致我的 2021To My 2021

And just like that it's the tail end of 2021. The countdown has already begun, but time has lost its markings in my head — a year gets cut into fifty-two weeks, and then into countless smaller stretches, and by the time I look up, another spring, summer, autumn and winter have gone by.

Looking back on the year — the second year of the pandemic — I finally got a completely fresh start: I moved from Beijing to Shanghai, and most of what my life looks like changed with it.

First, the difference between the two cities. Beijing is a city for working; it feels like the crowds are forever in a hurry. Shanghai, by comparison, has much more life in it. Maybe it's because this is where I've made a home, but this city gives me a settled feeling, and no shortage of moments that catch my heart.

Then work. My team is all in Beijing and I'm in Shanghai, so I went from being based in Beijing to flying up for two days a month. Then in the second half of the year I went twice and couldn't even check into a hotel — those absurd pandemic-control rules — and I came to hate going even more. At first I really couldn't adjust to being split across cities from my team, and I worried about how we'd communicate. I went back and forth on it for a while, and by the later part of the second half I seemed to have found something that looked comfortable. But at the very end of the year I realized it may not be the best state either — am I being too passive about it? There's still a lot of room to do better. As for results, there's no proving it yet. I'll let time give me the answer.

Then friends and hobbies. At first I worried the friends I used to see all the time in Beijing would drift away now that we rarely met. Turns out not: partly because years of habit had already built an easy understanding, and partly because everyone flies around anyway, so we actually still see each other plenty. And more and more classmates and friends have been moving to Shanghai. The tennis I'd picked back up in Beijing, though, didn't survive the move. Once the gym near my place opened I at least got back into training. This was the Olympic year the pandemic had pushed back, and I never would have guessed I'd fall for table tennis. Xiao Liu and I started leveling up together — we went to watch the National Games, bought better gear, and, not content with the outdoor tables in our compound, bought a table of our own to practice on in the garage. I started studying technique videos and loving watching matches. That's a fairly big change in my life. It had been a long time since sport gave me that kind of pure joy. During the 618 sales I also impulse-bought a digital piano; progress has been slower than I'd hoped, mostly because I keep dropping it and picking it back up. I hope I can stick with it next year.

Finally, mindset. This year I read more and spent more time alone, and I became more aware of my emotions — gradually able to tell which feelings are just hormones, and then to step into a third-person view and adjust my behavior and manage my expectations. I started using reading to regulate my state of mind, biographies especially: seeing how other people faced their own dead ends gave me something to work with. I also came to accept how much luck matters in a life, which left me a little more even-tempered about things.

Toward the end of the year I found myself facing problems and pain I'd never faced before, and I sank back into the emotion of it and couldn't pull myself out. It was hard. Reflecting on my mental state in the second half, I realized I didn't actually want to win that badly — which is exactly why I became more afraid of losing. So when difficulty or a challenge showed up, my first move was to avoid it. But thinking it through, I also see these new knots come from responsibility and risk. I chose this road, so of course I have to face it and carry it. And growth and pain usually come together. Usually once you get past the point in front of you and think it through, you just meet the next problem and the next challenge. At the same time I need to reset my state and my thinking faster: cut life into stretches, treat each stretch as a match, and focus on each game, each point. What matters isn't staying in peak form the whole time — it's adjusting quickly when difficulty comes.

Things I kept up this year: a weekly journal, exercise, reading. Things I didn't: practicing piano, doing equity research.

My top three books of the year: Kaige's Youth, Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi, and The Submarine at Night. I was struck by the prose in Kaige's Youth — the way it examines himself and others inside a particular moment of history. Following Agassi, an athlete at the very top, through his growth and his endless fight with himself, I felt like I got some redemption of my own. And I was taken by Chen Chuncheng's writing, walking with him through one fluid world after another.

For the new year: keep being someone with energy, and pass that on to the people around me. I also want to keep searching for an investing and living methodology that converges, so I can reset my state faster. Care less about winning and losing. Stay in the game. And never lose the nerve to keep going.

Typing this on a beach holiday in Hainan, it suddenly hit me: I was sixteen when I wrote my first year-end review. This is the tenth one, and the tenth year, and I'm twenty-five now. I wonder what that kid would say if he met me today — but the me of today is genuinely grateful to the me back then who kept wanting to get better.

To my 2021, my twenty-fifth year.