Top Performer Appreciation Quotes

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book. The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them. The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.

I’ve decided to make you my mistress.” A small thread of temper mixed in with the fear traveling through her veins. “Have you now?” “I bought this building just for you, and had the top floor decorated in a manner I was quite certain, given your dramatic attitude, you’d appreciate.” Lucetta drew in a breath—refusing to allow Silas the satisfaction of even glancing at some of the more gaudy pieces in the room he was pointing out—and waited until he’d run out of words before she lifted her chin another notch. “I’d like to know, if you please, how you came to the conclusion I’d be receptive to the idea of becoming your mistress.” Silas settled back in the chair, folding his hands across a stomach that strained against the buttons of the jacket he was wearing. “Come now, dear. There’s no need to continue playing coy. You’ve led me on a merry chase these past few years, never affording me an audience after your performances, and neglecting to answer the notes I sent asking you to join me for a late-night dinner here or there.” He wiggled a finger in her direction. “You and I know full well that you did so in order to increase your value.” “I wouldn’t be so certain about that.” He continued speaking as if she hadn’t voiced a reply. “I’m willing to allow you to live here, amongst this lavish setting, and will provide you with your very own personal maid, a carriage with matching bays, a driver for that carriage, and . . . give you the pleasure of my company until I tire of you.” She dug her fingernails into the tender skin of her palm so that she wouldn’t be tempted to rake them across the man’s face. “I have my own carriage, thank you very much, as well as a lovely place to stay, and while I’m flattered you want to spend time in my company, I do have a profession I need to get back to. That means I am—regretfully, of course—going to have to refuse your simply charming offer to become your mistress.” Her head snapped back from his slap before she’d even realized he’d gotten up from his chair. Blinking to hold back tears that longed to fall, she lifted her chin and ignored the pain in her cheek as Silas retook his seat and immediately took to staring at her. His eyes were filled with something hot, something she was certain verged on the edge of true insanity, and that insanity chilled her straight through her bones. “It wasn’t an offer, my dear,” he finally said quite pleasantly.

There is no old age like anxiety,” said one of the monks I met in India. “And there is no freedom from old age like the freedom from anxiety.” In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place. Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that’s not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement. You don’t necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Without seeing Sicily one cannot get a clear idea of what Italy is. “No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws,” Plato wrote, “when its citizens…do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love.” In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real. The idea that the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s humanity. You should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. They break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life. The Zen masters always say that you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water. Your treasure—your perfection—is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. Balinese families are always allowed to eat their own donations to the gods, since the offering is more metaphysical than literal. The way the Balinese see it, God takes what belongs to God—the gesture—while man takes what belongs to man—the food itself.) To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile. The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally “a walled garden.” The four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. Once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

Recognition is largely about behavior. “Catch them doing what you want and recognize it,” the books say. Appreciation, conversely, focuses on performance plus the employee’s value as a person. Recognition is about improving performance and focuses on what is good for the company. Appreciation emphasizes what is good for the company and good for the person (which may sometimes mean helping them find a position that is better for them than their current role). The relational direction of recognition is top-down, coming from leadership.

Relationship elements with the strongest correlation to successful therapeutic outcomes (Norcross, 2010) Useful questions for building relationships at an individual and team level Empathy “Involves entering the private, perceptual world of the other” and “communicating that understanding back to the client in ways that can be received and appreciated” (p. 118). How well do you really listen (listening like they are the most important person in the world)? Do you listen to the whole person (beyond their words)? How well do you sensitively communicate back your understanding of how you think the other person is feeling (feeling with another)? Alliance “The quality and strength of the collaborative relationship” (p. 120) How strong is your emotional bond to the other person? What can you do to strengthen it? What could be getting in the way of a stronger bond? Cohesion (in groups) “The forces that cause members to remain in the group” (p. 121) How do you help the team develop cohesion? What do you do that decreases team cohesion? What could you do more of to develop team cohesion? Goal Consensus and Collaboration “The therapist and client journey together toward a mutual destination” (p. 122) Does the relationship have a joint overriding purpose from which goals can be derived? What do you want to achieve together that you cannot do separately? What would success for this relationship look like? Adapted from Norcross (2010: 118–25)