1.a 了解心智的力量

Make Time Your Friend 1.a: Understanding the Power of the Mind

> By Li Xiaolai · 2008-05-18 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20111113132536/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/422.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

Students often ask me, "Teacher, does this method really work?" For quite a long time, I was extremely impatient with this kind of question, and would always frown while trying my best to look calm and say, "Well—what do you think?" Students would usually be taken aback for a moment, then turn and walk away—probably disappointed. I could almost feel the little person inside their heads shutting its eyes tight and shaking its head hard, then opening its eyes still looking completely puzzled.

At that time, I felt truly powerless. Whatever the method, you can only get results through practice. Whether it works or not—how can you know without doing it? The problem is that practice takes time, and everyone's time is precious because it is limited. When I saw such students, I couldn't help feeling anxious for them from the bottom of my heart: "Why are you still wasting time thinking about such useless questions? If you had started practicing long ago, wouldn't you know by now whether the method really works!"

I suppose many teachers must face the same predicament as me, right? I'm surely not the only teacher whose students ask like this. In the end, I struggled once more and made another effort. For quite a long time afterward, before or after explaining some important method—or even simply before, during and after—I would repeatedly warn my students: "Listen carefully: no matter how interesting, how useful or how reasonable what I say is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with you—if and only if you have done what I say does it count, for you, as truly interesting, truly useful, truly reasonable."

However, in the end I found that this speech of mine didn't have much effect. Because there were still many students—I strongly suspect it was actually most of them—who simply didn't do what I said. The killer was that I found that when I was doing my utmost to explain those methods and those principles in a way both interesting and thorough, I could clearly see them nodding in agreement! For a period of time, I was close to despair. Even while lecturing, hearing the students' laughter and applause, seeing them nodding and taking notes, I rather suspected that what I saw and heard at the time was not real, merely my hallucination.

Where was the problem? A thousand, ten thousand times, I asked myself.

When the answer suddenly popped out of my head one day, I was somewhat shocked. In the past, when students came to ask me, "Teacher, does this method really work?", I had, of all things, completely failed to realize that the reason these students asked this way was, in a sense, entirely rational! Their logic goes like this:

> I think your method makes quite a bit of sense, but I'm not very sure. The problem is that if I decide to use your method, then it's like an investment: it requires putting in time, energy and even money. If I put in time, energy and money when I can't be at all sure what results this choice of mine will actually bring me, wouldn't I be worse than a fool? So you have to tell me: does your method actually really work or not? If the answer isn't certain, I'm not going to take action.

This logic is so complete that they hold to it unshakably, so much so that it had never occurred to me that there could be such a "reasonable" possibility. Think about it carefully: almost everyone who refuses to learn chooses to refuse so self-righteously precisely because they believe this reasoning of theirs is accurate and flawless.

> I know I should study now and work hard; that's no problem. The problem is that studying, or working hard, is like an investment: it all requires putting in time, energy and even money. If I put in time, energy and money when I can't be at all sure what results my studying now will actually bring me, wouldn't I be worse than a fool? So you have to tell me: what exactly is the use of learning this stuff? I'm not going to learn anything useless!

This is an even harder question to explain. In fact, everyone engaged in interdisciplinary research may understand instantly what I'm talking about; but the people I need to explain it to are students with little experience of the world, so I think I have to be a bit long-winded. Perhaps my own experience can illustrate the problem well, and I also believe that in essence this is not an experience unique to me personally. Let me tell it in detail from the beginning.

> In 1984, that is, more than twenty years ago, my mother, of all things, gave me 10 yuan and allowed me to sign up for the first computer class in our area. You have to understand that 10 yuan back then was perhaps equivalent to 1000 yuan now, or more—because at that time my parents' combined monthly income was only a little over two hundred yuan.
>
> Roughly, this is how it happened. I was then in my second year of junior high school. Near the summer holidays, one day our head teacher brought in a sheet of paper and stuck it on the blackboard, saying the Children's Palace was going to run some kind of class, and anyone who wanted to could go and have a look. The next day, a bunch of us classmates ran there in the blazing sun, racing and fooling around; in fact we didn't even know what kind of class it was. Today, many years later, that day in my memory still seems dazzlingly bright.
>
> When we got there we found we were far too late; the room was already packed. A few of us had to squeeze to the very back of the classroom and stand on the desks to see the blackboard. After waiting a long time we finally saw a thin male teacher connect a keyboard (the earliest R1 model; it was not until '86 that I saw an APPLE II) to a monochrome monitor and give some demonstrations that dazzled us. Today, I suppose no one would get excited about the screen being able to display a geometric figure spelled out in letters, would they? But back then, we were just very excited; the room kept ringing with children's gasps of amazement and cheers.
>
> I remember the children's disappointed sighs when the male teacher said, "That's it for today." The teacher went on to say, "Formal classes start tomorrow afternoon; students who sign up must pay 10 yuan tuition." I ran almost all the way home, and when I told Mom, she didn't hesitate at all; she just said that when your dad gets back this evening he'll give it to you. The next day, holding the 10 yuan my dad had given me that morning, I excitedly ran to find one of the classmates who had gone with me the day before (our head teacher's son). As it turned out, he said he wasn't going, because his mother said learning that was of no use.
>
> So, rather deflated, I walked all the way to the Children's Palace by myself, my hand in my pocket tightly clutching that 10 yuan. You have to understand that at that time the 10-yuan note was still the largest denomination I had ever seen. When I got to the classroom on the third floor of the Children's Palace, I found that the classroom was actually very large; the day before I just hadn't noticed because it was packed with people—apart from the teacher, there were only 5 students in all, including me. Later still I learned that one of them was actually a member of the Children's Palace staff. So the total income of that session of the computer class was 35 yuan—because later another student dropped out partway, and her father came and got back 5 yuan of the tuition.
>
> Many years later, I mentioned this to my mother, and she said she had just wanted me to have a summer holiday that wasn't boring. But she did remember very clearly that when my father heard the tuition was 10 yuan, he said only one sentence: "Learning something is always a good thing." Later still, once when I went back to my hometown, I ran into my head teacher from those days and mentioned this while chatting. She, surprisingly, simply didn't remember that any such thing had happened. So I didn't say anything more, and on second thought didn't go on to ask what her son is doing now.
>
> Leaving aside for the moment the pleasure of the mind that tinkering with computers has given me over so many years, mentioning one thing is enough. In the course of writing *[TOEFL Core Vocabulary: A 21-Day Breakthrough](http://product.dangdang.com/product.aspx?product_id=8775272)* (《托福核心词汇21天突破》), if I hadn't had that little bit more computer knowledge than ordinary people and been able to write some batch scripts, it would have been impossible to finish a massive amount of work in such a short time; and even spending several times as long, it would have been hard to produce that quality—and in the end quality guaranteed sales, sales of course then guaranteed income, and my personal financial freedom (one of the most important freedoms) had more support.

But the problem is: when I went to the Children's Palace to learn computer programming languages back then, how could I have imagined that one day more than 20 years later I would use software to pull data from a corpus, then use statistical methods to mark every word with its frequency[[1](#footnote_0_422 "Words do not all appear with the same frequency. In Chinese, the most common is '的', followed by '了'; characters like '昶' or '鬯' are so rare that many people have never seen them at all. In English, the most common is 'the', followed by 'of'…… words like 'exorbitant' rank beyond thirty thousand.")] , and after that write a batch program to copy and paste more than 20M of content out of the corresponding dictionaries within a few hours, and then reorganize it…… By the way, statistics was something I studied in university purely for fun, yet it was, surprisingly, eventually proven by the facts to be the most useful knowledge—the branch of mathematics that every field of modern science needs. Fifteen or sixteen years ago, when I was leafing through statistics books at university, I would never in a million years have thought that one day I would apply those theories to English teaching—in fact, counting back just seven years from now, the me of that time could not possibly have imagined that one day I would go and teach English! And students have always rated me the teacher with the most brilliant lectures; I think it's because I have extremely strong powers of persuasion—because my first job after graduating from university was in sales. But the reason I was able to develop good powers of persuasion was not at all so that I could one day become the best teacher—back then it was merely to earn money and make a living.

When I examined myself seriously in order to be able to answer effectively that question from students that troubled me so endlessly, I found that my motivation for going to learn something was, surprisingly, exactly the same as the reason those people give for refusing to learn: "**I don't know what exactly the use of learning it is**." So, while some people—probably most people—are still wondering "……but what's the use of my learning this?", other people—certainly a minority—are thinking, "I don't know what exactly the use of learning it is…… but precisely because I don't know what use it is, it may be all the more valuable!"

If many years later you suddenly discover that something you learned many years before happens to be useful right then, you can imagine the degree of your delight. Just recently, a colleague of mine, at the end of a certain discussion meeting, excitedly told me, "Ha, I actually studied this specially! I spent quite a lot of money learning it just for fun back then, and thought it was pretty boring. Who'd have thought I'd finally get to use it here now—heh heh, I'm going to do this well and get my investment back!" I think her extreme delight at that moment and my excitement when using seemingly very complicated statistical theory to compute the frequencies of English vocabulary must be, in essence, exactly the same.

At this point, I think I really can answer those students' question fairly clearly. I hope those students know that all methods are nothing more than two kinds: right ones or wrong ones. As a teacher, especially a responsible teacher, the methods you tell students should be effective and reasonable. If even a responsible teacher's methods turn out to be useless and unreasonable, then all you can say is that the student's luck is really bad, having run into the least likely situation. Conversely, however, as a student, there is really only one effective and reasonable choice, and that is to do as the teacher says—really do it, and stick with it to the end, and then whether the method is right or wrong will naturally become clear. (Besides, sometimes even using a wrong method can succeed, and conversely, using a right method doesn't necessarily succeed—I'll come to this later.)

But all the writing before this is meant to illustrate another, deeper problem—the power of the mind. **The mental strength each person has differs, and differences in mental strength bring incalculable differences in value to each person's life.** We have already seen that, facing the same question—"why study"—differences in mental ability can, surprisingly, make people make opposite choices for the same reason—"I don't know what the use of studying is."

The direct result of these opposite choices is a difference in the quality of time—this is not something so-called "time management techniques" can make up for. Anyone can make a "task list"; there's no one who can't distinguish "important" from "secondary," or "urgent" from "non-urgent." People who refuse to learn because "I don't know what the use of studying is" will idle away countless days in the time that follows, even if they "scientifically" draw up plans and compile "task lists" every day. Conversely, people who choose to study hard because "I don't know what the use of studying is" are full of gains every moment, and one day in the future will gain even more "unexpected" gains, even if they may seem "aimless"—it really is a difference as great as between heaven and earth.

**This is the difference between people—besides the visible looks, figure, background and wealth, there are invisible, intangible differences in mental strength.** We often hear people sigh, "How can there be such great differences between people?" In fact, we shouldn't be at all surprised by this.

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Footnotes:

1. Words do not all appear with the same frequency. In Chinese, the most common is "的", followed by "了"; characters like "昶" or "鬯" are so rare that many people have never seen them at all. In English, the most common is "the", followed by "of"…… words like "exorbitant" rank beyond thirty thousand. [[↩](#identifier_0_422)]

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