The author of this article, Wang Qiang, co-founder of Zhen Fund, co-founder of New Oriental, is also a well-known ancient book lover and collector. He said that he had passed the destiny of heaven in his old age, and the reason why he could do something was that he dared to do something different from others. Whether you do business or investment, whether you can make a little achievement in the end depends not on how smart you are, but on how dare you not follow the trend, especially dare not to go with the future trend that everyone takes for granted, so as to walk out of your own unique life course.
Do you dare to stand against the trend of the times?
Text | Wang Qiang
Figure | Jules Julien
01
The general anxiety of the era of fragmentation
In today's fragmented age, there is a pervasive anxiety that people are afraid of missing anything. In the Internet age, with the biting of information, the only criterion for us to measure good or bad seems to be speed.
The network is not smooth, the download is not fast, downloading a movie can be completed in a few seconds, downloading a text can be completed in a few seconds, how long it takes to complete a sale, and so on.
In this era, there is only one thing, efficiency. Speed becomes the only measure of the state and value of all lives.
With speed as the only indicator, everyone is in a state of anxiety. Everyone constantly stares at the screen, checks the network, receives information, cares where there are best-selling products and new things, constantly chases new and fast, forgetting that in fact, the real precipitation of life requires time and space extension.
Reading, in a way, is anti-fragmentation. It allows you to be born with a complete cognitive world, make life-related choices or decisions in different events, guide your behavior, from the so-called "failure", "ineffectiveness" to effectiveness, and even in any sense of success or maturity, we need to dare to experience a mental structure and habits, which is different from the future development trend that everyone thinks now. In this era, if you are a person who is truly responsible for your own life, you should dare to run counter to the so-called technology-led era.
In our current era, facing reading, facing the acquisition of knowledge, facing the construction of wisdom, what are the problems?
Three words: many, fast, shallow.
02
When everyone pursues more,
Do you dare to pursue less?
Much, this is the problem we have.
There has never been so much information, and the explosion of knowledge is not enough to cover the overwhelming information we are facing now. As far as the structure of knowledge is concerned, the explosive growth of various schools of knowledge and various currents of thought is also unprecedented. In this case, what kind of work should we spend on our limited life, and what kind of information should we focus on in order to transform knowledge into our own wisdom? At this point, the choice is very important. If we don't choose, we won't be able to find meaning.
It is very important to choose what kind of book to read, what kind of knowledge you can actually acquire, and to internalize this knowledge into the wisdom that you can use in your daily life.
So to cope with more, my advice is to learn less. Turn the state of everyone pursuing more into the courage to pursue less. Less means that your choice goal is right, and it becomes one of the best ways to carry the mass accumulation of your life.
03
When everyone is pursuing fast,
Do you dare to pursue slowly?
You talk to people around you about any book, and no one doesn't know it, because everyone already knows a rough idea from the Internet, and even after listening to a lecture, they end the reading of the book. This kind of fastness, rather than saying that you are walking into knowledge and approaching knowledge, it is better to say that you are wasting your life. Do anything, if you only understand a name, do not go into it, do not learn to be slow, in the long run is not a win.
As far as reading is concerned, only slowness can really turn words into something powerful, or get the power that words should give you.
04
When everyone pursues shallow,
Do you dare to pursue deep?
Due to the fragmentation of our time, many of the otherwise heavy things have been broken apart by us. This fragmentation itself, I don't think there is any guilt, because when you slice a thick thing to you, it essentially does not change the essence of the object being cut.
However, because we are accustomed to fragmentation, after fragmenting the complete life, the subconscious mind thinks that cutting a little bit will grasp the whole picture, and then there is a problem. Our technical media, dismantling the original knowledge, the thick information, into fragments of things that can be obtained in time, but we only accept the part, accept the one-sided, accept the tenth that is cut.
We are dealing with a whole, and if we only walk into one-tenth of it, we think we have it all—in the long run, such reading and your life have no real intersection.
05
My ideal reader: Proust
One of my ideal readers, and one of the writers I admire most, is Proust. Eight years of reading of John Ruskin left Proust with a magnificent seven-volume work for humanity.
"The best way to discover what you feel is than to try to recreate within yourself what a master has already felt," he says. In this far-reaching endeavour, we use this master to bring our own thoughts to life. ”
This sentence is both the highest requirement for a translator and a precise summary of a reader and author.
Proust's reading goes from speed, shallowness, fragmentation, and multiplicity to the opposite slowness, depth, completeness, and less. And these things build the essence of a great reader. Such a reader, he does not necessarily read many books, but every time he reads a book, the book becomes a ring that constructs his life. After reading these books, each one of them was closely related to his life. In the end, when he is about to leave this world, he will find that his ego is built up by reading in circles.
The only thing that really makes reading produce traces in your life, generates motivation, destroys the past you, and gives birth to a new self, is whether you have the courage to seriously walk into the text and feel what the author has already felt. When you feel that he has not yet clearly described it, use him to present this thing —this is the mystery of the writer's final creation, and the definition of the ideal reader in my mind.
Finally, I conclude with two poems by my favorite Portuguese poet Pessoa.
"The Tagus River is beautiful for the little river that flows through my village, but the Tagus River is not as beautiful as the little river that flows through my village."
Even if the Tagus River is magnificent, if it is not as powerful as the small river that flows through your village, it is like a famous book, no matter how influential, if it cannot penetrate your life, it is only the words that can penetrate your heart.