Quotes About Adaptation

Loyalty on a mercenary is like armour on a swimmer.

You can pick out the bits that suit your story and toss the unhappy truths to the wind.

The truth, if it ever existed, has gone through its customary transformation into something more easily digested by the human mind.

A foundation of values surrounded by those flexible rings of changeable tactics is the strongest basis for stability in business today. You can most successfully change what you're doing and how you do it if you have a clear sense of who you are.

Whatever you've done to become successful, it won't be enough to keep you successful. You have to move on to the next thing or be prepared to lose ground. There's very little maintaining of your position these days. You're either moving forward or backward.

These tend to be in the areas of basic values like integrity, creating mutually beneficial relationships with customers and employees, and providing honest value. What I am saying is don't make assumptions about what will work tomorrow based on what worked yesterday, especially in the area of processes, procedures, strategies, and operations.

Prosperity can be very dangerous for any company. It can lead you to believe that you've cracked the code, or "figured this business out," or that you "know how this business works." No. You know how it used to work. To stop and relax for more than a brief moment is one of the most dangerous things you can do in a marketplace that changes constantly. This doesn't mean that you should run scared or operate your business in a panic mode.

Changing just for the sake of changing can be a more dangerous trap than being stuck in complacency. The graveyard of failed businesses is full of companies that were willing to try anything, whether it made sense or not, just so they could feel that they were "riding the waves of change.

Just because something has always been done a certain way does not necessarily mean it's the best way, or the correct way, or the healthiest way for your horse, or your relationship with your horse, or your life.

I didn't want to write SF about people who Sold The Moon or were the big Earth-shattering Newtons-Pasteurs-Einsteins-Hawkings of the future. I wasn't interested in the people who shaped the future. I was more interested in people who were shaped by the future. People who were products of their environment.

If you want a new outcome, you will have to break the habit of being yourself, and reinvent a new self.

So if we want to change some aspect of our reality, we have to think, feel, and act in new ways; we have to "be" different in terms of our responses to experiences. We have to "become" someone else. We have to create a new state of mind … we need to observe a new outcome with that new mind.

Think of it this way: the input remains the same, so the output has to remain the same. How, then, can you ever create anything new?

We can't create a new future while we're living in our past. It's simply impossible.

For instance, when a lion was chasing your ancestors, the stress response was doing what it was designed to do—protect them from their outer environment. That's adaptive. But if, for days on end, you fret about your promotion, overfocus on your presentation to upper management, or worry about your mother being in the hospital, these situations create the same chemicals as though you were being chased by a lion.

Personal change takes an intentional act of will, and it usually means that something was making us uncomfortable enough to want to do things differently. To evolve is to overcome the conditions in our life by changing something about ourselves. We

Now, when a new day dawns for us after the long night of darkness and the phoenix rises regenerated from its ashes, we have invented a new self. And the physical, biological expression of the new self is literally becoming someone else. That's true metamorphosis.

If a species is subject to repetitive external environmental stimuli over the course of several generations, in time that species will adapt to those stimuli. The genetics of that species will change to support a new internal state, one that will help the species survive that external stimuli for generations to come. This is called survival of the species. It is a linear, slow process for most species.

self-directed neuroplasticity (or SDN).

The Solid Ground We Stand On … Isn't

In order to change your life, you have to literally become someone else.

It seems that human nature is such that we balk at changing until things get really bad and we're so uncomfortable that we can no longer go on with business as usual. This is as true for an individual as it is for a society. [...] My message is: Why wait? We can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, or we can evolve in a state of joy and inspiration.

Reality can be a bit of a moving target—literally.

A new mind creates a new brain.