南开大学 2016 级新生开学典礼讲话

Speech at Nankai University's Opening Ceremony for the Class of 2016

> By Zhang Yiming · speech at Nankai University's opening ceremony for the class of 2016 · Nankai News (the university's own page) · 2016-09-18 (speech given 2016-09-17) · [Original link](https://news.nankai.edu.cn/ztbd/system/2016/09/18/000296379.shtml)

Hello, my younger fellow students!

Seeing you, I feel how good it is to be young. It's been 11 years since I graduated. Thank you, President Gong, for inviting me back to my alma mater for the opening ceremony.

When I walked into Nankai in 2001, I really wouldn't have imagined that 15 years later, today, I'd be standing here. I don't know what brought each of you to Nankai. I can still remember very clearly that when I was filling in my university choices in my last year of high school, I set myself four criteria. First, it had to be a famous comprehensive university, not like the University of Science and Technology of China, where the ratio of men to women is badly out of balance, supply and demand don't match, and finding a girlfriend is too hard. Second, it had to be by the sea, because I like seafood. Third, it couldn't be close to home, so my parents wouldn't keep turning up outside my dorm. Fourth, it had to snow in winter: I'm from Fujian, I'd really never seen snow, and I badly wanted to play in it. Put those dimensions together and you get: a big coastal city where it snows in winter and there are lots of pretty girls...

After filtering, I found that no other school met all these conditions; there was only one: Nankai University. On the first day of term, when I came out of what was then Tianjin railway station, I finally understood what "big coastal city" meant.

Last night I took a walk around campus, and I think the new campus is really beautiful; you're very lucky. It was completely different in our day. I was on the Balitai campus. I remember coming out of the station and taking a "Daihatsu" taxi; along the way we passed the Weijin River, and the Weijin River wasn't what I'd imagined either. The car drove straight to the door of the old gymnasium, which was very run-down at the time. The gymnasium and the main building you have now, and some of the fine buildings of today, didn't exist then. That wasn't even the disappointing part. The worst was that in my first year I lived in the Ruyuan apartments at Wangdingdi, and every morning I had to cycle, huffing and puffing, for 20 minutes to get to campus. A couple of years ago I heard President Gong say all undergraduates would be housed on campus, and I wanted to say: if only that had happened sooner.

But none of that is the most important thing. The most important thing is your state of mind. In my first year, I always felt I was going through a "fourth year of high school." When I filled in my choices for the college entrance exam, my first choice was life sciences, because my biology teacher had said life sciences would lead science in the 21st century; my second choice was microelectronics. Unfortunately my exam score fell a little short, so I was assigned to microelectronics. Why did it feel like a fourth year of high school? My way of life hadn't adjusted from high school, the coursework was heavy, and every day was classes and self-study, shuttling between classroom, canteen and dorm. That left me pretty disappointed.

But I wasn't dejected for long. Gradually, in the quiet, simple campus and its steady, hardworking atmosphere, I found my own rhythm: I decided to switch majors, to software engineering. The reason was that I found I was more interested in computers than in building sine-wave signal generators on breadboards. In my first year I was already living on the web development board of the "I Love Nankai" BBS; in today's terms, I was a minor internet celebrity. On my first day after switching majors, I found the software engineering teachers all knew me already.

What I want to tell you is that for some of you it may be the same: once the excitement fades, you gradually find that university life isn't as rich and exciting as you imagined. Before university we lived step by step, without much choice of our own. But from university on, personal choice becomes especially important, and the sooner you realize this, the more you'll gain from your university years.

Back to my university life. Actually, after I switched schools, life didn't change much either; it was still day after day of the library and the lab. How do you face a dull life?

Read. Lonely university life gave me the quietest reading time of my life. There was the tranquil old library (I don't know if it's still there), the cozy TEDA College library (I think it's the best campus library in the world, really great: whatever book you needed, you just left a message on the BBS and they would buy it, even very expensive books, books priced in US dollars), and the grand TEDA development zone library (it was nearby, so I often went to use it too). In the time others spent playing games and cards, I read all kinds of books, or you could say all sorts of odds and ends: books from every discipline, biographies, and all kinds of newspapers and magazines from China and abroad.

When I got tired of reading, I'd go and sit and daydream by Xinkai Lake, or walk in TEDA Park, and list all kinds of questions for myself to think about that had nothing to do with short-term goals. These questions really had no effect in the short term, but in an environment like that, it was good to think about long-term questions.

Of course, back then I was puzzled too: I felt the things I read and the questions I thought about were very interesting but not much use in life. Only later, when I entered the internet industry and started businesses, did all kinds of knowledge come into play, helping me understand industries and management and get the hang of unfamiliar fields faster.

Also, I have to say, biographies are excellent chicken soup for the soul. I read lots of biographies, and if I gained anything, it was discovering that before those great people became great, they too lived seemingly dull lives, doing trivial things every day, but in the end those things joined up from dots into lines and made them who they were.

After graduating I took part in founding Kuxun, Fanfou, 99fang, and now Toutiao, and every one of those start-ups was quite lonely, especially in the frustrating, agonizing times. A few years ago the start-up environment wasn't like today's: a bunch of companies were starting up in Huaqing Jiayuan and Dongshengyuan in Wudaokou. Day to day you were in residential buildings looking things up, studying user needs and writing code; nobody knew you, and maybe your ideas were good, but they wouldn't turn into products right away, and you had to endure that long, torturous stretch of time. Looking back now, patience is very important: not only the patience to wait, but also the patience to think deeply, and the patience to find more and better partners.

So I think some qualities of mind really can only be cultivated in a quiet environment like Nankai's: patience, for example, doing things steadily and solidly, not looking for shortcuts, and thinking on as long a horizon as possible. Since founding Toutiao, we've faced many temptations every day, including very good offers from the giants and sky-high acquisition bids, and we've held firm. That owes a lot to Nankai's influence. I often think: I got through all that long loneliness at Nankai, so what is there to be afraid of, right?

Last, and most important, I got to know many excellent companions at Nankai. As an engineering guy who didn't take part much in group activities, how did I keep up a social life? Mainly by fixing computers, programming and building websites. Unlike now, back then complete PCs weren't yet common, so I spent years hanging around Anshan West Road, Tianjin's Silicon Valley, helping everyone pick parts. I assembled dozens of computers, mostly for female classmates, of course, and I not only had to help assemble them but also often do the repairs. That's right, just as you imagine: fixing computers brought me a major gain in life, my girlfriend then and my wife now.

There are also many friends I got to know through a love of computers who later became my co-founders or colleagues. My roommate Liang Rubo, for example. In our second year he bought a computer and I bought a monitor, and we put them together as a pair and used it between the two of us. The two of us, both microelectronics majors, studied programming together every day. Later, when I switched to software engineering, I gave him that computer. He later became my co-founder too. I remember that at university I was also president of the school's software development association and organized computer competitions. The winner then was a student called Li Fei; he was in the chemistry department, but he wrote code faster than the software majors. Now he's part of Toutiao as well. In those days we often stayed in the lab together until one or two in the morning, and I'd treat everyone to barbecue skewers, two or three times a week. My memories of the barbecue at Xinancun are so vivid; I wonder if it's still there? Those were really happy days.

Having said all that, what I finally want to tell you is this: the college entrance exam isn't the end of life; university life is a new beginning. The most important thing in university life is to build up steadily and become someone with judgment. Only then can you make the right choices at life's crossroads, and that is almost the most important thing in your life. Thank you, Nankai, for being a very important chapter in my life. Best wishes to you all.

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