创始人的信#5：人生是一场实验，所以要学会脱离“别人”的影子~
Foreword
前言
A lot of people admire me for being able to learn Chinese in a rather short time, for being invited to be on a UN COP15 panel, for being a TEDx speaker or for many other reasons.
很多人钦佩我能在很短的时间内学会中文，我被邀请参加联合国COP15大会，我是TEDx的讲者，还有很多其他原因。
Although these achievements look very outstanding from the outside, but for me they don't seem special anymore after I've done them.
虽然这些成就从表面上看非常出色，但对我来说，在我完成这些成就之后，它们似乎不再特别。
At the same time, I can't say that these are some things that I planned and worked for really hard.
同时，我不能说这些都是我努力计划并争取的成就。
They happened because I happened to be the right person at the right time to do these things.
它们之所以发生，是因为我恰好是在正确的时间做这些事情的正确人选。
Everything else is just a reflection of my curiosity, desire to explore the unknown and my way of thinking.
其他一切都只是我的好奇心、探索未知事物的欲望和我的思维方式的反映而已。
As a matter of fact, I take my entire life as being an experiment, and enjoy both the good and the bad in it as an opportunity to learn and grow.
事实上，我把我的整个人生都当作一个实验，享受其中的好与坏，以此作为一个学习和成长的机会。
In other words, I just enjoy what I am doing and it is that passion that inflences all my results.
换句话说，我只是喜欢我正在做的事情，正是这种热情影响着我所有的成就。
During the TEDx talk I did in May 2020 I talked exactly about this way of thinking.
在2020年5月的TEDx演讲中，我谈到了这种思考方式。
I encourage everyone to adopt it and stop living in the shadow of other people.
我鼓励每个人都开始应用这种思维模式，并停止生活在“别人”的阴影下。
Why should you live your life as an experiment?
为什么应该把自己的生活当做一场实验？
Below is the exact script of the TEDx Talk.
下面是TEDx演讲的确切脚本
Why should you live your life as an experiment?
What can living your life as an experiment bring?
Today I will share with you some of my stories and hope that it will encourage you to look at your life with different eyes.
I’ve always been a curious person, interested in a lot of topics, sometimes not directly linked with one another.
我一直是一个好奇心很强的人，对很多话题感兴趣，有时彼此之间没有直接联系。
Yet I was often told that some things are not possible or that I am not stable for being interested in so many things, that I should focus only on one thing.
And I have struggled many times because of this.
In environmental psychology, the social relationships that we have and their quality are considered an important element of the environments in which we live and will have a great influence on our personalities and beliefs, and even our actions, fears and anxieties.
在环境心理学中，我们拥有的社会关系及其质量被认为是我们社会环境的一个重要因素，并将对我们的个性和信仰，甚至我们的行为、恐惧和焦虑产生重大影响。
Living in environments with many discouraging voices around makes it easy to turn into someone who is afraid of taking risks, who stops asking questions, someone who just does things for immediate results or someone who always thinks that others have the answers.
For a very long time I also didn’t trust myself enough to think that I may have answers too.
And I have a feeling that I am not the only one who has ever felt this way in this room.
Self-doubt and the belief that “I can’t” are the ones to stop us from achieving.
Self-doubt can be so overwhelming that it will block us into the anxiety of not knowing what and how to choose.
自我怀疑对人造成的负面影响很大，它会让我们陷入不知道如何选择的焦虑之中。
So this is why you should choose to live your life as an experiment and embrace “Let’s see”, “What if?” and “I’ll figure it out”.
Such thoughts can help us get out of our anxieties, try new things and slowly build self-confidence.
这些思维模式可以帮助我们摆脱焦虑，尝试新事物，慢慢建立自信。
These 3 toughts allow us to make choices even when we are facing an uncertain future and feel paralized by our anxieties.
I will share with you how they worked out for me and hopefully that will inspire you to start using them yourself too.
“Let’s see” is what brought me to China in 2012.
With the world financial crisis in 2008, with no more job in the urban planning field, in order to be able to continue supporting myself through university, I started changing various jobs in customer service, sales, training, marketing.
随着2008年世界金融危机的爆发，我在城市规划领域没有了更多的工作机会，为了能够继续在大学里养活自己，我开始在客户服务、销售、培训、营销等方面换工作。
For those of you who are wondering, I started working full-time since my second year of bachelor.
In 2012 a former university colleague suggested I should come to China in an attempt to return to the urban planning field.
Her exact words were: “You are wasting your life doing customer service after studying urban planning for so many years”.
I actually had a very high salary, so I didn’t think working in customer service was actually a waste of my life, but my colleague’s voice was stronger, so I told to myself “let’s see” what China is like and what it has to offer.
I will not say too much about what happened next, apart from the fact that going back to the urban planning field didn’t really work out as I planned it, although I am still in China now.
“What if?” got me to reach HSK6-level in Chinese in less than 5 years from the moment I started learning the langauge in 2012.
“如果。。？”让我从2012年起开始学习汉语的那一刻起，不到5年的时间内就达到了汉语水平考试6级（也就是说用中文写博士论文没问题的水平）。
当我第一次来到中国的时候，我什么都听不懂，对我而言全部都是一个声音。
我当时甚至怀疑中国人的大脑生理结构跟西方人都不一样，因为我怎么也不明白大家怎么能用我当时就感觉是一只鸟的声音来沟通。
但是我依然很好奇，想要知道我周边的人到底在说什么，他们是怎么想的，他们的感受是什么，因此我把我自己当做一个实验。
我当时没有任何期待，也没有什么学习的目标，只是在想“如果我会把我自己全部融入到中国的环境只会是什么样的结果？”。
如此，虽然我当时什么都听不懂，但是我就开始主动地聆听中国广播、看中国电影、在路上观察中国人的说话方式、他们的肢体语言，尽可能去猜测他们在说什么。
同时，我也开始注意大街上的路牌，从上面开始学习认字，然后再用各种广告牌来练习阅读技能。
这样我就把城市当作我个人的教室，天天在学习新的内容。
当我搬到了英国之后，我才知道我这么做的结果是什么。
那么这件事情带我到讲”I’ll figure it out”的部分了。
“I’ll figure it out” is what got me to move to the UK to study an MSc Environmental Psychology in 2013, even if when I left China to move to the UK I had money to survive there only for 3 months.
At that time, I thought “Even if I don’t have enough money, I’ll surely find some part-time jobs to help me.
Why bother thinking about some problems that haven’t happened yet and maybe will never happen.
If they do happen, then I’ll figure them out when time comes”.
Many things did happen while in the UK and I did have to solve a lot of problems that I hadn’t anticipated.
I remember the toughest thing was actually finding part time jobs to be able to support myself throughout my studies.
With really bad weather, expensive and not so tasty food compared to my time in China, coming from a design background without any academic research experience, not many friends and having to worry all the time about my finances, I can say that my year in the UK was the darkest year of my life.
与我在中国的时间相比，英国的天气真的很糟糕，各种价格昂贵，食物也不太好吃，来自设计背景的我，没有任何学术研究经验，没有什么朋友，不得不一直担心我的财务状况，我可以说，我在英国的那一年是我一生中最黑暗的一年。
Looking back, I realized that I was on the verge of despression.
To keep myself sane and recreate an environment in which I was happy, apart from attending courses and any part time job that I could find, I would shut myself in my room to watch Chinese soap operas, movies, or just listen to Chinese music.
For the same reason, I also registered for an optional course in Chinese at the university and I remember the teacher refusing me at first.
Her words were: “You’re much too advanced for what we can teach you in this course”.
I was shocked.
What does “too advanced” even mean?
I had no idea, so I begged her to allow me to attend the course anyway.
That’s when I realized that me turning the city into a classroom while in China had paid off.
The environment had tought me a lot more Chinese than I had even realized.
Another thing I hadn’t realized was how I had acquired some Chinese habits like drinking hot water, something that I never did before coming to China the first time.
The moment I realized it was when the manager in one of my part time jobs in the UK asked me:
“Are you crazy? Are you drinking hot water? No tea?”
His words made me realize that Ihad actually poured just hot water in my mug, without adding tea in it.
After a few seconds of taking in the moment, I remember telling him very proudly: “Yes. Drinking hot water is good” and just sat down at the desk to continue my work.
Yet another example how the environments in which we live will influence us, either in a positive or negative way, if we let them.
这件事情额外说明，如果我们允许，我们生活的环境将以积极或消极的方式影响我们的行为。
Do I regret any of my decisions?
Did everything turn out as I planned it?
Not at all and some have been extremely difficult moments, but looking back I have no way of knowing if choosing something else wouldn’t have been worse.
Regrets or desires to change the past are not going to help.
You think the way you think now because you have experieced all the things you did.
Being able to go back in time would lead you to make the exactsame decisions because you would go back in time to the exact mindset you had when you made the decisions in the first place.
All the experience you’ve accumulated after you’ve made the decision would wipe out.
你做出决定后积累的所有经验都会消失。
Thinking in any other way will just block you in the past and not allow you to live a future full of new and amazing things.
It will deny you the joy of learning new things everyday and experience things that you never even thought would be possible before.
So, learn to live your life as an experiment and allow yourself to open paths that you never thought existed because nobody else was curious enough to walk them before.
I hope my talk will inspire you to look at the world with different eyes, be more mindful of your own environments and dare to live your lives like an experiment.
Let “Let’s see”, “I’ll figure it out” and “What if?” guide you in your decision making and get you out of anyanxieties that you might have about what might be the “right” or “wrong”decision.
And just be prepared for all the wonders that will be waiting for you once you do that, even if you won’t know from the very beginning what they are.
一旦你做到了这些，就要准备好迎接所有等待你的奇迹，即使你从一开始就不会知道这些奇迹是什么。
For those who want the video version, below you can watch the recording of the TEDx Talk
想要看看现场讲座的亲们，即可观看下面TEDx讲座的录像
To live up to my words, I will do two more experiments to see what will happen and learn more.
为了不辜负我的诺言，我将再做两次实验，看看会发生什么，并从中学到更多。
The experiments I am talking about are the Lunch Chat sessions for whoever is interested in having a 1 on 1 face to face conversation with me and the After Work Chat, a live broadcast to answer questions for those who are either not in Shanghai or don't manage to book a Lunch Chat.
我所说的实验是为有兴趣与我进行一对一面对面交谈的朋友提供午餐聊天机会，以及下班后聊天，为不在上海或无法预约午餐聊天的朋友而回答可能想要知道的问题的直播。
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