【推荐1】Even now, I have vivid memories of my last day of high school. In my mind’s eye, I’m cleaning out my locker, and then staring at the emptiness for a few extra beats before slamming it shut for the last time. I’m roaming the halls with my best friend, blissfully ignoring the bells going off every 50 minutes on schedule because, just today, we’re allowed to break the rules. I’m sitting on my desk, swinging my feet, and shooting the breeze (闲聊) with my English teacher, Mr. Carr, in a way that makes me feel almost grown up.

It was maybe my favorite day of the whole year. Like the final layer of watercolor, the freedom and lightness I feel seeps (渗透) into the rest of my memories of that day and turns them just a shade rosier.

If the school year hasn’t yet ended for you, consider what you can do to make the finale count. Why? Because when it comes to human memory, not all moments are created equal. Instead, our remembered experiences are disproportionately (不成比例地) influenced by peaks(the best moments as well as the worst)and endings (the last moments). Nobel Prize winner Danny Kahneman, who discovered this phenomenon, called this the peak-end rule. It suggests that our judgment of a past experience is largely based on its most extreme point and its endpoint.

I took advantage of the peak-end rule years ago, when my girls were young enough to want a bedtime story each night. I remember thinking that whatever strife (冲突) and stress had occurred that day, I could make the last moments count. I could end on a note of calm and act like the patient mom I hadn’t quite managed to be just hours before.

Don’t mistake all moments as equal in significance. There’s a reason why yoga classes end with savasana (挺卧式). There’s a reason we eat dessert last. Do orchestrate (精心安排) endings. As Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll might say: Finish strong. Last impressions are especially lasting.

【推荐2】Even smart people can make terrible decisions. Generally, it’s not because they spent time deliberating and somehow arrived at the wrong answer.     1     Below, we’ve listed some of the easiest traps to fall into, at the office and at home.

    2    

The siren call of your inbox can be hard to resist. Yet research suggests that switching between tasks — say, doing research and checking for new email — takes up to 40 percent longer than doing one at a time. Even when you think you’re being more productive by multitasking, you’re probably not.

Staying seated all day

Office jobs doesn’t contribute to getting a lot of physical activity.     3    . A growing body of research suggests that even if you get up and move around for a few minutes several times a day, you’re improving your overall health.

Listening to music while you work

You might feel more productive when you listen to music while doing focused work — but you’re probably not really. In 2015, neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin, who cited a growing body of research suggesting that, in almost every case, your performance on intellectual tasks (thinking, reading or writing) suffers considerably when you listen to music.

Choosing foods that seem nutritious — but aren’t really

Don’t believe the hype — know the facts about your food.     4    . For example, bottled juices and fast-casual smoothies might seem nutritious, when in fact they’re generally loaded with sugar and calories.

Staying up too late

Scientists have identified a common phenomenon they call “bedtime procrastination”: Failing to go to bed at the intended time, while no external circumstances prevent a person from doing so. For example, you keep watching one episode after another of a not-that-interesting TV show.     5    . As Business Insider previously reported, in some cases sleep loss can be just as deadly as smoking. Turn off the TV and get ready for bed. You’ll be grateful tomorrow, and years later.

【推荐3】At this point, a new live stage show, The Music Critic, is touring across the US. In the show, John Malkovich transforms into the sharpest critics of the greatest classical musicians in history and reads their comments aloud as the music critics in his unusual voice.

For example, Frederic Chopin was once criticized by pianist Hyung-ki Joo. “Mr. Chopin has, by some means or the other which we cannot understand, obtained an enormous reputation too often refused to composers who possess several times his genius. Mr. Chopin is by no means a composer of the ordinary. He is worse,” Malkovich comments as the critic.

In the show, even Beethoven got a very bad review from the wonderful composer Tchaikovsky. “He first fills the soul with sweet sadness, and then destroys it by a mass of messy notes,” Malkovich reads.

The Music Critic is part concert, part theater. Malkovich says that the similarities between them are part of the draw for him.

“I always say they are like surfing because we just paddle (划) out on our little boards. We turn our back to the sun and wait for a wave. We’re not the wave, which most of us think we are, but we are really not the wave,” Malkovich emphasizes. “The wave is created by the collision (碰撞) between the material and the audience. We ride the wave or we don’t.”

For sure, it is fun to criticize anyone. However, there’s something more at the heart of The Music Critic—and there’s a lesson for all of us. Everyone will be at the receiving end of bad reviews at some point. As Malkovich points out: If Beethoven and Chopin got dismissed, you will too.

“I think of it as an inspirational piece for people in the creative industry to keep going,” Malkovich says. “You know, face all the criticism, enjoy it, and have fun with it because you’re going to get it. There’s no one who’s going to be spared.”

【推荐3】My 12-year-old niece was staying with us for a couple of days. She was remembering some acts of kindness that we did together when she was less than five years old. We talked about how so much had changed, and with the pandemic, how difficult it would be to do so many of those things, especially when it comes to strangers.

The next day, I needed something from the downtown area and happened to take her with me. As we walked

After getting a few things done, we happened to sit at an outdoor dining restaurant across from him on the other side of the street. My niece was learning how to sing herself, and she kept smiling and saying how wonderful his singing was. Seeing how moved she was by his music, at the end of our meal, I gave her a ten-dollar bill and asked her to walk across the street and put it in his bowl.

She was a little surprised. “Really?” she asked with bright eyes. I nodded. So she headed over and as she approached, the man was just finishing a song and started talking to her, and they ended up having a sweet conversation. She told him how touched she was by his music, and he ended up telling her that she made his day. As she was excitedly repeating the conversation back to me, she mentioned, “He didn’t even know how much it was. He was just thankful that someone was enjoying his music.”