Transformers Movie Quotes

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to." [MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]

She’s pretty, but her face doesn’t transform into sunlight when she talks about music.” He did that clench thing with his jaw and said, “She’s funny, but not spit-out-your-drink-in-astonishment funny.” It felt like my heart was going to explode as his eyes moved down to my lips under the glow of the buzzing streetlight. He moved his face a little closer to mine, looked into my eyes, and rumbled, “And when I see her, I don’t feel like I have to talk to her or mess up her hair or do something—anything—to get her to swing that gaze on me.

There’s a great quote from the movie Almost Famous that says, “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.

I have nothing against Sean Penn. I don't even mind that he ended up divorcing Madonna. I mean, I still like Shia LaBeouf even though he chose to star in Transformers, which turned out to be a movie about robots from space. That Talk. Which is just as bad as choosing to divorce Madonna, if you ask me

Imagine a movie where the camera is shaking all the time. It would be the worst movie you've ever seen. You could barely focus on anything that's going on and you'd probably walk out in five minutes. Stillness is everything. It’s an opportunity to observe our chaotic mind and allow it to settle down no matter what else is happening around us.

Movies always have a beginning and end. But in any movie you see, something always happened before the movie began. We just don't see it. And so we fall for this illusion that things have this beginning and end. For a long time, physics believed that there was a beginning to the universe, and only now they're beginning to say there might have been something before the Big Bang. But from a spiritual perspective, of course there was no beginning. Beginnings and endings are merely illusions.

My story ended where so many stories have ended since the Rising: with a man—in this case, my adoptive brother and best friend, Shaun—holding a gun to the base of my skull as the virus in my blood betrayed me, transforming me from a thinking human being into something better suited to a horror movie.

Transform into your dream.

Above all else, he loves trilogies. There has never been a trilogy he didn't like, and if you don't understand why, I have three words for you: father, son, and Holy Spirit. Foremost among his favorites is the original Star Wars trilogy, which he fervently believes is about priests in space, and the first three Alien films, which he believes are about how all women are destined to be mothers. Currently he is obsessed with the Transformers movies, because the greatest Transformer of all . . . is Jesus Christ. He even sat me down one day to have a serious discussion about "moral choices the Transformers are forced to make." At no point did I interrupt him to say, "But Dad, they're cars." This means I am becoming an adult. Because truly, the Transformers are more than cars. Some of them are trucks.

Within our core self is an indelible blueprint of unrivaled individuality—the singular being that each of us exists to express. In this three-dimensional movie called “Life” there are no stand-ins, body doubles, or understudies—no one can fill in for us by proxy! Realization of this truth alone eliminates the need to imitate, conform, limit, or betray our loyalty to the originality of Self. Imagine the relief of removing your carefully crafted masks fashioned by societal forms of conditioning and instead responding to what comes into your experience directly from your Authentic Self. One of the first principles to honor in your relationship with yourself is to respect and trust your own inner voice. This form of trust is the way of the heart, the epitome of well-being.

Just like the characters of a movie, you are a character in the show called “Life.” Are you in a starring role? Or are you a supporting actor?

How you choose to respond to each moment of the movie of life determines how you see the next frame, and the next, and eventually how you feel when the movie ends.

Cinema – all art really – has great power. Power to illuminate. Power to transform. For those of us who experience film as literature, classic movies comprised an introductory education in the genre. As kids, many of us went searching through library shelves for obscure source novels after seeing some old movie or other. It was the start of many an adventure.

Movie directors often shoot funerals in the rain. The mourners stand in their dark suits under large black umbrellas, the kind you never have handy in real life, while the rain falls symbolically all around them, on grass and tombstones and the roods of cars, generating atmostphere. What they don't show you is how the legs of your suit caked with grass clippings, cling soaked to your shins, how even under umbrellas the rain still manages to find your scalp, running down your skull and past your collar like wet slugs, so that while you're supposed to be meditating on the deceased, instead you're mentally tracking the trickle of water as it slides down your back. The movies don't convey how the soaked, muddy ground will swallow up the dress shoes of the pallbearers like quicksand, how the water, seeping into the pine coffin, will release the smell of death and decay, how the large mound of dirt meant to fill the grave will be transformed into an oozing pile of sludge that will splater with each stab of the shovel and land on the coffin with an audible splat. And instead of a slow and dignified farewell, everyone just wants to get the deceased into the ground and get the hell back into their cars.

i choose to focus my energy on what I believe deserves my time, life passes us by so quickly and before we know it; were looking back at our story, make sure the choices you decide on; will give you a movie worth watching.

Even earthquakes are the consequence of tensions built up over long spans of time, imperceptibly, incrementally. You don't notice the buildup, just the release. You see a sick person, an old person, a dying person, the sight sinks in, and somewhere down the road you change your life. In movies and novels, people change suddenly and permanently, which is convenient and dramatic but not much like life, where you gain distance on something, relapse, resolve, try again, and move along in stops, starts, and stutters. Change is mostly slow. In my life, there had been transformative events, and I'd had a few sudden illuminations and crises, crossed a rubicon or two, but mostly I'd had the incremental.

She’s pretty, but her face doesn’t transform into sunlight when she talks about music.” He did that clench thing with his jaw and said, “She’s funny, but not spit-out-your-drink-in-astonishment funny.” It felt like my heart was going to explode as his eyes moved down to my lips under the glow of the buzzing streetlight. He moved his face a little closer to mine, looked into my eyes, and rumbled, “And when I see her, I don’t feel like I have to talk to her or mess up her hair or do something—anything—to get her to swing that gaze on me. He raised one eyebrow, an unspoken question, and I realized at that moment that I wanted it. I wanted Wes. Michael had been my endgame, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about that anymore. I wouldn’t run through a train station for Michael. But I would do it for Wes. Holy shit.

The basic 110-volt AC power line moves the electrons at 60 cycles. If a transformer is close to the power source (and all speakers have transformers), the 60 cycles produce an audible hum. Crackling, caused by dirt on the sound head, can also be heard.

After that, a strange thing happened: Amy couldn't stop her expectations from rising. She imagined herself transformed and beautiful, like Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink, with her homemade dress and mysterious lace boots. She pictured her hair in an upsweep of loose curls. In the fantasy, her prom face looked like the one she only wore asleep, loose and relaxed. She imagined a photographer asking her to smile and, for the first time in her life, being able to do it.

She’s pretty, but her face doesn’t transform into sunlight when she talks about music.” He did that clench thing with his jaw and said, “She’s funny, but not spit-out-your-drink-in-astonishment funny.” It felt like my heart was going to explode as his eyes moved down to my lips under the glow of the buzzing streetlight. He moved his face a little closer to mine, looked into my eyes, and rumbled, “And when I see her, I don’t feel like I have to talk to her or mess up her hair or do something—anything—to get her to swing that gaze on me. He raised one eyebrow, an unspoken question, and I realized at that moment that I wanted it. I wanted Wes. Michael had been my endgame, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about that anymore. I wouldn’t run through a train station for Michael. But I would do it for Wes.

As time passes, the cast and crew go the way of all flesh, though their celluloid echoes remain--walking, talking, fighting, fucking. After enough time, every person you see onscreen will have died, transformed through the magic of cinema into a collection of visible memories: light on a screen, pixels on a videotape, information on a DVD. We bring them back every time we start a movie, and they live again, reflected in our eyes. It's a cruel sort of immortality, I guess, though it probably beats the alternative.

what does help the person who has been raped is to chew it up and then spit it the hell out. And by chew it up I mean talk about it, write about it, paint it, make a movie about it, and then be done with it and move on. Because here’s the truth about rape: you do not have to be victimized by it forever. You can take this awful, bottomless horror the rapist has inflicted on you, and you can seize it and recycle it into something wonderful and helpful and useful. You can, in this way, transform what was “done” to you into something that was “given” to you in the form of brutally raw material. You can, in other words, accept this hideous thing and embrace it and take complete control of the experience and reshape it as you please. This is not to deny the experience and how devastating it is; it is to accept the experience on the deepest level as your own possession now. An experience that is now part of you. Instead of allowing it to be a tap that drains you, you can force it into duty in service to your creative or intellectual goals. Many

She's pretty, but her face doesn't transform into sunlight when she talks about music.

Just like music had the power to transform a moment in film, I realized that the way I captured an athlete with my camera had the power to create a story.

She’s pretty, but her face doesn’t transform into sunlight when she talks about music.” He did that clench thing with his jaw and said, “She’s funny, but not spit-out-your-drink-in-astonishment funny.

When not through external events, spirit communicates “internally” via symbols and signs. Symbolic language, like music, is universal and crosses beyond the limitations of verbal and written languages. It is a divine communication. Essentially, the Spirit is using All means necessary to inspire us and to get our attention – not an easy task in the material world of sights, sounds, online messages, TV and movies - and commercialism!

I put the TV on. I’ve a specially curated selection of box sets, because one thing that spins like a weathervane when you change causality is entertainment, and if you have a deft hand you can collect all the really good versions of things, like the final series of Lost where all the loose ends actually got tied up, or that peculiarly tangled timeline where William Shakespeare, Helen Mirren and Orson Welles got together to make a Transformers movie.

Because complex animals can evolve their behavior rapidly. Changes can occur very quickly. Human beings are transforming the planet, and nobody knows whether it’s a dangerous development or not. So these behavioral processes can happen faster than we usually think evolution occurs. In ten thousand years human beings have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody knows. Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.” “Yes? Why is that?” “Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh, that hurts. Are you done?” “Almost,” Harding said. “Hang on.” “And believe me, it’ll be fast. If you map complex systems on a fitness landscape, you find the behavior can move so fast that fitness can drop precipitously. It doesn’t require asteroids or diseases or anything else. It’s just behavior that suddenly emerges, and turns out to be fatal to the creatures that do it. My idea was that dinosaurs—being complex creatures—might have undergone some of these behavioral changes. And that led to their extinction.

What I’ve found through research is that trust is built in very small moments, which I call “sliding door” moments, after the movie Sliding Doors. In any interaction, there is a possibility of connecting with your partner or turning away from your partner.

When you watch a TV show or a movie, what you see looks like what it physically represents. A man looks like a man, a man with a large bicep looks like a man with a large bicep, and a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo "Mama" looks like a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo "Mama." But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it's approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm.

The movie is about a woman who falls in love with a monster. Her love magically transforms the monster into a handsome man. At the very end of the movie, after the monster becomes a man, the woman does something very odd. She presses her lips against his. I can’t help wondering what it might feel like to do that.

Tommy noticed my sullenness. “Hey. Greg.” He was tapping this Transformer-y robot thing he’d affixed to his dashboard. It looked a little bit like an armored crab—the cheap, Happy Meal–ish toy that a boy might stick to his bedroom windowsill. “Be careful, Greg,” Tommy said, as he bobbled his dashboard toy. “Be careful or monster will get you.

There are two ways to turn devils into angels: First, acknowledge things about them that you genuinely appreciate. Uncle Morty took you to the beach when you were a kid. Your mom still sends you money on your birthday. Your ex-wife is a good mother to your children. There must be something you sincerely appreciate about this person. Shift your attention from the mean and nasty things they have said or done to the kind and helpful things they have said or done—even if there are just a few or even only one. You have defined this person by their iniquities. You can just as easily—actually, more easily—define them by their redeeming qualities. It’s your movie. Change the script. Perhaps you are still arguing that the person who has hurt you has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. She is evil incarnate, Rosemary’s baby conceived with Satan himself, poster child for the dark side of the Force, destined to wreak havoc and horror in the lives of everyone she touches. A nastier bitch never walked the earth. Got it. Let’s say all of this is true—the person who troubles you is a no-good, cheating, lying SOB. Now here’s the second devil-transformer. Consider: How has this person helped you to grow? What spiritual muscles have you developed that you would not have built if this person had been nicer to you? Have you learned to hold your power and self-esteem in the presence of attempted insult? Do you now speak your truth more quickly and directly? Are you now asking for what you want instead of passively deferring? Are you setting healthier boundaries? Have you deepened in patience and compassion? Do you make more self-honoring choices? There are many benefits you might have gained, or still might gain, from someone who challenges you.

We are offered glimpses, even deep searches, into the questions that haunt people the most. We experience a level of intimacy with our clients that few will ever know. We are exposed to levels of drama and emotional arousal that are at once terrifying and captivating. We get to play detective and help solve mysteries that have plagued people throughout their lives. We hear stories so amazing that they make television shows, novels, and movies seem tedious and predictable by comparison. We become companions to people who are on the verge of making significant changes— and we are transformed as well. We go to sleep at night knowing that, in some way, we have made a difference in people’s lives. There is almost a spiritual transcendence associated with much of the work we do.

The main asset of a modern CEO is speed. Today, all industries move and change with the speed of a racing car. This is not only due to the development of technologies but to geopolitical events as well. Right now, the economic situation in the country is similar to that of a movie that is played in fast-forward mode. In conditions of transformation of global and internal markets, the management approach itself changes.

A Day Away We often think that our affairs, great or small, must be tended continuously and in detail, or our world will disintegrate, and we will lose our places in the universe. That is not true, or if it is true, then our situations were so temporary that they would have collapsed anyway. Once a year or so I give myself a day away. On the eve of my day of absence, I begin to unwrap the bonds which hold me in harness. I inform housemates, my family and close friends that I will not be reachable for twenty-four hours; then I disengage the telephone. I turn the radio dial to an all-music station, preferably one which plays the soothing golden oldies. I sit for at least an hour in a very hot tub; then I lay out my clothes in preparation for my morning escape, and knowing that nothing will disturb me, I sleep the sleep of the just. On the morning I wake naturally, for I will have set no clock, nor informed my body timepiece when it should alarm. I dress in comfortable shoes and casual clothes and leave my house going no place. If I am living in a city, I wander streets, window-shop, or gaze at buildings. I enter and leave public parks, libraries, the lobbies of skyscrapers, and movie houses. I stay in no place for very long. On the getaway day I try for amnesia. I do not want to know my name, where I live, or how many dire responsibilities rest on my shoulders. I detest encountering even the closest friend, for then I am reminded of who I am, and the circumstances of my life, which I want to forget for a while. Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, lovers, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops. If we step away for a time, we are not, as many may think and some will accuse, being irresponsible, but rather we are preparing ourselves to more ably perform our duties and discharge our obligations. When I return home, I am always surprised to find some questions I sought to evade had been answered and some entanglements I had hoped to flee had become unraveled in my absence. A day away acts as a spring tonic. It can dispel rancor, transform indecision, and renew the spirit.

Opportunity to suspend disbelief is often why we watch movies. The stories and images touch us and shift perspectives in ways we may not allow in our daily lives. As readily as you check your “this isn’t real” attitude at the ticket counter – when transformers are defending earth against aliens and 21st century vampires frolic by daylight – on the big screen of your heart and mind train for, run and celebrate finishing your first marathon.

Movies and books and all such products of the imagination are terrible things for most people because they make them believe that they can be other than what they actually are. Terrible and beautiful things. People sit and wait for the transformation, which never comes, as if they might arise from their chairs or depart the theater as other people entirely. Instead all that is left to them is to gather their addictions around them and to sing their onion songs.

Each being in the universe, therefore, inhabits a private world. It is as if the universe were populated by countless cinemas, each occupied by a single person, each eternally viewing a different film projected by consciousness, each eternally suspending disbelief. For the Yogacara, ignorance and suffering result from believing the movie to be real, from mistaking the projections to be an external world, from thinking that what appear to be external objects are independent of consciousness, and then running after them, desiring some and hating others. For the Yogacara, wisdom is the insight that everything is of the nature of consciousness and the product of one's own projections. With this insight, desire and hatred, attachment and aversion, naturally cease, for their objects are seen to be illusions. With the achievement of enlightenment, the substratum consciousness is transformed into the mirror like wisdom of a buddha.

As they sneaked through the corridors, Metal Beard and Benny heard robot guards approaching. They jumped back against a wall and quickly disguised themselves as a photocopier and a trash can. The robots looked at each other when they spotted the photocopier. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” one asked. “Do it!” said the other. The first guard climbed on top of the photocopier and started Xeroxing his tush. Metal Beard immediately un-transformed and blasted the guards with his cannon.

Individually and collectively, we will have to be the resistance—offering daily, bold, defiant pushback against all that feels wrong here. This pushback will come as we loudly and unapologetically speak truth where truth is not welcome. It will come as we connect with one another on social media and in faith communities and in our neighborhoods, and as we work together to demand accountability from our elected officials and pastoral leaders. It will come in the small things: in the art we create and the conversations we have and the quiet gestures of compassion that are barely visible. It will come in the way we fully celebrate daily life: having dinner with friends, driving through the countryside, playing in the yard with our children, laughing at a movie we love. It will come as we use the shared resources of our experience and our talents and our numbers to ensure that our children inherit a world worth being here for. It will come as we transform our grief into goodness.

She’s pretty, but her face doesn’t transform into sunlight when she talks about music.” He did that clench thing with his jaw and said, “She’s funny, but not spit-out-your-drink-in-astonishment funny.” It felt like my heart was going to explode as his eyes moved down to my lips under the glow of the buzzing streetlight. He moved his face a little closer to mine, looked into my eyes, and rumbled, “And when I see her, I don’t feel like I have to talk to her or mess up her hair or do something—anything—to get her to swing that gaze on me.” ― Lynn Painter, Better Than the Movies

Along with Batman v. Superman and Godzilla vs. Kong, I suppose we’ll get Frankenstein vs. Dracula, and perhaps Transformers vs. G.I. Joe in the HasbroVerse, and Warcraft vs. Angry Birds in the GameVerse — not to be confused with the BoardgameVerse of Battleship vs. Risk and Chutes and Ladders vs. Candy Land. And eventually all of these shared universes will collide with all of the others, including Alien vs. Predator and Freddy vs. Jason, in a Brobdingnagian rumble pitting Jedi against Pirates of the Caribbean, Terminators against Borg, and Muppets against Smurfs, world without end. Even if for some inexplicable reason that doesn’t happen, the LegoVerse will make it happen

We are offered glimpses, even deep searches, into the questions that haunt people the most. We experience a level of intimacy with our clients that few will ever know. We are exposed to levels of drama and emotional arousal that are at once terrifying and captivating. We get to play detective and help solve mysteries that have plagued people throughout their lives. We hear stories so amazing that they make television shows, novels, and movies seem tedious and predictable by comparison. We be come companions to people who are on the verge of making significant changes— and we are transformed as well. We go to sleep at night knowing that, in some way, we have made a difference in people’s lives. There is al most a spiritual transcendence associated with much of the work we do.

personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, by Jason Schreier; Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, by David Kushner; Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (specifically the section on Sierra On-Line), by Steven Levy; A Mind Forever Voyaging: A History of Storytelling in Video Games, by Dylan Holmes; Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, by Tom Bissell; All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture, by Harold Goldberg; and the documentaries Indie Game: The Movie, directed by James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot, and GTFO, directed by Shannon Sun-Higginson. I read Indie Games by Bounthavy Suvilay after I finished writing, and it’s a beautiful book for those looking to see how artful games can be.

This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company.

For my speaking gigs, the title of my presentation is always the same: 'The journey of a hero'. I learned from writer Joseph Campbell, that a hero is someone born into a world where they don’t fit in. They are then summoned on a call to an adventure that they are reluctant to take. What is the adventure? A revolutionary transformation of self. The final goal is to find the elixir. The magic potion that is the answer to unlocking HER. Then she comes "home" to this ordinary life transformed and shares her story of survival with others... My journey was like a war movie, where at the end, the hero has been bruised and bloodied, traumatized from witnessing untold amounts of death and destruction, and so damaged that she cannot go back to being the same woman who went to war. She may have even seen her death but was somehow resurrected. But to go on THAT journey, I had to be armed with the courage of a lioness... Individuals on the journey eventually find themselves experiencing a baptism by fire. It's that moment when they are just about to lose their lives, and they, miraculously, courageously find the answer that gives their life meaning. And that meaning saves them. In the words of Joseph Campbell, in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", "The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero. The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth, or the dreamer in a dream, discovers and assimilates his opposites, his own unsuccessful self, either by swallowing it or being swallowed. I still see my younger self so clearly from that fateful day in my therapist's office. She stands up, in tears, on a mound of snow. Pissed off, she shouts, "Bitch!!! I'm not going to be swallowed!

Remove this quote from your collectionLynn Painter “She’s pretty, but her face doesn’t transform into sunlight when she talks about music.” He did that clench thing with his jaw and said, “She’s funny, but not spit-out-your-drink-in-astonishment funny.” It felt like my heart was going to explode as his eyes moved down to my lips under the glow of the buzzing streetlight. He moved his face a little closer to mine, looked into my eyes, and rumbled, “And when I see her, I don’t feel like I have to talk to her or mess up her hair or do something—anything—to get her to swing that gaze on me. He raised one eyebrow, an unspoken question, and I realized at that moment that I wanted it. I wanted Wes. Michael had been my endgame, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about that anymore. I wouldn’t run through a train station for Michael. But I would do it for Wes.

This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This

Many of us drink in order to take that flight, in order to pour ourselves, literally, into new personalities: uncap the bottle, pop the cork, slide into someone else’s skin. A liquid makeover, from the inside out. Everywhere we look, we are told that this is possible; the knowledge creeps inside us and settles in dark corners, places where fantasies lie. We see it on billboards, in glossy magazine ads, in movies and on TV: we see couples huddled together by fires, sipping brandy, flames reflecting in the gleam of glass snifters; we see elegant groups raising celebratory glasses of wine in restaurants; we see friendships cemented over barstools and dark bottles of beer. We see secrets shared, problems solved, romances bloom. We watch, we know, and together the wine, beer, and liquor industries spend more than $1 billion each year*2 reinforcing this knowledge: drinking will transform us.

Wow. she is pretty,' Laila said. Her voice stuttered across the last word. The original thought had been, Wow she is hot, and the sentence had transformed on the way out. Laila couldn't talk about anybody like that. Not even her celebrity crushes, not even avatar of perfection Samuel Marquez. A barrier of shame as impermeable as plexiglas walled her off from everything sexual, every thought, every action, even something as small as the difference in connotation between 'pretty' and 'hot.' Hannah had teased her about this once and had stopped when Laila didn't come close to smiling. Her inexperience didn't feel charming or virtuous, like she was some good-girl persona from a movie. It felt furious and heated, humiliating and childish, as if physicality were a language she was supposed to have learned, and here she was in senior year, surrounded by a horde of native speakers, unable to translate the most basic concepts.

Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or thirteenth. A hundred million people us electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet, fascism has given them a ganner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.

All human creativity is an echo of God’s creativity. When God makes man, he forms him in the dirt, breathes life into him, and sends him out in the world. We’ve been playing in the dirt ever since. Just as God took something he’d made, shaped it, breathed life and meaning into it, and transformed it into something new, so we set about our own business, taking creation, shaping it, and giving it new meaning and purpose. Clay becomes sculpture. Trees become houses. Sounds are arranged in time to become music. Oils, pigments, and canvas are arranged to become paintings. Various metals, glass, and petroleum products become iPhones. The same is true of stories. There is nothing new under the sun, and our stories—no matter how fresh and new they might feel—are all a way of “playing in the dirt,” wrestling with creation, reimagining it, working with it, and making it new. Our stories have a way of fitting into the bigger story of redemption that overshadows all of life and all of history. Because that bigger story is the dirt box in which all the other stories play.

I’m talking about all the order in the natural world,” Malcolm said. “And how perhaps it can emerge fast, through crystallization. Because complex animals can evolve their behavior rapidly. Changes can occur very quickly. Human beings are transforming the planet, and nobody knows whether it’s a dangerous development or not. So these behavioral processes can happen faster than we usually think evolution occurs. In ten thousand years human beings have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody knows. Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.” “Yes? Why is that?” “Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh,

Associated with Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood is the endowment of courage balanced with consideration. Does it take courage and consideration to not be understood first? Think about it. Think about the problems you face. You tend to think, “You need to understand me, but you don’t understand. I understand you, but you don’t understand me. So let me tell you my story first, and then you can say what you want.” And the other person says, “Okay, I’ll try to understand.” But the whole time they’re “listening,” they’re preparing their reply. They’re just pretending to listen, selectively listening. When you show your home movies or tell some chapter of your autobiography—“Let me tell you my experience”—the other person is tuned out unless he feels understood. What happens when you truly listen to another person? The whole relationship is transformed: “Someone started listening to me, and they seemed to savor my words. They didn’t agree or disagree, they just were listening, and I felt as if they were seeing how I saw the world. And in that process, I found myself listening to myself. I started to feel a worth in myself.

Everything is going to be alright" we often say to ourselves or to others - when we are faced with problems, before falling asleep, after we have been disappointed. "Things may be unpleasant and difficult at the moment, but in the end everything is going to be alright." As far as the animals are concerned, nothing is going to be alright! Everything is bad, getting worse and the end will be more terrible than all fearful anticipations: on the death transport, on the slaughterhouse floor, on the chair of torture. "Everything is going to be alright!" This pacifying phrase for human beings is not valid for animals, because we have transformed their world into a singular hell. What we invented in horror movies or psychological thrillers to send pleasant shivers down our spine, is what animals are subjected to in reality: everywhere, continuously, in our midst, at this very moment - right now. Everybody knows, everybody remains silent, nobody takes action. Can it go on like this? It must not go on like this! Anyone who feels bound in earnest by any moral principles at all has the absolute duty to stand up against these crimes, which are in utter contradiction to every kind of morality.

Overtaken by demographic transformation and two generations of socio-geographic mobility, France’s once-seamless history seemed set to disappear from national memory altogether. The anxiety of loss had two effects. One was an increase in the range of the official patrimoine, the publicly espoused body of monuments and artifacts stamped ‘heritage’ by the authority of the state. In 1988, at the behest of Mitterrand’s Culture Minister Jack Lang, the list of officially protected items in the patrimoine culturel of “France—previously restricted to UNESCO-style heirlooms such as the Pont du Gard near Nîmes, or Philip the Bold’s ramparts at Aigues-Mortes—was dramatically enlarged. It is revealing of the approach taken by Lang and his successors that among France’s new ‘heritage sites’ was the crumbling façade of the Hôtel du Nord on Paris’s Quai de Jemappes: an avowedly nostalgic homage to Marcel Carné’s 1938 film classic of that name. But Carné shot that movie entirely in a studio. So the preservation of a building (or the façade of a building) which never even appeared in the film could be seen—according to taste—either as a subtle French exercise in post-modern irony, or else as symptomatic of the unavoidably bogus nature of any memory when subjected thus to official taxidermy.

me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

Some Christian missionaries who sent in the audio Bibles learned that, to no one’s surprise, there was a much higher demand for Japanese porn movies than for Bibles, which, to people unfamiliar with religious text, may seem to be merely a series of stories with no context or grounding.

The Things They Carried has sold over two million copies internationally, won numerous awards, and is an English classroom staple. Isabel Allende was the first writer to hold me inside a sentence, rapt and wondrous. It's no surprise that her most transformative writing springs from personal anguish. Her first book, The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to her dying grandfather whom she could not reach in time. Eva Luna, one of my favorite novels, is about an orphan girl who uses her storytelling gift to survive and thrive amid trauma, and Allende refers to the healing power of writing in many of her interviews. Allende's books have sold over fifty-six million copies, been translated into thirty languages, and been made into successful plays and movies. Such is the power of mining your deep. Jeanette Winterson acknowledges that her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is her own story of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian household in the 1950s. She wrote it to create psychic space from the trauma. In her memoir, she writes of Oranges, “I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.” Sherman Alexie, who grew up in poverty on an Indian reservation that as a child he never dreamed he could leave, does something similar in his young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, named one of the “Best Books of 2007” by School Library Journal. He has said that fictionalizing life is so satisfying because he can spin the story better than real life did. Nora Ephron's roman à clef Heartburn is a sharply funny, fictionalized account of Ephron's own marriage to Carl Bernstein. She couldn't control his cheating during her pregnancy or the subsequent dissolution of their marriage, but through the novelization of her experience, she got to revise the ending of that particular story. In Heartburn, Rachel, the character based on Ephron, is asked

They became indignant over the living images that the preposterous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears of affliction had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many felt that they had been the victims of some new and showy gypsy business and they decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings.

Can’t you tell I’m broken?” she demanded. “I can’t stand anyone touching me!” “You handled me touching you until I pushed you too far.” “Freaking out because someone you’re enjoying kissing tries to get closer to you is not normal.” “It wasn’t normal that I was turned into a vampire because a female vamp became obsessed with my best friend,” David replied. “When Liam didn’t follow after her, she decided to turn his friends in the hopes she would get him to fall in line with her. That’s about as far from normal as it gets. I didn’t have a clue about the paranormal being real when my transformation occurred. Vampires were for horror movies, not reality. Life’s not normal. Shit happens. We all work through it.” “Is that so, Dr. Phil?” The frustrating man smiled at her. “That’s so,” David replied.

It is fun to be around really, really creative makers in the second half of the chessboard, to see what they can do, as individuals, with all of the empowering tools that have been enabled by the supernova. I met Tom Wujec in San Francisco at an event at the Exploratorium. We thought we had a lot in common and agreed to follow up on a Skype call. Wujec is a fellow at Autodesk and a global leader in 3-D design, engineering, and entertainment software. While his title sounds like a guy designing hubcaps for an auto parts company, the truth is that Autodesk is another of those really important companies few people know about—it builds the software that architects, auto and game designers, and film studios use to imagine and design buildings, cars, and movies on their computers. It is the Microsoft of design. Autodesk offers roughly 180 software tools used by some twenty million professional designers as well as more than two hundred million amateur designers, and each year those tools reduce more and more complexity to one touch. Wujec is an expert in business visualization—using design thinking to help groups solve wicked problems. When we first talked on the phone, he illustrated our conversation real-time on a shared digital whiteboard. I was awed. During our conversation, Wujec told me his favorite story of just how much the power of technology has transformed his work as a designer-maker.

The HR department is like the soldiers in the movie 300, holding the line. They have no power to say ‘yes’ but enormous power to say ‘no.’ Their job is to prevent you from moving forward. Find a way to vault past them by getting introductions to people who can say ‘yes.

Either you couldn’t tell by looking at her that she was a bully, or Mia truly had transformed herself. Then later, for someone like Lou who simply didn’t enjoy going to a movie on her own, seeing Mia wait to go in by herself had struck another chord with her. Mia had been far from the only person waiting in solitude, but there had been something about her as she stood there with her shoulder leaning against the wall, trying to conceal that she knew Lou was there as well. Something so vulnerable, Lou would never have associated it with Mia. And for a split second, the thought had popped into her brain: maybe Mia was a victim too.

Prototypes need to be testable, but they do not need to be physical. Storyboards, scenarios, movies, and even improvised acting can produce highly successful prototypes—the more the better.

My past now played like an old movie, one I was no longer interested in, dream-like, progressively fading away. Old attachments, too, began dissolving – I didn’t care so much about the things, places or issues of my past (indeed, I threw away forty years of personal journals without an ounce of regret!). My previous world was gone, had died, but in its place, I started noticing – and exploring – the empty space left by its disappearance. Then, unexpectedly, in this emptiness, I begin to notice subtle and spontaneous changes in consciousness – expanding moments of silence, stillness, and timelessness, moments when it seemed as if the mystery of eternity was leaking into the everyday world. I was moving into a curious new and peaceful space – consciousness without thought, an awareness devoid of purpose, effort, agenda, point of view, or even self. These changes, which had been emerging unappreciated for some time, seemed to increase when observed, and eventually became harbingers of a new kind of consciousness and a new kind of life – intimations of spiritual transformation

To this day, Huston seems less amazed that she found Polanski with a thirteen-year-old girl than that he was arrested for being so. "Those were the days where everybody thought that was just great," she remembered. "Everybody was operating with immunity. . . . Somebody takes the fall, and I think Roman probably took the fall for a lot of immunities. A lot of people I know at the time were going out with extremely young women, maybe not on a regular basis, but he certainly wasn't the only person around town who was sleeping with very young women.'97 It was a measure of how thoroughly the cloud of decadence had settled onto the Los Angeles scene by the mid-1970s that it didn't strike Huston as particularly unusual to find Polanski with a girl that young. Among the stars glittering in LA, the vices varied, but the costs were consistent.

Anyone comparing photos of Glenn Frey and Don Henley in 1972 and, say, 1977 could track the price of the years of drugs and high living. Julia Phillips's drug addiction incinerated her Hollywood career. Martin Scorsese barely survived his own cocaine addiction in the mid-seventies. Since the days of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, Los Angeles had sold a vision of personal liberation. A decade later, liberation had curdled into license. The theme song for Los Angeles in the buoyant early 1970s could have been "Take It Easy" or "Rock Me on the Water." But by 1976, when the Eagles released Hotel California, the mood of lengthening shadows was more precisely captured by their rueful "Life in the Fast Lane.

Compared to all this, Ronstadt and Browne were still trying to graduate from the kids' table. Ronstadt had released her first album for Geffen, Don't Cry Now, in September 1973. Browne followed a few weeks later, in October, with his second album, For Everyman. Both albums sold respectably, but neither cracked the Top 40 on the Billboard album chart. And while Geffen had great expectations for both artists, in early 1974 each was still building an audience. Their tour itinerary reflected their transitional position. It brought them to big venues in Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, but also took them far from the bright lights to small community theaters and college campuses in Oxnard, San Luis Obispo, New Haven, and Cortland, New York. At either end, there wasn't much glamour in the experience. They had moved up from the lowest rung on the touring ladder, when they had lugged their gear in and out of station wagons, but had progressed only to a Continental Trailways bus without beds that both bands crammed into for the late-night drives between shows. "The first thing that happened is we were driving all night, and the next morning we were exhausted," Browne remembered. "Like, no one slept a wink. We were sitting up all night on a bus."' "Touring was misery," Ronstadt said, looking back. "Touring is just hard. You don't get to meet anybody. You are always in a bubble . . . You saw the world outside the bus window, and you did the sound check every day."9 The performances were uneven, too. "While Browne is much more assured and confident on stage than he was a year or two ago, he's still very much like a smart kid with a grown-up gift for songwriting," sniffed Judith Sims of Rolling Stone. She treated Ronstadt even more dismissively, describing her as peddling "country schmaltz."' The young rock journalist Cameron Crowe, catching the tour a few days later in Berkeley, described Browne's set as "painfully mediocre."" But Ronstadt and Browne found their footing as they progressed, each alternating lead billing depending on who had sold more records in each market. By the time the cavalcade rolled into Carnegie Hall, the reception for Browne and Ronstadt was strong enough that the promoters added a second show. In February 1974, Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt were still at the edge of the stardom they would soon achieve.

Then the center of influence shifted to London, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Cream, the Who, the Kinks, and all the bands that orbited them. San Francisco, with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Santana, had its moment in a psychedelic spotlight around the Summer of Love and the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, but as the 1960s gave way to the '70s, the center of the musical universe shifted unmistakably to Los Angeles. "It was incredibly vital," said Jonathan Taplin, who first came to LA as the tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band and later relocated there to produce Martin Scorsese's breakthrough movie, Mean Streets. "The nexus of the music business had really moved from New York to Los Angeles. That had been a profound shift . . . It was very clear that something big had changed."'' For a breathtaking few years, the stars aligned to glittering effect in Los Angeles. The city attracted brilliant artists; skilled session musicians; soulful songwriters; shrewd managers, agents, and record executives; and buzz-building clubs. From this dense constellation of talent, a shimmering new sound emerged, a smooth blend of rock and folk with country influences. Talented young people from all over the country began descending on Los Angeles with their guitar cases or dreams of becoming the next Geffen. Irving Azoff, a hyper-ambitious young agent and manager who arrived in Los Angeles in 1972, remembered, "It was like the gold rush. You've never seen anything like it in the entertainment business. The place was exploding. I was here—right place, right time. I tell everybody, `If you're really good in this business, you only have to be right once,' so you kind of make your own luck, but it is luck, too. It was hard to be in LA in that time and have any talent whatsoever in the music business—whether you were a manager, an agent, an artist, a producer, or writer—[and] not to make it, because it was boom times. It was the gold rush, and it was fucking fun.

Just think about the incredible transformation that took place in Steve’s life and career after Pixar. In 1983, Apple launched their computer Lisa, the last project Jobs worked on before he was let go. Jobs released Lisa with a nine-page ad in the New York Times spelling out the computer’s technical features. It was nine pages of geek talk nobody outside NASA was interested in. The computer bombed. When Jobs returned to the company after running Pixar, Apple became customer-centric, compelling, and clear in their communication. The first campaign he released went from nine pages in the New York Times to just two words on billboards all over America: Think Different. When Apple began filtering their communication to make it simple and relevant, they actually stopped featuring computers in most of their advertising. Instead, they understood their customers were all living, breathing heroes, and they tapped into their stories. They did this by (1) identifying what their customers wanted (to be seen and heard), (2) defining their customers’ challenge (that people didn’t recognize their hidden genius), and (3) offering their customers a tool they could use to express themselves (computers and smartphones). Each of these realizations are pillars in ancient storytelling and critical for connecting with customers. I’ll teach you about these three pillars and more in the coming chapters, but for now just realize the time Apple spent clarifying the role they play in their customers’ story is one of the primary factors responsible for their growth. Notice, though, the story of Apple isn’t about Apple; it’s about you. You’re the hero in the story, and they play a role more like Q in the James Bond movies. They are the guy you go see when you need a tool to help you win the day.

found the horror soothing, almost cathartic. Maybe it was the knowledge that everything I was seeing was fake and would be wrapped up neatly in under two hours. If I could train myself to sit through scary movies, face all different kinds of horrors head-on, then maybe I could transform into a calmer, more serene version of myself.

At least since the early twentieth century, commentators have observed that Karl Marx’s “law of increasing misery”—the idea that workers’ suffering would steadily rise as capitalism expanded and exploitation intensified—was forestalled in the West thanks to technological advances that transformed yesterday’s luxuries into today’s necessities. George Orwell once ventured that what kept young men going into the coal mines during the interwar years, instead of forming barricades and demanding a better life, was the spread of cheap sweets and electricity, which brought movies and radio to the masses.[3]

The football monologue catapulted Andy into a career in radio and on Broadway. In 1957, he got his shot at film stardom, debuting in Elia Kazan’s astonishing A Face in the Crowd, written by Budd Schulberg. The movie, a dark, prescient take on American politics and mass media, is more appreciated now than it was at the time of its release. But even then, critics were mesmerized by Andy’s fiery performance as Lonesome Rhodes, a small-time radio host who, as his popularity snowballs, transforms into a lusty, egomaniacal demagogue. Many years later, when I was a young adult, Andy told me that playing Lonesome Rhodes had been a harrowing experience for him. Kazan was a brilliant director, he said, but he had manipulated and provoked Andy to summon his darkest, ugliest thoughts and impulses, and the process about wrecked him. “I don’t ever want to do that again,” Andy said. “I like to laugh when I’m working.” Andy had his pick of dramatic roles after A Face in the Crowd, but he chose not to go down that path—the psychological toll had been too high. To some degree, Andy said, Mayberry and the benevolent Sheriff Andy Taylor were a conscious response to Lonesome Rhodes, embodiments of rural America at its best.

*I’ve always had an alternative reading of the Body Snatchers movies (Siegel’s, Kaufman’s, and Ferrara’s). Each movie presents the Pod People in a sinister light. Yet really, almost nothing they do on screen really bears out this sinister interpretation. If you’re one who believes that your soul is what makes you you, then I suppose the Pod People are murdering the Earthlings they duplicate and replace. However, if you’re more of the mind that it is your intellect and your consciousness that make you who you are, then the Pod People transformation is closer to a rebirth than a murder. You’re reborn as straight intellect, with a complete possession of your past and your abilities, but unburdened by messy human emotions. You also possess a complete fidelity to your fellow beings and a total commitment to the survival of your species. Are they inhuman? Of course, they’re vegetables. But the movies try to present their lack of humanity (they don’t have a sense of humor, they’re unmoved when a dog is hit by a car) as evidence of some deep-seated sinisterness. That’s a rather species-centric point of view. As human beings it may be our emotions that make us human, but it’s a stretch to say it’s what makes us great. Along with those positive emotions—love, joy, happiness, amusement—come negative emotions—hate, selfishness, racism, depression, violence, and rage. For instance, with all the havoc that Donald Sutherland causes in the Kaufman version, including the murder of various Pod People, there never is a thought of punishment or vengeance on the Pod People’s part, even though he’s obviously proven himself to be a threat. They just want him to become one of them. Imagine in the fifties, when the Siegel film was made, that instead of some little town in Northern California (Santa Mira) that the aliens took root in, it was a horribly racist, segregated Ku Klux Klan stronghold in the heart of Mississippi. Within weeks the color lines would disappear. Blacks and whites would be working together (in genuine brotherhood) towards a common goal. And humanity would be represented by one of the racist Kluxers whose investigative gaze notices formerly like-minded white folks seemingly enter into a conspiracy with some members of the county’s black community. Now picture his hysterical reaction to it (“Those people are coming after me! They’re not human! You’re next! You’re next!”). *Solving the problems, both large and small, of your actors—lead actors especially—is the job of a film director.

Visualization As you hone and create your identity and new narrative, being able to picture yourself moving through this new life actually helps it become your reality. As you use imagery as a tool, be aware that there is a huge difference between fantasizing and visualizing. It’s like the saying “If you write it down, it’s a plan; if you don’t, it’s a wish.” Fantasizing is the activity of imagining scenarios that satisfy your desire for gratification and vengeance. Fantasizing is wishing, which is not a bad place to start. Fantasy often uses a third-person POV, like watching yourself in the best movie ever, starring you. It might be fun to fantasize, but as a psychological tool that enables you to get what you want in life, it’s more or less useless. Fantasy is usually about outcome. You imagine yourself being respected or thin, in a sexual or romantic relationship, or on the beach, but you are no closer to realizing those dreams than you were before you fantasized about them. Visualizing is like writing it down to make a plan; more specifically, it is making a model in your mind of the process leading to the desired result. Visualizing is a scientific methodology for rehearsing different reality-based scenarios in your head before an important event or interaction. If you learn to visualize effectively, you can condition yourself to succeed, even in stressful, anxious situations. To visualize for success: First, use the third-person POV to see yourself showing up as required in your life, on task, and with the performance you desire. Next, use the first-person POV, where you enter into the scene and you see and feel the experience. Go over the specifics of a job interview and see yourself being assertive. Feel your steady heart rate. Smell the confidence. Train your brain to associate walking into that interview with assurance and calm. Visualize every sensation and step. The coldness of the doorknob, the plush carpet under your shoes, the overhead lighting, the sound of the copy machine down the hall. Immerse yourself in detail. Script the scene with positive, powerful phrases, like I can and I am. I can get the job done. I am the person you’re looking for. Repeat the scenario. During the week before the specific event or interaction is to take place, practice daily. Later on, when it’s all over, examine how close your visualization was to reality. Even if the two look completely different, you’ll be glad you did all you could to be prepared and to succeed. This is a tried-and-true method of practicing for success. Athletic coaches on the sports field and personal life coaches advocate and outright require this kind of thorough mental preparation. There is no substitute except to rely on luck, which is not really a plan. Prepare, prepare, prepare, and remember what Louis Pasteur said: “Chance seems to favor the prepared mind.

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Just like the characters of a movie, you are a character in the show called “Life.” Are you in a starring role? Or are you a supporting actor? If

I believe that information technologies, especially well-designed, purposeful ones, empower and renew us and serve to amplify our reach and our abilities. The ensuing connectedness dissolves away intermediary layers of inefficiency and indirection. Some of the most visible recent examples of this dissolving of layers are the transformations we have seen in music, movies and books. Physical books and the bookstores they inhabited have been rapidly disappearing, as have physical compact discs, phonograph records, videotapes and the stores that housed them. Yet there is more music than ever before, more books and more movies. Their content got separated from their containers and got housed in more convenient, more modular vessels, which better tie into our lives, in more consumable ways. In the process, layers of inefficiency got dissolved. By putting 3000 songs in our pockets, the iPod liberated our music from the housings that confined it. The iPhone has a high-definition camera within it, along with a bunch of services for sharing, distributing and publishing pictures, even editing them — services that used to be inside darkrooms and studios. 3D printing is an even more dramatic example of this transformation. The capabilities and services provided by workshops and factories are now embodied within a printer that can print things like tools and accessories, food and musical instruments. A remarkable musical flute was printed recently at MIT, its sound indistinguishable from that produced by factory-built flutes of yesterday.

Unlike the scary movies and sermons from my youth, not one of them focuses on personal salvation as a way of escaping hell in the afterlife. Rather, they present how the good news about eternity should transform this life. The Christian sees the world as a transitional home badly in need of rehab, and we are active agents in that project.

Failures as people: millions of Americans felt that this description fit them to a T. Seeking a solution, any solution, they eagerly forked over their cash to any huckster who promised release, the quicker and more effortlessly the better: therapies like “bioenergetics” (“The Revolutionary Therapy That Uses the Language of the Body to Heal the Problems of the Mind”); Primal Scream (which held that when patients shrieked in a therapist’s office, childhood trauma could be reexperienced, then released; John Lennon and James Earl Jones were fans); or Transcendental Meditation, which promised that deliverance could come if you merely closed your eyes and chanted a mantra (the “TM” organization sold personal mantras, each supposedly “unique,” to hundreds of thousands of devotees). Or “religions” like the Church Universal and Triumphant, or the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, or “Scientology”—this last one invented by a science fiction writer, reportedly on a bet. Devotees paid cash to be “audited” by practitioners who claimed the power—if, naturally, you paid for enough sessions—to remove “trauma patterns” accreted over the 75 million years that had passed since Xenu, tyrant of the Galactic Confederacy, deposited billions of people on earth next to volcanoes and detonated hydrogen bombs inside those volcanos, thus scattering harming “body thetans” to attach to the souls of the living, which once unlatched allowed practitioners to cross the “bridge to total freedom” and “unlimited creativity.” Another religion, the story had it, promised “perfect knowledge”—though its adherents’ public meeting was held up several hours because none of them knew how to run the movie projector. Gallup reported that six million Americans had tried TM, five million had twisted themselves into yoga poses, and two million had sampled some sort of Oriental religion. And hundreds of thousands of Americans in eleven cities had plunked down $250 for the privilege being screamed at as “assholes.” “est”—Erhard Seminars Training, named after the only-in-America hustler who invented it, Werner Erhard, originally Jack Rosenberg, a former used-car and encyclopedia salesman who had tried and failed to join the Marines (this was not incidental) at the age of seventeen, and experienced a spiritual rebirth one morning while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge (“I realized that I knew nothing. . . . In the next instant—after I realized that I knew nothing—I realized that I knew everything”)—promised “to transform one’s ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with, clear up just in the process of life itself,” all that in just sixty hours, courtesy of a for-profit corporation whose president had been general manager of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of California and a former member of the Harvard Business School faculty. A

That new mindset moves you from a state of panic into a state of power. Do you remember in the movie Forest Gump how Lieutenant Dan battles the storm on the mast of his ship. “Is that all ya got?” he screams as the waves wash over him. The storm could not throw enough at him. When it eventually passed, he was a transformed man.

If after reading the newspaper, hearing the news, or being in a conversation, we feel anxious or worn out, we know we have been in contact with toxins. Movies

Hey, sleepyhead,” Mom said brightly when I walked into the kitchen. I grunted. Tara handed me my coffee mug. I filled it quickly, added my milk and sugar, and took my first sip. “Watching Ash drink coffee is kinda like watching a werewolf movie,” Tara said. “You can see the transformation from man into beast.” “Except for me, it’s beast into girl, I know,” I said sourly and took another sip. “Want some pancakes?” Mom asked. “No, thanks.” I leaned against the counter. “They’re really good,” Josh said. He was watching me like he was hoping to see the transformation that Tara was talking about.

But despite our fear, there is something in us that wants to feel all these emotional energies, because they are the juice of life. When we suppress and diminish our emotions, we feel deprived. So we watch horror movies or so-called reality shows like Fear Factor We seek out emotional intensity vicariously, because when we are emotionally numb, we need a great deal of stimulation to feel something, anything. So emotional pornography provides the stimulation, but it’s only ersatz emotion—it doesn’t teach us anything about ourselves or the world.

The minute he arrived at his own parents' house and was confronted by the smallness of the rooms, the old walls covered with dusty calendars, and passepartout pictures of animals, the electrical wires snaking and dangling loosely from the ceiling, the buzzing fluorescent lamp that never lit properly, transforming the house into a gloomy, dusty cubicle, he wanted to return to the city. He could not properly splice in movie landscapes here, because everything was too familiar, and because he was too connected with the droning quarrels.

It would just be like a movie makeover montage, pop music scoring the ugly girl's transformation from bespectacled duckling to cheerleader swan.

Our first idea is a grand opening, a big launch, a press release, or major media coverage. We default to thinking we need an advertising budget. We want red carpet and celebrities. Most dangerously we assume we need to get as many customers as possible in a very short window of time—and if it doesn’t work right away, we consider the whole thing a failure (which, of course, we cannot afford). Our delusion is that we should be Transformers and not The Blair Witch Project. Needless to say, this is preposterous. Yet you and I have been taught, unquestionably, to follow it for years. What’s wrong with it? Well, for starters: most movies fail. Despite the glamour and the history of movie marketing, even after investing

Created in 1972 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, two friends in their early twenties, Dungeons and Dragons was an underground phenomenon, particularly on college campuses, thanks to word of mouth and controversy. It achieved urban legend status when a student named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared in the steam tunnels underneath Michigan State University while reportedly reenacting the game; a Tom Hanks movie called Mazes and Monsters was loosely based on the event.

As Chris Milk, an early VR pioneer, explains: You read a book; your brain reads letters printed in ink on paper and transforms that into a world. You watch a movie; you’re seeing imagery inside of a rectangle while you’re sitting inside a room, and your brain translates that into a world. And you connect to this even though you know it’s not real, but because you’re in the habit of suspending disbelief. With virtual reality, you’re essentially hacking the visual-audio system of your brain and feeding it a set of stimuli that’s close enough to the stimuli it expects that it sees it as truth. Instead of suspending your disbelief, you actually have to remind yourself not to believe.

FRANK ... so, many things happen in the 70s to transform the horror genre. Present end premodern fears mix, birthing scary movies which are more seedy, grim, but also more artistic and religious. Criminal evil escapes the prison of murder-mystery and revenge plots, making us see trough the eyes of killer and victim. Supernatural evil is freed from the gothic frame, making viewers believe again in the reality of the devil and other medieval superstitions. If the 60s were about love, the spirit of the 70s is fear. Which means they are more horribly real, more perversely in touch with the dark mystery.

There has never been a trilogy he didn’t like, and if you don’t understand why, I have three words for you: father, son, and Holy Spirit. Foremost among his favorites is the original Star Wars trilogy, which he fervently believes is about priests in space, and the first three Alien films, which he believes are about how all women are destined to be mothers. Currently he is obsessed with the Transformers movies, because the greatest Transformer of all . . . is Jesus Christ. He even sat me down one day to have a serious discussion about “moral choices the Transformers are forced to make.” At no point did I interrupt him to say, “But Dad, they’re cars.” This means I am becoming an adult. Because truly, the Transformers are more than cars. Some of them are trucks.

Hulking piece of rust,” she grumbled, then gave it a little pat on the wheel well as she scooted out between her truck and Hannah’s car. “Can’t let the car gods hear you dis their minions,” she said when she caught Cooper’s amused look. “They’ll strand you in the desert as sure as look at you. Besides, she might be a hulking piece of rusted metal but she’s my hulking piece.” She stopped when she reached her sister and gave her a one-armed hug. “And to what do I owe this pleasure? Cross-examining my afternoon date, are we?” “Maybe,” Hannah said, hugging her back. “Oh, good.” Kerry grinned, rubbing her hands together. “What did you learn?” “Hey, now,” Cooper said, chuckling. “What makes you think I’d give anything up?” “Oh, she’s good,” Kerry told him. “She once talked a tribal chief in Papua New Guinea, out of marrying me to his youngest son.” Cooper looked at Hannah, who just raised an arched brow but didn’t refute the statement. “Well, then, I suppose I’m even more in your debt,” he told Kerry’s oldest sister. “Unless of course the tribe believes in polygamy.” Kerry looked affronted. “You’d share me? Well, well, good to know.” She folded her arms. “So glad we’re having this little chat.” “Oh, no, Starfish, no such luck. You’d be stuck making do with only me. You see, I know a guy who could fly us out of there on his helicopter, and I’m guessing your erstwhile tribal spouse wouldn’t go anywhere near one of those flying birds. I’d spirit you off and--” “And leave my poor first husband brokenhearted and alone? Do I get a say in this?” She looked to her sister. “You’re drawing up my pre-nup, right?” Cooper brightened and clapped his hands together, which earned him an arched brow from Kerry. “Well, while I’m not too thrilled about your attachment to Number One, speaking as Number Two, I will say I’m happy to hear we’re in the negotiation phase.” “Husband Number One is a lot younger,” she said consideringly. “And while he doesn’t have as many head of cattle as you do, he does come with an entire village, and if something happens to his other six brothers, he’ll be chief one day.” She smiled sweetly. “Just saying.” Cooper flashed her a smile that might have been a little too private with her sister standing right there, but what the hell. “Keep in mind, Number Twos traditionally try harder. So I have that going for me.” Hannah looked from Cooper to Kerry, then at both of them, before finally looking at Kerry. “Seriously, marry him before he wises up.” “Hey,” Kerry replied, mock wounded. “And why do you say that?” “You speak the same language.” “Says the woman who communicates with her husband using old movie quotes that nobody gets but the two of you.” Hannah smiled, really smiled, and it transformed her often more serious expression into something truly radiant. “Yes, that’s exactly who’s saying that.” She looked at Cooper. “I have a feeling you and Calder will become fast friends.” “Thank you,” Cooper said, “for both sentiments.

If we think deeply about our childhood, not just about our memories of it but how it actually felt, we realize how differently we experienced the world back then. Our minds were completely open, and we entertained all kinds of surprising, original ideas. Things that we now take for granted, things as simple as the night sky or our reflection in a mirror, often caused us to wonder. Our heads teemed with questions about the world around us. Not yet having commanded language, we thought in ways that were preverbal—in images and sensations. When we attended the circus, a sporting event, or a movie, our eyes and ears took in the spectacle with utmost intensity. Colors seemed more vibrant and alive. We had a powerful desire to turn everything around us into a game, to play with circumstances. Let us call this quality the Original Mind. This mind looked at the world more directly—not through words and received ideas. It was flexible and receptive to new information. [...] Masters and those who display a high level of creative energy are simply people who manage to retain a sizeable portion of their childhood spirit despite the pressures and demands of adulthood. This spirit manifests itself in their work and in their ways of thinking. Children are naturally creative. They actively transform everything around them, play with ideas and circumstances, and surprise us with the novel things they say or do. [...] Masters not only retain the spirit of the Original Mind, but they add to it their years of apprenticeship and an ability to focus deeply on problems or ideas. This leads to high-level creativity. Although they have profound knowledge of a subject, their minds remain open to alternative ways of seeing and approaching problems. They are able to ask the kinds of simple questions that most people pass over, but they have the rigor and discipline to follow their investigations all the way to the end. They retain a childlike excitement about their field and a playful approach, all of which makes the hours of hard work alive and pleasurable. Like children, they are capable of thinking beyond words—visually, spatially, intuitively—and have greater access to preverbal and unconscious forms of mental activity, all of which can account for their surprising ideas and creations.

I would study my classmates as they talked, and watch shows and movies and mimic the way the cool kids acted. I would create scripts in my mind and practice them over and over again. I became so good at being who my peers wanted me to be that I lost myself in the process. While I was able to stop the scrutiny, that pain was replaced by extreme anxiety and depression as a result of suppressing everything I was meant to be. It wasn’t until I was in my early 30s that I started to find myself again–my true autistic, queer self. I’m an expert at masking and transforming, but it does come at a price to my mental health. It’s why I try to only do it in short stints.

The second strategy is also simple. I carry a small sheet of paper in my wallet that has written on it the names of people whose opinions of me matter. To be on that list, you have to love me for my strengths and struggles. You have to know that I’m trying to be Wholehearted, but I still cuss too much, flip people off under the steering wheel, and have both Lawrence Welk and Metallica on my iPod. You have to know and respect that I’m totally uncool. There’s a great quote from the movie Almost Famous that says, “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.

His album that year was Sign O’ the Times. I took the fact that the gang in the title track was named the Disciples as a personal tribute. The tour behind that record was the best Rock show I’ve ever seen. I went three times, and it blew my mind every time. The production was the highest evolution of the live, physical part of our Artform I have ever seen. It was Prince’s vision, but his production designer, LeRoy Bennett, deserves much of the credit for pulling it off. It was Rock, it was Theater, it was Soul, it was Cinema, it was Jazz, it was Broadway. The stage metamorphized into different scenes and configurations right before your eyes, transforming itself into whatever emotional setting was appropriate for each song. On top of that, the music never stopped, for three solid hours. Prince wrote various pieces, or covered Jazz, as interstitial transitions for those moments when the stage was shifting or the musicians were changing clothes. At one point, he even had a craps game break out, which made me laugh—it brought me back to Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom and our onstage Monopoly games. They captured it pretty well on film, but it can’t compare. When you’re watching a movie, your mind is used to scene changes, different sets and lighting. Live, it’s something else. That kind of legerdemain before your eyes is mind-boggling.

Story in a game,” he said, “is like a story in a porn movie; it’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.