“If you obsess over whether you are making the right decision, you are basically assuming that the universe will reward you for one thing and punish you for another.
The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience.
If this sounds too mystical, refer again to the body. Every significant vital sign- body temperature, heart rate, oxygen consumption, hormone level, brain activity, and so on- alters the moment you decide to do anything… decisions are signals telling your body, mind, and environment to move in a certain direction.”
— ― Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life (via onherway)
(via mangostreet)
When I was twenty-one years old, I actually had a pretty brilliant observation. (I remember this observation distinctly, as it stood out in the relative wasteland of stupidity that was my thinking at that age.)
I made the observation that anyone who worked at a job for ten years invariably became an expert at that job. Didn’t matter the person, didn’t matter the field. Grocery clerk, college professor, machinist, airline pilot — after ten years of trying to do something, it seemed like you couldn’t help but end up knowing how to do it…
Since I [was] going to be working and studying screenwriting for ten years, that took some of the pressure off. It doesn’t make sense to kick yourself after failing at something for four years, when the path you’re on is designed to take ten. This allowed a period of time to undertake an analysis and exploration of the business, the techniques, the craft, the history, etc. Step by step, from style to format to character to concept to theme, etc. In other words, we gave ourselves room to practice. And in that practicing, we learned the elements needed to construct a good screen story.
— Terry Rosio
If it takes 10 years to learn how to write a great script, what makes us so sure that it doesn’t take 10 years to become a great entrepreneur?
— Dan Shipper
$45 million will be spent on award entries this year alone on just the main award shows. The cost of flights, hotels, ball gowns, trophies, booze and cheap entertainment aren’t factored in either. With that kind of money we could have given 1,345,943 families access to emergency water kits in a war stricken country.
— Prentice Mathew
June 13, 2013 at 9:57pm
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As you grow older, your passions start to collate and they become one, and that’s when sometimes great businesses are formed.
— Jo Malone
In Niger, which has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world, the UNFPA has created 11 so-called “husband schools” in which men examine case studies on reproductive health and try to come up with best practices. According to the organization, safe deliveries have doubled in areas where these schools have been set up.
But these advocacy messages can’t be too blatant — “our members don’t go in with a banner that says ‘We are here to talk to you about child marriage.’” said Sundaram, of Girls Not Brides. Instead, they subtly point out to local elders how families might become richer if the girls were able to go to school for longer.
— Africa’s New Agents of Progress in Female Health: Traditional Male Chiefs
Every great company, every great brand, and every great career has been built in exactly the same way: bit by bit, step by step, little by little. Managers who are both smart and patient can take the same inexorable downward force that drives some companies to mediocrity and turn it on its head.
If every element of an organization gets a little better every day, then that organization will become unstoppable. An organization that builds that kind of momentum will soon evolve into a market leader. Yet our impatience negates the simplicity of that statement. Amazingly, it was the Three Stooges who first codified this management technique: “Slowly I turned … step by step … inch by inch …” It worked for them, and it can work for us. We’re not going to fix our economy — or our miserable negative attitude — with a federally mandated intervention in time for the next election. You’re not going to build a great company because of a neat idea that you got in the shower one day. You’re not going to find that perfect job just because your ré sumé ends up on the right desk on the right day.
We need to stop shopping for lightning bolts. The way out of our paralysis is simpler than that: It’s about thinking small and thinking gradual.
— Seth Godin
But what has happened is not that food has led to art, but that it has replaced it. Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known — in the days of the rising postwar middle class, when Mortimer Adler was peddling the Great Books and Leonard Bernstein was on television — as culture. It is costly. It requires knowledge and connoisseurship, which are themselves costly to develop. It is a badge of membership in the higher classes, an ideal example of what Thorstein Veblen, the great social critic of the Gilded Age, called conspicuous consumption.
— A Matter of Taste?
The last thing to say about solitude is that it isn’t very polite. Thoreau knew that the “doubleness” that solitude cultivates, the ability to stand back and observe life dispassionately, is apt to make us a little unpleasant to our fellows, to say nothing of the offense implicit in avoiding their company. But then, he didn’t worry overmuch about being genial. He didn’t even like having to talk to people three times a day, at meals; one can only imagine what he would have made of text-messaging. We, however, have made of geniality — the weak smile, the polite interest, the fake invitation — a cardinal virtue. Friendship may be slipping from our grasp, but our friendliness is universal. Not for nothing does “gregarious” mean “part of the herd.” But Thoreau understood that securing one’s self-possession was worth a few wounded feelings. He may have put his neighbors off, but at least he was sure of himself. Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone.
— The End of Solitude
So if it’s common now for men and women to be friends, why do we so rarely see it in popular culture? Partly, it’s a narrative problem. Friendship isn’t courtship. It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories about friendships of any kind are relatively rare, especially given what a huge place the relationships have in our lives. And of course, they’re not sexy. Put a man and a woman together in a movie or a novel, and we expect the sparks to fly. Yet it isn’t just a narrative problem, or a Hollywood problem.
We have trouble, in our culture, with any love that isn’t based on sex or blood. We understand romantic relationships, and we understand family, and that’s about all we seem to understand.
— A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?
They’re no longer alone, the story goes. But, then again, they never really were.
— Nathan Heller
At one point, Klinenberg suggests that living alone provides “restorative solitude”; it may be “exactly what we need to reconnect.” But most of the people he introduces seem neither especially restored nor vigorously connected. They are insecure, proud of their freedoms but hungry for contact, anxious, frisky, smug, occasionally scared—in short, they experience a mixture of emotions that many people, even those who do not live alone, are apt to recognize.
— Nathan Heller
The first thing I think she would say is, don’t settle. Then, marry for the right reasons: for love, not for money or appearances or expectations. But most importantly—and this is what I talk about in the love chapter, the last chapter—don’t fall for all the romantic clichés about Romeo and Juliet and love at first sight. For Austen, love came from the mind as well as the heart. She didn’t believe you could fall in love with someone until you knew them, and then what you fell in love with was their character more than anything else—whether they were a good person and also an interesting one. So I guess that means, date someone for a while before you commit, and don’t get so carried away by your feelings that you forget to give a good hard look at who they are.
— bill deresiewicz
Actually, the long stories are the good ones. About how you found that great job, or discovered this amazing partner or managed to get that innovation approved. If long stories are so great, how come we spend all our lives working for the short ones? The very act of seeking out the shortcut and the quick win might very well be the reason you don’t have enough successful long stories to share.
— Seth Godin
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