For slightly more than 2000 years, the message of Xmas is a simple one – “[God] wants all men to be saved” 1 Timothy 2:4a.
Qoheleth is the Hebrew word for Ecclesiastes, a book we can commonly find in Tanakh or the Bible. It is after all the wisest book I’ve found in the world. You don’t know which one you say – it’s the one that has lots of ‘meaningless, meaningless. Everything is meaningless’, i.e. words/ phrases that you can also catch from time to time in this blog.
We left a very important question in the previous post – i.e. what can we change and what can’t we change?
If you have been following this blog since its start, you’ll observe that I’m very big on the concept of randomness. We talked about causation vs correlation and looked at specific examples like the capital market and the casino game baccarat. Now I can sum up the entire concept in one statement –
(source: http://tinyurl.com/mmf88jm). Refer to footnote for definitions.
The reason I thought Patricia Madson is fantastic is because her writing is exceptionally inspiring. If you can, get her book called Improv Wisdom, her one and only book I think. Click here for the previous post.
Consolidating her experience into a mere 13 maxims or rules, she teaches us how to paint outside the lines.
One of the books that I got through abebooks.com is a gem called Improv Wisdom by Patricia Madson.
From Wikipedia: “Improvisational theatre, also known simply as improv, is a form of performance art… Some of the basic skills improvisation teaches actors are to listen and be aware of the other players, to have clarity in communication, and confidence to find choices instinctively and spontaneously“.
I find this extremely inspiring. From the book Drive, pp. 154-155, Daniel Pink wrote:
In 1962, Clare Boothe Luce, one of the first women to serve in the U.S. Congress, offered some advice to President John F. Kennedy. ‘A great man,’ she told him, ‘is one sentence.’ Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was: ‘He preserved the union and freed the slaves.’ Franklin Roosevelt’s was: ‘He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.’ Luce feared that Kennedy’s attention was so splintered among different priorities that his sentence risked becoming a muddled paragraph. …