写在25岁到来之际On Turning 25

"I keep my own stories deep inside — every gain and loss, every sorrow and dream, written down by my own hand."

Looking Back

The past year has been a roller coaster.

Same thing I always say: a birthday is mostly just a pretext — a convenient marker for taking stock of the time behind me and the world ahead, and for sharing how I feel right now.

To honestly acknowledge, face, accept, embrace, and even like this less-than-perfect version of myself — that was one of this year's assignments. There was still plenty of feeling, gain, and growth packed into it.

The past year had its joys and its disappointments; its happiness and its restlessness; its confusion — and I'm still searching, still growing.

Looking back on the year, I'll give myself a 73.

Your View of Life Is Your View of Death

A friend once said you can roughly sort people into two kinds: target-based versus experience-based. The first kind has crystal-clear goals, and every action points toward them; the second chases the experience of the process, with personal experience being the reason behind every choice. I thought for a long time about which one I am, and finally landed on the second: even though my goals are clear and I don't change course once I decide, all of my goals and all of my drive come from a single conviction — life is all about experience.

Almost every confusion any of us ever has can be traced back to one question: how do I want to spend my one life? And behind that question lies the finitude of time and life — every person has to think about the way they'll choose to live out their days; life is fragile, and it could end at any moment. Seen this way, your view of life is your view of death.

On March 15 this year I posted something on WeChat Moments, which went roughly like this: for a young person who wants to stay in Beijing, you need at least one of two things — ambition or a lover. Ambition is the thrill of conquest, the desire to realize your own worth. A lover is tenderness, someone you can text at midnight; even your best friend has their own work and their own boundaries. Without either of these, the cruelty and exhaustion of the big city will blur your vision, cloud your future, and leave you with too much loneliness and helplessness. Then a couple of days ago, on the Mid-Autumn Festival, I brought this up with a friend again — the feeling sharpens with every holiday. A deep, deep sense of helplessness.

As for cities, your feeling for a place hangs on a handful of people, a handful of shops, or on the memories you made with those people in those places.

In Beijing, I prefer Haidian to Chaoyang. There are universities and libraries where I can read, run, and play ball; there's the National Library, with even more books, where I can happily sit all day; there's the Olympic Forest Park for walks and exercise. Maybe I don't ask for much when it comes to food and drink — teaching myself to cook is its own kind of good. Quiet, comfortable, unhurried. But lately I find myself wanting more and more to live in Shanghai, even just for a while.

Which brings me to a related thought. The Chinese are a strange people. Nowhere else in the world is there such acute sensitivity — such anxiety — about time. Only the Chinese slice up their generations into "post-70s," "post-80s," "post-85s," "post-90s," "post-95s," "post-00s." Everywhere else, there's just "millennial."

This year I had the chance to be on the front line of hiring, which gave me a pretty vivid sense of the midlife crisis and the career plateau. So — is 35 a hurdle in one's career? After 35, how do you pivot, and where do you go?

My own feeling is that this hurdle may or may not exist. No one stays on the uphill, or the downhill, forever.

And the gaps between people, and between fields, are enormous. Take the musical prodigy Mozart — his creative peak basically ran from his teens into his twenties. Deng Xiaoping's career, by contrast, only reached its climax after he was 70 to 75. Warren Buffett made 99.8% of his fortune after the age of 50.

The story goes that Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky was once talking with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos about their shared idol, Buffett. Chesky asked Bezos, "What's the best advice Buffett ever gave you?" Bezos said, "I once asked Buffett — your investment philosophy is so simple, why doesn't everyone just copy what you do?" Buffett answered, "Because nobody wants to get rich slowly."

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Honestly, most of life's great truths were already spelled out to us back in kindergarten — treat people sincerely, be kind, sleep on time, eat properly. And how many of us actually manage them?

So the Chinese preoccupation with age is really a pseudo-concept we invented ourselves. Steve Jobs entered the working world in his twenties, but he was 55 by the time he actually made the iPhone — as if he were starting all over again at 55, except that by then he'd already been fired once from the company he founded.

The way I see it, your life's age depends entirely on you. Sometimes years of experience don't equal a strong ability to learn — companies increasingly value "the ability to learn." Years of experience only prove you've done certain things; they don't prove you can do more challenging ones. At the same time, years of experience also mean a higher cost to hire you. From a company's cost perspective, taking on someone with ten years' experience costs far more than someone with five. And for a business unit, a young person with five years' experience is easier to train, more open to new things, and better able to handle greater pressure. As for the physical side — the day you notice your energy flagging is the day you need to learn the art of management.

If we begin with the end in mind and read life backward: our generation will, on average, work until 65. Reverse-engineer that and you'll work at least 35 years (if you start at 30) or 40 (if you start at 25) — and 35 versus 40 hardly matters. Your starting salary is bound to be low; the gap gets opened up over the final 20 years.

And too many people stay marinating forever in opinions, instead of searching for and finding the right goals — forever using fake effort to chase fake targets.

Say your goal when young is to "go deep in an industry and win the wealth and status that come with it." Most people get tangled up in every kind of opinion, endlessly asking themselves: should I do consulting first to understand the industry? Should I go client-side first, then agency-side? Should I go to a multinational first to learn the management playbook? — and so on, until somewhere along the way they discover they had the wrong goal all along: your real goal was just wealth and status, and you don't actually like this industry at all.

Unless you've already found work or an industry you're both good at and drawn to, try to stay focused beyond that, and don't pay too much attention to things outside your growth at work. Start from work you like — or at least don't resent — instead of fixating only on the highest-paying jobs. Otherwise, by the time you find you dislike it or spot the problem, the sunk cost is so high you can't extract yourself.

But if in your youth you spent more time getting to know the people who are genuinely doing well in an industry, and understanding their original "motive" for being in it, you'd surely make a very different kind of discovery — or you'd realize none of this is what you wanted at all.

At minimum, once you understand the motives behind what they do, you're bound to discover the huge strategic error in the path you chose at the outset. And the sooner you correct it, the closer you get to your real goal.

The reason so many people in consulting eventually want to move client-side is that, to a large degree, they were only ever one link in the chain, never the whole picture. The truly formidable thing is never theory; it's execution and operations, put into practice.

Look far, don't fight over the moment.

Here's a question worth chewing on: what do you think is very likely to change in a major way over the next five years? And if you believe it very likely to happen — are you doing something about it?

Note the qualifiers: within five years, very likely, major change.

So when it comes to whether or not to pivot, what you actually need to do is: be clear about what you want, where your strengths lie, and which field to pour yourself into. What you need to do is find your calling as early as possible — what you love doing, what you can do, and what society needs you to do. If you can get those three to overlap, you'll be genuinely happy, and count as one of life's winners.

Dare to Love, Dare to Hate, Dare to Stay Indifferent Too

Lately my stance is this: I'd rather have fewer relationships — or none at all — than keep draining myself trying to hold on to people. My love and my time are both so precious; I'd rather give them all back to myself.

Maybe years from now, plenty of people will look back and find their summary of these years reads like this:

1. Followed a thousand hot takes and celebrity scandals;
2. Fluently deployed a hundred internet catchphrases;
3. Maxed out a mobile game;
4. Attended thousands of work gatherings and obligatory dinners;

(Figure in original.)

I honestly get curious sometimes about why so many people are so obsessed with gossip; maybe it's a new form of the "defeatist" culture of our era? I'm insensitive to it, even numb — so numb that when people come to ask me about something, I say I don't know, never heard of it.

The explosion of social networks means, on one hand, that everything worth or not worth your attention gets shoved in front of your eyes; and on the other, that emotions get endlessly amplified — people are encouraged to elevate feelings and sensations into values, even morality. It breeds a moment of passion, but can't solve the emptiness that follows.

I used to feel that people who were too calculating made me deeply uncomfortable, but I later realized that being calculating isn't wholly bad. This world only cares about what you can give; being calculating is, somehow, a prerequisite for real achievement. But calculation is also a superb magnifying glass — it magnifies a person's short-sightedness.

And what actually makes someone insufferable often isn't the "banker"-style ambition and calculation that's obvious from the start — it's all that short-sightedness, blown up and put on display. People who lack the long view but are heavily driven by calculation tend to dig themselves pits they don't even notice.

And what you fail to notice is this: your profession is, step by step, molding and shaping your character.

If you help someone at 100% every single time, all you'll get out of it is an enemy. The one time you help them at only 80%, they'll wipe out every good thing you ever did for them. As the old saying goes: a bowl of rice buys you a benefactor; a bushel of rice buys you an enemy. So don't always give someone everything you've got.

Don't be afraid that offending people will trip you up — 90% of the people around you, you can afford to offend. The most they can do is be a minor nuisance; the big shots who could crush you with a flick of a finger don't have time to bother with you. There's no need to keep bowing and yielding just because you're afraid of offending someone. Once you realize you can afford to cross most people, you stop constantly compromising to "protect your image," and stop letting people cross your boundaries again and again. Even nations build high walls and electric fences along their borders to let other countries know: this is where you don't wander.

Letting people know you're someone with a sense of boundaries is the foundation of all good relationships — anyone sincerely interested in being your friend knows that respect is the price of admission.

Restrain your urges to flatter, to fawn, and even to loathe or resent; don't take sides, don't cling to fixed positions, don't hang on where you're not wanted. This will earn you some exclusion, some mockery, some suspicion, even some inexplicable resentment. But once you learn not to depend so heavily on relationships, you'll actually get along with people more harmoniously — because when you want nothing, everything is simple.

I've always thought there are three bugs in the process of personal growth and life choices:

At 16 to 18, when you barely half-understand any subject or field of knowledge, you're asked to choose your major;

At 22 to 25, when you have no grasp whatsoever of how the commercial world works, you're asked to settle on a career direction;

At 25 to 28, when you only half-understand yourself and relationships, you're asked to lock in an intimate partnership;

Seen this way, it's no surprise that life goes wrong — it's the likely outcome. But the truth is, life is really made up of accidents, tragedies, and pain, and more often than not they strike at random and can't be avoided. So what we have to do is build up a mature set of values and mental resilience, so that when the rough times come, we don't fall apart.

A lot of people have probably had this confusion: I have so many hobbies — what should I do? A flicker of interest in everything. That actually means you don't really have any hobbies. I love this take: a hobby isn't something you enjoy; it's something you're willing to do even when it demands a price and a sacrifice, and you take joy in it anyway. Lying on a beach soaking up sun doesn't count as a hobby — it's just surrendering to the psychology and genetics of laziness.

Loving to do something, and doing something because it lets you briefly escape your real anxieties and troubles, are two different things. Is the decision you're making a pursuit of what you want more? Or an escape from what you don't want? So before you call yourself a foodie, think hard about whether you genuinely love food, or whether you're using food to run from reality.

Only the World You Meet Truly Has Warmth

"Of all the countries and places you've been, which is your favorite?" This is a question I used to ask people a lot — and it really is a fascinating topic.

Why exactly do we come to love a place? I used to think traveling the world took a very long time and a lot of money, but it really doesn't — that's quite overrated. You can do it in three to five years, after which you still have to return to the ultimate question of how you plan to spend the remaining decades of your life. And don't get led astray by all the new media: a lot of the people (couples) who quit their jobs to travel, or to go around the world, already own homes in Beijing and Shanghai.

There's a passage that puts it well: "Loving a place isn't necessarily the same as loving its scenery — on the other side of that equals sign should be time. Fondness for a place is made of memories: ten Forbidden Cities are worth less than an autumn afternoon walking through a park with the person you loved then; twenty Old Summer Palaces can't match being soaked to the bone through a rainy summer's day; a bell tower plus a drum tower, times ten, still can't beat catching one great rock show. My fondness for Beijing has little to do with the scenery — it's more about the friends I made there, the time I spent there, the lazy Sunday afternoons frittered away in a nearby café."

It was apparently written by a foreigner who'd lived in Beijing a long time — and it captures what I want to say more aptly than I could.

Tokugawa Ieyasu said, "Possession is an illusion." The truth is we possess nothing; all we possess is a feeling — a certain feeling in the face of these things. Possession is an illusion, and gain and loss are only a fleeting instant.

In theory, we could skip travel altogether — stay home, read, look at images, construct scenes from various sources of information; with a large enough volume of data, we could come to know what a place is like. Provided, of course, that our "computing power" is advanced enough. But as ordinary people, most of us will never have such formidable "computing power."

We can feel the cold of the winter wind, and to us that cold is real; if our bodies feel no cold, then to us the cold may not exist at all. So is cold really there? Between idealism and materialism, there does seem to be a subtle relationship.

In all these betweens — the somethings and the nothings — so much is hard to grasp, hard to catch. So rather than overthink the existence or nonexistence of things, better to hold tight to every experience, because these experiences may be the only truly real thing.

And whether what drew you there was a photo, a film, a song, or a person, what truly makes a place matter in your life is your encounter with it.

For me, for instance, the trips with the most warmth were Taiwan, and this year's trip to the American West.

The West Coast, really, was more about the tenderness and the moments that came out of "tragedy." The trip had been going smoothly all along, and then came the turning point, halfway through, one afternoon in San Francisco — I stupidly lost my bag. The whole thing took maybe a minute and a half. In the bag were all my documents (passport, etc.), all my cash, and every one of my bank and credit cards. So in an instant I became penniless, unable to withdraw money, an undocumented ghost.

For a moment I was in a panic and a daze. I rushed off in both directions to chase after it, but there was no one to be found. Then I called and messaged friends for help — first a friend who used to be at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then Kelvin asked around too. In the end, a classmate down in Palo Alto took an hour-long train (two hours round-trip) to bring me $900 in cash, which pulled me out of the fire. Truly a lifesaver.

After that, of the three things I used to take pride in — never losing anything (losing AirPods has nothing to do with me), never having insomnia, and sleeping exceptionally well — I was down to two. As for the Taiwan story, you can refer to it elsewhere. I won't belabor it here.

For me, the world only truly gains warmth after the encounter. It's these memories, stories, and names that gave my travels their warmth and their tenderness — not the checking-off of boxes, not a few photos.

These journeys, these stories — they are my "whole world." The far shore isn't in some place; it's in the fact that the world is never the same again.

What Are You Looking For in a Woman

Even though I've been single for a while, I've never stopped studying this thing called intimacy. What I've been feeling out and thinking through this year is exactly the question in the heading: what are you looking for in a woman?

When people choose a spouse, they mostly weigh three conditions: looks, wealth, and character. The vast majority keep squandering two of the three — looks and wealth — when character is the single greatest factor in whether a marriage lasts a lifetime. And that's the root cause of most modern marriages being unhappy.

There's a question that goes: should you marry someone who's your equal, or someone who complements you? A 1992 Nobel laureate once put forward a theory: a person seeks to maximize their utility through their choice of spouse.

Let x = the man's pre-marriage quality of life; y = the woman's pre-marriage quality of life; m = the value the two create together after marriage. What each person gets after marriage is (x + y + m) / 2 = individual post-marriage value. "Marrying an equal" means x = y, so as long as m > 0 — as long as they create even a little positive value after marriage — both come out better off than before. But if the gap between them is huge before marriage — say x = 3, y = 6 — then only when m > 6 do both end up better off than before. If the two complement each other, the room for m to grow is especially large.

To sum up: a marriage of equals is smooth for the first few years, but lacks complementarity, so there's little room for m to grow. A complementary marriage is bumpier at first, but once you get through it, the room for m to grow is large, and the marriage gets smoother and smoother.

Later I came to think, and to realize: no matter who I end up with, she can never be perfect. And neither am I.

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A good relationship is one where both people improve and grow together, spiraling upward. The moment either side falls behind or gives up on their own growth, it's doomed not to last. By the time you find that the person beside you can no longer exchange thoughts with you — that your conversations no longer earn each other's understanding or agreement — it's already too late, doomed never to be a happy ending.

I hope neither of us ever gives up on learning, gives up on exercise, or gives up on and lowers the standards we hold for ourselves. Learn something new, arrive at a new insight, spot something interesting, hit on a fresh idea, or run into a new confusion — and any of it can be shared right away, the first thing you want to send to the other person, so that the two of you stay communicating on the same wavelength.

So later I realized: maybe all I ask of her is this. That the one she loves most is herself; that she won't set aside a shred of her dignity for a moment's pleasure, whether to please me or anyone else. That without me, she can be just as happy — and yet she chooses to begin every morning and end every night with me. That she has her own dreams and her own life, but when she wants to share her triumphs and her failures, I'm her first choice. Delighting in every new idea and new thing, glad to share it with the other, hoping the other can see the beauty in her eyes too. I love solitude and I also savor high-quality company — feeling, in each quiet moment, the power of growing on my own.

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Try not to fight over small things; every argument should come from a genuine difference in thinking or understanding between the two of you. When a problem comes up, communicate promptly in the spirit of solving it, and never carry a conflict into the next day. Over-communication is always more effective than under-communication. Learn to accept each other as you are; never try to make the other into who you imagine them to be, because wanting what you can't have is the root of all suffering.

There's a metaphor Teacher Bamao uses: intimacy isn't "I'm hungry, and I hope someone will cook me a good meal." It's "I have a whole table of good food, I'm eating happily on my own, but when someone comes to eat it with me, I'm even happier — so I gladly set out an extra pair of chopsticks."

I've never believed the line that only another person can make you whole — everyone can only rely on themselves. A sense of security is a small, very concrete thing. Sometimes it has to be a particular line said by a particular person; sometimes it's just seeing every object at home always arranged in its fixed spot, the way you like it.

A lovely sense of security is never actively noticed. The moment you start needing to verify that it's there — however trivial it may be — a person turns tangled and miserable.

By the same logic, most women are looking for someone to lean on; only a small minority are looking for a comrade-in-arms. And the ease of a comrade-in-arms is not something a dependent personality can stand shoulder to shoulder with.

For me, love is a weapon.

Life is long and hard, and love is the weapon to fight it with. Of course we can go it alone and wrestle with life single-handed, but with love beside us — with someone I can fight shoulder to shoulder with — I'll be more fearless, stronger, braver. That's what I'm looking for in a woman.

A Marathon Runner Must Look Up at the Stars — and Protect Himself Too

The marathon is booming in China. Registrations for the Beijing, Shanghai, and Wuhan marathons routinely exceed 100,000, even 150,000. Somewhere along the way, the blind pursuit of speed — the worship of nothing but speed — has become an unhealthy culture and an unspoken rule in the running world.

In a marathon race, when they're well prepared, some runners give it everything, chase speed, and set a PB — that's absolutely an expression of sportsmanship. But it doesn't mean you should chase speed relentlessly in ordinary training. Right now the "faster" culture rules the running scene — for example, you're almost embarrassed to post a 10K to Moments unless it's under 50 minutes. And yet the pace at which Eliud Kipchoge, king of the marathon, runs easy is only 6:00 per kilometer.

These distorted phenomena stem from amateur runners' lack of a solid, scientific understanding of endurance and endurance training.

The king of the marathon is currently in Kenya, systematically preparing to break two hours. He's raised his weekly mileage from the 190–210 km of his London Marathon build-up to 200–230 km. His usual routine is to wake at 5 a.m. and start training at 6. Plenty of people assume Kipchoge's pace must be blistering — and it is on race day, but the Kipchoge of everyday training would leave you stunned: in fact, on his adjustment days, his easy or recovery runs are only around 6:00 per kilometer.

Kipchoge — the world's best endurance athlete, king of the marathon — trains at just 6:00 per kilometer in his ordinary sessions, a pace that not only plenty of "running gods" but plenty of seasoned amateurs would probably sneer at: how slow do you have to be to run 6-minute kilometers? But the truth is that 6:00 pace is only one part of Kipchoge's vast training repertoire; of course he also does huge volumes of fast running. Still, it should at least remind us of one thing: if even a truly top athlete like Kipchoge trains at 6:00 pace, what grounds do you have to look down on easy runs, slow runs, and recovery runs? Are you better than Kipchoge?

In many amateur runners' training, low-intensity aerobic slow running makes up a tiny share, while the anaerobic intervals and sprints that reflect true absolute intensity are either undertrained or never reach real high intensity. Their daily runs are neither slow nor fast, or medium-to-high intensity that skews fast overall — panting, laboring, grinding it out on willpower. The problem this training style creates is that, even though the training isn't easy, ability improves slowly, results stall, and injuries come easily. You fall into the "can't slow down, can't speed up" trap.

Judging by how the world's top endurance athletes train today, high-intensity speed and race-specific endurance work makes up no more than 10% of the total endurance training load.

(Figure in original.)

The common flawed training pattern among amateur runners is the "olive" (barrel) shape; a genuinely good endurance training pattern should be the pyramid.

(Figure in original.)

The "pyramid model" means that, over a long training cycle, the intensity of endurance training should hold a pyramid shape — low-intensity work makes up a high share of total volume, and high-intensity work a low share. The highest-intensity anaerobic work stays within 5–10% of total volume; mixed-aerobic work is best kept under 10%; and the remaining 80% should be medium-to-low-intensity training below the aerobic-anaerobic threshold.

(Figure in original.)

The "pyramid model" is remarkably effective at helping elite athletes achieve outstanding results, and it's adopted in most endurance training.

If even Kipchoge, the king of the marathon, has to train at 6:00 pace, what grounds do you have to chase speed relentlessly and make every run agony?

(Figure in original.)

A lot of people, when they take part in the marathon, more or less forget that it exists precisely to commemorate a man who died from running. The marathon has never really been a trendy sport — what's trendy is always the people themselves. In truth it's deeply old-fashioned, a sport where you reap in proportion to what you sow. And to me, the marathon is a sport about restraint: restraining the urge to slack off, restraining the urge to chase results beyond your ability, restraining the endless urge to respond to the outside world, and returning to yourself.

I hope everyone who loves it stays far from injury, and gets to fully enjoy the happiness it brings.

Wish List

Which reminds me — I was pretty lucky last year. Of last year's wish list, everything but item 3 came true: I went to some of the countries and places I wanted to go; I saw concerts by the singers I wanted to hear; and I ran the marathon I wanted to run (about to start — this Sunday).

At 25, I still want to keep things simple, keep things focused. No drama, no panic, no agonizing — just steadier. To stay hungry to learn, curious, and brave enough to start over.

1: Make more money — a lot more money.

2: Try to complete three of the World Marathon Majors.

3: Fall in love.

4: Keep it on the road — always recruiting travel companions; Xinjiang and New Zealand first.

5: Go bungee jumping once.

6: If the chance is still there, see one concert by each of them: Rene Liu, Fish Leong, Bon Jovi. (No expiry.)

I still want to experience different ways of living in the years ahead — to go through them, to feel them.

At 25, still walking the straight road.