The other day, over dinner with a friend, I ended up hearing the full arc of his career. It was one of those stories that makes the word change feel concrete.
Ten years ago, he was guarding a warehouse for a little over 4,000 yuan a month. Then, by chance, he came across a book on PHP. He started teaching himself, built a simple demo with basic create, read, update, and delete functions, and for a moment felt unstoppable. The industry looked fascinating, so he went out to interview.
He got rejected everywhere.
Still, he refused to stop. He kept applying, even telling employers that he would work for free if they would just give him time to learn what he didn’t know yet. After a lot of persistence, he finally landed a job that paid 2,000 yuan a month. He was thrilled.
From there, his pattern never really changed: whenever he hit something he didn’t understand, he buried himself in study. Whatever skills could create value, he learned them. Back when many people were still building front-end work with jQuery, he had already gone deep into Angular 1.0. The result was predictable—using what was then considered more advanced tooling, he could handle the workload of three people by himself, and he kept operating at that level for years.
Eventually, he made it to Baidu.
He has always wanted freedom. He can work hard, but he doesn’t like endless overtime. At Baidu, there was a period when leaving exactly on time every day got him called in by his manager more than once. Later, he moved to a relatively less busy department. Instead of coasting, he threw himself into another intense stretch of learning, this time rebuilding his computer science fundamentals from the ground up. When the business started growing, he stepped up with it, led a team, and went into battle.
That phase was fulfilling in its own way, but the overtime became too much. So he left Baidu and joined a company that promised a no-overtime culture. It turned out to be true: over the course of a full year, he did not work overtime at all. What he gained was time, and he used it the same way he always had—reading, studying, and continuing to sharpen himself.
Later, he moved into the training business. As soon as he entered, he went all in. He took course offerings straight to the front lines and worked in sales himself. During that period, he kept learning how sales actually works, and for two straight months he became the company’s top salesperson. At one point, he sold more than one million yuan worth of courses in a single evening. He was also teaching frequently, and in technical live-streaming circles his delivery rose to the top tier. Now he serves as the director of courses in his field.
Most recently, he has decided that education is the next thing he wants to devote himself to. So he has once again started buying books in bulk and studying intensely. His dream is to build a free online academy—something that can spread technical literacy more broadly and, through sustained effort, create some real change in society. As he put it, once people pass thirty, there are certain things they find themselves wanting to do almost involuntarily.
People who dare to imagine, and who also have the nerve and discipline to act, deserve real respect.
There was something else I took away from that conversation.
At every stage of life, different problems show up. When they do, books are often still one of the best places to turn. Reading is a kind of conversation across space and time, and more often than not, it gives back far more than expected.
We also talked about practical things: how to do live streaming well, how to design courses, how to sell them, how to lead a team of instructors, and how to actually help students grow. I came away genuinely inspired.
Sometimes it’s worth stepping outside, meeting a friend, talking at length, and trading thoughts about work and the industry. That, too, can be one of life’s pleasures. 😀