Ten Year Challenge Quotes

Living is the challenge. Not dying. Dying is so easy. Sometimes it only takes ten seconds to die. But living? That can take you eighty years and you do something in that time.

What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think—the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world. You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn’t known. Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about. The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie’s rim as you climbed its cliffs. And each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another. Knowledge wasn’t a body, or a tree, but instead air, or space, or being—whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars.

Think about the world. War, violence, natural disasters, man-made disasters, corruption. Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and the number of poor just keeps increasing; and we will soon run out of resources unless we do something drastic. At least that’s the picture that most Westerners see in the media and carry around in their heads. I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population lives somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated, they live in two-child families, and they want to go abroad on holiday, not as refugees. Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.

You're going to go living. Because living is the challenge, Josie. Dying is so easy. Sometimes it only takes ten seconds to die. But living? That can take eighty years and you do something in that time, whether it's giving birth to a baby or being a housewife or a barrister or a soldier. You've accomplished something. To throw that away at such a young age, to have no hope, is the biggest tragedy.

Reincarnation isn't something in which I choose to believe but rather a truth I accept. Most people will never know the meaning of their friendships, passions, choices and even challenges. I embrace them, knowing that there’s always a perfect correlation between everything, including between us and the ones that love us and betray us at the end. That’s how I know I’m almost never traveling somewhere but returning, or not meeting someone but fixing the past, or facing a challenge but ending a karmic cycle. If I was a Buddhist Monk, a Scottish Doctor, a French Monarch, or a Spanish Templar, none of that really matters, not as much as what I experienced and believed during that time, not as much as what I did ten years ago or what I believed during my childhood, not as much as who I am now and what I can do with my life at present time.

I cannot think of those years without horror, loathing and heartache. I killed men in war and challenged men to duels in order to kill them. I lost at cards, consumed the labour of the peasants, sentenced them to punishments, lived loosely, and deceived people. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder--there was no crime I did not commit, and in spite of that people praised my conduct and my contemporaries considered and consider me to be a comparatively moral man. So I lived for ten years. During that time I began to write from vanity, covetousness, and pride. In my writings I did the same as in my life. to get fame and money, for the sake of which I wrote, it was necessary to hide the good and to display the evil. and I did so. How often in my writings I contrived to hide under the guise of indifference, or even of banter, those strivings of mine towards goodness which gave meaning to my life! And I succeeded in this and was praised.

Consent matters after ten years just as much as after ten days, but it rarely looks the same after a decade as it did on the third date. Checks and balances that are crucial earlier on become unnecessary for both people now that they know each other better and can read each other’s cues. The forms consent takes will change, but the right to say no always must remain. If someone never wants to have sex, that is okay forever. For people who do decide to have sex, it is a choice each time, not a set of ossified obligations that are impossible to challenge or change.

, I have experienced firsthand how easy it is for a ten year old to obtain marijuana for next to nothing, this trend seems to have been taken to a new dimension with the abuse of pharmaceutical products especially prescription medicines in schools and communities, increasing the number of mentally and emotionally challenged men and women on our streets and diverting young people from classrooms and lecture halls to prisons and drug rehabilitation centers.

creative people appear to be difficult because the expectations for a project keep changing midstream, after they’ve done a tremendous amount of conceptual work that will have to be rehashed just to get back to the starting line. Is it possible that what comes across as ego is merely a response to their craft’s— which they’ve spent years mastering and cultivating—being challenged at a moment’s notice by someone who has given their hard work a total of ten seconds of distracted consideration before scrapping it?

You are the king of all the fears that ruled my life, a man of ferocity and passion and balls to the wall determination and endless, boyish enthusiasm. You crack the soul of life open in your palms and drink your fill. A man like that needs a queen by his side,” I murmured, repeating my excuse for our breakup back to him in a way that had his eyes clicking to life like flashlights. “And I’m that queen. I will match your ferocity. I will exceed your passion and challenge your balls to the wall determination. I will see your boyish enthusiasm and raise you my newborn love for life. I will stand beside my biker King and be his rough-and-tumble Queen, even if it takes me the next ten years to convince you to take me back.

Baby girl, this is your mother. I know I’ve given you explicit instructions to trace this into your yearbook, but they’re my words. That means this is from me, my heart, and my love for you. There’s so many things I want to say to you, things I want you to hear, to know, but let’s start with the reason I’m having you put these words in your senior yearbook. First of all, this book is everything. It may be pictures, some names of people you won’t remember in five years, ten years, or longer, but this book is more important than you can imagine. It’s the first book that’s the culmination of your first chapter in life. You will have many. So many! But this book is the physical manifestation of your first part in life. Keep it. Treasure it. Whether you enjoyed school or not, it’s done. It’s in your past. These were the times you were a part of society from a child to who you are now, a young adult woman. When you leave for college, you’re continuing your education, but you’re moving onto your next chapter in life. The beginning of adulthood. This yearbook is your bridge. Keep this as a memento forever. It sums up who you grew up with. It houses images of the buildings where your mind first began to learn things, where you first began to dream, to set goals, to yearn for the road ahead. It’s so bittersweet, but those memories were your foundation to set you up for who you will become in the future. Whether they brought pain or happiness, it’s important not to forget. From here, you will go on and you will learn the growing pains of becoming an adult. You will refine your dreams. You will set new limits. Change your mind. You will hurt. You will laugh. You will cry, but the most important is that you will grow. Always, always grow, honey. Challenge yourself. Put yourself in uncomfortable situations (BUT BE SAFE!) and push yourself not to think about yourself, your friends, your family, but to think about the world. Think about others. Understand others, and if you can’t understand, then learn more about them. It’s so very important. Once you have the key to understanding why someone else hurts or dreams or survives, then you have ultimate knowledge. You have empathy. Oh, honey. As I’m writing this, I can see you on the couch reading a book. You are so very beautiful, but you are so very humble. You don’t see your beauty, and I want you to see your beauty. Not just physical, but your inner kindness and soul. It’s blinding to me. That’s how truly stunning you are. Never let anyone dim your light. Here are some words I want you to know as you go through the rest of your life: Live. Learn. Love. Laugh. And, honey, know. Just know that I am with you always.

Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called ‘deep time’–the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years–crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer." ... "Yet there is also something curiously exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time. True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger projects of the universe. But you are also rewarded with the realization that you do exist–as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist.

The road to mastery requires patience. You will have to keep your focus on five or ten years down the road, when you will reap the rewards of your efforts. The process of getting there, however, is full of challenges and pleasures.

Most incarcerated women—nearly two-thirds—are in prison for nonviolent, low-level drug crimes or property crimes. Drug laws in particular have had a huge impact on the number of women sent to prison. “Three strikes” laws have also played a considerable role. I started challenging conditions of confinement at Tutwiler in the mid-1980s as a young attorney with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee. At the time, I was shocked to find women in prison for such minor offenses. One of the first incarcerated women I ever met was a young mother who was serving a long prison sentence for writing checks to buy her three young children Christmas gifts without sufficient funds in her account. Like a character in a Victor Hugo novel, she tearfully explained her heartbreaking tale to me. I couldn’t accept the truth of what she was saying until I checked her file and discovered that she had, in fact, been convicted and sentenced to over ten years in prison for writing five checks, including three to Toys “R” Us. None of the checks was for more than $150. She was not unique. Thousands of women have been sentenced to lengthy terms in prison for writing bad checks or for minor property crimes that trigger mandatory minimum sentences. The collateral consequences of incarcerating women are significant. Approximately 75 to 80 percent of incarcerated women are mothers with minor children. Nearly 65 percent had minor children living with them at the time of their arrest—children who have become more vulnerable and at-risk as a result of their mother’s incarceration and will remain so for the rest of their lives, even after their mothers come home. In 1996, Congress passed welfare reform legislation that gratuitously included a provision that authorized states to ban people with drug convictions from public benefits and welfare. The population most affected by this misguided law is formerly incarcerated women with children, most of whom were imprisoned for drug crimes. These women and their children can no longer live in public housing, receive food stamps, or access basic services. In the last twenty years, we’ve created a new class of “untouchables” in American society, made up of our most vulnerable mothers and their children.

As a child Gottfried was very close to his mother, and his memories of those early years are sunny and warm. But before he turned ten, his mother developed cancer, and died in great pain. The young boy could have felt sorry for himself and become depressed, or he could have adopted hardened cynicism as a defense. Instead he began to think of the disease as his personal enemy, and swore to defeat it. In time he earned a medical degree and became a research oncologist, and the results of his work have become part of the pattern of knowledge that eventually will free mankind of this scourge. In this case, again, a personal tragedy became transformed into a challenge that can be met. In developing skills to meet that challenge, the individual improves the lives of other people.

From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whooming roar that apparently is what a shotgun really sounds like; (b) trapshooting looks comparatively easy, because now the stocky older guy who's replaced the trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these little fluorescent plates away one after the other, so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the Nadir's wake; (c) a clay pigeon, when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking midflight peripeteia -- erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a corkscrewy way that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster. All the shooters who precede me seem to fire with a kind of casual scorn, and all get eight out of ten or above. But it turns out that, of these six guys, three have military-combat backgrounds, another two are L. L. Bean-model-type brothers who spend weeks every year hunting various fast-flying species with their "Papa" in southern Canada, and the last has got not only his own earmuffs, plus his own shotgun in a special crushed-velvet-lined case, but also his own trapshooting range in his backyard (31) in North Carolina. When it's finally my turn, the earmuffs they give me have somebody else's ear-oil on them and don't fit my head very well. The gun itself is shockingly heavy and stinks of what I'm told is cordite, small pubic spirals of which are still exiting the barrel from the Korea-vet who preceded me and is tied for first with 10/10. The two brothers are the only entrants even near my age; both got scores of 9/10 and are now appraising me coolly from identical prep-school-slouch positions against the starboard rail. The Greek NCOs seem extremely bored. I am handed the heavy gun and told to "be bracing a hip" against the aft rail and then to place the stock of the weapon against, no, not the shoulder of my hold-the-gun arm but the shoulder of my pull-the-trigger arm. (My initial error in this latter regard results in a severely distorted aim that makes the Greek by the catapult do a rather neat drop-and-roll.) Let's not spend a lot of time drawing this whole incident out. Let me simply say that, yes, my own trapshooting score was noticeably lower than the other entrants' scores, then simply make a few disinterested observations for the benefit of any novice contemplating trapshooting from a 7NC Megaship, and then we'll move on: (1) A certain level of displayed ineptitude with a firearm will cause everyone who knows anything about firearms to converge on you all at the same time with cautions and advice and handy tips. (2) A lot of the advice in (1) boils down to exhortations to "lead" the launched pigeon, but nobody explains whether this means that the gun's barrel should move across the sky with the pigeon or should instead sort of lie in static ambush along some point in the pigeon's projected path. (3) Whatever a "hair trigger" is, a shotgun does not have one. (4) If you've never fired a gun before, the urge to close your eyes at the precise moment of concussion is, for all practical purposes, irresistible. (5) The well-known "kick" of a fired shotgun is no misnomer; it knocks you back several steps with your arms pinwheeling wildly for balance, which when you're holding a still-loaded gun results in mass screaming and ducking and then on the next shot a conspicuous thinning of the crowd in the 9-Aft gallery above. Finally, (6), know that an unshot discus's movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean's sky is sun-like -- i.e., orange and parabolic and right-to-left -- and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.

more than a minute. The wilderness decade was over. Finally Jobs waved for silence and cut to the heart of the challenge. “We’ve got to get the spark back,” he said. “The Mac didn’t progress much in ten years. So Windows caught up. So we have to come up with an OS that’s even better.

As the acknowledged leader of the group by now, he threw out another challenge. In his most daring move, he insisted that in the group’s creative adaptation of the play they change the ending. In their version, with the title “To Revenge or Not to Revenge,” Hamlet should choose not to kill.

Our bones lose mass at a rate of about 1 percent a year from late middle age onward, which is of course why elderly people and broken bones are so unhappily synonymous. Broken hips are especially challenging for the elderly. About 40 percent of people over seventy-five who break their hips are no longer able to care for themselves. For many, it is a kind of last straw. Ten percent die within thirty days, and nearly 30 percent die within twelve months. As the British surgeon and anatomist Sir Astley Cooper liked to quip, “We enter the world through the pelvis and leave it through the hip.

Let me repeat once more that great quote by Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Peace: “The difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man sees everything as either a blessing or a curse.” So before you start your business, or before you return to it tomorrow, ask yourself the following questions: • What do I wish my life to look like? • How do I wish my life to be on a day-to-day basis? • What would I like to be able to say I truly know in my life, about my life? • How would I like to be with other people in my life—my family, my friends, my business associates, my customers, my employees, my community? • How would I like people to think about me? • What would I like to be doing two years from now? Ten years from now? Twenty years from now? When my life comes to a close? • What specifically would I like to learn during my life—spiritually, physically, financially, technically, intellectually? About relationships? • How much money will I need to do the things I wish to do? By when will I need it? These are just a few of the questions you might ask yourself in the creation of your Primary Aim.

Yes, our parents will grow old and yes they will get sick and yes they will die, but that will happen to us two as well. Where you’re wrong is that you think that’s a problem in the future. But it’s not. The answer to that problem is to spend time with them now. Be in their lives so that when the worst happens—which we hope is many years away—there will have been ten, twenty, however many years of Scrabble, University Challenge, curries, walks, gardening and whatever else behind us. And then, when the time comes we’ll know what to do. Not because we’ll have it all figured it out but because we will have had the habit, the practice, of loving them and being with them, and the utter clarity that comes with that. Mam and Dad have enjoyed the wedding so much because they speak to you all the time and you’re calling over, and you’re including them. You being here has reminded them of how much they miss you when you’re busy. They don’t really want a holiday, they just want to know that you won’t forget about them when it’s all over. You need to go and be happy with Andrew, and unfetter yourself from this story you have about your role in the family. And then, when you come over—once a week, once a month, whenever you can, it doesn’t matter—just hang out and be yourself.

Today, Arabic numerals are in use pretty much around the world, while the words with which we name numbers naturally differ from language to language. And, as Dehaene and others have noted, these differences are far from trivial. English is cumbersome. There are special words for the numbers from 11 to 19 and for the decades from 20 to 90. This makes counting a challenge for English-speaking children, who are prone to such errors as “twenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty-ten, twenty-eleven.” French is just as bad, with vestigial base-twenty monstrosities, like quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (four twenty ten nine) for 99. Chinese, by contrast, is simplicity itself; its number syntax perfectly mirrors the base-ten form of Arabic numerals, with a minimum of terms. Consequently, the average Chinese four-year-old can count up to forty, whereas American children of the same age struggle to get to fifteen. And the advantages extend to adults. Because Chinese number words are so brief—they take less than a quarter of a second to say, on average, compared with a third of a second for English—the average Chinese speaker has a memory span of nine digits, versus seven digits for English speakers. (Speakers of the marvelously efficient Cantonese dialect, common in Hong Kong, can juggle ten digits in active memory.)

She opened the book. “Don’t,” said Arin. “Please.” But she had already seen the inscription. For Arin, it read, from Amma and Etta, with love. This was Arin’s home. This house had been his, this library his, this book his, dedicated to him by his parents, some ten years ago. Kestrel breathed slowly. Her fingers rested on the page, just below the black line of writing. She lifted her gaze to meet Irex’s smirk. Her mind chilled. She assessed the situation as her father would a battle. She knew her objective. She knew her opponent’s. She understood what she could afford to lose, and what she could not. Kestrel closed the book, set it on a table, and turned her back to Arin. “Lord Irex,” she said, her voice warm. “It is but a book.” “It is my book,” Irex said. There was a choked sound behind her. Without looking, Kestrel said in Herrani, “Do you wish to be removed from the room?” Arin’s answer was low. “No.” “Then be silent.” She smiled at Irex. In their language, she said, “This is clearly not a case of theft. Who would dare steal from you? I’m certain he meant only to look at it. You can’t blame him for being curious about the luxuries your house holds.” “He shouldn’t have even been inside the library, let alone touching its contents. Besides, there were witnesses. A judge will rule in my favor. This is my property, so I will decide the number of lashes.” “Yes, your property. Let us not forget that we are also discussing my property.” “He will be returned to you.” “So the law says, but in what condition? I am not eager to see him damaged. He holds more value than a book in a language no one has any interest in reading.” Irex’s dark eyes flicked to look behind Kestrel, then returned to her. They grew sly. “You take a decided interest in your slave’s well-being. I wonder to what lengths you will go to prevent a punishment that is rightfully mine to give.” He rested a hand on her arm. “Perhaps we can settle the matter between us.” Kestrel heard Arin inhale as he understood Irex’s suggestion. She was angry, suddenly, at the way her mind snagged on the sound of that sharp breath. She was angry at herself, for feeling vulnerable because Arin was vulnerable, and at Irex for his knowing smile. “Yes.” Kestrel decided to twist Irex’s words into something else. “This is between us, and fate.” Having uttered the formal words of a challenge to a duel, Kestrel stepped back from Irex’s touch, drew her dagger, and held it sideways at the level of her chest like a line drawn between him and her. “Kestrel,” Irex said. “That isn’t what I had in mind when I said we might solve the matter.” “I think we’ll enjoy this method more.” “A challenge.” He tsked. “I’ll let you take it back. Just this one.” “I cannot take it back.” At that, Irex drew his dagger and imitated Kestrel’s gesture. They stood still, then sheathed their blades. “I’ll even let you choose the weapons,” Irex said. “Needles. Now it is to you to choose the time and place.” “My grounds. Tomorrow, two hours from sunset. That will give me time to gather the death-price.” This gave Kestrel pause. But she nodded, and finally turned to Arin. He looked nauseated. He sagged in the senators’ grip. It seemed they weren’t restraining him, but holding him up. “You can let go,” Kestrel told the senators, and when they did, she ordered Arin to follow her. As they left the library, Arin said, “Kestrel--” “Not a word. Don’t speak until we are in the carriage.

This is something I regret, and something I would encourage you to investigate ASAP if you’re in a relationship. If you haven’t already, start now. Consider crafting a relationship contract that lays out the foundations and guidelines for the various facets of your relationship, including the inevitable conflicts that arise. While the content of the contract is up to you, I recommend that it address how you’ll handle a range of issues such as disappointments, conflicts, differences in needs and desires, frustrations, communication styles, and mismatched libidos. Essentially, address all potential challenges proactively, in the abstract, before they become concrete, real-world problems. Also, begin having these conversations from the start of your relationship, so that when challenges inevitably arise in years two, five, ten, or twenty, you will already have the language and tools required to navigate them. Many couples are not proactive in their communication because they never learned how to be, but it’s never too late to start.

Pay attention to everything the dying person says. You might want to keep pens and a spiral notebook beside the bed so that anyone can jot down notes about gestures, conversations, or anything out of the ordinary said by the dying person. Talk with one another about these comments and gestures. • Remember that there may be important messages in any communication, however vague or garbled. Not every statement made by a dying person has significance, but heed them all so as not to miss the ones that do. • Watch for key signs: a glassy-eyed look; the appearance of staring through you; distractedness or secretiveness; seemingly inappropriate smiles or gestures, such as pointing, reaching toward someone or something unseen, or waving when no one is there; efforts to pick at the covers or get out of bed for no apparent reason; agitation or distress at your inability to comprehend something the dying person has tried to say. • Respond to anything you don’t understand with gentle inquiries. “Can you tell me what’s happening?” is sometimes a helpful way to initiate this kind of conversation. You might also try saying, “You seem different today. Can you tell me why?” • Pose questions in open-ended, encouraging terms. For example, if a dying person whose mother is long dead says, “My mother’s waiting for me,” turn that comment into a question: “Mother’s waiting for you?” or “I’m so glad she’s close to you. Can you tell me about it?” • Accept and validate what the dying person tells you. If he says, “I see a beautiful place!” say, “That’s wonderful! Can you tell me more about it?” or “I’m so pleased. I can see that it makes you happy,” or “I’m so glad you’re telling me this. I really want to understand what’s happening to you. Can you tell me more?” • Don’t argue or challenge. By saying something like “You couldn’t possibly have seen Mother, she’s been dead for ten years,” you could increase the dying person’s frustration and isolation, and run the risk of putting an end to further attempts at communicating. • Remember that a dying person may employ images from life experiences like work or hobbies. A pilot may talk about getting ready to go for a flight; carry the metaphor forward: “Do you know when it leaves?” or “Is there anyone on the plane you know?” or “Is there anything I can do to help you get ready for takeoff?” • Be honest about having trouble understanding. One way is to say, “I think you’re trying to tell me something important and I’m trying very hard, but I’m just not getting it. I’ll keep on trying. Please don’t give up on me.” • Don’t push. Let the dying control the breadth and depth of the conversation—they may not be able to put their experiences into words; insisting on more talk may frustrate or overwhelm them. • Avoid instilling a sense of failure in the dying person. If the information is garbled or the delivery impossibly vague, show that you appreciate the effort by saying, “I can see that this is hard for you; I appreciate your trying to share it with me,” or “I can see you’re getting tired/angry/frustrated. Would it be easier if we talked about this later?” or “Don’t worry. We’ll keep trying and maybe it will come.” • If you don’t know what to say, don’t say anything. Sometimes the best response is simply to touch the dying person’s hand, or smile and stroke his or her forehead. Touching gives the very important message “I’m with you.” Or you could say, “That’s interesting, let me think about it.” • Remember that sometimes the one dying picks an unlikely confidant. Dying people often try to communicate important information to someone who makes them feel safe—who won’t get upset or be taken aback by such confidences. If you’re an outsider chosen for this role, share the information as gently and completely as possible with the appropriate family members or friends. They may be more familiar with innuendos in a message because they know the person well.

Every night, millions of Americans spend their free hours watching television rather than engaging in any form of social interaction. What are they watching? In recent years we have seen reality television become the most popular form of television programming. To discover the nature of our current “reality,” we might consider examples such as Survivor, the series that helped spawn the reality TV revolution. Every week tens of millions of viewers watched as a group of ordinary people stranded in some isolated place struggled to meet various challenges and endure harsh conditions. Ah, one might think, here we will see people working cooperatively, like our ancient ancestors, working cooperatively in order to “win”! But the “reality” was very different. The conditions of the game were arranged so that, yes, they had to work cooperatively, but the alliances by nature were only temporary and conditional, as the contestants plotted and schemed against one another to win the game and walk off with the Grand Prize: a million dollars! The objective was to banish contestants one by one from the deserted island through a group vote, eliminating every other contestant until only a lone individual remained—the “sole survivor.” The end game was the ultimate American fantasy in our Age of Individualism: to be left completely alone, sitting on a mountain of cash! 　　While Survivor was an overt example of our individualistic orientation, it certainly was not unique in its glorification of rugged individualists on American television. Even commercial breaks provide equally compelling examples, with advertisers such as Burger King, proclaiming, HAVE IT YOUR WAY! The message? America, the land where not only every man and every woman is an individual but also where every hamburger is an individual! 　　Human beings do not live in a vacuum; we live in a society. Thus it is important to look at the values promoted and celebrated in a given society and measure what effect this conditioning has on our sense of independence or of interdependence

After shedding my old self, I didn’t suddenly discover a more authentic version underneath. When you carve yourself out of your entire life, you are not left with much. It takes a decade to build both a new self and a life to go with it, and had somebody told me how hard it would be, I might not have undertaken the challenge at all. Yet I never expected it to be easy either. I had no fairy-tale ending in my head and I think that helped. Happiness has a way of playing hide-and-seek when you actively pursue it, but it often surprises you when you least expect it. I found my version of happiness in Berlin. If someone had predicted that ten years ago, I would have found the thought hilarious bordering on insane.

Two hours later, Revere trotted into Lexington, his mount thoroughly lathered after outgalloping a pair of Gage’s equestrian sentinels near Charlestown. Veering north toward the Mystic River to avoid further trouble, Revere had alerted almost every farmstead and minute captain within shouting distance. Popular lore later credited him with a stirring battle cry—“The British are coming!”—but a witness quoted him as warning, more prosaically, “The regulars are coming out.” Now he carried the alarm to the Reverend Jonas Clarke’s parsonage, just up the road from Lexington Common. Here Clarke had written three thousand sermons in twenty years; here he called up the stairs each morning to rouse his ten children—“Polly, Betsey, Lucy, Liddy, Patty, Sally, Thomas, Jonas, William, Peter, get up!” And here he had given sanctuary, in a bedroom to the left of the front door, to the renegades Hancock and Samuel Adams. A squad of militiamen stood guard at the house as Revere dismounted, spurs clanking. Two warnings had already come from the east: as many as nine mounted British officers had been seen patrolling the Middlesex roads, perhaps “upon some evil design.” At the door, a suspicious orderly sergeant challenged Revere, and Clarke blocked his path until Hancock reportedly called out, “Come in, Revere, we’re not afraid of you.” The herald delivered his message: British regulars by the hundreds were coming out, first by boat, then on foot. There was not a moment to lose.

De Grey describes his goal as “engineered negligible senescence”—stopping the body and brain from becoming more frail and disease-prone as it grows older.18 As he explains, “All the core knowledge needed to develop engineered negligible senescence is already in our possession—it mainly just needs to be pieced together.”19 De Grey believes we’ll demonstrate “robustly rejuvenated” mice—mice that are functionally younger than before being treated and with the life extension to prove it—within ten years, and he points out that this achievement will have a dramatic effect on public opinion. Demonstrating that we can reverse the aging process in an animal that shares 99 percent of our genes will profoundly challenge the common wisdom that aging and death are inevitable. Once robust rejuvenation is confirmed in an animal, there will be enormous competitive pressure to translate these results into human therapies, which should appear five to ten years later.

Stand firmly rooted in your convictions, and eventually the whole world will come around to you. In 1838, Emerson delivered a lecture to the senior class of Harvard Divinity School. He had been a student there, himself, ten years earlier. Following in his father’s footsteps, Emerson was ordained as junior pastor at Boston’s Second Church in 1829. But just three years later, he resigned his position because he could no longer repeat the prayers and rituals of the past. “To be a good minister,” he wrote in his journal, “I must leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. We worship the dead forms of our forefathers.”  Emerson sought new insights, new revelations, and new words to express them. The “Divinity School Address” is an invitation for others to join him. It challenged religious orthodoxy, scandalized some in his audience, and was condemned by church leaders—including the college dean. Emerson wasn’t invited back to Harvard for the next thirty years.

[Bisexuality] is seen as threatening the homosexual/heterosexual and male/female dichotomies, or binarisms, which underpin our gender and sexual identities to such a large extent. In the case of the first three stereotypes, there is a refusal even to acknowledge the existence of bisexuality. It is simply wished out of existence. You can either be homosexual or heterosexual but anything else is just a phase, just playacting, not real. As Udis-Kessler argues [‘Challenging the Stereotypes’, in Rose and Stevens (eds), Bisexual Horizons: Politics, Histories, Lives. 1996. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 45-57], this reflects an ideology of essentialism which dismisses the idea that sexuality may be fluid, not fixed, and that its forms can change over a person’s lifetime. This ideology assumes that there is a ‘true’ sexuality which we are working our way towards and that bisexuality is not really ‘true’ or ‘serious’ because it is a transition towards that other state… As Udis-Kessler points out, transitions are not a rehearsal for life. Life is a series of transitions: points of arrival become new points of departure, and vice versa. So why should we assume that the way we experienced our sexuality ten or twenty years ago is necessarily less ‘true’ or important than the way we experience it now, or that the way we experience it now will necessarily be the same in ten or twenty years time? Obviously this applies not only to bisexuality, but it is an argument which those - including some lesbian and gay activists - who accuse bisexuality of being a sort of ‘false consciousness’ seldom get to grips with… lesbians and gay men, anxious to create safe spaces where they are not subject to homophobic rejection or oppression, may (consciously or unconsciously) seek to exclude bisexuals[…].Unfortunately, as soon as this happens, as with every oppressed or stigmatised group, it can lead to others being oppressed or stigmatised in turn.

What’s really worried me over the years is not our stock price, but that we might someday fail to take care of our customers, or that our managers might fail to motivate and take care of our associates. I also was worried that we might lose the team concept, or fail to keep the family concept viable and realistic and meaningful to our folks as we grow. Those challenges are more real than somebody’s theory that we’re headed down the wrong path. As business leaders, we absolutely cannot afford to get all caught up in trying to meet the goals that some retail analyst or financial institution in New York sets for us on a ten-year plan spit out of a computer that somebody set to compound at such-and-such a rate. If we do that, we take our eye off the ball. But if we demonstrate in our sales and our earnings every day, every week, every quarter, that we’re doing our job in a sound way, we will get the growth we are entitled to, and the market will respect us in a way that we deserve.

[Refers to 121 children taken into care in Cleveland due to suspected abuse (1987) and later returned to their parents] Sue Richardson, the child abuse consultant at the heart of the crisis, watched as cases began to unravel: “All the focus started to fall on the medical findings; other supportive evidence, mainly which we held in the social services department, started to be screened out. A situation developed where the cases either were proven or fell on the basis of medical evidence alone. Other evidence that was available to the court, very often then, never got put. We would have had statement from the child, the social workers and the child psychologist’s evidence from interviewing. We would have evidence of prior concerns, either from social workers or teachers, about the child’s behaviour or other symptoms that they might have been showing, which were completely aside from the medical findings. (Channel 4 1997) Ten years after the Cleveland crisis, Sue Richardson was adamant that evidence relating to children’s safety was not presented to the courts which subsequently returned those children to their parents: “I am saying that very clearly. In some cases, evidence was not put in the court. In other cases, agreements were made between lawyers not to put the case to the court at all, particularly as the crisis developed. Latterly, that children were sent home subject to informal agreements or agreements between lawyers. The cases never even got as far as the court. (Channel 4, 1997)” Nor is Richardson alone. Jayne Wynne, one of the Leeds paediatricians who had pioneered the use of RAD as an indicator of sexual abuse and who subsequently had detailed knowledge of many of the Cleveland children, remains concerned by the haphazard approach of the courts to their protection. I think the implication is that the children were left unprotected. The children who were being abused unfortunately returned to homes and the abuse may well have been ongoing. (Channel 4 1997)

On the third day after all hell broke loose, I come upstairs to the apartment, finished with my shift and so looking forward to a hot shower. Well, lukewarm—but I’ll pretend it’s hot. But when I pass Ellie’s room, I hear cursing—Linda Blair-Exorcist-head-spinning-around kind of cursing. I push open her door and spot my sister at her little desk, yelling at her laptop. Even Bosco barks from the bed. “What’s going on?” I ask. “I just came up but Marty’s down there on his own—he won’t last longer than ten minutes.” “I know, I know.” She waves her hand. “I’m in a flame war with a toxic bitch on Twitter. Let me just huff and puff and burn her motherfucking house down…and then I’ll go sell some coffee.” “What happened?” I ask sarcastically. “Did she insult your makeup video?” Ellie sighs, long and tortured. “That’s Instagram, Liv—I seriously think you were born in the wrong century. And anyway, she didn’t insult me—she insulted you.” Her words pour over me like the ice-bucket challenge. “Me? I have like two followers on Twitter.” Ellie finishes typing. “Boo-ya. Take that, skank-a-licious!” Then she turns slowly my way. “You haven’t been online lately, have you?” This isn’t going to end well, I know it. My stomach knows it too—it whines and grumbles. “Ah, no?” Ellie nods and stands, gesturing to her computer. “You might want to check it out. Or not—ignorance is bliss, after all. If you do decide to take a peek, you might want to have some grain alcohol nearby.” Then she pats my shoulder and heads downstairs, her blond ponytail swaying behind her. I glance at the screen and my breath comes in quick, semi-panicked bursts and my blood rushes like a runaway train in my veins. I’ve never been in a fight, not in my whole life. The closest I came was sophomore year in high school, when Kimberly Willis told everyone she was going to kick the crap out of me. So I told my gym teacher, Coach Brewster—a giant lumberjack of a man—that I got my period unexpectedly and had to go home. He spent the rest of the school year avoiding eye contact with me. But it worked—by the next day, Kimberly found out Tara Hoffman was the one talking shit about her and kicked the crap out of her instead

Our ability to believe in supernatural agents may well have begun as an accidental by-product of a hypersensitive agency detection device, but once early humans began believing in such agents, the groups that used them to construct moral communities were the ones that lasted and prospered. Like those nineteenth-century religious communes, they used their gods to elicit sacrifice and commitment from members. Like those subjects in the cheating studies and trust games, their gods helped them to suppress cheating and increase trustworthiness. Only groups that can elicit commitment and suppress free riding can grow. This is why human civilization grew so rapidly after the first plants and animals were domesticated. Religions and righteous minds had been coevolving, culturally and genetically, for tens of thousands of years before the Holocene era, and both kinds of evolution sped up when agriculture presented new challenges and opportunities. Only groups whose gods promoted cooperation, and whose individual minds responded to those gods, were ready to rise to these challenges and reap the rewards.

No dragon was safe in the Sky Palace, but the ones in the most danger by far were the daughters of Queen Scarlet. Or was it now daughter, singular? Ruby hadn’t seen her sister, Tourmaline, in three days. Not since the night they went flying together and, high in the starlit sky, glowing in the light of two of the moons, Tourmaline had whispered that she was almost ready. “Don’t be an idiot. You’re only ten, and furthermore, you’ll never be ready,” Ruby had whispered back. “She killed her mother plus all three of her sisters and eleven of ours. There’s no way to defeat her.” “She can’t be queen forever,” Tourmaline said. “She has been queen forever,” Ruby argued. “Twenty-four years is a long time but not that long,” said Tourmaline. “Queen Oasis was queen longer than that, and look what happened to her.” “Are you planning to throw a scavenger at Mother?” Ruby asked. “Because I’m sure she’d appreciate a snack before she kills you.” “It’s always going to be like this,” Tourmaline hissed. She flicked clouds away with her dark orange wings. “Until one of us challenges her and wins. You and I are the only ones left now — the only hope the SkyWings have of a decent queen. Ruby, if I defeat her and become queen, we can get out of this war.” Ruby wasn’t so sure about that. She’d met Burn, and she suspected the SandWing wouldn’t let her allies go that easily. But it didn’t matter — there was no way Tourmaline could win a battle with their mother. “The prophecy will take care of the war,” she argued. “The brightest night is in four days … ” “Right.” Tourmaline rolled her eyes. “I’ll just wait for a bunch of eggs that haven’t even hatched yet to save us. Ruby, I don’t want to wait for things to happen to me. I want to make them happen.” “I don’t want to watch you die,” Ruby growled. Her sister hovered in front of her for a moment. Stars glittered in her eyes, searching Ruby’s. She’s wondering if I want the throne for myself, Ruby thought. She thinks I’m trying to talk her out of it because I’m planning something. Like I’m that stupid. “Well, don’t worry, I won’t do it yet,” Tourmaline promised. “Another few months of training, maybe. I’m feeling really strong, though. I beat Vermilion in a fight the other day. Want to hear about it?” Ruby

while the behaviour patterns of archaic humans remained fixed for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens could transform their social structures, the nature of their interpersonal relations, their economic activities and a host of other behaviours within a decade or two. Consider a resident o Berlin, born in 1900 and living to the ripe age of one hundred. She spent her childhood in the Hohenzollern Empire of Wilhelm II; her adult years in the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich and Communist East Germany; and she died a citizen of a democratic and reunified Germany. She had managed to be a part of five very different sociopolitical systems, though her DNA remained exactly the same. This was the key to Sapiens' success. In a one-on-one brawl, a Neanderthal would probably have beaten a Sapiens. But in a conflict of hundreds, Neanderthals wouldn't stand a chance. Neanderthals could share information about the whereabouts of lions, but they probably could not tell - and revise - stories about tribal spirits. Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers, nor could they adapt their social behaviour to rapidly changing challenging. (p. 38)

Through the spectacles of geology, terra firms becomes terra mobilis, and we are forced to reconsider our beliefs of what is solid and what is not. Although we attribute to stone great power to hold back time, to refuse its claims (cairns, stone tablets, monuments, statuary), this is true only in relation to our own mutability. Looked at in the context of the bigger geological picture, rock is as vulnerable to change as any other substance. Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called 'deep time' - the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years - crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body.

So, will deep learning eventually become “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), matching human intelligence in every way? Will we encounter “singularity” (see chapter 10)? I don’t believe it will happen by 2041. There are many challenges that we have not made much progress on or even understood, such as how to model creativity, strategic thinking, reasoning, counter-factual thinking, emotions, and consciousness. These challenges are likely to require a dozen more breakthroughs like deep learning, but we’ve had only one great breakthrough in over sixty years, so I believe we are unlikely to see a dozen in twenty years. In addition, I would suggest that we stop using AGI as the ultimate test of AI. As I described in chapter 1, AI’s mind is different from the human mind. In twenty years, deep learning and its extensions will beat humans on an ever-increasing number of tasks, but there will still be many existing tasks that humans can handle much better than deep learning. There will even be some new tasks that showcase human superiority, especially if AI’s progress inspires us to improve and evolve. What’s important is that we develop useful applications suitable for AI and seek to find human-AI symbiosis, rather than obsess about whether or when deep-learning AI will become AGI. I consider the obsession with AGI to be a narcissistic human tendency to view ourselves as the gold standard.

As we’ll explain in the coming chapters, these everyday parenting challenges result from a lack of integration within your child’s brain. The reason her brain isn’t always capable of integration is simple: it hasn’t had time to develop. In fact, it’s got a long way to go, since a person’s brain isn’t considered fully developed until she reaches her mid-twenties. So that’s the bad news: you have to wait for your child’s brain to develop. That’s right. No matter how brilliant you think your preschooler is, she does not have the brain of a ten-year-old, and won’t for several years. The rate of brain maturation is largely influenced by the genes we inherit. But the degree of integration may be exactly what we can influence in our day-to-day parenting. The good news is that by using everyday moments, you can influence how well your child’s brain grows toward integration. First, you can develop the diverse elements of your child’s brain by offering opportunities to exercise them. Second, you can facilitate integration so that the separate parts become better connected and work together in powerful ways. This isn’t making your children grow up more quickly—it’s simply helping them develop the many parts of themselves and integrate them. We’re also not talking about wearing yourself (and your kids) out by frantically trying to fill every experience with significance and meaning. We’re talking about simply being present with your children so you can help them become better integrated. As a result, they will thrive emotionally, intellectually, and socially. An integrated brain results in improved decision making, better control of body and emotions, fuller self-understanding, stronger relationships, and success in school. And it all begins with the experiences parents and other caregivers provide, which lay the groundwork for integration and mental health.

For years before the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps won the gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he followed the same routine at every race. He arrived two hours early.1 He stretched and loosened up, according to a precise pattern: eight hundred mixer, fifty freestyle, six hundred kicking with kickboard, four hundred pulling a buoy, and more. After the warm-up he would dry off, put in his earphones, and sit—never lie down—on the massage table. From that moment, he and his coach, Bob Bowman, wouldn’t speak a word to each other until after the race was over. At forty-five minutes before the race he would put on his race suit. At thirty minutes he would get into the warm-up pool and do six hundred to eight hundred meters. With ten minutes to go he would walk to the ready room. He would find a seat alone, never next to anyone. He liked to keep the seats on both sides of him clear for his things: goggles on one side and his towel on the other. When his race was called he would walk to the blocks. There he would do what he always did: two stretches, first a straight-leg stretch and then with a bent knee. Left leg first every time. Then the right earbud would come out. When his name was called, he would take out the left earbud. He would step onto the block—always from the left side. He would dry the block—every time. Then he would stand and flap his arms in such a way that his hands hit his back. Phelps explains: “It’s just a routine. My routine. It’s the routine I’ve gone through my whole life. I’m not going to change it.” And that is that. His coach, Bob Bowman, designed this physical routine with Phelps. But that’s not all. He also gave Phelps a routine for what to think about as he went to sleep and first thing when he awoke. He called it “Watching the Videotape.”2 There was no actual tape, of course. The “tape” was a visualization of the perfect race. In exquisite detail and slow motion Phelps would visualize every moment from his starting position on top of the blocks, through each stroke, until he emerged from the pool, victorious, with water dripping off his face. Phelps didn’t do this mental routine occasionally. He did it every day before he went to bed and every day when he woke up—for years. When Bob wanted to challenge him in practices he would shout, “Put in the videotape!” and Phelps would push beyond his limits. Eventually the mental routine was so deeply ingrained that Bob barely had to whisper the phrase, “Get the videotape ready,” before a race. Phelps was always ready to “hit play.” When asked about the routine, Bowman said: “If you were to ask Michael what’s going on in his head before competition, he would say he’s not really thinking about anything. He’s just following the program. But that’s not right. It’s more like his habits have taken over. When the race arrives, he’s more than halfway through his plan and he’s been victorious at every step. All the stretches went like he planned. The warm-up laps were just like he visualized. His headphones are playing exactly what he expected. The actual race is just another step in a pattern that started earlier that day and has been nothing but victories. Winning is a natural extension.”3 As we all know, Phelps won the record eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. When visiting Beijing, years after Phelps’s breathtaking accomplishment, I couldn’t help but think about how Phelps and the other Olympians make all these feats of amazing athleticism seem so effortless. Of course Olympic athletes arguably practice longer and train harder than any other athletes in the world—but when they get in that pool, or on that track, or onto that rink, they make it look positively easy. It’s more than just a natural extension of their training. It’s a testament to the genius of the right routine.

Over the next few days we spent every waking moment together. We made up silly dances, did puzzles in the evening, and she stood smiling on the beach waiting for me as I took my customary New Year’s dip in the freezing cold North Atlantic. I just had a sense that we were meant to be. I even found out she lived in the next-door road along from where I was renting a room from a friend in London. What were the chances of that? As the week drew to a close we both got ready to head back south to London. She was flying. I was driving. “I’ll beat you to London,” I challenged her. She smiled knowingly. “No, you won’t.” (But I love your spirit.) She, of course, won. It took me ten hours to drive. But at 10:00 P.M. that same night I turned up at her door and knocked. She answered in her pajamas. “Damn, you were right,” I said, laughing. “Shall we go for some supper together?” “I’m in my pajamas, Bear.” “I know, and you look amazing. Put a coat on. Come on.” And so she did. Our first date, and Shara in her pajamas. Now here was a cool girl. From then on we were rarely apart. I delivered love letters to her office by day and persuaded her to take endless afternoons off. We roller-skated in the parks, and I took her down to the Isle of Wight for the weekends. Mum and Dad had since moved to my grandfather’s old house in Dorset, and had rented out our cottage on the island. But we still had an old caravan parked down the side of the house, hidden under a load of bushes, so any of the family could sneak into it when they wanted. The floors were rotten and the bath full of bugs, but neither Shara nor I cared. It was heaven just to be together. Within a week I knew she was the one for me and within a fortnight we had told each other that we loved each other, heart and soul. Deep down I knew that this was going to make having to go away to Everest for three and a half months very hard. But if I survived, I promised myself that I would marry this girl.

But nothing in my previous work had prepared me for the experience of reinvestigating Cleveland. It is worth — given the passage of time — recalling the basic architecture of the Crisis: 121 children from many different and largely unrelated families had been taken into the care of Cleveland County Council in the three short months of the summer of 1987. (p18) The key to resolving the puzzle of Cleveland was the children. What had actually happened to them? Had they been abused - or had the paediatricians and social workers (as public opinion held) been over-zealous and plain wrong? Curiously — particularly given its high profile, year-long sittings and £5 million cost — this was the one central issue never addressed by the Butler-Sloss judicial testimony and sifting of internal evidence, the inquiry's remit did not require it to answer the main question. Ten years after the crisis, my colleagues and I set about reconstructing the records of the 121 children at its heart to determine exactly what had happened to them... (p19) Eventually, though, we did assemble the data given to the Butler-Sloss Inquiry. This divided into two categories: the confidential material, presented in camera, and the transcripts of public sessions of the hearings. Putting the two together we assembled our own database on the children each identified only by the code-letters assigned to them by Butler-Sloss. When it was finished, this database told a startlingly different story from the public myth. In every case there was some prima fade evidence to suggest the possibility of abuse. Far from the media fiction of parents taking their children to Middlesbrough General Hospital for a tummy ache or a sore thumb and suddenly being presented with a diagnosis of child sexual abuse, the true story was of families known to social services for months or years, histories of physical and sexual abuse of siblings and of prior discussions with parents about these concerns. In several of the cases the children themselves had made detailed disclosures of abuse; many of the pre-verbal children displayed severe emotional or behavioural symptoms consistent with sexual abuse. There were even some families in which a convicted sex offender had moved in with mother and children. (p20)

In 2009, Kahneman and Klein took the unusual step of coauthoring a paper in which they laid out their views and sought common ground. And they found it. Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform. The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid. In golf or chess, a ball or piece is moved according to rules and within defined boundaries, a consequence is quickly apparent, and similar challenges occur repeatedly. Drive a golf ball, and it either goes too far or not far enough; it slices, hooks, or flies straight. The player observes what happened, attempts to correct the error, tries again, and repeats for years. That is the very definition of deliberate practice, the type identified with both the ten-thousand-hours rule and the rush to early specialization in technical training. The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better. Kahneman was focused on the flip side of kind learning environments; Hogarth called them “wicked.” In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both. In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons. Hogarth noted a famous New York City physician renowned for his skill as a diagnostician. The man’s particular specialty was typhoid fever, and he examined patients for it by feeling around their tongues with his hands. Again and again, his testing yielded a positive diagnosis before the patient displayed a single symptom. And over and over, his diagnosis turned out to be correct. As another physician later pointed out, “He was a more productive carrier, using only his hands, than Typhoid Mary.” Repetitive success, it turned out, taught him the worst possible lesson. Few learning environments are that wicked, but it doesn’t take much to throw experienced pros off course. Expert firefighters, when faced with a new situation, like a fire in a skyscraper, can find themselves suddenly deprived of the intuition formed in years of house fires, and prone to poor decisions. With a change of the status quo, chess masters too can find that the skill they took years to build is suddenly obsolete.

THE ORIGIN OF INTELLIGENCE Many theories have been proposed as to why humans developed greater intelligence, going all the way back to Charles Darwin. According to one theory, the evolution of the human brain probably took place in stages, with the earliest phase initiated by climate change in Africa. As the weather cooled, the forests began to recede, forcing our ancestors onto the open plains and savannahs, where they were exposed to predators and the elements. To survive in this new, hostile environment, they were forced to hunt and walk upright, which freed up their hands and opposable thumbs to use tools. This in turn put a premium on a larger brain to coordinate tool making. According to this theory, ancient man did not simply make tools—“tools made man.” Our ancestors did not suddenly pick up tools and become intelligent. It was the other way around. Those humans who picked up tools could survive in the grasslands, while those who did not gradually died off. The humans who then survived and thrived in the grasslands were those who, through mutations, became increasingly adept at tool making, which required an increasingly larger brain. Another theory places a premium on our social, collective nature. Humans can easily coordinate the behavior of over a hundred other individuals involved in hunting, farming, warring, and building, groups that are much larger than those found in other primates, which gave humans an advantage over other animals. It takes a larger brain, according to this theory, to be able to assess and control the behavior of so many individuals. (The flip side of this theory is that it took a larger brain to scheme, plot, deceive, and manipulate other intelligent beings in your tribe. Individuals who could understand the motives of others and then exploit them would have an advantage over those who could not. This is the Machiavellian theory of intelligence.) Another theory maintains that the development of language, which came later, helped accelerate the rise of intelligence. With language comes abstract thought and the ability to plan, organize society, create maps, etc. Humans have an extensive vocabulary unmatched by any other animal, with words numbering in the tens of thousands for an average person. With language, humans could coordinate and focus the activities of scores of individuals, as well as manipulate abstract concepts and ideas. Language meant you could manage teams of people on a hunt, which is a great advantage when pursuing the woolly mammoth. It meant you could tell others where game was plentiful or where danger lurked. Yet another theory is “sexual selection,” the idea that females prefer to mate with intelligent males. In the animal kingdom, such as in a wolf pack, the alpha male holds the pack together by brute force. Any challenger to the alpha male has to be soundly beaten back by tooth and claw. But millions of years ago, as humans became gradually more intelligent, strength alone could not keep the tribe together.

What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne—we may stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men, and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well to do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well to do, and I challenge you that, if he had not been well to do, he would no more have attained to write Saul or The Ring and the Book than Ruskin would have attained to writing Modern Painters if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a mad-house, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is—however dishonouring to us as a nation—certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance. Believe me—and I have spent a great part of ten years in watching some three hundred and twenty elementary schools, we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’ (cit. The Art of Writing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch) Nobody could put the point more plainly. ‘The poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance . . . a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’ That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own. However, thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of whom I wish we knew more, thanks, curiously enough to two wars, the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and the European War which opened the doors to the average woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered. Otherwise you would not be here tonight, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in the extreme.

When we reflect on our daily lives, we might look back at a day that was very stressful and think, “Well, that wasn’t my favorite day this week.” When you’re in the middle of one of those days, you might long for a day with less stress in it. But if you put a wider lens on your life and subtract every day that you have experienced as stressful, you won’t find yourself with an ideal life. Instead, you’ll find yourself also subtracting the experiences that have helped you grow, the challenges you are most proud of, and the relationships that define you. You may have spared yourself some discomfort, but you will also have robbed yourself of some meaning. And yet, it’s not at all uncommon to wish for a life without stress. While this is a natural desire, pursuing it comes at a heavy cost. In fact, many of the negative outcomes we associate with stress may actually be the consequence of trying to avoid it. Psychologists have found that trying to avoid stress leads to a significantly reduced sense of well-being, life satisfaction, and happiness. Avoiding stress can also be isolating. In a study of students at Doshisha University in Japan, the goal to avoid stress predicted a drop, over time, in their sense of connection and belonging. Having such a goal can even exhaust you. For example, researchers at the University of Zurich asked students about their goals, then tracked them for one month. Across two typically stressful periods—end-of-semester exams and the winter holidays—those with the strongest desire to avoid stress were the most likely to report declines in concentration, physical energy, and self-control. One particularly impressive study conducted through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, in Palo Alto, California, followed more than one thousand adults for ten years. At the beginning of the study, researchers asked the participants about how they dealt with stress. Those who reported trying to avoid stress were more likely to become depressed over the following decade. They also experienced increasing conflict at work and at home, and more negative outcomes, such as being fired or getting divorced. Importantly, avoiding stress predicted the increase in depression, conflict, and negative events above and beyond any symptoms or difficulties reported at the beginning of the study. Wherever a participant started in life, the tendency to avoid stress made things worse over the next decade. Psychologists call this vicious cycle stress generation. It’s the ironic consequence of trying to avoid stress: You end up creating more sources of stress while depleting the resources that should be supporting you. As the stress piles up, you become increasingly overwhelmed and isolated, and therefore even more likely to rely on avoidant coping strategies, like trying to steer clear of stressful situations or to escape your feelings with self-destructive distractions. The more firmly committed you are to avoiding stress, the more likely you are to find yourself in this downward spiral. As psychologists Richard Ryan, Veronika Huta, and Edward Deci write in The Exploration of Happiness, “The more directly one aims to maximize pleasure and avoid pain, the more likely one is to produce instead a life bereft of depth, meaning, and community.

Their affair had been three of the most intense, reckless, terrifying, happy, alive months of his life. Like how he imagined being on heroin felt if the high never ended, if every syringe didn’t also contain the possibility of death. They’d been partners at the time, and there had been one week when they’d been on the road together in northern California. Every night, they rented two rooms. Every night, for five days, he stayed with her. They barely slept that week. Couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Couldn’t stop talking when they weren’t making love, and the daylight hours when they had to pretend to be professionals made it all the more beautifully excruciating. He had never felt such a complete lack of self-consciousness around anyone. Even Theresa. Unconditional acceptance. Not just of his body and mind, but also of something more, of something indefinably him. Ethan had never connected with anyone on this level. The most generous blessing and life-destroying curse all wrapped up in the same woman, and despite the pain of the guilt and the knowledge of how it would crush his wife, whom he still loved, the idea of turning away from Kate seemed like a betrayal of his soul. So she had done it for him. On a cold and rainy night in Capitol Hill. In a booth over glasses of Belgian beer in a loud dark bar called the Stumbling Monk. He was ready to leave Theresa. To throw everything away. He had asked Kate there to tell her that and instead she had reached across the scuffed wood of a table worn smooth by ten thousand pint glasses and broken his heart. Kate wasn’t married, had no children. She wasn’t ready to jump off the cliff with him when he had so much pulling him back from the ledge. Two weeks later, she was in Boise, pursuant to her own transfer request. One year later, she was missing in a town in Idaho in the middle of nowhere called Wayward Pines, with Ethan off to find her. Eighteen hundred years later, after almost everything they had known had turned to dust or eroded out of existence, here they stood, facing each other in a toy shop in the last town on earth. For a moment, staring into her face at close range blanked Ethan’s mind. Kate spoke first. “I was wondering if you’d ever drop in.” “I was wondering that myself.” “Congratulations.” “For?” She reached over the counter and tapped his shiny brass star. “Your promotion. Nice to see a familiar face running the show. How are you adjusting to the new job?” She was good. In this short exchange, it was obvious that Kate had mastered the superficial conversational flow that the best of Wayward Pines could achieve without straining. “It’s going well,” he said. “Good to have something steady and challenging, I bet.” Kate smiled, and Ethan couldn’t help hearing the subtext, wondered if everyone did. If it ever went silent. As opposed to running half naked through town while we all try to kill you. “The job’s a good fit,” he said. “That’s great. Really happy for you. So, to what do I owe the pleasure?” “I just wanted to pop in and say hi.” “Well, that was nice of you. How’s your son?” “Ben’s great,” Ethan said.

Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.

He was also a more astute politician than even his admirers realized. During his rise to power, he constructed his own base as an independent candidate not beholden to the oil interests in Southern California. For party loyalty, he substituted personal connections to the state’s two most important (and quite conservative) publishers—Joe Knowland in Oakland, and Harry Chandler in Los Angeles. At the very least, these friendships helped neutralize papers that might otherwise have rejected his increasingly liberal agenda. He was a distinguished governor of California. The state was growing by as many as ten thousand new residents a week, and the pressures on the state’s schools, roads, and its water resources were enormous. Facing that challenge had made him tough-minded and pragmatic about government, its limits, and how best it could benefit ordinary people. He was both an optimist and an activist: If he did not exactly bring an ideology to the Court, then he brought the faith of someone who had seen personally what government could and should do to ameliorate the lives of ordinary people. That the great figures on the bench had so much more judicial experience—Black with sixteen years of service on the Court, Frankfurter and Douglas with fourteen each, and Jackson with twelve—did not daunt him. As he saw it, they knew more about the law, but he knew more about the consequences of the law and its effect on ordinary citizens. His law clerk, Earl Pollock, said years later that there were three things that mattered to Earl Warren: The first was the concept of equality; the second was education; and the third was the right of young people to a decent life. He had spent a lifetime refining his view of the role of government, and he came to the Court ready to implement it.

He was also a more astute politician than even his admirers realized. During his rise to power, he constructed his own base as an independent candidate not beholden to the oil interests in Southern California. For party loyalty, he substituted personal connections to the state’s two most important (and quite conservative) publishers—Joe Knowland in Oakland, and Harry Chandler in Los Angeles. At the very least, these friendships helped neutralize papers that might otherwise have rejected his increasingly liberal agenda. He was a distinguished governor of California. The state was growing by as many as ten thousand new residents a week, and the pressures on the state’s schools, roads, and its water resources were enormous. Facing that challenge had made him tough-minded and pragmatic about government, its limits, and how best it could benefit ordinary people. He was both an optimist and an activist: If he did not exactly bring an ideology to the Court, then he brought the faith of someone who had seen personally what government could and should do to ameliorate the lives of ordinary people. That the great figures on the bench had so much more judicial experience—Black with sixteen years of service on the Court, Frankfurter and Douglas with fourteen each, and Jackson with twelve—did not daunt him. As he saw it, they knew more about the law, but he knew more about the consequences of the law and its effect on ordinary citizens. His law clerk, Earl Pollock, said years later that there were three things that mattered to Earl Warren: The first was the concept of equality; the second was education; and the third was the right of young people to a decent life. He had spent a lifetime refining his view of the role of government, and

Ariely’s book clearly gives empirical verification for what you and I know happens all the time. Here is a tiny example I hope you cannot relate to: Ariely says, “Over the course of many years of teaching, I have noticed that there typically seems to be a rash of deaths among students’ relatives at the end of the semester. It happens mostly in the week before final exams and before papers are due.” Guess which relative most often dies? Grandma. I am not making this stuff up. Mike Adams, a professor at Eastern Connecticut State University, has done research on this. He has shown that grandmothers are ten times more likely to die before a midterm and nineteen times more likely to die before a final exam. Worse, grandmothers of students who are not doing well in class are at even higher risk. Students who are failing are fifty times more likely to lose Grandma than nonfailing students. It turns out that the greatest predictor of mortality among senior citizens in our day ends up being their grandchildren’s GPAs. The moral of all this is, if you are a grandparent, do not let your grandchild go to college. It’ll kill you, especially if he or she is intellectually challenged.

Why is this? How can experience be so valuable in some professions but almost worthless in others? To see why, suppose that you are playing golf. You are out on the driving range, hitting balls toward a target. You are concentrating, and every time you fire the ball wide you adjust your technique in order to get it closer to where you want it to go. This is how practice happens in sport. It is a process of trial and error. But now suppose that instead of practicing in daylight, you practice at night—in the pitch-black. In these circumstances, you could practice for ten years or ten thousand years without improving at all. How could you progress if you don’t have a clue where the ball has landed? With each shot, it could have gone long, short, left, or right. Every shot has been swallowed by the night. You wouldn’t have any data to improve your accuracy. This metaphor solves the apparent mystery of expertise. Think about being a chess player. When you make a poor move, you are instantly punished by your opponent. Think of being a clinical nurse. When you make a mistaken diagnosis, you are rapidly alerted by the condition of the patient (and by later testing). The intuitions of nurses and chess players are constantly checked and challenged by their errors. They are forced to adapt, to improve, to restructure their judgments. This is a hallmark of what is called deliberate practice. For psychotherapists things are radically different. Their job is to improve the mental functioning of their patients. But how can they tell when their interventions are going wrong or, for that matter, right? Where is the feedback? Most psychotherapists gauge how their clients are responding to treatment not with objective data, but by observing them in clinic. But these data are highly unreliable. After all, patients might be inclined to exaggerate how well they are to please the therapist, a well-known issue in psychotherapy. But there is a deeper problem. Psychotherapists rarely track their clients after therapy has finished. This means that they do not get any feedback on the lasting impact of their interventions. They have no idea if their methods are working or failing—if the client’s long-term mental functioning is actually improving. And that is why the clinical judgments of many practitioners don’t improve over time. They are effectively playing golf in the dark.11

Each year, the graduate students are challenged to develop a company, product, or organization that will positively affect the lives of a billion people within ten years.

Like last week, she was wearing all black. And like last week, he couldn’t keep from noticing the way the dark color highlighted her pale skin and grayish-blue eyes. She was petite and put together in every detail from her severe coif to her immaculate garments. Though she wasn’t remarkable in her appearance, there was something in her delicate porcelain face that he liked. Perhaps her determination? Or compassion? Or honesty? Truthfully, he hadn’t noticed her at all before last Sunday, but now he was chagrined to admit he’d thought about her all week. He’d told himself that his thoughts had only to do with the way God had spoken through her to answer his prayer. He’d been battling such doubts recently regarding his ministry among the immigrants, and when she’d spoken to him after the service, it was almost as if she’d been delivering a message directly from God. He loved when God worked that way. Regardless, his mind had wandered too many times from the answered prayer to the bearer of the answer. He hadn’t met a woman in years who had arrested him quite the way Miss Pendleton had. And he was quite taken aback by his strange reaction. After Bettina had passed away ten years ago, he’d had little desire to think about courting other women. At first he’d been too filled with grief and had focused all his energy on raising Thomas. When Thomas had left home to pursue his studies at Union Theological Seminary, Guy had taken the challenge given by the New York Methodist Episcopal Conference. He’d accepted their position as an itinerant pastor to start a mission and chapel among the lions’ den. He’d left his comfortable pastoral position and embraced God’s calling to raise the outcast and homeless, to be among those who had no friend or helper, and do something for them of what Christ had done for him. He’d focused all his time and attention on reaching the lost. Nothing and no one had shaken that attention. Until last week.

Helen, a junior high math teacher in Minnesota, spent most of the school week teaching a difficult “new math” lesson. She could tell her students were frustrated and restless by week’s end. They were becoming rowdy so she told them to put their books away. She then instructed the class to take out clean sheets of paper. She gave each of them this assignment: Write down every one of your classmates’ names on the left, and then, on the right, put down one thing you like about that student. The tense and rowdy mood subsided and the room quieted when the students went to work. Their moods lifted as they dug into the assignment. There was frequent laughter and giggling. They looked around the room, sharing quips about one another. Helen’s class was a much happier group when the bell signaled the end of the school day. She took their lists home over the weekend and spent both days off recording what was said about each student on separate sheets of paper so she could pass on all the nice things said about each person without giving away who said what. The next Monday she handed out the lists she’d made for each student. The room buzzed with excitement and laughter. “Wow. Thanks! This is the coolest!” “I didn’t think anyone even noticed me!” “Someone thinks I’m beautiful?” Helen had come up with the exercise just to settle down her class, but it ended up giving them a big boost. They grew closer as classmates and more confident as individuals. She could tell they all seemed more relaxed and joyful. About ten years later, Helen learned that one of her favorite students in that class, a charming boy named Mark, had been killed while serving in Vietnam. She received an invitation to the funeral from Mark’s parents, who included a note saying they wanted to be sure she came to their farmhouse after the services to speak with them. Helen arrived and the grieving parents took her aside. The father showed her Mark’s billfold and then from it he removed two worn pieces of lined paper that had been taped, folded, and refolded many times over the years. Helen recognized her handwriting on the paper and tears came to her eyes. Mark’s parents said he’d always carried the list of nice things written by his classmates. “Thank you so much for doing that,” his mother said. “He treasured it, as you can see.” Still teary-eyed, Helen walked into the kitchen where many of Mark’s former junior high classmates were assembled. They saw that Mark’s parents had his list from that class. One by one, they either produced their own copies from wallets and purses or they confessed to keeping theirs in an album, drawer, diary, or file at home. Helen the teacher was a “people builder.” She instinctively found ways to build up her students. Being a people builder means you consistently find ways to invest in and bring out the best in others. You give without asking for anything in return. You offer advice, speak faith into them, build their confidence, and challenge them to go higher. I’ve found that all most people need is a boost. All they need is a little push, a little encouragement, to become what God has created them to be. The fact is, none of us will reach our highest potential by ourselves. We need one another. You can be the one to tip the scales for someone else. You can be the one to stir up their seeds of greatness.

It was this hierarchy—so central to Western cosmology for so long that, even today, a ten-year-old could intuitively get much of it right—that was challenged by the most famous compendium of all: Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s eighteen-thousand-page Encyclopédie. Published between 1751 and 1772, the Encyclopédie was sponsored by neither the Catholic Church nor the French monarchy and was covertly hostile to both. It was intended to secularize as well as to popularize knowledge, and it demonstrated those Enlightenment commitments most radically through its organizational scheme. Rather than being structured, as it were, God-down, with the whole world flowing forth from a divine creator, it was structured human-out, with the world divided according to the different ways in which the mind engages with it: “memory,” “reason,” and “imagination,” or what we might today call history, science and philosophy, and the arts. Like alphabetical order, which effectively democratizes topics by abolishing distinctions based on power and precedent in favor of subjecting them all to the same rule, this new structure had the effect of humbling even the most exalted subjects. In producing the Encyclopédie, Diderot did not look up to the heavens but out toward the future; his goal, he wrote, was “that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous and happier.” It is to Diderot’s Encyclopédie that we owe every modern one, from the Britannica and the World Book to Encarta and Wikipedia. But we also owe to it many other kinds of projects designed to, in his words, “assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth.” It introduced not only new ways to do so but new reasons—chief among them, the diffusion of information prized by an élite class into the culture at large. The Encyclopédie was both the cause and the effect of a profoundly Enlightenment conviction: that, for books about everything, the best possible audience was the Everyman.

What did you say?” Henry grated. “I said shut up, Henry.” Rachel’s voice was still soft, but the glint in her eyes was fighting mean. “I’ve put up with your cussedness for nigh on nine years. No more. You apologize to Loretta Jane this instant.” “Or you’ll do what?” Rachel lifted a challenging brow. “Well, I reckon you’re too big for me to grab you by the heels and bash your brains. Guess I’ll have to blow them out. Now apologize. I won’t have that kind of talk in my house.” “Your house?” “That’s right.” Henry did an admirable job of trying to appear amused. Placing his hands on his hips, he bent one knee and eyed the rifle. “Rachel, darlin’, you have a gun right now. Here shortly, you’re gonna have to put it down and cook. And when you do, I’m gonna beat the sass plumb out of you. Now I suggest you be the one to apologize. If you do it convincin’ enough, maybe I’ll forgit this ever happened.” Loretta figured the bluff would probably work. Aunt Rachel had never been long on guts, and Loretta didn’t see her getting a goodly supply in the space of ten minutes. Rachel surprised her, though. Instead of apologizing, she set her jaw and raised her chin. “Henry, if you touch me when I’m cookin’, I’ll rip you from stem to bow with my butcher knife. I’ve had it up to my gullet with you.” “Give me that gun!” Henry stomped toward her. Rachel took quick aim. The explosion of noise nearly scared Loretta out of her skin. Henry jumped straight up, clearing the floor by several inches. “Holy Mother, you near shot my foot off, you damned fool woman!” “Next time, I won’t miss.” Henry sputtered, so mad he looked fit to bust. “Rachel, I swear, I’ll give you the hidin’ of your life for this.” “Touch her, Uncle Henry, and I’ll knock you senseless with a chunk of firewood,” Loretta inserted. “And if she don’t do a good job of it, I’ll finish it for her!” Amy yelled from the loft ladder. “Good for you, Ma! Give the old wart toad what for!” Rachel returned the Spencer to the rack. “Well, Henry? It sounds like three to one. You gonna apologize to Loretta Jane or not?

In constraint-induced movement therapy, stroke patients wear a sling on their good arm for approximately 90 percent of waking hours for fourteen straight days. On ten of those days, they receive six hours of therapy, using their seemingly useless arm: they eat lunch, throw a ball, play dominoes or cards or Chinese checkers, write, push a broom, and use standard rehab equipment called dexterity boards. “It is fairly contrary to what is typically done with stroke patients,” says Taub, “which is to do some rehabilitation with the affected arm and then, after three or four months, train the unaffected arm to do the work of both arms.” Instead, for an intense six hours daily, the patient works closely with therapists to master basic but crucial movements with the affected arm. Sitting across a pegboard from the rehab specialist, for instance, the patient grasps a peg and labors to put it into a hole. It is excruciating to watch, the patient struggling with an arm that seems deaf to the brain’s commands to extend far enough to pick up the peg; to hold it tightly enough to keep it from falling back; to retract toward the target hole; and to aim precisely enough to get the peg in. The therapist offers encouragement at every step, tailoring the task to make it more attainable if a patient is failing, then more challenging once the patient makes progress. The reward for inserting a peg is, of course, doing it again—and again and again. If the patient cannot perform a movement at first, the therapist literally takes him by the hand, guiding the arm to the peg, to the hole—and always offering verbal kudos and encouragement for the slightest achievement. Taub explicitly told the patients, all of whose strokes were a year or more in the past, that they had the capacity for much greater use of their arm than they thought. He moved it for them and told them over and over that they would soon do the same. In just two weeks of constraint-induced movement therapy with training of the affected arm, Taub reported in 1993, patients regained significant use of a limb they thought would forever hang uselessly at their side. The patients outperformed control patients on such motor tasks as donning a sweater, unscrewing a jar cap, and picking up a bean on a spoon and lifting it to the mouth. The number of daily-living activities they could carry out one month after the start of therapy soared 97 percent. That was encouraging enough. Even more tantalizing was that these were patients who had long passed the period when the conventional rehab wisdom held that maximal recovery takes place. That, in fact, was why Taub chose to work with chronic stroke patients in the first place. According to the textbooks, whatever function a patient has regained one year after stroke is all he ever will: his range of motion will not improve for the rest of his life.

In September 2009 the lead article in the journal Nature said that above 350 we “threaten the ecological life-support systems that have developed in the late Quaternary environment, and severely challenge the viability of contemporary human societies.”41 A month later, the journal Science offered new evidence of what the earth was like 20 million years ago, the last time we had carbon levels this high: sea levels rose one hundred feet or more, and temperatures rose as much as ten degrees.

Describe your life and passions ten years ago. What was your focus? What were your challenges? What were your hopes and dreams?

I remember only the deep sense of injury, the anger, and the disappointment that came upon me some years later, when it turned out that a head filled with wickedness would never, not in any place nor in any company, be struck by lightning; that breaking free of and not participating in the Proper brought with it no—absolutely no—punishment. If it is at all possible to speak thus of a child of less than ten, I wanted that lightning or some other form of dire retribution; I summoned it, challenged it, and grew to despise the world, the place of my existence, because it had demonstrated the futility of all action and thought, evil included.

I’d be hard-pressed to find a better start to a brand story than the one that chronicles the birth of “the people’s car,” the Tata Nano. The story goes that Ratan Tata, chairman of the well-respected Tata Group, was travelling along in the pouring rain behind a family who was precariously perched on a scooter weaving in and out of traffic on the slick wet roads of Bangalore. Tata thought that surely this was a problem he and his company could solve. He wanted to bring safe, affordable transport to the poor—to design, build, and sell a family car that could replace the scooter for a price that was less than $2,500. It was a business idea born from a high ideal and coming from a man with a track record in the industry, someone with the capability to innovate, design, and produce a high-quality product. People were captivated by the idea of what would be the world’s cheapest car. The media and the world watched to see how delivering on this seemingly impossible promise might pan out. Ratan Tata did deliver on his promise when he unveiled the Nano at the New Delhi Auto Expo in 2009, six years after having the idea. The hype around the new “people’s car” and the media attention it received meant that any mistakes were very public (several production challenges and safety problems were reported along the way). And while the general public seemed to be behind the idea of a new and fun Indian-led innovation, the number of Facebook likes (almost 4 million to date) didn’t convert to actual sales. It seemed that while Tata Motors was telling a story about affordability and innovating with frugal engineering (perhaps “lean engineering” might have worked better for them), the story prospective customers were hearing was one about a car that was cheap. The positioning of the car was at odds with the buying public’s perception of it. In a country where a car is an aspirational purchase, the Nano became symbolic of the car to buy if you couldn’t afford anything else. Since its launch in 2009, just over 200,000 Nanos have sold. The factory has the capacity to produce 21,000 cars a month. It turns out that the modest numbers of people buying the Nano are not the scooter drivers but middle-class Indians who are looking for a second car, or a car for their parents or children. The car that was billed as a “game changer” hasn’t lived up to the hype in the hearts of the people who were expected to line up and buy it in the tens of thousands. Despite winning design and innovation awards, the Nano’s reputation amongst consumers—and the story they have come to believe—has been the thing that’s held it back.

Adam Welz noted in his Guardian blog NatureUp that much of Yukon Men is grossly misleading.15 He could find no evidence to support the claim that there have been twenty fatal wolf attacks in Alaska in the past ten years. He is also baffled why Discovery would produce and broadcast a “factual” show that portrays wolves as “man-eating monsters straight out of Victorian fairytales, a serious threat to life and limb,

clear enough. I asked Birenbaum what he was ultimately trying to preserve by keeping Walden technology free. Was it the land, the cabins, and the lake, and leaving those spaces undisturbed by the outside world? Or were his efforts to keep the digital barbarians at the gate driven by a desire to preserve something deeper, that universal truth that not only made Walden what it was, but drove the Revenge of Analog in all its various forms? Birenbaum didn’t hesitate to answer. “We look at the heart of what we do, and it is interpersonal relationships,” he said. Any debate about technology’s use came down to a simple binary question: will it impact interpersonal relationships or not? “This camp could be wiped out by a meteor tomorrow, and we could rebuild across the road and we’d still be Walden,” he said. What mattered were the relationships and the uniquely analog recipe that enabled their formation. First, you place lots of people together, and have them relate to one another with the guidance of caregivers, who encourage and enforce mutual respect. Next, you mix in a program that creates various stresses, frustrations, and challenges that campers need to confront. This ranges from the simplest task of getting to breakfast on time to ten-day canoe trips in the harsh Canadian wilderness where twelve-year-olds might be expected to carry a 60-pound canoe on their head for a mile or more in the pouring rain, as blackflies gnaw at their ankles. These situations eventually lead to individual perseverance and self-respect . . . what most people call character. And that character is the glue that allows the relationships built at camp to last a lifetime, as my own friendships formed at Walden have. “You go a bit out of your comfort zone, endure a little hardship, people push you and help you to succeed, and you end up with friendships, confidence, and an inner fortitude that ends in a sense of belonging to a greater, interdependent community,” Birenbaum said. “This is one of the most basic aspects of the human condition.

Maybe you can’t see the potential here,” he said. “I’m going to impress you, in that case.” “I’m already impressed,” she said. “It looks like a monumental job. Where I grew up, there were a bunch of old cabins just like this, out on the beach. I was a teenager. They were almost never in use and the local kids used to sneak in. To smoke pot and…other stuff. Then one day they were gone. Razed.” “When you were a teenager,” he said, shoving the rag back into his pocket. “Last week?” “Hey,” she laughed. “I’m talking ten years ago.” “In which case, you don’t age.” “Why don’t you just ask?” she challenged him. “Okay. How old are you? Exactly?” “Twenty-five. And you?” “One hundred and ten.” She laughed again. When she did, she threw her head back and that braid rippled down her back. “Yeah, I thought you were probably really old. How old?” “Thirty-eight. Pretty well out of your range.” “That depends,” she said with a shrug. “On?” “On whether I have a range.” Oh God, he thought weakly. She liked him. Not a little teasing, but private flirting, just between the two of them. Luke was a man with few scruples and even less control. It wasn’t a good idea for her to do this. She was too alluring for her own good.

To be a member of the elite now meant, ipso facto, supporting the low-fat diet. So effectively did the NHLBI-AHA alliance silence its antagonists, in fact, that among the tens of thousands of researchers in the worlds of medicine and nutrition over the next fifteen years, only a few dozen would publish research even gingerly challenging the diet-heart hypothesis.

human history was dominated by what Jared Diamond had called the “conditions of unpredictably alternating feast and famine that characterized the traditional human lifestyle.” Reasonable as this may seem, we have no evidence that food was ever any harder to come by for humans than for any other organisms on the planet, at least not until our ancestors began radically reshaping their environment ten thousand years ago, with the invention of agriculture.

DESPITE NEARLY A CENTURY’S WORTH OF therapeutic innovations, the likelihood of a diabetic’s contracting coronary artery disease is no less today than it was in 1921, when insulin was first discovered. Type 2 diabetics can still expect to die five to ten years prematurely, with much of this difference due to atherosclerosis and what Joslin’s Diabetes Mellitus has called an “extraordinarily high incidence” of coronary disease.

By 2004, one in three Americans was considered clinically obese; two in three were overweight. One in ten adult Americans had Type 2 diabetes—one in five over the age of sixty. It is now clear that the roots of this epidemic are evident even in infants and in the birth weights of newborns. Among middle-income families in Massachusetts, for example, as a team of researchers led by Matthew Gillman of Harvard reported last year, the prevalence of excessively fat infants increased dramatically between 1980 and 2001. This increase was most conspicuous among children younger than six months of age.

Randolph, having provoked the challenge, could not decline it. As much as he hated Clay’s politics he had a sneaking admiration for him personally—Black George, after all, was a good-natured knave—and had been heard to say, “I prefer to be killed by Clay to any other death.”33 The two men met, with their seconds, on the Virginia side of the Potomac on April 8. Neither was experienced with dueling pistols. Both missed on the first exchange of shots at ten paces. This was enough to satisfy the code duello, but it did not satisfy Clay. He insisted on another round, and Randolph consented. Clay then put his bullet through the long, voluminous white coat Randolph wore for the occasion. Uninjured, and drained of any desire to injure Clay, he fired into the air, dropped his pistol, came forward, extended his hand and said, “You owe me a coat, Mr. Clay.” Taking his hand, Clay replied, “I am glad the debt is no greater.” (Rebecca Gratz, one of Clay’s friends, remarked, “It would be well if he gave him [Randolph] a strait jacket. “)34 In the sensation produced by the duel no one blamed Clay but many, including some of his best friends, felt he should have consulted his discretion rather than his courage and found some other way of dealing with Randolph. Clay’s sense of honor was never in question; the duel, while unnecessary to prove that, dramatized the very traits of anger and unruliness that he most needed to erase from the public image. It did not quiet Randolph. He liked Clay too much to kill him, yet continued his shrill attack; and when he died seven years later left instructions that he be buried facing west—not east as customary—so as to keep an eye on Henry Clay.35

MODEL 2: Multiple Stakeholder Sustainability, Fons Trompenaars and Peter Woolliams (2010) PROBLEM STATEMENT How can I assess the most significant organizational dilemmas resulting from conflicting stakeholder demands and also assess organizational priorities to create sustainable performance? ESSENCE Organizational sustainability is not limited to the fashionable environmental factors such as emissions, green energy, saving scarce resources, corporate social responsibility, and so on. The future strength of an organization depends on the way leadership and management deal with the tensions between the five major entities facing any organization: efficiency of business processes, people, clients, shareholders and society. The manner in which these tensions are addressed and resolved determines the future strength and opportunities of an organization. This model proposes that sustainability can be defined as the degree to which an organization is capable of creating long-term wealth by reconciling its most important (‘golden’) dilemmas, created between these five components. From this, professors and consultants Fons Trompenaars and Peter Woolliams have identified ten dimensions consisting of dilemmas formed from these five components, because each one competes with the other four. HOW TO USE THE MODEL: The authors have developed a sustainability scan to use when making a diagnosis. This scan reveals: The major dilemmas and how people perceive the organization’s position in relation to these dilemmas; The corporate culture of an organization and their openness to the reconciliation of the major dilemmas; The competence of its leadership to reconcile these dilemmas. After the diagnosis, the organization can move on to reconciling the major dilemmas that lead to sustainable performance. To this end, the authors developed a dilemma reconciliation process. RESULTS To achieve sustainable success, organizations need to integrate the competing demands of their key stakeholders: operational processes, employees, clients, shareholders and society. By diagnosing and connecting different viewpoints and values, their research and consulting practice results in a better understanding of: The key challenges the organization faces with its various stakeholders and how to prioritize them; The extent to which leadership and management are capable of addressing the organizational dilemmas; The personal values of employees and their alignment with organizational values. These results help an organization define a corporate strategy in which crucial dilemmas are reconciled, and ensure that the company’s leadership is capable of executing the strategy sustainably. It does so while specifically addressing the company’s wealth-creating processes before the results show up in financial reports. It attempts to anticipate what the corporate financial performance will be some six months to three years in the future, as the financial effects of dilemma reconciliation are budgeted.

But seat-back video screens and the hard frames that surround them pose a safety challenge, partly because of the potential for injuries caused by head strikes, and partly because the computers and the electrical systems that serve them have to be both fireproof and fully isolated from the plane’s—so that crossed wires in somebody’s seat don’t allow a ten-year-old playing a video game to suddenly take control of the cockpit. Largely as a result, in-flight entertainment systems are almost unbelievably expensive. The rule of thumb, I was told, is “a thousand dollars an inch”—meaning that the small screen in the back of each economy seat can cost an airline ten thousand dollars, plus a few thousand for its handheld controller.

the Soil Carbon Challenge measures carbon levels over ten years. Someone at a university, completing a PhD or seeking publication, has incentives to do research projects of no more than a few years. In government agencies and nonprofits, soil carbon work is geared to the “so-called carbon market.” And all organizations—this is a pet peeve of his—tend toward fragmentation, so that soil conservation and climate mitigation are seen as separate, even competing, campaigns. All this means that stories that don’t fit into a short time frame, aren’t linked to profitable ventures, and/or can’t be neatly tucked into departmental divisions may not get told.

BUILDING RENEWAL INTO YOUR WORKDAY – Tony Schwartz Zeke is a creative director at a large agency. The workday he described when we first met was typical of the managers and leaders I meet in my travels. After six or six and a half hours of sleep—which never felt like enough—Zeke’s alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. each morning. His first move was to take his iPhone off the night table and check his e-mail. He told himself he did this in case something urgent had come in overnight, but the truth was he just couldn’t resist. Zeke tried to get to the gym at least two times a week, but he traveled frequently, and at home he was often just too tired to work out. Once he got to work—around 7:30 a.m. most days—Zeke grabbed a cup of coffee, sat down at his desk, and checked his e-mail again. By then, twenty-five or more new messages were typically waiting in his in-box. If he didn’t have an early meeting, he might be online for an hour or more without once looking up. Zeke’s days were mostly about meetings. They were usually scheduled one after the other with no time in between. As a result, he would race off to the next meeting without digesting what he’d just taken in at the last one. Lunch was something Zeke squeezed in. He usually brought food back to his desk from the cafeteria and worked while he ate. Around two or three in the afternoon, depending on how much sleep he’d gotten the previous night, Zeke began to feel himself fading. Given his company’s culture, taking even a short nap wasn’t an option. Instead, for a quick hit of energy, he found himself succumbing to a piece of someone’s leftover birthday cake, or running to the vending machine for a Snickers bar. With so many urgent demands, Zeke tended to put off any intensive, challenging work for later. By the end of the day, however, he rarely had the energy to get to it. Even so, he found it difficult to leave work with so much unfinished business. By the time he finally did, usually around 7:30 or 8 p.m., he was pretty much running on empty. After dinner, Zeke tried to get to some of the work he had put off earlier in the day. Much of the time, he simply ended up returning to e-mail or playing games online. Either way, he typically stayed up later than he knew he should. How closely does this match your experience? To the extent that it does resonate, how did this happen? Most important, can you imagine working the way you do now for the next ten or twenty years? YOUR CAPACITY IS LIMITED The challenge is that the demand in our lives increasingly exceeds our capacity.

You were right, you know—coming here was completely crazy. It was irrational. To think I’d choose to go to a town where there’s no mall, much less a day spa, and one restaurant that doesn’t have a menu? Please. No medical technology, ambulance service or local police—how is it I thought that would be easier, less stressful? I almost slid off the mountain on my way into town!” “Ah… Mel…” “We don’t even have cable, no cell phone signal most of the time. And there’s not a single person here who can admire my Cole Haan boots which, by the way, are starting to look like crap from traipsing around forests and farms. Did you know that any critical illness or injury has to be airlifted out of here? A person would be crazy to find this relaxing. Renewing.” She laughed. “The state I was in, when I was leaving L.A., I thought I absolutely had to escape all the challenges. It never occurred to me that challenge would be good for me. A completely new challenge.” “Mel…” “When I told Jack I was pregnant, after promising him I had the birth control taken care of, he should have said, ‘I’m outta here, babe.’ But you know what he said? He said, ‘I have to have you and the baby in my life, and if you can’t stay here, I’ll go anywhere.’” She sniffed a little and a tear rolled down her cheek. “When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is check to see if there are deer in the yard. Then I wonder what Preacher’s in the mood to fix for dinner. Jack’s usually already gone back to town—he likes splitting logs in the early morning—half the town wakes up to the sound of his ax striking wood. I see him five or ten times through the day and he always looks at me like we’ve been apart for a year. If I have a patient in labor, he stays up all night, just in case I need something. And when there are no patients at night, when he holds me before I fall asleep, bad TV reception is the last thing on my mind. “Am I staying here? I came here because I believed I’d lost everything that mattered, and ended up finding everything I’ve ever wanted in the world. Yeah, Joey. I’m staying. Jack’s here. Besides, I belong here now. I belong to them. They belong to me.” *

we challenged the reader with deeper questions that examined the very core character of a man, whether he is a king or a convict;

Correlations made by big data are likely to reinforce negative bias. Because big data often relies on historical data or at least the status quo, it can easily reproduce discrimination against disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities. The propensity models used in many algorithms can bake in a bias against someone who lived in the zip code of a low-income neighborhood at any point in his or her life. If an algorithm used by human resources companies queries your social graph and positively weighs candidates with the most existing connections to a workforce, it makes it more difficult to break in in the first place. In effect, these algorithms can hide bias behind a curtain of code. Big data is, by its nature, soulless and uncreative. It nudges us this way and that for reasons we are not meant to understand. It strips us of our privacy and puts our mistakes, secrets, and scandals on public display. It reinforces stereotypes and historical bias. And it is largely unregulated because we need it for economic growth and because efforts to try to regulate it have tended not to work; the technologies are too far-reaching and are not built to recognize the national boundaries of our world’s 196 sovereign nation-states. Yet would it be best to try to shut down these technologies entirely if we could? No. Big data simultaneously helps solve global challenges while creating an entirely new set of challenges. It’s our best chance at feeding 9 billion people, and it will help solve the problem of linguistic division that is so old its explanation dates back to the Old Testament and the Tower of Babel. Big data technologies will enable us to discover cancerous cells at 1 percent the size of what can be detected using today’s technologies, saving tens of millions of lives. The best approach to big data might be one put forward by the Obama campaign’s chief technology officer, Michael Slaby, who said, “There’s going to be a constant mix between your qualitative experience and your quantitative experience. And at times, they’re going to be at odds with each other, and at times they’re going to be in line. And I think it’s all about the blend. It’s kind of like you have a mixing board, and you have to turn one up sometimes, and turn down the other. And you never want to be just one or the other, because if it’s just one, then you lose some of the soul.” Slaby has made an impressive career out of developing big data tools, but even he recognizes that these tools work best when governed by human judgment. The choices we make about how we manage data will be as important as the decisions about managing land during the agricultural age and managing industry during the industrial age. We have a short window of time—just a few years, I think—before a set of norms set in that will be nearly impossible to reverse. Let’s hope humans accept the responsibility for making these decisions and don’t leave it to the machines.

Ten years ago, foster parents typically earned only 80-cents per hour (Time magazine, 10-8-90, p.44).  In 2010, the range was $446 to $667 per child per month. For the difficult challenge of fostering a child needing “specialized care” there  is an  incremental increase of $84 or $169 per month (subsidy determined by the child’s social worker).

That Thanksgiving has evolved over hundreds of years into a national holiday of eating is rather ironic given the quality of Thanksgiving food. Stuffing and roasting a twenty-pound turkey is, without a doubt, the worst possible way to enjoy a game bird. The whole notion of eating a game bird is to savor those subtleties of flavor that elude the domesticated hen. Partridge, pheasant, quail are all birds that can be prepared in various ways to delight the senses; but a corn-fed turkey that’s big enough to serve a gathering of ten or more is virtually impossible to cook with finesse. The breasts will inevitably become as dry as sawdust by the time the rest of the bird has finished cooking. Stuffing only exacerbates this problem by insulating the inner meat from the effects of heat, thus prolonging the damage. The intrinsic challenge of roasting a turkey has led to all manner of culinary abominations. Cooking the bird upside down, a preparation in which the skin becomes a pale, soggy mess. Spatchcocking, in which the bird is drawn and quartered like a heretic. Deep frying! (Heaven help us.) Give me an unstuffed four-pound chicken any day. Toss a slice of lemon, a sprig of rosemary, and a clove of garlic into the empty cavity, roast it at 425° for sixty minutes or until golden brown, and you will have a perfect dinner time and again. The limitations of choosing a twenty-pound turkey as the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving meal have only been compounded by the inexplicable tradition of having every member of the family contribute a dish. Relatives who should never be allowed to set foot in a kitchen are suddenly walking through your door with some sort of vegetable casserole in which the “secret ingredient” is mayonnaise. And when cousin Betsy arrives with such a mishap in hand, one can take no comfort from thoughts of the future, for once a single person politely compliments the dish, its presence at Thanksgiving will be deemed sacrosanct. Then not even the death of cousin Betsy can save you from it, because as soon as she’s in the grave, her daughter will proudly pick up the baton. Served at an inconvenient hour, prepared by such an army of chefs that half the dishes are overcooked, half are undercooked,

The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, “Please do not tell us what you feel.” I have always been a fan of the Sylvia cartoon where two women sit, one looking into a crystal ball as the other woman says, “He never talks about his feelings.” And the woman who can see the future says, “At two P.M. all over the world men will begin to talk about their feelings—and women all over the world will be sorry.” If we cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed. It is not just men who do not take their pain seriously. Most women do not want to deal with male pain if it interferes with the satisfaction of female desire. When feminist movement led to men’s liberation, including male exploration of “feelings,” some women mocked male emotional expression with the same disgust and contempt as sexist men. Despite all the expressed feminist longing for men of feeling, when men worked to get in touch with feelings, no one really wanted to reward them. In feminist circles men who wanted to change were often labeled narcissistic or needy. Individual men who expressed feelings were often seen as attention seekers, patriarchal manipulators trying to steal the stage with their drama. When I was in my twenties, I would go to couples therapy, and my partner of more than ten years would explain how I asked him to talk about his feelings and when he did, I would freak out. He was right. It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want my image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Here I was, an enlightened feminist woman who did not want to hear my man speak his pain because it revealed his emotional vulnerability. It stands to reason, then, that the masses of women committed to the sexist principle that men who express their feelings are weak really do not want to hear men speak, especially if what they say is that they hurt, that they feel unloved. Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure. Since sexist norms have taught us that loving is our task whether in our role as mothers or lovers or friends, if men say they are not loved, then we are at fault; we are to blame.

On the third day, a sail crept over the waves, full-bellied and perfectly white. Yule watched the ship lumbering closer, awkward and squarish in the water, until his eyes burned from salt and sun. There was a single figure aboard, facing the island with a challenging, prideful stance and a flaxen tangle of hair whipping around her head. Yule felt a hysterical desire to dance or scream or faint, but instead he simply stood and raised one arm into the air. He saw her see him. A stillness fell over her, despite the lolling of the ship beneath her feet. Then she laughed—a wild, whooping laugh that rolled over the water to Yule like summertime thunder—removed several layers of dirt-colored clothing, and dove into the shallow waves beneath her ship without a trace of hesitation. Yule had half a second in which to wonder precisely what manner of half-wild madwoman he had been questing after for twelve years, and to doubt his sufficiency for the task, before he was splashing out to meet her, laughing and dragging his white scholar’s robes through the waves. And so, in the late spring of the year 1893 in your world, which was the year 6920 in that one, Yule Ian Scholar and Adelaide Lee Larson found one another in the noonday tides surrounding the City of Plumm. They were never willingly parted again.

There are some challenges, however, that are uniquely American. It is difficult to reform the American system; apart from the ten amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights, there have been only seventeen amendments to the Constitution since its adoption and none for the past thirty years.

If 400,000 cases of Lyme a year yielded 50,000 chronic cases, and if even only a few thousand of those were as bad as mine, then, over the accumulated years, tens of thousands of people had to be facing impossible challenges without the moneyed, highly educated advantages that helped us, barely, to survive.

When the facts of slave labour and especially the slave trade from Africa began to filter through to the Vatican chambers in Rome, popes began to express their concern. This was good. The popes began to criticise the exploitation of the native peoples. But unfortunately, they did not examine the principle of slavery itself. Thus Pope Paul III, in 1537, condemned the indiscriminate enslavement of Indians in South America. But when challenged, he confirmed ten years later that both clergy and laity had the right to own slaves. A century later, in 1639, Pope Urban VIII criticised unjust practices against the natives, but did not deny the four 'just titles' for owning slaves. Pope Benedict XIV condemned the wholesale enslavement of natives in Brazil — without denouncing slavery as such, nor the importation of slaves from Africa.

In this ongoing process, the Program is asking us to go where none of us has ever been before—into lives of lessened fear, diminished anger, fewer resentments, and genuine self-esteem instead of self-pity. There is a price, however: the willingness to challenge and change patterns of thought, speech, and behavior that may have gone unchallenged for ten, twenty, thirty years or more.

Ketika kamu nggak berjuang untuk hidupmu, ya artinya kamu nggak cukup mencintai diri sendiri. Artinya, kamu sudah membuat hidupmu sia-sia.

He'd saved quite a lot over the years. Had he made a will? He'd been fairly confused the past ten years or so. He might have made one. Had he been confused enough to leave all his money to himself? He hoped so. There'd been practically no known cases of anyone successfully challenging their own will -

Kita bukan produk lingkungan sosial kita. Semua yang kupunya hanya alat, tapi harus aku yang menentukan arah hidupku. Semua it nggak ada artinya kalau aku bahkan nggak tahu apa yang mau aku lakukan dalam hidup.

A good rule of thumb is a 10- to 25-year horizon, perhaps longer if the mission is particularly challenging. Of course, some missions can be fulfilled faster than ten years, and it may be appropriate and effective to have a short time frame. Whatever time-length mission you set, be sure to recognize when you’ve fulfilled it and, most important, set a new one. Otherwise, you may fall into one of the most dangerous of traps: the “We’ve Arrived Syndrome.

Pierce considered himself conservative about any satellite gambit. He wasn’t certain that Bell engineers knew enough yet to build a foolproof and durable active satellite—one that could operate for more than a few weeks or months. He also knew that the small research department at Bell Labs, unlike the huge development department, lacked the manpower and budget necessary for an active project. “There’s a difference, you see, in thinking idly about something, and in setting out to do something,” he explained to an interviewer in the early 1960s. “You begin to see what the problems are when you set out to do things, and that’s why we thought [passive] would be a good idea.” A passive satellite, he added, probably wouldn’t be useful in terms of the business of communications. But it tested the possibility of orbiting relays before they were developed into something more. A passive satellite, in other words, was an experiment. Ten years earlier, Pierce had witnessed how problems with the transistor didn’t show up until the device entered the development and production stage. Here, too, was a relatively low-risk opportunity to confront and solve the practical challenges of this new technology—“to get one’s hands dirty”—before making a slew of big and expensive mistakes.

Why consider military history in a book on wokeness? Because, like the ill-fated French defenses of yesteryear, our theology is not adapted to the major challenge of our day. We are prepared for what you could call “soft postmodernism”—the belief that there is no objective truth, no “ought” in life, and that science tells us the meaning of the cosmos. We are not prepared for the “hard postmodernism” that is now dominant in our culture. Unlike the earlier form of ten to thirty years ago, hard postmodernism presents a very carefully framed argument, many oughts, a clear good group and bad group, and maintains that science—like all disciplines—is shot through with Western rationalism borne of white supremacy.4 If you do not know this, however good your intentions may be, you are equipped for a different struggle than the one that is knocking on your door. Wokeness is not soft postmodernism; wokeness is hard postmodernism.5

Standing out from the (New York City) map's delicate tracery of gridirons representing streets are heavy lines, lines girdling the city or slashing across its expanses. These lines denote the major roads on which automobiles and trucks move, roads whose very location, moreover, does as much as any single factor to determine where and how a city's people live and work. With a single exception, the East River Drive, Robert Moses built every one of those roads. (...) Only one borough of New York City—the Bronx—is on the mainland of the United States, and bridges link the island boroughs that form metropolis. Since 1931, seven such bridges were built, immense structures, some of them anchored by towers as tall as seventy-story buildings, supported by cables made up of enough wire to drop a noose around the earth. (...) Robert Moses built every one of those bridges. (He also built) Lincoln Center, the world's most famous, costly and imposing cultural complex. Alongside another stands the New York Coliseum, the glowering exhibition tower whose name reveals Moses' preoccupation with achieving an immortality like that conferred on the Caesars of Rome. The eastern edge of Manhattan Island, heart of metropolis, was completely altered between 1945 and 1958. (...) Robert Moses was never a member of the Housing Authority and his relationship with it was only hinted at in the press. But between 1945 and 1958 no site for public housing was selected and no brick of a public housing project laid without his approval. And still further north along the East River stand the buildings of the United Nations headquarters. Moses cleared aside the obstacles to bringing to New York the closest thing to a world capitol the planet possesses, and he supervised its construction. When Robert Moses began building playgrounds in New York City, there were 119. When he stopped, there were 777. Under his direction, an army of men that at times during the Depression included 84,000 laborers. (...) For the seven years between 1946 and 1953, no public improvement of any type—not school or sewer, library or pier, hospital or catch basin—was built by any city agency, even those which Robert Moses did not directly control, unless Moses approved its design and location. To clear the land for these improvements, he evicted the city's people, not thousands of them or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, from their homes and tore the homes down. Neighborhoods were obliterated by his edict to make room for new neighborhoods reared at his command. “Out from the heart of New York, reaching beyond the limits of the city into its vast suburbs and thereby shaping them as well as the city, stretch long ribbons of concrete, closed, unlike the expressways, to trucks and all commercial traffic, and, unlike the expressways, bordered by lawns and trees. These are the parkways. There are 416 miles of them. Robert Moses built every mile. (He also built the St. Lawrence Dam,) one of the most colossal single works of man, a structure of steel and concrete as tall as a ten-story apartment house, an apartment house as long as eleven football fields, a structure vaster by far than any of the pyramids, or, in terms of bulk, of any six pyramids together. And at Niagara, Robert Moses built a series of dams, parks and parkways that make the St. Lawrence development look small. His power was measured in decades. On April 18, 1924, ten years after he had entered government, it was formally handed to him. For forty-four years thereafter (until 1968), he held power, a power so substantial that in the field s in which he chose to exercise it, it was not challenged seriously by any (of 6) Governors of New York State or by any Mayor of New York City.

Having spent 4,000 turbulent years consolidating its land mass, China is now building a Blue Water navy. A Green Water navy patrols its maritime borders, a Blue Water navy patrols the oceans. It will take another thirty years (assuming economic progression) for China to build naval capacity to seriously challenge the most powerful seaborne force the world has ever seen – the US navy. But in the medium to short term, as it builds, and trains, and learns, the Chinese navy will bump up against its rivals on the seas; and how those bumps are managed – especially the Sino–American ones – will define great power politics in this century.

I lived in London for ten years and every time you saw a cop in the street you got scared. They are technically “civil servants,” but they do not fulfill this function. You talked about the US, the police being militarized—during the demonstrations for Gaza in France in Paris, it wasn’t civil servants in the streets, it was riot police. Robocop-looking kind of people. This by itself creates and implies violence. Precisely. That was the whole point. And also it might be important to point out that the Israeli police have been involved in the training of US police. So there is this connection between the US military and the Israeli military. And therefore it means that when we try to organize campaigns in solidarity with Palestine, when we try to challenge the Israeli state, it’s not simply about focusing our struggles elsewhere, in another place. It also has to do with what happens in US communities.

In a now-famous experiment, he and his colleagues compared three groups of expert violinists at the elite Music Academy in West Berlin. The researchers asked the professors to divide the students into three groups: the “best violinists,” who had the potential for careers as international soloists; the “good violinists”; and a third group training to be violin teachers rather than performers. Then they interviewed the musicians and asked them to keep detailed diaries of their time. They found a striking difference among the groups. All three groups spent the same amount of time—over fifty hours a week— participating in music-related activities. All three had similar classroom requirements making demands on their time. But the two best groups spent most of their music-related time practicing in solitude: 24.3 hours a week, or 3.5 hours a day, for the best group, compared with only 9.3 hours a week, or 1.3 hours a day, for the worst group. The best violinists rated “practice alone” as the most important of all their music-related activities. Elite musicians—even those who perform in groups—describe practice sessions with their chamber group as “leisure” compared with solo practice, where the real work gets done. Ericsson and his cohorts found similar effects of solitude when they studied other kinds of expert performers. “Serious study alone” is the strongest predictor of skill for tournament-rated chess players, for example; grandmasters typically spend a whopping five thousand hours—almost five times as many hours as intermediatelevel players—studying the game by themselves during their first ten years of learning to play. College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups. Even elite athletes in team sports often spend unusual amounts of time in solitary practice. What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful—they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them. Deliberate Practice is best conducted alone for several reasons. It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally. Only when you’re alone, Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class—you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” To see Deliberate Practice in action, we need look no further than the story of Stephen Wozniak. The Homebrew meeting was the catalyst that inspired him to build that first PC, but the knowledge base and work habits that made it possible came from another place entirely: Woz had deliberately practiced engineering ever since he was a little kid. (Ericsson says that it takes approximately ten thousand hours of Deliberate Practice to gain true expertise, so it helps to start young.)

He spends more time than ever now schooling players on the value of competition. He explains to them in spring training the challenge and magnificence of getting a World Series ring, because “it won’t happen accidentally. You gotta tell ’em to want it.” He sees how quickly clubhouses empty out regardless of how sweet the win or how tough the loss, suburbanites hoping to catch the 5:05 home, all-night talk of baseball replaced by simply wanting to get to wherever they’re going. He wishes there were more team parties, but when so many players are glancing impatiently at their Rolexes because it’s almost ten o’clock, no party could generate much esprit de corps. In recent years,

From the outside, looking at a woman objectively, there’s no obvious single transition point which marks the beginning of this odyssey. Menarche, the first occurrence of menstruation and a gateway to adulthood, is easily identifiable; pregnancy, a gateway to motherhood, is even more visible. But the features of menopause — that final, great biological upheaval in a woman’s life — aren’t nearly so obvious from the outside and are often deliberately concealed. To add to the complexity, the passage lasts for a much longer period of time. Usually, it starts during our “midlife” years. Perimenopause, sometimes called “menopause transition,” kicks off several years before menopause itself, and is defined as the time during which our ovaries gradually begin to make less estrogen. This usually happens in our forties, but in some instances it can begin in our thirties or, in rare cases, even earlier. During perimenopause, the ovaries are effectively winding down, and irregularities are common. Some months women continue to ovulate — sometimes even twice in the same cycle — while in other months no egg is released. Though four to six years is the average span, perimenopause can last for as little as a year or it can go on for more than ten. Menopause is usually declared after twelve months have passed without a period. In the US, the average age at which menopause is recorded is fifty-one years, though around one in a hundred women reach this point before the age of forty. Four years is the typical duration of menopause, but around one in ten women experiences physical and psychological challenges that last for up to twelve years — challenges which include depression, anxiety, insomnia, hot flashes, night sweats, and reduced libido. Sometimes, these challenges are significant; at their most severe they can present as risks to physical or mental health, and women need help to manage them.

I set myself a personal challenge every day to recognize my errors and my accuracies so I could verify whether I had made any mistakes, and to continue forward without punishing myself with guilt. I just had to get better day-by-day. That was my strategy in order to survive ten shows a week, year after year.

That model is often referred to as “solution selling” or a “solutions approach”—or simply “solutions”—and has come to dominate sales and marketing strategy across the last ten to twenty years.