In The Slow Fix, bestselling author Carl Honoré delivers an exhilarating model for effective problem-solving, and provides brilliant insights on how you can solve problems, work smarter, and live better. Honoré decodes how we approach problems and paves the way to better decision-making and generating long-term solutions to life’s inevitable challenges. Engaging and thought-provoking, The Slow Fix revolutionizes the way we live, work, consume, and think, ultimately increasing our wins and enhancing personal success. With The Slow Fix, Honoré details a new paradigm for efficient, sustainable problem solving, teaching us how to use time to build expertise, take advantage of teamwork, find the right messenger to deliver our message, and much more.
We live in the age of speed. We strain to be more efficient, to cram more into each minute, each hour, each day. Since the Industrial Revolution shifted the world into high gear, the cult of speed has pushed us to a breaking point. Consider these facts: Americans on average spend seventy-two minutes of every day behind the wheel of a car, a typical business executive now loses sixty-eight hours a year to being put on hold, and American adults currently devote on average a mere half hour per week to making love. Living on the edge of exhaustion, we are constantly reminded by our bodies and minds that the pace of life is spinning out of control. In Praise of Slowness traces the history of our increasingly breathless relationship with time and tackles the consequences of living in this accelerated culture of our own creation. Why are we always in such a rush? What is the cure for time sickness? Is it possible, or even desirable, to slow down? Realizing the price we pay for unrelenting speed, people all over the world are reclaiming their time and slowing down the pace -- and living happier, healthier, and more productive lives as a result. A Slow revolution is taking place. Here you will find no Luddite calls to overthrow technology and seek a preindustrial utopia. This is a modern revolution, championed by cell-phone using, e-mailing lovers of sanity. The Slow philosophy can be summed up in a single word -- balance. People are discovering energy and efficiency where they may have been least expected -- in slowing down. In this engaging and entertaining exploration, award-winning journalist and rehabilitated speedaholic Carl Honoré details our perennial love affair with efficiency and speed in a perfect blend of anecdotal reportage, history, and intellectual inquiry. In Praise of Slowness is the first comprehensive look at the worldwide Slow movements making their way into the mainstream -- in offices, factories, neighborhoods, kitchens, hospitals, concert halls, bedrooms, gyms, and schools. Defining a movement that is here to stay, this spirited manifesto will make you completely rethink your relationship with time.
Ivan E. Coyote is one of Canada's most acclaimed storytellers; her first three collections were insightful, deeply personal stories about gender, identity, and community. Ivan's most recent book, Bow Grip (2006), was her first novel; it won the ReLit Award, was shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Fiction Prize in the US, and was named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association. With The Slow Fix, Ivan returns to her short story roots in a collection that is disarming, warm, and funny while at the same time subverting our pre-conceived notions of gender roles. In ''By Any Other Name,'' Ivan gets into some serious male bonding with her Uncle Rob; in ''the Curse?'' a cousin's stepdaughter helps her to overcome her lifelong dread of buying tampons; and in the title story, she does her best to fix what's wrong in the world by telling the homophobe in the barber's seat next to hers to shut up. Ivan excels at finding the small yet significant truths in our everyday gestures and interactions. By doing so, she helps us to embrace not what makes us women or men, but human beings.
"Why do grown-ups have to take over everything?" This innocent question from acclaimed journalist and international bestselling author Carl Honoré’s son sparked a two-year investigation into how our culture of speed, efficiency, and success at all costs is damaging both parents and children. When the impulse to give children the best of everything runs rampant, parents, schools, communities, and corporations unwittingly combine forces to create over-scheduled, over-stimulated, and overindulged kids. The mere mention of potty-training, ballet classes, preschool, ADD, or overeating is enough to spark a heated debate about the right way to raise our children. The problem is that despite the best intentions of all involved, the pressure to manage every detail of our children’s lives from in utero through college is overwhelming. Delivering much more than a wake-up call, international bestselling author Carl Honoré interviews experts in Europe, North America, and the Far East, talks to families around the world and sifts through the latest scientific research. Not only do we see the real dangers of micromanaging children, but Honoré also shows us an emerging new movement inspiring many to slow down and find the natural balance between too little and too much. Blending the finest reportage, intellectual inquiry, and extraordinary true stories, Under Pressure is the first book to challenge the status quo by mapping out an alternative to the culture of hyperparenting that is presently pushing children and their parents to the brink.
A practical, step-by-step guide to eliminate the rushing, distraction and busyness in your life. Become calmer, healthier, happier, more focused, more efficient, more productive, more creative, more present. Unleash a better you at work, at home and everywhere in between. This workbook is the perfect companion to the global bestseller In Praise of Slow (In Praise of Slowness in the USA). Carl Honoré is the voice of the Slow Movement and the world's leading expert on slowing down in a fast world. While researching In Praise of Slow, he got slapped with a speeding ticket ....
The Flower Fix presents wild inspiration and modern arrangements by Swallows and Damsons florist Anna Potter, with beautiful photography by India Hobson. Blousy blooms, speckled branches, rich foliage, and delicate petals; nature has the power to inspire and energize, calm and soothe, focus and still. Anna has harnessed this magic with 26 tailor-made combinations of flowers to bring a floral boost to your home, no matter what your mood. With easy-to-find seasonal blooms, found items such as twigs and dried fruit, and any assortment of containers, discover how simple it is to bring a little bit of nature’s mystery into the everyday. Spanning all seasons and including both larger installations and smaller, simpler projects, there is something for anyone looking to play, experiment, and create atmosphere with flowers. Get your daily flower fix with these and more inspiring arrangements: Inspire Playfulness is a spring arrangement to bring joy, featuring lilac, roses, ranunculus, poppy, narcissi, and forget-me-nots. Flowers for Gratitude is a mix of summer’s bounty to inspire thankfulness, including garden rose, daucus, echinacea, and chocolate sunflower. Find Beauty in the Everyday is a colorful arrangement to bring a fresh perspective, featuring autumn foliage, hydrangea, dahlia, crab apple, and rosehip. The Shape of Self-Expression is a circular wreath design to express individuality, with holly, lamb’s ear, yellow holly berries, twigs and dried seedheads, and ivy berries. Each project lists the equipment, flowers, and foliage needed to start the project along with step-by-step instructions. You’ll also find a guide to basic flower arranging; notes on color palettes and how to use color; and a flower glossary listing the color, seasonal availability, and vase life of each flower. Be led by the flowers, foliage, stems, follow their shapes and form, feel their weight and heft to create versions of these gorgeous arrangements that are uniquely your own.
In the tradition of his internationally bestselling In Praise of Slow, and drawing on examples from the most progressive and successful leaders in business, politics, science and society, Carl Honoré brilliantly illuminates why the best way to face our problems might just be to take our time. If the high-flying fighter pilots of the RAF can own up to their mistakes, why can't the rest of us? Toyota was fantastically good at exposing its failings and correcting them, until it stopped, setting the company up for one of the most spectacular falls from grace in the history of the auto industry. BP couldn't bring itself to apologize for its catastrophic oil spill until the entire Gulf Coast of the United States was bearing the brunt of its technological shortcomings. Addicted as we might be to the quick fix--pills, crash diets or just diverting attention from things about to go wrong--the quick fix never really works. Trying to solve problems in a hurry, sticking on a plaster when surgery is needed, might deliver temporary relief, but only at the price of storing up worse trouble for later. For those looking for a fix that sticks, The Slow Fix will help us produce solutions in life and work that endure.
Carl Honoré captured the zeitgeist with his international bestseller, In Praise of Slow. Now he tackles another rising global movement: our revolutionary new approach to a human inevitability--ageing. A revolution in how we age is on its way. Yes, ageing is inevitable: one year from now we will all be a year older; that will never change. What can and will change is how we age--and how we can all take a much bolder approach to doing it with vigour and joy. The time has come to cast off prejudices and to blur the lines of what is possible and permissible at every stage of life. In other words: we need to learn to re-imagine our approach to later life. Emboldening ourselves in older age demands big structural changes. For a start, we will have to tear up the old script that locks us into devoting the early part of our life to education, the middle chunk to working and raising kids, and whatever is left over at the end to leisure. In an age-inappropriate world, these silos will dissolve. We'll embrace the idea that we can carry on learning from start to finish; that we can work less and devote more time to family, leisure, and giving back to our communities in our middle years; and that we can remain active and engaged in our later years. Carl Honoré has travelled the globe speaking to influential figures who are bucking preconceived notions of age, whether at work or in their personal lives. He looks at the cultural, medical, and technological developments that are opening new possibilities for us all. Bolder is a radical re-think of our approach to everything from education, healthcare and work, to design, relationships and politics. An essential and inspiring read for everyone interested in our collective future.
You don't have to accept slow Ruby or Rails performance. In this comprehensive guide to Ruby optimization, you'll learn how to write faster Ruby code--but that's just the beginning. See exactly what makes Ruby and Rails code slow, and how to fix it. Alex Dymo will guide you through perils of memory and CPU optimization, profiling, measuring, performance testing, garbage collection, and tuning. You'll find that all those "hard" things aren't so difficult after all, and your code will run orders of magnitude faster. This is the first book ever that consolidates all the Ruby performance optimization advice in one place. It's your comprehensive guide to memory optimization, CPU optimization, garbage collector tuning, profiling, measurements, performance testing, and more. You'll go from performance rookie to expert. First, you'll learn the best practices for writing Ruby code that's easy not only on the CPU, but also on memory, and that doesn't trigger the dreaded garbage collector. You'll find out that garbage collection accounts for 80% of slowdowns, and often takes more than 50% of your program's execution time. And you'll discover the bottlenecks in Rails code and learn how selective attribute loading and preloading can mitigate the performance costs of ActiveRecord. As you advance to Ruby performance expert, you'll learn how profile your code, how to make sense out of profiler reports, and how to make optimization decisions based on them. You'll make sure slow code doesn't creep back into your Ruby application by writing performance tests, and you'll learn the right way to benchmark Ruby. And finally, you'll dive into the Ruby interpreter internals to really understand why garbage collection makes Ruby so slow, and how you can tune it up. What You Need: Some version of Ruby. The advice from this book applies to all modern Ruby versions from 1.9 to 2.2. 80% of the material will also be useful for legacy Ruby 1.8 users, and there is 1.8-specific advice as well.
500 Low-Carb Meals—from the Series that has Sold More Than 11 Million Copies! The keto diet has soared in popularity due to its effectiveness in helping people lose weight, balance blood sugar and blood pressure, lower cholesterol, and more. But coming up with family-friendly keto meals that don’t require a lot of preparation time can be tricky. Maybe you find yourself making the same three meals over and over again. Well, now you can choose from 500 recipes for delicious keto-friendly meals all in one book! Here are tasty breakfasts, easy lunches, healthy dinners, delicious desserts, and even some snacks and hot drinks—many are made in a slow cooker or Instant Pot, with a generous selection of recipes made on the stovetop, in the oven, or on the grill! Healthy cooking doesn't get much easier. Find recipes such as: Buffalo Chicken Dip Buttery Lemon Chicken Quick Steak Tacos Cajun Shrimp Bacon and Cheese Crustless Quiche Slow-Cooker Pumpkin Pie Pudding And hundreds more! There are plenty of options to please every palate! Never has sticking to keto been so easy.
