Traction Quotes

The most common English word spoken in the nail salon was sorry. It was the one refrain for what it meant to work in the service of beauty. Again and again, I watched as manicurists, bowed over a hand or foot of a client, some young as seven, say, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry," when they had nothing wrong. I have seen workers, you included, apologize dozens of times throughout a forty-five-minute manicure, hoping to gain warm traction that would lead to the ultimate goal, a tip--only to say sorry anyway when none was given. In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I'm here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one's definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that's charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.

I’m not talking about them. We told you before, Smith, we wouldn’t play if her”—he pointed at Sissy—“or her”—he pointed at Ronnie—“were playing.” Mitch looked at her. “Uh…Sissy?” Sissy rounded on the coach. “I can’t believe you are still holding that against us. It’s been years!” “He was in traction for three months. A shifter! In traction!” “He was in my way!

It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by 'new at it,' I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction...Give it a minute.

Vision without traction is merely hallucination.

More often than not, that was a tough sell. If you go to a business and tell it you can save it $50,000 per year in labor costs if it eliminates this one job, then your AI product better eliminate that entire job. Instead, what entrepreneurs found was that their product was perhaps eliminating one task in a person’s job, and that wasn’t going to be enough to save their would-be customer any meaningful labor costs. The better pitches were ones that were not focused on replacement but on value. These pitches demonstrated how an AI product could allow businesses to generate more profits by, say, supplying higher quality products to their own customers. This had the benefit of not having to demonstrate that their AI could perform a particular task at a lower cost than a person. And if that also reduced internal resistance to adopting AI, then that only made their sales task easier. The point here is that a value-enhancing approach to AI, rather than a cost-savings approach, is more likely to find real traction for AI adoption.

She is sixteen and her skin is the darkness before the black, the plum of the day’s light, her breasts like sunsets trapped beneath her skin, but for all her youth and beauty she has a sour distrusting expression that only dissolves under the weight of immense pleasure. Her dreams are spare, lack the propulsion of a mission, her ambition is without traction. Her fiercest hope? That she will find a man. What she doesn’t yet know: the cold, the backbreaking drudgery of the factorias, the loneliness of Diaspora, that she will never again live in Santo Domingo, her own heart. What else she doesn’t know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again.

The weird thing is that the more efficient, on task, on goal you are with your time, the more energy you have. Working with no traction, or for that matter simply wasting a day, does not relax you, it drains you.// Strange as it may seem, when you work a daily plan in pursuit of your written goals that flow from your mission statement born of your vision for living your dreams, you are energized after a tough long day.

The conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan's central insight - that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie - contained a good deal of truth.

Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have are enough customers.

Action is traction.

If you want to see traction and results, consistency is key.

It wasn’t that she particularly wanted to be fattened up and eaten, or turned into a donkey, or forced to wear hair shirts and ashes like the children of wicked parents in fairy tales. But if your parents were wicked, you needn’t worry about pleasing them. When they were doing the best they could, you had no traction at all.

To save wildlife and wild places the traction has to come not from the regurgitation of bad-news data but from the poets, prophets, preachers, professors, and presidents who have always dared to inspire.

That is the secret of an empowering education: A girl learns she is not who she’s been told she is. She is the equal of anyone, and she has rights she needs to assert and defend. This is how the great movements of social change get traction: when outsiders reject the low self-image society has imposed on them and begin to author a self-image of their own.

Poor distribution - not product - is the number one cause of failure.

Quality ... you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on? Why else would people pay fortunes for some things and throw others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are better than others ... but what's the betterness? ... So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell is Quality? What is it?

Clarify your vision and you will make better decisions about people, processes, finances, strategies, and customers.

We broke something, I think it was traction…

He did not display his locomotive or his traction engine to his fellow professors, fearing that if he did so he would not be taken seriously when he spoke on mediaeval poetry.

This is what we call the 50% rule: spend 50% of your time on product and 50% on traction.

Why was she thinking about such silly stuff at a time like this? She knew the answer. Her mind was spinning its tires, looking for traction on friendly ground.

If you feel disappointed when a post you make doesn’t gain any traction, that’s a form of rejection, and it will impact you on a genetic level.

Sometimes it's easier to gain traction once you slow the spinning wheels.

It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by 'new at it,' I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction.

Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main carbohydrate sources; four pulses, with 20—25 percent protein, and four domestic animals, as the main protein sources, supplemented by the generous protein content of wheat; and flax as a source of fiber and oil (termed linseed oil: flax seeds are about 40 percent oil). Eventually, thousands of years after the beginnings of animal domestication and food production, the animals also began to be used for milk, wool, plowing, and transport. Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.

Most people are sitting on their own diamond mines. The surest ways to lose your diamond mine are to get bored, become overambitious, or start thinking that the grass is greener on the other side. Find your core focus, stick to it, and devote your time and resources to excelling at it.

Many entrepreneurs who build great products simply don’t have a good distribution strategy.

Marketing is the art of allocating resources—sending more power to the wheels that are getting traction, sending it away from the ones that are spinning. And investing in each strategy until the results stop working. Then find the next one!

Coconut,” I say. “You always smell coconut-y.” Then, because it’s dark in the van, and because I’m wiped out from all the panic and my guard is down, I add, “You always smell good.” “Sex Wax.” “What?” I sit up a little straighter. He reaches down to the floorboard and tosses me what looks like a plastic-wrapped bar of soap. I hold it up to the window to see the label in the streetlight. “Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax,” I read. “You rub it on the deck of your board,” he explains. “For traction. You know, so you don’t slip off while you’re surfing.” I sniff it. That’s the stuff, all right. “I bet your feet smell heavenly.” “You don’t have a foot fetish thing, do you?” he asks, voice playful. “I didn’t before, but now? Who knows.” The tires of the van veer off the road onto the gravelly shoulder, and he cuts the wheel sharply to steer back onto the pavement. “Oops.” We chuckle, both embarrassed. I toss the wax onto the floorboard. “Well, another mystery solved

How frustrated we get with the ones we love. We shove our hopes and thoughts down their throats hoping they swallow our passion. The unnecessary traction creates friction and fire, the perfect contradiction to the passion we desire. A.I.M. Lawal

exercise his brain and keep him fed, but how to gain any traction? Books, he thought. Books, books, books. Books to get him somewhere. Books to turn him into someone. Books to grab hold of on his way up. Books as a way to be alone without feeling so alone.

However, by early 2014 one conclusion had gained considerable traction across partisan lines: The attacks could have been prevented. That is, if only the State Department had taken appropriate steps to improve security at the Compound in response to numerous warnings and incidents during the months prior. That conclusion featured prominently in a bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In the Garden story, good and evil are found on the same tree, not in separate orchards. Good and evil give meaning and definition to each other. If God, like us, is susceptible to immense pain, He is, like us, the greater in His capacity for happiness. The presence of such pain serves the larger purpose of God's master plan, which is to maximize the capacity for joy, or in other words, "to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." He can no more foster those ends in the absence of suffering and evil than one could find the traction to run or the breath to sing in the vacuum of space. God does not instigate pain or suffering, but He can weave it into His purposes. "God's power rests not on totalizing omnipotence, but on His ability to alchemize suffering, tragedy, and loss into wisdom, understanding, and joy.

The faster you run high quality experiments, the more likely you’ll find scalable, effective growth tactics. Determining the success of a customer acquisition idea is dependent on an effective tracking and reporting system, so don’t start testing until your tracking/reporting system has been implemented.

I am a wordy writer, and often churn out pages on end without advancing the plot a jot. Hence I try to take my cue from a childhood impatience with any device that doesn't get somewhere. Even in his sprightly youth, Clippity had a problem with running in place—just like my first drafts—when the surface was too slick. As a kid, I was ingenious enough to smear green Plasticine on his rear hooves. Thus I discovered the importance of traction, as handy a concept in literature as for wind-up toys.

Good customer support is so rare that, if you simply try to make your customers happy, they are likely to spread the news of your awesome product on that basis alone.

The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.

Life is much easier for everyone when you have people around you who genuinely get it, want it, and have the capacity to do it.

A season with the herd and you’ll be riding like an arat,” Noyon said, referring to the local horsemen. “A season in that saddle and I’d be ready for traction,” Giordino grumbled.

Bodee keeps us upright; not that his traction is better than mine, but because it’s what he does.

Art was there to scratch at people’s brains, to help ideas find traction in metaphor that they could not when made explicit.

On many occasions animals are not so much trying to hurt us as giving us a mere rebuke or warning. The trouble is, a mere rebuke or warning from a bear can put a human in traction.

traction (stretching) is easier during exhalation, but lumbar traction (stretching) is eased by inhalation and retarded by exhalation.

By turning our values into time, we make sure we have time for traction.

Several pallets had been pulled to the middle of the open space and stacked two high with a large blanket over them. The implication stunned her – it was so unexpected, so unlike what she believed about him – her mind only registered denial. She heard Ash bolt the door and remove his leather jacket, felt his hands on her shoulders as he turned her around to face him. He stroked her cheek with one hand while the other reached for his belt. “My sweet, innocent Sage,” he whispered, and still her thoughts could gain no traction. There was the snap of a release from his belt, and though she continued to meet his eyes, she saw a sheathed dagger in the hand he raised between them. “Tonight I must teach you how to kill a man.

People need to hear the vision seven times before they really hear it for the first time. Human beings have short attention spans and are a little jaded when it comes to new messages.

Pride can easily cause us to nod our heads in agreement at God’s Word and yet not allow it to gain traction in our hearts and minds. Complacency is one of the Christian’s worst enemies.

If you’re truly going to commit to building a great company, a strong leadership team, and getting the right people in the right seats, you must prepare for change on your leadership team.

Jennifer and Mark were a reminder that they weren’t all a lost cause. It was just a shame they were in such a minority group. Maybe they could start a movement: Decent People’s Lives Matter. It could be all inclusive, even accept cops in their charter. Probably wouldn’t get any traction with the PC crowd, though. Not the “right” kind of people, or the “right” kind of cause.

“I don’t want to be without you. I like who I am with you, and I don’t want to go back to who I was before.” “I love you, Rachel. So this will work. No matter what or who stands in our way.” My body rocks as if Isaiah used a defibrillator on my chest. He loves me. His words gain traction in my head...he loves me. My heart patters faster and faster. Not because of anxiety but because of hope. Gathering air into my lungs, I rest my head against his shirt, which is wet with my tears. His heart has a slow, steady beat. One that never panics. One that is always strong.

In spite of being a marketing guy for over 40 years, I never realised how challenging it would be to gain global traction for the Irish romantic fantasy novel, Dolphin Song. It's succeeding, but the workload has been terrific.

As you entrust your concerns to Me, I receive them into My care and keeping. This lightens your load and helps you gain traction so you can move forward in dependence on Me. I don’t guarantee you a trouble-free journey, but I do promise to make your life meaningful. I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you and watch over you. Treasure My teaching in your heart, for it is not your plans but My counsel that will stand.

Here is where the electric car can gain traction. While an electric car may cost more, its operating costs will be lower because the costs of electricity per mile will be lower than that for gasoline (unless internal combustion engines become much more efficient). So if you’re running a massive fleet of cars that is working most of the time, the electric car becomes compelling. Moreover, the recharging conundrum can be solved with a central charging location.

Oppose established habits, and use the counterforce of training to get traction and make progress. If you find yourself cutting corners during a workout or on a project, say to yourself: “OK, now I am going to go even further or do even better.

Most leaders know that bringing discipline and accountability to the organization will make people a little uncomfortable. That’s an inevitable part of creating traction. What usually holds an organization back is the fear of creating this discomfort.

I want to grab her and confess that I'm an unbeliever. That being on that machine makes me feel like I'm running in some sucking substance worse than mud. I can find no foothold, no traction. That I feel out of control, inches from the lip of the abyss. That while we've been sitting here, there's this angry, hungry maw in me that is fathoms deep. But even though Ruth's only a hair thinner than I am, she's way on the other side of the fat girl spectrum, looking at me from the safe, slightly smug distance of her own control and conviction.

He approached life like he was sprinting down a hill. As though as long as he concentrated and held full speed, he’d keep his traction. Sometimes I worried about what would happen if he misstepped, however. Would he manage to keep his momentum, or would he hit the ground?

big domestic mammals were crucial to those human societies possessing them. Most notably, they provided meat, milk products, fertilizer, land transport, leather, military assault vehicles, plow traction, and wool, as well as germs that killed previously unexposed peoples.

She regretted volunteering, as getting off the ship required wading in chest-deep water. It was very cold and took her breath away. Her robe billowed around her as she struggled to find traction in the ground below. A strong wave struck her from behind and she started to fall face forward. Hadrian caught her by the elbow and held her up. “Thank you. I thought I was going for a swim there,” she told him. “Bad form on the wave’s part, sneaking up and attacking you from the back like that.” “Not very chivalrous, was it?” “Not at all—I’d complain.

triggers can now be identified for what they rightly are: tools. If we use them properly, they can help us stay on track. If the trigger helps us do the thing we planned to do in our schedule, it’s helping us gain traction. If it leads to distraction, then it isn’t serving us.

Climate change demands that we consume less, but being consumers is all we know. Climate change is not a problem that can be solved simply by changing what we buy---a hybrid instead of an SUV, some carbon offsets when we get on a plane. At it's core, it is a crisis born of overconsumption by the comparatively wealthy, which means the world's most manic consumers are going to have to consume less so that others can have enough to life. The problem is not "human nature," as we are so often told. We weren't born having to shop this much, and we have, in our recent past, been just as happy (in many cases happier) consuming significantly less. The problem is the inflated role that consumption has come to play in our particular era. Late capitalism teaches us to create ourselves through our consumer choices: shopping is how we form our identities, find community, and express ourselves. Thus, telling people they can't shop as much as they want to because the planet's support systems are overburdened can be understood as a personal attack, asking to telling them they cannot truly be themselves. This is likely why, of environmentalism's original "three Rs" (reduce, reuse, recycle), only the third one has ever gotten any traction, since it allows us to keep on shopping as long as we put the refuse in the right box. The other two, which require that we consume less, were pretty much dead on arrival.

My friend John Maxwell says a budget (for your money) is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went. Managing time is the same; you will either tell your day what to do or you will wonder where it went. The weird thing is that the more efficient, on task, on goal you are with your time, the more energy you have. Working with no traction, or for that matter simply wasting away a day, does not relax you, it drains you. Have you ever taken a day off, slept late, wandered around with no plan or thought for the day, watched some stupid rerun of a bad movie as you surfed the TV, and at the end of your great day off found yourself absolutely exhausted? Strange as it may seem, when you work a daily plan in pursuit of your written goals that flow from your mission statement born of your vision for living your dreams, you are energized after a tough long day.

Three-Step Method for Making Stronger Connections: Take the Triangle Talk approach to connecting and reaching agreement with others: You, Me, Us. First refer to their interest, then yours - and then note how your interests coincide. This approach enables diverse people to gain traction sooner toward a common goal.

Viewed through the lens of this critical question, triggers can now be identified for what they rightly are: tools. If we use them properly, they can help us stay on track. If the trigger helps us do the thing we planned to do in our schedule, it’s helping us gain traction. If it leads to distraction, then it isn’t serving us.

Goals Must Have a Time Limit Goals without a time limit are unable to be broken down into micro goals to measure your progress, to observe your traction. You might say, “I want to write a book.” Great, when? In twenty years? In twenty months? If you don’t put a deadline on the goal it will never happen and you will get to eat the bitter fruit of regret.

In order to live our values in each of these domains, we must reserve time in our schedules to do so. Only by setting aside specific time in our schedules for traction (the actions that draw us toward what we want in life) can we turn our backs on distraction. Without planning ahead, it’s impossible to tell the difference between traction and distraction.

Rain is the last thing you want when you're chasing someone in Miami. They drive shitty enough as it is, but on top of that, snow is a foreign concept, which means they never got the crash course in traction judgment for when pavement slickness turns less than ideal. And because of the land-sea temperature differential, Florida has regular afternoon rain showers. Nothing big, over in a jiff. But minutes later, all major intersections in Miami-Dade are clogged with debris from spectacular smash-ups. In Northern states, snow teaches drivers real fast about the Newtonian physics of large moving objects. I haven't seen snow either, but I drink coffee, so the calculus of tire-grip ratio is intuitive to my body.

Problems are like mushrooms: When it’s dark and rainy, they multiply. Under bright light, they diminish.

You can have one name in two seats, just not two names in one seat.

When everything is important, nothing is important.

You will establish the three to seven most important priorities for the company, the ones that must be done in the next 90 days. Those priorities are called Rocks.

In the case of querymongo.com, RJMetrics built a tool that translates SQL queries to MongoDB syntax (two database technologies). This

If you cannot risk, you cannot grow. If you cannot grow, you cannot become your best. If you cannot become your best, you cannot be happy. If you cannot be happy, what else matters?

Bolshevik socialism (anticapitalism) attracted and gave meaning to the shock-troop activists, supplied the vocabulary and worldview of millions in the party and beyond, and achieved a monopoly over the public sphere, but this same politically empowering ideology afforded no traction over the international situation or the faltering quasi-market domestic economy.

We are told that Louis Pasteur, in the days before he was renowned, would walk in the park, pondering the nature of the “invisible enemy … the Rabies germs,” in order to find a way to kill them. But Pasteur’s idea was not compelling to his contemporaries. We are shown children pointing fingers at him and mocking him, and adults yelling at him that what he attempted was impossible. Pasteur soldiered on, though, and we are all the beneficiaries of that. ... For every Pasteur, there must be thousands of people who have had an idea that didn’t pan out, as well as countless others whose ideas were good, but never got traction. Science depends on the tenacity of the person with the new idea, even when others take pleasure in mocking it.

I eventually realized that to make a difference I had to step outside, into creation, and refocus on the roots of my passion. If an ounce of soil, a sparrow, or an acre of forest is to remain then we must all push things forward. To save wildlife and wild places the traction has to come not from the regurgitation of bad-news data but from the poets, prophets, preachers, professors, and presidents who have always dared to inspire. Heart and mind cannot be exclusive of one another in the fight to save anything. To help others understand nature is to make it breathe like some giant: a revolving, evolving, celestial being with ecosystems acting as organs and the living things within those places -- humans included -- as cells vital to its survival.

The first element of marketing strategy is your target market, or “The List.” Identifying your target market involves defining your ideal customers. Who are they? Where are they? What are they?

Newton supposed that the case of the planet was similar to that of [a ball spun around on the end of an elastic string]; that it was always pulled in the direction of the sun, and that this attraction or pulling of the sun produced the revolution of the planet, in the same way that the traction or pulling of the elastic string produces the revolution of the ball. What there is between the sun and the planet that makes each of them pull the other, Newton did not know; nobody knows to this day; and all we are now able to assert positively is that the known motion of the planet is precisely what would be produced if it were fastened to the sun by an elastic string, having a certain law of elasticity. Now observe the nature of this discovery, the greatest in its consequences that has ever yet been made in physical science:— I. It begins with an hypothesis, by supposing that there is an analogy between the motion of a planet and the motion of a ball at the end of a string. II. Science becomes independent of the hypothesis, for we merely use it to investigate the properties of the motion, and do not trouble ourselves further about the cause of it.

She was shaking. Her hands, her knees and everywhere in between. And kisses did not make her shake.And she didn't kiss men she didn't like. She didn't kiss men in uniforms who had a fetish for order and cleanliness. She didn't yell at people, either, but right now the yelling was lower on her list of sins than the kissing. "What did you... I don't even... I'm going to go." She turned, her shoulders stiff, her heart hammering in her ears. "If I'd known a kiss would have gotten rid of you, I would have kissed you the moment I saw your car sitting on the side of the road." Oh. That. Did it. She whirled back around, anger gaining traction in her again. "Well, sure, your kiss got rid of me. Congratulations. Now who's going to help you get rid of the hard-on it gave you? Your right hand?

Salespeople are famous for lack of discipline and losing focus. They attempt to call on an account (once), but don’t get anywhere. Instead of sharpening their weapons and continuing to attack the same strategically selected targets, they turn and pursue a new set of prospects. This constant change of direction becomes their death knell because they never gain traction against the defined target set.

Wait." Walter went to the basket, taking what was a gray sleeve, drawing it out fro the middle of the heap. "Oh," He said. He held the shapeless wool sweater to his chest. Joyce had knit for months the year Daniel died, and here was the result, her handiwork, the garment that would fit a giant. It was nothing more than twelve skeins of yarn and thousands of loops, but it had the power to bring back in a flash the green-tiled walls of the hospital, the sound of an ambulance trying to cut through city traffic in the distance, the breathing of the dying boy, his father staring at the ceiling, the full greasy bucket of fried chicken on he bed table. "I'll take this one," Walter said, balling up the sweater as best he could, stuffing it into a shopping bag that was half full of the books he was taking home, that he was borrowing. "Oh, honey," Joyce said. "You don't want that old scrap." "You made it. I remember your making it." Keep it light, he said to himself, that's a boy. "There's a use for it. Don't you think so, Aunt Jeannie? No offense, Mom, but I could invade the Huns with it or strap the sleeves to my car tires in a blizzard, for traction, or protect our nation with it out in space, a shield against nuclear attack." Jeannie tittered in her usual way in spite of herself. "You always did have that sense of humor," she said as she went upstairs. When she was out of range, Joyce went to Walter's bag and retrieved the sweater. She laid it on the card table, the long arms hanging down, and she fingered the stitches. "Will you look at the mass of it," she exclaimed. "I don't even recall making it." ""'Memory -- that strange deceiver,'" Walter quoted.

There are three stages in documenting your Way. First, identify your core processes. Then break down what happens in each one and document it. Finally, compile the information into a single package for everyone in your company.

Like here it was that I entered that stage when a child overcomes naivite enough to realize an adult's emotional reaction as somethimes freakish for its inconsistencies, so can, on his own reasoning canvas, paint those early pale colors of judgement, resulting from initial moments of ability to critically examine life's perplexities, in tentative little brain-engine stirrings, before they faded to quickly join that train of remembered experience carrying signals indicating existence which itself far outweighs traction effort by thinking's soon slipping drivers to effectively resist any slack-action advantage, for starting so necessitates continual cuts on the hauler - performed as if governed lifelong by the tagwork of a student-green foreman who, crushed under on rushing time always building against his excessive load of emotional contents, is forever a lost ball in the high weeds of personal developments - until, with ever changing emphasis through a whole series of grades of consciousness (leading up from root-beginnings of obscure childish inconscious soul within a world), early lack - for what child sustains logic? - reaches a point of late fossilization, resultant of repeated wrong moves in endless switching of dark significances crammed inside the cranium, where, through such hindering habits, there no longer is the flexibility for thought transfer and unloading of dead freight that a standard gauge would afford and thus, as Faustian Destiny dictates, is an inept mink, limited, being in existence firmly tracked just above the constant "T" biased ballast supporting wherever space yearnings lead the worn rails of civilized comprehension, so henceforth is restricted to mere pickups and setouts of drab distortion, while traveling wearily along its familiar Western Thinking right-of-way. But choo-choo nonsense aside, ...

see that her help is needed. Advocating means fighting for not fighting with. As I’ve said before in many different ways, you have to make your case in a manner that makes other people listen, and that usually means considering their needs as well as your own. You may feel as if your parents’ needs take precedence over your sibling’s—and they do—but this more communicative approach is likely to get more traction than making people defensive ever does. One great way to keep all of your family

How often things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant, before the speculative eye and the moment of vision came! It was Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who first puzzled his brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and silk and shellac, and so began the quickening of the human mind to the existence of this universal presence. And even then the science of electricity remained a mere little group of curious facts for nearly two hundred years, connected perhaps with magnetism—a mere guess that—perhaps with the lightning. Frogs' legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron railings and twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them. Except for the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after Gilbert before electricity stepped out of the cabinet of scientific curiosities into the life of the common man… . Then suddenly, in the half-century between 1880 and 1930, it ousted the steam-engine and took over traction, it ousted every other form of household heating, abolished distance with the perfected wireless telephone and the telephotograph… .

Right on cue, the ground came whipping up beneath them. No longer simply held aloft by anti-gravity units, the vehicle’s futuristic replacements for wheels could be put to work. Bigger, beefier versions of the same things that made his delivery bike work, the repulsors used the interplay between two tangible energy fields to create a synchronized wave pattern capable of instituting temporary charge differences between the vehicle and road surface for the purposes of facilitating the attraction and repulsion necessary to maintain an approximately constant distance. In other words, he had traction now.

To be clear, splitting your time evenly between product and traction will certainly slow down product development. However, it counterintuitively won’t slow the time to get your product successfully to market. In fact, it will speed it up! That’s because pursuing product development and traction in parallel has a couple of key benefits. First, it helps you build the right product because you can incorporate knowledge from your traction efforts. If you’re following a good product development process, you’re already getting good feedback from early customers. However, these customers are generally too close to you. They often tell you what you want to hear.

The only question that got any traction was when he asked Martin what he did. Martin tersely replied that he was a wizard and was met with a blank stare. “You know, a wizard,” Martin said. “I do magic.” Martin had expected that this would at least impress Ampyx. Martin was wrong. “Why?” Ampyx asked. “Why what? Why do I do magic?” “Yes, why do you do magic?” Ampyx asked, as if it were the most obvious question in the world. Martin looked at Phillip, who shrugged. Finally, Martin answered, “Why wouldn’t I do magic? Wouldn’t you do magic if you could?” “Never,” Ampyx said. “Well, why not?” Ampyx scrunched his face and said, “Magic . . . it is . . . woman’s work.

Reconstruction prompted a vicious white backlash, which gained traction following the disputed election of 1876, when the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes pulled federal troops out of the South in return for the electoral votes of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Segregationist whites, known as Redeemers, regained power and quickly targeted black voters, first through violence and fraud and then via devices like literacy and good character tests, poll taxes, and stringent residency requirements. Mississippi became the first state to change its constitution to disenfranchise black voters in 1890. Every other southern state quickly followed. Black voters disappeared seemingly overnight.

She kissed him kind, and hard, and desperately, and the Colonel could not think about any fights or any picturesque or strange incidents. He only thought of her and how she felt and how close life comes to death when there is ecstasy. And what the hell is ecstasy and what’s ecstasy’s rank and serial number? And how does her black sweater feel? And who made all her smoothness and delight and the strange pride and sacrifice and wisdom of a child? Yes, ecstasy is what you might have had and instead you drew sleep’s older brother. Death is a lot of shit, he thought. It comes to you in small fragments that hardly show where it has entered. It comes, sometimes, atrociously. It can come from unboiled water; an un-pulled-up mosquito boot, or it can come with the great, white-hot, clanging roar we have lived with. It comes in small cracking whispers that precede the noise of the automatic weapon. It can come with the smoke-emitting arc of the grenade, or the sharp, cracking drop of the mortar. I have seen it come, loosening itself from the bomb rack, and falling with that strange curve. It comes in the metallic rending crash of a vehicle, or the simple lack of traction on a slippery road. It comes in bed to most people, I know, like love’s opposite number. I have lived with it nearly all my life and the dispensing of it has been my trade. But what can I tell this girl now on this cold, windy morning in the Gritti Palace Hotel?

If the interest of a scientific expositor ought to be measured by the importance of the subject, I shall be applauded for my choice. In fact, there are few questions which touch more closely the very existence of man than that of animated motors—those docile helps whose power or speed he uses at his pleasure, which enjoy to some extent his intimacy, and accompany him in his labors and his pleasures. The species of animal whose coöperation we borrow are numerous, and vary according to latitude and climate. But whether we employ the horse, the ass, the camel, or the reindeer, the same problem is always presented: to get from the animal as much work as possible, sparing him, as far as we can, fatigue and suffering. This identity of standpoint will much simplify my task, as it will enable me to confine the study of animated motors to a single species: I have chosen the horse as the most interesting type. Even with this restriction the subject is still very vast, as all know who are occupied with the different questions connected therewith. In studying the force of traction of the horse, and the best methods of utilizing it, we encounter all the problems connected with teams and the construction of vehicles. But, on a subject which has engaged the attention of humanity for thousands of years, it seems difficult to find anything new to say. If in the employment of the horse we consider its speed and the means of increasing it, the subject does not appear less exhausted. Since the chariot-races, of which Greek and Roman antiquity were passionately fond, to our modern horse-races, men have never ceased to pursue with a lively interest the problem of rapid locomotion. What tests and comparisons have not been made to discover what race has most speed, what other most bottom, what crossings, what training give reason to expect still more speed?

The most effective way to make time for traction is through “timeboxing.” Timeboxing uses a well-researched technique psychologists call “setting an implementation intention,” which is a fancy way of saying, “deciding what you’re going to do, and when you’re going to do it.” It’s a technique that can be used to make time for traction in each of your life domains. The goal is to eliminate all white space on your calendar so you’re left with a template for how you intend to spend your time each day. It doesn’t so much matter what you do with your time; rather, success is measured by whether you did what you planned to do. It’s fine to watch a video, scroll social media, daydream, or take a nap, as long as that’s what you planned to do. Alternatively, checking work email, a seemingly productive task, is a distraction if it’s done when you intended to spend time with your family or work on a presentation. Keeping a timeboxed schedule is the only way to know if you’re distracted. If you’re not spending your time doing what you’d planned, you’re off track.

This man is someone for whom the world isn’t a mystery. The world is a boulder, but it has levers and he knows when and where and how to apply just the right amount of force, and it moves for him, while my father and I, pushing up against it, don’t have any angle, any torque, no grip or traction or leverage. My father thinks success must be in direct proportion to effort exerted. He doesn’t know where or how to exert the least amount for the most gain, doesn’t know where the secret buttons are, the hidden doors, the golden keys. He thinks that, even if you have a great idea, there have to be trials and tribulations, errors and failures, a dark night of the soul, a slog, a time in the desert, a fallow period, a period of quiet, a period of silent and earnest and frustrated toiling before emerging, victorious, into the sunshine and acclaim. My father makes to-do lists, makes plans, makes business plans. This is how he starts, always with a blank sheet of graph paper. We make bullet points. We identify the key areas we need to research further. We try to figure out how to research those areas. We work in a vacuum. We work in his study. We ponder. We stare at our feet. We stare at the ceiling. We talk to each other, create a world, create a tiny, artificial, formal space, on a blank sheet of paper, where we can imagine rules and principles and categories and ideas, all of which have absolutely nothing to do with the actual world out there.

We call that a leaden sleep, and it seems as if, during the few minutes after such a sleep has ended, we have ourselves turned into mere figures of lead. Identity has vanished. So how, then, searching for our thoughts, our identities, as we search for lost objects, do we eventually recover our own self rather than any other? Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? It is not clear what dictates the choice, or why, among the millions of human beings we might be, it is the being we were the day before that we unerringly grasp. What is it that guides us when there has been a genuine interruption (whether it be that we have been totally taken over by sleep, or that our dreams have been utterly different from ourselves)? What has happened really is a death, as when the heart has ceased to beat and a rhythmical traction of the tongue revives us. No doubt the room, even if we have seen it only once before, awakens memories to which older memories cling; or possibly some of them have been lying dormant inside us and we now become conscious of them. The resurrection that takes place when we wake up—after that beneficent attack of mental derangement we call sleep—must in the end be similar to what happens when we recall a name, a line of poetry, or a refrain we had forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be thought of as a phenomenon of memory.

GM: What are the foods you recommend that have sufficient calorie density that make you feel full? What are the best foods to make the staples of your diet? PP: Whole grains, legumes, and starchy vegetables. More broadly, I tell people to make the staples of their diet the four food groups, which are whole grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables. We have our own little pyramid that we use here at The Wellness Forum. Beans, rice, corn, and potatoes are at the bottom of the pyramid. Then steamed and raw vegetables and big salads come next, with fruits after that. Whole grains, or premade whole grain foods like cereals and breads, are all right to eat. Everything else is either optional or a condiment. As for high-fat plant foods—nuts, seeds, avocados, olives—use them occasionally or when they’re part of a recipe, but don’t overdo it; these foods are calorie-dense and full of fat. No oils, get rid of the dairy, and then, very importantly, you need to differentiate between food and a treat. I don’t think you can get through to people by telling a twenty-five-year-old that she can’t have another cookie or a piece of cake for the rest of her life. Where you can gain some traction is to say, “Look, birthday parties are a good time for cake, Christmas morning is a good time for cookies, and Valentine’s Day is a good time for chocolate, but you don’t need to be eating that stuff all the time.” People end up in my office because they’re treating themselves several times a day.

right to use Apple Corps for their record and business holdings. Alas, this did not resolve the issue of getting the Beatles onto iTunes. For that to happen, the Beatles and EMI Music, which held the rights to most of their songs, had to negotiate their own differences over how to handle the digital rights. “The Beatles all want to be on iTunes,” Jobs later recalled, “but they and EMI are like an old married couple. They hate each other but can’t get divorced. The fact that my favorite band was the last holdout from iTunes was something I very much hoped I would live to resolve.” As it turned out, he would. Bono Bono, the lead singer of U2, deeply appreciated Apple’s marketing muscle. He was confident that his Dublin-based band was still the best in the world, but in 2004 it was trying, after almost thirty years together, to reinvigorate its image. It had produced an exciting new album with a song that the band’s lead guitarist, The Edge, declared to be “the mother of all rock tunes.” Bono knew he needed to find a way to get it some traction, so he placed a call to Jobs. “I wanted something specific from Apple,” Bono recalled. “We had a song called ‘Vertigo’ that featured an aggressive guitar riff that I knew would be contagious, but only if people were exposed to it many, many times.” He was worried that the era of promoting a song through airplay on the radio was over. So Bono visited Jobs at home in Palo Alto, walked around the garden, and made an unusual pitch. Over the years U2 had spurned

Yet the deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occurs from the “top down.” In other words, the work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites. The reason for this, as I have said, is that culture is about how societies define reality—what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, unimportant, and so on. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well-developed networks and powerful institutions. Over time, cultural innovation is translated and diffused. Deep-rooted cultural change tends to begin with those whose work is most conceptual and invisible and it moves through to those whose work is most concrete and visible. In a very crude formulation, the process begins with theorists who generate ideas and knowledge; moves to researchers who explore, revise, expand, and validate ideas; moves on to teachers and educators who pass those ideas on to others, then passes on to popularizers who simplify ideas and practitioners who apply those ideas. All of this, of course, transpires through networks and structures of cultural production. Cultural change is most enduring when it penetrates the structure of our imagination, frameworks of knowledge and discussion, the perception of everyday reality. This rarely if ever happens through grassroots political mobilization though grassroots mobilization can be a manifestation of deeper cultural transformation.

No, seriously," Mark continued. "Once you've been involved for a while, do your charity work in some third world toilet, they start letting you in on some of the bigger secrets to Responsivism, and how the knowledge will save you." "Go on," Juan said to indulge him. Murph might be flakey, but he had a topflight mind. "Ever heard of 'brane theory?" He'd already talked with Eric about it so only Stone didn't return a blank stare. "It's right up there with string theory as a way of unifying all four forces in the universe, something Einstein couldn't do. In a nutshell, it says our four-dimensional universe is a single membrane, and that there are others existing in higher orders of space. These are so close to ours that zero-point matter and energy can pass between them and that gravitation forces in our universe can leak out. It's all cutting-edge stuff." "I'll take your word for it," Cabrillo said. "Anyway, "brane theory started to get traction among theoreti cal physicists in the mid-nineties, and Lydell Cooper glommed on to it, too. He took it a step further, though. It wasn't just quantum particles passing in and out of our universe. He believed that an intelligence from another 'brane was affecting people here in our dimension. This intelligence, he said, shaped our day-to-day lives in ways we couldn't sense. It was the cause of all our suffering. Just before his death, Cooper started to teach techniques to limit this influence, ways to protect ourselves from the alien power." "And people bought this crap?" Max asked, sinking deeper into depression over his son. "Oh yeah. Think about it from their side for a second. It's not a believer's fault that he is unlucky or depressed or just plain stupid. His life is being messed with across dimensional membranes It's an alien influence that cost you that promotion or prevented you from dating the girl of your dreams. It's a cosmic force holding you back, not your own ineptitude. If you believe that, then you don't have to take responsibility for your life. And we all know nobody takes responsibility for himself anymore. Responsivism gives you a ready-made excuse for your poor life choices.

Found a startup society. This is simply an online community with aspirations of something greater. Anyone can found one, just like anyone can found a company or cryptocurrency.2 And the founder’s legitimacy comes from whether people opt to follow them. Organize it into a group capable of collective action. Given a sufficiently dedicated online community, the next step is to organize it into a network union. Unlike a social network, a network union has a purpose: it coordinates its members for their mutual benefit. And unlike a traditional union, a network union is not set up solely in opposition to a particular corporation, so it can take a variety of different collective actions.3 Unionization is a key step because it turns an otherwise ineffective online community into a group of people working together for a common cause. Build trust offline and a cryptoeconomy online. Begin holding in-person meetups in the physical world, of increasing scale and duration, while simultaneously building an internal economy using cryptocurrency. Crowdfund physical nodes. Once sufficient trust has been built and funds have been accumulated, start crowdfunding apartments, houses, and even towns to bring digital citizens into the physical world within real co-living communities. Digitally connect physical communities. Link these physical nodes together into a network archipelago, a set of digitally connected physical territories distributed around the world. Nodes of the network archipelago range from one-person apartments to in-person communities of arbitrary size. Physical access is granted by holding a web3 cryptopassport, and mixed reality is used to seamlessly link the online and offline worlds. Conduct an on-chain census. As the society scales, run a cryptographically auditable census to demonstrate the growing size of your population, income, and real-estate footprint. This is how a startup society proves traction in the face of skepticism. Gain diplomatic recognition. A startup society with sufficient scale should eventually be able to negotiate for diplomatic recognition from at least one pre-existing government, and from there gradually increased sovereignty, slowly becoming a true network state.

When Musk took delivery of his F1, CNN was there to cover it. “Just three years ago I was showering at the Y and sleeping on the office floor,” he told the camera sheepishly, “and now obviously, I’ve got a million-dollar car… it’s just a moment in my life.” While other McLaren F1 owners around the world—the sultan of Brunei, Wyclef Jean, and Jay Leno, among others—could comfortably afford it, Musk’s purchase had put a sizable dent in his bank account. And unlike other owners, Musk drove the car to work—and declined to insure it. As Musk drove Thiel up Sand Hill Road in the F1, the car was the subject of their chat. “It was like this Hitchcock movie,” Thiel remembered, “where we’re talking about the car for fifteen minutes. We’re supposed to be preparing for the meeting—and we’re talking about the car.” During their ride, Thiel looked at Musk and reportedly asked, “So, what can this thing do?” “Watch this,” Musk replied, flooring the accelerator and simultaneously initiating a lane change on Sand Hill Road. In retrospect, Musk admitted that he was outmatched by the F1. “I didn’t really know how to drive the car,” he recalled. “There’s no stability systems. No traction control. And the car gets so much power that you can break the wheels free at even fifty miles an hour.” Thiel recalls the car in front of them coming fast into view—then Musk swerving to avoid it. The McLaren hit an embankment, was tossed into the air—“like a discus,” Musk remembered——then slammed violently into the ground. “The people that saw it happen thought we were going to die,” he recalled. Thiel had not worn a seat belt, but astonishingly, neither he nor Musk were hurt. Musk’s “work of art” had not fared as well, having now taken a distinctly cubist turn. Post-near-death experience, Thiel dusted himself off on the side of the road and hitchhiked to the Sequoia offices, where he was joined by Musk a short while later. X.com’s CEO, Bill Harris, was also waiting at the Sequoia office, and he recalled that both Thiel and Musk were late but offered no explanation for their delay. “They never told me,” Harris said. “We just had the meeting.” Reflecting on it, Musk found humor in the experience: “I think it’s safe to say Peter wouldn’t be driving with me again.” Thiel wrung some levity out of the moment, too. “I’d achieved lift-off with Elon,” he joked, “but not in a rocket.