Are you satisfied with your life? How often do you think of reasons why everyone around you is successful though they are not usually better than you? What do you do wrong? Here are some things you should stop doing to be successful.

1） {#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    Different people may interpret “success” in different ways: some of them measure it in money, other ones — in positive changes to people around them and the world.{#blank#}2{#/blank#} And do not worry about what other people think, and come after what makes you happy.

2）Do not believe anything without questioning it.

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#} They are critical thinkers, and they understand that we are all ruled by our prejudices; so, they will always question new information.

3）Do not worry about all unpredictable things that may happen to you.

    If you want to be successful, stop thinking about everything that MAY happen to you.{#blank#}4{#/blank#} Be ready to change your deeds and decisions when things suddenly don't go according to your plan.

4）Do not care about what other people think of you.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} Your attempts to become “good” for everyone will turn into nothing but new worries, stresses, and problems. Successful people do not concentrate on quantity of people to please, but worry about their quality and focus on developing friendships with people they really care about.

Success is good, but you should understand that life will get depressing without friendship and love.

A. Try to feel comfortable with the reality and accept the fact your future can't be predicted.

B. Do not let others decide what “success” is for you.

C. As far as we all know, it's impossible to please all the people who surround us.

D. Do not wait for the “right time” to do anything.

E. Successful people never ignore or avoid problems, no matter how big and awful they seem.

F. Successful people do not just accept any new information to be true.

G. If you want to be successful, do not let others force their interpretation of success on you.

    The Healthy Habits Survey shows that only about one third of American seniors have correct habits. Here are some findings and expert advice.

    ⒈How many times did you brush your teeth yesterday?

    Finding: A full 33% of seniors brush their teeth only once a day.

    Step: Remove the 300 types of bacteria in your mouth each morning with a battery-operated toothbrush. Brush gently for 2 minutes, at least twice a day.

    ⒉How many times did you wash your hands or bathe yesterday?

Finding: Seniors, on average, bathe fewer than 3 days a week. And nearly 30% wash their hands only 4 times a day—half of the number which doctors recommend.

    Step: We touch our faces around 3,000 times a day-often inviting germs（病菌）to enter our mouth, nose, and eyes. Use toilet paper to avoid touching the door handle. And, most important, wash your hands often with hot running water and soap for 20 seconds.

    ⒊How often do you think about fighting germs?

    Finding: Seniors are not fighting germs as well as they should.

    Step: Do you know it is not your toilet but your kitchen sponge（海绵）that can carry more germs than anything else? To kill these germs, keep your sponge in the microwave for 10 seconds.

Boosting(促进) your Brain Power

    Who hasn't wished that they were just a little smarter? Maybe you're in school and just want to get a better grade on a test. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Here are some ways you can go about boosting your brainpower.

    Sleep is one of the easiest things to do, yet one of the ones that most of us don't do. We live in a busy age and often it seems that we don't have enough time to get everything done. So many of us sacrifice our hours of sleep to accomplish our daily tasks. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    Read a book. Being smarter is not only about thinking but knowledge plays a big part in it, too. Reading helps your brain stay active.{#blank#}3{#/blank#} Think of it as exercise for the brain.

    Try turning off that television set and going for a walk. A walk will stimulate your body and relax your mind. Just as watching too much TV can hurt your body, it also causes your brain to slow down as well.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#} There is a big difference between knowing something and being able to teach it to someone else. There is nothing like trying to break something down into simpler terms for others to help you understand it better than you did before.

    Work on a puzzle. It can be anything from the newspaper crossword or the new Sudoku puzzle. Puzzles help you use your brain to figure out the answers.{#blank#}5{#/blank#} Your brain needs exercise just like your body does to be able to function in top form.

    So go out there and boost your brainpower, your mind will thank you.

A. The more you read, the more you know, and the smarter you will be.

B. By writing about things you know, it helps you to understand them better.

C. Crossword puzzles also have the added benefit of increasing your vocabulary and knowledge.

D. Maybe you want to show your boss that you are good enough to get a promotion.

E. Giving your body the rest it needs every night can boost your ability to function at your best the next day.

F. Skipping meals can make it harder for you to think and perform at your best.

G. Learn something new and then teach someone else how to do it.

    Fashions have a lot of rules. Most of them, however, are just wrong. But there's one rule that goes beyond tradition and into the field of scientific study of the brain: Black clothes are slimming. It all comes down to how your visual system processes the light. The below holes in each square are the same in size, yet the white hole looks bigger than the black hole.

    In the 1500s, Galileo Galilei noticed that some of the planets looked larger when viewed with the naked eye than they did when viewed through a telescope, making the white light of Venus appear eight to ten times larger than Jupiter in the night sky. He knew something strange must be going on with his vision to cause this illusion, but he wasn't sure what it was. Luckily, scientists never stopped wondering, and in 2014, they figured it out.

    Our visual system operates via two main channels: "on" neurons (神经元) that are sensitive to light things and "off" neurons that are sensitive to dark things. When it came to the dark "off" neurons, the researchers found that they responded predictably to dark shapes on a light background the greater the contrast between the two, the more active these neurons were. But the light on" neurons behaved unpredictably. Even with the same amount of contrast, light objects on a dark background caused a greater response in these neurons.

    This phenomenon makes some sense, evolutionarily speaking. In the dark of night, you'd want to be able to take in every bit of light you can get, so a visual system that enlarges light objects on a dark background could be very useful. However, it's not that hard to see dark objects in the light of day. It has some effects in the colors of your clothes and in the appearance of the planets—the brighter appearance of Venus in the night sky makes it look bigger than the darker Jupiter.

    It seems that electronic devices just keep getting smaller. Scientists in the United States have announced the creation of the first transistor with only two dimensions(二维).

    A transistor is a small electronic device that transfers or carries electronic current. Scientists hope these new 2D transistors will be used for building high-resolution(高分辨率)displays that need very little energy.

    Two groups of scientists created these 2D transistors. They report that the transistors are only a few atoms thick.

    Usually transistors are made with the element silicon(硅). Computer processors, memory chips, TV screens and other electronic devices contain billions of silicon-based transistors. But these very small electrical parts have certain limitations.

    Dimitris Ioannou is an electrical engineering professor at George Mason University. He says the traditional transistor has been improved as much as it can be. He adds that researchers have been looking for new materials with special features and they want transistors to be seen through and soft.

    "If the layers are very thin, the transistor can become flexible, so it doesn't have to be rigid(坚硬的), like it would be in a silicon chip. So people can think of applications like wearable electronics, television screens and other things," said Ioannou.

    These new transistors can also carry higher current. They also can move the current much faster than traditional transistors. This is important for high-definition screens.

    Dimitris Ioannou says the scientific success could prove very useful in the future. "Now, how good and how useful it will be, it's still in the stage of research, but it certainly is an advance," said Ioannou.

In life, once on a path, we tend to follow it, for better or worse. What's sad is that even if it's the latter, we often accept it anyway because we are so used to the way things are that we don't even recognize that they could be different. This is a phenomenon psychologist call functional fixedness.

This classic experiment will give you an idea of how it works and a sense of whether you may have fallen into the same trap: People are given a box of tacks (大头钉) and some matches and asked to find a way to attach a candle to a wall so that it burns properly.

Typically, the subjects try tacking the candle to the wall or lighting it to fix it with melted wax. The psychologists had, of course, arranged it so that neither of these obvious approaches would work. The tacks are too short, and the paraffin (石蜡) doesn't stick to the wall. So how can you complete the task? The successful technique is to use the tack box as a candle-holder. You empty it, tack it to the wall. and stand the candle inside it. To think of that, you have to look beyond the box's usual role as a receptacle just for tacks and re-imagine it serving an entirely new purpose. That is difficult because we all suffer to one degree or another from functional fixedness.

The inability to think in new ways affects people in every corner of society. The political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase" frozen thoughts" to describe deeply held ideas that we no longer question but should. In Arendt's eyes, the self- content reliance on such accepted "truths" also made people blind to ideas that didn't fit their worldview, even when there was plenty of evidence for them.

Frozen thinking has nothing to do with intelligence. She said," It can be found in highly intelligent people."