各位请注意：我们主要学习的是它的句子，非其晦涩难懂的深义也。有哪位对其细节不太明白的请知会本人。

　　No Difficulty, No Fun

　　Possession for its own sake or in competition with the rest of the neighborhood would have been Thoreau's idea of the low levels. The active discipline of heightening one's perception of what is in nature would have been his idea of the high. What he saved from the low was time and effort he could spend one the high. Thoreau certainly disapproved of starvation, but he would put into feeding himself only as much effort as would keep him functioning for more important efforts.

　　Effort is the gist of it. There is no happiness except as we take on life- engaging difficulties. Short of the impossible, as Yeats put it, the satisfaction we get from a lifetime depends on how high we choose out difficulties. Robert Frost was thinking something like the same terms when he spoke of“the pleasure of taking pains”. The mortal flaw in the advertised version of happiness is in the fact that it purports to be effortless.

　　We demand difficulty even in our games. We demand it because without difficulty there can be no game. A game is a way of making something hard for the fun of it. The rules of the game are an arbitrary imposition of difficulty. When someone ruins the fun, he always does do by refusing to play by the rules. It is easier to win at chess if your are free, at your pleasure, to change the wholly arbitrary rules, but the fun is in winning within the rules. No difficulty, no fun.

　　Winners & Losers

　　The word“winner”and“loser”have many meanings. When we refer to a person as a winner, we do not mean one who makes someone else lose. To us, a winner is one who responds authentically by being credible, trustworthy, responsive, and genuine, both as an individual and as a member of a society.

　　Winners do not dedicate their lives to a concept of what they imagine they should be; rather, they are themselves and as such do not use their energy putting on a performance, maintaining pretence and manipulating others. They are aware that there is a difference between being loving and acting loving, between being stupid and acting stupid, between being knowledgeable and acting knowledgeable. Winners do not need to hide behind a mask.

　　Winners are not afraid to do their own thinking and to use their own knowledge. They can separate facts from opinions and don't pretend to have all the answers. They listen to others; evaluate what they say, but come to their own conclusions. Although winners can admire and respect other people, they are not totally defined, demolished, bound or awed by them.

　　Winners do not play“helpless”, nor do they play the blaming game. Instead, they assume responsibility for their own lives.