When I was little, I always wanted a luxurious house. That was my idea to be successful. I took all the classes with full carefulness and tried to do well in the exams with my mind set on going to a key school. I just knew that I would somehow become famous and be able to afford the dream house. All the way through junior years, my mind was planning this wonderful future.

    Then in the tenth grade, many losses changed my mind. First, one of my friends died at 16. Soon after, my great-grandmother passed away, followed by my beloved fourth-grade teacher. These events left me not knowing what to do or where to go. Death had never touched me so closely.

    After a long period of emptiness, it finally struck me: Life is not promised and neither is future success. Though I was attempting to achieve material success, I was not enjoying my daily life. I realized that finding inner peace, purpose and happiness will stick with me forever and that is real success.

    Enjoying life's precious quirks(偶发事件) makes an ordinary person more successful than a wealthy person who isn't content and takes everything for granted. The summer before senior years, my attitude changed greatly. Instead of memorizing facts, I began learning skills. Instead of focusing on the future, I focused on today and the many blessings and successes that came with it.

    I still get excellent grades, but now I devote weeks to studying instead of struggling for exams, and I think about the future with a deeper sense of meaning. For me, being successful means truly living life each day.

    Digital technology-email and smart phones especially-have vastly improved workers' ability to be productive outside of a traditional office. Even so, most white-collar work still happens in an office. One reason is that, according to findings of a new survey of office workers conducted by Wakefield Research for the IT company Citrix, most bosses arc doubtful about remote working. Half of the workers say their boss doesn't accept it, and only 35 percent say it's tolerated.

    Skeptical bosses will likely have their doubts reinforced (加深) by the same survey, which shows that 43 percent of workers say they've watched TV or a movie while “working” remotely, while 35 percent have done housework, and 28 percent have cooked dinner.

    It is true, however, that working at home makes people much more efficient (高效的), because it allows workers to take care of annoying housework while still getting their jobs done. It's much faster, for example, to shop for groceries at a quarter to three than to stand in line during the after-work rush.

    The fact that such practices remain officially unaccepted reflects how far we haven't come as a society from the days when we expected every full-time worker to be supported by a full-time homemaker.

    More broadly the Wakefield survey suggests that employers may be missing a low-cost way to give workers something of value. Sixty-four percent of those survey participants who haven't worked remotely would rather give up some bonus in order to get even one day a week working from home. Under such circumstances, smart firms need to find ways to let their employees have enough flexibility (灵活性) to manage their time efficiently.

    We all know what a brain is. A doctor will tell you that the brain is the organ of the body in the head. It controls our body's functions, movements, emotions and thoughts. But a brain can mean so much more.

    A brain can also simply be a smart person. If a person is called brainy, he is smart and intelligent. If a family has many children but one of them is super smart, you could say, “He's the brains in the family.” And if you are the brains behind something, you are responsible for developing or organizing something. For example, Bill Gates is the brains behind Microsoft.

    Brain trust is a group of experts who give advice. Word experts say the phrase “brain trust” became popular when Franklin D. Roosevelt first ran for president in 1932. Several professors gave him advice on social and political issues（问题）facing the U.S. These professors were called his “brain trust”.

    These ways we use the word “brain” all make sense. But other ways we use the word are not so easy to understand. For example, to understand the next brain expression, you first need to know the word “drain”. As a verb, to drain means to remove something by letting it flew away. So a brain drain may sound like a disease where the brain flows out the ears. But, brain drain is when a country's most educated people leave their countries to live in another. The brains are, sort of, draining out of the country.

    However, if people are responsible for a great idea, you could say they brainstormed it. Here, brainstorm is not an act of weather. It is a process of thinking creatively about a complex topic. For example, business leaders may use brainstorming to create new products, and government leaders may brainstorm to solve problems.

    If people are brainwashed, it does not mean their brains are nice and clean. To brainwash means to make some accept new beliefs by using repeated pressure in a forceful or tricky way. Keep in mind that brainwash is never used in a positive way.

    My children are perfect. All four of them. Perfect and beautiful and clever. I bet yours are, too. Except, of course, they are not. In reality, my children and yours are likely to be reasonably average in terms of looks, behavior, intelligence and charm. That's why it is called average. Your belief in your child being special is more probably a biological thing than a fact.

    A loved one, particularly a loved child, is edited as we observe them. Other people's children are spoiled; ours are spirited. Theirs are naughty; ours are confident.

    This is all natural and even touching when not taken too far. However, it is one thing feeding this idea to ourselves but feeding it to our children may be a little less desirable. We have the idea that — unlike my parents' generation — we should build our children's self-respect as high as we can. Therefore, their random scribble (胡写乱画) is up there with Picasso, their C-minus is an unfortunate oversight on the part of the teacher, and the fact that no one wants to be friends with them is because they are particularly clever or sensitive.

    Children see through this kind of thing very quickly and ignore their parents' praises as a matter of course. As they grow up, they sense that the wider world judges them differently. This leads to a – hopefully gentle – cynicism (猜忌) about anything their parents tell them about their achievements. Perhaps that is OK — but I'm not sure if it is good for them to have the parental praise so overlooked.

    If parents were a little harsher sometimes, this could have two positive effects — first, when praise came, it would be more likely to be believed and, second, it would fit in rather more accurately with the picture of reality that the child is forming in their heads.

    A lot of pressure is put on children who are told they are beautiful, special and perfect. Because then, where is there to go? Only downwards. They become too much aware of their status in your eyes, and a danger must be that they fear failing you. To be over-praised by your parents is the counter side of being criticized all the time. Both can have negative consequences.

    It is important to give your children the freedom to be flawed (缺点) — to know that it's OK to be imperfect, and that, in fact, we often love people for their flaws — perfect people (whom we can only imagine, as they do not exist) are easy to respect, but hard to love.

    Now I am nearly 60, my main insight is that I am much less special than I once believed. This knowledge has actually been helpful in leading a more well-balanced life.

    I certainly wouldn't like to go back to attitudes that my parents, particularly my father, held, that to praise the child was to "spoil them" or make them bigheaded. However, the history of families is like the history of everything else — the story of overreactions. We praise our children to the skies, partly because we think it makes them feel good, but also because it makes us feel good. And perhaps it is more the latter than the former.

    Too much love can be as big a burden as a shortage of it. My advice is to limit your praise. Then every piece of praise will count, rather than being just ignored.

    The Top 4 Restaurants of 2018

    No. 4

    Kuya Ja's Lechon Belly (4 stars): 5268-H Nicholson Lane, Rockville, Md. 240-669-4383. kuyajas. com.

    Open: Breakfast, lunch and dinner Wednesday through Monday; breakfast and lunch Tuesdays.

    Prices: Sandwiches, bowls and combination meals, $ 6.99-$ 12.59.

    Sound check: 74 decibels（分贝）/ Must speak with raised voice.

    No. 3

    Little Havana（41/2 stars): 3704 14th St. NW. 202-758-2127. littlehavanadc.com.

    Open: Dinner daily.

    Prices: Sandwiches and mains $ 9-$ 25.

    Sound check: 70 decibels / Conversation is easy.

    No. 2

    Three Blacksmiths (41/2 stars): 20 Main St., Sperryville, Va. 540-987-5105. Three black smiths.com.

    Open: Dinner Thursday—Saturday.

    Prices: Small plates $ 5 - $ 20, large plates and family-style plates $ 24 - $ 94.

    Sound check: 81 decibels / Extremely loud.

    No. 1

    Momofuku（5 stars): 1090 I St. NW. 202-602-1832. ccdc.momofuku.com.

    Open: Lunch Monday through Friday, dinner daily, breakfast Saturday and Sunday.

    Prices: Small plates $ 5 - $15.

    Sound check: 75 decibels / Must speak with raised voice.

Martha Payne is 9 years old. She lives in a small community in Scotland. Martha is interested in the food at her school. She is interested in how good it tastes, and how healthy it is, and whether it contains any hairs. A few months ago, she started to write a blog about her school dinners. She photographed her school dinners, and then posted the pictures on her blog and told us what she thought about the food. Most days, she thought the food was OK, and on some days she thought it was really good.

Children in other schools, and other countries, started to read Martha's blog. Some of them left comments on Martha's school dinners. And some sent Martha pictures of their own school dinners, and Martha published these on her blog. Then Martha started to use her blog to raise money for a charity called Mary's Meals, which provides school meals for children in poor communities in developing countries.

And at this point, the officials who run the education system in the part of Scotland where Martha lives became aware of her blog. They didn't want publicity for the food in their schools. Perhaps they were afraid that people would start to criticize (批评) their school dinners and say that they were unhealthy. They said that Martha's blog had to stop.

Martha's head teacher told Martha the bad news, and Martha was sad and wrote a final blog post to say goodbye to her readers. The newspapers, the radio and the television all carried stories about Martha's blog. This was not at all what the officials wanted. A day later, they decided that Martha could continue writing her blog about her school dinners, and taking pictures of them.