2019年招聘市场回顾及2021年展望China's Hiring Market: 2019 in Review, 2021 Outlook

Introduction

Last year, I said 2019 should be the hardest year for employment on record so far. And then we "welcomed" the once-in-a-century black-swan of the pandemic.

In 2020, the graduating class of that year and students returning from overseas were among the most unfortunate cohorts of all.

On top of structural unemployment, which still hadn't budged, frictional, cyclical, and technological unemployment all rose sharply because of the pandemic.

And then there's hidden unemployment. So-called hidden unemployment refers to people who appear to have a job but contribute nothing to output — people with a "position" but no real "work," whose marginal productivity is effectively zero. When an economy sheds workers without any drop in output, hidden unemployment is present. Take ByteDance, for instance.

What follows is, as always, one year's worth of my own impressions and experience. These are strictly personal views, not the position of any institution, and are not aimed at any company or individual. Discussion and debate are welcome.

01 The Market in Review

To sum it up, this is what the market looked like in 2020. The main theme was still consumer-facing (2C) consumption and everyone-piling-into enterprise (2B).

Beyond that, two sub-plots:

1: The people around me (and around them) are either on their way to ByteDance or already there.

In 2020, ByteDance's headcount grew by leaps and bounds, day after day. Total headcount surged by 30,000–40,000 in a single year, and now stands at nearly 100,000. Do the math: on average, 150 people are queuing up to onboard every single working day. In its headquarters alone there are nearly 40 offices; worldwide, more than 240. A scale that takes other companies 20 or 30 years to reach, ByteDance compressed into eight.

(Figure in original.)

And what came with that rapid expansion was a decline in output per head. Compared with other giants at the 100,000-employee mark — measured by revenue and by the valuation/market cap each employee supports — ByteDance basically sits at the bottom. And as headcount has grown, its output per head has fallen for three straight years.

None of that is the point, though. What actually baffles me most is this: where was everyone in 2017 and 2018? Why didn't people join when the momentum was strongest? Instead they piled in all at once in 2019 and 2020 — onto an ever more crowded path, just as the best positions were nearly gone.

2: More and more people want to jump from the private markets to the public markets — no longer just people from consulting firms and BDA, but even people at some of the top USD funds want to make the move.

If practitioners on the private and public sides used to be clearly separated, then over these two years the gap has been steadily narrowing — though a chasm remains. The reason people want to switch is simple: the public markets offer more names to trade, faster feedback, and more money.

But behind the urge to move from private to public lies a deeper tension: the conflict between atoms and bits. In other words, people have waited a long time and haven't seen linear technological innovation — one reason the heat around 2C entrepreneurship and investment has plummeted since 2016.

Peter Thiel has a line: "We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters" (a reference to Twitter). Futurists in the 1950s and '60s predicted that by the 21st century flying cars would be part of everyday life. None of it came true.

"Flying cars vs. 140 characters" is, at bottom, a portrait of how glacially slow innovation is in the world of atoms (physical things) compared with the world of bits (software).

The Boeing 747 first flew in 1969 — the world's first wide-body commercial aircraft — and it's still a workhorse for long-haul flying today. Cars have become more fuel-efficient and safer, but they still can't fly, and won't.

Bits are a different story. Years ago the mobile phone was called the "big brother" handset — as big and heavy as a brick. A decade ago phones started getting smaller and lighter, but they were still fundamentally just phones. Today the phone is camera, camcorder, voice recorder, television, cinema, transit card, credit card, health-monitoring device, and office tool all rolled into one.

In fact, a little observation and a bit of contrarian thinking is all it takes to see that we are currently in a state where every other technology has stalled.

The metric in economics that comes closest to capturing technological progress is called total factor productivity (TFP). It refers to the growth in productivity left over after accounting for growth in labor and capital investment. When TFP rises, it means the same amount of labor, working the same land with the same machines, produces more output than before.

To borrow Jobs's phrasing, it's about "working smarter," which is what keeps raising human living standards. Put simply: if TFP is flat, living standards stagnate too.

The biggest problem right now is that, as automation advances, the labor of most people no longer creates value — and may even be dragging productivity down. Hartnett recently warned that over the past decade the U.S. market has been awash in liquidity, but technological innovation has stalled. The vast inequality and social fragmentation these forces produce could cause serious problems — never mind that the scale of U.S. financial assets has now reached six times GDP.

Forget factory workers — just look at the jobs people once assumed machines could never replace: drivers, lawyers, bankers, teachers. All of them are on the eve of wholesale displacement, with the low- and mid-tier roles in these knowledge professions being taken over by machines.

This too is a symptom of involution.

By the calculations of Robert Gordon — the distinguished macroeconomist and economic historian at Northwestern University — TFP has been essentially flat for decades. Since the 1970s, TFP has grown at only a third of the rate it did between the 1920s and 1970s. In terms a non-economist can follow, this means we are poorer, we work longer hours, and we are leaving our descendants a worse world than the one we inherited from our forebears.

Which raises the question: why do some of the smartest people on the planet — Silicon Valley founders and venture capitalists — remain, most of the time, buoyantly optimistic and self-satisfied amid an obvious social decline?

There may be only one explanation: self-interest.

The mediocrity of every other sector of the economy has made Silicon Valley richer, more important, and more valuable. Thanks to positive feedback, money and prestige flow almost entirely into one field, which builds up enough potential energy not only to keep growing on its own, but to expand and encroach on other domains by sheer momentum.

The dazzling advance of gadgets like the smartphone distracts us from the stagnation of our communities. Screens are everywhere. The world went from being flat to being a screen.

The relentless march of TMT (technology, media, telecom) has made itself the precondition for full participation in society. The result is the wholesale social-media-ization of mass life: newspapers, radio, and television each extended a particular human sense; the internet first fused and intensified those extensions, then, through social platforms and mobile, reconstructed our relationship with the world.

When a single computer or tablet can deliver work, consumption, entertainment, and communication all at once, the person himself becomes social-media-ized — a train running on social-media rails. He can still control his pace and direction; derail, and he faces discipline and punishment.

The consequence of being thoroughly disciplined by the internet and social media: work today has "drift" — the office, the subway, the bus, the café, the bedroom can all be "hooked in" by digital information technology. Work time is "fragmented" — into every crevice of eating, sleeping, entertaining, working, and socializing, the internet "wedges itself in," jolting us psychologically and physically. And the mode of work carries a hidden "collaboration": users' everyday liking, sharing, group-buying, and commenting are casually turned into "chips" for commercial capital, fueling its growth.

WeChat has become the "second battlefield" of professional work, and as usage rises, our relationship with it drifts toward "alienation."

The way WeChat forcibly compresses people's time and space in daily life has been mocked like this: there's a kind of work called "WeChat teleport," a kind of phone call called "WeChat voice," a kind of hunting-people-down called "WeChat location," a kind of escape called "uninstalling WeChat," a kind of sound called the "WeChat ding-dong," a kind of helplessness called "WeChat online," a kind of harassment called "WeChat group chat," and a kind of "Moments" called "company advertising"...

Today, the "strong connectivity" that the information society creates makes "disembedding" (escape) harder and harder. The capitalists grow richer and richer, and what's left behind is countless struggling workers.

02 Luck

The old saying puts it well: first fate, second luck, third feng shui. After fate, luck matters most. In the hiring and job market, luck plays an enormous part. So much of it is just the "happy accident" of good fortune: when you graduate (whether you do a master's or not), when you choose to switch jobs, what industry you pick, what company, what boss, what city.

William Li — one of the most luckless Chinese people of 2019 — suddenly "welcomed" enormous good news in 2020, and along for the ride were everyone who'd bought NIO and XPeng shares before then.

Work follows the same logic: the company you want isn't hiring when you're looking, or when it is hiring you've just joined somewhere else or just switched jobs, or your title doesn't line up.

03 Geography

I just got back from Shanghai a while ago, and I have to say the city is just so comfortable. Comfortable isn't quite the same as easygoing, though — "easygoing" might fit Chengdu better. A lot of people want to work in Shanghai, or move back, and they look and wait for ages — sometimes years — and still can't get back there.

I've said to friends more than once: apart from having fewer job openings, Shanghai crushes Beijing on almost every other dimension. But even that "fewer opportunities" isn't absolute.

Sector by sector: in internet/tech, Shanghai definitely has no opportunities. Or to put it another way, in Shanghai the internet industry is a case of severe supply falling short of demand.

Fifteen companies worth over 10 billion: Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, Pinduoduo, JD, NetEase, Xiaomi, Baidu, ZTO, TAL, New Oriental, Trip.com, iQiyi, Bilibili, and Vipshop; and seven worth over 5 billion: Huazhu, Autohome, Weibo, 58.com, GSX, SMIC, and JOYY. Add the unlisted giants: ByteDance, Didi, Yuanfudao, Zuoyebang, and Shein.

Of those 27 companies, the number founded in Shanghai you can count on one hand. Plenty of companies have opened offices in Shanghai, but that doesn't solve the problem — it only eases it somewhat. And these days startups are increasingly fleeing the top-two cities of Beijing and Shanghai, heading instead to Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan, and Changsha — five weaker first-tier and "tier-1.5" cities.

Shanghai missed out on the entire decade of the internet and mobile internet. There are many reasons for this, and one of the main ones is the influence of the city's atmosphere: Shanghai is just too good for living. The environment shapes people in ways that are enormous and invisible, so a lot of Shanghai startups are small and beautiful, and many founders lack the wolfish drive and ambition you find in Beijing.

And gentleness is a poor fit for the wolfish internet culture — what the internet stresses and prizes are its inherent "economies of scale" and "network effects." I've explained these two concepts before.

These two principles have become gospel in the internet world: use economies of scale early to trigger network effects, until you cross the "critical threshold," at which point network effects take over automatically and, in turn, further ignite scale. Round and round it goes, until winner takes all.

So an internet war is a hundred-meter dash, not a marathon. Victory isn't about who reaches the finish line first, but who crosses the critical threshold faster. Once that threshold is crossed, the subsequent street-fighting is just mopping up the battlefield — it no longer decides the outcome.

And Shanghai's urban culture is fundamentally at odds with this. Few startups also means fewer opportunities in the private markets, which I'll come to.

Splitting finance apart: in the private markets, Shanghai is still crushed by Beijing — you'll hardly see any headcount in Shanghai. In the public markets, Shanghai can hold its own against Beijing, even coming out ahead 60/40.

As I said, because of Shanghai's culture, the city has few startups and few founders, which means few deals (targets). So for private-markets practitioners (junior to mid-level), you can't really be based in Shanghai, and many funds simply don't hire there. But the deal-flow issue doesn't affect the public side, and since Shanghai is a financial center, its public-markets scene is thriving.

Shanghai has a "comprador culture," so the mature, foreign-origin professions all do quite well there: various multinationals, investment banking, consulting, FMCG, the Big Four. There are plenty of opportunities in Shanghai for these roles.

The most mature of all is consumer goods. Shanghai's per-capita disposable income is 2.2 times the national average, and its first-quarter growth rate was not only above the national level but above CPI as well — the consumption potential yet to be released remains enormous.

During the pandemic, Shanghai's overall consumption power stayed strong; online retail was relatively weak, otherwise total retail sales of consumer goods would have looked even better. Beijing, precisely because of its online strength, kept its consumption decline from straying too far below the national average.

Shanghai has extraordinarily deep brick-and-mortar retail DNA. In the early 20th century, the first escalator, the premier department stores, and more all got their start in Shanghai. The city has one of the country's densest networks of convenience stores, shopping malls, and department stores. Its large retail enterprises are among the very best in the nation, contributing at least a third or so of total retail sales of consumer goods.

To sum up: because Shanghai is just so good for living, many of its founders and professionals lack the wolfish drive and ambition of Beijing, and lack the impulse to job-hop frequently. If no one leaves, no new slots open up — and round and round it goes.

04 The Venture/PE Industry

If VC/PE was still in the street-fighting phase a few years ago, then the arrival of the pandemic in 2020 ended that phase early.

The war in the private markets is, in some sense, already over.

"USD funds, USD funds, and still more USD funds... every day there's another headline about a mega USD fund closing its raise — that may well be the collective sigh of most of China's private equity practitioners this year."

In 2020, China's equity-investment market saw a "triple decline" in both the number of newly established funds and total capital raised.

The number of newly raised funds has fallen year after year: from 3,637 in 2018 down to 2,585 in 2020.

Total capital raised keeps shrinking: from over 1.3 trillion in 2018 down to under 900 billion in 2020.

The most painful part: the "80/20 rule" has become the "90/10 rule," even "95/5." The top (few) institutions oversubscribe one after another, in stark contrast to the vast body of mid- and tail-end firms that come away with nothing.

(Figure in original.)

Many people tell me a homegrown RMB-fund boom is bound to come. Maybe it will. But whether it'll be our turn, or whether we'll see it while we still have the energy, I'm pessimistic. Frankly, in the short term, there's no sign of any improvement in the current situation. Fiscal money is busy fighting the pandemic, capital-commitment requirements are getting ever stricter, the industrial side is pulling in its lines, and individual wealth has basically fled the higher-risk private equity space. Lower fundraising efficiency is the lesser problem; the crux is you simply can't raise the money at all.

According to incomplete statistics from the FOF Research Center, since the start of 2020 the publicly reported size of USD funds established in China has exceeded 4.3 billion dollars.

(Figure in original.)

The unprecedented expansion of the top firms' assets under management and the across-the-board inflation of asset prices and valuations go hand in hand. And once an asset manager gets big and cash-rich, expanding its business is only natural.

The common result and pattern is to attack on two fronts at once. Vertically, later-stage funds start setting up and dabbling in early-stage funds: Sequoia, Hillhouse, Boyu, etc., swallowing the whole value chain. Horizontally, they expand across categories: traditional buyout PE stretches from equity into real estate, credit, derivatives, and so on.

If in the past the emphasis was on return-rate-as-king (which is, after all, the mission and vocation of asset management), then in this new era, from a certain angle, beyond returns, how much money you can manage for your LPs may matter even more than returns. Returns depend on the heavens, after all, but if the money never gets deployed, you've plainly failed at your job.

Take Bridgewater, whose returns Ray Dalio is often criticized for not being the best — sometimes even lagging the market. But sorry: being able to manage 160 billion dollars in this market is itself a core competitive advantage. Very few people can do that. Put another way, hand that money to someone else and they'd have no idea how to invest it, where to put it, or what to put it in.

By the point the market has evolved to, the relationship between large LPs and large GPs has become a new paradigm of mutual entanglement and mutual dependence — like "soulmates." Consider the long-term funds Carlyle and CVC have raised, with investment horizons stretching 15 years, or Blackstone, which in 2017 launched a 5-billion-dollar, 20-year core fund.

The LP/GP symbiosis has also produced new management models and ways of relating — for instance, GPs helping LPs build up their investment capabilities, even standing up their internal systems. Think CIC and Blackstone.

05 Women's Predicament in the Workplace

Women's employment difficulties are an unbearable pain in society today — not just in China but worldwide, though abroad it's handled far better overall than at home.

Whenever a major natural disaster, disease, or economic shock hits, the rule of thumb is that the group hardest hit is disadvantaged women's employment. Moreover, looking at causes of unemployment by age, for women aged 45 to 64 the leading cause is workplace downsizing or shutdown — so with COVID's blow to the service sector, women bore the brunt first.

Many will say: plenty of men have never felt any "gender dividend," yet most women have clearly felt gender discrimination. Why is that?

Because there really is no gender dividend, but gender discrimination genuinely exists. Why?

Because most men are also low- or middle-class, doing work that's low-paid, high-intensity, or dangerous — that can hardly be called a dividend. And the reason women clearly feel discriminated against is that most of them aren't even given the chance to qualify for the job in the first place.

The victims of gender discrimination aren't only women — men too. Because our society's yardstick is far too one-dimensional: demanding and conditioning men to shoulder more actually, in a sense, imprisons women too. The core of feminism is to integrate women and gender-diverse groups into society, into social production and construction, and to shatter stereotypes.

Among fatal-overwork cases in China each year, men outnumber women roughly four to one. In Shenzhen's work-injury cases, the ratio of male to female patients is about 12 to 1. Similar data is endless.

All of it points to an obvious fact: in modern society, men take on the vast majority of high-intensity, high-risk jobs. If you flipped the genders now — men withdrawing entirely from these jobs and women doing them instead — the female casualty rate would surely be far higher than men's. Yet many women would still consider this a form of discrimination and oppression.

From an employer's point of view, because women's "cost-effectiveness" in the workplace is relatively lower, when a crisis hits, the odds of a woman being fired or laid off are much higher than a man's.

Today's predicament for women in the workplace isn't really a gender problem — it's a social problem.

It's not that male bosses prefer to hire men; once you (a woman) become a female boss, you too will lean toward hiring men. Because where you sit determines how you think — as the boss, what you weigh is the company's costs and returns.

And from the company's perspective, the more benefits women get, the harder their employment becomes.

When hiring female employees, why do so many companies directly or indirectly ask whether a woman is already married or pregnant? Because a female employee's pregnancy raises the company's costs.

Why does a woman's pregnancy raise costs? Because national policy grants three months of maternity leave; pregnancy lowers an employee's work efficiency; and during the leave, the original workload must either be covered by a new hire or spread across colleagues — all while her salary continues to be paid. By contrast, a non-pregnant employee incurs none of these extra costs.

Why does the state mandate three months of maternity leave? Because it's a matter of humanitarianism, and because national development needs young people, so policy is needed to ensure women have a good environment supporting childbirth — and after giving birth the body needs recuperation and shouldn't return to work too soon. That's why the state imposes the three-month rule.

The analysis above reasons from phenomenon to cause; run it in reverse, and because the policy of three-month maternity leave raises company costs, companies feel the need to ask about marital and pregnancy status up front when hiring.

Why does giving women more benefits make their employment harder instead? The crux of the problem is: who bears the cost of that benefit?

The reality right now is that companies cover the bulk of it and the state only a small part. The good name goes to the state, while the cost is shifted onto companies themselves. So, at equal pay levels, companies will preferentially choose men or unmarried women, avoiding the outlay for these "benefits" right at the hiring gate. That's why I say: today's predicament for women in the workplace isn't really a gender problem — it's a social problem.

Can this predicament be solved? For now, not effectively — only relatively eased, and the way to do it is to lower the "benefit costs" companies have to bear. Any policy where the state isn't willing to foot the bill and the boss is forced to instead, the boss will ultimately pass on to employees and consumers.

The state lengthens women's marriage-and-childbirth leave, so bosses stop hiring married-but-childless women. The state bars asking about marriage and childbirth in interviews, so bosses just don't let them into the interview.

For now, the only workable path is to follow Europe: mandate that every company guarantee a certain percentage of female employees, and have the state pay women the average wage during their childbirth period — otherwise the problem has no solution.

Take the U.S.: there's no such thing as paid maternity leave for mothers, only 12 weeks of unpaid leave. That effectively reduces the company's "benefit" cost. So until the question of who bears the "benefit cost" is resolved, the more benefits policy grants women, the less friendly the job market is to them — because benefits don't materialize out of thin air; a benefit is just a one-time transfer of payment.

Look at it from the other side, and companies don't have it easy either. The average lifespan of a private firm in China is only three to four years. Companies do have social responsibilities, but they aren't charities. If a company can barely keep itself alive, how is it supposed to root out gender discrimination?

Policy can't just slap and offer no candy. Current departmental policies are all punitive in nature, and the effect they achieve ends up being counterproductive.

One current view is to add paternity leave for men — for example, considering an appropriate reduction in women's (paid) maternity leave, an increase in men's leave, or having couples share the leave, so as to balance things out. This breaks the current situation where benefits (and the discrimination that comes with them) all land on women. Many European countries have policies like this now.

But I think men's paternity leave treats the symptom, not the disease. Better to lighten companies' burdens and taxes and strengthen their childcare infrastructure.

Men's paternity leave is a flower in the mirror, a moon in the water. How many years has labor law been in force — and are statutory working hours and overtime pay actually being enforced? Everyone knows the answer. Otherwise there wouldn't be so much 996 and so many deaths from overwork. If a boss hints that a man should quietly come in to work during his paternity leave, do you think the man will file a complaint, or obediently comply?

Right now companies treat women's childbirth as fleecing the company, as a burden. Now that the state sees the demographic dividend vanishing, it's starting to encourage second and third children, granting women all sorts of protective policies. But the stronger the mandatory protection of women, the more opportunities women lose, and the heavier the atmosphere of discrimination against female jobseekers grows.

Actually, lightening companies' burdens and taxes is a way to positively encourage them to recruit women: ease the company's load, and it won't be so harsh on women.

For example, favorable policies could be tied to the proportion of female staff or the number of women who've given birth — much like a housing subsidy. Say: first child, the company gets a tax break of X thousand; second child, a tax break of X thousand.

This way, you positively encourage companies to employ women, rather than creating a double burden on both companies and women. Bearing life is inherently a great and sacred thing. Only when companies can normally embrace women can women peacefully enjoy the happiness of motherhood, and companies take pride in employing more working mothers.

Additionally, companies should strengthen their childcare infrastructure — childcare spaces, dedicated nursery and childcare staff (built out according to company size) — and a functioning childcare operation is exactly the kind of thing relevant departments can inspect periodically and by surprise.

Every company above a certain size should be required to be equipped with the above hardware and software, with regular checks on readiness, provisioning, and operation. Even a company that hires only men would still have to be equipped, and still incur the cost — so there'd be no point in hiring only men. The cost of a nursery room could be deducted from the company's taxable income for corporate income tax, which amounts to a government subsidy.

The stronger the mandatory protection, the greater the indirect harm. The more benefits women get, the greater the pressure on companies, and the more severe the discrimination against women's employment. And the ultimate victim isn't just women — it's the whole family. Because women have fewer job opportunities, men inevitably have to shoulder more of the "mission" of earning and providing.

Clearly, only when women have more work opportunities will men live more easily and society function better. Right now, the single, rigid social standard — that men should go out to work, earn and provide, and not raise children as the norm — is bad for family stability, and the culture of the "widowed marriage" (an absent-parent household) is growing ever more pronounced.

If both men and women have to take parental leave, then in a sense it becomes indifferent to the company. As China's economy develops, we hope that in the future men will have more rights and opportunities to take leave for childbirth and jointly care for the family — the more they do, the more equally men and women can obtain the same employment opportunities.

Childbirth is, in a small sense, a family's affair, and in a large sense, a nation's. But in practice, the negative return that childbirth imposes on career development is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, borne by women. This grand social problem can only be solved — and can only be solved — by the government taking over the burden of childbirth with hard cash. Since the state reaps the demographic dividend, don't shift the cost onto companies.

In truth, whether man or woman, in all likelihood each is merely a propertyless worker. The struggle of the propertyless should be to join hands and fight the capitalists to win back the rights that are theirs — not, like crabs in a bucket, to yank down any crab they see climbing up. The people who most love to watch the crabs fight each other like this are precisely the ones preparing to sell them off.

Western neoliberalism, through identity politics, has split the proletariat into men, women, Black people, Asians, and other separate tribes, and then, by playing one against another, set them at each other's throats. The capitalists and landlords hide among them, becoming the spokesmen for these identities, and thereby dissolve the revolutionary force of the proletariat. So stop harping on some man-versus-woman gender conflict: there has only ever been class conflict, never conflict internal to the people.

Proletarian revolution is men and women united as one — not frantically involuting over the one-tenth of the harvest that's their own, but taking the nine-tenths from the landlord's hands and redistributing it.

06 Happiness at Work

The Pinduoduo affair, which has been building all this time, has by now nearly been forgotten. The truth is that the world itself has never cared about the individual; it cares only about the group.

(Figure in original.)

PDD employees push themselves this hard, so they'll surely win the grocery war — which is exactly why there's no need to go work at a company like that. If you want in, just buy its stock (though even that idea is quite dangerous: when you fight the monster, guard against becoming the monster yourself).

Happy work is something employees are owed. We must discard the mistaken notion that "work was never meant to be a primary source of fulfillment." Far too many people believe that if they can achieve success, they'll automatically obtain happiness. The truth is exactly the reverse: "happiness comes before success."

Because the positive emotions that come from engagement, satisfaction, and a sense of value at work bring many benefits: they help the brain function better, boost creativity and adaptability, and leave you energetic, wise in decisions, and better able to cope with difficulty.

The principle is simple: happy people perform better than unhappy ones. It's time to demand the right to happy work.

07 You Come for the Work, You Leave for the People

Analyzing emotion helps us understand its power over people's decisions and behavior.

Most of us are rational when we job-hunt: the company's past, its future; our own income, whether there's a future in it — you'll often even see people pull out an Excel spreadsheet to calculate and rank. But we are emotional when we quit: the reasons, boiled down, are always that the boss is an idiot, the colleagues are idiots, the office vibe is idiotic, and so on.

Very few people join a company for emotional reasons, and very few quit for rational ones. This is what I mean by "you come for the work, you leave for the people."

Think back over it: compare the reasons you chose this company with the reasons you now want to leave, and you'll find that people apply a double standard — two separate systems — when they join versus when they quit.

Every factor you considered when you joined is still there: it's still BAT, still MBB, the company is still huge (a Fortune Global 500), the pay is still high, the prospects are still pretty good. So why are you choosing to leave?

Some will say: the boss is a fool, the colleagues freeze me out. So when you look for your next job, will "the boss isn't a fool, the colleagues don't freeze me out" become your priority, the main factor in choosing a company? If someone introduced you to a job where the boss treats employees like his own sons and the colleagues are one big harmonious family — but the salary is only half of what you make now and the company's room to grow is worse — would you take it? You'd curse that person out, wouldn't you?

You certainly wouldn't join for those reasons, yet you'd quit for them — and that's what we call the most common "double standard" in the workplace.

So when you want to quit, face your own heart honestly and give yourself a true reason for leaving. Judge whether that reason is a rational assessment or an emotional experience. If it's merely that the "experience" is bad, then think about whether there's a solution, or whether to set it aside for now — because quitting simply because the experience is bad means the next job may well have a bad "experience" too.

People's choices are mostly determined by emotions and feelings. Different emotions affect people differently, and what actually troubles a person isn't negative emotion but chaotic emotion. Chaos makes you lose your reason, lose your sense of time and space.

If you can't pin down what you're feeling, it's easy to make so-called "emotional" choices — whereas continually digging into and focusing on "what does this mean?" is a more efficient way to locate the precise emotion.

08 A Closing Word

From childhood on, almost no one ever prompted us to think carefully about one question: "What do I truly enjoy doing?" And most of us never carefully asked ourselves this either.

Choosing a career based on passion is the optimal solution.

Very few people find what they truly love to do from the very start; the search itself is a process of groping and refinement. Even if we fail in the attempt, or find it's not the right fit, at least we've come to understand our own traits through it — and it gives us the chance to pause and change course.

Consider: has humanity ever stopped falling in love just because the relationship might eventually end? What most people do is pile unrealistic expectations and demands onto romance while pouring nowhere near comparable energy into their careers.

(Figure in original.)

When you don't know what you enjoy, start by process of elimination — enter from what you dislike. Understanding your own personality matters a great deal. And once you find your genuine point of interest at work, act on it immediately. Follow one path to the end, without hesitation or timidity. This kind of choice is grounded in your own interest.

Geniuses are scarce; almost everyone is an ordinary person. But there's no need to be a genius, because many geniuses have to endure enormous suffering to grow.

And human talent is extremely fine-grained — as the saying goes, "of the three thousand waters, take but a single ladleful." So strive to find your ladleful, keep investing your time, iterate on your energy, and focus on doing it to the utmost.

Every point along the river of life connects up in some way.

Every opportunity, every experience, is a point of starlight in the river of life, and they will eventually connect in some fashion. As Jobs said in his Stanford commencement address: you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. You have to trust that the dots — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever — will somehow connect in your future.

Intuition is, at its essence, a voice from deep within. People often lose their intuition amid so-called rational thinking, making decisions that stray from their inner voice.

Your intellect may confuse right and wrong, but your emotions will never lie to you. The most important decisions in life are all made through emotion.

We need to be able to receive our own intuition. That requires quieting the mind and getting away from the many voices the brain generates. Jobs meditated for years, which cultivated his extreme sensitivity to intuition — he could not only hear his own intuition, but follow it.

Continually exploring inward and self-reflecting brings us closer to our own inner voice.

Doing what you love is the cornerstone of a rich life.

Some hold that work is merely a means, not the purpose of life. I completely disagree. Modern people spend far more time at the company than at home; far more time in the office chair than asleep in bed; far more encounters with colleagues and business partners than time with friends and partners.

When a person spends at least a third of their life doing things they're neither good at nor enjoy, life becomes rather sad.

Yet the hardest thing is often precisely this: how do you know what you truly enjoy? That's where the crux lies. What you liked at eighteen you may not still like at twenty-eight. People's tastes and cognition are always in flux, so it's often through endless trial that you come to understand what you dislike. Only by comparison can you possibly discover what you like.

So, first, some detours must be walked. Second, when you're doing something, your inner feelings will tell you whether you enjoy it. On the road of searching, what matters most really is courage and perseverance. And the courage to heed your inner voice comes from living in the present and quieting your mind.

So first, be brave enough to search out what interests you and what you're good at, rather than making how much money it pays the primary consideration in your decisions. Keep your feeling-radar sensitive at all times, because feelings are real — keep feeling and experiencing, and you'll hear your inner voice.

When we do what we love and grow ever more engaged, the odds of doing it well and doing it finely rise dramatically. At that point, money is merely the result that follows.

There's a line I've always kept in mind: what is interest? Competence is interest. When you have the edge in competition, you naturally take an interest; when you're always falling behind, your interest naturally fades.

Whatever stage of life you're in, I hope you can find the thing and the leverage that let your life stand on its own two feet — not money, not power, but a desire that springs from deep within.

References

• How on Earth Did ByteDance Reach 100,000 People
• No Matter How Triumphantly the Internet Advances, Technology Can't Replace Human Contact