"Does this thing make money?"

This article is Lu Canwei's 66th original piece.

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One thing we often observe is that when you see others continuously doing something, you tend to ask, "Is this thing profitable?"

At this point, if the other person tells you it is profitable, you might start trying to find out why it isn't. Or if they say it isn't profitable, you might think they are lying to you, not wanting to share their path to wealth.

The same thing happens in investing. When you see your friends making money in the stock market, you ask them for the secret to their wealth. I've heard many people share experiences where they kindly informed others about a stock they were optimistic about, only for it to drop, leading their friends to criticize them for recommending such a poor choice. If it rises and they make money, they want you to keep recommending more, like flipping a coin, where the next round's odds are still 50/50, since it’s either going up or down.

Unless you can be 100% accurate, the friendship boat can capsize at any moment.

If you could achieve 100% accuracy, in 2020, you could have entered the futures market with 5,000 yuan and walked away with 60 billion.

Of course, there are many other versions like the stock market, so if you have the chance to time travel in the future, don’t just dream about winning the lottery; figuring out this stuff is the real wealth secret.

So even when we hear and see things, we still can’t do them. This is because your accumulation of knowledge and experience is not on the same dimension as others. Even if someone tells you the future is bright, you might still struggle with today.

Recently, during the cryptocurrency crash, I felt a pang of anxiety and asked a friend about it. He simply told me to hold on and not worry. But I still wasn't at ease with my small investment, thinking about whether to make a move, fantasizing about cashing out at a high and buying back at a low.

Then I thought to myself, wouldn’t that mean no growth? Later, I had a chance to chat with a friend who had suffered greatly in the last bull market, accumulating millions in debt. In this round, he turned that debt into profit. I shared this with him, and he analyzed the fundamentals and his views, which I found somewhat reasonable.

However, I still felt a bit uneasy, but later I reflected on this. If you are afraid of losing 10,000, then you won’t be able to earn more than 10,000. If you are afraid of losing 100,000, then you won’t be able to earn more than 100,000. If you are afraid of losing 1,000,000, then you won’t be able to earn more than 1,000,000.

Translating this to product design, when we design products, I’m also unsure whether users will buy in. Even though during research, users confidently say they would pay for certain features and can’t use it without them, when we actually deliver, you find that users have changed… they will say if you have other features, they will definitely buy, just like a player who leads you on.

The purpose of these two examples is to illustrate that trial and error is our fundamental basis. Why do others’ products perform better than yours? Why do they earn more from investments? It’s because they have gone through more trial and error than you. You are just entering the market, just starting to develop products, while they have been cut down countless times in this field and know which paths to avoid. Even if they tell you, you won’t be able to understand, after all, you haven’t experienced it.

Entrepreneurship is the same. Wang Xing founded many companies before Meituan, such as Duoduo You, Youzit, Xiaonei, Fanfou, and Hainet, among others. Zhang Yiming founded 99fang; I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, and there are many more examples. We can only see their current success and not the detours they took to get there.

Charlie Munger once said: "If I knew where I would die, I would never go there."

If you ask me, "Is this thing profitable?" I would say I don’t know, but the next thing will definitely be profitable.

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