Stake Relationship Quotes

As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard.

I sprang toward him with the stake, hoping to catch him by surprise. But Dimitri was hard to catch by surprise. And he was fast. Oh, so fast. It was like he knew what I was going to do before I did it. He halted my attack with a glancing blow to the side of my head. I knew it would hurt later, but my adrenaline was running too strong for me to pay attention to it now. Distantly, I realized some other people had come to watch us. Dimitri and I were celebrities in different ways around here, and our mentoring relationship added to the drama. This was prime-time entertainment. My eyes were only on Dimitri, though. As we tested each other, attacking and blocking, I tried to remember everything he'd taught me. I also tried to remember everything I knew about him. I'd practiced with him for months. I knew him, knew his moves, just as he knew mine. I could anticipate him the same way. Once I started using that knowledge, the fight grew tricky. We were too well matched, both of us too fast. My heart thumped in my chest, and sweat coated my skin. Then Dimitri finally got through. He moved in for an attack, coming at me with the full force of his body. I blocked the worst of it, but he was so strong that I was the one who stumbled from the impact. He didn't waste the opportunity and dragged me to the ground, trying to pin me. Being trapped like that by a Strigoi would likely result in the neck being bitten or broken. I couldn't let that happen. So, although he held most of me to the ground, I managed to shove my elbow up and nail him in the face. He flinched and that was all I needed. I rolled him over and held him down. He fought to push me off, and I pushed right back while also trying to maneuver my stake. He was so strong, though. I was certain I wouldn't be able to hold him. Then, just as I thought I'd lose my hold, I got a good grip on the stake. And like that, the stake came down over his heart. It was done. Behind me, people were clapping but all I noticed was Dimitri. Our gazes were locked. I was still straddling him, my hands pressed against his chest. Both of us were sweaty and breathing heavily. His eyes looked at me with pride—and hell of a lot more. He was so close and my body yearned for him, again thinking he was a piece of me I needed in order to be complete. The air between us seemed warm and heady, and I would have given anything in that moment to lie down with him and have his arms wrap around me. His expression showed that he was thinking the same thing. The fight was finished, but remnants of the adrenaline and animal intensity remained.

It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for.

I am, and always have been - first, last, and always - a child of America. You raised me. I grew up in the pastures and hills of Texas, but I had been to thirty-four states before I learned how to drive. When I caught the stomach flu in the fifth grade, my mother sent a note to school written on the back of a holiday memo from Vice President Biden. Sorry, sir—we were in a rush, and it was the only paper she had on hand. I spoke to you for the first time when I was eighteen, on the stage of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when I introduced my mother as the nominee for president. You cheered for me. I was young and full of hope, and you let me embody the American dream: that a boy who grew up speaking two languages, whose family was blended and beautiful and enduring, could make a home for himself in the White House. You pinned the flag to my lapel and said, “We’re rooting for you.” As I stand before you today, my hope is that I have not let you down. Years ago, I met a prince. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, his country had raised him too. The truth is, Henry and I have been together since the beginning of this year. The truth is, as many of you have read, we have both struggled every day with what this means for our families, our countries, and our futures. The truth is, we have both had to make compromises that cost us sleep at night in order to afford us enough time to share our relationship with the world on our own terms. We were not afforded that liberty. But the truth is, also, simply this: love is indomitable. America has always believed this. And so, I am not ashamed to stand here today where presidents have stood and say that I love him, the same as Jack loved Jackie, the same as Lyndon loved Lady Bird. Every person who bears a legacy makes the choice of a partner with whom they will share it, whom the American people will “hold beside them in hearts and memories and history books. America: He is my choice. Like countless other Americans, I was afraid to say this out loud because of what the consequences might be. To you, specifically, I say: I see you. I am one of you. As long as I have a place in this White House, so will you. I am the First Son of the United States, and I’m bisexual. History will remember us. If I can ask only one thing of the American people, it’s this: Please, do not let my actions influence your decision in November. The decision you will make this year is so much bigger than anything I could ever say or do, and it will determine the fate of this country for years to come. My mother, your president, is the warrior and the champion that each and every American deserves for four more years of growth, progress, and prosperity. Please, don’t let my actions send us backward. I ask the media not to focus on me or on Henry, but on the campaign, on policy, on the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans at stake in this election. And finally, I hope America will remember that I am still the son you raised. My blood still runs from Lometa, Texas, and San Diego, California, and Mexico City. I still remember the sound of your voices from that stage in Philadelphia. I wake up every morning thinking of your hometowns, of the families I’ve met at rallies in Idaho and Oregon and South Carolina. I have never hoped to be anything other than what I was to you then, and what I am to you now—the First Son, yours in actions and words. And I hope when Inauguration Day comes again in January, I will continue to be.

Your happiness in a relationship depends greatly on your ability to get your needs heard and taken seriously. If these decisions are taken over by an abusive or controlling partner, you experience disappointment after disappointment, the constant sacrificing of your needs. He, on the other hand, enjoys the luxury of a relationship where he rarely has to compromise, gets to do the things he enjoys, and skips the rest. He shows off his generosity when the stakes are low, so that friends will see what a swell guy he is.

I closed my eyes, wondering why it was no effort at all to call up the exact shade of his dark eyes, hostile as they were. I should be thinking about the bounty on our heads, not whether or not I’d get to see him again. Because of course I’d get to see him again; he’d probably try and stake one of my brothers, if not me. Hardly a promising start to a relationship. Relationship? What the hell was I thinking? No doubt my impending birthday was making my head fuzzy. There was no other explanation. I just needed more sleep.

What do I really want for myself? What do I really want for others? What do I really want for the relationship?

For the first few weeks after we'd gotten back together, I'd been worried that things might fall apart again, not sure that I was up to being in a real relationship, one with actual stakes and feelings and something to lose

something important is indeed at stake that has to do with the relationship between female liberation and female beauty.

I don’t care if men accused of assault have good relationships with their wives or daughters or women they deem valuable. How do you treat women you have no stake in protecting?

I have to tell you what's at stake here: when we were young, we were both in relationships that we thought would never end, not like I will love you even when it goes dark, more like It's so dark out there. How could you survive without me? People have taken so much from me that I don't know how I'm not gone.

At this point we can finally see what's really at stake in our peculiar habit of defining ourselves simultaneously as master and slave, reduplicating the most brutal aspects of the ancient household in our very concept of ourselves, as masters of our freedoms, or as owners of our very selves. It is the only way that we can imagine ourselves as completely isolated beings. There is a direct line from the new Roman conception of liberty – not as the ability to form mutual relationships with others, but as the kind of absolute power of "use and abuse" over the conquered chattel who make up the bulk of a wealthy Roman man's household – to the strange fantasies of liberal philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Smith, about the origins of human society in some collection of thirty- or forty-year-old males who seem to have sprung from the earth fully formed, then have to decide whether to kill each other or begin to swap beaver pelts.

You can measure the health of relationships, teams, and organizations by measuring the lag time between when problems are identified and when they are resolved.

successful leaders are bigger than any individual outcome; their sense of self-worth doesn’t depend on its having to work. Their whole self-image is not at stake. They are separate from “the deal.

You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack--there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That's what it feels like, anyway. Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

Attachment is about survival; relationships are about survival. When they are threatened, we do whatever it takes to hold on to them, because there are no higher stakes than our connection with our attachment objects.

But the compulsive overachievement of today's elite college students - the sense that they need to keep running as fast as they can - is not the only thing that keeps them from forming the deeper relationships that might relieve their anguish. Something more insidious is operating, too: a resistance to vulnerability, a fear of looking like the only one who isn't capable of handling the pressure. These are young people who have always succeeded at everything, in part by projecting the confidence that they always will. Now, as they get to college, the stakes are higher and the competition fiercer. Everybody thinks that they are the only one who's suffering, so nobody says anything, so everybody suffers. Everyone feels like a fraud; everybody thinks that everybody else is smarter than they are.

Why is hesed love so important? Because life is moody. Feelings come and go. Pressures rise and fall. Passions ebb and flow. Hesed is a stake in the heart of the changing seasons of life. Words of commitment create a bond that stands against life’s moodiness.

He, on the other hand, enjoys the luxury of a relationship where he rarely has to compromise, gets to do the things he enjoys, and skips the rest. He shows off his generosity when the stakes are low, so that friends will see what a swell guy he is. The abuser ends up with the benefits of being in an intimate relationship without the sacrifices that normally come with the territory. That’s a pretty privileged lifestyle.

Guillaume Belibaste, the last Cathar recorded to have burned at the stake in 1321, is said to have prophesied that “at the end of seven hundred years the laurel would again turn green,”114 implying that the principles of “the true Christianity” would return to the world’s attention.

Now, when he kissed her or put his arms around her, Scarlet felt like he was staking a claim. Which normally would have sent her on a tirade about relationship independence, except she felt like she’d claimed him a long time ago. The moment she’d expected him to choose her over his pack, the moment she’d dragged him aboard that ship and taken him away from everything he’d ever known, she’d made the decision for them both. He was hers now, just like she was his. Except

Maybe the concept of friendship is already too colonized by liberalism and capitalism. Under neoliberalism, friendship is a banal affair of private preferences: we hang out, we share hobbies, we make small talk. We become friends with those who are already like us, and we keep each other comfortable rather than becoming different and more capable together. The algorithms of Facebook and other social networks guide us towards the refinement of our profiles, reducing friendship to the click of a button. This neoliberal friend is the alternative to hetero- and homonormative coupling: "just friends" implies a much weaker and insignificant bond than a lover could ever be. Under neoliberal friendship, we don't have each other's backs, and our lives aren't tangled up together. But these insipid tendencies do not mean that friendships are pointless, only that friendship is a terrain of struggle. Empire works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake and to infuse intimacy with violence and domination.

You can be right, or you can be in a relationship. —Stan Tatkin

SUMMARY—START WITH HEART Here’s how people who are skilled at dialogue stay focused on their goals—particularly when the going gets tough. Work on Me First, Us Second • Remember that the only person you can directly control is yourself. Focus on What You Really Want • When you find yourself moving toward silence or violence, stop and pay attention to your motives. • Ask yourself: “What does my behavior tell me about what my motives are?” • Then, clarify what you really want. Ask yourself: “What do I want for myself? For others? For the relationship?” • And finally, ask: “How would I behave if this were what I really wanted?” Refuse the Fool’s Choice • As you consider what you want, notice when you start talking yourself into a Fool’s Choice. • Watch to see if you’re telling yourself that you must choose between peace and honesty, between winning and losing, and so on. • Break free of these Fool’s Choices by searching for the and. • Clarify what you don’t want, add it to what you do want, and ask your brain to start searching for healthy options to bring you to dialogue.

So the first time she and Leo combusted, she'd practically been poised for the breakup. In some inexplicable way, she'd been looking forward to it and all its attendant drama, because wasn't there something nearly lovely–when you were young enough–about guts churning and tear ducts being put to glorious overuse? She recognized the undeniable satisfaction of the first emotional fissure because an unraveling was still something grown-up and, therefore, life affirming. See? The broken heart signalled. I loved enough to lose; I felt enough to weep. Because when you were young enough, the stakes of love were so very small, nearly insignificant. How tragic could a breakup be when it was part of the fabric of expectation from the beginning? The hackneyed fights, the late-night phone calls, the indignant recounting for friends over multiple drinks and in earshot of an appropriately flirtatious bartender–it was theatre for a certain type of person . . . Until it wasn't.

The question of accumulation,” Adrian had written. You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack—there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That’s what it feels like, anyway. Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure. Adrian

Here are some great ones: What do I really want for myself? What do I really want for others? What do I really want for the relationship? Once you’ve asked yourself what you want, add one more equally telling question: How would I behave if I really wanted these results?

Relational leaders have a growth mindset. They learn and grow from experience in order to achieve a skill, overcome an obstacle, solve a problem, or master an ability. A relational leader asks for help and seeks out teachers, mentors, and guides. Leaders are always learning.

Even though the woman was not human—the land—or was less than human—a cow—farming had the symbolic overtones of old-fashioned agrarian romance: plowing the land was loving it, feeding the cow was tending it. In the farming model, the woman was owned privately; she was the homestead, not a public thoroughfare. One farmer worked her. The land was valued because it produced a valuable crop; and in keeping with the mystique of the model itself, sometimes the land was real pretty, special, richly endowed; a man could love it. The cow was valued because of what she produced: calves, milk; sometimes she took a prize. There was nothing actually idyllic in this. As many as one quarter of all acts of battery may be against pregnant women; and women die from pregnancy even without the intervention of a male fist. But farming implied a relationship of some substance between the farmer and what was his: and it is grander being the earth, being nature, even being a cow, than being a cunt with no redeeming mythology. Motherhood ensconced a woman in the continuing life of a man: how he used her was going to have consequences for him. Since she was his, her state of being reflected on him; and therefore he had a social and psychological stake in her welfare as well as an economic one. Because the man farmed the woman over a period of years, they developed a personal relationship, at least from her point of view: one limited by his notions of her sex and her kind; one strained because she could never rise to the human if it meant abandoning the female; but it was her best chance to be known, to be regarded with some tenderness or compassion meant for her, one particular woman.

We all have a stake in the truth. Society functions based on an assumption that people will abide by their word - that truth prevails over mendacity. For the most part, it does. If it didn't, relationships would have a short shelf life, commerce would cease, and trust between parents and children would be destroyed. All of us depend on honesty, because when truth is lacking we suffer, and society suffers. When Adolf Hitler lied to Neville Chamberlain, there was not peace in our time, and over fifty million people paid the price with their lives. When Richard Nixon lied to the nation, it destroyed the respect many had for the office of the president. When Enron executives lied to their employees, thousands of lives were ruined overnight. We count on our government and commercial institutions to be honest and truthful. We need and expect our friends and family to be truthful. Truth is essential for all relations be they personal, professional, or civic.

You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That’s what it feels like, anyway. Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

I knew then, this relationship would have to be different. I knew I'd have to know myself and be known. These weren't only terrifying prospects, they were foreign. I didn't know how to do either. And the stakes were high. I was going to have to either learn to be healthy or I'd spend the rest of my life pretending. It was either intimacy or public isolation.

there are three kinds of people you’re going to meet in the dating world. There are the freeloaders who come in and take everything you give with no expectation of ever having to give anything back to you. There are renters—people who give you something in exchange for something else. They aren’t freeloaders, but they aren’t permanent either. The second the deal isn’t working for them, they’re gone. And then there are buyers. “Buyers are serious. They aren’t flipping houses. They buy into the relationship to stay. They invest in the relationship. They have a stake in it. They see things as permanent or at least that they could turn into permanent. Buyers aren’t in it for some temporary fix. They are about forever.

Breakups will make the best of us go fucking batshit, but if you learn through it that you can rely on yourself to mend, you’ll go a little less crazy each time they happen. By the time I met Vince, I was a confident person who, while wanting a relationship, didn’t stake my personality, my dignity, and my life on it. It became a nice addition to an already lovely life

I can’t think of another relationship in one’s life where you actively root for the other person to outgrow you. Where the whole goal is for them to surpass you, to separate. That’s the fundamental tension of parent and child. You can’t wait for them to stop being so needy every second, and then they stop needing you every second, and it feels like a stake to the heart.

5.4 The question of accumulation. If life is a wager, what form does it take? At the racetrack, an accumulator is a bet which rolls on profits from the success of one of the horse to engross the stake on the next one. 5.5 So a) To what extent might human relationships be expressed in a mathematical or logical formula? And b) If so, what signs might be placed between the integers?Plus and minus, self-evidently; sometimes multiplication, and yes, division. But these sings are limited. Thus an entirely failed relationship might be expressed in terms of both loss/minus and division/ reduction, showing a total of zero; whereas an entirely successful one can be represented by both addition and multiplication. But what of most relationships? Do they not require to be expressed in notations which are logically improbable and mathematically insoluble? 5.6 Thus how might you express an accumulation containing the integers b, b, a (to the first), a (to the second), s, v? B = s - v (*/+) a (to the first) Or a (to the second) + v + a (to the first) x s = b 5.7 Or is that the wrong way to put the question and express the accumulation? Is the application of logic to the human condition in and of itself self-defeating? What becomes of a chain of argument when the links are made of different metals, each with a separate frangibility? 5.8 Or is "link" a false metaphor? 5.9 But allowing that is not, if a link breaks, wherein lies the responsibility for such breaking? On the links immediately on the other side, or on the whole chain? But what do you mean by "the whole chain"? How far do the limits of responsibility extend? 6.0 Or we might try to draw the responsibility more narrowly and apportion it more exactly. And not use equations and integers but instead express matters in the traditional narrative terminology. So, for instance, if...." - Adrian Finn

Never really either private or public, the modern self establishes its value through processes that are at once psychological and sociological, private and public, emotional and ritualistic. Clearly, then, in modern erotic/romantic relationships what is at stake are the self, its emotions, interiority, and, mostly, the way these are recognized (or fail to be recognized) by others.

The question at stake is how you will react to the pain you experience in relationships. If you fall back on the classic fear-driven reactions, you will necessarily start treating people like rattlesnakes. You will either run away or try to control people so they won’t hurt you. The problem is that neither of these options will help you pursue and protect the goal of connection in a relationship.

The “bad news” version is the saving of some from the devouring fire that will consume the rest. The “good news” version is a vision of transformed people and a transformed earth filled with the glory of God. What’s at stake in the question of God’s character is our image of the Christian life. Is Christianity about requirements? Here’s what you must do to be saved. Or is Christianity about relationship and transformation? Here’s the path: follow it. Both involve imperatives, but one is a threat, the other an invitation.

Imagine you live on a planet where the dominant species is far more intellectually sophisticated than human beings but often keeps humans as companion animals. They are called the Gorns. They communicate with each other via a complex combination of telepathy, eye movements & high-pitched squeaks, all completely unintelligible & unlearnable by humans, whose brains are prepared for verbal language acquisition only. Humans sometimes learn the meaning of individual sounds by repeated association with things of relevance to them. The Gorns & humans bond strongly but there are many Gorn rules that humans must try to assimilate with limited information & usually high stakes. You are one of the lucky humans who lives with the Gorns in their dwelling. Many other humans are chained to small cabanas in the yard or kept in outdoor pens of varying size. They are so socially starved they cannot control their emotions when a Gorn goes near them. The Gorns agree that they could never be House-Humans. The dwelling you share with your Gorn family is filled with water-filled porcelain bowls.Every time you try to urinate in one,nearby Gorn attack you. You learn to only use the toilet when there are no Gorns present. Sometimes they come home & stuff your head down the toilet for no apparent reason. You hate this & start sucking up to the Gorns when they come home to try & stave this off but they view this as evidence of your guilt. You are also punished for watching videos, reading books, talking to other human beings, eating pizza or cheesecake, & writing letters. These are all considered behavior problems by the Gorns. To avoid going crazy, once again you wait until they are not around to try doing anything you wish to do. While they are around, you sit quietly, staring straight ahead. Because they witness this good behavior you are so obviously capable of, they attribute to “spite” the video watching & other transgressions that occur when you are alone. Obviously you resent being left alone, they figure. You are walked several times a day and left crossword puzzle books to do. You have never used them because you hate crosswords; the Gorns think you’re ignoring them out of revenge. Worst of all, you like them. They are, after all, often nice to you. But when you smile at them, they punish you, likewise for shaking hands. If you apologize they punish you again. You have not seen another human since you were a small child. When you see one you are curious, excited & afraid. You really don’t know how to act. So, the Gorn you live with keeps you away from other humans. Your social skills never develop. Finally, you are brought to “training” school. A large part of the training consists of having your air briefly cut off by a metal chain around your neck. They are sure you understand every squeak & telepathic communication they make because sometimes you get it right. You are guessing & hate the training. You feel pretty stressed out a lot of the time. One day, you see a Gorn approaching with the training collar in hand. You have PMS, a sore neck & you just don’t feel up to the baffling coercion about to ensue. You tell them in your sternest voice to please leave you alone & go away. The Gorns are shocked by this unprovoked aggressive behavior. They thought you had a good temperament. They put you in one of their vehicles & take you for a drive. You watch the attractive planetary landscape going by & wonder where you are going. You are led into a building filled with the smell of human sweat & excrement. Humans are everywhere in small cages. Some are nervous, some depressed, most watch the goings on on from their prisons. Your Gorns, with whom you have lived your entire life, hand you over to strangers who drag you to a small room. You are terrified & yell for your Gorn family to help you. They turn & walk away.You are held down & given a lethal injection. It is, after all, the humane way to do it.

First, clarify what you really want. You’ve got a head start if you’ve already Started with Heart. If you know what you want for yourself, for others, and for the relationship, then you’re in position to break out of the Fool’s Choice. “What I want is for my husband to be more reliable. I’m tired of being let down by him when he makes commitments that I depend on.” Second, clarify what you really don’t want. This is the key to framing the and question. Think of what you are afraid will happen to you if you back away from your current strategy of trying to win or stay safe. What bad thing will happen

If she cheats on you once, chances are good SHE’LL CHEAT ON YOU AGAIN So leave while the costs aren’t as sunk and the stakes aren’t as high.  Once a scorpion, always a scorpion. Sure there is a chance that this failed relationship can get better.  But the majority of the time it will only get worse and you’ll wish you had left it all behind earlier. There is always a deep seeded reason why the cheating happened in the first place, and usually the reasons are deeper and more complicated than a simple one-night stand. Happy healthy people in happy healthy relationships simply don’t cheat on each other and you both deserve better than that.  

I have heard stories from the depths of human lives where men and women were wrestling with the elemental problems of misery and sin--stories that put upon a man's heart a burden of vicarious sorrow, even though he does but listen to them. Here was real human need crying out after the living God revealed in Christ. Consider all the multitudes of men who so need God, and then think of Christian churches making of themselves a cockpit of controversy when there is not a single thing at stake in the business. So much of it does not matter! And there is one thing that does matter--more than anything else in all the world--that men in their personal lives and in their social relationships should know Jesus Christ.

As you practice presenting this question to yourself at emotional times, you’ll discover that at first you resist it. When our brain isn’t functioning well, we resist complexity. We adore the ease of simply choosing between attacking or hiding—and the fact that we think it makes us look good. “I’m sorry, but I just had to destroy the guy’s self-image if I was going to keep my integrity. It wasn’t pretty, but it was the right thing to do.” Fortunately, when you refuse the Fool’s Choice—when you require your brain to solve the more complex problem—more often than not, it does just that. You’ll find there is a way to share your concerns, listen sincerely to those of others, and build the relationship—all at the same time. And the results can be life changing.

Patriotism comes from the same Latin word as father. Blind patriotism is collective transference. In it the state becomes a parent and we citizens submit our loyalty to ensure its protection. We may have been encouraged to make that bargain from our public school education, our family home, religion, or culture in general. We associate safety with obedience to authority, for example, going along with government policies. We then make duty, as it is defined by the nation, our unquestioned course. Our motivation is usually not love of country but fear of being without a country that will defend us and our property. Connection is all-important to us; excommunication is the equivalent of death, the finality we can’t dispute. Healthy adult loyalty is a virtue that does not become blind obedience for fear of losing connection, nor total devotion so that we lose our boundaries. Our civil obedience can be so firm that it may take precedence over our concern for those we love, even our children. Here is an example: A young mother is told by the doctor that her toddler is allergic to peanuts and peanut oil. She lets the school know of her son’s allergy when he goes to kindergarten. Throughout his childhood, she is vigilant and makes sure he is safe from peanuts in any form. Eighteen years later, there is a war and he is drafted. The same mother, who was so scrupulously careful about her child’s safety, now waves goodbye to him with a tear but without protest. Mother’s own training in public school and throughout her life has made her believe that her son’s life is expendable whether or not the war in question is just. “Patriotism” is so deeply ingrained in her that she does not even imagine an alternative, even when her son’s life is at stake. It is of course also true that, biologically, parents are ready to let children go just as the state is ready to draft them. What a cunning synchronic-ity. In addition, old men who decide on war take advantage of the timing too. The warrior archetype is lively in eighteen-year-olds, who are willing to fight. Those in their mid-thirties, whose archetype is being a householder and making a mark in their chosen field, will not show an interest in battlefields of blood. The chiefs count on the fact that young braves will take the warrior myth literally rather than as a metaphor for interior battles. They will be willing to put their lives on the line to live out the collective myth of societies that have not found the path of nonviolence. Our collective nature thus seems geared to making war a workable enterprise. In some people, peacemaking is the archetype most in evidence. Nature seems to have made that population smaller, unfortunately. Our culture has trained us to endure and tolerate, not to protest and rebel. Every cell of our bodies learned that lesson. It may not be virtue; it may be fear. We may believe that showing anger is dangerous, because it opposes the authority we are obliged to appease and placate if we are to survive. This explains why we so admire someone who dares to say no and to stand up or even to die for what he believes. That person did not fall prey to the collective seduction. Watching Jeopardy on television, I notice that the audience applauds with special force when a contestant risks everything on a double-jeopardy question. The healthy part of us ardently admires daring. In our positive shadow, our admiration reflects our own disavowed or hidden potential. We, too, have it in us to dare. We can stand up for our truth, putting every comfort on the line, if only we can calm our long-scared ego and open to the part of us that wants to live free. Joseph Campbell says encouragingly, “The part of us that wants to become is fearless.” Religion and Transference Transference is not simply horizontal, from person to person, but vertical from person to a higher power, usually personified as God. When

Look at your “hobophobia.” If there is one group of people our majority population fear and despise it is rootless, nomadic individuals with no stake in society. They offend simply by “opting out”—of property, commitments, beliefs, relationships, expectations. Many such people have turned their backs on a society they don’t understand or can’t cope with. They have absconded from the pressures to compete, to perform, to sell out, to join in the dance of bureaucracy, money worries, cohabitation, housekeeping, procreation, you-name-it. Society is right to fear such people because they embody the sane rejection of many insanely onerous “civilized” values that would collapse under scrutiny. Strangely, though, society also makes an idol of Jesus, apparently a nomad who had no possessions or family ties, who walked away from a promising career in carpentry, a hobo if ever there was one. (We haven’t, however, made a popular hero out of Diogenes, the ultimate dirty Greek hobo.)

The argument is not simply that some women are not beautiful, therefore it is not fair to judge women on the basis of physical beauty; or that men are not judged on that basis, therefore women also should not be judged on that basis; or that men should look for character in women; or that our standards of beauty are too parochial in and of themselves; or even that judging women according to their conformity to a standard of beauty serves to make them into products, chattels, differing from the farmer’s favorite cow only in terms of literal form. The issue at stake is different, and crucial. Standards of beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body. They prescribe her mobility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which she can put her body. They define precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom. And, of course, the relationship between physical freedom and psychological development, intellectual possibility, and creative potential is an umbilical one.

As humans, we are all driven to avoid being wrong. Even when we may have some doubts, the desire to be right about almost everything seems to be part of our DNA. Whenever we’re trying to get others to believe us, to agree with us, to take our side, or even to feel sorry for us, being right about what we claim is usually of utmost importance. Our inner voice is always telling us we must prevail, even if logic or other factors suggest we might just be wrong. OMG, perish the thought! As soon as we take a stand that we’re right – at any cost – someone or something else must automatically be wrong. Consider this. What is the true cost of always having to be right? The emotional cost … the reputation cost … the relationship cost. Before putting your stake in the ground, take a deep breath, ponder the costs, and then articulate your position. It takes a lot of courage for someone to admit his or her burning need to be right, but the pathway to altering any relationship for the better is by taking of responsibility for your actions.

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also if this isn't too grand a word-our tragedy. "The question of accumulation," Adrian had written. You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack-there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That's what it feels like, anyway. Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

Tell me about your adventures, Abigail. Any diabolical new cases to investigate?” “Yes, as a matter of fact—bones and bodies and everything. We’ll be leaving for Gad’s Valley tomorrow.” “Isn’t that where that handsome young policeman of yours got stationed? What’s his name?” I felt my cheeks flush, which made Jenny smile impishly. “Charlie is hardly my anything,” I said. “But yes, he’ll be involved. Not that there are enough flowers in the world to make that romance a reality.” “You don’t need flowers, dear. You need confidence. Next time you see him, you should just go right up to him and plant a kiss on that boy’s pretty face.” “Jenny!” “Fortune favors the bold, Abigail!” “Sure it does. The last time I was bold, I nearly got the man killed, and then he changed his name and moved a hundred miles away. That’s not exactly a strong start to a relationship.” “You silly girl. Of course it is—he risked his life for you!” “Oh, never mind about it, anyway. I’m not going to the valley looking for romance—there are more important matters at stake. I’m looking for a murderer.” “You should definitely have kissed him right after the big fight.” Jenny smiled, willfully ignoring my protests. She let her gaze drift to the window. “My fiancé got in a fight over me, once. He lost terribly, the poor man—he never was much of a pugilist. He looked like an absolute mess afterward, with gauze wadded up in each nostril and one eye all swollen, but it was still just the sweetest thing. And the stupidest. I told him as much . . . right before I kissed him.” She turned her eyes meaningfully back to me. “Because that’s what you do.

Anarchists and antiauthoritarians clearly differentiate between charity and solidarity--especially thanks to working with indigenous solidarity movements and other international solidarity movements--based on the principles of affinity and mutual aid. Affinity is just what it sounds like: that you can work most easily with people who share your goals, and that your work will be strongest when your relationships are based on trust, friendship, and love. Mutual aid is the idea that we all have a stake in one another's liberation, and that when we can act from that interdependence, we can share with one another as equals. Charity, however, is something that is given not only because it feels like there is an excess to share but also because it is based in a framework that implies that others inherently need the help--that they are unable to take care of themselves and that they would suffer without it. Charity is patronizing and selfish. It establishes some people as those who assist and others as those who need assistance, stabilizing oppressive paradigms by solidifying people's positions in them. Autonomy and self-determination are essential to making this distinction as well. Recognizing the autonomy and self-determination of individuals and groups acknowledges their capability. It's an understanding of that group as having something of worth to be gained through interactions with them, whether that thing is a material good or something less tangible, like perspective, joy, or inspiration. The solidarity model dispels the idea of one inside and one outside, foregrounding how individuals belong to multiple groups and how groups overlap with one another, while simultaneously demanding respect for the identity of self-sufficientcy of each of those groups. Original Zine: Ain't no PC Gonna Fix it, Baby. 2013. Featured in: A Critique of Ally Politics. Taking Sides.

SCULLEY. Pepsi executive recruited by Jobs in 1983 to be Apple’s CEO, clashed with and ousted Jobs in 1985. JOANNE SCHIEBLE JANDALI SIMPSON. Wisconsin-born biological mother of Steve Jobs, whom she put up for adoption, and Mona Simpson, whom she raised. MONA SIMPSON. Biological full sister of Jobs; they discovered their relationship in 1986 and became close. She wrote novels loosely based on her mother Joanne (Anywhere but Here), Jobs and his daughter Lisa (A Regular Guy), and her father Abdulfattah Jandali (The Lost Father). ALVY RAY SMITH. A cofounder of Pixar who clashed with Jobs. BURRELL SMITH. Brilliant, troubled hardware designer on the original Mac team, afflicted with schizophrenia in the 1990s. AVADIS “AVIE” TEVANIAN. Worked with Jobs and Rubinstein at NeXT, became chief software engineer at Apple in 1997. JAMES VINCENT. A music-loving Brit, the younger partner with Lee Clow and Duncan Milner at the ad agency Apple hired. RON WAYNE. Met Jobs at Atari, became first partner with Jobs and Wozniak at fledgling Apple, but unwisely decided to forgo his equity stake. STEPHEN WOZNIAK. The star electronics geek at Homestead High; Jobs figured out how to package and market his amazing circuit boards and became his partner in founding Apple. DEL YOCAM. Early Apple employee who became the General Manager of the Apple II Group and later Apple’s Chief Operating Officer. INTRODUCTION How This Book Came to Be In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I’d worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn’t heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado. He’d be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted instead to take a walk so that we could talk. That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet

The stakes are so high. Our boys deserve meaningful relationships, the freedom to pursue what interests and challenges them, a feeling of belonging and social connection to others, and a sense that they’re contributing to something larger than themselves.

Retail managers know that while their official vendors are large multinationals like Procter & Gamble and Hindustan Unilever Limited, what they are actually dealing with is someone like ‘Agarwal & Gupta Distributors’, the RS of the MNC. And so, while a good relationship with HUL can be developed by promoting their products, the truth is that a good relationship with the RS can be developed mainly by promoting his working capital availability. The RS is not merely a supplier of goods. He is a vital link in the whole retail chain and can be underestimated only at one’s peril. This is exactly what one large retail chain figured out early, and used to get the most amazing competitive advantage. Supermarket retail has a built-in advantage not available to traditional retailers. On the buying end, they buy bigger quantities and get a substantial period of time to make payment to the suppliers compared to smaller retailers, who sometimes have to pay cash on delivery. On the selling side, no customer gets credit at a supermarket. You scan, you bill, you pay and go — that’s the supermarket way. For the kirana, however, most regular customers expect a ‘khata’, a monthly account. Kirana customers buy through the month and pay only at the end. Supermarkets, by design, therefore, buy on liberal credit and sell on cash. Therefore, they are ‘cash surplus’ on a day-to-day basis. Their competitors, the kirana stores, are not. This particular retailer decided to make the payment terms more favourable to the supplier. So where the industry practice was eight days, this retailer reduced it to four days. In effect, the retailer halved the credit period, thus influencing the vendor’s working capital availability favourably. The vendor, in turn, now had a stake in the retailer’s growth and continued prosperity. The relationship soon turned into a win-win partnership. The vendor developed ingenious ways to enhance the retailer’s market share in various catchments.

There is too much at stake to chance rocking the boat by holding on to highly inflated expectations. Keeping our relationships intact and pretending they’re successful, even if they aren’t, is the price we must pay to harbor our deepest secrets.

As more complex forms of knowledge emerge and an economic surplus is built up, experts devote themselves full-time to the subjects of their expertise, which, with the development of conceptual machineries, may become increasingly removed from the pragmatic necessities of everyday life. Experts in these rarefied bodies of knowledge lay claim to a novel status. They are not only experts in this or that sector of the societal stock of knowledge, they claim ultimate jurisdiction over that stock of knowledge in its totality. They are, literally, universal experts. This does not mean that they claim to know everything, but rather that they claim to know the ultimate significance of what everybody knows and does. Other men may continue to stake out particular sectors of reality, but they claim expertise in the ultimate definitions of reality as such. This stage in the development of knowledge has a number of consequences. The first, which we have already discussed, is the emergence of pure theory. Because the universal experts operate on a level of considerable abstraction from the vicissitudes of everyday life, both others and they themselves may conclude that their theories have no relation whatever to the ongoing life of the society, but exist in a soft of Platonic heaven of ahistorical and asocial ideation. This is, of course, an illusion, but it can have great socio-historical potency, by virtue of the relationship between the reality-defining and reality-producing processes. A second consequence is a strengthening of traditionalism in the institutionalized actions thus legitimated, that is, a strengthening of the inherent tendency of institutionalization toward inertia.91 Habitualization and institutionalization in themselves limit the flexibility of human actions. Institutions tend to persist unless they become “problematic.” Ultimate legitimations inevitably strengthen this tendency. The more abstract the legitimations are, the less likely they are to be modified in accordance with changing pragmatic exigencies. If there is a tendency to go on as before anyway, the tendency is obviously strengthened by having excellent reasons for doing so. This means that institutions may persist even when, to an outside observer, they have lost their original functionality or practicality. One does certain things not because they work, but because they are right—right, that is, in terms of the ultimate definitions of reality promulgated by the universal experts.

Dealing with Business Vampires We’ve all had to deal with people we don’t like. People who suck the life out of us like a Business Vampire. If you have a business associate who is making your life a living hell, and you can’t break up with them (sorry!), than you have to change the relationship. Since you can’t stake them and they may press charges if you throw holy water on them, here’s 3 quick ways to change your interactions: 1) Eliminate every personal interaction. That means stop being “friends” on Facebook, and decline every social event they attend (that you can – don’t risk your business). 2) Change the way you communicate. Don’t call, just email. Don’t set a meeting unless you have an agenda (and stick to it!). 3) Keep it professional. Don’t be nasty or snarky – kill them with kindness. Keep every interaction as pleasant (and fast!) as you possibly can. Don’t

Becoming an expert not only establishes you as a leader in your field, it will make you a trusted resource that people can rely on for new and innovative ideas. In addition to raising the stakes and helping you increase your income, your expertise will serve to make a powerful first impression, which will truly help you shine and stand apart from the crowd. Having fun and meeting interesting, incredible people along the way is an added bonus!

But here is my hope: God willing, when he wills and as he wills, the reform of the reform will take place in the liturgy. Despite the gnashing of teeth, it will happen, for the future of the Church is at stake. To ruin the liturgy is to ruin our relationship to God and the concrete expression of our Christian faith.

Hunter grew amused, watching Loretta. When she threw him an accusing glance, he noted that her pupils had flared until her irises were almost black. Crimson rode her cheeks, and a rosy flush colored her slender throat. He wondered if her entire body was pink and wish they were alone so he could find out. Soon. Tonight he would build a fire so she couldn’t hide in shadows, and he would learn every inch of her, slowly. Her shyness tantalized him. He anticipated the time when she would come to him without reservation, but he intended to savor this stage of their relationship just as thoroughly. Like now, teasing her with a blade of grass and watching the emotions that played upon her face, imagining the moment when he could stake claim to what she guarded so jealously. “We should get back,” she said softly. “It’ll be getting dark soon. And I’m tired.” Brimming with the energy of youth, Swift Antelope and Amy leaped to their feet, eager to be gone. When Loretta stood, Hunter grasped her ankle. “We will follow later,” he said huskily. Swift Antelope flashed a knowing grin and took Amy’s hand to hurry her along. Loretta gazed after them, her color deepening. When she looked down at Hunter, her eyes were wide with wariness. “Why aren’t we going now?” “You know why.

The surgeon knows that her work is creative work. A machine can’t do it because it requires human delicacy and decision making. It can’t be done by an automaton because it requires critical thinking and a good dose of winging-it-ness. Her work requires a balance of self-confidence and collaboration, a blend of intuition and improvisation. If the surgeon, while slicing that vulnerable brain, hits an unexpected bump in the process and needs to ask the person beside her for something essential—and quickly—she has absolutely no time to waste on questions like: Do I deserve to ask for this help? Is this person I’m asking really trustworthy? Am I an asshole for having the power to ask in this moment? She simply accepts her position, asks without shame, gets the right scalpel, and keeps cutting. Something larger is at stake. This holds true for firefighters, airline pilots, and lifeguards, but it also holds true for artists, scientists, teachers—for anyone, in any relationship. Those who can ask without shame are viewing themselves in collaboration with—rather than in competition with—the world. Asking for help with shame says: You have the power over me. Asking with condescension says: I have the power over you. But asking for help with gratitude says: We have the power to help each other.

Consent & Manhood (The Sonnet) Better deemed a coward than forward, For there is too much at stake. Stand ready to wait till infinity, Without violating her personal space. She's not your bonerville, Until she gives you consent. Remember, consent is the line, Between a baboon and a sapiens. Expose your feeling with your gestures, Earn her trust without forcing yourself. Keep your libido down, below your knee, Till you are asked to strip all restraint. It is no man that turns a beast at the sight of woman. Real Man is a father, friend and lover - all in one.

you can’t work through conflict with someone who won’t even come to the table.

The reason why people in traditional marriages tend to stay together for a lifetime is because it is ‘standard’ to sacrifice novelty for longevity, while some of us [the modern ones] who value sensuality and depth of connection in a relationship or marriage find it absolutely preposterous to sacrifice novelty for longevity—the price is just way too high, that is if you truly understand what’s really at stake.

The reason why people in traditional marriages tend to stay together for a lifetime is because it is ‘standard’ to sacrifice novelty for longevity, while some of us [the modern ones] who value and prioritize sensuality and depth of connection in a relationship or marriage find it absolutely preposterous to sacrifice novelty for longevity—the price is just way too high, that is if you truly understand what’s really at stake.

In all 279 episodes of Big Bang, one that consistently pops up on everyone’s best-of list, including the actors, happened early on in season seven. It was “The Scavenger Vortex,” which saw the characters pair off to find a gold coin that Raj had hid. At the time the episode aired, Oliver Sava wrote in the A.V. Club (October 3, 2013): “Over the past seven seasons, The Big Bang Theory has grown to become a nerdy West Coast version of Friends, so it’s no surprise that this week’s competition-centric ‘The Scavenger Vortex’ is reminiscent of Friends’ classic ‘The One with the Embryos.’ Both episodes spotlight the series’ tight ensemble casts by putting the characters in increasingly tense circumstances, and while Big Bang’s paired scavenger [hunt] doesn’t have the high stakes of Friends’ apartment game show, the mismatched couples bring focus to some of the less defined relationships on the show.

When you’re a repeat player, when your world is your business and your business is your world, it’s all about long-term relationships. In any negotiation I believe in leaving a little bit on the table. And in any relationship I believe in sharing the stakes.

Ivar had faced a difficult question: How could he raise capital from investors who wanted a share of his company’s upside without giving them too much power over how the company was to be governed? Ivar didn’t want foreigners intruding on his Swedish companies, but he wanted their money. How could he get more cash from investors without giving them control? Historically, companies had tried various responses to this quandary, with little success. During the late nineteenth century, many companies had been resigned to the fact that they would have to give votes to all of their investors. Even the preferred shares of major industrial trusts (Steel Corporation, the American Woolen Company, and the American Shipbuilding Company, for example) had voting rights.17 Nearly every corporation gave votes to all of its shareholders, including both common and preferred shares. Years earlier, Coca-Cola had devised one awkward solution. It was a publicly listed and widely owned corporation, but 251,000 of its 500,000 shares were held by the Coca-Cola International Company, which was owned by a knot of insiders who held control.18 A few companies had followed CocaCola’s two-company approach: Associated Gas and Electric Securities Corporation held a controlling stake in Associated Gas and Electric Company; Armour and Company of Delaware was controlled by Armour and Company of Illinois.19 But that structure was clumsy and raised legal uncertainties about the relationships between parent and subsidiary.

And so Andy Malloy became the first of many managers I was to have throughout my career. Up to the time I teamed up with Jack Kearns, the managers I had were mostly my friends or well-meaning acquaintances who tried to help me get fights, arranging the small details so that I could dedicate myself to my training. I never signed a contract with any of them, not even Kearns. It just didn’t seem necessary in those days; a handshake was stronger and more meaningful than any inked signature. The only ingredients necessary were respect and trust. There is no doubt in my mind that a fighter needs a manager. Ideally, a manager gets up good likely bouts, arranges suitable dates and times and living accommodations, hires and sometimes fires sparring partners, “sells” his fighter’s ability and skill to others by taking scouting trips and being a good press agent, and honestly handles all accounts as well. This gives the fighter more time to keep himself in shape, running miles, punching bags, jumping rope, sleeping. Together the fighter and the manager are a team, pulling and pushing toward the same goal. If either takes advantage of the other, underestimates or oversteps the given role, then that’s it; a loss of respect sets in and the whole relationship is shot to hell. If such a split does take place, it is usually the fighter who winds up with the short end of the stick. I learned many things from my manager Andy Malloy. I learned to make my body a complete unit, the muscles of my feet, legs, waist, back and shoulders all contributing to the power of my arm. He taught me, in short, that my entire body was at stake in the ring, not just my fists. He was a good teacher.

Of course, forcing conflict is not only healthy for personal relationships. The willingness to lean into tough conversations can make or break a business, sometimes with billions of dollars at stake.

She wanted steady love. A love that was too ordinary to inspire fiction. A collection of sacred, small, everyday moments — not high-stakes drama. She wanted a relationship that was a choice, every minute of every day.

Relationships are a girl’s primary classroom, and what they learn about responsibility in relationship forms the foundation of lifelong habits. Honesty is as much a skill as it is a value. Admitting a wrong is a high-stakes, nerve-racking experience; the longer girls go without these formative moments, the more terrifying they will seem. In confrontation, the need to be seen as Good—and the fear of being exposed as Bad—will pull girls’ strings like a puppeteer. If girls feel they cannot be straightforward about their mistakes, they will hide them and take their true selves underground. And if they feel unable to own mistakes, they will not feel comfortable learning to make them.

There's more at stake from the ripples we make than simply passing through.

Our thinking diverged in several areas. I championed, and he distrusted, formal policy frameworks like inflation targeting, which were intended to improve the Fed’s transparency. He had even made jokes about his own strained relationship with transparency. He told a Senate committee in 1987, “Since becoming a central banker, I have learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.” Also, he did not put much stock in the ability of bank regulation and supervision to keep banks out of trouble. He believed that, so long as banks had enough of their own money at stake, in the form of capital, market forces would deter them from unnecessarily risky lending. And, while I had argued that regulation and supervision should be the first line of defense against asset-price bubbles, he was more inclined to keep hands off and use after-the-fact interest rate cuts to cushion the economic consequences of a burst bubble.

If the eternal destiny of unrepentant, practicing homosexuals is at stake, or even a full relationship with God in the present life, then it would be a "cruel abuse of religious power" to give false assurance that these texts do not condemn homosexual behavior.

For Any Husband Reading This Book: If your wife has shared with you what’s in this book, if you’ve taken our Passive Aggressive Test, or if you’ve just been doing research on your own, you may be beginning to see the truth about your own behavior. You may not want to admit that you have passive aggressive behaviors, but you can still admit that something is not right between you and your partner. No matter what, your marriage is at stake at the moment you’re reading this: a wife in pain means a marriage in pain.  If you still haven’t acted, try to think about what you are facing now. Something is wrong in your relationship: what happens if you don’t fix it? It is easy for us to think that problems go away if we let them drift under the rug, but that can’t happen if we are the ones causing a recurring, troublesome situation. What is preventing you from opening up to yourself and your wife about your situation? If you had a condition passed down to you from your parents (such as hair loss), would you have problems admitting that? We’ve been talking a lot about how passive aggression is taught to people by their parents. In terms of origin, admitting to your (learned) behavior is not so very different from admitting to hereditary hair loss. However, we understand that the hardest thing to admit to yourself is that you’ve been hurting your family. If you acted in the way you’ve always acted, it has  to be normal, right? If you didn’t mean to hurt someone, do you still have to take responsibility? Unfortunately, being an adult means that you DO. Is it painful, difficult? Yes. It’s always hard to admit that we’re doing something damaging to someone else, even unwittingly. It makes us feel less than worthy. But think: your wife hasn’t rejected you now. And she’s telling you that she’s willing to work

In 1511, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, following the orders of Columbus’ son Diego, took a group of 300 men to the island of Cuba, or Caobana as it was called, looking for gold. He conquered and governed Cuba on behalf of the Spanish Crown and moved Havana from Santiago de Cuba on the south-eastern coast to the north coast. Soon Many settlers seeking new beginnings followed his example and although not much gold was discovered on the island, land was available for the taking and the soil was fertile. As the settlers arrived, the Spaniards continued to be overbearing and cruel in their relationship with the Indians, causing the become hostile between them. Chief Hatuey was the Cacique or Chief of 400 Taíno Indians that had fled from the Spaniards in Hispaniola for Cuba. Hatuey resented the ruthless Spaniards and encouraged the Arawakan-speaking people to rise up against them. Seeing the malice of these new intruders, they had no other option but to engage them in guerrilla warfare. Hatuey rallied the local Taínos, telling them that the Spaniards were merciless and that their god was gold. A number of the local Indians actually joined him in the fight. When the Chief was ultimately captured, the Spaniards tortured him, and when he refused to tell them the location of the gold, they burnt him at the stake. A bust on top of a monument honoring Chief Hatuey is located in the town of Baracoa, Cuba. It reads “Primer Rebelde De America Immolado En Yara De Baracoa”, “First rebel of America, Sacrificed in the town of Yara in Baracoa.” He is considered by many to be the first hero of Cuba. His last words were that he did not want to go to Heaven, if that is where Christians go when they die.

The next time you have a high-stakes meeting, a presentation, or an important social engagement, practice power posing beforehand to potently and powerfully impact your confidence.

As with Japanese keiretsu, the member firms in a Korean chaebol own shares in each other and tend to collaborate with each other on what is often a nonprice basis. The Korean chaebol differs from the Japanese prewar zaibatsu or postwar keiretsu, however, in a number of significant ways. First and perhaps most important, Korean network organizations were not centered around a private bank or other financial institution in the way the Japanese keiretsu are.8 This is because Korean commercial banks were all state owned until their privatization in the early 1970s, while Korean industrial firms were prohibited by law from acquiring more than an eight percent equity stake in any bank. The large Japanese city banks that were at the core of the postwar keiretsu worked closely with the Finance Ministry, of course, through the process of overloaning (i.e., providing subsidized credit), but the Korean chaebol were controlled by the government in a much more direct way through the latter’s ownership of the banking system. Thus, the networks that emerged more or less spontaneously in Japan were created much more deliberately as the result of government policy in Korea. A second difference is that the Korean chaebol resemble the Japanese intermarket keiretsu more than the vertical ones (see p. 197). That is, each of the large chaebol groups has holdings in very different sectors, from heavy manufacturing and electronics to textiles, insurance, and retail. As Korean manufacturers grew and branched out into related businesses, they started to pull suppliers and subcontractors into their networks. But these relationships resembled simple vertical integration more than the relational contracting that links Japanese suppliers with assemblers. The elaborate multitiered supplier networks of a Japanese parent firm like Toyota do not have ready counterparts in Korea.9

Planning – ‘Listen and learn’: Ensure commitment to get the business social. Presence – ‘Stake our claim’: Evolution from planning to action, establishing a formal and informed presence in social media; Engagement – ‘Dialogue deepens relationships’: Commitment where social media is seen as a critical element in relationship-building; Formalized – ‘Organize for scale’: A formalized approach focuses on three key activities: establishing an executive sponsor, creating a centre of excellence and establishing organization-wide governance; Strategic – ‘Become a social business’: Social media initiatives gain visibility and real business impact. Converged – ‘Business to social’: Having cross-functional and executive support, social business strategies start to weave into the fabric of an evolving organization.

The last thing she needed was to fall for someone again. Before the move from Denver, she’d had her first serious boyfriend. Millicent had gone along on every one of their dates, suddenly determined to play chaperone. Uncle Pat’s decision to move came just as the relationship was heating up Tara sagged. Why bother falling for another guy? It would hurt too much when Uncle Pat pulled up stakes again. My life sucks, she thought.

Today’s innovators need to figure out how to build working relationships with customers who feel that they too have a stake in the business.

Courtrooms are battlegrounds where society’s bullies and the oppressed clash, where the victims of abusers seek recompense, and where parties cheated by scalawags seek retribution. Because of the high stakes involved, the parties are not always honest, and justice depends upon an array of factors including the prevailing case precedent, the skills of the legal advocates, and the merits of each party’s claims and counterclaims.

Spiritual mentors or peers who are mature in their relationship with God and whose present walk with God we trust can seek God with us and provide us with a sort of “safety net.” If we feel the Spirit is leading us to do something but recognize that much is at stake if we are wrong, we may do well to talk the matter over with other mature Christians. Proverbs advised rulers that wisdom rests in a multitude of counselors, and that advice remains valid for us as well. In the end, we may not always settle on the counsel others give us—like us, they too are fallible—but if they are diligent students of the Scriptures and persons of prayer, we should humbly consider their counsel.

Diana has frequently discussed her concerns about Camilla wither friend James Gilbey. He has provided a sympathetic ear as Diana poured out her feelings of anger and anguish about Camilla. He believes that she is unable to put out of her mind the one-time relationship Camilla enjoyed with Prince Charles. He says: “As a result their marriage is a charade. The whole prospect of Camilla drives her spare. I can understand it. I mean what the hell is that woman doing in her house? This is what she sees as the gross injustice of the thing.” Gilbey, a motor-trade executive, has known Diana since she was 17 but became much closer to her when they met at a party hosted by Julia Samuel. They talked long into the night about their respective love lives--he about a failed romance, she about her fading marriage. In the summer of 1989 she was concerned about winning her husband back and forcing him to make a break with the Highgrove set. He recalls: “There was enormous pride at stake. Her sense of rejection, by her husband and the royal system, was apparent.

When you’re a freelancer, your reputation is always on the line. You have skin in the game, and the stakes are high. You’re fired up about every job because if you don’t do a good job, the client doesn’t have to hire you again. There’s a direct relationship between the work you do and your future with the client. On the other hand, if you’re on staff, you get paid whether the work is great or not.

In this regard I saw a sudden surge of private outreach surrounding each family and each child in need. Waves of individuals began to form personal relationships, beginning with those who saw the family every day—merchants, teachers, police officers on the beat, ministers. This contact was then expanded by other volunteers working as “big brothers,” “big sisters,” and tutors—all guided by their inner intuitions to help, remembering their intention to make a difference with one family, one child. And all carrying the contagion of the Insights and the crucial message that no matter how tough the situation, or how entrenched the self-defeating habits, each of us can wake up to a memory of mission and purpose. As this contagion continued, incidents of violent crime began mysteriously to decrease across human culture; for, as we saw clearly, the roots of violence are always frustration and passion and fear scripts that dehumanize the victim, and a growing interaction with those carrying a higher awareness was now beginning to disrupt this mind-set. We saw a new consensus emerging toward crime that drew from both traditional and human-potential ideas. In the short run, there would be a need for new prisons and detention facilities, as the traditional truth was recognized that returning offenders to the community too soon, or leniently letting perpetrators go in order to give them another chance, reinforced the behavior. Yet, at the same time, we saw an integration of the Insights into the actual operation of these facilities, introducing a wave of private involvement with those incarcerated, shifting the crime culture and initiating the only rehabilitation that works: the contagion of remembering. Simultaneously, as increasingly more people awakened, I saw millions of individuals taking the time to intervene in conflict at every level of human culture—for we all were reaching a new understanding of what was at stake. In every situation where a husband or wife grew angry and lashed out at the other, or where addictive compulsions or a desperate need for approval led a youthful gang member to kill, or where people felt so restricted in their lives that they embezzled or defrauded or manipulated others for gain; in all these situations, there was someone perfectly placed to have prevented the violence but who had failed to act. Surrounding this potential hero were perhaps dozens of other friends and acquaintances who had likewise failed, because they didn’t convey the information and ideas that would have created the wider support system for the intervention to have taken place: In the past perhaps, this failure could have been rationalized, but no longer. Now the Tenth Insight was emerging and we knew that the people in our lives were probably souls with whom we had had long relationships over many lifetimes, and who were now counting on our help. So we are compelled to act, compelled to be courageous. None of us wants to have failure on our conscience, or have to bear a torturous Life Review in which we must watch the tragic consequences of our timidity.

In each of these examples, the determining factor between success and failure is the amount of time that passes between when the problem emerges and when those involved find a way to honestly and respectfully resolve it. What we’re suggesting is that the greatest damage to your relationship with your in-laws is not due to their occasional interference. It’s the toxic emotions and dysfunctional behavior that occurs in the absence of a forthright conversation that causes the greatest damage.

Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack—there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked.

Overcoming the fear of regret starts with lowering the stakes. It helps to remember that not every commitment is an existential saga, and that not all commitments have to be permanent. Commitments are relationships, and relationships are like living things. And living things die. When the life has gone out of a commitment, it’s no longer a relationship—it’s just a dead rule. It’s good to take on relationships and invest in them, and it’s good to work to heal relationships when they are sick. But when they are dead, they are dead. And there’s something morbid about playacting what’s not there anymore.

In addition to its significance in liberal democratic theory, privacy stakes out a sphere for creativity, psychological wellbeing, our ability to love, forge social relationships, promote trust, intimacy, and friendship.

The subject’s relationship to death undergoes a substantive transformation in the turn from a society of prohibition to a society of enjoyment. Despite the latter’s reduction of everything to immanence, the one transcendent moment that no amount of communication would seem to be able to eliminate is that of death. Death is a moment that transcends the immanence of life, indicating a radically inaccessible beyond (even if this beyond is nothingness itself ). It acts as a barrier that every subject must endure, and it is the necessity of this barrier that, for Heidegger, confirms our being-in-the-world. In Being and Time, Heidegger sees the inevitability of death as the one nonrelational moment within existence. That is to say, unlike every other moment of life, universal communication cannot reduce death to the level of the ordinary; it proves an insurmountable barrier. As Heidegger famously puts it, “The non- relational character of death understood in anticipation individualizes Dasein down to itself. This individualizing is a way in which the ‘there’ is disclosed for existence. It reveals the fact that any being-together-with what is taken care of and any being-with the others fails when one’s ownmost potentiality-of-being is at stake.” Death provides the subject with an experience of necessity—a necessary barrier—that constitutes the subject as such and that cannot be communicated or relativized. As such, it represents the moment of transcendence in the midst of immanence, a moment that universal immanence cannot include. Subjects experience their own death as a fundamental limit. However, at a time, as Baudrillard says, “when everything is available” and all distance evaporates, even the necessity of death disappears. Death becomes something contingent, not constitutive. One might encounter it—and then again one might not. The controlling idea in a world without distance is not that death doesn’t exist—one is confronted with it all the time in undeniable forms—but that it is avoidable. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes at length this attitude toward death (an attitude he of course labels “inauthentic”). According to Heidegger, “characteristic talk speaks about death as a constantly occurring ‘case.’ It treats it as something always already ‘real,’ and veils its character of possibility and concomitantly the two factors belonging to it, that it is nonrelational and cannot-be-bypassed.” We experience death as the result of “errors” in human calculation or behavior, rather than a moment constitutive for human existence proper. When death is just a “case” or the result of certain “behavior patterns,” I can focus entirely on my behavior that might prevent it—diet, exercise, “healthy living” in general—and not on the possibility that “cannot-be-bypassed,” the necessity that cannot be evaded. In this way, the idea of an insurmountable barrier disappears.

A good transitional call to action can do three powerful things for your brand: 1.​Stake a claim to your territory. If you want to be known as the leader in a certain territory, stake a claim to that territory before the competition beats you to it. Creating a PDF, a video series, or anything else that positions you as the expert is a great way to establish authority. 2.​Create reciprocity. I’ve never worried about giving away too much free information. In fact, the more generous a brand is, the more reciprocity they create. All relationships are give-and-take, and the more you give to your customers, the more likely they will be to give something back in the future. Give freely. 3.​Position yourself as the guide. When you help your customers solve a problem, even for free, you position yourself as the guide. The next time they encounter a problem in that area of their lives, they will look to you for help.

It is not unusual to be drawn into a love relationship with a person we hurt in the distant past in an attempt to heal. The problem is that instead of healing an ancient wound, most often we end up reinjuring each other. That person who once burned you at the stake for your beliefs in a Christian or pagan god, and whom you confuse for your beloved, ends up lighting the kindling under you once again. And you’re left wondering why you are choking from the smoke of the relationship. When you are sure that you have met your dream lover, your soul mate, and every cell in your body is quivering with excitement, run away as fast as you can. Unless, of course, you are ready to sign up for another lesson in the school of emotional storms. We never got the best parents, only the right parents for us. We never got the best spouse, only the right spouse. The sooner we recognize this the faster we will be able to move on to more interesting engagements with the world. Learning to love the people you do not necessarily approve of or agree with is a challenge, but they are often our greatest teachers. They hold the mirror up to us so we can see hidden and neglected parts of ourselves in them. As for your soul mate, accept that you will never find that person perfectly designed to your romantic specifications. They do not exist. But know that you can become the right partner. This will only happen once you stop looking for him or her.

By tentatively sharing a story rather than attacking, name-calling, and threatening, the worried spouse averted a huge battle, and the couple’s relationship was strengthened at a time when it could easily have been damaged.

After feeling rejected, bullied, and lonely in middle school, I realized, in a much more profound way, how important relationships were. Fitting in, and being liked, became the only thing I really cared about. Belonging is a central need in the human experience. Relationships are everything.

According to Hegel, the desire for recognition initially drives two primordial combatants to seek to make the other “recognize” their humanness by staking their lives in a mortal battle. When the natural fear of death leads one combatant to submit, the relationship of master and slave is born. The stakes in this bloody battle at the beginning of history are not food, shelter, or security, but pure prestige. And precisely because the goal of the battle is not determined by biology, Hegel sees in it the first glimmer of human freedom.

A good transitional call to action can do three powerful things for your brand: 1.​Stake a claim to your territory. If you want to be known as the leader in a certain territory, stake a claim to that territory before the competition beats you to it. Creating a PDF, a video series, or anything else that positions you as the expert is a great way to establish authority. 2.​Create reciprocity. I’ve never worried about giving away too much free information. In fact, the more generous a brand is, the more reciprocity they create. All relationships are give-and-take, and the more you give to your customers, the more likely they will be to give something back in the future. Give freely. 3.​Position yourself as the guide. When you help your customers solve a problem, even for free, you position yourself as the guide. The next time they encounter a problem in that area of their lives, they will look to you for help. Transitional calls to action come in all shapes and sizes. Here are a few ideas to create transitional calls to action of your own: •​Free information: Create a white paper or free PDF educating customers about your field of expertise. This will position you as a guide in your customer’s story and create reciprocity. Educational videos, podcasts, webinars, and even live events are great transitional calls to action that on-ramp customers toward a purchase. •​Testimonials: Creating a video or PDF including testimonials from happy clients creates a story map in the minds of potential customers. When they see others experience a successful ending to their story, they will want that same ending for themselves. •​Samples: If you can give away free samples of your product, do it. Offering a customer the ability to test-drive a car, taste your seasoning, sample your music, or read a few pages of your book are great ways to introduce potential customers to your products. •​Free trial: Offering a limited-time free trial works as a risk-removal policy that helps to on-ramp your customers. Once they try your product, they may not be able to live without it.

Africans began life in the Americas as subjects profoundly shaped by their Atlantic experience, and the communities they created in the Americas were organized around solutions to the specific problems they faced. The cultures they produced do not reflect the simple transfer and continuation of Africa in the Americas but rather reflect the elaboration of specific cultural content and its transformation to meet the particular needs of slave life in the Atlantic system: their need to reassert some kind of healthy relationship to ancestors; to manage death; to produce social networks, communities, and relations of kinship; to address the imbalance of power between black and white; to stake a claim to their bodies to counter the plantation economy’s claim to ownership. In this sense, the cultural practices of diasporic Africa could have meaning only outside Africa. Shared Atlantic experience and memory served as a touchstone for new cultural practices that emerged in the New World diaspora. Only through the capacity and willingness to invent and experiment—to grow and change the cultural tools carried in memory and create new ones to meet the demands of this new world—could Africans hope to remain recognizable to themselves as human beings in a system that held so much of their humanity in callous and calculated disregard. African immigrants retained that foothold in ways determined by the varied circumstances of their slavery: the immigrant slave might adapt a remembered ritual practice to new applications in American slavery or explore and perhaps ultimately adopt an entirely novel practice. The means were extraordinarily diverse because of the great variety of settings and conditions in which the colonial economies of the Americas enslaved human beings. The continuity Africans needed was not the static, ossifying connection of conformity of practice—doing things in the present as they had been done in the past, even when the context of past cultural forms no longer corresponded to the needs and circumstances of the present. Rather, the connection Africans needed was a narrative continuity between past and present—an epistemological means of connecting the dots between there and here, then and now, to craft a coherent story out of incoherent experience.

Now, allow yourself to consider the radical nature of what this passage says about the deepest motivations of the hearts of God’s people. They have connected their deepest love, belief, joy, and faith to someone they have never seen, heard, or touched. They have staked the hopes and dreams of their lives to this invisible One. Their relationship to him is one of life-altering love. When they think of him, they experience joy, joy so deep that it cannot be expressed.