Belief Determines Success or Failure

This post was extracted from my early NetEase blog. NetEase Blog is no longer operating, but looking back, these words are still quite interesting, so I decided to move them over as intact as possible. It is mainly kept as a record; after all, it is from a long time ago, so the quality of the writing, images, and links may all be affected.

This post was originally published on November 17, 2010. I was about 21 years old at the time and was studying in college.

In my spare time I read a book called "College Students Graduating with an Annual Salary of 100,000." I was quite inspired by it, especially the "3-5-8 rule" mentioned inside, which is indeed worth thinking about deeply.

Set a goal and then work toward it according to that goal. Becoming an industry expert in 3 years should not be a problem. Then, on that basis, continue working hard for 5 years to become a domestic expert, and in 8 years become an international expert. For an ambitious person, this path is not impossible to realize. Perhaps it is not even especially difficult. If one follows this plan to achieve one's career goals, the corresponding annual salaries should be 100K, 300K, and 500K. Similarly, for ambitious college students, they can absolutely use their three or four years of college to focus on studying one subject, and then after three or four years become an industry expert. In that case, their annual salary after graduation would be 100K.

Although this theory is somewhat forced, it is not groundless, nor is it necessarily impossible to achieve. Many people think college is a place to relax, a place to fall in love, sleep in, and enjoy life. So in the morning playgrounds and evening classrooms, the figures of college students can almost no longer be seen. They squander their youth and their best years in a way like slow suicide. Only when they truly step onto the stage of society will they regret it endlessly and end in complaints.

During college, although I cannot count myself among those who worked with great determination, through my own efforts I still lived fully and at ease. But when I truly stepped into society, I finally understood what a gap means. People of the same age, some had just graduated and earned four or five thousand a month, while some were indeed only at one or two thousand. I belong to the latter group. Compared with them, perhaps I still have not "graduated," and have not learned what I should have learned in college.

So these past few days I carefully studied the basic skills possessed by the outstanding people in the same industry. Then when I returned to school to take graduation photos, I borrowed several books that I should have mastered but had never studied, to research and improve myself. I plan to use one year to train myself into an outstanding person in the industry and complete the "mission" of my college years.

The essence of life is breadth. Only by setting a goal and then using all effort to realize it can one accomplish something and achieve something! Come on!

This article was first published on Zhu Wenlong's official blog http://z-snake.blog.163.com