我是羊，我并非来自ivy，但我的本科学校有着向ivy看齐的野心，而且在她的地区姑且也算是“ivy”。刚进入羊群的时候我就发现，我不能成为一只羊，然后我开始试图逃离，莽撞地，失败，再试，再失败，但是从来都不知道为什么。今年初的失败将我打落谷底，我还是不知道为什么，只知道自己应该继续尝试，却害怕得不敢踏出步子来。但是现在我终于知道了，我知道了羊的幸福，不可能成为一只羊的痛苦，知道自己不能成为羊但依然过着羊的生活大有人能在，大家都能够幸福，然而我不能成为大家。离开了羊圈，我茫然彷徨，然而我偏偏一直还眺望着那个羊圈，憧憬着羊圈里的光荣和幸福，却忘了自己为什么要出来。筱敏说过遇到某些书让她庆幸，我读着这本书的时候明白了这句话。我太庆幸William Deresiewicz写了这本书，更庆幸自己在这时候遇到了这本书，坚持读完了它。这个阅读过程非常痛苦，像我当初离开羊圈一样，但离开羊圈的心情意义非凡。这短短两个月我的精神状况发出了许多信号，新的成瘾，强烈的梦境，压力，所有的一切都在告诉我，不能再停滞不前了。我不可能再成为羊，意识到这一点不过是个开始，可是，我该成为什么呢？
Excellent Sheep
Introduction
“Education is the way that a society articulates its values，the way that it transmits its values.”
自己活得多失败这种问题及其反思与解决，是没有办法向别人诉说的，也没有办法反证，任何争辩和求助的念头都只是掩饰，是自欺欺人，是再度混淆问题有如在流脓的伤口上加一创可贴。成其为人就是这么件事，只有变回蛹，回到那种安静与痛苦中，才能真正起飞。
现在感觉就像，仿佛自己至今都依然在这个圈子里，被束缚的太深已经忘记自己的样貌，自己为什么要逃走…然后以一种沉迷的状态装作沉迷什么的样子拼命压抑这种和丧失自我有关的不安全感
Chapter 1
"Very few (of the students) saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development, one that they directed by themselves and for themselves." （14/39）
..."Hence the relentless extracurricular busyness, the neglect of learning as an end in itself, the inability to imagine doing something that you can’t put on your resume. （19/39）"
Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation. （bloodly true for me, and disturbing
6. Inventing your life
(1-3)
Vocation is Latin for calling: it means the thing you're called to do. It isn't something that you choose, in other words; it chooses you. It is the thing that you can't not do. It makes more sense to you than you do -- makes more sense of you. But the summons dosen't happen by itself. You have to do the work to make yourself receptive to it. ...You won't be able to recognize the things you really care about until you have released your grip on all the things that you've been taught to care about.
True self-esteem means not caring whether you get an A in the first place. It means recognizing, despite all you've been trained to believe, that the grades you get do not define your value as a human being. It means deciding for yourself what constitutes success.
"Innovation" is all the rage these days, as a panacea for what ails us, but we need to innovate in our idea of innovation. ...There is artistic imagination, and scientific imagination, but there is also such a thing as moral imagination -- "moral" meaning, not right or wrong per se, but having to do with the making of choices in the broadest sense. Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new alternatives for how to live.
(11-12)
"When the soul of a man is born in this country," the protagonist Stephen Dedalus says about Ireland, "there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets."
"self-indulgent"--These are the kinds of question that young people find themselves being asked today if they even think about doing something a little different -- even worse, the kinds that they are made to feel compelled to ask themselves.
(16-17)
So how do you find your vocation -- or as people like to say today, your passion? ...Do for work what you do spontaneously -- or did spontaneously, back when you were younger, before all the spontaneity got beaten out of you. Do what you would choose to do anyway, even if you didn't get rewarded for it. Do the thing that you can immerse yourself inside for hours at a time. You know the thing you wish you could do, instead of what you're doing now? Just do that thing. Do what you love to do the most: no, not that -- not what you think you love, or think you ought to love, but what you really do love.
Beyond a moderate level of material comfort, happiness consists of two things: feeling connected to others and engaging in meaningful work. ... Doing strenuously, in other words, what you do well. Summoning that sense of joy and freedom that arises from your belly when you're doing work that calls upon your favorite powers.
(20)
Purpose means doing somthing, not "being" something.
(21)
Now we have the gift and burden of freedom: the chance to figure them out for ourselves. We can surrender that chance and let other people tell us what to do -- freedom is often scary and confusing -- but we shouldn't pretend that it dosen't exist.
(24)
One word, oddly, that is never used in this connection is "ideals."...We seem to find the word forbidding now, preferring the squishier "values." But ideals have enormous power. They give you the strength to resist the seductions of status and wealth and success. An ideal is somthing that is more important to you than anything the world can give you.
p33
看到作者介绍自己经历的一段泣不成声。脑海里有些字句开始蹦出来，思绪不受控制地被带走。还有我的故事。最后是我的故事。
I don't know when exactly things began to go wrong with my chosen course of study, or why. Perhaps there was simply a natural limit to my interest, or perhaps it had to do with the way that all the science class were taught, in large lectures with no discussion sections, or perhaps my vision of what I was going to do with it all, why I was slogging through what turned out to be a lot of dry material, was too vague to sustain me....(35)So there I was, a couple of years after college, bitter from the fact that I had thrown away the chance to get an education, working a job that meant nothing to me, my career essentially dead in the ater, my self-belief in ruins, with no idea what I wanted to do or where I should go next...(36)But for the first time in a very long while, I performed at the top of my ability, and for the first time ever, I loved being in school. ... I had finally learned to listen to my gut, or in more sophisticated terms, had come to recognize the moral significance of desire. I had found out that I could do what I wanted. and that I could do it just because I wanted to.
还有另一个人的故事里的一段话，同样真实震撼
(29)
And I've realized: I'm pretending. I'm pretending to be a climate scientist. And I'm pretending to care about this job that I know hundreds would kill for. But most of all, I'm pretending to care about this version of "success". ..