I remember in 2020, the word involution suddenly became popular.
What is involution?In fact, it refers to the limited resources, the limitation of cognition, and a synonym for vicious internal competition.
The involution out of the circle also reflects some current social problems: many people can easily fall into a trap or predicament and cannot get out, such as the poverty trap, the involution trap, the development trap and so on.
I'll give you a few examples, and you can feel it.
For example, a pair of parents who do not have a high level of education can only go to the big city to work, and the children can only stay in the countryside to take care of the elderly. Left-behind children have no one to supervise, so they drop out of school early to work, can only do manual work, and occasionally spend their leisure time playing games and brushing Tik Tok, he wants to learn something new, basically can't get the support of the people around him, and he doesn't have more time to study, so he has been so muddy, caught in the "poverty trap" in the loop, can't get out.
For another example, a white-collar worker working in a first-tier city, getting up early every day to squeeze the bus and subway to work, working overtime until late to go home at night, and being busy every day, but he found out after some years that the promotion and salary increase he had received before were essentially dividends of education and age. This is the result of the "involution trap" in the workplace. You can't start a business, you can't do an indispensable position within the company, and you're bound to be replaced by young, cheap college students.
The same is true when it rises to the national level, such as Russia, Thailand, Malaysia, etc., they have developed to a certain extent, and without greater technological breakthrough and progress, they have fallen into the "middle-income trap" and cannot get out. So now China has been emphasizing industrial upgrading, Made in China 2050.
We can think of this kind of trap as a closed system. In this system, if you keep going as you are, you're either stagnant or getting worse and worse. Ancient China has always led the world in science and technology in history, but why has it been left far behind by the West in modern times, because the Qing Dynasty began to close the country.
One of the obvious features of the system is that the entropy increases. What entropy increases?
In short, if left to its natural course, it will be chaotic and disorderly. It's like if you don't clean your home every once in a while, it's easy to get dirty and messy. From order to disorder, this law applies to almost everything in nature.
In order to avoid entropy increase, we need to input energy to improve. For example, a fresh apple will rot after a long time, so you need to store the refrigerator;A cup of boiling water, let it sit for a while, it will become cold, and you need to reheat it. Life is in motion, not a slogan, and the idea of once and for all can only be limited to ideas. 
Of course, we need to apply an external force to fight the increase in entropy, but sometimes after applying the external force, our state is only from -10 to -1, and we have not completely escaped the predicament. At this time, we need to reflect on how to jump out of the current "trap".
There are two ways here, one is self-change, and the other is the help of nobles.
Let's talk about the help of nobles first.
When we are in our own low-level trap, if there is a higher-level nobleman to pull a hand, we may be able to immediately change from -1 to 1, after all, it is a trouble for us, but it is not a problem for others at all, and then through their own efforts to iterate and upgrade, from 1 to 10, completely change.
After all, going from 0 to 1 is hard, but going from 1 to 10 is not hard.
Cao Cao has Xun Yu, Liu Bei has Zhuge , Sun Quan has Zhang Zhao, all of them have the assistance of nobles to have the Three Kingdoms.
But to be honest, the so-called noble people help each other, it is impossible to find, and things gather people in groups, and the premise of wanting nobles is to shine first. Therefore, the second point, self-change, is particularly important.
Self-change and effort are very important, so what kind of effort is effective?
Of course, it is not a repetitive move of bricks, if you can get rich by going out early and returning late and moving bricks diligently, then the farmers will get rich early.
In fact, I don't need to say it too clearly, I can feel it, but if you have worked the original model and the result is not effective, then it proves that you need to change the way of thinking and output.
For example, if you feel that working to make money is a dead end, and the money is too little, then you shouldn't stay, I work more shifts, jump more slots to raise salary, and continue to work harder is equivalent to repeatedly moving bricks, reality has told you that this method cannot break the game, you should jump out of this way of exchanging time for remuneration, think about it, how do I get a side hustle, shoot**, write articles, do** Earn information difference, and so on, go to the market and directly do value exchange, so that you can skip the boss as a middleman and earn the difference in the value of your output. Maybe one day your side hustle will become your main business, and you will also start a business?
A person must change from a consumer to a producer in order to change the predicament, because production is the big brother, and consumption is the poor.
If a person has been a consumer, playing other people's games, eating other people's food, instead of changing to the production side, he will always be in a pit and can't get out.
Some people always like to say, I don't have talent, and neither can my parents, how can I compete with those who fight for my parents, no matter how hard I try!
It's a delusion, because you never have to compete with them, because they're not on the same track at all.
But the good news is that most people are lazy and stupid, and it's not hard to surpass them.
You don't need to be first or second, you don't even need to compete with them, you just need to work a little harder, you can surpass the vast majority of lazy and stupid people, you can live a relatively good life, and then iteratively upgrade on that basis.
Life is like a snowball, when we find very wet snow and a very long slope, put the small snowball on the long snow slope, keep accumulating, the bigger it rolls, the more obvious the advantage. —Warren Buffett.
Someone else said, I'm unlucky, he's lucky, so there's no way?
Luck is divided into active and passive.
Passive luck, as if you were born in Ma Huateng's family, that is called the ovarian dividend.
As for active luck, as we often say, the harder you work, the luckier you are, which is scientifically justified.
Because wealth is the link.
We often make the mistake of looking at the world from a static perspective and thinking within the boundaries of the resources of the time. Many of the current problems cannot be solved within the current resource boundary, and if this boundary can be broken, it is likely not to be a problem at all. It's like waiting for you to reach the high school level, and you go to the elementary school topic, and the topic that stumped you at the time is not a problem at all now.
Resources are much bigger than you think or are right in front of you, but you can't get them, that is, the resource boundary is too small. Therefore, you need to think more, try more, connect more things and people, expand your boundaries, try more within the scope of what you can bear, and face uncertainty, so that you can get lucky.
If you have a strong sense of certainty in everything you do, when you're in school, you're a good student, and when you graduate, you're a good employee. Yes, you rarely take risks, and life goes according to plan, so you don't have to ask God and worship Buddha, because luck is not with you.
How to break through life's predicaments, to sum up:
1.It is necessary to exert external forces to avoid a natural increase in entropy on its own
2.External forces can be noble people to help, but more often than not, you need to work hard yourself
3.One has to change from a consumer to a producer in order to change the situation
4.Only by connecting people and things more can we reap active luck and embrace uncertainty
Most of the things in life are things that you can't decide, but you must do your best, 95% of the things we may not be able to decide, but we still have to use 5% of the effort to pry the 95% of the things, do your best in everything, but at the same time accept all the arrangements of fate.
Finally, I would like to give you a message: the best time to do something was ten years ago, followed by now.