平常心做非常事（字节跳动九周年演讲）

Ordinary Mind, Extraordinary Things (ByteDance 9th Anniversary Speech)

> By Zhang Yiming · ByteDance 9th anniversary speech · first published on ByteDance's official WeChat account 字节范儿 · 2021-03-31 (speech given 2021-03-30) · [Original link](https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/AgvuGQuHjstezvZAA7Wcpw)

As at this moment every year, I'd like to share with you how the company did over the past year, along with some of my own feelings. These feelings all come from life and work, and from talking with colleagues. First, a brief look back at the past year.

Overall our business still grew very fast, and we made some breakthroughs in new directions. Including the fight against the epidemic, we also did quite a lot on corporate social responsibility; you could call it the starting year of our corporate social responsibility work around the world. I hope that in the new year we can keep refining our business, and keep treating our social responsibility goals as one of our business goals, serving society well.

Last year was very unusual. All kinds of sudden events, including the Covid epidemic, and the chain reactions they set off, were extremely dynamic; I believe you all felt it deeply. Many people like to say "the years are quiet and good," but as I see it, the world is changing dynamically and at an accelerating pace. Every day you can see lots of news; it's very noisy.

So today I want to talk about the topic of "ordinary mind" (平常心). Facing a dynamically changing world, we are often uneasy, worrying about the future or regretting the past, and a lot of energy and time gets wasted on dealing with the swings. In the past, the industry talked a lot about methodology, and everyone took it very seriously. But I think that in an environment like this, keeping an ordinary mind is something that sounds easy but matters.

Over the past year I talked with many colleagues, and I found that people who keep an ordinary mind are fairly relaxed, with nothing twisted inside; they observe things in fine detail, seek truth from facts, and are fairly patient. They are often better at getting things done well. Most of the time, when people are free of obsession or distracting thoughts, they can make very good judgments; there's a saying, "already complete in oneself" (本自具足). Only by keeping an ordinary mind can you do extraordinary things. Our anniversary theme is "Remain Grounded, Keep Aiming Higher," and as I understand it the two phrases mean something similar: only the steadier your mind, the more firmly you are rooted, and the more you can have the boldness and imagination to do things that are harder to reach.

"When eating, really eat; when sleeping, really sleep"

When we discuss a topic, we first need to understand clearly what the topic actually is. Concepts are generally very abstract, and since they are abstract, it's easy for them to drift.

"Ordinary mind" is a word of Buddhist origin; Chinese has many such words, like 精进 (diligent progress) and 想入非非 (fanciful thinking). The encyclopedia definition of "ordinary mind" is: "in all circumstances and all actions, remaining undiscriminating and not obsessive (unbiased)." Modern psychology has some explanations too, roughly: "do your best, let things take their course, be calm and composed." If you search on Toutiao, you can find other articles, concepts and explanations; common ones are: let it be/let it go (letting things take their course), common sense, intuition (intuitive conscience), and 正心诚意 (rectifying the mind and making one's intentions sincere). A line like "never apart from what is done in daily use, reaching back to the time before the first stroke was drawn" is really talking about intuition. And there's the phrase popular in internet circles, "return to the essence, seek truth from facts," as well as accepting uncertainty.

To put it in the plainest words: "When eating, really eat; when sleeping, really sleep."

Everyone is an ordinary person

About ordinary mind, the first thing I want to say is: treat yourself with an ordinary mind. Most basically, recognize that every person, including yourself, is an ordinary person.

When some media report on startups or tell people's stories, they want to add drama: either the experience seems legendary, or the person's traits are very striking. When I used to give interviews, the other side also hoped I would share twists and turns. I'd often say there was nothing special. Actually, as I see it, most things have causes and reasons; there's no part that is especially hard to explain or especially unusual.

It really is like that. As the business has grown, I've come to know more and more people, including many very talented and capable people. My own feeling is: maybe there are some differences in knowledge and experience, but as people, everyone is still very close; they are ordinary people, regular people. But there's one thing: people who achieve a lot often keep a very ordinary state of mind. That is, if you keep an ordinary mind, accept yourself as you are now and do yourself well, you can often do things well: ordinary people can also do extraordinary things.

Expectations and labels are both shackles

When you care a great deal about the result, you're quite likely to perform badly.

For example, in archery we aim at the bullseye, but if you're thinking "I have to score a ten," it's actually hard to perform well. Work and life are the same: when we carry expectations, our movements get distorted and things easily get complicated.

"I ought to be such and such": if you care about your own or other people's expectations, then when you think or make decisions you'll be more or less constrained. All kinds of labels bring psychological burdens.

For example, the label of "senior executive" may make someone too embarrassed to ask a question that looks very simple, and may also keep them from experiencing product scenarios in depth the way a user does. If you position yourself as a big company, you'll think: how should a big company hold its annual meeting, a big company should have a grand strategy, it should hold rallies. Our company's emphasis on not promoting titles is the same idea. Titles make people compare: a vice president should manage so many people, should have such-and-such reporting format, should deal with counterparts of such-and-such level, which creates all sorts of shackles.

Or the label of "young person" may make you afraid to put forward ideas, suggestions or criticism. If you position yourself as a front-end engineer, you feel you don't need to look at machine learning. When I was at Kuxun I did back-end work, but when there was a front-end problem I got involved, when there was a product problem I got involved, when there was a sales problem I got involved. I think you shouldn't be limited by your self-imposed settings; for me, all those experiences were very helpful.
## Focus on the present; treat the past and the future with an ordinary mind

Two years ago, on the English-learning app Kaiyan English, I listened to a bestselling book called The Power of Now. In it there is a passage: all negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry: all forms of fear are caused by too much focus on the future; guilt, regret, resentment, grievance, sadness, bitterness: all forms of non-forgiveness arise from too much focus on the past.

This description may sound very serious. Let me give a small example of my own. In my life I'm not especially regular or especially disciplined; I often look at my phone, listen to music, read Toutiao, scroll Douyin and Xigua, which is rather different from what people outside say. Sometimes I plan to do some work in the evening, but then I get drawn in by something interesting on Xigua and watch it for a long time. Before bed I'm a bit annoyed: oh, I didn't do what I meant to do. Then I do some revenge work for a while, but that makes me go to bed late (I truly think sleep is very important), and at an important meeting the next day I'm in very poor shape. Actually, at that point what you should do is go and rest right away. These days I still often have no plan, but at least when I find it's too late, I don't get annoyed; I go straight to sleep.

The Power of Now's main point is that people spend too much time worrying about the future and fretting over the past, and very little time and attention on the present: on what most needs doing right now, on how they feel right now, on their judgment right now. We've said the past year was dynamic and accelerating, and I believe many people had many different worries. But perhaps in the course of worrying, time and energy have already been used up, and the more important present, the things we need to do now, may actually lack attention. Or perhaps, while regretting losses and mistakes, we miss new opportunities.

Last year, when we faced crises and challenges, I kept telling everyone "stay calm, be patient," and on the whole we managed it. This really is the biggest thing we gained from the challenges we went through: you can't control the result one hundred percent; stay as calm as you can, make the right decisions, don't rush to decide, don't panic, and often you've already got the best result possible.

Some companies hold annual meetings and say: the company is great, the business is great, next year will be even better. I don't much want to stress that with you; business always has all sorts of situations and goes up and down. People also often ask me: how do you deal with anxiety? Your company grew 100% last year; can it grow 100% again next year? I usually reply like this: why must our company grow 100% next year?

Of course, we hope we can grow fast, but we shouldn't let growth anxiety affect you. Right now the company's business is indeed growing very fast, but we can't be intoxicated by past results, nor regret past mistakes, and at the same time we can't hold habitual expectations that our company will definitely turn out a certain way. Open your eyes and see the environment clearly, understand users, make good decisions without distracting thoughts, and whatever the result is, that's what it is.

There's a saying that if you treat yourself as an object, you can be in a state of more ordinary mind, and the same goes for a company. Right now there are many outside summaries of our company, which I think are called "ByteDance success studies"; they're all very problematic. I try not to read them. We shouldn't, in reverse, be defined and influenced by outside evaluations; we should set higher standards based on ourselves.

This year I hope the company can, to some degree, slow down its state of mind: on one hand, avoid the baggage of short-term business anxiety; on the other, imagine the future broadly without fixed expectations, and have longer-range goals. Only without shackles can we keep our imagination for the longer term. As for me, I'll also cut back on more of my daily trivial work and free up more time to focus on company culture, social responsibility and new directions, and to complete the OKRs mentioned in last year's all-staff letter (because of outside challenges, last year we set many goals, and some of them weren't actually achieved).

Competition is the best Blue Army

More than once I've actually heard teams say: ugh, why is this competition endless, when on earth will it be over?

I think the first point of treating competitors with an ordinary mind is to treat competition as the normal state. Don't try to escape competition; competition is a good thing too. I even think competition shouldn't be ended through acquisitions. We've seen many companies that eliminated rivals by acquiring them grow more and more pleased with themselves, and in the end they all slackened.

Competitors make a very good Blue Army (the opposing side in a drill). Competitors may have product innovations, market strategies and other good methods worth learning from. Even with critical articles pushed by competitors, we read them seriously instead of getting angry. Maybe 80% of the article is wrong, but 20% is illuminating for us, so we should absorb that 20%. Apart from competitors, no one will pick at your problems that seriously.

Of course, there's also "don't compete for competition's sake." Sometimes, after a long stretch of competition, beating the competitor becomes the goal. For example, back when Microsoft competed with Google, for a long time Microsoft made beating Google its goal and invested heavily in search. Only years later did it realize that what really affected its core business was the emerging cloud computing, and the rival was Amazon.

Why do we sometimes turn a blind eye to some opportunities? Very likely it's because in the course of competing, our state of mind has already lost its balance and leans more toward defeating the rival. Besides competition there may be other reasons, such as the desire for success or the hope of going public. When the state of mind is no longer ordinary and is already obsessive and discriminating, a company may go "blind."

All-in is sometimes laziness

I particularly want to say: don't rely on shortcuts, use less leverage. Two examples.

When doing business, many people say they want to go all-in and end the battle in one stroke. My own feeling is that a team that casually says all-in has a big problem. All-in is sometimes a kind of laziness. If you've thought it through clearly and the strategy should be like that, there's no problem. But my sense is that very often it's just "I don't want to think about it any more, let's just do it, if it works it works, let's gamble."

Another way of taking shortcuts is: over-abstracting things and over-pursuing methodology. My own feeling is that methodology really isn't that useful; most of the time it may even be pretty much useless. Because abstracting a thing amounts to adding leverage to your thinking. Once that leverage is applied wrongly, it's usually "off by a hair at the start, off by a thousand miles at the end."

There's actually a term for this phenomenon, "the fatal conceit of reason," which is also human ego. Because the limits of knowledge are very obvious, and much knowledge is unstructured, overusing concepts actually doesn't help understanding; avoiding over-abstraction in how you use methods is also a form of ordinary mind.

In all kinds of discussions I often tell colleagues: don't rush to conclusion. Don't too easily say "to put it bluntly, it's just this." When we draw conclusions, we should guess at other possibilities and keep an open mind.

Using more and more abstract and high-flown vocabulary is also a tendency to seek methodology. Let me read you a passage I pieced together from words I pulled out of our bimonthly meeting materials:

In the past we mainly relied on the information-distribution capability empowered by recommendation technology, cross-end linkage of Douyin-Toutiao-Xigua, and in-house development split across multiple products, to achieve deep co-construction, form a combination punch, and build a closed-loop content ecosystem, thereby empowering customers and users to create value. In the future we will increase horizontal cross-scenario value and extend the service chain. At the same time we will meet user needs in depth, leveraging the natural potential energy of human age to achieve deep penetration among users of multiple age groups: children, middle-aged and young. In addition, by strengthening infrastructure investment and improving the business value chain across multiple position-related products, we will build lasting external user influence.

In reality, many of our important decisions don't need such complicated descriptions. Many important judgments are made by observing users and facts; keeping a sensitive empathy and a broad imagination is what matters. I found some old photos of me and our management team doing random user interviews in Delhi in India, Qingyang, Chongqing and Zhangjiakou. Even earlier, we encouraged all employees, when on holiday, to talk with five relatives and friends, see what apps they used on their phones, and ask why they used them.

I often find counterintuitive designs in our products. I also often wonder why we make some counterintuitive designs. If you set methodology aside and just use the product in a very relaxed way, you'll notice: this spot isn't quite right. Is it because we want too much to prove some idea, cling too stubbornly to some concept, and so make mistakes in product design? Often small children can spot the counterintuitive parts of a design; why can't product managers who have read all sorts of product-philosophy analysis documents spot them? Is it because they want too much to validate some idea, or are too influenced by some dogmatic concept?

Here I've put up three products, all of them very well made. One is Google Earth, which I often use to learn geography; it's a great product but doesn't make money. Scratch, children's programming: I don't know whether it makes money, but it's also great. Roblox, a UGC sandbox game, very different from what we usually mean by games. [Translator's note: he was pointing to slides; the images were not preserved.]

What do these products have in common? First, they need a lot of imagination. Second, they need a lot of patience, a very long time of work. I wonder whether our company can make products like these. I'm not saying slow is good. Fast or slow is decided by the thing itself, but if the thing needs a great deal of imagination and you've only been at it for two years, and lots of people say, oh, this won't work, will the strong outside expectations at that point affect whether we keep investing?

Don't take external causes for internal ones, or luck for ability

Once, in a discussion of business competition that left a deep impression on me, a team said: oh no, the rival's growth has sped up again, we'd better do something fast. I said: back when we were behind the rival, we thought of many ways to improve, but without psychological baggage, imagining boldly and acting boldly. Now that we're ahead of the rival, we can't keep an ordinary mind; we're too afraid of failing, and our moves may get distorted.

I asked him: do you play games? Have you ever run into this in a game: a game has 100 levels to clear, and when you reach level 99 your hands start to shake. You think, "I finally made it to level 99," "I absolutely mustn't make a mistake," and then you usually die.

Treating success and failure with an ordinary mind also includes not misattributing: don't take external causes for internal ones, don't take luck for ability; find the real reasons for success or failure. When we first did short video, retention among urban users wasn't very good. In the discussion, one colleague felt it must be because urban white-collar workers do more mental labor and lean more toward expression through pictures and text. The logic of that summary sounds very reasonable at first. Now we know the facts weren't like that.

I'm not saying all conclusions are wrong. Only that we should admit there are things we don't know. People dislike uncertainty very much, so for both success and failure they want to find attributions that fit their own narrative. I hope we can have a bit more of an ordinary mind.

On how to face mistakes, I have a "four-step routine." The first three lines come from a book; they say that when you run into a problem, there are several things you have to do. Step one is realize it: truly recognize the mistake, after which you can regret it a little less; recognizing it is itself a gain. You can also correct it: fix it, amend it, which is another gain. You can also learn from it: learn the reasons behind the mistake. The book lists these three steps, and later I added one more: forgive it. If you've finished the first three steps, then you should let it go. When facing mistakes, many people stress reflecting painfully after the pain; my suggestion is: don't stay in a state of self-blame for too long.

Two years ago there was a very popular documentary called Free Solo. When I was in California I met its protagonist, Alex Honnold. Many people shared his story, but what impressed me most was this: going forward and going back are both dangerous, but weak legs and a racing mind are the most dangerous of all. During the climb you can neither look back too much, be scared after the fact, or agonize over a wrong step; nor look ahead at how long a way there still is to go. One thing is very much worth learning from Alex: in that moment he is completely focused on the present.

Free soloing, an experience with such a high degree of uncertainty, is something very few people will have. I have a much more ordinary but similar feeling. Running and swimming used to be hard for me to keep up; even two kilometers was hard. Later I wondered what exactly kept me from running on. It was actually aversion to, or worry about, the fatigue of running that made me tense. So I tried not thinking about anything else while running: apart from the necessary adjustments to my breathing, I kept every muscle that didn't need effort as loose as possible, relaxed as much as I could, ignored the distraction of the soreness, and could easily run 3 or 4 kilometers. Later I applied this practice to swimming too. I could only swim 500 meters at first, and easily got to 1,000 meters; it wasn't that my fitness improved, but as I felt it, I removed the losses in between. By not worrying about whether I could finish, whether I'd rested well yesterday, whether I was in good form today, I actually ran better.

I especially like watching videos on Douyin of sailing on the open sea. I'm not saying your work or life really has stormy-sea difficulties; I want to use it as a metaphor for a state of mind: whatever challenges and difficulties there are in your work and life, those are all external. What you yourself can achieve is this: outside, the waves rise and fall; inside, the mind is as calm as ever.

That's all I'll share today. Thank you, everyone.

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