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李開復博士英文自傳全書（連載【35】）

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Working Hard & Playing Hard

I often look back fondly upon my four years at Columbia University, those years when my heart was filled with youthful passion. Besides computers, I was also passionate about bridge.

After getting tired of video games in my freshman year, I spent almost all my leisure time playing bridge, which I had learned to play pretty well in high school. I knew the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) would recognize those who had earned 300 points from bridge games as Life Masters, so I made attaining that status my goal.

Based on the ACBL rules, winning a game in a bridge club would only result in 0.3 point. That meant I had to win 1,000 games in the shortest time possible.

To that end, I played about six bridge games a week. In order to win, I went to some bridge clubs located in senior centers to play with grandpas and grandmas who didn’t know the game as well as I did. But later I realized that kind of winning didn’t really mean much. I began to seek challenges in competitions.

Sometimes my bridge partners and I took the train to Harvard or Yale for inter-college bridge competitions. We won the Ivy League championship.

I accumulated enough points to become a Life Master at the end of my junior year.

One of my bridge partners, Alex Ornstein, later became a professional player.  He won the second place in the Bermuda Bowl, the “World Cup” of bridge. He was able to make good money and played bridge every day. It looked somewhat enviable to me that he was making a career out of his hobby. When I mentioned it to another friend, he said with a smile, “Kai-Fu, hadn’t you chosen the computers, you could be a professional bridge player, too!”

Although I’ve never had a bridge-related job, what I’ve learned from bridge is helpful to my career. Thanks to bridge, I know how to read people’s faces and predict their next moves. These skills are essential in business negotiations.

Drawing from my own experience, I often tell college students that extracurricular activities can do them a lot of good, and that studying is not everything. I also encourage them to get jobs or internships in the summer.

I worked two of the three summers in my college years. The first summer I obtained a great opportunity to work for the Law School of Columbia University. The dean of the Law School wanted to move a software system from an IBM mainframe to a lower-priced DEC VAX, but all the price quotes from contractors looked too high to him, so he gave the job to me based on my reputation in the university’s computer center, of which he had heard.

He offered me $7 per hour, which was a high wage to me. I was excited. When he asked me how soon I could deliver initial results, I said confidently, “I can make the program run in early August so we’ll have time to adjust it before school starts.”

“That sounds great!” The dean looked very happy.

He believed in my promise, which I thought I could easily keep, too. But just because I considered it a piece of cake, I didn’t start it from the beginning of the summer break. I obsessively played three weeks of bridge in July. Then I recalled my promise to the dean and picked up the task, which unfortunately turned out to be a lot more time-consuming than I had thought. August soon arrived. I had no choice but to try explaining to the dean, “This job is more complicated than I thought, so the program won’t run until late August. But it’ll still be done before school starts.”

I expected the dean to accept my excuse and let me continue with the project. But he didn’t. He appeared angry and said in a serious tone, “Since you can’t finish it on time, I’ll get someone else to do it.”

Obviously I had lost his trust. I felt terrible about it. I couldn’t fall asleep that night and reflected upon myself all night long. The next day I went to the dean and apologized, “I’m sorry that I disappointed you. I broke my promise, so I’m here to return the money you’ve paid me.”

“It’s OK. You can keep the money,” the dean kindly responded. “It’s excusable to make a mistake when you don’t have much experience. I’m sure you’ve learned a lesson.”

I did. Since then I have always kept my promises.

This work ethic began to win applause for me during my second summer break, in the beginning of which I went to an interview for a Goldman Sachs internship. To protect its assets, the bank needed to ensure the intern’s integrity, so it used a lie detector to conduct interviews.

“Do you drink?” The interviewer began with a question very easy for me to answer.

“No,” I replied, feeling certain that the lie detector wouldn’t indicate anything suspicious.

“Do you do drugs?”

“No.”

“Have you embezzled any amount of money?”

“No.”

“Do you gamble?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?” The interviewer asked again. “How come your heart is beating faster?”

The lie detector! It did pick up my quicker heartbeat while I was wondering whether bridge should count as gambling. Occasionally, we’d play for money, but it was never more than $20 in one evening.

“Why is your heart beating so fast?” The interviewer started interrogating me. “Do you lose money over gambling? How much do you lose every week? A thousand? Five hundred?”

He sounded more and more serious. I was afraid he already mistook me for a gambler. Would I lose this wonderful internship just because of playing bridge? I felt frustrated, but I didn’t give up. I made an effort to explain my love for bridge to him, and fortunately, the misunderstanding was soon cleared.

The interviewer smiled and said, “Don’t worry. You did fine. You scored a lot higher than most of the interns we’ve accepted.”

I will never forget the two summer jobs I did in college. Before I entered the real job market, they showed me what qualities of me would be in demand, how the world would view me and how I could adjust myself to fit in better.

Nowadays, whenever a college student asks me how to make the best use of a summer break, I always say, “Get a job! Find an internship! Do something that will prepare you for the real world!”

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