Mindset
Just before the May Day holiday, something at work made me particularly angry. Since the “minor epiphany” I had during the Spring Festival, I hadn’t been this unsettled. Fortunately, I hadn’t lost all my hard-won composure. Looking back, the root cause was that my mindset had slipped again — three months of endless meetings and trivial matters had thrown me off balance.
When your mindset is off, if it’s not one thing nagging at you, it’s another making you furious — so there’s no point dwelling on it. I actually wrote a journal entry about it, but on second thought, I deleted it.
I have a tendency to get overly invested and serious about work. If I’m not careful, I start thinking of the company as my home and the job as my life’s mission — then I push too hard and overthink everything. It’s not exactly wrong, but it’s not quite right either. When things don’t go my way, frustration follows — and what’s the point of that? Reminding myself that “aiming for 60 percent first is fine” and “it’s just a paycheck” actually makes me more productive. The truth is, many tasks can only be dealt with perfunctorily — taking them too seriously is the real mistake, because energy is a scarce resource. Only by letting go of that obsessive grip can I accept and tolerate the things that annoy or offend me.
Here’s the irony: this detachment might actually lead to better outcomes. Someone buried in the work naturally sees all its problems, but precisely because of that, they’re emotionally entangled, unable to control their reactions. A healthy distance — not caring too much — lets you preserve your emotional reserves, avoiding the crushing sense of defeat and regret.
Buddhism
Over the past two months, I’ve read many books on Buddhist thought and come to feel that its original, core ideas are not superstition at all, but rather a discipline of the inner life. Of course, what I can stomach is mainly writing about Buddhism by non-Buddhists — scholars like Liang Qichao and Ji Xianlin. The works by contemporary Buddhist masters, with their heavy doses of mythology and religious overtones, actually put me off.
Still, there has been progress. First, I rarely lie awake anymore because of racing thoughts. Second, I can more often maintain a state of presence rather than getting swallowed up by whatever is happening. Third, I increasingly appreciate the tranquility and peace that meditation brings.
The human mind is like a bowl of water: constant stimulation from the outside world stirs up an endless churn of stray thoughts. Only by cultivating inner discipline — or consciously avoiding and reducing those stimuli — can you find peace.
Psychology
I remember spending a lot of time in the university library reading psychology books during my freshman year. Recently I’ve picked them up again. Psychology books come in two flavors. One resembles Western textbook psychology — systematic and grounded in experiments and neuroscience, but mostly cataloging psychological phenomena. The other, more in the style of writers like Wu Zhihong, focuses on inner growth but tends to be unsystematic and scattered.
Gradually I’ve come to feel that a more systematic and transcendent understanding might be found in Buddhist thought. Perhaps our entire lives are spent seeking the self and coming to terms with mortality. For instance, the practice of being present in the moment is really about recognizing that our thoughts and our “self” are not the same thing — that these stray thoughts are, as the Diamond Sutra puts it, “like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow; like dew, like lightning.” Realizing this is the first genuine step toward self-knowledge. Or consider how many psychological issues trace back to a sense of insecurity, and insecurity itself stems from the fear of death and the refusal to accept impermanence. Sometimes it’s the fear of physical pain and bodily decay; sometimes it manifests on a psychological level — like the dread of being judged by others.
Sleep
I just finished reading Why We Sleep in the past few days. Its most important point is that getting a full eight hours of sleep is critically important, and the sleep lost to staying up late can never be recovered.
I couldn’t agree more. From years of personal experience, I know that sleep deprivation makes me extraordinarily irritable — if I only got four hours the night before, I become hypersensitive. It also makes it nearly impossible to focus the next day. And sustained sleep deprivation over a long stretch is something the body simply cannot endure — those two weeks last year showed me exactly where the breaking point is.
But this book taught me something new: sleep lost to late nights truly cannot be made up, and even six hours still takes a toll on the brain and body. Moreover, fragmented sleep doesn’t deliver the benefits of a full, unbroken night. So I should aim for nine hours in bed each day, which basically guarantees eight hours of actual sleep.
As for those polyphasic sleep methods and four-hour sleep hacks that float around the internet — I’ve more or less tried them all, and for me they all failed. What I’ve observed is that sleep runs in roughly four-hour cycles. So if I absolutely must pull a late night, sleeping for four hours first and then getting up is manageable. But if it’s five hours, I can rarely wake up on my own — I either sleep like a rock or drag myself out of bed in a daze.
Talent
Talent is passionate interest. If someone consistently fails at something and can’t generate enough sense of accomplishment or validation, how could they ever develop a “passionate interest” in it? So passionate interest necessarily means the person is good at it.
But being good isn’t enough. Talent also implies creativity, which springs from proactive thinking and from facing a hundredfold difficulty with two hundred times the courage and enthusiasm. It’s precisely this inexplicable drive that lets talented people stand out. As Steve Jobs said in an interview, only those who love what they do, only those who find joy in it, can persevere — because any rational person who doesn’t love it will give up when confronted with that hundredfold difficulty:
People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you’re doing and it’s totally true. And the reason is because it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard. And you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, you don’t really love it, you’re going to give up. And that’s what happens to most people, actually. If you really look at the ones that ended up, you know, being “successful” in the eyes of society and the ones that didn’t, oftentimes, it’s the ones [who] were successful loved what they did so they could persevere, you know, when it got really tough. And the ones that didn’t love it quit because they’re sane, right? Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don’t love it?
As a jack-of-all-trades, I couldn’t agree more. Among all the different kinds of work I’ve done, the only kind that doesn’t drain my energy but actually generates it is engineering work on computers. In that domain, I always find the enthusiasm to devour mountains of documentation and try multiple approaches. Some seemingly minor difficulties turn out to be enormously tricky, but whenever I judge that something absolutely must be conquered, no matter how many times a voice inside says to give up, I still manage to tell myself “one last try” — and somehow, it always works out.
Focus
When tackling difficult or complex problems, I often feel the need to be alone and quiet, to lay out all the relevant factors clearly so that my brain’s working memory can reload the necessary knowledge. Without that process, I feel I can only handle routine tasks on autopilot — anything that requires creative problem-solving becomes impossible.
In the past, I carved out these blocks of focused time by skipping lunch, skipping naps, or staying up late — essentially shifting my schedule out of sync with everyone else’s. Mornings were usually lighter on interruptions too, so I could sometimes get a solid stretch in.
But now, this department is effectively three small teams rolled into one, staffed at a single team’s headcount. And by nature, it’s a dumping ground for miscellaneous issues — anything that comes up can somehow be pinned on us. The current rhythm is: half the day in meetings, the other half interrupted every ten minutes by someone needing something, leaving my time shattered into fragments barely sufficient for routine work. On top of that, the three functions within the department are quite independent, so my brain has to constantly context-switch between unrelated problems — exhausting and inefficient. After work I need to spend time with my kid, and I’m no longer willing to sacrifice sleep by staying up late. The result is that I hardly ever have time for focused thinking anymore.
Deep down I’m still an engineer at heart — an introvert who needs sizable blocks of time to dig into a few things before I feel at ease.
Management
This past year, I’ve developed some new thoughts on so-called “management.”
Previously, I’d only hired fresh graduates. So I took a mentorship approach, essentially teaching them hands-on. No matter how busy I was, I’d try to make time. The upside: the people I trained developed good work habits (especially in coding) and a stronger sense of responsibility and trust. The downside: it took a long time, and once things got hectic, there was simply no time for mentoring.
But over the past year, work has been absolutely overwhelming. Nobody cares whether you have enough people or whether they’re up to the task. I’d started out confident, only to find that the old approach was no longer viable — with all the meetings and emails, I barely had time for my own work, let alone training newcomers.
So the solution now can only be this: find experienced hands for each function, while I oversee the overall workload and progress and personally tackle the critical problems others can’t handle. Ideally, these people would have a broader skill set than mine in some areas — complementary rather than overlapping — and fit well into the company culture and team atmosphere.
And then there’s “managing up.” That means constantly explaining to my boss and colleagues what we’ve done, what we plan to do, and why we’re doing it this way. You have to make sure everyone knows our department is drowning in work and short on people — otherwise, before you know it, a flood of new tasks comes pouring in.
Original Intentions
When I first started working, I was naive and clueless about what a career even meant. All I knew was that I didn’t want to join a big bureaucratic institution — I wanted something entrepreneurial, far away from the politics, infighting, and administrative drudgery. So I never applied to any large corporation. Back then, when the asset management company was about to spin off from the life insurance company’s investment division, I became one of its earliest employees. And here I am again — last year I joined the preparatory team for yet another new asset management company, struggling through every difficulty along the way.
The company’s overall management is still fairly flat, with relatively little political wrangling — the focus is mostly on the business itself. Still, wherever people gather, there’s drama. Add in the nature of this department’s work, and the title of “King of Miscellaneous Affairs” belongs to none other than me.
I don’t like it. I really don’t.
Here’s hoping I can find a management-oriented partner to take some of these unwanted duties off my plate.