The decisions that we make shape us throughout our lives. No matter what decisions we make, good or bad, each one puts us on a new road in the future. Make a bad decision? No problem. Learn from the decision and make another decision to get on a different path. This is advice that I got from Tony Robbins in his book Awaken the Giant Within. This is a book that I recommend(推荐) to anyone wanting to develop a fire to make changes in their life. It helped me to understand how fear of making poor choices was hindering me from becoming the great man who I am today. Now I am not saying I am a well-known person in any particular circle. But I am the king of my castle working hard and trying to make good decisions in regard to the paths that I have chosen. I am a great man in the eyes of my wife and my children. And that is all the recognition that I need in my lifetime. And I know that my past failures have been the building block that I continue to use to build my career and self-image in my community that I live in.

    Ben Lerer, cofounder of the CEO of Thrillist Media Group, is a good example of this. In an article on the Fast Company website, Lerer talks about this very subject. He says, “I've had to make some really tough decisions but finally, I think the best companies are those that can recognize when something isn't going right, and fix it, instead of just turning a blind eye because it's easier.” Great people make decisions. When a decision does not have the desired result, make a different decision. It does not get any simpler than that.

    It was an oral English class and in front of us was standing our teacher Lila Betray, who was a university student from the US. Somehow we came to the point whether any of us could sing an English pop song in front of the class. You know, maybe three or more out of ten Chinese students are shy in class. As a result, there was silence in class for quite a while, which made everybody feel rather embarrassed (尴尬的), including the teacher.

    I was a shy boy. However, just at that moment, a great idea struck me suddenly. “Seize the enjoyment! Seize the chance. Yes, there couldn't be a better chance.” I said to myself. “Why not seize it? Why should I have always to be the guy regretting missing the opportunity just because of shyness? Yes, maybe I should have a try!”

    So, I raised my hand. And I remember that it took me quite a while to think what the song's name was. Though I sang no more than five sentences because of forgetting the lyrics (歌词), their clapping hands told me that I did the job well. Later, I got a gift and I was really happy.

    I think that is one of the most unforgettable moments in my life. Through this experience, I've also got to know that we should believe that we can do the job well, no matter how difficult it seems for us. Just have a little more courage.

    I went through a training program and became a literacy volunteer(扫盲志愿者)last summer. The training I received, though excellent, did not tell me how it was to work with a real student. When I began to discover what other people's lives were like because they could not read, I realized the true importance of reading.

    My first student Marie was a 44-year-old single mother of three. In the first lesson, I found out she walked two miles to the nearest supermarket twice a week because she didn't know which bus to take. When I told her I would get her a bus schedule, she told me it would not help because she could not read it. She said she also had difficulty once she got to the supermarket because she couldn't always remember what she needed. Since she did not know words, she could not write out a shopping list. Also, she could only recognize items by sight, so if the product had a different label(标识), she would not recognize it as the product she wanted.

    As we worked together, learning how to read built Marie's self-confidence, which encouraged her to continue her studies. She began to make rapid progress and was even able to take the bus to the supermarket. After this successful trip, she reported how self-confident she felt. At the end of the program, she began helping her youngest son, Tony, a shy first grader, with his reading. As she described this experience, I was proud of myself as well. I found that helping Marie to build herself-confidence was more rewarding than anything I had ever done before.

    As a literacy volunteer, I learned a great deal about teaching and helping others. In fact, I may have learned more from the experience than Marie did.

    When I was about twelve, I headed to a restaurant for dinner with my family. It was winter, and on that night, the wind was really blowing hard.

    As my mom and I headed to the restaurant from our car, a girl about my age and her mother came up to us. They asked if we had any spare change. My mom right away asked where they lived. They pointed to an old car in a parking lot across the street. The girl said there were six of them living in that car.

    My mom said she had something to do after handing the people a few dollars. She sent me inside the restaurant with my dad and my three siblings (兄弟姐妹). But she didn't come. Later, I found out she had gone home and put all the food in our cupboards into a few bags. Then, she brought that food over to the car and handed the bags to the family. I wasn't there when that happened, but I can only imagine the joy it brought to those people.

    A few days later, when I actually found out about what she had done, I asked her why she helped those people. She told me that they were not lucky. I remember the face of that girl who had asked us for change. She was the same age as me, yet we looked so different.

    Here I stood, dressed in almost new clothes, headed to eat in a restaurant and then back home to the bedroom I shared with my younger sister. I remember thinking that the other girl didn't have any food to eat and she was heading back to a cold car shared with five other people.

    After painting this picture in my mind, I understood why my mom had done what she did. I will never forget what she did that night, and how she taught me one of the best lessons I ever learned.

Face up to Reality

Calls to stop the use of face recognition technology are growing louder, but it is already too late. Given its widespread use by tech companies and the police, a permanent roll back is impossible.

The European Commission is considering temporarily banning the use of the technology in public spaces, giving politicians in Europe time to develop measures to reduce the potential risks of face recognition systems. Some US cities, such as San Francisco, have already implemented bans.

{#blank#}1{#/blank#}Public areas make up a small proportion of the physical spaces we inhabit. What about the many that are privately owned, such as shops, schools and museums, in which face recognition is steadily being rolled out, sometimes without our knowledge?

Most of us now associate face recognition with CCTV cameras（闭路电视摄像机）. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} Facebook, for example, runs face recognition on users' photos to automatically identify them in other images on the site, which has been functioning for years. Russian search engine Yandex has a smart search function that, given one image of a face, can find pictures online of the same person even in different poses and lighting conditions.

Other concerns relate to the fact that the technology is imperfect. An independent analysis of a face recognition trial by London's Metropolitan Police found that 81 per cent of matches the system flagged to a watch list of suspects were incorrect. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}

So what is the possible solution? When we consider both the rate at which the technology is developing and its widespread use nowadays, it is crystal-clear that a ban on its use in public spaces would be too little, too late.

{#blank#}4{#/blank#}A set of effective rules on when and how it can be used needs to be decided quickly. Face recognition technology is here to stay; implementing a temporary ban would be the regulatory equivalent of burying our faces in the sand.

A. This applies to face recognition, as is often the case.

B. As a matter of fact, it is advancing in the online field, too.

C. What face recognition needs is strict and urgent regulation.

D. But the prohibitions are so limited that they are hardly bans at all.

E. And it's even less accurate for some minorities, which risks worsening racial issues.

F. Companies cannot let market make a final decision on the future of new technology.

I was sitting at my desk when another graduate student in my lab approached me. "Can you help?" he asked. His experiment wasn't working and he desperately needed help. I was then a fifth year PhD student, and I took pride in being the senior member of the lab, whom everyone looked up to. But that also meant I was the one everyone turned to for help — which ate away bours, days, and sometimes weeks that I could have spent on my own research.

There were many reasons I had a hard time saying no to such pleas (恳求). I was new to the United States for graduate school. I found it difficult to make new friends and discover activities I enjoyed. So I spent a huge chank of my time in the lab, with my lab-mates serving as my primary source of social connection. I feared that if I turned down their requests, I'd lose their favor.

But the extra responsibilities came at a cost. I had to work extra hours to catch up with my own work, and I often made sacrifices to my personal life.

It wasn't until my wife gave birth to our first child that I realized how thin I had stretched myself and how misguided my priorities(优先次序) were. While she lay in a hospital bed in the early stages of labor, I sat nearby hunched(伏首前倾的) over my laptop finishing up a work report. Hours later, after hearing my daughter's first cry and watching her tiny fingers grab tightly onto mine, it dawned on me: I should have been fully present during my daughter's birth. I was clearly spending too much time working if my job had intruded(侵入) into one of the most precious moments of my life.

From then on ,I decided to spend more time with my family by declining extra assignments and carefully considering each request for help. I still enjoyed collaborating with others, but I prioritized mutually beneficial tasks or those my manager asked me to take on, rather than accepting everything that came my way.

I noticed many benefits: no longer working overtime and improved work performance. I was also pleased to discover that "Sorry , I'd love to help but I have a deadline coming up" is an acceptable response to a request for assistance.

It's hard to say "no " to those you work with. But I've learned that sometimes that's the best course of action to avoid an excessive workload and lead a freer and happier life.