The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
George Orwell in
Politics and the English Language, 1946
“With such an abundance of information available simultaneously at all levels, micromanagement can creep unnoticed into the chain of command and pull it apart. For example, if a general is able to follow an ongoing firefight through email and IM, and he is inclined to believe he knows what’s best for the units in contact, then he very well might start directing those small units from afar, consequently eliminating the need for his colonels, captains, and sergeants to do any thinking of their own.
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“a commander may be dismayed to find his soldiers have become too heavily reliant on headquarters for critical decisions. That’s dangerous, because sooner or later headquarters won’t be available. Equipment will break; signals will be lost; communications will go down, and almost certainly at the worst times. That’s when the commander will wish most that he had cultivated his men’s initiative rather than tamped it out through incessant electronic directives or rebukes for mistaken decisions.”
IT vs. initiative: The Internet age comes to the battlefield
former US Marine Captain Tyler Boudreau
in The Industry Standard
“For human beings the really important evolutionary advantage is our ability to create new worlds.”
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“In fact, I think now that the two abilities – finding the truth about the world and creating new worlds-are two sides of the same coins. Theories, in science or childhood, don’t just tell us what’s true – they tell us what’s possible, and they tell us how to get to those possibilities from where we are now. When children learn and when they pretend they use their knowledge of the world to create new possibilities. So do we whether we are doing science or writing novels. I don’t think anymore that Science and Fiction are just both Good Things that complement each other. I think they are, quite literally, the same thing.”The World Question Center at Edge.org
Alison Gopnik
Psychologist, UC-BerkeleyCoauthor, The Scientist In the Crib
…the killer apps that have really worked on the web have always been about connecting people to one another. So, whether it is instant messaging and e-mail as communications to connect people to one another, whether it’s photo-sharing as a way to connect people to one another through photos, or blogging as a way to connect people to one another through the words, people have always been social and the killer apps that have really succeeded on the web have always been social.
Google’s Joe Krauss in
Knowledge@Wharton
I got a call from a salesman looking for my help to close a business owner. The salesman was frustrated because the owner so needed the product but was not making a decision, though he was willing to keep talking.
The business owner was tired and frantically busy as his company grew past 100 employees. He was traveling more and more, continually meeting prospective clients, reviewing active projects, and checking on employees. He was proudly a stickler for quality and involved with every detail. His company’s reputation for excellent work was a foundation of their success and growth.
My immediate response was, “Wow! He must have a terrible time retaining key employees.”
“How did you know that?” the salesman exclaimed, “He says that’s his #1 problem.”
“Of course it is. The best people (more…)
What is more amazing about Tiger Woods: his athleticism or his focus? David Brooks writes, in the New York Times, that:
Woods seems able to mute the chatter that normal people have in their heads and build a tunnel of focused attention. … He was, as always, locked in, focused and self-contained.
You may not have time to practice golf, but you can always practice mental discipline.
See also World Changing Coach about Tiger’s father.
See free, easy Meditation Instructions on this blog.
Randy Pausch’s short commencement speech at CMU on May 18, 2008.
The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
Who was Randy Pausch? Click here.
Scientists argue that the brain has evolved to see a split second into the future when it perceives motion. Because it takes the brain at least a tenth of a second to model visual information, it is working with old information. By modeling the future during movement, it is “seeing” the present.
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice
Hear this poem read by T. S. Eliot at: http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/armstrong/ashwednesday.shtml
Establish the habit of slowing down your responses to questions, to save time and trouble. A simple and effective way to do this is by training yourself to respond to every question with a clarifying question. This gives the questioner a chance to explain why they asked and what they are trying to accomplish. You’ll be surprised how often the quick answer you might have given would not have helped them –or you– at all.
Suppose, for example, you shipped that big report yesterday, just as you had promised. Today the client telephones and asks, “Have you (more…)
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