Some people think that success is only for those with talent or those who grow up in the right family, and others believe that success mostly comes down to luck. I'm not going to say luck, talent, and circumstances don't come into play because they do. Some people are born into the right family while others are born with great intelligence, and that's just the reality of how life is.

    However, to succeed in life, one first needs to set a goal and then gradually make it more practical. And, in addition to that, in order to get really good at something, one needs to spend at least 10,000 hours studying and practicing. To become great at certain things, it'll require even more time, time that most people won't put in.

    This is a big reason why many successful people advise you to do something you love. If you don't enjoy what you do, it is going to feel like unbearable pain and will likely make you quit well before you ever become good at it.

    When you see people exhibiting some great skills or having achieved great success, you know that they have put in a huge part of their life to get there at a huge cost. It's sometimes easy to think they got lucky or they were born with some rare talent, but thinking that way does you no good, and there's a huge chance that you're wrong anyway.

    Whatever you do, if you want to become great at it, you need to work day in and day out, almost to the point of addiction, and over a long period of time. If you're not willing to put in the time and work, don't expect to receive any rewards. Consistent, hard work won't guarantee you the level of success you may want, but it will guarantee that you will become really good at whatever it is you put all that work into.

    Letters as a way of communication have long given way to phone calls and WeChat messages.

    But a TV show, Letters Alive, is helping bring this old way to keep in touch back into the present.

    Letters Alive took its idea from a UK program with a similar name, Letters Live, which was first shown in 2013. Both shows feature famous actors and actresses, but there is no gossip , no eye-catching visual effects or any regular showbiz (演艺圈) activities. Instead, it's just one person walking up to a microphone and reading a letter.

    But these are not just any letters. They are selected from a wide time span and a diverse range of subjects. There is, for example, a passionate letter that famous painter Huang Yongyu wrote to playwright Cao Yu 30 years ago to criticize his lack of creativity. There is also a heartfelt note from Spring and Autumn Period written by two ordinary young soldiers to their elder brother to report their lives in the war zone.

    Every letter is like a small piece of history. By hearing them being read, it's as if we are being sent back in time to experience a moment that we would otherwise never have had the chance to.

    “Letters Live makes us pause and imagine the lives behind the letters,” UK actor Benedict Cumberbatch, one of the readers on the UK show, told The Guardian. “It allows people from all ages and all walks of life to experience a moment of time in someone else's life for a brief moment.”

    Compared to published texts, letters also come with a personal touch.

    One example from Letters Live was a note of thanks from the mother of a dying child to JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books. It read: “Mrs Rowling, Cancer threatened to take everything from my daughter, and your books turned out to be the castle we so desperately needed to hide in.”

    According to Guan Zhengwen, the director of Letters Alive, it is this kind of humanity behind every letter that strikes a chord (引发共鸣) with the audience. It is also what made the show a big hit in China ever since its first episode aired on Dec 5.

    “It's a thing of the past that entertainment shows establish themselves only with pretty faces,” Guan told Sohu News. “Showbiz is starting to switch to a focus on wisdom and intelligence.

    One day. One lifetime. You can do it! From the museum of modern art to the museum of ancient articles, visit our picks for the world's best museums.

National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa)

    This museum has a great collection of art spanning the Middle Ages to the present day, including American, Indian, European, Inuit and Canadian works. It offers a unique, near-complete overview of Canadian art — from early Quebec religious work, through Inuit work from the 1950s, to the contemporaries.

Tokugawa Art Museum (Japan)

    The Tokugawa family reigned over Japan from 1600 to 1868. Under them, the country enjoyed the longest period of peace in its history. This time span is also known as the Edo period, during which the arts flowered in Japan. Artists of this period directly influenced Western masters such as Monet, Gauguin and Whistler and have since gone on to become household names. Other exhibits effectively present, through accurately reproduced environments, aspects of Japanese life at the time.

    Museum of Fine Arts (Boston)

    Highlights of this museum's collection include a 4th-century Christian marble bust (半身像) of St. Paul at prayer, and a painting that questions life and our very existence, Gauguin's “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” It's a must — go in the US.

The Egyptian Museum (Cairo)

    As well as gathering together some of the finest archaeological finds from all Egypt, this museum also provides a rare opportunity to simply pop in and within minutes be standing face-to-face with one of the greatest works of mankind, Tutankhamun's golden mask. A portrait of unbelievable quality, craftsmanship and beauty, the highly polished gold face — at once a god, a king and a teenager — shines like water: delicate, yet untouchable all at the same time.

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    Adults understand what it feels like to be flooded with objects. Why do we often assume that more is more when it comes to kids and their belongings? The good news is that I can help my own kids learn earlier than I did how to live more with less.

    I found the pre-holidays a good time to encourage young children to donate less-used things, and it worked. Because of our efforts, our daughter Georgia did decide to donate a large bag of toys to a little girl whose mother was unable to pay for her holiday due to illness. She chose to sell a few larger objects that were less often used when we promised to put the money into her school fund(基金）(our kindergarten daughter is serious about becoming a doctor)

    For weeks, I've been thinking of bigger, deeper questions: How do we make it a habit for them? And how do we train ourselves to help them live with, need, and use less? Yesterday, I sat with my son, Shepherd, determined to test my own theory on this. I decided to play with him with only one toy for as long as it would keep his interest. I expected that one toy would keep his attention for about five minutes, ten minutes, max. I chose a red rubber ball-simple, universally available. We passed it, he tried to put it in his mouth, he tried bouncing it, rolling it, sitting on it, throwing it. It was totally, completely enough for him. Before I knew it an hour had passed and it was time to move on to lunch.

    We both became absorbed in the simplicity of playing together. He had my full attention and I had his. My little experiment to find joy in a single object worked for both of us.

Yoga (瑜伽) is a kind of sport. It is very popular around the world now. Everyone, young or old, men or women, can do yoga.

There are many reasons why people like yoga. First, yoga can build up your muscle. Your body will become stronger and more flexible. Second, yoga helps you get rid of stress. What's more, yoga can help your mind stay calm. To put it simply, the reason why so many people are falling in love with yoga is that they are discovering how wonderful it is for their mind, body and spirit.

Yoga began in India about 5,000 years ago. At that time, people wanted to be free, healthy and live a long life. As a result, this kind of exercise was born. The early yoga was part of the religion (宗教). It was usually taught one to one—one teacher and one student. Later, it was accepted by more people.

Yoga is an Indian word that means "to join together". There are three parts of yoga altogether: exercise, breathing and meditation (冥想). In the past, people paid more attention to the spirit. The idea behind the exercise was to join the mind, body and spirit as one.

With the development of the exercise, more and more people are doing yoga as a way of keeping healthy. Among them, office ladies enjoy doing yoga most. Yoga can give them peace, help them feel relaxed and have fewer worries and illnesses.

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."