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cashandprizes · 20 days

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The Boring CBT Final for the Fun CBT King - By Lexi Moon aka CashAndPrizes

Okay! People asked and I fought tumblr to deliver!

Hi, I'm CashAndPrizes also known as Lexi Moon, and I am a doctoral student studying clinical psychology. I wrote about Redacted (specifically Lasko) for my final for Cognitive Behavioral Therapies. Here's the paper.

Shout out to my beloved friends in the WhoreHome and W.A.R. for keeping me going through this paper. I love you dearly.

Words of warning:

I am a clinician in training. I am still being supervised. I have not been graded on this final yet. (I'll update when I get it!) And I am definitely not an expert. Take everything here with a grain of salt.

I am not a licensed therapist but even if I was I am not your therapist. I'm play acting as Lasko's therapist for a class. Take everything here with a grain of salt. If you read any of this and think "It's a bit loud in here" do not assume this is absolutely you. If you have the means, please try finding your own mental health professionals and if you don't, please do a lot of research on these subjects. Don't use this as a diagnosis please, I'm just a guy.

I filled in a lot of Lasko's backstory based on my experiences with patients and my beloved Lasko kinnies who were instrumental to the writing of this paper. (I won't tag you and call you out, but you know who you are an I love you.) Your headcanons might be different - that's cool. I'm not claiming canon over most of this - but I did use the transcripts and timeline very heavily.

If you don't like the idea of pansexual, transgender, Indo-Caribbean/Trinidadian child of immigrants Lasko - pookie this might not be for you. If that sounds like your jam though - come on in, the water's fine.

Without further ado. Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Mambo Number Five. Here's Lasky. I can, in fact, fix him.

Case Summary

This case conceptualization addresses the hypothetical course of treatment for Lasko Moore, a character in a modern-fantasy audio narrative. Lasko Moore presented to treatment as a 30-year-old pansexual and transgender Indo-Caribbean man working as an administrator and adjunct professor at Dahlia Academy for Magical Novices for persistent anxiety symptoms. Upon intake, Lasko reported experiencing near constant racing thoughts that he was unable to “turn off”, panic attacks, and increased anxiety about social interactions at his work. He described spending a significant amount of mental energy preparing for and reviewing social interactions with colleagues such that he often avoids his colleagues in an effort to minimize his anxiety. Lasko reported that the anticipation around coworker interactions (meetings, socials, etc.) becomes quickly overwhelming as he becomes preoccupied with what he will say and do in an effort to try and minimize his tendency to become hyperverbal and overshare information as well as stuttering. He described this process as starting with embarrassment over previous interactions which leads to critical thoughts like “I shouldn’t be so anxious” which leads to rehearsal of potential outcomes of interactions. However, in the moment of social interactions he becomes so anxious as there “aren’t any objectives [or] any specific roles” to the conversations that he “word vomits” and becomes tangential and overshares until he runs out of breath and stops himself from talking due to his own critical thoughts and begins to isolate himself.

Lasko was initially diagnosed with Panic Disorder (F41.0) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (F41.1) to capture his persistent anxious state with occasional intense bouts of extreme anxiety and panic. An initial long-term goal was collaboratively set as improving his coping strategies and tolerance of anxious affect to better network and create relationships. As this was Lasko’s first time utilizing mental health services, treatment began with inhibitory learning in combination with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in order to facilitate willingness to experience interoceptive cues and extinguish avoidance due to fear of negative consequences. This was able to reduce his panic attacks as he felt more able to tolerate overwhelming anxious affect. Despite his clear engagement with treatment through attendance, homework, and skills practice, Lasko continued to struggle with critical thoughts and avoidance of coworkers which he identified as a major barrier to his continued professional development and potential non-academic relationships. Through collaborative exploration, a persistent early maladaptive schema relating to his critical thoughts emerged and treatment shifted to a goal of starting dialogue between schema modes to facilitate the use of coping strategies to build interpersonal effectiveness. Lasko was born as the human-born child of Trinidadian immigrants who moved the southern California in the early 1990s due to political unrest. From an early age Lasko faced high academic expectations from his parents who desired upward mobility for their child and a “piece of the American Dream.” His mother was emotionally labile to the point of explosive outbursts where his father was more passive and spent significant energy working and caring for his wife. This experience started Lasko’s early maladaptive schema regarding rigid standards with no support, which only became worse when Lasko’s elemental powers began developing at thirteen and his parents expected perfect control (and perfect suppression) of his powers with no training and a highly critical environment. This led to Lasko isolating himself at home as much as possible to hide his lack of control but left him with an environment that created a positive feedback loop where his lack of control led to increased yelling and criticism which led to worsening outbursts of his powers. This culminated in a final traumatic event when Lasko was seventeen and lost control of his powers, leading to his mother “calling [him] everything she could think of […] she was so loud and I just wanted her to stop” to the point that Lasko accidentally sucked all of the air out of the room and almost suffocated his mother. Though Lasko was able to find support with the Department of Uniform Magical Practices and become emancipated from his parents, these experiences developed a maladaptive pattern of hypercritical thinking about himself, especially in the context of social relationships.

Research

Avelino Cardoso et al. (2023) pose potential ways to modify and apply Schema Therapy to sexual and gender minorities. This work focuses on understanding how of harmful implicit and explicit messages about gender and sexuality contribute to early maladaptive schemas based on consideration of the minority stress model, and how Schema Therapy interventions can be applied to sexual and gender minorities. One area of particular relevance from this article is the conceptualization of an inner critic mode that specifically represents stereotypes and prejudice that are naturalized by society. When applying these principles to the case of Lasko, the environment of his childhood can be understood as an essential aspect of the treatment. Though Lasko did not present to treatment looking to discuss the impact of his pansexuality and transgender identity, potentially because of the clinician’s own advertised identities, the impacts of systemic oppression against sexual and gender minorities can be woven into treatment for his hypercritical early maladaptive schema. Based on the suggestions of Avelino Cardoso et al. (2023), it may be worth examining his secondary schemas around shame and social isolation as also being shaped by his experience as a gender and sexual minority and how that may contribute to his predominant hypercritical schema.

A major concern for this section of the paper is the lack of research modifying second and third wave cognitive behavioral therapies for sexual and gender minorities. Results for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy with LGBTQ+ individuals only revealed one article about group therapy and a study proposal; results for Schema Therapy with LGBTQ+ individuals only provided Avelino Cardoso et al.’s (2023) theoretical essay. There does not appear to be much research and what research exists is extremely limited with no randomized control trials. This makes it clear that evaluating the efficacy of treatment for sexual and gender minorities is not a priority, which leads to a major critique of Avelino Cardoso et al.’s work. Though the article is useful for considering how to address systemic change in the room, it seems to attribute lived experiences of sexual and gender minorities to a schema rather than ongoing threats in a world where hate crimes and discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals is on the rise. The abandonment and violence that these individuals may face is not imagined and it can be seen in the lack of interest in research.

ADDRESSING Model

When considering the case of Lasko, it is important to remember that psychology does not develop in the vacuum of individual experiences – psychology develops based on the global environment, which includes the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts as well as individual context. Utilizing Hays (2022) ADDRESSING Model, the impact of Lasko’s intersecting identities can be understood to have a major impact on his current symptom presentation and the development of early maladaptive schemas and schema modes. Lasko was born to first generation immigrants from Trinidad with strong Indo-Caribbean and Catholic roots – and he was assigned female sex at birth. Using a systems-focused lens, Lasko’s current symptoms can also be understood within the larger context of living in a world where several aspects of his identity are under intense scrutiny and political debate. As a child of immigrants and as someone Indo-Caribbean, Lasko likely faced explicit and implicit messages about his intellectual capabilities, his body, and his work ethic. While Lasko directly experienced his mother as extremely critical and never satisfied with his performance, it is just as likely that he received messages as a child about needing to work harder than many of his same aged peers for equal amounts of recognition based on his racial, ethnic, and sex assigned at birth. There is also the element of the disconnect between his sex assigned at birth and his gender presentation, and the messages he received about being transgender from his Catholic, Trinidadian immigrant parents as well as the American culture – which were likely discouraging at best and hostile at worst.

Keeping all of this in mind, Lasko’s hypercritical, social isolated, and emotional deprived schemas can be understood as also being a direct result of the intersection of his identities – and this does not even cover the added layer of being an empowered human-born. In a variety of ways, Lasko has had very different experiences than his peers by virtue of being a transgender, pansexual, child of unempowered human immigrants. When Lasko describes feeling different from the people around him growing up and when he entered the empowered world, this is a real experience based on the multiple identity intersections – it is not hard to believe that he did not have many friends or family members between the late 1990s and late 2000s that had similar experiences to him. This left him with the acute sense that he was fundamentally different and needed to work much harder than those around him, and also that to get validation he needed to sacrifice his needs (or identities) for those of others.

Methodology

The initial treatment approach for Lasko was a combination of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and inhibitory learning with interoceptive and in vivo exposure, which was successful in decreasing his panic symptoms but not generalized anxiety symptoms. Lasko reported that he experienced sudden panic attacks that seemed random and included symptoms such as accelerated heart rate, tightness in his chest, hyperventilation, feeling that he would lose control, sweaty palms, and loss of control over his magic. At the time of treatment, he reported that he had been having at least one panic attack every other month since he was a teenager and that they would occur more frequently when he was in periods of intense stress. After exploration, Lasko was able to determine that he often had panic attacks related when he spends time ruminating in anticipation of social interactions. Lasko explained that during panic attacks he tends to seek quiet, dark places to hide and “ride out” the panic attack and that he has thoughts like “I’m going to mess this up” or “I can’t do this.”

Treatment started with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and inhibitory learning as an evidence-based approach for treating panic attacks and generalized anxiety to address his symptoms and reduce further panic attacks as well as his anxious thought patterns (Barlow, 2021; Ruiz et al, 2020). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a therapeutic practice that focuses on improving psychological flexibility and understanding the function of behavioral patterns (Gordon & Borushok, 2017). Much of early treatment with Lasko consisted of psychoeducation around the therapeutic process, behavioral therapy, and mindfulness. He took easily to ACT and benefited from understanding how avoiding social interactions was negatively reinforced by decreasing his anxiety while keeping him from creating connection. Inhibitory learning through multiple types of exposure (in-vivo and interoceptive) was able to make him more comfortable with feeling panicked, effectively reducing his panic attacks (Ramnero & Törneke, 2008). However, his baseline anxious affect and negative thoughts did not ease despite the use of ACT, so treatment shifted towards understanding the function of his persistent negative thoughts through Schema Therapy.

Lasko’s symptom presentation after several sessions of ACT and inhibitory learning was a persistent anxious affect and worry (especially around social situations) that felt uncontrollable and critical ruminative thoughts. As it seemed treatment had plateaued, the content of sessions moved towards a deeper understanding of his critical thoughts based on an indication of deeply held early maladaptive schemas. Barlow defines early maladaptive schemas as persistent behavioral, cognitive, and relational themes developed in early childhood that are reinforced throughout lifetime and that cause significant disruption and dysfunction (2021). Schemas are often viewed as truths about the self and others and are difficult to challenge because of the deep affective component and lifetime of reinforcement (Barlow, 2021). Movement towards schema work started with psychoeducation which involved discussing how schemas are reinforced through modeling (in this case by his mother’s critical comments about his performance) and how people can often act in ways that reconfirm schemas into adulthood. Lasko then completed the Young Schema Questionnaire - Revised and received high scores on schemas related to emotional deprivation, social isolation, and unrelenting standards (Rijkeboer, 2015). During the debriefing and explanation of the results, Lasko reported that when he was completing the questionnaire he felt “really seen” in a way that was uncomfortable but also validating to his experiences in childhood and as a queer person of color living in America.

The topic of sessions then moved towards further psychoeducation about the process of schema work, including delving into his schemas and determining schema modes with the goal of improving his understanding of schemas and working towards healthier integration of modes and coping strategies (Barlow, 2021). Lasko was committed to treatment but apprehensive about “what would come up,” speaking to his concerns about dredging up uncomfortable memories and feelings. In response, he was encouraged to revisit his understanding of ACT and his core values as a reminder of why he wanted to continue treatment and work through feelings of discomfort and grief. The next session started proper schema work, starting with Lasko explaining his understanding of schemas and how they were currently impacting him. He aptly summarized that his childhood experience of feeling intense pressure to do well academically and conform to socially and religiously defined gender roles left him feeling isolated from his peers and that he always needed to work harder and do more, while also feeling as though he had no support or anyone who truly understood him – this led to the development of schemas related to emotional unrelenting standards, social isolation, and emotional deprivation.

The first step of schema work was to identify schema modes as recommended by Barlow (2021). Lasko completed the Young Schema Mode Inventory (YSMI) as homework (along with his regular thought and feeling records) and scored highly in the following modes: vulnerable child, compliant surrenderer, detached self-soother, punitive parent, and demanding parent (Lobbestael, 2015). With this in mind, the next session started with reviewing his thought and emotion records as a baseline for identifying schema modes. Lasko was able to sort different thoughts and feelings into categories that broadly resembled the categories for child modes, coping modes, and parent modes, but he struggled to come up with names for them. He eventually decided on “Young Lasko” to describe his vulnerable child mode, “The Doormat” to describe his compliant surrenderer mode, and “The Critic” to describe his punitive and demanding parent modes with suggestions from the therapist based on his results on the YSMI. Lasko was overwhelmed with sadness and fear during this session, describing how hard it was to name and admit these schemas out loud and how scared and vulnerable he felt. He reported a heavy weight on his chest and how badly he wanted to hide from the therapist and his own internal experience, and his wavering control over his powers was evident by the rustling of papers in the room. The second half of the session was dedicated to using ACT and mindfulness techniques to sit with the almost intolerable affect without judgement. The session closed with a discussion of how he could focus on his value of self-care after the session and he decided that he had plans to meet with his friend group the next day and try to talk with them about his feelings as a form of self-care and confirming his acceptance in his friend group.

The following session he reported that his conversation with his friend group had gone “really well, better than [he] expected” and the session started by discussing how this did not conform to his expectations as a way to integrate the initial phase of inhibitory learning into the present. The conversation then moved to re-introducing the names for his schema modes and utilizing a combination of mindfulness skills and reaffirmation of his core values to give a voice to those modes and their needs by recommendation of Barlow (2021). Lasko explored that “Little Lasko” felt “awful, awful all the time” and was a sad little boy trapped in a girl’s body who “[held] onto all the bad stuff” including feelings of being completely isolated from others and deep sadness. Lasko further explored that “The Doormat” was a representation of how he had worked so hard in school and at home to make everyone else happy and that by avoiding his own needs and wants (for self-expression, acceptance, nurturance, joy, etc.) he thought he would get his needs met. At this point in treatment, discussing “The Critic” was still too affectively laden so discussion started with the first two with the goal of working up to “The Critic.” Based on guidelines from Barlow (2021), the next few sessions focused on identifying the ways these schemas had developed within his childhood and how they had once been adaptive and essential for his survival. Lasko’s homework between these sessions was to read handouts given by the therapist about schema modes and the ways they are internalized throughout childhood. Lasko was also willing to try journaling once a week from the perspective of either “Little Lasko” or “The Doormat” to better understand how integral they had been to his survival.

Session Description

This transcript describes the first part of the schema work, where Lasko began to identify and label schemas with prompting from the therapist. Rather than just using the terms from the YSMI, Lasko was encouraged to create his own meaning to better represent his own understanding of the schema modes based on evidence-based methods from Barlow (2021). The goal of this session was to help Lasko observe the schema modes based on his thought and feeling record from the previous week and start thinking of the modes as parts of him that were observable separate from himself.

Therapist: You’ve summed up schemas and how they work, and I don’t even have anything else to add. Lasko: I really, um, want to make sure you know I’m serious about this. I want to get better, I want to be better. Therapist: It feels like it’s really important for you to feel like I know how hard you’re working right now. Lasko: Yeah, well… Yeah, I don’t want you to think I’m not doing the work. Therapist: It’s interesting because you’re the one paying for sessions, you know? While I’m glad that we are working together towards your goals, what you get out of this is really up to you. Can we talk more about how you want to make sure I know you’re working hard? I think that’s really tied to this whole schema thing I’m trying to sell you on. Lasko: I’m already sold on it! Therapist: [Hm] Lasko: … That’s… that’s what you mean, isn’t it? Therapist: [Affirmative hm] Lasko: Fuck – sorry – shit! I um… I feel like I need to prove to you that I’m listening and trying really hard. Therapist: What will happen if I think you aren’t trying? Lasko: Well, you won’t take me seriously – at all. You’ll think I’m wasting your time and that I should – I need to be doing more and taking it seriously. Therapist: And how would I be feeling with you? Lasko: Angry, because I’m wasting your time – but I’m not, or I don’t want to. I don’t want to waste your time, you have so many other patients you could be seeing and if I’m not doing what I should be doing then I’m just- I’m taking up space someone else could be using and they probably need it more than me. I mean, I’m fine you know, I’m anxious but I can survive, right? There’re people out there who need your time more than me and I’m wasting it – or I would be. I’m not – I don’t think I’m wasting your time right now except I keep rambling. Therapist: There’s a through-line in there that I want to pull. You feel like you need to do what I expect you to do, right? Lasko: Yeah, I mean you’re the therapist. You’re the expert with – all the experience and degrees. So yeah, I should be doing what you expect. Therapist: It sounds like there’s some part of you that feels like you need to be doing what I say you should do, even if you don’t want to or have something else to say – like your “rambling” – and that if you don’t, you’re wasting my time. Does that feel right?

Lasko: I want to do this, I do. But um, yeah. That feels right. Therapist: And you do what I say you should do because if you don’t…? Lasko: Well I’m wasting your time. And then you’ll – I mean you probably won’t, you’re a really nice person and you’re so helpful but I just… I have this thought that you’ll get mad at me. Therapist: I would be mad at you. What would I do if I was mad at you? Lasko: You would um… Well I know you wouldn’t, because you just – you’re not like that but like my mom would start screaming at me. She would just… she would just yell and tell me that I was wasting their money because I wasn’t doing well enough at the school they paid for me to go to you know? Or I messed up the nice clothes they paid for. Or I just – anything like that really, I was wasting money and time and I was a waste of space and… Fuck – sorry – wait, um. This is hard to talk about and I don’t want to cry. Therapist: This is really hard, I’m really putting you through it already today, aren’t I? Lasko: [Affirmative hm] Therapist: I want to take what you just said and kind of summarize, kind of explain, is that okay? So, it sounds like you have these thoughts that you aren’t trying hard enough – or at least that I don’t think you’re trying hard enough, right? And these thoughts serve to make sure that you show me how hard you’re working so that I believe you, because if I don’t, I might think you’re wasting my time and become angry and yell at you. Lasko: That’s a really succinct way to put it, but yeah. Therapist: So what I think is happening here, is that there’s a part of you that is so terrified that I will become angry and yell at you and make you feel just awful about yourself. And to deal with that, there’s another part of you that works really hard to try and anticipate and meet my needs so I won’t become angry with you. And then there’s also this third part of you, this part that is so critical and reminds you of how scary I could become if I got angry with you and kind of beats me to the punch by being mean first. And all three of these parts were working together in those last few minutes. Lasko: Wow… yeah, that um… you hit the nail right on the head. That feels right. It’s not – um, it’s not really great for me, though. Therapist: What I’d like to do is start by giving a voice to these parts of you, just letting them speak. Do you think we could do that? Lasko: That… That sounds really awful. But, yeah we can… we can do that. Therapist: And here I am, asking you to do these terrible things you don’t want to do and you’re doing them with me anyway. Lasko: That’s the um.. that part of me that tries to meet your needs, right? That’s what you said? Therapist: I think so. I really want to hear more from that part of you.

At this point in the transcript, the therapist was using a combination of techniques to try and get closer to the schemas that were indicated in Lasko’s dialogue. There was a mix of rephrasing/restating what Lasko had said with the dual purpose of making sure the therapist understood and phrasing things in a way that would lead to more dialogue about schemas. The therapist in this section also started outlining the core schema modes operating at the moment in broad terms to gauge Lasko’s ability to tolerate and explore them further with the intention of eventually moving towards labeling schema modes. In this section, it is becoming clear that Lasko’s persistent anxiety about the therapy (proving he is engaged enough) is a result of active schema modes that attempt to anticipate and meet the therapist’s needs to prevent criticism and anger on the part of the therapist. This insight from the conversation can be broadened to potentially explain the utility of Lasko’s critical thoughts and anxiety around social interactions – he spends so much time preparing and planning for these interactions to try and anticipate and meet the needs of others to prevent criticism and anger from his peers, the mere idea of which causes deep feelings of fear and sadness, by criticizing himself first.

Therapist: I think so. I really want to hear more from that part of you. Lasko: I mean – geez, what should I say? Therapist: Maybe we could start with what that feels like…? Lasko: It feels like I’m always guessing, trying to figure it out. I feel like I have to do everything right, try harder, do more…I feel like I always need to be doing more, doing it better. Therapist: What emotions does this part of you have? Lasko: Um, I don’t – I don’t know. Therapist: Do you think I should bring out your old friend the feelings wheel? Lasko: Yeah that might – might help. You know how much I love the wheel. Yeah – um, I guess I feel… inadequate? Maybe… Therapist: Can I suggest something that I’m sensing in you? Lasko: Please, you’re way better at this than me. Therapist: I’m wondering if this part of you feels desperate. Lasko: Yes, desperate. Therapist: Desperate… it feels like there’s more to that. Desperate for what, do you think? Lasko: Desperate… desperate to please – desperate to get it right. Therapist: Wow… desperate to please feels really powerful. I see you rubbing your chest right now, what are you feeling? Lasko: It’s like… my chest feels tight – a little like when I have panic attacks. Therapist: That connection feels really important. What do you make of that? Lasko: I feel – I’ve felt desperate when I’ve had panic attacks before. Like desperate for air, which is just – it’s funny as an air elemental you know, well not funny-funny, but it’s just – anyway, it’s like desperate for air but it’s also like I’m desperate for… I don’t know how to phrase it…? For it to stop, yeah, but also like I… I want to do things right when I talk to people but I always fuck it up – sorry – wait, don’t apologize Lasko. Sorry, I – sorry – fuck. I just- I want to have better interactions with people! I want things to go better and to communicate better so people like me and – I don’t know. Therapist: So people like you… do you think that’s what this part of you wants? Lasko: Yes – so badly… So badly it hurts. Therapist: It hurts in your chest, right there? Lasko: Yeah… it’s tight and heavy and then I start crying because I’m just – I’m a mess. Therapist: You’re feeling so much right now, and you’re doing it because I said we should. Lasko: Well… yeah, it’s um – it sucks but you know better than me. Therapist: That seems to be a thought you have a lot, we’ve talked about it before on your thought and emotion records – and I think it’s really tied to this part of you. Lasko: I mean… maybe, yeah. Therapist: What do you think you could name this part? How do you think we could refer to it? Lasko: Like a name? What kind of name…? Therapist: It’s really up to you, I think it’ll be more helpful to use whatever you think is the best way to describe it rather than my clinical-ese jargon. Lasko: I don’t… I don’t really know. I’m not good at this kind of thing. Can’t you – you can just name it, right? Therapist: I could, but I feel like if I name it we’re staying in this pattern where you just acquiesce to my demands. Lasko: Which is like – the whole point of this, yeah. Therapist: Exactly. What feels hard about thinking of a name? Lasko: I don’t – I don’t want to pick some stupid name that I have to use, and you’ll think “wow that was a really stupid name choice, I should have picked it.” Therapist: [Hm] Lasko: Yeah, you don’t have to say anything, I hear it. Also, I just… naming it feels so real, you know? Then it’s a real thing. Therapist: And there’s something about it being “a real thing” then? Lasko: Then I’d… I’d have to talk about – acknowledging all of it – that feels really awful. I feel like I can’t breathe right now. Therapist: I can feel the air becoming thin too. Why don’t we take a few moments and just notice how you’re feeling and breathe through it?

This section of the transcript starts to explore and move towards labeling the schema mode of the Compliant Surrenderer. This mode attempts to anticipate and meet the needs of his hypercritical Punitive and Demanding Parent mode to protect his Vulnerable Child mode, which becomes clear in the transcript as he verbalizes that this part of himself is desperate to do well (whatever that may look like) so that others will like him. Just sitting with this part of himself causes Lasko almost intolerable feelings of desperation and panic, likely due to his fear of his Punitive and Demanding Parent mode as well as a fear of criticism and rejection from the therapist.

Closing Thoughts

I really enjoyed this case and this paper. While I didn't choose a current patient, I feel that I got a lot out of this assignment. It was really interesting to think formally about a character and work through a treatment plan and focus on a specific element of treatment. I managed to pick a case where I got to implement schema therapy, which is one of the forms of CBT that I find most interesting in addition to ACT. Despite this being a fictional character, I have certainly had previous patients who have similar struggles – and I also felt that I was able to use the media (and my previous experience to fill in gaps) to make the most of this assignment for my learning.

As I was working on this case, it occurred to me that though I felt like I was able to portray this character as accurately as possible I felt like so much was missing or unaccounted for. Because I was working from a CBT rather than psychodynamic lens, I felt like there were clear points where I would have ideally worked more relationally to address resistance or spoken more about the therapeutic relationship. There are always a million different things you could pick out of a patient’s response to respond to, and it was challenging to focus more on the schemas rather than talk about the relationship. I also felt like because of the limits of this paper, I did not have enough space to talk in the methodology or transcript session about how I felt his identities played a part in the development of his schemas. In this example, it was very clear to me that Lasko’s experiences of his parents were only part of the equation as development does not exist in a vacuum – there is a reality that his identity as a pansexual, transgender, Indo-Caribbean, second-generation immigrant and his experiences of xenophobia, racism, heterosexism, and transphobia would have also impacted his feelings of isolation/difference from others and internalized pressure to present and perform well. I also think that this would have been something I discussed in subsequent sessions as I believe this is another function of his schemas – to protect and prepare himself from his experiences of a hostile, sometimes violent world.

References

Avelino Cardoso, B. L., Paim, K., Figueiredo Catelan, R., & Liebross, E. H. (2023). Minority stress and the inner critic/oppressive sociocultural schema mode among sexual and gender minorities. Current Psychology, 42(23), 19991–19999. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03086-y

Barlow, D. H. (2021). Clinical handbook of psychological disorders: a step-by-step treatment manual. Sixth edition. New York, The Guilford Press.

Hays, P. A. (2022). Addressing Cultural Complexities in Counseling and Clinical Practice: An Intersectional Approach. Fourth edition. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.

Lobbestael, J. (2015). Validation of the Schema Mode Inventory. In M. van Vreeswijk, J. Broersen, & M. Nadort (Eds.), The Wiley‐Blackwell Handbook of Schema Therapy: Theory, Research, and Practice (pp. 541–552). Wiley-Blackwell.

Ramnero, J., & Törneke, N. (2008). ABCs of human behavior: Behavioral principles for the practicing clinician. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger & Reno, NV: Context Press.

Rijkeboer, Marleen (2015). Validation of the Young Schema Questionnaire. In M. van Vreeswijk, J. Broersen, & M. Nadort (Eds.), The Wiley‐Blackwell Handbook of Schema Therapy: Theory, Research, and Practice (pp. 531-540). Wiley-Blackwell.

Ruiz, F. J., Luciano, C., Flórez, C. L., Suárez-Falcón, J. C., & Cardona-Betancourt, V. (2020). A multiple-baseline evaluation of acceptance and commitment therapy focused on repetitive negative thinking for comorbid generalized anxiety disorder and depression. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00356

Home. (n.d.). Redacted Audio. Retrieved May 5, 2024, from https://redacted-audio.com/

Appendix

Character and Media Primer

Redacted Audio is an urban-fantasy audio narrative on YouTube that centers around the fictional city of Dahlia in southern California and its inhabitants (“Home”, n.d.). In this urban-fantasy world, people are separated into four categories: unempowered humans; empowered humans, which can be further broken down into elementals and energetics (people with control over the four elements, gravity, sound waves, magnetics, psychokinesis, telepathy, seers, or a jack of all trades) and shifters (e.g.: werewolves); vampires, who are turned unempowered or empowered humans that feed on blood to survive, have superhuman speed and senses, and cannot go out in the sun; and demons, beings of pure magic that are not necessarily evil or good. The character I have chosen is an empowered human who was born to unempowered human parents – a human-born – which is a rare kind of person who often faces discrimination and barriers to learning how to control their magic. Lasko is an administrator and adjunct faculty member at the Dahlia Academy of Magical Novices, which is essentially magical community college where students (of any age) can learn mastery over either their specialty or all aspects of empowered human magic. The Dahlia Academy of Magical Novices operates as a school under the larger Department of Uniform Magical Practices, which oversees magical practices, ethics, and maintains the covert status of magic. Lasko specifically has natural control over the element of air, giving him an increased lung capacity and control over air (making wind currents, taking air out of the room, making tornados, etc. – think air benders in Avatar: The Last Airbender if you are familiar), but chose to complete his full certification at The Dahlia Academy of Magical Novices to have a better understanding of all types of magic. He teaches an introductory class on magic for incoming students as a way to provide a less discriminatory experience for other human born students.

ACT Hexaflex

YSQ-R Table

YSMI Table

That's all, folks!

#speed run #redacted #redactedasmr #redacted asmr #redacted audio #redactedverse #redacted lasko

50 notes · View notes

ganglands-marseillais · 1 year

Text

Croupier Comptable: Game Theory for The Venetian Macao, China (Trapping Aesthetic for Volleyball) 14K

BIO

My Name is Adrian Blake-Trotman. I am Indo-Mediterranean Caribbean Born in Toronto but From Barbados and Haiti. I am a Beta-arbitrage Mergers & Acquisitions Banker that Specializes in Commodities. I have Understanding Financial Markets by Université de Genève and Monetary Policy in the Asian-Pacific by Hong Kong University of Science and Technology with No Gr. 12 Math or Intro to Linear Algebra; I built a mathematical learning style by using Japanese Candlesticks Bullish Engulfing Discounted Cash Flow Charts for Poker. I Operate TAX AVOIDANCE through Freelance Mergers & Acquisitions through an Enterprise Foundation and Investment Trust. My background is Agriculture Working Class, I've worked in Kitchens and Grocery Stores. My goal is to connect the Democratic Republic of the Congo to two tax havens; Haiti & Seychelles to stabilize the Diamond Trade and more Important the Commodities Market. Through Mercantilism Agriculture Hedge Fund as a Central Bank, Options Volatility Exchange, Lab Grown Re-sale Market, Decentralized Currency and Fiat Money, Hospitality & Gaming. Also To form a Socioeconomic Status Agriculture Working Class; Blue, Pink, and White Collar Jobs. I am Modelling my Cartel off of Wall Street for De Beers but is owned and operated by the Société des Bains de Mer (SBM); The Casino de Monte-Carlo is owned and operated by the Société des Bains de Mer (SBM), a public company in which the government of Monaco and the ruling princely family have a majority interest. The company also owns the principal hotels, sports clubs, food service establishments, and nightclubs throughout the Principality. The Société des Bains de Mer operates in the accommodation, dining, entertainment, and gambling services. SBM manages and owns casinos, hotels, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, spas, beach clubs, and golf clubs. Fifty-two of their fifty-eight properties are located in Monaco. The concept of state-corporate crime refers to crimes that result from the relationship between the policies of the state and the policies and practices of commercially motivated corporations. The term was coined by Kramer and Michalowski in 1990.

THE ARNAULT MODEL: BALANCING FINANCIAL DISCIPLINE AND CREATIVITY

Over the next three decades, as he brought the best luxury brands in fashion, cosmetics, and beverages under the LVMH umbrella, Arnault proceeded to make “a series of brilliant business decisions” that “can only be called masterful.” Even his critics were impressed by “his ability to manage creativity for the sake of profit and growth.” Industry observers frequently credit his outstanding success in a highly competitive industry to the fact that—unlike other global CEOs—Arnault understands both the creative and the financial aspects of running a luxury business

Financed through Real Estate and Convertible Bonds

The Creation of Star Brands

In a 2001 Harvard Business Review interview, Arnault explained his famous business process, which—unlike the traditional fashion industry—requires financial discipline as well as creativity. The entire focus of Arnault's teams is the creation of “star brands” that must meet a high bar for four artistic and financial criteria: LVMH brands must be “timeless, modern, fast-growing, and highly profitable.” In practice, “profitable creativity” means that “star brands are born only when a company manages to make products that ‘speak to the ages’ but feel ‘intensely modern’ and ‘sell fast and furiously, all while raking in profits

Although the LVMH process begins with "radical innovation—an unpredictable, messy, highly emotional activity” on the creative end, as soon as “it comes to getting creativity onto shelves—chaos is banished,” and the company imposes "strict discipline on manufacturing processes, meticulously planning all 1,000 tasks in the construction of one purse.”

The genius of Arnault’s process is that, although the "front end of a star brand—the innovation…the creative process, the advertising—is very, very expensive,” the “back end of the process in the atelier (the factory)” is a place of "amazing discipline and rigor” that drives “high profitability behind the scenes.” Brands with “unbelievably high quality” require “unbelievably high productivity,” so “every single motion, every step of every process is carefully planned with the most modern and complete engineering technology.”

For example, when Arnault automated production at Vuitton, he drove that venerable old brand to the top spot on Fashionista’s list of the world's best-selling luxury brands in 2011, with a value of $24.3 billion—more than twice the amount of its nearest competitor.

As he spent “lavishly” on advertising, Arnault "rigorously" controlled costs by leveraging every possible synergy across the group: Kenzo manufactured a Christian Lacroix line; Givenchy manufactured a Kenzo perfume, and Guerlain created the first Vuitton perfume.

Creative Talent Management

As Arnault built LVMH into the world's largest luxury conglomerate, he hired new design talent for star brands that “speak to the ages” but “feel intensely modern”: from Céline, Kenzo, Guerlain, and Givenchy to Loewe, Thomas Pink, Fendi, and DKNY.

Because his model requires that “the counterbalance to creativity must be commerce,” Arnault “never hesitated to reign in, or outright terminate, creative executives who did not produce.” Since the early days at Dior, he has often replaced creative executives with non-traditional talent and then shuffled them across his brands to help him identify opportunities to drive profit—no matter how unpopular.

For example, at Givenchy in 1995, Arnault brought in a “fashion industry darling” and “notorious wild child,” British designer John Galliano, to replace Hubert de Givenchy, the industry icon “credited with defining simple elegance for an entire generation of women, (including) Audrey Hepburn, Jacqueline Kennedy, and the Duchess of Windsor.”

Within a year, Arnault moved Galliano, the first British designer in French haute couture, from Givenchy to Christian Dior to replace Gianfranco Ferré, the Italian couturier who had led Dior design since the late 1980s. Other non-traditional Arnault hires included installing 27-year-old Alexander McQueen (another British designer) at Givenchy and Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton, where he gave the American designer a mandate to challenge LVMH’s competitors, Prada and Gucci.

Although those iconoclastic designers later left LVMH, they had served Arnault’s purpose: interest in his traditional fashion houses had been jumpstarted by the early 21st century.

HOW TO STABILIZE THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO, SEYCHELLOIS, AND HAITIAN CURRENCY (INDIAN PREMIER LEAGUE BUT FOR MMA & COMMODITIES NOT CRICKET & TECHNOLOGY MODEL)

Bioeconomy Agriculture Central Hedge Fund with Agriculture Bulge Brackets Oligopolistic System Hyper Inflation Vehicle Fiat Currency: Strict Negative Interest Rates for Investments; Debt/Equity Business Loan Period and Construction Loan/Tax Benefits Programs, Investment Trusts & Enterprise Foundations are Common Corporate Tax Avoidance Practices, and Raise Denominator of Currency & Print Currency for Insurance Companies for Building Process

Combat Sport as National Sport: Free Internet with Corporate Sponsor Purse Bid System Mixed Martial Arts Camps, Orphanages, Polytheist Churches, Gaming-Hospitality; and +EV Gambling

Mercantilism Fiat Currency Pegging: Foreign Exchange Rate to Diamond Peg Currency

Market Extension Vertical Integration Mergers Lottery

Industries: Mergers & Acquisitions Agriculture Industry, Decentralized Finance, Real Estate Finance and Economics, Capital Gains Tax Haven, Corporate Tax Haven, Inheritance Tax Haven, Art Ports, and Gaming-Hospitality

Blockchain Diamond-Metal Exchange Modelled Off of CBOE Volatility Index (VIX). Founded in 1973, the CBOE Options Exchange is the world's largest options exchange with contracts focusing on individual equities, indexes, and interest rates. Credit Spread Options and Blockchain the Commodities Market.

Business Capital is a Collaborative Environment through Generalized Education (STEM AND M & A)

Socioeconomic Status Agriculture Working Class Immigrants

XYY or Triple X Syndrome, ACTN3 Gene, MSTN Gene, and Mercury-Venus Births

A ROUND OF PAR GAME THEORY NETWORK

Beta Arbitrage with Convertible Bonds Compounding

Key Ingredients

Player's: Futures Exchange and Investor

Actions: Issue payments under any circumstances

Payoffs: Exchange - Larger Market Volume, Investor - Larger Assets Under Management or Profits

Representation

Extensive Form includes timing of moves. Player's move sequentially, represented as a tree (timing). Chess: the white player moves, then the black player can see White's move and react

Theory

There's a common expression of higher the risk, higher the reward; but in finance it should be higher reward, higher risk because people's savings are involved. This is why I created The Round of Par Games Theory Network where the intended score should always be 0. Nobody wins and nobody loses between investor and stock exchange, just a nice friendly draw. The Investors assets under management grows and the Exchange's Market Volume Grows.

Let's break down the Components:

Beta Arbitrage

Investor: Beta Arbitrage involves longing in one market and shorting in a DIFFERENT market. The example is longing Company A in the stock market but then going to Company A in the options market and placing a put/short option. Either way the Investor earns a profit.

Exchange: The Futures Exchange benefits because now not only is equity on the stock market is being bought but the options market has a larger volume.

Convertible Bond Compounding

Investor: By compounding through Convertible Bonds not only are you going to be paid back your money because creditors are first on the company's bankruptcy list unlike investors, but it's an easier way to buy more shares for growth investing while not diving head first.

Exchange: The Futures Exchange benefits because now not only is equity on the stock market is being bought, but the bond market has a larger volume.

LANGUAGES

Mandarin

Latin

INDUSTRY WORTH FOR COMMODITIES (AGRICULTURE WORKING CLASS)

In 2012, Forbes reported that $21 trillion was Off-Shored

In 2017 the equivalent of at least 10% of the world’s GDP is in offshore banks, and that number is probably higher due to the opaqueness of the world’s global tax havens, according to a research report release this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The estimated amount of money laundered globally in one year is 2 - 5% of global GDP, or $800 billion - $2 trillion in current US dollars.

Taxes in the US – The federal government collected revenues of $3.5 trillion in 2019—equal to about 16.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) (figure 2). Over the past 50 years, federal revenue has averaged 17.4 percent of GDP, ranging from 20.0 percent (in 2000) to 14.6 percent (most recently in 2009 and 2010).

The foreign exchange or forex market is the largest financial market in the world – larger even than the stock market, with a daily volume of $6.6 trillion, according to the 2019 Triennial Central Bank Survey of FX and OTC derivatives markets.

In 2019, for example, the sales value of rough diamonds amounted to some 13.9 billion U.S. dollars worldwide. After polishing, the value increased by nearly double to 26.7 billion U.S. dollars. In 2019, the global diamond jewelry market value was approximately 79 billion U.S. dollars.

Global Cut Flowers Market to Reach $41. 1 Billion by 2027.

The global coffee market was valued at USD 102.02 billion in 2020,

Global Vanilla Market Is Expected to be worth Around USD 735 Million By 2026

According to the report published by Allied Market Research, the global cocoa market generated $12.8 billion in 2019, and is projected to reach $15.5 billion by 2027, witnessing a CAGR of 4.3% from 2021 to 2027

The global water and wastewater market was valued at 263.07 billion U.S. dollars in 2020. The market is projected to reach a value almost 500 billion U.S. dollars by 2028 at a CAGR of 7.3 percent in the 2021 to 2028 period.

The global tobacco market size was estimated at USD 932.11 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach USD 949.82 billion in 2021.

For the year 2020, Worldwide Cotton Market was US$ 38.54 Billion. Global Cotton Market is expected to reach US$ 46.56 Billion by 2027, with a CAGR of 2.74% from 2020 to 2027.

The global waste management market size was valued at $1,612.0 billion in 2020, and is expected to reach $2,483.0 billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of 3.4% from 2021 to 2030

According to Brandessence Market Research, the Energy Drink market size reached USD 61.23 billion in 2020 and expected to reach USD 99.62 Billion by 2027.

LEGAL DEFENSE

Smurfing: Reverse Onus, Challenge Mens Rea and Actus Rea, Press Malicious Prosecution Charges, Financial Settlement

RICO Legal Disputes Trademark (30 for 30 Court): Undisclosed Settlement; 1 large sum ($30 million) broken into a 3-part settlement, Not going to trial settlement (guaranteed payment for being brought into court), Case being unsealed settlement (if the case gets reopened), and Testimony settlement (in court testimony in reopened case). The non-disclosure agreement (NDA); Agreement to 10 years jail time for every broken NDA, NDA on Case, NDA on Testifying, and NDA on Settlement. Sealed Federal Cases: Have legal matters sealed by the court to prevent leaked information to media and Precedence for RICO

CRIME COLLAR

White-Blue collar crime is a subgroup of white-collar crime White Collar Crime, a term reportedly first coined in 1939, is synonymous with the full range of frauds committed by business and government professionals. Blue-collar crime is a term used to describe crimes that are committed primarily by people who are from a lower social class. This is in contrast to white-collar crime, which refers to crime that is usually committed by people from a higher social class.

SOCIOCULTURAL THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT

Agriculture Working Class Immigrants Socioeconomic Status Focused Key Players in Commodities Market*

Polytheism (Zeus, Poseidon, and Ogou-Athena)*

Births: Mercury-Venus, MSTN Gene, ACTN3 Gene, XYY Syndrome, or Triple X Syndrome

Māori All Blacks Sports Culture and Volleyball is National Sport*

Jumping for Cardio*

Poker Brain*

REITs/Real Estate ETF Investors with Index Credit or Debit Spreads Options Trading*

Mergers and Acquisitions Exploratory School System*

Sand-Based Calisthenics kallos sthenos (beautiful strength) Interval Training: Isometric-Plyometric, Circuit Training: Isometric-Isotonic, and Isometric-Mobility

Tofu is Protein of Choice

Fish/Seafood is Meat of Choice

Blueberry is consumed at every breakfast

Mineral Water instead of Spring Water

Coconut Syrup as Sugar Replacement

Business News is a part of The Cigar Culture

Sports Gambling for Extra Revenue Stream instead of Lottery Tickets when in Working Class

Hydrolyzed Collagen-Leucine is the Main Sports Medicine

Brokerage Accounts with First 10 Investments as Bond Funds and REITs

VAMMMBRGC LIFESTYLE BRAND RACKET

Volleyball (Trampoline)

Acting (Short Film Series: Aesthetic Taxi Game, Character: Expansive Mood Villain)

Modeling (Brand Activation Models)

Music (Psychedelic Festival Trap)

Martial Arts

Ballet (Females Only)

Rings Gymnastics (Males Only)

Graffiti (Art)

Cooking (Endorsements)

LVMH-Lacoste Collaboration Company For Tax Mergers Law; Market-extension merger: Two companies that sell the same products in different markets. 4.2.2 Corporate Taxation At the corporate level, the tax treatment of a merger or acquisition depends on whether the acquiring firm elects to treat the acquired firm as being absorbed into the parent with its tax attributes intact, or first being liquidated and then received in the form of its component assets.

What Is Vertical Integration? Vertical integration is a strategy that allows a company to streamline its operations by taking direct ownership of various stages of its production process rather than relying on external contractors or suppliers. A company may achieve vertical integration by acquiring or establishing its own suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, or retail locations rather than outsourcing them. However, vertical integration may be considered risky potential disadvantages due to the significant initial capital investment required.

Analysis Discounted Cash Flow (DCF): A key valuation tool in M&A, a discounted cash flow (DFC) analysis determines a company's current value, according to its estimated future cash flows. Forecasted free cash flows (net income + depreciation/amortization (capital expenditures) change in working capital) are discounted to a present value using the company's weighted average cost of capital (WACC). Admittedly, DCF is tricky to get right, but few tools can rival this valuation method.

VŒUX DE CHAMPAGNE SOGNI CAVIALI

Description: Beta-arbitrage Mergers & Acquisitions Cartel that commits Mediterranean-Caribbean and Afro-Mediterranean Socioeconomic Status Development Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction (CPR) Unit Charities, Protection Racket, Paramilitary Financing, Lobbyist-Investment Trust, Commodities Management, Gambling & Diamond Trafficking, Rolex Re-sale Market, Real Estate Brokerage, Graffiti Art Port, Smurfing, Nike Sports & Fashion Corporate Espionage and Larceny Business Model Reengineering, and VAMMMBRGC Contract Racketeering Through Enterprise Foundations

Activities: Executive Council for Mayor, Culinary Arts, Grey Market Fashion, Trap Shooting Gambling Tournaments, Volleyball Tournaments, Corporate Sponsor EdTech, Grocery Insurance & Electronic Financial Data Interchange, Diamond Encrusted Accessories Collaboration with LVMH, OTC Beta-arbitrage Branch Bracket, OTC Exchange (Commodities, Sports Betting Investment Trust, Real Estate Investment Trust, Cuisine Real Estate Investment Trust, Forex Pairs Contract for Difference, Retail/Hospitality Real Estate Investment Trust, Credit Swap Options Endorsement Index), VAMMMBRGC Youtube Distribution Channel (Gambling News Network, Noir Short Film Series [Shakespearean Crime], Cooking Channel, Sports Resort Real Estate, Sports/Modelling/Acting Business Case Study Video Essay, Brand Activation Modelling, Combat Sports, Calisthenics Workout Class, Sports Science Lessons, Graffiti Tourism, Music Videos, Natural Resources Documentaries, Hype Beast Re-Sale Market, Rolex Business Case Study Video Essays, Business Conferences).

DIAMOND TRAFFICKING

The WFDB Trade And Business Committee

The Trade and Business Committee makes recommendations to the Executive Committee concerning industry relations with financial institutions worldwide, lab-grown diamonds, Know Your Customer and the System of Warranties.

Idea 1: Luxury Goods Encrusted Items Investment Service and Auction. Example: Hermès Bag, Investment System: Masterworks, Auction System: Information Catwalks with models then bidding in a separate room with Video Replay for YouTube.

Idea 2: A sightholder is a company on the De Beers Global Sightholder Sales's (DBGSS) list of authorized bulk purchasers of rough diamonds. De Beers Group made this list, the second largest miner of diamonds. DBGSS was previously known as DTC (Diamond Trading Company). In May 2006, DTC released a list of the 93 sightholders on its website. High Fashion Accessories Aggregator Business Model with Auction and Re-sale.

Business Model

The London Metal Exchange (LME) which is based in Hong Kong is a commodities exchange that deals in metals futures and options. It is the largest exchange for options and futures contracts for base metals, which include aluminum, zinc, lead, copper, and nickel. The exchange also facilitates trading of precious metals like gold and silver.

Originally known as the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), the exchange changed its name in 2017 as part of a rebranding effort by its holding company, CBOE Global Markets. Traders refer to the exchange as the CBOE ("see-bo"). CBOE is also the originator of the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX), the most widely used and recognized proxy for market volatility.

ABC Exchange (Alumina, Beryllium, Carbon): There are four types of precious stones: diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds. Each type has its own specific chemical and physical properties. Diamonds are made from carbon, rubies and sapphires from alumina and emeralds from beryllium.

Diamond Monopoly

My Vertical Integration Mergers: Company’s Diamond Mines, Merger Manufacturers, Company’s Distribution, and Merger Hospitality and Gaming Diamond Exchange

The Diamond Standard

Influence: Agricultural Bank of China is active in commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance services.

Mercantilism was a form of economic nationalism that sought to increase the prosperity and power of a nation through restrictive trade practices. Its goal was to increase the supply of a state's gold and silver with exports rather than to deplete it through imports. It also sought to support domestic employment.

The bio-economy is defined as the economic activity associated with the invention, development, production; and use of primarily bio-based products, bio-based production processes, and/or biotechnology-based intellectual property.

Industries Association; Hospitality and Gaming: Daily and Monthly Revenue Streams, Capital Gains Taxing: Create Offshore revenue through trading and Blockchain is a volatile market for good liquidity. FOREX Vehicle Currency: Low Interest Rates means currency will be traded against other currencies, Shorting own currency to get foreign currency and exchanging returns to domestic currency stabilize exchange rate and Currency Basket

Interest Rate Pegging: Environmental alternative to gold, Surplus item during Quantitative Easing, and Low Interest Rates lead to spending and loans for investment which means buying and trading diamonds will balloon

Mine Options: Credit spreads and debit spreads are different spread strategies that can be used when investing in options. Both are vertical spreads or positions that are made up entirely of calls or entirely of puts with long and short options at different strikes. They both require buying and selling options (with the same security) with the same expiration date but different strike prices.

Diamond Mine Investment Group: Mines can create private Investment Groups. Items within Group: diamond retail, diamond trading, industrial diamond manufacturing sectors

Lab-created diamonds are grown in controlled laboratory environments using advanced technology that replicates the conditions under which diamonds naturally develop beneath the Earth's crust. These lab-grown diamonds consist almost entirely of carbon atoms and are arranged in a diamond crystal structure.

DIAMOND ROLEX INVESTMENT TRUST (EXAMPLE)

Description

Watch Listing Through Discounted Cash Flow for Rolex Drop Culture or Re-Sale Market

Underwriting Products

$50,000 in value

Collector's Edition

Less than 20 models made

Masterwork Investing Platform (reference)

Masterworks is making the world of art a little less exclusive by offering everyday investors the chance to own a fraction of these high-priced investments with a much smaller amount of money.

Through the fine art investing platform, users can purchase (and trade) shares in what the company has defined as "blue-chip" art: masterpieces from artists like Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Andy Warhol, Banksy, Kaws, Jean-Michel Basquiat and more.

How Masterworks functions (reference)

Masterworks provides an affordable way to invest in art. What was once an option reserved exclusively for wealthy investors is now accessible to investors of all types. Here's how the platform works:

Masterworks will purchase a painting and file it with the SEC as a public offering, or IPO, similar to how a company goes public. Shares of the painting are then made available for purchase on the Masterworks website for as little as $20 per share. The company says it launches about one new painting every four to five days.

The platform stands out, especially for using propriety data to determine which artist markets have the most momentum, focusing on the very high-end segment of the art market that has predictable returns, the company says. Meanwhile, its research team works in the background to calculate appreciation rates, correlation, and loss rates.

Masterworks even recently added a secondary market, too, where investors can trade shares in paintings. Plus, Masterworks lets you invest your IRA earnings into their fine art through its partnership with Alto IRA, an alternative asset investing platform.

Industrial Embassy

Business Model: Insurance companies base their business models around assuming and diversifying risk. The essential insurance model involves pooling risk from individual payers and redistributing it across a larger portfolio. Most insurance companies generate revenue in two ways: Charging premiums in exchange for insurance coverage, then reinvesting those premiums into other interest-generating assets. Like all private businesses, insurance companies try to market effectively and minimize administrative costs. Types of Insurance: Mining, Manufacturing, Retail, Logistics

Financing is the process of providing funds for business activities, making purchases, or investing. Financial institutions, such as banks, are in the business of providing capital to businesses, consumers, and investors to help them achieve their goals. The use of financing is vital in any economic system, as it allows companies to purchase products out of their immediate reach. Equity financing is the process of raising capital through the sale of shares. Companies raise money because they might have a short-term need to pay bills or have a long-term goal and require funds to invest in their growth. By selling shares, a company is effectively selling ownership in their company in return for cash. Advantages of Equity Financing; Funding your business through investors has several advantages, including the following: The biggest advantage is that you do not have to pay back the money. If your business enters bankruptcy, your investor or investors are not creditors. They are part-owners in your company, and because of that, their money is lost along with your company. You do not have to make monthly payments, so there is often more cash on hand for operating expenses. Investors understand that it takes time to build a business. You will get the money you need without the pressure of having to see your product or business thriving within a short amount of time.

Planning Permission and Building Regulations Courses: Planning permission assesses whether the development fits in with local and national policies and whether it would cause unacceptable harm, for example, to neighbours' quality of life. Whereas building control covers the structural aspects of development and progress throughout the construction

AFRO-MEDITERRANEAN PARAMILITARY FINANCING

Military Payments

Sercurity Operations (SercOps) Payment: $150,000 yearly salary: Receives $100,000 salary; other $50,000 is used for branch-managed investment portfolio and investment trust

Discharge Payment: $75,000 yearly salary for Armoured Car Guard and Driver, Receives $50,000 salary; other $25,000 is used for branch-managed investment portfolio and investment trust

Military Funding: Central Hedge Fund Equity Given

Payment is in Fixed Currency

AFRO-MEDITERRANEAN SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS DEVELOPMENT CONFLICT PREVENTION AND RECONSTRUCTION (CPR) UNIT CENTERS

Corporate Sponsor: M & A Schools (Mergers and Acquisitions) & Retirement-preparatory School

Cross-Curriculum

STEM education is the cross-curricular study of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and the application of those subjects in real-world contexts.

Studying Style

I use Interleaving Studying for Generalist Kinaesthetic Learners.

Transition to Interleaving Studying: Online PowerPoint Presentation, Video Essays, Case Studies & Meta-analyses over Books to present Information as a country, Less Paper Use, Courses on Different PowerPoint Studying Styles, Make country a Business & Finance Culture and Technological Advanced, Overview at Beginning; Program Learning Concept Check During Quizzes at the End for Courses, Spaced Learning on concept checks before exiting the course.

A great example of when to use interleaving is sports, for instance, tennis. Instead of just practicing backhands in one session, you can interleave backhands, forehands, and volleys to get increased results. Another great example can be found in science classes, where interleaving math, physics, and chemistry, for example, can provide you with an advanced understanding of all 3 fields.

Spaced learning is a learning method in which highly condensed learning content is repeated three times, with two 10-minute breaks during which distractor activities such as physical activities are performed by the students. It is based on the temporal pattern of stimuli for creating long-term memories reported by R. Douglas Fields in Scientific American in 2005.

Spacing boosts learning by spreading lessons and retrieval opportunities out over time so learning is not crammed all at once. By returning to content every so often, students' knowledge has had time to rest and be refreshed.

The two concepts are similar but essentially spacing is revision throughout the course, whereas interleaving is switching between ideas while you study. Although interleaving and spacing are different interventions, the two are linked because interleaving inherently introduces spacing. These two concepts will create student-athletes

The best part about interleaving is that it is almost a universal aid in learning

Evidence suggests that spaced practice is more effective for long-term retrieval.

Interleaving Studying forces the brain to continually retrieve because each practice attempt is different from the last, so rote responses pulled from short-term memory won’t work.

Multiple choice test is an example of measuring retrieval by A. reconstruction. B. recognition.

Chess

Increasing Intelligence: Fluid and crystallized intelligence are constructs originally conceptualized by Raymond Cattell. The concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence were further developed by Cattell and his former student John L. Horn. Crystallized intelligence. This refers to your vocabulary, knowledge, and skills. Crystallized intelligence typically increases as you get older. Fluid intelligence, also known as fluid reasoning, fluid intelligence is your ability to reason and think abstractly. Fluid intelligence refers to basic processes of reasoning and other mental activities that depend only minimally on prior learning (such as formal and informal education) and acculturation. Horn notes that it is formless, and can "flow into" a wide variety of cognitive activities Tasks measuring fluid reasoning require the ability to solve abstract reasoning problems. Examples of tasks that measure fluid intelligence include figure classifications, figural analyses, number and letter series, matrices, and paired associates. Crystallized intelligence refers to learned procedures and knowledge. It reflects the effects of experience and acculturation. Horn notes that crystallized ability is a "precipitate out of experience," resulting from the prior application of fluid ability that has been combined with the intelligence of culture. Examples of tasks that measure crystallized intelligence are vocabulary, general information, abstract word analogies, and the mechanics of language.

Bullet Chess: The rules for bullet chess aren't different from those of a regular chess game. Bullet chess refers to games played with time controls that are faster than 3 minutes per player. The most popular forms of bullet chess are 1|0 (one minute with no increment per player) or 2|1 (two minutes with a one-second increment per player). Increment (also known as bonus and Fischer since former World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer patented this timing method)—a specified amount of time is added to the players main time each move, unless the player's main time ran out before they completed their move.

Chess Benefits: It has been suggested by different scientists that chess involves, and possibly boosts, cognitive abilities such as working memory, fluid intelligence, and concentration capacity. Besides, chess may be beneficial for mathematical ability and, more widely, academic achievement by enhancing concentration and problem-solving skills.

Life-History Strategy

Life history theory posits that behavioral adaptation to various environmental (ecological and/or social) conditions encountered during childhood is regulated by a wide variety of different traits resulting in various behavioral strategies. Unpredictable and harsh conditions tend to produce fast life history strategies, characterized by early maturation, a higher number of sexual partners to whom one is less attached, and less parenting of offspring. Unpredictability and harshness not only affects dispositional social and emotional functioning, but may also promote the development of personality traits linked to higher rates of instability in social relationships or more self-interested behavior. Similarly, detrimental childhood experiences, such as poor parental care or high parent-child conflict, affect personality development and may create a more distrustful, malicious interpersonal style. The aim of this brief review is to survey and summarize findings on the impact of negative early-life experiences on the development of personality and fast life history strategies. By demonstrating that there are parallels in adaptations to adversity in these two domains, we hope to lend weight to current and future attempts to provide a comprehensive insight of personality traits and functions at the ultimate and proximate levels.

The Savant Skills Curriculum

Savant gifts, or splinter skills, may be exhibited in the following skill areas or domains: memory, hyperlexia (ie, the exceptional ability to read, spell and write), art, music, mechanical or spatial skill, calendar calculation, mathematical calculation, sensory sensitivity, athletic performance, and computer ability. These skills may be remarkable in contrast to the disability of autism, or may be in fact prodigious when viewed in relation to the non-disabled person.

Learning Centers

Enrichment centers require you to be aware of your students' learning styles (Kinesthetic) as well as their knowledge about a topic. The enrichment center can provide individual students with varied activities or combination of activities that differ from those pursued by other students. As such, the center becomes an individualized approach to the promotion of the topic.

Skill Centers Skill centers are typically used at the elementary level, more so than at the secondary level. Students may work on math facts, phonics elements, or other tasks requiring memorization and/or repetition.

Interest and Exploratory Centers: Interest and exploratory centers differ from enrichment and skill development centers in that they are designed to capitalize on the interests of students. They may not necessarily match the content of the textbook or the curriculum; instead they provide students with hands-on experiences they can pursue at their own pace and level of curiosity. These types of centers can be set up throughout the classroom, with students engaging in their own selection of activities during free time, upon arrival in the morning, as a “free-choice” activity during the day, or just prior to dismissal. These centers allow students to engage in meaningful discoveries that match their individual interests.

Programmed Learning

The way a teaching machine works is: It asks you a question. If you give the right answer, it goes on to the next question. If you give the wrong answer, it tells you why the answer is wrong and tells you to go back and try again. This is called "programmed learning".

Programmed learning, educational technique characterized by self-paced, self-administered instruction presented in logical sequence and with much repetition of concepts. Programmed learning received its major impetus from the work done in the mid-1950s by the American behavioral psychologist B.F.

Exploratory Learning (Singapore Field Trips)

The Choice Theory Culture:

Is an expected way of being or living

Encourages positive choices which lead to healthy relationships

Is relationship based and collaborative

Is not about controlling behavior, rather promoting personal responsibility

Carol Dweck's Growth Mindset Theory

Growth Mindset: “In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. With a growth mindset, students continually work to improve their skills, leading to greater growth and ultimately, success. The key is to get students to tune into that growth mindset.

Dweck writes, “In the fixed mindset, everything is about the outcome. If you fail—or if you’re not the best—it’s all been wasted. The growth mindset allows people to value what they’re doing regardless of the outcome. They’re tackling problems, charting new courses, working on important issues. Maybe they haven’t found the cure for cancer, but the search was deeply meaningful,” (Dweck, 2015).

Poker as Intro to Portfolio Building

Famous Fund Managers who played Poker

Steven A. Cohen (born June 11, 1956) is an American hedge fund manager and owner of the New York Mets of Major League Baseball since September 14, 2020, owning roughly 97.2% of the team. He is the founder of hedge fund Point72 Asset Management and now-closed S.A.C. Capital Advisors, both based in Stamford, Connecticut. Cohen grew up in Great Neck, New York, where his father was a dress manufacturer in Manhattan's garment district, and his mother was a piano teacher. He is the third of seven brothers and sisters. He took a liking to poker as a high school student, often betting his own money in tournaments, and credits the game with teaching him "how to take risks." Cohen graduated from John L. Miller Great Neck North High School in 1974, where he played on the school's soccer team. Cohen received an economics degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. While in school, Cohen was initiated as a brother of Zeta Beta Tau fraternity's Theta chapter where he served as treasurer. While in school, a friend helped him open a brokerage account with $1,000 of his tuition money.

Carl Icahn is one of the most recognisable and successful investors in the world, having far outperformed the market on an annualised basis since 1968; at a rate which, by some measures, has him ahead of Warren Buffett. Carl Icahn was born on the 16th February 1936 in Queens, New York. It was a beach neighbourhood and a poor area. His mother was a pianist, but dropped her dreams of pursuing it as a career and instead chose a more stable job as a school teacher. His father also became a substitute teacher. As you may expect with both parents involved in education, Carl was extremely studious. At high school, he didn’t involve himself in many activities such as sports and clubs, instead he had set himself the big goal of making it to an Ivy League university; something most people in his area had no chance of doing. His teacher didn’t even think it was worth him applying, but this made him even more determined to be different. He had a mind-set that he wanted to be the best at everything. Icahn’s parents said they would only pay for university if he got into one of the top Ivy League universities. Although no one thought he stood a chance, he managed to enrol at Princeton University and studied philosophy as his major. His parents fulfilled their promise and paid for his Princeton fees but couldn’t stretch to anything else such as his accommodation or food. Instead, Carl got himself a summer job at a Cabana club in his neighbourhood to fund his living costs. It was at the Cabana club that he learnt how to play poker and joined in the games regularly. He says at the start he didn’t know how to play, but then he read 3 poker books in 2 weeks and became the best player there, taking home huge winning each summer. He says: “To me, it was a big game, big stakes. Every summer I won about $2,000, which was like $50,000 back in the ‘50s”

Brain Training: How Regular Poker Play Could Help Soccer Stars Succeed: An athlete’s brain is their most vital organ. It controls how the body functions, and it needs to be cultivated and disciplined just like the muscles do. Those in the industry are constantly searching for new ways to help soccer players get their heads in the game, and it turns out that poker can help immensely. By sharpening cognitive function, increasing social awareness, and improving mental endurance, poker enables athletes to rise to the occasion for peak performance on the field.

Conflict Prevention & Reconstruction Unit Psychology

Reintegration of child soldiers should emphasize three components: family reunification, psychosocial support and education, and economic opportunity. Family reunification—or, where that is not possible, foster placement or support for independent living—is crucial to successful reintegration.

Children are reintegrated into community life through the provision of psychosocial support, life skills classes and basic vocational training. At the end of the program, participants are provided with small grants to start businesses.

Post-traumatic growth (PTG) is a theory that explains this kind of transformation following trauma. It was developed by psychologists Richard Tedeschi, PhD, and Lawrence Calhoun, PhD, in the mid-1990s, and holds that people who endure psychological struggle following adversity can often see positive growth afterward. Post-traumatic growth often happens naturally, Tedeschi says, but it can be facilitated in five ways: through education (rethinking ourselves, our world, and our future), emotional regulation (managing our negative emotions and reflecting on successes and possibilities), disclosure (articulating what is happening and its effects), narrative development (shaping the story of a trauma and deriving hope from famous stories of crucible leadership), and service (finding work that benefits others).

People who have experienced posttraumatic growth report changes in the following 5 factors: Appreciation of life; Relating to others; Personal strength; New possibilities; and Spiritual, existential or philosophical changes

Although posttraumatic growth often happens naturally, without psychotherapy or other formal intervention, it can be facilitated in five ways: through education, emotional regulation, disclosure, narrative development, and service.

Forgeard found that the form of cognitive processing was critical in explaining growth after trauma. Intrusive forms of rumination caused a decline in multiple areas of growth, whereas deliberate rumination led to an increase in five domains of posttraumatic growth. Deliberate rumination involves perceiving multilateral sides of the stressful experience including value, meaning, and significance (Calhoun et al., 2000; Cann et al., 2011), and may also decrease the discrepancy between global and situational meanings, as it promote finding meaning. Trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) & Compassion-focused therapy (CFT) is a recommended psychotherapy

The two psychological traits which indicate a higher likelihood of experiencing post-traumatic growth are openness to experience and extraversion. Novelty seeking is positively associated with the Big Five personality trait of "extraversion," and to a lesser extent “openness to experience,” but is inversely associated with "conscientiousness." Online poker players are high sensation seekers who gamble to experience strong feelings and arousal, whereas impulsivity plays an important role in developing and maintaining pathological gambling.

CORPORATE SPONSOR: BETA-ARBITRAGE M & A EXAM

Poker Contest: Bankroll Budget*

Math Contest: Linear Algebra Contest, Probability and Ratios

Investment Management Contest: Decentralized Portfolio Building Simulation

Latin and Mandarin Technical Analysis Settings Fair: Year-Long Competition

Blues Ocean Strategy Game Theory Network Mergers & Acquisitions Contest: Macau Game Theory - The course includes modules in areas such as: Essentials of M&A, Due diligence training, Business valuation training, post-merger integration planning

Machine Learning Contest: Quantitative Aptitude

Winners Get a Full Ride to Internships (Licenes Courses I'm Gonna Make with Established Schools and Banks) Freshman Class is made of the contest winners: Mergers & Acquisitions Generalization with Corporate Sponsor; Understanding Capital Markets, Game Theory, Investment Model & Analysis, Quantitative Aptitude, Hedging Techniques, Foreign Language, Business Engineering, Business Models & Reengineering, Offshore Law, Blue Ocean Strategy, Investment Management with Python (Machine Learning)

Ages: 10, 12, 14, 17, 18, 20

SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS DEVELOPMENT CENTRES

Socioeconomic status is the social standing or class of an individual or group. It is often measured as a combination of education, income, and occupation.

EdTech

Business Model: Grants, corporate sponsorships, and recruiting business FutureLearn is another MOOC heavyweight with 210+ partners that include universities, humanitarian foundations, and large businesses. Some startups even rely on corporate sponsorship as their main business model

Generalist Education

VAMMMBRGC: Volleyball, Acting, Modelling, Music, Martial Arts, Ballet (Female), Rings Gymnastics (Male), Graffiti (Art), Cooking (Gastronomy)

STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics

M&A: Merger, Acquasitions

Welfare Investment Program

Fund through Rental Properties: Bond Funds, REITs

Credit Building Program: Line of Credit Deposit Program

Job Placement for Agriculture Working Class

Agricultural Industry means an industrial activity involving the processing, cleaning, packing or storage of the results from agricultural production. The working class (or labouring class) comprises those engaged in manual-labour occupations or industrial work, who are remunerated via waged or salaried contracts. Working-class occupations (see also "Designation of workers by collar colour") include blue-collar jobs, and most pink-collar jobs. Members of the working class rely exclusively upon earnings from wage labour; thus, according to more inclusive definitions, the category can include almost all of the working population of industrialized economies, as well as those employed in the urban areas (cities, towns, villages) of non-industrialized economies or in the rural workforce.

As with many terms describing social class, working class is defined and used in many different ways. The most general definition, used by many socialists, is that the working class includes all those who have nothing to sell but their labour. These people used to be referred to as the proletariat. In that sense, the working class today includes both white and blue-collar workers, manual and menial workers of all types, excluding only individuals who derive their livelihood from business ownership and the labour of others. The term, which is primarily used to evoke images of laborers suffering "class disadvantage in spite of their individual effort," can also have racial connotations. These racial connotations imply diverse themes of poverty that imply whether one is deserving of aid.

COMMODITIES REAL ESTATE

Insurance Premium, Financial Electronic Data Interchange, Royalties, Lease, & Gross Sale Payments for Restaurant Clientele Grocery Stores and Delivery Food Courts:

A lease payment is the equivalent of the monthly rent, which is formally dictated under a contract between two parties, granting one participant the legal right to use the other individual's real estate holdings, manufacturing equipment, computers, software, or other fixed assets, for a specified amount of time.

Gross sales refer to the grand total of all sales transactions over a given time period. This doesn't include the cost-of-sales or deductions (like returns or allowance). To calculate a company's gross sales, add up the total sales revenue for a specified period of time—monthly, quarterly, or annually.

A franchise (or franchising) is a method of distributing products or services involving a franchisor, who establishes the brand's trademark or trade name and a business system, and a franchisee, who pays a royalty and often an initial fee for the right to do business under the franchisor's name and system. Royalties is the amount someone pays you to use your property, after you subtract the expenses you have for the property.

CONFLUENCE FOREX & COMMODITIES BETA-ARBITRAGE FORMULA

Trading Psychology: Play Defense, Focus on preserving capital instead of gaining capital

Position Trading: Currency being used, Shorting Low-Interest Currency against High-Value Currency Or Currency Being used, Shorting Low Interest/High-Value Currency against High-Interest Currency. Examples: Carry-Roll Down Bonds, CFD Forex Gold

Swing Trading: Use mt4/mt5 With Heiken Ashi Charts, Setting at 14 or 21 Momentum Indicator above 0 as Divergence Oscillator and VSA as Reversal Oscillator and Trade when bullish candlesticks above 200 exponential moving average and/or 20 exponential moving average (EMA) on H1 (Hourly) Time Frame; use H4 (4 Hours) and D1 (1 Day) as reference. Works for Oil & Gold Commodities

Master Supply and Demand (S&D) Zones (banks use this)

Candlestick Patterns for Momentum: Bearish Engulfing, Hanging Man, Shooting Star Three Crows, Evening Star, (Short). Bullish Engulfing, The Bearish Inverted Hammer or Regular Hammer (Regardless of Colour), Morning Star, and Piercing Line (Long) are extremely Important

Candlestick Patterns for VSA When Volume Spikes Down and Price is Up Bearish: Shooting Star, Doji, Hanging Man, Doji-Star

Candlestick Patterns for VSA When Volume Spikes Up and Price is Down Bullish: Hammer, Inverted Hammer, Doji, Doji-Star

S&D Reversal Patterns: The Drop-Base-Rally is a bullish reversal pattern, The Rally-Base-Drop is a bearish reversal pattern

S&D Continuation patterns: The Rally-Base-Rally is a bullish continuation pattern, The Drop-Base-Rally is a bearish continuation pattern

Swing Trading Time Frame H1 (Hourly) Reference D1 and H4 to locate supply and demand zones Pivot Points and VSA

Heiken Ashi Candlesticks Much easier to read candlestick charts and analyze market trends

Using Pivot Points for Prediction A pivot point is a technical analysis indicator, or calculations, used to determine the overall trend of the market over different time frames Works for commodities

Exponential Moving Average (EMA) 200 Day 20 Day

Momentum Indicator Settings 14 or 21

Volume Spread Analysis (VSA Trading) Entry 4 Steps: Identify the trend, Identify the sign of weakness in an existing uptrend, Wait to test the weakness for confirmation for the continuation of the uptrend, Look for any bullish reversal candlestick pattern for entry.

Relative Strength Index (RSI) Relative Strength Index (RSI) is a momentum indicator. It is a single line ranging from 0 to 100 which indicates when the stock is overbought or oversold in the market. If the reading is above 70, it indicates an overbought market and if the reading is below 30, it is an oversold market. RSI is also used to estimate the trend of the market, if RSI is above 50, the market is an uptrend and if the RSI is below 50, the market is a downtrend.

Commodity Channel Index Commodity Channel Index identifies new trends in the market. It has values of 0, +100, and -100. If the value is positive, it indicates uptrend, if the CCI is negative, it indicates that the market is in the downtrend. CCI is coupled with RSI to obtain information about overbought and oversold stocks.

What is Cash-and-Carry-Arbitrage? Cash-and-carry-arbitrage is a market-neutral strategy combining the purchase of a long position in an asset such as a stock or commodity, and the sale (short) of a position in a futures contract on that same underlying asset. A cash-secured put is an income options strategy that involves writing a put option on a stock or ETF and simultaneously putting aside the capital to buy the stock if you are assigned.

What are Gold CFD? A contract for difference (CFD) is a popular type of derivative that allows you to trade on margin, providing you with greater exposure to the gold market. Instead of purchasing gold itself, you buy or sell units for a given financial instrument depending on whether you think the underlying price will rise or fall.

What is Quanto Option? The Quanto option is a cash-settled, cross-currency derivative in which the underlying asset has a payoff in one country, but the payoff is converted to another currency in which the option is settled.

Hedging Strategies: Forex and Commodities CFD, Crude Oil Cash-secured Put Options (Binary Options)

TURF ACCOUNTANT

Beta-Arbitrage (PROFITS FOR BOOKMAKER)

+EV (Investment)

Live Betting (Balance Sheets)

BRANCH BRACKET DISCOUNTED CASH FLOW PORTFOLIO BET SLIP

+EV Round Robin instead of WACC Portfolio

$5 Units

GAME THEORY OPTIMAL POKER WITH LOOSE AGGRESSIVE & GROWTH INVESTING

Growth Investing Strategy & Game Theory

Japanese Candlestick Charts: Bullish Engulfing

Discounted Cash Flow Model: EV (Expected Value replaces WACC)

Mixed Strategy

Fold Equity

Community Cards

Companies Charts and Historical Financials

Royal Flush

Straight Flush

4 of a Kind

Full House

Flush

Hands

FCF of Companies

Strategy

Every chart starts with a green candlestick

Depending on your hand the second candlestick is either green or red

Green for the top 5 hands: Listed above

Red for the bottom 5 hands

If it's green invest by betting

If it's red fold

The third candlestick depends on the Flop

The fourth candlestick depends on The Turn

As more money gets betted the Green candlestick gets larger

After The Flop risk-assessment and probability needs to be accounted for

After The Flop, The Turn, and The River it is possible for a red candlestick to appear because of a fold or a better hand because you lost money. Judge how much money you lost by the size of the candlesticks growth

Tony Dunst Tips

Learn to think in Big Blinds, Opponents are Effective Big Blinds

Identify Player Types then Adjust

Study Big Blind Defense Frequency (Hand Ranges)

Work on Bubble and Final Table Play (Independent Chip Model)

Build 3 Betting Ranges

AFRO-MEDITERRANEAN SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS VOLLEYBALL SPORTS PERFORMANCE FOR KINAESTHETIC LEARNERS

Volleyball Physiological Age System for Both Genders: Plyometric High-Intensity Interval Training Through Cross Training, Wingspan Through Cross Training, Unstable Surface Muscle Recruitment Contrast Training, Isometric-Plyometric-Sprint-or-Vertical Jump Contrast Conditioning, Intermittent Hypoxic Training (IHT) Weighted Jump Rope Respiratory Conditioning, Functional Threshold Power (FTP) Cycling, Fascia and Central Pattern Generator Skill Development, Stretch-Reflex Elastic Strength Training, Running-Based Anaerobic Sprint Test (RAST), Stimulus-Fatigue-Recovery-Adaptation for Supercompensation, Autophagy Recovery, High Fat and High Carb with Lipolysis Supplement Nutrition: 3 Fuels of Energy in Oxygen, Fat, and Glucose, Convert Hybrid Muscle Fibers

Stretch Goal of Having a Physiological Age of 25

Volleyball is an aerobic sport with additional anaerobic demands. This will require volleyball players to work both energy systems, making cardiorespiratory conditioning very important. The aerobic, or lower intensity training, will help build a strong cardio base that is needed for a long match. A study done on college athletes showed that gymnasts and volleyball players had significantly higher bone mineral density than swimmers, which is considered a low-impact sport.

Collagen Athletes: Researchers found that a year of daily collagen peptides supplementation measurably increased bone mineral density in the lumbar spine and in the upper femur. The women also had higher levels of a blood biomarker that indicates bone formation. Collagen provides resistance to tension and stretch, which commonly occur in fascial tissues, such as ligaments, tendons, sheaths, muscular fascia and deeper fascial sub-layers. Julio Jones and Cam Newton do Fascia Beach Workouts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unm5dvlcqL4

Offensive Systems 5-1 System Rotation 1: Setter Starts in Right Back, Rotation Offense to Middle Front, Run One Man or Two Man Routes, Call out Formations

Defensive Systems Middle Back Systems: The Set is important to determine if there’s enough time for one man, two man, or three man block. Shots to Plan for: Dink, Off-speed, and Angle. Setting Blocks: Mix Sequencing of Jump Two Man and Three Man Back

Anta Sports Fashion Collab Circuits (Graffiti Beachwear Fashion Week and Trade Show): Key City Tournaments

Planned Pregnancy: Mercury-Venus Cusp, MSTN Gene, ACTN3 Gene, and XYY Syndrome or Triple X Syndrome

CARTEL THEORY

HSBC Bank Holding Company Equity Financing

What Is a Bank Holding Company? A bank holding company is a corporation that owns a controlling interest in one or more banks but does not itself offer banking services. Holding companies do not run the day-to-day operations of the banks they own. However, they exercise control over management and company policies. They can hire and fire managers, set and evaluate strategies, and monitor the performance of subsidiaries’ businesses.

What Is Equity Financing? Equity financing is the process of raising capital through the sale of shares. Companies raise money because they might have a short-term need to pay bills or have a long-term goal and require funds to invest in their growth. By selling shares, a company is effectively selling ownership in their company in return for cash. Equity financing comes from many sources: for example, an entrepreneur's friends and family, investors, or an initial public offering (IPO). An IPO is a process that private companies undergo to offer shares of their business to the public in a new stock issuance. Public share issuance allows a company to raise capital from public investors.

Palmiers Noirs Rivals

United Kingdom

Jews

Luxembourg (EU Blacklist Creator)

Latin Kings

Sinaloa Cartel

Sonora Cartel

Colombian Cartels

Neymar

Banker Title

Croupier Comptable: An investment banker who has experienced decadence through Casino Capitalism

Palmiers Noirs Structure

Clandestine Cell System

A clandestine cell system is a method for organizing a group of people (such as resistance fighters, sleeper agents, mobsters, or terrorists) such that such people can more effectively resist penetration by an opposing organization (such as law enforcement or military units).

In a cell structure, each of the small group of people in the cell know the identities of the people only in their own cell. Thus any cell member who is apprehended and interrogated (or who is a mole) will not likely know the identities of the higher-ranking individuals in the organization.

The structure of a clandestine cell system can range from a strict hierarchy to an extremely distributed organization, depending on the group's ideology, its operational area, the communications technologies available, and the nature of the mission.

Criminal organizations, undercover operations, and unconventional warfare units led by special forces may also use this sort of organizational structure.

Infrastructure cells

Any clandestine or covert service, especially a non-national one, needs a variety of technical and administrative functions, such as: Recruitment/training, Forged documents/counterfeit currency, Finance/Fundraising, Communications, Transportation/Logistics, Safehouses, Reconnaissance/Counter-surveillance, Operational planning, Arms and ammunition, and Psychological operations

A national intelligence service has a support organization to deal with services like finance, logistics, facilities (e.g., safehouses), information technology, communications, training, weapons and explosives, medical services, etc. Transportation alone is a huge function, including the need to buy tickets without drawing suspicion, and, where appropriate, using private vehicles. Finance includes the need to transfer money without coming to the attention of financial security organizations.

Cartel Definition

Cartel is an ambiguous concept, which usually refers to a combination or agreement between rivals, but – derived from this – also designates organized crime. The main use of ‘cartel’ is that of an anticompetitive association in the economy.

Price cartels engage in price fixing, normally to raise prices for a commodity above the competitive price level.

Cartel Theory

Cartel theory is usually understood as the doctrine of economic cartels. However, since the concept of 'cartel' does not have to be limited to the field of the economy, doctrines on non-economic cartels are conceivable in principle. Such exist already in the form of the state cartel theory and the cartel party theory. For the pre-modern cartels, which existed as rules for tournaments, duels and court games or in the form of inter-state fairness agreements, there was no scientific theory. Such has developed since the 1880s for the scope of the economy, driven by the need to understand and classify the mass emergence of entrepreneurial cartels. Within the economic cartel theory, one can distinguish a classical and a modern phase. The break between the two was set through the enforcement of a general cartel ban after the Second World War by the US government.

Constituent characteristics and exclusion criteria for cartels

Constituent criteria for cartels would be the following: The members are, at the same time, partners as well as competitors (so do e.g. enterprises, states, parties, duelists, tournament knights). These members can be individual persons or organizations. The members of a cartel are independent of each other, negotiating their interests with each other and against each other. So there have to be at least two participants and they determine their interests autonomously. The members of a cartel know each other; they have a direct relationship, in particular they communicate with each other.

Exclusion criteria for cartels would be the following: There is a "hierarchical" or other strong "dependency relationship among the participants": a drug mafia that is organized hierarchically and managed by a single boss can't be a drug cartel in the sense of a real "cartel". KLikewise, a business corporation can't be a "cartel" due to its central management, which controls its subsidiaries. Furthermore, an OPEC, in which all adherents would be dependent on the largest member (since long: Saudi Arabia) would no longer be a "cartel". Similarly, colonial empires from a motherland and colonies do not constitute a "state cartel". The union of competitors, in their entirety or via important members of its association, is dependent on an outside power. A strict, state-mandated compulsory cartel without freedom of choice between the partners would not be a (real) cartel. A suitable example is the "Deutsche Wagenbau-Vereinigung" (German Railway Cars Association), which was organized in the 1920s by the "Deutsche Reichsbahn" (German Imperial Railways) – its "market opponent". The combination takes place between actors of different levels. Thus, the concerted actions of employers’ associations and trade unions in some industrialized countries was not a cartel, because the allies there were no homogenous competitors. The alleged members of a suspected cartel do not know each other, but only randomly show a parallel behavior: “Cartels of the godless”, “cartels of maintenance deniers” or “silent cartels” are therefore usually no real cartels, but pure verbal abuse formulas.

MACAU ECONOMICS

Science

Science of Aesthetics

Nutritional Biochemistry

Vertical-Rotational Force Kinetic Chain

Biomechanics

Sports Medicine

Technology

Biotechnology

FinTeach

RealTeach

Merger & Acquisition EdTech

Engineering

Business Engineering (Tribes Organism and Keynesian Macroeconomics)

Construction Management

Business Model Reengineering

Mathematics (Decentralized Central Banking)

Investment Management

Monetary Policy & Central Banking

Wolf Packs are Generalist

David Epstein examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They’re also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can’t see.

Wolves are habitat “generalists,” meaning they can adapt to living in many kinds of habitat. They basically need two things to thrive: abundant prey and human tolerance.

Trophic Cascade, an ecological phenomenon triggered by the addition or removal of top predators and involving reciprocal changes in the relative populations of predator and prey through a food chain, which often results in dramatic changes in ecosystem structure and nutrient cycling. (Trillwave in Macau)

A keystone species is an organism that helps define an entire ecosystem. Without its keystone species, the ecosystem would be dramatically different or cease to exist altogether. Keystone species have low functional redundancy. (Trillwave in Macau)

Unpredictable and harsh conditions tend to produce fast life history strategies, characterized by early maturation, a higher number of sexual partners to whom one is less attached, and less parenting of offspring.

BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY BY RENÉE MAUBORGNE AND W. CHAN KIM (COURTESY OF BLINKIST)

What’s in it for me? Conquer uncontested market space.

Every business asks themselves the same question: how can we beat out the competition? And almost every business comes up with the same answer: we need to become bigger, better, and faster to outperform our rivals.

But what if your business didn’t have to beat the competition because there wasn’t any? What if you could enjoy unlimited growth without worrying about limited demand? This isn’t some idle fantasy but a strategic approach that a handful of successful businesses have already made reality. How did they do it? And how can your business do the same? This short Blink will give you a taste.

Escape your competition by setting sail to a blue ocean.

When you establish a new business, competition can be brutal. Whether you’re selling wine, audio books, or life insurance, the market for a product can only get so big. So you’re left to fight with hundreds of other companies for your share of a limited demand. No surprise that America’s most popular business TV show is called Shark Tank! Markets today are like oceans, swarming with hungry companies ready to kill each other. There’s so much blood in the water, we can call these markets red oceans.

But every once in a while, a company emerges that seems to sail past all the competition. These are businesses that rise fast, grow uncontested, and seem to play by their own rules. What are they doing differently?

Well, instead of fighting over scraps in red oceans, these businesses navigate uncharted territory: blue oceans. You can think of blue oceans as all the markets we haven’t yet discovered, for products and services that don’t yet exist. Demand isn’t limited because demand isn’t there – it has to be created. But this isn’t a handicap, it’s an opportunity. Because if the size of your market isn’t limited, neither are your growth and profits.

In blue oceans, the water isn’t bloodied by cut-throat competition. It’s deep, clear, and full of undiscovered potential. The blue ocean strategy gives you the methodology and tools to conquer such uncontested markets. The basic tenet is this: It’s true that the space in a certain industry might be limited. But who’s to say that a business can’t create an entirely new industry?

Let’s look at an example of this in action: famous Canadian circus company Cirque du Soleil. With its extraordinary variety shows, Cirque du Soleil has entertained millions of people worldwide. On top of that, it’s made record profits. Not something you would expect from a circus company! How did the company do it?

Well, Cirque du Soleil did two interesting things. First, it got rid of the old circus staple of animal acts. Then, it supplemented its human acts with live music and compelling storylines. The first move reduced costs while the second introduced exciting new elements into the world of circus. In effect, Cirque du Soleil created a blue ocean: it carved out an entirely new market for artistic theater experiences. And people love it.

Lower your costs and differentiate yourself.

Perhaps you find the example of a circus company a bit too eclectic? No problem. There are thousands of other businesses that have successfully implemented a blue ocean strategy. Companies like Ford, Nintendo, Netflix, Nespresso, Yellow Tail, Southwest Airlines, and even The Body Shop. In this section, we’ll take a closer look at how they succeeded.

But first, a few more words about red oceans. In red oceans – industries that are already established – everyone plays by agreed rules. Not so long ago, these rules might have looked something like this: “Movies can be bought or rented.” “Wine needs to have an air of sophistication.” “Air travel is expensive.” But in blue oceans, none of these rules apply. Blue oceans are actively shaped by the actions of the industry players who create them.

Let’s be clear – you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to establish a blue ocean. Often, a few little tweaks are enough to set a product apart from its competitors and create a new market. It’s really quite simple: Take a close look at your industry as it is right now. Then think about which factors you can Raise, Eliminate, Reduce, and Create. Let’s go through these points step-by-step with examples.

Raise. Think about how you can elevate the product quality, price point, or service standards of your industry. Southwest Airlines did this when it became the first US airline to make domestic flights quick, easy, and affordable for everyone.

Eliminate. Consider which aspects of your product or service can be cut completely. Remember how Cirque du Soleil got rid of costly and unethical animal acts? Every industry has some outdated practice they’d be better off abandoning.

Reduce. Look at which production processes, product features or service offers you can reduce. Australian wine brand Yellow Tail, for instance, decided to reduce its focus on prestigious vineyards and the aging process in favor of affordable wines with broad appeal.

Create. Brainstorm what new features you can offer your customers. Netflix is a premium example of this that barely needs an explanation: it was the first company to offer on-demand streaming for movies and TV shows.

Ideally, considering these questions will help you do two things: lower your costs and differentiate your business from the competition. And that’s really all you need to create a blue ocean. Even more so, if your company keeps addressing these four factors – that’s raise, eliminate, reduce, and create –, it will stay one step ahead of the competition at all times.

Final summary

In this short Blink, you’ve learned about the difference between red and blue oceans. Rather than competing for limited market space, successful businesses often capture new markets with unlimited potential. They’re discovered by raising, eliminating, reducing, and creating industry factors in a way that lowers costs and sets your business apart from the competition.

RANGE BY DAVID EPSTEIN (COURTESY OF BLINKIST)

What’s in it for me? Learn why taking a wide-ranging approach to life will pay off.

In our complex and cutthroat world, there’s a lot of pressure to get a head start and specialize early. Many successful people, such as Tiger Woods, start to focus on one path early in life. But delve a little deeper, and it becomes clear that it’s generalists, not specialists, who are primed to excel.

Generalists may take a little longer to find their path in life, but they are more creative, can make connections between diverse fields that specialists cannot. This makes them more innovative and, ultimately, more impactful.

Drawing on examples from medicine to academia to sport, these blinks explore how breadth and range are far more powerful than specialized expertise. They also show that experts often judge their own fields more narrowly than open-minded, intellectually curious amateurs do.

In these blinks, you’ll learn; what comic books have to tell us about the ingredients of success, how the complexity of modern life has changed the way we think, and why you should be a Roger; not a Tiger.

Starting early and specializing is fashionable, but has dubious merit.

At the age of ten months old, Tiger Woods picked up his first miniature golf club. At two, he showed off his golf drive on national television. Later that same year, he entered and won his first tournament in the under ten category. Tiger Woods embodies a now popular idea that the key to success in life is to specialize, get a head start and practice intensively.

This trend toward specialization doesn’t only show up in the sports world. In fact, it’s also true of academia, our complex financial system and medicine. Oncologists, for example, now rarely focus on cancer alone. Rather, they specialize in cancer of a particular organ. The writer and surgeon Atul Gawande notes that when doctors joke about right-ear surgeons, we shouldn’t be so quick to assume they don’t actually exist.

But is specializing really the way to go? Simply put, no. In many walks of life, building up experience in just one field doesn’t help performance. In a 2009 paper, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein explored the connection between experience and performance.

Klein shows that experience counts in certain fields. For firefighters, for example, years of focused experience trains them to recognize patterns in the behavior of flames, which enables them to make 80 percent of their on-the-job decisions instinctively in seconds.

But Kahneman found that in other areas, experience counted for nothing. Studying the assessment of officer candidates in the Israeli Defence Forces, he found that recruiters’ predictions of a recruit’s future performance, based on physical and mental abilities, were no more reliable than guesswork. Crucially, as the recruiters received more and more feedback after multiple recruitment rounds, they didn’t get any better at making predictions. Kahneman concluded that there was a complete disconnect between experience and performance.

Some fields of life resemble golf or firefighting. While not necessarily easy, they offer recurring patterns or simple rules that govern decision-making. But there are many more fields of life, like army recruitment, that are much more nebulous and require the creativity and flexibility that generalization offers.

Experimentation is as reliable a route to expertise as early specialization.

In 2006, a now 31-year-old Tiger Woods watched Roger Federer win the US Open final for the third year in a row. Both were at the peak of their powers. As they sipped champagne together in the locker room afterward, Federer felt he had never connected with someone who understood his feeling of invincibility so well. They became firm friends. But, as Roger later told a biographer, his story was very different from Tiger’s.

Roger’s mom was a tennis coach, but if she ever felt tempted to coach him, she resisted it. As a young boy, he dabbled in squash, skiing, wrestling, skateboarding, basketball, tennis and badminton. Later, he gave credit to this range of sports experience for helping his hand-eye coordination and athleticism.

Over time, he found that he liked sports with balls. He moved toward tennis as a teenager, but not intensively. In fact, when his instructors recognized his talent and tried to move him to a group of older players, he asked to stay in the group with his friends. Roger Federer’s winding path to tennis success points to the fact that sampling, rather than specialization, can often be the best route to eventual success.

And plenty of evidence across multiple disciplines supports this. This is true even in an area like music, where plenty of outstanding musicians do specialize young. World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, for instance, started playing music at a very young age. But what many people don’t know is that Ma first tried violin and piano, and only moved to the cello because he didn’t like the first two.

Yo-Yo Ma isn’t alone in this. In a study of students at a British boarding school, music psychologist John Sloboda found that every one of the students who attended structured music lessons early in their development was categorized by the school as “average,” while not one was “exceptional.” In contrast, those children identified as exceptional were those who had tried out three instruments.

So, if you haven’t yet found your calling, experiment. You could take Vincent van Gogh as inspiration. He tried everything from working in bookstores to teaching and art dealing to preaching before finding his calling as an artist who changed painting forever.

Let’s find out how this works.

Living in a complex world has increased the average person’s IQ and ability to think abstractly.

In 1981, James Flynn, a professor of political studies from the beautiful hilly town of Dunedin in New Zealand, changed the way we think about thinking.

Flynn stumbled upon reports of IQ test scores of American troops that showed dramatic improvement between the two World Wars. The same score that placed a World War I soldier in the 50th percentile would only land him in the 22nd percentile of World War II troops. Intrigued, Flynn asked researchers in other countries for data. He received IQ test results from the Netherlands that showed similarly huge leaps from generation to generation. He then compiled data from 14 other nations.

In what’s now known as the Flynn effect, this research reveals an average three-point increase in IQ every decade in over 30 countries. But what causes this rapid rise? The work of a Russian psychologist, Alexander Luria, gives us an idea.

In 1931, the Soviet Union was changing rapidly. Remote, essentially premodern villages operating in ways unchanged for centuries were converted to collective farms with industrialized development, planned production and division of labor.

Luria capitalized on this rate of change to conduct unique studies. In one experiment, he asked villagers to sort wools into groups. In more modern villages, people would happily group similar pieces of wool, like those in different shades of blue. But in the remote, still premodern villages, participants simply refused to do so. According to them, each piece of wool was different – it was an impossible task!

Other questions involving conceptual thinking got a similar response. One villager, named Rakmat, was shown a picture of three adults and one child and asked which person did not belong. But Rakmat didn’t think about the question abstractly, as we would, and identify the child as different. Instead, he insisted that the boy must stay with the adults and help them with their work.

Luria’s findings were clear. The more exposure to modernization, the greater the ability to make conceptual connections between objects or abstract notions. Today, our minds are constantly dealing with abstract concepts. We glance at a download progress bar on our computer, for example, and instantly understand its meaning. Our minds are better at understanding a breadth of topics and making connections between ideas than ever before.

And yet, we continue to narrow our conceptual focus.

If you want it to stick, learning should be slow and hard, not quick and easy.

The teachers you liked the most in your educational career might be the ones who taught you the least. A study of teaching at the US Air Force Academy tracked the progress of thousands of students working with hundreds of different professors, starting with Calculus I classes. It found that the professors whose students’ got better grades on the exam were also highly rated in student evaluations. The professors whose students did not receive good grades received harsher student feedback.

But when the economists conducting the study looked at long-term results, there was a twist. The professors who received positive feedback had a net negative effect on their students in the long run. In contrast, those professors who received worse feedback actually inspired better student performance later on.

Rather than teaching to the test, these professors appeared to be facilitating a deeper understanding of underlying math concepts. It made their classes frustrating and difficult, hence the poor grades and student evaluations. But it paid off in the long run. Those professors were using desirable difficulties – harder, but ultimately more rewarding, ways to learn.

There are certain techniques we can all use that embrace desirable difficulties. One such technique is spacing, which means leaving time between learning something and practicing it. Consider a 1987 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. This study separated Spanish students into two groups, testing one group on vocabulary that they had learned the same day, and the other group weeks later. Eight years later, and with no further study in the interim, the two groups were tested again. The results showed that the latter group could remember over 200 percent more words.

Even short-term spacing is effective. In a 1972 study, researchers at Iowa State University read people a series of words. The first group of participants was asked to recite the words straight away. Another group was asked to recite them after being distracted for fifteen seconds by some simple math problems.

The first group did considerably better than the group that was distracted. But later the same day, the participants were asked to write down each word they could recall. This time, the group that previously performed worse did the best. The process of working hard to recall the information in the first instance had helped them move it from short-term to long-term memory.

So, don’t get too excited by quick progress when you learn. Embrace hard, slow learning. It will pay off in the long run.

A narrow focus is unhelpful, and a remedy for this is to think outside the box.

In some environments, dealing with specialists is desirable. If you need an operation, you probably want a doctor who specializes in the procedure and has done it many times before. However, as we benefit from more reflection and thinking, this narrow focus can be unhelpful.

For example, cardiologists use stents – metal tubes that hold blood vessels open – to treat chest pain so often that they often do so reflexively, even in situations that may be dangerous or inappropriate. This explains a 2015 study by Dr. Anupam Jena of Harvard Medical School. The study found that patients with cardiac arrest or heart failure were actually less likely to die if they were admitted to hospital while top cardiologists were away.

Other fields also point to the benefits of looking at problems with an outside view, rather than the inside view dictated by your own particular specialty.

In a study by University of Sydney professor Dan Lovallo, private equity investors were asked to provide a detailed assessment of businesses they were considering investing in, including their estimated return on investment. The investors were then asked to write notes about some other projects with broad similarities, like another tech start-up or an infrastructure project.

It turned out that the investors’ estimates of returns for the businesses they were actually planning to invest in were around 50 percent higher than for those alternative projects they had identified but not looked at in detail. The investors were shocked to discover the differences, and quickly slashed their estimated profit for their original potential investments.

As further psychological research has repeatedly shown, the more details we consider about something, the more extreme our judgments become. In one example, students rated a university higher when told that only certain science departments, rather than all science departments, were ranked in the national top ten.

Clearly, failing to see things from a broad perspective can lead to some bad calls.

A breadth of experience and interest drives innovation.

Comic books can tell us a surprising amount about range and success. When Dartmouth business professor Alva Taylor and Henrik Greve from the Norwegian School of Management decided to examine the impact of individual breadth on creative impact, they chose to study comics.

Tracking the careers of comic creators and the commercial success of thousands of comic books from 1971 onward, they made some predictions about what would boost the average value of a comic. They predicted that the more comics a creator made, the better the comics would be. Further, they thought that the more resources a publisher had, the higher quality and more successful its product would be.

All these assumptions were wrong. Neither experience nor financial resources bred success. What did drive success was the breadth of a comic creator’s experience across comic genres. Of 22 genres, the more a creator had worked in, from comedy to crime, fantasy to non-fiction, the more successful they were. But this link between breadth and success isn’t just the case in creative or artistic worlds.

Andy Ouderkirk, an inventor at the multinational company 3M, was named Innovator of the Year in 2013 and has been named on 170 patents, a proxy for creative success. He became fascinated with what generates successful and inventive teams, so he started to do some research. He found that the inventors who were most likely to succeed within 3M and win the company’s Carlton Award, which recognized innovation, were not specialists. They were polymaths, people with one area of depth, but a great deal of expertise in other areas as well.

These polymaths tended to have many patents in their area of focus, but also repeatedly took expertise gathered in one area and applied it to another. A study of prestigious scientists led by Robert Root Bernstein, a Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University, confirm Ouderkirk’s findings. Comparing Nobel prize-winning scientists to other scientists, the figures show that Nobel laureates are a full 22 times more likely to be an amateur actor, magician, dancer or performer.

So, for any hiring managers out there looking for fresh talent, here’s a plea. Don’t just look for people who fit into your clearly-defined slots. Make some space for those who don’t fit so clearly into any one category. Their breadth of experience might be invaluable.

The experts and pundits that our society listens to are usually hopeless at making predictions.

During 20 years of the Cold War, world-renowned forecasting expert Philip Tetlock collected and assessed the predictions of 284 experts. He concluded that experts are absolutely terrible at making predictions about anything.

Tetlock found that an expert’s years of experience, academic degree and even ability to access classified information made no difference. When experts said that some potential event was impossible, it happened in 15 percent of cases. Events declared to be an absolute sure thing failed to occur 25 percent of the time.

And worryingly for anyone who listens to cable news, Tetlock found that there was a perverse and inverse relationship between fame and accuracy. The more an expert appeared in the news, the more likely they were to be wrong, or as Tetlock famously put it, “roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.”

One of the problems was that many of the experts’ focus was too narrow. Having spent entire careers studying a single issue – say, US-Soviet relations – they tended to have explicit theories about how it worked. So, what makes a better forecaster of future events? Well, researchers like psychologist Jonathan Baron point to active open-mindedness – a willingness to question your own beliefs. Most of us fail at this, and can’t override our strong instinct to cherry-pick evidence that confirms our existing beliefs.

Consider a study run by Yale professor Dan Kahan. Pro and anti-Brexit voters were first tasked with interpreting a set of statistics about the effectiveness of a skin cream. Most participants completed the task successfully. But when presented with the same numbers framed as the link between crime and immigration, many of the participants misinterpreted the statistics according to their political beliefs. The same study has yielded similar results in the US on the topic of gun control.

So, how exactly can we combat our tendency to stick to our existing beliefs, despite the evidence? Kahan argues that one personality feature is important if we want to stay open-minded and think clearly about the world around us. Instead of scientific knowledge – how much you know – emphasize scientific curiosity – a desire to learn more, willingness to look at new evidence and ability to think with a genuinely open mind.

Now, let’s consider how we can embrace this kind of curiosity.

To be more of a generalist, you need to change your attitude toward learning and success.

See if you can answer this question correctly. Disease X has a prevalence of one in 1,000 people. The test for the disease has a false positive rate of five percent. What is the chance that someone receiving a positive test result has the disease?

If your answer was two percent, or 1.96 to be precise, you got it right. And in doing so, you did better than the 75 percent of physicians and students at Harvard and Boston University who got it wrong. Their most frequent answer was 95 percent.

The problem is straightforward if you know how to think about it. In a sample of 10,000 people, ten will have the disease and get a true positive. Five percent, or 500 people, will get a false positive. So out of the 510 people with a positive result, only 10, or 1.96% are ill. Sadly, many students aren’t taught to think openly about such problems. And this, according to Arturo Casadevall – a star in the world of microbiology and immunology – has to change.

In a new role at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Casadevall is developing programs focused on an interdisciplinary understanding of topics such as philosophy, ethics, statistics and logic. One course, called “How do we Know What is True,” examines different types of evidence in various academic disciplines. “Anatomy of Scientific Error” encourages students to hunt for signs of misconduct or poor methodology in scientific research.

Casadevall hopes that, with a more rigorous grounding in reasoning and multidisciplinary thinking, students will be better prepared to make a real impact on our economy and society.

Of course, not all of us hold senior academic positions like Casadevall. What can we do to expand our range? Well, one thing is to embrace failure. Dean Keith Simonton, a creativity researcher, has shown that the more work creators produce, the more failures they produce, but they are also more likely to produce a superstar success. Thomas Edison, for instance, held over 1,000 patents, many of which were ultimately failures. But his successes, like the light bulb, were revolutionary.

Treading a wide-roaming, disorderly path of experimentation may not always bring instant results. But it may just be the best route to greatness in the end.

Final summary

The key message in these blinks: Embracing range, experimentation and breadth of experience is often a better road to success than specialization. Range demands patience, open-mindedness and scientific curiosity. If we can foster and exemplify these, the chances that we will generate major innovations and contribute significantly to our economy and society increase.

THINKING IN BETS BY ANNIE DUKES (COURTESY OF BLINKIST) CROUPIER COMPTABLE PSYCHOLOGY

Human minds tend to confuse decisions with their outcomes, which makes it hard to see mistakes clearly.

Super Bowl XLIX ended in controversy. With 26 seconds left in the game, everyone expected Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll to tell his quarterback, Russell Wilson, to hand the ball off. Instead, he told Wilson to pass. The ball was intercepted, the Seahawks lost the Super Bowl, and, by the next day, public opinion about Carroll had turned nasty. The headline in the Seattle Times read: “Seahawks Lost Because of the Worst Call in Super Bowl History”!

But it wasn’t really Carroll’s decision that was being judged. Given the circumstances, it was actually a fairly reasonable call. It was the fact that it didn’t work.

Poker players call this tendency to confuse the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome resulting, and it’s a dangerous tendency.

A bad decision can lead to a good outcome, after all, and good decisions can lead to bad outcomes

In fact, decisions are rarely 100 percent right or wrong. Our decision-making is like poker players’ bets. We bet on future outcomes based on what we believe is most likely to occur.

So why not look at it this way? If our decisions are bets, we can start to let go of the idea that we’re 100 percent “right” or “wrong," and start to say, “I’m not sure.” This opens us up to thinking in terms of probability, which is far more useful.Volunteering at a charity poker tournament, the author once explained to the crowd that player A’s cards would win 76 percent of the time, giving the other player a 24 percent chance to win. When player B won, a spectator yelled out that she’d been wrong. But, she explained, she’d said that player B’s hand would win 24 percent of the time. She wasn’t wrong. It was just that the actual outcome fell within that 24 percent margin.

If we want to seek out truth, we have to work around our hardwired tendency to believe what we hear.

We all want to make good decisions. But saying, “I believe X to be the best option” first requires good-quality beliefs. Good-quality beliefs are ideas about X that are informed and well thought-out. But we can’t expect to form good-quality beliefs with lazy thinking. Instead, we have to be willing to do some work in the form of truth-seeking. That means we have to strive for truth and objectivity, even when something doesn’t align with the beliefs we hold.

Focusing on accuracy and acknowledging uncertainty is a lot more like truth-seeking, which gets us beyond our resistance to new information and gives us something better on which to bet.

We can learn a lot from outcomes, but it’s difficult to know which have something to teach us.

The best way to learn is often by reviewing our mistakes. Likewise, if we want to improve our future outcomes, we’ll have to do some outcome fielding. Outcome fielding is looking at outcomes to see what we can learn from them.

To become more objective about outcomes, we need to change our habits.

Habits work in neurological loops that have three parts: cue, routine and reward. As Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter Charles Duhigg points out in his book The Power of Habit, the key to changing a habit is to work with this structure, leaving the cue and reward alone but changing the routine.

We can improve our decision-making by being part of a group, but it needs to be the right kind of group.

We’ve all got blind spots, which makes truth-seeking hard. But it’s a little easier when we enlist the help of a group. After all, others can often pick out our errors more easily than we can.

But to be effective, a group dedicated to examining decisions isn’t like any other. It has to have a clear focus, a commitment to objectivity and open-mindedness, and a clear charter that all members understand.

In a decision-examining group committed to objective accuracy, this kind of change is self-reinforcing. Increasing objectivity leads to approval within the group, which then motivates us to strive for ever-greater accuracy by harnessing the deep-seated need for group approval that we all share.

To work together productively, a group needs CUDOS.

Shared commitment and clear guidelines help define a good-quality decision-examining group. But once you’ve got that group, how do you work within it?

You can start by giving each other CUDOS.

CUDOS are the brainchild of influential sociologist Merton R. Schkolnick, guidelines that he thought should shape the scientific community. And they happen also to be an ideal template for groups dedicated to truth-seeking. The C in CUDOS stands for communism. If a group is going to examine decisions together, then it’s important that each member shares all relevant information and strives to be as transparent as possible to get the best analysis. It’s only natural that we are tempted to leave out details that make us look bad, but incomplete information is a tool of our bias. U stands for universalism – using the same standards for evaluating all information, no matter where it came from. When she was starting out in poker, the author tended to discount unfamiliar strategies used by players that she’d labeled as “bad.” But she soon suspected that she was missing something and started forcing herself to identify something that every “bad” player did well. This helped her learn valuable new strategies that she might have missed and understand her opponents much more deeply. D is for disinterestedness and it’s about avoiding bias. As American physicist Richard Feynman noted, we view a situation differently if we already know the outcome. Even a hint of what happens in the end tends to bias our analysis. The author’s poker group taught her to be vigilant about this. But, teaching poker seminars for beginners, she would ask students to examine decision-making by describing specific hands that she’d played, omitting the outcome as a matter of habit. It left students on the edge of their seats, reminding them that outcomes were beside the point! “OS” is for organized skepticism, a trait that exemplifies thinking in bets. In a good group, this means collegial, non-confrontational examination of what we really do and don’t know, which keeps everyone focused on improving their reasoning. Centuries ago, the Catholic church put this into practice by hiring individuals to argue against sainthood during the canonization process – that’s where we get the phrase “devil’s advocate.”

If you know that your group is committed to CUDOS, you’ll be more accountable to these standards in the future. And the future, as we’ll see, can make us a lot smarter about our decisions.

To make better decisions, we need to spend some time in the future.

Temporal Discounting – making decisions that favor our immediate desires at the expense of our future self – is something we all do.

We can also recruit our future feelings using journalist Suzy Welch’s “10-10-10.” A 10-10-10 brings the future into the present by making us ask ourselves, at a moment of decision, how we’ll feel about it in ten minutes, ten months and ten years. We imagine being accountable for our decision in the future and motivate ourselves to avoid any potential regret we might feel.

Backcasting, imagining a future in which everything has worked out, and our goals have been achieved, and then asking, “How did we get there?" This leads to imagining the decisions that have led us to success and also recognizing when our desired outcome requires some unlikely things to happen. If that’s the case, we can either adjust our goals or figure out how to make those things more likely.

Premortems are when we imagine that we’ve failed and ask, “What went wrong?" This helps us identify the possibilities that backcasting might have missed. Over more than 20 years of research, NYU psychology professor Gabrielle Oettingen has consistently found that people who imagine the obstacles to their goals, rather than achieving those goals, are more likely to succeed.

Final summary

The key message in these blinks: You might not be a gambler, but that’s no reason not to think in bets. Whether or not there’s money involved, bets make us take a harder look at how much certainty there is in the things we believe, consider alternatives and stay open to changing our minds for the sake of accuracy. So let go of “right” and “wrong” when it’s decision time, accept that things are always somewhat uncertain and make the best bet you can.

Side Note: I think there is a link between Poker and Financial Psychopathy & Cerebral Narcissism because of the Rewiring of the Brian Benefits of Poker through Dopamine Release.

PITCH ANYTHING BY OREN KLASS (COURTESY OF BLINKIST)

PITCH ANYTHING is a fast-paced narrative packed with crystal clear examples illustrating the unique S.T.R.O.N.G. Method, which takes advantage of how the brain really works by Setting the Frame; Telling the Story; Revealing the Intrigue; Offering the Prize; Nailing the Hookpoint; and Getting a Decision.

You must tailor your pitch to the audience’s croc brains.

Everyone should learn to pitch ideas well. In every profession, from dentistry to investment banking, there comes a time when you must convince someone of something. Unfortunately, there is a gap between what we are trying to tell our audience and how they perceive it. To understand this gap and overcome it, we must look at the evolution of the human brain.

Basically, the human brain has evolved in three separate stages, resulting in three distinct parts: the primitive reptilian part, the croc brain, developed first. It’s a simple device primarily focused on survival and it can generate strong emotions, like the desire to flee a predator. Next, the midbrain developed. It allows us to understand more complex situations, such as social interactions. Finally, the sophisticated neocortex evolved, facilitating reasoning and analysis to understand complex things.

When you pitch, you use your neocortex to put into words the ideas you are trying to convey. Unfortunately, your audience doesn’t at first process these ideas with their neocortices. Instead, it is the audience’s primitive croc brains that receive the ideas and they ignore everything that is not new and exciting. Worse still, if your message seems abstract and unfathomable to the croc brain, it might perceive the message as a threat. This will make your audience want to flee to escape the situation.

This is why you must tailor your pitch to the croc brain. Since croc brains are simple, your message should be clear, concrete and focused on the big picture. You also need to ensure the croc brain sees your message as something positive and novel, which deserves to be passed on to the higher brain structures.

To secure your target’s attention, you must create desire and tension.

The one critical thing you need throughout your pitch is the attention of your target. To successfully attain this, research has shown that you must evoke two sensations in your pitch: desire and tension. Desire arises when you offer your target a reward, and tension arises when you show them they might lose something, like an opportunity, as a result of this social encounter. On a neurological level, this effectively floods your target’s brain with two neurotransmitters: dopamine and norepinephrine.

Dopamine is a chemical associated with anticipating rewards — desire. One such reward would be the pleasure of understanding something new, such as solving a puzzle. Thus, to increase the level of dopamine in your target’s brain, you must introduce novelty through a pleasant surprise, like an unexpected yet entertaining product demo.

Norepinephrine, on the other hand, is the chemical responsible for alertness and it creates tension in the target. If your pitch convinces them that there is a lot at stake here, their brains will be flooded with norepinephrine.

To create tension, you must create a bit of low level conflict with a push-pull strategy. This means first saying something to push the target away, like, “Maybe we aren’t a good match for each other.” You then counter this by pulling the target back toward you with something like, “But if we are, that would be terrific.”

This push-pull dynamic creates alertness in the target, as they sense that they might lose this opportunity. Depending on the situation, you may use very powerful push-pull statements, especially if you sense your target’s attention beginning to wane.

To control a meeting, you must first establish frame control.

Different people will see any given situation from a different perspective or point of view based on their intelligence, ethics and values. These perspectives are called frames, and they dictate how we perceive social situations such as meetings and sales pitches. Frames also determine who controls those situations.

When two people meet, their individual frames crash into each other. Only one frame can survive such an encounter — the stronger one. For example, let’s assume a cop pulls you over for speeding. He has a strong moral-authority frame and you only have a weak “I’m so sorry officer”-frame. It is clear that when your frames clash, his frame will prevail. This means he will control every aspect of the encounter: from its duration to its content and tone.

You will often face a similar clash of frames in a business environment; for example, a customer may be focused on the price of your product while you are focused on its quality. You will both try to get the other to focus on what you think is important.

If it is your frame that survives this clash, you will have frame control in the situation meaning your ideas and statements will be accepted as facts by the customer. This is a crucial advantage in any pitch. Without frame control, you are unlikely to convince anyone of anything.

You will often encounter the power frame, time frame and analyst frame, hence you must know how to counter them.

In a pitch or sales meeting you will often encounter certain archetypes of frames, and it is important you choose strong with which to counter them.

Typically, your target will use the power frame which exudes arrogance. You must not do anything that validates the other person’s power. Instead, use small acts of defiance and denial to bust the frame; for example, by yanking your presentation material away from the target if they do not seem to be taking it seriously.

Another oft-used frame is the time frame, where your customer asserts control over time: “I only have ten more minutes.” This is meant to push you off balance, but you can always counter with: “That’s fine, I only have five.”

A particularly lethal frame is the analyst frame, denoted by a fixation on details and numbers. If your opponent is in this frame, they will likely insist on drilling down into minor technical and financial details, effectively bogging down your pitch.

In such situations, give a direct but high-level answer to the question asked and get right back to your pitch. Analysis comes later. Before more questions come up, counter the analyst frame with your own intrigue frame. This basically means you tell a compelling personal story and leave it unfinished as a cliffhanger: “… so there we were, in a pitch black, falling airplane with no idea what was going to happen. Anyway, back to the pitch …" This redirects the focus of the room onto you and makes the discussion personal once again.

Use prizing to make the target seek your acceptance.

The most important frame you should be able to use is the prize frame, as it works in a variety of situations against many opposing frames.

Typically when you’re selling something or pitching an idea, your target will tend to see their money as the “prize” of the meeting, something you have to fight for. You must reframe the situation so that you are the prize and they would be lucky to do business with you.

Because people tend to want things they can’t have, prizing yourself will make your target work for your acceptance instead of the other way around. BMW does this with a special-edition M3. The company demands prospective buyers sign a contract assuring they will take proper care of the car, otherwise they cannot buy one.

In a pitching situation, never engage in behavior that makes it seem as if you are chasing the target, for example by agreeing to last minute schedule changes or trying to prematurely close the deal by saying things like, “So, what do you think so far?” Such behavior only reinforces the impression that the target is the prize. Instead, get your target to explicitly qualify themselves to you; for example, you could say, “I am very particular about with whom I work. Why should I do business with you?” This usually catches them off guard and they start trying to impress you.

Stack frames to trigger hot cognitions.

Contrary to popular belief, we are more prone to making choices instinctively than through rational analysis. In fact, we often make a decision about something before we even fully understand it and only later come up with reasons for that decision. These gut calls are called hot cognitions, whereas the decisions arrived at through rational reasoning are known as cold cognitions.

After you’ve introduced your big pitch idea, you want to trigger hot cognitions within your target. These will make him or her want what you have to offer in mere seconds, instead of analyzing your pitch for days to reach a rational, cold decision. You trigger the hot cognitions by stacking frames, meaning you introduce multiple frames in quick succession.

The first frame is the intrigue frame: you tell your target a compelling story, a personal narrative where a dilemma is solved. At the crucial juncture, you stop telling the story, leaving your target on the edge of their seat, ensuring their full attention.

Next, you pile on the prize frame, where you flip the tables on the target: instead of trying to impress them, make them qualify themselves to you. You could say something like, “This deal has so many investors after it, I have to choose who to take on board.”

After this, you stack on the time frame by adding time pressure to the pitch: “Unfortunately, this is a limited-time offer, and the train, so to speak, is leaving the station on Monday.” This will make the target feel like they are losing an opportunity, at which point they will want it even more.

By triggering all these hot cognitions in the target, you will leave them drooling for what you have to offer.

Don’t be needy – make the target chase you.

Neediness, otherwise known as validation-seeking behavior, is a sign of weakness and it can be absolutely fatal to your pitch. If you act needy, the audience will sense you are weak and their primitive croc brains will classify your proposal as a threat – to their money. This can easily push you into a vicious cycle where the audience becomes more and more distant due to your neediness, which in turn makes you anxious and even needier!

To negate neediness, you can use a simple three-step formula based on the movie The Tao of Steve, where the protagonist, Dex, follows a pseudo-Taoist philosophy to pick up women.

First, try to eliminate your desires, at least in the eyes of the target. If they have something you desperately want, this will translate as neediness in you. To negate this, make it clear to the target that you do not need them.

Second, focus on the things you do well, your strengths. Demonstrate something that showcases your excellence. Dex, for instance, was great with children and made sure the target of his affections saw this. Similarly, you must demonstrate excellence in front of your target.

Third, withdraw. At the crucial moment when your target expects you to chase them for their money, withdraw instead by saying something like, “I’m not totally convinced we’re a good match for each other.” This will make them chase you, much like the women in the Tao of Steve chased Dex.

To pitch effectively, you must attain situational alpha status.

Status plays a vital part in any social encounter. In any meeting, a dominant member known as an alpha emerges, while others take subordinate beta-positions. It is very difficult to be persuasive from a beta-position; hence, you must grab alpha status.

Though some elements of status, like your reputation or wealth, are quite stable, situational status can vary immensely; for example, while a successful surgeon has considerably higher social status than a golf teacher, the teacher is still the alpha during a golf lesson.

Often your pitch targets will lay so-called beta traps to force you into the situational beta position; for example, being made to wait in the lobby is a classic beta trap.

You must try to ignore these traps and avoid doing anything that enforces your opponent’s alpha status. Instead, use small acts of defiance and denial to grab the situational alpha status for yourself as soon as you can.

Say a customer has made you wait in the lobby. Once in the meeting room, you could begin examining some papers on the table in front of you. When the customer peeks at them, you could yank them away and say something like, “Nope, not until I’m ready.” If done in a good-natured, half-joking manner, this enforces your alpha position.

Once you have alpha status, you must then steer the discussion into a direction where you are the expert, much like the golf professional talks about golf, not heart surgery, when teaching the surgeon. To solidify your status, force your opponent to say something that reinforces your alpha position with a good-natured jest, like, “Remind me, why on earth should I work with you guys on this?”

Keep your pitch short and simple.

Before you begin any pitch, let your target know you will keep the presentation short. This will put them at ease. When Watson and Crick presented their Nobel Prize-winning idea of the DNA helix, they only needed five minutes. If you know what you are doing, you can pitch anything in twenty.

Start your pitch by introducing yourself. This does not mean rattling off your entire résumé but just outlining your greatest successes, like projects where you really did something impressive.

Most people will be tempted to jump right to the “big idea” for which they’re trying to get financing. But before you get to it, you should address one crucial concern in your target’s mind. Namely, you must explain why now is the right time to invest.

Rather than a long and complex analysis, simply outline the economic, social and technological forces which make your deal unmissable right now. Economic forces that benefit your pitch, for example, could be your target customers becoming wealthier and interest rates going down, the social forces could be the rising consumer concern for the environment, and the technological force could be the development of the electric car. You must present these forces in a way that shows a window of opportunity has recently opened but will not remain open forever.

The three forces set the stage and paint a backstory for your big idea, which should also be kept brief and simple. Use an established “recipe” for this: “For [target customers] who are dissatisfied with [current offerings on the market]. My product is a [new idea] that provides [solution to key problem] unlike [competing product]. My product has [key product features].”

That’s it. The time for details comes later.

Final summary

The key message in this book is: In any social encounter where you aim to be persuasive, it is vital that you seize control of the situation and ensure the target sees your pitch through the frame of mind you have chosen. At the same time, you must cater your pitch so that on a neurological level, the target’s brain works for you, not against you.

TRIBES BY SETH GODIN (COURTESY OF BLINKIST)

All Tribes Share 3 Components

A Group of People

A Common Cause

At least one Leader who Represents and Organizes the Tribe

The most important feature for a tribe is the shared cause.

A tribe’s shared cause leads its members to internalize the tribe’s values and ideas as their own. These internalized incentives make tribe members into driven believers instead of mere followers

Don’t engineer your ideas for the masses: make it exclusive and meaningful for a distinct group of people.

Apple set out to produce a new kind of phone that almost no one would initially like, but that a few people would really love.

With today’s technology, everyone can form and lead a tribe.

The first thing to know is that people need to be able to communicate intensely about their shared cause. This means that communication can’t just be vertical – between you (the leader) and the individual tribe members – more importantly, it must be horizontal, between tribe members.

With today’s technology, you have everything you need to facilitate both vertical and horizontal communication. Websites, blogs and social networks allow you not only to spread your cause, but also provide the room and the tools for your tribe to communicate, share ideas and organize. For example, you can use Basecamp to organize projects, and Twitter to share brief updates about developments. At the same time, these websites allow you to set ground rules for participation, and align everyone with your common vision by setting specific goals.

If you have a meaningful cause and the will to lead, people will follow.

Have you ever wondered how many people make up a movement? The answer is around 1,000: that’s the amount of true believers you need for a group to keep moving.

Creating a movement is about organizing an existing yearning into a way that tribe members can connect with each other, and form a movement under your leadership.

As former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley defines it, a movement contains three elements: A narrative that tells the story of the future you’re trying to build; a connection between the leader and the tribe and among the tribe members; and something to do – the fewer limits, the better.

When forming a tribe, don’t worry about making it grow – concentrate on tightening connections.

At least in the beginning, a tribe’s biggest advantage is not its size, but the multiple connections between the members, the leader and the outside world.

In fact, a tribe has four different directions of communication: Leader to tribe, tribe to leader, tribe members to one another and tribe member to outsider. Normal marketing pales in comparison, with communication generally only in one direction: company to market.

The most important of these directions is the communication between members. And this is where tightening a tribe comes in.

Tightening a tribe means bringing members closer together by facilitating communication and tightening their common bonds. You can do this by transforming a shared interest into one passionate goal, and by providing a platform for members to easily connect with each other.

Or you can harness the power of insiders and outsiders. To create a feeling of cohesion, you have to develop a culture of insiders – which inevitably excludes others. This allows the tribe to differentiate itself from other tribes, and create a stronger sense of internal identification.

Leadership is about stepping into a vacuum and creating motion.

For a tribe to form there has to be a particular change that people want to see made. This need for change has to come from a certain discomfort with the status quo, from a sense that there is something missing in the world. A leader steps right into this discomfort zone – the vacuum – and starts to organize so people will follow him.

Leaders do this despite the risks because of two things: they have faith in the cause and they know that innovation is always more effective the earlier it happens – so the sooner the better.

To make the world a better place, we need more heretics and less sheepwalkers.

What we need in the world are more heretics: people who question the status quo and the existing dogmas, and take action without asking for permission. Organizations need more heretics to advocate change from the inside: because if you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they will do amazing things. And tribes need heretics as leaders to break into new territory and help change the world.

ARMED ROBBERY INFLUENCE PASSING ATHLETE

Generalist Kinaesthetic Learners VAMMMBRGC

Volleyball

Acting

Modeling

Music

Martial Arts

Ballet (Female Only)

Rings Gymnastics (Male Only)

Graffiti (Art)

Cooking (Endorsements)

Characteristics

Suddenness

Speed

Intense

Aggressive Intervention for the Victim

Maximum Masking his own Contribution

Choosing the appropriate moment to attack and target the more vulnerable and defenseless victims.

Roles: The Bosses

**The Mastermind: The leader, who found the target, calls the shots, and thought up the plan. Usually the most experienced in the business as well, and very respected by their crew otherwise they wouldn't be able to keep all these amoral people in line. Compare The Chessmaster (Bullet Chess), The Captain, the Big Bad. May or may not have been the one to put the team together

**The Partner In Crime: The leader's second-in-command, who assists The Mastermind in plan-making and usually almost equally as experienced. Depending on the nature of the crew, he might be the only one besides The Mastermind who actually knows what's going on. May overlap with other roles. Compare The Lancer, The Dragon, the Number Two.

**The Backer: The Client who is paying for everything. Sometimes he has a deadline or is fussy in some other way that influences the crew's actions. Usually only The Mastermind and his Partner interact much with him. There isn't always a backer though, sometimes the crew front the money themselves and fence it hoping to make back enough for a profit.

Business Equity Heist

Scatter Site Shares Appreciation Rights Social Club

Bullet Chess Influenced Robbery

Preparation: The first step in creating such a good repertoire is to understand that memorization comes in a distant second to an appreciation of the ideas behind your opening moves

Prophylaxis*: In the game of chess, prophylaxis or a prophylactic move is a move that stops the opponent from taking action in a certain area for fear of some type of reprisal. Prophylactic moves are aimed at not just improving one's position, but preventing the opponent from improving their own.

Pre-Move: This is when you make your move *before* the opponent has taken their turn. Helps with Time and Creates psychological pressure.

Tactical Vision: Tactics are maneuvers that take advantage of short-term opportunities. They can support your strategy and/or destroy your opponent's plan and ideas. Tactical and combinational themes must be mastered.

Opening Game: A chess opening is the group of initial moves of a chess game. In addition to referring to specific move sequences, the opening is the first phase of a chess game,

Middle Game: The middlegame in chess is the portion of the game in between the opening and the endgame, though there is no clear line between the opening and middlegame or between the middlegame and endgame. Theory on the middlegame is less developed than the opening or endgames.

Development: It is important to develop your whole Army. Note the word whole. Some players get a few pieces out and launch an attack. The necessity for quick development depends on the type of Center that exists. For example, if the center is closed, development is not necessarily a priority because the enemy pieces won't be able to break into your position. However, if the center is open, development takes on a great significance

Initiative**: The side that forces it's ideas on a reacting opponent and Are making believable threats or responding to threats.

Dynamic Advantage: A dynamic Advantage centers around temporary items like development, the initiative, and more active pieces. Make sure you make use of this Dynamic plus before the opponent catches up in development, initiative runs dry, or you're active pieces are exchanged

Compensation: If you give up something (space, structural weakness, squares, material) and get nothing in return you are in trouble. However if you give up the same imbalances (space, structural weakness, squares, material) in exchange for different types of imbalance you are said to have compensation for whatever it is you gave up

Material Advantage: A material advantage goes to the player who has more and/or stronger pieces.

End Game: In chess and chess-like games, the endgame is the stage of the game when few pieces are left on the board. The line between middlegame and endgame is often not clear, and may occur gradually or with the quick exchange of a few pairs of pieces.

KEY MOTIFS

Mr. & Mrs Smith, Physical Fitness, Force-Velocity Curve Stimulus-Fatigue-Recovery-Adaptation Performance Training, Circuits, Networking, Chaárms or Athena Venus-Mercury Cusp Births, Triple Decker Projects with Sand Volleyball Courts, Brand Activation Modelling, Sports Larceny & Contract Racketeering, Sports for Orphans Charities, Short Film Series Acting, Polyglot, Industrial-Organizational Psychologist and Mergers & Acquisitions Bankers Advisory Team

KEY VALUES

Brass Knuckles as Weapons, Decadence, Socratic Methods Game Theory, Poker Country Clubs with Sports Betting Investment Trust, Red Bull Music Festivals, Athletic excellence, Sports Performance Centers, Med Spas, Patchwork Tattoos, Pastel Goth, Pastel Wavy Hair, Video Games, Real Estate Investment Groups, Scatter-site Share Appreciation Rights Social Club, Art House and Management Companies, Business Incubators and Startups Accelerators Collaboration Holding Company, Syncretism of Athena through Occult Magic to Warrior Spirits, Law Education EdTech Sponsor and Provider, Armed Robbery Sports Playbooks, Force-Velocity Curve Physique, Smurfing, Sports Betting, Poker Tournaments, Enterprise Foundations, Rental Properties, and Overview of the Nevada Economy: The top three sectors by total employment are Real Estate and Rental and Leasing, Accommodation and Food Services, Retail Trade, while the unemployment rate across the state in 2022 was 4.8%.

AESTHETIC THEORIES

Subjective

Based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions

Precarious Balance

Precariously: If something is happening or positioned precariously, it's in danger. A glass could be precariously balanced on the edge of a table. If something is on the verge of danger, then the word precariously fits.

Semblance

Semblance is generally used to suggest a contrast between outward appearance and inner reality.

Phantasmagorical

Having a fantastic or deceptive appearance

adjective. having a fantastic or deceptive appearance, as something in a dream or created by the imagination. having the appearance of an optical illusion, especially one produced by a magic lantern.

Law of Polarity in Relationships

In any successful relationship that has an intimate connection and sexual attraction, there is polarity. What does this mean exactly? Polarity in relationships is the spark that occurs between two opposing energies: masculine and feminine. Gender does not affect whether you have masculine or feminine energy.

Second Reflection

Burden Aesthetics with Intentions

The Second Reflection lays hold of the Technical Procedures

CRIMINOLOGY THEORIES

Choice Theory: The belief that individuals choose to commit a crime, looking at the opportunities before them, weighing the benefit versus the punishment, and deciding whether to proceed or not.

Classical Theory: Similar to the choice theory, this theory ascertains that people think before they proceed with criminal actions; that when one commits a crime, it is because the individual decided that it was advantageous to commit the crime.

Critical Theory: Critical theory upholds the belief that a small few, the elite of the society, decide laws and the definition of crime; those who commit crimes disagree with the laws that were created to keep control of them.

Labeling Theory: Those who follow the labeling theory of criminology ascribe to the fact that an individual will become what he is labeled or what others expect him to become; the danger comes from calling a crime a crime and a criminal a criminal.

Life Course Theory: The theory that a person’s “course” in life is determined by short (transitory) and long (trajectory) events in his life, and crime can result when a transitory event causes stress in a person’s life causing him to commit a crime against society.

Positivist Theory: The positivist rejects the idea that each individual makes a conscious, rational choice to commit a crime; rather, some individuals are abnormal in intelligence, social acceptance, or some other way, and that causes them to commit crime.

Rational Choice Theory: Reasons that an individual thinks through each action, deciding on whether it would be worth the risk of committing a crime to reap the benefits of that crime, whether the goal be financial, pleasure, or some other beneficial result.

Routine Activity Theory: Followers of the routine activity theory believe that crime is inevitable, and that if the target is attractive enough, crime will happen; effective measures must be in place to deter crime from happening.

Social Learning Theory: Social learning indicates that individuals learn from those around them; they base their morals and activities on what they see others in their social environment doing.

Strain Theory: The theory holds that individuals will turn to a life of crime when they are strained, or when they are unable to achieve the goals of the society, whether power, finance, or some other desirable goal.

Trait Theory: Those who follow the trait theory believe that individuals have certain traits that will contribute to whether or not they are capable of committing a crime when pushed in a certain direction, or when they are in duress.

Consensual or Victimless Crime: Consensual crime refers to crimes that do not directly harm other individuals or property. Rather, individuals choose to participate in risky behaviors that may be considered against the law. This includes indulging in drug use, prostitution, or obscenity.

CROUPIER ACCOUNTING

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