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In the Amazon letter to shareholders in 1998, Bezos said: “We want to fight entropy.”

Management master Peter Drucker said: “The only thing management needs to do is how to counter the entropy increase. In this process, the vitality of the enterprise will increase, rather than silently die.” p>

Physicist Schrödinger said: “Nature all tend to move from order to disorder, that is, the entropy increases. Life needs to maintain itself in a stable and low entropy by constantly offsetting the positive entropy produced in its life. At the level, life lives on negative entropy.”

So many people are talking about entropy, saying that they want to resist entropy, but what is entropy?

1. What is entropy?

Entropy is a word from the second law of physics thermodynamics.

When an inactive system is isolated, or placed in a uniform environment, all movements will quickly stop due to the surrounding friction; the difference in potential or chemical potential will gradually disappear; The same is true for substances that tend to form compounds; the temperature gradually becomes uniform due to the action of heat conduction. As a result, the entire system eventually degenerates into a lifeless, lifeless mass.

Therefore, it has reached the “maximum entropy” that physicists have become. This is a state of permanence, in which no event can be observed any more, it has been attributed to death.

Entropy represents the degree of chaos in a system, or the degree of disorder – the more disordered the system, the larger the entropy; the more ordered the system, the smaller the entropy.

Therefore, negative entropy represents the vitality of the system. The higher the negative entropy, the more orderly the system is. This is why Schrödinger would say that “life takes negative entropy for life.”

For example: at the beginning of each week, we will clean up the room, but as soon as we reach the weekend, we will find the room in a mess. This process is the process of entropy increase.

Another example: the continuous eating, drinking, breathing, and (plant) assimilation of the living organisms, that is, metabolism, is a process of increasing entropy.

Don’t underestimate this seemingly simple entropy law, it’sIt is the most basic and important rule in nature. The chemist Atkins once listed it as one of the “four laws that promote the universe.”

It is a belief in the minds of physicists, even the gravitational formula can be rewritten, but the law of entropy increase has never been violated. Professor Zhang Shouyi believes that human knowledge can move forward, Newtonian mechanics may not be right, quantum mechanics may not be right, and relativity may not be right, but the formula of information entropy is eternal.

If you infer it into the development of the entire universe, we will find that if there is nothing outside the universe we exist, that is, if no one inputs energy into the universe, the final outcome of the universe is to go thorough. Disorder, that is, death.

If you infer it into business management, we will find that there is only one thing that management has to do, that is, how to counter the entropy increase. If it fails to effectively counter the increase in entropy, the company will go to death in silence.

If you infer it into your life, we will find that if we do not fight entropy increase, our vitality will gradually become lifeless and lifeless in a closed system or in a balanced state.

At that time, even if life was not over, the vitality had come to an abrupt end, which confirmed the famous saying that “many people died when they were 20 years old and buried only when they were 80 years old.”

However, how do we fight entropy increase?

2, against entropy increase bottom logic of life

To combat entropy increase, it is necessary to introduce a very important theory-dissipative structure.

The “dissipative structure” was proposed by a scientist named Prigogine, who also won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this theory.

What is a “dissipative structure”?

The dissipative structure is a nonlinear open system (whether physical, chemical, biological, or even social, economical) that is far from equilibrium, by constantly exchanging matter and energy with the outside world, within the system. When a parameter changes to a certain threshold, the system may undergo a sudden change, that is, a non-equilibrium phase transition, from the original chaotic disorder state to an ordered state in time, space or function.

The dissipative structure has two most important characteristics, one is openness; the other is unbalanced. When a system has a “dissipative structure,” it can effectively counter the entropy increase.

So, how do we use these two characteristics to make ourselves a “dissipative structure” that can counter the entropy increase?

(1)Openness

The entropy of an isolated system will increase with time. When the entropy reaches the maximum value, the system will reach the most disordered equilibrium state, so the isolated system will neverA dissipative structure will appear.

Therefore, the dissipative structure must be generated in an open system. It must have a negative entropy flow from the environment to the system, and it can offset the entropy increase of the system itself. Only in this way can the entropy of the system be reduced and the order degree increased. .

Wikipedia and the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica are very professional, but Wikipedia does not need a group of experts to collect and compile, it is an open system, everyone can contribute content to it. Because of this, it even has a higher degree of transmission than the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

So how do we make ourselves an open system?

1) Replace “fixed thinking” with “growth thinking”

Many people have always maintained the notion that we are born with some specific fixed abilities and qualities, like “I am not good at sports”, “I don’t have the talent to learn mathematics”, etc. change.

But is this true?

In fact, human intelligence, creativity, athletic ability and other qualities can be forged, and can be changed through time and effort.

In 2006, Carol Dwijk, a professor of behavioral psychology at Stanford University, published a book called Thinking Mode: New Success Psychology. In this book, Dweck summed up his research results for more than 30 years and proposed two theories of thinking: fixed thinking and growth thinking.

Fixed thinking says that we believe that we are born with a fixed amount of intelligence and ability. People who adopt fixed thinking tend to avoid adjustments and failures, thus depriving themselves of life that is rich in experience and learning.

Growth-oriented thinking is a system of thinking with intellectual plasticity as the core belief. It believes that through practice, persistence and hard work, human beings have unlimited potential for learning and growth.

People with growth thinking can calmly cope with challenges. They are not afraid of making mistakes or embarrassment, but instead focus on the process of growth. They are not afraid of failure because they know to learn from failures and mistakes and they will eventually become successful.

As the research big data tells us: If a child has a growth-oriented mindset, this advantage may eliminate the gap between the richest family and the poorest, because the children of growth thinking will get better and better.

From this chart, we can still see a little bit, maybe it is often overlooked by us, thenIt is different between the two in dealing with the success of others: people with growth thinking will regard the success of others as their own inspiration, while those with fixed thinking will regard the success of others as a threat to themselves. This will lead to great insecurity and vulnerability. Such a sense of insecurity and vulnerability often leads him to choose to block his ears and close his eyes, thus cutting off the channels and ways of self-growth and making the whole situation worse.

2) Replace “stock thinking” with “flow thinking”

A pile of oil paint lying on a desk doesn’t automatically turn into a wonderful oil painting. It must be because there is some kind of external energy exchange. For example, you pick up the brush, open the paint, start painting, and the paint can become oil painting.

What does this mean?

meaning that a talent can change dramatically after exchanging energy with the outside world. Such a person is a person with a “flow” thinking, and on the contrary a “stock thinking.”

What is the typical behavior of the “stock” thinker?

Because he is investing in himself in learning, he is more willing to save the money and let it generate interest; he is more willing to continue to be safe and comfortable now than to change to a more promising position or industry. Work; he is more willing to quietly collect than to recommend good articles and good books that he has seen; he is more willing to let others know his ideas than to communicate with those who are excellent.

Unfortunately, as a result, the entropy increase will increase and the crisis will lurk. According to the “entropy increase law”, entropy is the opposite of prosperity and order. However, on the surface, prosperous order is the recessive state of entropy.

Therefore, when we see the prosperous and orderly appearance, we think that entropy does not exist, but on the contrary, entropy is secretly watching. It doesn’t exist anymore, it’s just invisible.

In 1975, 24-year-old young Kodak engineer Steve Sasson invented the world’s first digital camera. When he presented this amazing achievement to the company’s top management, the arrogant management The strange machine that can shoot 100.100 pixels sneered at it – “No one wants to see their photos on TV.” At that time, Kodak was proud of the film age.

After more than 30 years, when Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012, the decision makers of that year would not have thought that the digital camera that their own company invented and snowed up was the one that knocked their death knell.

History is always strikingly similar, and the same thing happened to Motorola and Nokia. Sticking to the “stock” and despising “flow” will eventually lead to the inevitable result of “the present is good, the future is very bad”, and this result is often not affordable to the average person, just like the Qing government’s “closed-door” policy.

In 2012, Ren ZhengThere is no very important speech called “Huawei’s 2012”.

It sounds like he is singing singer, but it is not. He is only soberly aware that Huawei is a company. Like all other companies, there is always a huge threat. It is entropy. Therefore, Ren Zhengfei believes that as long as Huawei exists for one day, it must fight against entropy.

He did the same for Huawei:

Investing in Huawei’s R&D has made huge investments. For example, Huawei invested more than 90 billion yuan in research and development in 2017. R&D investment accounts for nearly 16% of revenue. The investment intensity of this R&D may be better than that of Ali and Tencent. The sum of R&D investment is large, and it is more than Apple. In the past 10 years, it has invested a total of 240 billion yuan in research and development. Huawei has also ranked first in global patent applications for many years.

Since 1997, Huawei has continued to introduce management experience from outside, including IBM, Accenture, and Boston Consulting. They have provided Huawei with many changes, which has enabled Huawei to continuously improve its management innovation, organizational innovation, and process change, and laid the foundation for Huawei to become a global company.

These are all using “flow thinking” instead of “stock thinking”. As a well-known domestic company, even if you don’t make huge investment in scientific research, you can be proud of the “stock”; however, Huawei does not think so. It sees “traffic” and is the energy exchange required to open the system.

3) Replace “temporary learning” with “lifelong learning” and replace “no longer explore” with “lifelong exploration”

Someone, learning every day, no matter how much or not. Some people, once in a while, look at a book for seven or eight months.

The former, I call it “lifelong learner”, the latter, I call it “temporary learner.” Learning is like breathing for the former, and the plaster for the latter is like an emergency. It will only be remembered when it is stimulated or needed for work.

For “lifelong learners,” he builds himself into an open system through daily learning and can produce compounding effects.

For the “temporary learner”, he is a closed system, unable to fight entropy increase, and can not produce compounding effect. Naturally, it can’t be seen in the short term, but in the long run, there is a world of difference between the two.

A lot of people don’t explore after adulthood. They stop exploring the world and exploring themselves. They just want to walk on the road that has already been clear and step by step. But I don’t know, according to the law of entropy increase, the shadow of entropy has already followed it. The arrival of the “middle-age crisis” is only a matter of time.

And those “lifetime explorers”?

They are very different. They always have a strong curiosity about the world, for themselves and for others. They want to explore things that they don’t understand.Want to unlock the mysteries that are hard to understand; whether they are from a movie, a trip, a magazine, or a conversation, they can explore fresh information, knowledge or wisdom. They are like containers with open mouths, greedily absorbing everything from the outside world.

So, if you want to make yourself an “open system,” you need to do at least three things:

First, replace “fixed thinking” with “growth thinking.”

Second, replace “stock thinking” with “flow thinking”.

Thirdly, replace “temporary learning” with “lifelong learning” and replace “no longer explore” with “lifelong exploration”.

(2) Stay away from equilibrium

Away from equilibrium is the second feature of the “dissipative structure”.

Equilibrium state refers to a state in which the macroscopic properties of various parts of the thermodynamic system do not change for a long period of time without external influence.

The proponent of the “dissipative structure” Plygojin believes that non-equilibrium is the source of order.

How can we stay away from equilibrium?

1) From the “comfort zone” into the “learning area” or even the “panic zone”

The “comfort zone” is the theory put forward by American NoelTichy. The three zones in the picture can be expressed as the level of things you want to learn:

The innermost circle is the “comfort zone”, which represents the knowledge that you have no difficulty in learning or the things you are used to, and you can be in a very comfortable state of mind.

The middle circle is the “learning area”. It represents the work, study, and thinking that are challenging for you and therefore uncomfortable, but not too uncomfortable.

The outermost circle is the “panic zone”, which represents a transaction or knowledge that is too much beyond your ability. The psychological feelings will be seriously uncomfortable and may lead to a collapse and abandon learning.

In the comfort zone, you can be handy, because every day is in a familiar environment, doing what you are doing, communicating with familiar people, even you are an expert in this field, to this area People and things in the room are very comfortable.

This is the temporary “balanced state” because you can make everything in a relatively balanced and comfortable state without too much effort.

However, don’t forget that the equilibrium state is the time when entropy is greatest..

At this time, you have learned very little, slow progress, lack of challenges and mobility. This is a state that seems to be smooth and comfortable, but it is a crisis, that is, “false prosperous.”

If you want to increase the entropy of life, according to the dissipative structure, you have to stay away from the equilibrium state, that is, leave the area that makes you feel very comfortable, and take the initiative to go to the “learning area” or even the “panic area.”

Amazon CEO Bezos did just that, he extended Amazon’s self-operated e-commerce business to AWS cloud services and FBA logistics systems. Moreover, when Amazon was doing self-operated e-commerce, it also boldly introduced third-party sellers, so that they all opened stores on Amazon and competed with their own stores. Amazon started selling books online, but Bezos was still reluctant to develop a Kindle reader to beat his own paper book with an e-book.

If Amazon is only staying in its seemingly powerful self-operated e-commerce business, it will certainly get a good profit for a period of time to achieve a solid balance.

However, as time progresses, companies will become less and less energetic, lack innovation, and eventually die.

Because Bezos is very aware of the serious harm that “entropy” has on a company, he is trying to push Amazon to build a good sense of balance every time, constantly investing money and investing resources in new areas; Create various forms of competition within the company.

For this reason, Amazon has created a heavyweight star business, and Bezos has become the world’s richest man, which is a huge force away from the equilibrium.

2) Subversive growth

Personal growth follows the S-curve. At the beginning, there will be a very long flat state, and then it will suddenly rise like a rocket and eventually stay stable at a high level.

But this is not a subversive growth.

Subversive growth is not only a fly-by of an S-shaped curve, it is a flyby many times, it requires us to complete the S-curve growth, then enter the second S-shaped curve, come back again, constantly Subvert yourself.

In 2007, IPOD accounted for more than 50% of Apple’s revenue, and iTune accounted for 74% of the market. It stands to reason that this is exactly the case when a product is in full swing. The idea of ​​a normal person must be to continue to make this product and use it to make money. Jobs is good, he has to personally overturn this already successful product.

Want to stay away from the equilibrium state, you need to walk on the long flat road again and again, and then jump to the peak. After you finally jump to the peak, you have to start the second S-shaped curve. Conduct self-subversion.

This self-subversion is difficult because inertia occurs when we reach the upper platform of the S-curve. At this time, it is the peak period of a certain stage of career, is the peak period of self-development at a certain stage, is a very good looking state. However, if you stop at this equilibrium, you will no longer grow and progress, and the final outcome is the entropy increase.

For me, I have done at least a few big subversive growths after my work.

From the sales department to the marketing department, and then from the marketing department to the sales department; from the previous work in the workplace to the current independent work, each time is a subversive growth.

In every process of subversive growth, it has never been smooth sailing. Every time there are many difficulties and obstacles, and the loneliness and fear that comes with it, but the gain is very huge. My life has also been greatly expanded.

So, let’s summarize now, two ways to stay away from equilibrium:

First, leave the comfort zone, walk into the study area, or even the panic zone.

Second, subversive growth.

This is the underlying logic of life in the entropy law of physics in physics – for the rest of our lives, we must fight against entropy, or our vitality will die in silence.

The method of countering entropy increase is to make yourself a dissipative structure that has both “growth thinking”, “flow thinking”, “lifelong learning, lifelong exploration”, away from the comfort zone, and continuous subversive growth. .