Unnecessary Pressure Quotes

Valentine's Day is just a capitalist scam, designed to make people currently in a relationship spend unnecessary money in a fruitless attempt to ensure undying love and devotion. For those of us not in a relationship, Valentine's Day is simply added pressure to identify ourselves within the context of a romantic relationship, whipping us into a frenzy that only the presence of our soul mates can relieve.

Rest is a decision we make. Rest is choosing to do nothing when we have too much to do, slowing down when we feel pressure to go faster, stopping instead of starting. Rest is listening to our weariness and responding to our tiredness, not to what is making us tired. Rest is what happens when we say one simple word: "No!" Rest is the ultimate humiliation because in order to rest, we must admit we are not necessary, that the world can get along without us, that God's work does not depend on us. Once we understand how unnecessary we are, only then might we find the right reasons to say yes. Only then might we find the right reasons to decide to be with Jesus instead of working for him. Only then might we have the courage to take a nap with Jesus.

Teaching remains a heroic act to me, and teachers live a necessary and all-important life. We are killing their spirit with unnecessary pressure and expectation that seem forced and destructive to me. Long ago I was one of them. I still regret I was forced to leave them. My entire body of work is because of men and women like them.

That got me thinking about the pressure we women and moms are all under these days. It seems as if the standards are so much higher than they were just a few years ago, mainly because of what we see whenever we look on the Internet.

The Press Ganey patient surveys, it turned out, had an unintended effect in this context. It was to subtly pressure doctors to write unnecessary scripts for opiates. A doctor reluctant to write them was more likely to get a poor patient evaluation. Too many bad scores and a hospital began asking questions.

Prematurely labeling your relationship as a ‘twin flame’ or ‘soul mate’ partnership can create unnecessary stress. “Why?” you may wonder. The answer is that when we label love too early, we create the unnecessary pressure of having to live up to these beliefs and expectations.

Few things hold the potential to so drastically alter the landscape of your life as when you claim godly authority over the insane amount of unnecessary pressures you face. Be ready to see your eyes opened as you close them in prayer. One day soon a whole new kind of woman is going to be emerging from that prayer closet. A free one. A rested one. A contented one.

Having something to lose would just be a distraction. Having something to hold dear would just cause him to hesitate. If he didn’t cut away all the things that were unnecessary for battle…he would never survive.

Feelings and emotions are energetic states that do not magically dissipate when they are ignored. Much of our unnecessary emotional pain is the distressing pressure that comes from not releasing emotional energy. When we do not attend to our feelings, they accumulate inside us and create a mounting anxiety that we commonly dismiss as stress.

Whether we know it or choose to admit it, we are either an Encourager or a Discourager. We each make a choice as to which type we will be… every day. Discouragers bring “stresspools.” I call any of those places that add unnecessary stress and aggravation “stresspools.” They are just as stinky and rotten as cesspools, but “stresspools” wreak of tension, strain, anxiety, worry, hassle, pressure, and emotional trauma.

Happiness is not a choice, or we’d all be happy. Let’s stop putting unnecessary pressure on ourselves to be happy all the time, and to pretend we can choose to be happy whenever we want. That’s not how life works. Sure, we can make choices that reflect a commitment to our well-being, and the more of these choices we make, the more likely we are to find ourselves feeling good more often. Healthy choices are within our power, and are important. But we can’t choose happiness, and we just set ourselves up for failure by believing we can. Life is more than happiness, anyway. It’s okay to feel all the things we feel. It’s human. There’s no shame in wanting to be happy, of course. We all want to be happy. But rather than try to choose happiness, maybe we can choose to being kinder and more loving. That we can do. We can work hard to take better care of ourselves, and better care of each other. If we do these things, and we remember that we are all connected, all brothers and sisters, all worthy of love, maybe then happiness will choose us a little more often.

Groups have powerful self-reinforcing mechanisms at work. These can lead to group polarization—a tendency for members of the group to end up in a more extreme position than they started in because they have heard the views repeated frequently. At the extreme limit of group behavior is groupthink. This occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment.” The original work was conducted with reference to the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. However, it rears its head again and again, whether it is in connection with the Challenger space shuttle disaster or the CIA intelligence failure over the WMD of Saddam Hussein. Groupthink tends to have eight symptoms: 1 . An illusion of invulnerability. This creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks. [...] 2. Collective rationalization. Members of the group discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions. [...] 3. Belief in inherent morality. Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions. 4. Stereotyped views of out-groups. Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary. Remember how those who wouldn't go along with the dot-com bubble were dismissed as simply not getting it. 5. Direct pressure on dissenters. Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views. 6. Self-censorship. Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed. 7. Illusion of unanimity. The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous. 8. "Mind guards" are appointed. Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group's cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions. This is confirmatory bias writ large.

The twentieth-century mystic Thomas Merton wrote, “There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular—and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.”20 Merton elegantly articulates how the pressure of the create-on-demand world can cause us to look sideways at our peers and competitors instead of looking ahead. The process of discovering and refining your voice takes time. Unnecessary Creation grants you the space to discover your unique aptitudes and passions through a process of trial, error, and play that won’t often be afforded to you otherwise. Initiating a project with no parameters and no expectations from others also forces you to stay self-aware while learning to listen to and follow your intuition. Both of these are crucial skills for discovering your voice. It’s completely understandable if you’re thinking, “But wait—I hardly have time to breathe, and now you want me to cram something else into my schedule, just for my own enjoyment?” It’s true that every decision about where we spend our time has an opportunity cost, and dedicating time to Unnecessary Creation seems like a remarkably inefficient choice. In truth, it is inefficient. Consider, however, the opportunity cost of spending your life only on pragmatics. You dedicate your time to pleasing everyone else and delivering on their expectations, but you never get around to discovering your deeper aptitudes and creative capacities. Nothing is worth that.

Let the first motion be that motion of resistance in matter which is inherent in each several portion of it, and in virtue of which it absolutely refuses to be annihilated. So that no fire, no weight or pressure, no violence, no length of time can reduce any portion of matter, be it ever so small, to nothing, but it will ever be something, and occupy some space; and, to whatever straits it may be brought, will free itself by changing either its form or its place; or if this may not be, will subsist as it is; and will never come to such a pass as to be either nothing or nowhere. This motion the Schoolmen (who almost always name and define things rather by effects and incapacities than by inner causes) either denote by the axiom "two bodies cannot be in one place," or call "the motion to prevent penetration of dimensions." Of this motion it is unnecessary to give examples, as it is inherent in every body.

KEY TAKEAWAYS – Sharpening Your Creative Mind PRACTICE UNNECESSARY CREATION Use personal creative projects to explore new obsessions, skills, or ways of working in a low-pressure environment. WANDER LONELY AS A CLOUD Make time for your mind—and body—to wander when you’re stuck. Disengaging from the problem allows your subconscious to do its work. DEFINE “FINISHED” FROM THE START Keep your inner perfectionist in check by defining what finished looks like at the beginning of a project. And when you get there, stop! DON’T GO ON AUTOPILOT Repetition is the enemy of insight. Take unorthodox—even wacky—approaches to solving your stickiest problems and see what happens. SEARCH FOR THE SOURCE When the well runs dry, don’t blame a lack of talent. Creative blocks frequently piggyback on other problems. See if you can identify them. LOVE YOUR LIMITATIONS Look at constraints as a benefit, rather than an impediment. They activate our creative thinking by upping the ante.

When the Unconscious has us fully at its mercy we talk not as we should voluntarily choose to talk if we could see all the consequences of our speech, but from a need to relieve some half-perceived pressure. So we grumble humorously about our difficulties, and make ourselves self-conscious by doing so. Or we excuse ourselves defiantly. Or we complain of a trifling injustice, and are sometimes startled to see how much more pity we invoke than the occasion warrants. Once we have found a well-spring of pity and indulgence in another, we are seldom mature enough not to take advantage of it, thus reinforcing our infantilism and defeating our growth. One of the worst wiles of the Will to Fail is that it forces its victim to ask for unnecessary advice. Here again, the universal deep motive for asking for advice (unnecessarily, it should be emphasized once more) is that by so doing we can go on feeling protected and cherished even though we are no longer children. But that again means that we are being provided with advance excuses for failure. If we act on the advice of another and are unsuccessful, obviously the failure is not ours but our counsellor’s; isn’t that plain? So we can continue to day-dream of successful action, to believe that if only we had followed our first impulse we could not have failed. Since such motives can be present, it is wise to scrutinize every impulse to ask for advice. If the origin of the desire is above suspicion, then there is only one further question to ask before seeking help with a clear conscience: “If I worked this out for myself, would I consume only my own time?” If the answer to that is “Yes,” then it is generally better to work out the problem independently, unless the amount of time so expended would be grossly disproportionate to the importance of the result. If you are a creative worker, remember that time spent in finding an independent technique is seldom wasted.

As it turned out, Mary Jo White and other attorneys for the Sacklers and Purdue had been quietly negotiating with the Trump administration for months. Inside the DOJ, the line prosecutors who had assembled both the civil and the criminal cases started to experience tremendous pressure from the political leadership to wrap up their investigations of Purdue and the Sacklers prior to the 2020 presidential election in November. A decision had been made at high levels of the Trump administration that this matter would be resolved quickly and with a soft touch. Some of the career attorneys at Justice were deeply unhappy with this move, so much so that they wrote confidential memos registering their objections, to preserve a record of what they believed to be a miscarriage of justice. One morning two weeks before the election, Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy attorney general for the Trump administration, convened a press conference in which he announced a “global resolution” of the federal investigations into Purdue and the Sacklers. The company was pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and to violate the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, as well as to two counts of conspiracy to violate the federal Anti-kickback Statute, Rosen announced. No executives would face individual charges. In fact, no individual executives were mentioned at all: it was as if the corporation had acted autonomously, like a driverless car. (In depositions related to Purdue’s bankruptcy which were held after the DOJ settlement, two former CEOs, John Stewart and Mark Timney, both declined to answer questions, invoking their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves.) Rosen touted the total value of the federal penalties against Purdue as “more than $8 billion.” And, in keeping with what had by now become a standard pattern, the press obligingly repeated that number in the headlines. Of course, anyone who was paying attention knew that the total value of Purdue’s cash and assets was only around $1 billion, and nobody was suggesting that the Sacklers would be on the hook to pay Purdue’s fines. So the $8 billion figure was misleading, much as the $10–$12 billion estimate of the value of the Sacklers’ settlement proposal had been misleading—an artificial number without any real practical meaning, designed chiefly to be reproduced in headlines. As for the Sacklers, Rosen announced that they had agreed to pay $225 million to resolve a separate civil charge that they had violated the False Claims Act. According to the investigation, Richard, David, Jonathan, Kathe, and Mortimer had “knowingly caused the submission of false and fraudulent claims to federal health care benefit programs” for opioids that “were prescribed for uses that were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary.” But there would be no criminal charges. In fact, according to a deposition of David Sackler, the Department of Justice concluded its investigation without so much as interviewing any member of the family. The authorities were so deferential toward the Sacklers that nobody had even bothered to question them.

Here are just a few of the unnecessary burdens women are often made to bear. Single women are made to feel that they are “less than” other women; women who are gifted for a career are made to feel that college or a career is a waste of time and that these women are resisting “God’s best” for them. Women whose interests, giftings, and opportunities do not fit the mold of post-industrial-revolution suburbia are disdained by other women who have been gifted with husbands, fruitful uteruses, and inclinations that better portray what has been elevated to the greatest expression of godliness for a woman: the stay-at-home mom. And stay-at-home moms are weighted with additional pressures: it’s not enough to be home; they must also serve on every committee, live in a perfectly decorated (and always clean) house, and have perfectly behaved children.

Few things hold the potential to so drastically alter the landscape of your life as when you claim godly authority over the insane amount of unnecessary pressures you face. Be ready to see your eyes opened as you close them in prayer. One day soon a whole new kind of woman is going to be emerging from that prayer closet. A free one. A rested one. A contented one. Strategy 9 Your Hurts Turning Bitterness to Forgiveness

The typical procrastinator completes most assignments on time, but the pressure of doing work at the last minute causes unnecessary anxiety and diminishes the quality of the end result.

Other people could be comparing your progress to those of others. But you're in your own world and should be concerned mostly about your development. The external pressure is unnecessary.

We are not resting because social media has stolen our ability to exist without it. A perfect plan to keep us distracted and addicted. The algorithms guiding our every move, putting unnecessary pressure on many to post, retweet, hashtag, and grow their platforms obsessively.

Time pressure was most destructive when people felt they were “on a treadmill” because their schedules were packed with fragmented and unimportant tasks, unnecessary meetings, and constantly shifting plans. The resulting frustration, anxiety, and inability to concentrate on their work undermined creativity. In contrast, time pressure didn’t undermine creativity when people felt their team was on an important mission and members had long stretches to focus on essential solo work.

Right Mindfulness, and the self-scrutiny it engenders, builds a mental muscle. It is a muscle of nonjudgmental self-observation, but it can become much more than that. It is also a precursor of insight. The form such insight takes is different for everyone, but the flavor is similar. Mindfulness makes use of all of those throwaway thoughts that harken back to our childhoods, the ones we adopted to cope with the pressures of growing up. In asking us to pay attention to their repetitive nature, mindfulness also encourages us to recognize their childish quality. ... stopped in our tracks and made aware of how unnecessary such self-protective responses could be. Given the freedom to act differently, we both made a similar choice. Mindfulness showed us how.

The bird doesn’t envy the sky; it flies because it doesn’t know the weight of the earth. . . Freedom or lightness often comes from a lack of awareness of burdens or limitations. The bird flies not because it aspires to some ideal or envies something beyond itself, but because it is unburdened by the gravity—both literal and metaphorical—that might hold it down. In human terms, it reflects how sometimes we carry unnecessary weights, whether they are worries, doubts, or societal pressures, and that true freedom can come from not being bound by those invisible constraints.

No matter that both colds and flu are the work of viruses, not bacteria, and antibiotics can’t touch them. Or that the majority of colds will burn themselves out in days or weeks, without risk to life or limb. As antibiotic resistance becomes an ever more serious problem, the pressure is on doctors to be judicious in their prescribing habits. There’s plenty of room for improvement. In the US in 1998, three-quarters of all the antibiotics doled out by primary care doctors were for five respiratory infections: ear infections, sinusitis, pharyngitis (sore throat), bronchitis and upper respiratory tract infections (URI). Of the 25 million people who went to their doctor about a URI, 30 per cent were prescribed antibiotics. Not so bad, you might think, until you realise that only 5 per cent of URIs are caused by bacteria. The same goes for sore throats; 14 million people were diagnosed with pharyngitis that year, and 62 per cent of them were given antibiotics. Only 10 per cent of them would have had bacterial infections. Overall, around 55 per cent of antibiotic prescriptions given out that year were unnecessary.

What troubles me most about my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience. Other people now have to accommodate me, and I find this uncomfortable: My new dietary restrictions throw a big wrench into the basic host-guest relationship. As a guest, if I neglect to tell my host in advance that I don’t eat meat, she feels bad, and if I do tell her, she’ll make something special for me, in which case I’ll feel bad. On this matter I’m inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners. Even if the vegetarian is a more highly evolved human being, it seems to me he has lost something along the way, something I’m not prepared to dismiss as trivial. Healthy and virtuous as I may feel these days, I also feel alienated from traditions I value: cultural traditions like the Thanksgiving turkey, or even franks at the ballpark, and family traditions like my mother’s beef brisket at Passover. These ritual meals link us to our history along multiple lines—family, religion, landscape, nation, and, if you want to go back much further, biology. For although humans no longer need meat in order to survive (now that we can get our B-12 from fermented foods or supplements), we have been meat eaters for most of our time on earth. This fact of evolutionary history is reflected in the design of our teeth, the structure of our digestion, and, quite possibly, in the way my mouth still waters at the sight of a steak cooked medium rare. Meat eating helped make us what we are in a physical as well as a social sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, anthropologists tell us, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the hearth where the spoils of the hunt were cooked and then apportioned, human culture first flourished. This isn’t to say we can’t or shouldn’t transcend our inheritance, only that it is our inheritance; whatever else may be gained by giving up meat, this much at least is lost. The notion of granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal, amoral world of eater and eaten—of predation—but along the way it will entail the sacrifice, or sublimation, of part of our identity—of our own animality. (This is one of the odder ironies of animal rights: It asks us to acknowledge all we share with animals, and then to act toward them in a most unanimalistic way.) Not that the sacrifice of our animality is necessarily regrettable; no one regrets our giving up raping and pillaging, also part of our inheritance. But we should at least acknowledge that the human desire to eat meat is not, as the animal rightists would have it, a trivial matter, a mere gastronomic preference. By the same token we might call sex—also now technically unnecessary for reproduction—a mere recreational preference. Rather, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.

There is only one thing that can guarantee our having a long term ministry — that is the ability to cut ourselves off from all unnecessary hustle and bustle and outside pressure and to unite our spirits with Him, with the Lord who loves us and delights to bless us.

It is unnecessary, he added, to pressure students to produce speech or writing in the second language before they are ready, because “output” contributes nothing. It is the result of second language acquisition, not the cause. In fact, putting pressure on children to speak or write can be counterproductive, increasing stress and raising the affective filter.

When I talk about kindness in business, a few people scoff. They say, “Steve Jobs and the leaders at Apple created a pressure-cooker environment but it produced category-defining products that people love and obsess over.” That is the point — the results are not worth the cost, because there is an alternative. The goal of TRM is to create a kind, sustainable, and fulfilling experience for everyone. Caring and a sense of purpose evoke better performance than pressure and fear. The idea that only obsessive egomaniacs can produce breakthroughs is nonsense. People are the most important resource for any business, and people — whether they are employees, vendors, or customers — respond best to kindness, respect, humility, and empathy. You never know what other people are going through in their lives. Many of us are under great stress, especially when business cycles shift and economic pressures build. Others are struggling in relationships. When everyone feels valued and heard, they are more likely to show up fully and bring their best each day. Kindness is the alternative to the unnecessary “business is war” analogies that are not only tiresome but borderline offensive. It is the opposite of the “outcome justified the means” mentality that drives many entrepreneurs to consider sacrificing everything (including their morals) to build $100 million businesses in seven years. It’s success without the collateral damage. This aspect of TRM creates a healthy framework for daily interactions and long-term goals and helps people avoid burnout even when they put in heavy hours over long periods of time. We are all naturally optimistic, motivated to be better tomorrow than we are today. A kind organization understands that and leverages it. Your goal is to build a product that lasts, but to do that, you must also build an organization, a work environment, and a fabric of relationships that last too. People will remain engaged and focused on achievements when they are doing something meaningful that they care about in an organization that lets them live the way they want to live. “Caring and a sense of purpose evoke better performance than pressure and fear. The idea that only egomaniacs can produce breakthroughs is nonsense.

Jim Blair didn’t want to raise unnecessary attention. The Fayetteville attorney made a few discreet phone calls, worked some personal connections, and quietly arranged to buy a $10 million bond note that was owned by the investment firm Stephens Inc., in Little Rock. A bond note is a form of corporate debt, and in this case the $10 million in debt had been borrowed by Clift Lane, a poultry magnate from central Arkansas. In all likelihood, Stephens was more than happy to unload the debt at that point, in the early 1980s. Lane was looking like a shakier borrower by the day as his company foundered, due to weak sales and high interest payments. Lane almost certainly had no idea that Blair was buying up his debt, but he would find out soon enough. Blair handed over the note to his biggest client, and Lane’s most hated rival, Don Tyson. Tyson had cajoled Blair into becoming general counsel for Tyson’s Foods, a high-pressure job Blair was hesitant to take. He didn’t need the money, having become independently wealthy by 1980 from a series of shrewd stock investments. In spite of his personal wealth, he found himself working far more than he wanted to on the Tyson account. Blair had a job that was never done, and to call him Tyson’s general counsel was to miss his larger role at the company. He didn’t just handle lawsuits or regulatory matters. He was more like a well-trained attack dog, with a deep and creative understanding of U.S. law. Don Tyson kept him on a short leash.

He was lying on his side, and the water pressed against his face forced him to turn his head and try to raise himself a couple of inches without losing track of where he was cutting the suit. His new position was too awkward to allow him to work efficiently, so he took a deep breath and lay flat again, torquing the blade around his calf, to keep cutting away the trapped suit mate rial. His lungs screamed for air, but he ignored his body's needs, working with preternatural calm despite the danger. He tried yanking himself free, but the tough plastic cloth wouldn't tear. He tried again with the same results. Now he had to breathe, so he heaved himself upright to clear his helmet of water, but there was too much pressure. The helmet wouldn't drain. Cabrillo's lungs convulsed, allowing a trickle of bubbles to es cape his lips. It was like suppressing a cough, and the correspond ing pain in his chest was an unnecessary reminder that his brain was starving for oxygen. He was already becoming light-headed. He pulled savagely at the suit and felt it tear slightly, but it wouldn't give completely. Juan tried to force himself to calm down, but survival instincts were overwhelming any sense of logic.

Should Statements. You try to motivate yourself by saying, “I should do this” or “I must do that.” These statements cause you to feel pressured and resentful. Paradoxically, you end up feeling apathetic and unmotivated. Albert Ellis calls this “musturbation.” I call it the “shouldy” approach to life. When you direct should statements toward others, you will usually feel frustrated. When an emergency caused me to be five minutes late for the first therapy session, the new patient thought, “He shouldn’t be so self-centered and thoughtless. He ought to be prompt.” This thought caused her to feel sour and resentful. Should statements generate a lot of unnecessary emotional turmoil in your daily life. When the reality of your own behavior falls short of your standards, your shoulds and shouldn’ts create self-loathing, shame, and guilt.

Much of the increased prevalence of ADHD results from the “false positive” misidentification of kids who would be better off never receiving a diagnosis. Drug company marketing pressure often leads to unnecessary treatment with medications that can cause the harmful side effects of insomnia, loss of appetite, irritability, heart rhythm problems, and a variety of psychiatric symptoms.

The biggest benefit of being humble is that you're comfortable with yourself, and you aren't putting unnecessary pressure on yourself. By being humble, you're accepting yourself and realizing you're flawed, but you're also great.

Kenny, used a ramrod to force the ammunition down the length of the barrel of a gun that everyone referred to as Nuke-U-Ler. “Okay,” Kenny said, his speech slightly slurred, beer cans scattered around his feet, “now I just open the valve here on the propane tank and set the pressure regulator to sixty PSI.” Buster struggled to write this down in his notebook, his fingers frozen at the tips, and asked, “Now what does PSI stand for?” Kenny looked up at Buster and frowned. “I have no idea,” he said. Buster nodded and made a notation to look it up later. “Open the gas valve,” Kenny continued, “wait a few seconds for it to regulate, then close the valve and open up the second valve here. That sends the propane into the combustion chamber.” Joseph, missing two fingers on his left hand, his face round and pink like a toddler’s, took another swig of beer and then giggled. “It’s about to get good,” he said. Kenny closed the valves and pointed the contraption into the air. “Squeeze the igniter button and—” Before he could finish, the air around the men vibrated and there was a sound like nothing Buster had ever heard before, a dense, punctuated explosion. A potato, a trail of vaporous fire trailing behind it, shot into the air and then disappeared, hundreds of yards, maybe a half mile across the field. Buster felt his heart stutter in his chest and wondered, without caring to discover the answer, why something so stupid, so unnecessary and ridiculous, made him so happy. Joseph put his arm around Buster and pulled him close. “It’s awesome, isn’t it?” he asked. Buster, feeling that he might cry at any moment, nodded and replied, “Yes it is. Hell yes it is.” Buster had come to Nebraska on assignment from a men’s magazine, Potent, to write about these four ex-soldiers who had been, for the past year, building and testing the most high-tech potato cannons ever seen. “It’s so goddamned manly,” said the editor, who was almost seven years younger than Buster, “we have to put it in the magazine.” Buster had been in his one-room apartment in Florida, his Internet girlfriend not returning his e-mails, nearly out of money, not working on his overdue third novel, when the editor had called him to offer the job. Even with the terrible circumstances of his life at the moment, he was loath to accept the assignment.

CONCLUSION: THE CENTRAL BANKER AS JUDGE This breakdown of the Ulysses/punch-bowl function of the Federal Reserve doesn’t mean that separating some of the Fed’s functions from the day-to-day of electoral politics is unnecessary in the face of deflationary, rather than inflationary, pressures. In fact, the very opposite could be true: if there is a partisan movement in favor of economic policies that could result in a deflationary spiral, we would face the Great Depression redux. Keeping the power to trigger such a consequence away from partisan politics seems like a desirable goal for the institutional design of central banks. But it also requires a different theoretical frame. It may be that the frame for independence is one that we already widely accept in society: judicial independence. The U.S. Constitution gives the federal judiciary life tenure and effective budgetary independence (that is, while they can’t print their own money or raise it independent of congressional appropriations, the Congress cannot constitutionally lower judicial salaries). The reason is so that, to the fullest extent possible, any determinations that favor politicians occur either because the law compels it or because the judge and the politician share the same worldview. The idea that the judge is currying favor with the politician in hopes of further appointment or out of fear of getting her salary removed are taken off the table. It’s not a perfect system, but it is one that most recognize as an important balance between democratic values (the politician gets to appoint the judges from the polity) and some degree technocratic, objective judgment (the judges decide the cases, not the politicians).26 The crisis and the reactions to unconventional monetary policy suggest that the Fed is often performing a delicate adjudicative function, not a simply technocratic one. The problem with the technocratic, Ulysses-contract view of central banking are the two fractured constituencies mentioned above. While most economists have endorsed the Fed’s approach to postcrisis monetary policy, the “technocratic” view has been far from uniform. And, again, the populists aren’t clearly clamoring for prosperity by way of inflation, contra that Ulysses/punch-bowl view. At least in a crisis, and arguably in other times as well, the central bank isn’t

Prescribed positions aren’t selected by the birthing person listening to the inner signals of their body. They aren’t adopted due to where the pain or pressure urges room. The body or the baby gives the nudge. The prescription, like the epidural, doesn’t allow a spontaneous choice. Signals from the body are overridden by social agreement (compliance) or numbed out.

Paul had a gift from God, but he did not allow it to put unnecessary pressure on those who did not have the same gift. If you don't recognize your gifts for what they are, manifestations of God's grace, you will assume that what is easy for you is easy for others as well. This can make other people think there is something wrong with them, when in fact they simply have different gifts. False humility makes light of God's gifts; true humility values them.

...decision makers should realize that even with rational models and established parameters, situations will arise that may compel the United States to participate in peace operations. Humanitarian issues may seem compelling; domestic political pressures and pressures from allies may develop; and a range of foreign and domestic policy issues may require response, even if important U.S. security interests are not at stake directly. Military strategist and planners should be aware, also, that in a democratic society and an interdependent world, sometime decisions will be made outside established parameters for interventions. That makes the development of a strategy and the establishment of criteria all the more important, although planning for such events is necessarily less predictable and necessarily of lower priority. The systematic ability to analyze both the significance for national security and the immediate rationale for involvement may permit policy makers to withstand pressures if the consequences might be negative, or set limits that reduce potential harm. The...debate...about U.S. involvement in the former Yugoslavia is a microcosm of the varied and conflicting pressures that may arise. Some combination of assessment of national interest weighed against risk has militated against any commitment of ground troops while hostilities continue. Yet the importance of protecting allies may cause the policy to bend somewhat before the war ends, and the United States may become involved in an operation on a scale that may have been unnecessary if a strategy and the organization of national assets to support it had been available to prevent the crisis in the first place. Traditionally, peace operations, especially peacekeeping, were viewed as operations that came at the tail end of conflict. There will continue to be a need for peace operations to assist in bringing about and guaranteeing peace. However, the value of peace operations in dealing with precursor instabilities - to prevent, contain, or ameliorate incipient conflicts -- must be considered also. In this sense, peace operations are investments. Properly conducted by forces that have planned, prepared and trained for them within the proper strategic framework, peace operations may well preclude the need to deploy larger forces at substantial costs in both blood and treasure later.

When it comes to perfection, the bottom line is this: Stop putting unnecessary pressure on yourself to achieve some unattainable standard. Give yourself and others grace and consider how you feel and what you want to be remembered for—then learn