From Nothing to Something

From Nothing to Something

In the blink of an eye, the time has come for my son to graduate from college. He stands at a crossroads between pursuing a graduate degree and entering the workforce. I would prefer that he work first, and then, on the basis of his real needs after gaining some experience, decide whether to go on to graduate school. But he himself is more eager to continue his studies. I respect his choice and let him first walk the road of his own life according to his own wishes. Yet should the day come when the job market for young people turns bleak and he finds it hard to land a job that satisfies him, I, as his father, will step forward to lift him up and help him start his own business.

When it comes to our child's future, my wife and I do not see eye to eye entirely, but we never quarrel over it - there is not even a dispute between us. I lean toward letting him not consider job-hunting at all and go straight into starting a business. His mother would rather he find a stable job and live a smooth, untroubled life.

That my wife and I could come together to form a harmonious family is, in truth, something of a surprise. The two of us differ enormously in temperament. In my youth I loved nothing more than striking out on my own - and that is still true today, only the way I strike out is not quite the same as before. As for her, the very first job she found after graduation is one she could hold all the way through to retirement.

That a person like her should acknowledge me and support nearly every decision I make is something many people would find hard to imagine. Perhaps because we were classmates through both middle school and high school, she has a deep appreciation of my character and abilities, and so the differences between us simply fade into the background.

There is one thing we have in common: we are both easygoing people. We seldom grow anxious about the present or the future, we do not cling too tightly to our own opinions, and toward our child's future we both hold an attitude of letting nature take its course. This does not mean we do not love our son or are indifferent to him - it is only that we would rather watch him grow at his own natural pace.

All my life I have never truly held a job in the proper sense of the word; instead, I have spent my whole life immersed in libraries. Even during the years I worked at a hospital in Beijing, I was allowed to arrange my own time freely and never had to punch a clock. I worked in a free, collaborative mode rather than a simple employer-employee relationship.

From the bottom of my heart, I do not wish my son to enter the system and then, whether he likes it or not, spend his whole life, for the sake of stability, doing work that may well be dull. I would far rather he be like me: while still young, strike out on his own, learn to create a career of his own from nothing, and provide jobs for others, rather than cringe and beg for a job at another's door.

I also hope he will learn a way of thinking that creates something from nothing, rather than following convention all his life and walking in the footsteps of other people's thinking. As long as young people do not break the law or commit crimes, there are ample chances to take risks in their careers; if they fail, they can start over, and there is nothing to fear.

Work, in fact, can reshape a person's mind. Someone who does the same kind of fixed-pattern work over a long period gradually becomes conservative. But a person who has grown accustomed to constantly facing new challenges, always needing to find the answers himself, will keep his vitality and remain far more open than the former.

In my lifetime I have built many things from nothing. In my youth, pressed hard by the need to make a living, I had no choice but to make many decisions that seemed risky. Before I was even twenty, I gave up college and chose to start a business. Because no one was there to catch me if I fell, I taught myself to swim in the great rivers and lakes of society. And in that process I built an unshakeable self-confidence; to this day I still dare to challenge any difficulty, to think what others dare not think, and to do what others dare not do.

Such experiences have ensured that my way of thinking is utterly different from that of more than ninety percent of people. I have never felt unsettled by the changes in society, nor do I worry about making a living - not because I have a large sum of money that would let me live the rest of my life without working, but because I know that if the road I am on leads nowhere, as long as I am willing to explore, I can soon find a new path good enough to support my family, and it will not take much time. In 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 the four words 'creating from nothing.' At first it was because I had no choice - I had to strike out empty-handed, and could only build 'from nothing.' Later it was because I loved to challenge myself: in business, technology, medicine and many other fields, I loved doing things that built something 'from nothing.'

'Creating from nothing' is an ability that can be trained. At least more than half of the population has the potential for it. It is only the fear of uncertainty deep within us that keeps many people from daring to try 'creating from nothing' - and this is a tremendous waste, both of our human capabilities and of our very lives.