Terrific Non-Errors In My Life

"But my hope is to write a book that will be useful . . . and so I thought it sensible to go straight to a discussion of how things are in real life and not waste time with a discussion of an imaginary world; for the gap between how people actually behave and how they ought to behave is so great that anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to live up to an ideal will soon discover he has been taught how to destroy himself, not preserve himself."

This quote explains Tom and Jim’s philosophy on how work should be done and how people

I choose this quote because the problems from his past keep causing problems for his future if he doesn’t figure out how to work through them.

Two different but similar forms of writing are able to be tied down into one general but specific category. In the book, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), by Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris, Aronson and Tavris commentates on events that people go through. The book is mainly about Elliot Aronson’s and Carol Tavris’ opinion on how people behave and should behave when caught in tough situations. Instead of focusing on one main character in the book, each section of the book illustrates a different person 's’ situation and that situation would correspond with a specific theme in the chapter. Throughout the book, Aronson and Tavris give us a broad idea of how some psychological thinking/processes comes into play, each psychological concept corresponds to a chapter or section in the book, these ideas are: confirmation bias, revision of memories, self-justification, pyramid of choice, cognitive dissonance, blind spots, closed loops, reducing cognitive dissonance, blaming, self-justification (for the greater good), and (sunk costs). Another form of writing, “Wrong Answer”, by Rachel Aviv, is an article focusing on the main idea of a school going through tough times and the outcome of the actions taken by the staff. The article revolves around Parks Middle School in Atlanta. The teachers and staff in Parks Middle School were caught cheating and changing the answers students submitted for standardized tests, and this little mess resulted in hundreds of teachers being laid off and

In his essay, William F. Buckley Jr. is questioning why people do not complain. From my perspective, after working three years in customer service, people are complaining to much. They complain for not be acknowledge by a salesperson who was just answering a phone call, they complain that the music is too loud, the lines too long, the food too hot, the shopping bags too simple... The shoes are supposed to last a lifetime, and so should do the batteries of the watches. The fabrics need not to shrink/enlarge but the only variable that is changing is actually the customer's weight! People are finding unreasonable motives just to make someone else's life as miserable as their own.

"I believed that my greatest effort should be directed to seek in a beautiful simplicity ...and there is no accepted rule that I have not thought should be gladly sacrificed in favour of effectiveness."

“We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can change the world”

"no learning to accept life the way it was meant to be and acting on it is going to bring change."

In reading "Mistakes were Made but Not by me," multiple accounts are given of traits exhibited by humans that are displayed subconsciously. The authors, Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, begin by defining these traits and give readers the actual terminology to these characteristics. With various examples being provided to the reading audience they are then able to make a clear correlation between the behaviors displayed and how they may impact not only themselves but others around them. "Mistakes were Made but Not by me" has a theme which is centralized around the two key facets which are cognitive dissonance and self- justification.

“The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for

Ellyn Bache once said, “It’s normal to shy away from illness and death. It’s natural to gravitate toward laughter and life.” My dad has congestive heart failure, which is normally not considered a terminal disease, but his stage of failure is. He had his first heart attack when I was 8 years old. He was in and out of the hospital quite often. My dad had his second heart attack the summer after my 6th-grade year when I was twelve. He was in California, visiting his mother before she died. He had a heart attack and a stroke and was in the hospital for 52 days before we were able to go out to California and visit him. By the time we got there, almost all his bodily systems had shut down. He had frontal lobe brain damage, which made him unable to recognize my

“When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”

“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”

By the second week of the challenge, I was starting to become accustomed to not complaining. But, I started to notice that if I was around people who often complained I would feel the urge to complain much stronger. A recent study by Murray Munro, a Linguistics professor at Simon Fraser University, shows that second-hand complaining was even more harmful to the individuals than their own self-generated whining (Osgood). This shows how if you are around people with negative energy, you will often be motivated to complain as well.

Barlow and Møller claim that complaints are not problems to be avoided but gifts to be welcomed. They also write that complaints are important for several reasons, including: