Reflections During Travel in October 2024
To my friend Chen Zheng,
Thoughts and Expectations Regarding Work in the Near Future
I feel that my enthusiasm for work has recovered quite a bit. Let’s spend some time later to adjust the Fountain strategy to its ideal position. Currently, the most urgent issues I see are the optimization of alerting and position adjustment methods.
- The lack of alerting makes us very insensitive to risk exposure, which affects our motivation and confidence in adjusting positions and leverage to an ideal state.
- The inconvenience of position adjustment makes it a troublesome and undesirable task for us. Imagine if adjusting positions were a very simple thing.
In DevOps, there is a concept called Day N. Day 0 refers to software design and planning, Day 1 to implementation and deployment, and Day 2 to ongoing maintenance and iteration. Applied to the Fountain strategy, we have clearly entered the Day 2 phase, which, in my view, is a boring and prolonged stage. However, people, including myself, often easily overlook its importance and become numb over time.
However, the recent vacation has given me some time to think and rest. Upon reflection, perfecting the Fountain strategy should be our most serious and necessary task. After ensuring the existence of risk control and the convenience of operations for Fountain, we can free up our hands to explore things like Meme, which expand our business boundaries.
My Overall Thoughts on Our Current Situation and Future
My expectation for the future (similar to our expectations in March but with some subtle differences, and similar to my thoughts in May with some development) is that, relying on the stable operation of Fountain, we can obtain a continuous cash flow to support the expansion of other future businesses.
My judgment of our situation is that the most important need to fulfill is a stable and sufficient cash flow: the most basic requirement for maintaining the reproduction of our own standard of living.
Next is our own development to a higher level. My idea of this higher level is: expanding the assets we can control tenfold, reaching the tens of millions level—to achieve a certain degree of freedom. To accomplish this step, we need to further develop the NTNL venture. In the thoughts I sent you in May, I outlined several paths we have taken or considered for developing our venture, discussing the most important issue of how to allocate our energy. Now, five months later, looking back, we have completed a shift in posture, from confusion to confidence: we have entered the Web3 field, operated our fund with a more prudent and mature attitude, and explored some further ways to make money based on Yuan as a product. These three points, I believe, are our favorable conditions. Embarking on the journey is more important than obtaining the scriptures. It can be said that we have completed the important starting point.
How to further develop the NTNL venture? In my view, we need to do two things:
- Deepen communication, enhance information acquisition, discover inspiration, and avoid working behind closed doors.
- Patiently and continuously grasp and develop the favorable conditions we already have (such as the three mentioned above).
The second point is a matter of understanding and attitude, which can be addressed by adjusting our mindset. The first point is necessary but something we currently lack.
For example, the acquisition of these favorable conditions we have came from stumbling and serendipity over the past two years. We both feel that such favorable turning points come too slowly. What is the reason? “Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.” Our past practices did not strike a balance between these two. We absorbed too little new knowledge, and in comparison, engaged in too much stubborn, narrow-minded thinking. Additionally, there was a lot of numbness (at least on my part).
In September, we had a discussion where you mentioned that work should follow its natural course, not forcing oneself to work, and that happily wasting time is better than working painfully. I agree with this statement, but at the time, I felt something was missing. During that day’s discussion, I didn’t accurately grasp what it was, leading you to misunderstand that I needed some pressure from you, like a challenge, which was not the case. Now I would like to add: besides the instrumental rationality of work attitude and methods in daily life that you mentioned, we need value rationality to guide our direction. This value rationality is to further develop the NTNL venture, so as to expand our asset scale, and then further develop some mission-oriented venture. Starting from such value rationality, we certainly need to balance our daily state, avoid excessive anxiety and pain, and also maintain some pressure and desire that drive us to work.
Some Other Casual Talk
This trip has been a great opportunity for me to think and clear my mind. I just talked about anxiety. I don’t know why I couldn’t grasp it well before to describe it in words. Actually, the source of my anxiety is simple and can be attributed to anxiety about insufficient capital. Anxiety and desire are two sides of the same coin:
- Anxiety and desire regarding economic capital: Specifically, anxiety about the decline of one’s own class and anxiety about insufficient confidence in moving to a higher level.
- Anxiety and desire regarding cultural capital: Desire for general social recognition and desire to know more.
Essentially, it is a longing for a certain kind of “freedom”: the freedom to buy things and the freedom to experience the existence of life.
These anxieties and desires can actually become fuel that drives my life. Looking at it today, it’s not that I am too anxious in daily life, but that I just needed a vacation to think and rest (lol). In the future, I should rest more proactively. How can one work well without resting well?