- The reason why children look happy is that they have no concept of the future and live completely in the present when their minds are still in the initial stage before the age of five or six. Living in the moment means no worries, and can be immersed in simple things for a long time without heart and soul. But the premise is that an adult can cover it to help him prevent potential risks and injuries.
- Between the ages of five or six to eighteen, you will be constantly exposed to all kinds of new things, new concepts, and new friends. For a simple-minded individual, every day is a new day, enough to satisfy one’s curiosity and learn new things, so he is still happy, full of longing and anticipation for the future. But this kind of happiness decays with age and the pressure of exam-oriented education.
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Even if the physical conditions are not good and the family is poor, but you are still growing up before at least eighteen years old, as long as you are still growing, no matter what dimension it is, growth itself is the reason for people to be happy.
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But after the age of 25, most people cannot grow taller. Many people basically don’t gain knowledge anymore. The contact surface of information, the contact surface of social interaction, and the scope of daily activities have basically stagnated. Marriage and childbirth mean that various responsibilities and pressures to bear are increased, and leisure time is rapidly reduced. This is the turning point when happiness begins to shrink rapidly. Then many people will never be able to get rid of this quagmire. They can only curse, sigh and complain.
- «Happiness is neither virtue nor happiness. It is neither this thing nor that thing. The essence of happiness is growth. When we grow up, we will feel happy.» This quote is from the Irish poet, 1923 Connaught Bell Prize winner William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
6. The greatest happiness is comprehensive, long-term, organic, and sustainable compound growth. When you grow up, you are naturally happy, and you will not treat this as an illusory philosophical issue. A person who continues to grow in multiple dimensions has no time to realize that happiness is a topic worth discussing. If you have to repeatedly discuss with others what happiness is, then you can basically be sure that you will not have considerable growth in any dimension.
7. The underlying physiological mechanisms of pleasure and happiness are different. The former mainly stimulates neurons through the combination of dopamine and dopamine receptors. But the more stimulation, the fewer dopamine receptors, and more dopamine will be needed in the future to bring pleasure and motivation. In the end, dependence and addiction are formed. Obesity caused by frequent eating, frequent trading regardless of risk and leverage, and drug addiction are all similar mechanisms.
8. It’s fun to eat, drink and play, but if you do too much, it seems that something is wrong. The essence is that after the matter is over, your energy and information efficiency has not improved. You wouldn’t say that one steamed bun is full, but now half a steamed bun is enough. Your efficiency in absorbing and using glucose has not improved at all. Your ability to penetrate the nature of the problem has not improved. Happy for a while, but if people do not make substantial progress, they will remain empty after the end.
9. If through continuous efforts, you get a real efficiency improvement of several times in a certain dimension, although the process is a bit difficult, this is true happiness. You will find that because of the improvement in efficiency, your resource surplus will be higher. There is more redundancy, and things that could not be done before are easy to do. The space and time range you can explore is larger, and you are full of expectations and strive to seek further efficiency improvements.
10. This is an essential difference between happiness and happiness. And when I look back at the state of inefficiency that year, it feels pure silly*.
11. The efficiency improvement can take many forms: In the past, the Internet broadband access speed was 100 MB, and now it can reach 1G; in the past, any thoughts can only be sent to a few hundred people, and now a text can reach tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands See, get unexpected feedback and enlightenment; I have encountered difficult problems in the past, and I can’t do it for a long time. Now I search on the Internet and shout in the circle of friends. I quickly found several alternatives, and it was done in a few minutes;
12. The essence of effective accumulation is that it can bring multi-dimensional compound growth on this basis. What I did many years ago and a good habit I formed can still benefit from it now. For example, if the road is repaired in a place, the transportation cost is lowered, the cost of the goods is also lowered, and the loss of traffic vehicles is also lowered, so the service life is longer, and so on. The reason why the U.S. agricultural production efficiency is the highest in the world is that the agricultural population accounts for less than 1.5% of the total population.
13. The biggest dilemma for migrant workers is that most of their efforts can only be exchanged for cheap praise from the boss and some depreciating legal currency, and they cannot produce an effective accumulation of life-long benefits inefficiency. Then every time you change jobs, you have to reset it again. The so-called mid-life crisis means that there is no point in growth, and I don’t know how to grow organically. I want to demolish the east wall to supplement the west wall to seek superficial growth but sink deeper and deeper in the quagmire.
14. So to get happiness, we must systematically and scientifically find new sustainable growth points, especially the growth of wealth, leisure time and knowledge. But there are many information patches of fog and scams in this world, and many external growth points are found to be empty after entering, and even the previous savings are lost. This is an objective reality. Facing this difficult reality, there is no easy way to cure the disease. It can only be surpassed by long-term and steady accumulation.
15. From the perspective of the cost and efficiency of information input, in today’s world, there is no more continuous reading (a total of thousands), reading books in various fields and industries, reading various portable e-books, and the cost is lower. Identify traps faster, get rid of the quagmire, and look for ways to obtain new growth points.
16. From the perspective of output cost and efficiency, writing (including writing code) is a good way to improve efficiency. For example, you used to write something that was read by only a hundred people, but now it can be read by one million people, and the efficiency has increased ten thousand times. But how can more people watch it? One technique is not to discuss superficial phenomena (such as price fluctuations), but to dig deeper into the underlying mechanism. The appearance will become obsolete in a few days, but if the underlying mechanism is really understood, it will be repeated countless times.
17. The second way to improve efficiency is to insist on building your own brand. The essence of the brand is an invisible network, and works linked to this network will be easy to promote, and will be prosperous, greatly improving the efficiency of communication, and will continue to accumulate and superimpose. Many people register an inexplicable and unbranded screen name on Weibo or Twitter. Once the account is blocked, all previous creations are gone, the effort is wasted, and no one remembers who they are. The Beatles lead singer John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono (1933-) inherits approximately $12 million in royalties each year. This is the high efficiency and win-win situation brought by the real brand.
18. The third point of improving efficiency is to constantly look for new channels and methods to increase the composability of their own works. Every time a new combination is used by the outside world, it is a dilutive cost for the original creator and a booster to expand the contact space, especially for virtualized products. Moreover, the original creators of this combination are often unpredictable. Always adhere to the compatibility with the most versatile connection mode, and continuously connect with the most combinable network. British musician Ed Sheeran’s «Shape of you» has been played on Spotify 2.3 billion times from 2017 to January 2020. Spotify pays him £0.0034 in royalties each time it plays. The cumulative income has exceeded 7 million. GBP. One reason for the popularity of this single is that it is Sheeran’s first song suitable for dance. There are multiple dance videos with its soundtrack on the tubing, and it has hundreds of millions of hits at every turn.
19. Generally people can only understand the immediate application of their labour results in the tangible fields, but if they connect their highly versatile works or services to the most combinable network, you can’t derive them. There is no upper limit for imagined combinatorial applications. The potential value of this type of creation will always be underestimated in the long run. «Who is in charge of what is right or wrong behind me, the whole village heard that Cai Zhonglang» translated in modern language means that the future value of certain work cannot be evaluated by the original creator himself. Therefore, we must think more about solving the problem of high versatility and continue to establish connections with highly combinable networks.
20. There is a more subtle increase in efficiency, which can be called «cognitive efficiency». For example, facing this complex and changing world in the past, doubts but no point. After the cognitive efficiency is improved, you will know what you want to pull when you see a certain person. When you see a person advancing and leveraging, you can foresee their future liquidation; see someone who wants to cover up the publicity. It can be speculated about what he lacks; seeing someone’s arbitrariness, you can foresee future collisions between him and countless southern walls; seeing subtle signals, you can more quickly perceive the development of the situation in advance. and many more
21. Some experiences about «cognitive efficiency»:
- If your friend treats you indifferently and perfunctorily, he is not interested in you. Don’t be sentimental or wishful thinking.
- In many cases, when one person or several people say nothing or do nothing, the amount of information deduced is greater than what he said or did on the surface. Many things on the surface are illusions and are used to mislead outsiders.
- If you see fraud in a place, the scale of fraud in the place you haven’t seen may be at least be an order of magnitude higher.
- If you understand your own dark side, you can better understand the dark side of others (the original words come from Swiss psychologist Jung).
- Despite this, most people are still habitually wishful thinking, misled by surface illusions, underestimating the scale of fraud, and always wanting to treat others as fools (and underestimating the dark side of outsiders).
22. In the end, sharing information and cooperating with a large group of reliable distributed network nodes quickly, safely, and comprehensively is the core strategy to save costs and greatly improve efficiency. It is Homo sapiens that eventually surpasses other creatures and dominates the evolutionary path of the earth. «Sharing information and collaboration» is essentially software technology. It doesn’t seem to be as sexy as eating a big piece of meat, drinking a big bowl, or dancing with a gun, but it can allow a single service module on the network to be reused to the greatest extent, layered on top of each other. , Become the key to determining the pros and cons of the outcome. This is also the core reason why Amazon has much second-rate technical personnel but still makes a first-class company.
23. This «shared information and collaboration» is not only among people but also on many other levels. For example, the multimodal association cortex in the brain of Homo sapiens can integrate information from various dimensions. An example of the brain’s lack of comprehensive abilities. For example, if you see a photo of a human face, you can understand that it is a human face, but you cannot associate it with a specific person, and you cannot quickly judge whether it is an opportunity or a threat. Because of inefficiency in the long-term survival competition, they are destined to be eliminated. See the author’s old article
Wang Chuan: Talk about building a personal information infrastructure
24. There is no upper limit to the compound growth of efficiency, and there is no upper limit to happiness.