Selected For Job Quotes

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Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.
Raymond Carver (Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories)
If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, "You're an asshole," which maybe he or she is, and if you don't say, "That's idiotic," when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.
Noam Chomsky
…This… ’stuff’? I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? …And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.
Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada (The Devil Wears Prada, #1))
...your name will be in a history book one day, and some bored ten-year-old will memorize it for a test and then forget all about you. You have a job, just like everyone in the world. Stop acting like it makes you more or less than anyone else.
Kiera Cass (The Heir (The Selection, #4))
I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.
Alice Munro (Selected Stories)
I've always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I've never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it.
John Steinbeck (America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction)
Pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Consider A Move The steady time of being unknown, in solitude, without friends, is not a steadiness that sustains. I hear your voice waver on the phone: Haven't talked to anyone for days. I drive around. I sit in parking lots. The voice zeroes through my ear, and waits. What should I say? There are ways to meet people you will want to love? I know of none. You come out stronger having gone through this? I no longer believe that, if I once did. Consider a move, a change, a job, a new place to live, someplace you'd like to be. That's not it, you say. Now time turns back. We almost touch. Then what is? I ask. What is?
Michael Ryan (New and Selected Poems)
Let the tutor not merely require a verbal account of what the boy has been taught but the meaning and the substance of it: let him judge how the child has profited from it not from the evidence of his memory but from that of his life. Let him take what the boy has just learned and make him show him dozens of different aspects of it and then apply it to just as many different subjects, in order to find out whether he has really grasped it and make it part of himself, judging the boy's progress by what Plato taught about education. Spewing up food exactly as you have swallowed it is evidence of a failure to digest and assimilate it; the stomach has not done its job if, during concoction, it fails to change the substance and the form of what it is given.
Michel de Montaigne (The Essays: A Selection)
But shouldn't there be a least? Shouldn't there be a bare minimum that life should give you? Is it too much to ask for a job you don't hate, or for someone to truly have and hold? Is it too much to ask for one child? Even one some would call flawed? Couldn't I at least have that?
Kiera Cass (The Queen (The Selection, #0.4))
And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beating and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for their are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior: official censors, judges and executors. That's you, Montag, and that's me.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
I loved those little bits of luxury in my day. Dresses made to my exact measurements, exotic desserts flown in simply because it was Thursday, and an endless supply of beautiful things were all perks; and they were easily my favorite parts of the job.
Kiera Cass (The Heir (The Selection, #4))
Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Indeed, this is how 99 percent of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But that’s the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job—not a calling.
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
Your job is just one tiny part of your life. We talk so much about choosing jobs or selecting careers. But what if we chose a life instead?
Emily Ley (Grace, Not Perfection: Embracing Simplicity, Celebrating Joy (Tools and Strategies to Help You Simplify Your Space, Your Time, and Your Mind So You Can Slow Down and Enjoy Life))
One never can see, or not till long afterwards, why any one was selected for any job. And when one does, it is usually some reason that leaves no room for vanity. Certainly, it is never for what the man himself would have regarded as his chief qualifications.
C.S. Lewis (Perelandra (The Space Trilogy, #2))
For the last century, almost all top political appointments [on the planet Earth] had been made by random computer selection from the pool of individuals who had the necessary qualifications. It had taken the human race several thousand years to realize that there were some jobs that should never be given to the people who volunteered for them, especially if they showed too much enthusiasm. As one shrewed political commentator had remarked: “We want a President who has to be carried screaming and kicking into the White House — but will then do the best job he possibly can, so that he’ll get time off for good behavior.
Arthur C. Clarke (Imperial Earth)
At Apple, we never would have dreamed of doing that, and we never staged any A/ B tests for any of the software on the iPhone. When it came to choosing a color, we picked one. We used our good taste—and our knowledge of how to make software accessible to people with visual difficulties related to color perception—and we moved on.
Ken Kocienda (Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs)
Taste is developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole.
Ken Kocienda (Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs)
It is the job of the creator to explode. It is the task of the academic to walk around the bomb site, gathering up the shrapnel, to figure out what kind of an explosion it was, who was killed, how much damage it was meant to do and how close it came to actually achieving that.
Neil Gaiman (The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction)
A game at which the liberals have become masters is that of deliberate evasiveness. The question often comes up `what can you do?`. If you ask him to do something like stopping to use segregated facilities or dropping out of varsity to work at menial jobs like all blacks or defying and denouncing all provisions that make him privileged, you always get the answer - `but that's unrealistic!' While this may be true, it only serves to illustrate the fact that no matter what a white man does, the colour of his skin - his passport to privilege- will always put him miles ahead of the black men. Thus in the ultimate analysis, no white person can escape being part of the oppressor camp.
Steve Biko (I Write What I Like: Selected Writings)
Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss. As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
Harrington Emerson
What do you have to be stressed about?” the normies might have said, if I ever talked about these things with normal people. “You have a family, a house, a car, a good job. Just deal with it!” As if I could simply do that. As if I chose this. As if I looked at the options available to me and they were clearly labeled “Perseverance” and “Freaking the Fuck Out All the Time” and calmly said, “Mmm, yes, I select option B.
John Moe (The Hilarious World of Depression)
Life is Beautiful? Beyond all the vicissitudes that are presented to us on this short path within this wild planet, we can say that life is beautiful. No one can ever deny that experiencing the whirlwind of emotions inside this body is a marvel, we grow with these life experiences, we strengthen ourselves and stimulate our feelings every day, in this race where the goal is imminent death sometimes we are winners and many other times we lose and the darkness surprises us and our heart is disconnected from this reality halfway and connects us to the server of the matrix once more, debugging and updating our database, erasing all those experiences within this caracara of flesh and blood, waiting to return to earth again. "Life is beautiful gentlemen" is cruel and has unfair behavior about people who looked like a bundle of light and left this platform for no apparent reason, but its nature is not similar to our consciousness and feelings, she has a script for each of us because it was programmed that way, the architects of the game of life they know perfectly well that you must experiment with all the feelings, all the emotions and evolve to go to the next levels. You can't take a quantum leap and get through the game on your own. inventing a heaven and a hell in order to transcend, that comes from our fears of our imagination not knowing what life has in store for us after life is a dilemma "rather said" the best kept secret of those who control us day by day. We are born, we grow up, we are indoctrinated in the classrooms and in the jobs, we pay our taxes, we reproduce, we enjoy the material goods that it offers us the system the marketing of disinformation, Then we get old, get sick and die. I don't like this story! It looks like a parody of Noam Chomsky, Let's go back to the beautiful description of beautiful life, it sounds better! Let's find meaning in all the nonsense that life offers us, 'Cause one way or another we're doomed to imagine that everything will be fine until the end of matter. It is almost always like that. Sometimes life becomes a real nightmare. A heartbreaking horror that we find impossible to overcome. As we grow up, we learn to know the dark side of life. The terrors that lurk in the shadows, the dangers lurking around every corner. We realize that reality is much harsher and ruthless than we ever imagined. And in those moments, when life becomes a real hell, we can do nothing but cling to our own existence, summon all our might and fight with all our might so as not to be dragged into the abyss. But sometimes, even fighting with all our might is not enough. Sometimes fate is cruel and takes away everything we care about, leaving us with nothing but pain and hopelessness. And in that moment, when all seems lost, we realize the terrible truth: life is a death trap, a macabre game in which we are doomed to lose. And so, as we sink deeper and deeper into the abyss, while the shadows envelop us and terror paralyzes us, we remember the words that once seemed to us so hopeful: life is beautiful. A cruel and heartless lie, that leads us directly to the tragic end that death always awaits us.
Marcos Orowitz (THE MAELSTROM OF EMOTIONS: A selection of poems and thoughts About us humans and their nature)
Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you’re going to do a good job with it.
Raymond Carver (Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories (Vintage Contemporaries))
When it comes to being selected for a thankless job, the man who leaves the room just before the vote is the fool who gets the job.
Anne Bishop (Murder of Crows (The Others, #2))
There are times when the marvels of scientific advancement expedite our processes, making our lives easier. Modern technology provides machines that can think three or five or seven steps ahead of the human mind, machines that offer elegant solutions, a selection of contingency plans, Bs and Cs and Ds in case A isn't to your liking. And then there are times when a screwdriver and a bit of elbow grease are all that's necessary to get the job done.
Victoria Schwab (Vicious (Villains, #1))
The most common theory points to the fact that men are stronger than women and that they have used their greater physical power to force women into submission. A more subtle version of this claim argues that their strength allows men to monopolize tasks that demand hard manual labor, such as plowing and harvesting. This gives them control of food production, which in turn translates into political clout. There are two problems with this emphasis on muscle power. First, the statement that men are stronger is true only on average and only with regard to certain types of strength. Women are generally more resistant to hunger, disease, and fatigue than men. There are also many women who can run faster and lift heavier weights than many men. Furthermore, and most problematically for this theory, women have, throughout history, mainly been excluded from jobs that required little physical effort, such as the priesthood, law, and politics, while engaging in hard manual labor in the fields....and in the household. If social power were divided in direct relation to physical strength or stamina, women should have got far more of it. Even more importantly, there simply is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans. People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twenty-somethings are much stronger than their elders. ...Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labor. Another theory explains that masculine dominance results not from strength but from aggression. Millions of years of evolution have made men far more violent than women. Women can match men as far as hatred, greed, and abuse are concern, but when push comes to shove…men are more willing to engage in raw physical violence. This is why, throughout history, warfare has been a masculine prerogative. In times of war, men’s control of the armed forces has made them the masters of civilian society too. They then use their control of civilian society to fight more and more wars. …Recent studies of the hormonal and cognitive systems of men and women strengthen the assumption that men indeed have more aggressive and violent tendencies and are…on average, better suited to serve as common soldiers. Yet, granted that the common soldiers are all men, does it follow that the ones managing the war and enjoying its fruits must also be men? That makes no sense. It’s like assuming that because all the slaves cultivating cotton fields are all Black, plantation owners will be Black as well. Just as an all-Black workforce might be controlled by an all-White management, why couldn’t an all-male soldiery be controlled by an all-female government?
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
WORK, SOMETIMES I was sad all day, and why not. There I was, books piled on both sides of the table, paper stacked up, words falling off my tongue. The robins had been a long time singing, and now it was beginning to rain. What are we sure of? Happiness isn’t a town on a map, or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work ongoing. Which is not likely to be the trifling around with a poem. Then it began raining hard, and the flowers in the yard were full of lively fragrance. You have had days like this, no doubt. And wasn’t it wonderful, finally, to leave the room? Ah, what a moment! As for myself, I swung the door open. And there was the wordless, singing world. And I ran for my life.
Mary Oliver (New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2)
With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 'bright,' did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of a well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world [...] there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior: official censors, judges and executors.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
What if our bodies were transparent, like a washing machine window? How wondrous to watch ourselves. Joggers would job even harder, blood pumping away. Lovers would love more. God damn! Look at that old semen go! Diets would improve-- kiwi fruit and strawberries, borscht with sour cream.
Lucia Berlin (A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories)
So in life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control
Epictetus (Discourses and Selected Writings (Classics))
In addition, school teaches us that 'A efforts' bring 'A results.' Real life shows us that 'A efforts' only give us a chance at 'A results.' Students can go out into the job market, do all the right things, and still get a real-life 'F' when they aren't selected for a job.
Stephen Guise (How to Be an Imperfectionist: The New Way to Fearlessness, Confidence, and Freedom from Perfectionism)
The solicitor he selected, a Mr Makepeace, had demanded five thousand pounds up front, even before he took the top off his fountain pen, and then another five once he'd briefed Alex Redmayne, the barrister who would represent him in Court. Danny couldn't understand why he needed two lawyers to do the same job.
Jeffrey Archer (A Prisoner of Birth)
New Rule: Gun-control people have to stop pressuring Starbucks to ban guns. I want my gun nuts overcaffeinated, twitchy, and accident-prone. That way, the problem will take care of itself. Plus, if just one gun nut kills just one pseudo-intellectual writing a screenplay-slash-graphic-novel on his iPad, natural selection is doing its job.
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
If you want the shortest version of my answer to the question of why Buddhism is true, it's this: Because we are animals created by natural selection. Natural selection built into our brains the tendencies that early Buddhist thinkers did a pretty amazing job of sizing up, given the meager scientific resources at their disposal. Now, in light of the modern understanding of natural selection and the modern understanding of the human brain that natural selection produced, we can provide a new kind of defense of this sizing up.
Robert Wright (Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment)
No one who is unmemorable is going to be chosen for an important job, because one cannot select what one cannot remember.
Jeffrey Pfeffer (Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time)
Selection starts even before the formal interview process.
Roopesh Tiwari (WHAT WON’T GET YOU YOUR DREAM JOB : STORY OF A JOB HUNT)
Why do some products, like the iPhone, turn out as well as they do? I’m now ready to offer my complete answer. It comes in three parts.
Ken Kocienda (Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs)
This points to the more general lesson I took from my WebKit editing work: People matter more than programming
Ken Kocienda (Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs)
We always started small, with some inspiration. We made demos. We mixed in feedback. We listened to guidance from smart colleagues. We blended in variations. We honed our vision. We followed the initial demo with another and then another. We improved our demos in incremental steps. We evolved our work by slowly converging on better versions of the vision. Round after round of creative selection moved us step by step from the spark of an idea to a finished product.
Ken Kocienda (Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs)
By the end of medical school, most students tended to focus on "lifestyle" specialities - those with more humane hours, higher salaries, and lower pressures - the idealism of their med school application essays tempered or lost. As graduation neared and we sat down, in a Yale tradition, to re-write our commencement oath - a melding of the words of Hippocrates, Maimonides, Osler, along with a few other great medical forefathers - several students argued for the removal of language insisting that we place our patients' interests above our own. (The rest of us didn't allow this discussion to continue for long. The words stayed. This kind of egotism struck me as antithetical to medicine and, it should be noted, entirely reasonable. Indeed, this is how 99 percent of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But thats the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job - not a calling).
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
If you asked my dad about selecting any kind of professional career, he’d tell you, “Don’t make a date with a heart attack.” Meaning: You’ve got to pace yourself and not forget to slow down. No job is forever. So relax and have some fun.
Chuck Palahniuk (Damned (Damned #1))
A person’s selection of a vocation is a crucial step with significant ramification relating to their degree of financial success, personal happiness, and sense of contributing the best part of themselves – their unique talent – to the community.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
Coming in from the factory or warehouse, tired enough, there seemed little use for the night except to eat, sleep and then return to the menial job. But there was the typewriter waiting for me in those many old rooms with torn shades and worn rugs, the tub and toilet down the hall, and the feeling in the air of all the losers who had proceeded me. Sometimes the typewriter was there when the job wasn't and the food wasn't and the rent wasn't. Sometimes the typer was in hock. Sometimes there was only the park bench. But at the best of times there was the small room and the machine and the bottle. The sound of the keys, on and on, and shouts: 'HEY! KNOCK THAT OFF, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE! WE'RE WORKING PEOPLE HERE AND WE'VE GOT TO GET UP IN THE MORNING!' With broom sticks knocking on the floor, pounding coming from the ceiling, I would work in a last few lines...
Charles Bukowski (The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966)
Dad just smiled wryly. “You’ll learn, Frank, that when you’re up there’re hundreds of people who’ll claim you as a friend. When you’re down, you’re lucky if one of them will buy you a cup of coffee. If I had it to do over again, I’d select my friends more carefully. I do have a couple of good friends. They’re not wealthy, but one of them got me my job in the post office.
Frank W. Abagnale (Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake)
We used the word “heuristics” to describe aspects of software development that tip toward the liberal arts. Its counterpart, “algorithms,” was its alter ego on the technical side. Heuristics and algorithms are like two sides of the same coin. Both are specific procedures for making software do what it does: taking input, applying an operation, and producing output. Yet each had a different purpose.
Ken Kocienda (Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs)
There is not a moral to every story in animal behavior. Sometimes a snake is just a snake, and sometimes snake sex is only about sex in snakes, or sex in egg-laying reptiles. Although a biologist’s job in part is to interpret what organisms do in a broader context, that context does not, and should not, need to include a lesson for human beings. This is true regardless of whether the lesson is something we would like to teach, which means that using animals as vehicles for nonsexist thinking is just as out of bounds as using them to keep women barefoot and pregnant.
Marlene Zuk (Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can't Learn about Sex from Animals)
I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide--sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself. I lived in a state of siege, always losing just what I wanted to hold on to[...] It was being a watcher that did it. A watcher, not a keeper.
Alice Munro (Selected Stories)
Any discussion of the sexuality of the digestive tract must inevitably touch on the anus. Anal tissue is among the most densely innervated on the human body. It has to be. It requires a lot of information to do its job. The anus has to be able to tell what’s knocking at its door: Is it solid, liquid, or gas? And then selectively release either all of it or one part of it. The consequences of a misread are dire. As Mike Jones put it, “You don’t want to choose poorly.” People who understand anatomy are often cowed by the feats of the lowly anus. “Think of it,” said Robert Rosenbluth, a physician whose acquaintance I made at the start of this book. “No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
While Alpha Males are often gifted with superior physical attributes—size, strength, speed, good looks—selected by evolution over the eons by the strongest surviving and, essentially, getting all the girls, the Beta Male gene has survived not by meeting and overcoming adversity, but by anticipating and avoiding it.
Christopher Moore (A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper, #1))
The question of what you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life. Attachment to the past and fears concerning the future not only govern the way you select the things you own but also represent the criteria by which you make choices in every aspect of your life, including your relationships with people and your job.
Marie Kondō (The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (Magic Cleaning #1))
Here is a selection from her portfolio.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
Yeah, jobs, just for the rent and some food in your belly so you can come back and let them rape your hours, your life, you.
Charles Bukowski (Reach for the Sun: Selected Letters 1978-1994, Volume 3)
special access to her friend Steve Jobs. Here is a selection from her portfolio. 1. At his home in Woodside, 1982: He was such a perfectionist that he had
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
Indeed, this is how 99 percent of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But that’s the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job—not a calling.)
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
Walker Photos For almost thirty years, photographer Diana Walker has had special access to her friend Steve Jobs. Here is a selection from her portfolio.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
Portfolio of Diana Walker Photos For almost thirty years, photographer Diana Walker has had special access to her friend Steve Jobs. Here is a selection from her portfolio.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
Make sure the job you select complements your personal life the best.
Abhishek Ratna (No Parking. No Halt. Success Non Stop!)
This is how 99% of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But that's the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job - not a calling.
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
In this body, this universe, this community, it is inevitable that each of us faces some such event. [28] Your job, then, is to appear before the court, say what you have to say and make the best of the situation. [29] Then the judge declares you guilty. ‘I wish you well, judge. I did my part, you can decide if you did yours.’ Because the judge runs a risk too, don’t forget.
Epictetus (Discourses and Selected Writings (Classics))
the fundamental most comical tragedy of parenthood: that if you do your job properly, if you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won’t need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away.
Neil Gaiman (The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction)
It is necessary for the oppressors to approach the people in order, via subjugation, to keep them passive. This approximation, however, does not involve being with the people, or require true communication. It is accomplished by the oppressors' depositing myths indispensable to the preservation of the status quo: for example, the myth that the oppressive order is a "free society"; the myth that all persons are free to work where they wish, that if they don't like their boss they can leave him and look for another job; the myth that this order respects human rights and is therefore worthy of esteem; the myth that anyone who is industrious can become an entrepreneur--worse yet, the myth that the street vendor is as much an entrepreneur as the owner of a large factory; the myth of the universal right of education, when of all the Brazilian children who enter primary schools only a tiny fraction ever reach the university; the myth of the equality of all individuals, when the question: "Do you know who you're talking to?" is still current among us; the myth of the heroism of the oppressor classes as defenders of "Western Christian civilization" against "materialist barbarism"; the myth of the charity and generosity of the elites, when what they really do as a class is to foster selective "good deeds" (subsequently elaborated into the myth of "disinterested aid," which on the international level was severely criticized by Pope John XXIII); the myth that the dominant elites, "recognizing their duties," promote the advancement of the people, so that the people, in a gesture of gratitude, should accept the words of the elites and be conformed to them; the myth of private property as fundamental to personal human development (so long as oppressors are the only true human beings); the myth of the industriousness of the oppressors and the laziness and dishonesty of the oppressed as well as the myth of the natural inferiority of the latter and the superiority of the former.
Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)
When speaking of heritage. Not all of it is good and nor all of it is bad; for some people it isn’t all bad but for some of us; it’s all bad. But often not of the ancestors’ creation. But it’s your job as a person of your ancestors’ future is to evaluate it and select the good fruits and hold them dear but it’s also your responsibility to know when to have enough common sense to cast the bad ones out.
A. White
I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it's an expert gardener at work or a good carpenter chopping dovetails. I don't think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn't matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental, and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has. I hate populist [shit], no matter how much the demos love it.
Robert Hughes (The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes)
If we’re not ready for leadership or don’t want to be the leader, then we need to focus on our followership skills that relate to a bad leader or select another leader that we think would do a better job than we would.
Kurt Madden (The Synergetic Follower: Changing Our World Without Being the Leader)
Heuristics also have a measurement or value associated with them—the duration for an animation or the red-green-blue values for an onscreen color, but there isn’t a similar “arrow of improvement” that always points the same way. Unlike evaluating algorithms, heuristics are harder to nail down. For instance, how quickly should a scrolling list glide to a stop after you’ve flicked it? We always made demos to evaluate the possibilities.
Ken Kocienda (Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs)
While Alpha Males are often gifted with superior physical attributes—size, strength, speed, good looks—selected by evolution over the eons by the strongest surviving and, essentially, getting all the girls, the Beta Male gene has survived not by meeting and overcoming adversity, but by anticipating and avoiding it. That is, when the Alpha Males were out charging after mastodons, the Beta Males could imagine in advance that attacking what was essentially an angry, woolly bulldozer with a pointy stick might be a losing proposition, so they hung back at camp to console the grieving widows. When Alpha Males set out to conquer neighboring tribes, to count coups and take heads, Beta Males could see in advance that in the event of a victory, the influx of female slaves was going to leave a surplus of mateless women cast out for younger trophy models, with nothing to do but salt down the heads and file the uncounted coups, and some would find solace in the arms of any Beta Male smart enough to survive. In the case of defeat, well, there was that widows thing again. The Beta Male is seldom the strongest or the fastest, but because he can anticipate danger, he far outnumbers his Alpha Male competition. The world is led by Alpha Males, but the machinery of the world turns on the bearings of the Beta Male.
Christopher Moore (A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper, #1))
it’s crucial to make the right call about whether to use an algorithm or a heuristic in a specific situation. This is why the Google experiment with forty-one shades of blue seems so foreign to me, accustomed as I am to the Apple approach. Google used an A/B test to make a color choice. It used a single predetermined value criterion and defined it like so: The best shade of blue is the one that people clicked most often in the test. This is an algorithm.
Ken Kocienda (Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs)
I thanked everyone whose job it ever was to lay hands on the skin of strangers, and I gave general thanks that I was lying facedown in a warm puddle of soap and not a warm puddle of blood in some corner of this incomprehensible city.
Billy Collins (Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems)
There are a dozen different ways of delivering destruction in impersonal wholesale, via ships and missiles of one sort or another, catastrophes so widespread, so unselective, that the war is over because that nation or planet has ceased to exist. What we do is entirely different. We make war as personal as a punch in the nose. We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time . . . . We are the boys who go to a particular place, at H-hour, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die. We're the bloody infantry, the doughboy, the duckfoot, the foot soldier who goes where the enemy is and takes him on in person. We've been doing it, with changes in weapons but very little change in our trade, at least since the time five thousand years ago when the foot sloggers of Sargon the Great forced the Sumerians to cry "Uncle!" Maybe they'll be able to do without us someday. Maybe some mad enius with myopia, a bulging forehead, and a cybernetic mind will devise a weapon that can go down a hole, pick out the opposition, adn force it to surrender or die--without killing that gang of your own people they've got imprisoned down there. I wouldn't know; I'm not a genius, I'm an M.I. In the meantime, until they build a machine to replace us, my mates can handle that job--and I might be some help on it, too.
Robert A. Heinlein
The cerebral cortex in the frontal lobe is not able to perform its job of prioritizing, selection and inhibition. The brain, flooded with multiple bits of sensory data, thoughts, feelings and impulses, cannot focus, and the mind or body cannot be still.
Gabor Maté (Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder)
Can that be a human life, not to feel that one is moving on, toward the end? My life till now seems to have been fairly empty, and the certainty that it will remain empty gives a feeling of endlessness, a feeling which tells one to go to sleep, and to do only the most unavoidable things. So that is just what I do: I only pretend to work industriously when I detect behind me the smelly breath of my boss, creeping up to surprise me in my slothfulness. The breath which streams from him is his betrayer. The good man always provides me with a little distraction, so I really like him quite a lot. But what causes me to respect my duty and instructions so little? I am a small, pale, timid, weak, elegant, silly little fellow, full of unworldly feelings, and would not be able to endure the rigor of life if things ever went against me. Can the thought of losing my job, if I go on like this, inspire no fear in me? As it seems, it cannot; yet again, as it seems, it can. I am a bit afraid and a bit not afraid, too.
Robert Walser (Selected Stories)
A country is only as strong as its most vulnerable people...You know from our own library that bad people always go after transvestites first, no matter the country or culture. They are the first ones removed when an environment turns poisonous. What makes it more worrisome is you represent everything. You represent housing and job security and access to healthcare. You represent workers' rights and voting rights and full stomachs and freedom. And perhaps most importantly of all, you represent the right to body and personhood. You represent a country not owning you, not using you however benefits a select few at the top. You represent a country of a people, not a country of the dominant. If transvestites are under attack, then the whole of the country is on the brink of destruction. If transvestites are cared for, the resto f us are cared for. You touch everything a strong society has to offer. We could work, we could eat, we could be healthy, we could live in safe homes, we could decline to fight in unnecessary wars. Our country would be honest. We would no longer be tricked. Our country would take care of us and we, in turn, would take care of our country. So as long as transvestites are okay, we know society is, too. That's why I'm here for you. Because I love my country.
Milo Todd (The Lilac People)
Forever, Tom thought. Maybe he’d never go back to the States. It was not so much Europe itself as the evenings he had spent alone, here and in Rome, that made him feel that way. Evenings by himself simply looking at maps, or lying around on sofas thumbing through guidebooks. Evenings looking at his clothes - his clothes and Dickie’s - and feeling Dickie’s rings between his palms, and running his fingers over the antelope suitcase he had bought at Gucci’s. He had polished the suitcase with a special English leather dressing, not that it needed polishing because he took such good care of it, but for its protection. He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn’t that worth something? He existed. Not many people in the world knew how to, even if they had the money. It really didn’t take money, masses of money, it took a certain security. He had been on the road to it, even with Marc Priminger. He had appreciated Marc’s possessions, and they were what had attracted him to the house, but they were not his own, and it had been impossible to make a beginning at acquiring anything of his own on forty dollars a week. It would have taken him the best years of his life, even if he had economised stringently, to buy the things he wanted. Dickie’s money had given him only an added momentum on the road he had been travelling. The money gave him the leisure to see Greece, to collect Etruscan pottery if he wanted (he had recently read an interesting book on that subject by an American living in Rome), to join art societies if he cared to and to donate to their work. It gave him the leisure, for instance, to read his Malraux tonight as late as he pleased, because he did not have to go to a job in the morning. He had just bought a two-volume edition of Malraux’s Psychologic de I’art which he was now reading, with great pleasure, in French with the aid of a dictionary.
Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley (Ripley, #1))
Since one could virtually open the Bible to any page and likely find something that speaks to his particular situation, is it fair to attribute this to the voice of God? After all, the Bible is not the only relevant book in existence. There are other religions with other scriptural texts which could do the same job. In fact, the text need not even be “scriptural.” I could select Sartre’s “Existentialism and Humanism” off the shelf, randomly flip to any page, and likely find something applicable to my life. Does this mean God is speaking through the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, a man who was by no means considered a friend to Christian thought? If the answer is yes, then who really needs to read the Bible? If this God is capable of turning anything into his “word” at any time, then you could theoretically receive a message from him in your Alpha-Bits.
Michael Vito Tosto (Portrait of an Infidel: The Acerbic Account of How a Passionate Christian Became an Ardent Atheist)
The entire United States government had been drifting that way for some time—management jobs once done by career civil servants being turned into roles performed by people appointed by the president. One of the problems this created was management inexperience: the average tenure of the appointees fluctuated between eighteen months and two years, depending on the administration. Another was the kind of person the job now selected for. There would be exceptions, of course, but the odds favored the pleaser. The person who did not present risks to the White House’s political operation.
Michael Lewis (The Premonition: A Pandemic Story)
graduates of elite American universities who had little sense of what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of them decided to get a job working for a Wall Street investment bank or management consultancy. If you don’t know what your passion is or what you really want to do, they said, then “you might as well go to Wall Street and make a lot of money if you can’t think of anything better to do.”36 And I have heard similar comments from young graduates of selective colleges and universities. Nobody has ever taught them that what you do influences the kind of person you will become.
Leonard Sax (The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups)
Eighty-six percent of the senior executives selected two qualities as being more important for career success and advancement than any others. First was the ability to set priorities, to separate the relevant from the irrelevant. Second was the ability to get the job done fast, to execute quickly.
Brian Tracy (Goals!: How to Get Everything You Want -- Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible)
The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action, The manufacturer who in the long run acts counter to these norms, will just as inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the streets without a job. Thus the capitalism of to-day, which has come to dominate economic life, educates and selects the economic subjects which it needs through a process of economic survival of the fittest. But here one can easily see the limits of the concept of selection as a means of historical explanation. In order that a manner of life so well adapted to the peculiarities of capitalism could be selected at all, i.e. should come to dominate others, it had to originate somewhere, and not in isolated individuals alone, but as a way of life common to whole groups of men. This origin is what really needs explanation.
Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism)
Nine Southern states adopted vagrancy laws - which essentially made it a criminal offense not to work and were applied selectively to blacks - and eight of those states enacted convict laws allowing for the hiring-out of county prisoners to plantation owners and private companies. Prisoners were forced to work for little or no pay. One vagrancy act specifically provided that 'all free negroes and mulattoes over the age of eighteen' must have written proof of a job at the beginning of the year. Those found with no lawful employment were deemed vagrants and convicted. Clearly, the purpose of the black codes in general and the vagrancy laws in particular was to establish another system of forced labor. In W.E.B. Du Bois's words: 'The Codes spoke for themselves. . . . No open-minded student can read them without being convinced they meant nothing more nor less than slavery in daily toil.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
I'm a features writer, and an Indian at that, so I get all the shit jobs. Not the dangerous shit jobs or the monotonous shit jobs. No. I get to write the articles designed to please the eye, ear, and heart. And there is no journalism more soul-endangering to write than journalism that aims to please.
Sherman Alexie (Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories)
We used algorithms and heuristics like they were the left and right sides of our collective product development brain. Employing each involved an interplay of craft and taste, and we always tried to strike the correct balance. Algorithms and heuristics must coordinate to make a great high-tech product.
Ken Kocienda (Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs)
The competition to lead the Review was ferocious every year, involving rigorous vetting and a vote by eighty student editors. Being picked for the position was an enormous achievement for anyone. It turned out that Barack was also the first African American in the publication’s 103-year history to be selected—a milestone so huge that it had been written up in the New York Times, accompanied by a photo of Barack, smiling in a scarf and winter coat. My boyfriend, in other words, was a big deal. He could have landed any number of fat-salaried law firm jobs at that point, but instead he was thinking about practicing civil rights law once he got his degree,
Michelle Obama (Becoming)
Gentlemen, let us suppose that man is not stupid. (Indeed one cannot refuse to suppose that, if only from the one consideration, that, if man is stupid, then who is wise?) But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped. But that is not all, that is not his worst defect; his worst defect is his perpetual moral obliquity, perpetual—from the days of the Flood to the Schleswig-Holstein period. Moral obliquity and consequently lack of good sense; for it has long been accepted that lack of good sense is due to no other cause than moral obliquity. Put it to the test and cast your eyes upon the history of mankind. What will you see? Is it a grand spectacle? Grand, if you like. Take the Colossus of Rhodes, for instance, that’s worth something. With good reason Mr. Anaevsky testifies of it that some say that it is the work of man’s hands, while others maintain that it has been created by nature herself. Is it many-coloured? Maybe it is many-coloured, too: if one takes the dress uniforms, military and civilian, of all peoples in all ages—that alone is worth something, and if you take the undress uniforms you will never get to the end of it; no historian would be equal to the job. Is it monotonous? May be it’s monotonous too: it’s fighting and fighting; they are fighting now, they fought first and they fought last—you will admit, that it is almost too monotonous. In short, one may say anything about the history of the world— anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can’t say is that it’s rational.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead)
That's the trouble with the world we live in, Dana. It's full of people just doing their job and ignoring what's really going on. Care about the rainforest until they get a couple of kids and enough money for a gas guzzling car, or some fancy hardwood dining furniture. Watch all those wildlife programmes and coo over the furry animals, but still eat meat and poultry that was raised in conditions of unbelievable cruelty. I'm sorry, but we live in a relatively free society. The facts are available, but people choose to ignore them. As far as I'm concerned, any educated person who works for the government or a big oil company is guilty through their own selective ignorance.
Robert Muchamore (Divine Madness (Cherub, #5))
Moreover, even at elite colleges, the personnel attracted to college admissions are seldom themselves part of the intellectual elite. Yet their job is to select students unlike themselves, to be taught by professors unlike themselves, for careers unlike theirs. It can hardly be surprising that admissions personnel are drawn toward non-intellectual criteria and toward ideas not unlike the notion of judging “the whole person,” as found among educators at the pre-college level. Over the years, all sorts of criteria from popular psychology and sociological speculation have assumed increasing weight visa-vis such standard intellectual criteria as academic records and test scores. The
Thomas Sowell (Inside American Education)
The lack of self-listening is often the cause of communication breakdown. If we could hear our words and comments through the ears of our listeners, we would be appalled at the overgeneralizations, the inaccuracies, and the insensitive, negative comments we make about ourselves and others. Learning to carefully select our words plays a major role in presenting ourselves in a favorable light, getting along well with others, and effectively getting the job done. When we make self-deprecating remarks about our looks, intelligence, or competence, we reveal an unhealthy mindset, chip away at our self-confidence, and create the wrong impressions, setting the stage for us not to be taken seriously.
Rebecca Z. Shafir (The Zen of Listening: Mindful Communication in the Age of Distraction)
However, the “one person, one vote” democratic process has the drawback of having leaders selected via popularity contests by people who are largely not doing the sort of thoughtful review of capabilities that most organizations would do when trying to find the right person for an important job. Democracy has also been shown to break down in times of great conflict.
Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)
The Church wishes, for example, to apply Rosmini's invitation to 'hear loftily of God' with worthy liturgical celebrations, stripping the concept of God from the guises, at times ingenuous and caricatural, in which an agrarian and prescientific civilization had dressed it. But it is a hard job. On the right, they shout impiety and sacrilege every time an old ritual is abandoned for a new one. On the left, vice versa, novelty is indiscriminately hailed for the sake of novelty, the whole edifice of the past is merrily dismantled, paintings and statues are sent up to the attic; idolatry and superstition are found everywhere, and it is even said that, to safeguard God's dignity, God must be spoken of in only the most select terms, or there must actually be silence.
Pope John Paul I (Illustrissimi: Letters from Pope John Paul I)
gave when she asked him that question. “Bush’s iPod is heavy on traditional country singers,” she reported. “He has selections by Van Morrison, whose ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ is a Bush favorite, and by John Fogerty, most predictably ‘Centerfield.’” She got a Rolling Stone editor, Joe Levy, to analyze the selection, and he commented, “One thing that’s interesting is that the president likes artists who don’t
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
Very often a man can hardly read and yet he takes nothing less than Marx's Capital, only to discover that he does not understand it. The less energetic and persevering lose heart; they consider the job of studying too difficult and drop it. And it is difficult only because the man tackles Marx without having either the skill or knowledge to master the subject, because he goes bear-hunting with bare hands, so to speak.
Nadezhda Krupskaya (On education: Selected articles and speeches)
After several rounds of interviews with Google’s founders, they offered me a job. My bank account was diminishing quickly, so it was time to get back to paid employment, and fast. In typical—and yes, annoying—MBA fashion, I made a spreadsheet and listed my various opportunities in the rows and my selection criteria in the columns. I compared the roles, the level of responsibility, and so on. My heart wanted to join Google in its mission to provide the world with access to information, but in the spreadsheet game, the Google job fared the worst by far. I went back to Eric and explained my dilemma. The other companies were recruiting me for real jobs with teams to run and goals to hit. At Google, I would be the first “business unit general manager,” which sounded great except for the glaring fact that Google had no business units and therefore nothing to actually manage. Not only was the role lower in level than my other options, but it was entirely unclear what the job was in the first place. Eric responded with perhaps the best piece of career advice that I have ever heard. He covered my spreadsheet with his hand and told me not to be an idiot (also a great piece of advice). Then he explained that only one criterion mattered when picking a job—fast growth. When
Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
The Job Application Esteemed gentlemen, I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. I know that your good firm is large, proud, old, and rich, thus I may yield to the pleasing supposition that a nice, easy, pretty little place would be available, into which, as into a kind of warm cubbyhole, I can slip. I am excellently suited, you should know, to occupy just such a modest haven, for my nature is altogether delicate, and I am essentially a quiet, polite, and dreamy child, who is made to feel cheerful by people thinking of him that he does not ask for much, and allowing him to take possession of a very, very small patch of existence, where he can be useful in his own way and thus feel at ease. A quiet, sweet, small place in the shade has always been the tender substance of all my dreams, and if now the illusions I have about you grow so intense as to make me hope that my dream, young and old, might be transformed into delicious, vivid reality, then you have, in me, the most zealous and most loyal servitor, who will take it as a matter of conscience to discharge precisely and punctually all his duties. Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-ranging sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and foremost I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. I am a dreamer rather than a thinker, a zero rather than a force, dim rather than sharp. Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in a dream? --I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid. I know only the need to feel at my ease, so that each day I can thank God for life's boon, with all its blessings. The passion to go far in the world is unknown to me. Africa with its deserts is to me not more foreign. Well, so now you know what sort of a person I am.--I write, as you see, a graceful and fluent hand, and you need not imagine me to be entirely without intelligence. My mind is clear, but it refuses to grasp things that are many, or too many by far, shunning them. I am sincere and honest, and I am aware that this signifies precious little in the world in which we live, so I shall be waiting, esteemed gentlemen, to see what it will be your pleasure to reply to your respectful servant, positively drowning in obedience. Wenzel
Robert Walser (Selected Stories)
The greatest misfortune for a poor country is that, instead of producing wealth, it produces rich people. But rich people without wealth. In fact, it would be better to call them moneyed rather than rich: a rich person is one who possesses the means of production. A rich person is someone who generates money and provides jobs. A moneyed person is someone who quite simply has some cash. Or rather, he thinks he has. For, in reality, it’s the cash that has him.
Mia Couto (Pensativities: Selected Essays)
Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor. Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor. It doesn’t involve heavy lifting, running fast, or leaping high. Most people, though, only see the surface reality of writing and think of writers as involved in quiet, intellectual work done in their study. If you have the strength to lift a coffee cup, they figure, you can write a novel. But once you try your hand at it, you soon find that it isn’t as peaceful a job as it seems. The whole process—sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track—requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine. You might not move your body around, but there’s grueling, dynamic labor going on inside you.
Haruki Murakami (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running)
Fifteen years ago, a business manager from the United States came to Plum Village to visit me. His conscience was troubled because he was the head of a firm that designed atomic bombs. I listened as he expressed his concerns. I knew if I advised him to quit his job, another person would only replace him. If he were to quit, he might help himself, but he would not help his company, society, or country. I urged him to remain the director of his firm, to bring mindfulness into his daily work, and to use his position to communicate his concerns and doubts about the production of atomic bombs. In the Sutra on Happiness, the Buddha says it is great fortune to have an occupation that allows us to be happy, to help others, and to generate compassion and understanding in this world. Those in the helping professions have occupations that give them this wonderful opportunity. Yet many social workers, physicians, and therapists work in a way that does not cultivate their compassion, instead doing their job only to earn money. If the bomb designer practises and does his work with mindfulness, his job can still nourish his compassion and in some way allow him to help others. He can still influence his government and fellow citizens by bringing greater awareness to the situation. He can give the whole nation an opportunity to question the necessity of bomb production. Many people who are wealthy, powerful, and important in business, politics, and entertainment are not happy. They are seeking empty things - wealth, fame, power, sex - and in the process they are destroying themselves and those around them. In Plum Village, we have organised retreats for businesspeople. We see that they have many problems and suffer just as others do, sometimes even more. We see that their wealth allows them to live in comfortable conditions, yet they still suffer a great deal. Some businesspeople, even those who have persuaded themselves that their work is very important, feel empty in their occupation. They provide employment to many people in their factories, newspapers, insurance firms, and supermarket chains, yet their financial success is an empty happiness because it is not motivated by understanding or compassion. Caught up in their small world of profit and loss, they are unaware of the suffering and poverty in the world. When we are not int ouch with this larger reality, we will lack the compassion we need to nourish and guide us to happiness. Once you begin to realise your interconnectedness with others, your interbeing, you begin to see how your actions affect you and all other life. You begin to question your way of living, to look with new eyes at the quality of your relationships and the way you work. You begin to see, 'I have to earn a living, yes, but I want to earn a living mindfully. I want to try to select a vocation not harmful to others and to the natural world, one that does not misuse resources.' Entire companies can also adopt this way of thinking. Companies have the right to pursue economic growth, but not at the expense of other life. They should respect the life and integrity of people, animals, plants and minerals. Do not invest your time or money in companies that deprive others of their lives, that operate in a way that exploits people or animals, and destroys nature. Businesspeople who visit Plum Village often find that getting in touch with the suffering of others and cultivating understanding brings them happiness. They practise like Anathapindika, a successful businessman who lived at the time of the Buddha, who with the practise of mindfulness throughout his life did everything he could to help the poor and sick people in his homeland.
Thich Nhat Hanh (Creating True Peace: Ending Violence in Yourself, Your Family, Your Community, and the World)
Writing is the way I process the world. When I was given the opportunity to write this book, whatever God was up there said, You got your dream. I said, Actually I was hoping for a lighter topic, and God was like, Ha! Ha! You thought you got to choose. This was the topic I was given. If something else had happened to me, I would have written about that, too. When I get worked up over what happened, I tell myself, you are a pair of eyes. I'm a civilian who's been randomly selected to receive an all-access pass to the court system. Feelings will include invasion, shame, isolation, cruelty. My job is to observe , feel, document, report. What am I learning and seeing that other people can't see? What doorways does my suffering lead to? People sometimes day, I can't imagine. How do I make them imagine? I write to show how victims are treated at this moment in time, to record the temperature of our culture. This is a marker...
Chanel Miller (Know My Name)
Selection is also important in non-biological contexts. In designing machines and computer programs, it has been found that a very efficient way to find the optimal design is to successively make small, random changes to the design, keeping versions that do the job well, and discarding others. This is increasingly being used to solve difficult design problems for complex systems. In this process, the engineer does not have a design in mind, but only the desired function. Adaptations
Brian Charlesworth (Evolution: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
Spinner parts, who do not themselves become dizzy, have the job of spinning internally to send out feelings or impulses to all the other parts, the main person, or a group of selected parts. Many of the “booby traps" or “fail-safe" programmes involve spinning. Often, when a programme (that is, a particular training) is in operation, the survivor feels dizzy, as though something or someone is “spinning" inside his or her head. If this is happening to you, you can speak to the spinner and ask that part to stop spinning or to slow down the spin. If this does not work, ask to speak with whoever is making the spinner part spin. This strategy, of working up through the chain of command, applies to mind control treatment recovery in general. Another tactic you can use is to ask the spinner to spin in the opposite direction, which will often put away whatever is being spun. If permitted by those in charge, a spinner can also replace whatever lesson is being spun with something positive, such as a feeling of calmness, taken from a positive memory.
Alison Miller (Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse)
The moral sense is a gadget, like stereo vision or intuitions about number. It is an assembly of neural circuits cobbled together from older parts of the primate brain and shaped by natural selection to do a job. That does not mean that morality is a figment of our imagination, any more than the evolution of depth perception means that 3-D space is a figment of our imagination. [...] But it does mean that the moral sense is laden with quirks and prone to systematic error-moral illusions, as it were just like our other faculties.
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
I think Edison’s large-scale success was built on a foundation of tending to small details. I would like to turn the discussion back to how Edison himself described his approach for constructing the foundations for his innovative work, specifically, how he solved problems like finding the best filament material for his lightbulb: “None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.”6
Ken Kocienda (Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs)
You will be subject when you know that you never suffer undeserved punishment but deserve much greater punishment. The proud are smug in their opinion that they deserve only blessing. Like Job, they are not afraid, because they rely on their works (Job 9:28). Therefore they do not stand in the time of trial; but, as Matt, 7:24 ff. said about the house of the foolish man that was built on sand, they collapse in a great fall and become worse. Accordingly, this fear is a great part of the cross in the whole of life and in all our works; in fact, it is almost the whole of the cross.
Martin Luther (Luther's Works, Vol. 14: Selected Psalms III)
This lad is an elite European coach. One of a select group of about half a dozen managers working in the world game today. The other five only take jobs with clubs that guarantee squads and trophies that will further enhance their already muscular CVs. Klopp doesn’t seem to need that in his life. He is truly a throwback. A contradiction in many senses – for instance he seems to have no problem being a shameless shill in doing adverts for some heavy weight corporations (Puma, Opel and others) and yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that here is a man on a mission that represents something more honest.
Rob Gutmann
Even more importantly, there simply is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans. People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twenty-somethings are much stronger than their elders. The typical plantation owner in Alabama in the mid-nineteenth century could have been wrestled to the ground in seconds by any of the slaves cultivating his cotton fields. Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In organized crime, the big boss is not necessarily the strongest man. He is often an older man who very rarely uses his own fists; he gets younger and fitter men to do the dirty jobs for him. A guy who thinks that the way to take over the syndicate is to beat up the don is unlikely to live long enough to learn from his mistake. Even among chimpanzees, the alpha male wins his position by building a stable coalition with other males and females, not through mindless violence. In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labor. This may reflect homo sapiens position in the food chain. If all that counted were raw physical abilities, sapiens would have found themselves on a middle rung of the ladder. But their mental and social skills placed them at the top. It is therefore only natural that the chain of power within the species will also be determined by mental and social abilities more than by brute force. It is therefore hard to believe that the most influential and most stable social hierarchy in history is founded on men's ability to physically coerce women.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Pattee explains there is a basic and extremely important distinction between laws and rules in nature.11 Laws are inexorable, meaning they are unchangeable, inescapable, and inevitable. We can never alter or evade laws of nature. The laws of nature dictate that a car will stay in motion either until an equal and opposite force stops it or it runs out of energy. That is not something we can change. Laws are incorporeal, meaning they do not need embodiments or structures to execute them: there is not a physics policeman enforcing the car’s halt when it runs out of energy. Laws are also universal: they hold at all times in all places. The laws of motion apply whether you are in Scotland or in Spain. On the other hand, rules are arbitrary and can be changed. In the British Isles, the driving rule is to drive on the left side of the road. Continental Europe’s driving rule is to drive on the right side of the road. Rules are dependent on some sort of structure or constraint to execute them. In this case that structure is a police force that fines those who break the rules by driving on the wrong side. Rules are local, meaning that they can exist only when and where there are physical structures to enforce them. If you live out in the middle of the Australian outback, you are in charge. Drive on either side. There is no structure in place to restrain you! Rules are local and changeable and breakable. A rule-governed symbol is selected from a range of competitors for doing a better job constraining the function of the system it belongs to, leading to the production of a more successful phenotype. Selection is flexible; Newton’s laws are not. In their informational role, symbols aren’t dependent on the physical laws that govern energy, time, and rates of change. They follow none of Newton’s laws. They are lawless rule-followers! What this is telling us is that symbols are not locked to their meanings.
Michael S. Gazzaniga (The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind)
How different it could all have been … Taylor Swift was never meant to be a singer-songwriter; she was supposed to become a stockbroker. Her parents even chose her Christian name with a business path in mind. Her mother, Andrea, selected a gender-neutral name for her baby girl so that when she grew up and applied for jobs in the male-dominated finance industry no one would know if she were male or female. It was a plan that came from a loving place, but it was not one that would ever be realised. Instead, millions and millions of fans across the world would know exactly which gender Andrea’s firstborn was, without ever meeting her. In Taylor’s track ‘The Best Day’, which touchingly evokes a childhood full of wonder, she sings of her ‘excellent’ father whose ‘strength is making me stronger’. That excellent father is Scott Kingsley Swift, who studied business at the University of Delaware. He lived in the Brown residence hall. There, he made lots of friends, one of whom, Michael DiMuzio, would later cross paths with Taylor professionally. Scott graduated with a first-class degree and set about building his career in similarly impressive style. Perhaps a knack for business is in the blood: his father and grandfather also worked in finance. Scott set up his own investment-banking firm called the Swift
Chas Newkey-Burden (Taylor Swift: The Whole Story - Free Sample)
If you spend all your time trying to be happy, you end up focusing all your attention on yourself and how “happy” you are and, as a result, you become a shriveled self who can’t live for some larger cause. Your life will center on yourself and your moment-by-moment focus will be on how you feel inside. Your sole criterion of evaluation for seeking a job, making friends, finding a spouse (or staying with a spouse!), and selecting a church will reduce to one overarching concern: How does this particular thing make me feel? The best way to be happy in the contemporary sense is to forget about it, to try to live a good life for a bigger purpose, especially for the cause of Christ.
J.P. Moreland (Kingdom Triangle: Recover the Christian Mind, Renovate the Soul, Restore the Spirit's Power)
It is finished!” What was finished? The history-long plan of redeeming man was finished. The message of God to man was finished. The works done by Jesus as a man on earth were finished. The task of selecting and training ambassadors was finished. The job was finished. The song had been sung. The blood had been poured. The sacrifice had been made. The sting of death had been removed. It was over. A cry of defeat? Hardly. Had his hands not been fastened down I dare say that a triumphant fist would have punched the dark sky. No, this is no cry of despair. It is a cry of completion. A cry of victory. A cry of fulfillment. Yes, even a cry of relief. The fighter remained. And thank God that he did.
Max Lucado (No Wonder They Call Him the Savior: Discover Hope in the Unlikeliest Place (The Bestseller Collection Book 4))
One of Winston’s colleagues in the Ministry of Truth who is working on the dictionary explains the beauty of Newspeak: You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone.… It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.… Take good, for instance. If you have a word like good, what need is there for a word like bad? Ungood will do just as well.… You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston. In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.… In fact, there will be no thought as we understand it now.
E.L. Doctorow (Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution:: Selected Essays, 1977-1992)
This was the topic I was given. If something else had happened to me, I would have written about that too. When I get worked up over what happened, I tell myself, you are a pair of eyes. I'm a civilian who's been randomly selected to receive an all-access pass to the court system. Feelings will include invasion, shame, isolation, cruelty. My job is to observe, feel, document, report. What am I learning and seeing that other people can't see? What doorways does my suffering lead to? People sometimes say, I can't imagine. How do I make you imagine? I write to show how victims are treated at this moment in time, to record the temperature of our culture. This is a marker, and I hope that in twenty years this grueling aftermath of victimhood will feel foreign.
Chanel Miller (Know My Name)
Opportunity Knocks Being selective when deciding what opportunities to go after is one thing, but it can get even harder when opportunities come to us. We get a job offer we didn’t expect. A side project comes along that isn’t really what we do, but it is easy cash. Someone asks us to help out with something we love doing, but it is unpaid work. An acquaintance has a time share available in a less-than-ideal location but at a discounted rate. What do we do? The fear of missing out goes into full effect. How can we say no; the offer is right here for the taking. We might never have gone after it, but now it is so easy to get it we consider it. But if we just say yes because it is an easy reward, we run the risk of having to later say no to a more meaningful one.
Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
I'd attended a selective liberal arts college, trained at respectable research institutions, and even completed a dissertation for a doctoral degree. In our shared office, I'd tell new hires I was ABD, so they wouldn't feel their own situation was so bleak. If they saw a ten-year veteran adjunct with a PhD, they might lose hope of securing a permanent job. It was the least I could do, as a good American, to remind the young we were an innocent and optimistic country where everyone was entitled to a fulfilling career. To make sure they understood that PhD stood not for "piled higher and deeper" or "Pop has dough," but in fact the degree meant "professional happiness desired," and at the altruistic colleges of democratic America only the angry or sad ones need not apply.
Alex Kudera (Auggie's Revenge)
Yes, but what about the firemen, then?” asked Montag. “Ah.” Beatty leaned forward in the faint mist of smoke from his pipe. “What more easily explained and natural? With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won’t stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That’s you, Montag, and that’s me.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
As I have already mentioned, the process of selecting Capos was a negative one; only the most brutal of the prisoners were chosen for this job (although there were some happy exceptions). But apart from the selection of Capos which was undertaken by the SS, there was a sort of self-selecting process going on the whole time among all of the prisoners. On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles - whatever one may choose to call them - we know: the best of us did not return.
Viktor E. Frankl
Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor. Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor. It doesn’t involve heavy lifting, running fast, or leaping high. Most people, though, only see the surface reality of writing and think of writers as involved in quiet, intellectual work done in their study. If you have the strength to lift a coffee cup, they figure, you can write a novel. But once you try your hand at it, you soon find that it isn’t as peaceful a job as it seems. The whole process—sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track—requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine.
Haruki Murakami
Here is a little boy,” said Bingo, indicating me to the strange lady, “who wets his bed every night. Do you know what I am going to do if you wet your bed again?” she added, turning to me. “I am going to get the Sixth Form to beat you.” The strange lady put on an air of being inexpressibly shocked, and exclaimed “I-should-think-so!” And here occurred one of those wild, almost lunatic misunderstandings which are part of the daily experience of childhood. The Sixth Form was a group of older boys who were selected as having “character” and were empowered to beat smaller boys. I had not yet learned of their existence, and I mis-heard the phrase “the Sixth Form” as “Mrs. Form.” I took it as referring to the strange lady—I thought, that is, that her name was Mrs. Form. It was an improbable name, but a child has 110 judgement in such matters. I imagined, therefore, that it was she who was to be deputed to beat me. It did Dot strike me as strange that this job should be turned over to a casual visitor in no way connected with the school. I merely assumed that “Mrs. Form” was a stern disciplinarian who enjoyed beating people (somehow her appearance seemed to bear this out) and I had an immediate terrifying vision of her arriving for the occasion in full riding kit and armed with a hunting whip. To this day I can feel myself almost swooning with shame as I stood, a very small, round-faced boy in short corduroy knickers, before the two women. I could not speak. I felt that I should die if “Mrs. Form” were to beat me. But my dominant feeling was not fear or even resentment: it was simply shame because one more person, and that a woman, had been told of my disgusting offence.
George Orwell (A Collection Of Essays: (Authorized Orwell Edition): A Mariner Books Classic (Harvest Book))
...wandered into a shoe store. A lone customer stood at the display rack, turning the shoes over, one after another, to look at their soles. Jessica recalled the proverb "Hell is a stylish shoe." A salesman greeted her at the door, a young man with a shaved head and a black turtleneck. Too intimate from the start, he held each selection so close to her face that she had to lean back to get a better look. She felt his breath as he pressed some studded sparkly sneakers on her. Jessica found it fascinating that he thought she would want these, or the next pair he held up--stiletto-heeled jobs that seemed lewd, as did his smirk. The salesman didn't conceal his disappointment when she bought a pair of marked-down Vera Wang flats. She bought them because they seemed so pedestrian. Men preferred women teetering so she chose to walk like a Neanderthal.
Thomas McGuane (Crow Fair: Stories)
Everywhere we look in nature, we see animals that seem beautifully designed to fit their environment, whether that environment be the physical circumstances of life, like temperature and humidity, or the other organisms—competitors, predators, and prey—that every species must deal with. It is no surprise that early naturalists believed that animals were the product of celestial design, created by God to do their jobs. Darwin dispelled this notion in The Origin. In a single chapter, he completely replaced centuries of certainty about divine design with the notion of a mindless, materialistic process—natural selection—that could accomplish the same result. It is hard to overestimate the effect that this insight had not only on biology, but on people’s worldview. Many have not yet recovered from the shock, and the idea of natural selection still arouses fierce and irrational opposition.
Jerry A. Coyne (Why Evolution Is True)
Sam Moore had scuffled his way into hosting a talent show at a nightclub, the King of Hearts, in his hometown of Miami. Dave Prater was a bread baker. Sam remembers that when Dave signed up for that week’s show, he was wearing his baker’s whites; wherever he walked, he left behind white flour shoe prints. At the auditions, Dave sang a Jackie Wilson song, “Doggin’ Around,” but realized he didn’t know the verses. Sam, whose job depended on selecting acts that would produce a good show, agreed to stay close during the performance and feed him the lines. But that night, Sam’s foot caught the microphone cable, and as the mike began to fall, Dave went down to catch it and Sam went down to catch Dave. Choreographers couldn’t have written it better: They came up together, singing and with the mike in hand. In that little mix-up, an act was born that would last the better part of twenty-two years and would remain forever a part of the public consciousness.
Robert Gordon (Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion)
… no technical skill is worth more than knowing how to select exciting research projects. Regrettably, this vital ability is almost never taught. When I signed on with a research adviser in my first year of graduate school, I was thrilled to be given a problem to work in the physics of the upper atmosphere. That I had no idea what motivated the problem did not prevent me from carrying out an analysis, on a supercomputer of the day, and publishing my first paper at the age of 22… I found myself assimilating technical skills without ever grasping the significance of the problem, without understanding how or whether it was at the cutting edge of science. This way of working became a habit, one that seriously threatened my career… I relied on a senior scientist to tell me what would be an interesting problem to work on; then I would carry out the task… Four years and two postdoctoral positions after earning a PhD—still having little sense of what I wanted to learn as a scientist—I was on the job market.
Peter J. Feibelman (A PhD Is Not Enough!: A Guide to Survival in Science)
Mainstream US culture prompted this sense of belonging to some of its citizens - those who were white, who had secure enough jobs to be consumers, and who felt entitled to the historical wealth of the country despite the horrible toll some of it had taken on others. Like my parents, people wanted to put the difficulties of the past behind them, ignoring the legacies of those difficulties. They signed onto a future that was bright, and in which they were privileged. They were better-off because they were better people , the reasoning generally went, omitting the point that many such opportunities had often been purchased at other people's expense. Once people signed on to a worldview and its spokespersons, it was hard to shake their perception of the world as it was constantly reinforced by a selective input of information. They believed only what their leaders said, regardless of whether or not it was firmly grounded in fact. Remembering my earnest childhood patriotism, I called this phenomenon a sense of allegiance.
Cathy Wilkerson
I was once shown the script of a film based on a parable of a city completely ruled by randomness—very Borgesian. At set intervals, the ruler randomly assigns to the denizens a new role in the city. Say the butcher would now become a baker, and the baker a prisoner, etc. At the end, people end up rebelling against the ruler, asking for stability as their inalienable right. I immediately thought that perhaps the opposite parable should be written: instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we should have citizens randomize the jobs of rulers, naming them by raffles and removing them at random as well. That is similar to simulated annealing—and it happens to be no less effective. It turned out that the ancients—again, those ancients!—were aware of it: the members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder)
Hence the term “voluntary muscle” is in many ways a figure of speech. I can consciously command a movement, but I cannot consciously command the recruitment of every muscle fiber which must be used, nor the precise order of their contractions and lengthenings which actually produce the desired effect. This is to say that every consciously willed movement is always conditioned by two things: genetically established organization and habitual usage. Our genetic organization is quite plastic, open-ended, filled with potential variations in behavior; on the other hand, habitual usage can become just as limiting as it is convenient, and can become a tyrant to exactly the degree that it becomes practiced, automatic, unconscious. We are free to train ourselves to act differently, but it is very difficult to suddenly act differently than we have been trained. The tendencies in our motor behavior created by genetically determined patterns and by habitual usage do not lie within the muscle cells, nor even in the motor neurons that unite them into motor units. The search for the organizational factors of purposeful muscular control—whether it be action or relaxation—takes us deeper and deeper into the central nervous system, where we find that every muscular response is built up, selected, and colored by the totality of our neural activity, both conscious and unconscious.
Deane Juhan (Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork)
What struck me powerfully was that Mr. Spano had honored every word of his inner contract. Like everyone, he had this right of self determination. We do this when we select a partner who confirms our feelings of unworthiness. When we pick the job that pays us less than we deserve. It is all the same. It is all part of that contract, that even if we didn’t write it for ourselves, we certainly cosigned. I wondered too about my contract with myself. I wondered why the behavior of this self-hating man would rock me for even a second. I thought about how I needed to love myself enough to allow others to fulfill their contract with themselves. Be it Mr. Spano, my ex-husband, my father, my mother, Collin, the hospital administrators, or anyone else. Mr. Spano’s contract demanded that he act in ways that were dismissive of my attempts to help him. A human being can never treat another person better than he treats himself. So, if he says things that are disrespectful, this is his contract. His contract has nothing to do with mine, unless I allow it to. Unless I uncover a clause, in minuscule print on page five. A clause that I overlooked, that stipulates my need to be validated by the Mr. Spanos of the world in order to feel OK about myself. He was kind enough to prompt me to review that section again, to edit out that portion for good. In that way, he was an angel of the shift.
Michele Harper (The Beauty in Breaking)
It was George the Mailman’s last day on the job after 35 years of carrying the mail through all kinds of weather to the same neighborhood. When he arrived at the first house on his route, he was greeted by the whole family who congratulated him and sent him on his way with a tidy gift envelope. At the second house, they presented him with a box of fine cigars. The folks at the third house handed him a selection of terrific fishing lures. At the fourth house, he was met at the door by a strikingly beautiful blonde woman in a revealing negligee. She took him by the hand, gently led him through the door, which she closed behind him, and took him up the stairs to the bedroom where she blew his mind with the most passionate love he had ever experienced. When he had enough, they went downstairs and she fixed him a giant breakfast: eggs, potatoes, ham, sausage, blueberry waffles, and fresh-squeezed orange juice. When he was truly satisfied, she poured him a cup of steaming coffee. As she was pouring, he noticed a dollar bill sticking out from under the cup’s bottom edge. "All this was just too wonderful for words," he said, "But what’s the dollar for?" "Well," she said, "Last night, I told my husband that today would be your last day, and that we should do something special for you. I asked him what to give you. He said, “Screw him. Give him a dollar.” The breakfast was my idea.
Adam Smith (Funny Jokes: Ultimate LoL Edition (Jokes, Dirty Jokes, Funny Anecdotes, Best jokes, Jokes for Adults) (Comedy Central Book 1))
Actually I'm reminded of a time when I smuggled myself into Sydney Opera House to see Faust. Sydney Opera House is very beautiful at night, its grand interiors and lights beaming out over the water and into the night sky. Afterwards I came out and I heard three women talking together, leaning on the railing overlooking the darkened bay. The older woman was describing how she was having problems with her job, which turned out to be working for the CIA as an intelligence agent, and she had previously complained to the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence and so on, and she was telling this in hushed tones to her niece and another woman. I thought, "So it is true then. CIA agents really do hang out at the Sydney opera!" And then I looked inside the Opera House through the massive glass panels at the front, and there in all this lonely palatial refinement was a water rat that had crawled up in to the Opera House interior, and was scurrying back and forth, leaping on to the fine linen-covered tables and eating the Opera House food, jumping on to the counter with all the tickets and having a really great time. And actually I think that is the most probable scenario for the future: an extremely confining, homogenized, postmodern transnational totalitarian structure with incredible complexity, absurdities and debasements, and within that incredible complexity a space where only the smart rats can go.
Julian Assange (Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet)
Donald Trump repeatedly promised he would hire "the best people." He did not. That is not my opinion; it is President Trump's, which he expresses frequently. Trump has said that his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, was "dumb as a rock" and "lazy as hell." His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was "scared stiff and Missing in Action," "didn't have a clue," and "should be ashamed of himself." Trump described one of his assistants, Omarosa Manigault Newman, as "wacky," "deranged," "vicious, but not smart," a "crazed, crying lowlife," and finally a "dog." After lasting only eleven days as communications director, Anthony Scaramucci "was quickly terminated 'from' a position that he was totally incapable of handling" and was called "very much out of control." An anonymous adviser to the president was called "a drunk/drugged-up loser." Chief strategist Steve Bannon was "sloppy," a "leaker," and "dumped like a dog by almost everyone." His longtime lawyer Michael Cohen was "TERRIBLE," "hostile," "a convicted liar & fraudster," and a "failed lawyer." The president was "Never a big fan!" of his White House counsel Don McGahn and "not even a little bit happy" with Jerome Powell, his selection to head the Federal Reserve, whom he called an "enemy." His third national security advisor, John Bolton, was mocked as a "tough guy [who] got us into Iraq." When the president was irritated with his former chief of staff, John Kelly, the president's press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, declared that Kelly "was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president.
John Dickerson (The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency)
As we mature we progressively narrow the scope and variety of our lives. Of all the interests we might pursue, we settle on a few. Of all the people with whom we might associate, we select a small number. We become caught in a web of fixed relationships. We develop set ways of doing things. "As the years go by we view our familiar surroundings with less and less freshness of perception. We no longer look with a wakeful, perceiving eye at the faces of people we see every day, nor at any other features of our everyday world. "It is not unusual to find that the major changes in life-a marriage, a move to a new city, a change of jobs, or a national emergency-break the patterns of our lives and reveal to us quite suddenly how much we had been imprisoned by the comfortable web we had woven around ourselves. "One of the reasons why mature people are apt to learn less than young people is that they are willing to risk less. Learning is a risky business, and they do not like failure. In infancy, when the child is learning at a truly phenomenal rate-a rate he or she will never again achieve-he or she is also experiencing a shattering number of failures. Watch him or her. See the innumerable things he or she tries and fails. And see how little the failures discourage him or her. "With each year that passes he or she will be less blithe about failure. By adolescence the willingness of young people to risk failure has diminished greatly. And all too often parents push them further along that road by instilling fear, by punishing failure, or by making success seem too precious.
Karl Albrecht (Social Intelligence: The New Science of Success)
Suppose that you need to hire a sales representative for your firm. If you are serious about hiring the best possible person for the job, this is what you should do. First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in this position (technical proficiency, engaging personality, reliability, and so on). Don’t overdo it—six dimensions is a good number. The traits you choose should be as independent as possible from each other, and you should feel that you can assess them reliably by asking a few factual questions. Next, make a list of those questions for each trait and think about how you will score it, say on a 1–5 scale. You should have an idea of what you will call “very weak” or “very strong.” These preparations should take you half an hour or so, a small investment that can make a significant difference in the quality of the people you hire. To avoid halo effects, you must collect the information on one trait at a time, scoring each before you move on to the next one. Do not skip around. To evaluate each candidate, add up the six scores. Because you are in charge of the final decision, you should not do a “close your eyes.” Firmly resolve that you will hire the candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better—try to resist your wish to invent broken legs to change the ranking. A vast amount of research offers a promise: you are much more likely to find the best candidate if you use this procedure than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and to make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as “I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
Are you wondering what to write? Let’s start with some general statements that are useful each and every day. Then we’ll create statements that address specific emotional states like depression, anxiety, and feelings of stress. We’ll also create statements that pertain to specific situations such as sleep, relationships, parenting, job, school, health, skills, talents, and leisure activities. GENERAL STATEMENTS Here are some useful statements to write each and every day. Select two or three that resonate with you. You are not limited to these examples. You can write whatever you wish as long as it is a POSITIVE statement in the PRESENT TENSE that begins with ‘I AM’ and uses the PROGRESSIVE ‘ing’ form of the verb. At first, while learning the technique, you might want to use the statements suggested in this book. REMEMBER: Each POSITIVE, PRESENT TENSE, PROGRESSIVE statement is something you would like to be true. But you are writing it as if it already is true. In other words: I am writing positive statements. I am wanting them to be true. I am noticing that they are becoming true. I recommend writing at least two general statements every day. Here are some examples: I am embracing each and every day. I am enjoying today. I am living in the present moment. I am looking forward to today. I am having a productive day. I am staying focused. I am handling things well. I am taking things as they come. I am coping well with problems. I am focusing on the positives. I am moving smoothly through the day. I am confidently coping with challenges. I am noticing how well the day is going. I am feeling fully and deeply alive. Select two or three statements from the above list and write them here.
Peggy D. Snyder (The Ten Minute Cognitive Workout: Manage Your Mood and Change Your Life in Ten Minutes a Day)
People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twentysomethings are much stronger than their elders. The typical plantation owner in Alabama in the mid-nineteenth century could have been wrestled to the ground in seconds by any of the slaves cultivating his cotton fields. Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In organised crime, the big boss is not necessarily the strongest man. He is often an older man who very rarely uses his own fists; he gets younger and fitter men to do the dirty jobs for him. A guy who thinks that the way to take over the syndicate is to beat up the don is unlikely to live long enough to learn from his mistake. Even among chimpanzees, the alpha male wins his position by building a stable coalition with other males and females, not through mindless violence. In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labour. This may reflect Homo sapiens’ position in the food chain. If all that counted were raw physical abilities, Sapiens would have found themselves on a middle rung of the ladder. But their mental and social skills placed them at the top. It is therefore only natural that the chain of power within the species will also be determined by mental and social abilities more than by brute force. It is therefore hard to believe that the most influential and most stable social hierarchy in history is founded on men’s ability physically to coerce women.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Since I did Selection all those years ago, not much has really changed. The MOD (Ministry of Defence) website still states that 21 SAS soldiers need the following character traits: “Physically and mentally robust. Self-confident. Self-disciplined. Able to work alone. Able to assimilate information and new skills.” It makes me smile now to read those words. As Selection had progressed, those traits had been stamped into my being, and then during the three years I served with my squadron they became molded into my psyche. They are the same qualities I still value today. The details of the jobs I did once I passed Selection aren’t for sharing publicly, but they included some of the most extraordinary training that any man can be lucky enough to receive. I went on to be trained in demolitions, air and maritime insertions, foreign weapons, jungle survival, trauma medicine, Arabic, signals, high-speed and evasive driving, winter warfare, as well as “escape and evasion” survival for behind enemy lines. I went through an even more in-depth capture initiation program as part of becoming a combat-survival instructor, which was much longer and more intense than the hell we endured on Selection. We became proficient in covert night parachuting and unarmed combat, among many other skills--and along the way we had a whole host of misadventures. But what do I remember and value most? For me, it is the camaraderie, and the friendships--and of course Trucker, who is still one of my best friends on the planet. Some bonds are unbreakable. I will never forget the long yomps, the specialist training, and of course a particular mountain in the Brecon Beacons. But above all, I feel a quiet pride that for the rest of my days I can look myself in the mirror and know that once upon a time I was good enough. Good enough to call myself a member of the SAS. Some things don’t have a price tag.
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
Professional Bio of Shahin Shardi, P.Eng. Materials Engineer Welding and Pressure Equipment Inspector, QA/QC Specialist Shahin Shardi is a Materials Engineer with experience in integrity management, inspection of pressure equipment, quality control/assurance of large scale oil and gas projects and welding inspection. He stared his career in trades which helped him understand fundamentals of operation of a construction site and execution of large scale projects. This invaluable experience provided him with boots on the ground perspective of requirements of running a successful project and job site. After obtaining an engineering degree from university of British Columbia, he started a career in asset integrity management for oil and gas facilities and inspection of pressure equipment in Alberta, Canada. He has been involved with numerus maintenance shutdowns at various facilities providing engineering support to the maintenance, operations and project personnel regarding selection, repair, maintenance, troubleshooting and long term reliability of equipment. In addition he has extensive experience in area of quality control and assurance of new construction activities in oil and gas industry. He has performed Owner’s Inspector and welding inspector roles in this area. Shahin has extensively applied industry codes of constructions such as ASME Pressure Vessel Code (ASME VIII), Welding (ASME IX), Process Piping (ASME B31.3), Pipe Flanges (ASME B16.5) and various pressure equipment codes and standards. Familiarity with NDT techniques like magnetic particle, liquid penetrant, eddy current, ultrasonic and digital radiography is another valuable knowledge base gained during various projects. Some of his industry certificates are CWB Level 2 Certified Welding Inspector, API 510 Pressure Vessel Inspector, Alberta ABSA In-Service Pressure Vessel Inspector and Saskatchewan TSASK Pressure Equipment Inspector. Shahin is a professional member of Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta.
Shahin Shardi
We have looked at some of the things that a female might do if she has been deserted by her mate. But these all have the air of making the best of a bad job. Is there anything a female can do to reduce the extent to which her mate exploits her in the first place? She has a strong card in her hand. She can refuse to copulate. She is in demand, in a seller's market. This is because she brings the dowry of a large, nutritious egg. A male who successfully copulates gains a valuable food reserve for his offspring. The female is potentially in a position to drive a hard bargain before she copulates. Once she has copulated she has played her ace — her egg has been committed to the male. It is all very well to talk about driving hard bargains, but we know very well it is not really like that. Is there any realistic way in which something equivalent to driving a hard bargain could evolve by natural selection? I shall consider two main possibilities, called the domestic-bliss strategy, the he-man strategy. The simplest version of the domestic-bliss strategy is this. The female looks the males over, and tries to spot signs of fidelity and domesticity in advance. There is bound to be variation in the population of males in their predisposition to be faithful husbands. If females could recognize such qualities in advance, they could benefit themselves by choosing males possessing them. One way for a female to do this is to play hard to get for a long time, to be coy. Any male who is not patient enough to wait until the female eventually consents to copulate is not likely to be a good bet as a faithful husband. By insisting on a long engagement period, a female weeds out casual suitors, and only finally copulates with a male who has proved his qualities of fidelity and perseverance in advance. Feminine coyness is in fact very common among animals, and so are prolonged courtship or engagement periods. As we have already seen, a long engagement can also benefit a male where there is a danger of his being duped into caring for another male's child.
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
The US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. What country do you want to live in?
Cory Doctorow (Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future)
Sumerian culture -- the society based on me -- was another manifestation of the metavirus. Except that in this case, it was in a linguistic form rather than DNA." "Excuse me," Mr. Lee says. "You are saying that civilization started out as an infection?" "Civilization in its primitive form, yes. Each me was a sort of virus, kicked out by the metavirus principle. Take the example of the bread-baking me. Once that me got into society, it was a self-sustaining piece of information. It's a simple question of natural selection: people who know how to bake bread will live better and be more apt to reproduce than people who don't know how. Naturally, they will spread the me, acting as hosts for this self-replicating piece of information. That makes it a virus. Sumerian culture -- with its temples full of me -- was just a collection of successful viruses that had accumulated over the millennia. It was a franchise operation, except it had ziggurats instead of golden arches, and clay tablets instead of three-ring binders. "The Sumerian word for 'mind,' or 'wisdom,' is identical to the word for 'ear.' That's all those people were: ears with bodies attached. Passive receivers of information. But Enki was different. Enki was an en who just happened to be especially good at his job. He had the unusual ability to write new me -- he was a hacker. He was, actually, the first modern man, a fully conscious human being, just like us. "At some point, Enki realized that Sumer was stuck in a rut. People were carrying out the same old me all the time, not coming up with new ones, not thinking for themselves. I suspect that he was lonely, being one of the few -- perhaps the only -- conscious human being in the world. He realized that in order for the human race to advance, they had to be delivered from the grip of this viral civilization. "So he created the nam-shub of Enki, a countervirus that spread along the same routes as the me and the metavirus. It went into the deep structures of the brain and reprogrammed them. Henceforth, no one could understand the Sumerian language, or any other deep structure-based language. Cut off from our common deep structures, we began to develop new languages that had nothing in common with each other. The me no longer worked and it was not possible to write new me. Further transmission of the metavirus was blocked." "Why didn't everyone starve from lack of bread, having lost the bread-making me?" Uncle Enzo says. "Some probably did. Everyone else had to use their higher brains and figure it out. So you might say that the nam-shub of Enki was the beginnings of human consciousness -- when we first had to think for ourselves. It was the beginning of rational religion, too, the first time that people began to think about abstract issues like God and Good and Evil. That's where the name Babel comes from. Literally it means 'Gate of God.' It was the gate that allowed God to reach the human race. Babel is a gateway in our minds, a gateway that was opened by the nam-shub of Enki that broke us free from the metavirus and gave us the ability to think -- moved us from a materialistic world to a dualistic world -- a binary world -- with both a physical and a spiritual component.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
Prior to your interview, select the proper suit and the nicest shoes and come armed with information about the company too. Just like in a marriage, you don’t want to sign on the dotted line until you find out you’re compatible. Remember, in so many ways, careering is just like life.
Tamara S. Raymond (Careering: The Pocket Guide to Exploring Your Future Career)
Some managers ignore the long-lasting nature of skills acquired through training. They give employees no alternative skills which can be used beyond their current jobs. Unless, if those employees get selected for new positions.
Mitta Xinindlu
...unique character of each human life as well as the distinctive gifts that each individual brings to a family should not blind us to the way that membership to a broader social group matters in the creation of inequality. Social group membership structures life opportunities. The chances of obtaining key and widely sought goals: high scores on standardized tests such as the SAT, graduation from college, professional jobs, and sustained employment are not equal for all the infants whose births are celebrated by their families. It turns out that the family into which we are born an event over which we have no control matters quite a lot. It matters in part because the system of institutions is selective building on some cultural patterns more than others... The social structure of inequality is not all determining, but it exists." (Part III: Chapter 12 10:19:00 audio book)
Annette Lareau (Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life)
In any complex effort, communicating a well-articulated vision for what you’re trying to do is the starting point for figuring out how to do it.
Ken Kocienda (Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs)
the aristocratic and authoritarian air of a sheikh, except he wasn’t because Madigan knew every one of them currently in the area. He’d been tracking a select handful of them for months—all part of a job he’d conclude tomorrow.
Onley James (Play Dirty (Wages of Sin, #2))
On a warm June day in 2005, Steve Jobs went to his first college graduation—as the commencement speaker. The billionaire founder and leader of Apple Computer wasn’t just another stuffed-shirt businessman. Though only fifty years old, the college dropout was a technology rock star, a living legend to millions of people around the world. In his early twenties, Jobs almost single-handedly introduced the world to the first computer that could sit on your desk and actually do something all by itself. He revolutionized music and the ears of a generation with a spiffy little music player called the iPod and a wide selection of songs at the iTunes store. He funded and nurtured a company called Pixar that
Karen Blumenthal (Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different: A Biography)
If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. They will adopt the easier task of making our successful men good.
G.K. Chesterton (Selected Essays (Classic Library))
Investor: “Great! Now, I know we talked about the fact that you want $110,000 for the house. I already mentioned that I’d be purchasing your house as an investment, and unfortunately, I just can’t afford to pay that much and still be able to make a profit on the deal. But, here’s what I can do. I can either pay you $90,000 in cash for the property or I can pay you $100,000 if you’re willing to owner finance the sale. That means we would complete the sale in ten days, but you would wait six months to collect your $100,000. Which of those options would you prefer?” At this point, if you’ve done a good job of selecting your offer prices (e.g., you weren’t too generous), there is a good chance the seller isn’t going to accept either of those offers without some additional negotiation. The good news is that we’ve gotten the seller to implicitly agree to all the other terms and contingencies in the contract. Not only that, but we’ve now given the seller two options for the sale price, and his response to your final question (“Which of those options would you prefer?”) will give insight into which direction the negotiation goes.
J. Scott (The Book on Negotiating Real Estate: Expert Strategies for Getting the Best Deals When Buying & Selling Investment Property (Fix-and-Flip 3))
select log_id, log_date, owner, job_name from ALL_SCHEDULER_JOB_LOG where job_name like 'RMAN_B%' and log_date > sysdate-2; select log_id,log_date, owner, job_name, status, ADDITIONAL_INFO from ALL_SCHEDULER_JOB_LOG where log_id=113708;
Arun Kumar (Oracle DBA Quick Scripts: Oracle dba scripts collection used by expert database administrators everyday. Must have dba scripts for your daily activities!)
Experts have been revered—and well paid—for years for their “It is my opinion that ... ” judgments. As James March has stated, however, such reverence may serve a purely social function. People and organizations have to make decisions, often between alternatives that are almost equally good or bad. What better way to justify such decisions than to consult an expert, and the more money he or she charges, the better. “We paid for the best possible medical advice,” can be a palliative for a fatal operation (or a losing legal defense), just as throwing the I Ching can relieve someone from regretting a bad marriage or a bad career choice. An expert who constructs a linear model is not as impressive as one who gives advice in a “burst” of intuition derived from “years of experience.” (One highly paid business expert we know constructs linear models in secret.) So we value the global judgment of experts independently of its validity. But there is also a situational reason for doubting the inferiority of global, intuitive judgment. It has to do with the biased availability of feedback. When we construct a linear model in a prediction situation, we know exactly how poorly it predicts. In contrast, our feedback about our own intuitive judgments is flawed. Not only do we selectively remember our successes, we often have no knowledge of our failures—and any knowledge we do have may serve to “explain” them (away). Who knows what happens to rejected graduate school applicants? Professors have access only to accepted ones, and if the professors are doing a good job, the accepted ones will likewise do well—reinforcing the impression of the professors’ good judgment. What happens to people misdiagnosed as “psychotic”? If they are lucky, they will disappear from the sight of the authorities diagnosing them; if not, they are likely to be placed in an environment where they may soon become psychotic. Finally, therapy patients who commit suicide were too sick to begin with—as is easily supported by an ex post perusal of their files.
Reid Hastie (Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making)
Readers of this book, however intelligent and knowing, could scarcely expect to do a better job of portfolio selection than the top analysts of the country. But if it is true that a fairly large segment of the stock market is often discriminated against or entirely neglected in the standard analytical selections, then the intelligent investor may be in a position to profit from the resultant undervaluations.
Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
There was so much I thought I’d known about Max, but now I questioned whether we had been perfect strangers in a pretence of togetherness. We had first met as five photos and a few words about our respective hobbies, jobs and location. Our meet-cute of Linx profiles was anything but spontaneous—it was curated and censored, enabled by an algorithm, determined by self-selection. We’d read the signage of each other and we’d filled in the rest with our imaginations.
Dolly Alderton (Ghosts)
Conservative” should not be used as a synonym for “evangelical.” Evangelicals have been only selectively conservative. Many evangelicals have also been progressive, and sometimes even radical—in doctrine, in ethics, in politics, in art, and more: whatever gets the job done.
John G. Stackhouse Jr. (Evangelicalism: A Very Short Introduction)
Facebook Marketing Course By taking a Facebook marketing course, you can quickly create a means of income on a huge platform like Facebook. This Facebook marketing course covers a large part of digital marketing. When we talk about social media, we mean Facebook as the biggest online social media platform. Because every month on average 2.96 billion people around the world actively use Facebook and 1.3 billion people use Facebook Messenger. So think about how much of a platform you are getting for free to promote your business. Most of us don't know about Facebook's numerous features and tools, or even if we do, we don't know how to use them. Although it is unbelievable, it is true that if we learn the use of those tools, we can easily increase the sales of our website, Facebook page, or e-commerce site many times. Why learn Facebook Marketing? The interface we usually see on Facebook is only 20% of Facebook. The remaining 80 percent are in various subdomains of Facebook. In our country, no one can use 99 percent of Facebook. It cannot be said that more than 5% of the mangoes are used by the common people. And spammers can use 10 percent. So today I will discuss how to earn from Facebook by using the maximum of Facebook. In 2019, Facebook earned $40 million from Facebook ads alone, after paying content creators, bloggers, publishers, and developers. Which has doubled till now. If the calculation includes the amount Facebook pays to those who create content and make videos on Facebook, the amount would be $1 billion. Have you ever wondered why Facebook gives them so much money? The reason is propaganda. As a result of this campaign, the business expanded. That is not in the words - "propaganda is expansion"! The objective of this Facebook campaign and marketing is to increase sales. The higher the sales, the higher the profit. That's why every company now hires its own social media marketing manager to promote its business and increase sales. A social media marketing manager's salary ranges from around $500 to $3,000. In other words, Facebook has facilitated the way to do business in social media as well as to get a job. How many Types of Facebook Marketing? To know how to use Facebook's features and tools, you need to take a Facebook Marketing Course. Facebook marketing is generally of two types, namely – free Facebook marketing and paid Facebook marketing. In this case, you can do both types of courses. Facebook free and paid marketing is used according to the type of business. Free Facebook Marketing Marketing or advertising on Facebook without spending any money is called Free Facebook Marketing. Let's give an example – “You open a Facebook page for your business, then give it a nice name according to the type of work you do. Then continue to post about your products every day, as well as request your relatives and friends to like your page. Also, ask them to share your page. Give them a little flattery so that they stay by your side and help grow your page by liking-commenting-sharing, etc etc”. But you don't have to spend any money to do them. This is called Free Facebook Marketing. Paid Facebook Marketing On Facebook, those posts that we see under a post (Sponsored) are called paid Facebook marketing. Every company wants everyone to know about their products. So they use paid Facebook marketing in addition to using free Facebook promotion. It is possible to reach very selective customers by using this paid Facebook marketing. For example, "You want your product's customers to be located within the Dhaka Banani area and for both men and women, and you can also give an age limit that people between so and so age will see my ad or post". It is natural that you will not get the benefits that you can enjoy in the case of paid Facebook marketing in the case of free. This is why you need to spend money on paid Facebook marketing.
Bhairab IT Zone
Everything You Need to Do Freelancing One must possess some basic skills to do freelancing work. For example, a good computer, internet, and browsing should be well understood. Freelancing work is mostly hired by foreign buyers. In that case, you must have English speaking skills, know how to write good English while chatting, and keep practicing speaking English regularly. How to Get Work at Freelancing? Freelancing means being contracted to other people or companies and working as a contract. To do this, you need to have some special creativity in freelancing, which you can sell to clients as a service. How You Can Get Work: First, you need to select a freelancing platform from which you want to work. Decide in which category you want to make your career. Then open an account there, add your portfolio, and post it through a blog. Then start promoting your freelancing skills and talent. You can also get work by promoting your skills on Linkedin, Pinterest, and Twitter. Search for jobs based on your skills on various job forums (Upwork, Fiverr) and others. By doing these above tasks, you will get a job according to your needs, InshaAllah. Some Principles to Be a Good Freelancer: Time-sharing: You can create a timetable for when you will do a task. For example – You can keep morning time for various practices, afternoon time for study or other research, and night time for work. It will reduce the pressure on you. Eat meals on time: Never have irregular meals, if you do you will get sick very soon. And if you get sick, you can't work. As a result, you will suffer both physically and financially. So eat food on time. And remember, "Food first then Work". Don't Embrace Loneliness: People who are freelancing have to be alone most of the time. As a result, they cannot give time to everyone and become lonely. But you should never make this mistake. You will find time for yourself outside of your work to spend time gossiping with family or friends. How to Increase Your Workload: Increase work efficiency, and present the nature of work attractively and accurately. Quality of work will help you get additional work. Keeping the client happy at work is paramount. If you want, you can provide a little more service than the client asked to do without any charge. And can request you to give a 5-star rating. Clients may be happy with you for additional services and offer more work. Never overprice your work or service unless you are a popular freelancer in the marketplace. Please visit Our Website (Bhairab IT Zone) to Read more Articles related to Freelancing and Outsourcing. Thank You.
Bhairab IT Zone
The job interview is perhaps the most obvious example of this sort of unpaid emotional labour: here the candidate must appear sufficiently confident and enthusiastic to satisfy a selection panel assessing "presentation" and "personality", as if these were objective scientific criteria. So the interview, regardless of the job, becomes a kind of talent show audition hinging on generic questions about change, teamwork etc. (the equivalents of the standard repertoire of X Factor ballads), while the interviewee must project an all-purpose positivity by extemporising around this script without revealing its artificiality. The candidate must project the right image and hit the right notes, and must put his 'heart and soul' into every performance, even for the most dreary role.
Ivor Southwood (Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work)
Have you heard of Job who was made holy on a dunghill, O my soul?
Sophronius of Jerusalem (The Great Canon of Saint Andrew (Selected Classics in Orthodox Christian spirituality Book 1))
Understanding the taste of your visitor as well as guests is necessary to getting the right entertainment for your event. Best Corporate Events Booking Agency will provide the right entertainment that stay fit to the theme of the event. When you organize an event, mainly a business happening, you desire to ensure that you not only have the jobs connected with the business or core reason of the event placed to make sure victory, but you also desire to ensure that you have the best and most suitable entertainment that your visitor as well as guests will take pleasure in. If you are having a hard time trying to make a decision the top type of entertainment and where to safe the entertainment, you will really benefit from booking your entertainment using the services with Private Entertainment Event Planner. Booking the top entertainment agency means you will have the ability to choose the entertainment for your occasion from a diversity of different sort of entertainment. While booking Entertainment Events Booking Agency, you will be able to select from such entertainers including musical tribute entertainers, celebrity impersonators, comedians, bands and DJs among others. The top entertainment agency will surely allow a variety of entertainers of special types and will support you with selecting the best entertainment that merge well with your particular event. Booking Entertainment Agency is simple with the help of internet. When you search for a popular agency over the internet, you will be capable to browse different entertainment agencies and assessment the services and sorts of entertainers they present. You will obtain a thought of the costs and you will contain their contact details so you can call or email them about the information related to the event. They will then react and give you with more information related to the agency and services and how they can assist you. The Special Events Organizer will be simple to work with and understand your particular requirements. The team will listen to your wishes related to your event and give you with suggestions about the kind of entertainment your particular guests will enjoy. The group will also be more than eager to respond all of your questions and give you with a price quote. Moreover, one can demand references as well as find out how long they have been in the Celebrity Talent Agency .
Important Tips on Booking the Best Corporate Events Booking Agency
its selection and vetting process. The workers, for their part, can hope for a steady flow of jobs and prompt payment with minimal fuss. Handy’s computer system also tries to schedule each worker’s jobs in such a way as to minimise travel time.
Anonymous
Dad just smiled wryly. “You’ll learn, Frank, that when you’re up there’re hundreds of people who’ll claim you as a friend. When you’re down, you’re lucky if one of them will buy you a cup of coffee. If I had it to do over again, I’d select my friends more carefully. I do have a couple of good friends. They’re not wealthy, but one of them got me my job in the post office.
Anonymous
The job of management is not to select the best ideas; it is to create a great system that allows for the best ideas to emerge.
Jurgen Appelo (#Workout: Games, Tools & Practices to Engage People, Improve Work, and Delight Clients (Management 3.0))
Cope had caused office ripples when he first took over as county prosecutor and stunned all by promoting Muse to be his county chief investigator. The job was usually given to a gruff old-timer, always male, who was supposed to show the political appointee through the system. Loren Muse was one of the youngest investigators in the department when he selected her. When asked by the media what criteria he had used to select a young female over more seasoned male veterans, he answered in one word: “Merit.” Now here she was, in a room with four of those same passed-by old-timers. “I
Harlan Coben (Hold Tight)
Step 2: Work Out WHY You're Procrastinating This can depend on both you and the task. But it's important to understand which of the two is relevant in a given situation, so that you can select the best approach for overcoming your reluctance to get going. One reason is that people find a particular job unpleasant, and try to avoid it because of that. Most jobs have unpleasant or boring aspects to them, and often the best way of dealing with these is to get them over and done with quickly, so that you can focus on the more enjoyable aspects of the job. Another cause is that people are disorganized. Organized people manage to fend off the temptation, because they will have things like prioritized to-do lists and schedules which emphasize how important the piece work is, and identify precisely when it’s due. They’ll also have planned how long a task will take to do, and will have worked back from that point to identify when they need to get started in order to avoid it being late. Organized people are also better placed to avoid procrastination, because they know how to break the work down into manageable “next steps”. Even if you’re organized, you can feel overwhelmed by the task. You may doubt that you have the skills or resources you think you need, so you seek comfort in doing tasks you know you're capable of completing. Unfortunately, the big task isn't going to go away – truly important tasks rarely do. You may also fear success as much as failure. For example, you may think that success will lead to you being swamped with more requests to do this type of task, or that you’ll be pushed to take on things that you feel are beyond you. Surprisingly, perfectionists are often procrastinators, as they can tend to think "I don't have the right skills or resources to do this perfectly now, so I won't do it at all." One final major cause is having underdeveloped decision-making skills. If you simply can’t decide what to do, you’re likely to put off taking action in case you do the wrong thing.
Tony Narams (I Moved Your Chesee: The Best Way to Dealing With a Disease Called Stagnation!)
After January 1, 1959, the Castro Revolution changed the way business was done in Cuba. Abruptly, supplies for Cubana were no longer available, most routes were altered or suspended, and many of the pilots deserted their jobs or were exiled. In May of 1960, the new Castro administration merged all of the existing Cuban airlines and nationalized them under a drastically restructured Cubana management. At the time, many of Cubana’s experienced personnel took advantage of their foreign connections, and left for employment with other airlines. During the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April of 1961, two of the remaining Cubana DC-3’s were destroyed in the selective bombing of Cuba’s airports. Actually the only civil aviation airport that was proven to be bombed was the Antonio Maceo Airport in Santiago de Cuba. During the following years, the number of hijackings increased and some aircraft were abandoned at American airports, as the flight crews sought asylum in the United States. This corporate instability, as well as political unrest, resulted in a drastic reduction of passengers willing to fly with Cubana. Of course, this resulted in a severe reduction in revenue, making the airline less competitive. The Castro régime reacted by blaming the CIA for many of Cubana’s problems. However, slowly, except to the United States, most of the scheduled flights were restored. Not being able to replace their aging fleet with American manufactured aircraft, they turned to the Soviet Union. Currently Cubana’s fleet includes Ukrainian designed and built Antonov An-148’s and An-158’s. The Cubana fleet also has Soviet designed and built Illyushin II-96’s and Tupolev TU-204’s built in Kazan, Russia. Despite daunting difficulties, primarily due to the United States’ imposed embargo and the lack of sufficient assistance from Canada, efforts to expand and improve operations during the 1990’s proved successful. “AeroCaribbean” originally named “Empresa Aero” was established in 1982 to serve as Cuba’s domestic airline. It also supported Cubana’s operations and undertook its maintenance. Today Cubana’s scheduled service includes many Caribbean, European, South and Central American destinations. In North America, the airline flies to Mexico and Canada. With Cuban tourism increasing, Cubana has positioned itself to be relatively competitive. However much depends on Cuba’s future relations with the United States. The embargo imposed in February of 1962 continues and is the longest on record. However, Cubana has continued to expand, helping to make Cuba one of the most important tourist destinations in Latin America. A little known fact is that although Cubana, as expected, is wholly owned by the Cuban government, the other Cuban airlines are technically not. Instead, they are held, operated and maintained by the Cuban military, having been created by Raúl Castro during his tenure as the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces.
Hank Bracker
to his, before pulling out slowly, leaving a void inside of me that quickly fills with a warm, honey-like fulfillment. I gather my breath and straighten up, leaning against the wall. My heart is pounding in my chest and my knees are shaking. All I can think is, I’ve never been fucked like this before. Dylan kisses the back of my neck gently and I purr happily. “Was it good?” I ask, softly. “You’re always good,” he says, brushing my hair over my shoulder to plant another soft peck along the upper part of my neck. “You’re just…perfect for me.”   As I get dressed afterward, Dylan stands near the doorway in the manner that boyfriends, husbands, and – well, whatever the hell we are – have waited for women since the beginning of time. Impatiently, inexplicably, and long-since ready. Once I’m finished with my outfit selection, make-up, and hair, I step out of the bathroom and walk towards him. “Ready now?” he says, doing a decent job of hiding
J.D. Hawkins (Bootycall, Part 2 (Bootycall, #2))
Your ranking serves two purposes,” he says. “The first is that it determines the order in which you will select a job after initiation. There are only a few desirable positions available.
Veronica Roth (Divergent (Divergent, #1))
Much has been written about process design, so I won’t repeat that here. I have found the “The Basics of Production,” the first chapter of Andy Grove’s High Output Management, to be particularly helpful. For new companies, here are a few things to keep in mind:   Focus on the output first. What should the process produce? In the case of the interview process, an outstanding employee. If that’s the goal, what’s the process to get there?   Figure out how you’ll know if you are getting what you want at each step. Are you getting enough candidates? Are you getting the right candidates? Will your interview process find the right person for the job? Once you select the person, will they accept the job? Once they accept the job, will they become productive? Once they become productive, will they stay with your company? How will you measure each step?   Engineer accountability into the system. Which organization and which individual is responsible for each step? What can you do to increase the visibility of their performance?
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers—Straight Talk on the Challenges of Entrepreneurship)
Before the do-gooders “helped,” they forgot to ask, why would anyone work ten hours per day for the paltry sum of $2 or $3 an hour? Would they have selected such a job if they had superior alternatives? The only conclusion is that the low-paying sweatshop job might be their best alternative. Such a person is indeed unfortunate, but they are by no means made better off by the destruction of that low-paying job.
Walter E. Williams (Race & Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination? (Hoover Institution Press Publication Book 599))
Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective—doing less—is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest. Of course, before you can separate the wheat from the chaff and eliminate activities in a new environment (whether a new job or an entrepreneurial venture), you will need to try a lot to identify what pulls the most weight. Throw it all up on the wall and see what sticks. That’s part of the process, but it should not take more than a month or two. It’s easy to get caught in a flood of minutiae, and the key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities. Take time to stop and smell the roses, or—in this case—to count the pea pods. The 9–5 Illusion and Parkinson’s Law I saw a bank that said “24-Hour Banking,” but I don’t have that much time.
Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek)
As he explained it, the maximizers in the job-search experiment were doing what maximizers generally do: Rather than compare actual jobs, with their various pros and cons, in their minds they wound up selecting the features of each particular job and creating a “fantasy job,” an ideal that neither they nor, probably, anyone else would ever get.
Aziz Ansari (Modern Romance)
Here are the types of questions I consider asking during product analysis: What is the nature of the product? (What are its benefits? Why would someone buy it?) Is it a commodity good or a unique good? (Could the company increase differentiation?) Are there any complementary goods? (Can the company piggyback off growth in complements or near complements?) Are there any substitutes? (Is the company vulnerable to indirect competitors, namely substitutes?) What is the product’s life cycle? (Is it new or almost obsolete?) How is it packaged? (This is an optional question. Is anything bundled or included with the product—for example, just a razor versus a razor with replacement blades, or just a product versus a product with a service contract? Would a change in the product’s packaging make the product more likely to meet specific consumer segments’ needs?) If you selectively ask questions about these product-related topics, you can uncover insights that will help you refine your hypotheses and ultimately serve your client more effectively.
Victor Cheng (Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting)
AlphaPoint Completes Blockchain Trial Together with Scotiabank AlphaPoint, a fintech company, devoted to blockchain technological innovation, has accomplished a successful proof technology together with Scotiabank, a major international bank based in Barcelone, Canada. From the trial, Scotiabank sought to learn and examine how the AlphaPoint Distributed Journal Platform could be leveraged inside across a selection of use situations. When questioned if AlphaPoint and Scotiabank intended to further build this job, Igor Telyatnikov, president and also COO regarding AlphaPoint, advised Bitcoin Journal that he was not able to comment especially on the subsequent steps in the particular Scotiabank-AlphaPoint effort. He performed, however, suggest that AlphaPoint is about to reveal several additional media shortly. “We have a couple of other significant announcements that is to be announced inside the coming calendar month, including a generation launch using a systemically crucial financial institution, ” said Telyatnikov. “2017 will be shaping around be an unbelievable year for that distributed journal technology market as a whole and then for AlphaPoint also. ” Within the multi-month venture, trade studies were published upon deployment of the AlphaPoint Distributed Journal Platform, which usually ran concurrently on Microsoft’s Azure impair and AlphaPoint hardware. Inside real-time, typically the blockchain community converted FIXML messages to be able to smart deals and produced an immutable “single truth” across the complete network. The particular Financial Details eXchange (FIX) is a sector protocol used for communicating stock options information inside specific digital messages. Including information about getting rates, market info and buy and sell orders. Using trillions involving dollars bought and sold annually around the Nasdaq only, financial providers entities are usually investing seriously in maximizing electronic buying and selling to increase their particular speed monetary markets and decrease costs. Blockchain technology may help them help save $8-12 million per annum, which includes savings up to 70 percent throughout reporting, 50 % in post-trade and 50 % in consent, according to a report by Accenture and McLagan.
Melissa Welborn
Exercise: The Eight Statements The simple set of eight statements below will help you gauge where you are on the path to bending reality. Indicate how true each statement is for you by selecting one of the choices offered. There are no right or wrong answers. If you’re still in the starting gate, no worries. We’ll be talking more about how to get there. 1.​I love my current job to the point where it does not feel like work. NOT AT ALL TRUE​SOMETIMES TRUE​VERY TRUE 2.​My work is meaningful to me. NOT AT ALL TRUE​SOMETIMES TRUE​VERY TRUE 3.​There are often moments at work that make me so happy the time just flies by. NOT AT ALL TRUE​SOMETIMES TRUE​VERY TRUE 4.​When things go wrong, I don’t worry at all. I just know something good is on the horizon. NOT AT ALL TRUE​SOMETIMES TRUE​VERY TRUE 5.​I feel excited about my future, knowing even better things are always on their way. NOT AT ALL TRUE​SOMETIMES TRUE​VERY TRUE 6.​Stress and anxiety don’t seem to faze me much. I trust in my ability to attain my goals. NOT AT ALL TRUE​SOMETIMES TRUE​VERY TRUE 7.​I look forward to the future because I have unique and bold goals on the horizon. NOT AT ALL TRUE​SOMETIMES TRUE​VERY TRUE 8.​I spend a good amount of time thinking excitedly about my visions for the future. NOT AT ALL TRUE​SOMETIMES TRUE​VERY TRUE If you answered “Very true” to statements 1 through 4, you are likely happy in the now. If you answered “Very true” to statements 5 through 8, you likely have a good vision for your future. If you can answer “Very true” for all eight statements, you’re likely in the state of bending reality. Most people, however, find that they tend to be able to answer “Very true” to either the happiness-related statements or to the vision-related questions, but not to both.
Vishen Lakhiani (The Code of the Extraordinary Mind: 10 Unconventional Laws to Redefine Your Life and Succeed On Your Own Terms)
The sense that I'd fled my Jewishness in Odessa added painful new pressure to the dilemma I would face at sixteen. That's when each Soviet citizen first got an internal passport - the single most crucial identity document. As a child of mixed ethnicities - Jewish mom, Russian dad - I'd be allowed to select either for Entry 5. This choice-to-come weighed like a stone on my nine-year-old soul. Would I pick difficult honor and side with the outcasts, thereby dramatically reducing my college and job opportunities? Or would I take the easy road of being 'Russian'? Our emigration rescued me from the dilemma, but the unmade choice haunts me to this day. What would I have done?
Anya von Bremzen (Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing)
complex vortex of tests, classes, selections and preparations is something every insignificant Indian student like me has to go through to have a shot at a decent life. Else, I could always take the job of Birju the watchman or, if I wanted it simpler, hang myself
Chetan Bhagat (Revolution Twenty20)
of the large numbers of people who applied for jobs, and she wondered how employers managed to select from such a wide field. Was everyone interviewed? And even if that happened, how did one distinguish one applicant from another when they all probably had roughly the same qualifications?
Alexander McCall Smith (Precious and Grace (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency #17))
There’s a country that does something a little like this. Its young people, including its very best educational prospects from all different backgrounds, spend two or three years training and solving problems in a nonhierarchical environment and get together every year. Many then collaborate to start companies. This country leads the world in venture capital investments per capita (over $170, versus $75 in the United States in 2010).1 It has more companies on the NASDAQ than any non-US country except for China, despite having a population of less than eight million.2 Its quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate was above 5 percent in 2011 and it’s in the top thirty globally in per capita GDP, above Spain and Saudi Arabia, among others.3 This country is Israel, where eighteen-year-olds complete two- or three-year tours in the military, getting to know each other in highly selective military units. They operate at a high level of autonomy and responsibility and then travel the world for months before heading to college and/or grad school. In Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s book Start-up Nation, this network and training ground is credited as helping give rise to a culture of risk taking and entrepreneurship. By the time Israelis graduate from college, they’re in their midtwenties and mature; in many cases, they’ve already been in operating environments and borne life-and-death responsibilities. This cocktail of experience gives rise to a mixture of both courage and impatience. As one entrepreneur put it, “When an Israeli entrepreneur has a business idea, he will start it that week. The notion that one should accumulate credentials before launching a venture simply does not exist. . . . Too much time can only teach you what can go wrong, not what could be transformative.”4 Another observer commented, “Israelis . . .  don’t care about the social price of failure and they develop their projects regardless of the economic . . . situation.”5
Andrew Yang (Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America)
Overall, maximizers had less job satisfaction and were less certain they’d selected the right job at all. The satisficers, by contrast, were generally more positive about their jobs, the search process, and their lives in general.
Aziz Ansari (Modern Romance: An Investigation)
Rather than compare actual jobs, with their various pros and cons, in their minds they wound up selecting the features of each particular job and creating a “fantasy job,” an ideal that neither they nor, probably, anyone else would ever get. Johnny Satisficer is sitting around at his dum-dum job, eating his disgusting subpar taco and thinking about hanging his generic Christmas ornaments later on. But he’s totally happy about that.
Aziz Ansari (Modern Romance: An Investigation)
Hawaii DUI attorney Hawaii DUI Legislation As part of the Hawaii DUI is taken to manage OVUII provisions relating "to the job without having to do, under the influence of narcotics." At any time, arrested me with this design crime, two different scenarios are part of the action. Individual courses in prison behind the lower through life, and the management can unforeseen consequences for you are behind the privileges. While it has an address that is protected effectively only two scenarios and the services of a DUI attorney in Hawaii will have to use, is the perfect solution. Take a Hawaii DUI lawyer as well as a symbol of crimes and administrative conditions in order simply because a knowledgeable attorney composed of a selection of tools and consultants from personal experience what is a second has been selected to represent the country. Team Hawaii DUI North Carolina, which do not contain a large number of other closely how the situation further. Two scenarios can be supplied to the defendant standards. In particular, it depends on the devaluation of the accused, even if it makes the work of the unit. This usually means that the defendant was the less able, of course, the direction of action of motor vehicles and motor vehicles that the liquid does not eat before experiencing again. Fiscal policy scenarios on how to warn this routine, the incredible strength, the smell of alcohol on his breath of the accused, chemical tests are successful, the driver's actual appearance. When you are ready to have to effectively protect against cross phase of the project, I recommend Hawaii DUI lawyer trained to drive during treatment and can demonstrate an adequate protection. Delgado was of the view that it is "per se". This means that the prosecutor have not been included in the exhibition show the method or the driver looked in the direction under the influence of alcohol behind the negative cable. These types of circumstances, mostly on the same chemical research and the prosecution on the basis must prove that the defendant to reduce the crime in Hawaii in March for chemical research in the blood of 0.08% or more, is in the liquid phase summarized exposed. Hawaii DUI lawyer to eat properly trained is reflected in this model can help each scenario to ensure that the legs yourselfer difference in the fighting. Hawaii is a place, a time of "natural Look Back", contains to return to the effects of the crime. Search again, it's time the crime is alleged for the first act, when the perpetrator of a lack of experience composed only other offense again. If a particular offense known author and has only should recognize this period as an impending crime or offense. Exhibition Dates countries Hawaii is five years. This suggests that the accused has no criminal DUI during the last five calendar years; the first violation would be appreciated. Administrative Results Concession withdrawal of the Office of Management reliable care for administrative purposes on drunken driving offense in Hawaii leaders together. Hawaii is the player under Tiny Interstate. This little machine is comparable towards alternative requirements for the content of teaching, the DUI offense. This means that if someone is breaking the law is arrested by driving under the influence of alcohol in the country that the players informed of their offensive in the direction of your region and the country at home, the home to protect the rights of accessories to suspend. This may be necessary, for depression itself could protect live in Hawaii. Hawaii DUI attorney, these values and work to be able to move to an adequate safety system hard, suspended to keep the license point home.
Jon Royals
A Role Model for Managers of Managers Gordon runs a technical group with seven managers reporting to him at a major telecommunications company. Now in his late thirties, Gordon was intensely interested in “getting ahead” early in his career but now is more interested in stability and doing meaningful work. It’s worth noting that Gordon has received some of the most positive 360 degree feedback reports from supervisors, direct reports, and peers that we’ve ever seen. This is not because Gordon is a “soft touch” or because he’s easy to work for. In fact, Gordon is extraordinarily demanding and sets high standards both for his team and for individual performance. His people, however, believe Gordon’s demands are fair and that he communicates what he wants clearly and quickly. Gordon is also very clear about the major responsibility of his job: to grow and develop managers. To do so, he provides honest feedback when people do well or poorly. In the latter instance, however, he provides feedback that is specific and constructive. Though his comments may sting at first, he doesn’t turn negative feedback into a personal attack. Gordon knows his people well and tailors his interactions with them to their particular needs and sensitivities. When Gordon talks about his people, you hear the pride in his words and tone of voice. He believes that one of his most significant accomplishments is that a number of his direct reports have been promoted and done well in their new jobs. In fact, people in other parts of the organization want to work for Gordon because he excels in producing future high-level managers and leaders. Gordon also delegates well, providing people with objectives and allowing them the freedom to achieve the objectives in their own ways. He’s also skilled at selection and spends a great deal of time on this issue. For personal reasons (he doesn’t want to relocate his family), Gordon may not advance much further in the organization. At the same time, he’s fulfilling his manager-of-managers role to the hilt, serving as a launching pad for the careers of first-time managers.
Ram Charan (The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company (Jossey-Bass Leadership Series Book 391))
Rothschild houses had capital in excess of £35 million on the eve of the First World War, all of it family money; it was the job of the partners to manage this huge portfolio. A large part of it they held in the form of European government bonds, the most secure form of investment and also the kind of security the Rothschilds knew best, since they had long been the principal underwriters for new bond issues on the London market. They, more than anyone, stood to lose in the event of a European war, not least because such a war would almost certainly divide the three houses, pitting Paris and perhaps also London against Vienna. Yet the outbreak of war caught them almost entirely by surprise.
Niall Ferguson (The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks))
In the name of all that is holy, please consider the wages of a particular profession before you select that degree plan.
Miles Anthony Smith (Becoming Generation Flux: Why Traditional Career Planning is Dead: How to be Agile, Adapt to Ambiguity, and Develop Resilience)
Finding a job that is a good fit is as much about you selecting the right company as it is about them selecting the right candidate.
Miles Anthony Smith (Becoming Generation Flux: Why Traditional Career Planning is Dead: How to be Agile, Adapt to Ambiguity, and Develop Resilience)
BBQ Grills There are a number of gas grills which might be obtainable to the market. Grill professionals from different manufactures point out that the grills can either be propane and none propane BBQ grills can be found. Once the necessity to purchase the brand new grill to switch the outdated one, one has to contemplate security components and the mobility of the grill. Gas out of doors grill are ideal for cooking out that saves the consumer an ideal deal on gas vitality giant, future-laden fuel grills have taken over the barbecue backyard what one has to keep in mind is that a better worth doesn’t guarantee performance. Gasoline grills make the most of propane or natural gasoline as gasoline. They're accessible in various textures and sizes. The commonest type of such a grill is the Cart Grill design mannequin. Infrared grills, however, produce built-in grills infrared warmth to cook dinner meals and are fueled using propane or pure gas. Charcoal bbq grills use charcoal briquettes because the gas supply and it generates high ranges of warmth. Electrical grills are much smaller in dimension and they can be simply placed in the kitchen. They offer nice convenience however are expensive to function compared to the other grill types. A grill is cooking gear that cooks by directly exposing meals to heat. The floor where the meals is placed is an open rack with a source of warmth beneath it. There are a number of forms of grills relying on the type of warmth source used.A barbeque grill is a grill that uses charcoal or wooden as the heat supply. Food produced from BBQ grills have gotten attribute grill marks made by the racks where they had been resting throughout cooking. BBQ grills are often used to cook dinner poultry meat. However they will also be used to cook dinner other forms of meat in addition to fish. Manufactures recommendation the grill customers to depart the grill open when u have completed grilling. The fueled propane grill finally ends up burning itself out after the fuel has been used up within the tank. Typically the regulator can develop a leak which may shortly empty the propane bottle. There are significant variations between the grills fueled by pure gases and the ones with propane. Selecting the best grill all is determined by your self upon the uniqueness of the product.one has to take into concern the security points associated to natural gases. Choosing a good quality barbeque grill could be quite a difficult job. Due to this fact, it is crucial that you understand the advantages and features of the different types of bbq grills. In addition, while making your alternative, you want to consider several features. Test the essential options of the grill including the heat management mechanism, ash cleanup and different points that affect the feel and taste of the food. Guantee that the grill framework accommodates a protecting coating for preventing rust.
Greg Bear
factory automation services Our company majorly dedicated to serving clients having biodiesel plants. Our company has more than 60 engineers who are highly experienced and proficient. Moreover, all our professionals are expertise in different niche such as electrical, process, application, project, mechanical, chemical, civil, structural and controls too. Our professionals do the best possible job to ensure a favorable outcome. For factory automation services, we build and maintain the biodiesel plant. In this context, our experts follow the biodiesel plant construction standards that include plant size determination, selecting an appropriate site, permitting, biodiesel plant engineering, determining your equipment needs, assistance which plant installation, quality and BQ-9000 considerations, plant start up and training, plant management and planning for the future.
SRS International Biodiesel
Everyone you meet should go into a people file (organized by categories) that you keep on your computer or phone. Include a few details about the person. Selected names should be placed on your “big-mouth” e-mail list. It should consist of former bosses, former coworkers whom you want to stay in touch with, anyone who has mentored you, people you’ve met who seem interested in your career. People on your big-mouth list then get sent an e-mail notification when you have important career news—for instance, you’ve switched jobs, been promoted, or started your own business.
Kate White (I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know)
There is no doubt that I am selective in my listening, hence "directive" if people wish to accuse me of this. I am centered in the group member who is speaking, and am unquestionably much less interested in the details of his quarrel with his wife, or of his difficulties on the job, or his disagreement with what has just been said, than in the meaning these experience have for him now and the feeling they arouse in him. It is to these meanings and feelings that I try to respond.
Carl R. Rogers
In his early twenties, Jobs almost single-handedly introduced the world to the first computer that could sit on your desk and actually do something all by itself. He revolutionized music and the ears of a generation with a spiffy little music player called the iPod and a wide selection of songs at the iTunes store. He funded and nurtured a company called Pixar that made the most amazing computer-animated movies—Toy Story, Cars, and Finding Nemo—bringing to life imaginary characters like never before. Though
Karen Blumenthal (Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different: A Biography)
it’s worth repeating that for most investors, selecting individual stocks is unnecessary—if not inadvisable. The fact that most professionals do a poor job of stock picking does not mean that most amateurs can do better. The vast majority of people who try to pick stocks learn that they are not as good at it as they thought; the luckiest ones discover this early on, while the less fortunate take years to learn it. A small percentage of investors can excel at picking their own stocks. Everyone else would be better off getting help, ideally through an index fund.
Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
Likewise for all cases of extinction, which represent well over 99 percent of species that ever lived. (This, by the way, poses an enormous problem for theories of intelligent design (ID). It doesn’t seem so intelligent to design millions of species that are destined to go extinct, and then replace them with other, similar species, most of which will also vanish. ID supporters have never addressed this difficulty.) Natural selection must also work with the design of an organism as a whole, which is a compromise among different adaptations. Female sea turtles dig their nests on the beach with their flippers—a painful, slow, and clumsy process that exposes their eggs to predators. Having more shovel-like flippers would help them do a better and faster job, but then they couldn’t swim as well. A conscientious designer might have given the turtles an extra pair of limbs, with retractable shovel-like appendages, but turtles, like all reptiles, are stuck with a developmental plan that limits their limbs to four.
Jerry A. Coyne (Why Evolution Is True)
When a woman who is very anxious about the future chooses a partner, for example, she is less likely to select someone purely because she likes and enjoys being with him. She might choose someone she doesn’t really like simply because the relationship seems advantageous to her or because she is afraid that if she doesn’t choose him, she may not find anyone else. When it comes to career choices, the same type of person is more likely to choose a job with a large company because it will give her more choices in the future, or to work toward certain qualifications as a guarantee rather than because she actually likes the work and wants to do it.
Marie Kondō (The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (Magic Cleaning #1))
...the leader must 1) avoid getting swamped in detail; 2) not be petty; 3) not be pompous; 4) know how to select people to fit the task; 5) trust others to do a job without the leader's meddling; 6) be capable of clear decisions; 7) inspire confidence.
J. Oswald Sanders (Spiritual Leadership (Commitment To Spiritual Growth))
If you are serious about hiring the best possible person for the job, this is what you should do. First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in this position (technical proficiency, engaging personality, reliability, and so on). Don’t overdo it – six dimensions is a good number. The traits you choose should be as independent as possible from each other, and you should feel that you can assess them reliably by asking a few factual questions. Next, make a list of those questions for each trait and think about how you will score it, say on a 1–5 scale. You should have an idea of what you will call ‘very weak’ or ‘very strong’ …
John Lanchester (How to Speak Money)
The Four Global Options Now that you grasp the BIG picture, which includes your life values, your career values, your T-Bar, and current market conditions, it’s time to consider the four global options. I call these global options because, in reality, these are the only four job or career options you have. Option #1: Same job–same industry. Choosing Option #1 means you enjoy both and, most likely, need only conduct a job transition campaign to seek out a new company or organization. For example, a fifth grade teacher who is teaching in a public school may seek the same job (teacher) in the same industry (public school system); this teacher only needs to look at a new school in the same school district or to apply for a teacher’s position in a new school district. Option #2: New job–same industry. Option #2 means you enjoy the industry but need to identify a new job within that industry. Using the fifth grade teacher as an example again, she might seek a new job as an assistant principal or librarian. Or maybe she wants to earn more money than she would make as a teacher, so she becomes a sales professional and sells textbooks to educational institutions. The job transition campaign will take place within education, but she will identify and pursue a new, more inspiring, and more rewarding job within that industry. Option #3: Same job–new industry. If you select Option #3, it means you enjoy your job or vocation, but you need to identify a new industry or environment to perform that job in. The fifth grade teacher might get a job teaching for a private school (new industry or venue) or a private learning center, or she might even start her own tutoring business. In this case, the job transition campaign will focus on teaching but in a new, more appealing industry or venue. Option #4: New job–new industry. This option means you are ready for a wholesale change. Oftentimes this option is the option of choice if there’s a career or job you’ve always dreamt about. Or possibly you have a nice severance package or the financial means to return to school and prepare for an entirely new career. Possibly the fifth grade teacher always had a passion for antiques. In this case, she might pursue a job as a manager or even an owner of an antique store. Perhaps she’ll make the decision to stay home and be a full-time mom. The job transition campaign will focus on an entirely new job or activity in an entirely new industry or venue.
Jay A. Block (101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times)
Guideline #5: Select your vocabulary with meticulous care. Did you increase sales or orchestrate explosive growth in revenues? Did you provide good levels of customer service or unparalleled levels of quality customer service? As a receptionist, did you merely greet people, or were you the manager of first impressions? Are you a good problem solver, or can you resolve complex technical issues professionally and expeditiously? Words are power, and keywords and phrases are powerful agents for eliciting the right emotions to enthusiastically engage prospective employers to want to read your document. Well-chosen words can be the difference between an interview and a missed opportunity, so select your words and messages with painstaking precision.
Jay A. Block (101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times)
Interviews suck. We all seem to understand that fact, but not its implications. Our field is choc-a-bloc with advice from employers to candidates on how best to navigate scary interviews. That's all well and good, but it's the hiring teams that pay the steepest price for poor, biased, and unreliable selection. It can't be the candidate's job to handle irrational processes. Unless you're playing to lose.
Anonymous
Connective talents are useless, of course, if people can’t perform the work. And the most talented people in every occupation have huge advantages over their ordinary peers. Dean Keith Simonton, who studies greatness and genius, finds that whether it comes to songwriters, composers, scientists, programmers, or filmmakers, the top 10 percent generate as much or more output than the other 90 percent. The superiority of great bosses is seen in a summary of eighty-five years of research on employee selection methods. Frank Schmidt and John Hunter found that the top 15 percent of professionals and managers produced nearly 50 percent more output than their average peers. The strongest predictors of performance included general mental ability (IQ and similar measures), job sample tests (having people prove they can do the work), and evaluations by peers; other useful predictors included structured employment interviews (where each candidate is asked the same questions in the same order) and conscientiousness (self-discipline and follow-through, similar to grit). These findings provide ammunition for bosses who stock up on the best talent and believe that little else is required. Yet without constructive connections among people, collective performance and humanity is tough to achieve – no matter how many superstars are in the fold.
Robert I. Sutton (Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst)
By some quirk of fate, I had been chosen—along with five others—as a candidate to be the next equerry to the Princess of Wales. I knew little about what an equerry actually did, but I did not greatly care. I already knew I wanted to do the job. Two years on loan to the royal household would surely be good for promotion, and even if it was not, it had to be better than slaving in the Ministry of Defense, which was the most likely alternative. I wondered what it would be like to work in a palace. Through friends and relatives I had an idea it was not all red carpets and footmen. Running the royal family must involve a lot of hard work for somebody, I realized, but not, surely, for the type of tiny cog that was all I expected to be. In the wardroom of the frigate, alongside in Loch Ewe, news of the signal summoning me to London for an interview had been greeted with predictable ribaldry and a swift expectation that I therefore owed everybody several free drinks. Doug, our quiet American on loan from the U.S. Navy, spoke for many. He observed me in skeptical silence for several minutes. Then he took a long pull at his beer, blew out his mustache, and said, “Let me get this straight. You are going to work for Princess Di?” I had to admit it sounded improbable. Anyway, I had not even been selected yet. I did not honestly think I would be. “Might work for her, Doug. Only might. There’re probably several smooth Army buggers ahead of me in the line. I’m just there to make it look democratic.” The First Lieutenant, thinking of duty rosters, was more practical. “Whatever about that, you’ve wangled a week ashore. Lucky bastard!” Everyone agreed with him, so I bought more drinks. While these were being poured, my eye fell on the portraits hanging on the bulkhead. There were the regulation official photographs of the Queen and Prince Philip, and there, surprisingly, was a distinctly nonregulation picture of the Princess of Wales, cut from an old magazine and lovingly framed by an officer long since appointed elsewhere. The picture had been hung so that it lay between the formality of the official portraits and the misty eroticism of some art prints we had never quite got around to throwing away. The symbolic link did not require the services of one of the notoriously sex-obsessed naval psychologists for interpretation. As she looked down at us in our off-duty moments the Princess represented youth, femininity, and a glamour beyond our gray steel world. She embodied the innocent vulnerability we were in extremis employed to defend. Also, being royal, she commanded the tribal loyalty our profession had valued above all else for more than a thousand years, since the days of King Alfred. In addition, as a matter of simple fact, this tasty-looking bird was our future Queen. Later, when that day in Loch Ewe felt like a relic from another lifetime, I often marveled at the Princess’s effect on military people. That unabashed loyalty symbolized by Arethusa’s portrait was typical of reactions in messhalls and barracks worldwide. Sometimes the men gave the impression that they would have died for her not because it was their duty, but because they wanted to. She really seemed worth it.
Patrick D. Jephson (Shadows Of A Princess: An Intimate Account by Her Private Secretary)
The question of what you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life. Attachment to the past and fears concerning the future not only govern the way you select the things you own but also represent the criteria by which you make choices in every aspect of your life, including your relationships with people and your job. When
Marie Kondō (The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (Magic Cleaning #1))
Next, comparing children to arrows in the hands of a warrior, Psalm 127:4-5 talks about how parents are to handle their offspring. Wise and skillful parents are to know their children, understand them, and carefully point them in the right direction before shooting them into the world. And, as you may have learned in an archery class, shooting an arrow straight and hitting a target is a lot harder in real life than it looks like in the movies or on TV. Likewise, godly and skillful parenting isn’t easy. The last section of today’s selection teaches the importance of the Lord’s presence in the home. • The Lord blesses a home that follows His ways (Psalm 128:1-2). • A wife who knows the Lord will be a source of beauty and life in the home (Psalm 128:3a). • With the Lord’s blessing, children will flourish like olive trees, which generously provide food, oil, and shelter (Psalm 128:3b). Ask yourself, What can I do to make the Lord’s presence more recognizable in our home? Or a more pointed question, What kind of steward am I being in my home? God has entrusted to you some very special people—your children. You will be held accountable for how you take care of them. But you’re not in it alone. God offers to walk with you today and always. He provides you with guidelines like those we looked at today, plus His wisdom and His love, to help you do the job and do it well.9 Prayer: Father God, forgive me for the ways I shortchange my children. Help me know how to slow down the pace of life. Help me stay very aware that my children will be with me for just a short time, and that how I treat them will affect them and their children’s lives too. Continue to teach me how to be the parent You want me to be. Amen.   Action: Give your child/children the gift of time—today and every day.   Today’s Wisdom: The Christian home is the Master’s workshop where the processes of character-molding are silently, lovingly, faithfully, and successfully carried on. —RICHARD M. MILNES
Emilie Barnes (Walk with Me Today, Lord: Inspiring Devotions for Women)
Sometimes quick experiences pay big dividends. You need refreshment and renewal. Don't let yourself become so overwhelmed by your responsibilities that you forget how to nourish yourself with those things that give you a lift.. .like a cup of tea, perhaps? PRAYER Lord, help my spirit to be still and silent before You. I pray that I will carve out time to be with You and enjoy simple pleasures that fill me with happiness and hope and peace. It is good to take time for myself and to nurture my life. I want to give andgive to my family, my job, and to You...guide me toward balance. Lead me to the joy of quiet time and "me" time so I am refreshed and even more prepared to serve and to love. Amen. HEART ACTION Select a way to relax and restore yourself today. Choose an inspiring verse from Scripture and meditate on it while you relax. Your outlook will change dramatically.
Emilie Barnes (The Tea Lover's Devotional)