1 . 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    

2 . 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.

3 . 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.

4 . 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.

5 . As we know, it is very important that a firm should pay attention to the training of its staff as there exist many weak parts in its various departments.     1     It is defined when a firm considers its training needs, which are in turn based on job descriptions and job specifications.

A job description should give details of the performance that is required for a particular job, and a job specification should give information about the behavior, knowledge and skills that are expected of an employee who works in it.     2     This specifies what the Training Department must teach for the successful performance of the job, and also the best methods to use in the training period.

    3     Successful training programmes depend on an understanding of the difference between learning about skills and training in using them. It is frequently said that learning about skills takes place “off the job” in the classroom, but training in using these skills takes place “on the job,” by means of such activities as practice in the workshop.

    4     The success of such a programme depends not only on the methods used but also on the quality of the staff who do the training. A company can often check on savings in time and cost by examining the work performed by the workers and technicians who have completed a training programme. The evaluation of management training is much more complex than that.

6 . Success Requires “Ample Doses of Pain”

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, has a simple message for young people who want to achieve greatness: No pain, no gain. That was essentially his message for students at his alma mater, Stanford University, where he made a speech at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

“Greatness is not intelligence.     1     And character isn’t formed out of smart people; it’s formed out of people who suffered,” Huang said in response to a question about how students can maximize their shot at being successful.

    2     In 1993, he co-founded computer chip company Nvidia, where he’s served as CEO for more than three decades. The company’s success turned Huang into a billionaire. Now, with Nvidia’s chips in high demand for building AI software, it’s become one of the world’s most valuable companies with a valuation worth of $2 trillion.

“One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations,” Huang said, noting that most Stanford graduates have very high expectations as a result of having an elite education. Often people with very high expectations have very low resilience because they are not accustomed to, or prepared for, failure. “     3     I don’t know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you,” he said. Psychologists also tend to agree that resilient people are more likely to have the strength and confidence to handle challenges and bounce back from failure. Huang certainly had to struggle in his company’s early days.

“To this day I use the phrase ‘pain and suffering’ inside our company with great joy,” Huang told the Stanford students. “    4     You want greatness out of it.”

7 . 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.

8 . Monarch Butterflies Listed as Endangered

The monarch butterfly, known for its legendary migration from Mexico to Canada, is now at great risk of extinction. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the population of this orange-and-black insect has shrunk between 23% and 72% over the past 10 years. IUCN has labeled it as being endangered after having added it to its Red List of Threatened Species.

    1    . In order to make space for agriculture and urban development, people have been illegally cutting down trees. As a result, the massive forested areas that had previously sheltered the butterflies during winter have now been destroyed.

Another factor at play is the use of herbicides (除草剂) in agricultural fields.     2    . Just before leaving their overwintering grounds, females lay eggs on milkweed plants. But now milkweed is disappearing, and monarch caterpillars are losing their host plants.

Climate change has also taken a heavy toll on the species.     3    . What’s worse, severe weather conditions such as hurricanes and storms are proving to be disastrous for the already vulnerable butterflies.

Monarch experts are calling for the public’s help in the fight to save the species. “Few species inspire the awe and wonder that the migratory monarch butterfly commands,” said Dr. Sean T. O’Brien, President and CEO of Nature Serve. “While efforts to protect this species are encouraging, much is still needed to ensure its long-term survival.”

What can be done to case the problem? A middle-of-the-road solution is gaining ground. Scientists recommend promoting the growth of native milkweed and nectar flowers. Monarch butterflies are a common backyard insect in America, so everyone can contribute their share.   —     4    . They can also plant flowers for monarchs. — Those flowers will provide nectar for monarchs when they bloom.

9 . The Maya loved cacao so much that they used the beans as currency. They also believed it is good for you — which many people still say today about cacao’s most famous byproduct, chocolate.     1    . While some have suggested that less than an ounce of dark chocolate might improve heart health, much of the research doesn’t involve eating actual chocolate but rather its components-flavanol, especially.

    2    . In a clinical trial of 21,000 adults, they found that the half of the group that took500mg of. cocoa flavanol supplements daily had a significantly lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease than those who had taken a placebo (安慰剂).

Flavanols may also boost insulin sensitivity, according to some studies, which might be helpful in reducing the risk of type 2 diabetes (糖尿病).     3    . Those at risk of diabetes might be wise to choose a cacao-inspired supplement instead of eating chocolate — and the sugar it contains. Other research suggests that the flavanols found in cacao (also present in fruits, vegetables, and tea) could slow cognitive decline during aging, or even boost brain performance by improving blood flow to the cerebral cortex.

What these findings mean for chocolate is limited, however. Participants would have had to eat multiple fat and sugar filled chocolate bars a day to source 500mg of flavanols.     4    . So understanding why certain types of chocolate are healthier than the rest is the focus of further research.

10 . Successful people have a few common characteristics that make them great. Now look at the following common traits exhibited by successful people that I have observed across various fields including sports, business and arts.

I put this at the top of the list simply because without self-discipline nothing is possible. Self-discipline is a quality that can be developed by having a clear idea on what we want and then ensuring the desire to succeed is greater than the consequences of not doing it. If we want to exercise 5 times a week, then we can imagine the enormous benefits of exercise and visualise that while trying to keep the end goal in mind.     1     It is resolving to do what we have set out to accomplish in both our personal and official lives.

Angela Lee Duckworth says that grit is the single quality that guarantees success, based on her groundbreaking studies. There are going to be setbacks, like we may not get the promotion we wanted, but having patience and perseverance never goes out of fashion. Talent will not take the place of persistence and resilience.     2    

    3     We can look no further than Tiger Woods to understand the value of passion. Tiger Woods who had already reached the apex (顶点) of sporting achievement actually changed his style of swing because he wanted to get the extra edge. This was after winning the Masters tournament by a record of 12 strokes in 1997. Passion can ignite reservoirs of resilience that may lay latent (隐藏的). Tiger Woods didn't play golf for the money though that helped, he played it for the love. Passion can happen when we do something we love,but as a beginning, we should start loving what we do and giving our very best every single day.

One of the best kept secrets of the highly successful is the ability to keep learning something new every day in their field or related fields. The hallmark of learning is curiosity. Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, is an excellent example of someone who kept learning till the end of his life.     4     When we learn something everyday, it keeps our mind sharp and it also gives a sense of accomplishment as we are using our time wisely. There is no end to this journey of continuous learning.