Zeng Guofan, what did the "stupidity" of his youth bring him

Zeng Guofan was born in an ordinary peasant family in a small county town in Hunan, and his ancestors have been farming for generations, and there has not been a single reader in the family. In his father's generation, Zeng Linshu, he was forced to read every day. Maybe the family really did not have the gene to read, and my father took the seventeen imperial examinations and barely passed the Xiucai examination.

In this environment, Zeng Guofan carried the hopes of two generations and entered a private school when he was six years old. At the age of fourteen, he began to take the imperial examination. However, Zeng Guofan did not know how hard he tried to read.

There is even such a joke: zeng guofan endorsed the book at home in the middle of the night, and the thieves hiding in the room were all memorized, but he has not yet memorized it. It can be seen that Zeng Guofan when he was a child was really not so talented.

Zuo Zongtang always looked down on him and repeatedly criticized him mercilessly for being "short in talent" and "lacking in talent." His student Li Hongzhang also said he was too "polite." Even he himself often said, "My life is shorter than talent."

But it is this "stupidity" that makes Zeng Guofan have extraordinary diligence and persistence.

During the Qing Dynasty, the Xiucai examination was divided into three levels: the county examination, the prefectural examination and the hospital examination. To take the exam, Zeng Guofan needed to walk one hundred and twenty miles from his home to the county seat, and then trekked more than two hundred miles from the county seat to Changsha Province. If calculated by three hundred and fifty miles one way, Zeng Guofan walked nearly five thousand miles in order to test for a show talent. Even so, Zeng Guofan still failed repeatedly and fell off the list continuously.

However, Zeng Guofan became more and more frustrated and courageous, and the more stupid he became, the harder he worked.

He knew that he was too stupid to fly first, and if he wanted the stupid bird to fly first, he could only rely on the efforts of extraordinary people. He warned himself that when he read a book, if he could not understand this sentence, he would not read the next sentence; if he did not finish reading the book, he would never read the next book; if he did not complete today's study task, he would not sleep.

Zeng Guofan once said: When his father taught him to read, he learned from morning to night, and if he couldn't remember, his father would repeat and read repeatedly. On the road, his father was telling him; when he was sleeping and lying in bed at night, his father was also talking, and he must let him learn before he stopped.

It is this "clumsy" learning method that allows Zeng Guofan to develop a diligent and down-to-earth personality, and also lays a very solid knowledge foundation for himself.

Finally, in the thirteenth year of Daoguang, Zeng Guofan passed the Xiucai examination. It is also because of so many years of precipitation and accumulation that Zeng Guofan's life has since opened up. The following year, Zeng Guofan was elected. Five years later, after becoming a jinshi, the emperor personally conferred on him the title of Shu Jishi of the Hanlin Academy, equivalent to today's doctoral candidate at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The "stupid" boyhood created his tenacious character.