1 . The Age of Information is bulging: if you tried to download all the data available today, you’d need more than 180 million years to do so. But you are wrong to assume that all information would stimulate a boost of innovation to match the output of data. Indeed, the last time we found ourselves in a period of significant innovation was over 120 years ago, called the Age of Insight.

Innovations, big or small, start with a new idea. Often, these ideas occur as a moment of insight — the result of a novel connection in our brains made between existing and new information. Studies show insights involve quiet signals deep in the brain. Anything that helps us notice quiet signals can increase the chance of insights. However, it’s becoming more challenging to find those signals today, every moment filled with an endless supply of content.

Besides, we also want to increase the quality of them to sort through big new ideas and find the really valuable ones that can be hard to measure. Launched in 2015, the Eureka Scale (尤里卡量表) allows us to assess the strength of our insight experiences on a five-point scale, namely, intense emotions, motivation, memory advantage, aftershocks, and following ideas. The Scale combines these five variables into a single value to define the importance of a new idea and has broad applications for measuring and improving individual and organizational performance. Even it can be used to measure the impact of different kinds of work environments and learning approaches on participants’ growth. The level-5 insight, involving the richest emotion, motivation, and lasting impact, holds the greatest significance.

In order for organizations to benefit from another age of insight, it’s not enough to try to access more data or increase the number of insights we generate. Instead, it’s about making space for the biggest ideas to emerge from all the information. Using the Scale as a way to measure how important ideas are will enable better decision-making toward practical and competitive outcomes. If we’re to enter a new age of insight, we must make timely and necessary changes to design our environments for the best insight possible to surface.

Everyone in the seaside town knows that Fliss has a special bond with her dog Molly. They work together, live together, and play together. The Labrador is literally at Fliss’s side all the time. If a person spent this much time with a friend, they would probably have fallen out by now, but the bond between Molly and her owner just gets stronger over time.

Fliss grew up in the city. In 2017, she moved to the seaside where she opened a bath and skincare shop. Upon arrival, she couldn’t believe how much litter was left “senselessly” on the beach. In fact, she was shocked and appalled by the “unavoidable” amount of litter she found while taking Molly for walks. Being a person who cares a lot about her surroundings, Fliss decided that she had to do something about it before the tide carried the litter into the sea, threatening marine life.

One day, while collecting litter on the beach, Fliss saw Molly running towards her with an empty water bottle in her mouth. As Molly drew near, she dropped the bottle at Fliss’s feet and set out to find other waste. This gave Fliss an idea: what if she could train Molly to find all those plastic bottles and bags, and make good use of them?

The training started and Fliss was surprised at how fast Molly learned. Before long, the clever girl would venture to the seaside on her own and come home with her “prize”. She had soon filled Fliss’s house with pieces of rubbish from the local beach. At one point, Fliss’s garage was 60% filled with beach litter waiting to be distributed to local artists for use in their artwork.

When Fliss heard paws on the door the other day, she went to greet her good girl as usual. To her surprise, she saw Molly carrying a small plastic purse in her mouth. Fliss opened the purse and gasped. Inside was a passport, several credit cards, and a bunch of keys.

Fliss immediately took the purse to the local police station.

Three days later, a journalist called at Fliss’s shop.

4 . One by one, prejudices are disappearing in the West. People may harbor private suspicions that other people’s race or sex makes them inferior—but to say so openly is totally taboo. One old prejudice remains respectable, though. Just ask a childless person.

They are not charged to special taxes, as they were in Soviet Russia; nor are they driven from their homes, as they still are in some poor countries. The childless nonetheless come in for a lot of criticism. Some point out that non-parents are failing to produce the future workers who will pay for their pensions. Childless politicians are charged with not having a proper stake in society. “He talks to us about the future, but he doesn’t have children!” complained Jean-Marie Le Pen, co-founder of the National Front party, of Emmanuel Macron, who went on to win the French presidency. Similar attacks on Theresa May and Angela Merkel also failed but researchers find that many voters quietly agree.

The charges against the childless should be thrown out, along with other social prejudice. In many rich countries, between 15% and 20% of women, and a slightly higher proportion of men, will not have children. The share is rising. Some have medical problems; others do not meet the right person in time; still others decide they do not want them. Whatever the cause, the attacks on the childless are baseless.

If non-breeders are selfish, they have a strange way of showing it. They are more likely to set up charitable foundations than people with children, and much more likely to donate money to good causes. According to one American estimate, the mere fact of not having children raises the amount a person leaves to charity by a little over $10,000. The childless are thus a small but useful counterweight to the world’s parents, who stop social immobility by passing on their social and economic advantages to their children.

The fact that so many senior politicians lack offspring ought to put to rest the idea that they do not care for society. Five of the G7 countries are led by childless men and women. Mr. Macron, Mrs. May, Mrs. Merkel, Shinzo Abe and Paolo Gentiloni have their faults, but they are not notably less able than Justin Trudeau (who has three children) let alone Donald Trump (who has five). Their opportunities for nepotism are limited. And they spare their countries dynastic politics.

The charge that childless people fail to pull their weight in population is correct, but is less serious than it appears. Those who do not have children do put pressure on public pension systems. Governments have to do unpopular things like making pensions less generous, as Japan has done, or accepting more immigrants, as some Western countries have done. But to sustain public pensions in the long term, countries do not actually need more parents. What they need instead is more babies. It is possible to combine a high rate of childlessness with a high birth rate, provided people who become parents have more than one or two children. That was the pattern in many Western countries a century ago. Ireland, yet another country with a childless leader, still manages it today.

The childless also do everyone else a favour by creating wonderful works of art. British novelists have been especially likely to have no offspring: think of Hilary Mantel, P.G Wodehouse and the Bronte sisters. In September last year Britain put Jane Austen on its ten-pound note. That decision was controversial, though it was hard to see why. Few people have written as shrewdly about money or about families even though Austen did not marry, and had no children.

6 . Going against the tide of flocking to well-known tourist destinations on vacation, a growing number of holidaymakers in China tend to spend their leisure time at lesser-known attractions. Reverse tourism (逆向旅游) has appeared as a   new trend among young holidaymakers in China.

According to data from an online travel agency, the number of rooms booked at hotels in less-traveled cities during the holiday was up 30 percent year-on-year. Bookings for four-star or five-star hotels in less-traveled places all increased ten times at a minimum. Some lesser-known scenic spots posted double-digit (两位数的) growth during the holiday. Baimaiquan Park in Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province, received 52,100 visits in the seven days, up to 15.78 percent year-over-year.

Besides crowds, some vacationers chose less-traveled places to save on the cost of trips to popular destinations. In addition, lesser-known attractions are not as “commercial” as developed ones and are able to offer more actual experiences and natural encounters.

Essentially speaking, total relaxation is becoming a real expectation for many people when they travel. Changes in demand may be the fundamental reason for the popularity of reverse tourism. COVID-19 is another key factor fueling reverse tourism. As preventive measures continue, traveling has an unpredictable quality. Travelers have thus become more cautious and tend to choose local attractions or places with fewer tourists.

“The rise of reverse tourism is not a bad thing,” said Zhengzhou Daily. It means that vacationers now have more options, which brings more possibilities to the tourism market. More importantly, it noted, the trend is set to force popular destinations to improve themselves instead of resting on their past honor.

Jiang Han, a senior researcher, said that reverse tourism will become one of the future directions for the market. To give a real boost to the tourism market, Jiang suggested that more efforts be made to tap the potential of underestimated, lesser-known destinations. It is necessary to dig deeper into the local customs and highlight the local characteristics to improve the quality of local tourism.

8 . Is it true that our brain alone is responsible for human cognition(认知)? What about our body? Is it possible for thought and behaviour to originate from somewhere other than our brain? Psychologists who study Embodied Cognition(EC)ask similar questions. The EC theory suggests our body is also responsible for thinking or problem-solving. More precisely, the mind shapes the body and the body shapes the mind in equal measure.

If you think about it for a moment, it makes total sense. When you smell something good or hear amusing sounds, certain emotions are awakened. Think about how newborns use their senses to understand the world around them. They don’t have emotions so much as needs – they don’t feel sad, they’re just hungry and need food. Even unborn babies can feel their mothers’ heartbeats, and this has a calming effect. In the real world, they cry when they’re cold and then get hugged. That way, they start to associate being warm with being loved.

Further studies have backed up the mind-body interaction. In one experiment, test subjects were asked to judge people after being handed a hot or a cold drink. They all made warm evaluations when their fingertips perceived warmth rather than coolness. And it works the other way too. In another study, subjects’ fingertip temperatures were measured after being “included” in or “rejected” from a group task. Those who were included felt physically warmer.

For further proof, we can look at the metaphors(比喻)that we use without even thinking. A kind and sympathetic person is frequently referred to as one with a soft heart and someone who is very strong and calm in difficult situations is often described as solid as a rock. And this kind of metaphorical use is common across languages.

Now that you have the knowledge of mind-body interaction, why not use it? If you’re having a bad day, a warm cup of tea will give you a flash of pleasure. If you know you’re physically cold, warm up before making any interpersonal decisions.

9 . Bruno went into the kitchen and got the biggest surprise of his life. He could barely believe his eyes. “Shmuel!” he said. “What are you doing here in my kitchen?”

Shmuel looked up and his terrified face _________ a broad smile on seeing his friend. “Bruno!” he said. “They asked me to polish the glasses. They said they needed someone with tiny _________.”

He held his hand out and Bruno noticed that it was like the hand of the pretend skeleton. In reply, Bruno held his own hand out, which appeared _________ and full of life. The veins (血管) weren’t visible through the skin, the fingers weren’t little more than dying twigs (细枝). Shmuel’s hand, however, told a very _________ story.

“Shmuel! Here!” said Bruno, stepping forward and putting some slices of chicken in his friend’s hand. “Just eat them.” The boy stared at the food in his hand for a moment and then looked up at Bruno with wide and _________ but terrified eyes. He threw a _________ in the direction of the door and then thrust all the slices into his mouth in one go.

“Thank you, Bruno.” said Shmuel, giving a faint smile.

Bruno smiled back and was about to offer him more food, but just at that moment Lieutenant Kotler reappeared. Bruno stared at him, feeling the _________ grow heavy, sensing Shmuel’s shoulders sinking down.

_________ Bruno, Lieutenant Kotler marched over to Shmuel and glared at him. Shmuel looked up at Lieutenant Kotler, who frowned, leaning forward slightly as he examined the boy’s face. “You have been eating,” said Lieutenant Kotler. “Did you _________ something from that fridge?” Shmuel looked toward Bruno, his eyes pleading for __________.

“Answer me!” shouted Lieutenant Kotler.

“No, sir. He gave it to me,” said Shmuel, tears welling up in his eyes. “He’s my friend,” he added.

“Do you know this boy, Bruno?” he asked in a loud voice.

Bruno’s mouth __________ and he tried to say the word “yes”, but then he realized that he couldn’t because he was feeling just as __________ himself.

“Tell me, Bruno!” shouted Kotler, his face growing red. “I won’t ask you a third time.”

“I’ve __________ seen him before in my life,” said Bruno immediately, “I don’t know him.”

Hearing that, Shmuel wasn’t crying any more, merely staring at the floor and looking as if he was trying to __________ his soul not to live inside his tiny body any more, but to __________ away and sail to the door and rise up into the sky, gliding through the clouds until it was far away.

10 . Kindness is seen as a true strength, and the success of civilizations relies on kindness. As parents and teachers, we also teach children from a young age to “be kind to one another” and “treat others the way you want to be treated.”

In addition to being helpful to our interpersonal relationships, research has shown that kindness can even contribute to our well-being. According to the Mayo Clinic, when we perform acts of kindness, the pleasure center in our brain is activated, releasing the stress-reducing hormone (激素). Individuals who volunteer on a regular basis report greater life satisfaction. And what is even greater is that kindness rarely stops with just one person. There can be a positive contagion (扩散) effect, where other people are motivated to be nice if they receive a random act of kindness. The question then arises: Could kindness be harmful to us when it has such clear benefits? Let’s think about this in the workplace or in an organization.

You are the new person on the team and you want to be well-liked and respected by your colleagues. You are a kind person and tell your team, “Let me know how I can help you; I’m always available to help.” Though you may truly mean this, there are unfortunately people in this world who can see your kindness as a weakness. This can lead to you being taken advantage of by others.

Let’s fast forward a year. You have been in your position now for one year, and you are working with the same team. You are noticing that your colleagues continue asking for your help over and over again. In fact, the only time they communicate with you is when they need something. You have been so helpful to your colleagues and there has rarely been any return from them.

In a very broad sense, it is advantageous to be kind to others, and your kind acts will be appreciated and, perhaps, paid forward. However, you need to be willing to say “no”. Recognize when your plate is already too full. When people ask you a favor, assess if you have the time, energy, and attention to give to them. To truly be kind, sometimes you need to be more comfortable saying “no” to others and saying “yes” to yourself.