A few years ago, a little boy sat on a small elevated stool on the barber's chair and was getting readied for his haircut. The usual instruction to "cut it short in the side and back, medium on top" followed, and the barber knew it even before the words came out.
The boy's father, standing nervously near the chair, jostling for space in the compact salon, was enquiring about his son's hairstyle and asked the barber for expert tips to solve one seemingly unsolvable problem - "His hair stands straight up like an antenna on the top of his scalp. Is there anything you can do to cut the hair such that, it doesn't give that hair-raising, porcupine effect?"
The middle-aged barber replied in a calm, meditative and somewhat reassuring voice -
"There is nothing you or I can do about his hair situation.
You just have to wait for a few years till he reaches his teenage.
Then he will put in enough effort to make his hair bend in whichever direction he prefers, with the power of his will."
A decade later, when I see my 13yo son spending a good 10 minutes everyday in front of the mirror after each shower, shaping the crests and troughs of his now more obedient hairdo, I remember the old barber's psychological hack to calm his customers' parental anxieties!
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