Flourishing Tree Moments of Inspiration (Issue Four): Interrogating the Essence, and the Great Way Is Simple
English edition · Adapted from the Chinese original
In Flourishing Tree’s Moments of Inspiration, the four partners of Flourishing Tree, every so often, exchange and share with one another the gains they have distilled over the period from work, clients, and study.
I am reminded of a saying. The renowned German philosopher Karl Theodor Jaspers wrote in What Is Education: “The essence of education means: one tree shaking another tree, one cloud pushing another cloud, one soul awakening another soul.”
We four partners, through these Moments of Inspiration, push and awaken one another. I share some of the distilled content here, in the hope that it may bring a little inspiration to friends who come across it.
For this issue’s Moments of Inspiration, I have distilled from each person’s sharing a single core keyword, set out below.
The Value of Time (shared by Richard)
Last week I made a decision: to sit for the CFA. This is very hard for me, because the textbooks and exam are all in English and the material is vast. This financial certification exam has been in China for over a decade, and so far probably fewer than 10,000 people have obtained CFA membership. For someone who long ago handed his English back to the teacher, this is surely a hard thing.
But what I want to share today is not the exam itself. Through this exam, beyond working hard to earn a certificate, I also want to run an experiment.
If you believe something is important, then you must invest enough time in it. And once enough time is invested, that thing can very likely be done well, no matter how hard it looks.
I have heard or read many people share how to give a good speech—Steve Jobs, for instance, or Luo Zhenyu, or TED speakers with tens of millions of views. They conclude that if you want to give a brilliant speech, one that can become a “fine work,” there are two principles: 1. Write a full verbatim script; 2. Invest roughly 40 times the length of the speech in preparation. If you’re giving a one-hour speech, invest 40 hours preparing, write out the full script, and rehearse it repeatedly.
After distilling this lesson, I applied it to several important speeches, salons, and hosting engagements. Whenever I managed it, that speech or hosting turned out very well. When preparation fell short, the effect tended to be underwhelming.
For the CFA exam, I transferred this speaking lesson and principle by structural analogy. The official standard is that passing the exam requires 300 hours of study. Given that my English is on the weaker side, I set myself a standard of investing 400 hours of study, then broke it down day by day. I believe that so long as I invest this much time, there will be a good result in the end. This is the experiment I want to run.
But this still isn’t the real content I want to talk about. I want to go one layer deeper:
First, time can be precisely quantified
I calculated that the effective time remaining in 2022 (counting eight effective hours a day) was 2,400 hours. If I carve off 400 hours for the CFA, how should I allocate the remaining 2,000? How can I spend them on the most efficient, most valuable things? How can I refuse low-value matters, people, and activities?
Once time is precisely quantified, you become far more perceptive about how you spend each day. And when the value of time is taken more seriously, it actually leads you to keep clarifying your own mission and vision.
Second, time can be better categorized
In Wang Xiao’s Five Kinds of Time: Rebuilding the Order of Life, time is divided into survival time, money-making time, looking-good time, fun time, and flow time.
Survival time is the time a person spends simply to survive. Eating, sleeping, and the like are indispensable, and they take up roughly a third of each day. Extending this further, we can define it as: the distribution of time that most people, for most of their lives, are passively subject to because of their own insufficient ability and external constraints, unable to choose actively.
Money-making time is easy to grasp from the literal meaning. Pushed further, it can be defined as: the time in which you do work solely on the core competitiveness of some product, until you push that product’s core value far beyond the industry average—that is real money-making time. “Product” here is a broad concept, meaning the value you can “sell.”
Looking-good time is the time you invest in yourself—persevering with exercise, learning to meditate, improving your health, raising your energy, tending to your appearance, and so on. It reflects how much you love yourself, how much you value the time that is your own, and how well you keep hold of the rhythm of your life.
Fun time is time you actively choose to invest in order to gain enjoyment. In fun time, we accept that we are human and allow ourselves moments of weak will. In fun time, we may have no specific goal and no unfinished plan; we simply seek relaxation and enjoyment for their own sake, with a clear conscience. To build a tough, rich, full structure of the self, fun time is an important material—it is specifically responsible for the “rich” part.
Flow time is the time we choose to spend in order to gain the experience of flow. If a person can enter flow at will, unconstrained by external conditions, they have already grasped the key to changing the quality of life. Those who learn and create in sustained flow come to feel they have found some magical key, leaping to a new dimension. A person who can pursue and experience flow over the long term is, in effect, keeping themselves in a continuous state of happiness and creativity.
So we should categorize our own time, and then look at how much we invest in each category. Is it balanced enough?
Third, time has different dimensions
Just as the great physicist Dirac deduced, from the mathematical principle that a positive number’s square root has both a positive and a negative solution, that particles have antiparticles—let me make an analogy: suppose time, too, has “anti-time” or “dark time.” When you invest “positive time”—the quantity of time—what matters more is “anti-time,” the quality of time. It flows on the reverse side of time, not so easily measured or noticed, and yet it is more important.
That is my sharing on the value of time. Finally, a line to leave with everyone: “How you spend a day is how you spend a life.”
Interrogating the Essence (shared by Joyce)
Recently, in organizing an event jointly held with another institution, I met with some challenges in coordination and organization, which forced me to keep adjusting and reflecting. The good side, of course, is that the process also let me grow. I’ve sorted out three reflections.
First, everything has cause and effect.
That is, one must not be too attached to oneself. In organizing the event, there were many differences of philosophy and approach with the co-organizers, which made the process rather bumpy, and at times I felt pressure and frustration. But in self-reflection, my philosophy and methods come from my past work experience, environment, and habits; the present “effect” arises from my own earlier “cause.” The same is true of others. So one must not be too attached to what is “right” or “good”; letting go and seeking common ground while reserving differences is a better way.
Second, everything has rules.
As just said, you may encounter decisions where consensus can’t be reached—so what is the basis for judgment then? Here, establishing a clear set of rules is very important. Each party’s identity and duties, the order of priority in collaboration, how to divide labor and cooperate, and so on—establishing clear rules in advance is the foundation for smooth, efficient collaboration afterward.
Third, everything has an origin.
The first two points lead to this third and most important one. Everything must be traced back to its essence; one must ask “why,” must ask what the purpose is. Very often, the purpose we assume is not the true purpose; only through continual questioning can we gradually approach the essence. Divergences in behavior and differences in thought must arise because the purpose has not yet been agreed upon.
This process of interrogating the essence has made my thinking about my work ever deeper, my sorting-out of purpose ever clearer, and my own heart ever more settled.
The Great Way Is Simple (shared by Carolyn)
Lately I’ve been listening to the lectures of Professor Zhang Shoucheng, which have given me great stirring and inspiration.
The late Professor Zhang Shoucheng was a world-renowned physicist, a tenured professor at Stanford University, and a winner of the Dirac Medal (the highest award in the field of international theoretical physics). He was given this award because, like Dirac, he derived the most complex physical theories in the most concise way.
Professor Zhang always held that the most core essence of this world is being able to explain and solve the most complex problems with the simplest methods. And the sciences that can be used to explain this world are physics plus chemistry. For example, the smallest unit of granularity in this universe is the atom; based on this first principle, even if we one day discover aliens—we don’t know what aliens look like, but we can be certain that they too must be made of atoms.
Or take Euclid, who founded geometry more than 2,000 years ago. The most remarkable thing about geometry is those five axioms and five postulates. On the basis of five axioms and five postulates, plus 23 definitions, using deduction, Euclid derived in all 48 theorems and 467 propositions, building the entire system of geometry. After more than 2,000 years, it is still the system of geometry we learn today. Euclid’s great historical merit lies not only in founding geometry, but in pioneering a deductive way of thinking: starting from a small number of axioms, deriving all theorems and propositions, and thereby building the entire geometric system. This too is a method of deriving the most complex system from the most concise principles.
In a word: the great way is simple.
The inspiration it gives me is this: for my own work—family structuring and family wealth management—how can I find the first principle, and then use that first principle to explain and solve complex problems from a higher dimension?
Flourishing Tree’s “Four Floors” (shared by Andy)
This weekend I’m attending Professor Li Shanyou’s masterclass on the World of Ideas, and combining it with my recent communication with clients, I’ve arrived at some new understanding of what Flourishing Tree should do. If we think of the family-office business as having “four floors,” then:
The first floor is the level of specific products—driven by product sales; it’s what most institutions and teams in the wealth-management market are doing.
The second floor is the level of thinking models—using simple methods to explain and solve complex problems, systematically building structures and making plans for clients.
The third floor is the level of first principles—returning to the family’s essence, attending to the family’s origin, goals, and vision, and attending to the growth of the family’s people.
The fourth floor is the level of the World of Ideas—where family members, by way of the family enterprise, family wealth, and family succession, “enter the Way through craft, cultivating the true through the provisional,” and find the meaning and value of their own lives.
At Flourishing Tree we have done a great deal on the second floor, forming our own system and models, and we have already begun exploring the third floor with clients. The fourth floor we have glimpsed, but are still learning about and reflecting on.
By the way, last weekend during the training, amid the impact and the emotion, I wrote a short piece. It is a flow of consciousness and thought, about meaning, purpose, and value. I share it here.
Andy’s Short Essay
What is the meaning of wealth? I have long been pondering it.
I think the meaning of wealth is to help a person find and realize the meaning of their own life.
Wealth, like other forms of family capital, is a tool and a road for finding and realizing the meaning of one’s life.
Why do wealth protection and growth matter—this is more important than how to do wealth protection and growth. There are too many professional experts in wealth protection and asset allocation, and I truly cannot be more professional than they are technically. I cannot know trusts better than a trust expert, because they’ve handled a hundred times more cases than I have; I cannot know investing better than an investment expert, because they manage a hundred times more wealth than I do. What I hope is to understand people better, to understand entrepreneurs better, to understand better why people need wealth and how to use wealth meaningfully.
Because I exist, how will this world be different? If I did not exist, what would this world lose?
I would rather be a servant, a companion, an awakener, pursuing together with family clients the meaning of wealth and the truth of wealth. Making wealth the drill bit with which we bore holes—sharper and more efficient, yes—but what we truly want is, after hanging the picture on the wall, to experience a beautiful life.
Within the Zhiqian system’s logic of always having wealth, having more wealth, and having wealth that endures, how to think, and how to think one dimension deeper, is in fact a person’s greatest growth and reflection.
This reflects how we see this world, how we see ourselves and our children, and how we see the future.
I hope the service I can offer is decisively different from others’.
I want to bore a hole and hang a picture, but most people are chasing a better drill bit.
We must not lose the tool—but the purpose of life is not the tool.
Impact investing that helps this world progress is also values investing, meaning investing—investing that gives wealth a soul.
When we choose an investment methodology, we choose our way of seeing this world: whether to seize or to contribute, to occupy or to share.
Let our core resources, beyond serving ourselves, also serve others’ dreams—serve society, serve the world—and create value.