1
First, let me ask everyone two questions:
1) Why is it that the people who are best at climbing trees and farming can’t get bonus points on the college entrance exam, while Jiang Fangzhou, who writes good essays, Kobe, who plays basketball well, and Liu Xiang, who runs the hurdles fast, are all fought over by universities?
2) Why is it that the Jews, after more than two thousand years of unrelenting oppression in history, have produced so many remarkable people in modern and contemporary times?
Don’t rush to answer these two questions; read the whole article and you’ll naturally understand.
Now let’s first state the main point of this article: the reason you live so hard in the city and success stays so far out of reach may be that you are still living, working, socializing, and investing with the thinking and habits of an agrarian society — you haven’t adapted to what an industrial and commercial era requires of you.
Having gone to school in the city, or having already lived in the city for a long time, or even having grown up in the city, doesn’t necessarily make you a city person. As long as you haven’t shaken off, in your thinking and behavioral habits, the brand that a long agrarian society left on you, you’re still a country bumpkin.
Your rusticity will kill opportunities, stop success, and drag you firmly down into the swamp of failure.
In a market economy, only people who adapt to what society needs can make money. Those who don’t adapt can only end up losers.
In other words, only by getting rid of your rusticity can you possibly succeed.
2
Wang Xiaobo once told a story in his essay “The Experience of Working”.
When he was studying in the United States, short of money, he and his classmate Old Cao took on a job renovating a Chinese restaurant. The job shouldn’t have fallen to the two of them, but the boss was especially stingy and couldn’t bear to hire a proper renovation crew, so he had the two of them do it. In the end, the two of them made complete fools of themselves.
The essay is written with great humor. Let me share the main content below:
“In the past, I knew that America had advanced technology and advanced business, but I didn’t yet know that America is also a country of all kinds of craftsmen. On the street where we worked there was a whole nest of them — electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and so on, plus the small contractors who take on renovation projects; the moment they heard we’d started work, they all came running to watch. First they watched us swing sledgehammers and drive in chisels, smiles on their faces, and then they ran around to the back to find the boss and said: if those two treasures you hired can finish renovating this restaurant within this century, I’ll bet you a hundred bucks. I really couldn’t keep a straight face; I wanted to throw down my chisel and quit. But Old Cao spat through his teeth and said: Ignore him! If we don’t finish it this century, there’s still the next century — anyway the foreign devils have to pay us our wages…”
Neither Wang Xiaobo nor Old Cao had ever done renovation work; they were just selling their muscle. Old Cao proposed buying various tools, but the stingy boss wouldn’t part with the money, thinking the two of them were trying to skim something off.
“After we knocked out the floor, we won a certain amount of respect on that street. By the way, I carried the broken-up concrete blocks out one by one and threw them into the dumpster; the boss wouldn’t even rent a wheelbarrow. He felt he’d already paid for the labor, so renting tools on top of that would be a loss for him. When those American craftsmen passed by, they’d always come over to chat and expressed deep admiration for our hard-working spirit. But they said this isn’t how the work should be done. Honestly, they all wanted to take on this renovation project; it was just that they couldn’t agree on the price. The next step was to tear down the old partition wall. I thought this was simple, so I swung the sledgehammer and smashed — after just one blow, the boss shouted at me to stop. He said it would damage the wood inside the wall. What wood could there be in a partition wall — just a bunch of odds and ends of scrap lumber. But the boss said he wanted to use it to build the floor. So we pulled the nails out of these bits of scrap wood one by one. When the Americans saw it and asked what we were doing, I told them honestly, and the guy doubled over, squatted down on the ground, and laughed so hard he rolled around on the spot. This time even Old Cao couldn’t keep a straight face, and he blamed me for talking too much…”
After that, the American workers all came to watch how the two of them worked. Because the work was so terrible, they were curious about what the two of them did for a living. Wang Xiaobo had previously been a university teacher and Old Cao had previously been an engineer at the Hudong Shipyard; to avoid embarrassing their former employers, Wang Xiaobo brazenly said that both of them were artists. The American worker said: “I could tell long ago that you’re artists… workers don’t do the job the way you two do.”
Though ashamed and angry, they were just too poor, so the two of them stuck it out.
“We worked for the foreign devil boss for over a month and also earned a few hundred bucks in wages from him, and that restaurant still didn’t look like a restaurant, nor like a cold storage room, but like a junk pile. Before we knew it, summer had gone and autumn had come, and it was time for us to go back to school. The boss’s face got uglier and uglier, and he urged us to work overtime every day. Urging was no use; with a hammer and an iron bar in hand, no matter how desperately we worked, we couldn’t get the job done.”
The stingy boss really couldn’t take it any more, so he had no choice but to fire the two of them and hire a different renovation crew. Old Cao, though, was quite conscious of the shame, and insisted on finding out how American workers actually did the job.
“The American contractor took on the project and immediately farmed it out — to an electrician, a carpenter, a plumber: this morning is yours, the afternoon is his, the day after tomorrow is mine, and so on. A few phone calls, and people came to deliver tools, a whole truckload of them. Tools like these had never been seen by me, and not even by Old Cao. Besides electric saws and electric planers, there was even a battery-powered forklift that could run indoors; in a trice it pushed the junk we’d left behind out of the room. The electrician went up on an electric lift platform to run wires above the ceiling, while the carpenter below assembled the floor, incredibly skilled. Even though they were using ready-made components, you have to admit the work went really fast. Once it was assembled, they ran an electric planer over it and it gleamed; when they finished they left immediately, hauled away the machinery, and the new workers and machines drove in right away… In the blink of an eye, the restaurant looked the part…”
In the end Wang Xiaobo closed with this sentence:
“Old Cao and I watched for a while, then slunk away. This is because we had both been workers, and we knew how work had to be done for it to have dignity.”
When I read this piece as a young man, I only found it quite amusing. Only later did I understand that this is really the small revealing the large, a profound reflection of the collision of two civilizations and of one absolutely crushing the other.
In that piece, Wang Xiaobo, Old Cao, and the stingy boss represent the country bumpkins who grew up under agrarian civilization, full of rural flavor, while the American workers represent modern people who grew up under modern industrial civilization. In this collision, agrarian civilization was beaten by industrial civilization until it had not a shred of dignity left — and isn’t this also a microcosm of how, since the Industrial Revolution, every industrial civilization has crushed agrarian civilizations in every respect?
3
The Israeli scholar Yuval Noah Harari put forward a view in his global phenomenon bestseller Sapiens: human physiology, along with our habits of living, thinking, and socializing, actually formed to suit millions of years of a gathering life. Those habits still influence us today.
Starting from that inference: the different ways of life in human society over these several thousand years have also formed different modes of thinking and behavior among different groups of people. In the 1980s, Chinese people reflected on the “yellow earth civilization” and hoped to embrace the “oceanic civilization”. Although this reflection later went too far and slid toward a wholesale negation of the Chinese nation, some of the views it raised are worth thinking about. Under the impact of modernization, some aspects of the Chinese yellow-earth mentality need to change.
Thomas Sowell’s famous book Ethnic America analyzes the rise of the Jews in modern society.
For as long as two thousand years, the Jews were a pitiful wandering people with no country and no land. Wherever they were, they were in a state of being squeezed, pushed aside, bullied, slandered, and guarded against. Because for so long they had no land, the Jews had no choice but to work in commerce, handicrafts, middleman trades, and the classic financial business of lending money at interest.
But after the Industrial Revolution, the Jews, long engaged in industry and commerce, quickly adapted to modern society. Whether in Europe or in the New World, the Jews rose rapidly and achieved results that drew the world’s attention in business, politics, and intellectual life. Many of today’s well-known world-class scholars are Jews; in finance, Jews control Wall Street and can summon wind and rain across the globe; in professional services such as law and consulting, Jews have built a very good reputation; among Americans, Jews make up only 2% of the population, yet a quarter of Harvard’s students are Jewish; Jews are about 0.3% of the world’s population, yet their share of Nobel Prizes is as high as 20%…
But Thomas Sowell particularly notes that the Jews do very well in many industries, yet not in agriculture. In American agriculture there has never been a Jewish agricultural giant.
Don’t be fooled by how well Israeli agriculture does now — that is agriculture remade by industrialization. Over the centuries of development in Europe and America, the Jews never did agriculture well. Because the Jews don’t have the thinking and behavioral habits for it. To use an internet catchphrase, the Jews don’t have the “racial talent” for farming.
The Chinese are different. For several thousand years we have been an agrarian society, and we reached the peak that a civilization can reach. In productivity, culture, military affairs, and politics alike, we created the highest point an agrarian society could attain. Today, wherever Chinese people go, the first thing they do is put the land in front of and behind the house to use, planting vegetables on it. Even for the batch of islands that nature’s uncanny workmanship brought forth in the South China Sea, our first goal was to plant vegetables, to “improve the living conditions of the officers and soldiers stationed on the islands”. Growing vegetables is regarded as the Chinese people’s racial talent.
Very regrettably, modern society has more need of industrial and commercial talent than of vegetable-growing talent. Therefore, Chinese people still, for the time being, cannot compete with Jews in industry and commerce, finance, politics, and academia. Because we are still in the middle of the transformation from agrarian civilization to industrial civilization. The Jews, on the other hand, have been an industrial and commercial civilization consistently for two thousand years. The moment they encountered the industrial society that followed the Industrial Revolution, they took to it like a fish to water and rose rapidly.
4
What was said above is about the maladaptation of agrarian civilization in modern society, and the adaptability of industrial and commercial civilization, from the perspective of a whole population or of a civilization/race. In fact, for each one of us, whether what we possess is the rural thinking of agriculture or the modern thinking of industry and commerce makes a world of difference to the probability of succeeding in society.
The following are the “seven deadly sins” of rural thinking that I have summed up. Please check yourself against them: do you have the following flaws? These “seven deadly sins” may be exactly what limits your room to develop and makes your life so difficult.
1) Chasing stability too much, not daring to take risks
After I left the system, friends often told me that they wanted to leave too, but didn’t dare. There are also many friends outside the system who feel that their current job is fairly stable; although it has all kinds of disappointments and is a hundred thousand miles from their dreams, they still can’t bear to start over. This is in fact the rustic thinking of chasing stability too much.
An agrarian society values stability most and fears risk most. In Confucian classics and in the records of the histories, the days Chinese people liked best were ones with favorable weather and the four seasons in order. Because agricultural production has to be stable; any abnormal change could cause a total loss of the harvest. In addition, since the imperial examination system, over more than a thousand years China formed the deep-rooted notion that “if you excel in learning, you shall serve as an official”. A stable job, especially a guaranteed iron rice bowl, became the best career choice in the minds of many Chinese people.
Western society is mainly an oceanic civilization: it dares to take risks and is dealing with uncertainty all the time. This trait was not of much use in an agrarian society. But once it entered the industrial age, its power was quickly brought into play. The match between a civilization’s traits and the course of history let Western countries overtake China, India, and the Ottoman Empire in the East and lead the world.
In modern society, change happens at every moment; it is long past the time when an agrarian society spent a whole lifetime guarding a few thin acres and living the same days year after year. In an industrial and commercial society, opportunity is proportional to risk. Chasing stability too much and being unable to tolerate uncertainty means losing many opportunities.
It’s understandable that our parents’ generation prefers jobs inside the system. Because most of them were born in the countryside and grew up in the countryside, or had just washed the mud off their feet and come up from the fields. But people born in the 1980s and 1990s should learn to embrace uncertainty and to coexist with it. If you cling stubbornly to a stable job, or are bound by a position inside the system, afraid to do anything, it is really rural thinking limiting your future.
2) Only moving in strong-tie circles, ignoring weak ties
Relatives, friends, classmates, teachers, people from your hometown — these naturally formed relationships that are kept in frequent contact are strong ties. Relationships established starting from strangers, with a lower frequency of contact, are weak ties.
In an agrarian society, strong ties were all the relationships most people could come into contact with in their whole lives. “Li”, an important component of Confucian thought, is in fact about understanding the position each individual occupies in the set of strong ties. John King Fairbank said that the core of the structure of Chinese rural society is the family system, and that the most important characteristic of Chinese society is that it is a society of acquaintances. As the peak of agrarian civilization, Chinese kinship relations may be the most finely distinguished in the world: Chinese separates out shushu, bobo, jiujiu, yifu, gufu, and so on, while English has just one: uncle.
In modern society, though, what matters more may be weak ties. Because the characteristic of the industrial and commercial era is that market actors transact and satisfy each other, not the self-sufficiency or small-scale exchange of the agrarian era. Therefore, weak ties appear especially important. With strong ties, because the circle of interaction is the same, you get too little external information and too much redundant information. Only weak ties can bring fresh, valuable information.
So the thinking that is keen on treating people to meals and giving gifts, forming cliques, and building and maintaining strong-tie bonds will fall further and further behind the times, while weak-tie thinking, centered on the exchange of information and value, is what better suits the needs of today’s industrial and commercial era.
On the value of weak ties, you can refer to the two articles “Pinduoduo Goes Public: The Post-80s Founder Reached a Net Worth of 80 Billion in 28 Months, Thanks to Weak Ties” (that article had 1.2 million+ reads and influenced countless people) and “The Best Opportunities in Life Often Come from Weak Ties”.
3) Believing in fatalism, rather than personal striving
We often hear people say, “It’s all fate”, “How could I have that kind of luck”, “Working hard is useless, the result is the same anyway”, and so on. These are in fact all rustic thinking.
In an agrarian society productivity was backward: the power of people was limited while the power of nature was boundless, so people were especially prone to imagining that everything about them was decided by heaven. In terms of social form, agrarian society was also too frozen and unchanging: no matter how desperately a person struggled, there was basically no possibility of changing their own fate, and from this a strong fatalistic outlook formed. Even when a few heroes of troubled times emerged during war, or a few high officials emerged from the imperial examinations through hard study, people tended to regard it as merit accumulated in a previous life, or as the Wenqu star descending to earth.
Chinese peasants are extremely diligent, but that diligence was the diligence of having to do hard labor in order to survive, not a belief that their own diligence could change their fate. Only scholars could be said to defy heaven and change their fate through years of hard study and the path of the imperial examinations, but there were far too few of them, and they had nothing to do with 99% of peasants.
In Western society, since the Age of Discovery there have been countless individuals who changed their own fate and their family’s fate through hard striving. The prevalence of this phenomenon gave Western society a general expectation that dreams can be realized through individual effort; the “American Dream” is its concrete embodiment.
In the industrial and commercial era, competition never ends, and an individual absolutely must not admit defeat and accept their fate. The moment you stop striving, society throws you behind and the class hierarchy tramples you underfoot. Personal striving is the only road to making your own life better. If you accept your fate, or expect to improve your life through luck such as winning the lottery, then you will inevitably live harder and harder, and become more and more disappointed.
4) Loving to hoard things, and saving money desperately in unnecessary places
Every family has such an old person, who hoards everything and can never bear to throw anything away. The home is almost too crowded to stand in, with bottles and jars and scrap iron scattered all over the house, and if you want to throw them out as trash, they’ll say you don’t know how to run a household.
Every family also has such an old person, who would rather squeeze onto a bus for an hour during the morning rush to buy vegetables at the big market than buy at the vegetable shop downstairs, because the big market is a few cents cheaper. Leftover food must never be thrown away: either they ignore the fact that they already have the “three highs” and force themselves to finish it, or they save it for the next meal, and the meal after that, continuing to eat leftovers that have long produced countless nitrites harmful to the body.
These are all aftereffects left behind by the extreme material scarcity of a long agrarian society.
We all know that Americans like to move: one car carries everything away, across states and provinces, to live in a different place. Chinese people, by contrast, find a single move practically the death of them. The difference lies in the fact that Americans hoard fewer unnecessary things at home, so moving is easy. Anyone who has visited a foreigner’s home will find it very simple and tidy, with a good sense of space. Chinese homes, no matter how large, are always short of room for things. Why is Nordic interior design minimalist? Because Nordic people are already used to life in the industrial age: throw away what you don’t need, and buy it again when you do.
Saving money in unnecessary places is an even more fatal flaw. Some people always like to buy the cheapest fruit and bread; apart from not tasting good, these are often rotten or nearly expired, so in the end you neither satisfy your appetite nor do your body any good. At work, some people like to buy the lowest-spec computer or phone, and pirated software, and end up finding everything about using them unpleasant; their mood is affected every day, and quite often their work is delayed as well.
An industrial and commercial society requires that you value space, value experience, and value time. Don’t bring the rustic thinking of an agrarian society in with you, making yourself live cramped and miserable and your work unpleasant or inefficient.
5) Holding on to a retro mentality, rather than embracing the future
Not long ago, Michael Atiyah, one of the very top mathematicians of our time, claimed to have proved the “Riemann hypothesis”. Later everyone discovered that this mathematician had in fact gone senile (interested friends can refer to my article “Riemann Hypothesis Everywhere — What Is It Actually About?”). I thought, thank goodness this is modern times: we won’t blindly accept all the teachings of old people, especially old people who were once very impressive (hasn’t China suffered enough on this front?). In ancient China, by contrast, people always believed that the ancients were more capable than people today, the old more capable than the young, and antiquity more capable than the present.
Development in an agrarian society was flat: a thousand years passed and society still looked the same, and people’s lives still looked the same. In such a society, the experience of the ancients and of old people always applied. And because society did not change, the future was hopeless, so people placed all their beautiful hopes in the past. Chinese literati loved to fantasize about “high antiquity” and “the rule of the three kings”, believing that to be humanity’s golden age.
It was only after the Industrial Revolution that humanity became accustomed to the idea that tomorrow’s life would be better than today’s, and the next generation’s life better than this generation’s. And Chinese people have only lived that kind of life for a few decades. We have not yet been able to absorb this way of thinking into our bones. We still believe that learning was greater among the ancients and that prescriptions were better among the ancients, and we believe that the peak our life can reach is the present, afraid to give up the present to strive for a better future.
In the industrial and commercial era, we must cast off this rustic thinking. We must learn from young people — they command new technology and new trends, far better than we do; we must focus on the future and believe that with our own two hands we can create a better future. Only in this way can we catch the updraft and keep pace with the times.
6) Egalitarian thinking
In my consulting work I often need to interview people at various companies. I have found that in interviews about pay and benefits, whether they are senior executives, middle managers, or ordinary employees, everyone feels that they earn little while others earn a lot, and the opinion they voice most is the hope that compensation policy will reflect “fairness and justice”. But a minority also say they hope compensation policy will reflect value contribution: those who contribute more take more, those who contribute less take less.
The former way of thinking is rustic thinking; the latter is modern thinking.
The inheritance system in ancient China was “equal division among all sons”. Family property was divided equally among the sons. Only the throne, noble titles, or official positions used inheritance by the legitimate eldest son, but the other sons would also have corresponding rights.
Ancient Western society mostly used “primogeniture”: the title or the entire family fortune was inherited by the eldest son, and the other sons went off to seek their own futures.
The habit of mind this produced is that Chinese people especially like egalitarianism, which a sage summed up as “it is not scarcity that is feared, but inequality”. Whenever there was to be a revolution, the slogans had to be “equalize the land”, “equalize wealth”, “equalize land rights”, and so on.
In the agrarian era, when wealth accumulated linearly, egalitarianism was easy to realize and had its rationale. But in the industrial and commercial era, when wealth grows exponentially, this way of thinking is far behind the times. Wealth distribution in modern society follows a power-law distribution; in plain terms, 80% of newly created wealth will be taken by 20% of people. 80% of a company’s bonuses will be carved up by 20% of its people. In modern society, egalitarianism is no longer possible. If a country has egalitarianism, that means the disaster of the communal mess hall has arrived once more. If a company has egalitarianism, it is not far from shutting down.
If you still cling to egalitarian thinking, you will do nothing but complain about unfairness forever, full of negative energy and grievances every day. Better to cast off the rustic thinking of egalitarianism, see social reality clearly, and think more about how to get into that 20%.
7) A weak sense of time
There was a particularly outstanding job applicant who hoped to join my company. I saw that his resume was impeccable and the video interview also felt good, so I arranged an interview together with my partner. In the end, for a 30-minute interview slot, the young man was 10 minutes late. My partner insisted that we not hire him, and I had no choice but to regretfully turn him away.
Punctuality is one of the basic qualities of a modern industrial and commercial society. Being unpunctual is essentially a rustic way of thinking and a rustic habit.
The sense of time in an agrarian society was “farming season”: the solar terms mattered most, and as long as you didn’t miss a solar term you wouldn’t miss the farming. And during the slack farming season, time lost its meaning entirely. Therefore people in an agrarian society did not demand much precision in time.
Of course, agrarian society is a bit better than the tropics. People in the tropics live by gathering and hunting and calculate time by season. In which season you go to which place, and you can eat bananas, or catch a wildebeest — this precision of time is even worse. So we can see that even the most unpunctual Chinese person, once in Africa, India, or Latin America, is practically driven to death by the unpunctuality of the locals.
An industrial and commercial society is different: the delivery of goods must be precise to the day, transportation precise to the minute, operations on the production line precise to the second. Without a sense of time, things easily fall into chaos. We can see that the better-developed industrial countries — Germany, Britain, the Nordics — are all extremely punctual, while Southern Europe is worse, which is why the economies of Spain, Portugal, and Greece don’t do well (though of course they are still better off than agrarian countries).
What was said above is about disrespect for other people’s time. Another even more fatal piece of rustic thinking is disrespect for your own time.
The first is using inefficient tools or methods to do things. What Wang Xiaobo’s essay described above is a typical case. There are many in real life too: clearly able to afford a high-speed rail ticket that arrives in 3 hours, yet insisting on buying a regular ticket that takes 12 hours; clearly able to get there in 10 minutes by taxi, yet insisting on bouncing on a bus for an hour; clearly something that genuine software could solve in a minute, yet insisting on spending three hours doing it with pirated software; clearly able to watch a show directly by paying for a membership, yet insisting on watching 75 seconds of ads first in order to have it free… Time is all wasted on these inefficient things.
The second is spending too much time on things that do no good. Others are studying while you play games. Others are working while you scroll through Douyin. Five minutes in a game or on Douyin, and three hours have passed in the human world — yet you never tire of it.
Have you ever thought about it: the value of your time determines your wages. Whatever you think an hour of your time is worth is the highest point of the wages you can get. If even you think your own time is not worth much, how could your wages possibly be high?
5
We must recognize that the modern world is an industrial and commercial world. Only things that meet the needs of the new era can produce value; only people who do things that meet the needs of the new era can make money. Rustic thinking will only limit you and keep success far from you.
The following are a few suggestions on how to adapt to the industrial and commercial era.
1) Study the needs of an industrial and commercial society
The needs of an industrial and commercial society differ from those of an agrarian society. Climbing trees and farming were the needs of an agrarian society; literature, sports, entertainment, and so on are the needs of an industrial and commercial society. This is why climbing trees and farming cannot earn bonus points, while Jiang Fangzhou, Kobe, and Liu Xiang are fought over by universities.
We should look at problems starting from social needs, not from personal abilities.
You say you saw wood especially fast, or cut paper especially well, or that your makeup skills surpass A’Zhu in Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils — to the market, none of this means anything.
Only when there are people idle enough to enjoy watching someone saw wood, when there are people pursuing high-quality niche entertainment who simply want to learn paper-cutting, when there are girls who want to present a more perfect self and so love to learn makeup, and you can find these people and push yourself to them, does your ability have somewhere to be put to use.
So first of all we must learn to study the needs of an industrial and commercial society. There are still a great many of these needs; satisfy even a very small part of them and you can make a lot of money.
2) Cultivate thinking suited to an industrial and commercial society
First, the “seven deadly sins” of rustic thinking mentioned earlier must be resolutely cast off.
Beyond that, you must also develop the habit of not relying on connections but on market rules and personal striving; you must learn throughout your life, work tirelessly, and always grow upward; you must have long-term vision and an investor’s mindset, and learn to harness the power of compound interest; and you must pay attention to building a personal brand (in a weak-tie society, a personal brand is incomparably important).
Each of these points deserves a 5,000-word article to explain. As long as you keep following the He Jiayan official account, you’ll be able to learn them all later.
3) Train the abilities to survive and develop in an industrial and commercial society
I put this one last because, logically, you first need to know what needs the market has and what underlying thinking you should possess, and only then train the related abilities. Only in this way can you aim at the target, achieve twice the result with half the effort, and avoid taking detours.
The abilities you need to cultivate come from those needs, and they are cultivated and brought into play with the help of your underlying thinking. As for what the specific abilities are, that depends on your grasp of market needs and on your interests, hobbies, and strengths.
I can give a few examples for your reference, but you must also think and search for yourself:
For example: how to help producers raise efficiency and lower costs (related specialties and skills: artificial intelligence, mechanical manufacturing, engineering design, informatization, management science, accounting, and so on); how to help sellers quickly find buyers (related specialties and skills: marketing, e-commerce, big data, advertising design, market planning, and so on); how to please a public that puts entertainment above all in a post-industrial society (related specialties and skills: literature, art, sports, and so on, but you must be able to reach a high level); and so on.
There are also some universal must-have abilities, for example: financial management ability (you need to learn about managing money), athletic ability (you need to exercise your body), statistical analysis ability (you need to possess some basic knowledge of statistics), leadership ability (you need to learn how to drive yourself and others), language ability (you need to learn how to give a speech, or learn one or several foreign languages), writing ability (you need to write often), and so on. In short, whatever an industrial and commercial society needs is what you train. As long as you have ability, you needn’t worry about failing to seize opportunities.
6
Chinese agrarian society lasted for several thousand years, and it hasn’t been long since we entered industrial and commercial society. Every one of us possesses some rural flavor, more or less; this has nothing to do with whether you grew up in the city or in the countryside — it comes from our historical inheritance and is buried deep in our marrow.
There is no high or low between rural flavor and modern flavor, but they suit different environments. In an industrial and commercial society, rural thinking will limit your success, while modern thinking will help you develop.
In other words, the more rustic you are, the poorer you will be. Only by washing off the rustic flavor can you move toward success.
About the author: He Jiayan, a remarkable person who specializes in studying remarkable people. He once worked in government, later founded a consulting company, and is now a consultant and an official-account writer. Together with you, he learns how remarkable people are forged, and from their experiences and methods gains improvements in thinking and cognition. To understand remarkable people, learn from remarkable people, and become a remarkable person, start by following He Jiayan.
This article was reprinted from: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/783yvYbdVoDjTTe-EgEbOw
