Panda gene on the loser

Panda gene on the loser

This is a classic story told by Yu Minhong in the New Oriental TOEFL class. Teacher Yu Minhong used this story to illustrate an important point that New Oriental promoted: hardship is the source of happiness, and ease and enjoyment is the beginning of suffering.

Civilized society is a competitive society. In a civilized society, it is necessary to achieve a higher level through competition. The reason is very simple, for example, in sports, who runs the fastest, who is the champion. Competition in sports competition is tangible, but the competition in daily life is intangible. It is even more necessary for us to be alert and give ourselves a fierce sense of competition anytime and anywhere.
For example, there are three or four hundred people in the classroom. By next year, half of the three or four hundred people may have gone abroad, and the other half stayed in the country. Half of the students who stayed in China, through their own efforts for a period of time, may have half of them succeeding in the end, and half of them will not succeed.
In fact, the same is true for students who go abroad. If you go abroad, it does not mean success. The students present here can now say that people are basically the same level, but after a few years, there may be such a gap. So competition is intangible, but it is very cruel. The competitive system of the entire society is a pyramidal structure.

You can say that I can not compete, I eat and eat every day, sleeping is not very good. Of course you can do this, but civil society does not allow you to do this. Because if you do this, you will be left behind by the society and fall to the bottom of the pyramid. There are only two outcomes at the bottom of the pyramid. One is that you will feel the weight of the entire pyramid will be on you, and you will feel like the whole society is bullying you. Second, because you are at the bottom, you are in the dark, you will feel that you can't see the sun. The only way you pass to the top of the pyramid is to work through your own efforts, so that when you get to the top, you will have unlimited scenery. At the peak of danger. It will be the top of the list, and the mountains are small.
If you want to study abroad, it is not difficult. Every year, tens of thousands of people in China get the full prize to study in the United States and Canada. It is not difficult for you to become one of them. But if you want to go to Harvard University, and Harvard University only accepts one or two hundred Chinese students each year, you join a very brutal competition. If you work hard, you will be one of the 200. You climbed to the top of the pyramid on the road to study abroad. If you want to work in a well-known enterprise at home and abroad by improving your English ability, you can also see that the better the wages and development opportunities of famous companies, the more intense the competition. I have a friend at Microsoft Research and another at McKinsey. They have never stayed in school and have never gone abroad. But because they have overcome countless competitors, they have done an excellent job. The annual salary is four or five thousand. .

As you can see, in the process of climbing the pyramid, the more you go up, the more intense the competition, and the stronger your opponent's ability. If you want to win in some people with high ability, your ability will be higher, and you will have to work harder and harder. But if you want to quit the competition, the result will be very bad. Exiting the competition will mean that you will lose more power and reach the edge of despair.

To make a simple metaphor: I saw a feature film about bears in the United States, saying that the pandas and polar bears originally had a common ancestor, but because of the climate change, the bears of the same ancestor were divided into two batches, and one group moved to China. In the temperate regions of Sichuan, another group moved to the frigid regions of the Arctic. According to the general logic, bears entering the frigid zone will be frozen and starved to death, while bears in the temperate zone will easily survive. But the result is the opposite.
Because of the good environment, the pandas have changed from ferocious animals to lazy, endangered animals. Why is this happening? The reason is simple, because the panda made two mistakes because it first withdrew from the competition.
There are many carnivores in temperate regions, such as tigers, lions, and wolves. They often eat food with it, so the pandas are angry and do not eat meat, and they have withdrawn from the ranks of fierce animals. Then it made another second mistake, that is, because there were many animals grazing, it decided not to eat even the grass, decided to eat something that other animals did not eat: bamboo. This is another fatal mistake it made, and it chose the only source of food to survive.

Just like a person, if he only has one skill and does not constantly update or change his skills according to the needs of the environment, when the society does not need this skill, he will be unemployed or laid off. The same is true for pandas. When bamboo is getting less and less, a large number of pandas are starved to death, leaving only the few giant pandas in the world.
The descendants of the bear who moved to the North Pole gradually evolved into polar bears, living in the frozen Arctic Arctic, and there is no crisis of extinction. It is fierce than a panda and weighs at least twice as much as a panda. It was originally a terrestrial animal, but in the end it can swim for a few hours in the sea, and can prey on a large number of creatures in the water, eat seals, eat walruses, eat all kinds of shrimps and fish, and finally there is nothing to eat, at minus 40 degrees. In the Arctic, it can also hibernate. After three or four months, the polar bears hibernate and the snow on the pat is a good bear!

The story of the polar bear tells us that despite the harsh living environment in the Arctic, the adaptation of the environment has led to the polar body and strong survivability of the polar bear. Numerous biologists have experimented with the same species in two different environments. One is a very comfortable environment where food and water can be obtained without effort, and the other is an environment in which food can be obtained through hard work. The result is always a life-stable creature that is either early death or sick. The creatures in harsh environments are very happy and long-lived.
The same is true for people. Anyone who grows up in a tough environment is a person who is strong, energetic and successful. People who grow up in a comfortable and comfortable environment are usually people who have nothing to lose. This can be seen in the examples of countless families in China. Therefore, it is definitely not a good thing to withdraw from competition and avoid hardship. Therefore, I often say to students in class: hardship is the source of happiness, and comfort is the beginning of suffering.