Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you. Specific kno4.5 Stars
Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you. Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now. Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others. Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.
Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment. Judgment requires experience but can be built faster by learning foundational skills. Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it. Work as hard as you can. Even though who you will work with and what you work on are more important than how you work. Become the best in the world at what you do.
Keep redefining what you do until this is true. Apply specific knowledge with leverage and eventually you will get what you deserve. Money is how we transfer wealth. Money is social credits. It is the ability to have credits and debits of other people’s time. Wealth is the thing you want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory, the robots, cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that’s running at night serving other customers. Wealth is even the money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets and into other businesses. Technology is the set of things that don't quite work yet. Once something works, it's no longer technology.
The most interesting thing to keep in mind about new forms of leverage is they are permissionless. They don't require somebody else's permission for you to use them or succeed. Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. Judgment - especially demonstrated judgment with high accountability and a clear track record - is critical. There are fundamentally two huge games in life that people play. One is the money game. Because money is not going to solve all your problems but it's going to solve all of your money problems. The other game is the status game. Status is your ranking in the social hierarchy. It is a zero-sum game.
Those attracting wealth creation are often just seeking status. The problem is to win at a status game, you have to out somebody else down. That's why you should avoid status games in your life -they make you into an angry, combative person. You're always fighting to put other people down, to put yourself and the people you like up. Lusting for money is bad for us because it is a bottomless pit. It will always occupy your mind. If you love money and you make it, there's never enough. There is never enough because the desire is turned on and doesn't turn off at some number. It's a fallacy to think it turns off at some number.
The punishment for the love of money is delivered at the same time as the money. As you make money, you just want even more and you become paranoid and fearful of losing what you do have. There are really four kinds of luck: the first kind is blind luck where one gets lucky because something completely out of their control happened. This includes fortune, fate, etc. Then there's luck through persistence, hard work, hustle and motion. This is when are running around creating opportunities. You're generating a lot of energy, you're doing a lot to stir things up.
You’re just generating enough force, hustle and energy for luck to find you. A third way is you become very good at spotting luck. If you are very skilled in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in your field and other people who aren’t attuned to it won’t notice. So you become sensitive to luck. The last kind of luck is the weirdest, hardest kind, where you build a unique character, a unique brand, a unique mindset, which causes luck to find you. Your character and your reputation are things that you can build, which will let you take advantage of opportunities other people may characterize as lucky, but you know it wasn’t luck.
Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment. They're highly linked: knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and then making the right decision to capitalize on that. The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level. The moment of suffering - when you're in pain - is a moment of truth. It is a moment where you're forced to embrace reality the way it actually is. Then you can make meaningful change and progress. You can only make progress when you're starting with the truth. There are two attractive lessons about suffering in the long term. It can make you accept the world the way it is. The other lesson is it can make your ego change in an extremely hard way.
If you had two choices to make and they're relatively equal choices, take the path more difficult and more painful in the short term. If you start with the originals as your foundation, then you have enough of a worldview and understanding that you won't fear any book. Then you can just learn. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing and when nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something. Happiness is what's there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life. Real happiness only comes as a side-effect of peace.
Most of it is going to come from acceptance, not from changing your external environment. Anxiety is just a series of running thoughts. At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with. All you should do is what you want to do. If you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them, you get to listen to the little voice inside your head that wants to do things a certain way. Then, you get to be you. If you make the easy choices right now, your overall life will be a lot harder. An emotion is our evolved biology predicting the future impact of a current event. The mind itself is our evolved biology predicting the future impact of a current event.
The mind itself is a muscle - it can be trained and conditioned. It has been haphazardly conditioned by society to be out of our control. Life is going to play out the way it's going to play out. There will be some good and some bad. Most of it is actually just up to your interpretation. You're born, you have a set of sensory experiences and then you die. How you choose to interpret those experiences is up to you, and different people interpret them in different ways. When we're older, we're a collection of thousands of habits constantly running subconsciously. We have a little bit of extra brainpower in our neocortex for solving new problems. You become your habits.
Having the skill of persuasion is important because if you can influence your fellow human beings, you can get a lot done. Mathematics helps with all the complex and difficult things in life. If you want to make money, if you want to do science, if you want to understand game theory or politics or economics or investments or computers, all of these have mathematics at the core. It's a foundational language of nature. Anger is a way to signal as strongly as you can to the other party you're capable of violence. Anger is a precursor to violence. Anger is a contract you make with yourself to be in physical, mental and emotional turmoil until reality changes.
Disturbing to the core. Verity is pitched as a thriller and a suspense book, which it definitely is. But the main character VERITY is a full on creep,Disturbing to the core. Verity is pitched as a thriller and a suspense book, which it definitely is. But the main character VERITY is a full on creep, disturbed and twisted to the point that you would hate her from the very beginning.
Verity is not an easy read. I am not really even sure if I can say it was an enjoyable read. But it was brilliant. Amazingly well written and unputdownable, Colleen will leave you questioning everything.
By the end of the book, you'll be detesting all the characters.
Too long for my liking. But great strategies to gain power.
Making a show of one's weakness is actually a very effective strategy, subtle and deceptiveToo long for my liking. But great strategies to gain power.
Making a show of one's weakness is actually a very effective strategy, subtle and deceptive, in the game of power. The use of honesty is indeed a power strategy, intended to convince people of one's noble, good hearted, selfless character. It is a form of persuasion, even a subtle form of coercion. We humans have two contrary selves within us - a lower and a higher. The lower tends to be stronger. It impulses pull us down into emotional reactions and defensive postures, making us feel self righteous and superior to others. It makes us grab for immediate pleasures and distractions, always taking the path of least resistance. It induces us to adapt what other people are thinking, losing ourselves in the group.
We feel the impulses of the higher self when we are drawn out of ourselves, wanting to connect more deeply with others, to absorb our minds in our work, to think instead of react, to follow our own path in life and to discover what makes us unique. The lower is the more animal and reactive side of our nature, and one that we easily slip into. The higher is the more truly human side of our nature, the side that makes us thoughtful and self-aware. Because the higher impulse is weaker, connecting to it requires effect and insight.
Most people are open books. They say what they feel, say out their opinions at every opportunity and constantly reveal their plans and intentions. 1) It is easy and natural to always want to talk about one's feelings and plans for the future. It takes effort to control your tongue and monitor what you reveal. 2) Many believe that by being honest and open they are winning people's hearts and showing their good nature. By being unabashedly open you make yourself so predictable and familiar that it is almost impossible to respect or fear you and power will not accrue to a person who cannot inspire such emotions. The pattern is powerful in that it deceives the other person into expecting the opposite of what you are really doing. People feel superior to the person whose actions they can predict. If you show them who is in control by playing against their expectations, you both gain their respect and tighten your hold on their fleeting attention.
An air of mystery can make the mediocre appear intelligent and profound. If you find yourself trapped, cornered and on the defensive on some situation, try a simple experiment: do something that cannot be easily explained or interpreted. Choose a simple action, but carry it out in a way that unsettles your opponent, a way with many possible interpretation making your intentions obscure. Do not let your air of mystery be slowly transformed into a reputation of deceit. Learn to use the knowledge of the past and you will look like a genius, even when you are really just a clever borrower. The essence of power is the ability to keep the initiative, to get others to react to your moves, to keep your opponent and those around you on the defensive.
Two things must happen to place you in this position: you yourself must learn to master your emotions and never to influenced by anger; meanwhile however you must play on people's natural tendency to react angrily when pushed and baited. In the long run, the ability to make others come to you is a weapon far more powerful than any tool of aggression. When you suspect you are in the presence of an inferior, don't argue, don't try to help, don't pass the person on to your friends or you will become enmeshed. Flee the inferior's presence or suffer the consequences. Never associate with those who share your defects - they will reinforce everything that holds you back. Only create associations with positive affinities.
The ultimate power is the power to get people to do as you wish. The ultimate power is the power to do as you wish. When you can do this without having to force people or hurt them, when they willingly grant you what you desire, then your power is untouchable. The best way to achieve this position is to create a relationship of dependence. Do not be one of the many who mistakenly believe that the ultimate form of power is independence. Self interest is the lever that will move people. Once you make them see how you can in some way meet their needs or advance their cause, their resistance to your requests for help will magically fall away.
At each step on the way to acquire power, you must train yourself to think your way inside the other person's mind to see their needs and interests, to get rid of the screen of your feelings that obscure the truth. Master this act and there will be no limits to what you can accomplish. Everything in the world depends on absence and presence. A strong presence will draw power and attention to you - you shine more brightly than those around you. But a point is inevitably reached where too much presence creates the opposite effect: the more you are seen and heard from the more your value degrades. You become a habit. No matter how hard you try to be different, subtly without your knowing why, people respect you less and less. At the right moment you must learn to withdraw yourself before they unconsciously push you away. It is a game of hide and seek.
The ability to measure people and to know who you're dealing with is the most important skill of all in gathering and conserving power. Without it you are blind: not only you will offend the wrong people, you will choose the wrong types to work on and will think you are flattering people when are actually insulting them. Power greatly depends on appearances, so you must learn the tricks that will enhance your image. Refusing to commit to a person or group is one of these. When you hold yourself back, you incur not anger but a kind of respect. This aura of power only grows with time: as your reputation for independence grows, more and more people will come to desire you, wanting to be the one who gets you to commit.
If there is something unpleasant or unpopular that needs to be done, it is far too risky for you to do the work yourself. You need a cat's paw - someone who does the dirty and dangerous work for you. The cat's paw grabs what you need, hurts whom you need hurt, and keeps people from noticing that you are the one responsible. Let someone be the executioner, or the bearer of bad news while you bring only joy and glad tidings. Truly powerful people keep their hands clean. Only good things surround them and the only announcements they make are of glorious achievements. People are not interested in the truth about change. They do not want to hear that it has come from hard work, or from anything as banal as exhaustion, boredom or depression, they are dying to believe in something romantic, otherworldly.
The want to hear of angels and out of body experiences. Indulge them. Hint at the mystical source of some personal change, wrap it up in ethereal colors and a cultlike following will form around you. Boldness should never be the strategy behind all your actions. It is a tactical instrument to be used at the right movement. Plan and think ahead and make the final element the bold move that will bring you success. As a person of power, you must research and practice endlessly before appearing in public, onstage or anywhere else. Never expose the sweat and labor behind your poise. Some think such exposure will demonstrate their diligence and honesty, but it actually makes them look weaker - as if anyone who practiced and worked for it could do what they had done or as if they weren't really up to the job.
Keep your effort and your tricks to yourself and you seem to have the grace and ease of God. Leaders who try to dissolve that distance through a false chumminess gradually lose the ability to inspire loyalty, fear or love. When you force the pace out of fear and impatience, you create a nest of problems that require fixing and you end up taking much longer than if you had taken your time. Sour grapes approach - if there is something you want but that you realize you cannot have, the worst thing you can do is draw attention to your disappointment by complaining about it. An infinitely more powerful tactic is to act as if it never really interested you in the first place.
When you are attacked by an inferior, deflect people's attention by making it clear that the attack was never registered. Look away or answer sweetly, showing how little the attack concerns you. Similarly, when you yourself have committed a blunder, the best response is often to make less of your mistake by treating it lightly. Never show that something has affected you, or that you are offended - that only shows you have acknowledged a problem. Your search for power depends on shortcuts. You must always circumvent people's suspicions, their perverse desire to resist your will. To show your frustration is to show that you have lost your power to shape events; the powerful never reveal this kind of weakness.
Powerful people judge everything by what it costs not just in money but in time, dignity and peace of mind. Money has to circulate to bring power. To give a gift is to imply that you and recipients are equal at the very least or that you are the recipient's superior. The mirror reflects reality but it is also the perfect tool for deception: when you mirror your enemies, doing as they do, they cannot figure our your strategy. The mirror effect mocks and humiliates them, making them overreact. By holding up a mirror to their psyches, you seduce them with the illusion that you share their values; by holding up a mirror to their actions, you teach them a lesson. In the moral effect, you mirror what other have done to you, and do so in a way that makes them realize you are doing to them exactly what they did to you. The fact that the past is dead and buried gives you the freedom to reinterpret it. To support your cause, tinker with the facts. The past is a test in which you can safely insert your own lines.
Egypt is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that have organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass Egypt is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that have organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. Countries such as US and Great Britain became rich because their citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society where political rights were much more broadly distributed, where the government was accountable and responsive to citizens and where the great mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities. It took the Virginia Company twelves years to learn its first lesson that what had worked for the Spanish in Mexico and in Central and South America would not work in the north.
The rest of the seventeenth century saw a long series of struggles over the second lesson: that the only option for an economically viable colony was to create institutions that gave the colonists incentives to invest and to work hard. While economic institutions are critical for determining whether a country is poor or prosperous, it is politics and political institutions that determine what economic intuitions a country has. The Constitution of the United States did not create a democracy by modern standards. Who could vote in elections was left up to the individual states to determine.
No state enfranchised women or slaves, and as property and wealth restrictions were lifted on white men, racial franchises explicitly disenfranchising black man were introduced. Slavery of course was deemed constitutional when the Constitution of the United States was written in Philadelphia and the most sordid negotiation concerned the division of the seats in the House of Representatives among the states. The compromise was that in apportioning seats of the House of the Representatives, a slave would count as three-fifths of a free person. New fixes were added overtime - for example the Missouri Compromise, an arrangement where one proslavery and one antislavery state were always added to the union together to keep the balance in the Senate between those for and those against slavery.
The situation in Mexico was very different. If the United States experienced five years of political instability between 1860 and 1860, Mexico experience almost nonstop instability for the first fifty years of independence. Such instability led to highly insecure property rights. It also led to a severe weakening of the Mexican state, which now had little authority and ability to raise taxes or provide public services. The motivation behind the Mexican declaration of independence was to protect the set of economic institutions developed during the colonial period. These institutions by basing the society on the exploitation of indigenous people and the creation of monopolies, blocked the economic incentives and initiatives of the great mass of the population.
As the United States began to experience the Industrial Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century, Mexico got poorer. We live in an unequal world. In rich countries, individuals are healthier, live longer and are much better educated. They also have access to a range of amenities and options in life from vacations to career paths that people in poor countries can only dream of. Governments do no arbitrarily arrest or harass them; on the contrary the governments provide services including education, health care, roads, law and order. Geographic factors are unhelpful for explaining not only the differences we see across various parts of the world today but also why many nations such as Japan and China stagnate for long periods and then start a rapid growth process.
Market economy is an abstraction that is meant to capture a situation in which all the individuals and firms can freely produce, buy and sell any products or services that they wish. When these circumstances are not present there is a 'market failure'. Such failures provide the basic for a theory of world inequality since the more that market failure goes unaddressed, the poorer a country is likely to be. Explaining world inequality needs economics to understand how different types of policies and social arrangements affect economic incentives and behavior but it also needs politics.
Inclusive economic institutions foster economic activity, productivity growth and economic prosperity. Secure private property rights are central since only those with such rights will be willing to invest and increase productivity. Extractive political institutions concentrate power in the hands of the narrow elite and place few constraints on the exercise of this power. Economic institutions are then often structured by this elite to extract resources from the rest of the society. Extractive economic institutions thus naturally accompany extractive political institutions. Inclusive political institutions vesting power broadly would tend to uproot economic institutions that expropriate the resources of the many, erect entry barriers and suppress the functioning of markets so that only a few benefit.
Nations fail when they have extractive economic institutions supported by extractive political institutions that impede and even block economic growth. The main barrier to political centralization is again a form of fear from change: any clan, group or politician attempting to centralize power in the state will also be centralizing power in their own hands and this is likely to meet the ire of other class, groups and individuals who would be the political losers of the process. Lack of political centralization means not only lack of law and order in much of a territory but also there being many actors with sufficient powers to block or disrupt things and the fear of their opposition and violent reaction will often deter many would - be centralizers.
Political centralization is likely only when one group of people is sufficiently more powerful than others to build a state. Economies based on the representation of labor and systems such as slavery and selfdom are notoriously noninnovative. This is true form the ancient world to the modern era. The feat of creative destruction is the main reason why there was no sustained increase in living standards between Neolithic and Industrial revolutions. Technological innovation makes human societies prosperous, but also involves the replacement of the old with the new and the destruction of the economic privileges and political power of certain people.
Society needs newcomers to introduce the most radical innovations and these newcomers and the creative destruction they wreak must often overcome several sources of resistance, including that form powerful rulers and elites. Inclusive economic institutions lead to a more equitable distribution of resources than extractive institutions. As such, they empower the citizens at large and thus create a more level playing field, even when it comes to the fight for power. Inclusive economic and political institutions do not emerge by themselves. They are often the outcome of significant conflict between elites resisting economic growth and political charge and those wishing to limit the economic and political power of existing elites.
The internal logic of oligarchies and in fact of all hierarchical organizations is that they will reproduce themselves not only when the same group is in power but even when an entirely new group takes control. Extractive political institutions create few constraints on the exercise of power so there are essentially no institutions to restrain the use and abuse of power by those overthrowing previous dictators and assuming control of the state and extractive institutions imply that there are great profits and wealth to be made merely by controlling power, expropriating assets of others and setting up monopolies. Despite the vicious circle, extractive institutions can be replaced by inclusive ones.
A confluence of factors in particular a critical juncture coupled with a broad coalition of those pushing for reform or other propitious existing institutions is often necessary for a nation to make strides toward more inclusive institutions. Modernization theory is both incorrect and unhelpful for thinking about how to confront the major problems of extractive institutions in failing nations. The str0ngest piece of evidence in favor of modernization theory is that rich nations are the ones that have democratic regimes, respect civil and human rights and enjoy functioning markets and generally inclusive economic institutions. Yet interpreting this association as supporting modernization theory ignores the major effect of inclusive economic and political institutions on economic growth.
Through many millennia of Chinese civilization, China was never obliged to deal with other countries or civilizations that were comparable to it in scThrough many millennia of Chinese civilization, China was never obliged to deal with other countries or civilizations that were comparable to it in scale and sophistication. Though China and Japan shared a number of core cultural and political institutions, neither was prepared to recognize the other's superiority; their solution was to curtail contact for centuries at a time. China acquired no overseas colonies and shared relatively little interest in the countries beyond its coast. It was for centuries the world's most productive economy and most populous trading area. The methods by which it was unified and periodically overturned and reunified again were occasionally brutal.
Chinese history witnessed its share of sanguinary rebellions and dynastic tyrants. With distinctive traditions and millennial habits of superiority, China entered the modern age a singular kind of empire: a state claiming universal relevance for its culture and institutions but making few efforts to proselytize; the wealthiest country in the world but one that was indifferent to foreign trade and technological innovation; a culture of cosmopolitanism overseen by a political elite oblivious to the onset of the Western age of exploration; and a political unit of unparalleled geographic extent that was unaware of the technological and historical currents that would soon threaten its existence. The results of the interplay between Western overwhelming force and Chinese psychological management were two treaties negotiated, the Treaty of Nanjing and the Supplementary Treaty of the Bogue.
It provided the Britain for payment of a $6 million indemnity by China, the cession of Hong Kong and the opening of five coastal 'treaty ports' in which Western residence and trade would be permitted. This effectively dismantled the "Canton System" by which the Chinese court had regulated trade with the West and confined it to licensed merchants. Within the space of a decade, the Middle Kingdom had gone from preeminence to being an object of contending colonial forces. Poised between two eras and two different conceptions of international relations, China strove for a new identity, and above all to reconcile the value that marked its greatness with the technology and commerce on which it would have to base its security.
Mao's approach to preemption differed in the extraordinary attention he paid to psychological elements. His motivating force was less to inflict a decisive military first blow than to change the psychological balance, not so much to defeat the enemy as to alter his calculus of risks. Ideology had brought Beijing and Moscow together and ideology drove them apart again. The Soviet Union regarded the Communist world as a single strategic entity whose leadership was in Moscow. It had established satellite regimes in Eastern Europe that were dependent on Soviet military and to some extent economic support. It seemed natural to the Soviet Politburo that the same pattern of dominance should prevail in Asia. In terms of Chinese history, cultural differences exacerbated latent tensions - especially since the Soviet leaders were generally oblivious of Chinese historic sensitivities.
As the 1960s progressed, even Mao began to recognize the potential perils of China were multiplying. Along its vast borders, China faced a potential enemy in the Soviet Union; a humiliated adversary in India; a massive American deployment and an escalating war in Vietnam; self-proclaimed governments-in-exile in Taipei and the Tibetan enclave of northern India; a historic opponent in Japan; and across the Pacific an American that viewed China as an implacable adversary. Sino-American diplomacy within a year moved from irreconcilable conflict to a visit to Beijing by a presidential emissary to prepare a visit by the President himself. It did so by sidestepping the rhetoric of two decades and staying focused on the fundamental strategic objective of a geopolitical dialogue leading to a recasting of the Cold War international order.
To Nixon, the opening of China was part of an overall strategic design not a shopping list of mutual irritations. Chinese leaders pursued a parallel approach. Invocations of returning to an existing international order were meaningless to them, if only because they did not consider the existing international system, which they had no hand in forming, as relevant to them. They had never conceived their security to reside in the legal arrangement of a community of sovereign states. When Zhou wrote about reestablishing friendship between the Chinese and American peoples, he described an attitude needed to foster a new international equilibrium, not a final state of the relationship between peoples.
What was sought, rather, was a world in which China could find security and progress through a kind of combative coexistence in which readiness to fight was given equal pride of place to the concept of coexistence. One cultural trait regularly invoked by Chinese leaders was their historic perspective - the ability, indeed the necessity, to think of time in categories different from the West's. Whatever an individual Chinese leader achieves is brought about in a timeframe that represents a smaller fraction of his society's total experience than any other leader in the world. The duration and scale of the Chinese past allow Chinese leaders to use the mantle of an almost limitless history to evoke a certain modesty in their opposite numbers. Nixon's visit to China is one of the few occasions where a state visit brought about a seminal change in international affairs.
The reentry of China into the global diplomatic game and the increased strategic options for the United States gave a new vitality and flexibility to the international system. Nixon's visit was followed by comparable visits by the leaders of other Western democracies and Japan. The adoption of the anti-hegemony classes in the Shanghai Communiques signified a de facto shift of alliances. Though at first confined to Asia, the undertaking was expanded a year later to include the rest of the world. Consultation between China and the United States reached a level of intensity rare even among formal allies.
What the opening to China accomplished was an opportunity to increase cooperation where interests were congruent and to mitigate differences where they existed. The reward for Sino-American rapprochement would not be a state of perpetual friendship or a harmony of vales but a rebalancing of the global equilibrium that would require constant tending and perhaps in time produce a greater harmony of values. In that process, each side would be the guardian of its own interests. And each would seek to use the other as a source of leverage in its relations with Moscow. Ideology would be relegated to domestic management; it took a leave from foreign policy. The ideological armistice was of course valid as long as objectives remained compatible. After the opening to China, Moscow started to compete for Washington's favor.
Contacts between the nuclear superpowers multiplied. While the United States clearly signaled that it considered China as essential component of the international order and would support it if threatened, it also had a separate and more strategic option in Moscow. Mao introduced the "Three World": The United States and the Soviet Union belonged to the first world. Countries such as Japan and Europe were part of the second world. All the underdeveloped countries constituted the Third World to which China belonged as well.
Deng Xiaoping abolished the communes and fostered provincial autonomy to introduce what he called 'socialism with Chinese characteristics. The China of today - with the world's second largest economy and largest volume of foreign exchange reserves, and with multiple cities boasting skyscrapers taller than Empire State Building - is a testimonial to Deng's vision, tenacity and common sense. Societies operate by standards of average performance. They sustain themselves by practicing the familiar. But they progress through leaders with a vision of the necessary and the courage to undertake a course where benefits at first reside largely on mutual cooperation.
China had invaded Vietnam to 'teach it a lesson' after Vietnamese troops had occupied Cambodia in response to a series of border clashes with the Khmer Rogue which has taken over Cambodia in 1975 and in ultimate pursuit of Hanoi's goal of creating an Indochinese Federation. China had done so in defiance of a mutual defense treaty between Hanoi and Moscow signed less than a month earlier. The invasion served its fundamental objective: when the Soviet Union failed to respond it demonstrated the limitation of its strategic reach. A principal difference between Chinese and Western diplomatic strategy is the reaction to perceived vulnerability.
The Third Vietnam War may thus be counted as another example in which Chinese statesmen succeeded in achieving long-term, big-picture strategic objectives without the benefit of a military establishment comparable to that of their adversaries. Equanimity in the face of materially superior forces has been deeply imagined in Chinese strategic thinking - as is apparent from the parallels with China's decision to intervene in the Korean War. Both Chinese decisions were directed against what Beijing perceived to be a gathering danger - a hostile power's consolidation of bases at multiple points along the Chinese periphery. In both cases, Beijing believed that if the hostile power were allowed to complete its design, China would be encircled and thus remain in a permanent state of vulnerability.
Seemingly regional issues - in the first case the American rebuff of North Korea, in the second case Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia - was treated as the focus of the struggles in the world. Despite some uncomfortable conservations and bruised egos, the United States, the People's Republic and Taiwan all emerged from the early 1980s with their core interests generally fulfilled. Beijing was disappointed with Washington's flexible interpretation of the communique; but on the whole the People's Republic achieved another decade of American assistance as it built its economic and military power and its capacity to play an independent role in world affairs.
Washington was able to pursue amicable relations with both sides of the Taiwan Strait and to cooperate with China on common anti-Soviet imperatives such as intelligence sharing and support for the Afghan insurgency. Taiwan obtained a bargaining position from which to negotiate with Beijing. Soviet retreats gave Chinese diplomacy a new flexibility to maneuver. Chinese leaders spoke less of military containment and began to explore their scope for a new diplomacy with Moscow. They continued to list three conditions for improving relations with the Soviets: evacuation of Cambodia; ending Soviet troop concentration in Siberia and Mongolia along the northern Chinese borders; and evacuation of Afghanistan.
These demands were in the process of being fulfilled largely by the changes in the balance of power that made Soviet forward positions untenable and the decisions to withdraw inevitable. The United States received reassurances that China was not ready to move toward Moscow - the Chinese proving that two sides could play at triangular diplomacy. The reassurances in any event had a dual purpose: they affirmed continued adherence to the established strategy of preventing Soviet expansion but they also served to bring China's growing options before the United States. As the Reagan years ended, the situation i Asia was the most tranquil it had been in decades.
A half century of war and revolution in China, Japan, Korea, Indochina and maritime Southeast Asia had given way to a system of Asian states on essentially Westphalian lines - following the pattern of sovereign states emerging in Europe at the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648. With the exception of periodic provocations from the impoverished and isolated North Korea and the insurgency against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, Asia was now a world of discrete states with sovereign governments, recognized borders and a nearly universal trait agreement to refrain from involvement in each other's domestic political and ideological alignments.
A new era of Asian economic reform and prosperity was taking root - one that in the 21st century may well turn the region to its historic role as the world's most productive and prosperous continent. Deng's Reform and Opening Up was designed to overcome China's built-in central planning. He and his associates embarked on market economics, decentralized decision making and opening to the outside world - all unprecedented changes. To facilitate the process, China welcomes foreign investment in part through Special Economic Zones on the coast, where enterprises where given wider latitude and investors were granted special conditions.
Systematic decentralization followed. Agricultural communes were abandoned by encouraging the so-called responsibility centers which in practice amounted to family farming. For other enterprises a distinction was elaborated between ownership and management. Ownership world remain in the hands of the state; management would be left largely to managers. Agreements between the authorities and the manages would define the function of each with substantial latitudes for managers.
The student unrest at Tiananmen Square started as a demand for remedies to specific grievances. But the occupation of the main square of a country's capital even when completely peaceful is also a tactic to demonstrate the impotence of the government, to weaken it and to tempt it into rash acts, putting it at a disadvantage. The People's Republic of China had never claimed to function as a Western-style democracy and indeed had consistently rejected the insinuation. Now it emerged in the media of the world as an arbitrary authoritarian state crushing popular aspirations to human rights. In this atmosphere, the entire Sino-US relationships including the established practice of regular consultations between the two countries came under attack from across a wide potential spectrum.
The basic direction of a society is shaped by its values, which define its ultimate goals. At the same time, accepting the limits of one's capacities is one of the test of statesmanship; it implies a judgement of the possible. Statesman are judged by their ability to sustain their concepts over time. The attempt to alter the domestic structure of a country of the magnitude of China from the outside is likely to involve vast unintended consequences. At the beginning of the 1990s the total volume of US trade with mainland China was still only half the volume of American trade with Taiwan. By the end of the decade US-China trade had quadrupled and Chinese to the US had increased sevenfold. China was using its increasing cash reserves to invest in US Treasury bonds (and in 2008 became the largest foreign holder of American debt).
In all this China was surging toward a new world role, with interests in every corner of the globe and integrated to an unprecedented degree with broader political and economic trends. China and the United States no longer had a common adversary but neither had they developed a just concept of world order. The United States and China perceived that they needed each other because both were too large to be dominated, too special to be transformed and too necessary to each other to be able to afford isolation.
The crucial competition between the United States and China is more likely to economic and social than military. The United States bears the responsibility to retain its competitiveness and its world role. China, fulfilling its own interpretation of its national destiny, will continue to develop its economy and pursue a board range of interest in Asia and beyond. The appropriate label for the American relationship is less partnership than "co-evolution." It means that both countries pursue their domestic imperatives, cooperating where possible and adjust their relations to minimize conflict. Neither side endorses all the aims of the other or presumes a total identity of interests, but both sides seek to identify and develop complimentary interest.
The future of Asia will be shaped to a significant degree by how China and America envision it, and by the extent to which each nation is able to achieve some congruence with the other's historic regional role. Throughout its history, the United States has often been motivated by visions of the universal relevance of its ideals and of a proclaimed duty to spread them. China has acted on the basis of its singularity; it expanded by cultural osmosis, not missionary zeal. For these two societies representing different versions of exceptionalism, the road to cooperation is inherently complex. Both sides should be open to conceiving to each other's activities as a normal part of international life and not in itself as a cause for alarm.
China and the United States need not agree on their respective political evolutions to recognize that a strategic contest for dominance will prove draining and will ultimately drive most of the Asian states, especially in South and Southeast Asia into domestic crisis or a kind of combative neutralism. A strategy based on confrontation makes both the United States and China hostage to worst-case scenarios, some of which may not be in the control of either sides. In the end, history lauds not conflicts of societies but their reconciliations which are important for a peaceful world.
World renowned painter Rodrigo Concepcion seemingly has it all: a millionaire dollar loft in SoHo, talent for creativity that seems never end1.5 Stars
World renowned painter Rodrigo Concepcion seemingly has it all: a millionaire dollar loft in SoHo, talent for creativity that seems never ending, a recurring invitation to the exclusive modern art exhibit Art Basel and lovers by the dozen.
Rodrigo couldn't differentiate between his real life and dream life, especially Carlotta. Drug and alcohol influenced blurred the lines between reality and dreams, though his art improved to new levels but overall his health deteriorated. Julia forced him to seek help which he eventually did but couldn't keep away from his Carlotta.
To live in his dream forever he killed himself and reunited with Carlotta forever. Before dying he mended his ways with mentor Hiberto whom he had denounced after gaining success.
The fundamental difference in the scriptures of Christianity and Islam is the fact that Christianity does not have a text which is both revealed and wThe fundamental difference in the scriptures of Christianity and Islam is the fact that Christianity does not have a text which is both revealed and written down. Islam, however, has the Quran which fits their description. The Christian Revelation is based on numerous indirect human accounts. The Quran deals with many subjects of interest to science far more in fact than the Bible. We must note the contrast between the rich abundance of information on a given subject in the Quranic Revelation and the modesty of the other two revelations (Bible and Torah) on the same subject. Quran did not contain a single statement that was assailable from a modern scientific point of view.
What strikes us is when we realize Biblical contradictions and incompatibilities with well-established scientific date how specialists studying the texts either pretend to be unaware of them or else draw attention to these defects then try to camouflage them with dialectic acrobatics. From the very beginning, Islam directed people to cultivate science; the application of this percept brought with it the prodigious strides in science taken during the great era of Islamic civilization from which before the Renaissance, the West itself benefited.
The Old Testament is a collection of works of greatly differing length and many different genres. They were written in several languages over a period of more than nine hundred years based on oral traditions. The Old Testament appears as a literary monument to the Jewish people from its origin to the coming of Christianity. Torah is the Semitic name. The Greek expression which in English gives us 'Pentateuch' designates a work in five parts; Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. These were to form the five primary elements of the collection of thirty nine volumes that makes up the Old Testament.
The Pentateuch is shown to be formed from various traditions brought together more or less skillfully by its authors. The latter sometimes juxtaposed their compilations and sometimes adapted the stories for the sake of synthesis. They allowed improbabilities and disagreements to appear in the texts, however which have led modern man to the objective study of the sources. Genesis was adapted at least twice over a period of not less than three centuries it is hardly surprising to find improbabilities or descriptions that are incompatible with reality.
The majority of Christians believe that the Gospels were written by direct witnesses of the life of Jesus and therefore constitute unquestionable evidence concerning the events highlighting His life and preachings. The Gospel are texts which "are suitable for various circles, meet the needs of the Church, explain observations on the Scriptures, correct errors and even on occasion answer adversaries' objections. Thus the evangelists each according to his own outlook have collected and recorded in writing the material given to them by the oral tradition".
Quran while inviting us to cultivate science, itself contains many observations on natural phenomena and includes explanatory details which are seen to be in total agreement with modern scientific data. Thanks to the undisputed authenticity, the text of the Quran hold a unique place among the books of Revelation shared neither by the Old or the New Testament. The Quran was written down at the time of the Prophet. Although not all the questions raised by the descriptions in the Quran have been completely confirmed by scientific data, there is in any case absolutely no opposition between the data in the Quran on the creation and modern knowledge on the formation of the Universe.
It is moreover perfectly legitimate not only to regard the Quran as the expression of a Revelation but also to award it a very special place, on account of the guarantee of authenticity it provides and the presence in it of scientific statements which when studied today appear as a challenge to explanation in human terms.
Your ecosystem shapes your energy and your surroundings influence your performance dramatically. Everything outside you profoundly affects the way youYour ecosystem shapes your energy and your surroundings influence your performance dramatically. Everything outside you profoundly affects the way you think, feel, create and execute. The fortification of positivity, inspiration and high hopes at a time of general negativity is mission-central to the campaign of producing sublime work and leading a life that surges with happiness, serenity and spiritual freedom. To be an original, you need to take radical risks. This belief is embedded so deeply in our cultural psyche that we rarely even stop to think about it.
It's when all four [mindset (psychology), heartset (emotionality), soulset (spirituality) and healthset (physicality)] of human dynasties are awakened and then improved that you will reveal your genius, display your highness, lead your field and experience a life of rare-air positivity, vitality, wonder and spiritual freedom. Longevity is a primary ingredient to become legendary and by taking an uncommon amount of weekly, monthly and yearly sabbaticals to be with your family, take great trips, read great books, develop great friendships and simply rest, you'll ensure that you're creative, inspired, skilled and ultra-strong for many, many more decades.
Education truly is an inoculation against disruption and the leader who learns the most wins. The defeat is choosing not to go all in and playing small with the gifts the universe has given to you. Getting bloodied is just part of winning. So wear your wounds as medals of valor. Great creativity demands deep sensitivity and deep sensitivity comes from growing intimacy with your emotionality. Repress uncomfortable emotions and you'll create a vast subconscious world of darkness, anger and guilt that chains you to victimhood - and gets you addicted to escapes such as overwork, drama, digital distraction and rampant consumerism because you're fleeing yourself.
Remember: to have the results that only 5% of the population have, you need to do what 95% of people are unwilling to do. The main reason to keep pushing for better - even when you're at the top - is not more fame, fortune and adulation. It's to experience even greater personal growth, to befriend even more of your unseen talents and to uplift the caliber of your character by pushing yourself to produce even more jewels while dutifully serving the whispers of your most supreme spiritual self. Entropy explains why once-successful people descend into irrelevance and once-revered companies become washed up. To ensure elite performance and maximum impact, you absolutely need to be more monomaniacally vigilant against all your hard-won accomplishments being degraded by the natural forces you face as a creative producer and exceptional leader.
Genuine power can be revealed when a human simply remember how to be fully human because nature does not allow a vacuum. Life's meant to be lived right now. The future's just a sprinkling fantasy.
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