【Unit 1】
If great achievers share anything, said Simonton, it is an unrelenting drive to succeed.\"There\'s a tendency to think that they are endowed with something super-normal,\" he explained.\"But what comes out of the research is that there are great people who have no amazing intellectual procees.It\'s a difference in degree.Greatne is built upon tremendous amounts of study, practice and devotion.\"
He cited Winston Churchill, Britain\'s prime minister during World War II, as an example of a risk-taker who would never give up.Thrust into office when his country\'s morale was at its lowest, Churchill rose brilliantly to lead the British people.In a speech following the Allied evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940, he inspired the nation when he said, \"We shall not flag or fail.We shall go on to the end...We shall never surrender.\"
【Unit 2】
Some persons refrain from expreing their gratitude because they feel it will not be welcome.A patient of mine, a few weeks after his discharge from the hospital, came back to thank his nurse.\"I didn\'t come back sooner,\" he explained, \"because I imagined you must be bored to death with people thanking you.\"
\"On the contrary,\" she replied, \"I am delighted you came.Few realize how much we need encouragement and how much we are helped by those who give it.\"
Gratitude is something of which none of us can give too much.For on the smiles, the thanks we give, our little gestures of appreciation, our neighbors build up their philosophy of life.
【Unit 3】
The normal Western approach to a problem is to fight it.The saying, \"When the going gets tough, the tough get going,\" is typical of this
aggreive attitude toward problem-solving.No matter what the problem is, or the techniques available for solving it, the framework produced by our Western way of thinking is fight.Dr.de Bono calls this vertical thinking; the traditional, sequential, Aristotelian thinking of logic, moving firmly from one step to the next, like toy blocks being built one on top of the other.The flaw is, of course, that if at any point one of the steps is not reached, or one of the toy blocks is incorrectly placed, then the whole structure collapses.Impae is reached, and frustration, tension, feelings of fight take over.
Lateral thinking, Dr.de Bono says, is a new technique of thinking about things—a technique that avoids this fight altogether, and solves the problem in an entirely unexpected fashion.
In one of Sherlock Holmes\'s cases, his aistant, Dr.Watson, pointed out that a certain dog was of no importance to the case because it did not appear to have done anything.Sherlock Holmes took the opposite point of view and maintained that the fact the dog had done nothing was of the utmost significance, for it should have been expected to do something, and on this basic he solved the case.
Lateral thinking sounds simple.And it is.Once you have solved a problem laterally, you wonder how you could ever have been hung up on it.The key is making that vital shift in emphasis, that sidestepping of the problem, instead of attacking it head-on.
Dr.A.A.Bridger, psychiatrist at Columbia University and in private practice in New York, explains how lateral thinking works with his patients.\"Many people come to me wanting to stop smoking, for instance,\" he says.\"Most people fail when they are trying to stop smoking because they wind up telling themselves, \'No, I will not smoke; no, 1 shall not smoke; no, I will not; no, I cannot...\' It\'s a fight and what happens is you end up smoking more.\"
\"So instead of looking at the problem from the old ways of no, and fighting it, I show them a whole new point of view—that you are your body\'s keeper, and your body is something through which you experience life.If you stop to think about it, there\'s really something helple about your body.It can do nothing for itself.It has no choice, it is like a baby\'s body.You begin then a whole new way of looking at it—‘I am now going to take care of myself, and give myself some respect and protection, by not smoking.\'
【Unit 4】
When a student\'s work did not measure up to the teacher\'s expectations, as often happened, the student was not treated with disappointment, anger, or annoyance.Instead, the teacher aumed that this was an exception, an accident, a bad day, a momentary slip — and the student believed her and felt reaured.The next time around, he tried harder, determined to live up to what the teacher knew he could do.
The exact part of communication that tells a child, \"I expect the best,\" is difficult to pinpoint.In part it consists of a level tone showing aurance, a lack of verbal impatience, an absence of negative qualities such as irony, put-downs, and irritation.The teacher who expects the best asks her questions with conviction, knowing the answers she gets will be right, and the child picks up that conviction.
【Unit 5】
I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me.I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life.As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.I certainly wasn\'t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students.My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafne, dumbne, and blindne that
was afflicting the black race in America.Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions.One was, \"What\'s your alma mater?\" I told him, \"Books.\" You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I\'m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man...
【Unit 6】
EQ is not the opposite of IQ.Some people are bleed with a lot of both, some with little of either.What researchers have been trying to understand is how they complement each other; how one\'s ability to handle stre, for instance, affects the ability to concentrate and put intelligence to use.Among the ingredients for succe, researchers now generally agree that IQ counts for about 20%; the rest depends on everything from cla to luck to the neural pathways that have developed in the brain over millions of years of human evolution.
【Unit 7】
As a child, I identified so strongly with my mother that I thought my father was just a long-term house guest with spanking privileges.She and I are bookish, introverted worriers.My father is an optimist who has never had a sleeple night in his life.
Like most fathers and sons, we fought.But there was no cooling-off period between rounds.It was a cold war lasting from the onset of my adolescence until I went off to college in 1973.I hated him.He was a former navy fighter pilot with an Irish temper and a belief that all the problems of the world--including an overprotected son who never saw anything through to completion--could be cured by the application of more discipline.
