"You're a disaster"
Stay Pragmatic, Stay Awake
实事求是，贫穷不是共产主义。
Embrace feedback from the real world. Tranquility exists only in contrast to disturbance.
Soul-searching must remain tethered to secular standards. It's acceptable to be a secular success yet a spiritual failure — the spiritual part is intangible and hardly provable. But it is foolish to claim a universal truth that holds in every world except our own.
Trouble is a friend. The tension between ideals and reality, is too often dismissed or blamed on chance. Yet these moments of friction are rare gifts — the few clues that can actually prove your system wrong. Pay attention to them; they point to where true growth begins.
The small hermit hides from the world.
The middle hermit lives quietly within it.
The great hermit shapes it — yet stays untouched.
"Trust the process"
Focus on Cause, not Effect
心安于行，果安于命。
Water does not aim to rush, but to flow. Success is not forced, but drawn.
By tending to the cause,
every effort compounds over time, eventually yielding exponential returns.
Chase only the effect, the curve overfits short-term performance,
converging toward less than you could become.
The stock market is designed to transfer money from the impatient to the patient.
— Warren Buffett
"Wubba lubba dub dub"
Smart Ass Can't Lead
虽有智慧，不如乘势。
Being accountable and being a smart ass both require effort. However, they yield significantly different ROI — one builds trust and capital; the other often burns it.
Influence without authority: make yourself the essential resource others leverage to win. Leadership emerges when people rely on you for their success.
The sage puts himself last and finds himself in the foremost place;
He holds himself outside and yet he always remains.
Is it not because he has no thought of self that he is able to accomplish his self?
— Lao Tzu
"For the damaged coda"
Grow out of Growth Pain
一朝悟道见真我，何惧昔日旧枷锁？
The universe does not casually reveal its true intentions.
For when it does, it makes sure you get the message.
Fate keeps rotating the cast of actors around you, holding the things you dear the most, tortures you over and over again — until you finally let go of your attachments to the old self.
The problems that exist in the world today,
cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.
— Albert Einstein
No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.
— Carl Jung
"The pursuit of escape velocity"
Burnout Theory is a Hoax
行到水穷处，坐看云起时。
Life is a multi-stage rocket navigating the purpose landscape — seeking the path of steepest improvement while shedding excess weight.
Passion is a capability — an interface for propulsion, defining how energy becomes motion.
Drive is a skill — the logic that determines when and where to apply thrust.
Burnout is not exhaustion, and therefore cannot be cured by a recharge.
It is a mismatch between architecture and intent —
an outdated build trying to handle new trajectories.
A person doesn't get burned out. The wick does.
Passion never disappears; it only awaits reimplementation.
The task is not to reignite old flames, but to switch gears —
to recompile the system for escape velocity.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
— Albert Camus
"Red pill or blue pill"
Meaningfulness precedes Meaning
缘起性空，意义是一种涌现。
Meaning, is what emerges when we integrate the infinitesimal moments that make up our life trajectory.
Meaning doesn't "reside" in any particular instant. It lives in the flow between them — much like music. A single note is trivial; beauty arises from the relations among notes, the rhythm, the resonance.
Meaning is a multi-dimensional integral, where each axis represents a domain of becoming. Material pursuit is not opposed to spirituality; it's a substrate that enables higher integrations. Likewise, pleasure isn't the enemy of growth — but its short half-life reminds us where not to anchor our identity.
You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
— Steve Jobs