A person’s work state can be divided into three types: One is the negative feedback type, where the harder you work, the worse off you are. The second is the no-feedback type, where no matter how hard you work, there is no significant difference compared to those who don’t work hard. The last one is the positive feedback type, where working harder leads to better results.
If you’re a salesperson doing telemarketing in a third-rate small company, you fall into the negative feedback or no-feedback category. No matter how hard you try or love your job, there’s no improvement.
If you’re involved in MLM, P2P, or agency franchise-type industries, you’re in the negative feedback category, where the harder you work, the more you get exploited.
If you work in a state-owned enterprise or within a bureaucratic system, it’s a no-feedback or negative feedback mechanism. Working hard doesn’t yield significantly better returns, and sometimes, the harder you work, the more exhausted you become.
If you’re in a Fortune 500 company working in marketing or sales, you’re in a positive feedback mechanism where the harder you work, the higher the returns.
Should you follow the experiences of successful people, especially those like Da Vinci, Buffett, Dalio, Musk, and Jobs, who are masters of motivational speeches? It depends on the environment you’re in.
Here’s a side note: why do most successful people’s shared experiences seem useless and even make them appear shallow, naive, and foolish? These so-called successful individuals, like directors and vice-presidents of foreign or renowned companies, are not necessarily exceptionally cunning or smart. Instead, they are genuinely naive and shallow, lacking an understanding of the complexities of human nature. They don’t need to be cunning and deceitful; they are not familiar with the treacherous side of human nature. They don’t need to be. With their high education, good luck graduating from college, and immediately entering a renowned company, especially a team with outstanding business lines, they don’t need additional thinking, guessing, understanding human nature, or society. They just need to work hard without much thought, immerse themselves like Da Vinci, and naturally climb the ranks.
Success is a peculiar thing: For those with high intelligence, good education, and a good social class, success doesn’t require profound wisdom. For those with average intelligence, ordinary education, and a lower social class, success necessitates extremely profound and exceptional wisdom.
This creates a mission impossible; those with average intelligence and education find it challenging to acquire wisdom and are more easily deceived.
Middle-class individuals with a high education level remain shallow and naive. They boast in times of economic stability but quickly collapse when companies downsize.
Individuals with strong hard skills who excel in solo performances are indeed remarkable. While it sounds simple, very few can achieve it, whether from prestigious universities or ordinary schools, from wealthy classes or the middle-income working class. Therefore, in terms of success and understanding society, interpreting human nature, Western success literature can be read but not fully trusted, only used as a reference.
You should read two types of books:
- Books written by Chinese authors, such as Han Feizi, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Guiguzi, Xunzi, etc. All of them delve into conspiracies and analyze human nature very explicitly and accurately.
- Western social sciences, popular science books. Books like game theory, behavioral economics, etc., explain human irrational behavior in detail.
The wisdom of individuals like Da Vinci, Jobs, and Musk has a significant drawback. They assume that 100% of people in the workplace are purely rational. Because they are rational enough, your efforts will always result in positive feedback. Thus, you don’t need to learn deceit and cunning; you just need to love your job, invest effort, and naively put in the effort, expecting good results.
However, in reality, an average person encounters 99.99% of people who are not rational but are filled with irrationality. Therefore, if you don’t understand human nature and only love hard work, you become a sucker easily fooled.
This is the difference between strategy and tactics.
The wisdom of individuals like Da Vinci tells you: love your work, fully immerse yourself, and you’ll naturally see good results.
But the wisdom of Li Si and the disciples of Xunzi tells you: if you work hard in the wrong place, it’s useless. Only when you’re in the right place will you thrive.
Xunzi tells you that human nature is inherently wicked; there’s no such thing as naturally good people. Transformation is needed, using legal systems, rewards and punishments, moral education, to restrain human nature, making everyone hypocritical. Inner thoughts may be evil, but surface actions doing good deeds for a lifetime will make one a good person. Believing that deep down, everyone is good is a naive and foolish idea.
So, is the wisdom of Da Vinci more sophisticated, or the wisdom of Li Si and Xunzi’s disciples more sophisticated? I think I don’t need to say more.
In practice, when facing specific workplace environments, most people won’t use these broad principles. The office environment is divided into several types, each with its own internal logic and specific rules.
To understand the causes behind the behavior of colleagues and leaders in the office, what specific characteristics each type has, how to get along with and deal with different types of colleagues and leaders, and how to judge whether the office environment is a negative feedback or no-feedback one or a positive feedback one, all of these require hands-on guidance from experienced seniors. Don’t expect to solve these issues by reading a few books.