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Obama is right: being early has everything going for it

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Time spent waiting is an opportunity to catch up with emails, reading and phone calls, says Lucy Kellaway.

奥巴马总统说他最大的优点在于早到，这常给别人一种一切尽在掌控的感觉。早到使自己免去担心迟到的压力，还可以利用早到空出的时间做一些不用担心被打扰的事情。大多知名人士也遵守守时的原则，并没有认为普通人的时间不如自己的宝贵。

相关短语

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punctual adj. 准时的

on the dot prep. 准时

moral high ground n. 道德高地

lord it over v. 对……逞威风

…, by which time… 到时候

Nobel Prize winning economist

time to set aside 留出的时间

appointed time n. 约定好的时间

self-important ad.j 高傲的

Brownie points n. 幼年女童子军积分;品行良好而获的称赞

短语句子

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it makes no odds… …也没关系。

参考文本

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I was sitting at Heithrow Terminal 2 last Wednesday, having arrived a couple of hours early for a short flight to Dublin. I didn't solve myself at eat while I was enjoy a bowl of porrige doing my emails, and I came upon a link to the latest act for the Clinton campaign. Normally I would've ignored it. The US election has become so ugly that the only rational response is to pretend it isn't happening. But as I had time to kill, I clicked on the link and there was Barack Obama, his hansome face alert and amused, speaking to camera "my greatest strength? Probably I'm always early". The president went on to explain that he likes to turn up early for every meeting, speech and press conference. "My commitment to being early isn't just good for me," he said, "it's good for the nation, it's good for the world." At this I started notting? so violently that the man next to me looked up to see what was going on.

Earliness has almost everything going for it. Being early means you're feeling in control, or makes others think you're in control, which is the next best thing. It gives you the moral high ground. If you arrive first at a meeting, not only do you choose where to sit, you're also in a position to lord it over those arriving later. The only time when it's not entirly good to be super-punctual is when arriving for a meal at a private house. But in that case, all you need do is walk around the block a few times, by which time you'll build up an appetite for the meal ahead.

Earliness is the defining characteristic of my entire family. Both my parents will be wildly early for everything, or three of their children and ten grandchildren. Even when they're through sort of teenage phases, could alway be relied upon to pitch up when bags of time to spare for any given occasion (?). To my knowledge, none of my blood relations had ever missed a plane. This means, according to George Stigler, the Nobel Prize winning economist, we're managing our time poorly and spend far too much time in airports. I've seen the maths supposed to prove this, but I'm unmoved. Time spent waiting is not wasted. It's time you have chosen to set aside. And it's a peaceful period that can be used for reading, making phone calls and emailing. Moreover, the stress saved by knowing that you'll never have to run down on a moving conveyer belt with heavy bags just as the flights close has too much of a value to be captured by any equation.

To see how the famous and successful fail about turning up before their appointed time, I've been living through archives of launch with FT. My inpression was that almost self-important guests were routinely late, their time after all being more important than the time of journalists. I was wrong. Most of our interviewees arrive on the dot, or neither early nor late enough to get a recording of it. Among the rest, the early outstretch the late by 5 to 1. The only two exemples of lateness of recent interviews were Edward Snowdon and Russel Brand, both of whom have upset so many people in the course of what they do. And it makes no odds if they upset them a bit more by showing up late.

The early crowd were moreover makes of bunch, Adele Turner, former head of the Financial Services Authority, was predictably early. So were Paul Crogman, Anoral Robini, and more surprisingly Shawn Pen, the former Hollywood …(?) turned political activist. People on the back fort seem to make a point of arriving super-promply, possibly in the hope of reclaiming a few Browny points. S Blanchit got here early for his launch. So did Jeremy Clarkson. But my favourit lesson from launch with FT cartings comes from Steven Green, then head of HBC, he turned out three minutes early for the meeting, and apologized for being late. This is a stroke of genius, and forces the other person who had been occupying the moral high ground by didn't getting there even earlier, to pull out his watch, and to protest on the contrary the new arrival is early too. So thank you, Mr Green. I'll remember this trick if ever I found myself in an unusual position of arriving at anything after anyone else.