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By (Travis McGee, #1))
There are men who bloom in chaos. You call them heroes or villains, depending on which side wins the war, but until the battle call they are but normal men who long for action, who lust for the opportunity to throw off the routine of their normal lives like a cocoon and come into their own. They sense a destiny larger than themselves, but only when structures collapse around them do these men become warriors.
Guillermo del Toro (The Fall (The Strain Trilogy, #2))
While we all need external structure in our lives—some degree of predictability, routine, organization—those with ADD need it much more than most people. They need external structure so much because they so lack internal structure.
Edward M. Hallowell (Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder)
In order to build any structure, we should keep a close tab on its daily, weekly, and monthly progress. Unless we religiously follow all the steps, chances are that the structure will not meet our expectations.
Prem Jagyasi
If we wish to have a beautiful, peaceful and safe home, we need healthy expanding roots that go deep into the ground. These roots are our Routine, our Stability, our Structure.
Nataša Pantović (Conscious Parenting: Mindful Living Course for Parents (AoL Mindfulness #5))
Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazines. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn't about truth, love, or the divine. If you take on these disciplines for a few weeks, as well as any other disciplines that may particularly cut through your unique habits of dullness, then your life will be stripped of routine distraction. All that will be left is the edge you have been avoiding by means of your daily routine. You will have to face the basic discomfort and dissatisfaction that is the hidden texture of your life. You will be alive with the challenge of living your truth, rather than hiding form it. Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel. And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control. Instead, feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel your suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation. Almost everything you do, you do because you are afraid to die. And yet dying is exactly what you are doing, from the moment you are born. Two hours of absorption in a good Super Bowl telecast may distract you temporarily, but the fact remains. You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering. By eliminating the safety net of comforts in your life, you have the opportunity to free fall in this moment between birth and death, right through the hole of your fear, into the unthreatenable openness which is the source of your gifts. The superior man lives as this spontaneous sacrifice of love.
David Deida (The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire)
Routines give structure to empty days.
Shari Lapena (Someone We Know)
People need routines. It's like a theme in music. But it also restricts your thoughts and actions and limits your freedom. It structures your priorities and some cases distorts your logic.
Haruki Murakami (1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3))
Be very attentive towards the child’s evolving World of Senses that needs Stability, Routine, & Structure, World of Emotions that needs Love, Freedom & Creativity and World of Thoughts that needs Discrimination as an Ability to choose Right Thinking, Emotions, Behaviour.
Nataša Pantović (Conscious Parenting: Mindful Living Course for Parents (AoL Mindfulness #5))
The routine helped the healing process. It gave me structure. It eliminated any sense of surprise, which at that point, I really didn’t want anymore surprises in my life. Routine gave me the foundation for creat- ing a healthier life.
Sharon E. Rainey (Making a Pearl from the Grit of Life)
In addition to conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and the pleasure routine. Man becomes a 'nine to fiver', he is part of the labour force, or the bureaucratic force of clerks and managers. He has little initiative, his tasks are prescribed by the organisation of the work; there is even little difference between those high up on the ladder and those on the bottom. They all perform tasks prescribed by the whole structure of the organisation, at a prescribed speed, and in a prescribed manner. Even the feelings are prescribed: cheerfulness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get along with everybody without friction. Fun is routinised in similar, although not quite as drastic ways. Books are selected by the book clubs, movies by the film and theatre owners and the advertising slogans paid for by them; the rest is also uniform: the Sunday ride in the car, the television session, the card game, the social parties. From birth to death, from Monday to Monday, from morning to evening - all activities are routinised, and prefabricated. How should a man caught up in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and separateness?
Erich Fromm (The Art of Loving)
Build your scaffolding again, but while you’re conscious. Use the bricks that you’ve still got, in spite of the pandemic. Make coffee in the morning. Meditate. Watch Schitt’s Creek. Have a glass of wine at dinner. FaceTime the friends you can’t see in person. Whatever habits you used to have, stack them up and give yourself structure. I promise. You won’t feel as unsettled.
Jodi Picoult (Wish You Were Here)
The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasise specific starting times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones. ‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.
Oliver Burkeman (The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking)
Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?
Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)
People need routines. It’s like a theme in music. But it also restricts your thoughts and actions and limits your freedom. It structures your priorities and in some cases distorts your logic.
Haruki Murakami (1Q84 (Vintage International))
In recent weeks, I’d figured out my own routine. It was a simple structure that allowed me to determine the direction in which I needed to take a girl: First, open. Then demonstrate higher value. Next, build rapport and an emotional connection. And, finally, create a physical connection.
Neil Strauss (The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists)
In education, we need to begin paying attention to matters routinely ignored. We spend long hours trying to teach a variety of courses on, say, the structure of government or the structure of the amoeba. But how much effort goes into studying the structure of everyday life — the way time is allocated, the personal uses of money, the places to go for help in a society exploding with complexity? We take for granted that young people already know their way around our social structure. In fact, most have only the dimmest image of the way the world of work or business is organized. Most students have no conception of the architecture of their own city's economy, or the way the local bureaucracy operates, or the place to go to lodge a complaint against a merchant. Most do not even understand how their own schools — even universities — are structured, let alone how much structures are changing under the impact of the Third Wave.
Alvin Toffler (The Third Wave)
My love has saved me. It wraps strong arms around me when I cry with despair;it gives me the routine of a working week to lend vicarious structure to my shapeless days. It brings me daily laughter, a reason to keep washing...and it slices me open with guilt.
Anna Lyndsey (Girl in the Dark)
In the past, Flaubert implied, idiots had had no clue as to what the carbon structure of diamonds was. Their shallowness had been entirely and reliably evident. But now the press had made it very possible for a person to be at once unimaginative, uncreative, mean-minded and extremely well informed. The modern idiot could routinely know what only geniuses had known in the past, and yet he still was an idiot- a depressing combination of traits that previous ages had never had to worry about. The news had, for Flaubert, armed stupidity and given authority to fools.
Alain de Botton (The News: A User's Manual)
Habits never really disappear. They’re encoded into the structures of our brain, and that’s a huge advantage for us, because it would be awful if we had to relearn how to drive after every vacation. The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards. This explains why it’s so hard to create exercise habits, for instance, or change what we eat. Once we develop a routine of sitting on the couch, rather than running, or snacking whenever we pass a doughnut box, those patterns always remain inside our heads. By the same rule, though, if we learn to create new neurological routines that overpower those behaviors—if we take control of the habit loop—we can force those bad tendencies into the background, just as Lisa Allen did after her Cairo trip. And once someone creates a new pattern, studies have demonstrated, going for a jog or ignoring the doughnuts becomes as automatic as any other habit.
Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business)
People with personal experience of bipolar disorder will often state the importance of routine and structure as a way of preventing relapse. Routine, in this context, does not mean boring and repetitive so much as relatively predictable and stable. This appears to have many beneficial physical effects, one of which is sleep.
Jerry Kennard (Bipolar Disorder: a student's guide)
What the ethnographer is in fact faced with—except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection—is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity; interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households … writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.
Clifford Geertz (The Interpretation of Cultures)
People who have dementia need to have structure and routine every day, in order to get a better day.
Jolene Brackey (Creating Moments of Joy for the Person with Alzheimer's or Dementia: A Journal for Caregivers)
the ethical and political ideas of Locke, Rousseau and Jefferson. However, once the heretical scientific insights are translated into everyday technology, routine activities and economic structures, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain this double-game, and we – or our heirs – will probably require a brand-new package of religious beliefs and political institutions.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: ‘An intoxicating brew of science, philosophy and futurism’ Mail on Sunday)
Psychotropic drugs have also been organized according to structure (e.g., tricyclic), mechanism (e.g., monoamine, oxidase inhibitor [MAOI]), history (first generation, traditional), uniqueness (e.g., atypical), or indication (e.g., antidepressant). A further problem is that many drugs used to treat medical and neurological conditions are routinely used to treat psychiatric disorders.
Benjamin James Sadock (Kaplan and Sadock's Synopsis of Psychiatry: Behavioral Sciences/Clinical Psychiatry)
I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
My best guess about my own attraction to the habit is that I belong to a class of people whose lives are insufficiently structured... We embrace a toxin as deadly as nicotine...because we have not yet found pleasures or routines that can replace the comforting, structure bringing rhythm of need and gratification that the cigarette habit offers. One word for this structuring might be "self medication"; another might be "coping".
Jonathan Franzen (How to Be Alone)
Clericalism is the pyramid, a structure of domination that must be protected at all costs by everyone occupying a niche in it — which is why bishops and most priests so routinely shield the clerical abusers instead of their victims.
James Carroll (The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul)
The relationship between the people and their government troubled her. The government was the mission of an entire society: why was the society undermining it? “I’m routinely appalled by how profoundly ignorant even highly educated people are when it comes to the structure and function of our government,” she said. “The sense of identity as Citizen has been replaced by Consumer. The idea that government should serve the citizens like a waiter or concierge, rather than in a ‘collective good’ sense.
Michael Lewis (The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy)
One of the central tenets of the Western worldview is that one should always be engaged in some kind of outward task. Thus, the Westerner structures his time—including, sometimes, even his leisure time—as a series of discrete programmed activities which he must submit to in order to tick off from an actual or virtual list. One need only observe the expression on his face as he ploughs through yet another family outing, cultural event, or gruelling exercise routine to realise that his aim in life is not so much to live in the present moment as it is to work down a never-ending list. If one asks him how he is doing, he is most likely to respond with an artificial smile, and something along the lines of, ‘Fine, thank you – very busy of course!’ In many cases, he is not fine at all, but confused, exhausted, and fundamentally unhappy. In contrast, most people living in a country such as Kenya in Africa do not share in the Western worldview that it is noble or worthwhile to spend all of one’s time rushing around from one task to the next. When Westerners go to Kenya and do as they are wont to do, they are met with peels of laughter and cries of ‘mzungu’, which is Swahili for ‘Westerner’. The literal translation of ‘mzungu’ is ‘one who moves around’, ‘to go round and round’, or ‘to turn around in circles’.
Neel Burton (The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide)
You sell your own wares,then.Are you clever at it?" Shelby lifted her wine. "I like to think so." Tossing her hangs out of her eyes, she turned to Alan. "Would you say I was clever at it, Senator?" "Amazingly so," he returned. "For someone without any sense of organization, you manage to work at your craft,run a shop,and live precisely as you choose." "I like odd compliments," Shelby decided after a moment. "Alan's accustomed to a more structured routine. He'd never run out of gas in the freeway." "I like odd insults," Alan murmured into his wine. "Makes a good balance.
Nora Roberts (The MacGregors: Alan & Grant (The MacGregors, #3-4))
If you want to stop smoking, ask yourself, do you do it because you love nicotine, or because it provides a burst of stimulation, a structure to your day, a way to socialize? If you smoke because you need stimulation, studies indicate that some caffeine in the afternoon can increase the odds you’ll quit. More than three dozen studies of former smokers have found that identifying the cues and rewards they associate with cigarettes, and then choosing new routines that provide similar payoffs—a piece of Nicorette, a quick series of push-ups, or simply taking a few minutes to stretch and relax—makes it more likely they will quit.3.28
Charles Duhigg (The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business)
I learned that structure allows us to invest in the things that are important to us but don’t exist inside of us yet. There are plenty of other existing tasks, challenges, and crises that threaten to derail us, but for the things we want to build—for those getting-better goals we want to achieve—we have to create a space and a routine for bringing them into existence.
Henry Cloud (The Power of the Other: The startling effect other people have on you, from the boardroom to the bedroom and beyond-and what to do about it)
I continued to find it much easier to assimilate knowledge within the structured military environment than at college, for at training sites such as Mare Island, outside influences were kept to a minimum.  All I had to do was make my bunk in the morning, show up at the appointed classrooms, and focus on the subject at hand.  Others took care of the daily routine of life while we hit the books.
Lee Vyborny (America's Secret Submarine: An Insider's Account of the Cold War's Undercover Nuclear Sub)
When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit—unless you find new routines—the pattern will unfold automatically. However, simply understanding how habits work—learning the structure of the habit loop—makes them easier to control. Once you break a habit into its components, you can fiddle with the gears.
Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do and How to Change)
most people tend to accept, at least outwardly, this system of the moral code and thus feel quite safe from any terrible event or problem such as homelessness or AIDS or nonexistent medical care or rampant crime or hunger or unemployment or racism or sexism simply because they go to sleep every night in a house or apartment or dormitory whose clean rooms or smooth walls or regular structures of repeated daily routines provide them with a feeling of safety that never gets intruded upon by the events outside.
David Wojnarowicz (Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration)
✽  Many people find the concept of ‘mindfulness’ in Buddhism appealing but a similar practice, called prosochê or ‘attention’ to one’s conscious ‘ruling faculty’, was central to ancient Stoicism. ✽  Epictetus’ Stoic Handbook opens with the fundamental practice of evaluating our impressions using the ‘Stoic fork’, the distinction between what’s ‘up to us’ and what isn’t, reminding ourselves that external things are inherently ‘indifferent’ with regard to virtue and eudaimonia. ✽  Planning the day ahead and reviewing the day gone by can help you maintain a structured routine of living wisely, and following Stoic principles.
Donald J. Robertson (Stoicism and the Art of Happiness: Ancient Tips for Modern Challenges (Teach Yourself))
For many people, work itself is a grounding activity. Aside from providing our basic tool of survival—money—the routine of working a job according to a regular schedule can provide a basic structure that supports the life around it. This routine, while it may be drudgery at times, can actually be beneficial in its limitations. It builds a foundation. Through focus and repetition, energies become dense enough to manifest. If we are involved with constant change, we are like a rolling stone that gathers no moss. We’re kept at a survival level because we are constantly building new foundations. Only through focus and repetition can we achieve expertise in an area leading to larger manifestation of goals, be they physical or ideological.
Anodea Judith (Wheels of Life: A User's Guide to the Chakra System (Llewellyn's New Age Series))
In 1976, a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham in England demonstrated that randomizing letters in the middle of words had no effect on the ability of readers to understand sentences. In tihs setncene, for emalxpe, ervey scarbelmd wrod rmenias bcilasaly leibgle. Why? Because we are deeply accustomed to seeing letters arranged in certain patterns. Because the eye is in a rush, and the brain, eager to locate meaning, makes assumptions. This is true of phrases, too. An author writes “crack of dawn” or “sidelong glance” or “crystal clear” and the reader’s eye continues on, at ease with combinations of words it has encountered innumerable times before. But does the reader, or the writer, actually expend the energy to see what is cracking at dawn or what is clear about a crystal? The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential—X is the route to work, Y is the heft and feel of a nickel between your fingers. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw—actually saw—a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs. We need habit to get through a day, to get to work, to feed our children. But habit is dangerous, too. The act of seeing can quickly become unconscious and automatic. The eye sees something—gray-brown bark, say, fissured into broad, vertical plates—and the brain spits out tree trunk and the eye moves on. But did I really take the time to see the tree? I glimpse hazel hair, high cheekbones, a field of freckles, and I think Shauna. But did I take the time to see my wife? “Habitualization,” a Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917, “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things—words, friends, apartments—as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we’re not careful, pretty soon we’re gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack. In the Tom Andrews Studio I open my journal and stare out at the trunk of the umbrella pine and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.
Anthony Doerr (Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World)
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.
Patricia Hill Collins (Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment)
Racial stereotyping. For Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders, the sin of white racism was stereotyping all black people as inferior. It was a prejudice to be sure, but it was predicated on the assumption that all blacks were the same. King objected to stereotyping because he wanted blacks to be treated as individuals and not reduced exclusively to their racial identity (hence the meaning of his famous statement about the content of one's character taking precedence over the color of one's skin). The postmodern left turns the civil rights model on its head. It embraces racial stereotyping -- racial identity by any other name -- and reverses it, transforming it into something positive, provided the pecking order of power is kept in place. In the new moral scheme of racial identities, black inferiority is replaced by white culpability, rendering the entire white race, with few exceptions, collectively guilty of racial oppression. The switch is justified through the logic of racial justice, but that does not change the fact that people are being defined by their racial characteristic. Racism is viewed as structural, so it is permissible to use overtly positive discrimination (i.e., affirmative action) to reorder society. This end-justifies-the-means mentality of course predates the postmodern left. It can be found in the doctrine of affirmative action. But the racial theorists of identity politics have taken "positive" discrimination to a whole new level. Whereas affirmative action was justified mainly in terms of trying to give disadvantaged blacks a temporary leg up, the racial theorists of the postmodern left see corrective action as permanent. The unending struggle that ensues necessitates acceptance of a new type of racial stereotyping as a way of life and increasingly as something that needs to be enshrined in administrative regulations and the law. The idea of positive stereotyping contains all sorts of illiberal troublemaking. Once one race is set up as victim and another as guilty of racism, any means necessary are permitted to correct the alleged unjust distribution of power. Justice becomes retaliatory rather than color blind -- a matter of vengeance rather than justice. The notion of collective racial guilt, once a horror to liberal opinion, is routinely accepted today as the true mark of a progressive. Casualties are not only King's dream of racial harmony but also the hope that someday we can all -- blacks and whites -- rise above racial stereotypes.
Kim R. Holmes (The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left)
4Paul Gaydos My Books Browse ▾ Community ▾ The Way of the Superior Man Quotes The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to... by David Deida Read Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazines. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn't about truth, love, or the divine. If you take on these disciplines for a few weeks, as well as any other disciplines that may particularly cut through your unique habits of dullness, then your life will be stripped of routine distraction. All that will be left is the edge you have been avoiding by means of your daily routine. You will have to face the basic discomfort and dissatisfaction that is the hidden texture of your life. You will be alive with the challenge of living your truth, rather than hiding form it. Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel. And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control. Instead, feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel your suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation. Almost everything you do, you do because you are afraid to die. And yet dying is exactly what you are doing, from the moment you are born. Two hours of absorption in a good Super Bowl telecast may distract you temporarily, but the fact remains. You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering. By eliminating the safety net of comforts in your life, you have the opportunity to free fall in this moment between birth and death, right through the hole of your fear, into the unthreatenable openness which is the source of your gifts. The superior man lives as this spontaneous sacrifice of love.
David Deida
I have a good friend, let’s call him Slim Berriss, who’s devised a schedule for himself that combines practical microdosing and pre-planned 1- to 2-day treks into deeper territory. For him, this blend provides a structured approach for increasing everyday well-being, developing empathy, and intensively exploring the “other.” Here is what it looks like: Microdosing of ibogaine hydrochloride twice weekly, on Mondays and Fridays. The dosage is 4 mg, or roughly 1/200 or less of the full ceremonial dosage at Slim’s bodyweight of 80 kg. He dislikes LSD and finds psilocybin in mushrooms hard to dose accurately. Woe unto he who “microdoses” and gets hit like a freight train while checking in luggage at an airport (poor Slim). The encapsulated ibogaine was gifted to him to solve this problem. Moderate dosing of psilocybin (2.2 to 3.5 g), as ground mushrooms in chocolate, once every 6 to 8 weeks. His highly individual experience falls somewhere in the 150 to 200 mcg description of LSD by Jim later in this piece. Slim is supervised by an experienced sitter. Higher-dose ayahuasca once every 3 to 6 months for 2 consecutive nights. The effects could be compared (though very different experiences) to 500+ mcg of LSD. Slim is supervised by 1 to 2 experienced sitters in a close-knit group of 4 to 6 people maximum. NOTE: In the 4 weeks prior to these sessions, he does not consume any ibogaine or psilocybin.
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
Not only was the four-poster- a lofty structure that would have put princesses and peas to shame- a place of rest and relaxation but it was, and had been for quite some time now, a portal for her magic carpet escapades. It was there that Estelle first began to practice what Marjan had called "eating at the edge of a ready 'sofreh'." Estelle always followed the same routine when assembling her dinner 'sofreh' on her bed. First, she would spread the paisley blanket Marjan had given her, tucking the fringed ends in tight around the sides of her mattress. Then, having already wetted a pot of jasmine tea, she would dig a trivet into the blanket's left corner and place the piping pot on top of it. Following the Persian etiquette of placing the main dishes at the center of the 'sofreh', Estelle would position the plate of saffron 'chelow' (with crunchy 'tadig'), the bowl of stew or soup that was the day's special, and the 'lavash' or 'barbari' bread accordingly. She would frame the main dishes with a small plate of 'torshi', pickled carrots and cucumbers, as well as a yogurt dip and some feta cheese with her favorite herb: balmy lemon mint. Taking off her pink pom-pom house slippers, Estelle would then hoist herself onto her high bed and begin her ecstatic epicurean adventure. She savored every morsel of her nightly meal, breathing in the tingle of sumac powder and nutmeg while speaking to a framed photograph of Luigi she propped up on its own trivet next to the tea. Dinner was usually Persian, but her dessert was always Italian: a peppermint cannoli or marzipan cherry, after which she would turn on the radio, always set to the 'Mid-West Ceili Hour', and dream of the time when a young Luigi made her do things impossible, like when he convinced her to enter the Maharajah sideshow and stand on the tallest elephant's trunk during carnival season in her seaside Neapolitan town.
Marsha Mehran (Rosewater and Soda Bread (Babylon Café #2))
We don't die willingly. The more invested we are in the worlds projected by patterns, the stronger the denial, anger, and bargaining, and the despair of depression. Insight practice is inherently frustrating because you are looking to see where, at first, you are unable to see--beyond the world of the patterns. Another way to look at insight practice is to see that the process has three stages: shock, disorganization, and reorganization. The first stage starts when you see beyond illusion. You experience a shock. You react by denying that you saw what you saw, saying, in effect, "That makes no sense. I'll just forget about that." Unfortunately, or fortunately, your experience of seeing is not so easily denied. It is too vivid, too real, to ignore. Now you become angry because the illusion in which you have lived has been shattered. You know you can't go back, but you don't want to go forward. You are still attached to the world of patterns. You feel anxious, and the anxiety gradually matures into grief. You now know that you have to go forward. You experience the pain of separating from what you understood, just as the lama in the example experienced pain at the loss of his worldview. You then enter a period of disorganization. You withdraw, become apathetic, lose your energy for life, become restless, and routinely reject new possibilities or directions. You surrender to the changes taking place but do nothing to move forward. A major risk at this stage is that you remain in a state of disorganization. You hold on to an aspect of the old world. parents who have lost a child in an accident or to violence, for example, have great difficulty in letting go. They may keep the child's bedroom just as it was. Their views and expectations of life have been shattered, and, understandably, they cling to a few of the shards. They may stay in the stage of disorganization for a long time. The third stage of insight is reorganization. You experience a shift, and you let the old world go, even the shards. You accept the world that you see with your new eyes. What was previously seen as being absolute and real is now seen differently. The old structures, beliefs, and behaviors no longer hold, and you enter a new life.
Ken McLeod (Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention)
Busyness lies. It tricks us into thinking that things are happening. That we’re going places, being productive, living a full life. The exhilarating effects of stress, not the quiet or stillness after chaos, is familiar. We would rather have something, than nothing, even if that something is…empty. We all do this. We look to relationships, drugs or distractions to fill so-called “voids” and assuage our loneliness or anxiety about who we are and the uncertainty of our futures. Isn't that why we tie our self worth to salaries and job titles in hopes that this will validate us? Isn't that why we justify the long hours, routine work, and deteriorating relationships as “real life?” How is it that we've become so complacent? I refuse to believe that with age, you need to be realistic and live out your decisions based on what’s been done or what’s expected of you. What if we stopped looking externally for validation or excitement, but found that within ourselves? See I want to feel like life is worth living. Not for culture, not for the societal structures and institutions in place, not for the security, none of that. Just life itself. The idea that being alive is enough…beautiful, even. I don’t want to be tied down to a job I despise or to be surrounded by people who take that shit too seriously. And by shit, I mean, jobs, resumes, salaries, kids, marriage, age, any of it. Others may be able to go through life’s routine and find their truth, or perhaps never bother finding it at all. But I can’t. I just can’t.
Thoughts of a post-grad 21 year old who finds busyness overrated
If there’s a single idea I emphasize when people ask about writing, it’s that there’s no right way to produce a book. But I do think that whatever you do, you should do regularly, whether it’s waking up at midnight and drinking vodka or waking up at dawn and drinking tea, whether it’s sitting in a monkish study or writing on the back of a flatbed truck. The analogy I like is children’s literature: in a lot of children’s books, there’s a huge institutional structure (Hogwarts, for example) whose presiding safety allows the children’s imagination to run free. The more consistent your habits are – and this ties into having your tools nailed down – the more secure your brain will be to run free and create.
Charles Finch
breaks from the ordered configurations of everyday life...'anti-structures.' The chief characteristic of the anti-structure...is...'communitas' - a spontaneous, rich, classless, nonhierarchical association of people who have stepped out of their routine lives and into a liminal passage like a pilgrimage...The pilgrim could step outside of all roles and just be a person
Gideon Lewis-Kraus (A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful)
The challenge for us is to make the gospel the center of our lives not just on Sunday mornings but on Monday mornings. This means ending distinctions between “full-timers,” “part-timers,” and people with secular employment in our team and leadership structures. We need non-full-time leaders who can model whole-life, gospel-centered, missional living. It means thinking of our workplaces, homes, and neighborhoods as the location of mission. We need to plan and pray for gospel relationships. This means creating church cultures in which we see normal, celebrating day-to-day gospel living in the secular world and discussions of how we can use our daily routines for the gospel.
Tim Chester (Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community (Re:Lit))
Even before 'absolute' weapons were invented, automatism and absolutism were firmly coupled together in the constitution of every military organization. Hence war is the ideal condition for promoting the assemblage of the megamachine, and to keep the threat of war constantly in existence is the surest way of holding the otherwise autonomous or quasi-autonomous components together as a functioning working unit. Once a megamachine has been brought into existence, any criticism of its program, any departure from its principles, any detachment from its routines, any modifications of its structure through demands from below constitute a threat to the whole system.
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
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.
Mary Hopkins-Best (Toddler Adoption: The Weaver's Craft Revised Edition)
But I think if a program is well written, there will be something about its structure that will guide me to various parts of it in an order that will make some kind of sense. You know, it's not just what the program does—there's a story. There's a story about how the program is organized, there's a story about the context in which the program is expected to operate. And one would hope that there will be something about the program, whether it's block comments at the start of each routine or an overview document that comes separately or just choices of variable names that will somehow convey those stories to you. And one would hope that a good programmer, a really good programmer, will have given thought to conveying those stories in addition to the story of what the program actually does.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
My naked eyes see the naked truth,” Diablo began. “And the naked truth is that life is an adventure in the imagination of God, Providence at play, and to the extent that we release control, we experience grace. It is not a coincidence that the more you accept the flow of life, the more that life will flow through you. And that the minute you close your heart, the instant you presume to protect yourself from hurt or heartache, or the moment you try to control the insecurity of life with routine and structure, you have already lost exactly that which you are trying to protect. Your heart goes hard, your life goes stagnant, and Spirit will burn you with a thousand sufferings until you sit in your sacred fire and wake up to the naked truth that you are not in control of your life. This is the truth that is so fretfully foreign to common sense. You are a temporarily stable matrix of energetic probabilities, a spiritual synapse in the mind of God, and that’s all. This is no more your life than it is mine. It’s an experience to behold, but never to hold.” Diablo paused, seeking summation, feeling foolish in his nakedness, another hairy monkey squawking all the answers. “Anyway, the trick is simply this: No matter what happens, keep your heart open. Wide open. The heart is made of love, and love is indestructible, and only the arrogance of ego would presume that it requires protection. To open your heart is to reduce your ego, and this is the only magic that is ever required to experience the naked truth.
Tony Vigorito (Nine Kinds of Naked)
Indeed, routine biases, stereotypes, and prejudices are all examples of the negative voice toward others. These views tend to be supported by conventional attitudes that are very prevalent in our society and, for this reason, they are very difficult to challenge.
Robert W. Firestone (The Fantasy Bond: Structure of Psychological Defenses)
The transfer paradox We do not support this conclusion however. Highly structured methods may indeed have a positive effect on the acquisition curb and performance on retention tests, but not on problem-solving and transfer of learning. Instead, we believe that if One aims at transfer of learning and the ability to show performance that goes beyond given learning objectives, it is necessary to use Germane load inducing methods. This phenomenon in which the message that work best for reaching specific objectives are not the methods that work best for reaching transfer of learning, has been described as the “transfer paradox”. One group learned with pipe pieces of different sizes, with a focus on routine building because the pieces are easily seen as fractions of a whole; the other group learned with tile pieces of equal size is, with a focus on interpretation because the pieces should be interpreted as parts of a whole rather than just units. For subsequent problem-solving the new materials ( beans,bars,etc.) , It was found that the interpretation group was better able to use the novel materials, she’ll better progress, and eventually became more efficient than the routine building group. From instructional control of cognitive load in the design of complex learning environments
Fred Paas (Cognitive Load Theory (Educational Psychologist))
Alarmed at a high incidence of crashes during routine flight training in the 1940s, U.S. Air Force officials looked for evidence of mechanical flaws in the planes or human error perhaps inadvertently introduced by their curriculum, but the cause of the crashes remained mysterious. At last, officials commissioned a lieutenant trained as a scientist, Gilbert Daniels, to look at the physical structures of the cockpit and the men who used them. Daniels noted that all the cockpit structures—seat and back, pedals, knobs, and so on—had been built to specifications calculated for an average military recruit. Recruits for pilot training were already selected for some degree of averageness, had been the reasoning, so these dimensions should fit most pilots, most of the time. But when Daniels measured 4,063 soldiers, he was astonished to find that not a single one of the men fit all ten of the measurements that had been determined to be average. Instead, every body offered its own variation: One pilot might have a longer-than-average arm length, but a shorter-than-average leg length. Another pilot might have a big chest but small hips. Even more astonishing, Daniels discovered that if you picked just three of the ten dimensions of size—say, neck circumference, thigh circumference, and wrist circumference—less than 3.5 percent of pilots would be average sized on all three dimensions. Daniels’s findings were clear and incontrovertible. There was no such thing as an average pilot. The unyielding fixity of the average cockpit ended up being useful to exactly no one. Thereafter, aeronautical engineers began to make everything from seats and foot pedals to flight suits and helmet straps adjustable, and the Air Force adjusted its cockpit specifications to stipulate movable parts that could be adapted to fit a range of body measurements, from 5 to 95 percent of average, just right.
Sara Hendren (What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World)
Controlling images were never just about the object of study—popular culture memes or characters from movies and television shows—but about the process of reproducing structural inequalities in our everyday lives. Social psychologists study how we acknowledge and reproduce status groups like “man,” “woman,” “black,” “white,” “Asian,” “poor,” “rich,” “novice,” and “expert” in routine interactions. These are statuses of people that we recognize as meaningful categories. When we interact with someone, a few things happen. We size up the person we are engaging with, scanning for any risks to our own social status. You don’t want to be the person who mistakes the company president for the janitor, for example. We also scan others’ perception of us. This is how all kinds of impromptu moments of cooperation make our day go smoothly. It’s the guy who sees you struggling to get something on the bus and coordinates the four people around you to help you get on. Or it’s the three women in a fast food line who all grab for a baby’s bottle just before it hits the floor. We cooperate in micromoments and in longer settings like the waiting room of a doctor’s office. And, when we are cooperating with strangers or near strangers, we are using all kinds of ideas about status to make the interaction work to our benefit.
Tressie McMillan Cottom (Thick: And Other Essays)
my problems had been easy with the schedule I’d maintained. Every minute of my life had been choreographed. Sitting idle hadn’t held any appeal. Now that I had time to think about why I’d kept myself so busy, I saw that routines and structure had become a necessary distraction. When I was working, running the house or organizing a function for Thomas’s company, I didn’t have time to think about the last time I’d truly smiled or laughed carefree. When
Devney Perry (Runaway Road (Runaway, #1))
This idea of two distinct varieties of people (which quickly hardened into a Polynesian/Melanesian divide) turns what is, in fact, a spectrum of skin tones and peoples across the Pacific into a more or less binary division between black and white. With this binary came a tangle of other ideas about morality, intelligence, temperament, beauty, social and political complexity, even depth of time. Melanesians were routinely described by Europeans as not just dark-skinned, but “primitive” in their political, economic, and social structures. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts, they are depicted as small, dark, and mistrustful, the women “ill-favoured” and “ugly,” the men “despotic” and cruel. Banded together in small, autonomous groups, they appeared to Europeans to lack any form of law, government, or organized religion and compared unfavorably with their larger, fairer-skinned, more hierarchical neighbors the Polynesians, differing from them, in one unforgettable formulation, “as the wolf from the dog.” The term “Melanesian” had thus long served in European discourse as a marker for otherness and inferiority, and in the racially charged climate of the early twentieth century, Te Rangi Hiroa could hardly fail to be aware of this. When the anatomist J. H. Scott (the probable author of the Otago Medical School notice offering to buy Māori skeletons) asserted, “We know the Maoris to be . . . the result of the mingling of a Polynesian and a Melanesian strain,” or when Sullivan argued for a “Melanesian element” in his Tongan or Samoan data sets, Te Rangi Hiroa would certainly have recognized the subtext. And in his own early somatological studies, which were written explicitly with the work of these other men in mind, you can see him struggling with the problem.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
The path to being free from overwhelm is to become conscious of it and put in place structures and routines for your thoughts and actions that don’t simply manage overwhelm but actually prevent it from building up in the first place.
Andrew Leedham (Unstoppable Self Confidence: How to create the indestructible, natural confidence of the 1% who achieve their goals, create success on demand and live life on their terms)
The first step in breaking organizational culture inertia is simplification. This helps to eliminate the complex routines, processes, and hidden bargains among units that mask waste and inefficiency. Strip out excess layers of administration and halt nonessential operations—sell them off, close them down, spin them off, or outsource the services. Coordinating committees and a myriad of complex initiatives need to be disbanded. The simpler structure will begin to illuminate obsolete units, inefficiency, and simple bad behavior that was hidden from sight by complex overlays of administration and self-interest. After the first round of simplification, it may be necessary to fragment the operating units. This will be the case when units do not need to work in close coordination—when they are basically separable. Such fragmentation breaks political coalitions, cuts the comfort of cross-subsidies, and exposes a larger number of smaller units to leadership’s scrutiny of their operations and performance. After this round of fragmentation, and more simplification, it is necessary to perform a triage. Some units will be closed, some will be repaired, and some will form the nuclei of a new structure. The triage must be based on both performance and culture—you cannot afford to have a high-performing unit with a terrible culture infect the others. The “repair” third of the triaged units must then be put through individual transformation and renewal maneuvers. Changing a unit’s culture means changing its members’ work norms and work-related values. These norms are established, held, and enforced daily by small social groups that take their cue from the group’s high-status member—the alpha. In general, to change the group’s norms, the alpha member must be replaced by someone who expresses different norms and values. All this is speeded along if a challenging goal is set. The purpose of the challenge is not performance per se, but building new work habits and routines within the unit. Once the bulk of operating units are working well, it may then be time to install a new overlay of coordinating mechanisms, reversing some of the fragmentation that was used to break inertia.
Richard P. Rumelt (Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters)
Creating original mathematics requires a very high level of motivation, persistence, and reflection, all of which are considered indicators of creativity (Amabile, 1983; Policastro & Gardner, 2000; Gardner, 1993). The literature suggests that most creative individuals tend to be attracted to complexity, of which most school mathematics curricula has very little to offer. Classroom practices and math curricula rarely use problems with the sort of underlying mathematical structure that would necessitate students’ having a prolonged period of engagement and the independence to formulate solutions. It is my conjecture that in order for mathematical creativity to manifest itself in the classroom, students should be given the opportunity to tackle non-routine problems with complexity and structure - problems which require not only motivation and persistence but also considerable reflection.
Bharath Sriraman (The Characteristics of Mathematical Creativity)
Incorporate order and structure into your life by creating daily routines. This is the only real way to fully liberate yourself, and to gain more mental energy to address what really matters. Learn
Alexis G. Roldan (Zen: The Ultimate Zen Beginner’s Guide: Simple And Effective Zen Concepts For Living A Happier and More Peaceful Life)
All human activity is subject to habitualization. Any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy of effort and which, ipso facto, is apprehended by its performer as that pattern. Habitualization further implies that the action in question may be performed again in the future in the same manner and with the same economical effort. This is true of non-social as well as of social activity. Even the solitary individual on the proverbial desert island habitualizes his activity. When he wakes up in the morning and resumes his attempts to construct a canoe out of matchsticks, he may mumble to himself, “There I go again,” as he starts on step one of an operating procedure consisting of, say, ten steps. In other words, even solitary man has at least the company of his operating procedures. Habitualized actions, of course, retain their meaningful character for the individual although the meanings involved become embedded as routines in his general stock of knowledge, taken for granted by him and at hand for his projects into the future.17 Habitualization carries with it the important psychological gain that choices are narrowed. While in theory there may be a hundred ways to go about the project of building a canoe out of matchsticks, habitualization narrows these down to one. This frees the individual from the burden of “all those decisions,” providing a psychological relief that has its basis in man’s undirected instinctual structure. Habitualization provides the direction and the specialization of activity that is lacking in man’s biological equipment, thus relieving the accumulation of tensions that result from undirected drives.18 And by providing a stable background in which human activity may proceed with a minimum of decision-making most of the time, it frees energy for such decisions as may be necessary on certain occasions. In other words, the background of habitualized activity opens up a foreground for deliberation and innovation.19In terms of the meanings bestowed by man upon his activity, habitualization makes it unnecessary for each situation to be defined anew, step by step.20 A large variety of situations may be subsumed under its predefinitions. The activity to be undertaken in these situations can then be anticipated. Even alternatives of conduct can be assigned standard weights. These
Peter L. Berger (The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge)
As we just discussed, reminders provide a good example of the relative tradeoffs between knowledge in the world versus in the head. Knowledge in the world is accessible. It is self-reminding. It is always there, waiting to be seen, waiting to be used. That is why we structure our offices and our places of work so carefully. We put piles of papers where they can be seen, or if we like a clean desk, we put them in standardized locations and teach ourselves (knowledge in the head) to look in these standard places routinely. We use clocks and calendars and notes. Knowledge in the mind is ephemeral: here now, gone later. We can’t count on something being present in mind at any particular time, unless it is triggered by some external event or unless we deliberately keep it in mind through constant repetition (which then prevents us from having other conscious thoughts). Out of sight, out of mind.
Donald A. Norman (The Design of Everyday Things)
The Power of Myth For screenwriting, Jon recommends The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, which he used to determine if Swingers was structurally correct. He is also a big fan of The Power of Myth, a video interview of Joseph Campbell by Bill Moyers. “With The Jungle Book, I really am going back and doubling down on the old myths.” TF: We recorded our podcast during the shooting of The Jungle Book, in his production office next to set. Months later, The Jungle Book was the #1 movie in the world and currently has a staggering 95% review average on Rotten Tomatoes. Long-Term Impact Trumps Short-Term Gross “Thanks to video, and later DVD and laser disc, everybody had seen this film [Swingers], and it had become part of our culture. That’s when I learned that it’s not always the movie that does the best [financially] that has the most impact, or is the most rewarding, or does the most for your career, for that matter.” Another Reason to Meditate “In the middle of [a meditation session], the idea for Chef hit me, and I let myself stop, which I don’t usually do, and I took out a pad. I scribbled down like eight pages of ideas and thoughts, [and then I] left it alone. If I look back on it, and read those pages, it really had 80% of the heavy lifting done, as far as what [Chef] was about, who was in it, who the characters were, what other movies to look at, what the tone was, what music I would have in it, what type of food he was making, the idea of the food truck, the Cuban sandwiches, Cuban music . . . so it all sort of grew out from that.
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
Routines and daily habits aren’t restrictive. They provide structure, direction, and opportunities for spontaneity.
Mensah Oteh
I couldn't see beyond the walls of our apartment or the few miles between home and school. Every day was about getting through it. Every weekend was about getting back to school, where there could be some structure and my routines.
Sara Zarr (Gem & Dixie)
Corruption is usually classified as a humanitarian aid problem, to be handled by donor agencies, not mainstreamed into overall foreign and defense policy. And while governments may support across-the-board efforts on a multilateral level, they almost never consider acute corruption as they shape their approach to specific countries. Human rights, religious freedom, protections for the LGBT community may enter the conversation, but corruption rarely does. Tools to raise the cost of kleptocratic practices exist—in abundance. It’s just a matter of finding the courage and finesse to use them. All the levers and incentives listed below can be further refined, and new ones imagined, in specific contexts. Particular corrupt officials or structures have unique vulnerabilities and desires; and timelines and windows of opportunity for effective action will be specific to individual cases and will suggest even more potential actions as they are examined. Many of the actions below can and should be routinized—folded into the everyday activities of relevant bureaucracies—so as to reduce the onus on leaders to sign their names to audacious and thus potentially career-threatening moves. But in other cases, a strategy may need to be carefully thought through and tailored to the specific conditions of a given country at a specific point in time.
Sarah Chayes (Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security)
If chess is this complicated, you can imagine how complicated things are in our economy, which involves billions of people and millions of products. Therefore, in the same way in which individuals create routines in their daily lives or chess games, companies operate with ‘productive routines’, which simplify their options and search paths. They build certain decision-making structures, formal rules and conventions that automatically restrict the range of possible avenues that they explore, even when the avenues thus excluded outright may have been more profitable. But they still do it because otherwise they may drown in a sea of information and never make a decision. Similarly, societies create informal rules that deliberately restrict people’s freedom of choice so that they don’t have to make fresh choices constantly. So, they develop a convention for queuing so that people do not have to, for example, constantly calculate and recalculate their positions at a crowded bus stop in order to ensure that they get on the next bus.
Ha-Joon Chang (23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism)
They create in our present-day a “structure of feeling,” as Raymond Williams put it, a system of sentiments combining “elements of impulse, restraint and tone”) that can span the generations.[60] This historically created structure of feeling routinely makes today’s politics of corporate and carceral devastation viewable as “normal” and “tolerable”—but only so long as the devastation is visited upon those whom the nation is accustomed to see targeted (black and brown bodies) and usually only so long as the ones viewing the devastation as “tolerable” are not themselves among the targeted!
Mark Lewis Taylor (The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America)
Routine gave you structure. Structure gave you perspective. And perspective gave you a horizon.
Peter James (Dead Simple (Roy Grace #1))
At last I came to understand the value in it. The point of waking up early wasn't to torture us - it was to start the day off with peace and tranquility. Birds. A gong. The sound of flowing water. And our morning routine never varied. The simplicity and structure of ashram morning spared us from the stressful complexity of decisions and variation. Starting our day so simply was like a mental shower. It cleansed us of the challenges of the previous day, giving us the space and energy to transform greed into generosity, anger into compassion, lost into love. Finally, it gave us resolve, a sense of purpose to carry out into the day.
Jay Shetty (Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day)
Rico completes the whole process, silently saying to himself, ‘Trust.’ He enjoys doing the Intensity Clarity Execution routine because it is short, simple and structured, and it makes him feel light, bright and clear. He uses it three times a day leading into a match, which seems to settle his body and mind down, reducing doubt and overthinking.
Ceri Evans (Perform Under Pressure)
Who we are when everything is stripped away, in our barest moments, is something we don’t routinely examine. When a horrific loss uproots us, we leave pieces of ourselves behind in the soil, the structure on which we built our identity reduced to nothing more than an absent appendage, left behind to rot.
Rana Awdish (In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope)
He couldn’t trust his inner guide, so he structured his life through routines and religion, and built the best attachments he could.
Dorothy Husen (Breaking the Chains of Transgenerational Trauma: My Journey from Surviving to Thriving)
When you have spent most of your young adult life surrounded by people and cushioned by structure - at school, at work, following timetables and deadlines and familiar routines - the abrupt silence that comes with working from home is utterly unnerving.
Kate MacDougall (London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir)
Jay Abraham is one of Daymond John’s (page 323) mentors and the author of Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got, which is one of Ramit’s most-gifted books. I often recommend Jay’s work to people who ask about how to structure “JVs,” or joint ventures.
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
The concept is to establish a welcoming structure and routine by assigning students to tables and lunchtime discussion topics based upon their mutual (or similar) passions. If possible, the tables could be moved off to one side of the cafeteria, away from the distracting noise and visuals, to help foster successful conversations.
William Stillman (The Conscious Parent's Guide To Asperger's Syndrome: A Mindful Approach for Helping Your Child Succeed (Conscious Parenting Relationship Series))
The effect of the pecuniary interest and the pecuniary habit of mind upon the growth of institutions is seen in those enactments and conventions that make for security of property, enforcement of contracts, facility of pecuniary transactions, vested interests. Of such bearing are changes affecting bankruptcy and receiverships, limited liability, banking and currency, coalitions of labourers or employers, trusts and pools. The community's institutional furniture of this kind is of immediate consequence only to the propertied classes, and in proportion as they are propertied; that is to say, in proportion as they are to be ranked with the leisure class. But indirectly these conventions of business life are of the gravest consequence for the industrial process and for the life of the community. And in guiding the institutional growth in this respect, the pecuniary classes, therefore, serve a purpose of the most serious importance to the community, not only in the conservation of the accepted social scheme, but also in shaping the industrial process proper. The immediate end of this pecuniary institutional structure and of its amelioration is the greater facility of peaceable and orderly exploitation; but its remoter effects far outrun this immediate object. Not only does the more facile conduct of business permit industry and extra-industrial life to go on with less perturbation; but the resulting elimination of disturbances and complications calling for an exercise of astute discrimination in everyday affairs acts to make the pecuniary class itself superfluous. As fact as pecuniary transactions are reduced to routine, the captain of industry can be dispensed with. This consummation, it is needless to say, lies yet in the indefinite future. The ameliorations wrought in favour of the pecuniary interest in modern institutions tend, in another field, to substitute the 'soulless' joint-stock corporation for the captain, and so they make also for the dispensability of the great leisure-class function of ownership. Indirectly, therefore, the bent given to the growth of economic institutions by the leisure-class influence is of very considerable industrial consequence.
Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class)
The advent of low temperature scanning EM led to a study by Bill Wergin and colleagues from NASA in which they collected samples from different types of snow cover found in the prairies, taiga (snow forest), and alpine environments. With snow depths up to a metre, various layers occurred in which the crystals underwent a change in their microscopic shape from the original freshly fallen crystals, to the development of flat faces and sharp edges. It is this metamorphosis of lying snow that determines the likelihood of avalanches, which can be predicted from the crystal structures at various depths. Although scanning EM (electron microscopy) is hardly available as a routine assay in distant mountain regions, this work helped in the use of microwave radiology investigation of the snow water equivalent in the snow pack, as large snow crystals scatter passive microwave more than small crystals. Smaller and more rounded crystals of snow do not interlock, and can slide more easily over each other, increasing the risk of avalanches.
Terence Allen (Microscopy: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
how racism becomes institutionalized in the ideas and routine practices of our social organizations: our families, our laws and policies, our educational system and decisions and structures shaping the representation of race we absorb from the media. From mass incarceration to sentencing laws to racial discrimination in housing and home loans, the invisibility of institutional racism is maintained by the fact that it is literally hard to see.
Crystal Marie Fleming (How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide)
The progressive form of the verb go has been available for centuries in constructions such as I am going home, in which go clearly retains its ordinary verbal sense. This same construction could also be used with a complement of purpose, in cases like I am going to visit Mrs Pumphrey, in which the verb go still had its ordinary meaning: the structure of such a sentence was [I] [am going] [to visit Mrs Pumphrey], broadly parallel to [I] [am going] [home]. Such a sentence could be uttered by a speaker who was actually on her way to Mrs Pumphrey’s house, but equally, and crucially, it could be uttered by someone just about to set out, just like I’m going home. As a consequence, speakers began to reanalyse such utterances as expressing, not actual motion, but rather an intention for the near future. Accordingly, it became possible for something like I am going to buy a new carriage to be said by someone curled up comfortably at home with no immediate intention of moving. This largely happened in the early nineteenth century, but the new usage has extended its domain very rapidly, and today we routinely say things like You’re going to like this book, in which no relevant motion is even conceivable: the be going to construction has entirely lost its original connection with movement and become a mere grammatical marker of the (near) future. Together with this grammaticalization, the structure has been reanalysed: we no longer have the old structure [I] [am going] [to buy a new car]; instead, we have [I] [am] [going to] [buy a new car], in which going to forms part of a single grammatical marker. To see this, observe that this new going to can now be reduced to gonna, as in I’m gonna buy a new car. The same is not possible with the ordinary progressive of the verb go, as in *I’m gonna the beach, in which going and to do not constitute parts of a single grammatical form.
Robert McColl Millar (Trask's Historical Linguistics)
As much as we want to think of ourselves as spontaneous, most of us thrive on routine. The brain prefers structure. It likes to know what comes next. This allows it to focus on the next action rather than being distracted by a plethora of potential next actions.
Damon Zahariades (Fast Focus: A Quick-Start Guide To Mastering Your Attention, Ignoring Distractions, And Getting More Done In Less Time! (Improve Your Focus and Mental Discipline Book 1))
While we all need external structure in our lives—some degree of predictability, routine, organization—those with ADD need it much more than most people. They need external structure so much because they so lack internal structure. They carry with them a frightening sense that their world might cave in at any moment. They often feel on the brink of disaster, as if they were juggling a few more balls than they’re able to. Their inner world begs for reassurance, for signposts and guidelines.
Edward M. Hallowell (Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder)
From the point of view of brain structure, it is important to note that the tasks of synthesis and evaluation essentially need to get the right hemisphere involved. That is, when higher-order learning is targeted, we have to necessarily stimulate right hemisphere through appropriate instructions and activities that go beyond mere procedural/routine/sequential operations. In addition, essentially the frontal integrative cortex of the cerebral cortex needs to be stimulated to a higher degree for promoting higher-order learning; this is the region we use for more integrative tasks of abstract conceptualisation, as presented earlier.
Chandana Watagodakumbura (Education from a Deeper and Multidisciplinary Perspective: Enhanced by Relating to Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) Based on Mindfulness, Self-Awareness & Emotional Intelligence)
The pomodoro technique’s snappy, rigorous structure lends itself to another purpose as well: you can assign a specific task to each and every pomodoro. Or, put differently, you can use the pomodoro technique as a way to schedule everything you need to get done.
Dominic Mann (Daily Routine Mastery: How to Create the Ultimate Daily Routine for More Energy, Productivity, and Success - Have Your Best Day Every Day)
According to the law of requisite variety, the survival of any system depends on its capacity to cultivate variety in its internal structures. Disequilibrium is life ... When I'm in a spiritual slump, nine times out of ten, something sacred has become routine ... one of the ways I snap out of a spiritual slump is by disturbing by routine and experimenting with spiritual disciplines.
Mark Batterson (Wild Goose Chase: Reclaim the Adventure of Pursuing God)
I like to remind people that Mondays do not suck. If you feel that way, it’s not Mondays that are the problem, but the current structure and routine in your life.
James Smith (Not a Life Coach: Push Your Boundaries. Unlock Your Potential. Redefine Your Life.)
Through their unique dance routines, SM Entertainment’s idol groups were redefining music, and the music industry’s consumers did not remain simply as listeners, but became fiercely devoted fans. In addition to this, with BIGBANG and 2NE1, YG Entertainment had fused the international hip-hop and pop trends of the time with the structure of K-pop melodies. They also utilized street and high fashion—something rarely attempted by idols before then—and through this, their influence went beyond the fandom, to the masses and the fashion industry itself.
BTS (Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS)
Paradoxically, the more people give up their crutches, the soothing mechanisms of their lives, their self-nourishing habits and deadening routines, the more they are able to embrace life.
Robert W. Firestone (The Fantasy Bond: Structure of Psychological Defenses)
If you want to stop smoking, ask yourself, do you do it because you love nicotine, or because it provides a burst of stimulation, a structure to your day, a way to socialize? If you smoke because you need stimulation, studies indicate that some caffeine in the afternoon can increase the odds you’ll quit. More than three dozen studies of former smokers have found that identifying the cues and rewards they associate with cigarettes, and then choosing new routines that provide similar payoffs—a piece of Nicorette, a quick series of push-ups, or simply taking a few minutes to stretch and relax—makes it more likely they will quit.
Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business)
Habits never really disappear. They’re encoded into the structures of our brain, and that’s a huge advantage for us, because it would be awful if we had to relearn how to drive after every vacation. The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.” This explains why it’s so hard to create exercise habits, for instance, or change what we eat. Once we develop a routine of sitting on the couch, rather than running, or snacking whenever we pass a doughnut box, those patterns always remain inside our heads. By the same rule, though, if we learn to create new neurological routines that overpower those behaviors—if we take control of the habit loop—we can force those bad tendencies into the background,
Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business)
If you want to stop smoking, ask yourself, do you do it because you love nicotine, or because it provides a burst of stimulation, a structure to your day, a way to socialize? If you smoke because you need stimulation, studies indicate that some caffeine in the afternoon can increase the odds you’ll quit. More than three dozen studies of former smokers have found that identifying the cues and rewards they associate with cigarettes, and then choosing new routines that provide similar payoffs—a piece of Nicorette, a quick series of push-ups, or simply taking a few minutes to stretch and relax—makes it more likely they will quit. If you identify the cues and rewards, you can change the routine.
Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business)
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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: TUTORIAL 6 – had been enough on their own to fill Miller with an apocalyptic dread, but the content, delivered in an unfortunate monotone that sounded like a Dalek on Mogadon, was an altogether different level of horrific. ‘As an IT infrastructure technician, you’ll be supporting clients, assisting with troubleshooting and providing solutions so as to problem-solve business-wide infrastructure concerns.’ ‘I think I’m actually slipping into a coma,’ Miller said. ‘You’ll be responsible for workflow management, as well as applying structured IT techniques to both common and non-routine computing issues . . .
Mark Billingham (The Last Dance (Detective Miller #1))
For most people, disruptions in routine are simply annoying, but for someone with BPII, these types of disruptions may actually lead to depressive or hypomanic symptoms. In addition, research has found that individuals with bipolar disorder have more difficulty than the average person in maintaining a regular schedule (Shen et al. 2008). Does this ring true for you? During times of stress, is it harder for you to maintain a daily schedule? How do you feel when you have no daily structure or routine? Perhaps you oversleep, skip meals, watch TV late at night, or overeat. How do these feelings and behaviors affect your mood?
Stephanie McMurrich Roberts (The Bipolar II Disorder Workbook: Managing Recurring Depression, Hypomania, and Anxiety (A New Harbinger Self-Help Workbook))
How quickly the shell of a routine is shattered. Any routine, however solid it may be, is obliterated by the unexpected.
Margarita García Robayo (La encomienda)
Part of the intensity of her relief—she thought, as she walked silently by his side—was the shock of a contrast: she had seen, with the sudden, immediate vividness of sensory perception, an exact picture of what the code of self-sacrifice would have meant, if enacted by the three of them. Galt, giving up the woman he wanted, for the sake of his friend, faking his greatest feeling out of existence and himself out of her life, no matter what the cost to him and to her, then dragging the rest of his years through the waste of the unreached and unfulfilled—she, turning for consolation to a second choice, faking a love she did not feel, being willing to fake, since her will to self-deceit was the essential required for Galt’s self-sacrifice, then living out her years in hopeless longing, accepting, as relief for an unhealing wound, some moments of weary affection, plus the tenet that love is futile and happiness is not to be found on earth—Francisco, struggling in the elusive fog of a counterfeit reality, his life a fraud staged by the two who were dearest to him and most trusted, struggling to grasp what was missing from his happiness, struggling down the brittle scaffold of a lie over the abyss of the discovery that he was not the man she loved, but only a resented substitute, half-charity-patient, half-crutch, his perceptiveness becoming his danger and only his surrender to lethargic stupidity protecting the shoddy structure of his joy, struggling and giving up and settling into the dreary routine of the conviction that fulfillment is impossible to man—the three of them, who had had all the gifts of existence spread out before them, ending up as embittered hulks, who cry in despair that life is frustration—the frustration of not being able to make unreality real.
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)