Successful Teaching Demonstration Quotes

This century will be called Darwin's century. He was one of the greatest men who ever touched this globe. He has explained more of the phenomena of life than all of the religious teachers. Write the name of Charles Darwin on the one hand and the name of every theologian who ever lived on the other, and from that name has come more light to the world than from all of those. His doctrine of evolution, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of orthodox Christianity. He has not only stated, but he has demonstrated, that the inspired writer knew nothing of this world, nothing of the origin of man, nothing of geology, nothing of astronomy, nothing of nature; that the Bible is a book written by ignorance--at the instigation of fear. Think of the men who replied to him. Only a few years ago there was no person too ignorant to successfully answer Charles Darwin, and the more ignorant he was the more cheerfully he undertook the task. He was held up to the ridicule, the scorn and contempt of the Christian world, and yet when he died, England was proud to put his dust with that of her noblest and her grandest. Charles Darwin conquered the intellectual world, and his doctrines are now accepted facts. His light has broken in on some of the clergy, and the greatest man who to-day occupies the pulpit of one of the orthodox churches, Henry Ward Beecher, is a believer in the theories of Charles Darwin--a man of more genius than all the clergy of that entire church put together. ...The church teaches that man was created perfect, and that for six thousand years he has degenerated. Darwin demonstrated the falsity of this dogma. He shows that man has for thousands of ages steadily advanced; that the Garden of Eden is an ignorant myth; that the doctrine of original sin has no foundation in fact; that the atonement is an absurdity; that the serpent did not tempt, and that man did not 'fall.' Charles Darwin destroyed the foundation of orthodox Christianity. There is nothing left but faith in what we know could not and did not happen. Religion and science are enemies. One is a superstition; the other is a fact. One rests upon the false, the other upon the true. One is the result of fear and faith, the other of investigation and reason.

Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled, the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains—its successful maintenance against a formidable attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion, that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets, and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace, teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take by war—teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.” In

The intelligent want self-control; children want candy. —RUMI INTRODUCTION Welcome to Willpower 101 Whenever I mention that I teach a course on willpower, the nearly universal response is, “Oh, that’s what I need.” Now more than ever, people realize that willpower—the ability to control their attention, emotions, and desires—influences their physical health, financial security, relationships, and professional success. We all know this. We know we’re supposed to be in control of every aspect of our lives, from what we eat to what we do, say, and buy. And yet, most people feel like willpower failures—in control one moment but overwhelmed and out of control the next. According to the American Psychological Association, Americans name lack of willpower as the number-one reason they struggle to meet their goals. Many feel guilty about letting themselves and others down. Others feel at the mercy of their thoughts, emotions, and cravings, their lives dictated by impulses rather than conscious choices. Even the best-controlled feel a kind of exhaustion at keeping it all together and wonder if life is supposed to be such a struggle. As a health psychologist and educator for the Stanford School of Medicine’s Health Improvement Program, my job is to help people manage stress and make healthy choices. After years of watching people struggle to change their thoughts, emotions, bodies, and habits, I realized that much of what people believed about willpower was sabotaging their success and creating unnecessary stress. Although scientific research had much to say that could help them, it was clear that these insights had not yet become part of public understanding. Instead, people continued to rely on worn-out strategies for self-control. I saw again and again that the strategies most people use weren’t just ineffective—they actually backfired, leading to self-sabotage and losing control. This led me to create “The Science of Willpower,” a class offered to the public through Stanford University’s Continuing Studies program. The course brings together the newest insights about self-control from psychology, economics, neuroscience, and medicine to explain how we can break old habits and create healthy habits, conquer procrastination, find our focus, and manage stress. It illuminates why we give in to temptation and how we can find the strength to resist. It demonstrates the importance of understanding the limits of self-control,

Today, many popular preachers are positive thinkers who offer the promise of wealth, success, and health through their teachings. They believe that there is enough for everyone and if we just demonstrate our faith a little bit more, everything will be ours for the taking. These preachers repeat the same message in a variety of ways, but one thing is clear: the devil is negative thinking. . . . Within these positive religious communities, there is a strong belief that everything happens for a reason, it's all part of God's plan, if you had faith you wouldn't worry, and God wants you to be healthy, happy, and rich. If you are falling short in any of these areas, you simply need to change your thoughts.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz demonstrated a similar, learned inflexibility among experienced practitioners when he gave college students a logic puzzle that involved hitting switches to turn light bulbs on and off in sequence, and that they could play over and over. It could be solved in seventy different ways, with a tiny money reward for each success. The students were not given any rules, and so had to proceed by trial and error.* If a student found a solution, they repeated it over and over to get more money, even if they had no idea why it worked. Later on, new students were added, and all were now asked to discover the general rule of all solutions. Incredibly, every student who was brand-new to the puzzle discovered the rule for all seventy solutions, while only one of the students who had been getting rewarded for a single solution did. The subtitle of Schwartz’s paper: “How Not to Teach People to Discover Rules

The aim is to get the students actively involved in seeking this evidence: their role is not simply to do tasks as decided by teachers, but to actively manage and understand their learning gains. This includes evaluating their own progress, being more responsible for their learning, and being involved with peers in learning together about gains in learning. If students are to become active evaluators of their own progress, teachers must provide the students with appropriate feedback so that they can engage in this task. Van den Bergh, Ros, and Beijaard (2010: 3) describe the task thus: Fostering active learning seems a very challenging and demanding task for teachers, requiring knowledge of students’ learning processes, skills in providing guidance and feedback and classroom management. The need is to engage students in this same challenging and demanding task. The suggestion in this chapter is to start lessons with helping students to understand the intention of the lesson and showing them what success might look like at the end. Many times, teachers look for the interesting beginning to a lesson – for the hook, and the motivating question. Dan Willingham (2009) has provided an excellent argument for not thinking in this way. He advocates starting with what the student is likely to think about. Interesting hooks, demonstrations, fascinating facts, and likewise may seem to be captivating (and often are), but he suggests that there are likely to be other parts of the lesson that are more suitable for the attention-grabber. The place for the attention-grabber is more likely to be at the end of the lesson, because this will help to consolidate what has been learnt. Most importantly,Willingham asks teachers to think long and hard about how to make the connection between the attention-grabber and the point that it is designed to make; preferably, that point will be the main idea from the lesson. Having too many open-ended activities (discovery learning, searching the Internet, preparing PowerPoint presentations) can make it difficult to direct students’ attention to that which matters – because they often love to explore the details, the irrelevancies, and the unimportant while doing these activities. One of Willingham's principles is that any teaching method is most useful when there is plenty of prompt feedback about whether the student is thinking about a problem in the right way. Similarly, he promotes the notion that assignments should be primarily about what the teacher wants the students to think about (not about demonstrating ‘what they know’). Students are very good at ignoring what you say (‘I value connections, deep ideas, your thoughts’) and seeing what you value (corrections to the grammar, comments on referencing, correctness or absence of facts). Thus teachers must develop a scoring rubric for any assignment before they complete the question or prompts, and show the rubric to the students so that they know what the teacher values. Such formative feedback can reinforce the ‘big ideas’ and the important understandings, and help to make the investment of

This reaction to the work was obviously a misunderstanding. It ignores the fact that the future Buddha was also of noble origins, that he was the son of a king and heir to the throne and had been raised with the expectation that one day he would inherit the crown. He had been taught martial arts and the art of government, and having reached the right age, he had married and had a son. All of these things would be more typical of the physical and mental formation of a future samurai than of a seminarian ready to take holy orders. A man like Julius Evola was particularly suitable to dispel such a misconception. He did so on two fronts in his Doctrine: on the one hand, he did not cease to recall the origins of the Buddha, Prince Siddhartha, who was destined to the throne of Kapilavastu: on the other hand, he attempted to demonstrate that Buddhist asceticism is not a cowardly resignation before life's vicissitudes, but rather a struggle of a spiritual kind, which is not any less heroic than the struggle of a knight on the battlefield. As Buddha himself said (Mahavagga, 2.15): 'It is better to die fighting than to live as one vanquished.' This resolution is in accord with Evola's ideal of overcoming natural resistances in order to achieve the Awakening through meditation; it should he noted, however, that the warrior terminology is contained in the oldest writings of Buddhism, which are those that best reflect the living teaching of the master. Evola works tirelessly in his hook to erase the Western view of a languid and dull doctrine that in fact was originally regarded as aristocratic and reserved for real 'champions.' After Schopenhauer, the unfounded idea arose in Western culture that Buddhism involved a renunciation of the world and the adoption of a passive attitude: 'Let things go their way; who cares anyway.' Since in this inferior world 'everything is evil,' the wise person is the one who, like Simeon the Stylite, withdraws, if not to the top of a pillar; at least to an isolated place of meditation. Moreover, the most widespread view of Buddhists is that of monks dressed in orange robes, begging for their food; people suppose that the only activity these monks are devoted to is reciting memorized texts, since they shun prayers; thus, their religion appears to an outsider as a form of atheism. Evola successfully demonstrates that this view is profoundly distorted by a series of prejudices. Passivity? Inaction? On the contrary, Buddha never tired of exhorting his disciples to 'work toward victory'; he himself, at the end of his life, said with pride: katam karaniyam, 'done is what needed to he done!' Pessimism? It is true that Buddha, picking up a formula of Brahmanism, the religion in which he had been raised prior to his departure from Kapilavastu, affirmed that everything on earth is 'suffering.' But he also clarified for us that this is the case because we are always yearning to reap concrete benefits from our actions. For example, warriors risk their lives because they long for the pleasure of victory and for the spoils, and yet in the end they are always disappointed: the pillaging is never enough and what has been gained is quickly squandered. Also, the taste of victory soon fades away. But if one becomes aware of this state of affairs (this is one aspect of the Awakening), the pessimism is dispelled since reality is what it is, neither good nor bad in itself; reality is inscribed in Becoming, which cannot be interrupted. Thus, one must live and act with the awareness that the only thing that matters is each and every moment. Thus, duty (dhamma) is claimed to be the only valid reference point: 'Do your duty,' that is. 'let your every action he totally disinterested.

True law necessarily is rooted in ethical assumptions or norms; and those ethical principles are derived, in the beginning at least, from religious convictions. When the religious understanding, from which a concept of law arose in a culture, has been discarded or denied, the laws may endure for some time, through what sociologists call "cultural lag"; but in the long run, the laws also will be discarded or denied. With this hard truth in mind, I venture to suggest that the corpus of English and American laws--for the two arise for the most part from a common root of belief and experience--cannot endure forever unless it is animated by the spirit that moved it in the beginning: that is, by religion, and specifically by the Christian people. Certain moral postulates of Christian teaching have been taken for granted, in the past, as the ground of justice. When courts of law ignore those postulates, we grope in judicial darkness. . . . We suffer from a strong movement to exclude such religious beliefs from the operation of courts of law, and to discriminate against those unenlightened who cling fondly to the superstitions of the childhood of the race. Many moral beliefs, however, though sustained by religious convictions, may not be readily susceptible of "scientific" demonstration. After all, our abhorrence of murder, rape, and other crimes may be traced back to the Decalogue and other religious injunctions. If it can be shown that our opposition to such offenses is rooted in religion, then are restraints upon murder and rape unconstitutional? We arrive at such absurdities if we attempt to erect a wall of separation between the operation of the laws and those Christian moral convictions that move most Americans. If we are to try to sustain some connection between Christian teaching and the laws of this land of ours, we must understand the character of that link. We must claim neither too much nor too little for the influence of Christian belief upon our structure of law. . . . I am suggesting that Christian faith and reason have been underestimated in an age bestridden, successively, by the vulgarized notions of the rationalists, the Darwinians, and the Freudians. Yet I am not contending that the laws ever have been the Christian word made flesh nor that they can ever be. . . . What Christianity (or any other religion) confers is not a code of positive laws, but instead some general understanding of justice, the human condition being what it is. . . . In short, judges cannot well be metaphysicians--not in the execution of their duties upon the bench, at any rate, even though the majority upon the Supreme Court of this land, and judges in inferior courts, seem often to have mistaken themselves for original moral philosophers during the past quarter century. The law that judges mete out is the product of statute, convention, and precedent. Yet behind statute, convention, and precedent may be discerned, if mistily, the forms of Christian doctrines, by which statute and convention and precedent are much influenced--or once were so influenced. And the more judges ignore Christian assumptions about human nature and justice, the more they are thrown back upon their private resources as abstract metaphysicians--and the more the laws of the land fall into confusion and inconsistency. Prophets and theologians and ministers and priests are not legislators, ordinarily; yet their pronouncements may be incorporated, if sometimes almost unrecognizably, in statute and convention and precedent. The Christian doctrine of natural law cannot be made to do duty for "the law of the land"; were this tried, positive justice would be delayed to the end of time. Nevertheless, if the Christian doctrine of natural law is cast aside utterly by magistrates, flouted and mocked, then positive law becomes patternless and arbitrary.

EXPERIMENT That our beliefs about the capability of others have a direct impact on their performance has been adequately demonstrated in a number of experiments from the field of education. In these tests teachers are told, wrongly, that a group of average pupils are either scholarship candidates or have learning difficulties. They teach a set curriculum to the group for a period of time. Subsequent academic tests show that the pupils’ results invariably reflect the false beliefs of their teachers about their ability. It is equally true that the performance of employees will reflect the beliefs of their managers. For example, Fred sees himself as having limited potential. He feels safe only when he operates well within his prescribed limit. This is like his shell. His manager will only trust him with tasks within that shell. The manager will give him task A, because he trusts Fred to do it and Fred is able to do it. The manager will not give him task B, because he sees this as beyond Fred’s capability. He sees only Fred’s performance, not his potential. If he gives the task to the more experienced Jane instead, which is expedient and understandable, the manager reinforces or validates Fred’s shell and increases its strength and thickness. He needs to do the opposite, to help Fred venture outside his shell, to support or coach him to success with task B. To use coaching successfully we have to adopt a far more optimistic view than usual of the dormant capability of all people. Pretending we are optimistic is insufficient because our genuine beliefs are conveyed in many subtle ways of which we are not aware.

The idea is to help patients more clearly assess the contents of their thought stream, teaching them to note and correct the conceptual errors termed "cognitive distortions" that characterize psychopathological thinking. Somone in the grips of such thinking would, for instance, regard a half-full glass not merely as half-empty but also fatally flawed, forever useless, constitutionally incapable of ever being full, and fit only to be discarded. By the mid-1980s, cognitive therapy was being used more and more in combination with behavioral therapy for OCD, and it seemed naturally compatible with a mindfulness-based perspective. If I could show that a cognitive-behavioral approach, infused with mindful awareness, could be marshaled against the disease, and if successful therapy were accompanied by changes in brain activity, then it would represent a significant step toward demonstrating the causal efficacy of mental activity on neural circuits.

The job of the artist or the poet or the educator or the business person is not just to paint what we want to see, write what we want to read and hear, teach us what we want to learn or produce what we want to buy. Their role is to interpret the underlying high-level objectives that we seek from art, poetry, education, or goods and services more fully than we could ourselves articulate them. Success in recasting problems to achieve our objectives more effectively than we had conceived distinguishes the great from the merely competent ad demonstrates why the direct approach is so often banal. 

Completed studies suggest that psilocybin—or rather the mystical state of consciousness that psilocybin occasions—may be useful in treating both addiction (a pilot study in smoking cessation achieved an 80 percent success rate, which is unprecedented) and the existential distress that often debilitates people facing a terminal diagnosis. When we last met, Griffiths was about to submit an article reporting striking results in the lab’s trial using psilocybin to treat the anxiety and depression of cancer patients; the study found one of the largest treatment effects ever demonstrated for a psychiatric intervention. The majority of volunteers who had a mystical experience reported that their fear of death had either greatly diminished or completely disappeared.

In summary, a good teacher does the following: - never tells a student anything that the teacher thinks is true - never allows himself to be the ultimate judge of his own students' success - teacher practice first, theory second (if he must teach theory at all) - does not come up with lists of knowledge that every student must know - doesn't teach anything unless he can easily explain the use of learning it - assigns no homework, unless that homework is to produce something - groups students according to their interests and abilities, not their ages - ensures that any reward to a student is intrinsic - teaches students things they may actually need to know after they leave school - helps students come up with their own explanations when they have made a mistake - never assumes that a student is listening to what he is saying - never assumes that students will do what he asks them to do if what he asked does not relate to a goal they truly hold - never allows pleasing the teacher to be the goal of the student - understands that students won't do what he tells them if they don't understand what is being asked of them - earns the respect of students by demonstrating abilities - motivate students to do better, and does not help them to do better - understands that his job is to get students to do something - understands that experience, not teachers, changes belief systems - confuses students - does not expect credit for good teaching

Hawaii DUI attorney Hawaii DUI Legislation As part of the Hawaii DUI is taken to manage OVUII provisions relating "to the job without having to do, under the influence of narcotics." At any time, arrested me with this design crime, two different scenarios are part of the action. Individual courses in prison behind the lower through life, and the management can unforeseen consequences for you are behind the privileges. While it has an address that is protected effectively only two scenarios and the services of a DUI attorney in Hawaii will have to use, is the perfect solution. Take a Hawaii DUI lawyer as well as a symbol of crimes and administrative conditions in order simply because a knowledgeable attorney composed of a selection of tools and consultants from personal experience what is a second has been selected to represent the country. Team Hawaii DUI North Carolina, which do not contain a large number of other closely how the situation further. Two scenarios can be supplied to the defendant standards. In particular, it depends on the devaluation of the accused, even if it makes the work of the unit. This usually means that the defendant was the less able, of course, the direction of action of motor vehicles and motor vehicles that the liquid does not eat before experiencing again. Fiscal policy scenarios on how to warn this routine, the incredible strength, the smell of alcohol on his breath of the accused, chemical tests are successful, the driver's actual appearance. When you are ready to have to effectively protect against cross phase of the project, I recommend Hawaii DUI lawyer trained to drive during treatment and can demonstrate an adequate protection. Delgado was of the view that it is "per se". This means that the prosecutor have not been included in the exhibition show the method or the driver looked in the direction under the influence of alcohol behind the negative cable. These types of circumstances, mostly on the same chemical research and the prosecution on the basis must prove that the defendant to reduce the crime in Hawaii in March for chemical research in the blood of 0.08% or more, is in the liquid phase summarized exposed. Hawaii DUI lawyer to eat properly trained is reflected in this model can help each scenario to ensure that the legs yourselfer difference in the fighting. Hawaii is a place, a time of "natural Look Back", contains to return to the effects of the crime. Search again, it's time the crime is alleged for the first act, when the perpetrator of a lack of experience composed only other offense again. If a particular offense known author and has only should recognize this period as an impending crime or offense. Exhibition Dates countries Hawaii is five years. This suggests that the accused has no criminal DUI during the last five calendar years; the first violation would be appreciated. Administrative Results Concession withdrawal of the Office of Management reliable care for administrative purposes on drunken driving offense in Hawaii leaders together. Hawaii is the player under Tiny Interstate. This little machine is comparable towards alternative requirements for the content of teaching, the DUI offense. This means that if someone is breaking the law is arrested by driving under the influence of alcohol in the country that the players informed of their offensive in the direction of your region and the country at home, the home to protect the rights of accessories to suspend. This may be necessary, for depression itself could protect live in Hawaii. Hawaii DUI attorney, these values and work to be able to move to an adequate safety system hard, suspended to keep the license point home.

To help your child, try implementing the following strategies: Encourage your child to invite friends over after school or on weekends. If they don’t feel confident enough to do this, you could contact the parents to make arrangements yourself. Talk to your child’s teacher and ask them to suggest some potential friends whose parents you might be able to make contact with. Help your child plan in advance the activities they could do or play with their friends and discuss important issues such as sharing and not being bossy. Model and teach positive social skills, and always praise your child when you witness these being used. This is essential to being successful at making friends. Some examples of positive social skills that must be used when making friends and keeping them are: Smiling and being friendly Making eye contact when speaking or being spoken to Knowing names and using a confident, friendly voice when talking to others Listening to the needs and preferences of others Making compromises with friends, they won’t always want to do what your child wants to do If you see your child being negative and displaying poor social behaviors, quietly discuss with them the need to behave differently. Demonstrate what to say or role-play preferred behaviors with them, so they have a good understanding of how to act. Don’t make this discussion a critical or negative experience; your approach should be positive and helpful.

To help your child, try implementing the following strategies: Encourage your child to invite friends over after school or on weekends. If they don’t feel confident enough to do this, you could contact the parents to make arrangements yourself. Talk to your child’s teacher and ask them to suggest some potential friends whose parents you might be able to make contact with. Help your child plan in advance the activities they could do or play with their friends and discuss important issues such as sharing and not being bossy. Model and teach positive social skills, and always praise your child when you witness these being used. This is essential to being successful at making friends. Some examples of positive social skills that must be used when making friends and keeping them are: Smiling and being friendly Making eye contact when speaking or being spoken to Knowing names and using a confident, friendly voice when talking to others Listening to the needs and preferences of others Making compromises with friends, they won’t always want to do what your child wants to do If you see your child being negative and displaying poor social behaviors, quietly discuss with them the need to behave differently. Demonstrate what to say or role-play preferred behaviors with them, so they have a good understanding of how to act. Don’t make this discussion a critical or negative experience; your approach should be positive and helpful. Coach and support your child on a regular basis with the skills they need to remember when making friends. They can practice the desired behaviors with family members. Quietly prompt, remind and encourage them to use the skills you have discussed. Praise should be used to encourage your child when they act in a friendly and cooperative manner. Always do this quietly away from

Basketball’s real gift was teaching me that it’s limiting to try to measure a life in points per game, grade point averages, or other arbitrary metrics of success. It’s fine to strive for greatness, but as Anyu has demonstrated, it’s far more lasting to take pride in your goodness.

When our kids are infants and toddlers it’s highly appropriate for us to engage in a running monologue about their environment—that’s how they learn the language—but once they are toddlers and can carry on a bit of conversation, we want them to be doing their share of the talking in response to our good, open-ended questions. Since conversation is the best mechanism for practicing and seeing the results of critical thinking, below are sample dialogues between parent and child that demonstrate ways you can teach your kids to think for themselves. These dialogues employ the continual questioning approach, which boils down to you, the parent, being always interested in the “what,” “how,” or “why” underneath whatever your kid has just said. This method will work regardless of your kid’s age, though the subject matter will change and grow more complex as the child matures and becomes more intellectually sophisticated.

The issue is just as devastating for modern scholars who pronounce the merits of Gnosticism. Since the 1980s a succession of historians of religion have rightly pointed out that the Gnostics were unfairly maligned by their ancient critics. The “Gnostics” (if the term is even appropriate) were philosophical Christians who sincerely and intellectually asked and answered questions about the nature of the world, the identity of Christ, and the human condition. The portrayal of the Gnostics as the archetypical heretics out to destroy the true church through the production of invidious heretical teachings is overblown, inaccurate, and the result of ancient polemic written by the orthodox, historical victors. Harvard New Testament scholar Karen King has even demonstrated that there really was no coherent group of “Gnostics” in antiquity and that our belief that this group existed is also the product of paranoid orthodox invective.35

As crazy as all of this may sound to you, I know that our brains are able to control so many things depending on how we think about something. About twenty years ago, a business partner and I taught real estate investing seminars. One of the most significant factors that affects someone’s success in real estate, or any other endeavor, is belief. I’ve heard it said that if you believe you can or if you believe you can’t, either way, you’re right. Suppose you really honestly believe that you’ll succeed in real estate or any other endeavor. In that case, you’re about 1,000 times more likely to put in the effort and stick with it. If you don’t believe you’re going to succeed, then most people put in next to no effort to basically prove themselves right when nothing happens. At our seminars, we would demonstrate this by teaching the concept of “Spots.” We explained that according to an ancient methodology, we all have a weak spot and a strong spot. Speaking in a strong, confident voice, we’d say, “Here’s your strong spot right here,” and demonstrate this by touching the center of our forehead. “You also have a weak spot” (speaking in a softer, weaker voice). “It’s located in the soft fleshly spot right here behind your ear.” We again demonstrated and encouraged them to follow along. Then to give it a little emphasis, we added, “Careful, don’t push it too much, or you’ll get really weak!” Then we said, “We’ll show you how this actually works,” and invited one of the stronger-looking participants up onto the stage. We’d touch the person in their “strong” spot and ask them to hold their arm straight out to the side. “Now I’m going to push down on your arm, and I want you to resist me as much as you can.” We’d push down with a decent amount of effort, and our client’s arm would not budge down at all. “Now I’m going to touch your weak spot” (touching the person behind their ear). “And watch as I’m now able to push their arm completely down.” The crazy thing is that no matter how hard the subject tries to hold their arm up, after touching their “weak” spot, it drops right down with much less effort than during the first attempt. Then we said, “Now I want you to prove this to yourself. Pair up with the person next to you to test this out for yourself.” The room would buzz with the sounds of people talking as they discovered that the strong and weak spots really did, for the most part, work. Then we would switch the spots. “Isn’t it crazy that just because we told you to push on the strong spot behind your ear, that made you really strong? And when we told you to push on the weak spot in the middle of your forehead, that made you really weak?” we’d say. “No, no, you’ve got them backward!” the crowd would shout at us. At which point, we’d demonstrate that the spots worked just as well if you switched them, finally telling them, “We actually made all this up—but it works anyway!” What you tell yourself and what you believe really does make a difference. I don’t know if this helps to explain why I was hiking the Appalachian Trail. I was passionately committed to the belief that if I hiked the entire Appalachian Trail, then my foot and leg were going to have to be better. Each day that I hiked, with every mile further north that I went, heck, with every single step I took, I was reclaiming my life. I know that anything is possible. My adventure on the trail proved this to me each and every day. 14 May—Finding a Buddy You Can’t Avoid Pain, But You Can Choose to Overcome it. —Paulo Coelho Two and a half hours after leaving Shenandoah National Park, I arrived home.

Prince Arjuna, though born into the warrior estate, was at heart a peace-loving man. When the two colossal armies lined up on opposite sides, he began to have serious doubts about his task. It was not so much personal fear of death that swayed his heart but, rather, acute moral qualms. Has anyone the right, he wondered, to use force in order to promote the larger good? His dilemma was greatly aggravated by the fact that among those whom he was supposed to fight—maim and possibly kill—were kinsmen and revered teachers. Arjuna’s duty as a warrior was clear enough; he had to fight. But the moment he contemplated the larger implications of this action, he was terrified to abide by his decision to reconquer his lost kingdom. Arjuna’s attitude is typical of human life itself. We are all the time engaged in decision-making or in decision-avoidance. The more consciously we live, the more we realize that life is really an incessant stream of potential decisions. Arjuna, as we know, did fight his war and also emerged victorious. But first he had to learn an important spiritual lesson. Lord Krishna, who acted as his charioteer, convinced the prince that his whole confusion was the result of a faulty perspective. The God-man demonstrated to the prince that the problem that caused him such anxiety was a problem conjured up by the ego. It had no existence apart from the ego. The divine teacher made Arjuna understand that we can never transcend our circumstances merely by closing our eyes, by avoiding action, by dropping out. Even avoidance is an action, which will have its inevitable repercussions since avoidance is rooted in the ego. What Lord Krishna recommended instead was a cognitive shift, a new view of the whole matter: away from the delimiting, anxious ego and toward the boundless Self. All action must be sacrifice, he explained. We must not hold on to any conventional ego-derived scheme. Only when we abandon the delusion that we, as ego-personalities, are the ultimate initiators of actions can we have knowledge of what is truly right and good. That is to say, when we discover the “witness,” the transcendental Self, we realize that life unfolds spontaneously and mysteriously, and that the ego is merely one of the countless forms arising within the flux of life. For the Hindu authorities, the general deterioration of spirituality and the decline of humanity’s psychological health in no way precludes the possibility of spiritual aspiration and success. It is nowhere denied that contemporary humanity, feeble as it may be in comparison to its ancestors, can swim against the stream. On the contrary, all spiritual teachings affirm that we must do our utmost to cultivate spiritual values in the midst of the great darkness surrounding us.

The most successful entrepreneur that every lived (God) was and is successful because Jesus and the Holy Spirit showed they cared for poor lost souls. They were willing share knowledge and demonstrate how things should be done. Not one successful entrepreneur has every done it alone or has not had help from another. Teaching and working together is becoming a lost art. The lack of this may seem like job security for the some, but it's not. The one who does this must come to the realization that his security is threaten by the desperate fuel by his own selfishness. Even inventors have to find caring distributors who get their products out before the masses. Perseverance is just a link in the chain of success. 99% of the chain is sharing knowledge and showing that you care. The opposite of this is fleeting success. Success that is like a vapor, here one moment and gone the next.