Notes: The Economic Naturalist

by Robert H. Frank.

Intro

• If you can tell such stories and understand why they make sense, you have a far better grasp than simply memorizing. Same with narrative explanations based on principles of economics. 
• the human brain's specialty seems to be absorbing information in narrative form. 
• If your goal is for the core ideas to become part of your working knowledge, the only way that can happen is through engagement and repetition. 

Cost-benefit principle

• Product design features are dictated by it (like rectangular milk cartons). Principle says an action should be taken if, and only if, its benefit is at least as great as its cost.

Supply and demand

• "no cash on the table" principle - holds that freely available money seldom sits unclaimed for long. Only way to make real money will be through some combination of talent, thrift, hard work and luck. 
• It reminds us to be wary of opportunities that seem too good to be true. 
• Competition drives price to a common level. Law of one price - restatement of the no cash on the table principle. 
• General pattern -- as price of a good keeps rising, the quantity demanded keeps falling. 
• Supply side -- as price of good keeps rising, sellers are willing to sell more units. 
• Many important patterns in the marketplace can be understood by focusing on sellers in some cases and on buyers in others. 

Discounted Prices - why some pay more

• Hurdle method of differential pricing -- jump through hoops, then you pay less, ie. find out about sales, wait for sales, etc. 
• Marginal cost - cost of producing one additional unit -- is less than average cost (total cost divided by number of units produced.)

Myth of ownership

• People enjoy property rights in chickens but not in whales explains why the former are secure and the latter are endangered. 
• When all other attempts to explain rationale for a law fail, a good strategy is to ask how it might change income of those affected by it. 

Decoding Marketplace Signals

• "Costly to fake principle" -- costly or difficult to fake. Size (in dogs) is one such signal. 

Personal Relationships

• Familiar conflict between individual and group incentives: Although it would be better for all to wait, the dominant strategy for each individual may be to snap up the first strong opportunity that comes along ... spouses in rural areas, free cherries ... 

Parting Thoughts

• Agreements to limit arms races -- not limited to formal athletic competition. ... mandatory kindergarten start dates, school uniform requirements, etc. 
• theory of compensating wage differentials ... because jobs that entail moral compromise, inflexible work schedules, poor promotion prospects, and low employment security are generally viewed as less attractive, they must pay more to compensate for those attributes. 

Notes: Wherever You Go There You Are

Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, J. Kabat-Zinn.

What is Mindfulness?

• it has everything to with waking up and living in harmony with oneself and with the world. 
• Meditation helps us wake up. 
• Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. Art of conscious living. 
• Simple but not easy: Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use is energies to guide us rather than tyrannize us. 
• Stopping: Meditation is simplicity itself. It is stopping and being present. 
• Meditation not really a "doing" but a "being." "This is it."
• Breath  - helps to have a focus for your attention, an anchor line to tether you to the present moment and to guide you when your mind wanders. The breath serves this purpose. Bare bones awareness of breath moving in and breath moving out. 
• Make a little time in your life for stillness and what we call non-doing, and then tune in to your breathing. 
• You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
• Meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment. It's not about getting somewhere else, but about allowing yourself to be where you already are. 
• Non-doing: formal meditation involves purposefully making a time for stopping all outward activity and cultivating stillness, with no agenda other than being fully present in each moment. 
• Non-doing in action: the action does itself. Effortless activity. Nothing is forced. No small-minded "I," "me" or "mine" to lay claim to the result, yet nothing is left undone. Non-doing is a cornerstone of mastery in any realm of activity. 
• Doing non-doing: Simply means letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way. Effortless effort. Years and years of practice and experience combine, giving rise to a new capacity to let execution unfold beyond technique, beyond exertion, beyond thinking. Action then becomes a pure expression of art, of being, of letting go of all doing -- a merging of mind and body in motion. 
• Meditation is synonymous with the practice with the practice of non-doing. We aren't practicing to make things perfect. We practice to grasp and realize things are already perfect, perfectly what they are. 
• Patience: ethics as "obedience to the unenforceable." Patience as one of the fundamental ethical attitudes. Things unfold in their own time. 
• Feeling under pressure, blocked or stymied ... try not to push the river in the moment but listen carefully to it instead. What does it tell you? What is it telling you to do? If nothing, then just breathe, let things  be as they are, let go into patience, continue listening. If the river tells you something, the do it, do it mindfully. 
• Letting go: an invitation to cease clinging to anything. 
• Non-judging. Meditation means cultivating a non-judging attitude toward what comes up in the mind. Simply witness whatever comes up in the mind and to recognize it without condemning it or pursuing it. Interested in the direct contact with experience itself. 
• Trust. Trusting the present moment. 
• Generosity. A good place to start is with yourself. Give yourself gifts that may be true blessings, such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose. Experiment with giving away this energy -- in little ways at first -- directing it toward yourself and toward others with no thought of gain or return. Give more than you think you can, trusting that you are richer than you think. 
• Mindful cultivation of generosity. Actually an inward giving, a feeling state, a willingness to share your own being with the world. Such is the power of mindful, selfless generosity. Deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient ... only the universe rearranging itself.
• Have to be strong enough to be weak. If you are truly strong, there is little need to emphasize it to yourself or to others. What looks like weakness is actually where your strength lies. And what looks like strength is often weakness, and attempt to cover up fear. 
• Voluntary Simplicity. The impulse frequently arises in me to squeeze another this or another that into this moment. Practice voluntary simplicity - doing only one thing at a time and making sure I am here for it. It means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so that I can have more. Slowing everything down. 
• I practice saying no to keep my life simple, and I find I never do it enough. 
• Concentration - capacity of the mind to sustain an unwavering attention on one object of observation. Cultivated by attending to one thing such as breath, and just limiting one's focus to that. In Sanskrit, it's called samadhi, or "onepointedness." Samadhi is developed and deepened by continually bringing the attention back to the breath every time it wanders. 
• Vision. Asking yourself why you meditate? What is my vision, my map for where I am and where I am going? 
• Bhavana translates as "development through mental training." In Buddhism, the vehicle for this work of inner development is meditation. 
• Practice as path. Tao for "Way" or "Path." In Buddhism, meditation practice is usually spoken of as a path -- the path of mindfulness, the path of right understanding, the path of the wheel of truth (Dharma). 
• Meditation is more rightly thought of as a "Way" than a technique. It is a Way of being, a Way of living, a Way of listening, a Way of walking along a path of life and being in harmony with things as they are. Useful at times to admit to yourself that you don't know the way and to be open to help from unexpected places. 
• Meditation is not Positive Thinking. Does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself. 

Heart of Practice

• Sitting meditation. Think of yourself as a mountain. 
• Sitting posture. Dignity. Posture itself is the meditation. Sitting with dignity -- coming back to our original worthiness. 
• Meditation practice is the slow, disciplined work of digging trenches, of working in the vineyards, of bucketing our a pond. Work of moments and the work of a lifetime, all wrapped into one. 
• What to do with the hands. Hand mudras have different energies. Palms down -- self-containment. Palms up - openness. Rid of anger - palms together over your heart in the prayer position. 
• How long to practice. Value of stopping, of shifting even momentarily from doing to being. 15 minutes a day, if not, then 10 or 5 minutes. 
• Truly no one "right way" to practice. Best to encounter each moment with freshness. Look deeply into it, and then let go into the next moment, not holding to the last one.
• Trust that in this moment, "This is it," whatever and wherever "this" is. Without analyzing, discoursing, judging, condemning, or doubting; simply observing, embracing, opening, letting be, accepting. Right now. Only this step. Only this moment. 
• Contemplating "What is my Way?" We just watch, listen, note, let be and keep generating the question, "What is my Way?", "What is my path?", "Who am I?" The intention here is to remain open to not knowing. 
• Mountain meditation. Invite yourself to become a breathing mountain. Sit with holding this image in our mind. By becoming the mountain in our meditation, we can link up with its strength and stability, and adopt them for our own. 
• Lake meditation. Lake image in your meditation. Allow yourself to become one with the lake as you lie down or sit. 
• Walking meditation. You can couple an awareness of walking with an awareness of breathing. Take each step as it comes and be fully present with it. Feeling the very sensation of walking, moment by moment, step by step. 
• If you find yourself rushing, slow down, remind yourself your are here now, and that when you get there, you will be there. If you miss the here, you will also likely to miss the there. 
• Standing meditation. Best learned from trees. Stand close to one, better still, in a stand of trees. Remembering that trees stand still for years, occasionally lifetimes if they are fortunate. Work at being in touch with the air on your skin, the feel of the feet in contact with the ground, the sounds of the world, the dance of light and color and shadow, the dance of the mind. 
• Lying down meditation. You can reclaim your entire body as the locus of your being and your vitality, and remind yourself that "you," whoever you are, are not just a resident in your head. Body scan - lie here and feel the different regions of your body and then let go of them. Inwardly direct your breath in and out from various regions of the body as if you could breathe right in to your toes or knees. When you are ready, on an outbreath you just let go of that region, allowing/inviting it to dissolve in your mind's eye. 
• As much as possible, breathing to be through your nose. 
• Getting your body down on the floor at least once a day. Just being low down in a room tends to clear the mind. 80,000 basic yoga postures. But I keep coming back to a core routine of 20 or so postures. Yoga folds movement and stillness into one another. 
• Not practicing is practicing. Yoga and life are different ways of saying the same thing. Coming back to mindfulness that seeing lies. 
• Loving kindness meditation. Being whole and simultaneously part of a larger whole, we can change the world simply by changing ourselves. From your heart or belly, invite feelings or images of kindness and love to radiate until they fill your whole beings. Invite feelings of peacefulness and acceptance. Once you've established yourself as a center of love and kindness radiating throughout your being, a cradling of yourself in loving kindness and acceptance, you can dwell here indefinitely.
• Take practice further ... can let the loving kindness radiate outwardly and direct it wherever you like ... to immediate family - hold them in your mind's eye and in your heart, visualizing their essential selves, wishing them well, that they not suffer needlessly.
• If you are capable of it and it feels healthy to you, and liberating, finding a place in your own heart to forgive them for their limitations, for their fears, and for any wrong actions and suffering they have have caused, remembering Yeats's line, "Why, what could she have done, being what she is?"
• Make sure you are not trying to help anybody else or the planet. Rather, you are simply holding them in awareness, honoring them, wishing them well, opening to their pain with kindness and compassion and acceptance. 

Spirit of Mindfulness

• Mindfulness is the very opposite of routine. 
• Direct contact. We don't even bother to look or check how we feel because we think we already know and understand. We forget that direct contact is even possible. Direct experience. 
• Is there anything else you would like to tell me? But what is required most by patients is simply listening, being present, taking the person seriously, not just the disease. 
• Wherever you go, there you are: There is no successful escaping from yourself in the long run, only transformation. You must be willing to left life itself become your teacher. This is the path of working where you find yourself, with what is found here and now. This, then, really is it... this place, this relationship, this dilemma, this job. 
• When you get to your cave or beach, there you would be, with the same mind, the same body, the very same breath that you already have here. So why not let go and admit that you might as well be at home wherever you are?
• The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. 
• Going Upstairs: sometimes slow my ascent, reminding myself that there really is no place I have to go and nothing I have to get that can't wait another moment for the sake of being fully in this one. To use ordinary, repetitive occasions in your own house as invitations to practice mindfulness. 
• What is my Job on this planet?: Ask ourselves over and over again. Otherwise, we may wind up doing somebody else's job and not even know it. That somebody else might be a figment of our own imagination and maybe a prisoner of it as well. 
• At risk of never realizing our uniqueness -- as long aw we remain in shadow cast by our thought habits and conditioning. 
• Buckminster Fuller - discoverer/inventor: to live from then on as if he had died that night. The rest of his life would be a gift. Instead of living for himself, asking, "What is it on this planet that needs doing that I know something about, that probably won't happen unless I take responsibility for? Just ask this question continuously and do what came to him. 
• The asking/the inquiry itself may lead you to a few places that you would not have gone had you merely followed mainstream conventions, or your parents' expectations for you, or even worse, your own unexamined self-limiting beliefs and expectations. Once the universe is your employer, very interesting things start to happen. 
• Mount Analogue: "it's the mountain that will decide who will climb it." There are outer mountains and inner mountains. Perhaps the full teaching of a mountain is that you carry the whole mountain inside yourself, the outer one as well as the inner. 
• The mountain climb is a powerful metaphor for the life quest, the spiritual journey, the path of growth, transformation, and understanding. Ultimately, it is the climb itself which is the adventure, not just standing at the top. 
• Interconnectedness: Everything is related to everything else. Everything is in flux. New way of seeing, a new way of being, a new way of experiencing that permits a new of acting in the world. It's our way of seeing which creates and maintains separation. We become conscious of a connectedness which has been here all the time. 
• We have climbed to a vantagepoint from which we can more readily perceive wholeness, and can cradle the flow of present moments in awareness. All things are one thing and that one thing is all things. 
• Non-harming - Ahimsa: Why not try to live so as to cause as little damage and suffering as possible? You can start practicing ahimsa's gentleness on yourself and in your life with others in any moment. The willingness to harm or hurt comes ultimately out of fear. Non-harming requires that you see your own fears and that you understand them and own them. 
• Karma: Here's how mindfulness changes karma. When you sit, you are not allowing your impulses to translate into action. You are just watching them. Mindlessness that imprisons us. More and more we are stuck in our cultivated-over-a-lifetime habits of not-seeing, but only reacting and blaming. 
• When you stop outward activity for some time and practice being still, right there, in the moment, with that decision to sit, you are already breaking the flow of old karma and creating an entirely new and healthier karma. Herein lies the root of change, the turning point of a life lived. 
• Wholeness and Oneness: When we perceive our intrinsic wholeness, there is truly no place to go and nothing to do. Thus, we are free to choose a path for ourselves. 
• What is This? Inquiry doesn't mean looking for answers. It means asking without expecting answers, just pondering the question, carrying the wondering with you, letting it percolate, bubble, cook. Inquiry and mindfulness are one and the same thing, come to from different directions. Inquiry means asking questions, over and over again. 
• Selfing: "me," "I", and "mine" are products of our thinking. What we call "the self" is really a construct of our own mind, and hardly a permanent one. There is no absolute separate "self" in the first place, just the process of continual self-construction or "selfing." Stop trying so hard to be "somebody" and instead just experience being; we would be happier and more relaxed. Start from where you find yourself and work here. Begin by taking things a little less personally. 
• Anger: watch your reactions in situations that annoy you or make you angry. Experiment with mindfulness as a pot into which you can put all our feelings and just be with them, letting them slowly cook. Knowing as they are more cooked, they will be more easily digested and understood simply by holding them in the pot of mindfulness. 
• Parenting as practice: To do it (parenting) well would demand the greatest clarity of view and the greatest letting go and letting be. Parenting was nothing short of a perfect opportunity to deepen mindfulness, if I could let the children and the family become my teachers, and remember to recognize and listen carefully to the lessons in living. 
• These trials are not impediments to either parenting or mindfulness practice. They are the practice, if you can remember to see it this way. Also, make time for yourself: for stillness, for just being, for just sitting. 
• Try seeing the children as your teachers. Observe them in silence sometimes. Listen more carefully to them. Ask yourself, "How can I help them right now?" Then follow what your heart tells you. Advice is probably the last thing that will be useful in most situations. Just being centered yourself, fully present and open and available, is a great gift for them. 
• Children are and will always be their own beings; but they need great love and guidance to come to full humanness. Best way to impart wisdom, meditation, or anything else to your children is to live it yourself, embody what you most want to impart, and keep your mouth shut. The real teaching is almost entirely non-verbal. 
• Pitfalls along the Path: the ego wants to lay claim and take credit for this special feeling or understanding. As soon as this happens, you are no longer into meditation but into advertising. It's using meditation practice to support the self-inflation habit. 
• In the spirit of inquiry and genuine curiosity, keep asking, "What is this?", "What is this?" It's when you get attached to your experience that the practice arrests, and your development along with it. 
• Whenever you think you are getting somewhere or that you are not getting where you are supposed to be, ask yourself, "Where am I supposed to be?"; "Who is supposed to get somewhere?"; "Am I inviting mindfulness into each moment, or indulging in mindless repetition of the forms of meditation practice, mistaking the form for the essence?"
• Meditation really is the one human activity in which you are not trying to get anywhere else but simply allowing yourself to be where and as you already are. 
• Mindfulness Spiritual? The work of mindfulness is waking up to vitality in every moment that we have. Mindfulness is beyond all thinking, wishful and otherwise, that the here and now is the stage on which this work unfolds continuously. 
• Perhaps ultimately, spiritual simply means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and the totality are interwoven. 

Notes: Accidental Buddhist

by Dinty Moore.

• It is easier, more efficient, to chop onions when you are only chopping onions, not conversing, checking up on the rest of the kitchen, answering the phone, etc.
• Tibetan: the source of our problems is our human weakness, and that weakness is our tendency to become attached. 
• Ok to have xyz (house, car etc) but so long as we don't expect these things to make us happy. Happiness is internal, not external and chasing externals is a waste of time. 
• Buddhist realization of our lack of independence actually calls for greater responsibility. For ourselves and everyone else because we all rise and fall on the same wave. 
• Cars keep us isolated from our environment, whereas "self-propulsion" (biking, walking, canoeing) puts us in touch with the land below us and world around us. 
• We seek enlightenment for the benefit of others.
• We are not separate creatures, separate entities, the Buddha taught, we are all one interconnected reality. 
• Only a trick of the brain that creates this perception of individuality. 
• Turn off the faucet, stop all input. Second, you have to quit grabbing. The water settles, and the still water of the mind then becomes a mirror in which you can find yourself. 
• The more we insist on our preferences, the bigger our ball and chain, and the more it weighs us down. But if we don't prefer things ... we don't have to like a rainy day, we just have to take it, notice it, and pass through it, without dwelling on our preference that it be different. 

For further reading:

• Instructions to the Cook, Glassman
• Mindfulness in Plain English, H. Gunaratana
• Miracle of Mindfulness, T Nhat Hanh.
• Being Peace, T Nhat Hanh
• Dropping Ashes on the Buddha, S. Sahn. 

Notes: Taming the Tiger Within

by Thich Nhat Hanh.

• If your house is on fire, the most urgent thing to do is to go back and try to put out the fire, not to run after the person you believe to be the arsonist. That is not the action of a wise person. You must go back and put out the fire. When you are angry, if you continue to interact with or argue with the other person, if you try to punish him, you are acting exactly like someone who runs after the arsonist while their home goes up in flames. 
• Whatever you do or say in a state of anger will only cause more damage in the relationship. Instead, try not to do anything or say anything when you are angry. 
• If it is your partner who is angry, just listen. Listen and do not react. Do your best to practice compassionate listening. Do not listen for the purpose of judging, criticizing, or analyzing. Listen only to help the other person express himself and find some relief from his suffering. 

Notes: To Sell is Human

The Surprising Truth About Moving Others.

by D. Pink.

• the new ABCs of moving others. A - Attunement. B - Buoyancy. C - Clarity. 
• E test - snap your fingers 5 times, then draw capital E on your forehead. Shows self-centered or perspective-taking. 
• Attuning yourself with others hinges on: 1. Increase your power by reducing it. Inverse relationship between power and perspective taking. Those with lower power  are keener perspective-takers. Attunement as persuasion jiu-jitsu: using an apparent weakness as an actual strength. Start your encounters with the assumption that you're in a position of lower power. 
• 2. Use your head more than your head. Getting in their heads more efficient than empathy/ than in their hearts. 
• 3. Mimic strategically / subtly. Waitresses who repeated orders word for word got 70% more tips. Touching. Lightly on arm or shoulder. 
• Humility - #1 ... reducing their power. Curious, asking questions - #2 ... getting inside their heads. In synch, connecting ... #3 ability to "chameleon."
• Ambivert advantage. Right in the middle. Best movers because they're the most skilled attuners. 
• Best way to start conversation: Where are you from?
• Strategic mimicry - watch, wait, wane ... less conscious, less effort, subtle. 
• Meeing. Pull up an empty chair. That represents the customer. Forces you to attune yourself to others. 
• Conversation with a time traveler. Forces you to care about the worldview of the other person. 
• Discussion map. Map who's talking, and to whom. Circles each time they talk, Xs and arrows to whom they talk to. 
• Find uncommon commonalities. Can help you attune yourself to others. Similarity is a key form of human connection.
• Buoyancy -- how to deal with sea of rejection and still go on. 
• Before: Interrogaive self-talk. Ask a question. Can we fix it? Can we do it? From making statements to asking questions. To get out the door. The pre-talk. First component of buoyancy.
• During: Positivity. 2nd component. Ratio. 3 to 1. Three positives to one negative thoughts, comments, emotions. Interrogative self-talk when preparing to move someone, but positivity during. Once positive emotions hits 11:1 more harm than good. 
• After: Explanatory style. People who give easily, who become helpless explain bad events as permanent, pervasive, and personal. Flexible optimism - optimism with eyes open. 
• Buoyancy in practice. Prepare - can i move these people? Answer it directly and in writing. 5 specific reasons why answer is yes. Monitor positivity ratio. 
• Tweak explanatory style. How we explain negative events has an enormous effect on our buoyancy and ultimately our performance. When something bad happens, ask yourself these three questions and come up with an intelligent "no" to each: 1. Is this permanent? 2. Is this pervasive? 3. Is this personal? 
• More you explain bad events as temporary, specific and external, more likely you are to persist in the face of adversity. 
• Learned Optimism. Book
• CLARITY - the capacity to help others see their situations in fresh and more revealing ways and to identity problems they didn't realize they had. Ability to move others hinges less on problem solving than on problem finding. 
• Clarity involves problem finding and putting it in the right frame. Clarity depends on contrast. Compared to what? 
• the five frames: 1. Less frame. Limit choices. Less is more. 2. Experience frame - happier with experiences than material purchases. 3. Label frame - merely assigning positive labels. 4. Blemished frame - negative info must follow positive. 5. Potential frame - when selling ourselves, emphasize potential rather than achievements. 
• Finding off-ramp - once you've find problem and framed it right, need to give off ramp. Specific directions to make it easier for people. Details on how to act, what to do.
• Clarify motives with two irrational questions. Instant Influence (book). On a scale from 1 to 10 ... and why wasn't a lower number?
• Jolt of the unfamiliar. Change your routine. 
• Become a info Curator. In old days, the challenge was assessing info. These days, our challenge is curating it. 1. Seek -- list of best sources; 2. Sense -- creating meaning out of it; 3. Share. 
• Learn how to ask better questions. 1. Produce your questions; 2. Improve your questions; 3. Prioritize - choose the three most important questions. 
• Read these books: Influence, R. Cialdini; Made to Stick, C. Heath; Switch, C. Heath; Mindless Eating, B. Wansink; Nudge: Improving Decisions ... , R. Thaler. 
• the Five Whys. to find out what kind of problem. Ask why five times. 
• What to do. Pitch, improvise, and serve.
• Pitch - ability to distill one's point to its persuasive essence. 
• Hollywood. If the catcher of pitch categorized the pitcher as "uncreative" in first few minutes, meeting doomed. In the most successful pitches, pitcher didn't push her idea until she extracted a yes. She invited in her counterpart as a collaborator. The more the suits were able to contribute, the better the idea became. Purpose of pitch isn't necessarily to move others to adopt your idea, but to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings other person in as participant. 
• Kinds of pitches: 1. One-word pitch; 2. Question pitch - by making people work just a little harder, question pitches prompt people to come up with their own reasons for agreeing; 3. rhyming pitch - rhyme can enhance processing fluency of your listeners, allowing message to stick; 4. Subject-line pitch (email) - Utility and curiosity. People opened useful messages for extrinsic reasons (something to gain or lose); opened other messages for  intrinsic reasons (just curious). Your subject line should be obviously useful or mysteriously intriguing BUT NOT BOTH. 
• Third principle - specificity. 
• 5. Twitter pitch - 140 characters or less. Mark of effective pitch - it engages recipients and encourages them to take the conversation further, by responding, clicking a link, or sharing. Best were: Tweets that asked questions, and provided info and links. 
• 6. Pixar pitch. Pixar code, every Pixar film shares the same narrative DNA, a deep structure of storytelling that involves six sequential sentences: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
• Actual Pitching: Answer three questions: 1. What do you want them to know? 2. What do you want them to feel? What do you want them to do?
• Add a visual to your pitch. 
• After pitching, comes improvising. Three essential rules of improv theater: 1. Hear offers; 2. Say "Yes and."; 3. Make your partner look good. 
• Listen game - wait 15 secs before answering. Listening without some degree of intimacy isn't really listening. Must listen without listening for anything. Once we listen in this new, more intimate way, we begin to hear things we might have missed. Offers come in all shapes and sizes. Only way to hear them is to change the way we listen and then the way we respond.
• "Yes and" spirals toward possibility. 
• Make your partner look good. Win-win thinking. Arguing or debating, polite questions not statements, change the rules of engagement and therefore the nature of the interaction itself. Curious questions. Respectful interaction. 
• Improvise in action: Listen twice as much as talk. Wait five seconds before responding. 
• To Serve. Ultimately about service. About improving people's lives and in turn, the world. Need to make it personal and make it purposeful. 
• Focus not on the self but on the target group. Making it personal works better when we make it purposeful. Servant-leaders - serve first and sell later. 
• Don't upsell, UPSERVE. 
• from Seth Godin -- "why not always act as if the other guy is doing the favor?" Connects with attunement ... lowering your status can enhance your powers of perspective-taking, and the wisest and most ethical way to move others is to proceed with humility and gratitude. 
• Emotionally intelligent signage. Makes it personal and purposeful. Expresses empathy with person viewing the sign (personal) or by triggering empathy in that person will understand the rationale behind the posted rule (purposeful). 
• Imagine the person you're dealing with is your grandmother. This is ultimate way to make it personal. 
• Always ask and answer these two questions: 1. If the person you're selling to agrees to buy, will his life improve? 2. When you're interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began? 
• If the answer to either of these questions is no, you're doing something wrong. 

Notes: Hold On To Your Kids

Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers, G. Neufeld and G. Mate.

Note to Reader

• Our focus is not on what parents should do but on who they need to be for their children. 
• Parenthood is a relationship. 

Why Parents Matter More than Ever

• Only the attachment relationship can provide the proper context for child-rearing.
• The secret to parenting is not in what a parent does but rather who the parent is to a child. 
• It is not a lack of love or of parenting know-how but the erosion of the attachment context that makes our parenting ineffective. 
• Most damaging of competing attachments that undermine parenting authority and parental love is the increasing bond of our children with their peers -- they are being brought up by each other. Peer orientation.
• Instead of culture being passed down vertically, it is being transmitted horizontally within the younger generation. 
• Linked the escalation of antisocial behavior to the breakdown of the vertical transmission of mainstream culture. 

Skewed Attachments, Subverted Instincts

• Not a behavior problem but a relationship problem. 
• Attachment is the pursuit and preservation of proximity, of closeness and connection: physically, behaviorally, emotionally, and psychologically. 
• Orienting instinct. Orienting involves locating oneself in space and time. First business of attachment is to create a compass point of the the person attached to.
• Being lost means losing contact with their compass point. Orienting voids ... are attachment voids. 
• Attachment with peers does not save them from getting lost, only feeling lost. 
• Ways of Attaching: 1. senses (physical proximity); 2. Sameness (seek to be like those child feels closest to) or identification ... often where extreme nationalism and racism come from ... id-ing one's sense of worth with one's country or ethnic group; 3. Belonging and Loyalty; 4. Significance (we matter to somebody); 5. Feeling (emotional intimacy); 6. Being Known (closeness by secrets shared).
• Peers - secrets they share most commonly gossip about other people. 
• Quest for sameness being the least vulnerable way of attaching, it is the one usually chosen by kids.
• Bipolar nature of attachment. With peer orientation on the rise, so is corresponding parent alienation and the problems that come with it. 
• Alienating behavior as humans -- mock and mimic those we wish to distance ourselves from. To be imitated may be a compliment, but to be mocked and mimicked is one of the most offensive put-downs. 

Why We've Come Undone

• Children find themselves in attachment voids everywhere. 
•  Need to create a village of attachment -- a set of nurturing adult relationships to replace what we have lost. 
• Teacher training completely ignores attachment; thus educators learn about teaching subjects but not about the essential importance of connected relationships to the learning process of young kids.
• Attachments come into being: 1. natural offspring of existing attachments; 2. when an attachment void becomes intolerable. 
• Imprinting process -- first person to appears to offer relief from attachment void. 

Power to Parent is Slipping Away

• Parents had to rely on force because, unawares, they had lost the power to parent. 
• problem is not parental ineptitude but parental impotence -- lacking sufficient power. 
• Many confuse power with force. Power means spontaneous authority to parent. That flows not from coercion or force but from appropriate aligned relationship with the child. 
• The more power a parent commands, the less force is required in day-to-day parenting. 
• The loss of power has led to preoccupation in parenting literature with techniques -- brides and threats.
• Power is absolutely necessary for the task of parenting. The power we have lost is the power to command our children's attention, to solicit their good intentions, to evoke their deference and secure their cooperation. Without these four abilities, all we have left is coercion or bribery. 
• Secret of a parent's power is in the dependence of the child. Being dependent does not guarantee dependence of the appropriate caregivers. 
• Power to execute our parental responsibilities lies not in the neediness of our children but in their looking to us to be the answer to their needs. 
• Teenagers -- still dependent, only they no longer depended on their parents. What looks to us like independence is really just dependence transferred. 
• To reclaim their children, to realign the forces of attachment on the side of parenting. This book intended to help parents reassume their natural position of authority. 
• Three ingredients to make parenting work: a dependent being in need of being taken care of, an adult willing to assume responsibility, and a good working attachment from child to the adult. 
• Easier for parents today to confess incompetence rather than impotence. Parenthood is above all a relationship, not a skill to be acquired. Attachment is not a behavior to be learned but a connection to be sought. 
• Labels: Difficulty in parenting often leads to hunt to find out what's wrong with the child. Search for labels to explain our children's problems. 

When Attachment Works Against Us

• First business of attachment is to arrange adults and children in a hierarchical order. Into dominant and dependent. What attachment does: trigger the instincts to take care. 
• Getting a child to look at us and to listen to us is the foundational to all parenting. Attention follows attachment. 
• One of the telltale signs of a child who isn't paying attention is a parent having to continually to raise his voice or repeat things. 
• Attachment keeps child close. Child accepts as his models only those to whom he is strongly attached. In the absence of attachment, the learning is labored and the teaching forced. 
• Attachment instills in child a desire to be good. 

Counterwill

• Counterwill is an instinctive, automatic resistance to any sense of being forced. Since counterwill is a counterforce, we invite it into being every time our wish to impose something on our child exceeds his desire to connect with us. 
• Parental efforts to gain leverage generally take two forms: bribery or coercion. All attempts to motivate a child involve use of psychological force -- negative (punishment), positive (rewards). 
• best response to a child's counterwill is a stronger parental relationship and less reliance on force. 

Flatlining of Culture

• The time we as parents and educators spend on trying to teach our children social tolerance, acceptance, and etiquette would be much better invested in cultivating a connection with them. 
• Peer culture more like cult than culture.

Flight from Feeling

• Profound dejection of an excluded child reveals a much more serious attachment problem than does a peer-rejection problem. 
• Parental attachment shield.
• Vulnerability is usually attacked. Carl Jung explained we tend to attack in others what we are most uncomfortable in ourselves. 
• Vulnerability is built into the highly insecure nature of peer-oriented relationships. 
• Human beings are in either defensive mode or growth mode, cannot be in bother at same time. 

Stuck in Immaturity

• Thumbnail sketch of maturation: Phase 1 - kind of splitting, or differentation; Phase 2 - brings ever increasing integration of the separated elements. 
• B/c their feelings and thoughts were not differentiated enough to withstand mixing, they were capable of only one feeling or impulse at a time. B/c anger did not mix with love, they showed no forgiveness. B/c frustration did not mix with fear or affection, they lost their tempers. They lacked immaturity. 
• Foster Maturity: No substitute for genuine maturation, no shortcut. Behavior can be prescribed or imposed, but maturity comes from the heart and mind. Key to activating maturation is to take care of attachment needs of child. 
• Story of maturation is one of paradox: dependence and attachment foster independence and genuine separation. We need to release child from preoccupation with attachment so he can pursue natural agenda of independent maturation. Make sure child does not need to work to get his needs met for contact and closeness, to find his bearings, to orient. 
• Need to create an atmosphere which simply demonstrates -- I care; not I care for you if you behave thus and so. She cannot do anything, since that love cannot be won or lost. It is not conditional. 
• Ways peer-orientation stunts growth: Impossible to satiate attachment needs of child who is not actively attaching to person willing and able to provide for those needs. Peer orientation and immaturity go hand in hand. Peer relationships connect immature beings. Instead of rest, peer orientation brings agitation. 
• Peer-oriented children cannot let go: inability to from frustration to futility, from "mad to sad," is a major source of aggression and violence. 
• Impulse to cry hardwired to feelings of futility. Tears of futility actually bring a release, a sense that something has come to an end. Without futility, as without satiation, maturation is impossible.
• Peer Orientation (PO) crushes individuality. Immature people tend to trample on any individuality that dares show itself. When attachment to peers is the primary concern, individuality must be sacrificed. 

Legacy of Aggression

• Frustration is fuel of aggression. Frustration - emotion we feel when something doesn't work.
• Many triggers to frustration. But what matters to children, attachment, so greatest source of frustration is attachments that do not work: loss of contact, thwarted connection ... 
• Frustration that comes up against impassable obstacles is meant to dissolve into feelings of futility. Mad should move to sad quickly. But if tears of futility never come, adaptation will not occur. 
• most common feelings of futility are sadness, disappointment and grief. Feelings of futility involve vulnerability. 
• Our automatic tendency is to focus on aggression rather than on underlying issue of children's misdirected attachments. Need to reclaim our children and to restore their attachment to us. 

Making of Bullies and Victims

• Measures ineffective b/c they seek to address behaviors rather causes. 
• Real dynamic - not missing adult authority but dearth of adult attachments. Underlying problem is not the behavior but the loss of natural attachment hierarchy with adults in charge. 
• Bullying - fundamentally an outcome of a failure of attachment. 
• More time children spent in peer company and away from parents, the more prone they were to develop bullying behavior. 
• First item of business of any attachment relationship is to establish a working hierarchy. Result of PO is powerful attachment urges force immature kids who should be on equal terms with one another into an unnatural hierarchy of dominance and submission. 
• Children (or adults) become bullies when the striving for dominance is not coupled with the instinctual sense of responsibility for those lower in the pecking order. 
• Dominance does not elicit caretaking b/c bully's flight from vulnerability has become hardened against feelings of caring and responsibility. 
• Why dominate? Then they are less vulnerable than one in dependent position. Ones most emotionally shut down are ones most predisposed to seek dominance over others. 
• They are deprived of experience of transforming frustration into feelings of futility, of letting go and adapting. (when they bully parents) -- parents confuse respect for their children with indulging their wants instead of meeting their needs. 
• If parents are too needy or too passive or too uncertain to assert their dominance, the attachment instincts are going to move the child into dominance position by default. Children are coming increasingly to bully their parents. 
• Forms of dominance/elevating oneself: boast or brag. Most common way -- to put others down. Differences become primary targets of insult -- anything that stands out, anything that renders a child unique, not valued by peer culture. 
• Intimidation. Bully must never be seen as being afraid of anything. Also, demands deference. 
• Trigger an attack: Bully is provoked to attack whenever his demands, even if unstated are not frustrated. Also, a show of vulnerability. 
• Personality of bully: distancing one person to get close to another. Danger in loving but none in loathing. Bullies take least vulnerable route to destination. Not personal - targets are only a means to an end. 
• Whenever two or more PO children are gathered, they are likely to back into their attachments with each other by ostracizing others. 
• Unmaking bully: Only hope is to attach to some adult who in turn is willing to assume the responsibility for nurturing the bully's emotional needs. 
• Essence of bully: a tough shell of hardened emotion protecting a very sensitive creature of attachment, highly immature and hugely dependent, who seeks dominant position. Their behavior -- a predictable result of PO. All attributes of bully stem from combination of two powerful dynamics: attachment that is intense, inverted and displaced and a desperate flight from vulnerability. 
• PO breeds both bullies and victims. 
• To unmake a bully -- reintegrate the child into a proper attachment hierarchy and proceed to soften her defenses and fulfill her attachment hunger. It's a breakdown in basic values of attachment and vulnerability in mainstream society. 

Sexual Turn

• Sex is about attachment. In adolescents, most often an expression of unfulfilled attachment needs. 
• Great difference between sexual contact as an expression of genuine intimacy and sexual contact as a primitive attachment dynamic. Result of latter is dissatisfaction and an addictive promiscuity. 
• Family/parents loved them but they were not "feeding" at their table. Looking to peers to fulfill attachment hunger. 
• PO adolescent is a sexual being who is apt to use anything at his disposal to satisfy his need to attach. The less vulnerability and maturity are present, more likely drive to attach will find sexual expression. 
• Sexual activity of PO kids -- really about seeking in each other's arms what they should be looking for in the relationship with their parents -- contact and connection.
• the more sexually active adolescents are, harder they become emotionally. Become desensitized / it's flight from vulnerability. Sex loses its potency as a bonding agent, becomes a nonvulnerable attachment activity. No longer works as human superglue. 
• Need maturity to have sex.
• Adolescent sex is not so much about experimentation as it is of emotional desperation and attachment hunger. 

Unteachable Students

• Teachability of student depends on: natural curiosity, an integrative mind, an ability to benefit from correction, and relationship with teacher. 
• PO extinguishes curiosity: preoccupied with attachment, bored by anything not does not serve purpose of peer attachment. 
• Integrative mind - capable of processing contradicting impulses or thoughts. Must be mature enough to tolerate of being two minds. 
• Most learning occurs by adaption, process of trial and error. Failure is essential part of learning and correction is the primary instrument of teaching. 
• Attachment is the most powerful process in learning. Problem when they become attached to peers rather than mentoring adults. 
• Children learn best when they like their teacher and they think their teacher likes them. 
• What children learn from their peers is how to talk like their peers, walk like their peers, dress like their peers, act like their peers, look like their peers. What they learn is how to conform and imitate. 
• To open our students' minds, we need to first win their hearts. 

How to Hold on to Our Kids

• Collecting our kids: we need to make a habit of collecting our children daily and repeatedly until they are old enough to function as independent beings. 
• Four steps to collecting: 1. attract the child's eyes, to evoke a smile, elicit a nod. Get in their face, their space, in a warm friendly way. 
• A greeting should collect the eyes, a smile, and a nod. Especially important to reconnect after any sort of emotional separation - after a fight or argument, whether by distancing, misunderstanding or anger. 
• For teachers and/or adults, who are in charge of children, collecting them should be the first item of business. 
• 2nd step of collecting: in order to engage children's attachment instincts, we must offer them something to attach to. Like a finger to an infant. Something to grasp, something to hold dear. Ultimate gift is to make a child feel invited to exist in our presence exactly as he is, to express our delight in his very being. And it needs to be genuine and unconditional.
• We cannot cultivate connection by indulging a child's demands, whether for attention, for affection, for recognition, or for significance. Providing something to hold on to is most effective when least expected. 
• Dance of attachment ... conveying spontaneous delight in the child's very being .. by gestures, smiles, tone of voice, etc.
• The real spoiling of children is not in indulging of demands or giving of gifts but in ignoring of their genuine needs. 
• Attention given at the request of the child is never satisfactory, not voluntarily giving of himself to the child. Seize the moment, invite contact when the child is not demanding it. 
• Praise is not collecting.
• The foundation of a child's self-esteem is the sense of being accepted, loved, and enjoyed by the parents exactly as he, the child, is. 
• Step 3: Invite dependence. We are assuming too much responsibility for the maturation of our children. Independence is the fruit of maturation. Cannot get there by resisting dependence. Our refusal to invite them drives them to each other - transference of dependence. 
• Need to orient them. We are the best resource for that. Orientating reactivates the child's instincts to keep us close. 
• Reclaiming PO children: need to win back their hearts and minds, not just have their bodies under our roof. Need to create an attachment void by separating them from her peers, then place ourselves in the void as substitutes. Must come to terms with the futility of addressing behavior and redirect ourselves to the task of restoring the relationship. 
• Grounding works best if parents seize the opportunity to reestablish the relationship with their child. 
• Parent's responsibility to keep the child close. Don't let them go before the parenting is done. 

Make Relationship the Priority

• Children do not experience our intentions; they experience what we manifest in tone and behavior. 
• Unconditional acceptance is the most difficult to convey exactly when it is most needed. Precisely at those difficult times, we need to, in work or gesture, indicate that the child is more important than what he does, the relationship matters more than conduct or achievement. 
• Make the relationship safe before we address behavior. 
• A child will usually know what is expected and is either unable or unwilling to deliver. The inability is usually a maturity problem; the unwillingness is an attachment problem. 
• The child is more important than his conduct. 

Parenting with Attachment in Mind

• Natural sequence of development, in this order: 1. Attachment; 2. Maturation: 3. socialization (societal fit, child's behavior). 
• If we let ourselves be pushed away, there is nothing left for the child to hold on to. Ultimatums make the child feel very keenly that her parents love and accept her only conditionally. 
• Temporary breaks in the relationship are inevitable. Real harm when we neglect to re-collect our child. 

Intimacy

• Make it easy for them to share, to remember our primary objective is not to correct them or to teach them but to connect with them. Create special one on one time. 
• More our children feel known and understood by us, the less risk we run of being replaced. 

Create structures, impose restrictions

• Impose order on child's attachments. Establish structures that cultivate connection, and restrictions that enfeeble the competition. 
• Holding on to our children is not about shaping their behavior but about engaging their attachment instincts and preserving the natural hierarchy. 
• This is prevention. Structures and restrictions cannot be forcibly imposed on PO child without doing further damage. Wise parents will not impose more restrictions than the attachment power they wield will bear. 
• Some take holidays from their kids. A break from their children. More breaks we take, the less attached children are to us. 
• The family meal can be a potent collecting ritual. We have to create a time and place for an activity with a child where our real agenda is connection. Building relationships and maintaining attachments are more effective one-on-one. 
• PO children get stuck in their agendas and can't let go. Aggression and hostility. Mistake to think it's strong-willed or headstrong; actually stuck and desperate. 
• Maintain realistic view of attachment power. Without attachment power we have no genuine power at all. Challenge is not just to separate them from their peers, but to reverse the process. We have to replace their peers with ourselves, the parents. 
• ****** We do not recommend that parents accept our suggestions until they have the confidence, the patience and warmth to follow through with them. One must not parent a child from a book -- not even this one!" ***********

Discipline that does not Divide

• Punishment creates an adversarial relationship and incurs emotional hardening. 
• 7 principles of natural discipline - developmentally safe and attachment-friendly. We do not require skills or strategies but compassion, principles, and insight. Could be titled, 7 disciplines for parents. We need to bring ourselves under control and work systematically toward a goal. Manage ourselves. 
• Put ourselves on hold as parents until loving impulses once more come to the surface. 
• #1: Use Connection, not separation, to bring a child into line. No time-outs. "Connection before direction." Collect the child, engage the child's attachment instincts in order to give guidance and provide direction. Parent needs to draw near the child, reestablish emotional closeness before expecting compliance. 
• The will to connect must be in the parent before there is anything positive for the child to respond to. Human connection must be intact before we are likely to get our points across. Having the eyes, the smile, and the nod, and then bring the child near. 
• A failure to collect the child should be a reminder for us to back off a preoccupation with conduct and to focus our effort and attention on building the relationship. Solicit the smile and the nod before placing our request or making our demand. 
• #2 - When problems occur: Focusing on the frustration instead of taking the attack personally will often help. Acknowledging the frustration that exists in the child and tone of voice that indicates that what happened has not broken the union. 
• #3 - When things aren't working, draw out tears instead of trying to teach a lesson: key to adaption is for futility to sink in whenever we are up against something that won't work and we can't change. Adaptive process accomplishes its task of "disciplining" in natural ways -- by bringing to end a course of action that does not work; by enabling child to accept limitations and restrictions.
• Parent needs to be agent of futility and angel of comfort. Represent a "wall of futility." Stand firm when something is immutable. Then come alongside the frustration and provide comfort. The agenda should not be to teach a lesson but to move frustration to sadness. 
• Much more important than words is the child's sense that we are with her, not against her. 
• #4 - change of focus from behavior to intention. Solicit good intentions. Draw attention not to our will, but to the child's: "Can I count on you to ... Are you willing to give it a try ... Do you think you could ... Will you try to remember ... ?"
• Essential to acknowledge a child's positive intentions instead of identifying him with is impulses, actions, or failures. 
• Draw out mixed feelings: Alternative to confrontation. Key to self-control is not willpower, but mixed feelings. When conflicting impulses mix together that's when orders cancel each other out, putting child in driver's seat. A new order emerges where behavior is rooted in intention rather than impulse. 
• Rather than trying to address the behavior, we draw out the tempering element to moderate the impulse that gets the child in trouble. Confrontation leads, at best, to an empty compliance, or to defensiveness. It does nothing to develop impulse control from within. 
• When coaxing conflicting feelings into consciousness, we need to get outside the incident and inside the relationship where we can take the lead. We cannot cut out a child's repertoire behavior that is deeply rooted in instinct and emotion. 
• With immature children: rather than demanding that they spontaneously exhibit mature behavior, we could script the desired behavior. Provide cues for what to do and how to do it. No negative instructions. Focus on the actions that are desirable. Like a director, the end result is created first in the adult's mind. 
• Immature beings should not be left to their own devices in social interaction. Many kinds of behavior can be scripted: fairness, helping, sharing, cooperation, conversation, gentleness, consideration, getting along. 
• If you can't change child, change situation: Adding force usually backfires. Coercion elicits counterwill, punishment provokes retaliation, yelling leads to tuning out, sanctions evoke aggression, time-outs to emotional detachment. Need to discipline differently. Impose order on the child's environment. Alter the situations and circumstances that trigger the problem behavior. 

Preventing PO

• enemy is not our children's peers but PO.
• PO kids go to school to be with their friends, not to learn. 
• Shyness: not a problem. It's an attachment force. 
• Children don't need to be home but they need to feel at home with those responsible for their care. Home is a matter of attachment. Being related is not the issue, being connected is. Shyness of a child should be a sign child is not ready to be taken care of. Need to connect first. 

Getting Along

• Kids to gravitated towards their parents demonstrated more characteristics of positive sociability. 
• Social integration means much more than simply fitting in or getting along; true social integration requires not only a mixing with others but a mixing without losing one's separateness or identity. 
• Mixing indiscriminately and prematurely, without adults being involved as the primary attachment figures, will lead either to conflict, as each child seeks to dominate the other or has to resist being dominated, or to cloning, as a child suppresses his sense of himself for the sake of acceptance by others. 
• By placing getting along at the top of the agenda for immature beings, we are really pushing them into patterns of compliance, imitation, and conformity. 

Not Friends that children need

• very concept of friendship is meaningless when applied to immature people. Until children are capable of true friendship, they really do not need friends, just attachments. with family and those who share responsibility for the child. 
• Developmentally, children have a much greater need for a relationship with themselves than a relationship with peers. Until the child manifests the existence of a relationship with himself, his is not ready to develop genuine relationships with other kids. Much better for him to spend time interacting with nurturing adults or in creative play, on his own. 
• Peers not answer to boredom: hole that is usually experienced as boredom is the double void of attachment and of emergence. Lacks sufficient curiosity and imagination to spend time creatively on his own. 
• Precisely when children are bored that they are also the most susceptible to forming attachments that will compete with us. The more prone to boredom, the more they need us and more of their selves needs to emerge. 
• More a child depends on accepting adults, the more room there is for uniqueness and individuality to unfold and greater the insulation against the intolerance of peers. 
• Self-esteem: ultimate issue is not how good one feels about oneself, but the independence of self-evaluations from the judgments of others. 
• PO children - their self-esteem will never become intrinsic, never rooted in a self-generated valuation. It will be conditional, contingent on the favor of others. Based on external and evanescent factors like social achievement or looks or income. That's not genuine self-esteem. Usually, they are esteeming what others think of them. 
• Peers no substitute for siblings: trouble is not in children playing with one other, but in being left to one other when their basic attachment needs have not been met by adults in charge. This is when our children are most at risk for forming attachments that compete with us. 
• The play that children need for healthy development is emergent play, not social play. Creative solitude. Because the strong emphasis on peer socialization, emergent play -- play arising from the child's creativity, imagination, and curiosity about the world--has become endangered. 
• Children need adults much more than they need other children. 

Re-Create Attachment Village

• We need to value our adult friends who exhibit an interest in our children and to find ways of fostering their relationships with them. We also need to put a high premium on creating customs and traditions that connect our children to extended family. Being related is not enough -- genuine relationship is required. 
• Matchmaking: involves priming two persons in such a way that they are more likely to become attached to each other. Introduction -- opportunity to create friendly first impressions. Also, a natural way of giving our attachment blessing. 
• Seize the lead in becoming acquainted with the adult to whom we are entrusting our child an the to assume control of the introduction. 
• Also, endear the unconnected parties to each other. Whether it is passing on compliments or interpreting signs of appreciation, make it easy for parties to like each other. 
• Relationship must be established first and foremost, before we deal with what does not work. To teacher -- "you've made quite an impression on her ... likes you and eager not to disappoint ..." One can usually find something that can be interpreted in a positive way to prime a connection between one's child and the adult responsible for her. 
• Create attachment relay team. We have to successfully pass the attachment baton before we let go. 

Diffuse competition

• Those not in relationships with us are likely our competition. What breaks the ice and brings them into relationship with us is to serve them a meal in a family setting. 
• My unannounced agenda was to get into their face in a friendly way, make eye contact if possible, solicit a smile and a nod, get a name and try to remember it, and introduce myself as well. The message would be clear -- relating to her meant relating to her family. 
• Another way to diffuse potential competition is to cultivate relationships with the parents of our children's friends. 
• Because childhood is a function of immaturity, the duration of childhood is increasing in our society. At the same time, since true parenthood is a matter of relationship and exists only while the child is actively attaching to us, the duration of hands-on parenthood is rapidly decreasing. 
• For parenthood to fade before the end of childhood is disastrous for both parent and child. 
• Who is to raise our kids? We, the parents and other adults concerned with care of children. We need to hold on to our children until our work is done. Until they can hold on to themselves. 

Notes: Wake Up - A Life of Buddha

by Jack Kerouac.

This is it. The last book and I'm out of the Kerouack rabbit hole. I've read: Dharma Bums, On the Road, Maggie Cassidy, Big Sur and now this.

Intro by Robert Thurman. (intros, as a rule, I read after I finish the book).

• Kerouac preferred the Mahayana Buddhism (Indian) [as opposed to the Chinese/Japanese Ch'an/Zen Buddhism].
• "obtainng nirvana is like locating silence." -- from Dharma Bums. 
• The birth of anything means death of the thing: and this is decay, this is horror, change, this is pain.

On to Wake Up.

• "I fear birth, old age, disease and death, and so I seek to find a sure mode of deliverance." - Buddha (B).
• "The thought of 'self' gives rise to all these sorrows, binding as with cords the world, but having found there is no 'I' that can be bound, then all these bonds are severed. There is no 'I' at all. No doer and no knower, so no birth and death." - B.
• "All creatures tremble at punishment, all creatures love life; remember that thou art like unto them, and do not kill, nor cause slaughter. In seeking to escape from suffering ourselves, why should we inflict it upon others?" - B.
• The stopping of all thoughts and all conceptions, the curing the mind of thoughts and of the very thought of thoughts, is the practice that leads to Nirvana.
• "The essence of the discerning, perceptive conscious mind has no definite location anywhere."
• They had forgotten their own true nature amongst the illusive reflections of the world and the world was mind-only.
• "Everything is taking place in your mind, like a dream. As soon as you wake up and stop dreaming, your mind returns to its original emptiness and purity."
• The sense organs are by nature false and fantastic and continue to fool you as you live and breathe. 
• False perception of discriminative thinking. 
• False ripples of sense perception. They will go away. 
• Concentrate his attention on this Intrinsic Sound of Reality which is the absence of sound, the Hearing of the Emptiness Sublime. In the silence he hears a teaching going on! Later on, he learns to hear it everywhere and under all conditions. 
• The false discriminating brain-mind. 
• 1. Concentrate the mind -- see things as they are and not be fooled by "realities." All things are the same as emptiness.
• 2. Keep the precepts -- adhere to four precepts. 1. cease sexual lust; 2. cease unkindness to others; 3. cease greediness and stealing; 4. cease secret insincerity and lying. There should be no falsehood. 
• 3. Practice dhyana - make a regular practice to meditate. 
• "There is love at the center of all things and all things are the same thing." 

[Still confused about how all is illusion, and all our senses are deceiving us. Also, can't quite seem to reconcile Mindfulness with illusion concept. Jon Kabat-Zinn got all his Mindulness from Buddhism, and they are all about paying attention, being mindful, focusing on one thing, slowing things down ... all to be less stressful, to be happy, etc.

But what about when Buddha says all the info we get from our senses is false, illusion. Are we being mindful of false things? Are we supposed to pay attention to everything that is illusionary?]

Must read more Mindful books. I have read Zen Buddhism. It's all sitting and meditating, but I'm intrigued by the Mahayana side now, like Kerouac.

Notes: Adventures of Johnny Bunko

by D. Pink.

The last career guide you'll ever need.

Every high school kid should read this. Then again, I'm not sure I would have taken it to heart like now. It makes a lot of sense now that I'm 47 years old, and I hope it's not too late for me. Good thing my 10-year-old has just read it.

• Lesson 1: There is no plan.
• Lesson 2: Think strengths, not weaknesses.
• Lesson 3: It's not about you.
• Lesson 4: Persistence trumps talent.
• Lesson 5: Make excellent mistakes.
• Lesson 6: Leave an imprint. 

L1: career decisions based two different types of reasons -- 1. Instrumental ... practical, lead to something whether you enjoy it or not; 1. Fundamental -- because you think it's inherently valuable, whether it leads to something or not.
    i. Instrumental reasons usually don't work. Life too complicated and unpredictable.

L2: look up Flow and Mihaly Csikszenthihalyi.

L3: look outward, not inward. About the customer. Here to serve, not self-actualize.

L6: leave their companies, their communities, their families a little better than before.

Notes: Book of Merlyn

by T.H. White

Last book of the Once and Future King.

• "Nobody can be saved from anything, unless they save themselves. It is hopeless doing things for people -- it is often very dangerous indeed to do things at all -- and the only thing worth doing for the race is to increase its stock of ideas. Then, if you make available a larger stock, the people are at liberty to help themselves from out of it. By this process the means of improvement is offered, to be accepted or rejected freely, and there is a faint hope of progress in the course of the millennia. Such is the business of the philospher, to open new ideas. It is not the business to impose them on people."  -- Merlyn.

Notes: Black Swan

by NN Taleb.

Book 2 of the Random series.

I agree with all he writes but I'm wish there was more concrete advice on how I can use it in my daily life or even how to make money off of it, since he did it. Have to read the whole 300 pages and there's only a paragraph of "useful" or what I was looking for.

• Black Swan. an outlier. Defined by its rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective predictability. 
• A small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world. 
• Low predictability and large impact. 
• Central idea: our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly the large deviations. 
• What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. 
• Focus on antiknowledge, or what we do not know. 
• Contrary to social-science wisdom, almost no discovery, no technologies of note, came from design and planning -- they were just Black Swans. 
• The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can. 
• This is a book about uncertainty; to this author, the rare event equals uncertainty. 
• People in the classroom not having faced man true situations of decision making under uncertainty. 
• You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent than ideas. Ideas come and go, stories stay. 
• Not relying on the beastly method of collecting "corroborating evidence" -- he calls these overload of examples naive empiricism -- succession of anecdotes selected to fit a story do not constitute evidence. 
• Our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated. The future will be increasingly less predictable, while both human nature and social "science" seem to conspire to hide the idea from us. 
• How we humans deal with knowledge -- our preference for the anecdotal over the empirical. 
• History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. 
• Triplet of opacity (as it concerns humans about history): 1. illusion of understanding; 2. retrospective distortion; overvaluation of factual info and handicap of authoritative and learned people. 
• This retrospective plausibility causes a discounting of the rarity and conceivability of the event. Minds are wonderful explanation machines, but incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability. These events were unexplainable, but intelligent people thought they were capable of providing convincing explanations for them -- after the fact. 
• History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. We are just great machines for looking backward, and that humans are great at self-delusion. 
• Manifestation of Platonicity, the desire to cut reality into crisp shapes. [Clusters and herding] Categorizing always produces reduction in true complexity. 
• Not only are some scientific results useless in real life, because they underestimate the impact of the highly improbable, but that many of them may be actually creating Black Swans. 
• Platonic fold is where our representation of reality ceases to apply--but we do not know it. 
• Most traders were just "picking pennies in front of a steamroller," exposing themselves to the high-impact rare event yet sleeping like babies, unaware of it. 
• Mine was the only job you could do if you thought yourself as  risk-hating, risk-aware, and highly ignorant. 
• Advice from 2nd yr Wharton student: to get a profession that is "scalable," one in which you are not paid by the hour and thus subject to the limitations of the amount of your labor. 
• Bad advice according to NNT. He recommends someone to pick a profession that is not scalable. It's predictable. Scalable profession only good if you are successful. Very competitive, has few giants and many dwarves. Creation of giants by Black Swans. 
• Art De Vany -- studied wild uncertainty in the movies. Much of what we ascribe to skills is an after-the-fact attribution. 
• In Extremistan, inequalities are such that one single observation can disproportionately impact the aggregate, or the total. Almost all social matters are from Extremistan. Social quantities are informational, not physical. 
• In Extremistan, always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data. In this world, type 2 randomness: wealth, income, book sales, etc. Where most of Black Swans happen. 
• In Mediocristan, height, weight, bell curve. Predictable. 
• The turkey problem, Problem of Induction. Something works in the past, until, unexpectedly, it no longer does. Derive solely from past data a few conclusions concerning the properties of the pattern with projections into the future. Turkey is feed for 1000 days, then 1001, his head chopped. 
• Black Swan problem in its original form: How can we know the future, given knowledge of the past; how can we figure out the properties of the unknown based on the known?
• Pyrrhonian skeptics taught themselves to systematically doubt everything, and thus attain a level of serenity. 
• Black Swan problem -- central difficulty of generalizing from available info, or of learning from the past, the known, and the seen. 
• Domain specificity of our reactions -- depend on the context in which the matter is presented, or the domain. 
• Simple confusion of absence of evidence (of the benefits of mothers' milk) with evidence of absence of the benefits. 
• Negative empiricism: as applies to cancer detection -- the finding of a single malignant tumor proves you have cancer, but the absence of such finding cannot allow you to say with certainty that you are cancer-free. We can get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification. It is misleading to build a general rule from observed facts. 
• Popper, who promoted this idea of one-sided semiskepticism. Empirical decision makers who hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete info is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.
• Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations: formulate a bold conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. 
• Our natural tendency to look only for corroboration - corroboration error, or confirmation bias. Disconfirming instances are far more powerful in establishing truth. 
• Need to find what experimenters said no to. 
• the search for their own weaknesses that makes them good chess players. 
• the central problem of knowledge is that there is no such animal as corroborative evidence. 
• The modern world, being Extremistan, is dominated by rare--very rare-- events. We need to withhold judgement for longer than we are inclined to. 
• Narrative fallacy - our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths. Our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. 
• Problem of induction: what could be inferred about the unknown, what lies outside our info set; now looking at the seen, what lies within the info set. 
• Nylon stocking experiment. Post hoc rationalization. Women supplied backfit, post hoc explanation. Better at explaining than understanding. 
• Our biological dependence on a story. Hard to avoid interpretation. A higher concentration of dopamine appears to lower skepticism and result in greater vulnerability to pattern detection. 
• Deeper reason for our inclination to narrate: 1. info is costly to obtain; 2. info is costly to store; 3. info is costly to manipulate and retrieve. Not a capacity problem but an indexing, retrieval one. Same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think the world is less random than it actually is. 
• Our tendency to perceive--to impose--narrativity and causality are symptoms of dimension reduction. We tend to remember those facts from our past that fit a narrative, while neglecting others that do not appear to play a causal role in that narrative. 
• Memory is dynamic, more a self-serving dynamic revision machine. We pull memories along causative lines. Far too many possible ways to interpret past events. 
• The Black Swans we imagine, discuss, and worry about do not resemble those likely to be Black Swans. False Black Swans -- narrated, present in the current discourse and likely to hear about on TV; real ones that no one talks about since they escape models. 
• We learn from repetition -- at the expense of events that have not happened before their occurrence, and overestimated after (for a while). 
• Thinking and reasoning: System 1 -- experiential, effortless, automatic, fast, "intuition, produces shortcuts; System 2 -- cogitative, normally call thinking, effortful, slow, logical, serial. Most of our mistakes in reasoning come from using System 1. 
• World is more nonlinear than we think. Nonlinear relationships can vary, cannot be expressed verbally to do them justice. Linear progression is not the norm. 
• Some people are like the turkey, exposed to a major blowup without being aware of it, while others play reverse turkey, prepared for big events that might surprise others. We have a marked preference for making a little bit of income at a time. Property of Extremistan to look less risky, in the short run, than it really is. 
• Engaged in a strategy that he called "bleed:" you lose steadily, daily, for a long time, except when some event takes place for which you get paid disproportionately well. 
• Another fallacy: Silent evidence - what events use to conceal their own randomness. To understand success and analyze what caused them, we need to study the traits present in failures. 
• A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient. 
• That we got here by accident does not mean that we should continue to take the same risks. 
• Reference point argument: do not compute odds from the vantage point of the winning gambler, but from all those who started in cohort. 
• We are explanation-seeking animals but there may not be a visible because.
• Whenever your survival is in play, don't immediately look for causes and effects. Be suspicious of the "because."
• Nerd is simply someone who thinks exceedingly inside the box. Ever wondered why many of these straight-A students end up going nowhere in life?
• Ludic fallacy - the attributes of the uncertainty we face in real life have little connection to the sterilized ones we encounter in exams and games. 
• Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world. 
• Epistemic arrogance - we think we know a little bit more than we do. Scandal of prediction - we are very bad at it. We are simply not wise enough to be trusted with knowledge. 
• Epistemic arrogance bears a double effect: we overestimate what we know, and underestimate uncertainty, by compressing the range of possible uncertain states ... ingrained tendency to underestimate outliers, Black Swans. 
• One main effect of info: impediment to knowledge. Additional knowledge of minutiae can be useless. The problem is that our ideas are sticky; once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds (belief perseverance). 
• Pony handicapping experiment. More info did not lead to increase in their accuracy, but their confidence went up. 
• Good idea to question that error rate of an expert's procedure. Do not question his procedure, only his confidence. 
• Things that move, and therefore require knowledge do not usually have experts. Professions that deal with the future and base their studies on the nonrepeatable past have an expert problem. Things that move are often Black Swan-prone. 
• You cannot ignore self-delusion. The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know. Lack of knowledge and delusion about the quality of your knowledge come together; also makes you satisfied with your knowledge. 
• Problem with prediction. We are living in Extremistan, not Mediocristan. Good at predicting the ordinary, but not the irregular. What matters is not how often you are right, but how large yoru cumulative errors are. Economic forecasters tend to fall closer to one another than to the resulting outcome (cluster effect). 
• Expert excuses for prediction errors: Invoke the outlier, outside the system, outside scope of your science; "Almost Right" defense, retrospectively. Experts ... when right attribute to their own depth of understanding and expertise; when wrong, it was situation to blame. 
• We humans are victims of asymmetry in perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events, to randomness. 
• Hedgehog and the fox: most prediction failures come from hedgehogs who are mentally married to a single big Black Swan event, a big bet that is not likely to play out. Rather be a fox, with an open mind. I know history will be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be. 
• Plans fail because of tunneling, the neglect of sources of uncertainty outside the plan itself. Consider the track records of builders, paper writers, and contractors. The unexpected almost always pushes in a single direction: higher costs and a longer time to completion. 
• Researchers on how students estimate their time of projection completion. Optimists promised 26 days; pessimists 47 days. Average actual time: 56. 
• Also the nerd effect - stems from mental elimination of off-modeled risks, or focusing on what you know. View the world from within a model. Most delays and cost overruns arise from unexpected elements that did not enter into the plan. 
• Anchoring - you lower your anxiety about uncertainty by producing a number. 
• The longer you wait, the longer you will be expected to wait. 
• Corporate and government projections have an additional easy-to-spot flaw: they do not attach a possible error rate into their scenarios. Fallacy 1: variability matters; 2. forecast degradation as project period lengthens; 3. misunderstanding the random character of the variables being forecast. 
• almost all inventions we see: product of serendipity. 
• Fat tail - technical term for Black Swan. 
• Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future. But that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. 
• Poincare: nonlinearities, small effects that can lead to severe consequences; about the limits that nonlinearities put on forecasting. 
• Montaigne, vulnerability of human knowledge. 
• To me utopia is an epistemocracy. Society governed from the basis of the awareness of ignorance, not knowledge. 
• The assertive idiot has more followers than the introspective wise person. Pyschopaths rally followers. 
• In practice, randomness is incomplete info. Opacity. 
• Maximize the serendipity around you. Barbell strategy for investing: 85-90% in extremely safe instruments like T-bills; other 10-15% in extremely speculative bets. Taking maximum exposure to positive Black Swans while remaining paranoid about the negative ones. 
• Invest in preparedness, not in prediction. Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like opportunity. Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. 
• Asymmetry: Put yourself in situations where favorable consequences are much larger than unfavorable ones. 
• Matthew effect: people take from the poor to give to the rich. "cumulative advantage". 
• standard deviation is meaningless outside of Mediocristan. Same as sigma. Variance is square of sigma. 
• With Gaussian bell curve, dramatic speed of decrease in odds as you move away from the average. But Gaussian bell curve not ubiquitous in real life. 
• One can almost always ferret out predecessors for any thought. You can always find someone who worked on a part of your argument and use his contribution as your backup. The scientific associaiton with a big idea goes to the one who connects the dots. Those who derive consequences and seize the importance of the ideas, seeing their real value, who win the day. 
• Nature's geometry is not Euclid's -- triangles, squares, circles. 
• Fractal is the word Mandelbrot coined to describe the geometry of the rough and broken. Fractality is the repetition of geometric patterns at different scales, revealing smaller and smaller versions of themselves. No qualitative change when an object changes size. Large resembles the small. 
• Fractal Geometry of Nature, Mandelbrot. 
• fractal has numerical or statistical measures preserved across scales, ratio is the same.
• Distribution is scalable and fractal (didn't know the exact exponent though). 
• Precise models and humbled by reality. About opacity, incompleteness of info, the invisibility of the generator of the world. 
• Fractal randomness a way to reduce these surprises, to make swans possible, to make them gray. 
• It is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity. 
• Domain dependence of skepticism. Irritated by those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economics, social scientists, and phony statisticians. 
• Having plenty of data will not provide confirmation, but a single instance can disconfirm. 
• Rule: I am very aggressive when I can gain exposure to positive Black Swans -- when a failure would be a small amount--and very conservative when I am under threat from a negative Black Swan. 
• Refusing to catch trains. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice. 

Notes: The Perfect Score Project

by Debbie Stier.

A single mom studies and takes the SAT so that she can bond with her son. She takes it seven times in the year before her son takes it in order to get a perfect score.

• College Board's Question of the Day.
• Advice: full, timed practice SATs using College Board material only. Take a least 10 practice tests before the actual test. 
• Test Success!, B. Bernstein
• Outsmarting the SAT, E. King.
• about motivating a teen, and the kids who never rebelled because that family did projects together. Lots of family activities together and vacations together. 
• blog - Kitchen Table Math. 
• Hold on to your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers, G. Neufeld and G. Mate. 
• Authoritative parents -- warm and strict, who give their children the mental freedom to think whatever they want but not the physical freedom to do whatever they want -- raise great kids. 
• attempting to convince her son he was not the only kid on the planet whose mom wanted him to study for the SAT before his junior year. 
• Advice II: 1. Get College Board Blue Book (Official SAT Study Guide); 2. Do one full timed test every weekend; 3. Spend rest of the weekend going over the wrong answers. 
• perfectscoreproject.com -- more links to practice tests. 
• Vocab -- tend to fall into predictable categories -- "unoriginal", "to make better", " to praise". On the test, cross out wrong answers. 
• Vocab study -- thecriticalreader.com (Erica Meltzer); word-nerd.com. 
• SAT math - like a puzzle. Need to spot shortcuts. 
• SAT strategy -- The New Math SAT Game Plan, P. Keller. 
• What Can I do to Help My Child with Math When I Don't Know Any Myself?, Dr. Yaqoob. 
• Essay -- essay length is the best predictor of score. No waffling. Pick a side. 
• Math -- erikthered.com/tutor/
• Pwn the SAT -- blog. SAT full of patterns, esp. Math. Pull in answers, esp the small numbers, variables. 
• Test prep must address -- fundamental skills and test strategy. 
• SAT math -- test of speed as much as reasoning. Math knowledge must be ingrained. 
• Kumon - 20 min. a day. A sealant to stop the gaps. Most of the math on the SAT happens in Levels E to K. 
• Critical Reader -- grammar. Correct answers do pop up when you come up with your own answers first. Students need to read closely so as to understand how particular linguistic and stylistic choices shape the impression the author wants to convey. That's what the SAT is asking. 
• Deliberate practice -- things you can't do. It's hard. 
• Mathematics 6, Enn Nurk and Aksel Telgmaa. Russian 6th grade math. Find an English translation.
• "The development of expertise requires coaches who are capable of giving constructive, even painful feedback." -- Ericcson (original 10,000 hour guy). 
• Top drawer test prep - most expensive, too. Advantage Testing. Personal SAT notebooks. Heavy-gauge reinforced loose leaf. For the Math, 3 columns: term, definition, examples. 
• SAT requires proficiency. Proficiency takes time. 
• Take college tours before junior year of high school.