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What counts as worthwhile effort

If staying up late to read, sleeping only a few hours for a few days in a row, and not having a holiday for a long time are also worth boasting about, then anyone on the Foxconn assembly line has worked harder than you. People are born with self-pity, and only by staying sober at all times can we see where the true value is.

When I was young, I imagined many times that after I became famous, I could share my experience of how to go from nothing to the pinnacle of life with my young friends, just like those idols in the past, and then tell everyone in a serious way: people can't live like a grass but like a tree, and the only animals that can reach the top of the pyramid are eagles and snails, and you can also replicate my success, etc. But after the age of 26, I suddenly realized a serious problem - people don't necessarily achieve much in life. For more than a decade, there have been some problems that have been bothering me and my friends, and after some changes and setbacks, I have a new perspective on these issues.

1. Can hard work really achieve your dreams?

Imagine that Mr. Wang Feng sits on a swivel chair, looks at you affectionately and asks, "What is your dream?" It is said that Mr. Stephen Chow's sentence "If you don't have a dream, what is the difference between being a man and a salted fish" has also inspired several generations. Dreams are so important that they are simply a beacon of life. Successful people succeed for different reasons, but they don't forget to tell you: never forgetting their dreams is the primary reason for their success. So much so that the most common understanding of the meaning of life in our generation is to hold on to our dreams and eventually achieve them.

But the one thing that few people are willing to face is that most people's dreams will never (yes, never) come true.

When I was in college, I was passionate about all kinds of gambling games and was a regular visitor to the casinos around the school. I started my career as a gambler with the most basic game in a casino, roulette, and my dream was to decipher the mysteries. My initial strategy was very simple, but it worked too well to be true. With this strategy strictly enforced, the first few times I went to the casino, I not only walked away, but also made a lot of money each time, so that I had the illusion that maybe the game had a pattern to follow, and the peak of life beckoned to me not far away. Of course, everyone can guess the final outcome, and I obediently returned all the money I had earned to the casino.

Later, I learned that stupid dream was called the gambler's fallacy. It made me finally understand that in the face of purely random events, all laws are meaningless.

There are very few things in life that are purely random events like roulette, such as two-color balls. But almost everyone who has hit the two-color ball will tell you how much effort they put into studying the numbers of the previous periods, studying the laws of history, and how much hard work they put in to finally succeed. In fact, even if something is dominated by pure randomness, as long as the base of people involved is large enough, a small probability event will always happen. Interestingly, almost all the beneficiaries of random events will attribute this result to their own efforts, which is determined entirely by luck. Not only the participants themselves, but also the onlookers.

Everything we encounter in life can be basically divided into three categories: the first type is purely determined by randomness, such as Brownian sports and roulette, the second type is purely determined by ability, such as English 6 test, 110m hurdles, etc., and the third type is most commonly encountered by ability, which is determined by both ability and randomness, such as entrepreneurship, investment, love or dreams.

I am deeply tired of inspirational gurus always telling young people to chase their dreams at all costs. Because most people's dreams, while not pure two-color balls, are definitely dominated by randomness. In the face of strong randomness, no matter how hard you sweat, it is like squatting next to the roulette wheel day and night, eager to understand the rules. For example, a singer won the championship of The Voice of China, but there are so many girls in China who sing as well or even better than her, if they all become the champion of The Voice as a lifelong dream, then the vast majority of them will only spend the rest of their lives in pain. Whether it's singing or acting, no amount of hard work can only make you very good, but if you want to become a star in the limelight, randomness is far more important than strength.

I think that being able to clearly judge the proportion of randomness in everything that a person does when he is young and accept it calmly is the most valuable asset.

How important is luck in your dreams? When you feel deeply that the randomness of luck may not favor you, are you willing to stick to it? For me, dreams are always worth pursuing, but I can still accept with great peace that it may never come true.

2. Since you can't even realize your dreams, what else is worth working on?

Last year, I posted a Weibo: "I have been reminding myself all these years: don't move yourself. Most people seem to be working hard, but it's just the result of stupidity. What stay up late to read until dawn, only sleep for a few hours in a row, how long you haven't had a holiday, if these things are also worth boasting about, then anyone on the Foxconn assembly line has worked harder than you. People are born with self-pity, and only by staying sober at all times can we see where the true value is. ”

The viral spread of this passage on the Internet caught me by surprise. What is even more unexpected is that there is a considerable part of the scolding in the comments, and there are also people who seriously wrote me quite profound words: "Don't blow out other people's candles when you have your own light, you can't deny others because you don't like them." "It's inexplicable, isn't it? After listening to my thoughts about randomness, you'll know that I've never felt like hard work is a trivial thing. On the contrary, I've always believed that you don't even have the qualifications to deal with randomness until you reach a certain level of ability.

3. So the question is: what is a worthwhile effort?

Last year, my friend and I decided to go from Beijing to Daqing to inspect a few shopping malls, and the night before we left, we had a lot of fun outside with our friends, and when we got home, we were worried that we would miss the flight if we overslept, so we leaned on the sofa for the night. It was the first time I went to Harbin, it was already very cold in November, I didn't have enough clothes, I got off the plane and had a headache, and because I didn't book a ticket in advance, I only bought a station ticket to Daqing after arriving in Harbin. After not sleeping well all night, dizzy from the cold, and standing on the green train for more than two hours, the moment I arrived in Daqing, I felt that it was really not easy, and I had to write it into my memoirs in the future. However, looking back and thinking about it, these so-called "efforts" have nothing to do with my final success in business. What's more, if I could have gone to bed earlier the night before, prepared more clothes, and booked my train tickets online in advance, I could have comfortably achieved the same goal.

That experience was a microcosm of a lot of things in our lives – indulging in behaviors that didn't directly contribute to the outcome, but only caused us some pain, and mistook it for effort.

When I finally realized that I was not the only one who had ever regarded meaningless consumption as an effort, I suddenly realized that people who think they work hard may not be so diligent, and if they stick to action in the right direction, it is not difficult to surpass them.

Our generation's understanding of diligence and hard work almost all comes from school, and more precisely, the people who work hardest in our eyes are those who can read books and work hard the most. In fact, this understanding is extremely one-sided and naïve, because reading books and doing questions are for the very purpose of passing the exam. This kind of hard work is extremely pure, and generally speaking, more revision time and higher revision intensity can directly improve the score of the exam, and the connection between the two is clear and direct, and everyone can understand it. ？

But the beauty of life is that there are many things that we can't understand until we have reached a certain level.

It's like learning English, and for more than ten long years I have fantasized about how complex the process, how sophisticated the design, how comprehensive the involvement, and what incredible effort it takes to speak English like Chinese, and not have to design its sentence tense before opening my mouth and then "memorize" it fluently. Who didn't envision it that way? Unfortunately, it never came to fruition.

It wasn't until about two years after I went to the United States that I suddenly realized that I could speak English fluently without any barriers. This is not due to the adoption of any new learning methods, but because after going to Indiana, there are few Chinese around, and in the absence of choice, I can only be forced to communicate and express in English, in the process I did not seriously think about how much I have improved every day, nor did I test the learning effect in stages, but just kept listening and speaking, because there was no choice. Suddenly one day I realized: Hey, it seems that I really did it.

The most valuable abilities a person can acquire are the same as mastering a language. The effort put in is not immediately rewarded, and there is no even any gain for a long period of time, until it has accumulated to a certain stage, and suddenly bursts with amazing power, and even you don't know how it all happened. For example, exercising, reading and writing, or doing business, after experiencing enough quantitative changes to finally lead to qualitative success, most people will never be able to achieve it, not because they are too stupid - on the contrary, because they are too smart.

The most basic principle that triggers human action is called reflexes, and we are species that need immediate feedback, so the vast majority of people's understanding of the world is linear. But more often than not, things erupt after a long period of latent shocks. I often think that it is easier for people to master language, musical instruments, art, and other skills that are difficult to learn in adulthood when they are teenagers, not because they are gifted and intelligent from an early age, but because children rarely question their gains once a week, and they practice for years until they learn: Oh, they already know. Only smart adults believe in the story of reading the I Ching in 1 book, revealing the secret of Jack Ma's success in 10 sentences, and becoming a guitar master in 30 days.

In short, in real life, there is often not that immediate connection between effort and outcome. Many of the things that I encountered after leaving school are no longer as closely related as the relationship between doing questions and exams, and many people's efforts have become superficial. The most valuable effort is to choose the right direction, even if it does not pay off immediately, but still give ten years of dedication and enthusiasm. The end result may not be enough to make you alone, but it is good enough to excel.

4. Is there a point in this life where everything will be fine?

When you think about it, it seems like we've spent our whole lives struggling to achieve our goals. When you were in junior high school, the teacher told you that the elimination rate of the high school entrance examination was the highest, as long as you passed it, everything would be fine when you went to high school; but when you went to high school, you found that it was not like that, and the high school teacher said that if you were admitted to college, you would go to heaven......

In this life, there are new pains and concerns at every stage, and the cycle is endless, and it will never be because you are admitted to college, have a successful career, and marry the goddess, and you will be happy from now on, but there will be irreplaceable happiness at every stage. Life is not a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, nor is it a Hollywood movie, from the moment of birth to the end of life, there is no node, after which everything is happy and carefree.

Every period of time has its value, there is no distinction between high and low, and it should not be let down. And the stupidest thing I can think of a person can do in this life is to put all the hope of life on a certain point in the future, and ignore the joy of life itself. Because even if you really achieve the goal of that obsession, you may find that it is far from being as good as you think. When I was young, I played basketball and drank Coke with my buddies on the playground, which could not be replaced by drinking red wine in the golf club in the future. Especially boys, don't always think about what will happen when you get rich in the future - not to mention that you probably won't be too rich in the future, and believe me, even if you are rich, you really can't do well. Life is in the daily life, all obsessions are vain, get along happily with the people around you, carefully arrange every day's activities, and feel the mood of each day with your heart, which is the meaning of life itself.

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