The Spartans, a warrior society in ancient Greece, were feared and revered for their strength, courage and endurance. The power of the Spartan army did not come from the sharpness of their spears, however; it came from the strength of their shields. Losing one's shield in battle was considered the single greatest crime a Spartan could commit. Spartans excuse without penalty the warrior who loses his helmet or breastplate in battle, writes Steven Pressfield in his account of the Battle of Thermopylae, but deprive the man who discards his shield of all his citizenship rights. And the reason was simple. A warrior carries a helmet and breastplate for his own protection, but his shield for the safety of the whole line.

Some things in life are important, and they deserve your full commitment. It's important to do your best when performing your job, cultivating your marriage, raising your children, and competing for the league bowling championship. Giving it your all is a necessary part of success, which gives us pride and joy and a sense of self-worth. Unfortunately, at some point early in life, we all heard someone say, Always do your best. And a lot of people accepted the wisdom of this advice without ever questioning it. These are the people who avoid trying new activities because they are afraid that someone will judge their effort and scold them if it's not their best. So these people miss out on lots of fun, mind-expanding, enjoyable activities because of the always do your best mentality.

The past couple of decades have seen many corporations joining with charities in what is called cause-related marketing efforts, in which a corporation donates a certain percentage of its profits from a particular item. The nonprofit group and the corporation advertise the arrangement and encourage people who may be choosing among similar products to choose the one that also benefits the charity. Variations on this theme include corporations that offer to give a percentage of profits to a certain kind of organization or who allow customers to nominate groups that should receive corporate funding. Cause-related marketing has benefited many organizations by allowing shoppers to feel that their spending can also serve a charitable purpose. The drawback is that these donors do not become part of an organization's donor base.

When life deals us multiple losses, we create unnecessary burdens for ourselves if we continue to postpone the tears and the acknowledgment of pain. Over time, we may find it more and more difficult to cry about anything. Or we may suddenly cry for reasons totally unrelated to our pain, as when a television commercial sets us off. Or we may even cry in inappropriate places, as when we burst into tears in a meeting at work. We may be storing up such a flood of emotions that we become afraid to feel, especially when we are feeling more vulnerable with a new loss. We may begin to avoid topics that might make us cry. Others may avoid us, frightened by the urgency of our tears when we do express our sadness. Sorrow is not one of the more popular feelings because we must be willing to allow it to overtake us.

When George Lucas succeeded in making Star Wars, despite those who said the special effects he wanted hadn't ever been done and couldn't be done, many other possibilities opened up to him. Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), the company he created to produce those impossible special effects, became a source of revenue to help fund his other projects. He was able to produce merchandising tie-ins to his movies, thus bringing in another revenue stream to fund his moviemaking. But his confidence in doing the difficult has also made a huge impact on other moviemakers and a whole new generation of moviegoers. Popular culture writer Chris Salewicz says, At first directly through his own work and then via unparalleled influence of ILM, George Lucas has influenced for two decades the essential broad notion of what is cinema.

Programs of economic development often lead to changes in people's dietary habits. In some cases these dietary changes are voluntary to the extent that some new foods, associated with powerful outsiders, are status symbols. But more often than not, diets change because of circumstances associated with the objectives of economic development that are beyond the control of the local people. For example, in an attempt to grow more cash crops (which help to raise wages and bring in foreign exchange capital), non-Western people often divert time and energy from growing their normal subsistence crops. The result is that they spend much of their hard-earned cash on foods that are both costly and nutritionally inferior to feed their families.

According to philosopher Radcliffe Richards, it is incoherent to think that something's real nature is revealed when it is in its correct environment. First of all, the whole notion of a 'correct environment' is problematic. Isn't the notion of what is correct relative to various concerns? The correct environment for a salmon when cooking one is perhaps a heated oven. The correct environment for its spawning is something else again. But more importantly, to know something's nature is to know how it is in a variety of environments. Iron's nature, for example, is most fully understood if we know how it behaves when it is hot, cold, smashed, left in water and so on. Knowing how iron behaves when left in conditions optimal to its continued, unchanged existence only gives a partial view of its nature.

Our instincts tell us the higher we climb up the ladder, the more stress we feel and the weaker our feeling of safety. Consider the stereotype of the high-strung executive facing relentless pressure from shareholders, employees and the firm's largest customers. We are hardly surprised when one of them suddenly drops dead of a heart attack before fifty. Decades ago, scientists in Britain set out to study this link between an employee's place on the corporate ladder and stress. Known collectively as the Whitehall Studies, the studies' findings were both astounding and profound. Researchers found that workers' stress was not caused by a higher degree of responsibility and pressure usually associated with rank. It is not the demands of the job that cause the most stress, but the lack of control workers feel they have throughout their day. The studies also found that the effort required by a job is not in itself stressful, but rather the imbalance between the effort we give and the reward we feel.

In a study at Stanford University, four-year-olds at a nursery school were offered a marshmallow. They were told they could either eat the marshmallow immediately or wait. If they waited to eat the marshmallow that sat before their eyes until the experimenter returned (about 15 minutes), they would receive two marshmallows. Walter Mischel, a psychologist studying delaying gratification, had three daughters who attended the nursery school; they and their classmates participated in the study. Over the years, he would ask his daughters about their friends, and in doing so he detected a relationship between an ability to delay gratification in preschool and excelling in adolescence. Mischel and his colleagues located the participants in the initial study to more formally track their progress as they matured. They noticed that the children who ate the single marshmallow right away were likely to have problems in the areas of behavior, friendship, and attention. In contrast, those who were able to delay gratification had higher SAT scores and coped better with stress.

You and your friend have just finished your meal. The waiter lays the check on your table. Boom! To an earsplitting duet of Let me get that, you and your friend's hands snatch down on it like two pelicans plunging for the same fish. Embarrassing battles follow. You disturb nearby diners. Here's how to avoid this happening. Arrive at the restaurant before your guest arrives, and give the person who seats you your credit card. Say you want him to bring the bill with the credit card already stamped as you finish your meal. When the meal is over, the server brings the check directly to you. You merely fill in the tip and hand it back. When your friend says Oh no, simply say No, it's done. I really want to get this one. Your friend is impressed and pleased.

Our bodies have a protecting trick up their sleeves. Once certain viruses have done their dirty work in a body, they'll never be let back in again. It's called immunity and it's why we get chicken pox only once in a lifetime. Let's say that a big, ugly dog moves in next door. The first time you try to pet it, it snarls and tries to take a small chunk out of your rear end. So the next time you have to walk past that dog, you are prepared. You blow a dog whistle that sends him cowering into his doghouse with his paws over his ears. You fight back because you recognize danger when you see it. Your body works the same way. It recognizes an evil virus the second time around, knows it will cause trouble, and attacks it before it has a chance to do its mischief again.

'Research has shown that ...' is a phrase often used to persuade the listener that the speaker can back up what he or she is saying with firm empirical evidence. However, it is extremely vague to claim that 'research has shown' anything unless you can back up the claim with specific details about the research. Who carried out this research? What methods did they use? What precisely did they find? Have their results been confirmed by other workers in the field? These are the sorts of questions which anyone who uses this phrase should be able to answer. If they can't, then there is no reason to be persuaded by the phrase, which is then empty of content.