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Sharing a letter from Wu Shichun, the founding partner of Plum Ventures, which went viral among his Heart and Effort Club members. Every sentence is a gem of wisdom gained from countless pitfalls.

1. Many people's right decisions end up in vain: ask someone who has only ridden a bicycle if a luxury car is worth buying? Ask someone who has never benefited from equity investments if they should become a Plum LP?... Many wrong decisions and missed opportunities are often due to seeking advice from the wrong people. One way of giving bad advice is by saying "I'm doing this for your own good." When you encounter someone who is not as good as you, stay firm in your own ideas. When you meet someone similar to you, doubt your own ideas. When you meet someone better than you, negate your own ideas.

2. Time is the only true asset people have. The only important strategy is how to use your time wisely. Don't care about the price of valuable things, and don't waste time on things without value. The difference between decision-making based on price thinking and value thinking is huge. Entrepreneurship is like building with Lego blocks. Time is not spent on looking at blueprints, but rather on finding the right pieces. The three most important things for founders are finding people, finding money, and finding direction.

3. If an entrepreneur does not thoroughly reflect on a lesson, that lesson will repeat itself until you learn it completely. People teach people, and it takes many times to learn a lesson. What convinces a person is not preaching, but hitting a wall.

4. The opportunity for poor people to turn their lives around is to take big risks. If you don't have a large number of chips, you need to have multiples. It is impossible to succeed by evenly distributing your bets. Your big bets include money, time, energy, and loyalty. The so-called first pot of gold is the amount that helps you take a step forward. This society is both realistic and cruel. Money flows to those who don't lack it, while hardship is left for those who can endure it.

5. Many people's lives have improved compared to the past, but they have not become happier as imagined. People's happiness is determined by their senses, dopamine, and endorphins. Most people have the first level of happiness, but the majority do not have the third level. The true measure of a person's happiness is determined by how much dopamine they secrete in the second level. From the perspective of dopamine, having a stockpile is boring, and only gaining increments is interesting. Don't rely on past achievements, strive for new ones. Only with increments can you have more happiness. Cross-border talk shows by investors are also increments.

6. Being used to mediocrity is a game of "if the levels are similar, then who makes fewer mistakes." Similarly, entrepreneurship is a game of being more lean and frugal if the strategy and tactics are clear. Among the new forces in the automotive industry, the one who makes the fewest mistakes in the same things wins half the battle.

7. Entrepreneurs need to leave their comfort zone and enter their adaptive zone to evolve. Whoever is in pain will change, whoever changes will adapt, and whoever adapts will benefit. The most effective way to leave the comfort zone is to use others as a mirror to reflect your own problems. Ordinary people like to hear pleasing words, just like children like to eat candy, sweet but useless. Masters like to hear harsh words, just like adults like to drink tea, bitter but detoxifying.

8. Don't recruit people for entrepreneurship, but attract the people you need on the entrepreneurial journey. Recruiting people for entrepreneurship requires making promises, and promises give people certainty, which leads to laziness and wrongdoing.

9. Smart people find fools as opponents and experts as friends. This goes against human nature but is in line with common sense. Stupid people find experts as opponents and fools as friends. This is in line with human nature but goes against common sense.

10. People have three lives: being born, the emergence of heart and effort, and cognitive awakening. Heart and effort, and cognition are the two main veins of entrepreneurs. Only by unblocking them can one truly be invincible. The success of not having heart and effort and cognitive growth is more terrifying than failure because time will eventually bring the success achieved by luck back to its original state. Social mobility is very difficult, while falling only takes a short time.

11. Humans are born with double standards. Understanding others' double standards and overcoming one's own double standards is a lifelong practice. It is a painful practice of cultivating the mind and a way to distinguish whether a person is truly objective, honest, and empathetic.

12. Charlie Munger believes in having five lists for a happy life:

• Do not overconsume, do not exceed your capacity.
• Make smart investments.
• Stay away from toxic people and activities.
• Maintain lifelong learning.
• Do more delayed gratification activities.
  Otherwise, you need to have very, very good luck! The master believes that even ordinary things are not simple in every aspect. Most people ultimately hope to have very, very good luck, and are willing to spend time praying and worshiping, choosing evolution and joining a company.

13. Money raised through financing is not spent, only money earned from the market is spent. First-class entrepreneurs always have the ability to make money far greater than the ability to raise money. 95% of founders need to go through painful experiences to develop their ability to spend money. It is important to be frugal when you don't need to spend. Many founders spend money on the back of the knife, even on the handle, instead of spending it on the blade.

14. People, even if reluctantly, as long as they are slightly ahead of their opponents in some aspect, their state will emerge, and they can even exert 120% or 150% of their strength. Bite the bullet and stay ahead, fully embodying the "tall tree principle": in a forest, the taller the tree, the more sunlight it receives, and the faster it grows through photosynthesis.

15. In any company, fence-sitters and opportunists make up the majority. It is normal for them to sit on the fence and observe when you are not doing well or making mistakes. If you use a single, absolute loyalty value system, you will push them towards your opponents.

16. The unwritten rule of entrepreneurial socializing is to filter, not educate. Changing others is a great internal consumption, while changing oneself is growth. Prosperity and adversity are reflections of the inner self. If you are persistent and moved, it is adversity for you. If you let go and remain unmoved, everything is prosperity.

17. When people strive for higher levels, they are striving for higher dimensions to obtain more information, not just abilities. In higher dimensions, the speed, density, and accuracy of information you grasp are completely different, and they become the thickness of your cognition. With cognitive thickness, you can reduce dimensions, be compatible, and serve the users you can serve. This is the logic of making money.

18. "True brightness is never without darkness, it is just never overshadowed by darkness. True heroes are never without lowly sentiments, they just never succumb to lowly sentiments." - A passage I greatly admire.