Q&A: Is the source of passion the desire to have it all?

From Day Lesson: Growth is becoming who you are

Reader Rabbit Without Tongue: I am a person who has been living under the control of my parents since I was a child. Whether it was going abroad, choosing a profession, returning to my parents’ business after graduation, or getting married at an age when I was under their influence, I didn’t seem to have ever thought about what kind of person I wanted to be and tried to listen to my own inner voice until I was about to run into my fourth year of age, and only through changing my mind after listening to Wansir’s lessons in the past few years did I step by step get rid of some of the shackles. It was not until I was about to reach the age of four, and after listening to Wan Sir for the past few years, that I was able to break away from some of the shackles step by step. Now I want to try very much, but I have long lost the courage of 20 years old, and I still can’t get rid of the desire to be recognized by my parents. I would like to ask, for me at such an age, how can I explore the road of finding myself forward?

Reply from Wan Wan Gang

The easiest way is ‘gentle violation’. Read a banned book, watch a niche movie, take up a non-mainstream hobby, travel to a cold place. Others won’t say anything even though they don’t understand. People don’t know where their destiny lies at first, they are using one point of interest as a stepping stone to jump to another slightly farther point of interest, and then jump again, slowly self-discovering and self-actualizing at the same time.

Recently, there’s a new book called “Why Greatness Can’t Be Planned”, which I wrote the preface to the Chinese version of the book, and it talks about a “novelty search”, which is what it means. We’ll be broadcasting it in a while.

KK Advice 2: The Hot and Cold of Work

Reader seifer-zzg: Mr. Wan, is the source of passion the desire to get everything? Does fostering children’s passion for what they want and what they want to know give them just the right amount of access? Nowadays, children will buy and help solve whatever they want from their elders, and their desires will be satisfied instantly. Does this quench the enthusiasm?

Reply from Vanguard Steel -

Kevin Kelly and other tech gurus are very enthusiastic about the role of “passion” in their work, i.e., to be enthusiastic, and some psychologists’ research results also support this view. What exactly is this passion? It is not the desire of “I want to get a thing”, but a strong motivation of “I must do this thing”, which is the internal drive of human beings. In our previous column “Don’t train AI to raise people”, we mentioned a concept called “motivation strength”, which is passion. Why is passion so important?

For example, there is a job to move bricks at a construction site, and the price is very good: you will be given 100 yuan for each brick you move, and if you move a lot of bricks, there will be a double reward at a later stage, which is a good deal. Because the rewards of this job are far greater than the cost of most people’s time, people will be willing to do it. In fact, you don’t need to give 100 yuan, as long as the reward is slightly higher than the cost of time, there are people who want to do it, and will be very diligent to do it, such as delivery is such a kind of work. Such a job doesn’t require passion.

However, there are some advanced things in the world that don’t have the same certainty of reward as bricklaying and delivery. Take for example making art. Yes, famous artists get lots and lots of money and are envied by everyone; however, the success rate of making art is very, very low. The learning curve for an artist is long and winding, and full of uncertainty in between. You may have practiced this art for ten years without earning any income, and you may have run the show for ten years without getting an official role, so how do you stick with it? We only see actor Zhang Songwen in “Mad Biao”, but how did Zhang Songwen survive the years before when he was unknown and couldn’t get a good movie?

The common people’s thinking is that you just have to “stick with it”: they believe that they will be successful in the future, and they are not afraid of how much they suffer and how much they are tired. …… What is the difference between this kind of thinking and buying a lottery ticket? As long as I insist on buying lottery tickets, I will surely win one day? Isn’t it stupid to hope for a very small probability?

What really keeps artists and entrepreneurs going is never just a desire or belief in success, it’s passion. It’s what I love to do. Even if there’s simply no reward, I’m willing to do it. Because even though there is no reward from the outside world, there is a reward within me. Yesterday I wasn’t making money, today I’m still not making money, and to outsiders I’m still just as much of a failure - but in my own mind, I’m at a level today that surpasses yesterday. I recognize it in myself. You guys think I’m struggling in pain, but I’m actually growing in joy. This kind of is the internal drive, this is what passion does.

• So passion is not a desire or a belief, it’s self-driven. * Predictably, then, buying things for your children and helping them solve problems clearly does not inspire passion. Encouraging children to explore on their own and do things on their own, allowing them to develop autonomy and rate themselves, is what fosters enthusiasm.

KK Persuasion #3: Strive for Initiative in Relationships

Reader free: May I ask Mr. Wan if it is easy to confuse kindness with weakness, and how to distinguish kindness from weakness? And how can you make others think you are kind but not weak?

Reader Zheng Hongyan: How do you differentiate between taking responsibility and not apologizing for your work as stated in the Seven Rules of Power?

Wei Wei Gang replied -

These are questions I recently found a unifying theory called “The Pratfall Effect (Pratfall Effect), a concept developed by psychologist Elliot Aronson in 1966. The point is that the same behavior has different effects on different people.

The fall effect is that if you have been generally recognized as competent and highly placed, then if you suddenly make a mistake, or make a somewhat embarrassing move, such as falling down on stage, then not only does this thing not subtract from your image, but it adds to it. People say omg so you’re human too, you’re so cute hahaha.

You are not afraid to admit your mistakes because you are not worried about people thinking you are weak, you are very secure in your ability and position as proven long ago. This is why Zigong said, “A gentleman’s transgressions are like the eclipse of the sun and the moon: when they are transgressions, they are seen by all; when they are more, they are admired by all.” You all see my mistakes, I correct them, and you still look up to me.

But that’s not true if you haven’t proven yourself before. Your mistakes will make people think you are incompetent, and your obedience may make people think you are a bully. That’s why people who don’t have absolute strength must find a way to prove themselves first and build a good image.

The game of power in particular is a particularly brutal one, and if you don’t get the opening right the job behind you may be difficult. You were hired from the outside to be a middle-level director, you have not yet proved their ability to the company, then you do not have the luxury of “sincerity”.

But people like Kevin Kelly are not in a position of power. I don’t care what you think of me, I’ve got all the time in the world, I don’t need to prove myself, and I like the feeling of being honest and open.

But even if you are in the field of power, you can be Kevin Kelly in occasions outside of power. Imagine if there is a section chief who spends all day in the unit whispering to the leader, but goes home and plays rough with his wife and kids, isn’t that pathetic and hateful?

AI Topic 16: The Usefulness of People Having People

Reader Zhu Yu: If we make another leap in productivity with the help of AI, isn’t it really possible to realize what Ultraman said, pay everyone and everyone can enjoy basic security. Then, we can choose to be Zhuangzi and get away with it every day, or we can choose to become the superman that Nietzsche said, and embody our own will to live.

World Wide Steel replies -

This is a bit of a luxury to talk about right now, but let’s think about it. Direct handouts to provide basic life support may be a given in the future, but there are bound to be some unintended consequences involved.

I remember an experiment done in a city in the US [1], where a group of poor people were chosen by lottery and paid monthly to see if they would become lazy and stop looking for work. The results were interesting: people didn’t stop looking for work - but surprisingly, the divorce rate in these poor families increased significantly. Is this because couples no longer need to rely on each other when they have basic income security? We don’t know, and the experiment wasn’t conducted for long enough.

On the other hand, direct welfare for the poor is routinely practiced in many developed countries, and some of the effects are negative. In a book Mr. Luo once wrote called “The Antisocials: How the Upper and Lower Classes Ruined Germany, and Who Profited from It” (by Walter Wollenweber), it is portrayed that the welfare system just produces a lot of lazy people.

The poor people on welfare in Germany have a pretty high standard of living, and not only do they have all kinds of appliances in their homes, but they can afford the latest and greatest televisions - they just never buy any books. If you visit their homes, you will find that they are all dirty, they don’t clean their rooms at all, and they only know how to find the janitor when something goes wrong.

There’s a kayaking club that wants to give poor kids a chance to get ahead, specializes in reaching out to poor neighborhoods, provides top-notch facilities, has dedicated coaches, and does initially select a group of physically fit kids …… but after a couple of weeks, the only kids left on the team are those from middle-class families. Why? Because kayak training is very disciplined: you have to be there on time or your teammates will have to wait, you have to pay attention to the coach’s instructions, and you have to be 100% committed. …… And poor kids can’t do that.

Then you say just handing out money doesn’t seem to work, you have to organize people and find them something to do, food for work. Germany also thought of this, the government set up a number of so-called “laundry factories”, organizing the poor to dismantle and wash clothes, and then pay wages. In fact, this kind of work was meaningless because the cost of making new clothes directly was much lower than this. In fact, the factories simply threw away the clothes that the workers washed and dismantled. As a result, this did not improve the quality of will of the German poor.

The reality is that the middlemen in Germany simply turned the welfare system into a means of making money out of the government on the one hand and fooling the poor on the other. So there are a lot of conundrums here. But the German experience is not absolute, and perhaps the results would be different in another country. The key here is that the government should empower the people, not disable them.

There’s a woman economist who’s been very popular in recent years called Mariana Mazzucato, and she’s got a book out in 2021 called Mission Economy, in which she puts forward a concept called ‘pre-distribution’, which I think is a much better approach than handing out welfare.

The money you earn directly from the market is the primary distribution, the money the government sends to the people through taxes is the secondary distribution, and now some people in China are calling on capitalists to make donations, which is called the “tertiary distribution” - while the so-called pre-distribution is that the government, in the form of risk investors, will make contributions to certain programs that do not have obvious short-term benefits, and the government will also make contributions to certain programs that do not have obvious short-term benefits. The so-called pre-distribution is that the government, in the form of a venture capitalist, provides financial support to certain projects that do not have obvious short-term benefits, and fosters innovation among the people.

According to this spirit, although kayaking itself does not make money, but it is after all a more meaningful project than washing clothes: if the government says that our country needs a gold medal in kayaking, so as long as you come to train properly I’ll give you money, and I’ll also give you bonuses for your good results - this has the flavor of the national lifting system, but if the real purpose is to give people empowerment, I think it’s better than just handing out money.

Then perhaps in the future, when the material is very rich, there may be “square dance competition”, “street strongest brain”, “folk inventor forum” everywhere on the ground of China, “AI thought, “You human beings really know how to have fun,” he said.

Comments

[1] This may appear in Ian Ayres, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart (2008).

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