Aphorisms on Leadership and Lowly Tasks

You cannot lead with poor attitude. The attitude which you do a lowliest task marks your character.  If your attitude is poor doing a lowly task you will never be qualified to do a leaderly task.

A lowly task, even sweeping with a broom, can be done elegantly and excellently.

A leaderly worker performs his tasks in a leaderly way, with a marked level of diligence, elegance and excellence that serves his master and models excellence to his fellow works.

Business Aphorism

Excellent customer service is the product of rising to both the technical challenge and the human challenge that lies within every task, obstacle and difficulty.

Aphorism based on Proverbs 17:21

Clarity comes from the wise, not from the merely educated.

A Couple More Aphorisms

Being a problem preempter is superior to being a problem solver

It is not true that the effort being creative in one area of your life will detract from being creative in another area.  Creativity is not a zero-sum game.  The more things you are creative in, the more creative you will be in those things.

Aphorism of the Day 03-02-16

The profundity of the essential difference between men and women is proportional to the intensity of sexual attraction.

Aphorism of the day

Having clarity of thought is the child of having depth of thought

Aphorism

As a culture moves forward in time it simultaneously moves both forward and backward in moral progress.  It is foolish to pine for a more morally pure past. So too is it foolish to believe that the passage of time has accrued only moral progress. 

More Aphorisms

-- We are designed to find joy in the perception of order and in the pursuit of order.

-- Both the artist and the scientist are engaged in a journey of discovery. The only difference between them is the type of laboratory the operate in.

-- Behind every law is a moral idea, and behind every moral idea is a moral universe.

-- A mediocre teacher presents facts. A great teacher imparts joy.

--To be stated and restated and restated in slightly different words each time in perpetuity ... is the rhythm of truth breathing.

-- To be ethical in your fame is to give back something of value to the culture worthy of the attention that you are taking from it. To be unethical in your fame is to take attention from the culture out of proportion to the value you add to it.  Example of ethical fame: Capt. Sully Sullenberger after US Airways flight 1549 miracle on the Hudson.  Example of unethical fame: Kim Kardashian.

-- In romantic relationships, the physical intimacy should be in proportion to the commitment, knowing that marriage is the ultimate commitment, and sex is the ultimate physical act.

Aphorisms 2011 to 2015

Here is a collection aphorisms that I have posted on Facebook spanning 2011 to 2015:

·      -- Masculinity is like fire:  submitted to God it can be an instrument of light, protection, provision and warmth.  It is dangerous if it rages uncontrolled and but is also dangerous if it is quenched.

·      -- It is not necessarily a good thing that someone is "standing up" for what they believe.  Standing up for what you believe is like entering the boxing ring.  If you are trained and prepared you stand the chance of representing yourself and your cause well.  If you are not, you risk damaging yourself and your cause.

·      -- Accept the world you are in, but not the world as it is.

·      -- To fear the Lord is the alpha of wisdom.  To enjoy the Lord is the omega of wisdom.

·      -- Arrogance is to assume that what you don’t see isn’t there. Humility is to assume there is more there than what you see.

·       -- Leadership is the ability to help others connect the small picture with the big picture.

·       -- Attention to detail is love.

·       -- Empathy is the soul of wisdom.

·        -- "Cutting the rock with water" is the act of applying continual,           persistent low impact pressure to solve a hard problem, wearing it           down until it cracks and breaks.

·        -- Solving a problem with art is superior to solving it with force.

·         -- A wise man is slow to offer advice on how to run the place when he's newly arrived.

·          --   A person who has “class” has it as a byproduct of being excellent in the right things, of  having the right character. A person who is pre-occupied with “having class” only succeeds in being a snob.

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more aphorisms

Fashionable skepticism is a species of gullibility

Giving good advice and good council is a high art. For those who meet the challenge of that art, their council will be received by others as music. For those who do not meet the challenge, their council will be received as clanging gongs.

Common Sense

There are two competing ideas of "common sense". The first idea of "common sense" is an understanding that is commonly held by most people. The second idea of "common sense" is an understanding that does not require special/difficult/esoteric knowledge for one to hold, regardless of whether most people hold it. The latter may be better described as "commonly available sense".

aphorism

The one engaged in strenuous thought is creating the future before it is revealed.

Aphorism on clothing

The clothing that I appreciate on others the most is the clothing I notice the least.

Another aphorism

A wise man knows when he is ignorant. A fool does not.

A couple more aphorisms

When you treat a social reality as having a simple moral problem with a simple fix, you often ignore other moral realities that exist in the true complexity of the matter. When that happens the cure you created for the one problem becomes the poison that causes other problems.


To those who say "There's talk and there's action!" I say this: Serious talk is a form of action and is often necessary before any other constructive action can begin.

Even more aphorisms

Beware the offhand remark -- it is the serious point that one feels no need to defend. It is a window into a subterranean world of pressure to conform to the belief system that assigns truth and value to what is being offhandedly said.

Beware one who makes a serious point/argument wrapped up in jokey talk. If you challenge his point he will try to shame you for being humorless.

Beware the national leader who attempts to charm you out of your desire for specifics on a topic of national interest.

More aphorisms

When discussing a sensitive topic, one must be capable of making a distinction between raw truth and useful truth.



A morally serious person will find more of a sense of community among the grass and the trees than among morally unserious people.



Some seeds require fire to break free of their husk to germinate. So it is with our moral and ethical sensibilities.



Is the grass green? Or is it many shades of yellow, green, brown and black? Or is the color of the grass subject to cultural perception? The truth is, each facet of the grass represents a different setting of a zoom lens on life that will be more enlightening to certain discussions and not others.

More aphorisms

• A thing has value if someone values it, no matter how mean or insignificant the item is or how mean and insignificant the person appears to be.
  

• While a certain degree of cerebral maturity comes with age, moral maturity is not guaranteed by age. One must work at gaining moral wisdom.

• A lizard can be fearless, but it takes a human to have courage, since to have courage you must have the capacity to see your fear within and put it aside.
  
  

• Show me one who thinks that those on the other side of a controversial issue from him are thoughtless and I’ll show you one who likes to think that he thinks more than he actually thinks.
  

• That which is a source of your pleasure is that which is gaining your allegiance.
  

• You commit an original sin the day you first promote yourself at another's expense. It remains as a mark on your soul and character until the day you are contrite about it. It remains and outstanding offense until you apologize.

• When someone denies the existence of an evil, remember that it is often a tactic used by those who wish to promote it.

• Making a false distinction between people leads to injustice. So too does making a false equality.

Every week the Week magazine has a puzzle contest where they provide a story/scenario and invite their subscribers to try to complete it, offering a years free subscription to the winner. This week the puzzle is about the Dalai Lama and his new twitter account. The contest was to come up with a wise saying within 140 characters that the Dalai Lama might send his followers.

So here is my entry:

"If you surf the internet too much you will not download wisdom. Take the time for reflection for the internet is only as big as your imagination."

I thought it would be fitting if the Dalai Lama questioned the very medium he was using to enlighten his followers with. It is an aphorism that will lead into a set of essays that I am working on about modern technology and the inner life.

More Aphorisms

There are habits of casual cruelty that will make one a schoolyard success but that will cause one to fail at meaningful endeavors later in life


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Fear that is not taken captive to curiosity is a tyrant


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A temptation is a crisis of wisdom


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People often have good reasons for having bad or flawed beliefs


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Pictures and artistic renderings from the ancient past of revelry and celebrating always seem darker to our eyes than they appeared to those enjoying it at the time. We are privy to all of the fierce things that happened afterward, and so we see those celebrations through the lens of sobriety.



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Much of life’s detritus and ephemera is pregnant with meaning but covered in a shell of banality that one must crack so that its beauty and/or its darkness can be taken captive.


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Social climbing is the pursuit of vapid excellence.