Big

Read the opening page of David Schwartz's The Magic of Thinking Big and the story of his six-year-old son's ambition to become a Professor of Happiness will leave you energetic.

Now that I've brought with me this self-help classic on my conference leave, I'm halfway through the book. If there was one lesson learned from this book, it was this: think big, smile big, and grow big.

Let's see an example put up by the author and see what you think: How many times have you been summoned by your boss to accomplish a special task when your timetable has already been darn full?

Think for a minute about the best reply.

Yes, we can give our boss three reasons we should take the task but hundred more justifications why we're simply too busy to handle. But please, I'm told, find ways to believe you can.

The following advice by David Schwartz is important enough to quote at length: Where there's a will, there is a way. And I am growing more and more convinced that I should stick to my habit of never turning down the boss.

Right

Never in the history of our country has any illegal immigrant made the headlines more than a 12-year-old boy who has lived in Hong Kong with his grandma since the age of three.

When I picked up a copy of South China Morning Post on my flight to London, I noticed that his story appeared at least twice in the news today.

But the distance between this mainland boy and me, ultimately, can be measured in light-years. I'd be more interested in the education of our local children. I skipped that boy's story, but found much more interesting feature articles. One of them is about local children's writers who named their favourite picture books for youngsters. I know some of the recommendations (like The Gruffalo); some others I had to jot down in my bucket list.

Another opinion article on the second page of the newspaper drew my attention. It's about the twisted education race, the tutoring centres that rob our toddlers of their childhood by training them how to handle interviews for kindergartens and primary schools. Remember the tagline in the education centre's poster, "You don't like competition? But competition will find you?"

Say those last two sentences out loud and wonder at them. There's never a shortage of places to keep the local kids busy, dizzy or, at best, crazy. Who knows how far that cutthroat game could go?

Terrible, yes.

But it's not one-tenth as thrilling as watching a local documentary of kids' after-school work. I watched a replay of it on the plane. Be grateful you (or your primary school kid) never had to keep track with the incredibly packed timetable of ten homework assignments, as what the poor kid did in the documentary. Yes, ten assignments. By his mum's account the boy is talented enough to finish each item within ten, maybe fifteen, minutes, setting time aside, around 2 minutes between each, for play. That doesn't make sense to me.

There is, of course, an escape hatch. Its name is Plan B. The boy asked his mum, "May I be excused, just for a short while, to go poo-poo?"

Yes, that's allowed. But I tell you, the Plan B is to swap the play time with poo-poo time. All his mum can do is, quite literally, hold her breath and wait for the poo-poo time to finish as quickly as possible.

I have no interest in defending a child's poo-poo time. That's as basic as a human right, and definitely much less controversial than the right of abode for an illegal immigrant. As a parent, I just want to remind myself the 10-minute rule: We should expect all homework assignments together to last as long as 10 minutes multiplied by the student's grade level (or perhaps 15 minutes if required reading time is included). If you don't believe in this rule, go and ask the National Parent-Teacher Association in the United States.

Loss

Everyone fears the ideas of losing. Students fear it. Gamblers fear it. Investors fear it. As long as we own something, we fear the chance of losing it.

The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky coined the phrase loss aversion to describe how we feel the pain of loss more intensely than we feel the pleasure of gain.

What are the differences between losing a deposit of $150 and not getting a reward of $150? What are the differences between a 5-cent levy on the use of a plastic shopping bag and a 5-cent bonus for bringing your own grocery bag? Simple: we dislike the former (losses) more than we like the corresponding gains.

Have we proven this loss aversion in a scientific way? Not by a long shot, I must say, until I read a research paper on smoking cessation program in the New England Journal of Medicine this week.

Pretend for a moment (if necessary) that you're a chain-smoking guy who can't give up cigarettes, and then receive an invitation to enroll in a randomized, controlled trial for smoking cessation. The idea is simple: you'll be assigned (as randomly as tossing a coin) either to a deposit program or a reward program. In the deposit program, you deposit $150 at the beginning and will get back the money if you kick the habit of puffing, along with $650 extra. In the reward program, on the other hand, there is no deposit to make; you'll be eligible to receive $800 if you stop smoking.

Anyone with an ounce of loss aversion psychology would immediately tell you the deposit program is the least attractive. In the end, it is a simple truth: the least attractive program gives the most impetus to quit smoking. That sounds nuts. And it is! The researchers reported that 52.3 percent of those recruited in the deposit program had sustained smoking abstinence for 6 months, as compared with just 17.1 percent of those in the reward program.

The power of loss aversion is overwhelming.

Showstoppers

Child's growth, like weather, can be hard to predict. But you know it when you see it.

All I need is seeing how Jasmine is determined to prepare gifts for her mum's birthday and Mother's Day this week. Never mind her grammar mistake. Not that she writes perfect sentences. Far from it. But she rehearsed before writing the birthday card. And yes, for the tote bag she designed and painted, my wife loves it with every inch of her soul.

But perhaps the best example of my daughter's readiness is how we celebrated my wife's birthday together. My wife had suggested to buy tickets of Showstopper! The Improvised Musical. The first time we talked about this idea, it took me a while to realise she means three tickets - including that for our daughter. That's a work of surreal genius, I know. And yet. Can a five-year-old appreciate a bunch of professional performers who create musical impromptu based on audience suggestions?

We bought three tickets, anyway. And, of course, our daughter turned out to be the youngest in the audience. The single hardest thing for us is we couldn't check the subject of the show beforehand. We had to wait for whatever crazy ideas that came up on the spot. A fantastical reverie of what-ifs and why-nots. It was our first view of such unique off-the-cuff show; nothing was the same as the previous show. What did we get in the end? A story of rewriting Shakespeare's works, Romeo and Juliet, space station, superpower of ultra-sensitive toes, radioactive kitten, and many many funny ideas.

Incredibly crazy and magical, yes. My daughter loves it a lot. Unbelievable.