“
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.
To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.
”
”
Bill Watterson
“
White men get a choice. They get to choose they job, they house. They get to choose to make black babies, then disappear into thin air, like they wasn't never there to begin with, like these black women they slept with or raped done laid on top of themselves and got pregnant. White men get to choose for black men too. Used to sell 'em; now they just send 'em to prison like my daddy, so that they can't be with they kids.
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Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing)
“
[Greens] don't come through the back door the same as other groceries. They don't cower at the bottom of paper bags marked 'Liberty.' They wave over the top. They don't stop to be checked off the receipt. They spill out onto the counter. No going onto shelves with cans in orderly lines like school children waiting for recess. No waiting, sometimes for years beyond the blue sell by date, to be picked up and taken from the shelf. Greens don't stack or stand at attention. They aren't peas to be pushed around. Cans can't contain them. Boxed in they would burst free. Greens are wild. Plunging them into a pot took some doing. Only lobsters fight more. Either way, you have to use your hands. Then, retrieving them requires the longest of my mother's wooden spoons, the one with the burnt end. Swept onto a plate like the seaweed after a storm, greens sit tall, dark, and proud.
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Georgia Scott (American Girl: Memories That Made Me)
“
Michael Jordan didn’t become a great basketball player because he wanted to do product endorsements. Van Gogh didn’t become a great painter because he dreamed that one day his paintings would sell for $50 million.
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Jack D. Schwager (Stock Market Wizards: Interviews with America's Top Stock Traders)
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It is illegal for women to go topless in most cities, yet you can buy a magazine of a woman without her top on at any 7-11 store. So, you can sell breasts, but you cannot wear breasts, in America.
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Violet Rose
“
Up until two years ago, I was one of the top-selling real estate agents in the tricounty area. I went to a convention in Boca Raton. I had one too many margaritas, met a tall, pale, and handsome man in the bar, and woke up a vampire."
"I was mistaken for a deer and got shot," I offered."
"Oh.
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Molly Harper (Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs (Jane Jameson, #1))
“
Never try to sell at the top. It isn't wise. Sell after a reaction if there is no rally.
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Edwin Lefèvre (REMINISCENCES OF A STOCK OPERATOR)
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O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?
Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.
O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.
P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.
O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.
P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.
Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.
(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.
”
”
Terry Pratchett
“
Start doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
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Joe Girard (Joe Girard's 13 Essential Rules of Selling: How to Be a Top Achiever and Lead a Great Life)
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You’ll never reach the top (you won’t even get out of the basement) if all you ever do is take on the role of victim. Forget about blaming other people for your failures and shortcomings.
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Joe Girard (Joe Girard's 13 Essential Rules of Selling: How to Be a Top Achiever and Lead a Great Life)
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Corporations don't create jobs. Customers do. So when all the economic gains go to the top, as they're doing now, the vast majority of Americans don't have enough purchasing power to buy the things corporations want to sell, which means businesses stop creating enough jobs.
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Robert Reich
“
If you lack the courage to start, you have already finished.
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Joe Girard (Joe Girard's 13 Essential Rules of Selling: How to Be a Top Achiever and Lead a Great Life)
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Only two people can buy at the bottom and sell at the top- One is God and the other is a liar.
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Vijay Kedia
“
Your word is your brand and if your word contradicts the quality of what you grow and sell, you will have difficulty in your community in the future.
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Cindy Ann Peterson (The Power of Civility: Top Experts Reveal the Secrets to Social Capital)
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What’s the main allure of folks in Extreme Spiritual Addiction? Astral flash, of course.
Picture a wannabe rock star, all decked out in garish colors and sequins. Why does that over-the-top kind of dress-up work so well in Vegas?
Because audiences in Vegas aren’t seeking Spiritual Enlightenment, nor even a refined experience. Quite the opposite, right? Fact is, multitudes anywhere prefer entertainment that’s larger-than-life. Sleazy sex sells, and so does every other kind of garishness, including astral flash.
To some spiritual seekers – and others -- astral flash can seem incredibly wonderful. Only some folks of course – you need not be one of them.
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Rose Rosetree (Seeking Enlightenment in the Age of Awakening: Your Complete Program for Spiritual Awakening and More, In Just 20 Minutes a Day)
“
If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives. FedEx couldn’t get its night shift to finish on time; they tried everything to speed it up but nothing worked—until they stopped paying night shift workers by the hour and started to pay them by the shift. Xerox created a new, better machine only to have it sell less well than the inferior older ones—until they figured out the salesmen got a bigger commission for selling the older one. “Well, you can say, ‘Everybody knows that,’ ” said Munger. “I think I’ve been in the top five percent of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little
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Michael Lewis (The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)
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White men get a choice. They get to choose they job, choose they house. They get to make black babies, then disappear into thin air, like they wasn't never there to begin with, like these black women they slept with or raped done laid on top of themselves and got pregnant. White men get to choose for black men too. Used to sell 'em; now they just send 'em to prison like they did my daddy, so that they can't be with they kids.
”
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Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing)
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Goldman’s top four officers could not sell more than 10 percent of their Goldman shares until 2011, or until Buffett sold his own, even if they left the firm. He had explained his rationale for this condition to Blankfein by saying, “If I’m buying the horse, I’m buying the jockey, too.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin (Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves)
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When other countries run sustained trade deficits, they must finance these by selling off domestic assets or running into debt — debt which they actually are obliged to pay. It seems that only the Americans are so bold as to say “Screw the world. We’re going to do whatever we want.” Other countries simply cannot afford the chaos from which the U.S. economy is positioned to withstand as a result of the fact that foreign trade plays a smaller role in its economy than in those of nearly all other nations in today’s interdependent world.
Using debtor leverage to set the terms on which it will refrain from causing monetary chaos, America has turned seeming financial weakness into strength. U.S. Government debt has reached so large a magnitude that any attempt to replace it will entail an interregnum of financial chaos and political instability. American diplomats have learned that they are well positioned to come out on top in such grab-bags.
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Michael Hudson (The Bubble and Beyond)
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With a room of his own, a room at the top, he could proffer a temporary refuge to some lovely, fatigued, world-weary, sophisticated, black-turtlenecked, heavily-eyelinered girl he might lure up the stairs into his newspaper-strewn boudoir and onto his Indian-bedspreaded bed with the promise of artistic talk about the craft of writing, and the throes and torments of creation, and the need for integrity, and the temptations of selling out, and the nobility of resisting such temptations, and so forth. A promise offered with a hint of self-mockery in case such a girl might think he was pompous and cocksure and full of himself. Which he was, because at that age you have to be that way in order to crawl out of bed in the morning and sustain your faith in your own illusory potential for the next twelve hours of being awake.
”
”
Margaret Atwood (Stone Mattress)
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We have made money our god and called it the good life. We have trained our children to go for jobs hat bring the quickest corporate advancements at the highest financial levels. We have taught them careerism but not ministry and wonder why ministers are going out of fashion. We fear coddling the poor with food stamps while we call tax breaks for the rich business incentives. We make human community the responsibility of government institutions while homelessness, hunger, and drugs seep from the centers of our cities like poison from open sores for which we do not seek either the cause or the cure. We have created a bare and sterile world of strangers where exploitation is a necessary virtue. We have reduced life to the lowest of values so that the people who have much will not face the prospect of having less.
Underlying all of it, we have made women the litter bearers of a society where disadvantage clings to the bottom of the institutional ladder and men funnel to the top, where men are privileged and women are conscripted for the comfort of the human race. We define women as essential to the development of the home but unnecessary to the development of society. We make them poor and render them powerless and shuttle them from man to man. We sell their bodies and question the value of their souls. We call them unique and say they have special natures, which we then ignore in their specialness. We decide that what is true of men is true of women and then say that women are not as smart as men, as strong as men, or as capable as men. We render half the human race invisible and call it natural. We tolerate war and massacre, mayhem and holocaust to right the wrongs that men say need righting and then tell women to bear up and accept their fate in silence when the crime is against them.
What’s worse, we have applauded it all—the militarism, the profiteering, and the sexisms—in the name of patriotism, capitalism, and even religion. We consider it a social problem, not a spiritual one. We think it has something to do with modern society and fail to imagine that it may be something wrong with the modern soul. We treat it as a state of mind rather than a state of heart. Clearly, there is something we are failing to see.
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Joan D. Chittister (Heart of Flesh: Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men)
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As Daniel Pink notes in To Sell Is Human, “Like it or not, we’re all in sales now.”4
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Carmine Gallo (Talk Like TED: The 9 Public Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds)
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In our research we consistently found that the people who were most effective during the Investigating stage were the ones most likely to be top sales performers.
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Neil Rackham (SPIN Selling: Situation Problem Implication Need-payoff)
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During COVID-19, home gym equipment became a top selling item.
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Steven Magee
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The opening chapter was the book's unique selling point, the singular idea that had carried Darcy through last November, and Coleman had just come up with it off the top of his head.
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Scott Westerfeld (Afterworlds (Afterworlds, #1))
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George paid for college by working for Cutco. Cutco is a company that makes and sells knives. Their salespeople go door-to-door. George Pinkman talked his way into peoples' homes with a big bag of knives and sold them potential murder weapons. Do I have to add that he was their top salesman three years running? I do not.
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MaryJanice Davidson (You and I, Me and You (Cadence Jones, #3))
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I figured out that for every dollar I made trading, 30 percent was going to the government, 30 percent was going to support my planes, and 20 percent was going to support my real estate. So I finally decided to sell everything.
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Jack D. Schwager (Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders)
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One of my favorite patterns is the tendency for the markets to move from relative lows to relative highs and vice versa every two to four days. This pattern is a function of human behavior. It takes several days of a market rallying before it looks really good. That’s when everyone wants to buy it, and that’s the time when the professionals, like myself, are selling. Conversely, when the market has been down for a few days, and everyone is bearish, that’s the time I like to be buying.
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Jack D. Schwager (The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America's Top Traders (Wiley Trading Book 95))
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If there are no pop stars churning out those mind-numbing songs, then there are no musicians in the booths backing them up, no clerks running back and forth with tapes, no shop owners selling the music. Taking out one person at the top destroys thousands at the bottom.
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Kiera Cass (The One (The Selection, #3))
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The value decade is upon us. If you can’t sell a top-quality product at the world’s lowest price, you’re going to be out of the game . . . the best way to hold your customers is to constantly figure out how to give them more for less.—Jack Welch, Chairman, General Electric
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Philip Kotler (Kotler On Marketing: How To Create, Win, and Dominate Markets)
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At around this time, my mother, on a journey of her own to Wonsan to visit Uncle Cinema, saw a policeman order an old woman down. Her clothing was bulging with some contraband she was hoping to sell. The police were always alert for smuggled goods that they could confiscate for themselves and sell.
'Please don't search me.' She was begging him from the top of the train. 'It's all I have.'
'Get down right now, you old bitch,' the policeman yelled.
The woman asked to be helped down.
The policeman reached up to her. As she took his hand, her free arm shot up and her fist closed over the electrified wire above the train. Both were killed instantly. She must have thought, If I'm going, I'm taking this bastard with me.
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Hyeonseo Lee
“
Organizing the books was a fun afternoon. We decided to put the thick hardback books, mostly intro. to philosophy textbooks and Norton literature anthologies, on the top shelves where they looked good but stayed out of reach since there's no reason for opening them ever again. Then we went by genre: mysteries, cozies, modernists, mountains, sci-fi, beloved childhood volumes, books we bought abroad, books required in school we couldn't sell back, books bought for us we'll read soon, books bought for us we have no intention of reading, books we want to read but are too long for a commitment with our current schedules...We're not really done with this organization, and I doubt we ever will be, but that's one great part about it.
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Joshua Isard (Conquistador of the Useless)
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I'd gotten my first glimpse of Elizabeth DeVille. She'd had her hair in a pony-tail that stuck up off the side of her head, and she'd been wearing short red shorts and a light blue tank top with a whale on it. “You like whales?” I'd asked her when I finished with the car. Her face had gone all soft and pretty, making me feel more like one-hundred-and-three than the twenty-three I was, and she'd shrugged. “Yeah, but not a lot more than any other animal. I just like saving things.
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Ella James (Selling Scarlett (Love Inc., #1))
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There is so much confusion about branding even at top levels of The Fortune 500 it makes one wonder how they got successful in the first place !
Brace yourself !
Here is the shortest scientific statement on branding you ‘ll ever hear !
It appears simplistic – I assure you it is anything but . If you really understand it & internalize it – you ll be like an Avenger – a superhero in a herd of weaklings
Here it goes !
A successful brand is one that is perceived to be USEFUL & UNIQUE
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Dharmendra Rai (Corporate Invisible Selling Behavioural Economics & More)
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Raza : “ The bow and arrow was once the pinnacle of weapons technology. It allowed the great Genghis Khan to rule from the Pacific to the Ukraine.
Today-- whoever has the latest Stark weapons rules these lands. Soon it will be my turn “
End of scene
Today picture Fortune 500 CEOs whispering to their top men “ Today – whoever has the latest sales weapons rules the world . Soon it will be our turn – thanks to Invisible Selling - Behavioural Economics & More . Get that Rai bloke to train all our guys
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Dharmendra Rai (Corporate Invisible Selling Behavioural Economics & More)
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The worst thing that can happen to you in the markets is being right and still losing money. That’s the danger in buying on rallies and selling on breaks these days.
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Jack D. Schwager (The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America's Top Traders (Wiley Trading Book 95))
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Salespeople of the future have to actually create value, not communicate value.
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Nicholas A.C. Read (Selling to the C-Suite: What Every Executive Wants You to Know About Successfully Selling to the Top)
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His characters may be cardboard, but each has a clear, uncomplicated purpose. Every moment of the story contributes to building conflict.
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Donald Maass (Writing the Breakout Novel: Winning Advice from a Top Agent and His Best-selling Client)
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The fact is that roughly two-thirds of all fiction purchases are made because the consumer is already familiar with the author.
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Donald Maass (Writing the Breakout Novel: Winning Advice from a Top Agent and His Best-selling Client)
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Get control of your health now before it gets control of you.
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Joe Girard (Joe Girard's 13 Essential Rules of Selling: How to Be a Top Achiever and Lead a Great Life)
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Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. —Thomas Edison, inventor and scientist
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Joe Girard (Joe Girard's 13 Essential Rules of Selling: How to Be a Top Achiever and Lead a Great Life)
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If you pluck and sell you feathers to climb to the top, you won't be able to fly when someone shoves you off. - The Malwatch
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Scaylen Renvac
“
Don't be afraid to shine. The world needs your light.
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Timi Nadela (Get To The Top: It's About The Heart Sell, Not The Hard Sell)
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Always believe something wonderful is about to happen today! You can pray for anything, if you believe that you've received it, it will be yours.
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Timi Nadela (Get To The Top: It's About The Heart Sell, Not The Hard Sell)
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Language as a Prison
The Philippines did have a written language before the Spanish colonists arrived, contrary to what many of those colonists subsequently claimed. However, it was a language that some theorists believe was mainly used as a mnemonic device for epic poems. There was simply no need for a European-style written language in a decentralized land of small seaside fishing villages that were largely self-sufficient.
One theory regarding language is that it is primarily a useful tool born out of a need for control. In this theory written language was needed once top-down administration of small towns and villages came into being. Once there were bosses there arose a need for written language. The rise of the great metropolises of Ur and Babylon made a common written language an absolute necessity—but it was only a tool for the administrators. Administrators and rulers needed to keep records and know names— who had rented which plot of land, how many crops did they sell, how many fish did they catch, how many children do they have, how many water buffalo? More important, how much then do they owe me? In this account of the rise of written language, naming and accounting seem to be language's primary "civilizing" function. Language and number are also handy for keeping track of the movement of heavenly bodies, crop yields, and flood cycles. Naturally, a version of local oral languages was eventually translated into symbols as well, and nonadministrative words, the words of epic oral poets, sort of went along for the ride, according to this version.
What's amazing to me is that if we accept this idea, then what may have begun as an instrument of social and economic control has now been internalized by us as a mark of being civilized. As if being controlled were, by inference, seen as a good thing, and to proudly wear the badge of this agent of control—to be able to read and write—makes us better, superior, more advanced. We have turned an object of our own oppression into something we now think of as virtuous. Perfect! We accept written language as something so essential to how we live and get along in the world that we feel and recognize its presence as an exclusively positive thing, a sign of enlightenment. We've come to love the chains that bind us, that control us, for we believe that they are us (161-2).
”
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David Byrne (Bicycle Diaries)
“
She was assigned to Dan Quiterio, one of the top publicists at Pacific Pictures, who was supposed to mold her image. The man decided the best course of action was to sell her as mysterious, exotic, and unattainable.
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Silvia Moreno-Garcia (The Seventh Veil of Salome)
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What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone—where, in the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, nobody knows you’re a dog—is now a tool for soliciting and analyzing our personal data. According to one Wall Street Journal study, the top fifty Internet sites, from CNN to Yahoo to MSN, install an average of 64 data-laden cookies and personal tracking beacons each. Search for a word like “depression” on Dictionary.com, and the site installs up to 223 tracking cookies and beacons on your computer so that other Web sites can target you with antidepressants. Share an article about cooking on ABC News, and you may be chased around the Web by ads for Teflon-coated pots. Open—even for an instant—a page listing signs that your spouse may be cheating and prepare to be haunted with DNA paternity-test ads. The new Internet doesn’t just know you’re a dog; it knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium kibble.
”
”
Eli Pariser (The Filter Bubble)
“
Faced with the almost inescapable conclusion that it had been selling lemons, Nike shifted into make-lemonade mode. Jeff Pisciotta became head of a top-secret and seemingly impossible project: finding a way to make a buck off a naked foot.
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Christopher McDougall
“
Despite all threats, Prudence Crandall opened the school … The Negro students stood bravely by her side. And then followed one of the most heroic—and most shameful—episodes in American history. The storekeepers refused to sell supplies to Miss Crandall.… The village doctor would not attend ailing students. The druggist refused to give medicine. On top of such fierce inhumanity, rowdies smashed the school windows, threw manure in the well and started several fires in the building.
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Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race, & Class)
“
Love is not enough. Nor are attentiveness, romantic feelings, a charming personality, great competencies and skills, or promises to change. You need substance underneath the topping. Don’t sell yourself short. Character always wins over time.
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John Townsend (Beyond Boundaries: Learning to Trust Again in Relationships)
“
In some of the early northern European paintings, Christ looks like you flushed him out from under a bridge, but in Sunday-school books and the sorts of pictures they sell at Christian supply stores, he falls somewhere between Kenny Loggins and Jared Leto, always doe-eyed and, of course, white, with brown—not black—hair, usually wavy. And he always has a fantastic body, shown at its best on the cross, which—face it—was practically designed to make a man's stomach and shoulders look good.
What would happen, I often wonder, if someone sculpted a morbidly obese Jesus with titties and acne scars, and hair on his back? On top of that, he should be short—five foot two at most. "Sacrilege!" people would shout. But why? Doing good deeds doesn't make you good-looking.
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David Sedaris (Calypso)
“
I stole you, among others, from the streets of God’s birthplace. I forced you to work as a slave. Imprisoned, mistreated and starved you and your companion. To top it off, I am in the process of selling your life to the highest bidder. Why would you trust me?
”
”
V.S. Carnes
“
Listen to my last words anywhere. Listen to my last words any world. Listen all you boards syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth consummated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn feet forever -
"Don't let them see us. Don't tell them what we are doing -"
Are these the words of the all-powerful boards and syndicates of the earth?
"For God's sake don't let that Coca-Cola thing out - "
"Not The Cancer Deal with The Venusians - "
"Not The Green Deal - Don't show them that - "
"Not The Orgasm Death - "
"Not the ovens - "
Listen: I call you all. Show your cards all players. Pay it all pay it all pay it all back. Play it all pay it all play it all back. For all to see. In Times Square. In Picadilly.
"Premature. Premature. Give us a little more time."
Time for what? More lies? Premature? Premature for who? I say to all these words are not premature. These words may be too late. Minutes to go. Minutes to foe goal -
"Top Secret - Classified - For The Board - The Elite - The Initiates -
Are these the words of the all-powerful boards and syndicates of the earth? These are the words of liars cowards collaborators traitors. Liars who want time for more lies. Cowards who can not face your "dogs" your "gooks" your "errand boys" your "human animals" with the truth. Collaborators with Insect People with Vegetable People. With any people anywhere who offer you a body forever. To shit forever. For this you have sold out your sons. Sold the ground from unborn feet forever. Traitors to all souls everywhere. You want the name of Hassan i Sabbah on your filth deeds to sell out the unborn?
What scared you all into time? Into body? Into shit? I will tell you; "the word." Alien Word "the." "The" word of Alien Enemy imprisons "thee" in Time, In Body. In Shit. Prisoner, come out. The great skies are open.
”
”
William S. Burroughs (Nova Express (The Nova Trilogy, #2))
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I find that major trends are now frequently preceded by a sharp price change in the opposite direction. I still make my judgments as to probable price trends based on overall market action, as I always did. However, with a few exceptions, I now buy on breaks and sell on rallies.
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Jack D. Schwager (The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America's Top Traders (Wiley Trading Book 95))
“
On the contrary, I’m too weak for it. I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody’s like, Words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people, blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable. And then, once you’re nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people’s triumphs, that’s when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don’t get me started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that’s just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don’t need it. Any of it.” Blandine cracks her neck. “I’m corrupt enough.
”
”
Tess Gunty (The Rabbit Hutch)
“
Seen through the lens of human perception, cycles are often viewed as less symmetrical than they are. Negative price fluctuations are called “volatility,” while positive price fluctuations are called “profit.” Collapsing markets are called “selling panics,” while surges receive more benign descriptions (but I think they may best be seen as “buying panics”; see tech stocks in 1999, for example). Commentators talk about “investor capitulation” at the bottom of market cycles, while I also see capitulation at the top, when previously prudent investors throw in the towel and buy.
”
”
Howard Marks (Mastering The Market Cycle: Getting the odds on your side)
“
Big towns all have a kauppahalli (covered market), which is the place to head for all sorts of Finnish specialities, breads, cheeses, deli produce, meat and a super variety of both fresh and smoked fish. It’s also a top place for a cheap feed, with cafes and stalls selling sandwiches and snacks.
”
”
Lonely Planet Finland
“
Before I opened my computer in the parking lot today, I relived one of my favorite memories. It's the one with Woody and me sitting on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum after it's closed. We're watching people parade out of the museum in summer shorts and sandals. The trees to the south are planted in parallel lines. The water in the fountain shoots up with a mist that almost reaches the steps we sit on. We look at silver-haired ladies in red-and-white-print dresses. We separate the mice from the men, the tourists from the New Yorkers, the Upper East Siders from the West Siders. The hot-pretzel vendor sells us a wad of dough in knots with clumps of salt stuck on top. We make our usual remarks about the crazies and wonder what it would be like to live in a penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking the Met. We laugh and say the same things we always say. We hold hands and keep sitting, just sitting, as the sun beings to set. It's a perfect afternoon.
”
”
Diane Keaton (Then Again)
“
I’m a maker of ballads right pretty
I write them right here in the street
You can buy them all over the city
yours for a penny a sheet
I’m a word pecker out of the printers
out of the dens of Gin Lane
I’ll write up a scene on a counter
- confessions and sins in the main, boys
confessions and sins in the main
Then you’ll find me in Madame Geneva’s
keeping the demons at bay
There’s nothing like gin for drowning them in
but they’ll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging day
They come rattling over the cobbles
they sit on their coffins of black
Some are struck dumb, some gabble
top-heavy on brandy or sack
The pews are all full of fine fellows
and the hawker has set up her shop
As they’re turning them off at the gallows
she’ll be selling right under the drop, boys
selling right under the drop
Then you’ll find me in Madame Geneva’s
keeping the demons at bay
There’s nothing like gin for drowning them in
but they’ll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging day
”
”
Mark Knopfler (Kill to Get Crimson (Tab))
“
The next biggest reason folks buy fiction is that it has been personally recommended to them by a friend, family member or bookstore employee. That process is called word of mouth. Savvy publishers understand its power and try to facilitate its effect with advance reading copies (ARCs), samplers, first chapters circulated by e-mail, Web sites and the like.
”
”
Donald Maass (Writing the Breakout Novel: Winning Advice from a Top Agent and His Best-selling Client)
“
Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile. Like the Warby Parker crew, the entrepreneurs whose companies topped Fast Company’s recent most innovative lists typically stayed in their day jobs even after they launched. Former track star Phil Knight started selling running shoes out of the trunk of his car in 1964, yet kept working as an accountant until 1969. After inventing the original Apple I computer, Steve Wozniak started the company with Steve Jobs in 1976 but continued working full time in his engineering job at Hewlett-Packard until 1977. And although Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured out how to dramatically improve internet searches in 1996, they didn’t go on leave from their graduate studies at Stanford until 1998. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page says, because we “were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program.” In 1997, concerned that their fledgling search engine was distracting them from their research, they tried to sell Google for less than $2 million in cash and stock. Luckily for them, the potential buyer rejected the offer. This habit of keeping one’s day job isn’t limited to successful entrepreneurs. Many influential creative minds have stayed in full-time employment or education even after earning income from major projects. Selma director Ava DuVernay made her first three films while working in her day job as a publicist, only pursuing filmmaking full time after working at it for four years and winning multiple awards. Brian May was in the middle of doctoral studies in astrophysics when he started playing guitar in a new band, but he didn’t drop out until several years later to go all in with Queen. Soon thereafter he wrote “We Will Rock You.” Grammy winner John Legend released his first album in 2000 but kept working as a management consultant until 2002, preparing PowerPoint presentations by day while performing at night. Thriller master Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, and gas station attendant for seven years after writing his first story, only quitting a year after his first novel, Carrie, was published. Dilbert author Scott Adams worked at Pacific Bell for seven years after his first comic strip hit newspapers. Why did all these originals play it safe instead of risking it all?
”
”
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
“
There's a fortune of Authentic Vintage French Linen Tea Towels on every clothes line. These are the exact kind of linens that specialty shops in America sell for top dollar to affluent customers who pay dearly to add that touch of French Farmhouse Fabulousness to their million-dollar McMansions.
Flaubert is so wrong.
Even wash day in Normandy is achingly chic.
”
”
Vivian Swift (Le Road Trip: A Traveler's Journal of Love and France)
“
Selling is hard to teach because it is about what exists in your head and what goes on in your whole life. The objective in sales becomes the same as that in the rest of your life, to respect others and do best for them. Then you don't have to be a salesperson about what you do. Selling becomes an activity consistent with who you are. (From Mrs. Shibata the top salesperson in Japan)
”
”
Philip Delves Broughton (The Art of the Sale)
“
Let me tell you some news. In the last few years, there’s been a shift in this world and certainly a change in business. In the past, particularly in New York, some of the rudest people with the worst reputations rose to the top. Nastiness worked. I won’t mention any names, but they are now has-beens. And so are their ways. Today, moving forward, it is all about being charismatic, alluring, fascinating, and magnetic. Prince and Princess Charming
”
”
Fredrik Eklund (The Sell: The secrets of selling anything to anyone)
“
If you’re a fly, you keep flying and being a nuisance. If you lived in Linares at that time, you could never stop going out to the fields or ranches to tend to your crops or animals. You might close the store for a few days because of the initial shock, but you would open it again because, even if your relatives were sick or dead, your needs and the needs of others—those who sold to you and those who bought from you—persisted. If you lived at that time, you could not avoid having to go out to buy food, and not a day could pass without washing diapers or underpants, even if you sent your mother to the cemetery two hours earlier. In the midst of this crisis, you had tooth decay, infected toenails, and stomach upsets—slight or severe—that you put up with for a while before having to seek help from a doctor, if you could find one. Others went out to sell goat milk, or whistles, yo-yos, and spinning tops in the square, in the hope that there were still children alive to buy them.
”
”
Sofía Segovia (The Murmur of Bees)
“
We lie and we are lied to, and the best liars—the ones who don’t even see it as lying—get the business cards and the corner offices and the fancy clothes some other liar tricked them into thinking they needed. At least it used to bother people that the liars and
frauds and phonies rose to the top, the citizens expressed concern that shit floated. Today we put the shit on magazine covers, laud its buoyancy, and anxiously wait to buy the shit’s best-selling business book about how you can float your shit, too.
”
”
Shalom Auslander
“
I love the way the rain melts the colors together, like a chalk drawing on the sidewalk. There is a moment, just after sunset, when the shops turn on their lights and steam starts to fog up the windows of the cafés. In French, this twilight time implies a hint of danger. It's called entre chien et loup, between the dog and the wolf.
It was just beginning to get dark as we walked through the small garden of Palais Royal. We watched as carefully dressed children in toggled peacoats and striped woolen mittens finished the same game of improvised soccer we had seen in the Place Sainte Marthe.
Behind the Palais Royal the wide avenues around the Louvre gave way to narrow streets, small boutiques, and bistros. It started to drizzle. Gwendal turned a corner, and tucked in between two storefronts, barely wider than a set of double doors, I found myself staring down a corridor of fairy lights. A series of arches stretched into the distance, topped with panes of glass, like a greenhouse, that echoed the plip-plop of the rain. It was as if we'd stepped through the witch's wardrobe, the phantom tollbooth, what have you, into another era.
The Passage Vivienne was nineteenth-century Paris's answer to a shopping mall, a small interior street lined with boutiques and tearooms where ladies could browse at their leisure without wetting the bustles of their long dresses or the plumes of their new hats.
It was certainly a far cry from the shopping malls of my youth, with their piped-in Muzak and neon food courts. Plaster reliefs of Greek goddesses in diaphanous tunics lined the walls. Three-pronged brass lamps hung from the ceiling on long chains.
About halfway down, there was an antique store selling nothing but old kitchenware- ridged ceramic bowls for hot chocolate, burnished copper molds in the shape of fish, and a pewter mold for madeleines, so worn around the edges it might have belonged to Proust himself. At the end of the gallery, underneath a clock held aloft by two busty angels, was a bookstore. There were gold stencils on the glass door. Maison fondée en 1826.
”
”
Elizabeth Bard (Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes)
“
Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last twelve weeks of their lives. She revealed the most common regrets of her patients in the best-selling book “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying—A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing” (Ware). Here were the regrets, starting at #2: 2.I wish I didn’t work so hard. 3.I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. 4.I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. 5.I wish that I had let myself be happier.
”
”
Pankaj Goyal (Before You Start Up: How to Prepare to Make Your Startup Dream a Reality)
“
What are you doing here?"
He shoved one hand in his pocket. "I need a wife."
"And you came here..." She searched for an explanation for his outlandish statement. "Because you thought a company that sells feminine care products might also have a supply of women available for marriage? I can go to the stock room if you want and see what we have on the shelf. Are you looking for a blonde or a brunette? I guess it doesn't matter whether she likes you or not."
"It's not just for me," Liam explained, pulling his hand out of his pocket. "I need a wife to preserve my family legacy."
"So you want to breed her? Good to know. That takes Margie and Joan out of the running. They're both in their sixties."
He dropped to one knee and held out a blue velvet box. "I want you. Marry me, Daisy."
Of all the things she'd expected him to say, "Marry me," did not even make the top thousand. For a long moment, all she could do was stand and stare.
"I think you have me confused with someone who would even want to be in the same room as you, much less wed you after such a romantic proposal.
”
”
Sara Desai (The Dating Plan (Marriage Game, #2))
“
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She also saw an interesting sight. On a curve not far from Little Rock a busload of Elks had turned over. The bus was on its right side in the ditch, the front wheels still slowly turning, and the Elks were surfacing one at a time through the escape hatch on the left side, now topside. One Elk was lying on the grass, maybe dead, no ball game for him, and others were limping and hopping about and holding their heads. Another one, in torn shirt-sleeves, was sitting on a suitcase on top of the bus. He was not lifting a finger to help but as each surviving brother Elk stuck his head up through the hatchway, he gave a long salute from his compressed-air horn. The big Trailways cruiser began to slow down. When the man saw this he turned with his noise device and hooted it -- there could be no mistake -- at the driver. Norwood was talking to a man with bulging eyes across the aisle who had gone broke in Mississippi selling premium beer for $3.95 a case on credit, and they both missed it, that hooting part. They did help load the injured into ambulances. The former tavern keeper found a silver dollar in the grass and kept it.
”
”
Charles Portis (Norwood)
“
Mr. Constant,” he said, “right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears. But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine. In the Magnum Opus Building, we will have thousands of them! And you and I can have the top two stories, and you can go on keeping track of what’s really going on the way you do now.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (The Sirens of Titan)
“
Similar to Christ’s, rap’s mission is self-esteem for those “previously deemed shit.” So it’s as dangerous as Christ’s. Because a lot of kids of all manner are listening, and no one in the industry wants their top floors threatened by either the wrong skin color or the wrong mindset—that is, anyone who cares about truth. Kids are the market, but you have to keep them believing they’re worth less than the stars or they won’t think they need what stars are selling. Wait till you see. When showbiz execs realize they can’t kill rap, they will hijack it. They’ll make millionaires of impostor rappers who say things like “You can’t be like me.
”
”
Sinéad O'Connor (Rememberings)
“
The illusionists of quantity are performing sleights of hand wherever it concerns the topic of quality. A profession that went from being second in command under the throne, to outsourced to the cheapest external providers, is perhaps one of greatest conflicts of interest society faces today, not to mention the blatant disrespect of the people quality is intended for in the first place.
Quality is about ascertaining the absolute best, for the sake of all involved. It therefore, is a lofty profession combining research, science, and morality to make the best judgements for today based on the history of the past in order to most adequately prepare for an ever oncoming future. Most importantly, quality removes personal preference that is not in the best interest of all people. Thus, anyone who would launch a war on quality can be considered an enemy of mankind, as they are would be purveyors of an ultimate breach of trust and security.
Until the concept of quality is reinstituted as the governing advisor in all aspects of society, sychophants will chant "more" is "better". They will sell mediocrity at top dollar, and make top profits. Mediocrity should not be the accepted, celebrated standard, it should be the rudimentary blueprint for the greatest rollouts of progress ever marked in human history.
”
”
Justin Kyle McFarlane Beau
“
Prostitution arrests are racist. They have always been racist. In 1866, San Francisco police arrested 137 women, 'virtually all Chinese'; the police boasted that they had 'expelled three hundred Chinese women.' In the 1970s, the American Civil Liberties Union found that black women were seven times more likely to be arrested for prostitution-related offenses than white women. This disparity is no relic of the past: between 2012 and 2015, 85 percent of people charged with 'loitering for the purpose of prostitution' in New York City were Black or Latinx- groups that only make up 54 percent of the city's population. Increases in prostitution enforcement mean increases in the arrests of women of color. Between 2012 and 2016, the New York Police Department stepped up enforcement mean increases in the arrest of women of color. Between 2012 and 2016, the New York Police Department stepped up enforcement targeting massage parlors. As journalist Melissa Gira Grant details, during this period the arrests of Asian people in New York charged either with 'unlicensed massage' or prostitution went up by 2,700 percent. Arrests on the street target Black and Latina women - who may not even be selling sex - simply for wearing 'tight jeans' or a crop top. The NYPD do not arrest white women in affluent areas of the city for wearing jeans.
”
”
Juno Mac & Molly Smith
“
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.
To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.
Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time.
”
”
Bill Watterson
“
No matter what you do for a living or who you think you work for, you only work for one person, YOURSELF!. It makes no difference if you work part time, have a salaried position, are a top executive of a corporation or run your own business. You are selling your existence at a set price. Your career goal in life should be based on doing work that you’re passionate about, while saving your time and increasing your profit.
This is your life. You have the same existence in this life as any world leader, corporate executive or celebrity. You have your own free will to make decisions to get you exactly where you want to go. There are opportunities around every corner. Go find them!
”
”
John Geiger
“
I am Emir Dynamite!" he shouted, swaying on top of the tall camelback. "If within two days we don't get any decent food, I'll incite the tribes to revolt! I swear! I will appoint myself the Prophet's representative and declare holy war, jihad. On Denmark, for example. Why did the Danes torment their Prince Hamlet? Considering the current political situation, a casus beli like this would satisfy even the League of Nations. No, seriously, I'll buy a million worth of rifles from the British--they love to sell firearms to the tribes--and onward to Denmark. Germany will let us through--in lieu of war reparations. Imagine the tribes invading Copenhagen! I'll lead the charge on a white camel.
”
”
Ilya Ilf (Золотой теленок)
“
A 1997 study of the consumer product design firm IDEO found that most of the company’s biggest successes originated as “combinations of existing knowledge from disparate industries.” IDEO’s designers created a top-selling water bottle, for example, by mixing a standard water carafe with the leak-proof nozzle of a shampoo container. The power of combining old ideas in new ways also extends to finance, where the prices of stock derivatives are calculated by mixing formulas originally developed to describe the motion of dust particles with gambling techniques. Modern bike helmets exist because a designer wondered if he could take a boat’s hull, which can withstand nearly any collision, and design it in the shape of a hat. It even reaches to parenting, where one of the most popular baby books—Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946—combined Freudian psychotherapy with traditional child-rearing techniques. “A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.” Within sociology, these middlemen are often referred to as idea or innovation brokers. In one study published in 2004, a sociologist named Ronald Burt studied 673 managers at a large electronics company and found that ideas that were most consistently ranked as “creative” came from people who were particularly talented at taking concepts from one division of the company and explaining them to employees in other departments. “People connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving,” Burt wrote. “The between-group brokers are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable.” They were more credible when they made suggestions, Burt said, because they could say which ideas had already succeeded somewhere else.
”
”
Charles Duhigg (Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business)
“
My “10 Smart Market Diagnosis and Profiling Questions” What keeps them awake at night, indigestion boiling up their esophagus, eyes open, staring at the ceiling? What are they afraid of? What are they angry about? Who are they angry at? What are their top three daily frustrations? What trends are occurring and will occur in their businesses or lives? What do they secretly, ardently desire most? Is there a built-in bias to the way they make decisions? (Example: engineers = exceptionally analytical) Do they have their own language? Who else is selling something similar to their product, and how? Who else has tried selling them something similar, and how has that effort failed? So, Step 1 in our system is to analyze thoroughly, understand, and connect with the customer.
”
”
Dan S. Kennedy (The Ultimate Sales Letter: Attract New Customers. Boost your Sales.)
“
The most popular TED speakers give presentations that stand out in a sea of ideas. As Daniel Pink notes in To Sell Is Human, “Like it or not, we’re all in sales now.”4 If you’ve been invited to give a TED talk, this book is your bible. If you haven’t been invited to give a TED talk and have no intention of doing so, this book is still among the most valuable books you’ll ever read because it will teach you how to sell yourself and your ideas more persuasively than you’ve ever imagined. It will teach you how to incorporate the elements that all inspiring presentations share, and it will show you how to reimagine the way you see yourself as a leader and a communicator. Remember, if you can’t inspire anyone else with your ideas, it won’t matter how great those ideas are. Ideas are only as good as the actions that follow the communication of those ideas.
”
”
Carmine Gallo (Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds)
“
Back in 1995, Munger had given a talk at Harvard Business School called “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.” If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives. FedEx couldn’t get its night shift to finish on time; they tried everything to speed it up but nothing worked—until they stopped paying night shift workers by the hour and started to pay them by the shift. Xerox created a new, better machine only to have it sell less well than the inferior older ones—until they figured out the salesmen got a bigger commission for selling the older one. “Well, you can say, ‘Everybody knows that,’” said Munger. “I think I’ve been in the top five percent of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.” Munger’s
”
”
Michael Lewis (The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)
“
April 13, 2005
It was so nice to be able to talk to you tonight. I miss you something terrible. I can’t wait to be with you again, especially the truck ride home while I am teasing the hell out of you. Yea! I love you so much baby. About the computer, how much is too much for a new computer? I got an email through eBay that a guy is willing to sell me that computer I wanted because the winning bidder didn’t pay up, but he wants 2500 for it. I know when I get something in my head that I want, I usually don’t care too much about the price, so I want a sanity check. The computer is an Alienware computer with 2 gigs of ram and 120 gigs of hard drive. It’s top of the line, but is it too much? I know you can bring me back to earth if I am over-anxious. Anyway, I love you so much, baby. I will call you again tomorrow night for me, day for you. Take care of yourself and think about the ride home!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
”
”
Taya Kyle (American Wife: Love, War, Faith, and Renewal)
“
In Fort Wayne, Indiana, a must-stop is Fort Wayne Coney Island Weiner Stand, where you get the hot dog with way too many fresh-cut onions and a dollop of chili on top. How dogs that are prepared this way in the Midwest are known as "Coney Island hot dogs" but have really nothing to do with Coney Island, New York. The only thing that I can figure out about the origin of the name is that a hundred years ago when someone from Fort Wayne, Indiana, decided to open a hot dog place, they named it after Coney Island, because that seemed like a faraway place where people ate hot dogs and they would probably sell more "Coney Island hot dogs" than "chili dogs" (as everyone else called them) because Coney Island sounded more romantic. Yes, to people in Fort Wayne in 1914, Coney Island seemed romantic. Fort Wayne Coney Island Weiner Stand has been serving their hot dogs that way since, well, since people wanted a pound of fresh onions and chili on their hot dog.
”
”
Jim Gaffigan (Food: A Love Story)
“
We're all equal before a wave. —Laird Hamilton, professional surfer In 2005, I was working as an equity analyst at Merrill Lynch. When one afternoon I told a close friend that I was going to leave Wall Street, she was dumbfounded. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?" she asked me. This was her polite, euphemistic way of wondering if I'd lost my mind. My job was to issue buy or sell recommendations on corporate stocks—and I was at the top of my game. I had just returned from Mexico City for an investor day at America Movíl, now the fourth largest wireless operator in the world. As I sat in the audience with hundreds of others, Carlos Slim, the controlling shareholder and one of the world's richest men, quoted my research, referring to me as "La Whitney." I had large financial institutions like Fidelity Investments asking for my financial models, and when I upgraded or downgraded a stock, the stock price would frequently move several percentage points.
”
”
Whitney Johnson (Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work)
“
Ted and Rick. Ted graduates from university and starts his climb up the corporate ladder. Every day he works long hours. He spends Saturday on projects to try to get ahead. No time for sports, no time for relationships, and no money to save. Every month he reviews his goals to see how far he can climb the corporate ladder. Extra meetings, extra projects. Gradually, Ted begins his climb to the top. And after 18 short years, Ted has his chance. He could become the next new, semi-young, chief executive of the company. But the owner gives the chief executive job to his recently graduated grandson, who promptly fires Ted. Ted has lost 18 years of his life, his dignity, his hard effort, and is again unemployed. Ted’s friend, Rick, also leaves university, but takes an ordinary job. However, Rick does something different. In the evenings, after work, Rick starts his part-time network marketing business. Four years later, Rick fires his boss, and lives the rest of his life on the earnings of his network marketing business.
”
”
Tom Schreiter (How To Prospect, Sell and Build Your Network Marketing Business With Stories)
“
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Top 36 best Place to Verified WebMoney Accounts In New Week
“
What is a “pyramid?” I grew up in real estate my entire life. My father built one of the largest real estate brokerage companies on the East Coast in the 1970s, before selling it to Merrill Lynch. When my brother and I graduated from college, we both joined him in building a new real estate company. I went into sales and into opening a few offices, while my older brother went into management of the company. In sales, I was able to create a six-figure income. I worked 60+ hours a week in such pursuit. My brother worked hard too, but not in the same fashion. He focused on opening offices and recruiting others to become agents to sell houses for him. My brother never listed and sold a single house in his career, yet he out-earned me 10-to-1. He made millions because he earned a cut of every commission from all the houses his 1,000+ agents sold. He worked smarter, while I worked harder. I guess he was at the top of the “pyramid.” Is this legal? Should he be allowed to earn more than any of the agents who worked so hard selling homes? I imagine everyone will agree that being a real estate broker is totally legal. Those who are smart, willing to take the financial risk of overhead, and up for the challenge of recruiting good agents, are the ones who get to live a life benefitting from leveraged Income. So how is Network Marketing any different? I submit to you that I found it to be a step better. One day, a friend shared with me how he was earning the same income I was, but that he was doing so from home without the overhead, employees, insurance, stress, and being subject to market conditions. He was doing so in a network marketing business. At first I refuted him by denouncements that he was in a pyramid scheme. He asked me to explain why. I shared that he was earning money off the backs of others he recruited into his downline, not from his own efforts. He replied, “Do you mean like your family earns money off the backs of the real estate agents in your company?” I froze, and anyone who knows me knows how quick-witted I normally am. Then he said, “Who is working smarter, you or your dad and brother?” Now I was mad. Not at him, but at myself. That was my light bulb moment. I had been closed-minded and it was costing me. That was the birth of my enlightenment, and I began to enter and study this network marketing profession. Let me explain why I found it to be a step better. My research led me to learn why this business model made so much sense for a company that wanted a cost-effective way to bring a product to market. Instead of spending millions in traditional media ad buys, which has a declining effectiveness, companies are opting to employ the network marketing model. In doing so, the company only incurs marketing cost if and when a sale is made. They get an army of word-of-mouth salespeople using the most effective way of influencing buying decisions, who only get paid for performance. No salaries, only commissions. But what is also employed is a high sense of motivation, wherein these salespeople can be building a business of their own and not just be salespeople. If they choose to recruit others and teach them how to sell the product or service, they can earn override income just like the broker in a real estate company does. So now they see life through a different lens, as a business owner waking up each day excited about the future they are building for themselves. They are not salespeople; they are business owners.
”
”
Brian Carruthers (Building an Empire:The Most Complete Blueprint to Building a Massive Network Marketing Business)
“
Most fish—like skate wing—naturally taper off and narrow at the outer edges and toward the tail. Which is fine for moving through the water. Not so good for even cooking. A chef or cook looks at that graceful decline and sees a piece of protein that will cook unevenly: will, when the center—or fattest part—is perfect, be overcooked at the edges. They see a piece of fish that does not look like you could charge $39 for it. Customers should understand that what they are paying for, in any restaurant situation, is not just what’s on the plate—but everything that’s not on the plate: all the bone, skin, fat, and waste product which the chef did pay for, by the pound. When Eric Ripert, for instance, pays $15 or $20 a pound for a piece of fish, you can be sure, the guy who sells it to him does not care that 70 percent of that fish is going in the garbage. It’s still the same price. Same principle applies to meat, poultry—or any other protein. The price of the protein on the market may be $10 per pound, but by the time you’re putting the cleaned, prepped piece of meat or fish on the plate, it can actually cost you $35 a pound. And that’s before paying the guy who cuts it for you. That disparity in purchase price and actual price becomes even more extreme at the top end of the dining spectrum. The famous French mantra of “Use Everything,” by which most chefs live, is not the operative phrase of a three-starred Michelin restaurant. Here, it’s “Use Only the Very Best.
”
”
Anthony Bourdain (Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook)
“
For most people moving is a tiring experience. When on the verge of moving out to a new home or into a new office, it's only natural to focus on your new place and forget about the one you’re leaving. Actually, the last thing you would even think about is embarking on a heavy duty move out clean. However, you can be certain that agents, landlords and all the potential renters or buyers of your old home will most definitely notice if it's being cleaned, therefore getting the place cleaned up is something that you need to consider.
The process of cleaning will basically depend to things; how dirty your property and the size of the home. If you leave the property in good condition, you'll have a higher the chance of getting back your bond deposit or if you're selling, attracting a potential buyer. Below are the steps you need to consider before moving out.
You should start with cleaning. Remove all screws and nails from the walls and the ceilings, fill up all holes and dust all ledges. Large holes should be patched and the entire wall checked the major marks. Remove all the cobwebs from the walls and ceilings, taking care to wash or vacuum the vents. They can get quite dusty. Clean all doors and door knobs, wipe down all the switches, electrical outlets, vacuum/wipe down the drapes, clean the blinds and remove all the light covers from light fixtures and clean them thoroughly as they may contain dead insects. Also, replace all the burnt out light bulbs and empty all cupboards when you clean them. Clean all windows, window sills and tracks. Vacuum all carpets or get them professionally cleaned which quite often is stipulated in the rental agreement.
After you've finished the general cleaning, you can now embark on the more specific areas. When cleaning the bathroom, wash off the soap scum and remove mould (if any) from the bathroom tiles. This can be done by pre-spraying the tile grout with bleach and letting it sit for at least half an hour. Clean all the inside drawers and vanity units thoroughly. Clean the toilet/sink, vanity unit and replace anything that you've damaged. Wash all shower curtains and shower doors plus all other enclosures. Polish the mirrors and make sure the exhaust fan is free of dust. You can generally vacuum these quite easily. Finally, clean the bathroom floors by vacuuming and mopping.
In the kitchen, clean all the cabinets and liners and wash the cupboards inside out. Clean the counter-tops and shine the facet and sink. If the fridge is staying give it a good clean. You can do this by removing all shelves and wash them individually. Thoroughly degrease the oven inside and out. It's best to use and oven cleaner from your supermarket, just take care to use gloves and a mask as they can be quite toxic. Clean the kitchen floor well by giving it a good vacuum and mop . Sometimes the kitchen floor may need to be degreased.
Dust the bedrooms and living room, vacuum throughout then mop. If you have a garage give it a good sweep. Also cut the grass, pull out all weeds and remove all items that may be lying or hanging around.
Remember to put your garbage bins out for collection even if collection is a week away as in our experience the bins will be full to the brim from all the rubbish during the moving process. If this all looks too hard then you can always hire a bond cleaner to tackle the job for you or if you're on a tight budget you can download an end of lease cleaning checklist or have one sent to you from your local agent. Just make sure you give yourself at least a day or to take on the job. Its best not to rush through the job, just make sure everything is cleaned thoroughly, so it passes the inspection in order for you to get your bond back in full.
”
”
Tanya Smith
“
But then I don’t begin to understand a lot of things about Sweden and Norway. It’s as if they are determined to squeeze all the pleasure out of life. They have the highest income-tax rates, the highest VAT rates, the harshest
drinking laws, the dreariest bars, the dullest restaurants, and television that’s like two weeks in Nebraska.
Everything costs a fortune. Even the purchase of a bar of chocolate leaves you staring in dismay at your change, and anything larger than that brings tears of pain to your eyes. It’s bone-crackingly cold in the winter and it does nothing but rain the rest of the year. The most fun thing to do in these countries is walk around semi-darkened shopping centers after they have closed, looking in the windows of stores selling wheelbarrows and plastic garden furniture at
prices no one can afford.
On top of that, they have shackled themselves with some of the most inane and restrictive laws imaginable,
laws that leave you wondering what on earth they were thinking about. In Norway, for instance, it is illegal for a barman to serve you a fresh drink until you have finished the previous one. Does that sound to you like a matter that needs to be covered by legislation? It is also illegal in Norway for a bakery to bake bread on a Saturday or Sunday. Well, thank God for that, say I. Think of the consequences if some ruthless Norwegian baker tried to foist fresh
bread on people at the weekend. But the most preposterous law of all, a law so pointless as to scamper along the outer margins of the surreal, is the Swedish one that requires motorists to drive with their headlights on during the daytime, even on the sunniest summer afternoon. I would love to meet the guy who thought up that one. He must be
head of the Department of Dreariness. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if on my next visit to Sweden all the pedestrians are wearing miners’ lamps.
”
”
Bill Bryson (Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe)
“
In an ideal world, the intelligent investor would hold stocks only when they are cheap and sell them when they become overpriced, then duck into the bunker of bonds and cash until stocks again become cheap enough to buy. From 1966 through late 2001, one study claimed, $1 held continuously in stocks would have grown to $11.71. But if you had gotten out of stocks right before the five worst days of each year, your original $1 would have grown to $987.12.1 Like most magical market ideas, this one is based on sleight of hand. How, exactly, would you (or anyone) figure out which days will be the worst days—before they arrive? On January 7, 1973, the New York Times featured an interview with one of the nation’s top financial forecasters, who urged investors to buy stocks without hesitation: “It’s very rare that you can be as unqualifiedly bullish as you can now.” That forecaster was named Alan Greenspan, and it’s very rare that anyone has ever been so unqualifiedly wrong as the future Federal Reserve chairman was that day: 1973 and 1974 turned out to be the worst years for economic growth and the stock market since the Great Depression.2 Can professionals time the market any better than Alan Green-span? “I see no reason not to think the majority of the decline is behind us,” declared Kate Leary Lee, president of the market-timing firm of R. M. Leary & Co., on December 3, 2001. “This is when you want to be in the market,” she added, predicting that stocks “look good” for the first quarter of 2002.3 Over the next three months, stocks earned a measly 0.28% return, underperforming cash by 1.5 percentage points. Leary is not alone. A study by two finance professors at Duke University found that if you had followed the recommendations of the best 10% of all market-timing newsletters, you would have earned a 12.6% annualized return from 1991 through 1995. But if you had ignored them and kept your money in a stock index fund, you would have earned 16.4%.
”
”
Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
“
Where will you go if you don’t get into NYU?” he asks.
“Where else?” I say. “Ole Miss, with Lucy and Morgan.”
“Then Ole Miss is my backup too. Here’s the thing, Jem. I’m going wherever you’re going--whether it’s New York or Oxford. I’m not missing my chance this time.”
“Why?” The word just tumbles out of my mouth before I can stop myself. “You’re going to be some kind of college superstar, whether it’s the SEC or the Ivy league. You’ll probably win a freaking Heisman.”
“And you just might win an Oscar,” he counters.
I roll my eyes. “Yeah, right. Please.”
“Why not? God, Jemma, you don’t even see it. How strong and smart and tenacious you are. Everything you do, you do well. I’ve never seen you put your mind to something and not come out on top. You win that trophy at cheer camp every single summer--what’s it called, the superstar award? Only three people at the whole camp get it or something like that, right?”
“How’d you know about that?”
“Miss Shelby told my mom. I think they put it in the yearbook, too, don’t they?”
“Maybe,” I say with a shrug. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s just a cheerleading trophy.
“And how long did it take you to win your first shooting tournament after your dad bought you that gun? Six months, tops? From what I hear, you’re the best shot in all of Magnolia Branch.”
“Okay, that’s true,” I say, a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth.
He reaches for my hand. “And then there’s those dresses you make, like the one you wore to homecoming. You take something old and make it new--turn it into something special. My mom says you and Lucy could make a fortune selling ’em, and I bet she’s right. Don’t you see? You’re not just good at the stuff you do--you’re the best. That’s just the way you are. So I have no doubt that you’re going to be some award-winning filmmaker if you put your mind to it.”
My heart swells unexpectedly. “You really think that?”
He nods, his dark eyes shining. “I really do.”
“Tell me again why we’ve hated each other all these years?”
“Because we’re both stubborn as mules?” he offers.
I can’t help but laugh. “Yeah, I’d say that about covers it.
”
”
Kristi Cook (Magnolia (Magnolia Branch, #1))
“
Oh, ’ello, ’Arry,” said Mundungus Fletcher, with a most unconvincing stab at airiness. “Well, don’t let me keep ya.” And he began scrabbling on the ground to retrieve the contents of his suitcase with every appearance of a man eager to be gone. “Are you selling this stuff?” asked Harry, watching Mundungus grab an assortment of grubby-looking objects from the ground. “Oh, well, gotta scrape a living,” said Mundungus. “Gimme that!” Ron had stooped down and picked up something silver. “Hang on,” Ron said slowly. “This looks familiar —” “Thank you!” said Mundungus, snatching the goblet out of Ron’s hand and stuffing it back into the case. “Well, I’ll see you all — OUCH!” Harry had pinned Mundungus against the wall of the pub by the throat. Holding him fast with one hand, he pulled out his wand. “Harry!” squealed Hermione. “You took that from Sirius’s house,” said Harry, who was almost nose to nose with Mundungus and was breathing in an unpleasant smell of old tobacco and spirits. “That had the Black family crest on it.” “I — no — what — ?” spluttered Mundungus, who was slowly turning purple. “What did you do, go back the night he died and strip the place?” snarled Harry. “I — no —” “Give it to me!” “Harry, you mustn’t!” shrieked Hermione, as Mundungus started to turn blue. There was a bang, and Harry felt his hands fly off Mundungus’s throat. Gasping and spluttering, Mundungus seized his fallen case, then — CRACK — he Disapparated. Harry swore at the top of his voice, spinning on the spot to see where Mundungus had gone. “COME BACK, YOU THIEVING — !” “There’s no point, Harry.” Tonks had appeared out of nowhere, her mousy hair wet with sleet. “Mundungus will probably be in London by now. There’s no point yelling.” “He’s nicked Sirius’s stuff! Nicked it!” “Yes, but still,” said Tonks, who seemed perfectly untroubled by this piece of information. “You should get out of the cold.” She watched them go through the door of the Three Broomsticks. The moment he was inside, Harry burst out, “He was nicking Sirius’s stuff!” “I know, Harry, but please don’t shout, people are staring,” whispered Hermione.
”
”
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, #6))
“
I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody’s like, Words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people, blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable. And then, once you’re nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people’s triumphs, that’s when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don’t get me started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that’s just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don’t need it. Any of it.” Blandine cracks her neck. “I’m corrupt enough.
”
”
Tess Gunty (The Rabbit Hutch)
“
An American businessman took a vacation to a small coastal Mexican village on doctor’s orders. Unable to sleep after an urgent phone call from the office the first morning, he walked out to the pier to clear his head. A small boat with just one fisherman had docked, and inside the boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish.
“How long did it take you to catch them?” the American asked.
“Only a little while,” the Mexican replied in surprisingly good English.
“Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?” the American then asked.
“I have enough to support my family and give a few to friends,” the Mexican said as he unloaded them into a basket.
“But… What do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican looked up and smiled. “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Julia, and stroll into the village each evening, where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, señor.”
The American laughed and stood tall. “Sir, I’m a Harvard M.B.A. and can help you. You should spend more time fishing, and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. In no time, you could buy several boats with the increased haul. Eventually, you would have a fleet of fishing boats.”
He continued, “Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the consumers, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village, of course, and move to Mexico City, then to Los Angeles, and eventually to New York City, where you could run your expanded enterprise with proper management.
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, señor, how long will all this take?”
To which the American replied, “15-20 years, 25 tops.”
“But what then, señor?”
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions.”
“Millions señor? Then what?"
“Then you would retire and move to a small coastal fishing village, where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, and stroll in to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.
”
”
Tim FERRIS
“
I don't have social media"
"Oh right." He rolls his eyes. "Too good for all that."
She shakes her head. "Not at all. On the contrary, I'm too weak for it. I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It's designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody's loneliness and promises us a community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that - weaponizing a person's isolation - it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody's like 'words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people,' blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody's influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they're lovable. And then, once you're nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people's triumphs, that's when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don't get m e started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that's just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don't need it. Any of it." Blandine cracks her neck. "I'm corrupt enough.
”
”
Tess Gunty (The Rabbit Hutch)
“
I’ll let you off your leash, but you have to show some manners. No humping, no pissing on anything man made, and keep the crotch greetings exclusive to your four-legged fury friends. Got it?”
Swarley nods because I’ve made him part human over the past few months and I’m pretty sure I saw him roll his eyes at me too. Guess I’d better start getting used to sassiness and eye rolling … read that on a parenting blog too.
Note to self. Find more positive bloggers that paint the picture of parenthood with rainbows, fairies, and pixie dust.
“Sydney?”
I turn. “Hey, Dane!”
He bends down to let his dogs off their leashes. “Gosh, I didn’t think you’d be back. How was Paris?”
Which part? The view of the ceiling from the couch or the drain from the top of the toilet?
“Great!” Extremely sugarcoated … maybe teetering on an outright lie.
“So how long are you staying?” He rests his hands on his hips.
Dane is adorable. I’m sure grown men don’t like to be called adorable; hell, I didn’t like it when Lautner said it to me, but Dane is just that. Tall, dark, and admittedly handsome with a boyish grin that makes me want to take him home, bake him cookies, and pour him a tall glass of milk.
“I’m not sure. Trevor and Elizabeth just moved to San Diego and I’m staying at their house until it sells or until I find something else.”
He cocks his head to the side. “Yet, they left Swarley?”
Turning my gaze to look for the wild pooch, I shake my head. “Their condo association doesn’t allow large pets. They’ve been looking for a new home for him, but for now I have him.”
“You two have come a long way since the first day you showed up at my office.”
Clasping my hands behind my back, I look down and kick at the dirt. “Yeah, you’re right. As of lately, I’ve considered taking him myself. But until I know where I’m going to end up, offering it would be a little premature if not irresponsible.”
“Grad school with a dog. You’d have to find some place to live that allows pets.”
My faces wrinkles as I peek up at him. “I’m not going to grad school, at least not for a while. Something’s kind of come up.”
“Oh?” Dane’s hands shift from his hips to crossing over his chest as he widens his stance.
I blow out a long breath, scrubbing my hands over my face. My fingers trace my eyebrows as I meet his eyes again. “I’m … pregnant.”
Dane’s eye are going to pop out of his head and the dogs will be chasing them if he opens them any wider. “I’m sorr—or congrat—or—”
I smile because his adorableness doubles when he gets all nervous and starts stuttering.
“It’s congratulations now … ‘I’m sorry’ was last month.”
He nods in slow motion. “So you came back for Lautner?”
“No … well, yes, but that backfired on me. He’s … moved on.”
“Moved on? Are you serious? From … you?”
I shrug, bobbing my head up and down.
“Well … he’s a fuc—a freaking idiot.”
As much pain as this conversation brings me, I still manage to let a giggle escape with an accompanying smile.
“You’re right. He is a fucafreaking idiot.”
Dane grins.
“Especially because he’s with Claire.”
His eyes go wide again. “Dr. Brown?”
I nod. “Dr. Fucafreaking Brown.”
Dane mouths WOW!
“Exactly.
”
”
Jewel E. Ann (Undeniably You)
“
Show me." He looks at her, his eyes darker than the air. "If you draw me a map I think I'll understand better."
"Do you have paper?" She looks over the empty sweep of the car's interior. "I don't have anything to write with."
He holds up his hands, side to side as if they were hinged. "That's okay. You can just use my hands."
She smiles, a little confused. He leans forward and the streetlight gives him yellow-brown cat eyes. A car rolling down the street toward them fills the interior with light, then an aftermath of prickling black waves. "All right." She takes his hands, runs her finger along one edge. "Is this what you mean? Like, if the ocean was here on the side and these knuckles are mountains and here on the back it's Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, West L.A., West Hollywood, and X marks the spot." She traces her fingertips over the backs of his hands, her other hand pressing into the soft pads of his palm. "This is where we are- X."
"Right now? In this car?" He leans back; his eyes are black marble, dark lamps. She holds his gaze a moment, hears a rush of pulse in her ears like ocean surf. Her breath goes high and tight and shallow; she hopes he can't see her clearly in the car- her translucent skin so vulnerable to the slightest emotion. He turns her hands over, palms up, and says, "Now you." He draws one finger down one side of her palm and says, "This is the Tigris River Valley. In this section there's the desert, and in this point it's plains. The Euphrates runs along there. This is Baghdad here. And here is Tahrir Square." He touches the center of her palm. "At the foot of the Jumhurriya Bridge. The center of everything. All the main streets run out from this spot. In this direction and that direction, there are wide busy sidewalks and apartments piled up on top of shops, men in business suits, women with strollers, street vendors selling kabobs, eggs, fruit drinks. There's the man with his cart who sold me rolls sprinkled with thyme and sesame every morning and then saluted me like a soldier. And there's this one street...." He holds her palm cradled in one hand and traces his finger up along the inside of her arm to the inner crease of her elbow, then up to her shoulder. Everywhere he touches her it feels like it must be glowing, as if he were drawing warm butter all over her skin. "It just goes and goes, all the way from Baghdad to Paris." He circles her shoulder. "And here"- he touches the inner crease of her elbow-"is the home of the Nile crocodile with the beautiful speaking voice. And here"- his fingers return to her shoulder, dip along their clavicle-"is the dangerous singing forest."
"The dangerous singing forest?" she whispers.
He frowns and looks thoughtful. "Or is that in Madagascar?" His hand slips behind her neck and he inches toward her on the seat. "There's a savanna. Chameleons like emeralds and limes and saffron and rubies. Red cinnamon trees filled with lemurs."
"I've always wanted to see Madagascar," she murmurs: his breath is on her face. Their foreheads touch.
His hand rises to her face and she can feel that he's trembling and she realizes that she's trembling too. "I'll take you," he whispers.
”
”
Diana Abu-Jaber (Crescent)
“
What is your name?” she said crossing her legs.
“I am Raj Singhania, owner of Singhania group of Industries and I am on my way to sign a 1000 crore deal.”
“Oh my God, Oh my God!” she said laughing and looked at Bobby from top to bottom.
“What’s with this OMG thing and girls, stop saying that. I am not going to propose you anytime soon. But it’s OK. I can understand how girls feel when they meet famous dudes like me,” Bobby said smiling.
“What kind of an idiot are you?” she said laughing.
“Indeed, a very rare one. The one that you find after searching for millions of years,” Bobby said.
“Do you always talk like this?” she said laughing.
“Only to strangers on bus or whenever I get bored,” Bobby said.
“OK, tell me your real name,” she said.
“My name is Mogaliputta Tissa and I am here to save the world.”
“Oh no not again!” she said squeezing her head with both her hands.
“I know you are dying inside to kiss me,” Bobby said flashing a smile.
“Why would I kiss you?” she said with a pretended sternness.
“Because, you are impressed with my intelligence level and the hotness quotient, I can see that in your eyes.”
“You think you are hot! Oh no! You look like that cartoon guy in 7 up commercial,” she said laughing.
“Thank you. He was the coolest guy I saw on TV,” Bobby said.
“OK fine, let’s calm down. Tell me your real name,” she said calmly.
“I don’t remember my name,” Bobby said calmly.
“What kind of idiot forgets his name?” she said staring into Bobby’s eyes.
“I am suffering from multiple personality disorder and I forgot my present personality’s name. Can you help me out?” Bobby said with an innocent look on his face.
“I will kill you with my hair clip. Leave me alone,” she said and closed her eyes.
“You look like a Pomeranian puppy,” Bobby said looking at her hair.
“Don’t talk to me,” she said.
“You look very beautiful,” Bobby said.
“Nice try but I am not going to open my eyes,” she said.
“Your ear rings are very nice. But I think that girl in the last seat has better rings,” Bobby said.
“She is not wearing any ear rings. I know because I saw her when I was getting inside. It takes just 5 seconds for a girl to know what other girls around her are wearing,” she said with her eyes still closed.
“Hey, look. They are selling porn CDs at a roadside shop,” Bobby said.
“I have loads of porn in my personal computer. I don’t need them,” she said.
“OMG, that girl looks hotter than you,” Bobby said.
“I will not open my eyes no matter what. Even if an earthquake hits the road, I will not open my eyes,” she said crossing her arms over her chest.
Bobby turned back and waved his hand to the kid who was poking his mom’s ear. The kid came running and halted at Bobby’s seat.
“This aunty wants to give you a chocolate if you tell her your name,” Bobby whispered to the kid and the kid perked up smiling.
“Hello Aunty! Wake up, my name is Bintu. Give me my chocolate, Aunty, please!” the kid said yanking at the girl’s hand.
All of a sudden, she opened her eyes and glared at the kid.
“Don’t call me aunty. What would everyone think? I am a teenage girl. Go away. I don’t have anything to give you,” she said and the kid went back to his seat.
“This is what happens when you mess with an intelligent person like me,” Bobby said laughing.
“Shut up,” she said.
“OK dude.”
“I am not a dude. Stop it.”
“OK sexy. Oops! OK Saxena,”
“I will scream.”
“OK. Where do you study?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Are you suffering from split personality disorder like me?” Bobby said staring into her eyes.
“Shut up. Don’t talk to me,” she said with a pout.
“What the hell! I have enlightened your mind with my thoughts, told you my name and now you are acting like you don’t know me. Girls are mad.
”
”
Babu Rajendra Prasad Sarilla