Stop wasting your time thinking of reasons for your failures and shortcomings.  Instead, realize that the seeds of success were planted within you when you were born. Only you have the power to make those seeds grow.

    The seeds, and the power to grow them, are contained in the most awesome machine ever created: the human mind. Success is a choice and not a chance. You were born a winner. You were born rich. You can be a success if only you make the right choice.

    You cannot be successful without first developing your self-esteem (自信心). Your level of self-esteem is always based on the degree of control that you are able to exercise over yourself, and thus over your life. People with low self-esteem are people who do not believe that they have any power，or responsibility for their lives. They are always victims. They are leaves tossed (摇摆) by the winds of chance blown about with any sudden change in the weather.

    You can exercise control over your life only to the degree that you believe you are responsible for everything that happens in your life.  Failures think that everything happens by accident and chance. Successful people realize that they are responsible.

    Everything happens as a result of something.  If we can identify the cause，we can control the effect. We are responsible for what we choose to think and believe. One generally rises to the level that one expects. We are responsible for setting our expectations. Our success is dependent upon our level of confidence.

    If you associate with positive-thinking people，you are definitely going to achieve success. On the contrary，the opposite happens. We are responsible for finding，planting，and nurturing (培育) the seeds that contain future victory, born from setbacks (挫折).

    In short, in all areas of your life，whether they are financial, physical, emotional, or spiritual, you are responsible. Once you recognize this, accept it, and firmly believe it. You are on the road to success.

    Why not write in a foreign language? If people feel free to choose their profession, their religion, and even their sex, why not just decide which language you want to write? Ever since Jhumpa published In Other Words in Italian, people have been asking me, “Why don't you write in Italian, Tim? After all, you've been in the country 35 years. What keeps you tied to English?” Is it just a question of economic convenience?

    Certainly economics can be important. It was the factor that pushed Conrad to abandon his Polish mother tongue. If it is not possible to publish at home, or to publish there as one would wish to publish, then one is likely to go elsewhere. And if to publish elsewhere one has to change language, then some authors are willing to take that step.

    Something of the same logic has driven many writers from Africa, Asia to write in French and English in recent years. There is also the fact that people in Europe and the West are interested in the countries they grew up in. Just as in the nineteenth century, novelists like Thomas Hardy could “sell” their familiarity with peasant life to a middle-class metropolitan public, so these writers have interested us with stories that might seem common in their home countries.

    There is also a real internationalism in the decision to change language. If you have “a message” and if English is the language that offers maximum spread, then it would seem appropriate to use it.

    All these make sense. Critics tend to pay attention only to those who have made a success of writing in a new language. In April 2014, a New York Times article essentially listed young literary stars who had switched to writing in the main Western languages. At this point, the native English speaker almost begins to feel at a disadvantage for having been born into the dominant culture. Should we perhaps head for Paris, like Beckett or Jonathan Littell, just to be between two worlds? Or look for something more exotic(异国的) and have ourselves translated back into English afterward? However, one fact is that changing languages doesn't always work.

    I did write a novel in Italian. But after rereading it, I decided against it. My work lost power with the switch of language. My real subject matter still had to do with England and it was to my home culture that my books were addressed. The second language never seems to mean quite as much as the first. In any event, after my early experiment, I never went back to write in Italian. Changing language is not the only way to bring energy to your writing.

    Noah Webster was born on October 16, 1758, in the West Division of Hartford. At that time, few people went to college, but Noah loved to learn so his parents let him go to Yale, Connecticut's only college. He left for New Haven in 1774. Noah's years at Yale were the years of the Revolutionary War.

    Sometimes 70 children of all ages were in one-room schoolhouses with no desks, poor books, and untrained teachers. Noah did not like that. Their books came from England. Noah thought that Americans should learn from American books, so in 1783, Noah wrote his own textbook: A Grammatical Institute of the English Language.

    For 100 years, Noah's book taught children how to read, spell, and pronounce words. It was the most popular American book of its time. Ben Franklin used Noah's book to teach his granddaughter to read.

    When Noah was 43, he started writing the first American dictionary. He did this because Americans in different parts of the country spelled, pronounced and used words differently. He thought that all Americans should speak the same way. He also thought that Americans should not speak and spell just like the English. Noah used American spellings like “color” instead of the English “colour”, “music” instead of “musick” and “center” instead of “centre”. He also added American words that weren't in English dictionaries like “skunk” and “squash”. It took him over 27 years to write his book. When finished in 1828, Noah's dictionary had 70,000 words in it.

    Noah did many things in his life. He worked for copyright laws, wrote textbooks, Americanized the English language, and edited (编辑) magazines. When Noah Webster died in 1843, he was regarded an American hero.

    Don't we all know a "Happy Meal" when we see one—the famous boxed meal that includes a hamburger, kid-sized French fries, fruits and milk, served with a toy that's extremely popular with children who love to collect them?

    A Happy Meal is a form of kids' meal sold at a certain fast-food chain since 1979. A toy is included in the meal, both of which are usually contained in a box or paper bag. However, collectors of these little toys will not get them any longer, since the company will replace toys with books and each of these books will mainly pass on nutritional messages.

    Happy Meals are extremely popular with kids, especially for their collectable toys, when you consider that over 1.3 billion of these packages are sold each year. These packages have been very controversial. Health supporters believe that drawing kids to these meals with toys is clever way of promoting unhealthy food choices. They see it as an advertising strategy of "catching its customers young"—a move that has paid off very well for the fast-food company.

    Child development experts say that food habits get formed in children by age six and continue through to their adult life. Fatty and sugary foods such as those served in Happy Meals are believed to play a big role in growing health problems such as obesity and diabetes. Public health care costs have gone up and untold amounts of money have been spent on coping with these health problems. On November 2, 2010, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a law requiring that children's meals sold in restaurants must meet certain nutritional standards before they could be sold with toys, to overcome the problem of childhood obesity—in other words, the State of California tried to ban the toys in Happy Meals. However, it was strongly opposed by some as being heavy-handed, and the ban was thrown out by the government.

    While some people believe that the fast-food company, with its large following of children, can create a powerful message through the books, others believe its actions are contradictory. Anyway, the company is trying to spread the message of nutrition while it is serving food that is anything but healthy.

    You'll need to take a deep breath before hearing this news. An astonishing 93% of kids around the world live in environments with air pollution levels that are damaging their health, according to a new report by WHO.

    Air pollution is to blame for the deaths of 543, 000 kids under 5 in 2016, with more than one in four deaths of children under five years old being related to environmental issues. Exposure (暴露) to air pollution can damage the health of kids in a variety of ways, either causing or being associated with everything from low birth weight to childhood obesity and so on.

    "The large toll of disease and death revealed (揭示) by these new data should result in an urgent call to action for the global community especially for those in the health department WHO stated. "Strong action to reduce exposure to air pollution offers an opportunity to protect the health of children." The report stressed that health experts should communicate with families, communities and policy-makers about the serious risks of air pollution exposure. "Although more researches into how air pollution affects children's health will continue to be valuable, there is already evidence to justify strong, swift action to prevent the damage it clearly produces," WHO added.

    Disease caused by dirty air is more common in low-and-middle in some countries, especially those in Africa, South-East Asia, and Western Pacific regions. Poor countries in these areas have the highest levels of exposure to household air pollution due to the use of polluting fuels and technologies for basic needs like cooking, heating and lighting.

    Advised solutions include cleaner transport, cleaner cooking and heating fuels and technologies energy-efficient housing and urban planning, safer industrial technologies and better waste management.

The coronavirus in China right now has really turned things upside down for a lot of people, but not even it can come between a marathon runner and his training.

Like many of his countrymen, Pan Shancu, an amateur marathon runner from Hangzhou, in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang, is trapped in his apartment because of the COVID-19，but he didn't let that small detail stop him from keeping in shape for his next race, whenever it may be. He has been using the small space in his apartment as a training track, jogging around two tables and the short length of a small hallway, and recently posted on social media.

"I could not bear siting around anymore," Pan wrote. "Let's run laps in the room! Yes, one lap is about eight meters (26 feet) and I ran 50 kilometers (31 miles), I did it in 4:48:44. I am sweating all over, feeling great!"

The runner, who has a marathon best of two hours and 59 minutes, also wrote that he considers his neighbors while jogging, trying to step as lightly as possible on the floor as not to disturb them. He completed 6, 250 circuits in one of his rooms in four hours, 48 minutes and 44 seconds, and his neighbors have yet to complain.

Pan Shancu's achievement spread rapidly like virus this week, with people praising his training spirit, and saying to adopting similar strategies to stay in shape.

"I start in the kitchen, go through the living room, turn into my daughter's room, the less than 20m-long racecourse has beautiful scenery and on my left, my husband's snoring is cheering me on," one commented on Pan's post. "This is a silent battle. My husband's opinion is that I have psychological issues.