The depths of the Valley of Worry (4): whose Paradise? On)

Every gorgeous dream starts from the night.

At the beginning of the dream, we do not know our role, joy or sadness, leisure or hesitation? Dream only Vague road, we run, no one to pay attention to the wind in the dust, water falling petals. However, when the dream woke up, did we really find the dream of "paradise"? Or, still standing in the endless Road to sing: Who, picked up my once dream?

Many people see the first instinct of the headline: Silicon Valley, of course, is the dream paradise for entrepreneurs. Yes, if you've seen the film "The Social Receptacle", you'll remember the Silicon Valley that Sean Parker described when he persuaded Mark Zuckerberg to move west. In the picture of Sean Parker, Silicon Valley is a paradise filled with opportunities, money, investors, and talented entrepreneurs.

Five years ago, I was convinced, but not now.

In my view, the entrepreneur is a rare and unique group, they have a strong free heart, and desire to control the wheel of Fate. For entrepreneurs, there is no such thing as "paradise", because the whole world has been put in its own heart, One world. In other words, for them, any corner of the world, that is, heaven, and hell, they can read as a Buddha, can also be read as demons.

The concept of "paradise" is more meaningful for ordinary people who do not have the ability to change the "world". To be exact, every ordinary person who has no ability to make an epoch-making, is more inclined to seek a tranquil "paradise" in the objective world.

And Silicon Valley is a paradise for ordinary employees in the computer industry. If you want to be free of work emails after work, if you want to take two days off on weekends, hiking, fishing, mountaineering, parent-child, if you want to enjoy a calm and steady pace of life and do what you like in your spare time, come to Silicon Valley. While this may well be a "born of Sorrow" and a repetition of euthanasia, at least the current Silicon Valley can provide a comfortable environment for ordinary people.

The foregoing is not an absence of words. Let's take a look at the specific numbers. The U.S. Department of Labor Statistics [1] shows that in Silicon Valley, the average annual income of computer practitioners is 115,000 dollars. If bonuses and stocks are counted, the average annual income of computer practitioners should be around 150,000 dollars. Then in a double computer worker's family, a year's income is 300,000 dollars. In terms of 30 working life, the total income of a family's career is 9 million dollars, about 55 million yuan. (equivalent to 11 times lottery tickets.) Single-worker families can also win lottery tickets 5.5 times:

If you don't have a "wealthy" ambition, then that's enough to earn you a decent and prosperous life, and even for many entrepreneurs, you may not have 9 million dollars in your lifetime.

On the other hand, American workers are more stable and more loyal than their computer workers. An annual report from linked [2] shows: The average length of China's Internet operators is 31 months, compared with 45 months in the U.S., where telecoms workers change their employers on average every 38 months, while the US telecoms sector has a 60-month job-hopping cycle. The US Department of Labor Statistics [3] also show that the American computer industry has changed employers for about 5 years. This data is basically consistent with the LinkedIn report.

I don't want to discuss what caused the difference in employee loyalty between China and the United States because it involves too many tangled elements. But I believe that the vast majority of people do not like such a frequent change of work, the vast majority of people are expected to live a stable nine to six, this is not a "luxury" or "fault", which is just the normal human needs. If we focus, improve efficiency, 9 hours a day, enough for us to do our job clean and beautiful. There are already some Internet start-ups, such as quartz (qz.com) and Treehouse (Teamtreehouse.com), which set a four-day work schedule and a three-day break.

Successful entrepreneurs do need to have "wolf sex" and an uncontrollable "ambition", but this "wolf" and "ambition" cannot be imposed on ordinary employees by "corporate culture" hats. We should face up to the difference between the common man and the leader. You know, "people still want to have a dream, in case of realization?" The phrase applies only to a very small number of people.

Silicon Valley, of course, there are days of the Wizards of the entrepreneurs, there are countless dedicated ordinary people. In fact, this "paradise" is not a godsend, it is just countless ordinary people with their own simple life cast. Ordinary forget worry, is this kind of happiness.

I like to go to the annex for brunch on a weekend morning. The small restaurant, next to Stanford University, is far from the famous Dune road (Sand Hill M.I.) in the venture world. I can imagine that thousands of VCs on the Dune road spend their daily lives in madness and agitation, and their money, rotation, and magic have changed the world's trajectory.

And I am different from them, only hope in their own quiet world, enjoy a flower, and their legendary story.

Every gorgeous dream ends in the darkness before the dawn.