Having been away from the workplace for more than a year, I’ve realized that making real changes truly requires an extended break, and this period has its own profound significance.

1. Relaxing the Body and Mind

Putting down everything, important or otherwise, slowing down, and returning to a state of calm are essential for an objective understanding of life.

2. Forgetting the Past

With the extremely slow passage of time, one should forget the behaviors and thoughts from past work and life. Such changes can only occur within a deeply purified mind. Just as in Jin Yong’s novels, to learn Tai Chi, one must first forget; only by forgetting can one truly learn, and only an empty cup can hold water.

Forget your previous routine, forget emotions, forget labels, forget abilities, forget everything.

However, forgetting is not losing. Those experiences and abilities will drift away because they are freed from their previous pull, and then, through new understanding, they will reaggregate in a new form.

3. Cultivating Metacognition

To set everything aside and start anew, the first step is to correct the fundamental concepts and understanding of things.

By using good books as a reference for thinking, you should question the cognitions you have established about work and life, and identify those incorrect ones. For example, the notions that work can make you money, that diligence is necessary for doing things, or that learning simply means memorizing answers for exams, are all wildly wrong. In reality, work often can’t make you truly rich; instead, it offers a relatively low leverage ratio. True financial freedom is about freedom of time and choice. More importantly, doing things is about doing the right things, not just being diligent. Learning primarily aims to cultivate thinking and analysis skills, not to remember standard answers.

Therefore, the common sense that we follow without question might actually be flawed. The Truman Show is a fictional movie, yet it truly exists in our daily lives. The more important question to explore is how to build your own trustworthy dependencies in a world that is inherently untrustworthy.

Only by continuously improving your metacognitive ability can you find a relatively reliable anchor point, upon which you can build a more reliable and broader set of capabilities.

For example, I’ve always felt a sense of rejection and tediousness toward technical professional education and work. Now, with more insight, I can explain it: it’s because what they teach is incomplete. They only teach professional knowledge, but they fail to teach the technical culture, value metrics, and, more importantly, the ability to learn and analyze.

Why do they design education and work this way? A possible reason is simply limited teaching quality, but the greater probability is that the curriculum has been compromised by the need for selection, industrial demands, obedience, and various other designs, making it impure. Simply put, it’s not designed for your personal development; it’s subservient to some larger agenda—they need to mass-produce industrial workers.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution was deeply insightful. It not only chronicles the history of computers from research to home use but also vividly documents the people behind the computer’s development, how their abilities were formed, their values, their subculture, and its dilution and return over time. I also read Linus Torvalds’ autobiography, and you realize that technology is not about step-by-step instruction, standard-answer exams, cold documentation, or all-night overtime. Technology has heart and soul; it’s driven by people who are full of curiosity and courage for the world. They love life, love technology, focus on what is interesting, useful, and tasteful. A technology project is not just a pile of code and execution; behind both software and hardware are abundant wisdom, passion, and personality. You can also trace the origins of many current technical forms and cultures through their experiences. For instance, the now-popular GitHub can likely trace its roots to the culture and spirit of the MIT hackers—those freely shared rolls of paper tape. Similarly, today’s forums and online shopping may originate from Lee Felsenstein’s “Community Memory” decades ago. The times are advancing, and technology is evolving, but everything is not just code; it also contains the polish of time and the warmth of people. By following them through books and images, understanding the culture and origins behind technology, you can truly connect the past and the future to genuinely understand and engage with technology itself.

Therefore, personal development should involve clearly seeing the issues within these frameworks, discovering the bugs in the manipulated world, and hacking everything.

4. Rebuilding the Personal Operating System

Based on more accurate metacognition and associations of things, I am rebuilding my personal understanding, moral compass, values, and capabilities.

Then, based on these new personal capabilities, I will rebuild my social life, personal life, technical skills, and investment strategies.

Only by undergoing a complete transformation can one achieve true elevation.

I’ve observed a common trait among successful people in both technology and investment: they all possess strong metacognitive abilities. They are certainly not focused on diligence or hard work, nor are they merely greedy for wealth. They are more concerned with understanding and hacking the entire system, hoping to gain a certain return and achievement through their understanding. That is, they use their metacognitive ability to deeply understand the system, then continuously iterate and verify their understanding, thus forming a positive feedback loop and a deeper comprehension of the world.

5. Doing The Right Things

Doing the right things is significantly more important than merely doing things correctly. I’ve seen this concept in the books of Li Xiaolai and ‘Left-Ear Rabbit’ (Zou Xin), as well as in the actions of people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. This applies well to both investing and technology.

Doing the right things is paramount, even if it means moving a little slower. What currently might not look like the right path, might, in fact, be the only true path.

6. Recommended Reading

Cognitive Awakening

• The Road to Wealth Freedom by Xiaolai Li

Investment Cognition

• Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Toru Kiyosaki

Technology Cognition

• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy
• iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon by Steve Wozniak
• Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary by Linus Torvalds
• Left Ear Listens to the Wind by Hao Chen