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551-600

601 - 650
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THE SWORD AND THE SHIELD

Peniel E. Joseph

Summary​

  • Read like a bland timeline of events. I was really hoping for more 'punch' or analysis / insights. I just did not get caught up with the story. 

Memorable Parts

  • "'The gentleman you knew as Malcolm X,' announced the Columbia Presbyterian physician, 'is dead'."

  • "'I often think, sir, that in 1946, I was sentenced to 8 to 10 years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a common thief who had never passed the eight grade,' he reminded Haley. 'And the next time I went back to Cambridge was in March 1961, as the guest speaker at the Harvard Law School Forum'."

  • "Raising enough money to maintain the SCLC's annual expenses of $84,000 required King to conduct grueling speaking tours, sometimes delivering five speeches in one day."

  • "King preached his first sermon as Dexter's full-time pastor in May, the same month as the Brown Supreme Court decision and shortly before Malcom X arrived in Harlem to preside over Temple No. 7."

  • "When Malcolm X was allowed into the hospital to see Hinton, he turned to the crow and, with a single wave of his hand, dispersed the Muslim battalion, with bystanders soon following. 'Mr. Hicks,' the inspector reportedly said, 'that's too much power for one man to have.'"

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Average

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TAKING THE WORK OUT OF NETWORKING

Karen Wickre

Summary​

  • The book has valuable content and advice but it was written in 2018 - many of the tools and social media recommendations are obviously outdated. I would look for a more recent publication on the topic. 

Memorable Parts

  • "The easiest thing is to react. The second easiest thing is to respond. But the hardest thing is to initiate."

  • "A solid email should restablish your connect with to the askee, offer specific reasons and context for considering this introduction, vouch for the person who is asking and make clear that nothing happens without the askee's okay up front."

  • "If you can approach networking based on what you can give someone else, it lesses the akwardness you may feel about what you need. There will be times when you do need new ideas, introductions, guidance - we all do."

  • "Be open. Pick your favorite: both Robert De Niro and Smash Mouth are credited with saying, 'If you don't go, you'll never know'."

  • "Friends sometimes say that I 'know everyone.' That's not true, of course - but I do have a good sense of who everyone is. In other words, I remember names and connections."

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THE STRANGE LAST VOYAGE OF DONALD CROWHURST

Nicholas Tomalin & Ron Hall

Summary​

  • I have to admit that I fell for two traps. First, the 'A masterpiece' New Yorker review at the top fo the book. Second, an instagram book influecer's recommendation of this book. If you like sailing, you will like this book. Calling it a masterpiece is a stretch. 

Memorable Parts

  • "Crowhurst had halved the amount of oil, forgetting that one man cooks as often as two, and therefore needs as much. Crowhurst only had one and a half gallons on board. 'It should be OK though, it should last 81 x 3 = 243 days'. By some macabre irony his voyage lasted precisely 243 days."

  • "He did, however, have doubts on textual grounds. He noteced that the entire week had apparently been entered up with the same pencil, with no variation of pencil sharpness, and had noe of the changes in writing style and speed that one might have expected during such hectic sailing."

  • "Sir Francis Chichester has said that the period of greatest psychological strain during his voyage was just after he left Australia. The experience of meeting human beings again had seerved no to alleviate loneliness but to intesify it. Much later he speculated that whether on a long single-handed voyage was, in fact, made easier by stopping."

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THE MARY KAY WAY

May Kay Ash

Summary​

  • Every businessowner, aspiring entrepeneur and leader of teams has to read this book. Period. 

Memorable Parts

  • "Remember that invisible sign: Everyone needs to feel important. And no one counts more than your loved ones! They, too, wear an invisible sign. You know how valuable it is to tell an employee 'You did a great job on the XYZ account. Keep up the good work.' Your family is no different."

  • "Don't trust it to memory. If you don't write it down, you'll never get around to doing even the most well-intended task. We also provide a Six Most Important Things notepad - and the people who use it realize measurable improvement in their time-management efficiency."

  • "When someone has an issue I instruct their team leader to ask them to address the group on the topic. In researching 'their problem area', Margaret had reviewed and reanalyzed all the principles and techniques she had once used so successfully."

  • "Never give criticism in front of others. It's not only self-defeating to criticize someone in fron of others, it's also downright cruel. Not only does such action create bitter resentment, but everyone present becomes embarrassed and insecure. A 'Wil I be next?' atmosphere is created."

  • "Let people know you appreciate them. Even if it's only for showing up to work on time - let the person know that you value punctuality."

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Recommended

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THE SYSTEMS THINKER

Albert Rutherford

Summary​

  • Probably one of the worst book I have ever read. I have a strong suspicion it was written in its entirety by AI. Each paragraph is it's own unique thought and has almost no relation to the previous one. I learned absolutely nothing. 

Memorable Parts

  • "A system is a group of interconnected elements that work together to achieve a common purpose or function. We need to have elements, interconnections and purpose or function. If even one of the above is missing, we don't have a system."

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DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL

Matt Dinniman

Summary​

  • A book out of my comfort zone but a gift from a close friend. I enjoyed a lot reading this book of fiction. The story is very unique and has a great mix of fun, action and horror. Note: this is Book 1 of a series. 

Memorable Parts

  • "A trio of X's appeared outside the hallway. I mentally clicked on one. Corpse - Level 2 Goblin. I mentally clicked away,  and the whole map shrank back to normal."

  • "The scroll of Confusing Fog filled the room with a mist that only mobs could see, and the Iron Skin portion raised my physical armor by 100% for five minutes."

  • "We used the bathroom - thankfully neither of us exploded - and we headed out on our way."

  • "It was the final moments of our battle with the Hoarder. My stomach dropped, watching that scene from above. The camera focused on my own face. I was stricken with how scared I looked."

  • "Shit. I hadn't thougth about that. Before, Mordecai had been more forthright, but we also hadn't been under a crazy amount of scrutiny, either."

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Recommended

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THE COMFORT CRISIS

Michael Easter

Summary​

  • This is my second Michael Esater book. Thru personal experience and an ongoing adventure, the author makes the point that our cushiony and comfortable living standards make us depressed, unhealthy and brittle. The book is a good opportunity for self-reflection and challening ourselves. 

Memorable Parts

  • "Nearly everything in my life deferred to alcohol. If I wasn't drinking, I was running out the clock until the weekend, when I'd drink again. This practice made my life a fast-moving fog, and I lost years ina cicle of weekend bingeing."

  • "No one gets sober on a Friday evening. It's a Sunday-morning-coming-down king of a decision. The acute physical hell of drying out lasted for days. My mind was like a hard rubber ball shot from a cannon into a concrete room."

  • "He called this 'prevalence-induced concept change.' It explains that as we experience fewer problems, we don't become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. We end up with the same number of troubles."

  • "'The rules for surviving in the wild are shelter first, water second, food last.'"

  • "The 11 hours and 6 minutes of attention we're handling over to digital media isn't free. Like trying to do rep after rep of an excercise, our attention eventually tires when we overwork it. Modern life overworks the hell out of our brains."

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Recommended

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SLOW PRODUCTIVITY

Cal Newport

Summary​

  • What I found most powerful for me were all the examples of famously productive people who we falsely believe were producing all day, every day. Taking time for reflection is not a luxury, it is a necessity for creative thinking. 

Memorable Parts

  • "Slow productivity is based on the following principles: do fewer things, work at a natural pace and obsess over quality."

  • "An easy way to organize these sessions is  to maintain a shared document of tasks to discuss. Team members can add items to the list as they come up in betweem meetings."

  • "Imagine everyone on your team puts aside one hour a day for completing smalls tasks and answering quick questions. Further imagine that they each post a shared document containing a sign-up sheet for a day's block, including only a limited number of slots."

  • "Between chosing to create a challenging insightful report on a new technology vs organizing a one-day conference, I would definitively chose the report for a simple reason: it will generate many fewer tasks. To organize the conference will require endless coordination with different clients."

  • "But unlike in the industrial sector, in this invisible factory (knowledge workers) we'd constructed for ourselves we didn't have reform legislation or unions to identify the most draining aspects of this setup and fight for limits."

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Recommended

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EISENHOWER

Geoffrey Perret

Summary​

  • I can't recall how long I have had this book with me. After seeing the movie Pressure (recommended) I finally got the push I needed to dive into this 600 page biography. The book is well written but I wish it contained a little more of the author's intepretation and comments about events.

Memorable Parts

  • "MacArthur was wrong. There were only two strategic points the region - Singapore and Hong Kong - and the most important mineral resource, the oil of Brunei, was also under British control."

  • "...We pay for a single fighter plane with half a million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

  • "In the hurley burly of a military campaign - or a political effort - loyal, effective subordinates are mandatory. To tie them to the leader with unbreakable bonds one rule must always be observed - take full responsibility for everything that remotely resembles failure. Give extravagant and public praise for every success."

  • "Marshall, however, told him that in other wars, individual considerations had been allowed to take precedence over the goodof the country. That must not happen now. The President must have an entirely free hand in deciding what was best for the success of Overlord."

  • "But if this thing ever gets out, they'll be howling for Patton's scalp, and that will be the end of Patton's services in this war. I simply cannot let that happen. Patton is indispensable to the war effort - one ofthe guarantors of our victory."

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Recommended

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LEGACY OF ASHES

Tim Weiner

Summary​

  • Just by reading this book you scratch your head and think how in the hell did the CIA do anything good? The author presents failure after failure. Similar to my review (above), I needed a lot more of the author's comments in this book. Otherwise, it reads like an Encyclopedia - just facts.

Memorable Parts

  • "The one crim of lasting consequence has been the CIA's inability to carry out its central mission: informing the president of what is happening in the world."

  • "It fell to machines, not men, to understand the other side. As the technology of espionage expanded its horizons, the CIA's vision grew more myopic. Spy satellites enabled it to count Soviet weapons. They did not deliver the crucial information that communisn was crumbling."

  • "They helped device a secret codicil that gave the CIA the capability to conduct political warfare. It let the agency skim uncounted millions of dollars from the Marshall Plan."

  • "Four suspected North Korean double agents were among the first known human guinea pigs under a program code-named Project Artichoke, a small but significant part of a fifteen-year search by the CIA for ways to control the human mind."

  • "The illusion tha the CIA could overthrow a nation, like they did in Iran, by sleight of hand was alluring. It led the agency into a battle in Central America that went on for the next forty years."

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Average

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THE YES BRAIN

Daniel J Siegel & Tinay Payne Bryson

Summary​

  • I have lost count on how many Daniel Siegel books I have read. What I find most appealing is that even though they are supposed to be guides for pareting for the benefit of the child, I find myself learning a lot of basic information I did not know as an adult. I definitively need to develop my emotional intelligence. 

Memorable Parts

  • "When you think about what success in life means for your kids, what do you have in mind? We might guess that interacting with the world from a place of balance, resilience, insight and empathy. But let's be real here. This is not the definition of success that guides much of contemporary culture -what I do, what I accomplish, are the only valid measures of my worth."

  • "These emotions themselves aren't the problem. Don't misunderstand that. Feelings are important, even when they feel uncomfortable, or what we often name as 'bad'."

  • "Shower your kids with the Four S's: safe, seen, soothed and secure. When your kids know that you've got their back, that creates a safe base from which they can venture into the unknown."

  • "The short term goal with kids is balance - getting them back to their green zone. The long term goal is resilience - expanding their green zone of comfort."

  • "The healthy mind platter: sleep time, physical time, focus time, time-in, down time, connecting time and play time."

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Recommended

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PERMISSION TO FEEL

Marc Brackett

Summary​

  • The author is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. This book captured my attention because I do believe that there is a link between how extensive our emotional vocablary is and how well we can handle emotions. I got that idea from the 'How Emotions are Made' book.

Memorable Parts

  • "My parents loved me and cared for me - I knew that. But they had their own miseries. Mom was anxious and depressed and had a drinking problem. Dad was raging, scary and dissapointed in a sown who wasn't as tought as he was. But they had at least one thing in common: no clue about how to deal with feelings - either their own or mine."

  • "What skills do you want your kids to have? When we talk to corporations, they tell us they're searching for employees who persevere with a tasks, who take personal responsibility for their work, who can get along with others and function as a member of a team. Not technical abilities or specialized knowledge."

  • "Anger's influence isn't what you might expect: researchers found that when people are angry, they tend to believe that individuals are at fault when things go wrong. When they're sad, we're more likely to blame external circumstances."

  • "Integral emotions are directly caused by the action at hand. Incidental emotions have nothing to do with what's going on."

  • "As a child, I was secure in the knowledge that I was loved by my parents. However, I went to school every day and played after school on our street where I was being abused and bullied for many years. How did this go unnoticed? All the obvious signs were there. But loving me was not synonymous with seeing me."

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Recommended

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THINKING IN BETS

Annie Duke

Summary​

  • The premise is a solid one - who wouldn't want to read about a professional poker player's approach to life. On top of that, Annie Duke has a fantastic academic background. She used the same real life examples (i.e. Seahawks Super Bowl) over and over again.

Memorable Parts

  • "No sober person thinks getting home safely after driving drunk reflects a good decision or good driving ability. Changing future decisions based on that lucky result is dangerous and unheard of."

  • "It turns out, though, that we we actually form abstract beliefs this way: we hear something; believe it to be true; only sometimes, later, if we have time or inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is true or false."

  • "A lot of the way we feel about ourselves comes from how we think we compare with others. By shifting what it is that makes us feel good about ourselves, we can move toward a more rational fielding of outcomes and a more compassionate view of others."

  • "There are people who, like Phil Ivey, have substituted the routine of truthseeking for the outcome-oriented instinct to focus on seeking credit and avoiding blame."

  • "Companies implemeting prediction markets to test decisiones include Google, Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Siemens. People are more willing to offer their opinion when the goal is to win a bet rather than get along with people in a room."

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THE MEANING OF LIFE

Arthur C. Brooks

Summary​

  • I wouldn't say this is the best Arthur Brooks book but it is a strong one. Absolutely great for all thos 'Strivers' out there who just focus on results (promotions, money, etc.) and feel emptiness in their lifes. 

Memorable Parts

  • "Virtual jobs, dating apps, social media friends and video games. What was missing was the one thing that can never be simulated: meaning. Again and again, people said that life was busy but not meaningful. That experiences and relationships felt meaningless."

  • "Strivers are absolutely great at solving technical problems and answering specific, hard questions. But meaning is not one of them. 'What is the meaning of my life?' is a question that cannot be answered like 'How do I build an app for fidning concert tickets?'"

  • "Happinness = Enjoyment + Satisfaction + Meaning. Meaning = Coherence + Purpose + Significance. Why do things happen the way they do in my life (Coherence)? Why am I moving in this directions (Purpose)? Why does my life matter (Significance)?"

  • "We have moved from playing sports outside with friends to computer gaming; from reading newspapers to scrolling clickbait; from watching full stories to scanning reels; from writing letters to cranking out disappearing short texts...we have implemented easy substitutes for the experiences we crave, but they don't deliver a sense of life's meaning."

  • "Suffering = Resistance x Pain"

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Recommended

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CRACKING THE SALES MANAGEMENT CODE

Jason Jordan

Summary​

  • One of the best sales management books I have read in a long time. Are you overwhelmed with so many sales KPIs, dashboards and metrics? This is the book for you.

Memorable Parts

  • "I've been generally succesful in turning around poor-performing salesforces if the first-line managers I worked with had good potential, even if the salespeople themselves were mediocre. But I've never succeeded if it was the other way around."

  • "So what has all this reporting gotten us? Increased transparency to field-level activities gives us the satisfying sense that we are somehow in control of the sales force's behaviors. However, visibility to an action does not equate to control over it."

  • "Our criterion for managing became that a frontline sales manager could directly influence the metric by asking someone to do something differently. That is, he could direct or take some action that would consequently and undoubtedly cause the number to change."

  • "Business Results = cannot be managed. Sales Objectives = can be influenced, but only by managing their preceding activities. Sales Activities = can be proactively managed." 

  • "What you have witnessed is 'managing by results'. This business conversation is the equivalent for your doctor saying, 'You are not looking too healthy. You'd better go get more health, or else you're not going to be healthy the next time I see you."

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Highly Recommended

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CEO FOR ALL SEASONS

Carolyn Dewar

Summary​

  • I was a big fan of CEO Excellence, also a McKinsey book. I felt this book as simply a collection of mini bios of succesful CEOs and quotes. Felt like a marketing book, for McKinsey's brand. 

Memorable Parts

  • "The CEO's six responsibilities: direction setting, organizational alignment, leadership mobilization, board engagement, eternal stakeholder and personal effectiveness."

  • "'How I'll add value as CEO?' I'll ask the tough questions and make decisions that unlock the full potential of others."

  • Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, summarizes success on this dimensation as whether you have followership. 'The best definition of a leader,' he reflects, 'is if people are willing to follow you.'"

  • "Are you asking the right questions? What organizational purpose do I serve? Who does the company need me to be? What conditions will I need to put in place to maximize my team's success? How will we know if we're winning?"

  • "'Steve is smart, diligent and jealous.' 'Steve is jealous, diligent and smart.' People who were given the first sentence evaluated Steve more positively than those given the second. This is called the primacy effect."

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BETWEEN TWO FIRES

Christopher Buehlman

Summary​

  • I am not a fiction reader but who can resist this: The year is 1348. Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village.

Memorable Parts

  • "He forgot his name. How long he had been there stopped meaning anything. He went from one torment to another, starting with bodily pain and going on to heartbreak...2

  • "Go back to Picardy and ask the bishop to pardon you, if he's still alive. He'll send you on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, or maybe on crusade, if there's anyone left to make war on in the east."

  • "Don Eduardo de Burgos, the oldest of the four knights, a Spanish vassal of d'Evreux's father and a veteran of battles with the Moors, shook his head at the young man's foolishness."

  • "I don't know. But don't you see? This is the one thing I can do as well as anyone else. I can't plow. I can't build. But I can suffer. God wants suffering now."

  • "What had things come to when a man of God wished misfortune on a family because he coveted their roof?

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Highly Recommended

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THE LIGHTHOUSE OF STALINGRAD

Iain MacGregor

Summary​

  • I first heard about Pavlov's house from a YouTube video and was intrigued by the story. This is a great book even if you have read Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad. 

Memorable Parts

  • "The Russian army at the front had gone through 488 percent of its average monthly strength from 1941 to 1943. In other words, it had been rebuilt five times."

  • "In November Hitler was confronted with the mathematics of supply. His tanks would run out of fuel, food, and ammunition after twenty days of operation once the invasion began."

  • "Stalin's infaous purge of the Red Army officer class in the latter half of the 1930s had caused untold systemic damage. During the brutal elimination, 45 percent of the senior officers and political officials of not only the army but also the navy were executed or sacked."

  • "The skills of close air support he had pioneered in the Spanish Civil War he had then perfected in the conquest of France and the Low Countries."

  • "'We will not abandon our city to the Germans! All of you, organize brigades, go to build barricades. Barricade every streeet...quicly in such a way so that the soldiers defending Stalingrad will destroy the enemy without mercy!"

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Recommended

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WHAT TO MAKE OF A LIFE

Jim Collins

Summary​

  • This book will 'dissapoint' if you have read Conllins' previous books. You have to take into account that the level of analyses that can be done to a company can not be done to human beings. You will get great insights, however, from this book. 

Memorable Parts

  • "I take from studying them a reminder that I wrote for myself and that I return to whenever I find myself being pulled around backward in the saddle by past regrets: You cannot straighten out the road behind you."

  • "If you coun the pages in 3 major biographies of Benjamin Franklin, how many pages remain on average after he hits age 60? 53%. Imagine coming at life with the idea that turning 60 means taht more than half of what might be the most ineresting and creative life has yet to be written."

  • "'Wisdom too often never comes, and so one one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.' - Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter."

  • "I like analogies. I watched some lumbering up in Maine...[A]nd when they get a great big log and one ox can't budge the darn thing, they don't try to grow a bigger ox and they don't import and elephant - they use two oxen."​​​​

  • "I expected cliffs to be promiment in their lives (that was, after all, the study design), but I didn't expect the pervasiveness of fog. Episodes of fog - when people find themselves feeling lost or confused - can roll in at any point in life, but they are prevalent in the wake of cliffs. This study taught me that even the most accomplished people can land in a major fog funk."

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Recommended

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1-2-3 MAGIC

Thomas W. Phelan, PhD

Summary​

  • One more parenting book can't hurt! Maybe this is the one =)

Memorable Parts

  • "The messages this parenting philosophy sends to children are: Warm-friendly: I love you and I'll take care of you and Demanding-firm: I expect something from you."

  • "Parenting Job 1: Controlling obnoxious behavior. Parenting Job 2: Encouraging good behavior. And Parenting Job 3: Strengthening your relationship with your children."

  • "Children present two basic problems to adults. The kids are either (1) doing something negative we want them to Stop (like whining), or (2) not doing something positive we would like them to Start (like getting dressed)."

  • "There is an enchanting but troublesome idea that parents and teacher carry around in their heads about young children. This naive assumption - or wish - causes not only discipline failures but stormy scenes. The idea we're talking about is the 'Little Adult Assumption.'"

  • "If you have a child who is doing something you don't like, get really upset about it on a regular basis and, sure enough, she'll repeat it for you."

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Recommended

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