1 . Chen Yuzhu, a 29-year-old young man, opened his first Chinese beef rice noodles restaurant in 2014 in the neighborhood of New York City’s Queens borough. He then took the flavor of his childhood memory to three other states in the US, building a recognized brand.

Actually, he started his own catering (餐饮) business after he lost his job and found noway out. It was at that time that beef rice noodles of his home village flashed in his mind.

However, the early days of setting up his business were not that easy. He frequently worked 18 hours a day, transported food at 2 am and promoted (推销) the restaurant near the New York City subway entrance by yelling, “Special noodles from my hometown, Guizhou!” But it didn’t work well. During the first two weeks. daily sales were only $200 at most, which wasn’t enough to pay the rent. He felt so anxious that he tried every possible means. Two months later, his Chinese beef rice noodles finally gained great popularity. His store has become hot spots for vloggers (视频博主) and he has made himself famous among locals as the“Rice Noodle Prince”.

“At first, running restaurants was for survival, but then I felt a sense of achievements. I became more open, inclusive and made a lot of friends. And the process to learn, make efforts and get inspired was really cool.” Chen said.

2 . The past few years have been difficult for 13-year-old Adeola Abraham. In 2020, the teen was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder, and he survived a successful bone marrow transplant (骨髓移植) and rounds of chemotherapy (化疗). Thankfully, Adeola is now out of the hospital. During his recovery, he found out that he had qualified for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ask for a dream wish from Make-A-Wish Mississippi. While many teens would choose a memorable Disney trip, meet a favorite figure or get a PlayStation, Abraham instead chose to feed the homeless in his local community.

The Make-A-Wish Foundation is famous for brightening the lives of children suffering from critical illnesses by meeting their wishes. A wish typically falls into three categories: a wish to have something, go somewhere or meet someone. Abraham’s charitable wish to give came as a surprise to the organization. Linda Sermons, a Make-A-Wish Mississippi representative, said that Abraham’s generous wish was the first of its kind in the organization’s 35-year history. She was impressed with the teen’s maturity and sense of sympathy.

Make-A-Wish Mississippi approved of the teen’s wish in a big way. They created a service named after the teen, called Abraham’s Table, which would provide free meals to the homeless every month for the next year. Local businesses generously donated food and supplies, and receivers gathered in Jackson’s Poindexter Park for the meals. Abraham and his proud mom personally attended and handed out the food. Abraham’s Table fed more than 80 people at its first event. Abraham said it warmed his heart when the receivers came back to thank him for the meal he provided.

Abraham now wants to inspire other teens to get more involved in local charities. He also wants to continue his mission of helping others by starting his own nonprofit that helps those experiencing food insecurity.

5 . When someone is homeless or trying to recover from a natural disaster, they are in need of a lot of the basic life necessities that many of us take for granted (认为……是理所当然的). While people are often encouraged to donate canned goods, not everyone is thinking about things like shoes.

Of course, you can’t go looking for a new job or a home, if you have no shoes to walk in. One woman in Hays, Kansas took this into consideration, and found a way to help hundreds of people.

Payless stores were going out of business, and shoes were selling for as little as $1 per pair, so a woman named Addy Tritt bought out all the remaining shoes at the Hays Payless store—more than 200 pairs—and donated them to flood victims (灾民) in Nebrsska.

Those shoes were then included in a flood relief shipment taken to farmers in Nebraska by Fort Hays State University. Tritt, who recently graduated from FHSU’s human resources program, wanted to “pay it forward”.

“I have been so lucky,” she said. “There have been so many great people in my life who have inspired me. I see so many terrible things in the news. So many people have helped me when I was down. They influenced me so much that I want to help if I can.”

Tritt has a history of charitable (慈善发) acts. She has donated more than 60 bags of school supplies to Hays students, and organized a baby clothes drive and two supply drives for the animal shelter.

“I really feel I have been directed and guided to help people,” she said. “If you can do something for someone else, you need to find a way even if it is a pair of shoes.”

6 . As the Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, Jessica Pels is responsible for managing the content of one of the world’s largest young women’s media brands. Pels has ambitiously navigated her career to the top role relatively quickly, but the path she took wasn’t traditional.

Pels learnt ballet as a child and found her way to New York City dancing for a summer, but eventually gave up dance when she knew she “wasn’t good enough to be a star”. She didn’t give up her dream of working in the big city, though. Pels attended a film school at New York University and as a sophomore (大学二年级), got her first internship at The New Yorker. After graduation in 2008, many brands were in a hiring freeze. But Pels was not affected. She got a job doing communications for a charity.

Six months into her first job, Pels got a job at Glamour Magazine to work for the Editor-in-Chief Cindy Levy. She would turn this first assistant role into her career, and finally found her way to Cosmopolitan, where she became the youngest editor-in-chief in the magazine’s history.

Reflecting on her career and the worst advice she’s ever received, Pels said it was “to say yes to everything”. It was a habit she had to learn to break. And while she acknowledges the importance of seizing opportunities, she doesn’t think that strategically saying “no” would have been a damage to her career.

She remembers the conversation with her boss Kate Lewis that changed her perspective on over-committing. “I had just started at Marie Claire as the digital director, and she said, ‘I worry you’re going to burn out because you’re saying yes to everything and you are acting in such an aggressive way, and you need to take a step back and prioritize.’ And that really changed my life. I thought that was an incredible career moment.”

7 . A long time ago, there was a farmer who had ten donkeys (驴). One evening, after a long day of hard work, the farmer returned home with the donkeys and began to tie them to the stakes(桩). When he finished nine donkeys, he found that the tenth rope was gone.

What now? He could not let the last donkey run around all night. It would surely run away. Suddenly, he saw that, under a tree, there was a monk(和尚). The farmer ran to the monk and asked for advice. The monk said, “The only thing you have to do to the tenth donkey is make the movements (动作) you would have made with a rope in your hands. Pretend (假装) to tie the donkey. That’s all.”

The farmer returned to the tenth donkey, pretended to fasten (拴紧)a rope around its neck and then to tie the rope to a stake. He then entered his little house, half trusting the monk’s advice, half worried that his donkey would run away in the middle of the night.

When he went outside very early the next morning, all the donkeys were still standing nicely next to their stakes, even the tenth one. The farmer untied the donkeys and wanted to take them to the field. But to his surprise, donkey number ten refused to move an inch. The farmer pulled and shouted, but the animal just didn’t move.

Suddenly, the farmer thought of what he had done to the donkey the night before. With a great “ah ha”, he returned to donkey number ten, and just after a simple movement the donkey happily walked with him to the field.

10 . An 89-year-old man, Manfred Steiner, has reached a goal he spent 20 years working toward and nearly a lifetime thinking about: earning his Ph. D. And now he is a physicist

Steiner values this degree because it is what he always wanted and because he overcame health problems that could have affected his studies. “But I made it, and this was the most satisfactory point in my life, to finish it,” he said.

When he was young, Steiner wanted to become a physicist after reading about Albert Einstein. But his mother and uncle persuaded him that studying medicine would be a better choice. He earned his medical degree in 1955 and moved to the US soon after.

Steiner studied hematology（血液学）at Tufts University and biochemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became a full professor and led the hematology department at Browns’ medical school from 1985 to 1994. Steiner helped establish a research program in hematology at the University of North Carolina. He directed that program until he retired from medicine in 2000.

Steiner found medical research pleasing, but it was not quite the same as his interest in physics. “It was something like a wish that was never fulfilled, that always stuck in the back of my head,” he said. At age 70, he started taking undergraduate classes.

Physics professor Brad Marston was surprised when Steiner entered his quantum mechanics class. But he became Steiner’s adviser for his dissertation（学位论文）after realizing how serious Steiner was about the subject and how hard he worked. “He has written many papers in medical science, more papers than I’ve written in physics,” Marston said. “One thing that’s really true about Manfred is that he perseveres.”

After the university published a story about Steiner on its website, people across the US contacted him to ask for advice on how to go after their dreams later in life. His advice is: Do what you love to do.