Recruiting Animal

Thatcher's Credo

From: David Olive, Toronto Star

An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay; live within your means; put a nest egg by for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police.”

 

Clean Up After Work

From: Thanh Pham

In restaurants, cleaning the grill is very important.

Before the restaurant closes, the cooks always clean the grill so the next day when they come in it is ready for use.

When you clean up your work space, the next time you use it there will be no obstacle to clear before you can start work.

Comment: Pham gives this a fancy name: Clearing To Neutral. I suppose a novel frame might encourage people to see something humdrum as intriguing.

 

 

Too Stupid To Fail

From: Bryan Goldberg (edited)

My group of friends didn't have a single asset when we went out to raise our angel round.

We had no money in the bank. None of us could code. Our collective work experience was the sort of crap that looks bad on a founder’s resume.

Even our pitch book was laughably clunky in its design.

But we had one asset that carried the day: we had never heard the mantra, “Failure is OK” -- probably because we never went to any Silicon Valley networking parties.

It also helped that TechCrunch barely existed back then.

 

Success Without Talent

From: CNNmoney Why talent is overrated. Geoff Colvin, October 21, 2008 (edited)

Deliberate Practice is a skill-improvement technique. It's creators claim that success is not based on talent but intensive practice of specific skills. Here's how you do it.

1. Isolate one aspect of performance.

Identify a well-defined element of your performance that needs to be improved. Be very specific and focus on that one thing until it improves.

You Can Do Anything

From: Bob Dylan, Chronicles - Volume 1, Page 90

The dominant myth of the day (early 1960s) seemed to be that anybody could do anything, even go to the moon.

You could do whatever you wanted - in the ads and in the articles, ignore your limitations, defy them.

If you were an indecisive person, you could become a leader and wear lederhosen.

If you were a housewife you could become a glamour girl with rhinestone sunglasses.

Are you slow witted? No worries - you can be an intellectual genius.

If you're old, you can be young. Anything was possible. It was almost a war against the self.

Why we like heroes

From: Sasson, The Birth of Moses

Everyone loves a hero. Be it Wonder Woman or Muhammad Ali, a true champion is always inspiring.

Religious heroes are particularly intriguing, as they are expressions of the super-human effort required to reach extraordinary heights of spiritual potential.

Moses and the Buddha are worthy examples — both showing fearlessness in the face of tremendous odds and perseverance in achieving their goals.

 

The Value of Tragedy

From The Tyranny of the Happy Ending

The best tragedies show us that a great spirit is still great even when it doesn’t win, that aspiration, courage and hope, however doomed, are virtues in their own right.

That’s why reading (or seeing) “Hamlet” isn’t actually depressing, although everyone dies in the end and the hero doesn’t even get the girl. Hamlet’s moral struggle has meaning despite all that.

History is written by the losers

From: A Nation Conceived in Defeat (completely edited)

History written by victors is shallow. It has a limited time frame. The key message is: thanks to our merits we achieved victory.

They don't have to figure out why they won. The obvious answer is that they are doing the right thing.

History written by the vanquished is different. There can be no simple celebration of merits. They have to figure out what went wrong.

Therefore, they search for middle or long-term factors and draw more lessons from history than their opponents.

Defeat, then, becomes the wellspring of intellectual progress.

Good Grooming and Success

From: Voxxi

Comment: That's an incredibly shallow comment. If she's a good person, it shouldn't matter whether she has "sex appeal".

Comment: We want to have sex with good looking persons, not with Mother Theresa, it is a fact of life.

Comment: If I were Holly Petraeus, I would consider this affair a wake up a call and take action. I would:

1. Get on the elliptical machine daily.

2. Hire a trainer and get on an exercise and healthy food regimen

3.Go to George of the Four Seasons in DC (or another top hairstylist) and get a plan for my hair cut and color and implement it how he suggests. Get a French manicure while you're there.

4. Find a great makeup artist and implement a plan for day and evening makeup

5. Hire an image consultant to do a complete wardrobe redesign. You can make some immediate impacting changes and then more as you see the results from the work out plan . Even conservative clothes manufacturers like Talbots have great looking, eye catching outfits.

I would implement all five steps immediately - you can afford to do it.

Scalzi on Being Poor

Being poor is hoping you’ll be invited for dinner.

Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime.

Being poor is needing that 35-cent raise.

Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.

Read the rest here