The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be common, nor the common heroic.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at best, if he wins,knows the thrills of high achievement, and, if he fails, at least fails daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
—John F. Kennedy
on Theodore Roosevelt
New York City, December 5, 1961
Fun happens when you are intellectually excited. It’s people interacting with each other – with one idea leading to another. It’s the struggle, and even the failures that go with the struggle, that make work fun.
Founder & Chairman of AES
market capitalization: $6 billionin FastCompany
This child — he thought —
has this child heroically persevered under all doubts and dangers, struggled with poverty and suffering, upheld and sustained by strong affection and the consciousness of rectitude alone! And yet the world is full of such heroism. Have I yet to learn that the hardest and best-borne trials are those which are never chronicled in any earthly record, and are suffered every day!
Imagine there is a bank that credits your account each morning with $86,400. It carries over no balance from day to day. Every evening deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to use during the day. What would you do? Draw out every cent, of course!!
Each of us has such a bank. It’s name is TIME. Every morning it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off, as lost, whatever of this you have failed to invest to good purpose. It carries over, no balance. It allows no overdraft. Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the remains of the day. If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is yours.
There is no going back. There is no drawing against the “tomorrow”. You must live in the present on today’s deposits. Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness and success! The clock is running. Make the most of today. Carpe diem!
–Author Unknown
If you know, click here to tell me.
Live your life each day as you would climb a mountain. An occasional glance towards the summit keeps the goal in mind, but many beautiful scenes are to be observed from each new vantage point.
–Harold B. Melchart
No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.
French humanist essayist 1533-92
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
—Henry Ford, 1863-1947
Chaos: Making a New Science
by James Gleick
To purchase through Amazon.com, click here.
_____________________
Page references are to the soft cover edition
[Items enclosed in brackets are paraphrases or commentary by Tony Mayo]
Two favorite excerpts:
p. 38 Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility. A physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Joseph Ford, started quoting Tolstoy: “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
p. 231 “Rigor is the strength of mathematics,” Peitgen said. “That we can continue a line of thought which is absolutely guaranteed–mathematicians never want to give that up. But you can look at situations that can be understood partially now and with rigor perhaps in future generations. Rigor, yes, but not to the extent that I drop something just because I can’t do it now.”
I am an artist…It’s self-evident that what that word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full.
It is the opposite of saying, “I know all about it. I’ve already found it.”
As far as I’m concerned, the word means, “I am looking. I am hunting for it. I am deeply involved.”
–Vincent van Gogh
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
— Albert Ellis
Spirituality is an awareness of the gap between what you can experience and what you can describe.
–Doug Muder via uuworld.org
before words:
the spirituality of humanism.
HAMLET
Let me question more in particular: what have you,
my good friends, deserved at the hands of fortune,
that she sends you to prison hither?
GUILDENSTERN
Prison, my lord!
HAMLET
Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ
Then is the world one.
HAMLET
A goodly one; in which there are many confines,
wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
ROSENCRANTZ
We think not so, my lord.
HAMLET
Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
it is a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ
Why then, your ambition makes it one; ’tis too
narrow for your mind.
HAMLET
O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I
have bad dreams.
GUILDENSTERN
Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very
substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
HAMLET
A dream itself is but a shadow.
ROSENCRANTZ
Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a
quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Act 2, Scene 1
by William Shakespeare
The founder and CEO of Amazon seems to agree with Dan Pink’s famous TED video that incentive compensation plans can be detrimental to creativity, cooperation and–ultimately–companies.
We pay very low cash compensation relative to most companies. We also have no incentive compensation of any kind. And the reason we don’t is because it is detrimental to teamwork.
—Amazon’s Jeff Bezos:
The ultimate disrupter
in Fortune Management
The upside for workers is in Amazon stock. That is quite an incentive, amounting to $20+ billion for Bezos and millions for many individual employees.
As I discussed in my popular article, Truth or Consequences: Beyond the Punishment Model, employers are too quick to act like cops with the result that employees respond like criminals. Here is more support for my advice, this time from a rigorous study of new restaurant software. Instead of using the software mainly to fire workers suspected of theft, all employees were made aware that the software was looking for misbehavior. The results were positive and–to those not familiar with my approach–surprising.
The same people who are stealing from you can be set up to succeed.
–Prof. Lamar Pierce
Washington University
“The savings from the [monitoring software’s] theft alerts themselves were modest, $108 a week per restaurant. However, after installing the monitoring software, the revenue per restaurant increased by an average of $2,982 a week, or about 7 percent.
“The impact, the researchers say, came not from firing workers engaged in theft, but mostly from their changed behavior. Knowing they were being monitored, the servers not only pulled back on any unethical practices, but also channeled their efforts into, say, prompting customers to have that dessert or a second beer, raising revenue for the restaurant and tips for themselves.”
––How Surveillance Changes Behavior:
A Restaurant Workers Case Study
The New York Times
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