【推荐1】With the first quarter of 2021 crossed out of your calendar, have you stuck with your New Year’s resolutions? If yes, congratulations! Keep on doing it! However, it won’t surprise anyone if you are among the majority of people who fail to make any changes.

Procrastination, meaning delaying actions for one reason or another, may play an important part here. For example, when we read a book or write articles, the efficiency will decrease if we have a cell phone close by and we have to finish the plans next day.

Apart from procrastination, overconfidence may also be part of the problem. Israeli-American behaviorist Daniel Kahneman has identified something called “planning fallacy ”. This means we believe our own projects will proceed as planned even though similar tasks took more time.

Why do we keep making this mistake? In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman says it’s because of “optimism bias” . He also says we underestimate the time we will need. In one famous example, planners originally estimated the Sydney Opera House would be completed by 1963. It was actually completed in 1973, an entire decade later. “Optimism and even overconfidence can generate false beliefs, leading us to overrate our abilities,” Kahneman wrote.

According to US writer Steve Pavlina, we could make a to-do list of upcoming tasks, and write down a rough estimate for how long we expect each task to take. Chinese news site Qdaily also noted, “People could use historical data in a proper manner. Previous experiences can help them see future trends.” Another way is to try and be more objective — take more of an “outsider” view. The ability to think about your experiences from a more detached point of view, rather than an immersed one, is important.

These methods aren’t enough to send a man to the moon. You also should take action right now.

【推荐1】After the death of her nature-loving mother, Margaret Renkl tenderly placed in an antique jar the “soft white hair” left behind in her mother’s hairbrush. Years passed. When it no longer carried the scent (气味) she treasured, Renkl laid the hair across a tree branch in her yard. This act was meant as a direct invitation to the birds in her yard, and it was accepted: A bird used the hair for the nest it was building.

Renkl devotes only a half-page to this story, but it conveys the beautiful interaction of human and other animal lives at the heart of The Comfort of Crows. Starting in winter and continuing through the seasonal round, Renkl brings alive in 52 chapters her love for the animals and plants in her half-acre (半英亩) yard in Tennessee and in nearby parks. Equally moving, she admits her desperation at the human-caused crisis the natural world faces, and her determination not to back off.

Her determination is more than lip service. She cures a neighborhood fox against a skin disease, with the help of a trap, a bit of bacon, and advice from an animal doctor; ensures that leaves from the trees in her yard are not gathered so that insects overwinter and hungry birds can dine there; fills a garden with milkweed in support of monarch butterflies.

With these steps, Renkl refuses to give up in the face of human-caused global warming that is changing our environment and harming other species. In these days of climate crisis, the phenomenon of ecological anxiety is real. In order to seize opportunities to help, many of us do require fuel to restore our spirits. Find that fuel in Renkl’s chapters of The Comfort of Crows. The animals and plants so cherished by Renkl need us now more than ever.

【推荐3】As the name suggests, alpine football, a variation of the world’s most popular competitive sport, is played on mountain slopes (斜坡) in order to make it more difficult.

Most competitive sports usually take place on level playing fields, but in the case of alpine football, one of the main conditions is that the field must be steep (陡峭的). It sounds totally impossible, but a group of football fans in the Austrian Alps claim that it’s the best way to play their favorite sport. They got the idea for alpine football during the 2014 World Cup, while watching a boring game and brainstorming for ways to make it more challenging.

“We were watching the games and found them very boring,” alpine football co-inventor Franz Mair said. “Then, Peppi Knunz, the other inventor of the sport, said to me, ‘The way they play isn’t hard enough and they should try running up and down our mountains. They’d soon be out of breath.’ And then we thought they might not even be able to play, but we would manage it!”

Flat ground is very hard to find in the Alps, so it’s most often used for more important things than playing football. Therefore, fans of the sport in such mountainous areas decided to turn lemons into lemonade and use the mountain slope to invent a new game. Now, locals take pride in only playing alpine football.

“Anyone can play on flat ground,” says Alois Gantner, trainer of the Supa BUrschis team. “In Montafon, we only play on the steepest slopes we can find.”

The rules of alpine football are the same as for the regular football, with the only difference being the need for strong legs and great energy to fight against gravity on the uneven field.