The most important of these skills, and power’s crucial foundation, is the ability to master your emotions. An emotional response to a situation is the single greatest barrier to power, a mistake that will cost you a lot more than any temporary satisfaction you might gain by expressing your feelings. Emotions cloud reason, and if you cannot see the situation clearly, you cannot prepare and respond to it with any degree of control.

Anger is the most destructive of emotional responses, for it clouds your vision the most. It also has the ripple effect that invariably makes situations less controllable and heightens your enemy’s resolve.

Related to mastering your emotions is the ability to distance yourself from the present moment and think objectively about the past and future. Like Janus, the double-faced Romain deity, you must be able to look in both direction at once, the better to handle danger from wherever it comes.


The most fateful results of inflation derive from the fact that the rise of prices and wages which it causes occurs that different times and in a different measures for various kinds of commodities and labor. Some classes of prices and wages rise more quickly and rise higher than others. Not merely inflation itself, but its unevenness, works havoc.

While inflation is under way, some people enjoy the benefit of higher prices for the goods or services they sell, while the prices for goods and services they buy have not yet risen or have not risen to the same extent. These people profit from their fortunate position. Inflation seems to them “good business,” a “boom.” But their gains are always derived from the losses of other sections of the population. The losers are those in the unhappy situation of selling services or commodities whose prices have not yet risen to the same degree as have prices of the things they buy for daily consumption.


People sometimes call inflation a special way of “taxing” a country’s citizens. This is a dangerous opinion. And it is wholly untrue. Inflation is not a method of taxation, but an alternative for taxation. When a government imposes taxes, it has full control. It can tax and distribute the burden any way it consider fair and desirable, allotting a larger share of the tax burden to those who are better to carry it, reducing the burden on the less fortunate. But in the case of inflation, it sets in motion a mechanism that is beyond its control. It is not the government, but the operation of the price system, that decides how much this or that group will suffer.

And there is another important difference. All taxes collected flow into the vaults of the public treasury. But with inflation, the public treasury’s gain is less than what it costs the individual citizen, since a considerable part of that cost is drained off by the profiteers, the minority that benefits from the inflation.


Người ta có câu “anh hùng tương tích”, tức là anh hùng thì hiểu lòng nhau, quý mến nhau. Lưu Bị võ kém Quan Trương, mưu thua Gia Cát. Tống Giang võ kém Lâm Xung, mưu thua Ngô Dụng. Vậy tại sao những người giỏi võ, giỏi mưu hơn lại cam chịu ở dưới trướng họ? Bởi vì anh hùng không phải chỉ là biết võ biết mưu. Anh hùng là ở cốt cách, khí phách, ý chí. Những võ tướng tài giỏi, những hảo hán Lương Sơn đâu có đời nào lại chịu nghe một kẻ nhu nhược chỉ huy? Đừng nói là những tay hảo hán, mà ngay cả người bình thường, gặp kẻ nhu nhược đớn hèn chỉ huy, phỏng có ai chịu tuân theo mệnh lệnh?

Cốt cách anh hùng đấy, nói thì trừu tượng, nhưng nó cũng có những biểu hiện rất cụ thể mà cả ở Lưu Bị và Tống Giang đều thấy rõ, đó là không ngại khó, không ngại khổ, không sợ nguy hiểm; gặp nghịch cảnh vẫn hiên ngang, gặp cường địch vẫn bình thản. Đó là những tính cách mà tất cả đàn ông trên đời đều phải học tập.


The counselor opened with “Most couples are here because of issues with sex, money, or the other person’s family.” If there are problems in one or more of those areas, deal with it before marriage.


To solve problems at scale, paradoxically, you have to know the smallest details. Jeff and Sanjay understood computers at the level of bits. Jeff once circulated a list of “Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know.” These numbers are hard-wired into Jeff’s and Sanjay’s brains. As they helped spearheaded several rewritings of Google’s core software, the system’s capacity scaled by orders of magnitude.


In terms of sexiness, compilers are pretty much as boring as it gets. On the other hand, they get you very close to the machine. Jeff has a model going on as you’re writing code. What is the performance of this code going to be? He’ll think about all the corner cases almost semi-automatically.


Sanjay’s brother, Pankai, became the youngest faculty member ever awarded tenure at Harvard Business School. Pankaj went to the same school at Sanjay and had a reputation as a Renaissance man. “I kind of lived in the shadow of my brother,” Sanjay said. As an adult, he retains a talent for self-effacement.


He is known for being quiet but profound — someone who thinks deeply and with unusual clarity. On his desks, he keeps a stack of Mead composition notebooks going back nearly 20 years, filled with tidy lists and diagrams. He writes in pen an in cursive. He rarely references an old notebook, but writes in order to think. At MIT, his graduate adviser was Barbara Liskov, an influential computer scientist who studied, among other things, the management of complex code bases. In her view, the best code is like a good piece of writing. It needs a carefully realized structure; every word should do work. Programming this way requires empathy with readers. It also means seeing code not just as a means to an end but as an artifact in itself.


Jeff’s programming is dazzling — he can quickly outline startling ideas — but, because it’s done quickly, in a spirit of discovery, it can leave readers behind. Sanjay’s code is social.

“Some people, their code’s too loose. One screen of code has very little information on it. You’re always scrolling back and forth to figure out what’s going on. Others write code that’s too dense. You look at it, you’re, like, ‘Ugh. I’m not looking forward to reading this.’ Sanjay has somehow split the middle. You look at his code and you’re like, ‘OK, I can figure this out.’ Whenever I want to add new functionality to Sanjay’s code, it seems like the hooks are already there. I feel like Salieri. I understand the greatness. I don’t understand how it’s done.”


Politics is about the characteristic blend of conflict and co-operation that can be found so often in human interactions. Pure conflict is war. Pure co-operation is true love. Politics is a mixture of both.


Politics is “who gets what, when, how”.


But there will be no glory.


I must admit that I am not a member of the ugly school. I have a great regard for certain notions of beauty even though to some it is an old fashioned idea. Some photographers think that by taking pictures of human misery, they are addressing a serious problem. I do not think that misery is more profound than happiness.


the nothingness where, in fact, everything happens


And, as Pauline Vermare writes in the new monograph, this might be understood through Leiter’s belief in a very Japanese concept: ‘Saul lived in accordance with the mayor zen principle of not attaching any great significance to himself, or even his art, and having no defined purpose or intent in life except for being present to the world and always highly aware of its fleeting beauty,’ Vermare writes. ‘Not preaching, just looking.’ 


Unconscious processes are understood to be directly represented in dreams, as well as in slips of the tongue and jokes.


Every human being, he wrote, “however high his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.”


  • Wealth/Income (most common): Ties between persons with the same personal income
  • Gender: Ties between persons of the same sex and sexuality
  • Political status: Ties between persons of the same political views/status
  • Religion: Ties between persons of the same religion
  • Race/Ethnicity: Ties between persons of the same ethnic/racial group
  • Social class: Ties between persons born into the same economic group
  • Coolness: Ties between persons who have similar levels of popularity

  • Prestige is a significant factor in determining one’s place in the stratification system. The ownership of property is not always going to assure power, but there are frequently people with prestige and little property.
  • Property refers to one’s material possessions and their life chances. If someone has control of property, that person has power over others and can use the property to his or her own benefit.
  • Power is the ability to do what one wants, regardless of the will of others.

  • Economic capital: Command of economic resources (money, assets, property).
  • Social capital: Actual and potential resources linked to the possession of a durable network of institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.
  • Cultural capital: A person’s education (knowledge and intellectual skills) that provides advantage in achieving a higher social-status in society.

The glass ceiling of happiness is held in place by two stout pillars, one psychological, the other biological. On the psychological level, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions. We don’t become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when realities matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon. Dramatic improvements in conditions, as humankind has experienced in recent decades, translate into greater expectations rather than greater contentment. If we don’t do anything about this, our future achievements too might leave us as dissatisfied as ever.

On the biological level, both our expectations and our happiness are determined by our biochemistry, rather than by our economic, social, or political situation. According to Epicurus, we are happy when we feel pleasant sensations and are free from unpleasant ones. Jeremy Bentham similarly maintained that nature gave dominion over man to two masters — pleasure and pain — and they alone determine everything we do, say and think. Bentham’s successor, John Stuart Mill, explained that happiness is nothing but pleasure and freedom from pain, and that beyond pleasure and pain there is no good and evil. Anyone who tries to deduce good and evil from something else (such as the word of God, or the national anthem) is fooling you, and perhaps fooling himself too.

In the day of Epicurus such talk was blasphemous. In the days of Bentham and Mill it was radical subversion. But in the early 21st century this is scientific orthodoxy. According to the life sciences, happiness and suffering are nothing but different balances of bodily sensations. We never react to events in the outside word, but only to sensations in our own bodies. Nobody suffers because she lost her job, because she got divorced or because the government went to war. The only thing that makes people miserable is unpleasant sensations in their own bodies. Losing one’s job can certainly trigger depression, but depression itself is a kind of unpleasant bodily sensation. A thousand things may make us angry, but anger is never an abstraction. It is always felt as a sensation of heat and tension in the body, which is what makes anger so infuriating. Not for nothing do we say that we ‘burn’ with anger.


Dr. Taylor practiced her popular TED talk more than 200 times.


Athletes may imagine the successful completion of a physical task thousands of times before achieving it. This mental mapping ensures that when the body moves, it’s more likely to follow its pre-ordained path.


And Newton in particular was a rather unpleasant person, who had an arrogant belief in his own abilities and a spiteful reaction to anyone he perceived as an opponent.