- Text / Yao Yang, professor and doctoral supervisor of Peking University, director of the China Center for Economic Research, former president of the Peking University Development Institute, and co-chairman of the National Leading Readers Alliance of the President's Reading Club
- Source: President's Reading Club (ID: winnerbook_club)
- Huaxia Cornerstone e Insight is reprinted with permission, and the article only represents the author's own views
I'm glad to have this opportunity to share something with you. I am the co-chair of the President's Reading Club's National Readers' Alliance, and I have participated in several reading activities of the President's Reading Club, reading other people's books and guiding my own books.
The topic of the speech handed to me today is Scholarly Enterprises and New Quality Productivity. I'm an economist, not a business researcher. Here I mainly want to share some of my own personal experience of reading, and see if it is helpful for employees to read, enhance the competitiveness of enterprises, and build a scholarly enterprise.
01
Reading useful books can help you in your work and life
I started my reading experience in college, and I have been reading books for more than 40 years. There are two kinds of books, one is useful and the other is "useless book", and I think both books should be read.
The so-called useful books are those that are directly helpful to your work and life after reading, and you can use them immediately. Reading useful books is the first level, and reading books cannot always be aimless.
For me personally, the first priority of studying is to do research. In retrospect, my highest concentration of reading was after I returned to China in 1997. Because I was a student before this, students can learn the knowledge in the books well, and they can basically cope with the past.
But after returning to China, facing the reality of the situation, I need to do some research beyond my studies and cultivate some comprehensive skills, and then I really started to read some books that are beyond my own research, but still belong to the professional field. For example, the topic of my Ph.D. dissertation was on institutional economics, but in fact I would only do a little bit of my own small field. After returning to China, I had to give lectures, which forced me to read a lot of books on institutional economics, and I basically understood the things in the field of institutional economics, and I became more comfortable doing research.
In addition, in the process of teaching, I also read a lot of books that are immediately useful. Now that I have a wider range of fields of study, I have more books to read, and sometimes the books I read may not necessarily arouse your interest, but they are knowledge points that you must learn and master.
Therefore, I believe that reading a book is first and foremost about reading books related to one's own work.
Now everyone is talking about AI, thinking that there is AI now, it seems that there is no need to read, if you want to know what knowledge, use AI to look it up, and AI can tell you. AI can also write a lot of things for you, help you make PPT, and even make the entire courseware. In that case, why do we still study?
I think there is a benefit to reading books that cannot be replaced by AI. I think it is very difficult for AI to surpass human knowledge, because people can build a concept and a framework, which is not easy for AI to do. What AI can do at the moment is still something fragmented, it will only tell you that there is some knowledge here, there is some knowledge there, but it doesn't know about the relationship between knowledge. To this end, we must not stay at the level of fragmentation, but establish a framework of knowledge, and reading books can help us establish such a framework for understanding the world.
Many of you here today are in business, and some of them are already doing very well, so why do you want to go to business school? It's because you want to establish such a framework. With this framework, it is possible to touch the bypass. Why should an entrepreneur study? If you want to be innovative, contact bypass is very important. In this sense, doing research and doing business are also the same, and with a big framework, you know where your innovation is, which becomes a necessary quality for us to guide students.
Reading is also useful when it comes to life. In addition to research, the other useful books that I currently read on my own are basically focused on the field of healthy living.
When we Chinese talk about life, we talk about health preservation. For example, if you don't move, you sit there to study, meditate, and you take medicine. This is the result of not reading books, and after reading books, you will find that these ideas are wrong. Modern science tells us that by the time a person lives to be 70 years old, 40% of his muscles have been lost, so the elderly are easily injured. Some people think that they don't eat enough tonics, so they hurry up to take tonic medicine to replenish bones, but in fact, it is a muscle problem.
I was reading a book recently that said that our lifespan is improving, but our healthy lifespan is not keeping up with our lifespan, so we live a sick life for a long time in our lives. One of the shocking statistics is that 8.7% of China's population over the age of 60 is unable to take care of themselves, which means that the last decade or so is basically left to others to serve. This kind of life is not only meaningless to oneself, but also a burden to society.
How to overcome this meaningless life? The book tells us that we should exercise all our lives, and the most important thing is to build muscles, and all kinds of muscles must be exercised. The author says that he often exercises his grip and that it is also important to walk with weights. After reading this book, I realized that many of the health principles that have been passed down by word of mouth and passed down from generation to generation in the past are wrong, and that if you want to live a healthy life, you must exercise.
It's the same with food. In the past, we would think that when we get old, we should eat less meat or greasy things, but if you read the book "Life in Grains", it will subvert your imagination, such as eating too much food, it is very easy to get Alzheimer's. In fact, Alzheimer's disease is a similar disease to diabetes, where does diabetes come from, that is, if you eat too many grains, you should eat more high-grade meat and high-grade fat, so that you can live a healthier life.
02
Reading "books of uselessness" helps us find meaning in life
Reading useful books is part of it, and it can help you a lot in your work and life. However, reading "useless books" is probably even more important for most of us.
The so-called useless book means that after reading it, it has no direct effect on your real life and real work. Since it has no direct effect, why do you still need to read it? I think that people should have meaning in living a lifetime, and this meaning does not necessarily have to go beyond the pursuit of personal greatness, but this meaning lies first in yourself, live yourself well, and constantly improve and improve yourself.
I spent a lot of time during the pandemic, and I read a lot of books about history. Reading history books is of no direct use to me, purely out of interest. I read more than a dozen books about the Song Dynasty, and after reading them, I had a new understanding and sublimation of Chinese history. If there's one thing that's useful, it's that reading history gives you a clearer picture of the times you're living in.
For example, our generation has experienced a very painful period, in the 60s and 70s, we have all experienced that we were very poor and could not have enough to eat, and we have also experienced the climax, the most exciting, and fiery era in the early days of reform and opening up in the 80s, and the era of rapid growth in the 90s and 2000-2010. Now that our economic growth rate has slowed down, many people are uncomfortable and very anxious, thinking that there are many things wrong with this era.
After reading the history, you will realize that we are really lucky. There is very few generations in human history that have not experienced war, and they are very lucky not to have experienced war. Especially after reading about the Three Kingdoms, 500 years of turmoil, the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, you will be glad that you did not live in that era, so that you have a new understanding of history, a new understanding of the era in which you live, and a new understanding of your life, so that you may not be so anxious.
The book of uselessness says that it is useless, it just says that it was useless at the time, but in the long run, it is still useful. In addition to the period after returning to China for my doctorate, there was also a period when I was in college. At that time, Peking University was not very famous, and the requirements were not high, and the economic geography major I studied was relatively low. At that time, there was an advantage that I could study more, and the monthly stipend was 14 yuan, and my parents gave another 20 yuan, a total of 34 yuan. It's a miracle to think about it now, and I can still buy so many books to read under such difficult conditions. For example, there are dozens of books in the Future series, 60% of which I have bought, and almost every one of them has been read. And there was a lot of time, in the dilapidated dormitory of Peking University, I sat on the west-facing balcony and read in the afternoon. At that time, the air in Beijing was very good, the clouds were like mountains, and it was a real pleasure to read at sunset, and it is also a pleasure to think about it today.
The books I read at that time are very useful to me today, they are a kind of enlightenment and an improvement. I still remember reading a book called "The Six", which is an idle book that uses characters from literary works to describe the six forms of life, such as Faust, Don Quix, and so on. I always remember this book, and two years ago at the graduation ceremony, I also told you about Don Quixote and talked about the book "The Six".
After returning to China, I read a lot of books outside my major, political science, sociology, philosophy, which seemed to be of little use more than 20 years ago. However, 20 years later, I suddenly found that in addition to the study of economics, I also gave rise to a new field of study, that is, the study of political philosophy, and I have also published some books in the field of political philosophy, which have had a certain impact.
Therefore, reading books should not limit oneself to one field, only read books related to one's own field, in fact, reading such useless books will be beneficial to the improvement of one's life and career development.
03
The construction of scholarly enterprises is an important force to promote social progress
Today's theme is about scholarly enterprises and new quality productivity, and I think it is very good to build a scholarly enterprise. Our primary goal as an enterprise is to make money, and if an enterprise does not make money and has no profits, the enterprise has no meaning of existence. But in today's era, an enterprise is probably more than just a profit center, especially after our post-00s enter the workplace, their requirements are different from the past. Many people have a worry-free life, of course it is important to make money, because making money is a manifestation of the value of life, but this is not enough, there is also a question of how employees can improve, which is also very important to them. And reading is a very good way to improve.
Reading can be very purposeful, for example, just to manage the business well. I have participated in the recommendation of the book list of the president's reading club, such as what the CEO should read, what the middle management should read, and what the average employee should read, which is important, but not the only one. To build a scholarly enterprise, we still need to let our employees read some useless books, such as the teachers of the National Development Institute also have a spontaneous reading club, the books they read have nothing to do with the major, but in this process, it will enhance the cohesion of the enterprise, and it will also allow employees to get more sense of gain.
At the same time, if an enterprise wants to develop sustainably, it cannot simply regard the enterprise as a money-making organization, but also needs to assume some social responsibilities. How can we embody this social responsibility? Reading is also one of them. Let all employees read, so that everyone's cognition and quality can be improved, so that they will consider more social needs and assume more social responsibilities, which will also help enterprises play their due role.
In short, the promotion of such activities as the construction of scholarly enterprises is not only helpful for the construction of our corporate culture, but more importantly, it has a positive guiding effect on the construction of our whole society. It can be said that the construction of scholarly enterprises is a very important force to promote social progress.