2 . Since our twins began learning to walk, my wife and I have kept telling them that our sliding glass door is just a window. The _______ is obvious. If we _______ it is a door, they’ll want to go outside _______. It will drive us crazy. The kids apparently know the _______. But our insisting it’s _______ a window has kept them from _______ millions of requests to open the door.

I hate lying to the kids. One day they’ll _______ and discover that everything they’ve always known about windows is a _______.

I wonder if _______ should always tell the truth no matter the ____________. I have a very strong     ____________ that the lie we’re telling is doing ____________ damage to our children. Windows and doors have ____________ metaphorical(比喻) meanings. I’m telling them they can’t open what they absolutely know is a door. What if later in ____________ they come to a metaphorical door, like an opportunity(机会) of some sort, and ____________ opening the door and taking the opportunity, they just ____________ it and wonder, ＂What if it isn’t a door?＂ That is, ＂What if it isn’t a ____________ opportunity?＂

Maybe it’s an unreasonable fear. But the ____________ is that I shouldn’t lie to my kids. I should just ____________ repeatedly having to say, ＂No. We can’t go outside now.＂ Then when they come to other doors in life, whether they are real or metopherical, they won’t ____________ to open them and walk through.

3 . Last year I decided to do some volunteer work. I began to________on the Internet and discovered Volunteer USA. Three months later I________myself on a plane to Phoenix, Arizona. I was________at the thought of living with loads of new people for three months. However, within fifteen minutes of________, my worries had gone. Everyone was so________and like-minded that it was very________to feel at home.

I was sent to the Coronado National Forest for my first 8-day________. We had to________everything we needed and walk three miles to where we worked. It may not seem like a________way but in 35℃ heat and with a heavy pack, my legs were on fire.

My job was to________a stairway out of rock. This________climbing up and down the side of a mountain inhabited (栖息) by mountain lions, although I should say they were only heard,never________.

Three days later, a beautiful stairway came into being. The________of knowing that my________will be on that mountainside for years to come is massive.

But on the last night we were________in a thunderstorm. I woke up at midnight to find a swimming pool in my tent. The temperature was close to________. I had to spend the rest of the night trembling in the only________part of my tent.

________, I suffered a lot. But I know whatever I have to face in my life I was there and I________. I think I am much________for having taken part in the project.

4 . You run into the grocery store to pick up one bottle of water. You get what you need, head to the front, and choose the line that looks fastest.

You chose wrong. People who you swear got in other lines long after you are already checked out and off to the parking lot.     1    

It turns out, it’s just math working against you; chances are, the other line really is faster.

Grocery stores try to have enough employees at checkout to get all their customers through with minimum delay.     2    Any small interruption-a price check, a chatty customer-can have downstream effects, holding up an entire line.

If there are three lines in the store, delays will happen randomly at different registers. Think about the probability:    3    So it's not just in your mind: Another line probably is moving faster.

Researchers have a good way to deal with this problem. Make all customers stand in one long, snaking line- called a serpentine line-and serve each person at the front with the next available register.     4    This is what they do at most banks and fast-food restaurants. With a serpentine line, a long delay at one register won't unfairly punish the people who lined up behind it. Instead, it will slow down everyone a little bit but speed up checkout overall.

    5    It takes many registers to keep one line moving quickly, and some stores can't afford the space or manpower. So wherever your next wait may be: Good luck.

5 . There is something to be said for being a generalist, even if you are a specialist. Knowing a little about a lot of things that interest you can add to the richness of a whole, well-lived life.

Society pushes us to specialize, to become experts. This requires commitment to a particular occupation, branch of study or research. The drawback to being specialists is we often come to know more and more about less and less. There is a great deal of pressure to master one's field. You may pursue training, degrees, or increasing levels of responsibility at work. Then you discover the pressure of having to keep up.

Some people seem willing to work around the clock in their narrow specialty. But such commitment can also weaken a sense of freedom. These specialists could work at the office until ten each night, then look back and realize they would have loved to have gone home and enjoyed the sweetness of their family and friends, or traveled to exciting places, meeting interesting people. Mastering one thing to the exclusion （排 除）of others can hold back your true spirit.

Generalists, on the other hand, know a lot about a wide range of subjects and view the whole with all its connections. They are people of ability, talent, and enthusiasm who can bring their broad perspective （视角）into specific fields of expertise （专长）.The doctor who is also a poet and philosopher is a superior doctor, one who can give so much more to his patients than just good medical skills.

Things are connected. Let your expertise in one field fuel your passions in all related areas. Some of your interests may not appear to be connected but, once you explore their depths, you discover that they are. My editor Toni, who is also a writer, has edited several history books. She has decided to study Chinese history. Fascinated by the structural beauty of the Forbidden City as a painter, she is equally interested to learn more about Chinese philosophy. "I don't know where it will lead, but I'm excited I'm on this pursuit."

These expansions into new worlds help us by giving us new perspectives. We begin to see the interconnectedness of one thing to another in all aspects of our life, of ourselves and the universe. Develop broad, general knowledge and experience. The universe is all yours to explore and enjoy.

6 . About five weeks ago, I noticed the skin of our pet lizard was growing dusty. It worried me. I reported the strange surface on the skin of the lizard to my husband and children the next morning. Seconds later, our lizard emerged from its tank with its old skin flowing behind it.

I didn't think about it much until a morning last week when I knocked my favorite teapot off the table. It burst into hundreds of pieces. As I swept up the mess, I wondered why we had been breaking so many things over the months.

The destruction started three months ago. It was my husband's birthday. He had just lost his job. The uncertainty was starting to wear on us, so I wanted to do something special.

“Let's make a cake for Dad!” I cried.

My kids screamed with joy. We baked, iced and sprinkled for most of the day. Candles on the cake! Balloons on the walls! Flowers on the table!

Two hours before my husband came back home from another job interview, my daughter climbed up to grab a glass vase from a high shelf. It fell and crashed beside the cake. Tiny pieces of glass were everywhere. She sobbed loudly as I threw the cake away. My husband had banana pudding for his birthday.

Three days ago, the light in our living room suddenly went out. After several frustrating hours of unsuccessful attempts to fix it, my husband suggested watching the Michael Jordan documentary series The Last Dance.

The poignancy of Jordan retiring from his beloved basketball to play baseball and what had pushed him to make such a tough decision took me by surprise. As I watched him take off his basketball uniform and replace it with a baseball uniform, I saw him leaving behind the layer that no longer served him, just as our lizard had. Neither of them chose the moment that had transformed them. But they had to live with who they were after everything was different. Just like us. I realized that we have to learn to leave the past behind.

Humans do not shed skin as easily as other animals. The beginning of change is upsetting. The process is tiring. Damage changes us before we are ready. I see our lizard, raw and nearly new.

Jordan said that no matter how it ends, it starts with hope. With our tender, hopeful skin, that is where we begin.

7 . Being good at something and having a passion for it are not enough. Success _______ fundamentally on our view of ourselves and of the _________ in our lives.

When twelve-year-old John Wilson walked into his chemistry class on a rainy day in 1931, he had no _______ of knowing that his life was to change _________. The class experiment that day was to _________ how heating a container of water would bring air bubbling (冒泡) to the surface. _________, the container the teacher gave Wilson to heat _________ held something more volatile (易挥发的) than water. When Wilson heated it, the container _______, leaving Wilson blinded in both eyes.

When Wilson returned home from hospital two months later, his parents _________ to find a way to deal with the catastrophe that had ____________ their lives. But Wilson did not regard the accident as ____________. He learned braille (盲文) quickly and continued his education at Worcester College for the Blind. There, he not only did well as a student but also became a(n)____________ public speaker.

Later, he worked in Africa, where many people suffered from ____________ for lack of proper treatment. For him, it was one thing to __________ his own fate of being blind and quite another to allow something to continue __________ it could be fixed so easily. This moved him to action. And tens of millions in Africa and Asia can see because of the ____________ Wilson made to preventing the ____________.

Wilson received several international ____________ for his great contributions. He lost his sight but found a __________. He proved that it’s not what happens to us that ____________ our lives-it’s what we make of what happens.

8 . I was ready to pay for my bananas at the grocery one night, when fear seized me. My wallet was gone. I could only have left it on the G9 bus, which was now speeding in the dark to some _____________ station.

The _________ moment was quickly followed by mental math. How much time and money would it cost to replace the ___________ of that little wallet? The credit cards, the driver’s license, the cash, all lost to the bus.

Two hours later, back at my house, I heard a knock on the door. My husband _____________ it while I was on the phone in the dining room. “Does Jennifer live here?” I heard a lady say. In my husband’s hand was my wallet, with not a penny ___________. She left before I could _________ make it to the door to offer my thanks.

After sharing the story online, I heard from someone, who _________ the lady as Erin Smith. Without _______, I called to thank her. She said she _________ my wallet on a bus seat. She ______________ that going to a stranger’s house was a ____________ move, but she decided to take the chance. “If I were in that ____________, I would want someone to try to find me,” she said.

This one stranger responded beautifully to my small ____________, but she actually wasn’t the only one. Right after Erin ____________ my wallet on the bus, she posted a picture of my driver’s license to an online forum(论坛), trying to see ____________ anyone knew me. No sooner did she leave my doorstep than I had emails from two women whose kids go to my son’s nursery and who recognized my face. I’ve never ____________ words with those moms beyond small talk, but they wanted to help. I read that people are more divided than ever, but that’s not how the people I ______________ tend to act.

__________, I feel blessed someone had wanted to help a stranger. Erin had gone ____________ what almost anyone would have done, finding my house on a bitterly cold night, and for that I was extremely ____________.

9 . Great work is work that makes a difference in people’s lives, writes David Sturt, Executive Vice President of the O.C. Tanner Institute, in his book Great Work: How to Make a Difference People Love. Sturt insists, however, that great work is not just for surgeons or special-needs educators or the founders of organizations trying to eliminate poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. The central theme of Great Work, according to Sturt, is that anyone can make a difference in any job. It’s not the nature of the job, but what you do with the job that counts. As proof, Sturt tells the story of a remarkable hospital cleaner named Moses.

In a building filled with doctors and nurses doing great life-saving work, Moses the cleaner makes a difference. Whenever he enters a room, especially a room with a sick child, he engages both patients and parents with his optimism and calm, introducing himself to the child and, Sturt writes, speaking “little comments about light and sunshine and making things clean.” He comments on any progress he sees day by day (“you’re sitting up today, that’s good.”) Moses is no doctor and doesn’t pretend to be, but he has witnessed hundreds of sick children recovering from painful surgery, and parents take comfort from his encouraging words. For Matt and Mindi, whose son McKay was born with only half of a heart, Moses became a close friend. As Sturt explains, “Moses took his innate (与生俱来的) talents (his sensitivity) and his practical wisdom (from years of hospital experience) and combined them into a powerful form of patient and family support that changed the critical-care experience for Mindi, Matt and little McKay.”

How do people like Moses do great work when so many people just work? That was the central question raised by Sturt and his team at the O.C. Tanner Institute, a consulting company specialized in employee recognition and rewards system.

O.C. Tanner launched an exhaustive Great Work study that included surveys to 200 senior executives, a further set of surveys to 1,000 managers and employees working on projects, an in-depth qualitative study of 1.7 million accounts of award-winning work (in the form of nominations (提名) for awards from corporations around the world), and one-on-one interviews with 200 difference makers. The results of the study revealed that those who do great work refuse to be defeated by the constraints of their jobs and are especially able to reframe their jobs: they don’t view their jobs as a list of tasks and responsibilities but see their jobs as opportunities to make a difference. No matter, as Moses so ably exemplifies (例证), what that job may be.