Student Question: You said the three core competencies for internet operations roles are: taking the blame, fighting for turf, and having thick skin. So what are the core competencies for internet product roles?
Master Chi’s Response: What I said was just a joke — it means that operations roles need to know how to compete for resources. (Product roles are the same way.)
Tech roles can achieve high income simply by focusing on improving their technical skills. (I’m not talking about technical management here — those who become managers are always a minority.) Even if the company collapses or the project disappears, someone with strong technical skills never has to worry about finding work. Technical ability can be quantified directly. Post your code on GitHub, and the whole world can see exactly what level you’re at.
First, wishing all my brothers and sisters a peaceful and healthy Dragon Boat Festival.
Because this is the first Dragon Boat Festival of the Nine Purple Fire major cycle, there are several things worth paying close attention to — and ideally doing well. From the perspective of traditional customs, these details carry genuine benefit.
1 - You may have noticed that your regular earned income hasn’t been flowing very smoothly this month. Deals that seemed settled keep falling through at the last moment for no apparent reason.
Some insider, high-level thinking is the kind you’ll never hear anywhere else in your lifetime. This article is exactly that. Brothers and sisters, I am Master Chi. Let me walk you through this.
Do not — I cannot stress this enough — do not carry any notion of “overnight success” into the business of making money. Because nearly everyone who holds this reckless idea ends up shattered to pieces in the pursuit of wealth.
Student Question: I’ve recently noticed that I enjoy buying things. On the positive side, I don’t overspend on food — but on the negative side, I tend to buy a lot of everyday household items: shampoo, body wash, tissues, that sort of thing. When there’s a sale, I want to stock up even more.
This is especially true when I’m in a good mood — after landing a job, or after solving some major problem. The urge becomes particularly strong then. Subconsciously, I feel like I’m rewarding myself through shopping. I’m not sure whether this counts as some kind of psychological issue.
One of the foundational skills for product managers — one of the three core roles in the internet industry — is called “competitive analysis.” The idea is straightforward: study your competitors, track how their products evolve and change, and extract general industry patterns and lessons to learn from their strengths while compensating for your own weaknesses.
To me, this is a textbook example of work where form trumps value.
The product managers who write competitive analyses tend to cluster in the junior-to-mid range. Senior PMs, interestingly, rarely bother — probably because they’ve figured out it’s not particularly useful.
Tonight I only meant to have a casual chat with you. But when I finished writing, I was surprised to find the whole piece carries a quiet thread of Zen wisdom — an almost ethereal quality.
I think this may be a sign that Heaven, in its mysterious way, also wants you to see this.
Even if what follows reveals a simple yet vast heavenly secret (天机).
Not long ago, I took the time to look back over all the brothers and sisters I’ve guided over the years — a straightforward review. And I arrived at a remarkable conclusion:
Only the weak compete.
When do we need to compete? When there is no meaningful difference between you and others, you can only fight over limited positions through competition.
Put bluntly: whether you win or lose is, to everyone else, completely irrelevant. You may be slightly better than others, but that margin isn’t enough to set you apart.
Among the resources a person possesses, background, appearance, and talent are the most “important” — and not in the sense that no matter how hard you grind, someone who coasts on their looks will still beat you.
Once, you believed happiness meant earning big money, driving luxury cars, living in a gleaming high-floor apartment adorned with fine things — surrounded by vast assets and profits flowing endlessly your way.
Then one day, you fell asleep and had a dream.
In the dream, you returned to your younger years — back to that small, familiar home, seeing your parents as they were then, still in the prime of their lives. You tasted again that flavor only your childhood kitchen could produce.
In the office, everyone was hotly debating the case of the Wuhan University female government-track trainee who had refused her posting to a direct city-level unit in Jiayuguan. A political commissar officer walked in, and his words cut through the noise: “Comrades, you’re still treating this as after-dinner gossip without grasping the real danger here. Government-track trainees are reserve cadres selected through the organization’s screening standards and filtering processes, layer by layer. After two years of grassroots training, these reserve cadres are promoted to more important positions to shoulder greater responsibilities. Ten years from now, these people will become the backbone — even the heads — of their respective units. So the reserve cadres selected through the organization’s screening mechanisms and investigative interviews should be people with firm convictions, strong organizational discipline, clean backgrounds, outstanding abilities, and the right attitude. What makes this incident serious is not whether Jiayuguan is some backward frontier outpost — it’s that this woman single-handedly announced to all of society the complete failure of this organizational screening mechanism and selection process.”
I’m not entirely sure why, but many readers find that once they become familiar with my work, their lives start improving — steadily, and often noticeably.
My best guess is this: the content here has always been positive, always full of good energy.
As the old saying goes — what you dwell on will find its echo.
If a person can consistently take in good wisdom and content full of light, then over time, they will inevitably develop a more positive inner state — and begin receiving more and more positive feedback from the world around them. Life, in turn, keeps getting better.