2020年 年终总结2020 Year in Review

It's My Life —— Bon Jovi, Crush

The 15th installment.

Introduction

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.

What's in those WeChat public accounts is all not important.

Looking Back

If I absolutely had to pick a word or two to describe 2020, the only ones my mind would throw up are probably these: surreal; chaos and upheaval.

2020 was a hard year for everyone. For most people, it brought the biggest black swan of their lives, and I was no exception. From Kobe's death to the spread of the pandemic, all of last year's plans were paused, delayed, canceled.

For someone who has always disliked chaos and likes everything neatly in order, it really was a little beyond imagining. Still, I took the chance to do an all-around sorting, review, and clearing-out.

2020 was the year I cut out sugar and cut out carbonated drinks; the year I ran seriously and trained properly, and also a year with no races to run; a year I didn't travel; a year I kept my weight and body fat in check. It was a year my personal life "stood still," and also a year I felt my way toward a direction and found my footing.

One of the biggest changes the pandemic made in people is their perception of time. The reason you feel time passes faster year by year is that time grows more important to you year by year.

Time is your life's currency. It's the only currency you have, and you alone get to decide how to spend it.

Below is the 2020 year-end review. Enjoy:

01 Reading

Life can be bitter sometimes; reading is that little bit of sweetness. In 2020, I read about 35 books.

(Figure in original.)

Beyond finding my footing professionally, my taste in book categories also shifted toward a few emphases and priorities afterward.

Reading is the one thing that makes you feel a little less lonely when you're alone. Don't try to please this world; you are the only you in it.

(Figure in original.)

02 Film

In 2020, as of this writing, I watched 61 films in all.

(Figure in original.)

Ones I really liked: Assassination, Parasite, The Neighbors, Man in Love, The Man from Nowhere.

I actually saw a lot of very good documentaries this year, and my interest in films dipped a bit.

03 Running

I'll do a separate piece later on how I felt about running this year. For now, let me share a video I've watched who knows how many times this year—may it inspire us both.

(Video in original: the stirring 2019 Berlin Marathon.)

04 Career

My biggest gain this year was finding my passion and my point of interest for the next ten years (I don't yet dare say for the rest of my life). Another was gaining a somewhat deeper awareness and understanding of things many people (myself included) once thought were fluff: mission, vision, values.

I wrote a lot about my view of careers in an earlier piece; the main updates since then are these:

First: the society we live in today is one where finding a job will be hard, but finding wealth is fairly easy.

Second: I've long stressed that too many people don't know how to look for a job, don't know how to switch jobs, and don't even really know how to ask a proper question. The most common question is: "What do you think of company XX?"

How do you define "what do you think"? Asking "what do you think" without stating the variables and dimensions you care about is just playing games—under different definitions come completely different answers.

Every day, rather than going to work, we're really getting paid to know ourselves, discover ourselves, become ourselves. So the self is the essence, the core, the crux, the root—not the "getting paid." "Getting paid" is just the modifier.

Many people confuse "cost" with "advantage": the time, energy, feeling, and money you put in only become a real return when—and after—they've formed an "advantage" (a differentiated advantage especially). Input that hasn't formed an "advantage" or a "moat" has essentially just been expensed.

Third: changing jobs and switching employers isn't fundamentally about the switch itself; at root it's about choosing your life strategy—figuring out what you absolutely refuse to give up, then bravely giving up everything else. You think that by changing jobs, starting a new relationship, or buying something new, your life will become different? If your mindset never changes and stays stuck, all the old troubles will come around again and again.

And career planning isn't just about choosing a big or small company, or how much it pays—those dimensions are too one-note and their half-lives too short; everyone is doing exactly that. The most important thing is: you have to understand what your own underlying operating system looks like.

Every person is a set of algorithms, and dealing with someone means dealing with a whole set of algorithms, a fixed batch of reaction patterns. If the algorithm doesn't change, the specific results it computes won't change much. If you're someone who keeps missing opportunities, what you want to change looks on the surface like some scenario—but really it should be your own algorithmic pattern.

At bottom, this demands that a person be able to make trade-offs and be accountable. And making trade-offs first requires having a goal. Having a goal alone screens out most people—most either drift with the current and muddle along, or want everything, forever eyeing the higher hill from the one they're on. Once you have a goal, you understand that to gain you must give up: the more you gain, the more you give up. This runs deeply against human nature. Most people can't get past it inside, and are bound to waver. Psychologically it's an enormous difference—and from it are born panic, loneliness, and fear.

So, personally, I think you first have to settle for yourself: what you genuinely consider achievement, what success is, what leadership is—first have your own worldview (plenty of people, before they've had a chance to think it through properly, get carried off by all kinds of opinions). Only then do you collide with people holding different views, slowly forming your own system; and only then do you have your own critical thinking with which to see problems, and your whole frame of vision becomes different.

Many companies love to tell newcomers, "Welcome to this warm big family." That framing is actually wrong. A company isn't like a family; it's more like a sports team—players look out for one another, and also make demands of one another. Play at a high level and you land the big contract; play at a low level and you take a seat on the bench.

I've seen quite a few impressive, highly capable people who could already stand on their own. Their success gave them an illusion, an unrealistic fantasy about their own ability and expectations, and when they struck out on their own, they failed. Setting aside some objective factors, the more important reason is that the predicament of working under someone else and working for yourself are completely different. Only when they found they had no one to fall back on did they realize how hard it is to be decisive, unshaken under threat, calm and objective.

Fourth: mission, vision, and values are actually buried deep in everyone's heart.

Mission is a bigger topic. From my own limited life experience, I'd advise most people to first find their unique value—that is, the thing they do a bit better than the others around them. Not absolutely better; relatively better is enough. It needn't be your main line of work; it can be a hobby. To achieve this relative kind of "better," you don't need so-called hardcore prowess—you just need to be relatively more interested in something, more attentive, more willing to spend time on it.

Many women discover a long-hidden interest after having children—one friend of mine rekindled her interest in food, and another started a business after giving birth.

Once you've found this "relatively better" point, to be safe, you can ask yourself a few questions:

a. Why am I good at this? Is it talent, interest, or the time I've put in?

b. Who does this "strength" mainly serve? What are their characteristics? What kind of needs do they have?

c. Can I keep getting better at this?

d. Can this be done for a long time—say, more than ten years?

Fifth: being recognized is a good thing, but living inside other people's expectations is dangerous. There are many people who perform outstandingly, learn fast, and win favor. Yet entering the fast track for promotion often fails to make them leaders quickly as hoped—and instead affects them negatively. For them, being recognized seems to become a curse. The reason is that they fixate on what they should do to secure their standing in the organization. And these expectations may keep getting amplified. They strive to be flawless leaders, and in doing so suppress the very passion and personal qualities that made them stand out in the first place.

And the last point is: "be a bit greedy—if you want it, go get it." Ambition isn't a bad thing, as long as it's rational.

05 Awareness

For a very long stretch of my life, I agonized over whether acquiring knowledge should be breadth-first or depth-first—whether so-called wide-ranging, curiosity-driven dabbling is really meaningful at all. I thought about it a long time, and this year I gained a bit of insight and feeling for it.

Actually, a lot of things in life are judgments and dilemmas, and they can be sorted into three types:

• Judge whether it's emotion—deal with it later.
• Judge whether it's an end or a means—why do this?
• Judge whether you want it or someone else wants you to—time will tell you.

First, failing to tell the matter apart from the emotion: many things, when they arrive, put emotion out front rather than the matter itself. That's human nature.

Second, failing to tell the goal apart from the means: often we feel righteous because we think our starting point is correct—and once the starting point is correct, we feel everything we do is right. In reality it isn't; carrying a so-called "correct starting point," you can end up heading due south to reach the north.

Third, failing to tell the self apart from the projection: can't tell whether the thing is what you want or what someone else expects and has projected onto you as your wanting it. No matter how high the intelligence, how rational the person, everyone falls into this.

I feel more and more that my time is precious, and the frequency with which I chat with people gets lower and lower. I've come to accept that I have basically no friends, and that a lot of socializing isn't really necessary.

Talk is cheap; saying less avoids a lot of problems. I care more about how I feel than about pleasing others. My own thoughts matter more. The truth is, others care about you far less than you imagine. What everyone truly cares about is always themselves.

And I really have come to more and more dislike people who don't reply to WeChat messages, who don't reply for ages, who don't reply time after time—it's become the number-one behavior I detest on WeChat.

You've probably heard many people say: it's not important who you know, it's important who knows you. That's actually not quite accurate either. What truly matters is that you find your own direction and passion, then place yourself in that field—and the rest, the people you're meant to meet and to know, the ones you want to see and who want to see you, will all come to your side and into your life.

06 On People

Honestly, I like people who are excellent in themselves yet don't carry an air of superiority in how they interact and talk. They're bright without being glaring, brimming with confidence yet keeping their edge sheathed. Their emotions are all pitched just right—comfortable to be around, like a spring breeze. Put another way, it's downward compatibility.

For years I've been watching one thing: has this person, at some moment, shown that strong sense of superiority that puts great pressure on the other person? This is a precious quality for someone who wants to keep leveling up—and one that many people lack.

This holds regardless of gender: those who are handsome, beautiful, rich, well-off in family background, high in status—feeling that because I'm beautiful, because I'm handsome, because I have money and status, because I have an extraordinary and outstanding résumé, I'm therefore entitled to make any extremely harsh demand of the other person.

All superiority comes from a lack of exposure and a lack of compassion. The most noble kind of superiority is the kind that puts no pressure on others.

07 Love

I once read a Q&A: How do you know whether you love a person or a thing? Love isn't something you "know for sure." It's when you know, you know.

To express your positive feelings toward another person frankly and without disguise is a fairly difficult thing—it's a skill. And it's one I've never done all that well.

At bottom, this may stem from a deep-seated dissatisfaction, unease, and lack of confidence with myself, and to some degree from a fear of granting others the power to hurt me. So over time I came to feel that the indirect, the metaphorical, the artful, the tacitly understood, the mutually unspoken—those seemed more beautiful and also safer.

But over these years, as I've gotten older, I feel more and more that sincerity is the greatest skill and the rarest of all. The greatest craft looks clumsy. I'm slowly fixing this problem, and fixing it pretty fast.

This leads into a social phenomenon: when it comes to their own humor, sense of proportion in expression, and personal charm, Chinese men's confidence and self-awareness in front of women are basically catastrophic. Chinese women's yearning for men's wealth and power vastly outweighs their pursuit of men's humor, sense of proportion, and personal charm.

When we want to define a relationship, it's so the relationship can have a reasonably clear framework, so both sides are clear on their responsibilities and obligations, making it easier to sustain. Through a shared, clear confirmation of the relationship, both dispel the fantasy; it's a shared promise between two people that they'll treat this relationship sincerely—whether that relationship is friendship, love, or something else.

Nowadays many women, clearly knowing that the other person (or they themselves) can't meet their own (or the other's) expectations, still won't refuse the flirtation—exploiting this information asymmetry to enjoy the other person's feelings while bearing no responsibility.

(Figure in original.)

From observing those around me, and those around them, many people—men and women alike—hold unrealistic expectations and demands about relationships.

I like Warren's definition of happiness: I want the people who love me to love me for real. That's his definition, and I think it's a very good one.

08 Sharing 12 Questions

Back in March, I posted on Moments: being able to pose a good question is far harder than answering one well, but it also more readily helps you understand something and think clearly through some matter or confusion. I planned to try something: on a monthly basis, pose at least one good question each month, then answer it as best I could.

Below are the questions I posed from March through December, shared here—anyone with thoughts is welcome to trade ideas:

March: Do you think it's easier to love, or to be loved?

April: Have you ever made a non-consensus choice that turned out to be right?

May: Are you a bold person or a cautious one?

June: How do you regard time and space?

July: When people first meet you, what kind of impression do they usually form of you?

August: What was your greatest fear in childhood? (Not the frightening thing or object itself, but the feeling it gave you.)

September: What is the greatest strength in your character? (What you think, not what others think.)

October: What character trait do you deeply envy in others but don't possess yourself?

November: What character trait in other people do you especially dislike?

December: If you could answer only with "5-4-3-2-1" words, what is the life you most want? What would your answer be?

09 Closing

What makes you happy? What delivers you peaceful mind? Go back to it.

Lengthen the time frame, widen the field of view, and by getting one small thing done to build a sense of achievement and confidence—you can solve nearly every problem in life.

Be with fun, interesting people you love, and there'll be no loneliness and no fear.

Whatever you do, don't merely look like you're living well. Live, from the bottom of your heart, the life you want to live; love the state you're in now; and still look forward to the future.

Don't fret over the valuation—what matters is that you win when the game is over.