Tackling Problems Quotes

The key is this: Meet today's problems with today's strength. Don't start tackling tomorrow's problems until tomorrow. You do not have tomorrow's strength yet. You simply have enough for today.

In the fixed mindset, everything is about the outcome. If you fail—or if you’re not the best—it’s all been wasted. The growth mindset allows people to value what they’re doing regardless of the outcome . They’re tackling problems, charting new courses, working on important issues. Maybe they haven’t found the cure for cancer, but the search was deeply meaningful.

Having solved all the major mathematical, physical, chemical, biological, sociological, philosophical, etymological, meteorological and psychological problems of the Universe except for his own, three times over, [Marvin] was severely stuck for something to do, and had taken up composing short dolorous ditties of no tone, or indeed tune. The latest one was a lullaby. Marvin droned, Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see in infrared, How I hate the night. He paused to gather the artistic and emotional strength to tackle the next verse. Now I lay me down to sleep, Try to count electric sheep, Sweet dream wishes you can keep, How I hate the night.

Every problem has a solution. But after every solution, there's a new problem to tackle, some new challenge to take on.

Every problem has a solution. But after every solution, there's a new problem to tackle, some new challenge to take on. You don't stop after you solve one thing You keep going, you find a new way and a new path, try to do better and create better. tearing something down isn't the end; doing something great, or better, something right, is. Or maybe there isn't such a thing as an end goal at all. You accomplish something, and then you shift, ready to accomplish the next. You keep solving one problem after another until you change the world.

We have, in short, somehow become convinced that we need to tackle the whole problem, all at once. But the truth is that we don’t. We only need to find the stickiness Tipping Points,

Principle 4: Tackle your toughest challenge today. Burnout doesn’t occur because we’re solving problems; it occurs because we’ve been trying to solve the same problem over and over. The problem named is the problem solved. Identify and then confront the real obstacles in your path. Stay current with the people important to your success and happiness. Travel light, agenda-free.

Her feelings of fear and helplessness had reached such a pitch that they were suddenly transformed into their opposites. Having overcome them, she felt corageous and self-confident enough to tackle any power on earth; more precisely, she had ceased to worry about herself.

Such a tough life. This is not the easy way." "No," Penn agreed, "but I'm not sure easy is what I want for the kids anyway." She looked up at him. "Why the hell not?" "I mean, if we could have everything, sure. If we can have it all, yeah. I wish them easy, successful, fun-filled lives, crowned with good friends, attentive lovers, heaps of money, intellectual stimulation, and good views out the window. I wish them eternal beauty, international travel, and smart things to watch on tv. But if I can't have everything, if I only get a few, I'm not sure easy makes my wish list." "Really?" "Easy is nice. But its not as good as getting to be who you are or stand up for what you believe in," said Penn. "Easy is nice. But I wonder how often it leads to fulfilling work or partnership or being." "Easy probably rules out having children," Rosie admitted. "Having children, helping people, making art, inventing anything, leading the way, tackling the world's problems, overcoming your own. I don't know. Not much of what I value in our lives is easy. But there's not much of it I'd trade for easy either, I don't think.

If you bake a cupcake, the world has one more cupcake. If you become a circus clown, the world has one more squirt of seltzer down someone's pants. But if you win an Olympic gold medal, the world will not have one more Olympic gold medalist. It will just have you instead of someone else.

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy—not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.

The heart of software is its ability to solve domain-related problems for its user.

We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve "the problem of evil," yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is the "problem of good." How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results.

He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy. They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back? Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn't prove his intelligence, what would? Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal. Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.

To be a good professional engineer, always start to study late for exams. Because it teaches you how to manage time and tackle emergencies.

TACKLE the ROOT CAUSE not the EFFECT.

The problem is that our world and our education remain focused exclusively on external, materialistic values. We are not concerned enough with inner values. Those who grow up with this kind of education live in a materialistic life and eventually the whole society becomes materialistic. But this culture is not sufficient to tackle our human problems. The real problem is here," the Dalai Lama said, pointed to his head. The Archbishop tapped his chest with his fingers to emphasize the heart as well. "And here," the Dalai Lama echoed. "Mind and heart..

We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We are now ready to bask in Dickens. In our dealings with Jane Austen we had to make a certain effort to join the ladies in the drawing room. In the case of Dickens we remain at table with our tawny port. With Dickens we expand. It seems to me that Jane Austen's fiction had been a charming re-arrangement of old-fashioned values. In the case of Dickens, the values are new. Modern authors still get drunk on his vintage. Here, there is no problem of approach as with Austen, no courtship, no dallying. We just surrender ourselves to Dickens' voice--that is all. If it were possible I would like to devote fifty minutes of every class meeting to mute meditation, concentration, and admiration of Dickens. However my job is to direct and rationalize those meditations, that admiration. All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder-blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine, the wick really runs through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week. But I think Dickens will prove stronger.

No, what's troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics--the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working concensus to tackle any big problem.

she tackled the problem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her. When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?

...his horoscope had been pretty misleading as well. It had mentioned an unusual amount of planetary activity in his sign and had urged him to differentiate between what he thought he wanted and what he actually needed, and suggested that he should tackle emotional or work problems with determination and complete honesty, but had inexplicably failed to mention that he would be dead before the day was out.

Matt huffs. “Can you do me a favor, Ryke? These two owe my uncle forty grand.” He points to me. “This girl says her checkbook is in the car. Follow them and get the money from her.” “Yeah, no problem.” My stomach drops further. Now we’re going to be tailed by Matt’s superhero friend who looks fit enough to tackle me and pin me to the grass.

Whatever the situation and however disheartening it may be, it is a great hour when a man ceases adopting difficulties as an excuse for despondency and tackles himself as the real problem. No mood need be his master.

You don't look at the problem all at once, or it's like being caught in a spring flood under a downpour. You tackle the problem in pieces...

Only when white people come to terms with the white-on-white crime problem can we finally tackle the even more pernicious problem of male-on-male crime, which grows year after year.

But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years - problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space - and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die.

Annabeth caught Piper’s eye. She asked a silent question: What’s your feeling? Piper still wasn’t used to that – the way Annabeth looked to her for advice now. Ever since Sparta, they’d learned that they could tackle problems together from two different sides. Annabeth saw the logical thing, the tactical move. Piper had gut reactions that were anything but logical. Together, they either solved the problem twice as fast, or they hopelessly confused each other.

At the end of the day, the problem is education. Without an educated population, it doesn't matter what other problems you try to tackle. It's not gonna work. Think of how much less powerful campaign contributions would be if people had the critical thinking skills to see through advertising? Think of how many of our problems are based just on pure ignorance, whether it's antiscience people or bigots or whatever.

You don't have any problem with reality. You face it head on and tackle that bitch to the ground.

...given sufficient ignorance, one can doubt evolution....

Tom hated to admit defeat, even in matters far less important than this. He believed that all problems could be solved if they were tackled in the right way, with the right equipment. This was a challenge to his scientific ingenuity; the fact that there were many lives involved was immaterial. Dr. Tom Lawson had no great use for human beings, but he did respect the Universe. This was a private fight between him and It.

Beavers, the animal that doubles as an ecosystem, are ecological and hydrological Swiss Army knives, capable, in the right circumstances, of tackling just about any landscape-scale problem you might confront. Trying to mitigate floods or improve water quality? There’s a beaver for that. Hoping to capture more water for agriculture in the face of climate change? Add a beaver. Concerned about sedimentation, salmon populations, wildfire? Take two families of beaver and check back in a year. If that all sounds hyperbolic to you, well, I’m going to spend this book trying to change your mind.

she tackled the problem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her. When am I happy and when am I sad and what us the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?

It's not just the cheerleading thing I have a problem with, it's the whole jock enchilada. I'm all for a good game of basketball in teh driveway or a killer bike ride. But when there's tackling and grunting involved-- no thanks.

With a deliberate shrug, he stepped free of the hold on his shoulder. “Tell me something, boys,” he drawled. “Do you wear that leather to turn each other on? I mean, is it a dick thing with you all?” Butch got slammed so hard against the door that his back teeth rattled. The model shoved his perfect face into Butch’s. “I’d watch your mouth, if I were you.” “Why bother, when you’re keeping an eye on it for me? You gonna kiss me now?” A growl like none Butch had ever heard came out of the guy. “Okay, okay.” The one who seemed the most normal came forward. “Back off, Rhage. Hey, come on. Let’s relax.” It took a minute before the model let go. “That’s right. We’re cool,” Mr. Normal muttered, clapping his buddy on the back before looking at Butch. “Do yourself a favor and shut the hell up.” Butch shrugged. “Blondie’s dying to get his hands on me. I can’t help it.” The guy launched back at Butch, and Mr. Normal rolled his eyes, letting his friend go this time. The fist that came sailing at jaw level snapped Butch’s head to one side. As the pain hit, Butch let his own rage fly. The fear for Beth, the pent-up hatred of these lowlifes, the frustration about his job, all of it came out of him. He tackled the bigger man, taking him down onto the floor. The guy was momentarily surprised, as if he hadn’t expected Butch’s speed or strength, and Butch took advantage of the hesitation. He clocked Blondie in the mouth as payback and then grabbed the guy’s throat. One second later, Butch was flat on his back with the man sitting on his chest like a parked car. The guy took Butch’s face into his hand and squeezed, crunching the features together. It was nearly impossible to breathe, and Butch panted shallowly. “Maybe I’ll find your wife,” the guy said, “and do her a couple of times. How’s that sound?" “Don’t have one.” “Then I’m coming after your girlfriend.” Butch dragged in some air. “Got no woman.” “So if the chicks won’t do you, what makes you think I’d want to?” “Was hoping to piss you off.” “Now why’d you want to do that?” Blondie asked. “If I attacked first”—Butch hauled more breath into his lungs—“your boys wouldn’t have let us fight. Would’ve killed me first. Before I had a chance at you.” Blondie loosened his grip a little and laughed as he stripped Butch of his wallet, keys, and cell phone. “You know, I kind of like this big dummy,” the guy drawled. Someone cleared a throat. Rather officiously. Blondie leaped to his feet, and Butch rolled over, gasping. When he looked up, he was convinced he was hallucinating. Standing in the hall was a little old man dressed in livery. Holding a silver tray. “Pardon me, gentlemen. Dinner will be served in about fifteen minutes.” “Hey, are those the spinach crepes I like so much?” Blondie said, going for the tray. “Yes, Sire.” “Hot damn.” The other men clustered around the butler, taking what he offered. Along with cocktail napkins. Like they didn’t want to drop anything on the floor. What the hell was this? “Might I ask a favor?” the butler said. Mr. Normal nodded with vigor. “Bring out another tray of these and we’ll kill anything you want for you.” Yeah, guess the guy wasn’t really normal. Just relatively so. The butler smiled as if touched. “If you’re going to bloody the human, would you be good enough to do it in the backyard?” “No problem.” Mr. Normal popped another crepe in his mouth. “Damn, Rhage, you’re right. These are awesome.

If we come to see the purpose of the universe as God’s long-term glory rather than our short-term happiness, then we will undergo a critical paradigm shift in tackling the problem of evil and suffering. The world has gone terribly wrong. God is going to fix it. First, for his eternal glory. Second, for our eternal good.

Mainly, though, the Democratic Party has become the party of reaction. In reaction to a war that is ill conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action. In reaction to those who proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use market principles to tackle pressing problems. In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism, and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a larger meaning. We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans. We lost the courts and wait for a White House scandal. And increasingly we feel the need to match the Republican right in stridency and hardball tactics. The accepted wisdom that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists these days goes like this: The Republican Party has been able to consistently win elections not by expanding its base but by vilifying Democrats, driving wedges into the electorate, energizing its right wing, and disciplining those who stray from the party line. If the Democrats ever want to get back into power, then they will have to take up the same approach. ...Ultimately, though, I believe any attempt by Democrats to pursue a more sharply partisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment we're in. I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face as a country. It's what keeps us locked in "either/or" thinking: the notion that we can have only big government or no government; the assumption that we must either tolerate forty-six million without health insurance or embrace "socialized medicine". It is such doctrinaire thinking and stark partisanship that have turned Americans off of politics.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts. He might have added that everyone is entitled to their own interpretations but not their own logic. When we accept lies as facts, or illogic as logic, we lose the shared reality necessary to tackle our common problems. We become powerless.

Don’t try to do everything. Don’t try to tackle multiple business problems. Focus on one core problem and deliver one great solution.

There is...no easy answer to the evil and suffering problem and no easy road to its solution. But Christ tackled the matter radically and realistically by winning the allegiance of a few men and women to a new way of living...They were to be the spearhead of good against evil.

Having children, helping people, making art, inventing anything, leading the way, tackling the world’s problems, overcoming your own. I don’t know. Not much of what I value in our lives is easy.

Wisdom that neglects method leads to excessive introversion and an inability to effectively communicate with others. Method without wisdom can produce well-intentioned but naive and superficial acts of altruism that alleviate merely the symptoms of suffering without tackling the root cause of the problem.

In science fiction, we dream. In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities, which are so far out of whack, to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required.

INTJs aren’t just smart, they know they are. While this can make some cocky, but it is a benefit for many. As they are confident in their knowledge, they don’t shy away from tackling the hard problems and the big questions. They retain information well and can access it at will. And they don’t question their mental capacities or the depth of their knowledge. INTJs are sharp minds with quick intellect and they relish mental challenges.

Trust me. What a phrase. Is it a phrase or an idiom? I was never a wordsmith and I was too far along in life to even attempt to tackle a problem as complicated as words. Do writers struggle as much with words as a painter does with his paint and his brush? “Okay,” it is impossible not to trust a beautiful woman. Even macho noir anti-heroes who talk about staying out of trouble and doin’ nothin’ for nobody always get sucked into intricate snares set for them by beautiful women… I would not be an exception.

Lick was unique in bringing to the field a deep appreciation for human beings: our capacity to perceive, to adapt, to make choices, and to devise completely new ways of tackling apparently intractable problems. As an experimental psychologist, he found these abilities every bit as subtle and as worthy of respect as a computer’s ability to execute an algorithm. And that was why to him, the real challenge would always lie in adapting computers to the humans who used them, thereby exploiting the strengths of each.

AN EXTERNAL LAYER: The thing that happens, the external event, the unavoidable problem the protagonist must tackle (the plot). 2. AN INTERNAL LAYER: What that external problem causes the protagonist to struggle with, internally—the misbelief versus the truth—in order to solve it (what the story is really about). Combined, those two layers rivet us.

Let Your Mind Work in the Background The next time you are tackling a tough problem, work on it for a few minutes. When you get stuck, move on to another problem. Your diffuse mode can continue working on the tougher problem in the background. When you later return to the tougher problem, you will often be pleasantly surprised by the progress you’ve made.

Tackle problems with purity of personal power,

Single life is time to heal, breathe, re-establish who you are, and tackle any fears you may still have - all without society, friends, and family breathing down your neck.

Having children, helping people, making art, inventing anything, leading the way, tackling the world’s problems, overcoming your own. I don’t know.

… the problem, and our understanding of it, changes as we tackle it.

But if youthful idealism makes someone proceed in attempts to tackle the enormity of our problems, then we need more, not less, youthful "naïveté".

If we hope to successfully tackle overthinking, we need to take a step back rather than trying to work through the problem from inside our own rumination.

Your muscles tensed up, your blood pressure rose, and your heart rate increased. Someone looking closely at your eyes while you tackled this problem would have seen your pupils dilate.

We’ve come to the conclusion that it’s much better to ask small questions than big ones. Here are a few reasons: 1.  Small questions are by their nature less often asked and investigated, and maybe not at all. They are virgin territory for true learning. 2.  Since big problems are usually a dense mass of intertwined small problems, you can make more progress by tackling a small piece of the big problem than by flailing away at grand solutions. 3.  Any kind of change is hard, but the chances of triggering change on a small problem are much greater than on a big one. 4.  Thinking big is, by definition, an exercise in imprecision or even speculation. When you think small, the stakes may be diminished but at least you can be relatively sure you know what you’re talking about.

And our resistance against changing our habits of thought is immense and unrelenting. If we try, briefly, we find it ass vexing and unrewarding as writing a letter with the left hand. What we are used to is comfortable; what is comfortable is good; and what is good is right - this is the unspoken belief of almost all people everywhere. When a scientist, however, tackles a problem that has hitherto seemed insoluble, he abandons all his preconceptions, and all the preconceptions of the past. Only when he begins to question the basic assumptions he has always held can he make an utterly fresh start, unencumbered by the intellectual baggage of the past.

In the era of globalization, everything is interconnected. A problem in one part of the world will definitely impact on other parts of the globe. Such phenomenon is also valid for defense and security context. A conflict in a state will bring implications in its neighboring countries or other countries extended in the same region. Therefore, collaborative efforts in tackling common defense and security problems are essentially required.

Why would I what?” Will asked, wanting another bite of his burger. “Why would you risk your job teaching some stupid fantasy book?” “Because alternative universe literature promotes critical thinking, imagination, empathy, and creative problem solving. Children who are fluent in fiction are more able to interpret nonfiction and are better at understanding things like basic cause and effect, sociology, politics, and the impact of historical events on current events. Many of our technological advances were imagined by science fiction writers before the tech became available to create them, and many of today’s inventors were inspired by science fiction and fantasy to make a world more like the world in the story. Many of today’s political conundrums were anticipated by science fiction writers like Orwell, Huxley, and Heinlein, and sci-fi and fantasy tackle ethical problems in a way that allows people to analyze the problem with some emotional remove, which is important because the high emotions are often what lead to violence. Works like Harry Potter tackle the idea of abuse of power and—” Will stopped himself and swallowed. Everybody at the table, including Kenny, was staring at him in openmouthed surprise. “Anyway,” he said before taking a monster bite of his cooling hamburger on a sudden attack of nerves, “iss goomfer umf.” “It’s good for us,” Kenny translated, sounding a little stunned

The key is to take a larger project or goal and break it down into smaller problems to be solved, constraining the scope of work to solving a key problem, and then another key problem. This strategy, of breaking a project down into discrete, relatively small problems to be resolved, is what Bing Gordon, a cofounder and the former chief creative officer of the video game company Electronic Arts, calls smallifying. Now a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Gordon has deep experience leading and working with software development teams. He’s also currently on the board of directors of Amazon and Zynga. At Electronic Arts, Gordon found that when software teams worked on longer-term projects, they were inefficient and took unnecessary paths. However, when job tasks were broken down into particular problems to be solved, which were manageable and could be tackled within one or two weeks, developers were more creative and effective.

R.O.TC. kept me away from sports while the other guys practiced every day. They made the school teams, won their letters and got the girls. My days were spent mostly marching around in the sun. All you ever saw were the backs of some guy's ears and his buttocks. I quickly became disenchanted with military proceedings. The others shined their shoes brightly and seemed to go through maneuvers with relish. I couldn't see any sense in it. They were just getting shaped up in order to get their balls blown off later. On the other hand, I couldn't see myself crouched down in a football helmet, shoulder pads laced on, decked out in Blue and White, #69, trying to move out some brute with tacos on his breath so that the son of the district attorney could slant off left tackle for six yards. The problem was you had to keep choosing between on evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25, most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

When life hands you questions, answer them. When life hands you mysteries, unravel them. When life hands you enigmas, decipher them. When life hands you tasks, accomplish them. When life hands you problems, tackle them. When life hands you skills, develop them. When life hands you talents, sharpen them. When life hands you friends, cherish them. When life hands you family, value them. When life hands you acquaintances, treasure them. When life hands you opponents, confront them. When life hands you acquaintances, celebrate them. When life hands you allies, support them. When life hands you riches, multiply them. When life hands you possessions, protect them. When life hands you pleasures, ration them. When life hands you experiences, relish them. When life hands you students, instruct them. When life hands you mentors, study them. When life hands you teachers, esteem them. When life hands you disciples, inspire them. When life hands you gurus, honor them. When life hands you lessons, remember them. When life hands you teachings, impart them. When life hands you demands, tackle them. When life hands you obstacles, challenge them. When life hands you troubles, overcome them. When life hands you burdens, conquer them. When life hands you titles, cherish them. When life hands you degrees, employ them. When life hands you medals, welcome them. When life hands you awards, appreciate them. When life hands you blessings, count them.

To maximize what you get out of your college experience, I want your friends to look at your semester schedule and say “this is the weirdest schedule I’ve ever seen!” Trust me on this one. If you want to be an engineer, take Engineering 101, and a crash course in philosophical literature. then take Engineering 102, and art appreciation. then Engineering 103, and Intro to Women’s Rights. You will expand your knowledge and ways of looking at the world, and become a more powerful person for it. Because that way, when you encounter difficulties, you won’t only tackle the problem from the point of view of an engineer. Anybody can do that. You will be able to look at it as a scientist, a philosopher, an artist, and choose the best course of action from there.

Having children, helping people, making art, inventing anything, leading the way, tackling the world’s problems, overcoming your own. I don’t know. Not much of what I value in our lives is easy. But there’s not much of it I’d trade for easy either, I don’t think.

We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way people see the world, leaping far ahead of our current understanding. I’m arguing that in reality, innovation is more systematic. We grind away to expand the cutting edge, opening up new problems in the adjacent possible to tackle and therefore expand the cutting edge some more, opening up more new problems, and so on. “The truth,” Johnson explains, “is that technological (and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible.

Colleges should offer lots of optional life-enriching experiences, like intramural basketball and a place to sunbathe. But reading books, like basketball or sunbathing, is a leisure activity, neither more nor less admirable than any other, and colleges should not pretend otherwise.

JUST FOR TODAY Just for today I will be happy. This assumes that what Abraham Lincoln said is true, that ‘most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.’ Happiness is from within; it is not a matter of externals. Just for today I will try to adjust myself to what is, and not try to adjust everything to my own desires. I will take my family, my business, and my luck as they come and fit myself to them. Just for today I will take care of my body. I will exercise it, care for it, nourish it, not abuse it nor neglect it, so that it will be a perfect machine for my bidding. Just for today I will try to strengthen my mind. I will learn something useful. I will not be a mental loafer. I will read something that requires effort, thought and concentration. Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways; I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don’t want to do, as William James suggests, just for exercise. Just for today I will be agreeable. I will look as well as I can, dress as becomingly as possible, talk low, act courteously, be liberal with praise, criticise not at all, nor find fault with anything and not try to regulate nor improve anyone. Just for today I will try to live through this day only, not to tackle my whole life problem at once. I can do things for twelve hours that would appall me if I had to keep them up for a lifetime. Just for today I will have a program. I will write down what I expect to do every hour. I may not follow it exactly, but I will have it. It will eliminate two pests, hurrying and indecision. Just for today I will have a quiet half-hour all by myself and relax. In this half-hour sometimes I will think of God, so as to get a little more perspective into my life. Just for today I will be unafraid, especially I will not be afraid to be happy, to enjoy what is beautiful, to love, and to believe that those I love, love me. If we want to develop a mental attitude that will bring us peace and happiness, here is Rule 1: Think and act cheerfully, and you will feel cheerful.

Since it is through faith in the Lord’s promises that we are saved (Acts 16:31), then surely, if faith is mighty to solve the great and eternal problem of our sinfulness, alienation, and helplessness, is it not the way to tackle every problem – to look up to our almighty, ever-loving God and say ‘I trust you’?

[D]espite her alternative leanings, it turned out Crystal was not particularly psyco-babbly or airy-fairy or tree-huggy, as one might have expected. In fact, the first thing she did was write a list. She said writing lists helped calm her down when she was stressed about anything because it put problems in order. You can look at a list of things and see how you can tackle each one separately without feeling sick about it, she said. Whereas if they all just stayed jumbled in your mind in one great bit sticky ball you never got to consider them individually. She actually spoke a lot of sense for someone with toe rings and a Chinese tattoo.

Unless we’re willing to spend eons striving for perfection every time we encounter a hitch, hard problems demand that instead of spinning our tires we imagine easier versions and tackle those first. When applied correctly, this is not just wishful thinking, not fantasy or idle daydreaming. It’s one of our best ways of making progress.

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.

I HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It’s where I’m from, after all. There’s baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don’t obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective. Consider two small experiences I had upon arriving at a hotel in downtown Austin, Texas. When I checked in, the clerk needed to record my details, naturally enough, and asked for my home address. Our house doesn’t have a street number, just a name, and I have found in the past that that is more deviance than an American computer can sometimes cope with, so I gave our London address. The girl typed in the building number and street name, then said: “City?” I replied: “London.” “Can you spell that please?” I looked at her and saw that she wasn’t joking. “L-O-N-D-O-N,” I said. “Country?” “England.” “Can you spell that?” I spelled England. She typed for a moment and said: “The computer won’t accept England. Is that a real country?” I assured her it was. “Try Britain,” I suggested. I spelled that, too—twice (we got the wrong number of T’s the first time)—and the computer wouldn’t take that either. So I suggested Great Britain, United Kingdom, UK, and GB, but those were all rejected, too. I couldn’t think of anything else to suggest. “It’ll take France,” the girl said after a minute. “I beg your pardon?” “You can have ‘London, France.’ ” “Seriously?” She nodded. “Well, why not?” So she typed “London, France,” and the system was happy. I finished the check-in process and went with my bag and plastic room key to a bank of elevators a few paces away. When the elevator arrived, a young woman was in it already, which I thought a little strange because the elevator had come from one of the upper floors and now we were going back up there again. About five seconds into the ascent, she said to me in a suddenly alert tone: “Excuse me, was that the lobby back there?” “That big room with a check-in desk and revolving doors to the street? Why, yes, it was.” “Shoot,” she said and looked chagrined. Now I am not for a moment suggesting that these incidents typify Austin, Texas, or America generally or anything like that. But it did get me to thinking that our problems are more serious than I had supposed. When functioning adults can’t identify London, England, or a hotel lobby, I think it is time to be concerned. This is clearly a global problem and it’s spreading. I am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas.

[A]s important as moral and ethical issues are here, you don't need to rely on altruism to make the case for tackling poverty. It is in everyone's self-interest to reduce the societal consequences of deprivation. Poverty can foster crime and health care problems and in various other ways increase social costs and affect the lives of people who aren't poor.

Democracy provides the institutional framework for the reform of political institutions (other than this framework). It makes possible the reform of institutions without using violence, and thereby the use of reason in the designing of new institutions and the adjusting of old ones. It cannot provide reason. The question of the intellectual and moral standard of its citizens is to a large degree a personal problem. (The idea that this problem can be tackled, in turn, by an institutional eugenic and educational control is, I believe, mistaken ; some reasons for my belief will be given below.) It is quite wrong to blame democracy for the political shortcomings of a democratic state. We should rather blame ourselves. In a non-democratic state, the only way to achieve reasonable reforms is by the violent overthrow of the government, and the introduction of a democratic framework. Those who criticize democracy on any ' moral ' grounds fail to distinguish between personal and institutional problems. It rests with us to improve matters. The democratic institutions cannot improve themselves. The problem of improving them is always a problem of persons rather than of institutions.

There is a persistent belief amongst abled people that a cure is what disabled people should want. To abandon our disabled selves and bodies and assimilate into a perhaps unachievable abled skin. Pushback to this idea often comes in the form of the social model of disability, which states that we are disabled by society and lack of access rather than by our bodies. For many, the social model can be liberating: by locating the cause of our problems outside our bodies, we can begin to love ourselves again. Tackling systemic ableism may feel like tilting at windmills, but it is still easier to address than some kind of failing within ourselves. There is a criticism of the social model of disability, located in the idea that some disabled people may want a cure. Particularly with matters like chronic pain/chronic illness, a cure is seen as something that can itself be liberating: a way to simply be in one’s body without feeling pain, for example. There is a danger in the cure mentality, as it can be a slippery slope toward eugenics when it is applied by abled people. Many in the Deaf and autistic communities do not want a cure and feel that those who advocate for a cure are advocating that they not exist anymore. Sometimes it comes down to how we see our individual disabilities: Are they an intrinsic part of who we are? Or are they an identity that comes with a side of agony we would gladly give up? How do we feel when abled people start advocating for “cures”—which may come in the form of eliminating our people entirely—rather than when the desire for a cure comes from disabled advocates?

That mental strength under pressure is absolutely critical for the long, deep dives that Rick and John tackle. When you are hundreds of yards into a sump, you are so isolated from the basic needs of survival that you may as well be on the surface of the moon. It’s no wonder, then, that sump divers seem to possess the same qualities as astronauts: the ability to prepare thoroughly, solve problems quickly, and keep cool in an emergency.

Anyone watching her would have thought her cold, indifferent, but this was the only way she knew to tackle her deepest troubles, to shoo them aside as if they were a cloud of summer gnats, and deal with the task at hand brusquely and efficiently. Hannah always thought of it as her mother's Englishness, that ability to equalize problems so that a scuffed shoe and an impending disaster were almost equally distasteful, but both were born with aplomb.

Monkeys and pedestals is a mental model that helps you quit sooner. Pedestals are the part of the problem you know you can already solve, like designing the perfect business card or logo. The hardest thing is training the monkey. When faced with a complex, ambitious goal, (a) identify the hard thing first; (b) try to solve for that as quickly as possible; and (c) beware of false progress. Building pedestals creates the illusion that you are making progress toward your goal, but doing the easy stuff is a waste of time if the hard stuff is actually impossible. Tackling the monkey first gets you to no faster, limiting the time, effort, and money you sink into a project, making it easier to walk away. When we butt up against a hard problem we can’t solve, we have a tendency to turn to pedestal-building rather than choosing to quit. Advance planning and precommitment contracts increase the chances you will quit sooner. When you enter into a course of action, create a set of kill criteria. This is a list of signals you might see in the future that would tell you it’s time to quit. Kill criteria will help inoculate you against bad decision-making when you’re “in it” by limiting the number of decisions you’ll have to make once you’re already in the gains or in the losses. In organizations, kill criteria allow people a different way to get rewarded beyond dogged and blind pursuit of a project until the bitter end.

Culturally one of the most difficult things that happens is to get creative people to understand [that] the world is no longer just defined by television. The thing that happened, and has been happening for some time here, is that our work was much more diverse than even we knew it was. And I think as we began to change, the way we tackled problems and the way that we looked at problems was completely and utterly holistic in a way that I’d probably not ever really experienced before.

Shirogane: "This is a brand-new show called 'Naze? Naze? Neeze!' " I'm Shirogane, the teacher of course.♥" " We're covering Arithmethic!" "Here we have Akira-kun and Kengo-kun, who will tackle the questions with us!" Kengo: "Hello there!" ^_^ Akira: "I'm a high school student, by the way!" "Why do I have to do arithmethic?!" Shirogane: "And here's my assistant, kokuchi!" Kokuchi: "HISS!" Akira: "HEY! I don't get why a kokuchi is here...Besides, does it even remotely understand our language." Shirogane:"Here's the first question" "Akira-kun, what's three times four?" Akira: "Twelve..." Shirogane: "CORRECT!!!" "Wonderful Akira-kun! Fantastic Job!" "You're so smart. Can I call you genius from now on?" Akira: "Only if you want a pencil shoved in your eye!" "Stop making fun of me right now!" Shirogane: "Let's move on to the next question.♥ (Shirogane spinning) Akira: "Why are you so hyper today?" "You're acting like a different person!" Shirogane: "Kengo-kun what is 23 minus 15?" Kengo: "Twe--" Shirogane: "WRONG." " If you can't solve a simple problem like this, you don't even deserve to be considered human. You'd be better off dead. SO JUST DIE." Kengo: "I made a small mistake! No need to walk all over me like that!!" Shirogane: "Let me explain this problem so that stupid Kengo-kun can understand." Kengo: "I...I am not stupid!" Shirogane: "First, you have 23 kokuchi..." "...You take 15 from the 23..." "...AND KILL THEM" (Shirogane killing the Kokuchi) Kengo: "OMG, Akira! Can you stop him?!" Akira: "Well...Why should I? I don't really care...I'm tired." Kengo: "AKIRA!!" (Shirogane covered in Kokuchi blood) Shirogane: Now then! How many kokuchi do we have left now, Kengo-kun." (Kokuchi shivers) Kengo: "SO GROSS! EI--EIGHT! THE ANSWER IS EIGHT!" Shirogane: "Yes you are correct! Well, the dumb boy finally understood the problem, and it's time for us to say goodbye!" "Take care and see you next week!" (Akira sleeping) Kengo: Not likely..." Shirogane: "GOODBYE!

It is impossible [he continued] that such a conference, which is to determine the fate of this continent for many years to come, could carry on its deliberations while cannon are thundering or mobilized armies are bringing pressure to bear upon it. If, however, these problems must be solved sooner or later, then it would be more sensible to tackle the solution before millions of men are first uselessly sent to death and billions of riches destroyed. Continuation of the present state of affairs in the West is unthinkable. Each day will soon demand increasing sacrifices… The national wealth of Europe will be scattered in the form of shells and the vigor of every nation will be sapped on the battlefields… One thing is certain. In the course of world history there have never been two victors, but very often only losers. May those peoples and their leaders who are of the same opinion now make their reply. And let those who consider war to be the better solution reject my outstretched hand.

These fields, which govern the interaction of all subatomic particles, are now called Yang-Mills fields. However, the puzzle that has stumped physicists within this century is why the subatomic field equations look so vastly different from the field equations of Einstein-that is, why the nuclear force seems so different from gravity. Some of the greatest minds in physics have tackled this problem, only to fail. Perhaps the reason for their failure is that they were trapped by common sense. Confined to three or four dimensions, the field equations of the subatomic world and gravitation are difficult to unify. The advantage of the hyperspace theory is that the Yang-Mills field, Maxwell's field, and Einstein's field can all be placed comfortably within the hyperspace field. We see that these fields fit together precisely within the hyperspace field like pieces in a jig-saw puzzle. The other advantage of field theory is that it allows us to calculate the precise energies at which we can expect space and time to foem wormholes.

Humans and other organics were dangerously error-prone in so many ways: They somehow failed to see or hear important stimuli, insisted on ignoring data they didn’t like, and forgot things they desperately needed to remember. Any self-respecting droid would have addressed such failings with a quick diagnostics session and memory defragmentation. Yet organics made up for this—at least a little bit—with a talent for tackling a problem with simultaneous bits and pieces of multiple subroutines at once, what they called improvisation.

Why do so many people do nothing? I think it’s because most of us look at the evils and injustice around us, and we become overwhelmed. The problems look too big for us to tackle. We say to ourselves, “What can I do? I’m just one person.” One person is a start. One person can act and make a change by helping another. One person can inspire a second person to be intentional, and another. Those people can work together. They can become a movement. They can make an impact. We should never let what we cannot do keep us from doing what we can do. A passive life does not become a meaningful life.

Social scientists have argued that a strategy of “small wins”—making quick, opportunistic, tangible gambits only modestly related to a desired outcome—is in many instances the most effective way of tackling big problems.2 Part of the reason small wins can produce much bigger results than a grand strategy is psychological: Defining a problem as “big and serious” can make us feel frustrated and helpless and therefore can elicit a less creative (or more habitual) response. We become paralyzed. We make the wrong move just to change. When we see change as requiring “big, bold strokes,” we amplify our fear of it; we overcome this fear by putting one foot in front of the other, in a series of safer steps.

We are not so at home with the resurrected form of things despite a yearly springtime, healings in our bodies, the ten thousand forms of newness in every event and every life. The death side of things grabs our imagination and fascinates us as fear and negativity always do, I am sad to say. We have to be taught how to look for anything infinite, positive, or good, which for some reason is much more difficult. We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve “the problem of evil,” yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is “the problem of good.” How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results.

Megan Meade’s Guide to the McGowan Boys Entry One Observation #1: When they’re beautiful, they know they’re beautiful. Like the second-to-oldest one, Evan. He’s a senior. He is perfection personified. And he knows it. You can tell because he just sort of smiles knowingly when you gape at him. Not that I’ve been gaping at him. Not at all. Anyway, too soon yet to tell if it negatively affects his behavior. (Like Mike Blukowsi and his Astrodome-sized ego problem.) Observation #2: They like skin. Especially skin they think they’re not necessarily supposed to be seeing. Like the space between your belly tee and your waistband. Observation #3: They have no problem bringing up events that would mortify me into shamed silence if the roles were reversed. Like Evan totally brought up the wiffleball bat incident, when if that had happened to me, I’d be wishing on every one of my birthday cakes for everyone to forget it. Observation #4: They gossip. Can you believe it? I overheard Finn and Doug in the backyard talking about some girl named Dawn who blew off some guy named Simon for some other guy named Rick for like TWENTY MINUTES! They sounded like those old mole-hair ladies at Sal’s Milkshakes. ‘Member the ones who lectured us for a whole hour that day about how young women shouldn’t wear shorts? Wait, okay, I got sidetracked. Observation #5: The older ones are so cute with the younger ones. They were playing ultimate Frisbee when I first got here and Evan totally let Caleb and Ian tackle him. It was soooooo cute. **sigh.** Observation #6: They’re cliquey. I mean, eye-rolling, secret-handshake, don’t-talk-to-us-unless-you’ve-got-an-X-and-a-Y cliquey. Very schooled in the art of the freeze-out. Observation #7: They have no sense of personal space. I need a lock on my door. STAT. Observation #8: Boys are icky. Do not even get me started on the state of the bathroom. I’m thinking of calling in a haz-mat team. Seriously. Observation #9: They have really freaky things going on down there. Yeah, I don’t think I’m ready to elaborate on that one yet. Observation #10: They know how to make enemies. Big time.

Timing is something that none of us can seem to get quite right with relationships. We meet the person of our dreams the month before they leave to go study abroad. We form an incredibly close friendship with an attractive person who is already taken. One relationship ends because our partner isn’t ready to get serious and another ends because they’re getting serious too soon. “It would be perfect,” We moan to our friends, “If only this were five years from now/eight years sooner/some indistinct time in the future where all our problems would take care of themselves.” Timing seems to be the invariable third party in all of our relationships. And yet we never stop to consider why we let timing play such a drastic role in our lives. Timing is a bitch, yes. But it’s only a bitch if we let it be. Here’s a simple truth that I think we all need to face up to: the people we meet at the wrong time are actually just the wrong people. You never meet the right people at the wrong time because the right people are timeless. The right people make you want to throw away the plans you originally had for one and follow them into the hazy, unknown future without a glance backwards. The right people don’t make you hmm and haw about whether or not you want to be with them; you just know. You know that any adventure you had originally planned out for your future isn’t going to be half as incredible as the adventures you could have by their side. That no matter what you thought you wanted before, this is better. Everything is better since they came along. When you are with the right person, time falls away. You don’t worry about fitting them into your complicated schedule, because they become a part of that schedule. They become the backbone of it. Your happiness becomes your priority and so long as they are contributing to it, you can work around the rest. The right people don’t stand in the way of the things you once wanted and make you choose them over them. The right people encourage you: To try harder, dream bigger, do better. They bring out the most incredible parts of yourself and make you want to fight harder than ever before. The right people don’t impose limits on your time or your dreams or your abilities. They want to tackle those mountains with you, and they don’t care how much time it takes. With the right person, you have all of the time in the world. The truth is, when we pass someone up because the timing is wrong, what we are really saying is that we don’t care to spend our time on that person. There will never be a magical time when everything falls into place and fixes all our broken relationships. But there may someday be a person who makes the issue of timing irrelevant. Because when someone is right for us, we make the time to let them into our lives. And that kind of timing is always right.

Locke's political philosophy was, on the whole, adequate and useful until the industrial revolution. Since then, it has been increasingly unable to tackle the important problems. The power of property, as embodied in vast corporations, grew beyond anything imagined by Locke. The necessary functions of the State—for example, in education—increased enormously. Nationalism brought about an alliance, sometimes an amalgamation, of economic and political power, making war the principal means of competition. The single separate citizen has no longer the power and independence that he had in Locke's speculations. Our age is one of organization, and its conflicts are between organizations, not between separate individuals.

Stop Telling Yourself You’re Not Ready As we noted yesterday, we fear the unknown. For example, in our personal lives, we hesitate before saying hello to strangers. We immediately call a plumber before trying to fix plumbing problems on our own. We stick to the same grocery stores rather than visiting new stores. We gravitate toward the familiar. In our professional lives, we shy away from taking on unfamiliar projects. We cringe at the thought of creating new spreadsheets and reports for our bosses. We balk at branching out into new avenues of business. Instead, we remain in our comfort zones. There, after all, the risk of failure is minimal. One of the biggest reasons we do this is because we believe we’re unready to tackle new activities. We feel we lack the practical expertise to handle new projects with poise and effectiveness. We feel we lack the knowledge to know what we’re doing. In other words, we tell ourselves that we’re not 100% ready. This assumption stems from a basic and common fallacy: that we must be 100% prepared if we hope to perform a given task effectively. In reality, that’s untrue. The truth is, you’ll rarely be 100% ready for anything life throws at you. Individuals who have achieved success in their respective fields claim their success is a reflection of their persistence and grit, and an ability to adapt to their circumstances. It is not dictated by whether the individual has achieved mastery in any particular area.

In other words, in their own ways, both systems basically attempt to follow the Buddha in addressing the same fundamental problem of clinging to reference points or extremes. They just tackle this issue from different angles, with different terminologies and methods. As Harris says: Nagarjuna and Asanga ... have set themselves the common task of rendering traditional Buddhist doctrine in such a way that it can be used to tackle particular problems. Furthermore it is pointless categorizing them as nihilists or idealists or anything else of the kind. They should be seen as expositors, adapting traditional doctrine to meet the needs of particular tasks while at the same time leaving the body of the doctrine fundamentally unchanged and unquestioned.

These new discoveries of depth psychology are bound to make some change in our collective ethical views, for they will compel us to judge all human actions in a much more individual and subtle way. The discovery of the unconscious is one of the most far-reaching discoveries of recent times. But the fact that recognition of its unconscious reality involves honest self-examination and reorganization of one’s life causes many people to continue to behave as if nothing at all has happened. It takes a lot of courage to take the unconscious seriously and to tackle the problems it raises. Most people are too indolent to think deeply about even those moral aspects of their behavior of which they are conscious; they are certainly too lazy to consider how the unconscious affects them.

Modern analytical empiricism, of which I have been giving an outline, differs from that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume by its incorporation of mathematics and its development of a powerful logical technique. It is thus able, in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy. It has the advantage, as compared with the philosophies of the system-builders, of being able to tackle its problems one at a time, instead of having to invent at one stroke a block theory of the whole universe. Its methods, in this respect, resemble those of science. I have no doubt that, in so far as philosophical knowledge is possible, it is by such methods that it must be sought; I have also no doubt that, by these methods, many ancient problems are completely soluble.

When I got home, I thought about the fact that Einstein supposedly used to stock his wardrobe with the same suits and shoes so he’d never have to think about what he was going to wear. I lack the intellect it takes to solve problems that way. I’ve advanced nothing in the field of psychology, and my paper on PTSD was given little attention; I wrote that psychological disorders with a genetic link, such as borderline personality disorder, might seem impossible to treat, while PTSD, which is based in trauma that has been experienced, seems easy to tackle, at least to the layperson. The opposite is true. It can be difficult to find the right medication for genetic disorders, but they can be sufficiently treated. Conversely, PTSD never goes away. One might think that our genes are so elementary that we cannot escape them, but our experiences have the ability to do far greater damage.

I LOVE men. I understand and love the solid atmosphere that men spread. I understand and love their determination that makes them reach their goals so successfully. I love their courage to take risks and tackle things that scare me or what I don't have the mental or physical strength to do. I love their friendly tussles and their ability to meet problems with humor. I love their unspeakable gentleness, tenderness and care in dealing with the fragile. I love their strengths that they so generously give - and their weaknesses that give the opportunity to balance and give back to them. I love how “impossible” they are sometimes because it gives the opportunity to love unconditionally. I love their straightforwardness and their pride, and their wild passions as well as their shyness and humbleness when they realize life is calling them to grow. Men and women can complement each other perfectly and I celebrate that! I love manhood and I LOVE all my boys!

Tackle a clearly identified and isolated task. If you have to write an article, for example, do the research ahead of time, so that when you get to your focus block you can put your word processor in fullscreen mode and turn your entire attention to your prose. Consider using a different location for these blocks. Move to a different room, or a library, or even a quiet place outside to perform your focused work. When possible, do your work with pen and paper to avoid even the possibility of online distraction. The battle between focus and distraction is a serious problem—both to the competitiveness of our companies and to our own sanity. The amount of value lost to unchecked use of convenient but distracting work habits is staggering. The focus block method described above does not fix this problem, but it does give you a way to push back against its worst excesses, systematically producing important creative work even when your environment seems designed to thwart this goal.

The discords of our experience--delight in change, fear of change; the death of the individual and the survival of the species, the pains and pleasures of love, the knowledge of light and dark, the extinction and the perpetuity of empires--these were Spenser's subject; and they could not be treated without this third thing, a kind of time between time and eternity. He does not make it easy to extract philosophical notions from his text; but that he is concerned with the time-defeating aevum and uses it as a concord-fiction, I have no doubt. 'The seeds of knowledge,' as Descartes observed, 'are within us like fire in flint; philosophers educe them by reason, but the poets strike them forth by imagination, and they shine the more clearly.' We leave behind the philosophical statements, with their pursuit of logical consequences and distinctions, for a free, self-delighting inventiveness, a new imagining of the problems. Spenser used something like the Augustinian seminal reasons; he was probably not concerned about later arguments against them, finer discriminations. He does not tackle the questions, in the Garden cantos, of concreation, but carelessly--from a philosophical point of view--gives matter chronological priority. The point that creation necessitates mutability he may have found in Augustine, or merely noticed for himself, without wondering how it could be both that and a consequence of the Fall; it was an essential feature of one's experience of the world, and so were all the arguments, precise or not, about it. Now one of the differences between doing philosophy and writing poetry is that in the former activity you defeat your object if you imitate the confusion inherent in an unsystematic view of your subject, whereas in the second you must in some measure imitate what is extreme and scattering bright, or else lose touch with that feeling of bright confusion. Thus the schoolmen struggled, when they discussed God, for a pure idea of simplicity, which became for them a very complex but still rational issue: for example, an angel is less simple than God but simpler than man, because a species is less simple than pure being but simpler than an individual. But when a poet discusses such matters, as in say 'Air and Angels,' he is making some human point, in fact he is making something which is, rather than discusses, an angel--something simple that grows subtle in the hands of commentators. This is why we cannot say the Garden of Adonis is wrong as the Faculty of Paris could say the Averroists were wrong. And Donne's conclusion is more a joke about women than a truth about angels. Spenser, though his understanding of the expression was doubtless inferior to that of St. Thomas, made in the Garden stanzas something 'more simple' than any section of the Summa. It was also more sensuous and more passionate. Milton used the word in his formula as Aquinas used it of angels; poetry is more simple, and accordingly more difficult to talk about, even though there are in poetry ideas which may be labelled 'philosophical.

Poetry is needed—but for poetry you need surrender. You need to throw off this ego. If you can do it, if you can put it aside even for a few moments, your life will have glimpses of the beautiful, of the divine. Without poetry you cannot really live, you can only exist. Love is poetry. And if love is not possible, how can you be prayerful, meditative, aware? It becomes almost impossible. And without a meditative awareness, you will remain just a body; you will never become aware of the innermost soul. Only in prayerfulness, in a deep meditation and silence do you reach the peaks. That prayerful silence, that meditative awareness is the highest peak of experience—but love opens the door. Carl Gustav Jung, after a lifetime of studying thousands of people—thousands of cases of people who were ill, psychologically crippled, psychologically confused—said that he had never come across a psychologically ill person whose real problem after the fortieth year is not spiritual. There is a rhythm in life, and in your forties a new dimension arises, the spiritual dimension. If you cannot tackle it rightly, if you don’t know what to do, you will become ill, you will become restless. The whole of human growth is a continuity. If you miss one step, it becomes discontinuous. The

Skills Unlocked: How to Build Heroic Character Strengths If you want to make a change for the better or achieve a tough goal, don’t worry about motivation. Instead, focus on increasing your self-efficacy: confidence in your ability to solve your own problems and achieve your goals. The fastest and most reliable way to increase your self-efficacy is to learn how to play a new game. Any kind of game will do, because all games require you to learn new skills and tackle tough goals. The level of dopamine in your brain influences your ability to build self-efficacy. The more you have, the more determined you feel, and the less likely you are to give up. You’ll learn faster, too—because high dopamine levels improve your attention and help you process feedback more effectively. Keep in mind that video games have been shown to boost dopamine levels as much as intravenous amphetamines. Whenever you want to boost your dopamine levels, play a game—or make a prediction. Predictions prime your brain to pay closer attention and to anticipate a reward. (Playing “worst-case scenario bingo” is an excellent way to combine these two techniques!) You can also build self-efficacy vicariously by watching an avatar that looks like you accomplish feats in a virtual world. Whenever possible, customize video game avatars to look like you. Every time your avatar does something awesome, you’ll get a vicarious boost to your willpower and determination. Remember, self-efficacy doesn’t just help you. It can inspire you to help others. The more powerful you feel, the more likely you are to rise to the heroic occasion. So the next time you feel superpowerful, take a moment to ask yourself how you can use your powers for good.

Yes, he admitted, if gravity is always attractive, and never repulsive, then the stars in the universe might be unstable. But there was a loophole in this argument. Assume that the universe is, on average, totally uniform and infinite in all directions. In such a static universe, all the forces of gravity cancel one another out, and the universe becomes stable once again. Given any star, the forces of gravity acting on it from all the distant stars in different directions eventually sum to zero, and hence the universe does not collapse. Although this was a clever solution to this problem, Newton realized there was still a potential flaw to his solution. The universe might be uniform on average, but it cannot be exactly uniform at all points, so there must be tiny deviations. Like a house of cards, it appears to be stable, but the tiniest flaw will cause the entire structure to collapse. So Newton was clever enough to realize that a uniform infinite universe was indeed stable but was always teetering on the edge of collapse. In other words, the cancellation of infinite forces must be infinitely precise or else the universe will either collapse or be ripped apart. Thus, Newton’s final conclusion was that the universe was infinite and uniform on average, but occasionally God has to tweak the stars in the universe, so they do not collapse under gravity. Why Is the Night Sky Black? But this raised another problem. If we start with a universe that is infinite and uniform, then everywhere we look into space our gaze will eventually hit a star. But since there are an infinite number of stars, there must be an infinite amount of light entering our eyes from all directions. The night sky should be white, not black. This is called Olbers’ paradox. Some of the greatest minds in history have tried to tackle this sticky question. Kepler, for example, dismissed the paradox by claiming that the universe was finite, and hence there is no paradox. Others have theorized that dust clouds have obscured starlight. (But this cannot explain the paradox, because, in an infinite amount of time, the dust clouds begin to heat up and then emit blackbody radiation, similar to a star. So the universe becomes white again.) The final answer was actually given by Edgar Allan Poe in 1848. Being an amateur astronomer, he was fascinated by the paradox and said that the night sky is black because, if we travel back in time far enough, we eventually encounter a cutoff—that is, a beginning to the universe. In other words, the night sky is black because the universe has a finite age. We do not receive light from the infinite past, which would make the night sky white, because the universe never had an infinite past. This means that telescopes peering at the farthest stars will eventually reach the blackness of the Big Bang itself. So it is truly amazing that by pure thought, without doing any experiments whatsoever, one can conclude that the universe must have had a beginning.