Trivial Pursuit Quotes

(about organizing books in his home library, and putting a book in the "Arts and Lit non-fiction section) I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.

Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.

Avoid trivial pursuits. You are a child of God, destined for glory, and called to do great things in His Name. Do not waste your life on hobbies, sports, and other recreational pursuits. Do not throw away the precious moments of your life on entertainment, movies, and video games. Though some of these things can properly have a 'small place' in the Christian’s life, we must be careful not to give undue attention to temporal and fruitless activities. Do not waste your life. Employ the time of your youth in developing the character and skills necessary to be a useful servant of God.

The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.

You shouldn't believe all the press about Ouija boards. They can't be used in an exorcism. Trivial Pursuit can, but that's another story.

Cassandra sat on the floor with Chris and Kat, playing Life. They had tried to play Trivial Pursuit earlier only to learn that a Dark-Hunter and an immortal handmaiden to a goddess had a decidedly unfair advantage over Cassandra and Chris. In Life, the only thing that mattered was luck.’ (Cassandra)

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas.

Science is an organized pursuit of triviality. Art is a casual pursuit of significance. Let's keep it in perspective.

I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.

Death by Trivial Pursuits

[My husband] can beat most anyone in Trivial Pursuit, but only because the game does not include questions like "Where is your wallet?

A surrogate activity is an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that the individual pursues for the sake of the “fulfillment” that he gets from pursuing the goal, not because he needs to attain the goal itself. For instance, there is no practical motive for building enormous muscles, hitting a little ball into a hole or acquiring a complete series of postage stamps. Yet many people in our society devote themselves with passion to bodybuilding, golf or stamp-collecting. Some people are more “other-directed” than others, and therefore will more readily attach importance to a surrogate activity simply because the people around them treat it as important or because society tells them it is important. That is why some people get very serious about essentially trivial activities such as sports, or bridge, or chess, or arcane scholarly pursuits, whereas others who are more clear-sighted never see these things as anything but the surrogate activities that they are, and consequently never attach enough importance to them to satisfy their need for the power process in that way.

Some rush through life by linking together a constant stream of trivial pursuits.

The point of fashion is not for the gentlemen: they call it trivial because they cannot bear the thought of women having a whole silent language between themselves.

Writing. It's a trivial pursuit, hardly worth the effort, inconsequential on any cosmic level. It's just blood and sweat and guts and bone hauled out of our bodies and fed through a typewriter to slosh all over the platen.

baptizing all containers with an orifice that appeals to their cock is the trivial pursuit of little boys" (23) (rbt: every "boy" i know has done this at least 15 times -- why?)

that may be a bit of stretch as I’d obviously prefer to play Trivial Pursuit than spend the night in a spider cave or give a hobo a rimjob, but you get the point.

Due to Jade's fortresslike manner, which, like any well-built castle, made access challenging, girls found her existence not only threatening but flat-out wrong. Although Bartelby Athletic Center featured the latest advertising campaign of Ms. Sturd's three member Benevolent Body-Image Club (laminated Vogue and Maxim covers above captions, “You Can't Have Thighs Like This and Still Walk" and "All Airbrushing"), Jade would only have to swan by, munching on a Snickers to reveal a disturbing truth: You could have thighs like that and still walk. She emphasized what few wanted to accept, that some people did win Trivial Pursuit: The Deity Looks Edition, and there wasn't a thing you could do about it, except come to terms with the fact that you'd only played Trivial Pursuit: John Doe Genes and come away with three pie pieces.

When there is a lack of clarity, people waste time and energy on the trivial many. When they have sufficient levels of clarity, they are capable of greater breakthroughs and innovations – greater than people even realise they ought to have – in those areas that are truly vital.

The Internet’s self-curated view from everywhere has the amazing ability to distract us in trivial pursuits, narrow our choices, and keep us safe in a balkanized suburb of our own taste.

people found off-putting. You could not beat her at chess or Trivial Pursuit or even Monopoly. She knew all the questions on Jeopardy. She knew when to use who or whom. She could not abide misinformation. She disdained organized religion. In social situations, she had the strange habit of spouting obscure facts.

[L]et us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic. The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. ... On the contrary science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is a blank. Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects. Whoever will dip into Hugh Miller's works on geology, or read Mr. Lewes's “Seaside Studies,” will perceive that science excites poetry rather than extinguishes it. And whoever will contemplate the life of Goethe will see that the poet and the man of science can co-exist in equal activity. Is it not, indeed, an absurd and almost a sacrilegious belief that the more a man studies Nature the less he reveres it? Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses anything in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as a mere snow-flake, does not suggest higher associations to one who has seen through a microscope the wondrously varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals? Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded. Whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedge-rows can assume. Whoever has not sought for fossils, has little idea of the poetical associations that surround the places where imbedded treasures were found. Whoever at the seaside has not had a microscope and aquarium, has yet to learn what the highest pleasures of the seaside are. Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena—care not to understand the architecture of the universe, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!—are learnedly critical over a Greek ode, and pass by without a glance that grand epic... upon the strata of the Earth!

Most people in the West belong to a popular cult of individualism and materialism where the pursuit of our trivial, petty desires is a daily ritual.

A person who questions the value of living has endured a worthless life committed to trivial pursuits. A disoriented person constantly asks whom they are and where must they go. A stupid person fails to realize basic truths and flees from reality.

Frankly, Olive was a bit on the fence about this whole grad school thing. Not because she didn’t like science. (She did. She loved science. Science was her thing.) And not because of the truckload of obvious red flags. She was well aware that committing to years of unappreciated, underpaid eighty-hour workweeks might not be good for her mental health. That nights spent toiling away in front of a Bunsen burner to uncover a trivial slice of knowledge might not be the key to happiness. That devoting her mind and body to academic pursuits with only infrequent breaks to steal unattended bagels might not be a wise choice. She was well aware, and yet none of it worried her.

I sat wondering: Why is there always this deep shade of melancholy over the fields arid river banks, the sky and the sunshine of our country? And I came to the conclusion that it is because with us Nature is obviously the more important thing. The sky is free, the fields limitless; and the sun merges them into one blazing whole. In the midst of this, man seems so trivial. He comes and goes, like the ferry-boat, from this shore to the other; the babbling hum of his talk, the fitful echo of his song, is heard; the slight movement of his pursuit of his own petty desires is seen in the world's market-places: but how feeble, how temporary, how tragically meaningless it all seems amidst the immense aloofness of the Universe! The contrast between the beautiful, broad, unalloyed peace of Nature—calm, passive, silent, unfathomable,—and our own everyday worries—paltry, sorrow-laden, strife-tormented, puts me beside myself as I keep staring at the hazy, distant, blue line of trees which fringe the fields across the river. Where Nature is ever hidden, and cowers under mist and cloud, snow and darkness, there man feels himself master; he regards his desires, his works, as permanent; he wants to perpetuate them, he looks towards posterity, he raises monuments, he writes biographies; he even goes the length of erecting tombstones over the dead. So busy is he that he has not time to consider how many monuments crumble, how often names are forgotten!

God is the infinite and eternal judge What others say or think about you is trivial pursuit

I forget who fought in World War II. I can't name more than ten presidents. I'm geographically lost. Trivial Pursuit is my nightmare.

Deep inside each human being is a spirit that hungers for movement and for growth. A live and burgeoning ball of energy, the spirit naturally moves, expands, gyrates—dances, even—purely by virtue of its desire for freedom. It craves beauty over entertainment, meaning over triviality, and knowledge over sensation. American society devotes few harbors to the trade of truth. Too often we sacrifice the pursuit of knowledge, distracted instead by sparkling material things.

Where people once sought information to manage the real context of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use. The crossword puzzle is one such pseudo-context; the cocktail party is another; the radio quiz shows of the 1930's and 1940's and the modern television game show are still others; and the ultimate, perhaps, is the wildly successful "Trivial Pursuit." In one form or another, each of these supplies the answer to the question,"What am I to do with all these disconnected facts?" And in one form or another, the answer is the same: Why not use them for diversion? for entertainment? to amuse yourself, in a game?

Essentialists spend as much time as possible exploring, listening, debating, questioning, and thinking. But their exploration is not an end in itself. The purpose of the exploration is to discern the vital few from the trivial many.

And if that illustration will not move you, here is another: -- We are children now; we feel as children, and we understand as children; and when we are told that men and women do not play with toys, and that our companions will one day weary on the trivial sports and occupations that interest them and us so deeply now, we cannot help being saddened at the thoughts of such an alteration, because we cannot conceive that as we grow up, our own minds will become so enlarged and elevated that we ourselves shall then regard as trifling those objects and pursuits we now so foolishly cherish, and that, though our companions will no longer join us in those childish pastimes, they will drink with us at other fountains of delight, and mingle their souls with ours in higher aims and nobler occupations beyond our present comprehension, but not less deeply relished or less truly good for that, while yet both we and they remain the same individuals as before.

Through The Mecca I saw that we were, in our own segregated body politic, cosmopolitans. The black diaspora was not just our own world but, in so many ways, the Western world itself. Now, the heirs of those Virginia planters could never directly acknowledge this legacy or reckon with its power. And so that beauty that Malcolm pledged us to protect, black beauty, was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black five-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit. Serious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was “white,” and so Tolstoy “mattered,” like everything else that was white “mattered.” And this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?

Two Dutch researchers did a study in which they had groups of students answer forty-two fairly demanding questions from the board game Trivial Pursuit. Half were asked to take five minutes beforehand to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind. Those students got 55.6 percent of the questions right. The other half of the students were asked to first sit and think about soccer hooligans. They ended up getting 42.6 percent of the Trivial Pursuit questions right. The “professor” group didn’t know more than the “soccer hooligan” group. They weren’t smarter or more focused or more serious. They were simply in a “smart” frame of mind, and, clearly, associating themselves with the idea of something smart, like a professor, made it a lot easier—in that stressful instant after a trivia question was asked—to blurt out the right answer.

It’s human nature to get distracted by minor issues. We play Trivial Pursuit with our lives. Henry David Thoreau observed that people live lives of “quiet desperation,” but today a better description is aimless distraction. Many people are like gyroscopes, spinning around at a frantic pace but never going anywhere.

We had almost exactly a year together as a couple after that. She wanted to swim the Great Barrier Reef. I wish we had gone. I wish we had read books to each other. We had one weekend of sexy-times in New York City while her father looked after the kids. I wish we’d had more. I wish we’d walked more. I wish we hadn’t sat in front of the TV so much. It was nice, we cuddled, we laughed at Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers, but it didn’t make much in the way of memories. We did such ordinary, banal things. Ordered pizza and played Trivial Pursuit with her sister and her dad. Helped the kids with homework. We did dishes together more than we ever made love. What kind of life is that?” “Real life,” Harper said.

I had high-performing anxiety, and was always on edge, eager to add check-marks to my personal and professional to-do and bucket lists. Possessions, vacations, entertainment were transitory fixes, “trivial pursuits.” I was not a true caregiver for key people in my life. I was not taking proper care of my emotional and physical need, let alone those of others. I gave myself this prescription: Stop doing. Let it be. Let it go. Less is more.

Spiritual progress requires us to highlight what is essential and to disregard everything else as trivial pursuits unworthy of our attention. Moreover, it is actually a good thing to be thought foolish and simple with regard to matters that don’t concern us. Don’t be concerned with other people’s impressions of you. They are dazzled and deluded by appearances. Stick with your purpose. This alone will strengthen your will and give your life coherence.

ratings in the NFL. Then Kemp, too, was injured. His replacement was a fellow named Mike Moroski, so obscure that any question concerning his NFL career would be considered out of bounds in a game of Trivial Pursuit. Moroski had been with the 49ers for exactly two weeks before he became, by default, their starting quarterback. He completed 57.5 percent of his passes. Eventually people must have noticed. As Walsh performed miracle after miracle with his quarterbacks,

Okay," Adam began, "Now concentrate! This was a real person. White suit!" "Colonel Sanders!" Lily replied quickly. "Colonel Sanders? I said it was a real person, not a logo for a chicken joint!" "He was a real person! If you don't believe me look it up!" "Whatever! Not Colonel Sanders though. Humor!" he said urgently. "Steve Martin!" She clapped her hands with joy, obviously believing that they had finally gotten one right. "No, uh..." He searched for another clue. "Wait! White suit and humor but not Steve Martin?" She looked crushed. "I just said no!" He yelled! "Hannibal!" "Um, uh, Dumbo..." she said with a deeply pensive expression. "Dumbo?! What the fuck?!" "Hannibal! Elephants! And before you say it he was real, too, you schmuck!" "Guess again goddamnit!" "Anthony Hopkins!" Adam threw down the card and looked like he was going to cry. "Halley's Comet!" he growled. "Halley's Comet?! What in the hell do you mean Halley's Comet!" "Time!" Braden informed them gleefully, wiping tears of laughter out of his eyes. "Mark Twain! You're an author Christ's sake!" Adam bit out. "Oh, right! He was from Hannibal, Missouri! What in the hell did Halley's Comet have to do with Mark Twain?!" "It appeared on the day he was born and the day he died! Duh huh!" Adam said. "This isn't Trivial fucking Pursuit!" Lily shot back. "Why didn't you say Mississippi or riverboat or frog jumping contest or something besides Halley's Motherfucking Comet?!" "Because they're all forbidden motherfucking words! Miss 'like a human'!" he yelled.

When there is a lack of clarity, people waste time and energy on the trivial many. When they have sufficient levels of clarity, they are capable of greater breakthroughs and innovations—greater than people even realize they ought to have—in those areas that are truly vital.

We discover how even the many good opportunities we pursue are often far less valuable than the few truly great ones. Once we understand this, we start scanning our environment for those vital few and eagerly eliminate the trivial many. Only then can we say no to good opportunities and say yes to truly great ones.

Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one’s time, the better part of one’s strength, and in the end there is left a life groveling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.

Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.

that play is trivial. Play is a waste of time. Play is unnecessary. Play is childish. Unfortunately, many of these negative messages come from the very place where imaginative play should be most encouraged, not stifled. The word school is derived from the Greek word schole, meaning “leisure.” Yet our modern school system, born in the Industrial Revolution, has removed the leisure—and much of the pleasure—out of learning. Sir Ken Robinson, who has made the study of creativity in schools his life’s work, has observed that instead of fueling creativity through play, schools can actually kill it: “We have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education, and it’s impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.… Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it’s the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.”2 In this he is correct.

There are far more activities and opportunities in the world than we have time and resources to invest in. And although many of them may be good, or even very good, the fact is that most are trivial and few are vital. The way of the Essentialist involves learning to tell the difference—learning to filter through all those options and selecting only those that are truly essential.

If you believe being overly busy and overextended is evidence of productivity, then you probably believe that creating space to explore, think, and reflect should be kept to a minimum. Yet these very activities are the antidote to the nonessential busyness that infects so many of us. Rather than trivial diversions, they are critical to distinguishing what is actually a trivial diversion from what is truly essential.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. It ‘bakes no bread,’ as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world’s perspectives.” William James, Pragmatism

the common thread amongst the SCRIPTED sheeple is they have no meaning. Instead, hyperreality babysits—this is why we have a society addicted to Game of Thrones and whoever wins some stupid singing contest. With meaning, this shit cannot compete. Social media showboating is no longer entertaining. Sporting events—fleeting entertainment not worthy of tears or a sibling smackdown. Pop culture: who’s dating whom, who got fat, who’s styling a new bikini—a pointless insult and trivialization of your purpose

Most of us do live like that; we live according to a preordained plan. We spend our youth being educated. Then we find a job, and meet someone, marry, and have children. We buy a house, try to make a success of our business, aim for dreams like a country house or a second car. We go away on holiday with our friends. We plan for retirement. The biggest dilemmas some of us ever have to face are where to take our next holiday or whom to invite at Christmas. Our lives are monotonous, petty, and repetitive, wasted in the pursuit of the trivial, because we seem to know of nothing better.

Priming is not, it should be said, like brainwashing. I can’t make you reveal deeply personal details about your childhood by priming you with words like “nap” and “bottle” and “teddy bear.” Nor can I program you to rob a bank for me. On the other hand, the effects of priming aren’t trivial. Two Dutch researchers did a study in which they had groups of students answer forty-two fairly demanding questions from the board game Trivial Pursuit. Half were asked to take five minutes beforehand to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind. Those students got 55.6 percent of the questions right. The other half of the students were asked to first sit and think about soccer hooligans. They ended up getting 42.6 percent of the Trivial Pursuit questions right. The “professor” group didn’t know more than the “soccer hooligan” group. They weren’t smarter or more focused or more serious. They were simply in a “smart” frame of mind, and, clearly, associating themselves with the idea of something smart, like a professor, made it a lot easier—in that stressful instant after a trivia question was asked—to blurt out the right answer. The difference between 55.6 and 42.6 percent, it should be pointed out, is enormous. That can be the difference between passing and failing.

Take a simple pocket pen, so cheap that they are given away as advertising. Back of it lie several sorts of chemists, metallurgists, synthetic polymer experts, mechanical engineers, extrusion presses, computer programmers, computers, computer technicians, toolmakers, electrical engineers, a planet-wide petroleum industry, five or more sorts of mines with mining engineers, geologists, miners, railroads, steamships, production engineers, management specialists, merchandizing psychologists—et cetera to a splitting headache. It is impossible even to list the myriad special skills that underlie even the most trivial trade item of our enormously complex and interdependent industrial web.

The problem of doing justice to the implicit, the imponderable, and the unknown is of course not unique in politics. It is always with us in science, it is with us in the most trivial of personal affairs, and it is one of the great problems of writing and of all forms of art. The means by which it is solved is sometimes called style. It is style which complements affirmation with limitation and with humility; it is style which makes it possible to act effectively, but not absolutely; it is style which, in the domain of foreign policy, enables us to find a harmony between the pursuit of ends essential to us, and the regard for the views, the sensibilities, the aspirations of those to whom the problem may appear in another light; it is style which is the deference that action pays to uncertainty; it is above all style through which power defers to reason.

In explaining the way that trivial, if diverting, pursuits like Guitar Hero provide an easy alternative to meaningful work, Horning draws on the writing of political theorist Jon Elster. In his 1986 book An Introduction to Karl Marx, Elster used a simple example to illustrate the psychic difference between the hard work of developing talent and the easy work of consuming stuff: Compare playing the piano with eating lamb chops. The first time one practices the piano it is difficult, even painfully so. By contrast, most people enjoy lamb chops the first time they eat them. Over time, however, these patterns are reversed. Playing the piano becomes increasingly more rewarding, whereas the taste for lamb chops becomes satiated and jaded with repeated, frequent consumption. Elster then made a broader point: Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: They become more enjoyable the more one has already engaged in them. Exactly the opposite is true of consumption. To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages. “Consumerism,” comments Horning, “keeps us well supplied with stuff and seems to enrich our identities by allowing us to become familiar with a wide range of phenomena—a process that the internet has accelerated immeasurably. . . . But this comes at the expense with developing any sense of mastery of anything, eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing.” Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them. A

Another way in which people satisfy their need for the power process is through surrogate activities. As we explained in paragraphs 38-40, a surrogate activity is an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that the individual pursues for the sake of the “fulfillment” that he gets from pursuing the goal, not because he needs to attain the goal itself. For instance, there is no practical motive for building enormous muscles, hitting a little ball into a hole or acquiring a complete series of postage stamps. Yet many people in our society devote themselves with passion to bodybuilding, golf or stamp-collecting. Some people are more “other-directed” than others, and therefore will more readily attach importance to a surrogate activity simply because the people around them treat it as important or because society tells them it is important. That is why some people get very serious about essentially trivial activities such as sports, or bridge, or chess, or arcane scholarly pursuits, whereas others who are more clear-sighted never see these things as anything but the surrogate activities that they are, and consequently never attach enough importance to them to satisfy their need for the power process in that way. It only remains to point out that in many cases a person’s way of earning a living is also a surrogate activity.

The mythical ‘butterfly effect’ does exist, but we don’t spend enough time butterfly hunting. Here are some recent butterfly effect discoveries, from my own experience: A website adds a single extra option to its checkout procedure – and increases sales by $300m per year. An airline changes the way in which flights are presented – and sells £8m more of premium seating per year. A software company makes a seemingly inconsequential change to call-centre procedure – and retains business worth several million pounds. A publisher adds four trivial words to a call-centre script – and doubles the rate of conversion to sales. A fast-food outlet increases sales of a product by putting the price . . . up. All these disproportionate successes were, to an economist, entirely illogical. All of them worked. And all of them, apart from the first, were produced by a division of my advertising agency, Ogilvy, which I founded to look for counter-intuitive solutions to problems. We discovered that problems almost always have a plethora of seemingly irrational solutions waiting to be discovered, but that nobody is looking for them; everyone is too preoccupied with logic to look anywhere else. We also found, rather annoyingly, that the success of this approach did not always guarantee repeat business; it is difficult for a company, or indeed a government, to request a budget for the pursuit of such magical solutions, because a business case has to look logical.

Some prejudices and fallacies of the human mind are understandable on a theoretical basis, but practically impossible to implement. As matters now stand, I have little choice but to recognize myself as possessing a personal state of conscious awareness and presupposing that my active state of mental awareness constitutes a personal identity. Acknowledgement of my ignorance begins with the opening admission that the concept of a self delineates the most that I will ever understand in life. Although it might be a spectacular illusion to perceive the self as the unchanging nucleus at the center of my being, from a human evolutionary standpoint and to develop and carryout strategies necessary for personal survival it is a useful illusion. Belief in a self allows a person to integrate streams of information and resolve conflicts between competing values and goals. Absence of a self-identity and devoid of the specific goal of seeking personal self-realization, would not only jeopardize human survival on a daily bases, but it would render life utterly meaningless, making a person’s ontological existence a triviality. Lacking a philosophical status of fundamental ontological event, human life would be a windowless absurdity. A person must perceive oneself as an actual entity in physical Minkowski space, not merely as a philosophical concept in order to engage in the necessary activities to perpetuate personal existence and import meaning to personal efforts. Accordingly, I elect to perceive the self as an actual entity, not as a mere abstraction, composed of a single, definite set of well-defined ontological criteria. Self-perception guides future behavioral choices, frame intellectual inquires, and the evolution of the self represents the ultimate level of personal achievement in pursuit of my goal of attaining self-realization.

Who was the first person to walk on the moon?” Ellie sighed. “Seriously? If you are going to try to stump me, you need to come at me with something better than a fifth-grade question.” “So, you don’t know?” “Neil Armstrong.” “Correct … and you’re right, that was too easy. You must be good at Trivial Pursuit.” “They hired me as a consultant for their Book Lovers Edition.” Cedric blinked. She smiled. “You don’t believe me? Try me.” Cedric sat up and rubbed his hands together. “When was the civil war?” “Which one?” “Very good.” Cedric laughed. “American.” “1861 to 1865.” “The Spanish?” “1936 to 1939. Look, I appreciate the effort, but I can answer these questions with ninety-nine percent of my brain cells tied behind my back.

When there is a lack of clarity, people waste time and energy on the trivial many. When

Axe was a quiet man, six foot four, with piercing blue eyes and curly hair. He was smart and the best Trivial Pursuit player I ever saw. I loved talking to him because of how much he knew. He would come out with answers that would have defied the learning of a Harvard professor.

Jesus prevents us from thinking that life is a matter of ideas to ponder or concepts to discuss. Jesus saves us from wasting our lives in the pursuit of cheap thrills and trivializing diversions. Jesus enables us to take seriously who we are and where we are without being seduced by the intimidating lies and illusions that fill the air, so that we needn't be someone else or somewhere else. Jesus keeps our feet on the ground, attentive to children, in conversation with ordinary people, sharing meals with friends and strangers, listening to the wind, observing the wildflowers, touching the sick and wounded, praying simply and unselfconsciously. Jesus insists that we deal with God right here and now, in the place we find ourselves and with the people we are with. Jesus is God here and now.

The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In

The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless. The

Then down into Giggleswick to a silly supper and a game of Trivial Pursuit. To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.

job that might be smothering your soul. Dealing with stressful worries and endless responsibilities that stifle your originality and steal your energy. Lusting after unimportant pursuits and hungry for the instant fulfillment of trivial desires, often driven by a technology that enslaves us instead of liberating us.

Henry David Thoreau (who wrote, “I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day;…so simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real”).5

You didn’t plan on each day looking the same, did you? In a job that might be smothering your soul. Dealing with stressful worries and endless responsibilities that stifle your originality and steal your energy. Lusting after unimportant pursuits and hungry for the instant fulfillment of trivial desires, often driven by a technology that enslaves us instead of liberating us. Living the same week a few thousand times and calling it a life. I need to tell you that too many among us die at thirty and are buried at eighty.

trivial many” from the “vital few

...this kind of inquisitorial and, let’s be frank, voyeuristic pursuit, of venial sins as the way of sizing up political life, has reached heights undreamed of. And this can be entertaining—indeed, it may be intended by the media to be so, as it is eye- and ear-catching. It displays a kinship with the inherent sensationalism of consumer culture more generally. It is also, often, if not always, stupendously trivial or only marginally relevant, but is treated in exactly the opposite way. We have grown accustomed to examine all sorts of personal foibles as if they were political MRIs lighting up the interior of the most sequestered political motivations. Credit this hyperpersonalizing of political life with keeping interest alive, even if it’s a kind of morbid interest in the fall of the mighty or the wannabe mighty. Otherwise, for many millions of citizens, cynicism (and only cynicism) prevails. The system seems transparently to have become an arena for gaming the system. Cycles of corruption and insiderism repeat with numbing frequency and in a nonpartisan distribution, verging on kleptocracy.

The research on IQ profiles indicates that children with Asperger’s syndrome have good factual and lexical (or word) knowledge. Their highest scores are often on the sub-tests that measure vocabulary, general knowledge and verbal problem solving. Such children have an impressive vocabulary and their recall of facts can make them popular in a Trivial Pursuit team.

Modern Education What Buddhists meditators long for, that trivia packrats lust to fill with random facts, is the Spartan austerity of an empty mind at rest from the relentless onslaught of thoughts. What trivia packrats lust to fill with random facts, once foundational to the quadrivia of higher education, is now a parlor game, a trivial pursuit at every smarty party because the power of becoming a pussy magnet resides in: 'The Canary Islands were named after which animal?' Once foundational to the quadrivia of higher education, the liberal arts have been defanged so students equate education with the random accumulation of data, the clever recapitulation of assumptions and the repackaging and regurgitation of conviction and dogma. Hence the fashionableness of the Buddhist empty mind ~ ergo, our kids know shit and should be accredited by Reddit.

Sophie gazed wistfully at their cutoff shorts and tank tops. Once upon a time she, too, had lived in grunge wear. She didn’t miss the clothes so much as that time in her life, when she’d had nothing more to do than go to keg parties on weekends and cut class to hang out with her boyfriend. Now both those pursuits seemed worse than trivial—they seemed wasteful. How could a few short years make such a difference in her outlook? She

This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental "firsts" - first black five star general, first black congressman, first black mayor - always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit. Serious history was the West, and the West was white.

discern the vital few from the trivial many.

THE BIGGER PICTURE   During World War II, thousands in factories across the United States constructed parachutes. From the worker’s point of view, the job was tedious. It required stitching endless lengths of colorless fabric, crouched over a sewing machine eight to ten hours a day. A day’s work produced a formless, massive heap of cloth with no visible resemblance to a parachute. In order to motivate workers and keep them concerned with quality, the management in one factory held a meeting. Management informed workers each day of the approximate number of parachutes that had been strapped to the back of pilots, copilots, and other “flying” personnel the previous day. They learned just how many men had jumped to safety from disabled planes as a result of their high-quality work. The managers encouraged their workers to see the big picture on their job. As a second means of motivation, the workers were asked to form a mental picture of a husband, brother, or son who might be the one saved by the parachute they sewed. That factory held one of the highest levels of quality on record!3 Don’t let the tedium of each day’s chores and responsibilities wear you down so you only see the “stitching” in front of you. Keep your eyes on the big picture. Focus on why you do what you do and who will benefit from your work, including those you don’t know and may never meet. You may not have all the answers to the question, “Why am I here?” but you can rest assured, the Lord does! Ultimately, the Bible tells us we will be in heaven for eternity—and that is the biggest picture of all! God is preparing us for heaven, just as He is preparing heaven for us. He is creating us to be the people He wants to live with forever. Whatever mundane tasks or trivial pursuits you undertake today, see them in the light of eternity. They will take on a whole new meaning!   “I GO TO PREPARE A PLACE FOR YOU. AND IF I GO AND PREPARE A PLACE FOR YOU, I WILL COME AGAIN AND RECEIVE YOU TO MYSELF; THAT WHERE I AM, THERE YOU MAY BE ALSO.” JOHN 14:2-3 NKJV

Ma mentre trovavo loro una casa nella sezione “saggistica d’arte e letteratura” (personalmente trovo che agli scopi domestici il sistema di archiviazione Trivial Pursuit funzioni meglio del Dewey), d’un tratto ho avuto una piccola epifania: tutti i libri che possediamo, letti e no, sono l’espressione più piena che abbiamo a disposizione della nostra personalità.

The most insidous influence on the young is not violence, drugs, drink or sexual perversion, but our pursuit of the trivial and tolerance of the third rate.

Henry David Thoreau (who wrote, “I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; … so simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real”).

When we see people whose talents lie fallow, whose energy is engaged in pursuits they see as trivial—or worse, in pursuits others see as destructive—the problem usually isn’t that they have too many distractions. The problem is that they have too few devotions.

When you love the work, you don’t cheat it. Or the demands it asks of you. You respect even the most trivial aspects of the pursuit.

Philosophers in the Western tradition have paid little attention to comedy, focusing instead on tragedy. This is unfortunate, as comedy is the more appropriate genre for representing humanity. Ours is a ridiculous species, its members displaying every manner of stupidity, willing to harm ourselves and others in the pursuit of trivial ends, all while pretending to believe obvious falsehoods. This is not the appropriate subject matter for tragedy. It is comedy that specializes in exposing and lampooning the ridiculous. I will argue here that a comic representation of humanity has three primary virtues for the misanthropist. First, it accurately represents humanity. Second, it provides a kind of palliative to the terrible truth about humanity that I have defended in previous chapters. Third, comedic genres are permitted wider latitude than more serious genres when it comes to free expression, allowing for especially incisive and honest critique.

In gathering data from more than five hundred people about their experience on more than one thousand teams, I have found a consistent reality: When there is a serious lack of clarity about what the team stands for and what their goals and roles are, people experience confusion, stress, and frustration. When there is a high level of clarity, on the other hand, people thrive. When there is a lack of clarity, people waste time and energy on the trivial many. When they have sufficient levels of clarity, they are capable of greater breakthroughs and innovations—greater than people even realize they ought to have—in those areas that are truly vital. In my work, I have noticed two common patterns that typically emerge when teams lack clarity of purpose. PATTERN 1: PLAYING POLITICS In the first pattern, the team becomes overly focused on winning the attention of the manager. The problem is, when people don’t know what the end game is, they are unclear about how to win, and as a result they make up their own game and their own rules as they vie for the manager’s favor. Instead of focusing their time and energies on making a high level of contribution, they put all their effort into games like attempting to look better than their peers, demonstrating their self-importance, and echoing their manager’s every idea or sentiment. These kinds of activities are not only nonessential but damaging and counterproductive.

When there is a serious lack of clarity about what the team stands for and what their goals and roles are, people experience confusion, stress, and frustration. When there is a high level of clarity, on the other hand, people thrive. When there is a lack of clarity, people waste time and energy on the trivial many. When they have sufficient levels of clarity, they are capable of greater breakthroughs and innovations – greater than people even realise they ought to have – in those areas that are truly vital. In my work, I have noticed two common patterns that typically emerge when teams lack clarity of purpose.

These words, so ordinary, for some reason moved Gurov to indignation, and struck him as degrading and unclean. What savage manners, what people! What senseless nights, what uninteresting, uneventful days! The rage for card-playing, the gluttony, the drunkenness, the continual talk always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it -- just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.

The fact is, motivation and cooperation deteriorate when there is a lack of purpose. You can train leaders on communication and teamwork and conduct 360 feedback reports until you are blue in the face, but if a team does not have clarity of goals and roles, problems will fester and multiply. This is not just my theory or something I read in another business book. In gathering data from more than five hundred people about their experience on more than one thousand teams, I have found a consistent reality: When there is a serious lack of clarity about what the team stands for and what their goals and roles are, people experience confusion, stress, and frustration. When there is a high level of clarity, on the other hand, people thrive. When there is a lack of clarity, people waste time and energy on the trivial many.

Look At The Stars (The Sonnet) Look up my friend, look at the stars, You know some of them exploded long ago. Yet their light keeps shining even when they're gone, For none of their rays is tainted by ego. Not a kernel of kindness ever goes to waste, Not a gesture of gentleness ever goes awry. The unselfish one is the happiest person in the world, You'll find joy when you answer someone's cry. You're thirsty, you seek a glass of water, That is just plain necessity. Someone else is thirsty, you share your last glass, That my friend, is plain humanity. When self-preservation turns trivial, ‘n humanity common sense, That's when a star is born, amidst all self-serving nuisance.

We start scanning our environment for those vital few and eagerly eliminate the trivial many. Only then can we say no to good opportunities and say yes to truly great ones.

In the midst of writing a poem, he suddenly realized that there was not a single pursuit he could think of that was so trivial, so superfluous to living. He was in an academic setting, of course, and that could have been part of the problem. Here poetry was published in slim, arch magazines and read by perhaps twenty-five people who published in the same journals. But it was not just this elitism that troubled Furman. He realized, in the midst of composition, that he could attach any adjective to any noun (the "arbitrary teapot" or the "truculent rose," for instance) and then cobble up some sort of meaning to suit the phrase. There seemed something despicable in this wordplay, a kind of intellectual self-abuse. Perhaps, he thought, it was only his own poetry that he despised. But no, he discovered that he hated the poetry of all his peers, and, incredibly, all poetry ever written. Behind every poem there seemed to crouch an immensely self-involved ego, the sort of man or woman who would let the infant cry in its cradle while seeking just the right nuance of tone and cadence. The people who wrote poetry were to be avoided as were the poems that emanated from them like methane gas seeping from a swamp.

In this section of the book we have been talking about how to explore and evaluate options in order to discern the essential few from the many trivial, mediocre, or even just good.

Think back to what happens to our closets when we use the broad criterion, “Is there a chance that I will wear this someday in the future?” The closet becomes cluttered with clothes we rarely wear. But if we ask, “Do I absolutely love this?” then we will be able to eliminate the clutter and have space for something better. We can do the same with other choices—whether big or small, significant or trivial—in every area of our lives.

I kept telling myself that I was great, that I was enviable, that I was attractive, and wonderful, but this source of self-worth seemed trivial, because whenever my circumstances changed, so did the narrative that I told myself. It’s hard to think you’re the bomb when your life looks like a bomb hit it. It seemed disingenuous to tell myself that I was awesome when the people around me thought otherwise. In a way, it felt like I was lying to myself. The deep, inward insecurity probed at me, exposing that one opinion —mine or theirs —was not rooted in reality.

DISCERNING THE TRIVIAL MANY FROM THE VITAL FEW One paradox of Essentialism is that Essentialists actually explore more options than their Nonessentialist counterparts. Whereas Nonessentialists commit to everything or virtually everything without actually exploring, Essentialists systematically explore and evaluate a broad set of options before committing to any. Because they will commit and “go big” on one or two ideas or activities, they deliberately explore more options at first to ensure that they pick the right one later.

It is about pausing constantly to ask, “Am I investing in the right activities?” There are far more activities and opportunities in the world than we have time and resources to invest in. And although many of them may be good, or even very good, the fact is that most are trivial and few are vital. The way of the Essentialist involves learning to tell the difference—learning to filter through all those options and selecting only those that are truly essential.

Distinguishing the “trivial many” from the “vital few” can be applied to every kind of human endeavor large or small and

Beware the folly of lending your focus to vain pursuits. Just as a river, when it is split into countless rivulets, loses its force and becomes but a whimper, a mind divided by trivial pursuits dissipates its strength. Focus, therefore, is not merely concentration, it is selection; not merely observation, it is dedication.

Distractions are the relentless waves of the ocean, crashing against the shores of our consciousness. They erode our resolve, and little by little, wash away the sandcastles of our focus. They arrive in various guises: the allure of trivial pleasures, the lure of the inconsequential, the din of idle gossip, the chains of past regret and the ghostly shadows of future anxieties. Each wave seeks to pull us into the depths of irrelevance, away from the firm ground of meaningful pursuits.

Americans gear all their living to a constantly challenging world and are prepared to accept the challenge. Japanese reassurances are based rather on a way of life that is planned and charted beforehand and where the greatest threat comes from the unforeseen. The Japanese, more than any other sovereign nation, have been conditioned to a world where the smallest details of conduct are mapped and status is assigned. During two centuries where law and order were maintained in such a world with an iron hand, the Japanese learned to identify this meticulously plotted hierarchy with safety and security. So long as they stayed within known boundaries and so long as they fulfilled known obligations, they could trust their world. The Japanese point of view is that obeying the law is repayment upon their highest indebtedness. In spite of the fact that Japan is one of the great Buddhist nations in the world, her ethics at this point contrast sharply with the teachings of Gautama Buddha and of the holy books of Buddhism. The Japanese do not condemn self-gratification. They are not Puritans. They consider physical pleasures good and worthy of cultivation. Buddhist teachers and modern nationalistic leaders have written and spoken on this theme: human nature in Japan is naturally good and to be trusted. It does not need to flight and evil half of itself. It needs to cleanse the windows of its soul and act with appropriateness on every different occasion. The Japanese define the supreme task of life as fulfilling one's obligations. They fully accept the fact that repaying "on" means sacrificing one's personal desires and pleasures. The idea that the pursuit of happiness is a serious goal of life is to them an amazing and immoral doctrine. Happiness is a relaxation in which one indulges when one can. Zen seeks only the light man can find in himself. if you do this, if you do that, the adults say to the children, the word will laugh at you. The rules are particularistic and situational and a great many of them concern what we should call etiquette. They require subordinating one's own will to the ever-increasing duties to neighbors, to family and country. The child must restrain himself, he must recognize his indebtedness. Training is explicit for every art and skill. It is the habit that is taught, not just the rules. Adults do not consider that children will "pick up" the proper habits when the time to employ them comes around. Great things can only be achieved through self-restraint. Japanese people often keep their thoughts busy with trivial minutiae in order to stave off awareness of their real feelings. They are mechanical in the performance of a disciplined routine which is fundamentally meaningless to them. Japan's real strength which she can use in remaking herself into a peaceful nation lies in her ability to say to a course of action: "that failed" and then to throw her energies into other channels. The Japanese have an ethic of alternatives.

Lusting after unimportant pursuits and hungry for the instant fulfillment of trivial desires, often driven by a technology that enslaves us instead of liberating us. Living the same week a few thousand times and calling it a life. I need to tell you that too many among us die at thirty and are buried at eighty.

If other technology has made life easier, and provided options hitherto unknown, it has simultaneously infiltrated the human spirit in corrosive ways—impinging on our inner life with one cyber temptation after another. The explosion of information leaves us senseless and robotically at their mercy, as we “waste our powers” in trivial pursuits and newer hyperlinks.

Harley cringed: oh, no! Another