If you want to succeed, create something of your own.

If you want to succeed, create something of your own—a product, a short video, an app, a course, an article, a song, a dance, or even a late-night food stall. Even dressing yourself well and stepping outside can be a work of creation.

Use your work to express yourself and attract society’s attention. Once you gain attention, you have succeeded.

Creating your own work can, at the very least, preserve hope during the darkest periods of your life and keep you from falling into absolute despair. At its best, it can help you gain attention and achieve success through creativity. If you start doing this at twenty, you are bound to succeed within ten years.

Yet most people spend their entire lives as nothing more than screws in someone else’s creation or product. They never produce even the simplest complete, functional, independent work of their own. That is why they fail.

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Many people misunderstand what it means to create something of their own.

A work is not some cliché side hustle designed to make money. The essential principle is that it must come from your heart and be made for yourself. It is not about collecting market demands, making something you imagine the masses need, and then raking in money.

What your work does, whom it serves, and how much money it earns are incidental and secondary.

From society’s perspective, money and resources are already there, waiting to be given to someone. Why should they be given to you?

If you want money, you need a work that establishes your position in society. Your work determines your value, and society will pay you accordingly.

If you have no work of your own, you will be valued as merely an “ordinary person”—an insignificant nobody. Society will give you only the lowest level of subsistence, just enough to keep you from starving.

From your personal perspective, your work or product only needs to express who you are. You do not need to worry about whether it achieves conventional success. Leave the question of whether anyone notices you to probability.

Expressing yourself may not attract attention, but failing to express yourself guarantees that you will never attract attention.

The most important quality of a work is individuality—the fact that it is different from everything else.

A tree grows in a forest filled entirely with trees. From the moment it breaks through the soil and sprouts, through its vigorous growth, until it withers, falls, rots, and returns to the earth, no one notices it even once. Did that tree ever exist?

You do not exist.

You are one packet among an entire shelf of instant noodles. You are one stone on a rocky beach. You are one screw among seven billion. You are one drop of water in the Pacific Ocean.

If you cannot distinguish yourself from everyone else, then you do not exist.

Your existence depends on your work.

Your work distinguishes you from other people and makes you unique. It is not you who constructs your work; it is your work that constructs you.

You are not creating a work—you are creating yourself.

You are the sum of everything you create. You yourself are a work. Your creations express and reveal who you are. Through them, you speak to the world; through them, the world understands, recognizes, and positions you.

You are who you are because your works have made you so.

Wu Song is not remembered merely as Wu Song, but as Wu Song the Tiger Slayer. Even his brother Wu Dalang is remembered as Wu Dalang the Flatbread Seller. If one had never slain a tiger and the other had never sold flatbread, they would possess no distinctive identity. No one would recognize them, and they would effectively not exist.

Your work defines you. Without your work, there is no you. Your work is you.

If you spend your entire life adding bricks to someone else’s creation, acting as a screw in someone else’s machine, and making things according to other people’s demands, you will always fail.

That is because you do not exist in that world. You are merely an accessory attached to someone else’s work.

Once you understand that a product should be made for yourself, you will always succeed and can never truly fail.

If you create something for other people—the masses—and no one uses or sees it, you have failed. But if you create something for yourself and no one uses or sees it, you can still use and appreciate it yourself.

A work created for yourself can never fail. Under no circumstances is it a loss.

Go and create. Make something of your own, and then release it into the world.

During that process, the freshness, stimulation, and exhilaration of solving complex problems and pushing your work forward—and the sense of achievement that comes when people notice and discuss it—cannot be compared with lying in bed scrolling through videos, browsing Zhihu, or playing with your phone.

Anyone who has experienced creation will discover that going to work, scrolling on a phone, and other purely passive activities are dull, meaningless, and unstimulating.

Once you have experienced creating anything of your own, you can never return to the ordinary, boring, and mediocre life of merely working and browsing the internet. You will no longer be able to tolerate boredom.

Your true source of stimulation will come from creating your own work.

The act of creating something for yourself can itself heal you. It can help you follow your heart and find peace.

Life is long and painful. You can rely on the act of creating for yourself—not necessarily the finished work—to carry you across the long, dark journey of life and toward your ideal destination.

You may not even need to begin immediately. The thought “I am going to bring this into existence” alone may be enough to pull you out of a spiritual hell.

A work dedicated to yourself can be more powerful than any psychological or pharmaceutical treatment. It may save you from poverty, and the moment this intention arises, your depression or psychological suffering may begin to lift—because it gives you hope.

That is the greatest benefit your work can give you.

Do not think about how your work will make money. Do not think about whether it will succeed or fail.

You only need to conceive it. Your work can rescue you from suffering and pull you out of your present difficulties. If you do more than think—if you actually create it—everything else will come naturally.

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Creating a work or product is only one way of realizing your individuality. It is the mainstream method, but it is not the only one.

The essence of creating a work or product is to distinguish yourself from others through uniqueness, thereby attracting society’s attention in the form of money or other resources.

The purpose of every concept is to distinguish one thing from another. This does not apply merely to every person, every living creature, or every physical object. It is the fundamental purpose of every concept recognized by human civilization.

What do human beings live for? The essential purpose of everything that exists in the universe is to declare: “I am different!”

Your success—and the success of your work—depends on how individualized, recognizable, and distinctive you and your work are.

How am I different from everyone else?

Think deeply about that question.

Your life will begin again on the day you discover the answer.

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Appendix

A work needs a form or medium through which it can be expressed. In essence, all forms of creative work are equal. In reality, however, some formats are clearly more effective than others.

If you do not know what kind of work is most likely to succeed, the following are some recommended contemporary media. They are characterized by low barriers, low costs, and low success rates, making them particularly suitable for you—an ordinary person starting with zero resources.

1. Short videos

   Short-form video is unquestionably the leading creative medium. Its barriers and costs are extremely low: all you need is a smartphone and a brain.

   Sometimes, a ten-second video can make you famous across the planet within a few days and capture everyone’s attention.

   Other visual forms—whether music, art, dance, or similar creative expressions—also depend on short-form video as a medium for publication and circulation.

2. Internet application development

   This includes apps, websites, mini programs, and other internet applications.

   With the assistance of AI programming tools, someone who understands only basic computer operations and software installation can learn development skills and create a functional app within a few days.

   You only need to solve one obscure, niche problem—preferably one of your own, because the major problems are unlikely to be left for you to solve.

   If you have 100,000 users, a 1% conversion rate, and a VIP subscription price of RMB 10 per month, that is RMB 10,000 in monthly revenue. A single app could set you free.

3. Tutorials

   Turn your specialized skills and knowledge into written or video tutorials and sell them individually.

   It could be anything from making clothes to developing apps, from singing to flying drones. Anything you understand that other people do not can become a tutorial.

   This medium has been repeatedly proven to work.

4. Articles

   Writing is a classic, traditional medium.

   If you have ideas and writing ability, publish articles through public accounts and independent media platforms. You, too, can become an internet personality.

How Can You Improve Your Work’s Chances of Success?

Create gently and comfortably. Move slowly, one small step at a time. The creative process should produce a sense of pleasure and exhilaration.

Do not pursue perfection through grim determination, suffering, or exhausting struggle.

The prerequisite for success is completion. Creating is the work of a lifetime, and people who push themselves too hard rarely travel far.

Let your work begin nourishing you while you are still creating it.

People do not have to succeed exclusively through their creative works. You could become a government official, open a café, milk-tea shop, or flower shop, trade cryptocurrency, or engage in quantitative trading.

But these paths either have high barriers and costs or depend heavily on luck, making them of little use to you.

In contemporary society, creating something of your own remains the true path forward.