1.b 心智力量的差异

心智力量的不同，最终会使一个人无论是在学习上，工作上，还是生活上与另外一些人相比甚至可能产生不可逾越的鸿沟。例子太多太多，但是，无论哪一个都不是那么容易说清楚。以下，是一些日常工作和生活上的例子，用来说明心智力量的差异。

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20111113101050/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/423.html

Make Time Your Friend 1.b: Differences in the Power of the Mind

> By Li Xiaolai · 2008-05-18 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20111113101050/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/423.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

Differences in mental strength can, in the end, open up a gulf—possibly even an unbridgeable one—between one person and others, whether in study, in work or in life. There are far, far too many examples, but none of them is all that easy to explain clearly. Below are some examples from daily work and life, used to illustrate differences in mental strength. The problems a person runs into in every aspect of life are actually all interrelated and influence one another. Practice has shown that almost all of life's awkward predicaments, whether in daily life or in work and study, whether material or spiritual, are by and large caused by differences in mental strength—and of course, solutions can often indeed be found through opening and developing the mind. Moreover, all these differences have to do with time.

**(1) Is your boss really that stupid?**

At work you often come across people complaining that their boss or superior is stupid. But is the superior really that stupid? It can't be ruled out that in some cases the superior really is stupid—no one is perfect. However, a more likely explanation is this:

In most cases, if a person doesn't do anything, he won't expose his shortcomings, because people expose their shortcomings only when doing things. This is an important reason why most people don't know themselves—because, in essence, most people don't have anything much to do; and if they really are doing something, then what they are doing is more likely something others have told them to do. In any department or team, everything the superior does is visible, seen by all subordinates or members; while subordinates and members often don't know very clearly what each other is doing. So subordinates find it easier to "collectively" see the superior's shortcomings. Mr. Qian Zhongshu has a very amusing description: "Only when the monkey climbs up the tree do we get to see its red bottom." But looked at from another angle, the reason the monkeys under the tree haven't seen, or can't see, the red bottoms of the monkeys beside them is simply that they are all squatting on the ground.

Let's look at how a person with powerful mental strength thinks when facing "the boss's stupidity."

- Will this shortcoming of his hinder the achievement of the team's goals?
- If so, is there room for remedy?
- If it can be remedied, then what is the way to remedy it?
- If it is certain that it can't be remedied, then can you, as a team member, effectively offer help?
- If you can offer effective help, then think of an effective way to communicate and offer the help—because this is in fact one of the team's obligations.
- If you can't offer effective help, then as a team member, do you have any other feasible suggestions, or an effective plan that can be implemented?
- If you do, then find a way to submit it, and push for it to be put into practice.
- If you don't, then shut up for now—in any case, no complaining.
- If not, then you should treat it calmly.
- If you can treat it calmly, then concentrate on doing your own work and making your own contribution.
- If you can't treat it calmly, don't complain; you should leave quietly.

So, if you observe carefully, you will find that almost all those people who keep complaining about "the boss's stupidity" have only one common trait: they are merely using "the boss is very stupid" as an excuse for their own slacking—they themselves don't know how ridiculous and pitiable they are: since the boss is so stupid, why do they spend most of the time of their own precious lives working for that stupid boss? The few people who can put forward constructive opinions don't complain that "the boss is very stupid," because they either find a way to help the boss solve the problem, or, when they're unable to help, choose to leave the company and go their own way.

Differences in mental strength make different people facing the same situation give different explanations, reach different conclusions, and finally make diametrically opposite choices. Think about it: after their different choices, what a world of difference there is in the quality of these people's time?

**(2) Are you really that outstanding?**

At work you often come across people who tell you smugly, "Another headhunting firm has come looking for me……" Being noticed by headhunters is often these people's capital for showing off, or for bargaining with their superiors. But is it really as they think?

A headhunter's job is to find talent and then sell the talent they find. Of course, sometimes the headhunter first meets a buyer and then looks for suitable talent according to the buyer's requirements. In a sense, what headhunters do is essentially no different from stock traders: both have to "buy low and sell high" to make money. So headhunters are often not interested in all talent, because if he were equally interested in all talent, his behavior would be as foolish as that of a stock trader who, of all things, bought equal amounts of every stock on the market.

Like stock traders, headhunters like undervalued targets. Just as there are always severely undervalued stocks on the stock market, there are certainly some severely undervalued people on the talent market. However, in a sense the talent market is not as transparent as the stock market—although the stock market isn't purely transparent either—because at least stocks carry clearly marked prices, whereas talent doesn't have its monthly salary, bonus and the full list of benefits marked on its forehead.

As the saying goes, cats have their ways and mice have theirs. So headhunters certainly have their own methods too. One relatively simple method is to target second-rate talent. The reason is fairly simple too. First-rate talent in any team usually rarely develops a wish to move. Their salaries are high, even too high; because they are already recognized, they enjoy more benefits and are also often respected by colleagues and leaders; they have more sense of satisfaction and responsibility; they care more about their reputations…… Besides, even if one day they do develop a wish to leave, it is often not to go to another company but to go out and work for themselves. So first-rate talent is often of no value at all to headhunters; put another way, for headhunters first-rate talent actually has no value to be developed.

Of course, headhunters aren't interested in third-rate talent or those even further below grade either, because they don't have, or hardly have, any potential to be developed. So headhunters pay the most attention to second-rate talent. Because in any team, these people have a strong feeling of "not being recognized"; their pay isn't high enough; their satisfaction isn't strong enough; they often feel others don't respect them enough; the responsibilities they bear aren't that many; they don't yet value their reputations as much as first-rate talent does…… So, in a team, second-rate talent is the most likely to develop a wish to move. At the same time, because of the principle that "one mountain can hardly hold two tigers," "another real tiger" is most likely to exist among the group defined as "second-rate talent."

The above is an analysis from the headhunter's point of view. Conversely, if one day a headhunter comes looking for you, perhaps you now understand that it isn't necessarily an especially happy thing. Because quite possibly, in some sense, it was because you are defined as "second-rate talent" that the headhunter took a huge interest in you.

The problem is that perhaps you really are "another real tiger," and perhaps you actually aren't. If you yourself are sure that you are, then the headhunter is actually of no use to you—you are destined to do your own thing and don't need him. If you aren't sure that you are, or you yourself know clearly that you simply aren't, then the headhunter is still of no use to you—because believing what he says may well lead you into another predicament, because sometimes changing environments means giving up everything you have accumulated in the past and starting over completely.

Of course, not all headhunters are like this. Just as there are many stock traders who don't play by the rules at all and end up making so much they could die laughing, many headhunters also have their own unique methods. Every industry has people whose talent overflows until it fills the sky. Some headhunters not only really have a special set of methods for discovering "another real tiger," but can even specialize in finding those who "don't yet know they are tigers," and then step by step train them into tigers, or watch them bit by bit turn into tigers, and then sell them—of course, the most awesome thing is selling them after they've become tigers but before they've realized they are already tigers. However, the odds of this are really too small, and the difficulty of pulling it off is really too high.

Again, differences in mental strength make different people facing the same situation give different explanations, reach different conclusions, and finally make diametrically opposite choices. Think about it: after their different choices, what a world of difference there is in the quality of these people's time?

**(3) Is interest really that important?**

Students often tell me that she isn't interested in her current major, and that what she is really interested in is such-and-such a major.—As we often see, these people are not happy. Because they (feel that they) are doing something they don't like doing.

But is it really as they think? To put it bluntly, in 99% of cases it isn't. First of all, these people aren't uninterested in what they are doing; rather, they lack the ability to do what they are currently doing well. No one likes doing things they don't do well. Everyone unconsciously tries to avoid their own weak points: people who sing off-key usually don't much like going to KTV with friends; people who are poor at cards are often very reluctant when friends call them in to make up the numbers; people who are bad at dealing with others usually sit in a corner of the room at meetings…… Of course, some people don't know themselves: they sing off-key yet, of all things, hog the microphone; they're terrible at cards yet are always organizing card games and have no card-table manners; they're extremely annoying yet love the limelight. But in any case, you must ask yourself this question clearly: is it possible that I don't like doing this thing merely because I haven't done it well? If you dislike it because you haven't done it well, then you have to sort out another matter: does doing this thing well actually have any concrete meaning for you? If it does, then you must work hard at it until you do it well—there is no other choice.

Conversely, if you do it quite well but just don't like it, purely because the thing really has no concrete meaning for you—in fact such cases are few and far between—then simply switch to doing something else and that's that. In fact, who has the power to force you to do something you really don't like doing? And if you really were forced to do it, how hateful can it be to do something you can do well?

Now to the other side. People always say that what they are really interested in is something else. But in fact, that should be merely because they haven't started doing that thing yet, and so haven't yet met with setbacks in it. Because they haven't met setbacks yet, and it hasn't yet been proven that they can't do it well, that thing does indeed hold a great attraction for them. [Translator's note: the original writes 与他们来讲 ("with them speaking"), a slip for 对他们来讲, "for them"; translated by the intended sense] In fact, when many people really do give up what they were doing and go to do something new that they are supposedly really interested in, they eventually find that doing this thing well is just as full of difficulties and constant setbacks. Before long, these people lose interest because they can't do it well, and start fantasizing about doing something else, and the line after "rationalization" (rationalization) is: "What I'm really interested in isn't this……"

So I don't think interest is very important. As long as you can do something well, and do it better than anyone, or at least better than most people, you can't help being interested in it. Sometimes, when I see the way some parents educate their children and they say it's to cultivate the child's interests, I quickly shut my eyes—I don't want to see a child harmed like this; but with my eyes shut I see even more clearly, because it is all too easy to imagine the result, which takes many years to finally show itself, and whose cause has been forgotten because so many years have already passed. Cultivating a child's interest isn't just a matter of buying a piano, or buying the child a book. In fact, you have to choose, according to the child's situation, the thing the child is most likely to do better than others (this alone may already be extremely time-consuming and laborious); and then you have to rack your brains to work out how to get the child to learn it and get to doing it well, doing it better than average people, doing it better than anyone—and then interest appears naturally.

When all is said and done, it is again the order that has gone wrong—**it is often not that you can do something well only once you're interested, but that you become interested only once you do it well.** People always get the order wrong and are totally unaware of the error. Although it isn't absolute, most things really do need practice to make perfect. Do it enough, and naturally you become good at it; once you're good at it, naturally you do it better than others; once you do it better than others, your interest grows, and then you like doing it more, get better at it, more…… a virtuous circle. But, likewise, doing a lot requires a large investment of time. Lack of interest is often merely a result, yet it is treated as the reason for not doing something well, and in the end the punishment is a great deal of time passing in vain.

**(4) Is study method really all that crucial?**

I've already mentioned that, as a teacher, I'm often asked by students, "Teacher, does this method really work?" In fact, I know students have more than this one question; they have further questions. Of course, only clever people concern themselves with method; there's nothing wrong with that. However, students are always overly concerned with whether the method they're using is correct. Merely correct isn't enough; they also have to consider whether the method is clever enough. Going further, besides being correct and clever, it also has to be efficient, because life is short, and if success comes too slowly, happiness is bound to be halved.

But these thoughts, seemingly born of "reason," surely have their limits. Otherwise one phenomenon would be utterly impossible to explain: many people use very stupid and inefficient methods, yet do in the end succeed. There are many such examples. My father graduated from the Russian Department of Heilongjiang University in the 1960s. During the Cultural Revolution, at a May Seventh Cadre School, he began teaching himself English. In that era, listening to Voice of America wasn't called "listening"; it was called "secretly listening to enemy radio"—something you could be convicted for. After the Cultural Revolution ended, when policies were implemented and he was rehabilitated, in the early 1980s he began teaching at a university in Northeast China, serving as head of the English Department until he retired. [Translator's note: the original writes these decades with full-width digits (６０年代, ８０年代), i.e. "the '60s," "the '80s" of the last century; rendered as the 1960s and the 1980s] It's hard to imagine how many reference books he had back then, and there was nothing special about his method either—I once deliberately asked him about many details, and what I can be sure of is that it was from my mouth that he first learned that there was such a thing in this world as the "Ebbinghaus memory curve[[1](#footnote_0_423 "Ebbinghaus (Hermann Ebbinghaus, 1850-1909), a famous German psychologist. After he published his experimental report in 1885, memory research became one of the most-studied fields in psychology, and Ebbinghaus was the first person to discover the laws of memory and forgetting.")] ." I am often amazed that my father, with no Kingsoft PowerWord, no electronic Webster's dictionary with real human pronunciation, no "I Love Memorizing Words" software, and still less any super-flashy secret manual, could learn to that level!

Another example that says a good deal involves a respected professor, Mr. Zhong Daolong. Mr. Zhong Daolong is known for his *Reverse English Learning Method* (《逆向英语学习法》). No offense whatsoever is meant here; I am only trying to state facts. Mr. Zhong's method is not only not new (its essence—"listen and copy," or "dictation"—is the most basic learning tool used in almost every university that teaches second-language majors), it is also not especially efficient. Yet not only did Mr. Zhong Daolong himself learn very well—it's said that he began learning English at forty-five and a year later became a senior translator—but many students who believe in the reverse English learning method also achieved very good results. How could that be?

The most extreme example involves another person, the famous, crazy Li Yang. This man, who had more than three thousand students kneel down en masse, and later urged female university students to shave their heads to show their resolve in becoming his disciples, with his beautiful pronunciation that can't help but win people over and an attitude so crazy it has shocked many, conquered countless students north and south of the Yangtze. However far the controversy goes, one thing can be said for sure: while he himself succeeded through craziness, many students really did improve their English because of it. What's going on?

The place where I once worked was called New Oriental School. The rise of the school's founder, Yu Minhong, began with his TOEFL and GRE training. The vocabulary method he taught is the currently most popular "roots and affixes" memorization method. This method actually isn't any miracle cure either; it's merely an auxiliary aid. But what can be said for sure is that Yu Minhong himself really does have a very large vocabulary, and his students really did memorize words with his method and get good scores. New Oriental Education & Technology Group has now grown into a giant of China's education sector, and has long since been successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange; this in itself shows that word of mouth from students who benefited played a decisive role—New Oriental rarely spends money on media advertising. But that method isn't brilliant, is it?

I don't know about other people, but I know my father has nothing but disdain for the so-called "roots and affixes memorization method." Once, after I had gone on and on to him about "roots and affixes," his rebuttal was: "Did you memorize all Chinese characters by their radicals? You're joking. Have you forgotten that after you learned the three thousand common characters, whenever you met a character you didn't know you had no choice but to look it up in the dictionary? At such times, if you didn't look it up but insisted on guessing from the radicals, wouldn't every guess be wrong?—to the point that Chinese has a special expression warning you never to 'take the meaning from the look of the characters'; have you forgotten that" [Translator's note: the father's quoted words have no closing punctuation in the original] I don't know whether Li Yang or Yu Minhong, when studying back then, also used the essence of Mr. Zhong Daolong's reverse English learning method ("listen and copy"); even if they did, they probably didn't learn it from Mr. Zhong Daolong; but one thing I know for certain: Mr. Zhong Daolong and Principal Yu Minhong are certainly not crazy, yet they are even more successful.

The indisputable fact is that they are all very successful—at least, they themselves have all been very successful. Yet their methods are not the same, and may even be at odds. But if you observe carefully, you will find that they have at least one thing completely in common—they are all very hardworking people. Yes, what I've wanted to say all along is—method is of course important, but compared with "hard work" it is almost negligible. Explaining one thing clearly isn't easy, and explaining this thing clearly is especially not easy. Not until one day, chatting with my fitness trainer, did I suddenly get the inspiration that made me able to explain it clearly.

My trainer's arms measure 43 centimeters around, almost as thick as an ordinary person's thigh. Once he told me the secret of his training—when gripping the dumbbell, you must press the edge of your palm against the dumbbell plate on the side nearest your body. That way the other end of the dumbbell naturally turns outward by a very small angle, so that when you flex your arm the muscle gets exactly the maximum stretch-and-contraction stimulus. Then he smiled proudly and brightly and said, "How simple is that!" But I suddenly understood something else: his success didn't actually come from this so-called "simple and mysterious technique," because I know another fitness trainer whose arms measure 45 centimeters, and I have never seen that 45-centimeter trainer grip the dumbbell this way. Yet they both succeeded.

Arms bigger than an ordinary person's are trained like this: there are only three to five commonly used exercises for the biceps. Train the biceps specifically once a week; three exercises each time; at least 5 sets of each exercise; each set repeating the same movement 8–12 times; the weight calculated so that you can't do a single more; keep it up for more than 54 weeks—as for how you grip the dumbbell, it doesn't matter much. Especially for ordinary people, there's no difference between 43 centimeters and 45 centimeters; both are "as thick as a thigh……" The most important thing is nothing but this: repetition, uninterrupted repetition, repetition for more than a year.

So, **all success in learning depends on only two things: strategy and persistence, and persistence itself should be one of the most important strategies.** Persistence is really repetition, and repetition, when all is said and done, is the investment of time—I mean, a large investment of time. According to my mother, whenever my father was learning anything he could, without either going without sleep or forgetting to eat, use all his time for study. Mr. Zhong Daolong is very frank; he said, "To learn English, I put in a great deal of effort. Here are a few concrete examples: I kept up dictating 20 pages of A4 paper every day, never stopping until I reached the target; even when a meeting ran late in the evening I would make it up. From January 31, 1980 to February 1983, in three years I filled a whole cabinet with dictation records, used up a handful of ballpoint refills, wore out 9 vacuum-tube tape recorders, 3 transistor radio-cassette recorders and 4 tape players, and wore out 2 dictionaries from leafing through them." Yu Minhong is someone who works extraordinarily hard when he is doing what he wants to do. I don't know how he learned English, but I know that in order to make New Oriental big, he arranges the next year's schedule a year in advance; his Outlook calendar, when printed out, takes a page a day, and every page is full. Even with Li Yang, I believe his beautiful pronunciation doesn't come merely from talent or so-called "craziness," but from the fact that he was "crazy" for many, many years.

Compared with persistence, how important is method? Very often, even saying it is so unimportant as to be almost negligible isn't actually going especially too far. So the fact that so many people keep searching for better methods is something very laughable and yet sadly deplorable. **Rather than constantly searching for better methods, you'd do better to start acting right away and save yourself from wasting more time.**

**(5) Is touch typing really worth learning?**

Around the age of 25, I realized for the first time that some of my ideas could, of all things, be "wrong yet seemingly correct with rigorous logic." At that time I had already been around computers for nearly 10 years. And before I came into contact with computers, when none of my classmates had even seen what a typewriter looked like, I had long known how to operate a keyboard, because I had a dad who was proficient in English and Russian. However, nearly at 25, I still couldn't touch-type—even though even the schools had dedicated typing classes (at that time many schools' computer classes were really just practice in Wangma Wubi Chinese input).

I also often lectured my classmates, with great self-assurance, that practicing typing was a complete waste of time. I thought the Wangma Wubi Chinese input method was only for typists. To be precise, the Wubi input method is merely a copying method, because you can only type while looking at a text. And for people who truly create content, writing it out first with paper and pen and then copying it into the computer—is there anything more absurd than that? Learning the strokes of Chinese characters is tiring enough already; and on top of that you have to practice some fingering—to hell with it. Not to mention the interference of this so-called input method with thinking—you have to take characters apart before inputting them, and take them apart according to baffling rules at that. I thought the pinyin input method was the true input method, with a short learning curve, quick to pick up, and no interference with thinking. Besides, even if I couldn't touch-type, I was already quite fast with two fingers (at least faster than handwriting); so tell me, did I need to learn any Wubi input and touch typing? Ha, my dad typed with two fingers his whole life!

Of course, to this day, I still maintain that the Wubi input method is merely a transitional product of a temporary compromise and will sooner or later die out completely; I also still maintain that the pinyin input method is the greatest Chinese input method. But that isn't the point.

Much later, something else happened. That year I was 25. Around 1997, there were almost no practical applications on the internet apart from chat rooms and forums. It was just when Microsoft's Windows finally came bundled with the "Microsoft Pinyin Input Method 1.0" developed by the Harbin Institute of Technology. One afternoon, after two hours of unrestrained chatting with a girl whose identity I will never know, I suddenly discovered that I had, of all things, taught myself so-called "touch typing" without a teacher! For a while after that, many people envied how fast I typed, so I simply spent about 20 minutes changing the default "full pinyin input" setting to "double pinyin input"; and after that, still not satisfied, I also chose to add the "southern fuzzy sounds" setting (of course, this had side effects too: more than 10 years later, I suddenly discovered that I had long since become unable to tell flat-tongue and retroflex sounds apart……).

This was the first time I realized that "some things, even common sense, can only be truly felt after experiencing them yourself." Of course, for many years after that, what I kept struggling toward was a different direction—how to use the power of the mind so that, even without having had the chance to experience something personally, I could feel it as deeply as if I had really been through it, merely by the mind? (In later writing, I will explain in detail how to break free of the limits of experience. See [4.b Breaking Free of the Limits of Experience](http://www.lixiaolai.com/?p=435).)

Only when you have incomparable typing speed do you know how great the benefits of typing fast are. [Translator's note: the original writes 无以伦比, a common slip for 无与伦比, "incomparable"; translated by the intended sense] I suddenly found that I no longer hated taking notes while reading, because typing any amount of text on a keyboard is so much easier than with paper and pen. I started recording my thoughts in long passages, and sometimes simply copying out long passages of the original—of course, if I was reading an electronic text, even better: just copy and paste, how convenient! In just two or three months, I had more than 100M of text material. In the past, one of the annoyances of reading was this: I had clearly read a passage related to this, but where was it? When I absolutely couldn't find it, I felt like cursing. [Translator's note: the original writes 于此相关, a slip for 与此相关, "related to this"; translated by the intended sense] Electronic text, besides being easy to edit, has a powerful search function that printed text can't offer. With such a search function, it's hard to run into those situations that make you so angry your palms itch.

When I truly experienced how great the benefits of taking notes while reading—even taking lots of notes—really are, in the midst of my delight I actually scared myself into a cold sweat. I suddenly understood how absurd my past refusal to practice touch typing had been. And back then, something that, even without the stimulus of the opposite sex, would have taken at most a week to master, I had refused to learn and practice merely out of laziness. If—this thought gave me goose bumps all over—even 5 years earlier I had spent a week learning to touch-type, how many more reading notes could I have had, how much more writing could I have accumulated?—not to mention that nearly 15 years earlier, I had had the chance, and it was entirely possible, to learn touch typing. Good heavens, how much time had I wasted? I didn't dare think any further.

I talked to myself for a long time: "Good heavens, how much time have I wasted?!" My eyes stared blankly at the icon of the folder on my computer holding 100M of text material, while in my heart I already wished I could beat my chest and stamp my feet. I will never forget the shudder of that instant—exactly the kind where you fall off a cliff in a nightmare and then suddenly wake up. Saying merely that my past absurdity came from laziness and naivety would be rather oversimplified. [Translator's note: the original writes 处于懒惰 ("being located in laziness"), a slip for 出于懒惰, "came from laziness"; translated by the intended sense] In fact, it was because my mental ability wasn't powerful enough that I didn't even realize I was merely being lazy—and was even, of all things, self-assured and smug about it. Frightening! That day, I told myself a sentence that I have never forgotten since: "A low mind is truly frightening……"

I remember a teacher in the past explaining that Zengzi's line in the *Analects*, "I examine myself three times a day," has two interpretations: the first is that every day I reflect on myself three (many) times; the second is that every day I reflect on myself in the light of the following three things; and, judging from the context, the second interpretation seems more reasonable. But my sudden insight, after being frightened that time by the realization I had suddenly arrived at, was this: whether he "reflected three times" a day or "listed three things to reflect on" doesn't matter; **what matters is that he "reflected" every day**—as a human being in the true sense, there seems to be nothing more important than this.

**(6) Summary**

The examples just given can tell us clearly how shockingly large the differences in mental strength between people can be. What's even more frightening is that these differences are too hidden—because they are not at all the obvious kind of differences like looks, figure or wealth. So these differences are either simply ignored, or refused acknowledgment in all kinds of ways.

**In fact, nothing is more important than discovering, cultivating, nurturing and adjusting the power of one's own mind.** Once something goes wrong with our minds, we make wrong judgments because of wrong understanding, and the time wasted as a result is often not only immeasurable; what's more frightening is that such errors and waste may not even be knowable at all.

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Footnotes:

1. Ebbinghaus (Hermann Ebbinghaus, 1850-1909), a famous German psychologist. After he published his experimental report in 1885, memory research became one of the most-studied fields in psychology, and Ebbinghaus was the first person to discover the laws of memory and forgetting. [[↩](#identifier_0_423)]