Category: Books

LEAN IN

WOMEN, WORK, AND THE WILL TO LEAD

BY SHERYL SANDBERG

 Introduction: Internalizing the Revolution

P. 5 “Knowing that things could be worse should not stop us from trying to make them better.”

P. 7 “A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes.”

P. 7 “Conditions for all women will improve when there are more women in leadership roles giving strong and powerful voice to their needs and concerns.”

P. 8 “Men are promoted based on potential, while women are promoted based on past accomplishments.”

P. 9 “Internal obstacles deserve a lot more attention, in part because they are under our own control.”

P. 10 “Many people are not interested in acquiring power, not because they lack ambition, but because they are living their lives as they desire.”

P. 11 “Shift to a more equal world will happen person by person. We move closer to the larger goal of true equality with each woman who leans in.”

1. The Leadership Ambition Gap – What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?

P. 15 “Girls growing up today are not the first generation to have equal opportunity, but they are the first to know that all that opportunity does not necessarily translate into professional achievement.”

P. 17 “Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishment comes at cost.”

P. 23 “Women are not thinking about having it all, they’re worried about losing it all—their jobs, their children’s health, their families’ financial stability—because of the regular conflicts that arise between being a good employee and a responsible parent.”

P. 24 “Children, parents, and marriages can all flourish when both parents have full careers. Sharing financial and child-care responsibilities leads to less guilty moms, more involved dads, and thriving children.”

P. 24 “Fear is the root of so many barriers that women face—without fear, women can pursue professional success and personal fulfillment—and freely choose one, or the other, or both.”

P. 25 “Find the right career for you and go all the way to the top.”

P. 25 “As you walk off this stage today, you start your adult life.  Start out by aiming high. Try—and try hard.”

P. 26 “Ask yourself: What would I do if I weren’t afraid? And then go do it.”

2. Sit at the Table

P. 38 “Feeling confident—or pretending that you feel confident—is necessary to reach for opportunities.”

P. 36 “If we want a world with greater equality, we need to acknowledge that women are less likely to keep their hands up. We need institutions and individuals to notice and correct for this behavior by encouraging, promoting, and championing more women. And women have to learn to keep their hands up, because when they lower, even managers with the best intentions might not notice.”

P. 38 “No one can accomplish anything all alone.”

3. Success and Likeability

P. 40 “Success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less.”

P. 43 “If a woman is competent, she does not seem nice enough. If a woman seems really nice, she is considered more nice than competent.”

P. 44 “Owning one’s success is key to achieving more success.”

P. 47 “Women can increase their chances of achieving a desired outcome by doing two things in combination. First, women must come across as being nice, concerned about others, and ‘appropriately female’. Second, what women must do is provide a legitimate explanation for the negotiation.”

P. 50 “Everyone needs to get more comfortable with female leaders—including female leaders themselves.”

P. 51 “When you want to change things you cannot please everyone. If you do please everyone, you aren’t making enough progress.”

4. It’s a Jungle Gym, Not a Ladder

P. 53 “Careers do not need to be mapped out from the start. Job seekers often have to accept what is available and hope that It points in a desirable direction.”

P. 58 “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.”

P. 59 “Employees who concentrate on results and impact on results are the most valuable.”

P. 62 “Women need to shift from thinking ‘I’m not ready to do that’ to thinking ‘I want to do that—and I’ll learn by doing it.’”

P. 63 “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

P. 63 “Do not wait for power to be offered.”

5. Are You My Mentor?

P. 69 “Capturing someone’s attention or imagination in a minute can be done, but only when planned and tailored to that individual.”

P 74 “Guidance can come from all levels.”

6. Seek and Speak Your Truth

P. 78 “Communication works best when we combine appropriateness with authenticity, finding that sweet spot where opinions are not brutally honest but delicately honest.”

P. 79 “Great leadership is ‘conscious’ leadership.”

P.  79 “Communication starts with the point of view (my truth) and someone else’s point of view (his truth). Rarely is there one absolute truth, so people who believe that they speak the truth are very silencing to others.”

*P. 80 “The ability to listen is as important as the ability to speak.”

P. 80 “Restate the other person’s point before responding to it.”

P. 81 “We all want to be heard, and when we focus on showing others that we are listening, we actually become better listeners.”

P. 81 “Being aware of a problem is the first step to correcting it.”

P. 81 “We can try to guess what they’re thinking, but asking directly is far more effective.”

P. 83 “As hard as it is to have an honest dialogue about business decisions, it is even harder to give individuals honest feedback.”

P. 84 “Being open to hearing the truth means taking responsibility for mistakes.”

P. 86 “When people are open and honest, thanking them publicly encourages them to continue while sending a powerful signal to others.”

P. 86 “Humor can be an amazing tool for delivering an honest message in a good-natured way.”

P. 88 “Sharing emotions builds deeper relationships.”

P. 88 “Motivation comes from working on things we care about. It also comes from working with people we care about.”

P. 88 “Recognizing the role emotions play and being willing to discuss them makes us better managers, partners, and peers.”

7. Don’t Leave Before You Leave

P. 95 “No one should pass judgement on highly personal decisions.”

P. 95 “The months and years leading up to having children are not the time to lean back, but the critical time to lean in.”

P. 99 “It’s hard to predict how an individual will react to becoming a parent, it’s easy to predict society’s reaction—when a couple announces that they are having a baby, everyone says ‘congratulation’ to the man and ‘congratulation! What are you planning on doing about work?’ to the woman.”

P. 102 “Child care is a huge expense, and it’s frustrating to work hard just to break even. But professional women need to measure the cost of child care against their future salary rather than their current salary.”

P. 103 “We make it too easy for women to drop out of the career marathon; we also make it too hard for men.”

8. Make Your Partner a Real Partner 

P. 109 “Anyone who wants her mate to be a true partner must treat him as an equal—and equally capable—partner.”

P. 115 “The image of happy couples still includes a husband who is more professionally successful than the wife. If the reverse occurs, it’s perceived as threatening to the marriage.”

P. 115 “When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, crazy boys. But do not marry them. When it comes to settlement, find someone who wants an equal partner.”

P. 116 “If a relationship begins in an unequal place, it is likely to get more unbalanced when and if children are added to the equation.”

P. 117 “If you want an equal partnership, you should start now.”

P. 119 “A more equal division of labor between parents will model better behavior for the next generation.”

P. 120 “We need more men to sit at the table … the kitchen table.”

9. The Myth of Doing It All

P. 122 “Pursuing both a professional and personal life is a noble and attainable goal, up to a point.”

P. 136 “Exclusive maternal care was not related to better or worse outcomes for children. There is, thus, no reason for mothers to feel as though they are harming their children if they decide to work.”

*P. 139 “Success is making the best choices we can… and accepting them.”

10. Let’s Start Talking About It

P. 155 “Don’t be afraid to ask, even if it seems like a long shot.”

P. 155 “Every job will demand some sacrifice. The key is to avoidunnecessarysacrifice.”

P. 157 “Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.”

P. 158 “The result of creating a more equal environment will not just be better performance for our organizations, but quite likely greater happiness for all.”

11. Working Together Towards Equality

P. 159 “True equality is long overdue and will be achieved only when more women rise to the top of every government and every industry.”

P. 160 “Equal opportunity is not equal unless everyone receives the encouragement that makes seizing those opportunities possible.”

P. 168 “We all want the same thing: to feel comfortable with our choices and to feel validated by those around us. So, let’s start by validating one another.”

P. 171 “If we start using the talents of the entire population, our institutions will be more productive, our homes will be happier, and the children growing up in those homes will no longer be held back by narrow stereotypes.”

P. 171 “If more women lean in, we can change the power structure of our world and expand opportunities for all.”

Priyanka Uprety

 

 

 

 

What School Could Be

By Ted Dintersmith

Overview

“What School Could Be” presents a vision and encouraging ideas of what schools can accomplish if teachers, students and parents work together innovatively to help students develop the skills and ways of thinking needed to flourish in today’s world of fast-paced technological change.

According to the author, actual learning happens when we give kids real-world challenges, have them work in groups with other kids and provide them with resources and adult support. If we give students credit for real-world projects and internships they have the opportunity to go deeply into a discipline to seek out potentially fulfilling career paths. Such projects also provide non-academically oriented students with opportunities to shine and thus broaden everyone’s perception of ‘intelligence’ beyond the traditional knowledge-based definition. Dintersmith states: “the purpose of education should be to develop potential, not to rank it.”

PROLOGUE

P. XVI “Students thrive in environments where they develop:

• Purpose—Students attack challenges they know to be important, that make their world better.
• Essentials—Students acquire the skill sets and mind-sets needed in an increasingly innovative world.
• Agency—Students own their learning, becoming self-directed, intrinsically motivated adults.
• Knowledge—What students learn is deep and retained, enabling them to create, to make, to teach others.”

P. XVII “We need to observe and create learning conditions that prepare students to capitalize on, rather than be victimized by, machine intelligence.”

P. XVIII “We need to have the courage to revolutionize paths forward and attack the many problems we’re dumping on student’s laps.

P. XVIII “We can’t keep feeding children into an education machine that churns out young adults lacking meaningful skills and purpose, primed to throw hand grenades into the ballot box, or worse.”

P. XIX “Our children should study what’s important to learn, not what’s easy for us to test. Schools should develop each child’s unique potential, not rank it with high-stakes standardized tests of low-level skills.”

P. XXI “Do better things,” not “do obsolete things better.”

1. Conventional Schools and Their Contexts

P. 12 “Children need to learn to leverage machine intelligence, not replicate its capacity to perform low-level tasks.”

P. 18 “Project-based learning is how people work in the real world.”

2. Real Gold Amid Fool’s Gold

P. 24 “When we let go and engage students, discipline issues disappear and real learning happens.”

P. 37 “Our world desperately needs young people who know how to think deeply, communicate clearly, resolve conflict, and lead with empathy.”

P. 38 “Once you jump outside of the box, there’s endless running room.”

3. Prepare for What?

P. 47 “Education should prepare our children for life, but we have it backward—we prepare children’s lives for education.”

P. 59 “If a goal of education is to get students excited about literature’s great works, an essential question is how to spark such passion.”

P. 60 “In today’s world everyone needs to be entrepreneurial. Not entrepreneurial in the sense of starting a for-profit business but in the sense of fighting tirelessly to improve your world through your skills, passions, perseverance, audacity and community support.”

P. 68 “School transcripts are designed so that the admission officer can review it in ten minutes or so.”

*P. 68 “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

P. 70 “Kids are rewarded more for memorizing than thinking—a balance that would shift dramatically if students were assessed on the basis of authentic and creative work.”

4. The Ivory Tower

P. 74 “Colleges should be valued for developing excellence in the students they admit, not for admitting students with excellent test scores.”

P. 82 “The issue with the liberal arts isn’t the failure to prepare students for careers. It’s the failure to convince adults—parents and employers—that liberal arts majors develop relevant competencies.”

P. 85 “Any college committed to educating kids from challenging circumstances is making an unequivocally positive contribution to our society.”

P. 89 “Education is no longer sitting in a classroom and telling students what’s going on; they have to relate what they’re learning in a classroom out to their life.”

5 & 6 Letting Go/ Social Equity 

P. 98 “In today’s world, we have to balance trade-offs—what colleges want, what twenty-first-century organizations want, and what leads to a fulfilling life.”

P. 121 “If young adults need to be bold and creative in a world brimming with innovation, we can’t tolerate education policies that destroy these characteristics.”

P. 124 “Education has become the modern American caste system. We fuzz up the issue in a sea of statistics about test-score gaps, suggesting that social inequality is a classroom issue.”

P. 125 “Achievement should be based on challenging real-world problems, not standardizing tests that amount to little more than timed performance on crossword puzzles and Sudoku.”

*P. 125 “If the cow is starving, we don’t weigh it. We feed it.”

7 & 8. Human Potential / Doing (Obsolete) Things Better

P. 133 “Science is so much fun, but we make it boring. We make it about rote memorization.”

P. 145 “We need to help students achieve self-sufficiency.”

P. 147 “Many people are quite capable of learning, just not in school. The right job can be their salvation. Internship, apprenticeships, and entry-level jobs can make or break a young adult’s future.”

P. 150 “Learning is about so much more than just filling in the right bubbles.”

P. 152 “We need to empower our teachers, engage our students, and deliver learning experiences that recognize, and capitalize on, the reality that our students will have digital devices at their fingertips for the rest of their lives.”

P. 156 “Doing obsolete things better will hardly ‘carry us across the water’.”

*P. 160 “Give teachers more respect, training and professional development. Have kids learn more by doing instead of memorizing.”

P. 162 “A lot of people can step up and do great work if they get training and support.”

*P. 166 “We’ll never fix our schools until we get rid of teachers’ unions and tenure.”

9. Doing Better Things

P. 170 “Education’s job today is less in purveying information than in helping people to use it—that is, to exercise their minds.”

P. 172 “Look what we do to our kids. If you’re a low performing student, we pull you out of the classes you enjoy and make you do more rote math—Our kids don’t know why they’re being educated other than to go to college. The role of intrinsic motivation has been completely lost in our school.”

P. 173 “Our education system spends billions of dollars collecting data precisely measuring student progress on material they’ll probably never use.”

P. 180 “When kids feel like a school is a great place to be, they learn—Making things is what we’re about.”

P. 184 “Education shouldn’t be about acquiring narrow content or specific skills, but helping students reach their full potential, and directing this potential to greater good.”

P. 188 “We just need to embrace the right kinds of assessments and ensure our kids are doing things that are valuable to them.”

10. It Takes a Village

P. 192 “Change is nigh impossible when people dump on anything new.”

P. 192 “Innovation has its inevitable hiccups, which can draw out critics.”

P. 192 “Everything changes in environments that celebrate creativity, welcome innovation, and accept setbacks as part of progress.”

P. 192 “It takes a village to raise a child.’ Well, a community can come together to transform its schools.”

P. 210 “Grades reflect factors unrelated to work quality—factors like effort, positive attitude, persistence, attendance, class participation, and meeting deadlines.”

Priyanka Uprety

 

 

 

 

Creative Schools

The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education

By Ken Robinson, Ph.D.

And Lou Aronica

Introduction

P. XVIII “We’re all born with immense natural talents, but by the time we’ve been very far into our education system, many of us have lost touch with these talents.”

*P. XXII “If you design a system to do something specific, don’t be surprised if it does it. If you run an education system based on standardization and conformity that suppress individuality, imagination and creativity, don’t be surprised if that’s what it does.”

P. XXIV “Whether you’re a student, an educator, a parent, an administrator, or a policy—if you’re involved in education in any way—you can be part of the change. To do that, you need three forms of understanding: acritiqueof the way things are, a visionof how they could be, and a theory of change for how to move from one to the other.”

P. XXIV “If you want to change education, it’s important to recognize what sort of system it is. It is neither monolithic nor unchanging, which is why you can do something about it.”

P. XXIV “The aims of education are to enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens.”

P. XXV “If you’re involved in education in any way you have three options: you can make changes within the system, you can press for changes to the system, or you can take initiatives outside the system.”

P. XXVI “The challenges we face on Earth are not theoretical; they are all too real and they are mostly being created by people.”

P.XXVII “The danger is not to the planet, but to the conditions of our own survival on it.”

Chapter 1: Basic to Basics

P. 3 “You’ve got to listen to what’s important to the child.”

P. 8 “Why is education such a hot political issue? The reasons are;

–Economic—Education has huge implications for economic prosperity.

–Cultural—Education is one of the main ways that communities pass on their values and traditions from one generation to next.

–Social—Education provides all students, whatever their background and circumstances, with opportunities to prosper and succeed and to become active and engaged citizens.

–Personal—Education contains ritual passages about the need for all students to realize their potential and to live fulfilled and productive lives.”

P. 19 “Unemployment is not only an economic issue; it’s a scourge that can destroy lives and whole communities.”  Children must get skills in school that are applicable and necessary for employment.

P. 20 “Education is not the only source of the income gap, but the forms of education that the ‘standards movement’ is promoting are exacerbating it. The drab nature of standardized education does little to inspire and empower those caught in poverty.”

*P. 24 “The best way to raise student motivation and expectations is to improve the quality of teaching, have a rich and balanced curriculum, and have supportive, informative system of assessment.”

Chapter 2: Changing the Metaphors

P. 33 “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

*P. 36 “The problem with conformity in education is that people are not standardized to begin with.”

P. 37 “The lives we create are the result of all sorts of currents and crosscurrents, most of which we can’t anticipate in advance.”

P. 39 “We are born with all the skills—all the basics—we need. Let’s really spend some time observing the kids in our nursery and early-years facilities and see how we can take forward what they’re doing.”

P. 41 “Education is about living people, not inanimate things. If we think of students as products or data points, we misunderstand how education should be.”

P. 44 “The emphasis in industrial education has been, and increasingly is, on outputs and yield: improving test results, dominating league tables, raising the number of graduates.”

*P. 44 “Education is really improved only when we understand that it too is a living system and that people thrive in certain conditions and not in others.”

P. 45 “What basic purpose of education should the culture of schools fulfill? In my view, there are four:

–Economic—Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent.

–Cultural—Education should enable students to understand and appreciate their own cultures and to respect the diversity of others.

–Social—Education should enable young people to become active and compassionate citizens.

–Personal—Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them.”

P. 49 “There are three cultural priorities for schools: to help students understand their own cultures, to understand other cultures, and to promote a sense of cultural tolerance and coexistence.”

P. 51 “Education is a global issue; it is also a deeply personal one. None of the other purposes can be met if we forget that education is about enriching the minds and hearts of living people.”

*P. 52 “All students are unique individuals with their own hopes, talents, anxieties, fears, passions, and aspirations. Engaging them as individuals is the heart of raising achievement.”

P. 52 “We only know the world around us through the world within us, through the senses by which we perceive it and the ideas by which we make sense of it.”

Chapter 3: Changing Schools

P. 66 “The best place to start thinking about how to change education is exactly where you are in it. If you change the experiences of education for those you work with, you can change the world for them and in doing so become part of a wider, more complex process of change in education as a whole.”

P. 70 “The fundamental work of schools is not to increase test results but to facilitate learning.”

*P. 71 “The heart of education is the relationship between the student and the teacher. Everything else depends on how productive and successful that relationship is.”

P. 72 “If students are not learning, education is not happening. Something else may be going on, but it’s not education.”

*P. 72 “A great deal of learning and education goes on outside the formal setting of schools and national curricula. It happens anywhere there are willing learners and engaging teachers. The challenge is to create and sustain those experiences within schools.”

Chapter 4: Natural Born Learners

P. 78 “For many students, the problem is not that they cannot learn but how they are required to learn.”

P. 90 “If different people learn best in different ways, they also learn at different rates.”

P. 91 “If the schedule is flexible and more personalized, it is more likely to facilitate the kind of dynamic curriculum that students now need.”

P. 93 “Good teachers know how to use a broad range of assessments.”

*P. 95 “Children are designed by nature, to play and explore on their own, independently of adults. They need freedom in order to develop; without it they suffer.”

P. 96 “Nothing that we do, no amount of toys we buy or ‘quality time’ or special training we give our children, can compensate for the freedom we take away.”

P. 96 “If the system doesn’t work, don’t blame the people in it—work with them to change it so that it does work.”

P. 96 “The people who are best placed to make the change are those who, in the right conditions, can have the most impact on the quality of learning: the teachers.”

Chapter 5: The Art of Teaching

*P. 100 “It doesn’t matter how detailed the curriculum is or how expensive the tests are; the real key to transforming education is the quality of teaching.”

P. 102 “Good teachers create the conditions for learning, and poor one don’t.”

P. 103 “There are two complementary ways of engaging students in the arts: “making”—the production of their own work; and “appraising”—understanding and appreciating the work of others.”

P. 104 “Great teachers understand that it’s not enough to know their disciplines—their job is not to teach subjects; it is to teach students.”

P. 111 “Students who are more confident of their own learning ability learn faster and learn better.”  Helping students develop a strong self-concept is critical to effective learning.

P. 113 “Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be.”

*P. 115 “Classrooms shouldn’t be built around passivity, and around listening to someone and taking notes. It should be learning at your pace.”

P. 118 “Creativity draws from many powers that we all have by virtue of being human. And like many human capacities, our creative powers can be cultivated and refined.”

P. 126 “Subject expertise is often essential for great teaching, but it’s never enough. The other half of great teaching is knowing how to inspire students with materials so that they actively want to, and do, learn it.”

Chapter 6: What’s Worth Knowing?

P.130 “Reaching all students is exactly what is at stake in the transformation of education.”

P. 136 “A lifelong sense of curiosity is one of the greatest gifts that schools can give their students.”

P. 137 “The development of skills in spoken languages is now, sadly and wrongly, neglected in schools—verbal communication is not only about literal meanings; it’s also about appreciating metaphor, analogy, allusion, and other poetic and literary of language.”

P. 139 “Compassion has to be practiced, not preached.”

P. 140 “Citizenship education is not about promoting conformity and status quo. It is about championing the need for equal rights, the value of dissent, and the need to balance personal freedoms with the rights of others to live in peace—it needs to be learned and practiced.”

P. 146 “Effective learning in any field is often a process of trial and error, of breakthroughs punctuated by failed attempts to find a solution.”

Chapter 7: Testing, Testing

*P. 168 “The world economy no longer pays you for what you know; Google knows everything.  The world economy pays you for what you can do with what you know.”

P. 171 “Not everything important is measurable and not everything measurable is important.”

P. 171 “One problem with the systems of assessment that use letters and grades is that they are usually light on description and heavy on comparison.”

*P. 176 “Assessment and standardization is not the problem; the problem is what we choose to standardize.”

P. 179 “You need to have the skills to assess your work. You need to have the skills to assess other people’s work.”

P. 181 “Assessment should not be seen as the end of the education, in either sense.”

Chapter 8: Principles of Principals

P. 188 “Great principals know that their job is not primarily to improve test; it is to build community among the students, teachers, and staff, who need to share a common set of purposes.”

P. 191 “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us—Many of the conventional rituals of schooling are not fixed in law. Many schools are organized as they are because they always have been, not because they must be.”

P. 194 “How quickly things change will depend, in large part, on the vision of the people who run them, especially the principals, on how they set expectations, and where they draw the lines of permission.”

P. 205 “The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it is to encourage a culture where everyone has them.

Chapter 9/10: Bring it All Back Home/Changing the Climate

P. 208 “As a parent, you have an essential role in helping the schools evolve a more rounded understanding of your children’s unique qualities and capabilities.”

P. 213 “When children aren’t given the space to struggle through things on their own, they don’t learn to problem-solve very well.”

P. 218 “Family involvement is vital, but it is only possible if schools make such involvement accessible.”

P. 231 “Education should be based on the principles of health, ecology, fairness and care.”

P. 233 “The quality of education is not inevitably related to the amount of money spent on it.”

*P. 234 “One of the most powerful strategies for systemic change is to test the benefits of doing things differently.”

P. 234 “One of the rules of policymakers is to create conditions in which local innovation is actively encouraged and supported.”

P. 234 “It is essential to have high standards in schools in all areas of learning.”

*P. 255 “Effective education always ways a balance between rigor and freedom, tradition and innovation, the individual and the group, theory and practice, the inner world and the outer world.”

P. 256 “The experience of education is always personal but the issues are increasingly global.”

Priyanka Uprety

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Road to Character

By DAVID BROOKS

Introduction

P. XI “Most of us have clearer strategies for how to achieve career success than we do for how to develop a profound character.”

P. XII “You have to give to receive.”

P. XII “You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself.”

P. XII “You have to conquer your desire to get what you crave.”

P. XII “Success leads to the greatest failure, which is pride.”

P. XII “Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning.”

P. XIII “We live in a society that encourages us to think about how to have a great career but leaves many of us inarticulate about how to cultivate inner life—We live in a culture that teaches us to promote and advertise ourselves and to master the skills required for success, but that gives little encouragement to humility, sympathy, and honest self-confrontation, which are necessary to build character.”

P. XIII “Most don’t have a strategy to build character, and without that, not only your inner life but also your external life will eventually fall to pieces.”

P. XV “The heart cannot be taught in a classroom intellectually, to students mechanically taking notes… Good, wise hearts are obtained through lifetimes of diligent effort to dig deeply within and heal lifetimes of scars…. You can’t teach it or email it or tweet it.”

P. XV “Moral improvements occurs most reliably when the heart is warmed, when we come into contact with people we admire and love and we consciously and unconsciously bend our lives to mimic theirs.”

Chapter 1: The Shift

P.7 “You have a responsibility to do great things because you are so great.”

P. 8 “Humility is the awareness that there’s a lot you don’t know and that a lot of what you think you know is distorted or wrong.”

P. 9 “We can be knowledgeable with other peoples’ knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other peoples’ wisdom.”

P. 11 “People who are humble about their own nature are more realists.”

P. 12 “Character is built not only through austerity and hardship. It is also built sweetly through love and pleasure.”

P.12 “The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery on his or her own.”

P.13 “People with character may be loud or quiet, but they do tend to have a certain level of self-respect.”

Chapter 2: The Summoned Self

P. 23 “Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly puts before us.”

P. 24 “It is not your obligation to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from beginning it.”

P.28 “Today, teachers tend to look for their students’ intellectual strengths, so they can cultivate them. But a century ago, professors tended to look for their students’ moral weaknesses, so they could correct them.”

P. 46 “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; so we must be saved by hope.”

Chapter 3: Self-Conquest

P. 63 “Always try to associate yourself closely and learn as much as you can from those who know more than you, who do better than you, who see more clearly than you.”

P. 63 “The plans are nothing, but the planning is everything,” “Rely on planning, but never trust plans.”

P. 67 “We should live our life being truthful to that authentic inner self, not succumbing to the pressures outside our self.”

P. 67 “To live artificially, with a gap between your inner nature and your outer conduct, is to be deceptive, cunning, and false.”

Chapter 4: Struggle

P. 78 “Everyone must go through something analogous to a conversion… conversion to an idea, a thought, a desire, a dream, a vision—without vision the people perish.”

P. 94 “Often, physical or social suffering can give people an outsider’s perspective, an attuned awareness of what others are enduring.”

P.94 “The first big thing suffering does is it drags you deeper into your-self—The people who endure suffering are taken beneath the routine busyness of life and find they are not who they believed themselves to be.”

Chapter 5: Self – Mastery

P. 108 “Proper behavior is not just knowing what is right; it is having the motivation to do what is right, an emotion that propels you to do good things.”

P. 115 “If everybody is told to think outside the box, you’ve got to expect that the boxes themselves will begin to deteriorate.”

P. 116 “A person’s social function defines who he or she is. The commitment between a person and an institution is more like a covenant. It is an inheritance to be passed on and a debt to be repaid.”

Chapter 6/7: Dignity and Love

P. 149 “We could not be virtuous if we were really as innocent as we pretended to be—If we were truly innocent we couldn’t use power in the ways that are necessary to achieve good ends.”

P. 170 “We don’t build love; we fall in love, out of control.”

P. 170 “You will be loved the day when you will be able to show your weakness without the person using it to assert his strength.”

P. 172 “Love is submission, not decision.”

P. 182 “Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.”

Chapter 8: Ordered Love

P.  200 “The self-cultivator spends more energy trying to display the fact he is happy—posting highlight reel Facebook photos and all the rest—than he does actually being happy.”

P. 203 “If you work hard, play by the rules, and take care of things yourself, you can be the cause of your own good life.”

Chapter 9: Self-Examination

P. 219 “We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinions because we very often differ from ourselves.”

P. 222 “Happiness is not found in self contemplation; it is perceived only when it is reflected from another.”

P. 224 “The happiness of society depends on virtue.”

P. 224 “The essential human act is the act of making strenuous moral decisions.”

P. 224 “The first step to greatness is to be honest.”

P. 225 “The reigning error of mankind is that we are not content with the conditions on which the goods of life are granted.”

Chapter 10: Big Me

P. 250 “To improve yourself, you have to be taught to love yourself, to be true to yourself, not to doubt yourself and struggle against yourself.”

P. 250 “The answers are all inside of me.  All I’ve got to do is believe.”

P. 262 “Although we are flawed creatures, we are also splendidly endowed—We are divided within ourselves, both fearfully and wonderfully made.”

P. 262 “In the struggle against your own weakness, humility is the greatest virtue.”

P. 265 “The struggle against weakness often has a U shape.”

P. 265 “Only by quieting the self, by muting the sound of your own ego, can you see the world clearly.”

P. 266 “The best leaders try to lead along the grain of human nature rather than go against it.”

P. 269 “People do get better at living, at least if they are willing to humble themselves and learn.”

P. 269 “Joy is not produced because others praise you. Joy comes as a gift when you least expect it.”

Priyanka Uprety

 

ENGINE of IMPACT

Essentials of Strategic Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector

By William F. Meehan III

Kim Starkey Jonker

 

Introduction: Strategic Leadership in the Impact Era

P. 1 “We are the dawn of a new era—the impact Era—in which non-profits will play an ever more vital role in supporting, safeguarding and sustaining civil society.”

P. 19 “The practice of strategic leadership involves not just doing good work but also doing that work in a highly intentional and highly effective way.”

P. 19 “An engine of impact, as we call it, starts with the mission of an organization. That mission is the very air that people in the organization breathe as they do their work.”

P. 20 “Helping to generate power for an engine of impact are the twin “turbines” of insight and courage.”

P. 20 “To operate its engine of impact, meanwhile, an organization must draw on three varieties of fuel: well-managed talent and organization, sustained and sufficient funding, and effective board governance.”

P. 20 “When the engine works well, it creates thrust, or what we call impact.”

P. 20 “Strategic leadership in short, equals strategic thinking plus strategic management.”

P. 22 “Talent is a critical source of fuel for every organization, but talented people will thrive in an organization only if they have strong and responsive leadership.”

P. 23 “Nonprofit leaders must recognize that if they want to save the world, they have to knock on doors and ask for money.”

Part 1: Strategic Thinking—Build and Tune Your Engine of Impact

P. 29 “A mission-driven organization should pursue its mission like a lodestar that will always keep it on course.”

P. 29 “A well-conceived mission statement that can guide an organization in making key decisions should do the following:

• Be focused
• Solve unmet public needs
• Leverage distinctive skills
• Guide trade-offs
• Inspire and be inspired by key stakeholders
• Be timeless
• Be “sticky” – clear, understandable and easy to stay with over the long term

P. 44 “If you think that your organization’s vision is an essential element of its mission, then includes it in your mission statement.”

P. 45 “A clear focused mission statement is a necessary foundation for becoming a focused and effective organization.”

P. 45 “The ultimate test is not the beauty of a mission statement—The ultimate test is right action.”

P. 67 “An organization’s strategy must be built on its distinctive skill, or skills.”

P. 72 “The most important goal of excellent strategic planning is shaped by process rather than end product.”

P. 73 “Don’t underestimate the time and effort required for an effective strategic planning process.”

P. 73 “Remember that effective strategic planning is based on issues, not calendar.”

P. 90 “Strategic thinking can’t make real progress until it is supported by a feedback loop.”

P. 91 “If possible, don’t wait until your organization is firmly established to start measuring impact. Instead, start early and let evaluation results guide your program activities as you grow.”

P. 92 “Evaluation should be more than a onetime endeavor that tells an organization whether to shut down a program or to keep it going.”

P. 102 “Great nonprofits invariably start with a profound insight, that is, a distinct and compelling viewpoint about how social change can come about, including a sense of one’s personal role in that change.”

P. 111 “Courage, like insight, is an indispensable aspect of nonprofit strategic leadership.”

P. 112 “We cannot supply you with courage, but we can offer you examples that might help you find it.”

Part II: Strategic management—Fuel Your Engine of Impact

P. 121 “Your organization is only as good as those people within it who embody your mission and tirelessly strive to achieve it—your organization is only as good as your people—and how you organize and lead them.”

P. 123 “Empathy is foundational to the ability to resolve conflict, collaborate in teams, align interests, listen effectively, and make decisions where there are no rules or precedents—to solve problems and drive change.”

P. 130 “Those who build great organizations make sure they have the right people on the key bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the key seats before they figure out where to drive the bus.”

P. 131 “Letting people go, when appropriate, will not only improve the efficiency of an organization; it also sends a powerful signal about the values of that organization.”

P. 133 “Organizations must tightly manage things in a few areas even as they enable creativity and flexibility in other areas.”

P. 136 “There’s nothing more important in generating social impact than taking great care in selecting and developing the people engaged in the work.”

P. 136 “Great ideas don’t change the world, great people do.”

P. 153 “If you don’t know where to start, consider the power of networks.”

P. 169 “Make sure that your organization has a clear mission that is focused where the organization has the necessary skills/resources and embraced by the board, management, and other key stakeholders.”

P. 172 “Hire, fire and evaluate your executive on the basis of a sound, objective, ongoing process.”

P. 175 “Compose and structure your board using transparent structures and processes that support effective decision making.”

P. 176 “In determining the appropriate composition of a nonprofit board, you are unlikely to go wrong if you remember the venerable idea of the three Ws: work, wisdom, and wealth.”

P. 183 “The right time for the executive director and staff to bring up issues is early in the process, when board members can give real input and have a dynamic discussion.”

P. 195 “The primary role of nonprofit leaders is not to grow the size of an organization, or even to reach more people, but to achieve the greatest possible impact.”

P. 197 “Cost-efficiency and cost-effectiveness are critical for scaling, but impact must remain the top priority.”

P. 200 “Scaling typically requires proactive action to build necessary skills, resources, and processes.”

Priyanka Uprety

 

 

THE FOUR AGREEMENTS

A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

By Don Miguel Ruiz

Introduction

P. 4 “It was not your choice to speak English. You didn’t choose your religion or your moral values—they were already there before you were born.”

P. 6 “We train our children, whom we love so much, the same way that we train any domesticated animal.”

P. 7 “The rewards feels good, and we keep doing what others want us to do in order to get the reward.”

P. 12 “The human is the only animal on earth that pays a thousand times for the same mistake. The rest of the animals pay once for every mistake they make. But not us.”

P. 14 “Every human has his or her own personal dream and just like the society dream, it is often ruled by fear.”

P. 15 “All of humanity is searching for truth, justice, and beauty.”

P. 15 “We don’t see the truth because we are blind. What blinds us are all those false beliefs we have in our mind.”

P. 17 “Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive—the risk to be alive and express what we really are.”

P. 19 “The way we judge ourselves is the worst judge that ever existed.”

P. 20 “The more self-love we have, the less we will experience self-abuse.”

P. 22 “Each of us is born with certain amount of personal power that we rebuild every day after we rest.”

The First Agreement: Be Impeccable with Your Word

P. 27 “The word is so powerful that one word can change a life or destroy the lives of millions of people—your word can create the most beautiful dream, or your word can destroy everything around you.”

P. 28 “Every human is a magician, and we can either put a spell on someone with our words or we can release someone from a spell.”

P.32 “Being impeccable with your word is the correct use of your energy; It means to use your energy in the direction of truth and love for yourself.”

The Second Agreement: Don’t Take Anything Personally

P. 47 “Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally.”

P. 48 “Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves.”

P. 52 “If you are not afraid, there is no way you will be jealous or sad.”

P. 55 “We have a choice whether or not to believe the voices we hear within our own minds, just as we have a choice of what to believe and agree with our dream for the planet.”

 

P. 58 “If someone is not treating you with love and respect, it is a gift if they walk away from you.”

P. 60 “You need to trust yourself to make responsible choices. You are never responsible for the actions of others; you are only responsible for you.”

The Third Agreement: Don’t Make Assumptions

P. 64 “All the sadness and drama you have lived in your life was rooted in making assumptions and taking things personally.”

P. 66 “Making assumptions in our relationship is really asking for problems.”

P. 70 “We do not need to justify love; it is there or not there.”

P. 70 “Real love is accepting other people the way they are without trying to change them.”

P. 71 “Find someone whom you don’t have to change at all. It is much easier to find someone who is already the way you want him/her to be, instead of trying to change that person.”

P. 72 “If you do not understand something, it is better for you to ask and be clear, instead of making an assumption.”

The Fourth Agreement: Always Do Your Best

P. 75 “Keep in mind that your best is never going to be the same from one moment to the next.”

P. 76 “Just do your best—in any circumstance in your life.”

P. 79 “Doing your best is taking the action because you love it, not because you’re expecting a reward.”

P. 83 “Whatever life takes away from you, let it go. When you surrender and let go of the past, you allow yourself to be fully alive in the moment.”

P. 84 “You are born with the right to be happy, to love, to enjoy and to share love.”

P. 84 “You can only be you when you do your best.”

P. 91 “Do not be concerned about the future; keep your attention on today, and stay in the present moment.”

Priyanka Uprety

QUIET

The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

By Susan Cain

Introduction: The North and South of Temperament

P.3 “Yet today we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles. We’re told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable. We see ourselves as a nation of extroverts-which means that we’ve lost sight of who we really are”.

P.4 “If you’re not an introvert yourself, you are surely raising, managing, married to, or coupled with one”.

P.4 “Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are.”

P.4 “Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.”

P.5 “Introverts and extroverts differ in the level of outside stimulation that they need to function well. Introverts feel “Just right” with less stimulation, as when they sip wine with a close friend, solve a crossword puzzle, or read a book, Extroverts enjoy the extra bang that comes from activities like meeting new people, skiing slippery slopes, and cranking up the stereo.”

P.6 “A person cannot be either introverted or extroverted. A person will fall somewhere on the axis on the introvert-extrovert spectrum.”

P.6 “Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating.”

Part 1: The Extrovert Ideal

P.28 “Harvard’s provost Paul Buck declared in the late 1940s that Harvard should reject the “sensitive, neurotic” type and the “intellectually over-stimulated” in favor of boys of the “healthy extrovert kind”.

P.28 “In 1950, Yale’s president, Alfred Whitney Griswold, declared that the ideal Yalie was not a “beetle-browned, highly specialized intellectual, but a well-rounded man.”

P.29 “According to some researchers, world travelers were more extroverted than those who stayed home – and they passed on their traits to their children and their children’s children.”

P. 73 “If you are a rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, advice that might be hard to take is: Work alone, you’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you are working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

P. 74 “The more creative people tended to be socially poised introverts. They were interpersonally skilled but “not of an especially sociable or participative temperament”.

P. 77 “Students take ownership of their education when they learn from one another.”

P. 77 “People’s respect for others is based on their verbal abilities, not their originality or insight.”

P. 77 “Cooperative learning enables skills in working as teams — skills that are in dire demand in the workplace.”

P. 94 “Our schools should teach children the skills to work with others — cooperative learning can be effective when practiced well in moderation, but also need the time and training to deliberately practice on their own.”

Part 2: Your Biology, Yourself?

P. 108 “Introversion-extroversion is only 40 to 50 percent heritable.”

P. 109 “Conversely, highly reactive children may more likely develop into artists and writers and scientists and thinkers because their aversion to novelty causes them to spend time inside the familiar — and intellectually fertile — environment of their own heads”.

P. 129 “There is no one more courageous than the person who speaks with the courage of his convictions.”

P. 144 “The elements of the embarrassment are fleeting statements the individual makes about his or her respect for the judgment of others”.

P. 144 “Embarrassment reveals how much the individual cares about the rules that bind us to one another.”

P. 145 “The type that is ‘sensitive’ or ‘reactive’ would reflect a strategy of observing carefully before acting.”

P.  158 “The introverts are much better at making a plan, staying with a plan, being disciplined.”

P. 169 “It is not that I’m so smart,” said Einstein, who was a consummate introvert. “It’s that I stay with problems longer.”

P. 173 “If you’re an introvert, find your flow by using your gifts.”

P. 173 “Introverts need to trust their guts and share their ideas as powerfully as they can.”

P. 173 “The trick for introverts is to honor their own styles instead of following themselves to be swept up by prevailing norms.”

Part 3: Do all Cultures have an Extrovert Ideal?

P. 182 “If you were Asian, you had to confirm you were smart. If you were white, you had to prove it.”

P. 190 “The point is not that one is superior to others, but that a profound difference in cultural values has a powerful impact on the personality styles favored by each culture.”

P. 191 “Each way of being — quiet and talkative, careful and audacious, inhibited and unrestrained — is characteristic of its own mighty civilization.”

P. 192 “Asians are not uncomfortable with who they are, but are uncomfortable with expressing who they are.”

P. 200 “Quiet persistence requires sustained attention; in effect restraining one’s reaction to external stimuli.”

Part 4: How to Love, How to Work

P. 209 “We are born and culturally endowed with certain personality traits — introversion, for example — but we can act out of character in the service of “core personal projects.”

P. 216 “Taking simple physical steps — like smiling — makes us feel stronger and happier, while frowning makes us feel worse.”

P. 218 “Three key steps to identify your core personal projects are: First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. Finally, pay attention to what you envy.”

P. 228  “Jealously is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth.”

P. 228  “You mostly envy those who have what you desire.”

P. 231 “Introverts like people they meet in friendly contexts; extroverts prefer those they compete with.”

P. 248 “One of the best things you can do for an introverted child is work with him or her on their reaction to novelty.”

P. 248 “Introversion-extroversion levels are not correlated with either agreeableness or the enjoyment of intimacy. Introverts are just as likely as the next kid to seek other’s company, though often in smaller doses.

P. 249 “The key is to expose your child gradually to new situation and people — taking care to respect his/her limits, even when they seem extreme.”

*P. 255 “Do not think of introversion as something that needs to be cured. If an introverted child needs help with social skills, teach her or recommend training outside class, just as you’d do for a student who needs extra attention in math or reading. But celebrate these kids for who are they.”

P. 261 “Unleashing passion can transform a life, not just for the space of time that your child is in elementary or middle or high school, but way beyond.”

*Conclusion*

P. 264 “Love is essential; gregariousness is optional.”

P. 264 “Relationships make everyone happier, introverts included; but think quality over quantity.”

P. 264 “The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamp lit desk.”

P. 264 “Use your natural powers — of persistence, concentration, insight and sensitivity — to do work you love and work that matters.”

P. 264 “Figure out what you meant to contribute to the world and make sure you contribute it.” It may not be easy or comfortable to achieve, but DO IT!

P. 265 “Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you’re supposed to.”

P. 265 “If your children are quiet, help them make peace with new situations and new people, but otherwise let them be themselves.”

P. 265 “If you’re a teacher, enjoy your gregarious and participatory students. But don’t forget to cultivate the shy, the gentle, the autonomous, the ones with single-minded enthusiasms for chemistry sets or nineteenth century art. They are the artists, engineers and thinkers of tomorrow.”

P. 265 “If you’re a manager, remember that one third to one half of your workforce is probably introverted, whether they appear that way or not. Think twice about how you design your organization’s office space.”

P. 266 “Whoever you are bare in mind that appearance is not reality.”

Priyanka Uprety

 

By Sogyal Rinpoche, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama

1. Death is a natural part of life, which we will all surely have to face sooner or later. There are two ways we can deal with it while we are alive. We can either choose to ignore it or we can confront the prospect of our own death and, by thinking clearly about it, try to minimize the suffering that it can bring. However in neither of these ways can we overcome it.

2. Knowing that I cannot escape it, I see no point in worrying about it.

3. Our state of mind at the time of death can influence the quality of our next rebirth.

4. No less significant than preparing for our own death is helping others to die well.

The Book: “What I am trying to do in this book is to explain and expand the Tibetan Book of the Dead”

5. The purpose of the book is to offer the wisdom of the ancient Buddhist teachings in order to bring the maximum possible benefit.

6. Death is the most important moment of our lives.

7. There was humility in everything we did (in the monastery).

8. Most of the western world lives either in denial of death or in terror of it.

9. All of the greatest spiritual traditions of the world have told us clearly that death is not the end. They have all handed down a vision of some sort of life to come, which infuses this life that we are leading now with sacred meaning. But despite their teachings, modern society is largely a spiritual desert where the majority imagine that this life is all that there is. Without any real or authentic faith in an afterlife, most people live lives deprived of any ultimate meaning.

10. The master knows that if people believe in a life after this one, their whole outlook on life will be different, and they will have a distinct sense of personal responsibility and morality.

11. We need a fundamental change in our attitude toward death and dying… It is only with spiritual knowledge that we can truly face, and understand, death.

12. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross has shown that with unconditional love, and a more enlightened attitude, dying can be a peaceful, even transformative experience.

13. Death is neither depressing nor exciting; it is simply a fact of life.

14. According to the wisdom of Buddha, we can actually use our lives to prepare for death. We do not have to wait for the painful death of someone close to us or the shock of terminal illness to force us into looking at our lives. Nor are we condemned to go out empty-handed at death to meet the unknown. We can begin, here and now, to find meaning in our lives. We can make of every moment an opportunity to change and to prepare – wholeheartedly, precisely, and with peace of mind – for death and eternity.

15. In the Buddhist approach, life and death are seen as one whole, where death is the beginning of another chapter of life.

16. Tibet’s famous poet saint, Milarepa, said: “My religion is to live – and die – without regret.”

17. Meditation is the only way we can repeatedly uncover and gradually realize and stabilize the nature of mind. The nature of mind the West now has is an extremely narrow one.

18. The fundamental message of the Buddhist teachings is that if we are prepared, there is tremendous hope, both in life and in death.

19. Montaigne: “Let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death…”

20. Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are.

21. Chuang Tzu: “Man’s thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.”

22. We have a false belief in continuity and permanence.

23. Yet if our deepest desire is truly to live and go on living, why do we blindly insist that death is the end?

24. Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.

25. In Tibetan the word for body is “lu”, which means “something you leave behind,” like baggage.

26. In Buddhism the key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity.

27. The only truly serious goals in life are “learning to love other people and acquiring knowledge.

28. There is nothing that is permanent and constant…Nothing, nothing at all, has any lasting character…One of the chief reasons we have so much anguish and difficulty facing death is that we ignore the truth of impermanence.

29. The whole universe, scientists now tell us, is nothing but change, and process – a totality of flux that is the ground of all things.

30. The Buddha listened with infinite compassion. He said, “The death of your child has helped you to see now that the realm we are in – samsara – is an ocean of unbearable suffering. There is one way, and one way only, out of samsara’s ceaseless round of birth and death, which is the path to liberation. Because pain has now made you ready to learn and your heart is open to the truth, I will show it to you.”

31. A close encounter with death can bring a real awakening, a transformation in our whole approach to life, an increased concern for helping others, less interest in materialistic pursuits, a purpose in life, a definition, a definite direction, a passionate desire to see world conditions improve.

32. Reflection can slowly bring us wisdom.

33. Letting go is the path to real freedom.

34. All things are interdependent with all other things. Nothing has any inherent existence of its own; everything in the universe helps to make the tree what it is…We must therefore develop a sense of universal responsibility.

35. Have positive intention. This is the essential point. This is true spirituality.

36. Only in that meeting of hearts and minds will the student realize the living presence of enlightenment is within.

37. Pure awareness of “nowness” is the real Buddha.

38. The true revolutionary insight of Buddhism is that life and death are in the mind, and nowhere else.

39. To realize the nature of mind is to realize the nature of all things.

40. Buddha’s message – that enlightenment is within the reach of all – holds out tremendous hope.

41. Perhaps the darkest and most disturbing aspect of modern civilization is its ignorance and repression of who we really are.

42. We are terrified to look inward. Why is that?

43. The Dalai Lama talks often of the lack of real self-love and self-respect that he sees in many people in the modern world. Underlying our whole outlook is a neurotic conviction of our own limitations.

44. Tibetan saying: If you are too clever, you may miss the point entirely.

45. It is meditation that slowly purifies the ordinary mind, unmasking and exhausting its habits and illusions, so that we can, at the right moment, recognize who we really are.

46. The final goal of human existence is enlightenment. Meditation is the road to enlightenment. The root of ignorance itself is our mind’s habitual tendency to distraction. The gift of learning to meditate is the greatest gift you can give yourself in this life. Above all, be at ease; it is essential to create the right inner environment of the mind.

47. Meditation is a question of training and the power of habit. It is a state free of all cares and concerns. When you begin to understand where meditation will lead you, you will approach it as the greatest endeavor of your life, one that demands of you the deepest perseverance, enthusiasm, intelligence and discipline. Meditation is bringing the mind home.

48. The practice of mindfulness, of bringing the scattered mind home, and so of bringing the different aspects of our being into focus, is the first practice on the Buddhist path of meditation. It defuses negativity.

49. Meditation is the true practice of peace, the true practice of nonaggression and nonviolence, and the real and greatest disarmament.

50. A firm faith in life after death has occupied an essential place in nearly all the world’s religions. Voltaire: “After all, it is no more surprising to be born twice than it is to be born once.”

51. Buddhism believes in universal causation, that everything is subject to change…so there is no place given to a divine creator…rather everything arises as a consequence of causes and conditions.

52. Karma: the natural law of cause and effect. Whatever we do with our body, speech or mind will have a corresponding result. The result of our actions are often delayed, even into future lifetimes.

53. The Buddha: “What you are is what you have been, what you will be is what you do now.” The kind of birth we will have in the next life is determined by the nature of our actions in this one…the effect of our actions depends entirely upon the intention or motivation behind them, and not upon their scale.

54. Whatever joy there is in this world, all comes from desiring others to be happy, and whatever suffering there is in this world, all comes from desiring myself to be happy.

55. Dalai Lama: “There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; my philosophy is kindness.

56. Karma is not fatalistic or predetermined. Karma means our ability to create and to change. It is creative because we can determine how and why we act. We can change. The future is in our hands, and in the hands of our heart.

57. How we act and think inevitably changes the future.

58. Whenever we act negatively, it leads to pain and suffering; whenever we act positively, it eventually results in happiness.

59. The masters tell us that the qualities of buddhahood are veiled by the body, and as soon as the body is discarded, they will be radiantly displayed.

60. With constant repetition our inclinations and habits become steadily more entrenched.

61. All of us have our own individual karma. We each live in our own unique and separate individual worlds.

62. The six main negative emotions: pride, jealousy, desire, ignorance, greed and anger.

63. How can we possibly say definitively what does or does not exist beyond the bounds of our limited vision?

64. The “three wisdom tools”: the wisdom of listening and hearing; the wisdom of contemplation and reflection; and the wisdom of meditation.

65. Lifetimes of ignorance have brought us to identify the whole of our being with ego. Ego and its grasping are the root of all our suffering. To end the bizarre tyranny of ego is why we go on the spiritual path.

66. The noblest and the wisest thing to do is to cherish others instead of cherishing yourself.

67. The more and more you listen, the more and more you hear; the more and more you hear; the deeper and deeper your understanding becomes.

68. The deepening of understanding comes through contemplation and reflection, the second tool of wisdom.

69. Our society promotes cleverness instead of wisdom.

70. The more knowledge you have, the more doubts it gives rise to. Doubt is a fundamental activity of the unenlightened mind. Doubts cannot resolve themselves immediately; but if we are patient a space can be created within us, in which doubts can be carefully and objectively examined, unraveled, dissolved and healed. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to solve all your doubts. Make haste slowly.

71. The spiritual journey is one of continuous learning and purification. The greatest achievements take the deepest patience and the longest time.

72. A man in his fifties said: “It’s not what you know that moves me, but that you really do have an altruistic and a good heart.”

73. True teachers are kind, compassionate, and tireless in their desire to share whatever wisdom they acquire.

74. I would encourage you to follow with complete sincerity the path that inspires you most.

75. What will we have learned, if at the moment of death we do not know who we really are?

76. We need to realize the continual presence of this ultimate teacher within us.

77. We need to have the humility to go on learning.

78. Simply opening your heart and mind to the embodiment of truth really does bless and transform your mind.

There is some very helpful guidance on pages 177 – 188 entitled, “Heart Advice on Helping the Dying.” I would encourage anyone who is with or around a dying person to read and consider the counsel from this section. Briefly summarized salient points include:

79. Don’t deny the likelihood or certainty of impending death – to yourself or the person dying.

80. Relax any tension in the atmosphere; this will allow the dying person to bring up the things he or she really wants to talk about.

81. Encourage the person warmly to feel s free as possible to express thoughts, fears and emotions about dying and death. This hones and unshrinking baring of emotion is central to any possible transformation…and you must allow the person complete freedom, giving your full permission to say whatever he or she wants.

82. Sometimes you may be tempted to preach to the dying, or to give them your own spiritual formula. Avoid this temptation ABSOLUTELY. No one wishes to be “rescued” with someone else’s beliefs.

83. A dying person most needs to be shown as unconditional a love as possible, released from all expectations. People will die as they have lived, as themselves.

84. Kubler-Ross’ five stages of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

85. “I once asked a man who knew he was dying what he needed above all in those who were caring for him. He said, ‘For someone to look as if they are trying to understand me.’ It is essential that we care enough to try. Just be there as fully as you can.

86. Should people be told they are dying? Yes, as quietly, as kindly, as sensitively, and as skillfully as possible. “I believe dying to be a great opportunity for people to come to terms with their whole lives.” So by kindly and sensitively telling people at the earliest opportunity they are dying, we are really giving them the chance to prepare, and to find their own powers of strength, and the meaning of their lives.

87. As a caregiver, looking at your own fears honestly will also help you in your own journey to maturity and will help you immeasurably to be aware of the fears of the dying person.

88. Another anxiety of the dying is often that of leaving unfinished business.

89. Give the dying person “permission” to die and reassure the person they will be all right after he or she has gone, and that there is no need to worry about them. Tell them they are not alone, now or ever – they have all your love.

90. Be aware of the importance of talking positively and frequently to the dying person. Allow the dying person to die in silence and serenity. There is no greater gift of charity you can give than helping a person to die well. The power of compassion has no bounds.

91. Every dying person is a teacher, giving all those who help them a chance to transform themselves through developing their compassion.

92. “Wherever I go in the West, I am struck by the great mental suffering that arises from the fear of dying.”

93. Your task is never under any circumstances to impose your beliefs but to enable them to find these within themselves.

94. Always when you are with a dying person, dwell on what they have accomplished and done well. People who are dying are frequently extremely vulnerable to guilt, regret, and depression; allow them to express these freely.

95. “So what is it I hope from this book? To inspire a quiet revolution in the whole way we look at death and care for the dying, and so the whole way we look at life and care for the living.”

End of Notes

By J-F Revel and M. Ricard —

1. Revel is a renowned French philosopher and atheist and Ricard is his son who has a PhD in biology and a very western education before moving to Asia to become a monk some 30 years ago.

2. In this dialogue, Ricard defends the validity of his life-changing experience of enlightenment. He does not see his conversion to Buddhism as any repudiation of what he knew as a scientist. Revel is a formidable proponent of liberal Western individualism, of that enlightened self-interest which
accords so well with Western science.

3. Ricard became an interpreter for the Dalai Lama.

4. Ricard: “My scientific career was the result of a passion for discovery…but science, however interesting, wasn’t enough to give meaning to my life.”

5. Two films that give a very alive and inspiriting account of Tibet and Buddhism: “The Message of the Tibetans” and “Himalaya, Land of Serenity”.

6. More than a million Tibetans – one in five of the population – died following the Chinese invasion of 1950. 6,000 monasteries, practically all of them, were destroyed. 20% of Tibet’s population were ordained monks, nuns and lamas. Spiritual practice was beyond doubt the principal goal in life for
most Tibetans. The whole culture was centered around its religion.

7. Tibetan Buddhist masters are not trying to develop a doctrine but rather to be faithful and accomplished inheritors of a spiritual tradition thousands of years old.

8. Wisdom is to recognize the ultimate nature of things…The most important science is knowledge of oneself.

9. There is no fundamental incompatibility between science and the spiritual life.

10. Buddhism is a metaphysical tradition from which a wisdom applicable in every instance and in all circumstances is derived. What leads many Christians and others to think of Buddhism as not being a religion in the usual sense is the fact that it is not a theistic tradition. Buddhism is not about
dogma. The Buddha’s teachings are like travel guides that show the way to enlightenment, to ultimate knowledge of the nature of the mind.

11. Buddha’s collected sermons fill 103 volumes of the Tibetan canon, the Kangyur.

12. Sutras: the sermons of the Buddha. Samsara: the world or ‘circle’ of rebirths. A Bodhisattva is someone who sets out on the path toward perfection, toward the state of Buddhahood, in order to be able to benefit others.

13. Buddhism concludes that suffering is born from desire, attachment, hatred, pride, jealousy, lack of discernment, and all the states of mind that are designated as ‘negative’ because they stir up the mind and plunge it into a state of confusion and insecurity.

14. Buddhism is about altruism and the inner peace that flows from letting go of that belief in a self.

15. Deep within ourselves it is important to maintain invincible compassion and inexhaustible patience.

16. Without contemplative practice, you can’t see the nature of mind.

17. Buddhism speaks of successive states of existence; in other words, everything isn’t limited to just one lifetime.

18. Nature itself becomes a book of teachings.

19. The Buddha says that death is just one state in life and that consciousness continues afterward.

20. Neurology tells us that around 90% of activity in the brain is unconscious. (Interesting!)

21. Buddhist wisdom is a method for finding some sort of serenity through self-effacement – and about the techniques for mastering the mind.

22. True patience and nonviolence consist of choosing the most altruistic solution… What counts is the motivation behind our actions and the final result of those actions.

23. Violence encourages violence, and usually has disastrous effects.

24. Another source of suffering is self-centeredness.

25. Buddhists nurture one main ambition without any limits, that of removing the suffering of all living beings throughout the whole universe.
26. Our own well-being is important, but it should never be to the detriment of others.

27. In the end, the Buddhist path consists of a new way of perceiving the world, a rediscovery of the true nature of the individual and of phenomena. It allows us to be much less vulnerable to the ups and downs of life, because we know how to take them not only philosophically, but also joyfully, using
difficulty and success as catalysts to make rapid progress in our spiritual practice. It is not a matter of withdrawing from the world, but of understanding its nature. You don’t look away from suffering, you look for a cure for it and go beyond it.

28. All the joy the world contains has come through wishing happiness for others. All the misery the world contains has come through wanting pleasure for oneself.

29. What’s so harmful is, of course, the ego’s excesses.

30. The spiritual path consists of freeing oneself from negative emotions and ignorance and, in so doing, actualizing the perfection that’s already present within us.

31. I think the simplest possible way to define Buddhism is, first and foremost, to see it as a path. The goal of that path is to attain what can be called ‘perfection’, ultimate knowledge, enlightenment,merging with the absolute, or, technically speaking, the state of Buddhahood.
32. Enlightenment is sometimes called “awakening”.

33. The Buddhist way is a discovery rather than anything else.

34. After achieving his own welfare by attaining enlightenment, the Buddha begins to deploy his vast activity to help others, to teach and show them the path. His teachings are the direct expression of his spiritual realization. They are like travel guides that lead others along the same path he took
himself.

35. Discovering ultimate wisdom within oneself. The goals isn’t to get out of the world, it is to no longer be enslaved to it.

36. We can put an end to the causes of suffering. To reach such a result, we have to cut through the root of the problem, the ignorance – the belief in a self – that causes it.

37. The Mahayana emphasized that to free oneself alone from suffering is a severely limited goal. The broader goal is to transform yourself in order to acquire the capacity to help others free themselves from suffering.

38. The primary cause of torture and war is still hatred. Any lasting peace can only come from a change of attitude.

39. Whatever happens to us is never just by chance. We have created the causes of our present sufferings ourselves.

40. If we understand that negative actions lead to suffering both for ourselves and others, and that positive actions lead to happiness, it is up to us to act now in such a way as to build our own future by sowing ‘good seeds’.

41. The Dalai Lama is always emphasizing that any religion practiced in its true spirit has the well-being of all as its goal, and so surely ought to be a factor in peace.

42. As soon as human beings allowed themselves to say, ‘There is only one true God, and that’s mine, so I have the right to annihilate anyone who doesn’t believe in him’, the cycle of intolerance and religious wars began. Genocide continues to be perpetrated in the name of religion.

43. The Dalai Lama often says, ‘We should have total conviction in our own spiritual path along with perfect respect toward other truths’.

44. To act on the world without having transformed oneself can’t lead to either lasting or profound happiness.

45. With the greatest teachers you could not find the slightest trace of ego.

46. To be able to help beings, there should no longer be any difference between what you teach and what you are.

47. By no longer cherishing and protecting the self, you acquire a much wider and deeper view of the world… Someone free of egocentric perceptions can have a much vaster effect on the world.

48. Tibetan civilization dedicated itself to the contemplative life, to developing a very pragmatic knowledge of how the mind works, in such a way as to enable people to free themselves from suffering.

49. The goal of the spiritual path is to eliminate any trace of pride, jealousy and hatred from the current consciousness, and become incapable of doing anything harmful to others.

50. Spiritual and temporal can be combined in an intelligent and constructive way, as long as one remains aware of their respective importance.

51. Buddhism considers that each person has to start where they are and use the methods that match their nature and their personal capacities.

52. Give priority to the quest for inner well-being. Buddhism can help people see how basic qualities like love, compassion, tolerance, and patience can actually be cultivated, and that it is possible to master one’s own mind. The goal is to dissolve attachment to the ego.

53. Buddhism does not try to convert anyone.

54. Someone can have a very rich spiritual life while only spending several minutes or an hour a day actually in contemplative practice.

55. What we are at present is the result of our past. Acts certainly bear their results.

56. Buddhism offers the west a vision of tolerance, open-mindedness, altruism, quiet confidence and a science of the mind. It makes it ideas available but does not try to impose them.

57. The Dalai Lama: “If you find anything I’ve said useful, make use of it. Otherwise, forget it! It is better to encourage those who believe in something to deepen their own faith. The point isn’t to convert people but to contribute to their well-being.

58. When the Dalai Lama spoke of love and compassion, everyone felt that his words were a direct expression of his experience. He was really living what he said.

59. Wars have never been waged in Buddhism’s name or with its blessing.

60. If an individual does not become more peaceful, a society that is the sum total of such individuals will never become more peaceful either.

61. Our educational systems these days hardly deal at all with becoming a better human being.

62. The Dalai Lama often says that we can do without religion, but no one can do without love, compassion and tenderness.

63. Compassion according to Buddhism is the wish to remedy all forms of suffering, and especially to tackle its causes – ignorance, hatred, desire, and so on.

64. It’s important to be aware that our joy and our suffering are intimately linked to those of others. Wisdom and intelligence give so much strength to compassion.

65. The Dalai Lama: “It is important that effective methods of contraception continue to be developed so as to avoid as much as possible any recourse to abortion.”

66. What distinguishes Buddhism from Christianity is its rejection of the notion of sin, especially original sin.

67. Man’s deepest wish is for happiness.

68. Life is short and if we want to develop our inner qualities, it’s never too soon to get started.

69. Lack of responsibility is one of the big weaknesses of our age.

70. Never stop teaching that all living beings have the same rights to life and happiness.

71. In other religions, to become a believer you have to agree to have faith in a certain amount of dogma from the start. But that is not the case with Buddhism.

72. Consider the Buddha not as a god but a guide and as a symbol of enlightenment; the Dharma isn’t a dogma but a path. Buddhism doesn’t force things or try to convert people.

73. The main thing that Buddhism has been investigating is the nature of the mind.

74. Death has become a friend. It is no more than a stage in life, a simple transition.

75. Thinking about death isn’t at all depressing, in fact, if we use it as a reminder, to help us stay aware of how fragile life is, and to give meaning to every instant of existence.

76. Einstein wrote: “The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description… If there is any religion that could cope with modern
scientific needs, it would be Buddhism.

77. Unable to find happiness within ourselves, we desperately look for it outside.

78. Spiritual practice is based on experiential exploration and discovery that has to be pushed just as far into the inner world as science pushes its explorations into the outer world.

79. Buddhism isn’t a religion that requires an act of blind faith It doesn’t require people to rule out or condemn other doctrines. It is a system of wisdom, a philosophy marked by tolerance.

80. The world can only be changed by changing ourselves. A Buddhist thinks that those who know how to be content with what they already have are holding a treasure in their hands.

81. Tibetan nomads and Bhutanese farmers might not earn as much as American businessmen, but their lives have a dimension quite beyond any accountant’s spreadsheet.

82. I think it is possible to acquire wisdom, fulfillment, and serenity, all of them arising from knowledge, or from what could be called spiritual realization.

83. Finally what we all seek in life is happiness… the fulfillment of living in a way that wholly matches the deepest nature of our being… Happiness necessarily implies wisdom. The other essential components of happiness are altruism, love and compassion. How can we find happiness for
ourselves when, all around us, there are others suffering all the time? Our own happiness is
intimately linked to the happiness of others.

1. The word “Buddha” means ‘one who is awake’. It is the experience of awakening to the truth of life that is offered in the Buddhist tradition.

2. The Buddha saw that human freedom must come from practicing a life of inner and outer balance, and he called this discovery the Middle Path.

3. The Buddha sat in the midst of these forces with his heart open and his mind clear until he could see to the depths of human consciousness, until he discovered a place of peace at the center of them all.

4. From the Buddha’s enlightenment, two great powers were awakened in him: transcendent wisdom and universal compassion.

5. His teachings, which the Buddha called the Dharma, or Way, are an invitation to follow the path of enlightenment.

6. There are a vast array of meditation practices to train the mind and the heart, including awareness of the breath and body, mindfulness of feelings and thoughts, practices of mantra and devotion, visualization and contemplative reflection, and practices leading to refined and profoundly expanded states of
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7. Buddhist texts were originally recited and passed down orally for six hundred years before being written down.

8. Bodhisattvas are awakened beings who follow and teach in the spirit of the Buddha.

9. “With great perseverance he meditates, seeking freedom and happiness.”

10. We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.

11. Speak and act with a pure mind and happiness will follow you.

12. Let no one deceive another or despise any state, let none by anger or hatred wish harm to another.

13. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do? For your brother is like you. He wants to be happy. Never harm him and when you leave this life, you too will find happiness.

14. To associate not with the foolish, to be with the wise, to honor the worthy ones, this is a blessing supreme. To reside in a suitable location, to have good past deeds done, to set oneself in the right direction, this is a blessing supreme. To be well spoken, highly trained, well educated and highly
disciplined, this is a blessing supreme.

15. Be reverent and humble, content and grateful.

16. How joyful to keep company with the wise.

17. If you cannot find friend or master to go with you, travel on alone – like a king who has given away his kingdom, like an elephant in the forest. But if the traveler can find a virtuous and wise companion, let him go joyfully and overcome the dangers of the way.

18. Again and again, look within.

19. In this world hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and
inexhaustible.

20. Profound truth is not to be gained by mere reasoning, and is visible only to the wise.

21. The extinction of greed, the extinction of hate, the extinction of delusion: this, indeed, is called Nirvana.

22. The purpose of the Holy Life does not consist in acquiring alms, honor or fame, nor in gaining morality, concentration or the eye of knowledge. That unshakable deliverance of the heart: that, indeed, is the object of the Holy Life, that is its essence, that is its goal.

23. In this world the wise person becomes themselves a light, pure, shining, free.

24. This only is the Law, that all things are impermanent.

25. By your own efforts waken yourself, watch yourself, and live joyfully.

26. Love yourself and be awake – today, tomorrow, always. First establish yourself in the Way, then teach others and so defeat sorrow. To straighten the crooked you must first do a harder thing – straighten yourself. You are your only master. Who else? Subdue yourself, and discover your master.

27. Having abandoned ill will and hatred, he dwells with a benevolent mind, sympathetic for the welfare of all living beings.

28. Get rid of the tendency to judge yourself above, below or equal to others.

29. Health, contentment and trust are your greatest possessions, and freedom your greatest joy.

30. The wise person should do good – that is the treasure which will not leave one.

31. The Buddha taught: Do not pursue the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. The past no longer is. The future has not yet come. Looking deeply at life as it is, in the very here and now, the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom. We must be diligent today. To wait until tomorrow is too late.

32. Searching for truth I saw ‘inward peace’.

33. Do not be the judge of people; do not make assumptions about others. A person is destroyed by holding judgments about others.

34. Be ye lamps upon yourselves.

35. Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.

36. Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things.

37. Your search among books, word upon word, may lead you to the depths of knowledge, but it is not the way to receive the reflection of your true self.

38. If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?