Other Books Archives - Page 17 of 26 - Ben Rosenfeld

February 10, 2016February 8, 2016

“Unstoppable Confidence” Quotes

I recently read “Unstoppable Confidence: How To Use The Power of NLP To Be More Dynamic and Successful” by Kent Sayre. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. If you like the quotes, buy the book here.

“Truly confident people all had a similar trait: their confidence came from within and it did not have to be voiced. A nonchalant, matter-of-fact confidence is ideal.” (24)

“Competence is defined as the ability to do something, and confidence is defined as your belief about your competence.” (27)

“There are four levels of competence that people go through as they develop any skill. Those four levels are: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence.” (28)

“Confident people make decisions rapidly and with a sense of finality. Once a decision is made, they are committed to it. They rarely change their minds. Confident people never waver because they know what they want.” (35)

“When you ask yourself, “how can I be of service to others today?” you will experience a paradigm shift of great proportions.” (39)

“A goal is a dream with a deadline.” (43)

“I encourage you to focus mostly on having a positive motivation strategy, allowing you to seek better things in your life. The most successful people have the positive motivation.” (51)

“Calling something “confidence” is actually a misnomer. There is only such a thing as acting confident or behaving in a confident way or thinking confident thoughts. The same goes for any emotion, be it fear, sadness, depression, or anxiety. None of these are actual “things.” They are the result of processes, sequences of thought that you run in your mind.” (59)

“Instead of saying “I feel sad,” describe for yourself what is really going on: “I choose to think in a certain way that results in my feeling sad when I encounter a certain set of circumstances.”” (61)

“Append “according to me at this time” onto every one of her sentences. This forces her to acknowledge that what she is describing is not absolute truth and not etched in stone for all time.” (63)

“Whenever there is an unwanted emotion (like fear, guilt, or anxiety), she must describe the emotion with the following phrase: “I choose to experience a certain emotion by doing something inside my mind that causes me to experience a set of pictures, sounds, and feelings that I collectively have labeled [emotion].” (63)

“After she restates it using the guidelines above, she must empower herself by using sentences that state how she will behave in the future. An example is: “Although I’ve done that in the past, I wonder how quickly I will find myself becoming more relaxed and confident when I go to ask the customers to purchase my product.” (63)

“When you change your language, you change your life.” (64)

“Ask yourself whether a particular belief serves you. If so, keep it. If the belief keeps you stuck in a station of your life that you’ve outgrown, get rid of it and replace it with a more empowering belief.” (67)

“If you have something positive that you want to experience more vividly, you can enlarge whatever you are visualizing – make it movie screen-size in your mind-and notice how that feeling becomes more intense. You can make that belief even more intense by making it brighter in your mind and picturing it being closer.” (69)

“The reverse is also true: If you want to make something less powerful, you can visualize it as being small, dark, and far away. To lessen the intensity even further, you can make the picture of what you’re thinking about grainy and black and white, as though you were viewing it on an ancient television screen.” (70)

“When you meet people and you want to create rapport, remember these beliefs:
People automatically like you because you are a good person
You can easily and naturally meet anyone you choose
You can have instant rapport with anyone you choose using these techniques
You have a lot in common with any person you meet
You can learn something from each and every person you speak with” (77)

“In all interpersonal relations, assume that you can get and maintain a rapport. Operate under the belief that you have far more in common with the person than not, and you will easily connect with him or her.” (77)

“Ask yourself, “What would it be like if I were feeling unstoppably confident right now?” How would you feel different? How would you look out at the world as a supremely confident person?” (78)

“All friendships are based on: similarity, cooperation, praise.” (80)

“If you intend to connect with someone before beginning to talk with him or her, you will project that intent and that person will unconsciously pick up on it, responding to you more positively than he or she might have otherwise.” (82)

“When you set someone else’s comfort as one of your outcomes, that person will find himself or herself automatically more comfortable in your presence.” (82)

“Adopt the belief that people are perfectly friendly and they love meeting new, dynamic people such as yourself. Furthermore, recognize that you like to get to know new people, since you can learn something new from each and every person you meet. You accept people for who they are, allow them to be themselves, and are free from judging them. After permanently adopting this frame of mind, go out each day or night for the week and notice how easily and naturally you converse with strangers.” (82)

“When someone is genuinely comfortable in being himself or herself, others esense it and consequently let their guard down.” (83)

“All the happiest, most fulfilled, most successful people realize that success is a process. It’s the journey of who we become, not simply the end result, that makes it all worthwhile. The achievement of the goal is sweet. But, as with any goal worth achieving, there will likely be setbacks along the way. Viewing those setbacks in the right light can make the difference in your ultimate success.” (91)

“There is no such thing as failure; there are only results. After you’ve been knocked down, the only thing that matters is that you get back up.” (92)

“Masters become masters because they make more mistakes. The more mistakes you make, the more distinctions (small pieces of information you learn by doing) you’ll get. The more distinctions you have, the more easily you will reach your outcome.” (92)

“If at first you’re not successful, be thankful. Some of the least successful people out there had early successes and decided that there was no room for improvement; therefore they became complacent and stagnated.” (92)

“Compare this to people who fail royally the first few times. These late bloomers have to develop skills to adjust their behavior based on feedback. They tend to develop habits that lead them toward continual improvement. As they develop these habits and being to succeed, they eventually surpass the early bloomers in productivity.” (93)

“To get your victories to occur more often, just as soon as you have a major success, visualize yourself having the same results again in many different contexts.” (98)

“What makes the difference between successful, confident people and those who are tentative and do not pursue their dreams is the way that they view their mistakes. If you want to do something well, it’s worth doing poorly at first. That is why taking action is almost always better than not taking action. In taking action, you will either get your outcome or at least learn something, so that you can do things better the next time. If you fail to take action out of fear, you will learning nothing and stay stuck in the same place you were.” (99)

“Imagine what it would be like to be ten times more confident than you are now, and answer the following questions:
How would you be moving differently?
How would your body posture be different?
How would your inner voice be different?
How would you be speaking to others?
What is going through your mind?
How does your body feel?
Where in your body do you feel that confidence first?
How could you intensify that confident feeling in your body?” (105)

“Make a game of finding something positive in every situation. Ninety-five percent of your emotions are determined by how you interpret events to yourself.” -Brian Tracy (109)

“When you’re aware of the specific qualities of your negative internal voice, you can more easily silence it.
Whose voice do you hear?
Where does the voice seem to come from?
At what level is the volume of the voice?
Does the voice speak rapidly or slowly?” (111)

“Sometimes the negative internal voice is your own. What would happen if you took the voice and made it sound like, say, Mickey Mouse’s voice? It would be hard to take that high-pitched voice seriously, right?” (111)

“The more you reward yourself for acting in the way you want, the more you will find yourself automatically acting in the way you want. You won’t even have to make it a point to do so – it will simply become a reflex.” (112)

“Your ideal internal dialogue should be in your own voice. The reason for this is that you and you alone run your life and make the decisions.” (113)

“Words that are confidence killers: try, hope, but, would, could, should.” (116)

“The word try communicates a “maybe” attitude in a world that craves certainty. Instead, use the word do.” (117)

“If you want to communicate the same thing without using the word but, substitute the phrase and yet.” (118)

“Here are the words and phrases to add to your vocabulary for enhanced confidence: absolutely, definitely, positively, assuredly, without a doubt, of course, certainly, undoubtedly, obviously, guaranteed, naturally, sure.” (120)

“A classic placating gesture is when someone shrugs her shoulders with palms facing upward, as if pleading, “I didn’t do it.” This conveys a need to absolve oneself of responsibility for a situation. In order to have unstoppable confidence, you must avoid these gestures at all times. Another placating gesture is the shrug, which means that someone doesn’t really know what’s happening – or perhaps doesn’t even care.” (129)

“Keep your head held high, your shoulders back, your tummy tucked in, and move through the world with deliberate steps.” (131)

“Get in the habit of steepling your hands when you want to convey confidence to others.” (131)

“If you want more confidence, all you have to do is smile.” (131)

“Vividly imaging confidence in your future means you are literally programming yourself to have that confidence when you need it.” (143)

“Here is how to set yourself up to have confidence any time:
Close your eyes
Watch yourself on your mental movie screen being confident
Enhance the visual and sound qualities of the movie
Jump into your on-screen body and sse through your own eyes, hear what you hear, and feel that total confidence
Hold your thumb and first finger together as you experience fondience
The more you feel confident, the harder you press your thumb and first finger together
After five seconds, separate your thumb and first finger and open your eyes
Repeat the first seven steps, but watch a different confident scenario” (144)

“I imagined that I had an entire history of making wonderful speeches, motivating audiences, and receiving standing ovations for my abilities. To go one step further, I imagined people taking my message to heart, acting on it, and transforming their lives.” (161)

Liked the quotes? Click here to buy the book.

February 9, 2016February 8, 2016

“Antifragile” Quotes

I recently read “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. If you like the quotes, please buy the book.

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.” (3)

“We can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.” (5)

“We are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes, that is, bureaucrats, bankers, Davos-attending members and academics with too much power and no real downside and/or accountability. They game the system while citizens pay the price.” (6)

“You need perfect robustness for a crack not to end up crashing the system. Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.” (8)

“You cannot say with any reliability that a certain remote even tor shock is more likely than another, but you can state with a lot more confidence that an object or a structure is more fragile than another should a certain event happen.” (9)

“Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.” (15)

“If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.” (15)

“the robust or resilient is neither harmed nor helped by volatility and disorder, while the antifragile benefits from them.” (17)

“The sword of Damocles represents the side effect of power and success: you cannot rise and rule without facing this continuous danger – someone out there will be actively working to topple you.” (34)

“Fiscal deficits have proven to be a prime source of fragility in social and economic systems.” (36)

“For society, the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.” (42)

“When I was a pit trader, I learned that the noise produced by the person is inverse to the pecking order: as with mafia dons, the most powerful traders were the least audible. One should have enough self-control to make the audience work hard to listen, which causes them to switch into intellectual overdrive.” (43)

“Loss of bone density and degradation of the health of the bones also causes aging.” (58)

“Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.” (64)

“Some parts on the inside of a system may be required to be fragile in order to make the system antifragile as a result.” (66)

“Evolution is not about a species, but at the service of the whole of nature.” (69)

“When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible – for deviations are more harmful than helpful. This is why the fragile needs to be very predictive in its approach, and, conversely, predictive systems cause fragility.” (71)

“If every plane crash makes the next one less likely, every bank crash makes the next one more likely. We need to eliminate the second type of error – the one that produces contagion – in our construction of an ideal socioeconomic system.” (73)

“A loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on.” (74)

“Natural and naturelike systems want some overconfidence on the part of individual economic agents, i.e., the overestimation of their chances of success and underestimation of the risks of failure in their businesses, provided their failure does not impact others. In other words, they want local, but not global, overconfidence.” (75)

“People have difficulty realizing that the solution is building a system in which nobody’s fall can drag others down – for continuous failures work to preserve the system. Paradoxically, many government interventions and social policies end up hurting the weak and consolidating the established.” (76)

“This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing – and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.” (84)

“The problem is that by creating bureaucracies, we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable way.” (89)

“We can also see from the turkey story the mother of all harmful mistakes: mistaking the absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence, a mistake that we will see tends to prevail in intellectual circles and one that is grounded in the social sciences.” (93)

“When a currency never varies, a slight, very slight move makes people believe that the world is ending. Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system. Indeed, confusing people a little bit is beneficial – it is good for you and good for them. For an application of the point in daily life, imagine someone extremely punctual and predictable who comes home at exactly six o’clock every day for fifteen years. You can use his arrival to set your watch. The fellow will cause his family anxiety if he is barely a few minutes late. Someone with a slightly more volatile – hence unpredictable – schedule, with say, a half -our variation, won’t do so.” (101)

“Stability is not good for the economy: firms become very weak during long periods of steady prosperity devoid of setbacks, and hidden vulnerabilities accumulate silently under the surface – so delaying the crises is not a very good idea.” (101)

“In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system.” (104)

“Absence of political instability, even war, lets explosive material and tendencies accumulate under the surface.” (105)

“The problem with artificially suppressed volatility is not just that the system tends to become extremely fragile; it is that, at the same time, it exhibits no visible risks.” (106)

“While we now have a word for causing harm while trying to help (iatrogenics), we don’t have a designation for the opposite situation, that of someone who ends up helping while trying to cause harm.” (113)

“We tend to over-intervene in areas with minimal benefits (and large risks) while under-intervening in areas in which intervention is necessary, like emergencies.” (119)

“It’s much easier to sell “Look what I did for you” than “Look what I avoided for you.” Of course a bonus system based on “performance” exacerbates the problem.” (121)

“The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.” (128)

“Political and economic “tail events” are unpredictable, and their probabilities are not scientifically measurable. No matter how many dollars are spent on research, predicting revolutions is not the same as counting cards; humans will never be able to turn politics and economics into the tractable randomness of blackjack.” (133)

“Warren Buffett tries to invest in businesses that are “so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.”” (137)

“People are cruel and unfair in the way they confer recognition, so it is best to stay out of that game.” (148)

“You can’t predict in general, but you can predict that those who rely on predictions are taking more risks, will have some trouble, perhaps even go bust. Why? Someone who predicts will be fragile to prediction errors.” (150)

“To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher.” (152)

“Stoicism, seen this way, becomes pure robustness – for the attainment of a state of immunity from one’s external circumstances, good or bad, and an absence of fragility to decisions made by fate, is robustness. Random events won’t affect us either way (we are too strong to lose, and not greedy to enjoy the upside).” (153)

“Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain.” (154)

“For my last job, I wrote my resignation letter before starting the new position, locked it up in a drawer, and felt free while I was there.” (155)

“If you have more to lose than to benefit from events of fate, there is an asymmetry, and not a good one.” (157)

“I initially used the image of the barbell to describe a dual attitude of playing it safe in some areas (robust to negative Black Swans) and taking a lot of small risks in others (open to positive Black Swans), hence achieving antifragility. That is extreme risk aversion on one side and extreme risk loving on the other, rather than just the “medium” or the beastly “moderate” risk attitude that in fact is a sucker game (because medium risks can be subjected to huge measurement errors).” (161)

“Antifragility is the combination aggressiveness plus paranoia.” (161)

“In risky matters, instead of having all members of the staff on an airplane be “cautiously optimistic,” or something in the middle, I prefer the flight attendants to be maximally optimistic and the pilot to be maximally pessimistic or, better, paranoid.” (162)

“Georges Simenon, one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, only wrote sixty days a year, with three hundred days spent “doing nothing.” He published more than two hundred novels.” (165)

“The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses tend to end up socializing with other people with big houses. Beyond a certain level of opulence and independence, gents tend to be less and less personable and their conversation less and less interesting.” (174)

“No one at present dares to state the obvious: growth in society may not come from raising the average the Asian way, but from increasing the number of people in the “tails,” that small, very small number of risk takers crazy enough to have ideas of their own, those endowed with that very rare ability called imagination, that rarer quality called courage, and who make things happen.” (180)

“The story of the wheel on the suitcase also illustrates the point of this chapter: both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the lurid, the newsworthy, the narrated, the scientistic, and the grandiose, rarely for the wheel on the suitcase. Simplicity, I realized, does not lead to laurels.” (190)

“We see a high degree of academic research in countries that are wealthy and developed, leading us to think uncritically that research is the generator of wealth.” (197)

“Academia is well equipped to tell us what it did for us, not what it did not – hence how indispensable its methods are.” (200)

“Serious empirical investigation shows no evidence that raising the general level of education raises income at the level of a country. But we know the opposite is true, that wealth leads to a rise of education.” (203)

“I am not saying that for an individual, education is useless: it builds helpful credentials for one’s own career – but such effect washes out at the country level.” (204)

“Yogi Berra said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.”” (213)

“An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived!” (215)

“He wondered ‘how traders could handle these complicated exotics if they do not understand the Girsanov theorem… Nobody worries that a child ignorant of the various theorems of aerodynamics and incapable of solving an equation of motion would be unable to ride a bicycle.” (218-219)

“I wondered if I was living on another planet or if the gentleman’s PhD and research career had led to this blindness and his strange loss of common sense – or if people without practical sense usually manage to get the energy and interest to acquire a PhD in the fictional world of equation economics.” (219)

“Traders trade -> traders figure out techniques and products -> academic economists find formulas and claim traders are using them -> new traders believe academics -> blowups (from theory-induced fragility)” (220)

“Practitioners don’t write; they do. Birds fly and those who lecture them are the ones who write their story. So it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position.” (220)

“We don’t put theories into practice. We create theories out of practice.” (221)

“A patent side effect of mathematics is making people over-optimize and cut corners, causing fragility. Just look how the new is increasingly more perishable than the old.” (223)

“Do not invest in business plans but in people.” (238)

“Find a problem first, and figure out the math that works for it, rather than study in a vacuum through theorems and artificial examples, then change reality to make it look like these examples.” (247)

“Much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.” (248)

“To this day I still have the instinct that the treasure, what one needs to know for a profession, is necessarily what lies outside the corpus, as far away from the center as possible.” (248)

“There is this error of thinking that things always have a reason that is accessible to us – that we can comprehend easily.” (249)

“We practitioners and quants aren’t too fazed by remarks on the part of academics – it would be like prostitutes listening to technical commentary by nuns.” (264)

“What is fragile is something that is both unbroken and subjected to nonlinear effects – and extreme, rare events, since impacts of large size (or high speed0 are rarer than ones of small size (and slow speed).” (270)

“In spite of what is studied in business schools concerning “economies of scale,” size hurts you at times of stress; it is not a good idea to be large during difficult times.” (279)

“Someone with a linear payoff needs to be right more than 50 percent of the time. Someone with a convex payoff, much less. The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming.” (299)

“Being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed – but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.” (303)

“I once testified in Congress against a project to fund a crisis forecasting project. The people involved were blind to the paradox that we have never had more data than we have now, yet have less predictability than ever.” (307)

“As shown from the track record of prophets: Before you are proven right, you will be reviled; after you are proven right, you will be hated for a while, or what’s worse, your ideas will appear to be “trivial” thanks to retrospective distortion.” (310)

“For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy.” (318)

“In general, the older the technology, not only the longer it is expected to last, but the more certainty I can attach to such a statement.” (319)

“We confuse the necessary and the causal: because all surviving technologies have some obvious benefits, we are led to believe that all technologies offering obvious benefits will survive.” (321)

“A writer with arguments can harm more people than any serial criminal.” (384)

“Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have – or don’t have – in their portfolio.” (389)

“Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.” (389)

“The Romans removed the soldiers incentive to be a coward and hurt others thanks to a process called decimation. If a legion loses a battle and there is suspicion of cowardice, 10 percent of the soldiers and commanders are put to death, usually by random lottery.” (392)

“Myles Burnyeat provides the example of a philosopher who puzzles about the reality of time, but who nonetheless applies for a research grant to work on the philosophical problem of time during next year’s sabbatical – without doubting the reality of next year’s arrival.” (394)

“Only he who has true beliefs will avoid eventually contradicting himself and falling into the errors of postdicting.” (397)

“My experience is that most journalists, professional academics, and other in similar phony professions don’t read original sources, but each other, largely because they need to figure out the consensus before making a pronouncement.” (399)

“Marketing beyond conveying information is insecurity.” (403)

“We accept that people who boast are boastful and turn people off. How about companies? Why aren’t we turned off by companies that advertise how great they are?” (404)

“A simple solution, but quite drastic: anyone who goes into public service should not be allowed to subsequently earn more from any commercial activity than the income of the highest paid civil servant. It is like a voluntary cap (it would prevent people from using public office as a credential-building temporary accommodation, then going to Wall Street to earn several million dollars).” (412)

“More data means more information, perhaps, but it also means more false information.” (416)

Liked the quotes? Click here to buy the book

January 6, 2016

“The Truth” Book Quotes

I recently read “The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships” by Neil Strauss. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. If you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“Intimacy is sharing your reality with someone else and knowing you’re safe, and them being able to share their reality with you and also be safe.” (50)

“But why should you have to make that sacrifice? A relationship should be about what you both want, not about what you both don’t want each other to have.” (54)

“Maybe that’s the female dilemma. She marries someone who’s giving her love and romance, but over time she gets taken for granted or turned into a maid or becomes a baby factory or gets cheated on. There’s not a single emotional need of hers that’s filled by her husband. Then he has the nerve to complain that sh’es not sexual or attractive when he’s drained the life out of her.” (83)

“Childhood trauma may sneak up from behind and fuck you in the ass when you grow up, but at least it leaves a tip on the nightstand.” (84)

“As a journalist, I’ve met a lot of so-called experts. Most are just people with a little experience and a lot of confidence who’ve given themselves a title with which they can fool the suggestible and dim-witted.” (85)

“Remember that humor is a wall. It’s a form of denial, just the same as repression, rationalization, globalization, and minimization.” (85)

“Are you relentlessly driving yourself to succeed and beating yourself up when you fail? Maybe that’s because when you were a teenager, your parents made you feel as if your worth as a human being was dependent on your grades, touchdowns, or accomplishments.” (88)

“Only when our love for someone exceeds our need for them do we have a shot at a genuine relationship together.” (97)

“All my anxiety and fear and guilt have peeled away, as if they were layers of clothing I didn’t know I was wearing. I thought they were part of my skin the whole time, but it runs out they were someone else’s hand-me-downs.” (105)

“I used to think that intelligence came from books and knowledge and rational thought. But that’s not intelligence: It’s just information and interpretation. Real intelligence is when your mind and your heart connect. That’s when you see the truth so clearly and unmistakably that you don’t have to think about it.” (105)

“Suddenly there seem to be very few adults in the world, just suffering children and overcompensating adolescents.” (109)

“Continuously complying with someone else’s priorities at the expense of my own is called pathological accommodation.” (134)

“If you add up all the people who’ve cheated in their relationships, that’s tens of millions of customers in the U.S. alone. Now add to that the even huger number of people who watch porn, and this is the smartest business plan in the world. If they turn being male and horny into some kind of brain cancer that’s covered by health insurance, they’ll be billionaires.” (139)

“Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was so notorious for cheating on his wife with attractive women who attended sobriety meetings that his colleagues later started calling this type of lechery the thirteenth step.” (143)

“No matter what your point of view may be, you can always find someone with a Ph.D to support it.” (144)

“It was the Catholic CHurch that began a relentless campaign to make monogamy and lifelong marriages inviolable institutions in the ninth century.” (163)

“We have so many contradictory, repressive, self-limiting beliefs about sexuality – and almost every one of them stems from a pathological need to dictate to someone else what they are and aren’t allowed to do with their body and heart.” (166)

“Loneliness is holding in a joke because you have no one to share it with.” (175)

“Perhaps just as there are cults around religion, so too are there cults around intimacy. But instead of monotheists, pantheists, and atheists, there are monogamists, polyamorists, and celibates. Each belief system comes with its own rituals, whether they be twelve steps, pujas, exclusivity, adultery, or arguing about money every night.” (182)

“Guys bring their dating problems on themselves. They program their daughter with an aversion to men and sex for fear that she’ll meet someone just like her father, then they meet someone else’s daughter and expect her to just jump into bed without anxiety or reservation.” (192)

“When your wife is tired of making the effort to understand you, when she’s fed up with hearing the same stories coming out of your mouth, when she holds so much resentment that it poisons every conversation, when she’s nicer to telemarketers than she is to you, when the only time she’s passionate with anyone anymore is when she’s criticizing you – that’s when you want a mistress.” (217)

“Once fear of loss is taken away, you get past jealousy.” (221)

“Some people live in an endless on-and-off relationship with control. Either they’re trying to exert it over their lives – by getting obsessive about a diet, a belief system, a phobia, a hobby, a need for order, a twelve-step program – or they’re completely out of control, making a mess of their lives.” (230)

“Any good Jungian therapist will tell you, you’re not supposed to repress the shadow in the first place. That’s when bad things happen. The goal is to integrate it.” (230)

“I used to think that a good relationship meant always getting along. But the secret, I realize, is that when one person shuts down or throws a fit, the other needs to stay in the adult ego state. If both people descended to the wounded child or adapted adolescent, that’s when all the forces of relationship drama and destruction are unleashed.” (246)

“Relationships are about giving, not getting.” (264)

“Life is a learned skill, but instead of teaching it, our culture force-fills developing minds with long division and capital cities-until, at the end of the mandatory period of bondage that’s hyperbolically called school, we’re sent into the world knowing little about it. And so, left on our own to figure out the most important parts of life, we make mistakes for years until, by the time we’ve learned enough from our stumbling to be effective human beings, it’s time for us to die.” (266)

“I have no idea what the boundary is between taking care of my emotions, wants, and needs and taking care of the emotions, wants, and needs of others.” (281)

“The problem many people have is that the exact quality that originally attracted them to their partner becomes a threat once a serious relationship beings.” (324)

“Most people seem to believe that if a relationship doesn’t last until death, it’s a failure. But the only relationship that’s truly a failure is one that lasts longer than it should. The success of a relationship should be measured by its depth, not by its length.” (334)

“Willard F. Harley writes that a man needs five basic things from his wife: sexual fulfillment, recreational companionship, physical attractiveness, domestic support, and admiration… A woman’s five basic needs are affection, conversation, honesty and openness, financial support, and family commitment.” (334)

“Try is the critical word here, because managing feelings is like tamping lions. No matter how successful you think you are, they’re still ultimately in control.” (342)

“life is a test and you pass if you can be true to yourself.” (347)

“Sex is easy to find – whether through game, money, chance, social proof, or charm. So are affairs, orgies, adventures, and three-month relationships-if you know where to look and are willing to go there. But love is rare.” (350)

“Evidently, if you have long receptors in the brain’s reward center for the hormone vasopressin, then you’re more likely to be monogamous. If not, then you’re a born player.” (363)

“The person who is too smart to love is truly an idiot.” (365)

“Our lives are like children’s building-block games in which objects are stacked one by one on top of each other. You can build the tower to a certain height without a problem, but as it continues to grow, eventually the instability of the foundation will cause everything to come tumbling down.” (366)

“love is when two (or more) hearts build a safe emotional, mental, and spiritual home that will stand strong no matter how much anyone changes on the inside or the outside. It demands only one things and expects only one thing: that each person be his or her own true self.” (381)

“I realize that I made a mistake by equating variety with freedom. I’m off all social and dating apps and websites. That’s freedom. Less than twenty people have my email address. That’s freedom. My phone barely makes a sound. that’s freedom.” (381)

“It turns out that leaving all my options open has kept me too busy juggling them to really live.” (381)

“The most caring thing to do when they’re upset is simply to ask if they want you to listen, to give advice, to give them space, or to give them loving touch.” (395)

“You can’t change a person unless they’re in diapers.” (400)

Harville Hendrix wrote that the unconscious purpose of a long-term relationship is to finish childhood.” (405)

“True intimacy is when partners stop living in the past – in their trauma history – and start having a relationship with each other in the present moment.” (406)

“In the end, love is not about finding the right person. It’s about becoming the right person>” (408)

“I’ve started thinking of the things my parents didn’t do perfectly as variables that make me an individual rather than as trauma that makes me a patient.” (416)

“It’s tragic. The wounds that humans get are so strong that they’re like robots operating on childhood programming.” (417)

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December 28, 2015

“Saban: The Making of a Coach” Quotes

I recently read “Saban: The Making of a Coach” by Monte Burke. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. If you like the quotes, buy the book here.

“Saban, at a very young age, learned to embrace and love the process of doing.” (16)

“He’s not worried about what you feel about his decisions, he doesn’t care who likes it. He makes every decision based on winning football games. He was unusual like that.” (70)

“His work ethic – the hours, the concentration – demonstrated something: that for all of his social awkwardness and screaming, he gave everything he had to make his team better and win. It showed, in whatever unusual way, a sort of unselfishness, which is perhaps the most important part of leadership. He never asked for more than he gave, but what he gave was sometimes nearly impossible for his assistants to match.” (155)

“The thing you figure out about Nick real early is that it’s fourth-and-one every second of every minute of every hour of every day.” (174)

“When it came ot the football program, “the Process” was all about doing what you could control, every minute of every day. The bigger picture wasn’t the focus, but all those little steps taken that filled it out. Saban sharply defined everyone’s role within the program and worked relentlessly to eliminate what he called “clutter.”” (230)

“His coaches didn’t visualize the relief and the joy they would feel on National Signign Day, when that five-start player they’d spent a year recruiting joined the team. Instead, they did the little things every day to help further the possibility of that result.” (230)

“Saban constantly admonished his players not to think about lifting a trophy at the end of the season, but focus on conditioning, reps in practice, and on keeping their grades up to remain eligible to play. Control what you can control, and find fulfillment within that.” (230)

“William Gass once joked in his novel The Tunnel, “If Americans ever had a dictator, they’d call him Coach.”” (290)

“The entire “Process” was the idea that the focus wasn’t on the past or the future, but the present, and that every single action one took in life mattered.” (296)

“Those who knew Saban had long realized that two of the most significant aspects of his career – his “Process” and his near-constant job-hopping-were intertwined at one crucial juncture: THey both, at their essence, were about the fact that Saban found it “more invigorating to want than to have,” as David Foster Wallace once wrote.” (302)

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September 28, 2015September 22, 2015

“Ally” Quotes

I recently read “Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide” by Michael B. Oren. The quotes I found most interesting are below. If you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“The Arabs were once dependent on American oil.” (39)

“The single best American insight into the Middle East – by former Union Army General-in-Chief George McClellan, who in 1874 warned that the United States would never understand its peoples “so long as we judge them by the rules we are accustomed to apply to ourselves.” (40)

“Accustomed to leaders like McCain, crusty old soldiers and seasoned pols, Israelis could not understand why Americans would choose a candidate lacking in any military, administrative, or foreign policy experience. Overweight, short, bald or bespectacled candidates stand little chance in a U.S. presidential election, but Israelis readily voted for portly Ariel Sharon, diminutive Ehud Barak, and Menachem Begin, who was both follically and visually challenged. Americans prefer their presidents to be eloquent, attractive, and preferably strong-jawed. Such qualities, in the life-and-death stakes of Israel, are irrelevant.” (43)

“Unlike AMericans who salute rank – a policeman is always “officer,” and a former president is still “Mr. President” – Israelis salute the person. The commander of the IDF is not called “general” and the chief justice of the SUpreme Court is not “your Honor.” Rather, they are addressed by their first names and, more frequently, their nicknames. This informality, a vestige perhaps of the biblical contempt for kings or the time when Israel’s population was minuscule, removes the interpersonal barriers. But it also erases private space.” (73)

“On American television, naive characters often had a southern drawl – but naifs on Israeli TV frequently sound like Americans.” (73)

“Far more than achieving a historic peace, possibly winning the Nobel Prize, and guaranteeing his place in diplomatic history, Abbas wanted to remain in power and stay alive.” (81)

“America’s new policies set conditions for talks that Israel could never meet and that Palestinians could not ignore. For the first time in the history of the U.S.-Israel alliance, the White House denied the validity of a previous presidential commitment.” (81)

“Henry Wotton observed, “An ambassador is a man of virtue sent abroad to lie for his country.” (89)

“Vernon Jordan told me that Obama was not Israel’s chief problem. Rather it was America’s economic crisis, which showed scant sign of abating, and its retreat from global leadership.” (93)

“Abracadabra means ‘I speak therefore I create.’”

“From Obama’s autobiographical works arose the image of an individual who had overcome adversity early in life, who displayed resilience and contempt for weakness but also a cold-blooded need for control. Projecting that need, not surprisingly, made his administration the most centralized since World War II, with many key decisions made in the Oval Office.” (97)

“Perhaps, too, Obama’s rejection by not one but two Muslim father figures informed his outreach to Islam.” (98)

“Instinctively, human beings seek order in the universe and, in politics, a clear formula for decision making. In reality, though, randomness – whims, quirks, gaffes – determines much of the relations between individuals, just as it does among nations.” (98)

“Israelis, very few of whom own firearms, frequently asked me why Americans needed so many guns when they had such a powerful army. “They need guns to protect them from the army,” I explained.” (106)

“in America, less than half of a percent of the population volunteers for the armed forces.” (108)

“Most Jewish holidays, an old joke goes, can be reduced to nine words: “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.” (120)

“Golda Meir said, “We Jews have a secret weapon, we have nowhere else to go.” (135)

“Israelis have difficulty understanding America’s missionizing zeal and the belief – hardwired into the nation’s identity – that the United states was created not only for its own good but for all of humanity’s.” (196)

“I once heard Obama say, “Mediating between Israelis and Palestinians is harder than mediating between Democrats and Republicans.” (207)

“The last thing I expected was to be accosted by a ninety-year-old Jewish woman whose head barely reached my belt. “I like you, but I don’t like everything your country does,” she growled.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” I courteously replied, “but do you like everything your country does?”
“No.” She wagged her finger in my face. “But your country must be perfect.” (254)

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