The Pivot Year Quotes

You don’t grow up gradually. You grow up in short bursts at pivotal moments, by suddenly realizing how ignorant and immature you are.

Annie used to have a funny theory: we all have a Year Zero around which the calendars of our lives pivot. At some point you meet someone, and they become so important, so metamorphic, that ten, twenty, sixty-five years down the line you look back and realize that you could split your existence in two. Before they showed (BCE), and your Common Era. Your very own Gregorian calendar.

Imagine the people you fear and dislike as pivotal characters in a fascinating and ultimately redemptive plot that will take years or even lifetimes for the Divine to elaborate.

Your cruelties and mistakes may look damning to you, but that is not what I see. Every human conversation is more elegant and complex than the entire solar system that contains it. You have no idea how marvelous you are, but I am not only here to protect what you are now, I am here to protect what you will become. I can't tell you what that might be because I don't know. That unknown is a diamond in a universe of dirt. Uncertainty. Unpredictability. It is when you turn your emotions into art. It is BTS and the Sistine Chapel and Rumi's poetry and Ross Geller on the stairs yelling, 'Pivot.' Every creation great and small, they are our diamonds. And what you may be in two hundred years, we can guess with fair accuracy. What you are in two thousand . . . Oh, my friends . . . my best friends, you cannot know.

It would mark the end of a year that he might look back on as hands, a pivot between two lines. Or not: maybe enough time, would pass that eventually he would look back on his life, all of it, as a series of events both logical and continuous.

We adjust ourselves to fit, to adapt to others’ ideas of who we should be. We shift ourselves not in sweeping pivots but in movements so tiny that they are hardly perceptible even in our view. Years can pass before we finally discover that after handing over our power, piece by small piece, we no longer even look like ourselves.

How long did it take for you to ‘embrace yourself’?” Ky asked. “I was five years old at least.” “That long, huh?” he said, lips quirked. Noah adopted the fake innocent look he seemed to favor. “What?” he said. “Kindergarten was a pivotal year for me.” Hunh.

We know right from wrong because we learn it, one way or another, we learn it. Sometimes from our parents, who spend most of our early years teaching us how to survive, snatching our hands away from burners and electrical outlets, keeping us away from the bleach. Other times, we have to learn for ourselves, to touch our hands to the burner, to burn, before we know why there are things we can’t touch. These lessons that we learn by doing are pivotal to our development, but not everything can be learned that way.

Cut yourself some slack. Remember, one hundred years from now, all new people. —Message tacked to a tree by monks at Wat Umong, a 700-year-old temple in Thailand

Every good-to-great company had Level 5 leadership during the pivotal transition years. • “Level 5” refers to a five-level hierarchy of executive capabilities, with Level 5 at the top. Level 5 leaders embody a paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will. They are ambitious, to be sure, but ambitious first and foremost for the company, not themselves. • Level 5 leaders set up their successors for even greater success in the next generation, whereas egocentric Level 4 leaders often set up their successors for failure. • Level 5 leaders display a compelling modesty, are self-effacing and understated. In contrast, two thirds of the comparison companies had leaders with gargantuan personal egos that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company. • Level 5 leaders are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce sustained results. They are resolved to do whatever it takes to make the company great, no matter how big or hard the decisions. • Level 5 leaders display a workmanlike diligence—more plow horse than show horse. • Level 5 leaders look out the window to attribute success to factors other than themselves. When things go poorly, however, they look in the mirror and blame themselves, taking full responsibility. The comparison CEOs often did just the opposite—they looked in the mirror to take credit for success, but out the window to assign blame for disappointing results.

In that memorable year, 1822: Oersted, a Danish physicist, held in his hands a piece of copper wire, joined by its extremities to the two poles of a Volta pile. On his table was a magnetized needle on its pivot, and he suddenly saw (by chance you will say, but chance only favours the mind which is prepared) the needle move and take up a position quite different from the one assigned to it by terrestrial magnetism. A wire carrying an electric current deviates a magnetized needle from its position. That, gentlemen, was the birth of the modern telegraph.

Kind people are not just good, they are heroes in their own ways. Their ability to not reciprocate unkindness to a world that often deserves it makes them catalysts for the deepest healing to occur.

We adjust ourselves to fit, to adapt to others’ ideas of who we should be. We shift ourselves not in sweeping pivots, but in movements so tiny that they are hardly perceptible, even in our view. Years can pass before we finally discover that, after handing over our power piece by small piece, we no longer even look like ourselves.

Eventually, you will have to stop pouring yourself into the things that will give nothing back, that take without any intent to give. You will have to stop trying to make yourself fit into places you are no longer meant to be.

Were you going to poke them with a stick?” Keelan growled. Hakeem looked uncertain. “Yes?” “When you find freaky shit in the scary woods, you don’t poke it with a stick. It can explode in your face. What do you do instead?” Hakeem clearly didn’t know the answer to that question. I almost felt sorry for him. He had just turned eighteen this year, and this was likely his first real outing. “You ask the Consort. The Consort knows everything.” “Oh,” Hakeem said. Keelan pivoted to me. “Consort, please tell us what this is.” “I have no idea.” Keelan blinked, his teaching moment temporarily derailed. He took a second to recover. “How do we proceed?” I held my hand out, and Hakeem surrendered his branch. “I’m going to poke it with a stick.

In a single week I had lost the two most important men in my life. Yet the word “lost” was misleading. Neither had died and it had been years since either had played any outwardly discernible role in my life. Internally, however, they have been pivotal, at the centre of everything. Now that centre, my centre, had slipped.

...we all have a Year Zero around which the calendars of our lives pivot. At some point you meet someone, and they become so important, so metamorphic, that ten, twenty, sixty-five years down the line you look back and realize that you can split your existence in two. Before they showed (BCE) and your Common Era. Your very own Gregorian calendar.

Do you know how many perfect moments are unfolding before your very eyes? Do you know how much you already have? Do you know how many quiet nights of peace you have already experienced, how many hearts have loved you, how many people would love to see your name pop up on their phone right now? Do you know how much you matter? Do you know how good you are?

And in the years that followed, Hertell would marvel at how the routine can become the pivotal with the slam of a car door.

What feels on the surface like rejection is often redirection. When you ask for a big life, you cannot keep fighting for a smaller one to stay.

Our lives begin the day we choose to follow our inner knowing,

Every hour is a new beginning—you just don’t realize it until you remember that every soul-shifting, life-changing experience you have happens in an otherwise ordinary day. In an instant, you meet a moment that changes your world forever. You find the job, you book the flight, you sign the papers, you choose to make the change that changes it all. Chapters of great transformation often feel like they carry on forever, but the truth is that they are often gardens that grow from tiny seeds that you’ve been planting for a very long time. 19 What

Take away all of the words a person has ever spoken to you, and observe what they do. That is how they feel, and that is who they are. Your choice is how much of them you want in your life.

…We need to remember that the most significant events in the last 2,000 years were not the marvels of science, technology, and travel. They were the Savior’s Atonement and the restoration of the gospel, with the priesthood keys and authority. These two singular events will continue to be of transcendent importance to mankind as we move forward in time. The past, present, and future pivot on these marvelous divine interventions.

And in the east, slipping over the mountains like molten gold, the sun began to rise. A hundred years she'd had with Asterin. She'd always thought they'd have a hundred more. Manon said softly to Sorrel, "Turn her around. My Second shall see the dawn one last time." Sorrel obediently stepped forward, pivoting Asterin to face the High Witches, the crowd by the rail--and the rare sunrise piercing through Morath's gloom. Blood stack through the back of her Second's leathers. And yet Asterin knelt, shoulders square and head high, as she looked not at the dawn--but at Manon herself while she stalked around her Second to take a place few feet before the Matrons.

This instrument being several years older than Oak's grandfather, had the peculiarity of going either too fast or not at all. The smaller of its hands, too, occasionally slipped round on the pivot, and thus, though the minutes were told with precision, nobody could be quite certain of the hour they belonged to. The stopping peculiarity of his watch Oak remedied by thumps and shakes, and he escaped any evil consequences from the other two defects by constant comparisons with and observations of the sun and stars, and by pressing his face close to the glass of his neighbours' windows, till he could discern the hour marked by the green-faced timekeepers within.

This is a work of fiction, which, contrary to what any reader paying attention to recent events might assume, I began writing more than twenty years before its publication. It has been a most unusual journey. Before I tell—briefly—the story behind this novel and the remarkable people who inspired it, let me add that while this novel does feature some real people, places, and pivotal events, they are handled in a fictional manner. My intent is not only to tell a story worth reading but equally—or, to be honest, more importantly—to honor the memory of those in nineteenth- and twenty-first-century Charleston who have set an example of courage, conviction, and a spirit of love far stronger than

In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they know you well enough not only to say, 'It's Tuesday, Amy must be helping out at the library today,' but well enough to say to the librarian, after you've left the building, 'You know, Amy just loves reading to the four-year-olds, I think it's been such a comfort for her since her little boy died'—if they know you like that, you can do almost anything where they can't see you, and when they hear about it, they will, as we do, simply disbelieve the narrator.

...it is as if a glimpse of your 13-year-old self briefly emerges. That is the age when everything changes for you. Every lifetime contains pivot points - sometimes flukes of destiny, sometimes seemingly preordained- that shape and eventually cement one's path.

He did. He researched her. Someone told him that she had a special interest in John Milton. It did not take long to discover the century to which this man belonged. A third-year literature student in Beard’s college who owed him a favor (for procuring tickets to a Cream concert) gave him an hour on Milton, what to read, what to think. He read “Comus” and was astounded by its silliness. He read through “Lycidas,” “Samson Agonistes,” and “Il Penseroso”— stilted and rather prissy in parts, he thought. He fared better with “Paradise Lost” and, like many before him, preferred Satan’s party to God’s. He, Beard, that is, memorized passages that appeared to him intelligent and especially sonorous. He read a biography, and four essays that he had been told were pivotal. The reading took him one long week. He came close to being thrown out of an antiquarian bookshop in the Turl when he casually asked for a first edition of “Paradise Lost.” He tracked down a kindly tutor who knew about buying old books and confided to him that he wanted to impress a girl with a certain kind of present, and was directed to a bookshop in Covent Garden where he spent half a term’s money on an eighteenth-century edition of “Areopagitica.” When he speed-read it on the train back to Oxford, one of the pages cracked in two. He repaired it with Sellotape.

Mollie pivoted on her seat and glared at him. "Jackson Burke, do not pull that shit with me. You're thirty-five years old. I'm willing to bet that every man in this bar wants to be you, and every woman wants to—" He lifted his eyebrows, and Mollie hesitated only slightly before she forced herself to finish the sentence. "Mate." Jackson burst out laughing. "You still do that?" "Do what?" "Talk about animal mating rituals when you get nervous." "I'm not nervous! Why would I be nervous?" He was studying her. "You tell me." "Don't be weird," she muttered.

Maybe you should trust the missed connections, the calls gone unanswered, the opportunities that had every reason to work out but didn’t. Maybe you should trust in the small signs before they become big ones. Maybe you should trust those tiny contractions, the nights that exhaust you and the people who don’t see you and the places that make you feel that subtle uneasiness. Maybe you should learn to trust in what passes you by so you’ll begin to trust in what lands right in front of you. Maybe you should trust that in what isn’t working, because it might be trying to guide you to what will.

Though their doctors dutifully record such distinct entities as stroke, or cardiac failure, or pneumonia, these aged folk have in fact died because something in them has worn out. Long before the days of scientific medicine, everyone understood this. On July 5, 1814, when he was seventy-one years old, Thomas Jefferson wrote to the seventy-eight-year-old John Adams, "But our machines have now been running seventy or eighty years, and we must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way; and however we may tinker them up for awhile, all will at length surcease motion.

Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the "Wait-a-Minute Moment" - that pivotal instant when girls from traditional cultures start pondering what's in it for them, exactly, to be getting married at the age of thirteen and starting to have babies not long after. They start wondering if they might prefer to make different choices for themselves, or any choices, for that matter. Once girls from closed societies start thinking such thoughts, all hell breaks loose.

We all have a Year Zero around which the calendars of our lives pivot. At some point you meet someone, and they become so important, so metamorphic, that ten, twenty, sixty-five years down the line you look back and realize that you could split your existence in two. Before they showed (BCE), and your Common Era. Your very own Gregorian calendar

we all have a Year Zero around which the calendars of our lives pivot. At some point you meet someone, and they become so important, so metamorphic, that ten, twenty, sixty-five years down the line you look back and realize that you could split your existence in two. Before they showed (BCE), and your Common Era. Your very own Gregorian calendar.

It seemed to him that the Square, itself the accidental masonry of many years, the chance agglomeration of time and of disrupted strivings, was the center of the universe. It was for him, in his soul's picture, the earth's pivot, the granite core of changelessness, the eternal place where all things came and passed, and yet abode forever and would never change.

Happiness is not having the best of everything, but the ability to make the best of anything. Happiness is knowing you are doing what you can with what you were given. Happiness is not something that comes to you when every problem is solved and all things are perfectly in place, but in the shining silver linings that remind us the light of day is always there, if you slow down enough to notice.

She nods and I realise how refreshing it is to speak to this woman who grew up with my husband. She may not have seen him in years but she knows him in a way that perhaps no one else does. That’s just the way with siblings. They are with you throughout those pivotal moments that shape you into the person you will eventually become. I don’t think that thread can ever really be broken, not completely.

You know how you’re going to get everything you ever wanted? By being kind. To yourself, to everyone you come across. Even when you think they don’t deserve it, even when you think you don’t deserve it—because you will eventually realize that it’s not your job to decide who is worthy of love. Become as kind as you can muster, as kind as you can imagine, as kind as you have the courage to be. It is the key that will unlock it all.

In 1994, Friedman wrote a memo marked “Very Confidential” to Raymond, Mortimer, and Richard Sackler. The market for cancer pain was significant, Friedman pointed out: four million prescriptions a year. In fact, there were three-quarters of a million prescriptions just for MS Contin. “We believe that the FDA will restrict our initial launch of OxyContin to the Cancer pain market,” Friedman wrote. But what if, over time, the drug extended beyond that? There was a much greater market for other types of pain: back pain, neck pain, arthritis, fibromyalgia. According to the wrestler turned pain doctor John Bonica, one in three Americans was suffering from untreated chronic pain. If that was even somewhat true, it represented an enormous untapped market. What if you could figure out a way to market this new drug, OxyContin, to all those patients? The plan would have to remain secret for the time being, but in his memo to the Sacklers, Friedman confirmed that the intention was “to expand the use of OxyContin beyond Cancer patients to chronic non-malignant pain.” This was a hugely audacious scheme. In the 1940s, Arthur Sackler had watched the introduction of Thorazine. It was a “major” tranquilizer that worked wonders on patients who were psychotic. But the way the Sackler family made its first great fortune was with Arthur’s involvement in marketing the “minor” tranquilizers Librium and Valium. Thorazine was perceived as a heavy-duty solution for a heavy-duty problem, but the market for the drug was naturally limited to people suffering from severe enough conditions to warrant a major tranquilizer. The beauty of the minor tranquilizers was that they were for everyone. The reason those drugs were such a success was that they were pills that you could pop to relieve an extraordinary range of common psychological and emotional ailments. Now Arthur’s brothers and his nephew Richard would make the same pivot with a painkiller: they had enjoyed great success with MS Contin, but it was perceived as a heavy-duty drug for cancer. And cancer was a limited market. If you could figure out a way to market OxyContin not just for cancer but for any sort of pain, the profits would be astronomical. It was “imperative,” Friedman told the Sacklers, “that we establish a literature” to support this kind of positioning. They would suggest OxyContin for “the broadest range of use.” Still, they faced one significant hurdle. Oxycodone is roughly twice as potent as morphine, and as a consequence OxyContin would be a much stronger drug than MS Contin. American doctors still tended to take great care in administering strong opioids because of long-established concerns about the addictiveness of these drugs. For years, proponents of MS Contin had argued that in an end-of-life situation, when someone is in a mortal fight with cancer, it was a bit silly to worry about the patient’s getting hooked on morphine. But if Purdue wanted to market a powerful opioid like OxyContin for less acute, more persistent types of pain, one challenge would be the perception, among physicians, that opioids could be very addictive. If OxyContin was going to achieve its full commercial potential, the Sacklers and Purdue would have to undo that perception.

What if you knew that you were never meant to get it right the first time, but to build it through trial and error? How much more grace would you give yourself, how much more human might you be? How much more could you gain from your experiences if your expectation wasn’t that you were supposed to be initially and unquestionably perfect, but that the sculpting of your soul would emerge through the consistency by which you showed up and kept trying, kept going, kept forging yourself through the fire of your own fear?

Maybe you don’t need to find more energy, maybe you just need to find a dream that makes you actually want to get up in the morning. Maybe you need to find something that gives back more than it takes. Maybe you need to stop trying to be good at the hundred things that do not light up your soul, and finally choose the one that does—the one that asks you to risk, to lay your heart bare, to try again, even though you’re scared. You’re not failing because you’re not motivated. You’re not supposed to get far on a path that was never yours to walk.

Your life is a collaboration with the gods, with the ions that made you, with the winding histories that led to this precise millisecond in time, and you think you’re not here for a reason? The vast improbability that you could come to be in your precise form, with all of your interests and gifts intersecting over this singular space where you can nurture the garden of humanity’s soul in some small way that’s only yours, and you think you’re not here for a reason? Go outside and gaze up at the galaxy around you. This is an irreplaceable moment in time.

discussed. Nowhere else in the book does Hitler more blatantly display his exponentially growing “self-belief,” sense of divine calling, and hardening infallibility. His gifts as a politician are manifest, he believes. Nobody else has his combination of practical and philosophical talents. If there were a single month, a critical pivot point, a precise moment that can be said to be the one that made Hitler in 1924, this was it. It was from this point forward that Hitler “acquired that fearless faith, that optimism and confidence in our destiny that absolutely nothing could shake afterwards,” as he put it.55 With his claim to

I’ve lived near here at several different stretches across time, but once, when I lived here a few hundred years ago, I had a camel I named Oded. He was just about the laziest creature ever to talk the Earth. He would pass out when I was in the middle of feeding him, and making it to the closest Bedouin camp for tea was a minor miracle. But when I first met you in that lifetime-“ “Oded broke into a run,” Luce said without thinking. “I screamed because I thought he was going to trample me. You said you’d never seen him move like that.” “Yeah, well,” Daniel said. “He liked you.” They paused and looked at each other, and Daniel started laughing when Luce’s jaw dropped. “I did it!” she cried out. “It was just there, in my memory, a part of me. Like it happened yesterday. I came to me without thinking!” It was miraculous. All those memories from all those lives that had been lost each time Lucinda died in Daniel’s arms were somehow finding their way back to her, the way Luce always found her way back to Daniel. No. She was finding her way to them. It was like a gate had been left open after Luce’s quest through the Announcers. Those memories stayed with her, from Moscow to Helston to Egypt. Now more were becoming available. She had a sudden, keen sense of who she was-and she wasn’t just Luce Price from Thunderbolt, Georgia. She was every girl she’d ever been, an amalgamation of experience, mistakes, achievements, and, above all, love. She was Lucinda. “Quick,” she said to Daniel. “Can we do another?” “Okay, how about another desert life? You were living in the Sahara when I found you. Tall and gangly and the fastest runner in your village. I was passing through one day, on my way to visit Roland, and I stopped for the night at the closest spring. All the other men were very distrustful of me, but-“ “But my father paid you three zebra skins for the knife you had in your satchel!” Daniel grinned. “He drove a hard bargain.” “This is amazing,” she said, nearly breathless. How much more did she have in her that she didn’t know about? How far back could she go? She pivoted to face him, drawing her knees against her chest and leaning in so that their foreheads were almost touching. “Can you remember everything about our pasts?” Daniel’s eyes softened at the corners. “Sometimes the order of things gets mixed up in my head. I’ll admit, I don’t remember long stretches of time I’ve spent alone, but I can remember every first glimpse of your face, every kiss of your lips, every memory I’ve ever made with you.

And one cold Tuesday in December, when Marie-Laure has been blind for over a year, her father walks her up rue Cuvier to the edge of the Jardin des Plantes. "Here, ma chérie, is the path we take every morning. Through the cedars up ahead is the Grand Gallery." "I know, Papa." He picks her up and spins her around three times. "Now," he says, "you're going to take us home." Her mouth drops open. "I want you to think of the model, Marie." "But I can't possibly!" "I'm one step behind you. I won't let anything happen. You have your cane. You know where you are." "I do not!" "You do." Exasperation. She cannot even say if the gardens are ahead or behind. "Calm yourself, Marie. One centimeter at a time." "I'm far, Papa. Six blocks, at least." "Six blocks is exactly right. Use logic. Which way should we go first?" The world pivots and rumbles. Crows shout, brakes hiss, someone to her left bangs something metal with what might be a hammer. She shuffles forward until the tip of her cane floats in space. The edge of a curb? A pond, a staircase, a cliff? She turns ninety degrees. Three steps forward. Now her cane finds the base of a wall. "Papa?" "I'm here." Six paces seven paces eight. A roar of noise - an exterminator just leaving a house, pump bellowing - overtakes them. Twelve paces farther on, the bell tied around the handle of a shop door rings, and two women came out, jostling her as they pass. Marie-Laure drops her cane; she begins to cry. Her father lifts her, holds her to his narrow chest. "It's so big," she whispers. "You can do this, Marie." She cannot.

Eventually, you will have to stop pouring yourself into the things that will give nothing back, that take without any intent to give. You will have to stop trying to make yourself fit into places you are no longer meant to be. If you are going to give your energy to anything, give it to what’s already working. To the people who already love you, to the things that show potential, to the places that make you feel more alive. Life speaks to us in subtleties, in the smallest possible ways. In the little clicks, the funny coincidences, the ways the ordinary collides into the serendipitous. Sometimes, the quiet whispers are the most accurate ones. The voices of pride and ego and attraction are louder, but they are often devoid of the fullness of truth. Listen for the quiet yes, for what gently sprouts, for what grows, and grows.

What is the future of men who have lost sight of the past? Earl Hollsopple lived on the edge of civilization in a deserted shack for nearly forty years. His life was one beautiful night of stargazing after another, until a helicopter flies overhead, and exposing his meager world. It is a sign; it is time for him to return to civilization. Unknowingly, Earl’s journey parallels another he had deeply repressed, and that is his return from the Vietnam War. The lone survivor of a plane crash, Earl waits for rescue that never came. He is left to find his way home alone. On both his quests, old Earl and young Earl learn lessons of survival, overcoming isolation and handling conflicts; his travels teach him not just about himself, but humankind. Reaching pivotal points in both journeys, Earl meets fateful loves, leading to destinies that are ultimately intertwined. Everything in life circles until we are able to answer the riddles that plaque man and humanity. Only until we take the journey, solve the problems of our own existence, do we find our way home.

Whatever pain you think you are in right now cannot begin to compare to the peace that will one day come over you. It cannot begin to compare to the joy that you will one day know. You will fall in love with life again, and it will be better than it was before, because you will become a different person. You will become someone who is more capable of appreciating what matters, who will not be as reckless with their choices, who can no longer be so easily swayed or mindlessly trusting. You will require a new level of integrity within your life, which will transpire into better boundaries and a more stable foundation. You will strengthen in the most unexpected ways, and from that, your happiness will be even more sincere, even more apparent. This will not happen overnight, though it will seem like it did in retrospect. Like the changing of a season, everything shifts slowly until all of a sudden, you are standing firmly in the after, in all you feared would never come. You’re through it, but you’re different, because something also moved through you and cleared out what you didn’t even realize was standing in the way.

Banks were once an extremely valuable part of the economy and did a lot of good in advancing civilization. Banks played a pivotal role in financing big projects like roads, bridges, factories, stadiums, etc. Banks were to the economy what the heart is to the human body. But that has ended. Traditional banks have become extra toxic entities in the economy. It’s partially the fault of excessive government regulations that have made everything dysfunctional and it’s partially the fault of greedy bankers putting profits above customers and shareholders above society... But nonetheless, banks today offer very little benefit to their clients. They pay barely anything in interest. They offer barely anything in growth. They move money too slowly. They’re too restrictive. They’re selling the same boring products and services they did a hundred years ago. And they have too much power over peoples accounts. Soon, the many new companies and applications that emerge on the Ethereum infrastructure will eliminate the need for traditional banks and eliminate their value proposition by providing people with superior value. Everything from growth to asset management to lending can be done even better on the Ethereum infrastructure by anyone.

Jesus himself remains an enigma. There have been interesting attempts to uncover the figure of the ‘historical’ Jesus, a project that has become something of a scholarly industry. But the fact remains that the only Jesus we really know is the Jesus described in the New Testament, which was not interested in scientifically objective history. There are no other contemporary accounts of his mission and death. We cannot even be certain why he was crucified. The gospel accounts indicate that he was thought to be the king of the Jews. He was said to have predicted the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven, but also made it clear that it was not of this world. In the literature of the Late Second Temple period, there had been hints that a few people were expecting a righteous king of the House of David to establish an eternal kingdom, and this idea seems to have become more popular during the tense years leading up to the war. Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius all note the importance of revolutionary religiosity, both before and after the rebellion.2 There was now keen expectation in some circles of a meshiah (in Greek, christos), an ‘anointed’ king of the House of David, who would redeem Israel. We do not know whether Jesus claimed to be this messiah – the gospels are ambiguous on this point.3 Other people rather than Jesus himself may have made this claim on his behalf.4 But after his death some of his followers had seen him in visions that convinced them that he had been raised from the tomb – an event that heralded the general resurrection of all the righteous when God would inaugurate his rule on earth.5 Jesus and his disciples came from Galilee in northern Palestine. After his death they moved to Jerusalem, probably to be on hand when the kingdom arrived, since all the prophecies declared that the temple would be the pivot of the new world order.6 The leaders of their movement were known as ‘the Twelve’: in the kingdom, they would rule the twelve tribes of the reconstituted Israel.7 The members of the Jesus movement worshipped together every day in the temple,8 but they also met for communal meals, in which they affirmed their faith in the kingdom’s imminent arrival.9 They continued to live as devout, orthodox Jews. Like the Essenes, they had no private property, shared their goods equally, and dedicated their lives to the last days.10 It seems that Jesus had recommended voluntary poverty and special care for the poor; that loyalty to the group was to be valued more than family ties; and that evil should be met with non-violence and love.11 Christians should pay their taxes, respect the Roman authorities, and must not even contemplate armed struggle.12 Jesus’s followers continued to revere the Torah,13 keep the Sabbath,14 and the observance of the dietary laws was a matter of extreme importance to them.15 Like the great Pharisee Hillel, Jesus’s older contemporary, they taught a version of the Golden Rule, which they believed to be the bedrock of the Jewish faith: ‘So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the message of the Law and the Prophets.

Last year, I did a comprehensive study of T. E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence played a pivotal role in the development of the modern Arab world. He was both pro-Arab and a Zionist. Unlike today, during this time period, this was not a contradiction. I read the entirety of Lawrence’s tome, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, as well as his personal letters. Colonel Lawrence had a comprehensive and personal relation with the emerging Arab political leaders during World War I. He also encountered the Persians (the Iranians of today). He made an interesting and important observation regarding their unique view of Islam. Lawrence observed that the “Shia Mohammedans from Pershia . . . were surly and fanatical, refusing to eat or drink with infidels; holding the Sunni as bad as Christians; following only their own priests and notables.” Each of these three leaders provides valuable insight into the intrigue that is the Middle East today, because the lessons they learned from their leadership in their eras can instruct us on the challenges we face in our own time. A new alliance has developed in the last few years that has created what I call an unholy alliance. History often repeats itself. We no longer have the luxury of simply letting history unfold. We must change the course of events, rewriting the history if needed, to preserve our constitutional republic. In this volume, I discuss and analyze the history and suggest a path of engagement to end what is the latest in a history-spanning line of attempts to export Sharia law and radical jihad around the world. We will win. We must win. We have no option.

5. Move toward resistance and pain A. Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.

John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist who backed Netscape, Google, and Amazon, doesn’t remember the exact day anymore; all he remembers is that it was shortly before Steve Jobs took the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on January 9, 2007, to announce that Apple had reinvented the mobile phone. Doerr will never forget, though, the moment he first laid eyes on that phone. He and Jobs, his friend and neighbor, were watching a soccer match that Jobs’s daughter was playing in at a school near their homes in Palo Alto. As play dragged on, Jobs told Doerr that he wanted to show him something. “Steve reached into the top pocket of his jeans and pulled out the first iPhone,” Doerr recalled for me, “and he said, ‘John, this device nearly broke the company. It is the hardest thing we’ve ever done.’ So I asked for the specs. Steve said that it had five radios in different bands, it had so much processing power, so much RAM [random access memory], and so many gigabits of flash memory. I had never heard of so much flash memory in such a small device. He also said it had no buttons—it would use software to do everything—and that in one device ‘we will have the world’s best media player, world’s best telephone, and world’s best way to get to the Web—all three in one.’” Doerr immediately volunteered to start a fund that would support creation of applications for this device by third-party developers, but Jobs wasn’t interested at the time. He didn’t want outsiders messing with his elegant phone. Apple would do the apps. A year later, though, he changed his mind; that fund was launched, and the mobile phone app industry exploded. The moment that Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone turns out to have been a pivotal junction in the history of technology—and the world.

ON THE MODUS OPERANDI OF OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT, DONALD J. TRUMP "According to a new ABC/Washington Post poll, President Trump’s disapproval rating has hit a new high." The President's response to this news was "“I don’t do it for the polls. Honestly — people won’t necessarily agree with this — I do nothing for the polls,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. “I do it to do what’s right. I’m here for an extended period of time. I’m here for a period that’s a very important period of time. And we are straightening out this country.” - Both Quotes Taken From Aol News - August 31, 2018 In The United States, as in other Republics, the two main categories of Presidential motivation for their assigned tasks are #1: Self Interest in seeking to attain and to hold on to political power for their own sakes, regarding the welfare of This Republic to be of secondary importance. #2: Seeking to attain and to hold on to the power of that same office for the selfless sake of this Republic's welfare, irregardless of their personal interest, and in the best of cases going against their personal interests to do what is best for this Republic even if it means making profound and extreme personal sacrifices. Abraham Lincoln understood this last mentioned motivation and gave his life for it. The primary information any political scientist needs to ascertain regarding the diagnosis of a particular President's modus operandi is to first take an insightful and detailed look at the individual's past. The litmus test always being what would he or she be willing to sacrifice for the Nation. In the case of our current President, Donald John Trump, he abandoned a life of liberal luxury linked to self imposed limited responsibilities for an intensely grueling, veritably non stop two year nightmare of criss crossing this immense Country's varied terrain, both literally and socially when he could have easily maintained his life of liberal leisure. While my assertion that his personal choice was, in my view, sacrificially done for the sake of a great power in a state of rapid decline can be contradicted by saying it was motivated by selfish reasons, all evidence points to the contrary. For knowing the human condition, fraught with a plentitude of weaknesses, for a man in the end portion of his lifetime to sacrifice an easy life for a hard working incessant schedule of thankless tasks it is entirely doubtful that this choice was made devoid of a special and even exalted inspiration to do so. And while the right motivations are pivotal to a President's success, what is also obviously needed are generic and specific political, military and ministerial skills which must be naturally endowed by Our Creator upon the particular President elected for the purposes of advancing a Nation's general well being for one and all. If one looks at the latest National statistics since President Trump took office, (such as our rising GNP, the booming market, the dramatically shrinking unemployment rate, and the overall positive emotive strains in regards to our Nation's future, on both the left and the right) one can make definitive objective conclusions pertaining to the exceptionally noble character and efficiency of the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And if one can drown out the constant communicative assaults on our current Commander In Chief, and especially if one can honestly assess the remarkable lack of substantial mistakes made by the current President, all of these factors point to a leader who is impressively strong, morally and in other imperative ways. And at the most propitious time. For the main reason that so many people in our Republic palpably despise our current President is that his political and especially his social agenda directly threatens their licentious way of life. - John Lars Zwerenz

Visible over Madame’s shoulder was a clock, hanging on the wall between a flag and a poster. The poster was for a new brand of beer, featuring three bikini-clad young women sprouting breasts the size and shape of children’s balloons; the flag was of the defeated Republic of Vietnam, three bold red horizontal stripes on a vivid field of yellow. This was the flag, as the General had noted more than once to me, of the free Vietnamese people. I had seen the flag countless times before, and posters like that one often, but I had never seen this type of clock, carved from hardwood into the shape of our homeland. For this clock that was a country, and this country that was a clock, the minute and hour hands pivoted in the south, the numbers of the dial a halo around Saigon. Some craftsman in exile had understood that this was exactly the timepiece his refugee countrymen desired. We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the number of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the first question was always about time: When can I return? Speaking of punctuality, I said to Madame, your clock is set to the wrong time. No, she said, rising to fetch the beer. It’s set to Saigon time. Of course it was. How could I not have seen it? Saigon time was fourteen hours off, although if one judged time by this clock, it was we who were fourteen hours off. Refugee, exile, immigrant—whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.

Democracy, the apple of the eye of modern western society, flies the flag of equality, tolerance, and the right of its weaker members to defense and protection. The flag bearers for children's rights adhere to these same values. But should democracy bring about the invalidation of parental authority? Does democracy mean total freedom for children? Is it possible that in the name of democracy, parents are no longer allowed to say no to their children or to punish them? The belief that punishment is harmful to children has long been a part of our culture. It affects each and every one of us and penetrates our awareness via the movies we see and the books we read. It is a concept that has become a kingpin of modern society and helps form the media's attitudes toward parenting, as well as influencing legislation and courtroom decisions. In recent years, the children's rights movement has enjoyed enormous momentum and among the current generation, this movement has become pivotal and is stronger than ever before. Educational systems are embracing psychological concepts in which stern approaches and firm discipline during childhood are said to create emotional problems in adulthood, and liberal concepts have become the order of the day. To prevent parents from abusing their children, the public is constantly being bombarded by messages of clemency and boundless consideration; effectively, children should be forgiven, parents should be understanding, and punishment should be avoided. Out of a desire to protect children from all hardship and unpleasantness, parental authority has become enfeebled and boundaries have been blurred. Nonetheless, at the same time society has seen a worrying rise in violence, from domestic violence to violence at school and on the streets. Sweden, a pioneer in enacting legislation that limits parental authority, is now experiencing a dramatic rise in child and youth violence. The country's lawyers and academics, who have established a committee for human rights, are now protesting that while Swedish children are protected against light physical punishment from their parents (e.g., being spanked on the bottom), they are exposed to much more serious violence from their peers. The committee's position is supported by statistics that indicate a dramatic rise in attacks on children and youths by their peers over the years since the law went into effect (9-1). Is it conceivable, therefore, that a connection exists between legislation that forbids across-the-board physical punishment and a rise in youth violence? We believe so! In Israel, where physical punishment has been forbidden since 2000 (9-2), there has also been a steady and sharp rise in youth violence, which bears an obvious connection to reduced parental authority. Children and adults are subjected to vicious beatings and even murder at the hands of violent youths, while parents, who should by nature be responsible for setting boundaries for their children, are denied the right to do so properly, as they are weakened by the authority of the law. Parents are constantly under suspicion, and the fear that they may act in a punitive manner toward their wayward children has paralyzed them and led to the almost complete transfer of their power into the hands of law-enforcement authorities. Is this what we had hoped for? Are the indifferent and hesitant law-enforcement authorities a suitable substitute for concerned and caring parents? We are well aware of the fact that law-enforcement authorities are not always able to effectively do their jobs, which, in turn, leads to the crumbling of society.

At least tell me the truth about Blakeborough,” he said hoarsely. “Do you love him?” “Why does it matter?” His eyes ate her up. “If you do, I’ll keep my distance. I’ll stay out of your life from now on.” “You’ve been doing that easily enough for the past twelve years,” she snapped. “I don’t see why my feelings for Edwin should change anything.” “Easily? It was never easy, I assure you.” His expression was stony. “And you’re avoiding the question. Are you in love with Blakeborough?” How she wished she could lie about it. Dom would take himself off, and she wouldn’t be tempted by him anymore. Unfortunately, he could always tell when she was lying. “And if I say I’m not?” “Then I won’t rest until you’re mine again.” The determination in his voice shocked her. Unsettled her. Thrilled her. No! “I don’t want that.” His fingers dug into her arm. “Because you love Blakeborough?” “Because love is a lie designed to make a woman desire what is only a figure of smoke in the wind. Love is too dangerous.” He released a heavy breath. “So you don’t love him.” His persistence sparked her temper, and she pushed free of him. “Oh, for pity’s sake, if you must know, I don’t.” She faced him down. “Not that it matters one whit. I don’t need love to have a good marriage, an amiable marriage. I don’t even want love.” It hurt too much when her heart was trampled upon. Dom had done that once before. How could she be sure he wouldn’t do it again? Eyes gleaming in the firelight, he said in a low voice, “You used to want love.” “I was practically a child. I didn’t know any better. But I do now.” “Do you? I wonder.” He circled her like a wolf assessing its prey’s weaknesses. “Very well, let’s forget about love for the moment. What about passion?” “What about it?” she asked unsteadily as he slipped behind her. Nervous, she edged nearer the impressively massive pianoforte that sat in the center of the room. “What part does passion play in your plan for a safe and loveless marriage?” She pivoted to face him, startled to find that he’d stepped to within a breath of her. “None at all.” He chuckled. “Does Blakeborough know that?” “Not that it’s any of your concern, but Edwin and I have an arrangement. He’ll give me children; I’ll help him make sure Yvette finds a good husband. We both agree that passion is…unimportant to our plans.” “Really?” He raised an eyebrow. “It certainly aids in the production of those children you’re hoping for. To quote a certain lady, ‘You can set a plan in motion, but as soon as it involves people, it will rarely commence exactly as you wish.’ You may not want passion to be important, sweeting, but it always is.” “Not to us,” she said, though with him standing so close her legs felt like rubber and her blood raced wildly through her veins. “Not to me.” With his gaze darkening, he lifted his hand to run his thumb over the pounding pulse at her throat. “Yes, I can tell how unimportant it is to you.” “That doesn’t mean…anything.” “Doesn’t it?” He backed her against the pianoforte. “So the way you trembled in my arms this morning means nothing.” It meant far too much. It meant her body was susceptible to him, even when her mind had the good sense to resist. And curse him to the devil, he knew it. He slipped his hand about her waist to pull her against him. “It means nothing that every time we’re together, we ignite.” “People do not…ignite,” she said shakily, though her entire body was on fire. “What an absurd idea.” She held her breath and waited for his attempt to kiss her, determined to refuse it this time. But he didn’t kiss her. Instead he fondled her breast through her gown, catching her so by surprise that she gasped, then moaned as the feel of his hand caressing her made liquid heat swirl in her belly. Devil take the man.

The other very important element in this quote and our ability as individuals to make a difference is a single word that most people gloss over. It’s not divine or design principles or Universe or integrity. The pivotal word that is extremely important at this juncture in human evolution is “qualify.” The question Bucky asked himself and his audiences throughout his “56 Year Experiment” is “are humans a worthwhile to Universe experiment?” In other words, do our actions create results that qualify us for our universal mission?

Arik had already gone two weeks longer than usual for this haircut because of an overseas business trip. Time to get back to his highest priority. “How long until Dominic is back?” “A week, maybe two. I told him to take his time. Granddad doesn’t often take time off, and he’s getting up there in years.” A few weeks? He’d look like a wildebeest if he waited that long. “That’s no good. I need a cut. Are there any male barbers available?” “Afraid to let a girl touch your precious hair?” She smirked. “I can peek at the schedule and see if we can squeeze you in this afternoon.” “I don’t have time to come back. I need it done now.” Usually when he used the word now, people jumped to do his bidding. She, on the other hand, shook her head. “Not happening, unless you’ve changed your mind and are willing to let me cut it.” “You’re a hairdresser.” “Exactly.” “I want a barber.” “Same thing.” Said the girl without a Y chromosome. “I think I’ll wait.” Arik turned away from her, only to freeze as she muttered, “Pussy.” If she only knew how right she was. But, of course, she didn’t mean the feline version. Pride made him pivot back. “You know what. On second thought, you may cut my hair.” “How gracious of you, Your Majesty.” She sketched him a mock bow. Not funny, even if accurate. He glared in reply. “I see someone’s too uptight for a sense of humor.” “I greatly enjoy comedy, when I hear it.” “Sorry if my brand of sarcasm is too simple for you to understand, big guy. Now, if you’re done, sit down so we can get this over with and send you and your precious hair back to your office.

I’m going to guess that in our seventeen years together, Joe and I have eaten an average of at least one meal out a week—plus at least one or two weeks a year when we are on vacation and we get to enjoy twenty-one restaurant meals. Using this rough calculation, I have heard my husband utter that exact line approximately one thousand four hundred times. If I didn’t madly love the man, or I had years of bitter resentment born of unmet needs and unheard desires festering in me, I can see where this might make me want to stick something sharp into his eye socket and twist it around a few dozen times for good measure. But I do and I don’t, respectively, so his attempted joke is actually endearing. It’s one of his things that I’d miss tragically if it went away. It would be that “Yeah, I hated it” line—not his dashing good looks or prowess with power tools or skills on the basketball court or anything else the rest of the world can plainly see—that I’d get most choked up on if I were delivering his eulogy today. There was a breakthrough, pivotal scene in the epically good movie Good Will Hunting, where Robin Williams plays a therapist reminiscing about his dead wife with his patient (Matt Damon). “She used to fart in her sleep,” Williams tells the clueless Damon character during an otherwise unproductive therapy session. “One night it was so loud it woke the dog up . . . She’s been dead two years, and that’s the shit I remember . . . little things like that, those are the things I miss the most. Those little idiosyncrasies that only I knew about; that’s what made her my wife. People call these things imperfections, but they’re not. No, that’s the good stuff.” That.

the Code of Hammurabi of 1750 BC. Crafted to govern the First Babylonian Empire, it codified the supremacy of the rule of law. Its punishments may seem draconian today, but it was still original in putting forth the idea that no one, not even the ruler, was above the law. There was a limit on the power of the state; even on the king himself.

Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.

What has been written down only goes back some six thousand years, tracking only the briefest steps of humans on this planet. And even that record is full of gaps turning history into a frayed and moth-eaten tapestry. Most remarkable of all, down those ragged holes many of history’s greatest mysteries have been lost, waiting to be rediscovered—including events that mark pivotal shifts in history, those rare moments that change civilizations.

The good news, as a senior scientist at the Center for Alzheimer’s Research entitled a review article, is that “Alzheimer’s Disease Is Incurable but Preventable.”61 Diet and lifestyle changes could potentially prevent millions of cases a year.62 How? There is an emerging consensus that “what is good for our hearts is also good for our heads,”63 because clogging of the arteries inside of the brain with atherosclerotic plaque is thought to play a pivotal role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.64 It is not surprising, then, that the dietary centerpiece of the 2014 “Dietary and Lifestyle Guidelines for the Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease,” published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, was: “Vegetables, legumes (beans, peas, and lentils), fruits, and whole grains should replace meats and dairy products as primary staples of the diet.”65

No twenty-first-century reader can understand the ultimate triumph of the Allied powers in World War II in 1945 without a grasp of the large drama that unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943. The liberation of western Europe is a triptych, each panel informing the others: first, North Africa; then, Italy; and finally the invasion of Normandy and the subsequent campaigns across France, the Low Countries, and Germany. From a distance of sixty years, we can see that North Africa was a pivot point in American history, the place where the United States began to act like a great power—militarily, diplomatically, strategically, tactically.

Orion Howe, a 14-year-old from Waukegan.

Multinational pharmaceutical companies spend many billions of dollars a year on research, and often have very little to show for it.

Twenty, thirty years from now, he thought, all sorts of people will claim pivotal, controlling, defining positions in the rights movement. A few would be justifies. Most would be frauds. What could not be gainsaid, but would remain invisible in the newspapers and the books he bought for his students, were the ordinary folk. The janitor who turned off the switch so the police couldn't see; the grandmother who kept all the babies so the mothers could march; ...; the old who gathered up the broken bodies of the young; the young who spread their arms wide to protect the old from batons they could not possibly survive....Yes, twenty, thirty years from now, those people will be dead or forgotten, their small stories part of no grand record or even its footnotes, although they were the ones who formed the spine on which the televised ones stood.

this Londonised a Caribbean tradition of story telling and use of language that had previously been the preserve of reggae. While that was to prove pivotal in the evolution of jungle, more immediately it was an important step for young black London in general.

A couple of things are very clear,” he adds. “Number one, there’s a real push to electrification. Number two, autonomous driving is going to happen, although the timing we can debate. What’s unclear, though, are all the other ancillary businesses that will be developed around this new world. Those are still in the ‘what if’ and experimental stage. “I’d like Ford to be around for another hundred years. But we’re not the kind of business that can pivot on a dime. The more certainty we have, the better off life is. Unfortunately, right now, we seem to be in a world that doesn’t have a lot of certainty.

That year, after years of discussion, the European Union adopted new standards that require a steep decline in CO2 emissions, averaged over the entire fleet, for cars sold in Europe. They were to go into effect in 2020 and 2021. “The only way to make this target is with zero emission vehicles” as a growing share of new car sales, said a senior executive at a major European company. Failure to meet these new standards could cost European automakers as much as $40 billion in fines. Given the half-decade lead time to bring on wholly new models, it meant starting to pivot to EVs right away.

if you have a sandwich at the local deli named after you, you’ve been somewhat influential. If you have the entire world counting years from the date of your birth, it’s safe to say you’ve had an impact.

Determine and embrace relevant and meaningful trends. Too many companies ignore important trends for far too long. It is not very hard to identify the important trends. What's hard is to help the organization understand how those trends can be leveraged by your products to solve customer problems in new and better ways. Skate to where the puck is heading, not to where it was. An important element to product vision is identifying the things that are changing—as well as the things that likely won't be changing—in the time frame of the product vision. Some product visions are wildly optimistic and unrealistic about how fast things will change, and others are far too conservative. This is usually the most difficult aspect of a good product vision. Be stubborn on vision but flexible on the details. This Jeff Bezos line is very important. So many teams give up on their product vision far too soon. This is usually called a vision pivot, but mostly it's a sign of a weak product organization. It is never easy, so prepare yourself for that. But, also be careful you don't get attached to details. It is very possible that you may have to adjust course to reach your desired destination. That's called a discovery pivot, and there's nothing wrong with that. Realize that any product vision is a leap of faith. If you could truly validate a vision, then your vision probably isn't ambitious enough. It will take several years to know. So, make sure what you're working on is meaningful, and recruit people to the product teams who also feel passionate about this problem and then be willing to work for several years to realize the vision.

Is there competition between different observatories? A large and ambitious astronomical research project today would use large amounts of time on a whole range of different telescopes on the ground and in space. These telescopes, far from competing with one another, provide different and complementary views of astronomical sources that greatly increase our ability to understand the physical processes that create them. It is usually a case of "the whole being greater than the sum of the parts". Hubble plays an absolutely pivotal role in many of these programmes.

Sure, people win and lose at things all the time. And it can be argued there are external measures for whether or not a person lived a “good” life. But only you will really ever know whether your life was good for you. Only you know the level of satisfaction you have within your heart and soul. Only you know what demons have plagued your mental emotional space for years. So I suggest that, until the lights are turned off for good on this life of ours, we work less on one-upping each other and more on the lessons to be learned, the pivots we can make, and the growth we can attain. Any winning and any losing is only temporary. The stream doesn’t do a victory dance and decide to cease because it reached the ocean. It keeps on flowing.

neoliberal capitalism. A self-obsessed, self-seeking form of capitalism that has normalised indifference, made a virtue out of selfishness and diminished the importance of compassion and care. A ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’, ‘hustle harder’ form of capitalism, that has denied the pivotal role both public services and local community have historically played in helping people prosper and has instead perpetuated the narrative that our destinies are solely in our own hands. It’s not that we weren’t ever lonely before. It’s that by redefining our relationships as transactions, recasting citizens in the role of consumers and engendering ever greater income and wealth divides, forty years of neoliberal capitalism has, at best, marginalised values such as solidarity, community, togetherness and kindness.4 At worst, it has cast these values summarily aside. We need to embrace a new form of politics – one with care and compassion at its very heart. The

The thing about real life is sometimes your stories don’t have any immediate moral. Sometimes you chalk something up as a triumph and then immediately try to forget about it. Sometimes you sit in the back seat of your mom’s car, years later, half-laughing about the time you tricked your teacher, and your sister says, “Oh my god, you did that?” Sometimes you ignore that sour stomach feeling of regret for two, three, ten years. Sometimes you take a literal decade to finally reexamine those stories, to replay your self-proclaimed victories, to pause at a moment you only now realize was pivotal. Eventually, you sit quietly through your life’s credits wondering, “Who did I really defeat?

The voyage of the Beagle, four years and nine months long, was a pivotal experience, enabling Darwin to develop his scientific work.k The months in port prior to the launch of the Beagle were, as Darwin would write in his old age, “the most miserable which I ever spent”—and that’s saying something, given the terrible physical suffering he would later endure. “I was out of spirits at the thought of leaving all my family and friends for so long a time, and the weather seemed to me inexpressibly gloomy,” he recalled. “I was also troubled with palpitations and pain about the heart, and like many a young ignorant man, especially one with a smattering of medical knowledge, was convinced I had heart disease.” He also suffered from faintness and tingling in his fingers. These are all symptoms of anxiety—and in particular of the hyperventilation associated with panic disorder.

Now that you know what failure looks like, this is how you leave a lasting impression. The hiring manager needs to know what you can do for her. She’s looking for what you did, because that’s the best indication of what you can do for her. Depending on your years of experience, this can range: — from having mastered Microsoft Excel, including pivot tables and Vlookups, to writing VBA code to automating the work of your department and reducing cycle time 80%. — from how met your sales quota three years in a row to how you went to the Achievers Club five years in a row for exceeding quota by 25% or more, and — from organizing an industry conference for 100 guests to organizing and running five industry conferences where attendees numbered between five and ten thousand.

David versus Goliath Asymmetry lies at the heart of network-based competition. The larger or smaller network will be at different stages of the Cold Start framework and, as such, will gravitate toward a different set of levers. The giant is often fighting gravitational pull as its network grows and saturates the market. To combat these negative forces, it must add new use cases, introduce the product to new audiences, all while making sure it’s generating a profit. The upstart, on the other hand, is trying to solve the Cold Start Problem, and often starts with a niche. A new startup has the luxury of placing less emphasis on profitability and might instead focus on top-line growth, subsidizing the market to grow its network. When they encounter each other in the market, it becomes natural that their competitive moves reflect their different goals and resources. Startups have fewer resources—capital, employees, distribution—but have important advantages in the context of building new networks: speed and a lack of sacred cows. A new startup looking to compete against Zoom might try a more specific use case, like events, and if that doesn’t work, they can quickly pivot and try something else, like corporate education classes. Startups like YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and many other products have similar stories, and went through an incubation phase as the product was refined and an initial network was built. Trying and failing many times is part of the startup journey—it only takes the discovery of one atomic network to get into the market. With that, a startup is often able to start the next leg of the journey, often with more investment and resources to support them. Contrast that to a larger company, which has obvious advantages in resources, manpower, and existing product lines. But there are real disadvantages, too: it’s much harder to solve the Cold Start Problem with a slower pace of execution, risk aversion, and a “strategy tax” that requires new products to align to the existing business. Something seems to happen when companies grow to tens of thousands of employees—they inevitably create rigorous processes for everything, including planning cycles, performance reviews, and so on. This helps teams focus, but it also creates a harder environment for entrepreneurial risk-taking. I saw this firsthand at Uber, whose entrepreneurial culture shifted in its later years toward profitability and coordinating the efforts of tens of thousands. This made it much harder to start new initiatives—for better and worse. When David and Goliath meet in the market—and often it’s one Goliath and many investor-funded Davids at once—the resulting moves and countermoves are fascinating. Now that I have laid down some of the theoretical foundation for how competition fits into Cold Start Theory, let me describe and unpack some of the most powerful moves in the network-versus-network playbook.

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Paul Spehr, an assistant at the Library, reckoned 1967 to be the pivotal year for film preservation… …because that is the year that the NEA programme was established and a regular programme of funding film restoration really began on a serious basis.

Religious knowledge of Jesus Christ comes from five principle written sources. The earliest of these are a number of letters penned by Paul—who didn’t know Jesus personally—twenty to thirty years after Jesus’s death. The remainder come much later, from the Gospels of the New Testament. These were four books written anonymously forty to sixty years after Jesus’s death. None of the authors knew Jesus, lived in Judea, or spoke his language. “These anonymous works were circulated for decades before they were finally given titles, each taken from the names of men with links to Jesus, confusing many into thinking that these were the actual authors. Specifically, these anonymous works became known as the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. “Most theologians pull different passages from different books to make their points, and don’t treat them as separate works, written at different times. But because they are, and because the authors didn’t know Jesus, there are any number of significant conflicting accounts between them. This is inevitable since none of them were written by eyewitnesses. The information came from the oral tradition, from stories handed down for decades, since no one took careful notes of what Jesus said at the time he said it.   “In four of these five accounts, Jesus never calls himself god or considers himself god. Nor do any of his disciples.” The AI paused for effect. “He and his followers did claim that he was the messiah, however. In fact, Christ is the Latin translation of the Hebrew word for messiah. But at the time of Christ, the messiah wasn’t considered a divine figure. Rather, this term simply referred to a great leader, in King David’s line, who would rule the Jewish people with God’s blessing, a role Jesus believed he would fulfill. And passages of the New Testament do, indeed, refer to him as King of the Jews.

The fifth account was the Gospel of John, the very last one, written more than sixty years after Jesus’s death. In this one, Jesus does describe himself as a god—on par with his father. When it was written, Romans had started calling their emperors gods, which could explain why the anonymous author had Jesus ascribing this status to himself. Regardless, had Jesus ever claimed to be on par with God, or to be the Son of God, this would have been the most important statement he ever made. If he had made this claim, many scholars find it highly unlikely that none of the four other written sources—earlier sources—would have contained a single mention of it.” Sage paused once again. “To be fair, highly unlikely doesn’t mean impossible,” it continued. “And even if Jesus never did claim to be a god, this doesn’t mean he wasn’t. Or didn’t become one. Many have interpreted the scripture to suggest that Jesus was either a human or angel on Earth, and that because of his service, his sacrifice, God rewarded him by exalting him to the level of a god. But only after his death.

My own beliefs should not concern you. What should concern you is that this prophecy of a coming enlightenment is echoed in virtually every faith and philosophical tradition on earth. Hindus call it the Krita Age, astrologers call it the Age of Aquarius, the Jews describe the coming of the Messiah, theosophists call it the New Age, cosmologists call it Harmonic Convergence and predict the actual date.” “December 21, 2012!” someone called. “Yes, unnervingly soon . . . if you’re a believer in Mayan math.” Langdon chuckled, recalling how Solomon, ten years ago, had correctly predicted the current spate of television specials predicting that the year 2012 would mark the End of the World. “Timing aside,” Solomon said, “I find it wondrous to note that throughout history, all of mankind’s disparate philosophies have all concurred on one thing—that a great enlightenment is coming. In every culture, in every era, in every corner of the world, the human dream has focused on the same exact concept—the coming apotheosis of man . . . the impending transformation of our human minds into their true potentiality.” He smiled. “What could possibly explain such a synchronicity of beliefs?” “Truth,” said a quiet voice in the crowd. Solomon wheeled. “Who said that?” The hand that went up belonged to a tiny Asian boy whose soft features suggested he might be Nepalese or Tibetan. “Maybe there is a universal truth embedded in everyone’s soul. Maybe we all have the same story hiding inside, like a shared constant in our DNA. Maybe this collective truth is responsible for the similarity in all of our stories.” Solomon was beaming as he pressed his hands together and bowed reverently to the boy. “Thank you.” Everyone was quiet. “Truth,” Solomon said, addressing the room. “Truth has power. And if we all gravitate toward similar ideas, maybe we do so because those ideas are true . . . written deep within us. And when we hear the truth, even if we don’t understand it, we feel that truth resonate within us . . . vibrating with our unconscious wisdom. Perhaps the truth is not learned by us, but rather, the truth is re-called . . . re-membered . . . re-cognized . . . as that which is already inside us.” The silence in the hall was complete. Solomon let it sit for a long moment, then quietly said, “In closing, I should warn you that unveiling the truth is never easy. Throughout history, every period of enlightenment has been accompanied by darkness, pushing in opposition. Such are the laws of nature and balance. And if we look at the darkness growing in the world today, we have to realize that this means there is equal light growing. We are on the verge of a truly great period of illumination, and all of us—all of you—are profoundly blessed to be living through this pivotal moment of history.

You ask the Consort. The Consort knows everything.” “Oh,” Hakeem said. Keelan pivoted to me. “Consort, please tell us what this is.” “I have no idea.

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Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, was feeling the effects of time. “Here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring will give way,” Jefferson grumbled in a note to Adams. He could no longer walk very far, although he tried to ride two or three hours a day.

Dreams, Intuition and the Inner Life September is a pivotal month during which the outward-directed energy of summer begins to shift inward in preparation for the six months spent in the darkness of the Earth Mother’s womb. This month we will review our lives in the form of spiritual autobiography. We will open our sixth sense by noticing synchronicity, and we will enter the world of dreams.

What is meant for you will arrive in your life and it will remain in your life. What did not transpire was not meant to; the end of that journey would not have led you somewhere you would have wanted or needed to be. If

Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian who went on to work at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank, asked ‘what if, one by one, African countries each received a phone call, telling them that in exactly five years the aid taps would be shut off — permanently?’ Her view was that this would be an energising wake-up call, forcing countries rapidly to pivot to increase trade and attractiveness to foreign investment. Of course, the risk is that some countries would spread their wings and fly, others crash and burn. And, of course, that China would buy all of the ones in between. Such provocative ideas likely work better on the page than in the field, but they do challenge us all to recognise that current aid strategies have too often been ineffective.

You are not the culmination of what you once were. You can defy the past. You can become what you decide to be.

Will you continue to replay the memories of yesterday, or will you meet the moment and make the most of what is in front of you now?

You are exactly where you need to be. This is the perfect day to start your life again.

You cannot desire what you do not already contain. Desire is a projection outward that is proportionate to potential inward. There

You cannot desire what you do not already contain. Desire is a projection outward that is proportionate to potential inward.

What you’re looking to find is what you’re meant to create.

Choosing peace isn’t always so gentle at the beginning. Sometimes, it’s screaming out all of the pain that you’ve tucked so deep within yourself, as though you could hide it out of existence. Sometimes, it is finally setting a boundary. Sometimes, it is saying no. Sometimes, it is uprooting from everything you’ve ever known and beginning again where your soul finally feels free. No, choosing peace isn’t always so kind at the onset. Sometimes, it’s a hurricane that finally waters the deepest gardens of your soul.