Dan Bldrsbts

“Can I make you a cup of tea?” He says that would be wonderful, and she smiles handsomely; then her face darkens in terrible sorrow. “And I am so sorry, Mr. Arthur,” she says, as if imparting the death of a loved one. “You are too early to see the cherry blossoms.” After the tea (which she makes by hand, whisking it into a bitter green foam—“Please eat the sugar cookie before the tea”) he is shown to his room and told it was, in fact, the novelist Kawabata Yasunari’s favorite. A low lacquered table is set on the tatami floor, and the woman slides back paper walls to reveal a moonlit corner garden dripping from a recent rain; Kawabata wrote of this garden in the rain that it was the heart of Kyoto. “Not any garden,” she says pointedly, “but this very garden.” She informs him that the tub in the bathroom is already warm and that an attendant will keep it warm, always, for whenever he needs it. Always. There is a yukata in the closet for him to wear. Would he like dinner in the room? She will bring it personally for him: the first of the four kaiseki meals he will be writing about. The kaiseki meal, he has learned, is an ancient formal meal drawn from both monasteries and the royal court. It is typically seven courses, each course composed of a particular type of food (grilled, simmered, raw) and seasonal ingredients. Tonight, it is butter bean, mugwort, and sea bream. Less is humbled both by the exquisite food and by the graciousness with which she presents it. “I most sincerely apologize I cannot be here tomorrow to see you; I must go to Tokyo.” She says this as if she were missing the most extraordinary of wonders: another day with Arthur Less. He sees, in the lines around her mouth, the shadow of the smile all widows wear in private. She bows and exits, returning with a sake sampler. He tries all three, and when asked which is his favorite, he says the Tonni, though he cannot tell the difference. He asks which is her favorite. She blinks and says: “The Tonni.” If only he could learn to lie so compassionately.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“After meticulously analyzing videos of 185 venture capital presentations — looking at both verbal and nonverbal behavior — Lakshmi ended up with results that surprised her: the strongest predictor of who got the money was not the person’s credentials or the content of the pitch. The strongest predictors of who got the money were these traits: confidence, comfort level, and passionate enthusiasm.”
― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

“the three factors that seem to have the greatest influence on increasing our happiness are our ability to reframe our situation more positively, our ability to experience gratitude, and our choice to be kind and generous.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

“We compare what we have with what other people have. Poverty, then, is relative—that’s not to say it isn’t a very bad/uncomfortable/life-shortening/fatal position to be in, just that it’s not an absolute. What it means to be “poor” changes through time and across the world—as does what it means to be “rich,” “well off,” or merely “comfortable” (though what it means to be “starving” is flatly invariable). In terms of toasters, if everyone else has a toaster and I don’t, well, I’ll feel a bit deprived, and I’ll go and buy a toaster if I can afford it. The fact that wealth is relative is, I think, one thing that drives the economy. It’s not that people have “infinite wants” (as economists traditionally claim), just that no one wants to be at the poor end of the scale.”
― Thomas Thwaites, The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch