Reflections: Life Lessons at 18-19

Written at ages 18-19

Learning and Growth

Accumulation During Student Life

During your student years, accumulate and read extensively. Accumulate connections, knowledge, and experience in how to navigate the world.

Accumulating experience in school is the most cost-effective approach. If you fail to learn these lessons during your student years, you'll pay a heavy price when you enter society and learn them through setbacks.

Read widely; read the thoughts of others. While the natural beauty of birds, flowers, fish, and insects is delightful, the principles of filial piety, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom cultivate a loyal and righteous spirit. The essence to grasp is:

Noble and compassionate humanity
Dignified and composed character
Insightful and open-minded cultivation
Unwavering ideals and pursuits

Choosing a Life Attitude

Prefer to challenge life rather than live a life of guaranteed security; prefer the thrill of achieving your goals to the lifeless calm of a utopian fantasy.

The Ability to Delay Gratification

Diligent accumulation cultivates our ability to delay gratification. This is also evident in the workplace: those who get paid most frequently tend to have lower incomes:

Paid per job → Manual labor
Paid monthly → Salaried employee
Paid annually → Senior executive
Willing to wait for company IPO → Stronger ability to delay gratification

This is not something everyone can achieve.

Combining Theory and Practice

One must be able to both "climb the mountain" to research and "descend the mountain" to practice.

Determination to Grow

The essence of growth lies not only in one's abilities but also in the environment, one's mindset, and determination.

You may think you're working hard, believing everyone else is just working, but years later, you'll find yourself far behind.

Personal growth is unrelated to company growth, but rather to one's willingness to constantly challenge their weaknesses and the level of determination they possess.

Expand your social network and cultivate good relationships. This isn't my forte; I'm a science student in the IT field.

A common phenomenon in this industry is:

Spending all day flirting with computers
Constantly either moving bricks from Github or right-clicking the desktop to refresh
Like Nongfu Spring, we don't produce code, we're code porters
Our industry generally lacks communication skills

Socializing doesn't mean complete and unconditional self-disclosure. "There are always greater people and higher heavens," don't speak rashly.

I used to talk a lot, now I prefer to listen, aiming for "less talk, more action."

Connections are the most valuable, priceless asset.

Lessons from Unexpected Friendships

I realized the seriousness of this issue and actively sought solutions from those around me. I consulted my parents:

My mother is an HR manager in a state-owned enterprise.
My father is a marketing director in a state-owned enterprise.

Theoretically, their children shouldn't have communication problems. This must be a personal issue.

Beware: Independent individuals entering society may experience a decline in intelligence (judgment).

Human beings don't inherently have communication bugs, unless you lack language skills. Computing power requires equivalence, and we IT people can communicate with computers, which have high computing power, let alone humans who occasionally have brain freezes?

A Story of Unexpected Friendship

A mentor predicted I would soon have unexpected friendships. These are friendships with people significantly older than oneself.

One day, I was attending a meeting in Hangzhou for Huawei, and I met a former senior executive from NetEase who now works at ByteDance. Even more fortuitous, I proactively contacted him and had a smooth conversation. Later, I learned he was a senior executive at the Hangzhou Daily Group and the head of a core technology company for Zhejiang Province's City Brain.

He's three or four decades older than me, and as he repeatedly said, this is an "unexpected friendship."

The friendship of gentlemen is as light as water; the friendship of small people is as sweet as wine.

Suggestions:

Everyone can have unexpected friendships.
Don't rush it, "Don't be hasty, don't seek small gains; haste makes waste."
A state of detachment and desirelessness is most important.

Technology and Reflection

The Essence of Technology

Whether it's informatization or intelligence, the core technology is algorithms, ultimately rooted in mathematics. However, we may be more concerned with business models and visualization. Even those claiming to be artificial intelligence mostly use existing tools; there's a significant lack of genuine research in algorithms.

Socioeconomic Observations

The Reality of the Wealth Gap

Don't Expect the Rich to Lift All Boats

A common phenomenon in Chinese society: many people first ask about your livelihood to gauge their level of respect for you and the resources they can utilize from you.

2019 Income Data:

The top 20% of earners account for 48% of total income.
The bottom 20% of earners account for only 4% of total income.

Human Capital vs. Tangible Assets:

Smart people's children aren't necessarily smarter, and the children of top students aren't necessarily top students themselves.
Human resources are difficult to inherit 100%, but tangible assets are not subject to this limitation.
Without inheritance tax, 1 million remains 1 million, and a 100㎡ house remains 100㎡ when passed down to the next generation.

Therefore, there's no mysterious economic force that automatically reduces income inequality; "trickle-down economics" won't happen naturally and requires policy intervention.

Don't Expect Society to Redistribute Assets to the Poor

One of the root causes of racial conflict in the United States is Black poverty:

The median income of Black families is less than 60% of that of white families.
For white people born into poverty, the probability of becoming wealthy is 10.6%, and the probability of remaining poor is 29%.
For Black people born into poverty, the probability of becoming wealthy is only 2.5%, and the probability of remaining poor is as high as 37%.

I firmly believe that the wealth gap will lead to internal conflict.

Reflections on Urbanization

Urban-Rural Income Gap

China's rural population accounts for 40%, but agricultural income accounts for only 10% of GDP. 40% of the population shares 10% of the income, resulting in relatively low income.

Therefore, we should encourage more people to move to cities, especially large cities. Large cities have large market sizes and detailed divisions of labor, even low-skilled workers have higher productivity and income compared to rural areas.

Young People Should Carefully Choose Their City to Strive In

Urbanization is an inevitable "major trend." Large cities cannot simply focus on attracting "high-level talent":

Example of Office Buildings:

Many service industry workers leave, restaurant costs rise rapidly.
Some restaurants even close, and the remaining ones raise prices.
As a result, more white-collar workers bring their own lunches.

If a city only wants high-skilled talent, service industry prices will increase, income will be eroded by living costs, and various inconveniences will lower the quality of life. Long-standing "left-behind" problems will continue!

Comparison of Inheritance Tax Rates in Different Countries

Country	Inheritance Tax
Japan	70%
USA	50%
Germany	50%
Hong Kong	0%
Taiwan	10% (50% before 2009)
China	40%

Success Philosophy

The Paradox of Success

Achieving success is extremely difficult, but achieving the next success is even harder. Successful individuals or organizations may be destined for failure; lasting success is a matter of chance.

The next success is the hardest, because success means the environment has selected those successful individuals. The problem is that the environment changes, and successful individuals rarely keep up with these changes; they are over-optimized for the previous environment.

Three Suggestions from the Intel President

To succeed in that era, one must do three things:

Don't pursue differentiation - Don't try to build a "better computer," the road to a better computer is littered with the corpses of pioneers.
Race, race, race - Important things said three times. First-mover advantage is crucial; profits belong only to the first mover.
Cost control - Estimate the lowest possible selling price for a product based on mass production, and then reduce costs to match.

The Wisdom of Success

"Good luck and bad luck" are merely cognitive biases; calm analysis reveals them to be illusions.

But the shelf life of the wisdom of success is too short. Successful people adapt to the environment, but the environment changes, and how it changes is unpredictable.

Principles of Success:

Whether then or now, only full commitment leads to success.
Be fully committed in thought and leave no room for error in action.
Humans are creatures easily tempted and prone to pride.

Competitive Strategy

Always consider others, to survive together.

If you want to be the next successful person, the shortest path is to do what current successful people consider meaningless, to do things they know you're doing but have no interest in stopping you from doing.

Lessons from The Art of War

The Art of War, Chapter 6, "Maneuvering":

When besieging an enemy army, you must leave a gap, allowing them a way to escape.
This is not compassion; if they have an escape route, they won't fight to the death.
"Do not press a defeated foe too hard."

Application in Business:
For example, railways are a monopoly, but road transport and aviation provide competition, providing an exit for customers who are dissatisfied with the railway monopoly and have the lowest switching costs. Those remaining are either tolerant or unable to leave, making the monopoly even stronger.

Life Equation

The Equation of Success

Outcome of Life/Work = Mindset × Passion × Ability

The above content is partially excerpted from books read during this period and organized based on personal learning and reflection.