Underappreciated Quotes

So I told them the truth: the hours are terrible, the pay is terrible, the conditions are terrible; you’re underappreciated, unsupported, disrespected and frequently physically endangered. But there’s no better job in the world.

Apparently, this really was Kill Charley Davidson Week. Or at least Horribly Maim Her.... It would probably never get government recognition, though, destined to be underappreciated like Halloween or Thesaurus Day.

I’m glad you think so. I’ve always considered my sense of humor to be largely underappreciated, so it’s nice to finally meet a fan.

I'm not trying to get you to sleep with me. I just literally had to lie down. Thank you for appreciating my face. I've always thought I had an underappreciated face. - Kenji

Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '. Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice. I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying 'How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry : Guaranteed success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say - ' Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself - And you will be happy '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.

Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked. But the modern workplace does not work for women. From its location, to its hours, to its regulatory standards, it has been designed around the lives of men and it is no longer fit for purpose. The world of work needs a wholesale redesign--of its regulations, of its equipment, of its culture--and this redesign must be led by data on female bodies and female lives. We have to start recognising that the work women do is not an added extra, a bonus that we could do without: women's work, paid and unpaid, is the backbone of our society and our economy. It's about time we started valuing it.

With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it’s essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint. I realize it may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how easily we lose sight of the fact that words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

By being so focused on how things “could be,” we are under-appreciating how great things already are.

She raised her eyebrows, looping her hands around his neck and wriggling provocatively. 'Looks like I've just been promoted to Alpha then, huh?' Lucien made a face. 'Well the job is yours if you want it, but I should warn you that the contract is bull crap. I've received none of the perks that were promised.' 'Perks?' 'Oh, you know... a lifetime supply of beer and foot massages, a harem of women to bathe and clothe me etcetera...' She snorted and pulled back from him. 'Harem of women?' He grinned unrepentantly. 'Did I mention my sense of humour is greatly underappreciated?

Wow,” she said. “Do you realise how wonderful you sound?” “Yes, I do,” he said with a firm nod. “And I think I’m underappreciated.

He's my dark storm cloud in the middle of a drought-an underappreciated beauty that makes me feel equally alive as the sun or the stars.

SELFLESS LOVE. If you have a special person in your life, but you find yourselves arguing, irritated and/or fighting out of the blue… you both need to try to step back and be selfless and think of the other person... with no ego of your own. No ego. We are ALL dealing with our own tough issues. We may keep them to ourselves, but we all have struggles. If you BOTH allow yourselves to step into each others shoes- to have the awareness and respect for each others issues and struggles... that will most likely allow the love that you have for each other to shine through at its brightest. There will be ups and downs- feelings of being under-appreciated for both. It will happen. But let that be the worst that happens. Unity through diversity. That's the greatest love. A selfless love. It’s paradoxical, but you each would get back more than you give out. That's the love that conquers all things that’s mentioned in the Bible. It will be challenging for both of you, but well worth it.

Stability is much underappreciated, especially by those who enjoy its benefits.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An underappreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder, and a failure to appreciate the precious niches of order we carve out, are a major source of human folly.

Manners,[...] are severely underappreciated in my opinion". "Oh?" "Where practiced well, they remove the probability that someone in my position will be forced to go through the effort of killing someone in yours. Believe that on occasion that much death can become tedious.

A man who wears his heart on his sleeve is a rarity, yet often underappreciated.

Clearing her throat, Peabody turned the cube on record. "I owe Dallas, Lieutenant Meaniepants Eve, twenty dollars to be paid out of my hard-earned, under-appreciated detective's salary next payday. Peabody, Detective Churchmouse Delia.

If you're brilliant and undiscovered and underappreciated (in whatever field you choose), then you're being too generous about your definition of brilliant.

psychological research clearly shows that people who feel underappreciated tend to resent criticism and ignore the advice they’re given.

He's my dark storm cloud in the middle of a drought - an underappreciated beauty that makes me feel equally alive as the sun or the stars.

I made my first home there and had been happy, because to be alienated in one's own country, in one's own hometown, among one's kin and peers, was problematic, but nothing could be more natural than to be alienated in a foreign country, and so there I had at last naturalized my estrangement. This may be one of the underappreciated pleasures of travel: of being at last legitimately lost and confused.

A wife is like a children's movie; always under-appreciated and without either, life would be incomplete

Be nice,' we're often told, particularly we women-- along with other populations under-appreciated and over-oppressed... Until recently, that has mostly been said to those without power... Because those in power didn't have to be nice, were never expected to be nice. Recently it's being said more often to those with great power, and there is value in that.

Consistency is an under-appreciated inspirational quality. It’s that ability to conduct yourself in a consistent, reliable manner that others will respect and appreciate.

Fungi constitute the most poorly understood and underappreciated kingdom of life on earth

The consultant experiment,” I continued, “showed that people dramatically underappreciate the extent and depth to which a feeling of accomplishment influences people.

The wisdom of skin is underappreciated.

I'd rather be underappreciate, and under worked, than over appreciate and over worked.

Praise is underused and underappreciated as a management tool.

Shoving aside fear and self-doubt, I met his eyes, aiming for absolute confidence in both my stance and my voice. “My father taught me to disarm my opponent at all costs—regardless of his choice of weapon,” I said, glancing pointedly at his groin. “Are you threatening me?” “Damn right. Lay one hand on me and you’ll never stand to pee again.” His eyes darkened, and his laugh sounded forced. “You’re very funny, gatita.” “I’m glad you think so. I’ve always considered my sense of humor to be largely under-appreciated, so it’s nice to finally meet a fan.

At its most basic, the logic of 'meritocracy' is ironclad: putting the most qualified, best equipped people into the positions of greates responsibility and import...But my central contention is that our near-religious fidelity to the meritocratic model comes with huge costs. We overestimate the advantages of meritocracy and underappreciate its costs, because we don't think hard enough about the consequences of the inequality it produces. As Americans, we take it as a given that unequal levels of achievement are natural, even desirable. Sociologist Jermole Karabel, whose work looks at elite formation, once said he 'didnt think any advanced democracy is as obsessed with equality of opportunity or as relatively unconcerned with equality of condition' as the United States. This is our central problem. And my proposed solution for correcting the excesses of our extreme version of meritocracy is quite simple: make America more equal

I loved rhubarb, that hardy, underappreciated garden survivor that leafed out just as the worst of winter melted away. Not everyone was a fan, especially of the bitter, mushy, overcooked version. Yet sometimes a little bitterness could bring out the best in other flavors. Bitter rhubarb made sunny-day strawberry face the realities of life- and taste all the better for it. As I brushed the cakes with a deep pink glaze made from sweet strawberry and bottled rhubarb bitters, I hoped I would change rhubarb doubters. Certainly, the little Bundt cakes looked as irresistible as anything I had ever seen in a French patisserie.

Limitless compassion. Finding beauty in the underappreciated. Patience devoted to a job well loved. These are the values that set Sensitive Intuitives on fire. Not competition and not reward-based approval systems.

Fungi constitute the most poorly understood and underappreciated kingdom of life on earth. Though indispensable to the health of the planet (as recyclers of organic matter and builders of soil), they are the victims not only of our disregard but of a deep-seated ill will, a mycophobia that Stamets deems a form of “biological racism.” Leaving aside their reputation for poisoning us, this is surprising in that we are closer, genetically speaking, to the fungal kingdom than to that of the plants. Like us, they live off the energy that plants harvest from the sun. Stamets has made it his life’s work to right this wrong, by speaking out on their behalf and by demonstrating the potential of mushrooms to solve a great many of the world’s problems.

It seems the trees' plight is to always be underappreciated by humans while working the hardest of any plant on earth for them. We cut them down, we poison them, we introduce disease and destructive pests. But we also plant them when someone is born, we plant them when someone dies. We want them to measure and commemorate our lives, even as the way we live hurts them.

This chapter is dedicated to those other delights of punctuation--exquisite little squiggles, those most delightful dots and dashes, and other tragically under-appreciated tiny tidbits! Nah. I'm just yankin' your chain.

These bizarre examples attempt to prove one conceptual point or another by deliberately reducing all but one underappreciated feature of some phenomenon to zero, so that what really counts can shine through. The twin earth example sets internal similarity to a maximum (you are whisked off to Twin Earth without being given a chance to register this huge shift) so that external context can be demonstrated to be responsible for whatever our intuition tells us.

Next is diet or nutrition—or as I prefer to call it, nutritional biochemistry. The third domain is sleep, which has gone underappreciated by Medicine 2.0 until relatively recently. The fourth domain encompasses a set of tools and techniques to manage and improve emotional health. Our fifth and final domain consists of the various drugs, supplements, and hormones that doctors learn about in medical school and beyond. I lump these into one bucket called exogenous molecules, meaning molecules we ingest that come from outside the body.

Drinking the same wines all the time is really boring.

I asked my Greek chorus about this sort of hero: the Underappreciated Personification of Resolve.

Strong women can be so underappreciated unless you’re screaming for their help.

WIthout the thorns the beauty would be too easy. It would be underappreciated. Rose and Thorn, you can have one without the other, and that's what makes them so precious.

Synchronous, face-to-face, physical interactions and rituals are a deep, ancient, and underappreciated part of human evolution.

Of the many things wealth was good for, one of the most underappreciated, in her opinion, was that it allowed you to purchase self-absolution.

My impression of you," Professor Ni told Raj gently, "is that I can give you a lot of work to do, but I don't have to pay much attention to you. Remember, in Silicon Valley, you can be the smartest, most capable person, but if you can't express yourself aside from showing your work, you'll be underappreciated. Many foreign-born professionals experience this; you're a glorified laborer instead of a leader.

Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize. To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence. Why

You are a remarkable man, Charles Cornick.” He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and put his chin on the top of her head. “I know,” he confided lightly. “And often underappreciated by those who don’t know any better.” She poked him with a finger and looked up at him. “And funny—though I expect that is another facet of your character that goes unappreciated even more often than your remarkableness.” “Some people don’t even notice,” he said in a mock-mournful voice.

It is understated and underappreciated, yet it plays the most important role. The bass is the link between harmony and rhythm. It is the foundation of a band. It is what all the other instruments stand upon, but it is rarely recognized as that.

When you look through a window you gasp at the beautiful tree in the backyard or the magical sunrise coming over the horizon, No one looks at a window and is taken away by the complexity of the transparency of millions of atoms joined together to form, from our perception of a crystal clear yet structural opening to the exterior, the same is with life, if you spend your whole life being a medium to enable others then you will be nothing but a sheet of glass, overused, underappreciated, and fragile to opportunity

For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as science.

I have certainly heard of the Subtle Art of Shutting Up, but I can't say I've practiced it all that much. I greatly prefer the underappreciated genius of Speaking My Mind. I figure if someone doesn't like what I have to say, they shouldn't put their ears in close proximity to my mouth.

Unfortunately, our negativity biases also make us underappreciate or ignore the real progress that humans have made in tackling environmental problems in the past. Furthermore, they militate against an attitude of rational optimism about our ability to solve environmental problems in the future.

The bottom line is that Germany is still an underappreciated food country. Furthermore, buying bread, cheese, and especially sausage in the supermarket will almost certainly not be disappointing. The best ethnic food in Germany is often from groups that don’t make their way in very large numbers to the United States.

That was why something might become a ghost- its life had meant so little, no one had even mourned it.

Byron had said teaching was an underpaid and underappreciated profession. He’d said it drained the life out of people. He’d said the system takes advantage of teachers and sets them up to fail, so why would any intelligent, reasonable person with an aptitude for science or mathematics or engineering ever willingly accept a teacher’s salary to do a teacher’s job?

And I can think of no more accurate description of how most of us parents feel far too much of the time. Far too often, we feel overwhelmed. We feel overstretched, overcommitted, underprepared, and underappreciated. That’s a recipe for feeling overwhelmed. As a result, most of us feel a gnawing sense of inadequacy. We don’t just feel like bad parents, we feel like failures.

All this time I kept my gaze fixed on hers, an enormously difficult task given the gravitational pull exerted by her cleavage. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them. The Chinese might have invented gunpowder and the noodle, but the West had invented cleavage, with profound if underappreciated implications.

To desecrate the dead is to humiliate the living, and humiliation may be the most powerful and most underappreciated force in human affairs. The angry citizen can shout, and the terrified citizen can lock the doors, or flee, or move, or arm himself. But the humiliated citizen can neither express her feelings nor respond to the offense. For it is in the nature of humiliation that it happens at the hands of someone with greater power:

Santería was traditionally an unacknowledged and underappreciated aspect of what it meant to be Cuban. Yet the syncretism between the Yoruban religion that the slaves brought to the island and the Catholicism of their masters is, in my opinion, the underpinning of Cuban culture. Every artistic realm--music, theater, literature, etc.--owes a huge debt to santería and the slaves who practiced it and passed it on, largely secretively, for generations.

Those struggling and without work resent the employed. The employed are encouraged to resent the poor and unemployed, who they are constantly told are scroungers and freeloaders. Those trapped in bullshit jobs resent those who do real productive or beneficial labor, underpaid, degraded, and underappreciated, increasingly resent those who they see as monopolizing those few jobs where one can live well while doing something useful, high-minded, or glamorous - who they refer to as "the liberal elite".

for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence.

Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '. Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice. I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying 'How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry : Guaranteed success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say - ' Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself - And you will be happy '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.” ― Stephen Fry

I might think I’m smarter than everyone else, or a great person. These seem positive and yet, as with believing I’m stupid, I’m likely to feel isolated and separate from others, misunderstood, and underappreciated. I may well become protective of my “status,” which could be the only value I feel I have as a person and the only characteristic through which I can relate to people. I would become less and less willing to look the fool, or risk revealing myself as “normal” or fallible, and so cut myself off from any real and honest interactions or self-expressions. We can see how this will feed upon itself and how the condition could easily become more and more intolerable as it grows.

…the third article we discovered was by Linda Hartling, who ties together research from several areas to propose a model explaining how humiliation can lead to violence. Hartling suggests that humiliation can trigger a series of reactions, including social pain, decreased self-awareness, increased self-defeating behavior, and decreased self-regulation, that ultimately lead to violence. Hartling and colleagues state that “humiliation is not only the most underappreciated force in international relations, it may be the missing link in the search for root causes of political instability and violent conflict…perhaps the most toxic social dynamic of our age.” This connection between humiliation and aggression/violence explains much of what we’re seeing today. Amplified by the reach of social media, dehumanizing and humiliating others are becoming increasingly normalized, along with violence. Now, rather than humiliating someone in front of a small group of people, we have the power to eviscerate someone in front of a global audience of strangers. I know we all have deeply passionate and cultural beliefs, but shame and humiliation will never be effective social justice tools. They are tools of oppression. I remember reading this quote from Elie Wiesel years ago and it’s become a practice for me-even when I’m enraged or afraid: “Never allow anyone to be humiliated in your presence.

Find what you love to do, what you're good at and passionate about and then dedicate your entire life to working hard at it. I wil say it again. Work hard. I mean that. Even if you're not sure where that work will lead, even if it is underappreciated or undervalued. Do it because the satisfaction, pride, and sense of self that comes from a job well done; from being the very best at what you do; from knowing that you did this, will be your ulltimate weapon and our greatest shield in a life that will often test you. One day destiny may conspire to take everything away from you, but it can never take away the abilities you have cultivated. As I am sure your grandfather will tell you, your winning lottery ticket is your mind.

These are the daily annoyances, the subtle messages of whiteness. But we bear other scars, too. Over and over I have seen white men and women get praise for their gifts and skills while women of color are told only about their potential for leadership. When white people end up being terrible at their jobs, I have seen supervisors move mountains to give them new positions more suited to their talents, while people of color are told to master their positions or be let go. I have been in the room when promises were made to diversify boardrooms, leadership teams, pastoral staff, faculty and staff positions, only to watch committees appoint a white man in the end. It's difficult to express how these incidents accumulate, making you feel undervalued, underappreciated, and ultimately expendable.

The Nook is an under-appreciated genius of a lovemark. The team at Barnes & Noble got a lot right with the Nook, and from a lovemark perspective, I think they created a more intimate product than any other dedicated e-reader. The rubber back behind the Nook is soft and pliable—not hard metal like the later Kindles—making it sensual and intimate. Barnes & Noble also recreated the engraved faces of famous authors from their stores and used them as Nook screensavers. It’s brilliant, not just because it makes reading more intimate, but also because it solidifies the Barnes & Noble brand itself.

Diversify Your Sources of Self-Esteem Another way to increase your resiliency is to diversify your sources of self-esteem. Just like putting all your money in a single stock is risky, putting all your self-esteem eggs in one basket is psychologically risky. If your self-esteem is almost entirely based on your career achievements, having a flat stomach, or how hot your boyfriend or girlfriend is, you’ll be at more risk of coming unstuck psychologically if your career stalls, you gain weight, or your hot boyfriend or girlfriend dumps you. You’ll feel less anxious if your self-esteem isn’t too closely tied to just one or two domains. Experiment: Self-esteem is composed of (1) a sense of self-worth and (2) a sense of being competent at things. For example, sources of self-worth might involve loving and being loved by others; an ability to make other people feel comfortable and at ease, or positive contributions you make to society, your field, or your community. In contrast, a sense of competency might come from being good at computer tasks, being able to prepare a dinner party for 10, or paying your bills on time. Try coming up with three sources of self-worth and three things you’re competent at. Aim to recognize areas you’ve tended to underappreciate.

We want things to return to normal, back to a world in which we do not have to waste time rebutting demented conspiracy theories and fact-checking farcical lies every single day. We want a government that operates competently and honestly, headed by a president who behaves with dignity and integrity. If we were at risk of under-appreciating the quiet grace of decency, Trump has cured us of that. But after we evict the squatter, we must repair the house he trashed. Trump became president because millions of Americans felt that a self-satisfied elite had created a pleasant society only for themselves. Millions of other Americans felt disregarded and discarded. They determined to crash their way in, and they wielded Trump as their crowbar to pry open the barriers against them. Trump is a criminal and deserves the penalties of law. Trump's enablers and politics and media are contemptable and deserve the scorn of honest patriots. But Trump's voters are our compatriots. Their fate will determine ours. You do not beat Trump until you have restored an America that has room for all its people. The resentments that produced Trump will not be assuaged by contempt for the resentful. Reverse prejudice, reverse stereotyping, never mind whether they are right or wrong--they are wrong--just be aware that they are acids poored upon the connections that bind a democratic society. [...] Maybe you cannot bring everybody along with you. But you still must try--for your own sake, as well as theirs.

The most impressive documentation of Europe’s rising creative powers may be found in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). During their successive rediscoveries in modern times, these astonishing collections were mistakenly perceived as sketches of original inventions, products of an individual “Renaissance” genius. The misconception was due in part to the aesthetic quality of the drawings, and in part to a prevailing notion of the character of invention, an exaggeration of the contribution of the individual “inventor” and an underappreciation of the social nature of technical innovation.

Are any of your employees on the brink of going AWOL because they’re overworked and underappreciated? When is it right for the leader to overturn protocol in the effort to rescue a single stressed-out subordinate? What messages do you need to keep repeating in your business to make sure your management team doesn’t take care of themselves first, to the neglect of their teams?

Many techies see themselves today as overworked, underappreciated lackeys of corporations that couldn't care less about either them or technology. Ballooning workloads will only deepen this attitude.

In these words glimmer the Surrealist proposal for finding the marvelous in the banal, in the spaces of everyday life, spaces overlooked and underappreciated... they made a first effort to re-enchant the quotidian pathways and places of the city by walking through them.

One of the underappreciated benefits of venturing into remote landscapes is that we are often thrown into connecting with each other.

Bridges once again proves what an underappreciated actor he is, while Williams is at his manic best,’ said Chuck O’Leary of FulvueDrive-In.com. ‘The Fisher King

Kirkus (starred review): A lucid, expertly researched biography of the brilliant Nikola Tesla. (Readers) will absolutely enjoy (Munson’s) sympathetic, insightful portrait. Booklist: Celebratory, comprehensive profile. ….A well-written, insightful addition to the legacy of this still-underappreciated visionary genius. Library Journal: Entrepreneurs, inventors, engineers, and futurists will find this biography inspiring. Gretchen Bakke (author of "The Grid"): Munson has provided us with an intimate tapestry of Tesla's life, personality, and inventions. Filled with quotes, and clearly researched with great care, Munson brings Tesla to life, not as a superhero but as a man—both ordinary and extraordinary. What surprised me, and proved to be one of the great pleasures of the book was to realize how much Tesla’s story is an immigrant story. Anne Pramaggiore (CEO of Commonwealth Edison): Tesla is an exactingly-researched history and wonderfully crafted tale of one of the most important and fascinating visionaries of the technological age. This book’s teachings have never been more relevant than in today’s world of digital transformation.

While meditation is not all about sitting still on the floor or in a chair, taking your seat both literally and metaphorically is an important element of mindfulness. We could say that in essence, it is a direct and very convenient way to cultivate greater intimacy with your own life unfolding and with your innate capacity to be aware—and to realize how valuable, overlooked, and underappreciated an asset that awareness actually is.

All the solitary hours a writer pours into a novel would avail little if not for the solitary hours poured into it by many unseen others. Anyway I assume those others also do their work in solitude; maybe they work in pairs or crews or tag teams, but I’d rather imagine them slaving over my words in a poorly lit and otherwise unoccupied room, just as I do. Maybe they will have a little music for company, but nothing too upbeat, something along the lines of Mozart’s Requiem, for example, because as everybody who has ever worked on a book knows, this work can be as grueling in its way as crawling on your knees through ten acres of ground-hugging plants to pick potato beetles off one at a time and flick them into a galvanized bucket filled with soapy water. But it can also be as transcendent as the Requiem—or as picking potato beetles when you are in the right frame of mind for it. Knowing other people are engaged in the same underappreciated labor and squeezing a perverse kind of joy out of it is what keeps me writing, especially if it’s my field of potatoes they are picking over. Sometimes I like to picture each of my collaborators working their way down a row, their backs aching, hands filthy with beetle juice, fingernails broken, eyes going cross-eyed in the faltering light. It’s inspirational. Thirty years ago, I would have written (and did) a dull-as-dirt acknowledgment to thank each of my collaborators. It would have had all the excitement of a divorce decree. Back then I had no idea how difficult and precarious a job it is to turn out a novel every couple of years. It gets more difficult and precarious every year. So does living. To me, they’re pretty much the same thing.

The Importance of Becoming Metacognitively Sophisticated as a Learner Whatever the reasons for our not developing accurate mental models of ourselves as learners, the importance of becoming sophisticated as a learner cannot be overemphasized. Increasingly, coping with the changes that characterize today’s world—technological changes, job and career changes, and changes in how much of formal and informal education happens in the classroom versus at a computer terminal, coupled with the range of information and procedures that need to be acquired—requires that we learn how to learn. Also, because more and more of our learning will be what Whitten, Rabinowitz, and Whitten (2006) have labeled unsupervised learning, we need, in effect, to know how to manage our own learning activities. To become effective in managing one’s own learning requires not only some understanding of the complex and unintuitive processes that underlie one’s encoding, retention, and retrieval of information and skills, but also, in my opinion, avoiding certain attribution errors. In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977) refers to the tendency, in explaining the behaviors of others, to overvalue the role of personality characteristics and undervalue the role of situational factors. That is, behaviors tend to be overattributed to a behaving individual’s or group’s characteristics and underattributed to situational constraints and influences. In the case of human metacognitive processes, there is both a parallel error and an error that I see as essentially the opposite. The parallel error is to overattribute the degree to which students and others learn or remember to innate ability. Differences in ability between individuals are overappreciated, whereas differences in effort, encoding activities, and whether the prior learning that is a foundation for the new learning in question has been acquired are underappreciated.

Life coaching is built around metaphor’s rhetorical alchemy, which turns something abstract (psychological repression, your underappreciated talents) into something concrete (a box, a magic wand).

Maybe she's single by choice. Maybe she's decided that after some time of being overlooked, underappreciated and neglected that she no longer wants to be placed in a situation where she feels like she's wasting her time. Maybe she's single because she promised herself to never settle for less than what she's always wanted and deserves.

2. Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan. What’s the saying? You plan, God laughs. Financial and investment planning are critical, because they let you know whether your current actions are within the realm of reasonable. But few plans of any kind survive their first encounter with the real world. If you’re projecting your income, savings rate, and market returns over the next 20 years, think about all the big stuff that’s happened in the last 20 years that no one could have foreseen: September 11th, a housing boom and bust that caused nearly 10 million Americans to lose their homes, a financial crisis that caused almost nine million to lose their jobs, a record-breaking stock-market rally that ensued, and a coronavirus that shakes the world as I write this. A plan is only useful if it can survive reality. And a future filled with unknowns is everyone’s reality. A good plan doesn’t pretend this weren’t true; it embraces it and emphasizes room for error. The more you need specific elements of a plan to be true, the more fragile your financial life becomes. If there’s enough room for error in your savings rate that you can say, “It’d be great if the market returns 8% a year over the next 30 years, but if it only does 4% a year I’ll still be OK,” the more valuable your plan becomes. Many bets fail not because they were wrong, but because they were mostly right in a situation that required things to be exactly right. Room for error—often called margin of safety—is one of the most underappreciated forces in finance. It comes in many forms: A frugal budget, flexible thinking, and a loose timeline—anything that lets you live happily with a range of outcomes. It’s different from being conservative. Conservative is avoiding a certain level of risk. Margin of safety is raising the odds of success at a given level of risk by increasing your chances of survival. Its magic is that the higher your margin of safety, the smaller your edge needs to be to have a favorable outcome.

teaching was an underpaid and underappreciated profession. He’d said it drained the life out of people. He’d said the system takes advantage of teachers and sets them up to fail, so why would any intelligent, reasonable person with an aptitude for science or mathematics or engineering ever willingly accept a teacher’s salary to do a teacher’s job?

Do not underestimate or underappreciate  The beauty and the power of the Blackness With time, the sun, and the stars, will dissipate. But still await and remain, everlastingly, the Darkness.

Many bets fail not because they were wrong, but because they were mostly right in a situation that required things to be exactly right. Room for error—often called margin of safety—is one of the most underappreciated forces in finance. It comes in many forms: A frugal budget, flexible thinking, and a loose timeline— anything that lets you live happily with a range of outcomes.

The obscure scientific term explaining why we see most other people as unintelligent or crazy is naïve realism. Its origins trace back to at least the 1880s, when philosophers used the term to suggest that we should take our perceptions of the world at face value. In its modern incarnation, it has almost the opposite meaning. Stanford social psychologist Lee Ross uses the term to indicate that although most people do take their perceptions of the world at face value, this is a profound error that regularly causes virtually unresolvable conflicts between people.

If a system is to deal successfully with the diversity of challenges its environment produces, then it needs to have a repertoire of responses (at least) as nuanced as the problems thrown up by the environment. So a viable system is one that can handle the variability of its environment. Or, as Ashby put it, only variety can absorb variety.

consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways.

We go into the GAP about ourselves, undervaluing and underappreciating ourselves. We go into the GAP about other people, turning them into a problem or an enemy. We go into the GAP about far too many things, and perhaps it’s a good time to stop complaining.

Feeling overwhelmed and maybe a bit underappreciated, we moms gravitate toward the insistence of well-meaning mom-fluencers who tell us what we “deserve”—we “deserve” a break. Praise. Recognition. To take our lives back and to remember that we’re more than just a mother. We’re told we deserve to be “authentic” selves by reclaiming “autonomy” over our lives and taking back the identity we had before we became moms. There’s some truth in these assurances. We do need a break. It would be nice for our husbands to acknowledge our hard work. We do have roles in addition to being a mom. But the deceptive premise in each of them is that we’re entitled to a tangible reward for simply doing our job. In that way, motherhood is subtly depicted as something that happened to us rather than something we chose and that God graciously gave us.

The thing that makes tail events easy to underappreciate is how easy it is to underestimate how things compound. How for example 9/11 prompted the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, which helped drive the housing bubble, which led to the financial crisis, which led to a poor jobs market, which led to 10s of millions to seek a college education, which led to $1.6 trillion in student loans with a 10.8% default rate. It's not intuitive to link 19 hijackers to the current weight of student loans, but that's what happens in a world driven by a few outlier tail events.

I do a job which I ought to find satisfying, and it leaves me bored and empty." "A diet of milk and honey, when you have teeth," he observed.

Most of my pedagogical excursions in my life have been with students (junior high through college) and the general public. Only rarely do I get the chance to talk to teachers, although I love nothing more. Apart from generally being an enthusiastic and friendly lot, they shape the conduit of our nation's brain trust. Along the way, they work in the trenches while the rest of us sit at home with a TV remote in our palm and bark out complaints about the state of the educational system. The nation's teachers are collectively underappreciated, underrespected, and underpaid, but they are not all created equal.

If you think you are being underpaid, underappreciated, and underdeveloped in your current job, then you are being hurt as a human being--and that is unacceptable.

Moonrise is underappreciated. Sunrises and sunsets get all the glory while the moon does the same amount of work without praise.

She’d had no idea teaching would be this physically and mentally exhausting. One day in the classroom, and she was convinced America’s teaching professionals were grossly underappreciated, not to mention underpaid.

I didn’t figure you for a turtle lover, Mr. Harper. What’s next? Feeding ducks? Adopting puppies?” Her playful questions coaxed a wider smile from me. “Don’t hold your breath. I watched a lot of Franklin growing up.” Her face glowed with laughter. “Ah, that explains it. I was an Arthur girl myself.” I filed that away for future reference. There were no unimportant details when it came to Stella. “Aardvarks are underappreciated, but sadly, they’re not a pet cause for Richard Wyatt’s wife. No pun intended,” I added.

Years were wasted trying to make him feel better. I never stopped to see if I felt appreciated.

Making a home is hard work, and for some reason it's underappreciated. It's way to make sense of things.

Spontaneity is an underappreciated dimension of spirituality. In fact, spiritual maturity has less to do with long-range visions than it does with moment-by-moment sensitivity to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. And it is our moment-by-moment sensitivity to the Holy Spirit that turns life into an everyday adventure.