Teach children to paint, and you will offer them a world of creativity that can last a life time. Start when children are young, and they will not feel the sting of criticism. 【小题1】

When you decide to teach a child to paint, don’t base the venture(冒险) on your experience. 【小题2】Or, your willingness to make mistakes. You don’t have to be good, you just have to be there.  

【小题3】 Instruct the child to pick a paint color that will be the background. The entire cardboard should be painted with this color, or a mixture of colors.  

After the first paint has dried somewhat, help the child decide what they want to do next. Paint a flower? A puppy? It doesn’t matter. Let the young artist know there will be plenty of paint days in their future. 【小题4】

Teaching your child to paint shouldn’t be too expensive. Think about investing a little in some paint supplies for future endeavors(努力;活动). Royal and Langnickel offers an art supply kit that is great for beginners. See www. royalbrush. com. We have some art supply kits purchased there that were $20, and include acrylics, oils, brushes, reusable palettes, and pastels.

【小题5】This will make the child more willing to learn. Be sure to have more paint days, eventually explaining some color theory, or art history. For other art ideas, see www.michaels.com.

Many people wonder what they can do to become well-rounded and competitive while increasing their rate of success. 【小题1】

Many of us seem to have lives that follow a certain way. From kindergarten all the way to getting married, every stage of our lives seems to be preset (预置). And although this works well for a lot of people, according to British scholar Jay Shetty, there is no “right” schedule to live our lives by.

A few months ago, a video of Shetty’s speech “Before You Feel Pressure” became popular on the Internet across the world. In the video, he sends an important message that we should think “outside of the way” and have the courage to follow our hearts. As Shetty says in the video, we don’t have to get stressed and put ourselves in the race with our peers (同龄人) or judge our lives based on others’. “Everything in life happens according to our time, our clocks,” he says.

In his inspiring speech, Shetty points out that UK author J. K. Rowing got her famous “Harry Potter” series published at age 32, after being turned down by 12 publishers. Shetty also mentions that Chinese businessman Jack Ma didn’t even start the Alibaba Group until he was 35 years old. So we shouldn’t let anyone rush us.

As physicist Albert Einstein once said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that is counted truly counts. The key to staying on our own tracks is to be patient and keep our own interest.” In Australian nurse Bronnie Ware’s best-selling book “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying”, she recorded the dying regrets of her patients, and the top one on the list was: “I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the one others expected of me.”

Indeed, we are all unique in our personalities and gifts, and there is no perfect fit for all. We should listen to our inner voices and ignore what the world has taught us, and what we have picked up from people around us. “It is important to allow people to go back to being self-aware of their own interests, needs and concerns”, Shetty told the magazine. “It’s disconnecting from what makes sense to what actually moves you and what makes sense internally (内在的).”