Values Formation Quotes

There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are "nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations." But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my "defense mechanisms," nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my "reaction formations.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.

formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance.

You are still young and stupid. Human life has no value. Haven't you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you've seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?" She made a tiny spitting sound. "You can always get some more people. they reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. Why should they be valuable? Do you know that it costs us less to recruit and use up a real snuff whore than it does to set up and run the virtual equivalent format. Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It's the axiomatic truth of our times.

All that incoherence. Selection, election, option, alternative. All behind him now. Codes and formats. Courses of action. Values, bias, predilection. Choice is a subtle form of disease.

Our attitudes, our perspectives, our ways of relating to others, our methods of responding to the circumstances of the world around us, our self-image, even our understanding of God have all been shaped by the destructive values and dehumanizing structures of the world's brokenness.

I consider it completely irresponsible that public schools offer sex education but no systematic guidance to adolescent girls, who should be thinking about how they want to structure their future lives: do they want children, and if so, when should that be scheduled, with the advantages and disadvantages of each option laid out. Because of the stubborn biological burden of pregnancy and childbirth, these are issues that will always affect women more profoundly than men. Starting a family early has its price for an ambitions young woman, a career hiatus that may be difficult to overcome. On the other hand, the reward of being with one's children in their formative years, instead of farming out that fleeting and irreplaceable experience to day care centres or nannies, has an inherent emotional and perhaps spiritual value that has been lamentable ignored by second-wave feminism.

People used to think that learning to read evidenced human progress; they still celebrate the decline of illiteracy as a great victory; they condemn countries with a large proportion of illiterates; they think that reading is a road to freedom. All this is debatable, for the important thing is not to be able to read, but to understand what one reads, to reflect on and judge what one reads. Outside of that, reading has no meaning (and even destroys certain automatic qualities of memory and observation). But to talk about critical faculties and discernment is to talk about something far above primary education and to consider a very small minority. The vast majority of people, perhaps 90 percent, know how to read, but do not exercise their intelligence beyond this. They attribute authority and eminent value to the printed word, or, conversely, reject it altogether. As these people do not possess enough knowledge to reflect and discern, they believe—or disbelieve—in toto what they read. And as such people, moreover, will select the easiest, not the hardest, reading matter, they are precisely on the level at which the printed word can seize and convince them without opposition. They are perfectly adapted to propaganda.

But for Christians, politics is not important because we ascribe great value to political ideas, but because we ascribe great value to the human person.

Humans possess the ability to engage in both external observation and internal introspection. How much time they invest engaged in each activity is reflective of their values, which manifest themselves in behavior, personality formation, and influences the selection of narrative stories that they share with their brethren.

If there’s one place, then, where we can intervene in a way that will pay dividends for society down the road, it’s in the classroom. Yet that’s barely happening. All the big debates in education are about format. About delivery. About didactics. Education is consistently presented as a means of adaptation – as a lubricant to help you glide more effortlessly through life. On the education conference circuit, an endless parade of trend watchers prophesy about the future and essential twenty-first-century skills, the buzzwords being “creative,” “adaptable,” and “flexible.” The focus, invariably, is on competencies, not values. On didactics, not ideals. On “problem-solving ability,” but not which problems need solving. Invariably, it all revolves around the question: Which knowledge and skills do today’s students need to get hired in tomorrow’s job market – the market of 2030? Which is precisely the wrong question. In 2030, there will likely be a high demand for savvy accountants untroubled by a conscience. If current trends hold, countries like Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland will become even bigger tax havens, enabling multinationals to dodge taxes even more effectively, leaving developing countries with an even shorter end of the stick. If the aim of education is to roll with these kinds of trends rather than upend them, then egotism is set to be the quintessential twenty-first-century skill. Not

There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are “nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations.” But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my “defense mechanisms,” nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my “reaction formations.

The designer is primarily confronted with three classes of material: a) the given material: product, copy, slogan, logotype, format, media, production process; b) the formal material: space, contrast, proportion, harmony, rhythm, repetition, line, mass, shape, color, weight, volume, value, texture; c) the psychological material: visual perception and optical illusion problems, the spectators’ instincts, intuitions, and emotions as well as the designer’s own needs.

To simply withdraw from the arena of ideas, from public discourse on public issues, from the value formation of the young—to shrug our shoulders and say, “I don’t know” or, worse, “I don’t care about those things anymore”—is to abandon the young to the mercy of their own ideas without the benefit of experience to guide them.

Canon formation is passed off as the objective trickle-down of the musical marketplace, but in truth it is as subjective as any other value judgment made in an unequal society.

However, there have always been “society pedagogues”, less outstanding but more numerous, who have become fascinated by their own great ideas, which might, sometimes, even be true, but are more often constricted or contain the taint of some hidden pathological thought processes. Such people have always striven to impose pedagogical methods which would impoverish and deform the development of individuals’ and societies’ psychological world view; they inflict permanent harm upon societies, depriving them of universally useful values. By claiming to act in the name of a more valuable idea, such pedagogues actually undermine the values they claim and open the door for destructive ideologies. At the same time, as we have already mentioned, each society contains a small but active minority of persons with various deviant worldviews, especially in the areas treated above, which are caused either by psychological anomalies, to be discussed below, or by the long-term influence of such anomalies upon their psyches, especially during childhood. Such people later exert a pernicious influence upon the formative process of the psychological world view in society, whether by direct activity or by means of written or other transmission, especially if they engage in the service of some ideology or other.

Nothing will teach you more about perceived value than taking something with literally no value and selling it in the auction format. It teaches you the beauty and power of presentation, and how you can make magic out of nothing.

I saw that learning how to love myself was my salvation, a rebellious act of refusing to believe I was what white institutions or Papa had wanted to reduce me to. To love myself was to accept myself as I am and to live in away that honored my feelings, aligned with my values and trusted my senses even when the outside world wanted me to doubt or shrink myself. Therapy became a place not for repair but for the formation of a relationship with someone who helped me see that I am already whole.

Studying in a developing/third-world country is way more intense and formative than studying in a first-world fancy country. It makes you so much more open-minded, adaptive, and confident. You become so much more real. When you have to shit on two little bricks into a hole the size of a tennis ball at an elementary school in the countryside, or sleep in a farmer's yurt after not bathing for five days, you become a much more easygoing person. It teaches you to value experience over material things real fast.

I was young and stupid,” I said simply. “I was used. I killed for people like you because I knew no better. Then I learned better. What happened at Innenin taught me better. Now I don’t kill for anyone but myself, and every time that I take a life, I know the value of it.” “The value of it. The value of a human life.” Kawahara shook her head like a teacher with an exasperating student. “You are still young and stupid. Human life has no value. Haven’t you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you’ve seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?” She made a tiny spitting sound. “You can always get some more people. They reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. Why should they be valuable? Do you know that it costs us less to recruit and use up a real snuff whore than it does to set up and run the virtual equivalent format? Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It’s the axiomatic truth of our times.

An education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of material, embodied practices. And this will be true even of the most instrumentalist, pragmatic programs of education (such as those that now tend to dominate public schools and universities bent on churning out “skilled workers”) that see their task primarily as providing information, because behind this is a vision of the good life that understands human flourishing primarily in terms of production and consumption. Behind the veneer of a “value-free” education concerned with providing skills, knowledge, and information is an educational vision that remains formative.

as we provide our software solutions in a service based format we get something in return that the on-premise didn’t provide: insight. We can actually see how users are using our services and where they have issues and challenges and with this insight we can do something about improving the value and minimizing the churn.

How do you tell a young girl in her formative years that the real value, real wealth is only in acquisition of knowledge through higher education? In caring for the downtrodden as well as the learned. In committing yourself to the matters of culture and creativity, when your own life has been complete antithesis of the same?

Propaganda is necessarily false, when it speaks of values, of truth, of good, of justice, of happiness-and when it interprets and colors facts and imputes meaning to them. It is true when it serves up the plain fact, but does so only for the sake of establishing a pretense and only as an example of the interpretation that it supports with that fact.

Each community has its own idiosyncrasies and their own intrinsic values, which must be respected. No two communities are the same: there are different characteristics that are influenced by the geographical location, race, and finally, a number of circumstances that bear upon the formation of that community. (Juan Peron, The organised community 1974)

This is an age-old fantasy. I remember reading a quote from the apologist Edward John Carnell in Ian Murray’s biography of the Welsh preacher David Martyn Lloyd-Jones. During the formative years of Fuller Theological Seminary, Carnell said regarding evangelicalism, “We need prestige desperately.” Christians have worked hard to position themselves in places of power within the culture. They seek influence academically, politically, economically, athletically, socially, theatrically, religiously, and every other way, in hopes of gaining mass media exposure. But then when they get that exposure—sometimes through mass media, sometimes in a very broad-minded church environment—they present a reinvented designer pop gospel that subtly removes all of the offense of the gospel and beckons people into the kingdom along an easy path. They do away with all that hard-to-believe stuff about self-sacrifice, hating your family, and so forth. The illusion is that we can preach our message more effectively from lofty perches of cultural power and influence, and once we’ve got everybody’s attention, we can lead more people to Christ by taking out the sting of the gospel and nurturing a user-friendly message. But to get to these lofty perches, “Christian” public figures water down and compromise the truth; then, to stay up there, they cave in to pressure to perpetuate false teaching so their audience will stay loyal.

Since knowledge and ideas are an important part of cultural heritage, social interaction and business transactions, they retain a special value for many societies. Logically, if the associated electronically formatted information is valued, preventive and detective measures are necessary to ensure minimum organizational impact from an IPR security breach.

The truth is that our enjoyments and our evaluations, like our trades, are learned; intensive knowledge, as well as extensive, is acquired. We learn how to value possessions as well as how to make them; our passions, our disgusts, and our ambitions are learned. Just as we have evolved ways of transmuting physical elements from one to another, so we have evolved ways of transmuting experience into meaning.

If having a valued skill no longer guarantees employment, then the only way to be sure of being employable is to be able to develop new skills, as Seymour Papert (1998) observed: So the model that says learn while you’re at school, while you’re young, the skills that you will apply during your lifetime is no longer tenable. The skills that you can learn when you’re at school will not be applicable. They will be obsolete by the time you get into the workplace and need them, except for one skill. The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn. It is the skill of being able not to give the right answer to questions about what you were taught in school, but to make the right response to situations that are outside the scope of what you were taught in school. We need to produce people who know how to act when they’re faced with situations for which they were not specifically prepared.

You really don’t believe that anything can have a value of its own beyond what function it serves for human beings?” Resaint said. “Value to who?” Resaint asked Halyard to imagine a planet in some remote galaxy—a lush, seething, glittering planet covered with stratospheric waterfalls, great land-sponges bouncing through the valleys, corals budding in perfect niveous hexagons, humming lichens glued to pink crystals, prismatic jellyfish breaching from the rivers, titanic lilies relying on tornadoes to spread their pollen—a planet full of complex, interconnected life but devoid of consciousness. “Are you telling me that, if an asteroid smashed into this planet and reduced every inch of its surface to dust, nothing would be lost? Because nobody in particular would miss it?” “But the universe is bloody huge—stuff like that must happen every minute. You can’t go on strike over it. Honestly it sounds to me to like your real enemy isn’t climate change or habitat loss, it’s entropy. You don’t like the idea that everything eventually crumbles. Well, it does. If you’re this worried about species extinction, wait until you hear about the heat death of the universe.” “I would be upset about the heat death of the universe too if human beings were accelerating the rate of it by a hundred times or more.” “And if a species’ position with respect to us doesn’t matter— you know, those amoebae they found that live at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, if they’re just as important as Chiu Chiu or my parents’ dog, even though nobody ever gets anywhere near them—if distance in space doesn’t matter, why should distance in time? If we don’t care about whether their lives overlap with our lives, why even worry about whether they exist simultaneously with us? Your favorite wasp—Adelo-midgy-midgy—” “Adelognathus marginatum—” “It did exist. It always will have existed. Extinction can’t take that away. It went through its nasty little routine over and over again for millions and millions of years. The show was a big success. So why is it important that it’s still running at the same time you are? Isn’t that centering the whole thing on human beings, which is exactly what we’re not supposed to be doing? I mean, for that matter—reality is all just numbers anyway, right? I mean underneath? That’s what people say now. So why are you so down on the scans? Hacks aside. Why is it so crucial that these animals exist right now in an ostensibly meat-based format, just because we do? My point is you talk about extinction as if you’re taking this enlightened post-human View from Nowhere but if we really get down to it you’re definitely taking a View from Karin Resaint two arms two legs one head born Basel Switzerland year of our lord two-thousand-and-when-ever.” But Resaint wasn’t listening anymore.

Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something someone has made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories... All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not... Fictional writing has no value, documentary narrative has no value. The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person?

Likewise, we “trusted the process,” but the process didn’t save Toy Story 2 either. “Trust the Process” had morphed into “Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us.” It gave us solace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in the end, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy. Once this became clear to me, I began telling people that the phrase was meaningless. I told our staff that it had become a crutch that was distracting us from engaging, in a meaningful way, with our problems. We should trust in people, I told them, not processes. The error we’d made was forgetting that “the process” has no agenda and doesn’t have taste. It is just a tool—a framework. We needed to take more responsibility and ownership of our own work, our need for self-discipline, and our goals. Imagine an old, heavy suitcase whose well-worn handles are hanging by a few threads. The handle is “Trust the Process” or “Story Is King”—a pithy statement that seems, on the face of it, to stand for so much more. The suitcase represents all that has gone into the formation of the phrase: the experience, the deep wisdom, the truths that emerge from struggle. Too often, we grab the handle and—without realizing it—walk off without the suitcase. What’s more, we don’t even think about what we’ve left behind. After all, the handle is so much easier to carry around than the suitcase. Once you’re aware of the suitcase/handle problem, you’ll see it everywhere. People glom onto words and stories that are often just stand-ins for real action and meaning. Advertisers look for words that imply a product’s value and use that as a substitute for value itself. Companies constantly tell us about their commitment to excellence, implying that this means they will make only top-shelf products. Words like quality and excellence are misapplied so relentlessly that they border on meaningless. Managers scour books and magazines looking for greater understanding but settle instead for adopting a new terminology, thinking that using fresh words will bring them closer to their goals. When someone comes up with a phrase that sticks, it becomes a meme, which migrates around even as it disconnects from its original meaning. To ensure quality, then, excellence must be an earned word, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves. It is the responsibility of good leaders to make sure that words remain attached to the meanings and ideals they represent.

Some of the variable words, say lunch and supper and dinner, may be highlighted but the differences are not particularly important. When we come to say `we just don't speak the same language' we mean something more general: that we have different immediate values or different kinds of valuation, or that we are aware, often intangibly, of different formations and distributions of energy and interest. In such a case, each group is speaking its native language, but its uses are significantly different, and especially when strong feelings or important ideas are in question. No single group is `wrong' by any linguistic criterion, though a temporarily dominant group may try to enforce its own uses as `correct'. What is really happening through these critical encounters, which may be very conscious or may be felt only as a certain strangeness and unease, is a process quite central in the development of a language when, in certain words, tones and rhythms, meanings are offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, changed.

In recent years, annual trading in stocks—necessarily creating, by reason of the transaction costs involved, negative value for traders—averaged some $33 trillion. But capital formation—that is, directing fresh investment capital to its highest and best uses, such as new businesses, new technology, medical breakthroughs, and modern plant and equipment for existing business—averaged some $250 billion. Put another way, speculation represented about 99.2 percent of the activities of our equity market system, with capital formation accounting for 0.8 percent.

We have the material conditions for world unity, but there is as yet no common moral order without which a true culture cannot exist. The entire modern world wears the same clothes, drives the same cars, and watches the same films, but it does not possess common ethical values or a sense of spiritual community or common religious beliefs. We have a long way ot go before such a universal spiritual community is conceivable, and meanwhile what we call modern civilization remains an area of conflict - a chaos of conflicting ideologies, institutions, and moral standards.

2. The classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them. For the fact is that the reading we do when young can often be of little value because we are impatient, cannot concentrate, lack expertise in how to read, or because we lack experience of life. This youthful reading can be (perhaps at the same time) literally formative in that it gives a form or shape to our future experiences, providing them with models, ways of dealing with them, terms of comparison, schemes for categorising them, scales of value, paradigms of beauty: all things which continue to operate in us even when we remember little or nothing about the book we read when young. When we reread the book in our maturity, we then rediscover these constants which by now form part of our inner mechanisms though we have forgotten where they came from. There is a particular potency in the work which can be forgotten in itself but which leaves its seed behind in us. The definition which we can now give is

The importance of project secrecy Propaganda can never reveal its true projects and plans or divulge government secrets. That would be to submit the project to public discussion, to the scrutiny of public opinion, and thus prevent their success. More serious, it would make the project vulnerable to enemy action by forewarning him so that he could take all the proper precautions to make them fail. Propaganda must serve instead as a veil for such project, masking true intentions. It must be in effect a smokescreen. Maneuvers take place behind protective screens of words on which public atten­tion is fixed. Propaganda is necessarily a declaration of one's intentions. It is a declaration of purity that will never be realized, a declaration of peace, of truth, of social justice. Of course, one must not be too precise at the top level, or promise short-term reforms, for it would be risky to invite a comparison between what was promised and what was done. Such comparison would be possible if propaganda operated in the realm of future fact. Therefore, it should be confined to intentions, to the moral realm, to values, to generalities. And if some angry man were to point out the contradictions, in the end his argument would cany no weight with the public.

a metaphor, visiting the Sistine chapel does more than conceptually advance your knowledge of Michaelango’s view of final judgment, as visiting the Grand Canyon does more than provide you information about the history of the Colorado River. There are sensibilities and emotions that are shaped by the whole experience. So also patristic and medieval theology can function to shape theological values and inclinations we will likely lack so long as we work narrowly within Reformation and modern theology alongside the Bible. It is an enriching, formative experience, comparable to traveling to a foreign country and being immersed in the culture and geography.

Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are "nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations." But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my "defense mechanisms," nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my "reaction formations." Man, however, is able to live and even die for the sake of his ideals and values!

The effort to eliminate the formative role of the mind, making the artifact more important than the artificer, reduces mystery to absurdity; and that affirmation of absurdity is the life-heresy of the present generation. This reductionism turns at last into the drooling blankness of 'Waiting for Godot' or 'Krapp's Last Tape,' with their representation of boredom and tedium as the inevitable climax of human existence. This in itself is a sardonic final commentary on the mechanical world picture, the power system, and the subjective non-values derived from them. For a technology that denies reality to the subjective life cannot claim any human value for even its own highest products.

Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are “nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations.” But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my “defense mechanisms,” nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my “reaction formations.” Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values!

Many aspects of how the Chinese political class manages its economy are antithetical to the Western values of democracy and free markets. But this stance has not put off foreign investors, who are attracted to the government’s willingness to prioritize physical infrastructure, political security, and stability over the health of the population, transparency in decision making, and transparency in the rule of law (if not necessarily the system of governance). In essence, the pursuit of economic growth overrides any views on the political system they invest in. Currently China’s political class has a strategy to evolve from an investment-led exporting economy to one more in line with Western economies, relying on domestic consumption. The transition to this new economic equilibrium will not be linear. China will likely experience significant economic volatility and market gyrations as the structure of its economy shifts. There is also mounting skepticism about China’s ability to manage its debt levels, and the country’s lack of individual political freedoms will continue to hamper its growth prospects. But Chinese policymakers will, no doubt, be focused on continuing to show economic progress in advance of two target dates: 2021—one hundred years after the formation of the Communist Party—and 2049, one hundred years after the formation of the People’s Republic of China.

Soul and body, body and soul—how mysterious they were! There was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began? How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools! Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also. He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us. As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.

abundant time in nature is a critical wellspring of human health, with a deep and formative influence on children in particular. Nature’s impacts extend far beyond physical fitness, encompassing intellectual and emotional health, self-identity, and basic values and morals. Health benefits of exposure to nature include enhanced healing, stress reduction, creativity, and self-esteem. Nature also has an unparalleled capacity to stir our emotions, fostering raw and powerful feelings of wonder, awe, mystery, joy—and, yes, fear. Smelling a wildflower in an alpine meadow, sprinting into the ocean surf, and sharing a face-to-face encounter with a coyote are all experiences that differ mightily from virtual alternatives.

If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845, available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead-weight upon the limbs of the working class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for the keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital. Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class; that the instruments of labour constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the labourer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation. Thus it comes about that the evolutioni of the instruments of labour becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labour-power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labour functions; that machinery, the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital.

God created man out of dust from the ground. At a basic level, the Creator picked up some dirt and threw Adam together. The Hebrew word for God forming man is yatsar,[11] which means “to form, as a potter.” A pot usually has but one function. Yet when God made a woman, He “made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man” (Genesis 2:22). He created her with His own hands. He took His time crafting and molding her into multifaceted brilliance. The Hebrew word used for making woman is banah, meaning to “build, as a house, a temple, a city, an altar.”[12] The complexity implied by the term banah is worth noting. God has given women a diverse makeup that enables them to carry out multiple functions well. Adam may be considered Human Prototype 1.0, while Eve was Human Prototype 2.0. Of high importance, though, is that Eve was fashioned laterally with Adam’s rib. It was not a top-down formation of dominance or a bottom-up formation of subservience. Rather, Eve was an equally esteemed member of the human race. After all, God spoke of the decision for their creation as one decision before we were ever even introduced to the process of their creation. The very first time we read about both Eve and Adam is when we read of the mandate of rulership given to both of them equally. We are introduced to both genders together, simultaneously. This comes in the first chapter of the Bible: Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:26–27) Both men and women have been created equally in the image of God. While within that equality lie distinct and different roles (we will look at that in chapter 10), there is no difference in equality of being, value, or dignity between the genders. Both bear the responsibility of honoring the image in which they have been made. A woman made in the image of God should never settle for being treated as anything less than an image-bearer of the one true King. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent in the world to be trodden on.”[13] Just as men, women were created to rule.

He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us. As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.

Although fascism rallies to the defense of the main points of bourgeois ideology which has become conservative (the family, property, the moral order, the nation), reuniting the petty-bourgeoisie and the unemployed routed by crisis or deceived by the impotence of socialist revolution, it is not itself fundamentally ideological. It presents itself as it is: a violent resurrection of myth which demands participation in a community defined by archaic pseudo-values: race, blood, the leader. Fascism is technically-equipped archaism. Its decomposed ersatz of myth is revived in the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion. Thus it is one of the factors in the formation of the modern spectacle, and its role in the destruction of the old workers’ movement makes it one of the fundamental forces of present-day society.

Not all minds can hold science so easily. Most of what you can find inside various minds have no or weak connection with science; they are only values. If your mind takes any idea for guaranteed before its empirical investigation, or if you cannot criticize or make any assumption that your hypothesis related to it can be false, as well as true, it means you don’t do science, your mind rather shares some ideological, historical, religious or ethical values. No politics, ethics, history, religion, etc. is a science in strict sense of term. All of them engage in manipulation of brains in different ways. That is why any strong political, ethical, historical, religious bias would make your so-called ‘scientific mind’ weak. Although it is true that not all questions can be answered using scientific approaches, the formation of values inside your mind should substantially be up to you — your critical thinking and doubting intuition.

This theory of beauty is not developed with respect to artefacts alone, but universally. It is independent of taste, for it is recognized that as Augustine says, there are those who take pleasure in deformities. The word deformity is significant here, because it is precisely a formal beauty that is in question; and we must not forget that "formal" includes the connotation "formative." The recognition of beauty depends on judgment, not on sensation; the beauty of the æsthetic surfaces depending on their information, and not upon themselves, Everything, whether natural or artificial, is beautiful to the extent that it really is what it purports to be, and independently of all comparisons; or ugly to the extent that its own form is not expressed and realized in its tangible actuality. The work of art is beautiful, accordingly, in terms of perfection, or truth and aptitude as defined above; whatever is inept or vague cannot be considered beautiful, however it may be valued by those who "know what they like.

In the first case, the religious association succumbs to destruction from within, its organism becomes subordinated to goals completely different from the original idea, and its theosophic and moral values fall prey to characteristic deformation, thereupon serving as a disguise for domination by pathological individuals. The religious idea then becomes both a justification for using force and sadism against non-believers, heretics, and sorcerers, and a conscience drug for people who put such inspirations into effect. Anyone criticizing such a state of affairs is condemned with paramoral indignation, allegedly in the name of the original idea and faith in God, but actually because he feels and thinks within the categories of normal people. Such a system retains the name of the original religion and many other specific names, swearing on the prophet’s beard while using this for its doubletalk. Something which was to be originally an aid in the comprehension of God’s truth now scourges nations with the sword of imperialism.

The whore, in defending the pimp, finds her own worth in the light reflected from his gaudy baubles. The wife, in defending the husband, screams or stammers that her life is not a wasteland of mur­dered possibilities. The woman, in defending the ideologies of men who rise by climbing over her prone body in military formation, will not publicly mourn the loss of what those men have taken from her: she will not scream out as their heels dig into her flesh because to do so would mean the end of meaning itself; all the ideals that motivated her to deny herself would be indelibly stained with blood that she would have to acknowledge, at last, as her own. So the woman hangs on, not with the delicacy of a clinging vine, but with a tenacity incredible in its intensity, to the very persons, institutions, and values that demean her, degrade her, glorify her powerlessness, insist upon constraining and paralyzing the most honest expressions of her will and being. She becomes a lackey, serving those who ruthlessly and effectively aggress against her and her kind.

We live in a time of such great disunity, as the bitter fight over this nomination both in the Senate and among the public clearly demonstrates. It is not merely a case of different groups having different opinions. It is a case of people bearing extreme ill will toward those who disagree with them. In our intense focus on our differences, we have forgotten the common values that bind us together as Americans. When some of our best minds are seeking to develop ever more sophisticated algorithms designed to link us to websites that only reinforce and cater to our views, we can only expect our differences to intensify. This would have alarmed the drafters of our Constitution, who were acutely aware that different values and interests could prevent Americans from becoming and remaining a single people. Indeed, of the six objectives they invoked in the preamble to the Constitution, the one that they put first was the formation of “a more perfect Union.” Their vision of “a more perfect Union” does not exist today, and if anything, we appear to be moving farther away from it.

We sometimes find ourselves changing our minds without any resistance or heavy emotion, but if we are told we are wrong, we resent the imputation and harden our hearts. We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem which is threatened . . . The little word ‘my’ is the most important one in human affairs, and properly to reckon with it is the beginning of wisdom. It has the same force whether it is ‘my’ dinner, ‘my’ dog, and ‘my’ house, or ‘my’ father, ‘my’ country, and ‘my’ God. We not only resent the imputation that our watch is wrong, or our car shabby, but that our conception of the canals of Mars, of the pronunciation of ‘Epictetus,’ of the medicinal value of salicin, or of the date of Sargon I is subject to revision. We like to continue to believe what we have been accustomed to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to it. The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

I had grown weary of so many rules. That's the thing about every discipline. There's often a format, a belief that if you don't follow the structure to the tiniest detail, you won't get the maximum value: mantras are private. Om is the most perfect sound in the universe. Never lay a sacred text to chant on the floor. If you are in a seminar, always wear a name tag. Put your name in the upper right hand corner of every essay. Just breathe. No, scream. No, cry or hit something. But don't lose yourself. Never do yoga on the full moon. Walk clockwise around a temple. Don't eat protein and starch in the same meal. Always begin the day with fruit. Don't eat any fruit. Never utter the word of G_d. There is no God. There are multiple gods. To be a good acupuncturist, "check your stuff" at the door. Bring all of you. Never do work on the Sabbath. Don't cary anything in your pockets. Consciousness is constant work. Accept Jesus. Read the Bible. There is no suffering. Acknowledge suffering as a noble truth. Tread lightly on the Earth. Leave no trace. Make your mark. Get noticed. Travel silently through life. Attend to the needs of others. Follow your bliss. Suppress. Express. Withhold. Let go. Let it in. Get off the grid. Join the marketplace. Go toward the light. Hadn't I heard enough?

For propaganda to succeed, a society must first have two complementary qualities: It must be both an individualist and a mass society. These two qualities are often considered contradictory. It is believed that an individualist society, in which the individual is thought to have a higher value than the group tends to destroy groups that limit the individual's range of action, whereas a mass society negates the individual and reduces him to a cipher. But this contradiction is purely theoretical and an illusion. In actual fact, an individualist society must be a mass society, because the first move toward liberation of the individual is to break up the small groups that are an organic fact of the entire society. In this process the individual frees himself completely from family, village, parish or brotherhood bonds - only to find himself directly vis-a-vis the entire society. When individuals are not held together by local structures, the only form in which they can live together is in an unstructured mass society, Similarly, a mass society can only be based on individuals — that is on men in their isolation, whose identities are determined by their relationships with one another. Precisely because the individual claims to be equal to all other individuals he becomes an abstraction and is in effect reduced to a cipher.

This entails certain corollaries on which true individualism once more stands in sharp opposition to the false individualism of the rationalistic type. The first is that the deliberately organized state on the one side, and the individual on the other, far from being regarded as the only realities, which all the intermediate formations and associations are to be deliberately suppressed, as was the aim of the French Revolution, the noncompulsory conventions of social intercourse are considered as essential factors in preserving the orderly working in human society. The second is that the individual, in participating in the social processes, must be ready and willing to adjust himself to changes and to submit to conventions which are not the result of intelligent design, whose justification in the particular instance may be recognizable, and which to him will often appear unintelligible and irrational. I need not say much on the first point. That true individualism affirms the value of the family and all the common efforts of the small community and group, that it believes in local autonomy and voluntary associations, and that indeed its case rests largely on the contention that much for which the coercive action of the state is usually invoked can be done better by voluntary collaboration need not be stressed further. There can be no greater contrast to this than the false individualism which wants to dissolve all these smaller groups into atoms which have no cohesion other than the coercive rules imposed by the state, and which tries to make all social ties prescriptive, instead of using the state mainly as a protection of the individual against the arrogation of coercive powers by the small groups. Quite as important for the functioning of an individualist society as these smaller groupings of men are the traditions and conventions which evolve in a free society and which, without being enforceable, establish flexible but normally observed rules that make the behavior of other people predictable in a high degree. The willingness to submit to such rules, not merely so long as one understands the reason for them but so long as one has no definite reasons to the contrary, is an essential condition for the gradual evolution and improvement of the rules of social intercourse; and the readiness ordinarily to submit to the products of a social process which nobody may understand is also an indispensible condition if it is to be possible to dispense with compulsion. That the existence of common conventions and traditions among a group of people will enable them to work together smoothly and efficiently with much less formal organization and compulsion than a group without such common background, is of course, a commonplace. But the reverse of this, while less familiar, is probably not less true: that coercion can probably only be kept to a minimum in a society where conventions and traditions have made the behavior of man to a large extent predictable.

The aim is to get the students actively involved in seeking this evidence: their role is not simply to do tasks as decided by teachers, but to actively manage and understand their learning gains. This includes evaluating their own progress, being more responsible for their learning, and being involved with peers in learning together about gains in learning. If students are to become active evaluators of their own progress, teachers must provide the students with appropriate feedback so that they can engage in this task. Van den Bergh, Ros, and Beijaard (2010: 3) describe the task thus: Fostering active learning seems a very challenging and demanding task for teachers, requiring knowledge of students’ learning processes, skills in providing guidance and feedback and classroom management. The need is to engage students in this same challenging and demanding task. The suggestion in this chapter is to start lessons with helping students to understand the intention of the lesson and showing them what success might look like at the end. Many times, teachers look for the interesting beginning to a lesson – for the hook, and the motivating question. Dan Willingham (2009) has provided an excellent argument for not thinking in this way. He advocates starting with what the student is likely to think about. Interesting hooks, demonstrations, fascinating facts, and likewise may seem to be captivating (and often are), but he suggests that there are likely to be other parts of the lesson that are more suitable for the attention-grabber. The place for the attention-grabber is more likely to be at the end of the lesson, because this will help to consolidate what has been learnt. Most importantly,Willingham asks teachers to think long and hard about how to make the connection between the attention-grabber and the point that it is designed to make; preferably, that point will be the main idea from the lesson. Having too many open-ended activities (discovery learning, searching the Internet, preparing PowerPoint presentations) can make it difficult to direct students’ attention to that which matters – because they often love to explore the details, the irrelevancies, and the unimportant while doing these activities. One of Willingham's principles is that any teaching method is most useful when there is plenty of prompt feedback about whether the student is thinking about a problem in the right way. Similarly, he promotes the notion that assignments should be primarily about what the teacher wants the students to think about (not about demonstrating ‘what they know’). Students are very good at ignoring what you say (‘I value connections, deep ideas, your thoughts’) and seeing what you value (corrections to the grammar, comments on referencing, correctness or absence of facts). Thus teachers must develop a scoring rubric for any assignment before they complete the question or prompts, and show the rubric to the students so that they know what the teacher values. Such formative feedback can reinforce the ‘big ideas’ and the important understandings, and help to make the investment of

167. Every form of catechesis would do well to attend to the “way of beauty” (via pulchritudinis).129 Proclaiming Christ means showing that to believe in and to follow him is not only something right and true, but also something beautiful, capable of filling life with new splendor and profound joy, even in the midst of difficulties. Every expression of true beauty can thus be acknowledged as a path leading to an encounter with the Lord Jesus. This has nothing to do with fostering an aesthetic relativism130 which would downplay the inseparable bond between truth, goodness and beauty, but rather a renewed esteem for beauty as a means of touching the human heart and enabling the truth and goodness of the Risen Christ to radiate within it. If, as Saint Augustine says, we love only that which is beautiful,131 the incarnate Son, as the revelation of infinite beauty, is supremely lovable and draws us to himself with bonds of love. So a formation in the via pulchritudinis ought to be part of our effort to pass on the faith. Each particular Church should encourage the use of the arts in evangelization, building on the treasures of the past but also drawing upon the wide variety of contemporary expressions so as to transmit the faith in a new “language of parables.”132 We must be bold enough to discover new signs and new symbols, new flesh to embody and communicate the word, and different forms of beauty which are valued in different cultural settings, including those unconventional modes of beauty which may mean little to the evangelizers, yet prove particularly attractive for others. 168.

Every ritual repetition of the cosmogony is preceded by a symbolic retrogression to Chaos. In order to be created anew, the old world must first be annihilated. The various rites performed in connection with the New Year can be put in two chief categories: (I) those that signify the return to Chaos (e.g., extinguishing fires, expelling 'evil' and sins, reversal of habitual behavior, orgies, return of the dead); (2) those that symbolize the cosmogony (e.g., lighting new fires, departure of the dead, repetition of the acts by which the Gods created the world, solemn prediction of the weather for the ensuing year). In the scenario of initiatory rites, 'death' corresponds to the temporary return to Chaos; hence it is the paradigmatic expression of the end of a mode of being the mode of ignorance and of the child's irresponsibility. Initiatory death provides the clean slate on which will be written the successive revelations whose end is the formation of a new man. We shall later describe the different modalities of birth to a new, spiritual life. But now we must note that this new life is conceived as the true human existence, for it is open to the values of spirit. What is understood by the generic term 'culture,' comprising all the values of spirit, is accessible only to those who have been initiated. Hence participation in spiritual life is made possible by virtue of the religious experiences released during initiation. All the rites of rebirth or resurrection, and the symbols that they imply, indicate that the novice has attained to another mode of existence, inaccessible to those who have not undergone the initiatory ordeals, who have not tasted death. We must note this characteristic of the archaic mentality: the belief that a state cannot be changed without first being annihilated-in the present instance, without the child's dying to childhood. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this obsession with beginnings, which, in sum, is the obsession with the absolute beginning, the cosmogony. For a thing to be well done, it must be done as it was done the first time. But the first time, the thing-this class of objects, this animal, this particular behavior-did not exist: when, in the beginning, this object, this animal, this institution, came into existence, it was as if, through the power of the Gods, being arose from nonbeing. Initiatory death is indispensable for the beginning of spiritual life. Its function must be understood in relation to what it prepares: birth to a higher mode of being. As we shall see farther on, initiatory death is often symbolized, for example, by darkness, by cosmic night, by the telluric womb, the hut, the belly of a monster. All these images express regression to a preformal state, to a latent mode of being (complementary to the precosmogonic Chaos), rather than total annihilation (in the sense in which, for example, a member of the modern societies conceives death). These images and symbols of ritual death are inextricably connected with germination, with embryology; they already indicate a new life in course of preparation. Obviously, as we shall show later, there are other valuations of initiatory death-for example, joining the company of the dead and the Ancestors. But here again we can discern the same symbolism of the beginning: the beginning of spiritual life, made possible in this case by a meeting with spirits. For archaic thought, then, man is made-he does not make himself all by himself. It is the old initiates, the spiritual masters, who make him. But these masters apply what was revealed to them at the beginning of Time by the Supernatural Beings. They are only the representatives of those Beings; indeed, in many cases they incarnate them. This is as much as to say that in order to become a man, it is necessary to resemble a mythical model.

That forum would hardly be the last time Hillary—or, for that matter, half the primary field—outperformed me, for it soon seemed as if we were gathered for a debate once every two or three weeks. I had never been particularly good in these formats myself: My long windups and preference for complicated answers worked against me, particularly onstage with seven savvy pros and a single timed minute to answer a question. During our first debate in April, the moderator called time at least twice before I was done speaking. Asked about how I’d handle multiple terrorist attacks, I discussed the need to coordinate federal help but neglected to mention the obvious imperative to go after the perpetrators. For the next several minutes, Hillary and the others took turns pointing out my oversight. Their tones were somber, but the gleam in their eyes said, Take that, rookie. Afterward, Axe was gentle in his postgame critique. “Your problem,” he said, “is you keep trying to answer the question.” “Isn’t that the point?” I said. “No, Barack,” Axe said, “that is not the point. The point is to get your message across. What are your values? What are your priorities? That’s what people care about. Look, half the time the moderator is just using the question to try to trip you up. Your job is to avoid the trap they’ve set. Take whatever question they give you, give ’em a quick line to make it seem like you answered it…and then talk about what you want to talk about.” “That’s bullshit,” I said. “Exactly,” he said.

The Borsht Belt became to stand-up comedy what New Orleans was to jazz -- an incubator of a new form of entertainment that gradually emerged from its formative center into the U.S. mainstream and beyond. Not that this comparison of Jewish comedy with jazz should obscure the contributions of Jews to the development of jazz itself, or black Americans to the growth of native comedy. The two forms of entertainment were similarly informal and improvisational. But the value placed by each community on its special cultural pastime dictated the opportunities for talented individuals within that community. Comedy and jazz depend on patronage, which rewards what it craves.

Your habits shape your identity, and your identity shapes your habits. It’s a two-way street. The formation of all habits is a feedback loop (a concept we will explore in depth in the next chapter), but it’s important to let your values, principles, and identity drive the loop rather than your results. The focus should always be on becoming that type of person, not getting a particular outcome.

The Four Dominant Learning Styles What are the Four Types of Learners? If you have spent any considerable amount of time in a learning institution, you know for almost a fact that each learner is different from the next. It is relatively easy to pick out the differences among learners. For instance, you can identify a student who has an easier time retaining information when presented in a particular format. Until recent decades, education seemed to be incredibly rigid towards the learners. Most often than not, they were subjected to a one-size-fits-all model that never accommodated for the differences in learning. However, research and studies made tremendous strides in identifying and reconciling these discrepancies. Nowadays, educators are developing strategies that help them reach out to each student's specific learning style. This gives each learner a fair chance at acquiring an education. This article seeks to breakdown the four main ways that learners acquire, process, and retain information. Visual Learners Information is optimally acquired and processed for this type of learners when conveyed in graphic or diagrammatic form. Such students retain content when it is presented as diagrams, charts, etcetera with much more ease. Some of them also lean towards pictures and videos at times. These learners tend to better at processing robust information rather than bits and pieces. This makes them holistic learners. Hence, they derive more value from summarized visual aids as opposed to segments. Auditory Learners On the other hand, these students learn more by processing information that has been delivered verbally. Such students are also more attentive to their instructors in class. Sometimes, they will do so at the expense of taking notes which can sometimes be mistaken for subpar engagement. Such learners will also thrive in group discussions where they get to talk through schoolwork with their peers. This not only reinforces their understanding but also presents an excellent opportunity to learn from others. Similarly, they can obtain significant value from reading out what they have written. Reading/Writing Learners These students lean more towards written information. For as long as they read through the content, they stand a better chance at retaining it. Such students prefer text-heavy learning. Thus, written assignments, handouts in class, or even taking notes are their most effective learning modes. Kinesthetic Learners Essentially, these students learn by doing. These are the students that rely on hands-on participation in class. For as long as they are physically proactive in the learning process, such learners stand a better chance at retaining and retrieving the knowledge acquired. This also earns them the popular term, tactile learners, since they tend to engage most of their sense in the learning process. As you would expect, such leaners have the most difficulties in conventional learning institutions. However, they tend to thrive in practical-oriented set-ups, such as workshops and laboratories. These four modalities will provide sufficient background knowledge on learning styles for you to formulate your own assessment. Ask yourself first, no less, what type of a learner are you?

where a = accumulated future value, p = principal or present value, r = rate of return in percentage terms, and n = number of compounding periods. All too often, management teams focus on the r variable in this equation. They seek instant gratification, with high profit margins and high growth in reported earnings per share (EPS) in the near term, as opposed to initiatives that would lead to a much more valuable business many years down the line. This causes many management teams to pass on investments that would create long-term value but would cause “accounting numbers” to look bad in the short term. Pressure from analysts can inadvertently incentivize companies to make as much money as possible off their present customers to report good quarterly numbers, instead of offering a fair price that creates enduring goodwill and a long-term win–win relationship for all stakeholders. The businesses that buy commodities and sell brands and have strong pricing power (typically depicted by high gross margins) should always remember that possessing pricing power is like having access to a large amount of credit. You may have it in abundance, but you must use it sparingly. Having pricing power doesn’t mean you exercise it right away. Consumer surplus is a great strategy, especially for subscription-based business models in which management should primarily focus on habit formation and making renewals a no-brainer. Most businesses fail to appreciate this delicate trade-off between high short-term profitability and the longevity accorded to the business through disciplined pricing and offering great customer value. The few businesses that do understand this trade-off always display “pain today, gain tomorrow” thinking in their daily decisions.

The List: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt Why: Especially because it will show you how to identify bad strategy The Five Dysnfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni Why: Learn most recognised tendencies of dysfunctional teams (in a storified format) Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks Why: Why storytelling matters in everything we do and how to tell a solid story Never Split the Difference by Christopher Voss Why: Learn the fundamentals of having a competitive edge in any discussion Understanding Michael Porter by Joan Magretta Why: The absolute fundamentals of organisational success - big or small Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore Why: If you are curious about what it takes to continue growing and scaling a technology company throughout its lifecycle 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer Why: You can read it once every year. You can pick any failed venture/product and do a post-mortem of why it failed through the lens of this book (learning the value of building and sustaining moats) Build by Tony Fadell Why: This book can be a great friend as you navigate every fork/decision in your career Super Thinking by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann Why: You can pick your pet mental models from this book and apply in any situation in your life; the pet mental models can keep evolving as you evolve

The denial of women's sex-specificity repeats in a newly invented format - the historic patriarchal refusal to grant specific recognition and value to women - to our rationality, bodies, and agency. The elimination of sex as a biological, material reality does not facilitate gender fluidity or breakdown gender hierarchy. On the contrary, it sures up the very patriarchal foundations which abuse women and children's human rights to agency and bodily integrity. Rather than transgenderism being about the opening up of gender for men to reject the norms of masculinity, it is the imposition of masculine dominance in a newly-minted form.

Sacramental living is a way of spiritual formation that sees all of creation as the means by which we can encounter the living God. He stands outside creation and simultaneously meets us through it. This has profound implications for our lives. If God is present through elements of water, bread, oil, and wine, he most certainly is present through our bodies as well. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. Our bodies, in their glory and fragility, in their energy and weakness, are means by which God meets us. To put it simply, we are not just to receive sacraments; we are to become them.

The demon is the mental shadow-side archetype. What it shows is that the lifeblood of Raktabija has the power to give birth to thousands of Raktabijas, just like the thinking of the soul. Similarly, thoughts from the mind seem to sprout more and more thoughts as soon as they appear to land. Even if one in meditation cuts them off, more will sprout. It requires the power of Shakti Kundalini to spring the mind, dispatch the demon. Kali comes in in this great mythical tale and cuts the demon's head off. Before it could hit the fertile ground of existence she drank all her blood. In other words, out of all the thoughts, desires, and delusions that plague the seeker and prevent the seeker from knowing pure union, Kali Kundalini takes the life energy. Kali, as She's chopping the heads off, is symbolically slashing through the soul, removing all the emotions that will give birth to slavery and illusion over and over again. She absorbs them into herself; in other words, She frees from those bound forms the life-force, the Shakti. The formation is all forms. She alone has the power to dissolve all forms, to free from them the soul, the life. Kali wears a fifty-skull garland all around her neck. In addition, these fifty skulls reflect the Sanskrit alphabet's fifty letters— the sounds and forms that make up thought, which are the basis of all life. She's the one who sucks the life-force out of them so we can be safe from them, as well as the one who gave them birth to begin with. Taking refuge in Kali takes refuge in that inherent ability to cut off the heads of the very modes of thought, behaviors, values and all of the mind's restricting mechanisms that trap us in illusion. When free, She brings us back into unity with the Infinite — as does Kali with her husband Shiva. Even a myth of this kind, which may seem so bizarre and gruesome to the ignorant, has profound significance for our sadhana, revealing moment by moment what is involved in our spiritual practice. When you do japa, the ritual of mantra repeating, of Om Kali Ma, her mantra, you bring your mind back to Kali again and again. You can do this practice right now, or you can sit for meditation the next time. Close your eyes and dissolve Om Kali Ma, Om Kali Ma, Om Kali Ma with every thought. Kali's story shows that with every repeat of Om Kali Ma, this glorious phenomenon occurs. She cuts off all the emotions, all the deluded ideas, all the bound behaviors and perceptions that might have filled the mind as the pulse of mantra. Keeping the mind in the mantra refuge means holding the mind in a sacred place that is safe from all the modes of thought with which the mind might have developed its own slavery. Every repetition of mantra is a movement of Kali's sword clearing and opening that spaciousness of awareness, freeing our energy and consciousness so we can experience the fullness of who and what we are in each moment.

The curse is, you will be tempted to believe that you can live your life off your gifts and not do the deep work of character formation. Your gifts can take you only so far. But there are no such limits when it comes to a life marked by deep character.

processed, and transformed into a format that is suitable for analysis. This often involves removing duplicate data, correcting errors, and dealing with missing values. After data is prepared, exploratory data analysis is performed to better understand the data and identify patterns, trends, and outliers. Descriptive statistics, data visualization, and data clustering techniques are often used to explore data. Once the data is understood, statistical methods such as hypothesis testing and regression analysis can be applied to identify relationships and make predictions.

prepare data for analysis, including cleaning, transformation, and normalization. Data cleaning involves identifying and correcting errors in the data, such as incorrect values, missing data, or duplicate records. It is crucial to ensure that data is accurate, complete, and consistent before proceeding with analysis. Data transformation involves converting data into a more suitable format for analysis. This may include converting data types, scaling data, and handling outliers. For example, data may need to be normalized to ensure that all values are on the same scale. Data normalization involves scaling data so that it falls within a specific range. This is important because many statistical methods assume that data is normally distributed, and normalization helps to achieve this. Common methods of normalization include z-score normalization and min-max normalization

around. For a human being, this has two distinct aspects. The unity of what we may call your “acting self”—a unity that we also call “integrity”—enables you to pursue your ends effectively and maintain your projects, commitments, relationships, and values over time.14 The unity of what we may call your “knowing self” involves the formation of an integrated conception of your environment, one that enables you to identify relations between the different parts of your environment well enough to find your way around in it. Those relations are temporal, spacial, causal, and for many animals social. By forming a unified conception of your environment, you also unify yourself as the subject of that conception. The fact that I identify with my self—with the agent of my projects and commitments and the subject of my conception of the world—means that there may be things about my body, such as its tendency to senescence, that are not good for me, even if perhaps they are good for my species or my genes. They are not good, that is, for the thing that I experience, and identify, as “me.” My functional good is what maintains the aspects of me that support my having a self.

In our universe, energy is manifested through four fundamental forces: electromagnetic force, gravitational force, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force. Their values were determined exactly in less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, and any slightest variation would have prevented the formation of the universe.

you will be tempted to believe that you can live your life off your gifts and not do the deep work of character formation. Your gifts can take you only so far. But there are no such limits when it comes to a life marked by deep character.

In l982, however, the success of the KFAC broadcasts was so apparent that I dropped all newspaper advertising and put the money into outright commercials for Trader Joe’s. These were broadcast on demographically suited radio stations: mostly all-news or all-classical. This is still the pattern followed by Trader Joe’s. About the format of the sixty-second radio spots, which has attracted a lot of attention in media circles: I think that most radio commercials are terrible. They have too many “production values.” Even worse, they issue commands to the listener: “Buy this!” “Shop now!” “Hurry!” One should never use a mandatory sentence in addressing a customer; should never give orders. The subliminal message of a Trader Joe’s commercial is, “We’re gonna be around for a long time. If you miss out on this bargain, there’ll be another. If you have the time and inclination . . .” Most supermarket radio spots are paid for by cooperative advertising allowances from manufacturers. The supermarkets jam as many brands into sixty seconds as possible, because it maximizes their revenue. Information be damned! In sharp contrast, each Trader Joe’s spot was devoted to a single product, about which we tried to develop a story.

Product: •What is the product? •Who is it for? •What does it do? •How does it work? •How do people buy and use it? Benefits: •How does the product help people? •What are its most important benefits? Reader: •Who are you writing for? •How do they live? •What do they want? •What do they feel? •What do they know about the product, or this type of product? •Are they using a similar product already? Aim: •What do you want the reader to do, think or feel as a result of reading this copy? •What situation will they be in when they read it? Format: •Where will the copy be used? (Sales letter, web page, YouTube video, etc) •How long does it need to be? (500 words, 10 pages, 30 seconds, etc) •How should it be structured? (Main title, subtitles, sidebars, pullout quotes, calls to action, etc) •What other types of content might be involved? (Images, diagrams, video, music, etc) Tone: •Should the copy be serious, light-hearted, emotional, energetic, laid-back, etc? Constraints: •Maximum or minimum length •Anything that must be included or left out •Legal issues (regulations on scientific or health claims, prohibited words, trademarks, etc) •How this copy needs to fit in with other copy that’s already been written, or that will be written in the future •Whether the copy will form part of a campaign, so that different ideas along the same lines will be needed in future (see ‘Take it further’ in chapter 9) •Which countries the copy will appear in (whether in English, or translated) •SEO issues (for example, popular search terms that should feature in headings) •Brand or tone of voice guidelines (see ‘Tone of voice guidelines’ in chapter 15) Other background information about: •The product (development history, use cases, technical specifications, distribution, retail, buying processes, buying channels, marketing strategy) •The product’s market position (price point, offers and discounts, customer perceptions, competitors) •The target market (size, history, typical customer profile, marketing personas) •The client (history, current setup, culture, people, values) •The brand (history, positioning, values) Project management points: •Timescales (dates for copy plan, drafts, feedback, final copy, approval) •Who will provide feedback, and how •Who will approve the final copy, and how •How the copy will be delivered (usually a Word document, but not always) These are only suggestions.

Moreover, stable prices foster saving and capital formation, because when the risk of erosion of asset values resulting from inflation—and the need to guard against such losses—are minimized, households are encouraged to save more and businesses are encouraged to invest more. (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System 2009)

Yes, yes,” he said. “That is true. They must have no inkling that we are using them for our own ends. They are honest men--and that is their value to us. It is curious--but you cannot make a revolution without honest men. The instinct of the populace is infallible.” He paused, and then repeated, as though the phrase pleased him: “Every revolution has had its honest men. They are soon disposed of afterwards.

Being full of both grace and truth is part of his glory revealed. It’s not a balancing act. The goal is to max out both, neglecting neither. This fullness defined Jesus, yet our pendulum tends to swing a mile to the left or a mile to the right, depending on what our formative faith environment emphasized. Very few of us have been nurtured toward both. Some of us grew up in a truth-focused faith environment or church. Typically, these environments value doctrine over method or, at the bare minimum, focus more on Scripture, study, and obedience than on understanding freedom and grace. While this environment may result in a more developed view of a doctrinal gospel, it often lacks the ability to empathize appropriately during a situational or social issue. Our default becomes a form of legalism, and our confidence is often misinterpreted as arrogance or even judgment. Conversely, some of us grew up in a grace-focused faith environment or church. Typically, it is these “it’s the heart that matters” environments that often value the how over the what. The life that accompanies this focus is often expressed outside the walls of a church service or Bible study. Our default is grace, at times seemingly at the expense of truth, and our freedom is often misinterpreted as being too compromising. Those of us who grew up in truth-focused environments most likely struggle with extending grace to ourselves and others. Those of us who grew up in grace-focused environments most likely struggle with applying truth to ourselves and others. And so we clash when we come together to pursue gospel living, not always realizing the reason we see things so differently. What can we do about this? Knowing where our roots lie is a great place to start. From there we can ask the questions, Do I need to apply more truth to this situation, issue, or relationship, or do I need to extend more grace? and, How is my perspective perhaps skewed by my faith environment background?

In constantly responding to preconceived ideas, children lose opportunities to demonstrate original thinking, organize concepts, and design formats which capture their intent. Prescribed curriculum, an exclusively predetermined learning agenda, ignores the contexts that are naturally created by childhood. Although some elements of prescription have value in planning curriculum, the notion of the "child's curriculum" has long been buried under layers of national, state, district, and school mandates.

The internet we know is full of places, languages, territories, and it’s an alternate world in itself. The strange thing is that, deep down, we don’t reinvent anything in this new world. We have this powerful tool, this parallel space that should be ideal, in theory, since it’s completely controlled by us, its creators. And yet it has the same functional faults as the physical world—the real one, you might say. All the social problems of our world exist online: theft, pedophilia, pornography, organized crime, drug trafficking, assassinations… The only difference is that everyone dares to be criminals or morally wrong, at least once, in the cyber world, but even when we do, we’re embarrassed, as if we’re incapable of thinking outside the original format. Humans have created this fantastic space of freedom and made it into a carbon copy of the world system. It’s as if we weren’t creative enough to invent a new moral code that would work online or new representations of ourselves that challenge the ones we’ve always had.

Financial management takes on a new meaning when you enter a partnership with a private equity group. There are software systems marketed to investment firms to consolidate their financials among the companies they own. For them, it has many benefits. It simplifies financial reporting and management of their investments. For the operating companies, it may provide huge value if their current reporting systems are inadequate. However, if your company has a well-implemented modern system, this can be a burden. Imagine having someone come in and require that you abandon your cuttingedge integrated system and, instead, put your reports in their format. I have a friend who was a CFO with a modern ERP system who was required to integrate their company’s reporting with an antiquated Excel-based report generator because their new equity partners required their charts to look a certain way. It cost them time and money that could have been applied to building their company’s value elsewhere.

Thus I divined to what extent a stronger kind of man must necessarily imagine — the elevation and enhancement of man in another direction: higher creatures, beyond good and evil, beyond those values which bear the stamp of their origin in the sphere of suffering, of the herd, and of the greater number — I searched for the data of this topsy-turvy formation of ideals in history (the concepts "pagan," "classical," "noble," have been discovered afresh and brought forward).

This hidden disease had shaped my relationship to my body, and with it the way I live as a woman in the world. But, as I have learned to live as an unwell woman, I have also learned that my history is a shared history. Written into the history of my disease are the histories of women whose suffering led to the formation of the medical knowledge that saved my life. The medical science that helped me heal would not exist without those women who, over centuries, struggled to have their pain recognised, valued, legitimised. The history of medicine is the history of unwell women, of their bodies, minds and lives. I owe them everything.

Come Clean with God It is a trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of all. —1 TIMOTHY 1:15 NASB     One of the most watched TV series in recent years has been Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. The highlight of the program is when Mr. Trump delights in saying, “You’re fired!” This format has been so well received in America that other networks quickly introduced their versions. While we never want to hear our bosses utter, “You’re fired!” it could happen. But thankfully, we will only hear Jesus say, “You’re hired.” He gives us new life. But in order for us to be hired, we must humble ourselves and come clean with God. The apostle Paul had the same dilemma when he was challenged to deal with God’s grace. Some of these struggles can be found in his writings: • 1 Corinthians 15:9—I am the least of all the apostles. • Ephesians 3:8—I am the least deserving Christian there is. • 1 Timothy 1:15—I am the worst sinner of all. Paul was humbled by his past and wanted to change his direction in life. At one time in my life I had to make a decision. I had to let old things pass away and then turn to eternal values. As I faced decisions about how I lived and what I wanted, I had to ask, How do I come close to God? Examine Paul’s challenge in 1 Timothy 2:1-4: Here are my directions: Pray much for others; plead for God’s mercy upon them; give thanks for all he is going to do for them.   Pray in this way for kings and all others who are in authority over us, or are in places of high responsibility, so that we can live in peace and quietness, spending our time in godly living and thinking much about the Lord. This is good and pleases God our Savior, for he longs for all to be saved (TLB). Paul gives us three very valuable challenges and instructions: (1) pray for your needs, (2) pray for others, and (3) pray for thanksgiving. Notice that we are instructed to go from our internal needs first and then move to prayers for others and then thanksgiving to God. We are a very narcissistic

Two kinds of clarity support habit formation: clarity of values and clarity of action. The clearer I am about what I value, and what action I expect from myself—not what other people value, or expect from me—the more likely I am to stick to my habits.

Besides clarity of values, another kind of clarity supports habit formation: clarity of action. The more specific I am about what action to take, the more likely I am to form a habit. A habit to “be more mindful,” for instance, is too vague to be a habit, but “have a moment of gratitude every time I walk into my apartment building” or “take a photo of something interesting every day” are concrete actions that can become habits.

Here is where Taylor locates the most significant shift in the post-’60s West: while ideals of tolerance have always been present in the modern social imaginary, in earlier forms (Locke, the early American republic, etc.) this value was contained and surrounded by other values that were a scaffolding of formation (e.g., the citizen ethic; p. 484). What erodes in the last half century is precisely these limits on individual fulfillment (p. 485). The Place of the Sacred in Our Secular Age What is the “imagined place of the sacred” in a society governed by expressivist individualism (p. 486)? Taylor has already hinted that such a society seems to forge its own “festive” rendition of the sacred — “moments of fusion in a common action/feeling, which both wrench us out of the everyday, and seem to put us in touch with something exceptional, beyond ourselves.

When dealing only with his own money, investment losses never bothered Munger much. To him it was like a losing night in a regular poker game where you knew you were one of the best players—you'd make up the difference later. But he now found that reported, temporary quotational losses in the Wheeler, Munger limited partnership accounts gave him tremendous pain. And so, by the end of 1974, he had resolved, like Buffett, to stop managing money for others in a limited partnership format. He would liquidate Wheeler, Munger after its asset value made a substantial recovery. And he would liquidate soon enough so that he would not take any general partner's override when the main investment positions were distributed. In 1975, Wheeler, Munger did make an impressive recovery with a gain of 73.2 percent, and Munger and Marshall liquidated the partnership early in 1976.

Not all minds can easily involve science. Most of what you can find inside various minds have no or weak connection with science; they are just values. If your mind takes any idea for guaranteed before its empirical investigation, or if you cannot criticize or make any assumption that your hypothesis related to it can be false, as well as true, it means you don’t do science but rather share some ideological, historical, religious or ethical values. No politics, ethics, history, religion can be a science in the strict sense of the term. All of them engage in the manipulation of brains in different ways. That is why any strong political, ethical, historical, religious bias would make your alleged ‘scientific mind’ weak. It is true that not all questions can be answered using scientific approaches, however, the formation of values inside your mind should substantially be up to you — be dependent on your critical thinking and sense of doubt, but should not be absorbed by various political, ethical, historical, religious doctrines in ready-form.

Salette, France (1846) The next apparition at La Salette happened four years later, in 1846. High up in the French Alps, Mary appeared to two children—Maximin, eleven; and Mélanie, fourteen—as they tended sheep. What they saw when they came upon her was unique among apparitions; she sat as a lady sobbing, her hands covering her face in grief. Indeed, looking at the turmoil in France and beyond, Mary had much to grieve over. France’s anti-Catholic streak had even reached the small village of La Salette, where Mass and the sacraments were neglected as fewer and fewer people valued the faith of their fathers. Cursing was preferred to prayer, sexual license erased purity, and greed and self-indulgence superseded piety and sacrifice. Even the children to whom Mary appeared had little faith or formation. They rarely went to Mass and were barely able to muddle through the Our Father or Hail Mary. The messages from La Salette are significant because of their length and detail.

Each seminarian is the protagonist of his own formation ... and is called to a journey of ongoing growth in the human, spiritual, intellectual and pastoral areas, taking into account his own personal and family background. Seminarians are likewise responsible for establishing and maintaining a climate of formation that is consistent with the values of the Gospel.

Man is encased, as though in a shell, in the particular ranking of the simplest values and value-qualities which represent the objective side of his *ordo amoris*, values which have not yet been shaped into things and goods. He carries this shell along with him wherever he goes and cannot escape from it no matter how quickly he runs. He perceives the world and himself through the windows of this shell, and perceives no more of the world, of himself, or of anything else besides what these windows show him, in accordance with their position, size, and color. The structure and total content of each man's environment, which is ultimately organized according to its value structure, does not wander or change, even though he himself wanders further and further in space. It is simply filled out anew with certain individual things. However, even this fulfillment must obey the law of formation prescribed by the value structure of the milieu. The goods along the route of a man's life, the practical things, the resistances to willing and acting against which he sets his will, are from the very first always inspected and "sighted," as it were, by the particular selective mechanism of his *ordo amoris*. Wherever he arrives, it is not the same men and the same things, but the same types of men and things (and this are in every case *types* of values), that attract or repulse him in accordance with certain constant rules of preference and rejection. What he actually notices, what he observes or leaves unnoticed and unobserved, is determined by this attraction and this repulsion; these already determine the material of *possible* noticing and observing. Moreover, the attraction and repulsion are felt to come from things, not from the self, in contrast to the case of so-called active attention, and are themselves governed and circumscribed by potentially effective attitudes of interest and love, experienced as readiness for being affected." —from_Ordo Amoris_

For in all the above cases it is a question of the specific and peculiar rationalism of Western culture. Now by this term very different things may be understood, as the following discussion will repeatedly show. There is, for example, rationalization of mystical contemplation, that is of an attitude which, viewed from other departments of life, is specifically irrational, just as much as there are rationalizations of economic life, of technique, of scientific research, of military training, of law and administration. Furthermore, each one of these fields may be rationalized in terms of very different ultimate values and ends, and what is rational from one point of view may well be irrational from another. Hence rationalizations of the most varied character have existed in various departments of life and in all areas of culture. To characterize their differences from the view-point of cultural history it is necessary to know what departments are rationalized, and in what direction. It is hence our first concern to work out and to explain genetically the special peculiarity of Occidental rationalism, and within this field that of the modern Occidental form. Every such attempt at explanation must, recognizing the fundamental importance of the economic factor, above all take account of the economic conditions. But at the same time the opposite correlation must not be left out of consideration. For though the development of economic rationalism is partly dependent on rational technique and law, it is at the same time determined by the ability and disposition of men to adopt certain types of practical rational conduct. When these types have been obstructed by spiritual obstacles, the development of rational economic conduct has also met serious inner resistance. The magical and religious forces, and the ethical ideas of duty based upon them, have in the past always been among the most important formative influences on conduct. In the studies collected here we shall be concerned with these forces.

The Form of Government in Islam In the view of Islam, government does not derive from the interests of a class, nor does it serve the domination of an individual or a group. Rather, it represents the fulfillment of the political ideal of a people who bear a common faith and common outlook, taking an organized form in order to initiate the process of intellectual and ideological evolution towards the final goal, i.e., movement toward Allah. Our nation, in the course of its revolutionary developments, has cleansed itself of the dust and impurities that accumulated during the past and purged itself of foreign ideological influences, returning to authentic intellectual standpoints and worldview of Islam. It now intends to establish an ideal and model society on the basis of Islamic norms. The mission of the Constitution is to realize the ideological objectives of the movement and to create conditions conducive to the development of man in accordance with the noble and universal values of Islam. With due attention to the Islamic content of the Iranian Revolution, the Constitution provides the necessary basis for ensuring the continuation of the Revolution at home and abroad. In particular, in the development of international relations, the Constitution will strive with other Islamic and popular movements to prepare the way for the formation of a single world community (in accordance with the Koranic verse “This your community is a single community, and I am your Lord, so worship Me” [21:92]), and to assure the continuation of the struggle for the liberation of all deprived and oppressed peoples in the world.

To attack a system that has evolved to contain social movements through elite representation, we believe in the absolute necessity of autonomous organizing. By "autonomous," we mean the formation of independent groups of people who face specific forms of exploitation and oppression, including but not to limited to nonwhite people, women, indigenous people, nonwhite and white queers, people with disabilities, trans* and gender-nonconforming people, and the poor. Creating a variety of spaces as free from anti blackness, racism, sexism, and sexual violence as possible are the minimal conditions needed for political projects to survive over time. We also believe in the political value of organizing across social divisions with the understanding that any identity category is already a "coalition" of different groups with often radically different political interests depending on the issues being addressed. We hope for the emergence of widespread autonomous organizing. Original pamphlet: Who is Oakland. April 2012. Quoted in: Dangerous Allies. Taking Sides.

As we’ve seen, up to 25 percent of employed seniors from our top universities are heading to financial services each year. Our financial services industry (and to a lesser extent its attendant legal industry) plays an equivalent role to the oil industry in Saudi Arabia in terms of talent attraction. You can see a similar dynamic at work in other fields with fixed slots. There were 682 orthopedic surgery residents in the United States in 2012. That number is set because there are only so many funded residency slots in teaching hospital programs throughout the country.4 If I were to kick butt in medical school and get one of these residencies, I would be on the way to becoming an orthopedic surgeon, probably the most coveted residency due to money, lifestyle, low morbidity of patients, gratification from restoring mobility, and other factors. But let’s say that I didn’t make it and fell short—there would still be 682 orthopedic surgeons five years from now because the next guy would have gotten that slot. We’re all competing to fit through the same finite gate. The value difference if I perform really strongly and get one of these coveted spots is not one more surgeon—it’s the gap between me and the 683rd person who didn’t get it (and perhaps went into a less prestigious or less lucrative specialty). From a value creation standpoint, it’s not ideal for a massive level of talent to be going to existing enterprises that have captured large economic rents or where people are fighting for a set of finite slots. The rents and slots will stay essentially constant. Contrast this with new business formation. If I were to say, “There are only going to be 682 new successful businesses started in the United States next year,” people would instantly regard that as ridiculous. It’s unknown and unknowable. But we all know that if another enterprising team comes along and starts a cool company, that number goes up by one.

Two centuries ago, a New Faith came to this land. Many found it an alien creed. Others merged it in with the old ideas and values. But in that interval, between the decaying and disappearance of the Old Faith and the formation and establishment of the New Faith, there was always a period of danger. Some people would become uncertain; others confused or even frightened. Emerging on both sides, there could be a wild fanaticism as each tried to protect their own beliefs. Unfortunately, claiming one deity as an ally for partisan values leads to the worst fanaticism of all. It is a step towards barbarism which destroys our humanity.

In West's guide, rule-of-thumb guidance comes in two formats that most valuation experts recognize:  Percentage of annual sales: If a business had total sales of $ 100,000 last year and the multiple for that business was 40 percent of annual sales, the price based on that particular rule of thumb would be $ 40,000.  Multiple of earnings: An earnings multiplier makes the most sense to prospective buyers. It directly addresses the buyer's motive to make money: to achieve a return on investment. In many small companies, this multiple is commonly used against what is known as seller's discretionary earnings (SDE), which are earnings before accounting for the following items: • Income taxes • Nonrecurring income and expenses • Nonoperating income and expenses • Depreciating an amortization • Interest expense or income • Owner's total compensation for one owner/ operator after adjusting the total compensation of all owners to market value