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.
I was searching for something on a video site when the homepage threw career advice content at me. Curious, I clicked on a few.
After a few moments, I felt genuinely unsettled.
How do I put this? It was like sitting in a restaurant and watching the person next to you eat excrement.
They haven’t done anything to you, but just having them nearby makes your skin crawl.
The internet feels completely surreal to me these days.
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.”
Long ago, a veteran educator said to me:
In all my years in education, I have never once seen a young person scrimp and save their living expenses to buy textbooks.
Young people will go hungry for video games, romance, socializing — even a pair of shoes. But they will never make that same sacrifice for their own education.
So sometimes I think: for some people, living in poverty is largely a result of their own choices.
Let me say something that might sting: mediocre, ordinary people have a habit of making both “rising up” and “making money” far more complicated than they need to be.
The path upward is genuinely simple. It has exactly one core principle: devote yourself completely to building your inner mastery.
Take my own life as an example. My daily existence is as stripped-down as an ascetic monk’s.
I do five things every day: earn money, train my body, learn, review, and maintain relationships. And for each one, I push for a small, visible gain before the day is over.
Let me share a little-known secret with you.
Women in the middle and lower tiers of life often make a particular mistake: they tend to mistake the girl who’s “quick with a comeback, sharp-tongued, and full of scattered ideas” for someone who possesses genuine wisdom.
But from my years of destiny reading (命理) experience, this type of woman is actually the least likely to break through — and the most prone to that painful situation where she’s been fighting fate tooth and nail for years, yet can’t see any real progress.
In all my years, I have never seen a single person achieve a fulfilling life and successful career through online “practical tips,” big-name lectures, industry conferences, training programs, or trade news.
Following high-quality bloggers online does offer some benefit — but it mostly comes from the “you become who you surround yourself with” effect of sustained exposure.
It’s somewhat like being in a class with a strong study culture — the environment alone helps lift your grades.
Entrepreneurship and employment are two completely different paths:
Entrepreneurs are driven by demand; employees are driven by tasks. Entrepreneurs solve problems in an open-ended environment; employees solve problems within a constrained one. Entrepreneurs face the real market; employees face a false market (the virtual environment constructed by the platform they operate within). Entrepreneurs continuously experiment and embrace failure; employees avoid making mistakes. Entrepreneurs take on responsibility; employees evade it.