学进去

Think of some great minds you like. You will probably find that their success didn’t come easily. As “Father of Hybrid Rice（杂交水稻）”, Yuan Longping got over great difficulties and spent his whole life working to increase rice production and helping to feed the country with the largest population.

Wu Mengchao, the “Father of Chinese Hepatobiliary Surgery（肝胆外科）”, focused on saving people’s lives for nearly eighty years. He did more than 16, 000 operations during his life. Holding the surgeon’s knife for such a long time deformed his fingers but he still kept doing operations. Wu once said, “It would be my greatest happiness if I could work at the operating table until the last moment of my life.”

In 1969, in order to solve the problem of treating malaria（疟疾）, Tu Youyou, worked as head of a research team. They did different kinds of experiments. However, the results were not satisfactory. Instead of giving up, they kept trying. Finally, in 1972, they made it! In 2015, at the age of 85, she received the Nobel Prize.

Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb believed that every failure was a step towards success. He once said, “If I find 10, 000 ways that won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong try is another step forward.”

Sometimes, their success was a surprise, even to themselves, even after a long time of their hard work. The famous scientist Alexander Fleming said, “When l woke up just after daybreak on 28th September, 1928, I just began another busy day with my research as I did many days and nights before. And I certainly didn’t plan to make a great difference to all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic（抗生素）. But I guess that was exactly what I did.”

Some people only became successful after their deaths. The artist Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting all through his life and that was to a friend. But he kept painting and he painted more than 2000 artworks in the following ten years. Now his paintings are very popular and they sell for millions of pounds.

One thing all these people have in common is that they never give up and stick to their goals no matter what happens.