[经典批改讨论] issue192 More + Conditioning 特训精彩作业 [复制链接]

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发表于 2004-7-17 14:20:10 |显示全部楼层 |倒序浏览

不知道是不是太啰嗦
issue192 "Success in any realm of life comes more often from taking chances or risks than from careful and cautious planning."

The speaker asserts people are more likely to attain success when taking chances or risks than planning carefully and cautiously. However, after comparing the characteristics of careful planning and taking chances, I strongly hold that they are of the same importance in the pursuit of success.

In competitive sports, while making appropriate training plans and effective competition strategies constitute necessary conditions of winning the matches, taking risks is almost inevitable when athletes or their coaches confront a sudden matter that might influence the course of a match and that has not been taken into consideration beforehand. In modern competitive sports, it is widely acknowledged that scientific and effective training contributes to athletes’ better performance during matches. Good competition strategies, on the other hand, resulting in the better allocation of physical force, better use of skills or the higher rate in scoring, also play a vital role. However, when the star players of a soccer team or a basketball team are off the game or fail to implement their chief coach's strategic intention, leaving the whole team in adverseness, the coach faces the choice whether to substitute he/she or not. No doubt substituting a star player with a bench player means taking risk because the bench player may not perform as good as the star player and may make matters worse. If this happens, the substitution will incur discontentment of the players and critique from the team's fans, media and the boss. The capability of the coach may then be suspected and he/she may even be fired. Nevertheless, if the coach dares not to take the risk to substitute a poorly performed star player, his/her team will probably lose the game. Taking chances and risks is reasonable when one is dealing with something that has not been taken into consideration previously. So, in competitive sports, planning and risking are both necessary.

In academic fields, careful and cautious planning is required for large projects and application disciplines while revolutionary scientific breakthroughs are almost impossible without taking chances or risks. Before starting the research project on human genome, scientists had already made plans on the content and method of the research. They did not have to take any chances or risks because all they should do have already been carefully planned. There were no technical obstacles that had not been solved. Therefore, they just followed the plan step by step and accomplished the project in the end. As for significant scientific breakthroughs, they are the important discoveries and theories that disaccord, at least to some extent, with established principles or our intuitions, such as the Theory of Relativity and quantum mechanics. One has no choice but to take chances because established theories may not be applicable on the boundary of what is known and what is unknown. Only after being examined through experiments, practices and observations, can they be confirmed or belied. In a word, planning and taking chances or risks are different means for different levels of academic researches.

In the business world, cautious planning contributes to the long-term development of a company and at the same time, risking is imperative for a company to survive, develop and thrive in the highly competitive society. Planning carefully on inquiring market, training stuff and manufacturing products ensure a company's long-term development by keeping its profit increasing or at least not declining. On the other hand, taking risks, such as incorporating with another company, involving in the market fields that have already been occupied by other enterprises or involving in the market fields that are not considered so profitable, is also necessary because these may save the company from the adversity or help to set foot in new businesses. Clearly, in the business field, planning and risking complement each other.

To conclude, success in any realm of life comes equally from taking chances or risks and from careful and cautious planning. In most cases, they complement each other and pave the way towards success.

Life is full of drama.