The New Year Formula

2025 is just around the corner. As I reflect on what matters most to me, I’ve tried distilling those ideas into ultra-minimalist “formulas”—not as rigid equations, but as conceptual anchors. Here’s what emerged:

  • Life = Present Moment × (Awareness + Action) ^ Transcendence
  • Death = (Soul: Free) AND (Body: Gone)
  • Health = (Movement AND Sleep AND Nutrition AND Emotion AND Medication) × Balance
  • Sleep Quality = (Motivation × Capacity × Environment) − Disruptors
  • Happiness = MIN(Meaning, Health, Relationships) × Present Moment
  • Meaning = (Mission → Focus → Achievement) × Continuity
  • Relationships = (Trust AND Boundaries AND Collaboration) × Maintenance
  • Mindset = Awareness → Acceptance → Regulation
  • Interpersonal Conduct = (Integrity + Altruism) × Boundaries
  • Family = (Acceptance AND Responsibility AND Presence) × Sustained Investment
  • Intimate Relationship = (Unconditional Love AND Nonviolent Communication AND Physical Intimacy) × Sustenance
  • Child Development = (Unconditional Love AND Environment AND Role Modeling) × Time
  • Decision-Making = (Information + Analysis + Intuition) × Accountability
  • Emotional Stability = Perspective ÷ Trigger Intensity
  • Learning Effectiveness = Depth of Understanding × Practice Frequency

AI Salon

Last weekend, 15 peers from across China gathered in Beijing for a deep-dive AI salon—focused on traffic (user acquisition) and AI’s practical implications. Here’s a distilled summary:

On Traffic:

  • User acquisition remains the top pain point. Two main levers: (1) using AI to boost content production speed and quality; (2) proactively entering emerging platforms early to capture their traffic bonus.
  • WeChat Official Accounts still deliver massive, highly tolerant traffic—ideal for long-form, nuanced content.
  • Diversify revenue streams. Never rely on a single channel.
  • Indirect marketing works: tell stories your target audience genuinely cares about—and let curiosity drive consultation.
  • China has vast underutilized resources: everyday people’s time, identities, accounts, devices. Shared-economy models could aggregate these into scalable traffic pools.

On AI:

  • AI today feels like how computers felt 20 years ago: transformative, foundational, and full of latent energy.
  • It’s not just a tool—it’s a state: when you’re “in AI,” you’re energized, focused, and future-oriented.
  • AI lets us build systems previously unimaginable. Its potential is truly open-ended.
  • Those with domain expertise have a head start: deepen your knowledge in one area, then layer AI on top.
  • AI cuts labor costs and lifts productivity—profoundly.
  • If you’re stuck, pick a familiar workflow and reconstruct it with AI: old ingredients + new tech = disruptive innovation.
  • With deep industry experience + AI thinking, leverage multiplies dramatically. Start where you’re strongest—and refine mature models, don’t chase novelty.
  • Shift training energy from employees to AI agents: teach them, tune them, trust them.
  • Revisit every process, every interaction, every pain point—and ask: “How would AI reshape this?”
  • Imagine each person having 100,000 AI “employees.” How do we unlock their collective output?
  • This wave isn’t just opportunity—it’s hope, excitement, and momentum reminiscent of the early internet.
  • AI reshapes learning itself: faster, more adaptive, deeply personalized.
  • Build your own AI “brain trust”: an always-on, context-aware advisor that surfaces blind spots and sparks insight.
  • Large language models each have distinct “personalities”—choose wisely, and calibrate accordingly.
  • Prompt engineering is now a core skill. Master it—or get left behind.
  • Generate custom prompts from keywords first, then use those prompts to create high-quality outputs.
  • Education and healthcare stand out as AI’s highest-potential sectors.
  • AI tutors will soon replace many 1:1 online tutoring services—especially as multimodal capabilities mature.
  • This wave favors those with technical intuition and execution ability. Yes, there’s still a barrier—but it’s surmountable, and the upside is asymmetric.
  • Success lies not in chasing AI everywhere—but in reconstructing your known world with AI as co-pilot.

Yang Xiang’s Synthesis:

  • Internet businesses need traffic—and traffic lives on platforms where users already are. To win it, produce content aligned with both user preferences and platform rules. AI accelerates that production dramatically.
  • Content formats (text, audio, video, images) are increasingly interoperable thanks to AI. Turn a blog post into a TikTok video, a Xiaohongshu carousel, or a voiceover script—all from one source.
  • Not all platforms serve all goals equally. For travel, customer purchasing power ranks roughly: Xiaohongshu < Douyin < Baidu Search. For other industries? Flip the order. Prioritize deliberately.
  • AI’s current boundaries:
    ① Best at text—rewriting, SEO optimization, headline generation, etc.
    ② Strong intent recognition and coherent multi-turn dialogue make it ideal for frontline customer service and lead qualification—especially in regulated fields like healthcare.
  • Video generation holds the greatest commercial promise—but remains immature. Template-based, clip-combining tools (e.g., creatify.ai) are more viable today.
  • Domestic platforms haven’t yet finalized AI-content policies—so tolerance is high, and early movers enjoy real advantage.
  • The biggest gap? People who understand both their industry and AI’s realistic capabilities. That’s where the highest-leverage opportunities live—e.g., feeding a keyword to AI and getting back a fully structured, SEO-optimized, professionally written mini-site cluster.
  • When competition devolves into price wars, seek blue oceans—not just new features, but new platforms in growth mode: e.g., shifting from Xiaohongshu to WeChat’s “Xiao Lü Shu” (green-book-style long-form content).

Cross-Circle Thinking

Take entrepreneurship: two dominant archetypes—“Jianghu” (martial-arts-world) and “Academy” styles.

  • Jianghu: Fast, pragmatic, obsessed with traffic, sales, and profit. Reads the market like weather.
  • Academy: Deliberate, systemic, focused on product architecture, business models, and capital strategy. Builds moats, not just momentum.

Each brings irreplaceable strengths. But true leverage comes not from choosing one over the other—nor from dabbling superficially in both—but from cross-circle thinking: stepping outside your native tribe (e.g., education, AI, traffic) to observe, compare, and synthesize.

The real value isn’t “learning a bit from everyone.” It’s:

  1. Mapping the underlying logic of each circle—what assumptions drive its decisions?
  2. Identifying complementarity: where does Jianghu’s speed fill Academy’s gaps—and vice versa?
  3. Choosing the right lens for the right moment: deploy Academy rigor for strategy, Jianghu agility for execution.

That’s how perspective becomes three-dimensional—and insight, actionable.

Simplifying Expression

Practicing simplicity in expression is one of the best ways to train logic and deepen thought.

Speaking fluently doesn’t equal communicating well. Often, verbosity masks shallow thinking—adding noise, diluting signal, obscuring structure.

So practice this hierarchy:

  • Say it in one word—if possible.
  • If not, use one sentence.
  • If not, use one paragraph.
  • If not, use one article.

No more.

Why? Because compression forces clarity. To express something simply, you must first know exactly what matters—and why. That act of distillation is deep thinking.

And in communication? Simplicity pierces. Complexity clouds. Too many adjectives, clauses, or caveats scatter attention like dust in clear water.

Using the right words, in the right place, with minimal adornment—that’s a rare, powerful skill.

True mastery isn’t just simplification. It’s elevation: turning complexity into lucidity—not by removing substance, but by revealing its essential shape.

Understanding Death

Today, a philosophy lecture on Socrates’ view of death struck me deeply.

He framed death as a profound blessing—one holding “great hope.” Why? Because it can mean only two things:

  1. Total cessation—no sensation, no awareness, like dreamless sleep.
  2. Or, the soul’s migration—to another place, another state.

Then he offered this elegant analogy:

“Imagine a night of perfect, dreamless sleep—deeper than any other night or day you’ve ever known. Compare it to all your waking hours. You’d say: No day or night in my life was better or more joyful than that night.”

Calling death “dreamless sleep” is quietly revolutionary.

Socrates feared no end—because for him, life’s worth wasn’t measured in years, but in meaning. His famous line echoes here: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Seen this way, death becomes strangely romantic—not as an erasure, but as a silent, dignified counterpoint to life’s intensity.

Wisdom may lie precisely here: meeting our final horizon with calm. Because when death loses its terror, presence gains its full weight—and life, its richest texture.

A gentle paradox: only by accepting finitude do we truly begin to live.

It’s hard. But it’s worth pursuing—not to master death, but to reclaim life. After all, understanding death is perhaps the deepest way we come to understand life itself.