The Blue Sky is Always There
Thich Nhat Hanh writes in Calming the Fearful Mind: A Zen Response to Terrorism: The Kingdom of Heaven is like the blue sky. Sometimes the blue sky reveals itself to us entirely. Sometimes it reveals half of itself, sometimes just a little bit of blue peeks through, and sometimes non at all. Storms, clouds and […]
Impediments to Alibaba’s Global Domination
In the bestselling The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, New York University-academic and business analyst Scott Galloway pontificates about the many obstacles Alibaba faces in its aspiration for global domination: As such, Alibaba carries a lot of water on its path to global domination. First, there is no historical precedent […]
Dismantle the Trance
Tara Brach writes in Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha, The way out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience. By accepting absolutely everything, what I mean is that we are aware of what is […]
The Wisdom of Nondiscrimination
From Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Path of Emancipation, My right hand, which has written hundreds of poems, can also write calligraphy and ring the bell. Yet it is not proud of itself. It never tells the left hand, “You are good for nothing. You don’t write poems or practice calligraphy.” … It knows that it […]
The Experience of Suffering
Sharon Salzberg writes in The Buddha Taught One Thing Only, There are times in our lives when we wish we could change the ending of the story. Sometimes we lose what we care about, we are separated from those we love, our bodies fail us as we get older, we feel helpless or hurt, or […]
Slaving Away for Materialistic Lifestyle
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the […]
What the Buddha Taught
Buddhist teacher and Zen priest Joan Halifax in The Lucky Dark: The Buddha taught that we should practice helping others while cultivating deep concentration, compassion, and wisdom. He further taught that enlightenment is not a mystical, transcendent experience but an ongoing process, calling for intimacy and transparency; and that suffering diminishes when confusion and fear […]
The Myth of Enlightenment
Charlotte Joko Beck writes in Life’s Not A Problem, One idea that really hampers us is to believe that people get ‘enlightened,’ and then they’re that was forever and ever. We my have our moments, and if we get sick and have lots of things happening, we may fall back. But a person who practices […]
The Wafer-thin Line Between Success and Failure
In The 75 Greatest Management Decisions Ever Made, Stuart Crainer writes, Managers are not perfect, but who ever said that management was about perfection? Management is about a combination of following inexplicable hunches, getting lucky, working hard, and taking risks. Often managers fall on their faces. That’s part of the job. Managers may run all […]
The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
Venture capitalist, and essayist Paul Graham’s 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups: Single Founder Bad Location Marginal Niche Derivative Idea Obstinacy Hiring Bad Programmers Choosing the Wrong Platform Slowness in Launching Launching Too Early Having No Specific User in Mind Raising Too Little Money Spending Too Much Raising Too Much Money Poor Investor Management Sacrificing Users […]