2 . Chances are you’re quite bored of your home by now. Oh sure, you know how lucky you are, if you have a warm and comfortable place to live when so many don’t. But a person could live in a full-on palace and still, at this point in a generation-defining global pandemic, think, “If I have to spend one more day looking at this cornicing (榐板) and those enormous wall sconces (壁式烛台), I will genuinely hurl myself off the balcony.” So allow me to share the greatest tip of all time for making your home more fun: get some wallpaper.

People are very cautious about wallpaper, especially the patterned type. I didn’t fully understand this until my partner and I were house–hunting half a decade ago, after we found out I was expecting twins. Off we went to look at family houses and, while the prices were horrific, the houses were, to my mind, even worse. That’s not fair: they were perfectly fine, but there was something about them that sent me plunging into a low-grade depression. I tried to explain it to the increasingly frustrated estate agents: maybe they were dark? Or they just had a bad atmosphere? Were the ceilings too low? At last, I understood: every house I looked at was painted all white or–worse!–dull grey. Literally, every single one, and I assume the people who lived in them thought they looked fashionable and safely neutral. To me they brought back memories of teenage years spent in a psychiatric unit (精神病病房).

“Safely neutral”: has there ever been a more depressing template (样板) for a home? “Safely neutral” is timidity, the decorating equivalent of a fear of letting yourself have fun in case people laugh at you, or a refusal to state an opinion in case you get it wrong. How so many people can bear to live like that is beyond my comprehension. I know not everyone is a maximalist, but I find it puzzling that people won’t commit to patterned wallpaper because they worry they’ll get tired of it, yet paint their home in the most boring shades possible. Be your fearless self! Make your stamp! If not on the world, then at least on your walls.

By the time we moved into our (entirely white, God help me) house, I was a month away from giving birth to two surprisingly big boys. I could no longer walk, but this in no way broke my stride when it came to sorting out the wallpaper. This was a home I hoped to live in for the next two decades, so I went all out and spent so much on wallpaper that we couldn’t really afford furniture for a while.

Rounding the corner into the classroom to pick up my daughter, I heard the teacher tell her, "You've done the most beautiful tree. Well done." A few days later, she pointed to another of my daughter's drawings and said, "Wow, you really are an artist!"

Both times, when I heard my daughter being praised, I felt at a loss. As a mother, how could I explain to the teacher that I would prefer it if she didn't praise my daughter?

Nowadays, we give a lot of praise to our children. Praise, self-confidence and performance at school, it is commonly believed, rise and fall together. But the present research shows something else—over the past decade, a number of studies on self-confidence have suggested that praising a child as "clever" may not help her at school. In fact, it might cause her to underperform. Often a child will react to praise by quitting—why make a new drawing if you have already made "the best"? Or a child may simply repeat the same work—why draw something new, or in a new way, if the old way always gets praise?

In a now famous 1998 study of children aged 10 and 11, psychologists Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller asked 128 children to solve a series of math problems. After completing the first set of simple exercises, the researchers gave each child just one sentence of praise. Some were praised for their intelligence—"You did really well, you're so clever"; others for their hard work—"You did really well, you must have worked really hard." Then the researchers had the children try a more challenging set of problems. The results were eye-opening. The students who were praised for their effort showed a greater willingness to work out new methods. They said they failed because of a lack of (缺少) effort, not a lack of intelligence. The children who had been praised for their cleverness worried more about failure and tended to choose tasks that they had done before. All in all, the excitement created by being told "You're so clever" gave way to an increase in anxiety and a drop in self-confidence and performance. When asked by the researchers to write to the children in another school, remembering their experience, some of the "clever" children lied about their scores. In short, all it took to knock these youngsters' confidence, to make them so unhappy that they lied, was one sentence of praise.

5 . A 2020 study by Balbix found that 99% of the people surveyed reused their passwords between work accounts or between work and personal accounts.     1    

For example, a 2019 study by Google found that 59% of the people they surveyed used a name or a birthday in their password. And 24% admitted using a password like one of these below: 1234, 12345, 123456, etc.     2     Since both personal and work accounts are accessible from the same device with the same password, it simplifies the work a bad actor has to do in order to breach (攻入) your systems.

    3     The NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Password Guidelines are widely regarded as the international standard for password best practices. Following these guidelines—and insisting your employees do the same—will help protect you against threats from weak or stolen passwords. Password managers can simplify the work required for your employees to follow these guidelines.

It's more secure to require your employees to use more than one authentication (身份验证) factor to access mobile company applications.     4     They'd need to check on their identity with additional authentication factors in order to log in.

Finally, you can also perform passwordless authentication.     5     For example, in the event that a mobile device is stolen or accessed illegally, requiring a facial scan (扫描) or a finger scan as a primary or secondary authentication factor could still prevent unauthorized access.

6 . World’s richest woman Gina Rinehart is suffering a media firestorm over an article in which she blames the middle class for “drinking, or smoking and socializing” rather than working to earn their own fortune. What if she has a point?

Steve Siebold, author of “How Rich People Think”, spent nearly three decades interviewing millionaires around the world to find out what separates them from everyone else. It had little to do with money itself, he told Business Insider. It was about their mentality.

Average people think money is the root of all evil (罪恶). Rich people believe poverty is the root of all evil. “The average person has been brainwashed to believe rich people are lucky or dishonest,” Siebold writes. That’s why there’s a certain shame that comes along with getting rich in lower-income communities. “The rich knows that while having money doesn’t guarantee happiness, it does make your life easier and more enjoyable.”

Average people believe you have to do something to get rich. Rich people believe you have to be something to get rich. “While the masses are attached to the doing and the immediate results of their actions, the great ones are learning and growing from every experience, whether it’s a success or a failure, knowing their true reward is becoming a human success machine that eventually produces outstanding results,” he writes.

Average people would rather be entertained than educated. Rich people would rather be educated than entertained. The rich don’t think it a must to earn their wealth through formal education, and they appreciate the power of learning long after college is over, Siebold says. “Walk into a wealthy person’s home and you often see many books used to educate themselves on how to become more successful,” he writes. “The middle class reads novels, tabloids (小报) and entertainment magazines”.

If you step into a bookstore, you might notice a section(区域) labeled “self-help”. You might also notice that the section is getting bigger. That’s because more people are turning to self-help books for advice. The Guardian once reported that sales of these books in the UK rose by 20 percent, to a record high of three million books.

Self-help books try to guide readers through various life problems. Popular themes include getting along with coworkers, time management and finding happiness.

Different kinds of people write self-help books, including some celebrities, but usually these books are the work of psychologists(心理学家).

“People come into the shop and they're really fed up with things. They're looking for reassurances(安心) and peace of mind,” Paul Sweetman, the owner of City Books in the UK told the Guardian.

In addition, millennials-people born after 1980—tend to be more aware of their own flaws and shortcomings(缺点), according to US psychologist Caroline Beaton. This means they're more likely to feel a need to improve themselves. Self-help books may have the answers they're looking for.

Self-help books used to be something people laughed at. Many people didn't take “Chicken Soup stories” or “success theory” books too seriously. But now they’re more respected. “They're as good to read as any novel,” Sweetman said.

Whatever the reason for the increased interest in self-help books, it's nice to know that help is at hand if we need it. But are these books truly helpful? Read one and find out.