“
Anyone can plot a course with a map or compass; but without a sense of who you are, you will never know if you're already home.
”
”
Shannon L. Alder
“
She'd suggested that he observe other teens for social cues, and he'd done the job in spades. Yesterday after spending the afternoon with the track team, Aelyx had smacked her on the back and yelled, "Good hustle!" after she jogged up the front porch steps.
”
”
Melissa Landers (Alienated (Alienated, #1))
“
Someone who doesn't make the (Olympic) team might weep and collapse. In my day no one fell on the track and cried like a baby. We lost gracefully. And when someone won, he didn't act like he'd just become king of the world, either. Athletes in my day were simply humble in our victory.
I believe we were more mature then...Maybe it's because the media puts so much pressure on athletes; maybe it's also the money. In my day we competed for the love of the sport...In my day we patted the guy who beat us on the back, wished him well, and that was it.
”
”
Louis Zamperini (Devil at My Heels)
“
as a lobbyist he had long ago concluded there was no difference in how Democrats and Republicans conducted the business of government. The game stayed the same: It was always about favors and friends, and who controlled the dough. Party labels were merely a way to keep track of the teams; issues were mostly smoke and vaudeville. Nobody believed in anything except hanging on to power, whatever it took. .....
”
”
Carl Hiaasen (Sick Puppy (Skink, #4))
“
They were all on the volleyball team together and tall and fit as colts and when they went for runs it was what the track team might have looked like in terrorist heaven.
”
”
Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)
“
But far too often when we face the failure of a business venture, we let that failure paralyze us from trying again. The failure could stem from a lack of financial planning, a lack of resources, or the lack of the right team members. But you have to realize that failure is part of the process when you are on the road to success. The only way to get back on track is to come up with another plan. I’ve failed more times than I can count. But you can’t let the failure freeze you in place and stop you from pursuing your dreams.
”
”
Steve Harvey (Act Like a Success, Think Like a Success: Discovering Your Gift and the Way to Life's Riches)
“
Kay Cannon was a woman I’d known from the Chicago improv world. A beautiful, strong midwestern gal who had played lots of sports and run track in college, Kay had submitted a good writing sample, but I was more impressed by her athlete’s approach to the world. She has a can-do attitude, a willingness to learn through practice, and she was comfortable being coached. Her success at the show is a testament to why all parents should make their daughters pursue team sports instead of pageants. Not that Kay couldn’t win a beauty pageant - she could, as long as for the talent competition she could sing a karaoke version of ‘Redneck Woman’ while shooting a Nerf rifle.
”
”
Tina Fey
“
A separate, international team analyzed more than a half million research articles, and classified a paper as “novel” if it cited two other journals that had never before appeared together. Just one in ten papers made a new combination, and only one in twenty made multiple new combinations. The group tracked the impact of research papers over time. They saw that papers with new knowledge combinations were more likely to be published in less prestigious journals, and also much more likely to be ignored upon publication. They got off to a slow start in the world, but after three years, the papers with new knowledge combos surpassed the conventional papers, and began accumulating more citations from other scientists. Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers. To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge. •
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David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
“
People play differently when they’re keeping score,” the 4DX authors explain. They then elaborate that when attempting to drive your team’s engagement toward your organization’s wildly important goal, it’s important that they have a public place to record and track their lead measures. This scoreboard creates a sense of competition that drives them to focus on these measures, even when other demands vie for their attention. It also provides a reinforcing source of motivation. Once the team notices their success with a lead measure, they become invested in perpetuating this performance.
”
”
Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
“
As the 2018 World Cup Championship in Russia draws to a close, President Trump scores a hat-trick of diplomatic faux pas - first at the NATO summit, then on a UK visit, and finally with a spectacular own goal in Helsinki, thereby handing Vladimir Putin a golden propaganda trophy. For as long as this moron continues to queer the pitch by refusing to be a team player, America's Achilles' heel will go from bad to worse. It's high time somebody on his own side tackled him in his tracks.
”
”
Alex Morritt (Lines & Lenses)
“
To me, the simplest gift that a husband or a wife can do for their partner is to remind them of their precious visions, goals and dreams. What a gift that is to have a voice of reason right in your corner when you sometimes need a little nudge to get back on track. To have a team player to cheer you on and to support your efforts is indeed a massive present from the universe. Whomever has such a gift should surely treasure and protect it for all its worth. It's worth is invaluable to the world.
”
”
Sereda Aleta Dailey (The Art of Manifesting Abundance)
“
The moment a team member relaxes is the moment their opponent in the next garage or the next driver on the track is pushing harder.
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Jade Gurss (Beast: The Top Secret Ilmor-Penske Race Car That Shocked the World at the 1994 Indy 500)
“
The physical board had a huge psychological effect compared to anything we got from the electronic tracking tool we used at Microsoft. By attending the standup each day, team members were exposed to a sort of time-lapse photography of the flow of work across the board. Blocked work items were marked with pink tickets, and the team became much more focused on issue resolution and maintaining flow. Productivity jumped dramatically.
”
”
David J. Anderson (Kanban)
“
You see, girls are supposed to run. "It can damage the reproductive system"... The issue is put to a vote and Cheryl is eventually allowed on track provided that she keeps away from the boys on the team as she represents a "distraction".
”
”
Pénélope Bagieu (Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World)
“
I’ve seen many managers who shy away from leadership moments (e.g., any moment where the team/project needs someone to take decisive action) and retreat to tracking the efforts of others instead of facilitating or even participating in them. If all someone does is keep score and watch from the sidelines, he might be better suited for the accounting department. When someone in a leadership role consistently responds to pressure by getting out of the fray, he’s not leading — he’s hiding. Ineffective
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Scott Berkun (Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management)
“
Even the listings of school clubs only emphasized how self-centered we were. The track team—oh, you can’t run? Too bad. The art club—you’re all thumbs? Take a hike. The drama society—you’ve got stage fright? Tough buns. The chess club—no brains? No dice.
”
”
Gordon Korman (Slacker)
“
I spent that night lying huddled and shivering in the vast bed of the hotel. My feet were icy, my knees drawn up, my head sideways on the pillow; in front of me the arctic waste of starched white bedsheet stretched out to infinity. I knew I could never traverse it, regain the track, get back to where it was warm; I knew I was directionless; I knew I was lost. I would be discovered years later by some intrepid team—fallen in my tracks, one arm outflung as if grasping at straws, my features desiccated, my fingers gnawed by wolves.
”
”
Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin)
“
We use OKRs to plan what people are going to produce, track their progress vs. plan, and coordinate priorities and milestones between people and teams. We also use OKRs to help people stay focused on the most important goals, and help them avoid being distracted by urgent but less important goals.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
“
1. Project What is the project? Why is it unique? Why is the business needed? Why will customers love your product? 2. Partners Who are you? Who are the partners? What are your educational backgrounds? How much experience do you all have? How are you and your partners qualified to make the project a success? 3. Financing What is the total cost of the project? How much debt and how much equity is there? Are partners investing their own money? What is the investor’s return and reward for their risk? What are the tax consequences? Who is your CFO or accounting firm? Who is responsible for investor communications? What is the investor’s exit? 4. Management Who is running your company? What is their experience? What is their track record? Have they ever failed? How does their experience relate to your industry? Do you believe this is the strongest management team you can assemble? Can you pitch them with confidence?
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Donald J. Trump (Midas Touch)
“
People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it.” To explain this peculiar phenomenon, Jost’s team developed a theory of system justification. Its core idea is that people are motivated to rationalize the status quo as legitimate—even if it goes directly against their interests. In one study, they tracked Democratic and Republican voters before the 2000 U.S. presidential election. When George W. Bush gained in the polls, Republicans rated him as more desirable, but so did Democrats, who were already preparing justifications for the anticipated status quo. The same happened when Al Gore’s likelihood of success increased: Both Republicans and Democrats judged him more favorably. Regardless of political ideologies, when a candidate seemed destined to win, people liked him more. When his odds dropped, they liked him less. Justifying the default system serves a soothing function. It’s an emotional painkiller: If the world is supposed to be this way, we don’t need to be dissatisfied with it. But acquiescence also robs us of the moral outrage to stand against injustice and the creative will to consider alternative ways that the world could work.
”
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Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
“
BY HIGH SCHOOL, the names no longer shocked her but the loneliness did. You could never quite get used to loneliness; every time she thought she had, she sank further into it. She sat by herself at lunch, flipping through cheap paperbacks. She never received visits on the weekends, or invitations to Lou’s for lunch, or phone calls just to see how she was doing. After school, she went running alone. She was the fastest girl on the track team, and on another team in another town, she might have been captain. But on this team in this town, she stretched alone before practice and sat by herself on the team bus, and after she won the gold medal at the state championship, no one congratulated her but Coach Weaver.
”
”
Brit Bennett (The Vanishing Half)
“
Hey Alex!” Natalie’s voice calls out. “Nice clothes from last night.”
There’s no jamming with the band, no all-night music. Just me in my boots and bedhead, and the whole girls’ track team now knows I didn’t sleep in my room last night.
I want to yell back, “You know nothing!”
But she obviously knows something. She was there. At the club. And I’m the one who knows nothing.
”
”
Daisy Whitney (The Mockingbirds (The Mockingbirds, #1))
“
I had Trevor Mitchell’s clothes in my arms. His sweater, V-neck, undershirt, khakis, socks, loafers, and underwear. I had his power. His mask. I had his whole life. What was a girl to do? This girl ran. I ran so hard, like I had never run before. Like I had been training every day in gym class. If Mr. Harris could have seen me then, he surely would have put me on the track team.
”
”
Ellen Schreiber (Vampire Kisses (Vampire Kisses, #1))
“
Encouragement during the early years is crucial because beginners are still figuring out whether they want to commit or cut bait. Accordingly, Bloom and his research team found that the best mentors at this stage were especially warm ans supportive: 'perhaps the major quality of these teachers was that they made the initial learning very pleasant and rewarding. much of the introduction to the field was as playful activity, and the learning at the beginning of this stage was like a game'.
A degree of autonomy during the early years is also important. Longitudinal studies tracking learners confirm that overbearing parents and teachers erode intrinsic motivation. Kids whose parents let them make their own choices about what they like are more likely to develop interests later identified as a passion.
”
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Angela Duckworth (Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance)
“
He simply had to trust the dogs. On the hunt, man and dogs were always a team.
With Jesse, perhaps this was more true than with most. Most men, knowing themselves to be a lot smarter than the dogs, often overruled their judgment. Jesse, not thinking himself much smarter than anything, did not. He often relied upon his own instincts. He
therefore had more respect for instinct, perhaps, than a man who normally relied upon intellect. The mind of the dog was in many ways as simple and uncomplicated as Jesse's own. He was taught to memorize actions in places he couldn't reason, and
obey in situations that he did not understand. When he did understand he followed his instinct. His instincts assured him that as hunter, the dog was at least the equal of man. And for scenting and tracking, the dog was superior.
”
”
Pamela Morsi (Simple Jess (Tales from Marrying Stone, #2))
“
Returning from a hunting trip, Orde-Lees, traveling on skis across the rotting surface of the ice, had just about reached camp when an evil, knoblike head burst out of the water just in front of him. He turned and fled, pushing as hard as he could with his ski poles and shouting for Wild to bring his rifle. The animal—a sea leopard—sprang out of the water and came after him, bounding across the ice with the peculiar rocking-horse gait of a seal on land. The beast looked like a small dinosaur, with a long, serpentine neck. After a half-dozen leaps, the sea leopard had almost caught up with Orde-Lees when it unaccountably wheeled and plunged again into the water. By then, Orde-Lees had nearly reached the opposite side of the floe; he was about to cross to safe ice when the sea leopard’s head exploded out of the water directly ahead of him. The animal had tracked his shadow across the ice. It made a savage lunge for Orde-Lees with its mouth open, revealing an enormous array of sawlike teeth. Orde-Lees’ shouts for help rose to screams and he turned and raced away from his attacker. The animal leaped out of the water again in pursuit just as Wild arrived with his rifle. The sea leopard spotted Wild, and turned to attack him. Wild dropped to one knee and fired again and again at the onrushing beast. It was less than 30 feet away when it finally dropped. Two dog teams were required to bring the carcass into camp. It measured 12 feet long, and they estimated its weight at about 1,100 pounds. It was a predatory species of seal, and resembled a leopard only in its spotted coat—and its disposition. When it was butchered, balls of hair 2 and 3 inches in diameter were found in its stomach—the remains of crabeater seals it had eaten. The sea leopard’s jawbone, which measured nearly 9 inches across, was given to Orde-Lees as a souvenir of his encounter. In his diary that night, Worsley observed: “A man on foot in soft, deep snow and unarmed would not have a chance against such an animal as they almost bound along with a rearing, undulating motion at least five miles an hour. They attack without provocation, looking on man as a penguin or seal.
”
”
Alfred Lansing (Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage)
“
As with everything she did, Aimi excelled. Academically, she was in the top one percent of students in the state and was in the track team that had just won the nationals. She said she only went in for cheerleading because she liked the physical activity. It made sense though, Sam thought. Because of her bright, cheerful attitude, she was also incredibly popular. At times Sam felt slightly jealous of her, but mostly he was just immensely proud.
”
”
Phillip W. Simpson (Rapture (Rapture Trilogy, #1))
“
many ExOs are adopting the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method. Invented at Intel by CEO Andy Grove and brought to Google by venture capitalist John Doerr in 1999, OKR tracks individual, team and company goals and outcomes in an open and transparent way. In High Output Management, Grove’s highly regarded manual, he introduced OKRs as the answer to two simple questions: Where do I want to go? (Objectives) How will I know I’m getting there? (Key Results to ensure progress is made)
”
”
Salim Ismail (Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it))
“
Following their line of vision, he found the distraction. The damn tennis team, running the perimeter of the football field in some half-assed formation, following their fearless leader. They weren’t looking at the field, weren’t yelling or causing a scene. Just concentrating on keeping up with Chris.
Having been a teenage boy himself, the draw was obvious. Teenage girls. Short shorts. No brainer. At thirty-four, he was past that.
Except his eyes didn’t seem to get the “I’m Too Old For This” memo. They were tracking Chris like a hawk tracks a field mouse.
”
”
Jeanette Murray (The Game of Love)
“
I was already an atheist, and by my senior year I had became obsessed with the question “What is the meaning of life?” I wrote my personal statement for college admissions on the meaninglessness of life. I spent the winter of my senior year in a kind of philosophical depression—not a clinical depression, just a pervasive sense that everything was pointless. In the grand scheme of things, I thought, it really didn’t matter whether I got into college, or whether the Earth was destroyed by an asteroid or by nuclear war. My despair was particularly strange because, for the first time since the age of four, my life was perfect. I had a wonderful girlfriend, great friends, and loving parents. I was captain of the track team, and, perhaps most important for a seventeen-year-old boy, I got to drive around in my father’s 1966 Thunderbird convertible. Yet I kept wondering why any of it mattered. Like the author of Ecclesiastes, I thought that “all is vanity and a chasing after wind” (ECCLESIASTES 1:14) . I finally escaped when, after a week of thinking about suicide (in the abstract, not as a plan), I turned the problem inside out. There is no God and no externally given meaning to life, I thought, so from one perspective it really wouldn’t matter if I killed myself tomorrow. Very well, then everything beyond tomorrow is a gift with no strings and no expectations. There is no test to hand in at the end of life, so there is no way to fail. If this really is all there is, why not embrace it, rather than throw it away? I don’t know whether this realization lifted my mood or whether an improving mood helped me to reframe the problem with hope; but my existential depression lifted and I enjoyed the last months of high school.
”
”
Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom)
“
The answer was, we weren’t at all ready. Annual flu shots didn’t provide protection against H1N1, it turned out, and because vaccines generally weren’t a moneymaker for drug companies, the few U.S. vaccine makers that existed had a limited capacity to ramp up production of a new one. Then we faced questions of how to distribute antiviral medicines, what guidelines hospitals used in treating cases of the flu, and even how we’d handle the possibility of closing schools and imposing quarantines if things got significantly worse. Several veterans of the Ford administration’s 1976 swine flu response team warned us of the difficulties involved in getting out in front of an outbreak without overreacting or triggering a panic: Apparently President Ford, wanting to act decisively in the middle of a reelection campaign, had fast-tracked mandatory vaccinations before the severity of the pandemic had been determined, with the result that more Americans developed a neurological disorder connected to the vaccine than died from the flu. “You need to be involved, Mr. President,” one of Ford’s staffers advised, “but you need to let the experts run the process.
”
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
“
When I interviewed with the Chief of Family Medicine at a large medical corporation on the West Coast, he explained that, since he was part of a team of people who arranged for pharmaceutical companies to issue cash grants, he was in a position to offer me a particularly enticing salary. “What are the grants for?” I asked. “We have a quality improvement program that tracks physician prescribing patterns. We call it ‘quality’ but it’s really about money.” And that’s all it’s about. It works like this. In his organization, any patient with LDL cholesterol over 100 is put on a cholesterol-lowering medication. Any person with a blood pressure higher than 140/90 is put on a blood pressure medication. Any person with “low bone density” is put on a bone-remodeling inhibitor. And so on. The doctors who prescribe the most get big bonuses. Those who prescribe the least get fired. With a hint of incredulousness in his voice, he explained, “So far, every time we’ve asked for funding for our program, the drug companies give it to us.” If this is where healthcare is headed, then these hybrid physicians-executives will instinctively turn their gaze to our children and invent more creative methods to bulldoze an entire generation into the bottomless pit of chronic disease.
”
”
Catherine Shanahan (Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food)
“
The reason a bunch of employees who had no direct responsibility for ads, or culpability when they were lousy, spent their weekends transforming someone else’s problem into a profitable solution speaks to the power of culture. Jeff and gang had a clear understanding of their company’s priorities, and knew they had the freedom to try to solve any big problem that stood in the way of success. If they had failed, no one would have chastised them in any way, and when they succeeded, no one—even on the ads team—was jealous of their progress. But it wasn’t Google’s culture that turned those five engineers into problem-solving ninjas who changed the course of the company over the weekend. Rather it was the culture that attracted the ninjas to the company in the first place. Many people, when considering a job, are primarily concerned with their role and responsibilities, the company’s track record, the industry, and compensation. Further down on that list, probably somewhere between “length of commute” and “quality of coffee in the kitchen,” comes culture. Smart creatives, though, place culture at the top of the list. To be effective, they need to care about the place they work. This is why, when starting a new company or initiative, culture is the most important thing to consider.
”
”
Anonymous
“
One day, fearing that I was coming down with the flu, I stopped by Bowerman’s office to say that I wouldn’t be able to practice that afternoon. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Who’s the coach of this team?” “You are.” “Well, as coach of this team I’m telling you to get your ass out there. And by the way . . . we’re going to have a time trial today.” I was close to tears. But I held it together, channeled all my emotion into my run, and posted one of my best times of the year. As I walked off the track I glowered at Bowerman. Happy now, you son of a—? He looked at me, checked his stopwatch, looked at me again, nodded. He’d tested me. He’d broken me down and remade me, just like a pair of shoes. And I’d held up. Thereafter, I was truly one of his Men of Oregon. From that day on, I was a tiger.
”
”
Phil Knight (Shoe Dog)
“
In December 1935, Louie graduated from high school; a few weeks later, he rang in 1936 with his thoughts full of Berlin. The Olympic trials track finals would be held in New York in July, and the Olympic committee would base its selection of competitors on a series of qualifying races. Louie had seven months to run himself onto the team. In the meantime, he also had to figure out what to do about the numerous college scholarships being offered to him. Pete had won a scholarship to the University of Southern California, where he had become one of the nation’s top ten college milers. He urged Louie to accept USC’s offer but delay entry until the fall, so he could train full-time. So Louie moved into Pete’s frat house and, with Pete coaching him, trained obsessively. All day, every day, he lived and breathed the 1,500 meters and Berlin.
”
”
Laura Hillenbrand (Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption)
“
We tried a number of single-threaded efforts to meet the challenge. We rolled out features one after another, such as a recommendation engine for people that our users should meet and a professional Q&A service. None of them worked well enough to solve the problem. We concluded that the problem might require a Swiss Army knife approach with multiple use cases for multiple groups of users. After all, some people might want a news feed, some might want to track their career progress, and some might be keen on continuing education. Fortunately, LinkedIn had grown to the point where the organization could support multiple threads. We reorganized the product team so that each director of product could focus on a different approach to address engagement. Even though none of those efforts alone proved a silver bullet, the overall combination of them significantly improved user engagement.
”
”
Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
“
The strongest evidence yet was published in 2010. In a painstaking long-term study, much larger and more thorough than anything done previously, an international team of researchers tracked one thousand children in New Zealand from birth until the age of thirty-two. Each child’s self-control was rated in a variety of ways (through observations by researchers as well as in reports of problems from parents, teachers, and the children themselves). This produced an especially reliable measure of children’s self-control, and the researchers were able to check it against an extraordinarily wide array of outcomes through adolescence and into adulthood. The children with high self-control grew up into adults who had better physical health, including lower rates of obesity, fewer sexually transmitted diseases, and even healthier teeth. (Apparently, good self-control includes brushing and flossing.) Self-control was irrelevant to adult depression, but its lack made people more prone to alcohol and drug problems. The children with poor self-control tended to wind up poorer financially. They worked in relatively low-paying jobs, had little money in the bank, and were less likely to own a home or have money set aside for retirement. They also grew up to have more children being raised in single-parent households, presumably because they had a harder time adapting to the discipline required for a long-term relationship. The children with good self-control were much more likely to wind up in a stable marriage and raise children in a two-parent home. Last, but certainly not least, the children with poor self-control were more likely to end up in prison. Among those with the lowest levels of self-control, more than 40 percent had a criminal conviction by the age of thirty-two, compared with just 12 percent of the people who had been toward the high end of the self-control distribution in their youth.
”
”
Roy F. Baumeister (Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength)
“
them.” “Okay, Arceus and Calvin,” I said. “Yes?” they answered. “I need you guys to get horses and track down Team Scorpion. Once you have their location, we will assemble a team and attack their hideout.” Arceus nodded. “It sounds like a good plan.” “But what if they just keep running and they never stop?” asked Calvin. “They have to stop sometime,” said Shadow. “Plus, they have to stash their loot somewhere.” Calvin nodded. “Okay, we’ll head to Thane’s stable. I’ll pick up Rose too, she can help us track them.” “Good idea,” I said. Before leaving, Arceus turned to Cindy and said, “Alas, our time reunited was so short, and now we must part again, my love.” “Uh, why are you calling me that? I’m not your love,” Cindy replied. “Oh, but you are, darling. I love you, so therefore, you are my love.” “You love me…?” Cindy had a shocked expression on her face. “Yes, of course. If not for you, I would have left this town a long time ago.” “Really?” "To be honest, I hate this town. There's always some troubling event going on here. But this is your hometown, and I know you love it so. Therefore, I will gladly fight to my dying breath to defend it if I must.” Cindy blushed. “Um… that’s… very sweet of you…” “Well, we should head out now. Until we meet again, my love.” Arceus hugged Cindy and then he left with Calvin to go to the stable. “What should we do in the meantime?” asked Devlin. “We’ll go home and check up on everyone. We gotta make sure they’re okay.” “And then?” “We’ll prepare for the assault on Team Scorpion’s hideout.” Knight-Captain Devlin nodded. We made our way back to town. When we arrived, we saw a bunch of villagers by town hall. They were drowning the mayor with questions. “Who were those jerks?!” a villager asked. “What did they want?!” asked another. “I thought this place was safe!” yelled a new villager. “How are you going to protect us from them?!” The questions went on and on. The mayor lost the crowd, he had no control over them whatsoever. They were becoming restless.
”
”
Steve the Noob (Diary of Steve the Noob 23 (An Unofficial Minecraft Book) (Diary of Steve the Noob Collection))
“
We then reached a fork in the valley. Should we go left or right? Dad called it left. I had a very powerful intuition that right was the choice we should make. Dad insisted left. I insisted right.
It was a fifty-fifty call and he relented.
Within two hundred yards we stumbled across a snowy track through the woods and followed it excitedly. Within a mile it came out on a mountain road, and within ten minutes we had flagged down a lift from a car heading up the hill in the darkness.
We had found salvation, and I was beat.
The car dropped us off at the gates of the garrison thirty minutes later. It was, by then, late into the night, but I was suddenly buzzing with energy and excitement.
The fatigue had gone. Dad knew that I had made the right call up there--if we had chosen left we would still be trudging into the unknown.
I felt so proud.
In truth it was probably luck, but I learned another valuable lesson that night: Listen to the quiet voice inside. Intuition is the noise of the mind.
As we tromped back through the barracks, though, we noticed there was an unusual amount of activity for the early hours of a weekday morning. It soon became very clear why.
First a sergeant appeared, followed by another soldier, and then we were ushered into the senior officers’ block.
There was my uncle, standing in uniform looking both tired and serious. I started to break out into a big smile. So did Dad. Well, I was excited. We had cheated a slow, lingering hypothermic death, lost together in the mountains. We were alive.
Our enthusiasm was countered by the immortal words from my uncle, the brigadier, saying: “I wouldn’t smile if I was you…” He continued, “The entire army mountain rescue team is currently out scouring the mountains for you, on foot and in the air with the search-and-rescue helicopter. I hope you have a good explanation.”
We didn’t, of course, save that we had been careless, and we had got lucky; but that’s life sometimes. And the phrase: “I wouldn’t smile if I was you,” has gone down into Grylls family folklore.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
In one of her most influential studies, she and her team tracked the emotional experiences of nearly two hundred people over years of their lives. The subjects spanned a broad range of backgrounds and ages. (They were from eighteen to ninety-four years old when they entered the study.) At the beginning of the study and then every five years, the subjects were given a beeper to carry around twenty-four hours a day for one week. They were randomly paged thirty-five times over the course of that week and asked to choose from a list all the emotions they were experiencing at that exact moment.
If Maslow’s hierarchy was right, then the narrowing of life runs against people’s greatest sources of fulfillment and you would expect people to grow unhappier as they age. But Carstensen’s research found exactly the opposite. The results were unequivocal. Far from growing unhappier, people reported more positive emotions as they aged. They became less prone to anxiety, depression, and anger. They experienced trials, to be sure, and more moments of poignancy—that is, of positive and negative emotion mixed together. But overall, they found living to be a more emotionally satisfying and stable experience as time passed, even as old age narrowed the lives they led.
The findings raised a further question. If we shift as we age toward appreciating everyday pleasures and relationships rather than toward achieving, having, and getting, and if we find this more fulfilling, then why do we take so long to do it? Why do we wait until we’re old? The common view was that these lessons are hard to learn. Living is a kind of skill. The calm and wisdom of old age are achieved over time.
Carstensen was attracted to a different explanation. What if the change in needs and desires has nothing to do with age per se? Suppose it merely has to do with perspective—your personal sense of how finite your time in this world is. This idea was regarded in scientific circles as somewhat odd. But Carstensen had her own reason for thinking that one’s personal perspective might be centrally important
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Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
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we neared Liverpool’s Lime Street station, we passed through a culvert with walls that appeared to rise up at least thirty feet, high enough to block out the sun. They were as smooth as Navajo sandstone. This had been bored out in 1836 and had been in continuous use ever since, the conductor told me. “All the more impressive,” he said, “when you consider it was all done by Irish navvies working with wheelbarrows and picks.” I couldn’t place his accent and asked if he himself was Irish, but he gave me a disapproving look and told me he was a native of Liverpool. He had been talking about the ragged class of nineteenth-century laborers, usually illiterate farmhands, known as “navvies”—hard-drinking and risk-taking men who were hired in gangs to smash the right-of-way in a direct line from station to station. Many of them had experienced digging canals and were known by the euphemism “navigators.” They wore the diminutive “navvy” as a term of pride. Polite society shunned them, but these magnificent railways would have been impossible without their contributions of sweat and blood. Their primary task was cleaving the hillsides so that tracks could be laid on a level plain for the weak locomotive engines of the day. Teams of navvies known as “butty gangs” blasted a route with gunpowder and then hauled the dirt out with the same kind of harness that so many children were then using in the coal mines: a man at the back of a full wheelbarrow would buckle a thick belt around his waist, then attach that to a rope dangling from the top of the slope and allow himself to be pulled up by a horse. This was how the Lime Street approach had been dug out, and it was dangerous. One 1827 fatality happened as “the poor fellow was in the act of undermining a heavy head of clay, fourteen or fifteen feet high, when the mass fell upon him and literally crushed his bowels out of his body,” as a Liverpool paper told it. The navvies wrecked old England along with themselves, erecting a bizarre new kingdom of tracks. In a passage from his 1848 novel Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens gives a snapshot of the scene outside London: Everywhere
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Tom Zoellner (Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World-from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief)
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Our team’s vision for the facility was a cross between a shooting range and a country club for special forces personnel. Clients would be able to schedule all manner of training courses in advance, and the gear and support personnel would be waiting when they arrived. There’d be seven shooting ranges with high gravel berms to cut down noise and absorb bullets, and we’d carve a grass airstrip, and have a special driving track to practice high-speed chases and real “defensive driving”—the stuff that happens when your convoy is ambushed. There would be a bunkhouse to sleep seventy. And nearby, the main headquarters would have the feel of a hunting lodge, with timber framing and high stone walls, with a large central fireplace where people could gather after a day on the ranges. This was the community I enjoyed; we never intended to send anyone oversees. This chunk of the Tar Heel State was my “Field of Dreams.” I bought thirty-one hundred acres—roughly five square miles of land, plenty of territory to catch even the most wayward bullets—for $900,000. We broke ground in June 1997, and immediately began learning about do-it-yourself entrepreneurship. That land was ugly: Logging the previous year had left a moonscape of tree stumps and tangled roots lorded over by mosquitoes and poisonous creatures. I killed a snake the first twelve times I went to the property. The heat was miserable. While a local construction company carved the shooting ranges and the lake, our small team installed the culverts and forged new roads and planted the Southern pine utility poles to support the electrical wiring. The basic site work was done in about ninety days—and then we had to figure out what to call the place. The leading contender, “Hampton Roads Tactical Shooting Center,” was professional, but pretty uptight. “Tidewater Institute for Tactical Shooting” had legs, but the acronym wouldn’t have helped us much. But then, as we slogged across the property and excavated ditches, an incessant charcoal mud covered our boots and machinery, and we watched as each new hole was swallowed by that relentless peat-stained black water. Blackwater, we agreed, was a name. Meanwhile, within days of being installed, the Southern pine poles had been slashed by massive black bears marking their territory, as the animals had done there since long before the Europeans settled the New World. We were part of this land now, and from that heritage we took our original logo: a bear paw surrounded by the stylized crosshairs of a rifle scope.
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Anonymous
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Less is more. “A few extremely well-chosen objectives,” Grove wrote, “impart a clear message about what we say ‘yes’ to and what we say ‘no’ to.” A limit of three to five OKRs per cycle leads companies, teams, and individuals to choose what matters most. In general, each objective should be tied to five or fewer key results. (See chapter 4, “Superpower #1: Focus and Commit to Priorities.”) Set goals from the bottom up. To promote engagement, teams and individuals should be encouraged to create roughly half of their own OKRs, in consultation with managers. When all goals are set top-down, motivation is corroded. (See chapter 7, “Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork.”) No dictating. OKRs are a cooperative social contract to establish priorities and define how progress will be measured. Even after company objectives are closed to debate, their key results continue to be negotiated. Collective agreement is essential to maximum goal achievement. (See chapter 7, “Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork.”) Stay flexible. If the climate has changed and an objective no longer seems practical or relevant as written, key results can be modified or even discarded mid-cycle. (See chapter 10, “Superpower #3: Track for Accountability.”) Dare to fail. “Output will tend to be greater,” Grove wrote, “when everybody strives for a level of achievement beyond [their] immediate grasp. . . . Such goal-setting is extremely important if what you want is peak performance from yourself and your subordinates.” While certain operational objectives must be met in full, aspirational OKRs should be uncomfortable and possibly unattainable. “Stretched goals,” as Grove called them, push organizations to new heights. (See chapter 12, “Superpower #4: Stretch for Amazing.”) A tool, not a weapon. The OKR system, Grove wrote, “is meant to pace a person—to put a stopwatch in his own hand so he can gauge his own performance. It is not a legal document upon which to base a performance review.” To encourage risk taking and prevent sandbagging, OKRs and bonuses are best kept separate. (See chapter 15, “Continuous Performance Management: OKRs and CFRs.”) Be patient; be resolute. Every process requires trial and error. As Grove told his iOPEC students, Intel “stumbled a lot of times” after adopting OKRs: “We didn’t fully understand the principal purpose of it. And we are kind of doing better with it as time goes on.” An organization may need up to four or five quarterly cycles to fully embrace the system, and even more than that to build mature goal muscle.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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In the shock of the moment, I gave some thought to renting a convertible and driving the twenty-seven hundred miles back alone. But then I realized I was neither single nor crazy. The acting director decided that, given the FBI’s continuing responsibility for my safety, the best course was to take me back on the plane I came on, with a security detail and a flight crew who had to return to Washington anyway. We got in the vehicle to head for the airport. News helicopters tracked our journey from the L.A. FBI office to the airport. As we rolled slowly in L.A. traffic, I looked to my right. In the car next to us, a man was driving while watching an aerial news feed of us on his mobile device. He turned, smiled at me through his open window, and gave me a thumbs-up. I’m not sure how he was holding the wheel. As we always did, we pulled onto the airport tarmac with a police escort and stopped at the stairs of the FBI plane. My usual practice was to go thank the officers who had escorted us, but I was so numb and distracted that I almost forgot to do it. My special assistant, Josh Campbell, as he often did, saw what I couldn’t. He nudged me and told me to go thank the cops. I did, shaking each hand, and then bounded up the airplane stairs. I couldn’t look at the pilots or my security team for fear that I might get emotional. They were quiet. The helicopters then broadcast our plane’s taxi and takeoff. Those images were all over the news. President Trump, who apparently watches quite a bit of TV at the White House, saw those images of me thanking the cops and flying away. They infuriated him. Early the next morning, he called McCabe and told him he wanted an investigation into how I had been allowed to use the FBI plane to return from California. McCabe replied that he could look into how I had been allowed to fly back to Washington, but that he didn’t need to. He had authorized it, McCabe told the president. The plane had to come back, the security detail had to come back, and the FBI was obligated to return me safely. The president exploded. He ordered that I was not to be allowed back on FBI property again, ever. My former staff boxed up my belongings as if I had died and delivered them to my home. The order kept me from seeing and offering some measure of closure to the people of the FBI, with whom I had become very close. Trump had done a lot of yelling during the campaign about McCabe and his former candidate wife. He had been fixated on it ever since. Still in a fury at McCabe, Trump then asked him, “Your wife lost her election in Virginia, didn’t she?” “Yes, she did,” Andy replied. The president of the United States then said to the acting director of the FBI, “Ask her how it feels to be a loser” and hung up the phone.
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James Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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What would be the natural thing? A man goes to college. He works as he wants to work, he plays as he wants to play, he exercises for the fun of the game, he makes friends where he wants to make them, he is held in by no fear of criticism above, for the class ahead of him has nothing to do with his standing in his own class. Everything he does has the one vital quality: it is spontaneous. That is the flame of youth itself. Now, what really exists?"
"...I say our colleges to-day are business colleges—Yale more so, perhaps, because it is more sensitively American. Let's take up any side of our life here. Begin with athletics. What has become of the natural, spontaneous joy of contest? Instead you have one of the most perfectly organized business systems for achieving a required result—success. Football is driving, slavish work; there isn't one man in twenty who gets any real pleasure out of it. Professional baseball is not more rigorously disciplined and driven than our 'amateur' teams. Add the crew and the track. Play, the fun of the thing itself, doesn't exist; and why? Because we have made a business out of it all, and the college is scoured for material, just as drummers are sent out to bring in business.
"Take another case. A man has a knack at the banjo or guitar, or has a good voice. What is the spontaneous thing? To meet with other kindred spirits in informal gatherings in one another's rooms or at the fence, according to the whim of the moment. Instead what happens? You have our university musical clubs, thoroughly professional organizations. If you are material, you must get out and begin to work for them—coach with a professional coach, make the Apollo clubs, and, working on, some day in junior year reach the varsity organization and go out on a professional tour. Again an organization conceived on business lines.
"The same is true with the competition for our papers: the struggle for existence outside in a business world is not one whit more intense than the struggle to win out in the News or Lit competition. We are like a beef trust, with every by-product organized, down to the last possibility. You come to Yale—what is said to you? 'Be natural, be spontaneous, revel in a certain freedom, enjoy a leisure you'll never get again, browse around, give your imagination a chance, see every one, rub wits with every one, get to know yourself.'
"Is that what's said? No. What are you told, instead? 'Here are twenty great machines that need new bolts and wheels. Get out and work. Work harder than the next man, who is going to try to outwork you. And, in order to succeed, work at only one thing. You don't count—everything for the college.' Regan says the colleges don't represent the nation; I say they don't even represent the individual.
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Owen Johnson (Stover at Yale)
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Excuse me, sir.” One the young officers put his hand up to stop them. “Are you Furious Barkley?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Is there a problem, officers?” Doug stepped in front of Furi.
“Damn straight there’s a problem.” Syn stepped inside the door, yanking his dark aviator glasses off his face. The scowl he wore told Furi this was not a pleasant coincidence. “Thanks guys, you can go.”
Furi stood with his mouth hanging open while Syn dismissed the officers.
“Seriously, Starsky. You gonna track my boy down every time he leaves the house?” Doug said angrily, still blocking Furi.
“He’s not your boy. And what I do regarding Furi is none of your goddamn business.” Syn’s clenched jaw made his words sound like an evil hiss. He shouldered past Doug and got directly in Furi’s face. “When I’ve been calling him for over six hours and he hasn’t picked up or returned any of my calls, I’ll send a fuckin’ SWAT team to find him if I want to.”
Syn spun and pointed his finger in Doug’s face, “That’s my say, not yours.” Syn’s voice was rising with his growing temper, and all eyes were on them.
“Okay, let’s get out of here.” Furi pushed at both men, urging them out the door.
As soon as they were out in the brisk fall air, Syn rounded on Furi, pushing their chest together. “Where have you been, Furious? I’ve been going crazy trying to check on you, and you’re sitting here casually eating pancakes,” Syn growled.
“Hey, back up, man.” Doug tried to wedge in between Furi and Syn.
Syn looked up in annoyance. “Doug, I swear, if you touch me, I’m gonna ensure that you never regain the use of that hand.”
“Okay, okay.” Furi put both hands flat on Syn’s chest, feeling his rapid heartbeat underneath all that muscle. Fuck. He really was scared. What was I thinking turning off my phone with everything that’s going on? “Syn. I’m so sorry. I turned my phone off because–”
“You don’t owe him an explanation. You’re a grown man, Furious. You were having a business meeting; he has no right to demand you be available to him at all times, just like Patrick.”
Furi and Syn both snapped at Doug. But Furi took control. “Hey! Don’t you ever say that again. This man is nothing like that asshole.” Furi shook his head at the absurdity of Doug’s accusation. “Don’t even say his name in the same sentence as Patrick’s.”
Doug looked at Furi as if he were a stranger.
“Doug, you don’t know everything that’s been going on. But I promise I’ll catch you up, okay? Then you’re going to feel pretty shitty about what you just said about Syn.” Furi nodded his head. “Go home. I’ll call you when I’m back at Syn’s place.”
“You’re staying with him?” Doug yelled.
“Doug. You know it’s not safe at my place,” Furi said softly, his eyes pleading with his friend for him to understand.
“Then you should come to stay with me. I don’t trust this guy!”
“This is fuckin’ crazy,” Syn snarled. “I know you’re his friend, but you’re sounding more pissed than a friend should be.”
“Don’t try to read me, Detective. Furi is my best friend, and I’ve had his back since the first day he got here.” Doug wasn’t backing down from Syn’s intimidating posture. Syn’s dark glasses were back on, creating a perfectly badass look with his black leather coat and boots. All the hardware Syn had tucked under his arms and the shiny badge hanging around his neck was a sight right out of a sexy cop porno.
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A.E. Via
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How Google Works (Schmidt, Eric) - Your Highlight on Location 3124-3150 | Added on Sunday, April 5, 2015 10:35:40 AM In late 1999, John Doerr gave a presentation at Google that changed the company, because it created a simple tool that let the founders institutionalize their “think big” ethos. John sat on our board, and his firm, Kleiner Perkins, had recently invested in the company. The topic was a form of management by objectives called OKRs (to which we referred in the previous chapter), which John had learned from former Intel CEO Andy Grove.173 There are several characteristics that set OKRs apart from their typical underpromise-and-overdeliver corporate-objective brethren. First, a good OKR marries the big-picture objective with a highly measurable key result. It’s easy to set some amorphous strategic goal (make usability better … improve team morale … get in better shape) as an objective and then, at quarter end, declare victory. But when the strategic goal is measured against a concrete goal (increase usage of features by X percent … raise employee satisfaction scores by Y percent … run a half marathon in under two hours), then things get interesting. For example, one of our platform team’s recent OKRs was to have “new WW systems serving significant traffic for XX large services with latency < YY microseconds @ ZZ% on Jupiter.”174 (Jupiter is a code name, not the location of Google’s newest data center.) There is no ambiguity with this OKR; it is very easy to measure whether or not it is accomplished. Other OKRs will call for rolling out a product across a specific number of countries, or set objectives for usage (e.g., one of the Google+ team’s recent OKRs was about the daily number of messages users would post in hangouts) or performance (e.g., median watch latency on YouTube videos). Second—and here is where thinking big comes in—a good OKR should be a stretch to achieve, and hitting 100 percent on all OKRs should be practically unattainable. If your OKRs are all green, you aren’t setting them high enough. The best OKRs are aggressive, but realistic. Under this strange arithmetic, a score of 70 percent on a well-constructed OKR is often better than 100 percent on a lesser one. Third, most everyone does them. Remember, you need everyone thinking in your venture, regardless of their position. Fourth, they are scored, but this scoring isn’t used for anything and isn’t even tracked. This lets people judge their performance honestly. Fifth, OKRs are not comprehensive; they are reserved for areas that need special focus and objectives that won’t be reached without some extra oomph. Business-as-usual stuff doesn’t need OKRs. As your venture grows, the most important OKRs shift from individuals to teams. In a small company, an individual can achieve incredible things on her own, but as the company grows it becomes harder to accomplish stretch goals without teammates. This doesn’t mean that individuals should stop doing OKRs, but rather that team OKRs become the more important means to maintain focus on the big tasks. And there’s one final benefit of an OKR-driven culture: It helps keep people from chasing competitors. Competitors are everywhere in the Internet Century, and chasing them (as we noted earlier) is the fastest path to mediocrity. If employees are focused on a well-conceived set of OKRs, then this isn’t a problem. They know where they need to go and don’t have time to worry about the competition. ==========
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Anonymous
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A couple of weeks before, while going over a Variety list of the most popular songs of 1935 and earlier, to use for the picture’s sound track – which was going to consist only of vintage recording played not as score but as source music – my eye stopped on a .933 standard, words by E.Y. (“Yip”) Harburg (with producer Billy Rose), music by Harold Arlen, the team responsible for “Over the Rainbow”, among many notable others, together and separately. Legend had it that the fabulous Ms. Dorothy Parker contributed a couple of lines. There were just two words that popped out at me from the title of the Arlen-Harburg song, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”. Not only did the sentiment of the song encapsulate metaphorically the main relationship in our story –
Say, it’s only a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn’t be make-believe
If you believed in me
– the last two words of the title also seemed to me a damn good movie title.
Alvin and Polly agreed, but when I tried to take it to Frank Yablans, he wasn’t at all impressed and asked me what it meant. I tried to explain. He said that he didn’t “want us to have our first argument,” so why didn’t we table this conversation until the movie was finished? Peter Bart called after a while to remind me that, after all, the title Addie Pray was associated with a bestselling novel. I asked how many copies it had sold in hardcover. Peter said over a hundred thousand. That was a lot of books but not a lot of moviegoers. I made that point a bit sarcastically and Peter laughed dryly.
The next day I called Orson Welles in Rome, where he was editing a film. It was a bad connection so we had to speak slowly and yell: “Orson! What do you think of this title?!” I paused a beat or two, then said very clearly, slowly and with no particular emphasis or inflection: “Paper …Moon!” There was a silence for several moments, and then Orson said, loudly, “That title is so good, you don’t even need to make the picture! Just release the title!
Armed with that reaction, I called Alvin and said, “You remember those cardboard crescent moons they have at amusement parks – you sit in the moon and have a picture taken?” (Polly had an antique photo of her parents in one of them.) We already had an amusement park sequence in the script so, I continued to Alvin, “Let’s add a scene with one of those moons, then we can call the damn picture Paper Moon!” And this led eventually to a part of the ending, in which we used the photo Addie had taken of herself as a parting gift to Moze – alone in the moon because he was too busy with Trixie to sit with his daughter – that she leaves on the truck seat when he drops her off at her aunt’s house.
… After the huge popular success of the picture – four Oscar nominations (for Tatum, Madeline Kahn, the script, the sound) and Tatum won Best Supporting Actress (though she was the lead) – the studio proposed that we do a sequel, using the second half of the novel, keeping Tatum and casting Mae West as the old lady; they suggested we call the new film Harvest Moon. I declined. Later, a television series was proposed, and although I didn’t want to be involved (Alvin Sargent became story editor), I agreed to approve the final casting, which ended up being Jodie Foster and Chris Connolly, both also blondes. When Frank Yablans double-checked about my involvement, I passed again, saying I didn’t think the show would work in color – too cute – and suggested they title the series The Adventures of Addie Pray. But Frank said, “Are you kidding!? We’re calling it Paper Moon - that’s a million-dollar title!” The series ran thirteen episodes.
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Peter Bogdanovich (Paper Moon)
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… and one day, after Mahlke had learned to swim, we were lying in the grass, in the Schlagball field. I ought to have gone to the dentist, but they wouldn't let me because I was hard to replace on the team. My tooth was howling. A cat sauntered diagonally across the field and no one threw anything at it. A few of the boys were chewing or plucking at blades of grass. The cat belonged to the caretaker and was black. Hotten Sonntag rubbed his bat with a woolen stocking. My tooth marked time. The tournament had been going on for two hours. We had lost hands down and were waiting for the return game. It was a young cat, but no kitten. In the stadium, handball goals were being made thick and fast on both sides. My tooth kept saying one word, over and over again. On the cinder track the sprinters were practicing starts or limbering up. The cat meandered about. A trimotored plane crept across the sky, slow and loud, but couldn't drown out my tooth. Through the stalks of grass the caretaker's black cat showed a white bib. Mahlke was asleep. The wind was from the east, and the crematorium between the United Cemeteries and the Engineering School was operating. Mr. Mallenbrandt, the gym teacher, blew his whistle: Change sides. The cat practiced. Mahlke was asleep or seemed to be. I was next to him with my toothache. Still practicing, the cat came closer. Mahlke's Adam's apple attracted attention because it was large, always in motion, and threw a shadow. Between me and Mahlke the caretaker's black cat tensed for a leap. We formed a triangle. My tooth was silent and stopped marking time: for Mahlke's Adam's apple had become the cat's mouse. It was so young a cat, and Mahlke's whatsis was so active – in any case the cat leaped at Mahlke's throat; or one of us caught the cat and held it up to Mahlke's neck; or I, with or without my toothache, seized the cat and showed it Mahlke's mouse: and Joachim Mahlke let out a yell, but suffered only slight scratches.
And now it is up to me, who called your mouse to the attention of this cat and all cats, to write. Even if we were both invented, I should have to write. Over and over again the fellow who invented us because it's his business to invent people obliges me to take your Adam's apple in my hand and carry it to the spot that saw it win or lose.
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Günter Grass (Cat and Mouse)
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Alfie is the goon in the team: think of Scooby-Doo with the brains of Homer Simpson. People often can’t believe he’s a collie because he is as smooth as a piglet and built like a lurcher with long legs and a deep chest. He is a true athlete and can run for miles and miles without tiring. Dog owners call it ‘having a good engine.’ He is obedient to the last – but sometimes ‘obedient’ can be another word for ‘stupid.’ If I ask him to lie down and get side-tracked, he will stay glued to the very spot until eventually I come looking for him ten minutes later. I would take sheep out the same gate every day for a week and on day seven Alfie would still need to be told what to do. But he is a great work dog and very honest, and no matter what situation he gets into he is always listening for my commands and has full faith that I will not see him wrong.
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Emma Gray (One Girl and Her Dogs: Life, Love and Lambing in the Middle of Nowhere)
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When I spoke with Keavy McMinn, one interesting point she made was that sometimes it’s helpful to be able to see things without the full historical context. Did you ever find that your context made it harder to move forward? Absolutely. I would notice myself coming into conversations with a team and I was prepared to give them a seven year history of every time someone had attempted the thing that they’re doing and why it didn’t work. It would take deliberate effort to review that history and ask myself, “Why is this information helpful or relevant to them?
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Will Larson (Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track)
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Paul Turovsky’s prolific experience in real estate has equipped him as an expert trainer for superintendents and agents. He understands the mechanics of property management and is well-versed in conflict resolution and tenant education. Mr. Turovsky brings over 15 years of experience to muti-level project management and has led accomplished teams of real estate professionals. He is people-oriented and has a proven track record of excellence.
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Paul Turovsky
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Then there’s project management software (sometimes referred to as task management or jobs management), which acts as an accountability and management tool. The goal of this software is to track all of your projects and ensure that every team member knows the tasks they should be working on and when they’re due. This also gets all your team communication, relating to any project, out of your email and into a central location.
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David Jenyns (SYSTEMology: Create time, reduce errors and scale your profits with proven business systems)
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We frequently encounter managers who’ve made a career of executing well in a culture with well-defined processes but who don’t know what to do with the “idea people” on their teams—so they shut them down. After all, innovation can be a distraction. And they may be proud of their no-failure track record—why take a risk now? If you have a cadre of well-meaning managers who are scared to pull the trigger on a new idea, you’ll need to help them work through their fear and teach them how to manage calculated risk taking.
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Karin Hurt (Courageous Cultures: How to Build Teams of Micro-Innovators, Problem Solvers, and Customer Advocates)
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there was something essential missing that prevented him from feeling content with his life, something he once had when he was on the UCLA track team. It was a sense of utterly consuming physical challenge, of pushing his limitations to the point of agony. The pain always ebbed, though, and left an afterglow of exhilaration that charged him until the next challenge, when he would give just a little bit more.
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Lee Goldberg (The Jury Series (The Jury #1-4))
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Axios In-House Newsletters Lights On from our revenue team . . . Cranes from Axios Local . . . Click Clack from our web-traffic guru . . . The Funnel from our head of growth . . . The TopLine from our sales warriors. • Those are just a few of the newsletters regularly published by Axios execs using Axios HQ—for their bosses, their teams and their colleagues across the company. Why it matters: This gives winners a forum for sharing best practices, encourages healthy competition among business units and gets rid of silos—everyone has visibility on what everyone’s up to. Between the lines: For the cofounders, these updates are an early-warning system for anyone’s activities that might be veering away from company goals. In one Sunday evening, we can be sure everyone’s on track and spot pockets that need our attention, encouragement or kudos. • And here’s our favorite part: When we have one-on-one meetings with our leaders, we’re already caught up. So we can use that time to talk through innovations, insights, bottlenecks, disruptions.
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Jim Vandehei (Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less)
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THE MOTOR YACHT AUTHORITY. TRUSTED EXPERTS & TRIED AND TRUE SALES TACTICS. The team of expert brokers at 26 North Yachts has an excellent track record - selling yachts 23% faster than our competitors and for a higher percentage of the asking price. This saves owners money on operational costs and depreciation when it’s time to sell. Our team focuses on leveraging both tried-and-true sales tactics as well as modern digital strategies to quickly get your yacht in front of qualified buyers.
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North Yachts
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The weekly leadership team Issues List. The time frame on these items is much shorter. These are all of the relevant issues for this week and quarter that must be tackled at the highest level. These issues will be resolved in your weekly leadership team meetings. You should not be solving departmental issues. These will typically be more strategic in nature. If it can be solved at a departmental level, push it down. Leadership issues include things as diverse as company Rocks being off track, a bad number in the Scorecard, key employee issues, major client difficulties, and process-and system-related problems.
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Gino Wickman (Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business)
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The Scorecard review is the leadership team’s opportunity at a high level to examine the five to 15 most important numbers in the organization and to make sure they are on track for the goal.
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Gino Wickman (Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business)
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Two roles are vital in the Level 10 Meeting. One person must run the meeting. This person will move the team through the agenda and keep them on track. Second, someone must manage the agenda. This person makes sure that the agenda, Scorecard, and Rock Sheet are updated and in front of everyone in each meeting. They update the To-Do and Issues Lists in the agenda each week.
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Gino Wickman (Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business)
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would be a fascinating character to profile. But how do you profile someone who shuns public attention? I started by cobbling together everything I could find about him online. I learned that what Bill lacked in physical strength, he made up for in heart. He was the MVP of his high school football team despite standing five feet ten and weighing 165 pounds. When the track coach was short on hurdlers, Bill volunteered. Since
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Eric Schmidt (Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell)
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Few things worth doing can be done alone. To get past the conceptual stage, ideas need to become crusades; you’ve got to convince people to join you. I was lucky right off the bat to find Bill Gates, whose passion for business matched mine for tracking technology. Later I’d be fortunate to meet Bert Rutan en route to SpaceShipOne and to find Allan Jones to lead our brain work. I’ve also seen what can happen when the right team isn’t in place, how the best ideas can founder. I made more mistakes in pursuing the Wired World than I can count, but the first and worst was this: I often failed to find the right people to help me execute my vision. My own history probably swayed me to take a flier on some with slim track records and to entrust them with too much too soon. Since then I have learned to be more careful. Talent is indeed essential, but seasoning and maturity are not to be underestimated. Above all, I’ve learned the pitfalls of getting so locked in to looking ahead that you miss the pothole that makes you stumble, or the iceberg that sinks you. Still, any crusade requires optimism and the ambition to aim high. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to find my own challenges, see them through to fruition, and—if everything breaks right—change the world for the better.
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Paul Allen (Idea Man)
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What i quickly discovered is that high school running was divided into two camps: those who ran cross-country and those who ran track. There was a clear distinction. The kind of runner you were largely mirrored your approach to life. The cross-country guys thought the track runners were high-strung and prissy, while the track guys viewed the cross-country guys as a bunch of athletic misfits.
It's true that the guys on the cross-country team were a motley bunch. solidly built with long, unkempt hair and rarely shaven faces, they looked more like a bunch of lumberjacks than runners. They wore baggy shorts, bushy wool socks, and furry beanie caps, even when it was roasting hot outside. Clothing rarely matched.
Track runners were tall and lanky; they were sprinters with skinny long legs and narrow shoulders. They wore long white socks, matching jerseys, and shorts that were so high their butt-cheeks were exposed. They always appeared neatly groomed, even after running.
The cross-country guys hung out in late-night coffee shops and read books by Kafka and Kerouac. They rarely talked about running; its was just something they did. The track guys, on the other hand, were obsessed. Speed was all they ever talked about....They spent an inordinate amount of time shaking their limbs and loosening up. They stretched before, during, and after practice, not to mention during lunch break and assembly, and before and after using the head. The cross-country guys, on the the other hand, never stretched at all.
The track guys ran intervals and kept logbooks detailing their mileage. They wore fancy watched that counted laps and recorded each lap-time....Everything was measured, dissected, and evaluated.
Cross-country guys didn't take notes. They just found a trail and went running....I gravitated toward the cross-country team because the culture suited me
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Dean Karnazes (Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner)
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The distance record holder was the black and white Arctic tern, with its 22,000-mile yearly journey between polar ice caps, but in fall 2006, a team of researchers published news of sooty shearwaters captured in their New Zealand breeding burrows and outfitted with satellite tracking devices. Flying in a giant figure eight over the Pacific basin, they journey 39,000 miles a year. (The birds can also dive beneath the ocean’s surface, searching for squid, to 225 feet.) In 2007, an even more astonishing record was established by a bar-tailed godwit. Satellite tracking allowed researchers to follow a female shorebird who flew 7,145 miles nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand. In nine days, she crossed the vast Pacific, without a single meal, rest, or drink.
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Sy Montgomery (Birdology: Adventures with a Pack of Hens, a Peck of Pigeons, Cantankerous Crows, Fierce Falcons, Hip Hop Parrots, Baby Hummingbirds, and One Murderously Big Living Dinosaur)
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Jeremy George Lake Charles The Fast Track C3 Corvette chassis is the ultimate aftermarket chassis for the Corvette 68-82.
The development team at Art Morrison Enterprises worked with leading manufacturers to develop the latest addition to the Ames series of GT-Sport bolt-on chassis for C2 applications. In order to simplify assembly, the C3 chassis has been designed to use the factory mounting points for bumpers, core and support bearings.
Jeremy George Lake Charles We offer a C-4 conversion, which includes a tailor-made front frame section that accepts crossbeams from 1984-96. Viper Super 44 / 9 QuickChange IRS diffusers are mounted on custom axles.
If you move the 500-pound V-8 engine 75 feet to the rear and the 300-pound automatic transmission 28 feet to the rear, you get a Corvette with a different weight distribution.
Jeremy George Lake Charles The bearings, in turn, improve acceleration and traction by shortening the braking distance, and all four tires are able to do their share of braking performance.
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Jeremy George Lake Charles
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I feel the smile slipping at the reminder that there’s no longer a track team at South Melville High. If I don’t cut it here, I have no chance at a college scholarship.
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Jesse Q. Sutanto (The New Girl)
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ENGINEERING ORGANIZATIONS OFTEN do the equivalent of spring cleaning. Everyone will stop working on new features for a week and fix bugs in the current product. Engineering teams are constantly tracking and evaluating bugs, so that they have a prioritized list to tackle when the so-called “fix-it” week comes around. A bug fix-it week is sort of the opposite of a Hack Week; instead of a chance to work on new and exciting ideas people usually don’t have time to get to, it’s a chance to fix old and annoying problems that have been bothering people for months. It’s like cleaning out the utensil drawer into which you spilled a little honey three months ago but somehow never found the moment to take all the knives and forks out to scrub the bottom of the drawer properly.
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Kim Malone Scott (Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity)
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But one small incident sticks in my mind that perhaps sums up the financial bubble we existed in: at a test, not long after I joined the team, McLaren chartered a helicopter … in a desperate attempt to dry out a wet track.
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Marc 'Elvis' Priestley (The Mechanic: The Secret World of the F1 Pitlane)
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(I would tell my athletes) you're here; your parents are sacrificing to send you to school. Don't let them down. Work a little harder. Be accountable. Be an impact person for your team. Help your teammates out. You know, they're not machines; they're going to have a bad every now and then.
-- Joe I. Vigil
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Pat Melgares (Chasing Excellence: The Remarkable Life and Inspiring Vigilosophy of Coach Joe I. Vigil)
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I grew up caring about things. I just carried it over into my work. I knew that people had problems. I knew that my mom had problems. I knew the problems that people on the south side had. I tried to get them all to the next level of success, something you could be proud of. And I just practiced the same principles on the team.
-- Joe I. Vigil
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Pat Melgares (Chasing Excellence: The Remarkable Life and Inspiring Vigilosophy of Coach Joe I. Vigil)
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The most convincing scientific validation of breathing less for asthma came by way of Dr. Alicia Meuret, director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. In 2014, Meuret and a team of researchers gathered 120 randomly selected asthma sufferers, measured their pulmonary lung functions, lung size, and blood gases, and then gave them a handheld capnometer, which tracked the carbon dioxide in their exhaled breath. Over
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James Nestor (Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art)
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Galen Rupp matriculated as a freshman at the University of Oregon in 2004 and was performing well. There was only one problem—Salazar didn’t have any faith that the head track-and-field coach was the right collegiate mentor for his young protégé. So Salazar and Cook helped orchestrate the firing of coach Martin Smith, a quirky leader who many of the Nike loyalists didn’t think was the right fit for Rupp. In this effort they came to loggerheads with Bill Moos, the university’s athletic director. Knight and Nike had had a long and mutually prosperous twelve-year run with Moos in which the school’s athletic budget grew from $18.5 million to $41 million. But he didn’t want to fire his head coach, who was objectively good at his job. Knight threatened to withhold funding for the construction of the school’s new basketball arena until both coach and director were gone. Less than a week after he led the team to a sixth-place finish at the NCAA indoor championships, Smith was replaced by former Stanford coach Vin Lananna, a devout “Nike guy.” Moos would retire a year later, saying, “I created the monster that ate me.” Knight then made a donation of $100 million—the largest donation in Oregon history—to the university.
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Matt Hart (Win at All Costs: Inside Nike Running and Its Culture of Deception)
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If Ranger needed help with the takedown on someone he was personally tracking he wouldn’t call me. If you gave Ranger fifteen minutes he could assemble a team that would make the invasion of Kuwait look like a kindergarten exercise. Needless to say, I wasn’t at the head of his commando-for-hire list. I wasn’t even on the bottom of it.
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Janet Evanovich (Two for the Dough (Stephanie Plum, #2))
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Conventional wisdom in the HR community held that bosses had to work with underperformers, sitting with them and providing coaching and oversight. As we saw it, that was precisely the wrong thing for bosses to do. Helping the single underperformer on a team of ten get back on track sucks up a lot of valuable managerial time. Leaders are much better off working with the other nine to help them notch wins for the organization, while also attending to customers and operational matters. Underperforming leaders (and lower-level managers and employees as well) needed to take responsibility for fixing their own performance. If they didn’t change within a fairly quick time period, they’d face the consequences. That might sound cold and uncompromising, but it really isn’t—it’s honoring and supporting the vast majority of people who are working hard and performing.
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David Cote (Winning Now, Winning Later: How Companies Can Succeed in the Short Term While Investing for the Long Term)
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If you are playing tennis, you have a partner, you are a team, and you never go against each other — never. Even if you both play tennis differently, you have the same goal: to have fun together, to play together, to be playmates. If you have a partner who wants to control your game, and she says, “No, don’t play like that; play like this. No, you are doing it wrong,” you are not going to have any fun. Eventually, you won’t want to play with that partner anymore. Instead of being a team, your partner wants to control how you play. And without the concept of a team, you are always going to have conflict. If you see your partnership, your romantic relationship, as a team, everything will start to improve. In a relationship, as in a game, it’s not about winning or losing. You are playing because you want to have fun. In the track of love, you are giving more than taking. And of course, you love yourself so much that you don’t allow selfish people to take advantage of you. You are not going for revenge, but you are clear in your communication. You can say, “I don’t like it when you try to take advantage of me, when you disrespect me, when you are unkind to me. I don’t need someone to abuse me verbally, emotionally, physically. I don’t need to hear you cursing all the time. It’s not that I am better than you; it’s because I love beauty. I love to laugh; I love to have fun; I love to love. It’s not that I am selfish, I just don’t need a big victim near me. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love you, but I cannot take responsibility for your dream. If you are in a relationship with me, it will be so hard for your Parasite, because I will not react to your garbage at all.” This is not selfishness; this is self-love. Selfishness, control, and fear will break almost any relationship. Generosity, freedom, and love will create the most beautiful relationship: an ongoing romance.
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Miguel Ruiz (The Mastery of Love: A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship (A Toltec Wisdom Book))
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Tricia thought about all those training runs, those miserable, hot steamy miles and hills in August in the Berkshires with the team. Or the frigid early - morning speed workouts in January on the track in New Haven. All this time, she'd thought it was about running, but it was really about preparing her for the last 17 minutes and the next few hours of pain, when she had to remain focused long enough to leave work, go to her apartment and pack a few things, and then get on the train out to Southport. This was the moment where developing all that endurance and a high pain threshold finally paid off.
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Lian Dolan (The Sweeney Sisters)
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In many organizations, your ability to grow in your career will hit a ceiling unless you start managing people. All C-level executives lead teams. If your ambitions are to be a CEO or VP someday, you’re going to need to move on to the management track. There are also jobs where, beyond a certain skill level, the only path for growth is learning how to manage and coordinate the work of more and more people—for example, in customer support or retail sales
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Julie Zhuo (The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You)
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We teach you how to implement our lower risk cashflow on demand strategy to generate a second income for your financial security. Enjoy the benefits of ongoing support and coaching from our expert team, to help you fast track to sustainable trading success.
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Andrew Baxter
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Success will often mean interpreting business needs, communicating a clear direction, defusing a looming crisis, convincing teams to agree on tradeoffs, or just being a good influence.
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Will Larson (Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track)
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When disaster strikes, Clean Slate Services is there to help. Our team of professional water damage restoration experts can quickly remediate any water damage, and our fire damage restoration specialists can take care of any fire damage. We also offer mold remediation services for those unfortunate times when mold strikes. We're here to help you get your life back on track, so call us today!
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Clean Slate Services
“
Boehner had apparently emphasized how “angry” I was during our discussions—a useful fiction that I’d told my team not to dispute in the interest of keeping the deal on track. For his members, there was no greater selling point. In fact, more and more, I’d noticed how the mood we’d first witnessed in the fading days of Sarah Palin’s campaign rallies and on through the Tea Party summer had migrated from the fringe of GOP politics to the center—an emotional, almost visceral, reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology. It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted. Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety. The suggestion that I hadn’t been born in the United States wasn’t new. At least one conservative crank had pushed the theory as far back as my Senate race in Illinois. During the primary campaign for president, some disgruntled Hillary supporters had recirculated the claim, and while her campaign strongly disavowed it, conservative bloggers and talk radio personalities had picked it up, setting off feverish email chains among right-wing activists. By the time the Tea Party seized on it during my first year in office, the tale had blossomed into a full-blown conspiracy theory: I hadn’t just been born in Kenya, the story went, but I was also a secret Muslim socialist, a Manchurian candidate who’d been groomed from childhood—and planted in the United States using falsified documents—to infiltrate the highest reaches of the American government.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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Team self-management and organization challenges the lead role definition. It’s difficult for many leads to give up making detailed decisions for teams on a daily basis and allow them to risk failure, even for smaller challenges. However, the benefits of growing self-management becomes apparent as some of the more mundane management duties of a lead, such as task creation, estimation, and tracking, are taken over by the team.
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Clinton Keith (Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat)
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Ruth suggests Richard first changed when he was thrown off the football team at the Lincoln School for his epilepsy. He was the quarterback, and Julian attended the Saturday games whenever he wasn’t away laying track. Richard was an excellent athlete and was very proud about being the quarterback. He was a fast runner and could think quickly on his feet. However, when Richard had had a grand mal seizure at the end of one game, the coach had unceremoniously and without apology thrown him off the team. There was medication Richard could have been given, but no one ever suggested it. Richard was very disappointed; it wasn’t his fault he had blackouts, and it was unfair for him to be thrown off the team. He protested to the coach, but the coach said, “If something happens to you while you’re playing, it’ll be all my fault. No, thank you.
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Philip Carlo (The Night Stalker: The Disturbing Life and Chilling Crimes of Richard Ramirez)
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There’s a car racing metaphor I find helpful when I’m trying to remind myself to look up from my laptop and take a break. When I was a child, I visited the maintenance pit of the famous Silverstone Formula One racetrack, and of course it was fascinating to learn about the tire switches and refueling that mechanics were able to do in just a few seconds. But what stayed with me most was the idea that success was determined not only by the car’s speed on the track, but also by the “pit strategy”—the race team’s scheduled pit stops. Each stop was a tactical investment in performance, a deliberate slowing down, to enable the car to speed up afterward. Pit stops are not wasted time—they’re an essential part of an efficient, well-planned race. And your brain is like that race car. Downtime is as important to your work as every other part of your day, and you need to make sure you get enough of that time throughout the day. Plan for it, protect it, respect it.
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Caroline Webb (How To Have A Good Day: The Essential Toolkit for a Productive Day at Work and Beyond)
“
The four common archetypes of Staff-plus roles I encountered are: The Tech Lead guides the approach and execution of a particular team. They partner closely with a single manager, but sometimes they partner with two or three managers within a focused area. Some companies also have a Tech Lead Manager role, which is similar to the Tech Lead archetype but exists on the engineering manager ladder and includes people management responsibilities. The Architect is responsible for the direction, quality, and approach within a critical area. They combine in-depth knowledge of technical constraints, user needs, and organization level leadership. The Solver digs deep into arbitrarily complex problems and finds an appropriate path forward. Some focus on a given area for long periods. Others bounce from hotspot to hotspot as guided by organizational leadership. The Right Hand extends an executive’s attention, borrowing their scope and authority to operate particularly complex organizations. They provide additional leadership bandwidth to leaders of large-scale organizations. This taxonomy is more focused on being useful than complete, but so far, I’ve been able to fit every Staff-plus engineer I’ve spoken to into one of these categories. Admittedly, some folks are easier to classify than others.
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Will Larson (Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track)
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Rich Nichols, another attorney, was there in Rochester, too. He had already been in contact with the players as far back as late 2012 through Hope Solo, who was frustrated with the team’s hesitance to take a stronger stance against U.S. Soccer. Solo didn’t know Nichols when she called him for the first time. She believed the national team needed a stronger voice in negotiations, and after asking around, she eventually got Nichols’s name. His highest-profile experience in sports came from representing Olympic track star Marion Jones in doping allegations and serving as general counsel for the American Basketball League, a women’s league that preceded the WNBA. Nichols’s expertise isn’t quite as a trial lawyer, but he speaks with the cadence and tempo of one, knowing which words to emphasize and where to pause for effect. As the players of the national team were debating how to move forward in contract negotiations, Solo called Nichols on her own to see if he could help. Their first conversation centered largely around the idea that the women should demand the same pay as the men’s national team. Nichols and Solo felt a philosophical connection right away. Both outspoken and unafraid to ruffle feathers, they had the same ideas about the tack the national team needed to take.
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Caitlin Murray (The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women Who Changed Soccer)
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded the team’s research, which was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.65 Gates announced on March 18, 2020, during a “Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ session” that he is working on the invisible Quantum Dot Tattoo Implant that will track who has been tested for COVID-19 and who has been vaccinated against it.
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Sheila Zilinsky (TECHNOGEDDON: The Coming Human Extinction)
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Dispersed teams must have the ability to adjust their practices and working agreements to meet their challenges and needs. No two dispersed teams are alike, so their Sprint practices cannot be entirely standardized. Areas of team self-organization include: Deciding core hours where communication is assured among every team member. Determining which online tools to use to plan, track, share, and communicate Sprint work. Deciding what to share and what not to share with stakeholders within a Sprint (see “Transparency” above).
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Clinton Keith (Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat)
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Innovation accounting works in three steps: first, use a minimum viable product to establish real data on where the company is right now. Without a clear-eyed picture of your current status—no matter how far from the goal you may be—you cannot begin to track your progress. Second, startups must attempt to tune the engine from the baseline toward the ideal. This may take many attempts. After the startup has made all the micro changes and product optimizations it can to move its baseline toward the ideal, the company reaches a decision point. That is the third step: pivot or persevere. If the company is making good progress toward the ideal, that means it’s learning appropriately and using that learning effectively, in which case it makes sense to continue. If not, the management team eventually must conclude that its current product strategy is flawed and needs a serious change. When a company pivots, it starts the process all over again, reestablishing a new baseline and then tuning the engine from there. The sign of a successful pivot is that these engine-tuning activities are more productive after the pivot than before.
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Eric Ries (The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses)
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The reviews run for three hours, with a dozen senior executives taking their turn. Little time is spent on people’s greens. Instead, they “sell” their reds. The team votes on the most important at-risk OKRs for the company as a whole, then brainstorms together as long as it takes to get the objectives back on track. In the spirit of cross-departmental solidarity, individuals volunteer to “buy” their colleagues’ reds. As Art says, “We’re all here to help. We’re all in the same bathwater.” As far as I know, “selling your reds” is a unique use of OKRs, and one well worth emulating.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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him. That in itself was deeply worrying. It was Jeff, one of our mountaineers, who followed a snowmobile track to an unobtrusive hole. He then came back and got Lance, the team’s other mountaineer, looking
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Kim Stanley Robinson (The Ministry for the Future)
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The entire company, he said, would restructure itself around what he called “two-pizza teams.” Employees would be organized into autonomous groups of fewer than ten people—small enough that, when working late, the team members could be fed with two pizza pies. These teams would be independently set loose on Amazon’s biggest problems. They would likely compete with one another for resources and sometimes duplicate their efforts, replicating the Darwinian realities of surviving in nature. Freed from the constraints of intracompany communication, Bezos hoped, these loosely coupled teams could move faster and get features to customers quicker. There were some head-scratching aspects to Bezos’s two-pizza-team concept. Each group was required to propose its own “fitness function”—a linear equation that it could use to measure its own impact without ambiguity. For example, a two-pizza team in charge of sending advertising e-mails to customers might choose for its fitness function the rate at which these messages were opened multiplied by the average order size those e-mails generated. A group writing software code for the fulfillment centers might home in on decreasing the cost of shipping each type of product and reducing the time that elapsed between a customer’s making a purchase and the item leaving the FC in a truck. Bezos wanted to personally approve each equation and track the results over time. It would be his way of guiding a team’s evolution.
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Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
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Nashville Addiction Clinic is an outpatient mental health and opioid addiction treatment facility. Patients come to us for help in getting their life back on track. A judgement free zone where compassion and action meet, is exactly what you can expect when you become a patient. Our team of Board Certified Addiction Specialists, therapists, and support staff have all been hand selected to ensure the success of each person entering our program. The number one goal we have each day, is helping you.
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Nashville Addiction Clinic
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Team roster—address, phone and fax of your doctors, and their assistants. • Notes—from consultations and conversations with your doctors. You can refer back to them if you are confused about anything they told you, and perhaps save yourself a call to their office. • Test results—copies of any important test results or reports such as mammograms, pathology reports, etc. • Questions—an ongoing list of questions to ask your doctors during your next visit (unless they are urgent . . . then call immediately). • Symptom tracking—if you are tracking any symptoms associated with treatment such as nausea to report back to your doctors. • Financial statements—keep copies of all medical bills from doctors and hospitals, whether they were sent to you or submitted directly to your insurance company. Also keep copies of all Explanation of Benefit (EOB) statements from your insurance company.
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Deborah A. Cohen (Just Get Me Through This! - Revised and Updated)
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When all the projections of intent and strategy twist and turn back on you, tracking team blood, 'sorry' just won't cover it. There's nothing so embarrassing as when things go wrong in a war.
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Michael Herr (Dispatches)
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Leaders’ Tip As a Leader, you should be making a welcome phone call to every new distributor in your team, and encourage all others in the sponsorship line to do the same to each new person. There are so many benefits to this: – a different voice who they can create synergy and rapport with; – tips and advice; – helps the new person feel a sense of belonging and part of something special; – makes them realise there’s plenty of support and a totally different working environment to anything they’ve experienced before. I think this approach increases retention considerably and it is something I have used and taught regularly in my business and when speaking abroad.
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Wes Linden (79 Network Marketing Tips: For Fast-Track Success)
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I call these lessons ‘learned on the fly’ because the knowledge gained from the experiences connected with them were very much akin to the spirit of the centerfielder in baseball running backward at full speed, looking towards the heavens, trying to not lose sight of the ball or fail to notice the sensation of gravel from the warning track under his cleats as he knowingly approaches the blindside impact of an outfield wall. His focused intention guides him into trying to make the catch that will save the game for his team, his city and the harmony of the moment, despite the foreboding threat of a pending collision. Decisions in these situations are made in an instant. One weighs the purpose of the game, the success of the catch and one’s own safety of survival in a fleeting moment, and in all hopes one lives to tell about it in the glow of great success.
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Michael Delaware (The Art of Sales Management: Lessons Learned on the Fly)
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Track coach Bill Bowerman decided that his team needed better, lighter running shoes. So he went out to his workshop and poured rubber into the family waffle iron. That’s how Nike’s famous waffle sole was born.‡
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Jason Fried (ReWork)
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Let’s call it the theory of receptivity. It’s the idea, often cited by young people in their case against the relevance of even marginally older people, that one’s taste—in music or film, literature or fine cuisine—petrifies during life’s peak of happiness or nadir of misery. Or maybe it’s not that simple. Maybe a subtler spike on the charts—upward, downward, anomalous points in between—might qualify, so long as it’s formative. Let’s say that receptivity, anyway, can be tied to the moments when, for whatever reason, a person opens herself to the things we can all agree make life worth living in a new and definitive way, whether curiosity has her chasing down the world’s pleasures, or the world has torn a strip from her, exposing raw surface area to the winds. During these moments—sleepaway camp right before your bar mitzvah; the year you were captain of the hockey team and the baseball team; the time after you got your license and before you totaled the Volvo—you are closely attuned to your culture, reaching out and in to consume it in vast quantities. When this period ends, your senses seal off what they have absorbed and build a sensibility that becomes, for better or worse, definitive: This is the stuff I like. These films/books/artists tell the story of who I am. There is no better-suited hairstyle. This is as good/bad as it gets for me. The theory suggests that we only get a couple of these moments in life, a couple of sound tracks, and that timing is paramount. If you came of age in the early eighties, for instance, you may hold a relatively shitty cultural moment to be the last time anything was any good simply because that was the last time you were open and engaged with what was happening around you, the last time you felt anything really—appallingly—deeply. I worry about this theory. I worry because it suggests that receptivity is tied closely to youth, and firsts, and also because as with many otherwise highly rejectable theories—Reaganomics and communism come to mind—there is that insolent nub of truth in it.
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Michelle Orange (This Is Running for Your Life: Essays)
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It’s getting-up time,” Alessandro declares. “Today is the day.”
“What day?”
“The release date.”
“What are we talking about?”
“Daa-add. The new XBOX game. Hunting Old Sammie.”
Armand opens his eyes. He looks at his son looking at him. The boy’s eyes are only inches away. “You’re kidding.”
“It’s the newest best game. You hunt down terrorists and kill them.” Lifting his voice, “‘Deploy teams of Black Berets into the ancient mountains of Tora Bora. Track implacable terrorists to their cavernous lairs. Rain withering fire down on the homicidal masterminds who planned the horror of September eleven, two-thousand-and-one.’” The kid’s memory is canny.
Armand lifts Alex off his chest and sits up. “Who invented it?”
“I’m telling you, dad. It’s an XBOX game.”
“We can get it today?”
“No,” Leah says. “Absolutely not. The last thing he needs is another violent video game.”
“Mahhuum!”
“How bad can it be?” says Armand.
“How would you know? A minute ago you hadn’t heard of it.”
“And you had?”
“I saw a promo. Helicopter gunships with giant machine guns. Soldiers with flamethrowers, turning bearded men into candles.”
“Sounds great.”
“Armand, really. How old are you?”
“I don’t see what my age has to do with it.”
“Dad, it’s totally cool. ‘Uncover mountain strongholds with thermal imaging technology. Call in air-strikes by F-16s. Destroy terrorist cells with laser weaponry. Wage pitched battles against mujahideen. Capture bin Laden alive or kill him on the spot. March down Fifth Avenue with jihadists’ heads on pikes. Make the world safe for democracy.’”
Safe for Dick Cheney’s profits, Armand thinks, knowing all about it from his former life, but says nothing. It’s pretty much impossible to explain the complexity of how things work within the greater systemic dysfunction. Instead, he asks the one question that matters.
“How much does it cost?”
Alessandro’s mouth minces sideways. He holds up fingers, then realizes he needs more than two hands.
Armand can see the kid doesn’t want to say. “C’mon. ’Fess up.”
Alex sighs. “A one with two zeros.”
“One hundred dollars.”
Alex’s eyes slide away. Rapid nods, face averted. “Yeah.”
“For a video game, Alex.”
“Yhep.”
“No way.”
“Daa-add! It’s the greatest game ever!” The boy is beginning to whine.
“Don’t whine,” Armand tells him.
“On TV it’s awesome. The army guys are flaming a cave and when the terror guys try to escape, they shoot them.”
“Neat.”
“Their turbans are on fire.”
“Even better.”
“Armand,” Leah says.
“Dad,” says Alessandro.
He will not admit it but Armand is hooked. It would be deeply satisfying in the second-most intimate way imaginable to kill al Qaida terrorists holed up along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border—something the actual U.S. military cannot or will not completely do. But a hundred bucks. It isn’t really the money, although living on interest income Armand has become more frugal. He can boost the C-note but what message would it send? Hunting virtual terrorists in cyberspace is all well and good. But plunking down $100 for a toy seems irresponsible and possibly wrong in a country where tens of thousands are homeless and millions have no health insurance and children continue, incredibly, to go hungry. Fifty million Americans live in poverty and he’s looking to play games.
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John Lauricella (Hunting Old Sammie)
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One spirit, one team, one win
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Derrick Adkins (Let's All Get High: Inspiration for the X Generation)
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One of the most ambitious men to exploit the timber trade was Hugh F. McDanield, a railroad builder and tie contractor who had come to Fayetteville along with the Frisco. He bought thousands of acres of land within hauling distance of the railroad and sent out teams of men to cut the timber. By the mid-1880s, after a frenzy of cutting in south Washington County, he turned his gaze to the untapped fortune of timber on the steep hillsides of southeast Washington County and southern Madison County, territory most readily accessed along a wide valley long since leveled by the east fork of White River. Mr. McDanield gathered a group of backers and the state granted a charter September 4, 1886, giving authority to issue capital stock valued at $1.5 million, which was the estimated cost to build a rail line through St. Paul and on to Lewisburg, which was a riverboat town on the Arkansas River near Morrilton. McDanield began surveys while local businessman J. F. Mayes worked with property owners to secure rights of way. “On December 4, 1886, a switch was installed in the Frisco main line about a mile south of Fayetteville, and the spot was named Fayette Junction.” Within six months, 25 miles of track had been laid east by southeast through Baldwin, Harris, Elkins, Durham, Thompson, Crosses, Delaney, Patrick, Combs, and finally St. Paul.
Soon after, in 1887, the Frisco bought the so-called “Fayetteville and Little Rock” line from McDanield. It was estimated that in the first year McDanield and partners shipped out more than $2,000,000 worth of hand-hacked white oak railroad ties at an approximate value of twenty-five cents each. Mills ran day and night as people arrived “by train, wagon, on horseback, even afoot” to get a piece of the action along the new track, commonly referred to as the “St. Paul line.” Saloons, hotels, banks, stores, and services from smithing to tailoring sprang up in rail stop communities.
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Denele Pitts Campbell
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Each group was required to propose its own “fitness function”—a linear equation that it could use to measure its own impact without ambiguity. For example, a two-pizza team in charge of sending advertising e-mails to customers might choose for its fitness function the rate at which these messages were opened multiplied by the average order size those e-mails generated. A group writing software code for the fulfillment centers might home in on decreasing the cost of shipping each type of product and reducing the time that elapsed between a customer’s making a purchase and the item leaving the FC in a truck. Bezos wanted to personally approve each equation and track the results over time. It would be his way of guiding a team’s evolution. Bezos was applying
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Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
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In subtle ways, Professor Vaughn showed us how to pay the land its due respect. He was patient with us if we tied an inept half hitch or ran the jeep into quick mud, but he bristled if we complained too much about the heat, or the smell of the cattle tank we used for a bath, or joked sarcastically about the social life of some small town. At the university, he lectured with such precision and speed that two students often teamed up for note taking. But stopped out on some two-track road in Jornada del Muerto, he could chew on a shaft of grass for an hour, languidly exchanging philosophy with a local cowboy. The professor even adopted a slower, lulling speech pattern in the field, and used local phrases liberally.
Time moved slowly in the desert and we were expected to fall into that rhythm.
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Michael Novacek (Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs)
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I changed my mind Iris, run!” I didn’t have to tell Iris twice. She was already sprinting down the path. Why she wasn’t on the track team, I didn’t know. She was lightning fast! I didn’t care if I looked like a coward. Being ripped to shreds wasn’t on my self-preservation list.
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Nicole Grane (Pinehurst (Pinehurst, #1))
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admiring remarks of my team as I track down the latest obscure but in the Project Mercury Monitor System.
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Gerald M. Weinberg (Becoming a Technical Leader)
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So training smart, training effectively, involves cycling through the three zones in any given week or training block: 75 percent easy running, 5 to 10 percent running at target race paces, and 15 to 20 percent fast running or hill training in the third zone to spike the heart and breathing rates. In my 5-days-a-week running schedule, that cycle looks like this: On Monday, I cross-train. Tuesday, I do an easy run in zone one, then speed up to a target race pace for a mile or two of zone-two work. On Wednesday, it’s an easy zone-one run. Thursday is an intense third-zone workout with hills, speed intervals, or a combination of the two. Friday is a recovery day to give my body time to adapt. On Saturday, I do a relaxed run with perhaps another mile or two of zone-two race pace or zone-three speed. Sunday is a long, slow run. That constant cycling through the three zones—a hard day followed by an easy or rest day—gradually improves my performance in each zone and my overall fitness. But today is not about training. It’s about cranking up that treadmill yet again, pushing me to run ever faster in the third zone, so Vescovi can measure my max HR and my max VO2, the greatest amount of oxygen my heart and lungs can pump to muscles working at their peak. When I pass into this third zone, Vescovi and his team start cheering: “Great job!” “Awesome!” “Nice work.” They sound impressed. And when I am in the moment of running rather than watching myself later on film, I really think I am impressing them, that I am lighting up the computer screen with numbers they have rarely seen from a middle-aged marathoner, maybe even from an Olympian in her prime. It’s not impossible: A test of male endurance athletes in Sweden, all over the age of 80 and having 50 years of consistent training for cross-country skiing, found they had relative max VO2 values (“relative” because the person’s weight was included in the calculation) comparable to those of men half their age and 80 percent higher than their sedentary cohorts. And I am going for a high max VO2. I am hauling in air. I am running well over what should be my max HR of 170 (according to that oft-used mathematical formula, 220 − age) and way over the 162 calculated using the Gulati formula, which is considered to be more accurate for women (0.88 × age, the result of which is then subtracted from 206). Those mathematical formulas simply can’t account for individual variables and fitness levels. A more accurate way to measure max HR, other than the test I’m in the middle of, is to strap on a heart rate monitor and run four laps at a 400-meter track, starting out at a moderate pace and running faster on each lap, then running the last one full out. That should spike your heart into its maximum range. My high max HR is not surprising, since endurance runners usually develop both a higher maximum rate at peak effort and a lower rate at rest than unconditioned people. What is surprising is that as the treadmill
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Margaret Webb (Older, Faster, Stronger: What Women Runners Can Teach Us All About Living Younger, Longer)
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To succeed as a business problem solver, you must choose your team carefully, getting the best mix of people from the resources you have available. McKinsey benefits from a global pool of talented, intelligent individuals whose strengths and weaknesses the Firm tracks closely. Even with this advantage, EMs and EDs must learn the art of team selection. Their experiences can help you, even if you can’t call on the same level of resources.
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Ethan M. Rasiel (The McKinsey Way)
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Four times a year, the program's street team sifts through police records and its own intelligence to determine, with actuarial detachment, the 50 people in Richmond most likely to shoot someone and to be shot themselves.ONS tracks them and approaches the most lethal (and vulnerable) on the list, offering them a spot in a program that includes a stipend to turn their lives around. While
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Anonymous
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the intelligence operator at this point begins to propose operations, and use clandestine operations lead to minor “Vietnams” or other such bleeding ulcer type projects that drain United States resources, wealth, and manpower on behalf of no meaningful national objective. The CIA maintains hundreds of U.S. military units for its own purposes. Many of these units become involved in this type of operation. After these cover units have been in existence for several years, the military has a hard time keeping track of them. The military system is prone to try to ignore such abnormalities, and the CIA capitalizes on this to bury some units deep in the military wasteland.
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L. Fletcher Prouty (The Secret Team: The CIA & its Allies in Control of the United States & the World)
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This is a story about the power and impact of “truly human” leadership. It is about bringing our deepest sense of right, authentic caring, and high ideals to business. It is about achieving success beyond success, measured in the flourishing of human lives. It is a story of an approach to business and leadership that emerged only in the last twenty years or so in the life of a 130-year-old company, but that has already built a strong track record of enriching the lives of team members and creating extraordinary shareholder value at the same time. It is an approach that has been tested, refined, and proven to work dozens of times in half a dozen very different countries and in numerous towns and cities across the United States.
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Bob Chapman (Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family)
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Thoughts are simultaneously the biggest obstacle to meditation, and also an unavoidable part of it—like the opposing team in basketball, or the hurdles in track. The goal is not to erase the obstacles, but to play as well as possible.
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Dan Harris (10% Happier)
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An integral part of a public offering is a “road show,” during which company leaders pitch their prospects to bankers and investment gurus. Brin and Page refused to see themselves as supplicants. According to Lise Buyer, the founders routinely spurned any advice from the experienced financial team they’d hired to guide them through the process. “If you told them you couldn’t do something a certain way, they would think you were an idiot,” she says. The tone of the road-show presentations was set early, as Brin and Page introduced themselves by first names, an opening more appropriate for bistro waiters than potential captains of industry. And of course they weren’t attired like executives—the day of their presentation of Google’s case to investors was one more in a lifetime of casual dress days for them. Google had prepared a video to promote the company, but viewers considered it amateurish. It was poorly lit and wasn’t even enlivened by the customary upbeat musical sound track. Though anyone who read the prospectus should have been prepared for that, some investors had difficulty with the heresy that Google was willing to forgo some profits for its founders’ idealistic views of what made the world a better place. On the video Brin cautioned that Google might apply its resources “to ameliorate a number of the world’s problems.” Probably the low point of the road show was a massive session involving 1,500 potential investors at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. Brin and Page caused a firestorm by refusing to answer many questions, cracking jokes instead. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Some investors sitting in the ballroom began speculating with each other whether the executives had spent any time practicing the presentation, or if they were winging it.” The latter was in fact the case—despite the desperate urging of Google’s IPO team, Page and Brin had refused to perform even a cursory run-through.
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Steven Levy (In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives)
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Walt had a way of communicating that was just magical,” composer Richard Sherman told me. “Simple, but magical. He would give you a challenge and say, ‘I know you can do this.’ He made you believe anything was possible. He made you proud to be on his team. And it really was a team effort—Walt would roll up his sleeves and go to work alongside the rest of us. “He saw potential in people who had never really done anything great. My brother Robert and I really had no track record in the music industry, but Walt heard a few of our songs and he gave us an opportunity and inspired us to keep topping ourselves. Without Walt to inspire us, I don’t know where we’d be today. “Walt always wanted you to find something wonderful in yourself, to believe in it and consider it God’s gift to you. God gives you the gift, and the rest is up to you. Walt taught me that what you do with that gift is your gift back to God.
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Pat Williams (How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life)
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productive kid and a juvenile delinquent. Parents with the happiest kids started this habit early in their parenting careers and then continued it over the years. They kept track of their children’s emotions the way some people keep track of their stock portfolios or favorite baseball team. They did not pay attention in a controlling, insecure style but in a loving, unobtrusive way, like a caring family physician. They knew when their kids were happy, sad, fearful, or joyful, often without asking. They could read and interpret with astonishing accuracy their child’s verbal and nonverbal cues.
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John Medina (Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five)
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OKR tracks individual, team and company goals and outcomes in an open and transparent way.
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Salim Ismail (Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it))
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How to scale and enter the risen path was largely unknown. It all might begin in darkness, but it cast a shadow that, when viewed from the ground, was too bleak. Demolition was once a question not of “whether, but when,” until one photographer spent a year on the trail documenting what was there. 4 The scenes were “hallucinatory”—wildflowers, Queen Anne’s lace, irises, and grasses wafted next to hardwood ailanthus trees that bolted up from the soil on railroad tracks, on which rust had accumulated over the decades. 5 Steel played willing host to an exuberant, spontaneous garden that showed fealty to its unusual roots. Tulips shared the soilbed with a single pine tree outfitted with lights for the winter holidays, planted outside of a building window that opened onto the iron-bottomed greenway with views of the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty to the left and traffic, buildings, and Tenth Avenue to the right. 6 Wading through waist-high Queen Anne’s lace was like seeing “another world right in the middle of Manhattan.” 7 The scene was a kind of wildering, the German idea of ortsbewüstung, an ongoing sense of nature reclaiming its ground. 8 “You think of hidden things as small. That is how they stay hidden. But this hidden thing was huge. A huge space in New York City that had somehow escaped everybody’s notice,” said Joshua David, who cofounded a nonprofit organization with Robert Hammonds to save the railroad. 9 They called it the High Line. “It was beautiful refuse, which is kind of a scary thing because you find yourself looking forward and looking backwards at the same time,” architect Liz Diller told me in our conversation about the conversion of the tracks into a public space, done in a partnership with her architectural firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and James Corner, Principal of Field Operations, and Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf. Other architectural plans proposed turning the High Line into a “Street in the Air” with biking, art galleries, and restaurants, but their team “saw that the ruinous state was really alive.” Joel Sternfeld, the “poet-keeper” of the walkway, put the High Line’s resonance best: “It’s more of a path than a park. And more of a Path than a path.” 10
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Sarah Lewis (The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery)
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We could say that the health of a culture is equal to the collective ability of the people who work there to feel the impacts of their actions on others. Now if you’re an app developer and want to help me build a tool that tracks that, please give a call. What I’ve seen over and over again in my career as a business leader and leadership mentor is that this one thing—the inability of people to feel their impact on others—is the cause of cultural dysfunction. And the higher up you are on the org chart, the more problematic that weakness is in terms of what it does to the culture at large. Which is why, as a manager, the most important thing you can do—after recognizing your own impact on your team—is to help people see their impacts on each other, and to help them let go of the emotional story they’re telling themselves that’s keeping the pattern going. In
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Jonathan Raymond (Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For)
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The way you can make one of your team members most effective on your project is by keeping that team member on track to meet their deliverables by the deadline. So,
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Mark Horstman (The Effective Manager)
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Jack Dongarra, a researcher at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Lab and part of a team that tracks supercomputer speed, determined that Apple’s best-selling tablet, the iPad 2, is as fast as a circa 1985 Cray 2 supercomputer. In fact, running at over 1.5 gigaflops (one gigaflop equals one billion mathematical operations, or calculations per second) the iPad 2 would have made the list of the world’s five hundred fastest supercomputers as late as 1994. In
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James Barrat (Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era)
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IV. Real techies don’t worry about forced eugenics. I learned this from a real techie in the cafeteria of a software company. The project team is having lunch and discussing how long it would take to wipe out a disease inherited recessively on the X chromosome. First come calculations of inheritance probabilities. Given a population of a given size, one of the engineers arrives at a wipe-out date. Immediately another suggests that the date could be moved forward by various manipulations of the inheritance patterns. For example, he says, there could be an education campaign. The six team members then fall over one another with further suggestions. They start with rewards to discourage carriers from breeding. Immediately they move to fines for those who reproduce the disease. Then they go for what they call “more effective” measures: Jail for breeding. Induced abortion. Forced sterilization. Now they’re hot. The calculations are flying. Years and years fall from the final doom-date of the disease. Finally, they get to the ultimate solution. “It’s straightforward,” someone says. “Just kill every carrier.” Everyone responds to this last suggestion with great enthusiasm. One generation and—bang—the disease is gone. Quietly, I say, “You know, that’s what the Nazis did.” They all look at me in disgust. It’s the look boys give a girl who has interrupted a burping contest. One says, “This is something my wife would say.” When he says “wife,” there is no love, warmth, or goodness in it. In this engineer’s mouth, “wife” means wet diapers and dirty dishes. It means someone angry with you for losing track of time and missing dinner. Someone sentimental. In his mind (for the moment), “wife” signifies all programming-party-pooping, illogical things in the universe. Still, I persist. “It started as just an idea for the Nazis, too, you know.” The engineer makes a reply that sounds like a retch. “This is how I know you’re not a real techie,” he says.
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Ellen Ullman (Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology)
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So again, why are you climbing a tree?” Christine asked as she shielded her eyes from the sun. She and everyone else sat around on blankets watching Kellen help Stevie put her gear on. “I wanted to learn how to do it, and Kellen fixed up this dead tree for me. I want to show off my new skills, too, because Linden made fun of me,” Stevie said and struck a pose. “Be still, I’m trying to connect the climb line to your saddle,” Kellen said, focused on the task. Kenzie climbed onto Trent’s shoulders and made a face. “Uncle Linden says Aunt Stevie’s gonna break her butt.” “Thanks, Linden,” Stevie said and shot him a look. “She won’t.” Kyle laughed. “I’ve never seen so much safety equipment in my life. Kell, you forgot to bubble wrap her butt before you put the saddle on.” “Where’d you get them giant pads from?” Walt asked. “They’re the ones the track team at the school used to use for pole vaulting.” Kellen adjusted the chinstrap on Stevie’s helmet. “This is our exercise tree.” Stevie patted the trunk. “I want iron legs like Kellen’s, so she topped it for me, cut most of the branches off, and put out the pads. See how she spoils me?” “Yeah, she gave you what looks like fifty feet of dead tree,” Kyle said with a grin. “Most people just get flowers.” Trent snorted. “Nothing says love like a fifty-foot stump.” Kellen double-checked her own gear just in case Stevie got into trouble and she had to go up for her. “Okay, babe, don’t go past the fifteen-foot mark, trust your saddle when your legs get tired, pay attention to the depth of your spikes.” She patted Stevie’s cheek and whispered, “Now show them your monkey.
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Robin Alexander (Kellen's Moment)
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• Join a sports team (a structured activity, yes, but better than nothing!), or take a fun exercise class like pole dancing, trampoline, or trapeze. • Engage in games that are fun for you. It could be board or card games, crosswords, or darts. Perhaps you love putting together model airplanes or building with Legos. Consider buying a Ping-Pong or pool table . . . and be careful not to turn that table into another place for competition and über-focus. • Find a play partner. Animals and children are always ready to play and laugh. Find opportunities to play with your own children or pets or those of friends and family. Finding
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Emma Seppälä (The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success)
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did his words stain his mind like ink on a page? His brother had hunted with a team of men and merely managed to bounce his spear off a deer. Talis was thirteen now and though he’d tried, had been spurned by every hunting trip his father’s men had pursued. Lad, don’t want you dying like your brother, you’re the last son of the Storm family lineage, and all. Finding nothing all day, he scanned the muddy ground for tracks, kicking away needles and sticks. Off to the corner
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John Forrester (Fire Mage (Blacklight Chronicles, #1))
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In recognition of his standing and commitment to conservation and research, the University of Queensland was about to appoint him as an adjust professor, an honor bestowed on only a few who have made a significant contribution to their field. Steve didn’t know this had happened. The letter from the university arrived at Australia Zoo while we were in the field studying crocs during August 2006. He never got back to the pile of mail that included that letter. I know he would have proudly accepted the recognition of his achievement, but I also suspect that he would have remained humble and given credit to those around him, especially Terri, his mum and dad, Wes, John Stainton, and the incredible team at Australia Zoo.
A year later, in 2007, we are back here in northern Australia, continuing the research in his name. There is a big gap in all our lives, but I feel he is here, all around us. One sure sign is that the sixteen-foot crocodile we named “Steve” keeps turning up in our traps.
My life has been enriched by my friendship with Steve. I now sit around the fire with Terri, his family, and mates from Australia Zoo chatting about crocodiles and continuing the legacy Steve has left behind. Terri and Bob Irwin are now leading the croc-catching team from Australia Zoo, and Bindi is helping to affix the tracking devices to crocs, and so the tradition continues.
I miss him. We all do. But I can sit at the campfire and look into the coals and hear his voice, always intense, always passionate, telling us stories and goading us on to achieve more. The enthusiasm and determination Steve shared with us is alive and well.
He has touched so many lives. His memory will never fade, and this book will be one of the ways we can remind ourselves of our brush with the indomitable spirit of a loving husband, father, and son; a committed wildlife ambassador and conservationist; and a great mate.
Professor Craig E. Franklin, School of Integrative Biology
University of Queensland
Lakefield National Park
August 2007
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Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
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How to locate find out on a Garmin GPS Device Complete Guideline
How about receiving message or email on phone that your son/daughter has reached school safely when they actually do so? Don’t you will be relaxed and concentrate more on your work? If you your question how can I do this? Then the answer is with the help of Garmin GPS device. And if next question comes like this How to locate find out on a Garmin GPS Device? Then read complete information mention on page.
What Is Garmin GPS Device?
Garmin GPS is a device that works on the concept of Global Positioning System. With this device you will not only be able to locate your position, but also you will be able to locate position of person or thing easily.
With Garmin there are multiple devices available that works fine to solve all your needs. Garmin GTU10, GPS locator works in same way.
This devise is attached to stuff whose location need to be tracked. Person can monitor the activity of items in their smart phone or computer.
Benefits of Garmin Locator
• You can attach Garmin locator device in your kid bag and draw a virtual parameter of area which you want to track. Once your child reach within the area or out of that area, you will get notification on your phone via mess or email.
• Similarly, the position of your pet, car, lovable things can also be tracked
• Have you seen in movies how the heroes track location of villain by sending a framed victim with GPS to their location? I am pretty sure devices of Garmin are used there.
• With the help of this device accidental bus, cars or any person’s location can be identified too.
Check Out Details with Garmin Team
So, if you are interested to know more about Garmin devices and How to locate find out on a Garmin GPS Device then give a call to Garmin tech support team. They will answer to all your concerns with perfection.
Among all GPS devices Garmin GPS are best. One can trust on accuracy of data present. There are time comes when devices face some hiccups but not often. Also, for that Garmin customer care is there to help users. They can be reached via all communication method i.e. through call, email and online chat. The details for same are mention on web page.
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Garmin Customer Service
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The last button on the main screen, your map, indicates all nearby Pokémon. You can see which Pokémon are nearby and how close they are. Their distance is measured by the amount of footsteps underneath the Pokémon. The more footsteps, the farther a Pokémon is away from you. To keep track of a Pokémon when walking around, you can tap the Pokémon to feature it on your map. This will allow you to check the amount of footsteps while walking and searching for the Pokémon. A Pokémon will be lit when you have caught it before and thus has been logged in your Pokédex. Now that we have covered the entire interface, you are ready to move on to the next chapter in which we will cover some more fundamentals.
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Jeremy Tyson (Pokémon Go: The Ultimate Guide to Pokémon Go Secrets,Tips & Tricks: Pokémon Go, Secrets, Android, iOS, Plus, Teams, Eggs, Gyms)
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Sean watched Lily turn as if to follow them. Clearly she wished to avoid him. While Sean wasn’t terribly eager to chat about the good old days, Lily’s patent reluctance to speak to him had the predictably perverse effect of his being determined to do so.
“So, your Lungness, I see you’ve finally decided to come up for air.” The nickname was a relic from their swim team days, and had popped out unintentionally. Still, it had the desired result: Lily stopped in her tracks.
She turned and faced him. “I assume this is one of your lame attempts at wit. As usual, though, you’ve fallen way short of the mark. I have no idea what you’re referring to, nor do I particularly care. However, if you call me that again, I’ll walk right out that door.”
“What? Your Lungness?” he repeated, all innocence, ignoring the fact that his behavior was childish, unprofessional, too.
How could she stand there looking so coolly collected, as if seeing him again meant absolutely nothing to her? Because, you idiot, an inner voice mocked, that’s exactly what you are to Lily. Nothing.
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Laura Moore (Night Swimming: A Novel)
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As soon as we reached the campsite, where we would launch the boat and start setting the traps, Steve was into it immediately. He would scan up and down the river system for an hour and a half, dozens of miles, getting to know where the crocs hung out. He was able to match a croc to each slide, each track, belly print, and foot mark in the mud. He even remembered crocodiles from the year before, recalling them by name.
As he set the traps, Steve specifically targeted different-sized animals that he and the other scientists had agreed to catch: big males, breeding females, and subadults. He set floating traps and soft mesh traps. Steve would often catch more crocs in a single day than the team could cope with.
Some of the crocodiles had amazing injuries. One had been hit by a crossbow. The arrow had stuck into the back of its head so deep that no probe that we used could find the end of the wound.
Other crocs had fought among themselves. One that we affectionately named Trevor had two broken legs. When we tried to pick up his front legs to tuck them into his sides, we felt only floppy bits of busted-up bone, which would twist in unnatural angles.
“I want to take this crocodile home,” I said.
Steve laughed. “This croc is still big and fat and fighting fit,” he said. “Don’t worry about him.”
As luck would have it, we caught Trevor a second time. “Here’s the deal,” I said to Steve. “If we catch this crocodile once more, I’m taking him home.” He could see I was serious. Perhaps it was intentional that Steve never caught Trevor again.
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Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
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Leadership
Leadership has a lot more to it than simply telling people what to do, keeping track of efforts, penalizing those who are late or who disrupt, and hiring / firing.
Great leaders are also great workers with a level of competence and confidence learned on the job that others accept and are willing to follow.
These leaders are good at working with themselves, they have developed discipline, an ability to delay gratification, curiosity as to why people think or do things the way they do, and are open minded and accepting of change.
Just look at any sports team, military unit or successful company and you will read or hear about all the leaders that make up the company. Most frequently these leaders are not the ones with a title, but the ones who make the place run through their efforts, focus, determination and ability to overcome obstacles.
It is from these ranks that titles are granted and rewards given. These people have proven that they can lead by example, are able to shoulder the load and have what it takes to lead others, helping them grow just as they were helped on their way.
My book entitled YOU Working With YOU is all about you, helping you to become the leader that you are capable of becoming.
Just showing up to work might keep you employed, stepping up and leading by example is what others will notice and align with.
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Richard Morin (You Working With You: A Roadmap to Self Mastery)
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We trapped several smaller females, all around the nine-foot mark. That’s when Steve stepped back and let the all-girl team take over: all the women in camp, zoo workers mainly, myself, and others. We would jump on the croc, help secure the tracking device, and let her go.
At one point Steve trapped a female that he could see was small and quiet. He turned to Bindi. “How would you like to jump the head?”
Bindi’s eyes lit up. This was what she had been waiting for. Once Steve removed the croc from the trap and secured its jaws, the next step was for the point person to jump the croc’s head. Everybody else on the team followed immediately afterward, pinning the crocodile’s body.
“Don’t worry,” I said to Bindi. “I’ll back you up.” Or maybe I was really talking to Steve. He was nervous as he slipped the croc out of its mesh trap. He hovered over the whole operation, knowing that if anything went amiss, he was right there to help.
“Ready, and now!” he said. Bindi flung herself on the head of the crocodile. I came in right over her back. The rest of the girls jumped on immediately, and we had our croc secured.
“Let’s take a photo with the whole family,” Professor Franklin said. Bindi sat proudly at the crocodile’s head, her hand casually draped over its eyes. Steve was in the middle, holding up the croc’s front legs. Next in line was me. Finally, Robert had the tail. This shot ended up being our 2006 family Christmas card.
I look at it now and it makes me laugh out loud. The family that catches crocs together, rocks together. The Irwin family motto.
Steve, Bindi, and I are all smiling. But then there is Robert’s oh-so-serious face. He has a top-jaw rope wrapped around his body, with knots throughout. He took his job seriously. He had the rope and was ready as the backup. He was on that croc’s tail. It was all about catching crocs safely, mate. No mucking around here.
As we idled back in to camp, Robert said, “Can I please drive the boat?”
“Crikey, mate, you are two years old,” Steve said. “I’ll let you drive the boat next year.”
But then, quite suddenly and without a word, Steve scooped Robert up and sat him up next to the outboard. He put the tiller in his hand.
“Here’s what you do, mate,” Steve said, and he began to explain how to drive the boat. He seemed in a hurry to impart as much wisdom to his son as possible.
Robert spent the trip jumping croc tails, driving the boat, and tying knots. Steve created a croc made of sticks and set it on a sandbar. He pulled the boat up next to it, and he, Robert, and Bindi went through all the motions of jumping the stick-croc.
“I’m going to say two words,” Robert shouted, imitating his father. “’Go,’ and ‘Now.’ First team off on ‘Go,’ second team off on ‘Now.’” Then he’d yell “Go, now” at the top of his lungs. He and Steve jumped up as if the stick-croc was about to swing around and tear their arms off.
“Another croc successfully caught, mate,” Steve said proudly. Robert beamed with pride too.
When he got back to Croc One, Robert wrangled his big plush crocodile toy. I listened, incredulous, as my not-yet-three-year-old son muttered the commands of a seasoned croc catcher. He had all the lingo down, verbatim.
“Get me a twelve-millimeter rope,” Robert commanded. “I need a second one. Get that top-jaw rope under that tooth, yep, the eye tooth, get it secured. We’ll need a third top-jaw rope for this one. Who’s got a six-millimeter rope? Hand me my Leatherman. Cut that rope here. Get that satellite tracker on.”
The stuffed animal thoroughly secured, Robert made as if to brush off his little hands. “Professor Franklin,” he announced in his best grown-up voice, “it’s your croc.
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Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
“
We trapped several smaller females, all around the nine-foot mark. That’s when Steve stepped back and let the all-girl team take over: all the women in camp, zoo workers mainly, myself, and others. We would jump on the croc, help secure the tracking device, and let her go.
At one point Steve trapped a female that he could see was small and quiet. He turned to Bindi. “How would you like to jump the head?”
Bindi’s eyes lit up. This was what she had been waiting for. Once Steve removed the croc from the trap and secured its jaws, the next step was for the point person to jump the croc’s head. Everybody else on the team followed immediately afterward, pinning the crocodile’s body.
“Don’t worry,” I said to Bindi. “I’ll back you up.” Or maybe I was really talking to Steve. He was nervous as he slipped the croc out of its mesh trap. He hovered over the whole operation, knowing that if anything went amiss, he was right there to help.
“Ready, and now!” he said. Bindi flung herself on the head of the crocodile. I came in right over her back. The rest of the girls jumped on immediately, and we had our croc secured.
“Let’s take a photo with the whole family,” Professor Franklin said. Bindi sat proudly at the crocodile’s head, her hand casually draped over its eyes. Steve was in the middle, holding up the croc’s front legs. Next in line was me. Finally, Robert had the tail. This shot ended up being our 2006 family Christmas card.
I look at it now and it makes me laugh out loud. The family that catches crocs together, rocks together. The Irwin family motto.
Steve, Bindi, and I are all smiling. But then there is Robert’s oh-so-serious face. He has a top-jaw rope wrapped around his body, with knots throughout. He took his job seriously. He had the rope and was ready as the backup. He was on that croc’s tail. It was all about catching crocs safely, mate. No mucking around here.
”
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Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
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Diversity, Equal Opportunity, and Success are Core Principals Driving the Mission of the Green Card Organization of the United States of America
The Green Card Organization is a reputable institution that provides a service for individuals who have a desire to immigrate by implementing a wide variety of services from basic to the most complex. The Green Card Organization can ensure error-free applications by assisting any individual who requires additional aid to simplify the process and guarantee a complete and accurate submission. Plenty of legal procedures are made easier, and by working with the Green Card Organization, their specialized services can fit the need of any client. The Green Card Organization provides expertise on the Diversity Visa (DV) lottery program. This program can be difficult to complete without error, as over 40% of applicants that are self-handled are disqualified due to inaccurate information. This lottery allows only one submission per year, and the Green Card Organization believes their assistance will guarantee qualification and the possibility of obtaining a Green card.
“For everyone the process of receiving a Green card is different, however when that amazing moment comes that you will receive confirmation, we will be here to help. Time is of the essence when it comes to the process of a successful Green card applicant, it is important to go through the immigration process according to the timeline and correctly. Delays in the process can result in termination. Here at our organization, we will make sure that everything happens quickly and correctly for you. Our team of immigration experts will keep everything on track and assist you with all the necessary procedures. We provide personalized services and will make sure that no opportunity is missed to help each and every one of our clients achieve their goal. Your success is our success!”
The Green Card Organization website provides important immigration information, such as different ways to obtain a Green card. The Green Card Organization explains that one of the most common ways to receive a Green card is through the sponsorship of a family member. The family member must be a U.S. citizen, or a Green card holder themselves. Additional details describe instances on who is permitted to apply for a Green card so the client is able to make certain they are eligible. Another way the Green Card Organization explains how to obtain a Green card is through a job, meaning their professional background and/or business dealings. An employer can petition for an employee to get a Green card, but they first must obtain a labor certification and file Form I-140, known as the Immigrant Petition for Alien Worker. Other individuals who deal in American Investments may apply for the Green card if they have sizeable assets in the United States. Any individual can self-petition and apply for a Green card without a labor certification as long as they are able to prove that they considerably contribute to the American workforce. The Green Card Organization provides a list of special jobs regarding professionals who are permitted to apply for a Green card with Form I-360, known as the Petition of Amerasian, Widow(er), or Special Immigrant.
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Green Card Organization
“
I’ve argued that the good data that effective metrics provide are essential to advancing the science at the heart of evidence-based medicine. But I’ve also argued that not all metrics or standards are created equal, and we should not equate metric-tracking with trust-building, because to do so misses a crucial point: What looks good on paper and what drives the best outcomes in practice can be two very different things. Too often, what looks good on paper is what is possible to measure, not necessarily what is actually the best approach to caring for patients. And when we consider the costs of abiding by and tracking and reporting all of these metrics—the four hours of physician time, the eight hours of care team time, the $8 billion we spend as a nation every year—it’s pretty clear that we’re interfering with those best, relationship-building approaches. Instead of spending so much more of our national time, resources, and attention in medicine on creating artificial metrics designed to incentivize good physician and provider behavior while unwittingly reinforcing bad behavior, let’s give the art of medicine the room it needs to build trusting relationships in the way that the best doctors and medical practices have always done so: honestly, naturally, compassionately, and with the best outcomes for the patient squarely in mind.
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Halee Fischer-Wright (Back To Balance: The Art, Science, and Business of Medicine)
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balance in leadership is crucial to victory. It must be monitored at all times and it must be modulated to specific situations as they arise. If a team member fails to perform adequately, for example, a leader must get down in the weeds and micromanage that member until he or she executes correctly. But once the team member gets back on track and resumes effective performance, the leader must maintain the ability to back off and give that team member room to take greater ownership and manage tasks on his or her own.
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Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win)
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Did she ask about anyone else?”
“Oh, everyone,” Brendan said, rushing on. “Names, friendships, hobbies. She was really interested in our hobbies. When we talked about the teams and stuff, she asked why Rafe and Sam aren’t on any. I said Rafe just moved here, and I don’t know what he’s into.”
“And me?” Sam said.
“I said you’re antisocial.”
“Thanks.”
“She asked whether you were good at any of the school’s specialties--singing, track, swimming, wrestling…I said all I know is you like to hit people.”
She flipped him the finger.
“What? It’s true. Then she asked if they let girls on the boxing team and I said Mr. Barnes tried to get you on it, but you weren’t interested. Then--get this--she starts asking if you’ve got a hate-on for certain people.”
Sam looked worried, almost alarmed, but when she saw me watching, she tried to hide it and said, “So what’d you tell her?”
“That you’re an equal opportunity hater.
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Kelley Armstrong (The Gathering (Darkness Rising, #1))
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When we talked about the teams and stuff, she asked why Rafe and Sam aren’t on any. I said Rafe just moved here, and I don’t know what he’s into.”
“And me?” Sam said.
“I said you’re antisocial.”
“Thanks.”
“She asked whether you were good at any of the school’s specialties--singing, track, swimming, wrestling…I said all I know is you like to hit people.”
She flipped him the finger.
“What? It’s true.
”
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Kelley Armstrong (The Gathering (Darkness Rising, #1))
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When we talked about the teams and stuff, she asked why Rafe and Sam aren’t on any. I said Rafe just moved here, and I don’t know what he’s into.”
“And me?” Sam said.
“I said you’re antisocial.”
“Thanks.”
“She asked whether you were good at any of the school’s specialties--singing, track, swimming, wrestling…I said all I know is you like to hit people.
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Kelley Armstrong (The Gathering (Darkness Rising, #1))
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Over the years, as it became my responsibility to evaluate and hire new people for my unit, I developed a profile of what I wanted in a profiler. At first, I went for strong academic credentials, figuring an understanding of psychology and organized criminology was most important. But I came to realize degrees and academic knowledge weren’t nearly as important as experience and certain subjective qualities. We have the facilities to fill in any educational gaps through fine programs at the University of Virginia and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. What I started looking for was “right-brained,” creative-type thinkers. There are many positions within the FBI and law enforcement in general where engineering or accounting types do the best, but in profiling and investigative analysis, that kind of thinker would probably have some difficulty. Contrary to the impression given in such stories as The Silence of the Lambs, we don’t pluck candidates for the Investigative Support Unit right out of the Academy. Since our first book, Mindhunter was published, I’ve had many letters from young men and women who say they want to go into behavioral science in the FBI and join the profiling team at Quantico. It doesn’t work quite that way. First you get accepted by the Bureau, then you prove yourself in the field as a first-rate, creative investigator, then we recruit you for Quantico. And then you’re ready for two years of intensive, specialized training before you become a full-fledged member of the unit. A good profiler must first and foremost show imagination and creativity in investigation. He or she must be willing to take risks while still maintaining the respect and confidence of fellow agents and law enforcement officers. Our preferred candidates will show leadership, won’t wait for a consensus before offering an opinion, will be persuasive in a group setting but tactful in helping to put a flawed investigation back on track. For these reasons, they must be able to work both alone and in groups.
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John E. Douglas (Journey Into Darkness (Mindhunter #2))
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Without the ability to account for the value the DevRel team is contributing toward the overall company goals, you’ll be hard-pressed to keep the team together. In addition, you’ll have a hard time keeping your team motivated. As Rob Spectre says in his “Measuring Developer Relations” talk,1 the primary reason why you track metrics in DevRel is so that “everyone on your team knows—not thinks, but knows—the difference they are making with their work.
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Mary Thengvall (The Business Value of Developer Relations: How and Why Technical Communities Are Key To Your Success)
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Lauren Poole certainly did not trust the beer can’s official count, because the AI was likely to have absent-mindedly lost track while he was counting, or just lost interest halfway through the count and decided that fudging the number was good enough for monkeys, or he knew the real count and decided to amuse himself by screwing with the STAR team.
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Craig Alanson (Renegades (Expeditionary Force, #7))
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By probing the full sequence of the London plague for the very first time, geneticist Johannes Krause and his team unearthed the evolution of Yersinia pestis [the Plague microbe], and the genomic tracks of its terrible journey. An earlier study had shown that, just like the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death in the 1340s had also originated in China. With a publicly available database of the full sequence, the history and the genetics can be aligned. Over a five-year period we can track a course from Russia to Constantinople, to Messina, to Genoa, Marseille, Bordeaux, and finally London. All these ports acted as points from which radiation of the plague could crawl inland. En route, it claimed the lives of some 5 million people.
Just as in the Byzantine Empire 600 years earlier, wave after wave of outbreak crashed into Britain’s population in the centuries after the fourteenth, and it was only after the Great Fire of London in 1666 that this pandemic was crushed. Krause’s work also shows that it never really went away. The pandemic might have ended, but the strains of Yersinia that cause bubonic plague outbreaks to this day are identical.
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Adam Rutherford (The Book of Humans: A Brief History of Culture, Sex, War and the Evolution of Us)
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A few years ago, MIT researchers analyzed the behavior of call center employees for Bank of America to find out why some teams were more productive than others. They hung a so-called sociometric badge around each employee’s neck. The electronics in these badges tracked the employees’ location and also measured, every sixteen milliseconds, their tone of voice and gestures. It recorded when people were looking at each other and how much each person talked, listened, and interrupted. Four teams of call center employees—eighty people in total—wore these badges for six weeks. These employees’ jobs were highly regimented. Talking was discouraged because workers were supposed to spend as many of their minutes as possible on the phone, solving customers’ problems. Coffee breaks were scheduled one by one. The researchers found, to their surprise, that the fastest and most efficient call
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Cathy O'Neil (Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy)
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I wasn’t one of those socially withdrawn fat kids, though. I was the girl who always wanted to get in the game, even if I played it really, really poorly. I was more than happy to sweat my life away on athletic teams: volleyball, track, if that meant having lots of friends. I was even willing to brave the swim team in a Speedo. I wish I had that kind of body confidence now.
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Ricki Lake (Never Say Never: Finding A Life That Fits)
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We only have red wolves here at Sandy Ridge now,” Ryan says. “Summer is our slow season. But by fall, this place will be packed with wolves and coyotes.”
“Why do you hold coyotes here?” I ask.
“If we know one is holding a territory, we trap it, sterilize it and put a radio collar on it,” Ryan explains. “They stay here at Sandy Ridge while they recover, and then we release them back to their territory.” By sterilizing coyotes that set up territories in the red wolf recovery area and then tracking them, the red wolf biologists protect the red wolf’s unique genome from hybridization with coyotes. But a sterile coyote doesn’t solve the red wolf’s propensity for running with and mating with coyotes. It only prevents conception. It is an elaborate birth-control scheme to ensure the survival of an endangered species.
One of the quirks of the genus Canis is that the various species within it can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Historically, hybridization of the last wild red wolves with coyotes was the single biggest threat that prompted the FWS to begin capturing the last wolves for breeding in captivity. When the first red wolves were reintroduced to Alligator River in 1987, the nearest coyotes were 500 miles west. Experts thought it would take them eight to ten years to pad their way to the coast - plenty of time, they thought, for red wolves to build up a big population and keep the invading coyotes at bay. But coyotes soon infiltrated the red wolf’s recovery area in the early 1990s. Suddenly, the Red Wolf Recovery Program had a problem on its hands: red wolves were once again hybridizing with coyotes.
“Why don’t you just trap all the coyotes out of the recovery area?” I ask.
“Even if we could remove them all, then more coyotes would likely just come in and take their territories,” Ryan replies. Plus, the team simply doesn’t have the manpower to trap all of the coyotes off the peninsula, though they put significant effort into patrolling certain areas to keep coyotes out. Coyotes are too adaptive and elusive for a large-scale trapping program to work permanently. In one of their biological quirks, coyotes are known to have more offspring survive to adulthood when their population is persecuted through lethal control efforts. The rascals can live on practically nothing, and they are prolific breeders to boot.
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T. DeLene Beeland (The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf)
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Now is the time to sound a note of caution: collaboration and crowdsourcing both have their limits. Working together is not the only answer to every problem. Even teams with a fine track record can, over time, grow stale and narrow-minded. The crowd can make mistakes or be sabotaged by rogue members.
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Carl Honoré (The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed)
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With extremely rare exception, the best sales managers we’ve encountered are unconsciously competent scientists. They hold formal meetings with formal agendas on formal schedules. They set rigorous expectations for their salespeople and track progress against those goals with equal rigor. They manage by analysis rather than anecdote and by measurement rather than gut. They are continuous-improvement experts with action plans galore. While their lower-performing peers try to manage with the same artistic flair that served them well as salespeople, high-performing managers adopt a more scientific approach to management that enables them to get consistently higher performance from their team. Salespeople
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Jason Jordan (Cracking the Sales Management Code: The Secrets to Measuring and Managing Sales Performance)
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Fulgham’s team started by coming up with more than one thousand scenarios in which Sentinel could be useful, everything from inputting victims’ statements to tracking evidence to interfacing with FBI databases that looked for patterns among clues. Then they started working backward to figure out what kind of software should accommodate each need. Every morning, the team conducted a “stand-up”—meetings where everyone stood to encourage brevity—and recounted the previous day’s work and what they hoped to accomplish over the next twenty-four hours.
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Charles Duhigg (Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive)
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When Larrea arrives at the ballpark, he begins working on players’ complimentary tickets. All big league players and coaches submit their ticket requests into a computer system that tracks all the complimentary tickets used throughout the year on a per-game basis. They did that a few years ago that for taxation purposes. At most ballparks the visiting team receives between 220 and 250 tickets for players and traveling staff. Roughly half of those seats, though, are in the upper deck. Some teams like the Dodgers can make things difficult on Larrea by giving tickets in strange configurations (i.e. one in front, three behind).
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Bill Schroeder (If These Walls Could Talk: Milwaukee Brewers: Stories from the Milwaukee Brewers Dugout, Locker Room, and Press Box)
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Chapter 30 Jones looked at the list of names on his notepad. The team had made a lot of progress over the last few days in tracking down and interviewing many acquaintances of the late professor. Pretty soon, it would be time to start re-interviewing some of those that the team were
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Paul Gitsham (The Last Straw (DCI Warren Jones #1))
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When I first started to run the Jingu Gaien course, Toshihiko Seko was still an active runner and he used this course too. The S&B team used this course every day for training, and over time we naturally grew to know each other by sight. Back then I used to jog there before seven a.m. — when the traffic wasn’t bad, there weren’t as many pedestrians, and the air was relatively clean—and the S&B team members and I would often pass each other and nod a greeting. On rainy days we’d exchange a smile, a guess-we’re-both-havingit-tough kind of smile.
I remember two young runners in particular, Taniguchi and Kanei. They were both in their late twenties, both former members of the Waseda University track team, where they’d been standouts in the Hakone relay race. After Seko was named manager of the S&B team, they were expected to be the two young stars of the team. They were the caliber of runner expected to win medals at the Olympics someday, and hard training didn’t faze them. Sadly, though, they were killed in a car accident when the team was training together in Hokkaido in the summer. I’d seen with my own eyes the tough regimen they’d put themselves through, and it was a real shock when I heard the news of their deaths. It hurt me to hear this, and I felt it was a terrible waste.
Even now, when I run along Jingu Gaien or Asakasa Gosho, sometimes I remember these other runners. I’ll round a corner and feel like I should see them coming toward me, silently running, their breath white in the morning air. And I always think this: They put up with such strenuous training, and where did their thoughts, their hopes and dreams, disappear to? When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish?
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Haruki Murakami (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running)
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ready to accept my comments. She challenged me and said that if I wanted, she could prove to me that she and her team had done everything that was required. She even showed me a few slides, which indicated improvement in the parameters that tracked our execution quotient. I decided to keep a close watch on Anamika and her team and monitor their activity through further reviews. I also decided to spend time with every individual in her team. After a few reviews, I understood the real problem. The issue was that Anamika did not allow any of her colleagues to spend their time in the field helping the business. Most of the time, she asked them to make presentations for different reviews. Her instruction to her team was simple: ‘I will stand up for you, so do not worry. I know how to manage perception, but you guys should ensure that I come across well.’ Thus, many days were spent not on the real job, but on her horrible idea of managing the perception of the senior management. In doing this, the purpose of the team was lost.
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Partha Sarathi Basu (Mid-career Crisis: Why Some Sail through while Others Don't)
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for several years starting in 2004, Bezos visited iRobot’s offices, participated in strategy sessions held at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and became a mentor to iRobot chief executive Colin Angle, who cofounded the company in 1990. “He recognized early on that robots were a very disruptive game-changer,’’ Angle says of Bezos. “His curiosity about our space led to a very cool period of time where I could count upon him for a unique perspective.’’ Bezos is no longer actively advising the company, but his impact on the local tech scene has only grown larger. In 2008, Bezos’ investment firm provided initial funding for Rethink Robotics, a Boston company that makes simple-to-program manufacturing robots. Four years later, Amazon paid $775 million for North Reading-based Kiva, which makes robots that transport merchandise in warehouses. Also in 2012, Amazon opened a research and software development outpost in Cambridge that has done work on consumer electronics products like the Echo, a Wi-Fi-connected speaker that responds to voice commands. Rodney Brooks, an iRobot cofounder who is now chief technology officer of Rethink, says he met Bezos at the annual TED Conference. Bezos was aware of work that Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT, had done on robot navigation and control strategies. Helen Greiner, the third cofounder of iRobot, says she met Bezos at a different technology conference, in 2004. Shortly after that, she recruited him as an adviser to iRobot. Bezos also made an investment in the company, which was privately held at the time. “He gave me a number of memorable insights,’’ Angle says. “He said, ‘Just because you won a bet doesn’t mean it was a good bet.’ Roomba might have been lucky. He was challenging us to think hard about where we were going and how to leverage our success.’’ On visits to iRobot, Greiner recalls, “he’d shake everyone’s hand and learn their names. He got them engaged.’’ She says one of the key pieces of advice Bezos supplied was about the value of open APIs — the application programming interfaces that allow other software developers to write software that talks to a product like the Roomba, expanding its functionality. The advice was followed. (Amazon also offers a range of APIs that help developers build things for its products.) By spending time with iRobot, Bezos gave employees a sense they were on the right track. “We were all believers that robotics would be huge,’’ says former iRobot exec Tom Ryden. “But when someone like that comes along and pays attention, it’s a big deal.’’ Angle says that Bezos was an adviser “in a very formative, important moment in our history,’’ and while they discussed “ideas about what practical robots could do, and what they could be,’’ Angle doesn’t want to speculate about what, exactly, Bezos gleaned from the affiliation. But Greiner says she believes “there was learning on both sides. We already had a successful consumer product with Roomba, and he had not yet launched the Kindle. He was learning from us about successful consumer products and robotics.’’ (Unfortunately, Bezos and Amazon’s public relations department would not comment.) The relationship trailed off around 2007 as Bezos got busier — right around when Amazon launched the Kindle, Greiner says. Since then, Bezos and Amazon have stayed mum about most of their activity in the state. His Bezos Expeditions investment team is still an investor in Rethink, which earlier this month announced its second product, a $29,000, one-armed robot called Sawyer that can do precise tasks, such as testing circuit boards. The warehouse-focused Kiva Systems group has been on a hiring tear, and now employs more than 500 people, according to LinkedIn. In December, Amazon said that it had 15,000 of the squat orange Kiva robots moving around racks of merchandise in 10 of its 50 distribution centers. Greiner left iRo
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Anonymous
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In 1921, Terman decided to make the study of the gifted his life work. Armed with a large grant from the Commonwealth Foundation, he put together a team of fieldworkers and sent them out into California’s elementary schools. Teachers were asked to nominate the brightest students in their classes. Those children were given an intelligence test. The students who scored in the top 10 percent were then given a second IQ test, and those who scored above 130 on that test were given a third IQ test, and from that set of results Terman selected the best and the brightest. By the time Terman was finished, he had sorted through the records of some 250,000 elementary and high school students, and identified 1,470 children whose IQs averaged over 140 and ranged as high as 200. That group of young geniuses came to be known as the “Termites,” and they were the subjects of what would become one of the most famous psychological studies in history. For the rest of his life, Terman watched over his charges like a mother hen. They were tracked and tested, measured and analyzed. Their educational attainments were noted, marriages followed, illnesses tabulated, psychological health charted, and every promotion and job change dutifully recorded. Terman wrote his recruits letters of recommendation for jobs and graduate school applications. He doled out a constant stream of advice and counsel, all the time recording his findings in thick red volumes entitled Genetic Studies of Genius.
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Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
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But in 2009, even as the British track cycling team was preparing for the London Olympics, Brailsford embarked upon a new challenge. He created a road cycling team, Team Sky, while continuing to oversee the track team. On the day the new outfit was announced to the world, Brailsford also announced that they would win the Tour de France within five years. Most people laughed at this aspiration. One commentator said: “Brailsford has set himself up for an almighty fall.” But in 2012, two years ahead of schedule, Bradley Wiggins became the first-ever British rider to win the event. The following year, Team Sky triumphed again when Chris Froome, another Brit, won the general classification. It was widely acclaimed as one of the most extraordinary feats in British sporting history. How did it happen? How did Brailsford conquer not one cycling discipline, but two? These were the questions I asked him over dinner at the team’s small hotel after the tour of the facilities. His answer was clear: “It is about marginal gains,” he said. “The approach comes from the idea that if you break down a big goal into small parts, and then improve on each of them, you will deliver a huge increase when you put them all together.” It sounds simple, but as a philosophy, marginal gains has become one of the hottest concepts not just in sports, but beyond. It has formed the basis of business conferences, and seminars and has even been debated in the armed forces. Many British sports now employ a director of marginal gains.
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Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes--But Some Do)
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My team and I established the Samana Cay Points System with rewards and penalties, and our AI dispenses points based on what it observers. Jaywalking, a fifty-point deduction. Service in the Military Police, a thousand-point bonus each week. Our tracking system has a record of where every resident has been over the past three years. When your actions and behaviors have a direct bearing on whether you can afford to feed your family come Friday night, the level of conformity achieved is astonishingly high. We’ve built accountability into the very design of our community.
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J.D. Lasica (Catch and Kill (Shadow Operatives, #2))
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The Indians say that the river once ran both ways, one half up and the other down, but that, since the white man came, it all runs down, and now they must laboriously pole their canoes against the stream, and carry them over numerous portages. In the summer, all stores—the grindstone and the plow of the pioneer, flour, pork, and utensils for the explorer—must be conveyed up the river in batteaux; and many a cargo and many a boatman is lost in these waters. In the winter, however, which is very equable and long, the ice is the great highway, and the loggers' team penetrates to Chesuncook Lake, and still higher up, even two hundred miles above Bangor. Imagine the solitary sled-track running far up into the snowy and evergreen wilderness, hemmed in closely for a hundred miles by the forest, and again stretching straight across the broad surfaces of concealed lakes! We
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Heritage Illustrated Publishing (The Maine Woods (Illustrated))
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What should employees do once technologies like enterprise software and the World Wide Web free them from the “paperwork mine”? Hammer and Champy offered a clear answer in Reengineering the Corporation: with the computers handling the routine, people should be empowered to exercise their judgment. “Most of the checking, reconciling, waiting, monitoring, tracking—the unproductive work . . .—is eliminated by reengineering. . . . People working in a reengineered process are, of necessity, empowered. As process team workers they are both permitted and required to think, interact, use judgment, and make decisions.
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Andrew McAfee (Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future)
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If you were in the railroad industry, would you be more interested in the business of laying the tracks or delivering the freight? One element is discrete and transactional (how many new rail lines do you really need?); the other represents ongoing value. A new management team at Cisco decided to go all-in on services, which by definition meant subscriptions. But how do you sell routers and switches on a subscription basis? By focusing on the data inside all that hardware—the freight, not the tracks. Cisco’s latest set of Catalyst hardware comes embedded with machine learning and an analytics software platform that helps companies solve huge inefficiencies by reducing network provisioning times, preventing security breaches, and minimizing operating expenses.
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Tien Tzuo (Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It)
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It is the Scrum Master's duty to ensure all these issues are addressed efficiently and appropriately in order to ensure the project stays on track and the team is happy.
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Ricky Toyoda (SCRUM: A Complete Beginner’s Guide for Professional Agile Process. How to Manage Projects with Your Team, Save Time and Achieve Your Goals)
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IF YOU PEOPLE DON’T WANNA GET FLATTENED, YOU’D BETTER MOVE OUT OF THE WAY!” The entire male track team looked behind them to see Eric and…was that Heather Grant? Yes, it was. Their new PE assistant coach was also running down the hallway, and there was a large cloud of what looked like dust chasing after them. Everyone present jumped away, their backs pressing against the wall, just as the two ran past them. “There they are!” “Get them!” “Hurry up! Don’t let them get away!” “Come back here, you stupid perverts!” “I can’t believe we trusted you!” “KILL THEM!!!” Before anyone could even think about relaxing, the track team was forced back against the wall as a horde of outraged teenage girls rushed by. Several drops of sweat rolled down Kevin’s face as he noticed that every girl was carrying some kind of household appliance: a broom, a mop, a rake, a strange pole thing, and… “Holy shit! Is that chick carrying a claymore?!” Kevin nearly did a double take when he saw that one of the girls rushing past them was, indeed, carrying a claymore: a two-handed longsword with a cross hilt of forward-sloping quillons with quatrefoil terminations. The weapon was gigantic, literally a foot or so longer than the girl was tall.
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Brandon Varnell (A Fox's Family (American Kitsune #4))
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When thinking about how to incorporate lecture videos, many online faculty imagine posting videos of their classroom lectures in the course. This is certainly one way to do it, and some institutions are investing in elaborate lecture-capture systems to facilitate this process. But lecture capture requires expensive tech and a team of skilled professionals. The small teaching way is to record short narrated slideshow videos or webcam-style videos speaking directly to the camera on your computer monitor. The key word here is short. “Traditional in-person lectures usually last an hour, but students have much shorter attention spans when watching educational videos online,” writes Philip Guo in a blog post about a study he and his colleagues conducted (Guo, 2013). The researchers compiled data from 6.9 million video-watching sessions to track engagement patterns of online students. Their findings led to a strong recommendation that online class videos should be no longer than six minutes.
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Flower Darby (Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes)
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The moment you’re part of a group, the amygdala tunes in to who’s in that group and starts intensely tracking them. Because these people are valuable to you. They were strangers before, but they’re on your team now, and that changes the whole dynamic. It’s such a powerful switch—it’s a big top-down change, a total reconfiguration of the entire motivational and decision-making system.
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Daniel Coyle (The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups)
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We’ve shielded our feet from their natural position by providing more and more support,” Lananna insisted. That’s why he made sure his runners always did part of their workouts in bare feet on the track’s infield. “I know as a shoe company, it’s not the greatest thing to have a sponsored team not use your product, but people went thousands of years without shoes. I think you try to do all these corrective things with shoes and you overcompensate. You fix things that don’t need fixing. If you strengthen the foot by going barefoot, I think you reduce the risk of Achilles and knee and plantar fascia problems.
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Christopher McDougall (Born to Run)
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Despite these uncertainties, researchers have found some evidence that AA works. When two things go together and researchers want to know which one causes the other, they sometimes try to track them over time and see which comes first—assuming that causation moves forward across time, so the cause precedes the effect. After tracking more than two thousand men with drinking problems for two years, a team led by John McKellar of Stanford University concluded that attendance at AA meetings led to fewer future problems with drinking (and not the reverse—they found no evidence that the presence or absence of drinking problems affected attendance at meetings later on).
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Roy F. Baumeister (Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength)
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Reece nodded, remembering all that his friends had done to help him avenge his family and his Team. There had been an emptiness to those killings. Born of pure rage, their purpose had been death unto itself. What he'd done since Freddy tracked him down in Mozambique had been different. The purpose of the killing he'd done on this new mission had been life.
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Jack Carr (True Believer (Terminal List, #2))
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The process works like this: Your team meets for a full day every 90 days. You review your vision, and then determine what the Rocks are for the organization for the next 90-day period to keep you on track for your vision.
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Gino Wickman (Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business)
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Today the bribes may no longer be necessary. Now that the SWAT teams, the multiagency drug task forces, and the drug enforcement agenda have become a regular part of federal, state, and local law enforcement, it appears the drug war is here to stay. Funding for the Byrne-sponsored drug task forces had begun to dwindle during President Bush’s tenure, but Barack Obama, as a presidential candidate, promised to revive the Byrne grant program, claiming that it is “critical to creating the anti-drug task forces our communities need.”61 Obama honored his word following the election, drastically increasing funding for the Byrne grant program despite its abysmal track record. The Economic Recovery Act of 2009 included more than $2 billion in new Byrne funding and an additional $600 million to increase state and local law enforcement across the country.62 Relatively little organized opposition to the drug war currently exists, and any dramatic effort to scale back the war may be publicly condemned as “soft” on crime. The war has become institutionalized. It is no longer a special program or politicized project; it is simply the way things are done.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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The Lost Boys had hardly unpacked by the time they started appearing in local newspaper headlines for their exploits on high school track teams. “Only months after settling in Michigan, two Sudanese refugees are finding that they are among the fastest high school runners in the state,” went the lead of one AP article. Another, in the Lansing State Journal, noted that Abraham Mach, a Lost Boy who had no competitive running experience before arriving at East Lansing High, was the most outstanding performer in the thirteen-to-fourteen age group at the 2001 National AAU Junior Olympic Games, medaling in three events. Mach, who had been living in a Kenyan refugee camp just one year earlier, went on to become an NCAA All-American at Central Michigan in the 800-meters.
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David Epstein (The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance)
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Upholders respond readily to both outer expectations and inner expectations. Questioners question all expectations, and will meet an expectation only if they believe it’s justified. Obligers respond readily to outer expectations but struggle to meet inner expectations (my friend on the track team). Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike.
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Gretchen Rubin (Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life)
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the girls on the track team do their thang, when I spot ass. See, when ya boy spots ass, I be on it. I leave Dre and Twan, my teammates, and head over to see what the face looks like that's connected to this ass. Oh yea, I’m Rashard Peterson, number 06, quarterback for UMA. This is my last year and I’ll have my Bachelors in Business Management. I do my thang with Twan and Dre in these streets too. If you want some weed, I got you, but that's pretty much all I’ll touch. I never keep enough on me to get a charge. The most I’ll have on me is a blunt and shit, that's for recreational use. Ya boy ain’t dumb by a long shot. That's why I got this degree in the works, so I can open up different businesses. Anyway, if you want pills then holla at Twan; my boy got opioids, tabs, Xanax
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Linette King (Addicted to Him)
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Bezos wanted to personally approve each equation and track the results over time. It would be his way of guiding a team’s evolution.
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Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
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Krause and his team unearthed the evolution of Yersinia pestis, and the genomic tracks of its terrible journey. An earlier study had shown that, just like the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death in the 1340s had also originated in China. With a publicly available database of the full sequence, the history and the genetics can be aligned. Over a five-year period we can track a course from Russia to Constantinople, to Messina, to Genoa, Marseille, Bordeaux, and finally London. All these ports acted as points from which radiation of the plague could crawl inland. En route, it claimed the lives of some 5 million people.
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Adam Rutherford (A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes)
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This is what you will remember. Every time you want to do anything other than working towards your goals, I want you to remember what you felt under the water. That’s, my lad, how you will know if you are on the right track. If even for a second you don’t strive the same way for success, then I want you to remember these words- “You will never be successful” and then I want you to sacrifice whatever you were doing and rush to the ground.
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Arka Datta (A Team of Extraordinary Bastards)
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Cooking for the students and staff at Ever After High wasn't an easy feat, because there were so many palates to please. For example, fairies were known to have finicky appetites and preferred delicate, crustless sandwiches. Those from Wonderland insisted on hot tea with every meal. The vegetarians wanted organic salad bar options, while the Track and Shield team liked chowing down on heaping plates of barbecued ribs with smashed pumpkin.
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Suzanne Selfors (Kiss and Spell (Ever After High: A School Story, #2))
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One broad way of thinking about the use of blockchain concepts is applying them beyond the original context to see ways in which everything is like an economy, a market, and a currency — and equally important, how everything is not like an economy. This is a mindset that requires recognizing the fundamental properties of economics and markets in real-life situations. Blockchain technology helps elucidate that everything we see and experience, every system in life, is economics to some degree: a system for allocating resources. Furthermore, systems and interactions are economics in that they are a matter of awareness and discovery, value attribution, and potential interaction and exchange, and may include a mechanism for this exchange like a currency or token, or even a simple exchange of force, energy, or concentration (as in biological systems). This same basic economic structure could be said to exist universally, whether in a collaborative work team or at a farmers’ market. The quantized structure of blockchain technology in the form of ledger transaction-level tracking could mean higher-resolution activity tracking, several orders of magnitude more detailed and extensive than we are accustomed to at present, a time at which we are still grateful for SKU-level tracking on a bill of materials.
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Melanie Swan (Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy)
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Fragmentation of Time One of my clients is an agency of the Australian government. During one consulting call, I collected data indicating that the average worker there was involved in four or more different projects. I complained about this to the Commissioner. He said it was regrettable, but just a fact of life. People’s duties were fragmented because their skills and knowledge made them indispensable to efforts other than the principal ones they were assigned to. He said it was inevitable. I said it was nonsense. I proposed that he make it a specific policy that people be assigned to one and only one project at a time and that the policy be written down and widely distributed. He was game. A year later, when I returned, the average worker was assigned to fewer than two projects. —TDM Fragmentation is bad for team formation, but it’s also bad for efficiency. (Perhaps you’ve begun to pick up a trend here.) People can keep track of only so many human interactions. When they try to be part of four working groups, they have four times as many interactions to track. They spend all their time changing gears. No one can be part of multiple jelled teams. The tight interactions of the jelled team are exclusive. Enough fragmentation and teams just won’t jell.
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Tom DeMarco (Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams)
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They can hear your thoughts, you know, the people you’re tracking, he’d told Greer. Thought waves go first, tickling the senses. Empty your mind. Silence it, his grandfather had warned.
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Elaine Levine (Assassin's Promise (Red Team #5))
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Insight is the opposite of predictable. Insights are disruptive. They come without warning, take forms that are unexpected, and open up unimagined opportunities. Insights get in the way of progress reviews because they reshape tasks and even revise goals. They carry risks—unseen complications and pitfalls that can get you in trouble. So insights make you work harder. Are you prepared for this additional work? You already have so much to think about and track once your project is under way; you won’t have the mental space to anticipate all the implications of the insights that your team members bring you.
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Gary Klein (Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights)
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Bilateral (from the Latin for “both sides”) coordination means that we can use both sides of the body to cooperate as a team. A well-regulated vestibular system helps us to integrate sensory messages from both sides of our body. By the age of three or four, a child should be crossing the midline. For the child who avoids crossing the midline, coordinating both body sides may be difficult. When she paints at an easel, she may switch the brush from one hand to the other at the midway point separating her right and left sides. She may appear not to have established a hand preference, sometimes using her left and sometimes her right to eat, draw, write, or throw. It may also be hard to survey a scene or to track a moving object visually without stopping at the midline to blink and refocus. The child with poor bilateral coordination may have trouble using both feet together to jump from a ledge, or both hands together to catch a ball or play clapping games. She may have difficulty coordinating her hands to hold a paper while she cuts, or to stabilize the paper with one hand while she writes with the other. Poor bilateral coordination, a sensory-based motor disorder, is often misinterpreted as a learning disability such as dyslexia. In fact, this difficulty can lead to learning or behavior problems, but it does not ordinarily mean that a child is lacking in intelligence or academic ability.
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Carol Stock Kranowitz (The Out-of-Sync Child: Recognizing and Coping with Sensory Processing Disorder)
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But Dragnet evolved slowly. Webb pondered the idea he had received from Marty Wynn and developed it for more than a year. Realism should be the show’s hallmark: the stories should be authentic to the last sound effect. He began hanging out at police headquarters, riding with detective teams on house calls. He attended classes at the police academy, becoming fluent in police terminology and technique. But when he prepared his series proposal, NBC was unimpressed. It sounded like just another cop show, without the contrived thrill trappings. Webb was told to prepare an audition record: he had one week to pull it together. With his audition disc in hand, his next job was to obtain the cooperation of the police. This was essential, for the series Webb envisioned could not be done without it. He wanted to get his stories from official files, to show the step-by-step procedure used by real officers in tracking down a real criminal.
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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M113 Family of Vehicles Mission Provide a highly mobile, survivable, and reliable tracked-vehicle platform that is able to keep pace with Abrams- and Bradley-equipped units and that is adaptable to a wide range of current and future battlefield tasks through the integration of specialised mission modules at minimum operational and support cost. Entered Army Service 1960 Description and Specifications After more than four decades, the M113 family of vehicles (FOV) is still in service in the U.S. Army (and in many foreign armies). The original M113 Armoured Personnel Carrier (APC) helped to revolutionise mobile military operations. These vehicles carried 11 soldiers plus a driver and track commander under armour protection across hostile battlefield environments. More importantly, these vehicles were air transportable, air-droppable, and swimmable, allowing planners to incorporate APCs in a much wider range of combat situations, including many "rapid deployment" scenarios. The M113s were so successful that they were quickly identified as the foundation for a family of vehicles. Early derivatives included both command post (M577) and mortar carrier (M106) configurations. Over the years, the M113 FOV has undergone numerous upgrades. In 1964, the M113A1 package replaced the original gasoline engine with a 212 horsepower diesel package, significantly improving survivability by eliminating the possibility of catastrophic loss from fuel tank explosions. Several new derivatives were produced, some based on the armoured M113 chassis (e.g., the M125A1 mortar carrier and M741 "Vulcan" air defence vehicle) and some based on the unarmoured version of the chassis (e.g., the M548 cargo carrier, M667 "Lance" missile carrier, and M730 "Chaparral" missile carrier). In 1979, the A2 package of suspension and cooling enhancements was introduced. Today's M113 fleet includes a mix of these A2 variants, together with other derivatives equipped with the most recent A3 RISE (Reliability Improvements for Selected Equipment) package. The standard RISE package includes an upgraded propulsion system (turbocharged engine and new transmission), greatly improved driver controls (new power brakes and conventional steering controls), external fuel tanks, and 200-amp alternator with four batteries. Additional A3 improvements include incorporation of spall liners and provisions for mounting external armour. The future M113A3 fleet will include a number of vehicles that will have high speed digital networks and data transfer systems. The M113A3 digitisation program includes applying hardware, software, and installation kits and hosting them in the M113 FOV. Current variants: Mechanised Smoke Obscurant System M548A1/A3 Cargo Carrier M577A2/A3 Command Post Carrier M901A1 Improved TOW Vehicle M981 Fire Support Team Vehicle M1059/A3 Smoke Generator Carrier M1064/A3 Mortar Carrier M1068/A3 Standard Integrated Command Post System Carrier OPFOR Surrogate Vehicle (OSV) Manufacturer Anniston Army Depot (Anniston, AL) United Defense, L.P. (Anniston, AL)
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Russell Phillips (This We'll Defend: The Weapons & Equipment of the US Army)
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One morning Gordy found out that Columbia Records, previous home of the Motown group the Four Tops, was going to rerelease one of the Tops’ old records. He instructed his top team at the time, Holland-Dozier-Holland, to produce a response, and by early afternoon they’d come up with “It’s the Same Old Song.” The track was recorded later the same day; the record was in stores three days later. It reached number five on the charts and became a classic. (The Columbia Four Tops release peaked at number 93.)
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Ben Yagoda (The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song)
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So here’s how all of this comes together. I think we need a career system that encourages people to oscillate between individual contributor roles and manager roles. Maybe we provide “manager sabbaticals” where a manager becomes an individual contributor on a team for six to nine months. Maybe when a manager goes on vacation, an individual contributor takes on their role for a period of time (or for the duration of an entire project). I don’t know exactly what this looks like yet, but I think it’s important for us to figure it out. Being an individual contributor makes you a better manager because you understand the day-to-day frustrations of your team better, and it ensures that you keep your technical skills up to date. Being a manager makes you a better designer because you understand the needs of leadership teams better, which allows you to communicate more effectively. One feeds the other, so we shouldn’t be forced to “pick a track.
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Anonymous
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Contract Reinforcement: Start tracking every day that you say hello to just one of your team members, then make sure to start and greet others too. You will make them feel like valuable members of the team and not just a number.
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Heather R. Younger (The 7 Intuitive Laws of Employee Loyalty: Fascinating Truths About What It Takes to Create Truly Loyal and Engaged Employees)
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contained a designer virus engineered to access NCTC's computer network. The virus would install a backdoor into the system for the waiting cyber-ops team, while covering its own tracks with the latest generation rootkit software. Once the team had access to the system, they would download a more sophisticated and robust kernel-mode rootkit to conceal their direct access to the operating system. Since kernel-mode rootkits operated at the same security level as the operating system itself, they were difficult to detect and nearly impossible to remove without rebooting the entire system.
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Steven Konkoly (The Black Flagged Thriller Series Boxset Books 2-4 (The Black Flagged Series #2-4))
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Wage Garnishment
Majority of students complete their education with student loan debt. Once you have graduated from college and stepinto the real world, you realize it isn’t as easy as it seemed. Student loan is one of the most difficult loans to repay and it also cannot be discharged into bankruptcy. Thus it has to be repaid!One thing that should always be kept in mind is to never skip your loan payments. If this happens and happens consecutively for months it will open doors to many other problems. It will put your loan in default; your entire loan amount and interest will become due immediately. It will adversely impact your credit score. We discuss Wage Garnishment with The Student Loan Help Center team, let’s see what they said about it.
So What is wage garnishment?
Wage garnishment happens when your loan is in default (you can consult The Student Loan help center if you want) i.e you have not paid the loan for consecutive 270 days. Now Wage garnishment is one of the legal consequences of going into default. Through this method the government starts deducting 15% of your income. That means you in hand income willreduce with only 85% coming in your bank account. However the amount of wage that can be garnished for private loandiffers from state to state since every state is not allowed to garnish the wages.
How to avoid?
As discussed before, wage garnishment happens only when your loan is in default. The department of education sends you one letter when you are in default. The best way to avoid this problem is to avoid going to default. There are numerous measures you can adopt right from very beginning to keep your loan repayment on track. For eg, starting to pay interest in your grace period, automating the process of monthly payments to get some discount from bank etc. Now what if you are in default or going in default, then the best option would be to consider forbearance or deferment which will stop your wages from being garnished.
How can it be challenged?
If you have just received the notice from Department of Education then you are given one opportunity to get a hearing and object to wage garnishment. You can challenge wage garnishment on following grounds:
Your income
Your employment
Procedures followed to start the garnishment etc
Also your wage garnishment cannot begin before the notice of 30 days. During this time period you request a hearing garnishment will be put on hold and if 30 days are over garnishment will not stop if you have won the hearing.
One of the Best Student Loan consolidation services in USA is The Student Loan Help Center in Florida for all kind of Student Loan consultation you can contact any time.
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The Student Loan Help Center
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Ten months after Jamie’s death, the 2006 football season began. The Colts played peerless football, winning their first nine games, and finishing the year 12–4. They won their first play-off game, and then beat the Baltimore Ravens for the divisional title. At that point, they were one step away from the Super Bowl, playing for the conference championship—the game that Dungy had lost eight times before. The matchup occurred on January 21, 2007, against the New England Patriots, the same team that had snuffed out the Colts’ Super Bowl aspirations twice. The Colts started the game strong, but before the first half ended, they began falling apart. Players were afraid of making mistakes or so eager to get past the final Super Bowl hurdle that they lost track of where they were supposed to be focusing. They stopped relying on their habits and started thinking too much. Sloppy tackling led to turnovers. One of Peyton Manning’s passes was intercepted and returned for a touchdown. Their opponents, the Patriots, pulled ahead 21 to 3. No team in the history of the NFL had ever overcome so big a deficit in a conference championship. Dungy’s team, once again, was going to lose.3.36 At halftime, the team filed into the locker room, and Dungy asked everyone to gather around. The noise from the stadium filtered through the closed doors, but inside everyone was quiet. Dungy looked at his players. They had to believe, he said. “We faced this same situation—against this same team—in 2003,” Dungy told them. In that game, they had come within one yard of winning. One yard. “Get your sword ready because this time we’re going to win. This is our game. It’s our time.”3.37 The Colts came out in the second half and started playing as they had in every preceding game. They stayed focused on their cues and habits. They carefully executed the plays they had spent the past five years practicing until they had become automatic. Their offense, on the opening drive, ground out seventy-six yards over fourteen plays and scored a touchdown. Then, three minutes after taking the next possession, they scored again. As the fourth quarter wound down, the teams traded points. Dungy’s Colts tied the game, but never managed to pull ahead. With 3:49 left in the game, the Patriots scored, putting Dungy’s players at a three-point disadvantage, 34 to 31. The Colts got the ball and began driving down the field. They moved seventy yards in nineteen seconds, and crossed into the end zone. For the first time, the Colts had the lead, 38 to 34. There were now sixty seconds left on the clock. If Dungy’s team could stop the Patriots from scoring a touchdown, the Colts would win. Sixty seconds is an eternity in football.
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Charles Duhigg (The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business)
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BillingParadise
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3 Proven Method for Rapid Weight Gain
Looking for a healthy and balanced technique of quick weight gain for the following stage of your physical fitness strategy ? Fast weight gain is feasible via just all-natural techniques. Also if you believe you are consuming sufficient to get weight, you might not also be making up for the additional calories shed by your exercise. A weight loss (or gain, in this instance) calculator will certainly take your dimensions, physical task degree, and also preferred weight to provide you a needed calorie consumption each day. Lots of individuals believe they require to exercise extra in order to attain fast weight gain. However, that breaks down the muscle mass without providing the body a possibility to restore itself.
Looking for a healthy and balanced approach to fast weight gain for the following stage of your physical fitness strategy? There are rather a couple of weight gainer tablets out there, however exactly how do you understand which ones are healthy and balanced? Fast weight gain is feasible via just all-natural techniques.
A weight loss (or gain, in this situation) calculator will certainly take your dimensions, physical task degree, as well as preferred weight to offer you a needed calorie consumption each day. Integrating this with your online tracking website allows you rapidly as well as quickly see if you are fulfilling your calorie objectives for the day.
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There are changes you could make while you are in the fitness centre to speed up your weight gain. Considerably overwhelming a details muscle mass team with enhancing quantities of weight will certainly optimize your gains in dimension from one exercise to the following. Numerous individuals believe they require to exercise extra in order to attain fast weight gain, however that just breaks down the muscular tissues without providing the body a possibility to reconstruct itself.
Usage of the internet calorie checking devices and also weight loss calculators to establish objectives as well as track your development. You had to look up every food in a calorie publication and also compose down your computations in a notepad. Currently, you could conveniently input the food you simply consumed right into an online calorie counting website as well as it will certainly look up the calories for you.
This might appear like an apparent pointer, yet problem obtaining weight typically suggests you are not consuming anywhere near sufficient food. Also if you assume you are consuming sufficient to acquire weight, you might not also be making up for the added calories shed by your exercise. Many individuals undervalue the large quantity of calories required to acquire also one extra pound.
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Roslyn
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Several of them have moved up to the highest ranks of the organization, thanks to a strong track record of proving to their bosses, day in and day out, that they have what it takes to help the company succeed. They are passionately curious about the entire organization and how it can beat the competition. They have shown repeatedly that they can tackle tough assignments. They have built teams of complementary staff and rallied them around ambitious goals. They have distilled complex strategy decisions down to just a few priorities, helping align their employees around just a handful of focused goals. And they have pushed and prodded their bosses to shake up the organization, taking bold steps even when there was no burning need to do so. These are the people you find at the top of organizations. They embody these qualities and, as leaders, help develop them in others.
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Adam Bryant (The Corner Office: How Top CEOs Made It and How You Can Too)
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I’ve also trained employees and teams to pause and gaze in the middle of their days. We call these breaks “wonder interventions at work.” This particular wonder intervention is called Pause-Gaze-Praise. The idea is that when you are working and you notice your temples tightening, your eyesight narrowing, your body aching, and your mind spinning downward, you train yourself to pause. The employees and teams each learn to look away from what they’re busily doing—especially if they’ve been staring for hours at a screen—and instead gaze upon something ordinary right around them. A chair or paper clip suffice. They learn to let their eyes soften and simply receive the shape, hue, and design of the thing itself without thinking about the thing. Then they take a moment to appreciate what they gaze upon.
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Jeffrey Davis (Tracking Wonder: Reclaiming a Life of Meaning and Possibility in a World Obsessed with Productivity)
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Agile terminology describes this type of flowchart as an “information radiator.” Having large, highly visible displays lets everyone on the team track everyone else’s progress. “If you have something public like this in your home,” Jeff said, “I guarantee you’ll get twice as much done. Guarantee.
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Bruce Feiler (The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More)
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At 4:49 p.m. the outside and interior security alarms of safety for the Oscar 7 missile silo were activated at the control desk located sixteen kilometers (ten miles) away. A security team was dispatched and discovered that not only was the fence open but the horizontal door closing the missile silo was also open. This reinforced-concrete door weighed nearly twenty tons and there were no tire tracks nor any record of a visit that could account for this.
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Leslie Kean (UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record)
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CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a marketing strategy that focuses on managing interactions and relationships with customers. CRM enables businesses to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention by providing personalized experiences that meet their needs. CRM is an essential aspect of modern marketing as it enables businesses to understand their customers' behavior, preferences, and needs and develop targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with them. In Go High Level, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a core component of the platform. The CRM functionality in Go High Level enables businesses to manage their customer interactions and relationships more effectively, improving customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.
The CRM functionality in Go High Level includes a range of features and tools designed to help businesses automate and streamline their customer-facing processes, as well as provide them with insights into their customers' behavior, preferences, and needs.
In essence, CRM is a set of practices, technologies, and strategies that businesses use to manage their customer interactions and relationships. The goal of CRM is to build stronger, more meaningful relationships with customers by providing them with personalized experiences and tailored solutions. CRM in marketing can be divided into three main categories: operational CRM, analytical CRM, and collaborative CRM. Operational CRM focuses on automating and streamlining customer-facing processes, such as sales, marketing, and customer service. This type of CRM is designed to improve efficiency and productivity by automating repetitive tasks and providing a centralized database of customer information. Operational CRM includes features such as sales pipeline management, lead nurturing, and customer service management. Analytical CRM focuses on analyzing customer data to gain insights into their behavior, preferences, and needs. This type of CRM enables businesses to make data-driven decisions by providing them with a better understanding of their customers' needs and preferences. Analytical CRM includes features such as customer segmentation, data mining, and predictive analytics. Collaborative CRM focuses on enabling businesses to collaborate and share customer information across different departments and functions. This type of CRM helps to break down silos within organizations and improve communication and collaboration between different teams. Collaborative CRM includes features such as customer feedback management, social media monitoring, and knowledge management. CRM is important for marketing because it enables businesses to build stronger, more meaningful relationships with customers. By understanding their customers' behavior, preferences, and needs, businesses can develop targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with them. This results in higher customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. CRM can also help businesses to improve their sales and marketing processes by providing them with better visibility into their sales pipeline and enabling them to track and analyze their marketing campaigns' effectiveness. This enables businesses to make data-driven decisions to improve their sales and marketing strategies, resulting in increased revenue and growth.
Another benefit of CRM in marketing is that it enables businesses to personalize their marketing campaigns. Personalization is essential in modern marketing as it enables businesses to tailor their marketing messages and solutions to meet their customers' specific needs and preferences. This results in higher engagement and conversion rates, as customers are more likely to respond to marketing messages that resonate with them. Lead Generation: Go High Level provides businesses with a range of tools to generate leads, including customizable landing pages, web forms, and social media integrations.
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What is CRM in Marketing?
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When researchers at Eastern Washington University compared coaches utilizing either servant (supportive) or power (thwarting) styles in sixty-four NCAA track teams, the athletes under the servant leader scored higher on measures of mental toughness and ran faster on the track.
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Steve Magness (Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness)
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One of the top questions I get from managers is: “How can I carve out time to focus on long-term work when there’s so much to do right now to keep the trains running?” In the framing of this question, there is an assumption that popping your head up to plan for the months or years ahead comes at the expense of successful near-term execution. It doesn’t have to be this way. One of my colleagues runs her team with a strategy that is similar to that of an investor’s. Just as no financial advisor would recommend putting all your money into one kind of asset, neither should you tackle projects with one kind of time horizon. My colleague makes sure that a third of her team works on projects that can be completed on the order of weeks, another third works on medium-term projects that may take months, and finally, the last third works on innovative, early-stage ideas whose impact won’t be known for years. By taking this portfolio approach, her team balances making constant improvements to their core features while casting an eye toward the horizon. Over the past decade, they’ve shown that this strategy works: her team has an amazing track record of identifying new opportunities and scaling them to huge businesses over the course of three years.
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Julie Zhuo (The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You)
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The term “jogging” became widely used in the United States in the late 1960s, as it was a result of a popular book with the title Jogging. Its author was University of Oregon track coach and Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman. He had been exposed to jogging while on vacation in New Zealand with his college team. He took time off and went for some easy runs with legendary running coach Arthur Lydiard, who had trained several Olympic running champions. On weekends, Lydiard would invite locals to join him for “fitness and sociability” runs, or what he called jogging. Lydiard wanted New Zealanders to stop being sedentary and get some easy, non-strenuous exercise. Bowerman enjoyed these easy runs, and lost ten pounds in the process. He was eager to spread the message about jogging to residents in Eugene, Oregon, where he lived and coached. When these jogging get-togethers became popular, Bowerman decided to broaden the message, and co-wrote the 126-page bestselling Jogging book with the help of a local cardiologist.
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Hiroaki Tanaka (Slow Jogging: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, and Have Fun with Science-Based, Natural Running)
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With KwickMetrics, it’s easy to track and manage all of your Amazon seller data – on your computer, on your phone, your tablet, and more. KwickMetrics was founded by a young team of entrepreneurs, engineers, and visionaries who saw a gap in the Amazon after-sales market. What began as an idea flourished into a full-fledged app with a group of individuals keen on revolutionizing how data is consumed by sellers. We learned that every single byte of data can be used to optimize every link in the product chain. Amazon provides sellers with data, we transform this data and give it meaning.
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Kwick Metrics
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of Wartortle’s office. The walls still somewhat stood. The windows were blown off, they were punctured with way more holes than one could count and the ground was littered with fragments of cement. Pikachu recalled that time that seemed so distant now when he finally started putting the dots together. …when he realized that Phione’s parentage was the center point of this missing person case. Sure, Phione’s mother was a Cubone and a mighty nice one too, but it was the missing dad that ended up making this case spiral out of control. After getting as much information as possible from Cubone and tracking some records, Pikachu uncovered that Phione’s birth father had gone missing many years ago and some suggested foul play. They say that he might have been involved with the wrong teams and they found a rather permanent way to make him disappear.
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K.T. Coolbricks (The Great Detective Pikachu: Episode 1 - A Mother’s Lament, A Pokémon’s Torments (A Pokemon Story))