Reading List
55 books from my notes. Each blurb sums up what I took away; titles link to Douban, China's main book site, with the original Chinese title alongside.
55 books
Don't lock your knees on landing, keep your weight slightly forward, and don't fling your lower legs. Train 80/10/10 and avoid the middle-intensity trap of never easy enough, never hard enough. For anyone who wants to keep running without getting hurt.
Training has to be systematic, not a test of willpower. For beginners, three half-hour runs a week are enough to build the heart; intervals should stay under 10% of total volume. Running and nothing else is a dead end.
Health is a long-term asset. Medicine should act before disease takes root, not after it's entrenched. Normal isn't optimal, and chasing longevity while ignoring emotional health is pointless.
Building muscle is the least of what exercise does — the real payoff is a rewired brain. The brain, like muscle, is use it or lose it: two 30-minute jogs a week for twelve weeks measurably improve executive function.
Strength training builds lean mass; cardio builds your heart and fat metabolism. You need both. If you don't have much space, start with what you can do.
Strength training gives you more than numbers — it gives you the youthful sense that you could easily keep going. Best treated as a small daily dose, not something you save for when you have time for the gym.
The best doctors are sunlight, rest, exercise, diet, self-respect and friends. Don't outsource your health to voices that just want you to keep buying.
Sleep isn't slack you can squeeze. Early birds and night owls are probably a leftover of tribal shift work; you know you've fallen asleep when perception fades and your sense of time disappears.
Tune from evidence, not by tweaking parameters first. Keep locks small and primary keys short; keep sync_binlog at 1. The 4th edition reads more like a manual for running MySQL at scale than a single-server tuning guide.
The right model is human–AI collaboration: AI handles the quantitative, the optimizing and the repetitive; people bring creativity, strategy and complex judgment. It's not about replacing people but putting them where they're strongest.
Theory that lines up with what you see on real projects. Operators are just the steps of an execution plan, and an aggregate can't start until its children have pulled everything in.
To make money work for you, first learn the difference between assets and liabilities. What's missing is usually financial literacy, not a bigger salary — and if you want things to change, start with yourself.
Presales is about giving the customer a reason to choose you, not getting carried away with your own product. The complexity of domestic databases is exactly what makes the role valuable — real needs only surface when you spend time on site.
Every title should answer the audience's question: what does this have to do with me? Keep only the most direct conclusion on the slide and cut adjectives ruthlessly. Plain language beats decoration.
An asset is something that produces income. Investing is a trade-off between risk and return: first get insurance for the family's breadwinner, then let index funds follow the fundamentals.
Big-tech talent systems are mostly solutions for a particular stage, not timeless doctrine. Google's Perf is a loop of goals, self-review, peer review, calibration and a conversation — and the stories told outside rarely match the people inside.
Products often fail because someone decided "this is what users need". Real demand hides in the hassles — the gap between what people buy and what they actually want. Even a five-minute walk can make or break a product.
Consumer products sell experience; B2B products sell service value. Pricing is just unit price times quantity — and never forget that B2B is still people dealing with people.
Plan complex work before you start. The worst thing a PM can do is design by gut feel: go to the front line and see where people actually get stuck. Sit back and only take requests, and your value thins out fast.
Most of life's frustration comes from fuzzy choices. The rational mind isn't meant to do the work itself — it should steer instinct and emotion. Break down what you fear and look at it clearly; procrastination is usually muddled thinking, not a hard task.
Happiness is rarely luck; it's mostly management. A habit is something you do without needing a reason. When saving, work out how much you need, and let compounding start as early as possible.
Keep one eye on the business and one on your own growth — you can't drop either. Process, tooling, automation and documentation keep proving their worth; life is the main thing, work is only part of it.
Exhaustion often isn't lack of sleep — it's fear and overgeneralization draining you. The only thing you control is your attitude, and the key to getting your energy back is simply to start moving.
Reading beats listening, and doing beats watching. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep; first ask what unique value you can offer, then think about leverage and lifelong learning.
Think your goals through in advance and you'll be able to filter out distractions. Hard skills are the ones that open doors directly. Influence people rather than trying to change them — daring matters more than knowing how.
Getting more out of time rarely means stretching it; it means restructuring it. Of all the things you could do, pick one or two you intend to do for life. If you can think it but can't say it, practice writing.
Behavior = Motivation × Ability × Prompt. Stop the self-criticism, shrink aspirations into tiny behaviors, and treat every slip as a discovery. Anchor prompts to things that are certain to happen.
Communication is creating meaning through messages. The medium, the audience and nonverbal signals all change the outcome; good communicators rely on adapting and self-monitoring, not scripted lines.
Writing is a skill and also a way of spending time with yourself. A piece needs a clear point of view, then gathering, trimming and filling in; refining a topic forces tangled thoughts into a straight line.
Inner friction is like an eraser rubbing back and forth between ideals and reality until what it wears away is you. Stop the self-depletion first; methods come after.
Only a few notes, so just one line: breaking through means taking your competitiveness apart and examining it, not waiting for a turning point to show up.
Time poverty is a feeling — that you'll never get through what you have to do and what you want to do. Time never comes back, which makes it dearer than money; learning to say no is how you protect what truly makes you happy.
For young people, growth matters more than success, and there's only one road: accumulation. Attention matters even more than time; friends are people you're willing to spend time with to get at least one thing done.
If you can't solve it calmly, you won't solve it in a panic. How you speak up is up to you; how the other person responds is a different system. To cut inner friction, put your focus only on what you can change.
Build a habit through action first, then slowly add time. Don't postpone the good things in life until you have more money, more time and better health — that "later" may never come.
Unwilling to invest in serious things, yet finding pastimes unrewarding — that emptiness is boredom. Being interesting isn't a performance; it's being willing to spend real time on something.
Loneliness is, at heart, disconnection. Most distress comes from secondary emotions: refusing to accept the first feeling is what piles up the rest. Go long enough without talking about feelings and your sense of self blurs.
Technology is yesterday's fantasy, today's stretch and tomorrow's normal. Once you've seen the light, darkness is hard to bear; the book is about turning belief into new drugs and real action.
Writing makes the unseen seen. That's the only line in my notes, and it's enough.
Systems are more reliable than willpower. Goals set the direction; systems keep you in the game. Habits should be built on identity — the goal isn't to run a marathon, it's to become a runner.
The clearest kind of upbringing in this oral history is kindness, equality and no showing off. Being treated roughly by foreigners when the country was weak was a lived experience, not an abstraction.
About 40% of what we do each day isn't decisions but habits. Rather than making choices all day to change your fate, change the loop that runs on autopilot.
Good for stretching your sense of time. Sapiens' most unusual ability is talking about things that don't exist; from the point of view of cattle and sheep, the agricultural revolution was a disaster. Power tends to follow social skill, not muscle.
In local lawsuits, whoever makes the most noise often gets the most. Technical officials want to explain things more clearly, while official memos only care about careers — when those two languages don't meet, everything stalls.
Self-cultivation should start hard and continue with grit. A life ripens like fruit: you can't rush it and you can't slack. There are no clever tricks, only solid work; swallowed humiliations become fuel for the will.
Yu Hua says that events become public stories while everyday life becomes the secret one. The blood, the dogs and the shouting in these stories all land on days nobody pays attention to.
Short and brutal. He cares more about characters' desires than their personalities; a job is just a costume. A writer should stay in a state of discovery rather than guard a stable self.
A birthday belongs to you, not your parents — he doesn't blame them for forgetting. The best way not to think about something is not to talk about it; time becomes the strongest immunity.
Procedures are often rules only the weak have to follow. With nowhere left to retreat, the only way is forward; office life, clients changing requirements and bureaucratic savvy are all packed into one lychee delivery.
Wandering through the seven days after death, money looks small next to power. Yu Hua gathers the absurdities of the news into a funeral; it isn't easy reading.
The heavens aren't heavenly — they mirror bureaucratic boilerplate and buck-passing. We may not understand mortal obsessions, but that doesn't mean the pain isn't real.
"Survival of the fittest" isn't Darwin's phrase. For a long time science viewed females through a Victorian pinhole; only by seeing female animals clearly does the story of evolution become complete — and more interesting.
Law governs outward behavior; morality governs the heart, and its power is limited. The rule of law starts from a clear view of human darkness, and the forces that keep order must themselves be restrained. Justice can only ever be limited.
Law emphasizes fairness; rules emphasize universal application. Aristotle still holds: the law that is obeyed should itself be good law. The state exists to protect rights, so power has to be divided.
Real-world legal decisions can't afford heavy computation, so complex problems call for simple rules. "A life for a life, pay what you owe" boils down to reciprocity. There's no optimum, only better.