5 . What to Do when Working with Disliked Ones

In life, we may always work together with someone because of a mutual benefit. It sounds great, except for one thing: You don’t like your cooperator because he is selfish. In fact, you don’t have to like him, but you’d be smart to work with him.     1    

The typical advice you may hear is to just do whatever business you need to do with them and move on.     2     And the biggest problem is that if you don’t like someone, chances are that they know it, which will make them dislike you. Thus, it turns out to be an impossible strategy.

So, if avoiding them is a losing strategy, what should you do?

    3    Maybe you think they are greedy or selfish. Then ask yourself this question: can you yourself be greedy or selfish? You really don’t like that part of yourself, right? You may not like them because they remind you of something you don’t like about yourself.

Then working with people who you don’t like can become much more interesting, because getting to know them, and accepting the parts of them you don’t like, is actually getting to know yourself and accepting the parts of yourself you don’t like. It means you use them to understand yourself better. What is it about them that you don’t like?     4    This is a game, and you win by finding that hated behavior in yourself.

Humans are very complex-we have both good and bad traits in ourselves. That’s the key to sharing the suffering of others.     5    .

7 . Arts or Science? Streaming is a step that one must take in adolescence. Certainly, the answer to this decision does not come easy to most people. The most important thing to do is to identify where your interests lie. You may also consider future jobs, through which you can find what you love. The little known but interesting jobs below are for your reference.

10 . Li Jian, aged 61, is a senior lab scientist at the Chengdu Institute of Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences， and has dedicated himself to scientific sketching (速写) in the area of animal and plant taxonomy (动植物分类学). Over the past 40-plus years, he has sketched thousands of animal and plant drawings with a scientific attitude and superb skills, presenting to readers more than 730 species on the planet.

Over decades of work, Li has developed a particularly keen eye that helps him identify even the tiniest features of animals and plants. “It is impossible for an animal to arrange every part of its body in the way we want it to be so that we can take a clear picture of it,” Li said, explaining the necessity of scientific sketching in research work. “Different from works of art, my drawings require a high level of scientific rigor (严谨),” he said.

In animal and plant taxonomy, species are often identified through tiny features. Take frogs, for example. Some have long fingers, while others have short ones. Some have fingers that are unwebbed, some partially webbed, and others fully webbed. The tip of their fingers can be pointed or round, and with or without long narrow cuts. “When I sketch, I must sketch accurately. Sometimes, I need to study the structure of my subject under a microscope before getting down to draw,” he said.

Usually, it took Li about ten days to draw a palm-sized animal. For complicated animals like snakes covered in scales, it would take him more than half a month. A big obstacle Li encountered in his work was the fading of the color in samples as a result of long-time immersion in chemicals. In this case, he would need to rely on known morphological (形态学的) characteristics of the samples and text descriptions to make his sketches more accurate.

“With the assistance of Li’s large number of high-quality drawings, China’s illustrated scientific publications rank among the best in the world,” said Fei Liang, a famous Chinese zoologist.