以下建議非常實用，多看幾次，受用無窮！
(順便復習一下英文……)
1.Tip from police: The elbow is the strongest point on your body. If you are close enough to use it, do!
警方的提醒：手肘是身體最有力的部位。距離夠近，就善用手肘！
2.If a robber asks for your wallet and/or purse, DO NOT HAND IT TO HIM.Toss it away from you....
chances are that he is more interested in your Wallet and/or purse than you and he will go for the wallet or purse.
RUN LIKE MAD IN THE OTHER DIRECTION!
假如歹徒向你要皮夾或錢包，不要遞給他，而是將皮夾或錢包往遠處丟去。歹徒很 可能對財物比對你有興趣，他會去拿皮夾或錢包，這是你逃跑的機會。往反方向拼命跑！！
3.If you are ever thrown into the trunk of a car: Kick out the back tail lights and stick your arm out the hole and
start waving like crazy. The driver won\'t see you but everybody else will. This has saved lives.
假如你被丟進車子的後車廂：把車後燈踢破，將你的手從洞中伸出去，用力揮手，駕駛人看不到你，但是其他人看得到。這個方法救過無數人命。
4.Women have a tendency to get into their car after shopping, eating,working, etc., and just sit
(doing their check book, or making a list,etc.) DON\'T DO THIS! The predator will be watching you, and this is the
perfect opportunity for him to get in on the passenger side, put a gun to your head, and tell you where to go.
女性常常在購物、吃飯及下班後進入車子，然後就坐在駕駛座上處理事情（如記帳、列清單等）。千萬不要這堋做！歹徒會藉機觀察情勢，闖入車內，拿槍威脅，控制你的行動。
AS SOON AS YOU GET INTO YOUR CAR, LOCK THE DOORS AND LEAVE.
進入車內，立即鎖門，駛離現場。
5.A Few Notes About Getting Into Your Car In a Parking Lot, or Parking Garage:
在平面停車場及立體停車場的幾個注意事項：
A.Be aware: look around you; look into your car, at the passenger side floor, and in the back seat. (And check out
under the car as you approach.)
要警覺：環顧四周；察看車內的乘客座和後座。（接近車子時，留意車底。）
B.If you\'re parked next to a big van you should enter your car from thepassenger door. Most serial killers attack
their victims by pulling theminto their vans while the women are attempting to get into their cars.
假如你的車子停在箱型車旁，則應該從乘客車門進入你的車子。許多連續殺人犯都是趁著女性要進入車中時，將她們拖進箱型車中加害。
C.Look at the car parked on the driver\'s side of your vehicle and the passenger side. If a male is sitting alone in the
seat nearest your car,you may want to walk back into the mall, or work, and get a guard/policeman to walk you back out. IT IS ALWAYS BETTER TO BE SAFE THAN SORRY. (And better paranoid than dead.)
觀察停放在你左右兩邊的車子。如果有男性單獨坐在最近的鄰車內，最好回到購物中心或辦公室，找保全人員或員警陪你回去。寧願防患未然，也不要終生遺憾。(大驚小怪總比喪命好。)
6.ALWAYS take the elevator instead of the stairs. (Stairwells are horrible places to be alone and the perfect crime
spot).
永遠搭電梯，不要走樓梯。（樓梯間是一個可怕的地方，容易讓人形單影支，變成最好的犯罪場所。)
7.If the predator has a gun and you are not under his control, ALWAYS RUN!
The predator will only hit you (a running target) 4 in 100 times; And even then, it most likely WILL NOT be a vital
organ, RUN!
假如歹徒有槍而你並沒有受到他的控制，一定要跑！一百次中，只有四次歹徒會襲擊逃跑的目標；即使他攻擊你，大多不會是致命的部位，要跑！
8.As women, we are always trying to be sympathetic: STOP IT! It may get you raped, or killed. Ted Bundy,
the serial killer, was a good-looking, well educated man, who ALWAYS played on the sympathies of unsuspecting
women?
He walked with a cane, or a limp, and often asked "for help" into his vehicle or with his vehicle, which is when he
abducted his next victim.
身為女性，我們總是發揮同情心：不要再這樣！這樣會增加被強暴或是殺害的機 會。一個叫泰得•邦迪
（Ted Bundy）的連續殺人犯就是一個相貌堂堂並且受過良好教育的人，總是利用女性的同情心。他走路時帶著一根手杖或是跛行，經常要求別人[幫忙」他進入車內或是看一下他的車子，趁機綁架受害者。
Someone just told me that her friend heard a crying baby on her porch the night before last, and she called the
police because it was late and she thought it was weird. The police told her "Whatever you do,
DO NOT open the door." The lady then said that it sounded like the baby had crawled near a window, and she was worried that it would crawl to thestreet and get run over. The policeman said, "We already have a unit on the way,
whatever you do, DO NOT open the door." He told her that they think a serial killer has a baby cry recorder and
uses it to coax women out of their homes thinking that someone dropped off a baby. He said theyhave not verified
it, but have had several calls by women saying that they heard baby cries outside their doors ! when they\'re home
alone at night. Please pass this on! and DO NOT open the door for a crying baby.
最近有人告訴我，他的朋友在晚上聽到門口有嬰兒在哭，不過當時已經很晚了，而且 她認為這件事很奇怪，於是她打電話給員警。員警告訴她：「無論如何，絕對不要開門。」這位女士表示那聲音聽起來像是嬰兒爬到窗戶附近哭，她擔心嬰兒會爬到街上，被車子碾過。員警告訴她：我們已經派人前往，無論如何不能開門。警方認為這是一個連續殺人犯，利用嬰兒哭聲的錄音帶，誘使女性以為有人在外面遺棄嬰兒，騙她們出門察看。雖然尚未證實此事，但是警方已經接到許多女性打電話來說，他們晚上獨自在家時，聽到門外有嬰兒的哭聲，請將這個消息傳給其他人，不要因為聽到嬰兒的哭聲而開門。
2007年3月16日
2007年3月15日
The Pursuit of Happyness
The Pursuit of Happyness 中一小段台詞 ......
Don't ever let someone tell you, you can't do something. Not even me.
別讓人家說你，你成不了大器，即使是我也不行。
You got a dream, you gotta protect it. People can't do something themselves, they wanna tell you that you can't do it. You want something? Go get it. Period.
如果你有夢想的話，就得捍衛它，那些自己沒有成才的人會説你也不能成才。
你想要得到什麼的話，就得努力去做。。。
2007年3月14日
Ten most industries in China today in terms of profits 中國十大暴利的行業排行
1：化妝品
這裏的化妝品是指進口高端產品。
SK-II著名的神仙水在中國零售價格為560元，而其製造成本僅為人民幣6.5元。驚訝麼？就算研發成本都加進去，每單只成本也不超過人民幣10元。資生堂650元/50克的眼霜連包裝成本也只有10元不到。而歐伯萊那些150元左右的低端眼霜成本僅在3元左右。
呵呵女士們，現在不再認為你們往臉上塗抹的是什麼高科技產品了吧？在這裏，女士是第一受害大頭！
2：日用品
其中以個人清潔化學製品利潤最恐怖。以牙膏為例，其中最貴的成分—發泡劑成本僅為600元/噸左右甚至更低，而這600元的發泡劑足足能夠裝滿6000只最大號的180克牙膏。剩餘的有效成分成本更是可以忽略不計了，碳酸鈣粉末每噸用量成本僅為120元左右，最高級的含氟牙膏其有效成分—單氟磷酸鈉每噸成本不過100元。國產的低端產品就不算了，就算是用矽磨料的佳潔士，180克裝市場零售價為13元左右，6000只能賣多少錢？洗頭水就不說了，比這個更恐怖。
3：飲料
這其中，非碳酸類果汁飲料的利潤最大，市場零售價2塊錢的果汁飲料連包裝成本+設備成本只有7分錢，而易開罐飲料則更低，僅有5分錢。
4：白酒
以五糧液酒廠為例，每噸糧食能夠生產100市斤左右白酒，其中10市斤最品質好的是五糧液，其餘則被用作什麼五糧春啦、瀏陽河啦類似低端產品。每噸糧食的收購價格大概是400塊錢，而生產出的產品在市場上零售則最多可達到15000元左右。大家不要相信某些白酒所謂的N年陳釀，廠家沒那耐心真的去陳釀，只不過是用現代工業的催化劑加快發酵過程罷了。
5：藥品
藥品的暴利大家是知道的。在一般人的眼睛裏，藥品的利潤應該是最高的。但事實卻不是如此。比較以上行業，藥品的設備、廠房及研發成本都要高出許多，所以只能排在第5。而進口藥品的配方研發一般是在國外進行，導致其研發成本更高。雖然其有效成分不值幾個錢，但廠家的時常出新卻是實實在在的。當金六福賣不動的時候，五糧液可以註冊一個金七福的品牌繼續賣以前的酒，而藥品卻不行。新藥就是新藥，沒聽說過麥迪黴素淘汰以後改個名字繼續賣的。
6：保健品
這東西是咱中國人民的老朋友了，從太陽神到腦白金，就從來沒有一個保健品能真正起到其宣傳效果。這裏排行的保健品是指真正意義上的由正規廠家通過正規配方生產的產品，並非假冒偽劣產品。
由於行業競爭激烈，保健品在前兩年的暴利狀況已經改觀了很多，尤其是異軍突起的腦白金，雖說是購買美國的淘汰配方，但其不到200的售價比起其每單位十多元的成本(包括包裝成本、配料成本、廣告成本)來說，比例顯然低了很多。與藥品不同的是，保健品的研發及設備成本相對較低，吃不死人就成，最好也別吃出事來。
7：通訊
其中以移動通訊更甚，典型的一次投入長久收益的例子。GSM基站每台的造價約為人民幣20萬，但其確可以負擔最多15萬門的信號流量，以每人40元月租算，就算這15萬人不打電話，一個月的月租就能買30個基站。當然，移動通訊行業還有其他設備及科技成本投入，這裏就不細算了，總之將其排在第七位比較合理。
8：軟體
任何軟體在中國賣的都不好，這裏說的只針對買正版的人。每張光碟的製造成本是9分錢，高檔軟體的包裝成本不過5元錢，但軟體的大頭往往在於研發。WINDOWS98賣了近8年，賺的錢已經足夠再研發40個WIN98了，但是這是外國。如果比爾蓋茨生在中國，相信其早被餓死或還在中關村當裝機工。
9：小家電
比起冰箱彩電，小家電的成本最低，利潤最高。飛利浦就是做小家電起家的大公司之一。其實，1800元的刮胡刀製造成本往往只比180元的刮胡刀高1.5-2倍，但在零售時卻可以賣到10倍價錢。誰用飛利浦刮胡刀的請舉手：您好幾百的高科技產品其實也就值20塊錢。
10：汽車
國外的汽車利潤已經很透明了，每量成本在8000美金的車零售能賣到10000美金就不錯。但國內卻不然。本田飛度那種破車大家都覺得很便宜，其實那車在中國的售價足足比國際參考價高了1000美金。更低的材料成本，更低的人員成本，更高的利潤，中國人很多人還被蒙在鼓裏，天真的人為汽車真的便宜了。其實那群洋生產商正躲在被窩裏偷著數錢呢。
2007年3月12日
電影劇情分類表 一網打盡型
Duc 看過很多的DVD,某天算了一下，發覺電影的劇情多半有規律，大體來說，劇情可分為下面種類，某幾項相加，或單獨進行。
1) 求告
2) 援救
3) 復仇
4) 骨肉間的報仇
5) 逃亡
6) 災禍
7) 不幸
8) 革命
9) 壯舉
10) 綁劫
11) 釋謎
12) 取求
13) 骨肉間仇視
14) 骨肉間競爭（為戀愛）
15) 姦殺
16) 瘋狂
17) 魯莽
18) 無意間的戀愛造成罪惡
19) 為主義或信仰而犧牲自己
20) 為骨肉而犧牲自己
21) 為情慾而不顧一切
22) 必須犧牲所愛的人
23) 兩個不同勢力的人（為愛）
24) 姦淫
25) 戀愛的罪惡
26) 發現所愛的人不榮譽
27) 戀愛受阻
28) 愛戀仇敵
29) 野心
30) 人和神的鬥爭
31) 因錯誤衍生的忌妒
32) 錯誤判斷
33) 悔恨
34) 骨肉重逢
35) 喪失所愛的人
* 似乎小說也如此喔。。。
Arrangement By DUC LIN
1) 求告
2) 援救
3) 復仇
4) 骨肉間的報仇
5) 逃亡
6) 災禍
7) 不幸
8) 革命
9) 壯舉
10) 綁劫
11) 釋謎
12) 取求
13) 骨肉間仇視
14) 骨肉間競爭（為戀愛）
15) 姦殺
16) 瘋狂
17) 魯莽
18) 無意間的戀愛造成罪惡
19) 為主義或信仰而犧牲自己
20) 為骨肉而犧牲自己
21) 為情慾而不顧一切
22) 必須犧牲所愛的人
23) 兩個不同勢力的人（為愛）
24) 姦淫
25) 戀愛的罪惡
26) 發現所愛的人不榮譽
27) 戀愛受阻
28) 愛戀仇敵
29) 野心
30) 人和神的鬥爭
31) 因錯誤衍生的忌妒
32) 錯誤判斷
33) 悔恨
34) 骨肉重逢
35) 喪失所愛的人
* 似乎小說也如此喔。。。
Arrangement By DUC LIN
在酒吧泡MM 或請MM吃飯時用的賤笑話
1.找個MM，讓她先說3遍“老鼠”，然後再說3遍“鼠老”，待她說完“老鼠，老鼠，老鼠，鼠老，鼠老，鼠老”之後，立即問她“貓最怕什麼”，幾乎可以保證她會答“老鼠”，屢試不爽。
2.隨便找3個東西，比如3個杯子吧，你敲第一個時讓你的朋友說“忘”，敲第二個說“情”，第三個說“水”，美其名曰測試你朋友的反映速度，幾次之後，不停的敲第一個，3. 你的朋友如果跟著說“忘，忘，忘，忘，汪，汪，汪，汪，汪，……”呵呵，效果就出來了。
3.找一個MM，說是測試她的英文能力。由你說一個單詞，MM說這個單詞的第二個字母。開始時隨便說幾個，接著好戲開始。
先說husband,MM會說u(you);
再說wife，MM會說i（I）；
反復。
明白了嗎？
4.你問她：“一個三點水加一個來是什麼？”
她想了一想說：“不確定，淶（LAI)？”
你再問：“一個三點水加一個去呢？”
她八成會說：“...什麼字？有這個字嗎？去？”
其實應該是“法”......
5. 伸出1個手指，問別人“這是幾”
再次伸出2個手指，問別人“這是幾”
再次伸出3個手指，問別人“1＋1是幾”
10人裏最多1人答對
6.看過一個小說，《一半是火焰，一半是海水》裏面的遊戲很有意思。就是手中夾硬幣然後回答問題的那一個
問比1大的數字有嗎？對方說有
再問比10大的有沒有？對方說有
直到說到100000——
最後問比你傻的傻瓜的有沒有？對方回很警覺的說“沒有”！
7.順便說一個：你可以對你的MM說我要測測你的英語反應能力，伸出左手，對她說：“我點拇指是A，食指是C，中指是M，無名指是S,小指是X”，然後說，為了增加難度，我會用中文干擾你。然後，你指中指說魚，她會說m，你指無名指說驢，她會說S，然後在指拇指說豬，她會說A,然後一直點拇指說豬，她會一直說：A,A,A,A,A,A,如果MM聰明，可以多試其她的手指之後再說拇指。
8.勸MM酒時對她說:我喝清一杯,你喝一口
然後重複....我清,你一口..........
9.把雙手放在大腿上，然後左手作向前摩擦的動作，右手就做上下捶擊的動作，作幾下，然後換手作，改成右手向前作摩擦的動作，左手做上下捶擊的動作......如此反復...
對了，速度要快些，慢了就沒效果了。呵呵 試試吧，大多數人不能的說
10.甲：除了人什麼動物最愛問“為什麼”？
乙：不知道。
甲：是豬！
乙：為什麼？
哈！！！
11. 說個老故事吧,人越多得場合越好:
冒險故事.爺孫出海經歷險！
爺爺是個水性很熟的漁夫，這天，天氣很好，她喊了小孫子一起出海打魚。
誰知剛出海不久，天氣突變，海上起了風浪。小孫子很害怕，爺爺就安慰她：乖孫別怕，爺爺這麼多年的技術了，這點風浪怕啥？
突然，一個大浪頭打過來，把船漿給劈頭打成兩節. ！
爺爺無奈地對孫兒說：乖孫啊，漿完了！
12. 豬的英語拼寫是PUG吧？
--不對，是PIG
--不是吧，我怎麼記得是U（YOU）呀
-你弄錯了，是I
--豬是YOU
--豬是I
2.隨便找3個東西，比如3個杯子吧，你敲第一個時讓你的朋友說“忘”，敲第二個說“情”，第三個說“水”，美其名曰測試你朋友的反映速度，幾次之後，不停的敲第一個，3. 你的朋友如果跟著說“忘，忘，忘，忘，汪，汪，汪，汪，汪，……”呵呵，效果就出來了。
3.找一個MM，說是測試她的英文能力。由你說一個單詞，MM說這個單詞的第二個字母。開始時隨便說幾個，接著好戲開始。
先說husband,MM會說u(you);
再說wife，MM會說i（I）；
反復。
明白了嗎？
4.你問她：“一個三點水加一個來是什麼？”
她想了一想說：“不確定，淶（LAI)？”
你再問：“一個三點水加一個去呢？”
她八成會說：“...什麼字？有這個字嗎？去？”
其實應該是“法”......
5. 伸出1個手指，問別人“這是幾”
再次伸出2個手指，問別人“這是幾”
再次伸出3個手指，問別人“1＋1是幾”
10人裏最多1人答對
6.看過一個小說，《一半是火焰，一半是海水》裏面的遊戲很有意思。就是手中夾硬幣然後回答問題的那一個
問比1大的數字有嗎？對方說有
再問比10大的有沒有？對方說有
直到說到100000——
最後問比你傻的傻瓜的有沒有？對方回很警覺的說“沒有”！
7.順便說一個：你可以對你的MM說我要測測你的英語反應能力，伸出左手，對她說：“我點拇指是A，食指是C，中指是M，無名指是S,小指是X”，然後說，為了增加難度，我會用中文干擾你。然後，你指中指說魚，她會說m，你指無名指說驢，她會說S，然後在指拇指說豬，她會說A,然後一直點拇指說豬，她會一直說：A,A,A,A,A,A,如果MM聰明，可以多試其她的手指之後再說拇指。
8.勸MM酒時對她說:我喝清一杯,你喝一口
然後重複....我清,你一口..........
9.把雙手放在大腿上，然後左手作向前摩擦的動作，右手就做上下捶擊的動作，作幾下，然後換手作，改成右手向前作摩擦的動作，左手做上下捶擊的動作......如此反復...
對了，速度要快些，慢了就沒效果了。呵呵 試試吧，大多數人不能的說
10.甲：除了人什麼動物最愛問“為什麼”？
乙：不知道。
甲：是豬！
乙：為什麼？
哈！！！
11. 說個老故事吧,人越多得場合越好:
冒險故事.爺孫出海經歷險！
爺爺是個水性很熟的漁夫，這天，天氣很好，她喊了小孫子一起出海打魚。
誰知剛出海不久，天氣突變，海上起了風浪。小孫子很害怕，爺爺就安慰她：乖孫別怕，爺爺這麼多年的技術了，這點風浪怕啥？
突然，一個大浪頭打過來，把船漿給劈頭打成兩節. ！
爺爺無奈地對孫兒說：乖孫啊，漿完了！
12. 豬的英語拼寫是PUG吧？
--不對，是PIG
--不是吧，我怎麼記得是U（YOU）呀
-你弄錯了，是I
--豬是YOU
--豬是I
英國專家發明戀愛方程式 可以計算愛情
有情人都想知道，戀情是否會開花結果。聯合晚報消息，英國的心理學家、數學家和人際關係專家就發明瞭一條終極戀愛方程式，讓男女推算自己和心儀的物件，是否能情花開。
這條由專家發明的戀愛方程式是：愛情=｛〔(F+Ch+P)/2〕+〔3(C+I)〕/10｝/〔(5-SI)2+2〕。
方程式中，F代表自己對對方的好感，Ch代表對方的魅力，P代表體內分泌吸引異性的化學物質，C代表自己的信心，I代表親密程度，SI代表自我形象。
測試者可就每個指標給分，最低1分，最高10分。將所有評分在方程式上對座入號後，可得出一個總分。若總分介乎8至10分之間，即代表測試者跟物件可發展出一段浪漫熱戀；5至6分代表兩人感覺溫馨；4至5分代表感情冷淡；低於4分則代表這段感情不會開花結果。
專家指出，只約會了幾次的初相識男女，測試時一般會較高評分，這樣雙方才會有發展一段長久戀情的機會。
這條由專家發明的戀愛方程式是：愛情=｛〔(F+Ch+P)/2〕+〔3(C+I)〕/10｝/〔(5-SI)2+2〕。
方程式中，F代表自己對對方的好感，Ch代表對方的魅力，P代表體內分泌吸引異性的化學物質，C代表自己的信心，I代表親密程度，SI代表自我形象。
測試者可就每個指標給分，最低1分，最高10分。將所有評分在方程式上對座入號後，可得出一個總分。若總分介乎8至10分之間，即代表測試者跟物件可發展出一段浪漫熱戀；5至6分代表兩人感覺溫馨；4至5分代表感情冷淡；低於4分則代表這段感情不會開花結果。
專家指出，只約會了幾次的初相識男女，測試時一般會較高評分，這樣雙方才會有發展一段長久戀情的機會。
Inspire your mind body & soul 女人的美麗生活點子
50個讓生活更好的點子……
什麼樣的點子可以讓生活更好一點？有人說想法其實最重要，
因為「境隨心轉」，但是作法也很實際，「坐而言，不如起而行」。
我們邀請到5位對未來有想法，過生活有創意的專家，包括：文壇才女成英姝，
達一廣告創意總監徐一鳴，廣告文案兼創意家李欣頻，暢銷作家吳淡如以及
瑞士銀行投資顧問執行副董劉台芬，以1分鐘、1小時、1天、1星期、1個月，
5種不同時間帶，與妳一起分享她們生活上的好點子
1分鐘 改變心境
1小時 善待自己
1天 從容解壓
1星期 揹起行囊，接受變化帶來的樂趣
1個月 可旅行、可學習、可創作
1分鐘
改變心境
1分鐘不算長，但是這1分鐘
卻也可能成為轉念讓生活更好的關鍵時刻。
01
聽音樂——將音樂分類為可以讓心情平靜、幫助入睡、處理壓力情況等不同類型。音樂總是能治癒各種情緒疾病，而且是立時見效。（李欣頻）
02
靜思——1分鐘不算長，但這1分鐘卻也可能成為轉念，讓生活更好的關鍵時刻，利用這偷閒的1分鐘靜思，沉澱一下浮動不安的思緒，做好下1分鐘的再出發。（劉台芬）
03
活動筋骨——偷得浮生半日閒，隨時想到就利用1分鐘來動一動筋骨，身、心、靈一向是互為因果的，「戶樞不蠹，流水不腐」，選擇動動身體倒是個不錯的好點子。（劉台芬）
04
作10個深呼吸——選擇靜下來做10個深呼吸，特別是當遭遇緊張事情時，10個深呼吸是消除緊張的最佳妙方。但如果是碰見不愉快的人或事，則選擇運用想像力讓所有的情境變得輕鬆，例如想像那個令自己不愉快的人可笑的景況，或是假想自己對著他嘮嘮叨叨、破口大罵等等，一下子心情就變得輕鬆起來。（吳淡如）
05
打電話給朋友——如果心情不好，又只有1分鐘的時間紓解，選擇拿起話筒與朋友聊天，抒發心中的情緒。（吳淡如）
06
「不斷與自己溝通」——「不斷與自己溝通」，而且一以貫之。1分鐘、1小時、1天或1星期、1個月，都是一樣的。如果有1分鐘，選擇誠實面對自己，檢討得失、對錯成敗。此外，試著將所有負面的事情，轉換成相反的益處。「存在就是合理」是他的人生名言。如果有一天客戶決定要撤換廣告公司，首先他一定會點頭同意客戶的決定，接著他便會認真地請客戶告知他真正的想法、深入了解究竟是哪兒發生了問題？對他來說，所有的問題都不是問題，而且還可能是轉機。（徐一鳴）
07
運用想像力——很奇怪，人的想像力用在描繪日後的希望，遠勝過現下這1分鐘。有時妳可能會想像10年後，發財了可以買部保時捷跑車，或者出國拉皮，以後變成松山島菜菜子之類的，但是其實想像眼前的我，就是躺在沙灘上的珍妮佛羅培茲豈不是更妙？（成英姝）
08
喝喝水——去喝一大杯水，溫的、冷的都好，最好1天找出8個1分鐘，走到茶水間倒杯水，一口飲盡，妳的身體會感到前所未有的清爽。
09 易經占卜——遭遇挫折或猶豫徬徨時，利用占卜來做決定，藉著占卜的過程，進行自己與自己的對話，之後一切往往更了然於胸。
10
說聲謝謝妳－－妳對誰心懷感激，卻還沒有向她道謝，那就是現在囉，拿起電話或走過去，大聲說：「謝謝妳！」
1小時
善待自己
選擇疼惜一下自己的身體，
或離開令人不快的現場，都是妙方。
11
做SPA－－了解健康的重要，學習中醫、經絡操、阿南達瑪珈瑜伽打坐，對於自己身體的狀況都在掌握之中，如果有空出來的1個小時，則選擇利用芳香療法好好地疼惜一下自己的身體。（李欣頻）
12
看電影－－依當時的心情所選擇的電影，總有些機緣巧合，藉著從電影中尋求一些答案。（李欣頻）
13
看精采的表演錄影帶－－除了歌劇之外，加拿大的「太陽馬戲團」是個值得注目的表演團體，因為他們的藝術是經過精密計算的，而且必需全神貫注的投入，有時觀賞他人專注的神情也是一種享受。（李欣頻）
14
閱讀－－如果有1小時的空閒，選擇隨手抓本身邊的書或雜誌，就可馬上進入閱讀的樂趣裡，忘掉不快。（劉台芬）
15
「離開現場」－－生活中或工作壓力太大時，「離開現場」不啻為解脫妙方。有時候1天的工作中，無巧不巧地充滿挫折、令人窒息，這個時候她便選擇起身離開，到辦公室以外的地方透透氣，買杯果汁甚至逛街買衣服，返回辦公室前，再帶包糖果請同事吃，這時候的心情，就已經與起身離開時有了180度的大轉變。（劉台芬）
16
使自己風格獨具——別認為想辦法讓自己的外貌顯得更美好是件壞事。有些人會希望妳把時間花在其他更有意義的事情上，這可能意味著相對地妳花在「變漂亮」的效率不佳──投資很大，報酬卻很小。簡單的方法就是使自己風格獨具。(Duc)
17
輕鬆時光偷閒打發－－偷閒為自己煮杯咖啡、聽音樂，對於時常看書，看書速度超快的人來說，利用這1個小時的時間還可以看完半本書。（吳淡如）
18
聆聽新世紀音樂－－靜坐冥想撫平動盪的心靈，或者打開音響播放新世紀音樂，一邊聆聽音樂、一邊無意識的擺動身體，這樣的肢體是相當美妙的。（吳淡如）
19
欣賞歌劇－－除了在台北接觸藝文活動，也可以找機會接觸參與紐約豐富活躍的藝術活動，歌劇就是他最喜歡的一種。從懵懂到了解、到與劇中人物起共鳴、深諳歌劇的奧妙堂奧，在其中獲得許多樂趣。(DucLin)
20
燉鍋好湯－－一鍋放了各色青菜的蔬菜湯，它的綜合營養可以提供妳身體最理想的能量，更重要的是它的五顏六色，還可以修補鬱卒的心情。建議妳，先把大黃瓜煮滾後關火悶1個小時，讓甜分慢慢溢出，然後把高麗菜、青花菜、紅蘿蔔、豌豆莢、白洋菇……統統放進去，稍煮一下就OK！(Duc)
21
把他擺平－－作愛的運動效果不錯喔！而且，絕對有助於兩性親密關係。就提前1個小時上床吧！要他一切聽妳的，任妳擺布，享受一次女性上床當自強的樂趣。
1天
從容解壓
努力度過充實愉快的1天，就是一種成功。
22
朋友聚餐－－選擇洗溫泉身心放鬆一下，或者與朋友相聚，唯一不同的是，一定要求朋友再帶一個不認識的朋友加入，增加新元素有時會有新的樂趣與想法。（李欣頻）
23
採購精神糧食－－喜歡看書，甚至有資訊恐慌症的她，如果有1天的時間，會想盡辦法逛書店，大量採購精神糧食。（李欣頻）
24
看書、聽音樂－－如果有1天的時間，能夠看書、聽音樂，就是內心感受到最幸福的一件事了。選擇靠在室內最舒服的一張椅子上，把喜歡的書攤了一地，從椅子上看出去的窗景視野特佳，看書時最喜歡播放的是歌劇音樂帶，她形容歌劇簡直是百聽不厭，又不會干擾到閱讀的專注。（劉台芬）
25
嘗試新事物－－利用1天的時間做些過去沒有嘗試過的事情，例如最近一次的中東之旅，她走過阿布達比、巴林、阿曼等阿拉伯國家之後，對於這些陌生的地方感到更好奇，就跑到書店去買了一本相當有重量的專書來研讀、學習一下。（吳淡如）
26
充電－－除了把家裡設計打理得舒舒服服，藏書並有5,000套以上，1個月至少吸收翻看30本以上的書籍、雜誌，每半個月還會將收藏的書籍、雜誌整理出來送人，娛樂類的送給大樓管理員、知識類的即分送給學生。
身為廣告人，面對工作上的要求，除了不斷地壓榨腦汁，每天一張開眼睛要做的就是吸收各類的資訊，因此閱讀也是他每天必備的功課，是讓工作產質更佳的一個點子。（徐一鳴）
27
運動－－可以將運動變成一種習慣。根據研究調查，緩和的運動有助於腦部靈活思考，激烈的運動則對腦子沒什麼幫助，但是卻可以減少脂肪。（成英姝）
28
不說一句話－－妳每天都在講話嗎？給自己一個機會，一整天不講一句話，也是一種休息與修行，試試看吧！不容易做到，但絕對值得，如果妳噤聲1天之後大哭一場，恭喜妳，妳會有一個全新的自己。（Duc）
29
拜訪一個好朋友－－去拜訪一個妳很想見她、卻老是沒時間成行的好朋友，再做一件妳們曾經都喜歡做的事情，譬如，放一首妳們都愛的歌給她聽，盡興而浪漫。(Duc)
30
潛水度假——在陽光晴朗的日子與好友一起相邀潛水，在海底用完兩支空氣瓶之後上岸，中午享用一頓美味的海鮮大餐，下午去洗個溫泉，晚上再回家看書、寫稿，一天感覺充實愉快。
1星期
揹起行囊， 接受變化帶來的樂趣
換個地方住，有時候就換了不同的心情。
31
近程旅行－－如果有1星期的時間，她喜歡在國內、東北亞或東南亞旅行，如果不能成行，最起碼會選擇換個地方住。因為換個地方住，有時候就換了不同的心情。（李欣頻）
32
重新整理家裡－－心血來潮重新整理自己的東西，往往會發現許多過去買了卻還來不及享受的東西，讓人有另一種歡喜。（李欣頻）
33
讀書－－肯定讀書有增加Vision的機會，認為讀書是長期的培養與內化修鍊，一個人紮不紮實、有沒有深度，可以從聊天就看出端倪，多讀書也才能凡事皆由大處著眼，因此，如果有1星期的時間，她會選擇看完1本書，1個月4本書則是既定的目標。（劉台芬）
34
出外旅行－－1年裡最起碼會找出1周的時間出外旅行，其中美國是最常造訪也最喜歡的國度，一方面休息，另一方面探親訪友。美西的年輕活潑、美東的人文薈萃，都深深吸引她，此外，日本、歐洲以及上海也都是喜歡的旅點。（劉台芬）
35
旅行－－特別是海島度假，對於1個星期的假期來說，海島最是恰當，只不過在住宿上有些特別的要求，例如她喜歡去住些特別昂貴、有特色的度假別墅，好好享受一下。（吳淡如）
36
海外充電－－到國外上課充電一番，她舉例道，最近就有朋友邀她到加拿大上一種心靈成長與兩性關係的課程。充電的地方除了國外，例如日本導演也曾來台灣教授一種專為成人設計的遊戲課程，這種課程可以讓成人從中找回過去、彌補童年的缺憾。（吳淡如）
37
蒔花弄草——植物是很好的解壓劑，有1天的閒暇時，就會窩在家裡搬弄花草、整理花園，或者上假日花市買些新的盆栽，讓生活有些遐思。事實上，翻看室內設計的雜誌，也讓她感受到同樣輕快的心情。
38
「不斷與自己對話」－－人有兩種，一種是向前思考，另一種則是向後思考，向前思考的人可以清楚地知道事情的去脈，向後思考的人則可以把事情的來龍搞得一清二楚。「不斷與自己對話」，不論是1秒鐘或1個星期，時間的長短，都不會改變他「上窮碧落下黃泉」，透過對話尋找答案的決心。（徐一鳴）
39
收藏－－收藏品可能是就現實面而言，生活裡最不需要的東西，到頭來也有可能是最花錢的東西。但是一個人至少應該有1種收藏癖好，讓妳可以從中得到安慰和樂趣，也可使朋友到妳家拜訪時，不至於太無聊而顯得尷尬。種種有特殊故事的，珍奇的，來自不同地方的收藏品，有時甚至會讓人感到強烈的蒐集渴望，或者購買衝動，是一種具有滿足感的生活目標。（成英姝）
40
1周健走計畫－－連續7天，計畫一個短期的運動計畫，鍛鍊自己的耐心與毅力，健走是一個很棒的點子。選擇住家或辦公室旁邊的公園或還算寬敞的人行道，規定自己每天至少走30分鐘，最少固定時間。看看自己的「堅持」指數有多高？（Duc）
41
重組習慣的步調－－選擇1個星期的時間，從早晨張開眼睛開始，改變一下習慣的順序或內容，譬如吃不一樣的早餐、換不一樣的路線上班、換掉習慣使用的口紅顏色……，透過改變生活習慣，也可以帶給腦袋不一樣的刺激喔！
1個月
可旅行、可學習、可創作
人如果沒有長進，停留在原地，是很可悲的。
42
長程旅行－－對旅行的態度是認真，而且非常堅決的，只要旅行的生物時鐘到了，無論什麼都阻擋不了她。透過旅行可以找到許多意料之外的答案，希臘、西班牙、日本這些異地對她都有許多不同的啟發，找到繼續快樂活著的理由。（李欣頻）
43
學東西－－學習的時機永遠不嫌太遲，學習的範圍永遠不嫌太廣。30歲之後她更肯定自己要的是什麼，她說人如果沒有長進，停留在原地，是很可悲的。（李欣頻）
44
review工作進度－－除了1週一次review工作進度，每個月她也都會時時檢討、省視自己工作目標的達成率，畢竟工作與生活的重要性是等量齊觀的。（劉台芬）
45
音樂會或歌劇－－1個月至少欣賞一場音樂會或歌劇，是生活裡最起碼的享受。（劉台芬）
46
旅行學習－－特別鍾愛旅行中的學習，例如到英國學習香精油按摩、到巴黎、義大利學作點心，她特別懷念曾經到過印度的一座靈修學院習畫的經驗，有一節美術課程規定學生只能用黑色與白色兩種顏料作畫，學生被關在一間暗室裡，跟著自己的感覺在黑暗中創作，學習如何與自己相處。（吳淡如）
47
環遊世界－－如果有更長的時間，希望能夠計畫環遊世界，從文明進步的國家走到文明古國，普羅旺斯、愛丁堡、巴黎、紐約、馬德里及義大利的托斯卡尼地區，在安定舒適的旅行之後，再前往第三世界或其他驚險刺激的國家旅行，例如亞馬遜河、摩洛哥、阿拉斯加或是南極。（吳淡如）
48
展開妳的減重計畫－－不要再遲疑了，如果「減重」是妳今年的重要規畫，那就從現在開始吧！如果妳需要一個有效的方法，一定要參考我們舉辦「塑身美體大挑戰」的健康精神與方法。
49
快樂為元氣之本－－能讓妳快樂的事情同樣能激發妳的能量，每個月在月初的時候，就為自己預先安排至少2件快樂的事，譬如吃一頓美味的義大利餐、趕看一次夕陽、來一次SPA、把腳指甲塗得性感兮兮……。
50 探親旅行——因為戀家，自嘲自己的旅行是「蝸牛」式的旅行，也就是只要旅行，一定是帶著一大家子同行。視旅行是一種學習的他，帶著家人一同分享學習的心境，開放視覺、聽覺，接受文化衝擊。
旅行，一方面達到與親人相聚的目的，另方面也因為心情真正放輕鬆，因此更能打開心靈的眼來看世界，效果絕對是相加相乘的。
什麼樣的點子可以讓生活更好一點？有人說想法其實最重要，
因為「境隨心轉」，但是作法也很實際，「坐而言，不如起而行」。
我們邀請到5位對未來有想法，過生活有創意的專家，包括：文壇才女成英姝，
達一廣告創意總監徐一鳴，廣告文案兼創意家李欣頻，暢銷作家吳淡如以及
瑞士銀行投資顧問執行副董劉台芬，以1分鐘、1小時、1天、1星期、1個月，
5種不同時間帶，與妳一起分享她們生活上的好點子
1分鐘 改變心境
1小時 善待自己
1天 從容解壓
1星期 揹起行囊，接受變化帶來的樂趣
1個月 可旅行、可學習、可創作
1分鐘
改變心境
1分鐘不算長，但是這1分鐘
卻也可能成為轉念讓生活更好的關鍵時刻。
01
聽音樂——將音樂分類為可以讓心情平靜、幫助入睡、處理壓力情況等不同類型。音樂總是能治癒各種情緒疾病，而且是立時見效。（李欣頻）
02
靜思——1分鐘不算長，但這1分鐘卻也可能成為轉念，讓生活更好的關鍵時刻，利用這偷閒的1分鐘靜思，沉澱一下浮動不安的思緒，做好下1分鐘的再出發。（劉台芬）
03
活動筋骨——偷得浮生半日閒，隨時想到就利用1分鐘來動一動筋骨，身、心、靈一向是互為因果的，「戶樞不蠹，流水不腐」，選擇動動身體倒是個不錯的好點子。（劉台芬）
04
作10個深呼吸——選擇靜下來做10個深呼吸，特別是當遭遇緊張事情時，10個深呼吸是消除緊張的最佳妙方。但如果是碰見不愉快的人或事，則選擇運用想像力讓所有的情境變得輕鬆，例如想像那個令自己不愉快的人可笑的景況，或是假想自己對著他嘮嘮叨叨、破口大罵等等，一下子心情就變得輕鬆起來。（吳淡如）
05
打電話給朋友——如果心情不好，又只有1分鐘的時間紓解，選擇拿起話筒與朋友聊天，抒發心中的情緒。（吳淡如）
06
「不斷與自己溝通」——「不斷與自己溝通」，而且一以貫之。1分鐘、1小時、1天或1星期、1個月，都是一樣的。如果有1分鐘，選擇誠實面對自己，檢討得失、對錯成敗。此外，試著將所有負面的事情，轉換成相反的益處。「存在就是合理」是他的人生名言。如果有一天客戶決定要撤換廣告公司，首先他一定會點頭同意客戶的決定，接著他便會認真地請客戶告知他真正的想法、深入了解究竟是哪兒發生了問題？對他來說，所有的問題都不是問題，而且還可能是轉機。（徐一鳴）
07
運用想像力——很奇怪，人的想像力用在描繪日後的希望，遠勝過現下這1分鐘。有時妳可能會想像10年後，發財了可以買部保時捷跑車，或者出國拉皮，以後變成松山島菜菜子之類的，但是其實想像眼前的我，就是躺在沙灘上的珍妮佛羅培茲豈不是更妙？（成英姝）
08
喝喝水——去喝一大杯水，溫的、冷的都好，最好1天找出8個1分鐘，走到茶水間倒杯水，一口飲盡，妳的身體會感到前所未有的清爽。
09 易經占卜——遭遇挫折或猶豫徬徨時，利用占卜來做決定，藉著占卜的過程，進行自己與自己的對話，之後一切往往更了然於胸。
10
說聲謝謝妳－－妳對誰心懷感激，卻還沒有向她道謝，那就是現在囉，拿起電話或走過去，大聲說：「謝謝妳！」
1小時
善待自己
選擇疼惜一下自己的身體，
或離開令人不快的現場，都是妙方。
11
做SPA－－了解健康的重要，學習中醫、經絡操、阿南達瑪珈瑜伽打坐，對於自己身體的狀況都在掌握之中，如果有空出來的1個小時，則選擇利用芳香療法好好地疼惜一下自己的身體。（李欣頻）
12
看電影－－依當時的心情所選擇的電影，總有些機緣巧合，藉著從電影中尋求一些答案。（李欣頻）
13
看精采的表演錄影帶－－除了歌劇之外，加拿大的「太陽馬戲團」是個值得注目的表演團體，因為他們的藝術是經過精密計算的，而且必需全神貫注的投入，有時觀賞他人專注的神情也是一種享受。（李欣頻）
14
閱讀－－如果有1小時的空閒，選擇隨手抓本身邊的書或雜誌，就可馬上進入閱讀的樂趣裡，忘掉不快。（劉台芬）
15
「離開現場」－－生活中或工作壓力太大時，「離開現場」不啻為解脫妙方。有時候1天的工作中，無巧不巧地充滿挫折、令人窒息，這個時候她便選擇起身離開，到辦公室以外的地方透透氣，買杯果汁甚至逛街買衣服，返回辦公室前，再帶包糖果請同事吃，這時候的心情，就已經與起身離開時有了180度的大轉變。（劉台芬）
16
使自己風格獨具——別認為想辦法讓自己的外貌顯得更美好是件壞事。有些人會希望妳把時間花在其他更有意義的事情上，這可能意味著相對地妳花在「變漂亮」的效率不佳──投資很大，報酬卻很小。簡單的方法就是使自己風格獨具。(Duc)
17
輕鬆時光偷閒打發－－偷閒為自己煮杯咖啡、聽音樂，對於時常看書，看書速度超快的人來說，利用這1個小時的時間還可以看完半本書。（吳淡如）
18
聆聽新世紀音樂－－靜坐冥想撫平動盪的心靈，或者打開音響播放新世紀音樂，一邊聆聽音樂、一邊無意識的擺動身體，這樣的肢體是相當美妙的。（吳淡如）
19
欣賞歌劇－－除了在台北接觸藝文活動，也可以找機會接觸參與紐約豐富活躍的藝術活動，歌劇就是他最喜歡的一種。從懵懂到了解、到與劇中人物起共鳴、深諳歌劇的奧妙堂奧，在其中獲得許多樂趣。(DucLin)
20
燉鍋好湯－－一鍋放了各色青菜的蔬菜湯，它的綜合營養可以提供妳身體最理想的能量，更重要的是它的五顏六色，還可以修補鬱卒的心情。建議妳，先把大黃瓜煮滾後關火悶1個小時，讓甜分慢慢溢出，然後把高麗菜、青花菜、紅蘿蔔、豌豆莢、白洋菇……統統放進去，稍煮一下就OK！(Duc)
21
把他擺平－－作愛的運動效果不錯喔！而且，絕對有助於兩性親密關係。就提前1個小時上床吧！要他一切聽妳的，任妳擺布，享受一次女性上床當自強的樂趣。
1天
從容解壓
努力度過充實愉快的1天，就是一種成功。
22
朋友聚餐－－選擇洗溫泉身心放鬆一下，或者與朋友相聚，唯一不同的是，一定要求朋友再帶一個不認識的朋友加入，增加新元素有時會有新的樂趣與想法。（李欣頻）
23
採購精神糧食－－喜歡看書，甚至有資訊恐慌症的她，如果有1天的時間，會想盡辦法逛書店，大量採購精神糧食。（李欣頻）
24
看書、聽音樂－－如果有1天的時間，能夠看書、聽音樂，就是內心感受到最幸福的一件事了。選擇靠在室內最舒服的一張椅子上，把喜歡的書攤了一地，從椅子上看出去的窗景視野特佳，看書時最喜歡播放的是歌劇音樂帶，她形容歌劇簡直是百聽不厭，又不會干擾到閱讀的專注。（劉台芬）
25
嘗試新事物－－利用1天的時間做些過去沒有嘗試過的事情，例如最近一次的中東之旅，她走過阿布達比、巴林、阿曼等阿拉伯國家之後，對於這些陌生的地方感到更好奇，就跑到書店去買了一本相當有重量的專書來研讀、學習一下。（吳淡如）
26
充電－－除了把家裡設計打理得舒舒服服，藏書並有5,000套以上，1個月至少吸收翻看30本以上的書籍、雜誌，每半個月還會將收藏的書籍、雜誌整理出來送人，娛樂類的送給大樓管理員、知識類的即分送給學生。
身為廣告人，面對工作上的要求，除了不斷地壓榨腦汁，每天一張開眼睛要做的就是吸收各類的資訊，因此閱讀也是他每天必備的功課，是讓工作產質更佳的一個點子。（徐一鳴）
27
運動－－可以將運動變成一種習慣。根據研究調查，緩和的運動有助於腦部靈活思考，激烈的運動則對腦子沒什麼幫助，但是卻可以減少脂肪。（成英姝）
28
不說一句話－－妳每天都在講話嗎？給自己一個機會，一整天不講一句話，也是一種休息與修行，試試看吧！不容易做到，但絕對值得，如果妳噤聲1天之後大哭一場，恭喜妳，妳會有一個全新的自己。（Duc）
29
拜訪一個好朋友－－去拜訪一個妳很想見她、卻老是沒時間成行的好朋友，再做一件妳們曾經都喜歡做的事情，譬如，放一首妳們都愛的歌給她聽，盡興而浪漫。(Duc)
30
潛水度假——在陽光晴朗的日子與好友一起相邀潛水，在海底用完兩支空氣瓶之後上岸，中午享用一頓美味的海鮮大餐，下午去洗個溫泉，晚上再回家看書、寫稿，一天感覺充實愉快。
1星期
揹起行囊， 接受變化帶來的樂趣
換個地方住，有時候就換了不同的心情。
31
近程旅行－－如果有1星期的時間，她喜歡在國內、東北亞或東南亞旅行，如果不能成行，最起碼會選擇換個地方住。因為換個地方住，有時候就換了不同的心情。（李欣頻）
32
重新整理家裡－－心血來潮重新整理自己的東西，往往會發現許多過去買了卻還來不及享受的東西，讓人有另一種歡喜。（李欣頻）
33
讀書－－肯定讀書有增加Vision的機會，認為讀書是長期的培養與內化修鍊，一個人紮不紮實、有沒有深度，可以從聊天就看出端倪，多讀書也才能凡事皆由大處著眼，因此，如果有1星期的時間，她會選擇看完1本書，1個月4本書則是既定的目標。（劉台芬）
34
出外旅行－－1年裡最起碼會找出1周的時間出外旅行，其中美國是最常造訪也最喜歡的國度，一方面休息，另一方面探親訪友。美西的年輕活潑、美東的人文薈萃，都深深吸引她，此外，日本、歐洲以及上海也都是喜歡的旅點。（劉台芬）
35
旅行－－特別是海島度假，對於1個星期的假期來說，海島最是恰當，只不過在住宿上有些特別的要求，例如她喜歡去住些特別昂貴、有特色的度假別墅，好好享受一下。（吳淡如）
36
海外充電－－到國外上課充電一番，她舉例道，最近就有朋友邀她到加拿大上一種心靈成長與兩性關係的課程。充電的地方除了國外，例如日本導演也曾來台灣教授一種專為成人設計的遊戲課程，這種課程可以讓成人從中找回過去、彌補童年的缺憾。（吳淡如）
37
蒔花弄草——植物是很好的解壓劑，有1天的閒暇時，就會窩在家裡搬弄花草、整理花園，或者上假日花市買些新的盆栽，讓生活有些遐思。事實上，翻看室內設計的雜誌，也讓她感受到同樣輕快的心情。
38
「不斷與自己對話」－－人有兩種，一種是向前思考，另一種則是向後思考，向前思考的人可以清楚地知道事情的去脈，向後思考的人則可以把事情的來龍搞得一清二楚。「不斷與自己對話」，不論是1秒鐘或1個星期，時間的長短，都不會改變他「上窮碧落下黃泉」，透過對話尋找答案的決心。（徐一鳴）
39
收藏－－收藏品可能是就現實面而言，生活裡最不需要的東西，到頭來也有可能是最花錢的東西。但是一個人至少應該有1種收藏癖好，讓妳可以從中得到安慰和樂趣，也可使朋友到妳家拜訪時，不至於太無聊而顯得尷尬。種種有特殊故事的，珍奇的，來自不同地方的收藏品，有時甚至會讓人感到強烈的蒐集渴望，或者購買衝動，是一種具有滿足感的生活目標。（成英姝）
40
1周健走計畫－－連續7天，計畫一個短期的運動計畫，鍛鍊自己的耐心與毅力，健走是一個很棒的點子。選擇住家或辦公室旁邊的公園或還算寬敞的人行道，規定自己每天至少走30分鐘，最少固定時間。看看自己的「堅持」指數有多高？（Duc）
41
重組習慣的步調－－選擇1個星期的時間，從早晨張開眼睛開始，改變一下習慣的順序或內容，譬如吃不一樣的早餐、換不一樣的路線上班、換掉習慣使用的口紅顏色……，透過改變生活習慣，也可以帶給腦袋不一樣的刺激喔！
1個月
可旅行、可學習、可創作
人如果沒有長進，停留在原地，是很可悲的。
42
長程旅行－－對旅行的態度是認真，而且非常堅決的，只要旅行的生物時鐘到了，無論什麼都阻擋不了她。透過旅行可以找到許多意料之外的答案，希臘、西班牙、日本這些異地對她都有許多不同的啟發，找到繼續快樂活著的理由。（李欣頻）
43
學東西－－學習的時機永遠不嫌太遲，學習的範圍永遠不嫌太廣。30歲之後她更肯定自己要的是什麼，她說人如果沒有長進，停留在原地，是很可悲的。（李欣頻）
44
review工作進度－－除了1週一次review工作進度，每個月她也都會時時檢討、省視自己工作目標的達成率，畢竟工作與生活的重要性是等量齊觀的。（劉台芬）
45
音樂會或歌劇－－1個月至少欣賞一場音樂會或歌劇，是生活裡最起碼的享受。（劉台芬）
46
旅行學習－－特別鍾愛旅行中的學習，例如到英國學習香精油按摩、到巴黎、義大利學作點心，她特別懷念曾經到過印度的一座靈修學院習畫的經驗，有一節美術課程規定學生只能用黑色與白色兩種顏料作畫，學生被關在一間暗室裡，跟著自己的感覺在黑暗中創作，學習如何與自己相處。（吳淡如）
47
環遊世界－－如果有更長的時間，希望能夠計畫環遊世界，從文明進步的國家走到文明古國，普羅旺斯、愛丁堡、巴黎、紐約、馬德里及義大利的托斯卡尼地區，在安定舒適的旅行之後，再前往第三世界或其他驚險刺激的國家旅行，例如亞馬遜河、摩洛哥、阿拉斯加或是南極。（吳淡如）
48
展開妳的減重計畫－－不要再遲疑了，如果「減重」是妳今年的重要規畫，那就從現在開始吧！如果妳需要一個有效的方法，一定要參考我們舉辦「塑身美體大挑戰」的健康精神與方法。
49
快樂為元氣之本－－能讓妳快樂的事情同樣能激發妳的能量，每個月在月初的時候，就為自己預先安排至少2件快樂的事，譬如吃一頓美味的義大利餐、趕看一次夕陽、來一次SPA、把腳指甲塗得性感兮兮……。
50 探親旅行——因為戀家，自嘲自己的旅行是「蝸牛」式的旅行，也就是只要旅行，一定是帶著一大家子同行。視旅行是一種學習的他，帶著家人一同分享學習的心境，開放視覺、聽覺，接受文化衝擊。
旅行，一方面達到與親人相聚的目的，另方面也因為心情真正放輕鬆，因此更能打開心靈的眼來看世界，效果絕對是相加相乘的。
這輩子,應該為愛的人做的50件事情
- 從後面抱著蝦米一樣的她睡覺，你做了嗎？
- 真誠地說：“我愛你”，你做了嗎？
- 在藍色的地毯上坐著籃球抱著吉他為她唱歌，你做了嗎？
- 她生病時陪著她照顧她，你做了嗎？
- 全身心投入的接吻，你做了嗎？
- 帶她回你出生成長的城市，帶她看你的幼稚園你的小學你的初中和高中，你做了嗎？
- 讓她看你拿到大學籃球聯賽的冠軍，你做了嗎？
- 給她飛翔的翅膀，你做了嗎？
- 保護她遠離傷害和不好的東西，你做了嗎？
- 學會做她最愛吃的，你做了嗎？
- 多要求自己少要求她，你做了嗎？
- 冬天你用粗壯的大腿溫暖她冰棍般的小腳，你做了嗎？
- 帶她走過細軟的沙灘，並把焰火棒插成心形然後一根根點燃，你做了嗎？
- 每年的紀念日用你能想到的最浪漫的方式慶祝，你做了嗎？
- 有自己的菜園種她最愛吃的蔬菜，你做了嗎？
- 晚上接她回家並幫她按摩放鬆，你做了嗎？
- 晚飯後一起出去遛狗，你做了嗎？
- 一起騎雙人自行車喜歡她的朋友並把他們當作自己的朋友，你做了嗎？
- 給她足夠的自由空間，你做了嗎？
- 開著她喜歡的甲克蟲小車去郊遊，你做了嗎？
- 陪她度過每個生日一起吹滅100歲生日蠟燭，你做了嗎？
- 夏天的淩晨起來給她煮綠豆湯，然後放進冰箱確保她喝到時它是冰冰涼的，你做了嗎？
- 在她醒來的同時睜開眼，然後深深的吻她，你做了嗎？
- 一起逛超市買她愛吃的零食，你做了嗎？
- 跟她拍好多貼紙照貼滿手機錢包……一切經常看到的地方，你做了嗎？
- 努力工作，你做了嗎？
- 她無聊時陪她打牌打麻將，你做了嗎？
- 讓她幫你選衣服設計髮型，你做了嗎？
- 帶她去西藏拉薩非洲的埃及，你做了嗎？
- 用突發的靈感為她寫下小詩，你做了嗎？
- 為她弄好早飯再吻醒她，你做了嗎？
- 睡覺前給她讀故事，哄她入眠，你做了嗎？
- 改正自己邋遢的壞習慣，你做了嗎？
- 帶她乘船一起看日出，你做了嗎？
- 她開心時陪她哈哈大笑，她難過時把她抱在懷裏輕輕安慰，你做了嗎？
- 吻去她臉上的淚，你做了嗎？
- 和她一起把新家漆成淡蘭色，你做了嗎？
- 和她一起洗澡為她擦背，你做了嗎？
- 為她剪指甲和手上的倒刺，你做了嗎？
- 帶她見你的父母,告訴他們她讓你知道什麼是真愛，什麼是生命的意義，你做了嗎？
- 學會送花給她而不是很實際的請她吃烤肉，你做了嗎？
- 養她喜歡的小狗和你喜歡的大狗,並象孩子那樣愛它們，你做了嗎？
- 買那只手感很好的大象給她做生日禮物，你做了嗎？
- 一起聽她喜歡的歌伴隨著旋律做愛，你做了嗎？
- 一起鍛煉身體並教會她三步上籃，你做了嗎？
- 陪她去吃遍所有小攤，你做了嗎？
- 離開她不超過10天以上，你做了嗎？
- 買她喜歡的戒指拿著花向她求婚，你做了嗎？
- 陪她看電視，你做了嗎？
- “答應我，下輩子還嫁給我”~~看著她終老並在她死後去找她……
不理財 就到龍山寺找個位子！
Vol. 358 Sun, 2 Nov, 2003
依照人口的平均壽命來看，六十五歲退休，活到八十五歲，保守規畫須有二十年的生活費用；你可想好該如何規畫一個手頭充裕不必再為錢煩心的晚年歲月？
有位理財專家半恐嚇半開玩笑地說：如果你五十歲還不懂得為退休存點錢的話，最好期待你有個孝順的兒子，如果沒有，那就到龍山寺找個位子，以免老了變成流浪漢，連個睡覺的地方都沒有。
這話說得一點都不誇張，也一針見血地點出現代上班族在未來退休時最嚴重的問題－－理財。尤其是年輕人常認為：「我沒什麼錢，不用理了。」其實，這是錯誤的觀念，專家建議，只要「有進帳」就得規畫，而且愈早開始愈好。
理財要務實 不能太夢幻
今年四十歲的胡道安，任職日盛投信行銷處企畫部協理，是位典型的上班族，每天認真工作，閒暇時帶著妻子家人到處吃吃喝喝，生活過得倒也愜意，不過，他心裡依舊存在那麼一點的不安，深怕老了沒法悠哉過活。
胡道安說，有一天他女兒問他：「爸爸你五十歲要退休嗎？要做什麼呢？」他想了一下，還沒出口回答，女兒就說：「媽媽會做很多事，洗碗、煮飯，而你只會看電視。」他認真想想才發現，好像真的沒有一項專長，那退休後還能做什麼？
也許是女兒的刺激，讓胡道安認真地開始思考退休問題，他認為，目前他的時間與才能都花在工作上，生活品味的培養全仰賴太太，每個月大概要花十萬元，未來他希望也能過這樣「有品味」的生活，換句話說，退休後每個月要有十萬元可以花用。但，這不是一筆小數目。
胡道安先設定目標：六十歲退休，每月十萬元，再活二十五年，那算一算退休後約需三千萬元。他用四十萬元開始做起，利用長期投資累積財富，將資產配置在波動性的股市，及安全性的債券型基金，配置比例約為四比六，不過，他可不要在股市裡殺進殺出，而是一年只抓幾個時機點進場，賺的錢就放到安全的債券資產上，操作四年後，他的財富已累積到上百萬元，每月平均報酬率約在一萬元至二萬元。
胡道安之前也曾投資失利，因此他知道要有風險控管的能力，建議要投資的人，對工具要有信任感，維持長期的關係，而且要隨市場波動考量自己的資產風險，不要被股市所迷惑，要設停損、停利點。他以一個過來人的經驗說：「冒險要有冒險的本錢，務實一點，放棄夢想式的投資理財，才會累積財富。」
單身過活 是危機也是轉機
老年危機感正在四年級族群蔓延著，「我們這一代是奉養的最後一代，卻是被遺棄的第一代。」這話意謂著你一定要靠自己才能安度後半生。單身的瑞士銀行台北分行助理副總裁劉台芬，比一般人更能意識到這樣的危機，她除了積極工作，更理性地規畫未來的生活。
出過幾本有關理財的書籍，大家都認定她是理財專家，但劉台芬希望自己不僅是理財專家，更希望作個懂得生活的人，她說也許是單身太久，一度讓她變的很自我，但隨著年齡的增長，現在觀念想法都有點變了。
她認為，「工作」是群聚的環境，不僅可以帶來收入，而且還可以填滿偶爾襲來的空虛感，如果沒有工作，將是一件可怕的事情。然而，她非常清楚知道，人不可能永遠不退休，因此，劉台芬規畫再工作二十年，六十五歲退休，但如果沒工作又活很長，日子勢必會很悽慘，「生活可以簡單，卻也必須有錢才行，」她希望退休後每月還有十萬至十五萬元的花費。
「四十五歲，好像是該考慮退休的問題了！」劉台芬說，人生有太多不可測的事，四十幾歲如果再做太多的投資，極有可能賠光光，因此她建議，先檢視一下自己是否具有創業的特質，不然，薪水族就要聰明投資，選定好的投資工具，手中要有長短期的資金，不要搶高點、搶市場的消息面，投資心理要看得比人早，看得比人快。
在三十五、六歲時就明白自己不太容易結婚，可能會單身過一輩子，因此劉台芬的理財模式以安全感出發。目前她的資產配置，則以台股及股票型的定期定額基金為主，尤其是定期定額基金，是較適合做退休規畫的理財工具。
她直指：「很多人會買股票，不會賣股票，」這是理財最大的致命傷，千萬不要要求太高的投資報酬率。劉台芬建議，不管有錢沒錢，看清自己真正的財力，然後選擇投資或守成，才是聰明理財的高手。
中產階級亟需理財長期投資縮小風險
很多人經常在錢堆裡進進出出，看錢來錢去太容易了，卻從來不曾想過也該為自己好好規畫一番，趁著工作之便留點資產，往往是因緣際會，才頓悟為自己打算的重要性，從事證券業二十幾年的劉凱平就是這樣的例子。
六年多前，一個偶然的機會，看到有位老太太捧了一堆錢到公司來買股票，當時他忽然想到，這是人家的棺材本，如果操作一不小心，全部就會化為烏有；不過，他也回頭想想自己，好像連棺材本都沒有，頓時不知所措，覺得自己不能再混了，必須好好思考自己的退休生活。
也正因為如此，劉凱平看到另一個商機，他認為理財規畫將會是現代人的必修課程，於是他離開工作許久的公司，跟朋友合夥開了一家理財顧問公司。劉凱平說，理財愈年輕做愈好，有收入就做，要知道，理財不只是給有錢人做的，而是大多數無恆產的中產階級更有需要。
他說，理財有三塊，包括保險、租稅及投資風險，而最須要好好規畫的就是投資風險這塊，他認為做理財一定要有四點認知，第一要很清楚地知道自己的需求，第二要知道投資市場的規律，第三要用科學的方法降低震盪的幅度，第四要承認投資者都有非理性的行為。
依照歷史軌跡的研判，長期投資報酬率是往上走的，時間拉長，風險才會縮短，但是投資人往往過度自信或害怕，而造成損失。理財顧問存在的價值並非是要帶領投資人去打敗市場，而是幫助你累積財富。
核算退休美夢的價錢 踏實從現在準備
鴻鈞理財規畫顧問公司執行長林鴻鈞表示，退休理財就像一個築夢工程，須給夢想一個價錢，而且計算的成本一定要包含醫療費用，切記須是年輕時的兩倍，再來就是估算出你何時退休，畢竟每個人生命的終點不一樣，不過依照人口的平均壽命來看，六十五歲退休，約可以活到八十五歲，所以保守規畫須有二十年的生活費用。
林鴻鈞認為，如果想要過舒適一點的生活，二十年大概需要一千萬元，當然每個人想要過的生活不同，也可以一個月二萬元，二十年五百萬元即可。他建議，五年級生，未來十年是收入的高峰期，應趁此機會存錢，資產配置要有現金、平衡式基金及股債等，退休的部分，則最好挑選收益好的股債。在未來可以準備的二十年裡，最好四分之一的錢要放在退休那塊領域。
另外，六年級生則有三十年的準備期，建議不妨作階梯式儲蓄，以五年一階，第一階段每月起碼五千元放在股市，第二階段資金可配置在基金及歐美股市，第三階段放平衡式基金，第四階段可以六成放股市，四成放平衡式基金，最後則股債各五成，退休後，資金在股市裡最好少於五成，採保守投資。
大部的理財專家都建議，雖然年紀大了才做規畫未必來得及，但「有做比不做好」，不管你是幾年級生，現在開始規畫財務，給自己的未來點一盞明燈，以免真的要到龍山寺去找位子了。（本文轉載自358期今周刊）
358期相關報導：
◎四、五年級的你 憑什麼退休？
◎《退休也要心理準備》及早規畫絢麗多彩的黃昏歲月
◎《退休後把工作當娛樂》麥當勞阿桑 快樂不服老
依照人口的平均壽命來看，六十五歲退休，活到八十五歲，保守規畫須有二十年的生活費用；你可想好該如何規畫一個手頭充裕不必再為錢煩心的晚年歲月？
有位理財專家半恐嚇半開玩笑地說：如果你五十歲還不懂得為退休存點錢的話，最好期待你有個孝順的兒子，如果沒有，那就到龍山寺找個位子，以免老了變成流浪漢，連個睡覺的地方都沒有。
這話說得一點都不誇張，也一針見血地點出現代上班族在未來退休時最嚴重的問題－－理財。尤其是年輕人常認為：「我沒什麼錢，不用理了。」其實，這是錯誤的觀念，專家建議，只要「有進帳」就得規畫，而且愈早開始愈好。
理財要務實 不能太夢幻
今年四十歲的胡道安，任職日盛投信行銷處企畫部協理，是位典型的上班族，每天認真工作，閒暇時帶著妻子家人到處吃吃喝喝，生活過得倒也愜意，不過，他心裡依舊存在那麼一點的不安，深怕老了沒法悠哉過活。
胡道安說，有一天他女兒問他：「爸爸你五十歲要退休嗎？要做什麼呢？」他想了一下，還沒出口回答，女兒就說：「媽媽會做很多事，洗碗、煮飯，而你只會看電視。」他認真想想才發現，好像真的沒有一項專長，那退休後還能做什麼？
也許是女兒的刺激，讓胡道安認真地開始思考退休問題，他認為，目前他的時間與才能都花在工作上，生活品味的培養全仰賴太太，每個月大概要花十萬元，未來他希望也能過這樣「有品味」的生活，換句話說，退休後每個月要有十萬元可以花用。但，這不是一筆小數目。
胡道安先設定目標：六十歲退休，每月十萬元，再活二十五年，那算一算退休後約需三千萬元。他用四十萬元開始做起，利用長期投資累積財富，將資產配置在波動性的股市，及安全性的債券型基金，配置比例約為四比六，不過，他可不要在股市裡殺進殺出，而是一年只抓幾個時機點進場，賺的錢就放到安全的債券資產上，操作四年後，他的財富已累積到上百萬元，每月平均報酬率約在一萬元至二萬元。
胡道安之前也曾投資失利，因此他知道要有風險控管的能力，建議要投資的人，對工具要有信任感，維持長期的關係，而且要隨市場波動考量自己的資產風險，不要被股市所迷惑，要設停損、停利點。他以一個過來人的經驗說：「冒險要有冒險的本錢，務實一點，放棄夢想式的投資理財，才會累積財富。」
單身過活 是危機也是轉機
老年危機感正在四年級族群蔓延著，「我們這一代是奉養的最後一代，卻是被遺棄的第一代。」這話意謂著你一定要靠自己才能安度後半生。單身的瑞士銀行台北分行助理副總裁劉台芬，比一般人更能意識到這樣的危機，她除了積極工作，更理性地規畫未來的生活。
出過幾本有關理財的書籍，大家都認定她是理財專家，但劉台芬希望自己不僅是理財專家，更希望作個懂得生活的人，她說也許是單身太久，一度讓她變的很自我，但隨著年齡的增長，現在觀念想法都有點變了。
她認為，「工作」是群聚的環境，不僅可以帶來收入，而且還可以填滿偶爾襲來的空虛感，如果沒有工作，將是一件可怕的事情。然而，她非常清楚知道，人不可能永遠不退休，因此，劉台芬規畫再工作二十年，六十五歲退休，但如果沒工作又活很長，日子勢必會很悽慘，「生活可以簡單，卻也必須有錢才行，」她希望退休後每月還有十萬至十五萬元的花費。
「四十五歲，好像是該考慮退休的問題了！」劉台芬說，人生有太多不可測的事，四十幾歲如果再做太多的投資，極有可能賠光光，因此她建議，先檢視一下自己是否具有創業的特質，不然，薪水族就要聰明投資，選定好的投資工具，手中要有長短期的資金，不要搶高點、搶市場的消息面，投資心理要看得比人早，看得比人快。
在三十五、六歲時就明白自己不太容易結婚，可能會單身過一輩子，因此劉台芬的理財模式以安全感出發。目前她的資產配置，則以台股及股票型的定期定額基金為主，尤其是定期定額基金，是較適合做退休規畫的理財工具。
她直指：「很多人會買股票，不會賣股票，」這是理財最大的致命傷，千萬不要要求太高的投資報酬率。劉台芬建議，不管有錢沒錢，看清自己真正的財力，然後選擇投資或守成，才是聰明理財的高手。
中產階級亟需理財長期投資縮小風險
很多人經常在錢堆裡進進出出，看錢來錢去太容易了，卻從來不曾想過也該為自己好好規畫一番，趁著工作之便留點資產，往往是因緣際會，才頓悟為自己打算的重要性，從事證券業二十幾年的劉凱平就是這樣的例子。
六年多前，一個偶然的機會，看到有位老太太捧了一堆錢到公司來買股票，當時他忽然想到，這是人家的棺材本，如果操作一不小心，全部就會化為烏有；不過，他也回頭想想自己，好像連棺材本都沒有，頓時不知所措，覺得自己不能再混了，必須好好思考自己的退休生活。
也正因為如此，劉凱平看到另一個商機，他認為理財規畫將會是現代人的必修課程，於是他離開工作許久的公司，跟朋友合夥開了一家理財顧問公司。劉凱平說，理財愈年輕做愈好，有收入就做，要知道，理財不只是給有錢人做的，而是大多數無恆產的中產階級更有需要。
他說，理財有三塊，包括保險、租稅及投資風險，而最須要好好規畫的就是投資風險這塊，他認為做理財一定要有四點認知，第一要很清楚地知道自己的需求，第二要知道投資市場的規律，第三要用科學的方法降低震盪的幅度，第四要承認投資者都有非理性的行為。
依照歷史軌跡的研判，長期投資報酬率是往上走的，時間拉長，風險才會縮短，但是投資人往往過度自信或害怕，而造成損失。理財顧問存在的價值並非是要帶領投資人去打敗市場，而是幫助你累積財富。
核算退休美夢的價錢 踏實從現在準備
鴻鈞理財規畫顧問公司執行長林鴻鈞表示，退休理財就像一個築夢工程，須給夢想一個價錢，而且計算的成本一定要包含醫療費用，切記須是年輕時的兩倍，再來就是估算出你何時退休，畢竟每個人生命的終點不一樣，不過依照人口的平均壽命來看，六十五歲退休，約可以活到八十五歲，所以保守規畫須有二十年的生活費用。
林鴻鈞認為，如果想要過舒適一點的生活，二十年大概需要一千萬元，當然每個人想要過的生活不同，也可以一個月二萬元，二十年五百萬元即可。他建議，五年級生，未來十年是收入的高峰期，應趁此機會存錢，資產配置要有現金、平衡式基金及股債等，退休的部分，則最好挑選收益好的股債。在未來可以準備的二十年裡，最好四分之一的錢要放在退休那塊領域。
另外，六年級生則有三十年的準備期，建議不妨作階梯式儲蓄，以五年一階，第一階段每月起碼五千元放在股市，第二階段資金可配置在基金及歐美股市，第三階段放平衡式基金，第四階段可以六成放股市，四成放平衡式基金，最後則股債各五成，退休後，資金在股市裡最好少於五成，採保守投資。
大部的理財專家都建議，雖然年紀大了才做規畫未必來得及，但「有做比不做好」，不管你是幾年級生，現在開始規畫財務，給自己的未來點一盞明燈，以免真的要到龍山寺去找位子了。（本文轉載自358期今周刊）
358期相關報導：
◎四、五年級的你 憑什麼退休？
◎《退休也要心理準備》及早規畫絢麗多彩的黃昏歲月
◎《退休後把工作當娛樂》麥當勞阿桑 快樂不服老
心理按摩技巧
現代人講究生活質量和生活品位，注重外部形體和容顏。而當心理疲憊時，你是否想對它進行必要的呵護呢？請不要小覷此問題，這種呵護是對心理的支撐、養護和保健。經常進行心理"按摩"，會使你容光煥發，青春常駐。下面，介紹幾種便捷有效的心理按摩技巧。
幽默：是一種美麗的轉化劑。它可以把煩惱轉為歡暢，讓痛苦變成愉快，將尷尬變為自然，緩解生活中的矛盾與衝突，給人帶來歡快的情緒。適時來點幽默逗趣，不僅能使自己的心理得到舒展，還能解開別人心頭的鬱結，起到化解焦慮的積極作用。
傾訴：是一種自我心理調節術。生活不會一帆風順，向親朋好友吐露鬱積在心頭的苦悶，是排解不良情緒的好辦法。在"心理梗塞"時，若能及時向值得信任的親朋好友傾訴，可以在別人的理解中，使自己受挫的心靈得到安撫與慰藉。
遊戲：于玩樂中放鬆自己。遊戲不只屬於孩童，它應該陪伴我們走過整個人生。哪里有開心的遊戲，哪里就一定充滿笑聲，少有憂愁。能遊戲者，肯定是一個內心有著愉快感的人。遊戲還可以豐富家庭生活，密切家庭成員之間的關係。
遺忘：對痛苦的遺忘是必要的，沉湎於舊日的失意是脆弱的，迷失在痛苦的記憶裏是可悲的。遺忘不是簡單地抹去記憶，而是一種振作，一種成熟和超脫。忘記生活曾經給自己造成的種種不幸和苦痛，充分享受生活和各種樂趣，讓心靈沉浸在現實的快樂之中。
運動：運動的好處不言而喻。喜動者可跑步、爬山、打拳、練劍等，喜靜者可飽覽群書、習字練畫、養花釣魚、下棋打牌。憑你的興趣，找一種適合自己的活動方式，學會休閒，適度放鬆，才能擁有健康的心身狀態。
閱讀：你會發現另一方洞天。古書典籍、力作精品，都是古今中外名人、偉人和學養高深之人的智慧積澱與結晶。與書為伍，同這些人交友談心，可使你變得更加睿智、大度和富有才情，還會使你熱愛生活，更加珍惜現在擁有的一切。
寫作：這是一種提神益腦的健康生活方式。當你感到有話說而無聽眾時，當你感到心理壓力大又不願向他人訴說時，不妨就說給自己"聽"。把你的苦痛、不滿、感慨和心聲，訴諸筆頭，記錄成文。這樣可緩釋心理壓力，調節情緒，使傾斜了的心理天平重新恢復平衡。
幽默：是一種美麗的轉化劑。它可以把煩惱轉為歡暢，讓痛苦變成愉快，將尷尬變為自然，緩解生活中的矛盾與衝突，給人帶來歡快的情緒。適時來點幽默逗趣，不僅能使自己的心理得到舒展，還能解開別人心頭的鬱結，起到化解焦慮的積極作用。
傾訴：是一種自我心理調節術。生活不會一帆風順，向親朋好友吐露鬱積在心頭的苦悶，是排解不良情緒的好辦法。在"心理梗塞"時，若能及時向值得信任的親朋好友傾訴，可以在別人的理解中，使自己受挫的心靈得到安撫與慰藉。
遊戲：于玩樂中放鬆自己。遊戲不只屬於孩童，它應該陪伴我們走過整個人生。哪里有開心的遊戲，哪里就一定充滿笑聲，少有憂愁。能遊戲者，肯定是一個內心有著愉快感的人。遊戲還可以豐富家庭生活，密切家庭成員之間的關係。
遺忘：對痛苦的遺忘是必要的，沉湎於舊日的失意是脆弱的，迷失在痛苦的記憶裏是可悲的。遺忘不是簡單地抹去記憶，而是一種振作，一種成熟和超脫。忘記生活曾經給自己造成的種種不幸和苦痛，充分享受生活和各種樂趣，讓心靈沉浸在現實的快樂之中。
運動：運動的好處不言而喻。喜動者可跑步、爬山、打拳、練劍等，喜靜者可飽覽群書、習字練畫、養花釣魚、下棋打牌。憑你的興趣，找一種適合自己的活動方式，學會休閒，適度放鬆，才能擁有健康的心身狀態。
閱讀：你會發現另一方洞天。古書典籍、力作精品，都是古今中外名人、偉人和學養高深之人的智慧積澱與結晶。與書為伍，同這些人交友談心，可使你變得更加睿智、大度和富有才情，還會使你熱愛生活，更加珍惜現在擁有的一切。
寫作：這是一種提神益腦的健康生活方式。當你感到有話說而無聽眾時，當你感到心理壓力大又不願向他人訴說時，不妨就說給自己"聽"。把你的苦痛、不滿、感慨和心聲，訴諸筆頭，記錄成文。這樣可緩釋心理壓力，調節情緒，使傾斜了的心理天平重新恢復平衡。
確實需要婚姻嗎？現代中國人的婚姻觀
讓一個男性和一個女性持續不斷地生活在一起……從生物學的角度看，是一種極其不自然的狀況。
——羅伯特•布裏伏爾特，《罪與性》
張亮 32歲-快樂驛站動畫監製
中央美術學院版畫系畢業，現任北京東方萬象文化有限公司藝術總監。已婚，結婚3年，目前妻子在法國留學。
你問婚姻對我來說意味著什麼？意味著吃苦受累活受罪！我既不相信婚姻也不需要婚姻。是，我結婚了，我不得不結婚的原因就是任何事物的發展都有慣性，當時我和我老婆的關係發展到那種程度，所有的人包括雙方父母都認為我應該結婚，當時如果我不結婚我就是個混蛋。也正是因為我結婚了，所以我才特別有資格談論男人不需要婚姻的話題。
婚姻生活讓我特別排斥的地方有幾點：首先就是，如果我不結婚的話，我只需面對一個家庭，但是我結婚了，就變成了面對三個家庭：我的、她的和我們的。而且我還要裝作更看重她的家庭、對她的父母比對我的父母還好，這對我是很勉為其難、很偽善的。這涉及到人的本性，人總是習慣於認為自己付出的更多，別人付出的很少。當雙方的家庭都認為我理應付出更多的時候，我就覺得太累、太痛苦。
其次讓我排斥的是婚姻帶來的厭倦。現在各種雜誌上連篇累牘的各種如何在婚姻中保持性的新鮮感的訣竅啊、手法啊什麼的，那些東西都是沒用的。人對同一事物的忍耐是有限度的，沒有任何人能對同一事物保持長久同樣的願望和熱情。對男人來說尤其不可能。我從小到大認識的所有男人，就沒有一個沒和老婆以外的女人有過關係。
人們經常說，現在女人的地位提高了，我卻覺得女人的經濟地位近幾年反而下降了。20年前女性普遍工作，只依靠男人的工資根本無法養活全家；而現在個人收入提高了，女人可以不工作在家做主婦，男女的收入差距拉大了。我認為，女性結婚就是為了物質保障，男性承擔的經濟壓力越來越大，這是對婚姻影響很大的因素。我曾經算過一筆比較差勁的帳，我每年在我媳婦身上花去差不多20萬，如果我把這筆錢作為成本投入到在我身邊的其他女性身上，我會得到什麼？我可以每年、每個月都有新的女朋友，不管是在性、還是在情感上，我都總是能得到持續不斷的新鮮感。打個比較差勁的比方，這就像批發和零售的關係，現在我的批發價比零售價還貴了，這比喻聽起來很刺耳吧，但它是事實，我能平衡嗎？其實不只是我，很多人都有著同樣的想法，只不過我說出來了而已。
確實需要婚姻嗎？
婚姻能給我帶來什麼？我現在的全部需求都不需要通過婚姻來滿足，比如情感需求和性需求在婚姻之外我完全可以得到滿足，更別提其他需求了。所謂幸福的婚姻，我認為只能出現在60歲以後，也就是結婚30年以後，60歲以後夫妻二人已經從糾纏不休的兩個男女變成了心平氣和的伴侶。那時所謂的幸福是用前30年的痛苦換來的，我無論如何接受不了。我厭惡婚姻，我從來沒有在我身邊任何一個已婚男性的臉上看到過幸福。
［男人靠身價來滿足自己，女人靠虛榮心來成全自己。那婚姻又算誰的籌碼呢？Tommy在大規模賑災捐款時，開出的數額向來是一百萬人民幣，從他七八年前開出的第一個一百萬開始。錢是個好東西，它可以強調男人的價值。婚姻也是個好東西，它可以毫不留情地分割男人的資產。］
姓名：Tommy Leong
年齡：36歲
職業：香港某私營鋼鐵貿易公司董事長
女人都一樣，區別只是開始。不懂女人的男人不值得同情，同樣，不懂男人的女人不值得憐憫。
完成原始積累之後，我開始了大規模的生意擴展。
企業上市之前，我和太太已經有了二個孩子並且都先後上學讀書。我在外面賺錢，太太在家裏打打麻將。香港人的生活似乎是大大小小一大家子人就對了。
剛結婚的時候，我很感謝太太。因為她的家庭給了我很多關照。而我憑藉自己的努力，靠著經驗和機遇開始了自己事業的輝煌。整天泡在外面，只是為了家人生活的幸福快樂。後來我們有錢了，生意也並不需要自己打理了，問題就來了。
我太太認為我有太多錢可以去包二奶，於是她要求除了名份以外，還要主宰屬於她應有的那部分資產。我並沒有太多想法，自己有能力的時候，當然會提供給你家人和孩子的。
我太太除了錢之外，不再要求其他的東西。哪怕是幾個月不回去香港，只要她戶口裏有足夠的錢，生意裏分到她名下相應的利益，就OK了。
我辛辛苦苦這幾十年，希望得到的家庭是溫馨和睦暖意融融的。我太太對於我早年間創業的支持，使我實在感激不盡。但她最近這些年，包括現在和以後對於財富的佔有欲望，使使我覺得她不再像我太太而是個陌生人一般，雖然我也承認那是她該得的。
我現在無法說明婚姻是什麼，能夠帶給男人什麼。只知道如果做事業的時候你的太太很支持你，是你的幸運；但財富足夠多的時候，沒有了關心和關愛，不能算是幸福的。
"所有的女人無所謂正派，正派是因為她受的誘惑不夠多！男人也一樣。男人無所謂忠誠，忠誠是因為他背叛的籌碼不夠重！"
姓名：張寧
年齡：33周歲
婚史：8個月
職業：某安防科技集團公司董事長兼法人代表
［傳奇般地從四川大山裏娶回來一個漂亮的黃花閨女，在五星級的酒店的喜宴上，他對外宣稱：我也有後方根據地啦！這樣一個安全的後方，讓他無論在風光或者風流回來後，都可以有個安穩的家。張甯的婚姻似乎成為傳奇，在知情不知情的人群中肆意廣播著。走進他的家，除了幾近裝修設計立面圖一般的奢華且井然有序之外，在這近六十平米的陽光客廳中，並沒有發現任何使人意外的感覺。我們的對於他婚姻狀況的瞭解，從廚房裏那個忙碌的靚麗身影開始。］
問：有沒有人問過你，怎捨得把如此美麗的女人藏在家裏做廚娘？你不覺得是"種源"的浪費嗎？
張：不好意思，我勢必要糾正你一下了，我是把她養在家裏做老婆的，並不是專業廚娘。當然，燒飯是我老婆的一項重要生活內容之一。
問：你娶她之前怎麼想的？娶她付出了什麼代價？
張：娶她前就是為了身體上的和心理上的放鬆。如果說代價，我給她家裏的財禮還比不上我們婚宴酒席花費的一半呢。
問：那時候你不覺得婚姻會束縛你的自由嗎？
張：不，我覺得是新生活的開始，我預想裏的自由生活。誰說婚姻都是對男人的約束和埋葬？
問：你怎麼看你老婆？
張：我老婆現在也是我資產的一部分了。而且，遠比量化的資產意義更重大。主要有三個方面——首先，是經濟上的放鬆。我根本不用去考慮花費的多少，在我家豐衣足食的生活，她比在天堂還滿足；其次，視覺上的全部滿足我都有了。她很漂亮，連女人都忍不住去欣賞，關鍵是她的美來自天然，不加任何修飾。第三，也就是最俗、最關鍵的部分了。我是男人，滿足生理需求很重要啊。我老婆身材好，而且，不瞞你說，她是個絕對純潔的處女，我估計小時候他爸都未必抱過她，乾淨！有了這麼個尤物，做起來心裏除了純粹的爽沒別的了。而且，我還可以把學到的、聽說過的技巧在她身上加以實驗，而她毫無疑問地跟從。
問：你覺得你的這種滿足感會不會最終消失？
張：有足夠能力的男人對生理需求總是不停滯的。娶這老婆的最大好處就是你隨意她不會隨便。乏了累了或者來性趣了，我在家怎麼發洩，或者到外面如何，她根本不會去糾纏。這樣的女人，除了省心，怎麼會乏味呢？
問：你可以用幾點來概括有個單純老婆的幸福生活。
張：1、最純粹的全職業太太，燒菜做飯洗衣服收拾屋子生孩子，都沒怨言，還幹得挺踏實。2、你可以站在牆外等紅杏或者小妖精，感情談累了或者身體玩累了回家睡覺沒人跟你吵跟你鬧。3、你不用擔心自己財產流失，她根本不懂也不會跟你過問。給她買菜錢就行。4、她可以滿足你不同的心理角色需求，當老婆去看管，當情人般寵愛，哪怕是純粹的性伴侶為睡上一覺。5、你完全控制自己對於傳宗接代的選擇。該不該生孩子，什麼時候生，想生幾個，關鍵在於這麼漂亮的美人生出來的孩子肯定也漂亮啊。6、少是夫妻老是伴，現在帶著出去風光、漂亮，還不用擔心跟別人跑了；等老了、身體不行了，那個伴也就有了。
問：你的婚姻可以說是出於傳統意義的搭幫過日子嗎？
張：僅從性的角度講也是這樣。
——羅伯特•布裏伏爾特，《罪與性》
張亮 32歲-快樂驛站動畫監製
中央美術學院版畫系畢業，現任北京東方萬象文化有限公司藝術總監。已婚，結婚3年，目前妻子在法國留學。
你問婚姻對我來說意味著什麼？意味著吃苦受累活受罪！我既不相信婚姻也不需要婚姻。是，我結婚了，我不得不結婚的原因就是任何事物的發展都有慣性，當時我和我老婆的關係發展到那種程度，所有的人包括雙方父母都認為我應該結婚，當時如果我不結婚我就是個混蛋。也正是因為我結婚了，所以我才特別有資格談論男人不需要婚姻的話題。
婚姻生活讓我特別排斥的地方有幾點：首先就是，如果我不結婚的話，我只需面對一個家庭，但是我結婚了，就變成了面對三個家庭：我的、她的和我們的。而且我還要裝作更看重她的家庭、對她的父母比對我的父母還好，這對我是很勉為其難、很偽善的。這涉及到人的本性，人總是習慣於認為自己付出的更多，別人付出的很少。當雙方的家庭都認為我理應付出更多的時候，我就覺得太累、太痛苦。
其次讓我排斥的是婚姻帶來的厭倦。現在各種雜誌上連篇累牘的各種如何在婚姻中保持性的新鮮感的訣竅啊、手法啊什麼的，那些東西都是沒用的。人對同一事物的忍耐是有限度的，沒有任何人能對同一事物保持長久同樣的願望和熱情。對男人來說尤其不可能。我從小到大認識的所有男人，就沒有一個沒和老婆以外的女人有過關係。
人們經常說，現在女人的地位提高了，我卻覺得女人的經濟地位近幾年反而下降了。20年前女性普遍工作，只依靠男人的工資根本無法養活全家；而現在個人收入提高了，女人可以不工作在家做主婦，男女的收入差距拉大了。我認為，女性結婚就是為了物質保障，男性承擔的經濟壓力越來越大，這是對婚姻影響很大的因素。我曾經算過一筆比較差勁的帳，我每年在我媳婦身上花去差不多20萬，如果我把這筆錢作為成本投入到在我身邊的其他女性身上，我會得到什麼？我可以每年、每個月都有新的女朋友，不管是在性、還是在情感上，我都總是能得到持續不斷的新鮮感。打個比較差勁的比方，這就像批發和零售的關係，現在我的批發價比零售價還貴了，這比喻聽起來很刺耳吧，但它是事實，我能平衡嗎？其實不只是我，很多人都有著同樣的想法，只不過我說出來了而已。
確實需要婚姻嗎？
婚姻能給我帶來什麼？我現在的全部需求都不需要通過婚姻來滿足，比如情感需求和性需求在婚姻之外我完全可以得到滿足，更別提其他需求了。所謂幸福的婚姻，我認為只能出現在60歲以後，也就是結婚30年以後，60歲以後夫妻二人已經從糾纏不休的兩個男女變成了心平氣和的伴侶。那時所謂的幸福是用前30年的痛苦換來的，我無論如何接受不了。我厭惡婚姻，我從來沒有在我身邊任何一個已婚男性的臉上看到過幸福。
［男人靠身價來滿足自己，女人靠虛榮心來成全自己。那婚姻又算誰的籌碼呢？Tommy在大規模賑災捐款時，開出的數額向來是一百萬人民幣，從他七八年前開出的第一個一百萬開始。錢是個好東西，它可以強調男人的價值。婚姻也是個好東西，它可以毫不留情地分割男人的資產。］
姓名：Tommy Leong
年齡：36歲
職業：香港某私營鋼鐵貿易公司董事長
女人都一樣，區別只是開始。不懂女人的男人不值得同情，同樣，不懂男人的女人不值得憐憫。
完成原始積累之後，我開始了大規模的生意擴展。
企業上市之前，我和太太已經有了二個孩子並且都先後上學讀書。我在外面賺錢，太太在家裏打打麻將。香港人的生活似乎是大大小小一大家子人就對了。
剛結婚的時候，我很感謝太太。因為她的家庭給了我很多關照。而我憑藉自己的努力，靠著經驗和機遇開始了自己事業的輝煌。整天泡在外面，只是為了家人生活的幸福快樂。後來我們有錢了，生意也並不需要自己打理了，問題就來了。
我太太認為我有太多錢可以去包二奶，於是她要求除了名份以外，還要主宰屬於她應有的那部分資產。我並沒有太多想法，自己有能力的時候，當然會提供給你家人和孩子的。
我太太除了錢之外，不再要求其他的東西。哪怕是幾個月不回去香港，只要她戶口裏有足夠的錢，生意裏分到她名下相應的利益，就OK了。
我辛辛苦苦這幾十年，希望得到的家庭是溫馨和睦暖意融融的。我太太對於我早年間創業的支持，使我實在感激不盡。但她最近這些年，包括現在和以後對於財富的佔有欲望，使使我覺得她不再像我太太而是個陌生人一般，雖然我也承認那是她該得的。
我現在無法說明婚姻是什麼，能夠帶給男人什麼。只知道如果做事業的時候你的太太很支持你，是你的幸運；但財富足夠多的時候，沒有了關心和關愛，不能算是幸福的。
"所有的女人無所謂正派，正派是因為她受的誘惑不夠多！男人也一樣。男人無所謂忠誠，忠誠是因為他背叛的籌碼不夠重！"
姓名：張寧
年齡：33周歲
婚史：8個月
職業：某安防科技集團公司董事長兼法人代表
［傳奇般地從四川大山裏娶回來一個漂亮的黃花閨女，在五星級的酒店的喜宴上，他對外宣稱：我也有後方根據地啦！這樣一個安全的後方，讓他無論在風光或者風流回來後，都可以有個安穩的家。張甯的婚姻似乎成為傳奇，在知情不知情的人群中肆意廣播著。走進他的家，除了幾近裝修設計立面圖一般的奢華且井然有序之外，在這近六十平米的陽光客廳中，並沒有發現任何使人意外的感覺。我們的對於他婚姻狀況的瞭解，從廚房裏那個忙碌的靚麗身影開始。］
問：有沒有人問過你，怎捨得把如此美麗的女人藏在家裏做廚娘？你不覺得是"種源"的浪費嗎？
張：不好意思，我勢必要糾正你一下了，我是把她養在家裏做老婆的，並不是專業廚娘。當然，燒飯是我老婆的一項重要生活內容之一。
問：你娶她之前怎麼想的？娶她付出了什麼代價？
張：娶她前就是為了身體上的和心理上的放鬆。如果說代價，我給她家裏的財禮還比不上我們婚宴酒席花費的一半呢。
問：那時候你不覺得婚姻會束縛你的自由嗎？
張：不，我覺得是新生活的開始，我預想裏的自由生活。誰說婚姻都是對男人的約束和埋葬？
問：你怎麼看你老婆？
張：我老婆現在也是我資產的一部分了。而且，遠比量化的資產意義更重大。主要有三個方面——首先，是經濟上的放鬆。我根本不用去考慮花費的多少，在我家豐衣足食的生活，她比在天堂還滿足；其次，視覺上的全部滿足我都有了。她很漂亮，連女人都忍不住去欣賞，關鍵是她的美來自天然，不加任何修飾。第三，也就是最俗、最關鍵的部分了。我是男人，滿足生理需求很重要啊。我老婆身材好，而且，不瞞你說，她是個絕對純潔的處女，我估計小時候他爸都未必抱過她，乾淨！有了這麼個尤物，做起來心裏除了純粹的爽沒別的了。而且，我還可以把學到的、聽說過的技巧在她身上加以實驗，而她毫無疑問地跟從。
問：你覺得你的這種滿足感會不會最終消失？
張：有足夠能力的男人對生理需求總是不停滯的。娶這老婆的最大好處就是你隨意她不會隨便。乏了累了或者來性趣了，我在家怎麼發洩，或者到外面如何，她根本不會去糾纏。這樣的女人，除了省心，怎麼會乏味呢？
問：你可以用幾點來概括有個單純老婆的幸福生活。
張：1、最純粹的全職業太太，燒菜做飯洗衣服收拾屋子生孩子，都沒怨言，還幹得挺踏實。2、你可以站在牆外等紅杏或者小妖精，感情談累了或者身體玩累了回家睡覺沒人跟你吵跟你鬧。3、你不用擔心自己財產流失，她根本不懂也不會跟你過問。給她買菜錢就行。4、她可以滿足你不同的心理角色需求，當老婆去看管，當情人般寵愛，哪怕是純粹的性伴侶為睡上一覺。5、你完全控制自己對於傳宗接代的選擇。該不該生孩子，什麼時候生，想生幾個，關鍵在於這麼漂亮的美人生出來的孩子肯定也漂亮啊。6、少是夫妻老是伴，現在帶著出去風光、漂亮，還不用擔心跟別人跑了；等老了、身體不行了，那個伴也就有了。
問：你的婚姻可以說是出於傳統意義的搭幫過日子嗎？
張：僅從性的角度講也是這樣。
google brainy test/exam
google brainy test/exam 就是流傳甚廣的傳說中的google 的21道 GLAT 考試了。
2004/10月底，Google在美國《麻省技術評論》、《LinuxJournal》、《Mensa》、《今日物理》等幾本專業雜誌上，刊登了一份"Google實驗室能力傾向測試"。
試卷開頭，蠱惑地寫著"試試看！把答案寄回Google，你有希望去Google總部參觀，並成為我們其中一員"。
1. Solve this cryptic equation, realizing of course that values for M and E could be
interchanged. No leading zeros are allowed.
WWWDOT - GOOGLE = DOTCOM
2. Write a haiku describing possible methods for predicting search traffic seasonality.
3.
1
1 1
2 1
1 2 1 1
1 1 1 2 2 1
What is the next line?
4. You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. There is a dusty laptop here with a weak wireless connection. There are dull, lifeless gnomes strolling about. What dost thou do?
A) Wander aimlessly, bumping into obstacles until you are eaten by a grue.
B) Use the laptop as a digging device to tunnel to the next level.
C) Play MPoRPG until the battery dies along with your hopes.
D) Use the computer to map the nodes of the maze and discover an exit path.
E) Email your resume to Google, tell the lead gnome you quit and find yourself in whole different world.
5. What’s broken with Unix? How would you fix it?
6. On your first day at Google, you discover that your cubicle mate wrote the extbook you used as a primary resource in your first year of graduate school. Do you:
A) Fawn obsequiously and ask if you can have an autograph.
B) Sit perfectly still and use only soft keystrokes to avoid disturbing her concentration.
C) Leave her daily offerings of granola and English toffee from the food bins.
D) Quote your favorite formula from the textbook and explain how it’s now your mantra.
E) Show her how example 17b could have been solved with 34 fewer lines of code.
7. Which of the following expresses Google over-arching philosophy?
A) "I’m feeling lucky"
B) "Don’t be evil"
C) "Oh, I already fixed that"
D) "You should never be more than 50 feet from food"
E) All of the above
8. How many different ways can you color an icosahedron with one of three colors on
each face?
What colors would you choose?
9. This space left intentionally blank. Please fill it with something that improves upon emptiness.
10.On an infinite, two-dimensional, rectangular lattice of 1-ohm resistors, what is the
resistance between two nodes that are a knight’s move away?
11.It’s 2 PM on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the Bay Area. You’re minutes from the Pacific Ocean, redwood forest hiking trails and world class cultural attractions. What do you do?
12.In your opinion, what is the most beautiful math equation ever derived?
13. Which of the following is NOT an actual interest group formed by Google employees?
A. Women’s basketball
B. Buffy fans
C. Cricketeers
D. Nobel winners
E. Wine club
14.What will be the next great improvement in search technology?
15.What is the optimal size of a project team, above which additional members do not
contribute productivity equivalent to the percentage increase in the staff size?
A) 1
B) 3
C) 5
D) 11
E) 24
16.Given a triangle ABC, how would you use only a compass and straight edge to find a point P such that triangles ABP, ACP and BCP have equal perimeters? (Assume that ABC is constructed so that a solution does exist.)
17.Consider a function which, for a given whole number n, returns the number of ones required when writing out all numbers between 0 and n. For example, f(13)=6. Notice that f(1)=1. What is the next largest n such that f(n)=n?
18.What’s the coolest hack you’ve ever written?
19.’Tis known in refined company, that choosing K things out of N can be done in ways as many as choosing N minus K from N: I pick K, you the remaining.
Find though a cooler bijection, where you show a knack uncanny, of making your choices contain all K of mine. Oh, for pedantry: let K be no more than half N.
20.What number comes next in the sequence:
10, 9, 60, 90, 70, 66,?
A)96
B) 1000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000000
C) Either of the above
D) None of the above
21.In 29 words or fewer, describe what you would strive to accomplish if you worked
at Google Labs.
2004/10月底，Google在美國《麻省技術評論》、《LinuxJournal》、《Mensa》、《今日物理》等幾本專業雜誌上，刊登了一份"Google實驗室能力傾向測試"。
試卷開頭，蠱惑地寫著"試試看！把答案寄回Google，你有希望去Google總部參觀，並成為我們其中一員"。
1. Solve this cryptic equation, realizing of course that values for M and E could be
interchanged. No leading zeros are allowed.
WWWDOT - GOOGLE = DOTCOM
2. Write a haiku describing possible methods for predicting search traffic seasonality.
3.
1
1 1
2 1
1 2 1 1
1 1 1 2 2 1
What is the next line?
4. You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. There is a dusty laptop here with a weak wireless connection. There are dull, lifeless gnomes strolling about. What dost thou do?
A) Wander aimlessly, bumping into obstacles until you are eaten by a grue.
B) Use the laptop as a digging device to tunnel to the next level.
C) Play MPoRPG until the battery dies along with your hopes.
D) Use the computer to map the nodes of the maze and discover an exit path.
E) Email your resume to Google, tell the lead gnome you quit and find yourself in whole different world.
5. What’s broken with Unix? How would you fix it?
6. On your first day at Google, you discover that your cubicle mate wrote the extbook you used as a primary resource in your first year of graduate school. Do you:
A) Fawn obsequiously and ask if you can have an autograph.
B) Sit perfectly still and use only soft keystrokes to avoid disturbing her concentration.
C) Leave her daily offerings of granola and English toffee from the food bins.
D) Quote your favorite formula from the textbook and explain how it’s now your mantra.
E) Show her how example 17b could have been solved with 34 fewer lines of code.
7. Which of the following expresses Google over-arching philosophy?
A) "I’m feeling lucky"
B) "Don’t be evil"
C) "Oh, I already fixed that"
D) "You should never be more than 50 feet from food"
E) All of the above
8. How many different ways can you color an icosahedron with one of three colors on
each face?
What colors would you choose?
9. This space left intentionally blank. Please fill it with something that improves upon emptiness.
10.On an infinite, two-dimensional, rectangular lattice of 1-ohm resistors, what is the
resistance between two nodes that are a knight’s move away?
11.It’s 2 PM on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the Bay Area. You’re minutes from the Pacific Ocean, redwood forest hiking trails and world class cultural attractions. What do you do?
12.In your opinion, what is the most beautiful math equation ever derived?
13. Which of the following is NOT an actual interest group formed by Google employees?
A. Women’s basketball
B. Buffy fans
C. Cricketeers
D. Nobel winners
E. Wine club
14.What will be the next great improvement in search technology?
15.What is the optimal size of a project team, above which additional members do not
contribute productivity equivalent to the percentage increase in the staff size?
A) 1
B) 3
C) 5
D) 11
E) 24
16.Given a triangle ABC, how would you use only a compass and straight edge to find a point P such that triangles ABP, ACP and BCP have equal perimeters? (Assume that ABC is constructed so that a solution does exist.)
17.Consider a function which, for a given whole number n, returns the number of ones required when writing out all numbers between 0 and n. For example, f(13)=6. Notice that f(1)=1. What is the next largest n such that f(n)=n?
18.What’s the coolest hack you’ve ever written?
19.’Tis known in refined company, that choosing K things out of N can be done in ways as many as choosing N minus K from N: I pick K, you the remaining.
Find though a cooler bijection, where you show a knack uncanny, of making your choices contain all K of mine. Oh, for pedantry: let K be no more than half N.
20.What number comes next in the sequence:
10, 9, 60, 90, 70, 66,?
A)96
B) 1000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000000
C) Either of the above
D) None of the above
21.In 29 words or fewer, describe what you would strive to accomplish if you worked
at Google Labs.
單身的地下規則 (女生看)
1.婚姻就像黑社會：沒加入者不知其黑暗，一旦加入又不敢吐露實情，逃出來的保命尚且不暇哪敢多話？所以其內幕永不為外人所知……
2.工作計畫與男友約會衝突，取前者——前者不會辜負你（且越老越不會，除非你當三陪）。
3.隨緣，但不是說不努力。
4.酒吧裏認識的男子就不必留電話了。
5.自己開車。車子比男人好的地方是：它不會自己跑掉——當然它可能被偷，但你可以買保險，男人則不能買保險。
6.失節事小，失業事大。
7.沒有任何事、任何人會重要到需要你過了半夜12點還苦想不睡。
8.即使你“真的”沒有男友，備一隻安全套也不多餘。
9.已婚前男友打電話問最近好不好——說好。
10.過去，童話故事是以“在很久很久以前”開頭的；現在，童話故事是以“如果我還沒有結婚”開頭的。你已經過了聽童話的年齡了。
11.愛你的工作，但不要愛上你上司。
12.不要動念做單親媽媽——孩子不需要父親，但你需要：一個照顧孩子的人，非常需要有人照顧。
13.其實，人生即使有伴也是寂寞的……不如及早培養興趣，中年之後，種花養魚。
14.談戀愛就像打麻將：不認真沒樂趣，太認真易傷心——培養點遊戲精神。
15.中年發跡而離婚的男人求婚，說不。
16.曾經背叛過你的男人想回頭，說不。
17.你曾經背叛的男人請你回頭，說不。
18.已經到了這個時候，就更不要將就了。
19.男人的主要功能是產生精子……但我們現在有了精子銀行。
20.獨居的好處之一是：你不必在一個很久以前愛過的人的臂彎醒來。
21.死都不肯讓男朋友來公司接送。
22.別用他的生日做密碼——常常換，很煩的。
23.床上用品一定要品質好的，男人也是一種床上用品。
24.遇到好男人不妨追。
25.若無殺伐決斷之天才，不要給人作情婦。
26.祈禱，不如思考——上帝一定不是女人，否則不會創造這麼多不完美的男人。
27.老而彌純是可恥的。
28.感情之事，知其不可而不為。
30.再怎麼愛他，也不必為他去隆胸。
2.工作計畫與男友約會衝突，取前者——前者不會辜負你（且越老越不會，除非你當三陪）。
3.隨緣，但不是說不努力。
4.酒吧裏認識的男子就不必留電話了。
5.自己開車。車子比男人好的地方是：它不會自己跑掉——當然它可能被偷，但你可以買保險，男人則不能買保險。
6.失節事小，失業事大。
7.沒有任何事、任何人會重要到需要你過了半夜12點還苦想不睡。
8.即使你“真的”沒有男友，備一隻安全套也不多餘。
9.已婚前男友打電話問最近好不好——說好。
10.過去，童話故事是以“在很久很久以前”開頭的；現在，童話故事是以“如果我還沒有結婚”開頭的。你已經過了聽童話的年齡了。
11.愛你的工作，但不要愛上你上司。
12.不要動念做單親媽媽——孩子不需要父親，但你需要：一個照顧孩子的人，非常需要有人照顧。
13.其實，人生即使有伴也是寂寞的……不如及早培養興趣，中年之後，種花養魚。
14.談戀愛就像打麻將：不認真沒樂趣，太認真易傷心——培養點遊戲精神。
15.中年發跡而離婚的男人求婚，說不。
16.曾經背叛過你的男人想回頭，說不。
17.你曾經背叛的男人請你回頭，說不。
18.已經到了這個時候，就更不要將就了。
19.男人的主要功能是產生精子……但我們現在有了精子銀行。
20.獨居的好處之一是：你不必在一個很久以前愛過的人的臂彎醒來。
21.死都不肯讓男朋友來公司接送。
22.別用他的生日做密碼——常常換，很煩的。
23.床上用品一定要品質好的，男人也是一種床上用品。
24.遇到好男人不妨追。
25.若無殺伐決斷之天才，不要給人作情婦。
26.祈禱，不如思考——上帝一定不是女人，否則不會創造這麼多不完美的男人。
27.老而彌純是可恥的。
28.感情之事，知其不可而不為。
30.再怎麼愛他，也不必為他去隆胸。
單身的地下規則 (男生看)
1.孤獨的單身者是可恥的。
2.有女朋友也不代表不是單身，換女朋友也不能說明不忠誠。
3.單身是為了過著結婚式的生活，如今結婚者往往過著單身式的生活。
4.遇到困難時，掏出錢包看看前妻或前女友的照片，“難道還有什麼比她更難對付的嗎？
5.像歧視麻風病人一樣歧視已婚人士，越理直氣壯越好，否則被歧視的是你。
6.特殊情況下，已婚人士也能成為好友——他老婆跳了幾次樓？
7.你可以不帥，但一定要壞。
8.買得起房也不買房，買不起車也要買車。
9.同性密友，異性密友，性夥伴，同學，同事，父母，前BF或GF，以上是一個單身人士關係網依親密程度排列。如果同志，前兩者對調。
10.竭力敗壞自己的名聲。
11.在公司裏炫耀感情實屬不智，向性夥伴吐露公司八卦更是愚蠢。
12.周身沒一件名牌的人不摳，周身名牌的人也不摳。
13.保姆比女朋友的好處在於——她永遠不會對你臥室的髒亂大發雷霆，即使她發現了你襯衫上的唇印。
14.粉色套套，黑色T-Back，皮鞭與蠟燭用過了要收好。尤其是與父母同住。
15.世界上最恐怖的事莫過於被老婆打上門，其次是辦公室戀愛。
16.深夜兩點後的異性電話堅決不聽，或者告訴她：滅火隊員也需預約，自救才能逃生。
17.用冷水沖涼，據說能使臀部更性感，堅持運動，尤其是腰腹運動。
18.堅決不用浴缸，小心摔斷腿無人照料。
19.相信科學，女性遠比男性耐寒——送她一個熱水袋或者讓她去旅館。
20.男人可以無良，可以無德，但不可無風度；女人可以無智慧，可以無見識，但不可無美貌。
21.定期打電話讓父母來換煤氣瓶和縫補破襪子。
22.和女孩看恐怖片，和同事們看搞笑片，和好哥們看言情片。
23.時刻牢記：安全第一。
24.對你單身身份起疑的人通常也比較可疑。
25.不和太小的女人戀愛，缺乏公德，易引火焚身。
26.不和黃色笑話講得比你還好的女人來往。
27.只有一個人在的時候才多愁善感。
28.不記日記，不留回憶。
29.抵抗誘惑的唯一方式是向誘惑投降。
30.相信我，只要不愛女人，一個男人就能和任何女人相處愉快。
波蘭專家給出女性完美身材新標準
愛美之心，人皆有之。塑造完美身材一直是不少人熱衷的話題。不過，自古以來，何謂完美身材，人們卻莫衷一是。據英國《獨立報》11日報導，依照波蘭專家的觀點，人體各部位之間的比例關係，成為判定一個人身材是否理想的新標準。
對比研究顯差異
三圍是人們公認的衡量身材好壞的標準，但波蘭格但斯克大學的萊謝克•波克瑞卡等人所做的一項研究證明，這一傳統審美標準已經過時。
波克瑞卡帶領研究人員，對參加全波蘭選美比賽決賽的24名選手和其他115名普通女性的三圍資料進行對比。他們指出，雖然人們一般通過腰圍、身高和臀圍來評判女性身材是否迷人，但這種“一般法則”卻無法把魅力十足的女性和其他女性明顯區分開。
通過對選美小姐和普通女性的對比研究，波克瑞卡等人發現，人體不同部位與身高的比例關係才是身材完美的女性與其他女性之間的真正差別。
研究表明，身材完美的女性身高與大腿長度的比例比普通女性低約12%，因此她們看上去更加纖細；小腿皮膚褶測試顯示，體形完美女性的小腿脂肪厚度僅為15毫米，而普通女性為18毫米。
女性身材新標準
根據以上對比研究，波克瑞卡等人還提出一套評價女性身材的標準，即身材完美女性的平均身高應為5英尺9英寸(約1.74米)，腰圍與胸圍的比例為76%、與臀圍的比例為70%。
“女性身材是否散發出魅力是選擇伴侶的重要因素之一。此外，什麼樣的身體暗示才是女性魅力的評價標準也是進化心理學的一個基本內容，”波克瑞卡對記者說。
如果以波克瑞卡提出的女性體形新標準為依據，英國名模納奧米•坎貝爾的體形堪稱完美。
擁有魔鬼身材的坎貝爾身高1.75米。她的胸圍是腰圍的1.4倍，即腰圍約是胸圍的71%，這與波克瑞卡提出的“腰圍與胸圍比例為76%”的標準十分接近。坎貝爾的腿長為上身長度的1.4倍，她的大腿長度占身長的29.7%、小腿長度占身長的19.5%。與普通女性相比，坎貝爾的雙腿更顯纖長秀麗。此外，身體品質指數(BMI)也可作為一個參考標準。BMI指一個人的體重(公斤)數除以其身高(米)的平方所得數字。坎貝爾的身體品質指數為20.85。
男性也關注身材
事實上，人們不僅熱衷於評價女性身材，如今男性體形也備受關注。科學家表示，身高、身體品質指數、腰圍與臀圍比例以及腰圍與胸圍的比例都是衡量男性體形的重要標準。
有關專家也提出一套男性身材的理想標準：身高不低於6英尺(約1.82米)，腿長應該與上身長度相當。專家解釋說，腿長與上身長度比例為1使男性看上去更強健，這也是男性的理想身體品質指數比女性高的原因。
英國影星克利斯蒂安•貝爾被認為是擁有完美體形的男性典範。1.88米的身高使他看上去十分健壯。他的腿長幾乎等同於身高，腰圍與胸圍的比例為60%，身體品質指數為26.5。
對比研究顯差異
三圍是人們公認的衡量身材好壞的標準，但波蘭格但斯克大學的萊謝克•波克瑞卡等人所做的一項研究證明，這一傳統審美標準已經過時。
波克瑞卡帶領研究人員，對參加全波蘭選美比賽決賽的24名選手和其他115名普通女性的三圍資料進行對比。他們指出，雖然人們一般通過腰圍、身高和臀圍來評判女性身材是否迷人，但這種“一般法則”卻無法把魅力十足的女性和其他女性明顯區分開。
通過對選美小姐和普通女性的對比研究，波克瑞卡等人發現，人體不同部位與身高的比例關係才是身材完美的女性與其他女性之間的真正差別。
研究表明，身材完美的女性身高與大腿長度的比例比普通女性低約12%，因此她們看上去更加纖細；小腿皮膚褶測試顯示，體形完美女性的小腿脂肪厚度僅為15毫米，而普通女性為18毫米。
女性身材新標準
根據以上對比研究，波克瑞卡等人還提出一套評價女性身材的標準，即身材完美女性的平均身高應為5英尺9英寸(約1.74米)，腰圍與胸圍的比例為76%、與臀圍的比例為70%。
“女性身材是否散發出魅力是選擇伴侶的重要因素之一。此外，什麼樣的身體暗示才是女性魅力的評價標準也是進化心理學的一個基本內容，”波克瑞卡對記者說。
如果以波克瑞卡提出的女性體形新標準為依據，英國名模納奧米•坎貝爾的體形堪稱完美。
擁有魔鬼身材的坎貝爾身高1.75米。她的胸圍是腰圍的1.4倍，即腰圍約是胸圍的71%，這與波克瑞卡提出的“腰圍與胸圍比例為76%”的標準十分接近。坎貝爾的腿長為上身長度的1.4倍，她的大腿長度占身長的29.7%、小腿長度占身長的19.5%。與普通女性相比，坎貝爾的雙腿更顯纖長秀麗。此外，身體品質指數(BMI)也可作為一個參考標準。BMI指一個人的體重(公斤)數除以其身高(米)的平方所得數字。坎貝爾的身體品質指數為20.85。
男性也關注身材
事實上，人們不僅熱衷於評價女性身材，如今男性體形也備受關注。科學家表示，身高、身體品質指數、腰圍與臀圍比例以及腰圍與胸圍的比例都是衡量男性體形的重要標準。
有關專家也提出一套男性身材的理想標準：身高不低於6英尺(約1.82米)，腿長應該與上身長度相當。專家解釋說，腿長與上身長度比例為1使男性看上去更強健，這也是男性的理想身體品質指數比女性高的原因。
英國影星克利斯蒂安•貝爾被認為是擁有完美體形的男性典範。1.88米的身高使他看上去十分健壯。他的腿長幾乎等同於身高，腰圍與胸圍的比例為60%，身體品質指數為26.5。
why we travel
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again -- to slow time down and get taken in, and
fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, "The Philosophy of Travel." We "need sometimes," the Harvard philosopher wrote, "to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what."
I like that stress on work, since never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are
to the difficulty that precedes them; and I like the stress on a holiday that's "moral" since we fall into our ethical habits as easily as into our beds at night. Few of us ever forget the connection between "travel" and "travail,"
and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship -- both my own, which I want to feel, and others', which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion -- of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring; while
feeling without seeing can be blind.
Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home,
and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. In that regard, even a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (in Beijing) or a scratchy revival showing of "Wild Orchids" (on the Champs-Elysees) can be both novelty and revelation: In China, after all, people will pay a whole week's wages to
eat with Colonel Sanders, and in Paris, Mickey Rourke is regarded as the greatest actor since Jerry Lewis.
If a Mongolian restaurant seems exotic to us in Evanston, Ill., it only follows that a McDonald's would
seem equally exotic in Ulan Bator -- or, at least, equally far from everything expected. Though it's
fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the "tourist" and the "traveler," perhaps the real
distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don't: Among
those who don't, a tourist is just someone who complains, "Nothing here is the way it is at home,"
while a traveler is one who grumbles, "Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo --
or Cuzco or Kathmandu." It's all very much the same.
But for the rest of us, the sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around
and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. If a diploma can
famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash
course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is
how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal. When you go to North Korea,
for example, you really do feel as if you've landed on a different planet -- and the North Koreans
doubtless feel that they're being visited by an extra-terrestrial, too (or else they simply assume that you,
as they do, receive orders every morning from the Central Committee on what clothes to wear and
what route to use when walking to work, and you, as they do, have loudspeakers in your bedroom
broadcasting propaganda every morning at dawn, and you, as they do, have your radios fixed so as
to receive only a single channel).
We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies,
the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow's headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is
almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the Internet
and a "one world order" grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity
of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.
And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction ourselves, and come to see how much we can
bring to the places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of carrier pigeon -- an
anti-Federal Express, if you like -- in transporting back and forth what every culture needs. I find that
I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California;
I invariably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap, and
come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long-lost brothers.
But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many parts
of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can
take people out of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or impoverished places, like
Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only contact with
the world outside and, very often, the closest, quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson
or Bill Clinton. Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import --
and export -- dreams with tenderness.
By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel
is that it enables you to bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even as holidays help
you appreciate your own home more -- not least by seeing it through a distant admirer's eyes --
they help you bring newly appreciative -- distant -- eyes to the places you visit. You can teach them
what they have to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to teach. This, I think, is
how tourism, which so obviously destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how it has
created new "traditional" dances in Bali, and caused craftsmen in India to pay new attention to their
works. If the first thing we can bring the Cubans is a real and balanced sense of what contemporary
America is like, the second -- and perhaps more important -- thing we can bring them is a fresh
and renewed sense of how special are the warmth and beauty of their country, for those who can
compare it with other places around the globe.
Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that
we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that
might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods
and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we'd otherwise seldom have cause to visit.
On the most basic level, when I'm in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m.,
I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end
in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and,
in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally
obscured by chatter and routine.
We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity -- and, of course, in finding the one we
apprehend the other. Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are,
as Hazlitt puts it, just the "gentlemen in the parlour," and people cannot put a name or tag to us.
And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the
opportunity to come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to
explain why we may feel most alive when far from home).
Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as
when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves
up for grabs and open to interpretation. We even may become mysterious -- to others, at first,
and sometimes to ourselves -- and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted,
"A man never goes so far as when he doesn't know where he is going."
There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to every kind of freedom, but the great promise
of it is that, traveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more
open kind of self. Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year
-- or at least 45 hours -- and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood,
with what we cannot understand. Language facilitates this cracking open, for when we go to
France, we often migrate to French, and the more childlike self, simple and polite, that speaking
a foreign language educes. Even when I'm not speaking pidgin English in Hanoi, I'm simplified in
a positive way, and concerned not with expressing myself, but simply making sense.
So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the unknown, but the unknowing; I, at least, travel
in search of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent self. I tend to believe more
abroad than I do at home (which, though treacherous again, can at least help me to extend my
vision), and I tend to be more easily excited abroad, and even kinder. And since no one I meet
can "place" me -- no one can fix me in my rsum --I can remake myself for better, as well as,
of course, for worse (if travel is notoriously a cradle for false identities, it can also, at its best,
be a crucible for truer ones). In this way, travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move:
On the road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a luxury hotel), with no more
possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance.
This is what Camus meant when he said that "what gives value to travel is fear" -- disruption,
in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide.
And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like
many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish most the ones that ask
the most searching questions back of me: In Paraguay, for example, where one car in every
two is stolen, and two-thirds of the goods on sale are smuggled, I have to rethink my every
Californian assumption. And in Thailand, where many young women give up their bodies in
order to protect their families -- to become better Buddhists -- I have to question my own
too-ready judgments. "The ideal travel book," Christopher Isherwood once said, "should be
perhaps a little like a crime story in which you're in search of something." And it's the best kind
of something, I would add, if it's one that you can never quite find.
I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, how I would
come back to my apartment in New York, and lie in my bed, kept up by something more than
jet lag, playing back, in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging
wistfully though my photographs and reading and re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some
mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion:
I was in love.
For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite
speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper
into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left
puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in love with. All the great travel books are
love stories, by some reckoning -- from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy
and the New Testament -- and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself
and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as
we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another.
For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much
as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much
on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation
(and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.
We are the comic props in Japanese home-movies, the oddities in Maliese anecdotes and the
fall-guys in Chinese jokes; we are the moving postcards or bizarre objets trouves that villagers
in Peru will later tell their friends about. If travel is about the meeting of realities, it is no less about
the mating of illusions: You give me my dreamed-of vision of Tibet, and I'll give you your
wished-for California. And in truth, many of us, even (or especially) the ones who are fleeing
America abroad, will get taken, willy-nilly, as symbols of the American Dream.
That, in fact, is perhaps the most central and most wrenching of the questions travel proposes
to us: how to respond to the dream that people tender to you? Do you encourage their notions
of a Land of Milk and Honey across the horizon, even if it is the same land you've abandoned?
Or do you try to dampen their enthusiasm for a place that exists only in the mind? To quicken
their dreams may, after all, be to match-make them with an illusion; yet to dash them may be to
strip them of the one possession that sustains them in adversity.
That whole complex interaction -- not unlike the dilemmas we face with those we love
(how do we balance truthfulness and tact?) -- is partly the reason why so many of the great
travel writers, by nature, are enthusiasts: not just Pierre Loti, who famously, infamously, fell in
love wherever he alighted (an archetypal sailor leaving offspring in the form of
Madame Butterfly myths), but also Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence or Graham Greene, all of
whom bore out the hidden truth that we are optimists abroad as readily as pessimists as home.
None of them was by any means blind to the deficiencies of the places around them, but all,
having chosen to go there, chose to find something to admire.
All, in that sense, believed in "being moved" as one of the points of taking trips, and
"being transported" by private as well as public means; all saw that "ecstasy" ("ex-stasis")
tells us that our highest moments come when we're not stationary, and that epiphany can
follow movement as much as it precipitates it. I remember once asking the great travel writer
Norman Lewis if he'd ever be interested in writing on apartheid South Africa. He looked at
me astonished. "To write well about a thing," he said, "I've got to like it!"
At the same time, as all this is intrinsic to travel, from Ovid to O'Rourke, travel itself is
changing as the world does, and with it, the mandate of the travel writer. It's not enough to
go to the ends of the earth these days (not least because the ends of the earth are often coming
to you); and where a writer like Jan Morris could, a few years ago, achieve something
miraculous simply by voyaging to all the great cities of the globe, now anyone with a Visa card
can do that. So where Morris, in effect, was chronicling the last days of the Empire, a younger
travel writer is in a better position to chart the first days of a new Empire, post-national, global,
mobile and yet as diligent as the Raj in transporting its props and its values around the world.
In the mid-19th century, the British famously sent the Bible and Shakespeare and cricket round
the world; now a more international kind of Empire is sending Madonna and the Simpsons and
Brad Pitt. And the way in which each culture takes in this common pool of references tells you
as much about them as their indigenous products might. Madonna in an Islamic country, after all,
sounds radically different from Madonna in a Confucian one, and neither begins to mean the
same as Madonna on East 14th Street. When you go to a McDonald's outlet in Kyoto, you
will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies. The placemats offer maps of the great
temples of the city, and the posters all around broadcast the wonders of San Francisco.
And -- most crucial of all -- the young people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn
backwards, and tight 501 jeans, are still utterly and inalienably Japanese in the way they move,
they nod, they sip their Oolong teas -- and never to be mistaken for the patrons of a McDonald's
outlet in Rio, Morocco or Managua. These days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the
way one culture colors and appropriates the products of another.
The other factor complicating and exciting all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves
as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong. I am, in many ways,
an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England,
moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman. I was,
in short, a traveler at birth, for whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through a foreign
world where no one I saw quite matched my parents' inheritance, or my own. And though some
of this is involuntary and tragic -- the number of refugees in the world, which came to just 2.5 million
in 1970, is now at least 27.4 million -- it does involve, for some of us, the chance to be transnational
in a happier sense, able to adapt anywhere, used to being outsiders everywhere and forced to fashion
our own rigorous sense of home. (And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.)
Besides, even those who don't move around the world find the world moving more and more around
them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or Berkeley, and you're traveling through several cultures in as
many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you're often in a piece of Addis Ababa.
And technology, too, compounds this (sometimes deceptive) sense of availability, so that many people
feel they can travel around the world without leaving the room -- through cyberspace or CD-ROMs,
videos and virtual travel. There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it says about essential
notions of family and community and loyalty, and in the worry that air-conditioned, purely synthetic
versions of places may replace the real thing -- not to mention the fact that the world seems
increasingly in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But there is, for the traveler at
least, the sense that learning about home and learning about a foreign world can be one and the
same thing.
All of us feel this from the cradle, and know, in some sense, that all the significant movement we
ever take is internal. We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new friendship, get held up.
Novels are often journeys as much as travel books are fictions; and though this has been true
since at least as long ago as Sir John Mandeville's colorful 14th century accounts of a Far East
he'd never visited, it's an even more shadowy distinction now, as genre distinctions join other
borders in collapsing.
In Mary Morris's "House Arrest," a thinly disguised account of Castro's Cuba, the novelist reiterates,
on the copyright page, "All dialogue is invented. Isabella, her family, the inhabitants and even la isla
itself are creations of the author's imagination." On Page 172, however, we read, "La isla, of course,
does exist. Don't let anyone fool you about that. It just feels as if it doesn't. But it does." No wonder
the travel-writer narrator -- a fictional construct (or not)? -- confesses to devoting her travel magazine
column to places that never existed. "Erewhon," after all, the undiscovered land in Samuel Butler's
great travel novel, is just "nowhere" rearranged.
Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler
brings back is -- and has to be -- an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what's really
there and what's only in him. Thus Bruce Chatwin's books seem to dance around the distinction
between fact and fancy. V.S. Naipaul's recent book, "A Way in the World," was published as
a non-fictional "series" in England and a "novel" in the United States. And when some of the
stories in Paul Theroux's half-invented memoir, "My Other Life," were published in
The New Yorker, they were slyly categorized as "Fact and Fiction."
And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of perception and imagination, the two
great travel writers, for me, to whom I constantly return are Emerson and Thoreau (the one
who famously advised that "traveling is a fool's paradise," and the other who "traveled a
good deal in Concord"). Both of them insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that
we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find
outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne
sagely put it, "We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. There is Africa and
her prodigies in us."
So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of home inside us, we also --
Emerson and Thoreau remind us -- have to carry with us our sense of destination.
The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us,
and the most important Northwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue
of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private
Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center.
And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted, our travels do not, and some of the
finest travel books in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel journey, matching
the physical steps of a pilgrimage with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in
Peter Matthiessen's great "The Snow Leopard"), or chronicling a trip to the farthest reaches
of human strangeness (as in Oliver Sack's "Island of the Color-Blind," which features a journey
not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific, but to a realm where people actually see light differently).
The most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within the person asleep at our side.
So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana,
the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, "There is wisdom in turning as often
as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it
fosters humor." Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles
of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness.
And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness,
in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed.
That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.
fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, "The Philosophy of Travel." We "need sometimes," the Harvard philosopher wrote, "to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what."
I like that stress on work, since never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are
to the difficulty that precedes them; and I like the stress on a holiday that's "moral" since we fall into our ethical habits as easily as into our beds at night. Few of us ever forget the connection between "travel" and "travail,"
and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship -- both my own, which I want to feel, and others', which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion -- of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring; while
feeling without seeing can be blind.
Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home,
and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. In that regard, even a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (in Beijing) or a scratchy revival showing of "Wild Orchids" (on the Champs-Elysees) can be both novelty and revelation: In China, after all, people will pay a whole week's wages to
eat with Colonel Sanders, and in Paris, Mickey Rourke is regarded as the greatest actor since Jerry Lewis.
If a Mongolian restaurant seems exotic to us in Evanston, Ill., it only follows that a McDonald's would
seem equally exotic in Ulan Bator -- or, at least, equally far from everything expected. Though it's
fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the "tourist" and the "traveler," perhaps the real
distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don't: Among
those who don't, a tourist is just someone who complains, "Nothing here is the way it is at home,"
while a traveler is one who grumbles, "Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo --
or Cuzco or Kathmandu." It's all very much the same.
But for the rest of us, the sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around
and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. If a diploma can
famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash
course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is
how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal. When you go to North Korea,
for example, you really do feel as if you've landed on a different planet -- and the North Koreans
doubtless feel that they're being visited by an extra-terrestrial, too (or else they simply assume that you,
as they do, receive orders every morning from the Central Committee on what clothes to wear and
what route to use when walking to work, and you, as they do, have loudspeakers in your bedroom
broadcasting propaganda every morning at dawn, and you, as they do, have your radios fixed so as
to receive only a single channel).
We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies,
the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow's headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is
almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the Internet
and a "one world order" grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity
of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.
And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction ourselves, and come to see how much we can
bring to the places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of carrier pigeon -- an
anti-Federal Express, if you like -- in transporting back and forth what every culture needs. I find that
I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California;
I invariably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap, and
come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long-lost brothers.
But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many parts
of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can
take people out of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or impoverished places, like
Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only contact with
the world outside and, very often, the closest, quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson
or Bill Clinton. Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import --
and export -- dreams with tenderness.
By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel
is that it enables you to bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even as holidays help
you appreciate your own home more -- not least by seeing it through a distant admirer's eyes --
they help you bring newly appreciative -- distant -- eyes to the places you visit. You can teach them
what they have to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to teach. This, I think, is
how tourism, which so obviously destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how it has
created new "traditional" dances in Bali, and caused craftsmen in India to pay new attention to their
works. If the first thing we can bring the Cubans is a real and balanced sense of what contemporary
America is like, the second -- and perhaps more important -- thing we can bring them is a fresh
and renewed sense of how special are the warmth and beauty of their country, for those who can
compare it with other places around the globe.
Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that
we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that
might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods
and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we'd otherwise seldom have cause to visit.
On the most basic level, when I'm in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m.,
I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end
in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and,
in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally
obscured by chatter and routine.
We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity -- and, of course, in finding the one we
apprehend the other. Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are,
as Hazlitt puts it, just the "gentlemen in the parlour," and people cannot put a name or tag to us.
And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the
opportunity to come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to
explain why we may feel most alive when far from home).
Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as
when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves
up for grabs and open to interpretation. We even may become mysterious -- to others, at first,
and sometimes to ourselves -- and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted,
"A man never goes so far as when he doesn't know where he is going."
There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to every kind of freedom, but the great promise
of it is that, traveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more
open kind of self. Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year
-- or at least 45 hours -- and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood,
with what we cannot understand. Language facilitates this cracking open, for when we go to
France, we often migrate to French, and the more childlike self, simple and polite, that speaking
a foreign language educes. Even when I'm not speaking pidgin English in Hanoi, I'm simplified in
a positive way, and concerned not with expressing myself, but simply making sense.
So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the unknown, but the unknowing; I, at least, travel
in search of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent self. I tend to believe more
abroad than I do at home (which, though treacherous again, can at least help me to extend my
vision), and I tend to be more easily excited abroad, and even kinder. And since no one I meet
can "place" me -- no one can fix me in my rsum --I can remake myself for better, as well as,
of course, for worse (if travel is notoriously a cradle for false identities, it can also, at its best,
be a crucible for truer ones). In this way, travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move:
On the road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a luxury hotel), with no more
possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance.
This is what Camus meant when he said that "what gives value to travel is fear" -- disruption,
in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide.
And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like
many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish most the ones that ask
the most searching questions back of me: In Paraguay, for example, where one car in every
two is stolen, and two-thirds of the goods on sale are smuggled, I have to rethink my every
Californian assumption. And in Thailand, where many young women give up their bodies in
order to protect their families -- to become better Buddhists -- I have to question my own
too-ready judgments. "The ideal travel book," Christopher Isherwood once said, "should be
perhaps a little like a crime story in which you're in search of something." And it's the best kind
of something, I would add, if it's one that you can never quite find.
I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, how I would
come back to my apartment in New York, and lie in my bed, kept up by something more than
jet lag, playing back, in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging
wistfully though my photographs and reading and re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some
mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion:
I was in love.
For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite
speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper
into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left
puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in love with. All the great travel books are
love stories, by some reckoning -- from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy
and the New Testament -- and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself
and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as
we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another.
For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much
as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much
on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation
(and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.
We are the comic props in Japanese home-movies, the oddities in Maliese anecdotes and the
fall-guys in Chinese jokes; we are the moving postcards or bizarre objets trouves that villagers
in Peru will later tell their friends about. If travel is about the meeting of realities, it is no less about
the mating of illusions: You give me my dreamed-of vision of Tibet, and I'll give you your
wished-for California. And in truth, many of us, even (or especially) the ones who are fleeing
America abroad, will get taken, willy-nilly, as symbols of the American Dream.
That, in fact, is perhaps the most central and most wrenching of the questions travel proposes
to us: how to respond to the dream that people tender to you? Do you encourage their notions
of a Land of Milk and Honey across the horizon, even if it is the same land you've abandoned?
Or do you try to dampen their enthusiasm for a place that exists only in the mind? To quicken
their dreams may, after all, be to match-make them with an illusion; yet to dash them may be to
strip them of the one possession that sustains them in adversity.
That whole complex interaction -- not unlike the dilemmas we face with those we love
(how do we balance truthfulness and tact?) -- is partly the reason why so many of the great
travel writers, by nature, are enthusiasts: not just Pierre Loti, who famously, infamously, fell in
love wherever he alighted (an archetypal sailor leaving offspring in the form of
Madame Butterfly myths), but also Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence or Graham Greene, all of
whom bore out the hidden truth that we are optimists abroad as readily as pessimists as home.
None of them was by any means blind to the deficiencies of the places around them, but all,
having chosen to go there, chose to find something to admire.
All, in that sense, believed in "being moved" as one of the points of taking trips, and
"being transported" by private as well as public means; all saw that "ecstasy" ("ex-stasis")
tells us that our highest moments come when we're not stationary, and that epiphany can
follow movement as much as it precipitates it. I remember once asking the great travel writer
Norman Lewis if he'd ever be interested in writing on apartheid South Africa. He looked at
me astonished. "To write well about a thing," he said, "I've got to like it!"
At the same time, as all this is intrinsic to travel, from Ovid to O'Rourke, travel itself is
changing as the world does, and with it, the mandate of the travel writer. It's not enough to
go to the ends of the earth these days (not least because the ends of the earth are often coming
to you); and where a writer like Jan Morris could, a few years ago, achieve something
miraculous simply by voyaging to all the great cities of the globe, now anyone with a Visa card
can do that. So where Morris, in effect, was chronicling the last days of the Empire, a younger
travel writer is in a better position to chart the first days of a new Empire, post-national, global,
mobile and yet as diligent as the Raj in transporting its props and its values around the world.
In the mid-19th century, the British famously sent the Bible and Shakespeare and cricket round
the world; now a more international kind of Empire is sending Madonna and the Simpsons and
Brad Pitt. And the way in which each culture takes in this common pool of references tells you
as much about them as their indigenous products might. Madonna in an Islamic country, after all,
sounds radically different from Madonna in a Confucian one, and neither begins to mean the
same as Madonna on East 14th Street. When you go to a McDonald's outlet in Kyoto, you
will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies. The placemats offer maps of the great
temples of the city, and the posters all around broadcast the wonders of San Francisco.
And -- most crucial of all -- the young people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn
backwards, and tight 501 jeans, are still utterly and inalienably Japanese in the way they move,
they nod, they sip their Oolong teas -- and never to be mistaken for the patrons of a McDonald's
outlet in Rio, Morocco or Managua. These days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the
way one culture colors and appropriates the products of another.
The other factor complicating and exciting all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves
as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong. I am, in many ways,
an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England,
moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman. I was,
in short, a traveler at birth, for whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through a foreign
world where no one I saw quite matched my parents' inheritance, or my own. And though some
of this is involuntary and tragic -- the number of refugees in the world, which came to just 2.5 million
in 1970, is now at least 27.4 million -- it does involve, for some of us, the chance to be transnational
in a happier sense, able to adapt anywhere, used to being outsiders everywhere and forced to fashion
our own rigorous sense of home. (And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.)
Besides, even those who don't move around the world find the world moving more and more around
them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or Berkeley, and you're traveling through several cultures in as
many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you're often in a piece of Addis Ababa.
And technology, too, compounds this (sometimes deceptive) sense of availability, so that many people
feel they can travel around the world without leaving the room -- through cyberspace or CD-ROMs,
videos and virtual travel. There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it says about essential
notions of family and community and loyalty, and in the worry that air-conditioned, purely synthetic
versions of places may replace the real thing -- not to mention the fact that the world seems
increasingly in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But there is, for the traveler at
least, the sense that learning about home and learning about a foreign world can be one and the
same thing.
All of us feel this from the cradle, and know, in some sense, that all the significant movement we
ever take is internal. We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new friendship, get held up.
Novels are often journeys as much as travel books are fictions; and though this has been true
since at least as long ago as Sir John Mandeville's colorful 14th century accounts of a Far East
he'd never visited, it's an even more shadowy distinction now, as genre distinctions join other
borders in collapsing.
In Mary Morris's "House Arrest," a thinly disguised account of Castro's Cuba, the novelist reiterates,
on the copyright page, "All dialogue is invented. Isabella, her family, the inhabitants and even la isla
itself are creations of the author's imagination." On Page 172, however, we read, "La isla, of course,
does exist. Don't let anyone fool you about that. It just feels as if it doesn't. But it does." No wonder
the travel-writer narrator -- a fictional construct (or not)? -- confesses to devoting her travel magazine
column to places that never existed. "Erewhon," after all, the undiscovered land in Samuel Butler's
great travel novel, is just "nowhere" rearranged.
Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler
brings back is -- and has to be -- an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what's really
there and what's only in him. Thus Bruce Chatwin's books seem to dance around the distinction
between fact and fancy. V.S. Naipaul's recent book, "A Way in the World," was published as
a non-fictional "series" in England and a "novel" in the United States. And when some of the
stories in Paul Theroux's half-invented memoir, "My Other Life," were published in
The New Yorker, they were slyly categorized as "Fact and Fiction."
And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of perception and imagination, the two
great travel writers, for me, to whom I constantly return are Emerson and Thoreau (the one
who famously advised that "traveling is a fool's paradise," and the other who "traveled a
good deal in Concord"). Both of them insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that
we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find
outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne
sagely put it, "We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. There is Africa and
her prodigies in us."
So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of home inside us, we also --
Emerson and Thoreau remind us -- have to carry with us our sense of destination.
The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us,
and the most important Northwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue
of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private
Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center.
And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted, our travels do not, and some of the
finest travel books in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel journey, matching
the physical steps of a pilgrimage with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in
Peter Matthiessen's great "The Snow Leopard"), or chronicling a trip to the farthest reaches
of human strangeness (as in Oliver Sack's "Island of the Color-Blind," which features a journey
not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific, but to a realm where people actually see light differently).
The most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within the person asleep at our side.
So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana,
the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, "There is wisdom in turning as often
as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it
fosters humor." Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles
of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness.
And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness,
in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed.
That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.
You've got to find what you love
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
Do what you love
To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.
The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn't-- for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun.
And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work.
The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didn't, but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of work meant to prepare us for the real thing. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy.
Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most of them. Why did we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing dodgeball? For the same reason they had to watch over a bunch of kids instead of lying on a beach. You couldn't just do what you wanted.
I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. They may have to be made to work on certain things. But if we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later. [1]
Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that precisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told to use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn't think he meant work could literally be fun-- fun like playing. It took me years to grasp that.
Jobs
By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about their work, or we would go to see them at work. It was always understood that they enjoyed what they did. In retrospect I think one may have: the private jet pilot. But I don't think the bank manager really did.
The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to. It would not merely be bad for your career to say that you despised your job, but a social faux-pas.
Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The first sentence of this essay explains that. If you have to like something to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what they do. That's where the upper-middle class tradition comes from. Just as houses all over America are full of chairs that are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed 250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who've done great things.
What a recipe for alienation. By the time they reach an age to think about what they'd like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one's work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."
Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do.
The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring. [2] Maybe it would be better for kids in this one case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house.
[3]
It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. Ideally these coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in the patent office) proved they weren't identical.
The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve. But after the habit of so many years my idea of work still included a large component of pain. Work still seemed to require discipline, because only hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn't literally be fun. Surely one had to force oneself to work on them.
If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.
Bounds
How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you'll tend to stop searching too early. You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige-- or sheer inertia.
Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first.
It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.
But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.
Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.
As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else-- even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it.
I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you'll have terrible problems with procrastination. You'll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.
To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.
So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is reading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive.
I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do things that would make your friends say wow. But it probably wouldn't start to work properly till about age 22, because most people haven't had a big enough sample to pick friends from before then.
Sirens
What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know? [4]
This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially when you're young. [5] Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.
That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.
Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind-- though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.
Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what's admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.
The other big force leading people astray is money. Money by itself is not that dangerous. When something pays well but is regarded with contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personal injury litigation, ambitious people aren't tempted by it. That kind of work ends up being done by people who are "just trying to make a living." (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say this.) The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine. A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn't thought much about what they really like.
The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it-- even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?
This test is especially helpful in deciding between different kinds of academic work, because fields vary greatly in this respect. Most good mathematicians would work on math even if there were no jobs as math professors, whereas in the departments at the other end of the spectrum, the availability of teaching jobs is the driver: people would rather be English professors than work in ad agencies, and publishing papers is the way you compete for such jobs. Math would happen without math departments, but it is the existence of English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity in the novels of Conrad. No one does that kind of thing for fun.
The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money. It seems safe to say there are more undergrads who want to be novelists and whose parents want them to be doctors than who want to be doctors and whose parents want them to be novelists. The kids think their parents are "materialistic." Not necessarily. All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won't get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you'll have to deal with the consequences.
Discipline
With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.
It's hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don't underestimate this task. And don't feel bad if you haven't succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented, you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If you're surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you find contemptible, odds are they're lying to themselves. Not necessarily, but probably.
Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think-- because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it-- finding work you love does usually require discipline. Some people are lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just glide along as if they were on railroad tracks. But this seems the exception. More often people who do great things have careers with the trajectory of a ping-pong ball. They go to school to study A, drop out and get a job doing B, and then become famous for C after taking it up on the side.
Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness. Are you dropping out, or boldly carving a new path? You often can't tell yourself. Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find their niche.
Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it. Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well.
Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you're actually writing.
"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.
Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you get to work on it. That's a separate question. And if you're ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible. [6]
It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their expectations. For example, if you asked random people on the street if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like "Oh, I can't draw.
" This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."
Another related line you often hear is that not everyone can do work they love-- that someone has to do the unpleasant jobs. Really? How do you make them? In the US the only mechanism for forcing people to do unpleasant jobs is the draft, and that hasn't been invoked for over 30 years. All we can do is encourage people to do unpleasant work, with money and prestige.
If there's something people still won't do, it seems as if society just has to make do without. That's what happened with domestic servants. For millennia that was the canonical example of a job "someone had to do." And yet in the mid twentieth century servants practically disappeared in rich countries, and the rich have just had to do without.
So while there may be some things someone has to do, there's a good chance anyone saying that about any particular job is mistaken. Most unpleasant jobs would either get automated or go undone if no one were willing to do them.
Two Routes
There's another sense of "not everyone can do work they love" that's all too true, however. One has to make a living, and it's hard to get paid for doing work you love. There are two routes to that destination:
the organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don't.
the organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don't.
the two-job route: to work at things you don't like to get money to work on things you do.
The organic route is more common. It happens naturally to anyone who does good work. A young architect has to take whatever work he can get, but if he does well he'll gradually be in a position to pick and choose among projects. The disadvantage of this route is that it's slow and uncertain. Even tenure is not real freedom.
The two-job route has several variants depending on how long you work for money at a time. At one extreme is the "day job," where you work regular hours at one job to make money, and work on what you love in your spare time. At the other extreme you work at something till you make enough not to have to work for money again.
The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because it requires a deliberate choice. It's also more dangerous. Life tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job. Worse still, anything you work on changes you. If you work too long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain. And the best paying jobs are most dangerous, because they require your full attention.
The advantage of the two-job route is that it lets you jump over obstacles. The landscape of possible jobs isn't flat; there are walls of varying heights between different kinds of work. [7] The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you from architecture to product design, but not, probably, to music. If you make money doing one thing and then work on another, you have more freedom of choice.
Which route should you take? That depends on how sure you are of what you want to do, how good you are at taking orders, how much risk you can stand, and the odds that anyone will pay (in your lifetime) for what you want to do. If you're sure of the general area you want to work in and it's something people are likely to pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route. But if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand the risk.
Don't decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it's wrong.
A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell "Don't do it!" (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way-- including, unfortunately, not liking it.
Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.
When you're young, you're given the impression that you'll get enough information to make each choice before you need to make it. But this is certainly not so with work. When you're deciding what to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information. Even in college you get little idea what various types of work are like. At best you may have a couple internships, but not all jobs offer internships, and those that do don't teach you much more about the work than being a batboy teaches you about playing baseball.
In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you get better results if you use flexible media. So unless you're fairly sure what you want to do, your best bet may be to choose a type of work that could turn into either an organic or two-job career. That was probably part of the reason I chose computers. You can be a professor, or make a lot of money, or morph it into any number of other kinds of work.
It's also wise, early on, to seek jobs that let you do many different things, so you can learn faster what various kinds of work are like. Conversely, the extreme version of the two-job route is dangerous because it teaches you so little about what you like. If you work hard at being a bond trader for ten years, thinking that you'll quit and write novels when you have enough money, what happens when you quit and then discover that you don't actually like writing novels?
Most people would say, I'd take that problem. Give me a million dollars and I'll figure out what to do. But it's harder than it looks. Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.
Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're practically there.
posted from : http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
Notes
[1] Currently we do the opposite: when we make kids do boring work, like arithmetic drills, instead of admitting frankly that it's boring, we try to disguise it with superficial decorations.
[2] One father told me about a related phenomenon: he found himself concealing from his family how much he liked his work. When he wanted to go to work on a saturday, he found it easier to say that it was because he "had to" for some reason, rather than admitting he preferred to work than stay home with them.
[3] Something similar happens with suburbs. Parents move to suburbs to raise their kids in a safe environment, but suburbs are so dull and artificial that by the time they're fifteen the kids are convinced the whole world is boring.
[4] I'm not saying friends should be the only audience for your work. The more people you can help, the better. But friends should be your compass.
[5] Donald Hall said young would-be poets were mistaken to be so obsessed with being published. But you can imagine what it would do for a 24 year old to get a poem published in The New Yorker. Now to people he meets at parties he's a real poet. Actually he's no better or worse than he was before, but to a clueless audience like that, the approval of an official authority makes all the difference. So it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. The reason the young care so much about prestige is that the people they want to impress are not very discerning.
[6] This is isomorphic to the principle that you should prevent your beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by how you wish they were. Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously. The continuing popularity of religion is the most visible index of that.
[7] A more accurate metaphor would be to say that the graph of jobs is not very well connected.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Dan Friedman, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, David Sloo, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this.
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