We are constantly nothing but a bunch of energy being processed. Into this whirlpool, the more complex the system, the more energy it requires to hold it together. Therefore, the more complex - the scientists call it 'coherent' - the more fluctuations are possible.
So when you tell a joke, you want to make someone laugh, or if you tell a story about someone who had a heart attack, it may be because you want the listener to exercise. Stories are tools to create social cohesion and to get humans to strategize together.
Without social cohesion, the human race wouldn't be here: We're not formidable enough to survive without the tactics, rules and strategies that allow people to work together.
You can take a team of absolute all-stars in terms of their native abilities, but if they are not working together, they are much less effective than a team where there is less native ability but a higher degree of teamwork and cohesion.
Undoubtedly, church fish fries and picnics help build social cohesion. It was at my dad's medium-size evangelical church - my first real exposure to a sustained religious community - that I first saw people of different races and classes worshiping together.
A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.
I guess there were things about the Obamas I discovered that I do think are universal to marriage. I found it very interesting in my reporting that their most difficult periods in the White House almost never seemed to coincide. When one was down, the other one was holding it together. In my experience, that's true of marriage generally.
I liked the idea of exposing the beams in collaborative novel. And there are many - especially in the crime world - there are many people working together: James Patterson and his stable of sub authors; and then there are like Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman and Jason Starr.
It varies from song to song, although Buck Owens and I recently collaborated on writing a duet together and am looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to recording that track for the new studio album.
With 'Light,' I collaborated with a lot of different producers and musicians I respected, and we all wrote and worked on material which I then took to an old-school producer, David Kahne, and we put it all together. The lyrics came first - they were written before the music.
I'm deeply honored to lead Deloitte. I look forward to collaborating with all our people to continue to lead our profession in quality and innovation. Together, we make an impact that matters every day for our clients, the capital markets, communities, and society.
Puffy produced four of the tracks on the album. Those are the four songs that are collaborations between Puffy and me. And he gives me my space to work even when we work together, like with my producer and my vocal coach.
That's a gift God's given us: the ability to work together in collaborations.
If you're going to write a song, try to get together with a collaborator because it's better to write with collaborators.
Hollywood is, of course, loaded with egos, but it's amazing to see how, despite the egos, those collaborators pull together and focus on telling a story rather than butt heads and sabotage what is extremely hard work and investment just because their ego apparently demands it.
For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.
When I work on a part, one of the things I love to do is to put together a collage of things, stuff I see or stuff that inspires me, images, whatever.
I know the fans are very personable with my mom and things like that. They make little collages and pictures. They make edits of me and my mom together.
When I was growing up, I saw the Aaliyah shirts, the DMX shirts, or the collab shirts with DMX and Aaliyah when they had a single together. Those were the dope collage shirts with their faces all over it. They were doing cool things like that.
I've been head of strategy at IBM and together with my colleagues built our five-year plan. My priorities are going to be to continue to execute on that.
