It Is Already Good Enough If One Knows Before Forty What One Truly Wants

Confucius said: At thirty one stands established; at forty one is free of perplexity. For a person to reach the state of being free of perplexity, he must have roughly seen the world clearly and roughly seen himself clearly. Achieving both is no easy matter. To see both the world and oneself clearly requires very rich life experience.

We live in society and can hardly detach ourselves from it and from others. We survive by establishing certain relations with this society; whether the way of life we have chosen suits our own heart is not something we know at the outset. Only by trying, by trial and error, do we finally learn the way of life that truly suits our nature. Only by practicing do we learn the work we truly love. And these attempts take time. Hence before forty, a person can hardly understand what he truly wants.

In my own life I have done many things. In college I studied mechanical engineering and automation, but I did not like the major; I loved medicine and philosophy, so I chose to drop out, moved to Beijing, and rented a room near the National Library. I spent most of my time immersed in the library reading the books I loved, while making a living by writing articles.

After that, influenced by a friend, I went into international e-commerce; and because this business required it, I began to learn programming. Ten years ago my mother fell ill, and I returned to the library and began a career of self-study in Chinese and Western medicine. After studying for five or six years, I gradually realized that what I truly loved was medicine and philosophy—helping people resolve physical and mental suffering. So four years ago I began going through the legal procedures and set out on the road to taking the licensing examination and practicing medicine full-time.

Today I roughly understand that the work I truly love in this life is practicing medicine and writing. If time could flow backward, I would have set out firmly on the road of medicine and writing from the beginning, and not wasted so much time on other things.

The age we live in is very restless; most people have lost themselves in it and do not know what they truly want, merely working hard to improve their living conditions. Few people work with joy. Not long ago I read a survey showing that employee engagement in China is quite low, ranking at the bottom among several major countries. The root cause is that many people are in jobs they do not love.

There is a Chinese idiom, 'live in peace and enjoy one's work.' Unfortunately, in the age we live in today, neither is easy. Sky-high housing prices make it hard to have a settled property; as for enjoying one's work, that is even harder. Many people today do not enjoy their work; they enjoy their salary. As long as the income is high enough, whether the work is enjoyable doesn't matter. So they end up exhausted; this state makes many people merely endure their days, and life, like Chinese herbal decoction, grows more bitter the longer it is simmered. Hence most people can only look forward to early retirement to enjoy a life of their own.

This is truly the greatest betrayal of one's splendid life. In recent years people often sigh that China has not produced a master for many years. Whether in the natural sciences or the humanities, master-level figures are now rare. This is connected with the broad environment, which has many people doing work they are fundamentally unwilling to do. Work is like imprisonment; to talk of producing results is a joke.

The great Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi of the Song dynasty said that in scholarship one must 'play with and ponder' (wansuo) before one grasps it. This phrase is thought-provoking: what does 'play with and ponder' mean? Literally, it means to savor and reflect. It is not easy for a person to hold a 'play-and-ponder' attitude toward his own work. The prerequisites for being able to do so are, first, love; second, willingness to delve. Without love, where does the willingness to delve come from?

No calling is without its drudgery. Anything is interesting when done as a hobby; it is dull when done as a career. Take studying medicine: the famous Qing physician Wang Ang once said that reading medical books makes one drowsy. Wang Ang was an honest man telling the honest truth; I too often grow drowsy reading medical books. But when I wake up and look for a book to read, I still feel that apart from medical books, all others are insipid. Putting the book down to go out and play for a few hours is fine; playing for two or three days begins to feel like too much, and if I have played several days without reading medical books, I feel wretched all over.

I have now been studying medicine for some time, and my clinical results are passable. I intend to study medicine, treat patients, and write until the moment I can no longer move. I have no retirement plan, because I love what I am doing. In the past I did many jobs I did not love, which made me wretched and eager to finish work early. But now that I love what I do, I am unwilling to step back into being an idle man. For a life of action, why become an inactive idler? Though I hope soon to leave the noisy big city, I have never thought of stopping my writing and my practice.

For a long time I could not understand why I lived so painfully, so without enthusiasm. In my earlier years I was in business, starting up five or six ventures in succession; my goal was to earn enough money by thirty and then retire. I had been an extremely diligent person since childhood, yet in my twenties I was so eager to retire at thirty; this only shows that, deep down, I loathed the work I was doing then and wanted to escape it as soon as possible.

Few men truly want to step back into a secondary role. My father-in-law and my own father both found it very hard to adjust when they stepped back. I hold the view that men are born into this world not to enjoy pleasure but to serve society. Once a man truly cannot serve society, many feel they have lost their reason for existing.

In the various jobs I once held I could not find my own value. I had once been an outstanding person: in high school I topped every subject, and my writing and speaking talents were outstanding; I could be called a person of brilliant gifts. My teachers and classmates all had high hopes of me, and I too had hoped to accomplish something.

But this long, tedious life made me lose confidence in myself. For a few years I was deeply insecure, feeling I was pure good-for-nothing, a total loser, a typical Zhong Yong—bright in youth, disappointing in adulthood. Even my wife, who had once greatly admired me for my erudition, turned into someone who could find nothing right in me; for a time she deeply resented my mountain of books, feeling they had made me an impractical bookworm, and that knowledge had made me poor.

There is an old saying: of all scholars, none is of any use. In this age when the economic tide decides everything, if a person does not properly go into business and make big money, striving for luxury homes and fancy cars, he is practically committing a crime against his family. Especially when relatives and friends around one have all prospered one by one, and the promising young man who once looked like a sure bet now lives worse than others—then the crime is doubled.

But I am happy. In this life I have harvested a joy and peace that the great majority of people in this world have not. My face says it all: it is a face of calm and serenity, and behind this face is a heart that may basically be called happy. I have gradually walked farther and deeper in the work I love. If one day I am dying, I will feel no regret, because I have striven and struggled for the work I love all my life. In the course of it I have enjoyed incomparable pleasure.

I can say without modesty that, regarding my whole life and the world, I have reached a state free of perplexity; before forty I came to know what I truly wanted. What I am truly proud of is not my precocity, but that my life is full and my heart is light. Every stream I was meant to wade, I have waded. Many people, to the end of their lives, still do not understand what they truly came into this world wanting. Hence those who early understand what they want are blessed.