Zhang Yiming, founder and CEO of ByteDance Science and Technology Co., Ltd., founder of today's headlines and founder of Tik Tok. In 213, he was selected as "3 entrepreneurs under 3 in China" by Forbes and "4 business elites under 4 in China" by Fortune.

The following is his sharing: Why do people with similar level widen the gap many years after graduation?

Hello everyone! You are all very young. I was under a lot of pressure when I came here today. Because I graduated almost 11 years ago, when I saw you, I really felt that "the waves behind the Yangtze River pushed the waves before".

I participated in the school recruitment in Wuhan last year, and I feel that the quality of the new generation of young people is really very good. I was thinking yesterday about what I should share with you today. After thinking about it, I first drew up the topic and changed Jobs's "Stay hungry, Stay foolish" to "Stay hungry, Stay young".

I want to share with you my own work experience and experience after graduation. In addition, as an interviewer, I may have interviewed 2 young people in the past 1 years. Some are in the same company as me, and some go to other companies. Their development is actually very different. From the algorithmic level, we call this "positive example" and "negative example".

I want to share: Why is there such a big difference between "positive example" and "negative example"?

what is "Stay hungry, Stay young"? "Stay hungry", as we all know, means curiosity, thirst for knowledge and self-motivation. But why say "Stay young"?

I think young people have many advantages: they don't set rules, they don't have much self-preservation, they often break the rules, they work very hard, they don't compromise, and they are not sophisticated.

Ten years later, some young people still maintain these good qualities. I think this is "Stay young".

The people of "Stay Young" have hardly reached the ceiling, and kept growing up. On the contrary, many people improve their skills after graduation, but after reaching a ceiling, they stop growing. How to become the supervisor of a team of 5 people in the second year of graduation

In 25, I graduated from Nankai University and joined a company called Kuxun. I was one of the first employees to join. I was just an ordinary engineer at first, but in the second year, I managed a team of forty or fifty people in the company, responsible for all back-end technologies and many product-related work.

someone asked me: why did you grow so fast in your first job? Are you particularly outstanding in that company?

not really. At that time, the company's recruitment standards were also very high. When I joined the company at the same time, I remember there were two doctors in the computer department of Tsinghua.

am I the best? Is it the most experienced? I found none. Later, I thought about what I had at that time.

when I work, I don't know what I should do and what I shouldn't.

after I finish my work, I will do most of my colleagues' problems as long as I can help solve them. At that time, I had seen most of the code in Code Base. Whenever I have time, I will explain it to a newcomer when he joins the company. By explaining, I can grow myself.

Another feature is that I went home at 12: every day for two years before I started work, and I also programmed very late after I got home. It is really because of interest, not because the company has requirements. So I quickly went from being in charge of a module for extracting reptiles to being in charge of the whole back-end system, starting with a team, then a small department, and then a big department.

I never set boundaries when I do things.

at that time, I was in charge of technology, but when there were problems with the product, I would actively participate in the discussion and think about the product scheme. Many people say this is not what I should do. But I want to say: your sense of responsibility and your motivation to do things well will drive you to do more things and give you great exercise.

I was an engineer at that time, but my experience in products helped me to make products later. My participation in business is also very helpful to my present job. I remember at the end of 27, I went to see customers with the sales director of the company. This experience let me know: what kind of sales is good sales. When I set up a headline to recruit people, these cases for reference will make me know nothing in this field.

the above are my characteristics when I just graduated. After 1 years' observation, all the outstanding talents I met have these five characteristics < P > Later, I joined various entrepreneurial teams one after another. During this process, I got along with many graduates and still keep in touch with many of them. Share with you some good and bad things I have seen. To sum up, what are the characteristics of these outstanding young people?

first, I am curious and can actively learn new things, new knowledge and new skills.

I'm not very modest today. I take myself as a positive example, and then I'll say another negative example. I have a former colleague who has a good theoretical foundation, but he always finishes his work and leaves work. He stayed in this company for more than a year, but he didn't know anything about the new technologies and tools on the Internet.

so he is very dependent on others. When he wants to realize a function, he needs someone to help him with the second half, because he can only do the first half himself-if he is a curious person, he can master the front-end, back-end and algorithm, or at least understand it, then he can do a lot of debugging and analysis by himself.

second, be optimistic about the uncertainty.

For example, at the beginning of the headline, I told you: We should do 1 million daily startup times. Many people think, how can your small company do it? Only big companies can do well. So he was afraid to try hard. Only optimistic people will believe and be willing to try.

actually, I did the same thing when I joined Cool News. That company wanted to be the next generation search engine. I don't know what other people think, but I feel very excited. I really wasn't sure, and I didn't know how to do it, but I went to study at that time and went to see all these related things. I think it may not be done in the end, or it may not be done completely, but this process will also be very helpful-as long as you are optimistic about the uncertainty of things, you will be more willing to try.

third, not content with mediocrity.

after entering the society, we should set higher standards. I met many college classmates and colleagues who worked together, and there were many very good talents, whose skills and grades were better than mine. But in the past 1 years, many people failed to meet my expectations: I thought he should be able to do well, but he didn't.

Many people don't set high goals after graduation. I reviewed IT and found that some colleagues joined the IT department of the bank: some joined after graduation, and some joined after working for a period of time. Why do I associate this with "not willing to be mediocre"? Because many of them joined in order to solve the Beijing hukou quickly, or at that time, some institutions had housing allocation subsidies and could buy affordable housing.

Later, I was thinking about a question. If I don't want to be mediocre and want to do very well, I won't worry about these things: do I have a Beijing hukou and can I buy a set of affordable housing?

If a person sets his goal here as soon as he graduates: to buy a small two-bedroom apartment and a small three-bedroom apartment in the Fifth Ring Road of Beijing and devote all his energy to it, then his work will be greatly affected. His behavior will change and he is unwilling to take risks.

For example, when I met my former friend, he did some part-time jobs in his spare time to earn some income. In fact, those part-time jobs have no technical content, and they have an impact on their own jobs, affecting both his career development and his mental state. I asked him why, and he said, hey, pay for a down payment quickly. I think he looks like he made a profit, but he actually lost.

it's important not to be mediocre. When I say not mediocre, I don't mean that the salary is very high or the technology is very good, but that you must set high standards for yourself. Maybe you changed slowly in the first two years, but looking back 1 years later, it will definitely be very different.

fourth, don't be arrogant, and you should be able to delay your satisfaction.

I'll give you a counterexample here: two young people who impressed me deeply have good qualities and skills, and they all have their own characteristics. I was their supervisor at that time, and I found that deliver was always in a bad situation at work. They think that other colleagues are doing worse than them, but they are not: they can really be counted as TOP 2% of the colleagues recruited at that time, but they mistakenly think that they are TOP 1%. So he doesn't want to do many basic tasks, such as making a debugging tool, or he doesn't cooperate well with his colleagues.

They are all talented people with very good qualifications. They are very smart and have strong hands-on ability, but they have failed to control their pride. I think this is not contradictory to "unwilling to be mediocre". "Not content with mediocrity" means that you should set high goals, and "not arrogant" means that you should be practical about the status quo.

among these 2 samples, I saw many things that I thought were very good, but they didn't develop as well as I expected. What I thought was bad actually exceeded my expectations. Let me give you an example here:

At that time, we had a colleague who made products and was also a fresh graduate. At that time, everyone thought that he was not particularly smart, so we asked him to do some auxiliary work, such as counting the data and doing user rebound. But now, he is the vice president of a billion-dollar company.

Later, I thought about it. His characteristic is that he is willing to do it, responsible and never shirks. As long as he has the opportunity to undertake something, he always tries his best to do it well. It's not particularly good every time, but we always give him feedback. After he went to that company, he took charge of an edge channel with less than 1 thousand users and made this channel better and better. Because this is a marginal channel and not equipped with a complete team, he has taken on many responsibilities and got a lot of exercise.

Fifth, have judgment on important things.

Choose your own major, company, career and development path, and you should have your own judgment, and don't be influenced by short-term choices. Some of the above examples also cover this point. For example, at that time, many people were willing to go to foreign companies rather than emerging companies. In 27, many younger brothers and sisters asked me about my career choice, and I advised them to go to Baidu instead of IBM or Microsoft. But in fact, many people do it for short-term reasons: foreign companies may be famous and pay a little more.

although this truth has been heard many times. When I first graduated, the salary difference was three or five thousand yuan, which was really negligible. Short-term salary difference is not important. But in fact, there are not many people who can get rid of this and have judgment.