Literature

Mo Yan and Gabriel García Márquez taught me a worldview, not a writing technique.

You think the world runs on cause and effect—you do A, you should get B. It does not. The world is magical, erratic, unreasonable. An old man can sprout wings; a person can live centuries and die in a tree—this is not metaphor. It really happened (in the book).

But when you read it, it doesn't feel absurd. You think: yes, the world was always like this.

This feeling—"it should not work, but it feels right"—appears all the time in my market research. Data tells you one conclusion; your gut tells you another. Magical realism taught me: when two conclusions fight, the one that looks illogical is often the truer one.

Li Bai wrote: "Heaven gave me talent, it shall be used. A thousand gold pieces scattered—they will come back." This isn't confidence; it's a kind of romanticism. He knew money could be earned again and talent would not be buried. Did he truly believe it? Hard to say. But when he said it, you believed.

Qu Yuan is the opposite version. He drowned himself. He knew his ideal would not be realized, and that his death would change nothing. He did it anyway. Confucius is the same—he traveled from state to state, no ruler adopted his doctrine, yet he never stopped.

I study history. Idealism has almost never succeeded. But you still do it. Not because you will win—because it is the only posture that is right.

It's the same as building websites, products, and markets.

I sat in Mu Xin's pavilion in Wuzhen once. The pavilion, the tree shadows, the quiet by the water. Nothing grand, nothing overwhelming—yet it made me sit there for a long time.

Mu Xin wrote: "In the past, the sun moved slowly. Cart, horse, and mail were all slow." This is not nostalgia. It is a specific truth. Write one sentence, one scene, one feeling precisely enough, and it needs no explanation.

The deepest things don't live in grand narratives. They live in your specific feelings.