One additional post

This additional post is completely beyond my plan. The reason I write it is as the following: I accidently publish a empty post and I don't know how to delete it. Therefore, rather than leave it blank, I just try to fill it with some words.

Now what am I going to say in the next few lines? Let me see... since it is now 3 o'clock in the mid-night, let's say something about "Dream".

Everyone on the earth has dreams, no matter you are somebody or nobody. The prominent American civil rights movement leader, Martin Luther King, mentioned about his dreams in a publich speech :"I have a dream... I have a dream... I have a dream... " Obviously he got so many dreams. However, the problem is, which dreams come true at the end?

Of course, having dreams is good. But don't you think we should put more emphasis on how to make them true?

In the Will Smith casted movie "The Pursuit of Happiness", the father talk to the son with the following words: "Don't let somebody else tell you: you can't do something, not even me, all right? you've got a dream, you've got to protect it. People can't do something themselves they want to tell you: you can't do it. You want something, go get it."

Yes exactly, I cannot agree more. We need to firstly set our dreams, and then protect them. In school, every book we read, every question we solve, and even every single defination or formula we learn, is indicating that we are taking further steps and are probably closer to our dreams. Therefore, don't ignore the little things we do in our daily lives. Don't think doing these is less significant than having a great dream. With these efforts, we are actually moving forward.

Well, maybe I talked too much. It is more than few lines already...Fine, that's all for this post, and good night to everyone.

Claim back or Not?

Conflicts are very common in our daily lives. Because different people are very likely to have different opinions on the same thing, when they cannot agree with each other, either explicitly or implicitly, conflict occurs. The kind of conflict I am going to illustrate is a very simple one and is inspired by my experience.

One day, my neighbor, who is also a friend of mine, borrowed one dollar from me for urgent use. However, after that, it seemed he forgot about this and did not give the one dollar back to me. Actually, I could see him every day since he was my neighbor, but I did not claim back my money because I did not know whether I should go for it or not. I was keeping asking myself: should I remind him of the story of the one dollar? Is it really necessary to ask my neighbor to return me such a small amount of money? If the answer is “yes”, how can I tell him? Will my words make him embarrassed? I felt difficult in making the decision. And I was not able to figure out a win-win solution. At last, I just gave up and let it go.

There was another similar case. Once, one of my best friends borrowed two dollars from me. After that, we did not meet each other for nearly one month. Later when we met casually in the campus, he also forgot about the two dollars he owed to me. This time, also, I did not claim back my money because, you know, it was just few minutes’ talk between two good friends and I felt really hard to open my mouth and mention about the “old story”, which occurred one month ago.

This kind of conflict, I believe, many people have experienced before. So when you were in this kind of situation, what would you do? If you decide to claim back your money, what would you say to your friend?

Why developing effective communication skills is important to me

As we know, communication is very important to everyone in this world. People speak, listen and write every day. However, as the community becomes increasingly complex, the basic abilities of communication are not enough. People are trying to develop more effective communication skills so that they can accomodate to the sophisticated society. To have a better understand on this, I would like to use an analogy of the food: we have enough food to consume every day, but we expect to eat and drink better.

Developing effective communication skills is also important to me, because it may help me achieve my goal more easily and successfully. The following is an example of mine, which shows communicating ineffectively leads to an undesirable result.

Once I was debating on an economic issue with my friend. I tried to push my ideas to him and seek for his consent. What I did was just flooding my words to him and I did not listen to him at all. Of course, at last I failed to convince him. I thought my failure was probably because I did not take enough attentions to my friend's response. It would be better if I completely understood his inquiries before I took further actions. However, this is not the end of story. The next time when I met the same friend, he told me that my words-flooding made him a bit uncomfortable that day. Well, you see, my ineffecitve communication even hurt my friend to some extent. I had to appologize for my rudeness, or more precisely, for my improper communication skill.

My experinces tell me it is important to develop effective communication skills so as to do things accurately, effectively and easily, as well as avoiding unnecessary mistakes. Now I have a chance to develop these skills with the guidance of professional instructors. I am expecting more from my joueney of ES2007S.