2023-7-12 英语

(1)Taking charge of yourself involves putting to rest some very prevalent myth. At the top of the list is the notion that intelligence is measured by your ability to solve complex problems; to read, write and compute at certain levels; and to resolve abstract equations quickly. This vision of intelligence asserts formal education and bookish excellence as the true measures of self-fulfillment. It encourages a kind of intellectual prejudice that has brought with it some discouraging results. We have come to believe that someone who has more educational merit badges, who is very good at some form of school discipline, is “intelligent”. Yet mental hospitals are filled with patients who have all of the properly lettered certificates. A truer indicator of intelligence is an effective, happy life lived each day and each present moment of every day.

If you are happy, if you live each moment for everything it’s worth, then you are an intelligent person. Problem solving is a useful help to your happiness, but if you know that given your inability to resolve a particular concern you can still choose happiness for yourself, or at a minimum refuse to choose unhappiness, then you are intelligent. You are intelligent because you have the ultimate weapon against the big N.B.D. —Nervous Break Down.( 精神崩溃)

“Intelligent” people do not have N.B.D. s because they are in charge of themselves. They know how to choose happiness over depression; because they know how to deal with the problems of their lives.

You can begin to think of yourself as truly intelligent on the basis of how you choose to feel in the face of trying circumstances(困难局面). The life struggles are pretty much the same for each of us. Everyone who is involved with other human beings in every social context has similar difficulties. Disagreements, conflicts and compromises are a part of what it means to be human. Similarly, money, growing old, sickness, deaths, natural disasters and accidents are all events which present problems to virtually all human beings. But some people are able to make it, to avoid immobilizing depression and unhappiness despite such occurrences, while others collapse or have a N.B.D. Those who recognize problems as a human condition and don’t measure happiness by an absence of problems are the most intelligent kind of human we know; also, the most rare.

（那些认识到问题是人类的一种状态，并且不以没有问题来衡量幸福的人是我们所知道的最聪明的人;也是最罕见的。）

(1)

Taking charge of yourself involves putting to rest some very prevalent myth

take charge of sb.为某人负责
involve doing sth 和.有关,关系到.
put sth to rest （文中是倒装,put to rest sth）把.放在一边,对.置之不理
翻译：
管好你自己,意味着要对那些流言蜚语置之不理.

At the top of the list: 通常表示最重要、最受欢迎或最优秀。