What do you do to motivate yourself when you are about to give up?
--转自“quora英语阅读”app
Sometimes giving up is exactly the right thing to do. So be careful; it isn't always right to motivate yourself. Maybe your mind or body is sending you a signal telling you that you should be doing something else.
My mentor Luis Alvarez used to point to physicists that were well known (at least to other physicists) but whom he considered to be failures. He said that many of them were still working on the same problems that they worked on 20 years ago. They were the experts in their fields, and they got recognition, they were asked to talk at conferences, but they had made no important advances in 15 years. He said that they never learned how to give up. Alvarez gave up an entire career in particle physics to work on a project with his son Walter, and they made one of the most important discoveries in 20th century science: that an asteroid/comet had killed the dinosaurs.
I gave up on many more projects than I succeeded at. I gave up on the development of a table-top cyclotron for radiocarbon dating. I gave up on a project to develop a liquid-xenon radiation detector; I gave up on an effort to detect double beta decay. I gave up on a project to detect anomalous (non-radioactive) carbon-14. I gave up on a project to measure the deflection of starlight by Jupiter. In retrospect, those were all good projects to give up on.
Of course, I never gave up. I gave up on projects so that I could work on something else. So be careful to make that decision. Sometimes it is important to give up a project. And maybe you'll think you are just being lazy when you start working on something new. But maybe giving up on the first to work on the second will prove to be the most important decision in your life.
But the decision is never easy. It could be a big mistake to give up on a project only because it hasn't made much progress. Sometimes giving up is the right decision, but sometimes it is the wrong decision. Life is tough.
--转自“quora英语阅读”app
Sometimes giving up is exactly the right thing to do. So be careful; it isn't always right to motivate yourself. Maybe your mind or body is sending you a signal telling you that you should be doing something else.
My mentor Luis Alvarez used to point to physicists that were well known (at least to other physicists) but whom he considered to be failures. He said that many of them were still working on the same problems that they worked on 20 years ago. They were the experts in their fields, and they got recognition, they were asked to talk at conferences, but they had made no important advances in 15 years. He said that they never learned how to give up. Alvarez gave up an entire career in particle physics to work on a project with his son Walter, and they made one of the most important discoveries in 20th century science: that an asteroid/comet had killed the dinosaurs.
I gave up on many more projects than I succeeded at. I gave up on the development of a table-top cyclotron for radiocarbon dating. I gave up on a project to develop a liquid-xenon radiation detector; I gave up on an effort to detect double beta decay. I gave up on a project to detect anomalous (non-radioactive) carbon-14. I gave up on a project to measure the deflection of starlight by Jupiter. In retrospect, those were all good projects to give up on.
Of course, I never gave up. I gave up on projects so that I could work on something else. So be careful to make that decision. Sometimes it is important to give up a project. And maybe you'll think you are just being lazy when you start working on something new. But maybe giving up on the first to work on the second will prove to be the most important decision in your life.
But the decision is never easy. It could be a big mistake to give up on a project only because it hasn't made much progress. Sometimes giving up is the right decision, but sometimes it is the wrong decision. Life is tough.
