【推荐1】Why are some people successful and others aren’t? What’s the secret of success?     1    

Many of Gladwell’s ideas appear in his social psychology bestseller Outliers.    2     Gladwell thinks that this is just an excuse for not trying… and if you really want to be good at something, you have to work at it. “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good,” Gladwell writes. “It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”

Central to the book is the “10,000-hour rule”. It means that if you want to be among the best in the world, you need to practise something for 10,000 hours.     3     For example, the Beatles played live in Hamburg more than 1,200 times between 1960 and 1964, which is more than 10,000 hours of playing time. And when Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was 13, he was given access to a high school computer (one of the few available in the country), allowing him to practise computer programming for more than (Yes, you guessed it!) 10, 000 hours.

    4     Take the example of Christopher Langan, who’s mentioned in the book. He’s got an IQ of between 195 and 210 (Albert Einstein’s IQ was estimated to have been between 160 and 180). As a boy at school, Langan was able to take an exam in a foreign language he’d never studied and pass it after just skim-reading a text book for three minutes. However, Langan never graduated from university and worked in labour-intensive jobs his whole life. This proves that intelligence alone will not lead to success—you need hard work, support, finance and opportunities. Gladwell adds, “No one — not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses — ever makes it alone.”

    5     Even after you’ve put in your 10,000 hours of practice, you still need one other key ingredient — luck. So, you could be the most amazing guitarist in the world, but unless you’re lucky enough to play in front of a record company executive who sees a way of exploiting that talent, you aren’t going to be seeing your name in lights.

【推荐2】About 7 million people over the age of 65 have been diagnosed with depression, and many more could be suffering. It is high time that you learned how to know the signs and help them. Depression is a big problem for seniors, especially those who are lack of care and attention. Older people are much more likely to be alone, socially isolated(孤立的) or feel a lack of purpose. Sometimes older people have a much more difficulty time admitting mental health problems. Many times, the link between depression and physical illness is much stronger.

The elderly don’t like to express sadness the way that young people do. Older people who are depressed may have more physical troubles and may pay more attention to them. Depression may result from early memory loss and meanwhile, depression will make a person forget more and faster. A patient with early memory loss and depression really needs to be treated for the depression to slow the memory loss. A mood change is also a sign of depression. If a previously calm person becomes increasingly annoyed, or a previously clean person no longer bothers to shower or clean up, that person should be considered.

Don’t tell older adults that you think they may be depressed, as older adults ----particularly men see depression as a weakness. What you should do is tell them you’re worried about their health. Tell them they seem to be out of sorts.

Say you just want to check with the doctor to see what’s going on. Once you’ve used physical symptoms to get that person to agree to a check-up, mention your fear to the doctor and allow the doctor to approach the subject of depression with the patient.