I am a writer．I spenda great deal of my time thinking about the power of language—the way it canevoke(唤起)an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth．Languageis the tool of my trade．And I use them all—all the Englishes Igrew up with．

Born into a Chinese family that hadrecently arrived in California, I've been giving more thought to the kind ofEnglish my mother speaks．Like others, I have described it topeople as "broken" English．But I feel embarrassed to say that．It hasalways bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than"broken", as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked acertain wholeness．I'veheard other terms used, "limited English," for example．Butthey seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people'sperceptions(认识)ofthe limited English speaker．

I know this for a fact, because when Iwas growing up, my mother's "limited" English limited my perception of her．I wasashamed of her English．Ibelieved that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say．Thatis, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect．And Ihad plenty of evidence to support me: the fact that people in departmentstores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not giveher good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they didnot hear her．

I started writing fiction in 1985．And forreasons I won't get into today, I began to write stories using all theEnglishes I grew up with: the English she used with me, which for lack of abetter term might be described as "broken", and what I imagine to be hertranslation of her Chinese, her internal(内在的) language, and for that I sought topreserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure．Iwanted to catch what language ability tests can never show: her intention, herfeelings, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts．

    Some people think if you are happy, you are blind to reality. But when we research it, happiness actually raises every single business and educational outcome for the brain. How did we miss this? Why do we have these social misunderstandings about happiness? Because we assumed you were average. When we study people, scientists are often interested in what the average is.

    Many people think happiness is genetic. That's only half the story, because the average person does not fight their genes. When we stop studying the average and begin researching positive outliers —people who are above average for a positive aspect like optimism or intelligence —a wildly different picture appears. Our daily decisions and habits have a huge impact upon both our levels of happiness and success.

    Scientifically, happiness is a choice. It is a choice about where your single processor brain will devote its limited resources as you process the world. If you scan for the negative first, your brain really has no resources left over to see the things you are grateful for or the meaning embedded(嵌入) in your work. But if you scan the world for the positive, you start to acquire an amazing advantage.

    I wrote the cover story for the Harvard Business Review magazine on “Happiness Leads to Profits.” Based on my article called “Positive Intelligence” and my research in The Happiness Advantage, I summarized our researched conclusion: the single greatest advantage in the modern economy is a happy and busy workforce.

    A decade of research in the business world proves that happiness raises nearly every business and educational outcome: increasing sales by 37%, productivity by 31%, and accuracy on tasks by 19%, as well as a number of health and quality-of-life improvements.

    Many people go to school for an education. They learn languages, history, geography, physics, chemistry and mathematics. Others go to school to learn a skill so that they can make a living. School education is very important and useful. Yet no one can learn everything they want to know. The teacher's job is to show his students how to learn. He teaches them how to read and how to think. So, much more is to be learned outside school by the students themselves.

    It is always more important to know how to study by oneself than to memorize some facts or a formula (公式). It is usually quite easy to learn a certain fact in history or a formula in mathematics. But it is very difficult to use a formula in working out a maths problem. Great scientists, such as Einstein, Newton and Galileo didn't get anything from school. But they were all so successful. They invented so many things for mankind.

    The reason for their success is that they knew how to study. They read books that were not taught at school. They worked hard all their lives, wasting not a single moment. They would ask many questions as they read and they did thousands of experiments.

    Above all, they knew how to use their brains.

    Laziness is a state of inaction. It is something that you do, not something that you are. Being lazy means you have no motivation to do anything. Many people make the mistake that they view themselves as lazy.

    Lazy people are often seen as useless. They are the ones who don't do anything. They can be seen as underachievers or even bums（废物）. This can be a child or an adult. You can view a student who never studies as lazy. You can see an employee who doesn't do his work as lazy. In all of these cases, what the lazy person is doing is being lazy. But are they really being lazy or are they acting lazy?

    There is a huge different between saying you act lazy sometimes and you are a lazy person. One is suggesting that your laziness is temporary while the other suggests that it's permanent. This is the myth of laziness. People who are lazy aren't; they simply are people who are temporarily acting that way.

    So that causes a person to be inactive? The answer is a lack of goals. If you give someone a good enough reason to do something, they will do it. People who don't seem to do anything just haven't found a good enough reason to do something. Lazy students don't study because they don't see the point in studying. If you give them a reason, a strong enough reason, they will take action.

    For example, if you are too lazy to go to the gym, would you go if someone offered you a million dollars to go? If you are too lazy to go to clean out the garage, would someone pointing a gun to your head help you take action? The reason can be positive or negative as long as it's strong enough to induce（引起）action.

    To motivate someone who is lazy, what you need to do is to help them find purpose and enough reasons to work towards a certain goal.

    I recently had dinner with someone who told me that one of his best friends had been killed in a private plane crash, and something happened at the memorial service that he'll never forget. He shared the story with me.

    At the memorial service, his friend's wife walked to the platform to speak to the gathering. She said a friend had asked her the best memory she had of their life together. At the moment, she had been too sad to answer, but she had thought about it since and wanted to answer the question.

    They were in their late forties when he died, and she began talking about a time in their life almost twenty years earlier. She had quit her job to obtain her master's degree, and her husband never hesitated in his support.

    He held down his own job and also did the cooking, cleaning, and other housework while she studied for her degree.

    One time they both stayed up all night. She was finishing her paper, and he was preparing for an important business meeting. That morning, she walked out of her study, leaned against the door by the stairs, looked at her husband downstairs and just thought about how much she loved him. She knew how important this meeting was to his future, and she was feeling guilty that she didn't even have time to make his breakfast. He took his briefcase and hurried out. She heard the garage door open and close, but much to her surprise, she heard it open again about thirty seconds later. From above, she watched her husband dash into the house and walk over to the forgotten coffee table. Marking the surface of it with his finger through the dust with the words "I love you", then he raced back to his car.

    The new widow then looked out at her audience and said, "John and I had a wonderful life together. We have been around the world several times. We've had everything money can buy but nothing comes close to that moment."

    Hearing this, I was deeply moved. "Love makes life worthwhile."

    Scientists around the world are striving for effective detection of cancer in the early stages, which is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body, and a Chinese scientist may have found a quick way of knowing whether malignant tumors (恶性肿瘤) exist in a patient's body, with just one drop of blood.

    Malignant tumors in early phases can be cured. However, it's extremely difficult to be aware of cancer in its early stages, as patients don't show obvious symptoms and thus it can only be found in its later stages, which is already too late, so to detect cancer early remains a global challenge for scientists.

    Back in 1989, scientists have found a kind of heat shock proteins (HSP), named Hsp90α, which existed in human bodies and can be used as a cancer biomarker detection kit. Scientists around the globe have been working on it since then, and more than 10, 000 journals have been published on accredited magazines, yet no one has actually turned their research results into medical products.

    However, Luo Yongzhang and his team in Tsinghua University's School of Life Sciences in Beijing seemed to have cracked the code, after working on the problem since 2009.The team has produced an artificial Hsp90α protein for clinical use that gains structural stability by regrouping proteins. The test kit can diagnose multiple kinds of cancer by analyzing a drop of human blood. This means they are able to "create" the protein, in any quantity, and at any time they wish to.

    The kit has since been used in clinical trials involving 2, 347 patients at eight hospitals in China. It was the first clinical trial in the world to test if the protein could be a useful tumor biomarker for lung cancer, and it succeeded. Now, the kit has been approved to enter the Chinese and European markets, 24 years after Hsp90α was discovered.