I was never rebellious by nature. More precisely, even as a very young child, I had an unusually strong loyalty to whatever judgment had already formed inside me. (Maybe that’s just a nicer way of saying I was stubborn.)
A lot of the trouble in my life has come from this. I seem to have a very stable internal operating system, one that sometimes doesn’t even feel entirely under the control of my own rational mind or willpower, let alone the outside world. Only things I genuinely believe in can really enter the system. I can try to fool myself, but somehow I always know. I figured this out about myself very early.
When I was in school, our entire grade once sat together in a huge auditorium for a psychology lecture. The teacher told us that scientific research had shown that if we stared carefully enough at a certain picture for long enough, we would eventually experience a particular sensation. So more than a thousand students sat there staring at it. When we were done, she asked, “Did anyone not feel it?” I raised my hand.I assumed a lot of other hands would go up too, but when I looked around, I seemed to be the only one. Then she asked me to stand up. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Look again, more carefully. If you didn’t feel it, could it be because you weren’t paying enough attention?” Even worse, my mother was there; she was a teacher at the same school. I still remember standing there trembling while the whole grade looked at me. I was terrified, but there was only one thought left in my head: But I really didn’t feel it. So I still said no. Then the teacher smiled. She told us that this was the actual psychology experiment. There had never been any such scientific research, she had simply found a random picture. I thought about that moment many times afterward. There was no way I was the only person in that auditorium who had felt nothing. But I am the only one insisted. If I didn’t feel it, then I didn’t feel it.
I got hit a lot as a child, and a large portion of it was because adults thought I was talking back, being argumentative, or refusing to behave. But I really wasn’t trying to challenge anyone. I was just unbearably curious. An adult would say, “That’s just how it is,” and my immediate response would be, “Why?” They would say, “Because everyone says so.” “But why does that make it true?” “Because I’m an adult.” “But what does being an adult have to do with being right?”
Obviously, this was not an especially pleasant child to raise. Once, when we went back to the countryside to visit my grandparents, my father hit me in front of a group of people. People in the village watched and said they had never seen such a stubborn child in all their years, especially a little girl. “There’s no taming this one,” they said. Looking back, I actually think taming was a surprisingly accurate word. I instinctively separated authority from truth. Someone having power over me only proved that they had the ability to punish me. It did not prove that what they were saying was true.
This became especially disastrous when it came to homework in elementary school. For almost my entire elementary-school life, I barely did homework at home. I would get to school in the morning and finish it as fast as possible, or copy someone else’s. My father hit me many times trying to break this habit. For a while, I would even dream that he had beaten me to death and wake up terrified. The absurd part was that after waking up, I still wouldn’t do my homework. I thought it was meaningless. The logic in my little head was very simple: if I already know how to do it, why do I need to write it again? If I don’t know how to do it, why would copying it ten times suddenly make me understand it? And if something is meaningless, why should I spend my time doing it?
As for “If you don’t do it, you’ll get hit,” that was somehow a separate issue. My father kept increasing the punishment, hoping punishment would change my behavior. The ridiculous result was that he never really changed the belief underneath it; he just increased my tolerance for punishment. Haha. Again and again, I discovered: Oh. Apparently I can survive this too. (This is also why I now believe so strongly in 因材施教 if I ever become a parent).
This operating system didn’t only show up in my relationship with authority. I have always genuinely liked people. I’m extroverted and I love being around others. If you drop me into a group of people, I can spend an entire day talking, playing, eating, and discussing all kinds of random things with them, and I’ll be perfectly happy. But strangely, once nobody is actively approaching me, I almost never go looking outward for social interaction. I can just go home, read story after story, lie in bed, and start imagining things. As a child, I had countless worlds inside my head, my brain could run its own amusement park, and it was open all year. Over time, I realized that I don’t particularly depend on the outside world to supply me with psychological content. That probably explains part of why the outside world has always had a limited ability to push me.
And yet, on the other hand, I really enjoy the moments when another person changes me or influences me. I almost welcome every real change that manages to happen to me, perhaps because on some level I know how rare it is. I hardly ever shop, but when I do, I usually go in with a very specific goal: a certain brand, a certain color, a certain T-shirt. But if I’m shopping with someone I trust and they casually say, “I think that one is better,” I can immediately change my mind and buy the other one instead. There is almost no resistance in me at all. So maybe I’m not actually someone who is “hard to change.”
I also figured out very early that this personality was not entirely an advantage. Real life contains a huge number of things that simply do not deserve some grand meaning. Filing taxes is not meaningful. Filling out forms is not meaningful. Replying to certain administrative emails is not meaningful. Renewing documents on time is not meaningful. A lot of exercises at the gym don’t feel meaningful in the moment either. But they still have to be done. If an adult has to conduct a full philosophical and moral trial in the depths of their soul before completing every ordinary task, life becomes extremely expensive.
And my life has always been expensive in exactly that way. I’ve made it this far largely because life itself kept pushing me forward: the conditions my parents gave me, a lot of luck, and some intelligence I happened to be born with. But all of those things have limits. If someone has no stable will, desire, or ability to execute, talent, environment, and momentum alone will not carry them very far.
And I am very obviously not satisfied with “not very far.” So I have to change. But I don’t want to replace the operating system I was born with. I admit that it has preserved a lot of things I value in myself: curiosity, sensitivity to what is true and false, an instinctive distance from authority, and a kind of honesty that is very difficult to fake. So what do I do? I can install a second operating system.
And just as I started seriously thinking about this, someone happened to spark my interest in finance and investing. I genuinely think I’m a very lucky person. Somehow the timing of things keeps arriving exactly when I need it. Finance, in a way, trains precisely another kind of thinking: instead of asking, “Do I like this reality?” it asks, “How does this reality actually work?” The second operating system I need as an adult is probably this: I don’t agree with it, but I’ve calculated the cost, and I’ve decided to do it anyway. That way, I don’t have to change the core of who I am, and I don’t have to be tamed. I’ve simply learned that after asking why, there is one more question I can ask: Given reality as it is, what is the smartest move now?