Short Catalyst Quotes

YOU YOU YOU your eyes, thick as a high school scrapbook crackling and yellow, curling at the edges a book of myths in which i do not appear.

The contemporary Matthew Paris wrote that, ‘foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the foulness of King John’. A bard sang that ‘no man may ever trust him, for his heart is soft and cowardly’. Yet this evil was catalyst for a greater good, Magna Carta.

Another example of how a metaphor can create new meaning for us came about by accident. An Iranian student, shortly after his arrival in Berkeley, took a seminar on metaphor from one of us. Among the wondrous things that he found in Berkeley was an expression that he heard over and over and understood as a beautifully sane metaphor. The expression was “the solution of my problems”—which he took to be a large volume of liquid, bubbling and smoking, containing all of your problems, either dissolved or in the form of precipitates, with catalysts constantly dissolving some problems (for the time being) and precipitating out others. He was terribly disillusioned to find that the residents of Berkeley had no such chemical metaphor in mind. And well he might be, for the chemical metaphor is both beautiful and insightful. It gives us a view of problems as things that never disappear utterly and that cannot be solved once and for all. All of your problems are always present, only they may be dissolved and in solution, or they may be in solid form. The best you can hope for is to find a catalyst that will make one problem dissolve without making another one precipitate out. [...] The CHEMICAL metaphor gives us a new view of human problems. It is appropriate to the experience of finding that problems which we once thought were “solved” turn up again and again. The CHEMICAL metaphor says that problems are not the kind of things that can be made to disappear forever. To treat them as things that can be “solved” once and for all is pointless. [...] To live by the CHEMICAL metaphor would mean that your problems have a different kind of reality for you.

Weakness drives us to set goals, to try harder, to put forth more effort, to dream and wish and hope, to reach out further and down deeper, to pray earnestly, to cry mightily, to understand and empathize with valid sincerity. In truth, weakness is a catalyst for greater strength.

I asked her where the posters in his room came from. She told me she had found some magazines in the forest at a spot where some soldiers had camped and had brought them home. This was shortly before the sexual murders started. I believe those pin-ups were the catalyst that triggered the fantasy that had been brewing inside Zikode since his childhood. His mother had unwittingly lit the tinder which had erupted into a blaze and cost many women their lives.

Petroleum is, of course, an extraordinarily convenient source of energy, as it can be transported easily, even in weight-sensitive aircraft. Chemists have long contributed to the refinement of the raw material squeezed and pumped from the ground. They have developed processes and catalysts that have taken the molecules provided by Nature and used them to cut the molecules into more volatile fragments and reshape them so that they burn more efficiently. But burning Nature’s underground bounty might by future generations be seen as the wanton destruction of an invaluable resource, akin to species extinction. It is also finite, and although economically viable new sources of petroleum are constantly, for the time being at least, being discovered, it is proving hazardous and increasingly expensive to extract it. We have to accept that although an empty Earth is decades off, one day it will arrive and needs to be anticipated.

FIND CORROBORATING EVIDENCE Are you dealing with a pebble or a boulder? How expensive, risky, time-consuming, or controversial is the change you’re asking people to make? How can you provide more proof? Like interventionists, by making sure people hear from multiple sources saying similar things? What similar but independent sources can you call on to help provide more evidence? How can you concentrate them close in time? Making sure people hear from multiple others in a short period? For larger-scale change, should you use a fire hose or a sprinkler? Concentrate scarce resources or spread them out?

In his 1961 letter to partners, Buffett laid out three broad categories of investments: generals, workouts, and controls. Generals were undervalued securities where Buffett had no say in corporate policies, nor a timetable for when the stock might reflect its intrinsic value. Buffett pointed out that the generals would behave like the Dow in the short term but outperform the index over the long term. Buffett expected to have five or six positions in this category that were 5% to 10% of total assets each, with smaller positions in another ten to fifteen. Later on, in his 1964 letter, Buffett would break generals into two categories: private owner basis and relatively undervalued. Private owner generals were generally cheap stocks with no immediate catalyst, while relatively undervalued securities were cheap compared to those of a similar quality. Relatively undervalued securities were generally larger companies where Buffett did not think a private owner valuation was relevant.173 Workouts were securities whose performance depended on corporate actions, such as mergers, liquidations, reorganizations, and spin-offs. Buffett expected to have ten to fifteen of these in the portfolio and thought this category would be a reasonably stable source of earnings for the fund, outperforming the Dow when the market had a bad year and underperforming in a strong year. He anticipated these investments would earn him 10% to 20%, excluding any leverage. Buffett would take on debt, up to 25% of the partnership’s net worth, to fund this category. While he didn’t disclose his allocation every year, he put around 15% of the partnership in workouts in 1966 but increased that to a quarter of the portfolio in 1967 and 1968, when he was having trouble finding bargains.174 The final category was controls, where the partnership took a significant position to change corporate policy. Buffett said these investments might take several years to play out and would, like workouts, have minimal correlation to the Dow’s gyrations. Buffett pointed out that generals could become controls if the stock price remained depressed.

Another example of how a metaphor can create new meaning for us came about by accident. An Iranian student, shortly after his arrival in Berkeley, took a seminar on metaphor from one of us. Among the wondrous things that he found in Berkeley was an expression that he heard over and over and understood as a beautifully sane metaphor. The expression was “the solution of my problems”—which he took to be a large volume of liquid, bubbling and smoking, containing all of your problems, either dissolved or in the form of precipitates, with catalysts constantly dissolving some problems (for the time being) and precipitating out others. He was terribly disillusioned to find that the residents of Berkeley had no such chemical metaphor in mind. And well he might be, for the chemical metaphor is both beautiful and insightful. It gives us a view of problems as things that never disappear utterly and that cannot be solved once and for all. All of your problems are always present, only they may be dissolved and in solution, or they may be in solid form. The best you can hope for is to find a catalyst that will make one problem dissolve without making another one precipitate out. And since you do not have complete control over what goes into the solution, you are constantly finding old and new problems precipitating out and present problems dissolving, partly because of your efforts and partly despite anything you do. The CHEMICAL metaphor gives us a new view of human problems. It is appropriate to the experience of finding that problems which we once thought were “solved” turn up again and again. The CHEMICAL metaphor says that problems are not the kind of things that can be made to disappear forever. To treat them as things that can be “solved” once and for all is pointless. To live by the CHEMICAL metaphor would be to accept it as a fact that no problem ever disappears forever. Rather than direct your energies toward solving your problems once and for all, you would direct your energies toward finding out what catalysts will dissolve your most pressing problems for the longest time without precipitating out worse ones. The reappearance of a problem is viewed as a natural occurrence rather than a failure on your part to find “the right way to solve it.” To live by the CHEMICAL metaphor would mean that your problems have a different kind of reality for you. A temporary solution would be an accomplishment rather than a failure. Problems would be part of the natural order of things rather than disorders to be “cured.” The way you would understand your everyday life and the way you would act in it would be different if you lived by the CHEMCAL metaphor. We see this as a clear case of the power of metaphor to create a reality rather than simply to give us a way of conceptualizing a preexisting reality.

There are times when the fear of missing out trumps the fear of losing. People start to chase, price momentum becomes its own catalyst and short-sellers are mercilessly squeezed, sending prices higher with unimaginable velocity.

Small float, a bull market and a good story are an explosive combination of catalysts. When thousands of institutions compete to own a small number of stocks, we could see gigantic moves in short periods of time.

All right, thought Kauffman, imagine that you had a primordial soup containing some molecule A that was busily catalyzing the formation of another molecule B. the first molecule probably wasn't a very effective catalyst, since it essentially formed at random. But then, it didn't need to be very effective. Even a feeble catalyst would have made B-type molecules form faster than they would have otherwise. Now, thought Kauffman, suppose that molecule B itself had a weak catalytic effect, so that it boosted the production of some molecule C. And suppose that C also acted as a catalyst, and so on. If the pot of primordial soup was big enough, he reasoned, and if there were enough different kinds of molecules in there to start with, then somewhere down the line you might very well have found a molecule Z that closed the loop and catalyzed the creation of A. But now you would have had more A around, which means that there would have been more catalyst available to enhance the formation of B, which then would have enhanced the formation of C, and on and on. In other words, Kauffman realized, if the conditions in your primordial soup were right, then you wouldn't have to wait for random reactions at all. The compounds in the soup could have formed a coherent, self-reinforcing web of reactions. Furthermore, each molecule in the web would have catalyzed the formation of other molecules in the web-so that all the molecules in the web would have steadily grown more and more abundant relative to molecules that were not part of the web. Taken as a whole, in short, the web would have catalyzed its own formation. It would have been an "autocatalytic set.

  MANTRAS: These are often referred to as sacred sounds because they are part of the practice of different religious traditions. Mantra is a Sanskrit word whose literal meaning is “that which protects and purifies the mind.” Here mind represents not only thought but also feelings. These sounds, each of which is a kind of germinating seed (in Sanskrit bija) that is implanted in the mind, are catalysts for ridding ourselves of traits that impede our spiritual unfoldment. Like toning and chanting they are sounded repetitively in a steady rhythm. They can be sounded either inwardly or aloud. Done inwardly within the mind, no tone is needed. Only the rhythm is necessary. This inner repetition is useful because it can be set in motion at any time and in any situation.   CHANTING: This is actually a form of singing characterized by the repetition of short phrases of tones, fairly narrow in range, often wedded to some kind of sacred text and done as part of a

Belief is the catalyst for the impossible

Worship changes the atmosphere around wherever it occurs and worship is a catalyst that brings revelation. Worship stirs up our spiritual gifts to minister. In short, the sum of all this is worship ushers us into God's Presence, where all kinds of things are possible for those who believe (Mark 9:23).

In a now-famous experiment, he and his colleagues compared three groups of expert violinists at the elite Music Academy in West Berlin. The researchers asked the professors to divide the students into three groups: the “best violinists,” who had the potential for careers as international soloists; the “good violinists”; and a third group training to be violin teachers rather than performers. Then they interviewed the musicians and asked them to keep detailed diaries of their time. They found a striking difference among the groups. All three groups spent the same amount of time—over fifty hours a week— participating in music-related activities. All three had similar classroom requirements making demands on their time. But the two best groups spent most of their music-related time practicing in solitude: 24.3 hours a week, or 3.5 hours a day, for the best group, compared with only 9.3 hours a week, or 1.3 hours a day, for the worst group. The best violinists rated “practice alone” as the most important of all their music-related activities. Elite musicians—even those who perform in groups—describe practice sessions with their chamber group as “leisure” compared with solo practice, where the real work gets done. Ericsson and his cohorts found similar effects of solitude when they studied other kinds of expert performers. “Serious study alone” is the strongest predictor of skill for tournament-rated chess players, for example; grandmasters typically spend a whopping five thousand hours—almost five times as many hours as intermediatelevel players—studying the game by themselves during their first ten years of learning to play. College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups. Even elite athletes in team sports often spend unusual amounts of time in solitary practice. What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful—they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them. Deliberate Practice is best conducted alone for several reasons. It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally. Only when you’re alone, Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class—you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” To see Deliberate Practice in action, we need look no further than the story of Stephen Wozniak. The Homebrew meeting was the catalyst that inspired him to build that first PC, but the knowledge base and work habits that made it possible came from another place entirely: Woz had deliberately practiced engineering ever since he was a little kid. (Ericsson says that it takes approximately ten thousand hours of Deliberate Practice to gain true expertise, so it helps to start young.)

One interesting thing I’ve noticed in my career is that breakthroughs often come after periods of struggle. Every runner, if she keeps it up for a while, will eventually hit a rough patch—a time when she might plateau, fall short of her goals, or give it all on race day only to have a result that doesn’t align with what she would have done in training. Those setbacks or challenges aren’t fun, but they’re often catalysts for the change and growth that ultimately propel her forward.

Individually, a single person cannot stop government tyranny, but an individual can be the start of a movement of defiance and disobedience, which progresses Tyranny through Revolution. We can evolve past the need for government, the need to be controlled, and an endless cycle of tyranny that has lasted thousands of years. But to get to this point, defiance in the face of tyranny is a must which would be the catalyst to end Tyranny and progress us to the beginning of Revolution.

THE SAVE THE CAT! SHORT SYNOPSIS TEMPLATE PARAGRAPH 1: Setup, flawed hero, and Catalyst (2–4 sentences) PARAGRAPH 2: Break Into 2 and/or Fun and Games (2–4 sentences) PARAGRAPH 3: Theme Stated, Midpoint hint and/or All Is Lost hint, ending in a cliffhanger (1 to 3 sentences)

Love will ALWAYS be a fleeting emotion. Short-lived. Finite. If PEOPLE will converse in a way… where they masked their DEMONS and THOUGHTS with what they BRAND — DECENCY. ©2019 JinQue RD POET | SPIRITUAL CATALYST | AUTHOR | I AM MOONDUST

In short, these are the rules of engagement, whether in a group or one-on-one: Identify what you’re feeling. Express what you’re feeling. Listen empathically to what others are feeling. Our group support sessions allow you to witness how to use your wounds as catalysts for transforming your pain—allowing your suffering to subside, your wounds to begin healing, and your heart to begin feeling safe enough to open a little wider.