In 1902, the 27-year-old poet Rilke was hired as an assistant to the 62-year-old painter and master sculptor Rodin, who, in the fledgling poet’s estimation, must have led a very romantic, crazy and different life. However, what he saw was very different from what he had imagined. Rodin was an old man who spent his days alone in his studio. Rilke asked him, “How can one find an element that is sufficient to express everything about oneself?” Rodin was silent for a moment, then said, with great seriousness, “One should work, just work. And be patient.”
What makes some people different? I think Rodin has revealed the real secret: work, and patience.
When we are young, we always want to become famous overnight, as Eileen Chang said, “Be famous before it’s too late, if you come too late, the pleasure is not so painful.” This sentence really delayed many teenagers. In fact, if you think of life as a marathon run, in the first 1,000 meters whether to run in first place is really an important thing?
I am surrounded by remarkable people who are different – at least in a secular sense – and who share a common trait of being fully committed to their work.
Among the Chinese economists I know well, Zhang Wuchang is probably the most gifted, having almost won the Nobel Prize in economics when he was in his forties, and he is also a very diligent person, having sorted through a dozen boxes of original files in his early years in order to write The Theory of Tenant Farming, a task that many PhDs probably do not care to do. Today, he is nearly 80 years old, yet he still writes two 1,500+ word op-eds a week.
Among the contemporary Western scholars I know, Britain’s Niall Ferguson is recognized as a “child prodigy” whose field of study straddles history, economics and political science, and who was hired as a research fellow at Oxford University before he was 30 and named one of Time magazine’s “100 People Who Influenced the World” at age 40. At the age of 40, he was named one of Time magazine’s “100 People Who Influenced the World”. He and his assistants went through tens of thousands of letters and tons of original material from the Rothschild family over the past hundred years in order to write the book “The Rothschilds”.
So, behind the difference is often something less than the hard work of outsiders. They simply run long and simply do one thing. They do things only for the meaning itself. The so-called success is just a result, it may be watered down or may never come.
Something different is often boring, repetitive and requires patience in the process of making.
Among the Ming and Qing porcelains that have been handed down to this day, those with rhinoceros skin markings are the most expensive and almost hard to find. For a long time, people did not even know which genius it was made by. Later, Wang Shixiang finally leaked the secret in his book, it is made in this way –
Artisans making rhinoceros skin, first with a toner of lacquer ash piled up one or a strip of high ground, that is the “bottom”; on the bottom and then brush different colors of lacquer, brush to a certain thickness, that is the “middle” and “surface “The smooth surface then emerges with fine and multi-layered color paint patterns.
When I read this secret, I suddenly smiled.
Each distinctive and superb piece is actually predicated on an incomparable lonely diligence, either blood, sweat, or a great deal of manly youthful good time.
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