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The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.
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Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
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Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.
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Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
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Imagine that the keeper of a huge, strong beast notices what makes it angry, what it desires, how it has to be approached and handled, the circumstances and the conditions under which it becomes particularly fierce or calm, what provokes its typical cries, and what tones of voice make it gentle or wild. Once he's spent enough time in the creature's company to acquire all this information, he calls it knowledge, forms it into a systematic branch of expertise, and starts to teach it, despite total ignorance, in fact, about which of the creature's attitudes and desires is commendable or deplorable, good or bad, moral or immoral. His usage of all these terms simply conforms to the great beast's attitudes, and he describes things as good or bad according to its likes and dislikes, and can't justify his usage of the terms any further, but describes as right and good the things which are merely indispensable, since he hasn't realised and can't explain to anyone else how vast a gulf there is between necessity and goodness.
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Plato (The Republic)
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Though the integration into a single whole of all legitimate theologies is an eschatological desideratum, it can only be approached asymptotically in time.
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Aidan Nichols (Chalice of God: A Systematic Theology in Outline)
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thinking and writing are very different. Thinking can often be somewhat unstructured, disorganized, and even chaotic. In contrast, writing encourages the creation of a story line and structure that help people make sense of what has happened and work toward a solution. In short, talking can add to a sense of confusion, but writing provides a more systematic, solution-based approach.
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Richard Wiseman (59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot)
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Success is the ability to solve problems as well. A goal or an objective unachieved, in any area, is merely a problem unsolved. This is why a systematic approach to problem solving, one that works at a higher level and more consistently, is absolutely vital for you to achieve the maximum success that is possible for you. Think
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Brian Tracy (Get Smart!: How to Think and Act Like the Most Successful and Highest-Paid People in Every Field)
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Learning and education have frequently degenerated into the systematic accumulation of facts and information.
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Stephen Batchelor (Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism (Grove Press Eastern Philosophy and Literature))
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systematic approach to knowledge building is more productive than an arbitrary skills approach with unspecified topics.31
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E.D. Hirsch Jr. (Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories)
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High-repetition kettlebell swings are known to help significantly with back tightness and pain. Why? Because kettlebell swings with light weights force your core muscles to stabilize your spine while simultaneously providing a stimulus for the back to become stronger under load.
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Steven Low (Overcoming Gravity: A Systematic Approach to Gymnastics and Bodyweight Strength)
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The alternative to systematic planning is decision-making based on history. This generally results in reactive management leading to crisis management, conflict management, and fire fighting.
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Harold R. Kerzner (Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling)
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People hate thinking systematically about how to optimize their relationships. It is normal to hear someone say: “I will just wait for something to happen naturally” when talking about one of the most important aspects of their life while genuinely believing that this approach has reasonable odds of success. Imagine if people said the same thing about their careers. It would sound truly bizarre for someone to expect a successful career to “just happen naturally” and yet it is entirely normalized to expect that good relationships will.
People pay tens of thousands of dollars to receive degrees in computer science, marketing, and neuroscience. They make tough sacrifices with the understanding that the skills and knowledge they build in these domains will dramatically affect their quality of life. Ironically, people spend very little time systematically examining mating strategies—despite the fact that a robust understanding of the subject can dramatically affect quality of life.
We will happily argue that your sexual and relationship skills matter more than your career skills. If you want to be wealthy, the fastest way to become so is to marry rich. Nothing makes happiness easier than a loving, supportive relationship, while one of the best ways to ensure you are never happy is to enter or fail to recognize and escape toxic relationships. If you want to change the world, a great partner can serve as a force multiplier. A draft horse can pull 8000 pounds, while two working together can pull 24,000 pounds. When you have a partner with whom you can synergize, you gain reach and speed that neither you nor your partner could muster individually.
Heck, even if you are the type of person to judge your self-worth by the number of people with whom you have slept, a solid grasp of mating strategies will help you more than a lifetime of hitting the gym (and we say this with full acknowledgment that hitting the gym absolutely helps). A great romantic relationship will even positively impact your health (a 2018 paper in Psychophysiology found that the presence of a partner in a room lowered participants’ blood pressure) and increase your lifespan (a 2019 paper in the journal Health Psychology showed individuals in happy marriages died young at a 20% lower rate).
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Malcolm Collins
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When the phonograms and rules of English are taught in a systematic manner through solid, multimodality teaching methods which develop visual muscle memory, prevent reversals, and address the needs of all types of learners, we will be on our way to solving the literacy crisis for all its current victims and preventing it in future generations.
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Denise Eide (Uncovering The Logic of English: A Common-Sense Approach to Reading, Spelling, and Literacy)
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The movement of this energy, if we can systematically observe it, is a way to understand what humans are receiving when we compete and argue and harm each other. When we control another human being we receive their energy. We fill up at the other’s expense and the filling up is what motivates us. Look, I must learn how to see these energy fields.
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James Redfield (The Celestine Prophecy: how to refresh your approach to tomorrow with a new understanding, energy and optimism)
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Then I spoke with proven shapers I knew—Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Reed Hastings, Muhammad Yunus, Geoffrey Canada, Jack Dorsey (of Twitter), David Kelley (of IDEO), and more. They had all visualized remarkable concepts and built organizations to actualize them, and done that repeatedly and over long periods of time. I asked them to take an hour’s worth of personality assessments to discover their values, abilities, and approaches. While not perfect, these assessments have been invaluable. (In fact, I have been adapting and refining them to help us in our recruiting and management.) The answers these shapers provided to the standardized questions gave me objective and statistically measurable evidence about their similarities and differences. It turns out they have a lot in common. They are all independent thinkers who do not let anything or anyone stand in the way of achieving their audacious goals. They have very strong mental maps of how things should be done, and at the same time a willingness to test those mental maps in the world of reality and change the ways they do things to make them work better. They are extremely resilient, because their need to achieve what they envision is stronger than the pain they experience as they struggle to achieve it. Perhaps most interesting, they have a wider range of vision than most people, either because they have that vision themselves or because they know how to get it from others who can see what they can’t. All are able to see both big pictures and granular details (and levels in between) and synthesize the perspectives they gain at those different levels, whereas most people see just one or the other. They are simultaneously creative, systematic, and practical. They are assertive and open-minded at the same time. Above all, they are passionate about what they are doing, intolerant of people who work for them who aren’t excellent at what they do, and want to have a big, beneficial impact on the world.
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Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
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The psychology of individuals – warts and all – must be a central consideration in the formulation of any practical investing approach. The good news here is that others’ misbehavior will consistently and systematically create opportunities for you. The bad news is that you are prone to all of the same quirks and are just as likely, in the absence of strict adherence to the rules, to create the same opportunities for others.
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Daniel Crosby (The Laws of Wealth: Psychology and the secret to investing success)
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From a very early age Edison became used to doing things for himself, by necessity. His family was poor, and by the age of twelve he had to earn money to help his parents. He sold newspapers on trains, and traveling around his native Michigan for his job, he developed an ardent curiosity about everything he saw. He wanted to know how things worked—machines, gadgets, anything with moving parts. With no schools or teachers in his life, he turned to books, particularly anything he could find on science. He began to conduct his own experiments in the basement of his family home, and he taught himself how to take apart and fix any kind of watch. At the age of fifteen he apprenticed as a telegraph operator, then spent years traveling across the country plying his trade. He had no chance for a formal education, and nobody crossed his path who could serve as a teacher or mentor. And so in lieu of that, in every city he spent time in, he frequented the public library. One book that crossed his path played a decisive role in his life: Michael Faraday’s two-volume Experimental Researches in Electricity. This book became for Edison what The Improvement of the Mind had been for Faraday. It gave him a systematic approach to science and a program for how to educate himself in the field that now obsessed him—electricity. He could follow the experiments laid out by the great Master of the field and absorb as well his philosophical approach to science. For the rest of his life, Faraday would remain his role model. Through books, experiments, and practical experience at various jobs, Edison gave himself a rigorous education that lasted about ten years, up until the time he became an inventor. What made this successful was his relentless desire to learn through whatever crossed his path, as well as his self-discipline. He had developed the habit of overcoming his lack of an organized education by sheer determination and persistence. He worked harder than anyone else. Because he was a consummate outsider and his mind had not been indoctrinated in any school of thought, he brought a fresh perspective to every problem he tackled. He turned his lack of formal direction into an advantage. If you are forced onto this path, you must follow Edison’s example by developing extreme self-reliance. Under these circumstances, you become your own teacher and mentor. You push yourself to learn from every possible source. You read more books than those who have a formal education, developing this into a lifelong habit. As much as possible, you try to apply your knowledge in some form of experiment or practice. You find for yourself second-degree mentors in the form of public figures who can serve as role models. Reading and reflecting on their experiences, you can gain some guidance. You try to make their ideas come to life, internalizing their voice. As someone self-taught, you will maintain a pristine vision, completely distilled through your own experiences—giving you a distinctive power and path to mastery.
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Robert Greene (Mastery (The Modern Machiavellian Robert Greene Book 1))
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System 2 also is capable of a more systematic and careful approach to evidence, and of following a list of boxes that must be checked before making a decision
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Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
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if it were part of a systematic approach they were taking to being well-rounded, self-actualised people: We exercise regularly, we go to the theatre, we read the right novels, not just the Man Booker shortlist but the Man Booker longlist, we see the right exhibitions and we take a real interest in international politics, social issues and our friends’ cute children.
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Liane Moriarty (Truly Madly Guilty)
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Nowadays, the work of Alfred Hitchcock is admired all over the world. Young people who are just discovering his art through the current rerelease of Rear Window and Vertigo, or through North by Northwest, may assume his prestige has always been recognized, but this is far from being the case.
In the fifties and sixties, Hitchcock was at the height of his creativity and popularity. He was, of course, famous due to the publicity masterminded by producer David O. Selznick during the six or seven years of their collaboration on such films as Rebecca, Notorious, Spellbound, and The Paradine Case.
His fame had spread further throughout the world via the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the mid-fifties. But American and European critics made him pay for his commercial success by reviewing his work with condescension, and by belittling each new film.
(...)
In examining his films, it was obvious that he had given more thought to the potential of his art than any of his colleagues. It occurred to me that if he would, for the first time, agree to respond seriously to a systematic questionnaire, the resulting document might modify the American critics’ approach to Hitchcock.
That is what this book is all about.
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François Truffaut (Hitchcock/Truffaut)
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To rest for the sake of rest—to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake—entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value.
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Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
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The pre-Greek civilizations, never discovering the field of epistemology, had no explicit idea of a cognitive process which is systematic, secular, observation-based, logic-ruled; the medievals for centuries had no access to most of this knowledge. The dominant, mystical ideas of such cultures represent a nonrational approach to the world, not an antirational approach.
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Leonard Peikoff (The Cause of Hitler's Germany)
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The issue is the same today. What is our standard; by what standard shall we approach the problems of philosophy and the problems of everyday life? If we begin with anything other than the ontological Trinity, with the sovereignty of God as intellectually applied and systematically delineated in every aspect and avenue of human thought, we end with the destruction of Christian theology and the deterioration of Christian life.
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Rousas John Rushdoony (By What Standard?)
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Creators generate new ideas and original concepts. They prefer unstructured and abstract activities and thrive on innovation and unconventional practices. • Advancers communicate these new ideas and carry them forward. They relish feelings and relationships and manage the human factors. They are excellent at generating enthusiasm for work. • Refiners challenge ideas. They analyze projects for flaws, then refine them with a focus on objectivity and analysis. They love facts and theories and working with a systematic approach. • Executors can also be thought of as Implementers. They ensure that important activities are carried out and goals accomplished; they are focused on details and the bottom line. • Flexors are a combination of all four types. They can adapt their styles to fit certain needs and are able to look at a problem from a variety of perspectives.
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Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
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I am not suggesting here that a non-ADHD spouse should simply roll over and say, “She’s ignoring me because she’s eccentric [or because she has ADHD]. Oh well!” In fact, having an ADHD spouse take charge of creating a systematic approach to treatment is one of the most important elements of improving your marriage. The “symptom” is, after all, at the beginning of the symptom-response-response sequence, and not much changes until the symptoms are under control—and that task can be accomplished only by the ADHD spouse. But ADHD in relationships is like a dance. One partner leads and initiates the steps, but both must understand their role to successfully circle the floor. In an ADHD partnership, an ADHD partner can address her symptoms, but the couple will be unsuccessful if the non-ADHD partner’s response doesn’t change, too. The inverse, of course, is also true.
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Melissa Orlov (The ADHD Effect on Marriage: Understand and Rebuild Your Relationship in Six Steps)
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In this world, as in our own, nearly all the chief means of production, nearly all the land, mines, factories, railways, ships, were controlled for private profit by a small minority of the population. These privileged individuals were able to force the masses to work for them on pain of starvation. The tragic farce inherent in such a system was already approaching. The owners directed the energy of the workers increasingly towards the production of more means of production rather than to the fulfilment of the needs of individual life. For machinery might bring profit to the owners; bread would not. With the increasing competition of machine with machine, profits declined, and therefore wages, and therefore effective demand for goods. Marketless products were destroyed, though bellies were unfed and backs unclad. Unemployment, disorder, and stern repression increased as the economic system disintegrated. A familiar story! As conditions deteriorated, and the movements of charity and state-charity became less and less able to cope with the increasing mass of unemployment and destitution, the new pariah-race became more and more psychologically useful to the hate-needs of the sacred, but still powerful, prosperous. The theory was spread that these wretched beings were the result of secret systematic race-pollution by riff-raff immigrants, and that they deserved no consideration whatever. They were therefore allowed only the basest forms of employment and the harshest conditions of work. When unemployment had become a serious social problem, practically the whole pariah stock was workless and destitute. It was of course easily believed that unemployment, far from being due to the decline of capitalism, was due to the worthlessness of the pariahs.
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Olaf Stapledon (Star Maker (S.F. MASTERWORKS))
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From the perspective of nearly half a century, the Battle of Hue and the entire Vietnam War seem a tragic and meaningless waste. So much heroism and slaughter for a cause that now seems dated and nearly irrelevant. The whole painful experience ought to have (but has not) taught Americans to cultivate deep regional knowledge in the practice of foreign policy, and to avoid being led by ideology instead of understanding. The United States should interact with other nations realistically, first, not on the basis of domestic political priorities. Very often the problems in distant lands have little or nothing to do with America’s ideological preoccupations. Beware of men with theories that explain everything. Trust those who approach the world with humility and cautious insight. The United States went to war in Vietnam in the name of freedom, to stop the supposed monolithic threat of Communism from spreading across the globe like a dark stain—I remember seeing these cartoons as a child. There were experts, people who knew better, who knew the languages and history of Southeast Asia, who had lived and worked there, who tried to tell Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon that the conflict in Vietnam was peculiar to that place. They were systematically ignored and pushed aside. David Halberstam’s classic The Best and the Brightest documents this process convincingly. America had every right to choose sides in the struggle between Hanoi and Saigon, even to try to influence the outcome, but lacking a legitimate or even marginally capable ally its military effort was misguided and doomed. At the very least, Vietnam should stand as a permanent caution against going to war for any but the most immediate, direct, and vital national interest, or to prevent genocide or wider conflict, and then only in concert with other countries. After
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Mark Bowden (Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam)
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This is somewhat of the word which he now speaks unto you: Why will ye die? why will ye perish? why will ye not have compassion on your own souls? Can your hearts endure, or can your hands be strong, in the day of wrath that is approaching? . . . Look unto me, and be saved; come unto me, and I will ease you of all sins, sorrows, fears, burdens, and give rest to your souls. Come, I entreat you; lay aside all procrastinations, all delays; put me off no more; eternity lies at the door . . . do not so hate me as that you will rather perish than accept of deliverance by me.
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Wayne Grudem (Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine)
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The word of God is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit. Hebrews 4:12 Some of God’s children lay great emphasis on rightly dividing the word of truth. Indeed, Scripture itself tells us we are to do this (2 Tim. 2:15), but it also tells us His Word is to divide us. Where we may be wrong is in seeking to divide His Word first before we have allowed it to do its work on us! Are we aware of this living, powerful character of God’s Word? Does it deal with us like a sharp, two-edged sword? Or do we handle it as though it were just one more book to be studied and analyzed? The strange thing about Scripture is that it does not aim to make us understand doctrines in a systematic way. Perhaps we think it would have been better if Paul and the others had got together to provide a detailed handbook of Christian doctrines. But God did not permit this. How easily He could have settled some of our theological arguments, but it seems He loves to confuse those who only approach the Bible intellectually! He wants to preserve men from merely getting hold of doctrines. He wants His truth to get hold of them.
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Watchman Nee (A Table in the Wilderness)
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How do we dispel this basic ignorance? The only way is through honesty and sincere introspection. There are two ways we can undertake this: analysis and contemplation. Analysis consists of a candid and systematic evaluation of every aspect of our own suffering and of the suffering we inflict on others. It involves understanding which thoughts, words, and actions inevitably lead to pain and which contribute to well-being. Of course, such an approach requires that we first come to see that something is not quite right with our way of being and acting. We then need to feel a burning desire to change.
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Matthieu Ricard (Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill)
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Harm reduction is often perceived as being inimical to the ultimate purpose of “curing” addiction—that is, of helping addicts transcend their habits and to heal. People regard it as “coddling” addicts, as enabling them to continue their destructive ways. It’s also considered to be the opposite of abstinence, which many regard as the only legitimate goal of addiction treatment. Such a distinction is artificial. The issue in medical practice is always how best to help a patient. If a cure is possible and probable without doing greater harm, then cure is the objective. When it isn’t — and in most chronic medical conditions cure is not the expected outcome — the physician’s role is to help the patient with the symptoms and to reduce the harm done by the disease process.
In rheumatoid arthritis, for example, one aims to prevent joint inflammation and bone destruction and, in all events, to reduce pain. In incurable cancers we aim to prolong life, if that can be achieved without a loss of life quality, and also to control symptoms. In other words, harm reduction means making the lives of afflicted human beings more bearable, more worth living. That is also the goal of harm reduction in the context of addiction. Although hardcore drug addiction is much more than a disease, the harm reduction model is essential to its treatment. Given our lack of a systematic, evidencebased approach to addiction, in many cases it’s futile to dream of a cure.
So long as society ostracizes the addict and the legal system does everything it can to heighten the drug problem, the welfare and medical systems can aim only to mitigate some of its effects. Sad to say, in our context harm reduction means reducing not only the harm caused by the disease of addiction, but also the harm caused by the social assault on drug addicts.
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Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
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My approach to creating an outline is completely systematic: first I brainstorm, next I categorize, and then I outline the final product. • Brainstorm: I take a blank piece of paper and jot down all my thoughts on the relevant subject. My goal is to get down as many ideas as possible, not to put them into any particular order. • Categorize: Next I put the ideas into various categories and subcategories. This process helps me organize my ideas into groupings, which will become the building blocks of an outline. • Outline: Then I arrange and rearrange the groupings in various combinations. In the end, I try to find a logical order for the groupings, which can serve as a writing outline.
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Robert C. Pozen (Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours)
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The great power of adopting a scientific approach to human behavior is the ability to unmask deep puzzles about human existence that otherwise hide in plain sight. Once we begin to think deeply and systematically about the antiquity, ubiquity, and power of our taste for intoxicants, the standard stories suggesting it’s some sort of evolutionary accident become difficult to take seriously. Considering the enormous costs of intoxication, which humans have been paying for many thousands of years, we would expect genetic evolution to work toward eliminating any accidental taste for alcohol from our motivational system as quickly as possible. If ethanol happens to pick our neurological pleasure lock, evolution should call in a locksmith.
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Edward Slingerland (Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization)
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Imagine being able to plot in advance, in systematic fashion, the approach of all meaningful coincidences. Is that a priori, by the very meaning of the word, not a contradiction? After all, a coincidence, or as Pauli called it, a manifestation of synchronicity, is by its very nature not dependent on the past; hence nothing exists as a harbinger of it (cf. David Hume on the topic; in particular the train whistle versus the train). This state, not knowing what is going to happen next and therefore having no way of controlling it, is the sine qua non of the unhappy world of the schizophrenic; he is helpless, passive, and instead of doing things, he is done to. Reality happens to him -- a sort of perpetual auto accident, going on and on without relief.
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Philip K. Dick
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Taking least squares is no longer optimal, and the very idea of ‘accuracy’ has to be rethought. This simple fact is as important as it is neglected. This problem is easily illustrated in the Logistic Map: given the correct mathematical formula and all the details of the noise model – random numbers with a bell-shaped distribution – using least squares to estimate α leads to systematic errors. This is not a question of too few data or insufficient computer power, it is the method that fails. We can compute the optimal least squares solution: its value for α is too small at all noise levels. This principled approach just does not apply to nonlinear models because the theorems behind the principle of least squares repeatedly assume bell-shaped distributions.
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Leonard A. Smith (Chaos: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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For what people of color quickly come to see—in a sense the primary epistemic principle of the racialized social epistemology of which they are the object—is that they are not seen at all. Correspondingly, the “central metaphor” of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is the image of the “veil,”20 and the black American cognitive equivalent of the shocking moment of Cartesian realization of the uncertainty of everything one had taken to be knowledge is the moment when for Du Bois, as a child in New England, “it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their [white] world by a vast veil.”21 Similarly, Ralph Ellison’s classic Invisible Man, generally regarded as the most important twentieth-century novel of the black experience, is arguably in key respects—while a multi-dimensional and multi-layered work of great depth and complexity, not to be reduced to a single theme—an epistemological novel.22 For what it recounts is the protagonist’s quest to determine what norms of belief are the right ones in a crazy looking-glass world where he is an invisible man “simply because [white] people refuse to see me… . When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.” And this systematic misperception is not, of course, due to biology, the intrinsic properties of his epidermis, or physical deficiencies in the white eye, but rather to “the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.”23
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Charles W. Mills (Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities))
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In about 1951, a quality approach called Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) came on the Japanese scene. Its focus is on maintenance rather than on production. One of the major pillars of TPM is the set of so-called 5S principles. 5S is a set of disciplines—and here I use the term “discipline” instructively. These 5S principles are in fact at the foundations of Lean—another buzzword on the Western scene, and an increasingly prominent buzzword in software circles. These principles are not an option. As Uncle Bob relates in his front matter, good software practice requires such discipline: focus, presence of mind, and thinking. It is not always just about doing, about pushing the factory equipment to produce at the optimal velocity. The 5S philosophy comprises these concepts: • Seiri, or organization (think “sort” in English). Knowing where things are—using approaches such as suitable naming—is crucial. You think naming identifiers isn’t important? Read on in the following chapters. • Seiton, or tidiness (think “systematize” in English). There is an old American saying: A place for everything, and everything in its place. A piece of code should be where you expect to find it—and, if not, you should re-factor to get it there. • Seiso, or cleaning (think “shine” in English): Keep the workplace free of hanging wires, grease, scraps, and waste. What do the authors here say about littering your code with comments and commented-out code lines that capture history or wishes for the future? Get rid of them. • Seiketsu, or standardization: The group agrees about how to keep the workplace clean. Do you think this book says anything about having a consistent coding style and set of practices within the group? Where do those standards come from? Read on. • Shutsuke, or discipline (self-discipline). This means having the discipline to follow the practices and to frequently reflect on one’s work and be willing to change.
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Robert C. Martin (Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship (Robert C. Martin Series))
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I have taken a different approach. One that I hope is more easily accessible to the reader’s emotional imagination, though less analytically systematic. I have summoned back into life again—through my own translations from a selection of popular Chinese novel sand poems—some of the imagined worlds in which Chinese have passed their daily reality during the last two hundred years. I have tried to convey something of what it felt like to be a Chinese, living in Chinese society, in different settings of status, age, and gender, and how this has changed over time. For reasons of method, I have looked at a small number of organically coherent emotional spaces, contained in individual works or parts of works, and considered them in detail. ... It would be pretending to more wisdom than I have to claim that the selection I have made is the result of a rigorous intellectual winnowing process from a harvest of widespread reading in late-imperial and modern Chinese literature. Honesty compels the admission that it is more the outcome of chance, serendipity, and whatever happened to catch my imagination, for reasons that I am probably in no position to do more than guess at. ... In so far as there has been a guiding principle behind my choices it has been the desire to show as much as the constraints of space allow of the contrasts among those in different social position, different periods, and different ideologies.
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Mark Elvin (Changing Stories in the Chinese World)
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Well before the end of the 20th century however print had lost its former dominance. This resulted in, among other things, a different kind of person getting elected as leader. One who can present himself and his programs in a polished way, as Lee Quan Yu you observed in 2000, adding, “Satellite television has allowed me to follow the American presidential campaign. I am amazed at the way media professionals can give a candidate a new image and transform him, at least superficially, into a different personality. Winning an election becomes, in large measure, a contest in packaging and advertising. Just as the benefits of the printed era were inextricable from its costs, so it is with the visual age. With screens in every home entertainment is omnipresent and boredom a rarity. More substantively, injustice visualized is more visceral than injustice described. Television played a crucial role in the American Civil rights movement, yet the costs of television are substantial, privileging emotional display over self-command, changing the kinds of people and arguments that are taken seriously in public life. The shift from print to visual culture continues with the contemporary entrenchment of the Internet and social media, which bring with them four biases that make it more difficult for leaders to develop their capabilities than in the age of print. These are immediacy, intensity, polarity, and conformity. Although the Internet makes news and data more immediately accessible than ever, this surfeit of information has hardly made us individually more knowledgeable, let alone wiser, as the cost of accessing information becomes negligible, as with the Internet, the incentives to remember it seem to weaken. While forgetting anyone fact may not matter, the systematic failure to internalize information brings about a change in perception, and a weakening of analytical ability. Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance and interpretation depend on context and relevance. For information to be transmuted into something approaching wisdom it must be placed within a broader context of history and experience. As a general rule, images speak at a more emotional register of intensity than do words. Television and social media rely on images that inflamed the passions, threatening to overwhelm leadership with the combination of personal and mass emotion. Social media, in particular, have encouraged users to become image conscious spin doctors. All this engenders a more populist politics that celebrates utterances perceived to be authentic over the polished sound bites of the television era, not to mention the more analytical output of print. The architects of the Internet thought of their invention as an ingenious means of connecting the world. In reality, it has also yielded a new way to divide humanity into warring tribes. Polarity and conformity rely upon, and reinforce, each other. One is shunted into a group, and then the group polices once thinking. Small wonder that on many contemporary social media platforms, users are divided into followers and influencers. There are no leaders. What are the consequences for leadership? In our present circumstances, Lee's gloomy assessment of visual media's effects is relevant. From such a process, I doubt if a Churchill or Roosevelt or a de Gaulle can emerge. It is not that changes in communications technology have made inspired leadership and deep thinking about world order impossible, but that in an age dominated by television and the Internet, thoughtful leaders must struggle against the tide.
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Henry Kissinger (Leadership : Six Studies in World Strategy)
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Above all, we should not let ourselves forget precisely what method is and what it is not. A method, at least in the sciences, is a systematic set of limitations and constraints voluntarily assumed by a researcher in order to concentrate his or her investigations upon a strictly defined aspect of or approach to a clearly delineated object. As such, it allows one to see further and more perspicuously in one particular instance and in one particular way, but only because one has first consented to confine oneself to a narrow portion of the visible spectrum, so to speak. Moreover, while a given method may grant one a glimpse of truths that would remain otherwise obscure, that method is not itself a truth. This is crucial to understand. A method, considered in itself, may even in some ultimate sense be “false” as an explanation of things and yet still be probative as an instrument of investigation; some things are more easily seen through a red filter, but to go through life wearing rose-colored spectacles is not to see things as they truly are. When one forgets the distinction between method and truth, one becomes foolishly prone to respond to any question that cannot be answered from the vantage of one’s particular methodological perch by dismissing it as nonsensical, or by issuing a promissory note guaranteeing a solution to the problem at some juncture in the remote future, or by simply distorting the question into one that looks like the kind one really can answer after all. Whenever modern scientific method is corrupted in this fashion the results are especially unfortunate. In such cases, an admirably severe discipline of interpretive and theoretical restraint has been transformed into its perfect and irrepressibly wanton opposite: what began as a principled refusal of metaphysical speculation, for the sake of specific empirical inquiries, has now been mistaken for a comprehensive knowledge of the metaphysical shape of reality; the art of humble questioning has been mistaken for the sure possession of ultimate conclusions.
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David Bentley Hart (The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss)
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Most religions and philosophies have consequently taken a very different approach to happiness than liberalism does.3 The Buddhist position is particularly interesting. Buddhism has assigned the question of happiness more importance than perhaps any other human creed. For 2,500 years, Buddhists have systematically studied the essence and causes of happiness, which is why there is a growing interest among the scientific community both in their philosophy and their meditation practices. Buddhism shares the basic insight of the biological approach to happiness, namely that happiness results from processes occurring within one’s body, and not from events in the outside world. However, starting from the same insight, Buddhism reaches very different conclusions. According to Buddhism, most people identify happiness with pleasant feelings, while identifying suffering with unpleasant feelings. People consequently ascribe immense importance to what they feel, craving to experience more and more pleasures, while avoiding pain. Whatever we do throughout our lives, whether scratching our leg, fidgeting slightly in the chair, or fighting world wars, we are just trying to get pleasant feelings. The problem, according to Buddhism, is that our feelings are no more than fleeting vibrations, changing every moment, like the ocean waves. If five minutes ago I felt joyful and purposeful, now these feelings are gone, and I might well feel sad and dejected. So if I want to experience pleasant feelings, I have to constantly chase them, while driving away the unpleasant feelings. Even if I succeed, I immediately have to start all over again, without ever getting any lasting reward for my troubles. What is so important about obtaining such ephemeral prizes? Why struggle so hard to achieve something that disappears almost as soon as it arises? According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. Even when experiencing pleasure, it is not content, because it fears this feeling might soon disappear, and craves that this feeling should stay and intensify. People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In meditation, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing – joy, anger, boredom, lust – but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasising about what might have been.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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Thus polyvictimization or complex trauma are "developmentally adverse interpersonal traumas" (Ford, 2005) because they place the victim at risk not only for recurrent stress and psychophysiological arousal (e.g., PTSD, other anxiety disorders, depression) but also for interruptions and breakdowns in healthy psychobiological, psychological, and social development. Complex trauma not only involves shock, fear, terror, or powerlessness (either short or long term) but also, more fundamentally, constitutes a violation of the immature self and the challenge to the development of a positive and secure self, as major psychic energy is directed toward survival and defense rather than toward learning and personal development (Ford, 2009b, 2009c). Moreover, it may influence the brain's very development, structure, and functioning in both the short and long term (Lanius et al., 2010; Schore, 2009).
Complex trauma often forces the child victim to substitute automatic survival tactics for adaptive self-regulation, starting at the most basic level of physical reactions (e.g., intense states of hyperarousal/agitation or hypoarousal/immobility) and behavioral (e.g., aggressive or passive/avoidant responses) that can become so automatic and habitual that the child's emotional and cognitive development are derailed or distorted. What is more, self-integrity is profoundly shaken, as the child victim incorporates the "lessons of abuse" into a view of him or herself as bad, inadequate, disgusting, contaminated and deserving of mistreatment and neglect. Such misattributions and related schema about self and others are some of the most common and robust cognitive and assumptive consequences of chronic childhood abuse (as well as other forms of interpersonal trauma) and are especially debilitating to healthy development and relationships (Cole & Putnam, 1992; McCann & Pearlman, 1992). Because the violation occurs in an interpersonal context that carries profound significance for personal development, relationships become suspect and a source of threat and fear rather than of safety and nurturance.
In vulnerable children, complex trauma causes compromised attachment security, self-integrity and ultimately self-regulation. Thus it constitutes a threat not only to physical but also to psychological survival - to the development of the self and the capacity to regulate emotions (Arnold & Fisch, 2011). For example, emotional abuse by an adult caregiver that involves systematic disparagement, blame and shame of a child ("You worthless piece of s-t"; "You shouldn't have been born"; "You are the source of all of my problems"; "I should have aborted you"; "If you don't like what I tell you, you can go hang yourself") but does not involve sexual or physical violation or life threat is nevertheless psychologically damaging. Such bullying and antipathy on the part of a primary caregiver or other family members, in addition to maltreatment and role reversals that are found in many dysfunctional families, lead to severe psychobiological dysregulation and reactivity (Teicher, Samson, Polcari, & McGreenery, 2006).
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Christine A. Courtois (Treatment of Complex Trauma: A Sequenced, Relationship-Based Approach)
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If asked what manner of beast fascism is, most people would answer, without hesitation, "fascism is an ideology." The fascist leaders themselves never stopped saying that they were prophets of an idea, unlike the materialist liberals and socialists. Hitler talked ceaselessly of Weltanschauung, or "worldview," an uncomely word he successfully forced on the attention of the whole world. Mussolini vaunted the power of the Fascist creed. A fascist, by this approach, is someone who espouses fascist ideology - an ideology being more than just ideas, but a total system of thought harnessed to a world-shaping project...
It would seem to follow that we should "start by examining the programs, doctrines, and propaganda in some of the main fascist movements and then proceed to the actual policies and performance of the only two noteworthy fascist regimes." Putting programs first rests on the unstated assumption that fascism was an "ism" like the other great political systems of the modern world: conservatism, liberalism, socialism. Usually taken for granted, that assumption is worth scrutinizing.
The other "isms" were created in an era when politics was a gentleman's business, conducted through protracted and learned parliamentary debate among educated men who appealed to each other's reasons as well as their sentiments. The classical "isms" rested upon coherent philosophical systems laid out in the works of systematic thinkers. It seems only natural to explain them by examining their programs and the philosophy that underpinned them.
Fascism, by contrast, was a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics. It sought to appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremonies, and intensely charged rhetoric. The role programs and doctrine play in it is, on closer inspection, fundamentally unlike the role they play in conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples. It has not been given intellectual underpinnings by any system builder, like Marx, or by any major critical intelligence, like Mill, Burke, or Tocqueville.
In a way utterly unlike the classical "isms," the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is "true" insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle, and not in the light of some abstract and universal reason. The first fascists were entirely frank about this.
"We [Fascists] don't think ideology is a problem that is resolved in such a way that truth is seated on a throne. But, in that case, does fighting for an ideology mean fighting for mere appearances? No doubt, unless one considers it according to its unique and efficacious psychological-historical value. The truth of an ideology lies in its capacity to set in motion our capacity for ideals and action. Its truth is absolute insofar as, living within us, it suffices to exhaust those capacities."
The truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.
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Robert Paxton (What Is Fascism? From the Anatomy of Fascism (A Vintage Short))
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When writing Chinese, the sequence of strokes is incredibly important. My mother tries to teach me00 Draw the line first and then the dots, not the other way around-- but quickly trhwos her hands up in frustration. Yet this systematic approach produces consistently beautiful handwriitng. My mother's. My father's. I go back to China and realize that everyone writes this way. How is it that I can always tell a Chinese person's handwriting by the way that they write their 5s? An elegant S with a long nose.
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Weike Wang (Chemistry)
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Following Paul’s example, our teaching about God should be rooted foremost in biblical theology, not simply systematic theology. Although these two disciplines are never fully separated, their approaches have important
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Jackson Wu (Reading Romans with Eastern Eyes: Honor and Shame in Paul's Message and Mission)
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address the concerns of a contemporary audience, which are not necessarily the same as the biblical authors’. Both approaches are valid and helpful, yet systematic theology should be grounded in biblical theology. Otherwise, modern readers are more prone to commit eisegesis, inserting their own meaning into the text. In that case, reader’s assumptions guide the study and systemization of the Bible’s teaching.20
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Jackson Wu (Reading Romans with Eastern Eyes: Honor and Shame in Paul's Message and Mission)
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drillsandskills.com
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Steven Low (Overcoming Gravity: A Systematic Approach to Gymnastics and Bodyweight Strength)
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Gradually working your way up to your most feared situation using a step-by-step approach is called "systematic desensitization." Systematic desensitization allows you to challenge your fears gradually. It gives you confidence as you pass through the steps successfully and teaches you skills for controlling your anxiety and panic in increasingly difficult situations..
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Travis Wells (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Beginners Guide to CBT with Simple Techniques for Retraining the Brain to Defeat Anxiety, Depression, and Low-Self Esteem)
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A journey of inquiry that (hopefully) culminates in change can be a long road, with pitfalls and detours and often nary an answer in sight. That’s why it can be helpful to approach inquiry systematically, as a step-by-step progression. The best innovators are able to live with not having the answer right away because they’re focused on just trying to get to the next question.
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Warren Berger (A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas)
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Eat. Move. Improve. website so you can follow along without
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Steven Low (Overcoming Gravity: A Systematic Approach to Gymnastics and Bodyweight Strength)
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In addition, telepathy lent itself to controlled laboratory investigation, whereas survival research did not. It was eventually discovered that psi performance in telepathy tests did not diminish when there was no “sender.” It also proved to be nearly impossible to create a test for “pure” telepathy that could not also be explained as clairvoyance. So most researchers began to focus on clairvoyance. It may seem odd that it took any time at all to go from systematic research on survival phenomena, to telepathy research, and then to clairvoyance, before it was realized that the fundamental issue in all cases was the nature of psi perception. But this just illustrates how difficult this topic is to study. Some researchers made these leaps in short order. Others took years. Collectively it took about a half-century to come to what we now see as a “reasonable” approach. Fifty years from now, entirely new “reasonable” ideas may have evolved.
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Dean Radin (The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena)
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One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most. What’s needed instead in such situations, I gradually came to understand, is a kind of anti-skill: not the counterproductive strategy of trying to make yourself more efficient, but rather a willingness to resist such urges—to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in. To approach your days in this fashion means, instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what’s truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further, with emails and errands and other to-dos, many of which you may never get around to at all.
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Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
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When a young employee gasped at his blue language, Simons flashed a grin. “I know—that is an impressive rate!” A few times a week, Marilyn came by to visit, usually with their baby, Nicholas. Other times, Barbara checked in on her ex-husband. Other employees’ spouses and children also wandered around the office. Each afternoon, the team met for tea in the library, where Simons, Baum, and others discussed the latest news and debated the direction of the economy. Simons also hosted staffers on his yacht, The Lord Jim, docked in nearby Port Jefferson. Most days, Simons sat in his office, wearing jeans and a golf shirt, staring at his computer screen, developing new trades—reading the news and predicting where markets were going, like most everyone else. When he was especially engrossed in thought, Simons would hold a cigarette in one hand and chew on his cheek. Baum, in a smaller, nearby office, trading his own account, favored raggedy sweaters, wrinkled trousers, and worn Hush Puppies shoes. To compensate for his worsening eyesight, he hunched close to his computer, trying to ignore the smoke wafting through the office from Simons’s cigarettes. Their traditional trading approach was going so well that, when the boutique next door closed, Simons rented the space and punched through the adjoining wall. The new space was filled with offices for new hires, including an economist and others who provided expert intelligence and made their own trades, helping to boost returns. At the same time, Simons was developing a new passion: backing promising technology companies, including an electronic dictionary company called Franklin Electronic Publishers, which developed the first hand-held computer. In 1982, Simons changed Monemetrics’ name to Renaissance Technologies Corporation, reflecting his developing interest in these upstart companies. Simons came to see himself as a venture capitalist as much as a trader. He spent much of the week working in an office in New York City, where he interacted with his hedge fund’s investors while also dealing with his tech companies. Simons also took time to care for his children, one of whom needed extra attention. Paul, Simons’s second child with Barbara, had been born with a rare hereditary condition called ectodermal dysplasia. Paul’s skin, hair, and sweat glands didn’t develop properly, he was short for his age, and his teeth were few and misshapen. To cope with the resulting insecurities, Paul asked his parents to buy him stylish and popular clothing in the hopes of fitting in with his grade-school peers. Paul’s challenges weighed on Simons, who sometimes drove Paul to Trenton, New Jersey, where a pediatric dentist made cosmetic improvements to Paul’s teeth. Later, a New York dentist fitted Paul with a complete set of implants, improving his self-esteem. Baum was fine with Simons working from the New York office, dealing with his outside investments, and tending to family matters. Baum didn’t need much help. He was making so much money trading various currencies using intuition and instinct that pursuing a systematic, “quantitative” style of trading seemed a waste of
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Gregory Zuckerman (The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution)
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A task force of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) distinguished four kinds of reproducibility: analytic reproducibility, which tries to duplicate original conclusions by reanalyzing original data; direct reproducibility, which tries to get the same experimental results using the same experimental conditions as in the original report; systematic reproducibility, which tries to get the same results as the original study under different experimental conditions than the original ones; and conceptual reproducibility, which uses new experimental approaches and aims “to demonstrate the validity of a concept or finding using a different paradigm.
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Bradley E. Alger (Defense of the Scientific Hypothesis: From Reproducibility Crisis to Big Data)
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Wall Street was perplexed by Rask's accuracy and his systematic approach, which not only led to consistent earnings but also was an example of the most rigorous mathematical elegance of an impersonal form of beauty.
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Hernan Diaz (Trust)
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For a scientist, the only valid question is to decide whether the phenomenon can be studied by itself, or whether it is an instance of a deeper problem. This book attempts to illustrate, and only to illustrate, the latter approach. And my conclusion is that, through the UFO phenomenon, we have the unique opportunities to observe folklore in the making and to gather scientific material at the deepest source of human imagination. We will be the object of much contempt by future students of our civilization if we allow this material to be lost, for "tradition is a meteor which, once it falls, cannot be rekindled."
If we decide to avoid extreme speculation, but make certain basic observations from the existing data, five principal facts stand out rather clearly from our analysis so far:
Fact 1. There has been among the public, in all countries, since the middle of 1946, an extremely active generation of colorful rumors. They center on a considerable number of observations of unknown machines close to the ground in rural areas, the physical traces left by these machines, and their various effects on humans and animals.
Fact 2. When the underlying archetypes are extracted from these rumors, the extraterrestrial myth is seen to coincide to a remarkable degree with the fairy-faith of Celtic countries, the observations of the scholars of past ages, and the widespread belief among all peoples concerning entities whose physical and psychological description place them in the same category as the present-day ufonauts.
Fact 3. The entities human witnesses report to have seen, heard, and touched fall into various biological types. Among them are beings of giant stature, men indistinguishable from us, winged creatures, and various types of monsters. Most of the so-called pilots, however, are dwarfs and form two main groups: (1) dark, hairy beings – identical to the gnomes of medieval theory – with small, bright eyes and deep, rugged, "old" voices; and (2) beings – who answer the description of the sylphs of the Middle Ages or the elves of the fairy-faith – with human complexions, oversized heads, and silvery voices. All the beings have been described with and without breathing apparatus.
Beings of various categories have been reported together. The overwhelming majority are humanoid.
Fact 4. The entities' reported behavior is as consistently absurd as the appearance of their craft is ludicrous. In numerous instances of verbal communications with them, their assertions have been systematically misleading. This is true for all cases on record, from encounters with the Gentry in the British Isles to conversations with airship engineers during the 1897 Midwest flap and discussions with the alleged Martians in Europe, North and South America, and elsewhere. This absurd behavior has had the effect of keeping professional scientists away from the area where that activity was taking place. It has also served to give the saucer myth its religious and mystical overtones.
Fact 5. The mechanism of the apparitions, in legendary, historical, and modern times, is standard and follows the model of religious miracles. Several cases, which bear the official stamp of the Catholic Church (such as those in Fatima and Guadalupe), are in fact – if one applies the deffinitions strictly – nothing more than UFO phenomena where the entity has delivered a message having to do with religious beliefs rather than with space or engineering.
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Jacques F. Vallée (Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact)
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Character education is any school-directed program designed to shape directly and systematically the behavior of young people by teaching explicitly the nonrelativistic values believed to directly bring about good behavior. (Lockwood, 1997, p. 179)
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Alan L. Lockwood (The Case for Character Education: A Developmental Approach)
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Our ambition is to make innovation a systematic approach, moving the field from a mysterious art to more of a disciplined science.
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Larry Keeley (Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs)
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In Ava DuVernay’s brilliant 2016 documentary, 13th, DuVernay and co-writer Spencer Averick chronologically narrate in chilling precision how this new approach to criminal justice led to the systematic mass criminalization of African Americans under the veil of the war on drugs and abetted by minimum sentence requirements.
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Seth David Radwell (American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation)
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Chinese authorities started systematically removing any mention of the virus online. This began on December 31, when technology services in China censored key words linked to the pandemic. The live-streaming platform YY censored words including “unknown Wuhan pneumonia” and “Wuhan Seafood Market”. WeChat censored phrases related to the pandemic, banned both speculative and factual information related to the outbreak, and removed even “neutral references to Chinese government efforts to handle the outbreak that had been reported on state media”, according to the Citizen Lab’s March 2020 report. The CCP censorship alarmed doctors and Chinese health authorities, who knew the precise opposite approach should be taken in order to save lives. This crucial point clearly shows China’s deliberate, intentional and clear-eyed decision to cover up the virus; to stop their own people and those internationally from finding out about it.
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Sharri Markson (What Really Happened in Wuhan: The Cover-Ups, the Conspiracies and the Classified Research)
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Based on twenty studies following more than 30,000 people for an average of about five years, a systematic review and meta-analysis found that higher TMAO was associated with a nearly 50 percent increase in all-cause mortality risk.
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Michael Greger (How Not to Age: The Scientific Approach to Getting Healthier as You Get Older)
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According to the Global Burden of Disease Study, the most comprehensive and systematic analysis ever undertaken of the causes of death,2102 the number one killer in the United States2103 and on planet Earth is a bad diet.2104 Unhealthy diets shave hundreds of millions of disability-free years off people’s lives annually
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Michael Greger (How Not to Age: The Scientific Approach to Getting Healthier as You Get Older)
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Queering Black Churches provides a systematic approach for dismantling heteronormativity in Black congregations.
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Brandon Thomas Crowley (Queering Black Churches: Dismantling Heteronormativity in African American Congregations)
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Plato’s dangerous sense for dangerous themes runs into the blind spot of all high-cultural pedagogies and politics—the actual inequality of human beings vis-à-vis the knowledge that confers power. Under the logical form of a grotesque way of defining things, the
dialogue of The Statesman develops the preambles of a political anthropotechnics. Here it is a matter not only of the taming guidance of the herds already tamed of their own accord, but also of a systematic new kind of breeding of human exemplars who approximate to the archetype. This approach begins so comically that even the not quite so comic ending could easily be passed over in the laughter.
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Peter Sloterdijk (Not Saved: Essays After Heidegger)
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Because advancing equity requires a systematic approach to embedding fairness in decision-making processes, executive departments and agencies must recognize and work to redress inequities in their policies and programs that serve as barriers to equal opportunity.”50
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Mark R. Levin (The Democrat Party Hates America)
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Anita had the mechanics of marriage down pat, even to the subtlest conventions. If her approach was disturbingly rational, systematic, she was thorough enough to turn out a creditable counterfeit of warmth.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Player Piano)
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Royse Lawn Care
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The aim of the “professional gambler,” as he is called, is to make money. He can be recognized by deliberate and extremely disciplined wagering. His wagering is systematic and usually limited to infrequent but highly favorable opportunities. The behavior of the professional gambler is highly controlled and usually the result of a studied approach to his chosen game. He concentrates on games where the element of skill is sufficient to produce the possibility of a player advantage, such as blackjack and parimutuel betting. The professional gambler is similar to the stock arbitrageur in that they both take calculated risks. They are dealing with an uncertain outcome and seek to profit from their ability to anticipate the future or to see the future—in other words, to speculate. Professional gamblers are actually speculators because of the characteristics they exhibit when risking money. They are not seeking entertainment at the tables like gamblers do, and they are not trying to be right. They are trying to make money.
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Jim Paul (What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars)
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My friend Bangaly Kaba, formerly head of growth at Instagram, called this idea the theory of “Adjacent Users.” He describes his experience at Instagram, which several years post-launch was growing fast but not at rocketship speed: When I joined Instagram in 2016, the product had over 400 million users, but the growth rate had slowed. We were growing linearly, not exponentially. For many products, that would be viewed as an amazing success, but for a viral social product like Instagram, linear growth doesn’t cut it. Over the next 3 years, the growth team and I discovered why Instagram had slowed, developed a methodology to diagnose our issues, and solved a series of problems that reignited growth and helped us get to over a billion users by the time I left. Our success was anchored on what I now call The Adjacent User Theory. The Adjacent Users are aware of a product and possibly tried using it, but are not able to successfully become an engaged user. This is typically because the current product positioning or experience has too many barriers to adoption for them. While Instagram had product-market fit for 400+ million people, we discovered new groups of billions of users who didn’t quite understand Instagram and how it fit into their lives.67 In my conversations with Bangaly on this topic, he described his approach as a systematic evaluation of the network of networks that constituted Instagram. Rather than focusing on the core network of Power Users—the loud and vocal minority that often drive product decisions—instead the approach was to constantly figure out the adjacent set of users whose experience was subpar. There might be multiple sets of nonfunctional adjacent networks at any given time, and it might require different approaches to fix each one. For some networks, it might be the features of the product, like Instagram not having great support for low-end Android apps. Or it might be because of the quality of their networks—if the right content creators or celebrities hadn’t yet arrived. You fix the experience for these users, then ask yourself again, who are the adjacent users? Then repeat. Bangaly describes this approach: When I started at Instagram, the Adjacent User was women 35–45 years old in the US who had a Facebook account but didn’t see the value of Instagram. By the time I left Instagram, the Adjacent User was women in Jakarta, on an older 3G Android phone with a prepaid mobile plan. There were probably 8 different types of Adjacent Users that we solved for in-between those two points. To solve for the needs of the Adjacent User, the Instagram team had to be nimble, focusing first on pulling the audience of US women from the Facebook network. This required the team to build algorithmic recommendations that utilized Facebook profiles and connections, so that Instagram could surface friends and family on the platform—not just influencers. Later on, targeting users in Jakarta and in other developing countries might involve completely different approaches—refining apps for low-end Android phones with low data connections. As the Adjacent User changes, the strategy has to change as well.
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
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We're stuck inside with ourselves, trying to believe the things we're supposed to say. We're performing interpersonal politics in public, more conscientious than conscious, systematic in our approach, same or shame, safe or sorry. What's the difference?
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Jill Louise Busby (Unfollow Me: Essays on Complicity)
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McQuown argued that a more scientific approach to investing was the future. In his telling, the traditional approach followed a version of the “Great Man” theory first espoused by the nineteenth-century philosopher Thomas Carlyle. Some preternaturally gifted hero would pick stocks that he thought would rise. When his touch inevitably deserted him at some point—and in the 1960s it was invariably a “him”—the investor would simply transfer their hopes onto another Great Man. “The whole thing is a chance-driven process. It’s not systematic and there is lots we still don’t know about it and that needs study,” McQuown argued.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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An underachievement reversal plan is not just important; it's the backbone of the reversal process. It not only guides the direction but also establishes clear priorities.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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A systematic approach to observing the student ensures a comprehensive understanding of the student's underachievement dynamics.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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It is important to determine the dominant underachievement category of an underachieving student.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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An underachievement reversal plan is a systematic approach that simplifies decision-making, measures the student's response, and helps maintain control throughout the intervention.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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Part 2, dealing with Origins, Evolution and Systematics, differs strikingly from previous syntheses on bryophytes in two important respects. First, the conceptual approach known as cladistics, a stochastic method for deducing evolutionary relatedness of
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Jeffrey W. Bates (Bryology for the Twenty-first Century (Maney Main Publication))
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Part 2, dealing with Origins, Evolution and Systematics, differs strikingly from previous syntheses on bryophytes in two important respects. First, the conceptual approach known as cladistics, a stochastic method for deducing evolutionary relatedness
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Jeffrey W. Bates (Bryology for the Twenty-first Century (Maney Main Publication))
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To create an effective rapid learning approach, teachers can follow a systematic process guided by rapid learning principles.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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Data-informed teaching, integral to the rapid learning approach, involves the systematic collection, analysis, and application of data to guide instructional decisions.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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Data, collected systematically, directly or indirectly influences a student's capacity to learn rapidly during any rapid learning session.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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The use of data in rapid learning is not just a supplementary element but a central tenet of the approach. Data-driven decisions, informed by systematic collection and analysis, empower educators to tailor instruction, create supportive environments, and ultimately optimize the learning experience for rapid and efficient knowledge absorption.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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Rapid learning involves a systematic cycle of data collection, analysis, and application. This approach enables educators to continually assess student progress, make informed instructional decisions, and foster an environment of continuous improvement.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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In the end, the best way to approach Chuang Tzu, I believe, is not to attempt to subject this thought to rational and systematic analysis, but to read and reread his words until one has ceased to think of what he is saying and instead has developed an intuitive sense of the mind moving behind the words, and of the world in which it moves.
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Burton Watson (translator)
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Zschool embodies the future of executive education. Its systematic approach—rooted in strong partnerships with leading universities, vast corporate networks, and an inherent financial responsibility—ensures an unparalleled learning experience.
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zSchool
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To rest for the sake of rest—to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake—entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value. “We are the sum of all the moments of our lives,” writes Thomas Wolfe, “all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape it or conceal it.” If we’re going to show up for, and thus find some enjoyment in, our brief time on the planet, we had better show up for it now.
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Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
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2. Mental Biofeedback. A second method which can be very useful involves monitoring your negative thoughts with a wrist counter. You can buy one at a sporting-goods store or a golf shop; it looks like a wristwatch, is inexpensive, and every time you push the button, the number changes on the dial. Click the button each time a negative thought about yourself crosses your mind; be on the constant alert for such thoughts. At the end of the day, note your daily total score and write it down in a log book. At first you will notice that the number increases; this will continue for several days as you get better and better at identifying your critical thoughts. Soon you will begin to notice that the daily total reaches a plateau for a week to ten days, and then it will begin to go down. This indicates that your harmful thoughts are diminishing and that you are getting better. This approach usually requires three weeks. It is not known with certainty why such a simple technique works so well, but systematic self-monitoring frequently helps develop increased self-control. As you learn to stop haranguing yourself, you will begin to feel much better.
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David D. Burns (Feeling Good: Overcome Depression and Anxiety with Proven Techniques)
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In a misguided abdication of our prophetic calling, many churches have allowed themselves to become internally segregated by age. Most began with the valuable goal that their teaching be age appropriate but went on to create a systematized method of discipleship akin to the instructional model of public schools, which requires each age-group be its own learning cohort. Thus many churches and parishes segregate by age-group and, in doing so, unintentionally contribute to the rising tide of alienation that defines our times. As a by-product of this approach, the next generation’s enthusiasm and vitality have been separated from the wisdom and experience of their elders.
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David Kinnaman (You Lost Me)
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Scientific Approach 7
Systematic Empiricism 7
Public Verification 7
Solvable Problems 8
The Scientist’s Two Jobs:
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Mark R. Leary (Introduction to Behavioral Research Methods)
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Michael Quinn Patton describes four levels of interviews, from ‘informal conversation’ (where the subject often does not even know s/he is being interviewed) to ‘closed, fixed-response interviews’ (basically questionnaires) (2002: 349). Our approach squarely falls into his second category, ‘interview guide approach,’ in which ‘topics and issues to be covered are specified in advance, in outline form; the interviewer decides sequence and wording of questions in the course of the interview.’ The interview schedule itself consisted of only twenty-one questions. All these questions sought to probe into people’s perceptions, dreams, and analysis of development, governance, the future – their future. We encouraged people to ask questions if they had any. In the rural areas, people systematically asked the same thing: What are you going to do with this? In urban areas, the questions were often more direct, sometimes a tad aggressive: So, now that you’ve asked us all these questions, what’s in it for you?
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Peter Uvin (Life after Violence: A People's Story of Burundi (African Arguments))
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He approached the task of finding good projects for his mission with the mindset of a marketer, systematically studying books on the subject to help identify why some ideas catch on while others fall flat. His marketing-centric approach is useful for anyone looking to wield mission as part of their quest for work they love. Purple
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Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love)
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Analyzing everyday situations using a systematic approach similar to that utilized by physicians when investigating a medical mysteries can result in better choices.
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Dr. Russ Hill (Medical Investigation 101: A Book to Inspire Your Interest in Medicine and How Doctors Think)
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Strategy blind spots are often created by the lack of future-driven mindset or a systematic approach to form and implement a strategy.
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Pearl Zhu (Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&as)
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Re-imaging the future of business is exciting, but investigating the different path for unleashing business potential needs to take a systematic approach and develop it into a more solid form.
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Pearl Zhu (Digital It: 100 Q&as)
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Happiness is more ephemeral than thought. It can't be observed without changing its nature. Its ingredients are subtle and there is no guarantee that a formula or recipe for joy can be written out or passed on or even repeated once again. Happiness evades capture, dissolving like a melody into the air, eluding even the most delicate, careful grasp. It frustrates any systematic search, responding better to random fossicking and oblique approaches, and it's rewards are infuriatingly arbitrary, stingy or abundant by purest chance.
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Anne Giardini (The Sad Truth About Happiness)
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The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless. The
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Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
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There are diverse styles of learning, problem solving, and a range of methodologies that a person can draw from in order to structure their thoughts or intentionally revise ingrained personal habits including both systematic and unsystematic approaches. Problems solving styles are reflective of personal differences in the manner that people prefer to position themselves in respect to the phenomena in the world and efficiently react to alterations in the external environment. Problem solving strategies encompass numerous variances in what manner a person approaches new concepts, how they manage their daily affairs, and respond effectively to new opportunities and complex challenges.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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At the café chain Pret A Manger, for example, regular customers noticed that, every now and then, they’d be given something for free with their order. One service expert wrote, of getting free coffee, “It has happened a few times over the last few years, too often for it to be a coincidence, yet so infrequent that it is unexpected. This makes me feel valued as a customer, puts a smile on my face and encourages me to visit again.” These “spontaneous” gifts are only half-spontaneous, as it turns out. Pret A Manger employees are allowed to give away a certain number of hot drinks and food items every week. Pret CEO Clive Schlee said of his staffers, “They will decide ‘I like the person on the bicycle’ or ‘I like the guy in the tie’ or ‘I fancy that girl or that boy.’ It means 28% of people have had something free.” Think on that. Almost a third of customers have gotten something free at least once. (Probably more than once, if they have dimples.) Other retail chains provide discounts or freebies to customers who use loyalty cards, of course, but Schlee told the Standard newspaper he rejected that approach: “We looked at loyalty cards but we didn’t want to spend all that money building up some complicated Clubcard-style analysis.” This is ingenious. Pret A Manger has restored the surprise and humanity to perks that, in a loyalty card scheme, would have been systematized. Note that the giveaways are satisfying for the staff as well as the customers. In an industry where rules tend to govern every employee behavior, it’s a relief for employees to be given some discretion: Hey, every week, give away some stuff to whomever you like. It broke the script for them, too. In the service business, a good surprise is one that delights employees as well as customers.
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Chip Heath (The Power of Moments: Why Certain Moments Have Extraordinary Impact)
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We approach economic growth from a practical point of view. To do this we look at the history of growth to work out the causes and mechanisms of continuing growth. We then systematize these mechanisms so as to extend the conventional theory.
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Edward A. Hudson (Economic Growth: How it works and how it transformed the world)
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Those who came up with the innovations were individuals already active in agriculture who looked deliberately and systematically to improve their businesses; the changes were decentralized, not centralized; and the changes were led by practical men, not by scientists or governments. The innovations involved tinkering, trial and error, or recognizing a new approach and transferring it to a different environment. There are two possible reasons motivating these innovations. The first is that they were supply driven - innovation took place for the sake of innovation, because someone had discovered a new process. The second is that they were demand driven - innovation resulted from the drive by farmers to expand their production and to increase their incomes. The evidence is entirely consistent with the demand-driven hypothesis. The nature and the timing of the innovations all is consistent with the idea that innovation was a response to a problem, the problem being to increase output and/or to reduce costs and so to increase incomes. Innovation was the response to business opportunities, not the cause.
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Edward A. Hudson (Economic Growth: How it works and how it transformed the world)
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Fear Hierarchy When learning to take bold action, it is helpful to gain an understanding of what exactly frightens us. Once we have a map of our fears, we are more equipped to approach them systematically. In behavioral psychology, this map is referred to as a fear hierarchy, and ranks our fears from most frightening to least frightening. Each one is paired
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Aziz Gazipura (The Solution To Social Anxiety: Break Free From The Shyness That Holds You Back)
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Learn how to frame bigger thinking boxes, or work across multiple boxes, for approaching problems systematically.
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Pearl Zhu (100 Digital Rules)