Why Smart Entrepreneurs Get Sick

He said:

Starting a business is a group of extremely smart people fighting on physical endurance. Too much cleverness wounds; too deep feeling does not last. The parasympathetic nervous system stays suppressed for too long; the body's systems never get proper recovery, and day by day it turns into illness. Especially the spleen and stomach—once they go bad, everything else follows. The clever eat the honest; heaven eats the clever… Peer too deep into heaven's designs, and you carry too much karma. If you have a gold bangle, don't also reach for the jade ruyi—know how to let go, and life can be safe and still. Before you study the I Ching, you think "great fortune and great profit" is the best. After a while, you discover that the two characters wu jiu ("without fault") are the advanced game. Then you read Xunzi's Exhortation to Learning, where it says: "Nothing is greater for the spirit than to merge with the Way; no blessing is longer than to be free from calamity." And you are struck speechless.

After saying this, he picked up the bowl of porridge on the table and took a sip. It burned his tongue. He frowned, set it down, and left it. That frown said more about him than the entire speech.

At three in the morning, he stared at the ceiling.

His heartbeat was so loud it startled him. He thought it was tinnitus, sat up, and pressed his ear to his arm. Yes, it was coming from his chest. Heavy, tight, as if someone were stomping inside his ribcage. He got up, poured a glass of water, drank it, and lay back down. He wasn't thinking about anything, but sleep didn't come. This was what a night looked like when the sympathetic nervous system had been in charge too long. His body didn't know whether he was reviewing spreadsheets or staring at the ceiling. It only knew he was awake, so it had to stay on standby.

The parasympathetic nervous system, the one in charge of repair, digestion, and keeping the stomach working, was suppressed. The stomach was the first organ to speak up. Except it didn't speak; it just made him unable to eat, or bloated after eating, or acid reflux in the middle of the night. When the spleen and stomach weaken, qi and blood lose their source, and the other organs go hungry. It's a silent chain. One end is eight hours in a conference room; the other end is a medical checkup three years later.

Of everyone he knew, not a single entrepreneur had ever said, "My stomach is fine."

The clever eat the honest. That's the basic law of the business jungle. They use information gaps, cognitive gaps, and speed gaps to eat those who react slower, know less, or are afraid to bet. But heaven eats the clever. It eats that illusion of being able to calculate every move.

He'd seen a project where the founder calculated every step: policy shifts, competitor moves, funding windows. Every step was right. But on step nine came something he hadn't calculated: he was hospitalized. His cleverness couldn't fix his own stomach, nor could it stop competitors from precisely attacking the gap he left open while he was away. On the day he was discharged, he stood outside the hospital for a while, didn't call a car, and walked two kilometers home. Halfway there, he realized he didn't recognize this street. He'd lived in this neighborhood for over a decade, but for the last five years, every time he passed through here, he'd been in a car, on a phone call.

Heaven doesn't eat the clever by sending down disasters. It makes them unable to see the things that don't need calculating at all.

When he first studied the I Ching, he only looked for "Yuan Heng Li Zhen" and "Da Ji Da Li", great fortune and great profit. That was the fast phase; he wanted every hexagram to say "you win." After studying for a while, he noticed he would pause whenever he turned to the phrase wu jiu ("without fault").

Wu jiu doesn't mean nothing happened. It means the thing is done. Maybe it didn't succeed, maybe you took a loss, but looking back, every step violated no principle, owed no debt to your conscience, and didn't drain your own or others' vitality beyond repair. It is not a mediocre goal; it is a high standard. Because to achieve wu jiu, you have to ask yourself one question before every decision: If I lose, can I afford to lose? And after losing, can I not hate myself?

Xunzi wrote in the Exhortation to Learning: "Nothing is greater for the spirit than to merge with the Way; no blessing is longer than to be free from calamity." That "calamity" isn't just a loss on the books. It's the regret in your heart, the stagnation in your body, the emptiness that wakes you in the middle of the night.

He closed the I Ching, picked up his phone, and deleted a WeChat Moment post he'd been about to share. That post had three lines of reflections on "great fortune and great profit." After deleting it, he went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, looked at himself in the mirror, and felt a little better.

On his desk sat an old watch, its strap worn white, a gift from his wife seven years ago. Next to it lay a funding pitch deck, its cover crisp, embossed with the company's gold-stamped logo. He sat for a moment, pushed the pitch deck into the drawer, and put on the watch. There was a scratch on the dial. He didn't remember when it got there, didn't know how.

A gold bangle and a jade ruyi: you can only choose one. The gold bangle is basic security: health, cash flow, a family that doesn't fall apart. The jade ruyi is the shape of desire: bigger scale, higher valuation, a louder name. It's not that he didn't want the jade ruyi; he just knew one hand couldn't grip a whole river of sand. The tighter you squeeze, the faster it runs through your fingers. What's left in the end is only the red mark worn into your palm.

He didn't consult anyone about letting go. Consulting only gets you people telling you "hang in there." If you can discuss it, it's not letting go; it's retreat. The things you truly let go are the three projects you silently crossed off your plan, the dinner invitation you turned down, the decision to turn off the lights at ten and go to sleep. No one applauds, no one objects, because you never told anyone.

He set a few rules for himself. Nothing grand, but he did them every day.

First: at least one meal a day with no phone. The sound of chopsticks touching the bowl's rim counted as the meal's background track. He chewed more than fifteen times before swallowing. This rule came from a traditional Chinese doctor who told him: the less you chew, the more your stomach has to chew for you. The stomach doesn't speak, but it keeps accounts.

Second: half an hour each day doing nothing that counted as work. He didn't read, didn't listen to podcasts, didn't think about projects. He just stood, or sat, or walked; it didn't matter what he looked at. He called this "returning karma," giving back to heaven those designs that were never his to control.

Third: when anxiety came up, he silently recited Xunzi's line: "no blessing is longer than to be free from calamity." Then he asked himself: was this worry about something real that was about to happen, or something he was imagining? If it wasn't going to go wrong today, he could sleep first. Deal with it after waking up; those few hours wouldn't make a difference.

Fourth: go deep with few, stay shallow with most. He used to try to absorb every partner's anxiety, only to find he couldn't, and ended up throwing off his own rhythm. Now he only held the emotions of three people: his wife, his co-founding partner, and himself. Everyone else: polite, listen, don't get pulled in.

He left a project group chat, put his phone down in the living room, and walked out to the balcony.

Below the building ran a man-made canal. The water was shallow enough to see the pebbles on the bottom. It flowed without noise, without hurry; it just kept flowing. He watched for five minutes, thinking nothing. A riverbed doesn't carry the water; it just lets the water pass over itself. When the water rises, the bed is submerged; when it falls, the bed reappears. But the bed never leaves that place.

Entrepreneurs always think of themselves as the water. They have to rush, be fast, surge forward. But water is tired; water is always in a hurry. The riverbed doesn't hurry. The riverbed is just there.

He stood there for five minutes, then turned back inside. The lights were off. The living room clock read 10:03. He poured himself a glass of water; this time it didn't burn him. The water was warm.

Peace is not mediocrity. It is the strong person's mercy toward themselves.
Stillness is not boredom. It is the wise person's salute to fate.

The next morning, he woke up and realized he'd forgotten to turn off the balcony light the night before. A small globe of yellow light glowed in the morning mist, like a sentence left unfinished. He reached out, turned it off, and went to breakfast. The porridge was warm.