Work Seminar Quotes

In my own professional work I have touched on a variety of different fields. I’ve done work in mathematical linguistics, for example, without any professional credentials in mathematics; in this subject I am completely self-taught, and not very well taught. But I’ve often been invited by universities to speak on mathematical linguistics at mathematics seminars and colloquia. No one has ever asked me whether I have the appropriate credentials to speak on these subjects; the mathematicians couldn’t care less. What they want to know is what I have to say. No one has ever objected to my right to speak, asking whether I have a doctor’s degree in mathematics, or whether I have taken advanced courses in the subject. That would never have entered their minds. They want to know whether I am right or wrong, whether the subject is interesting or not, whether better approaches are possible… the discussion dealt with the subject, not with my right to discuss it. But on the other hand, in discussion or debate concerning social issues or American foreign policy…. The issue is constantly raised, often with considerable venom. I’ve repeatedly been challenged on grounds of credentials, or asked, what special training do I have that entitles you to speak on these matters. The assumption is that people like me, who are outsiders from a professional viewpoint, are not entitled to speak on such things. Compare mathematics and the political sciences… it’s quite striking. In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is the concern for content.

Okay, here’s a cheat I learned in a leadership seminar. It’s called active listening. Someone says something, a complaint, or a criticism, or they’re excited about something that happened to them. For a lot of us, our instinct is to offer a solution, or expand on an idea, to fix or offer something. The key is to think about how they’re feeling, be receptive to that, and parrot it back to them. They just got a new car, and they’re happy about it? A simple ‘that’s excellent’ or ‘you must be so proud’ works. It leaves room for them to keep talking, to know you’re listening. For your teammate who just lost someone she obviously cared about, just recognizing that she’s upset and she’s right to feel upset, that’s enough.

On a blustery October night in a church outside Minneapolis, several hundred believers had gathered for a three-day seminar. I began with a one-hour presentation on the gospel of grace and the reality of Salvation. Using Scripture, story, symbolism, and personal experience, I focused on the total sufficiency of the redeeming work of Jesus Christ on Calvary. The service ended with a song and a prayer. Leaving the church by a side door, the pastor turned to his associate and fumed, 'Humph, that airhead didn't say one thing about what we have to do to earn our salvation!' Something is radically wrong.

I would love to say that I wrote (Good Will Hunting). Here is the truth. In my obit it will say that I wrote it. People don't want to think those two cute guys wrote it. What happened was, they had the script. It was their script. They gave it to Rob [Reiner] to read, and there was a great deal of stuff in the script dealing with the F.B.I. trying to use Matt Damon for spy work because he was so brilliant in math. Rob said, "Get rid of it." They then sent them in to see me for a day - I met with them in New York - and all I said to them was, "Rob's right. Get rid of the F.B.I. stuff. Go with the family, go with Boston, go with all that wonderful stuff." And they did. I think people refuse to admit it because their careers have been so far from writing, and I think it's too bad. I'll tell you who wrote a marvelous script once, Sylvester Stallone. Rocky's a marvelous script. God, read it, it's wonderful. It's just got marvelous stuff. And then he stopped suddenly because it's easier being a movie star and making all that money than going in your pit and writing a script. But I did not write [Good Will Hunting], alas. I would not have written the "It's not your fault" scene. I'm going to assume that 148 percent of the people in this room have seen a therapist. I certainly have, for a long time. Hollywood always has this idea that it's this shrink with only one patient. I mean, that scene with Robin Williams gushing and Matt Damon and they're hugging, "It's not your fault, it's not your fault." I thought, Oh God, Freud is so agonized over this scene. But Hollywood tends to do that with therapists. (from 2003 WGA seminar)

My books have all been very deeply felt. You don’t spend eight years of your life working on a trendy knockoff. In that sense I’ve been serious. But I don’t do lots of things that other serious writers do. I don’t write book reviews. I don’t sit on panels about the state of the novel. I don’t go to writer conferences. I don’t teach writing seminars. I don’t hang out at Yaddo or MacDowell. I’m not concerned with my reputation as a writer and where I stand relative to other writers. I’m not competitive or professionally ambitious. I don’t think about my work and my career in an overarching or systematic way. I don’t think about myself, as I think most writers do, as progressing toward some ideal of greatness. There’s no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.

No man's advice can change you unless you speak to yourself. Bible school or seminars can't change you, going to church can't change you except you decide to change. Psalm 139:23 - 24

The idea that “it takes money to make money” is the thinking of financially unsophisticated people. It does not mean that they’re not intelligent. They have simply not learned the science of money making money. Money is only an idea. If you want more money, simply change your thinking. Every self-made person started small with an idea, and then turned it into something big. The same applies to investing. It takes only a few dollars to start and grow it into something big. I meet so many people who spend their lives chasing the big deal, or trying to amass a lot of money to get into a big deal, but to me that is foolish. Too often I have seen unsophisticated investors put their large nest egg into one deal and lose most of it rapidly. They may have been good workers, but they were not good investors. Education and wisdom about money are important. Start early. Buy a book. Go to a seminar. Practice. Start small. I turned $5,000 cash into a one-million-dollar asset producing $5,000 a month cash flow in less than six years. But I started learning as a kid. I encourage you to learn, because it’s not that hard. In fact, it’s pretty easy once you get the hang of it. I think I have made my message clear. It’s what is in your head that determines what is in your hands. Money is only an idea. There is a great book called Think and Grow Rich. The title is not Work Hard and Grow Rich. Learn to have money work hard for you, and your life will be easier and happier. Today, don’t play it safe. Play it smart.

Recovery through sleep isn’t going to happen if the majority of the components of your being aren’t getting enough stimulation or resistance to work against. Your brain may be tired after work, but if your body and emotions haven’t been challenged through the day, they’re going to keep irritating you even if you’re asleep. They don’t need rest; they need work for real recovery to take place.

Whatever piece of unconscious we take and work through brings light to humanity.

he loves productivity seminars because they make him feel so productive—never mind that nothing has been produced yet.)

We attend too many seminars. We take too many classes. We buy too many books. We play too many audios in our cars. It's all wasted if we're unclear on what learning really is: Learning is not attending, listening, or reading. Learning is really about translating knowing what to do into doing what we know. It's about changing. If we have not changed we have not learned.

In that seminar I attended at eighteen, the speaker asked, “What percentage of shared responsibility do you have in making a relationship work?” I was a teenager, so wise in the ways of true love. Of course I had all the answers. “Fifty/fifty!” I blurted out. It was so obvious; both people must be willing to share the responsibility evenly or someone’s getting ripped off. “Fifty-one/forty-nine,” yelled someone else, arguing that you’d have to be willing to do more than the other person. Aren’t relationships built on self-sacrifice and generosity? “Eighty/twenty,” yelled another. The instructor turned to the easel and wrote 100/0 on the paper in big black letters. “You have to be willing to give 100 percent with zero expectation of receiving anything in return,” he said. “Only when you’re willing to take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work will it work. Otherwise, a relationship left to chance will always be vulnerable to disaster.” Whoa. This wasn’t what I was expecting! But I quickly understood how this concept could transform every area of my life. If I always took 100 percent responsibility for everything I experienced—completely owning all of my choices and all the ways I responded to whatever happened to me—I held the power. Everything was up to me. I was responsible for everything I did, didn’t do, or how I responded to what was done to me.

Honestly, I had no idea how to respond. My senior year of college I’d taken a seminar titled Public Education: Situations and Strategies. I thought about emailing my professor, maybe suggest some new topics and help him get current. Maybe he’d invite me back as a guest lecturer. He’d probably expect some strategies along with the situations though, so I guess that wouldn’t work, but whatever.

The ability to remain constant, whole and playful, even while working technically, concentrating and upholding urgency, is essential to achieve a state of balance that will allow for this to happen. This has to come to life, and cannot stay just an idea or hope or intention or imitation, or ignored. The guarantee and proof that this balance and power is real is in its actualization. That is, that it manifests in functional reality. As in any intention, whether that be vague or specific, an ambition or desire, a goal or state of being, a question or hope, a curiosity or purpose, there exist natural and unnatural obstacles to its realization.

I took an ethics seminar with her as part of my postdoctorate work. There was a story we read about this beautiful, utopic land where everything was wonderful and enlightened and pleasant and good and just, except for one child who had to live in confusion and misery. One child, in exchange for paradise to everyone else.” “I know that one. Omelas.

Sometimes “inner work” requires an act of loyalty rather than an effort at transformation. Knowing what makes us happy (Venus), expressing this to others (Mercury), and standing firm in the face of opposition (Mars) may seem very petty against the more profound concerns of the outer world. Yet in their own way, these things are equally profound, for it is these small acts of self-affirmation that define the ego and ultimately the capacity to mediate the heavy planets with their destructive and transformative potentials.

The universities are an absolute wreck right now, because for decades, any graduate student in the humanities who had independent thinking was driven out. There was no way to survive without memorizing all these stupid bromides with this referential bowing to these over-inflated figures like Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and so on. Basically, it's been a tyranny in the humanities, because the professors who are now my age – who are the baby boomer professors, who made their careers on the back of Foucault and so on – are determined that that survive. So you have a kind of vampirism going on. So I've been getting letters for 25 years since Sexual Personae was released in 1990, from refugees from the graduate schools. It's been a terrible loss. One of my favorite letters was early on: a woman wrote to me, she was painting houses in St. Louis, she said that she had wanted a career as a literature professor and had gone into the graduate program in comparative literature at Berkeley. And finally, she was forced to drop out because, she said, every time she would express enthusiasm for a work they were studying in the seminar, everyone would look at her as if she had in some way created a terrible error of taste. I thought, 'Oh my God', see that's what's been going on – a pretentious style of superiority to the text. [When asked what can change this]: Rebellion! Rebellion by the grad students. This is what I'm trying to foment. We absolutely need someone to stand up and start criticizing authority figures. But no; this generation of young people have been trained throughout middle school and high school and college to be subservient to authority.

People spoke to foreigners with an averted gaze, and everybody seemed to know somebody who had just vanished. The rumors of what had happened to them were fantastic and bizarre though, as it turned out, they were only an understatement of the real thing. Before going to see General Videla […], I went to […] check in with Los Madres: the black-draped mothers who paraded, every week, with pictures of their missing loved ones in the Plaza Mayo. (‘Todo mi familia!’ as one elderly lady kept telling me imploringly, as she flourished their photographs. ‘Todo mi familia!’) From these and from other relatives and friends I got a line of questioning to put to the general. I would be told by him, they forewarned me, that people ‘disappeared’ all the time, either because of traffic accidents and family quarrels or, in the dire civil-war circumstances of Argentina, because of the wish to drop out of a gang and the need to avoid one’s former associates. But this was a cover story. Most of those who disappeared were openly taken away in the unmarked Ford Falcon cars of the Buenos Aires military police. I should inquire of the general what precisely had happened to Claudia Inez Grumberg, a paraplegic who was unable to move on her own but who had last been seen in the hands of his ever-vigilant armed forces [….] I possess a picture of the encounter that still makes me want to spew: there stands the killer and torturer and rape-profiteer, as if to illustrate some seminar on the banality of evil. Bony-thin and mediocre in appearance, with a scrubby moustache, he looks for all the world like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush. I am gripping his hand in a much too unctuous manner and smiling as if genuinely delighted at the introduction. Aching to expunge this humiliation, I waited while he went almost pedantically through the predicted script, waving away the rumored but doubtless regrettable dematerializations that were said to be afflicting his fellow Argentines. And then I asked him about Senorita Grumberg. He replied that if what I had said was true, then I should remember that ‘terrorism is not just killing with a bomb, but activating ideas. Maybe that’s why she’s detained.’ I expressed astonishment at this reply and, evidently thinking that I hadn’t understood him the first time, Videla enlarged on the theme. ‘We consider it a great crime to work against the Western and Christian style of life: it is not just the bomber but the ideologist who is the danger.’ Behind him, I could see one or two of his brighter staff officers looking at me with stark hostility as they realized that the general—El Presidente—had made a mistake by speaking so candidly. […] In response to a follow-up question, Videla crassly denied—‘rotondamente’: ‘roundly’ denied—holding Jacobo Timerman ‘as either a journalist or a Jew.’ While we were having this surreal exchange, here is what Timerman was being told by his taunting tormentors: Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space. […] We later discovered what happened to the majority of those who had been held and tortured in the secret prisons of the regime. According to a Navy captain named Adolfo Scilingo, who published a book of confessions, these broken victims were often destroyed as ‘evidence’ by being flown out way over the wastes of the South Atlantic and flung from airplanes into the freezing water below. Imagine the fun element when there’s the surprise bonus of a Jewish female prisoner in a wheelchair to be disposed of… we slide open the door and get ready to roll her and then it’s one, two, three… go!

To many persons around him, he appears too much the academic. There may be some things about him that recall his beginnings—his shabby clothes; his persistent poverty; or his dark skin (in those cases when it symbolizes his parents’ disadvantaged condition)—but they only make clear how far he has moved from his past. He has used education to remake himself. They expect—they want—a student less changed by his schooling. If the scholarship boy, from a past so distant from the classroom, could remain in some basic way unchanged, he would be able to prove that it is possible for anyone to become educated without basically changing from the person one was. The scholarship boy does not straddle, cannot reconcile, the two great opposing cultures of his life. His success is unromantic and plain. He sits in the classroom and offers those sitting beside him no calming reassurance about their own lives. He sits in the seminar room—a man with brown skin, the son of working-class Mexican immigrant parents.

Oh yes, you can make the most marvelous drawings and you are nowhere at all. Particularly artists. Anybody can make drawings, even little children, and it means precious little. You see, the drawing must be an expression of a fact, of a psychological experience, and you must know that it is such an expression, you must be conscious of it. Otherwise you might just as well be a fish in the water or a tree in the woods. For every plant makes marvelous mandalas. A composite flower is a mandala, it is an image of the sun, but the flower does not know it. The human eye is a mandala, but we are not conscious of it. So it requires long and painstaking work in analysis to get people to the point where they become conscious of the impersonal [non-ego] character of the [or their] problem.

That was the old Ellen Gulden, the girl who would walk over her mother in golf shoes, who scared students away from writing seminars, who started work on Monday after graduating from Harvard with honors on a Thursday, who loved the moments in the office when she would look out at the impenetrable black of the East River, starred with the reflected lights of Queens, with only the cleaning crew for company, and think of her various superiors out at dinner parties and restaurants and her various similars out at downtown clubs or cheap but authentic places in Chinatown and say to herself, 'I'm getting ahead.' That Ellen Gulden, the one her boss suspected of using the dying-mother ploy to get more money or a better job title, would have covered every inch of [this datebook] with the frantic scribble of unexamined ambition.

Countless self-management workshops, motivational retreats, and seminars on personality or mental training promise boundless self-optimization and heightened efficiency. They are steered by neoliberal techniques of domination, which aim to capitalize not just on working time but on the person themselves.

The language of worldview tends to imply, to paraphrase the Catholic writer Richard Rohr, that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. The risk in thinking 'worldviewishly' is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. And they will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. They can create a cultural niche in which 'worldview thinkers' are privileged while other kinds of culture makers are shunted aside. But culture is not changed simply by thinking.

Mastery of anything is, more than anything else, the transformation of work into play. Giving orders and answers, never making mistakes, and having around you others with the opinion that you are great has nothing at all to do with it. Read carefully: to yearn for, to be compelled by, is being called to play.

Watch movies. Read screenplays. Let them be your guide. […] Yes, McKee has been able to break down how the popular screenplay has worked. He has identified key qualities that many commercially successful screenplays share, he has codified a language that has been adopted by creative executives in both film and television. So there might be something of tangible value to be gained by interacting with his material, either in book form or at one of the seminars. But for someone who wants to be an artist, a creator, an architect of an original vision, the best book to read on screenwriting is no book on screenwriting. The best seminar is no seminar at all. To me, the writer wants to get as many outside voices OUT of his/her head as possible. Experts win by getting us to be dependent on their view of the world. They win when they get to frame the discussion, when they get to tell you there’s a right way and a wrong way to think about the game, whatever the game is. Because that makes you dependent on them. If they have the secret rules, then you need them if you want to get ahead. The truth is, you don’t. If you love and want to make movies about issues of social import, get your hands on Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for Network. Read it. Then watch the movie. Then read it again. If you love and want to make big blockbusters that also have great artistic merit, do the same thing with Lawrence Kasdan’s Raiders Of The Lost Ark screenplay and the movie made from it. Think about how the screenplays made you feel. And how the movies built from these screenplays did or didn’t hit you the same way. […] This sounds basic, right? That’s because it is basic. And it’s true. All the information you need is the movies and screenplays you love. And in the books you’ve read and the relationships you’ve had and your ability to use those things.

When I was in the advertising business, I used to offer free seminars to advertisers about how to create better ads (the material in this chapter being the content). That was not so long ago, but since then the Internet has ballooned to major significance. If I were selling advertising today, I’d have that seminar online. Think of how this cuts down on your travel expenses. I used to fly all over creation to deliver those seminars. And appointments were harder to get. The education-based marketing concept that you learned in Chapter Four works hand in glove with the ability to do things over the Internet. Here’s the pitch I’d do today: “How would you like to learn to make your advertising literally 10 times more effective? And you can do it right from the comfort of your favorite office chair.” It’s hard to resist such an offer. There are many examples I could give you to flesh out the model of turning your Web site into a community. The examples below are simple and some are even silly, but each shows how far this concept can go and how it helps you capture more leads and build a better brand.

Whereas the neurosis and complaints that accompany it are never followed by the delicious feeling of good work well done, of a duty fearlessly performed, the suffering that comes from useful work, and from victory over real difficulties, brings with it those moments of peace and satisfaction which give the human being the priceless feeling that he has really lived his life.

When people in churches today discuss Paul and his letters, they often think only of the man of ideas who dealt with lofty and difficult concepts, implying a world of libraries, seminar rooms, or at least the minister’s study for quiet sermon preparation. We easily forget that the author of these letters spent most of his waking hours with his sleeves rolled up, doing hard physical work in a hot climate, and that perhaps two-thirds of the conversations he had with people about Jesus and the gospel were conducted not in a place of worship or study, not even in a private home, but in a small, cramped workshop. Saul had his feet on the ground, and his hands were hardened with labor. But his head still buzzed with scripture and the news about Jesus.

Now everybody separated that and said: there is either rushing virtuously to live a collective life or else there is this selfish introspection and concern with your own development. But the two are completely interdependent, they are completely interactive; and the more you have this response to life, the more you have a source to respond with, then of course the more enrichment you pass around you. Why we made a dichotomy between those two — saying that the two wouldn’t enrich each other — I don’t know. Because whatever the individual does for himself and by himself is something that ultimately flows back again like a river into the collective unconscious. So if we are disappointed today in the external changes it’s because not enough of us have worked at raising a better quality of human being.

It is standard for academics to subject their work to rigorous critique by peers: papers get torn to shreds in seminars and referee reports, and experiments pored over to look for potentially confounding variables. And for good reason: history is littered with bad theories and empty theoretical concepts, from inner demons to bodily humours to phlogiston. There’s no reason to think there isn’t room for similar error here – in fact, there is extra reason to think there is, inasmuch as some (though not all) trans people so clearly desperately want gender identity theory to work, which might be affecting their neutrality. Many trans people assume – wrongly, as I will eventually argue – that the existence and recognition of their political and legal rights depends upon gender identity theory’s correctness.

Liberals have elections to contest and centrist working-class voters to win back. That is job number one. And nothing will turn voters off more surely than being hectored in this way. So a couple of reminders to the identity conscious: Elections are not prayer meetings, and no one is interested in your personal testimony. They are not therapy sessions or occasions to obtain recognition. They are not seminars or “teaching moments.” They are not about exposing degenerates and running them out of town. If you want to save America’s soul, consider becoming a minister. If you want to force people to confess their sins and convert, don a white robe and head to the River Jordan. If you are determined to bring the Last Judgment down on the United States of America, become a god. But if you want to win the country back from the right, and bring about lasting change for the people you care about, it’s time to descend from the pulpit.*

At the Samarka Camp in 1946 a group of intellectuals had reached the very brink of death: They were worn down by hunger, cold, and work beyond their powers. And they were even deprived of sleep. They had nowhere to lie down. Dugout barracks had not yet been built. Did they go and steal? Or squeal? Or whimper about their ruined lives? No! Foreseeing the approach of death in days rather than weeks, here is how they spent their last sleepless leisure, sitting up against the wall: Timofeyev-Ressovsky gathered them into a “seminar,” and they hastened to share with one another what one of them knew and the others did not—they delivered their last lectures to each other. Father Savely—spoke of “unshameful death,” a priest academician—about patristics, one of the Uniate fathers—about something in the area of dogmatics and canonical writings, an electrical engineer—on the principles of the energetics of the future, and a Leningrad economist—on how the effort to create principles of Soviet economics had failed for lack of new ideas. Timofeyev-Ressovsky himself talked about the principles of microphysics. From one session to the next, participants were missing—they were already in the morgue.

Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest movement leader in American history. But, as Hillary Clinton once correctly pointed out, his efforts would have been futile without those of the machine politician Lyndon Johnson, a seasoned congressional deal maker willing to sign any pact with the devil to get the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed. And the work doesn’t stop once legislation is passed. One must keep winning elections to defend the gains that social movements have contributed to. If the steady advance of a radicalized Republican Party, over many years and in every branch and at every level of government, should teach liberals anything, it is the absolute priority of winning elections today. Given the Republicans’ rage for destruction, it is the only way to guarantee that newly won protections for African-Americans, other minorities, women, and gay Americans remain in place. Workshops and university seminars will not do it. Online mobilizing and flash mobs will not do it. Protesting, acting up, and acting out will not do it. The age of movement politics is over, at least for now. We need no more marchers. We need more mayors. And governors, and state legislators, and members of Congress . .

1. _______ I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities.   2. _______ I often prefer to express myself in writing.   3. _______ I enjoy solitude.   4. _______ I seem to care less than my peers about wealth, fame, and status.   5. _______ I dislike small talk, but I enjoy talking in depth about topics that matter to me.   6. _______ People tell me that I’m a good listener.   7. _______ I’m not a big risk-taker.   8. _______ I enjoy work that allows me to “dive in” with few interruptions.   9. _______ I like to celebrate birthdays on a small scale, with only one or two close friends or family members. 10. _______ People describe me as “soft-spoken” or “mellow.” 11. _______ I prefer not to show or discuss my work with others until it’s finished. 12. _______ I dislike conflict. 13. _______ I do my best work on my own. 14. _______ I tend to think before I speak. 15. _______ I feel drained after being out and about, even if I’ve enjoyed myself. 16. _______ I often let calls go through to voice mail. 17. _______ If I had to choose, I’d prefer a weekend with absolutely nothing to do to one with too many things scheduled. 18. _______ I don’t enjoy multitasking. 19. _______ I can concentrate easily. 20. _______ In classroom situations, I prefer lectures to seminars.

The essential dynamic underlying almost every elite and esoteric physical art is work with the breath, so there’s information available. I would only add that it’s unfortunate that so much work is done with it, and not much play. Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you. I’ve mentioned before that one good measure of someone’s depth of spirituality is how long it takes before they become offended. Imagine laughing hysterically at the criticisms, complaints and impositions you receive. At the least, you’d be breathing well.

One day, however, Maria Göppert—a future Nobelist—presented Born with a petition written on thick parchment and signed by her and most of the other members of the seminar: Unless the “child prodigy” was reined in, his fellow students would boycott the class. Still unwilling to confront Oppenheimer, Born decided to leave the document on his desk in a place where Robert could not help but see it when he next came to discuss his thesis. “To make this more certain,” Born later wrote, “I arranged to be called out of the room for a few minutes. This plot worked. When I returned I found him rather pale and not so voluble as usual.” Thereafter his interruptions ceased altogether.

If I were to make a list of focus for well-being, I would begin with lifestyle (the totality of one’s circumstance and how that is engaged, including job and relationships, and proximity to nature), attending to the physical functions correctly (posture, breathing, exercise, food, rest, etc.), consistent expression of your natural range of qualities, working and playing well and hard, and designing things so that you are doing what compels you. Obviously, you can’t give this list out as a prescription for physical problems and diseases, but then again, it is probably the correct prescription. If one were to follow it, any specific problem, even extreme, would almost certainly resolve itself.

Bar associations and even courts themselves regularly sponsor public seminars counseling mothers on how to fabricate abuse accusations. “With child abuse and spouse abuse you don’t have to prove anything,” the leader of one seminar quoted in the Chicago Tribune tells divorcing women. “You just have to accuse.”227 “The number of women attending the seminars who smugly—indeed boastfully—announced that they had already sworn out false or grossly exaggerated domestic violence complaints against their hapless husbands, and that the device worked!” writes an astonished Thomas Kiernan in the New Jersey Law Journal. “To add amazement to my astonishment, the lawyer-lecturers invariably congratulated the self-confessed miscreants.

THE SIX-HOUR SEMINAR that Jack was forced to attend at the beginning of each new semester had been called Orientation until a few years ago, when the university changed the seminar’s name to Onboarding. The name change coincided with a revamp of the orientation curriculum, which had bloated into this all-day human resources horror during which members of the HR team attempted, at unmerciful length, to “socialize the mission statement’s DNA,” is how they put it. They were referring to the many-planked mission statement the university had spent two years and countless consultant dollars developing in a campus-wide effort to express everything the university did in just one sentence. This was the brainchild of the university’s new CFO, who told the faculty in all seriousness that developing a mission statement that captured everything the university did in just one sentence was akin to their “moonshot,” and he asked for their help in this endeavor “not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” Why the university needed to corral its collective intelligence and creativity and energy for the task of expressing everything it did in just one sentence was a mystery to most faculty, but this did not stop their administrator bosses from enthusiastically assigning them to “mission statement working groups” so that they could have a voice (unpaid) in developing this one magical sentence, this one statement that would distill everything everyone did into a phrase ideally small enough for letterhead.

If you know why you have chosen to work on a particular problem, it is easy to present an absorbing seminar. Start out by telling your story, why the field you are working in is an important one, and what the main problems are. Give some historical material showing where the field is, the relative advantages of different methods, and so on. Then outline what you did, and describe your results. Conclude with a statement of how your results have advanced our understanding of nature, and perhaps give an inkling of the new directions that your work opens up. Do not assume that your audience comprises experts only. There may be a couple of them, but even experts like to hear things that they understand and particularly to have their colleagues hear (from someone else) why their field is an important one.

The curse has been the multiplication of those who haven’t yet made their individual selection of reading the work before coming to talk to me. They come out of some kind of contagion. And this is where I find the danger of mass thinking or mass media or whatever it is: that people come without having any relation to the thing they come to. I would have liked better meeting those who really wanted to have some kind of dialogue with that particular attitude in life. […] How do you keep a thing intimate in America where everything is always multiplied by people who have not really approached it sincerely, organically, individually, but just because they heard the name or because they saw you on T.V. This is a vicious kind of thing; it’s the non-relationship to things. They come and they’re not related to it.

GET BEYOND THE ONE-MAN SHOW Great organizations are never one-man operations. There are 22 million licensed small businesses in America that have no employees. Forbes suggests 75 percent of all businesses operate with one person. And the average income of those companies is a sad $44,000. That’s not a business—that’s torture. That is a prison where you are both the warden and the prisoner. What makes a person start a business and then be the only person who works there? Are they committed to staying small? Or maybe an entrepreneur decides that because the talent pool is so poor, they can’t hire anyone who can do it as well as them, and they give up. My guess is the latter: Most people have just given up and said, “It’s easier if I just do it myself.” I know, because that’s what I did—and it was suicidal. Because my business was totally dependent on me and only me, I was barely able to survive, much less grow, for the first ten years. Instead I contracted another company to promote my seminars. When I hired just one person to assist me out of my home office, I thought I was so smart: Keep it small. Keep expenses low. Run a tight ship. Bigger isn’t always better. These were the things I told myself to justify not growing my business. I did this for years and even bragged about how well I was doing on my own. Then I started a second company with a partner, a consulting business that ran parallel to my seminar business. This consulting business quickly grew bigger than my first business because my partner hired people to work for us. But even then I resisted bringing other people into the company because I had this idea that I didn’t want the headaches and costs that come with managing people. My margins were monster when I had no employees, but I could never grow my revenue line without killing myself, and I have since learned that is where all my attention and effort should have gone. But with the efforts of one person and one contracted marketing company, I could expand only so much. I know that a lot of speakers and business gurus run their companies as one-man shows. Which means that while they are giving advice to others about how to grow a business, they may have never grown one themselves! Their one-man show is simply a guy or gal going out, collecting a fee, selling time and a few books. And when they are out speaking, the business terminates all activity. I started studying other people and companies that had made it big and discovered they all had lots of employees. The reality is you cannot have a great business if it’s just you. You need to add other people. If you don’t believe me, try to name one truly great business that is successful, ongoing, viable, and growing that doesn’t have many people making it happen. Good luck. Businesses are made of people, not just machines, automations, and technology. You need people around you to implement programs, to add passion to the technology, to serve customers, and ultimately to get you where you want to go. Consider the behemoth online company Amazon: It has more than 220,000 employees. Apple has more than 100,000; Microsoft has around the same number. Ernst & Young has more than 200,000 people. Apple calls the employees working in its stores “Geniuses.” Don’t you want to hire employees deserving of that title too? Think of how powerful they could make your business.

Since I was about ten years younger than this crew of alcoholics, I just listened and filled their cups with cheap wine. After they’d had enough, I’d tell them of my escapades in Riverbank and in Panama where I’d worked with the Southern Baptist Convention and Jesus Christ to save the black souls of niggers, spics and Indians. I used to keep my eye on Harris when I told my stories. He had this nasty habit of pulling out a little notebook in the middle of a conversation and jotting down, as he said, “story ideas.” Later on, after I’d transferred to S.F. State and taken his writing course, he asked me if I wanted to read his first draft of Wake Up, Stupid! I kept it for a week and returned it to him at the next short story seminar. I only read the first paragraph. After that, I was no longer afraid of the intellectuals. I knew I could tell a better story.

The process of individuation has always been appreciated as the most valuable and important thing in life. It is the only thing that brings any lasting satisfaction to a man. Power, glory, wealth, mean nothing in comparison. These things are external and therefore futile. The really important things are within. It is more important to me that I am happy than that I have the external reason for happiness. Rich people should be happy, but often they are not, they are bored to death; therefore it is ever so much better for a man to work to produce an inner condition that gives him an inner happiness. Experience shows that there are certain psychological conditions in which man gets eternal results. They have something of the quality of eternity, of timelessness, they have the quality of reaching beyond man. They have a divine quality and yield all that satisfaction which man-made things do not.

Shin-shin-toitsu-do includes a wide variety of stretching exercises, breathing methods, forms of seated meditation and moving meditation, massage-like healing arts, techniques of auto-suggestion, and mind and body coordination drills, as well as principles for the unification of mind and body. These principles of mind and body coordination are regarded as universal laws that express the workings of nature on human life. As such, they can be applied directly to an endless number of everyday activities and tasks. It is not uncommon when studying Japanese yoga to encounter classes and seminars that deal with the direct application of these universal principles to office work, sales, management, sports, art, music, public speaking, and a host of other topics. How to use these precepts of mind and body integration to realize our full potential in any action is the goal. All drills, exercises, and practices of Shin-shin-toitsu-do are based on the same principles, thus linking intelligently a diversity of arts. But more than this, they serve as vehicles for grasping and cultivating the principles of mind and body coordination. And it is these principles that can be put to use directly, unobtrusively, and immediately in our daily lives.

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

Freud’s (1912/1957b) conclusion regarding men is as follows: “Anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister” (p. 186). It would seem, in other words, that a man must stop putting women on a pedestal, stop seeing them as Madonna-like figures, for in such cases he cannot desire them sexually. The second part of Freud’s sentence would seem to suggest that a man must come to terms with the fact that sexuality with a woman always involves some incestuous component; and incestuous impulses invariably appear in every analysis, assuming it is taken far enough, whether or not there has ever been direct sexual contact between siblings or between parent and child. If we bring together several of Freud’s formulations, then, a man’s love and desire can converge on one and the same woman, perhaps even durably, if and only if (1) his feeling of having been betrayed by his mother has been worked through; (2) he is no longer shocked that he might be inhabited by sexual desire for his mother and sister(s) and has seen through the incest taboo insofar as he realizes there is something incestuous involved in his relations with every woman; and (3) has come to grips with castration, that is, has allowed himself to be separated from his primary source of jouissance as a child without constantly striving to get it back. How any of these, much less all three, could be accomplished without a thoroughgoing analysis is hard to imagine!

According to Freud here, it is only by inhibiting or prohibiting sexual satisfaction that a more enduring investment can be made in someone. When real sexual satisfactions are thwarted, sexual desire for that person gives rise to a kind of symbolic idealization of him or her, leading to an affectionate current which is secondary, not primary. Idealization of the partner and affectionate love itself (we perhaps see the fullest expression of idealization in courtly love, as we shall see in Chapter 7) thus involve endless deferral and sublimation of the sexual drives. Affectionate love, which earlier in his work was either anaclitic or narcissistic (we shall turn to the latter of these in the second part of this book), here seems to involve idealization of the object, attention being paid to its spiritual merits as opposed to its sensual merits. Love is not considered here to precede sexual desire, but rather to result from the inhibition of sexual satisfaction. It leads to far greater excitement about the potential sexual partner than would have existed without such inhibition. In other words, restricted sexual access to the partner intensifies sexual excitation, ultimately leading to greater sexual satisfaction than would have been possible otherwise. Education or socialization channels the sexual drives so extensively into narrow pathways that they reach a feverish pitch and the sexual act becomes, in a certain sense, overvalued – this, Freud believes, is especially true of men. The idea here seems to be that the more a certain activity is inhibited or restricted, the more intense our desire for it becomes. As I have put it elsewhere, “prohibition eroticizes.

When I first started coming to the seminar, Gelfand had a young physicist, Vladimir Kazakov, present a series of talks about his work on so-called matrix models. Kazakov used methods of quantum physics in a novel way to obtain deep mathematical results that mathematicians could not obtain by more conventional methods. Gelfand had always been interested in quantum physics, and this topic had traditionally played a big role at his seminar. He was particularly impressed with Kazakov’s work and was actively promoting it among mathematicians. Like many of his foresights, this proved to be golden: a few years later this work became famous and fashionable, and it led to many important advances in both physics and math. In his lectures at the seminar, Kazakov was making an admirable effort to explain his ideas to mathematicians. Gelfand was more deferential to him than usual, allowing him to speak without interruptions longer than other speakers. While these lectures were going on, a new paper arrived, by John Harer and Don Zagier, in which they gave a beautiful solution to a very difficult combinatorial problem.6 Zagier has a reputation for solving seemingly intractable problems; he is also very quick. The word was that the solution of this problem took him six months, and he was very proud of that. At the next seminar, as Kazakov was continuing his presentation, Gelfand asked him to solve the Harer–Zagier problem using his work on the matrix models. Gelfand had sensed that Kazakov’s methods could be useful for solving this kind of problem, and he was right. Kazakov was unaware of the Harer–Zagier paper, and this was the first time he heard this question. Standing at the blackboard, he thought about it for a couple of minutes and immediately wrote down the Lagrangian of a quantum field theory that would lead to the answer using his methods. Everyone in the audience was stunned.

The traditional reluctance in this country to confront the real nature of racism is once again illustrated by the manner in which the majority of American whites interpreted what the Kerner Commission had to say about white racism. It seems that they have taken the Kerner Report as a call merely to examine their individual attitudes. The examination of individual attitudes is, of course, an indispensable requirement if the influence of racism is to be neutralized, but it is neither the only nor the basic requirement. The Kerner Report took great pains to make a distinction between racist attitudes and racist behavior. In doing so, it was trying to point out that the fundamental problem lies in the racist behavior of American institutions toward Negroes, and that the behavior of these institutions is influenced more by overt racist actions of people than by their private attitudes. If so, then the basic requirement is for white Americans, while not ignoring the necessity for a revision of their private beliefs, to concentrate on actions that can lead to the ultimate democratization of American institutions. By focusing upon private attitudes alone, white Americans may come to rely on token individual gestures as a way of absolving themselves personally of racism, while ignoring the work that needs to be done within public institutions to eradicate social and economic problems and redistribute wealth and opportunity. I mean by this that there are many whites sitting around in drawing rooms and board rooms discussing their consciences and even donating a few dollars to honor the memory of Dr. King. But they are not prepared to fight politically for the kind of liberal Congress the country needs to eradicate some of the evils of racism, or for the massive programs needed for the social and economic reconstruction of the black and white poor, or for a revision of the tax structure whereby the real burden will be lifted from the shoulders of those who don't have it and placed on the shoulders of those who can afford it. Our time offers enough evidence to show that racism and intolerance are not unique American phenomena. The relationship between the upper and lower classes in India is in some ways more brutal than the operation of racism in America. And in Nigeria black tribes have recently been killing other black tribes in behalf of social and political privilege. But it is the nature of the society which determines whether such conflicts will last, whether racism and intolerance will remain as proper issues to be socially and politically organized. If the society is a just society, if it is one which places a premium on social justice and human rights, then racism and intolerance cannot survive —will, at least, be reduced to a minimum. While working with the NAACP some years ago to integrate the University of Texas, I was assailed with a battery of arguments as to why Negroes should not be let in. They would be raping white girls as soon as they came in; they were dirty and did not wash; they were dumb and could not learn; they were uncouth and ate with their fingers. These attitudes were not destroyed because the NAACP psychoanalyzed white students or held seminars to teach them about black people. They were destroyed because Thurgood Marshall got the Supreme Court to rule against and destroy the institution of segregated education. At that point, the private views of white students became irrelevant. So while there can be no argument that progress depends both on the revision of private attitudes and a change in institutions, the onus must be placed on institutional change. If the institutions of this society are altered to work for black people, to respond to their needs and legitimate aspirations, then it will ultimately be a matter of supreme indifference to them whether white people like them, or what white people whisper about them in the privacy of their drawing rooms.

Fine art galleries are the excellent setups for exhibiting art, generally aesthetic art such as paints, sculptures, and digital photography. Basically, art galleries showcase a range of art designs featuring contemporary and traditional fine art, glass fine art, art prints, and animation fine art. Fine art galleries are dedicated to the advertising of arising artists. These galleries supply a system for them to present their jobs together with the works of across the country and internationally popular artists. The UNITED STATE has a wealth of famous art galleries. Lots of villages in the U.S. show off an art gallery. The High Museum of Fine art, Alleged Gallery, Henry Art Gallery, National Gallery of Art Gallery, Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Agora Gallery, Rosalux Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, The Alaska House Gallery, and Anchorage Gallery of History and Art are some of the renowned fine art galleries in the United States. Today, there are on the internet fine art galleries showing initial artwork. Several famous fine art galleries show regional pieces of art such as African fine art, American art, Indian fine art, and European art, in addition to individual fine art, modern-day and modern fine art, and digital photography. These galleries collect, show, and keep the masterpieces for the coming generations. Many famous art galleries try to entertain and educate their local, nationwide, and international audiences. Some renowned fine art galleries focus on specific areas such as pictures. A great variety of well-known fine art galleries are had and run by government. The majority of famous fine art galleries supply an opportunity for site visitors to buy outstanding art work. Additionally, they organize many art-related tasks such as songs shows and verse readings for kids and grownups. Art galleries organize seminars and workshops conducted by prominent artists. Committed to quality in both art and solution, most well-known fine art galleries provide you a rich, exceptional experience. If you wish to read additional information, please visit this site

If you’re still not sure where you fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum, you can assess yourself here. Answer each question “true” or “false,” choosing the answer that applies to you more often than not.* ______ I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities. ______ I often prefer to express myself in writing. ______ I enjoy solitude. ______ I seem to care less than my peers about wealth, fame, and status. ______ I dislike small talk, but I enjoy talking in depth about topics that matter to me. ______ People tell me that I’m a good listener. ______ I’m not a big risk-taker. ______ I enjoy work that allows me to “dive in” with few interruptions. ______ I like to celebrate birthdays on a small scale, with only one or two close friends or family members. ______ People describe me as “soft-spoken” or “mellow.” ______ I prefer not to show or discuss my work with others until it’s finished. ______ I dislike conflict. ______ I do my best work on my own. ______ I tend to think before I speak. ______ I feel drained after being out and about, even if I’ve enjoyed myself. ______ I often let calls go through to voice mail. ______ If I had to choose, I’d prefer a weekend with absolutely nothing to do to one with too many things scheduled. ______ I don’t enjoy multitasking. ______ I can concentrate easily. ______ In classroom situations, I prefer lectures to seminars. The more often you answered “true,” the more introverted you probably are. If you found yourself with a roughly equal number of “true” and “false” answers, then you may be an ambivert—yes, there really is such a word. But even if you answered every single question as an introvert or extrovert, that doesn’t mean that your behavior is predictable across all circumstances. We can’t say that every introvert is a bookworm or every extrovert wears lampshades at parties any more than we can say that every woman is a natural consensus-builder and every man loves contact sports. As Jung felicitously put it, “There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.” This is partly because we are all gloriously complex individuals, but also because there are so many different kinds of introverts and extroverts. Introversion and extroversion interact with our other personality traits and personal histories, producing wildly different kinds of people. So

In this way we give our lack, we give what we do not have, Aristophanes’ claim that such a thing is impossible notwithstanding. Men in Western culture generally seem to have a harder time than women do admitting to lack, a harder time verbally admitting that they are missing something, incomplete in some respect, limited in some way – in a word, castrated. (The reader will, I hope, allow me to momentarily associate men with obsession here, and women with hysteria, in a way that vastly overgeneralizes things, in order to highlight something schematically at first.) I do not mean simply admitting that they do not actually know how to drive somewhere in particular or that they do not know some specific fact about something that has come up in a conversation – I mean a lack that is more far-reaching than that! To love is to admit to lack (Soler, 2003, p. 243), and Lacan even goes so far at one point – and here I am jumping ahead some 15 years in his work – to suggest that when a man loves, it is insofar as he is a woman (Lacan, 1973–4, class given on February 12, 1974). Insofar as he is a man, he can admit to desiring the so-called partial objects he sees in his partner, but he generally feels that perfectly good partial objects of much the same kind can be found in many different partners. Insofar as he is a man, he contents himself with the enjoyment he derives from the partial objects he finds in a whole series of interchangeable partners, and avoids like the plague showing that he lacks.But unlike desire, “Love demands love,” as Lacan (1998a, p. 4) puts it in Seminar XX; love insistently requests love in return. When one is fascinated by or lusts after a sexual partner, one’s desire does not necessarily wither or disappear if one does not feel desired in return. Even if “desire is the Other’s desire” (a claim often repeated by Lacan; see, for example, Lacan, 2015, p. 178), in the sense that we wish to be desired in return by the object of our desire, desire can do just fine without being requited. But “to love is to want to be loved” (Lacan, 2006a, p. 853): to love – at least in our times – is to implicitly ask the beloved for love that can make good or somehow compensate one for one’s own lack, the hollow or emptiness one feels inside. In this sense, all love seems to constitute a request for love in return. (In Alcibiades’ case, this takes the form of a pressing demand for Socrates to prove that he returns Alcibiades’ passion for Socrates.) Since to love is to show and declare one’s lack, love is feminine, as Colette Soler (2003, p. 97) says, following Lacan’s statements to their logical conclusion.

It is the purpose of both God and the devil to provide you with the answers to these key questions.  If Satan is able to establish his images of identity and destiny in your life, he then has set up a system of governing your life that more or less runs itself and requires very little maintenance or service on his part. It is an effective scheme of destruction in your life. I believe that it has always been God’s intention to impart, especially at specific junctures in life, His message of identity and destiny.  He has appointed special agents on this earth to ensure that His message of identity and destiny is revealed.  These agents are called PARENTS.  Their primary job is to make sure that children receive God’s message of identity and destiny throughout their growing-up years. Satan’s purpose is to access these very agents of God, the parents, and to impart his message of identity and destiny.  Many times parents are unwittingly used to impart the devil’s message rather than God’s. SATAN’S MESSAGE VS. GOD’S MESSAGE What type of message does the devil want to reveal regarding identity and destiny?  His message is something along these lines.  IDENTITY: “You are worthless.  You aren’t even supposed to be here.  You are a mistake.  Something is drastically wrong with you.  You are a ‘nobody.’” DESTINY: “You have no purpose.  You are a total failure.  You’ll never be a success.  You are inadequate.  You are not equipped to accomplish the job.  Nothing ever works out for you, etc..” I once heard a woman say, “It’s as if someone dropped me off on the planet forty some years ago, and I’ve been trying to make my way the best I could ever since.  But deep inside, I don’t feel as though I belong here, and I’ve been waiting for that someone to come back and pick me up.”  God never intended for anyone to feel that he doesn’t belong.  That is Satan’s message. God's message of identity and destiny is something like this:  IDENTITY:  “To Me you are very valuable and are worth the life of Jesus Christ.  You are a `somebody.’  You do belong here.  Before the foundation of the earth, I planned for you.  You were no mistake.” DESTINY:  “You are destined to a great purpose on this earth.  I placed you here for a purpose.  You are a success as a person and are completely adequate and suited to carry out My purpose.  Set your vision high, and allow Me to complete great accomplishments in your life.” JOE’S STORY Joe was a well dressed, successful business man in his late thirties when I first met him.  He had come to a weekend “FROM CURSE TO BLESSING” seminar.  As we moved into the small-group ministry time, Joe began to share, somewhat sheepishly, about the tremendous problem that anger had caused him in his life.  “Anger causes me to embarrass myself, and

In order to grasp how exploitation is overcome by sublimation, it is not enough to stay with this standard definition of sublimation as the elevation of an ordinary object to the dignity of a Thing. As Lacan aptly demonstrated apropos courtly love, an ordinary object (woman) is there elevated to the dignity of the Thing, she becomes an “inhuman partner,” dangerous to get too close to, always out of reach, mixing horror and respect. The paradox of desire is here brought to an extreme, turning the experience of love into an endlessly postponed tragedy. In true love, however, comedy enters: while the beloved remains a Thing, it is simultaneously “desublimated,” accepted in all her ridiculous bodily imperfections. A true miracle is thus achieved: I can hold the Thing-jouissance in my hands, making fun of it and playing games with it, enjoying it without restraint – true love doesn’t idealize – or, as Lacan put it in his seminar on anxiety: “Only love-sublimation makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire.” This enigmatic proposition was perspicuously interpreted by Alenka Zupančič who demonstrated how, in the comedy of love, sublimation paradoxically comprises its opposite, desublimation – you remain the Thing, but simultaneously I can use you for my enjoyment: “to love the other and to desire my own jouissance. To ‘desire one’s own jouissance’ is probably what is the hardest to obtain and to make work, since the enjoyment has trouble appearing as an object.” One should not shirk from a quite concrete and graphic description of what this amounts to: I love you, and I show this by fucking you just for pleasure, mercilessly objectivizing you – this is how I am no longer exploited by serving the Other’s enjoyment. When I worry all the time whether you also enjoy it, it is not love – “I love you” means: I want to be used as an object for your enjoyment. One should reject here all the Catholic nonsense of preferring the missionary position in sex because lovers can whisper tender words and communicate spiritually, and even Kant was too short here when he reduced the sexual act to reducing my partner to an instrument of my pleasure: self-objectivization is the proof of love, you find being used degrading only if there is no love. This enjoyment of mine should not be constrained even by the tendency to enable my partner to reach orgasm simultaneously with me – Brecht was right when, in his poem “Orges Wunschliste,” he includes in the wish-list of his preferences non-simultaneous orgasms: “Von den Mädchen, die neuen. / Von den Weibern, die ungetreuen. / Von den Orgasmen, die ungleichzeitigen. / Von den Feindschaften, die beiderseitigen.” “Of the girls, the new. / Of the women, the unfaithful. / Of orgasms, the non-simultaneous. / Of the animosities, the mutual.

The Transcendent Function,” was written in 1916, while Jung was in the middle of his “deep reaching interior metamorphosis.” (He was serving a stint of military duty, stationed near the Gotthard Pass at the time.) Yet it wasn’t published until 1957, and only then when Jung was asked to contribute to a student publication, not something many of his readers would see. For forty years it remained in Jung’s files, off-limits to the general public. Jung discussed the ideas in seminars and lectures, but usually only with his closest students, rather like an initiate sharing the most profound mysteries with only his most devoted pupils. Although subsequent Jungian analysts have recognized their importance, neither idea plays a prominent role in any of Jung’s major works. For example, in Mysterium Coniunctionis , Jung’s alchemical magnum opus, active imagination warrants only a brief mention, again not by name, and the transcendent function is mentioned only twice. As is often the case with Jung’s ideas, we need to go to his followers for anything like a clear definition.19 Some suggest Jung kept quiet about active imagination because he considered it possibly dangerous. In a note, he cautioned that through it “subliminal contents . . . may overpower the conscious mind and take possession of the personality.”20 That Jung came upon it precisely when his own subliminal contents were mutinying against his ego makes this a reasonable concern. Yet there may have been other reasons. Weak egos might fragment practicing active imagination, but what would his peers think of a psychologist who talked to people in his head? As with his public and private opinions about spirits and the occult, Jung seems to have kept quiet about things that could threaten his persona as a scientist.

The sun rose at 7 A.M. each day, and that’s when the SpaceX team got to work. A series of meetings would take place with people listing what needed to get done, and debating solutions to lingering problems. As the large structures arrived, the workers placed the body of the rocket horizontally in a makeshift hangar and spent hours melding together all of its parts. “There was always something to do,” Hollman said. “If the engine wasn’t a problem, then there was an avionics problem or a software problem.” By 7 P.M., the engineers wound down their work. “One or two people would decide it was their night to cook, and they would make steak and potatoes and pasta,” Hollman said. “We had a bunch of movies and a DVD player, and some of us did a lot of fishing off the docks.” For many of the engineers, this was both a torturous and magical experience. “At Boeing you could be comfortable, but that wasn’t going to happen at SpaceX,” said Walter Sims, a SpaceX tech expert who found time to get certified to dive while on Kwaj. “Every person on that island was a fucking star, and they were always holding seminars on radios or the engine. It was such an invigorating place.

Karl enrolled in one of our Esalen month-long seminars after he had done some inner work in a renegade primal therapy group in Canada. It was one of the groups of people who had left the institute of primal therapy

Playwright Noel Coward once said, “Work is more fun than fun.” I included that quote in a seminar guidebook for a sales group a year ago and one of the participants in the back of the room raised his hand and said, “Yeah, Steve, who is this Noel Coward guy? I figure with a quote like that he’s either a porn star or a professional golfer.” That line got a great laugh at my expense, but it also revealed a truth (which almost all humor does). People believe that the fun jobs are always somewhere else. “If only I could get a job like that!” “If only I had been a pro golfer!” But the truth is that fulfilling and fun work can be found in anything. The more we consciously introduce game-playing elements (personal bests listed, goals, time limits, competition with self or others, record-keeping, and so on), the more fun the activity becomes.

Popper wrote that it ought to be seen as a mark of respect that he had devoted most of his first book to criticizing the Vienna Circle. “The Vienna Circle,” he added, by way of obituary, “was an admirable institution. Indeed, it was a unique seminar of philosophers working in close cooperation with first-rate mathematicians and scientists. Its dissolution was a most serious loss.” It was a body blow not only to philosophy but also, it might be added, to the town of Vienna.

Understanding the scale usually increases your tolerance of others along with your ability to help them, should help be desired. My own experiences in teaching are a good example. I have conducted more than a thousand seminars and workshops with groups residing on every pOint of the scale. The ability to work with very different types of people is linked with the ability to shift ones own energy. I would not introduce level 600 teachings to a level 400 group or level 400 teachings to a level 50 group. In shifting my state different demeanour, clothing, vocabulary is used.

A Constant Search for Knowledge The consistent, disciplined, purposeful, constant search for knowledge: it’s where the life-changing ideas are. Pursue knowledge with high expectations. Spend the money, time, and effort. They are all investments, but the payoff is so great it’s hard to compare the cost to the reward. First is the money. I have a great suggestion. Set up an educational fund for the programs, the books, the lectures, the seminars, and the videos you need for a constant flow of ideas and inspiration. Take a portion of your income each month and set it aside to invest in the search for knowledge. Remember, the best money spent is the money spent to cultivate the genius of your own mind and spirit. Make sure you don’t spend more for frivolous comforts and conveniences than you do for education. The money is a small price. The promise is unlimited potential. The next investment is time, which is an extremely valuable expenditure. It’s one thing to ask someone for their money, but to ask them for their time is a much more significant request. Knowledge takes time, precious time. The time you spend is irreplaceable. You can get more money, but you can’t get more time. However, life has a unique way of rewarding high investment with high return. The major investment of time you’re making now could be that small fine-tuning you need for major accomplishment. Last is the investment of effort. There is a great deal of difference between casual learning and serious learning. Learning that opens up the whole mental and spiritual process is truly an investment in effort. And this effort is the investment that opens the floodgates of ideas that can work their magic for you in the marketplace. So I don’t hesitate to ask you to spend—in a deliberate and consistent fashion—the money, time, and effort required to reach your goals. These are the investments that turn on the lights, sharpen the focus, and start turning your wishes of wealth and happiness into reality.

The best way I have found to meet women is at weddings, art shows, seminars, private parties, social events, malls, grocery stores, trade shows or even at work.

Here’s the truth: Knowledge is not power. It only has the potential to be power. You can read this book and learn everything in it, but if you don’t take it and apply the knowledge, it will be useless. All the books, podcasts, seminars, online programs, and inspiring social media posts in the world won’t work until you put your knowledge into action.

There he and Danny sat down to write together for the first time. Their offices were tiny, so they worked in a small seminar room. Amos didn’t know how to type, and Danny didn’t particularly want to, so they sat with notepads. They went over each sentence time and again and wrote, at most, a paragraph or two each day. “I had this sense of realization: Ah, this is not going to be the usual thing, this is going to be something else,” said Danny. “Because it was funny.

Warren Buffett’s appendix to the fourth revised edition of The Intelligent Investor describes a contest in which each of the 225 million Americans starts with $1 and flips a coin once a day. The people who get it right on day one collect a dollar from those who were wrong and go on to flip again on day two, and so forth. Ten days later, 220,000 people have called it right ten times in a row and won $1,000. “They may try to be modest, but at cocktail parties they will occasionally admit to attractive members of the opposite sex what their technique is, and what marvelous insights they bring to the field of flipping.” After another ten days, we’re down to 215 survivors who’ve been right 20 times in a row and have each won $1 million. They write books titled like How I Turned a Dollar into a Million in Twenty Days Working Thirty Seconds a Morning and sell tickets to seminars. Sound familiar?

In the eighties, the design community witnessed the great rise of “professionalism” (now a euphemism for the production of noninnovative but stylishly acceptable work—usually in corporate communications—coupled with very good fees). Along with “professionalism” came the “business consultant to the designers,” who proclaimed, “Design is a business.” This became the mantra of the eighties. The AIGA, along with other organizations and publications, produced seminars, conferences, and special magazine issues devoted to the business of design. These were followed by a plethora of design self-help books, which told you how to set up your own business, how to promote, how to speak correct business jargon, how to dress, how to buy insurance, and so on. There was nothing inherently wrong with this except for the subsequent confusion it caused. “Professional” work did look more professional, and corporate communications in general were visually improved. The level of design mediocrity rose. Also, practicing designers as a rule had previously been rather sloppy about running their businesses. They were easily taken advantage of, didn’t know how to construct proposals, and were generally more interested in designing than in minding the store, networking, or planning for the future. The business seminars did no harm, but the political and economic climate of the eighties in general, coupled with the pervasiveness of the “design is a business” hype, perverted the design community’s overall goal. The goal became money.

What to do to be an Expert in Freelancing? What is Freelancing? We already know that, Now let's see What to do to be an Expert in Freelancing - Things to do for Self Development: Get positive feedback from clients by practicing what you are good at, and finding work that matches your skills. This is the key to your improvement and the first step to success. When you start to succeed, choose the opportunities that work best for you. Use the time appropriately and fully. Some of the processes of Self-Presentation after Self-Development are discussed below - Process of Introducing Yourself: 1. Enhance your profile and build your portfolio with accurate information about yourself. 2. Create your own signature that will identify you in your work. 3. Always use your own photo and signature for original work. 4. Run your own campaign. For example: commenting on others' posts, making full use of social sites, keeping in touch with others, doing service work, teaching others, participating in various seminars, and distributing leaflets or posters. Showing Professionalism: How to express or calculate that you are a professional? There are many ways, by which you can easily express that you are a professional entrepreneur or employee. The ways are: 1. Professionals never work for free, so before starting a job, you must be sure about the remuneration. 2. Professionals don't work on balance, if you want to show professionalism you must pay in cash or promise to pay half in advance and the rest at the end of the job. 3. A professional never lacks any research or communication for his work. Win the Client's Heart: There are thousands of freelancers in front of a client for a job, but only one gets the job. The person who got the job got it because he presented himself in the client's mind. Mistakes to Avoid: Only humans are fallible. It is natural for people to make mistakes, but if people can't learn from those mistakes then it is better not to make such mistakes. The Mistakes are: 1. Failure to identify oneself. 2. Show Engagement. 3. Lack of communication with the client etc. Being Punctual: It is wise to do the work on time. Never leave work. Because if you leave work, the amount of work will increase and not decrease. Therefore, it is better to do the work of time in time and move towards the formation of life by being respectful of time. So, if the above tasks are done or followed correctly, achieving success as a freelancer is just a saying. To make yourself a successful and efficient freelancer, the importance and importance of the above topics is immense.

in my view, Gadamer’s theory with his two horizons, for all its very real fecundity, will not suffice for Christian biblical interpretation. What we need is a philosophical hermeneutics shaped by three horizons, not only that of the reader and the text but that of God and his revelation of himself in Christ. In my view, the Kuyperian tradition is best poised to produce such work, which with theological interpretation would be an enormous gift to biblical scholars today.

In the car that morning, I described the ideal selling system. Here’s how it would work: Prospects would deliver the presentations themselves. They would raise the stalls and objections, and they would resolve them. They would qualify themselves financially. They would close the sale. And finally, they would thank me for calling on them!

willing to close large distances in response to calls. Does that make them stupid? No! Due to the vastness of the landscape these birds often call home, it’s not uncommon for a walk-about tom to respond and come to a live-hen call that barely tickles his eardrums. When calling Merriam’s birds, I prefer to run calls that carry great distances and cut the all-to-often howling western wind. My favorite reach-out-and-touch-their-ears Merriam’s call is a trusty box call. Box calls get a bad rap. When I give seminars, I hear a lot of negative comments about them. They’re too easy to use. Every hunter on the planet hammers away on them. They don’t work on public land. You can’t get the exact pitch you want. I could go on forever with the complaints I’ve heard from hunters about box calls. Here’s my opinion on the matter. They work great to cut the western winds. They also work great when trying to raise the interest of a distant tom. On multiple occasions, I’ve been able to sit behind a quality spotting scope and watch a tom 500 yards away take notice of my box call. Once you master them, box calls can produce pitch-perfect tones. I especially feel this is the case when using a true chalk-on-wood system. Another Merriam’s eardrum ringer is an aluminum pot-and-peg call. I’ve found aluminum pot calls carry great distances. I’m also a fan of glass. What I love about pot-and-peg calls is that I can easily adjust the volume and pitch simply by swapping strikers. And that’s not all. Once you really know what you’re doing, these calls produce, in my opinion, simply the best turkey tones. Like many turkey fanatics, my go-to call is a diaphragm. Through this wonderful

I learned that female professors and departmental secretaries are the natural enemies of the academic world, as I was privileged to overhear discussions of my sexual orientation and probable childhood traumas from ten to ten-thirty each morning through the paper-thin walls of the break room located adjacent to my office. By these means I learned that although I was in desperate need of a girdle, I was better off than one of the other female professors, who would never lose all that baby weight by working all of the time. As hard as I worked, I just couldn’t get ahead. Showers became a biweekly ritual. My breakfast and lunch were reduced to a couple of cans of Ensure from the cases that I kept under my desk, and in desperation, I once threw one of Reba’s Milk-Bones in my purse so that I could gum it during a seminar, trying to keep peoples’ attention off of what I knew would be my growling stomach. The acne that I had never wrestled with as a teenager decided to make up for lost time with a magnificent debut, and I passed the workday biting my nails with ferocity. My brief forays into romance had convinced me that I would be relegated to love’s bargain bin; none of the single guys that I met could understand why I worked all of the time, and nobody wanted to listen to me talk about plants for hours, anyway. Everything about my life looked pretty well messed up compared with how adulthood had always been advertised to me.

go to the bank Monday and Thursday at noon; and you will attend your professional seminar alternate Tuesdays at 6 P.M. Before you know it, these regular appointments take root in your subconscious. Thursday afternoon becomes dry cleaners’ time, and after a while you drive to the cleaners almost without thinking about it. Wednesdays and Fridays become work-out time, and not only does the time become automatically reserved for you, but also you do not have to worry about when you will find the time to work out. You have decided in advance, not impulsively, what you want to make enough of a priority to pre-plan, and where to put each such activity or obligation. You know that you will do these things, and you know when you will do them. This means you do not need to wonder every day when you will get to the dry cleaners, or if you will get to the bank, or how you will find time to work out, or whether you can ever make it to that professional seminar again.

1 = Very important. Do this at once. 2 = Worth doing but takes more time. Start planning it. 3 = Yes and no. Depends on how it’s done. 4 = Not very important. May even be a waste of effort. 5 = No! Don’t do this. Fill in those numbers before you read further, and take your time. This is not a simple situation, and solving it is a complicated undertaking. Possible Actions to Take ____ Explain the changes again in a carefully written memo. ____ Figure out exactly how individuals’ behavior and attitudes will have to change to make teams work. ____ Analyze who stands to lose something under the new system. ____ Redo the compensation system to reward compliance with the changes. ____ “Sell” the problem that is the reason for the change. ____ Bring in a motivational speaker to give employees a powerful talk about teamwork. ____ Design temporary systems to contain the confusion during the cutover from the old way to the new. ____ Use the interim between the old system and the new to improve the way in which services are delivered by the unit—and, where appropriate, create new services. ____ Change the spatial arrangements so that the cubicles are separated only by glass or low partitions. ____ Put team members in contact with disgruntled clients, either by phone or in person. Let them see the problem firsthand. ____ Appoint a “change manager” to be responsible for seeing that the changes go smoothly. ____ Give everyone a badge with a new “teamwork” logo on it. ____ Break the change into smaller stages. Combine the firsts and seconds, then add the thirds later. Change the managers into coordinators last. ____ Talk to individuals. Ask what kinds of problems they have with “teaming.” ____ Change the spatial arrangements from individual cubicles to group spaces. ____ Pull the best people in the unit together as a model team to show everyone else how to do it. ____ Give everyone a training seminar on how to work as a team. ____ Reorganize the general manager’s staff as a team and reconceive the GM’s job as that of a coordinator. ____ Send team representatives to visit other organizations where service teams operate successfully. ____ Turn the whole thing over to the individual contributors as a group and ask them to come up with a plan to change over to teams. ____ Scrap the plan and find one that is less disruptive. If that one doesn’t work, try another. Even if it takes a dozen plans, don’t give up. ____ Tell them to stop dragging their feet or they’ll face disciplinary action. ____ Give bonuses to the first team to process 100 client calls in the new way. ____ Give everyone a copy of the new organization chart. ____ Start holding regular team meetings. ____ Change the annual individual targets to team targets, and adjust bonuses to reward team performance. ____ Talk about transition and what it does to people. Give coordinators a seminar on how to manage people in transition. There are no correct answers in this list, but over time I’ve

You don’t need another book, seminar or coaching program. Though these can dramatically accelerate your process, you really do have everything you need right now inside yourself. Your work, at the end of the day, is simply realizing this. Your need to be different, or to have something else to feel better, is rooted in lies; you can feel better right now, without changing a thing. What’s keeping you from being happy right here, right now, in middle of your process? When you realize there is nothing to fix, you will know that the answer is “Nothing”.

The transitory and random quality of emotions (“Well, that’s just the way I feel about it”) is deeply connected to, and largely the cause of, random engagement of one’s values and priorities. This very randomness and inconsistency is actually the cause of deeper suffering, primarily through the accumulation of addictions and the indulgence in reactions that are disproportionately small in comparison to what is really being sacrificed for them. Curiously—and a major theme in my own work over decades—the casual association of emotions to love is part of the insanity in all this.

I look at the idea of rest as rotating one’s qualitative focus, not just doing less or changing activity. The role of rest is recovery. If you keep pushing the same quality button (fast or slow, concentrated or dispersed, hard-working or lazy…) for the same component all the time, of course it’s going to become depleted, just like if you keep working a single muscle in the same fashion or don’t use it at all.

The primary reason that I’m not a representative of specific groups or schools of thought is that that choice gives me the freedom to look at these groups and thoughts from the inside and the outside. I’m trying to be honest in that role—what really works here and what does not? That is, I have nothing to sell or win by any given position. I’m promoting a similar process for any person I interact with in my work, including toward me. Investment in a given idea or group tends to immediately shut down options for perception, and then choice. Prejudice, bigotry and arrogance breed from that. One is forced to think a certain way to stay within the group or thought, and then to defend against apparent opposition. This constructs and feeds the kinds of adamant separation and conflict we see so many manifestations of on every level. In many cases, it’s also the cause of deep internal conflict in most individuals, yet it isn’t really addressed.

Each religion has provided a tremendous service in defining elements of conscience. They have made it possible for us to live together in a society, to work toward common goals, and to learn how to accept or tolerate relative opposition to our own opinions. I also think that this has been done much as a parent needs to provide a similar service for an adolescent. Internal and external conflict requires discipline to organize and structure some form of minimizing the chaos imposed on others.

Historically, techniques to attain altered states of consciousness, usually called meditation, or sometimes prayer, actually involve various forms of concentration, the first level of this kind of internal work. The linear scale of progression is Concentration, then Meditation, and finally Contemplation. Virtually all categories of meditation are, in actuality, forms of concentration. What makes them so are the innate “goals” or ambitions attached to them: to achieve a state or to acquire something, like relaxation, insight or “advancement.” This then constructs a dichotomy, or dualism, between the pursuer and the thing pursued. That is, you are conscious of or believe in something “better,” you are separate from it, and there is effort to attain it.

special committee of the Twelve appointed by President McKay in 1954 to study the issue concluded that there was no sound scriptural basis for the policy but that the church membership was not prepared for its reversal…. Personally, I knew something about the apostolic study because I heard Adam S. Bennion, who was a member of the committee, refer to the work in an informal talk he made to the Mormon Seminar in Salt Lake City on May 13, 1954. McKay, Bennion said, had pled with the Lord without result and finally concluded the time was not yet ripe.

In my work, I try to create situations in which we take ideas, information, experiences and qualities to a pragmatic arena. Then within those, to relearn or experiment with how we respond to internal and external variables. There’s no point to understanding something but remaining incapable of applying it. I think real knowledge and understanding is experiential, and the easiest way to access those is through our physical being.

Once you get off the bandwagon of believing that truth is your enemy and is bad news with all kinds of associated unhappy obligations, you can then afford to take it on with some enthusiasm and start to have some fun with it. You can begin to trust yourself and play with mystery and big questions without the need for a crutch of an answer to lean on and sell to others (“Here you go, this crutch worked for me.”). And you then begin to see these big words, like imagination, fearlessness and truth as signposts to more fun, instead of the reverse as you do now. To start the engine, just follow what you yearn for, make a contract with that which compels you, and fulfill the trust of that contract through choice and action.

If you are “playing” too much or “working” too much, you will have a reaction on the other side, which indicates your pace is off, too slow or too fast.

Cedar Capital Group Tokyo Review of Stats Shows Decrease in Mortality Rate in Construction Sites Cedar Capital Group in Tokyo Japan construction industry is one of the riskiest industries to work with. Not only do they have to deal with falling debris but workers also have to be aware of faulty wirings, defective equipment and weather warnings. Workers even sometimes have to lose their lives in the midst of construction. These circumstances are inevitable and precautions were already implemented even at the start of training. Yet, it cannot be denied that construction is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world today. Everywhere we go, we see buildings being built and establishments being constructed. We see new structures in developed nations. New York, America, Tokyo, Japan, Beijing, China and Seoul, South Korea are some of the leading cities which feature new construction projects almost everyday. Singapore is also not left behind. Considered as one of the most flourishing countries in the world, the little island-city has prided itself with new infrastructure projects and promise a thousand more to come. It came no surprise that the country’s journey towards urbanization was held liable for the deaths of hundreds of construction workers in the previous years. Just recently, though, Singapore has declared their concern on the number of fatalities there are in a construction project. If not of deaths, accidents resulting to fractures and minor and major injuries are also experienced in other neighboring countries. Cedar Capital Group in Tokyo Japan, one the distributor of heavy capital equipment in the country, reports to have dozens of death in the last 4 years of their operation. This, as they claim, is one of the reasons why there is a large scarcity in job application related to construction. Many companies are also faced with numerous complaints because of these deaths and injuries. According to further review, approximately one-quarter of the deaths result from exposure to hazardous substances which cause such disabling illnesses as cancer and cardiovascular, respiratory and nervous-system disorders. Analysts even warn that work-related diseases are expected to double by the year 2020 and that if improvements are not implemented now, exposures today will kill people by the year 2020. Surprisingly, though, while people are being troubled with the number of casualties in the construction sector, recent studies and statistics show fewer deaths in construction sector in the first half of the year. Specifically in Singapore, Manpower Ministry has announced only 8 death reports compared to the 17 deaths in 2014. Although this is not a reason to celebrate since there are still fatalities, Singapore’s Contractual Association stated that this is an improvement as it shows the effectiveness of the recent awareness programs and training seminars conducted across the island-city. The country aims to clear all fatalities for the next succeeding years.

The question under all this: How to get the idler to accept and engage the yearning? And that, my friends, is a deep and subtle question that will take a while to master, and the mastering of it will require redefining the presumption of what mastery even is. It is certainly not control. Mastery of anything is, more than anything else, the transformation of work into play. Giving orders and answers, never making mistakes, and having around you others with the opinion that you are great has nothing at all to do with it. Read carefully: to yearn for, to be compelled by, is being called to play.

Meditation, in contrast, is the accidental moments of actual harmony that arrive anyway when you are trying to get something, even in trying to get harmony or calm. This often happens outside of the intention to meditate, and most people access the beginnings of this through other events, such as walking, working, athletic activities, or transitional moments, such as between waking and sleeping. The effect, in brief, is one of harmony and well-being, from which other insights or intuitive glimpses can naturally emerge. The moment you notice this, the meditation is over.

Can there be any positives for an addicted child? It’s hard to believe that there could be. But there’s a lot to be learned from a drug addict or alcoholic. The experience of being a drug addict or alcoholic can definitely serve humankind. As it turns out, some of the only people qualified to call themselves authorities on the subject of substance abuse are former substance abusers themselves. Only the former addict can tell you how the mind of a drug addict works. That’s because he or she has been there. And we haven’t. Nor have many of the so-called expert psychologists and counselors. As in any trade, it’s best to have some degree of education. Former addicts got their education from the substances they abused. As the escalation of drug-use hits an all time high worldwide, there will be an increasing need for these former addicts who’ve actually been “in the field” and can counsel the steady flow of younger addicts. Counselors who have been addicts are usually better able to detect the manipulations or scams devised so cleverly by practicing addicts. As these counselors will testify, they probably know every move an addict is making or is planning to make. Didn’t they do the same? So perhaps there is a positive to your child being an addict. Perhaps your child is being trained to counsel others. Maybe the streets and the alleys are his or her classroom. On staff at practically every rehab in every city across this country, there will be at least several people who’ve gained an education living the life of a junkie or a drunk. These are invaluable personnel, people who’ve walked into the darkness and have walked out again. Could be this is where your addicted child is headed? How about you? Can you help others? There are many child-psychology experts out there making valuable contributions to our culture. But unless they’ve taken the same roller-coaster ride that the parent of an addict has taken, they can’t speak from experience on this topic. Experience doesn’t always count for everything. But once the parent of an addict has passed a certain stage, the “letting-go stage,” he or she can relate to other parents in trouble and offer help. After all, who knows better the pain and sorrow of seeing a child in such distress than the parent? It’s not that I don’t have the greatest respect for professionals or feel that there isn’t a huge need for them: It’s just that there’s a big difference in “living it” and “learning it.” Not long ago, I attended a three-hour seminar given by a noted child psychologist. His subject was how to deal with teenagers so that they wouldn’t fall into the clutches of drugs and alcohol. I was curious about his methods—which consist mainly of “talking” to young addicts and “talking’ to them some more. Then he mentioned that his own children were two and three years old. Listening to him, I wondered just how much his methods in dealing with young people would change over the years, especially after his children reached puberty. It will be interesting to hear what he has to say in a decade or two.

FIGURE 5.1 Buying and closing checklist. 1. Identify a potential bargain purchase; ask questions. 2. Write down the one urgent problem you can solve for the seller. 3. Establish the fair market value, give or take 5 percent. 4. Research the market rent and likely net income the property will produce. 5. State your minimum acceptable profit on this house. 6. Formulate an offer that solves the seller's one urgent problem. 7. Make the offer. Insist on either an acceptance or a counteroffer (Don't tell me what you won't do; tell me what you will do). 8. Make another offer based on any new information. 9. If the seller is unresponsive but you remain convinced there is opportunity, go away and come back in a week with another offer. 10. Get the contract accepted-signed by all parties. 11. Make your earnest money deposit with the closing agent. 12. Retain rights to house inspector and termite inspector if needed. 13. Order a title search with a title company, attorney, or escrow company, and furnish these agents a copy of your fully signed contract. 14. Talk with the agent or attorney who will prepare the closing documents to alert him to any unusual clauses in the contract. 15. Get copies of any documents you will be required to sign the day before the closing, and get a copy of the title insurance commitment-read to check for exceptions. 16. Read closing documents (very carefully!!!). 17. Walk through the house the day of the closing after the sellers are completely out of the house. 18. Go to the closing, review the documents, and collect the appropriate items listed on the closing documents list, and get the keys and garage door opener. Note: When you are buying, take your time. Time is on your side. Having both the buyers and the sellers at the closing can work to your advantage. When you are selling, sign documents in advance. Only go to pick up your check after the buyer has signed everything and left. Source: Reprinted from John Schaub, "Making It Big on Little Deals," seminar by permission

Josh Miller, 22 years old. He is co-founder of Branch, a “platform for chatting online as if you were sitting around the table after dinner.” Miller works at Betaworks, a hybrid company encapsulating a co-working space, an incubator and a venture capital fund, headquartered on 13th Street in the heart of the Meatpacking District. This kid in T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, and a potential star of the 2.0 version of Sex and the City, is super-excited by his new life as a digital neo-entrepreneur. He dropped out of Princeton in the summer of 2011 a year before getting his degree—heresy for the almost 30,000 students who annually apply to the prestigious Ivy League school in the hope of being among the 9% of applicants accepted. What made him decide to take such a big step? An internship in the summer of 2011 at Meetup, the community site for those who organize meetings in the flesh for like-minded people. His leader, Scott Heiferman, took him to one of the monthly meetings of New York Tech Meetup and it was there that Miller saw the light. “It was the coolest thing that ever happened to me,” he remembers. “All those people with such incredible energy. It was nothing like the sheltered atmosphere of Princeton.” The next step was to take part in a seminar on startups where the idea for Branch came to him. He found two partners –students at NYU who could design a website. Heartened by having won a contest for Internet projects, Miller dropped out of Princeton. “My parents told me I was crazy but I think they understood because they had also made unconventional choices when they were kids,” says Miller. “My father, who is now a lawyer, played drums when he was at college, and he and my mother, who left home at 16, traveled around Europe for a year. I want to be a part of the new creative class that is pushing the boundaries farther. I want to contribute to making online discussion important again. Today there is nothing but the soliloquy of bloggers or rude anonymous comments.” The idea, something like a public group email exchange where one can contribute by invitation only, interested Twitter cofounder Biz Stone and other California investors who invited Miller and his team to move to San Francisco, financing them with a two million dollar investment. After only four months in California, Branch returned to New York, where it now employs a dozen or so people. “San Francisco was beautiful and I learned a lot from Biz and my other mentors, but there’s much more adrenaline here,” explains Miller, who is from California, born and raised in Santa Monica. “Life is more varied here and creating a technological startup is something new, unlike in San Francisco or Silicon Valley where everyone’s doing it: it grabs you like a drug. Besides New York is the media capital and we’re an online publishing organization so it’s only right to be here.”[52]

Think of yourself as being a car and passion is the fuel. The more you have the further you’ll go-and without it you go nowhere! The gas stations are books, workshops, seminars, influential people and anything else that can inspire you to take action. Keep filling yourself up and you will keep moving towards your goal. Now on the other hand the fuel drainers are things like: negative people, bad diets, unfulfilling working conditions, garbage movies/music and basically anything that doesn’t produce value for your life. You want to stay far away from these drainers especially if you are PurposeSearching.       Chapter

Several years ago, Debashish Chatterjee, a good friend and well-known author on leadership1 opened a seminar on leadership at MIT by saying, ‘I’ve been guided in my work by the notion that older is often better. If an idea has been around for a few thousand years, it’s been submitted to many tests—which is a good indicator that it might have some real merit. We’re fixated on newness, which often misleads us into elevating novelty over substance.

Few killer viruses are more difficult to discern than this one. On the surface all appears to be healthy and working, but it’s not. All those hours and hours spent lost in one Christian book after another . . . all those many Christian responsibilities outside the home or going from one seminar to another . . . all that extra time in prayer and Bible study. . . . At times we use these Christian activities as an unconscious attempt to escape from pain. In

Andy’s Message Around the time I received Arius’ email, Andy’s message arrived. He wrote: Young, I do remember Rick Samuels. I was at the seminar in the Bahriji when he came to lecture. Like you I was at once mesmerized by his style and beauty, which of course was a false image manufactured by the advertising agencies and sales promoters. I was surprised to hear your backroom story of him being gangbanged in the dungeon. We are not ones to judge since both of us had been down that negative road of self-loathing. This seems to be a common thread with people whom others considered good-looking or beautiful. In my opinion, it’s a fake image that handsome people know they cannot live up to. Instead of exterior beauty being an asset, it often becomes a psychological burden. During the years when I was with Toby, I delved in some fashion modeling work in New Zealand. I ventured into this business because it was my subconscious way of reminding me of the days we posed for Mario and Aziz. It was also my twisted way of hoping to meet another person like me, with the hope of building a loving long-term relationship. It was also a desperate attempt to break loose from Toby’s psychosomatic grip on my person. Ian was his name and he was a very attractive 24 year old architecture student. He modeled to earn some extra spending money. We became fast friends, but he had this foreboding nature which often came on unexpectedly. A sentence or a word could trigger his depression, sending the otherwise cheerful man into bouts of non-verbal communication. It was like a brightly lit light bulb suddenly being switched off in mid-sentence. We did have an affair while I was trying to patch things up with Toby. As delightful as our sexual liaisons were there was a hidden missing element, YOU! Much like my liaisons with Oscar, without your presence, our sexual communications took on a different dynamic which only you as the missing link could resolve. There were times during or after sex when Ian would abuse himself with negative thoughts and self-denigration. I tried to console him, yet I was deeply sorrowed about my own unresolved issues with Toby. It was like the blind leading the blind. I was gravely saddened when Ian took his own life. Heavily drugged on prescriptive anti-depressant and a stomach full of extensive alcohol consumption, he fell off his ten story apartment building. He died instantly. This was the straw that threw me into a nervous breakdown. Thank God I climbed out of my despondencies with the help of Ari and Aria. My dearest Young, I have a confession to make; you are the only person I have truly loved and will continue to love. All these years I’ve tried to forget you but I cannot. That said I am not trying to pry you away from Walter and have you return to me. We are just getting to know each other yet I feel your spirit has never left. Please make sure that Walter understands that I’m not jeopardizing your wonderful relationship. I am happy for the both of you. You had asked jokingly if I was interested in a triplet relationship. Maybe when the time and opportunity arises it may happen, but now I’m enjoying my own company after Albert’s passing. In a way it is nice to have my freedom after 8 years of building a life with Albert. I love you my darling boy and always will. As always, I await your cheerful emails. Andy. Xoxoxo

Supervision, he says, is really a shared fantasy of what is actually going on – it is the result of a “trainee trying to imagine what he and his patient have been doing together and the supervisor (plus case seminar participants) trying to imagine it too.” Supervision works best, he says, “if all parties remain aware that what they are jointly imagining is not true.

The language of worldview tends to imply...that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. The risk in thinking "worldviewishly" is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. And they will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. They can create a cultural niche in which "worldview thinkers" are privileged while other kinds of culture makers are shunted aside. But culture is not changed simply by thinking.

We should conduct ourselves so that wisdom will grow. Our organization’s structures should be designed to facilitate learning at all levels, in all areas, even if at first we don’t see the relevance. Professional development opportunities including seminars, university programs, special project teams, and mentoring programs are just a few examples of structured learning.

To think you’re a leader because you attended a seminar is as dangerous as thinking you’re an athlete because you watched the Olympics on television.

Perhaps the best we can do is to work to uphold the human virtues and qualities we most value, even in the face of everyone’s cynicism, skepticism and distrust, including our own.

Groysberg found that exceptional success rarely follows an individual from company to company. Sending your salespeople to the most expensive sales seminars, led by someone who sold products for someone else, is unlikely to revolutionize your sales performance, because the specifics of what your company does matter.