凡事归咎于己，以保全自主权

让我们再讨论一条我初次看到时就喜欢、或许还转发过的推文。我认为人们转发内容时，往往是遇到了自己尚未找到合适方式表达、但内心已然知晓的想法——那些隐含未明的东西突然被明确道出时，人们就会觉得'我必须转发这个'。这条发布于1月17日的推文写道：'为一切责备自己，以保全你的主观能动性。'我的理解是：对一切负责，正是在这个担责的过程中，你创造并保留了解决问题的能动性。如果你对问题没有责任，你就无法解决问题。

Let's talk about one more tweet which I liked when I first saw it or I might have retweeted it. I think people retweet things when they see something that they haven't figured how to say yet but they knew in their head but it's just implicit, it hadn't been made explicit, I think that's when people are like I need to retweet this. So this one was January 17, Blame yourself for everything and preserve your agency. From my end it's like take responsibility for everything and in the process of taking responsibility for something, you create and preserve the agency to go solve that problem. If you're not responsible for the problem, there's no way for you to fix the problem.

关于你提到的'心有戚戚却未能言表'这点，爱默生就常做这样的事——他用优美的方式表述时，你会惊呼'这正是我所思所感却无法言说的'。他的表述方式是：'在每部天才作品中，我们都能认出自己曾摒弃的念头，它们带着某种疏离的威严回到我们身边。'我太爱这句话了。这也是我在推特上努力做的：用有趣的方式诉说真相。

Just to address your point of how it was something you already knew but phrased in a way that you liked, Emerson did this all the time, he would phrase things in a beautiful way and you would say Oh, that's exactly what I was thinking and feeling, but I didn't know how to articulate it. And the way he put it was he said, in every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts. They come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. And I just love that line. It's what I try to do with Twitter, which is I try to say something true, but in an interesting way.

不仅要真实有趣地表达，还必须蕴含真正的情感分量。它必须最近触动过我，对我有重要意义。否则就是在弄虚作假。我不会刻意构思推文，而是当某些事发生并触动我时，以特定方式将其凝练出来。

And not only just true and interesting way to say it, but also it has to be something that really has emotional heft behind it. It has to have struck me recently and been important to me. Otherwise, I'm just faking it. I don't sit around trying to think up tweets to write. It's more that something happens to me, something affects me emotionally, and then I synthesize it in a certain way.

我会验证：这是真相吗？如果觉得基本属实，或在我关注的语境下成立，并能用让我印象深刻的方式表达，就会发布。对理解者来说这并非新知——若表述无趣，就成了陈词滥调。

I test it. I'm like, is this true? And if I feel like it's true or mostly true or true in the context that I care about, and if I can say it in some way that'll help me stick in my mind, then I just send it out there. And it's nothing new for the people who get it. If it's not said in an interesting way, then it's a cliche.

或者听过太多次也会沦为陈词。但若表述新颖，就可能唤醒重要记忆，成为将具体认知转化为更普适认知的思维钩子。这个过程对我有益，希望他人亦然。说到那条推文，我注意到人们常愤世嫉俗地说'所有财富都是被银行家之流窃取的'，或归咎于裙带资本家、寡头等等。仿佛穷孩子就永无翻身之日...

Or Or if they've heard it too much, it's a cliche. But if it's said in an interesting way, then it may remind them of something that was important, or it might convert their specific knowledge or might be a hook for converting their specific knowledge into more general knowledge in their own minds. So I find that process useful for myself, and hopefully others do too. Now, for the specific tweet, I just noticed this tendency where people are very cynical, and they'll say all the wealth is stolen, for example, by banksters and the like, or crony capitalists, or what have you, or just outright thieves or oligarchs. You can't rise up in this world if you're ex.

仿佛特定种族、出生地或残障人士就注定无法成功。问题在于：世界确实存在真实障碍，竞争环境并不公平——'公平'只存在于孩童幻想中。但世界并非全靠运气。

You can't rise up in this world if you're a poor kid. You can't rise up in this world if you are from this race or ethnicity, if you were born in that country, or if you're lame or crippled or blind or what have you. And the problem with this is that, yes, there are real hindrances in the world. It is not a level playing field, and fair is something that only exists in a child's imagination and cannot be pinned down in any real way. But the world is not entirely luck.

事实上你深知这点，因为人生中某些主动作为确实带来了好结果。你也清楚若当初不作为就不会有那些收获。所以人绝对能改变命运。运气并非全部——时间跨度越长，行动越密集，迭代次数越多，投入的思考与选择越多，运气的影响就越微弱。举个硅谷人都懂的例子：二十年前我见过的每个年轻才俊，如今全都成功了。

In fact, you know that because in your own life, there are things that you have done that have led to good outcomes. And you know that if you had not done that thing, it would not have led to that good outcome. So you can absolutely move the needle. And it's not all luck, and especially the longer the timeframe you're talking about, the more intense the activity, the more iteration you take, and the more thinking and choice you apply into it, the less luck matters, it recedes into the distance. To give you a simple example, which most people won't love because they're not in Silicon Valley, but every brilliant person I met in Silicon Valley twenty years ago, every single one, the young brilliant ones, every single one is successful.

无一例外。真该做个天才指数追踪——其实YC孵化器就在大规模做这件事。

Every single one. I cannot think of an exception. I should have gone back and just indexed them all based on their brilliance. By the way, that's what Y Combinator does at scale. Right?

多么精妙的机制啊！坚持二十年就会见效。你或许会说'站着说话不腰疼，这是硅谷人的特权'——但这里所有人都是迁徙而来的。

What a great mechanism. So it works. If people stick at it for twenty years, it works. Now you might say, easy for you to say, man, that's for the people in Silicon Valley. No one was born here.

他们为与聪明人为伍而来，为掌握主动权而来。主观能动性确实有效——但若计较时间长短，你会过早放弃。所以需要更高层次的动力：这正是马斯克探索火星、山姆创造AGI、乔布斯八十年代就梦想打造书本大小电脑的原因。

They all moved here. They moved here because they wanted to be where the other smart kids were and because they wanted to be high agency. So agency does work, but if you're keeping track of the time period, you're gonna be disappointed, you'll give up too soon. So you need a higher motivator. That's why Elon goes to Mars, and that's why Sam wants to invent AGI, and that's why Steve Jobs wanted to build fifty years ago in the eighties, he was talking about building a computer that would fit in a book.

他当时在谈论iPad。正是这些长远的愿景支撑着你在漫长岁月中真正构建你想构建的东西，到达你想去的地方。所以，愤世嫉俗的信念会自我实现。悲观的信念就像你骑着摩托车，却盯着那堵你应该避开的砖墙——你会不知不觉地撞向那堵墙。

He was talking about the iPad. So it's these very long visions that sustain you over the long periods of time to actually build the thing you wanna build and get to where you wanna get. So a cynical be belief is self fulfilling. A pessimistic belief is like you're driving the motorcycle, but you're looking at the brick wall that you're supposed to turn away from. You will turn into the brick wall without even realizing it.

所以你必须保持自己的能动性。你天生就拥有能动性。孩子们具有高度的能动性——他们想要什么就去争取。如果他们看到想要的东西，就会主动去获取。

So you have to preserve your agency. You're born with agency. Children are high agency. They go get what they want. If they want something, they see it, they go get it.

你必须保持自己的能动性。你必须坚信自己能够改变事物。

You have to preserve your agency. You have to preserve your belief that you can change things.