We Succeed Together Quotes

I had a boyfriend who told me I’d never succeed, never be nominated for a Grammy, never have a hit song, and that he hoped I’d fail. I said to him, ‘Someday, when we’re not together, you won’t be able to order a cup of coffee at the fucking deli without hearing or seeing me.

Are tou trying to be annoying?" I demanded. My patience was not waning, but entirely gone. "Because if you are, then be assured, you have succeeded." Jared and Wes looked at me with shocked eyes. "I am female," I complained. "That 'it' business is really getting on my nerves." Jared blinked in surprise, then his face settled back into harder lines. "Because of the body you wear?" Wes glared at him. "Because of me," I hissed. "By whose definition?" "How about by yours? In my species, I am the one that bears young. Is that not female enough for you?" That stopped him short. I felt almost smug. 'As you should', Melanie approved. 'He's wrong and he's being a pig about it'. Thank you. 'We girls have to stick together'.

I pray for all of us, oppressor and friend, that together we may succeed in building a better world through human understanding and love, and that in doing so we may reduce the pain and suffering of all sentient beings.

When did they stop putting toys in cereal boxes? When I was little, I remember wandering the cereal aisle (which surely is as American a phenomenon as fireworks on the Fourth of July) and picking my breakfast food based on what the reward was: a Frisbee with the Trix rabbit's face emblazoned on the front. Holographic stickers with the Lucky Charms leprechaun. A mystery decoder wheel. I could suffer through raisin bran for a month if it meant I got a magic ring at the end. I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA. Here's a secret: those mothers don't exist. Most of us-even if we'd never confess-are suffering through the raisin bran in the hopes of a glimpse of that magic ring. I look very good on paper. I have a family, and I write a newspaper column. In real life, I have to pick superglue out of the carpet, rarely remember to defrost for dinner, and plan to have BECAUSE I SAID SO engraved on my tombstone. Real mothers wonder why experts who write for Parents and Good Housekeeping-and, dare I say it, the Burlington Free Press-seem to have their acts together all the time when they themselves can barely keep their heads above the stormy seas of parenthood. Real mothers don't just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady's car, and say, "Great. Maybe YOU can do a better job." Real mothers know that it's okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast. Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed. If parenting is the box of raisin bran, then real mothers know the ratio of flakes to fun is severely imbalanced. For every moment that your child confides in you, or tells you he loves you, or does something unprompted to protect his brother that you happen to witness, there are many more moments of chaos, error, and self-doubt. Real mothers may not speak the heresy, but they sometimes secretly wish they'd chosen something for breakfast other than this endless cereal. Real mothers worry that other mothers will find that magic ring, whereas they'll be looking and looking for ages. Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one.

First of all, accept that something is wrong with you. It’s a good start. Something has always been wrong with me, too. We’re in a club of sorts, the lunatic fringe who are proud to band together. There’s a joyous road to ruin out there, and if you let me be your garbage guru, I’ll teach you how to succeed in insanity and take control of your low self-esteem. Personality disorders are a terrible thing to waste.

One thing more I must tell you. For the longest time, the only emotion I have ever felt was the hunger to succeed. Then I met you. Is love the desire—no, the need—to be with that person, whatever the cost? Does it cause the rue of rage when you see that person with another? Does it make you ache to hold her, to whisper things that sound foreign and strange to your tongue? Does it make you wish for things you know can never be? I haven't the answers, Riley. In all that I've learned over the years, no one has ever mentioned a force such as this. But whatever it is, I feel it for you. We would have been good together. Written by Misha.

What?" he asked. "I don't know. Just thinking about flowers. And impressing people. I mean, how strange is it that we bring plant sex organs to people we're attracted to? What's up with that? It's a weird sign of affection." His dark eyes lit up, like he'd just discovered something surprising and delightful. "Is it any weirder than giving chocolate, which is supposed to be an aphrodisiac? Or what about wine? A 'romantic' drink that really just succeeds in lowering the other person's inhibitions." "Hmmm, It's like people are trying to be both subtle and blatant at the same time. Like, they won't actually go up and say, 'Hey, I like you, lets get together.' Instead, they're like, 'Here, have some plant genitalia and aphrodisiacs.

She is always trying to win. You want to say to her: We cannot advance together if you are like this. Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system. We are partners, paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with each other. Instead you say: Why don’t you understand? Don’t you understand? You do understand? Then what don’t I understand?

Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design. But we keep on trying because we know that others have succeeded, and we are not willing to acknowledge defeat.

We look back on history, and what do we see? Empires rising and falling; revolutions and counter-revolutions succeeding one another; wealth accumulating and wealth dispersed; one nation dominant and then another. As Shakespeare’s King Lear puts it, “the rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon.” In one lifetime I’ve seen my fellow countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, and the great majority of them convinced – in the words of what is still a favorite song – that God has made them mighty and will make them mightier yet. I’ve heard a crazed Austrian announce the establishment of a German Reich that was to last for a thousand years; an Italian clown report that the calendar will begin again with his assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Ashoka, more humane than Marcus Aurelius. I’ve seen America wealthier than all the rest of the world put together; and with the superiority of weaponry that would have enabled Americans, had they so wished, to outdo an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of conquest. All in one little lifetime – gone with the wind: England now part of an island off the coast of Europe, threatened with further dismemberment; Hitler and Mussolini seen as buffoons; Stalin a sinister name in the regime he helped to found and dominated totally for three decades; Americans haunted by fears of running out of the precious fluid that keeps their motorways roaring and the smog settling, by memories of a disastrous military campaign in Vietnam, and the windmills of Watergate. Can this really be what life is about – this worldwide soap opera going on from century to century, from era to era, as old discarded sets and props litter the earth? Surely not. Was it to provide a location for so repetitive and ribald a production as this that the universe was created and man, or homo sapiens as he likes to call himself – heaven knows why – came into existence? I can’t believe it. If this were all, then the cynics, the hedonists, and the suicides are right: the most we can hope for from life is amusement, gratification of our senses, and death. But it is not all.

We've got to get on the same page before we can turn it. We've tried a do-it-yourself approach to writing the racial narrative about America, but the forces selling denial, ignorance, and projection have succeeded in robbing us of our own shared history--both the pain and the resilience. It's time to tell the truth, with a nationwide process that enrolls all of us in setting the facts straight so that we can move forward with a new story, together.

God will not be tolerated. He instructs us to worship and fear Him. In our world, where hundreds of things distract us from God, we have to intentionally and consistently remind ourselves of Him. Because we don’t often think about the reality of who God is, we quickly forget that He is worthy to be worshiped and loved. We are to fear Him. The answer to each of these questions is simply this: because He’s God. He has more of a right to ask us why so many people are starving. As much as we want God to explain himself to us, His creation, we are in no place to demand that He give an account to us. Can you worship a God who isn’t obligated to explain His actions to you? Could it be your arrogance that makes you think God owes you an explanation? If God is truly the greatest good on this earth, would He be loving us if He didn’t draw us toward what is best for us (even if that happens to be Himself)? Doesn’t His courting, luring, pushing, calling, and even “threatening” demonstrate His love? If He didn’t do all of that, wouldn’t we accuse Him of being unloving in the end, when all things are revealed? Has your relationship with God actually changed the way you live? Do you see evidence of God’s kingdom in your life? Or are you choking it out slowly by spending too much time, energy, money, and thought on the things of this world? Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. Jesus’ call to commitment is clear: He wants all or nothing. Our greatest fear as individuals and as a church should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter. If life is a river, then pursuing Christ requires swimming upstream. When we stop swimming, or actively following Him, we automatically begin to be swept downstream. How could we think for even a second that something on this puny little earth compares to the Creator and Sustainer and Savior of it all? True faith means holding nothing back; it bets everything on the hope of eternity. When you are truly in love, you go to great lengths to be with the one you love. You’ll drive for hours to be together, even if it’s only for a short while. You don’t mind staying up late to talk. Walking in the rain is romantic, not annoying. You’ll willingly spend a small fortune on the one you’re crazy about. When you are apart from each other, it’s painful, even miserable. He or she is all you think about; you jump at any chance to be together. There is nothing better than giving up everything and stepping into a passionate love relationship with God, the God of the universe who made galaxies, leaves, laughter, and me and you. Do you recognize the foolishness of seeking fulfillment outside of Him? Are you ready and willing to make yourself nothing? To take the very nature of a servant? To be obedient unto death? True love requires sacrifice. What are you doing right now that requires faith? God doesn’t call us to be comfortable. If one person “wastes” away his day by spending hours connecting with God, and the other person believes he is too busy or has better things to do than worship the Creator and Sustainer, who is the crazy one? Am I loving my neighbor and my God by living where I live, by driving what I drive, by talking how I talk?” If I stop pursuing Christ, I am letting our relationship deteriorate. The way we live out our days is the way we will live our lives. What will people say about your life in heaven? Will people speak of God’s work and glory through you? And even more important, how will you answer the King when He says, “What did you do with what I gave you?

You want to say to her: We cannot advance together if you are like this. Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system. We are partners, paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with each other.

They weren't stronger than him, they weren't smarter, they weren't more prepared. But circumstances had brought them together and allowed them to succeed where so many others had failed. Patricia knew how they looked, a bunch of silly Southern women, yakking about books over white wine. A bunch of carpool drivers, skinned-knee kissers, errand runners, secret Santas and part-time tooth fairies, with their practical jeans and festive sweaters. Think of us what you will, she thought, we made mistakes and probably scarred our children for life, and we froze sandwiches, and forgot carpool, and got divorced. But when the time came, we went the distance.

We have talked at length of individual rights; but what, it may be asked, of the “rights of society”? Don’t they supersede the rights of the mere individual? The libertarian, however, is an individualist; he believes that one of the prime errors in social theory is to treat “society” as if it were an actually existing entity. “Society” is sometimes treated as a superior or quasi-divine figure with overriding “rights” of its own; at other times as an existing evil which can be blamed for all the ills of the world. The individualist holds that only individuals exist, think, feel, choose, and act; and that “society” is not a living entity but simply a label for a set of interacting individuals. Treating society as a thing that chooses and acts, then, serves to obscure the real forces at work. If, in a small community, ten people band together to rob and expropriate three others then this is clearly and evidently a case of a group of individuals acting in concert against another group. In this situation, if the ten people presumed to refer to themselves as “society” acting in “its” interest, the rationale would be laughed out of court; even the ten robbers would probably be too shamefaced to use this sort of argument. But let their size increase, and this kind of obfuscation becomes rife and succeeds in duping the public.

My idealized account was so much to her liking that it brought us together. At that moment Lola seemed to discover that we had at least one taste in common, well concealed in my case, namely, a taste for social functions. She went so far as to kiss me in a burst of spontaneous emotion, something, I have to admit, that she seldom did. And then she was touched by the sadness of bygone fashions. Everyone has his own way of mourning the passage of time. It was through dead fashions that Lola perceived the flight of the years. "Ferdinand," she asked, "do you think there will be races here again?" "When the war is over, Lola, I should think..." "We can't be sure, can we?" "No, we can't be sure." The possibility that there would never again be races at Longchamp overwhelmed her. The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.

I rest my head on his shoulder and we watch the near-dark ocean together. We watch the way the water pulls back and turns over and beats against the sand, trying to wear the earth away. And even though it doesn't succeed, it pulls back and pounds the shore again and again, as if there were no last time and there is no next time and this time is the time that counts.

As I train myself to cast off words, as I learn to erase word-thoughts, I begin to feel a new world rising up around me, The old world of houses, rooms, trees and streets shimmers, wavers and tears away, revealing another universe as startling as fire. We are shut off from the fullness of things. Words hide the world. They blur together elements that exist apart, or they break elements into pieces bind up the world, contract it into hard little pellets of perception. But the unbound world, the world behind the world – how fluid it is, how lovely and dangerous. At rare moments of clarity, I succeed in breaking through. Then I see. I see a place where nothing is known, because nothing is shaped in advance by words. There, nothing is hidden from me. There, every object presents itself entirely, with all its being. It's as if, looking at a house, you were able to see all four sides and both roof slopes. But then, there's no “house,” no “object,” no form that stops at a boundary, only a stream of manifold, precise, and nameless sensations, shifting into one another, pullulating, a fullness, a flow. Stripped of words, untamed, the universe pours in on me from every direction. I become what I see. I am earth, I am air. I am all. My eyes are suns. My hair streams among the galaxies.

She is always trying to win. You want to say to her: We cannot advance together if you are like this. Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn't have a scoring system. We are partners, paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with each other. Instead you say: Why don't you understand? Don't you understand? You do understand? Then what don't I understand?

The infinite distance between body and mind symbolizes the infinitely more infinite distance between mind and charity, for charity is supernatural. ...Out of all bodies together we could not succeed in creating one little thought. It is impossible, and of a different order. Out of all bodies and minds we could not extract one impulse of true charity. It is impossible, and of a different, supernatural, order.

we had more skill than you can imagine, at almost every position. But guys didn’t want to put in the effort or to play with toughness and togetherness, and the incredible skills never developed into talent.

I tried to put myself in his place, and realized we looked exactly like what we were: a family. These strangely tied together individuals trying desperately to keep both ourselves and one another happy. Succeeding, and failing, and succeeding. When Jeremy called me up to light one of the thirteen candles on the cake, he said the kindest things, and I knew he meant each and every one. He talked about me teaching him how to ride a bike, how to swim, how to kick an arcade game in just the right place to get a free play. He was remembering the best of me. The way he spoke, I almost recognized who he was talking about.

All mature adults must accept that they are essentially unknowable--and that they will never know the one they love. Even when we kiss there is distance; it is a distance that cannot be bridged by romantic love and must be respected if a relationship is to succeed. The real metric by which we can gauge the authenticity of love is not how close we want to be, how merged and intermingled, but how far we can stand apart and still be together.

You want to say to her: We cannot advance together if you are like this. Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system. We are partners, paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with each other.

You want to say to her: We cannot advance together if you are like this. Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn't have a scoring system. We are partners, paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with each other.

I tried to put myself in his place, and realized we looked exactly like what we were: a family. These strangely tied together individuals trying desperately to keep both ourselves and one another happy. Succeeding, and failing, and succeeding.

All great, simple images reveal a psychic state. The house, even more than the landscape, is a "psychic state," and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy. Psychologists generally, and Francoise Minkowska in particular, together with those whom she has succeeded interesting in the subject, have studied the drawing of houses made by children, and even used them for testing. Indeed, the house-test has the advantage of welcoming spontaneity, for many children draw a house spontaneously while dreaming over their paper and pencil. To quote Anne Balif: "Asking a child to draw his house is asking him to reveal the deepest dream shelter he has found for his happiness. If he is happy, he will succeed in drawing a snug, protected house which is well built on deeply-rooted foundations." It will have the right shape, and nearly always there will be some indication of its inner strength. In certain drawings, quite obviously, to quote Mme. Balif, "it is warm indoors, and there is a fire burning, such a big fire, in fact, that it can be seen coming out of the chimney." When the house is happy, soft smoke rises in gay rings above the roof. If the child is unhappy, however, the house bears traces of his distress. In this connection, I recall that Francoise Minkowska organized an unusually moving exhibition of drawings by Polish and Jewish children who had suffered the cruelties of the German occupation during the last war. One child, who had been hidden in a closet every time there was an alert, continued to draw narrow, cold, closed houses long after those evil times were over. These are what Mme. Minkowska calls "motionless" houses, houses that have become motionless in their rigidity. "This rigidity and motionlessness are present in the smoke as well as in the window curtains. The surrounding trees are quite straight and give the impression of standing guard over the house". Mme. Minkowska knows that a live house is not really "motionless," that, particularly, it integrates the movements by means of which one accedes to the door. Thus the path that leads to the house is often a climbing one. At times, even, it is inviting. In any case, it always possesses certain kinesthetic features. If we were making a Rorschach test, we should say that the house has "K." Often a simple detail suffices for Mme. Minkowska, a distinguished psychologist, to recognize the way the house functions. In one house, drawn by an eight-year-old child, she notes that there is " a knob on the door; people go in the house, they live there." It is not merely a constructed house, it is also a house that is "lived-in." Quite obviously the door-knob has a functional significance. This is the kinesthetic sign, so frequently forgotten in the drawings of "tense" children. Naturally, too, the door-knob could hardly be drawn in scale with the house, its function taking precedence over any question of size. For it expresses the function of opening, and only a logical mind could object that it is used to close as well as to open the door. In the domain of values, on the other hand, a key closes more often than it opens, whereas the door-knob opens more often than it closes. And the gesture of closing is always sharper, firmer, and briefer than that of opening. It is by weighing such fine points as these that, like Francoise Minkowska, one becomes a psychologist of houses.

We accept and willingly support the subjugation of our sisters to the East, even though we would never accept that for ourselves or our sisters in the West. Here, we demand that women be able to "free the nipple," but we support those in the East who demand that women "cover their head." It is devastating to see this disconnect. ... As much as women in the Muslim world are fighting back, we will only succeed if we work together. Women in the East must work together, and women in the West--please reach back your hand and pull women in the East up the road to equality with you.

The charge now is to move from understanding that we are bound together to choosing to be united. To live up to our best values so everyone feels like they are part of this country and can see the path for how they can succeed here. To build enough understanding among all of us that a gain for one isn’t seen as a loss by another.

And further, God should not be regarded as older than His creations by any period of time, but rather by the peculiar property of His own single nature. For the infinite changing of temporal things tries to imitate the ever simultaneously present immutability of His life: it cannot succeed in imitating or equalling this, but sinks from immutability into change, and falls from the single directness of the present into an infinite space of future and past. And since this temporal state cannot possess its life completely and simultaneously, but it does, in the same manner, exist forever without ceasing, it therefore seems to try in some degree to rival that which it cannot fulfill or represent, for it binds itself to some sort of present time out of this small and fleeting moment; but inasmuch as this temporal present bears a certain appearance of that abiding present, it somehow makes those, to whom it comes, seem to be in truth what they imitate. But since this imitation could not be abiding, the unending march of time has swept it away, and thus we find that it has bound together, as it passes, a chain of life, which it could not by abiding embrace in its fullness. And thus if we would apply proper epithets to those subjects, we can say, following Plato, that God is eternal, but the universe is continual.

Christian reformism arose originally from the ability of its advocates to contrast the Old Testament with the New. The cobbled-together ancient Jewish books had an ill-tempered and implacable and bloody and provincial god, who was probably more frightening when he was in a good mood (the classic attribute of the dictator). Whereas the cobbled-together books of the last two thousand years contained handholds for the hopeful, and references to meekness, forgiveness, lambs and sheep, and so forth. This distinction is more apparent than real, since it is only in the reported observations of Jesus that we find any mention of hell and eternal punishment. The god of Moses would brusquely call for other tribes, including his favorite one, to suffer massacre and plague and even extirpation, but when the grave closed over his victims he was essentially finished with them unless he remembered to curse their succeeding progeny. Not until the advent of the Prince of Peace do we hear of the ghastly idea of further punishing and torturing the dead. First presaged by the rantings of John the Baptist, the son of god is revealed as one who, if his milder words are not accepted straightaway, will condemn the inattentive to everlasting fire. This has provided texts for clerical sadists ever since, and features very lip-smackingly in the tirades of Islam.

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

The prophecy seemed to indicate that we should stay together in order to succeed.” “The prophecy has many meanings,” Kiernan said, “and none of them are clear.” “Then why have a prophecy at all?” Brant demanded, a hint of his old irritation breaking into his voice. “Has it really changed anything?” Kiernan asked. “It has changed everything!” “Interesting.” Kiernan looked thoughtful.“You really think so?

DevOps benefits all of us in the technology value stream, whether we are Dev, Ops, QA, Infosec, Product Owners, or customers. It brings joy back to developing great products, with fewer death marches. It enables humane work conditions with fewer weekends worked and fewer missed holidays with our loved ones. It enables teams to work together to survive, learn, thrive, delight our customers, and help our organization succeed.

This seat taken?" My eyes grazing over the only other occupant, a guy with long glossy dark hair with his head bent over a book. "It's all yours," he says. And when he lifts his head and smiles,my heart just about leaps from my chest. It's the boy from my dreams. The boy from the Rabbit Hole,the gas station,and the cave-sitting before me with those same amazing,icy-blue eues, those same alluring lips I've kissed multiple times-but only in slumber, never in waking life. I scold my heart to settle,but it doesn't obey. I admonish myself to sit,to act normal, casual-and I just barely succeed. Stealing a series of surreptitious looks as I search through my backpack, taking in his square chin,wide generous lips,strong brow,defined cheekbones, and smooth brown skin-the exact same features as Cade. "You're the new girl,right?" He abandons his book,tilting his head in a way that causes his hair to stream over his shoulder,so glossy and inviting it takes all of my will not to lean across the table and touch it. I nod in reply,or at least I think I do.I can't be too sure.I'm too stricken by his gaze-the way it mirrors mine-trying to determine if he knows me, recognizes me,if he's surprised to find me here.Wishing Paloma had better prepared me-focused more on him and less on his brother. I force my gaze from his.Bang my knee hard against the table as I swivel in my seat.Feeling so odd and unsettled,I wish I'd picked another place to sit, though it's pretty clear no other table would have me. He buries his smile and returns to the book.Allowing a few minutes to pass,not nearly enough time for me to get a grip on myself,when he looks up and says, "Are you staring at me because you've seen my doppelganer roaming the halls,playing king of the cafeteria? Or because you need to borrow a pencil and you're too shy to ask?" I clear the lump from my throat, push the words past my lips when I say, "No one's ever accused me of being shy." A statement that,while steeped in truth, stands at direct odds with the way I feel now,sitting so close to him. "So I guess it's your twin-or doppelganer,as you say." I keep my voice light, as though I'm not at all affected by his presence,but the trill note at the end gives me away.Every part of me now vibrating with the most intense surge of energy-like I've been plugged into the wall and switched on-and it's all I can do to keep from grabbing hold of his shirt, demanding to know if he dreamed the dreams too. He nods,allowing an easy,cool smile to widen his lips. "We're identical," he says. "As I'm sure you've guessed. Though it's easy enough to tell us apart. For one thing,he keeps his hair short.For another-" "The eyes-" I blurt,regretting the words the instant they're out.From the look on his face,he has no idea what I'm talking about. "Yours are...kinder." My cheeks burn so hot I force myself to look away,as words of reproach stampede my brain. Why am I acting like such an inept loser? Why do I insist on embarrassing myself-in front of him-of all people? I have to pull it together.I have to remember who I am-what I am-and what I was born to do.Which is basically to crush him and his kind-or,at the very least,to temper the damage they do.

Then Richard did something surprising. He politely halted the conversation. In his flip flops, he climbed onto the table amid our plates and glasses. He then extended his hand to Kristina , who was sitting next to me, and helped her up onto the table. "Let's dance," he said. And they did. A beautiful slow dance right there in the middle of the feast while everyone else watched--surprised and amused--cutlery and wine glasses be damned. It was the perfect reminder that life is not all business. We're here in this brief span of time to be happy together.

A creative rut is a bit like a finger trap, that little wicker tube that holds your fingers tightly until you stop pulling and bring your fingertips together. Then it slips right off. We get stuck in a rut by trying to think our way out of it: “This project is stalled. Maybe I don’t have the talent. I should probably take another class, sharpen my skills. Or just hit ‘pause’ on this for a few weeks until inspiration returns.” You’re probably very familiar with that voice. We all hear it whenever the flow comes to a stop. The way to get out of the trap is to relax. The path changes as you walk it. You can pivot only as you move.

They weren’t stronger than him, they weren’t smarter, they weren’t more prepared. But circumstances had brought them together and allowed them to succeed where so many others had failed. Patricia knew how they looked, a bunch of silly Southern women, yakking about books over white wine. A bunch of carpool drivers, skinned-knee kissers, errand runners, secret Santas and part-time tooth fairies, with their practical jeans and their festive sweaters. Think of us what you will, she thought, we made mistakes, and probably scarred our children for life, and we froze sandwiches, and forgot car pool, and got divorced. But when the time came, we went the distance.

And so these three facts came together to form a powerful syllogism for people who cared about poverty: First, scores on achievement tests in school correlate strongly with life outcomes, no matter what a student’s background. Second, children in low-income homes did much worse on achievement tests than children in middle-income and high-income homes. And third, certain schools, using a very different model than traditional public schools, were able to substantially raise the achievement-test scores of low-income children. The conclusion: if we could replicate on a big, national scale the accomplishments of those schools, we could make a huge dent in poverty’s impact on children’s success.

It was this situation that led mathematician Chris Hauert and his colleagues to consider another possibility in an important evolutionary model published in Science in 2002. In Axelrod's study and in most previous theoretical models, individuals were forced to interact with each other. But what if they could choose not to interact? Rather than attempting to cooperate and risking being taken advantage of, a person could fend for herself. In other words, she could sever her connections to others in the network. Hauert called the people who adopt this strategy "loners." Using some beautiful mathematics, Hauert and his colleagues showed that in a world full of loners it is easy for cooperation to evolve because there are no people to take advantage of the cooperators that appear. The loners fend for themselves, and the cooperators form networks with other cooperators. Soon, the cooperators take over the population because they always do better together than the loners. But once the world is full of cooperators, it is very easy for free riders to evolve and enjoy the fruits of cooperation without contributing (like parasites). As the free riders become the dominant type in the population, there is no one left for them to take advantage of; then, the loners once again take over -- because they want nothing to do, as it were, with those bastards. In short, cooperating can emerge because we can do more together than we can apart. But because of the free-rider problem, cooperation is not guaranteed to succeed.

Laia, The Soul Catcher tells me I do not have enough time to get Darin out of Kauf if I remain with Afya’s caravan. I’ll move twice as fast if I go ahead on my own, and by the time you reach Kauf, I’ll have found a way to break Darin out. We—or he, at least—will await you in the cave I told Afya about. In case it doesn’t go as planned, use the map of Kauf that I drew and make a plan of your own in the time you have. If I fail, you must succeed—for your brother and for your people. Whatever happens, remember what you told me: There is hope in life. I hope I see you again. —EV Seven sentences. Seven bleeding sentences after weeks of traveling together, of saving each other, of fighting and surviving. Seven sentences and then he disappears like smoke in a north wind.

What makes a human being dare the impossible? What fires the will when we glimpse something never done before and a wild urge surges up to cry, “Then let’s do it”? Here in San Francisco a young woman blind from birth decides to sail alone across the Pacific and succeeds; I can’t imagine getting as far as Alcatraz. Mountaineers decide that it is not enough merely to climb Mount Everest; they have to climb it alone, take no oxygen, and choose the most difficult ascent. And just a few months ago a man and woman mortgaged their future to put together a fragile plane with a cockpit smaller than a phone booth, so they could fly around the world without a stop. We ask, “Why did you do it?” And the pilot of the Voyager can only reply with a shrug, “Just for the hell of it.” He can give no better reason, yet everyone understands.

Come inside with me,” he urged, increasing the pressure on her elbow, “and I’ll begin making it up to you.” Elizabeth let herself be drawn forward a few steps and hesitated. “This is a mistake. Everyone will see us and think we’ve started it all over again-“ “No, they won’t,” he promised. “There’s a rumor spreading like fire in there that I tried to get you in my clutches two years ago, but without a title to tempt you I didn’t have a chance. Since acquiring a title is a holy crusade for most of them, they’ll admire your sense. Now that I have a title, I’m expected to use it to try to succeed where I failed before-as a way of bolstering my wounded male pride.” Reaching up to brush a wisp of hair from her soft cheek, he said, “I’m sorry. It was the best I could do with what I had to work with-we were seen together in compromising circumstances. Since they’d never believe nothing happened, I could only make them think I was in pursuit and you were evading.” She flinched from his touch but didn’t shove his hand away. “You don’t understand. What’s happening to me in there is no less than I deserve. I knew what the rules were, and I broke them when I stayed with you at the cottage. You didn’t force me to stay. I broke the rules, and-“ “Elizabeth,” he interrupted in a voice edge with harsh remorse, “if you won’t do anything else for me, at least stop exonerating me for that weekend. I can’t bear it. I exerted more force on you than you understand.” Longing to kiss her, Ian had to be satisfied instead with trying to convince her his plan would work, because he now needed her help to ensure its success. In a teasing voice he said, “I think you’re underrating my gift for strategy and subtlety. Come and dance with me, and I’ll prove to you how easily most of the male minds in there have been manipulated.” Despite his confidence, moments after they entered the ballroom Ian noticed the increasing coldness of the looks being directed at them, and he knew a moment of real alarm-until he glanced at Elizabeth as he took her in his arms for a waltz and realized the cause of it. “Elizabeth,” he said in a low, urgent voice, gazing down at her bent head, “stop looking meek! Put your nose in the air and cut me dead or flirt with me, but do not on any account look humble, because these people will interpret it as guilt!” Elizabeth, who had been staring at his shoulder, as she'd done with her other dancing partners, tipped her head back and looked at him in confusion. "What?" Ian's heart turned over when the chandeliers overhead revealed the wounded look in her glorious green eyes. Realizing logic and lectures weren't going to help her give the performance he badly needed her to give, he tried the tack that had, in Scotland, made her stop crying and begin to laugh: He tried to tease her. Casting about for a subject, he said quickly, "Belhaven is certainly in fine looks tonight-pink satin pantaloons. I asked him for the name of his tailor so that I could order a pair for myself." Elizabeth looked at him as if he'd taken leave of his senses; then his warning about looking meek hit home, and she began to understand what he wanted her to do. That added to the comic image of Ian's tall, masculine frame in those absurd pink pantaloons enabled her to manage a weak smile. "I have greatly admired those pantaloons myself," she said. "Will you also order a yellow satin coat to complement the look?" He smiled. "I thought-puce." "An unusual combination," she averred softly, "but one that I am sure will make you the envy of all who behold you.

We are already bound together in the way of my people. Will you speak vows in the way of yours?” Her blue eyes widened with shock, eyes a man could drown in. Eyes a man could spend eternity staring into. A small, very male smile tugged at his mouth. He had succeeded in shocking her. “Mikhail, are you asking me to marry you?” “I am not really certain I know how it is done. Should I be on my knee?” He was grinning openly at her. “You’re proposing to me with a carload of assassins approaching?” “Potential assassins.” He gave her a small, heart-wrenching smile. “Say yes. You know you cannot possibly resist me. Say yes.” “After you made me drink that disgusting apple juice? You set your wolves on me, Mikhail. I know there’s a long list of sins I should be reciting.” Her eyes were sparkling with mischief. He pulled her into his arms, against the heavy muscles of his chest, fitting her neatly into the cradle of his hips. “I can see this is going to take some heavy persuasion.

Remembering is a branch of witchcraftt; its tool is incantation. I often say as if it were a joke – but it's true – that instead of God, I believe in ghosts. To conjure up with the dead you have to dangle the bait of the present before them, the flesh of the living, to coax them out of their inertia. You have to grate and scrape the old roots with tools from the shelves of ancient kitchens. Use your best wooden spoons with the longest handles to whisk into the broth of our fathers the herbs our daughters have grown in their gardens. If I succeed, together with my readers – and perhaps a few men will join us in the kitchen – we could exchange magic formulas like favorite recipes and season to taste the marinade with the old stories and histories offer us, in as much comfort as our witches’ kitchen provides. It won't get too cozy, don't worry: where we stir our cauldron, there will be cold and hot currents from half-open windows, unhinged doors, and earthquake-prone walls.

For a start, we should recognise that the idea of being deeply in love with one special partner over a whole lifetime, what we can call Romantic love, is a very new, ambitious and odd concept, which is at best 250 years old. Before then, people lived together of course but without any very high expectations of being blissfully content doing so. It was a purely practical arrangement, entered into for the sake of survival and the children. We should recognise the sheer historical strangeness of the idea of happy coupledom. A good Romantic marriage is evidently theoretically possible, but it may also be extremely unlikely, something only some 5 or 10 per cent of us can ever properly succeed at – which should make any failure feel a good deal less shameful. As a society, we’ve made something normal that’s in fact a profound anomaly. It is as though we’d set up high altitude tight rope walking as a popular sport. No wonder most of us fall off – and might not want to, or be able to, face getting back on.

As he sat he felt the outside of her thigh, firm, against his, and she felt the outside of his, likewise firm, against hers. She said, “Aren’t you going to take that off?” She meant the black robe, which he had forgotten he was wearing, and he looked down at himself and over at her, and smiled, and answered, “You first.” She laughed. “Together, then.” “Together.” They stood and pulled off their robes, facing each other, and underneath both were wearing jeans and sweaters, there being a nip in the air tonight, and his sweater was brown and loose and hers was beige and clung to her torso like a soft second skin. He attempted chivalrously not to take in the sweep of her body, his eyes holding hers, but of course, as we know often happens in such circumstances, he was unsure as to whether or not he had succeeded, one’s gaze being less than entirely conscious a phenomenon. They sat back down and she placed her fist on her thigh, palm up, and opened it. “Have you ever done psychedelic mushrooms?” she asked.

It is over. The long Occupation that created Israeli generations born in Israel and not knowing another ‘homeland’ created at the same time generations of Palestinians strange to Palestine; born in exile and knowing nothing of the homeland except stories and news. Generations who posses an intimate knowledge of the streets of faraway exiles, but not of their own country. Generations that never planted or built or made their small human mistakes in their own country. Generations that never saw our grandmothers quarter in front of the ovens to present us with a loaf of bread to dip in olive oil, never saw the village preacher in his headdress and Azhari piety hiding in a cave to spy on the girls and the women of the village when they took of their clothes and bathed, naked, in the pool of ‘Ein al-Deir. The Occupation has created generations without a place whose colours, smell, and sounds they can remember; a first place that belongs to them, that they can return to in their memories in their cobbled-together exiles. There is no childhood bed for them to remember, a bed on which they forgot a soft cloth doll, or whose white pillows - once the adults had gone out of an evening were their weapons in a battle that had them shirking with delight. This is it. The Occupation has created generations of us that have to adore an unknown beloved; distant, difficult, surrounded by guards, by walls, by nuclear missiles, by sheer terror. The long Occupation has succeeded in changing us from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Palestine. I have always believed that it is in the interests of an occupation, any occupation, that the homeland should be transformed in the memory of its people into a bouquet of ’symbols’. Merely symbols, they will not allow us to develop our village so that it shares features with the city, or to move without city into a contemporary space. The Occupation forced us to remain with the old. That is its crime. It did not deprive us of the clay ovens of yesterday, but of the mystery of what we could invent tomorrow.

The stories abounded, both recounting these cross-continental journeys and perhaps inspiring them – how Hellenic Jason gathered his Argonauts together (including Augeas, whose vast stables Herakles would be forced to clean) for adventure and profit, how he stopped off along the Bosphorus and discovered the land of the rising sun before other Greek heroes headed to Asia in search of Helen, Troy and glory. In the Homeric epics we hear of Jason travelling east where he tangles with Medea of Colchis, her aunt Circe and the feisty Amazon tribe. Lured by the promise of gold (early and prodigious metalworking did indeed take place in the region – perhaps sparking the Greek idea that the East was ‘rich in gold’) and then detained by the potions and poisons of Princess Medea, Jason succeeded in penetrating the Caucasus – a land which, in the Greek mind, wept with both peril and promise. It was here that Prometheus was chained to a rock with iron rivets for daring to steal fire from the gods. Archaeology east of Istanbul demonstrates how myth grazes history.

Thus it is with the body bereft of life; but things which never possessed life may also have a claim on our forbearance, our reverence, even our self-sacrificing devotion; for example, statues, graves, the soldier’s flag. And if we do violence to our nature, if we succeed in breaking by main force the bonds of association, we lapse into savagery, we suffer injury in our own souls by the loss of all those feelings which, so to speak, clothe the hard bedrock of naked reality with a garniture of verdant life. On the maintenance of these overgrowths of sentiment, on the due treasuring of acquired values, depend all the refinement, the beauty, and the grace of life, all ennobling of the animal instincts, together with all enjoyment and the pursuit of art—all, in short, that the Cynics set themselves to root up without scruple and without pity. There is, no doubt, a limit—so much we may readily concede to them and their not inconsiderable imitators of the present day—beyond which we cannot allow ourselves to be ruled by the principle of association without incurring the charge of that same folly and superstition which quite certainly grew out of the unlimited sway of that principle.

4. The general who thoroughly understands the advantages that accompany variation of tactics knows how to handle his troops. 5. The general who does not understand these, may be well acquainted with the configuration of the country, yet he will not be able to turn his knowledge to practical account. 6. So, the student of war who is unversed in the art of war of varying his plans, even though he be acquainted with the Five Advantages, will fail to make the best use of his men. 7. Hence in the wise leader’s plans, considerations of advantage and of disadvantage will be blended together. 8. If our expectation of advantage be tempered in this way, we may succeed in accomplishing the essential part of our schemes. 9. If, on the other hand, in the midst of difficulties we are always ready to seize an advantage, we may extricate ourselves from misfortune. 10. Reduce the hostile chiefs by inflicting damage on them; and make trouble for them, and keep them constantly engaged; hold out specious allurements, and make them rush to any given point. 11. The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.

I have a covenant with almighty God sealed with the blood of Jesus. He has set me free from the waterless pit. Never again will I be unsatisfied with life. He has become my stronghold of safety and prosperity. He has restored to me double what was taken from me. He has bent me like a bow and filled me with His own power. He has stirred me up and made me like a warrior’s sword. Jesus, the warrior of warriors whose arrow flashes like lightning, is my supreme commander. I follow His every command and rally to His side when He sounds the battle horn. He is my very strength and shield of protection in the midst of the battle. Together, we destroy and overcome the enemy with heaven’s own artillery. I drink deeply of the Spirit and roar as one filled with wine. I am full to the brim with the anointing of God. The Lord has taken His stand at my side and sees to it that I rise victorious in every battle. I sparkle in His land like a jewel in a crown. He has made me as one to be envied—radiant and attractive to the eye—and I prosper and succeed in all that He has called me to do. (Hebrews 2:10; 8:6; John 10:10; Psalm 91:16; Job 42:10; Colossians 1:29; Ephesians 1:19; 5:18; 6:10-18; Genesis 12:1-3; 15:1; 1 John 2:20; 1 Corinthians 15:57; Romans 8:37; Daniel 1:4; Deuteronomy 28:12)

Mr. President, Dr. Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr. Emhoff, Americans and the world, when day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry asea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace. In the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice. And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished. We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one. And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect. We are striving to forge our union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none and harmony for all. Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true. That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped. That even as we tired, we tried that will forever be tied together victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division. Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid. If we’re to live up to her own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made. That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare. It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit. It’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a forest that would shatter our nation rather than share it. Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. This effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated. In this truth, in this faith we trust for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us. This is the era of just redemption. We feared it at its inception. We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves so while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us? We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be a country that is bruised, but whole, benevolent, but bold, fierce, and free. We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. Our blunders become their burdens. But one thing is certain, if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright. So let us leave behind a country better than one we were left with. Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one. We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the West. We will rise from the wind-swept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution. We will rise from the Lake Rim cities of the Midwestern states. We will rise from the sun-baked South. We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful. When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light. If only we’re brave enough.

I want you to write a narrative, a narrative from the future of your city, and you can date it, set it out one year from now, five years from now, a decade from now, a generation from now, and write it as a case study looking back, looking back at the change that you wanted in your city, looking back at the cause that you were championing, and describing the ways that that change and that cause came, in fact, to succeed. Describe the values of your fellow citizens that you activated, and the sense of moral purpose that you were able to stir. Recount all the different ways that you engaged the systems of government, of the marketplace, of social institutions, of faith organizations, of the media. Catalog all the skills you had to deploy, how to negotiate, how to advocate, how to frame issues, how to navigate diversity in conflict, all those skills that enabled you to bring folks on board and to overcome resistance. What you'll be doing when you write that narrative is you'll be discovering how to read power, and in the process, how to write power. So share what you write, do you what you write, and then share what you do. [...] Together, we can create a great network of city that will be the most powerful collective laboratory for self-government this planet has ever seen. We have the power to do that.

A chair down the row from mine shifted and my mouth watered from the aroma of hot cinnamon rolls. I snuck a peek and noticed red, silky, curly hair. I knew her. Echo Emerson. Not a cinnamon roll in sight, but damn if she didn’t smell like one. We had several of our main courses together and last semester one of our free periods. I didn’t know much about her other than she kept to herself, she was smart, a redhead and she had big tits. She wore large, long-sleeved shirts that hung off her shoulders and tank tops underneath that revealed just enough to get the fantasies flowing. Like always, she stared straight ahead as if I didn’t exist. Hell, I probably didn’t exist in her mind. People like Echo Emerson irritated the crap out of me. “You’ve got a f*cked-up name,” I mumbled. I didn’t know why I wanted to rattle her, I just did. “Shouldn’t you be getting high in the bathroom?” So she did know me. “They installed security cameras. We do it in the parking lot now.” “My bad.” Her foot rocked frantically back and forth. Good, I’d succeeded in getting under that perfect facade. “Echo … echo … echo …” Her foot stopped rocking and red curls bounced furiously as she turned to face me. “How original. I’ve never heard that before.” She swept up her backpack and left the office. Her tight ass swayed side to side as she marched down the hallway.

We also find *physics*, in the widest sense of the word, concerned with the explanation of phenomena in the world; but it lies already in the nature of the explanations themselves that they cannot be sufficient. *Physics* is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a *metaphysics* on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter. For it explains phenomena by something still more unknown than are they, namely by laws of nature resting on forces of nature, one of which is also the vital force. Certainly the whole present condition of all things in the world or in nature must necessarily be capable of explanation from purely physical causes. But such an explanation―supposing one actually succeeded so far as to be able to give it―must always just as necessarily be burdened with two essential imperfections (as it were with two sore points, or like Achilles with the vulnerable heel, or the devil with the cloven foot). On account of these imperfections, everything so explained would still really remain unexplained. The first imperfection is that the *beginning* of the chain of causes and effects that explains everything, in other words, of the connected and continuous changes, can positively *never* be reached, but, just like the limits of the world in space and time, recedes incessantly and *in infinitum*. The second imperfection is that all the efficient causes from which everything is explained always rest on something wholly inexplicable, that is, on the original *qualities* of things and the *natural forces* that make their appearance in them. By virtue of such forces they produce a definite effect, e.g., weight, hardness, impact, elasticity, heat, electricity, chemical forces, and so on, and such forces remain in every given explanation like an unknown quantity, not to be eliminated at all, in an otherwise perfectly solved algebraical equation. Accordingly there is not a fragment of clay, however little its value, that is not entirely composed of inexplicable qualities. Therefore these two inevitable defects in every purely physical, i.e., causal, explanation indicate that such an explanation can be only *relatively* true, and that its whole method and nature cannot be the only, the ultimate and hence sufficient one, in other words, cannot be the method that will ever be able to lead to the satisfactory solution of the difficult riddles of things, and to the true understanding of the world and of existence; but that the *physical* explanation, in general and as such, still requires one that is *metaphysical*, which would furnish the key to all its assumptions, but for that very reason would have to follow quite a different path. The first step to this is that we should bring to distinct consciousness and firmly retain the distinction between the two, that is, the difference between *physics* and *metaphysics*. In general this difference rests on the Kantian distinction between *phenomenon* and *thing-in-itself*. Just because Kant declared the thing-in-itself to be absolutely unknowable, there was, according to him, no *metaphysics* at all, but merely immanent knowledge, in other words mere *physics*, which can always speak only of phenomena, and together with this a critique of reason which aspires to metaphysics." ―from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, pp. 172-173

NO MATTER WHAT PART OF THE WORLD we come from, fundamentally we are all the same human beings. We all seek happiness and want to avoid suffering. We all have essentially the same needs and similar concerns. As human beings, we all want to be free, to have the right to decide our own destiny as individuals as well as the destiny of our people. That is human nature. The problems that confront us today are created by man, whether they are violent conflicts, destruction of the environment, poverty, or hunger. These problems can be resolved thanks to human efforts, by understanding that we are brothers and sisters and by developing this sense of fraternity. We must cultivate a universal responsibility toward each other and extend it to the planet that we have to share. I feel optimistic that the ancient values that have sustained mankind are reaffirming themselves today, preparing the way for a better, happier twenty-first century. I pray for all of us, oppressor and friend, so that together we can succeed in building a better world through mutual understanding and love, and that in doing so we may reduce the pain and suffering of all sentient beings.3 On December 10, 1989, the Dalai Lama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, quoted in part above, was broadcast throughout the world. The cause of Tibet had become international. But it was not as the leader of a government in exile, or as a Tibetan, that the Dalai Lama accepted the Nobel Prize. He shared this distinction as a human being with all those who recognize each other’s basic human values. By claiming his humanity in the universal language of the heart, which goes beyond ideological rifts and notions of cultural identity, the Dalai Lama gave us back our humanity. In Oslo on December 10, 1989, we all received the Nobel Peace Prize.

I don’t believe in love that never ends,” said Aiden, his whisper clear and distinct. “I don’t believe in being true until death or finding the other half of your soul.” Harvard raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment. Privately, he considered that it might be good that Aiden hadn’t delivered this speech to this guy he apparently liked so much—whom Aiden had never even mentioned to his best friend before now. This speech was not romantic. Once again, Harvard had to wonder if what he’d been assuming was Aiden’s romantic prowess had actually been many guys letting Aiden get away with murder because he was awfully cute. But Aiden sounded upset, and that spoke to an instinct in Harvard natural as breath. He put his arm around Aiden, and drew his best friend close against him, warm skin and soft hair and barely there shirt and all, and tried to make a sound that was more soothing than fraught. “I don’t believe in songs or promises. I don’t believe in hearts or flowers or lightning strikes.” Aiden snatched a breath as though it was his last before drowning. “I never believed in anything but you.” “Aiden,” said Harvard, bewildered and on the verge of distress. He felt as if there was something he wasn’t getting here. Even more urgently, he felt he should cut off Aiden. It had been a mistake to ask. This wasn’t meant for Harvard, but for someone else, and worse than anything, there was pain in Aiden’s voice. That must be stopped now. Aiden kissed him, startling and fierce, and said against Harvard’s mouth, “Shut up. Let me… let me.” Harvard nodded involuntarily, because of the way Aiden had asked, unable to deny Aiden even things Harvard should refuse to give. Aiden’s warm breath was running down into the small shivery space between the fabric of Harvard’s shirt and his skin. It was panic-inducing, feeling all the impulses of Harvard’s body and his heart like wires that were not only crossed but also impossibly tangled. Disentangling them felt potentially deadly. Everything inside him was in electric knots. “I’ll let you do anything you want,” Harvard told him, “but don’t—don’t—” Hurt yourself. Seeing Aiden sad was unbearable. Harvard didn’t know what to do to fix it. The kiss had turned the air between them into dry grass or kindling, a space where there might be smoke or fire at any moment. Aiden was focused on toying with the collar of Harvard’s shirt, Aiden’s brows drawn together in concentration. Aiden’s fingertips glancing against his skin burned. “You’re so warm,” Aiden said. “Nothing else ever was. I only knew goodness existed because you were the best. You’re the best of everything to me.” Harvard made a wretched sound, leaning in to press his forehead against Aiden’s. He’d known Aiden was lonely, that the long line of guys wasn’t just to have fun but tied up in the cold, huge manor where Aiden had spent his whole childhood, in Aiden’s father with his flat shark eyes and sharp shark smile, and in the long line of stepmothers who Aiden’s father chose because he had no use for people with hearts. Harvard had always known Aiden’s father wanted to crush the heart out of Aiden. He’d always worried Aiden’s father would succeed. Aiden said, his voice distant even though he was so close, “I always knew all of you was too much to ask for.” Harvard didn’t know what to say, so he obeyed a wild foolish impulse, turned his face the crucial fraction toward Aiden’s, and kissed him. Aiden sank into the kiss with a faint sweet noise, as though he’d finally heard Harvard’s wordless cry of distress and was answering it with belated reassurance: No, I’ll be all right. We’re not lost. The idea of anyone not loving Aiden back was unimaginable, but it had clearly happened. Harvard couldn’t think of how to say it, so he tried to make the kiss say it. I’m so sorry you were in pain. I never guessed. I’m sorry I can’t fix this, but I would if I could. He didn’t love you, but I do.

Hypocrisy—in other words, the practice of lying about lying—shields us from seeing ourselves as we are: a collocation of fragments that fit together as a biological unit but not as anything else, not as that ghost which has been called a self, a phantasm whose ecotoplasmic unreality we can never see through. By staying true to the lie of the self, the ego, we can hold onto the illusion that we will be who we are all our lives and not see our selves die a thousand times before our death. While some have dedicated themselves to getting to the bottom of how these parts create the illusion of a whole, this is not how pyramids are built. To get a pyramid off the ground takes a lot of ego—the base material of those stacks of stones that tourists visit while on vacation. Of course, a pyramid is actually a polyhedron, that is, a mathematical conception which pyramids in the physical world resemble . . . at least from a distance. The nearer one gets to a pyramid, the more it reveals itself to be what it is: a roughly pyramidal conglomeration of bricks, a composition of fragments that is not what it seems to be. This is also how it works with humans. The world around us encourages the build up of our egos—those pyramids of self-esteem—as if we needed such encouragement. Although everyone is affected by this pyramid scheme, some participate in it more than others: they are observably more full of themselves and tend to their egos as they would exotic plants in a hothouse. It helps if they can wear down the self-esteem of others, or simply witness this erosion. As the American novelist and essayist Gore Vidal said famously and often: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” None of this could work without the distance we put between what we are and what we think we are. Then we may appear to exist apart from our constituent elements. Self-esteem would evaporate without a self to esteem. As with pyramids, it is only at a distance that this illusion can be pulled off. Hypocrisy is that distance.

One cannot erase from a human being's soul those actions which his ancestors loved most and carried out most steadfastly: whether they were, for example, industrious savers attached to a writing table and money box, modest and bourgeois in their desires, as well as modest in their virtues, or whether they were accustomed to live giving orders from morning until night, fond of harsh entertainment and, along with that, perhaps of even harsher duties and responsibilities; or whether, finally, they had at some time or other once sacrificed the old privileges of their birth and possessions in order to live entirely for their faith ― their "God" ― as men of an unrelenting and delicate conscience, which blushes when confronted with any compromise. It is in no way possible that a man does not possess in his body the characteristics and preferences of his parents and forefathers, no matter what appearance might say to the contrary. This is the problem of race. If we know something about the parents, then we may draw a conclusion about the child: some unpleasant excess or other, some lurking envy, a crude habit of self-justification ―as these three together have at all times made up the essential type of the rabble― something like that must be passed onto the child as surely as corrupt blood, and with the help of the best education and culture people will succeed only in deceiving others about such heredity. And nowadays what else does education and culture want! In our age, one very much of the people - I mean to say our uncouth age ―"education" and "culture" must basically be the art of deception― to mislead about the origin of the inherited rabble in one's body and soul. Today an educator who preached truthfulness above everything else and constantly shouted at his students "Be true! Be natural! Act as you really are!" ― even such a virtuous and true-hearted jackass would after some time learn to take hold of that furca [pitchfork] of Horace, in order to naturam expellere [drive out nature]. With what success? "Rabble" usque recurret [always returns].

We live in a time I did not think I would see in my lifetime, a time when freedom—and in particular freedom of expression, without which the world of books could not exist—is everywhere under attack from reactionary, authoritarian, populist, demagogic, narcissistic, careless voices; when places of education and libraries are subject to hostility and censorship; and when extremist religion and bigoted ideologies have begun to intrude in areas of life in which they do not belong. And there are also progressive voices being raised in favor of a new kind of bien-pensant censorship, one which appears virtuous, and which many people have begun to see as a virtue. So freedom is under pressure from the left as well as the right, the young as well as the old. This is something new, and made more complicated by our new tool of communication, the Internet, on which well-designed pages of malevolent lies sit side by side with the truth, and it is difficult for many people to tell which is which; and our social media, where the idea of freedom is every day abused to permit, very often, a kind of online mob rule, which the billionaire owners of these platforms seem increasingly willing to encourage—and to profit by. What do we do about free speech when it is so widely abused? We should still do, with renewed vigor, what we have always needed to do: to answer bad speech with better speech, to counter false narratives with better narratives, to answer hate with love, and to believe that the truth can still succeed even in an age of lies. We must defend it fiercely and define it as broadly as possible, so, yes, we should of course defend speech that offends us; otherwise we are not defending free expression at all. Let a thousand and one voices speak in a thousand and one different ways. To quote Cavafy, “the barbarians are coming today,” and what I do know is that the answer to philistinism is art, the answer to barbarianism is civilization, and in any war it may be that artists of all sorts—filmmakers, actors, singers, and, yes, those who practice the ancient art of the book—can still, together, turn the barbarians away from the gates.

As Oliver and Freddy pulled away from the Blue Swan, Oliver paid little heed to the lad’s chatter about his spectacular meal. All he could hear was Maria calling him my lord, as if she hadn’t just been trembling in his arms. And the look on her face! Had she been insulted? Or just ashamed? How the devil had she stayed so collected, when he’d felt ready to explode after seeing her find her pleasure so sweetly in his arms? He’d actually come in his trousers, like a randy lad with no control over his urges. Now he had to keep his cloak buttoned up until he could reach Halstead Hall and change his clothes. She’d made light of their encounter, damn her. Though I thank you for the lesson in passion…Had it meant nothing more to her? Apparently not, since she’d said, It isn’t something we should repeat. Though the idea grated, she was right. They should stay apart, for his sake as well as hers. He’d actually offered to make her his mistress! He, who’d never kept a mistress in his life, who’d joked to his friends that mistresses were more trouble than they were worth since one woman was as good as another. He’d always been driven by the fear that a mistress might tempt him to let down his guard and reveal his secrets. Then even his family would desert him, and he couldn’t bear that. Even with his friends, he kept the strongbox of his secrets firmly closed. But with Maria… He stared out the window, trying to figure out at what point in their conversation he’d lost all good sense. Had it been when she’d said she didn’t believe the gossip about him? Or before that, when she’d chastised Pinter for telling it to her? No. Astonishing as those things had been, what had prompted his rash offer was the lost look on her face after he’d pointed out that Hyatt might not wish to be found. Even now he could see the fear rising in her eyes, much like the fear he’d seen in Mother’s eyes-of being inconsequential, unwanted. And suddenly he’d desired nothing more than to make Maria feel wanted. Not that he’d succeeded very well. She could hardly be flattered that he wanted her only for a mistress. He hadn’t meant it to insult her-he’d just been utterly swept up in the idea of her and him in a cottage together somewhere, without the rest of the rest of the world to muddy their lives.

Saphira? he asked. Flecks of purple light danced around the interior of the pavilion as she twisted her neck and fixed her eyes upon Eragon’s. Little one? Should I go? I think you must. He pressed his lips together in a rigid line. And what of you? You know I hate to be separated from you, but Nasuada’s arguments are well reasoned. If I can help keep Murtagh and Thorn away by remaining with the Varden, then perhaps I should. His emotions and hers washed between their minds, tidal surges in a shared pool of anger, anticipation, reluctance, and tenderness. From him flowed the anger and reluctance; from her other, gentler sentiments—as rich in scope as his own—that moderated his choleric passion and lent him perspectives he would not otherwise have. Nevertheless, he clung with stubborn insistence to his opposition to Nasuada’s scheme. If you flew me to Farthen Dûr, I would not be gone for as long, meaning Galbatorix would have less of an opportunity to mount a new assault. But his spies would tell him the Varden were vulnerable the moment we left. I do not want to part with you again so soon after Helgrind. Our own desires cannot take precedence over the needs of the Varden, but no, I do not want to part with you either. Still, remember what Oromis said, that the prowess of a dragon and Rider is measured not only by how well they work together but also by how well they can function when apart. We are both mature enough to operate independently of each other, Eragon, however much we may dislike the prospect. You proved that yourself during your trip from Helgrind. Would it bother you fighting with Arya on your back, as Nasuada mentioned? Her I would mind least of all. We have fought together before, and it was she who ferried me across Alagaësia for nigh on twenty years when I was in my egg. You know that, little one. Why pose this question? Are you jealous? What if I am? An amused twinkle lit her sapphire eyes. She flicked her tongue at him. Then it is very sweet of you…. Would you I should stay or go? It is your choice to make, not mine. But it affects us both. Eragon dug at the ground with the tip of his boot. Then he said, If we must participate in this mad scheme, we should do everything we can to help it succeed. Stay, and see if you can keep Nasuada from losing her head over this thrice-blasted plan of hers. Be of good cheer, little one. Run fast, and we shall be reunited in short order. Eragon looked up at Nasuada. “Very well,” he said, “I will go.

If marriage is the great mystery of the City, the image of the Coinherence - if we do indeed become members one of another in it - then there is obviously going to be a fundamental need in marriage for two people to be able to get along with each other and with themselves. And that is precisely what the rules of human behavior are about. They are concerned with the mortaring of the joints of the City, with the strengthening of the ligatures of the Body. The moral laws are not just a collection of arbitrary parking regulations invented by God to make life complicated; they are the only way for human nature to be natural. For example, I am told not to lie because in the long run lying destroys my own, and my neighbor's nature. And the same goes for murder and envy, obviously; for gluttony and sloth, not quite so obviously; and for lust and pride not very obviously at all, but just as truly. Marriage is natural, and it demands the fullness of nature if it is to be itself. But human nature. And human nature in one piece, not in twenty-three self-frustrating fragments. A man and a woman schooled in pride cannot simply sit down together and start caring. It takes humility to look wide-eyed at somebody else, to praise, to cherish, to honor. They will have to acquire some before they can succeed. For as long as it lasts, of course, the first throes of romantic love will usually exhort it from them, but when the initial wonder fades and familiarity begins to hobble biology, it's going to take virtue to bring it off. Again, a husband and a wife cannot long exist as one flesh, if they are habitually unkind, rude, or untruthful. Every sin breaks down the body of the Mystery, puts asunder what God and nature have joined. The marriage rite is aware of this; it binds us to loving, to honoring, to cherishing, for just that reason. This is all obvious in the extreme, but it needs saying loudly and often. The only available candidates for matrimony are, every last one of them, sinners. As sinners, they are in a fair way to wreck themselves and anyone else who gets within arm's length of them. Without virtue, therefore, no marriage will make it. The first of all vocations, the ground line of the walls of the New Jerusalem is made of stuff like truthfulness, patience, love and liberality; of prudence, justice, temperance and courage; and of all their adjuncts and circumstances: manners, consideration, fair speech and the ability to keep one's mouth shut and one's heart open, as needed. And since this is all so utterly necessary and so highly likely to be in short supply at the crucial moments, it isn't going to be enough to deliver earnest exhortations to uprightness and stalwartness. The parties to matrimony should be prepared for its being, on numerous occasions, no party at all; they should be instructed that they will need both forgiveness and forgivingness if they are to survive the festivities. Neither virtue, nor the ability to forgive the absence of virtue are about to force their presence on us, and therefore we ought to be loudly and frequently forewarned that only the grace of God is sufficient to keep nature from coming unstuck. Fallen man does not rise by his own efforts; there is no balm in Gilead. Our domestic ills demand an imported remedy.

The end of the war will see the final ruin of the Jew. The Jew is the incarnation of egoism. And their egoism goes so far that they're not even capable of risking their lives for the defence of their most vital interests. The Jew totally lacks any interest in things of the spirit. If he has pretended in Germany to have a bent for literature and the arts, that's only out of snobbery, or from a liking for speculation. He has no feeling for art, and no sensibility. Except in the regions where they live in groups, the Jews are said to have reached a very high cultural level! Take Nuremberg, for example: for four hundred years—that is to say, until 1838—it hadn't a single Jew in its population. Result: a situation in the first rank of German cultural life. Put the Jews all together: by the end of three hundred years, they'll have devoured one another. Where we have a philosopher, they have a Talmudistic pettifogger. What for us is an attempt to get to the bottom of things and express the inexpressible, becomes for the Jew a pretext for verbal juggleries. His only talent is for masticating ideas so as to disguise his thought. He has observed that the Aryan is stupid to the point of accepting anything in matters of religion, as soon as the idea of God is recognised. With the Aryan, the belief in the Beyond often takes a quite childish form ; but this belief does represent an effort towards a deepening of things. The man who doesn't believe in the Beyond has no understanding of religion. The great trick of Jewry was to insinuate itself fraudulently amongst the religions with a religion like Judaism, which in reality is not a religion. Simply, the Jew has put a religious camouflage over his racial doctrine. Everything he undertakes is built on this lie. The Jew can take the credit for having corrupted the Graeco- Roman world. Previously words were used to express thoughts; he used words to invent the art of disguising thoughts. Lies are his strength, his weapon in the struggle. The Jew is said to be gifted. His only gift is that of juggling with other people's property and swindling each and everyone. Suppose I find by chance a picture that I believe to be a Titian. I tell the owner what I think of it, and I offer him a price. In a similar case, the Jew begins by declaring that the picture is valueless, he buys it for a song and sells it at a profit of 5000 per cent. To persuade people that a thing which has value, has none, and vice versa—that's not a sign of intelligence. They can't even overcome the smallest economic crisis! The Jew has a talent for bringing confusion into the simplest matters, for getting everything muddled up. Thus comes the moment when nobody understands anything more about the question at issue. To tell you something utterly insignificant, the Jew drowns you in a flood of words. You try to analyse what he said, and you realise it's all wind. The Jew makes use of words to stultify his neighbours. And that's why people make them professors. The law of life is : "God helps him who helps himself!" It's so simple that everybody is convinced of it, and nobody would pay to learn it. But the Jew succeeds in getting himself rewarded for his meaningless glibness. Stop following what he says, for a moment, and at once his whole scaffolding collapses. I've always said, the Jews are the most diabolic creatures in existence, and at the same time the stupidest. They can't produce a musician, or a thinker. No art, nothing, less than nothing. They're liars, forgers, crooks. They owe their success only to the stupidity of their victims. If the Jew weren't kept presentable by the Aryan, he'd be so dirty he couldn't open his eyes. We can live without the Jews, but they couldn't live without us. When the Europeans realise that, they'll all become simultaneously aware of the solidarity that binds them together. The Jew prevents this solidarity. He owes his livelihood to the fact that this solidarity does not exist.

Even if I ultimately do not know this stone absolutely, even if knowledge about the stone gradually approaches infinity but is never completed, it is still the case that the perceived stone is there, that I recognized it, that I named it, and that we agree upon a certain number of claims regarding it. So it seems we are led into a contradiction: the belief in the thing and in the world can only signify the presumption of a completed synthesis--and yet this completion is rendered impossible by the very nature of the perspectives to be tied together, since each of them refers indefinitely to other perspectives through its horizon. There is indeed a contradiction, so long as we are operating within being, but the contradiction ceases...if we operate within time, and if we succeed in understanding time as the measure of being. The synthesis of horizons is essentially temporal, that is...it does not suffer time, and it does not have to overcome time; but rather, it merges with the very movement by which time goes by. Through my perceptual field with its spatial horizons, I am present to my surroundings, I coexist with all the other landscapes that extend beyond, and all of these perspectives together form a single temporal wave, an instant of the world. Through my perceptual field with its temporal horizons, I am present to my present, to the entire past that has preceded it, and to a future. And at the same time, this ubiquity is not actual, it is clearly only intentional. The landscape that I have before my eyes can certainly announce to me the shape of the landscape hidden behind the hill, but it only does so with a certain degree of indetermination, for here there are fields, while over there might be a forest, and, in any case, beyond the next horizon I know only that there will be either land or sea, and beyond again, either open sea or frozen sea, and beyond again, either earth or sky, and, within the confines of the earth's atmosphere, I know only that there will be something to see in general. I possess no more than the abstract style of these distant landscapes. Likewise, even though each past is gradually enclosed entirely in the more recent past that it had immediately succeeded--thanks to the interlocking of intentionalities--the past degrades, and my first years are lost in the general existence of my body of which I know merely that it was already confronted with colors, sounds, and a similar nature to the one I presently see. My possession of the distant landscape and of the past, like my possession of the future, is thus only a possession in principle; my life slips away from me on all sides and it is circumscribed by impersonal zones. The contradiction that we find between the reality of the world and its incompleteness is the contradiction between the ubiquity of consciousness and its engagement in a field of presence...If the synthesis could be actual, if my experience formed a closed system, if the thing and the world could be defined once and for all, if spatio-temporal horizons could (even ideally) be made explicit and if the world could be conceived from nowhere, then nothing would exist. I would survey the world from above, and far from all the places and times suddenly becoming real, they would in fact cease to be real because I would not inhabit any of them and I would be nowhere engaged. If I am always and everywhere, then I am never and nowhere. Thus, there is no choice between the incompleteness of the world and its existence, between the engagement and the ubiquity of consciousness, or between transcendence and immanence, since each of these terms, when it is affirmed by itself, makes its contradiction appear. What must be understood is that for the same reason I am present here and now, and present everywhere and always, or absent from here and now and absent from every place and from every time. This ambiguity is not an imperfection of consciousness or of existence, it is their very definition.

Together with a number of Negro and white reporters, I attended [Martin Luther] King's packed church. He spoke simply, emphasizing the nonviolent nature of the struggle, and told his congregation: "We are concerned not merely to win justice in the buses but rather to behave in a new and different way--to be nonviolent so that we may remove injustice itself, both from society and from ourselves. This is a struggle which we cannot lose, no matter what the apparent outcome, if we ourselves succeed in becoming better and more loving people.

We succeed if you succeed ... so succeed. Nothing would please us more than for those who have appreciated our work to exceed it, to excel, to be marvels. Our success is your success. Your success is our success. We are all in this together. We are here to provide the path. We want you to walk it and be all you can be.

But I firmly believe that we are all, the whole universe, connected in some way. That we all share a similar bond, similar properties, which make this universe function. There is a reason we have been put on this earth, and we will never quite know why or what our purpose is. There are higher factors at play that we will likely never understand. But what we have to ask ourselves—if we are, in fact, a part of some larger and higher plan—is: are we doing our part on this planet to ensure that we all work together, that we care for one another and love one another, so that the earth can function properly with all of its inhabitants, and function properly with the rest of the universe? “How can we possibly expect life from other planets to come visit Earth in such a hostile environment? An environment where its own people don’t care for one another, fight with one another, and even kill one another, all because of their differences in race, beliefs, religion, wealth, gender, and sexual orientation? We all must be unified, if we are ever to see the people of this earth function together and live in harmony. Only then will we have succeeded as a human race.

I buttoned my own shirt reluctantly though there wasn't much I could do about my throbbing hard on aside from plan a trip back to my room as soon as I could possibly get out of this training session so that I could jerk off repeatedly with all of the new spank bank material she'd just gifted me. Tory remained on the desk in front of me and I was hoping that was because her legs weren't working right yet. The thirst prickled at me again as I eyed her throat and she sighed loudly as she noticed. “You’re still going to bite me, aren’t you?” she asked, her fingers curling around the edge of the desk. “You could look at it as rewarding me for my efforts,” I teased, because there was no fucking way she was getting out of here without me drinking from her and we both knew it. “Well that makes me feel a little better about leaving you with blue balls,” she taunted and I almost groaned in frustration as my dick throbbed in agreement. “Next time, I’ll be sure to carve out a few hours to dedicate to you,” I told her. “And then neither of us will be left wanting.” “Next time?” she asked, raising an eyebrow like that wasn't at all likely to happen. But I could hear her heartbeat pounding and I knew she was wondering how hard I could make her come with several hours at our disposal and my cock a whole lot more involved in the act. I found myself smiling again but then my mood dipped as I realised there wasn't likely to be a next time if the other Heirs succeeded with their plans for the dance. I didn't even really want to go along with the damn plan and in a moment of madness, I suddenly wondered if I could just save her from it. They would still strike at Darcy and maybe that would be enough to force the twins to leave the academy. But if I was being honest, I didn't even really want them to leave anyway. I moved closer to her again, tucking a lock of dark hair behind her ear. “Are you going to the dance on Friday?” I murmured and her pulse scattered, making my smile deepen in satisfaction. “Err, yeah,” she said, that suspicious look returning to her eyes. “Why don’t you blow it off?” I suggested, wondering if I could just convince her to stay away from it all together. She was my Source after all so the others couldn't even really get mad at me for protecting her - that was kinda in the job description anyway. She blinked at me in surprise and I realised she'd probably thought I was going to ask her to go to the dance with me as her date. But I couldn't do that, if I wanted to save her from the other Heirs and their plans then I needed to keep her away from the whole thing. “What possible reason would I have to do that?” she asked, shifting just enough to make my hand fall from her face. I felt the rejection before she could even voice it, but I wasn't going to give up that easily. I ran my dislodged hand down her arm instead, raising goosebumps along her skin and hopefully reminding her of just how good I'd made her feel with these fingers. “Because then I could sneak out and come to your room. We could have the whole House and an entire evening to ourselves." “That’s pretty presumptuous of you, Earth boy.” “Earth boy?” I asked in amusement, refusing to back down no matter how hard she was trying to resist me. I held a hand out to her, bringing earth magic to my fingertips and causing a dark blue flower to blossom in my palm. Girls fucking loved that trick. “Perhaps I’ve gotten what I wanted from you now,” she said, shifting forward to get up without reaching for the flower. Okay, so maybe this girl didn't love that trick after all. I let the flower dissolve into nothing again and stepped forward to stop her from getting to her feet, smiling darkly. “I’m confident you’ll come back for more,” I promised her and I could tell she was at least a little tempted by the prospect.(Caleb POV)

Even if it looks like it does for other people, it almost always took years of work for someone to reach that moment or put themselves in a position for something to happen. It takes time for trees to bear fruit. It takes time for plans to come together. It takes time to learn and pivot after each attempt. Your ability to succeed and accomplish your goals is directly dependent on your ability to deal with adversity and time.

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After Matt and I sold our company, I started Capitalism.com, which empowers entrepreneurs to create change through business. I also started an annual event, the Capitalism Conference, where I bring together all the top entrepreneurs from whom I most want to learn and have them tell their stories to entrepreneurs like you. With the 12 Months to $1 Million method, we’ve inspired a community of entrepreneurs who are impacting their corners of the world, and I want you to be a part of that community. Hundreds of people have told me that they built seven-figure businesses as a result of listening to the free information that I publish on the internet. All of this is a way of saying that there are people rooting for you. We want you to succeed. But it’s a huge responsibility. You have to commit. You have to go all in.

We have to trust God for the future, always. If we try to control the future because it makes us nervous, we will only succeed in achieving the disasters we fear. And what we call controlling the future is actually controlling people—a point Lewis himself trenchantly makes in Abolition of Man—and thereby ruining their lives. He argues in that book that what we call control over nature is actually control over people, with nature as the instrument. We can say the same thing about the future. Control of the future is actually a (vain) attempt to control people, with the future as our instrument. Two words that do not go together are control and future. The future, like salvation, is the gift of God, and it must be apprehended by faith alone.

One of Satya’s first moves was to abolish stack ranking. He worked to reverse the traditional emphasis on rewarding the smartest person in the room, who dominates and pushes around others. He encouraged people to ask questions and listen—to be “learn-it-alls” not know-it-alls. He pressed people to live the One Microsoft philosophy, that the company is not to be “a confederation of fiefdoms” because “innovation and competition don’t respect our silos, so we need to transcend those barriers.” To support this new culture, Satya changed the reward system so that the superstars were people who worked across silos and teams to build products and services with pieces that meshed together well. And so that people deemed as superstars were those who helped others succeed in their careers. The backstabbers who’d flourished under Ballmer changed their ways, left the company voluntarily, or were shown the door.

Why are you so scared?” I asked him. “What does it mean?” He sniffled, an incongruous sound from the dignified Lord Golden. Worse, he took the corner of the cloak and wiped his eyes with it. It smeared his Jamaillian cosmetics, and I saw his bare skin. “Convergence,” he said hoarsely. He drew a breath. “It means convergence. All comes together. I’m on the right path. I feared I strayed. But this confirms it. Convergence and confrontation. And time set right.” “I thought that was what you wanted. I thought that was what White Prophets do.” “Oh, yes. That is what we do.” An unnatural calm came over him. He looked at me and met my eyes. I looked into a sorrow older and deeper than I wished to know. “A White Prophet finds his Catalyst. The one on whom great events may turn. And he uses him, ruthlessly, to turn time out of his track. Once more my tracks will converge with hers. And we will set our wills against one another, to see who prevails.” His voice suddenly strangled. “Again, death will try to take you.” His tears had stopped but moisture still glistened on his face. He caught up the hem of the cloak and smeared his face with it again. “If I don’t succeed, we’ll both just die.” Hunched miserably in his chair, he looked up at me. “Last time was too close. Twice, I felt you die. But I held you and refused to let you go to peace. Because you are the Catalyst, and I win only if I keep you in this world. Alive no matter how. A friend would have let you go. I heard the wolves calling you. I knew you wanted to go to them. But I didn’t let you. I dragged you back. Because I had to use you.” I tried to speak calmly. “That is the part that I have never understood.” He looked at me sadly. “You understand. You simply refuse to accept it.

Disney animation was sort of like a dog that had been beaten again and again Byron Howard, the director, told me when I asked him to describe the mindset back then. The crew wanted to succeed, but they were afraid of pouring their hearts into something that wasn’t going to succeed. You could FEEL that fear and in notes meetings everyone was so afraid of hurting someone’s feelings that they held back. We had to learn we weren’t attacking the person. We were attacking the project. Only then could we create a crucible that boils away everything that has not working and leaves the strongest framework. Earning trust takes time. There is no shortcut to understanding that we really do rise and fall together.

Too often we spend too much time asking or wondering why it didn’t work out. Why do friendships end? Why do people break up? These are great questions, but surely the more important question is, What keeps people together? And not just together, but together in dynamic relationships. For the primary goal of relationships is not simply to stay together. Many people succeed in staying together but have failed relationships: their relationships are surviving but not thriving.

To succeed on the trail, we would have to apply the same principle. In order to have any chance at succeeding, we would have to find a way to tune out the voices from outsiders and focus on what we thought was best for our family.

Everybody dreams of punching out their boss, their landlord or a cop. And every so often people actually do it. These largely spontaneous acts of individual resistance are self-limiting because they can never succeed in really striking effectively at the roots of the frustration that gives rise to them. But as soon as a group of people begins to come together on the basis of revolutionary consciousness, the question of collective direct action immediately comes to the fore: how do we strike our enemies?

The problem I see is one needs to accept and own the responsibility for one’s actions, whether you have power or not. The reason I have succeeded, and the reason you will succeed, in being a great leader, and in your results, is because we FOCUS on what is important. When you state your focus (at least to yourself, if no one else) and communicate your focus by your actions, you will draw those who believe the same as you. Then, together, you CAN change worlds. When you walk forward, and they follow, you became the leader, broken or not. Take this support and focus it like a laser and your team will burn through and accomplish the impossible. You have to find your totem - that one truth that you are not willing to bend on, to turn, to change your focus no matter what choice you have left.

The Godicle Theory is interesting to me because of what it implies: First, that all of us are connected, all life is connected, and we’re all in this together. Second, if we’re all connected, then we’re capable of intuitive insights gained from this connection. Third, there is a higher collective mind that seeks new visions for the betterment of itself and that picks individual Godicles to work on them. These Godicles experience this calling as their “quest.” And finally, if we are particles of God, then it’s beautiful to think that we are endowed with certain God-like powers. Perhaps this is why we sometimes seem to bend reality when we’re pursuing our quest.

And if we don't succeed, at least we'll have had this time together. Even if this is the end, it was worth it to get to play with you even for a little while.

Aimshala's Vision for Education: Empowering Educators, Enriching Lives In the heart of every learner's journey, there exists a light of inspiration, a guide through the moving seas of knowledge and discovery. This guide, often hidden and ignored, is the educator. At Aimshala, we understand the transformative power of educators not just in imparting knowledge, but in enriching lives and empowering minds. Our vision for education is deeply rooted in the belief that by empowering educators, we can create ripples of change that extend beyond classroom walls, enriching the lives of countless individuals and, by extension, society itself. The Unknown Heroes of Our Society Educators are the unknown heroes of our society, the architects of the future, shaping minds and inspiring hearts. They do more than teach; they awaken curiosity, instill resilience, and foster a lifelong love for learning. The impact of a passionate educator extends far beyond academic achievements; it touches on the very essence of who we become. At Aimshala, we recognize the challenges educators face daily juggling administrative tasks, adapting to new technologies, and meeting each student's unique needs. Yet, despite these hurdles, their commitment never wavers. They continue to light the path for their students, often with little recognition for their monumental impact. It's for these unsung heroes that Aimshala dedicates its mission: to empower educators and acknowledge their invaluable contribution to shaping our future. A Journey of Empowerment Empowerment is at the core of Aimshala's vision for education. But what does it truly mean to empower educators? It means providing them with the tools, resources, and support they need to thrive in their roles. It means creating an environment where their voices are heard, their challenges are addressed, and their achievements are celebrated. We believe in a holistic approach to empowerment. From continuous professional development opportunities to innovative teaching tools, Aimshala is committed to ensuring educators have what they need to succeed. But empowerment goes beyond material resources; it's about fostering a community of educators who can share experiences, challenges, and successes. A community where collaboration and support are the norms, not the exceptions. Enriching Lives Through Education Education has the power to transform lives. It opens doors to new opportunities, develops horizons, and builds bridges across cultures. Aimshala's vision extends to every student touched by our educators. By enriching the lives of educators, we indirectly enrich the lives of countless students. An enriched life is one of purpose, understanding, and continual growth. Through our support for educators, Aimshala aims to cultivate learning environments where students feel valued, respected, and inspired to reach their full potential. These environments encourage critical thinking, creativity, and the courage to question. They nurture not just academic skills but life skills—empathy, resilience, and the ability to adapt to change. Building a Future Together The future of education is a collaborative vision, one that requires the efforts of educators, students, families, and communities. Aimshala stands at the forefront of this collaborative effort, bridging gaps and fostering partnerships that enhance the educational experience for all. Technology plays a pivotal role in shaping this future. Aimshala embraces innovative educational technologies that make learning more accessible, engaging, and effective. However, we also recognize that technology is but a tool in the hands of our capable educators. It is their wisdom, passion, and dedication that truly transform education. At Aimshala, our vision for education is clear: to empower educators and enrich lives. We understand the challenges and celebrate the triumphs. We believe in the power of education to transform society.

YOU LEARNED ABOUT this period in high school: The standardized global curriculum calls for a month focused on it. Those decades just before the establishment of Shareholder Government, when we brought ourselves to the verge of a global breakdown. The system of economic interdependence created after World War II and reinforced after the Cold War had succeeded, more or less, in its original goal: keeping countries’ fortunes so intertwined that they could no longer afford major wars. Other benefits emerged as well. Fewer people were poor than ever before. Fewer infants died, fewer mothers. More children were enrolled in school, more young adults in universities. So many people in once-poor countries—China, India—were becoming rich that inequality between countries had fallen for the first time since the 1820s. This would seem like a positive development. But then why, the question had emerged forcefully at the turn of the twenty-first century, did people seem so upset, so convinced that the whole setup was bad for them? It had to do, it turned out, with fast-growing inequality within countries. If you were an Indian citizen who wasn’t among the newly rich, you weren’t gladdened by your countrymen’s suddenly acquired wealth. If you were an American or European who had always been poor, learning that children of Chinese peasants were becoming billionaires didn’t charm you. The defining sentiment of this late capitalist period was disaffection, and it began to take alarming forms. Mass murders became so frequent that they no longer trended on Social. Sure, you could go through the exercise of psychoanalyzing each killer in an attempt to classify him, as they used to, terrorist or psychopath, but what good did that do at this scale? The only useful conclusion was the broadest one, which was that the world order itself was making people murderous. But then, the politicians most equipped to address the unrest were those least invested in ending it. Race-baiting nationalists from oligarchical families began winning elections all over the world. It was the oldest trick around, promising the poor members of your own ethnic group that you’d help them become as rich as yourself, in large part by making sure that the poor members of other ethnic groups stopped stealing your group’s opportunities, thus dividing the poor so that they wouldn’t rise up together against the rich.

Today, there are plenty of examples of working people coming together to build real democracy from the ground up -often in extraordinarily difficult conditions and facing extremely powerful vested interests. The fact that many of these experiments have succeeded should provide some evidence that we have not exhausted all possible forms of social organization. And the fact that the powerful were so intent upon crushing movements like those led by Salvador Allende should be proof enough that, when undertaken at scale, they have the power to subvert and even uproot capitalism itself.

A Brief Mission Intermission Let’s take a moment to pull together what we’ve learned so far about mission. In the last chapter, I used Pardis Sabeti’s story to emphasize that you need career capital before you can identify a realistic mission for your career. Just because you have a good idea for a mission, however, doesn’t mean that you’ll succeed in its pursuit. With this in mind, in this chapter we studied the life of Kirk French to better understand how you make the leap from identifying a realistic mission to succeeding in making it a reality. Here we discovered the importance of little bets. To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback. For Chris Rock, such a bet might include telling a joke to an audience and seeing if they laugh, whereas for Kirk, it might mean producing sample footage for a documentary and seeing if it attracts funding. These bets allow you to tentatively explore the specific avenues surrounding your general mission, looking for those with the highest likelihood of leading to outstanding results. If career capital makes it possible to identify a compelling mission, then it’s a strategy of little bets that gives you a good shot of succeeding in this mission. To deploy this career tactic, you need both pieces. As you’ll learn in the next chapter, however, the story of mission is not yet complete. As I continued my study of this topic, I discovered a third and final strategy for helping to integrate this trait into your quest for work you love.

The home is a place where we show our children that we can communicate, learn, and succeed together.

Her relationships were more about shared memories and common values than about strategic partnerships to help each other succeed. That one killed me. I’d ask why we were getting together with so-and-so and she’d say something about how they hadn’t seen each other in a long time and one time they’d stayed up all night smoking cigarettes on the lawn and talking about boys. I had no mental category for that kind of friendship. I wasn’t sure how that kind of friendship profited anybody anything. What were they trying to build? Who were they trying to beat? What were the rules of the game, and how were they going to win? These are the questions in life that matter, right? “Staying up all night smoking cigarettes and talking about boys seems to me a waste of time,” I said sweetly. Betsy rolled her eyes. “Sometimes the real bonding happens in conversations about nothing, Don,” she said. “Sometimes being willing to talk about nothing shows how much we want to be with each other. And that’s a powerful thing.” She might be right. I’m unwilling to say at this point. God knows I’m not staying up all night to sit on a lawn and talk about nothing. Betsy said if we have children I’ll do it and I suppose I will. It’s funny what happens to you when part of your heart gets born inside somebody else. I trust I’ll do the crazy things parents do and they won’t seem crazy.

Meanwhile, the constant pressure of Islam was becoming an increasing danger for Europe, and Hungary was in the forefront of the fight; yet this did not awaken the Catholic countries to see the folly of destroying a barrier between them and their most dangerous foe, and the Pope wrote (1325) to the Ban of Bosnia: “Knowing that thou art a faithful son of the Church, we therefore charge thee to exterminate the heretics in thy dominions, and to render aid and assistance unto Fabian, our Inquisitor, forasmuch as a large multitude of heretics from many and divers parts collected, have flowed together into the Principality of Bosnia, trusting there to sow their obscene errors and to dwell there in safety. These men, imbued with the cunning of the Old Fiend, and armed with the venom of their falseness, corrupt the minds of Catholics by outward show of simplicity and lying assumption of the name of Christians; their speech crawleth like a crab, and they creep in with humility, but in secret they kill, and are wolves in sheep’s clothing, covering their bestial fury as a means whereby they may deceive the simple sheep of Christ.

We come from different worlds,” I said, “but each has so much to teach the other. There will be moments of dissonance, when people struggle to understand each other’s ways, but once we get past our misconceptions, imagine the reward. “The dancers will perform in the market of Wyvern’s Court; they will be beside avian poets, singers, philosophers and storytellers or we cannot hope to succeed. Merchants will haggle prices and barter goods as they have in both our markets throughout history. Scholars will work to impart their valuable knowledge to their students. Artists will create beauty. And our children will grow up together, playing the same games, taught by the same teachers, living side by side until as adults, I pray, they laugh at the petty arguments we had in this nest while we designed their world.” “And ravens will dance, and serpents will fight for the lives of falcons.

That is why in this time of heightened threats, we must remain vigilant and work together as closely as possible if we are to succeed in finding and stopping extremists before they act.

clear enough. I asked Birenbaum what he was ultimately trying to preserve by keeping Walden technology free. Was it the land, the cabins, and the lake, and leaving those spaces undisturbed by the outside world? Or were his efforts to keep the digital barbarians at the gate driven by a desire to preserve something deeper, that universal truth that not only made Walden what it was, but drove the Revenge of Analog in all its various forms? Birenbaum didn’t hesitate to answer. “We look at the heart of what we do, and it is interpersonal relationships,” he said. Any debate about technology’s use came down to a simple binary question: will it impact interpersonal relationships or not? “This camp could be wiped out by a meteor tomorrow, and we could rebuild across the road and we’d still be Walden,” he said. What mattered were the relationships and the uniquely analog recipe that enabled their formation. First, you place lots of people together, and have them relate to one another with the guidance of caregivers, who encourage and enforce mutual respect. Next, you mix in a program that creates various stresses, frustrations, and challenges that campers need to confront. This ranges from the simplest task of getting to breakfast on time to ten-day canoe trips in the harsh Canadian wilderness where twelve-year-olds might be expected to carry a 60-pound canoe on their head for a mile or more in the pouring rain, as blackflies gnaw at their ankles. These situations eventually lead to individual perseverance and self-respect . . . what most people call character. And that character is the glue that allows the relationships built at camp to last a lifetime, as my own friendships formed at Walden have. “You go a bit out of your comfort zone, endure a little hardship, people push you and help you to succeed, and you end up with friendships, confidence, and an inner fortitude that ends in a sense of belonging to a greater, interdependent community,” Birenbaum said. “This is one of the most basic aspects of the human condition.

Cultures grow out of the keystone habits in every organization, whether leaders are aware of them or not. For instance, when researchers studied an incoming class of cadets at West Point, they measured their grade point averages, physical aptitude, military abilities, and self-discipline. When they correlated those factors with whether students dropped out or graduated, however, they found that all of them mattered less than a factor researchers referred to as “grit,” which they defined as the tendency to work “strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.”4.26,4.27 What’s most interesting about grit is how it emerges. It grows out of a culture that cadets create for themselves, and that culture often emerges because of keystone habits they adopt at West Point. “There’s so much about this school that’s hard,” one cadet told me. “They call the first summer ‘Beast Barracks,’ because they want to grind you down. Tons of people quit before the school year starts. “But I found this group of guys in the first couple of days here, and we started this thing where, every morning, we get together to make sure everyone is feeling strong. I go to them if I’m feeling worried or down, and I know they’ll pump me back up. There’s only nine of us, and we call ourselves the musketeers. Without them, I don’t think I would have lasted a month here.” Cadets who are successful at West Point arrive at the school armed with habits of mental and physical discipline. Those assets, however, only carry you so far. To succeed, they need a keystone habit that creates a culture—such as a daily gathering of like-minded friends—to help find the strength to overcome obstacles. Keystone habits transform us by creating cultures that make clear the values that, in the heat of a difficult decision or a moment of uncertainty, we might otherwise forget.

I believe every day should begin and end with gratitude. I practice it every day in my morning meditation. Each morning, focusing on the reverse gap, I think of five things I’m grateful for in my personal life. Then I think of five things I’m grateful for in my work and career. A typical list might look like this: PERSONAL LIFE 1.​My daughter, Eve, and her beautiful smiles 2.​The happiness I felt last night relaxing with a glass of red wine and watching Sherlock on BBC 3.​My wife and life partner 4.​The time I spent with my son building his newest Lego Star Wars creation 5.​The wonderful cup of gourmet coffee my publicist, Tania, left on my desk WORK LIFE 1.​My leadership team and the amazing talent they bring to our company 2.​A particularly great letter we received for my online course Consciousness Engineering 3.​The incredibly fun Culture Day we had in the office yesterday 4.​The fact that plans are coming together to hold our upcoming A-Fest at another amazing location 5.​Having coworkers who are friends and who greet me with hugs when I come to the office This entire practice takes me no more than ninety seconds. But it’s perhaps one of the most important and powerful ninety seconds I can spend each day.

the frustration was knowing that the FBI’s silence had helped Putin succeed and that more exposure could have given the American people the information they needed. While Brennan and Reid had their hair on fire and Comey was dragging his feet, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell was actively playing defense for Trump and the Russians. We know now that even after he was fully briefed by the CIA, McConnell rejected the intelligence and warned the Obama administration that if it made any attempt to inform the public, he would attack it for playing politics. I can’t think of a more shameful example of a national leader so blatantly putting partisanship over national security. McConnell knew better, but he did it anyway. I know some former Obama administration officials have regrets about how this all unfolded. Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told the House Intelligence Committee in June 2017 that the administration didn’t take a more aggressive public stance because it was concerned about reinforcing Trump’s complaints that the election was “rigged” and being “perceived as taking sides in the election.” Former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, whom I’d come to trust and value when we worked together in President Obama’s first term, told the Washington Post that the Obama administration was focused on a traditional cyber threat, while “the Russians were playing this much bigger game” of multifaceted information warfare

All organizations start with WHY, but only the great ones keep their WHY clear year after year. Those who forget WHY they were founded show up to the race every day to outdo someone else instead of to outdo themselves. The pursuit, for those who lose sight of WHY they are running the race, is for the medal or to beat someone else. What if the next time when someone asks, “Who’s your competition?” we replied, “No idea.” What if the next time someone pushes, “Well, what makes you better than your competition?” we replied, “We’re not better than them in all cases.” And what if the next time someone asks, “Well why should I do business with you then?” we answer with confidence, “Because the work we’re doing now is better than the work we were doing six months ago. And the work we’ll be doing six months from now will be better than the work we’re doing today. Because we wake up every day with a sense of WHY we come to work. We come to work to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. Are we better than our competition? If you believe what we believe and you believe that the things we do can help you, then we’re better. If you don’t believe what we believe and you don’t believe the things we can do will help you, then we’re not better. Our goal is to find customers who believe what we believe and work together so that we can all succeed. We’re looking for people to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with us in pursuit of the same goal. We’re not interested in sitting across a table from each other in pursuit of a sweeter deal. And here are the things we’re doing to advance our cause . . .” And then the details of HOW and WHAT you do follow. But this time, it started with WHY. Imagine if every organization started with WHY. Decisions would be simpler. Loyalties would be greater. Trust would be a common currency. If our leaders were diligent about starting with WHY, optimism would reign and innovation would thrive. As this book illustrates, there is precedence for this standard. No matter the size of the organization, no matter the industry, no matter the product or the service, if we all take some responsibility to start with WHY and inspire others to do the same, then, together, we can change the world. And that’s pretty inspiring.

She laughs. “You’re so much like your father. Sometimes I wonder if you got any of my DNA at all.” I’ve never really seen any similarities between my dad and me. Except our love of business—our drive to succeed. We’ve always been evenly matched in that respect. Otherwise, my father’s as straight-laced as they come. A dedicated, loyal family man through and through. Pretty much the opposite of me in every way. “I am?” She’s still chuckling. “One day I’ll tell you how your dad and I really ended up together at Columbia. And I’ll include all the dirty little details he never wanted you to know.” If that story involves sex in any way, I don’t want to hear it. Ever. As far as I’m concerned, my parents have had sex two times in their entire lives. Once for Alexandra and once for me. That’s it. On some level I realize I’m deluding myself, but this is one topic where I prefer to live in denial.

Jessica: Who Could Ask For Anything More? I love the relationship Miss Kay and Phil have with each other. She respects and adores him. When Phil looks at Miss Kay or speaks to her, you can see in his eyes and hear in his voice that he thinks she is the best wife in the entire world. What I have observed since becoming part of the Robertson family is that Miss Kay has always taken care of Phil, and he has loved and cherished her. Even after many years together, they still laugh, they still love, and they still hug and kiss each other (even in front of the family and other people). Miss Kay still crawls into Phil’s lap while he sits in his big recliner, and when he walks close to her, he tickles her or gives her a pinch on the rear end. Miss Kay and Phil have an amazing love for God and for people. They believe not only in giving second chances but also in giving third and fourth chances. When they need a little extra work done on their property, they often hire people who need help and try to help them as best they can. They spend hours and hours, several nights a week, counseling people and sharing their wisdom with them. If Jep and I can do even half of the good things Phil and Miss Kay have done, we will consider ourselves to have truly succeeded and made a difference in the world.

In this talk, I tell the story of how, when I was first a manager at New York Tech, I didn’t feel like a manager at all. And while I liked the idea of being in charge, I went to work every day feeling like something of a fraud. Even in the early years of Pixar, when I was the president, that feeling didn’t go away. I knew many presidents of other companies and had a good idea of their personality characteristics. They were aggressive and extremely confident. Knowing that I didn’t share many of those traits, again I felt like a fraud. In truth, I was afraid of failure. Not until about eight or nine years ago, I tell them, did the imposter feeling finally go away. I have several things to thank for that evolution: my experience of both weathering our failures and watching our films succeed; my decisions, post–Toy Story, to recommit myself to Pixar and its culture; and my enjoyment of my maturing relationship with Steve and John. Then, after fessing up, I ask the group, “How many of you feel like a fraud?” And without fail, every hand in the room shoots up. As managers, we all start off with a certain amount of trepidation. When we are new to the position, we imagine what the job is in order to get our arms around it, then we compare ourselves against our made-up model. But the job is never what we think it is. The trick is to forget our models about what we “should” be. A better measure of our success is to look at the people on our team and see how they are working together. Can they rally to solve key problems? If the answer is yes, you are managing well.