Slow Improvement Quotes

When our emotional health is in a bad state, so is our level of self-esteem. We have to slow down and deal with what is troubling us, so that we can enjoy the simple joy of being happy and at peace with ourselves.

[...] He didn't want his wife to read historical romances because it might give her unrealistic expectations. [...] If I had been him, I would have been reading your books every time you laid them down to see how I could improve my skills and please you. Second warning of the night. I bought a couple." You bought a couple of what?" Historical romances. I'm three-quarters through the first one." He flashed her a slow grin. "All I can say is, I like the way your mind works." ~Jake Coulter and Molly Wells

It might seem to you that living in the woods on a riverbank would remove you from the modern world. But not if the river is navigable, as ours is. On pretty weekends in the summer, this riverbank is the very verge of the modern world. It is a seat in the front row, you might say. On those weekends, the river is disquieted from morning to night by people resting from their work. This resting involves traveling at great speed, first on the road and then on the river. The people are in an emergency to relax. They long for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. They play their radios loud enough to hear above the noise of their motors. They look neither left nor right. They don't slow down for - or maybe even see - an old man in a rowboat raising his lines... I watch and I wonder and I think. I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom.

Be slow of tongue and quick of eye.

The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one's decision making at work and at home.

Super-slow practice works like a magnifying glass: It lets us sense our errors more clearly, and thus fix them.

Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him.

Keep moving in the direction of your dreams. No matter how slows it may seems, stay focus, you will get to the finish line.

In a feast of fame and talks, Scandal flashing, raising tongue and brows. In a blast of bombing and power play, Fear and death dig more revenge. In a forgotten continent, Famine and drought devour lives. In an unfortunate eye of a rebelling weather, Crashing homes, leaving many in devastation and desperation. In a country shaking with violence, Innocent victims cry for justice and peace. In a home shaking with turmoil, Humble patient, hiding voice wants to be heard. In a tick of a second, A new breathe of life beats! To belong in this world. Constantly changing, decaying or improving? In a snap of innovation: Life goes big leap! Regression somewhere unseen, But felt in a slow, long run.

No,” I start, hesitantly. “Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. Ensure a strong national defense, prevent the spread of communism in Central America, work for a Middle East peace settlement, prevent U.S. military involvement overseas. We have to ensure that America is a respected world power. Now that’s not to belittle our domestic problems, which are equally important, if not more. Better and more affordable long-term care for the elderly, control and find a cure for the AIDS epidemic, clean up environmental damage from toxic waste and pollution, improve the quality of primary and secondary education, strengthen laws to crack down on crime and illegal drugs. We also have to ensure that college education is affordable for the middle class and protect Social Security for senior citizens plus conserve natural resources and wilderness areas and reduce the influence of political action committees.” The table stares at me uncomfortably, even Stash, but I’m on a roll.

Many bright people are really in the dark about vegetable life. Biology teachers face kids in classrooms who may not even believe in the metamorphosis of bud to flower to fruit and seed, but rather, some continuum of pansies becoming petunias becoming chrysanthemums; that's the only reality they witness as landscapers come to campuses and city parks and surreptitiously yank out one flower before it fades from its prime, replacing it with another. The same disconnection from natural processes may be at the heart of our country's shift away from believing in evolution. In the past, principles of natural selection and change over time made sense to kids who'd watched it all unfold. Whether or not they knew the terms, farm families understood the processes well enough to imitate them: culling, selecting, and improving their herds and crops. For modern kids who intuitively believe in the spontaneous generation of fruits and vegetables in the produce section, trying to get their minds around the slow speciation of the plant kingdom may be a stretch.

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

Friends can speed up your steps or slow down your pace. Leaders choose friends wisely; they are aware of the consequences.

It was beyond imagining that bad font influences judgments of truth and improves cognitive performance, or that an emotional response to the cognitive ease of a triad of words mediates impressions of coherence. Psychology has come a long way.

Your call to power is to slow down and reflect within. Gather the peace within yourself before you go out and act among the world. The feel good feeling that lasts is only achieved when you yourself know peace. Nothing is more powerful. This is why you have the highs and lows, the mood swings, the transcendent ecstasy followed by the crash. It is because you have yet to develop a foundation of peace for yourself that acts as an unmovable anchor in your life. Establish this peace in your life and you will experience a whole new reality of the world that flows with you in every way possible, rather than against you.

We could simply have used any of a number of reasonably priced handheld devices that train people to slow their breathing and synchronize it with their heart rate, resulting in a state of “cardiac coherence” like the pattern shown in the first illustration above.9 Today there are a variety of apps that can help improve HRV with the aid of a smartphone.10 In our clinic we have workstations where patients can train their HRV, and I urge all my patients who, for one reason or another, cannot practice yoga, martial arts, or qigong to train themselves at home. (See Resources for more information.)

It is the rare leader who actively tries to improve the lives of his most vulnerable people. The usual condition of monarchs is to take bribes, reign over a slow tumble into chaos, and deflect blame.” —ARNO TUUTTI, in The Unexpected Insouciance of Anarcho-Syndicalism

We live in a society of {more, faster, and extra.} So we feel the need to respond {more, faster, and extra.} Such a useless exercise. So much joy can be found in slowing down.

rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes. This proposition is supported by much evidence from research on pigeons, rats, humans, and other animals.

It keeps us centered and focused, it slows down the aging process, it lowers our blood pressure, it improves our stamina, our memory, our lung capacity, our general outlook on life itself.

The testers found that training attention not only improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also improved and the improvement was maintained for several months.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old - generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another.

I’ve found that refactoring helps me write fast software. It slows the software in the short term while I’m refactoring, but it makes the software easier to tune during optimization. I end up well ahead.

Still another factor is compatibility with vested interests. This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60 years.

Although listening is often more fun, reading improves comprehension and recall. Whereas listening promotes intuitive thinking, reading activates more analytical processing. It’s true in English and Chinese—people display better logical reasoning when the same trivia questions, riddles, and puzzles are written rather than spoken. With print, you naturally slow down at the start of a paragraph to process the core idea and use paragraph breaks and headers to chunk information.

So this is my aim for watercooler conversations: improve the ability to identify and understand errors of judgment and choice, in others and eventually in ourselves, by providing a richer and more precise language to discuss them. In at least some cases, an accurate diagnosis may suggest an intervention to limit the damage that bad judgments and choices often cause.

The most powerful way of being able to listen to your own intuition is by being silent. Find a quiet space, slow down and calm your mind. Your goal is to eliminate all that noise going through your head – all those thoughts that appear from nowhere.

You want to stay alive in a zombie swarm? You go alone or in a small group, where everyone is of similar physical condition and weapons training. You never stop, you never hesitate, and you never show any mercy for the people that would slow you down. That is what the military says we should do, and if I ever meet anybody who listens to that particular set of commands, I may shoot them myself just to improve the gene pool. When you can help people stay alive, you help them. We're all we've got.

This should not come as a surprise: overly optimistic forecasts of the outcome of projects are found everywhere. Amos and I coined the term planning fallacy to describe plans and forecasts that are unrealistically close to best-case scenarios could be improved by consulting the statistics of similar cases Examples of the planning fallacy abound in the experiences of individuals, governments, and businesses.

Want to know one of the most rewarding and holistic ways to heal & make significant life choices that will fully align? Learning to slow down, breath, think, journal, talk, and process before reacting. Knowing you have worked through the issue, be it mentally, emotionally or spiritually, before taking action lets you write the script of your life how you want. Which in turn gives you the best chance of achieving your dreams

He has analyzed what happens to a person’s focus if they engage in deliberately slow practices, like yoga, or tai chi, or meditation, as discovered in a broad range of scientific studies, and he has shown they improve your ability to pay attention by a significant amount. I asked him why. He said that “we have to shrink the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth.” If you go too fast, you overload your abilities, and they degrade. But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature—and you build that into your daily life—you begin to train your attention and focus. “That’s why those disciplines make you smarter. It’s not about humming or wearing orange robes.” Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.

In any case, I hope that it will be a good thing when we understand how our minds are built, and how they support the modes of thought that we like to call emotions. Then we'll be better able to decide what we like about them, and what we don't—and bit by bit we'll rebuild ourselves. I don't think that most people will bother with this, because they like themselves just as they are. Perhaps they are not selfish enough, or imaginative, or ambitious. Myself, I don't much like how people are now. We're too shallow, slow, and ignorant. I hope that our future will lead us to ideas that we can use to improve ourselves.

Caloric restriction is the only valid, scientifically proven dietary intervention that has been shown to slow the aging process and improve health. The reason we hear so little about this approach is because no one stands to make a profit on all of us eating less food and more apples, cranberries, and prunes.

Subplot is not one of the twenty-two steps because it’s not usually present and because it is really a plot of its own with its own structure. But it’s a great technique. It improves the character, theme, and texture of your story. On the other hand, it slows the desire line—the narrative drive. So you have to decide what is most important to you.

training attention not only improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also improved and the improvement was maintained for several months.

rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes.

A long walk is a slow remembering of how profound and wonderful life is; God is everywhere and in everything. Wherever I look I am looking at God.

I was telling them about an important principle of skill training: rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes.

important principle of skill training: rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes.

Treat yourself well. Care for yourself. Show yourself slow and deliberate gentle attention. Demonstrate that you're worth this kind of attention, because you are.

Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had…if you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you’re probably being slow." — Jeff Bezos

Amos and I coined the term planning fallacy to describe plans and forecasts that are unrealistically close to best-case scenarios could be improved by consulting the statistics of similar cases

A team of researchers at the University of Oregon explored the link between cognitive control and intelligence in several ways, including an attempt to raise intelligence by improving the control of attention.

The sophisticated allocation of attention has been honed by a long evolutionary history. Orienting and responding quickly to the gravest threats or most promising opportunities improved the chance of survival,

It was beyond imagining that bad font influences judgments of truth and improves cognitive performance, or that an emotional response to the cognitive ease of a triad of words mediates impressions of coherence.

I want you to stop working out.  Your fitness levels will continue to improve without effort, and that is one way to slow your fat loss.  I also want you to eat as much high-fat, high-calorie food as you can, like these.

The feelings associated with different activities suggest that another way to improve experience is to switch time from passive leisure, such as TV watching, to more active forms of leisure, including socializing and exercise.

I tend to view the occasional failures of algorithms as opportunities to improve them. On the other hand, I find more pleasure than Klein does in the come-uppance of arrogant experts who claim intuitive powers in zero-validity situations.

The testers found that training attention not only improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also improved and the improvement was maintained for several months. Other research by the same group identified specific genes that are involved in the control of attention, showed that parenting techniques also affected this ability, and demonstrated a close connection between the children’s ability to control their attention and their ability to control their emotions.

A correlation of .30 implies that you would find the stronger CEO leading the stronger firm in about 60% of the pairs—an improvement of a mere 10 percentage points over random guessing, hardly grist for the hero worship of CEOs we so often witness.

Users are a double-edged sword. They can help you improve your language, but they can also deter you from improving. So choose your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. Having users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it.

an organization is a factory that manufactures judgments and decisions. Every factory must have ways to ensure the quality of its products in the initial design, in fabrication, and in final inspections. The corresponding stages in the production of decisions are the framing of the problem that is to be solved, the collection of relevant information leading to a decision, and reflection and review. An organization that seeks to improve its decision product should routinely look for efficiency improvements at each of these stages. The

A recent study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience demonstrated that while most forms of exercise slow down age-related decline, dancing has even more profound benefits. Considered a psychosocial intervention, dancing combines the mood-elevating effects of increased social interaction with improvements in brain function, cardiac fitness, and overall quality of life. Mastering new rhythms, steps, and formations, in combination with increased social engagement, provides a boost to brain activity that creates additional cognitive benefits.

The village lay in the hollow, and climbed, with very prosaic houses, the other side. Village architecture does not flourish in Scotland. The blue slates and the grey stone are sworn foes to the picturesque; and though I do not, for my own part, dislike the interior of an old-fashioned pewed and galleried church, with its little family settlements on all sides, the square box outside, with its bit of a spire like a handle to lift it by, is not an improvement to the landscape. Still, a cluster of houses on differing elevations - with scraps of garden coming in between, a hedgerow with clothes laid out to dry, the opening of a street with its rural sociability, the women at their doors, the slow waggon lumbering along - gives a centre to the landscape. It was cheerful to look at, and convenient in a hundred ways. ("The Open Door")

Are you falling asleep before midnight?" Cassie leaned over the edge of the couch to look at Jack. He was stretched out on the floor, his head resting against a pillow near the center of the couch, his eyes closed. She was now wide awake and headache free. He wasn't in so good a shape. "The new year is eighteen minutes away." "Come kiss me awake in seventeen minutes." She blinked at that lazy suggestion, gave a quick grin, and dropped Benji on his chest. He opened one eye to look up at her as he settled his hand lightly on the kitten. "That's a no?" She smiled. She was looking forward to dating him, but she was smart enough to know he'd value more what he had to work at. He sighed. "That was a no. How much longer am I going to be on the fence with you?" "Is that a rhetorical question or do you want an answer?" If this was the right relationship God had for her future, time taken now would improve it, not hurt it. She was ready to admit she was tired of being alone. He scratched Benji under the chin and the kitten curled up on his chest and batted a paw at his hand. "Rhetorical. I'd hate to get my hopes up." She leaned her chin against her hand, looking down at him. "I like you, Jack." "You just figured that out?" "I'll like you more when you catch my mouse." "The only way we are going to catch T.J. is to turn this place into a cheese factory and help her get so fat and slow that she can no longer run and hide." Or you could move your left hand about three inches to the right right and catch her." Jack opened one eye and glanced toward his left. The white mouse was sitting motionless beside the plate he had set down earlier. "Let her have the cheeseburger. You put mustard on it." "You're horrible." He smiled. "I'm serious." "So am I." Jack leaned over, caught Cassie's foot, and tumbled her to the floor. "Oops." "That wasn't fair. You scared my mouse." Jack set the kitten on the floor. "Benji, go get her mouse." The kitten took off after it. "You're teaching her to be a mouser." "Working on it. Come here. You owe me a kiss for the new year." "Do I?" She reached over to the bowl of chocolates on the table and unwrapped a kiss. She popped the chocolate kiss into his mouth. "I called your bluff." He smiled and rubbed his hand across her forearm braced against his chest. "That will last me until next year." She glanced at the muted television. "That's two minutes away." "Two minutes to put this year behind us." He slid one arm behind his head, adjusting the pillow. She patted his chest with her hand. "That shouldn't take long." She felt him laugh. "It ended up being a very good year," she offered. "Next year will be even better." "Really? Promise?" "Absolutely." He reached behind her ear and a gold coin reappeared. "What do you think? Heads you say yes when I ask you out, tails you say no?" She grinned at the idea. "Are you cheating again?" She took the coin. "This one isn't edible," she realized, disappointed. And then she turned it over. "A real two-headed coin?" "A rare find." He smiled. "Like you." "That sounds like a bit of honey." "I'm good at being mushy." "Oh, really?" He glanced over her shoulder. "Turn up the TV. There's the countdown." She grabbed for the remote and hit the wrong button. The TV came on full volume just as the fireworks went off. Benji went racing past them spooked by the noise to dive under the collar of the jacket Jack had tossed on the floor. The white mouse scurried to run into the jacket sleeve. "Tell me I didn't see what I think I just did." "I won't tell you," Jack agreed, amused. He watched the jacket move and raised an eyebrow. "Am I supposed to rescue the kitten or the mouse?

This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. In the course of reporting it, I spoke to engineers and genetic engineers, biologists and microbiologists, atmospheric scientists and atmospheric entrepreneurs. Without exception, they were enthusiastic about their work. But, as a rule, this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt. The electric fish barriers, the concrete crevasse, the fake cavern, the synthetic clouds- these were presented to me less in a spirit of techno-optimism than what might be called techno-fatalism. They weren't improvements on the originals; they were the best that anyone could come up with, given the circumstances... It's in this context that interventions like assisted evolution and gene drives and digging millions of trenches to bury billions of trees have to be assessed. Geoengineering may be 'entirely crazy and quite disconcerting', but if it could slow the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or take some of 'the pain and suffering away', or help prevent no-longer-fully-natural ecosystems from collapsing, doesn't it have to be considered?

Your encounters will be more successful when you slow down, pay attention, and become more mindfully aware of the world around you. Heightening your awareness in your social, situational, contextual, orientational, and cultural scenarios will improve your agility as you adapt to new social settings.

Americans, provides a surprisingly definite answer to the most frequently asked question in well-being research: Can money buy happiness? The conclusion is that being poor makes one miserable, and that being rich may enhance one’s life satisfaction, but does not (on average) improve experienced well-being.

Truth is powerful, and, if not instantly, at least by slow degrees, may make good her possession. Gleams of good sense may penetrate through the thickest clouds of error … and, as the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking; open to him new mines of science and new incentives to virtue; and perhaps, by a blended and compound effect, produce in him an improvement which was out of the limits of his lessons, and raise him to heights the preceptor never knew.

We are committed to involving as many people as possible, as young as possible, as soon as possible. Sometimes too young and too soon! But we intentionally err on the side of too fast rather than too slow. We don’t wait until people feel “prepared” or “fully equipped.” Seriously, when is anyone ever completely prepared for ministry? Ministry makes people’s faith bigger. If you want to increase someone’s confidence in God, put him in a ministry position before he feels fully equipped. The messages your environments communicate have the potential to trump your primary message. If you don’t see a mess, if you aren’t bothered by clutter, you need to make sure there is someone around you who does see it and is bothered by it. An uncomfortable or distracting setting can derail ministry before it begins. The sermon begins in the parking lot. Assign responsibility, not tasks. At the end of the day, it’s application that makes all the difference. Truth isn’t helpful if no one understands or remembers it. If you want a church full of biblically educated believers, just teach what the Bible says. If you want to make a difference in your community and possibly the world, give people handles, next steps, and specific applications. Challenge them to do something. As we’ve all seen, it’s not safe to assume that people automatically know what to do with what they’ve been taught. They need specific direction. This is hard. This requires an extra step in preparation. But this is how you grow people. Your current template is perfectly designed to produce the results you are currently getting. We must remove every possible obstacle from the path of the disinterested, suspicious, here-against-my-will, would-rather-be-somewhere-else, unchurched guests. The parking lot, hallways, auditorium, and stage must be obstacle-free zones. As a preacher, it’s my responsibility to offend people with the gospel. That’s one reason we work so hard not to offend them in the parking lot, the hallway, at check-in, or in the early portions of our service. We want people to come back the following week for another round of offending! Present the gospel in uncompromising terms, preach hard against sin, and tackle the most emotionally charged topics in culture, while providing an environment where unchurched people feel comfortable. The approach a church chooses trumps its purpose every time. Nothing says hypocrite faster than Christians expecting non-Christians to behave like Christians when half the Christians don’t act like it half the time. When you give non-Christians an out, they respond by leaning in. Especially if you invite them rather than expect them. There’s a big difference between being expected to do something and being invited to try something. There is an inexorable link between an organization’s vision and its appetite for improvement. Vision exposes what has yet to be accomplished. In this way, vision has the power to create a healthy sense of organizational discontent. A leader who continually keeps the vision out in front of his or her staff creates a thirst for improvement. Vision-centric churches expect change. Change is a means to an end. Change is critical to making what could and should be a reality. Write your vision in ink; everything else should be penciled in. Plans change. Vision remains the same. It is natural to assume that what worked in the past will always work. But, of course, that way of thinking is lethal. And the longer it goes unchallenged, the more difficult it is to identify and eradicate. Every innovation has an expiration date. The primary reason churches cling to outdated models and programs is that they lack leadership.

But where should he begin? - Well, then, the trouble with the English was their: Their: In a word, Gibreel solemnly pronounced, their weather. Gibreel Farishta floating on his cloud formed the opinion that the moral fuzziness of the English was meteorologically induced. 'When the day is not warmer than the night,' he reasoned, 'when the light is not brighter than the dark, when the land is not drier than the sea, then clearly a people will lose the power to make distinctions, and commence to see everything - from political parties to sexual partners to religious beliefs - as much-the-same, nothing-to-choose, give-or-take. What folly! For truth is extreme, it is so and not thus, it is him and not her; a partisan matter, not a spectator sport. It is, in brief, heated. City,' he cried, and his voice rolled over the metropolis like thunder, 'I am going to tropicalize you.' Gibreel enumerated the benefits of the proposed metamorphosis of London into a tropical city: increased moral definition, institution of a national siesta, development of vivid and expansive patterns of behaviour among the populace, higher-quality popular music, new birds in the trees (macaws, peacocks, cockatoos), new trees under the birds (coco-palms, tamarind, banyans with hanging beards). Improved street-life, outrageously coloured flowers (magenta, vermilion, neon-green), spider-monkeys in the oaks. A new mass market for domestic air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, anti-mosquito coils and sprays. A coir and copra industry. Increased appeal of London as a centre for conferences, etc.: better cricketeers; higher emphasis on ball-control among professional footballers, the traditional and soulless English commitment to 'high workrate' having been rendered obsolete by the heat. Religious fervour, political ferment, renewal of interest in the intellegentsia. No more British reserve; hot-water bottles to be banished forever, replaced in the foetid nights by the making of slow and odorous love. Emergence of new social values: friends to commence dropping in on one another without making appointments, closure of old-folks' homes, emphasis on the extended family. Spicier foods; the use of water as well as paper in English toilets; the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of the monsoon. Disadvantages: cholera, typhoid, legionnaires' disease, cockroaches, dust, noise, a culture of excess. Standing upon the horizon, spreading his arms to fill the sky, Gibreel cried: 'Let it be.

After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and animals--and how few they are--gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our ideals are vague and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited; because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better organized, and still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies.

is also the case that depressed children who spend some time standing on their head or hug a cat for twenty minutes a day will also show improvement. Most readers of such headlines will automatically infer that the energy drink or the cat hugging caused an improvement, but this conclusion is completely unjustified. Depressed

In recent years, there has been an explosion of research into meditation, which has been shown to: • Reduce blood pressure • Boost recovery after the release of the stress hormone cortisol • Improve immune system functioning and response • Slow age-related atrophy of the brain • Mitigate the symptoms of depression and anxiety

Dr. Norman Shealy found while researching magnesium oil that magnesium applied to the skin on a regular basis naturally enhances the level of a vitally important hormone, DHEA. DHEA is normally produced in the adrenal glands, but production slows down as we age. Apparently as magnesium is absorbed through the skin and the underlying fatty tissues of the body it sets off many chain reactions, one of which ends in the production of DHEA. Increasing DHEA levels by taking supplements of the hormone is recommended by some antiaging specialists, but others caution about side effects. To increase it naturally by improving your magnesium balance may be a safe way to turn back the clock.

The cheapest orbit available is LEO (Low Earth Orbit). People often think that "orbit" means there's no gravity. This is incorrect. In fact, the International Space Station (which is in LEO right now) is usually around 250 miles high and experiences about 90% of the gravity you experience on Earth. So why do the astronauts float around like there's no gravity? Although they are pulled toward the Earth all the time, they always "miss" it. Think of it like this: Imagine you fire a cannonball from the top of a tower. If you fire it softly, the ball will go a little ways then fall to the ground. If you fire it incredibly fast, it will just fly off into space. But between falling right down and going off into space, there are a lot of intermediate regimes. For a given height, there is some speed that is slow enough that it can't leave Earth, but fast enough that you'll never plop to the ground. If you were ridong that cannonball, you'd be falling, because gravity is tugging you down. At the same time, because you're going so fast, you'd be able to see Earth's curve. As you move from a point on the globe in a straight line, Earth curves down and away from you, increasing your distance from the surface. At this particular speed, you have two balanced effects: Gravity wants you down low, but your speed keeps you up high. So you just keep going around and around. You "orbit.

The A.W.E. Method A.W.E stands for Attention, Wait, Exhale and Expand. Attention means Focusing your full and undivided attention on something you value, appreciate or find amazing. Wait means slowing down or pausing. Exhale and Expand amplifies whatever sensations you are experiencing. A.W.E. is a quick and easy intervention that can cultivate awe in the ordinary, at any time and in any place. Cultivating awe for less than a minute a day reduces symptoms of depression and anxiety, improves social connection, decreases loneliness, reduces burnout, lowers stress, increases wellbeing and reduces chronic pain. The capacity to help heal the mind and body is only one of awe's superpowers.

But scientists call this heightened performance during the acquisition phase of a skill “momentary strength” and distinguish it from “underlying habit strength.” The very techniques that build habit strength, like spacing, interleaving, and variation, slow visible acquisition and fail to deliver the improvement during practice that helps to motivate and reinforce our efforts.12

Keep looking at the finishing line in your way to achieve your dreams. Each step you take will carry you closer to your goal. Sometimes you will need to run, sometimes you will slow down to a walk, and sometimes you might need to take a break. Evaluate your effort, improve, and keep going; the only thing you will do wrong is to quit. Quitting will never take you anywhere but farther from your ambition and from all the effort you made so far.

But were this world ever so perfect a production, it must still remain uncertain whether all the excellences of the work can justly be ascribed to the workman. If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter who framed so complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And what surprise must we feel when we find him a stupid mechanic who imitated others, and copied an art which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving? Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labor lost; many fruitless trials made; and a slow but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making. In such subjects, who can determine where the truth, nay, who can conjecture where the probability lies, amidst a great number of hypotheses which may be proposed, and a still greater which may be imagined?

Europe—at least when it came to gunnery—had more in common with southern than with northern China. It was full of forts, had plenty of broken landscapes that constrained armies’ movements, and, because it was so far from the steppes (which made cavalry expensive), its armies always included a lot of slow-moving infantry. In this environment, tinkering with guns to squeeze out small improvements made a great deal of sense, and by 1600 so many improvements had accumulated that European armies were becoming the best on earth.

We are slow to realise that our future will be shared with billions of people whose urges for improvement are more urgent, more demanding, more ethical than ours. Mostly, we want them to develop, but relatively slowly and not at our expense. But that is not an option in the future we all deserve. On a planetary scale, not all will survive, and the rich are the least able to cope with change, so most of us (include me writing this and you reading) are going to need to swallow a lot of humble pie and remind the rump of humanity why we are worth keeping.

Whatever else it produces, an organization is a factory that manufactures judgments and decisions. Every factory must have ways to ensure the quality of its products in the initial design, in fabrication, and in final inspections. The corresponding stages in the production of decisions are the framing of the problem that is to be solved, the collection of relevant information leading to a decision, and reflection and review. An organization that seeks to improve its decision product should routinely look for efficiency improvements at each of these stages. The

The week of slow is the running equivalent of a juice fast. Some people use short-term juice fasts to hit the reset button on their diet. The fast is not an end in itself. The goal is to make permanent changes to their diet, replacing bad habits with good ones. But instead of just making these changes from one day to the next, they first take a few days to break their attachments to the old habits by consuming nothing but healthy fruit and vegetable juices. Then, once they are no longer craving potato chips or whatever else, they return to a normal but improved diet.

A crucial capability of System 2 is the adoption of “task sets”: it can program memory to obey an instruction that overrides habitual responses. Consider the following: Count all occurrences of the letter f in this page. This is not a task you have ever performed before and it will not come naturally to you, but your System 2 can take it on. It will be effortful to set yourself up for this exercise, and effortful to carry it out, though you will surely improve with practice. Psychologists speak of “executive control” to describe the adoption and termination of task sets,

When I was in high school I had to write an essay duplicating the manner and subject of Bacon’s ‘On Reading,’ and I remember including all the comfortable clichés. I said nothing about how books made me masturbate. I said nothing about nightmares, about daydreaming, about aching, cock-stiffening loneliness. I said something about wonder and curiosity, the improvement of character, quickening of sensibility, enlargement of mind, but nothing about the disappearance of the self in a terrible quake of earth. I did not say that reading drove a knife into the body. I did not say that as the man at breakfast calmly spoons his oatmeal into his mouth while words pass woundlessly through his eyes, he divides more noisily than chewing, becomes a gulf, a Red Sea none shall pass over, dry-shod across. There is no miracle more menacing than that one. I did not write about the slow return from a story like the ebb of a fever, the unique quality it conferred which set you apart from others as though touched by the gods. I did not write about the despair of not willing to be oneself or the contrary despair of total entelechy. I did not write about reading as a refuge, a toy drug, a pitiless judgement.

As a society we certainly equate speed with smarts. Think fast. Are you quick-witted? A quick study? A whiz kid? Even Merriam-Webster bluntly informs us that slowness is “the quality of lacking intelligence or quickness of mind.” But we also recognize something counter-intuitive about accepting full-stop that people who react faster are smarter. That’s why, even though athletic training improves reaction time, we wouldn’t scout for the next Einstein at a basketball game. Intelligence probably has a lot to do with making fast connections, but it surely has just as much to do with making the right connections.

Population growth accounts for much of the impact as cities have gobbled up farmland and forest land, as roads and highways have paved over more land, and as Third World farmers have cleared forest lands to eke out a living. However, during the late twentieth century it became apparent that rates of population growth were slowing throughout the world as urbanization, increasing education, and improved services simultaneously reduced the pressure to have large families and raised their cost. At present, it seems likely that global populations will level out at 9 to 10 billion toward the end of the twenty-first century.

The hotbed of innovation was initially southern China, because the wars against the Mongol overlords of the mid-fourteenth-century Yangzi Valley would be won by storming fortresses and sinking big ships fighting in the constrained space of a river. For both these jobs, early guns were excellent. But when the fighting ended in 1368, the main theater of war shifted to the steppes in northern China. Here there were few forts to bombard, and slow-firing guns were useless against fast-moving cavalry. Chinese generals, being rational men, spent their money on extra horsemen and a great wall rather than incremental improvements in firearms.

In a way, the human race needs to improve its mental and physical qualities if it is to deal with the increasingly complex world around it and meet new challenges like space travel. And it also needs to increase its complexity if biological systems are to keep ahead of electronic ones. At the moment computers have an advantage of speed, but they show no sign of intelligence. This is not surprising because our present computers are less complex than the brain of an earthworm, a species not noted for its intellectual powers. But computers roughly obey a version of Moore’s Law, which says that their speed and complexity double every eighteen months. It is one of these exponential growths that clearly cannot continue indefinitely, and indeed it has already begun to slow. However, the rapid pace of improvement will probably continue until computers have a similar complexity to the human brain. Some people say that computers can never show true intelligence, whatever that may be. But it seems to me that if very complicated chemical molecules can operate in humans to make them intelligent, then equally complicated electronic circuits can also make computers act in an intelligent way. And if they are intelligent they can presumably design computers that have even greater complexity and intelligence.

Animals, including people, fight harder to prevent losses than to achieve gains. In the world of territorial animals, this principle explains the success of defenders. A biologist observed that “when a territory holder is challenged by a rival, the owner almost always wins the contest—usually within a matter of seconds.” In human affairs, the same simple rule explains much of what happens when institutions attempt to reform themselves, in “reorganizations” and “restructuring” of companies, and in efforts to rationalize a bureaucracy, simplify the tax code, or reduce medical costs. As initially conceived, plans for reform almost always produce many winners and some losers while achieving an overall improvement. If the affected parties have any political influence, however, potential losers will be more active and determined than potential winners; the outcome will be biased in their favor and inevitably more expensive and less effective than initially planned. Reforms commonly include grandfather clauses that protect current stake-holders—for example, when the existing workforce is reduced by attrition rather than by dismissals, or when cuts in salaries and benefits apply only to future workers. Loss aversion is a powerful conservative force that favors minimal changes from the status quo in the lives of both institutions and individuals.

You may note the irony. In the context of the cab problem, the neglect of base-rate information is a cognitive flaw, a failure of Bayesian reasoning, and the reliance on causal base rates is desirable. Stereotyping the Green drivers improves the accuracy of judgment. In other contexts, however, such as hiring or profiling, there is a strong social norm against stereotyping, which is also embedded in the law. This is as it should be. In sensitive social contexts, we do not want to draw possibly erroneous conclusions about the individual from the statistics of the group. We consider it morally desirable for base rates to be treated as statistical facts about the group rather than as presumptive facts about individuals. In other words, we reject causal base rates.

In order to find and eliminate a Constraint, Goldratt proposes the “Five Focusing Steps,” a method you can use to improve the Throughput of any System: 1. Identification: examining the system to find the limiting factor. If your automotive assembly line is constantly waiting on engines in order to proceed, engines are your Constraint. 2. Exploitation: ensuring that the resources related to the Constraint aren’t wasted. If the employees responsible for making engines are also building windshields, or stop building engines during lunchtime, exploiting the Constraint would be having the engine employees spend 100 percent of their available time and energy producing engines, and having them work in shifts so breaks can be taken without slowing down production. 3. Subordination: redesigning the entire system to support the Constraint. Let’s assume you’ve done everything you can to get the most out of the engine production system, but you’re still behind. Subordination would be rearranging the factory so everything needed to build the engine is close at hand, instead of requiring certain materials to come from the other end of the factory. Other subsystems may have to move or lose resources, but that’s not a huge deal, since they’re not the Constraint. 4. Elevation: permanently increasing the capacity of the Constraint. In the case of the factory, elevation would be buying another engine-making machine and hiring more workers to operate it. Elevation is very effective, but it’s expensive—you don’t want to spend millions on more equipment if you don’t have to. That’s why Exploitation and Subordination come first: you can often alleviate a Constraint quickly, without resorting to spending more money. 5. Reevaluation: after making a change, reevaluating the system to see where the Constraint is located. Inertia is your enemy: don’t assume engines will always be the Constraint: once you make a few Changes, the limiting factor might become windshields. In that case, it doesn’t make sense to continue focusing on increasing engine production—the system won’t improve until windshields become the focus of improvement. The “Five Focusing Steps” are very similar to Iteration Velocity—the more quickly you move through this process and the more cycles you complete, the more your system’s Throughput will improve.

As I said, if I don’t do anything I tend to put on the pounds. My wife’s the opposite, since she can eat as much as she likes (she doesn’t eat a lot of them, but can never turn down anything sweet), never exercise, and still not put on any weight. She has no extra fat at all. Life just isn’t fair, is how it used to strike me. Some people can work their butts off and never get what they’re aiming for, while others can get it without any effort at all. But when I think about it, having the kind of body that easily puts on weight was perhaps a blessing in disguise. In other words, if I don’t want to gain weight I have to work out hard every day, watch what I eat, and cut down on indulgences. Life can be tough, but as long as you don’t stint on the effort, your metabolism will greatly improve with these habits, and you’ll end up much healthier, not to mention stronger. To a certain extent, you can even slow down the effects of aging. But people who naturally keep the weight off no matter what don’t need to exercise or watch their diet in order to stay trim. There can’t be many of them who would go out of their way to take these troublesome measures when they don’t need to. Which is why, in many cases, their physical strength deteriorates as they age. If you don’t exercise, your muscles will naturally weaken, as will your bones. Some of my readers may be the kind of people who easily gain weight, but the only way to understand what’s really fair is to take a long-range view of things. For the reasons I give above, I think this physical nuisance should be viewed in a positive way, as a blessing. We should consider ourselves lucky that the red light is so clearly visible.

A crucial capability of System 2 is the adoption of “task sets”: it can program memory to obey an instruction that overrides habitual responses. Consider the following: Count all occurrences of the letter f in this page. This is not a task you have ever performed before and it will not come naturally to you, but your System 2 can take it on. It will be effortful to set yourself up for this exercise, and effortful to carry it out, though you will surely improve with practice. Psychologists speak of “executive control” to describe the adoption and termination of task sets, and neuroscientists have identified the main regions of the brain that serve the executive function. One of these regions is involved whenever a conflict must be resolved. Another is the prefrontal area of the brain, a region that is substantially more developed in humans than in other primates, and is involved in operations that we associate with intelligence.

In a discussion of flight training, experienced instructors noted that praise for an exceptionally smooth landing is typically followed by a poorer landing on the next try, while harsh criticism after a rough landing is usually followed by an improvement on the next try. The instructors concluded that verbal rewards are detrimental to learning, while verbal punishments are beneficial, contrary to accepted psychological doctrine. This conclusion is unwarranted because of the presence of regression toward the mean. As in other cases of repeated examination, an improvement will usually follow a poor performance and a deterioration will usually follow an outstanding performance, even if the instructor does not respond to the trainee’s achievement on the first attempt. Because the instructors had praised their trainees after good landings and admonished them after poor ones, they reached the erroneous and potentially harmful conclusion that punishment is more effective than reward.

The combination of loss aversion and narrow framing is a costly curse. Individual investors can avoid that curse, achieving the emotional benefits of broad framing while also saving time and agony, by reducing the frequency with which they check how well their investments are doing. Closely following daily fluctuations is a losing proposition, because the pain of the frequent small losses exceeds the pleasure of the equally frequent small gains. Once a quarter is enough, and may be more than enough for individual investors. In addition to improving the emotional quality of life, the deliberate avoidance of exposure to short-term outcomes improves the quality of both decisions and outcomes. The typical short-term reaction to bad news is increased loss aversion. Investors who get aggregated feedback receive such news much less often and are likely to be less risk averse and to end up richer. You are also less prone to useless churning of your portfolio if you don’t know how every stock in it is doing every day (or every week or even every month). A commitment not to change one’s position for several periods (the equivalent of “locking in” an investment) improves financial performance.

It's always useful to make lists, ranked by either occurence or severity, single out each, one by one, trace the pathways of each fallen 'domino', and make active efforts to make sure each preceding domino stay upright. It is unfair to smash the last domino, just because we can't clearly see how they fell to begin with. With regards to crime, those who have enough food, acceptable shelter, and ability to acquire basic status and recognition within immediate groups - may be less prone to violence and crime. Though there are other reasons for crime to occur, it is often related [in one way or another] to physical, mental, social or economical wellbeing. Crime is desperation, actions of distress. Violent criminals may not be angels, but reality is, their state of mind very likely gradually became less and less empathic due to their subjective experience of society's inability to recognize the real need for greater stability within certain communities. It may be easier said than done, but small efforts to raise the poverty line, projects and development - showing that society truly cares, may be the only viable solution. Employing good rolemodels [in the right places] may be especially effective. Effort, great, small.

This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60 years. While the story of the QWERTY

Man must develop his tendency towards the good. Providence has not placed goodness ready formed in him, but merely as a tendency and without the distinction of moral law. Man’s duty is to improve himself; to cultivate his mind; and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself. Upon reflection we shall find this very difficult. Hence the greatest and most difficult problem to which man can devote himself is the problem of education. For insight depends on education, and education in its turn depends on insight. It follows therefore that education can only advance by slow degrees, and a true conception of the method of education can only arise when one generation transmits to the next its stores of experience and knowledge, each generation adding something of its own before transmitting them to the following. What vast culture and experience does not this conception presuppose? It could only be arrived at at a late stage, and we ourselves have not fully realised this conception. The question arises, Should we in the education of the individual imitate the course followed by the education of the human race through its successive generations? There are two human inventions which may be considered more difficult than any others—the art of government, and the art of education; and people still contend as to their very meaning.

The satiation level beyond which experienced well-being no longer increases was a household income of about $75,000 in high-cost areas (it could be less in areas where the cost of living is lower). The average increase of experienced well-being associated with incomes beyond that level was precisely zero. This is surprising because higher income undoubtedly permits the purchase of many pleasures, including vacations in interesting places and opera tickets, as well as an improved living environment. Why do these added pleasures not show up in reports of emotional experience? A plausible interpretation is that higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life. There is suggestive evidence in favor of this idea: priming students with the idea of wealth reduces the pleasure their face expresses as they eat a bar of chocolate! There is a clear contrast between the effects of income on experienced well-being and on life satisfaction. Higher income brings with it higher satisfaction, well beyond the point at which it ceases to have any positive effect on experience. The general conclusion is as clear for well-being as it was for colonoscopies: people’s evaluations of their lives and their actual experience may be related, but they are also different. Life satisfaction is not a flawed measure of their experienced well-being, as I thought some years ago. It is something else entirely.

Where to stash your organizational risk? Lately, I’m increasingly hearing folks reference the idea of organizational debt. This is the organizational sibling of technical debt, and it represents things like biased interview processes and inequitable compensation mechanisms. These are systemic problems that are preventing your organization from reaching its potential. Like technical debt, these risks linger because they are never the most pressing problem. Until that one fateful moment when they are. Within organizational debt, there is a volatile subset most likely to come abruptly due, and I call that subset organizational risk. Some good examples might be a toxic team culture, a toilsome fire drill, or a struggling leader. These problems bubble up from your peers, skip-level one-on-ones,16 and organizational health surveys. If you care and are listening, these are hard to miss. But they are slow to fix. And, oh, do they accumulate! The larger and older your organization is, the more you’ll find perched on your capable shoulders. How you respond to this is, in my opinion, the core challenge of leading a large organization. How do you continue to remain emotionally engaged with the challenges faced by individuals you’re responsible to help, when their problem is low in your problems queue? In that moment, do you shrug off the responsibility, either by changing roles or picking powerlessness? Hide in indifference? Become so hard on yourself that you collapse inward? I’ve tried all of these! They weren’t very satisfying. What I’ve found most successful is to identify a few areas to improve, ensure you’re making progress on those, and give yourself permission to do the rest poorly. Work with your manager to write this up as an explicit plan and agree on what reasonable progress looks like. These issues are still stored with your other bags of risk and responsibility, but you’ve agreed on expectations. Now you have a set of organizational risks that you’re pretty confident will get fixed, and then you have all the others: known problems, likely to go sideways, that you don’t believe you’re able to address quickly. What do you do about those? I like to keep them close. Typically, my organizational philosophy is to stabilize team-by-team and organization-by-organization. Ensuring any given area is well on the path to health before moving my focus. I try not to push risks onto teams that are functioning well. You do need to delegate some risks, but generally I think it’s best to only delegate solvable risk. If something simply isn’t likely to go well, I think it’s best to hold the bag yourself. You may be the best suited to manage the risk, but you’re almost certainly the best positioned to take responsibility. As an organizational leader, you’ll always have a portfolio of risk, and you’ll always be doing very badly at some things that are important to you. That’s not only okay, it’s unavoidable.

A pool game mixes ritual with geometry. The slow spaciousness of the green felt mirrors some internal state you get to after a few beers. Back at school, I’d been trying to read the philosophy of art, which I was grotesquely unequipped to do but nonetheless stuck on. I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow “transcend” the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down; how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger. In those days the drug culture was pimping “expanded consciousness,” a lie that partly descended from the old postindustrial lie of progress: any change in how your head normally worked must count as an improvement. Maybe my faith in that lie slid me toward an altered state that day. Or maybe it was just the beer, which I rarely drank. In any case, walking around the pool table, I felt borne forward by some internal force or fire. My first shot sank a ball. Then I made the most unlikely bank shot in history to drop two balls at once after a wild V trajectory. Daddy whistled. The sky through the window had gone the exact blue of the chalk I was digging my cue stick in, a shade solid and luminous at once, like the sheer turquoise used for the Madonna’s robe in Renaissance paintings. Slides from art history class flashed through my head. For a second, I lent that color some credit, as if it meant something that made my mind more buoyant. But that was crazy.

Thoughtless is the man who buries his ideals, surrendering to the common fate. Can he seem other than impotent, wooden, ignominious? The body is literally manufactured and sustained by mind. Through pressure of instincts from past lives, strengths or weaknesses percolate gradually into human consciousness. They express as habits, which in turn ossify into a desirable or an undesirable body. Outward frailty has mental origin. As all things can be reflected in water, so the whole universe is mirrored in the lake of the cosmic mind. The dual scales of maya ( delusion ) that balance every joy with a grief! Look fear in the face and it will cease to trouble you. Attachment is blinding; it lends an imaginary halo of attractiveness to the object of desire. Be comfortable within your purse. Extravagance will buy you discomfort. The vanished lives of all men are dark with many shames. Human conduct is ever unreliable until anchored in the Divine. everything in future will improve if you are making a spiritual effort now. Imagination is the door through which disease as well as healing enters. Disbelieve in the reality of sickness even when you are ill; an unrecognized visitor will flee! Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge. The ancient yogis discovered that the secret of cosmic consciousness is intimately linked with breath mastery. This is India's unique and deathless contribution to the world's treasury of knowledge. Fixity of attention depends on slow breathing; quick or uneven breaths are an inevitable accompaniment of harmful emotional states: fear, lust, anger. Imposters and hypocrites, there are indeed, but India respects all for the sake of the few who illumine the whole land with supernal blessings.

Learn how to critique. The value of exercises is very much a product of the quality of the critique, because it is in the critique that lessons can be drawn for all to see. Today, many critiques are poor quality. Often, they are not a critique at all, but just a narrative of who shot whom. At other times, the critique is stifled by an etiquette that demands no one be criticized and nothing negative be said. Too often, critiques can be summarized as “The comm was fouled up but we all did great.” There are a number of things you can do locally to improve the quality of critiques: First, the commanding officer can set a ground rule that demands frankness in critiquing. A good way to encourage this is for the CO to give a trenchant self-critique of his own actions and encourage others to do the same. Beginning a critique with the most junior officers and ending up with the most senior can also help encourage frankness. Second, a critique should be defined as something that looks beyond what happened to why it happened as it did. It may be helpful to look for instances where key decisions were made and ask the man who made them such questions as, “What options did you have here? What other options did you have that you failed to see? How quickly were you able to see, decide and act? If you were too slow, why? Why did you do what you did? Was your reasoning process sound, and if not, why not?” Third, the unit commander can attempt to identify individuals who are good critiquers and have them lead the critique. Not everyone can do it well; it takes a certain natural ability. Finally, the unit can hold a class on critiquing and from it develop some critique SOPs. These can help exercise participants look for key points during the exercise, points that can later serve to frame the critique. These actions are not substitutes for an overall reform of Marine Corps training. But they are concrete ways you can improve your own training. And just as individual self-education will be important after the schools are reformed, so these actions will help you train even after overall training is improved.

But all the feelings we are made to experience by the joy or the misfortune of a real person are produced in us only through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist consisted in understanding that in the apparatus of our emotions, the image being the only essential element, the simplification that would consist in purely and simply abolishing real people would be a decisive improvement. A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot lift. If a calamity should strike him, it is only in a small part of the total notion we have of him that we will be able to be moved by this; even more, it is only in a part of the total notion he has of himself that he will be able to be moved himself. The novelist’s happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these parts, impenetrable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say, parts which our soul can assimilate. What does it matter thenceforth if the actions, and the emotions, of this new order of creatures seem to us true, since we have made them ours, since it is within us that they occur, that they hold within their control, as we feverishly turn the pages of the book, the rapidity of our breathing and the intensity of our gaze. And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as might a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them (thus our heart changes, in life, and it is the worst pain; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality it changes, as certain natural phenomena occur, slowly enough so that, if we are able to observe successively each of its different states, in return we are spared the actual sensation of change).

intelligence. This is not surprising because our present computers are less complex than the brain of an earthworm, a species not noted for its intellectual powers. But computers roughly obey a version of Moore’s Law, which says that their speed and complexity double every eighteen months. It is one of these exponential growths that clearly cannot continue indefinitely, and indeed it has already begun to slow. However, the rapid pace of improvement will probably continue until computers have a similar complexity to the human brain. Some people say that computers can never show true intelligence, whatever that may be. But it seems to me that if very complicated chemical molecules can operate in humans to make them intelligent, then equally complicated electronic circuits can also make computers act in an intelligent way. And if they are intelligent they can presumably design computers that have even greater complexity and intelligence. This is why I don’t believe the science-fiction picture of an advanced but constant future. Instead, I expect complexity to increase at a rapid rate, in both the biological and the electronic spheres. Not much of this will happen in the next hundred years, which is all we can reliably predict. But by the end of the next millennium, if we get there, the change will be fundamental. Lincoln Steffens once said, “I have seen the future and it works.” He was actually talking about the Soviet Union, which we now know didn’t work very well. Nevertheless, I think the present world order has a future, but it will be very different. What is the biggest threat to the future of this planet? An asteroid collision would be—a threat against which we have no defence. But the last big such asteroid collision was about sixty-six million years ago and killed the dinosaurs. A more immediate danger is runaway climate change. A rise in ocean temperature would melt the ice caps and cause the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide. Both effects could make our climate like that of Venus with a temperature of 250 degrees centigrade (482 degrees Fahrenheit). 8 SHOULD WE COLONISE SPACE? Why should we go into space? What is the justification for spending all that effort and money on getting a few lumps of moon rock? Aren’t there better causes here on Earth? The obvious answer is because it’s there, all around us. Not to leave planet Earth would be like castaways on a desert island not trying to escape. We need to explore the

Performance measure. Throughout this book, the term performance measure refers to an indicator used by management to measure, report, and improve performance. Performance measures are classed as key result indicators, result indicators, performance indicators, or key performance indicators. Critical success factors (CSFs). CSFs are the list of issues or aspects of organizational performance that determine ongoing health, vitality, and wellbeing. Normally there are between five and eight CSFs in any organization. Success factors. A list of 30 or so issues or aspects of organizational performance that management knows are important in order to perform well in any given sector/ industry. Some of these success factors are much more important; these are known as critical success factors. Balanced scorecard. A term first introduced by Kaplan and Norton describing how you need to measure performance in a more holistic way. You need to see an organization’s performance in a number of different perspectives. For the purposes of this book, there are six perspectives in a balanced scorecard (see Exhibit 1.7). Oracles and young guns. In an organization, oracles are those gray-haired individuals who have seen it all before. They are often considered to be slow, ponderous, and, quite frankly, a nuisance by the new management. Often they are retired early or made redundant only to be rehired as contractors at twice their previous salary when management realizes they have lost too much institutional knowledge. Their considered pace is often a reflection that they can see that an exercise is futile because it has failed twice before. The young guns are fearless and precocious leaders of the future who are not afraid to go where angels fear to tread. These staff members have not yet achieved management positions. The mixing of the oracles and young guns during a KPI project benefits both parties and the organization. The young guns learn much and the oracles rediscover their energy being around these live wires. Empowerment. For the purposes of this book, empowerment is an outcome of a process that matches competencies, skills, and motivations with the required level of autonomy and responsibility in the workplace. Senior management team (SMT). The team comprised of the CEO and all direct reports. Better practice. The efficient and effective way management and staff undertake business activities in all key processes: leadership, planning, customers, suppliers, community relations, production and supply of products and services, employee wellbeing, and so forth. Best practice. A commonly misused term, especially because what is best practice for one organization may not be best practice for another, albeit they are in the same sector. Best practice is where better practices, when effectively linked together, lead to sustainable world-class outcomes in quality, customer service, flexibility, timeliness, innovation, cost, and competitiveness. Best-practice organizations commonly use the latest time-saving technologies, always focus on the 80/20, are members of quality management and continuous improvement professional bodies, and utilize benchmarking. Exhibit 1.10 shows the contents of the toolkit used by best-practice organizations to achieve world-class performance. EXHIBIT 1.10 Best-Practice Toolkit Benchmarking. An ongoing, systematic process to search for international better practices, compare against them, and then introduce them, modified where necessary, into your organization. Benchmarking may be focused on products, services, business practices, and processes of recognized leading organizations.

THE DIET-GO-ROUND LOW-CALORIE DIETS Diets began by limiting the number of calories consumed in a day. But restricting calories depleted energy, so people craved high-calorie fat and sugar as energizing emergency fuel. LOW-FAT DIETS High-calorie fats were targeted. Restricting fat left people hungry, however, and they again craved more fats and sugars. FAKE FAT Synthetic low-cal fats were invented. People could now replace butter with margarine, but without calories it didn’t deliver the energy and satisfaction people needed. They still craved real fat and sugar. THE DIET GO-ROUND GRAPEFRUIT DIETS Banking on the antioxidant and fat-emulsifying properties of grapefruit, dieters could eat real fat again, as long as they ate a grapefruit first. But even grapefruits were no match for the high-fat American diet. SUGAR BLUES The more America restricted fat in any way to lose weight, the more the body rebounded by storing fat, and craving and bingeing on fats and sugars. Sugar was now to blame! SUGAR FREE High-calorie sugars were replaced with no-calorie synthetic sweeteners. The mind was happy but the body was starving as diet drinks replaced meals. People eventually binged on excess calories from other sources, such as protein. HIGH-PROTEIN DIETS The new diet let people eat all the protein they wanted without noticing the restriction of carbs and sugar. Energy came from fat stores and dieters lost weight. But without carbs, they soon experienced low energy and craved and binged on carbs. HIGH-CARB DIETS Carb-craving America was ripe for high-carb diets. You could now lose weight and eat up to 80 percent carbs—but they had to be slow-burning, complex carbs. Fast-paced America was addicted to fast energy, however, and high-carb diets soon became high-sugar diets. LOW CHOLESTEROL The combination of sugar, fat, and stress raised cholesterol to dangerous levels. The solution: Reemphasize complex carbs and reduce all animal fats. Once again, dieters felt restricted and began craving and bingeing on fats and sugars. EXERCISE Diets weren’t working, so exercise became the cholesterol cure-all. It worked for a time, but people didn’t like to “work out.” Within 25 years, no more than 20 percent of Americans would do it regularly. VEGETARIANISM With heart disease and cancers on the rise, red meat was targeted. Vegetarianism came into fashion but was rarely followed correctly. People lived on pasta and bread, and blood sugars and energy levels went out of control. GRAZING High-carb diets were causing energy and blood sugar problems. If you ate every 2 hours, energy was propped up and fast-paced America could keep speeding. Fatigue became chronic fatigue, however, with depression and anxiety to follow. FOOD COMBINING By eating fats, proteins, and carbs separately, digestion improved and a host of digestive, energy, and weight problems were helped temporarily. But the rules for what you could eat together led to more frequent small meals. People eventually slipped back to their old ways and old problems. THE ZONE Aimed at fixing blood sugar levels, this diet balanced intake of proteins, fats, and carbs. It worked, but again restricted certain kinds of carbs, so it didn’t last, and America was again craving emergency fuel. COFFEE TO THE RESCUE Exhausted and with a million things to do, America turned to legal stimulants like coffee for energy. But borrowed energy must be paid back, and many are still living in debt. FULL CIRCLE Frustrated, America is turning to new crash diets and a wave of high-protein diets. It is time to break this man-made cycle with the simplicity of nature’s own 3-Season Diet. If you let nature feed you, you will not starve or crave anything.

Hyphen This word comes from two Greek words together meaning ‘under one’, which gets nobody anywhere and merely prompts the reflection that argument by etymology only serves the purpose of intimidating ignorant antagonists. On, then. This is one more case in which matters have not improved since Fowler’s day, since he wrote in 1926: The chaos prevailing among writers or printers or both regarding the use of hyphens is discreditable to English education … The wrong use or wrong non-use of hyphens makes the words, if strictly interpreted, mean something different from what the writers intended. It is no adequate answer to such criticisms to say that actual misunderstanding is unlikely; to have to depend on one’s employer’s readiness to take the will for the deed is surely a humiliation that no decent craftsman should be willing to put up with. And so say all of us who may be reading this book. The references there to ‘printers’ needs updating to something like ‘editors’, meaning those who declare copy fit to print. Such people now often get it wrong by preserving in midcolumn a hyphen originally put at the end of a line to signal a word-break: inter-fere, say, is acceptable split between lines but not as part of a single line. This mistake is comparatively rare and seldom causes confusion; even so, time spent wondering whether an exactor may not be an ex-actor is time avoidably wasted. The hyphen is properly and necessarily used to join the halves of a two-word adjectival phrase, as in fair-haired children, last-ditch resistance, falling-down drunk, over-familiar reference. Breaches of this rule are rare and not troublesome. Hyphens are also required when a phrase of more than two words is used adjectivally, as in middle-of-the-road policy, too-good-to-be-true story, no-holds-barred contest. No hard-and-fast rule can be devised that lays down when a two-word phrase is to be hyphenated and when the two words are to be run into one, though there will be a rough consensus that, for example, book-plate and bookseller are each properly set out and that bookplate and book-seller might seem respectively new-fangled and fussy. A hyphen is not required when a normal adverb (i.e. one ending in -ly) plus an adjective or other modifier are used in an adjectival role, as in Jack’s equally detestable brother, a beautifully kept garden, her abnormally sensitive hearing. A hyphen is required, however, when the adverb lacks a final -ly, like well, ill, seldom, altogether or one of those words like tight and slow that double as adjectives. To avoid ambiguity here we must write a well-kept garden, an ill-considered objection, a tight-fisted policy. The commonest fault in the use of the hyphen, and the hardest to eradicate, is found when an adjectival phrase is used predicatively. So a gent may write of a hard-to-conquer mountain peak but not of a mountain peak that remains hard-to-conquer, an often-proposed solution but not of one that is often-proposed. For some reason this fault is especially common when numbers, including fractions, are concerned, and we read every other day of criminals being imprisoned for two-and-a-half years, a woman becoming a mother-of-three and even of some unfortunate being stabbed six-times. And the Tories have been in power for a decade-and-a-half. Finally, there seems no end to the list of common phrases that some berk will bung a superfluous hyphen into the middle of: artificial-leg, daily-help, false-teeth, taxi-firm, martial-law, rainy-day, airport-lounge, first-wicket, piano-concerto, lung-cancer, cavalry-regiment, overseas-service. I hope I need not add that of course one none the less writes of a false-teeth problem, a first-wicket stand, etc. The only guide is: omit the hyphen whenever possible, so avoid not only mechanically propelled vehicle users (a beauty from MEU) but also a man eating tiger. And no one is right and no-one is wrong.