Tweak Book Quotes

To make my meal in a box taste better, I decided to tweak the logo, rather than the ingredients.

She stood back and examined the overall effect, then tweaked until the arrangement was just right. Where her books were, she was. Get the books right and the rest will follow. Now she could address the rest of the room.

As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars.

How do text messages make you feel existential? I start thinking about exactly that: how people can edit a thought before sending it out to the world. They can make themselves seem more well spoken than they are, or funnier, smarter. I start thinking that no one in the world is who they say the are, then my mind goes to how I also edit myself, not just online but in real life, except for those rare instances like right now where I'm ranting- even though that's a lie because I've had this train of thought before and damned if I didn't tweak it in my head a few times to make it sound better- and then my mind starts racing so furiously I can't control my thoughts, and I start thinking about robots and wondering if I'm even a real person.

Seafood Newburg is a dish with a history. Well, of course MOST dishes have some kind of “history,” but this particular dish is sort of a history celebrity. It all began around 1876 when an “epicurean” named Ben Wenberg (or Wenburg) demonstrated the dish at Delmonico’s restaurant in New York City. After some “tweaking” by the Delmonico chef, Charles Ranhofer, the dish was added to the menu under the name “Lobster Wenburg.” It proved to be very popular. But sometime later, Wenburg got involved in a dispute with the Delmonico’s management and the dish was subsequently removed from the menu. But customers still requested it. So, the name was changed to “Lobster Newburg” and reappeared to the delight of restaurant customers. So, that’s the story. Probably. One can never be sure about these origin myths.

But, when I was growing up, the one thing that did help me not to feel so isolated and crazy was reading - especially books by authors who fearlessly examined and exposed their highly imperfect inner lives. Books like "Confessions of a Mask" by Yukio Mishima; "Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller; "Try" by Dennis Cooper; and, of course, the works of authors like Bukowski, Salinger, Hesse, Bataille, Iceberg Slim, and Murakami. These writers revealed the things that existed beneath most humans' seemingly secure and confident exteriors. I suddenly realized, after reading their work, that I wasn't unique - that my doubts and fears and insecurities were more universal that I could've ever imagined. Their words gave me strength. They have me permission to start trying to accept my flaws, my darkness, my insanity. They let me know that it was okay not to fit in with everyone else - to be a sensitive person - and that others struggled just like I did. It was such a relief when I finally began to understand this. It was like I could breathe - maybe for the first time.

tweaks

Henceforward let none dare Stand, like a natural in the public way, Letting the very urchins twitch his beard And tweak his nose, to earn a nickname so, Be styled male-Grissel or else modern Job!

Antidepression medication is temperamental. Somewhere around fifty-nine or sixty I noticed the drug I’d been taking seemed to have stopped working. This is not unusual. The drugs interact with your body chemistry in different ways over time and often need to be tweaked. After the death of Dr. Myers, my therapist of twenty-five years, I’d been seeing a new doctor whom I’d been having great success with. Together we decided to stop the medication I’d been on for five years and see what would happen... DEATH TO MY HOMETOWN!! I nose-dived like the diving horse at the old Atlantic City steel pier into a sloshing tub of grief and tears the likes of which I’d never experienced before. Even when this happens to me, not wanting to look too needy, I can be pretty good at hiding the severity of my feelings from most of the folks around me, even my doctor. I was succeeding well with this for a while except for one strange thing: TEARS! Buckets of ’em, oceans of ’em, cold, black tears pouring down my face like tidewater rushing over Niagara during any and all hours of the day. What was this about? It was like somebody opened the floodgates and ran off with the key. There was NO stopping it. 'Bambi' tears... 'Old Yeller' tears... 'Fried Green Tomatoes' tears... rain... tears... sun... tears... I can’t find my keys... tears. Every mundane daily event, any bump in the sentimental road, became a cause to let it all hang out. It would’ve been funny except it wasn’t. Every meaningless thing became the subject of a world-shattering existential crisis filling me with an awful profound foreboding and sadness. All was lost. All... everything... the future was grim... and the only thing that would lift the burden was one-hundred-plus on two wheels or other distressing things. I would be reckless with myself. Extreme physical exertion was the order of the day and one of the few things that helped. I hit the weights harder than ever and paddleboarded the equivalent of the Atlantic, all for a few moments of respite. I would do anything to get Churchill’s black dog’s teeth out of my ass. Through much of this I wasn’t touring. I’d taken off the last year and a half of my youngest son’s high school years to stay close to family and home. It worked and we became closer than ever. But that meant my trustiest form of self-medication, touring, was not at hand. I remember one September day paddleboarding from Sea Bright to Long Branch and back in choppy Atlantic seas. I called Jon and said, “Mr. Landau, book me anywhere, please.” I then of course broke down in tears. Whaaaaaaaaaa. I’m surprised they didn’t hear me in lower Manhattan. A kindly elderly woman walking her dog along the beach on this beautiful fall day saw my distress and came up to see if there was anything she could do. Whaaaaaaaaaa. How kind. I offered her tickets to the show. I’d seen this symptom before in my father after he had a stroke. He’d often mist up. The old man was usually as cool as Robert Mitchum his whole life, so his crying was something I loved and welcomed. He’d cry when I’d arrive. He’d cry when I left. He’d cry when I mentioned our old dog. I thought, “Now it’s me.” I told my doc I could not live like this. I earned my living doing shows, giving interviews and being closely observed. And as soon as someone said “Clarence,” it was going to be all over. So, wisely, off to the psychopharmacologist he sent me. Patti and I walked in and met a vibrant, white-haired, welcoming but professional gentleman in his sixties or so. I sat down and of course, I broke into tears. I motioned to him with my hand; this is it. This is why I’m here. I can’t stop crying! He looked at me and said, “We can fix this.” Three days and a pill later the waterworks stopped, on a dime. Unbelievable. I returned to myself. I no longer needed to paddle, pump, play or challenge fate. I didn’t need to tour. I felt normal.

night.” “Sometimes, yes,” Meggie had said. “But it only works for children.” Which made Mo tweak her nose. Mo. Meggie had never called her father anything else. That night—when so much began and so many things changed forever—Meggie had one of her favorite books under her pillow, and since the rain wouldn’t let her sleep she sat up, rubbed the drowsiness from her eyes, and took it out. Its pages rustled promisingly when she opened it. Meggie thought this first whisper sounded a little different from one book to another, depending on whether or not she already knew the story it was going to tell her. But she needed light. She had a box of matches hidden in the drawer of her bedside table. Mo had forbidden her to light candles at night. He didn’t like fire. “Fire devours books,” he always said, but she was twelve years old, she surely could be trusted to keep an eye on a couple of candle flames. Meggie loved to read by candlelight. She had five candlesticks on the windowsill, and she was just holding the lighted match to one of the black wicks when she heard footsteps outside. She blew out the match in alarm—oh, how well she remembered it, even many years later—and knelt to look out of the window, which was wet with rain. Then she saw him. The rain cast a kind of pallor on the darkness, and the stranger was little more than a shadow. Only his face gleamed white as he looked up at Meggie. His hair clung to his wet forehead. The rain was falling on him, but he ignored it. He stood there motionless, arms crossed over his chest as if that might at least warm him a little. And he kept on staring at the house. I must go and wake Mo, thought Meggie. But she stayed put, her heart thudding, and went on gazing out into the night as if the stranger’s stillness had infected her. Suddenly, he turned his head, and Meggie felt as if he were looking straight into her eyes. She shot off the bed so fast the open book fell to the floor, and she ran barefoot out into the dark corridor. This was the end of May, but it was chilly in the old house. There was still a light on in Mo’s room. He often stayed up reading late into the night. Meggie had inherited her love of books from her father. When she took refuge from a bad dream with him, nothing could lull her to sleep better than Mo’s calm breathing beside her and the sound of the pages turning. Nothing chased nightmares away faster than

in Howard was in one of those moods during which crazy ideas sound perfectly sensible. A bullish, handsome man with decisive eyebrows and more hair than he could find use for, Lin had a great deal of money and a habit of having things go his way. So many things in his life had gone his way that it no longer occurred to him not to be in a festive mood, and he spent much of his time celebrating the general goodness of things and sitting with old friends telling fat happy lies. But things had not gone Lin’s way lately, and he was not accustomed to the feeling. Lin wanted in the worst way to whip his father at racing, to knock his Seabiscuit down a peg or two, and he believed he had the horse to do it in Ligaroti.1 He was sure enough about it to have made some account-closing bets on the horse, at least one as a side wager with his father, and he was a great deal poorer for it. The last race really ate at him. Ligaroti had been at Seabiscuit’s throat in the Hollywood Gold Cup when another horse had bumped him right out of his game. He had streaked down the stretch to finish fourth and had come back a week later to score a smashing victory over Whichcee in a Hollywood stakes race, firmly establishing himself as the second-best horse in the West. Bing Crosby and Lin were certain that with a weight break and a clean trip, Ligaroti had Seabiscuit’s measure. Charles Howard didn’t see it that way. Since the race, he had been going around with pockets full of clippings about Seabiscuit. Anytime anyone came near him, he would wave the articles around and start gushing, like a new father. The senior Howard probably didn’t hold back when Lin was around. He was immensely proud of Lin’s success with Ligaroti, but he enjoyed tweaking his son, and he was good at it. He had once given Lin a book for Christmas entitled What You Know About Horses. The pages were blank. One night shortly after the Hollywood Gold Cup, Lin was sitting at a restaurant table across from his father and Bing Crosby. They were apparently talking about the Gold Cup, and Lin was sitting there looking at his father and doing a slow burn.

The hardest part for me is the first chapter and then the ability to leave it alone until I’m completely done with the first draft. I wanna tweak it, make it better, make it pretty, but first chapters can change, and in some instances should change, as the story unfolds. First lines in a book are my favorite thing to create. I think this is where readers decide… buy me, or not.

He takes my hand and pulls me out of the room. Paul is in the lazy chair with Hayley in his lap, reading a book, and Sam and Pete are on one of the sofas. Matt is alone on the other, so I sit down beside him and lean into his shoulder. He reaches up to tousle my hair and smiles at me. “I’m glad you’re back, kid,” he says. I lean more heavily into him, and he lifts his arm to the back of the sofa so I can nestle into his side. I breathe him in. He’s so much softer than Logan. But the cancer took its toll. He’s lost weight, and he has dark shadows beneath his eyes. “You sure you’re okay?” I whisper to him. He looks down at me and tweaks my nose as Logan pulls my feet into his lap. I lay my head on Matt’s thigh and he leans down to whisper to me. “Quit worrying about me and enjoy being back.” His hand strokes absently down the length of my hair as someone presses “play” to start the movie. I love this gentle giant. The movie starts, and it’s not a thriller or a car chase. There’s no shooting. It’s a love story. My eyes well up with tears, and I scrub them on Matt’s leg. “There’s no place like home,” I say quietly.

Economic growth requires investment in things—more machines, more basic facilities like highways or broadband—and in people, who need more and better education. Knowledge needs to be acquired and extended. Some of that extension is the product of new basic science, and some of it comes from the engineering that turns science into goods and services, and from the endless tweaking and improvement of design that, over time, turned a Model-T Ford into a Toyota Camry, or my clunky personal computer of 1983 into the sleek, almost weightless, and infinitely more powerful laptop on which I am writing this book. Investment in research and development enhances the flow of innovation, but new ideas can come from anywhere; the stock of knowledge is international, not national, and new ideas disperse quickly from the places where they are created. Innovation also needs entrepreneurs and risk-taking managers to find profitable ways of turning science and engineering into new products and services. This will be difficult without the right institutions. Innovators need to be free from the risk of expropriation, functioning law courts are needed to settle disputes and protect patents, and tax rates cannot be too high. When all of these conditions come together—as they have in the United States for a century and a half—we get sustained economic growth and higher living standards.

1 A STRANGER IN THE NIGHT The moon shone in the rocking horse’s eye, and in the mouse’s eye, too, when Tolly fetched it out from under his pillow to see. The clock went tick-tock, and in the stillness he thought he heard little bare feet running across the floor, then laughter and whispering, and a sound like the pages of a big book being turned over. L. M. Boston, The Children of Green Knowe Rain fell that night, a fine, whispering rain. Many years later, Meggie had only to close her eyes and she could still hear it, like tiny fingers tapping on the windowpane. A dog barked somewhere in the darkness, and however often she tossed and turned Meggie couldn’t get to sleep. The book she had been reading was under her pillow, pressing its cover against her ear as if to lure her back into its printed pages. “I’m sure it must be very comfortable sleeping with a hard, rectangular thing like that under your head,” her father had teased the first time he found a book under her pillow. “Go on, admit it, the book whispers its story to you at night.” “Sometimes, yes,” Meggie had said. “But it only works for children.” Which made Mo tweak her nose. Mo. Meggie had never called her father anything else. That night—when so much began and so many things changed forever—Meggie had one of her favorite books under her pillow, and since the rain wouldn’t let her sleep she

Now that you understand the key players in ecosystems, here are the key principles of building an ecosystem. They are similar to the principles of creating a community discussed in chapter 8, “The Art of Evangelizing.” CREATE SOMETHING WORTHY OF AN ECOSYSTEM. Once again, the key to evangelism, sales, presentations, and now ecosystems is a great product. In fact, if you create a great product, you may not be able to stop an ecosystem from forming. By contrast, it’s hard to build an ecosystem around crap. DESIGNATE A CHAMPION. Many employees would like to help build an ecosystem, but who wakes up every day with this task at the top of her list of priorities? Another way to look at this is, “Who’s going to get fired if an ecosystem doesn’t happen?” Ecosystems need a champion—an identifiable hero—within the company to carry the flag for the community. DON’T COMPETE WITH THE ECOSYSTEM. If you want people or organizations to take part in your ecosystem, then you shouldn’t compete with them. For example, if you want people to create apps for your product, then don’t sell (or give away) apps that do the same thing. It was hard to convince companies to create a Macintosh word processor when Apple was giving away MacWrite. CREATE AN OPEN SYSTEM. An “open system” means that there are minimal requirements to participating and minimal controls on what you can do. A “closed system” means that you control who participates and what they can do. Either can work, but I recommend an open system because it appeals to my trusting, anarchic personality. This means that members of your ecosystem will be able to write apps, access data, and interact with your product. I’m using software terminology here, but the point is to enable people to customize and tweak your product. PUBLISH INFORMATION. The natural complement of an open system is publishing books and articles about the product. This spreads information to people on the periphery of a product. Publishing also communicates to the world that your startup is open and willing to help external parties. FOSTER DISCOURSE. The definition of “discourse” is “verbal exchange.” The key word is “exchange.” Any company that wants an ecosystem should foster the exchange of ideas and opinions. This means your website should provide a forum where people can engage with other members as well as your employees. This doesn’t mean that you let the ecosystem run your company, but you should hear what members have to say. WELCOME CRITICISM. Most organizations feel warm and fuzzy toward their ecosystem as long as the ecosystem says nice things, buys their products, and never complains. The minute that the ecosystem says anything negative, however, many organizations freak out and get defensive. This is dumb. A healthy ecosystem is a long-term relationship, so an organization shouldn’t file for divorce at the first sign of discord. Indeed, the more an organization welcomes—or even celebrates—criticism, the stronger its bonds to its ecosystem become. CREATE A NONMONETARY REWARD SYSTEM. You already know how I feel about paying people off to help you, but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t reward people in other ways. Things as simple as public recognition, badges, points, and credits have more impact than a few bucks. Many people don’t participate in an ecosystem for the money, so don’t insult them by rewarding them with it.

Note that failure isn’t personal. You don’t “fail”, you tried something that didn’t work. If it didn’t work, try something else. Ask for feedback. Consult experts. Find a mentor. Tweak your plan. Or try just one more time.

Hey, my name is Russell Brunson. Before we get started, I want to introduce myself and let you know what this book is about (and more importantly, what it’s not about). This book is NOT about getting more traffic to your website—yet the “DotCom Secrets” I’m going to share with you will help you to get exponentially MORE traffic than ever before. This book is NOT about increasing your conversions—yet these DotCom Secrets will increase your conversions MORE than any headline tweak or split test you could ever hope to make.

Engagement is not meant to serve any particular purpose other than its own enhancement, and yet the result is an unnatural global amplification of the ‘easy’ emotions, which happen to be the negative ones…. Remember, with old-fashioned advertising you could measure whether a product did better after an ad was run, but now companies are measuring whether individuals changed their behaviors, and the feeds for each person are constantly tweaked to get individual behavior to change…. The scheme I am describing amplifies negative emotions more than positive ones, so it’s more efficient at harming society than at improving it.

premature optimization, where you tweak or perfect code or algorithms (optimize) too early (prematurely).

He would have turned me into Putin if we hadn’t tweaked my word choices.

They continuously improve their business, looking for small and large ways to tweak their operation to make more profit, while simplifying the tasks that need to be accomplished.

If you want to make people behave more ethically, there are two ways you can go. You can change the elephant, which takes a long time and is hard to do. Or, to borrow an idea from the book Switch, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath,54 you can change the path that the elephant and rider find themselves traveling on. You can make minor and inexpensive tweaks to the environment, which can produce big increases in ethical behavior.

As I’ve argued previously, there is no rule that says we need to allow self-defeating prophecies in our picture of precognition. The common assumption that people could (and would) “use” precognitive information to create an alternative future flies in the face of the way precognition seems to work in the real world. It is largely unconscious (thus evades our “free will”), and it is oblique and invariably misrecognized or misinterpreted until after events have made sense of it. Laius and his son both fulfill the dark prophecies about them in their attempts to evade what was foretold; their attempts backfire precisely because of things they don’t know (Laius, that his wife failed to kill his son, as ordered; Oedipus, that his adopted family in Corinth was not his real family). The Greeks called these obliquely foreseen outcomes, unavoidable because of our self-ignorance, our fate. Any mention of Oedipus naturally calls to mind Sigmund Freud, whom I am recruiting as a kind of ambivalent guide in my examination of the time-looping structure of human fate. Making a central place for Freud in a book on precognition may perplex readers given (a) his reputed disinterest in psychic phenomena, and (b) the fact that psychological science long since tossed psychoanalysis and its founder into the dustbin. In fact, (a) is a myth, as we’ll see, and (b) partly reflects the “unreason” of psychological science around questions of meaning. Although deeply flawed and occasionally off-the-mark, the psychoanalytic tradition—including numerous course-corrections by later thinkers who tweaked and nuanced Freud’s core insights—represents a sincere and sustained effort to bring the objective and subjective into suspension, to include the knower in the known without reducing either pole to the other. More to the point, it was Freud, more than probably any other thinker of the modern age, who took seriously and mapped precisely the forms of self-deception and self-ignorance that make precognition possible in a post-selected universe. The obliquity of the unconscious—the rules Freud assigned to what he called “primary process” thinking—reflect the associative and indirect way in which information from the future has to reach us. We couldn’t just appear to ourselves bearing explicit messages from the future; those messages can only be obscure, hinting, and rich in metaphor, more like a game of charades, and they will almost always lack a clear origin—like unsigned postcards or letters with no return address. Their import, or their meaning, will never be fully grasped, or will be wrongly interpreted, until events come to pass that reveal how the experiencer, perhaps inadvertently, fulfilled the premonition. It may be no coincidence that Freud’s theory maps so well onto an understanding of precognition if the unconscious is really, as I suggested, something like consciousness displaced in time.

The UN was his idea, not hers,” Phil objected. “She worked for it after it was established, but he had the idea from even before the war. World peace, the rule of law, and the end of all the empires. It was amazing how hard he tweaked Churchill and de Gaulle on that. He wouldn’t lift a finger to help them keep their old empires after the war.

I’m trying to work on a children’s book and a screenplay about zombies that take over a drug rehab. These writing projects usually go nowhere, but it feels like I always have to be working on something. Writing gives me a purpose. I think in some ways it has helped keep me alive. Without it I’m not sure I would ever have enough hope to get sober—to make that decision to live.

I’m already fantasizing about how I’m going to wind up with Steven. The self-help books said to be flexible when goal setting, to be willing to adjust and tweak accordingly, and my God am I willing to adjust and tweak. I am ready to abandon my goal of focusing on myself. I don’t want to work on my shame and humiliation and grief and bulimia and alcohol issues.

I was tossed into a pool beside the Suwannee River. Out behind an old motel. Sink or swim. Arms flailing in the deep end. Chlorine and Fear. I hurt my shoulder. Tweaked my ankle. Had to be pulled out. They laughed about it all summer. Now pools are reminders. That your friends watched you sink.

Anne Fausto-Sterling, a Brown University anthropologist—who had written about gender and prompted Bo Laurent to start the Intersex Society—rekindled the testosterone conversation in her 2000 book Sexing the Body. She suggested that the term “sex hormones” be changed to “growth hormones,” because that’s what they do. Testosterone and estrogen affect the development not only of the ovaries, testicles, vagina, and penis, but also of the liver, muscles, and bones. Indeed, they influence nearly every cell in the body. “So to think of them as growth hormones,” Fausto-Sterling once told the New York Times, “which they are, is to stop worrying that men have a lot of testosterone and women, estrogen.” Back in 1935, the same year testosterone was named, two scientists working independently figured out how to make the hormone from scratch—the key to mass production. Butenandt, the testosterone-from-pee researcher, was funded by the German company Schering. His competitor Leopold Ruzicka was sponsored by Swiss company Ciba. They both accomplished in the laboratory what the body does on its own: they tweaked a few molecules of cholesterol and turned it into testosterone. Cholesterol (in addition to its notorious reputation as an artery-clogger) also serves as the raw material from which the body makes a variety of hormones. The

But it’s such a small tweak,” I said. “It can’t be that simple. It can’t be the only reason I’ve been struggling so much this year.” “Most solutions are simple,” he said. “At least, on the surface.

When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery

As I progressed, the lower flanks of Seana Bhraigh cleared, revealing the wide gaping valley of Gleann a’ Chadha Dheirg. Teasingly, the spectacle unfolded. With each step came a slight change, my angle of view refined, and those lower flanks moved aside just a little more. After all the tweaks, the full majesty of Gleann a’ Chadha Dheirg presented itself. At times, it appeared menacing. Seana Bhraigh, on one side of this valley, rose and stood proud of everything it surveyed. On the other side, of shorter stature but of no less beauty, stood Meall Glac an Ruighe. Both stood guard like sentinels, one minute placid, the next imposing like the gates of hell itself. Steep sides plummeted from a lofty perch, tumbling down from grey to green lowlands, and a ribbon of shimmering water wound down to meet me. The valley walls ran away, stretching further and converging until they curved and carved in to meet each other

A lane instantly formed in front of Stephen, and he passed through with smiling faces and kind looks on either side of him; he noticed some of the men whose backs he had oiled earlier that morning looked remarkably cheerful, particularly Edwards, for he, being black, had a smile that flashed far whiter in the gloom; attentive hands tweaked a bench out of his way, and a ship's boy was slewed violently round on his axis and desired 'not to turn his back on the Doctor – where were his fucking manners?' Kind creatures; such good-natured faces; but they were killing Cheslin.

Tweaks: The Beginning Tweaks: The Grey Op Tweaks: The Farm Tweaks: The Soldiers Tweaks: The Trap

A vertical movement toward market incentives is noticeable, nonetheless. As industrial capitalism arises in England in the eighteenth century, new economic structures raise the stakes for commercial ventures: tantalizing rewards lure innovators into private enterprise, and the codification of English patent laws in the early 1700s gives some reassurance that good ideas will not be stolen with impunity. Despite this new protection, most commercial innovation during this period takes a collaborative form, with many individuals and firms contributing crucial tweaks and refinements to the product. The history books like to condense these slower, evolutionary processes into eureka moments dominated by a single inventor, but most of the key technologies that powered the Industrial Revolution were instances of what scholars call “collective invention.” Textbooks casually refer to James Watt as the inventor of the steam engine, but in truth Watt was one of dozens of innovators who refined the device over the course of the eighteenth century.

instance, if you believe you can always become better at everything you do, you’ll look for ways to improve. You can do this by asking for feedback, tweaking your approach, finding a mentor or just by trying one more time. Since your new identity dictates that improvement is inevitable, you will keep going until reality “bends to your will”.