【推荐1】When everything goes wrong, always look at what you have, instead of what you have lost. Because it’s not what the world takes away from you that counts; it’s what you do with what you have left.    1    

Pain is part of growing.

Sometimes life closes doors because it’s time to move forward. That’s a good thing because we often won’t move unless life forces us to. When times are tough, remind yourself that no pain comes without a purpose.     2    When you roll with life, instead of resisting it, both kinds help you grow.

Everything in life is temporary.

Every time you get hurt, you heal. After darkness there is always light — you are reminded of this every morning, but still you often forget, and instead choose to believe that the night will last forever. It won’t.     3    

Complaining changes nothing.

    4    It’s always better to attempt to do something great and fail than to attempt to do nothing and succeed. It’s not over if you’ve lost; it’s over when you do nothing but complain about it. If you believe in something, keep trying. Don’t let the shadows of the past darken the doorstep of your future.

    5    

Don’t be afraid to get back up — to try again, to love again, to live again, and to dream again. Don’t let a hard lesson harden your heart. Life’s best lessons are often learned at the worst times and from the worst mistakes. There will be times when it seems like everything that could possibly go wrong is going wrong. And even if you fall short, keep going.

【推荐2】In order to survive in the world with challenges, we need to be wise. Why is wisdom crucial in this modern world? Let me tell you this, wisdom provides us with perspective when we need it and it calms us down in terrible situations.       1    

    2     This will open up new pathways for us. Never base your perspective on the most popular opinion or which is the most comfortable for you. Train your mind to be a judgment-free space for ideas. If you are humble, then you will always get to experience something new.

You must be the kind of person who learns something new every day, you must develop athirst for knowledge. Take new classes, read books, listen to educational podcasts, and the list goes on and on.     3     All of these activities will help you to tackle problems from different angles, making everything easier.

You obviously want to grow and do better in life, right? The best way is to have wise people as your mentors (导师), like teachers, colleagues and even special friends. Prior to making them a mentor, find out what makes them wiser, then engage in useful dialogue with them.     4    

If you have accumulated a lot of knowledge, then why not share it with others too?     5     In today’s world, it is very easy to become wise but it isn’t easy to help others. So keep things balanced and never let go of your passions and values. This will pave the path to success.

【推荐3】So often I hear people justify（为……辩解）their lack of family trips because their children are not old enough to remember them. This reason is so confusing to me. Who would travel based on another person’s memory?

Of course the kids aren’t going to remember anything in infancy（婴儿期）, but you will. You will remember all the sweet memories you had with them.

My parents would take me to Guatemala as a child. I don’t remember a lot about the trip, but I do know that when I went back as a young adult, I felt comfortable in my surroundings. I didn’t spend my time there discovering a new way of life. I spent the time having fun with my family. I love looking at pictures that we took together when I was my son’s age. I don’t remember them, but that’s not the point. The point is, I was there with my family, and I know I was happy.

Now that I’m a parent, I can’t help but do the same. Last year, we took our 2-year-old son to Disney alongside his great-grandmother. His great-grandmother had recently begun to suffer from Alzheimer’s. That trip was timed in the most magical way — right before my son was old enough to remember it and right before his great-grandmother began to forget. This makes me want to cry for them both. How did we get so lucky to have this moment to share with each other before big changes influenced our family forever?

Realistically speaking, many families do not have the opportunity to travel internationally or visit pricey theme parks. I understand this more than you know, but I’m talking beyond that. They are young but these forgettable moments are still changing them. They will shape your children into who they will be tomorrow. The memories we absorb as their parents are also as influential as we have not finished learning our truths either.

【推荐2】Italy’s Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo have been announced as the hosts of the 2026 Winter Olympics.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced Italy’s bid ahead of Stockholm, Sweden.

Skating sports and ice hockey will be held in Milan, while most skiing events will take place in the resort of Cortina. Other snow sports will be held in the Italian Alps, including Bormio and Livigno.

The 2026 Winter Olympics will take place from February 6 to 22. Cortina hosted the Winter Olympics in 1956, while Turin staged the 2006 Winter Olympics.

There were only two bidders left that were considered suitable for the Winter Olympics after four other bidders — the Swiss city of Sion, Japan’s Sapporo, Graz in Austria and the Canadian city Calgary, which had earlier dropped out of the race with concerns over the event’s size and cost.

The results showed Milan-Cortina had received 47 out of the 82 votes cast. Sweden has never hosted a Winter Games before and received 34 votes.

IOC president Thomas Bach said: “Congratulations to Milan-Cortina. We can look forward to an outstanding Olympic Winter Games in a traditional winter sports country. The passion and knowledge of Italian fans, together with experienced sporting event operators, will create the perfect atmosphere for the best athletes in the world.”

Knowing the winning, Italian people shouted “Italia, Italia” as the decision was announced.

【推荐1】On February 28, an engineer at Amazon made a seemingly small key error. As a result, this error produced a serious Internet slowdown that cost the company over $160 million in just four hours. Recently, an employee at the New England Compound, which is a medicine maker, didn’t clean a lab properly and now 76 people have died.

These examples are crazy, right? When did we come to live in a world where common errors, this do-your-best attitude or just good enough was acceptable? At some point, we’ve stopped valuing perfection, and now, these are the type of results that we get. It’s time that we should all seek perfection, all the time.

Perfectionism is an attitude developed in the small things and then applied to the larger job. I’m tired of everybody else accepting 99% as good enough. I mean, being less than perfect has real consequences, doesn’t it? If the makers of our credit cards were only 99% effective, there would be over a million cards in circulation today that had the wrong information on the magnetic strip(磁条)on the back. Or, if the Webster’s Dictionary was only 99% accurate, it would have 470 misspelled words in it. Our doctors were only 99. 9% correct, then every year, 4,453,000 prescriptions(处方)would be written incorrectly, and probably even scarier, 11 newborns would be given to the wrong parents every day in the United States.

So it comes down to this: trying our best is not good enough. We should seek perfection and settle for nothing less.

If we continue to cultivate this culture where nobody fails or nobody is told that they will fail, then nobody’s going to reach their potential, either.

Why don’t we try defining perfectionism as a willingness to do what is difficult to achieve what is right? Then we can agree that failure is a good thing in our quest for perfection, and when we seek perfection without fear of failure, just think about what we can accomplish.

【推荐2】The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) continues to be in the red. It reported a net loss of $5.6 billion for 2016 alone, the 10th straight year its expenses have exceeded revenue. Meanwhile, it has the debts of more than $120 billion, mostly for employee health and retirement costs. There are many bankruptcies. Fundamentally, the USPS is in a historic squeeze between technological change that has permanently decreased demand for its bread-and-butter product, and a regulatory structure that denies management the flexibility to adjust its operations to the new reality.

Interest groups ranging from postal unions to postcard makers exert self-interested pressure on the USPS’s final supervisor—Congress (参议院), insisting that whatever else happens to the Postal Service, aspects of the present legal situation they depend on get protected. This is why repeated attempts at reform legislation (立法) have failed in recent years, leaving the Postal Service unable to pay its bills except by postponing vital modernization.

Now comes word that everyone involved—Democrats, Republicans, the Postal Service, the unions and the systems heaviest users—has finally agreed on a plan to fix the system. Legislation is moving through the White House that would save USPS an estimated $28.6 billion over five years, which could help pay for new vehicles, among other survival measures. Most of the money would come from a penny-per-letter permanent rate increase and from shifting postal retirees into Medicare. The latter step would largely reduce the financial burden of annually pre-funding retiree health care, thus addressing a long-standing complaint by the USPS and its union.

If it clears the White House, this measure will still have to get through the Senate—where someone is bound to point out that it amounts to the bare, bare minimum necessary to make the Postal Service stay afloat, not comprehensive reform. There’s no change to collective bargaining at the USPS, a major mistake considering that personnel accounts for 80 percent of the agency’s costs. Also missing is any discussion of getting rid of Saturday letter delivery. That common-sense change enjoys wide public support and would save the USPS $2 billion per year. But postal special-interest groups seem to have killed it, at least in the White House. The emerging consensus around the bill is a sign that legislators are getting frightened about a politically embarrassing short-term collapse at the USPS. It is not, however, a sign that they’re getting serious about transforming the postal system for the 2lst century.