Q&A: How do you keep good ideas?
Q&A: How do you keep good ideas?
From Day Lesson: The Other’s Perspective
Reader Tae-Wei Chang-Taiwan Class 1-12: Hi Mr. Wan, I would like to ask about this chapter’s reference to “Don’t treat people as bad as they are, but treat them as good as you are.” How can this be combined with game theory? Does game theory expect us to treat people as they are, and treat them as good as you are?
Wiksteel replies -
Game theory deals with interests. We don’t say “return the favor” to make ourselves feel good, we say it to set norms for future actions and to rationalize the relationship of interests. For example, we are two noble families in the Spring and Autumn period, and your family suddenly takes over a piece of my family’s land and injures two of us. If I don’t retaliate at this point, I will always be bullied by you from now on, and I won’t be able to maintain my reputation in this area.
And Kevin Kelly is talking about small frictions in everyday life. Let’s say you get into a verbal altercation with someone in a public place over a line or something like that. There’s no real stakes involved, the other person is just trying to vent his feelings. He may be rude to you simply because something you said or did triggered some pent-up resentment within him. For example, this person consistently discriminates against a certain type of person and it just so happened that you caught on.
The best strategy in this situation is to ignore it. But outright ignoring may further enrage the person, so you may be able to treat him with extreme politeness. This is high profile for you and shows your cultivation; for him it will also help him calm down quickly, and perhaps he will be touched and educated.
Reader Double F: In recent times I’ve been in a level that is a bit out of place with me, and I’m a bit miserable, but I find that there’s really no good way to do it, it’s just to be myself as always, and insist on taking everyone seriously and communicating well with them, even if a lot of their ideas are different from mine, and needing to try to understand them, and taking the initiative to think from their point of view on a lot of things. But there is a point Wan sir, when you find that this is always you, other people because it has been difficult to change, only think of their own time, this sense of discrepancy, this sense of imbalance, will make people’s mind out of balance. How to regulate?
WanSir replied-
It depends on whether or not you are willing to “fiddle” with people. If you are not at all interested in human interaction, in the fate of others, then the best thing to do is to change your circle, or to develop a separate spiritual support, for example, to develop a secret project. Your fellow travelers are not around, but all over the world.
But if you are eager to do something for the local area, then now you are in a very favorable situation. You are perfectly capable of actively mobilizing the people around you to achieve something in accordance with your intentions. For this you must be good at finding the good in others and giving positive motivation. You can be an exporter of order like Song Jiang, the Timely Rain.
From the Daily Lesson: The Art of Writing
Reader guess: Mr. Wan, what is the difference between preaching and proclaiming? I’m going to participate in my unit’s speech contest soon, and I’d like to call on everyone to build a service-oriented organization. I don’t want to assume a superior posture, I just can’t stand to see some people make use of the insignificant bit of power in their hands, and then do their best to make things difficult for others.
Mr. WAN Gang replied -
When we reason normally, it’s like tutoring someone in math. Even if I don’t speak, if you know the relevant facts, you will deduce the same result yourself. Or if this reasoning were to be taught by someone else, the result would be the same. You’ll naturally agree with it once you’ve thought it through, and you’ll probably even be willing to pay to hear it from someone because you know the reasoning will be good for you.
And if a truth needs to be ‘preached’, that means it’s not necessarily in your personal favor to enforce it. For example, there’s a lot of litter in the neighborhood right now, and it’s a tragedy of the commons, and it’s really in your best interest to ignore, or even if you follow, the littering. But someone has to take the lead in improving the environment. If you preach that we shouldn’t litter and convince people to respond, you might change the situation. But the only way to get people to respond is to believe that they will respond. So you have to preach loud enough to make sure that not only can everyone hear you, but that everyone believes that everyone can hear you and that everyone will respond.
“Proclaiming” has another implication, which is that the validity of the truth has a lot to do with the identity of the speaker. You have to represent the official opinion and have authority to do so.
For example, there is a county where the government departments often make trouble for private enterprises, with frequent amortization and whatnot, causing them to leave in droves. One day the county leaders realized that this was unsustainable, and determined to attract private enterprises back, they formulated a new policy: no more amortization, no tricky inspections, and even promised that even if the entrepreneurs broke the law in the county, they would not be easily arrested.
This is a very strange policy, is the entrepreneur is superior? You can’t convince the people of this privilege - so you have to preach it loudly to the entrepreneurs and endorse it with the credit of the government.
For your speech contest, if your initiative is just a personal opinion that doesn’t represent such an up-to-date official intent, and the practice you’re advocating doesn’t provide a clear benefit to the people, then you’ll probably fail. Better yet, you can find reasons to say that not making things difficult for others and using your authority wisely will not only benefit the organization, but yourself as well.
Reader Wang Weijia: Wan Sir, sometimes a “good idea” pops up in my mind, which makes me so excited that I can’t sleep, but after I write it down, my excitement drops a little bit, and after I get to know more about it and communicate with other people, my excitement gets close to freezing point. I don’t know if I don’t have enough systematic thinking ability, but I still think in terms of wishful thinking, or other reasons. I don’t know if it’s because I don’t have enough systematic thinking ability and still have wishful thinking or other reasons. Do you have a way to screen and filter these “good ideas”?
Reply by Wikipedia–>Wikipedia
It is a wonderful experience to have an idea that you think is good and feel excited about. You should always write down such ideas and stick to them. I think getting a good idea is the best part of the day. But if you want to publish the idea, that’s a different story and you have to sift and weed through it.
At this very moment, for example, I have 881 projects in my Elite Day Class column library and 296 in my drafts box - but I’m still worried about what to write for my next column. That’s because the vast majority of these items won’t meet the criteria for being publishable and will be eliminated.
An idea is worth keeping as long as it is correct and useful. But to be worth publishing, it has to be novel, just like writing an academic paper. This novelty doesn’t mean that you find it new yourself, but the reader has to find it interesting.
As we’ve mentioned many times in our columns, “Like = Familiar + Unexpected,” and what interests readers must be within that ‘learning zone’ between comfort and panic.
To capture this degree, you need to develop a long-term sense of where the ‘baseline’ of public perception is. Anything below the baseline is a cliché not worth writing about. A baseline may not be a straight line, it can be a circle or a more complex figure, it takes different shapes in different areas ……
And all you have to do is break out of the baseline a little. You break too far and the reader doesn’t know what you’re talking about; you get too close and people don’t find it interesting.
To find out where the baseline is, you have to not only read a lot of popular articles that you may not even be able to read yourself, but you have to read the reader comments on those articles to find out what kind of reactions they provoke. You have to know what people are currently interested in, and from what perspective. There’s no manual here, you just have to find that out for yourself. It’s like you need to eat Chinese food in a lot of restaurants to understand what’s going on in Chinese food right now. That’s cultural self-awareness.
I think it’s the creator’s job to raise that baseline. I want what we’ve talked about in our columns to be understood by the public so quickly that no one else has to talk about it. Then, people can break forward from the baseline we’ve broken through.
KK Persuasion 6: Wisdom for Life
Reader Gu Yuxiao: Isn’t it too rigid to follow the “Three Doors of Speech” in casual conversation? In addition, according to my observation, many people speak in a cloudy manner, and after a little thought, they will find that it does not conform to logic and common sense, and when they check afterwards, it is really a rumor, so how to deal with this situation?
Wei Wei Gang replies -
I once had a sentiment. When I read a novel or a good TV show, I am often impressed by the dialog of the characters. Those people speak really wonderfully, sometimes one reversal per sentence, either full of deep meaning and wisdom …… I feel really ashamed of myself. And this time, as long as I open the microblogging for five minutes, my self-confidence will immediately return: those statements on the microblogging are just too stupid.
So I have a suggestion. When AI’s arithmetic becomes cheaper, I’d like to add a button to every tweet and every comment that generates the AI’s evaluation of that statement of yours. For example, if someone is about to post a netstorm-esque comment, the AI will first remind them that because of this, this and this, it’s neither true nor necessary nor kind for you to say this, and your comment will only lower your public image, are you sure you want to post it?
Users can let the AI preview it before posting it; after posting it, readers should be allowed to click that button and see what the AI says about your remark. Or just let the AI score it and show it directly.
We often complain that language models are too politically correct and love to say things that are foursquare and don’t offend - but the AI aligns itself with the prevailing values of current society. If everyone could check against the AI before speaking, the language environment, and indeed the morality of our society, might be significantly improved.
Then I imagine, if in the future every time a husband and wife quarrel, open the phone to allow the AI to be present to listen to the conversation, finished at any time to give reasoning, that will be some kind of scenario ……
Scale mindset
Reader Xiaotiancai: Is the current Netflix phenomenon considered a scale mindset? For example, the hot state of Zibo barbecue has cooled down, Zibo model want to scale should be to expand the consumer goods category (other than barbecue), or upgrade the level of service? Or both? Otherwise, the end of Netflix are short-lived.
Wagner replied -
Netflix bandwagon is a reflection of scale thinking, but Zibo BBQ is not. The explosion of Zibo BBQ is, as I understand it, a ‘reversal’ of the modern trend towards scaling.
Nowadays, many restaurants, the dishes you order are not made live on site from start to finish, but are simply processed with pre-made dishes and cooking packages. Everything is standardized. You spend a lot of money, but you don’t get to eat the chef’s handiwork. In this situation people start to crave for a real meal.
Zibo barbecue, if you put it a few decades ago, this is not the service we think we deserve? Not exorbitant prices, real food, by a real person to do their best, even sweating on the spot to give you grilled out, you eat both assured and satisfied. But with the trend toward scale, that experience has become rare.
So while scale and standardization have made life more convenient, they have also triggered a desire for authentic, non-industrialized service. People give barbecue stall waiters nicknames, people like playing online games to “swipe” a moncler outlet store mobile mung bean cake stall as an achievement …… people feel Zibo has real people, not those robots in the shopping malls of big cities.
And this anti-scaling demand is actually good, at least it solves the employment. It’s unlikely that everyone has the leverage to play the role of one person serving 10,000 people.
In that spirit, then, for Zibo to go further, it would never be a matter of turning barbecue into cooking kits, but rather extending this hard-to-scale service concept to other areas. For example, if Zibo can provide medical or cosmetic services, you come to us to spend how much money are surely real without worrying about being cheated, that must also be very promising.