Instead of assuming that emotional intelligence is always useful, we need to think more carefully about where and when it matters.
I went to high school in Columbia. I met my first wife, Richards, whom I married while I was working on a B.S. in chemistry at Georgia Tech. She bore Louise, and I studied. I learned most of the useful technical things – math, physics, chemistry – that I now use during those four years.
Britain’s most useful role is somewhere between bee and dinosaur.
The global capitalist project, which we are all a part of, leaves people behind. I don’t know what the answers are – I don’t think any actor does – but figuring it out through entertainment can be very useful.
About the only useful thing my economics degree taught me was that, in all decisions in life, you have to do a cost-benefit analysis.
I loved my time in Congress, but people who spend all of their time planning to run for office have very few useful skills to deploy when they finally get there.
Targeted ads, I think, are useful because I don’t want to see all the crap. I’m not interested in buying a Mercedes Benz, but I am interested in buying a new MacBook Air. So if organizations like Facebook can actually make the ads more relevant to me, if they know what I am interested in, I have no problem with that.
When Spotify launched in the U.S. in 2011, it relied on simple usage-based algorithms to connect users and music, a process known as ‘collaborative filtering.’ These algorithms were more often annoying than useful.
How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.
A computer can be a useful and indispensable tool. But if we allow it to devour our time with vain, unproductive, and sometimes destructive pursuits, it becomes an entangling net.
If kids can learn how to make a simple Bolognese sauce, they will never go hungry. It’s pretty easy to cook pasta, but a good sauce is way more useful.
Temperance is essential, if the services of men and women are to be employed to the best and most useful effect according, to the physical capacity and ability of each. Nothing less will assure a total effort.
It has been a useful experience to play for several different teams and move around.
Boredom or discontent is useful to me when I acknowledge it and see clearly my assumption that there’s something else I would rather be doing.
Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment.
Organizations like the ACLU fought and won the good fight back in the 1960’s, but it’s clear that nowadays they’ve run out of useful things to do since they now spend most of their time defending the scum of the Earth from getting what they rightly deserve.
If your home is anything like mine, it contains several rarely explored crannies stashed full of archaic chargers, defunct cables, and freshly antiquated gizmos whose sole useful function in 2011 is to make 2005 feel like 1926, simply by looking big and dull and impossibly lumpen.
Imagination is Reality Lite – a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work.
I aspire to be useful.
We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.
When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
We have a lot of work to do to get really important useful capabilities into people’s hands – self-driving cars are going to save an enormous number of lives.
Every mother in the world knows this feeling one day… of emptiness, a time comes where you feel a little less useful because you’re no longer running left and right. Life no longer has the same rhythm.
Actually, to be honest, this is a useful time to not be knowing what I’ll be doing in 2013 or 2014, because really, for the last however many years, I’ve known what I’ve been doing for years and years ahead. You get into a cycle of non-reflection, and that gets a bit scary.
The attention of a traveller, should be particularly turned, in the first place, to the various works of Nature, to mark the distinctions of the climates he may explore, and to offer such useful observations on the different productions as may occur.
When I was in the private sector, I found it immensely useful to go out and talk to customers and co-workers.
Anyway, in my writing I’ve always been interested in finding places to stand, and I’ve found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I’m writing about.
When it comes to vibrato, a lot of people look at their hands when they do it. Which is pretty much of no use. Because vibrato is one of those things you have to hear. There are some guitar things where the visual is really useful, like seeing chord shapes or scale patterns. But vibrato isn’t one of those things.
Novels for me are how I find out what’s going on in my own head. And so that’s a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.
I used to be a writer with superstitions worthy of a professional baseball player: I needed a certain desk chair and a certain armchair and a certain desk arrangement, and I could only get really useful work done between 8 P.M. and 3 A.M. Then I started to move, and I couldn’t bring my chairs with me.
I had a lot of chances to do things that other people don’t ever get, and I have to be content with that. I have to look around for some other way to make myself useful.
I want to make it clear that the lobbying sector does an important job. It is very useful to the government to hear the views of a broad range of groups to make sure we get the best.
‘First things first’ might be a cliche, but it’s a useful one that means prioritizing what matters most to you and believing there is no wrong answer. When it comes to figuring this out for yourself, the careful binary of work or life entirely misses the point.
I love playing around with ideas and turning them into something useful or fun.
My father was a photographer at the National Bureau of Standards. A self-educated man, he never finished high school, but in his career at the National Bureau of Standards, he made many useful inventions and eventually became chief of the Photographic Technology Section.
Read good books. Read bad books – and figure out why you don’t like them. Then don’t do it when you write. If you are a science fiction or fantasy writer, going to conventions and attending panels is very useful.
Dropbox is useful to anyone with a phone. That’s, like, two billion people.
A duty is to be chosen from what is virtuous, and from what is useful, and also from the comparison of the two, one with the other; but nothing is recognized by Christians as virtuous or useful which is not helpful to the future life.
Conscious breath control is a useful tool for achieving a relaxed, clear state of mind.
I was actually accepted into medical school in Italy. But then I wanted to come back and learn medicine in Germany. And while waiting, I decided to join a business school. I figured it would be useful for doctors to know some business as well!
By and large, prisons are survivable, though hope is indeed what you need least upon entering here; a lump of sugar would be more useful.
The type of science that I do is sometimes known as ‘curiosity-driven research.’ This means that my work will never result in a marketable product, a useful machine, a prescribable pill, a formidable weapon, or any direct gain.
I want to do very useful buildings and I would like to find a method of producing these buildings through our technology because I think that this is the only way that we will gain wonderful environment easily in the future.
Imagination tends to be truly useful if accompanied by the power of mental control – if the worlds in one’s head can be purposefully manipulated and distinguished from the real one outside it.
The people who write official histories for the Army believe that a generation needs to pass before you can tackle the official history. It’s useful to have some distance. Sources become available. Passions cool. It allows an opportunity to make some real assessments and judgments about personalities and characters.
Wine is similar to music in that it’s a purely experiential realm, and it’s a purely subjective practice. That’s sort of the funny thing about wine criticism or, for that matter, music criticism. At times, those are useful guides, but ultimately it’s all about how you react to that music or wine.
Certain classes of weapons that are strictly military and have no useful purpose in sport, hunting, or self-defense should not be legally sold.
I don’t mean it to sound egomaniacal, but in a way, for me, it was very useful to imagine that I was the only one who was taking pen in hand. I’d always been told that it was impossible to be published, so I was writing only for myself.
Yes, the car is still useful – for a few people it’s essential. It would make a good servant. But it has become our master, and it spoils everything it touches.
Personally, I don’t see old economics and behavioural economics as opposed. It is useful to assume people are rational as a good approximation to their long term behaviour, but it would be unwise not to think how in practice their behaviour may deviate from that simplifying assumption.
