A 17-year-old boy, caught sending text messages in class, was recently sent to the vice principal's office at Millwood High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The vice principal, Steve Gallagher, told the boy he needed to focus on the teacher, not his cellphone. The boy listened politely and nodded, and that's when Mr. Gallagher noticed the student's fingers moving on his lap. He was texting while being scolded for texting. “It was a subconscious act,” says Mr. Gallagher, who took the phone away. “Young people today are connected socially from the moment they open their eyes in the morning until they close their eyes at night. It's compulsive.”

    A study this year by psychology students at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Ga., found that the more time young people spend on Facebook, the more likely they are to have lower grades and weaker study habits. Heavy Facebook users show signs of being more sociable, but they are also more likely to be anxious, hostile or depressed. (Doctors, meanwhile, are now blaming addictions to 'night texting' for disturbing the sleep patterns of teens.)

    Almost a quarter of today's teens check Facebook more than 10 times a day, according to a 2009 survey by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group that monitors media's impact on families. Will these young people get rid of this habit once they enter the work force, or will employers come to see texting and 'social-network checking' as accepted parts of the workday?

    Think back. When today's older workers were in their 20s, they might have taken a break on the job to call friends and make after-work plans. In those earlier eras, companies discouraged non-business-related calls, and someone who made personal calls all day risked being fired. It was impossible to imagine the constant back-and-forth texting that defines interactions among young people today.

    Educators are also being asked by parents, students and educational strategists to reconsider their rules. “In past generations, students got in trouble for passing notes in class. Now students are skilled at texting with their phones still in their pockets,” says 40-year-old Mr. Gallagher, the vice principal, “and they're able to communicate with someone one floor down and three rows over. Students are just fundamentally different today. They will take suspensions rather than give up their phones.”

Product Description

    Life Without Limits helps you clarify what you want in every area of your life. By using Bassett's powerful techniques you will change; therefore your life will change. You control you life. will change. You control your life. And only you can take steps to change it. Life Without Limits helps you take back your power.

    Life Without Limits helps you to achieve satisfaction and fulfillment personally, professionally, and financially. Once you have defined what success means for you, you will clarify your dreams and start pursuing them.

Product Details

●Published in: 2001-12

●Released on: 2001-12-24

●Original language: English

●Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.7 x 8 inches

●Binding: Paperback

●304 pages

About the Author

    Lucinda Bassett is the founder and CEO of one of the most successful self-help companies in the country, the Midwest Center for Stress and Anxiety, Inc. Author of the national bestseller From Panic to Power, Lucinda Bassett produces and hosts the award-winning infomercial, Attacking Anxiety. She has shared her techniques with such clients as McDonalds, Chrysler, and AT&T. She has appeared on numerous talk shows, including Operah and The View, and been featured in Family Circle, Reader's Digest, and many more.

Customer Reviews

    This book has helped me to gain hope and courage to cope with all my fears and worries. Lucinda writes with such a great understanding and sympathy. She herself had problems with panic and worry. Her positive thinking tips are easy to follow. I don't get lost in a lot of mental problems. It's as if she were holding your hand, sitting right beside you, cheering you on! I believe I can do anything I set my mind to after reading this book. However, there are some other readers holding the contrary views.

    I am a strong believer that if a child is raised with approval, he will learn to love himself and will be successful in his own way.

    Several weeks ago, I was doing homework with my son in the third grade and he kept standing up from his chair to go over the math lines. I kept asking him to sit down, telling him that he should concentrate better. He sat but seconds later, as if he didn't even notice he was doing it, he got up again. I was getting frustrated, but then it hit me. I started noticing his answers were much quicker and accurate when he stood up. Could he be more intent while standing up?

    This made me start questioning myself and what I had been raised to believe. I was raised to believe that a quiet, calm child was a sure way to success. This child would have the discipline to study hard, get good grades and become someone important in life.

    Now those same people perhaps come to realize that their kids are born with their own sets of DNA and personality traits, and all you can do is loving and accepting them. As parents, throughout their growing years and beyond that, we need to be our kids' best cheerleaders, guiding them and helping them find their way.

    I have stopped asking my son to sit down and concentrate. Obviously, he is concentrating just in his own way and not mine. We need to learn to accept our kids' ways of doing things. Some way may have worked for me but doesn't mean we need to carry it through generations. There is nothing sweeter than being individual and unique. It makes us free and happy and that's just the way I want my kids to live their own life.

    Giving generously and receiving gratefully make it easier to live happily with others. Yet, why do we have such difficulty accomplishing these things in our relationships? I think people refuse to be generous with others because they fear being used.

    For example, my husband and I have family members who only contact us when they need money. We usually accept their requests, but we rarely receive a “thank you”. Most people would say that my husband and I are being used. But when we give, we shouldn't be giving for the purpose of getting gratitude. Rather, we should be giving because it's a good thing to do.

    Everything that we have, from our ability to wake up each morning to the money in our bank account, is a gift from the world. In return, the world asks us to use these gifts to help others, either by giving them our time or our resources. The good news is that when we live our lives being nice to others, our lives run more smoothly.

    If you're generous, yes, some people will use you. But if you practice being generous, most of your relationships will improve. And at the same time, we should remember to receive gratefully. I truly believe that you cannot say “thank you” enough.

    So often we get lazy about expressing gratitude. Parents can feel unappreciated by their children, and teachers can feel unappreciated by their students. Just because a task is part of someone's job description doesn't mean that you shouldn't thank them for it.

    Words of appreciation make others feel good about themselves like nothing else. It's good for us to say “thank you” because we often need to tell ourselves how lucky we are.

    If you are looking for a way to improve your life, I can give you one: Give generously and receive gratefully.

    Three men have had a big influence on modern sound and communication technologies. We started with the beginnings of computer-generated music.

Max Vernon Mathews

    Max Vernon Mathews has been called the father of computer music. He created electronic tools so that people could use computers, as musical instruments. He had a huge influence on the development of electronic music and how it is written, recorded and played. In 1957, Max wrote the first: computer program, Music, to enable a computer to create sound and play it back. The computer was so slow that it would have taken an hour to play the piece of music in seventeen seconds. For that reason, Mathews moved the work to a tape player, which could be sped up to play the music at a normal speed.

    Mathews continued creating other versions of the Music program. He became interested in how computers could help musicians outside recording studios. The Groove program he developed was the first computer program made for live performances.

Norio Ohga

    Sony Corporation official Norio Ohga helped to develop, the compact disc in the late 1970s.

    He pushed for CDs to be larger, and with a longer playing time. He wanted them to hold seventy-five minutes so that they could store all of Bcethoven's Ninth Symphony on one disc. This way, listeners could enjoy the musical work without any break. The compact disc changed the electronics industry and the way people listened to music.

Hubert Joseph Schlafly

    Hubert Joseph Schlafly was an electrical engineer who helped change the way actors, politicians and other people speak on television. In 1950, he and two other men developed the teleprompter. One co-worker, Fred Barton, was an actor. He had an idea for a tool that would help television actors read their lines without having to memorize them. The first teleprompter involved a person who turned a long piece of paper printed with tall letters. As the actor read the lines, another person would, move the paper ahead on the device. Later versions used television screens to show the words that were to be read.

    Professor Smith recently persuaded 35 people, 23 of them women, to keep a diary of all their absent-minded actions for two weeks. When he came to analyze their embarrassing lapses(差错)in a scientific report, he was surprised to find that nearly all of them fell into a few groupings. Nor did the lapses appear to be entirely random(随机的).

    One of the women, for instance, on leaving her house for work one morning threw her dog her earrings and tried to fix a dog biscuit on her ear. "The explanation for this is that the brain is like a computer," explains the professor. "People program themselves to do certain activities regularly. It was the woman's custom every morning to throw her dog two biscuits and then put on her earrings. But somehow the action got reversed(颠倒的)in the program," About one in twenty of the incidents the volunteers reported were these "program assembly failures".

    Altogether the volunteers logged 433 unintentional actions that they found themselves doing—an average of twelve each. There appear to be peak periods in the day when we are at our zaniest (荒谬可笑的). These are two hours sometime between eight a.m. and noon, between four and six p.m. with a smaller peak between eight and ten p.m. "Among men the peak seems to be when a changeover in brain 'programs' occurs, as for instance between going to and from work." Women on average reported slightly more lapses—12.5 compared with 10.9 for men—maybe because they were more reliable reporters.

    An astonishing finding of the research is that the absent-minded activity is a risk of doing things in which we are skilled. Normally, you would expect that skill reduces the number of errors we make. But trying to avoid silly slips by concentrating more could make things a lot worse—even dangerous.