Week Motivation Quotes

I believe some people are inherently evil. I believe guilt is a powerful motivator. I believe redemption is something you can strive for but never fully achieve. I believe second chances exist only in dreams, never in reality. I believe you don't have years, or months, or weeks to impact a person's life. You have seconds. Seconds to win them over, And seconds to lose them.

The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it. If you’re proud of how your hair looks, you’ll develop all sorts of habits to care for and maintain it. If you’re proud of the size of your biceps, you’ll make sure you never skip an upper-body workout. If you’re proud of the scarves you knit, you’ll be more likely to spend hours knitting each week. Once your pride gets involved, you’ll fight tooth and nail to maintain your habits.

DETOX your mind, body, AND your contact list.

How many of us will be saved the pain of seeing the most important things in our lives disappearing from one moment to the next? I don't just mean people, but our ideas and dreams too: we might survive a day, a week, a few years, but we're all condemned to lose. Our body remains alive, yet sooner or later our soul will receive the mortal blow. The perfect crime - for we don't know who murdered our joy, what their motives were, or where the guilty parties are to be found...they too are the victims of the reality they created.

Back in my day, which was about a week and a half ago, we took our lumps and we got back up and we cried like babies and quit and then put on weight.

What if there were health food stores on every corner in the hood, instead of liquor stores!?

Your Monday morning thoughts set the tone for your whole week. See yourself getting stronger, and living a fulfilling, happier & healthier life.

The whole thing about bullying is: yes, the culture has to change. Yes, teens have the power to change it. It’s not going to happen overnight, but this is definitely something that I want to start motivating teens to do today." - Publisher Weekly

The anticipation is an essential part of this whole trip. The excitement of going, the places we'll see, the people we'll meet, that's part of the joy of this whole thing...Never forget that anticipation is an important part of life...without excitement you have nothing, you're cheating yourself if you refuse to enjoy what's coming.

Never Ever Betray Your Soul

Decide to be fine until the end of the week. Make yourself smile, because you're alive and that's your job. Then do it again the next week. I call it being professional. Do it right, with a smile, or don't do it.

Unfurl Your Wings!

Time is the ultimate democracy. Rich and poor, young and old, male and female: all have 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week.

Your body is a Temple. You are what you eat. Do not eat processed food, junk foods, filth, or disease carrying food, animals, or rodents. Some people say of these foods, 'well, it tastes good'. Most of the foods today that statically cause sickness, cancer, and disease ALL TATSE GOOD; it's well seasoned and prepared poison. THIS IS WHY SO MANY PEOPLE ARE SICK; mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually; because of being hooked to the 'taste' of poison, instead of being hooked on the truth and to real foods that heal and provide you with good health and wellness. Respect and honor your Temple- and it will honor you.

How would your life be different if...You could control the outcome of your day, your week, your year? Let today be the day...You embrace the truth that you DO have such control to label every event in your life, and create an agreement with reality that empowers you and propels you to greatness.

If your child is killed by police, if the water in your community is poisoned, if a mockery is made of your grief, how do you feel? Do you want to be calm and quiet? Do you want to forgive in order to make everyone else comfortable? Or do you want to scream, to yell, to demand justice for the wrongs done? Anger gets the petitions out, it motivates marches, it gets people to the ballot. Anger is sometimes the only fuel left at the end of a long, horrible day, week, month, or generation.

Never let failure discourage you. Every time you get to the base of a mountain (literal or metaphorical), you're presented with a new opportunity to challenge yourself, to push your limits beyond what you thought possible, to learn from climbers on the trail ahead of you, and to take in some amazing views. Your performance on the mountain you climbed last week or last month or last year doesn't matter - because it's all about what you are doing right now.

We preach and practice brotherhood — not only of man but of all living beings — not on Sundays only but on all the days of the week. We believe in the law of universal justice — that our present condition is the result of our past actions and that we are not subjected to the freaks of an irresponsible governor, who is prosecutor and judge at the same time; we depend for our salvation on our own acts and deeds and not on the sacrificial death of an attorney.

Some people who have been working out regularly for months or even years are still out of shape because the number of cheat days they have in a week exceeds six.

In ten years time will you look back at your past week and be glad how you chose to spend it?

HAIL THE VISITATION OF THE GOD OF QUESTIONABLE MOTIVATIONS!” Dominic raised his eyebrows. “Is that my divinity this week?

Violence does not build up the kingdom of God, the kingdom of humanity. On the contrary, it is a favorite instrument of the Antichrist, however idealistic its religious motivation may be. It serves, not humanity, but inhumanity.

For an early morning I had so much fucking pep in my step. Lust was a great motivator. I was spending time with Tom Cohen. A Tsunami could sweep through the city and I’d still think I was having a great week.

Not after one month, not after one week, not after one day, not after one hour, not even after one minute, only after one second is the best time for a defeated person to stand up and fight for his future victory!

I believe some people are inherently evil. I believe guilt is a powerful motivator. I believe redemption is something you can strive for but never fully achieve. I believe second chances exist only in dreams, never in reality. I believe you don’t have years, or months, or weeks to impact a person’s life. You have seconds. Seconds to win them over, And seconds to lose them.

Really, Hagrid, if you are holding out for universal popularity, I'm afraid you will be in this cabin for a very long time,' said Dumbledore, now peering sternly over his half-moon spectacles. 'Not a week has passed, since I became Headmaster of this school, when I haven't had at least one owl complaining about the way I run it. But what should I do? Barricade myself in my study and refuse to talk to anybody?

The secret of making lasting change is to acknowledge and accept that real change takes time and patience. We didn't get chronically ill overnight. We didn't gain weight in one week or even one month. Good chance, it may take us longer than twenty-one days to overcome whatever we're facing. Whether it's something physical, emotional, spiritual, or a combination, we may need to be realistic in our goals for meaningful change to happen. The first step is getting started!

Someday is my favorite day of the week!

There is a classic psychology experiment that seems to confirm Brewer's point. Children who enjoy drawing were given marker pens and allowed to go at it. Some were rewarded for drawing (they were given a certificate with a gold seal and a ribbon, and told ahead of time about this arrangement, whereas for others the issue of rewards was never raised. Weeks later, those who had been rewarded took less interest in drawing, and their drawings were judged to be lower in quality, whereas those who had not been rewarded continued to enjoy the activity and produced higher-quality drawings. The hypothesis is that the child begins to attribute his interest, which previously needed no justification, to the external reward, and this has the effect of reducing his intrinsic interest in it. That is, an external reward can affect one's interpretation of one's own motivation, an interpretation that comes to be self-fulfilling.

Excellence must be pursued, it must be wooed with all of one’s might and every bit of effort that we have each day there’s a new encounter, each week is a new challenge. All of the noise and all of the glamour all of the color all of the excitement all of the rings and all of the money. These are the things that linger only in the memory. But the spirit, the will to excel, the will to win, these are the things that endure.” — Vince Lombardi (The winning coach from Super Bowl I and Super Bowl II)

We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life.

It is time to remind ourselves that today’s thoughts and actions become our legacy. When we forget this or lie to ourselves thinking our actions do not matter, we have permission to act as momentary buffoons. We let ourselves break, just this once, from our values. We cheat, just this once. We lie, just this once. We put off the hard task, just this once. We skip the workout, just this week. We take the drink, just one more. And soon we find that each of these little breaks in our will leads to another, and then to a lifetime of compromise and regret. Without vigilance, what is right and strong about the human spirit can be whittled away and broken forever.

Would you rather work forty hours a week at a job you hate or eighty hours a week doing work you love?

Remember that deliberate practice has one objective: to improve performance. “People who play tennis once a week for years don’t get any better if they do the same thing each time,

Appreciate, but never quite believe the applause of the crowd. Jesus once entered a city to triumphant applause, the same city where he was crucified a week later.

God meets daily needs daily. Not weekly or annually. He will give you what you need when it is needed.

Your life goal should be to make Monday the best day of the week.

Anyone can be motivated to work hard and go after something for a day, a week, or a few months. But champions are motivated to work towards something each and every day for years and years.

I believe some people are inherently evil. I believe guilt is a powerful motivator. I believe redemption is something you can strive for but never fully achieve. I believe second chances exist only in dreams, never in reality. I believe you don’t have years, or months, or weeks to impact a person’s life. You have seconds. Seconds to win them over, And seconds to lose them. —CAIN

In his twenties, John Bridgens most identified with Hamlet. The strangely aging Prince of Denmark—Bridgens was quite sure that the boy Hamlet had magically aged over a few theatrical weeks to a man who was, at the very least, in his thirties by Act V—had been suspended between thought and deed, between motive and action, frozen by a consciousness so astute and unrelenting that it made him think about everything, even thought itself.

All the talk of bullying and alienation provided an easy motive. Forty-eight hours after the massacre, USA Today pulled the threads together in a stunning cover story that fused the myths of jock-hunting, bully-revenge, and the TCM. “Students are beginning to describe how a long-simmering rivalry between the sullen members of their clique [the TCM] and the school’s athletes escalated and ultimately exploded in this week’s deadly violence,” it said. It described tension the previous spring, including daily fistfights. The details were accurate, the conclusions wrong. Most of the media followed. It was accepted as fact.

reminded that in reality this isn’t the case. Nor is this a phenomenon confined to megalomaniacs or pathological narcissists, but something much more fundamental to being human: it’s the understandable tendency to judge everything from the perspective you occupy, so that the few thousand weeks for which you happen to be around inevitably come to feel like the linchpin of history, to which all prior time was always leading up. These self-centered judgments are part of what psychologists call the “egocentricity bias,” and they make good sense from an evolutionary standpoint. If you had a more realistic sense of your own sheer irrelevance, considered on the timescale of the universe, you’d probably be less motivated to struggle to survive, and thereby to propagate your genes.

New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private, for-profit health care "soulless vampire bastards making money off human pain." Now, I know what you're thinking: "But, Bill, the profit motive is what sustains capitalism." Yes, and our sex drive is what sustains the human species, but we don't try to fuck everything. It wasn't that long ago when a kid in America broke his leg, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun stuck a thermometer in his ass, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle, and you were done. The bill was $1.50; plus, you got to keep the thermometer. But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some bean counter decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. The more people who get sick, and stay sick, the higher their profit margins, which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O. Did you know that the United States is ranked fiftieth in the world in life expectancy? And the forty-nine loser countries were they live longer than us? Oh, it's hardly worth it, they may live longer, but they live shackled to the tyranny of nonprofit health care. Here in America, you're not coughing up blood, little Bobby, you're coughing up freedom. The problem with President Obama's health-care plan isn't socialism. It's capitalism. When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross Blue Shield. And it's not just medicine--prisons also used to be a nonprofit business, and for good reason--who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition, you're going to have trouble with the tenants. It's not a coincidence that we outsourced running prisons to private corporations and then the number of prisoners in America skyrocketed. There used to be some things we just didn't do for money. Did you know, for example, there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? FDR said he didn't want World War II to create one millionaire, but I'm guessing Iraq has made more than a few executives at Halliburton into millionaires. Halliburton sold soldiers soda for $7.50 a can. They were honoring 9/11 by charging like 7-Eleven. Which is wrong. We're Americans; we don't fight wars for money. We fight them for oil. And my final example of the profit motive screwing something up that used to be good when it was nonprofit: TV news. I heard all the news anchors this week talk about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. And I thought, "Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it.

Usually, in daily life, we are motivated to do something, then we do it. But when mood is low, we have to do something before the motivation comes.

For those who love what they do, even working 18 hours a day, 7 days a week is not work at all. It is just fun. -RVM

My two most unproductive days of the week have always been yesterday and tomorrow. Keeping that in mind, I try to focus majority of my attention on today.

Don't just wish for success, get up every morning and dominate the day

Money is the byproduct of your mental state of abundance

WHOLE WORLD IS A SCHOOL FOR THOSE WHO WISH TO LEARN.

believe some people are inherently evil. I believe guilt is a powerful motivator. I believe redemption is something you can strive for but never fully achieve. I believe second chances exist only in dreams, never in reality. I believe you don’t have years, or months, or weeks to impact a person’s life. You have seconds. Seconds to win them over, And seconds to lose them.

an empathic and patient listener, coaxing each of us through the maze of our feelings, separating out our weapons from our wounds. He cautioned us when we got too lawyerly and posited careful questions intended to get us to think hard about why we felt the way we felt. Slowly, over hours of talking, the knot began to loosen. Each time Barack and I left his office, we felt a bit more connected. I began to see that there were ways I could be happier and that they didn’t necessarily need to come from Barack’s quitting politics in order to take some nine-to-six foundation job. (If anything, our counseling sessions had shown me that this was an unrealistic expectation.) I began to see how I’d been stoking the most negative parts of myself, caught up in the notion that everything was unfair and then assiduously, like a Harvard-trained lawyer, collecting evidence to feed that hypothesis. I now tried out a new hypothesis: It was possible that I was more in charge of my happiness than I was allowing myself to be. I was too busy resenting Barack for managing to fit workouts into his schedule, for example, to even begin figuring out how to exercise regularly myself. I spent so much energy stewing over whether or not he’d make it home for dinner that dinners, with or without him, were no longer fun. This was my pivot point, my moment of self-arrest. Like a climber about to slip off an icy peak, I drove my ax into the ground. That isn’t to say that Barack didn’t make his own adjustments—counseling helped him to see the gaps in how we communicated, and he worked to be better at it—but I made mine, and they helped me, which then helped us. For starters, I recommitted myself to being healthy. Barack and I belonged to the same gym, run by a jovial and motivating athletic trainer named Cornell McClellan. I’d worked out with Cornell for a couple of years, but having children had changed my regular routine. My fix for this came in the form of my ever-giving mother, who still worked full-time but volunteered to start coming over to our house at 4:45 in the morning several days a week so that I could run out to Cornell’s and join a girlfriend for a 5:00 a.m. workout and then be home by 6:30 to get the girls up and ready for their days. This new regimen changed everything: Calmness and strength, two things I feared I was losing, were now back. When it came to the home-for-dinner dilemma, I installed new boundaries, ones that worked better for me and the girls. We made our schedule and stuck to it. Dinner each night was at 6:30. Baths were at 7:00, followed by books, cuddling, and lights-out at 8:00 sharp. The routine was ironclad, which put the weight of responsibility on Barack to either make it on time or not. For me, this made so much more sense than holding off dinner or having the girls wait up sleepily for a hug. It went back to my wishes for them to grow up strong and centered and also unaccommodating to any form of old-school patriarchy: I didn’t want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with

John Maynard Keynes saw the truth at the bottom of all this, which is that our fixation on what he called “purposiveness”—on using time well for future purposes, or on “personal productivity,” he might have said, had he been writing today—is ultimately motivated by the desire not to die. “The ‘purposive’ man,” Keynes wrote, “is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his actions by pushing his interests in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor in truth the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. For

intricate motives, and complicated plots intimately. You live a book for weeks at a time, carrying it around in your bag, thinking about its characters like friends, worrying about their worries as your own. Not so short stories because as soon as you get to know the characters and voices and plots and complications, they’re over. Resolved or unresolved, clear or still completely obfuscated, either way, there’s nothing more . . . unless you’re

it was clear that if I nominated ‘write book’ or ‘move house’ as one of my three tasks in progress, it would clog up the system for months, so I was naturally motivated to figure out the next achievable step in each case instead.

But still, it was not the desire to ‘write’ that was his real motive. To get out of the money-world—that was what he wanted. Vaguely he looked forward to some kind of moneyless, anchorite existence. He had a feeling that if you genuinely despise money you can keep going somehow, like the birds of the air. He forgot that the birds of the air don’t pay room-rent. The poet starving in a garret—but starving, somehow, not uncomfortably—that was his vision of himself. The next seven months were devastating. They scared him and almost broke his spirit. He learned what it means to live for weeks on end on bread and margarine, to try to ‘write’ when you are half starved, to pawn your clothes, to sneak trembling up the stairs when you owe three weeks’ rent and your landlady is listening for you. Moreover, in those seven months he wrote practically nothing. The first effect of poverty is that it kills thought. He grasped, as though it were a new discovery, that you do not escape from money merely by being moneyless. On the contrary, you are the hopeless slave of money until you have enough of it to live on—a ‘competence’, as the beastly middle-class phrase goes.

In a sense, we here at the FSRI are like giant wizards at the controls of an incredible machine, operating levers and buttons from behind a great tapestry to provide you with the level of motivation and direction necessary for you to succeed!

Church leader. I urge you to teach the whole counsel of God. Make sure your chief motive is feeding the sheep truth and genuinely reaching the lost with the full biblical message of salvation rather than building a big following. If your primary goal is to get those who attend to come back to next week’s service, ask the Holy Spirit to forgive you and refocus your principal strategy on shepherding the flock of God with truth. Stay relevant, fresh, and innovative in method but timeless in message. Believer

You lock your house and go out for a week. When you return, everything seems strange inside the house. The house grows in your absence! Everything in the universe is sitting on Time and continuously growing, with or without you. You are working hard on a problem, trying to conceive a solution. Don’t make it an ego issue. Let it alone for some time. Let it grow without you. Let it conceive without you. When you return to it, you will be pleasantly surprised to find the solution curled beside it like a baby. 30

There are many stories and accounts about the winners of lotteries who are jubilant when they win, but whose lives descend into a nightmare after acquiring that unearned money. (No challenge, no skill.) Thelottery looks like "the answer" to people because they associate money with pleasure. But the true enjoyment of money comes in part from the earning of it, which involves skill and challenge. Watching television is usually done for pleasure. That's why so few people can remember (or make use of) any of the 30 hours of television they have watched in the past week.

Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the results of intense practice for a minimum of 10 years.”11 Mastery—of sports, music, business—requires effort (difficult, painful, excruciating, all-consuming effort) over a long time (not a week or a month, but a decade).

Most churches do not grow beyond the spiritual health of their leadership. Many churches have a pastor who is trying to lead people to a Savior he has yet to personally encounter. If spiritual gifting is no proof of authentic faith, then certainly a job title isn't either. You must have a clear sense of calling before you enter ministry. Being a called man is a lonely job, and many times you feel like God has abandoned you in your ministry. Ministry is more than hard. Ministry is impossible. And unless we have a fire inside our bones compelling us, we simply will not survive. Pastoral ministry is a calling, not a career. It is not a job you pursue. If you don’t think demons are real, try planting a church! You won’t get very far in advancing God’s kingdom without feeling resistance from the enemy. If I fail to spend two hours in prayer each morning, the devil gets the victory through the day. Once a month I get away for the day, once a quarter I try to get out for two days, and once a year I try to get away for a week. The purpose of these times is rest, relaxation, and solitude with God. A pastor must always be fearless before his critics and fearful before his God. Let us tremble at the thought of neglecting the sheep. Remember that when Christ judges us, he will judge us with a special degree of strictness. The only way you will endure in ministry is if you determine to do so through the prevailing power of the Holy Spirit. The unsexy reality of the pastorate is that it involves hard work—the heavy-lifting, curse-ridden, unyielding employment of your whole person for the sake of the church. Pastoral ministry requires dogged, unyielding determination, and determination can only come from one source—God himself. Passive staff members must be motivated. Erring elders and deacons must be confronted. Divisive church members must be rebuked. Nobody enjoys doing such things (if you do, you should be not be a pastor!), but they are necessary in order to have a healthy church over the long haul. If you allow passivity, laziness, and sin to fester, you will soon despise the church you pastor. From the beginning of sacred Scripture (Gen. 2:17) to the end (Rev. 21:8), the penalty for sin is death. Therefore, if we sin, we should die. But it is Jesus, the sinless one, who dies in our place for our sins. The good news of the gospel is that Jesus died to take to himself the penalty of our sin. The Bible is not Christ-centered because it is generally about Jesus. It is Christ-centered because the Bible’s primary purpose, from beginning to end, is to point us toward the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus for the salvation and sanctification of sinners. Christ-centered preaching goes much further than merely providing suggestions for how to live; it points us to the very source of life and wisdom and explains how and why we have access to him. Felt needs are set into the context of the gospel, so that the Christian message is not reduced to making us feel better about ourselves. If you do not know how sinful you are, you feel no need of salvation. Sin-exposing preaching helps people come face-to-face with their sin and their great need for a Savior. We can worship in heaven, and we can talk to God in heaven, and we can read our Bibles in heaven, but we can’t share the gospel with our lost friends in heaven. “Would your city weep if your church did not exist?” It was crystal-clear for me. Somehow, through fear or insecurity, I had let my dreams for our church shrink. I had stopped thinking about the limitless things God could do and had been distracted by my own limitations. I prayed right there that God would forgive me of my small-mindedness. I asked God to forgive my lack of faith that God could use a man like me to bring the message of the gospel through our missionary church to our lost city. I begged God to renew my heart and mind with a vision for our city that was more like Christ's.

I thought to do something good by giving an interview to People, which was exceedingly foolish of me. I asked Aaron [Asher] to tell you that the Good Intentions Paving Company had fucked up again. The young interviewer turned my opinions inside out, cut out the praises and made it all sound like disavowal, denunciation and excommunication. Well, we're both used to this kind of thing, and beyond shock. In agreeing to take the call, and make a statement I was simply muddle-headed. But if I had been interviewed by an angel for the Seraphim and Cherubim Weekly I'd have said, as I actually did say to the crooked little slut, that you were one of our very best and most interesting writers. I would have added that I was greatly stimulated and entertained by your last novel, and that of course after three decades I understood perfectly well what you were saying about the writer's trade - how could I not understand, or miss suffering the same pains. Still our diagrams are different, and the briefest description of the differences would be that you seem to have accepted the Freudian explanation: A writer is motivated by his desire for fame, money and sexual opportunities. Whereas I have never taken this trinity of motives seriously. But this is an explanatory note and I don't intend to make a rabbinic occasion of it. Please accept my regrets and apologies, also my best wishes. I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about the journalists; we can only hope that they will die off as the deerflies do towards the end of August.

The week before the marathon, sleep well. If normally you “get by” with five hours but require seven, make sure you get seven every night. The sleep you get the week leading up to the marathon is more important than the night before. The night before, you probably won’t sleep well due to anxiety, excitement and anticipation.

Every product you buy comes with a corresponding promise that you invest in. Your heart is set on attaining both. But while you’ll definitely come home with the object in your hands, you may or may not get the promise you see in your daydreams. Always look beyond the product to understand what’s really motivating your purchases.

If you had two weeks to live. How would you treat people and will you speak to people? Government is preparing graveyard. Hospitals are preparing beds. You should be preparing yourself, wash your hands, use your masks, social distance yourself and set your record straight with you maker. Because no one knows the day nor the hour. Matthew 24:36

Over the years, I’ve realized that in any new situation, whether it involves an elevator or a rocket ship, you will almost certainly be viewed in one of three ways. As a minus one: actively harmful, someone who creates problems. Or as a zero: your impact is neutral and doesn’t tip the balance one way or the other. Or you’ll be seen as a plus one: someone who actively adds value. Everyone wants to be a plus one, of course. But proclaiming your plus-oneness at the outset almost guarantees you’ll be perceived as a minus one, regardless of the skills you bring to the table or how you actually perform. This might seem self-evident, but it can’t be, because so many people do it. During the final selection round for each new class of NASA astronauts, for example, there’s always at least one individual who’s hell-bent on advertising him- or herself as a plus one. In fact, all the applicants who make it to the final 100 and are invited to come to Houston for a week have impressive qualifications and really are plus ones—in their own fields. But invariably, someone decides to take it a little further and behave like An Astronaut, one who already knows just about everything there is to know—the meaning of every acronym, the purpose of every valve on a spacesuit—and who just might be willing, if asked nicely, to go to Mars tomorrow. Sometimes the motivation is over-eagerness rather than arrogance, but the effect is the same.

I will never be that man who spends weeks and months crying over an old house! I am the man who builds a new house. A better, a stronger, a more beautiful house. But in this, I can only play the modest role which Providence has assigned to me. I can only be a small, modest architect for this house. The master builder is, and must always remain, the german Volk.

The 9/11 attacks activated several of these group-related adaptations in my mind. The attacks turned me into a team player, with a powerful and unexpected urge to display my team’s flag and then do things to support the team, such as giving blood, donating money, and, yes, supporting the leader.31 And my response was tepid compared to the hundreds of Americans who got in their cars that afternoon and drove great distances to New York in the vain hope that they could help to dig survivors out of the wreckage, or the thousands of young people who volunteered for military service in the following weeks. Were these people acting on selfish motives, or groupish motives? The rally-round-the-flag reflex is just one example of a groupish mechanism.

Let’s say that you have committed to running every day for two weeks, and at the end of those two weeks, you “reward” yourself with a massage. I would say, “Good for you!” because we all could benefit from more massages. But I would also say that your massage wasn’t a reward. It was an incentive. The definition of a reward in behavior science is an experience directly tied to a behavior that makes that behavior more likely to happen again. The timing of the reward matters. Scientists learned decades ago that rewards need to happen either during the behavior or milli-seconds afterward. Dopamine is released and processed by the brain very quickly. That means you’ve got to cue up those good feelings fast to form a habit. Incentives like a sales bonus or a monthly massage can motivate you, but they don’t rewire your brain. Incentives are way too far in the future to give you that all-important shot of dopamine that encodes the new habit. Doing three squats in the morning and rewarding yourself with a movie that evening won’t work. The squats and the good feelings you get from the movie are too far apart for dopamine to build a bridge between the two. The neurochemical reaction that you are trying to hack is not only time dependent, it’s also highly individualized. What causes one person to feel good may not work for everyone. Your boss may love the smell of coffee. When she enters a coffee shop and inhales, she feels good. And her immediate feeling builds her habit of visiting the coffee shop. But your coworker might not like the way coffee smells. His brain won’t react in the same way. A real reward — something that will actually create a habit — is a much narrower target to hit than most people think. I

The news cycle never let me breathe anymore. 9/11 happened last fall, two weeks into my freshman year, and a couple of weeks later two dudes attacked me while I was walking home from school and the worst part—the worst part—was that it took me days to shake off the denial; it took me days to fathom the why. I kept hoping the explanation would turn out to be more complex, that there’d turn out to be more than pure, blind hatred to motivate their actions. I wanted there to be some other reason why two strangers would follow me home, some other reason why they’d yank my scarf off my head and try to choke me with it. I didn’t understand how anyone could be so violently angry with me for something I hadn’t done, so much so that they’d feel justified in assaulting me in broad daylight as I walked down the street. I didn’t want to understand it. But there it was.

Follow these steps—over and over again for a decade—and you just might become a master: • Remember that deliberate practice has one objective: to improve performance. “People who play tennis once a week for years don’t get any better if they do the same thing each time,” Ericsson has said. “Deliberate practice is about changing your performance, setting new goals and straining yourself to reach a bit higher each time.” • Repeat, repeat, repeat. Repetition matters. Basketball greats don’t shoot ten free throws at the end of team practice; they shoot five hundred. • Seek constant, critical feedback. If you don’t know how you’re doing, you won’t know what to improve. • Focus ruthlessly on where you need help. While many of us work on what we’re already good at, says Ericsson, “those who get better work on their weaknesses.” • Prepare for the process to be mentally and physically exhausting. That’s why so few people commit to it, but that’s why it works.

People knit for their own reasons, but some of the most intense knitters I know are the ones who used it to help them quit smoking. It’s a perfect plan, really; knitting keeps your hands busy, and it is relaxing and repetitive enough to hold off most of the urges to smoke. You get to spend your cigarette money on yarn, a powerful motivator, and two weeks after you quit you have four sweaters, three hats, and several really big afghans. Knitting can be a useful tool for self-improvement.

Worship is God's gift of grace to us before it's our offering to God. We simply benefit from the perfect offering of the Son to the Father through the power of the Spirit (Ephesians 2:18). Worship is our humble, constant, appropriate, glad response to God's self-revelation and his enabling invitation. Apart from this perspective, leading worship can become self-motivated and self-exalting. We can become burdened by the responsibility to lead others and can think that we might not be able to deliver the goods. We subtly take pride in our worship, our singing, our playing, our planning, our performance, our leadership. Ultimately we separate ourselves from the God who drew us to worship him in the first place. That's why biblical worship is God-focused (God is clearly seen), God-centered (God is clearly the priority), and God-exalting (God is clearly honored). Gathering to praise God can't be a means to some "greater" end, such as church growth, evangelism, or personal ministry. God isn't a genie we summon by rubbing the bottle called "worship." He doesn't exist to help us get where we really want to go. God is where we want to go. So God's glory is the end of our worship, and not simply a means to something else. In the midst of a culture that glorifies our pitiful accomplishments in countless ways, we gather each week to proclaim God's wondrous deeds and to glory in his supreme value. He is holy, holy, holy. There is no one, and nothing, like the Lord.

Gabriel Duke. You are a complete hypocrite." "A hypocrite? Me?" "Yes, you. Mr. I-Know-a-Hidden-Tresaure-When-I-See-It. You said you know how to spot undervalued things. Undervalued people. And yet you persist in selling yourself short. If I'm the crown jewels in camouflage, you're a..." She churned the air with one hand. "... a diamond tiara." He grimaced. "Fine, you can be something manlier. A thick, knobby scepter. Will that suffice?" "I suppose it's an improvement." "For weeks, you've been insisting you haven't the slightest idea what it means to give a creature a loving home. 'I'm too ruthless, Penny. I'm only motivated by self-interest, Penny. I'm a bad, bad man, Penny.' And all this time, you've been running an orphanage? I could kick you." "I'm not running an orphanage. I give the orphanage money. That's all." "You gave them kittens." "No, you gave them kittens." "You sent them gifts at Christmas. Playthings and sweets and geese to be roasted for their dinner." "It was the only business I could attend to on Christmas, and I don't like to waste the day. All the banks and offices are closed." She skewered him with a look. "Really. You expect me to believe that?" He pushed a hand through his hair. "What is your aim with this interrogation?" "I want you to admit the truth. You are giving those children a home. A place of warmth and safety, and yes, even love. Meanwhile, you are stubbornly denying yourself all the same things." "I can't be denying myself if it's something I don't want." "Home isn't something a person wants. It's something every last one of us needs. And it's not too late for you, Gabriel." She gentled her voice. "You could have that for yourself.

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

John Maynard Keynes saw the truth at the bottom of all this, which is that our fixation on what he called “purposiveness”—on using time well for future purposes, or on “personal productivity,” he might have said, had he been writing today—is ultimately motivated by the desire not to die. “The ‘purposive’ man,” Keynes wrote, “is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his actions by pushing his interests in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor in truth the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. For him, jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality.” Because he never has to “cash out” the meaningfulness of his actions in the here and now, the purposive man gets to imagine himself an omnipotent god, whose influence over reality extends infinitely off into the future; he gets to feel as though he’s truly the master of his time. But the price he pays is a steep one. He never gets to love an actual cat, in the present moment. Nor does he ever get to enjoy any actual jam. By trying too hard to make the most of his time, he misses his life.

When Amabile analyzed the data, she came to a clear conclusion about one key factor: workers are happiest—and most motivated—when they feel that they accomplish something meaningful at work. These accomplishments do not need to be major breakthroughs: incremental but noticeable progress toward a goal was enough to make her subjects feel good. As one programmer described it, “I smashed that [computer] bug that’s been frustrating me for almost a calendar week. That may not be an event to you, but I live a very drab life, so I’m all hyped.”1 The lesson here is that managers can get the most out of their employees by helping them achieve meaningful progress every day.

The portrait was stolen on 21 August 1911 and the Louvre was closed for an entire week to aid the investigation of the theft. French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had once called for the Louvre to be burnt down, was arrested and put in jail. Apollinaire tried to implicate his friend Pablo Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning, but both were later released and exonerated. At the time, the painting was believed to be lost forever, and it was two years before the real thief was discovered. Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia had stolen it by entering the building during regular hours, concealing himself in a broom closet and walking out with it hidden under his coat after the museum had closed. Peruggia was an Italian patriot, who believed Leonardo’s painting should be returned to Italy for display in an Italian museum. Peruggia may have also been motivated by a friend who sold copies of the painting, which would skyrocket in value after the theft of the original. After having kept the painting in his apartment for two years, Peruggia grew impatient and was finally caught when he attempted to sell it to the directors of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The painting was exhibited all over Italy and returned to the Louvre in 1913. Peruggia was hailed for his patriotism in Italy and served only six months in jail for the crime.

One of the greatest tragedies of our culture is that millions of young people spend many hours, days, weeks and years listening to lectures, reading books and writing papers with a constantly increasing resistance. This has become such a widespread phenomenon that teachers on all levels, from grade school to graduate school, are complimented and praised when they can get the attention of their students and motivate them to do their work. Practically every student perceives his education as a long endless row of obligations to be fulfilled. If there is any culture that has succeeded in killing the natural spontaneous curiosity of people and dulling the human desire to know, it is our technocratic society.

Every conurb, my guide answered, has a chemical toilet where the city’s unwanted human waste disintegrates quietly, but not quite invisibly. It motivates the downstrata: “Work, spend, work,” say slums like Huamdonggil, “or you, too, will end your life here.” Moreover, entrepreneurs take advantage of the legal vaccuum to erect ghoulish pleasurezones for upstrata bored with more respectable quarters. Huamdonggil can thus pay its way in taxes and bribes. MediCorp opens a weekly clinic for dying untermensch to xchange any healthy body parts they may have for a sac of euthanaze. OrganiCorp has a lucrative contract with the city to send in a daily platoon of immune-genomed fabricants, similar to disastermen, to mop up the dead before the flies hatch.

The assumptions that propagandists are rational, in the sense that they follow their own propaganda theories in their choice of communications, and that the meanings of propagandists' communications may differ for different people reoriented the FCC* analysts from a concept of "content as shared" (Berelson would later say "manifest") to conditions that could explain the motivations of particular communicators and the interests they might serve. The notion of "preparatory propaganda" became an especially useful key for the analysts in their effort to infer the intents of broadcasts with political content. In order to ensure popular support for planned military actions, the Axis leaders had to inform; emotionally arouse, and otherwise prepare their countrymen and women to accept those actions; the FCC analysts discovered that they could learn a great deal about the enemy's intended actions by recognizing such preparatory efforts in the domestic press and broadcasts. They were able to predict several major military and political campaigns and to assess Nazi elites' perceptions of their situation, political changes within the Nazi governing group, and shifts in relations among Axis countries. Among the more outstanding predictions that British analysts were able to make was the date of deployment of German V weapons against Great Britain. The analysts monitored the speeches delivered by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and inferred from the content of those speeches what had interfered with the weapons' production and when. They then used this information to predict the launch date of the weapons, and their prediction was accurate within a few weeks. *FCC - Federal Communications Commission

One day Jobs came into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, an engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain, but Jobs cut him off. “If it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. “Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster,” Atkinson recalled. “Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture.

Yes. But ceasing sin is the by-product of seeing God. As we see the beauty of God and feel His weightiness in our hearts, our hearts begin to desire Him more than we desire sin. Before the Bible says, “Stop sinning,” it says, “Behold your God!” Think of it like a balloon. There are two ways to keep a balloon afloat. If you fill a balloon with your breath, then the only way to keep it in the air is to continually smack it upward. That’s how religion keeps you motivated: it repeatedly “hits” you. “Stop doing this!” “Get busy with that!” This is my life as a pastor. People come on a Sunday so I can “smack” them about something. “Be more generous!” And they do that for a week. “Go do missions!” And they sign up for a trip. Every week I smack them back into spiritual orbit. No wonder people don’t like being around me. But there’s another way to keep a balloon afloat. Fill it with helium. Then it floats on its own, no smacking required. Seeing the size and beauty of God is like the helium that keeps us soaring spiritually.

I've defined myself, privately and abstractly, by my brief, intense years as an athlete, a swimmer. I practiced five or six hours a day, six days a week, eating and sleeping as much as possible in between. Weekends were spent either training or competing. I wasn't the best; I was relatively fast. I trained, ate, traveled, and showered with the best in the country, but wasn't the best; I was pretty good. I liked how hard swimming at that level was- that I could do something difficult and unusual. Liked knowing my discipline would be recognized, respected, that I might not be able to say the right things or fit in, but I could do something well. I wanted to believe that I was talented; being fast was proof. Though I loved racing, the idea of fastest, of number one, of the Olympics, didn't motivate me. I still dream of practice, of races, coaches and blurry competitors. I'm drawn to swimming pools, all swimming pools, no matter how small or murky. When I swim now, I step into the water as though absentmindedly touching a scar. My recreational laps are phantoms of my competitive races

What is a “pyramid?” I grew up in real estate my entire life. My father built one of the largest real estate brokerage companies on the East Coast in the 1970s, before selling it to Merrill Lynch. When my brother and I graduated from college, we both joined him in building a new real estate company. I went into sales and into opening a few offices, while my older brother went into management of the company. In sales, I was able to create a six-figure income. I worked 60+ hours a week in such pursuit. My brother worked hard too, but not in the same fashion. He focused on opening offices and recruiting others to become agents to sell houses for him. My brother never listed and sold a single house in his career, yet he out-earned me 10-to-1. He made millions because he earned a cut of every commission from all the houses his 1,000+ agents sold. He worked smarter, while I worked harder. I guess he was at the top of the “pyramid.” Is this legal? Should he be allowed to earn more than any of the agents who worked so hard selling homes? I imagine everyone will agree that being a real estate broker is totally legal. Those who are smart, willing to take the financial risk of overhead, and up for the challenge of recruiting good agents, are the ones who get to live a life benefitting from leveraged Income. So how is Network Marketing any different? I submit to you that I found it to be a step better. One day, a friend shared with me how he was earning the same income I was, but that he was doing so from home without the overhead, employees, insurance, stress, and being subject to market conditions. He was doing so in a network marketing business. At first I refuted him by denouncements that he was in a pyramid scheme. He asked me to explain why. I shared that he was earning money off the backs of others he recruited into his downline, not from his own efforts. He replied, “Do you mean like your family earns money off the backs of the real estate agents in your company?” I froze, and anyone who knows me knows how quick-witted I normally am. Then he said, “Who is working smarter, you or your dad and brother?” Now I was mad. Not at him, but at myself. That was my light bulb moment. I had been closed-minded and it was costing me. That was the birth of my enlightenment, and I began to enter and study this network marketing profession. Let me explain why I found it to be a step better. My research led me to learn why this business model made so much sense for a company that wanted a cost-effective way to bring a product to market. Instead of spending millions in traditional media ad buys, which has a declining effectiveness, companies are opting to employ the network marketing model. In doing so, the company only incurs marketing cost if and when a sale is made. They get an army of word-of-mouth salespeople using the most effective way of influencing buying decisions, who only get paid for performance. No salaries, only commissions. But what is also employed is a high sense of motivation, wherein these salespeople can be building a business of their own and not just be salespeople. If they choose to recruit others and teach them how to sell the product or service, they can earn override income just like the broker in a real estate company does. So now they see life through a different lens, as a business owner waking up each day excited about the future they are building for themselves. They are not salespeople; they are business owners.

All week, we’ve heard pep talks like this one from Scott at last night’s post-Razzle’s debrief: “To me, here’s the motivation to evangelize: If I’m a doctor, and I find the cure for a terminal illness, and if I care about people, I’m going to spread that cure as widely as possible. If I don’t, people are going to die.” Leave the comparison in place for a second. If Scott had indeed found the cure to a terminal illness and if this Daytona mission were a vaccination campaign instead of an evangelism crusade, my group members would be acting with an unusually large portion of mercy—much more, certainly, than their friends who spent the break playing Xbox in their sweatpants. And if you had gone on this immunization trip, giving up your spring break for the greater good, and had found the sick spring breakers unwilling to be vaccinated, what would you do? If a terminally ill man said he was “late for a meeting,” you might let him walk away. But—and I’m really stretching here—if you really believed your syringe held his only hope of survival, and you really cared about him, would you ignore the rules of social propriety and try every convincement method you knew?

Grades can also be profoundly unfair, especially for students who are unable to keep up, because the level of the exams usually increases from week to week. Let’s take the analogy of video games. When you discover a new game, you initially have no idea how to progress effectively. Above all, you don’t want to be constantly reminded of how bad you are! That’s why video game designers start with extremely easy levels, where you are almost sure to win. Very gradually, the difficulty increases and, with it, the risk of failure and frustration—but programmers know how to mitigate this by mixing the easy with the difficult, and by leaving you free to retry the same level as many times as you need. You see your score steadily increase . . . and finally, the joyous day comes when you successfully pass the final level, where you were stuck for so long. Now compare this with the report cards of “bad” students: they start the year off with a bad grade, and instead of motivating them by letting them take the same test again until they pass, the teacher gives them a new exercise every week, almost always beyond their abilities. Week after week, their “score” hovers around zero. In the video game market, such a design would be a complete disaster. All too often, schools use grades as punishments.

My request to gain access to Mme de Guermantes’s collection of Elstir paintings had been met by Saint-Loup with, “I’ll answer for her.” And, unfortunately, it was he and he alone who did the answering. We find it easy enough to answer for other people when we set little images of them in our mind and manipulate them to suit our needs. No doubt even then we are mindful of the difficulties that arise from other people’s natures being different from our own, and are ready enough to resort to whatever means are powerful enough to influence them—self-interest, persuasion, emotion—and will cancel out any inclination to oppose our wishes. But these differences in other people’s natures are still conceived by our own nature; the difficulties are raised by us; the compelling motives are measured by our own standards. So, when we want to see the other person actually perform the actions we have made him rehearse in our mind’s eye, things are quite different, we encounter unforeseen resistances that may be insuperable. Perhaps one of the strongest of these is the resistance that can grow, in a woman who is not in love, from the unconquerable and fetid repulsion she feels for the man who loves her: during the long weeks when Saint-Loup still did not come to Paris, his aunt, to whom I was certain he had written begging her to do so, did not once invite me to call and see her Elstirs. I

So you don’t trust me: the guy who taught you everything you know. I’m guessing if you have her”—he jerked his thumb at Rae—“that’s no accident. Luke’s buddies sent her to trap you, and she thought she was doing the right thing, because, duh, she’s already proven she’s kinda gullible that way.” “Hey!” Rae said. “You are. Own it. Fix it. Now, you guys have her, which means you escaped whoever sent her after you. You didn’t escape without a fight, given that bruise I see rising on Daniel’s jaw and the scrapes on Derek’s knuckles. But you escaped, and you came back here, and you captured me. Who taught you all that?” “Daniel and I had already started learning,” Maya said, “during those weeks you were chasing us.” “Trial by fire,” he said. “Followed by hardcore, hands-on tactical training. You got away scot-free from these guys because of my lessons. And yet now you don’t trust I’m on your side?” “Nope,” Derek said. “Sorry,” Daniel said. Maya crossed her arms and shook her head. I shrugged. Moreno broke into a grin. “You guys do me proud. I’d give you all a hug, if that wasn’t a little creepy. And if I was the hugging sort. But if you survive the rest of this, I’ll take you all out for beer and ice cream.” “You don’t need to be sarcastic,” Rae muttered. “Oh, but I’m not, and they know it. This is exactly what I trained them for. Trust no one except one another. Excluding you, kid, because I don’t know you, and you have a bad habit of screwing up. But these guys are doing the right thing. Next step?” Turn the tables,” I said. “Capture someone who’s behind this and get them to talk.” “Mmm, yes. That would work. But even better?” “Stop them,” Derek said. “Don’t just take down one. Take them all down.” “Without running to the Nasts for help,” Daniel said. “Because in another year, some of us will be off to college, and we need to be able to look after ourselves.” “Starting with proving we can look after ourselves,” Maya said. Moreno beamed. “You guys are ace. See, this is what I told Sean. The best time to train operatives is when they’re still young and malleable. None of that shit about waiting until they’re eighteen and legally old enough to consent.” Maya shook her head. “I suppose you’d also suggest he have the Cabal terrorize them for weeks first, so they’re properly motivated.” “Exactly. Personal rights and freedoms are vastly overrated. And there’s nothing wrong with a little PTSD. I’ve always found mine useful. Keeps me on my toes.” Rae stared at him. “I’m kidding,” he said to her. “Mostly. Don’t you joke around like this with your instructors? Oh, wait. You don’t have any. Which is why you got tricked—again. And got captured by these guys.” “Can we tie him up now?” Rae said. “And gag him?” “Doesn’t do any good,” Derek said. “We could try.

Do we know the future somehow, even before it happens? Are things just coincidences, or unconscious expressions from some sort or pre-knowledge of what will happen to us? I mentioned earlier that Chris had been thinking about getting rid of his truck; the truck turned out to be somehow related to the crazed motive for the crime, at least according to what the murderer told his sister. I mentioned Chris saying, out of the blue, that he thought Chad would take a bullet for him. He thought about giving up dipping, as if feeling that he should do something to keep his life going longer. Those can certainly be explained as coincidences, as can other things: The day before he was killed, Chad had lunch with his parents, something that he did rarely. When he was leaving, he walked down to his vehicle, then suddenly turned back and gave them another big, heartfelt hug: their lasting memory of him, I would guess. Maybe they aren’t coincidences; maybe God grants us some moments of pre-knowledge. I don’t know. Maybe God puts things on our hearts and gives us a little push. Or it’s possible those of us left behind simply remember what we want to be significant when we experience loss. I do know I am glad Chris and I had that Christmas. I’m comforted by the weeks right before he died where our marriage reached a state of near perfection. And I’m glad that I have so many good moments from our days to remember.

The greatest difference between present-day Christianity and that of which we read in these letters, is that to us it is primarily a performance; to them it was real experience. We are apt to reduce the Christian religion to a code or, at best, a rule of heart and life. To these men it is quite plainly the invasion of their lives by a new quality of life altogether. They do not hesitate to describe this as Christ "living in" them. Mere moral reformation will hardly explain the transformation and the exuberant vitality of these men's lives -- even if we could prove a motive for such reformation, and certainly the world around offered little encouragement to the early Christians! We are practically driven to accept their own explanation, which is that their little human lives had, through Christ, been linked up with the very life of God. Many Christians today talk about the "difficulties of our times" as though we should have to wait for better ones before the Christian religion can take root. It is heartening to remember that this faith took root and flourished amazingly in conditions that would have killed anything less vital in a matter of weeks. These early Christians were on fire with the conviction that they had become, through Christ, literal sons of God; they were pioneers of a new humanity, founders of a new kingdom. They still speak to us across the centuries. Perhaps if we believed what they believed, we might achieve what they achieved.

1. Connect with Your Why Start by identifying your key motivations. Why do you want to reach your goal in the first place? Why is it important personally? Get a notebook or pad of paper and list all the key motivations. But don’t just list them, prioritize them. You want the best reasons at the top of your list. Finally, connect with these motivations both intellectually and emotionally. 2. Master Your Motivation There are four key ways to stay motivated as you reach for your goals: Identify your reward and begin to anticipate it. Eventually, the task itself can become its own reward this way. Recognize that installing a new habit will probably take longer than a few weeks. It might even take five or six months. Set your expectations accordingly. Gamify the process with a habit app or calendar chain. As Dan Sullivan taught me, measure the gains, not the gap. Recognize the value of incremental wins. 3. Build Your Team It’s almost always easier to reach a goal if you have friends on the journey. Intentional relationships provide four ingredients essential for success: learning, encouragement, accountability, and competition. There are at least seven kinds of intentional relationships that can help you grow and reach your goals: ​‣ ​Online communities ​‣ ​Running and exercise groups ​‣ ​Masterminds ​‣ ​Coaching and mentoring circles ​‣ ​Reading and study groups ​‣ ​Accountability groups ​‣ ​Close friendships If you can’t find a group you need, don’t wait. Start your own.

Cohen continued to struggle with his own well-being. Even though he had achieved his life’s dream of running his own firm, he was still unhappy, and he had become dependent on a psychiatrist named Ari Kiev to help him manage his moods. In addition to treating depression, Kiev’s other area of expertise was success and how to achieve it. He had worked as a psychiatrist and coach with Olympic basketball players and rowers trying to improve their performance and overcome their fear of failure. His background building athletic champions appealed to Cohen’s unrelenting need to dominate in every transaction he entered into, and he started asking Kiev to spend entire days at SAC’s offices, tending to his staff. Kiev was tall, with a bushy mustache and a portly midsection, and he would often appear silently at a trader’s side and ask him how he was feeling. Sometimes the trader would be so startled to see Kiev there he’d practically jump out of his seat. Cohen asked Kiev to give motivational speeches to his employees, to help them get over their anxieties about losing money. Basically, Kiev was there to teach them to be ruthless. Once a week, after the market closed, Cohen’s traders would gather in a conference room and Kiev would lead them through group therapy sessions focused on how to make them more comfortable with risk. Kiev had them talk about their trades and try to understand why some had gone well and others hadn’t. “Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it,” was how one skeptical staff member remembered Kiev being pitched to them. Kiev’s work with Olympians had led him to believe that the thing that blocked most people was fear. You might have two investors with the same amount of money: One was prepared to buy 250,000 shares of a stock they liked, while the other wasn’t. Why? Kiev believed that the reluctance was a form of anxiety—and that it could be overcome with proper treatment. Kiev would ask the traders to close their eyes and visualize themselves making trades and generating profits. “Surrendering to the moment” and “speaking the truth” were some of his favorite phrases. “Why weren’t you bigger in the trades that worked? What did you do right?” he’d ask. “Being preoccupied with not losing interferes with winning,” he would say. “Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win.” Many of the traders hated the group therapy sessions. Some considered Kiev a fraud. “Ari was very aggressive,” said one. “He liked money.” Patricia, Cohen’s first wife, was suspicious of Kiev’s motives and believed that he was using his sessions with Cohen to find stock tips. From Kiev’s perspective, he found the perfect client in Cohen, a patient with unlimited resources who could pay enormous fees and whose reputation as one of the best traders on Wall Street could help Kiev realize his own goal of becoming a bestselling author. Being able to say that you were the

I have time for only one drink,” Jordan said, glancing at the ormolu clock on the opposite wall. “I’ve promised Alexandra to stand at her side at a ball tonight and beam approvingly at a friend of hers.” Whenever Jordan mentioned his wife’s name, Ian noted with amusement, the other man’s entire expression softened. “Care to join us?” Ian shook his head and accepted his drink from the footman. “It sounds boring as hell.” “I don’t think it’ll be boring, precisely. My wife has taken it upon herself to defy the entire ton and sponsor the girl back into the ranks. Based on some of the things Alexandra said in her note, that will be no mean feat.” “Why is that?” Ian inquired with more courtesy than interest. Jordan sighed and leaned his head back, weary from the hours he’d been working for the last several weeks and unexcited at the prospect of dancing attendance on a damsel in distress-one he’d never set eyes on. “The girl fell into the clutches of some man two years ago and an ugly scandal ensued.” Thinking of Elizabeth and himself, Ian said casually, “That’s not an uncommon occurrence, evidently.” “From what Alex wrote me, it seems this case is rather extreme.” “In what way?” “For one thing, there’s every chance the young woman will get the cut direct tonight from half the ton-and that’s the half that will be willing to acknowledge her. Alex has retaliated by calling in the heavy guns-my grandmother, to be exact, and Tony and myself, to a lesser degree. The object is to try to brave it out, but I don’t envy the girl. Unless I miss my guess, she’s going to be flayed alive by the wagging tongues tonight. Whatever the bastard did,” Jordan finished, downing his drink and starting to straighten in his chair, “it was damaging as hell. The girl-who’s purported to be incredibly beautiful, by the way-has been a social outcast for nearly two years.” Ian stiffened, his glass arrested partway to his mouth, his sharpened gaze on Jordan, who was already starting to rise. “Who’s the girl?” he demanded tautly. “Elizabeth Cameron.” “Oh, Christ!” Ian exploded, surging out of his chair and snatching up his evening jacket. “Where are they?” “At the Willington’s. Why?” “Because,” Ian bit out, impatiently shrugging into his jacket and tugging the frilled cuffs of his shirt into place, “I’m the bastard who did it.” An indescribable expression flashed across the Duke of Hawthorne’s face as he, too, pulled on his evening jacket. “You are the man Alexandra described in her note as an ‘unspeakable cad, vile libertine,’ and ‘despoiler of innocents’?” “I’m all that and more,” Ian replied grimly, stalking toward the door with Jordan Townsende beside him. “You go to the Willingtons’ as quickly as you can,” he instructed. “I’ll be close behind you, but I’ve a stop to make first. And don’t, for God’s sake, tell Elizabeth I’m on my way.” Ian flung himself into his coach, snapped orders to his driver, and leaned back, counting minutes, telling himself it couldn’t possibly be going as badly for her as he feared it would. And never once did he stop to think that Jordan Townsende had no idea what motives could possibly prompt Elizabeth Cameron’s “despoiler” to be bent on meeting her at the Willington’s ball.

ALGERNON: I suspected that, my dear fellow! I have Bunburyed all over Shropshire on two separate occasions. Now, go on. Why are you Ernest in town and Jack in the country? JACK: My dear Algy, I don’t know whether you will be able to understand my real motives. You are hardly serious enough. When one is placed in the position of guardian, one has to adopt a very high moral tone on all subjects. It’s one’s duty to do so. And as a high moral tone can hardly be said to conduce very much to either one’s health or one’s happiness, in order to get up to town I have always pretended to have a younger brother of the name of Ernest, who lives in the Albany, and gets into the most dreadful scrapes. That, my dear Algy, is the whole truth pure and simple. ALGERNON: The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility! JACK: That wouldn’t be at all a bad thing. ALGERNON: Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don’t try it. You should leave that to people who haven’t been at a University. They do it so well in the daily papers. What you really are is a Bunburyist. I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know. JACK: What on earth do you mean? ALGERNON: You have invented a very useful younger brother called Ernest, in order that you may be able to come up to town as often as you like. I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose. Bunbury is perfectly invaluable. If it wasn’t for Bunbury’s extraordinary bad health, for instance, I wouldn’t be able to dine with you at Willis’s to-night, for I have been really engaged to Aunt Augusta for more than a week.

IN BERLIN, JOSEPH GOEBBELS contemplated the motivation behind Churchill’s broadcast, and its potential effect. He kept careful watch on the evolving relationship between America and Britain, weighing how his propagandists might best influence the outcome. “The battle over intervention or non-intervention continues to rage in the USA,” he wrote in his diary on Monday, April 28, the day after the broadcast. The outcome was hard to predict. “We are active to the best of our ability, but we can scarcely make ourselves heard against the deafening Jew-chorus. In London they are placing all their last hopes in the USA. If something does not happen soon, then London is faced with annihilation.” Goebbels sensed mounting anxiety. “Their great fear is of a knock-out blow during the next weeks and months. We shall do our best to justify these fears.” He instructed his operatives on how best to use Churchill’s own broadcast to discredit him. They were to mock him for saying that after he visited bombed areas, he came back to London “not merely reassured but even refreshed.” In particular, they were to seize on how Churchill had described the forces he had transferred from Egypt to Greece to confront the German invasion. Churchill had said: “It happened that the divisions available and best suited to this task were from New Zealand and Australia, and that only about half the troops who took part in this dangerous expedition came from the Mother Country.” Goebbels leapt on this with glee. “Indeed, it so happened! It invariably ‘so happens’ that the British are in the rear; it always so happens that they are in retreat. It so happened that the British had no share in the casualties. It so happened that the greatest sacrifices during the offensive in the West were made by the French, the Belgians and the Dutch. It so happened that the Norwegians had to provide cover for the British flooding back from Norway.

We need not have any illusions that a causal agent lives within the human mind to recognize that certain people are dangerous. What we condemn most in another person is the conscious intention to do harm. Degrees of guilt can still be judged by reference to the facts of a case: the personality of the accused, his prior offenses, his patterns of association with others, his use of intoxicants, his confessed motives with regard to the victim, etc. If a person’s actions seem to have been entirely out of character, this might influence our view of the risk he now poses to others. If the accused appears unrepentant and eager to kill again, we need entertain no notions of free will to consider him a danger to society. Why is the conscious decision to do another person harm particularly blameworthy? Because what we do subsequent to conscious planning tends to most fully reflect the global properties of our minds—our beliefs, desires, goals, prejudices, etc. If, after weeks of deliberation, library research, and debate with your friends, you still decide to kill the king—well, then killing the king reflects the sort of person you really are. The point is not that you are the ultimate and independent cause of your actions; the point is that, for whatever reason, you have the mind of a regicide. Certain criminals must be incarcerated to prevent them from harming other people. The moral justification for this is entirely straightforward: Everyone else will be better off this way. Dispensing with the illusion of free will allows us to focus on the things that matter—assessing risk, protecting innocent people, deterring crime, etc. However, certain moral intuitions begin to relax the moment we take a wider picture of causality into account. Once we recognize that even the most terrifying predators are, in a very real sense, unlucky to be who they are, the logic of hating (as opposed to fearing) them begins to unravel. Once again, even if you believe that every human being harbors an immortal soul, the picture does not change: Anyone born with the soul of a psychopath has been profoundly unlucky.

Some years ago I saw a documentary on dying whose main theme was that people die as they lived. That was Jimmy. For five years, since he began undergoing operations for bladder cancer and even after his lung cancer was diagnosed, he continued the activities that he considered important, marching against crackhouses, campaigning against the demolition of the Ford Auditorium, organizing Detroit Summer, making speeches, and writing letters to the editor and articles for the SOSAD newsletter and Northwest Detroiter. In 1992 while he was undergoing the chemotherapy that cleared up his bladder cancer, he helped form the Coalition against Privatization and to Save Our City. The coalition was initiated by activist members of a few AFSCME locals who contacted Carl Edwards and Alice Jennings who in turn contacted us. Jimmy helped write the mission statement that gave the union activists a sense of themselves as not only city workers but citizens of the city and its communities. The coalition’s town meetings and demonstrations were instrumental in persuading the new mayor, Dennis Archer, to come out against privatization, using language from the coalition newsletter to explain his position. At the same time Jimmy was putting out the garbage, keeping our corner at Field and Goethe free of litter and rubbish, mopping the kitchen and bathroom floors, picking cranberries, and keeping up “his” path on Sutton. After he entered the hospice program, which usually means death within six months, and up to a few weeks before his death, Jimmy slowed down a bit, but he was still writing and speaking and organizing. He used to say that he wasn’t going to die until he got ready, and because he was so cheerful and so engaged it was easy to believe him. A few weeks after he went on oxygen we did three movement-building workshops at the SOSAD office for a group of Roger Barfield’s friends who were trying to form a community-action group following a protest demonstration at a neighborhood sandwich shop over the murder of one of their friends. With oxygen tubes in his nostrils and a portable oxygen tank by his side, Jimmy spoke for almost an hour on one of his favorite subjects, the need to “think dialectically, rather than biologically.” Recognizing that this was probably one of Jimmy’s last extended speeches, I had the session videotaped by Ron Scott. At the end of this workshop we asked participants to come to the next session prepared to grapple with three questions: What can we do to make our neighborhoods safe? How can we motivate people to transform? How can we create jobs?

True beauty is found not in the exceptional but in the commonplaces Where does the beauty lie, in the exceptional or the commonplace? Some people believe, true beauty can be find only in exceptional and there isn’t any beauty in commonplaces, and it seems, they are all quotidian objects; but yet, another group of people attribute to the factual beauty of commonplaces and believe the beauty of exceptional seems artificial and it’ll be ephemeral. After weighing the evidence, it is certain that the true beauty lie in the commonplace not in the exceptional. People are most move by natural feature than the artificial ones. Those people that believe the beauty lie in the exceptional prefer the artificial beauties, which is made by human, to the natural beauties. Consider Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Liza, one of the most beautiful painting in the world. For sure it is beautiful and few people who view the painting are not moved by the sheer beauty of it. But how much time a person can enjoy watching this art work and praise it? One hour? Two hours? One week? Like Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Liza, the cathedral of north dame in Paris is another exceptional object which is wonderful and there are too many tourist that travel untold miles to view cathedral. Nobody can tell it is not beautiful; but, does it sacrifice people’s tendency as much as the original beauties do? People interest to visit these beautiful building and wonderful painting at least one time to be familiar with those great art work but it cannot be considered as a true beauty which is one of the requirement of human to be alive. On the other hand, the natural beauties which are around us are fantastic and eternal. They are always improve motivation on people and make them pleased. Consider a flower, although every people have seen many kind of flowers, it is always beautiful and move people to appropriate them. Like flower, plants, stars, sun, moon, sky, sea every object in the nature can be caused of an excited on people and motivate them to be alive. The common place beauties are the most part of the human’s life. If people every time don’t appreciate every beauty around him, and he praise exceptional object when he encounter, it cannot be a fair conclusion that the exceptional objects are true beauty. Indeed people believe nature is constantly compeer of human along the history, like one of his organs, he is not praising them every time, but it is incredible for human to feel he must be alive without common place beauty. Ultimately, after considering both sides of the issue, it must be concluded that the true beauty lie in the commonplace not in the exceptional. Exceptional are the beauties which can be as a complementary for the natural beauties. Because people’s life can be current even without exceptional but without commonplace beauties it is impossible for people to be alive.

[...] Kevin had grown up playing left-handed. Seeing him take on Andrew right-handed was ballsy enough, seeing him actually score was surreal. Kevin kicked them off the court [...], but instead of following [...] he stayed behind with Andrew to keep practicing. Neil watched them over his shoulder. "I saw him first," Nicky said. "I thought you had Erik," Neil said. "I do, but Kevin's on the List," Nicky said. When Neil frowned, Nicky explained. "It's a list of celebrities we're allowed to have affairs with. Kevin is number three." Neil pretended to understand and changed the topic. "How does anyone lose against the Foxes with Andrew in your goal?" "He's good, right? [...] Coach bribed Andrew into saving our collective asses with some really nice booze." "Bribed?" Neil echoed. "Andrew's good," Nicky said again, "but it doesn't really matter to him if we win or lose. You want him to care, you gotta give him incentive." "He can't play like that and not care." "Now you sound like Kevin. You'll find out the hard way, same as Kevin did. Kevin gave Andrew a lot of grief this spring [...]. Up until then they were fighting like cats and dogs. Now look at them. They're practically trading friendship bracelets and I couldn't fit a crowbar between them if it'd save my life." "But why?" Neil asked. "Andrew hates Kevin's obsession with Exy." "The day they start making sense to you, let me know," Nicky said [...]. "I gave up trying to sort it all out weeks ago. [...] But as long as I'm doling out advice? Stop staring at Kevin so much. You're making me fear for your life over here." "What do you mean?" "Andrew is scary territorial of him. He punched me the first time I said I'd like to get Kevin too wasted to be straight." Nicky pointed at his face, presumably where Andrew had decked him. "So yeah, I'm going to crush on safer targets until Andrew gets bored of him. That means you, since Matt's taken and I don't hate myself enough to try Seth. Congrats." "Can you take the creepy down a level?" Aaron asked. "What?" Nikcy asked. "He said he doesn't swing, so obviously he needs a push." "I don't need a push," Neil said. "I'm fine on my own." "Seriously, how are you not bored of your hand by now?" "I'm done with this conversation," Neil said. "This and every future variation of it [...]." The stadium door slammed open as Andrew showed up at last. [...] "Kevin wants to know what's taking you so long. Did you get lost?" "Nicky's scheming to rape Neil," Aaron said. "There are a couple flaws in his plan he needs to work out first, but he'll get there sooner or later." [...] "Wow, Nicky," Andrew said. "You start early." "Can you really blame me?" Nicky glanced back at Neil as he said it. He only took his eyes off Andrew for a second, but that was long enough for Andrew to lunge at him. Andrew caught Nicky's jersey in one hand and threw him hard up against the wall. [...] "Hey, Nicky," Andrew said in stage-whisper German. "Don't touch him, you understand?" "You know I'd never hurt him. If he says yes-" "I said no." "Jesus, you're greedy," Nicky said. "You already have Kevin. Why does it-" He went silent, but it took Neil a moment to realize why. Andrew had a short knife pressed to Nicky's Jersey. [...] Neil was no stranger to violence. He'd heard every threat in the book, but never from a man who smiled as bright as Andrew did. Apathy, anger, madness, boredom: these motivators Neil knew and understood. But Andrew was grinning like he didn't have a knife point where it'd sleep perfectly between Nicky's ribs, and it wasn't because he was joking. Neil knew Andrew meant it. [...] "Hey, are we playing or what?" Neil asked. "Kevin's waiting." [...] Andrew let go of Nicky and spun away. [...] Nicky looked shaken as he stared after the twins, but when he realized Neil was watching him he rallied with a smile Neil didn't believe at all. "On second thought, you're not my type after all [...].