How Can a 'Diaosi' Make a Comeback?

Note: The term 'Diaosi' is often used as a self-deprecating phrase for young men without girlfriends or with low incomes. Women sometimes use it too, referring to themselves as 'female Diaosi.' Everyone speaks well of grand principles; I will offer some practical advice. Let's start with an example. Egg pancakes are something everyone is familiar with. In areas where office workers gather in the city, there are always a few masters coming out early in the morning to make egg pancakes for everyone, and their business is always booming. If you calculate carefully, this seemingly insignificant small business can still generate decent income. Suppose an egg pancake sells for 3 yuan, and the cost accounts for half. If you can make one pancake in half a minute, you can earn 180 yuan in one hour. If we consider two hours as the golden morning time, you can earn 360 yuan. Over a month, you can earn 8,000 yuan. However, if you were asked to do this business, you would definitely be unwilling. Besides the hard work and lack of respect, there is another important reason: you would vaguely feel that you cannot see "hope." Yes, no hope. Why? Because it is too difficult to increase this income of 8,000 yuan further. Even if your hands and feet become extremely nimble later, you might raise it to 9,000 or 10,000 yuan, but is it possible to reach 50,000, 80,000, or 100,000 yuan? No. Because every penny you earn is made by making one pancake at a time with your own hands. You yourself are the biggest bottleneck to your income. This is a career with little randomness. In reality, most careers are careers with little randomness. Your income and its limited growth are predictable. You cannot get rich overnight or even in a year. You can only save money month by month, throwing coins into a piggy bank; or become a mortgage slave, working diligently and cautiously for twenty years until your temples turn white. And for all those who have accumulated huge wealth, their wealth accumulation is step-like, not linear growth. Therefore, the vast majority of 'Diaosi' cannot complete their comeback and can only live day by day, anesthetized by the slogans of making a comeback. If you want to make a comeback, you have to (to a large extent) rely on randomness. You have to seek luck, rather than let luck find you. Some industries or careers are more likely to experience random events, even positive ones with high returns, which Taleb calls "positive black swan" events. Fields prone to positive black swan events include movies, novels, scientific research, venture capital, internet startups, etc. Take a recent example. The movie "Lost in Thailand" created the highest box office record in Chinese history. This result was completely unexpected even for Xu Zheng himself; it is a typical positive black swan event. In this event, a 25-year-old young man, Yu Yuhang, exchanged an investment of 4 million for a return of 70 million. People who are envious and jealous will definitely think, how did Yu Yuhang have such accurate vision? Does he have special powers? Actually, the reason is simple: it's luck. But it's not just luck. If he had invested in a hotpot restaurant or an electrical appliance factory instead of a movie, he would not have been able to obtain such high returns quickly. His cleverness lies in choosing the right industry. Of course, investing in a movie could also make him lose everything, but this time luck happened to fall upon him. Of course, Xu Zheng and Yu Yuhang originally could not be considered 'Diaosi'. So let's just give a few examples of authentic 'Diaosi' making a comeback, such as Mr. Zhuo Mo who writes jokes on Weibo, and Li Yang who shoots micro-movies, etc. Talent shows are also a good place for 'Diaosi' to make a comeback. The participants in American Idol are mostly American 'Diaosi', such as unemployed people, single mothers, people with relatives suffering from serious illnesses, etc. These people hope to become famous overnight with their singing voices and completely change their current life situation. Actually, their approach is correct. Talent shows are also places where positive black swan events occur. For 'Diaosi' who truly have this talent, they should boldly try it. For many people, American Idol may be the best opportunity in their entire lives. Let's look at the field of writing again. J.K. Rowling was once a genuine 'Diaosi'. After a failed marriage, Rowling lived with her daughter who was only a few months old, relying on government welfare benefits, with no hope in sight. But during a train journey, a sudden image of a little boy who could do magic flashed through Rowling's exhausted mind. Thank goodness, she seized this image (this opportunity granted by the gods) instead of letting it slip away arbitrarily. She felt inexplicable excitement and immediately began to structure the framework and background of the story, until she wrote the first "Harry Potter." Stephen King, the king of horror novels, was once also a 'Diaosi'. Although he started writing novels at a very young age, he did not gain attention for a long time, only occasionally publishing small works, with meager and unstable income (fortunately, he had a wife who fully understood and supported him). To supplement household expenses, while persisting in his writing, he did various strange part-time jobs, including cleaning medical waste in a laundry. He wrote about this experience after becoming famous: The sheets and tablecloths sent by the hospital were even worse. In summer, they were also crawling with maggots, but the maggots here ate blood, not lobster meat and clam juice. The clothes, sheets, and pillowcases that were definitely contaminated were all packed in a large bag we called a "plague bag," which dissolved in hot water, but at that time, people did not think blood was particularly dangerous. There were often some small foreign objects in the clothes sent to the hospital for washing; the items to be washed were like dirty popcorn boxes, hiding strange little prizes inside. I once found a steel bedpan in a batch of items to be washed, and a pair of surgical scissors in another batch... Once I heard a strange sound coming from one of the three bags of washing machines I was responsible for. I pressed the emergency stop button, wondering if some part had fallen off this unlucky machine. I opened the doors of the washing machine bags one by one, dragging out a large pile of wet surgical patient gowns and green hats from inside, getting myself soaked as well. As a result, I found that underneath, in the filter inner bag of the middle bag, were scattered what seemed to be a whole mouthful of human teeth. At that moment, I thought that these teeth could make a quite unique necklace, but then I scooped them out and threw them into the trash can. Over the years, my wife has tolerated quite a lot, but her sense of humor is, after all, limited. But the point of giving these examples is not to say that if you just engage in these professions, you can definitely make a comeback in one go. I am just saying that doing these things gives you a better chance of making a comeback. The more likely actual situation is that you encounter failure after failure, enduring the torment of obscurity, just like the lives of Rowling and King once were. But as long as you persist and do not give up, you are very likely to succeed in a comeback in an opportunity that you did not even expect. So, you have two paths in front of you. One path is the egg pancake-style path, where you will obtain a stable income and a stable life, but you will forever be a 'Diaosi'. The other is the path of making a comeback, where you may wander and struggle, but you hold onto your talent without abandoning it, until you shine brightly. If you choose the latter path, you can choose one of the following things to start doing: • Write a novel • Shoot a micro-movie • Operate a Weibo or WeChat account • Make an APP • Conduct cutting-edge scientific research • Draw comics • Participate in talent shows • …

Source: Zhihu Author: Cai Tong