2 . All Rise

With just over 500 different species of shark classified, and a further two dozen waiting to be formally scientifically named, shark classification is not for the faint-hearted.     1    

Sporting a wide, flattened head that is uniquely shaped like a double-headed hammer, it’s not hard to see how these sharks got their name. The eyes and openings at the end of the nose are located at either end of the “hammer” — or cephalopodic, as it’s technically called.

    2     While undoubtedly giving the sharks extra lift, the cephalopodic may also help them make sharper turns in the water. The widely spaced eyes allow for effective three-D vision, while the head’s broad shape also houses a sense organ operating like an underwater metal detector, it helps the predators (捕食性动物) to detect prey (猎物) hidden on or just under the sea-floor deposit.

Though widespread, the scalloped hammerhead, one of the nine species of hammerhead, is most commonly encountered in the Hammerhead Triangle in the eastern Pacific. While it can be relatively easily observed at a number of sites, particularly around seamounts, there are only a few places where it gathers in large numbers.     3     These groups of sharks tend to consist mostly of females, with the males remaining out in deeper waters.

At locations such as the Hammerhead Triangle, numbers can reach into the hundreds or even, on occasion, thousands. As the sharks tend to assemble relatively close to the water’s surface, this is one ocean spectacle (壮观的景象) for diver.

With its fins highly prized as the key ingredient in shark-fin soup, it’s no surprise that the scalloped hammerhead has experienced a dramatic population decline. Any sharks caught are often subjected to the frankly horrible treatment of ‘finning’, whereby fins are sliced off and the bodies thrown overboard.

However, with hammerheads consistently ranking among the world’s top underwater wildlife attractions, shark tourism now contributes millions towards regional economies, thereby presenting a sustainable alternative to fishing them into extinction.     4    

4 . Time, What is it?

If I were to stop you on the street and say,“ Excuse me, what time is it?” what would you do? You’d probably look at your watch and say, “ It’s a quarter to three,” or some such thing.     1     But if I were to stop you on the street and say the same words but in a different order, “ Time, what is it?” you’d probably look at me as if I were crazy. What is time? How would you define it?

For centuries, philosophers and wise men have tried to explain time. Saint Augustine once tried to answer this question. He said: “For what is time? Who is able easily and briefly to explain it? …Surely we understand well enough when we speak of it. What then is time? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to someone — plainly I know not.”     2    

Sir Isaac Newton said that time was absolute, that it occurred whether the universe was here or not. Leibnitz came along and turned Newton’s definition upside down. He said, “ Time is merely the order of events, not an entity itself.” Albert Einstein followed Leibnitz, and made the statement that “ Time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it.”     3     He said the train does not arrive at the station at 7 :00 PM; the train arrives at the station at the same moment the little hand reaches seven.

    4     Everything is an event. Reading this book is an event. Getting out of bed this morning is an event. Driving your car is an event. Arriving at work is an event. Your phone ringing is an event. Eating lunch is an event.   I was in New York doing a time management seminar for Merrill Lynch executives, when a fellow handed me a card on which he had written his definition of time: “Time is what keeps one damned thing after another from becoming every damned thing at once.”

Ben Franklin said, “ Dost thou love life? Then do not squander (挥霍) time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.” If this is true, then controlling your life means controlling your time, and controlling your time means controlling the events in your life.

7 . Tuning in to Gestures

Gesture gets its power in part from the fact that it is seldom noticed by the speaker or listener yet is easily understood and included in our conversations. The challenge is to use it to good effect.     1    

Gesture more when you speak. It will help you learn and understand, and also think in a more abstract way. If you gesture while talking, you will remember more of what you have said. Do it while you are multitasking and it will lighten your mental load. What’s more, when you gesture, the people around you tend to do so too.     2    

Encourage gestures in your children, students and anyone else you are trying to teach. This will help them understand the material you are conveying.     3     That is important because being able to generalise what we learn is essential to acquiring new knowledge.

Pay attention to other people’s gestures. These offer a window into the thoughts that speakers have but don’t express in their words. These thoughts are often at the cutting-edge of their knowledge or address issues that are uppermost in their minds. Noticing and responding to such gestures will improve your interactions at home and at work.

Observe the gesturing of infants (婴儿). While learning to talk, children typically convey sentence-like meanings in a combination of gesture and speech before using words alone.     4     If a child fails to produce these gesture-word combinations, it may be a sign that their spoken language development will be delayed, allowing you to intervene and help.

8 . Many of our most worrying problems, from overeating to not saving enough for retirement to not working out enough have something in common: lack of self-control. Self-control is what gives us the capacity to say no to choices that are immediately satisfying but costly in the long term — that a piece of chocolate cake (instead of an apple), that afternoon in front of the couch (instead of a visit to the gym).     1    

The problem of self-control has puzzled psychologists and behavioral scientists for decades. A great deal of research has identified situations in which self-control failures are likely to happen and tools to help people exercise better control.     2     These motivating incentives can increase our self-control, at least up to a point.

Entrepreneurs have also become interested in self-control, as is evident from the many diet and exercise apps and gadgets on the market. To take one notable example, on the commitment contract website stickK.com, users put down some money (say, $200) and state a goal they want to achieve (such as to lose ten pounds in a month).     3     If they meet their goal, they earn their money back. If they don’t, they lose the money.

Tools like stickK.com can be effective, but they are often difficult to implement. My colleagues and I conducted a new research to point to a different solution that may be easier to carry out: using rituals.

    4     Players in all sorts of sports have rituals that involve actions such as eating the same foods in exactly the same order before a game. From the way some prepare their coffee to the way people celebrate important life events, like weddings or graduations, rituals are a part of our daily life. And though they may seem useless, or even silly, research has found that rituals are powerful.

9 . It is certainly difficult to make money. But should money be difficult to give away? In The Gilded Age, industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller worried about waste and misuse; Carnegie wrote in 1889 that $950 of every $1,000 that went to charity was “unwisely spent”.     1     Donors ran lengthy application processes, provided funds and fulfilled painstaking reporting requirements. In 2006 The Economist called it “philanthrocapitalism (慈善资本主义)”.

    2     The 400 richest Americans have given away just 6% of their combined fortunes, according to Forbes. At the last count in 2022, almost $1.2 trn was sitting in American private foundations and $230bn in donor-advised funds, a sort of savings account for donors. Plenty of money is being marked for charity. But it is not getting to worthy causes fast enough.

Fortunately, a new generation of donors is once again shaking up the world of big philanthropy (慈善事业). Leading the mission is MacKenzie Scott, who simplified the process of giving and is donating billions of dollars a year with few conditions. This “no-strings giving” is changing mega-donors’ long-held assumptions.     3    

One is the recognition that philanthropists do not have to do everything themselves.     4     An upside of a decades-long trend for businesslike philanthropy is that armies of consultants have emerged to help donors draw up a strategy and conduct due diligence on potential recipients. Donors can team up and share the work, too.

Another lesson from the no-strings crowd is that philanthropists can trust recipients to put money to good use once the proper due diligence is in place. That means analyzing a nonprofit organization’s annual reports and interviewing its leaders and other funders.