Ilana Ettinger

We have instinctual responses to help us choose the objects that meet our most basic needs—when we’re hungry, we seek food; when we’re cold, we want warmth. But there is an entire universe of desires for which we have no instinctual basis for choosing one object or another. For these objects of desire, Girard saw that the most important factor in

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Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at.

Two centuries ago, 84% of Americans worked on (mainly) our own farms in order to feed ourselves (decentralized, inefficient). By a century ago, we worked for a boss in big factories (centralized, more efficient), and today, while many people still work inside of big companies, more and more of us are working for ourselves or in creative jobs while

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It’s because there’s still a widespread reverence for the “ideal worker.” We commonly define the ideal worker as someone who starts working in early adulthood and continues, full-time and full force, for 40 years straight. The concept reflects a breadwinner-homemaker model that dates back to the Industrial Revolution and functioned fairly well

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The bottom line is that 7 Rules of Power provides a clear roadmap for increasing your personal power and status over other people, if that’s what you’re looking to achieve. But it neglects to wrestle fully with the negative impacts of the tactics it espouses.

“Women need to be twice as good to get half the credit. Fortunately many women are four times as good.” —Alison Davis-Blake, former president of Bentley University (p. 17)