Failure is probably the most exhausting experience a person ever has. There is nothing more tiring than not succeeding.

We experience this tiredness in two ways: as start-up fatigue(疲惫) and performance fatigue. In the former case, we keep putting off a task because it has either too boring or too difficult. And the longer we delay it, the more tired we feel.

     Such start-up fatigue is very real, even if not actually physical, not something in our muscles and bones. The solution is obvious though perhaps not easy to apply: always handle the most difficult job first.

Years ago, I was asked to write 102 essays on the great ideas of some famous authors. Applying my own rule, I determined to write them in alphabetical(按字母顺序), never letting myself leave out a tough idea. And I always started the day's work with the difficult task of essay-writing. Experience proved that the rule works.

Performance fatigue is more difficult to handle. Though willing to get started, we cannot seem to do the job right. Its difficulties appear so great that, however hard we work, we fail again and again. In such a situation, I work as hard as I can-then let the unconscious take over.

      When planning Encyclopaedia Britannica (《大英百科全书》), I had to create a table of contents based on the topics of its articles. Nothing like this had ever been done before, and day after day I kept coming up with solutions, but none of them worked. My fatigue became almost unbearable.

      One day, mentally exhausted, I wrote down all the reasons why this problem could not be solved. I tried to convince myself that the trouble was with the problem itself, not with me. Relived, I sat back in an easy chair and fell asleep.

An hour later, I woke up suddenly with the solution clearly in mind. In the weeks that followed, the solution which had come up in my unconscious mind provided correct at every step. Though I worked as hard as before, I felt no fatigue. Success was now as exciting as failure had been depressing.

      Human beings, I believe must try to succeed. Success, then, means never feeling tired.

    There are many idioms in English. An idiom is a phrase that we can't understand from the meaning of each word. The following are some of them.

As the crow flies

    When a bird flies from place to place, it takes the most direct route. But when people drive, they have to follow roads and often go farther. When people give a distance "as the crow flies", they mean the shortest distance between the two points, not the distance you would have to travel by following roads.

    As Dan and his mum drove along the river, they could see the beach on the opposite side. Dan asked "How far is it to the beach?"

    "It's only about a quarter of a mile as the crow flies" his mother said.

Blow hot and cold

    In one of Aesop's Fables, a man blows on his fingers to warm them up and then blows on his soup to cool it down. In both cases, the man is opening his mouth, but what comes out is different. If a person says one thing and later says the opposite, we say that the person is blowing hot and cold.

    "Is Felicia going to try out for the soccer team this year?" Stacy asked.

    "I don't know," Tricia replied." Last week she was saying yes, but this week she's saying no. She's really blowing hot and cold."

Break the ice

    Nowadays people use the phrase to refer to ending an awkward silence by beginning a conversation.

    It was the first day of summer camp. The four girls began to make their beds in silence. None of the girls knew each other, and no one knew what to say. Finally, one of them broke the ice by saying" Hey, where's everybody from?"

Bury the hatchet

    In native American culture, when two nations agreed to end their war, they buried the hatchet. So to bury the hatchet is to make peace with someone else.

Colin could not excuse his sister for breaking his tennis racket. Finally, his sister said, "Colin, can't we bury the hatchet?"

    The first ancient Olympic Games for which we still have written records were held in 776 BC. Coroebus won the only event at the Olympics. This made him the very first Olympic champion in history. Then they grew and continued to be played every four years. In 393 AD, the Roman emperor Theodosius Ⅰ, a Christian, announced to end the Games because of their pagan (异教的) influences.

    About 1,500 years later, a young Frenchman named Pierre de Coubertin began their revival (恢复). In 1892 Coubertin first brought forward his idea to revive the Olympic Games but failed.

    Two years later, Coubertin organized a meeting with 79 delegates (代表) who represented nine countries. At this meeting he got what he wanted. All the delegates at the conference voted for the Olympic Games. They also decided to have Coubertin set up an international committee to organize the Games. This committee became the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Demetrious Vikelas from Greece was selected to be its first president. Athens was chosen for the revival of the Olympic Games and the planning was begun.

    The very first modern Olympic Games opened in the first week of April, 1896. Since the Greek government had been unable to afford a stadium, a rich Greek architect, Georgios Averoff, donated one million drachmas (over $100,000) to repair the Panathenaic Stadium, originally built in 330 BC.

    Since the Games were not well publicized internationally, contestants (选手) were not nationally chosen but rather came individually and at their own expense. Some contestants were tourists who happened to be in the area during the Games.

    I left university with a good degree in English Literature, but no sense of what I wanted to do. Over the next six years, I was treading water, just trying to earn an income. I tried journalism, but I didn't think I was any good, then finance, which I hated. Finally, I got a job as a rights assistant at a famous publisher. I loved working with books, although the job that I did was dull.

    I had enough savings to take a year off work, and I decided to try to satisfy a deep-down wish to write a novel. Attending a Novel Writing MA course gave me the structure I needed to write my first 55,000 words.

    It takes confidence to make a new start — there's a dark period in-between where you're neither one thing nor the other. You're out for dinner and people ask what you do, and you're too ashamed to say, “Well, I'm writing a novel, but I'm not quite sure if I'm going to get there.” My confidence dived. Believing my novel could not be published, I put it aside.

    Then I met an agent（代理商）who said I should send my novel out to agents. So, I did and, to my surprise, got some wonderful feedback. I felt a little hope that I might actually become a published writer and, after signing with an agent, I finished the second half of the novel.

    The next problem was finding a publisher. After two-and-a-half years of no income, just waiting and wondering, a publisher offered me a book deal - that publisher turned out to be the one I once worked for.

    It feels like an unbelievable stroke of luck -of fate, really. When you set out to do something different, there's no end in sight, so to find myself in a position where I now have my own name on a contract（合同）of the publisher -to be a published writer - is unbelievably rewarding（有回报的）.

WELCOME AND ARRIVAL INFORMATION

    Welcome to Harvard University Housing and thank you for choosing to live with us. To help you make a smooth transition please read the information below on panning your arrival.

    Pets

    Dogs living with you in your pet-friendly apartment must be vaccinated(接种疫苗) for rabies and licensed with the City of Cambridge every year.

    International Students

    Consider unlocking your phone prior to leaving your home county. This will enable you to use a SIM card from a company such as campus SIMS or US Mobile in your phone after you arrive. Those SIM cards may be available at the Property Management Office.

    Driving

    If you plan on bringing a moving van or truck it will not fit under the overpasses(天桥) on Soldiers Field Road and Memorial Drive. Plan your route in advance to avoid a risky and costly problem.

    Parking arrangements for trucks and vans must be made in advance as well. Visit your property page for information about parking your car.

    Furniture and Lighting

    Most HUH units have no furniture-the unit is empty except for a stove and a refrigerator. You need to bring, buy, or rent a bed, other furniture, and household items. In many HUH units, rooms do not have overhead lights, so you also may need table or floor lamps.

    If you want to stock up on groceries and some household items as soon as you arrive, please find information about "Grocery Shopping" by clicking the drop-down menu.

Research spanning several decades demonstrates that you are more likely to think the information that is repeated to be true than the information you hear only once. You usually assume that if people put in effort to repeat a statement, this reflects the truth of the statement. This tendency-also called the truth effect-is a bias （偏见） that can lead you to draw incorrect conclusions. 

To what degree are people aware of the truth effect? This question was addressed in a paper in the journal Cognition early this year. 

In the critical study in this paper, participants did two sessions. In one session, they read about a hypothetical （虚构的） study in which they were exposed to some statements and then were asked whether both statements they had heard before as well as these new statements were true. They were asked to predict the proportion （比例） of each statement that would be judged as true. They did this both as a prediction of other people's performance as well as a prediction of how they would do in this study. 

At another session a few days later, participants actually performed this study, reading a set of 20 statements in the hypothetical study again and then judging the truth of altogether 40 statements, half of which were from the hypothetical study and the other half of which were new. 

This study did replicate the well known truth effect. People were more likely to judge statements they had seen before as true than statements that were new. Two interesting findings emerged from the prediction. First, participants tended to underestimate the size of the truth effect for everyone. T hat is, while they did expect some difference in judgments between the statements seen before and those that were new, they thought this difference would be smaller than it actually was. Second, participants more significantly underpredicted the truth effect for themselves compared to that for other people. 

This study is particularly important in light of the amount of misinformation present in social media. Many people have the power to influence public opinion about important matters. Flooding social media feeds with misinformation will lead people to believe this information is true just because it is stated. Recognizing that we are all susceptible to this influence of repeated information should lead us to mistrust our intuition （直觉） about what is true and to look up important information prior to using it to make important judgments and decisions.