I had reached the age of twenty-eight. Still, I_______ whether the letter from my past would make it to me, all these years later. It was a creative writing task from when I was eighteen. The teacher collected our letters to our_______ selves in self-addressed envelope with stamps and promised to _______ them ten years later. But since so much time had passed, would he even _______ ?

Thinking back on the _______, I recalled giving my future self some advice. When you're eighteen years old, twenty-eight seems like a _______ age, but I wasn't feeling as mature as I believed my younger self had _______ me to be.

When the letter finally reached me, I opened it _______. It began, "How much do you bet this letter will never get to you? "It continued to greet me casually as if we were having an IM (instant messaging) chat. As a senior in high school, facing the _______ important exams and college application, my eighteen-year-old self was so __________! She was apparently not quite happy and hoped I wouldn't worry so much in the future, and that I wouldn't forget to be present and __________my life!

__________to my belief, my eighteen-year-old self did not have any demands of me, or expectations I might have failed to meet. Instead, she wrote, "I'll __________whatever you do. Even if you are not the one I'm imagining now, I'll support you, because maybe __________ I'm imagining is someone else, but you're not someone else, you're me.

I was __________ , and tears came to my eyes at this self-acceptance through time. I had put a lot of pressure on myself to be the best version of myself that I could be. However, I came to realize what I would have accomplished in ten years would pale in comparison(相形见绌)to how I'd feel and who I'd be.

Take Heart, and Take Risks

Recently, we carried out an interesting social experiment. The participants were asked to choose between two _______: throw a coin to win one billion dollars if the coin happens to land on heads, or get a 10-million-dollar cheque without even throwing the coin.

Our purpose was not to measure the participants’ craze for money but to _______ their risk appetite. It _______ that a clear majority chose to take home the 10 million dollars. Only 31% of the subjects were _______ enough to test the depths of the river. Another study, conducted by psychology professor Keith Simonton at the University of California Davis, shows that most famous scientific _______ are risk-takers. Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton all dared to chase ideas that were _______ the mainstream ideas of their times.

The willingness to take risks without fear of failure is what _______ individuals towards achieving their ambitions. It forms a very important part of the stories of many successful businessmen globally.

The journey of Mark Zuckerberg is a classic example of this. In his second year in college, Zuckerberg decided to quit Harvard University to manage his social application company. In the years that followed, quite a few tech giants expressed early interest in purchasing the company. Their offers were _______. At the time, the young CEO and his team were widely criticized and publicly laughed at.

Today, Zuckerberg is one of the richest men on earth. His company still owns the most widely used social networking site in the world, _______ together over 2.8 billion users globally.

The lesson from Zuckerberg’s story is his risk-taking ________. He’s exactly the kind of person who’s willing to ________ interests for more rewarding future gains.

Generally, ________ achievements are often realized once a person decides to get out of their comfort zone. People’s ability to ________ from their comfort zone is closely tied to their risk-taking strength. It is like the case of a person who wishes to get a piece of fruit from the tree but is not willing to risk climbing up the branches of the tree in order to do so. “If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to ________ the ordinary,” said the American author Jim Rohn.

The willingness to take risks is the oxygen that drives success in every field. If a risk-taker succeeds, he can lead others. If he fails, he may ________ others to success.

I have trouble focusing on one thing at a time. I get excited about something and I’ll devote all my ________ to it for a couple of weeks. Then I’ll find something else that I’ll get even more excited about and focus on that ________. Many tasks get halfway finished and abandoned (放弃). It’s hard for me to fully ________ anything without setting a goal for myself. My head works better with a plan than without it.

I find this to be ________ for a lot of people: self- imposed (自我强加的) plans get things done more ________ than simply taking uninformed actions.

If your goal is to lose weight, the actions you take (what you eat, how much you exercise,   the amount of sleep you get) should all be ________ by the desire to lose weight. If you go out there ________ and do what you like, you may find yourself eating a whole box of cookies, saying, “Damn, I love Oreos (奥利奥)!”

Bringing yourself back to your ________ is a great way to stay grounded and motivated. Whenever I’ve lost sight of my goals, I feel the difference. I feel ________ and bad about myself, like I’m letting myself ________. When I’m aiming for a goal and taking ________ toward it, I feel inspired.

People against goals would tell me that it’s because I set the goals in the ________ place that I feel guilty and bad about myself. I wonder if feeling bad about myself because I’m ________to live up to my full potential is such a bad thing, I think we should always ________ to achieve more in our lives and be ________ for what we have.