【推荐2】How to Enjoy Life As a Teen

The “best years of your life”? Maybe not, but you can learn to make the most of your high school days.

    1    . Whether it’s having a computer, having friends, having a good supply of food, a bed to sleep on, family that loves you or simply being born in this world. Remember that the point of life is for you to enjoy it. Be happy, and life will reward you. Remember that these are the last few years you will be able to enjoy yourself without having to worry about the responsibility(责任) of an adult.

Choose your friends wisely. Unlike what many articles state, you don’t have to be popular and have lots of friends to be happy.     2    . Try to have friends that like you who you are, not just because you are wearing a certain brand of shoes or something like that. These are people who shop at the same store as you; not someone who will sympathize(同情，安慰) with you when your dog dies.

    3    . Having a healthy body leads to a healthy and happy mind. Being confident in your appearance makes you more confident in other areas. Be sociable.     4    While you only need 4 or 5 close friends, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to meet new people. Participating gives you something to do instead of sitting bored at home and wallowing in self-pity.

    5    ! If you have a special girl/guy you want to ask out, dance with, etc. just ask! You probably won’t be rejected(拒绝) but if you are, remember that there will always be someone else that likes you for who you are. Don’t go to sleep that night with regret.

【推荐3】Have you ever frequently put off things you should do for various reasons? If so, it is procrastination (拖延). Procrastinators often put off   doing things and leave them to the very last moment.     1    Lazy people simply don’t do anything and are just fine with it. Procrastinators, on the other hand, have the desire to do something but can’t force themselves to start.

You might think procrastination is a bit annoying but fairly harmless. However, long term procrastination has bad effects on your health. Not having seen the doctor when your illness was easier to treat may shorten your life. Just thinking about what you haven’t done may cause discomfort.     2    

Don’t place too much pressure on yourself. “This project has to impress everyone; I really can’t blow this opportunity,”       3     Overcome this mental block by simply allowing yourself to be imperfect with the next small task. You can always improve your work later.

    4     Concentrating on the size and difficulty of a task will overcome you and promote procrastination. Any work can be broken into smaller steps. The trick is - with each step along the way — to focus on the next achievable tasks. Make sure you can easily imagine the outcome of your small task. Don’t write a book; write a page.

Focus on starting, rather than finishing. For someone who’s having a hard time starting a task, imagining a hard-to-grasp future can be depressing. The solution in this case, then, is to focus on starting.     5     We all know that if we start, we’ll eventually finish the task.

【推荐1】If you want your life to stand for peace and kindness, it’s helpful to do kind, peaceful things. One of my favorite ways to do this is by developing my own helping actions. These little acts of kindness are opportunities to be of service and reminders of how good it feels to be kind and helpful.

We live in a rural area of the San Francisco Bay Area. Most of what we see is beauty of nature. One of the exceptions to the beauty is the litter that some people throw out of their windows as they are driving on the rural roads. One of the few shortcomings to live in the mountainous area is that public services, such as litter collection, are less available than those are closer to the city.

A helping action that I practice regularly with my two children is picking up litter in our surrounding area. We’ve become so used to doing this that my daughters will often say to me in exciting voices, “There’s some litter, Daddy, stop the car!” And if we have time, we will often pull over and pick it up. It may seem strange, but we actually enjoy it. We pick up litter in parks, on sidewalks, practically anywhere. Once I even saw a complete stranger picking up litter close to where we live. He smiled at me and said, “I saw you doing it, and it seemed like a good idea.”

Picking up litter is only one of endless supplies of possible helping actions. You might like holding a door open for people, visiting lonely elderly people in nursing homes, or removing snow off someone else’s driveway. Think of something that seems effortless yet helpful .It’s fun, personally rewarding, and sets a good example. Everyone wins.

【推荐2】One day a farmer’s donkey fell down into a well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do. Finally he decided the animal was old, and the well needed to be covered up anyway and it just wasn’t worth to retrieve the donkey. So, he decided to bury it!

He invited all his neighbours to come over and help him. They all grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well. At first, the donkey realized what was happening and cried horribly, then slowly he quieted down till nothing more was heard.

A few shovel loads later, the farmer finally looked down the well, and was astonished at what he saw. With every shovel of dirt that hit his back, the donkey was doing something amazing! He would shake it off and take a step up!

As the farmer’s neighbours continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up. Pretty soon, everyone was amazed as the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and trotted off!

Life is going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds of dirt. The trick to getting out of the well is to shake it off and take a step up. Each of our troubles is a stepping stone. We can get out of the deepest wells by not stopping, never giving up, shaking it off, and taking a step up!

【推荐3】When training for my first marathon, I treated myself to an expensive fitness watch that tracked my time, pace and splits.

At the end of my final training run, I threw myself down on the floor the moment I got home, only to see my watch had failed me. Twenty-one miles briefly flashed on the screen before it went blank and disappeared forever. I screamed in pain. That tragic image of me crying on my living room floor pretty much sums up my relationship with exercise tracking technology.

It can be a total joy to watch your data change as you get stronger and faster, but sometimes it became a stick for punishment. I would compare my pace with other people’s or criticize myself for not doing it 30 seconds faster. I never really recognized this as a problem. To me, tracking was the route to self-improvement, and the point was to be better.

In the past year, “being better” has taken on a different meaning. My mental health dropped, and things like brushing my teeth became unimaginably difficult. Being better stopped meaning getting faster or stronger. It meant taking care of myself and feeling some joy. Once I started getting better, I reflected on what made me happy and what did not. So, I stopped tracking my runs and deleted all the data.

I then found I genuinely love running. I run around my local park with a silly little smile. But I do not love running quickly. I do not like races. I do not want to be pushed to be faster. I now notice how my legs feel and how my mind feels afterwards — clear and focused. I notice the smell of the wild plants and the sunshine on my face.

I am better. Sometimes I am worse. But either way I’m moving forward slowly and firmly, and that’s good enough.

【推荐1】In recent years, increasing numbers of extra-wide parking spaces have been specially designed for female drivers in some cities. Some like the idea, but others call it discriminatory, saying it implies women are worse drivers than men. So are parking spaces for women considerate or discriminatory? Forum readers share their opinions.

I think there is no necessity for such a special treatment. If they are truly poorer drivers, they have to brush up on their driving skills instead. When obtaining a license, they should have stricter tests or more practice sessions. If you do this, when some of them go overseas, they might get into trouble due to the smaller lots there.

In the US some stores have special parking spaces, larger than normal and close to the store，for pregnant women. Maybe this is the intention. Besides, how many men go to shopping malls on their own regularly? There are always much larger than normal parking spaces in the US for the handicapped. Most are usually empty. Does this mean the handicapped are being labeled as “less than”？

It is not practicable. There are places where parking lot space is limited and if you reserve some lots for just lady drivers, the lot would go to waste if there are no lady drivers going to park. If she is considered a capable driver who can manage on her own, why need special treatment? There are also man drivers who are as bad when it comes to driving or parking skills. Should they be given special treatment as well? Just improve your skills.

It’s a good idea if it keeps the parking lot flowing and free of minor accidents, where no one moves out of the way for other drivers to pass. It is a bad idea if these spots are not used and creates overcrowding where people just sit, waiting for space around the lot. Time will tell.

【推荐2】The personal grievance provisions (个人申诉条款) of New Zealand’s Employment Relations Act 2000 (ERA) prevent an employer from firing an employee without good cause. Instead, dismissals must be justified. Employers must both show cause and act in a procedurally fair way.

Personal grievance procedures were designed to protect the jobs of ordinary workers from “unjustified dismissals”. The premise was that the common law of contract lacked sufficient protection for workers against arbitrary (随意的) conduct by management. Long gone are the days when a boss could simply give an employee contractual notice.

But these provisions create difficulties for businesses when applied to highly-paid managers   and executives. As countless boards and business owners will confirm, constraining (限制) firms from firing poorly performing, high-earning managers puts a brake on productivity and overall performance. The difference between C-grade and A-grade managers may very well be the difference between business success or failure, between preserving the jobs of ordinary workers or losing them. Yet mediocrity is no longer enough to justify a dismissal.

Consequently — and paradoxically — laws introduced to protect the jobs of ordinary worker may be placing those jobs at risk.

If not placing jobs at risk, to the extent employment protection laws constrain business owners from dismissing under-performing managers, those laws act as a constraint on firm productivity and therefore on workers’ wages. Indeed, in a 2014 article, the Productivity Commission single out the low quality of managerial capabilities as a cause of the country’s poor productivity growth record.

Nor are highly-paid managers themselves immune from the harm caused by the ERA’s unjustified dismissal procedures. Because employment protection laws make it costlier to fire an employee, employers are more cautious about hiring new staff. This makes it harder for the marginal manager to gain employment. And firms pay staff less because firms carry the burden of the employment arrangement going wrong.

Australia deals with the unjustified dismissal paradox by excluding employees earning above a specified “high-income threshold” from the protection of its unfair dismissal laws. In New Zealand, a 2016 Bill tried to permit firms and high-income employees to contract out of the unjustified dismissal regime. However, the mechanisms proposed were unwieldy and the Bill was voted down following the change in government later that year.