Author: Insight Pumpkin
If you ask me, what is the most important thing for young people?
I would answer without hesitation: vision.
How to improve vision?
Kazuo Inamori gave the answer: running away.
If you can't go out, your home is your world, and if you go out, the world is your home.
The growth of a person's life begins with three exodus.
01
Get out of your family of origin
In the novel Jonathan the Seagull, Jonathan is born into a traditional family of seagulls.
The only thing that matters to the Seagull family is to fill their stomachs.
They usually live on land or hover low above the sea, and when the fishing boats are fully loaded, they scramble to fly to the fishing boats for a bite to eat.
They think that flying is all about being fed, so they don't care about their flying skills.
In the beginning, Jonathan did the same.
But gradually it found that in the process of scrambling, the old seagull with a weak body could not grab it at all.
In order to avoid such a fate, Jonathan began to practice Xi flying alone.
It tried to break through the flight altitude, 300 meters, 600 meters, 1500 meters, and learned the skill of controlling speed in the loss of control of the body again and again.
It learns from other birds, Xi its wings and flies only with its wingtips, and successfully achieves a streamlined high-speed dive, allowing it to dive as low as 3 meters below the surface in search of food.
With this ability, Jonathan never went hungry again.
But when it was happy to share the results of its explorations with its companions, so that they could also practice Xi by flying and gain freedom of food, it was greeted with criticism.
The elders and the gulls denounced Jonathan as an offense to the dignity and traditions of the seagull family.
Parents also thought that Jonathan was not doing his job, and persuaded him not to toss and eat with peace of mind.
At this point, there are only two paths ahead of Jonathan:
Either return to the community and follow the rules, or leave the community and live alone.
Jonathan chose the latter, and it left sadly, flying alone into the distance.
During the flight, he encounters two skilled seagulls and follows them to a whole new world.
Jonathan was amazed to find that the seagulls there all had a belief: the seagulls that fly the highest can see the farthest, and there is no limit to flying.
Jonathan learns new flying techniques from them Xi push his limits.
Years later, it became a legend among seagulls and was revered as the "son of the great seagull".
Some of the companions who stayed in the group were starved to death because they could not get food, and some unfortunately died in the process of scrambling.
Jonathan's experience, how many people seem to be familiar:
If you are eager to go to a big city to fight for your career, your family discourages you from finding a stable job, it is enough.
If you want to quit your job and start a business, relatives and friends jump out against you, the risk of starting a business is too high, don't toss.
Running away means a challenge, and like Jonathan, you'll be far away from the pack and face the storm alone.
Staying behind means repeating, and you will always be tied to your home and live like your father's 2.0 version.
If you want to break out of the cycle of repetition, you have to leave the old environment, keep learning, keep Xi thinking, and keep learning.
is like what Gao Garin, who was born on the Loess Plateau in "The Road of Life", said to his students:
"If we don't get out of this mountain, like a frog at the bottom of a well, we can only see the sky outside the well.
No matter how much we jump, no matter how high we jump, it doesn't help. You can only see a little bit of the world outside the wellhead, a little bit of the sky, and you can't see the wider world outside. ”
02
Get out of the confines of your work
Yale University psychologist Amy Reisnes once divided work attitudes into three types:
Take work as an errand, work as a career, and work as a mission.
People who treat work as an errand think that work is a kind of torture, so they are constantly consuming themselves in troubled waters.
People who regard work as their mission regard the workplace as a dojo, regard work as a practice, and constantly break through their own ability radius.
Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, graduated from Nankai University and joined Kuxun as an ordinary coder.
But he rose to management the following year, leading a team of forty or fifty people.
He said that the reason why he has grown so fast is not because he has the best skills or because he has experience, but because he adheres to two principles when he works.
First: work does not distinguish between you and me.
After he had done his job, someone came to him to ask him any questions, and he did everything he could to help.
So much so that he had read most of the code in the company's code base at that time.
When a newcomer joins the company, as long as he has time, he takes the initiative to train, so that his own ability is also consolidated.
In this way, he quickly went from being in charge of one module to being in charge of the entire back-end system, first leading a small group and later leading a large department.
Second: there are no boundaries for doing things.
Although he was in charge of technology at the time, he actively participated in discussions when there was a problem with the product.
A lot of people say it's not something he should do. But he feels that by doing more, he can grow faster.
In fact, it is.
The experience of participating in the product helped him a lot in his later transformation into a product, the participation in the commercial part was very beneficial to him in establishing the company later, and the experience of meeting customers with the sales director helped him a lot when he set up the sales team of Toutiao.
Every night he stayed up at work, every extra shift, and every extra thing he did became a brick when he started his business, helping him build his own commercial building.
The same programmer, some people are busy with their own acres and thirds of land, and some people are willing to learn knowledge outside the scope of Xi work;
The same courier, some people are perfunctory, some people are actively familiar with the road conditions, and optimize the delivery process;
The same confinement lady, some people cope with errands, but some people can take the initiative to master more skills at work.
In the end, the person who was willing to do more in his work became an entrepreneur, a courier delivery king, and a gold medal confinement lady.
This is how the gap between people and people is widened.
Economist He Fan once mentioned the concept of "reluctance and dividends".
Meaning, every industry seems to be densely packed with people.
But the vast majority of people are reluctant.
As long as you are more responsible where others feel that it is not necessary, and go the extra mile where others have done things hastily.
You will be able to enjoy the dividends that you will not be able to bring to yourself.
03
Get out of the information cocoon
There is such a cartoon that vividly portrays the state of mind of contemporary people.
The brain space seems to hold everything, but in fact it is empty.
The famous sociologist Sunstein, the author of the "information cocoon", once said:
With the advent and increasing power of algorithms, the "filter bubble effect" and "echo chamber effect" began to appear in the whole society.
What is the filter bubble effect?
After learning about your preferences, the algorithm actively filters out information that contradicts your preferences, making you feel as if you are in an environment of network bubbles, unable to see other information and concepts, and becoming more and more narrow.
What is the echo chamber effect?
In the space that the algorithm customizes for you, all you hear are echoes of your similar opinions, and you will gradually think that your own views represent the mainstream and that other opinions are wrong, and in the long run, your vision will become narrower and more extreme.
The information cocoon makes us unconsciously lose the opportunity to contact different things and the ability to learn about different worlds, and on the surface, we know more things, but in reality our world is smaller.
I have two suggestions for getting out of the information cocoon.
Read more books in different fields.
Cai Kangyong once said: If you only read books that suit your taste, then you will always only know what you already know.
Each book is a separate world that will provide you with new perspectives and perspectives.
The more you read, the broader your understanding of the world will be, and you will no longer blindly follow black and white.
The more you read, the more you realize how little you know, and you become humble and not proud.
Pay more attention to the points you don't agree with.
In his book "Principles", Ray Dalio lists 7 characteristics of "closed-minded":
1. I don't like my views to be challenged.
2. Prefer to make statements rather than ask questions.
3. Always care about whether you are understood, not whether you understand the other person.
4. Knowing that you are wrong, but still clinging to your own opinions.
5. Don't leave room for the other person to express themselves in the conversation.
6. It is difficult to hold two ideas at the same time, and always try to make one's own point of view dominant and crowd out the opinions of others.
7. Lack of a sense of humility.
If you don't want to be a closed-minded person, you should pay more attention to people who are different from your own perception.
As Fitzgerald said:
The ability of a person to maintain two completely opposite ideas at the same time, and to be able to act normally and in parallel, is the mark of first-rate wisdom.
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In the movie "Men in Black 2", there is such a plot.
In a locker at Grand Central Station, there lives a group of alien villains, whose faith is no more than the light of a human watch.
The protagonist thinks that this group of alien villains living in a locker is too pitiful, but when he kicks open another door at the same time, he realizes that he is just a villain living in a "locker".
The metaphor of the locker may be a familiar environment, it may be a job, it may be a locked cognition in your head.
Trapped in the cabinet, it may be comfortable, but a leaf obstructs the eyes, and there is no Mount Tai to be seen.
Only by going out can we see the vastness of the universe, the complexity of the world, and the infinite truth.