A line in the movie "Why can't we live a good life even though we understand a lot of truths?" has touched countless people. Some people think that maybe we don't understand the truth deeply enough, right? Maybe. There are also people who think that if you only know how to do something but don’t do it, you won’t be able to live well, and they are right. I also want to talk about what it means to understand and how to do it.

Understanding is actually contained in doing. I think we will just talk about doing. It is easy for us to acquire a truth, but in order for the truth to unfold and have a lasting impact on our lives and work, we need to persist. Perseverance means sacrifice, sacrificing the need for immediate gratification in human nature. But some people can stick to a truth for a long time. Where does their sense of certainty come from? I very much agree that this sense of certainty comes from: 1. The courage to transcend oneself; 2. Reason and thinking

1.? "The things you still want to do when you have no money may be the same as you What you do automatically and consciously when you are financially free is the same thing."

2. "Success is an external pursuit, and achievement is an internal pursuit."

Hangzhou TV Station in 1995. I conducted a secretly filmed psychological test on the street. I hired a few migrant workers to secretly dig sewer manhole covers on the road to see the reactions of pedestrians passing by. Most of the people passed by, watched, and continued walking. Only a very thin young man who was riding a bicycle stopped and stopped them and asked them to carry the manhole cover back. I think everyone has heard this true story of Jack Ma more than 20 years ago. At that time, Ma Yun was just a young man who was in the early stages of starting a business. There was no income or financing for his entrepreneurial project. He was so thin that it was impossible for him to beat those migrant workers who were pretending to steal manhole covers. But he thought about what he had just seen in the newspaper about children falling into these uncovered sewers, and he believed that it was the conscience and responsibility of ordinary citizens to stop this kind of theft that endangers other people's lives.

Looking back at Teachers' Day on September 10, 2019, Jack Ma has already become famous. He announced that he would step down as chairman of the board of directors of Alibaba and devote himself to science and environmental protection. According to his own personal description, the work he did after retirement was to awaken the conscience of the people.

The proposition some people use when discovering their mission is "What is something that you would be willing to do unconditionally when you are financially free?" Others have used such a proposition. "What are the things you still want to do even when you have no money?" These are good propositions. "The things you still want to do when you have no money may automatically be the same as when you have financial freedom." What you do consciously is the same thing. That thing is probably your mission." The example of Jack Ma illustrates this proposition well.

Your personal mission is the source of your courage to transcend yourself.

During this year’s COVID-19 epidemic, there was an old lady over 80 years old who still devoted herself to volunteer medical work in Wuhan. The TV station interviewed her. She was wearing professional medical clothing. She was energetic and agile. The reporter asked her: "You are already retired. There is no reward for coming here, and there is a huge risk of infection and even death. Why are you still coming?" The old lady replied in an understatement. He said, "I am a doctor. If I really die in the rescue work of the epidemic, it will be a worthy death." Anyone who hears this will be moved, but for the old lady, this is her mission.

Many of us pursue career success, money, social status, power, influence, etc., but whether this pursuit can bring you lasting pleasure depends on whether your success is also Fulfill your inner desires. Success is an external pursuit, and achievement is an internal pursuit. Achieving the transition from pursuing "success" to "achievement" is a key step in gaining the courage to transcend yourself.

But how do you know what you want, that is, how do you discover your mission? This is difficult to obtain through mental logical deduction or brainstorming. Because these are beliefs that come from the depths of the soul. The specific experiences or touches in each person's life, coupled with self-guidance or the guidance of relatives and friends around us, establish our beliefs.

We need to deeply recall our life experiences and review our lives in detail many times in order to gradually unearth the belief system that has been buried in our subconscious. At that time, you will have the ability to describe your mission.

Teacher Cheng Jia, the author of "Study Well" and "Think Well", found that his mission experience is also of great reference value. He is a person who likes to communicate with others. He has been like this since he was a student. Now he is somewhat successful, and he still likes to chat with friends. He was also very confused in the process of discovering his mission. Even if he realized that he had a stable, long-lasting and strong interest in chatting with others, what did chatting have to do with his mission? He talked about his confusion with some equally powerful friends, and one of them casually said, "Cheng Jia, I think your words are always inspiring." Cheng Jia suddenly realized that his chats with others were not ordinary chats. He liked to share the knowledge and principles he had learned with the people around him in a very personalized way. He hopes to bring more thinking to others and let the friends around him grow with him. "My chat is to light up other people's thinking." He was immediately inspired by it. He used "lighting up more people's thinking" to summarize his mission. As can be seen from the example of Chengjia, mission is sometimes quite hidden. Secondly, mission can be processed, because it is up to you to decide how to describe your mission.

Personal mission is the source of courage for self-transcendence.

To live our life well, courage is not enough. We still have the opportunity to fall into emotional traps, and we still have the opportunity to look at problems narrowly and be stubborn and unable to achieve great results. Reason and thinking are the most important habits that enable us to make inhuman persistence and sacrifices. Someone asked Munger to sum up his most important experience in one sentence. Munger said one word: rationality.

1. “We are all cycling through some patterns, and these patterns are controlled by our emotions”

2. “We only have 20% of rational thinking or even less, and the rest They are all just reacting automatically.”

I remember when my eldest daughter was in first grade, we had a WeChat group for parents, and we communicated frequently. Do you know what is the most distressing thing for parents when their children go from carefree kindergarten to first grade? That's right, helping children with their homework. Many parents come home from get off work and spend their rest time accompanying their children to help them with their homework. This is originally good, but many people will be familiar with the subsequent plot development, that is, the child goes to the toilet, drinks some water, and talks to you about the conditions to watch cartoons. In short, he cannot concentrate and go smoothly all at once. Complete your homework. Many parents will be driven crazy by anger, and there are even parents who can't help but spank their children.

We are controlled by our anger and do many behaviors that are detrimental to the growth of our children. Do you think this pattern is made by rational parents? For rational analysis, you can first sympathize with the child's feelings and guide him to express them, soothe his emotions, discuss with him to set boundaries, and let him learn to be responsible. Punishment is allowed, but he should be informed in advance. Punishment is required within a responsible range. Even if you punish him, it will let him know that you love him unconditionally.

We can easily agree that the behavior mentioned above is irrational, but many people may not know the reason for this irrationality. In fact, we are all cycling through patterns, and these patterns are controlled by our emotions. These patterns are our subconscious reactions. In the above example, it may be the case (there are many other situations, but they are all patterns that are not easy for you to detect). You have a certain desire to control, and you want to Control the people or things you think you can control, and it's easy for you to feel like the people and things around you want to control you.

When you want your children to do what you want, but they don't, you will feel that they are challenging your power, so you are angry; more covertly, it may be that you want to be a good father, You think that a child studying well is a sign of a good father, and you believe that a child can learn well only if he or she learns your way. When you lose control of your child, you feel powerless and self-blame, but you are unwilling to bear such self-blame. And turned into anger towards the child.

If you don’t understand these patterns, you can only let them cycle continuously in your life. You are not actually you. We only have 20 rational thinking or even less. The rest are in automated reactions.

Only when you understand more about people’s distortions can you be able to turn yourself back a little bit. Therefore, knowledge of psychology and some training in awareness meditation highlight its importance.

1. “All judgments based on our background and knowledge are narrow-minded”

There is another important but hidden source of our irrationality, When we sit down quietly, put all the background and conditions of a decision on the table, perform logical reasoning and then make a decision, is this a rational decision? All judgments based on our background and knowledge are narrow, because if we only think about the problem from our own single perspective, our thinking will definitely not be comprehensive enough. A joke called "hammer syndrome" means that if you hold a hammer in your hand, everything you look at will be a nail.

There is a very strange philosophy in ancient Greece, which says that only the blind can see the truth. This sentence is very interesting. While most of us today believe that seeing is believing, the ancient Greeks 2,500 years ago keenly discovered that only by transcending the confinement of the eyes can we truly see the truth from the mind. Opening up our narrow single perspective, let’s start with thinking.

1. "You can truly master this knowledge if you can criticize your own point of view better than the person who is most qualified to refute it." --- Munger

2. “When we really understand what we are doing, there will be no crisis, only change”

3. “The criterion for judging whether you really understand a piece of knowledge can be whether you I have mastered the ability to sum up and decompose this knowledge until it is getting closer and closer to common sense."

Munger once said a very famous saying, "You can do better than the person who is most qualified to refute this point of view. Only then can you truly master this knowledge by criticizing your own opinions." This may be the most popular sentence to describe pluralistic thinking. If we want to make decisions more rationally, we need to think about problems from more perspectives. There is a "Blue Army Strategy" within Huawei. The Blue Army is a villain composed of outstanding members of Huawei (the Blue Army's salary is much higher than that of the Red Army) who specifically oppose Huawei's Red Army. It is a confrontation organization specifically designed to pick on the Red Army. No matter how excellent Huawei's products are, the Blue Army must identify its shortcomings and spur the Red Army to prevent them from becoming complacent.

Many times we feel that we have understood a point of knowledge. For example, "When others are greedy, I am afraid, and when others are fearful, I am greedy." What does this sentence mean? It means that when others are greedy, I must be cautious. I can be radical when others are afraid. When I tried to explain this sentence, I found that it could not be more straightforward. It seemed that even an explanation was unnecessary. Wouldn't it be enough to just go against the market? Some scholars of Munger’s thoughts put it this way: You must know the underlying reasons for others’ greed or fear, and you have thoroughly sorted out the development laws of the problem you are about to make a decision on, so that no matter when others are greedy or fearful, you must They can still think very independently and make accurate judgments. Be honest about knowledge, and only when you do it can you really understand. We can see that the companies Berkshire buys and holds are in line with their judgment on the development laws of the world. Yes, we are talking about rules. These rules are close to common sense.

I like first principles very much. The criterion for judging whether you really understand a piece of knowledge can be whether you have mastered it and can summarize and decompose the knowledge into something closer and closer to common sense. The common sense here does not mean the obvious knowledge, but the most basic knowledge of natural sciences, humanities and social sciences.

For example, in the world of physics, the smallest particle that can be decomposed in chemical changes is a molecule, and the smallest particle in chemical changes is an atom. Atoms are composed of neutrons, protons, and electrons, and quarks are the components discovered today. The smallest particles of matter, quarks make up protons and neutrons. Therefore, everything in nature is broken down to the smallest unit, which is just a series of quarks (6 quarks have been discovered so far). And can our knowledge be decomposed layer by layer, until it is decomposed into the most basic model that constitutes all knowledge? We assume that we call this most basic model a thinking model. Are there some such thinking models that can simplify and abstract the objective world (evolution of the earth, development of countries and societies, business operations, human growth, etc.), so as to Able to explain the past and predict the future most efficiently (just like various physical and chemical reactions that can be observed and predicted by particles). This sounds indeed profound enough, but it is conceivable that most of us are far away from understanding something.

Reflecting on this epidemic, when we truly understand what we are doing, we will not feel that this is a crisis, but just some changes that we need to face sooner or later. One way to better understand what we are doing is to cultivate our own multiple thinking models so that our understanding of things is as close to common sense as possible.

There are many ways to train multiple thinking models. Learning knowledge from multiple disciplines yourself, especially some seemingly useless knowledge, is often a necessary part of improving your knowledge system. These seemingly useless knowledge from other disciplines can give you differentiated competitiveness. Most of the time, differentiated competitiveness is more valuable than the competitiveness of GM's main business, and it is also the key to victory.

Chatting with more powerful people who hold opposite views to yours can also help you gain knowledge that you don’t have. These are efficient input ways to build your multi-dimensional thinking model. It is also a good way to learn the same skills with people from different industries.

1. “The unthinking life is not worth living”——Socrates

2. “Curiosity will lead to diverse thinking”

"The unthinking life is not worth living", this is Socrates' famous saying, and many people also quote him to tell themselves to think more. But I don’t know how well the person who quoted this sentence understood the meaning of this sentence. My understanding is that an irrational life is a cycle of several fixed patterns. You think you are alive and awake, but in fact when these patterns are fixed, you are already a dead person most of the time. Moreover, most of these models are formed before the age of 14, a small part are formed before the age of 21, and they are basically fixed after the age of 21.

So how do we think about our lives? For things you have done, recall what conditions you faced at that time, what thoughts you made, what emotions you controlled, how you interpreted various external conditions, what values ????were influencing you behind the scenes, etc. If you had the chance to do it again, could you do better? How? These are questions that we can reflect on when doing introspection. Only with the ability to be aware of your own thinking patterns can you improve your thinking patterns. Otherwise, you can only continue to be controlled by the original thinking patterns. ,

To cultivate multiple thinking modes, some methods have been mentioned in the previous section, but what I want to say here is that it is not something you can do just by working hard. People who can use multiple thinking modes to think and react must have one element, which is curiosity. Without curiosity and an open attitude driven by curiosity, you may not even be able to listen to other people's opinions that are different from your own, let alone delve into the knowledge behind different opinions.

I think curiosity is developed in childhood. Every newborn baby will have curiosity. Whether the curiosity can be sustained depends on whether the parents and the relatives and friends who grew up with them continue to satisfy the child's needs. Curiosity allows children to gain joy or excitement from curiosity. When adults train their curiosity, they can start by training themselves to be open-minded, realize their own insignificance, and humbly ask others for advice as if they don't understand anything.

The omitted sentence in "Understand the truth and live a good life" is "persistently practice this truth." But how can you be sure that this principle is right and stick to it for a long time? We need to have the courage to transcend ourselves and discover our mission in life; avoid being manipulated by distorted human nature, observe problems from multiple perspectives, maintain curiosity, and continue to grow and progress through introspection. I hope the article can give you a little inspiration.