21世纪大学英语读写教程第四册text A课文原文

Who Is Great?

Michael Ryan

As a young boy, Albert Einstein did so poorly in school that teachers thought he was slow. The young Napoleon Bonaparte was just one of hundreds of artillery lieutenants in the French Army. And the teenage George Washington, with little formal education, was being trained not as a soldier but as a land surveyor. Despite their unspectacular beginnings, each would go on to carve a place for himself in history. What was it that enabled them to become great? Were they born with something special? Or did their greatness have more to do with timing, devotion and, perhaps, an uncompromising personality?

For decades, scientists have been asking such questions. And, in the past few years, they have found evidence to help explain why some people rise above, while others—similarly talented, perhaps—are left behind. Their findings could have implications for us all. Who is great? Defining who is great depends on how one measures success. But there are some criteria. "Someone who has made a lasting contribution to human civilization is great," said Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis and author of the 1994 book Greatness: Who Makes History and Why. But he added a word of caution: "Sometimes great people don't make it into the history books. A lot of women achieved great things or were influential but went unrecognized." In writing his book, Simonton combined historical knowledge about great figures with recent findings in genetics, psychiatry and the social sciences. The great figures he focused on include men and women who have won Nobel Prizes, led great nations or won wars, composed symphonies that have endured for centuries, or revolutionized science, philosophy, politics or the arts. Though he doesn't have a formula to define how or why certain people rise above (too many factors are involved), he has come up with a few common characteristics.

A "never surrender" attitude. If great achievers share anything, said

Simonton, it is an unrelenting drive to succeed. "There's a tendency to think that they are endowed with something super-normal," he explained. "But what comes out of the research is that there are great people who have no amazing intellectual processes. It's a difference in degree. Greatness is built upon tremendous amounts of study, practice and devotion."

He cited Winston Churchill, Britain's prime minister during World War II, as an example of a risk-taker who would never give up. Thrust into office when his country's morale was at its lowest, Churchill rose brilliantly to lead the British people. In a speech following the Allied evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940, he inspired the nation when he said, "We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end...We shall never surrender."

Can you be born great? In looking at Churchill's role in history—as well as the roles of other political and military leaders—Simonton discovered a striking pattern: "Firstborns and only children tend to make good leaders in time of crisis: They're used to taking charge. But middle-borns are better as peacetime leaders: They listen to different interest groups better and make the necessary compromises. Churchill, an only child, was typical. He was great in a crisis, but in peacetime he was not effective—not even popular." Timing is another factor. "If you took George Washington and put him in the 20th century he would go nowhere as a politician," Simonton declared. "He was not an effective public speaker, and he didn't like shaking hands with the public. On the other hand, I'm not sure Franklin Roosevelt would have done well in Washington's time. He wouldn't have had the radio to do his fireside chats." Can you be too smart? One surprise among Simonton's findings is that many political and military leaders have been bright but not overly so. Beyond a certain point, he explained, other factors, like the ability to communicate effectively, become more important than innate intelligence as measured by an IQ test. The most intelligent U.S. Presidents, for example—Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy—had a hard time getting elected, Simonton said, while others with IQs closer to the average (such as Warren G. Harding) won by landslides. While political and economic factors also are involved, having a genius IQ is

not necessary to be a great leader. In the sciences, those with "genius level" IQs do have a better chance at achieving recognition, added Simonton. Yet evidence also indicates that overcoming traditional ways of thinking may be just as important. He pointed to one recent study where college students were given a set of data and were asked to see if they could come up with a mathematical relation. Almost a third did. What they did not know was that they had just solved one of the most famous scientific equations in history: the Third Law of Planetary Motion, an equation that Johannes Kepler came up with in 1618. Kepler's genius, Simonton said, was not so much in solving a mathematical challenge. It was in thinking about the numbers in a unique way—applying his mathematical knowledge to his observations of planetary motion. It was his boldness that set him apart. Love your work. As a child, Einstein became fascinated with the way magnets are drawn to metal. "He couldn't stop thinking about this stuff," Simonton pointed out. "He became obsessed with problems in physics by the time he was 16, and he never stopped working on them. It's not surprising that he made major contributions by the time he was 26."

"For most of us, it's not that we don't have the ability," Simonton added, "it's that we don't devote the time. You have to put in the effort and put up with all the frustrations and obstacles." Like other creative geniuses, Einstein was not motivated by a desire for fame, said Simonton. Instead, his obsession with his work was what set him apart. Where such drive comes from remains a mystery. But it is found in nearly all creative geniuses—whether or not their genius is acknowledged by contemporaries.

"Emily Dickinson was not recognized for her poetry until after her death," said Simonton. "But she was not writing for fame. The same can be said of James Joyce, who didn't spend a lot of time worrying about how many people would read Finnegans Wake." Today, researchers have evidence that an intrinsic passion for one's work is a key to rising above. In a 1985 study at Brandeis University conducted by Teresa Amabile, now a professor of business administration

at Harvard University, a group of professional writers—none famous—were asked to write a short poem. Each writer was then randomly placed in one of three groups: One group was asked to keep in mind the idea of writing for money; another was told to think about writing just for pleasure; and a third group was given no instruction at all. The poems then were submitted anonymously to a panel of professional writers for evaluation. The poetry written by people who thought about writing for money ranked lowest. Those who thought about writing just for pleasure did the best. "Motivation that comes from enjoying the work makes a significant difference, "Amabile said.

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The Gratitude We Need

A.J. Cronin

On a fine afternoon in New York, I got into a taxi. From the driver's expression and the way he slammed in his gears, I could tell that he was upset. I asked him what was the trouble. "I've got good reason to be sore," he growled. "One of my fares left a wallet in my cab this morning. Nearly three hundred bucks in it. I spent more than an hour trying to trace the guy. Finally I found him at his hotel. He took the wallet without a word and glared at me as though I'd meant to steal it." "He didn't give you a reward?" I exclaimed. "Not a cent. But it wasn't the dough I wanted..." he fumbled, then exploded, "If the guy had only said something..." Because his helpful, honest act had not been appreciated, that cabdriver's day was poisoned, and I knew he would think twice before rendering a similar service. The need for gratitude is something we all feel, and denial of it can do much to harm the spirit of kindness and cooperation.

During World War II a mother in Cincinnati received a letter from her son in the army in which he spoke of a woman in a village in Normandy who had taken him into her home when he was wounded and hungry, and hidden him from the Germans. Later on, unhappily, the boy was killed in the Ardennes offensive. Yet the mother was moved by an irresistible intention. She saved up for two years, crossed the Atlantic and located

the village referred to by her son. After many inquiries, she found the woman who had sheltered her son—the wife of an impoverished farmer—and pressed a package into her hand. It was the gold wristwatch her son had received on his graduation, the only object of real value the boy had ever possessed. The mother's act of gratitude so touched people's hearts that it has become something of a legend in and around the village. It has done more than fine speeches to foster good feeling toward Americans. Gratitude is the art of receiving gracefully, of showing appreciation for every kindness, great and small. Most of us do not fail to show our pleasure when we receive hospitality, gifts and obvious benefits, but even here we can perfect our manner of showing gratitude by making it as personal and sincere as possible. Recently, when touring in southern Italy with my wife, I sent to a friend in Connecticut several bottles of a local wine which had taken our fancy. It was a trifling gift, yet to our surprise, instead of the conventional letter of thanks, we receive a phonograph record. When we played it, we heard our friend's voice speaking after dinner, describing how he and his guests had enjoyed the wine and thanking us for our thoughtfulness. It was pleasant to have this unusual proof that our gift had been appreciated. Gratitude is sometimes more than a personal affair. My son, studying medicine at McGill University, told me of a patient brought into hospital in Montreal whose life was saved by a blood transfusion. When he was well again he asked: "Isn't there any way I can discover the name of the donor and thank him?" He was told that names of donors are never revealed. A few weeks after his discharge he came back to give a pint of his own blood. Since then he has returned again and again for the same purpose. When a surgeon commented on this splendid record of anonymous service, he answered simply: "Someone I never knew did it for me. I'm just saying 'thanks'". It is a comforting thought that gratitude can be not merely a passing sentiment but a renewal which can, in some instances, persist for a lifetime. A husband who recalls appreciatively some generous or unselfish act on his wife's part, or a wife who never forgets the gifts her husband has given her, does much to keep the domestic wheels spinning smoothly. W.H. Hudson, British author and naturalist, has written: "One evening I brought home a friend to share our usual evening

meal. Afterward he said to me:‘You are fortunate to have a wife who, despite ill health and children to look after, cooks such excellent meals.' That tribute opened my eyes and taught me to show gratitude for my wife's day-to-day heroism, which I had hitherto taken for granted." It is, above all, in the little things that the grace of gratitude should be most employed. The boy who delivers our paper, the milkman, the mailman, the barber, the waitress at a restaurant, the elevator operator—all oblige us in one way or another. By showing our gratitude we make routine relationships human and render monotonous tasks more agreeable.

A patient of mine in London who worked as a bus conductor once confided to me, "I get fed up with my job sometimes. People grumble, bother you, haven't got the right change for their tickets. But there's one lady on my bus morning and evening, and she always thanks me in a particularly friendly way when I take her ticket. I like to think she's speaking for all the passengers. It helps me to keep smiling." Arnold Bennett had a publisher who boasted about the extraordinary efficiency of his secretary. One day Bennett said to her, "Your employer claims that you are extremely efficient. What is your secret?" "It's not my secret," the secretary replied. "It's his." Each time she performed a service, no matter how small, he never failed to acknowledge it. Because of that she took infinite pains with her work. Some persons refrain from expressing their gratitude because they feel it will not be welcome. A patient of mine, a few weeks after his discharge from the hospital, came back to thank his nurse. "I didn't come back sooner," he explained, "because I imagined you must be bored to death with people thanking you." "On the contrary," she replied, "I am delighted you came. Few realize how much we need encouragement and how much we are helped by those who give it." Gratitude is something of which none of us can give too much. For on the smiles, the thanks we give, our little gestures of appreciation, our neighbors build up their philosophy of life.

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How to Change Your Point of View

Caroline Seebohm

Dr. Edward Jenner was busy trying to solve the problem of smallpox. After studying case after case, he still found no possible cure. He had reached an impasse in his thinking. At this point, he changed his tactics. Instead of focusing on people who had smallpox, he switched his attention to people who did not have smallpox. It turned out that dairymaids apparently never got the disease. From the discovery that harmless cowpox gave protection against deadly smallpox came vaccination and the end of smallpox as a scourge in the western world. We often reach an impasse in our thinking. We are looking at a problem and trying to solve it and it seems there is a dead end. It is on these occasions that we become tense, we feel pressured, overwhelmed, in a state of stress. We struggle vainly, fighting to solve the problem. Dr. Jenner, however, did something about this situation. He stopped fighting the problem and simply changed his point of view—from his patients to dairy maids. Picture the process going something like this: Suppose the brain is a computer. This computer has absorbed into its memory bank all your history, your experiences, your training, your information received through life; and it is programmed according to all this data. To change your point of view, you must reprogramme your computer, thus freeing yourself to take in new ideas and develop new ways of looking at things. Dr. Jenner, in effect, by reprogramming his computer, erased the old way of looking at his smallpox problem and was free to receive new alternatives. That's all very well, you may say, but how do we actually do that? Doctor and philosopher Edward de Bono has come up with a technique for changing our point of view, and he calls it Lateral Thinking. The normal Western approach to a problem is to fight it. The saying, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going," is typical of this aggressive attitude toward problem-solving. No matter what the problem is, or the techniques available for solving it, the framework produced by our Western way of thinking is fight. Dr. de Bono calls this vertical thinking; the traditional, sequential, Aristotelian thinking of logic, moving firmly from one step to the next, like toy blocks being built one on top of the other. The flaw is, of course, that if at any point one of

the steps is not reached, or one of the toy blocks is incorrectly placed, then the whole structure collapses. Impasse is reached, and frustration, tension, feelings of fight take over. Lateral thinking, Dr. de Bono says, is a new technique of thinking about things—a technique that avoids this fight altogether, and solves the problem in an entirely unexpected fashion. In one of Sherlock Holmes's cases, his assistant, Dr. Watson, pointed out that a certain dog was of no importance to the case because it did not appear to have done anything. Sherlock Holmes took the opposite point of view and maintained that the fact the dog had done nothing was of the utmost significance, for it should have been expected to do something, and on this basic he solved the case. Lateral thinking sounds simple. And it is. Once you have solved a problem laterally, you wonder how you could ever have been hung up on it. The key is making that vital shift in emphasis, that sidestepping of the problem, instead of attacking it head-on. Dr. A. A. Bridger, psychiatrist at Columbia University and in private practice in New York, explains how lateral thinking works with his patients. "Many people come to me wanting to stop smoking, for instance," he says. "Most people fail when they are trying to stop smoking because they wind up telling themselves, 'No, I will not smoke; no, 1 shall not smoke; no, I will not; no, I cannot...' It's a fight and what happens is you end up smoking more." "So instead of looking at the problem from the old ways of no, and fighting it, I show them a whole new point of view—that you are your body's keeper, and your body is something through which you experience life. If you stop to think about it, there's really something helpless about your body. It can do nothing for itself. It has no choice, it is like a baby's body. You begin then a whole new way of looking at it—‘I am now going to take care of myself, and give myself some respect and protection, by not smoking.' “There is a Japanese parable about a donkey tied to a pole by a rope. The rope rubs tight against his neck. The more the donkey fights and pulls on the rope, the tighter and tighter it gets around his throat—until he winds up dead. On the other hand, as soon as he stops fighting, he finds that the rope gets slack, he can walk around, maybe find some

grass to eat...That's the same principle: The more you fight something the more anxious you become—the more you're involved in a bad pattern, the more difficult it is to escape pain. "Lateral thinking," Dr. Bridger goes on, "is simply approaching a problem with what I would call an Eastern flanking maneuver. You know, when a zen archer wants to hit the target with a bow and arrow, he doesn't concentrate on the target, he concentrates rather on what he has in his hands, so when he lets the arrow go, his focus is on the arrow, rather than the target. This is what an Eastern flanking maneuver implies—instead of approaching the target directly, you approach it from a sideways point of view—or laterally instead of vertically." "I think the answer lies in that direction," affirms Dr. Bridger. "Take the situation where someone is in a crisis. The Chinese word for crisis is divided into two characters, one meaning danger and the other meaning opportunity. We in the Western world focus only up on the ‘danger' aspect of crisis. Crisis in Western civilization has come to mean danger, period. And yet the word can also mean opportunity. Let us now suggest to the person in crisis that he cease concentrating so upon the dangers involved and the difficulties, and concentrate instead upon the opportunity—for there is always opportunity in crisis. Looking at a crisis from an opportunity point of view is a lateral thought."

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How to Become Gifted

Julius and Barbara Fast

In a study of educational techniques, a teacher was told r that her newclass were all gifted children. "You should get above-average results from them," she was advised, and by the end of the term she was getting just that, better than average work. The remarkable thing about it all was that in reality the class was not unusual. They were just an average group of students with IQs within the normal range. The teacher had been deceived about their potential. This study uncovered many answers to many questions about teaching and children, but it left even more questions unanswered. One point it did make with unusual clarity is that a child will usually live up to a

teacher's expectations when the child believes those expectations are honest.

An unanswered question was: In what way did the teacher communicate to the students that they were special and could do superior work? She didn't tell them that in so many words, but obviously something about her attitude convinced the students that they were gifted. Further studies showed that the special "something" in the teacher's attitude was, in part, the type of work she gave the class, and in part how she presented it. But the strongest "something" was the teacher herself and her attitude toward the class and toward their ability. There was an extra amount of confidence and interest in her voice that said, "You're bright children." There was a constant reassuring tone that told them they would do well, very well. The children picked up these signals and reacted positively to them. When a student's work did not measure up to the teacher's expectations, as often happened, the student was not treated with disappointment, anger, or annoyance. Instead, the teacher assumed that this was an exception, an accident, a bad day, a momentary slip — and the student believed her and felt reassured. The next time around, he tried harder, determined to live up to what the teacher knew he could do. The exact part of communication that tells a child, "I expect the best," is difficult to pinpoint. In part it consists of a level tone showing assurance, a lack of verbal impatience, an absence of negative qualities such as irony, put-downs, and irritation. The teacher who expects the best asks her questions with conviction, knowing the answers she gets will be right, and the child picks up that conviction. Most of this is transmitted through the voice, but a surprising amount is in the attitude, in touch, and in facial expression. An experiment similar to the one done with "gifted" children was done with "gifted" mice. A scientist was given a group of ordinary mice, but told that they were a special breed, trained to run a maze in record time. Working with these mice, the scientist found that they did learn faster than other mice and did run the maze more quickly. But mice know nothing of our language. How was the scientist able to communicate his expectations to them? An examination of all the variables in the test concluded that the unusually good results were due

to the way he had handled the mice, the way he talked to them and the tone, the confidence, the reassurance, and the certainty in his voice. They absorbed all the messages and performed accordingly! In a broader view of both these experiments, the teacher and the scientist used a principle common to all societies at all levels — the principle of labeling. All our expectations are prejudiced, and we have very different expectations for different people, even on a national level. We think of people in terms of national characteristics. We expect Americans to be greedy, after the big buck, and we label them that way in our minds. We label Germans neat and orderly, English cold, distant, and reserved, Italians emotional, Japanese polite——and so it goes. We pin a very narrow label on a very broad, far from homogeneous group. We do it on racial levels too. Blacks are musical, Indians are stoic, Orientals inscrutable. We even label the sexes —men are aggressive, women passive. On a family basis, the labels are sometimes attached by the neighbors. "Those Joneses are trash...always on welfare." Or the label may be attached by the family itself. "We Smiths would rather go hungry than ask for government help！" The Smith boy, growing up with this label of awesome independence, lives up to it as readily as the Jones girl lives up to her label. "They all think we're trash? I'll act like trash！" The label may be less inclusive, even sexist. One family might say proudly, "The men in our family are always professionals." When Bill, a son in this family finds that carpentry is the work he loves best, he faces a family conflict —and a conflict with himself. His inner strength may allow him to go through with his own desires and become a carpenter, but then he knows that he hasn't lived up to the family label and he goes through life with a sense of guilt. He may even create his own label. "I'm a failure, really." It doesn't matter that Bill is a success in his field, that in time he owns his own business and makes more money than his brother Bob, who became a lawyer. Bill is still not a professional man, and as a result his inner label still reads failure. Labeling within a family starts very early. Before the baby understands verbal language, he responds to body language and indirect communication. He senses the love in his parents' voice before he understands the words, and he also senses the rejection, indifference, fear, or hostility, and

he reacts to those emotions too. If he's treated with love and gentleness, he responds with both emotions. Later, when he understands speech, he accepts his label. Jimmy is the nice one in the family, or Sally, who's been a difficult baby, earns the label of troublemaker. Each child, along with his given name, picks up a label. She's the clever one. He's the pushy one. Norman is always late. Betty is so hard to love. Barbara is cold. Jack is wild. Natalie is sweet, and so on. The labels may reflect reality. Natalie may be sweet, but as often as not the reality has been imposed on the child by the label. If Natalie hears that she is sweet often enough, she begins to act sweet. You tend to live up to your label. In the same way, the students in the teaching experiment were labeled bright, and they managed to be bright, to work beyond their ordinary ability.

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Prison Studies

Malcolm X

Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read something I've said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade. This impression is due entirely to my prison studies. It had really begun back in the Charlestown Prison, when Bimbi first made me feel envy of his stock of knowledge. Bimbi had always taken charge of any conversation he was in, and I had tried to emulate him. But every book I picked up had few sentences which didn't contain anywhere from one to nearly all of the words that might as well have been in Chinese. When I just skipped those words, of course, I really ended up with little idea of what the book said. So I had come to the Norfolk Prison Colony still going through only book-reading motions. Pretty soon, I would have quit even these motions, unless I had received the motivation that I did.

I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary—to study, to learn some words. I was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to improve my penmanship. It was sad. I couldn't even write in a straight line. It was both ideas together that moved me to request

a dictionary along with some tablets and pencils from the Norfolk Prison Colony school.

I spent two days just thumbing uncertainly through the dictionary's pages. I've never realized so many words existed! I didn't know which words I needed to learn. Finally, to start some kind of action, I began copying.

In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.

I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I've written on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting.

I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words—immensely proud to realize that not only had I written so much at one time, but I've written words that I never knew were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could remember what many of these words meant. I reviewed the words whose meanings I didn't remember. Funny thing, from the dictionary's first page right now, that "aardvark" springs to my mind. The dictionary had a picture of it, a long-tailed, long-eared, burrowing African mammal, which lives off termites caught by sticking out its tongue as an anteater does for ants.

I was so fascinated that I went on—I copied the dictionary's next page. And the same experience came when I studied that. With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia. Finally the dictionary's A section had filled a whole tablet—and I went on into the B's. That was the way I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary. I went a lot faster after so much practice helped me to pick up handwriting speed. Between what I wrote in my tablet, and writing letters, during the rest of my time in prison I would guess I wrote a million words.

I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something; from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn't have got me out of books

with a wedge. Between Mr. Muhammad's teachings, my correspondence, my visitors, and my reading of books, months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life... As you can imagine, especially in a prison where there was heavy emphasis on rehabilitation, an inmate was smiled upon if he demonstrated an unusually intense interest in books. There was a sizable number of well-read inmates, especially the popular debaters. Some were said by many to be practically walking encyclopedias. They were almost celebrities. No university would ask any student to devour literature as I did when this new world opened to me, of being able to read and understand.

I read more in my room than in the library itself. An inmate who was known to read a lot could check out more than the permitted maximum number of books. I preferred reading in the total isolation of my own room.

When I had progressed to really serious reading, every night at about ten p.m. I would be outraged with the "lights out." It always seemed to catch me right in the middle of something engrossing. Fortunately, right outside my door was a corridor light that cast a glow into my room. The glow was enough to read by, once my eyes adjusted to it. So when "lights out" came, I would sit on the floor where I could continue reading in that glow. At one-hour intervals the night guards paced past every room. Each time I heard the approaching footsteps, I jumped into bed and feigned sleep. And as soon as the guard passed, I got back out of bed onto the floor area of that light-glow, where I would read for another fifty-eight minutes—until the guard approached again. That went on until three or four every morning. Three or four hours of sleep a night was enough for me. Often in the years in the streets I had slept less than that.

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn't seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a

little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books." You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I'm not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man... Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book that I want to read—and that's a lot of books these days. If I weren't out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity—because you can hardly mention anything I'm not curious about. I don't think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I had attended some college. I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions. Where else but in prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day?

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The EQ Factor

Nancy Gibbs

It turns out that a scientist can see the future by watching four-year-olds interact with a marshmallow. The researcher invites the children, one by one, into a plain room and begins the gentle torment. You can have this marshmallow right now, he says. But if you wait while I run an errand, you can have two marshmallows when I get back. And then he leaves.

Some children grab for the treat the minute he's out the door. Some last a few minutes before they give in. But others are determined to wait. They cover their eyes; they put their heads down; they sing to themselves; they try to play games or even fall asleep. When the researcher returns, he gives these children their hard-earned marshmallows. And then, science waits for them to grow up. By the time the children reach high school, something remarkable has happened. A survey of the children's parents and teachers found that

those who as four-year-olds had enough self-control to hold out for the second marshmallow generally grew up to be better adjusted, more popular, adventurous, confident and dependable teenagers. The children who gave in to temptation early on were more likely to be lonely, easily frustrated and stubborn. They could not endure stress and shied away from challenges. And when some of the students in the two groups took the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the kids who had held out longer scored an average of 210 points higher. When we think of brilliance we see Einstein, deep-eyed, woolly haired, a thinking machine with skin and mismatched socks. High achievers, we imagine, were wired for greatness from birth. But then you have to wonder why, over time, natural talent seems to ignite in some people and dim in others. This is where the marshmallows come in. It seems that the ability to delay gratification is a master skill, a triumph of the reasoning brain over the impulsive one. It is a sign, in short, of emotional intelligence. And it doesn't show up on an IQ test. For most of this century, scientists have worshipped the hardware of the brain and the software of the mind; the messy powers of the heart were left to the poets. But cognitive theory could simply not explain the questions we wonder about most: why some people just seem to have a gift for living well; why the smartest kid in the class will probably not end up the richest; why we like some people virtually on sight and distrust others; why some people remain upbeat in the face of troubles that would sink a less resilient soul. What qualities of the mind or spirit, in short, determine who succeeds? The phrase "emotional intelligence" was coined by Yale psychologist Peter Salovey and the University of New Hampshire's John Mayer five years ago to describe qualities like understanding one's own feelings, empathy for the feelings of others and "the regulation of emotion in a way that enhances living." Their notion is about to bound into the national conversation, handily shortened to EQ, thanks to a new book, Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. Goleman, a Harvard psychology Ph.D. and a New York Times science writer with a gift for making even the most difficult scientific theories digestible to lay readers, has brought together a decade's worth of behavioral research into how the mind processes feelings. His goal, he announces on the cover, is to

redefine what it means to be smart. His thesis: when it comes to predicting people's success, brainpower as measured by IQ and standardized achievement tests may actually matter less than the qualities of mind once thought of as "character" before the word began to sound old-fashioned. At first glance, there would seem to be little that's new here to any close reader of fortune cookies. There may be no less original idea than the notion that our hearts hold dominion over our heads. "I was so angry," we say, "I couldn't think straight." Neither is it surprising that "people skills" are useful, which amounts to saying, it's good to be nice. "It's so true it's trivial," says Dr. Paul McHugh, director of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. But if it were that simple, the book would not be quite so interesting or its implications so controversial. This is no abstract investigation. Goleman is looking for antidotes to restore "civility to our streets and caring to our communal life." He sees practical applications everywhere for how companies should decide whom to hire, how couples can increase the odds that their marriages will last, how parents should raise their children and how schools should teach them. When street gangs substitute for families and schoolyard insults end in stabbings, when more than half of marriages end in divorce, when the majority of the children murdered in this country are killed by parents and stepparents, many of whom say they were trying to discipline the child for behavior like blocking the TV or crying too much, it suggests a demand for remedial emotional education. And it is here the arguments will break out. Goleman's highly popularized conclusions, says McHugh, "will chill any veteran scholar of psychotherapy and any neuroscientist who worries about how his research may come to be applied." While many researchers in this relatively new field are glad to see emotional issues finally taken seriously, they fear that a notion as handy as EQ invites misuse. Goleman admits the danger of suggesting that you can assign a numerical value to a person's character as well as his intellect; Goleman never even uses the phrase EQ in his book. But he did somewhat reluctantly approve an "unscientific" EQ test in USA Today with choices like "I am aware of even subtle feelings as I have them," and "I can sense the pulse of a

group or relationship and state unspoken feelings." "You don't want to take an average of your emotional skill," argues Harvard psychology professor Jerome Kagan, a pioneer in child-development research. "That's what's wrong with the concept of intelligence for mental skills too. Some people handle anger well but can't handle fear. Some people can't take joy. So each emotion has to be viewed differently." EQ is not the opposite of IQ. Some people are blessed with a lot of both, some with little of either. What researchers have been trying to understand is how they complement each other; how one's ability to handle stress, for instance, affects the ability to concentrate and put intelligence to use. Among the ingredients for success, researchers now generally agree that IQ counts for about 20%; the rest depends on everything from class to luck to the neural pathways that have developed in the brain over millions of years of human evolution.

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Running a Successful Company: Ten Rules that Worked for Me

Sam Walton

A whole lot has changed about the retailing business in the forty-seven years we've been in it—including some of my theories. We've changed our minds about some significant things along the way and adopted some new principles —particularly about the concept of partnership in a corporation. But most of the values and the rules and the techniques we've relied on have stayed the same the whole way. Some of them are such simple commonsense old favorites that they hardly seem worth mentioning.

This isn't the first time that I've been asked to come up with a list of rules for success, but it is the first time I've actually sat down and done it. I'm glad 1 did because it's been a revealing exercise for me. I do seem to have a couple of dozen things that I've singled out at one time or another as the "key" to the whole thing. One I don't even have on my list is "work hard." If you don't know that already, or you're not willing to do it, you probably won't be going far enough to need my list anyway. And another I didn't include on the list is the idea of building

a team. If you want to build an enterprise of any size at all, it almost goes without saying that you absolutely must create a team of people who work together and give real meaning to that overused word "teamwork." To me, that's more the goal of the whole thing, rather than some way to get there.

I believe in always having goals, and always setting them high. I can certainly tell you that the folks at Wal-Mart have always had goals in front of them. In fact, we have sometimes built real scoreboards on the stage at Saturday morning meetings. One more thing. If you're really looking for my advice here, trying to get something serious out of this exercise I put myself through, remember: these rules are not in any way intended to be the Ten Commandments of Business. They are some rules that worked for me. But I always prided myself on breaking everybody else's rules, and I always favored the mavericks who challenged my rules. I may have fought them all the way, but I respected them, and, in the end, I listened to them a lot more closely than I did the pack who always agreed with everything I said. So pay special attention to Rule 10, and if you interpret it in the right spirit — as it applies to you — it could mean simply: Break All the Rules. For what they're worth, here they are. Sam's Rules for Building a Business:

RULE 1: COMMIT to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else. I think I overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work. I don't know if you're born with this kind of passion, or if you can learn it. But I do know you need it. If you love your work, you'll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you —like a fever.

RULE 2: SHARE your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations. Remain a corporation and retain control if you like, but behave as a servant leader in a partnership. Encourage your associates to hold a stake in the company.

Offer discounted stock, and grant them stock for their retirement. It's the single best thing we ever did.

RULE 3: MOTIVATE your partners. Money and ownership alone aren't enough. Constantly, day by day, think of new and more interesting ways to motivate and challenge your partners. Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score. Make bets with outrageous payoffs. If things get stale, cross-pollinate; have managers switch jobs with one another to stay challenged. Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don't become too predictable.

RULE 4: COMMUNICATE everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know, the more they'll understand. The more they understand, the more they'll care. Once they care, there's no stopping them. If you don't trust your associates to know what's going on, they'll know you don't really consider them partners. Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitors.

RULE 5: APPRECIATE everything your associates do for the business. A paycheck and a stock option will buy one kind of loyalty. But all of us like to be told how much somebody appreciates what we do for them. We like to hear it often, and especially when we have done something we're really proud of. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free —and worth a fortune.

RULE 6: CELEBRATE your successes. Find some humor in your failures. Don't take yourself so seriously. Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up. Have fun. Show enthusiasm — always. When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song. Then make everybody else sing with you. Don't do a hula on Wall Street like I did. Think up your own stunt. All of this is more important, and more fun, than you think, and it really fools the competition. "Why should we take those cornballs at Wal-Mart seriously?"