The Degree of Success

By Wu Jun

The degree of success is determined by at least three factors:the work speed,the success rate,and the impact.The speed difference is often limited,while the other two factors may result in an immesurable difference and affect the degrees of their success.

The ratio of success ranges from 0 to 100%.When this factor is taken into consideration,it will change our mindset on the judgement.For instance,it looks that the difference between 10 and 1 is bigger than that between 1 and 0,because a difference value of 9 is bigger than that of 1.But in fact,it is much easier for a 1 to add to 10 than a 0 to become 1,or to create something out of nothing.If we compare a person who hastily and unsuccessfully does 5 things with another who just focuses on one thing and successfully does it,we’ll see clearly that the achievement of the latter is infinitely better than that of the former.Therefore,the value of a man’s life is not judged by what he has done,but by what he has accomplished.

Another factor,the impact,also affects the degree of success.

Among many Weibo users,some have millions of online fans,while other users may only have a few.The huge difference between the two numbers is what we call a “difference in degree.” Such difference also exists between official websites.The official websites of the John Hopkins Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital are thousands of times better than that of a community hospital in terms of impact.

Such difference can be easily found not only in the virtual world,but also in the real economy.Let us have a look at the net profit of internationally known smart phone brands.In the 2017 global market,the most profitable phone,the iPhoneX,made 38 times more profits (35% of the global total) than the 10th phone,the iPhoneSE (0.9%).Also in the same year,8 of the top 10 most profitable phones were Apple,while the other 2 were Samsung.This means that most of the smart phone brands made little contribution to the industry’s profitability.

The impact difference can be seen everywhere.A paper by Google’s Jeff Dean in the field of AI technology has more influence than hundreds of academic papers from universities in the last decade.The total price of 10,000 digital watches manufactured in Guangdong is lower than that of one Patek Philippe.

For an individual,it is better to focus on one line of work in his life than to do many things.Some American engineers working in video games once complained to me about their poor salary.They said that,as the engineers at the bottom,they could make only around 800 US dollars a month,which is less than one third of a cleaner’s monthly income.On hearing it,I think it is quite normal for there are about one million video games that fail to attract any players in the world.It evidently indicates that the engineers and the employees of these companies have done jobs without an impact.

Many start-up companies in China give so much priority to work speed that an engineer there may write 2 to 3 times more codes than his counterpart at Google or Microsoft.But according to my observation,most codes written this way have a life cycle of no more than 3 months,and are used only by their creators and a few users.Such work has very limited influence.Comparatively,some classical codes written by Google engineers have a life cycle of more than 10 years,and are widely used in a majority of programs.The difference here is obvious.Those most successful are often not the busiest.Think more about your success rate,and try to ensure the impact of your work,then your future will be promising and fulfilling.