6 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.
A. afford B. whispers C. critic D. commitment E. title F. passion
G. tough H. troubled I. soul J. air K. modest |
Let Enthusiasm Fuel Your Success
Years ago, when I started looking for my first job, wise advisers advised, “Barbara, be enthusiastic! Enthusiasm will take you further than any amount of experience.” How right they were!
“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is the paste that helps you hang on there when the going gets 1 . It is the inner voice that 2 . “I can do it!” when others shout, “No, you can’t!” It took years for the early work of Barbara Mclintock, a geneticist who won the Nobel Prize in medicine, to be generally accepted. Yet she didn’t stop working on her experiments. Work was such a deep pleasure for her that she never thought of stopping.
We are all born with wide-eyed, enthusiastic wonder and it is this childlike wonder that gives enthusiastic people such a youthful 3 , whatever their age. At 90, pianist Pablo Casals would start his day by playing Bach. As the music flowed through his fingers, joy would reappear in his eyes. As author and poet Samuel Ulman once wrote, “Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the 4 .”
Enthusiastic people also love what they do, without being affected by money, 5 or power. Patricia Mellratl, retired director of the Missouri Repertory Theater in Kansas City, who was known for her outstanding management and 6 attitude, was once asked where she got her enthusiasm. She replied, “My father, long ago, told me, I never made a penny until I stopped working for money.” Again, we can see that the reason for one’s success has little to do with material things, and instead, it is their 7 for the career that leads to their achievements.
If we cannot do what we love as a full-time career, we can do it as a hobby. Elizabeth Layton was 68 when she began to draw. This activity ended periods of depression that had 8 her for at least 30 years and the quality of her work led one 9 to say, “I am tempted to call Layton a genius.”
We can’t 10 to waste tears on the “might-have-been.” We need to turn the tears into sweat as we go after the “what-can-be.” We need to live each moment whole-heartedly, with all our senses-finding pleasure in the sweet smell of a back-yard garden, the simple picture of a six-year-old and the beauty of a rainbow.
