By Ai Li Excerpted from "8760 Hours in Your Year" On the desk beside my bed, there is a line of English text: "If you cannot do, teach." Since becoming a teacher, I have always regarded this as a warning. It is a great irony for those who can speak eloquently about principles but fail to practice them themselves. I have a friend, known in our circle as the "King of Principles," who rivals Dongfang Bubai in citing classics and expounding on truths. From ancient Egyptian civilization to Bitcoin, he can analyze everything with great eloquence, and he can also talk about entertainment gossip and marriage life in a captivating manner. With his good looks, everyone who chats with him feels like a spring breeze, and women even wish to pledge themselves to him. At that time, he and I were drifting in Beijing, crammed into a small room of about a dozen square meters in Zhongguancun, one of the busiest areas in Beijing. Despite the small size, the monthly rent was not low. One afternoon, he and I sat by the window. He held a cigarette between two fingers of his right hand, took a deep drag, and slowly blew out a large smoke ring. "Ai Li," he said, "I've recently been studying a book on financial management. You know, the money in the bank is depreciating every day. To succeed and make it in Beijing, working as a small clerk in a company, even with a small annual raise and a promotion every five years, there's no future in this lifetime. To stand out, you must take an unconventional path! Let's pool some money and invest in precious metals..." Later, due to work, he moved away. But every once in a while, he would call to tell me that he had changed jobs again, entered a new industry, or discovered another way to make big money in a short time. But whether it was a new industry or a new investment method, he never stuck with any of them, and he became a long-term consumer of regret. Out of friendship, I tried to remind him: "Aren't practical methods and actions more important than those principles and analyses?" He paused, then continued confidently, "See, the stock I mentioned last time really went up. If I had bought it then, I'd have an apartment now." The fact is, up to now, he has changed jobs four times, his monthly salary has increased by 1,050 yuan, and his position has risen from a small clerk to the leader of a five-person small project. Maybe one day he will really be hit by luck, and then I will shamelessly say, "If you become rich, don't forget me." In this world, there are people who love to talk about principles, and even more who love to listen to them. Many followers will obtain the principles they want, need, or feel they must have through various channels. But are these principles really that useful? After listening to an English learning lecture, you immediately swear to conquer GRE and TOEFL in half a year and get an offer from a prestigious American university within a year, but every year only a few get scholarships. After listening to a speech by a famous entrepreneur, or even just seeing an inspirational quote, you get excited and start fantasizing about working hard to become a CEO, marry a beautiful woman, and reach the peak of life. After reading a celebrity's Weibo sharing about emotions, you decide to be a woman who "remains true to the original heart and enjoys peace," waiting for a rich, handsome man to come on a colorful cloud to save your ordinary self... Relying only on reading principles to understand life means that most people will not realize their fantasies. Moreover, you must understand that some successful people, after climbing up, will pull away the ladder and tell you, who wants to climb up: "I flew up through hard work; you can too." A year has passed, and you still haven't studied abroad, and even your graduation grades are not excellent. When interviewing for jobs, you find too many competitors with CET-4/6 certificates, computer certificates, and student leadership experience. The Prince Charming you fantasized about appears at a luxury party or is surrounded by girls you consider "green tea bitches." After blindly resigning and taking a spontaneous trip, you return to the starting point and have to start from the bottom, while your former colleague has been promoted to be your boss. How many people hand over their character to astrology, their efforts to chicken soup, and their exams to koi fish, and then say to themselves, "I've heard many principles, but still can't live a good life." Young people always want to talk to the world, but the world doesn't want to talk to you. Even if you max out all your skill points, with full health and mana, you still can't resist the deep ruthlessness of the world. Young people easily doubt themselves, then doubt life, and then walk on that mediocre path. But life is wonderful precisely because miracles always happen. The key is to master the key to opening miracles—the correct method. When I was in middle school, my father told me, "Understanding a hundred principles is not as important as understanding one method; being moved a hundred times is not as helpful as taking one action." Up to now, my small success is largely due to my understanding of this sentence. Almost everyone is afraid of public speaking. Like many people, I have always yearned to express myself excellently and freely in front of others since childhood, but no matter how I tried, I seemed unable to achieve the expected results. I am also a person who gets nervous easily and has some timidity in my character. Later, I became a teacher at New Oriental and had to face hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of students. To master the essential skill of teaching, I read almost all the books on the art and techniques of public speaking that I could find. For a while, I even became a person who couldn't speak well but could teach others to speak well. One day, when I was again simulating a speech in an empty classroom, a colleague walked in, watched for a while, and said, "Do you realize the problem you have? If not, speaking ten thousand times won't help." On his advice, I adopted the method of "deliberate practice." "Deliberate practice" is a practice method proposed by K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida University, and the secret lies in repetition and feedback. First, the practitioner needs to establish an understanding and familiarity with the correct method. Taking speech as an example, you must truly understand what a good speech is, and to achieve this, abstract books alone are not enough. Therefore, I found videos of speeches by almost all famous speakers, watched them repeatedly, and pondered the subtleties. When I had the chance, I also went to live speeches by celebrities to feel the atmosphere of thousands of cheers and thunderous applause. Next, I conducted a cycle of practice-feedback-practice. Deliberate practice is error-centered practice. The practitioner must develop extreme sensitivity to errors. Once you find yourself wrong, you feel very uncomfortable and keep practicing until it is corrected. Whether in simulated practice or actual class teaching, I began to intentionally record videos of my speeches. At home, I would watch these videos repeatedly. At first, I was not used to seeing myself in the video, and I found that many places where I thought I performed well were actually not so. Like most people without professional training in broadcasting or body language, when I got excited, I would wave my arms vigorously, so much that the camera couldn't see my face, only a hand waving back and forth, and my body swayed without strength. I also often repeated phrases like "that is to say" and "in other words," which in English would be "so... so... that... that...". For familiar content, I would habitually speak too fast, lacking rhythm. The most fatal problem was the lack of camera presence, failing to make the audience feel that I was looking at them and caring about their feedback. I recorded these issues that needed improvement in a notebook, continuously corrected them, and compared them with the next public speech video. Only when a problem completely disappeared would I cross it off the notebook. After countless "deliberate practices," I not only became proficient in New Oriental classroom speeches but also became a speaker, standing on the stage of New Oriental's "Dream Journey" series of speeches with tens of thousands of audience members. Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestseller "Outliers," said: "The geniuses in people's eyes are not extraordinary because of superior talent, but because of continuous effort. After 10,000 hours of practice, anyone can go from ordinary to extraordinary." I am certainly not a genius. My feeling about the progress I have made through hard work is that there is no secret recipe for success in the world. When you learn to do the simplest things to the extreme, success will naturally be not far away. Along the way, although I have a prejudice against listening to "so many principles," it does not mean that I don't learn, don't understand, or don't care. Rather, I understand that no matter how many principles you hear, they are others' experiences. Only through the transformation of methods can they become your own. What leads me forward is always that seemingly insignificant self who works hard. Sometimes, the more principles you know, the more constraints you impose on yourself. Different principles often contradict each other, and different suggestions conflict. When you consume too much chicken soup for the soul, the taste differs: some salty, some sweet, some spicy. Eating too much will spoil your stomach, slow your steps, and confuse your mind. Sometimes, put the chicken soup and principles aside, take a step first, and then continuously summarize and correct in practice. Only in this way can we avoid becoming someone who knows a lot but can do little, and ultimately changes nothing and accomplishes nothing. 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