I've been in the early stages of my fourth entrepreneurial venture lately, going through a lot of organizational friction and turbulent adjustments. My wife is also in a very particular situation, so I've been feeling somewhat burned out. I've had to maintain a steady composure to face this rapidly changing world. There were indeed moments of hitting rock bottom, but I pushed through all of them. Suddenly, some thoughts came to me that I wanted to share.
Choose "Misfortune" Over Fortune
There's an old Chinese saying: "Fortune lies within misfortune; misfortune lurks within fortune." Why choose "misfortune" over fortune? It sounds counterintuitive. In our materially abundant world, we have plenty of comfortable escapes — outlets of "fortune" — to counter pressure and anxiety. But fortune and misfortune are intertwined. If every time we face pressure and anxiety we resort to these comfortable escapes, we'd actually be better off confronting the "misfortune" — the fear, the pressure — head-on. Pavel Durov once said that self-discipline is a muscle. Isn't resisting pressure and anxiety also a muscle? In my previous understanding, the response to anxiety was always about solutions — meditation, breathing exercises, "don't think about it," go relax. But this logic is completely wrong — perhaps fundamentally flawed. Even meditation and breathing are about directly facing these emotions. Like bench pressing — you can never handle it all at once; you always build up through training. So you must do what is difficult but right. This is the approach that yields the most "fortune."
People Aren't As Complex As You Think — It's Just Diversity
The reason people think others are complex is that they're always viewing others through their own framework, their own values. This is the last thing you should do, and the most unnecessary. Respect and non-interference — that's what matters. The essence of human relationships is mutual growth and win-win. There may be other approaches, but this one is the most efficient and most valuable. Benefiting others through collaboration is the baseline of partnership. Benefiting yourself through collaboration is your own baseline for entering one. Without arrogance — otherwise nothing lasts, and nothing matters.
Entrepreneurship Is a Long Road
Transitioning from an employee mindset to an entrepreneurial mindset, from a businessman's mindset to an entrepreneur's mindset — this itself is a form of self-actualization. The essence of entrepreneurship is a process of building compound returns. It's not just about risk — it's about establishing connections between your values, between people, between people and products. You "translate" valuable needs so that most people buy in and pay for it long-term. The core isn't in the frameworks you imagine, nor in the structures in a product manager's head, nor in whatever fancy technology. At its most fundamental, it's about the greatest common denominator of needs, generating short-term or long-term value. Entrepreneurship is hard — users, funding, resources, team, product — but this is what's difficult and right, because many products in the market serve their markets with inferior approaches and value. They have no reason to exist.