Numbers That Shape Our Lives
Fourteen cards
Danny opened with a question: how many meetings have you attended at SZTM? Then he took a stack of BEST cards out of his pocket and counted them on stage, one to fourteen. Fourteen meetings, fourteen BEST cards. And how many speeches does a Pathway take? Also fourteen. He wrote every word of them, even though it took him seven years and three clubs.
The rest was about Danny himself. First the Cantonese boy at university in Tianjin, popular for his Cantonese, then for his English, until the campus radio station tested his Mandarin and the judges could not stop laughing. Then the soldier, whose only answer was “Sir! Yes, sir!”, even when the answer meant asking for a satellite. The last part was a reflection that came from a eulogy he once gave, and it brought him back to the title: before how we connect, introduce who we are. “Hi, I’m Danny. Glad to know you.”
The next morning he submitted his path completion: “So glad to complete my first pathway in SZTM.” His next path, he says, will be mostly stand-up comedy. Anyone who has watched him host or speak may think he started a while ago. When he asked an AI about his script, it told him he never explains his jokes, which is how a comedian thinks, not a speaker. That night one member laughed so hard she was hitting the wall, and Anna’s advice to new members was never to look Danny in the eye on stage. We look forward to the stand-up path.
Can we think less?
Tina, who was also the Meeting Manager, gave her first Level 1 speech: AI Is Smart, but Can We Think Less? It began with an AI app that added up the numbers in a photo, got the total wrong, and apologised. “But does an apology give me back my time?” Then a Wharton study, Thinking Fast, Slow, and Artificial: when the AI was wrong, most participants went along with it. Her advice was to use AI as an assistant, not a decision maker. “Let’s use AI to do more, not to think less.”
Danny was her evaluator. He told her that on stage she is the boss, so her gestures can be bigger, and offered a new title: “AI wrote this speech for me, but I have to do the speech myself.” He also filmed her speech. Watching it the next day, Tina found small movements she had not noticed, and decided body language needs deliberate practice too. Not many speakers go back and watch themselves. With that habit, her next speeches should show it.
Numbers that shape our lives
Stella ran Table Topics on her own theme, with eight questions on the screen: the number in your checkup report that worries you most, whether one number ever changed how you live, whether you would pay more for a 666 or 888, and what numbers cannot measure.
Plans changed at six thirty
The evening was rearranged at the last minute. Susie, the planned Toastmaster of the Evening, had no one to look after her daughter, so Stella took over hosting on top of Table Topics, and won Best Host. In the end Susie came anyway, half an hour late, with her daughter, and answered a Table Topic. Her daughter did not understand the English, but she started laughing every time Danny came back on stage. When she was sitting alone, Danny went over to keep her company. Cecilia arrived without a role and was handed Table Topics Evaluator. She said afterwards it felt like sleepwalking, but David told her she did an excellent job.
Danny also took the Moment of Truth, with a theory of lucky numbers from the Five Elements. Members spent the rest of the night working out their own numbers.
One new member, one returning
Two members to welcome this week. David came back after a busy stretch away from the club, answered a Table Topic and won Best Table Topics. The officers were as happy as anyone; someone brought drinks for the occasion. Han had been to a few meetings before, and that night he paid his membership fee. His WeChat name is 雨, “rain”, which took the member group a few minutes to work out: so Rain is Han and Han is Rain? Tao answered with a pun, 汗如雨下, “sweat falling like rain”, where Han sounds like sweat. And Anna, applying Danny’s Five Elements, decided that Han, which also sounds like drought, needs Rain to balance it.
Tommy came from Oasis Club as General Evaluator, his fourth visit to SZTM and his first at New Oriental; he won Best Evaluator, and asked if he could rehearse his November contest speech here. Della, a new guest, found the club through an events app and asked whether SZTM does anything besides meetings.
Thank you, Winston
Almost every photo on this page is Winston’s. It was his second time as the club’s photographer, and he sent more than thirty pictures to the group before the night was over, asking everyone to pick the ones they liked. He wrote that through the lens he could watch everyone’s mood and gestures, their laughing and smiling, and that it lifted him out of a tiring day. If a picture flatters you, he said, that is your own doing; if it does not, blame his skills. Members disagreed: one guest said the photos really came out well. Thank you, Winston, for giving everyone a night worth looking back on.
Mini, Hark Master and Best Facilitator, summed up the evening: learning English is something each of us has to do alone, but on a dark road, everyone here brings a lamp, and with all of them together you feel you could walk until dawn.
