Treat Learning as Something Fun
When I opened my high-school textbooks again after twenty years, I found the speed at which knowledge has been updated truly astonishing. If we do not regularly update our own knowledge system, our brains will grow old before their time and fail to keep up with the times. If this college entrance exam goes as I hope, I would very much like to take it again ten years from now, to study clinical medicine or biology for a few years. At the same time, preparing for this exam lets me update my own knowledge system once more. One should constantly refresh one's understanding through broad learning; otherwise one gradually becomes backward, conservative, and set in one's ways.
I never treat anything I have to do as a burden; treating it as a burden makes life too exhausting. In fact, learning has never been a painful thing for me. I love learning all kinds of new knowledge. Curiosity is one of the best gifts God has given humankind; it keeps our daily lives from being dreary. Bertrand Russell once said that humanity's greatest enemy is boredom, and that without books life would offer little. By his own account, once he discovered the joy of mathematics, his depression lifted without treatment. I quite agree: in the pursuit of knowledge, people not only while away tedious hours but also forget many troubles. So those who love learning keep a young and sunny heart all their lives.
Recently I saw a report saying that scientific research shows that even reading for just 15 minutes a day stabilizes a person's mood and greatly benefits physical and mental health. From my own experience, learning and reading do indeed make people healthier and younger.
I love learning, perhaps because learning has never been difficult for me. Once I set a learning goal, I quickly break it down into executable subplans, find valuable learning resources, and then bury myself in carrying out the plan. I have always learned efficiently, so I have had plenty of time to play and to read books that others would not.
My brain has not grown dull. Over all these years I have kept training it through learning, and I have also kept writing (perhaps I write because I am too shy and inarticulate to communicate face to face, so I have to express my inner feelings through writing). These are the two things I have kept up best. So in terms of learning ability, I am actually stronger now than I used to be, though my rote memory may not be what it was when I was young.
Adequate sleep makes learning easier and more efficient. I basically never stay up late, and I take a midday nap every day. I used to go to bed at nine and wake at four—seven hours at night plus a one-hour midday nap, eight hours a day. Now I go to bed around ten at night, get up at six in the morning, and nap for half an hour to an hour at noon, so my mind is fresh both in the morning and the afternoon.
A friend of mine who studied biology told me that people who frequently stay up late develop DNA breaks; if broken DNA is not repaired in time, the genome becomes unstable and can induce mutated cancer cells. He himself works at a research institute using zebrafish; while raising them, he found that the light cycle matters greatly to zebrafish, and that an abnormal light cycle makes them die easily—it seems that disrupting the light cycle can cause zebrafish to spontaneously develop tumors. Yet he himself has to stay up late frequently doing experiments, which is rather comical.
Humans and zebrafish share 87% of their genes; what is true of the fish is true of us. So if you want a healthy body and high learning efficiency, do not keep burning the midnight oil. Staying up late easily traps you in a low-efficiency vicious cycle and is very damaging to physical and mental health.
The thing I have most successfully urged on my son is going to bed early every day, so this boy now studies very efficiently and often finishes his homework at school before classes let out. Once home at 5:30, he can freely pursue whatever interests him. I do not interfere with his hobbies; a hobby is a person's best reward in an uninteresting world, and depriving someone of hobbies and pleasures is both cruel and foolish. These hobbies have not hurt his grades. He used to top the school in math and physics; since this semester he has topped all three—math, physics, and chemistry. When his math teacher was out sick, the school even arranged for him to substitute, and his other subjects are steadily improving. So now, when I run into obstacles in math, physics, and chemistry, he is my teacher.
One must live happily to stay positive and optimistic throughout life. According to Seligman's research, positive, optimistic people always achieve more academically and professionally than depressed people, are healthier, and are more self-sufficient in old age. One must also learn happily to absorb meaningful knowledge. The main reason I now love learning everything related to human health is that when I see myself relieving someone's suffering, that happiness and joy are beyond description. With such joy as a reward, a person can keep learning tirelessly for a lifetime.