The 100 Series Quotes

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.

you must first accept that while there are things that have happened in your life that you had no say in, you are 100 percent responsible for what you do with your life in the aftermath of those events. Always, every time, no excuses.

you are 100 percent responsible for what you do with your life

My grandmother once told me, “Relationships are work, honey, and they aren’t 50/50. Some days when I get up I only feel like giving 10%, then your granddaddy has to give 90% that day. But there is always 100% love.

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.

The 100 tv series " Who we are and who we need to be survive are very different things

You want to be ‘the guy’ who services ‘this type of person’ or solves ‘this type of problem.’ And even more niched ‘I solve this type of problem for this specific type of person in this unique counter-intuitive way that reverses their deepest fear.

When you raise your price, you increase the value the consumer receives without changing anything else about your product.

Warren Buffet said, “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs. MBA programs don’t teach people how to create companies … Our position is that we hire someone in spite of an MBA, not because of one …

You can either be right or you can be rich. This book is for getting rich. If that bothers you, just put this down and go back to arguing against human nature. Hint: You’re not gonna change it.

The Grand Slam Offer only becomes valuable once the prospect perceives the increase in likelihood of achievement, perceives the decrease in time delay, and perceives the decrease in effort and sacrifice.

Entrepreneurship is about acquiring skills, beliefs, and character traits. To advance, I find that we must determine which skills, beliefs, and character traits we lack. Most times, we simply need to improve.

Sometimes it’s hard to see the things that are holding us back. Sometimes it takes a push to make us truly open our eyes.

Art is meant to provoke emotions, Avery. Its sole purpose is to arouse our senses, even if it disturbs. Even if it’s ugly. Even if it fucking scares the living shit out of you.

Masters never don’t do the basics.

Increased Response Rates (think clicks) Increased Conversion (think sales) Premium Prices (think charging a lot of money).

The degree of the pain will be proportional to the price you will be able to charge (more on this in the Value Equation chapter). When they hear the solution to their pain, and inversely, what their life would look like without this pain, they should be drawn to your solution. I have a saying I use to train sales teams “The pain is the pitch.” If you can articulate the pain a prospect is feeling accurately, they will almost always buy what you are offering. A prospect must have a painful problem for us to solve and charge money for our solution.

No offer? No business. No life. Bad offer? Negative profit. No business. Miserable life. Decent offer? No profit. Stagnating business. Stagnating life. Good offer? Some profit. Okay business. Okay life. Grand Slam Offer? Fantastic profit. Insane business. Freedom.

The 100 Tv-series" Clarke, who we are and who we need to be to survive are very different things

I said I had a three-year-old with broken fingers, and you said, ‘Maybe he owed somebody money.’” “Yes,

if your dreams don’t scare you, they are too small.

I never thought it could be like this with someone. I never imagined that I would ever feel this connected to anyone, this whole. I’ve never felt this terrified either.

Hormozi Law: The longer you delay the ask, the bigger the ask you can make. “The longer the runway, the bigger the plane that can take off.

We question all of our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe in, and those we never think to question.” ​— ​Orson Scott Card

The only thing that beats “free” is “fast.” People will pay for speed.

People want what they can’t have. People want what other people want. People want things only a select few have access to.

Aligning with other’s self interest is easier than persuading them to do what you want.

If you have a “commodity” offer, you will compete on price (having a price-driven purchase versus a value-driven purchase). Your Grand Slam Offer, however, forces a prospect to stop and think differently to assess the value of your differentiated product. Doing this establishes you as your own category, which means it’s too difficult to compare prices, which means you re-calibrate the prospect’s value-meter.

Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.” No doubt, entering space is an unforgiving business to deal with but Musk mastered it. His biggest advice is to, “really pay attention to negative feedback and actively solicit it, particularly from friends... hardly anyone does that. It's incredibly helpful.

Our goal as marketers and business owners is to increase the value of the dream outcome and its perceived likelihood of achievement, while decreasing the time delay of achievement and the effort and sacrifice one has to put in to get there.

I think the United States is more open to new ideas than any country in the world. And I think becomes somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that because the United States is open to new ideas, it attracted people from the world who had new ideas.

Here's the truth, simply stated...bookstores are suffering from a serious crisis of falling sales. Don't believe a single zero of all those editions claimed to be 100,000! 40,000!...even 400 copies! just for the suckers! Alack!...Alas!...only love and romance...and even then!...manage to keep selling...and a few murder mysteries...

The greatest hitters of all time also have many strike outs, just as there are many failed offers in the track record of great marketers. We learn skills through failure and practice. We do this knowing that nine out of ten times we will be wrong. We still act boldly, hoping for that offer we connect with so well that it results in our big payoff.

We desire no conquest, no dominion, we seek no indemnities, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.

I think our hopes are made when we are young, and we can never adjust them to the real world.

More than 100,000 children living in the US are sold into sex trafficking every year.

Gold is found in the deep rough soil, so go for gold

I have a 100 percent success rate on making it through the day. I don’t expect today to be any different.” She

The broken parts of me recognise the fractures in him, even if he hasn’t permitted me close enough to touch them yet.

God cannot bless u with credits or merits when u refuse to do your home work

Make it interesting and it will be true: this is what story writers live by.

People who experience a victory early on are more likely to continue with something than those who do not.

Create flow. Monetize flow. Then add friction.

Fundamentally, all marketing exists to influence the supply and demand curve.

The point of good writing is for the reader to understand. The point of good persuasion is for the prospect to feel understood.

Scarcity is a function of quantity. Urgency is a function of time. This is where you only limit when people can sign up, rather than how many.

Adding a deadline and incorporating one or multiple forms of urgency will get more people to take action than would otherwise.

Charge as high a price as you can say out loud without cracking a smile.” ​— ​Dan Kennedy

your most valuable asset ― your attention.

I’m going to be an entrepreneur so I can be free. Free to do whatever I want, whenever I want, with whomever I want.

Doing the thing that scared me most - giving away my secrets - led to the biggest breakthrough in my life.

If you cannot explain something in simple terms, then you don’t understand it.” - Dr. Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize Winner in Physics

We want engaged leads: people who *show* interest in the stuff you sell.

The primary task for the executive targeting first 100 days success is to set out the right strategic priorities and stay focused on them.

I don’t feel there is any reason to avoid gluten unless you have a specific sensitivity or allergy to it

You’re a good man, Dominic Baine.” “No. I’m not. But I want to be. For you.” “You’re the only man I want. The only one I love.

In plain words, pricing this way means you are providing a service at just above what it costs for you to stay above water. We are not trying to stay barely above water. We are trying to make egregious amounts of money that will have your relatives asking if what you are doing is legal. Again, we are not trying to get the most customers. We are trying to make the most money.

I'm not a prince. God, never hold me in that light. You'll only be disappointed." His touch gentles, even his gaze goes hard with intensity. "I'm not a good man, Avery. But I am the one who loves you.

You’ve changed everything, Avery. You’ve changed me.” “Not too much, I hope. I happened to like the man you are.” I arch a brow. “You like him?” “I love him,” she says. “With everything I am, I love him.

In order to understand how to make a compelling offer, you must understand value. The reason people buy anything is to get a deal. They believe what they are getting (VALUE) is worth more than what they are giving in exchange for it (PRICE). The moment the value they receive dips below what they are paying, they stop buying from you. This price to value discrepancy is what you need to avoid at all costs.

Money does what it’s told. A business has a mind of its own. Money is fickle and runs around. A business is steadfast and loyal. Money is easy come, easy go. A business drags its feet in coming and digs in its

Having a Grand Slam offer makes it almost impossible to lose. But why? What gives it such an impact? In short, having a Grand Slam Offer helps with all three of the requirements for growth: getting more customers, getting them to pay more, and getting them to do so more times. How? It allows you to differentiate yourself from the marketplace. In other words, it allows you to sell your product based on VALUE not on PRICE. Commoditized = Price Driven Purchases (race to the bottom) Differentiated = Value Driven Purchases (sell in a category of one with no comparison. Yes, market matters, which I will expound on in the next chapter) A commodity, as I define it, is a product available from many places. For that reason, it’s prone to purchases based on “price” instead of “value.” If all products are “equal,” then the cheapest one is the most valuable by default. In other words, if a prospect compares your product to another and thinks “these are pretty much the same, I’ll buy the cheaper one,” then they commoditized you. How embarrassing! But

Time delay is the time between a client buying and receiving the promised benefit. The shorter the distance between when they purchase and they receive value/the outcome, the more valuable your services or product is.

Getting people to buy is NOT the objective of a business. Making money is. And lowering price is a one-way road to destruction for most — you can only go down to $0, but you can go infinitely high in the other direction.

The pain is the pitch.” If you can articulate the pain a prospect is feeling accurately, they will almost always buy what you are offering. A prospect must have a painful problem for us to solve and charge money for our solution.

The home the military top brass had created for themselves was "picturesque, romantic and unreal", he wrote. "It was as though men were playing at war here, while others 60 miles away were fighting and dying in mud and gas-waves and explosive barrages.

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic series, explains his success this way: I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The “Dilbert” comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That’s how value is created.

Here is the short version of the Kool-Aid Fallacy: Cult … therefore Jim Jones … therefore mass suicide … therefore Kool-Aid. It’s astonishing how much of social media now revolves around simple word association sequences. Absolutely no thought goes into anything. No one ever delivers an actual argument. If they ever do attempt an argument, their punctuation, spelling, grammar, logic and general education are not up to the task, and soon dissolve into meaningless mush. But usually they just hurry on to the insults and ad hominem attacks, which is the part they love. Before long, the Kool-Aid fallacy is eagerly applied. Every argument should have a Dunning-Kruger quotient associated with it. Most people are 100% on the Dunning-Kruger scale. They imagine themselves geniuses, and geniuses dunces. As ever, they have inverted reality.

lead is a person you can contact. That’s all. If you bought a list of emails, those are leads. If you get contact information from a website or database, those are leads. The numbers in your phone are leads. People on the street are leads. If you can contact them, they are leads.

People want to buy expensive things. They just need a reason. And the goal isn’t just to be slightly above the market price — the goal is to be so much higher that a consumer thinks to themselves, “This is so much more expensive, there must be something entirely different going on here.

Second Lieutenant Walter Tull, whose body was never recovered, was the first black man to be commissioned as an infantry officer in the British Army. He was born in Folkestone in 1888, the son of a Barbadian carpenter and a Kent farm labourer's daughter. His grandmother had been a slave.

A good manager drives a project to be good enough, fast enough, cheap enough, and done as much as necessary. A good manager manages the coefficients on these attributes rather than demanding that all those coefficients are 100%. It is this kind of management that Agile strives to enable.

That, in brief, is the problem—criticism as the first step in a discussion stops the discussion and is therefore, generally the last step as well. It is an entirely different matter if I hear the other person first, understand what she is trying to do, then talk with her about better ways to do it.

In the first Test of the 1938 Ashes series, Eddie Paynter and Stan McCabe became the first players on opposing sides to score double-centuries in the same match. Bill Brown and Wally Hammond repeated the feat in the very next Test at Lord’s. How quickly the once-unprecedented accumulates its precedents.

My dear wife, my dear parents and all I love, I have been wounded. I hope it will be nothing, Care well for the children, my dear Lucie; Leopold will help you if I don't get out of this. I have a crushed thigh and am all alone in a shell hole. I hope they will soon come to fetch me. My last thought is of you.

The first $100,000 is a bitch, but you gotta do it. I don't care what you have to do—if it means walking everywhere and not eating anything that wasn't purchased with a coupon, find a way to get your hands on $100,000. After that, you can ease off the gas a little bit.” ​— ​Charlie Munger, Vice Chairman Berkshire Hathaway

there is a difference between gambling in business and gambling in a casino. In a casino, the odds are stacked against you. With skill, you can improve them, but never beat them. In contrast, in business, you can improve your skills to shift the odds in your favor. Simply stated, with enough skill, you can become the house.

A volunteer nurse for the British Red Cross, she followed her surgeon husband, Sir John Bradford, to northern France at the outbreak of the war and spent the duration of the conflict performing the remarkable yet unsung role of "hospital letter writer" for injured soldiers either too unwell or too illiterate to communicate with family members scattered across the globe.

It’s an offer you present to the marketplace that cannot be compared to any other product or service available, combining an attractive promotion, an unmatchable value proposition, a premium price, and an unbeatable guarantee with a money model (payment terms) that allows you to get paid to get new customers . . . forever removing the cash constraint on business growth.

October, for an instant, brings a new kind of power. Fleetingly, there is a shift towards workers’ control of production and the rights of peasants to the land. Equal rights for men and women in work and in marriage, the right to divorce, maternity support. The decriminalization of homosexuality, 100 years ago. Moves towards national self-determination. Free and universal education, the expansion of literacy. And with literacy comes cultural explosion, a thirst to learn, the mushrooming of universities and lecture series and adult schools. A change in the soul, as Lunacharsky might put it, as much as in the factory. And though those moments are snuffed out, reversed, become bleak jokes and memories all too soon, it might have been otherwise.

Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a 10 percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong nine times out of ten . . . We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it's important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments." ​— ​Jeff Bezos

Here is your first piece of good news: if you are reading this, then you are already in the top 10 percent. Most people buy stuff and then promptly ignore it. I can also throw out a spoiler: the further you get in the book, the bigger the nuggets become. Just watch. This book delivers. The world needs more entrepreneurs. It needs more fighters. It needs more magic. And that’s what I’m sharing with you ― magic.

Abraham Ellison dipped his sword in the pool and the red from the blood floated ominously across the water’s surface. He had been waiting all night for his vampire to arise from his 100th death and take his place among the ranks of the mortals. There was no discussion, no words of parting, or speeches of regret, as Ellison held his former superior’s head and made a powerful cut to his new life - a life of solitude as a normal man living on his own terms.

The French suffered 531,000 casualties (dead, wounded and captured) in those three months, roughly as many as in the eight months of Verdun in 1916. The British (including Empire troops) had 411,000 casualties - almost exactly the same as in the four-and-a-half months of the Somme. The Americans suffered 127,000 casualties, more than double the total number of American casualties in the Vietnam War. German casualties were devastating: 785,000 killed and wounded and 386,000 prisoners - more than a million men in three months.

The facts are unmistakably plain, for those who bother to check the facts. In 1921, when the tax rate on people making over $100,000 a year was 73 percent, the federal government collected a little over $700 million in income taxes, of which 30 percent was paid by those making over $100,000. By 1929, after a series of tax rate reductions had cut the tax rate to 24 percent on those making over $100,000, the federal government collected more than a billion dollars in income taxes, of which 65 percent was collected from those making over $100,000.[10

Wir rasen unserem eigenen Atem hinterher dem Horizont entgegen und wünschen uns Flügel. Würden wir abheben, so wäre es wirklich nicht verwunderlich. Wir sind grün und digital, hoffnungsvoll und realistisch, Weltverbesserer und Weltenbummler, verliebt und verlebt, vernetzt und ungebunden, haben die Taschen voll unreifer Ideen und den Kopf voll einstürzender Erwartungen unserer Eltern. Und jeder Tag bringt von neuem die Herausforderung, uns zu leben, in einer Welt, in der wir uns mit jedem Atemzug neu definieren können. Wir sind 100.000 Unikate – in Serie.

Here’s my patented approach to event cooking: shoot for 70 percent. My philosophy is based on an apocryphal story I’ve heard about how a large financial services firm used to choose their new analysts. They didn’t hire people who scored 100 on their Series 7 exam. They wanted people who purposely aimed for 70, because it meant you knew the material so well that you could confidently shoot for a C-minus and get it. That’s where you want to be when you’re cooking for events. Not the worst and not the best. Whether it’s a cooking demo or a collaborative dinner, trying to impress people is a fool’s errand.

Great mathematical geniuses such as Pythagoras, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Fourier and Gödel all recognized that mathematics is ontological. ‘Real’ mathematics is ontological mathematics that tells us about reality; it’s not abstract mathematics that has no connection with reality, as most professional mathematicians seem to believe. Reality is 100% mathematical. Above all, Fourier mathematics is the key to the mystery of the universe because it’s the answer to the mystery of mind and matter and how they interact. Mind is the Fourier frequency domain and matter is the inverse Fourier spacetime domain, and the two domains are absolutely tied together in feedback loop. The universe, finally, is a hologram and holography is all about Fourier mathematics.

the right way.’ Each went something like this: Step 1: They got me excited about all the new leads they would bring.   Step 2: I’d go through an onboarding process that felt valuable (and sometimes was).   Step 3: They assigned their “best” senior rep to my account.   Step 4: I saw some results.   Step 5: They moved my senior rep to the newest customer...   Step 6: A junior rep starts managing my account. My results suffered.   Step 7: I complained.   Step 8: The senior rep would come back once in a while to make me feel better.   Step 9: Results still suffered. And I’d eventually cancel.   Step 10: I’d search for another agency and repeat the cycle of insanity.   Step 11: For the zillionth time–Start wondering why I wasn’t getting results like the first time.

Which philosophers would Alain suggest for practical living? Alain’s list overlaps nearly 100% with my own: Epicurus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Michel de Montaigne, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell. * Most-gifted or recommended books? The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Essays of Michel de Montaigne. * Favorite documentary The Up series: This ongoing series is filmed in the UK, and revisits the same group of people every 7 years. It started with their 7th birthdays (Seven Up!) and continues up to present day, when they are in their 50s. Subjects were picked from a wide variety of social backgrounds. Alain calls these very undramatic and quietly powerful films “probably the best documentary that exists.” TF: This is also the favorite of Stephen Dubner on page 574. Stephen says, “If you are at all interested in any kind of science or sociology, or human decision-making, or nurture versus nature, it is the best thing ever.” * Advice to your 30-year-old self? “I would have said, ‘Appreciate what’s good about this moment. Don’t always think that you’re on a permanent journey. Stop and enjoy the view.’ . . . I always had this assumption that if you appreciate the moment, you’re weakening your resolve to improve your circumstances. That’s not true, but I think when you’re young, it’s sort of associated with that. . . . I had people around me who’d say things like, ‘Oh, a flower, nice.’ A little part of me was thinking, ‘You absolute loser. You’ve taken time to appreciate a flower? Do you not have bigger plans? I mean, this the limit of your ambition?’ and when life’s knocked you around a bit and when you’ve seen a few things, and time has happened and you’ve got some years under your belt, you start to think more highly of modest things like flowers and a pretty sky, or just a morning where nothing’s wrong and everyone’s been pretty nice to everyone else. . . . Fortune can do anything with us. We are very fragile creatures. You only need to tap us or hit us in slightly the wrong place. . . . You only have to push us a little bit, and we crack very easily, whether that’s the pressure of disgrace or physical illness, financial pressure, etc. It doesn’t take very much. So, we do have to appreciate every day that goes by without a major disaster.

According to a 2000 New York Times study of 100 "rampage" mass murders, where 425 people were killed and 510 injured, the killers: 1. Often have serious mental health issues 2. Are not usually motivated by exposure to videos, movies, or television 3. Are not using alcohol or other drugs at the time of the attacks 4. Are often unemployed 5. Are sometimes female 6. Are not usually Satanists or racists 7. Are most often white males although a few are Asian or African American 8. Sometimes have college degrees or some years of college 9. Often have military experience 10. Give lots of pre-attack warning signals 11. Often carry semiautomatic weapons obtained legally 12. Often do no attempt escape 13. Half commit suicide or are killed by others 14. Most have a death wish (Fessenden, 2000)

One of the things necessary for healing to take place is recognizing the truth of the relationship and that person. You experienced so many covert lies; it is incredibly helpful to be able to see clearly. The truth is you were in love with an illusion, with the person they portrayed themselves to be. At first, this is an excruciating realization. You will doubt and wonder if you are overinflating this, if they really are innocent and you’re just scared to move on. You will have a ton of self-doubt. Eventually, with education and support, you will see that your hunch, your inner knowing, is on target. In time the truth that you were in love with an illusion will feel like a relief because truth does set you free. That full realization will validate years of confusion you felt, years of unexplained exhaustion and health issues, years of sexual confusion, years of feeling less than, and years of unhappiness, along with anxiety. You lived in an unsafe environment, were demeaned and devalued for years (decades for some of you; entire childhoods for many of you). You did not experience unconditional love; you did not live with someone who treated you with respect, who cherished you, treasured you, and felt so lucky to have you in their life. No, the truth is you experienced a counterfeit. If this was a spouse or romantic partner, this awakening to the truth is excruciating because you did love that person with all your heart. You were dedicated. You were in 100%. The truth is that you were the lifeforce in the relationship. When you’re really honest with yourself, when you look back with clear vision, that life, that love you gave and felt, was never fully reciprocated.

At the beginning of the twentieth century we understood the workings of nature on the scales of classical physics that are good down to about a hundredth of a millimetre. The work on atomic physics in the first thirty years of the century took our understanding down to lengths of a millionth of a millimetre. Since then, research on nuclear and high-energy physics has taken us to length scales that are smaller by a further factor of a billion. It might seem that we could go on forever discovering structures on smaller and smaller length scales. However, there is a limit to this series as with a series of nested Russian dolls. Eventually one gets down to a smallest doll, which can’t be taken apart any more. In physics the smallest doll is called the Planck length and is a millimetre divided by a 100,000 billion billion billion. We are not about to build particle accelerators that can probe to distances that small.

A large brand will typically spend between 10 and 20 percent of their media buy on creative,” DeJulio explains. “So if they have a $500 million media budget, there’s somewhere between $50 to $100 million going toward creating content. For that money they’ll get seven to ten pieces of content, but not right away. If you’re going to spend $1 million on one piece of content, it’s going to take a long time—six months, nine months, a year—to fully develop. With this budget and timeline, brands have no margin to take chances creatively.” By contrast, the Tongal process: If a brand wants to crowdsource a commercial, the first step is to put up a purse—anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000. Then, Tongal breaks the project into three phases: ideation, production, and distribution, allowing creatives with different specialties (writing, directing, animating, acting, social media promotion, and so on) to focus on what they do best. In the first competition—the ideation phase—a client creates a brief describing its objective. Tongal members read the brief and submit their best ideas in 500 characters (about three tweets). Customers then pick a small number of ideas they like and pay a small portion of the purse to these winners. Next up is production, where directors select one of the winning concepts and submit their take. Another round of winners are selected and these folks are given the time and money to crank out their vision. But this phase is not just limited to these few winning directors. Tongal also allows anyone to submit a wild card video. Finally, sponsors select their favorite video (or videos), the winning directors get paid, and the winning videos get released to the world. Compared to the seven to ten pieces of content the traditional process produces, Tongal competitions generate an average of 422 concepts in the idea phase, followed by an average of 20 to 100 finished video pieces in the video production phase. That is a huge return for the invested dollars and time.

Moment, momentum, momentous If you reduce sports to its smallest discrete units, its subatomic particles, you're left with protons and electrons and neutrons called moments. They're the building blocks of every season, every game, every series of downs. Two or more moments may accrete into something more, a propulsive energy called momentum, which in turn can snowball into something greater still, that which is momentous. Consider those consecutive moments last Aug. 4 (2012 summer Olympics) in London, when Michael Phelps-in his final Olympic race-caught and then overtook Japan's Takeshi Matsuda on the butterfly leg of the men's 4 x 100 medley relay. Momentum passed to Phelps's U.S. teammate Nathan Adrian, who pulled away on the freestyle leg, sealing a victory that yielded Phelps's 18th gold medal, and 22nd medal overall, more than any other Olympian in history. It was like the conjugation of some Latin verb: moment, momentum, momentous. Or if you prefer: Veni, vidi, vici (we came, we saw, we conquered). From "moments of the year

So let’s make this work for us. This Ice Breaker requires that you find large groups of negative people. (In Texas, we call these people family and friends.) Next, you are going to listen to them whine, moan and complain. When they finally take a breath, you’re going to say these exact words: “Would you like to do something about it?” Let’s review. The prospect: 1. Has a problem 2. Knows he has a problem. 3. You have given him a choice, to fix the problem or not. You’re done! What are the two possible answers? “Yes” or “No.” If they say, “Yes, I’d like to do something about it,” ka-ching! You are done. Take the money for their product order, fill out the application, whatever you need to do. The prospect has made a decision to fix his problem. I love this. In a room of 100 people, I can quickly locate the 20 or 30 people who want to fix their problems. Just a simple question: “Do you want to do something about it?” Everything else is easy. Now, they could say, “No, I don’t want to do something about it.” Then I simply say, “And what else bothers you?” The prospect will continue with more negative stuff in his life, but I’ll quietly slip away at the first opportunity.

Then came a series of wondrous discoveries, beginning in 1924, by Edwin Hubble, a colorful and engaging astronomer working with the 100-inch reflector telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory in the mountains above Pasadena, California. The first was that the blur known as the Andromeda nebula was actually another galaxy, about the size of our own, close to a million light years away (we now know it’s more than twice that far). Soon he was able to find at least two dozen even more distant galaxies (we now believe that there are more than 100 billion of them). Hubble then made an even more amazing discovery. By measuring the red shift of the stars’ spectra (which is the light wave counterpart to the Doppler effect for sound waves), he realized that the galaxies were moving away from us. There were at least two possible explanations for the fact that distant stars in all directions seemed to be flying away from us: (1) because we are the center of the universe, something that since the time of Copernicus only our teenage children believe; (2) because the entire metric of the universe was expanding, which meant that everything was stretching out in all directions so that all galaxies were getting farther away from one another. It became clear that the second explanation was the case when Hubble confirmed that, in general, the galaxies were moving away from us at a speed that was proportional to their distance from us. Those twice as far moved away twice as fast, and those three times as far moved away three times as fast.

Fifty judges from various districts were asked to set sentences for defendants in hypothetical cases summarized in identical pre-sentence reports. The basic finding was that “absence of consensus was the norm” and that the variations across punishments were “astounding.” A heroin dealer could be incarcerated for one to ten years, depending on the judge. Punishments for a bank robber ranged from five to eighteen years in prison. The study found that in an extortion case, sentences varied from a whopping twenty years imprisonment and a $65,000 fine to a mere three years imprisonment and no fine. Most startling of all, in sixteen of twenty cases, there was no unanimity on whether any incarceration was appropriate. This study was followed by a series of others, all of which found similarly shocking levels of noise. In 1977, for example, William Austin and Thomas Williams conducted a survey of forty-seven judges, asking them to respond to the same five cases, each involving low-level offenses. All the descriptions of the cases included summaries of the information used by judges in actual sentencing, such as the charge, the testimony, the previous criminal record (if any), social background, and evidence relating to character. The key finding was “substantial disparity.” In a case involving burglary, for example, the recommended sentences ranged from five years in prison to a mere thirty days (alongside a fine of $100). In a case involving possession of marijuana, some judges recommended prison terms; others recommended probation.

The river’s isolation and secrecy, however, were only part of what made it superlative. There was also its vertical drop. The Colorado’s watershed encompasses a series of high-desert plateaus that stretch across the most austere and hostile quarter of the West, an area encompassing one-twelfth the landmass of the continental United States, whose breadth and average height are surpassed only by the highlands of Tibet. Each winter, storms lumbering across the Great Basin build up a thick snowpack along the crest of the mountains that line the perimeter of this plateau—an immense, sickle-shaped curve of peaks whose summits exceed fourteen thousand feet. As the snowmelt cascades off those summits during the spring and spills toward the Sea of Cortés, the water drops more than two and a half miles. That amounts to eight vertical feet per horizontal mile, an angle that is thirty-two times steeper than that of the Mississippi. The grade is unequaled by any major waterway in the contiguous United States and very few long stretches of river beyond the Himalayas. (The Nile, in contrast, falls only six thousand feet in its entire four-thousand-mile trek to the Mediterranean.) Also unlike the Nile, whose discharge is generated primarily by rain, the engine that drives almost all of this activity is snow. This means that the bulk of the Colorado’s discharge tends to come down in one headlong rush. Throughout the autumn and the winter, the river might trickle through the canyonlands of southern Utah at a mere three thousand cubic feet per second. With the melt-out in late May and early June, however, the river’s flow can undergo spectacular bursts of change. In the space of a week, the level can easily surge to 30,000 cfs, and a few days after that it can once again rocket up, surpassing 100,000 cfs. Few rivers on earth can match such manic swings from benign trickle to insane torrent. But the story doesn’t end there, because these savage transitions are exacerbated by yet another unusual phenomenon, one that is a direct outgrowth of the region’s unusual climate and terrain. On