Flourishing Tree Book Club, Session Three: Poetry by the Pillow, the View Fairer in Rain

Across the ages, countless words have been written about encounters of every kind.

“The reeds grow green and dense, the white dew turns to frost; the one of whom I dream stands somewhere past the water.” That is an encounter that stirs the heart. “This cousin — I have met her before.” That is the joyful first meeting of Baoyu and Daiyu. “How do you do? And how are you this evening?” That is Princess Ann’s dazed, muddled encounter in Roman Holiday. “Before I met you, I never thought of marrying; after I met you, I never thought of marrying anyone else.” That is the life-deciding encounter between Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang.

At the Flourishing Tree Book Club, every session is an encounter — with a book, with one another, and with ourselves.

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

Reader: Carolyn

The book I read most recently, and the one I want to share today, is Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out — a work that weighed very heavily in his favor during the Nobel Prize deliberations.

When the Nobel is awarded, the committee scores an author on the whole body of his work. Mo Yan’s early books include Red Sorghum and Big Breasts and Wide Hips. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out was written in 2004; it runs to 430,000 characters, and he finished it in a little over forty days — by hand.

First, I want to introduce the background against which the author wrote this book.

Mo Yan was born in Ping’an Village, Gaomi County, in what he calls Northeast Township — the famous land of red sorghum, which of course took on an added layer of cultural flavor after Red Sorghum appeared. Uncle Mo was born in 1955. In the fifth grade the Cultural Revolution forced him out of school, and he went to earn work-points in the people’s commune. Over ten years of rural labor he grew sorghum and cotton, herded cattle, and cut grass. He has often mocked himself for being a terribly poor farmhand. Fortunately, so fine a talent was not ground away by collective life. In 1976 he joined the army and became a librarian — which, if you think of Chairman Mao, is really a very good post. In 1981 he made his debut with his first work, Spring Night, Rain Drizzling Down.

Uncle Mo’s speech and writing often give me a sense of lifting great weights lightly. A pessimist who had lived his life might well find it unbearably bitter — dropping out of school, collectivism, farming, the army, reform and opening, one enormous shift of the age after another. If it were me, never mind ten years of farming; by the third year I would already have surrendered to life. Seen from the bright side, Mo Yan was also enormously fortunate: born just six years after New China’s founding, set down in the midst of China’s vast historical change, meeting life all along with his own brand of “Mo-style” humor, never letting slip a single chance to read and grow. Most important of all, in so difficult and hemmed-in an environment, he always had parents and elder brothers who supported him. If a life opens low and climbs high, that too is a great fulfillment.

From his interviews and his Nobel acceptance speech, you can feel that he was born into a deeply loving family — that his mother and brothers, with what kind of heart, sheltered a child’s extravagant love of reading amid hardship. Put yourself there: in a 1960s commune, unable to herd cattle well or cut grass quickly, earning few work-points, all but a “useless person.” I firmly believe that this sheltering gave him immense nourishment and strength in his youth.

So what kind of book is Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out?

Mo Yan says the title comes from a Buddhist scripture. He chose it because he feels that many of Buddhism’s basic ideas are a true cosmic consciousness. Many of the disputes of the human world are, in the eyes of the Buddha, utterly meaningless. Under so lofty a gaze, the human world appears deeply pitiable. The title also left foreign translators an enormous problem; anyone curious can look at how it was rendered in English.

In 2005, when Mo Yan saw a mural of the “six paths of reincarnation” in a temple, he thought of how to fold that image into the novel. The book spans the fifty years from 1950 to 2000. It tells of a landlord named Ximen Nao who is shot in 1950 and, carrying his grievance, passes through six lives of reincarnation — as a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, and a monkey — before at last laying down his resentment and being reborn as a human. That half-century sweep sets down the great changes of the age and the great bitterness of its people. In the preface Mo Yan has already struck his pose: “Man and beast share one principle — why must the wheel of rebirth turn six times? Grudges and kindnesses can never be repaid.” “Where the Buddha’s eyes are lowered, life and death are both weariness.” Life is a kind of cycle; whether you are a human or an animal, you are weary.

Following the book through its six reincarnations, you come to see a kind of forgiveness and self-growth. But the first and second lives are too bitter — the first a donkey, the second an ox.

These two lives carry the vast emotion of the former life. He watches himself as he was when still a landlord: of his three wives, two have remarried and one lives in terrible hardship. As a donkey, then an ox, he is the greatest asset of his master, the Lan Lian household — hauling people, hauling goods, plowing and laboring. To hold on as an independent household refusing to join the commune, he follows Director Lan Lian and is shunned by the entire village. Toward Lan Lian, his master, there is betrayal, there is tenderness, there is staunch support; toward the whole village there is a wish to belong that fails, so that he always carries antagonism — and then, still bearing the emotions of the former life, he is reincarnated as a pig.

His life as a pig is, at last, a little happier than the one before. A reader once joked that after finishing this book one might reasonably suspect Mo Yan had himself once been a dog, a pig, or a donkey; and as I read, I too came to feel that I was Pig Sixteen. The book relates, for instance, that Pig Sixteen loved the little sows when he was young; that, being hungry, he loved to snatch food; that he knew his fate was to be put to stud; that later he grasped that humans fatten pigs only to eat them; that later still he broke free of humans and became the Pig King; and that in the end he “sacrificed” himself to save several human children. This sense of reality springs from Mo Yan’s rich experience of rural life. He had once driven oxen in the production brigade and fed pigs, and after moving to the city he kept dogs; the order of the animals, in fact, follows the true sequence of his own life.

And so he says: “I did not write this book as a sermon; what I wrote is still human destiny and human feeling, human limitation and human tolerance, and the effort and sacrifice people make in pursuit of happiness and in holding to their own convictions.” The Lan Lian who sets his single body against the current of his age is, in Mo Yan’s heart, a true hero. “The prototype for this character was a peasant from the village next to Mo Yan’s. As a child, Mo Yan often saw him pushing a creaking wooden-wheeled cart along the road past his home. The one pulling the cart was a lame donkey; the one leading the donkey was his bound-foot wife. This strange working trio, in that collectivized society, looked so odd and out of step, and in the eyes of us children they were clowns moving against the tide of history — so that when they passed on the street, we would hurl stones at them, full of righteous indignation.” Many years later, when Mo Yan took up his pen, this figure and this image rose up in his mind.

When I first finished the book — through the donkey life and the ox life — Ximen Nao carries anger, defiance, absurdity, and grief, and as I read I grew angry along with him. In the pig life I felt swagger, purity, joy, forgiveness, and redemption; reading it, I was again and again made to laugh by Uncle Mo’s humor, and sometimes I wept until I nearly came apart. In the dog life I felt more of the bystander’s calm understanding, with far less of the resentment of one caught up in the thick of things. And it is in the dog life that the book reaches its climax. The author makes a deliberate move: in the passage from dog to monkey, the emotional state gradually eases and calms. At the launch of the book’s new edition, both Yu Hua and Xi Chuan said that a fine literary work does not keep you at the heights and never let you down, but rather, at the right moment, lets you descend slowly and comfortably into a state of calm.

The last animal is a monkey. Why is he reborn as a monkey? Because in the hall of King Yama, Ximen Nao says to Yama, “I have no more hatred.” And Yama says, “No — I can see from your eyes that some dregs of hatred still flicker.” Then Yama says: “I will send you around the wheel once more, but this time as a primate, already very close to humans. Frankly, it will be as a monkey, and only for a short time — just two years. I hope that in these two years you will vent all your hatred clean; and then will come the hour of your return to human form.”

Reading this, I wept bitterly again.

I do not know why, but as I read Mo Yan’s strokes — carried on a kind of wit and humor, with nothing anywhere to weigh you down, told gently and without haste — I would, at the ox’s, the pig’s, and the dog’s reincarnations, break into loud weeping for no reason at all. At the very end of the book, the monkey is at last reborn as a human: a big-headed child named Lan Qiansui, who is the narrator of the whole six-life cycle. At the book’s close he says: “My story begins on the first day of January, 1950.” This is also the book’s very first sentence.

As they say, the ending is also the beginning.

Flowers Bloom in Their Own Time

Reader: Joyce

This is a book of wisdom for living joyfully, and a manual of action for modern people facing the difficulties of life.

The author is Khenpo Sherab Zangpo. Born in 1963 in Dege, from childhood he followed the eminent monks and great masters of his hometown monastery in studying the Dharma, and at twenty-four he obtained the degree of Khenpo.

Everyone says that Buddhist practice is very bitter. Indeed, ascetic practice is exactly this. When the Buddha taught the Dharma, he too set us on a very steep ramp, beginning from suffering. Every day there is a great deal of suffering to torment you, and you ponder: where does this suffering come from? How can it be avoided or reduced?

First, we must come to know suffering.

1. The suffering of suffering — a cut hand, poor grades, falling ill;

2. The suffering of change — happiness in fact turns into pain: love turns into quarrels, sweets turn into fat;

3. The suffering of conditioned existence — trapped within the cycle of rebirth, the helplessness and imperfection that exist there (the pandemic, for example), tormented by every kind of affliction.

At the same time, human suffering divides into eight kinds: birth, aging, sickness, and death; meeting those we resent; parting from those we love; not getting what we seek; and the arrival of what we do not wish for. We must first acknowledge the universality of suffering; once we acknowledge it, we can put our energy into dealing with the problem itself, rather than sinking into the problem in indignation. We often fall into our emotions and feel it is unfair. So understanding suffering is not in order to flee it, but in order to face it. The bodhisattva Shantideva said: “If I have a way to solve it, then there is no need to worry. If I have no way to solve it, then worrying is of no use either.”

This chimes with the “Stoic dichotomy of control” — in life, some things are within your control and some are not, so give your attention to the things you can control. What is most needed, of course, is to understand the underlying reality and to accept it.

Next comes “overcoming fear.”

Why do people fear and feel anxious over the long term? At its core, it is a refusal to let impermanence occur. Life is constant change and dissolution. Knowing that something is certain to happen, yet refusing it in one’s heart, is what makes it hurt. As the book puts it: to lack a fixed self is non-self; to lack permanence is impermanence. A person’s cells are entirely replaced within seven years; and inwardly, too, many of one’s own thoughts and understandings have changed. We often assume that impermanence brings us pain, but what actually causes the pain is our fear of impermanence — this pandemic, for example, the invasion of the virus. The methods: first, grow familiar with impermanence; second, understand the causes of fear; third, face impermanence, and observe and grow familiar with it. In truth, everyone in the world faces the same thing, and so we come to cherish life all the more, and the fear too vanishes.

“Time slips away without pause, instant upon instant. Winter departs and spring arrives; flowers bloom and flowers fall; people know joy and sorrow, union and parting; the moon dims and brightens, waxes and wanes. All things are in flux — this is impermanence.”

“If there were no impermanence, those who part would never have the chance to reunite; a sick body could never possibly heal; the dark night would never wait its way to daylight; a low mood could never lift into joy. Would such a world not be a wretched one?”

To be born human is a very rare thing.

If this world is one of cycles, of the six paths of reincarnation — then in truth, if we dig up a dozen square meters of earth, the number of lives it holds far exceeds the number of human lives. The difficulty of being reborn as a human is very great. The odds are like this: across the ocean of this vast world floats a single piece of wood, and in that wood is a hole; at the bottom of the sea is a blind turtle that surfaces once every hundred years — and the chance is that of the turtle poking its head up through that very hole. For within the six paths we have already been spared the suffering and folly of hell, of the hungry ghosts, and of the beasts, nor are we like the long-lived devas of the heavenly realm. And so to be born human is a very rare thing indeed.

As for the six paths of reincarnation: in accordance with the karma of one’s former life, one naturally enters a different path. The six paths divide into three good paths and three evil paths. The three good: the path of the devas, the human path, and the path of the asuras. The three evil: the path of hell, the path of hungry ghosts, and the path of beasts (as in Mo Yan’s book). Reincarnation moves ceaselessly among these six paths, from the heavens down to hell, decided purely by the good and evil of one’s former life.

Let go of self-attachment; when suffering vanishes, that is happiness.

Peace and ease is an inward feeling. Sometimes people are not in fact unhappy; they merely believe themselves to be. If people could grow as familiar with the movements of their own mind as they are with the observation of their own wrinkles, it would not be hard to discover that every simple and direct present moment carries within it a faint joy. Do not imagine yourself so important that you must forever prove the outcome — who wins and who loses.

Wang Xiaobo once said that all human suffering is, in essence, anger at one’s own incompetence. Let go of attachment and there is ease. So paying attention to and observing your various emotions can help you dwell within a negative emotion rather than suppress it. When suffering vanishes, that is happiness. Even the most ordinary person, in the most ordinary life, is full of happiness. When you are thirsty, drinking water brings happiness; when you are hungry, eating brings happiness; after a whole day’s work has left you worn out, unexpectedly finding a seat on the subway home will also make you happy…

This self-discipline is not that self-discipline.

Practice is not the pursuit of mysterious experiences or the gaining of some extraordinary power. Practice is the cultivation of spiritual qualities — loving-kindness, tolerance, humility, goodwill toward others — that is, attending to the welfare of other lives, and consciously adjusting one’s own conduct so that other beings may feel at ease and glad. Compassion: to act, in all one does, so as to cause others no harm. To be unable to bear the sight of another life in pain is the heart of empathy. To go on, from that ground, to take part in and share another life’s pain — that is the heart of compassion. Though we sometimes behave selfishly and coldly, this capacity is present all along.

If we truly think for the sake of others, we must first achieve self-discipline. The first step of self-discipline is awareness. Right mindfulness is the refusal to let oneself be steeped in imaginings that do no good to people or to things. The presence of a negative emotion means the absence of a sense of well-being. Without self-discipline there is no benefit — neither to oneself nor to everyone else. Self-discipline is not the suppression of feeling, but the consideration of others’ feelings. Our aim is this: to do no harm.

Taking refuge is not the starting point of practice; it is the whole of practice.

Some people, with no fixed home, live out peaceful days; others spend a whole lifetime in flight within a luxurious mansion. People flee impermanence because they take it to be merely one episode of life, something that can be evaded so long as the best solution is found. But impermanence is not a transitional stretch of life; impermanence is the whole of life.

To believe in cause and effect is not the same as to believe in fate. If you enlarge the measure of your heart until the peace and joy of all beings is taken in, then you can calmly bear every hardship and trial. Many people take all sorts of precautions and still worship the Buddha — forever confirming for themselves a sense of security. To take refuge in the Dharma requires nerve, because the Dharma promises you neither security nor certainty; in fact, it seeks precisely to shatter your illusion of safety. Continuous training in awareness gradually accustoms us to the breaking of that security, so that we are no longer trapped upon any single matter or person.

To let inertia stop, to change one’s habits again and again — this is renunciation.

The cycle of rebirth is a kind of inertia; one must change one’s habits again and again in order to bring the inertia to a stop, widening the range of one’s cognition and of the learning by which one advances.

Why can practice not continuously change our lives? Perhaps the answer lies in this: we grip life too tightly. Life is in fact like the sand held in our hand — the tighter we grip, the faster it runs out. And so relaxation, you might say, is the first lesson of practice.

Every single thing that happens in life makes our heart tighten; we feel we must at once judge its advantages and disadvantages in order to take the corresponding action. (We so badly want to control everything — growing anxious over one dish fewer bought for the home, one dish fewer eaten, one word of reminder left unsaid — and this inertia keeps a person from ever tasting the joy of the present.) We take ourselves to be the troubleshooting repairmen of life, all day long in a posture of readiness for battle. So it is in good times, and all the more so in adversity. Practice merely lets us relax, no longer resist, and grow accustomed to that uncertainty and settle into it — which some also call being at ease.

Resolve to be intimate with yourself: loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity — the Four Immeasurables.

To be intimate with oneself carries two meanings: first, honestly to be aware of all the activity of one’s body, speech, and mind; and second, to treat oneself gently. Compassion is directed not only at others but also at oneself. Lacking compassion for oneself, it is very hard to be truly compassionate toward others. Only by not giving up on ourselves will we not give up on others; only by respecting our own inner feelings will we feel our way into the feelings of others; only by believing in our own capacity for awakening will we believe in the potential for awakening in others.

“May all beings forever possess happiness and the causes of happiness” — the wish that all beings be happy: this is loving-kindness. “May all beings be free of suffering and the causes of suffering” — the wish that all beings be free of pain: this is compassion. Gratitude toward oneself, and glad rejoicing at the good of others: this is sympathetic joy. To accept all things gladly, to treat all beings naturally and as equals, to embrace everything without the least bias: this is equanimity. These are loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity — the Four Immeasurables.

Conclusion

• Practice, for oneself, is a going forward stage by stage; it is ordinary and concrete, a thing done every single day, like eating and like sleeping.
• Life is not the days we have lived, but the days we remember — the days we bring back and re-present in memory in order to tell them.
• Pain deep in the heart, written on the face, is called the marks of hardship; wounds deep in the heart, written in the eyes, are called stories. The road of life is long — where is the harm in magnanimity? With stories in the heart, the face bears no marks of hardship.

A Guide to the Good Life

Reader: Richard

I have spoken before about Stoic philosophy. This book’s subtitle is “The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy” — that is, the application of Stoic philosophy in life.

The author is the American writer William B. Irvine. In its chapters the book divides into four parts. The first part treats the origins of Stoicism: how it arose and developed, and who its representative figures were. The second treats the core ideas of Stoicism, including negative visualization, the dichotomy of control, fatalism, and self-denial and contemplation. The third treats how Stoic theory is applied across various situations and themes, including duty, social relations, insults, grief, anger, personal values, exile, old age, and death. The fourth is the author’s defense of Stoicism, rebutting the various criticisms of it, and drawing on the discoveries of modern science to re-appraise the psychology of Stoicism. In closing the book, the author speaks of the insights he has gained in the course of practicing Stoicism.

In the preface, I feel this sentence captures my own purpose in studying Stoic philosophy:

Why is it so important to have a philosophy? Because without a philosophy, life is in danger of going astray — that is, although while you are alive you may engage in all sorts of activities and enjoy all sorts of pleasures, in the end you will have lived a very bad life. In other words, when you lie upon your deathbed and look back, you find that you have wasted your one and only chance at life. Your years spent, you did not pursue what is truly of worth, but instead squandered your life away, because you allowed yourself to be captured by all the showy and insubstantial things of life.

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The greatest benefit of a person’s having a philosophy of his own is that, in making many of his judgments, he need not agonize over the choice. A product with a philosophy of its own will not necessarily go far; but behind a product that does go far, there is certainly a philosophy holding it up.

Another sentence in the preface captures the meaning, for me, of studying Stoic philosophy:

According to Seneca, what the Stoic seeks to discover is “how the mind may hold forever to a steady and favorable course, be gentle toward itself, and look upon its present condition with an optimistic eye.” He further asserts that one who practices the principles of Stoicism “will surely, whether he wills it or not, be attended by a continual cheerfulness and a deep joy that rises from within — because he is able to draw joy out of himself, and this joy is one that no other joy can surpass.”

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As for the content of the book, I want to share two of its core ideas:

Negative visualization

When the Stoics counsel us to live each day as if it were our last, this is not, in their minds, what they mean. For them, to live with the thought that each day may be the last is merely an extension of the technique of negative visualization: as we go through a day, we should now and then pause and reflect upon the fact that “we will not live forever,” and that “therefore this day may be our last.” Such reflection will not turn us into hedonists; rather, it will make us appreciate how wonderful it is to be alive this day, and give us the chance to fill this day with activity. And in doing so, we then cannot possibly squander our days away. In other words, when the Stoics urge us to live each day as if it were our last, their aim is not to change our activities but to change the state of mind in which we carry out those activities. In particular, they do not wish us to stop thinking about the future or making plans for tomorrow; what they truly want is for us, even as we think and plan for tomorrow, to remember to appreciate today.

This also brings to mind something similar that Jobs once said:

“Remembering that you are going to die is the most important tool I have ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all outside expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment and failure — these things simply fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your own heart.”

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Su Shi, in his “Record of the Hall of Treasured Paintings,” wrote: a gentleman may lodge his heart in things, but must not let his heart be held captive by things. We should consciously cultivate a sense of detachment from life. When we have drawn a sufficient distance from life, we will find not only that the good side of life becomes more beautiful, but that even its bad side becomes easier to bear — for a sense of beauty always appears together with a sense of distance.

From the dichotomy to the trichotomy

The Stoic “dichotomy of control” tells us: in life, some things are within your power and some are not, and you should give your attention to what is within your power.

But once we know the dichotomy, we find in practice that many matters are not simply black or white; and so, the better to put the dichotomy into practice, we work it out further into a trichotomy.

First, it is meaningful to spend our time and energy on things wholly within our control. In such cases, our effort is guaranteed to have effect. And we will also notice that, because of the degree of our control over such things, usually only relatively little time and energy is needed to make sure they happen.

Now let us turn our attention to the second branch of the trichotomy of control — to those things over which we have no control at all, such as whether the sun will rise tomorrow. To spend time and energy attending to such things is plainly foolish. Because we have no control whatever over the matter in question, the time and energy we spend will make no difference to the outcome. As Marcus observed, “Anything without meaning is not worth doing.”

But there are also things over which we have some control, though not complete control. For example, playing in a tennis match is not something wholly within my control: no matter how much training I put in, no matter how hard I try, I may still lose. Yet it is not something over which I have no control at all: a great deal of practice and hard effort may not guarantee that I win, but it will surely affect my chances of winning. And so here is an example: winning a tennis match is something I can control in part but not completely.

The Stoic, too, cannot fully control the outcome of a tennis match; there is always the possibility that he will lose, and if he loses, he will be vexed and his tranquility disturbed. So for a Stoic, the safer course might seem to be to avoid playing tennis at all. Extended to every matter of the kind, this might make it seem that Stoicism is a philosophy of passive escape — but it is not.

I believe that when a Stoic attends to something he can control in part but not completely — a tennis match, say — he will be very careful in setting his goals. In particular, he will set himself internal goals rather than external ones. Thus his goal in playing tennis will not be to win the match (something outside himself, over which he has only partial control), but to play to the best of his ability in the match (something internal, over which he has full control). Having chosen this goal, then even if he loses the match he can be spared frustration and disappointment: because winning was never his goal, so long as he has done his utmost he will not have failed to reach it. His tranquility will not be disturbed.

Playing your best in a tennis match and winning that match are causally linked. Indeed, for the sake of winning a match, what better method is there than to play to the utmost of one’s ability? The Stoic realizes that our internal goals affect our external performance; but he also realizes that the goals we deliberately set have an enormous effect on our subsequent emotional state.

Ten pieces of advice

The book also sets out ten pieces of advice that the Stoic philosophers offer to those who seek tranquility:

• We should become self-aware, observing and reflecting on ourselves and on how, each day, we respond to the various things that occur.
• We should use rational thought to overcome negative feelings and desires, considering whether these things are really worth having.
• When we are wealthy without having chased wealth, we should enjoy our abundance but not cling to it, and should be prepared to lose it.
• We should not try to cut off our ties to others, for we are social animals. But we can avoid making friends of negative people.
• Though friction inevitably arises in dealing with people, our not responding to that friction lets us dissolve it away.
• Our misfortune springs mainly from insatiable greed and from a tendency to worry over things beyond our control.
• To address insatiable greed, we need to practice negative visualization, so that we may turn from a ceaseless craving for new things to a cherishing of the present.
• To restrain worry over things beyond our control, we should adopt the trichotomy of control, and not trouble ourselves over the part we cannot control.
• When we spend time dealing with things not wholly within our control, we should take care to internalize our goals.
• Toward the external world, we should hold to a fatalistic attitude: what is happening to us now lies beyond our control, and to be troubled by it is foolish.

The Stoic philosophy of life may be an ancient one, but it deserves the attention of any modern person who wishes to live a full and meaningful — that is to say, a good — life.

Hit Refresh

Reader: Andy

In the warmth of April, I read Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s third CEO. Across three generations of CEOs, Microsoft remains a benchmark of the American economy and of American business.

In 1975, the twenty-year-old Bill Gates founded Microsoft;

In 1986, Microsoft went public on NASDAQ;

In 2000, Steve Ballmer became CEO;

In 2014, Satya Nadella became CEO.

The three keywords in this book that impressed me most:

Refresh

When Nadella took over Microsoft, its stock had long been treading water and morale was at its lowest ebb. On February 4, 2014, with a few simple words, Gates entrusted the whole of Microsoft to Nadella.

After taking office, Nadella posed a crucial question:

“If Microsoft were to disappear, we must be clear: what would the world lose? What we must answer is this — what does this company do? Why do we exist? It is time to rediscover our soul — that is, what it is that makes us different.”

He found that the vast Microsoft had lost its soul — had lost the direction, the momentum, and the passion of a startup. He said it was like a web page: if it falls into some state of stagnation, you must click “Refresh” once.

Empathy

Nadella said: “I think what matters most is the ability to create new ideas and to show empathy; when this ability and this empathy are joined together, they produce an enormous power of influence. This is what gives me the most satisfaction, and it is also the reason I chose Microsoft. I hope that every one of you who works at Microsoft will possess this ability and this empathy.”

For when Nadella’s first child was born, weighing less than 1.5 kilograms, he could not to this day move about, and can express his thoughts and communicate only through machines. This has compelled the father to see the world from his child’s point of view; without empathy, the world between father and son would have collapsed.

Growth mindset

The Microsoft that Nadella entered was a proud Microsoft, a Microsoft that “knew it all.” He said that from this day on Microsoft must enter a state of “learning it all,” moving from a fixed mindset into a growth mindset. What stands out here is the empowering of others — helping a person, or a team, rise to a challenge and succeed.

He also spoke of three principles of leadership: “First, convey a clear message to the people you work with. This is one of the most basic things a leader must do every day, every minute. Second, a leader must generate energy — not only within his own team, but across the whole company. Third, find the way to achieve success and to make things happen. This means driving people to take part in the innovative work they love and long to do, and finding the balance between long-term success and short-term wins.”

At 6:02 on the morning of July 10, 2014, Nadella sent a letter to all Microsoft employees. It read:

“To quicken our pace of innovation, we must rediscover our soul — our one and only core.

We must understand and embrace what only Microsoft can bring to the world, and how we can once again change the world.

I believe that what we are doing now is bolder, and more ambitious, than ever before.

Microsoft is the expert in providing productivity and platforms for a world that is ‘mobile-first, cloud-first.’

We will reinvent productivity, empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

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This refreshed Microsoft’s new mission, and it led Nadella, at a public event, presenting to everyone an iPhone loaded with the whole of Office’s software, to say: “This is a very unique iPhone; I like to call it the iPhone Pro, because it has all of Microsoft’s software and apps installed on it.”

That a Microsoft person should publicly show off an iPhone had once been unthinkable, and even then the whole hall broke into laughter. But the Microsoft of today has regained its youth, its stock at a historic high, its products loaded onto countless devices the world over — whether PCs or phones, and whether running Windows, Apple, or Android systems.

It was Nadella who refreshed the whole of Microsoft. The youth of a mature, incumbent enterprise begins with the awakening of its soul.