Staying Full: Keeping Your Mental Energy Abundant Comes First, Just as a Ship Must Not Sink Below Its Waterline

Keeping your inner resources abundant is the most important thing.
I. Do not go from overdrawing your inner resources to exhausting them
Forcing yourself to march on when your inner resources are overdrawn is a predicament born of karmic obstructions.
Do not push yourself even harder in this state, exhausting your inner resources and entering classic predicaments such as the inner-resource asthma trap or the night-watchman ego.
Take the long view and go the distance. Do not get caught up in a single city or stronghold, or in temporary gains and losses.
Do not push too hard. Maintain your own rhythm and stay healthy.
II. Keeping your inner resources abundant is the most important thing
Keep your inner resources abundant and your mental health robust.
Do not fall below the minimum baseline, and do not draw on your strategic reserves of inner resources.

1. This is more important than maintaining physical health; it is a prerequisite for physical health.
2. Only then can you engage in metacognition with greater awareness: choices matter more than effort. Otherwise, you drift through life in a fog, make one bad move after another, and sink into a quagmire of obsession.
3. Only then can you be confident, at ease, and free—confident enough to feel proud. Live in, be at peace with, and enjoy the present.
4. Only then can you form connections naturally, connect with nature and high energy, and achieve things naturally.
   Before making an important investment or an important decision, people instinctively know to get themselves into the best state possible: well rested, mentally refreshed, with sufficient inner resources and a healthy connection to the deeper mind.
   Even Hengshui-style secondary schools do not make students stay up late right before the college entrance examination.
   Striving is not the most important thing. What matters instead is refraining from striving—from pushing too hard and exerting yourself to the limit until you collapse. The moment you apply force, you go wrong.
   Often, it is not severe internal friction that drains your inner resources; it is the exhaustion of your inner resources that produces severe internal friction.
   III. Daoist ideas of nourishing life and the signs of the fullness of virtue
   Liezi: “Unify your nature, nourish your vital energy, and hold your virtue within, so as to enter into the workings by which things are created. For someone like this, their natural endowment remains whole and their spirit has no gaps. How could anything enter?”
   Zhuangzi: “Know when to stop, and you will avoid danger. People do not look for their reflection in flowing water, but in still water. Wholeness of spirit is the way of the sage. Rather than moisten one another with spit, it is better to forget one another in the rivers and lakes.”
   Dao De Jing: “In the heart, value depth. Reach the utmost emptiness; hold firmly to stillness. Much speech repeatedly leads to exhaustion; it is better to hold to the center.”
   IV. It is like sailing: the water must not fall below the vessel’s draft
   Once the tide of your inner resources falls below the safety line, the boat will run aground, strike a reef, or become stuck in the mud.
   When the tide of your inner resources has fallen below the safety line, continuing to thrash about is to undermine yourself. You end up stranded in the mud, then attack yourself and whip the sailors into rowing. A vicious cycle.
   Thinking is a classic example of a vessel: it depends on the buoyancy of abundant inner resources. When those resources are scarce, thinking gets stuck in a local patch of mud instead of ranging freely and wandering at ease.
   Only when your inner resources remain at a sufficient water level can the vessel sail with the current, the prevailing conditions, and the wind.
   Once you have run aground, wait quietly for your inner resources to rise again. After they recover, learn from the experience, steer clear of mud, icebergs, and karmic obstructions, and keep the water level of your inner resources high.
   V. A lighter touch makes for smoother progress: putting “applying force leads you astray” and stillness without forced action into practice
5. Things have not gone smoothly because you have been pushing too hard all along
   The “mindfulness-practitioner ego” overdrafts itself through a false mindfulness of scattered toil and scattered leisure; the “night-watchman ego” deepens the overdraft when resources are already overdrawn, creating a vicious cycle.
   You remain tense and busy all the time, yet lack insight and awareness in the five elements of life: studies, career, social life, body, and mind. Exertion and fixation are merely signs of broken connections and entanglement in karmic obstructions.
6. Real progress requires relaxation, awareness, metacognition, and connection
   Real progress—advancement in the five elements of life, value investing in every area, selectivity in social relationships, breaking through the constraints of your life’s pattern and rising to a higher level, breaking through the karmic field of your environment, awakening and enlightenment—requires relaxation, awareness, metacognition, and connection. Choices matter more than effort.
   In other words, karmic obstructions must diminish so that they obscure your true nature less.
   Keeping your inner resources abundant is the most important thing.
7. Clarity and stillness -> progress -> clarity and stillness: a virtuous cycle
   In the past, you did not have a light enough touch or enough clarity and stillness, so things did not go smoothly enough. Of course, all of this is part of fate.
   VI. Social life, environment, and management culture
   Stay away from environments that exhaust your inner resources—environments of karmic obstructions. Many second-rate companies and companies that do not even make the grade deliberately keep their employees in a fog. They do not want employees to remain clearheaded and keep their inner resources abundant.
   Seek out environments that nourish your inner resources.
   This is also how companies such as DeepSeek and Google, to say nothing of companies such as Berkshire Hathaway, attract first-rate talent.
   DeepSeek’s Liang Wenfeng: “It is difficult for anyone to do more than six to eight hours of high-quality work a day. Poor judgment caused by the fatigue of working overtime instead wastes precious computing resources. The costs outweigh the gains.”
   Be rigorously selective in your social life. Engage only with first-rate people and those beyond the first rate; spend time with people who nourish you and strengthen your inner resources.