Lesson one in the cutthroat business arena: Stop obsessing over surprise attacks and industry disruption. Do the stupidest-looking thing first—tame your restless ego and copy the most fundamental maneuvers until you score a perfect 100.
When I mentor PhD students writing papers for journals at the level of EJOR (European Journal of Operational Research, a top global journal in the field), my first lesson is always a brutal bucket of cold water.
Ambitious young scholars often sit in front of me, convinced of their own genius. Their eyes shine, and their heads are filled with grand blueprints to “disrupt old architectures” and “fill century-old academic voids.” My first response to them is usually: “Stop. Shove those ‘genius’ constructs back into your drawer.”
The first task I assign them is to dig into the literature and find the most classic, foundational paper published by the pioneers of the field. Then, without injecting a single ounce of your ‘genius’ intellect, you are to strictly run the core models and experiments of this paper flawlessly, down to the last punctuation mark. Yes, academia calls this Reproduce; in layman’s terms, copying homework.
Many students feel profoundly humiliated on the spot. “Professor, I am here to do top-tier innovation, and you want me to copy someone else’s leftovers? Isn’t this insulting my intelligence and wasting my youth?”
I usually don’t waste time arguing. I stumbled on that exact same hurdle—during my PhD, I started writing models before fully digesting the literature, and the resulting code was miles away from the original results. That painful lesson left me with one ironclad baseline: If you can’t even copy someone else’s homework accurately, where do you get the muscle to innovate?
This isn’t just some pedantic rule of academia; it is the only reliable way for humans to build survival capacity in any complex system.
Rewind the clock to 1999, when the Chinese internet was still in diapers. In a shabby office in Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei, a young man named Pony Ma was doing exactly the same thing as my frustrated PhD students.
In February 1999, a little gadget then called OICQ had just been cobbled together by Ma. He stared intently at an Israeli chat software called ICQ on his screen and issued an inflexible mandate to his tech team: execute a “pixel-perfect” replication. Where every button was placed, how every pop-up appeared—never mind if it looked good, just make it exactly the same. And thus came their OICQ (later QQ), a product whose very name carried a heavy knock-off flavor.
Over the next dozen years, Tencent practically turned this “replication” mechanism into a dark art. From desktop games (Lianzhong → QQ Games) to stealing virtual vegetables (Happy Farm → QQ Farm), they “replicated” all the way down. This directly earned Tencent the ugliest public moniker in Chinese business history during those years: “Fucking Tencent.”
In the media’s mouth, “copying” is a filthy word. Everyone cursed them as the “King of Knock-offs,” accusing them of shamelessly using massive traffic to crush small teams fighting to the death for originality.
But I’ve always felt that many entrepreneurs who later washed up on the shore carried a mysterious arrogance in their subconscious when they cursed Tencent. They were secretly sour: “Tch, if I had a massive traffic pool like Tencent’s, I’d succeed at copying too.” I can only say they were spectacularly wrong. They only stared at the superficial “copying,” completely failing to understand the cold-blooded code running in the underlying decision-making system.
P(C): Gamblers Die of Illusions, Winners Only Look at the “Base Rate”
There is a sickness in our era called the “Cult of Innovation.” In behavioral economics, this is known as Representativeness Bias—you read a few biographies of Steve Jobs, take a glance at Elon Musk building rockets, and you conclude, “This is what a badass entrepreneur looks like.” Then you slap your forehead and decide you can also build a new gadget to change the world.
But the calculator in the Grim Reaper’s hand never cares whether “you think you look like Steve Jobs.” The Grim Reaper only looks at one cold, hard metric: the Base Rate. In any completely new track unverified by the market, the baseline mortality rate for reckless innovation is over 95%.
Your life, your savings, and your career only give you so many bullets. Are you going to the casino to buy a lottery ticket with a 10,000-to-1 payout but a 0.01% chance of winning? Or are you going to find a slot machine with an 80% win rate and steadily crank it until it’s empty?
This is the second core variable in our “Decision Operating System”: $P(C)$, the win rate of locking onto core facts. The ultimate taboo in decision-making is conflating “what I hope it is” (the inside view) with “what the system’s objective probability is” (the outside view).
By bearing the brunt of global infamy back then, Tencent was essentially executing a ruthless discipline: I will absolutely not test the base rate of unknown tracks. I will only wait until others have paved the road with their corpses, raising P(C) from 10% to 80%, before I enter with massive traffic to harvest.
This is not despicable; it is the highest form of rationality required to survive in the colosseum.
The First of the Three States: The Most Tormenting Phase, “Shu”
In the training framework of Kendo, this stage has a corresponding name: “Shu” (To Keep/Protect). It means: completely, meticulously, and obediently replicating the Kata (Forms) taught by your master.
At this stage, your master does not need your flashes of cleverness or your charming “personality.” Your only task is to act like an emotionless sword-swinging machine, repeating the most basic motions with extreme discipline until they become physical instinct.
Why so masochistic? Because in a system full of malice and noise (N), what determines your survival is not how peerlessly brilliant your initial idea was. Rather, it is if you take the wrong path, whether you can correct the error at superhuman speed before you die (this is the error-correction capability $A$ in the equation).
Those self-proclaimed “smartasses” insist on building an unprecedented, world-class spaceship the moment they step out the door. When they push it to the market and it explodes on the launchpad, they don’t even know whether the engine failed or the glass shattered. Because every single part is fucking new, the cost of error correction is absurdly high, and they can only wait in place to die.
Meanwhile, Pony Ma’s “pixel-perfect homework copying” was actually a masterful move to lock down variables. By completely replicating a model that had already proven successful overseas, he reduced all uncertainty regarding product validation to absolute zero.
When OICQ launched domestically, if users dropped off, engineers could instantly pinpoint the bug—because the skeleton was battle-tested, the problem had to be in the localized network. Right in this messy phase of being cursed out daily by peers, Tencent unknowingly built the fastest and most resilient systemic error-correction muscle (A) in the entire Chinese internet.
When you haven’t even gathered your own building blocks, there is zero shame in using someone else’s blueprints to lay your foundation. Trying to fly when you haven’t even learned to crawl isn’t innovation; it’s a suicide mission.
In Your Life, Who Is Brainwashing You With “Disruptive Innovation”?
Today, whether for corporate professionals or entrepreneurs, the hurdle where they die the ugliest is often their profound disdain for this concept of “Shu.”
Today’s internet and short-form videos are feeding you a daily dose of poison called “miracles.” You watch Gen Zers making millions a month as influencers, you see some peer achieving massive results using a “disruptive playbook” you can’t even comprehend, and your heart starts racing. You do foundational execution work at your company, thinking the SOPs left by your predecessors are absolute trash. You get itchy to implement “drastic reforms,” only to crash a business that was at least barely functioning. You want to start a side hustle or open a small shop, but you adamantly refuse to learn the tacky-but-profitable marketing routines of your peers. Instead, you insist on “blazing a new trail” with an unprecedented, high-end concept, ultimately losing your shirt.
To put it bluntly, it’s entirely your Ego (E) at work. You are too eager to broadcast to the world, proving that “I am not like those mediocre mortals.” You despise copying, you crave the halo, and you believe you possess that 1% of peerless talent.
But the real world is as cruel as an emotionless meat grinder. It doesn’t care about your talent; it only looks at the objective base rate. Before you swing that earth-shattering sword to break the deadlock, put your hand over your heart and ask yourself: Can you execute the most cliché, foundational money-making maneuver in this track perfectly with your eyes closed? Are your meager savings and remaining youth really enough to gamble against a 99% mortality rate?
Tencent literally closed its eyes and endured a painful decade of being universally reviled. It cranked its core win rate $P(C)$ and foundational error-correction capability $A$ to psychopathic levels. Until 2011. When the tidal wave of the mobile internet came crashing down, and the whole world was panicking without a compass. In an obscure R&D center in Guangzhou, a small team unspooled something with absurd smoothness (the execution power accumulated through years of replication) that even they had never seen before—WeChat.
A decade later, everyone is worshipping Tencent’s towering empire of innovation. But very few are willing to admit that every single root of this tree was once desperately anchored in that cold, tedious, downright loathed “absolute replication.”
[Homework Assignment: Test Your Survival Base Rate]
Since this is a practitioner’s training course, don’t just listen to stories today; let’s take action. Tonight, before you go to sleep, grab a pen and paper and ask yourself three questions about your current core business (or side hustle):
- Is your primary money-making maneuver something that has been verified a thousand times by your peers, or something you “innovated” by slapping your forehead?
- Stripped of all emotional bias, what is the objective failure rate in the field you are currently operating in?
- Before wanting to initiate drastic reforms, do you have a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) on hand that you wouldn’t mess up even with your eyes closed?
Write down the answers. If you don’t meet the mark, wake up tomorrow, put away your arrogance, and obediently go back to “Shu”.
PS: In the “Decision Operating System,” when the opponent has locked down the win rate $P(C)$, your only counterattack is to drop a massive fulcrum ($S$) and uproot their entire coordinate system. Next time, we’ll look at how Shein used a single line of code to devastate the entire ZARA empire.
