Let Enthusiasm Fuel Your Success

Years ago, when I started looking for my first job, wise advisers advised, “Barbara, be enthusiastic! Enthusiasm will take you further than any amount of experience.” How right they were!

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is the paste that helps you hang on there when the going gets     1    . It is the inner voice that     2    . “I can do it!” when others shout, “No, you can’t!” It took years for the early work of Barbara Mclintock, a geneticist who won the Nobel Prize in medicine, to be generally accepted. Yet she didn’t stop working on her experiments. Work was such a deep pleasure for her that she never thought of stopping.

We are all born with wide-eyed, enthusiastic wonder and it is this childlike wonder that gives enthusiastic people such a youthful     3    , whatever their age. At 90, pianist Pablo Casals would start his day by playing Bach. As the music flowed through his fingers, joy would reappear in his eyes. As author and poet Samuel Ulman once wrote, “Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the     4    .”

Enthusiastic people also love what they do, without being affected by money,     5     or power. Patricia Mellratl, retired director of the Missouri Repertory Theater in Kansas City, who was known for her outstanding management and     6     attitude, was once asked where she got her enthusiasm. She replied, “My father, long ago, told me, I never made a penny until I stopped working for money.” Again, we can see that the reason for one’s success has little to do with material things, and instead, it is their     7     for the career that leads to their achievements.

If we cannot do what we love as a full-time career, we can do it as a hobby. Elizabeth Layton was 68 when she began to draw. This activity ended periods of depression that had     8     her for at least 30 years and the quality of her work led one     9     to say, “I am tempted to call Layton a genius.”

We can’t     10     to waste tears on the “might-have-been.” We need to turn the tears into sweat as we go after the “what-can-be.” We need to live each moment whole-heartedly, with all our senses-finding pleasure in the sweet smell of a back-yard garden, the simple picture of a six-year-old and the beauty of a rainbow.

To hug or not to hug? That’s the question right now. Since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, we have been     1     in an unsafe place in the world of greeting etiquette. Though many of us have been vaccinated, we still need to be exceptionally careful about whether the person we embrace has gotten the jab. At the same time, many of us long for the warmth of a hug after long stretches of social isolation. According to research, humans     2     need touch, and a good long hug is one of the best     3     to getting it.

Suzanne Degges-White, a professor focused on social relationships at Northern Illinois University, says that our need for a hug goes all the way back to the     4     of our species. When we’re born, we are incapable of     5     for ourselves and we need to be comfortable with being held in order to survive. We’re rewarded with a rush of feel-good hormones that come from a cozy embrace. When we hug, our brains release oxytocin, the bonding hormone, as well as serotonin and endorphins.

This bond and sense of community has played an essential evolutionary role, because for humans, the security of our small groups and later communities was     6     to survival. People may think that an air greeting is       7     to embrace in their function. But actually, the former can never be compared with the latter. “When we can’t hug, we don’t get that jolt of good hormones,” says Degges-White. More importantly, a sense of community     8     from this close contact contributes to the development of our civilization. Some kids who didn’t grow up being held, says Degges-White, failed to develop a sense of safety and protection. They turned out to be more likely to avoid social activities and live a(an)     9     life.

For the past two years, we have been     10     from a desperate desire for embrace. However, it’s time for us to take a closer step to each other. Rajeev Fernando, director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, suggests that if you’re both vaccinated, just go for it as the risk of transmission is extremely low now.

From the time I met Alicia Tang, I knew she     1     the next big thing in the technology world. A fifteen-year-old app developer, she was confident that her first app     2     one of the biggest selling in the world. Now at only eighteen, she has accomplished her goal as her online shopping comparison app has millions of downloads. “I felt it was going to be a success because I knew that people     3     the fact that they     4     spend so much time searching for products they wanted,” says Alicia. “When I was going to launch the app, I spoke to lots of experts and app developers who gave me great advice and guidance. Because I had the support of so many people, I knew I     5     make a successful app,” she says.