What Are You Actually Picking?

The choice is about sacrifice. What are you truly willing to sacrifice? At its core, this is repeatedly asking yourself: what are you willing to give up?

Do you want the store with a long line of customers outside because of a grand opening sale, slashing prices at a loss just to attract attention? Or do you want the long lines despite high prices? You can curse at consumers all you want, saying they’ll never change. But cursing them for a lifetime changes nothing. A major platform’s subsidy—burning billions every day—attracts foot traffic, and people scramble to take advantage of it. Without subsidies, there’s no crowd. Even Jack Ma admitted that when Taobao upgraded to Tmall, they lost market share—and who took it? Pinduoduo did.

Where there’s significant profit, sacrifice becomes unavoidable. The only reason there isn’t one is that there’s no profit at all. Nobody wants it, nobody would even take it for free—so no sacrifice is required.

You force your way out by using methods that cause irreversible harm to your own body, driving away your competitors. Right now, there’s only one bowl of noodles on the table. I want to eat it, and you want to eat it too. So in order to stop me, you spit into the bowl, then push it toward me and say, “Come on, you spit in it too.” Everyone spits. After you’re done, you eat it with great satisfaction and ask me with a grin, “Want to join in?”

There’s no right or wrong in this story. The story is simply illustrating a tactic. It’s telling you this exact strategy: what are you willing to give up? Let’s see who is willing to sacrifice more. The truth is, the higher the income potential of a track, the more absurd the sacrifices inevitably become. That’s guaranteed.

The essence of this world is supply and demand. A mountain—it gets smaller the higher you climb. When spots are few and people are many, you have to shove and kick to get ahead. When supply exceeds demand, someone has to find a reason to eliminate you, no matter how absurd that reason is.

Flip it around: if a person keeps climbing upward, they can’t treat themselves as human anymore. When they’re pushed down, they’ll be given some preposterous excuse. If you can withstand every ridiculous reason thrown at you, in the end you’ll be physically and mentally broken.

You get beaten up, and after a few days you heal—that’s not a scar. What remains permanently damaged is the scar. What’s irreversible is the scar. Once you see through it, you realize the market game is simple. What logic is there to discuss? None. It’s simply forcing you to ask yourself: what are you willing to give up?