Cultivating Business Sensibility

The key to making money is cultivating business sensibility—an intuitive feel for commerce.

What matters most in building that sensibility? Empathy.

Most people lack genuine empathy—not out of malice, but because empathy demands high emotional investment, while daily life tends to orbit around self-centered awareness.

For example: When someone shares grief or distress with you, your instinct might be to say, “It’s no big deal,” “It doesn’t matter,” or “Don’t worry.” You may believe you’re being kind—offering tough love, sound advice. But that’s not empathy. It’s not even effective care. You’re just dispensing generic, low-effort platitudes—speaking down from a position of assumed superiority.

True care requires empathetic listening: high-bandwidth emotional engagement, stepping fully into the other person’s perspective and feeling with them. That’s hard—and energetically costly.

So even if full empathy feels out of reach, simply holding space—refraining from judgment, resisting the urge to lecture—is already extraordinary. And it changes everything for the other person.

Business works the same way. “Commercial need” isn’t what you think people need—it’s what they actually need. Need creates demand. And commerce is people: satisfying human needs is commerce.

Discovering what someone truly needs is an act of empathy.
Spotting that need—and having the sharpness to solve it—is what business sensibility looks like.

When you’re young, developing empathy on your own is rarely easy. A better path? Apprentice yourself to a proven commercial operator. Do what he does. First get results—then reflect, internalize, and grow your sensibility. It’s faster, and far more grounded.

Professional Ethos

Professional ethos means treating excellence as non-negotiable—doing the work well isn’t optional; it’s the baseline.

So when choosing partners, prioritize those with professional ethos.

How do you spot it? My litmus test is simple: Has this person ever earned their first meaningful income—through employment or entrepreneurship—using only their own skills and effort?

Why this benchmark? Because in a commercial world, “effective” professionalism means combining sound judgment with executional competence. Earning that first real income proves both.

Lean-Asset Business

A strong lean-asset business model meets four criteria:

Low fixed costs
Standardizable and replicable
High ceiling (scalable without hitting structural limits)
Capable of generating network or scale effects

Finding such a model is rare—and rarely happens on the first try. It demands practice.

At least two phases are required:

Immersion: Run many small experiments—feel firsthand what “cost,” “replication,” and “scale” actually mean in action.
Refinement: Only after that immersion can you identify the lean-asset model that fits you.

Almost no one nails it immediately. So while you’re young: act, iterate, ship. That’s the only reliable path forward.

Making Life Meaningful

How do you make life more meaningful?

My answer: accumulate experience—broadly defined. Not just travel or socializing, but also deep reading, sustained reflection, and deliberate exposure to unfamiliar ideas and disciplines.

The more varied your experiences, the richer your mental models. Your perspective widens. Your analysis gains dimensionality. Your response to difficulty grows calmer, more resilient.

That’s what I mean by “meaningful life”: it keeps you out of cognitive ruts—and gives you room to breathe.

Stop Worrying About Others’ Opinions

We obsess over what others think—constantly.

My mom used to pressure me about marriage with lines like, “Everyone else is married,” or “What will people say?” It’s a life lived entirely for outsiders.

An American writer put it well: “One sign of maturity is realizing that 99% of what happens to you each day means absolutely nothing to anyone else.”

Maturity has little to do with age. If you still measure your choices by imagined public opinion—you’re not yet mature inside.

Whether you marry, how much you earn, what joys or sorrows you endure—all of it is invisible to others. It carries zero weight in their lives.

The only exceptions? A handful of people closest to you—your parents, partner, children. With them, offering clarity and stability matters.

Yet most of us get this backward: we fret endlessly over strangers’ judgments—and never pause to ask how our actions land with those who truly depend on us.

“Both-And” Is Poison

In reviewing my startup journey, I reached a blunt conclusion: “I want both X *and Y and Z” usually guarantees you’ll get none.*

That “both-and” mindset is greed dressed up as ambition.

Life is short. Doing one thing well is already immense. Each deep endeavor drains real energy.

So—at any given stage—focus on one priority. Do it thoroughly. Finish it. Then move on.

Xu Xiaonian’s Latest Views (Unofficial Compilation)

Every generation faces its own realities—and must forge its own answers.
China’s golden era was 1978–2008: thirty years of extraordinary growth.
Businesses waste energy obsessing over policy. Focus instead on your core: outperform competitors—even slightly.
Real innovation isn’t chasing trends. Globally, only a handful of firms can build universally usable foundational software. (Stop mislabeling everything “AI.”)
Return to commercial fundamentals. Don’t chase hype. Stay alert to new tech—but don’t follow blindly.
Commerce exists to create customer value. Period.
Exponential growth is time’s higher-order function; linear growth is mere constant. Britain crushed Qing China not with superior guns—but with exponential institutional and technological momentum overwhelming linear thinking.
Higher-order systems dominate lower-order ones.
If you can’t beat them, join them. History shows no pre-modern civilization has ever preserved itself intact against modernity.
National differences don’t invalidate universal market principles—or basic economic truths.
Growth springs only from innovation—not demand. The “three engines” (investment, consumption, exports) may be a detour. Adam Smith’s path—innovation → efficiency → growth—is the right one. We must keep critiquing Keynesianism: it confuses cause and effect.
Today’s weak investment demand reflects deeper confidence deficits—not high interest rates. July’s loan drop wasn’t about cost—it was about belief. Keynesian tools ignore this.
“Stimulate consumption”? That’s a false framing. What’s missing isn’t desire—it’s income. Stimulus won’t help if people have no money.
Supply creates demand—not vice versa. Firms profit → workers earn → consumers spend.
In the U.S., household savings aren’t vanishing—they’re flowing into pension plans. No checking-account balance ≠ no saving.
Sell property now—if you haven’t already. Delay risks missing the window.
History records only one great transition: modernization. You’re either modern—or pre-modern (agrarian or early industrial).
Three historical “peaceful prosperities”: Wen-Jing Reign (Han Dynasty), Zhenguan Era (Tang Dynasty), Kang-Qian Prosperity (Qing Dynasty).
Read The Wealth of Nations. Division of labor boosts efficiency—even with fixed resources. Its downside? Growing societal monotony.
There’s nothing new under the sun.
Division raises efficiency—but collaboration raises transaction costs. Apple now designs its own chips partly for security: Samsung mastered Apple’s specs, then leveraged its own manufacturing and product lines against it.
A handshake or memo is not a credible commitment. Only binding promises backed by real stakes count—e.g., TSMC pledging never to make smartphones secured Apple’s orders.
Globalization isn’t ending—it’s evolving: from one WTO to overlapping regional trade pacts.
Since the pandemic, foreign buyers require Chinese suppliers to hold overseas production capacity—or risk losing contracts. Supply-chain risk must be hedgeable.
Chinese pragmatism asks one question: “Can it feed me?” Hence, many pursuits seem pointless.
The new globalization excludes China by design. The only option is to go out.
China leads the world in auto, smartphone, refrigerator, coal, and power production—massive overcapacity.
Nobody believes you care about them more than they do.
The Ukraine war is a defining setback for Russia’s modernization.
Use 2–3% annual growth as the benchmark—for developed economies. Asking “What policy will the government introduce?” misses the point. The real challenge isn’t policy or conditions—it’s thriving within prolonged low-growth reality.