Another way to say this is that weak minds don’t retain big thoughts. A mind is weak when that mind is left undeveloped. My focus in this chapter is on the potency of reading as it pertains to developing the mind and ultimately, the worth of an individual.
Heavy Weights Imagine for a moment that you are watching a game of ‘throw and catch’ between a grown man and a four year old and the object they are throwing happens to be a bag of cement. For the grown man, catching the bag of cement will be possible because he can handle the weight of the bag. However, for the four year old, it will be a different story because he cannot handle the weight of the bag of cement. If the four year old in his naivety tries to catch the bag of cement, he is most likely to get injured in the process.
Relating this to thoughts, ideas and the mind, the adult player is the person with a strong developed mind while the four year old is the person with a weak undeveloped mind and the bag of cement represents ideas. Grand ideas are everywhere. The only reason why they appear to be in short supply is because weak minds cannot retain grand ideas/thoughts. When great ideas breeze into the thoughts of people with weak undeveloped minds, it flows right through because they don’t have the capacity to retain such thoughts for their lives. This is a reason why people settle for less than they should.

It is amazing how this global economic recession has become a propagator of tales; tales ranging from misfortunes, financial wreckages, broken hearts, soberness, and more frequently an increased art of prudence. Everywhere you turn you hear stories of how people have been battered and tattered by the melt down around the world. You read new blogs, which the writers were forced to start since they lost their job, chronicling their lives with no pay and how they are attempting to make the best of it. Others share logs of woes that have befallen them, while seeking advice from a host of readers from the corners of the earth. Lives have been touched by the economic travails and many seem beyond redemption. But the stories that amaze me most are how much of a lie many people had been living when the system seemed to have been working fine. As much as the capitalist driven world laid its foundations on mere paper and had a sudden collapse at a little shove from a sector of one country, many people have had their illusionary cloaks stripped from them. Now nakedly they stare at an unforgiving world and wonder what happened.
New York, USA. Damien graduated from a respected Ivy League business school. He landed a job immediately as a financial analyst with a gold chip firm and started enjoying the benefits of doing this. Apart from a juicy salary for a young man of 29, he received wowing bonuses at the end of the financial year. After just six years of working, he drove a Mercedes Benz convertible, lived in a 3 bedroom apartment in Manhattan, bought another house in Stamford, Connecticut, and had a time share in Mexico.

The Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 rule (the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes (As stated in the Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). This principle has also been applied to many morel areas of life outside business. In recent times I've been wondering why in most cases 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. It really amazes me when decisions are taken based on this rule. In business it will be great and fine to do that but in dealing with individuals and people in general, the application of this rule, in my opinion would be detrimental to the peace of any society. This is because the decisions that will be made by the leadership of the society will be based on the 20% cause, which in most cases are not pleasant causes. So the majority of the society is subject to the effect of the actions of the seemingly vital few (as portrayed by the principle). I have been in situations where the pleasant deeds of 80% of the populace is acknowledged but still, vital decisions are made based on the misdeeds of the 20%, and in every way I've been trying to understand this concept, to me it sometimes comes across as wicked. At other times, I just wonder why the unpleasant 20% should determine the turn of events in a society with a pleasant 80% doing all things as expected.

Taking a class in diversity management has helped clear my ignorance on the subject matter. There is no feeling as soothing as knowing what you never used to know, and seeing that what you now know will help you know what you are yet to know. I always saw issues of diversity as bordering on race and ethnicity, concerns for which the world is greatly suffering because it still is awed by the complexities of the multiplicity of mankind (ha ha ha....crack that). Also another error of thought was that diversity was a discussion whose endpoint is oneness and also a mechanism through which equality of outcome is guaranteed; far from that. The discourse of diversity seems to have slipped through the hands of those that will constrict its meaning and append narrow definitions to a concept that in itself defies a single explanation. Diversity is as diverse as it sounds and it seeks to divert our attention to something a bit more colorful than the usual straight-jacketed issues of race and ethnicity and the preaching of equality by the year 20?