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Our industry is full of unpleasant type-A personalities such as myself...Never stand between me and a place I want to go. Don't confuse my civility with complacency.

The world is made up of three types of people: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened!

When they listen to your ravings with indulgence, and, heaven help me, affection, you know you've joined the herd.

There are few universals in life, but transference is one. What transference says is that no relationship we have is a new relationship; all relationships are colored by previous relationships.

Although people profess to learn from their mistakes, their behavior is shaped by their successes. This is why change is hard for people. Confronted with failure, or with a new world where the old tricks aren't working any more, most people keep doing what they have been doing, only harder.

Neuman surveyed the available evidence and found what advertisers and educators already knew--that most human beings are "obdurate, impenetrable, resourcefully resistant" toward any message, regardless of medium, that does not fit "the cognitive makeup of the minds receiving it."

Wrote Neuman: "The mass citizenry, for most issues, simply will not take the time to learn more or understand more deeply, no matter how inexpensive or convenient such further learning may be." People want from the Internet what they have always wanted from media: easy access to material of general interest and, especially, entertainment.

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

90% of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reason for supporting our predilections.

Of all the judgments we pass in life, none is as important as the one we pass on ourselves. Nearly every psychological problem - from anxiety and depression to self-sabotage at work or at school, from fear of intimacy to chronic hostility - is traceable to low self-esteem. In the chaotic and competitive world we face today, both personal happiness and economic survival rest on how well we understand self-esteem and nurture it in ourselves and in others...While poor self-esteem often undercuts the capacity for real accomplishment, even among the most talented, it does not necessarily do so. What is far more certain is that it undercuts the capacity for satisfaction.

We think, and with those thoughts, we create. We create the world we live in ... We harvest in life, only and exactly, what we sow in our minds.

This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, throu canst not then be false to any man.

Those who can't laugh at themselves leave the job to others.

To have hope, one doesn't need certainty, only possibility.

We are much beholden to Machiavelli and others that write what men do, not what they ought to do.

Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it Â… He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions that move with him like flies on a summer's day.

There are two reasons people behave the way they do--the reason they tell you and the real reason.

In avoiding all pain and seeking comfort at all costs we may be left without mercy and compassion. In rejecting change and risk, we often cheat ourselves of the quest. In denying suffering, we may never know our strength and our greatness.

Criticism is driven by the frustration and fears of the giver, not from the needs of the recipient. The underlying assumption is that the recipient somehow "should know better" and needs to be set straight. The implied message is that the recipient's intentions are questionable, that there is something wrong with the recipient that the giver of criticism knows how to fix. In criticism, the problem is all in the recipientÂ… In contrast, feedback has an air of caring concern, respect, and support. Far from being a sugar cookie, feedback is an honest, clear, adult to adult exchange about specific behaviors and the effects of those behaviors. The assumption is that both parties have positive intentions, that both parties want to be effective and to do what is right for the company and other people. Another assumption is that well-meaning people can have legitimate differences in perception. The person offering the feedback owns the feedback as being his reaction to the behavior of the other person. That is, the giver recognizes the fact that what is being offered is a perception, not absolute fact.

Â…everyone has a core drama that leads to their personality style. What makes each of us the person we are is the dominance of some inner wish. The wish to be loved, or to be understood, or noticed. The wish to be free from conflict, or to help, or to be able to hurt others. The wish to achieve or the wish to fail. When we go to work, we take this fundamental wish into a context of relationships. We project it on others, and rightly or wrongly anticipate how others will react to us, and then we react to their reactions. This basic wish, embedded in context, is what psychiatrists call the core conflictual relationship theme, and everybody's CCRT is unique.

The failure to listen and ask questions could be easily solved by posing three extraordinarily simple questions, yet these frequently go unasked. They are: What do you think? How do you feel? What can I/we do? These must be the three easiest questions in the world, yet only too often managers turn themselves inside out trying to 'second-guess' their staff, either 'telling' them without consultation or wondering what they want, yet failing to ask them or to explore what they think and feel. Those of us who are interested in emotional intelligence would argue that feeling is just as important as thinking.

If you are not prepared to exhibit a constant level of energy, those around you will respond in kind.

Note: Darwin Magazine is now dead. Some articles are moving to CIO. I will try to update the links when I have time...

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Managers would rather live with a problem they can't solve than with a solution they don't fully understand or control.

Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable or significant than any other.

We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons' conditions or ideals.

No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.

Jim Camp's thinking is that in any conversation, it's the listener who has the power. "People have a weakness for talking," he writes, and questions should "invite the adversary to indulge this weakness."

Classic entrepreneurs are likely to score high on achievement and autonomy but low on affiliation. They might rank somewhere in the middle on the need for power. Consequently, many entrepreneurs get bored and frustrated and often leave the confines of corporate life-or are moved aside-when their tiny ventures grow into big, bureaucratic businesses.

C. Northcote Parkinson, an oddball with an odd name, was a British novelist and historian whose output ranged from Napoleonic-era military fiction to a history of sea-borne trade. But his major claim to fame was Parkinson's Law which began a delightful series of books about how organizations make decisions, particularly bad ones. Here are some of Parkinson's best-known laws:
1. 'Expenditure rises to meet income'...
2. 'Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion'...
3. 'The matters most debated in a deliberative body tend to be the minor ones where everybody understands the issues.'

People tend to become so engrossed in activity that they lose sight of purpose.