In my own life, what I want to give to people, most importantly to people I love, is the power to deal with reality to get what they want. In pursuit of my goal to give them strength, I will often deny them what they “want” because that will give them the opportunity to struggle so that they can develop the strength to get what they want on their own. This can be difficult for people emotionally, even if they understand intellectually that having difficulties is the exercise they need to grow strong and that just giving them what they want will weaken them and ultimately lead to them needing more help.
在我自己的生活中，我想给予人们，最重要的是给予我所爱的人，是面对现实以获得他们想要的东西的能力。为了追求给他们力量的目标，我经常会拒绝他们“想要”的东西，因为这会给他们奋斗的机会，这样他们就可以发展力量，靠自己得到他们想要的东西。这对人们来说在情感上可能会很困难，即使他们在理智上明白，遇到困难是他们成长壮大所需的锻炼，而仅仅给他们想要的东西就会削弱他们并最终导致他们需要更多帮助。

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If you don’t let up on yourself and instead become comfortable always operating with some level of pain, you will evolve at a faster pace. That’s just the way it is.
如果你不放松自己，而是习惯于忍受一定程度的痛苦，你就会以更快的速度进步。就是那样子。

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There is no avoiding pain, especially if you’re going after ambitious goals. Believe it or not, you are lucky to feel that kind of pain if you approach it correctly, because it is a signal that you need to find solutions so you can progress. If you can develop a reflexive reaction to psychic pain that causes you to reflect on it rather than avoid it, it will lead to your rapid learning/evolving. After seeing how much more effective it is to face the painful realities that are caused by your problems, mistakes, and weaknesses, I believe you won’t want to operate any other way. It’s just a matter of getting in the habit of doing it.
痛苦是不可避免的，尤其是当你追求雄心勃勃的目标时。不管你相信与否，如果你正确地对待它，你很幸运能够感受到这种痛苦，因为这是一个信号，表明你需要找到解决方案，这样你才能进步。如果你能够对精神痛苦产生一种反射性反应，使你反思它而不是避免它，那么它将导致你快速学习/进化。在看到面对由你的问题、错误和弱点造成的痛苦现实是多么有效之后，我相信你不会想要采取任何其他方式。这只是养成这样做的习惯的问题。

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Realizing that we innately want to evolve–and that the other stuff we are going after, while nice, won’t sustain our happiness–has helped me focus on my goals of evolving and contributing to evolution in my own infinitely small way. While we don’t like pain, everything that nature made has a purpose, so nature gave us pain for a purpose. So what is its purpose? It alerts us and helps direct us.
意识到我们天生想要进化——而我们追求的其他东西虽然不错，但无法维持我们的幸福——这帮助我专注于我的进化目标，并以我自己无限小的方式为进化做出贡献。虽然我们不喜欢痛苦，但大自然创造的一切都有其目的，所以大自然给我们痛苦是有目的的。那么它的目的是什么？它提醒我们并帮助指导我们。

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Earlier, I mentioned that the unique abilities of thinking logically, abstractly, and from a higher level are carried out in structures located in the neocortex. These parts of the brain are more developed in humans and allow us to reflect on ourselves and direct our own evolution. Because we are capable of conscious, memory-based learning, we can evolve further and faster than any other species, changing not just across generations but within our own lifetimes.
前面我提到，逻辑思维、抽象思维和更高层次的独特思维能力是在位于新皮质的结构中实现的。人类大脑的这些部分更加发达，使我们能够反思自己并指导自己的进化。因为我们能够进行有意识的、基于记忆的学习，所以我们可以比任何其他物种进化得更远、更快，不仅会在几代人之间发生变化，而且会在我们自己的一生中发生变化。

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I have found understanding how nature and evolution work helpful in a number of ways. Most importantly, it has helped me deal with my realities more effectively and make difficult choices. When I began to look at reality through the perspective of figuring out how it really works, instead of thinking things should be different, I realized that most everything that at first seemed “bad” to me–like rainy days, weaknesses, and even death–was because I held preconceived notions of what I personally wanted. With time, I learned that my initial reaction was because I hadn’t put whatever I was reacting to in the context of the fact that reality is built to optimize for the whole rather than for me.
我发现了解自然和进化的运作方式在很多方面都有帮助。最重要的是，它帮助我更有效地应对现实并做出艰难的选择。当我开始从弄清楚现实如何运作的角度来看待现实，而不是认为事情应该有所不同时，我意识到大多数一开始对我来说似乎“糟糕”的事情——比如下雨天、弱点，甚至死亡——是因为我对我个人想要的东西抱有先入为主的观念。随着时间的推移，我了解到我最初的反应是因为我没有将我的反应放在这样一个事实的背景下：现实是为了整体而不是为了我而优化。

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Where you go in life will depend on how you see things and who and what you feel connected to (your family, your community, your country, mankind, the whole ecosystem, everything). You will have to decide to what extent you will put the interests of others above your own, and which others you will choose to do so for. That’s because you will regularly encounter situations that will force you to make such choices.
你的人生走向将取决于你如何看待事物以及你感觉与谁和什么有联系（你的家庭、你的社区、你的国家、人类、整个生态系统、一切）。你必须决定在多大程度上将他人的利益置于你自己的利益之上，以及你会选择为哪些人这样做。那是因为你经常会遇到迫使你做出这样选择的情况。

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It is a great paradox that individually we are simultaneously everything and nothing. Through our own eyes, we are everything–e.g., when we die, the whole world disappears. So to most people (and to other species) dying is the worst thing possible, and it is of paramount importance that we have the best life possible. However, when we look down on ourselves through the eyes of nature we are of absolutely no significance. It is a reality that each one of us is only one of about seven billion of our species alive today and that our species is only one of about ten million species on our planet. Earth is just one of about 100 billion planets in our galaxy, which is just one of about two trillion galaxies in the universe. And our lifetimes are only about 1/3,000 of humanity’s existence, which itself is only 1/20,000 of the Earth’s existence. In other words, we are unbelievably tiny and short-lived and no matter what we accomplish, our impact will be insignificant. At the same time, we instinctually want to matter and to evolve, and we can matter a tiny bit–and it’s all those tiny bits that add up to drive the evolution of the universe.
这是一个巨大的悖论，就我们个人而言，我们同时是一切，又什么都不是。通过我们自己的眼睛，我们就是一切——例如，当我们死时，整个世界都消失了。因此，对于大多数人（以及其他物种）来说，死亡是最糟糕的事情，而我们拥有尽可能美好的生活至关重要。然而，当我们用自然的眼光看自己时，我们就毫无意义了。事实上，我们每个人都只是当今活着的大约七十亿物种中的一员，而且我们的物种也只是我们星球上大约一千万个物种中的一员。地球只是我们银河系中约 1000 亿颗行星之一，而银河系只是宇宙中约 2 万亿个星系之一。而我们的寿命大约只是人类存在的1/3,000，而人类本身也只是地球存在的1/20,000。换句话说，我们的渺小和短暂令人难以置信，无论我们取得什么成就，我们的影响都是微不足道的。与此同时，我们本能地想要发挥作用并进化，我们可以发挥一点点作用——正是所有这些微小的部分加起来推动了宇宙的进化。

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Natural selection’s trial-and-error process allows improvement without anyone understanding or guiding it. The same can apply to how we learn. There are at least three kinds of learning that foster evolution: memory-based learning (storing the information that comes in through one’s conscious mind so that we can recall it later); subconscious learning (the knowledge we take away from our experiences that never enters our conscious minds, though it affects our decision making); and “learning” that occurs without thinking at all, such as the changes in DNA that encode a species’ adaptations. I used to think that memory-based, conscious learning was the most powerful, but I’ve since come to understand that it produces less rapid progress than experimentation and adaptation. To give you an example of how nature improves without thinking, just look at the struggle that mankind (with all its thinking) has experienced in trying to outsmart viruses (which don’t even have brains). Viruses are like brilliant chess opponents. By evolving quickly (combining different genetic material across different strains), they keep the smartest minds in the global health community busy thinking up countermoves to hold them off. Understanding that is especially helpful in an era when computers can run large numbers of simulations replicating the evolutionary process to help us see what works and what doesn’t.
自然选择的试错过程可以在没有任何人理解或指导的情况下进行改进。这同样适用于我们的学习方式。至少有三种学习方式可以促进进化： 基于记忆的学习（存储通过一个人的意识思维获得的信息，以便我们以后可以回忆起来）；潜意识学习（我们从经验中获取的知识永远不会进入我们的意识，尽管它会影响我们的决策）；以及完全无需思考即可发生的“学习”，例如编码物种适应能力的 DNA 变化。我曾经认为基于记忆的有意识的学习是最强大的，但后来我开始明白，它所产生的进步不如实验和适应那么快。为了给你一个例子来说明自然如何在不思考的情况下改进，只要看看人类（及其所有的思维）在试图智胜病毒（甚至没有大脑）时所经历的斗争即可。病毒就像出色的国际象棋对手。通过快速进化（结合不同菌株的不同遗传物质），它们让全球卫生界最聪明的人忙着想出对策来阻止它们。在计算机可以运行大量模拟来复制进化过程的时代，理解这一点尤其有用，可以帮助我们了解哪些有效，哪些无效。

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