独处，试错，投资自己真的能让你变的更好么？Solitude, Trial and Error, and the Cult of Self-Investment

In your twenties, there's still so much room to rise and so much you can still be shaped into. Not being fully formed yet is honestly the most normal thing in the world.

"Spend a little time alone each day. Leave a little room for your own soul, and in a fully relaxed state, listen to what your heart deep down really wants. Sometimes, you can even take out a blank sheet of paper and write your thoughts down. It doesn't matter how naive, how ridiculous, or even how outrageous those thoughts might look—they're for your eyes only, and they have nothing to do with anyone else."

"One good method is trial and error. Keep trying everything. Don't be afraid to fail. The cost of failure is small; as long as you don't get fired or expelled, worst case you can just go back to the classroom and start over from scratch."

Being alone, trying and failing over and over, and investing in yourself—these are the "well-meaning teachings" young people have been handed more and more often in recent years to grow and get ahead. But the more these lines circulate, the more I've noticed their meaning has long since been twisted and misused, warped the way a rumor turns into fact once three people repeat it.

I read that passage about solitude a few times, and the more I read it, the more it felt like a bowl of chicken soup for the soul. Sure, every one of us needs, to some degree, the space to "be alone and quiet the mind for a bit." But I've come to believe more and more that solitude for its own sake is not the best way for a young person to find their direction in life.

Picture it: you shut yourself in a room, take out a sheet of paper, scribble and write furiously with your mind roaming free—will that really spark some flash of insight and reveal the right direction for your life? Clearly, the answer is no. Not everyone is Newton, discovering gravity because an apple fell on his head; or Archimedes, discovering buoyancy while soaking in a hot bath.

Yang Jiang said the biggest problem with young people is mainly that they read too little and think too much. That's certainly true in a sense—though in my own humble opinion, the reason young people are lost is precisely that they do too little and think too much, and have no real thoughts of their own. Planning for the future when you're young matters, of course, especially in this fast-changing, all-devouring age; but at a point when your life experience is extremely limited and your field of vision hasn't fully opened up, you can't really see very far ahead. Trying to think through the road for many years to come is unrealistic and pointless. And being alone in a state where you have no real thoughts yields almost nothing of substance—if anything, it can backfire, and the more you write, the more tangled your mind gets.

As for trial and error: it's true that people grow up and mature through the cycle of try–fall–get up–try again, and the process of setting short-term goals and exploring a long-term direction absolutely requires it. But the cold, hard fact is that for the vast majority of people, a lot of the time you can't afford to lose—you don't have much cushion or capital to lose with.

A film-loving college grad once asked Ang Lee: "I'm only 19, but I feel a lot of things on my journey growing up have been a lot like yours. In my studies I can never quite live up to my own expectations, and a lot of the time I feel like a failure, and it really gets to me. I want to know how you kept yourself steady back then."

Here's how Ang Lee answered: "Some people feel failure is a way to temper themselves, that they absolutely have to overcome it and win. That's great. But that's not me. I think we can't afford too many experiences of failure. Otherwise, no matter what you do, you'll keep losing—because you've already gotten used to that failure mode. You need to find the interest or the thing that lets you win, get everything ready, and win one good time."

Investing in yourself is another concept that's been used in recent years to string young people along. By constantly swapping out what a word really means, merchants dress up your spending in the noble-sounding language of "investing in yourself"—when at bottom they're just stoking consumption.

If it's investing in your health: go to bed early and rise early, eat on schedule, get your vitamins and protein, and stick with training and running—the results won't necessarily be any worse than hiring a personal trainer. And learning about and buying insurance is one of the true keys to safeguarding your health. As for investing in knowledge: the libraries in every major university and city lend for free, and in both quality and quantity they more than hold their own against all those little paid private groups—and they're cheaper, open, and fair.

Knowing every last detail of the gossip flying around your feed, able to hold forth on it at length, is vulgar and shallow, and only adds to your so-called stock of small talk. But being able to pull the plots and ideas of good books out of thin air, knowing them cold—that's wisdom.

Investing in yourself is, at bottom, about improving the efficiency with which you convert your capacity to work into money—call it your return on investment.

For this investment that raises our money-making efficiency, what matters in the end is how much it improved your actual abilities, how you then turned that into money, and where the margin on that lies. That is the right path for investing in yourself—not falling into the consumerism the merchants are conning you into.

Without accumulating small steps, you'll never cover a thousand miles; without gathering small streams, you'll never make a river. Your direction in life is like that vast river a thousand miles off. It's bound to take time, energy, and a great deal of thinking and doing before you sense it and settle on it. Even a sudden epiphany always has enough groping around beforehand to lay the groundwork.

Back to that original question: in your twenties, there's still so much room to rise and so much you can still be shaped into. Not being fully formed yet is honestly the most normal thing in the world. And more important than settling early on the right direction for the future is settling on your "small goals" for right now, and executing them without a moment's delay—turning each small goal on your to-do list into one solid building block after another.

In an age where clever people are running around every street corner, what's scarce isn't cleverness—it's single-mindedness, going all in, being of one heart, one track.

After all this, what I really want to say is that for young people today—myself very much included—we're all missing a crucial lesson: self-knowledge, and knowing where we stand. Recognizing your own abilities, your potential, your limits—and accepting them.

When we're constantly exploring and getting to know ourselves, that's exactly the work I described above. Knowing yourself is the most important lesson in life.

As your self-knowledge gradually sharpens and clarifies, you'll find that setting goals, holding your direction, and choosing a career all come more comfortably and more fluidly than before. You won't be dazzled and thrown off by high pay, prestige, and glossy appearances, and so you'll take fewer wrong turns and choose what you genuinely like and love.