English Recommendation 1: Youth Pi + View of Wealth

(This essay is translated from zh-CN)

On July 1st this year, I started my first overseas trip from Hong Kong Airport. A very important goal during the trip was to understand English podcasts. Intensive listening to Chinese podcasts over the past few years has had a huge impact on me. I’m curious, what inspiration will the world of English podcasts bring me? I have switched most of my daily information input to English. This series serves as a monthly review of English input and recommends some of my favorite podcasts and texts from the previous month.

Here are my favorite podcasts and texts from October:

1. Podcast: Life of Pi

Before and After Pi: ​​Yann Martel in conversation with Jerry Pinto

An anchor with a slight Indian accent conducted an interview with Yann Martel, the original author of “Life of Pi”. Yann’s English accent is very nice. This one-hour podcast explains almost all the details in the book. It is the most detailed explanation of the book among the related podcasts I have listened to so far. for example:

• Pi drifted at sea for 227 days before finally landing. 227 is a prime number that can only be divided by 1 and itself, symbolizing the uniqueness of this story; 22 divided by 7 equals a decimal close to 3.14, which is also related to Pi.
• A mysterious island composed of a carnivorous green plant ecosystem at night, and another drifting man Pi met while drifting. These incredible plots are arranged to bring readers out of the drama and realize the fantasy of this version, so that When the author slowly tells another more true but crueler version at the end, the reader can choose which version to accept.

Confronting Your Fears and Taking a Leap

Because this is the first article in the English recommendation series, I would like to share one more podcast that I listened to in September. The host of the Indie Hacker podcast interviewed Pieter Level, an independent developer of Nomad List. I was very inspired by Level’s action of releasing an independently developed product every month for 12 consecutive months. He also wrote an e-book for independent developers , which is very practical (read it more than twice, and many of the views can be compared with Paul Gram’s As a venture capitalist’s blog corroborates each other).

• To create a good product, you don’t need to be a good designer or a good programmer; what you need is to use the way you are good at to solve real problems, continue to solve problems, continue to deliver new products, and let Paying users tell you which product is good.
• Focus on solving real problems (preferably starting with your own problems), not cool technologies, not new programming languages, not new development frameworks, just use the tools you are most familiar with.
• Find problems in your own life and turn them into seeds for your product. If I were to assign you any homework, it would be to list 3 problems in your life every day for a week and see which of these 21 problems can become your next product.

2. Text: Navarre’s view of wealth

Get wealthy without being lucky

This article is actually a transcript of the podcast. The podcast is 4 hours long and is suitable for extensive listening. The text version has subtitles to make it clearer and easier to read, making it easier to look up some new words. You can also click on the link to see more reference materials.

This blog post is based on a series of Naval’s tweets about wealth, explaining in detail the logic behind each of them. It is a key reference source for the wealth chapter of the book “Naval Book”.

There is a similar point of view in the sharing of Naval, Paul Gram, and Pieter Level, which can be summarized as what Ren told me in Dali three years ago, “Take what you like to the extreme, and opportunities will naturally appear.” Only by doing something you like can you put in a hundred times more energy without feeling like you are working, and you will stick to it for a long time.

I recently re-read the English version of “Siddhartha” and found that Siddhartha also said similar words when explaining to the famous courtesan Kamala why he could become rich so smoothly, explaining why a clear and firm goal Very important , (the following is a free translation):

“When you throw a pebble into the water, it will quickly fall to the bottom. When I have a goal and a determination, things will progress as smoothly as the pebble falling to the bottom. I don’t No matter what magic spell I use to practice, I do nothing. I just concentrate on letting the goal guide me forward. No other distracting thoughts can enter my mind. Ordinary people think that I use magic spells to make it so smooth. In fact, everyone Everyone can have such a ‘magic’, and everyone can achieve his goals, as long as he can think, wait, and fast.”

When explaining why “fasting” is important to the businessman Kamaswami, Siddhartha said, “If a person has no money to buy food, then the ability to fast (endure hunger) is important to him, because then he can I won’t succumb to hunger and make some wrong decisions.” Personally, I feel that this corresponds to wealth management, that is, being able to get used to a simple life with low consumption desire. People with real wealth freedom are not necessarily people with a lot of wealth, but people who have far more than they need. If the basic living standards you need are easily met, you can feel more comfortable doing the things you love without worrying about being able to meet your living expenses.

PS What are you passionate about?

Originally I was just sharing the content of the first two chapters. After writing it down, I found that the next question arose: For friends who don’t know what they like yet, how do they find what they like?

• If you think you like to do something but haven’t done it yet, do it quickly. You can learn more by doing it yourself than by watching others do it. No matter how difficult it is, you can still find the first, second, and third steps that you can take now. Take three small steps first and feel whether you like it or not during the action. For example, on May Day in 2022, after I came back from a trip to Yangshuo , I wanted to learn guitar on a whim. I watched guitar self-study videos online for a while, and soon bought a folk guitar and started self-study. After three months, I felt that I couldn’t persist in self-study. I started taking lessons at a music store and took lessons for more than half a year until I started traveling. During this period, I was constantly feeling and questioning whether playing guitar was something I liked to do.
• But many times, you have already done the things you like. What you need is to abandon distracting thoughts like Siddhartha and hear the signals the universe gives you. It is recommended that everyone record their thoughts. Writing can help you think better . Trust your intuition, trust your inner voice, and the universe will speak to you when you are on the right path.
• The law of the universe is that you can achieve anything you want to do, but you cannot achieve everything you want to do. So you need to narrow the scope of what you want to do to a few specific things, and often remind yourself what you can do for these important things today.