From Nothing to Something

In the blink of an eye, my son is nearly graduating from university. He faces the choice between graduate school and employment. I hoped he would work first and then decide whether graduate school was needed based on his actual situation, but he himself prefers to pursue a master's. I respect his choice and let him follow his own path for now. But if one day the job market for young people is poor and he cannot find a satisfactory job, I as his father will step in to lift him up and help him start a business.

On my child's future, his mother and I do not entirely agree, but we will not quarrel over it, nor even argue. I lean toward him not considering a job at all and starting a business directly; his mother leans toward him finding a stable job and living a steady, quiet life.

That my wife and I have formed a harmonious family is itself something of an accident. The two of us differ greatly in personality. When young I loved roaming and taking risks—and I still do, only the way I roam is not quite the same as before. She, on the other hand, took her first job after graduation and stayed there until retirement.

That such a person as her could accept me and support nearly all my decisions is something many people would find hard to imagine. Perhaps because we were classmates in both junior and senior high school, she has long recognized my character and ability, and so overlooks these differences between us.

One thing we share: both of us are very relaxed people, not easily anxious about the present or the future, not overly attached to our own opinions, and we both take a natural, let-it-be attitude toward our child's future. This is not to say we do not love our son or are indifferent to him; we simply prefer to watch him grow naturally.

In my whole life I have never held what one might call a real job, yet I have spent my whole life in libraries. Even when I worked at a Beijing hospital, I was allowed to arrange my own time freely and did not have to clock in; it was a free, collaborative mode of work rather than a simple employment relationship.

Deep down, I do not want my son to enter the system and, whether he likes it or not, spend his whole life at a perhaps boring job for the sake of stability. I would rather he, like me, make his way in the world while young, learn to build his own career from nothing, and provide jobs for others, rather than depending on others' favor to beg for a position.

I also hope he learns a "from-nothing-to-something" way of thinking, rather than spending his whole life following convention and other people's patterns. As long as young people do not break the law, they have plenty of chances to take risks in their careers; if they fail they can start over, and there is nothing to fear.

Work can actually reshape a person's brain. Those who spend years on a fixed, routine job gradually become conservative, whereas someone accustomed to constantly facing new challenges and always having to find the answers to problems on their own stays vital and far more open-minded.

In my life I have done many things from nothing to something. When young, driven by necessity, I had to make many seemingly risky decisions. At under twenty I gave up university to start a business. Because no one was there to back me up, I learned to swim in the great river and lake of society, and in the process built unshakable confidence. To this day I dare to challenge any difficulty, think what others dare not think, and do what others dare not do.

This experience has destined my thinking to be utterly different from more than 90% of people. I have never felt uneasy amid social change, nor do I worry about survival—not because I have a fortune that lets me never work, but because I know that if the current path does not work, as long as I am willing to explore, I can quickly work out new ways to support my family without spending much time. Over the past thirty years this has been proven again and again.

Most of the training I received in the first half of my life can be summed up in four words: "from nothing to something." At first it was because I had no choice and had to break in bare-handed, so I had no option but to build from nothing. Later it was because I love challenging myself, and in business, technology, medicine, and other fields I love doing things that go from nothing to something.

"From nothing to something" is an ability that can be trained; at least half the population has this potential. It is only our deep-seated fear of uncertainty that keeps many people from trying to build from nothing—a huge waste, both of human capability and of our lives.