1 . The science of setting goals.

It’s the time of year when we think to ourselves: our New Year’s resolutions will totally work out this time.     1    . But what if this year really could be different? Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist, shares four tips.            

Choose a goal that matters, not just an easy win. Our brains love rewards, so we often set simple goals that make it easy to check off boxes. But if that’s all are about, no wonder we end up abandoning them so quickly. A meaningful goal requires going deeper.     2    . For example, if you want to quit eating junk food, ask why you want to quit it. Then, if you want to quit it for your health, ask why you want good health.

    3    .When we set goals, it’s easy to focus on that magical ending. But we can’t control outcomes. We have to inch toward them, one choice at a time. Ask yourself, “What is the smallest thing I can do today that helps me reach my goal?” If you make daily choices that are consistent with your goal over and over again, you will eventually reach it.

Frame your goals positively. Focusing on what you want to bring into your life –not what you want to avoid — will make you more likely to actually pursue it. “Any sort of avoidance is going to trigger inhibition systems.     4    ,” says McGonigal.

Prepare for failure. Moments of failure are inevitable, but most of us abandon the goal entirely when minor failures and setbacks start piling up. Your task is not to avoid failures, but to plan for them. Ask yourself, “How am I likely to fail?” For example, if you’re likely to choose unhealthy meals when you’re hungry, carry a light snack that can tide you over.     5    .

2 . Pursue Your Dreams Today, Not Tomorrow

Have you caught yourself daydreaming about your dreams? We often postpone our dreams, trapped in a cycle of delay. But why wait? You don’t have to take a huge, life-changing step.    1     You can take minute steps toward a brighter future. And start right now.

    2     If you never try, you’re going to be weighed down by your regrets. You’re always going to wonder how your life would’ve turned out if you actually took a chance on yourself. Don’t let your future self be disappointed by your present self.

It doesn’t matter how old you are or how many people have warned you that you’re never going to succeed. Even the most successful people have had their hesitations about whether they had what it took to make it in their field.     3     Embrace a mindset of determination, knowing that success is within your reach.

At the end of the day, you need to carve out a path for yourself that will lead to the most satisfaction. Don’t allow your fear to get the best of you, or you’re never going to forgive yourself.     4    It’s what you would encourage your friends to do, so why aren’t you giving yourself that same push.

Sometimes, following your dreams means spending a lot of your time each day. It may require making slight changes to your schedule, but you don’t have to sacrifice(牺牲)everything to follow your hearts.     5     If things go well, you can gradually make further shifts.

Pursue your dreams now, even though that means you might need to break out of your comfort zone, and even though it means entering the unknown.

4 . Life is for living according to the well-used expression. Sometimes what we wish to do is not completely up to us.     1     Many of us write a list of things we’d like to do before we leave this world—often called a bucket list (人生愿望清单).

Bucket lists have been called “the greatest hits of your life” and have helped some people get over anxiety to follow their dreams. Some of us may choose to write one to fill our life with new experiences, from skydiving to swimming with sharks.     2    

This is something the BBC radio programme “All in the Mind” has been looking at. It heard from a blogger called Julie, who said she made a promise to live her bucket list.     3     Such a list can be exciting and can indeed help plan your life and give you focus.

    4     But some people have argued it can be used as a strategy to try to control something that is actually uncontrollable. Clinical psychologist Linda Blair told the BBC that she was “not really in favour of bucket lists, which take you away from the natural chances.”

It’s probably true that a list can encourage people to follow someone else’s idea. But why not at least dream of what we would like to do?     5     Whether we want to plan it or just see what happens, we should have our dreams.

5 . What we choose to do is up to us. “Life is for living”, according to a well-used expression. That may not be completely true, but there is no harm in dreaming about what we’d like to achieve in our life. Many of us write a list of things we’d like to do before we leave this world — often called a bucket list.

Bucket lists have been called “the greatest hits of your life” and have helped some people overcome anxiety which would have stopped them following their dreams. Some of us may choose to write one to fill our life with exciting and new experiences — from skydiving to swimming with sharks — the list is unlimited. This is something the BBC radio programme “All in the Mind” has been looking at. It heard from a blogger called Annette White, who said she made a promise to live her bucket list which “continuously pushes the comfort zone to its limits and beyond it.” Such a list can be exciting and can indeed help you plan your life and give you focus.

Creating a bucket list can certainly give us hope, but Clinical psychologist Linda Blair told the BBC that he was “not really in favour of bucket lists, which take you away from the chance to be spontaneous (顺其自然的).” It’s probably true that a list can encourage people to follow someone else’s idea of the perfect life. But why not at least dream of what we would like to do? Why not reach for the stars, even if we only reach the sky? Whether we want to plan it or just see what happens, we don’t know what tomorrow will bring, so maybe we should live for today.

An 89-year-old man has reached a goal he spent 20 years working toward. He earned his doctor degree and became a physicist.

Steiner values this degree because it is what he always wanted — and because he overcame health problems that could have interfered with his studies.

As a young person in Vienna, Austria, Steiner wanted to become a physicist after reading about Albert Einstein and Max Planck.

But after World War Ⅱ, his mother advised him that studying medicine would be a better choice. He earned his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1955 and moved to the United States soon after. In the U.S., he had a successful career studying blood, became a full professor and led the hematology (血液学) department at Brown’s medical school from 1985 to 1994. He helped establish a research program in hematology and 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 fulilled, that always stuck in the back of my head,” he said. “Once I’m finished with medicine, I really don’t want to spend my life just sitting around and maybe doing a little golfing or doing something like that. I wanted to keep active.

At age 70, he started taking undergraduate classes at Brown University. He was planning to just take a few classes that interested him. But by 2007, he had earned enough credits to join the doctoral program.

Physics professor Brad Marston soon realized how serious Steiner was about the subject and how hard he worked. “He already had a scientific way of thinking that younger students have to develop,” Marston said. “One thing that’s really true about Manfred is he perseveres.”

After the university published a story about Steiner on its website, people across the U.S. contacted him to ask for advice on how to go after their dreams later in life.

He said his advice is: Do what you love to do.

7 . Good afternoon. I am Sullivan. Now think about a question: What determines the way we are when we grow up? Let's start with the TV program Seven Up. Do you still remember it? It started following the lives of a group of children in 1973. We first meet them as wide-eyed seven-year-olds and catch up with them at seven-year intervals: nervous 14-year-olds, serious 21-year-olds and then grown-ups.

There are ups and downs in their lives, but interestingly, in almost all the cases the children's early hopes and dreams are shown in their future lives. For example, at seven, Tony is a lively child who says he wants to become a sportsman or taxi driver. When he grows up, he goes on to do both. How about Nicki? She says, "I would like to find out about the moon." And she goes on to become a space scientist. As a child, soft-spoken Bruce says he wants to help "poor children" and ends up teaching in India.

But the program would have been far less interesting if the lives of all the children had followed this pattern. It was the children whose childhood did not prepare them for what was to come that made the program so fascinating. Where did their ideas come from about what they wanted to do when they grew up? Are children influenced by what their parents do, by what they see on television or by what their teachers say? Many film directors, including Steven Spielberg, say that an early visit to the cinema was the turning point in their lives. One of my colleagues, Dr. Margaret, who has devoted herself to researches in this area and published her findings in Science, thinks that the major factors are parents, friends and the wider society.

9 . Craig Blackburn, a father and car fan, built a Batmobile for his son's hope for using the vehicle to brighten the lives of sick children. And now he hopes to use it for more than just his son's hope after seeing the children's reaction to the Batmobile.

Based on the number of failures he had seen in car groups, be estimated that only about one in 50 attempted constructions was actually finished and he realized what an incredible opportunity he had.

Mr. Blackburn started the project at the beginning of 2018 after hearing a friend in the US was doing the same thing. It started with importing an outer shell overseas, before picking brains of a friend who had a background as a worker in a car factory to gain knowledge of how to build the car. With the help of his friend, Mr. Blackburn built the Batmobile in 18 months with the cost reaching six figures.

Mr. Blackburn hoped to add a flamethrower (喷火器) onto the back of the vehicle and said he had thought about building the more recent Batman Tumbler from the series film Dark Knight. Though Mr. Blackburn encountered plenty of difficulties to get over during the construction, in September 2019 the car made its first show at the Carnival of Flowers in Toowoomba, before being used by Blackburn's son for his hope.

“It was great. It was so good to see the kids' and adults' excitement at seeing the Batmobile.” Mr. Blackburn said. As a result, the car lovers hope to make the car work on the roads as soon as possible, so he can visit sick children and take them out with his son.