Author: Qin Anna Zhang Ermao
Edit: Anna Qin
1
Zhang Ying, founding partner of Matrix Partners China, recently sent a Weibo (which has now been deleted) about hardships:
Suffering is not suffering from poverty or suffering. Most people understand the meaning of suffering too superficially.
The essence of suffering is the ability to focus on one thing for a long time, and the normal life of entertainment, social interaction, consumption, etc., which is abandoned in the process of focusing on doing one thing for a long time, and the loneliness and lack of understanding endured in this process. The essence is a kind of self-control, self-control and persistence, as well as deep thinking.
To be poor is not to suffer at all. To be poor is to be poor. The poverty and suffering of the majority are only the inevitable price of their own wandering, ignorance, intolerance, and blind obedience.
In fact, the rich man who succeeds on his own is often far more able to suffer than the poor, otherwise he would not be able to start from scratch on his own.
You will find that after he is rich, he is still more diligent than you, or more idealistic than you can endure loneliness, or more idealistic than you.
This is suffering.
Zhang Ying's words are actually a derivative version of the "American Dream", that is, a person can succeed through individual efforts.
This is also a common template for the widely circulated wealth legends, individuals through their own efforts and the opportunities of the times to achieve success, the achievement of a wealth legend. From Li Ka-shing to Wang Xing, Zhang Yiming and other Internet upstarts, most of them are such templates.
But behind these legends, people also find an excuse to blame the poor. Returning to Zhang Ying's above remarks, the core logic of it is that the poor are not worthy of suffering.
For poverty is the result, the result of your inability to focus on one thing for a long time, the price of your wandering, ignorance, intolerance, blind obedience. Zhang Ying's unsympathetic logic determines the cold and ruthless judgment: poverty is the result of not being able to bear hardships.
However, in real society, poverty is a very common initial condition, the initial setting that individuals have to spend a lot of effort to change.
In 2018, the founder of the clothing brand G2000, Hong Kong's billionaire Tian Beichen, was invited to participate in a TV show similar to "Metamorphosis" - "The Battle of the Rich and The Poor", which aims to throw billionaires into the pile of poor people and see if the rich can have a way to counterattack.
At the beginning of the show, Tian Beichen and Zhang Ying had the same idea, thinking that the reason why the poor were poor was because they had no plans, were not motivated, were lazy, did not study, and did not think. He said confidently: Struggle changes life, Hong Kong is a free market, here will eliminate a lot of weak people, as long as you have the fighting spirit, the weak will become stronger.
At that time, Tian Beichen was assigned to work as a cleaner: he started working at 6:15, working nine hours, with almost no time to rest. Such a busy work, only 50 Hong Kong dollars a day salary, and Hong Kong prices, a sandwich to sell to 15 yuan, to the evening after work, other colleagues also have to work overtime at night, Tian Beichen returned to his two or three square meters rental house, is such a windowless no toilet rental house, every month also two or three thousand yuan rent.
During the week-long experience period, he only insisted on 2 days. The idea has also undergone a 180-degree change, and the most painful feeling is that the bottom layer really can't turn over with effort.
Whatever you want to do, as long as you work hard and make the right life choices, you will definitely be able to achieve your goals, this chicken soup of the last century, almost chicken can not be the poor now. Tian Beichen left two sentences: "Fighting spirit cannot change fate" and "even the rich cannot change the status quo at the grassroots level."
For a poor person, getting rid of poverty requires everything. You need to have a reasonable starting salary, a chance to promote, a clear goal, a strong fighting spirit, no huge debts, diseases or drug addictions, but also a family that supports your development, friends with good character, and the appreciation and promotion of "noble people".
This set of conditions is indispensable, otherwise trouble will follow, because poverty means that you cannot protect yourself. Your trial and error costs are compressed to a very low rate.
2
"Talking about suffering" is very much in line with Zhang Ying's consistent operation. He believes in trying to change his destiny, at least from his life experience, can see the traces of "counterattack".
In the 1980s, Zhang Ying's family moved to the United States. When they first arrived in the United States, the family huddled in a basement not far from the sea, where it was damp and cramped, and the thin door panels could not even stop the coughing outside, relying on their father to go to the restaurant to wash the dishes, and their mother to make a living by measuring clothes in the garment factory. Zhang Ying went to pheasant school along the way, where she was bullied for her immigration status – "how to avoid being beaten less" became a survival problem in her youth.
His knowledge of business came from a friend's father, an American richest man in the Philippines. My friend's father was in the explosive stage of entrepreneurial success, his wealth increased significantly, and he had his own private jet.
This gave him a great stimulus: improving the living conditions of his family had always been the driving force for his progress, and the "private jet" had undoubtedly become the most rapid drug that prompted him to change careers, so the undergraduate medical student crossed the field of biotechnology and business in the choice of master's degree.
After joining the investment bank after work, the personality of the "good old man" makes him work very painfully, and even relies on hiding in the toilet to avoid some jobs that do not belong to him, "being bullied very badly".
Zhang Ying, who has tasted hardships, does have the qualifications to talk about hardships. Of course, on the road of simmering chicken soup for entrepreneurs from the standpoint of a person who has come over, he is also not polite at all.
In the circle of investors, Zhang Ying is a special existence, he likes to drive a motorcycle around, with the cool sense of wilderness heroes, when he speaks, he will be mixed with one or two sentences of "national scolding", which seems to be very true temperament, he also rarely talks about his successful experience, preferring to say "going with the flow", and very politely mentioning his successful projects, mainly due to "luck".
This is a somewhat modest statement, but it is undeniable that Zhang Ying likes to talk about her experience of counterattacking all the way from the pheasant school. This is indeed where he is different from the investors who graduated from the Qingbei and Ivy League universities in the United States, and his counterattack has a "sense of dream".
This also allowed him to simmer The Zhang's chicken soup had an audience. Zhang Xuhao, the founder of Hungry. To a certain extent, I'm a person who is influenced by his values."
However, counterattacks are valuable because they are scarce. Thousands of people have thousands of dreams, and those who can really realize their dreams are often the rare exceptions in many cycles of failures.
Zhang Ying distills this less-probability event and gives it value, condensing it into the perception that "the suffering of most people due to poverty is only the inevitable price of their own wandering, ignorance, intolerance, and blind obedience", with a sense of looking down from above and colored glasses of selective observation.
Zhang Ying threw out the hardship that the essence is the "only success theory", which conveys the "dualistic life theory" of conservative and boring successful people and ordinary people, and still respects the poisonous chicken soup that only a successful life deserves to be recorded.
And Zhang Ying's counterattack is not completely pure suffering. Zhang Ying was poor, but when the doctor's father and Tsinghua graduated mother, at least let him surpass the father who smoked dry tobacco and the mother who spun the socks in his vision, and the friend of the richest son must be stronger in business than the brother in the village who can only carry the dog over the wall.
Zhang Ying had never seen real poverty.
American writer David. In his documentary book Poor Busy, Shipler mentions the chain reaction of an ordinary American family due to poverty:
Living in a dilapidated apartment can make the child's asthma worse, so the parents have to call an ambulance, and then they will not be able to pay the medical bills, the credit history will be smeared, so their car loan interest rates will be greatly increased, so they have to buy a bad second-hand car, so the mother can not go to work on time, promotion opportunities and earning power are also frustrated, so she has to hide in a dilapidated house.
For the middle class, overtime has no time to spend with children, can hire someone to complete, the body is slightly sick, you can choose to take a vacation or stop working. None of these are big problems that can jeopardize their own jobs.
But the poor can't do it, and if they don't work for a day, their lives will be unsustainable.
3
Poverty always has the air of original sin, and to sum up in the classic quote "I am not a medicine god", there is only one disease in the world - the disease of poverty.
The cost of being poor is not seen by many people.
The first is the cost of survival.
The poor are a shortened term, and if they were more vividly described, they would probably be a group of people with meager incomes, low standards of living, little savings, lack of social security and medical services, an unstable living environment, and a lack of access to well-equipped communities.
Their next generation may face problems such as difficulty getting into good schools, and may even become left-behind children, in an environment prone to sexual abuse, with only closed access to information and no guaranteed future.
Poverty can even break down national borders. Poverty is similar in most parts of the planet.
The South Korean documentary EBS "Betrayal of Learning" filmed the purgatory-like Korean college entrance examination, and students from small places naturally lost at the starting line - "Students know that the higher the house price, the easier it is to enter a prestigious school." Even all students know that "equal opportunity" is a nonsense. These students worked desperately to solve the problem, tied the leather band to their wrists when they could not write, and continued to write by relying on the strength of their wrists, but there were still few people ashore.
The second is the economic cost, which is very expensive to be poor.
In real society, a poor person has no savings and has to endure repeated trials of various temptations. Nowadays, the apps of various Internet companies are scrambling to push a type of message to users: Do you want to borrow money?
The middle class may scoff at such pushes, but people who are really short of money will be impressed. When they are anxious because they can't pay the hospital deposit of 1,000 yuan, any money they can borrow is the nectar of a long drought – even if this nectar is poisonous.
Borrowing money is addictive. An Internet financial operator once counted the average number of repurchases on his platform: 6 times. That is to say, as long as you register, there is a high probability that you will borrow money 6 times before you will close it.
Ironically, however, these loan users targeted by big data are satirized as people whose material desires are stronger than the economic level, and they are the objects of telephone bombardment, and those Internet companies that provide Pandora's box, with such a decent name as "market behavior", cover up the nature of profiteering.
When Zhou Yahui, chairman of Kunlun Wanwei, was listed on Qudian, he once shared on his public account and talked about how he invested in Qudian. He did not mention that the campus loan business started by Qudian was itself an exploitation of the poor by capital.
The poor even have a higher cost of dreaming.
In the case that Haidian parents have supported the early love of middle school children and "monopolized the family", the solidification of class promotion has become a social pain point.
It is not enough for the cold students to suffer. In recent years, only about 15% of rural students have been admitted to Peking University Tsinghua University. In the 1980s, the proportion was as high as more than 80%. Looking at today's Internet circle, there is only one poor child who is in charge of the Eight Classics - Liu Qiangdong, in addition, behind the founder of the unicorn in the new matrix, he is a rich father, or a high-ranking mother.
Because of this, when Zhang Ying, as a successful person, talks about the chicken soup that "rich people can suffer more than poor people", he himself puts himself in danger.
After all, the anger of the poor may be more direct than that of the rich. They came to the world in the Hard model, and it was tired to maintain their lives, and the external scrutiny and harshness of the disadvantages of the group seemed to throw out a period of criticism.
But in fact, the causes of poverty are diverse, there are economic, social, and personal reasons, which are not only the legacy of the previous generation inherited by an individual, but also represent his judgment and choice of current life.
Poverty is by no means a problem that can be evaluated simply by the inability of individuals to endure hardships. Only emphasizing the individual's wrong choices, bad luck, is a very lazy evaluation statement.