When You Look Back on Your Life

My grandfather joined the revolution at fourteen. By the time he truly began his military career, it was already on the eve of Liberation. He followed Wang Zhen’s troops from Gansu into Xinjiang and “fought” all the way (Xinjiang had by then been basically peacefully liberated) to Aksu, where he was stationed with the Third Regiment of the First Agricultural Division and transferred to the Production and Construction Corps. Listening to his many experiences on the march, I would always feel my blood boil.

My father grew up in an unfortunate era. When he reached the age for university, it was the Cultural Revolution; by the time the Cultural Revolution ended, he was already past the age at which he could apply to university. He was trained as a doctor—and a doctor is not like a programmer: skill alone is not enough; you also need a diploma, a professional title (itself based on diplomas), and a whole series of hard credentials. So in his thirties he attended a TV university. At that time I slept fitfully and would wake at first light, and I would always see him lock himself out on the small balcony and study hard. This left a deep impression on my young mind. Later he graduated smoothly, and, riding the spring breeze of Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour and the further reform and opening of the Pearl River Delta, he moved the whole family by his own efforts from relatively closed and backward Gansu to open-minded and prosperous Guangdong. When he was past fifty—at the age when one should know heaven’s mandate—he was still striving for a senior professional title. Watching him shake his head as he crammed English, I felt both a pang of sadness and a sense of comfort. After obtaining the senior title, he began writing books, distilling a lifetime of experience into them.

Now my eighty-year-old grandfather is pouring his energy into compiling the family genealogy, and my sixty-year-old father is writing his second book.

I am now past thirty and a new father. Every evening when I come home, my daughter brings me books like My Dad, My Mom, and Little Shoes, Take a Walk, and pulls me over to read to her. As I read, scenes surface in my mind: lying in my grandparents’ arms as a child, listening to them tell one gripping story after another; and I also remember the stories of theirs that I experienced firsthand while following my parents.

It suddenly occurs to me that the lives of ordinary people are very simple (the children of Li Ka-shing and his like are different—they must inherit their father’s business): it is a journey with an unknown destination. Like the butterfly effect, a tiny disturbance can affect the direction of the future. If the troops had not then been stationed in Lintao, if my father had not chosen to go south to Guangdong, if after the college entrance exam Sun Yat-sen University had called me to transfer to the math department and I had accepted, if after graduating I had chosen the higher-paying ChinaSoft in my interview (at the time I felt the people interviewing me were lifeless, while the people at Digital China were full of vitality), if in early 2008 I had accepted the offer and jumped to VMware, if I hadn’t started a company in 2011, if at the end of February this year I hadn’t had the sudden impulse to write Programmer’s Life… any one of those choices would have made my life today different. I cannot say which choice would have been better or worse. But the choices have been made and cannot be changed.

Since the destination is unknown, the meaning of the journey lies in the scenery and stories along the way. I often think: when one day I can no longer walk and finally stop, and my children and grandchildren pester me to tell them stories, what stories will I have to tell? Will my stories be so pitifully thin that they can be summed up in a few dozen characters—or will they not even fill a single book?

The stories along the way are your experiences—that is obvious. So what is the scenery along the way? I think it is wisdom. Wisdom is your personal insight and judgment, formed on the foundation of knowledge. Wisdom comes from the books you have read and the world you have seen.

First, books.

A view is popular now: escape Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. The reason: what exactly is so good about big cities like these? Terrible air, awful traffic, high living costs… Yes, if you see only these negative things, then you can only have negative perceptions and feelings. The Beijing I see includes the National Library and many beautiful things. If you are in Beijing but have never visited the National Library, attended a concert, gone to a lecture at a university, or talked with all kinds of people outside work, then your Beijing is indeed much worse than your hometown.

In my first five or six years in Beijing after graduation, I spent many weekends holed up in the National Library or university study rooms. I did it to pass the time, but even more to search the books for my future path.

A programmer’s work is mostly like mining (rather than calling us code farmers, we might as well call ourselves miners): you dig in little by little, deeper and deeper, and many people spend their whole lives digging a single well. Mining is a path that grows narrower as you go: in a mine, every bit you dig reduces what remains to be extracted; every layer deeper you go, the opening becomes smaller and your perspective narrower. This is what is called “tunnel vision.” So programmers need to read more, to pull their thinking up to the height of a helicopter overlooking the whole mining area—and perhaps you will suddenly discover that there are still so many rich deposits around you to be mined.

Read more books, broaden your horizons, and the road really does become much wider. At least that is how it has been for me. Mr. Wang Guowei said that achieving scholarship requires passing through three realms:

• Last night the west wind withered the green trees. Alone I climb the high tower, and gaze to the end of the world.
• My clothes grow looser and I do not regret it; for her I have grown haggard.
• In the crowd I search for her a thousand times; then suddenly I turn, and there she is—where the lights are dim.

I am still lingering between the first and second.

I don’t remember which book I read the following passage in (it may not match the original exactly), but it expresses the same idea:

• You don’t know that you don’t know
• You know that you don’t know
• You know that you know
• You don’t know that you know

In fact, in many fields we are in the sad position of “I am ignorant of my own ignorance.” Take software, for example. Last Thursday my boss asked me to research a flight data recorder in software—that is, a black box, which everyone in aviation knows well—and I knew nothing about it (only later did I learn that the JVM has a built-in FDR). I had already tried hard to pull myself out of the mine, yet the world I could see was still narrow and small.

Reading is one way to open your eyes to the world; another is to measure the world with your own feet. As the saying goes: read ten thousand books and travel ten thousand miles.

When I had spare money and could travel abroad (this was a misconception of mine at the time—I always thought overseas travel cost a fortune; later, at Tuke Circle, I saw so many people breezing in and out of Europe for a few thousand yuan that I regretted my ignorance), I went looking for wisdom through one independent trip after another.

It is a way of life that, once you set foot in it, you cannot escape. Once you have seen one country, region, or city, you want to see more. Travel made me realize my ignorance, so I began to find ways to remedy it—more travel, more exploration of the unknown.

It was also because of travel that I embarked on the path of entrepreneurship. The whole process was exciting and thrilling, full of ups and downs: there were painful experiences like a knife cutting into my chest, and joyful hours of raising a glass with friends. The whole record is in my book The Tuke Circle Startup Diary, so I will not repeat it here.

Looking back, I find that I never had a clear “life” plan for my future (at most a five-year plan)—for example, when I graduated, I did not clearly know that ten years later I would take the path of entrepreneurship. But one thing I have kept practicing: pursuing wisdom, and trying to make every day of my life a little more wonderful. Perhaps this is what Steve Jobs called “connecting the scattered dots”:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path; and that will make all the difference.”