Take Criticism Positively Quotes

Don't Just Don't just learn, experience. Don't just read, absorb. Don't just change, transform. Don't just relate, advocate. Don't just promise, prove. Don't just criticize, encourage. Don't just think, ponder. Don't just take, give. Don't just see, feel. Don’t just dream, do. Don't just hear, listen. Don't just talk, act. Don't just tell, show. Don't just exist, live.

True confidence is not about what you take from someone to restore yourself, but what you give back to your critics because they need it more than you do.

Turn down the volume of your negative inner voice and create a nurturing inner voice to take it’s place. When you make a mistake, forgive yourself, learn from it, and move on instead of obsessing about it. Equally important, don’t allow anyone else to dwell on your mistakes or shortcomings or to expect perfection from you.

Any fool can break something, criticise someone and tear things apart. It takes a far more skilled, wise and kind soul to build something, nurture someone, fix things and help others thrive over time.

BEWARE OF THOSE Beware of those who are bitter, For they will never allow you To enjoy your fruit. Beware of those who criticize you When you deserve some praise for an achievement, For they secretly desire to be worshiped. Beware of those who are needy or stingy, For they would rather sting you Than give you anything. Beware of those who are always hungry, For they will feed you to the wolves Just to get paid. Beware of those who speak negatively About everything and everybody, For a negative person will never say A positive thing about you. Beware of those who are bored And not passionate about life, For they will bore you with reasons For not living. Beware of those who are too focused with Polishing and beautifying their outer shells, For they lack true substance to understand That genuine beauty is in the heart That resides inside. Beware of those who step in the path of your dreams, For they only dream to have the ability To take half your steps. Beware of those who steer you away From your heart’s true happiness, For it would make them happy to see you Steer yourself next to them, Sitting with both your hearts bitter. Those who are critical don’t like being criticized, And those who are insensitive have a deficiency in their senses. And finally, Beware of those who tell you to BEWARE. They are too aware of everything – And live alone, scared. Poetry by Suzy Kassem

It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary 'working' men. They are a race apart--outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men 'work', beggars do not 'work'; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not 'earn' his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic 'earns' his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable. Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no ESSENTIAL difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course--but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout--in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him. Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?--for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modem talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

And if the criticized person takes it quietly without rancor, not striking back but constantly loving, he will gather in friends faster than his critics can manufacture enemies.

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [quoting 1 Tim 1:7].

A willingness to be exposed and vulnerable. One of the major limitations of imagination’s fruits is the fear of standing out. It is more than a fear of criticism. It is anxiety at being alone, of being in a position where one can rely little on others, a position that puts one’s own resources to the test, a position where one will have to take total responsibility for one’s own response to the environment. Leaders must not only not be afraid of that position; they must come to love it.

Who then was the orthodox, who the freethinker? Where lay the true position, the true state of man? Should he descend into the all-consuming all-equalizing chaos, that ascetic-libertine state; or should he take his stand on the "Critical-Subjective," where empty bombast and a bourgeois strictness of morals contradicted each other? Ah, the principles and points of view constantly did that; it became so hard for Hans Castorp's civilian responsibility to distinguish between opposed positions, or even to keep the premises apart from each other and clear in his mind, that the temptation grew well-nigh irresistible to plunge head foremost into Naphtha's "morally chaotic All.

It takes an aeon to shift position, get comfortable, let alone create a wave in this fishbowl full of glue. - from the poem 'Critical Mass

Self-criticism and criticizing others are one and the same. In other words, self-blame is part of the same Upper Limit pattern as blaming someone else. Both criticizing yourself and criticizing others are highly addictive and very popular ways of busting up the flow of positive energy.

To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I was in high school, I cheered for the school athletic teams. That's a form of patriotism — group loyalty. It can take pernicious forms, but in itself it can be quite harmless, maybe even positive. At the national level, what "patriotism" means depends on how we view the society. Those with deep totalitarian commitments identify the state with the society, its people, and its culture. Therefore those who criticized the policies of the Kremlin under Stalin were condemned as "anti-Soviet" or "hating Russia". For their counterparts in the West, those who criticize the policies of the US government are "anti-American" and "hate America"; those are the standard terms used by intellectual opinion, including left-liberal segments, so deeply committed to their totalitarian instincts that they cannot even recognize them, let alone understand their disgraceful history, tracing to the origins of recorded history in interesting ways. For the totalitarian, "patriotism" means support for the state and its policies, perhaps with twitters of protest on grounds that they might fail or cost us too much. For those whose instincts are democratic rather than totalitarian, "patriotism" means commitment to the welfare and improvement of the society, its people, its culture. That's a natural sentiment and one that can be quite positive. It's one all serious activists share, I presume; otherwise why take the trouble to do what we do? But the kind of "patriotism" fostered by totalitarian societies and military dictatorships, and internalized as second nature by much of intellectual opinion in more free societies, is one of the worst maladies of human history, and will probably do us all in before too long. With regard to the US, I think we find a mix. Every effort is made by power and doctrinal systems to stir up the more dangerous and destructive forms of "patriotism"; every effort is made by people committed to peace and justice to organize and encourage the beneficial kinds. It's a constant struggle. When people are frightened, the more dangerous kinds tend to emerge, and people huddle under the wings of power. Whatever the reasons may be, by comparative standards the US has been a very frightened country for a long time, on many dimensions. Quite commonly in history, such fears have been fanned by unscrupulous leaders, seeking to implement their own agendas. These are commonly harmful to the general population, which has to be disciplined in some manner: the classic device is to stimulate fear of awesome enemies concocted for the purpose, usually with some shreds of realism, required even for the most vulgar forms of propaganda. Germany was the pride of Western civilization 70 years ago, but most Germans were whipped to presumably genuine fear of the Czech dagger pointed at the heart of Germany (is that crazier than the Nicaraguan or Grenadan dagger pointed at the heart of the US, conjured up by the people now playing the same game today?), the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at destroying the Aryan race and the civilization that Germany had inherited from Greece, etc. That's only the beginning. A lot is at stake.

I believe that we are henceforth incapable of returning to an order of moral life which would take the form of a simple submission to commandments or to an alien or supreme will, even if this will were represented as divine. We must accept as a positive good the critique of ethics and religion that has been undertaken by the school of suspicion. From it we have learned to understand that the commandment that gives death, not life, is a product and projection of our own weakness.

As CEO, you should have an opinion on absolutely everything. You should have an opinion on every forecast, every product plan, every presentation, and even every comment. Let people know what you think. If you like someone’s comment, give her the feedback. If you disagree, give her the feedback. Say what you think. Express yourself. This will have two critically important positive effects:   Feedback won’t be personal in your company. If the CEO constantly gives feedback, then everyone she interacts with will just get used to it. Nobody will think, “Gee, what did she really mean by that comment? Does she not like me?” Everybody will naturally focus on the issues, not an implicit random performance evaluation.   People will become comfortable discussing bad news. If people get comfortable talking about what each other are doing wrong, then it will be very easy to talk about what the company is doing wrong. High-quality company cultures get their cue from data networking routing protocols: Bad news travels fast and good news travels slowly. Low-quality company cultures take on the personality of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wiz: “Don’t nobody bring me no bad news.

It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary ‘working’ men. They are a race apart—outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men ‘work’, beggars do not ‘work’; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not ‘earn’ his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic ‘earns’ his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable. Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no ESSENTIAL difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course—but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless.

I can choose not to get angry. I can choose not to take offense. I can choose not to dwell on criticism. I can choose to pay no heed to harsh words. I can choose to ignore negativity and see positives. I can choose to value my own opinion over those of naysayers. Through it all, I can retain my good character and choose to be kind.

But what all of them were writing about were merely certainties. Impersonal things, things lacking depth. They were far removed from anything like real hopes or ambitions. Basically, uninspired things. They were criticisms, yes, but not actually things that had any positive bearing on my life. There was no introspection. No real self-awareness, self-regard, or self-respect. It may require courage to say what they said, but were they really able to take responsibility for the consequences? They may adapt their lifestyle to their environment, and may be capable of processing this but there's no true attachment to the self or to that particular lifestyle. There's no real sense of humility. A scarcity of creativity. Only mimicry. Any sense of innate "love" was simply lacking. They may put on airs but they had no dignity. Instead, all they did was write. It was really quite startling as I read. There was no denying it.

I came across an article recently that reported how growing numbers of employers today complain that many young job applicants exhibit all thesigns of having been -- there's no other word for it-- SPOILED. These young people feel entitled to jobs and salaries they haven't earned. They have unrealistic views of their own capabilities. They don't take criticism well, and they demand lots of attention and guidance from their employres. They "were raised with so much affirmation and positive reinforcement that they come into the workplace needy for more," said one manager.

Most such criticism and confrontation, usually made impulsively in anger or annoyance, does more to increase the amount of confusion in the world than the amount of enlightenment. For the truly loving person the act of criticism or confrontation does not come easily; to such a person it is evident that the act has great potential for arrogance. To confront one’s beloved is to assume a position of moral or intellectual superiority over the loved one, at least so far as the issue at hand is concerned. Yet genuine love recognizes and respects the unique individuality and separate identity of the other person. (I will say more about this later.) The truly loving person, valuing the uniqueness and differentness of his or her beloved, will be reluctant indeed to assume, “I am right, you are wrong; I know better than you what is good for you.” But the reality of life is such that at times one person does know better than the other what is good for the other, and in actuality is in a position of superior knowledge or wisdom in regard to the matter at hand. Under these circumstances the wiser of the two does in fact have an obligation to confront the other with the problem. The loving person, therefore, is frequently in a dilemma, caught between a loving respect for the beloved’s own path in life and a responsibility to exercise loving leadership when the beloved appears to need such leadership. The dilemma can be resolved only by painstaking self-scrutiny, in which the lover examines stringently the worth of his or her “wisdom” and the motives behind this need to assume leadership. “Do I really see things clearly or am I operating on murky assumptions? Do I really understand my beloved? Could it not be that the path my beloved is taking is wise and that my perception of it as unwise is the result of limited vision on my part? Am I being self-serving in believing that my beloved needs redirection?” These are questions that those who truly love must continually ask themselves. This self-scrutiny, as objective as possible, is the essence of humility or meekness. In the words of an anonymous fourteenth-century British monk and spiritual teacher, “Meekness in itself is nothing else than a true knowing and feeling of

The exciting aspect of creating a classroom community where there is respect for individual voices is that there is infinitely more feedback because students do feel free to talk — and talk back. And, yes, often this feedback is critical. Moving away from the need for immediate affirmation was crucial to my growth as a teacher. I learned to respect that shifting paradigms or sharing knowledge in new ways challenges; it takes time for students to experience that challenge as positive.

Trilling believed, in other words, that philosophical coherence is not a notable feature of most people’s politics. Their political opinions may be rigid; they are not necessarily rigorous. They tend to float up out of some mix of sentiment, custom, moral aspiration, and aesthetic pleasingness. People hold certain views because it feels good or right to hold them (which is why they have an answer for pollsters even when they have never given an issue serious thought). Trilling thought that this does not make those opinions any less potent. On the contrary, it is unexamined attitudes and assumptions—things people take to be merely matters of manners or taste, and nothing so consequential as political positions—that demand critical attention.

To be equally serious in receiving such communication, one must be not only a responsive but also a responsible listener. You are responsive to the extent that you follow what has been said and note the intention that prompts it. But you also have the responsibility of taking a position. When you take it, it is yours, not the author's. To regard anyone except yourself as responsible for your judgment is to be a slave, not a free man. It is from this fact that the liberal arts acquire their name. (P. 140)

some seem to get trapped in the compulsion to succeed, others take a rebellious stance. Pointing to the blatant cruelties and limitations involved in a cultural pattern which tends to value only the winner and ignore even the positive qualities of the mediocre, they vehemently criticize competition. Among the most vocal are youth who have suffered under competitive pressures imposed on them by parents or society. Teaching these young people, I often observe in them a desire to fail. They seem to seek failure by making no effort to win

I have found much value in considering monster theory, color theory, and the history of racial analogies in speculative fiction. However, when we read literary and cultural texts from the perspective of the monster, not the protagonist, we find ourselves in a completely different ballgame. This is why taking a supposedly 'neutral' or 'objective' approach to theorizing the dark fantastic is problematic; the default position is to allow those who are used to seeing themselves as heroic and desired the power and privileged of naming, defining, and delimiting the entire world and everything that is in it. We never notice that monsters, fantastic beasts, and various Dark Others are silenced because we have never been taught the language they speak. Critical race counterstorytelling provides both translation and amplification for these subsumed narratives.

Too many adults with ADHD are so focused on what they can’t do that they forget the positive aspects of who they are and what they’ve managed to achieve, their ADHD deficits notwithstanding. They think that if something comes easily to them, there’s only one of two reasons why: Either they’re doing it incorrectly, or it must come easily to everyone else, too. Having spent their whole lives listening to criticism, they don’t even have language for their own success. Many have practiced for so long covering up their weaknesses that they simply cannot acknowledge that they do anything well.

Obviously, those who take a critical position will be subjected to accusations of dogmatism and intolerance, when in fact those who are unwilling to take a stand are exercising the dogmatism of openness at any cost. This time, the cost of openness is the solidification of the medical empire and the multiplying of medical victims.

Dawn's Spawn: Cause and Effect Criticizing the next generation reflects on us. We hold the power to carve out good citizens who will take over the planet and wrest control from us. Step up with your hammer and chisel to create a defined character. Give up your cowardly position as friend and brave the battle of good parenting. Kamil Ali

Fiction is a set of observable manifestations, as represented and frozen in language, that triggers a profoundly subjective and individual experience. Ultimately, this is the kind of productive dilemma that can allow fiction to get to places that other media does not. Fiction is exceptionally good at providing models for consciousness, and at putting readers in a position to take upon themselves the structure of another consciousness for a short while. It is better at this than any other genre or media, and can do it in any number of modes (realistic or metafictional, reliably or unreliably, representationally or metafictionally, etc.). But for it to be able to do this as well as it possibly can, it must clear a space. This is where, for me, doing without becomes most crucial. The subtractions that we find in innovative fictions (even when those subtractions, as in Joyce's work, are followed by further ornamentations and encrustations) are there to facilitate the simulation of consciousness. What is subtracted is the significance and meaning designed to let us classify an experience without entering into it. Doing without such things opens the door wider for experience, putting the reader in a position where they are experiencing fiction in lieu of understanding it. By paying more attention to what we leave out than to how readers are going to interpret or work after the fact, we refuse to let fiction be assimilable, digestible, and safe. We keep it from being mere fodder for criticism and instead accept it as valid, vital experience.

I believe the principles of structural revolution are the same,” Lou Gerstner pointed out in the middle of his positive transformation of IBM. “First, it takes personal commitment on the part of the CEO. This is not a job you can delegate. Second, it takes a willingness to confront and expel the people and the organizations that are throwing up roadblocks to the changes you consider critical.

However, I have also argued for allegory’s positive effects. It is a process that typically takes control away from the author of a narrative and gives it to the reader. It is the reader who decides whether to interpret writing on a literal or a symbolic level. In giving greater control to the reader, allegory allows for imaginative and reflective analyses of mythology, and for its ideological purposes to be criticized, as well as affirmed.

What does it matter what any of us says about anything? Nobody takes much notice of it, luckily for everybody. This reflection must be of great comfort to editors and critics. A conscientious man who really felt that his words would carry weight and influence with them would be almost afraid to speak at all. It is the man who knows that it will not make an ounce of difference to anyone what he says, that can grow eloquent and vehement and positive.

The superego is the inner voice that is always putting us down for not living up to certain standards or rewarding our ego when we fulfill its demands . . . In fact, our superego is one of the most powerful agents of the personality: it is the "inner critic" that keeps us restricted to certain limited possibilities for ourselves. A large part of our initial transformational work centers on becoming more aware of the superego's "voice" in its many guises, both positive and negative. Its voices continually draw us back into identifying with our personality and acting out in self-defeating ways. When we are present, we are able to hear our superego voices without identifying with them; we are able to see the stances and positions of the superego as if they were characters in a play waiting in the wings, ready to jump in and control or attack us once again. When we are present, we hear the superego's voice but we do not give it any energy; the "all-powerful" voice then becomes just another aspect of the moment. However, we must also be on the lookout for the formation of new layers of superego that come from our psychological and spiritual work . . . In fact, one of the biggest dangers that we face in using the Enneagram is our superego's tendency to take over our work and start criticizing us, for example, for not moving up the Levels of Development or going in the Direction of Integration fast enough. The more we are present, however, the more we will recognize the irrelevance of these voices and successfully resist giving them energy. Eventually, they lose their power, and we can regain the space and quiet we need to be receptive to other, more life-giving forces within us. . . . If we feel anxious, depressed, lost, hopeless, fearful, wretched, or weak, we can be sure that our superego is on duty.

What is this power of words? In our everyday routine, we use words to carry out all our transactions. If someone praises us then we get happy and if someone criticizes us then we get annoyed. If we take a closer look at this phenomenon then we will easily understand that when somebody is praising us or calling us names, that time no material comes and hits us. All that happens is, we just get to hear the sound of the words uttered by the other person. When that sound reaches our ears, our mind starts analyzing and interpreting that sound. If the interpretation given by the mind is positive then we get happy. If the interpretation given by the mind is negative then we get annoyed. It is true that the meaning of those words is already present in our mind. Words only invoke the meaning already present in our mind. This relationship between words and their meanings is known as ‘Shakti’ (power) in philosophy.

These garments that God provides - such as kindness, humility, and gentleness - allow us to meet hostility and criticism with patience, forgiveness, and love. They give us staying power in the storms of life. When we face adverse conditions at home, school, or work, the 'clothing' God tells us to wear protects us and enables us to make a positive difference... Dressing according to God's guidelines doesn't change the weather - it equips the wearer... Kindness is the oil that takes the friction out of life.

As spouses, we play a big role in the development of each other's self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth. An entire personality can be destroyed and a marriage ripped apart over the course of just months. It's important that husbands and wives take this subject seriously and learn to build each other up through the simple concepts of dating. It's critical that the older we get, the younger we feel. As the years pass, our attitudes towards each other and our relationships should become more positive and our lives more meaningful.

There’s a brutal irony to the fact that many of the features of our built world that are billed as keeping us safe also make us feel unsafe. If one wanted to take a cynical point of view, one might posit that, at times, this is an intended outcome. And that certain individuals or institutions may want us to feel unsafe for their own selfish ends. But why would anybody actively want to make us feel unsafe? The Polyvagal Theory offers a simple explanation: When we feel unsafe, our bodies shut down our ability to critically think or learn in favor of a need for immediate survival.

1. All-or-Nothing Thinking The tendency to think in extremes like “always” and “never” without considering nuanced degrees between. “My boyfriend broke up with me; I always ruin my relationships.” 2. Overgeneralization The tendency to make broad assumptions based on limited specifics. “If one person thinks I’m stupid, everyone will.” 3. Mental Filter The tendency to focus on small negative details to the exclusion of the big picture. “My A+ average doesn’t matter; I got a C on an assignment.” 4. Disqualifying the Positive The tendency to dismiss positive aspects of an experience for irrational reasons. “If my friend compliments me, she is probably just saying it out of pity.” 5. Jumping to Conclusions The tendency to make unfounded, negative assumptions, often in the form of attempted mind reading or fortune telling. “If my romantic interest doesn’t text me today, he must not be interested.” 6. Catastrophizing The tendency to magnify or minimize certain details of an experience, painting it as worse or more severe than it is. “If my wife leaves me, then I will never be able to recover from my misery.” 7. Emotional Reasoning The tendency to take one’s emotions as evidence of objective truth. “If I feel offended by someone else’s remark, then he must have wronged me.” 8. Should Statements The tendency to apply rigid rules to how one “should” or “must” behave. “My friend criticized my attitude, and that is something that friends should never do.” 9. Labeling The tendency to describe oneself in the form of absolute labels. “If I make a calculation error, it makes me a total idiot.” 10. Personalization The tendency to attribute negative outcomes to oneself without evidence. “If my wife is in a bad mood, then I must have done something to upset her.

The Reverse Motte & Bailey Trojan Horse strategy involves three elements. First, unlike the Motte & Bailey, a motte (uncontroversial) position is proposed by one or multiple Woke participants. Second, the motte position is usually inserted through the use of a Woke crossover word. Third, once the Woke crossover word has been accepted and integrated into the situation (this can take a long time), it is then maintained by the Woke participant(s) that the correct interpretation of the crossover word is the extreme Critical Social Justice meaning. As such, the Trojan horse is the Woke crossover word, which goes unnoticed until the overt advance is made.

To the surprise of many sceptics, the results revealed the following associations: Full-fetal: People adopting this position tend to be anxious, emotional, indecisive, and overly sensitive to criticism. Dunkell interpreted the ‘closed’ nature of this position as indicative of a person who does not want to open themselves up to life. Semi-fetal: This position is associated with people who are well adjusted, conciliatory in nature, amenable to compromises, and unlikely to take extreme stances. Royal: This sleeping position is associated with being self-confident, open, expansive, and sensation-seeking. Prone: Those sleeping face down tend to show a tendency for rigidity and perfectionism. Dunkell thought that these sleepers disliked the unexpected, demand strong evidence for any assertion, and always arrive on time for meetings. The research also showed that those who have no preferred sleeping position have a strong need for being active, enjoy challenging work, and find it difficult to relax. However, please don’t be too upset or worried if your sleeping position suggests that you have a less-than-perfect personality. The associations between people’s sleeping positions and their personalities are fairly weak and many scientists would take them with a pinch of salt. I suspect that this is especially true of those researchers who tend to sleep in a prone position.

Just being nice is not a winning strategy. Nice sends a message that the woman is willing to sacrifice pay to be liked by others. This is why a woman needs to combine niceness with insistence, a style that Mary sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, calls "relentlessly pleasant." This method requires smiling frequently, expressing appreciation and concern, invoking common interests, emphasizing larger goals, and approaching the negotiation as solving a problem as opposed to taking a critical stance. Most negotiations involve drawn-out, successive moves, so women need to stay focused... and smile. No wonder women don't negotiate as much as men. It's like trying to cross a minefield backward in high heels. So what should we do? Should we play by the rules that others created? Should we figure out a way to put on a friendly expression while not being too nice, displaying the right levels of loyalty and using "we" language? I understand the paradox of advising women to change the world by adhering to biased rules and expectations. I know it is not a perfect answer but a means to a desirable end. It is also true, as any good negotiator knows, that having a better understanding of the other side leads to a superior outcome. So at the very least, women can enter these negotiations with the knowledge that showing concern for the common good, even as they negotiate for themselves, will strengthen their position.

Twentysomethings take these difficult moments particularly hard. Compared to older adults, they find negative information—the bad news—more memorable than positive information—or the good news. MRI studies show that twentysomething brains simply react more strongly to negative information than do the brains of older adults. There is more activity in the amygdala—the seat of the emotional brain. When twentysomethings have their competence criticized, they become anxious and angry. They are tempted to march in and take action. They generate negative feelings toward others and obsess about the why: “Why did my boss say that? Why doesn’t my boss like me?” Taking work so intensely personally can make a forty-hour workweek long indeed.

The positive side of the Animus can personify an enterprising spirit, courage, truthfulness, and in the highest form, spiritual profundity. Through him a woman can experience the underlying process of her cultural and personal objective situation, and can find her way to an intensified spiritual attitude to life. This naturally presupposes that her animus ceases to represent opinions that are above criticism. The woman must find the courage and inner broadmindedness to question the sacredness of her own convictions. Only then will she be able to take in the suggestions of the unconscious, especially when they contradict her animus opinions. Only then will the manifestations of the Self get through to her, and will she be able consciously to understand their meaning.

The wit and grace of Machado’s writing never diminish in these stories, and the scene is almost always the same. We are watching the bourgeoisie of Rio Janeiro at play, and occasionally trying to be serious. They misunderstand each other, they get married, they worry about dying, there is the occasional violent murder. Money and the business of keeping up appearances are large questions. The characters read Hugo and Feydeau, Dumas père and Dumas fils, and indeed the general tone is that of nineteenth-century Paris as reconstructed in so many Latin American locations of that time. Machado is gently mocking this class that believes only in borrowed culture, or in what the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz calls “misplaced ideas,” but he is not advocating any kind of nativism. When the chief character of “The Alienist,” refusing distinguished positions offered to him by the king of Portugal, refers to the Brazilian city of Itaguaí as “my universe,” we laugh because he seems to have made his world so small. But then we may also feel that his grandiose claim for his hometown and the exclusive fascination of others with the culture of Europe are simply rival forms of provincialism. There is a third way. We can take all culture, local and international, as our own, and this is the practice suggested by Machado’s own allusions, as it is by those of Jorge Luis Borges, writing a little later in a neighboring Latin American country. “We cannot confine ourselves to what is Argentine in order to be Argentine,” Borges says, and Machado might add that we don’t have to believe that Paris is the capital

...it's exemplification of our moment in American culture and American cultural journalism. It is an accurate document of the discourse of "takes." This movie, that book, this poem, that painting, this record, that show: Make a smart remark and move on. A take is an opinion that has no aspiration to a belief, an impression taht never hardens into a position. Its lightness is its appeal. It is provisional, evanescent, a move in a game, an accredited shallowness, a bulwark against a pause in the conversation. A take is expected not to be true but to be interesting, and even when it is interesting it makes no troublesome claim upon anybody's attention. Another take will quickly follow, and the silence that is a mark of perplexity, of research and reflection, will be mercifully kept at bay. A take asks for no affiliation. It requires no commitment.

Awareness of our conscious thinking patterns and unconscious behavior predilections enables us to examine the defining question of how we began to take certain values for granted. Once we accept that we are a product of our culture, we can begin the act of deliberately redefining our sense of self. By engaging in an intensive cultural investigation and undertaking a studious period of reflective self-examination, and by exercising disciplined behavior, we can alter our character. Using American society as a looking glass allows me to see how a dominating culture sculpted my self-image. This societal mirror reflects me in a either a positive or a perverted manner. Looking both inward and outward, therefore, is an essential step in seeing oneself clearly. An interior and exterior analysis is the critical initiating act in taking charge of the ultimate configuration of our conscious self.

We know that multitasking can even be fatal when lives are at stake. In fact, we fully expect pilots and surgeons to focus on their jobs to the exclusion of everything else. And we expect that anyone in their position who gets caught doing otherwise will always be taken severely to task. We accept no arguments and have no tolerance for anything but total concentration from these professionals. And yet, here the rest of us are—living another standard. Do we not value our own job or take it as seriously? Why would we ever tolerate multitasking when we’re doing our most important work? Just because our day job doesn’t involve bypass surgery shouldn’t make focus any less critical to our success or the success of others. Your work deserves no less respect. It may not seem so in the moment, but the connectivity of everything we do ultimately means that we each not only have a job to do, but a job that deserves to be done well.

Enzymes have made and unmade every single biomolecule inside every living cell that lives or has ever lived. Enzymes are as close as anything to the vital factors of life. So the discovery that some, and possibly all, enzymes work by promoting the dematerialization of particles from one point in space and their instantaneous materialization in another provides us with a novel insight into the mystery of life. And while there remain many unresolved issues related to enzymes that need to be better understood, such as the role of protein motions, there is no doubt that quantum tunneling plays a role in the way they work. Even so, we should address a criticism made by many scientists who accept the findings of Klinman, Scrutton and others, but nevertheless claim that quantum effects have as relevant a role in biology as they have in the workings of a steam train: they are always there but are largely irrelevant to understanding how either system works. Their argument is often positioned within a debate about whether or not enzymes evolved to take advantage of quantum phenomena such as tunneling. The

The Golden Bough captured the imagination of many artists in the early twentieth century. Eliot, certainly, was immersed in it, discussing it familiarly in his graduate school papers and book reviews and constantly alluding to it in his art. The most straightforward advice he offers to readers of The Waste Land (given in the notes to the poem) is, in paraphrase, that any serious reader of the poem must take into consideration modern scholarship in myth and anthropology, especially Frazer Golden Bough and Jessie Weston From Ritual to Romance. The poet says that he is indebted to this scholarship for his title, his plan, his symbolism, and many of his references to ancient religion and society. His claim about the title, taken from the monomyth of Frazer and Weston, his claim about the symbolism, associated with the birth-death-rebirth cycles of the myths, and his claim about the miscellaneous undergirding references have been discussed by Grover Smith and other scholars. We wish to focus more on Eliot's claim about being indebted to Frazer for the plan of the poem. We believe it refers, at least in part, to Frazer's use of the comparative method and to his practice of assembling many perspectives and allowing these perspectives to make his point. It must be noted at once that Eliot was quite selective in his admiration of Frazer. For example, he did not admire Frazer's positivism. Frazer put his faith in science and celebrated what he called the evolution from magic to religion to science. Nor did Eliot share Frazer's conclusions. In his 1913 paper on the interpretation of primitive ritual, he says that Frazer's interpretations of specific myths (the myth of the dying god is his example) are almost certainly mistaken. But Eliot did admire Frazer's erudition and his increasingly nontheoretical presentation of many angles of vision which in themselves tend to generate an overarching abstract primitive vision. In 1924, on the occasion of the publication of a condensed edition of The Golden Bough, Eliot wrote a review in which he lauded Frazer for having "extended the consciousness of the human mind into as dark a backward and abysm of time as has yet been explored." Eliot argues that Frazer's importance for artists is in his exemplary withdrawal from speculation, his adoption of the absence of interpretation as a positive modus operandi.

Look at the stories of people who have changed the world - they have so often started with little, but they distinguished themselves by how they approached life, opportunity, relationships and struggle. Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi. You name them. The list is huge but the common qualities are small. Resourcefulness and a determination to survive the ‘lemons’ are invariably at the heart of these successes. The secret to a life well lived is taking the resources around us - the people we know, the possessions we own, the skills we’ve acquired - and combining them in such a way that they add up to something greater than their constituent parts. That’s the lemonade bit. So often in the wild I have felt totally beaten, but I have kept going, kept trying to think smart, be resourceful, positive, energetic - despite the fatigue - and it has always made a critical difference. We can’t always choose our circumstances but we can choose how we respond to what life throws at us, and there is power when we realize our ability to alter our destiny. A life in the wild has taught me not to fear the unexpected, but to embrace it. In fact, I have learnt that those curve balls from left-field are very often the making of us.

Hitherto all that has given colour to existence has lacked a history: where would one find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law, as also of punishment, has hitherto been completely lacking. Have the different divisions of the day, the consequences of a regular appointment of the times for labour, feast, and repose, ever been made the object of investigation? Do we know the moral effects of the alimentary substances? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (The ever-recurring outcry for and against vegetarianism proves that as yet there is no such philosophy!) Have the experiences with regard to communal living, for example, in monasteries, been collected? Has the dialectic of marriage and friendship been set forth? The customs of the learned, of trades-people, of areists, and of mechanics have they already found been found and thought about? There is so much in them to think about! All that up till now has been considered as the "conditions of existence," of human beings, and all reason, passion and superstition in this consideration have they been investigated to the end? The observation alone of the different degrees of development which the human impulses have attained, and could yet attain, according to the different moral climates, would furnish too much work for the most laborious; whole generations, and regular co-operating generations of the learned, would be needed in order to exhaust the points of view and the material here furnished. The same is true of the determining of the reasons for the differences of the moral climates ("on what account does this sun of a fundamental moral judgment and standard of highest value shine here and that sun there?") And there is again a new labour which points out the erroneousness of all these reasons, and determines the entire essence of the moral judgments hitherto made. Supposing all these labours to be accomplished, the most critical of all questions would then come into the foreground: whether science is in a position to provide goals for human action, after it has proved that it can take them away and destroy them and then would be the time for a process of experimenting, in which every kind of heroism could satisfy itself, an experimenting for centuries, which would put into the shade all the great labours and sacrifices of previous history. Science has not as yet built its Cyclopic buildings; but for that also the time will come.

The institutionalized practices of excluding women from the ideological work of society are the reason we have a history constructed largely from the perspective of men, and largely about men. This is why we have so few women poets and why the records of those who survived the hazards of attempting poetry are so imperfect.40 This is why we know so little of women visionaries, thinkers, and political organizers.41 This is why we have an anthropology that tells us about other societies from the perspective of men and hence has so distorted the cross-cultural record that it may now be impossible to learn what we might have known about how women lived in other forms of society. This is why we have a sociology that is written from the perspective of positions in a male-dominated ruling class and is set up in terms of the relevances of the institutional power structures that constitute those positions.42 This is why in English literature there is a corner called “women in literature” or “women novelists” and an overall critical approach to literature that assumes it is written by men and perhaps even largely for men. This is why the assumptions of psychological research43 and of educational research and philosophy take for granted male experience, orientation, and concerns and treat as normative masculine modes of being.

This fetishistic transmutation separates Warhol from Duchamp and all his predecessors. For Duchamp, Dada, the Surrealists and all who worked to deconstruct representation and smash the work of art are still part of an avant-garde, and belong, in one way or another, to the critical utopia. For us moderns, at any rate, art has ceased to be an illusion; it has become an idea. It is no longer idolatric now, but critical and utopian, even when -- particularly when -- it demystifies its object or when, with Duchamp, it aestheticizes at a stroke, with its bottle-rack, the whole field of daily reality. This is still true of a whole segment of Pop Art, with its lyrical vision of popcorn or comic strips. Banality here becomes the criterion of aesthetic salvation, the means of exalting the creative subjectivity of the artist. Obliterating the object the better to mark out the ideal space of art and the ideal position of the subject. But Warhol belongs to no avant-garde and to no utopia. And if he settles utopia's hash, he does so because, instead of projecting it elsewhere, he takes up residence directly at its heart, that is, at the heart of nowhere. He is himself this no place: this is how he traverses the space of the avant-garde and, at a stroke, completes the cycle of the aesthetic. This is how he at last liberates us from art and its critical utopia.

Years ago, a friend gave me the best business advice I’ve ever received. His advice was so concise it rang in my head like a bell for the next five years. Bill had scaled his father’s company into the billions and with that money bought and sold several more companies that succeeded as well. Bill knew what it took to run a business, and he knew what it took to grow one. We were standing in my driveway after having talked for an hour or so. We’d talked about where my business was and where it could go. The future was limitless, yet I could tell there was something Bill didn’t want to say. He’d been nothing but encouraging in the years I’d known him, but this time it was obvious he had some constructive criticism. I asked point blank what he was thinking. He stood silently for a moment, measuring his thoughts. “Don,” he finally said, lowering his head and taking off his glasses. “You need to professionalize your operation.” “That’s your problem.” He continued. “Until you professionalize your operation, its potential is limited. The amount of money you make and your ability to have a positive impact on the world will be limited.” I’d never heard the term “professionalize your operation” before, but it rang true. My business revolved too much around me, and nobody (including me) knew exactly what they were supposed to do to make it grow. We had a vision, for sure, but we’d not built the reliable, predictable systems that would allow us to execute that vision.

Sung was a land which was famous far and wide, simply because it was so often and so richly insulted. However, there was one visitor, more excitable than most, who developed a positive passion for criticizing the place. Unfortunately, the pursuit of this hobby soon lead him to take leave of the truth. This unkind traveler once claimed that the king of Sung, the notable Skan Askander, was a derelict glutton with a monster for a son and a slug for a daughter. This was unkind to the daughter. While she was no great beauty, she was definitely not a slug. After all, slugs do not have arms and legs - and besides, slugs do not grow to that size. There was a grain of truth in the traveler's statement, in as much as the son was a regrettable young man. However, soon afterwards, the son was accidentally drowned when he made the mistake of falling into a swamp with his hands and feet tied together and a knife sticking out of his back. This tragedy did not encourage the traveler to extend his sympathies to the family. Instead, he invented fresh accusations. This wayfarer, an ignorant tourist if ever there was one, claimed that the king had leprosy. This was false. The king merely had a well-developed case of boils. The man with the evil mouth was guilty of a further malignant slander when he stated that King Skan Askander was a cannibal. This was untrue. While it must be admitted that the king once ate one of his wives, he did not do it intentionally; the whole disgraceful episode was the fault of the chef, who was a drunkard, and who was subsequently severely reprimanded. .The question of the governance, and indeed, the very existence of the 'kingdom of Sung' is one that is worth pursuing in detail, before dealing with the traveler's other allegations. It is true that there was a king, his being Skan Askander, and that some of his ancestors had been absolute rulers of considerable power. It is also true that the king's chief swineherd, who doubled as royal cartographer, drew bold, confident maps proclaiming that borders of the realm. Furthermore, the king could pass laws, sign death warrants, issue currency, declare war or amuse himself by inventing new taxes. And what he could do, he did. "We are a king who knows how to be king," said the king. And certainly, anyone wishing to dispute his right to use of the imperial 'we' would have had to contend with the fact that there was enough of him, in girth, bulk, and substance, to provide the makings of four or five ordinary people, flesh, bones and all. He was an imposing figure, "very imposing", one of his brides is alleged to have said, shortly before the accident in which she suffocated. "We live in a palace," said the king. "Not in a tent like Khmar, the chief milkmaid of Tameran, or in a draughty pile of stones like Comedo of Estar." . . .From Prince Comedo came the following tart rejoinder: "Unlike yours, my floors are not made of milk-white marble. However, unlike yours, my floors are not knee-deep in pigsh*t." . . .Receiving that Note, Skan Askander placed it by his commode, where it would be handy for future royal use. Much later, and to his great surprise, he received a communication from the Lord Emperor Khmar, the undisputed master of most of the continent of Tameran. The fact that Sung had come to the attention of Khmar was, to say the least, ominous. Khmar had this to say: "Your words have been reported. In due course, they will be remembered against you." The king of Sung, terrified, endured the sudden onset of an attack of diarrhea that had nothing to do with the figs he had been eating. His latest bride, seeing his acute distress, made the most of her opportunity, and vigorously counselled him to commit suicide. Knowing Khmar's reputation, he was tempted - but finally, to her great disappointment, declined. Nevertheless, he lived in fear; he had no way of knowing that he was simply the victim of one of Khmar's little jokes.

First off, as we saw above, ignorant people act according to the demands of their society rather than following their own tastes and inclinations. As to how they will entertain themselves, what films they will see and what restaurants, cafés or nightclubs they’ll go out to, they base their decisions on their society’s standards. They think that doing the chic and fashionable things that society approves of will earn them position, importance and respect in the eyes of others. For example, to be seen in a popular nightclub “where everyone goes” is very important for their self-respect. Even if they feel uncomfortable there, being able to tell colleagues or friends the next day that they had a good time at that popular place allows them to put on airs. When we look at these places of entertainment, we see that nothing in them appeals to the human spirit; rather, they make people weary and anxious. Most of these places are very crowded and full of stale air, due to the many people smoking. Given the noise, it is hard to hear what other people are saying. No matter how good the music is or how delicious the food is, the crowd and the noise make it impossible to enjoy them. Even if this place was invigorating, bright, clean, and well-appointed, the result would be the same, because the people who go there do not follow the Qur’an’s morality and therefore are not content. In an environment filled with envy and rivalry, people cannot really enjoy themselves. This can take place only in a natural, intimate, friendly, and secure environment. However, they can hardly be content if they are constantly looking for faults in others and humiliate other people by criticizing their shortcomings. It’s obvious that people who socialize with one another mainly to vent their envy and rivalry cannot enjoy any of their shared meals, their conversations, listening to music together or dancing. Instead, they will totally wear themselves out, both spiritually and physically. This is a fact that they themselves cannot deny.

First off, as we saw above, ignorant people act according to the demands of their society rather than following their own tastes and inclinations. As to how they will entertain themselves, what films they will see and what restaurants, cafés or nightclubs they’ll go out to, they base their decisions on their society’s standards. They think that doing the chic and fashionable things that society approves of will earn them position, importance and respect in the eyes of others. For example, to be seen in a popular nightclub “where everyone goes” is very important for their self-respect. Even if they feel uncomfortable there, being able to tell colleagues or friends the next day that they had a good time at that popular place allows them to put on airs. When we look at these places of entertainment, we see that nothing in them appeals to the human spirit; rather, they make people weary and anxious. Most of these places are very crowded and full of stale air, due to the many people smoking. Given the noise, it is hard to hear what other people are saying. No matter how good the music is or how delicious the food is, the crowd and the noise make it impossible to enjoy them. Even if this place was invigorating, bright, clean, and well-appointed, the result would be the same, because the people who go 36 THOSE WHO EXHAUST ALL THEIR PLEASURES IN THIS LIFE there do not follow the Qur’an’s morality and therefore are not content. In an environment filled with envy and rivalry, people cannot really enjoy themselves. This can take place only in a natural, intimate, friendly, and secure environment. However, they can hardly be content if they are constantly looking for faults in others and humiliate other people by criticizing their shortcomings. It’s obvious that people who socialize with one another mainly to vent their envy and rivalry cannot enjoy any of their shared meals, their conversations, listening to music together or dancing. Instead, they will totally wear themselves out, both spiritually and physically. This is a fact that they themselves cannot deny.

Naval’s Laws The below is Naval’s response to the question “Are there any quotes you live by or think of often?” These are gold. Take the time necessary to digest them. “These aren’t all quotes from others. Many are maxims that I’ve carved for myself.” Be present above all else. Desire is suffering (Buddha). Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else (Buddhist saying). If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day. Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else. All the real benefits in life come from compound interest. Earn with your mind, not your time. 99% of all effort is wasted. Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive. Praise specifically, criticize generally (Warren Buffett). Truth is that which has predictive power. Watch every thought. (Always ask, “Why am I having this thought?”) All greatness comes from suffering. Love is given, not received. Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts (Eckhart Tolle). Mathematics is the language of nature. Every moment has to be complete in and of itself. A Few of Naval’s Tweets that are Too Good to Leave Out “What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work.” “Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.” “If you eat, invest, and think according to what the ‘news’ advocates, you’ll end up nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt.” “We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.” “The guns aren’t new. The violence isn’t new. The connected cameras are new, and that changes everything.” “You get paid for being right first, and to be first, you can’t wait for consensus.” “My one repeated learning in life: ‘There are no adults.’ Everyone’s making it up as they go along. Figure it out yourself, and do it.” “A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time.

The First Amendment protects our freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to practice religion, to peacefully assemble, and the right to petition the government. This is true tolerance as defined by our founding documents. This is the right of all American citizens. Does the right of free speech end on college campuses of higher learning? Does it end when you step into a designated "safe space" at your local university? Does it end if your choice of words is construed to be a "trigger warning" when you walk into a classroom? The answer obviously should be no. Unfortunately, the answer today on most college campuses is yes. And take this warning seriously: it won't end there. The commentator Andrew Sullivan has noted the student anti-free-speech movement "manifests itself . . . almost as a religion". He continues: "It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained--and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., "check your privilege", and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. This sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if you are white or male or straight, that a profound conversion is required. It operates as a religion in one other critical dimension: If you happen to see the world in a different way, if you're a liberal or libertarian or even, gasp, a conservative, if you believe that a university is a place where any idea, however loathsome, can be debated and refuted, you are not just wrong, you are immoral . . . your heresy is a direct threat to others, and therefore needs to be extinguished. You can't reason with heresy. You have to ban it". Ironically, Christians, and others committed to the free expression of ideas, are the ones who are often accused of trying to force our beliefs on others. But that's not the case. Because we believe in objective truth, we believe reason and a robust exchange of ideas, with good, healthy debate can guide us to the truth. It is the radical Left that denies objective truth and therefore always relies on forced compliance and fascist tactics.

Get used to it. The weather may feel like science fiction, but the science underlying it is very real and mundane. It takes only a small increase in global average temperatures to have a big effect on weather, because what drives the winds and their circulation patterns on the surface of the earth are differences in temperature. So when you start to change the average surface temperature of the earth, you change the wind patterns—and then before you know it, you change the monsoons. When the earth gets warmer, you also change rates of evaporation—which is a key reason we will get more intense rainstorms in some places and hotter dry spells and longer droughts in others. How can we have both wetter and drier extremes at the same time? As we get rising global average temperatures and the earth gets warmer, it will trigger more evaporation from the soil. So regions that are already naturally dry will tend to get drier. At the same time, higher rates of evaporation, because of global warming, will put more water vapor into the atmosphere, and so areas that are either near large bodies of water or in places where atmospheric dynamics already favor higher rates of precipitation will tend to get wetter. We know one thing about the hydrologic cycle: What moisture goes up must come down, and where more moisture goes up, more will come down. Total global precipitation will probably increase, and the amount that will come down in any one storm is expected to increase as well—which will increase flooding and gully washers. That’s why this rather gentle term “global warming” doesn’t capture the disruptive potential of what lies ahead. “The popular term ‘global warming’ is a misnomer,” says John Holdren. “It implies something uniform, gradual, mainly about temperature, and quite possibly benign. What is happening to global climate is none of those. It is uneven geographically. It is rapid compared to ordinary historic rates of climatic change, as well as rapid compared to the adjustment times of ecosystems and human society. It is affecting a wide array of critically important climatic phenomena besides temperature, including precipitation, humidity, soil moisture, atmospheric circulation patterns, storms, snow and ice cover, and ocean currents and upwellings. And its effects on human well-being are and undoubtedly will remain far more negative than positive. A more accurate, albeit more cumbersome, label than ‘global warming’ is ‘global climatic disruption.’ 

It seems the primary breeding group for what might, in the widest possible sense of the word, be understood as an opposition in the post-totalitarian system is living within the truth. The confrontation between these opposition forces and the powers that be, of course, will obviously take a form essentially different from that typical of an open society or a classical dictatorship. Initially, this confrontation does not take place on the level of real, institutionalized, quantifiable power which relies on the various instruments of power, but on a different level altogether: the level of human consciousness and conscience, the existential level. The effective range of this special power cannot be measured in terms of disciples, voters, or soldiers, because it lies spread out in the fifth column of social consciousness, in the hidden aims of life, in human beings' repressed longing for dignity and fundamental rights, for the realization of their real social and political interests. Its power, therefore does not reside in the strength of definable political or social groups, but chiefly in the strength of a potential, which is hidden throughout the whole of society, including the official power structures of that society. Therefore this power does not rely on soldiers of its own, but on the soldiers of the enemy as it were—that is to say, on everyone who is living within the lie and who may be struck at any moment (in theory, at least) by the force of truth (or who, out of an instinctive desire to protect their position, may at least adapt to that force). It is a bacteriological weapon, so to speak, utilized when conditions are ripe by a single civilian to disarm an entire division. This power does not participate in any direct struggle for power; rather, it makes its influence felt in the obscure arena of being itself. The hidden movements it gives rise to there, however, can issue forth (when, where, under what circumstances, and to what extent are difficult to predict) in something visible: a real political act or event, a social movement, a sudden explosion of civil unrest, a sharp conflict inside an apparently monolithic power structure, or simply an irrepressible transformation in the social and intellectual climate. And since all genuine problems and matters of critical importance are hidden beneath a think crust of lies, it is never quite clear when the proverbial last straw will fall, or what that straw will be. This, too, is why the regime prosecutes, almost as a reflex action preventatively, even the most modest attempts to live within the truth.

General R. E. Lee, Commanding Army of Northern Virginia: Yours of the 8th instant has been received. I am glad to find that you concur so entirely with me as to the want of our country in this trying hour, and am happy to add that after the first depression consequent upon our disasters in the West, indications have appeared that our people will exhibit that fortitude which we agree in believing is alone needful to secure ultimate success. It well became Sidney Johnston, when overwhelmed by a senseless clamor, to admit the rule that success is the test of merit, and yet there has been nothing which I have found to require a greater effort of patience than to bear the criticisms of the ignorant, who pronounce everything a failure which does not equal their expectations or desires, and can see no good result which is not in the line of their own imaginings. I admit the propriety of your conclusions, that an officer who loses the confidence of his troops should have his position changed, whatever may be his ability; but when I read the sentence I was not at all prepared for the application you were about to make. Expressions of discontent in the public journals furnish but little evidence of the sentiment of an army.… But suppose, my dear friend, that I were to admit, with all their implications, the points which you present, where am I to find that new commander who is to possess the greater ability which you believe to be required? I do not doubt the readiness with which you would give way to one who could accomplish all that you have wished, and you will do me the justice to believe that if Providence should kindly offer such a person for our use, I would not hesitate to avail of his services. My sight is not sufficiently penetrating to discover such hidden merit, if it exists, and I have but used to you the language of sober earnestness when I have impressed upon you the propriety of avoiding all unnecessary exposure to danger, because I felt our country could not bear to lose you. To ask me to substitute you by someone in my judgment more fit to command, or who would possess more of the confidence of the army or of the reflecting men in the country, is to demand of me an impossibility. It only remains for me to hope that you will take all possible care of yourself, that your health and strength may be entirely restored, and that the Lord will preserve you for the important duties devolved upon you in the struggle of our suffering country for the independence which we have engaged in war to maintain. As ever, very respectfully and truly yours, JEFFERSON DAVIS

Since my visit to the Hermitage, I had become more aware of the four figures, two women and two men, who stood around the luminous space where the father welcomed his returning son. Their way of looking leaves you wondering how they think or feel about what they are watching. These bystanders, or observers, allow for all sorts of interpretations. As I reflect on my own journey, I become more and more aware of how long I have played the role of observer. For years I had instructed students on the different aspects of the spiritual life, trying to help them see the importance of living it. But had I, myself, really ever dared to step into the center, kneel down, and let myself be held by a forgiving God? The simple fact of being able to express an opinion, to set up an argument, to defend a position, and to clarify a vision has given me, and gives me still, a sense of control. And, generally, I feel much safer in experiencing a sense of control over an undefinable situation than in taking the risk of letting that situation control me. Certainly there were many hours of prayer, many days and months of retreat, and countless conversations with spiritual directors, but I had never fully given up the role of bystander. Even though there has been in me a lifelong desire to be an insider looking out, I nevertheless kept choosing over and over again the position of the outsider looking in. Sometimes this looking-in was a curious looking-in, sometimes a jealous looking-in, sometimes an anxious looking-in, and, once in a while, even a loving looking-in. But giving up the somewhat safe position of the critical observer seemed like a great leap into totally unknown territory. I so much wanted to keep some control over my spiritual journey, to be able to predict at least a part of the outcome, that relinquishing the security of the observer for the vulnerability of the returning son seemed close to impossible. Teaching students, passing on the many explanations given over the centuries to the words and actions of Jesus, and showing them the many spiritual journeys that people have chosen in the past seemed very much like taking the position of one of the four figures surrounding the divine embrace. The two women standing behind the father at different distances the seated man staring into space and looking at no one in particular, and the tall man standing erect and looking critically at the event on the platform in front of him--they all represent different ways of not getting involved. There is indifference, curiosity, daydreaming, and attentive observation; there is staring, gazing, watching, and looking; there is standing in the background, leaning against an arch, sitting with arms crossed, and standing with hands gripping each other. Every one of these inner and outward postures are all too familiar with me. Some are more comfortable than others, but all of them are ways of not getting directly involved," (pp. 12-13).

ROUND UP A lot more can be said, but finally, this is your last lesson in this epic 30 -day quest to become a successful conversationalist. For the past 29 days, you’ve been tutored about different techniques to make things happen, and today you’ll kick start a conversation with more confidence and organization, because you are now a professional in the communication world. There are takeaways that you should not forget as you go forth as a small talk professional. You have learnt and practiced many truths about the nature and composition of small talk, but there are certain ones that should be placed next to your heart: Small talk may be seen as a waste of time, but it is actually time well spent; take note of this important point, people might want to convince and confuse you. Small talk with personal meaning orientation will scratch business shop talk off any time. Small talk should now be seen as an effective tool that is available right next to you and can be a gateway to success. You still have the chance to go back to the previous chapters you struggled with, this way, you’ll review and assimilate the important points, no one is an island of knowledge, and so I don’t expect you to have everything registered in your brain already, constant practices will bring out the best in you. Identifying your weakness is just as important as acknowledging your strength. I want to assure you that you’ll definitely excel since you’ve been able to lay hands on this book, and this how you can help others who are still in the position that you were when you started in day one. You’ve been instructed about many secrets of success, as well as the things to exploit and avoid. It’s up to you to make this permanent, and this can only be achieved if you keep following these instructions. You have to make the decision now; whether you would make use of this manual or not, but I would advise that you want it again and again as this is the only way to dedicate your spirit, soul and body to constant improvement. You definitely would have noticed some changes in you, you’re not the same person any more. One important thing is that you shouldn’t give up; try to redouble your efforts and realize that you know everything you’re supposed to know. This shouldn’t end here, endeavour to spread the word to make sure that you impact at least three people per day, this means that you would have impacted about 90 people at the end of the next 30 days and close to about 120 people in just two months. Now, you see how you can make the world a better place? It’s up to you to decide what you want and how you want it to be. Don’t waste this golden opportunity of becoming a professional in communication, you’ll go a long way and definitely be surprised at the rate at which you’ve gone in such a small time. Take time to attend to things that need attention, don’t be too hard on yourself, and don’t go too soft on yourself, you’re one vessel that can’t be manipulated, so you have to be careful and sure about your status on communication skills. On the final note, I would like to congratulate you for reading this to the end, you’ve taken this course because you believe in the powers of small talks, so this shouldn’t be the last time I’m hearing from you. I would look forward to seeing your questions about any confusing aspect in the future. Till then, remain the professional that you are!

It’s not always so easy, it turns out, to identify your core personal projects. And it can be especially tough for introverts, who have spent so much of their lives conforming to extroverted norms that by the time they choose a career, or a calling, it feels perfectly normal to ignore their own preferences. They may be uncomfortable in law school or nursing school or in the marketing department, but no more so than they were back in middle school or summer camp. I, too, was once in this position. I enjoyed practicing corporate law, and for a while I convinced myself that I was an attorney at heart. I badly wanted to believe it, since I had already invested years in law school and on-the-job training, and much about Wall Street law was alluring. My colleagues were intellectual, kind, and considerate (mostly). I made a good living. I had an office on the forty-second floor of a skyscraper with views of the Statue of Liberty. I enjoyed the idea that I could flourish in such a high-powered environment. And I was pretty good at asking the “but” and “what if” questions that are central to the thought processes of most lawyers. It took me almost a decade to understand that the law was never my personal project, not even close. Today I can tell you unhesitatingly what is: my husband and sons; writing; promoting the values of this book. Once I realized this, I had to make a change. I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country. It was absorbing, it was exciting, and I got to meet a lot of interesting people whom I never would have known otherwise. But I was always an expatriate. Having spent so much time navigating my own career transition and counseling others through theirs, I have found that there are three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects. First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. If you wanted to be a fireman, what did a fireman mean to you? A good man who rescued people in distress? A daredevil? Or the simple pleasure of operating a truck? If you wanted to be a dancer, was it because you got to wear a costume, or because you craved applause, or was it the pure joy of twirling around at lightning speed? You may have known more about who you were then than you do now. Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. At my law firm I never once volunteered to take on an extra corporate legal assignment, but I did spend a lot of time doing pro bono work for a nonprofit women’s leadership organization. I also sat on several law firm committees dedicated to mentoring, training, and personal development for young lawyers in the firm. Now, as you can probably tell from this book, I am not the committee type. But the goals of those committees lit me up, so that’s what I did. Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire. I met my own envy after some of my former law school classmates got together and compared notes on alumni career tracks. They spoke with admiration and, yes, jealousy, of a classmate who argued regularly before the Supreme Court. At first I felt critical. More power to that classmate! I thought, congratulating myself on my magnanimity. Then I realized that my largesse came cheap, because I didn’t aspire to argue a case before the Supreme Court, or to any of the other accolades of lawyering. When I asked myself whom I did envy, the answer came back instantly. My college classmates who’d grown up to be writers or psychologists. Today I’m pursuing my own version of both those roles.

But as the daylight began to come through the curtains, I knew I was facing something for which I had not been prepared. It was a curious sensation, like suddenly feeling cold water round your feet, then feeling it slowly rising up your legs. It took me some time to realize that they were attacking from some part of my mind of whose existence I was unaware. I had been strong because I was fighting them out of knowledge, but I should have known that my knowledge of mind was pitifully small. I was like an astronomer who knows the solar system, and thinks he knows the universe. What the parasites were doing was to attack me from below my knowledge of myself. It is true that I had given some small thought to the matter; but I had—rightly—postponed it as a study for a more advanced period. I had reflected often enough that our human life is based completely on ‘premises’ that we take for granted. A child takes its parents and its home for granted; later, it comes to take its country and its society for granted. We need these supports to begin with. A child without parents and a regular home grows up feeling insecure. A child that has had a good home may later learn to criticize its parents, or even reject them altogether (although this is unlikely); but it only does so when it is strong enough to stand alone. All original thinkers develop by kicking away these ‘supports’ one by one. They may continue to love their parents and their country, but they love from a position of strength—a strength that began in rejection. In fact, though, human beings never really learn to stand alone. They are lazy, and prefer supports. A man may be a fearlessly original mathematician, and yet be slavishly dependent on his wife. He may be a powerful free thinker, yet derive a great deal more comfort than he would admit from the admiration of a few friends and disciples. In short, human beings never question all their supports; they question a few, and continue to take the rest for granted. Now I had been so absorbed in the adventure of entering new mental continents, rejecting my old personality and its assumptions, that I had been quite unaware that I was still leaning heavily on dozens of ordinary assumptions. For example, although I felt my identity had changed, I still had a strong feeling of identity. And our most fundamental sense of identity comes from an anchor that lies at the bottom of a very deep sea. I still looked upon myself as a member of the human race. I still looked upon myself as an inhabitant of the solar system and the universe in space and time. I took space and time for granted. I did not ask where I had been before my birth or after my death. I did not even recognize the problem of my own death; it was something I left ‘to be explored later’. What the parasites now did was to go to these deep moorings of my identity, and proceed to shake them. I cannot express it more clearly than this. They did not actually, so to speak, pull up the anchors. That was beyond their powers. But they shook the chains, so that I suddenly became aware of an insecurity on a level I had taken completely for granted. I found myself asking: Who am I? In the deepest sense. Just as a bold thinker dismisses patriotism and religion, so I dismissed all the usual things that gave me an ‘identity’: the accident of my time and place of birth, the accident of my being a human being rather than a dog or a fish, the accident of my powerful instinct to cling to life. Having thrown off all these accidental ‘trappings’, I stood naked as pure consciousness confronting the universe. But here I became aware that this so-called ‘pure consciousness’ was as arbitrary as my name. It could not confront the universe without sticking labels on it. How could it be ‘pure consciousness’ when I saw that object as a book, that one as a table? It was still my tiny human identity looking out of my eyes. And if I tried to get beyond it, everything went blank.

Criticism involves taking a position, Mr. Day. How long has it been since you took a considered position on anything important?

But one element of this contention remains true; namely, that all scientific descriptions of facts are highly selective, that they always depend upon theories. The situation can be best described by comparison with a searchlight (the ‘searchlight theory of science’, as I usually call it in contradistinction to the ‘bucket theory of the mind’3). What the searchlight makes visible will depend upon its position, upon our way of directing it, and upon its intensity, colour, etc.; although it will, of course, also depend very largely upon the things illuminated by it. Similarly, a scientific description will depend, largely, upon our point of view, our interests, which are as a rule connected with the theory or hypothesis we wish to test; although it will also depend upon the facts described. Indeed, the theory or hypothesis could be described as the crystallization of a point of view. For if we attempt to formulate our point of view, then this formulation will, as a rule, be what one sometimes calls a working hypothesis; that is to say, a provisional assumption whose function is to help us to select, and to order, the facts. But we should be clear that there cannot be any theory or hypothesis which is not, in this sense, a working hypothesis, and does not remain one. For no theory is final, and every theory helps us to select and order facts. This selective character of all description makes it in a certain sense ‘relative’; but only in the sense that we would offer not this but another description, if our point of view were different. It may also affect our belief in the truth of the description; but it does not affect the question of the truth or falsity of the description; truth is not ‘relative’ in this sense4. The reason why all description is selective is, roughly speaking, the infinite wealth and variety of the possible aspects of the facts of our world. In order to describe this infinite wealth, we have at our disposal only a finite number of finite series of words. Thus we may describe as long as we like: our description will always be incomplete, a mere selection, and a small one at that, of the facts which present themselves for description. This shows that it is not only impossible to avoid a selective point of view, but also wholly undesirable to attempt to do so; for if we could do so, we should get not a more ‘objective’ description, but only a mere heap of entirely unconnected statements. But, of course, a point of view is inevitable; and the naïve attempt to avoid it can only lead to self-deception, and to the uncritical application of an unconscious point of view5. All this is true, most emphatically, in the case of historical description, with its ‘infinite subject matter’, as Schopenhauer6 calls it. Thus in history no less than in science, we cannot avoid a point of view; and the belief that we can must lead to self-deception and to lack of critical care. This does not mean, of course, that we are permitted to falsify anything, or to take matters of truth lightly. Any particular historical description of facts will be simply true or false, however difficult it may be to decide upon its truth or falsity. So far, the position of history is analogous to that of the natural sciences, for example, that of physics. But if we compare the part played by a ‘point of view’ in history with that played by a ‘point of view’ in physics, then we find a great difference. In physics, as we have seen, the ‘point of view’ is usually presented by a physical theory which can be tested by searching for new facts. In history, the matter is not quite so simple.

The positive and negative personality characteristics of the hypermature silent son are: Positive He is organized. He is analytical. He is prepared. He is mature. He is reliable. He is intuitive. He meets goals. He is attentive. Negative He is too serious. He has difficulty expressing emotions. He constantly needs to be in control. He may exhibit stress-related illnesses. He doesn’t have much fun. He is fearful. He is driven. He avoids taking risks. He is critical. He blames himself too much. Transitions Needed Learn to relax and have fun. Learn to let others take charge. Learn to allow yourself to express emotions. Learn to adjust priorities to reduce feeling overwhelmed. Laugh more.

A Piece of Advice « At all times and in all situations, examine your mindstream moment by moment: are thoughts positive or negative? When you recognize a thought to have negative content, be aware of its potential for harm and lay it aside. This is crucial. Otherwise, when craving or other negative thoughts start to take shape, if you let them take hold, who knows where you’ll wind up in the end? You may not care about becoming a great scholar, but at least do your best to generate goodwill toward others and steadfast devotion to the Three Jewels. Your future rebirths stretch out ahead much farther than this one life. The circumstances of those lifetimes will depend on your current aspirations, positive or negative. Don’t jeopardize your future lives by seeking fame and status in this life. The rest of this life will depend on how stable your virtuous aspirations are. See if you can transform your mindstream through the teachings. You have come to a fork in the road: one path goes up, the other down. If you wait till you’re on your deathbed to make your choice, you’ll be out of luck. Whether others have good or bad qualities is hard to know. Whether others applaud you or criticize you, you need to turn away from both craving praise and avoiding blame. Though you may not accomplish great acts of merit, at least avoid evil actions, great or small. Stop thinking badly of other beings. Don’t speak ill of anyone, because you never know when the person you malign might be a sublime being. In terms of food, clothes, and other material things, be content with what you’ve got and just stay put. Otherwise, one day you’ll end up a nuisance in everyone’s eyes, a show-off in robes who just rambles on from one valley to the next, sniffing around like a stray dog. Don’t do that! — Written by Patrul. May it bring virtue!

35. Seek Out Motivation Over the years, I’ve noticed that people can be quite snobby about books like this. So-called ‘self-help’ books. They can be just as mocking of the people who read them or go to motivational talks. Their main criticism of the kind of books and talks that motivate and inspire people is that the impact is often fleeting - that the effects of the book or talk don’t last. My response is to say: of course it is fleeting, of course it is temporary. But so are the effects of washing your armpits - that’s why you should wash them every day! Likewise with motivation - we have to have it every day. We have to fill ourselves up to overflowing with the good stuff, because the daily grind wears us down and dirties us up. The trick with motivation is to make it part of your daily routine, like brushing your teeth or taking a shower. Do it, absorb it - every day. So, drown out the bad with the good. Blast away the negative with the positive. Refill the jug as much as you can. Don’t run your tank on empty but fill up at every possible opportunity with fresh, clean, good motivational fuel that will keep you soaring down the race track to the best of your ability. It’s not rocket science to understand that the more good we put into our mind and bodies (such as eating good, healthy food), then the better results we get out in return.

It is inevitable that as we develop a critical analysis of the various axes of identity--race, gender, class, ability, and more--we will experience deeply personal and political moments of self-realization--about ourselves and our relationships with others as well as about the way this culture functions. It is important and positive that we make those kinds of developments in identifying how oppression works, internally and externally. Yet we must not get so caught up in our own self-discoveries that we unthinkingly put the emotional weight of those breakthrough moments on others who live daily with he realities we are just beginning to understand. (A Critique of Ally Politics)

If the new belligerent discourses about the alleged superiority of the West are expressed in terms of the legacy of secular Humanism, while the most vehement opposition to them takes the form of post-secular practices of politicized religion, where can an anti-humanist position rest? To be simply secular would be complicitous with neo-colonial Western supremacist positions, while rejecting the Enlightenment legacy would be inherently contradictory for any critical project. The vicious circle is stifling.

The way in which knowledge progresses, and especially our scientific knowledge, is by unjustified (and unjustifiable) anticipations, by guesses, by tentative solutions to our problems, by conjectures. These conjectures are controlled by criticism; that is, by attempted refutations, which include severely critical tests. They may survive these tests; but they can never be positively justified: they can neither be established as certainly true nor even as 'probable' (in the sense of the probability calculus). Criticism of our conjectures is of decisive importance: by bringing out our mistakes it makes us understand the difficulties of the problem which we are trying to solve. This is how we become better acquainted with our problem, and able to propose more mature solutions: the very refutation of a theory --that is, of any serious tentative solution to our problem-- is always a step forward that takes us nearer to the truth. And this is how we can learn from our mistakes.

Passage Five: From Business Manager to Group Manager This is another leadership passage that at first glance doesn’t seem overly arduous. The assumption is that if you can run one business successfully, you can do the same with two or more businesses. The flaw in this reasoning begins with what is valued at each leadership level. A business manager values the success of his own business. A group manager values the success of other people’s businesses. This is a critical distinction because some people only derive satisfaction when they’re the ones receiving the lion’s share of the credit. As you might imagine, a group manager who doesn’t value the success of others will fail to inspire and support the performance of the business managers who report to him. Or his actions might be dictated by his frustration; he’s convinced he could operate the various businesses better than any of his managers and wishes he could be doing so. In either instance, the leadership pipeline becomes clogged with business managers who aren’t operating at peak capacity because they’re not being properly supported or their authority is being usurped. This level also requires a critical shift in four skill sets. First, group managers must become proficient at evaluating strategy for capital allocation and deployment purposes. This is a sophisticated business skill that involves learning to ask the right questions, analyze the right data, and apply the right corporate perspective to understand which strategy has the greatest probability of success and therefore should be funded. The second skill cluster involves development of business managers. As part of this development, group managers need to know which of the function managers are ready to become business managers. Coaching new business managers is also an important role for this level. The third skill set has to do with portfolio strategy. This is quite different from business strategy and demands a perceptual shift. This is the first time managers have to ask these questions: Do I have the right collection of businesses? What businesses should be added, subtracted, or changed to position us properly and ensure current and future earnings? Fourth, group managers must become astute about assessing whether they have the right core capabilities. This means avoiding wishful thinking and instead taking a hard, objective look at their range of resources and making a judgment based on analysis and experience. Leadership becomes more holistic at this level. People may master the required skills, but they won’t perform at full leadership capacity if they don’t begin to see themselves as broad-gauged executives. By broad-gauged, we mean that managers need to factor in the complexities of running multiple businesses, thinking in terms of community, industry, government,

PARTIES, CONFERENCES AND NETWORKING EVENTS. You’ve got to be honest with yourself; this was the actual lesson you’ve been dreading, only if you are a natural extrovert, there are some things that are more stressful than going to parties and other networking activities. Today is going to be a bit tough, so you are going to have to be tougher. This is where all the lessons you’ve learnt so far will pay off. When you’re in a party, a conference or networking event, you are likely to hold one of four possible roles. How you react to the event will depend on this role. The possibilities include: Host/Greeter. Guest. Networker. Support. People will definitely come to you if you’re in the first category, making introduction moderately easy and opportunities for small talk plentiful. You may be in charge of giving a presentation or attending to a table at a convention or any similar event. Make sure to create eye contact and smile at strangers to acknowledge them, someone will approach you in no time. Topics that may outstand may include how successful the turnout was or other positive factors that craved out of the event. If you happen to be a guest or a visitor, the challenge is on you to approach and kick start conversations. The golden rule for breaking ice at events and starting small talks ate networking arena are remarkably the same. You have to keep one thing in mind; everyone attends a party with the intention of meeting a new person and talking with them. So, if you find out that your introduction is not so much an imposition as making it up to meet new people, you will find it much compelling and easy. Your best topics in this case are basically probing enquires about what brings your other party to the event and if you have mutual acquaintances. Your own work as a networker is a little bit different from being a host or guest. As a networker, you have to join groups, or even groups of groups in a cohesive way. You may need to go in to many conversations in the middle. The best way to go about this is to smile or enthusiastically go with something that was just said. When this is done, be careful not to shoehorn your conversation topics in to small talks, but try to carefully merge in to each of them as if you’re approaching from a highway on- ramp. Support is the final role, and the sad part about this is that you might find yourself at the end catering an event or working as a neutral staff. Even with that, you may still create opportunities for personal networking or even very revealing small talks during the course of the event. Conversation with other staff, special guests or even the host can turn out to invaluable connections that you can make use of later. With this at the back of your mind, always prepare for short conversations when you’re working an event just as seriously as if you were attending the event as a special guest. Maybe you’re not that kind of person that can withstand large crowd, take a break to regain who you are and review the topical assessments you prepared in the previous lessons. Don’t forget to excuse yourself so you can move around in the event centre on a regular basis, perhaps going for another role you think you’re capable of. This particular aspect does not have any other way to go about it. In fact, it might take the next 5 days before you put the whole concept together, and you may need to combine the zeal with tomorrow’s lesson. Now, you should go for a party or be the host to one yourself so you can utilize all these principles you learnt today. There’s no way to wave this, you have to learn it and be perfect. Bring your partner who has been your support all this while along to tackle the four roles and many more within the time frame. Until then, maintain the free flow with ease.

Position Trading Position trading works best for traders who can’t spend the whole day trading. Position trades are taken on the larger trend in the market or a stock, and may last many days or even several months. The critical aspect of position trading is to always keep a stop loss and adjust the stop loss as the stock moves. That takes care of any sudden jolts to the stock which may be of a significant nature.

First, we need to take stock of ourselves and give up any hint of moral superiority and judgment toward the addict. Judging others clouds our eyes not only to their needs but to our own as well. We cannot help people when we put ourselves in a position of judgment. Addicts, all but the very few completely sociopathic ones, are deeply self-critical and harsh with themselves. They are keenly sensitive to judgmental tones in others and respond with withdrawal or defensive denial. Second, any rational approach to the problem of addiction has to be grounded in an appreciation of the interactive psychology and brain physiology of addiction. “An understanding of emotions should not be separated from neuroscience,” Dr. Jaak Panksepp told me. “If you don’t recognize that the brain creates psychological responses, then neuroscience becomes a highly impoverished discipline. And that’s where the battle is right now. Many neuroscientists believe that mental states are irrelevant for what the brain does. This is a Galileo-type battle and it will not be won very easily because you have generations and generations of scholars, even in psychology, who have swallowed hook, line and sinker the notion — the Skinnerian notion — that mentality is irrelevant in the control of behavior.

critics, like Dean Debnam, a liberal North Carolina businessman, accused Pope of exhibiting “a plantation mentality” by keeping “people working part time…He preys on the poorest of the poor, and uses it to advance the agenda of the richest of the rich,” he charged. But Pope said he didn’t take positions to enhance his bottom line. In the tradition of John Locke, he said, he just believed that society functioned best when citizens were rewarded with the wealth that their hard work produced.

I knew this was a critically important finding in my research, so I spent several hundred interviews trying to better understand the consequences of numbing and how taking the edge off behaviors is related to addiction. Here’s what I learned: Most of us engage in behaviors (consciously or not) that help us to numb and take the edge of off vulnerability, pain, and discomfort. Addiction can be described as chronically and compulsively numbing and taking the edge off of feelings. We cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.

Take deliberate steps to retrain your brain and turn your inner critic into an enthusiastic, devoted fan.

Taking repetitive steps toward a goal is tedious work, and, we fall more often than we would like to admit. This is why the emphasis on daily steps is so critical. No matter how boring or endless they may be; the way to align and realign with them is to pause, look around at how far you’ve come, celebrate, and then keep moving forward.

It is never good to ever criticize because you put that person in a bad light and it takes away from your own light. Put on the attitudes that God desires.

Create ways to foster alternative view and constructive criticism. Assign people to play the devils advocate, taking opposing viewpoints so you can see the holes in your position. Get people to wage debates that argue different sides of the issue. Have an anonymous suggestion box that employees must contribute to as part of the decision-making proces. Remember, people can be independent thinkers and team players at the same time, help them fill both roles.

Rudolph Gantenbrink's important discovery [of a door with metallic handles found with a robot inside a shaft in the Great Pyramid] has forced many Egyptologists to finally accept that their theories are flawed. This is an interesting development. Academic mores normally dictate that when a theory contains flaws, or unsubstantiated data that supports critical elements on which the theory is built, the entire theory must either be thrown out or revised. Instead of the tomb theory being dismissed, however, Gantenbrink himself was dismissed from the project. He discovered the "door" on March 22, 1993. A week later, he was told to pack up his robot and leave Egypt. Gantenbrink has the technology to go beyond the so-called door but, presumably because of political reasons, has been refused permission to resume his research in Egypt. Gantenbrink, with an engineer's typical pragmatism, stated, 'I take an absolute neutral position. It is a scientific process, and there is no need whatsoever to answer questions with speculation when these questions could be answered much more easily by continuing the research. Yet because of a stupid feud between what I call believers and non-believers, I am condemned as someone who is speculating. But I am not. I am just stating the facts. We have a device [ultrasonic] that would discover if there is a cavity behind the slab. It is nonsensical to make theories when we have the tools to discover the facts.

If our personal myths are healthy and we feel positive about ourselves, then our interactions and experiences with others are enhanced. The reverse is also true. Those of us who believe we are called and who have good self-esteem generally treat hostility received from others as part of the job, and we do not take criticism personally. Those of us who have negative convictions about ourselves often take criticism as an attack upon ourselves, and we experience a deflation of our self-esteem. Good personal myths help us deal positively with the potential for self-sabotage; negative myths make us more vulnerable.

Page 61-2 ... Rome expanded rapidly ... and became master over the entire Mediterranean Basin. It then had unlimited resources in terms of land, money, and slaves. It collected taxes or tribute throughout its empire and was able to transfer to the central capital massive quantities of foodstuffs and manufactured items. The peasants and the artisans of Italy saw their economic base disappear as this Mediterranean economy was "globalized" by the political domination of Rome. The society was polarized between, on the one hand, a mass of economically useless plebeians and, on the other, a predatory plutocracy. A minority gorged with wealth oversaw the remaining proletarianized population. The middle-classes collapsed, a process that brought about the end of the republic and the beginning of the political form known as "empire" in conformity with the observations made by Aristotle about the importance of intermediate social classes for the stability of political systems. Since one could not eliminate the plebeians, intractable but geographically central as they were, they came to be nourished and distracted at the empire's expense with "bread and circuses." Page 64-5: The positive American trade balance, when only "advanced technology" is counted, dropped from 35 billion dollars in 1990 to 5 billion in 2001 and had disappeared entirely to become one more element in the overall trade deficit in January 2002. This fall in economic strength is not compensated for by the activities of American-based multinationals. Since 1998 the profits that they bring back into the country amount to less than what foreign companies that have set up shop in the United States are taking back to their own countries. Page 68: In conformity with classical economic theory, the general opening up of commercial exchange has brought about an increase in inequality throughout the world. This general exchange tends to introduce into each country the same disparities in revenue that exist at the level of the whole planet. ... The compression of worker revenues caused by free trade revives the traditional dilemma of capitalism that has now spread across the globe: low salaries do not allow for the absorption of increases in production. Page 17: In developed countries a new class is emerging that comprises roughly 20 percent of the population in terms of sheer numbers but controls about half of each nation's wealth. This new class has more and more trouble putting up with the constraint of universal suffrage.

In an effort to help decode these buyer actions, researchers from consumer intelligence firm Motista found specific “emotional motivators” that provide a critical indicator of customers’ potential affinity to a company.2 In fact, these emotional motivators, a proxy for value, were more compelling than any other metric in terms of driving key buying sentiments such as brand awareness and customer satisfaction. While hundreds of emotional motivators were found to drive consumer behavior, the study found ten that drove significant levels of customer value across all of the categories studied. I am inspired by a desire to: Brands can leverage this motivator by helping customers: Stand out from the crowd Project a unique social identity; be seen as special Have confidence in the future Perceive the future as better than the past; have a positive mental picture of what’s to come Enjoy a sense of well-being Feel that life measures up to expectations and that balance has been achieved; seek a stress-free state without conflicts or threats Feel a sense of freedom Act independently, without obligations or restrictions Feel a sense of thrill Experience visceral, overwhelming pleasure and excitement; participate in exciting, fun events Feel a sense of belonging Have an affiliation with people they relate to or aspire to be like; feel part of a group Protect the environment Sustain the belief that the environment is sacred; take action to improve their surroundings Be the person I want to be Fulfill a desire for ongoing self-improvement; live up to their ideal self-image Feel secure Believe that what they have today will be there tomorrow; pursue goals and dreams without worry Succeed in life Feel that they lead meaningful lives; find worth that goes beyond financial or socioeconomic measures

trained to do a position that requires a new base of knowledge and skills. A third option is to learn about a different culture, like the fashion designers who became more innovative when they lived in foreign countries that were very different from their own. You don’t need to go abroad to diversify your experience; you can immerse yourself in the culture and customs of a new environment simply by reading about it. 4. Procrastinate strategically. When you’re generating new ideas, deliberately stop when your progress is incomplete. By taking a break in the middle of your brainstorming or writing process, you’re more likely to engage in divergent thinking and give ideas time to incubate. 5. Seek more feedback from peers. It’s hard to judge your own ideas, because you tend to be too enthusiastic, and you can’t trust your gut if you’re not an expert in the domain. It’s also tough to rely on managers, who are typically too critical when they evaluate ideas. To get the most accurate reviews, run your pitches by peers—they’re poised to spot the potential and the possibilities. B. Voicing and Championing Original Ideas

It is clear that spiritual naturalism can be used to defend any ‘positive’, i.e. existing, norm. For it can always be argued that these norms would not be in force if they did not express some traits of human nature. [...] In fact, this form of naturalism is so wide and so vague that it may be used to defend anything. There is nothing that has ever occurred to man which could not be claimed to be ‘natural’; for if it were not in his nature, how could it have occurred to him? Looking back at this brief survey, we may perhaps discern two main tendencies which stand in the way of adopting a critical dualism. The first is a general tendency towards monism, that is to say, towards the reduction of norms to facts. The second lies deeper, and it possibly forms the background of the first. It is based upon our fear of admitting to ourselves that the responsibility for our ethical decisions is entirely ours and cannot be shifted to anybody else; neither to God, nor to nature, nor to society, nor to history. All these ethical theories attempt to find somebody, or perhaps some argument, to take the burden from us. But we cannot shirk this responsibility. Whatever authority we may accept, it is we who accept it. We only deceive ourselves if we do not realize this simple point.

My last day as My Own Worst Enemy will be December 31st 2020. In my final two weeks I will: 1) Fire my inner critic, or at least demote it to part time 2) Assure my passions have the tools they need to unionize with my actions 3) Sit naked on the photocopy machine so there are one hundred copies of my ass to kiss when I’m gone. Though I suspect it won’t bode well for acquiring a positive referral letter, it’s important I state that I’m unwilling to train a replacement in this position. It is my suggestion that the job be eliminated altogether, and that no future person take on the task.

If you are new to a church staff or to an organization, here are five ways you can start well. 1. Take time to memorize the mission statement, vision, values, and creeds. Know the history of the church. Learn it by taking a pastor or leader to coffee, asking questions, and understanding key events that may have impacted the congregation and surrounding community. 2. Familiarize yourself with all the ministries in the church and those who lead them. Know their function, who they serve, what they offer, and how you might partner with them in the future. 3. In meetings, be a student. Learn the culture, observe team personalities, seek to understand, and speak to confirm and contribute. Be careful with criticism early on. It’s hard to critique a house you haven’t lived in. 4. Seek out a pastor of the same sex who has longevity with Jesus and ministry. Ask for mentorship, accountability, and community. Look for wisdom over popularity. 5. Get to know the congregation. When we love the people as we learn our position, we establish roots that won’t easily be pulled up when ministry gets hard.

It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary 'working' men. They are a race apart–outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men 'work,' beggars do not 'work'; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not 'earn' his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic 'earns' his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable. Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is not essential difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course–but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout–in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.

A positive workplace culture is built upon active civility among all employees and their colleagues, in words and in deeds. Another critical aspect of a positive workplace community is the active provision of social support, with people knowing they can turn to others for advice and help when they need it, and in turn providing that needed assistance to their colleagues. Mutual respect, responsiveness, and trust are essential for these mutually supporting behaviors to take place.

If the demand here is—to cut a long story short—for every individual to have the right to move to a country of his/her choice, and for this country to have a duty to provide him/her with residence, then we are dealing with an abstract vision in the strict Hegelian sense: a vision that ignores the complex context of social totality. The problem cannot be solved at this level: the only true solution is to change the global economic system that produces immigrants. The task is thus to take a step back from direct criticism to an analysis of the immanent antagonisms of the global situation, with the focus being on how our critical position itself participates in the phenomenon it criticizes.

Given the historical importance and exponential power ascribed to Convergence technologies, a comprehensive vision is required that describes how these technologies will be best aligned with our core human values and what the implications will be if they are not. Piecemeal descriptions and industry-centric narratives do not provide the holistic vantage point from which we must consider how best to make the critically important decisions regarding matters of privacy, security, interoperability, and trust in an age where powerful computing will literally surround us. If we fail to make the right societal decisions now, as we are laying the digital infrastructure for the 21st century, a dystopic “Black Mirror” version of our future could become our everyday reality. A technological “lock-in” could occur, where dysfunctional and/or proprietary technologies become permanently embedded into the infrastructure of our global systems leaving us powerless to alter the course of their direction or ferocity of their speed. A Web 3.0 that continues its march toward centralized power and siloed platforms would not only have crippling effects on innovation, it would have chilling effects on our freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and basic human rights. This should be enough to compel us to take thoughtful but aggressive action to prevent such a lock-in from occurring at all costs. Thankfully, there is also a “white mirror” version of Web 3.0, a positive future not well described in our sci-fi stories. It’s the one where we intentionally and consciously harness the power of the Convergence and align it with our collective goals, values, and greatest ambitions as a species. In the “white mirror” version, we have the opportunity to use these technologies to assist us in working together more effectively to improve our ecologies, economies, and governance models, and leave the world better than the one we entered.

Replacing the I am worthless, I will never make it, I am unlovable with I am worthy, I will make it and I am lovable is something that takes practice, but it is achievable. Positive self-talk is based on self-love, which develops through acts of kindness to ourselves. It is when you start to matter to yourself more than someone’s opinion, judgment or criticism does. It is about accepting yourself just the way you are because you are perfectly fine that way.

At the same time, some researchers wonder whether acetaminophen is impacting something as critical and fundamental as our emotions. One Ohio State researcher who examined this found that study participants who received acetaminophen versus a placebo had a harder time feeling “positive empathy” for strangers, which matters because the ability to experience empathy is associated with more stable romantic relationships and more successful careers. “Just like we should be aware that you shouldn’t get in front of the wheel if you’re under the influence of alcohol, you don’t take [acetaminophen] and then put yourself into a situation that requires you to be emotionally responsive—like having a serious conversation with a partner or coworker,” Dominik Mischkowski, an assistant professor at Ohio University who studies the relationship between pain and social behavior, told the BBC.

A. Change negative self thoughts to positive self thoughts. Stop the self criticism. Life is hard enough, be kind to yourself. Become aware of just how often you make negative comments about yourself that lessen your self esteem. At the end of each day make a Note of the negative comments you made about yourself and make a promise to eliminate these from your thoughts. You know the ones, ’why am I so stupid?’ ‘I just knew I’d get that wrong.’ ‘this is such an ugly dress, shirt’, ‘I’m so fat’, you get the picture. Get rid of these self hurtful thoughts. B. Change your language and you will change how you feel about you! Try this activity. Replace the word ‘try’ with ‘I will do that’; Replace ‘I can’t’ with ‘I can’; Replace ‘I should’ with ‘I will do that’ C. Get Fit! Start an exercise program. Start small but start. The better you look the better you feel about yourself. Check with your doctor or health care provider. D. An Act of Kindness. Try this. You’ll feel good and so will others and it’s contagious. Surprise your secretary, co-worker or friend with a morning coffee, muffin or homemade treat. Treat your kids to a surprise dessert. Leave a note of kind words on a loved one’s pillow. Mail an invite for a lunch/dinner date to friend/partner/spouse. Smile at a senior on the street or grocery store. Email/phone/write a note to a friend or family member you haven’t seen for awhile. E. Take Action Anxiety and fear can keep you from moving forward and cause you to be unsatisfied with yourself. Try this. Next time you have a task to complete, no matter how small, create an action plan. Write down the answers to What, When, How. Now do it! Successfully completing tasks is a great self esteem builder. You feel good when you complete actions, no matter how small. F. Personal Affirmations Practiced daily personal affirmation can increase Self Esteem. Check here.

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