知识创业：新时代的印钞模式来临

如果我往回复盘二十一年，1995 年，就是我大学毕业那年，就是我“突然变成工作狂”（其实只不过是彻底忽视“节假日”这个概念而已）的那一年，我一直以来都在痴迷于研究的东西实际上只有两个而已（这两个概念恰好也是整个金融学的核…

Source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ydnPxWyRxqYkWuP5VqMGrg

None

> By Li Xiaolai · 2016-11-22 · [Original link](https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ydnPxWyRxqYkWuP5VqMGrg) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

*Copyright notice*

```
This article was first published on the WeChat public account:
Learn, Learning, Learn Again (学习学习再学习; xiaolai-xuexi)
It may be reposted without authorization,
even without keeping the above copyright notice;
when reposting, please be sure to credit the author.
```

---

If I review the past twenty-one years: 1995 was the year I graduated from university, the year I "suddenly became a workaholic" (actually just completely ignoring the concept of "holidays"), and all along, the things I have been obsessed with studying have actually been only two (these two concepts also happen to be the core of the whole of finance):

> 1. **Time**
> 2. **Probability**

Over the course of 2007–2009, I wrote a book, Make Time Your Friend (《把时间当作朋友》)—in essence, it is my long-standing deep thinking about "time," this friend.

From the second half of 2015 until now, I have written a lot of things, including standalone articles and content made into books and collections: Rebirth—Seven Years Is a Lifetime (《新生 —— 七年就是一辈子》), and [The Road to Financial Freedom](http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzAxNzI4MTMwMw==&mid=2651630077&idx=1&sn=78add54c9008972a161e45e2dde47dd8&scene=21#wechat_redirect) (《通往财富自由之路》), in which the concept of "[Serendipity](http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzAxNzI4MTMwMw==&mid=402332613&idx=1&sn=68f183b065fb82204edb1dc6aaffb6bf&scene=21#wechat_redirect)" (惊喜, "pleasant surprise") comes up again and again—in essence, this is my deep thinking over so many years about probability, this friend. In fact, I really did once seriously consider naming The Road to Financial Freedom "Make Serendipity Your Friend"…… with "The Road to Financial Freedom" originally the subtitle.

> - Make Time Your Friend—Using the Mind to Gain Liberation
> - Make Serendipity Your Friend—The Road to Financial Freedom

Ha, looks quite neat, right? It's just that my personality is like this: although I know perfectly well in my heart the extreme importance of clickbait titles, sometimes I'm too embarrassed to compromise casually. (After writing this sentence, it occurred to me that some people will surely feel otherwise: "Yours is obviously the most successful clickbait!"—hmm, seen from the front it's a ridge, from the side a peak.)

[image]

On October 15, 2016, in cooperation with Luo Zhenyu's (罗振宇) Dedao (得到), I gave an offline lecture in Shanghai, "Upgrading Personal Business Models in a New Era" (《新时代的个人商业模式升级》), with more than a thousand people in the audience (tickets at ￥1200–￥2500). And this lecture I will keep repeating online in updated form from now on. At the event, I gave a path for "upgrading your personal business model," one point of which was this:

> You must find a way to **sell the same portion of your time many times over**.

Writing books is this kind of method, and teaching classes is too—of course, they can all be summed up as "making products." If you can rack your brains and spend time and effort making a product, and it actually turns out to be a good product, then you can sell it to many people, that is, in the end it amounts to "selling the same portion of your time many times over……" Looking from this angle, Tao Huabi (陶华碧) is the "master of selling time" I admire most: one Lao Gan Ma sauce, positioned very precisely, firmly and tenaciously occupying the 9–11 yuan chili sauce market.

In the past, writing books was better than teaching classes—a book can sell hundreds of thousands of copies, while a classroom, because of limited space, holds a few dozen people at most…… Even at New Oriental back then, the most "astonishing" classroom capacity was only a thousand-odd people—now classrooms are getting smaller and smaller, and everyone can only hype the concept of the "small-class advantage."

(Really) ten years ago, we already imagined that because of the appearance, development and spread of the internet, in the end "each field might need only one teacher—the teacher who teaches best does the teaching, and everyone else just listens……" But in fact, this scenario did not appear right away; it was a long time coming. How long was it late? At least ten years.

—But it has come after all.

On September 19, the lecture I held online, "My Reading Experience" (《我的读书经验》), charged 0.99 yuan, with 42,000 people listening live; on October 19, "Build a Lifelong Reading Operating System in One Hour" (《一小时建立终生受用的阅读操作系统》), charged 1 yuan, with 120,000 people listening live; on November 19, "Everyone Can Use English" (《人人都能用英语》), charged 2 yuan, with 53,000 people listening live……

Even I myself was stunned—a hundred and twenty thousand people, what does that mean? Just a few days before that, at the offline lecture I gave in Shanghai, there were only a thousand people; a hundred and twenty thousand is 120 times the offline number—and in the foreseeable future this multiple will keep growing. Could it grow to ten thousand times? The answer is yes. Imagine if I asked our classmate Luo Yonghao (罗永浩) to do something like "My Methodology of Product Design" (a title along those lines)—no need to wait several years; this very year, quite possibly several million people would pay to listen, wouldn't they? If someone will take the other side, I'm willing to bet (for me it's really not a bet): in a year or two, someone will definitely earn an astronomical sum from a single lecture, a hundred times, a thousand times higher [Translator's note: the original writes 搞出, literally "make out"; 高出 ("higher than") is meant; translated by the intended sense] than the income I've achieved today—quite possibly.

> ### Note
>
> **If this article's shares and likes reach a certain level, I really will seriously consider persuading our classmate Luo Yonghao to hold a lecture……**

For a long time before this, I was never very optimistic about all kinds of online education, nor very optimistic about concepts like "knowledge fragmentation," and even less optimistic about the various tools designed for these concepts. The reason is simple:

> They don't actually solve the problem of efficiency.

But this time, [I've become optimistic about online education](http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzAxNzI4MTMwMw==&mid=210661773&idx=1&sn=7b08461e73ebdf951d514073c4501833&scene=21#wechat_redirect). The reason is that this form of teaching (or "form of sharing") at least solves the teaching side's pain point: "enrollment scale." This is a fulcrum that can lever another thing: "quality." Enrollment scale suddenly amplified means income scale amplified, which means competition will be fiercer, which means that in the long run, in the end, this thing called quality will be forced up to the highest level—and so in the end the learners' side will also benefit from this, and may benefit greatly.

And for all this, the one most deserving of thanks is very likely an internet product nobody would think has anything to do with education: WeChat. Yes, the one most deserving of thanks really is WeChat—this thing people consider to be for "killing time."

Because WeChat has fulfilled the ideal the internet has always wanted to fulfill: connecting everyone. That's one; second, and more important: WeChat users' payment habits have long since formed. A few years ago, nobody could ever have imagined that WeChat could use a scenario like "sending red envelopes" to get several hundred million people to "voluntarily" link their bank cards. If you have studied the various difficulties faced by credit-card issuance in China over these years, you can understand what a great "invention" "WeChat red envelopes" was, or rather, what a great "operating strategy."

However, the most important thing is something few people mention:

> WeChat groups have cultivated another habit in users—today's WeChat users are especially used to listening to "sharing sessions," "lectures" and "big classes" in the form of "**sixty-second voice messages + images**"……

For a speaker like me—with many years of teaching experience, good at adjusting the atmosphere of a classroom, good at performing on stage, even the "show off in front of a crowd" type—at first glance, "sixty-second voice messages + images" was simply a nightmare:

> - Can't see the audience, nor their expressions (and all their reactions);
> - No room at all for body language;
> - No cool PPT to help (I'm used to using the even cooler Prezi);
> - No stimulation from the live atmosphere (warm applause and big laughs [Translator's note: the original writes 哈哈大小, literally "haha big-small"; 哈哈大笑 ("roaring with laughter") is meant; translated by the intended sense]);
> - No way to adjust the speaking strategy according to the situation on the spot;
> - ￥%…%\*@! And many more discomforts I can't put into words……

However, I'm someone who never begrudges changing myself whenever it's necessary, so I "braced myself" and tried a few times, and immediately discovered another fact:

> The form of "sixty-second voice messages + images" obviously **greatly lowers the threshold for giving talks**.

This is absolutely a "revolution"-level change. And my so-called "discomfort" is actually very similar to the sense of loss one feels on discovering a more convenient new solution after mastering a skill with a rather steep learning curve—just like people who practiced hard-pen calligraphy for many years thinking that typing on a computer keyboard "has no inspiration," like people skilled at the Wubi input method being unwilling to believe that pinyin input has surpassed it in every respect, or like people who learned with great difficulty to drive a manual car looking down on everyone who can only drive an automatic……

Personally, I feel these three points determine one fact:

> A good tool for paid lectures must grow inside WeChat.

It must let users sign up, pay and listen without leaving WeChat.

So I asked my team to make a simple tool: the WeChat service account "Listen Together" (一块听听). A very simple tool, but precisely because it's simple, it can iterate quickly.

This very Friday, November 25, I will give a lecture on "Listen Together," "[The Most Correct Way to Sell Knowledge](http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzAxNzI4MTMwMw==&mid=2651630529&idx=1&sn=5bbefd5e017bcb37accfc28d3ea052c4&chksm=801ff3b9b7687aaffbcb7148715cc972c2f69c41b13071230894b47b1fdaa3049e8ad6b7cdc0&scene=21#wechat_redirect)" (《卖知识的最正确姿势》), which will explain the "methodology of selling knowledge" in more depth. (How to sign up: search for and follow the service account "Listen Together" on WeChat, then pay and sign up to listen inside the service account……)

Scan the QR code above to follow "Listen Together"

At the end of last year, we were making community tools and founded "Qingfeideyi (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd." (情非得已（北京）科技有限公司); the company's slogan at the time was "Let some intellectuals get rich first"—now I feel I really can achieve this, which is also a pleasant surprise.

Right, "pleasant surprise" has come up. I wrote specifically before about "[the methodology of creating pleasant surprises](http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzAxNzI4MTMwMw==&mid=400793862&idx=1&sn=468e4eca4bca8a7cd5e23ca66d1c8d42&scene=21#wechat_redirect)," one means of which is:

> **Connecting more nodes**.

An increase in the number of nodes keeps increasing the possibilities of links geometrically, and so can brew up a great deal of "unexpected good luck, that is, pleasant surprises." Making a highly popular paid lecture (that is, a product) is, on the one hand, "selling the same portion of time many times," and on the other hand is actually "directly and indirectly connecting many nodes (that is, users, or listeners)," which inevitably generates pleasant surprises—an accident that is no accident, necessity within chance.

The concept hotly hyped in the field before was "content startups." Content comes in many kinds and is very broad, so in the end the business model of most content entrepreneurs is to choose "advertising."

> [I personally really don't hate ads](http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzAxNzI4MTMwMw==&mid=2651630529&idx=1&sn=5bbefd5e017bcb37accfc28d3ea052c4&chksm=801ff3b9b7687aaffbcb7148715cc972c2f69c41b13071230894b47b1fdaa3049e8ad6b7cdc0&scene=21#wechat_redirect), and I often deliberately collect brilliant commercials…… But I know there really are many people who, for one reason or another, "hate ads"; and there really are some ads that are very annoying, aren't there? (I've written two articles [praising Tesla](http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzAxNzI4MTMwMw==&mid=2651630498&idx=1&sn=326fb3019b9732b0194530aa5cb32bcd&chksm=801ff3dab7687acca8ecf273afa31563594853a4309f5a0ce22324f35a3c4c30468f456a4f3b&scene=21#wechat_redirect); too bad Tesla never pays anyone advertising fees……)

Now, I rather think another concept ought to catch fire:

> **Knowledge startups**

Knowledge was originally just one category of content; only, fortunately, in this era knowledge can be charged for directly. There's no need to rack your brains to monetize it; it is monetized directly. This is like the difference between 0 and 1: it looks as if 1 - 0 is only 1, but the actual difference may well be as great as that between heaven and earth.

What's more, very possibly even one's own structure will change accordingly. The self-media that used to do images, text, audio and video on WeChat public accounts were actually equivalent to "combining production and distribution in one"; while the "knowledge entrepreneurs" doing "sixty-second voice messages + images" now don't even have to bother with distribution; they only need to prepare their talk content—although at present this is still only [Translator's note: the original writes 知识, literally "knowledge"; 只是 ("only") is meant; translated by the intended sense] a conjecture.

Anyway, there is one fact I am very sure of:

> Over the coming period, a great many people's income structures will change because of this trend.

So, what about listeners? I suggest that all listeners, [in the course of paying money to buy knowledge](http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzAxNzI4MTMwMw==&mid=2651630511&idx=1&sn=3508938caec85915f4c38b6ea52d9f25&chksm=801ff3d7b7687ac143ff7541c347c2c91dc160f40385b8ed17b5e600a3bb7ed5a451b734a412&scene=21#wechat_redirect), keep an extra string on the bow: carefully observe, learn from and ponder the people doing knowledge startups—their views, their paths of growth, what they do—absorbing constantly like a sponge, ruminating constantly like a dairy cow, shooting up once with every rain like bamboo…… Because, no matter which new era begins, it won't reach its end all at once.

Good luck, everyone!