Jerry was the kind of guy you love to hate. He was always in a good mood and always had something positive to say. Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up to Jerry and asked him, “I don’t get it! You can’t be a positive person all the time. How do you do it?” Jerry replied, “Each morning I wake up and say to myself, ‘Jerry, you have two choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood.’ I choose to be in a good mood.”

“Yeah, right, but it’s not that easy,” I protested. “Yes, it is,” Jerry said. “Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people will affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line it’s your choice how to live life.”

Several years later, I heard that Jerry did something you are never supposed to do in a restaurant business he left the back door open one morning and was held up at gunpoint by three armed robbers While trying to open the safe, the robbers panicked and shot him. Luckily, Jerry was found immediately and sent to the local hospital. After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Jerry was released from the hospital with fragments of the bullets still in his body.

I saw Jerry about six months after the accident. When I asked him about the incident, he replied, “Wanna see my scars?” I declined to see his wounds, but did ask him what had gone through his mind as the robbery took place. “The first thing that came into my mind was that I should have locked the back door,” Jerry replied. “Then as I lay on the floor, I remembered that I had two choices I could choose to live, or choose to die. I choose to live.”

Jerry lived thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude. I learned from him that every day we have the choice to live fully. Attitude, after all, is everything.

The Two Roads

It was New Year’s night. An aged man was standing at a window. He raised his mournful eyes towards the deep blue sky, where the stars were floating like white lilies on the surface of a clear calm lake. When he cast them on the earth, where few more hopeless people than himself now moved towards their certain goal—the tomb. He had already passed sixty of the stages leading to it, and he had brought from his journey nothing but errors and remorse. Now his health was poor, his mind vacant, his heart sorrowful, and his old age short of comforts.

The days of his youth appeared like dreams before him, and he recalled the serious moment when his father placed him at the entrance of the two roads-one leading to a peaceful, sunny place, covered with flowers, fruits and resounding with soft, sweet songs; the other leading to a deep, dark cave, which was endless, where poison flowed instead of water and where devils and poisonous snakes hissed and crawled.

He looked towards the sky and cried painfully, “Youth, return! Oh, my father, place me once more at the entrance to life, and I’ll choose the better way!” But both his father and the days of his youth had passed away.

He saw the lights flowing away in the darkness. These were the days of his wasted life; he saw a star fall from the sky and disappeared, and this was the symbol of himself. His remorse, which was like a sharp sorrow, struck deeply into his heart. Then he remembers his friends in his childhood, which entered life together with him. But they had made their way to success and were now honored and happy on this New Year’s night.

The clock in the high church tower struck and the sound made him remember his parents’ early love for him. They had taught him and prayed to God for his good. But he chose the wrong way. With shame and grief, he dared no longer to look towards the heaven where his father lived. His darkened eyes were full of tears, and with a despairing effort, he burst out a cry, “Come back, my early days! Come back!”

And his youth did return, for all this was only a dream, which he had on New Year’s night. He was still young though his faults were real; he had not yet entered the deep, dark cave, and he was still free to walk on the road which leads to the peaceful and sunny land.

Those who still linger on the entrance of life, hesitating to choose the bright road, remember that when years are passed and your feet stumble on the dark mountains, you will cry bitterly, but in vain. “Oh, youth, return! Oh give me back my early days!”

“Do not get the idea that you’re anything special, because you’re not.” This is what English, teacher David McCullough told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School. Mothers and fathers present at the ceremony — and a whole lot of other parents across the internet — took issue with McCullough’s words. But lost in the anger and protest was something we really should be taking to heart: our young people actually have no idea whether they’re particularly talented or not. In our eagerness to raise their self-esteem, we forgot to teach them how to realistically assess their own abilities. In fact, it’s not just privileged high-school students: we all tend to view ourselves as above average. Therefore, it is of vital significance for us to learn and teach our kids how to evaluate ourselves (themselves) objectively.

Inflated (膨胀的) self-judgments have been found in study after study, and it’s often exactly when we’re least competent (有能力的) at a given task that we rate our performance most generously. In a 2020 study published in the journal Medical Education, for example, medical students who scored the lowest on an essay test were the most sympathetic in their self-evaluations, while high-scoring students judged themselves much more strictly. Poor learners, the authors note, “lack insight” into their own incapability. Why should this be? Another study, led, by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning, offers an explanation. People who are incapable, he writes, suffer from a “dual burden”: they’re not good at what they do, and their incapability prevents them from recognizing how bad they are.

In Dunning’s study, subjects scoring at the bottom on tests of logic, grammar and humor “extremely overestimated” their talents. Although their test scores put them in the 624 ^th, they guessed they were in the 12^th. What these individuals lacked (in addition to clear logic, proper grammar and a sense of humor) was “meta cognitive skill” (元认知技巧): the ability to monitor how well (or badly) they’re performing. In the absence of that ability, the subjects arrived at an overly hopeful view of their own abilities.

Fortunately, there are a couple of ways to cope with this problem. First, we can learn to make honest comparisons with others. Train yourself to recognize excellence, even when you yourself don’t possess it, and compare what you can do against what truly excellent individuals are able to accomplish. Second, seek out feedback that is frequent, accurate and specific. Find a critic who will tell you not only how poorly you’re doing, but just what it is that you’re doing wrong. As Dunning notes, success indicates to us that everything went right, but failure is more ambiguous: any number of things could have gone wrong. Use this feedback to figure out exactly where and when you made a mistake.

If we adopt these strategies — and most importantly, teach them to our children — they won’t need parents, or a graduation ceremony speaker, to tell them whether they’re special or not. If they are, they’ll already know that they are. Or they’ll have a plan to get that way.