Growth

Laid off at 45. Not a sudden accident — a slow sinking. Busy every day, but nothing actually growing. Anxious enough that the body reacted; bad nights, days held together by cigarettes.

The real problem wasn't money. It was having nothing that proved I was still moving forward. Stay in that state long enough and what you start doubting isn't your ability — it's whether you're worth anything as a person.

Looking back, the reason was simple to state: I was running inside someone else's rules and scoring someone else's points. However fast I ran, I had no place of my own.

The turn wasn't dramatic either. I started writing every day — not for readers, but to give myself evidence that today was finished. A few months in, the order in my life came back first.

Then filming. The kit was a second-hand iPhone and nothing else: no crew, no lighting, no script. Everyone else filmed lawyers in suits against bookshelves reciting statutes. I filmed what lawyers actually do — enforcement visits, bank record pulls, carrying blankets to a detention centre on New Year's Eve.

None of it is pretty. All of it is real. In an era where everyone performs, being real is the expensive thing.

Operating short video for enforcement lawyer Wang Qingwen: 20 videos over 3 months, not a single yuan of paid traffic, over 100 million yuan in signed case value. He confirmed the figure himself on camera.

But the part I'd rather talk about is this: the route is repeatable. Not talent, not luck — a set of judgements you can state plainly: go after high-value cases, replace staging with real casework, throw away the teleprompter, and build the conversion funnel into the content structure.

Those judgements now sit in Solutions and Cases on this site, in the open.

Wall one: anger has three fixed entrances

My anger isn't random. It always comes in through the same three doors: being treated as someone who doesn't deserve it; being told to fall in line, or being told I'm wrong; watching someone get what I actually want by means I don't respect.

Three situations, one underlying question — "am I good enough".

Wall two: the pain isn't "I lost something", it's "I am defective"

When something fails, the sadness passes. What holds me down is a different sentence: not "I botched this", but "there is something wrong with me".

Shame isn't the same as sadness. Sadness has an object; shame has no exit. It doesn't point at the thing, it points at the person — so it can't be solved by doing the thing better.

Wall three: three loops I ran for years

• The dopamine loop: new information, new plans, new tools produce the feeling of progress while the actual working time gets squeezed out.
• The shame loop: something fails → "I'm not good enough" → I stop touching it → I become more certain I'm not good enough.
• The proving loop: I need fresh results to feel safe, and the moment I stop, the panic starts.

I've run all three. They share one fuel: tying self-worth to results.

One more thing I only saw later

Everything I've written — articles, scripts, years of saved reading — has had one subject: being real. Against staging, for unpolished real scenes, for the argument that "being human is the most expensive thing in the AI era".

Eventually I understood: the part of you that goes unseen long enough becomes the thing you most want to win for other people.

Four walls I eventually named

Those eight sentences eventually sorted into four kinds. Not so anyone can tick a box — just to say where I was actually stuck.

I've saved hundreds of articles on psychology and growth, and written plenty of self-analysis about why I am the way I am. They gave me a sense of control — and an illusion: that understanding something is the same as having dealt with it.

Things actually changed when I stopped explaining myself and only added structure. Three moves did the most:

• Write a thousand words a day. Not for readers — as evidence for yourself. Order grows out of "today is finished".
• Give "done" a stopping condition first. Perfectionism isn't a high standard; it's the absence of a stopping condition. Four checks pass, ship it.
• Don't wait for the mood. Mood isn't the precondition for starting, it's the result. When anxiety rises, ask only "can this ship?" — not "will it blow up?"

None of these answer "why am I like this". They only answer "did I move today". The second is where the door out of the first actually is.