【推荐2】I have been one of those men who set the same goals every year but rarely ______ any of them. I started hot and ready for a ______ year each year but that energy ______ by the end of February. I came to the end of each year feeling ______.

At the end of 2016, I reached my ______ point. I was tired of being overweight and broke, ______ to pay my bills, in ______ relationships, and feeling like a(n)______ to those in my life.

I said “enough”, and started at the beginning of 2017 in a place that ______ me — Maui, Hawaii. I spent mornings on the beach reflecting quietly and ______ my mentality to process trauma (创伤). I spent days ______ how to promote myself in the areas I wanted to, and I got to work. I left Maui a changed man, and the ______ to becoming the best version of myself hasn’t stopped since.

One of my biggest realizations was the ______ of putting myself first and creating goals connected with where I wanted to go in life.

Self-prioritization (自我优先) has helped me create goals I can go hard on all year. Self-prioritized goals have led to a better me for everyone else in my life. Life is more ______ since making the shift to self-prioritization in goal setting. Understanding and carrying out self-prioritization in your goal-setting can greatly ______ how you reach your goals and work on becoming the best version of yourself.

【推荐2】Someone wise once said that there's no wrong time to learn. There's nothing more _________ than seeing someone try to study and learn new things years after they were last at school. A woman is now getting much _________ for graduating from Texas University.

Minnie Payne, a 90-year-old woman,_________ to get her Master's degree 73 years after graduating from high school in 1950._________ that she wasn't ready to give up on her academic career just yet, she went to Texas University. This made her the _________ graduate who completed her _________ and earned a degree at the university at any level.

Payne wasn't born into a family of intellectuals. She _________ quite poor in the South Carolina textile（纺织业）community. Despite her humble _________ , she said, “I've always tried to _________ myself. ”Talking about the importance of __________ and how it helped us, she added, "When you gain an education, you better yourself and those around you. Certainly, you gain __________ as well." She's undoubtedly a devoted student. Her __________ for knowledge coupled with her discipline is quite impressive.

According to Payne, her education wasn't an __________ part of her childhood, considering the __________ she was born into. Since her parents didn't __________ understand the importance of education, there was nobody there to __________ her in that direction. She said, "We were poor, but we __________ to realize we were poor because everybody else was in the same boat."

"Payne was __________ throughout the program to getting the education, knowledge and skills she __________ ," said Billy Roessler, who was Payne's academic adviser. "And her story __________ the fact that it's never too late to learn."

【推荐3】I turned on the radio and heard a woman describe her father’s final days in a hospice (临终安养院). ________, his end was a warming memory because of the hospice volunteers who ________the pain of strangers. In her sadness, she had ________ humanity at its best. I suddenly realised that I wanted to be where life matters most, which is when it is ________. I wanted to be one of those hospice volunteers.

I Googled hospices and ________ to one hospice seeking a volunteer to write the life stories of patients in its day center. Within a month, their ________ took my breath away. I was listening to the strangers giving an ________ of their loves and their losses, the memories that had never been shared and regrets that had ________ been expressed.

I began to see life differently. Everything I ________ the school run, the weekly shop seemed a gift to those no longer able to experience it. The details that the patients recalled of their past were so ________ , though so small. I saw people ________ , too. Instead of the unknown faces of ________ in the street, I saw leading characters of untold stories and the quiet heroism of ordinary life.

Six months later, my father fell ill and died ten days later. His sickness was sudden, but the hospice had ________ me. It was my encounters with patients and their relatives that enabled me to accept my father’s diagnosis without ________ .

These days, I try to see the world from the perspective of those I briefly knew and cherish chores and routines as a gift. And I want to take back into the outside world that sense of life stripped back to its ________ , where what ultimately matters is love.