The Purpose of Learning Is Not Just to Acquire Skills, but to Plant a Seed

The blogger gives a very concrete example:

When I was learning English as a kid, the only time I had tutors was during my first summer of elementary school. I hired two foreign-language majors from C9 universities to teach me—and they only taught phonetics. That entire summer was dedicated solely to pronunciation; they weren’t allowed to touch anything else. Then my grandmother arranged for her colleague’s son to teach me, and that arrangement stuck. My job was just to learn, but sometimes I’d overhear the adults chatting. My grandmother and her colleague always talked about career prospects.

Back in the early 1990s, my teacher worked at the Foreign Trade Bureau. My grandmother and his mother discussed things like departmental income, career trajectories, and whether I might someday make a living using my English skills. So this arrangement wasn’t just about getting extra tutoring, nor was it solely because learning English was important. It was also about planting a seed—or rather, two seeds.

If I had grown up and actually pursued a career in translation, I might have ended up at that same bureau. In that case, my teacher would have become my future supervisor—a perfectly natural progression. And his father, who chaired the Chemistry Department at a C9 university and happened to teach me chemistry as well, was also part of that six-year plan. If I had chosen chemistry for the college entrance exam, that would’ve been another piece of foreshadowing. It’s a way of thinking.

The question is: am I learning a skill just to become a replaceable tool, or am I planting seeds and building relational connections? If it’s the former, it really doesn’t matter who teaches me—I could just teach myself at the library. But if it’s the latter, paving the way is crucial.

Paving the way doesn’t mean every path you lay down will necessarily be the one you walk. Remember Lai Changxing’s famous line: “I cast a hundred lines; I don’t expect to catch a hundred fish. Catching two would be good enough.” That’s a fundamentally different mindset.

Ask most people what matters most, and they’ll say learning, skills, having a trade.

Our family’s kids never think that way. They’ll tell you that who teaches you matters—it’s about using learning as an excuse to build relationships that lay the groundwork for future opportunities.