Stephanie would be late again! Now she was sorry that she read for such a long time, but the book was so absorbing she could not put it down. She grabbed the last bite of the sandwich her mother made for breakfast. She dashed out of the house. In the driveway, she jumped on her bike and started to pedal as fast as she could. She remembered when she got the bike for Christmas last year, it was such a surprise. She knew that her mother could not afford it, but she bought it for her anyway. It was a beautiful blue and shiny bike. She was so grateful to her mother.

While most experts say eight hours of sleep is ideal, the truth is it all depends on how you feel. Some people do well with seven hours or less, while others require nine or more to be at their best. If you are ill or under tremendous stress, you will probably need to sleep longer than you usually do. The best indicator of how much sleep you need should be based on how you feel. Keep in mind that sometimes we fool ourselves into thinking that we're getting enough sleep. If you are getting sufficient sleep, you should feel refreshed and not have trouble getting out of bed in the morning.

What Hippocratic ideas are still in practice today? Even though Hippocrates lived nearly 2,500 years ago, many of his ideas sound very familiar today. He would inquire about the family health history to see if any relatives had suffered from similar diseases. He asked questions about the patient's home to see if his or her environment might be causing the illness. He discovered that diet played an important role in preventing disease. Hippocrates was the first to understand the physical illness caused by emotional stress. He even made suggestions on what we call bedside manner. He said physicians should pay as much attention to the comfort and welfare of the patient as to the disease itself.

One of the ways to identify your values is to look at what frustrates or upsets you. Anger often indicates an ignored value or a misdirected passion. Think of specific times when you were mad or frustrated. What about these situations upset you most? Write down your descriptions of them. To find your values, reflect on the words or phrases you've written to focus on what's most important to you. For example, if you get annoyed when someone asks you about something he could figure out for himself, perhaps you value resourcefulness, independence, or taking care of oneself.

One way to make a pursuer work harder is to zigzag. A rabbit running from a coyote, for example, does not run endlessly in a straight line. Instead, it moves quickly back and forth, forcing the coyote to change direction and make sharp turns, too. Zigzagging is easier for a rabbit, which is small, than for the larger coyote. The coyote also cannot tell when the rabbit will run this way or that, so it cannot plan its next move. In this way, the rabbit makes the chase more difficult and tiring for the coyote. Though a coyote may still succeed in catching its prey, there is a chance that it may tire out, give up, and go look for an easier meal.

Executives' emotional intelligence —their self-awareness, empathy, and rapport with others —has clear links to their own performance. But new research shows that a leader's emotional style also drives everyone else's moods and behaviors. It's similar to Smile and the whole world smiles with you. Emotional intelligence travels through an organization like electricity over telephone wires. Depressed, ruthless bosses create toxic organizations filled with negative underachievers. But if you're an inspirational leader, you cultivate positive employees who accept the tough challenges. Emotional leadership isn't just putting on a game face every day. It means understanding your impact on others —then adjusting your style accordingly.

The above graph shows the rates of the most common sports-related injuries in children and adults in the U.S. Basketball causes the highest rate of injuries in both children and adults. The rate of injuries in Playground Activities ranks second highest for children, while it ranks the lowest for adults. The rate of Basketball injuries to children is slightly over twice higher than the rate of Football injuries to children. For adults, the rate of Football injuries is the same as the rate of injuries in Horseback Riding. For Baseball and Horseback Riding, the rate of injuries for children is lower than the rate for adults in each of the two sports.

Clyde W. Tombaugh, an American astronomer, was born in 1906. Being poor, he couldn't attend college but he continued to study on his own. In 1926, he built his first telescope, but he was dissatisfied with the result. He determined to master optics, and built two more telescopes in the next two years, grinding his own lenses and mirrors. Using these homemade telescopes, he made drawings of the planets Mars and Jupiter and sent them to the Lowell Observatory. The astronomers at Lowell were so impressed with the young amateur's powers of observation they invited him to work at the observatory. Staying there, he discovered hundreds of new stars. The young astronomer came into the spotlight in the field of astronomy when he discovered Pluto on February 18, 1930.

Consider how running, yoga, and weight lifting complement one another. Running improves aerobic capacity, which in turn will enhance your endurance when weight lifting or through a long yoga class. The increased flexibility from yoga will lengthen your running stride, allowing you to run smoother and faster. Your improved flexibility will also increase your range of motion while weight lifting, which in turn will make your muscles stronger. Lifting weights increases muscle strength, which will make you a stronger runner and improve your endurance and balance when maintaining difficult yoga postures. All of these activities reinforce one another, and the total benefit is much greater than the sum of its parts.

People may or may not remember what you said or did, but they will always remember how you made them feel. Have you ever noticed when people enter a room, they bring a type of energy with them? For example, you're at your office talking with someone when another person approaches you and you get a feeling of, Oh great, I'm so glad he's coming. Or maybe it's a feeling of, Oh man, he's coming over here. Let me get out of here before he comes, because he's either going to say something I don't like or try to make me feel inferior. What energy do you carry when you enter a room? Are you a person who brightens up the room? Or are you bringing in storm clouds?

People are loyal to their e-mail. There appears to be an unwritten expectation that you are accessible and available, so if someone sends you something, you will read it, understand it, and respond immediately. That's the deal. And when you break the deal, you are not a team player, you are not competent, and something is wrong with you. Every day, and sometimes constantly throughout the day, you have to check your e-mail. Why? You may have received an e-mail that, if left unopened, will have an impact on how you are perceived. E-mail has become a(n) electronic tyrant. It says, Read me, feed me, do what I say. It demands our attention, directs our work, and has a controlling presence in our lives.

Ethical decision making requires us to look beyond the immediate moment and beyond personal needs and desires to imagine the possible consequences of our choices and behavior on self and others. In its most elemental sense, moral imagination is about picturing various outcomes in our interactions with others. In some sense, moral imagination is a dramatic virtual rehearsal that allows us to examine different courses of action to determine the morally best thing to do. The capacity for empathy is crucial to moral imagination. As we have no immediate experience of what others feel, we can have no idea of how they are affected. Only by conceiving what we ourselves would feel in the situation can we understand how they feel.

Humans who lived as hunter-gatherers more than 10,000 years ago fitted into ecosystems by acting as predators, and on occasion they probably also served as prey. The role of humans in today's ecosystems differs from that of early human settlements. Today, humans in almost every part of the world no longer interact with nature as they once did. People have detached themselves from most ecosystems. Modern humans also tend to negatively affect ecosystems in ways that the earliest civilizations did not. One aspect of the study of ecosystems in environmental science provides a clue as to how disconnected humans have become from nature. Many ecosystems are named for the dominant species within them. Therefore, the world contains coral reef ecosystems, evergreen forest ecosystems, grassland ecosystems, and so on, but environmental science contains no human ecosystems.

John Ray, the English naturalist, believed there was a good reason why birds reproduce by laying eggs. He pointed out that if their young developed in an internal womb, pregnant birds would be too heavy to fly and would therefore be very vulnerable to predators. Consequently, pregnant birds would be killed, and before long all birds would disappear. If birds bore live young, there could be no birds. Reproduction by egg-laying was one example of the way birds were fitted to life in their environment, and close examination revealed that every type of plant and animal was equipped for its way of life. Ray saw adaptation as an expression of the way every organism was fitted for its assigned role in nature.

In order to understand why an individual fails or succeeds at some task which confronts him, we must know two things: how much ability he has for the task in question and how strongly motivated he is. Failure may be due to lack of ability or to lack of motivation. Success, on the other hand, requires a high degree of motivation working with a high degree of ability. In everyday situations, the measure of motivation is the amount of time and effort which the individual will devote to the activity in question. For example, a motivated pianist will practice from six to eight hours every day to become truly great. Even with such work, success will be gained only if the individual also has great inborn ability.

Nature is timed to the alternating rhythm of light and dark produced by Earth's rotation. Birds sing, and blossoms open and close in tune with this twenty-four-hour cycle. Daylight also sets the pace for the activity of our mind. When deprived of regular intervals of dark and light, the mind can lose its bearings. This is especially true with elderly people. For example, some older people whose brain function is fine at home can become confused when hospitalized where artificial light is always on. The loss of rhythmic light and dark exposure will only worsen their condition. Simply moving the patient to a bed that is near a window and darkening the room at night can significantly improve mental state.

Al-Khwarizmi was a mathematician, astronomer, and geographer. Born in Persia, he eventually found a place at the renowned House of Wisdom in Baghdad ― the greatest center of learning in Islam's golden age. While there, Al-Khwarizmi wrote a book explaining Hindu concepts in mathematics, including the symbols used in India for counting. The book was translated from Arabic into Latin, three hundred years after his death. The translated text helped introduce to Europeans a radical new way to count and do math―using what are now called Arabic numerals: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 0. These were much easier to use than Roman numerals, especially for division and multiplication. They eventually came to be used throughout the world.

In one study, subjects listened to four music records and then were asked to rate how much they liked each one. As a reward for participating in the study, they were told that they could have the record of their choice when they made additional ratings on a second occasion. When the subjects returned for the second session, they were told that one of the four records would not be available. The excluded record varied from subject to subject. It was always the record ranked third best by that individual in the first set of ratings. The subjects listened to the four records again and made their second set of ratings. The researcher found that the ratings of the excluded records increased significantly. In other words, the record that a subject could not have became all the more desirable.

Let's think about waiting in line. Whether you're at a bank, supermarket, or amusement park, waiting in line is probably not your idea of fun. Consider the almost universal motivation to get through the line as quickly as possible. Under what circumstances would you be willing to let another person cut in front of you in the line? Small changes in the way that requests are made can often lead to some startlingly big results. But is it possible that just a single word from a requester could drastically increase the likelihood that you'd say, Yes, go ahead? Yes ― and the single word is because. Behavioral scientist Ellen Langer and her colleagues decided to put the persuasive power of this word to the test. In one study, Langer arranged for a stranger to approach someone waiting in line to use a photocopier and simply ask, Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the copy machine? Faced with this direct request to cut ahead in the line, 60 percent of the people were willing to agree to allow the stranger to go ahead of them. However, when the stranger made the request with a reason(May I use the copy machine, because I'm in a rush?), 94 percent of the people said yes. After all, providing a solid reason for the request justifies asking to jump ahead.

I was a daughter of parents who never finished high school. They were hard workers, but our family could not escape from our tough life. Books were a shelter and a friend to me when that shelter wasn't available in real life. My mom sought that shelter, too. She read great books from the library. One day when I was 12, my mom gave me a book. Reading that book, I felt I was like Francie Nolan, the star of the book. She was an urban child who wanted to be a writer. Her family was poor, but her mother, Katie, taught her that education was the only way to leave behind their hard life. It reminded me of my own mother, who did the same for me until she died when I was 19. My mom always knew that I wanted to be a writer. Giving me the story of a girl who achieved her dream, she tried to give me the message that nothing was off limits for me as long as I could learn. Reading the story as a child, I felt Francie was showing me that education was my way to have what I wanted, too. I learned quickly to write the sad realities of my life beautifully. Eventually, I too became a writer. Since the day my mom gave that book to me, I've read it several times. I have had a tradition of reading it before every book I write. Whenever I turned to the book, it gave me wisdom and the simple understanding of real life that she had tried to teach me.