2019年终总结2019 Year in Review

"I carry my own story deep inside, writing out by hand every gain and loss, every joy and sorrow and dream."

—— "Old Boys," Yu Quan, I Am a Singer Season 1, Episode 3

Thinking for yourself is important.

Doing something meaningful is important.

Keeping long-term, sincere, mutually giving relationships is important.

A steady dose of mild, healthy pressure is important.

A healthy sense of being alive is important.

Staying curious is important.

The things you consume and your lifestyle are not important.

What others think is not important.

99% of what's in those WeChat public accounts is not important.

Last year was my zodiac year, and overall things were a bit rough; I figured that once it passed, my luck would turn for the better.

It didn't quite work out that way. How to put it—2019 had its good and its bad. On the whole, 2019 was indeed an improvement over last year, but it wasn't a year I found especially memorable or wonderful.

This year, I've still mostly been working on a few things:

(1) Subtracting, defining my own boundaries—knowing how big your boundary (your circle of competence) is matters far more than exactly how big that boundary happens to be.

(2) Pinning down and feeling my way toward my interests, my strengths, and where I can make money.

(3) Running and thinking—exploring and searching for myself.

I've written before: being on my own for a long time, only two things truly frighten me: lack of sleep and lack of money. And one thing I've come to understand is that making money brings me more pleasure and satisfaction than spending it. Here I'll also plant a small flag for the next five years: buy only running shoes, no sneakers.

Some new experiences, feelings, and encounters this year taught me a few truths and gave me some hard-won lessons, so that feeling my way toward my direction now comes with more method and better aim.

To learn, live, and roam far in a more focused, self-contained way, building a world of my own. To gain knowledge, perspective, and character. Even if I don't know the shows and films everyone around me is discussing, even if I miss the hot topics flooding people's Moments—it doesn't matter.

I don't want my days filled with "meaningless" conversation, and I don't need to worry about which line I have to keep up with.

Do the hard things—do them by advancing one square a day like a patient chess pawn, do them calmly and with a settled heart. First treat yourself like a robot, undisturbed by emotion, making a to-do list every day.

The secret to getting better is nothing more than that. Anxiety is pointless.

Being liked isn't hard; being respected is.

Below is the 2019 year-end review. Enjoy:

Reading

In 2019, I read about 35 books. On Singles' Day, I bought a Kindle and a dozen-odd books. It wasn't that buying the Kindle made me feel guilty into reading—rather, I'd decided to read more e-books, so I bought a Kindle, and then went on to buy the books.

These past couple of years, the push to promote reading has grown louder and louder, and the supposed benefits of reading come in every flavor: it brings you closer to success, sets your worldview straight, widens your eyes, nurtures a kind heart; it gives you warmth, taste, the ability to think, and on and on.

For my part, I think that for a nation like ours, promoting reading on a mass scale is actually not very realistic—especially in an economic downturn. And a lot of the time, the effect of reading gets treated too instrumentally and blown out of proportion.

I'll grant that all of the above are benefits reading offers and ways it helps people. But one thing you need to weigh is: could you possibly achieve the same effect by some other means? In other words, the opportunity cost.

I strongly agree with a point Gao Xiaosong once made: I particularly dislike sorting these things into high and low, noble and base—as if reading makes you a cut above, while gaming or watching TV puts you a cut below. All experience actually comes from an input matched to your own energy density; that's exactly why we have such a diverse range of inputs—books, games, films. You can master a game, or grasp the truths and philosophy of life through one, too.

Another way to read the phrase "reading too little while thinking too much" is this: when you don't have a large enough body of data to serve as input, your output is skewed, shallow, and biased.

When there's nothing pressing, you can spend less time mulling over things like meaning and value. Giving them a thought now and then is fine, but lose your sense of proportion and it's like climbing a tree to catch fish. Better to spend more thought on how to raise your earning power. Once you've "come home from a hundred battles," once you've "weathered the vicissitudes," once you've "seen the world," once you've tasted the summit of hope and the valley of ignorance and been through matters of real life and death—having gained and having lost—then it won't be too late to think about these things; you'll do it better.

I think that in today's world, the benefit of reading, for me, is narrowing and reducing the digital divide: we live in an age of information coming at us from all sides, an age where the "post-truth" happens again and again. To build your own reading taste, your own stance, your own capacity for independent thought without being swayed and seduced by your surroundings—that's very hard, because the content we face every day is extremely homogeneous.

Reading in itself is nothing remarkable, but the act of reading means you haven't fully signed off on this world—you're still unsatisfied, still in pursuit of other possibilities.

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Same as I always say: I once believed the people and things that mattered would drift slowly away with time—until now, when there are really only two or three good friends left by my side. Plus the books I've grown used to reading on my Kindle. When no one reaches out to talk, chat with yourself now and then; nothing matters more than "letting me understand me."

Film

In 2019, as of this writing, I watched 64 films in all.

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Ones I really liked: Green Book, The Bucket List, Pad Man, Einstein and Einstein, So Long, My Son, The Attorney.

My moviegoing over these past few years has gradually made me fall for Indian and Korean films—Indian comedies and Korean dramas especially. That's also where, in the process of watching, I've come to feel the gap between Chinese films and those from India and Korea: whether in plot or in substance, Chinese film still has a long way to go.

Running

For the running world, 2019 will surely go down in history. "Breaking" was the theme.

2019 was the year of the marathon world—break! break! break! Eleven world records fell one after another without pause.

Before Kipchoge completed the "1:59 challenge," scientists once concluded from mountains of data that "the human limit for running a marathon under two hours would arrive in 2075." But we've already witnessed history.

Likewise, there were many other historic moments this year that shouldn't be overlooked:

February 27—the women's 5K world record was broken.

May 4—the men's 50-mile ultramarathon world record was broken.

August 10—the women's half-marathon world record for 70-and-over was broken.

September 1—the women's 50K ultramarathon world record was broken.

September 15—the men's half-marathon world record was broken.

September 29—the women's marathon world record for ages 70–74 was broken.

October 6—the half-marathon world record for a double-leg amputee runner was broken.

October 12—Kipchoge "broke two."

October 13—the women's marathon world record was broken.

October 13—the marathon world record for a double-leg amputee runner was broken.

November 9—the men's 5K world record was broken.

December 1—the men's 10K world record was broken.

For me, this year, it was a decent one too. I completed one half marathon and one World Marathon Major.

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I had two big takeaways from running this year. One is that the marathon really is catching fire in China. The other is that people lack reverence for so many things, running included—and that became all the more obvious after Breaking 2.

For Kipchoge's challenge, over 100,000 people witnessed the historic moment live in Vienna, and via TV, the internet, and mobile devices, the number who watched the full broadcast reached the hundreds of millions. It even managed to break out beyond its own circle. As the saying goes, "fame is to people what fattening is to pigs"—as "outsiders" gradually came to "know" about this, some raised the question: "Are there really that many people staring at a screen to watch one person run for two whole hours? What's there to see?"

The quickest way to get invested in a sport is to "follow the stars." Just as in basketball you watch Jordan and Kobe; in soccer, Ronaldo, Messi, Neymar; in tennis, King Federer and Nadal—the marathon, too, has its star athletes.

First, since it's competitive sport, there's a hierarchy of ability, and what the marathon tests above all is, of course, endurance and speed. Many of you have probably seen the video of American netizens trying to hold Kipchoge's sub-two pace on a treadmill. If you haven't, please enjoy it.

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To run 42.195 kilometers straight at nearly the speed an ordinary person sprints 100 meters, holding an average pace steady between 2:48 and 2:52 per kilometer—what kind of endurance and speed does that take? If you can be moved to marvel at this, then you've already crossed the threshold into "watching the marathon."

Second, before watching a marathon, you need a little grounding in what a marathon is. The full marathon runs 42.195 kilometers. If that number means nothing to you, open Baidu Maps: it's roughly the distance from Pingguoyuan subway station to Beijing Capital International Airport, or from Pingguoyuan to Sihui East and then from Sihui East to Tiananmen; or, crudely put, you can think of it as 105 laps on a standard track. Then go test the limit of how many laps you can run, and you'll get a rough sense of just how grueling a sport the marathon is.

Last but not least, everyone's focus and interests differ, so what each person feels will surely differ too. If you can't find the fun and the highlights in the process, you naturally can't grasp the subtleties of how the race unfolds, and finding it boring is a perfectly natural result.

Just as some find soccer boring—nothing but running back and forth, no goal for 90 minutes or even longer, dull and bland; or find volleyball and tennis to lack physical confrontation, purely a contest with no clever technique; or find Go to be just sitting there placing stones back and forth, without even any liveliness to it.

You need to understand a bit, to watch a match with a touch of "purpose," so you won't blurt out something as shallow as "it's meaningless." A marathon race, too, has its own art and its own excitement. Don't hand down a verdict of "boring, meaningless" on something before you've begun. "Whatever exists has its reason"—you have to watch with understanding to taste a different kind of fun.

What's more, the marathon is genuinely interesting in itself. And as a highly experiential sport, it's fun to watch and even more fun to take part in.

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In 2019 and beyond, I'll keep running the roads—live to old age, run to old age.

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Travel

2019 was a rewarding year for travel too.

My footsteps reached seven countries I'd never set foot in before. There were experiences, there were stories, there were memories.

People can be roughly divided into two types: target-based versus experience-based. The former have a clear goal, and every action points toward it; the latter chase the experience along the way, and personal experience is the reason behind their choices.

Target-based people are always fixing their position by comparing with others, and that's how they get their satisfaction. Experience-based people get their satisfaction from the process of exploring the world. I thought long and hard about which one I am, and in the end I decided I'm the latter: though my goals are clear and I don't change a decision once made, all my goals and drive to execute come from one place—life is all about experience.

Target-based people tend to be more hard than soft in temperament, more sharp than mild; most of the time they want to stand at the summit to take in the view. But their lives have a very low tolerance for error, so they're duty-bound to hit specific targets within specific windows and to live a life of precision. Because only results and achievements can offset the anxiety that's so hard to avoid in a life shadowed by the void.

Honestly, I envy target-based people. They live clear-headed, decisive, direct—heading straight for the goal, never wasting their lives, and most of them do come away with what they want.

Experience-based lives mostly look like "a mess"; these people live "without goals," love variety, prefer to wander down the side road to see whether some unexpected scenery is there—even when they have GPS. Because in their eyes, nothing matters more than a deep experience of life.

There's a line that goes: "Whatever moves you is your fate."

Experience-based people actually understand more clearly than target-based ones that life is a journey away from home, understand more clearly that life is full of variables, and that in the end, dust returns to dust and earth to earth. It's just that, having seen life's limits clearly, they still want to live out a more many-layered life within those bounds. And so they're willing to experience the world more thoroughly, to make deeper contact with it.

The word "worth it" is the experience-based person's entire footnote to this world.

And travel is to see the world, to live the moment, to experience new things, to raise your limit.

There's "adventure," there's satisfaction, there's excitement—but you also have to accept the setbacks and the surprises. When it all comes to an end, the treasure of memory is still there, glittering.

Career

I had quite a few reflections on my career this year; given space, I'll write a dedicated piece on it later.

The first principle of a career: development. And two things are key to development: raising your own market value, and choosing an industry and company that are on the way up.

So you can try answering the following questions for yourself:

• If the company changed, how many valuable and transferable skills would you have?
• What's the "shelf life" of those skills?
• How much valuable experience do you have that's general across other firms?
• How great is society's demand for that kind of experience?
• If you left the company, how many people would be willing to help you? Of those willing, how many have decision-making power?
• How many people outside the company are willing to help you? Of those, how many have decision-making power?
• What are the future prospects of the market you're in?
• How much growth potential does your market value have going forward?

This year, the cooling macro climate became something the people around me talk about often. I've always positioned myself as a pessimistic optimist. A downturn can't be overcome—it can only be survived. In a trough, the most important thing is to keep your confidence and keep accumulating; beyond that, look for new growth points for personal development and growth.

Troughs can't be avoided, but after living through one, your overall antifragility leaps upward the next time you face something similar. Resilience can only be forged in adversity. In good times, carry the composure of one who idly passes the days amid peach and plum and spring breeze; in hard times, hold the calm of one who waits out ten years of river-and-lake rain and night.

I strongly agree with a point Mr. Zhang makes: when I decide to invest my time, resources, and capital in another person, there are three things I always confirm with myself:

1) Does this person teach me a lot every time we meet?

2) Thinking of interacting with them fairly often over the next 5–10 years, do I feel it would be a chore or a pleasure?

3) Do they have rational ambition?

That third point struck me especially deeply this year. Many people lack a truthful sense of themselves, always feeling they're in the top 1%, that they're a top performer. Coming to know your own talents, abilities, family background, and existing resources is actually something a college student should get right over four years of university—yet, sadly, plenty of people go through four years of college plus two or three years after graduation without even coming to know themselves.

At the same time, though they don't lack the ability to learn, they don't know what they're most missing right now. Or rather, in handling both the fine details and the big picture, they're like "headless flies"—doing petty, useless things at the very time they should be shoring up their big-picture view; failing to lay a firm foundation at the very time they should be laying the base—and a few years later the gap shows.

Here's an example.

A mass of correct information + the right way of thinking = the correct answer;

A little correct information + the right way of thinking = a not-wrong answer;

A mass of wrong information + the right way of thinking = the wrong answer;

A little wrong information + the right way of thinking = the wrong answer;

A mass of correct information + the wrong way of thinking = a not-wrong answer;

A little correct information + the wrong way of thinking = the wrong answer;

A mass of wrong information + the wrong way of thinking = the wrong answer;

A little wrong information + the wrong way of thinking = the wrong answer;

Difficulty of optimizing: gathering enough of it < judging whether it's true or false < getting the way of thinking right.

So, to make a good decision, what's the very first thing we should do?

And people are actually pretty small; the opportunities of the era matter more.

Awareness

Only two people of comparable energy can sustain a friendship—no need to lean on how long you've known each other, no need to lean on constant interaction. The ones who, no matter how much time or distance has passed, feel intimate and natural again the moment you meet—those are the true friends. It's exactly what the ancients said: the friendship of the noble-minded is as plain as water.

In everyday life, I really dislike being called "bro" or "buddy," and I won't lightly use the word "friend" in conversation either. This shows up more, specifically, in the north. More often I use terms like "boss" or "old brother," or I substitute "someone I sort of know" and "an acquaintance."

Maybe I'm on the blunt side: with friends I like, I plainly and openly say they're "good friends," and I don't think I can, or need to, become friends with a great many people. I feel that over time, this way, what you end up with are true friends—the people you genuinely want to draw close to from the heart.

Once, discussing with a friend what mattered most to each of us, my answer at the time was diversity, and hers was focus.

Specifically, I don't think the diversity I seek and the focus I seek contradict each other; the crux is maximizing the efficiency of time use within a fixed, finite, scarce span of time.

Here's a small piece of advice: many people read plenty of financial reports every year or hold forth on grand matters, but the most crucial thing is that, in this life, we're actually running a company—that company is ourselves. You're the CEO, the CFO, the CHO, the COO; you're answerable to yourself.

So, as your own management, you need to set next year's plan and strategy, and you need to set the plan and strategy for the years to come.

Every year-end, you can try writing yourself a financial report: how many assets, and how much liability; and beyond tangible assets, which are the intangible assets in your head. Over these years, which real resources have you accumulated, which valuable things have you learned—and try to put a fair value on them.

As the years pass, the shell that wraps you inevitably depreciates from wear and tear. If you love exercise, keep a regular schedule, and have healthy habits, then depreciate this asset a little less—and vice versa.

Wall Street may not be a place with long-term patience, but you yourself need to be a friend of time. You need to learn to balance long-term and short-term gains. Maximizing certain near-term interests will of course make next quarter's or next fiscal year's report look good, but doing it at the cost of learning and accumulation may leave your later growth flagging.

Wish List

1: Continue the World Marathon Majors journey

2: Go bungee jumping once

3: Keep on the road

4: Read more and improve my cooking

5: Keep waiting for the chance to see them in concert: René Liu, Fish Leong, Bon Jovi.

What I'm Proud Of

A: Went to some countries and places I'd wanted to visit; heard the singers I'd wanted to hear in concert; finished my first World Marathon Major; made new friends.

B: My self-awareness, self-understanding, and self-reflection are still making progress.

What Needs Work

A. In terms of character, I could be steadier still.

B. In dealing with people and situations, there's still much I can learn and improve.