Question for the week

Are 5,001 Facebook Friends One Too Many?
By AIMEE LEE BALL
Published: May 28, 2010, The New York Times

THE British anthropologist and Oxford professor Robin Dunbar has posed a theory that the number of individuals with whom a stable interpersonal relationship can be maintained (read: friends) is limited by the size of the human brain, specifically the neocortex. “Dunbar’s number,” as this hypothesis has become known, is 150.

Facebook begs to differ.

Friending “sustains an illusion of closeness in a complex world of continuous partial attention,” said Roger Fransecky, a clinical psychologist and executive coach in New York (2,894 friends).



Do you agree or disagree?



Or, do you have a front porch? (local conversation, people you really know or see?)

Roger Franseky

Roger Franesky, CEO of The Apogee Group

We deeply believe that the invitation of life is to live a remarkable life. Never settle for second best. You must be committed each day to the sense of the prose and poetry of your life.

Lessons—they are called lessons because they are less every year

Everyone in my life is my teacher. Everyone is in my life because I choose them to be in my life. Everything happens for a reason. There are no accidents. No what age you are, no matter what you are doing, you are supposed to be here. You are here to unfold to other people.

Most of us think we change. We do not. We modify.

Real change occurs deliberately and with intention. It happens because you are living in that dynamic tension between attention and intention.

The question of life is not what you are doing, the question if life is what are you becoming. Are you becoming that by default or by design? If becoming by default the universe steps in and surprises you and you may not get to the destination you want. Wouldn’t it be better to step in and try to design the future you want?

We are leaping into the future without a parachute. The core energy of the world is not order it is chaos. Everywhere we see order it is an illusion.

We are in the process of every day of leaping into the unknown. If you are able to do that and survive you will prevail. If you stay in the plane and tighter the parachute you will end up in a place not of your own choosing. Someone else will choose.

Change begins with endings, not beginning. You must surrender your beliefs, you must grieve about it, and you must let it go before you can step into a new beginning.

You never change without going through this unfathomable process of sitting and surrendering to the neutral zone.

It is like sitting in a fog-draped lake rowing from one rowing from one pier to another. You are leaving the place you knew and understood and you are rowing through the fog to something that is unknown. Mid-lake you have a choice. You trust at some level but you can’t see it. Do you have the courage to keep going or turn back? Most of us turn back. Most of us are terrified at what is at the other end. Change occurs when you stay in the rowboat. The mist clears rather quickly.

All change occurs with one thing—starts with what you believe. Most people have encoded their beliefs at the age of nine. They are stuck in nine. Part of how they experience life and their fears is not as a rational 40-year-old but as a scared nine-year-old.

Nobody can impose change on you. It comes from within you. We stop learning. We stop seeking. We fail to develop emotionally. We fail to make creative decisions. We fail to positively listen to ourselves and others. We believe our own BS.


We need to know about ourselves: beliefs, values, the prose and the poetry.
We need more self-knowledge.
We must commit to a ruthless self-inventory
We commit to a guilt-free action plan.
We find the tools, the mentors, the partners to succeed.
We surrender bias, old data, empty baggage, smelly socks.

STRATEGY

Give up the illusion that you can predict the future. It is a very liberating moment.

All you can do is to give yourself the capacity to respond to the only certainty in life—which is uncertainty.

The creation of that capacity is the purpose of strategy.

THE TRANSITION PROCESS

Ending
Letting go and surrendering.
Neutral zone: non-man’s land between the old reality and the new

New Beginnings
Re-invention and renewal.

Principals of change
Each individual chooses to change. Change is about choice.
Change is a process that can be enabled, not managed.

Check your current beliefs . . . are they out of date
Celebrate what you do well, and own your own centers of excellence
Acknowledge the gaps and gaffs

What are your gifts?
Sort for the real values and the sources of value creation.

Each day we have reminders of how important it is to align our intentions and where we focus our attention, our efforts, our hard work. And when we do, discovering rewards in surprising corners.

"Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become your character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny."

Eat, Pray, Love

If you were to design your own version of Eat, Pary and LOve where would you go. Mention all three components and tell me why. Example. For Love I would go to XXXXXXXXXXXX because. AThe length should not exceed six sentences.

Marx posting

Blog posting: Due by 6 p.m. Sunday. Two-three sentences.

Take your assigned quote. What did Marx mean by this statement?

A-G: "A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of Communism"

H-M: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles"

N-P: "Society as a whole is more and more splitting into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat"

Q-Scott: "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for the managing of the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie"

Shirley-Stewart: "What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable"

Stvartak-Z: "Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that is does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation"

Kafka query

What is The Trial about? There are about 20 different topics. You must read the posts before you. No duplicates allowed. Due 6 p.m. Sunday.

Kafka

An ambitious, worldly young bank official named Joseph K. is arrested by two warders "one fine morning," although he has done nothing wrong. K. is indignant and outraged. The morning happens to be that of his thirtieth birthday. One year later, on the morning of his thirty-first birthday, two warders again come for K. They take him to a quarry outside of town and kill him in the name of the Law. K. lets them.

The Trial is the chronicle of that intervening year of K.'s case, his struggles and encounters with the invisible Law and the untouchable Court. It is an account, ultimately, of state-induced self-destruction. Yet, as in all of Kafka's best writing, the "meaning" is far from clear. Just as the parable related by the chaplain in Chapter Nine (called "The Doorkeeper" or "Before the Law") elicits endless commentary from students of the Law, so has The Trial been a touchstone of twentieth-century critical interpretation. As some commentators have noted, it has, in parts, the quality of revealed truth; as such it is ultimately unresolvable--a mirror for any sectarian reading.

How to summarize this kind of text? It was written during 1914-1915, while Kafka was an official in the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. On one level we can see in The Trial a satirical pillorying of the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy of Kafka's day. Yet to many readers it is eerily prescient of the psychological weaponry used by the much more insidious totalitarian regimes to come, of the legally-sanctioned death machines Kafka never lived to see. It is also an unfinished novel, and this is apparent in the final chapters. It is at times as suffocating to read as the airless rooms of the Court that it describes. The German title, Der Prozess, connotes both a "trial" and a "process," and it is perhaps this maddening feeling of inevitability that leaves a lasting visceral impression: the machinery has been set in motion, and the process will grind toward conclusion despite our most desperate exhortations.

Characters
Joseph K. - The hero and protagonist of the novel, K. is the Chief Clerk of a bank. Ambitious, shrewd, more competent than kind, he is on the fast track to success until he is arrested one morning for no reason. There begins his slide into desperation as he tries to grapple with an all-powerful Court and an invisible Law.

Fraulein Burstner - A boarder in the same house as Joseph K. She lets him kiss her one night, but then rebuffs his advances. She makes a brief reappearance in the novel's final pages.

Frau Grubach - The proprietress of the lodging house in which K. lives. She holds K. in high esteem.

Uncle Karl - K.'s impetuous uncle from the country, formerly his guardian. Karl insists that K. hire Huld, the lawyer.

Huld, the Lawyer - K.'s fustian advocate who provides precious little in the way of action and far too much in the way of anecdote.

Leni - Herr Huld's nurse, she's on fire for Joseph K. She soon becomes his lover. Apparently, she finds accused men extremely attractive--the fact of their indictment makes them irresistible to her.

Assistant Manager - K.'s unctuous rival at the Bank, only too willing to catch K. in a compromising situation.

Block, the Tradesman - Block is another accused man and client of Huld. His case is five year's old, and he is but a shadow of the prosperous man he once was. All his time, energy, and resources are now devoted to his case. Although he has hired hack lawyers on the side, he is completely and pathetically subservient to Huld.

Titorelli, the Painter - Titorelli inherited the position of Court Painter from his father. He knows a great deal about the comings and goings of the Court's lowest level. He offers to help K., and manages to unload a few identical landscape paintings on the accused man. If the novel had been finished, we might have heard more from Titorelli.

Freud postings

Note: questions are assigned based on alphabetical order.
About 50-75 words. You should reference page numbers (p. X).

Last names:
A-G: Articulate the Pleasure Principle (positive and negative)
H-M: What are the Three Sources of Human Suffering?
N-P: Is Civilization as a Source of Our Unhappiness, Our Malaise or Discontent? (How Does Civilization Emerge?)
Q-Scott: Explain the Aggressive Instinct and the Generation of the Super-Ego
Shirley-Stewart: Explain the Super-Ego and the Sense of "Guilt"
Stvartak-Z: What are the implications of Freudian theory?