People are seeking for opportunities that will assist them in reaching their goals. Marketing yourself can be a good choice, which can help you achieve your goals. Though when people talk about marketing, they usually think that this is about producing a sale, it does not necessarily have to be.

    If you are an employee then you want your boss to take your ideas, and if you are on a job hunting then you want to find a good position. So in reality, marketing really leads to sale. So marketing yourself means you are simply “selling” yourself!

    The common problem in marketing yourself is that most people think that it is unpleasant to market themselves. They think that marketing concerns only to a business. Of course, this is absolutely not true. People who want to attain the success they desire must promote themselves.

    Marketing yourself is a useful tool. The better you market yourself, the more opportunities you will have. Marketing yourself does not really mean telling every person how beautiful and wonderful you are. It means letting your prospective employer know that you exist or you can do something better.

    There are actually several different ways of marketing yourself. But there are only two primary ways that you carry out. The first is to find ways to reach out to others and the second is to construct ways in order for the people to find you and make connection with you.

    To reach out and touch the lives of others, you have to be a good person and a good employee. In that way your good reputation will follow naturally. Have a brief and concise message that you can share with others. When you market yourself, you tell people who you are and what you can do for others. Plan well and practice your message.

    In constructing ways for the people to notice and make connection with you, you must be open to them. Communication is a great opportunity to make an impact especially when you market yourself. You also communicate by what you are wearing. Know the appropriate dress code and have plenty of time to decide what you will wear. Just remember to make a great first impression!

    We always knew our daughter Kendall was going to be a performer of some sort. She entertained people in our small town by putting on shows on our front porch when she was only three or four. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and beautiful, she sang like a little angel.

    When Kendall was five, we began to notice that she was blinking a lot and clearing her throat frequently. We took her to our local children's hospital where she was diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome.

    It was pretty devastating（毁灭性的）because other children constantly made fun of her, and sadly, even a teacher teased her. Through all this, Kendall continued to sing and entertain. Remarkably, her tics disappeared when she sang.

    In 2005 when Kendall was sixteen, we thought she was pretty much out of the woods -- or at least heading in that direction. However, a freak accident happened.

    At a birthday party, Kendall hopped on a friend for a piggyback ride. Kendall flew over his back and landed on the cement floor -- on her neck. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital where she spent the next week, paralyzed from the neck down. Ironically, her biggest concern wasn't whether she would walk again, but whether she would be able to audition（试唱）for American Idol.

    Doctors said Kendall had central cord syndrome. Sometimes the pain was so unbearable that she had to bite down on a toothbrush to take her mind off it. As the days dragged on, we didn't know for sure how much of her movement would ever come back.

    I believe Kendall wanted the American Idol audition so much that she willed herself to move again. One of her friends brought a microphone to the hospital and put it on her bed. Every day, Kendall tried hard to pick it up with her right hand. It was more important for her to pick up that microphone than a spoon or fork.

    Sometimes we all cried because of the pain we witnessed. But on the day Kendall walked into the stadium to audition for American Idol – a mere three months after her accident -- we cried tears of joy. And our tears turned into shouts when she was given a golden ticket to Hollywood.

    Kendall is eighteen now, living every day to its fullest. She's recorded a CD with some of John Mellencamp's band members. I'm absolutely sure she's going to make it big some day. Kendall just puts it all in God's hands.

    When she was a little girl trying hard to be strong, she looked up at me, her big eyes brimming with tears, and asked me why she had to have Tourette's Syndrome. My heart ached to make the word right for my child. But I looked right back at her and told her the truth as I see it.

    “Kendall, God gave you a pure heart, an angelic voice, a strong mind, and a beautiful presence. With all of that, he had to make it fair for everyone else.”

    I have just arrived in a country where I don't know the language, where I have no family roots and where I find myself all alone. It may sound frightening. But let me tell you a little secret: it is not.

    When you travel abroad by yourself for whatever reason—exchange program, internship, volunteering, or simply as a tourist—a new and fascinating world will open up for you. A world you would have never been able to see if you had just stayed at home.

    People from a different country are not aliens. They are simply people like you who happened to be born in another region. They have pretty much the same wishes and worries as people from your own country.

    I know that you see a lot of news on TV saying terrible things people do all the time. Your family may have spent a great deal of time telling you not to trust strangers. However, when you travel alone you will realize that people are just as good as you. Everyone is just leading their lives, working, studying and having a good time with their friends. Most people will be happy to help you and get to know you.

    Maybe in the past when you would need months to travel from one place to another, traveling could be expensive. Nowadays, the world is just so connected that it is perfectly possible to find cheap flights, accommodation for all budgets and cheap and quality food.

    You will get lost, but it's fine! I can't even count how many times I didn't know where I was going or how to find the right direction. Everything looks great on Google maps, but sometimes your phone will die or your data will end. Just calm down. Go to a store or stop someone in the street and ask! Or simply walk around and be curious.

    The fence was long and high. He put the brush into the whitewash and moved it along the top of the fence. He repeated the operation. He felt he could not continue and sat down.

    He knew that his friends would arrive soon with all kinds of interesting plans for the day. They would walk past him and laugh. They would make jokes about his having to work on a beautiful summer Saturday. The thought burned him like fire.

    He put his hand into his pockets and took out all that he owned. Perhaps he could find some way to pay someone to do the whitewashing for him. But there was nothing of value in his pockets-nothing that could buy even half an hour of freedom. So he put the bits of toys back into his pockets and gave up the idea.

    At this dark and hopeless moment, a wonderful idea came to him. It filled his mind with a great, bright light. Calmly he picked up the brush and started again to whitewash.

    While Tom was working, Ben Rogers appeared. Ben was eating an apple as he walked along the street. As he walked along it, he was making noises like the sound of a riverboat. First he shouted loudly, like a boat captain. Then he said "Ding—Dong-Dong", "Ding—Dong— Dong" again and again, like the bell of a riverboat. And he made other strange noises. When he came close to Tom, he stopped.

    Tom went on whitewashing. He did not look at Ben. Ben stared a moment and then said: "Hello! I'm going swimming, but you can't go, can you? "

    No answer. Tom moved his brush carefully along the fence and looked at the result with the eye of an artist. Ben came nearer. Tom's mouth watered for the apple, but he kept on working.

    Ben said, "Hello, old fellow, you've got to work, hey?"

    Tom turned suddenly and said, "Why, it's you, Ben! I wasn't noticing."

    "Say—I'm going swimming. Don't you wish you could? But of course you'd rather work—wouldn't you? Of course you would."

    Tom looked at the boy a bit, and said, "What do you call work?"

    "Why, isn't that work?"

    Tom went back to his whitewashing, and answered carelessly.

    "Well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. All I know is, it suits Tom Sawyer."

    "Oh come, now, you don't mean to say that you like it?

    The brush continued to move.

    "Like it? Well, I don't see why I shouldn't like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?"

    Ben stopped eating his apple. Tom moved his brush back and forth, stepped back to look at the result, added a touch here and there, and stepped back again. Ben watched every move and got more and more interested. Soon he said, "Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little."

    Tom thought for a moment, and was about to agree, but he changed his mind.

    "No-no-it won't do, Ben. You see, Aunt Polly wants this fence to be perfect. It has got to be done very carefully. I don't think there is one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it well enough."

    "No——is that so? Oh come, now——let me just try. Only just a little."

    "Ben, I'd like to, but if it isn't done right, I'm afraid Aunt Polly …"

    "Oh, I'll be careful. Now let me try. Say—I'll give you the core of my apple."

    "Well, here—No, Ben, now don't. I'm afraid …"

    "I'll give you all of it."

    Tom gave up the brush with unwillingness on his face, but joy in his heart. And while Ben worked at the fence in the hot sun, Tom sat under a tree, eating the apple, and planning how to get more help. There were enough boys. Each one came to laugh, but remained to whitewash. By the time Ben was tired, Tom sold the next chance to Billy for a kite; and when Billy was tired, Johnny bought it for a dead rat——and so on, hour after hour. And when the middle of the afternoon came, Tom had won many treasures.

    And he had not worked. He had had a nice idle time all the time, with plenty of company, and the fence had been whitewashed three times. If he hadn't run out of whitewash, Tom would have owned everything belonging to his friends.

    He had discovered a great law of human action, namely, that in order to make a man or a boy want a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to get.

    In a room at Texas Children Cancer Center in Houston, eight-year-old Simran Jatar lay in bed with a drip(点滴)above her to fight her bone cancer. Over her bald(秃的)head, she wore a pink hat that matched her clothes. But the third grader's cheery dressing didn't mask her pain and weary eyes.

    Then a visitor showed up. "Do you want to write a song?" asked Anita Kruse, 49, rolling a cart equipped with an electronic keyboard, a microphone and speakers. Simran stared. "Have you ever written a poem?" Anita Kruse continued. "Well, yes," Simran said.

    Within minutes, Simran was reading her poem into the microphone. "Some bird soaring through the sky," she said softly. "Imagination in its head…" Anita Kruse added piano music, a few warbling (鸣,唱)birds, and finally the girl's voice. Thirty minutes later, she presented Simran with a CD of her first recorded song.

    That was the beginning of Anita Kruse's project, Purple Songs Can Fly, one that has helped more than 125 young patients write and record songs. As a composer and pianist who had performed at the hospital, Kruse said that the idea of how she could help "came in one flash".

    The effect on the kids has been great. One teenage girl, curling(蜷缩)in pain in her wheelchair, stood unaided to dance to a hip-hop song she had written. A 12-year-old boy with Hodgkin's disease who rarely spoke surprised his doctors with a song he called I Can Make It.

    "My time with the kids is heartbreaking because of the severity of their illnesses," says Anita Kruse. "But they also make you happy, when the children are smiling, excited to share their CD with their families."

    Simran is now an active sixth grader and cancer-free. From time to time, she and her mother listen to her song, Always Remembering, and they always remember the "really sweet and nice and loving" lady who gave them a shining moment in the dark hour.

Painting is an ancient medium and even with the introduction of photography, film and digital technology, it still has remained a persistent mode of expression. So many paintings have come into being over the years but only a small percentage of them could be described as "timeless classics". The following are some of the most famous paintings of all time. 

Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503—1519

Painted between 1503 and 1519, Leonardo da Vinci's attractive portrait has been a subject of controversy since the day it was made, due to two questions: Who's the subject and why is she smiling? A number of theories for the former have been provided over the years: That she's the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo and that she's Leonardo's mother, Caterina. As for that famous smile, its quality has driven people crazy for hundreds of years. 

James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1. 1871

Whistler's Mother, or Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, as it's actually titled, speaks to the artist's ambition to pursue art for art's sake. James Abbott McNeill Whistler painted the work in his London studio in 1871. Whistler's mother Anna is pictured as one of several elements locked into an arrangement of right angles. Her severe expression fits in with the rigidity of the composition, and it's somewhat ironic to note that despite Whistler's formalist intentions, the painting became a symbol of motherhood. 

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434

As one of the most significant works produced during the Northern Renaissance, this composition is believed to be one of the first paintings finished in oils. It portrays an Italian merchant and a woman who may or may not be his bride. In 1934. the celebrated art historian Erwin Panofsky proposed that the painting is actually a wedding contract. What can be reliably said is that the piece used orthogonal perspective to create a sense of space. It feels like a painting you could step into.