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Are you willing to experience life with a “versatile mind” and with less “literal-mindedness? Literal Mindedness vs Versatile Mind Making someone better is the best gift you can give them, you and humanity! The best teachers work through stories, parables, metaphors and analogies. Those with the disease of literal mindedness do not want to be told that there are multiple interpretations, do not want to be told that they will just have to decide for themselves. They want to be told what the facts are. But this is just a refusal to learn to evaluate. The fact is that the facts are always changing. Thursday, May 9 Venus pokes above the eastern horizon about an hour before sunrise. The brilliant planet dominates the predawn sky as the rosy glow heralding the Sun’s arrival grows brighter. Venus shines at magnitude –3.8, more than three times brighter than the second-brightest planet, Jupiter. When viewed through a telescope, the inner world shows a disk that spans 11″ and appears 90 percent lit. The way to get by has always been to develop our perceptions, our judgements, our intuitions, and to expect to be wrong from time to time; while there may be factual landmarks on the hard ground of limited experience, out on the ocean of real life what counts is to know how to navigate. Literal-mindedness resides in recalling facts or traditions and evaluating which are the most appropriate to any situation. True, this is a part of using the mind, but there is much more. What distinguishes us from chimpanzees is that complex but precise melange of thinking, feeling, evaluating, willing, fantasizing, visualizing and other more subtle functions. The obvious solution is to require everyone in the world to study the process of using their brains. Only when a student is certified by a committee of clearly superior individuals can he be licensed to marry, attend church, watch television, or perform any other activity that can be considered difficult or dangerous. Obviously, the literal-minded among the powers that be would never allow so fanciful a solution to become reality. And thank heavens for that, because complex systems are never successfully imposed; rather, they evolve. And the materials already exist out of which this complex cure for literal-mindedness can arise. They are waiting in the medicine cabinets of our minds like so many bottles of pills. Or perhaps I should say like potted herbs growing in our kitchen windows, since their gentle operation has none of the harsh side effects of pills and since various mixtures of these same cerebral herbs can serve as preventatives as well as cures. “Are you able to seek guidance from the stars and tap into your deeper intuitive knowing so you can navigate the realms of life that are more fluid and less solid? While studying astrology I have applied it to concrete cases many times. …The experiment is most suggestive to a versatile mind, unreliable in the hands of the unimaginative, and dangerous in the hands of a fool, as those intuitive methods always are.  If intelligently used the experiment is useful in cases where it is a matter of an opaque structure.  It often provides surprising insights. The most definite limit of the experiment is lack of intelligence and literal-mindedness of the observer.”  ~ Carl Jung After much study, Carl Jung concluded that in order to reap the benefit of astrology it was so important to have a versatile mind… a mind that is open and receptive to the unknown and ephemeral.  Join me with your open mind as I share how to minimize your bias and know your stars. I care about you having a great life because I know Oneness! We also want a thriving Earth, a just world, and for you to discover and embody the “Miraculous Adult” that you are! you’ll hear life topics next week that will help you know the time-tested practices of astrology. You’ll learn how to accept change as the Great Wheel of Life turns astrology art and spiritual adventure. Ariel Goodman Venus star rising and the geometry of astrology the mathematical geometry behind the logic of the astrology Venus in particular as a planet the sequence of with which it rotates around in its in its orbit creates a mathematical precision that is used in almost every form of art love to have you tell us a little bit more about that okay well we’re for that it fascinated me too yeah okay so the five pointed star of Venus is equivalent to a nautilus shell to a lot of seashells but let’s say the knot of it yeah yeah and everybody will recognize the nautilus shell because it’s it’s an iconic image and just as venus is an iconic image you know the painting by Botticelli of Venus The Birth of Venus where she’s floating to the shore on a seashell so it’s interesting that the mythology of Venus from homer and hesiod. The Birth of Venus floating came floating to the shore on a shell and then Botticelli painted it and 1500 or something and then but the real truth of it is Venus is orbit which we didn’t really prove scientifically until probably the 19th or 20th century is that she actually that orbit of Venus and Earth is equivalent to the same frequency mathematically is if you were to break down the proportions or the ratio of a nautilus shell it is the same exact thing this is the mathematical precision. this is a a measurement right 1.6 right is the measurement right it’s one point six because the orbit of Venus to earth is one point six the orbit of Venus is 584 days Earth is 365 days and when you divide one by the other you come up with the one point six and there’s a lot of other one point six in the orbit around the star the five pointed star in eight years makes one point six the musical scale makes one point six which Venus is really a part of there are five or is it eight yeah five black keys and eight white keys on a musical scale there are all kinds of artists designers architects mathematicians creators etc that photographers that use they that what you’ve probably heard of is the golden mean the golden mean yeah the golden mean the golden ratio and the golden section are all the same it’s that 1. 6 measurement which we see in almost every form of art we see. The Golden ratio is a special number found by dividing a line into two parts so that the longer part divided by the smaller part is also equal to the whole length divided by the longer part. It is often symbolized using phi, after the 21st letter of the Greek alphabet. … Phi is usually rounded off to 1.618. It in nature as well we see it in pine cones we see it in Nautilus shells we see it in flower blossoms beehives beehives any number of things have this have this so this shows that there is a mathematical contingency mathematical connection logic to this same pattern right which is just amazing right really substantiates the fact that the universe really is a mathematical construct it’s the unfolding what I’ve come to see about it because this is what Venus and this earth dance is it’s the unfolding of organic life because the star itself is a fractal that reaches out and can create another star once it’s like one star attracts another and they hook up and then it attracts another and then another and it just keeps growing and growing and growing and it never ends and so it’s that it’s that attraction magnetism principle that’s present in it it’s the mating principle the life-giving principle each star point of Venus takes nine point two months from one to the next and that’s the human life the gestation development cycle so these things all connect and I find that to be fascinating and it’s they went Botticelli or any of these people were designed these famous buildings and these pieces are art they probably didn’t recognize that or didn’t maybe didn’t know that that was based on the Fibonacci sequence which is part of the what’s called what determines the golden sequence mm-hmm and the golden section but well they knew it was something they knew it was something cuz they didn’t rizal it maybe Fibonacci until Fibonacci came along and really I identified it but the Vitruvian Man was was an image that Leonardo da Vinci brought back that’s basically the way we look if we stand with their arms out and their legs out that’s cool yeah after the Truvia right it’s the same but you see in all those old architecture books exactly an art of da Vinci because the body the human body is all made out of fire ratio and that’s what Leonardo da Vinci was fascinated with the human body and so he would measure like the ratio between the hand and the whole arm are the this part of the arm to up to the social door between the lips and the to the whole forehead and I mean he had broke it down into so many different ways but it all came down to that point six or one point six which was this perfect harmony so the human being is actually a part of this five pointed star you know and what I love about it is that there’s this point time where these are all smaller components like you mentioned of the the arm the hand to the arm is a 1.6 I take the arm to the rest of the body its 1.6 so this is a formula that keeps recurring throughout all of nature and it’s tied to the the the transit and the cycle of Venus at the planet which is the planet that represents beauty and astrology right which is just fascinating it’s it’s a startlingly accurate right precise point that just if you don’t believe in astrology this will make you believe in astrology because the precision is so crisp you can’t deny it and then I realized it’s working with this five-pointed man or woman star Vitruvian figure venus figure now is that so we have our arms outstretched and we have our legs and we have our head but at the end of each of those is five fingers on each arm five toes on each leg and five senses so there’s again the fractal of the five and then more five and then who knows what else how that how that radiates out into into the universe it does speak to a master plan nothing yes right as if somebody is in charge here who has a master plan depending upon your persuasion in that regard but I find to be fascinating because it has such that great precision and you mentioned the word fie before pH I that is the Greek word or these are the Greek word for the golden mean or the golden ratio in the golden section so golden ratio golden mean golden section are all the same it’s all the just different words right but it refers to that one point six segments of the Fibonacci numbers right. The Golden Ratio, usually denoted by the Greek letter ? (phi), has the propensity of popping up where least expected, in a variety of natural phenomena and works of art. In its decimal representation, ? is equal to the never-repeating, never-ending number 1.6180339887… Where can such an irrational number show up in astronomy? First, it appears in an astronomical symbol. Most people use the pentagram — the five-pointed star (Figure 1) — as a symbol for a star (this reflects the twinkling of stars due to the Earth’s atmosphere). In the pentagram, in each one of the five side triangles, the ratio of the side to the base is precisely equal to ?. Second, when Plato wanted to discuss the cosmos as a whole in his celebrated Timaeus, he chose the dodecahedron (Figure 2) as the shape “which the god used for embroidering the constellations on the whole heaven.” The dodecahedron has the Golden Ratio written all over it. If you take a dodecahedron with an edge length of 1 unit, its volume is equal to 5?3/(6 – 2?) units. In a surprising turn of events, in 2003 a few cosmologists proposed that some observations of the “afterglow of creation” — the cosmic microwave background — could be explained if the universe is in fact finite, and shaped like a dodecahedron! It would have been truly amusing if Plato were right after all. However, more detailed analyses of the data indicate that the universe is infinite and geometrically flat.           Another intriguing area of astronomy in which the Golden Ratio made an unexpected appearance is that of the extreme objects we call black holes. Black holes warp space in their vicinity so much that in Einstein’s classical General Relativity, nothing can escape from them, not even light. However, when quantum effects are brought into the picture, black holes can lose energy via a process known as Hawking radiation. Black holes are characterized by two physical properties, their mass and their angular momentum (a measure of how fast they are spinning). Spinning black holes (called Kerr black holes, after the New Zealander physicist Roy Kerr) can exist in two states: one in which they heat up when they lose energy (negative specific heat), and one in which they cool down (positive specific heat). They can also transition from one state into the other, in the same way that water can freeze to form ice. Believe it or not, but the transition takes place when the square of the black hole mass (in the appropriate units) is precisely equal to ? times the square of its spin! Finally, it turns out that the Golden Ratio happens to be optimal for the design of certain radio telescopes. The goal of such telescopes is to place radio antennas so as to uniformly sample the visibility plane, avoiding overlapping and redundancy. The fact that the Golden Ratio is ideal for this task has already been “discovered” by many plants in their leaf arrangement. The leaves along a twig of a plant tend to grow in positions that would optimize their exposure to the Sun, air, and rain. This is best achieved when the angle between successive leaves equals the “Golden Angle” of 137.5 degrees, which is 360o/? subtracted from a full circle. One can show mathematically that the Golden Angle allows for the most efficient filling of space without overlapping. Amazing, isn’t it, for one number to connect black holes to the telescopes that observe them? shows a powerful jet emanating from the center of a disk surrounding the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87. why is a Greek letter yes but it’s also a Greek number we have a lot of words in English that have Phi in it but it’s also a number of value a mathematical value and it’s also I think in the Greek alphabet there are you know the the the letters of the Greek alphabet actually are not just letters they all have there there’s an energy frequency there their frequencies right they mean more than just have a harmonic quality right exactly and I think the Hebrew alphabet is like this too like if people that have studied the Kabbalah you know each of these letters that represent the different pathways or gates or portals or whatever our energy centers so there’s a lot of ancient knowledge that was already embedded in certain things that just in our modern times we’ve kind of let go and forgotten about but I think now we’re able to go back to looking at some of these things because we have the computer technology and the scientific abilities to study things in much more my new detail yeah actually huge difference and I think that when we recognize this we really get to that point where I mentioned earlier that there is a logic to all of this to the universe which is stunning because it just brings into play so much of explain so many things I think having that explanation I think it really gives me you know it gives me reason to live I think it’s very heartening to have that kind of knowledge out there I think it’s also why we love Venus so much because it is that it because that if that value really does speak to something called harmony a principle called harmony don’t don’t we all want to be harmonious that would be the goal yes I mean don’t we want to live in a harmonious world don’t we want to be peaceful in our lives don’t we want to feel like we’re in the flow absolutely it’s also that frequency is the frequency of synchronicity you know how you always say gee I can’t believe that happened I would just happen to be in the right place at the right time or was we called coincidence right incidences myth is really synchronicity it’s really synchronicity and synchronicity in a sort of a summing up phrase. Balance is being able when events occur that seem implausible or seem unlikely to have occurred because they’re like how did that happen right boom right right exactly and that is and Carl Jung did a great deal of work on that exactly yeah it’s kind of an intersection it’s an intersection of you at a certain point in time and space where you where you get to that intersection where that kind of thing happens but if you look again at that figure of the nautilus shell and that’s the Fibonacci sequence and maybe to explain that to your audience I mean a lot of people have heard of the Fibonacci sequence but they don’t really know what it is okay it was defined by a man named Fibonacci but what it’s based on is just a simple set of numbers you start with zero and you go to the next value which is 1 okay and then you add 0 and 1 together and you get 2 and you add 1 and 2 together you get 3 so you’re always looking behind you at the last number that you were just at and add yourself to that and you create the next number so then the sequence goes to 5 8 13 21 and then you plot those points on a yeah you start connecting right the same right and I think we have a graphic 5 8 13 21 34 so that’s the organic unfoldment. of this particular seashell but that’s the Fibonacci sequence and that has been identified with not only how nature works and how we grow as human beings and life cycles repeat and so’s and how we expand but the whole evolutionary plan is is that so we’re all spiraling out on that same seat right right exactly and so and and one of the things about astrology which I always find interesting is that is that we are always history does repeat itself we do have these cycles that recur and we see them recurring what happens is that they recur in a different place in time so it’s like a giant Helios or a corkscrew or an event will happen and then they’ll go around the the as time moves forward is going in a circular time motion like that events will reoccur not at the same place at the same time but not in the same place and when the place changes all the circumstances change so we can see this in history when they say history repeats itself this is what they’re referring to mm-hmm it does yes but I think the fascinating thing for me about discovering that sequence and connecting it to Venus was that again it synched me up in my life I like I like to follow the rhythm of Venus in my own life every 9.2 months it changes star points which means it’s it’s it’s usually going from a yen signed to a yang RA yen phase to a Yang and the so we’re it’s the heartbeat of the cosmos it’s really so being in sync with that like what element is it in what you know we go from Gemini more more recently we went from Gemini as an evening star to Aries as a morning star and then it’ll go to Capricorn and so many times it brings along the the attributes of that sign that’s right so if you’re in an area sign you’re being a very aggressive right well the whole world is kind of operating under that you know we have the planets operating all the time and everybody’s looking at the planets and what they’re doing on a day to day basis but in the background behind the planets we have this very slow-moving Venus clock that is just kind of ticking away a very slow slow mechanism that’s moving in the background and every now and then again principle of synchronicity it syncs up with where a planet is or was it a very important point in your own chart and it allows that feeling of wow I was in the right place at the right time to have these circumstances and that works in both good and bad you could say I suppose probably times that people wonder they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time yes exactly but I think being in tune with this and knowing where these points are in your life allows you to be more cognizant I think people have to be I’ve always found that if you’re more attuned to the possibility of synchronicity that they are more likely to occur I think that we are not always aware of sometimes in and and the types of events that can happen through synchronicity may appear to be minor but they actually are in plural larger meaning behind them mm-hmm don’t you think there seems to be I think that you have to be I have to have a little antenna up it says looking for synchronistic events mm-hmm and then when they occur they’re just yeah and then we want more it’s kind of like okay I liked that do that again hit me with that one again I mean it really is a fascinating if anybody’s ever had us and you’ll know what a synchronistic event is it is I always give the example supposing you’re at a party and you meet somebody they talk talking about a book or whatever you recommend you make a mental note of the book and then you disappear and you know you go across country to a different part of the world then somebody who you’ve never met before mentions the same book and you say bah that’s a synchronistic offense to different people I always think it has to be two extraneous sequences or events that come together boom to create the synchronistic event you pay attention that’s a very simplistic idea like my example rather very simplistic example but still it does give the idea of coincidence instances are good things to have happen or I I liked the rule of three with synchronicity you’re reading a book and this has happened to me a few times you’re reading I’m reading a passage in a book and the next day I find myself in a very almost playing out the same scene in my life that I just read about in the book the night before and then a third thing happens where I’m someplace else and somebody mentions oh my friend was telling me they were reading this book and it’s the same book you just read and that you just played out and now you’ve heard it a third time and then you have to wonder wait a minute. right yes and when they happen they are they are thrilling they are very thrilling right and that you think is also tied to the Fibranocci number and this sort of this sequence of events and times and it’s or that yes clock-like precision of these yeah and Davina Starr is attuned to that cycle yeah I don’t I know that people that work in the financial markets use the Fibonacci a sequence of numbers to because they have determined that the markets work that way because if organic well yeah if you know how to use it I mean if organic life works that way if we grow and expand. And if rivers flow in and Forests grow in and leaves on a tree and flowers unfold and bloom in that Phi ratio pattern or Fibonacci sequence and it really is organic life right. The more technical this world becomes, the more obsessed we become with our phones, our status, our money, the less we realize how great we really have it. The vast majority of people bitch and moan about things that don’t matter. The fact you’re alive, healthy, and able to work is literally a miracle. Do you realize what has to happen for you to be born, and the chances you came out as you? The odds of you being born as you are about 1 in 400 trillion, or more. Take a second and think about that, and put a smile on your face, you fucking miracle you… While we punch our desks for slow internet connection or a lousy hair day, let’s remember there are people out there that can’t eat, live under a bridge, die of disease, and will never know a life of prosperity. Every year you age, you get wiser, even if you don’t feel it, or see it. You might be 30 and still lost, you might be 22 and think your life sucks. You have a choice, literally, to choose to be happy. To choose positivity. The one thing you have control over is hustle. If you want it, hustle, get it. Whatever that “it” may be. Unfortunately, people aren’t grateful like they used to be. And if we could be more grateful, you naturally become happier, and even more grateful for things to come. You woke up this morning? Be happy. Smile and be grateful. A guy I look up to, Gary Vaynerchuk, talks often about regret. He says to go to a nursing home, and talk to folks in their 90s and look at the regret in their eyes. The wish that they had tried to start that business, to talk to their parents more, to laugh more, to spend more quality time with the people they love, to not sweat the small stuff, but to appreciate all you have, and even appreciate all you don’t have. When you see regret in a person’s eyes as death approaches, you see the realest version of pain. Regardless of how difficult a time you may be going through, realize someone out there is going through more. Regardless of how hard you work, realize someone is working harder to take if from you. Life is fucking beautiful, even when it isn’t. No matter the shit hand you’re dealt, find the silver lining. Find the avenue in that tumultuous road to make it out better than you started. If you work hard, and treat people the right way good things will happen. I don’t care what it is you believe in; whether that be God, or karma, or aliens, working hard and treating people the right way will always have you getting to where you want to be. That goes for work, and relationships. So, since you now know you’re actually a miracle, grab life by the balls and make it your bitch. so what happens when you look at your life would you use for the determinating factors for that when would you say the beginning is and then the year in a 1.60 later it will occur what would you use for some sort of a major beginning or a demarcation of some sort like a well in Venus’s case it is every one point six years and that is Phi mmm I mean that simply is five one point six women do what would be the determining factor what what determines happiness well when Venus begins to go retrograde she and which she does every one point six years she is slowing down in her orbit and now at the middle part of the retrograde like halfway between the beginning and end of the retrograde she meets with earth in an exact conjunction are very close conjunction called Kazemi to create a star point and at that point the seed is planted for the beginning of The author Gregg Braden fractal time which is a beautiful book and he talked about Venus in the 1.6 cycle but he was actually suggesting that you can take any important event in your life that’s happened like take the most important most extraordinary event of your life and figure out exactly how old you were how many years how many months and then you can add a 1.6 equivalent to it and you’re likely to get another really big important event one point six from that Wow and then you keep going one point six from that so does keep expanding 584 it’s not always 584 but based on that graphic you were showing earlier of the numbers remember the five the eighth the 13 and there it is the 21 all right so when you’re when you’re looking at those numbers he’s got the instructions in the book I can’t tell you he wasn’t timing it exactly from Venus retrograde to Venus retrograde the way that I do so it works and it works in a lot of different ways this Venus synchronization mechanism is finely tuned like a like a the most incredibly program Swiss clock it is it is so precise it’s very on different levels and now I’m calling it actually the Venus clock this Venus star when I first got all this information and wrote it down it is still is a Venus star because it’s a five-pointed star but the way it moves is it is like a slow moving clock working. in the back backdrop of our life always clicking away and those synchronistic events I think are important so I think knowing these points in an individual astrology chart your own personal life is irrelevant because it can be moments of great decisions at moments of great progress moments of great discovery moments of great creation creativity and to be cognizant of them particular birth time because there are moments when you’re going to have these points hitting now now point I want to make is or ask about is when you do this does the where we are in the world have a specific attribute to your own personal chart so if you are in a Venus star you have your Venus star chart and a point comes up where the Sun goes over that or a major planet goes over that point is it activated and yes so for instance maybe you’ll look at your birth chart and you’ll say well I don’t really have all you know points connecting these different points since I don’t have planets and those particular points but hey if you live a certain to a certain age you’re likely I’ve seen this over and over again you’re likely to have the star hit not just one planet but two points of the star hit two planets at the exact same time in your life or sometimes with people three points and I’ll get to that part of their life when I’ll say gee this star was the Capricorn star was sitting near Jupiter and the airy star was hitting your mercury and the Gemini star was hitting your Venus or your son let’s say and something must have really taken plate and that’s in an eight year period because the pentagram of Venus those degrees are usually good for about eight years and I’ll say something like wow this must have been in a really big time of your life very incredible that you would have three hits on the star in this particular few year period and that’s usually the responses oh yes everything happened in my life at that time that influenced my life that put me on the road that I’m on now that changed everything for me that wow that’s first thing and you can tie that back to the date and see exactly what it was when you think of someone like you mentioned Oprah earlier when you think of someone like Oprah obviously she’s a hard-working individual but a lot of what happened to her you think is based on her alignment of this Kazemi in her chart whereby she was sort of gifted with this sort of destiny of sorts would you call it I would call it a destiny for sure she was born at that Venus Kazemi very powerful in Aquarius she has been the queen of the air wave she surpassed broken and surpassed every record on the books for you no no I miss women nods were stuck together me being a woman being exactly a report from a poor part of the country in the south that she didn’t really have any advantages special advantages or opportunities when she was growing up this was her talent her what she came in with it birth her destiny you could call it but there it was Sun Venus and the Venus star point the triple crown all lined up at 9 degrees Aquarius at the time of her birth and there are similar figures to that that I’ve looked at that maybe had better advantages growing up but still became you know just shot into the stratosphere of you know incredible talent it does make you wonder I mean you have to stop and think about you know we all know that astrology is about timing obviously and that’s the basis of the whole astrological concept but when you see someone such as she you can’t help but wonder you know I mean she obviously had to do her work but you know she really was at the right place at the right time well we’re all doing our work we’re all hard-working and in the sense of things but but then you think okay but but she really did that so another person bore at the same time as her well you know what’s interesting exactly four years later when the Venus Kazemi came back to Aquarius and almost on the same date maybe a couple days later but four years later on that Kazemi Ellen DeGeneres was born it was those who’s another major media presence and both of them broke major records I mean when you think about the fact that it was Aquarius it wasn’t just that they were women and they broke through a lot of glass ceilings in the broadcasting brought Oprah for sure and the broad testing industry and talk shows and all of that and media empire that she’s inherited but Ellen had a similar kind of leadership quality breakthrough when she openly announced that she was gay she was the first major TV personality to announce that and I think maybe at first it didn’t really exactly work in her favor and maybe there was you know some backlash to that but it didn’t take long for her realizing that coming out with who her her real self who she was now the difference between Oprah and Ellen is that Oprah is an evening star and Ellen is a morning star and I often use this example when I’m talking about it because morning and evening are running on – they have almost two different types of machines that are driving them that makes perfect sense because of the timing and where they were born and so but the fact that the two of them and that course the four and the four makes the eight which gives you that same cycle that is phenomenal to me I didn’t realize that about Ellen that is really right perfect example of what it would bribe that’s a mathematical precision right Wow and it’s amazing we’ve been talking today with Ariel Guttman she’s the author of Venus star rise and we had around earlier to talk about the particular Venus star rising as well but more importantly we were talking about the the logic and the geometry of the universe which is much of which is explained in this book Venus star rising I encourage you to look up her website which is on the screen up there and we will see her name come up and she can do a fascinating reading and show you where your Venus star points are in your life and hopefully you can use them to your great advantage I think you’ll find creative people have this as you mentioned I think Oprah and Ellen DeGeneres are fascinating examples of that so when there’s hundreds of us it’s a tap in my head I’m I it’s been great for everyone thank you having me thank you If you want to transform and experience greater love, joy, healing, and magic, then this Masterclass is for you! 1. “Anyone can be a millionaire, but to become a billionaire you need an astrologer.” —J. P. Morgan 2. “A physician without a knowledge of Astrology has no right to call himself a physician.” —Hippocrates 3. “Astrology reveals the will of the gods. —Juvenal 4. “Astrology is just a finger pointing at reality.” —Steven Forrest 5. “We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac.  The zodiac is well worth flirting with.” —D. H. Lawrence 6. “The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection…” —Carl Jung 7. “Astrology is one of the oldest and most accurate tools known to mankind.” —Chris Flisher 8. “Astrology is a Language. If you understand this language, The Sky Speaks to You.” —Dane Rudhyar 9. “Without astrology man treads, as it were, in the dim twilight of ignorance.” —Luke Dennis Broughton 10. “Your path is illuminated by a road-map of stars. I am here to guide you!” —Ambika Devi 11. “Astrology has no more useful function than this, to discover the inmost nature of a man and to bring it out into his consciousness, that he may fulfil it according to the law of light.” —Aleister Crowley 12. “The soul of the newly born baby is marked for life by the pattern of the stars at the moment it comes into the world, unconsciously remembers it, and remains sensitive to the return of configurations of a similar kind.” —Johannes Kepler 13. “I believe in a lot of astrology. I believe in aliens…I look up into the stars and I imagine: ‘How self-important are we to think that we are the only life-form?’” —Katy Perry 14. “We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.” —Carl Jung 15. “About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.” —Kurt Vonnegut 16. “Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can’t understand many things unless you know something about astrology—the plays of Shakespeare and so on.” —Steven Pinker 17. “I was born during an eclipse. I believe very much in astrology. If you were born on an eclipse it indicates your destiny is chaotic.” —Gloria Vanderbilt 18. “We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.” —Carl Jung 19. “The way that I see astrology is as a repository of thought and psychology. A system we’ve created as a culture as way to make things mean things.” —Eleanor Catton 20. “To the medical man, astrology is invaluable in diagnosing diseases and prescribing a remedy, for it reveals the hidden cause of all ailments.” —Max Heindel 21. “Astrology is assured of recognition from psychology, without further restrictions, because astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.” —Carl Jung 22. “For all its complexity, however, astrology remains fundamentally simple. It offers a time-honored system of symbols that sum up key aspects of human life while providing profound insights and practical guidance.” —Anne M. Nordhaus-Bike 23. “The planets are God’s punctuation marks pointing the sentences of human fate, written in the constellations.” —James Lendall Basford 24. “There is no better boat than a horoscope to help a man cross over the sea of life.” —Varaha Mihira 25. “We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and banded which way please them.” —John Webster 26. “The astronomer has a starry map of the past; the astrologer, of our futures.” —Terri Guillemets 27. “A child is born on that day and at that hour when the celestial rays are in mathematical harmony with his individual karma.” —Sri Yukteswar 28. “Astrology is one of the earliest attempts made by man to find the order hidden behind or within the confusing and apparent chaos that exists in the world.” —Karen Hamaker-Zondag 29. “I will look on the stars and look on thee, and read the page of thy destiny.” —Letitia Elizabeth Landon 30. “Astrology is like a weather report; it tells you what conditions you’re likely to face in the future. If the weatherman says it’s probably going to rain, you bring an umbrella. If you follow that advice, you won’t get wet.” —Lee Goldberg 31. “There is something out there. Astrology is like a game of chess with an invisible partner. We set out the board and the rules, make a move, and then find that the pieces are moving themselves, as if by an invisible hand.” —Noel Tyl 32. “Don’t laugh at the voice of the stars. They are far away, their rays are light and pale, and we can barely see their sleeping shadows, but their sorcery is stern and dark.” —Leonid Andreyev 33. “Though Astrology is like a deep ocean…anybody can get knowledge through going deeply in water and get some drops of nectar of this divine knowledge.” —Onkarlal Sharma Prmad  We are at the lowest level of consciousness when we have no memory of who we are! Caveman 13, 000 years 6, 000 years go by Spiritual Leaders Ascended super beings Mesopotamia Mastering language and inventions Egypt China MesoAmerica 4,000 ___________________________________

Peru | The 5D Experience!

Exercises for Balanced Chakras, Detoxification, and Longevity!

The Ancient Secret of the Fountain of Youth
By Dr. Sarah Larsen

Potential Benefits of the Five Rites

The benefits of the “Five Tibetan Rites” including the following: looking much younger; sleeping soundly; waking up feeling refreshed and energetic; release from serious medical problems including difficulties with spines; relief from problems with joints; release from pain; better memory; arthritis relief; weight loss; improved vision; you thing instead of aging; greatly improved physical strength, endurance and vigor; improved emotional and mental health; enhanced sense of well being and harmony; and very high overall energy.

How the Five Rites Work

As a Holistic Doctor, I  explain the benefits based on my personal perspective as a scientist.

And I see the benefits as a Medical Intuitive, Mentor and Antiaging specialist. The rites represent a system of exercise that affects the body, emotions and mind.

The Tibetans claim that these exercises activate and stimulate the seven key chakras that in turn stimulate all the glands of the endocrine system.

The endocrine system is responsible for the body’s overall functioning and the aging process.

This means that the Five Rites will affect the functioning of all your organs and systems, including the physical and energetic systems and that includes the aging process. The physicians to the Monks in Tibet are quoted to say “performing the Five Rites stimulates the circulation of essential life energy throughout the body”.



Chakras
Chakra is an Indian Sanskrit word that translates to mean “Wheel of Spinning Energy”. Chakras are spinning wheels or vortexes of energy of different color that perform many functions connecting our energy fields, bodies and the Cosmic Energy Field. Chakras are powerful electrical and magnetic fields. Chakras govern the endocrine system that in turn regulates all of the body’s functions including the aging process. Energy flows from the Universal Energy Field through the chakras into the energy systems within our bodies, including the Meridian System.  We know now that each of the Chakras corresponds to a Nerve bundle within our body!

Our bodies contain seven major chakras or energy centers and 122 minor chakras. The major chakras are located at the base of the spine (Root Chakra), at the navel (Sacral Chakra), in the solar plexus (Solar Plexus Chakra), within your heart (Heart Chakra), within the throat (Throat Chakra), at the center of your forehead (Brow or Third Eye Chakra), and at the top of your head (Crown Chakra). These chakras are linked together with all other energy systems in the body and various layers of the auras.

The Speed of the chakra spin is key to vibrant health. The other keys to vibrant health that relates to the chakra is ensuring they are clear of negative energy and that they are perfectly shaped and not distorted.

The Five Rites speed up the spinning of the chakras, coordinate their spin so they are in complete harmony, distribute pure prana energy to the endocrine system, and in turn to all organs and processes in the body. This is one of the major requirements for vibrant health, rejuvenation, and youthfulness.

The Five Rites Exercise Program at Creative Chakra Spa

This program is a modified yoga program. Simply put, yoga is a science that unites the body, mind and spirit. Today this is often called Mind/ Body Healing. We believe that yoga was brought to Tibet from India in the 11th or 12th century and that Tibetan monks over time developed modified these exercises and developed an effective program of exercises that western society now calls the “Five Tibetan Rites”. The rugged mountainous conditions these monks live in may well account for their particular emphasis on vigor. Many of the yoga exercises and practices being taught in the western world today are very new. The “Five Tibetan Rites” are exactly what the ancient Tibetans developed over many centuries of time. Therefore it’s very important to do the “Five Tibetan Rites” exactly as they are presented without altering the form or sequence to achieve some of the benefits accrued to these “Rites”.Warm-up ExercisesThe following group of exercises has been developed to open, relax, release tension, to strengthen various parts of the body, and to provide toning to different parts of your body.

If you are overweight, in poor physical condition, or experiencing serious illness, this group of exercises is an excellent to help you begin your journey towards physical fitness. I suggest you do these warm-up exercises prior to the Five Rites if you are overweight or have not exercised in a long time.

This group of exercises 10 warm up of each!

Warm up

Warm-Up Exercise #1

Stand upright, tilt your head sideways towards your left shoulder and hold it for five seconds, then tilt your head towards your chest and hold it 5 seconds. Then tilt your head towards your left Shoulder and hold it five seconds, and lastly tilt your head backward and hold it five seconds. Return your head to a normal position.

Breathing: Exhale as you move your head around, and inhale as you return to the upright position.  

Warm-Up Exercise #2

Stand upright, slowly rotate your shoulders in a forward circular motion 5 times, then reverse the movement and rotate your shoulders in a backward circular motion 5 times.

Breathing: Breathe normally but deeply as you do this exercise.


 Warm-Up Exercise #3

Stand upright with your arms help up, your elbows bent, and your hands together in front of your chest, with your fingertips touching and palms apart. Press inward on your fingers until their inside surfaces are almost touching. Your palms should not be touching. Release and press your fingers again.

Breathing: Breathe normally. 


Warm-Up Exercise #4

In a relaxed standing position, hold your arms in front of you. Clasp your right hand around your left wrist, with your thumb against the inside of the wrist. Squeeze gently but firmly five times. Repeat the procedure with the left hand Squeezing the right wrist

.Breathing: Breathe normally. 

Warm-Up Exercise #5

Recline on the floor, resting the upper part of your body on your upper arms. Flex your knees and rhythmically bang them up and down against the floor in rapid succession. Your heels should remain on the floor throughout this exercise. Do this exercise for 20 – 30 seconds.

Breathing: Breathe normally through this exercise.

Warm-Up Exercise #6

Get down on the floor on your hands and Knees with your hands positioned under your shoulders and your knees under your hips. Bring your chin up and rotate your hips so the tailbone moves up, arching your back down. Then tuck your chin into your chest and rotate your back so that your pelvis moves down, arching you’re your back down.

Breathing: Inhale as you move your tailbone up and exhale as you move your tailbone down. 

The Five Tibetan Rites

Rite #1

Stand erect with arms outstretched horizontal to the floor, palms facing down. Your arms should be in line with your shoulders. Spin around clockwise until you become slightly dizzy. Gradually increase the number of spins from 1 spin to 21 spins.

Breathing: Inhale and exhale deeply as you do the spins. 

Rite #2

Lie flat on the floor, face up. Fully extend your arms Along your sides and place the palms of your hands against the floor, keeping fingers close together. Then raise your head off the floor tucking your chin into your chest. As you do this, lift your legs, knees straight, into a vertical position. If possible, extend the legs over the body towards your head. Do not let the knees bend. Then slowly lower the legs and head to the floor, always Keeping the knees straight. Allow the muscles to relax, and repeat.

Breathing: Breathe in deeply as you lift your head and legs and exhale as you lower your head and legs.

Rite #3

Kneel on the floor with the body erect. The hands should be placed on the backs of your thigh muscles. Incline the head and neck forward, tucking your chin in against your chest. Then throw the head and neck backward, arching the spine. Your toes should be curled under through this exercise. As you arch, you will brace your arms and hands against the thighs for support. After the arching returns your body to an erect position and begin the rite all over again.

Breathing: Inhale as you arch the spine and exhale as you return to an erect position.

Rite #4

Sit down on the floor with your legs straight out in front of you and your feet about 12″ apart. With the trunk of the body erect, place the palms of your hands on the floor alongside your buttocks. Then tuck the chin forward against the chest. Now drop the head backward as far as it will go. At the same time raise your body so that the knees bend while the arms remain straight. Then tense every muscle in your body.

Finally, let the muscles relax as you return to your original sitting position. Rest before repeating this Rite.   

Breathing: Breathe in as you raise up, hold your breath as you tense the muscles, and breathe out fully as you come down. 

Rite #5

Lie down with your face down to the floor. You will be supported by the hands palms down against the floor and the toes in the flexed position. Throughout this rite, the hands and feet should be kept straight. Start with your arms perpendicular to the Floor, and the spine arched, so that the body Is in a sagging position. Now throw the head back as far as possible. The, bending at the hips, bring the body up into an inverted “V”. At the same time, bring the chin forward, Tucking it against the chest.

Breathing: Breathe in deeply as you raise the body, and exhale fully as you lower the body.

Epigenetics, as a simplified definition, is the study of biological mechanisms that will switch genes on and off.

What are genes?
A gene is the basic physical and functional unit of heredity. Genes are made up of DNA. Some genes act as instructions to make molecules called proteins. … Every person has two copies of each gene, one inherited from each parent.

Gene or plural noun: genes (in informal use) is a unit of heredity which is transferred from a parent to offspring and is held to determine some characteristic of the offspring.

Your proteins are coded directly by your genes!

Genes, in technical terms, is a distinct sequence of nucleotides forming part of a chromosome. The order of which determines the order of monomers in a polypeptide or nucleic acid molecule which a cell (or virus) may synthesize.

You are made up of:

• Cells are fundamental working units of every human being. All the instructions required to direct their activities are contained within the chemical deoxyribonucleic acid, also known as DNA.
• DNA from humans is made up of approximately 3 billion nucleotide bases. There are four fundamental types of bases that comprise DNA – adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, commonly abbreviated as A, C, G, and T, respectively.
• The sequence, or the order, of the bases is what determines our life instructions.  Interestingly enough, our DNA sequence is mostly similar to that of a chimpanzee. Only a fraction of distinctively different sequences makes us human.
• Within the 3 billion bases, there are about 20,000 genes. Genes are specific sequences of bases that provide instructions on how to make important proteins – complex molecules that trigger various biological actions to carry out life functions.

In other words, Your DNA gives the instructions for various functional proteins to be produced inside your cells. This is the central
principle or set of principles laid down by a Scientific authority as incontrovertibly true.

Genetics has a new central principle called epigenetics.

Epigenetics affects how genes are read by cells, and subsequently whether the cells should produce relevant proteins.

Epigenetics: Myths and Facts

It used to be thought that we were born with a fixed genetic blueprint that determined our traits, behaviors, and health. Now, discoveries in the field of epigenetics have radically rebooted this theory by demonstrating that our DNA is more of a switchboard than a blueprint. Epigenetics is the study of how external forces, such as your environment and life experiences, trigger on-off mechanisms on the genetic switchboard. Epigenetic scientists are examining the mechanisms by which genes become expressed or silenced with the goal of understanding how we can influence their activity and change our genetic health outcomes. 

• Epigenetics Controls Genes. This is achieved through (a) nature: epigenetics is what determines a cell’s specialization (e.g., skin cell, blood cell, hair cell, liver cells, etc.) as a fetus develops into a baby through gene expression (active) or silencing (dormant); and (b) nurture: environmental stimuli can also cause genes to be turned off or turned on.
• Epigenetics Is Everywhere. What you eat, where you live, who you interact with, when you sleep, how you exercise, even aging – all of these can eventually cause chemical modifications around the genes that will turn those genes on or off over time. Additionally, in certain diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer’s, various genes will be switched into the opposite state, away from the normal/healthy state.
• Epigenetics Makes Us Unique. Even though we are all human, why do some of us have blonde hair or darker skin? Why do some of us hate the taste of mushrooms or eggplants? Why are some of us more sociable than others? The different combinations of genes that are turned on or off is what makes each one of us unique. Furthermore, there have been indications that some epigenetic changes can be inherited.
• Epigenetics Is Reversible. With 20,000+ genes, what will be the result of the different combinations of genes being turned on or off? The possible arrangements are enormous! But if we could map every single cause and effect of the different combinations, and if we could reverse the gene’s state to keep the good while eliminating the bad… then we could theoretically* cure cancer, slow aging, stop obesity, and so much more.

Presented in Nessa Carey’s book Epigenetics Revolution!

Think of your lifespan as a very long movie. Your cells are the actors and actresses that are essential units that make up your movie. Your DNA, in turn, is your script — instructions for all the participants of the movie to perform their roles.

Then your DNA sequence are the words on the script, and certain blocks of these words that instruct key actions or events to take place would be the genes.

The concept of genetics would be like screenwriting. Follow the analogy so far? Great. The concept of epigenetics, then, would be like directing.

The script can be the same, but the director can choose to eliminate or tweak certain scenes or dialogue, altering the movie for better or worse. After all, Steven Spielberg’s finished product would be drastically different than Woody Allen’s for the same movie script, wouldn’t it?

How to Stop the cycle of Misery!

“People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be a means to that end.” … “We are happy when we have family, we arehappy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends.”
“Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.” 
~ Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

Misery:

1. a state or feeling of great distress or discomfort of mind or body.”she went upstairs and cried in misery”synonyms:unhappiness, distress, wretchedness, hardship, suffering, affliction, anguish, anxiety, angst, torment, torture, hell, agony, pain, discomfort, deprivation, poverty, grief, heartache, heartbreak, heartbrokenness, despair, despondency, dejection, depression, desolation, gloom, gloominess, low spirits, moroseness, doldrums, melancholy, melancholia, woe, sadness, sorrow; More
   • a cause or source of great distress or discomfort.plural noun: miseries“the miseries of war”synonyms:affliction, misfortune, difficulty, problem, adversity, ordeal, trouble, hardship, deprivation; 

“If someone offered you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to run fast and run far. Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do, and a compass that perpetually stuck on north is worthless.” 
~Daniel Gilbert

How do you make yourself miserable in advance? Do your fears or attachments to a future result cause you to diminish your energy, light, and love now? How to stop creating pain in your life today because of an imagined, future misery. You might be concerned with future events or just have subtle energy around future events that you can shift with deeper insight.  Or you might have had a past incident that is still hard to let go of! It may just be an unlabeled feeling or emotion! Whatever it might be it’s time to just say no to future misery! If you are co creating based on your biology, beliefs, and possibilities than you must bring yourself into the now! We all know the past is history, the future mystery, and this moment is a gift! Ah, get the gift that you are and stop making yourself miserable, or apathetic, or less than you are here to be! All healing happens in the NOW! Create what you want to feel by truly accepting all that is! Accepting it mean consent to receive (a thing offered). If it already happened accepting it in the current moment allows your energy to most fully create the future! Acceptance does not mean approval. Acceptance is not the same as approval and approval is not the same as acceptance. Acceptance is something any one person can give to any other person. You don’t need any training or qualifications to accept somebody. Acceptance means, “I receive you as you are.” You are here to blaze a new path! To be a leader and the light that you are! Just say no to future misery! This live web meeting is for you if you want to ground yourself more deeply to your truth, your wisdom, and the intuition of your mind, body, and soul. Be here now and stop creating unnecessary pain! Thank you for being in Miracle Makers Academy: We believe that you are part of our global family! We empower, support and mentor all we can to build a supportive, sustainable and just world for all beings! We believe you are special and that everyone has the sam amount of essence of specialness! You don’t have to believe what we believe, we want to support you in getting your message out and for you to know yourself! You are here to do miraculous things! You are a unique individual and we want you to HEAL, FEEL, and THRIVE! Access to new Master Classes and our library of guided meditations is part of the Miracle Makers Academy! You can transform your relationships with the support of the academy and our beautiful community of Miracle Makers!  The purpose of the Miracle Makers Academy is to empower you to be the healthiest and happiest version of yourself in relationship to people you cherish, admire, and inspire!  Miracle Makers support you in leading a meaningful, self-expressed, and fulfilled life!

Accept being wrong or right!

Here is one Miracle Maker’s experience with the MasterClass: “Before attending a MasterClass, I believed that I was broken. Crippled with multiple back surgeries, a tight heart from a failed marriage, lost thoughts running around in my brain, and a career in shambles, I thought that I was just powerless. But, something shifted in the way I saw the world as a result of this class. Instead of feeling like a victim, I had a fresh start. Instead of seeing loss, I started to see possibilities.For example, what if my vulnerabilities connected me to others with unbridled empathy? But, it just wasn’t my thoughts that changed. Within days of this session, my life was actually changed. First, a new home. Then, new career interviews. And even further, new dating possibilities…Could just one session really transform a life? Really? Yes. It did! And, it will for you too!”~ Andrew

David Tegenfeldt’s reflection on the meaning of ‘hope’— _

“Commonly today, people use the term “hope” to express a wish, desire, or something they dream of. However, if we look at the Indo-European root of the word “hope” and at the Hebrew and Greek equivalents of the word “hope”, we get a somewhat different understanding of the word than how it is used in common parlance.

The Indo-European root of the word “hope” is the same root from which the word “curve” (to bend) comes from. Therefore, the root of the word “hope” gives us the connotation of a change in direction; going in a different way.

The Hebrew and Greek equivalent of our English word “hope” has the meaning of a strong and confident expectation. This meaning stands in contrast to “wishful thinking.”

Putting the Indo-European root and the Hebrew and Greek equivalent together, yields a meaning of the word “hope” as a confident expectation that a desirable change is likely to happen.

Percy Shelley, the 19th century romantic poet, in talking about “the moral imagination” said, “a man to be greatly good must imagine clearly, he must see himself and the world through the eyes of another and of many others

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.” –Wayne Dyer”Just pick a goal, a goal you truly want to achieve, and take a clear-eyed look at your weaknesses–not so you’ll feel less confident, but so you can determine exactly what you need to work on. Then get to work. Celebrate small successes. Analyze your weaknesses. Keep going. As you gain skill, you’ll also gain a feeling of genuine confidence, one that can never be taken away–because you’ve earned it.” (OK, that one is mine, he said, blushing.)

Jan Phillips wrote in “The Art Of Original Thinking” ~ The making of a Thought Leader thoughts on hope. She believes that originality is a practice that can be learned, or rather rediscovered, with the engines of attention and surrender. This kind of thinking moves beyond dualities and discovers the connections between people and the oneness of the entire human family. With many illustrations from artists and creative individuals in the corporate world, Phillips reveals how the practice of uniting the opposites makes for a synthesis that makes a difference. Another point she makes is that visionaries must be willing to embrace mysteries and not try to know everything:

“Mysticism is an experience of communion. It is an embodied awareness of oneness, an intuitive recognition that the whole is in all of the parts. If religion were intelligence, mysticism would be wisdom. If religion were the recipe, mysticism would be the meal. Mysticism is the outer brought inward. It is not the knowledge of something, but the experience of something.”

Phillips makes a good case for this kind of spiritual intelligence and its role in creating a better world. She quotes philosopher Jacob Needleman who has written:

“No one person can answer the question of meaning in this world today. It is in thinking together, under the strong conditions of serious search, that a new understanding can be approached. Group communication, group pondering, is the real art form of our time.”

The Surprising habits of Original
Thinkers | Adam Grant

“Don’t waste your energy trying to change opinions … do your thing, and don’t care if they like it.” –Tina Fey

“Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it.” –Bryce Courtenay

“The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear and get a record of successful experiences behind you.” –William Jennings Bryan

“If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” –Vincent van Gogh

“Always be yourself and have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful personality and try to duplicate it.” –Bruce Lee

“Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles, and less than perfect conditions. So what? Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident, and more and more successful.” –Mark Victor Hansen

“You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.” –Eleanor Roosevelt

“Low self-confidence isn’t a life sentence. Self-confidence can be learned, practiced, and mastered–just like any other skill. Once you master it, everything in your life will change for the better.” –Barrie Davenport

“Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” –E.E. Cummings

“Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.” –Golda Meir

“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.” —Arthur Ashe

“It is confidence in our bodies, minds, and spirits that allows us to keep looking for new adventures.” —Oprah Winfrey

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

“But failure has to be an option in art and in exploration–because it’s a leap of faith. And no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk. You have to be willing to take those risks.” –James Cameron

“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within.” –Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.” –Peter T. McIntyre

“Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.” –Richard Bach

“The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.” –Paul Tillich

“If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.” –Thomas Alva Edison

“Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.” –Andre Dubus

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be?” –Marianne Williamson

“Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love.” –Brené Brown

“Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” –Dr. Benjamin Spock

“Successful people have fear, successful people have doubts, and successful people have worries. They just don’t let these feelings stop them.” –T. Harv Eker

“You can have anything you want if you are willing to give up the belief that you can’t have it.” –Dr. Robert Anthony

“It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” –Sir Edmund Hillary

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” –Oscar Wilde

“I had to grow to love my body. I did not have a good self-image at first. Finally it occurred to me, I’m either going to love me or hate me. And I chose to love myself. Then everything kind of sprung from there. Things that I thought weren’t attractive became sexy. Confidence makes you sexy.” –Queen Latifah

“You yourself, as much as anyone in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” –Buddha

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” –Dale Carnegie

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” –Helen Keller

“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.” –Thomas Jefferson

“Confidence is a habit that can be developed by acting as if you already had the confidence you desire to have.” –Brian Tracy

“When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.” –Willie Nelson

“If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.” –T. Harv Eker

“Wouldn’t it be powerful if you fell in love with yourself so deeply that you would do just about anything if you knew it would make you happy? This is precisely how much life loves you and wants you to nurture yourself. The deeper you love yourself, the more the universe will affirm your worth. Then you can enjoy a lifelong love affair that brings you the richest fulfillment from inside out.” –Alan Cohen

“To anyone that ever told you you’re no good … They’re no better.” –Hayley Williams

“Always remember you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” –Christopher Robin

“You have no control over other people’s taste, so focus on staying true to your own.” –Tim Gunn

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” –Eleanor Roosevelt

“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.” –J.M. Barrie

“It’s a dead-end street if you sit around waiting for someone else to tell you you’re OK.” –Michael Pitt

“I think that the power is the principle. The principle of moving forward, as though you have the confidence to move forward, eventually gives you confidence when you look back and see what you’ve done.” –Robert Downey Jr.

“If you’re presenting yourself with confidence, you can pull off pretty much anything.” –Katy Perry

“Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sail. Explore. Dream. Discover.” –Mark Twain

“I’ve finally stopped running away from myself. Who else is there better to be?” –Goldie Hawn

“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” –Rumi

“We avoid the things that we’re afraid of because we think there will be dire consequences if we confront them. But the truly dire consequences in our lives come from avoiding things that we need to learn about or discover.” –Shakti Gawain

“Persons of high self-esteem are not driven to make themselves superior to others; they do not seek to prove their value by measuring themselves against a comparative standard. Their joy is being who they are, not in being better than someone else.” –Nathaniel Branden

“Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many–not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.” –Charles Dickens

“Tension is who you think you should be, relaxation is who you are.” –Chinese proverb

The first thing I want to do is say thank you to all of you. The second thing I want to do is introduce my co-author and dear friend and co-teacher. Ken and I have been working together for almost 40 years. That’s Ken Sharpe over there.

So there is among many people — certainly me and most of the people I talk to — a kind of collective dissatisfaction with the way things are working, with the way our institutions run. Our kids’ teachers seem to be failing them. Our doctors don’t know who the hell we are, and they don’t have enough time for us. We certainly can’t trust the bankers, and we certainly can’t trust the brokers. They almost brought the entire financial system down. And even as we do our own work, all too often, we find ourselves having to choose between doing what we think is the right thing and doing the expected thing, or the required thing, or the profitable thing. So everywhere we look, pretty much across the board, we worry that the people we depend on don’t really have our interests at heart. Or if they do have our interests at heart, we worry that they don’t know us well enough to figure out what they need to do in order to allow us to secure those interests. They don’t understand us. They don’t have the time to get to know us.

There are two kinds of responses that we make to this sort of general dissatisfaction. If things aren’t going right, the first response is: let’s make more rules, let’s set up a set of detailed procedures to make sure that people will do the right thing. Give teachers scripts to follow in the classroom, so even if they don’t know what they’re doing and don’t care about the welfare of our kids, as long as they follow the scripts, our kids will get educated. Give judges a list of mandatory sentences to impose for crimes, so that you don’t need to rely on judges using their judgment. Instead, all they have to do is look up on the list what kind of sentence goes with what kind of crime. Impose limits on what credit card companies can charge in interest and on what they can charge in fees. More and more rules to protect us against an indifferent, uncaring set of institutions we have to deal with.

Or — or maybe and — in addition to rules, let’s see if we can come up with some really clever incentives so that, even if the people we deal with don’t particularly want to serve our interests, it is in their interest to serve our interest — the magic incentives that will get people to do the right thing even out of pure selfishness. So we offer teachers bonuses if the kids they teach score passing grades on these big test scores that are used to evaluate the quality of school systems.

Rules and incentives — “sticks” and “carrots.” We passed a bunch of rules to regulate the financial industry in response to the recent collapse. There’s the Dodd-Frank Act, there’s the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that is temporarily being headed through the backdoor by Elizabeth Warren. Maybe these rules will actually improve the way these financial services companies behave. We’ll see. In addition, we are strugglingto find some way to create incentives for people in the financial services industry that will have them more interested in serving the long-term interests even of their own companies, rather than securing short-term profits. So if we find just the right incentives, they’ll do the right thing — as I said — selfishly, and if we come up with the right rules and regulations, they won’t drive us all over a cliff. And Ken [Sharpe] and I certainly know that you need to reign in the bankers. If there is a lesson to be learned from the financial collapse it is that.

But what we believe, and what we argue in the book, is that there is no set of rules, no matter how detailed, no matter how specific, no matter how carefully monitored and enforced, there is no set of rules that will get us what we need. Why? Because bankers are smart people. And, like water, they will find cracks in any set of rules. You design a set of rules that will make sure that the particular reason why the financial system “almost-collapse” can’t happen again. It is naive beyond description to think that having blocked this source of financial collapse, you have blocked all possible sources of financial collapse. So it’s just a question of waiting for the next one and then marveling at how we could have been so stupid as not to protect ourselves against that.

What we desperately need, beyond, or along with, better rules and reasonably smart incentives, is we need virtue. We need character. We need people who want to do the right thing. And in particular, the virtue that we need most of all is the virtue that Aristotle called “practical wisdom.” Practical wisdom is the moral will to do the right thing and the moral skill to figure out what the right thing is. So Aristotle was very interested in watching how the craftsmen around him worked. And he was impressed at how they would improvise novel solutions to novel problems — problems that they hadn’t anticipated. So one example is he sees these stonemasons working on the Isle of Lesbos, and they need to measure out round columns. Well if you think about it, it’s really hard to measure out round columns using a ruler. So what do they do? They fashion a novel solution to the problem. They created a ruler that bends, what we would call these days a tape measure — a flexible rule, a rule that bends. And Aristotle said, “Hah, they appreciated that sometimes to design rounded columns, you need to bend the rule.” And Aristotle said often in dealing with other people, we need to bend the rules.

Dealing with other people demands a kind of flexibility that no set of rules can encompass. Wise people know when and how to bend the rules. Wise people know how to improvise. The way my co-author , Ken, and I talk about it, they are kind of like jazz musicians. The rules are like the notes on the page, and that gets you started, but then you dance around the notes on the page, coming up with just the right combination for this particular moment with this particular set of fellow players. So for Aristotle, the kind of rule-bending, rule exception-finding and improvisation that you see in skilled craftsmen is exactly what you need to be a skilled moral craftsman. And in interactions with people, almost all the time, it is this kind of flexibility that is required.A wise person knows when to bend the rules. A wise person knows when to improvise. And most important, a wise person does this improvising and rule-bending in the service of the right aims. If you are a rule-bender and an improviser mostly to serve yourself, what you get is ruthless manipulation of other people. So it matters that you do this wise practice in the service of others and not in the service of yourself. And so the will to do the right thing is just as important as the moral skill of improvisation and exception-finding. Together they comprise practical wisdom, which Aristotle thought was the master virtue.

So I’ll give you an example of wise practice in action. It’s the case of Michael. Michael’s a young guy. He had a pretty low-wage job. He was supporting his wife and a child, and the child was going to parochial school.Then he lost his job. He panicked about being able to support his family. One night, he drank a little too much,and he robbed a cab driver — stole 50 dollars. He robbed him at gunpoint. It was a toy gun. He got caught. He got tried. He got convicted. The Pennsylvania sentencing guidelines required a minimum sentence for a crime like this of two years, 24 months. The judge on the case, Judge Lois Forer thought that this made no sense.He had never committed a crime before. He was a responsible husband and father. He had been faced with desperate circumstances. All this would do is wreck a family. And so she improvised a sentence — 11 months,and not only that, but release every day to go to work. Spend your night in jail, spend your day holding down a job. He did. He served out his sentence. He made restitution and found himself a new job. And the family was united.

And it seemed on the road to some sort of a decent life — a happy ending to a story involving wise improvisation from a wise judge. But it turned out the prosecutor was not happy that Judge Forer ignored the sentencing guidelines and sort of invented her own, and so he appealed. And he asked for the mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery. He did after all have a toy gun. The mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery is five years. He won the appeal. Michael was sentenced to five years in prison. Judge Forer had to follow the law. And by the way, this appeal went through after he had finished serving his sentence, so he was out and working at a job and taking care of his family and he had to go back into jail. Judge Forer did what she was required to do, and then she quit the bench. And Michael disappeared. So that is an example,both of wisdom in practice and the subversion of wisdom by rules that are meant, of course, to make things better.

Now consider Ms. Dewey. Ms. Dewey’s a teacher in a Texas elementary school. She found herself listening to a consultant one day who was trying to help teachers boost the test scores of the kids, so that the schoolwould reach the elite category in percentage of kids passing big tests. All these schools in Texas compete with one another to achieve these milestones, and there are bonuses and various other treats that come if you beat the other schools. So here was the consultant’s advice: first, don’t waste your time on kids who are going to pass the test no matter what you do. Second, don’t waste your time on kids who can’t pass the testno matter what you do. Third, don’t waste your time on kids who moved into the district too late for their scores to be counted. Focus all of your time and attention on the kids who are on the bubble, the so-called “bubble kids” — kids where your intervention can get them just maybe over the line from failing to passing. So Ms. Dewey heard this, and she shook her head in despair while fellow teachers were sort of cheering each other on and nodding approvingly. It’s like they were about to go play a football game. For Ms. Dewey, this isn’t why she became a teacher.

Now Ken and I are not naive, and we understand that you need to have rules. You need to have incentives.People have to make a living. But the problem with relying on rules and incentives is that they demoralizeprofessional activity, and they demoralize professional activity in two senses. First, they demoralize the peoplewho are engaged in the activity. Judge Forer quits, and Ms. Dewey in completely disheartened. And second,they demoralize the activity itself. The very practice is demoralized, and the practitioners are demoralized. It creates people — when you manipulate incentives to get people to do the right thing — it creates people who are addicted to incentives. That is to say, it creates people who only do things for incentives.

Now the striking thing about this is that psychologists have known this for 30 years. Psychologists have known about the negative consequences of incentivizing everything for 30 years. We know that if you reward kids for drawing pictures, they stop caring about the drawing and care only about the reward. If you reward kids for reading books, they stop caring about what’s in the books and only care about how long they are. If you reward teachers for kids’ test scores, they stop caring about educating and only care about test preparation. If you were to reward doctors for doing more procedures — which is the current system — they would do more. If instead you reward doctors for doing fewer procedures, they will do fewer. What we want, of course, is doctors who do just the right amount of procedures and do the right amount for the right reason — namely, to serve the welfare of their patients. Psychologists have known this for decades, and it’s time for policymakers to start paying attention and listen to psychologists a little bit, instead of economists.

And it doesn’t have to be this way. We think, Ken and I, that there are real sources of hope. We identify one set of people in all of these practices who we call canny outlaws. These are people who, being forced to operate in a system that demands rule-following and creates incentives, find away around the rules, find a way to subvert the rules. So there are teachers who have these scripts to follow, and they know that if they follow these scripts, the kids will learn nothing. And so what they do is they follow the scripts, but they follow the scripts at double-time and squirrel away little bits of extra time during which they teach in the way that they actually know is effective. So these are little ordinary, everyday heroes, and they’re incredibly admirable,but there’s no way that they can sustain this kind of activity in the face of a system that either roots them outor grinds them down.

So canny outlaws are better than nothing, but it’s hard to imagine any canny outlaw sustaining that for an indefinite period of time. More hopeful are people we call system-changers. These are people who are lookingnot to dodge the system’s rules and regulations, but to transform the system, and we talk about several. One in particular is a judge named Robert Russell. And one day he was faced with the case of Gary Pettengill.Pettengill was a 23-year-old vet who had planned to make the army a career, but then he got a severe back injury in Iraq, and that forced him to take a medical discharge. He was married, he had a third kid on the way,he suffered from PTSD, in addition to the bad back, and recurrent nightmares, and he had started using marijuana to ease some of the symptoms. He was only able to get part-time work because of his back, and so he was unable to earn enough to put food on the table and take care of his family. So he started selling marijuana. He was busted in a drug sweep. His family was kicked out of their apartment, and the welfare system was threatening to take away his kids.

Under normal sentencing procedures, Judge Russell would have had little choice but to sentence Pettengill to serious jail-time as a drug felon. But Judge Russell did have an alternative. And that’s because he was in a special court. He was in a court called the Veterans’ Court. In the Veterans’ Court — this was the first of its kind in the United States. Judge Russell created the Veterans’ Court. It was a court only for veterans who had broken the law. And he had created it exactly because mandatory sentencing laws were taking the judgment out of judging. No one wanted non-violent offenders — and especially non-violent offenders who were veterans to boot — to be thrown into prison. They wanted to do something about what we all know, namely the revolving door of the criminal justice system. And what the Veterans’ Court did, was it treated each criminal as an individual, tried to get inside their problems, tried to fashion responses to their crimes that helped them to rehabilitate themselves, and didn’t forget about them once the judgment was made. Stayed with them, followed up on them, made sure that they were sticking to whatever plan had been jointly developed to get them over the hump.

There are now 22 cities that have Veterans’ Courts like this. Why has the idea spread? Well, one reason is that Judge Russell has now seen 108 vets in his Veterans’ Court as of February of this year, and out of 108, guess how many have gone back through the revolving door of justice into prison. None. None. Anyone would glom onto a criminal justice system that has this kind of a record. So here’s is a system-changer, and it seems to be catching.

There’s a banker who created a for-profit community bank that encouraged bankers — I know this is hard to believe — encouraged bankers who worked there to do well by doing good for their low-income clients. The bank helped finance the rebuilding of what was otherwise a dying community. Though their loan recipients were high-risk by ordinary standards, the default rate was extremely low. The bank was profitable. The bankers stayed with their loan recipients. They didn’t make loans and then sell the loans. They serviced the loans. They made sure that their loan recipients were staying up with their payments. Banking hasn’t always been the way we read about it now in the newspapers. Even Goldman Sachs once used to serve clients,before it turned into an institution that serves only itself. Banking wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t have to be this way.

So there are examples like this in medicine — doctors at Harvard who are trying to transform medical education, so that you don’t get a kind of ethical erosion and loss of empathy, which characterizes most medical students in the course of their medical training. And the way they do it is to give third-year medical students patients who they follow for an entire year. So the patients are not organ systems, and they’re not diseases; they’re people, people with lives. And in order to be an effective doctor, you need to treat people who have lives and not just disease. In addition to which there’s an enormous amount of back and forth,mentoring of one student by another, of all the students by the doctors, and the result is a generation — we hope — of doctors who do have time for the people they treat. We’ll see.20:45

So there are lots of examples like this that we talk about. Each of them shows that it is possible to build on and nurture character and keep a profession true to its proper mission — what Aristotle would have called its proper telos. And Ken and I believe that this is what practitioners actually want. People want to be allowed to be virtuous. They want to have permission to do the right thing. They don’t want to feel like they need to take a shower to get the moral grime off their bodies everyday when they come home from work.

Aristotle thought that practical wisdom was the key to happiness, and he was right. There’s now a lot of research being done in psychology on what makes people happy, and the two things that jump out in study after study — I know this will come as a shock to all of you — the two things that matter most to happiness are love and work. Love: managing successfully relations with the people who are close to you and with the communities of which you are a part. Work: engaging in activities that are meaningful and satisfying. If you have that, good close relations with other people, work that’s meaningful and fulfilling, you don’t much need anything else.

Well, to love well and to work well, you need wisdom. Rules and incentives don’t tell you how to be a good friend, how to be a good parent, how to be a good spouse, or how to be a good doctor or a good lawyer or a good teacher. Rules and incentives are no substitutes for wisdom. Indeed, we argue, there is no substitute for wisdom. And so practical wisdom does not require heroic acts of self-sacrifice on the part of practitioners. In giving us the will and the skill to do the right thing — to do right by others — practical wisdom also gives us the will and the skill to do right by ourselves.

OPEN:

Seven years ago, a student came to me and asked me to invest in his company.He said, “I’m working with three friends, and we’re going to try to disrupt an industry by selling stuff online.”And I said, “OK, you guys spent the whole summer on this, right?””No, we all took internships just in case it doesn’t work out.””All right, but you’re going to go in full time once you graduate.””Not exactly. We’ve all lined up backup jobs.”Six months go by,it’s the day before the company launches,and there is still not a functioning website.”You guys realize, the entire company is a website.That’s literally all it is.”So I obviously declined to invest.And they ended up naming the company Warby Parker.(Laughter)They sell glasses online.They were recently recognized as the world’s most innovative companyand valued at over a billion dollars.And now? My wife handles our investments.Why was I so wrong?To find out, I’ve been studying people that I come to call “originals.”Originals are nonconformists,people who not only have new ideasbut take action to champion them.They are people who stand out and speak up.Originals drive creativity and change in the world.They’re the people you want to bet on.And they look nothing like I expected.I want to show you today three things I’ve learnedabout recognizing originalsand becoming a little bit more like them.So the first reason that I passed on Warby Parkerwas they were really slow getting off the ground.Now, you are all intimately familiar with the mind of a procrastinator.Well, I have a confession for you. I’m the opposite. I’m a precrastinator.Yes, that’s an actual term.You know that panic you feel a few hours before a big deadlinewhen you haven’t done anything yet.I just feel that a few months ahead of time.(Laughter)So this started early: when I was a kid, I took Nintendo games very seriously.I would wake up at 5am,start playing and not stop until I had mastered them.Eventually it got so out of hand that a local newspaper cameand did a story on the dark side of Nintendo, starring me.(Laughter)(Applause)Since then, I have traded hair for teeth.(Laughter)But this served me well in college,because I finished my senior thesis four months before the deadline.And I was proud of that, until a few years ago.I had a student named Jihae, who came to me and said,”I have my most creative ideas when I’m procrastinating.”And I was like, “That’s cute, where are the four papers you owe me?”(Laughter)No, she was one of our most creative students,and as an organizational psychologist, this is the kind of idea that I test.So I challenged her to get some data.She goes into a bunch of companies.She has people fill out surveys about how often they procrastinate.Then she gets their bosses to rate how creative and innovative they are.And sure enough, the precrastinators like me,who rush in and do everything earlyare rated as less creativethan people who procrastinate moderately.So I want to know what happens to the chronic procrastinators.She was like, “I don’t know. They didn’t fill out my survey.”(Laughter)No, here are our results.You actually do see that the people who wait until the last minuteare so busy goofing off that they don’t have any new ideas.And on the flip side, the people who race inare in such a frenzy of anxiety that they don’t have original thoughts either.There’s a sweet spot where originals seem to live.Why is this?Maybe original people just have bad work habits.Maybe procrastinating does not cause creativity.To find out, we designed some experiments.We asked people to generate new business ideas,and then we get independent readersto evaluate how creative and useful they are.And some of them are asked to do the task right away.Others we randomly assign to procrastinateby dangling Minesweeper in front of themfor either five or 10 minutes.And sure enough, the moderate procrastinatorsare 16 percent more creative than the other two groups.Now, Minesweeper is awesome, but it’s not the driver of the effect,because if you play the game first before you learn about the task,there’s no creativity boost.It’s only when you’re told that you’re going to be working on this problem,and then you start procrastinating,but the task is still active in the back of your mind,that you start to incubate.Procrastination gives you time to consider divergent ideas,to think in nonlinear ways, to make unexpected leaps.So just as we were finishing these experiments,I was starting to write a book about originals,and I thought, “This is the perfect time to teach myself to procrastinate,while writing a chapter on procrastination.”So I metaprocrastinated,and like any self-respecting precrastinator,I woke up early the next morningand I made a to-do list with steps on how to procrastinate.(Laughter)And then I worked diligentlytoward my goal of not making progress toward my goal.I started writing the procrastination chapter,and one day — I was halfway through –I literally put it away in mid-sentencefor months.It was agony.But when I came back to it, I had all sorts of new ideas.As Aaron Sorkin put it,”You call it procrastinating. I call it thinking.”And along the way I discoveredthat a lot of great originals in history were procrastinators.Take Leonardo da Vinci.He toiled on and off for 16 yearson the Mona Lisa.He felt like a failure.He wrote as much in his journal.But some of the diversions he took in opticstransformed the way that he modeled lightand made him into a much better painter.What about Martin Luther King, Jr.?The night before the biggest speech of his life,the March on Washington,he was up past 3am, rewriting it.He’s sitting in the audience waiting for his turn to go onstage,and he is still scribbling notes and crossing out lines.When he gets onstage, 11 minutes in,he leaves his prepared remarksto utter four words that changed the course of history:”I have a dream.”That was not in the script.By delaying the task of finalizing the speech until the very last minute,he left himself open to the widest range of possible ideas.And because the text wasn’t set in stone,he had freedom to improvise.Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity,but it can be a virtue for creativity.What you see with a lot of great originalsis that they are quick to start but they’re slow to finish.And this is what I missed with Warby Parker.When they were dragging their heels for six months,I looked at them and said,”You know, a lot of other companies are starting to sell glasses online.”They missed the first-mover advantage.But what I didn’t realize was they were spending all that timetrying to figure out how to get peopleto be comfortable ordering glasses online.And it turns out the first-mover advantage is mostly a myth.Look at a classic study of over 50 product categories,comparing the first movers who created the marketwith the improvers who introduced something different and better.What you see is that the first movers had a failure rate of 47 percent,compared with only 8 percent for the improvers.Look at Facebook, waiting to build a social networkuntil after Myspace and Friendster.Look at Google, waiting for years after Altavista and Yahoo.It’s much easier to improve on somebody else’s ideathan it is to create something new from scratch.So the lesson I learned is that to be original you don’t have to be first.You just have to be different and better.But that wasn’t the only reason I passed on Warby Parker.They were also full of doubts.They had backup plans lined up,and that made me doubt that they had the courage to be original,because I expected that originals would look something like this.(Laughter)Now, on the surface,a lot of original people look confident,but behind the scenes,they feel the same fear and doubt that the rest of us do.They just manage it differently.Let me show you: this is a depictionof how the creative process works for most of us.(Laughter)Now, in my research, I discovered there are two different kinds of doubt.There’s self-doubt and idea doubt.Self-doubt is paralyzing.It leads you to freeze.But idea doubt is energizing.It motivates you to test, to experiment, to refine,just like MLK did.And so the key to being originalis just a simple thingof avoiding the leap from step three to step four.Instead of saying, “I’m crap,”you say, “The first few drafts are always crap,and I’m just not there yet.”So how do you get there?Well, there’s a clue, it turns out,in the Internet browser that you use.We can predict your job performance and your commitmentjust by knowing what web browser you use.Now, some of you are not going to like the results of this study –(Laughter)But there is good evidence that Firefox and Chrome userssignificantly outperform Internet Explorer and Safari users.Yes.(Applause)They also stay in their jobs 15 percent longer, by the way.Why? It’s not a technical advantage.The four browser groups on average have similar typing speedand they also have similar levels of computer knowledge.It’s about how you got the browser.Because if you use Internet Explorer or Safari,those came preinstalled on your computer,and you accepted the default option that was handed to you.If you wanted Firefox or Chrome, you had to doubt the defaultand ask, is there a different option out there,and then be a little resourceful and download a new browser.So people hear about this study and they’re like,”Great, if I want to get better at my job, I just need to upgrade my browser?”(Laughter)No, it’s about being the kind of personwho takes the initiative to doubt the defaultand look for a better option.And if you do that well,you will open yourself up to the opposite of déjà vu.There’s a name for it. It’s called vuja de.(Laughter)Vuja de is when you look at something you’ve seen many times beforeand all of a sudden see it with fresh eyes.It’s a screenwriter who looks at a movie scriptthat can’t get the green light for more than half a century.In every past version, the main character has been an evil queen.But Jennifer Lee starts to question whether that makes sense.She rewrites the first act,reinvents the villain as a tortured heroand Frozen becomes the most successful animated movie ever.So there’s a simple message from this story.When you feel doubt, don’t let it go.(Laughter)What about fear?Originals feel fear, too.They’re afraid of failing,but what sets them apart from the rest of usis that they’re even more afraid of failing to try.They know you can fail by starting a business that goes bankruptor by failing to start a business at all.They know that in the long run, our biggest regrets are not our actionsbut our inactions.The things we wish we could redo, if you look at the science,are the chances not taken.Elon Musk told me recently, he didn’t expect Tesla to succeed.He was sure the first few SpaceX launcheswould fail to make it to orbit, let alone get back,but it was too important not to try.And for so many of us, when we have an important idea,we don’t bother to try.But I have some good news for you.You are not going to get judged on your bad ideas.A lot of people think they will.If you look across industriesand ask people about their biggest idea, their most important suggestion,85 percent of them stayed silent instead of speaking up.They were afraid of embarrassing themselves, of looking stupid.But guess what? Originals have lots and lots of bad ideas,tons of them, in fact.Take the guy who invented this.Do you care that he came up with a talking doll so creepythat it scared not only kids but adults, too?No. You celebrate Thomas Edison for pioneering the light bulb.(Laughter)If you look across fields,the greatest originals are the ones who fail the most,because they’re the ones who try the most.Take classical composers, the best of the best.Why do some of them get more pages in encyclopedias than othersand also have their compositions rerecorded more times?One of the best predictorsis the sheer volume of compositions that they generate.The more output you churn out, the more variety you getand the better your chances of stumbling on something truly original.Even the three icons of classical music — Bach, Beethoven, Mozart –had to generate hundreds and hundreds of compositionsto come up with a much smaller number of masterpieces.Now, you may be wondering,how did this guy become great without doing a whole lot?I don’t know how Wagner pulled that off.But for most of us, if we want to be more original,we have to generate more ideas.The Warby Parker founders, when they were trying to name their company,they needed something sophisticated, unique, with no negative associationsto build a retail brand,and they tested over 2,000 possibilitiesbefore they finally put togetherWarby and Parker.So if you put all this together, what you see is that originalsare not that different from the rest of us.They feel fear and doubt. They procrastinate.They have bad ideas.And sometimes, it’s not in spite of those qualities but because of themthat they succeed.So when you see those things, don’t make the same mistake I did.Don’t write them off.And when that’s you, don’t count yourself out either.Know that being quick to start but slow to finishcan boost your creativity,that you can motivate yourself by doubting your ideasand embracing the fear of failing to try,and that you need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones.Look, being original is not easy,but I have no doubt about this:it’s the best way to improve the world around us.Thank you.(Applause)English

Today we’re gonna look at how we can see organizations as systems.Ludwig von Bertalanffy and J. G. Millerestablished the foundations of general systems theoryin the 1960s and ’70s,and researchers in the organizational studies areaimported the systems metaphorof the living biological organismand the key terms that go along with itto pursue a richer understandingof how organizations worked.In 1966, for example, Daniel Katz and Robert Kahnpublished The Social Psychology of Organizationsthat applied systems theory’s conceptsto organizational life.I think it’s most helpful to see systemsas an alternative perspective at the time.Classical management era of organizational studieswas really the dominant view,and it saw organizations as machines,and that was the main way to view life in organizationsfor many decades.The goal of that classical management school of thoughtwas they wanted efficiency, productivity, and control,they were looking for the one right way,or as Frederick Taylor said, the one best wayto do every single task in the organization,and so when systems theory came alongit was really a whole ‘nother way to view life at work.A systems approach looks at the whole organism,not the little pieces of the machine,but how it all fits together as a whole.So the goal of the systems approachis to describe and explain how organizations work,they don’t have a control mindset,and they wanted to pursue multiple waysto accomplish the various goals of the organization,they’re not lookin’ for the one right way,so I think it’s best to understandthe systems approach as a counterpoint or an alternativeor even a reaction against the classical management eraand school of thought.So in an organization we have three main parts.We have a set of inputswhere we have resources, information that is neededto supply the organizational system,we also have the processes, or throughputs,that’s all the activity within the systemthat we need to do to accomplish work,and then we have the outputs,those are the outcomes, the products,the services created or delivered by the organization.Typical pizza place, for example,has inputs that you might expect,the people that are doing the work,the food, the ovens, the refrigerator,pizza boxes, and all the other materials,then you have your processes, or throughputs,where you make the dough, you cut the vegetables,and mix the sauce, answer the phones, take the orders,make the pizza, delegate the tasks,lots of work in a pizza place,and then you have outputs,which are hopefully pizza delivered to happy customers,you have a profit for the shop,hopefully your employees are getting good paychecks,you put the trash in the dumpsterand all the other kinds of waste material,those are also considered outputs of a system,and those are the three main parts.So systems here are clearly open,that’s one of the main concepts in systems theory,they’re open to their environment.And when we say environmentwe don’t just mean things like the weather,of course we’re not excluding that weather,but the environment more broadly.So you have permeable boundaries,where information comes in and out,resources flow both in and outof those boundaries around the organization,and you have an exchange with the environmentthat’s not just happeningbut it’s essential for the health of the system.So, constantly things are coming inand moving out of the systemto keep it healthy, to keep it functioning properly,and your environments that you’re in are very unpredictable,you can’t say for certainexactly what’s gonna happen with competitors,and exactly what’s gonna happen in the future,so you have the leaders that are scanning the environment,they’re called boundary spanners,and they’re looking at the environmentto see what the vendors are up to,what the customers are looking to do,what the competition is up to,where the general economy is headed,and they’re keeping an eye through environmental scanningon all of the things that are happeningin and around the organization to make better decisions.Holism is an important part of the systems approach,where systems are viewed as a whole,not simply as a collection of separate pieces,so you wouldn’t view yourself, your whole body,as just a collection of cells, you’re much more than that.Another way to say itis a system is greater than the sum of its parts.Some people use the term synergy here,which has a bad rap in some circles.Those parts of the system are interdependent,and they interact through mutual feedback processes.So, feedback is a dynamic processwhere the pieces of the system of that wholeare all interconnected.Interdependence is another leading conceptin the systems approach,where organizations are in a dynamicand interconnected relationship with their environment,for example, there are subparts within the systemthat are also interrelated, they’re not isolated.The organization is not simply isolatedand plopped down in a community,it’s connected to that community,and the pieces, the parts within that organization,are also interconnected,they’re made up of interconnected sub-systems,so you have a whole organizationand then you have, let’s say,some major departments within that organization,and then within those departments you have work teamsthat are also interrelated and overlapping.So, changes to one part of the systemdirectly or indirectly influence other parts.For example, if you had some people call in sickon one team, then other people in the organizationwould be at least indirectly affectedand have to maybe pick up some of that work.Maybe you hire a whole bunch of peoplein one part of the organization,and everybody’s going to have to get on boardand train them and adapt when you add people,so everything is interconnected.All the parts, either directly or indirectly,influence the other parts.Systems also have goals, but the goals, again,are not like classical management goalsof finding the one best way,goals are contingent and negotiated,so that means it depends on what exactlythe organization’s facing, and where it’s going,it’ll have to adapt along the wayas the situation develops.Equifinality is a powerful conceptto describe how systems people approach goals.The first part of equifinalityis that there’s no one best way to organize,and this, again, flies directly in the faceof people like Frederick Taylorwho were looking for the one best way.The second part of equifinality, however,makes the concept that much more powerful,that all ways of organizing are not equally effective.So what they’re not saying, is look,there’s no one best way, so let’s throw it all out.What they’re saying is,there may be not one single way to do everything,however, there are some ways that are better than others,you just can’t always know ahead of timeas you pursue your goals what those several good ways are.However, for example,if you want to travel from New York City on a road tripto Los Angeles, you cannot find one route at all timesthat’s the one best way.Depending on weather, time of year, traffic patterns,road conditions, you will have to lookfor a variety of ways to get there in that specific case.However, they’re not all the same.For example, if your travel companion,your co-pilot says, let’s go from New York Cityto Los Angeles on a road trip,but let’s go all the way up through Canada first,you’re probably gonna saythat’s not one of the better ways to do things.Feedback is also an important part of the systems approach,we have negative feedbackthat seeks to correct or reduce deviationsin a system’s processes to reestablish a steady courseback in the direction of the system’s goals,that’s negative feedback that corrects.Then you have positive feedbackthat changes or grows a system in desired waysthat amplify and enhance the system’s current processes.So you have positive feedbackthat gets you going in the direction you want to go faster.However, if you think about it,just like with kids, you can rewardthe wrong kinds of behavior accidentally,so positive feedback in this senseis not necessarily always good for a system.You might have a boss that’s screamingand yelling at everybody,and if that boss gets a promotionthat might be seen as positive feedbackthat would then amplify that boss’s approach,and maybe the people around that bosswould start to scream and yell at everybody too,’cause they’re seeing that that’s what’s being rewarded.And then eventually,people would have to give some negative feedback,say hey, let’s tone that down, we don’t wanna be like that,to get the system back on track.Entropy is a term that is central to the way systems work,it’s one that I think adds a lot of depth to this approach,and that is, systems tend to run down,they tend to deteriorate and move toward disorganization,so left on their own systems will run down.For example, if you just left your apartmentand didn’t clean it, and you were still living in itbut you left it on its ownand didn’t do the dishes, didn’t pick up,it would only take a day or twobefore it looked like a completely run down,deteriorated system,and that’s why we seek more balance.There’s energy, resources, informationcoming into the system to help it reach homeostasis,or equilibrium, those are both ways to say balance,so you have a whole lot of effort, and work, and timeput into maintaining a balance in the systemso it doesn’t on its own run down,and the same way if you stopped showering.Your body is a system, you stopped bathing,brushing your teeth,you would start to be noticed by your friends,they would say, wow, you’re not maintaining,you have to do that,otherwise you’re gonna continue to deteriorateand fall apart.Systems theory has not necessarily been usedin a lot of very specific ways as it is.It was more like an opening,an open door to lead us to a whole other setof precise theories to look at organizations.So, for example, complex adaptive systems,or chaos theory as it’s sometimes called,was built upon the foundation of systems theory.Learning organizations is another school of thoughtthat came out of systems thinking,and of course Karl Weick’s researchon loosely coupled systems is a direct outshootof the systems’ point of view on organizations,so systems theory has provided a powerful set of concepts,and a vocabulary, and a whole way of thinkingabout organizations that is a direct counterpointto the classical management era school of thought.