Relax. Take a deep breath. Don’t compare yourself with others. The world is full of all kinds of people – those who get successful early in life and those who do later. There are those who get married at 25 but divorced at 30, and there are also those who find love at 40, never to part with them again. Henry Ford was 45 when he designed his revolutionary Model T car. A simple WhatsApp forward message makes so much sense here:

“You are unique, don’t compare yourself to others.

Someone graduated at the age of 22, yet waited 5 years before securing a good job; and there is another who graduated at 27 and secured employment immediately!

Someone became CEO at 25 and died at 50 while another became a CEO at 50 and lived to 90 years.

Everyone works based on their ‘Time Zone’. People can have things worked out only according to their pace.

Work in your “time zone”. Your Colleagues, friends, younger ones might “seem” to go ahead of you. May be some might “seem” behind you. Everyone is in this world running their own race on their own lane in their own time. God has a different plan for everybody. Time is the difference.

Obama retires at 55, Trump resumes at 70. Don’t envy them or mock them, it’s their ‘Time Zone.’ You are in yours!” 

Source: http://www.mensxp.com/special-features/today/34993-if-you-think-you-are-going-nowhere-in-life-take-a-deep-breath-and-read-this.html

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jan/06/dan-shechtman-nobel-prize-chemistry-interview

To stand your ground in the face of relentless criticism from a double Nobel prize-winning scientist takes a lot of guts. For engineer and materials scientist Dan Shechtman, however, years of self-belief in the face of the eminent Linus Pauling‘s criticisms led him to the ultimate accolade: his own Nobel prize.

The atoms in a solid material are arranged in an orderly fashion and that order is usually periodic and will have a particular rotational symmetry. A square arrangement, for example, has four-fold rotational symmetry – turn the atoms through 90 degrees and it will look the same. Do this four times and you get back to its start point. Three-fold symmetry means an arrangement can be turned through 120 degrees and it will look the same. There is also one-fold symmetry (turn through 360 degrees), two-fold (turn through 180 degrees) and six-fold symmetry (turn through 60 degrees). Five-fold symmetry is not allowed in periodic crystals and nothing beyond six, purely for geometric reasons.

Shechtman’s results were so out of the ordinary that, even after he had checked his findings several times, it took two years for his work to get published in a peer-reviewed journal. Once it appeared, he says, “all hell broke loose”.

Many scientists thought that Shechtman had not been careful enough in his experiments and that he had simply made a mistake. “The bad reaction was the head of my laboratory, who came to my office one day and, smiling sheepishly, put a book on x-ray diffraction on my desk and said, ‘Danny, please read this book and you will understand that what you are saying cannot be.’ And I told him, you know, I don’t need to read this book, I teach at the Technion, and I know this book, and I’m telling you my material is not in the book.

“He came back a couple of days later and said to me, ‘Danny, you are a disgrace to my group. I cannot be with you in the same group.’ So I left the group and found another group that adopted a scientific orphan.”

He says that the experience was not as traumatic as it sounded. Scientists around the world had quickly replicated Shechtman’s discovery and, in 1992, the International Union of Crystallography accepted that quasi-periodic materials must exist and altered its definition of what a crystal is from “a substance in which the constituent atoms, molecules or ions are packed in a regularly ordered, repeating three-dimensional pattern” to the broader “any solid having an essentially discrete diffraction diagram”.

That should have been the end of the story were it not for Linus Pauling, a two-time Nobel laureate, once for chemistry and a second time for peace. Shechtman explains that at a science conference in front of an audience of hundreds Pauling claimed, “Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense, there are no quasi-crystals, just quasi-scientists.”

Pauling told everyone who would listen that Shechtman had made a mistake. He proposed his own explanations for the observed five-fold symmetry and stuck to his guns, despite repeated rebuttals. “Everything he did was wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong; eventually, he couldn’t publish his papers and they were rejected before they were published,” says Shechtman. “But he was very insistent, was very sure of himself when he spoke; he was a flamboyant speaker.”

Never let success go to your head, and never let failure go to your heart.

Wishing all readers a happy new year ahead. May your dreams and wishes come true!

再努力一下，或许就是成功!

Quite motivational indeed!

“The reality is that if your dream is to accomplish something awesome, it’s not going to be easy. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. People who go for greatness are going to get knocked down a lot. They’ll have difficult times. They’ll struggle with doubt and uncertainty. People around them will question the wisdom of their quest. The issue is not whether you’ll fail, because you will. It’s whether you’ll get back up and keep going. It’s whether you can sustain your self-confidence and your belief in yourself and keep bouncing back. Failure is only final when you stop striving.” – Bob Rotella

Source: https://www.newsghana.com.gh/why-every-youth-must-encounter-failure/

You can’t live without failure unless you live cautiously doing nothing. Even on that level, your failure is huge. The fatality of failure depends on the individual. You think failure has no benefit? This piece seeks to shed light on the need to embrace failure, learn from it and get better even after you have a warm encounter with it.

As toddlers strive to achieve their “shared goals” such as learning to walk, they fail 17 times per hour
IMPORTANCE

To start with, failure tells us the steps we need to change in order to attain the glory/crown we are seeking. Failure in its real sense means a slip or missing the mark. The mark here is synonymous to the desired target, glory, crown, et al.

To miss the mark means the processes have not been followed thoroughly or you underestimated the importance of a step. Failing helps you to identify the needed change, process or action that will facilitate your reaching the desired goal.

Furthermore, failure helps us to attain the mental toughness and wisdom we need to succeed. Interestingly, the sensible learn from their failures. Failure helps to toughen our minds, broaden our perspectives and help us acquire some essential nuggets for life.

Many successfully acquired practical wisdom after haven failed once or twice. Failure enhances character formation hence positively affects how you respond to things that didn’t go your way. You have to develop a thick skin to make it through life. Life isn’t easy, it is complicated and has pains no matter your level of blessings. Therefore, we come to terms with this reality especially after our encounter with failure.

In reality, failure teaches you things about yourself you wouldn’t have otherwise known (self-discovery and true relationships). Thus in our failures, we are able to know the loyal friends and family members. There are times we either overestimate or underestimate our strengths. At such points, failure brings us back to a stage of self-discovery. You can’t know yourself and the quality of your relationship unless you have been tested by adversities of which failure is part.

CONCLUSION
Life is a series of detours. We may set our minds on determinations but the detours will show if we did or did not expect it before the destination. One thing we must know is that the world is full of competition and as such extra skills are necessary to strategize and make the best out of every situation.

Most often than not we make up stories to make ourselves feel okay for our failures. We should rather endeavor to focus stories, events, circumstances et al that have the potential to impact on us and cause us to act more positively. Significantly, the detours in life lead us to the destinations.

Being angry at the detours mean you aren’t ready for the destination. Toughen yourself, let us embrace our failures, learn from it and strive hard to apply the valuable lessons we have acquired to write a positive narrative for ourselves and our continent. Let us meet at the top!

By: Bernard Owusu Mensah
President of New Era Africa
Ghana

Source: http://www.bdtonline.com/opinion/the-race-of-life-fear-of-failure-can-keep-people/article_b7dfe5c0-1e0c-11e6-ae25-e7a71f04d85b.html

Excerpts from this well written article:

Try your best. Even if you don’t hit your mark, you’ll be near the mark and that’s all you can hope for in life.

I’ve been knocked down in life, but I’m still close to where I want to be. I like writing and I hope to write a book some day. Trying to do something is not as bad as Yoda made it sound to be. “Do or do not there is no try,” Yoda said. Wrong Yoda. Trying is good for a person.

I think life is a bundle of different things. A couple of years ago, an evangelist came to my church and he said the worries we’ve got are first-world problems. Something I needed to hear. He said (most of us) are not worried about eating, where we’ll lay our heads at night or if we’ll be warm. Now, I realize that there are people in our community that are struggling, but for most of us with jobs and a roof over our heads what we’re looking at and what we spend most of our time struggling with are first-world problems. What are first world problems? First-world problems are the worries and cares of this world, in my humble opinion. We get caught up worrying to death about our jobs, whether we’ll do well on an exam or if our performance in the sports arena will land us the next big sign on.

We can’t get lost in this or we’ll miss life’s precious moments. The time with friends, the time with grandparents are little moments we don’t think about as we pass through our ordinary days. I urge you to spend time with those who are closest to you. You may spend a lifetime regretting not spending time with those you love because you became caught up in the rat race of life.

King Solomon said all is vanity and chasing after the wind. I’d say that aside from saving souls, he’s right. We want more. We get more. We want more again. Most of us are middle class, struggling with life’s issues. A bad boss, an angry customer, a student who’s on the edge of giving up. These things are all shaping us. Making us better. Gearing us up for the next round. Life’s a race, the bible says. Let us run with endurance the race placed before us.

Is your heart in your race? Are you in the wrong race? Do you just want to give up and throw in the towel. Maybe you’re way behind the race and you feel like you’ll never get to the end. Everyone is running the race of life. Encourage those who you’re running with. Help pick up those who’ve stumbled during the race. A lot of times it’s not what place you finish in the race, but how you ran the race. Integrity, helping others, putting others before yourself — those are the keys to truly winning the race at hand.

Max Ehrmann, “Desiderata“

Printable version: http://www.stpaulsbaltimore.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/desiderata-pamphlet.pdf

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/9594351/Sir-John-Gurdon-Nobel-Prize-winner-was-too-stupid-for-science-at-school.html

A British scientist whose schoolmasters told him he was too stupid to study the subject has been awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology for his pioneering work on cloning.

At the age of 15, Prof Sir John Gurdon ranked last out of the 250 boys in his Eton year group at biology, and was in the bottom set in every other science subject. Sixty-four years later he has been recognised as one of the finest minds of his generation after being awarded the £750,000 annual prize, which he shares with Japanese stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka. Speaking after learning of his award in London on Monday, Sir John revealed that his school report still sits above his desk at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, which is named in his honour.

Moral of the story: Teachers may not be always right!

Recently, the A Level results just came out, 93.1% score at least 3 H2 passes, best results since curriculum change in 2006. However, as most students know, 3 H2 passes (low pass e.g. 3 C’s) is far from enough to enter the 3 local universities. For those looking for a rank point calculator, check out my post on how to calculate JC Rank Points.

Just to share some motivational advice for those who may not have done as well for A levels. Source: http://www.kuenselonline.com/do-your-best-without-comparing-yourself-to-others-and-without-fear-or-failure/

In reality, the purpose of education should be to open your mind, gain life skills and help you develop your human qualities. It should not merely be considered as a gateway to a job.

Even if your main reason for studying is motivated by your future career, you still need to first consider what you really want to do before proceeding with your education plans. If, for example, you have a passion for cooking, then it might be better to enter a chef training programme rather than spend two more years in school. On the other hand, if you want to be a teacher then class 12 will be your route to achieve your goal.

Anyway, whatever you do, you should do it to the best of your ability. At the same time, you should have no expectations about the result.

Maybe this example will be helpful: Think of the seeds of a sunflower and a violet. A sunflower seed will produce a large, bright yellow flower, while the seed of a violet will produce a small, dark purple bloom. A violet seed can never produce a sunflower blossom no matter how hard it tries. Likewise, a sunflower seed cannot produce the flower of a violet. Neither flower is better or worse than the other. They are just different. However, it is important that the flowers open fully and are not ashamed whether they are small or large, bright or dark.

In the same way, you might discover that you are great at studies or you might find that you are not so great. Like the seeds, you cannot change your natural inclinations, but like the flowers you have to open fully. This means that you try your very best in every situation.

Practically, to do your best means that whatever assignment you are given, you aim to do it beautifully – not to get high grades, but for your own satisfaction. If you have to compose an essay, for example, write each letter and word clearly and in a way that is easy for others to read. Do the same with a math or science or any other assignment. Make each page of your notebook a work of art.

Most importantly is to have tried your very best. Very nice article!

Source: http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/tough-at-home-but-teen-perseveres-and-scores-at-a-level-exams

Very inspirational!

Excerpt:

Richmond Tan does not have a study table in the one-room rental flat that he shares with his father, grandfather and brother.

There were times when he did not even have a roof over his head, after his family was temporarily chased out of the Queenstown flat as a result of spats between his father and the landlord.

Richmond had to sleep in void decks or at Changi Airport.

He said what motivated him to do well in his studies was his role model, Han Xin, one of the heroes of the early Han dynasty in China.

He learnt of Han after reading The Art Of War by Sun Tzu, which inspired him to take China Studies for his A levels.

“Han Xin was so poor he had to beg for food. His circumstances were even worse than mine, but he studied hard and became a capable minister,” he added.

Han Xin was also a mathematician, and one of the earliest to discover the secret of the Chinese Remainder Theorem, a key result in Number Theory. According to legend, he used it to calculate the number of soldiers in his army. See this post for more details: http://chinesetuition88.com/2015/04/25/chinese-remainder-theorem-history-%E9%9F%A9%E4%BF%A1%E7%82%B9%E5%85%B5/

Soure: http://www.christiantoday.com/article/the.bible.says.that.youre.going.to.fail/78603.htm

Interesting perspective on faith!

We look at society and the things around us and it’s obvious that most of the things around us teach us to be afraid of failure. We were taught not to get “F’s” in school because it’s a bad thing to fail. We try not to look clumsy and fail socially because people would laugh at us. We were told maybe once or twice by our parents not to make a fuss because we’ll embarrass them (and if you’re a parent who’s done that, don’t worry, I’ve done it too!)

Psychologists claim that every human being has a certain amount of fear towards failure. As a result of this fear of failure that we have adopted, we try to avoid it as much as we can. However, the Bible tells us that there is no use in avoiding failure because we have already failed.

Romans 3:23 puts it this way: “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We have all failed God, and as a result we have failed so miserably at the one thing we were created to do, which is to bring glory and honour to God. There’s not one person except Jesus who has succeeded at living life the way it should be lived, and everyone else has just failed.

And here’s the thing, we’re going to continue to fail. We’ll try and try and sometimes we may do one or two things right, but sooner or later everything is just going to go south on us. It’s a given for us to fail.

However, there is good news. Even when we fail, we’re still going to win because God has already won the battle for us. It’s like we’re in a game of basketball and we’re shooting 0 out of 100 baskets and it doesn’t matter because God is scoring where we’re failing. Psalm 73:26 tells us, “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”