Author: Zi Bo (ZiBo)
Reviewer: Weiming

  Hello, my name is Zi Bo (ZiBo), and I graduated this year. I do not know why, but here I am writing an article for you. The last time I remember a Chinese teacher praising my writing was in sixth grade. His comment was: “If you didn’t copy this, it’s very well written!” So even if my article does not entertain you, it will not waste your time.

  I am an introvert who often looks up at the sky. When classmates run into me, they sometimes ask, “Are you pondering life again?” I smile without answering. (Classmates greet me when they see me because I have never been someone who fades into the background. I may be introverted, but I do not like being unnoticed.) I enjoy thinking, and I can appreciate the meaning of both “If I learned the Way in the morning, I could die content that evening” and “Learning makes me happy.” But I am neither exceptionally well read nor a top student. I dislike superficiality and prefer people with depth. I am not a badass; I just like acting like one.

  All right—time to bang the table and get to the point!

  “To live is to change the world.” That is the only line from Steve Jobs that I remember, and it matters. When I reached a low point in life and felt lost, it told me why I was alive and what life meant. Since I consider myself someone who likes to think, I had already given some thought to this question: “How can we change the world and realize the value of our lives?” 

  Let me restate the question: “How can we change the world and realize the value of our lives?” First, clear your mind and imagine yourself in the following situation:

  Suppose there are five people in the world: you, Black, Red, Blue, and White. You want to change the world. Black is a doctor, while Red, Blue, and White are ordinary people on the street. These five people and their surroundings make up the world you want to change. Here is what you know: Red is extremely hungry, Blue is ill, Black is a highly skilled doctor, and you are wondering which path to take in the future.

  At this point, you notice an unsolved problem: Red is extremely hungry, but there is no cook who can prepare a meal. That is your understanding of the world—you now know what the world needs. But you would not immediately resolve to become a cook, because you have not yet assessed your own circumstances. What if you had no hands? Your first step must therefore be to understand yourself, with the aim of identifying what you have.

  Once you understand yourself, you discover that generations of your family have been cooks and that the book propping up a table at home is a cookbook thought to have been lost for years. Let us define your understanding of yourself and the world as your worldview. By combining those two kinds of understanding, you finally realize that you really should become a cook. You now have a clear goal, and we will define the essence of a goal as creating a particular need. Once you have a goal, the next step is to use what you already know to achieve it; we will call the means of achieving a goal a methodology. To make the goal explicit: you want to become a cook and prepare a delicious meal for hungry Red. Cooked rice is made by steaming rice, and both rice and vegetables are grown in fields. We will call these things resources. Achieving a goal is thus the process of gathering resources and combining them effectively until they become the “particular need.” You can grow rice yourself or buy it, which gives us a distinction between “internal resources” and “external resources.” In real life, a great many resources may be external. For example, the circumstances of someone born into wealth may be the lifelong goal you have set for yourself. For ordinary people like us, then, the central question is how to acquire internal resources continuously and efficiently. That means finding out how to prepare rice, vegetables, and other ingredients quickly and well; how to learn the best culinary skills; how to develop the best recipes; and how to master cooking techniques such as sautéing and deep-frying. Broadly speaking, this is the process of learning. Learning can be painful, but it can also be joyful. One more thing is crucial: we must keep improving our methodology, because it arises from our goals and existing understanding, and that understanding may be incomplete. As the saying goes, “Practice determines knowledge.” We should regularly reflect on our own practical experience, and we should read the books in which others have recorded theirs. These are what we call “internal resources.” At the same time, we should not dismiss “external resources.” Cooperation may be difficult, but it can be tremendously powerful. 

  Below is a mind map. Today is November 13, and the map happened to be drawn exactly six months ago, on May 13:

  I am admittedly not very good at expressing myself, and this is an enormous question. What I have developed so far is only a rough framework, which I hope to keep refining in the future.

  This is the most important and central idea I have right now, and I wanted to share it with everyone. I will leave the typos in the mind map as they are. Please keep them in mind, and I sincerely apologize if they cause any difficulty.

  Thanks to the APC Science Outreach Group. Without it, I do not know whether I would ever have written an article to organize these earlier thoughts.