“越獄”人生雙語故事

羅伯特·卡普是一位真正的成功人士。他在事業巔峯期時是一位出版業高管。接下來，小編給大家準備了“越獄”人生雙語故事,歡迎大家參考與借鑑。

On the surface, Robert Capp is a true success. He’s a publishing executive at the top of his field. In his 38 years, he’s 1)overseen everything from major magazines to major Internet sites. In his free time, he 2)runs a charity that helps war 3)veterans adjust to life after 4)traumatic injury. But every day, Capp fights a battle he rarely wins.

從表面上看，羅伯特·卡普是一位真正的成功人士。他在事業巔峯期時是一位出版業高管。38歲的他已經當過各大雜誌及主要網站的一把手。在業餘時間，他管理着一家慈善機構，幫助退伍軍人克服戰後創傷，迴歸正常生活。但是每一天，卡普都進行着一場幾乎沒有贏過的戰爭。

“As soon as I have something important to do,”he says, “I get really into my head about it. I don’t do it, just can’t do it. Anxiety starts to build. If I have to arrange a meeting, just making the phone call to set it up becomes impossible. All sorts of 5)weird excuses start 6)popping into my brain. If the meeting is with someone important I start thinking,‘Who am I to be calling this guy, he’s really important and I’m not, why would he possibly want to waste time speaking to me?’ It’s truly awful.”

“只要我有重要的事情要做，”他說，“我會爲此很糾結。我做不了這件事，簡直無法下手。焦慮開始累積。如果我要安排一個會議，我無法只是通過打電話來搞定。我的腦子裏開始出現種.種怪異的藉口。如果要會見某個重要人物，我就會想：‘我是誰，有什麼資格給這個傢伙打電話，他是個大人物，而我不是，他爲什麼要浪費時間跟我說話呢?’真糟糕。”

For Capp, this awful feeling has been one of the more 7)defining features of his life. “Procrastination has affected every part of my life for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I was always 8)hiding from responsibility. By the time I was a teenager, I discovered drugs and alcohol and these were the perfect tools to 9)foster my procrastination. Why do something I should be doing when there were drugs to take?”

對於卡普來說，這種可怕的感覺已經成爲他生活中愈加典型的特徵之一。“記憶所及, 拖拉已影響到我生活的每一部分。孩提時期，我就喜歡逃避責任。當我十幾歲時，我發現和酒精是助長我拖拉的完美工具。當我可以在中飄飄欲仙時，爲什麼還要去做那些本應該去做的事呢?”

His addiction lasted over 10 years.“But even when I got sober, the urge to delay didn’t get better. It nearly destroyed my marriage. It’s impossible to be in a relationship with a chronic procrastinator. It feels crazy to a partner, who can’t help but think, ‘Here’s this rational, intelligent person, so how can this keep happening? It doesn’t make any sense.’”

他的毒癮持續時間超過10年。“但是，即使當我清醒時，拖拉的衝動也沒見好轉。這幾乎毀了我的婚姻。與長期拖拉者建立穩定關係是不可能的。拖拉者的伴侶會很抓狂，會忍不住想：‘這個理性、聰明的人怎麼會一直這樣呢?這根本講不通。’”

For Capp, it’s worse at work. “Several months ago my boss sent me a 10)memo listing things that were wrong with my performance. There were eight items on his list and all eight had to do with my procrastination problems.” Capp lost his job—although he 11)landed a 12)coveted position on a new Web site.

對卡普來說，工作中拖拉的情況要更糟糕。“幾個月前，我老闆給了我一份備忘錄，列出我表現欠佳的地方。清單裏一共列了八項，都與我拖拉的毛病有關。”卡普因而丟掉了這份工作——雖然他又在一個新網站上找到了一份令人垂涎的差事。

“Everyone procrastinates,” observes DePaul University psychologist Joseph Ferrari. However, “not everyone is a procrastinator.” Still, a large and growing proportion of the population can 13)lay claim to this problem. In a 1978 survey, 5 percent of the population defined themselves as procrastinators. Ferrari recently completed two large studies of the behavior. “We found that between 20 and 25 percent of the population are procrastinators.”

“每個人都會有點拖拉，”德保羅大學的心理學家約瑟夫·法拉利說，然而，“不是每個人都是拖拉者。”儘管如此，很大一部分人(這個人數還在不斷上升)可以說都存在拖拉的問題。1978年的一項調查顯示，5%的人認爲自己是拖拉者。法拉利最近完成了兩個大型的行爲研究。“我們發現，20%到25%的人可以歸類爲拖拉者。”

Psychologists define procrastination as a gap between intention and action. Chronic procrastinators like Robert Capp feel bad about their decisions to delay—which helps distinguish procrastination from laziness. Laziness involves a lack of desire; with procrastination, the desire to start that project is there, but it 14)consistently loses out 15)to our appetite for delay. And this is no ordinary delay. Procrastination is considered a needless, often irrational delay of some important task in favor of a less important, but seemingly more rewarding, task. And that accompanying negative feeling—the 16)gnawing guilt, the building anxiety—is one way we know we’re not doing what we’re supposed to do.

心理學家把“拖拉”定義爲意圖和行動之間的差距。像羅伯特·卡普這樣的人對自己拖拉的決定感覺並不好——這恰恰有助於區分懶惰與拖拉。懶惰是因爲缺乏慾望; 而拖拉則是有去做那件事情的願望，但總是輸給對拖拉的渴求。這絕不是指普通的拖拉。這裏所指的拖拉是不必要的，往往還是對一些重要任務的非理性延遲，因爲拖拉者更願去做一些不太重要、但似乎更有滿足感的事情。而這種拖拉又伴隨着消極情緒——令人痛苦的內疚感和不斷增長的焦慮感——因爲我們知道自己沒有去做那些本該做的事情。

Researchers now believe that procrastination reflects the triumph of 17)impulsivity over the lure of future rewards. We’re terrible at processing time. Because our brains were built largely when survival 18)hinged on mastering immediate conditions, we engage in 19)temporal discounting—that is, we misjudge the importance of a task when it lies even a short distance in the future, so we see distant rewards as smaller than they really are. And our impulsivity never had it so good: Modern life furnishes an 20)abundance of endlessly reinforcing demands for our attention, such as the streams of tweets you 21)subscribe to.

如今，研?a href="">咳嗽比銜俠從沉順宥絞ち碩暈蠢椿乇ǖ撓棧蟆Ｎ頤竊詼允奔淶拇砩鮮峭υ愀獾摹Ｔ豆攀貝死嗌嬙覽滌詼約詞弊純齙惱莆眨頤塹?a href="">大腦正是適應那時的條件而發展起來的，所以現在我們會只見樹木不見森林，也就是說我們會錯估任務的重要性，哪怕其並非一項長遠的任務。因此，我們看到的未來回報比實際上要小。加之，我們的衝動從來沒有像現在這麼強烈：現代生活使得我們的關注訴求豐富多樣且無休無止，例如你訂閱的推特消息。

However much procrastination reflects a 22)mismatch between our stone-age brains and the highly sophisticated environments those same brains have created, it reaches deep into our being. “It is always about choice,” observes Canadian psychologist Timothy Pychyl. And that makes procrastination 23)quintessentially an 24)existential problem. “We’re given a certain amount of time and we have to use it,” he says.

儘管拖拉反應了我們石器時代的大腦與其所創建的高度複雜的環境之間極不匹配，它卻深深觸及到人類的本質。“拖拉總是關乎選擇，”加拿大心理學家蒂莫西·塞克爾說。這使得拖拉成爲一個典型存在的問題。“我們被給予了一定的時間，因此必須把這些時間用上，”他說。

“It’s the acts of 25)omission that lead to our biggest regrets in life. Where do we choose to invest ourselves?”Procrastination, he contends, bumps right up against our commitment “to who it is we are trying to be in life.”Even 26)indecision and inaction are really decision and action, Pychyl notes.“Your indecision, your inaction, becomes your choice, your act—perhaps your whole life.” Unless, of course, you take 27)deliberate steps to 28)counteract your worst tendencies.

“正是疏忽的行爲導致我們人生中最大的遺憾。我們選擇在哪裏投資自己呢?”他聲稱，拖拉恰巧撞上了我們的承諾——“我們想盡力成爲怎樣的一個人”。塞克爾注意到，即使是優柔寡斷和不作爲其實也是真實的決定和行爲。“你的優柔寡斷、不作爲成了你的選擇和行爲——也許還是你的整個人生。”當然，除非你採取謹慎的措施來抵制最糟糕的拖拉傾向。