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We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.
The house becomes a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers, which shocks and shocks and is the principal difference between our house and a house where illness has worked away. Ill people, in their last day on Earth, do not leave notes stuck to bottles of red wine saying ‘OH NO YOU DON’T COCK-CHEEK’. She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone.
She won’t ever use (make-up, turmeric, hairbrush, thesaurus).
She will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm).
And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday.
I will stop finding her hairs.
I will stop hearing her breathing.
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Max Porter (Grief Is the Thing with Feathers)
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This is the paradox of transformative experience: Because our imagination is bounded by our existing templates of how the world as we know it works, we fail to anticipate the greatest transformations—the events and encounters so unmoored from the familiar that they transfigure our map of reality and propel us into a wholly novel mode of being.
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Maria Popova (Figuring)
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Nobody wants to be around a miserable self loathing person, would you? Be the person you would want to be with. Create a template for yourself using that philosophy and make the changes, do the work and start developing into a positive person.
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Meryl Bodek Hartstein
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There is no such thing as a relationship without a contract. All relationships are governed by contracts, be they implied or explicit. Relationship contracts are not legal contracts, though sometimes societal expectations of relationships get worked into law (this can come into play in situations like divorce as well as the legal establishment and relinquishment of paternity).
The society in which you grew up provided you with a set of template contracts to which you implicitly agree whenever you enter a relationship, even a non-sexual one. For example, a common clause of many societal template contracts among friends involves agreeing to not sleep with a friend's recent ex. While you may never explicitly agree to not sleep with a friend's ex, your friend will absolutely feel violated if they discover that you shacked up with the person who dumped them just a week earlier.
Essentially, these social contracts tell an individual when they have “permission” to have specific emotional reactions. While this may not seem that impactful, these default standards can have a significant impact on one’s life. For example, in the above reaction, a friend who just got angry out of the blue at a member of their social group would be ostracized by others within the group while a friend who became angry while citing the “they slept with my ex” contract violation may receive social support from the friend group and internally feel more justified in their retaliatory action. To ferret out the contractual aspects of relationships in which you currently participate, think through something a member of that relationship might do that would have you feeling justifiably violated, even though they never explicitly agreed to never take such action.
This societal system of template contracts may have worked in a culturally and technologically homogenous world without frequent travel, but within the modern world, assumed template contracts cause copious problems.
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Simone Collins (The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships)
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The mother‘s relationship to her daughter not only forms the earliest, if not primary, foundation for how the daughter formulates her sense of self, but is the basic template for her understanding of how relationships work in the world.
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Peg Streep (Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt)
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When we learn, we alter which genes in our neurons are “expressed,” or turned on. Our genes have two functions. The first, the “template function,” allows our genes to replicate, making copies of themselves that are passed from generation to generation. The template function is beyond our control. The second is the “transcription function.” Each cell in our body contains all our genes, but not all those genes are turned on, or expressed. When a gene is turned on, it makes a new protein that alters the structure and function of the cell. This is called the transcription function because when the gene is turned on, information about how to make these proteins is “transcribed” or read from the individual gene. This transcription function is influenced by what we do and think. Most people assume that our genes shape us—our behavior and our brain anatomy. Kandel’s work shows that when we learn our minds also, affect which genes in our neurons are transcribed. Thus we can shape our genes, which in turn shape our brain’s microscopic anatomy.
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Norman Doidge (The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science)
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Democracy is also a single ideology, and, like all such templates, it has its limits. what works in a legislature might not work in a corporation
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Fareed Zakaria (The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad)
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This work will only mater if it's sustained. To sustain it, people have to believe that the myriad small, incremental actions matter. That they matter even when the consequences aren't immediate or obvious. They must remember that often when you fail at your immediate objective—to block a nominee or a pipeline or to pass a bill—that, even then, you may have changed the whole framework in ways that make broader change more possible. You may change the story or the rules, give tools, templates, or encouragements to future activists, and make it possible for those around you to persist in their efforts.
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Rebecca Solnit (Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays))
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Yes, Jesus was the template for what Godness looks like. If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus of Nazareth. But the mystery of the incarnation is that he was also the template for what real, true humanness looks like. He’s the Son of God and he’s the “son of Adam.” If you want to know what a human being, fully awake and alive, ruling over the world as a conduit for the Creator God’s love looks like in flesh and blood — then look at Jesus.
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John Mark Comer (Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.)
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The mother‘s relationship to her daughter not only formed the earliest, if not primary, foundation for all the daughter formulates her sense of self, but is the basic template for her understanding of how relationships work in the world.
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Peg Streep (Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt)
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Hanging a banner from the front of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building that proclaimed it to be the “Native American Embassy,” hundreds of protesters hailing from seventy-five Indigenous nations entered the building to sit in. BIA personnel, at the time largely non-Indigenous, fled, and the capitol police chain-locked the doors announcing that the Indigenous protesters were illegally occupying the building. The protesters stayed for six days, enough time for them to read damning federal documents that revealed gross mismanagement of the federal trust responsibility, which they boxed up and took with them. The Trail of Broken Treaties solidified Indigenous alliances, and the “20-Point Position Paper,”14 the work mainly of Hank Adams, provided a template for the affinity of hundreds of Native organizations. Five years later, in 1977, the document would be presented to the United Nations, forming the basis for the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History, #3))
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My basic hypothesis is this: the people who run the media are Humanities graduates with little understanding of science, who wear their ignorance as a badge of honor. Secretly, deep down, perhaps they resent the fact that they have denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of Western thought from the past two hundred years. There is an attack implicit in all media coverage of science - in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them. The media create a parody of science. On this template, science is portrayed as groundless, incomprehensible didactic truth statements from scientists - who, themselves, are socially- powerful, arbitrary un-elected authority figures. They are detached from reality. They do work that is either wacky, or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory, probably going to change soon and - most ridiculously - hard to understand. Having created this parody, the Commentariat then attack it, as if they were genuinely critiquing what science is all about.
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Ben Goldacre (Bad Science)
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We are committed to involving as many people as possible, as young as possible, as soon as possible. Sometimes too young and too soon! But we intentionally err on the side of too fast rather than too slow. We don’t wait until people feel “prepared” or “fully equipped.” Seriously, when is anyone ever completely prepared for ministry?
Ministry makes people’s faith bigger. If you want to increase someone’s confidence in God, put him in a ministry position before he feels fully equipped.
The messages your environments communicate have the potential to trump your primary message. If you don’t see a mess, if you aren’t bothered by clutter, you need to make sure there is someone around you who does see it and is bothered by it. An uncomfortable or distracting setting can derail ministry before it begins. The sermon begins in the parking lot.
Assign responsibility, not tasks.
At the end of the day, it’s application that makes all the difference. Truth isn’t helpful if no one understands or remembers it.
If you want a church full of biblically educated believers, just teach what the Bible says. If you want to make a difference in your community and possibly the world, give people handles, next steps, and specific applications. Challenge them to do something. As we’ve all seen, it’s not safe to assume that people automatically know what to do with what they’ve been taught. They need specific direction. This is hard. This requires an extra step in preparation. But this is how you grow people.
Your current template is perfectly designed to produce the results you are currently getting.
We must remove every possible obstacle from the path of the disinterested, suspicious, here-against-my-will, would-rather-be-somewhere-else, unchurched guests. The parking lot, hallways, auditorium, and stage must be obstacle-free zones.
As a preacher, it’s my responsibility to offend people with the gospel. That’s one reason we work so hard not to offend them in the parking lot, the hallway, at check-in, or in the early portions of our service. We want people to come back the following week for another round of offending!
Present the gospel in uncompromising terms, preach hard against sin, and tackle the most emotionally charged topics in culture, while providing an environment where unchurched people feel comfortable.
The approach a church chooses trumps its purpose every time.
Nothing says hypocrite faster than Christians expecting non-Christians to behave like Christians when half the Christians don’t act like it half the time.
When you give non-Christians an out, they respond by leaning in. Especially if you invite them rather than expect them. There’s a big difference between being expected to do something and being invited to try something.
There is an inexorable link between an organization’s vision and its appetite for improvement. Vision exposes what has yet to be accomplished. In this way, vision has the power to create a healthy sense of organizational discontent. A leader who continually keeps the vision out in front of his or her staff creates a thirst for improvement. Vision-centric churches expect change. Change is a means to an end. Change is critical to making what could and should be a reality.
Write your vision in ink; everything else should be penciled in. Plans change. Vision remains the same. It is natural to assume that what worked in the past will always work. But, of course, that way of thinking is lethal. And the longer it goes unchallenged, the more difficult it is to identify and eradicate. Every innovation has an expiration date. The primary reason churches cling to outdated models and programs is that they lack leadership.
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Andy Stanley (Deep and Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend)
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Well, it helped that my husband was upstairs cheating on me. Because I was sickeningly jealous on both accounts. I was jealous when I found out Celia was gay, because it meant that she was with other women, or had been with other women, that her life wasn't just me. And I was jealous that my husband was with a woman upstairs at the very party I was at, because it was embarrassing and threatening my way of life. I had been living in this world where I thought I could have this closeness with Celia and this distance with Don and neither of them would need anything else from anyone else. It was this odd bubble that just up and burst."
"I would imagine, back then, it wasn't a conclusion you'd come to easily--being in love with someone of the same sex."
"Of course not! Maybe if I'd spent my whole life fighting off feelings for women, then I might have had a template for it. But I didn't. I was taught to like men, and I had found--albeit temporarily--love and lust with a man. The fact that I wanted to be around Celia all the time, the fact that I cared about her enough that I valued her happiness over my own, the fact that I liked to think about that moment when she stood in front of me without her shirt on--now, you put those pieces together, and you say, one plus one equals I'm in love with a woman. But back then, at least for me, I didn't have that equation. And if you didn't even realize that there's a formula to be working with, how the hell are you supposed to find the answer?
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Taylor Jenkins Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo)
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The principal advantage of narrative writing is that it assists us place our life experiences in a storytelling template. The act of strict examination forces us to select and organize our past. Narration provides an explanatory framework. Human beings often claim to understand events when they manage to formulate a coherent story or narrative explaining what factors caused a specific incident to occur. Stories assist the human mind to remember and make decisions based on informative stories. Narrative writing also prompts periods of intense reflection that leads to more writing that is ruminative. Contemplative actions call for us to track the conscious mind at work rendering an accounting of our weaknesses and our strengths, folly and wisdom.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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My basic hypothesis is this: the people who run the media are humanities graduates with little understanding of science, who wear their ignorance as a badge of honour. Secretly, deep down, perhaps they resent the fact that they have denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of Western thought from the past two hundred years; but there is an attack implicit in all media coverage of science: in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science. On this template, science is portrayed as groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality; they do work that is either wacky or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory, probably going to change soon and, most ridiculously, ‘hard to understand’. Having created this parody, the commentariat then attack it, as if they were genuinely critiquing what science is all about. Science stories generally fall into one of three categories: the wacky stories, the ‘breakthrough’ stories, and the ‘scare’ stories. Each undermines and distorts science in its own idiosyncratic way.
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Ben Goldacre (Bad Science)
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if everyone understood the basics, then economic policymakers would be able to do the right things a lot faster and with less angst in the future. That led me to make a thirty-minute video, How the Economic Machine Works, which I released in 2013. Besides explaining how the economy works it provides a template that helps people assess their economies and gives them guidance about what to do and what to expect during a crisis.
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Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
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There’s a saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. And that’s precisely what has happened to national nutritional policy in the United States in recent years. The government ignores studies that don’t fit within a preconceived template of a low-fat, low-salt, calorie-restricted, high-carb, plant-based diet. But this one-size-fits-all approach to eating does not work for the large segment of the population that is dealing with obesity and other metabolic chronic health issues.
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Jimmy Moore (Keto Clarity: Your Definitive Guide to the Benefits of a Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet)
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Viola could start again—there are no second chances, life’s not a rehearsal, blah, blah, blah—yes, but if she could, if she could retake the journey that wasn’t really a journey, what would she do? She would learn how to love. Learning to Love, a painful but ultimately redemptive journey, displaying warmth and compassion as the author learns how to overcome loneliness and despair. The steps she takes to mend her relationship with her children are particularly rewarding. (Half the members of the jury had nodded off by now.) She had tried, she really had. She had worked on herself. Years of therapy and fresh starts, although nothing that really required an effort on her part. She wanted someone else to effect change in her. It seemed a shame you couldn’t just get an injection that would suddenly make everything all right. (“Try heroin,” Bertie said.) She hadn’t turned to the Church yet, but now that she had voted Tory (tactical!), Anglicanism would probably be next. But it didn’t seem to matter how many new beginnings she had, Viola always somehow found herself in the same place, and no matter how hard she tried, the earliest template of herself always seemed to trump later versions.
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Kate Atkinson (A God in Ruins)
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IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place. The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one
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Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
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Not that long ago I wrote in a poem that 'life is so filled with meaning, there is no reason to try to reduce it'. That is how I feel and have felt like for years. Some sense of meaninglessness can come from an attack from others, at times subconscious, slowly but surely eroding one's self-respect and therefore sense of self, on all the meanings, infinite as they are, that are already right there. You can even be “raised” to do this self-destructive work yourself. The so called absurdity of life is a construction that creates a template for meaninglessness in itself. Humans revolting in this way against self-made systems. Perhaps to remove some responsibility of being human, because it is, wrongly, seen as a burden. What is truly a burden is to feel as if nothing in life is important. It is also the easiest thing to do. If you don't find meaning in for instance seeing a black squirrel running up the trunk of a tree, you probably won't find any meaning in travelling to the end of the world. It is a kind of explanatory greed this “search for meaning” that can literally destroy a world, and it is the equivalent of replacing the deepest of life’s mysteries with a nice looking garage. To numb before being looked at and experienced as a kind of totally lost "translation" is how the written language can be used at its worst. Meaning is already everywhere, expressing, unfolding itself, living and dying, changing and breathing. The noise distracting from that is what is meaningless but luckily, happily, that is just a construct.
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Rune Kjær Rasmussen
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A sundry of intimate encounters with the vibrant intellect of perceptive thinkers dissolves a recluse’s shroud of seclusion. Can I manufacture the needed first aid kit to arrest my internal hemorrhaging? Can I stave off my mental deterioration by exploring the written words of renowned authors? Can I map a course out of my present quandary by scouring the libraries brimming with the beautiful mind works of previous generations of eminent writers? Will diligent encounters with the incisive thoughts of outstanding essayist shred the indivisible bars shielding my indeterminate self and release me from of the monochrome cage of self-imposed isolation? Can respected writers’ perceptive soul-searching create a template for my inchoative thoughts spontaneously to mature?
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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Search engines and social networks are analog computers of unprecedented scale. Information is being encoded (and operated upon) as continuous (and noise-tolerant) variables such as frequencies (of connection or occurrence) and the topology of what connects where, with location being increasingly defined by a fault-tolerant template rather than by an unforgiving numerical address. Pulse-frequency coding for the Internet is one way to describe the working architecture of a search engine, and PageRank for neurons is one way to describe the working architecture of the brain. These computational structures use digital components, but the analog computing being performed by the system as a whole exceeds the complexity of the digital code on which it runs. The model (of the social graph, or of human knowledge) constructs and updates itself.
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George Dyson (Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe)
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But the weakness of these proposals isn't that they're unworkable, or even that they're 'traditional,' but that they're not traditional enough. For most of history, men and women worked together, in a productive household, and this is the model reactionary feminism should aim to retrieve. In any case, half a century into the cyborg era, there's little prospect of reviving the industrial-era housewife as the principal template for sex roles—and there's no need, because for knowledge workers at least the sharp split between 'home' and 'work' that drove the emergence of such roles is blurring again. And the blurring of that divide in turn opens up new possibilities, hinting at a way of viewing lifelong solidarity between the sexes that owes more to the 1450s than the 1950s. It does so by bringing at least some work back into the home, and in the process ramping up the kind of interdependence that can underpin long-term pragmatic solidarity.
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Mary Harrington (Feminism Against Progress)
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Rather than returning to school, he drove straight to the psychologist. “You may need a bit of adjustment, but it’s nothing serious,” the doctor said, after listening to his lengthy narrative. “Nothing serious?” Luo Ji opened his bloodshot eyes wide. “I’m madly in love with a fictional person from a novel of my own creation. I’ve been with her, I’ve traveled with her, and I’ve even broken up with my real-life girlfriend over her. Is that nothing serious to you?” The doctor smiled tolerantly. “Don’t you get it? I’ve given my most profound love to an illusion!” “Are you under the impression that the object of everyone else’s love actually exists?” “Is that even a question?” “Sure. For the majority of people, what they love exists only in the imagination. The object of their love is not the man or woman of reality, but what he or she is like in their imagination. The person in reality is just a template used for the creation of this dream lover. Eventually, they find out the differences between their dream lover and the template. If they can get used to those differences, then they can be together. If not, they split up. It’s as simple as that. You differ from the majority in one respect: You didn’t need a template.” “So this isn’t a sickness?” “Only in the way your girlfriend pointed out: You’ve got natural literary talent. If you want to call that a sickness, go right ahead.” “But isn’t imagining to this degree a little excessive?” “There’s nothing excessive about imagination. Especially where love is concerned.” “So what should I do? How can I forget about her?” “It’s impossible. You can’t forget her, so don’t make the effort. That will only lead to side effects, and maybe even mental disorders. Let nature take its course. Once more, for emphasis: Don’t try to forget about her. It won’t work. But as time passes, her influence on your life will decrease. And you’re actually quite lucky. Whether or not she really exists, you’re fortunate to be in love.” This
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Liu Cixin (The Dark Forest (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #2))
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The woman who wrote in to upbraid Orwell for talking about roses seemed to think that paying attention to that which does not need to be changed is idleness, dissipation, and distraction. Those focused on injustice, on those things that the more we contemplate them the more we want to change them, tend to think of contemplation of what we don’t want to change as akin to shirking one’s duty or dodging awareness of what we do want to change. I’ve talked about it as, instead, regeneration of the energy to face destruction, but Scarry suggests it might also matter as a study of the templates of the desirable and the good. What is the goal of social change or political engagement? Can studying what good already exists or has existed be part of the work? There is, of course, a meaningful difference between the dour (and widespread) position that we are forever starting from scratch because everything is contaminated or corrupt and the position that the good exists as a kind of seed that needs to be tended more energetically or propagated more widely.
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Rebecca Solnit (Orwell's Roses)
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The most effective way to make time for traction is through “timeboxing.” Timeboxing uses a well-researched technique psychologists call “setting an implementation intention,” which is a fancy way of saying, “deciding what you’re going to do, and when you’re going to do it.” It’s a technique that can be used to make time for traction in each of your life domains. The goal is to eliminate all white space on your calendar so you’re left with a template for how you intend to spend your time each day. It doesn’t so much matter what you do with your time; rather, success is measured by whether you did what you planned to do. It’s fine to watch a video, scroll social media, daydream, or take a nap, as long as that’s what you planned to do. Alternatively, checking work email, a seemingly productive task, is a distraction if it’s done when you intended to spend time with your family or work on a presentation. Keeping a timeboxed schedule is the only way to know if you’re distracted. If you’re not spending your time doing what you’d planned, you’re off track.
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Nir Eyal (Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life)
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Templates for Protest Letters 1. TO TACKLE A SURPRISE OUT-OF-NETWORK BILL Dear Sir or Madam: The bills enclosed were for out-of-network services performed on __________ during my admission to __________ Medical Center, a hospital that is in my insurance network. I went to __________ Medical Center precisely because it was in my network. I was not informed of these providers’ out-of-network status and did not consent to being treated by any out-of-network providers. Since I did not give informed consent for treatment beyond the terms and network of my insurance policy, I suggest you contact my insurer to work out payment; I will pay only that portion of the bill that I would have paid for in-network services. Please stop this effort to collect a bill I do not owe for a service I was never informed would be out-of-network. If I get another notice, I will report this collection effort to the __________ State Department of Insurance and __________ State Department of Consumer Affairs. Sincerely, 2. TO OBTAIN MEDICAL RECORDS AND ITEMIZED BILLS Dear Sirs or Madam: I have now requested my medical records/itemized bill __________ times and have yet to receive the material. It is my right to receive these
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Elisabeth Rosenthal (An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back)
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IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place. The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one Now,
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Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
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Working independently, Baltimore and Temin discovered an enzyme found in retroviruses that could build DNA from an RNA template. They called the enzyme reverse transcriptase-"reverse" because it inverted the normal direction of information flow: from RNA back to DNA, or from a gene's message backward to a gene, thereby violating Crick's "central dogma" (that genetic information only moved from genes to messages, but never backward).
Using reverse transcriptase, ever RNA in a cell could be used as a template to build its corresponding gene. A biologist could thus generate a catalog, or "library" of all "active" genes in a cell-akin to a library of books grouped by subject. There would be a library of genes for T cells and another for red blood cells, a library for neurons in the retina, for insulin-secreting cells of the pancreas, and so forth. By comparing libraries derived from two cells-a T cell and a pancreas cell, say-an immunologist could fish out genes that were active in one cell and not the other (e.g., insulin or the T cell receptor). Once identified, that gene could be amplified a millionfold in bacteria. The gene could be isolated and sequenced, its RNA and protein sequence determined, its regulatory regions identified; it could be mutated an inserted into a different cell to decipher the gene's structure and function. In 1984 this technique was deployed to clone the T cell receptor-a landmark achievement in immunology.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
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I once heard a story about Tom Watson, the founder of IBM. Asked to what he attributed the phenomenal success of IBM, he is said to have answered: IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place. The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one Now,
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Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
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Both C.K. and Bieber are extremely gifted performers. Both climbed to the top of their industry, and in fact, both ultimately used the Internet to get big. But somehow Bieber “made it” in one-fifteenth of the time. How did he climb so much faster than the guy Rolling Stone calls the funniest man in America—and what does this have to do with Jimmy Fallon? The answer begins with a story from Homer’s Odyssey. When the Greek adventurer Odysseus embarked for war with Troy, he entrusted his son, Telemachus, to the care of a wise old friend named Mentor. Mentor raised and coached Telemachus in his father’s absence. But it was really the goddess Athena disguised as Mentor who counseled the young man through various important situations. Through Athena’s training and wisdom, Telemachus soon became a great hero. “Mentor” helped Telemachus shorten his ladder of success. The simple answer to the Bieber question is that the young singer shot to the top of pop with the help of two music industry mentors. And not just any run-of-the-mill coach, but R& B giant Usher Raymond and rising-star manager Scooter Braun. They reached from the top of the ladder where they were and pulled Bieber up, where his talent could be recognized by a wide audience. They helped him polish his performing skills, and in four years Bieber had sold 15 million records and been named by Forbes as the third most powerful celebrity in the world. Without Raymond’s and Braun’s mentorship, Biebs would probably still be playing acoustic guitar back home in Canada. He’d be hustling on his own just like Louis C.K., begging for attention amid a throng of hopeful entertainers. Mentorship is the secret of many of the highest-profile achievers throughout history. Socrates mentored young Plato, who in turn mentored Aristotle. Aristotle mentored a boy named Alexander, who went on to conquer the known world as Alexander the Great. From The Karate Kid to Star Wars to The Matrix, adventure stories often adhere to a template in which a protagonist forsakes humble beginnings and embarks on a great quest. Before the quest heats up, however, he or she receives training from a master: Obi Wan Kenobi. Mr. Miyagi. Mickey Goldmill. Haymitch. Morpheus. Quickly, the hero is ready to face overwhelming challenges. Much more quickly than if he’d gone to light-saber school. The mentor story is so common because it seems to work—especially when the mentor is not just a teacher, but someone who’s traveled the road herself. “A master can help you accelerate things,” explains Jack Canfield, author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and career coach behind the bestseller The Success Principles. He says that, like C.K., we can spend thousands of hours practicing until we master a skill, or we can convince a world-class practitioner to guide our practice and cut the time to mastery significantly.
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Shane Snow (Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking)
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supporting things you can do to get there. The Crucial Cube feeds off of the remaining quadrants and the quadrants are fueled by what’s in the Crucial Cube. I’d like you to use the Crucial Cube template to the right and map out all of your priorities by either starting with what’s crucial to you first or what isn’t, and then work your way into the remaining boxes. (You can also create your own template if you’d like. Just use the format shown on the facing page as a guide.) Ready? Good. Let’s go.
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Anonymous
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Printable Calendar
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We have obsessed over Sunday-morning proclamation gatherings and organizational systems for so long, we have forgotten how to do honest missiological work in our own neighborhoods. Leaders would be well served by digging beneath the discussions of relevance based on speaking content, worship styles, sanctuary décor, branding, and prayer stations. These things all function on the proclamation template, which was designed during the Reformation; it is a teaching-based structure that assumes everyone has a churched understanding and is present for a greater understanding of Scripture. While that template is very meaningful for countless Christians, it was not designed to move people who hold a secular worldview toward faith.
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Verlon Fosner (Dinner Church: Building Bridges by Breaking Bread)
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But not all places are the same. If a church is located in suburbia, where families are the predominant social circle, then church-growth ideas work quite well when done right. However, if a church is located in an urban neighborhood in which singles are the predominant social circle, or in an impoverished neighborhood in which the lower third are the predominant social circle, then church-growth ideas will likely fail. This is why so many churches have moved out of our cities; they haven’t known how to do anything but the proclamation template, so they shrank into irrelevance, and then faced the choice to close down or move out. The
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Verlon Fosner (Dinner Church: Building Bridges by Breaking Bread)
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The separation of mind and body that informs medical practice is also the dominant ideology in our culture. We do not often think of socio-economic structures and practices as determinants of illness or well-being. They are not usually “part of the equation.” Yet the scientific data is beyond dispute:
socio-economic relationships have a profound influence on health. For example, although the media and the medical profession — inspired by pharmaceutical research — tirelessly promote the idea that next to hypertension and smoking, high cholesterol poses the greatest risk for heart disease, the evidence is that job strain is more important than all the other risk factors combined.
Further, stress in general and job strain in particular are significant contributors both to high blood pressure and to elevated cholesterol levels. Economic relationships influence health because, most obviously, people with higher incomes are better able to afford healthier diets, living and working conditions and stress-reducing pursuits.
Dennis Raphael, associate professor at the School of Health Policy and Management at York University in Toronto has recently published a study of the societal influences on heart disease in Canada and elsewhere. His conclusion: “One of the most important life conditions that determine whether individuals stay healthy or become ill is their income. In addition, the overall health of North American society may be more determined by the distribution of income among its members rather than the overall wealth of the society…. Many studies find that socioeconomic circumstances, rather than medical and lifestyle risk factors, are the main causes of cardiovascular disease, and that conditions during early life are especially important.”
The element of control is the less obvious but equally important aspect of social and job status as a health factor. Since stress escalates as the sense of control diminishes, people who exercise greater control over their work and lives enjoy better health. This principle was demonstrated in the British Whitehall study showing that second-tier civil servants were at greater risk for heart disease than their superiors, despite nearly comparable incomes.
Recognizing the multigenerational template for behaviour and for illness, and recognizing, too, the social influences that shape families and human lives, we dispense with the unhelpful and unscientific attitude of blame. Discarding blame leaves us free to move toward the necessary adoption of responsibility, a matter to be taken up when we come in the final chapters to consider healing.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
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Not miscalculation, bad strategy is the active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy. One common reason for choosing avoidance is the pain or difficulty of choice. When leaders are unwilling or unable to make choices among competing values and parties, bad strategy is the consequence. A second pathway to bad strategy is the siren song of template-style strategy—filling in the blanks with vision, mission, values, and strategies. This path offers a one-size-fits-all substitute for the hard work of analysis and coordinated action. A third pathway to bad strategy is New Thought—the belief that all you need to succeed is a positive mental attitude. There are other pathways to bad strategy, but these three are the most common. Understanding how and why they are taken should help you guide your footsteps elsewhere. THE
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Richard P. Rumelt (Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters)
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How investors fared in the bear market varied a lot. They generally fell into three broad categories: 1) those who were clobbered and let their fears prompt them to reduce their risks (sell “risky” assets) the more they got clobbered, 2) those who were clobbered and had blind faith that in the end things would work out, so they held on or even bought more risky assets, and 3) those who had a pretty good understanding of what was happening and did a good job of selling high and buying low. There were very few in the third group.
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Ray Dalio (A Template for Understanding Big Debt Crises)
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But isn’t the use of a template or a checklist confining? Surely we’re not arguing that a “color by numbers” approach will yield more creative work than a blank-canvas approach? Actually, yes, that’s exactly what we’re saying.
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Chip Heath (Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die)
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Template Zombie: The project team allows its work to be driven by templates instead of by the thought process necessary to deliver products.
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Jeff Patton (User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product)
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I’ll provide some templates and strategies for what to say, but first, let’s address the choice to say nothing at all. I want you to commit to rejecting “the coward’s no”—ghosting.
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Juliet Funt (A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work)
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Although the nucleus might have been recognized by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the late 17th century, it was not until 1831 that it was reported as a specific structure in orchid epidermal cells by a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown (better known for recognizing ‘Brownian movement’ of pollen grains in water). In 1879, Walther Flemming observed that the nucleus broke down into small fragments at cell division, followed by re-formation of the fragments called chromosomes to make new nuclei in the daughter cells. It was not until 1902 that Walter Sutton and Theodor Boveri independently linked chromosomes directly to mammalian inheritance. Thomas Morgan’s work with fruit flies (Drosophila) at the start of the 20th century showed specific characters positioned along the length of the chromosomes, followed by the realization by Oswald Avery in 1944 that the genetic material was DNA. Some nine years later, James Watson and Francis Crick showed the structure of DNA to be a double helix, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 with Maurice Wilkins, whose laboratory had provided the evidence that led to the discovery. Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction images of DNA from the Wilkins lab had been the key to DNA structure, died of cancer aged 37 in 1958, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. Watson and Crick published the classic double helix model in 1953. The final piece in the jigsaw of DNA structure was produced by Watson with the realization that the pairing of the nucleotide bases, adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine, not only provided the rungs holding the twisting ladder of DNA together, but also provided a code for accurate replication and a template for protein assembly. Crick continued to study and elucidate the base pairing required for coding proteins, and this led to the fundamental ‘dogma’ that ‘DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein’. The discovery of DNA structure marked an enormous advance in biology, probably the most significant since Darwin’s publication of
On the Origin of Species
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Terence Allen (The Cell: A Very Short Introduction)
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the idea of repurposing a frame from elsewhere. We do this when we need to reframe but have no ready alternative at our disposal, so we look to other domains for an existing frame that could be adjusted to our current circumstances. It won’t be a ready template and so may require substantial cognitive work to shape it appropriately, but at least having something to play with can get us started.
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Kenneth Cukier (Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil)
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Learning Plan Template Before Entry Find out whatever you can about the organization’s strategy, structure, performance, and people. Look for external assessments of the performance of the organization. You will learn how knowledgeable, fairly unbiased people view it. If you are a manager at a lower level, talk to people who deal with your new group as suppliers or customers. Find external observers who know the organization well, including former employees, recent retirees, and people who have transacted business with the organization. Ask these people open-ended questions about history, politics, and culture. Talk with your predecessor if possible. Talk to your new boss. As you begin to learn about the organization, write down your first impressions and eventually some hypotheses. Compile an initial set of questions to guide your structured inquiry after you arrive. Soon After Entry Review detailed operating plans, performance data, and personnel data. Meet one-on-one with your direct reports and ask them the questions you compiled. You will learn about convergent and divergent views and about your reports as people. Assess how things are going at key interfaces. You will hear how salespeople, purchasing agents, customer service representatives, and others perceive your organization’s dealings with external constituencies. You will also learn about problems they see that others do not. Test strategic alignment from the top down. Ask people at the top what the company’s vision and strategy are. Then see how far down into the organizational hierarchy those beliefs penetrate. You will learn how well the previous leader drove vision and strategy down through the organization. Test awareness of challenges and opportunities from the bottom up. Start by asking frontline people how they view the company’s challenges and opportunities. Then work your way up. You will learn how well the people at the top check the pulse of the organization. Update your questions and hypotheses. Meet with your boss to discuss your hypotheses and findings. By the End of the First Month Gather your team to feed back to them your preliminary findings. You will elicit confirmation and challenges of your assessments and will learn more about the group and its dynamics. Now analyze key interfaces from the outside in. You will learn how people on the outside (suppliers, customers, distributors, and others) perceive your organization and its strengths and weaknesses. Analyze a couple of key processes. Convene representatives of the responsible groups to map out and evaluate the processes you selected. You will learn about productivity, quality, and reliability. Meet with key integrators. You will learn how things work at interfaces among functional areas. What problems do they perceive that others do not? Seek out the natural historians. They can fill you in on the history, culture, and politics of the organization, and they are also potential allies and influencers. Update your questions and hypotheses. Meet with your boss again to discuss your observations.
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Michael D. Watkins (The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter)
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Often they are connected to our schedule or calendars, such as: • Meals • Bedtime routines • Words you say as your kids start the day, head to school, or return home Rituals and traditions are often connected to the regular things a family inevitably navigates together: • Family mantras can help us persevere through a challenge or remember who we are. • A template can guide how you ask for and offer forgiveness to one another. Some are born from a desire to lean into special experiences and connect them to important ideas: • Holiday traditions for Christmas and Easter help us enter into God’s great work in the world, not only as it happened in the past, but as it continues today. • Birthday celebrations are a chance to bless a family member for simply being who they are, honoring them as a gift from God and expressing gratitude for them. Repetition is the very thing that empowers any of these practices.
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Meredith Miller (Woven: Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn't Have to Heal From)
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Until that June day in 2004, PowerPoint had been the default tool for communication of ideas in many meetings at Amazon, just as it was and still is at many companies. Everybody knew its delights and perils. What could be more exhilarating than listening to a charismatic executive deliver a rousing presentation backed up by snappy phrases, dancing clip art, and cool slide transitions? So what if you couldn’t remember the details a few days later? And what could be worse than suffering through a badly organized presentation using a drab template and tons of text in a font too small to read? Or, worse still, squirming as a nervous presenter stumbled and faltered through slide after slide? The real risk with using PowerPoint in the manner we did, however, was the effect it could have on decision-making. A dynamic presenter could lead a group to approve a dismal idea. A poorly organized presentation could confuse people, produce discussion that was rambling and unfocused, and rob good ideas of the serious consideration they deserved. A boring presentation could numb the brain so completely that people tuned out or started checking their email, thereby missing the good idea lurking beneath the droning voice and uninspiring visuals
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Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
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Continuity could generate video images of Angie, animate them with templates compiled from her stims. Viewing them induced a mild but not unpleasant vertigo, one of the rare times she was able to directly grasp the fact of her fame.
'Public statement on your decision to go to Jamaica, praise for the methods of the clinic, the dangers of drugs, renewed enthusiasm for your work, gratitude to your audience, stock footage of the Malibu place...
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William Gibson (Mona Lisa Overdrive (Sprawl, #3))
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A spread is a predefined template or pattern that defines how to distribute and interpret the cards in a reading.
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Joan Bunning (The Big Book of Tarot: How to Interpret the Cards and Work with Tarot Spreads for Personal Growth (Weiser Big Book Series))
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1876, Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the first successful telephone) attempted to sell his patent for the device to Western Union for $100,000. They rejected the offer, claiming the telephone simply “wasn’t capable of transmitting recognizable speech over several miles.” In 1880, the Stevens Institute of Technology publically proclaimed that Thomas Edison’s light bulb would never work. In 1901, Wilbur Wright thought it would be fifty years before we could make airplanes that would fly. It was only two years later in 1903 that he and his brother, Orville, had their first successful flight.
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Steven Fies (24-Hour Business Plan Template)
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Although McGovern initially appeared as a likely candidate to pull off RFK’s political balancing act, the legacy of his campaign grew to become a damning metaphor for any form of Democratic boldness. Despite his commitment to real material concerns of working people, a long-standing intellectual interest in labor issues, and an exceptional pro-labor voting record, McGovern’s candidacy created an enduring, if distorted, political template for what the white, male American working class was not: radical, effete, movement-based, anti-war, and, perhaps most profoundly, Democratic.
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Jefferson R. Cowie (Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class)
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From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one
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Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
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Our practice of prayer not only needs to be pulled forward by the template of Jesus’s personal communion with the Father, it also should be pushed ahead by the demanding nature of shepherding work itself. Pastoral ministry can bring you to your knees, one way or another.
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Jeramie Rinne (Church Elders: How to Shepherd God's People Like Jesus (9Marks: Building Healthy Churches))
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AICPA peer review checklists are free and can be obtained by Googling “AICPA Peer Review Checklist.” Use the most recent checklist (they often change). Minimum Documentation SSARS 21 states that the minimum documentation requirements are as follows: Establish your firm’s minimum work paper documentation. What work papers are required for each type of engagement? Will your firm require the preparer to sign off on each work paper? When the partner or manager reviews the work papers, will she initial each reviewed work paper or just a summary review sheet? Authority to Issue Determine who has the authority to issue financial statements and compilation reports. Here are a few questions to consider: •Who has authority to issue financial statements using the preparation guidance? •Who has authority to issue financial statements using the compilation guidance? •Will your firm require a second partner review of each initial preparation engagement? •Will annual compilation reports be reviewed by a second partner? Quality Control - A Simple Summary •Well-designed templates will: ·Enhance your firm’s compliance with professional standards, and ·Increase your efficiency •Create templates for those work products that you expect to issue most often (e.g., tax-basis preparation financial statements) •In developing your templates: ·Include the minimum required work papers and reports ·Vet your templates using the AICPA peer review checklists •Determine who has the authority to issue different work products (e.g., preparation, compilation, monthly, annual)
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Charles Hall (Preparation of Financial Statements & Compilation Engagements)
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By now, you should have enough material to design, develop, or just renew your own core values, mission, and vision statements. Start with your one thing and work from there. A good building is never built until the architect blends the dream with the details.
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Deena B. Katz (Deena Katz's Complete Guide to Practice Management: Tips, Tools, and Templates for the Financial Adviser (Bloomberg Financial Book 64))
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Thirty years later, his regime had accomplished its historical task. Economic development had transformed Spanish society, radical mass politics had been extinguished, and democracy was no longer hazardous for capital. So completely had the dictatorship done its work that a toothless Bourbon socialism was incapable even of restoring the republic it had overthrown. In this Spanish laboratory could be found a parabola of the future, which the Latin American dictators of the 1970s – Pinochet is the exemplary case – would repeat, architects of a political order in which electors, grateful for civic liberties finally restored, could be trusted henceforward not to tamper with the social order. Today the Spanish template has become the general formula of freedom: no longer making the world safe for democracy, but democracy safe for this world.
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Perry Anderson
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However, before the collective interviews begin, we create a template for the job. This is a draft list of the qualities sought, along with numerical weightings that should be attached to each of these. Employees help design the template. They can log on to the company intranet and suggest the qualities and qualifications that we should look for in a candidate, and then assign scoring points to each attribute. Basic qualifications, like international experience or schooling, fluent English, and a firm command of financial technique, are not a part of the template.
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Ricardo Semler (The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works)
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WHAT WORKS WELL Mornings: I tend to get a lot done in the mornings. Scheduling/ batching: I spend time each month creating and scheduling social media posts all in one go. Project management: I use Asana to manage all my projects. (I moved to it recently after finding Basecamp a truly painful experience.) And I have ready-made projects set up, which means I can ‘set and forget’ and then wait for the alerts telling me what to do each day. Psst: By ‘ready-made projects’ I mean templates that are set up with standard tasks for each type of job I do. Documentation: I have documents for everything. I also have templates for all kinds of project emails, as well as ad hoc things such as interview requests, favour requests and tech issues. Toggl: I use Toggl to track my time (when I remember to switch it on). Typing: I type super fast (one of my superpowers). Bravery: I’m willing to give stuff a go without fear of failure, which means I don’t procrastinate much.
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Kate Toon (Confessions of a Misfit Entrepreneur: How to succeed in business despite yourself)
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Tieken has suggested, on the basis of the problems we have outlined, that all the Sangam poems in the major anthologies were composed to order by poets who were perfectly aware of the fictive nature of their subject (tuṟai) and its context. Thus eighth- or ninth-century poets at the Pandya court, in Tieken’s reconstruction, deliberately composed poems with an internal speaker addressing a far more ancient hero or patron—as if a poet today were to adopt the persona of, say, Christopher Marlowe writing verses for Queen Elizabeth. But there is no need to conjure up such a scenario, with early-medieval court poets busy composing thousands of poems deliberately retrojected into the distant past, using conventional themes as well as invented materials meant to bring these ancient kings and bards to life. Is it not far more economical to imagine a process whereby the poems, many of them very old, all of them self-conscious literary efforts to begin with, survived through a slow process of recording, editorial accretion, and explication? Moreover, the relation of poem to colophon must have been, in many cases, far more intimate than any linear development could account for. There may well have been cases where the text and the colophon are, in a special sense, mutually determining—that is, cases where the poetic situation at work in the poem fits and informs the colophon long before the latter was recorded. Again, there is no need to assume that the “fictive” nature of the colophon means it is false. Quite the contrary may be the case: poem and colophon, though certainly distinct, usually share a single mental template. Fiction often offers a much closer approximation to truth than what passes for fact can give us. It’s also possible that some of the colophons are arbitrary editorial interventions long after the period of composition—that is, that well-known, ancient names were recycled by creative editors. We need to keep an open, critical mind as we investigate these materials.
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David Dean Shulman (Tamil: A Biography)
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Business Plan Samples
This sample business plan is intended to provide you with a template that can be used as a reference for when you’re hard at work on your plan. It's always easier to write something if you can read an example first, so here's an executive summary example that you can use as a model for your own business plan's executive summary.
The Executive Summary is where you explain the general idea behind your company; it’s where you give the reader (most likely an investor, or someone else you need on board) a clear indication of why you’ve sent this Business Plan to them. In the Business Plan section, you will want to get the reader’s attention by letting them know what you do.
It’s vitality important to set up a strong foundation and a thorough business plan in the beginning. Nonprofit business plans have several different features and quirks that you’ll need to include to receive funding and having a strong passion to help your community is only a fragment of what it takes to run a not-for-profit organization.
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Business Plan Writers
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Star App Solutions is a world renowned software development and application company. Our head office is located in Richmond, BC, Canada. We develop all sorts of application for multiple technologies. Star App Solutions has many offices located throughout the globe. We take pride in our work; we have worked with a variety of companies internationally. We specialize in design as well as development of websites. With our expertise we can help you build a brand and take your brand to the next level. Branding is our forte which helps generate traffic and leads through multiple venues and sources. Even though we are a website company we provide a variety of services including high end logo design, template design, emailer design and flyer design. Click on the link to refer to our website for full details for the services provided by Star App Solutions.
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Star App Solutions
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1. Create intimacy: You’ll get more trust—and capture the attention of your prospects—by establishing a personal connection. Your emails should read as if one person has written it to another: one to one. This can be achieved by: using a personal, or plain-text template; using “you” instead of “we”, or “I”; telling stories; and making good use of personalization. For an even greater effect, you can add subtle personalization throughout your copy. For example: “…this is what we’ve heard from other people in [ Tampa ]”. 2. Make users feel special: On top of personalization, you can create exclusivity: “This offer is only for our most engaged users” “…it’s for early adopters” Or appeal to vanity: “Our most successful users want to feel this way…” 3. Demonstrate that you understand their reality: You can create obvious qualifications everyone wants to have assigned to themselves, for example “…people who care about maximizing their return on investment”; or “…savvy marketers”. Illustrate product benefits and value with clear examples that relate to the unique situation of your users. 4. Create urgency: As Zapier did, you can also get creative with deadlines. Use coupons with limited-time offers to accentuate the fear of missing out (FOMO)17: “Offer only available until June 4th…” “Only a few people get this plan…” 5. Use clear actions: Use a CTA that clearly establishes the next steps. Repeat it throughout the email, coming at it from different angles. Use the P.S. to attract the eye and to reinforce the action you want users to take (when appropriate). Keep your emails simple and your messaging scannable. It’s important for users to be able to get the email at a glance. Short and sweet often outperforms long and complex emails. You want a near-instant reaction from your readers. Your email has to build up to the desired action. Use copy to overcome objections, and accentuate the desire to buy or engage. A good email has to: capture attention through the subject line, personalization, or a story; build reader interest by demonstrating either the benefit or the problem; build desire to act by creating information gaps, time constraints, or the fear of missing out; and drive action through a well-timed CTA, telling users exactly what you want them to do. These are really just the four steps of the AIDA model18 (Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action) applied to email copywriting. Don’t get intimidated by copywriting. Emails that are too polished often don’t work as well. Get started crafting your own email offers. We’ll get started working on subject lines in the next chapter.
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Étienne Garbugli (The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook: Convert Leads, Increase Customer Retention, and Close More Recurring Revenue With Email)
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On Degenerate Templates and the Adaptor Hypothesis: A Note for the RNA Tie Club,” which Crick sent out early in 1955, is the first of his master-works about protein synthesis and the coding problem. By 1966, he had written two dozen papers related to the subject. Six at least were of great and general importance. Two of those included experiments and were written with collaborators. One more paper, of pleasing ingenuity, happened to be wrong: nature turned out to be less elegant than Crick’s imagination. Of the entire run, however, this first was the most unprecedented and original. The paper defined the next questions, and many were new questions. More, it established the way the questions were to be approached, and the terms in which they were to be argued. Most generally, it took for granted that the questions were spatial, physical, logical, easy to apprehend, and therefore tractable and even—in principle—simple. Yet even now, only a few hundred people have ever read the paper—for the surprising reason that it has never been published. It remained a note for the RNA Tie Club: seventeen foolscap pages, typewritten, double-spaced, mimeographed.
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Horace Freeland Judson (The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology)
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systMD is a NJ web design agency that offers high quality custom rental websites. Allow systMD to tailor-make your website from the ground up. With longtime professional experience in custom web design, graphic design services, template-based websites, client-updatable sites, and online stores, we are sure to meet all of your web design and development needs! Work one-on-one with our small team at competitvely-priced websites.
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systMD LLC
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I want my biggest achievement to be. Me being able to understand and know what I am doing. Be sure of what I am doing without relying on luck that it works, jinxing it, thumb sucking it or relying on templates. Being able to answer ,when they say, “yeah it works, but how does it work”.
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D.J. Kyos
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I want my biggest achievement to be. Me being able to understand and know what I am doing. Being sure of what I am doing without relying on luck that it works, jinxing it, thumb sucking it or relying on templates. Being able to answer ,when they say, “yeah it works, but how does it work”.
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D.J. Kyos
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The slow, deliberate forces of evolution that have shaped our emotions have done their work over the course of a million years; the last 10,000 years, despite having witnessed the rapid rise of human civilization and the explosion of the human population from five million to five billion, have left little imprint on our biological templates for emotional life.
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Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
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Also, tweak your ideal note-taking template if you feel some aspects aren’t working or could be improved upon.
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John Connelly (How To Take Great Notes Quickly And Easily: A Very Easy Guide)
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Human Resources Says, “Only Apply to Jobs If You Have 80% of the Requirements”
HR says this because it reduces the number of applications they have to review. The 80% requirement sounds logical, until:
• You read a job description, which is one continuous sentence and 15 lines long.
• The hiring manager says he's so busy that he didn’t have time to create a job description. In fact, the description online is only a template, so it doesn't describe the actual job.
• The hiring manager tells you that they haven’t fleshed out the responsibilities for the new role.
• The job requirements appear as if they’re looking for a Nobel Prize winner.
I’ve encountered all four situations.
I've applied for positions where I didn't have 80% of the requirements. Because of the exposure I received during the interview, I was asked to interview for another role. That is where I work now, four years later. I know others who’ve done the same thing.
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Clark Finnical (Job Hunting Secrets: (from someone who's been there))
“
A rough sense of Baker’s real time frame can also be teased out from internal evidence. The inferential details that help us to anchor the work in some genuine calendar is the extreme weather he described in his single winter of observations. It is without doubt the extraordinary winter of 1962–1963, that Arctic season when snow – more than at any time for 150 years – lay thick on the ground for months. It was the coldest period recorded in southern England since 1740, and long stretches of the coast froze into solid sheets with incipient ice floes. Baker’s description of an Essex landscape snowbound from 27 December right through until the first week of March fits closely with the meteorological pattern of that period. While these details may suggest a rough template for the book’s time and place, Baker felt in no way bound by it.
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J.A. Baker (The Peregrine)
“
In the latter half of the twentieth century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures.
One was George Orwell's 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother, and Thoughtcrime and Newspeak and the Memory Hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love, and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever.
The other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and Softer Form of Totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and Hypnotic Persuasion rather than through brutality; of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration; of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dimwitted serfs programmed to love their menial work; and of Soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects.
Which template would win, we wondered?
Would it be possible for both of these futures - the hard and the soft - to exist a the same time, in the same place? And what would that be like?
Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us.
Those of us still pottering along on the earthly plane - and thus still able to read books - are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, seventy-five years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers, and programmed conformists that it presents?
”
”
Margaret Atwood
“
How to account for [Eastern Europe's] wondrous and mystifying melange [of peoples]? Stempowski's answer had to do with nations and states. In the West, he wrote, the equation between ethnic and linguistic belonging and political allegiance began very early. Beginning in the Middle Ages, priests and prelates imposed their particular strands of Christianity on the populations, executing heretics and unbelievers. Meanwhile kings expelled their Jews and confiscated their property. If a realm contained Muslims, they were likewise forced to convert or were banished. By the nineteenth century, national belonging replaced religion as the dominant template to be imposed on society. Little armies of bureaucrats and educators fanned out into the countryside, making sure that all the people there spoke the same language. Across the territory conquered by the French kings, peasants were *made* into French people, and if the Scots didn't concurrently become English, they certainly adopted the English language. Virtually everywhere, the machinery of the state worked like a giant steamroller, ironing out differences wherever they could be found.
In all these regards, Eastern Europe was different. There, empires tended to accentuate difference rather than suppress it. In the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire offered many Christians and Jews a wide measure of autonomy, allowing them to manage their own affairs. The Russian Empire, Stempowki's birthplace, afforded religious minorities an even greater degree of freedom. The Habsburg empire did its best to impose Catholicism on its various peoples, especially the rebellious Czechs, but even so, it remained home to numerous Orthodox Christians and Jews. More importantly, the Habsburgs made hardly any effort to turn their various constituent peoples (around 1900 the empire was home to eleven official nationalities) into Germans. These empires took a laissez-faire approach to governing, They taxed and counted their subjects, but they did not intervene too deeply in the inner structure of their communities
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Jacob Mikanowski (Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land)
“
The primary challenge of happiness research comes in the application of insight to actual lives, each of which is highly individual and does not fit neatly into any group template. The findings and ideas we’ve presented in this book are based on research, but science can’t know the turmoil or contradictions you feel in your heart. It can’t quantify the stir that you experience when a certain friend calls. It can’t know what keeps you up at night, or what you regret, or how you express your love. Science can’t say whether you’re calling your kids too much or too little, or whether you should reconnect with a particular family member. It can’t say if it would be better for you to have a heart-to-heart over a cup of coffee or play a game of basketball or go for a walk with a friend. Those answers can only come through reflection, and figuring out what works for you. For anything in this book to be useful, you will need to tune in to your unique life experience and make its lessons your own. But here’s what science can tell you: Good relationships keep us happier, healthier, and help us live longer. This is true across the lifespan, and across cultures and contexts, which means it is almost certainly true for you, and for nearly every human being who has ever lived.
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Robert Waldinger (The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness)
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yama—moral discipline comprising nonharming (ahimsā), nonstealing (asteya), truthfulness (satya), chastity (brahmacarya), and nongrasping or greedlessness (aparigraha) 2. niyama—self-restraint comprising purity (shauca), contentment (samtosha), asceticism (tapas), self-study (svādhyāya), and devotion to the Lord (īshvara-pranidhāna) 3. āsana—posture (specifically for meditation) 4. prānāyāma—breath control 5. pratyāhāra—sensory inhibition 6. dhāranā—concentration 7. dhyāna—meditation, or sustained and deepening concentration 8. samādhi—ecstasy, or merging in consciousness with the object of meditation Together the eight limbs lead practitioners out of the maze of their own preconceptions and confusions to a sublime state of freedom. This is accomplished through the progressive control of the mind (citta). Beyond the highest ecstatic state lies the freedom of the transcendental Self, which is the pure Witness (sākshin) of all mental processes. For Patanjali, Self-realization is kaivalya, or the “isolation” or “aloneness” of that transcendental Witness. The many free Selves (purusha) all intersect in infinity and eternity. Enlightenment, or liberation, consists in simply waking up to our true nature, which is the transcendental Spirit, or Self. HATHA-YOGA The word hatha means “force” or “forceful.” Thus Hatha-Yoga is the “forceful Yoga” or “Yoga of Force,” meaning the Yoga of the inner kundalinī power. This branch of Yoga, which is particularly associated with Matsyendra Nātha and Goraksha Nātha, two perfected masters or siddhas, is a medieval development arising out of Tantra. It approaches Self-realization through the vehicle of the physical body and its energetic (pranic/etheric) template. In the first instance, Hatha-Yoga seeks to strengthen or “bake” the body so that practitioners have a chance to cultivate higher realizations. Secondly, it means to transubstantiate the body into a “divine body” (divyadeha) or “adamantine body” (vajra-deha), which is endowed with all kinds of paranormal capacities. Thus, the disciplines of Hatha-Yoga are designed to help manifest the ultimate Reality in the finite human body-mind. Sri Aurobindo put it this way: The chief processes of Hathayoga are āsana and prānāyāma. By its numerous Asanas or fixed postures it first cures the body of that restlessness which is a sign of its inability to contain without working them off in action and movement the vital forces poured into it from the universal Life-Ocean, gives to it an extraordinary health, force and suppleness and seeks to liberate it from the habits by which it is subjected to ordinary physical Nature and kept within the narrow bounds of her normal operations. . . . By various subsidiary but elaborate processes the Hathayogin next contrives to keep the body free from all impurities and the nervous system unclogged for those exercises of respiration which are his most important instruments.1
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Georg Feuerstein (The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice)
“
It was time to honestly evaluate how I spent every minute of every day. I scanned for wasted time, inefficient hours, and activities that failed to meet the litmus test of mission critical. Utilizing many of the tools set forth in Timothy Ferriss’s The Four-Hour Workweek, I made some drastic cuts, eventually creating a lifestyle template that forms the underpinnings of how I live and manage time today. On the professional front, I did away with all nonessential networking and business-development lunches, events, and meetings, a favorite Hollywood pastime that always sucked up precious hours and rarely led to new business. Unless it was crucial, I politely declined meeting with clients in person, forcing conversations to the phone. And anything that could be done via e-mail replaced lengthy conference calls. High-maintenance clients who represented low revenue were let go. Hours spent on the freeway commuting were traded whenever possible for the home office or the local Starbucks. I went digital on all fronts, untethering my business from location and always having handy my laptop or iPhone. And because I was self-employed—admittedly, a crucial component in my success equation—I could make creative decisions about when and where I worked, giving me the flexibility to train into the late morning and sometimes mid-afternoon without suffering professional consequences.
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Rich Roll (Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World's Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself)
“
First, distraction remains a destroyer of depth. Therefore, the hub-and-spoke model provides a crucial template. Separate your pursuit of serendipitous encounters from your efforts to think deeply and build on these inspirations. You should try to optimize each effort separately, as opposed to mixing them together into a sludge that impedes both goals. Second, even when you retreat to a spoke to think deeply, when it’s reasonable to leverage the whiteboard effect, do so. By working side by side with someone on a problem, you can push each other toward deeper levels of depth, and therefore toward the generation of more and more valuable output as compared to working alone.
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Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
“
Everyone’s job has different requirements, but the three main folders I use should fit many types of work. Current projects, with a subfolder for each project. (You should try to keep these to no more than ten. After all, how many of us are simultaneously working on more than ten projects? If you are, you’ll learn in the next chapter how to tidy your time.) Records, which contain policies and procedures you regularly access. Usually, these files are provided by others and you typically don’t modify them. Examples include legal contracts and employee files. Saved work, which consists of documents from past projects that you’ll use in the future. Examples include files that can help you with new projects, like a presentation from a previous client that can be a good template for a future one. Other types of saved work can include research you’ve done that could be helpful later, such as benchmarking of competitors or industry research. You may also want to save some projects to have a portfolio to show to prospective clients or new employees for training purposes. If you keep personal files in the same space, add a “Personal” folder so you don’t intermingle personal and work files. Keep digital documents organized. Staying organized is much easier once you have a small set of intuitive, primary folders. If you decide to keep a new file, put it in the most appropriate folder. Otherwise, delete it. The usefulness of your folders will improve as you consistently place similar files in the same place and keep only what you need. When projects are done, decide whether they warrant being moved to your “Saved Work” folder or if you can discard them. There’s no need to store records such as company policies if they’re accessible in other places or won’t be needed again.
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Marie Kondō (Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life)
“
In the latter half of the twentieth century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures.
One was George Orwell's 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother, and Thoughtcrime and Newspeak and the Memory Hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love, and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever.
The other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and Softer Form of Totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and Hypnotic Persuasion rather than through brutality; of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration; of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dimwitted serfs programmed to love their menial work; and of Soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects.
Which template would win, we wondered?
....Would it be possible for both of these futures - the hard and the soft - to exist a the same time, in the same place? And what would that be like?
....Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us...
....those of us still pottering along on the earthly plane - and thus still able to read books - are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, seventy-five years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers, and programmed conformists that it presents?
- excerpts from Margaret Atwood's introduction (2007) to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
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Margaret Atwood
“
Jazzie now has an OBE, and Trevor and Norman an MBE each, but their most vital legacy today is on the streets of London, among the next generation of sound systems, who automatically plugged into how it all worked from a British rather than Jamaican point of view. Most importantly, they could see how far it could go. The coming waves of London black music – latter-day ‘collectives’ like the So Solid Crew, Roll Deep and so on – benefited hugely from this template, using pirate radio, the internet, club nights and dances to operate as self-contained, self-supporting sound systems.
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Lloyd Bradley (Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital)
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MANAGING THE CURRENCY WELL-MANAGED Policy makers bluff, conveying that they will never allow the currency to weaken much. When they do devalue, it’s a surprise. The devaluation is large enough that the people are no longer broadly expecting the currency weakening more (creating a two-way market). POORLY MANAGED Policy makers are widely expected to allow a currency weakness, causing more downward pressure on the currency and higher interest rates. The initial devaluation is small, and further devaluations are needed. The market expects this, causing higher interest rates and inflation expectations. CLOSING EXTERNAL IMBALANCES WELL-MANAGED Tight monetary policy causes domestic demand to contract in line with the fall in incomes. Policy makers create incentives for investors to stay in the currency (i.e., higher interest rates that compensate for risk of currency depreciation). POORLY MANAGED Policy makers favor domestic conditions, and monetary policy is too loose, putting off domestic pain and stoking inflation. Policy makers attempt to stop the outflow of capital with capital controls or other restrictive measures. SMOOTHING THE DOWNTURN WELL-MANAGED Use reserves judiciously to smooth the withdrawal of foreign capital while working to close imbalances. POORLY MANAGED Rely on reserve sales to maintain higher levels of spending. MANAGING BAD DEBTS/DEFAULTS WELL-MANAGED Work through debts of entities that are over-indebted, making up the gap with credit elsewhere. POORLY MANAGED Allow disorderly defaults that lead to increased uncertainty and capital flight.
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Ray Dalio (A Template for Understanding Big Debt Crises)
“
The Creative Entrepreneur Mandala consists of four pathways that will help you design a viable creative business. Pathway 1: Heart and Meaning looks at how to follow your heart’s desire and creative dreams, while lessening the potential for heartbreak. Pathway 2: Gifts and Flow reveals how uncovering and using your unique gifts contributes to flow, or less-effortful accomplishment. Pathway 3: Value and Profitability is about creating a customer-centric business, and how to create and deliver value that people will pay for. Pathway 4: Tools and Skills presents the vital necessity of developing your business skills and leadership capacities (which few entrepreneurs are willing to do) to achieve the results you want in areas 1 through 3. Each of these four essentials is looked at as an individual pathway that, when put together, form a mandala, or flower shape. The goal is to find the overlapping center of the four pathways, which represents the “sweet spot” of your business—the absolutely unique value you offer to the marketplace that is aligned with your innermost aspirations and ideals. The mandala provides a template for working with the four pathways of the business in a visual manner. Awareness of and continual refinement of all four pathways is crucial for launching and sustaining the kind of enterprise that works for creative individuals. When even one pathway is missing, the outcome we get from our efforts is different—less—than if all four are used together. This process of refinement is meant to be continual, reflecting the dynamic nature of the marketplace and also the changing nature of our own goals and plans. Don’t be discouraged if “getting” all four pathways seems daunting at first. The mandala is a tool for reflection and critical thinking, which requires time and space to evolve. It is something to work with at regular strategic planning meetings, monthly, quarterly, and annually.
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Lisa Sonora (The Creative Entrepreneur: A DIY Visual Guidebook for Making Business Ideas Real)
“
Any meal that includes all six tastes is balancing to all doshas. Unless someone is very imbalanced, a six-taste meal is enough. In the case of any imbalance, keep meals simple, light, fresh, and easy to digest. This will suit all doshas. Prepare a large single-course meal and adjust portion size and spicing for individual doshas. For example, say you make rice, mung dal, and sautéed greens for a group. A person with vata imbalance can make the rice their largest portion, and add an extra dollop of ghee or stir in their favorite warming spice. A person with pitta imbalance can have equal portions and add a generous garnish of fresh cilantro, mint, or dill. A person with kapha imbalance can reduce the portion of rice, favoring instead the dal and the greens, and sprinkle with red pepper flakes. Use meal plans as templates, and be creative. Repeat days that work well for you.. Pick one day of the week to prepare foods in advance.
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Tiffany Shelton (Ayurveda Cookbook: Healthy Everyday Recipes to Heal your Mind, Body, and Soul. Ayurvedic Cooking for Beginners)
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This process can be conveniently summarized under the acronym ELSA: Embrace, Let go, Stop, Act. One embraces dukkha, that is, whatever situation life presents, lets go of the grasping that arises in reaction to it, and stops reacting so that one can act unconditioned by reactivity. This procedure is a template that can be applied across the entire spectrum of human experience, from one’s ethical vision of what constitutes a “good life” to one’s day-to-day interactions with colleagues at work. Buddhism 2.0 has no interest in whether or not such a way of life leads to a final goal called nirvana. What matters is an ever-deepening, ever-broadening engagement with a process of practice in which each element of ELSA is a necessary and intrinsic part. “Ceasing” is no longer seen as the goal of the path but as those moments when reactivity stops (or is suspended) in order that the possibility of a path can reveal itself and be “brought into being.” Just as dukkha gives rise to craving (rather than the other way round), so the ceasing of craving gives rise to the eightfold path (rather than the other way round). Thus Buddhism 2.0 turns Buddhism 1.0 on its head.
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Stephen Batchelor (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World)
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The secret to making decisions is to ask questions and use templates to work on the answers. To think outside the box, remember to S.C.A.M.P.E.R by Substituting, Combining, Adapting, Modifying, Purposing, and Eliminating. And ensure you are setting S.M.A.R.T. goals which are Specific, Measurable, Action-Oriented, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
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Robert Plank (WWHW, Why, What, How-To, What-If: Easily Create a Book, Podcast, or Online Course In Just a Few Easy-to-Follow Steps)
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While I won’t go into exactly how it works here, the most defining characteristics of bubbles that can be measured are: Prices are high relative to traditional measures Prices are discounting future rapid price appreciation from these high levels There is broad bullish sentiment Purchases are being financed by high leverage Buyers have made exceptionally extended forward purchases (e.g., built inventory, contracted for supplies, etc.) to speculate or to protect themselves against future price gains New buyers (i.e., those who weren’t previously in the market) have entered the market Stimulative monetary policy threatens to inflate the bubble even more (and tight policy to cause its popping)
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Ray Dalio (A Template for Understanding Big Debt Crises)
“
It’s obvious that nature uses genome templates to create life.
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Sahara Sanders (INDIGO DIARIES: A Series of Novels)
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Nature uses genome templates to create life.
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Sahara Sanders (INDIGO DIARIES: A Series of Novels)
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Emma saw in her night dreams that she was creating a reality: she took some visual components, having combined them with a little live energy, using a kind of software, such as programs working with genome templates.
She woke up at 4 AM and wrote in her diary: “Aha… Life is a compound structure (symbiosis) of the material-world and wise energy.
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Sahara Sanders (INDIGO DIARIES: A Series of Novels)
“
Caste in the South,” wrote the anthropologists W. Lloyd Warner and Allison Davis, “is a system for arbitrarily defining the status of all Negroes and of all whites with regard to the most fundamental privileges and opportunities of human society.” It would become the social, economic, and psychological template at work in one degree or another for generations.
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Isabel Wilkerson
“
THE ELEVATOR PITCH When I first started my consulting practice, I began networking at conferences to find potential clients. It was not unusual to be the only doctor in the room. I quickly learned the importance of the elevator pitch. The elevator pitch is where you explain what your business is all about concisely in the span of no more than a few minutes (or the length of the ride up an elevator). Here are a few approaches to developing your elevator pitch. THE WHAT, WHY, HOW TEMPLATE: The first is by answering these three questions: What do you do? Why should somebody listen to you? How can you help them? Here are my answers: I am a physician business consultant. I have run many successful six- and seven-figure companies. I can help them by identifying additional streams of income outside their medical career. THE FILL IN THE BLANKS ELEVATOR PITCH Another approach is by filling in the following sentence: “I help _________ so they can have ___________
by __________.” The first blank refers to your target market. The second blank refers to what your target market wants, and the third blank refers to the method they will use to achieve it. Here is my elevator pitch: I help doctors, so they can have a better quality of life by teaching them to build additional streams of income. Why the elevator pitch works is because the focus is on the prospect. A big mistake when networking conferences is people love to talk about themselves. Use that to your advantage, and keep the focus on what you can do for them. There is a radio station that we all tune into that is known as WII-FM, which stands for What’s In It For Me? If they have a problem that you can solve, you will have people beating down your door. Your elevator pitch is what is also known as your unique selling proposition (USP). What do you have that makes you special, that really out distances you away from the competition? This is what led me to gain new clients when attending business and marketing conferences. Create and memorize a 30-second elevator pitch that resonates with
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Michael Woo-Ming (The Positioned Physician [Updated Edition]: Earn More, Work Smart, and Love Medicine Again)
“
And harder economic times strained civic trust. As the U.S. growth rate started to slow in the 1970s—as incomes then stagnated and good jobs declined for those without a college degree, as parents started worrying about their kids doing at least as well as they had done—the scope of people’s concerns narrowed. We became more sensitive to the possibility that someone else was getting something we weren’t and more receptive to the notion that the government couldn’t be trusted to be fair. Promoting that story—a story that fed not trust but resentment—had come to define the modern Republican Party. With varying degrees of subtlety and varying degrees of success, GOP candidates adopted it as their central theme, whether they were running for president or trying to get elected to the local school board. It became the template for Fox News and conservative radio, the foundational text for every think tank and PAC the Koch Brothers financed: The government was taking money, jobs, college slots, and status away from hardworking, deserving people like us and handing it all to people like them—those who didn’t share our values, who didn’t work as hard as we did, the kind of people whose problems were of their own making. The intensity of these convictions put Democrats on the defensive, making leaders less bold about proposing new initiatives, limiting the boundaries of political debate. A deep and suffocating cynicism took hold. Indeed, it became axiomatic among political consultants of both parties that restoring trust in the government or in any of our major institutions was a lost cause, and that the battle between Democrats and Republicans each election cycle now came down to whether America’s squeezed middle class was more likely to identify the wealthy and powerful or the poor and minorities as the reason they weren’t doing better.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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Practicing Purpose Exercise Take a moment to fill out this statement template. You can do this as an individual or for your organization. After you have filled it out, share it with people and get feedback. Are they compelled? Do they believe it? Is it authentic? Ask them how it could be more powerful. Do they feel compelled to join you? Make this statement visible, and we will use it in the rest of the book to work on instilling it in all who interact with you or your organization. I/We exist to ______________(action verb) _____________________ (humans, who?) to _____________________________ (think/feel/do/believe). Example: I exist to help people and organizations awaken and deliver their authentic purpose to the world.
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Zach Mercurio (The Invisible Leader: Transform Your Life, Work, and Organization with the Power of Authentic Purpose)
“
Promoting that story—a story that fed not trust but resentment—had come to define the modern Republican Party. With varying degrees of subtlety and varying degrees of success, GOP candidates adopted it as their central theme, whether they were running for president or trying to get elected to the local school board. It became the template for Fox News and conservative radio, the foundational text for every think tank and PAC the Koch Brothers financed: The government was taking money, jobs, college slots, and status away from hardworking, deserving people like us and handing it all to people like them—those who didn’t share our values, who didn’t work as hard as we did, the kind of people whose problems were of their own making. The intensity of these convictions put Democrats on the defensive, making leaders less bold about proposing new initiatives, limiting the boundaries of political debate. A deep and suffocating cynicism took hold. Indeed, it became axiomatic among political consultants of both parties that restoring trust in the government or in any of our major institutions was a lost cause, and that the battle between Democrats and Republicans each election cycle now came down to whether America’s squeezed middle class was more likely to identify the wealthy and powerful or the poor and minorities as the reason they weren’t doing better.
”
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
“
Promoting that story—a story that fed not trust but resentment—had come to define the modern Republican Party. With varying degrees of subtlety and varying degrees of success, GOP candidates adopted it as their central theme, whether they were running for president or trying to get elected to the local school board. It became the template for Fox News and conservative radio, the foundational text for every think tank and PAC the Koch Brothers financed: The government was taking money, jobs, college slots, and status away from hardworking, deserving people like us and handing it all to people like them—those who didn’t share our values, who didn’t work as hard as we did, the kind of people whose problems were of their own making.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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The point of this team is not to dictate how the members of a team work together to build the product but, instead, to create the criteria for inputs and outputs of the work. For example, they are not creating the product roadmap for the teams. They are creating a system and template for teams to input their goals, themes, progress, and details that can then be shared around the organization. They are not dictating whether a team can talk to users. They are creating systems that help teams figure out which users to target for their experimentation.
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Melissa Perri (Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value)
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Life relies on digitally coded instructions, translating between sequence and structure (from nucleotides to proteins), with ribosomes reading, duplicating, and interpreting the sequences on the tape. But any resemblance ends with the different method of addressing by which the instructions are carried out. In a digital computer, the instructions are in the form of COMMAND (ADDRESS) where the address is an exact (either absolute or relative) memory location, a process that translates informally into “DO THIS with what you find HERE and go THERE with the result.” Everything depends not only on precise instructions, but also on HERE, THERE, and WHEN being exactly defined. In biology, the instructions say, “DO THIS with the next copy of THAT which comes along.” THAT is identified not by a numerical address defining a physical location, but by a molecular template that identifies a larger, complex molecule by some smaller, identifiable part. This is the reason that organisms are composed of microscopic (or near-microscopic) cells, since only by keeping all the components in close physical proximity will a stochastic, template-based addressing scheme work fast enough. There is no central address authority and no central clock. Many things can happen at once. This ability to take general, organized advantage of local, haphazard processes is the ability that (so far) has distinguished information processing in living organisms from information processing by digital computers.
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George Dyson (Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe)
“
With varying degrees of subtlety and varying degrees of success, GOP candidates adopted it as their central theme, whether they were running for president or trying to get elected to the local school board. It became the template for Fox News and conservative radio, the foundational text for every think tank and PAC the Koch Brothers financed: The government was taking money, jobs, college slots, and status away from hardworking, deserving people like us and handing it all to people like them—those who didn’t share our values, who didn’t work as hard as we did, the kind of people whose problems were of their own making. The intensity of these convictions put Democrats on the defensive, making leaders less bold about proposing new initiatives, limiting the boundaries of political debate. A deep and suffocating cynicism took hold. Indeed, it became axiomatic among political consultants of both parties that restoring trust in the government or in any of our major institutions was a lost cause, and that the battle between Democrats and Republicans each election cycle now came down to whether America’s squeezed middle class was more likely to identify the wealthy and powerful or the poor and minorities as the reason they weren’t doing better.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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Work gets done on the basis of its urgency alone.
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Tom DeMarco (Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior)