写在31岁到来之际On Turning 31

Introduction

This past year has had its gains and its losses. I ran four of the majors, met plenty of new friends, learned a lot of new things, and, in a few unguarded moments, came away with some new realizations too.

The older you get, the more you come to see: character is destiny. You can briefly exceed the limits of your ability, but you can rarely escape the cage of your character.

Childhood is the father of a life, and environment is its mother — the edges and the warmth we carry were mostly shaped back then. Mencius's mother moving three times isn't a story; it's fate.

Whether a person can walk through the world at ease often depends on whether, in childhood, they ever had the chance to be understood and forgiven.

Looking forward from the front, everything seems earned by effort; looking back from the end, most of it seems arranged by fate.

The sooner you understand this, the more lightly you can live in the real world. Because most so-called "results" are waited for, not fought for.

Sometimes I suddenly feel that the inner lives of young people are all pretty much alike: ambitious on the surface, anxious and unsure underneath. The distance between the giant and the ordinary person may not be talent, but simply that they learned earlier to coexist with anxiety. Once you realize this, it becomes easier to make peace with yourself.

It's just that more and more people around me have lost interest in a lot of things. It's as if the game stopped being fun, and they can't be bothered with films either; on weekdays they long for the weekend, and on the weekend there's nothing they want to do. Every night they go to sleep very late, without having done anything important. The small things that once made the heart flutter now seem "nothing special." Novelty has become a scarce commodity, and the only thing that can still move the emotional needle is, perhaps, the boss saying, "I'll give you a raise next month."

Willingly or not, they've stopped socializing, holing up at home on weekends, a whole day going by with the only reason to step outside being to take out the trash. And yet sometimes, when we happen to look up at the sky outside the window, or catch a shaft of light in the corner, the heart is still faintly stirred — it turns out that even the plainness of life hides a trace of a once-ardent self.

To others, feelings don't matter; results do.
To yourself, results don't matter; feelings do.

Maybe that's the truth of thirty: no longer rushing to prove anything, and no longer afraid to admit your own ordinariness. Just hoping that, in the years to come, I can still feel sincerely and live ardently.

01 Fate's Understudy, the Champion's Lead

There are a lot of very wealthy people around me — including, but not limited to, those with a mine at home, those with a listed company in the family, those who bought stocks into financial freedom, and so on.

To say you don't envy their lives would be a hollow lie; being born into the right family is a real skill, and money really does let you do as you please. But later, in my social feed, the people I envied most were the ones posting photos of running a half or a full marathon, trail-running dozens of kilometers, climbing a very high mountain. That's when I understood: vitality is one thing money can't buy.

I've felt this deeply from the day-in-day-out training of the past year, and also from this year's Shanghai Masters.

On October 12, 2025, in Shanghai, a Monaco player ranked just 204th, Vacherot, dropped to his knees and buried his face in his hands — he had just rewritten the history of the ATP Masters. Having fought his way from the qualifiers all the way to the final, he became the lowest-ranked champion in ATP Masters history, and the victory became one more classic moment in sports history because the man he beat in the final was his own cousin.

No one would have guessed that this year's Shanghai Masters — the most fairy-tale story of them all — would land on a qualifying-round alternate who very nearly didn't get to play at all. It wasn't until 24 hours before the start, when a player ahead of him withdrew, that he barely scraped into the qualifying draw for the Shanghai Masters.

For this 26-year-old Monaco player, simply setting foot on a Masters court was already a gift of fate. In the first round of qualifying he faced world No. 113 Basavareddy, came from behind to beat him in three sets, and, with difficulty, took his first step at this Shanghai Masters as the wheel of fate began to turn.

Once in the main draw, every step Vacherot took was writing new history for Monaco tennis: in the first round he beat Serbia's Djere, becoming the first Monaco player ever to win a main-draw match at an ATP Masters. In the second round he beat the 14th-seeded Belgian, raising Monaco's Masters win total to two. In the quarterfinal against 10th seed Rune, he lost the first set 2–6, and his left toe was scraped bloody in the fierce exchanges; yet in the second-set tiebreak, down 3–4, he took four straight points to win the set, and in the deciding set he locked up the win on a 77% first-serve win rate. In the semifinal he beat Djokovic in straight sets, becoming the first player in Monaco's history to beat a world top-10; and in the other semifinal, his cousin beat Medvedev.

And so an unprecedented cousins' final — No. 54 against No. 204 — was staged in Shanghai. Vacherot pulled off yet another fairy-tale comeback, beating his cousin 4–6, 6–3, 6–3 in the final to carve his name officially into tennis history. At the awards ceremony, the two cousins taking turns choking up through their speeches moved people even more.

(Figure in original.)

Vacherot's Shanghai run was utterly dreamlike, and the best possible illustration of the word perseverance. Behind this victory were nine matches, 19 hours of high-intensity combat in a very hot and humid environment; like the vast majority of players, he took a road different from the one super-talents like Sinner and Alcaraz walk.

They train day in and day out but can't manage to win most of their matches. Every week they face defeat, and after defeat they immediately pack their bags for the next stop — endless losing, endless traveling, going through a great deal just to arrive at their current position. And this champion's trophy brought him not only $1.12 million in prize money but a jump in his world ranking from 204th to 40th, meaning that for at least the coming year he won't have to play qualifiers at the big tournaments.

The tennis court is never short of miracles, and in Shanghai this year we were lucky enough to witness a little nobody ranked 204th write, with his racket, a deeply inspiring fairy tale.

This is the dreamlike blossoming of an ordinary little nobody after seizing the one chance fate handed him. We needn't mythologize the underdog's comeback story, but we can't call him a nobody, either.

Every professional athlete trains at high intensity every day; every one of them has been preparing for this day, as hard as they possibly can. This all-but-magical run through the draw proves once again that Shanghai has earned its nickname, the "Magic City." Whether or not Djokovic is past his peak, his level speaks for itself. That shows Vacherot deserves this champion's trophy — in technique, in reactions, in sportsmanship alike.

If you have a body, you're an athlete.

This past year, I've become more and more convinced that a person immersed in sport will not fall into depression. Because sport keeps you in a state of forward energy the whole time. I don't chase the so-called AI wave at all; I just single-mindedly dig into my sport.

Whether you're an active person or not, it's really worth watching a live competitive sporting event periodically, or, if you can, going to see one in person — the spirit of sport is deeply infectious. Every time I finish watching a sporting event, I feel my spirit has been enormously lifted.

Because of Shanghai's humid climate, upsets came one after another at this year's Masters. From the vantage point of a spectator, every time I saw one of those surprising results, I thought: this really is the charm of competitive sport — every element of uncertainty is part of the match. The weather, an individual's emotions, or even whether you and the place are a good fit, can all become part of the match. It's the same reflected in life: eight or nine times out of ten, things don't go as you'd wish.

In several matches, a player who was ahead ended up losing, and in that walk from the baseline to the net at the final moment, his expression was in fact very grave; but the instant he reached the net, most players had already gladly accepted the result — perhaps telling themselves inside: next I'll focus on what comes next, and I wish my opponent well in winning this match. Especially Djokovic. In that match against the 204th-ranked Vacherot, even before it began his leg was already bothering him, with fairly severe cramping — the match was in fact very painful, and in the end he did lose. Afterward he went over and said a lot to Vacherot; though we don't know what he said, you could tell from Vacherot's face that he was congratulating him, and there was clearly none of the negativity about the result on Djokovic's face.

Watching this, I remembered an interview of his. The host said: this super talent of yours, this gift of self-control, is truly remarkable — and Djokovic cut him off: this isn't a gift, I control myself every single moment; I look calm and unruffled on the surface, but trust me, inside me a storm is raging.

If you've seen that earlier interview, you know he may at this moment be controlling himself with all his might, and to witness that whole process of control is, in fact, deeply infectious and influencing. Reflected in life, I sometimes think that maybe a lot of things aren't so intractable after all.

In a sense, this is one of the greatest charms of athletes like Jordan, Kobe, Federer, Djokovic, Kipchoge.

Competitive sport holds so much that's out of your control, so many "why must there be a Zhou Yu when there's already a Zhuge Liang" stories of rivalry. So why is it that the great rivals, in the end, aren't consumed by mutual hatred but by mutual respect? Because only they know how long a road they walked to stand here, and what they ultimately got out of it.

The full name of the Olympics is the Olympic Games. Why that name? Olympus is where the gods dwell; humans stand before the gods to show them what a human being can be. Today's athletes don't stand before the gods — they stand before the world, showing us what we can be. And isn't living this one life also just about seeing what we ourselves can be?

We call our Olympians our delegation because they represent us at the edge of human possibility, going out to explore just how far the limits of the human body can reach.

Sometimes what they prove is how high a person's peak can be, and how long that peak can last; but sometimes what they prove is how a 46-year-old can vault, how a 61-year-old can play table tennis, how someone with a ruptured Achilles can play basketball. They prove how a person can beat cancer, beat depression; how a person can rise above the hatreds of history, how a person can even rise above winning and losing. For a life, what matters is not the triumph but the striving.

They've climbed high mountains, and they've been through deep valleys; in the end there's no hatred between them. Why is this road toward the body's limits so crowded? They're grateful that, on this lonely road of competitive sport, someone walked alongside them.

To say you don't want to win in competitive sport is a lie, but what matters more is wanting to win without fearing to lose. What sport taught me isn't how to win, but how to keep loving it even when you lose.

There's only ever one champion, but the meaning of life doesn't lie in that single result — it lies in every moment when you're exhausted, ready to give up, and still willing to throw everything into one all-out effort.

02 Entrepreneurship Gives Life Its Liquidity

A young person's greatest advantage is liquidity — but sometimes that's a young person's weakness too: restlessness.

Someone said: don't try to develop across the board. Just pick a direction, and spend three to five years studying its upstream and downstream inside out. Others switch tracks three times a year; you stay single-minded for three years, and the world will naturally open a crack for you, and you'll get the result you wanted.

I love running. Compared with the LSD run — long as the distance is — every time I do intervals or a lactate session, I doubt myself: does this step really have to be run? My breath is scalding, my ankles are tight, and there are still so many laps to the finish. But the body is honest: run one more step, and it repays you one step. It's a contest between body and will: you think you're at the limit, your breathing is already burning, your heart rate is climbing, your legs are trembling — but take one more step forward, and you find the limit isn't a line, but a flowing boundary.

Entrepreneurship is the same experience. It's excitement and fear interwoven, ice and fire pulling back and forth. Every time you push into the unknown, it's like sprinting through a finish line and then catching your breath at a new starting line. It forces you to know yourself anew, and forces you to grow. You won't know how long you can hold on, or whether there's a cliff around the bend — you can only run and try, at the same time, to believe in yourself.

Look at the people around you in ten-year units, and they roughly fall into four types:

• High-desire, high-execution people push the world forward: constantly breaking through boundaries, ambitious and highly effective at getting things done. Musk, for one — he longs to change the fate of humanity and won't stop at fantasy.
• High-desire, low-execution people are pushed along by their desire: often feeling the grass is greener elsewhere, highly anxious, with a huge gap between action and ideal. Kanye West, say — the "idea type" who wants to start things but never lands them.
• Low-desire, low-execution people are calm and settled.
• Low-desire, high-execution people reach lasting freedom through daily order. Buffett and Munger, whose hunger for wealth and fame isn't high, who live simply and both execute their investment strategies with astonishing discipline, steadily building the Berkshire Hathaway empire over decades, valuing the process over the show.

Most of the time, we drift between these four quadrants. Entrepreneurship made me see one thing clearly: what a person fears most in this life isn't failure, but being slowly frozen by some identity or some sense of stability.

The process of entrepreneurship is excitement and fear interwoven: you fear being swallowed on the one hand, while on the other you're pulled forward by that unknown force. That tug of staying clear-headed inside the chaos, paradoxically, makes me feel grounded.

Sometimes I wonder why so many people love competitive sport. Because the essence of sport is that it lets you see yourself in the most real moments. You know which instant you waver, which instant you want to give up, which instant you suddenly reignite. Entrepreneurship is actually the same. It's just that the opponents in the match become time, money, luck — and yourself.

We all once thought society would pay for our attitude; only later did we understand that the biggest cost is time (youth). Some people find their direction through round after round of trial and error; some are ground smooth by life; and some hold on, throughout the drifting, to that little bit of "liking."

Rereading Zhang Yiming's Weibo lately, I found he mentioned: experts who study happiness tell us there are three kinds of happiness: pleasure, passion, and higher purpose (an ideal, something meaningful).

Watch him (and many entrepreneurs and senior managers) immersed in their work — it isn't the enjoyment of short-term fun, but having a longer-term thing to strive for: the thing they do is meaningful. And it isn't the crappiness of the process they enjoy, but the result of making a good product (running a company as a product).

Back to myself: if I feel unhappy, I reflect on whether it's short-term or long-term, and on what I actually want.

Whether it's entrepreneurship, sport, or life, they're essentially answering the same question — are you still flowing, are you still growing?

Freedom is never cheap; it belongs to those willing to bear its cost. Liking something is the nerve to defy all uncertainty, the starting point of flow, and the way back to yourself. Liking money is fine, liking to create is fine, all of it is fine. What's most to be feared is not even knowing what you like.

If you hold something you love in your heart, this life won't be so bitter.

03 Less Blind Effort, More Smart Bets

One of my biggest takeaways since 2024: the ability to choose your Beta is, in fact, a kind of Alpha.

Before the 2024 election, several friends "followed" Elon in placing a bet, and after the election they got a very handsome return. At the time I sighed: if only my principal weren't so small, I'd have been free outright.

Life is like this: a probability game where one or two big opportunities can lift you up, and one or two big blunders can knock you down. In the big pullback over the National Day week, over the course of just one weekend, for the crypto crowd, the price hadn't changed but the position was gone.

So to raise your odds of success, you need to increase the number of times you "surf" and the success rate of your surfing, drawing your blade only at the most crucial moment; and to reduce your odds of falling, besides constantly learning and refining, you have to face your own shortcomings squarely, and then, like a sponge, learn from the "brain trust" around you, expanding your abilities and managing your desires.

So, the ordinary person's way of learning: "Strategically, treat yourself as a genius, and learn only from the very best in the world. Tactically, treat yourself as a somewhat dim ordinary person, and grind through the details step by step."

I once had a long talk with a peer who earns a million a year, and one bit of his high wisdom benefited me greatly and resolved a puzzle of mine: why do some people, at a young age, have enormous income, and unusually high insight and comprehension?

He put it this way: "People, at bottom, have only experiences, not age. Age is a hollow concept of time with no value at all. The essential meaning of life is experience, and trial and error, and these come from cognition, ambition, courage, and execution. Cognition solves the question of knowing versus not knowing; ambition solves the question of wanting versus not wanting; courage solves the question of daring versus not daring; execution solves the question of doing versus not doing — and these four are each other's source and each other's support. Very often, a breakthrough at one point can pull the other three up along with it." I couldn't help but give him a silent thumbs-up inside.

Then I asked him: "This is more or less theory — is there anything on the practical side I can borrow from?"

He said: it boils down to two points. First, learn from the masters efficiently and put it into practice. The sea of learning is boundless, and life is finite. All learning is practice-oriented; I learn only what my work requires me to learn — I won't waste my life learning all sorts of things at random. Once I've decided what to learn, I find ten masters at that thing; where I can imitate, I imitate, and where I can't, I pay to learn. The internet age is also an open-book exam: the masters in every field are all very active online, and of course their actions and their results are all on display there too. As long as you're an attentive person, as long as you've locked onto a field, you can easily find ten masters in it. What comes next is efficient learning and imitation, and as for what you can't see, you feel your way there yourself, or just pay to learn — which amounts to buying the answers.

Second, choose an industry with a high income ceiling. Different industries have different income ceilings, high and low, and the gap is enormous. In some industries, however hard you try, a year's income is only a hundred-odd thousand. In others, a little effort gets you hundreds of thousands or a million a year, and with talent or a team on top of that, tens of millions a year isn't out of the question.

At this point I'm reminded of what Boss Yusen shared about adding to a position: Doubling Down is an idea that can be reused across many domains, yet it's often overlooked or even done exactly backward.

• In relationships, strengthening the deep relationships that are genuinely yours is, in many situations, more beneficial than endlessly expanding weak ties.
• Young people should spend their first decade building a strong competitive edge in some niche field, but a lot of people prefer to keep being slash-career youths.

So on reflection, regardless of nationality, gender, origin, or stance, if a person wants to make money the causes come down to just two: either work hard, or gamble.

Effort is the certain path — it relies on time, discipline, accumulation, compounding: slow, but stable.
"Gambling" is the uncertain path — it relies on judgment, leverage, providence: fast, but perilous.
If you want to get rich fast, it's a combination of the two: work hard at studying how to gamble, or pour everything into one sure gamble.

The people who truly change their fate are, at bottom, all pouring all their effort into one gamble (all-in on some startup, new technology, new market, new platform), or using long-term rational effort to study an uncertain gamble (investors and traders, for example).

As for factors like choice, interest, talent, and social value — in the end, they're just different arrangements within the "effort × gamble" coordinate system.

Some win on talent, some win on diligence; some win on understanding risk, some win on bearing it. But no one can step outside these two main lines.

04 Why You Shouldn't Grind Blindly

Because effort necessarily produces cost, but doesn't necessarily produce profit.

Right now a lot of working people want a side hustle — Chinese and American alike — wanting to do self-media, but a lot of it is grinding blindly.

Doing business, for an individual, I feel the best way to start is to first understand your own consumption habits: break down which areas you pay out the most in. For instance, if you order takeout right now, you probably can't wedge yourself in; but from some micro-merchant friend around you, you placed an order for 1,000 or 500 — there you can pay attention: assess its profit structure, and reverse-engineer how they sold it to you. Start from a field you know, look at how you'd buy, and work through its profit structure.

If you can understand the profit structure, you'll definitely go ask some people and search for some material, and figure out roughly the capital scale, the resources required, whether it's online or offline, in which city — you'll basically have a sense of it — for making 1 million, 2 million, 3 million off this. But once you've connected things to this degree, don't you need enough people to ask? That comes down to your everyday accumulation in the industry, your so-called network and circle. And if there's a certain cost involved, how to do it asset-light.

To sum up, after working through many steps, you've got the basic footing of the business — only then do you get to the self-media link. It's a demand for amplifying, and for lowering, cost.

Everyone knows to break the information gap, but many can't grasp the value of information. Information isn't cognition. Information is the "result"; cognition is "understanding the logic behind that result."

Even if I tell you to buy Nvidia, if you don't understand why it has value, why others didn't see it, when to exit, then the information is still just noise to you. Selling too early and not being able to hold are inevitable.

Technology is the primary productive force; when a major technological shift happens, everything else stops mattering. When Homo sapiens appeared, lions and tigers stopped mattering — none of them could beat humans. In the 20th century's two world wars, people at the time felt these were world-shaking events, but looking back now, Einstein's five papers were the biggest thing of all — they raised the curtain on all of modern science.

So what is the essence of business? What you sell, and to whom. You — sell what — to whom? Apart from this, a lot of the rest, I feel, is human nature. A client you've served for ten years — if your relationship is still company-to-company...

How do you understand human nature? The underlying method of grasping human nature is to think from the angle of its animal nature; that way you'll often keep your expectations in check and better understand why some things happen. So the first thing you should think about is how to become un-ordinary, rather than which industry to pick — otherwise you'll be exhausted, spending huge amounts of time playing under an ordinary set of rules, grinding to the extreme, still under ordinary rules.

How do you make yourself un-ordinary? Talent aside, first you really have to intend to be un-ordinary.

Un-ordinary means un-ordinary thinking, un-ordinary ability, un-ordinary circles, un-ordinary cognition, un-ordinary everything. But why do so many people play by the rules? Because they're lazy, thinking all is well; you're timid, you're cowardly, you have no courage, you have no fire in the blood, you're greedy.

This includes me, too. The gods around me who can run sub-3-hour marathons log 500+ kilometers a month, up at 4 a.m. to run — I absolutely cannot get up at 4.

Human nature isn't rational; it's driven by desire, fear, comparison, and herd instinct. Only by understanding the underlying impulses of human nature can you truly read the laws by which business and society run.

For instance:
Why do people rush in even knowing speculation is high-risk? — greed and herd instinct;
Why "others made money, so I have to get in too"? — social comparison;
Why do companies expand even at a loss? — the drive to possess, and the survival instinct.

When you can view these behaviors from the angle of animal nature, you'll have less anger and more understanding; you can predict what people will do, instead of being led along by them.

When you have no money, make many small-cost trades to trial-and-error; when you have money, make big-cost, few trades to stay stable. Make small mistakes frequently, but feel that mistake, and the essence behind it, and the potential risk it carries — and don't cheat people; value your own reputation. A person's reputation is a long-term return; don't overdraw it in your mistakes. Learn to bear risk — how much risk you can bear often indicates the return you can get — but mind your own ability; don't be the snake trying to swallow the elephant, wiped out by a single risk. Talk more with the big shots around you, and feel out their ways of handling, analyzing, and solving problems.

How does a person get stronger?

• Decisive and ruthless: don't be too soft-hearted; don't drag your friends along on the road — find more friends on your own road.
• High fault tolerance: the truly strong are like an adult with kindergarten kids, with especially great capacity to accommodate.
• No expectations: the moment you have expectations of others, it's like handing your back over to them. The truly strong only expect things of themselves.

Everything we spend our whole lives creating — fame, reputation, career — will, after we die, be forgotten at an astonishing speed; we spend our whole lives looking for meaning, but many things need no meaning. Eating, drinking, and having fun isn't idling time away, and enduring hardship doesn't equal extraordinary meaning. The nights you stayed up, the life you poured out, the tears you shed, all become weightless A4 sheets in a file folder in the end, while the sunsets you missed, the dinners you stood up, the hands you never held — those are the main text of a life that can never be re-recorded.

05 Admire the Strong Without Bullying the Weak

I used to like the VC industry quite a bit: forever standing at the crest of the wave, at the world's frontier, with the newest and coolest things to see, an explosion of information, a steep learning curve.

Now I don't envy it at all: the fund's money isn't your own raised money — you're a wage worker. You strike a pose like you're Zhang Yiming or Neil Shen; wherever there's an industry hotspot you have to sharpen your head and squeeze in to play the expert, and few hold the power to define a track. The bustling big events have no substance; the brilliant small gatherings run on cliques. Congratulations pile up in the feed, but real insight is scarce; and the doers who can't resist the utilitarian pull get shoved onto the stage and squeezed dry.

When you're at some big institution, a crowd of people surrounds you; the moment you leave, the crowd instantly scatters, more than half of it gone. Rushed to ripen, rushed toward the end, and rushed to think again. It feels like the primary market's "sizing people up and serving accordingly" is at the very top of the finance pyramid's food chain, with a lot of people carrying built-in chameleon traits. Those who fawn on power and serve according to your status are many; those who treat people sincerely are few.

Someone loyal to power and social resources is of course a "reliable" person, one you can safely make money with; but if he can refrain from leaving you when things are hard, you admire him all the more. The ones worth having are those who'll choose to keep supporting you not because of the results you already have, your family background, your looks, or your achievements — even their gaze is different. But one of life's laws: never deal with people who don't respect you and don't respect your time.

I saw a line from someone on Douban: only by not slighting anyone whose "social symbols" rank below mine can I keep from cowering before anyone whose "social symbols" rank above mine; that's how I get to have an unconditional self-respect and self-confidence that don't depend on any "social symbol."

Looking back, it was from 26 that I began to live a bit like a real person, knowing what I want — so at 30 my life is only just beginning, and this year, at 31, I've been in this world for only 5 years.

First, care too much what others think and you'll live like someone else's underwear: catching their crap and piss and farts all day. Even if people bad-mouth you, dislike you, there's actually nothing worth minding, because how the other person regards you is the other person's problem. Really, be shameless, be reckless — walk out of that all-consuming illness of the heart.

Second, make yourself strong and everything becomes strong. Beauty without strength is just a low-tier sexual resource. If you socialize downward, you have to show your fierceness; socializing upward, you have to keep your original high-cognition state. Keep handing out sweet dates and people take them for granted, feel no gratitude; but slap them every time, and they can only stay away, even become your enemy. Only a proper combination makes people understand: the sweet date isn't easily had, and this slap wasn't taken for nothing. Besides — every time you change, every time you slim down, the smiles of the people around you vanish; they get unhappy, because you've lived the way many people don't dare to live, and so you've offended the make-do lives of many. The essence of human beings is to dislike what they can't have.

If you see a person who's really impressive, you should praise and bless them from the bottom of your heart. Every time I see someone especially impressive I think this: he's so impressive, and one day I'll surely be him. So every time you see one of those glossy, impressive people online, don't feel you have nothing, that you're plain and unremarkable, like an NPC, only able to hide like a rat in a gutter in some dim corner, peeking at other people's light.

(Figure in original.)

The truth is, ordinary people, ordinary lives, ordinary days are the normal state for most of us; and what everyone displays online every day is also just their most glossy, glamorous side. You can envy it, you can aspire to it, but don't put yourself down.

I have a few role models and people I aspire to be, and this is how I think of them: whenever I hesitate, procrastinate, or agonize over something, I think — if it were my role model, what logic of thinking and way of acting would he use to handle this? I'll fully mobilize the power of my role models to fire myself up in life, dealing with the demons that plague daily life, or the petty trifles. In the end, I strive and strive so that others let out a "that guy's really annoying — but I have to admit, he's got something."

In dealing with people, I think you shouldn't associate with fools; stupid is evil. Fools have one trait: the closer someone is to them, the more they guard against that person; the better you treat them, the more they wreck you. Something I shouldn't say: a lot of the older generation of parents are exactly like this — outwardly the sort who fawn on everyone, inwardly all bluster and bark — ordering you around in the name of "it's all for your own good," violating your boundaries in the form of guilt and expectation, needling you in a joking way, saying things that don't sit right, and some dispiriting words too. All of these will drain your energy, steal your vitality and spirit. So when someone does this to you, what do you do? Go through the motions without going through the heart. As long as you don't let it into your heart — polite and courteous on the surface — it can't actually hurt us.

In short, let's not cultivate ourselves in other people's eyes; I don't want to disclose my life's plans and points to everyone. Not everyone in this world is worthy of knowing my inner struggles, and we don't owe anyone an explanation. Silence is the strongest weapon in my hand; let them guess, let them speculate, let them gossip. If you mind, that's the best way for others to get a hold on you, and they don't have to pay any price — a wag of the tongue and you've caved. You should focus on the thing in your hands; you don't need anyone's blessing, hollow encouragement, or that condescending kind of judgment and advice.

Finally, when the light we give off is received by those low-level creatures, it only gets twisted into the dark, malicious understanding they're used to. So our kindness needs edges too. If you're kind and let everything slide, the outcome is being taken advantage of; in the slums, even refinement gets mocked, and if you want to turn things around, you have to walk out ready to disown all kin.

The thing you least want in this life is to live in a way that fits other people's presets. I won't play deep, serious, hot-topic-tracking, or ascetic because of my profession or my identity, and I won't fake enthusiasm, sociability, cliquing everywhere, or following the crowd for the sake of others' evaluations.

I strive to live a juicy, ardent, self-sufficient life that comes and goes freely as I feel, and for it I keep striving and bearing the cost — and when I pull it off, I'll only be proud.

06 Anxiety and Loneliness Are the Ground Color of Life

This year's long holiday, my social feed had a bit of a pre-2020 look — I'd already toured six continents through the feed. A bull market really is a good thing.

Countries appearing more than seven times:

• Africa: Tanzania
• Europe: France, Spain, Italy
• Asia: Georgia, UAE
• Oceania: Australia, New Zealand

More than four times:

• Oceania: Tahiti
• Africa: South Africa, Egypt
• Europe: Croatia, Switzerland, Greece
• Asia: Russia, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia
• North America: Canada, USA

More than twice:

• Africa: Madagascar
• South America: Brazil, Peru, Chile
• Off the beaten path: Yemen, Estonia, Chile

Every year my feed has plenty of groups of 8–10 people going out to travel together. At first my own state of mind was envy; later it turned into pure curiosity: this whole "big family," can they really all get along and have fun together?

(Figure in original.)

People are all small cliques, and most collective activities are essentially meaningless. Either they serve the many who want to use the collective to get into more small cliques, or they satisfy those small cliques that need the collective to give them applause.

I personally feel that a major essence of life is still loneliness, and learning to get along with yourself is quite important.

There's a book called A Biography of Loneliness, by Alberti, which is quite interesting; it's devoted to discussing loneliness as a social emotion — its origins, its effects, its essence. When Alberti talks about loneliness, he has one very distinctive observation: this emotion, loneliness, has no antonym in many cultures.

We all know the antonym of hot is cold, the antonym of many is few — but he says loneliness has no antonym. What is the antonym of loneliness? He says in Chinese he found three words: one is bustle, the second is multitude, the third is warmth. Bustle and loneliness can absolutely coexist; the antonym of multitude is actually solitude, and between solitude and loneliness there's no necessary connection; the antonym of warmth is coldness, and a lonely person isn't necessarily cold.

So what, in the end, is loneliness? He says loneliness is the inability to produce connection and resonance. You can't produce connection and resonance with people, and so you're lonely in the crowd; you can't produce connection and resonance with your environment, and so that environment is lonely to you; you can't produce connection and resonance between heaven and earth, and so all things are lonely to you. And its most concrete expression is in a poem we all read as children: "The flocks of birds have flown high and away; a lone cloud drifts off, at leisure. We gaze at each other, neither tiring — only Jingting Mountain and I."

If loneliness is the inability to produce connection and resonance, then what prevents it? Which age group most easily feels lonely? In the research, generally the ones who most like to feel that they're lonely are young people. In 2018 the BBC ran a survey, a loneliness experiment, drawing 55,000 participants worldwide, and the research showed that of those who can feel lonely, nearly half — over 40% — were aged 16–24.

Why? Actually this reason is understandable. Because for young people — and for most loneliness, really — loneliness is a narcissistic necessity.

The young person's age begins to awaken; they begin to want to feel unique, one of a kind. So my dad doesn't understand me, my mom doesn't understand me, look at everyone around me, all so shallow — who could understand me? Only the one who admires himself alone can admire himself at all; we've all walked through that time when we were young, when every one of us felt we were different, and this loneliness is actually a process of slowly being socialized.

In this process of socialization, the narcissism gradually breaks down; you gradually discover you're no different from anyone else, your ideas were brash, your analytical techniques you gradually take back, and in that moment you produce a connection with others. The process may be uncomfortable, and at the same time, you're also dissolving your loneliness.

So it seems the loneliest people, in terms of technique, are actually — honestly — this narcissism, and not only in young people; reporting to you all from the standpoint of humanity, it's the same.

Because of narcissism, most people, in fact, struggle to take in advice. In the workplace, what they want more is a direct solution. So this is also one reason why offering "solutions" is more welcome in the market than offering advice.

The success of this practice taught me a principle that I later applied to every aspect of life: to have many advantages while not being exposed to unacceptable disadvantages, the surest way is to make a series of good, uncorrelated bets that balance and complement one another.

Maybe because of my former job I picked up a lot of metaphysical cognition; I once found these cognitions off-putting, feeling they were just extra talking points that could occasionally spark inspiration.

Until recently I suddenly realized a person is just like a company. A company has its life cycle, its vision; a person likewise has a career cycle and goals. A company needs to keep scaling its operations to tell investors a bigger story, so it can raise round after round of funding — and doesn't a person also need to keep upgrading their abilities, taking on ever more complex things, so as to lift their own career "valuation"? Even the most complex financial statements, using free cash flow to assess whether a company's stock price is reasonable, can guide a person in assessing whether their salary matches their market value. And so I marveled that those once seemingly deep-rooted weaknesses can, from a different angle, all be resolved.

Talking with a former colleague who's at a big company, I felt a deep pang: the "high salary" bait of today's big companies may, for many young people, be a trap.

Or put it this way: if you first knock about outside for a good many years, hone a real skill set, and then — even without having made much money before — turn around and take a high salary at a big company to see out your days, that's great. But suppose you're only a few years out of school, and in the time you most need to grow fast you turn straight into a "big company," and unfortunately land in a business unit with a 2B boss and especially cutthroat internal competition — after a few years there, you may end up nothing more than blacker-hearted, more sensitive to all kinds of complex office relationships, less willing to believe in the world's truth, goodness, and beauty. On your actual personal ability, you won't have gained much at all.

On the contrary, once you've gotten used to the big company's "high salary," you'll find that stepping outside, the opportunities available for you to choose from get fewer and fewer. And so your road gets narrower and narrower, until, around 30–35, the big company may not need you either.

Some people, after 35, stop liking young people — such a person is old. Some people, after 70, still like young people — such a person is young.

If I set a very distant goal and now keep bending and twisting myself toward it, I may well miss a lot of opportunities. So for me, developing along its own life trajectory is what matters most. It's like a boat: whether sailing on a river or on the sea, it will meet wind and waves; but I'm working to make this boat sturdier, to make it bigger, to make it more efficient, and I hope it can sail safely on the water. The scenery along the way is, for me, the greatest reward.

Many people think worldly success necessarily involves starving the body and toiling the sinews, full of pain and hardship, and that therefore those who hold on must be mentally powerful and burdened with bitterness and grievance. After coming into contact with some of these people, you find it isn't so. Different people all need their own source of pleasure. It's just that some are short-term and some are long-term.

07 Love Is Not a Probability But a Stance

What is the essence of marriage: eating together, sleeping together, talking together; what you eat is the economic foundation, what you sleep is physiological harmony, what you talk is spiritual resonance.

The way you allocate your time and your affection is a direct clue for probing a person's values and character. I've always been very old-fashioned in this regard. I think money and companionship all matter, but none of them is the most precious. The most precious is the single-minded investment of feeling.

(Figure in original.)

Concretely: many people today may date this way (regardless of gender): at the same time they extend invitations to or pursue several members of the opposite sex, then play the odds and quickly confess to one of them, quickly get together.

I'm the kind who: as long as I still like this person, even if they never accept me, I'll keep refusing all other possibilities, until I let go of this feeling.

Dating isn't only so you can go somewhere together on your days off; that's just an incidental. "Supporting each other's lives" is the essence of dating. More than the times you're together, it's the times you can't be together that count — being able to become each other's strength. This is the most important point. It's the strength that, when work is hard, lets you push a little harder just by thinking of the other person's face.

I forget which blogger I saw say this: how many truly heartfelt moments can a person have in a whole life? To this day I feel more and more truly that there aren't many moments where you have the chance, the drive, and the courage to give your true heart.

When I was younger I thought sincerity was inexhaustible, but now I find that every time I take it out, it costs at least three to five years. If I unluckily hand it to the wrong person this time, the next time I take it out will be even longer, sometimes so long you think you can never take it out again. A numb dullness, only feeling you seem to have permanently lost the possibility of love. Everyone probing, everyone weighing; that ardent openness, that lovable sincerity, is really a rare sight.

I can't miss anyone who made me feel this way. That harm isn't a feeling; it's having the thing I most treasured, the thing I live by, taken from me: sincerity, courage, trust, expectation.

The meaning of a partner is really just having one person who continually witnesses your life, rather than one who constantly flatters and praises your charm. A person is, in the end, lonely, and the lasting company of a witness who asks for nothing is more precious than all the sweet words. This is also why a long-term, deep partner is hard to replace, and the same goes for close friends. Novelty can be pursued, but the sense of security that stores your memories, medals, and scars is something you can't bear to part with.

The two most important things in this life are, first, to get your career right, and second, to find the right person to love. When the sun rises, throw yourself into your work; when the sun sets, embrace the one you love.

May we all be able, as Mr. Huang Yongyu wrote: "A clear love, a direct dislike, a sincere fondness, an openness standing in the sun. And being firmly chosen!"

08 A Final Word

After thinking through those questions, life suddenly became a little clearer.

I started re-sorting my own underlying logic — the things that truly make up life's "base holding":

1. I have a passably decent education and set of experiences; even doing odd jobs, as long as I'm willing to work I'll have a steady income.
2. My material desires are low; I'm not led by the nose by consumerism, and I can feel at peace in a simple life.
3. I'm healthy in body, regular in my routine, never sleepless, and I eat everything with gusto. Sleep and health — the older I get, the more I feel they're the greatest wealth.
4. I have no money-burning hobbies; what I love most is eating and traveling, which can be as lavish or as thrifty as you like.
5. I have a group of reliable family and friends who trust one another and are willing to sincerely invest "resources" — time, energy, wisdom, money.
6. I believe one of the meanings of life is being able to spend this life in a way you like.
7. Going to work and making money are just tools, not the goal.
8. I still have 25 working years left, enough to realize 1–2 ultimate goals.

With these as a foundation, I began to draft the "operating rules" for the next stage:

• Think clearly about the things you absolutely must do in this life, and don't deceive yourself.
• Try bravely, to find the intersection of "what you like" and "what you're good at."
• Give your free time, as much as possible, to the things that make your heart glow.
• Before you're truly sure of your direction, keep your current life stable.
• Don't crave speed; a little accumulation each day is a kind of long-termism too.
• Keep a good routine, a good mood, and the urge to share, and stay in regular touch with family and friends.
• Proactively expand your boundaries, meet kindred spirits, and do your best to help them too.
• Look forward to tomorrow, believe in yourself, and leave the rest to time.

Drucker had a habit I love: "Once you decide to do something, write down the result you expect. Nine months or a year later, take it out and compare it with the actual result. Anyone can do this — and it lets you see clearly where your strengths lie."

There are plenty of smart people, and even more people with flashes of brilliance. But the ones who do ordinary things every day and can keep at it for a very long time — they're the ones who go the farthest.

In the end, they even go farther than they themselves once imagined.

Life is inherently an art in the broader sense. Each person's life history is their own work. — Zhu Guangqian