Pride

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  In the Hartford I grew up in and the one you grow old in, we greet one another not with “Hello” or “How are you?” but by asking, our chins jabbing the air, “What’s good?” I’ve heard this said in other parts of the country, but in Hartford, it was pervasive. Among those hollowed-out, boarded buildings, playgrounds with barbed-wire fences so rusted and twisted out of shape they were like something made out of nature, organic as vines, we made a lexicon for ourselves. A phrase used by the economic losers, it can also be heard in East Hartford and New Britain, where entire white families, the ones some call trailer trash, crammed themselves on half-broken porches in mobile parks and HUD housing, their faces OxyContin-gaunt under cigarette smoke, illuminated by flashlights hung by fishing lines in lieu of porch lights, howling, “What’s good?” as you walked by. In my Hartford, where fathers were phantoms, dipping in and out of their children’s lives, like my own father. Where grandmothers, abuelas, abas, nanas, babas, and bà ngoạis were kings, crowned with nothing but salvaged and improvised pride and the stubborn testament of their tongues as they waited on creaking knees and bloated feet outside Social Services for heat and oil assistance smelling of drugstore perfume and peppermint hard candies, their brown oversized Goodwill coats dusted with fresh snow as they huddled, steaming down the winter block—their sons and daughters at work or in jail or overdosed or just gone, hitching cross-country on Greyhounds with dreams of kicking the habit, starting anew, but then ghosting into family legends. In my Hartford, where the insurance companies that made us the big city had all moved out once the Internet arrived, and our best minds were sucked up by New York or Boston. Where everybody’s second cousin was in the Latin Kings. Where we still sell Whalers jerseys at the bus station twenty years after the Whalers ditched this place to became the Carolina Hurricanes. Hartford of Mark Twain, Wallace Stevens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, writers whose vast imaginations failed to hold, in either flesh or ink, bodies like ours. Where the Bushnell theatre, the Wadsworth Atheneum (which held the first retrospective on Picasso in America), were visited mostly by outsiders from the suburbs, who park their cars valet and hurry into the warm auditorium halogens before driving home to sleepy towns flushed with Pier 1 Imports and Whole Foods. Hartford, where we stayed when other Vietnamese immigrants fled to California or Houston. Where we made a kind of life digging in and out of one brutal winter after another, where nor’easters swallowed our cars overnight. The two a.m. gunshots, the two p.m. gunshots, the wives and girlfriends at the C-Town checkout with black eyes and cut lips, who return your gaze with lifted chins, as if to say, Mind your business.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  With the cannons of Sant’Angelo now pointing at all roads leading to the Vatican, she made it impossible for the cardinals to meet in one location and elect the new pope. To make her threats real, she had her soldiers fire the cannons as a warning. She meant business. Her terms for surrendering the castle were simple—that all of the property of the Riarios be guaranteed to remain in their hands, including Forlì and Imola. A few evenings after she had taken over Sant’Angelo, wearing some armor over her gown, she marched along the ramparts of the castle. It gave her a feeling of great power, so far above the city, looking down at the frantic men below, helpless to fight against her, a single woman hobbled by pregnancy. When an envoy of the cardinal who was organizing the conclave to elect the new pope was sent to negotiate with her and seemed reluctant to agree to her conditions of surrender, she shouted down from the ramparts, so all could hear, “So [the cardinal] wants a battle of wits with me, does he? What he doesn’t understand is that I have the brains of Duke Galeazzo and I am as brilliant as he!” As she waited for their response, she knew she controlled the situation. Her only fear was that her husband would surrender and betray her, or that the August heat would make her too ill to wait it out. Finally, sensing her resolve, a group of cardinals came to the castle to negotiate, and they acceded to her demands. The following morning, as the drawbridge was lowered to let the countess leave the castle, she noticed an enormous crowd pushing close to her. Romans of all classes had come to catch a glimpse of the woman who had controlled Rome for eleven days. They had taken the countess for a rather frivolous young woman addicted to clothes, the pope’s little pet. Now they stared at her in astonishment—she was wearing one of her silk gowns, with a heavy sword dangling from a man’s belt, her pregnancy more than evident. They had never seen such a sight. Their titles now secure, the count and countess moved to Forlì to rule their domain. With no more funds coming from the papacy, Girolamo’s main concern was how to get more money. And so he increased the taxes on his subjects, stirring up much discontent in the process. He quickly made enemies of the powerful Orsi family in the region. Fearing plots against his life, the count holed himself up in their palace. Slowly Caterina took over much of the day-to-day ruling of their realm. Thinking ahead, she installed a trusted ally as the new commander of the castle Ravaldino, which dominated the area. She did everything she could to ingratiate herself with the locals, but in a few short years her husband had done too much damage.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  “in Christ” who no longer would be governed by the distinction between Jew and non-Jew; and (2) that “in Christ” Paul’s Jewish identity—understood to describe the kind of “flesh” that Paul’s physical body was supposed to display—never ceased to articulate the substance of this flesh-and-blood human being. The coeval truth of these two claims means that, while Paul understood himself to be certainly Ioudaios as long as he remained on earth, he did not understand this identity to prevent him from simultaneously and already becoming a citizen of another “heavenly” polity in which that “fleshly” identity would be rendered of secondary importance even if and as it never was annulled or diminished as such. I have already acknowledged that the very possibility of such a “doubleness” is extremely difficult to imagine within the cultural (identity) politics of late capitalist North Atlantic (post-) modernity. At the same time, I am obviously trying to hold together two aspects of Paul’s self-understanding that usual y are opposed to one another. For this reason, I have argued that Paul remained from the beginning to the end of his early Christian apostolic life indubitably and even proudly Ioudaios. At the same time, he did not make of that identity—despite his own equation of it with his fleshly “nature”—the exclusive definition of who he was. Thus Paul claimed as “carnal” fact a Jewish identity that is basical y equivalent to the one that Boyarin otherwise ascribes to the ensuing rabbinical tradition; yet Paul, unlike Boyarin, disavowed the ability of this fact to disqualify the correlative and discrepant truth about himself “in Christ.” 33 My terminology here lacks rigor or stands in need of a more adequate vocabulary since Paul’s own sense of himself as a Jew who simultaneously was “in Christ” and thus already a “citizen of heaven” also describes an earthly possibility; its heavenly character is simply that which made it not what the more conventional earthly identity typical y entailed. 54 54 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles This latter truth displaced without undoing Paul’s “fleshly” identity, thereby enabling, theoretical y, a practice of non-integrative solidarity with the other kind(s) of human beings in the world, both then and in the time(s) to come. What shall we call this? How shall we explain it—if it is not merely to be dismissed as the wishful or inchoate thinking of someone who final y makes no sense as stated? How could and why should we take at face value such contradictory statements about a Jewish identity that was hardly stable, let alone confirmed, as such?

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  õ He led the Pueblo in destruction of Christian chapels, icons, and crosses. The rebels killed 21 of the province’s 31 missionaries. They were amazingly successful: After only a week and a half of fighting, the Spanish retreated. Here is a case of religion as a force for liberation rather than oppression. õ It’s true that in 1693, the Spanish re-conquered the region of New Mexico. Still, the revolt was partly successful, as it forced the Spanish to revise the encomienda system and lighten up on suppressing religion. SUGGESTED READING DeLumeau, Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire. Menocal, The Ornament of the World. Murphy, God’s Jury. O’Malley, The First Jesuits. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER ä What kind of person might have become a Jesuit or Franciscan in 16th-century Spain? ä Why did the kings, queens, and conquistadors of Spain believe that brutal treatment of native peoples was the righteous Christian thing to do? ä Millions of indigenous people accepted Christian baptism in New Spain. Which different motives and rationales might have compelled them to do so? Lecture 6—The Church Militant in the Spanish Empire 59 LECTURE 7 WAR AND WITCHCRAFT IN THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE On May 23, 1618, a group of Protestants forced their way into Hradčany Palace in Prague looking for Catholic representatives of the Holy Roman Emperor. They found the men they were looking for, and before the government officials knew what was happening, the Protestants pushed three of them out an open window. Amazingly, they all landed in a compost heap below and lived to tell the tale. This incident, the famous Defenestration of Prague, launched the Thirty Years’ War. The Thirty Years’ War is one of the most complicated and confusing episodes in European history, but this lecture takes a bird’s-eye view and focuses on some key characters and events. 60

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Use the appropriate dominance cues to make people think you are powerful, even before you reach the heights. You want to seem like you were destined for success, a mystical effect that always works. The master of this game has to be Emperor Augustus (63 BC–AD 14) of ancient Rome. Augustus understood the value of having a good enemy, a villain with whom he could contrast himself. For this purpose he used Mark Antony, his early rival for power, as the perfect foil. Augustus personally allied himself with everything traditional in Roman society, even placing his home near the spot where the city had supposedly been founded. While Antony was off in Egypt, dallying with Queen Cleopatra and giving in to a life of luxury, Augustus could continually point to their differences, showing himself off as the embodiment of Roman values, which Antony had betrayed. Once he became the supreme leader of Rome, Augustus made a public show of humility, of giving back powers to the Senate and to the people. He spoke a more vernacular Latin and lived simply, like a man of the people. And for all this he was revered. It was, of course, all a show. In fact he spent most of his time in a luxurious villa outside Rome. He had many mistresses, who came from places as exotic as Egypt. And while seeming to give away power, he held on tightly to the real reins of control, the military. Obsessed with the theater, Augustus was a master showman and wearer of masks. He must have realized this, for these were the last words he spoke on his deathbed: “Have I played my part in the farce of life well enough?” Realize the following: The word personality comes from the Latin persona , which means “mask.” In the public we all wear masks, and this has a positive function. If we displayed exactly who we are and spoke our minds truthfully, we would offend almost everyone and reveal qualities that are best concealed. Having a persona, playing a role well, actually protects us from people looking too closely at us, with all of the insecurities that would churn up.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Being Ioudaios therefore did not mean for Paul the enjoyment of any obvious social privilege—whatever the promises once made to his ancestor Abraham might have been. This did not mean, yet again, that Paul’s Jewish identity was not important to him. It plainly did “matter” to Paul; indeed, quite literal y—just as being, for example, a “Vaage” matters to me. It defined Paul’s family of origin, the matrix of his earthly identity, his social site in the world. But being Ioudaios did not make Paul eo ipso a man with social power. It did not make him “strong” in any immediate or other way. Instead, it described simply and sufficiently how he got the sort of “skin” he was “in” and thus who his “kinfolk” were. The same fact, however, also makes it clear that not all Ioudaioi were created equal; certainly not with respect to the practice of leisure with its literary delights and political “perks.” And for that same reason, being Ioudaios would not have answered all the questions or concerns that a person such as Paul conceivably might have any more than being Greek or Roman or a “Vaage” would. In other words, being Ioudaios did not necessarily “save” you from all your other afflictions especial y if and when you were a “poor” one as Paul apparently was. With Paul, you might be proudly Ioudaios but simultaneously find yourself welcoming “in Christ” a heretofore unthinkable “salvation.” And this would be not because you were looking to be “saved” from “Judaism” but, rather, because being Ioudaios did not encompass everything that was your life. It did not define the only identity you might hope to desire. It was not the only problem to be addressed. Not surprisingly, not all Ioudaioi agreed with Paul that a “Jew” actual y could do or think what Paul had done and said. But Paul obviously did insisting “in Christ” that he still belonged to the ancestral group that he called those who were physei Ioudaioi. This is, conceivably, what ought to make him at least an interesting historical point of reference for contemporary thinking about Jewishness; although it also likely will be the reason why those who insist on an ethno-geographical understanding of this identity will continue to dismiss him as an insignificant runagate. 38 See, e.g., Catherine Jones, “Theatre of Shame: The Impact of Paul’s Manual Labour on His Apostleship in Corinth” (Ph.D. diss.; University of St. Michael’s College, 2013). 58 58 59 3 The New Creation Motif in Romans 8:18–27 in Light of the Book of Jubilees Ronald Charles

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Mental Accounting The Hardest Cost to Bear The Difference between Knowing and Doing You Can’t Jedi Mind Trick Being Fresh to a Decision Chapter 6. Monkeys and Pedestals Getting the Monkey Off Your Back Kill Criteria Funnel Vision States and Dates Better, Not Perfect INTERLUDE II GOLD OR NOTHING SECTION III Identity and Other Impediments Chapter 7. You Own What You’ve Bought and What You’ve Thought: Endowment and Status Quo Bias An Oenophile among Economists Also, If You’ve Known It, You Own It The Endowment Effect Pro Sports Teams and Their Escalating Commitment to High Draft Picks The Status Quo Is Hard to Quit Better the Devil You Know The Price of Sticking Chapter 8. The Hardest Thing to Quit Is Who You Are: Identity and Dissonance The Cult of Identity Cognitive Dissonance The Mirror and the Window Out on a Limb Mistaken Identity A Ray of Hope Chapter 9. Find Someone Who Loves You but Doesn’t Care about Hurt Feelings (Over) Optimism The Difference between Being Nice and Being Kind Some Coaches Can Pull the Plug Divide and Conquer The Importance of Giving and Getting Permission INTERLUDE III THE ANTS GO MARCHING . . . MOSTLY SECTION IV Opportunity Cost Chapter 10. Lessons from Forced Quitting In the Meantime What Ants Can Teach Us about Backup Plans Notes from the London Underground Just One Day Diversifying Your Opportunities The Great Resignation Chapter 11. The Myopia of Goals The Problem with Pass-Fail Fixed Objects in a Changing World Every Goal Needs At Least One Unless Marking Progress along the Way Goal-Induced Myopia Quit Thinking about Waste Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index PROLOGUEThe Gaffed ScaleIn October 1974, boxer Muhammad Ali pulled off one of the greatest upsets in the history of sports when he knocked out George Foreman in the famous “Rumble in the Jungle.” With that victory, Ali regained the heavyweight boxing championship, a title he had first earned when he dethroned Sonny Liston a decade earlier in 1964. Ali faced unbelievable odds and adversity on the way to this momentous triumph. In 1967, he was stripped of his heavyweight title after refusing to serve in the Vietnam War, depriving him of the opportunity to fight for three and a half years during what should have been the prime of his career. After that layoff, he had to fight his way back into contention for another four years to get the title shot against George Foreman. By this time, Ali was nearly thirty-three and had fought as a professional forty-six times. Foreman was heavily favored: younger, bigger, stronger, undefeated, and considered indestructible. Ali had split a pair of fights that went the distance against both Joe Frazier and Ken Norton. Neither Frazier nor Norton lasted two rounds against Foreman. When Ali bested Foreman, he cemented his status as the Greatest of All Time. Muhammad Ali became a symbol of grit. Against all odds, among a sea of naysayers, he had refused to give up and triumphed.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  on the Republican ticket, but quickly regretted the choice. Nixon had kept a secret fund from the Republican Party that he had supposedly used for private purposes. In fact he was innocent of the charges, but Eisenhower did not feel comfortable with him, and this was the excuse to get rid of him. Cutting him loose in this way would almost certainly ruin Nixon’s political career. Once again he rose to the challenge, appearing on live television and delivering the speech of his life, defending himself against the charges. It was so effective, the public clamored for Eisenhower to keep him on the ticket. He went on to serve eight years as vice president. And so, the crushing defeats of 1960 and 1962 would again be the means of toughening himself up and resurrecting his career. He was like a cat with nine lives. Nothing could kill him. He laid low for a few years, then came charging back for the 1968 election. He was now the “new Nixon,” more relaxed and affable, a man who liked bowling and corny jokes. And having learned all the lessons from his various defeats, he ran one of the smoothest and savviest campaigns in modern history and made all of his enemies and doubters eat crow when he defeated Humphrey. In becoming president, he had seemingly reached the apex of power. But in his mind there was yet one more challenge to overcome, perhaps the greatest of all. Nixon’s liberal enemies saw him as a political animal, one who would resort to any kind of trickery to win an election. To the East Coast elites who hated him, he was the hick from Whittier, California, too obvious in his ambition. Nixon was determined to prove them all wrong. He was not who they thought he was. He was an idealist at heart, not a ruthless politician. His beloved mother, Hannah, was a devout Quaker who had instilled in him the importance of treating all people equally and promoting peace in the world. He wanted to craft a legacy as one of the greatest presidents in history. For the sake of his mother, who had died earlier that year, he wanted to embody her Quaker ideals and show his detractors how deeply they had misread him. His political icons were men like French president Charles de Gaulle, whom he had met and greatly admired. De Gaulle had crafted a persona that radiated authority and love of country. Nixon would do the same. In his notebooks he began to refer to himself as “RN”—the world leader version of himself. RN would be strong, resolute, compassionate yet completely masculine. The America he was to lead was riven by antiwar protests, riots in the cities, a rising crime rate. He would end the war and work toward world peace; at home he would bring prosperity to all Americans, stand for law and order, and instill a sense of decency the country had lost.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles34 34 are difficult to explain historically as the invention of this author. Left with only tiny fragments from Paul’s life, we do not have clear examples of what he said to other Judaeans, unless the letter to the Romans fits that bill. But already to the Corinthians he implies that he did talk with Judaeans when the opportunity arose, and when he did so he adapted his language for the sake of The Announcement: While being free from all, I have enslaved myself to all, so that I might win more. To the Judaeans I became as a Judaean, that I might win Judaeans; to those under law as one under law, though I am certainly not under law myself, that I might win those under law; to the law-less as law-less—though I certainly am not law-less with God, but in the “law of Christ”—that I might win the law-less. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I became all things to all people so that by all means I might save some. And I do all that because of The Announcement, so that I might be a partaker in it with others. (1 Cor 9:19–23) It is hard to see how Paul could have put more starkly the primacy of The Announcement and the resulting irrelevance of all other norms. Feeling an imperative to “rescue” as many as possible, he persuades Judaeans and foreigners in whatever language will work, though he claims no attachment except to The Announcement—and is certainly not “under law.” I can almost hear any colleagues who may still be reading saying, “Yes, but what about Romans?” The question I proposed at the outset concerned Paul’s letters to the groups he founded. Even there, my interest is not in his internal thoughts or formative influences, which can only be conjectured, but in how his letters present his relationship to Judaean ancestral law. When Paul comes to write Romans, by contrast his proclamation of The Announcement in the east is over (Rom 15:18–28). Rome had apparently not been on his itinerary in declaring The Announcement, in part because the Christ group there was established by others. But now his plans have changed. Since he has decided to go as far as Spain to reach “the remainder” of non-Judaeans, he can hope to visit Rome without causing offence and with due respect, purely as a passing-through point, since he must pass that way anyway. His groups in Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, or Galatia did not know his letter to the Romans, however, and that is why I have ignored it while trying to understand his correspondence with them. That said, the Romans reflex is so powerful in scholarship, even all-consuming, that some readers will think I am cheating if I ignore this unusual text. So I shall make a brief effort. Following our principle of stressing what is clearest, we see immediately that Romans continues to present Paul as uniquely linked with The Announcement (1:1, 9). He explains that “according to my Announcement” Christ will return to judge the world (2:16), ties The Announcement to his work among the nations (10:16; 11:28; 15:16, 19), and ends with a greeting to the group in Rome based on “my Announcement” (16:25). What his audience itself believes about Christ, tellingly, he cannot call The Announcement, but rather “your kind of teaching” or “the teaching you learned” (6:17; 16:17). Indeed, he will bring his Announcement when he visits, because he is not ashamed of it (1:15–16). He writes partly in preparation for that

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Once the letter was signed, he would do as he had promised. The conspirators, feeling they had no choice, granted his request but gave the countess a brief time frame to conclude the business. For a fleeting moment, just as she disappeared over the drawbridge into Ravaldino, she turned with a sneer and gave the Italian equivalent of “the finger” to Ronche and Orsi. The entire drama of the past few days had been planned and staged by her and Feo, with whom she had communicated through various messengers. She knew that the Milanese had sent an army to rescue her and she only had to play for time. A few hours later Feo stood on the ramparts and yelled down that he was holding the countess hostage and that was that. The enraged assassins had had enough. The next day they returned to the castle with her six children and called Caterina to the ramparts. With daggers and spears pointed at them in the most menacing fashion, and with the children wailing and begging for mercy, they ordered Caterina to surrender the fortress or they would kill them all. Surely they had already proven they were more than willing to shed blood. She might be fearless and the daughter of a Sforza, but no mother could possibly watch her children die before her eyes. Caterina wasted no time. She shouted down: “Do it then, you fools! I am already pregnant with another child by Count Riario and I have the means to make more!” at which she lifted her skirts, as if to emphasize her meaning. Caterina had foreseen the maneuver with the children and had calculated that the assassins were weak and indecisive—they should have killed her and her family on that first day, amid the mayhem. Now they would not dare to kill them in cold blood: the assassins knew that the Sforzas, on their way to Forlì, would take terrible revenge on them if they ever did such a deed. And if she surrendered now, she and her children would all be imprisoned, and some poison would find its way into their food. She didn’t care what they thought of her as a mother. She had to keep stalling. To emphasize her resolve, after refusing to surrender, she had the cannons of the castle fire at the Orsi palace.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  SECTION IIIn the LossesCHAPTER 4Escalating CommitmentToward the end of the 1930s, Harold Staw’s parents were among the millions of Americans who moved their families from the East Coast to Southern California, the latest frontier for chasing the American Dream. Shirley Posner’s family had made a similar move to Los Angeles, where she met Harold. They fell in love, married in 1940, and had two kids of their own while Harold worked in a defense plant in Los Angeles during World War II. After the war, Harold and Shirley settled in San Bernardino, along the eastern end of an area known as the Inland Empire, sixty miles from Los Angeles. The war years had been good for LA, a center for defense production. As that prosperity spread, much of the Inland Empire transitioned from farms and citrus groves to residential areas. Harold’s stepfather and mother operated a grocery store, and Harold and Shirley followed suit, purchasing a neighborhood store. They turned a small profit but after several years Harold could see the writing on the wall. Large supermarket chains were taking over and it would eventually be impossible for a mom-and-pop operation to compete. Harold needed to find a more promising business. By 1952, he noticed a unique opportunity in Fontana, ten miles to the west of San Bernardino, along the route of a new freeway that was supposed to one day reach all the way to Los Angeles. Fontana was a booming factory town. Kaiser Steel had opened a huge factory during World War II and it became even busier once the United States entered the Korean War. Harold thought all those workers—mostly new arrivals to the area who were now earning a good wage—represented a market he could sell appliances to. Because the factory’s workers all belonged to the steelworkers union, his store would sell exclusively to members of the union, like a PX on a military base. At the start, he had little beyond his idea. With the small amount of money the Staws got from selling the grocery store, Harold could only afford to lease a tiny property that had previously housed chickens. But with the help of Shirley and their two young children, he enthusiastically swept the space clear of chicken feathers and opened the Union Store. He didn’t have money for much inventory—the entire operation was, literally, bare bones—but he used the limitations of the space and his budget to offer discounted prices. Customers could look at several floor models. If they saw a refrigerator or a stove they liked, he ordered it for them from the manufacturer. Harold’s idea turned out to be a visionary first step in building a successful retail chain. The converted chicken coop did so well that Harold expanded to a larger property in Upland, another twelve miles west on the freeway as construction continued. The Upland store had more space, more inventory, and now featured housewares in addition to appliances.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  decision earlier, saving him valuable time and resources. That’s why Ron Conway is so proud of the role that he plays for his founders, and why he considers it such a big win when he can offer that fresh perspective to get them to quit. When it comes to business endeavors, career choices, or decisions about your personal life, we should all be striving for two things: First, you should find at least one person to be your quitting coach. Second, you should try to serve in that role for the people you love. Some Coaches Can Pull the Plug While a quitting coach can help by offering you a fresh perspective, uncontaminated by your growing katamari, you’re ultimately still the one who has to choose to walk away, and that means you can ignore the advice of your quitting coach. Having a coach improves the chances that you’re going to get to quitting sooner than you otherwise would without one. But, just like Conway’s founders, a lot of times you’re going to rebuff the attempt. Of course, sometimes there are situations where the person who’s the quitting coach actually has the authority to make the quitting decision. For example, managers can force people to shut down projects or sales leaders can force sellers to stop pursuing leads. The combination of kill criteria and a quitting coach who has the power to step in to force the quitting is the most efficient and effective way to get people to cut their losses, especially if those people are particularly gritty. Navy SEALs, by the simple fact that they made it through SEAL training, are legendary for their grittiness. We all remember the classic scenes in movies of grueling training where recruits have to prove they can endure conditions that would make most people give up. There’s that famous brass bell, which the trainees can ring to end the punishment of submersion for hours in freezing water, days without sleep, and constant physical trials. The ones that become SEALs are the ones who refuse to ring the bell. They are literally selected because the Navy found it impossible to make them quit. Admiral McRaven knows that part of his job is reining in people who, on their own, would literally die rather than give up. As he put it, “You want them

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Harold expanded his customer base by opening the store to members of other unions (and then dropped the membership requirement altogether). The fifties were a period of unbridled growth for Harold Staw and, it seemed, everything around him. The population of the Inland Empire grew nearly 80% during the decade. The Greater Los Angeles area (a sprawl eventually covering 34,000 square miles), increasingly linked by the rapidly expanding California highway system, became one of the fastest-growing and largest metropolitan areas in the world. Seemingly endless waves of people flocked to the opportunities and lifestyle promised by Southern California. Those people found good jobs, earned growing incomes, started and built families, became homeowners, and eventually moved into bigger homes. They needed appliances. They needed housewares. They needed a lot of consumer goods, and Harold Staw was just the man to sell to them. Harold opened an even bigger store, now renamed ABC, in Montclair (just another three miles west on the freeway). He negotiated a fifty-year lease on the property. Its profitability far exceeded anything he could have imagined when he was in Fontana or could have achieved in Upland. In quick succession, he began buying out competitors, expanding, and, in one case, merging with another owner of a pair of stores. The ABC Store in Covina—halfway to LA from San Bernardino on the still-expanding freeway—was cavernous, over 100,000 square feet. It was the largest retail outlet in California, if not in the entire country. Harold made these into true one-stop shopping centers. In addition to offering everything from clothing to housewares to large appliances, he leased space to specialty service providers like insurance agencies and optometrists. By the beginning of the sixties, ABC Stores was a major retail chain in Southern California. In 1961, Harold Staw expanded with his biggest deal yet, a merger with Texas-based discount retailer Sage Stores. Sage came from roots familiar to Harold. Whereas he started by specializing in selling to union members, Sage began by selling to government workers. (Sage was an acronym for “state and government employees.”) Staw became the largest shareholder and CEO of the combined company, named Sage International. A public stock offering in 1962 initially valued the company at $10 million, with the Staw family owning more than 30%. Harold Staw’s rise, in common with most success stories, came from a combination of skill and luck. Remarkably, he bootstrapped himself from practically nothing to a position of significant wealth (and potentially even greater wealth to come). His main starting assets were brains, grit, and nerve, and he used them to capitalize on favorable developments that he foresaw but were themselves outside his control: the demographic shifts of the baby boom generation and the growth of consumer culture. Those favorable trends continued in Southern California into the sixties (and beyond), but the opportunities for discount retailing became so lucrative that they eventually attracted competitors Harold Staw couldn’t outfox, outfight, or buy out.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  An exploded raccoon is abuzz over on the far side of the highway and crows are dropping down from time to time to sort among the pieces. On either side of the house, fields fall away, rolling and baking in the heat. The sisters are sitting on the stoop shelling peas, talking overtop of each other. My mother says mayonnaise goes bad in two hours in the hot sun and my aunt says bullshit. They’ve just driven out to the fields and left the lunches for the hired men. They argue energetically about this, until the rooster walks up and my aunt carries her bowl in the house to finish the discussion through the screen door. She and the rooster hate each other. “He thinks you’re a chicken,” my mother explains. “You have to show him you won’t put up with it.” She picks up a stick, threatens the rooster with it, and he backs off, pretends to peck the yard. My aunt comes back out. The front of her head is in curlers, the brush kind that hurt, and she keeps testing her hair to see if it’s done. She has on a smock with big pockets and pedal pushers. Her feet are bare, one reason why the rooster is scaring her so much. My mother doesn’t wear curlers because her hair is short but she has two clips crisscrossed on either side of her head, making spit curls in front of her ears. Every time a car drives by she reaches up automatically, ready to yank them out. She has on Bermuda shorts and a wide-bottomed plaid blouse with a bow at the neck. They are both pregnant again. We’re going to be in a parade at four o’clock, Wendell and I, riding bikes without training wheels, our dolls in the baskets. We asked to have the training wheels put back on for the parade but they said no. Our older sisters are upstairs somewhere, dumping perfume on one another and trying on bracelets. They’ll be in the parade, too, walking behind us and throwing their batons in the air, trying to drop them on our heads. Wendell jumps at the rooster suddenly and he rushes us, we go off screaming in different directions while he stands there furious, shifting from one scaly foot to another, slim and tall with greasy black feathers and a yellow ruff like a collie. He can make the dirty feathers around his neck stand up and fall back down whenever he gets mad, just like flexing a muscle. Even his wives give him a wide berth, rolling their seedy eyes and murmuring. They get no rest. I haven’t yet connected the chickens walking around out here with what we had for lunch, chopped up and mixed with mayonnaise. The mothers give up and go in the house to smoke cigarettes at the kitchen table and yell at us through the windows.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  On the march, the brightly caparisoned horses and the accompanying soldiers—all decked in the Sforza colors, scarlet and white—would fill the landscape. It was a hypnotic and thrilling sight, all orchestrated by her father. He delighted in always wearing the latest in Milanese fashions, with his elaborate and bejeweled silk gowns. She came to share this interest, clothes and jewels becoming her passion. He might seem so virile in battle, but she would see him crying like a baby as he listened to his favorite choral music. He had an endless appetite for all aspects of life, and her love and admiration for him knew no bounds. And so in 1473, when her father informed the ten-year-old Caterina of the marriage he had arranged for her, her only thought was to fulfill her duty as a Sforza and please her father. The man Galeazzo had chosen for her was Girolamo Riario, the thirty-year-old nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, a marriage that would forge a valuable alliance between Rome and Milan. As part of the arrangement, the pope purchased the city of Imola, in Romagna, which the Sforzas had taken decades before, christening the new couple the Count and Countess of Imola. Later the pope would add the nearby town of Forlì to their possessions, giving them control of a very strategically located part of northeastern Italy, just south of Venice. In her initial encounters with him, Caterina’s husband seemed a most unpleasant man. He was moody, self-absorbed, and high- strung. He appeared interested in her only for sex and could not wait for her to come of age. Fortunately, he continued to live in Rome and she stayed in Milan. But a few years later some disgruntled noblemen in Milan murdered her beloved father, and the power of the Sforzas seemed in jeopardy. Her position as the marriage pawn solidifying the partnership with Rome was now more important than ever. She quickly installed herself in Rome. There she would have to play the exemplary wife and keep on the good side of her husband. But the more she saw of Girolamo, the less she respected him. He was a hothead, making enemies wherever he turned. She had not imagined that a man could be so weak, and compared with her father he failed by every measure. She turned her attention to the pope. She worked hard to gain his favor and that of his courtiers. Caterina was now a beautiful young woman with blond hair, a novelty in Rome. She ordered the most elaborate gowns to be sent from Milan. She made sure to never be seen wearing the same outfit twice. If she sported a turban with a long veil, it suddenly became the latest craze. She reveled in the attention she received as the most fashionable woman in Rome, Botticelli using her as a model for some of his greatest paintings.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  (Take-gains don’t make sense in poker, so I didn’t employ that tool.) After turning pro, I still maintained a stop-loss. Elite poker players are still going to be worse at making quitting decisions when they’re in it, especially if they’re in it and losing . So, even after I gained experience and got a better understanding of the quality of my play and the short-term swings of luck, I still set loss limits. I also realized that I played better in sessions of six to eight hours or less, so I committed to quitting after I played that long. Because I was more aware of the importance of game conditions, I also committed to quit if the quality of the players in the game drastically changed in an unfavorable way as some players cashed out and new ones took their seats. Those kill criteria helped me to become better at quitting games. But was I perfect? Not even close. Did I always walk away when I reached my loss limit? No. When I had access to funds at the casino, there were times that I grabbed some more money and kept playing. Did I always stop after playing six to eight hours? Definitely not. There were times when I played for more than twenty-four hours at a stretch. Likewise, there were absolutely times when I convinced myself that I was still in a good game, even though the players who made the game so good had left and been replaced by much tougher ones. I was far from flawless, but I did better than I would have without those kill criteria. In the one long game of my poker career, I’m confident my bottom line benefited because I was able—some of the time—to reduce the mental and financial resources I spent in negative expected-value situations. The important thing is to be better, not perfect. After all, we’re only human and we’re operating under conditions of uncertainty. It’s hard to time quitting decisions perfectly. Astro Teller knows that they don’t always quit at the exact right moment at X. He’s fine with that because they do better overall since they are always trying. “This is exactly why X produces such outsized returns. Not because we’re perfect at what we aspire to, but because we’re so relentlessly aspiring to it that we’re modestly successful and that turns out to be enormous.” Taken together, the monkeys-and-pedestals mental model and kill criteria help us overcome our aversion to closing accounts in the losses. First, they both get you to no faster, which naturally limits the losses that you have to absorb when you quit. And the less you are down, the easier it is to walk away. Second, when you set out clear kill criteria in advance and make a precommitment to walk away when you see those signals, you are just more likely to follow through, even when you are losing.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  It also reinforced his viewpoint that Flow was the scrappy underdog and Asana, rather than being another struggling new venture, was one of “them” in an us-versus-them war of bootstrappers versus VC-backed founders. Within a few months after the release of Asana’s paid product (in April 2012), it had completed three rounds of funding, the last of which saw the company raise $28 million at a $280 million valuation. Wilkinson could have considered that a negative for Flow. After all, its main competitor was thriving, was flush with funds, and was clearly a hot property in the venture market. Instead, he treated this as good news for Flow’s prospects. If experienced venture investors thought Asana was worth $280 million, then his company with its superior product must be worth much more. At this point, Flow was outspending its monthly revenues by a factor of two or three, with greater spending necessary if keeping up with Asana was a priority. When his concerned CFO brought this up, Wilkinson told him they needed to hold on. Based on his reasoning that Flow had to be worth more than Asana, it was clearly worthwhile to continue investing his personal funds in the product. This self-mounted crusade against Asana quickly became a war of attrition. To make Flow available across multiple platforms (as Asana did), upgrade it with features customers wanted, and market at even a fraction of Asana’s level, Flow’s cash burn rate quickly doubled. Wilkinson maintained his belief that continuing to pour money into Flow was justified because of the quality of Flow’s product. “We started burning money on ads and hiring sales people just to keep a toe hold, but mostly we focused on making the product better than theirs. Our one remaining advantage.” As they continued to add features to the product, more bugs started to appear (a well-known issue in software development). Despite the regular cash infusions, the engineering and design team was understaffed and overworked. They found themselves unable to keep up with the endless stream of bug reports from customers. Month-over-month growth slowed from 20% to 5%. In September 2015, Asana launched a new version, which didn’t remotely resemble the product Wilkinson had viewed so negatively in its original form. It now had all the features Flow had and all those he wished Flow had. It worked on more platforms and, in contrast to Flow, was not plagued by bugs. By this time, Flow’s burn rate was $150,000 per month. Wilkinson’s total investment was more than $5 million, with no end in sight. The world was telling him that in this case, a scrappy, bootstrapped company trying to fight a well-funded, venture-backed company was a losing battle. Yet, he still didn’t shut it down, continuing on for seven more years, until he had eventually put $11 million into the company. During this period, he saw revenue growth slow and then stop, while Asana (along with other competitors in the space) kept making their product better.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  It’s not being radical to point out that people on the fringe have to be better than people in the mainstream, that they have twice as much to prove. In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity. Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can, and do, fail. But people have trouble with this concept. It’s like how, after Finding Nemo, people who were ill equipped to take care of them rushed to buy clown fish and how the fish died. People love an idea, even if they don’t know what to do with it. Even if they only know how to do exactly the wrong thing. [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 51. Andre was tried for, and acquitted of, Mendieta’s death. In his 911 call, Andre told the operator, “My wife is an artist, and I’m an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window.” Whenever Andre has an exhibition, protestors show up. They create outlines of bodies on the ground, as if someone has fallen from a great height. They leave animal viscera smeared on sidewalks. They ask, “¿Dondé está Ana Mendieta?”Dream House as Cabin in the WoodsI went to Yaddo to write this book in full performance mode. I didn’t realize it until a few weeks in, when I was midlaugh middinner and, for the first time in ages, heard myself. As a teenager I would have given my eyeteeth for this sense of sureness. I performed as a witch, a socialite. I wore mermaid-cut skirts and silk jumpsuits and elegant, floor-length sequined dresses and faux-fur wraps and black frocks and glittering rhinestone earrings. I didn’t hold back on my opinions. I drank wine at dinner and took second helpings and strutted around the grounds. I slept mere feet from where I wrote, in a cabin in the trees. I played Pokémon Go on long walks and vied for control of the property’s single gym (located, abstractly, in a grand and elegant fountain at the base of the slope that dropped down from the mansion) with an avatar called “Hornbuckets.” It was autumn, and every day leaves and pine needles came down; I was forever picking detritus out of my bra. It got cold, and warm, and cold again. It snowed, but the snow melted the next day. I drove to southern Vermont for a reading on Halloween with a bunch of other writers and blew out a tire on a dark country road on the way home, and as we waited for AAA we sat in the car and told stories about our worst jobs.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  From day one, it was a huge hit.” The beta version of Flow quickly got to $20,000 in monthly recurring revenues and was soon growing by 10% a month. The product was hot. All the big venture capital firms reached out to him. Among the community of people who incubate new ventures (and the larger community of people who follow what those people are up to), there has long been a spirited debate about the pros and cons of venture funding versus bootstrapping. Wilkinson was among those very publicly siding with bootstrapping as the better option, both for himself and as a general strategy. This obviously contributed to his refusal of all the offers of venture money coming his way. Flow was a spartan operation but, not surprisingly for a new company in this space, it was still significantly outspending its promising initial sales. Wilkinson willingly wrote the checks to cover the growing expenses. He had capital, a product he was in love with, and a frequently expressed desire to avoid the dilution that comes with taking on outside investors. Although Flow’s initial success confirmed that there was demand for a SaaS tool that helped teams manage and share to-do lists, he recognized that the potential demand meant others would try to enter the space. Shortly after starting Flow, Wilkinson began hearing about another product named Asana. He had reason to be concerned about Asana. It was cofounded and run by Dustin Moskovitz. Moskovitz was a cofounder of Facebook, a billionaire, and someone who had enormous credibility and name recognition with potential investors, employees, and prospective users. When Asana went live in late 2011, Wilkinson breathed a sigh of relief. “It was ugly! It was designed by engineers. Complicated and hard to use. Not a threat in the slightest.” By comparing Flow with this debut version of Asana, he felt validated. “With a team a quarter of the size, and a fraction of the money, we had built what I felt was a superior product.” After Asana debuted, Dustin Moskovitz reached out to Andrew Wilkinson and they met for coffee in San Francisco, where Asana had its office. At the meeting, Moskovitz was very open about how much cash they had and the talent they were bringing into the company. Wilkinson came away from the meeting believing the message was that Asana had superior resources and Flow wouldn’t be able to keep up. Much later, Moskovitz publicly made it clear that his memory of the meeting was quite different. He thought he was exploring the possibility of Asana and Flow teaming up, maybe through an acquisition, to better take on the bigger, established competitors in the space. It is hard to know why they interpreted what happened at the meeting differently. But the way Wilkinson heard it was certainly consistent with his beliefs about bootstrapping and venture funding.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Similarly, twenty-four-year-old Nancy (my very first trauma client from Chapter 2 ) and I discovered, unwittingly, that (rather than continuing to feel overpowered and overwhelmed by the surgeons as she had at age four), she could now escape from being held down and terrorized. These new experiences contradicted and repaired both of our experiences of helpless terror. Briefly, the way these active self-protective responses are reestablished is as follows: Specific tension patterns (as experienced through interoceptive awareness) “suggest” particular movements, which then can express themselves in minute or micro-movements. The positions that my arms and hands spontaneously and powerfully assumed during the accident had protected my head from smashing into the windshield and then from being cracked open on the pavement. Later, when I was in the ambulance, I revisited these instinctual reflexive movements and expanded them through sensation awareness—a process that allowed me to consciously experience the activation of muscle fibers as my body prepared for movement. These actions had previously been incomplete and remained nonconscious. By slamming forcefully, first into the windshield and then onto the pavement, these muscular reflexes had been truncated, leaving me with collapsed and constricted muscles and a vast reservoir of latent energy. Instead of feeling helpless and victimized by this dreadful event, I created a powerful sense of agency and mastery. In addition, the restoration of defensive responses has the effect of automatically titrating the energies of rage. In other words, the explosive energy that would be expressed as rage and non-directed flight was now channeled into effective, directed healthy aggression. Empowerment derives directly from expelling the physical attitude of defeat and helplessness and restoring the biologically meaningful active defense system—that is, the embodied triumph of successful protection and the visceral actuality of competency. Such renegotiation (as we shall see in Step 6 ) also helps to dissolve the entrenched guilt and self-judgment that may be byproducts of helplessness and repressed/dissociated rage. By accessing an active and powerful experience, passivity of paralysis and collapse is countered. Because of the central importance of restoring these lost (rather, misplaced) instinctive active responses in healing trauma, I will—at the risk of repetition—address this subject from a slightly different angle. It can be said that the experience of fear derives from the primitive responses to threat where escape is thwarted (i.e., in some way—actual or perceived—prevented or conflicted). 54 Contrary to what you might expect, when one’s primary responses of fight-or-flight (or other protective actions) are executed freely, one does not necessarily experience fear, but rather the pure and powerful, primary sensations of fighting or fleeing.