#195: 大卫·海涅迈尔·汉森：直言不讳的力量

嘿，各位。我是蒂姆。在我们开始之前，先快速提醒一下。我和Exploding Kittens的优秀团队共同制作的新卡牌游戏《Coyote》，现在已经是全国畅销品了。情况简直火爆到疯狂。

Hey, folks. Tim here. Before we get started, just a quick heads up. My new card game, Coyote, which I made with the amazing people at Exploding Kittens, is now a national bestseller. Things are going completely bananas.

它刚刚全面上市。亚马逊、沃尔玛、塔吉特，超过8000家零售店，任何你能买到游戏的地方都有售。所以去看看吧，在coyotegame.com上观看一些游戏玩法视频。到目前为止，游戏玩法的社交媒体浏览量已达3亿次。有点令人难以置信。

It just launched everywhere. Amazon, Walmart, Target, 8,000 plus retail locations, anywhere you can buy games. So check it out, see some videos of gameplay at coyotegame.com. 300,000,000 social views so far of gameplay. It's kind of mind blowing.

只需几分钟就能学会。我保证你会笑个不停。这个项目已经筹备了两年。请尽情享受。去看看吧。

Takes just minutes to learn. I guarantee you'll have a lot of laughs. This has been in the works for two years. Please enjoy it. Check it out.

Coyotegame.com。现在回到节目。

Coyotegame.com. Now back to the episode.

最优最小化。在这个高度，我可以全速奔跑半英里

Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile

大家好，男孩女孩们。

Hello, boys and girls.

喵。

Meow.

我是蒂姆·费里斯，欢迎收听新一期的《蒂姆·费里斯秀》。我的工作是尝试解构来自各行各业的世界级顶尖人物，无论是体育、军事、娱乐、商业、金融还是其他领域。本期节目，我们请来了令人敬畏的丹麦人DHH——大卫·海涅迈尔·汉森，他的名字里有很多元音和双S，就像我的姓氏一样。这是一个多面手人物，我们深入探讨了许多我认为他从未在其他地方详细讨论过的故事和细节。他是Ruby on Rails的创造者，我们当然会深入探讨这对非技术背景的听众意味着什么。他是Basecamp（前身为37signals）的联合创始人兼首席技术官。

This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show, where it is my job to attempt to deconstruct world class performers from all walks of life whether that be sports, military, entertainment, business, finance or otherwise. And this episode, we have the fearsome Dane himself known as DHH, David Hanamyar Hansen, lots of vowels and a double s in there, just like my last name. This is a multifaceted character, and we delve into a lot of stories and details that I don't think he's discussed at length anywhere else. He is the creator of Ruby on Rails, and we'll certainly dig into what that means for those of you who are not in technology. He is a founder and the CTO at Basecamp, formerly known as thirty seven Signals.

他还是一位畅销书作家，以非常、非常直言不讳而闻名。我想我们还漫谈到了直言不讳的力量。此外，他还是一位世界级的赛车手。他是勒芒系列赛的冠军车手，尽管他直到24或25岁才拿到驾照。你可以在多个地方找到他：Twitter上的dhh、Medium（他也在那里以dhh为名发布长篇内容）。

He is also a best selling author and known for being very, very outspoken. We also, I suppose, meander into a discussion of the power of being outspoken. And he's also a world class race car driver. He is a Le Mans class winning racing driver despite the fact that he didn't even get his driving license, his driver's license until he was 24 or 25. You can find him a number of places on Twitter at d h h medium, where he writes longer form content at d h h as well.

在Instagram上，他花很多时间在dhh79账号上拍照。这可能不太为人所知，但一定要去看看。我们确实涉及了相当多的不同主题领域：我们谈论技术，谈论十多年来在没有风险投资的情况下运营一家盈利企业，谈论他13年与Ruby on Rails的开源之旅，还谈论了斯多葛哲学、心流状态、赛车——我要提前警告大家，在节目开始的大约15到20分钟里，我们会大量讨论赛车。

And on Instagram, he does spend a lot of his time taking photographs at D H H 79. That might be lesser known, but certainly check that out. And we really bounce across quite a few different subject areas. We talk about tech. We talk about running a profitable business with venture capital for more than a decade, we talk about his thirteen years of open source with Ruby on Rails and we talk about stoic philosophy, we talk about flow states, we talk about racing and I will warn you in the very beginning for the first, I don't know, fifteen, twenty minutes, we have a lot of racing talk.

这与后面的内容相关，因为我们再次寻找跨学科和第一性原理的共通之处。所以，如果你已经熟悉DHH，我不会重复那些你在维基百科或他的书中可能听过一百遍的内容。我们——或者应该说“我”（这是皇室用语中的“我们”）——想要深入探讨他的规则。他遵循哪些规则？他用来在这个星球上创造卓越的个人操作系统哲学是什么？

It is relevant to what comes later because we're looking for, again, parallels across disciplines and first principles. So I'm not gonna dig into a bunch of stuff that you've heard a 100 times about DHH before, if you're familiar with him. On Wikipedia or in his books, for instance, we wanted or I should say I wanted, that's the royal we, to dig into his rules. What are the rules he follows? The philosophies that he uses as his personal operating systems for creating excellence on this planet.

对他来说，“优美的代码”意味着什么？这如何转化到其他领域？等等，等等，等等。那么，闲话少叙，一如往常，请享受我与DHH的对话。大卫，欢迎来到节目。

What does beautiful code mean to him? How does that translate to other areas? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So without further ado, as I always say, please enjoy my conversation with DHH. David, welcome to the show.

谢谢，老兄。

Thanks, man.

我们上次聊天已经是很久以前了，当然，在开始录制前我们还在聊，但我实在想不起来我们最初是怎么联系上的。我想我们得出的结论是通过赛斯·高汀——当你们最初考虑出版《重来》时，我们联系讨论了从标题的A/B测试到整个出版过程的种种事情。那大概是在六年前吧？

It has been a long time since we've chatted and we were we were, of course, talking before we started recording, and I couldn't pin down how we first came in contact. And I think where we arrived was somehow through Seth Godin when you guys were first considering publishing rework, we connected to talk about all sorts of things ranging from split testing titles to the entire publishing process. And that must have been, what, six years ago?

是的。我想，2010年是我们开始四处推销手稿的时候，或者那可能甚至是我们出版那本书的时候。这真的很奇怪。感觉就像昨天一样，然后六年后我们就在这里了。但我的意思是，开始的方式部分和我开始学习很多东西的方式相同。

Yeah. I think, 2010 was when we started shopping our manuscript around, or maybe that was even when we published the book. It's it's so weird. It feels like it was just yesterday and then six years later here we are. But I mean, started in part in the same way that I started on learning a lot of things.

我尝试确定在那个领域里我想向谁学习，然后想办法看是否能直接或间接地向他们学习。当然，如果你能建立直接联系，那是最好的。我之前读过《每周工作4小时》，我的商业伙伴兼《重来》合著者杰森也读过。我们俩都对那本书印象深刻，我们就想，嘿，这有点像我们想走的路。看看有没有办法能从你所做的事情中学到些什么，哦，这里有个联系。哦，杰森认识塞斯，塞斯认识...然后就成了。

I try to identify whoever in that domain I want to learn from and then figure out a way if I can either learn from them directly or indirectly. And of course, if you can have a direct link, that's the best. And I had read Far Workweek sometime in advance of that, and so had Jason, my business partner and co author of Rework, And we were both just impressed with that and we're like, hey, this is kind of the path we want to take. Let's see if there's a way we can learn from what you've done and oh, here's a connection. Oh, Jason knew Seth and Seth knows and there we go.

所以我们当然会深入探讨编程和其他一切。但既然你谈到了寻找专家，其实我对我将要问的几乎所有问题都不知道答案，因为那对我来说会很无聊。我只是看着手头的一些提纲要点来展开，但我不知道这部分。所以你25岁时还没有驾照，对吗？

So we're gonna get into certainly programming and everything else. But since you talked about seeking out experts, I don't actually know the don't know the answer to pretty much any question I'm gonna ask because that would be boring for me. But you I'm just looking at some cliff notes that I have here to go off of, but you I didn't know this part. So you did not have a driver's license at 25. Is that right?

大概那时候

Around that

没错。

That's right.

没有？好吧。那我们快进一下。34岁时发生了什么？

Negative? Okay. And then let's flash forward. What happened at 34?

在法国一个叫勒芒的小镇，经过24小时的比赛，我站上了世界最伟大的耐力汽车赛的领奖台，实现了我的梦想——不仅是完成那场比赛，而且在我们组别中获胜。所有这些，从没有驾照到拿到驾照，学习开普通车，然后进入赛车领域，并一步步攀登赛车运动的阶梯直到顶峰，只用了九年时间。

I got to stand on the podium after twenty four hours of racing in a town in France called Le Mans in the greatest endurance motor race in the world, fulfilling my dream of not only just completing that race, but winning our class there. And all that in nine years from not having a driver's license to getting a driver's license, learning how to drive a normal car, and then getting into racing and climbing the ladders of racing until you're at the top.

所以，如果我们想找一个与你联系我（我相信还有其他出版界人士）类似的例子，有两个问题。一是你是怎么决定的？比如，是否有某个时刻、某次晚餐或某次对话让你说，是的，这就是我想做的事？第二，你是如何开始尝试弄清楚具体该怎么做的？

So if if we were to try to find the parallel example to you reaching out to me and I'm sure other people about publishing, two questions. One is how did you decide? Like, was there a moment or a dinner or a conversation where you said, yes, this is what I want to do? And then second, how did you start trying to figure out how to go about it?

当然。有件事要从90年代中期说起，我在丹麦电视上偶然看到这项赛事——米兰24小时耐力赛，连续追了好几年，一直对那种速度感、团队合作、耐力精神着迷，就是整整24小时不停绕圈行驶，让机器保持运转，让人坚持到底的整个过程，我觉得这简直太迷人了。然后到了90年代末和2000年代初，一位丹麦同胞——我们说的是丹麦，全国只有600万人口，总共600万丹麦人。所以当另一个丹麦人在世界舞台上做出非凡成就时，其他丹麦人都会注意到。可能所有国家都这样，但我觉得小国尤其如此，因为我们根本不会预料到，对吧？

Sure. So one thing I've since the mid 90s, I had on Danish television just tuned into this race, the twenty four Hours of Milan, caught it a number of years and always just fascinated by the speed, the teamwork, the endurance, just the whole process of driving around in circles for twenty four hours straight and making the machine last, making the humans last, and just founded that absolutely fascinating. And then in the late 90s and early 2000s, a fellow Dane, we're talking about Denmark here, this is a population of 6,000,000 people, 6,000,000 Danes total. So when another Dane does something remarkable on the world stage, other Danes take note. Maybe that's true of all countries, but I think it's especially true of small ones, because we just don't expect it, right?

你不会想到这么一个小国家会有人登上巅峰。我们有了汤姆·克里斯滕森，他现在被称为'勒芒先生'，因为他九次赢得该项赛事，开始不断获胜，一次又一次赢得勒芒24小时耐力赛。这当然也激起了我的兴趣。我本来就对这项赛事有点兴趣，然后汤姆就开始一直赢。

You don't expect that out of such a small country, you're going to have someone who reaches the peak. And we had Tom Christensen, who now goes by the name Mr. Le Mans because he's won the race nine times, started winning races and started winning the twenty four hours of Le Mans just over and over and over again. So that of course piqued my interest too. I was already sort of interested in the race, Then Adaine started winning it all the time.

那时我甚至还没有驾照。但这就像种下了一颗种子，对吧？我已经玩过很多赛车游戏。从Commodore 64到Sega、Nintendo、Amiga等各种游戏机，我一直很喜欢赛车游戏。可能赛车游戏是我最喜欢的游戏类型之一。

This is still before I even have a driver's license. But this just plants the seed, right? I'd already been playing lots of racing games. I loved racing games all the way from the Commodore 64 to Sega and Nintendo's and Amiga and all sorts of video games. Probably racing games was one of my favorite genres.

所以玩了很多电子游戏。然后突然在25岁时，我想去度假。我就想，如果我去巴西或美国，没有驾照真的很麻烦。比如你到了那里想租辆车。有趣的是，我甚至不会想在哥本哈根开车，因为这感觉像个完全陌生的概念。

So played a lot of video games. Then all of sudden at 25, I'm I want to go on a vacation. And I go, actually if I go to Brazil or The United States and I don't have a driver's license, that's really annoying. Like you want to arrive there and you want to rent a car. The funny thing is, I wouldn't even think about driving around Copenhagen cause that seemed like such a foreign concept.

我在哥本哈根生活了25年，靠轮滑和偶尔骑自行车（虽然车经常被偷）就过得很好。这似乎完全足够了。哥本哈根不是很大的城市，对骑自行车或玩轮滑的人非常友好。所以在我自己国家甚至都不太需要开车。

I'd already made it twenty five years in Copenhagen on rollerblades and the occasional bike in between them getting stolen. And that seemed to be well sufficient. Copenhagen is not that big of a town. It's very well equipped for people who want a bike or rollerblade or whatever. So it wasn't even too used in my own country.

就像是，我想去度假，我想能够租辆车。所以我在哥本哈根学了开车，这本身也是个有趣的过程，因为大多数人，即使在哥本哈根，也觉得如果学开车，应该在18岁左右学，对吧？所以那应该是新鲜刺激的事情。而我25岁了，才尝试学开车。那时我已经懂编程，已经在多个领域工作过，养成了系统化的学习方法。

It was like, I want to go on vacation and I want to be able to rent a car. So I learned how to drive a car in Copenhagen, which was in itself a funny process because most people, even in Copenhagen, think if they learn how to drive a car, learn how to drive a car at 18 or whatever, right? So it's that kind of like new and exciting or what have you. And here I am 25, I'm trying to learn how to drive a car. And I, at that point I already knew programming, had already worked on a number of domains that I had taken sort of a methodical approach to.

而且我学开车也采取了相当系统的方法。甚至到了考试时，考官都注意到我在自言自语。我当时在考场上都没意识到这一点。你想啊，考官就坐在副驾驶评判我是否通过，我一边开车一边嘀咕：'哦，刚才应该早点转弯的'，'这里应该打转向灯的'。

And I took a pretty methodical approach to learning how to drive the car too. To the point where the guy I was doing the exam with, was remarking on the fact I was self commenting. I didn't even realize that at the conference. You're like, the guy was rating me whether I pass or I don't pass it right next to me in the car, I'm driving around and I'm like, Oh, I should have turned in a little sooner there. Oh, I should have turned on the blinkers there.

有趣的是，考官当然告诉我通过了。但真正特别的是他说：'你全程都在进行实况解说'。我当时想，哦是啊，可能这样不太聪明吧。不过在我这种情况下确实奏效了，我基本上是在指出自己的所有缺点，因为这就是我的学习方式。我就是这样学会开车的，然后时间稍微快进一下。

And it was funny, told me, you pass, of course. But what was really remarkable was that you were narrating the whole process. I was like, Oh yeah, actually, I don't know, maybe that wasn't so smart. I guess it worked out in my case, but I was basically pointing out all my own flaws because that's how I learned. So that's how I learned how to drive a car, then skip forward just a little bit.

我是 我是

I'm I'm

其实，你知道吗大卫？抱歉，我要稍微打断一下。所以

Well, actually, you know what, David? I'm sorry. I'm gonna interrupt just for a second. So

当然。

Sure.

两件事。第一是，你会在很多事上都这样自我解说吗？

Two things. The first is, do you do that self commentary for a lot of things?

是的。你也会吗？当我尝试学习新事物时，脑子里就像有个实时旁白在不断指出：'这里可以做得更好'，或者'下次试试这个方法'。特别是在赛车时，这种乐趣很常见，因为单圈时间不长，通常就两分钟。所以每两分钟你就能重新开始。

Yes. You do? There's like a running narrator just running in my head when I'm trying to learn something constantly pointing out, oh, you could have done that a little better or let's try this next thing on the on the new runaround. And, I mean in racing in particular, you get that enjoyment a lot because the lap isn't that long, it's usually two minutes. So every two minutes you get to reset.

对，你有一个第二次尝试。

Right, you have a take two.

是的，没错。可以有第二次、第三次、第四次尝试。通过这种持续的自我评论，我其实是在做笔记，记录下次需要调整的地方。编程时我也这样做。我的意思是，我会看一段代码，然后说，好吧，先让它运行起来。

Yeah, exactly. Have a take two and take three and take four. And by having that running commentary, I'm kind of taking notes on this is what I have to tweak next time around. And I do the same thing in programming too. I mean, I'll look at a piece of code and I go like, okay, let's get this working.

然后我会回头，好吧，第二次尝试，把它弄对。第三次尝试，让它变得优美。第三次或第四次尝试，让它简化。第五次尝试。就像这样一直自我评论：我哪里可以改进？哪里可以做得更好？

And then I go back, okay, take two, let's make this right. Okay, take three, let's make this beautiful. Okay, take three or take four, let's simplify this. Okay, take five. Like just having that commentary all the time about where can I improve, where can I get better?

我不知道这种习惯从何而来，但这确实是我一直以来学习的方式。

That's I don't know where it comes from, but that's just how I've always gone about learning things.

你的父母中有谁这样做吗？还有，我不知道你是否有兄弟姐妹，但是

Did either of your parents do that or I and I don't know if you have siblings, but

关于学习技巧的很多方面，我都和其他人讨论过。这些方法已经被系统化了，我会觉得，哦，这很有趣。我只是不知道这些方法要么有名称，要么就是人们普遍采用的方式。我觉得我可能是偶然发现，哦，如果我这样做，学习速度会更快。那我就多做一点。

A lot of these things on on learning techniques, I've talked with other people around them. These things have been codified and I would go like, oh, that's interesting. I just I didn't know that that either had a name or that was how people were doing it that somehow I think I just stumbled over the fact that, oh, if I do this, I learn faster. Oh, let me just do more of that.

对。当然。这完全说得通。不过我打断你了，抱歉。哦，另一个问题，当初考驾照时，你和其他人相比做了什么不同的事？

Right. Of course. That makes that makes perfect sense. So I I interrupted you, though. Oh, the the other second part, I apologize, was what did you do differently compared to other people when learning to drive for that initial driver's license test?

你是否记得自己当时有什么特别不同的做法或关注点？

Is there anything that you that you recall doing differently or focusing on in particular?

是的，是的。说起来很有趣。编程方面我也有类似经历，其实我一开始学得很慢。因为当我不理解某个东西的工作原理时，就很难将其付诸实践。

Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. One of the things that I and I had these things with programming too, where I'm actually a slow learner at the beginning. Because when I don't understand how something works, I have a very hard time putting it into action.

我没法简单地模仿别人正在做的事情——我不理解原理就做不好。记得在哥本哈根，我们学车用的全是手动挡汽车，需要自己操作离合器。我始终无法理解离合器接合这个抬踏板的过程如此模糊。教练根本说不清到底要抬多高才能达到完美接合。

I can't just, oh, let me just clone whatever it is you're doing, I don't understand it and then do it well. And I remember in Copenhagen, all the cars we were being taught to drive on were all stick cars, manual cars. So you had to operate the clutch yourself. And I could not get my head around the fact that clutch engagement, lifting the pedal from the floor was such a fuzzy process. Like he couldn't tell me how much do I have to lift my leg to get the right clutch engagement.

他就只说'靠感觉来'。而我一直追问：'不，我想知道是30度？70度？离合器到底要抬离地板多高？'

He's just like, Oh, just go on the feel of it. And I'm like, No, no. I want to know like, is it 30 degrees? Is it 70 degrees? Like how far does the clutch have to come up the floor?

那辆车我估计熄火了上百次。因为我坚持非要弄懂原理不可——不明白工作机制我就不愿盲目操作。别人一上车就能凭感觉操作，踩下离合器，松开，猛加油门，莫名其妙就成功了。而我还在原地反复尝试第三次、第四次、第五次起步。

And I must have stalled that car 100 times. Because I just kept going like, I'm not just going to do it if I don't understand how it works. I'm going to figure out like how this clutch thing works because then, I mean, I'll know how it works and that will help me move forward. But it just Other people would walk in, right? And they'd just go like, Oh, you just know how to feel.

这是其中一个方面。另一个让我印象深刻的是——很有趣我至今记得，这都十一年前的事了——我当时对教材的文字质量惊叹不已。

And they put in the clutch and they'd let it out and they just give it a bunch of gas and somehow it'd work and they'd get off the line. And I would just still sit there stalled trying to do take three, take four, take five on getting the thing going. So there was that aspect of it. And then the other aspect I was so impressed about, and it's funny I still remember this, this is eleven years ago. I was so impressed with the writing quality of the text.

我们既有实际上路驾驶的实操部分，也有学习交规的理论部分。我记得自己完全被这本极其枯燥教材的叙述者迷住了。虽然内容都是'看到这个标志表示某某含义'之类，但叙述者每个用词都精准到极致，带着种官僚式的刻板，却让我觉得：这实在太迷人了。

So we would have both the practical part where you go out and drive the car and then you'd have like the theoretical part where you learn about the rules and so forth. And just remember being remarkably impressed by the narrator of this incredibly dry material, right? Like, Oh, if you see this sign, then like it means this and that and the other thing. And the narrator was just entrancing because every single word had just been picked to perfection in a very bureaucratic, stilted way. But still I was just, oh, this is just so fascinating.

所以这实际上帮助我更快地掌握了材料，因为我当时非常专注地听那个人讲解这些标志的含义以及停车需要离路缘多远的距离。这让我意识到，只要找到正确的视角，任何事物都可以变得有趣。而且如果你能用恰当的语调讲述，即便是世界上最枯燥的内容——他并非刻意要让它活泼有趣，旁白也没有刻意搞笑，只是每个词都经过精心挑选和权衡，达到极致的精确。

So it actually helped me learn the material that much quicker because I was just paying so much damn attention to how the guy was telling us how these signs were and how far from the curb you had to stop. And it was just like, wow, everything can be interesting if you find a way to look at it the right way. And if you have a way of telling it in the right tone, even if it's the driest material in the world, and he wasn't trying to make it peppy, it wasn't like the narrator was being funny or whatever, just being ultra precise with every single word weighed and picked to perfection.

听起来确实如此，我们稍后会深入探讨这一点。但你之前两三个关于让代码变得优美的例子，我认为这可能与你为何痴迷于那个驾驶演示中语言的精确性和优雅性有关。

Well, it sounds like that probably, and we'll dig into this a little bit later, but your past two or past three example of making your code beautiful, I think that seems to perhaps relate to why you're entranced by the precision of the language and the elegance of the language in that presentation for driving.

完全正确。是一回事，对吧？从那时起，我就努力以编写那本关于停车距离路缘多远的指导手册的人的方式去写代码——我认为这与编程有很好的相关性。我们在编程中做的很多事情本身并不有趣。

Exactly. Same thing. Right? Ever since I've tried to strive to write code the way that whoever wrote that instruction manual for how far away from the curb you should park could write, which I actually think correlates pretty well to programming. We do a lot of things in programming that aren't inherently interesting.

如果你读一些编程大师的作品，他们会谈到，比如为克莱斯勒构建薪酬系统之类的，CE3系统现在在敏捷界有点传奇色彩，你会觉得那肯定是世界上最无聊的领域。编程一个系统来处理各种扣款、例外情况等等，这有什么意思？但哦，你有所不知，一旦深入挖掘，揭开其中的机制，就会发现它非常迷人。这些经历让我明白，任何表面看似无聊的事物，只是你还没有深入挖掘足够远。

If you read some of the programming greats, they talk about, oh, we were building a salary compensation system for Chrysler or something, the CE3 system, which is kind of legend now in agile world, and you go like, that's got to be the most boring domain in the world. Like you're programming a system to come up with all sorts of deductions and exceptions and so on. How is that interesting? And oh, little do you know, once you dig into it and you unravel the mechanics that go into it is just fascinating. And I think that some of those experiences have taught me that anything that looks boring on the surface, you just haven't scratched far enough.

持续挖掘，一切都会变得有趣。

Keep scratching and everything becomes interesting.

不，我完全同意。我想到了两点。第一点是——我可能要踏入危险领域了，因为这会很快超出我的能力范围——但你看的那些教学视频几乎就像是给人类设计的算法，对吧？它仍然是在向将要操作这台机器的人类传授指令和步骤。

No, I could not agree more. Two things came to mind. The first was, and I'm gonna be wading into dangerous territory for me because I'm getting outside of my competency real quick, but it seems like the the instructional videos that you were watching are almost an algorithm for human beings. Right? So you're still it it was imparting instructions and steps and so on to human operators who are gonna be interacting then inside this machine.

第二点是我个人判断优秀写作者的标准，至少在非虚构领域，是那些能让你以为无聊的主题变得绝对引人入胜的人。对吧？因为任何人都可以拿世界上最激动人心的话题，即使他们……是的……也只是拼凑出相当于意大利面条式的代码，对吧？

The the second is my personal litmus test for good writers is, at least in the world of non fiction, those people who can make topics you assume to be boring absolutely riveting. Right? Because anyone can take the most exciting topic in the world and even if they Yes. Just throw together the equivalent of spaghetti code. Right?

这就像草率的散文。只要故事足够强大，并且他们在题材上得到了某种威利·旺卡式的金票，你就不必在措辞和精确度上太费功夫。但以约翰·麦克菲为例，没读过他作品的人都应该去读一下，m c p h e e。他写过整本关于橙子的书。

It's just like sloppy prose. As long as the story is really strong and they were given, kind of a Willy Wonka golden ticket in terms of subject matter, you don't have to work very hard on the words and the precision. But then you take someone like John McPhee, for instance. Anyone who hasn't read his stuff should, m c p h e e. He's written entire books on oranges.

他写过整本关于手工雕刻独木舟的书。他写过一本关于普利茅斯岩的书。他还写过一整本关于一场网球比赛的书，是阿瑟·阿什和——我一时想不起第二位选手的名字——比赛名为《游戏的层次》。但他的能力在于，你可以分配给他任何主题，他都能像迈克尔·刘易斯一样写得引人入胜。对吧？

He's written entire books on hand carved canoes. He wrote one on Plymouth Rock. He wrote another one about an entire and then he wrote an entire book on a single tennis match between Arthur Ashe, and I'm blanking on the the second folk, this second competitor named Levels of the Game. But his ability, he can take any subject you could assign him and make it much like Michael Lewis. Right?

我是说，刘易斯写过关于信用违约互换的惊悚作品，让它变得扣人心弦。言归正传，我知道我容易跑题，但你通过了驾照考试。你是什么时候决定去赛车的？

I mean, wrote a thriller about credit default swaps and, just make it riveting. So so coming back, I know I'm, prone to making us digress, but So you passed your driver's test. At what point do you decide to race?

有趣的是，我甚至没有刻意决定。我有个朋友也是在网上认识的。其实我来美国的全部原因就是通过博客和邮件在网上认识了一个叫贾森·弗里德的人，我们开始合作，几年后我搬到美国全职和他工作。而这位是我在汽车论坛上认识的另一个人，他说：嘿，我知道芝加哥外四十五分钟有个赛道，你想来吗？

It's funny, didn't even decide. I had a friend who had actually met online again. I mean the whole reason I came to The US was because I met a guy online, Jason Fried, through a blog and an email, and we got working together and a couple years later I moved to The US to work with him full time. And here's another guy I met online on a forum discussion board for cars, who said, Hey, I know of this racetrack that's just forty five minutes out of Chicago. Do you want to come?

我当时觉得，酷，听起来很有意思。我们就去了那里。到了赛道，他安排另一个朋友让我试开赛车。在那之前，我不确定，也许我开过街车下过赛道之类的，但这次是真正的赛车。

And I was like, Cool, it sounds interesting. Let's go down there. And we come down to track and he had set up with another friend that I could try a race car. Up until that point, I don't know, maybe I had, I don't remember, maybe I had driven once with like a street car on a course or something. But this was a real race car.

那是辆单座车，你坐在车中央，轮子外露，看起来像迷你版的一级方程式赛车。我有机会开这辆车。我只记得，首先，每节练习大约三十分钟。你上赛道开三十分钟，或者可能只有二十分钟。但感觉就像三十秒，因为我刚出去就看到旗子，心想：等等，什么？

This was a single seater, you sit in the middle of the car, the wheels are exposed, they kind of look like miniature Formula One cars. And I get a chance to ride in this thing. And I just remember, first of all, these sessions were about thirty minutes long. You get out on track, you drive around for thirty minutes or maybe it was even just twenty minutes. And it felt like it took thirty seconds because I would just see the flag right away and it'd be like, wait, what?

我得进站了？我才刚开始啊。所以时间已经开始扭曲了，这时候你就知道体验很棒了

I have to come in? I just started. So time was already being distorted, which is when you know you have a good time when

你可以保持

you can keep

对时间的掌控，对吧？不仅如此，我从一开始就对这种封闭系统完全着迷——我们有一条赛道，跑完一圈大约需要一分三十秒，而每次经过时你都能即时获得关于表现的反馈。有一个时钟告诉你：哦，这次你跑了一分三十一秒四。然后你再跑一圈，这次是一分三十秒八。你会想：天啊，我刚刚缩短了零点六秒。

track of time, right? And not only that, I was just absolutely fascinated from the get go about this whole closed system that we have this track, a lap around the track was about a minute thirty, and you would get instant feedback on how well you were doing every single time you came around. There was a clock telling you, oh, this time you did it in one minute thirty one four. Then you go around one minute one more time and it's one minute thirty point eight. And you go like, man, I just shaved off six tenths.

这是世界上最令人兴奋的事情。我的意思是，这甚至撇开了它本身令人兴奋的事实——它是一辆轰鸣的赛车，它在震动，还有危险元素：你可能会偏离赛道，可能会撞上什么东西。但仅仅是这种改进的闭环系统就绝对令人陶醉。就像你刚喝了一瓶'心流'。你可以打开冰箱说：哦，我想要一些心流。能让我进入那种忘记时间、完全沉浸在学习和进步的美好体验中的状态吗？

This is the most exciting thing in the world. And I mean, that's even taking it beside the fact that it's exciting, it's a loud car and it's shaking and there's the element of danger, you could go off course, you could hit something, but just the closed loop system of improvement was absolutely intoxicating. I mean, it was kind of like you just had like a bottle of flow. You could just go open your fridge and like, Oh, I'd like some flow please. Can you get me into the flow state where you lose track of time and where you just have such a great experience learning and getting better?

就像我最初很多很多次坐进赛车时的感觉——我可以直接开启心流模式，这我在编程中也发现过不少。但至少在编程中，我觉得它更难以捉摸。最好的编程会话中我会进入心流，但也有很多其他编程会话中则不会。而当我坐进赛车时，感觉就像一转动点火钥匙，心流就来了。

Like that's how I felt the first very, very many times I got into a race car was I could just switch on flow, which was something I had discovered in programming a fair amount. But I find at least in programming it was a little more elusive. It was like the best programming sessions I'd have flow. But then I'd also have a fair number of other programming sessions where I wouldn't have flow. When I stepped into the race car, I just felt like, oh, I could just you turn the ignition and flow comes.

那简直就像魔法一样。

And that was just magic.

为什么你认为在编程中它更难以捉摸？你能找出那些有心流或没有心流的会话中的共同因素吗？

Why do you think it was more why do you think it was more elusive in programming? And can you identify any common factors for the sessions that had flow or that didn't have flow?

我认为赛车的一部分原因在于强度水平立刻达到100%。你一坐进车里，危险就达到最大——实际上，初期比后期更危险，因为在赛道上开车时如果不知道自己在做什么，会比后来更危险。相比之下，在编程中，我直到……我的意思是，我不该这么说。在我成为一个相当成熟的程序员之前，我并没有以我喜欢的频率持续获得高质量的心流体验。

I think part of it with racing was just the intensity level was at a 100% right away. You had as soon as you stepped into the car, you had maximum danger. Actually, had more danger in the beginning than you will have later on because much more dangerous to drive a car on the track when you don't know what you're doing than it is later on. Versus with programming, I didn't get flow until I was, I mean, I shouldn't say that. I didn't get great consistent flow in the quantities that I'd like to enjoy it before I was actually a fairly well developed programmer.

因为那时我已经对编程的整个领域有了足够的洞察力，能够真正深入其中，想着，让我们把它做得漂亮些。让我们尽可能简化它。而一开始我只是专注于让代码运行起来。PHP页面能渲染吗？哦不，出错了，让我试试别的办法。

Because that was when I had enough of an eye for the whole scope of programming to really dive into, oh, let's make this beautiful. Let's make this as simple as possible. When in the beginning I was just focused on, oh, let's get this to work. Can the PHP page render? Oh no, I get an error, let me try something else.

那很有趣。虽然偶尔会有心流的闪现，但真正的心流时刻直到我水平大幅提升后才出现。而开赛车时，你几乎从一开始就被迫进入一种情境——培养对这个领域的洞察力，这么说可能有点夸张，但这确实关乎生死，对吧？你以160英里的时速飞驰，如果下一个弯道没处理好，至少会损失惨重。然后情况只会越来越糟。

That was fun. There were glimpses of flow, but the real moments of flow I wouldn't get until I was much better. Where with stepping into the race car, were kind of forced into a situation really early on where developing your eye for this domain just was I mean, it putting a little bit on a pin, but it was life and death, right? You're going 160 miles an hour, if you don't get this next turn right, at the very least, it's going to be expensive. And then it only gets worse from there, right?

要么受伤，要么后果严重，甚至可能需要叫救护车之类的。我认为在这种情境下，求生本能会让人思维变得敏锐。当我试图让PHP页面运行时，如果出错，至少不需要报废一辆车或去医院——至少不是我写的那种软件。除非你第一次尝试就写心脏起搏器程序之类的。

Either it's going to hurt or it's going to be really bad, or there's going to be an ambulance involved or something else like that. And I think there's just a survival instinct that sharpens the mind in that sense. That I mean, when I'm trying to make a PHP page work, if I make an error, it's not like I have to write off a car or go to the hospital, at least. Not the kind of software I was writing. Maybe you get that if you try to write a pacemaker on your first go or something.

但我当时只是写信息系统和网页。随着时间推移，两者变得越来越相似。当我足够精通编程，对代码好坏形成判断力，能分辨代码异味与整洁代码时，过程就变得有趣多了。从‘勉强能用’到追求卓越——后者对我而言才值得投入，对吧？任何称职的程序员基本都能让代码运行起来。

But I was just writing information systems and web pages. But as things progressed, they became more the same. When I got sort of well versed enough into programming that I had developed an eye for and developed opinions about what was good code and what was bad code, what was smelly code and what was clean code. It became a lot more fun to try to go from, Oh, this is just something that just works, to which to me then became uninteresting, right? Like any programmer worth their salt, generally speaking, can get something to work, right?

就像能让程序大致完成预定任务。至少在信息系统领域，当业务域本身不算新颖或已成熟时，让代码运行只是基础。更重要的是让代码清晰——选用恰当命名，追求优美简洁，享受代码如散文般的书写乐趣，而非机械拼接。赛车则从一开始就充满这种趣味性，因为存在极高风险性。但随着技艺精进，两者又殊途同归。

Like can get the program to roughly perform the task it's supposed to do. At least in information systems where the domain itself isn't like that novel perhaps, or it's well established enough that getting things to work, okay, that's the baseline. But beyond that is getting to make it clear, picking the right names, making the code beautiful, making it succinct, simple, all these other pleasures you derive from code as prose, code as writing, not code as putting mechanical things together. And with racing, you had the sort of interest right from the get go because you had this criticality, really high criticality. But then as you developed, it became more of the same.

就像当你开始理解抓地力、滑移角、主销后倾角、倾角、离地高度等车辆调校机制，开始体会前后两毫米差异或胎压变化的影响时，兴趣就会超越‘拼命求生’的层面，进入更深层次的探索。两者都能带来心流，却是不同类型的心流。或许后期阶段更令人满足，因为正如你所说，当你能为一局网球赛写整本书时，才算真正理解了问题本质。无论是编程还是赛车，一旦深入那些细节——如我提到的车辆机械特性、滑移角、轮胎磨损等无数因素时...

Like once you start understanding grip and slip angle and all the mechanics of setting up a car in terms of caster and rake and ride height and you start appreciating the differences between two millimeters upfront and two millimeters on the rear or tire pressures, it becomes really interesting in a deeper level than just like, oh, I'm just holding on for my dear life, I'm trying to survive. Both things provide flow, but they're different kinds of flow. Perhaps the later part is the more satisfying part because it's as you say, when you can write a whole book about a single tennis match, you've really understood the problem. You've really understood the details that matter. And with programming and with race car driving, once you get into those nitty gritty details of, as I mentioned, all the particulars of the mechanics of a car and slip angle and wear of tyres and so on, there's just so many factors.

这又回归到系统思维与系统优化，成为一场充满权衡与优化的迷人旅程，而这正是通往心流之路，是深入细节的心流之路。培养洞察力——这是我发现的培育心流最可靠的方式。

And again, it becomes system thinking, system optimizing, and just a riveting thing of trade offs and optimizations and so forth that just is the path to flow, is the path to flow details. Developing an eye, that's for me the most reliable way I've found to cultivate flow.

正如你所说，如果你还没找到某个话题中吸引你的点，那就继续深挖，对吧？说明你挖得还不够深。比如，我一直想认真投入射箭运动，但直到一个月前——让我想想，其实是三个月前——才开始真正练习。触发点是一位奥运射箭教练建议我读一本叫《背部张力射击法》的书。

And and like you said, if you if you haven't found something that grabs your interest about a given topic, just keep scratching. Right? You haven't you haven't dug deep enough. For instance, I wanted to do get involved with archery for a very long time in a in a serious capacity, and I only started doing it about a month, let's see, three months ago. And part of what triggered it was an Olympic archery coach who suggested I get I get a book called shooting with back tension.

书名应该没记错。整本书都在讲如何利用中背部张力提高射击精度和动作可重复性。不知为何，这个角度让我特别着迷，正是这个钩子让我终于认真对待射箭——它成了吸引我上钩的诱饵。让我们稍微回溯一下，虽然之前提过，但有些听众可能不了解背景。

I think I'm getting the title right. It's an entire book about how to use mid back tension to fire more accurately and make the process more replicable. And for whatever reason, I just found this so fascinating that that is what enabled me to finally take it seriously because that was the hook. That was the lure that I needed to bite. Let's rewind the clock a little bit because we've alluded to it, but there are people who won't have the history necessary, to put some of this in context.

比如在巴西或美国因为不会开车而处处受限的故事。这听起来至少是考驾照的主要动机之一，那种潜在的挫败感。如果我说错了请纠正——编程是从创建游戏新闻网站开始的吧？你之前提到过赛车游戏，这是怎么开始的呢？

The story of not wanting to be inconvenienced in, say, Brazil or US with by not being able to drive. That was sounds like at least one of the primary catalysts for getting a driver's license, that, sort of potential frustration. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the programming came out of, starting a gaming news website. You mentioned the the racing games earlier. Is that how did that come to be?

你是怎么开始编程的？

How did you start coding?

其实动机完全一样。就像我学开车是因为不想在巴西或美国被困住，或者依赖公交系统影响度假体验。编程也是同样道理——我有意识地回避成为程序员很多年，虽然身边很多朋友都是程序员。我长期接触计算机，但始终徘徊在编程领域边缘。

It was actually exactly the same thing. As I said, like I learned how to drive a car because I didn't want to be in Brazil or in The US stranded or reliant on buses or whatever that would make it hard for me to sort of enjoy that vacation. With programming, I came to the same conclusion actually. I had almost consciously avoided becoming a programmer for a long time, because I grew up with a lot of programmers as friends. And I was involved with computers, not as a programmer, but around the edges of it.

我在互联网普及前运营过叫Waresight的BBS（电子公告板系统），大家在那里交换盗版软件什么的。算是深度参与计算机圈子，但从不是程序员。大概十三四岁时，我看着程序员朋友们的工作就想：这不适合我。编程看起来像数学，数学有趣，但不是我愿意花时间的方向。编程与我无缘。

I ran a what was called a Waresight, a BBS, a bulletin board system before the internet, where we trade pirated software and so on. Well involved in the scene of computers, but I wasn't a programmer. And I had kind of decided at some point, I don't know, 1314, when I had these programmer friends and I saw what they were doing and I thought like, that's not for me. Like programming, it kind of looks like math and math is interesting, but it's not really what I want to spend my time on. Programming is not for me.

直到多年后开始做游戏网站时，我总缠着程序员朋友帮忙：『能帮我实现这个功能吗？我们能做个内容管理系统吗？』（那时还没有这个术语）。他们帮忙时我总会感到挫败，因为觉得自己无能，无法自主实现想法。就像我害怕到达美国或巴西等需要用车的目的地时，陷入依赖他人的无助境地。

So it took several years after that until I started working with the internet, I started working on these gaming websites and I would pester my friends, my programmer friends, hey can you help me make this happen? Can we make a content management system before things were called that? And they would help me and I would kind of just get frustrated because I felt a little helpless. I felt I couldn't be self sufficient, I couldn't just make the things happen that I wanted to make happen. In much the same way that I wouldn't want to arrive in The US or in Brazil or whatever I had imagined of these destinations that required a car and feel helpless, like I was dependent on someone else.

我认为这是贯穿很多事情的一条主线，也是我选择做某些事情的原因。我确实有一种想要自给自足的倾向。这种自给自足的心态让我想，好吧，那我就学学ASP或者当时我们用的微软技术。之后又觉得，行吧，那我就学学PHP，这样我就能实现真正想要的东西。我想制作

And I think that's a thread that goes through a lot of things and why I choose to do certain things. I have definitely a streak for wanting to be self sufficient. And that self sufficiency then led me to think like, okay, fine, I'll learn ASP or whatever the Microsoft thing was that we were using at the time. And then after that, okay, fine, I learned this PHP thing just such that I can make the other thing that I really want happen. I wanted to make

所以这不是一个成为程序员的决定。更像是，好吧。

So it wasn't a decision to become a programmer. It's like, alright.

你知道吗？

You know what?

我就自己搞定这个，这样我就能做分类处理，不用等A、B、C这些人一周后才完成。

I will just figure this out so I can do triage so that I don't have to wait for a, b, and c person to get this done a week from now.

没错。就是这样。它纯粹是个工具问题。根本不是那种'哦，这是我的新追求，我要成为程序员'的感觉。绝对不是。

Exactly. That was it. It was it was a tool thing. It wasn't like, oh, this is my new pursuit, I'm going to be a programmer. Absolutely not.

是我想要一些程序，其实我是想要一些网站。然后我发现，哦，你需要做一些编程才能实现。我自学了HTML、CSS和JavaScript来做这些事情。而我长期抗拒学习编程，只是因为我觉得，哦，这涉及数学，很难。我对编程有这些固有观念，因为我看到搞编程的朋友们做演示、三维图形和游戏等各种东西——这些确实是编程，但和信息系统工作是截然不同的领域。

It was I wanted some programs, I wanted some websites actually. And I found out, oh, you kind of need to do some programs to do that. I taught myself self HTML and CSS and JavaScript to do some of those other things. And I just resisted learning programming for a long time simply because I thought, oh, it's math, it's hard. I had these notions about what programming was because I had observed the programming friends I had make demos and three d graphics and games and all sorts of things that actually it's programming, but it's a very different domain than working on information systems.

所以我掌握这个工具的方式，就像有人说'哦，我得组装这件家具'一样。该用哪个螺丝刀？好吧，就那个。然后我就看看说明书，试着组装起来。这可不是因为他们想成为木匠，对吧？

So I picked up this tool trade in much the same way as someone goes like, Oh, I have to put this piece of furniture together. Which screwdriver do I have to use? Okay, that one. And then let me just read the instructions, let me just try to put it together. It's not because they're trying to become a carpenter, right?

尝试

Trying

修复

to repair

是的，我只是想把这个桌子组装起来。我并不想成为一名木匠，我只是想组装一张桌子，宜家提供了一些说明书，我需要一把螺丝刀。我当时就是这么想的。而且这种想法持续了好几年。有趣的是，这就像是那种悄然而至的事情，比如赛车，那是有很多明确意图的。

Yeah, I just want this desk put together. I'm not trying to make a career as a carpenter, I just want a desk put together and IKEA has some instructions and I need a screwdriver. That was how I felt about it. And I felt that way about it for several years. It was just funny because it was kind of one of those things that snuck up on me, where with race car driving, for example, like there was a lot of intent.

我做了第一件事，立刻就上瘾了。但编程完全不同。我做了第一件事，实际上一点也不喜欢。我不太喜欢编程，觉得它有点麻烦，但我还是坚持做了下去。

I did the first thing and I immediately got hooked. With programming, no such thing. I did the first thing and I actually didn't enjoy it at all. I didn't enjoy programming very much. I thought it was just kind of an inconvenience, but I just kept doing it.

就像你说的，你只是慢慢开始剥开洋葱，越深入，层次越多，它就变得越有趣。所以快进几年到2001年左右，我完成了为丹麦一家孵化器建立的游戏网站。当时有很多类似丹麦.com的灵感涌现，孵化器会向我们这样的年轻人投钱，让他们构建东西，不考虑利润或商业模式，只为了眼球。总之，当美国互联网泡沫破裂时，我清楚地看到了警示。于是我想，不如先回大学待一段时间。

And as you say, you just slowly start unpacking the onion and the further you get into it, the more rings you get into it, the more interesting it becomes. So fast forward a couple of years in 2001 or whatever, I'm done with this gaming website I had been building for a Danish incubator. There was a lot of danish.com inspirations going on at the time, and one of the things was incubators who would throw money at kids like me to build things with no idea of profits or a business model or anything else just because eyeballs. Anyway, I kind of saw the writing on the wall painted pretty clearly when .com bubble bursted in The US. And I thought, let me just go back to university for a while.

高中毕业后我就停了学业，直接开始构建各种游戏网站，做了大概三年左右。然后整个泡沫破裂了，我想，我不完全确定接下来要做什么。我不想在这里继续捡残羹剩饭，让我试着学点东西。于是我报了一个商业管理和计算机科学的项目。

I had stopped after high school, went straight into building these gaming websites of various kinds, done that for what three years or so. And then the whole bubble thing went pop, and I went, I'm not 100% sure what else I'm going to do. I'm not going to keep just spinning around the scraps here. Let me just try to learn something. And I got into a program for business administration and computer science.

但那时，雪球已经开始滚动了。我已经重新尝到了编程的滋味，不是因为我想要，而是因为我必须做，但它变得越来越有趣。我对构建各种信息系统越来越着迷。那些游戏系统，其实就是信息系统，对吧？它们是内容管理系统、留言板，所有这些都是信息系统。

But at that point, like the snowball was already rolling. I had already gotten enough now of a taste of programming again, not because I wanted to, but because I had to, that it was it was kind of getting more interesting. And I was getting more fascinated by just building information systems of various kinds. These gaming systems, that was all they were, right? They were content management systems, they were message boards, they were all these kinds of information systems.

它真的激起了我的兴趣。我在大学里埋头苦读了三年拿到这个学位，同时我真的深入了进去，这倒不是因为学校的课程，因为学校教的都是些无聊的Java内容，虽然接触这些对以后的工作确实有影响，但功课本身并不有趣。也不是因为我觉得作业很吸引人。真正有趣的是我课余时间做的所有事情。

It had just really piqued my interest. And I hid away in university for three years getting this degree and at the same time then I really got into it, Not so much because of the schooling, because schooling was all about some nonsense Java stuff where I guess it was good to get exposed to that, that did provide influences for later work. But it wasn't the schoolwork that was interesting. It wasn't because we were getting assignments that I thought was also fascinating. It was all the stuff I was doing on the side.

课余时间我做的一件事，也是这个故事的关键，是我开始与Jason Fried合作，他后来成了我的商业伙伴。这些事情从“哦，还行吧，有点意思”逐渐变成“哦，这其实挺有趣的”，直到2003年我终于找到了我编程生涯的真爱——Ruby，然后恍然大悟：这就是我想毕生从事的事业。

And one of the things I was doing on the side to catch the tales of the story here was I started working with Jason Fried, who I would end up becoming a business partner with. And that stuff then went from, oh, okay. I guess this is kind of interesting to like, oh, this is actually pretty interesting to all the way until 2003 when I finally find the love of my programming language life in Ruby and go, oh, actually this is what I want to do with my life.

你是如何经历这些转变的？换句话说，是什么让它变得有趣？对吧？因为对于不同技能或主题，我都能指出某些特定时刻，就像从不感兴趣变得感兴趣了。

How did you, experience those jumps? In other words, what made it interesting? Right? Because there are certain moments in time where I can pinpoint for different skills or topics? Like, it went from not interesting to interesting.

对吧？有点像从不沸腾到沸腾，有一个非常明显的转变。对你来说，编程的那个转折点是什么？然后，为什么——我敢肯定你可能已经解释烦了，但首先是一般来说为什么是编程？

Right? It's kinda like a not boiling, boiling. There was a really clear shift. For you, what was that for programming? And then and then why I mean, I'm I'm sure you might be sick of explaining this, but this so the first is why programming generally?

比如，什么时候让你觉得“哇，这真的很有趣”？第二个问题是为什么是Ruby？

Like, when was it like, oh, shit. This is really interesting. And the second is why Ruby?

当然。第一个问题确实先出现，那就是为什么这很有趣。我的第一个重要时刻是当我达到自给自足的水平时。当我能够独立完成一个完整的东西、一个完整的功能、网站的整个部分，而不必咨询别人，不必磕磕绊绊地摸索，当我真的能自己组装好这张桌子，而且它是一张相当不错的桌子，能派上用场。

Sure. So the first thing certainly came first, which was why this is interesting. And the first big moment I had was when I reached self sufficiency. When I got to a level where I could make a whole thing, a whole feature, a whole part of the site, without having to consult someone else, without having to stumble through it, where I could actually just put this desk together and it was a pretty good desk. It served this purpose.

我可以在上面放东西，它不会倒塌，然后我会想：这其实挺酷的。就像你可以抓住一个想法，开始在文本编辑器里写代码，突然之间你就有了一个信息系统？等等，这真的很酷。所以这就是从“我喜欢结果”的角度的转折点，还不是“我喜欢这个活动本身”的转变。

I could put things on it, it wouldn't fall down and I'd go like, that's actually pretty cool. Like you can take something, you can take an idea and you can start writing things in a text editor and all of a sudden you have an information system? Wait, that's actually pretty cool. So that was the jump point from the standpoint of, I like the outcome. That wasn't the jump of the, I like the activity itself.

我真的很喜欢这个结果。我真的很喜欢自给自足的感觉，也喜欢从无到有创造事物的理念。然后，当我开始与他人合作时，可能又经历了一次飞跃。正如我所说，我开始与Jason Fried合作，他不仅是Basecamp的商业伙伴，还是第一个付钱让我编程的人。之前我做的所有其他编程项目更像是副业。

I really liked the outcome. I really liked the self sufficiency and I liked the idea of taking nothing and turning it into something. And then I had perhaps another jump when I started working with other people. I started working with Jason Fried, as I said, was not only a business partner at Basecamp, but he was also the first guy who paid me to program. All these other endeavors I had to program were more like side bichefs.

那些并不是我的主业。我为游戏网站做这个程序，并不是因为有人雇我当程序员，而是因为他们付钱让我运营它，或者我只是对运营感兴趣。通过这个过程，我变得足够自给自足，当时对PHP也算驾轻就熟了。后来我和Jason联系上了，他最终雇佣了我，每小时付给我15美元——我得说那时候美元还挺值钱的。现在美元实际上又升值了很多。

They were not the main thing I was supposed to do. I was doing this program for the gaming websites, not because someone had hired me as a programmer, but because they had paid me some money to run it, or I was just interested in running it. And then I just through that gotten self sufficient enough that I kind of knew my way around PHP at the time. And then Jason, I ended up connecting with him and he ended up hiring me, Paying me the grand sum of $15 an hour, which I was going to say back when the dollar was worth something. Now the dollar is actually worth a lot more again.

但我的意思是，我的比较标准是这样的：我可以在丹麦哥本哈根为某个只在网上认识的美国人工作，每小时赚15美元，或者我可以去做另一份学生工作，比如在图书馆整理文件之类的。所以嘿，这对我来说似乎很不错，对吧？我可以做一些编程工作，而且对此越来越感兴趣，还有人每小时付我15美元——顺便说个趣事，其实连15美元都不到，因为那时候汇款并不方便。

But I mean, again, my comparison frame was okay. I could either get $15 an hour working for some strange American I had only met online from Copenhagen, Denmark, or I could go do another student job of, I don't know, filing papers in the library or something. So hey, that seemed pretty good to me, right? Like I get to do some programming stuff, which I'm getting more interested in, and someone is paying me $15 an hour, which by the way, funny anecdote on that, it wasn't even $15 an hour because back then you couldn't really easily send money.

所以你有大约20%的交易成本。没错。

So you got like a 20% transactional cost. Exactly.

他会寄商品过来。他会寄苹果的产品。比如最早的第一代iPod就是我报酬的一部分。我还收到过iBook，诸如此类的东西。总之，只是回想一下这段经历。

He would send goods. He would send Apple goods. So he would send like the very first iPod was part of my payment. I got an iBook, a bunch of kind of stuff like that. Anyway, just wanted to think back about it.

之后我和Jason合作了几年，做了各种客户项目。37signals（在我们改名为Basecamp之前的公司名）主要做客户工作，以设计为主。我会和他们组队负责编程部分。但让我从仅仅喜欢产出转变为热爱编程活动本身的重大飞跃，真正来自于Ruby。我记得大概是在2002年底接触到了Ruby，稍微了解了一下。

And then I worked with Jason for a couple of years on a variety of client projects. Thirty seven Sickles, which was the name of the company before we changed it to Basecamp, was doing client work, mainly design work. And I would team up with them and work on the programming stuff. But the big jump where I went from just liking the output to loving the activity itself really came with Ruby. And Ruby I discovered, I think maybe late two thousand and two, I had a small look at it.

然后在2003年，我真正深入学习了Ruby，因为我们开始一起开发Basecamp——这是我和Jason合作的第一个重要产品。之前我们还做过其他一些项目，比如一个用PHP开发的追踪个人书籍的网站，叫Single File。那很有趣，也是很好的学习经历，但并没有真正发展起来。

And then again in the 2003, I really dove into it because we started working on Basecamp, our first sort of major product together, Jason and I. We had worked on some other stuff earlier, site to keep track of your, was it yeah, your books called Single File that I had made in PHP. And that was good fun. It was good learning experience. Never really took off.

它没有任何进展。所以几年后我们就放弃了。但后来出现了Basecamp这个想法。我们想更好地跟踪我们的客户，所有我们正在合作的客户。我们当时所有事情都是通过电子邮件处理的。

It didn't go anywhere. So we scrapped that a few years later. But then this Basecamp thing came up. We wanted to keep better track of our customers, all the clients we were working on. We were doing everything over email.

我们总是不断出错。当你试图通过电子邮件管理项目和人员时，都会遇到同样的故事。一开始觉得，哦，这太棒了。你只需要发一封邮件。但到最后，你会说，该死，那封邮件在哪里？

We just kept dropping the ball. All the same stories of when you try to manage projects and people over email. Go in the beginning, Oh, this is wonderful. You can just send an email. And then at the end of it, you go like, shit, where's that email?

就像我找不到它。哦，你告诉彼得这件事了吗？哦没有，我以为你...然后他没有正确版本的文件。所有当你试图这样做时遇到的常见问题，今天当人们试图通过电子邮件协调项目时仍然会遇到，对吧？所以我们想，嘿，我们正在为客户构建网站，难道我们不能构建一个让这些事情变得更简单的网络软件吗？

Like I can't find it. Oh, did you tell Peter about this? Oh no, I thought you and like he doesn't have the right version of the file. All the usual stuff you get when you try to do that you still get today when people try to coordinate projects over email, right? So we thought, hey, we're building websites for clients, can't we build a piece of web software that would make this stuff easier?

于是我们做到了。当我们开始一个项目时，我说，嘿，这不是客户项目。没有人说你必须使用PHP，必须使用ASP，必须使用Java。没有人强制规定我们必须使用什么技术。我从其他一些我尊重的程序员那里读到过关于Ruby的内容，Dave Thomas、Martin Fowler和其他人一直在行业杂志上写关于这种美妙语言的文章，他们也不能在工作中使用它，但他们用它来解释各种概念。

And so we did. So as we started on a project, I went, hey, this is not a client project. No one is saying you have to use PHP, have to use ASP, you have to use Java. No one is mandating technology we have to use about this. And I had read about Ruby from some other programmers that I respected, Dave Thomas, Martin Fowler and others had been sort of writing in industry magazines about this wonderful language that they also couldn't use at work, but they used it to explain various concepts.

我想，嘿，这是个机会。我可以使用一个全新的编程语言，让我们试试看。我基本上给自己设定了这个挑战。如果在一周内我觉得我能在屏幕上显示出与数据库交互等内容，就足够继续了。如果在一个月内我觉得，好吧，我可以构建所有我实际需要构建像Basecamp这样的东西所需的功能，我们就会做下去。

And I thought, hey, here's a chance. I can use a brand new programming language, let's just give it a try. And I set myself this challenge basically. If within a week I felt like I could get things up on the screen that talk to a database and so forth, it'd be enough to continue. And if within a month I felt like, okay, I can build all the things that I realistically would need to build something like Basecamp, we're going to do it.

当然，我只用了大约三天时间就觉得，哦，我可以在屏幕上显示东西，我可以让一切发生。然后又花了大概四天时间，我就想，是的，如果可能的话，我觉得我再也不需要其他编程语言了。这太棒了。这就像服用LSD之类的感觉。我有一个GIF，里面的人就像大脑被震撼了一样，看到了银河系等等。

And of course it took like three days for me to be like, oh, I can make things come up on the screen, I can make everything happen. And then it took another what four days to go like, yeah, I don't think I need to programming it in any other programming language ever again, if I can help it. This is wonderful. This is like I liken it to sort of take LSD or something. I have this GIF of the guy that just goes like where his mind is blown and he sees the galaxy and so forth.

即使不夸张地说，我当时的感觉就是这样，对吧？这就是我一直以来醒来的意义。这就像手套一样，完美地契合了我的大脑。我只是想，哇，这真是与众不同。而且它如此深奥，我可以不断深入探索。

That was a little without overdramatizing it even more than that, that what I felt like, right? That this is what I've been waking up for. This was the glove and it just fit my brain so perfectly. I just went, wow this is something else. And it's so deep, I can keep pulling on the thread.

上手足够简单，让我没有感到挫败，但又足够深奥，我甚至看不到它的底。我只是不停地深入、深入、再深入。我阅读了越来越多的Ruby标准库。基本上读遍了当时已发布的所有库。就这样一路走下去，发现这真是与众不同的东西。

This was easy enough to get started that I didn't get frustrated, but deep enough that I couldn't even see the bottom. I just kept going and going and going. I read more and more of the standard library for Ruby. I read basically every library that had been released at the time. Just went, this is truly something else.

然后我开始构建。我就这样开始不停地构建、构建、再构建。最初的目的只是为了打造Basecamp。而我发现，就像在尝试组装这张桌子，我能看出这是棵漂亮的树，是我想要用的那种木材，但没有锤子，没有锯子，我得先打造一堆这样的工具，但我觉得，哦，没问题。这太棒了。

And then I started building. I just started building, building, building, building. And the purpose in the beginning was just to build Basecamp. And what I found was, I was trying to put this desk together and okay, I could see sort of like, this is a beautiful tree, like this is the sort I want to use for it, but like there's no hammer, there's no saw, there's like I have to build a bunch of these tools first, but I go like, oh, no problem. This is wonderful.

我玩得非常开心。我不介意必须首先为自己打造所有工具。于是我开始构建所有这些工具，后来它们成为了Web框架Ruby on Rails。这基本上就是我在Ruby中的最初项目。而那时，我已经是一名职业程序员，以每小时15美元的报酬工作了两年。

I'm having such a great time. I don't mind that I have to build all my tools for myself first. So I started building all these tools, which then became the web framework Ruby on Rails. And that was basically my first projects in Ruby. And I'd been a professional programmer as someone paid $15 an hour for two years at the time.

但就在那一刻，你只觉得，这是下一步。真的，说真的，没过多久，也许就几个月，我就意识到，这是我人生中最有趣的经历之一。这是我遇到过的最有回报、最有趣的挑战，需要我去应对和解决。而且每天都有更多。我简直迫不及待地想回到键盘前，提升我的眼光，深入挖掘，变得更好。

But it was just that moment, and you just go like, this is next step. And it really, seriously, it didn't take that long, maybe a couple of months into it where I just went, this is some of the most fun I've ever had in my life. This is some of the most rewarding, interesting challenges I've ever had to tangle and deal with. And there's just more every day. I simply just could not wait to get back to the keyboard and develop my eye, dig deeper, get better.

真的，我感觉自己好像发现了什么不该发现的东西。就像是，这里的好几乎有点过分。我知道程序员可以享受乐趣，但我不知道可以这么好。尤其因为我之前已经以某种形式编程多年，却从未有过那样的感觉。

It was just, I really felt like I found something like you're not supposed to. As in, this is almost too good here. This is like, I knew programmers, I knew they could have fun, but I didn't know it could be this good. Especially because I'd been doing some version of programming for years in advance, and I'd never felt like that.

现在你提到了一些我想深入探讨的事情，因为我喜欢这个故事。首先，对于任何想知道的人，Tim编程吗？我我不是程序员。但顺便说一句，我和Chad Fowler有过一次非常有趣的经历。他和您提到的Martin没有关系，对吧？

Now you mentioned there are a bunch of things I want to dig into because I love this story. So the first is, and and for anyone who's wondering, does Tim program? I I am not a programmer. But I did have, as an aside, a very fun experience with Chad Fowler. He's not related to the Martin that you mentioned, is he?

没有。没有。但我也很了解Chad，他是早期的Ruby开发者之一，人非常棒。

Nope. Nope. But I know Chad, quite well as well, and he's a he was one of the early Ruby guys and really great guy.

他让我坐下，带我过了一遍基础内容——这大概是在我们第一次在RailsConf见面之后。他通过将他说的印地语与Ruby进行对比，带我了解了Ruby的基础知识。由于我有一些人类自然语言的经验，他能够通过这种方式引导我理解，而且他讲解的方式确实让我明白了。我的问题是，你之前提到过，大概三天就能让它（指编程语言）与数据库对话，对吧？

And he sat me down to walk me through this was probably this is after we first met at at RailsConf. He sat me down to walk me through the basics of Ruby, comparing it to a language that he speaks, which is Hindi. And because I have some human natural language experience, he was able to sort of walk me through it doing that, and it's and it it it made sense, I mean, the way he presented it. My question to you is, you you, had talked about three days to be able to get it to talk get something to talk to database. Right?

然后四天、五天就知道你可以构建东西了。这是一个典型的时间线，还是说这是一种从一种语言切换到另一种语言的‘美丽心灵’式时间线？因为如果我想，比如从西班牙语转到葡萄牙语，可能因为它们非常非常相似，对吧？但如果你是从西班牙语转到日语，你差不多得从头开始，要能流利使用一门新的自然语言会花长得多的时间。

And then four days, five days to know that you can build things. Is that a typical timeline, or is that a, sort of a beautiful mind timeline for going from one language to another? Because if I think about, say, going from maybe, Spanish to Portuguese, maybe because it's they're very, very similar. Right? But if you're going from Spanish to Japanese, you kinda start from scratch, and it would take a lot longer to get conversant in a new natural language.

但编程语言是怎么运作的呢？还有，你这么快就学会了Ruby，算是个特例吗？

But how do programming languages work? And and are you an anomaly in having picked up Ruby so quickly?

我不认为我有多特别，因为就像自然语言一样，它们也分语言家族。所以拉丁语系的语言或任何其他语系，你在它们之间切换会比跳到像日语这样完全不同的语言家族容易得多，对吧？因此从一开始，编程中的大多数概念往往有一个核心集合——一旦你理解了条件语句、变量等等，你就有了一个很好的基础，对吧？也许这有点像先学了拉丁语，然后再尝试学习其他语言。而Ruby真正有趣的地方在于，据我所知，它并没有提出任何一个全新的想法。

I don't think I'm that much of an anomaly because like natural languages, they're kind of families of languages. And so Latin languages or whatever, you can jump from one to another with much greater ease than if you jump to a completely different family of languages like Japanese, for example, right? So all from the get go, most of the concepts in programming tend to be, there's this core set of concepts that once you understand conditionals and variables and so on and so forth, you kind of have a good baseline, right? And perhaps that is kind of like learning Latin and then trying to learn other languages from there. And then Ruby really was interesting in the way that it wasn't it didn't come up with a single new idea as far as I really know.

它所做的是像一张大师级的混音带。它是之前所有编程语言中最棒的热门金曲，由你听过的最厉害的DJ混合在一起。然后你就会觉得，哦，是的，我认得这里所有的单曲，但我从未听过它们像这样组合在一起。我从未听过，哦，如果你这样加快节奏，它们就流畅地融合在一起，这完全是一种新的体验。所以我不断认出它的各个方面，哦，这有点类似那个，但哇，他们选择表达的方式真是太棒了。

What it did was it was like the master mixtape. It was the greatest hits of all the programming languages that went before it, mixed together by the most amazing DJ you've ever heard. And you go like, oh yeah, I recognize all the individual numbers here, but I've never heard them composed together like this. I've never heard like, oh, if you speed up the beat like this, so they just flow together, it's just, it's a new experience. So I kept recognizing all these angles of it, oh, this is kind of similar to that, but woah, what a way they've chosen to express it.

所以上手相当容易，我认为这是Ruby真正成功的领域之一：对于许多有编程经验的程序员来说，它立刻让人感到熟悉。

So the onboarding was quite easy and I think that's one of the areas of real success that Ruby has had is that for a lot of programmers who've had some experience with programming, it instantly feels familiar.

对，切换成本确实很低。

Right, the switching cost Yes, is really

入门门槛相当低。我的意思是，要成为任何领域的专家仍然需要很长时间，而且我确实对人们抱有不切实际的期望有些看法，尤其是如今关于成为专家需要多长时间的认知。但入门、掌握一些基础、尝到甜头、预览这门语言的可能性，就像是坐下来观看世界上最精彩的预告片。你会觉得，哦，这两分钟让我真的很想看完整部电影。

it's quite low to at least get started. I mean to become an expert at anything still takes a long time and I certainly have thoughts on unrealistic expectations that people have, especially these days about how long it takes to become an expert. But to get started and to get a hold of something and get a taste, get a preview of what this could be. It was like getting sit down and then watch the world's greatest trailer. Like you're like, Oh, in two minutes I really want to see the rest of this movie.

虽然看完电影可能还需要两个半小时，但仅仅那两分钟就足以让我对后续内容狂热不已。我认为在学习新语言时，当你遇到既有些熟悉又带来挑战的东西时就是这样。我当然不了解Ruby中融合的所有概念，但我懂得足够多，不至于完全陌生。这不是一个全新的概念，我不需要抛弃所有已知知识来接纳它。

Like it's still gonna take two and a half hours to watch the rest of the movie, but like just those two minutes was enough to get me fanatically excited about what was going on. And I think in terms of learning that new language, when you see something that's both that has some recognition and it also challenges you in some ways. I didn't certainly know all the concepts that were mixed into Ruby, but I knew enough that it wasn't totally foreign. It wasn't a brand new concept. I didn't have to throw out everything that I knew to adopt it.

我想这可能是其他更激进的编程语言如Lisp甚至Smalltalk的不同之处——它们的运作方式更加彻底，对吧？从某种角度说更纯粹。Ruby不是非常纯粹的语言，正如我说过的，它像是DJ打碟——一种混音语言。

I think that's where perhaps some other programming languages that were more radical like Lisp or even Smalltalk and the way those languages work, they were far more radical, right? Which in some ways is more pure. Ruby is not a very pure language. It's as I said, it's a DJ language. It's a remixed language.

它混合了所有经典元素。从这个意义上说，Ruby并没有太多原创内容。但这正是我所在领域运作的方式：当你试图应用那种完全单一的理念时，它往往因为缺乏弹性而不适用。而Ruby极具延展性。

It's a mix up of just all the greatest hits. RWBY didn't come up with very much original content in that sense. But that's really how the world, at least that I operate in works. That when you try to apply sort of that perfectly singular idea, it usually doesn't fit because it doesn't bend, doesn't stretch. Ruby really bends.

Ruby的灵活性让它能以优雅从容的方式适应各种不同场景。你可以拿任何单一语言比如Lisp或Smalltalk，应用于特别适合的某个问题，然后觉得：针对这个特定问题，这大概是世界上最好的语言。但问题在于适用范围较窄。当你试图将这种'世界最佳'理念应用于其他问题时，它可能变成最糟糕的选择，或者显得很别扭。

Ruby really stretches such that it covers all sorts of different scenarios with just an elegance and a grace on the long timeline. You can take any one individual language and you say, oh Lisp or Smalltalk and you can apply it to one problem that fits it really well and you go like, okay, was that one problem? This probably is the best language in the world. It's just, the problem is a little narrow. And then if you try to apply that same best in the world idea to another problem, it becomes sometimes the worst ideal idea in the world, or it becomes just kind of awkward.

而Ruby则是非常非常出色——可能在任何单项任务上都不是世界最佳，但凭借其灵活性和精妙的融合能力，它在众多不同领域都表现卓越。我发现这种特质贯穿于我感兴趣的许多事物中。比如用Ruby构建的Basecamp产品，我们在任何单项功能上都不是最优秀的，但Basecamp就像是优秀工具的DJ混音版。

Where with Ruby, it was just really, really good. Never perhaps the best in the world on any individual task, but so flexible, so well remixed that it was just exceptionally good at a lot of different things. And I find that trait to be something that runs as a line through a lot of the things I get interested in. With Basecamp for example, the product that I built with Ruby, we were never the best at any individual thing. Basecamp is a DJ remix of the best tools.

就像：我们有聊天功能、留言板、各种组件，它们有机组合后提供完整解决方案，对吧？不仅仅是追求单项世界最佳。Ruby on Rails框架也是如此——它在任何单一领域都不是世界第一，但就像DJ混音母带，能带来完美契合的体验。联系到我们讨论的赛车，如果我分析自己作为赛车手的优势，从来不是排位赛那种类型。

Like, oh, we got chat, we got message boards, we got all these different things, then they'd fit together and then it offers a solution, right? Not just like, I'm just going to be the best in the world, is one thing. I thought the same thing with Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails as a framework isn't the best in the world at any one thing, but it's a DJ remix master tape for like, oh, let's have a great evening and it's really going to fit well and it's going to work out great. And to tie it to the racing we've been talking about, I am if I look at the strengths I have as a race car driver, they were never like qualifying.

我永远无法完成一个完美的单圈，部分原因是我脑子里一直有个该死的声音在说我该如何改进，这有时意味着我会越界，实际上反而退步了。但我真正擅长的是长距离耐力赛，在车流中比赛，不断应对新情况，需要改变路线或调整策略。那时我才更接近赛车界的巅峰，而不仅仅是单一地擅长某一方面。我试图将这一点应用到我的生活中，也就是说，我不只有一件真正热爱或感兴趣的事情。我不是那种把所有精力都放在工作上、每周必须工作120个小时、只专注于一件事的人。

I could never put together the one perfect lap, in part because I kept having that damn dialogue running in my head of how I can improve things, which sometimes mean I step over the line and I actually regress. But where I was really good was long form endurance racing where I had to race in traffic, where I constantly had to deal with something new and have to alter my line or vary things. That was when I got much closer to the peak of the racing community, rather than just being singularly good in that one thing. And I've tried to apply that in my life in general, as in I don't just have one thing that I'm really passionate or interested about. I'm not like, oh, it's all about work and I have to work on base camp one hundred and twenty hours a week and it's all that.

不。我喜欢在Basecamp工作，喜欢研究Ruby on Rails，喜欢开赛车，喜欢陪伴家人，我还迷上了摄影。有很多事情你可以做，好吧，不是很多，但有一些事情你可以做，并且可以做得非常好。

Nope. I like working on base camp. I like working on Ruby on Rails. I like driving a race car, I like spending time with family, I've gotten into photography. There's a lot of things you can do, well not a lot of things, there's some of things you can do and then you can do those things really well.

我觉得是八二开的事情，我更愿意用100%的努力获得100%的回报，对吧？好吧，如果你想成为世界上最好中的最好，你必须付出100%的努力才能达到。我只是觉得那没什么意思。我宁愿有五件事，每件事都能做到前80%的水平。

I think eightytwenty thing where I'd much rather have you can get 100% for 100% of the effort, right? Okay, fine. If you want to be the very, very, very best in the world, you have to spend 100% of you to get there. I just find that uninteresting. I'd rather have five things where I'm like in the top eightieth percentile.

我想强调这一点，因为我认为这是一个非常重要的观点，许多人和我讨论过这个问题，我认为这是一个值得向听众们突出的模式。那就是，如果你想要——Scott Adams，《呆伯特》的创作者，在他的博客上写过这个，我认为这是职业建议。他说，实现所谓的伟大的选择大致有两种。第一种是尝试成为某个特定领域的迈克尔·乔丹，这极其困难，而且成功的概率看起来并不高。当然，我是在转述。

I want to underscore that because I think it's a really important point and it's something that a number of folks have spoken about with me, and it's it's a pattern, I think, worth highlighting for for those people listening. And that is if you want to Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, wrote about this, on his blog as I think it's just career advice. He said that either your options for achieving greatness, so to speak, are sort of number one and number two. Number one is trying to become the Michael Jordan of one specific domain, and that's extremely difficult, and your probabilities just don't look very good. And I'm paraphrasing, of course.

但第二种选择是结合不寻常的技能，在这些技能上你处于顶尖，就像你说的，比如前20%或15%，那么你就会变得极其有价值。对吧？这可以应用到赛车上，也可以应用到不仅仅是人，还有工具，就像你提到的Basecamp和Ruby。马克·安德森也谈过这一点，他当然创造了不止一两件令人印象深刻的事情，并且作为投资者重塑了自己。

But option number two is to combine unusual skills where you're in the top, like you said, the top, say, 20% or 15%, then you become extremely valuable. Right? And that can apply to racing. That can apply to not only people, but tools, like you mentioned, Basecamp, Ruby. And Mark Andreessen has also talked about this, who's who's, of course, created more than a handful of of impressive things and has reinvented himself as an investor.

但是，在这个特定案例中，CEO们，他的例子是结合了多个可能看似不相干领域的前15%、前20%的技能。对吧？所以，也许他们本科是物理学位，然后读了MBA，或者物理学位加法律学位，或者任何组合，比如经济和计算机科学。顺便一提，你关于Ruby的评论让我想到了游戏，我肯定会搞错这个，但‘易于学习，难于精通’，我相信这也是雅达利的Bushnell定律，说的是一个好游戏应该易于学习，难于精通。而Ruby本身，我有个问题，Ruby是什么，或者是谁？我本可以在维基百科上查，但既然你在这里，Ruby是什么或谁，然后你为什么用‘on Rails’这个词？

But the, CEOs in this particular case and his example being combinations of, say, top 15, top 20% in a number of fields that might be viewed as disparate. Right? So for perhaps they have a physics degree undergrad than an MBA or a physics degree and then a law degree or whatever the combination might be, econ and computer science. Quick thing, and and there's a what you said about Ruby made me think of gaming actually, and I'm gonna bastardize this, I'm sure, but the easy to learn, hard to master, and, I believe that's also Bushnell's law from Atari, which was a good game, is easy to learn, hard to master. And, Ruby itself, I had a question on what is and I I could look this up on Wikipedia, but since I have you here, what or who is Ruby, and then why did you use the the words on Rails?

是的。首先，我完全同意这一点。就像，这是理想状态，无论是对于Basecamp、Ruby还是Rails，所有我正在做的事情。这种观念认为，事物应该是友好的。世界上有那么多好想法，但需要付出巨大的努力才能理解它们。

Yeah. So first, I'd say that absolutely agree with that. Like, that is the ideal, both for Basecamp and for Ruby and for Rails, all the things I'm working on. This notion that things should be welcoming. Like there are so many good ideas in the world that are good ideas, but require an immense amount of effort to penetrate.

很多德国哲学家浮现在脑海中，他们有些真正深刻的哲学思想被埋藏在几乎难以理解的非人类语言描述之下，对吧？就像这些智慧需要人们去解码才能提取出来。我觉得这完全没必要。最好的东西，那些我真正感兴趣的东西，都是平易近人的。比如学习Ruby编程，甚至开赛车，或者我从事过的摄影等其他事情。

Lots of German philosophers come to mind where like there's some truly profound ideas about philosophy buried under an almost impenetrable description of them in non human language form, right? Like it really has to be decoded by people to extract that wisdom. I find that to be just unnecessary. Like the best things, the things that I get really interested in, like they're approachable. You can get in into say programming Ruby or even driving a race car or any of these other things that I've done into photography.

它们都相当容易上手，而且从未像现在这样容易接触，但要精通仍然非常困难，对吧？这正是有趣的部分——一开始你受到足够的鼓励继续深入探索，然后它就会变得越来越深入。我得说，我放弃的那些领域没有做到这一点，没有施展所有技巧，比如我曾经用PHP工作。PHP特别容易上手，在当时可能是在信息系统方面最容易入门的编程环境。

They're quite approachable and they've never been more approachable, but they're still really hard to get good at, right? And that's the fun part that you're encouraged enough in the beginning to keep pulling on the thread. And then it just goes deeper and deeper and deeper. And I'd say that some of those domains that I left behind that for me didn't do it for me, didn't pull all the tricks were like I had worked in PHP for example. PHP is exceptionally approachable and even more so at the time, probably the most approachable of all the programming environments if you want to work on an information system.

绝对令人惊叹，真的是一个台阶，对吧？在那个方面是世界上最好的。但后来我发现，至少对当时的我来说，这并不是反思——因为我知道这会引起激烈争论——而是对事物现状的反映。我们就说那是过去的情况吧。深度不够。

Just absolutely spectacular, really a step, right? Best in the world on that aspect of it. But then I found just for me at the time, this is not a reflection because I know it's just a firestorm that's going start otherwise, reflection of how things are. Let's just say that that's cabinet to how things used to be. The threat wasn't that deep.

你无法持续深入太久，直到感觉好像，好吧，我到这里就到头了。这正是Ruby真正激励我的地方，让我继续坚持下去的是你可以不断深入，它会变得越来越好，对吧？就像它一开始就有一个惊人的预告片，然后电影从未停止。现在我完全忘记最初的问题了。

You couldn't pull for that long until you kind of felt like, okay, I reached the end of the bucket here. That was what really inspired me with Ruby and to keep going with that was you could just keep pulling and it would just it would keep getting better, right? Like it already started out with this amazing trailer and like the movie just never stopped. Now I totally forgot the original question.

那是因为我的问题像是有17个部分。我在最后问了你关于Ruby的起源，比如它是根据谁或什么命名的，然后你是怎么使用Rails的，为什么选择Rails。

Well that's because my question was like a 17 parter. I asked you the at the very tail end, I asked about the origins of Ruby, like who or what was it named after, and then how you used on rails, why you used on rails.

当然。当然。是的。这很有趣，因为它确实与许多重叠和相互关联的趋势联系在一起，即使它们应用于不同的规模和领域。Ruby这个名字本身是一种混搭，Rails实际上也是，但我们先说说Ruby。

Sure. Sure. Yeah. So it's funny because it really ties to so many of each trends that are overlapping and interlinked even when they're applied at different scales and the different domains. The name Ruby itself is a kind of a remix and so is Rails actually, but let's take Ruby first.

我知道Ruby的日本创造者松本行弘受到Perl的启发。之前的这种语言提供了灵感，但甚至连名字本身也提供了灵感。

I know that Mats, the Japanese creator of Ruby was inspired by Pearl. The language that went before it served as an inspiration, but even the name itself served as inspiration.

C E R L，对吧？

C E R L, right?

是的，没错。然后他说，哦，这是个短名字。挺酷的。虽然珍珠严格来说不算石头，但可以说它是一种珍贵的宝石吧。有没有其他类似的短名字，属于同一个家族的？

Yeah, exactly. And he went like, oh, it's a short name. That's cool. It's kind of a precious, I guess you should say stone, though I guess a pearl is not a stone, but it's a precious stone of some sort. Is there another word like that that's also short that's kind of in the same family?

某种程度上是在向Ruby之前的事物以及Ruby汲取灵感的地方致敬和表示尊重。Ruby我想是95年诞生的，可能我记得好像是，甚至他93年就开始开发了。但至少第一个版本我相信是95年发布的。所以它已经存在二十一年了，而Matz仍在致力于这门语言，这真是令我无比钦佩、尊重并向往的一点——坚持长远。不是踢一脚球就跑出房间，而是长期坚持到底，对吧？

Was kind of paying homage and respect to the things that went before Ruby and where Ruby drew its inspiration. So Ruby was born I think in '95, maybe seem to remember, maybe he even started working on it already in '93. But the first release at least I believe was '95. So it's been around for twenty one years and Matt is still working on the language, which is just something else I truly admire, respect and aspire to, which is going to distance. Not just kicking off a ball and then running out of the room, but sticking with it over the long, long haul, right?

就像我现在已经和Basecamp合作十二年了，用Ruby十四年了。我的意思是，你看到的这些努力占据了我成年后大部分的经历。我现在甚至玩赛车也有十年了。一方面，确实起步很快就上手了，但我已经坚持了十年。它仍然是一个重要的爱好和追求。

Like I've been working with Basecamp now for twelve years, with Ruby for fourteen. I mean, you're looking at endeavors that like most of my adult experience have been with these tools. I've been even race car driving now. It's like on the one hand, yeah, got started quickly and got going, but I've been going at it now for ten years. It's still a key hobby and pursuit.

我真的很喜欢深入挖掘并持续探索，就像我们说的，对吧？我就是不停地探索，不断发现更有趣的新东西。总之，Rails也是一样。所以显然我们有了Ruby，对吧？然后我就想，好吧，我们来玩转这个。

I really like just digging deep and keep scratching as we said, right? Like I just keep scratching, keep finding new things that are more interesting. Anyway, the same thing with Rails. So obviously we had Ruby, right? And I was like, okay, let's play off that.

让我们用一个R来向它致敬。就像我也想要一个以R开头的东西。当时Ruby的灵感之一其实是一个叫Struts的Java网页框架，它在某些方面可能更多的是负面灵感而非正面灵感。就像是，哦，框架这个概念总体上很有趣，但我真的不喜欢它的实现方式。我基本上想在很多方面做与它相反的事情。

Let's pay some homage to that with an R. Like I want to have something that starts with an R too. And one of the inspirations at the time of Ruby was actually a Java web framework called Struts, which in some ways was more of a negative inspiration perhaps than a positive inspiration. It was like, oh, this is really interesting, like the concept of frameworks in general, but I really don't like how this is done. I really want to do basically the opposite of what this is doing in a whole different lots of areas.

但我发现这通常和你想要复制的东西一样是宝贵的灵感。看着某样东西说‘哦，那是我不想做的，那是我不想成为的样子’同样有价值。我从那些我认为做法极其愚蠢或糟糕的公司工作中学到的关于运营公司的知识，可能比试图模仿好公司学到的还要多。所以在某些领域，我认为审视不奏效的事物并尝试从中吸取教训，比只看成功案例甚至更重要。

But I find that's often just as valuable inspiration as the things you want to clone. It is just as valuable to look at something and say, Oh, that's what I don't want to do. That's what I don't want to be. I've learned perhaps more about running a say a company from working at companies that did things that I thought were absolutely boneheaded, stupid or whatever than I learned from trying to emulate good companies. So in some domains, think it's even more important to look at things that don't work and try to extract lessons from that rather than to look at things that do work.

不管怎样，Struts 这个名字有种建筑结构的感觉，对吧？我的意思是，哦，这挺酷的，然后我转向 R，比如 Rails，感觉有点类似，它有一些有趣的玩法，比如，哦，你把开发放在 Rails 上，它就会快速前进等等。然后我去了当时用来注册域名的网站，试了 rails.com，已被注册。哦，该死，我拿不到 rails.com。Rails.org，不行，也被注册了。

In any case, struts have kind of this construction feel to it, right? And I mean like, oh that's kind of cool and then I went R like, oh rails, like that's kind of similar, like it has some fun plays on like, oh, you you kind of put your development on Rails that it kind of just goes, it's fast and so forth. And then I went to whatever site I was using to reserve domain names back then, I went rails.com, taken. Oh, damn, I can't get rails.com. Rails.org, nope, taken.

Rails.net，不行，被注册了。Rails. 所有其他各种后缀，都被注册了，注册了，注册了，注册了，注册了，对吧？就像所有这些单数词早就被注册光了。然后我就想，哦，好吧。

Rails.net, nope, taken. Rails. All sorts of other things, taken, taken, taken, taken, taken, right? Like all those singular words were already taken long since. And then I went like, oh, okay.

嗯，我想我需要一个域名。那就 Ruby on rails 吧。哦。是空的。Rubyonrails.com。

Well, I guess I need a domain name. Ruby on rails then. Oh. Free. Rubyonrails.com.

就这样

That's

于是就成了。

and there you go.

所以它最终就叫这个名字了，并非出于其他原因。我的意思是，我最终其实更喜欢这个名字，因为它更向 Ruby 致敬。在某种意义上，它更加凸显了 Ruby，因为对我来说，Rails 的核心使命就是向世界介绍 Ruby。Rails 部分是让人们发现 Ruby 是一门多么美妙的编程语言的工具。所以我很高兴能把这一点融入名字中，这后来就成了一件标志性的事情。

So that's how it ended up with the name, not out of any other I mean, I ended up actually liking it even better, because it paid even more homage to Ruby. It was even more differential to it in the sense that Rails for me really is about introducing the rest of the world to Ruby. That was the main mission. The Rails part was a vehicle to get people to discover what a wonderful programming language that Ruby is. So loved that I could fit that as part of the name and that kind of became a thing.

你提到了从反面例子中学习。这当然可以应用到很多领域。我知道有些人，事实上，在高中甚至大学教写作时，会让学生阅读非常糟糕的写作范例，因为比起弄懂好作品为什么好，识别出他们不喜欢什么要更容易。让我们看看商业领域。所以你来到了美国。

You mentioned learning from bad examples. This can be applied to a lot of domains, of course. And I know people, in fact, who teach writing in high schools or even colleges by having their students read examples of really bad writing because it's easier to identify what they don't like as opposed to figure out why the good writing works. Let's look at business. So you you come to The US.

你当时和Jason一起工作，在37signals（现在的Basecamp）。你们有哪些与众不同的做法？

You're working with Jason. And at the time, 37 signals now Basecamp. What do you guys do differently?

这是个很宽泛的问题，我会尝试用更好的方式来回答。可以说，早期激励我们想要这样做、想要和Jason一起经营自己的公司并自己掌控方向的原因之一，是我们有机会从第一性原理重新评估一切。我觉得之前工作过的企业中有太多运作机制都是盲目照搬的，比如'哦，事情就是这样做的'、'我们就是这么做的'、'其他公司也是这么做的'。

That's a broad question that I'll try to answer in a better way where It is. By saying that one of the early inspirations for wanting to do this, wanting to work at my own company with Jason, where we would call the shots, was that we would get a chance to reevaluate everything from first principle. That I felt that there was so much of the mechanics of the businesses I had worked in before that was just mindlessly copied from, Oh, that's just the way things are. That's just how we're doing things. Like that's how other companies do things.

就好像这是你应该做事的方式。但我看到了太多这种错误应用或不当复制的情况，让我不禁想：我不这么认为。也许这在某个时间、某个地点、某种背景下是个好主意，但它已经完全失去了与'好'的联系，现在变成了一个非常糟糕的想法。所以我们要经营自己的公司，尽可能从第一性原理评估一切。

Like that's how you're supposed to do things. And I just saw enough of those misapplications or wrongful copies where I just went like, I don't think so. Like maybe this was a good idea somewhere at some time in some context, but it's lost all connection to goodness. And now it's just a really terrible idea. So we're going to run our own company, we're going to evaluate everything from as much as we can, from first principle.

从我们如何招聘、如何发展、如何做营销、如何开发产品、如何决定要做什么项目，所有事情都是如此。不是说我们不能从他人那里获得灵感，但我们要不断剥开表层，直到触及第一性原理。从第一性原理来看，这是个好主意吗？你这里到底有没有原则？很多人只是克隆技巧。

Everything from like how we hire, how we grow, how we do marketing, how we work on products, how we decide what we're going to work on. It's not that we can't be inspired by others, but let's just try to keep peeling back until we get to the first principle. Is this in first principle a good idea? Do you have any principles here at all, right? Like a lot of people just clone techniques.

他们不克隆原则。所以他们不审视原则，也不清楚自己希望这些原则是什么，除了那些过于宽泛的、毫无意义的口号，比如'我们想为世界做好事'之类任何人都会同意的空话。我关心的原则和方向，通常是那些理性的人可能会有不同意见的事情。我觉得这是个非常有趣的观点。

They don't clone principles. So they don't examine principles and they aren't clear about what they want those principles to be, except that they're these overly broad, oh, we want to do good work for world or whatever, meaningless things that anyone would agree to. The only kinds of principles and direction that I care about are the things where reasonable people could disagree, generally speaking. I think that that was such an interesting point.

理性的人可能会有不同意见。你能详细说明一下吗？

Where reasonable people can disagree. Could you elaborate on that?

是的，我认为当你说的话有意义时，是因为有人会持相反立场。如果这个观点没有对立面，那我说的就不是什么有趣的东西。如果我说'人最重要'，好吧，谁会不同意呢？基本上就是那些财富500强公司励志海报上的内容——没有人会说出相反的观点，对吧？

Yeah, I think where you're saying something that is meaningful because someone else would take the opposite side of it. Like if there's not an opposite side of this bet, I'm not saying something interesting. If I'm saying like people matters most, okay, who's going to disagree with that? Basically anything that's on a corporate fortune 500 motivational poster. Like you'd go like no one would say the opposite, right?

你读这些使命宣言时就会觉得，你什么都没说，因为你没有约束自己的观点。你没有限制世界的范围。如果你不限制世界范围，那你在做什么？为什么要试图制定这个？

And you read these mission statements and you go like, you're not saying anything because you're not constraining your view. You're not constraining the world. And if you're not constraining the world, what are you doing? Why are you trying to draw this up?

不仅如此，在某种程度上，我的意思是你在扮演科学家的角色。对吧？我认为优秀的工程师和程序员往往都有这种视角，通过这个视角看待事物，就好像如果这不是一个可证伪的假设，那就只是在做无用功。你只是在——

Only that but in a way, I mean you're acting as scientist. Right? And I think that good engineers and good programmers tend to have that lens through which they view things in so much as like if if it's not a falsifiable hypothesis, it's like it's just like, what are you doing? You're just

完全正确。我认为这一直是驱动力原则之一，至少对我来说是这样。有时我们内部会为此争论，但对我来说科学方法就是黄金标准。它并不适用于所有情况下的所有事情，但对我来说在大多数情况下适用于大多数事情。如果我找不到方法让我们正在做的事情或相信的事情有一个可证伪的版本，就像'哦，你相信的东西实际上并不奏效'，对吧？

Exactly. I think that has been one of the driving principles, at least for me. And sometimes we do argue about this internally, but the scientific method for me is just such a gold standard. It doesn't apply for everything in all cases always, but for me it applies for most things most of the time. And if I cannot find ways where either what we're doing or what we believe has a falsifiable version of it, where it's a like, oh, well what you believe actually didn't work, right?

如果我们无法得出那个结论，那它就不是一个值得相信的有趣事物。因为那样要么任何人都可以相信它，要么它实际上并没有驱动你的行动。如果这个原则能让你看到硬币的两面，那它就没有帮助你做出决策。这才是我真正想要的。我想要一个框架来帮助我做出决策，特别是越艰难的决定越有趣。

If we can't arrive at that conclusion, it's not an interesting thing to believe. Because then either anyone would believe it or it's not actually driving your actions. Because if this principle can lead you to both sides of the coin, then it's not helping you make decisions. And that's really what I want. I want a framework to help me make decisions and especially the tougher the call, the more interesting it is.

因为那才是我们取得进步的地方。这一直是我感兴趣的事情，即将Basecamp公司本身作为一个产品来完善，我们可以调整、优化并让它变得更好——Jason和我拥有这家公司，为我们所有的员工和所有客户服务。这再次体现了系统思维，我们试图改进系统并以某种方式优化它，让我们在更多时间为更多人做更多好事。如果你不衡量这一点，如果你不以科学的态度对待它，你可能会偶然成功。很多人偶然创建了所谓的伟大公司，因为他们只有一个想法，有些运气或者其他什么刚好奏效，然后其他方面就不重要了。

Because that's where we make progress. And that's always been what I've been interested in, in sort of refining Basecamp the company as being a product in itself that we could tweak and tune and optimize and make better Jason and I owning the company, for all the employees that we have and for all the customers that we have. And it's again, it's the system thinking that we're trying to improve the system and optimise it in such a way that we do more good for more people more of the time. And if you're not measuring that, if you're not being scientific about it, you might stumble into it. Lots of people stumble into quote unquote a great company because they have just one idea, they have some luck or they have something else that just works and then kind of the rest of it doesn't matter.

那对我来说并不那么有趣。我当然承认我们也有过自己的运气，确实如此。但我也认为，让我这些年来持续前进的不只是'哦，我们曾经幸运过一次'。有趣的部分在于我们不断探索：公司今年怎么能比去年更好——如果你追溯到37signals十七年前的起源。

That's not so interesting to me. I mean sure we've had our fair share of luck, course we have. But I also think that the thing that keeps me going after all these years was not just like, oh, we got lucky once. It's the interesting part of we keep scratching. How can the company be better this year than it was the well if you take it all the way to the origin of 37 signals seventeen years ago.

这其中有趣的是，这也不是一条直线，还存在倒退。所以对我来说，从构建Basecamp第一版的四个人，到今天运营公司的五十人，这一过程非常迷人。这很有趣，因为大多数人会看着说'哦，你们50人运营Basecamp，这公司小得可笑'，而对我来说这就像一个庞大的组织。因为我的起源是，或许在某种程度上我的偏好是，一个精心组建的小型组织。

And what's interesting in that too is that it's not just a straight line either, There are regressions. So it's been fascinating for me to go from the four people who built the first version of Basecamp, to the 50 people who today run the company. Which it's funny because I mean most people would look at that like, oh you're 50 people running Basecamp, like that's a laughably small company and to me it's like this huge organisation. Because my origins was, and perhaps to some extent my preferences are a smaller thing put together really well.

好的，所以我肯定会再回到'美与优雅'或仅仅是'美与优雅'作为概念这个话题。但既然你提到了，我想先问你，这本来也是我的问题之一。你们公司对员工人数有上限吗？换句话说，Basecamp是否规定不超过X人？或者有这方面的考虑吗？

And do you, so I'm definitely going to come back to the beauty and elegance or just beauty and elegance as concepts. But I wanna ask you first since you brought it up, and this was going to be one of my questions anyway. Do you guys have a cap on the number of employees that you want to have at the company? In other words, base camp not to exceed x number of people. Or is there any thinking along those lines?

如果有的话

And if so

我认为这更像是一个原则：在不对无法完成的事情感到疏忽的前提下，尽可能保持小规模。比如说，现在有50人很好，但如果只有30人却不去回复客户邮件呢？如果你不想回应反馈，公司确实可以更小，可能产品照样能卖出去，但这似乎是一种疏忽。所以我希望在不造成疏忽的前提下尽可能精简。当然，在某种程度上这可能不是个科学的说法，因为这如何证伪呢？

I think it's more a principle of let's try to stay as small as we possibly can while still not feeling negligent about the things that we cannot do. Like it's all good and well to say, oh you're 50 people now, like what if we were 30 people and we just like didn't answer customers emails? You can be a smaller company if you just don't wanna respond to feedback and you might still sell your product and so forth, but that seems negligent. So I wanna be as small as is not negligent to be. And of course like that, I mean, to some extent perhaps that's not a scientific statement because how is that falsifiable?

但我们有一种感觉，相对于我们客户数量、工作产出以及参与的开源项目而言，我们远比常规标准要小得多。我看到很多规模是我们数倍的公司，我就在想，那些额外的精力都用到哪里去了？我看不到，它们并不明显。也许是在幕后，而且人们总是容易在不知道全貌的情况下，用对自己有利的方式进行比较。但我认为，努力优化公司使其成为你最好的产品，这个理念仍然有其价值。

But there's just a sense that we can be much smaller than what the standard operating procedure is for a company of our number of customers, for the amount of work and output that we produce for all the open source that we're involved with, we are definitely far, far smaller than the norm. I see lots of companies, many times our size where I go, where is that effort going? Like I'm not seeing it, it's not visible. Maybe it's behind the scenes and it's always easy to compare yourself in flattering ways to stories where you don't know the full backstory. But I think there's still something to be said from the idea of just trying to optimise your company to be your best product.

如果你这样做，然后重新调整，比如我写代码时，写好代码的一个基本原则，就像写好散文一样，是删除不必要的词语、段落和复杂化。就拿公司政策举例，很多公司有各种复杂的开支政策，关于如何证明费用报告合理等等，而我们想的是，有没有办法不用这些？我们有一个长期政策是：当你被Basecamp录用时，你会得到一张信用卡，政策就是明智地使用它。就这样。

And if you do that, then rejigging it and I look at for example, when I write code, Like one of the cheap principles of writing good code, as it is about writing good prose, to remove needless words, remove needless paragraphs, remove needless complication. And for example, with companies there's, let's just say policies, for example. Lots of companies have all sorts of elaborate policies on spending, on how you can justify expense reports and so on and so forth, where we should like, there a way we can get away without that? And one of the enduring policies we've had is when you get hired at Basecamp, you get a credit card, and the policy is spend it wisely. The end.

然后，好吧，如果需要的话，把收据转发到一个我们没人看的邮箱，以防被审计之类。这不是一个完美的解决方案，没有把每笔开支追踪到极致。如果真被审计，可能会有一些对不上的地方，到时候再处理。相比而言，你节省了管理和复杂性，这还只是一个小例子。但想象一下在100件事情上都做这样的选择，突然之间，你消除的复杂性会叠加起来，整个事情就变得简单多了，对吧？

And then okay, forward receipts, if they're on email to this email address that we have that no one looks at, but just in case we get audited or something. And then that's not a perfect solution, doesn't track every expense to the ninth degree. And if we do get audited, there might be some discrepancies where things don't line up 100% and you deal with it then. Compared to what you sort of just save an overhead and complexity of, and it's not just about this thing, that's just one small thing. But imagine making that choice on 100 things, All of a sudden, the amount of complexity you get rid of just compounds and the whole thing ends up being so much easier, right?

因为如果你观察公司和公司增长，如果你是4个人，又雇了4个人，生产力可能提升接近100%，但很可能达不到。可能更接近50%或类似。如果你已经有50人，再雇20人，还能再提升50%吗？绝对不可能。可能只有5%、7%？

Because if you look at companies and you look at company growth, if you're four people and you hire four more people, maybe you get close to 100% improvement in productivity, but probably not. Probably more like 50% or whatever, right? If you're already 50 people and you hire another 20 people, are you getting like another 50% again? Absolutely not. You're getting what 5%, 7%?

就像复杂性曲线不是线性的。当你通过人员、流程或政策使公司变得更复杂时，为实现整体目标所带来的边际效益会迅速下降。这是我在个人层面一直感兴趣的事情之一——我们如何保持最高效率？在某些情况下，这种做法有时会走向极端。

Like the complexity curve is not linear. When you make your company more complex, either through people or processes or policies, the marginal benefit to sort of the overall thing you're trying to accomplish just drops really quickly. So that's one of the things that I've just on a personal level has been interested in. Like how can we maintain maximum efficiency? And to some extent and in some situations that's gone too far.

比如我有时会追求最高效率，甚至超出了合理范围。可以说在最初我们完全没有资金，只有四个人的时候，我们必须保持最高效率，因为没有别人的钱可以花。我们只能使用自己的收入，因此只能相应地发展。但现在我们处于不同的阶段，或许可以承受一定的宽松度。

Like I've been pursuing maximum efficiency sometimes beyond the point of what's reasonable. Can say like when in the beginning we had zero money at all and we had to be just four people and so forth, we had to be maximum efficient because didn't have anyone else's money to spend. We had to spend our own revenue, so we could only grow accordingly to that. But now we're at a different place. So now perhaps you can afford a little bit of slack.

我很欣赏这个理念。总的来说，我欣赏那些具有延展性和灵活性的想法，而始终追求最高效率并不具备太多这样的特性。但将其作为某种柏拉图式的理想，作为你始终牢记并以此驱动决策的准则，仍然会让你走向与标准路径截然不同的地方——那种'新软件公司产品起飞了，赶紧拿风投、大规模招聘、快速扩充到100人、立即大肆扩张'的标准模式。很多人遵循这个模式，有些人成功了，但更多人在 spectacular flame 中灰飞烟灭。

And I appreciate that idea. Again, I appreciate generally ideas that sort of stretch and bend and a maximum efficiency at all times does not stretch and bend that much. But having that at least as some sort of platonic ideal, something you always have at the back of your mind and something you try to drive decision from, still leaves you to a very different place than where we would have been if we had gone the standard route of, oh, here's a new software company with a product that's taking off, let's get a lot of venture capital money invested, let's hire a bunch of people, let's staff up to 100 as quickly as we can. Let's just start blowing it out right away. That's the standard model and lots of people have followed up and some have succeeded and lots and lots and lots of others have gone up in spectacular flame.

我审视现状后思考：我到底想做什么？我想用Basecamp实现什么？为什么是Basecamp？首先，我想创建一家二十年后我仍然愿意为之工作的公司。说实话，我并不喜欢一直认识大量新人。

And I just looked at the situation and went, what am I trying to do here? What am I trying to do with Basecamp? Why Basecamp? Well, of all, I'd like to set up a company that I would want to work at in twenty years. Like I actually, to be honest, I don't like learning tons of new people all the time.

我是个内向的人，喜欢长期与固定团队合作，因为这样可以深入了解彼此，建立舒适感，形成高效的工作节奏——用更少的沟通完成同样多的工作。这种合作建立在对彼此能力的信赖之上。如果我想实现这样的工作环境，就不能在业务中埋下各种定时炸弹。比如如果接受某些人的投资，他们可能要求七年内获得10倍回报，这就迫使我们必须冒险一搏，否则就会失败。

Like I'm an introvert, I like working with people for the long term because you get to get to know them and you get comfortable with them, you fall into a groove where things are just so much easier and you need to say so much less to get the same amount of work done. And there's just a reliance and a trust in that competency. And if I want to do that, then I can't install all sorts of time bombs in my business. I can't install like, okay, if I take X amount of money from these people, then they want it back in seven years and they want it 10X. So we have to shrink for the fences to get that otherwise we're going to blow up.

所以这是一方面：我想要一个稳定的长期工作环境，因为这样我才能尽可能进入心流状态，这才是工作的乐趣所在。另一方面，我也希望取得一定程度的成功——我不需要成为亿万富翁。

Well, so that's one thing, right? Like I want a stable long term work environment because that's just where I find that I can get access to these flow states as much as possible. And that's what's a lot of fun and so forth. Then secondly, I want to do this because I want some modicum of success. Like I don't need to be a billionaire.

我甚至不需要成为亿万富翁，只需要达到基本保障线就足够了。我喜欢用这个事实作对比：从0美元到100万美元对生活基本舒适度的提升是巨大的，但从100万到200万美元的差异就微乎其微了。越是往上走，边际效益就越小。

I don't need to be even a hundreds millionaire. I just need to be comfortable in knowing that like, okay, we got to some baseline, right? Like I like to compare the fact that the difference between having $0 and a million dollars is extremely large in terms of basic comforts of living. The difference between having a million dollars and $2,000,000 vanishingly small on the same scale, right? And the further up the chain you go, the less marginal benefit there is.

至少在我的希望、梦想和抱负中是这样。是的，如果你的最大梦想是像加里·维那样拥有纽约喷气机队，或者像埃隆·马斯克那样送人去火星，或者其他类似的疯狂梦想，好吧，那你需要数十亿美元，你应该追求与之相符的策略。我的想法可能更——听起来有点好笑，但相对那些极端案例来说算是比较适中的。所以我想要优化实现这个目标的机会。因此其中一部分就像是，我想在经营企业时优化自己成为百万富翁的机会？

At least within my hopes, dreams and aspirations. Yes, if your biggest dream in the world is to own the New York jets as Gary Vee wants to do, or you want to send people to Mars like Elon Musk or any of those kinds of wild dreams, okay, fine, you need billions of dollars and you should pursue strategies that are compatible with that. I perhaps have more, it sounds funny, but modest, it's only in comparison to those outliers, modest ideas of it. So I want to optimize my chances for that. So part of that was like, I want to optimise my chances when I'm running a business of how can I just become like a millionaire?

就像一个普通的百万富翁，这在世界舞台上仍然是非常罕见的，处于这样的位置是极其幸运的，但相比成为下一个亿万富翁，这个目标虽然不能说无限接近，但可能性要大得多，对吧？就像世界上百万富翁的数量与亿万富翁的数量对比。这实际上一直是我思考很多问题的驱动力：我想达到什么位置？就像通常问的：在编程领域你想达到什么水平？在赛车领域你想成为什么？

Like just a basic run of the mill millionaire, which is still like, you look at the world's stage, like incredibly rare thing, And they're extremely blessed position to be in, but still infinite, well not infinitely, far, far, far more likely than to become the next billionaire, right? Like the number of millionaires in the world versus the number of billionaires in the world. Like that's actually been one of the things that have been driving a lot of how I approach, where do I want to be? Like usually take, where do you want to be in programming? What do you want to be in racing?

在商业领域你想做什么？我觉得这听起来很矛盾，但我感觉自己只是适度地想要进入前5%。对吧？我不需要成为，就像我们之前讨论的，我不需要付出100%的努力去成为迈克尔·乔丹。我不需要这样做，因为情况甚至更糟，这也是我不想这么做的原因。

What do you want to do in business? I'm like, it's such an oxymoron, but I feel like I modestly just want to be in the top 5%. Right? I don't need to be, again as we talked about, I don't need to put in 100% to be Michael Jordan. I don't need because it's even worse than that, Again that's the reason I don't want to do it.

我不想付出100%的努力却只有非常非常小的机会成为迈克尔·乔丹。所以根本就不要想着成为迈克尔·乔丹。还有很多很多其他人，如果用棒球或篮球的比喻来说，他们都是优秀的篮球运动员，可以过上不错的生活，进入NBA打球，这已经很了不起了，对吧？我只想进入NBA，不一定要成为迈克尔·乔丹。

I don't want to put in 100% to have a really, really poor chance of becoming Michael Jordan. So don't even be Michael Jordan. Lots and lots and lots of other people who if you just take the baseball or basketball metaphor, that are good basketball players, And can make a good living and get to play in the NBA and like that's pretty amazing, right? I just wanna make it to the NBA. I don't have to be Michael Jordan.

是的，绝对如此。我想强调一点，我觉得这是你说过的。我的意思是，这就是我的思考方式，或者说在过去的五年里我越来越这样想：你必须或者说你应该努力拥有相容的目标。对吧？

No. Definitely. And I want to just emphasize something that, I think I think you said. I mean, this is how I think about it or have been trying to think about it more and more in the last, say, five years is that you have to or you should strive to have compatible goals. Right?

从某种意义上说，我遇到的很多人——我住在旧金山，就住在这个野兽的腹地。你会遇到一些可能拥有数亿美元却完全痛苦的人。当你深入探究时，如果有机会在喝酒时聊聊，经常会发现他们的目标是不相容的。换句话说，他们需要获得成就感和内心平静的东西，与他们其他雄心勃勃的商业或财务目标是不兼容的。

In the sense that a lot of the folks I meet I and live in San Francisco. I live right in the the belly of the beast. And, you run into folks who maybe they have hundreds of millions of dollars and they are completely miserable. And when you really dig into it, if you have the chance to do it over wine or whatnot, very often you find that they have incompatible goals. In other words, like, what they need to feel fulfilled and calm or inflow is not compatible with the other ambitious, say, business or financial goals that they have.

所以这注定会失败。对吧？我的意思是，如果你成功了，实现了所有目标，但如果这些目标相互矛盾，你基本上就是在自掘坟墓。所以我想问你，你认为自己是个快乐的人吗？

So it's doomed to fail. Right? I mean, if you succeed and you accomplish all of your goals, if they're incompatible, you're basically just sowing the seeds of your own destruction. And so I wanted to ask you, do you consider yourself a happy person?

是的。你也是吗？绝对是。部分原因是因为我为此付出努力。就像更高层次部落的一个明确目标是推动决策：这样做会让我成为一个更快乐的人吗？

Yes. You do? Absolutely. And part of it is because I work at that. Like that is one of the explicit goals of a higher tribe to drive the decision, is this going make me a happier person?

杰夫·贝佐斯有个相反的观点，即他的遗憾最小化框架——这听起来就很像杰夫·贝佐斯会想出来的东西——他说，我要尽量以让自己最少遗憾的方式生活。我不确定我是否走这条路，但快乐也是个有点模糊的术语，对吧？就像我知道你也感兴趣并深深触动我的斯多葛主义。那种宁静的概念，处于满足与平静的状态。快乐似乎带有某种含义，好像我整天都在跑来跑去、笑个不停。

Jeff Bezos has sort of the reverse of it, which is his regret minimization framework, which sounds like just something Jeff Bezos would come up with, where he's like, I'm just going to try to drive my life in such a way that I have the least regrets. I don't know if that's the path that I'm taking, but happiness is also sort of a fuzzy term, right? Like one of the things I know that you've been interested in too and has really spoken to me is stoicism. And this notion of tranquility, to be in this state of contentment and tranquility. Happiness have some sort of like connotations as though I'm running around all the time laughing my ass off.

天啊，这美妙的生活。对吧？那不是，我不向往那样。大多数日子并不是那样的。但我确实对我所处的境况有一种深深的宁静与满足感。

My god, this wonderful life. Right? Like that's not, I don't aspire to that. That's not how most days are. But I do have a sense of deep tranquility and contentment with the situation that I'm in.

这部分其实要追溯到最初。《每周工作四小时》给我的关键收获是生活方式设计的概念。有那么多人只是随波逐流，像是被设定好轨道一样，负面意义上地遵循事情“应该”如何发展。好吧，我先接受这种教育，我可能甚至并不太关心这个学科，但它会带来一份好工作。然后我得到一份好工作，然后结婚，然后……接着在65岁退休。

And part of that is actually going all the way back to the beginning. My key takeaway from the four hour work week was the concept of lifestyle design. That there's so many people who just follow, were on rails in the negative sense of the word of like how things are supposed to go. Okay, first I get this education, I perhaps don't even really care that much for the subject, but it'll lead to a good job. Then I'll get a good job, then I'll get married, then I'll like And then at 65, I'll retire.

然后我才能真正地生活。什么？你疯了吗？首先，很可能你活不到65岁，那么从出生到没活到那岁数之间的一切都浪费了。其次，你为什么要把享受生活推迟或等到你身体机能和能力最差的几十年？

And then I can really live life. What? Are you crazy? First of all, good chance you won't make it to 65 and then everything was wasted between getting born and not getting there. Second of all, why would you waste or wait until the worst decades of your life in terms of physical mobility and capabilities otherwise to start enjoying life?

这不应该是胜利吗？这太痛苦了。我讨厌这样。我不想待在这里。那其实并不是我的目的地。

Wasn't this supposed to be winning? This is miserable. I hate it. I don't want to be here. Like that was not actually my destination.

我放弃各种宝贵事物所追求到的，其实是一个悲惨的境地。我不想——很容易轻视这些事情，特别是当你已经是百万富翁时，更容易轻视那些金钱能带来巨大改变之人的挣扎与渴望。但当你谈论那些已经成功却想要更成功的人时，令人难以置信的是，他们往往陷入这种观念：只要再前进一步，我就会快乐。幸福在等着我。但这只是个虚假的跑步机。

The thing I gave up all sorts of valuable things to arrive at is a miserable place to be. And I don't want to it's easy to trivialize these things, especially you see when you actually already are a millionaire to trivialize sort of the struggles and the aspirations of someone where money can make a big difference. But when you're talking about people who already made it and want to make it more, It's incredible how often that people end up sucked into this notion that like, oh, if I just make it to the next step, then I'm going be happy. Then happiness awaits me. When just a false treadmill.

它不仅是享乐适应 treadmill（因为目标不断远离你），而且根本就是错误的。它真的不会以那种方式回报。正如我们在节目中多次讨论过的，心流、奋斗、变得更好——那才是生活所在，那也是幸福所在。无论你处于这段旅程的起点还是终点，它都可以发生。

Not only is it a hedonic treadmill in that it keeps moving further and further away from you, but it's also just false. It really does not pay out that way. As we've talked about a bunch on this show already, flow, the striving, the getting better, like that's where living is. That's where happiness is. And it can happen whether you're at the beginning or at your end of that journey.

就像我回想起有人问我‘你快乐吗？’的时候。我想起2001年2月，我坐在哥本哈根那个只有350平方英尺的公寓里，非常非常小的公寓。当时我在上学，正在学习PHP。我有很多担心的事情，比如房租等等，虽然不是生存层面的，但也是正常的担忧，对吧？但关键是，我仍然很快乐。

Like I think back of when someone asked me, are you happy? I think back of when I sat in Copenhagen in 02/2001, in my what three fifty square feet apartment, tiny, tiny little apartment in Copenhagen. I was going to school at the time, I was learning PHP. I had all sorts of things I was worried about like rent and so on, not on an existential level, but still in a normal sense of it, right? Also, it's also the thing, I'm still happy.

我只是处于当今境况的边际之内。如果你从物质或所谓的‘成功’层面看这两种情况，它们似乎是相当不同的境地，但感觉上并没有那么不同。部分原因在于要专注于内心旅程、内在奋斗。另一句我喜欢在任何合适（或不合适）的场合引用的话是可可·香奈儿说的：‘生活中最好的东西是免费的，次好的则非常昂贵。’我喜欢这句话，因为它承认次好的东西仍然相当棒。只是有太多最好的东西你可以关注，以至于那些次好的（恰好非常昂贵的）东西在阶梯上位置如此之低，一旦你采纳了能从那个角度看待生活的哲学，它真的能让事情变得清晰。

I'm just within margins of where things are today. And if you look at those two situations otherwise from a level of possessions or quote unquote success, like they're pretty different places to be, and yet they don't feel that different. And part of that is to have that focus on the inner journey, on the inner strive of this another quote I love just pulling out whenever context fits or not is Coco Chanel, The best things in life are free and the next best things are very expensive. And I like that because it sort of it recognises that the next best things are still pretty great. It's just that there's so many of the very best things that you can focus on, that whatever is on the next best thing and which does happen to be very expensive, it's just so far down the ladder that once you adopt the philosophy of life that allows you to view it from that angle, it really puts things into perspective.

这样就能更容易获得真正的品质。

It gets it so much easier to get to true quality.

而且我认为，宁静在很多方面是比快乐更好的目标，‘快乐’这个词被过度使用到几乎毫无意义。我想用它只是因为它更直接、更熟悉。但在我看来，如果我们谈论心流状态，谈论宁静，它关系到发展一种内在控制点，或者一种内在的——‘度量标准’可能太量化了——进展观。所以你是与自己竞争，而不是在某种位置经济意义上与邻居攀比。对吧？

And I I think that, tranquility is in a lot of respects a better goal than happiness, which has been the the word is so overused to have become almost meaningless. I wanted to use it just because it's a it's a more straightforward term and more familiar term. But it's it seems to me also that if we're talking about, say, flow states, if we're talking about tranquility, it relates to developing an internal locus of control or an internal a metric is probably too quantitative a term, view of progress. So you're competing against yourself as opposed to, in some positional economic sense, competing against the Joneses. Right?

你永远赢不了这种攀比，因为总会有另一个愿意比你牺牲更多的‘邻居’，如果你在追逐，如你所说，彩虹尽头的那桶金。这一切都与斯多葛主义相关，但我想重申你提到的一点：硅谷常见的那种七到十年的冲刺，以及误以为之后就能自动停下来坐在海滩上，赞美上帝说这就是涅槃。我认为对很多人来说，这种脱节或者他们应该问的问题是：我现在培养的属性能否用于多种状态、多种努力？对吧？因为人们没有意识到，如果你真有丝毫机会创造下一个独角兽或类似的东西并在七到十年内套现，你必须培养的工作习惯等与坐在那个海滩上享受快乐是完全不相容的。

Which you're never going to win because there's always going to be another Jones who's willing to sacrifice more than you are if if you're kind of chasing, as you said, this pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The, all of which relates to stoicism, but I wanted to, also reiterate one thing that you mentioned, which is this seven to ten year sprint that you see so often in Silicon Valley And the misconception that you can then automatically just park up and sit on a beach and, you know, praise, praise God here is nirvana. The the disconnect, I think, for a lot of folks or the question that they'd be well served to ask is, am I develop am I developing attributes now that I can use in multiple states in multiple endeavors? Right? Because what people fail to realize is that if you are going to stand a snowball's chance in hell of actually creating the next unicorn or whatever it might be and cashing out in seven to ten years, the work habits and so on that you're going to have to develop are completely incompatible with sitting on that beach and being happy.

是的。截然相反。而你自动切换这些状态并不像人们想象的那么容易。事实上，这异常困难。你必须彻底重新编程自己。

Yes. Diametrically opposed. And you and just automatically switching those gears is not as easy as one might think. In fact, it's exceptionally difficult. You have to completely reprogram yourself.

回到斯多葛主义，你提到了杰夫·贝佐斯。我一直在读你的一些文章，其中有一句话让我印象深刻，非常深刻且适用于许多情境。我想这是来自《我成为百万富翁的那天》这篇文章。那就是：决定你感知现实幸福的是期望，而非结果。我希望你能谈谈这一点，同时也谈谈——因为我确实不知道这个问题的答案。

So coming back to the stoicism, and you mentioned Jeff Bezos. I've been reading some of your articles, and, there's one line that jumped out at me is really profound and applicable in a lot of context. And I think this is from the the day I became a millionaire post. And it is expectations, not outcomes, govern the happiness of your perceived reality. And, I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that, but also talk about because I I genuinely don't know the answer to this.

为什么，你是如何在2006年2月决定接受杰夫·贝佐斯的投资的？

Why how did you navigate the decision to take money from Jeff Bezos in 02/2006?

好的。让我先从第一点开始。我经常需要重新学习这个教训，感觉这是我实践最多的教训之一。但就像生活中大多数深刻重要的教训一样，你不能仅仅读一遍文字就内化它。它需要反复的实践。

Yep. Let me start with the with the first thing. I keep having to relearn this lesson very often and I feel like this is one of these lessons I practise the most. But as most of the most profound important lessons in life, you can't just read the text and then internalise it. It takes practice time and time again.

这个观念——重要的是期望而非结果本身——实际上是关于向内看，审视在许多情况下（并非所有情况，但许多我们面临的挑战中）某件事是好是坏，那只是你个人的决定。这并非随机发生，而是因为它流经你的习惯，流经你的期望。举个例子，我们聊过很多关于赛车的事。在2013赛季，我们有一个出色的赛季。我们获得了锦标赛亚军，并在勒芒24小时耐力赛中获得了第二名。

And this notion that it's the expectations, not the outcomes themselves that's what matters, is really about looking inwards and seeing like whether something is good or bad in a lot of cases, not all cases, but in many of the challenges we face, whether something is good or bad, that's just you deciding that. And it doesn't happen by random, it happens because it flows through your habits, and it happens because it flows through your expectations. If I take one example, I got we've talked a bunch about racing. In my 2013 season, we had a stellar season. We finished second in the championship, and we finished second at the twenty four Hours of Le Mans.

听起来非常棒，对吧？但那可能是我赛车生涯中最糟糕的年份之一。在各种层面上都极其痛苦。而之所以痛苦，关键原因之一正是这种期望。我们从一开始就拥有一支阵容、支持和一辆被认为应该是领跑者的赛车。

Like absolutely amazing, right? It was probably one of the worst years I've had in racing. It was absolutely miserable on all sorts of levels. And one of the key reasons why it was miserable was exactly because of this expectation. We came in from the get go with a lineup at backing a car that said, this is supposed to be the front runner.

这些人理应获胜。然后当我们没有获胜时，获得第二名感觉并不像第二名。它感觉像是一个彻底的失败者。有趣的是，就在前一年，2012年，对吧？那是我第一次参加勒芒24小时耐力赛。

These guys are supposed to win. And then when we didn't win, finishing second didn't feel like finishing second. It felt like being a complete loser. And what was funny was just the year before 2012, right? I started, this was my first year at the twenty four Hours in Le Mans.

当时能完成比赛我就已经欣喜若狂了。那感觉太美妙了，对吧？就像我赛车生涯中最神奇的体验之一就是2012年完成了比赛。我不记得最终名次是第七还是第八，甚至根本不在乎。因为那本就不是我们的预期目标。

And I was thrilled just to finish the race. It was wonderful, right? Like one of the magic experiences of all the time I've been in racing was to finish the race in 2012. I don't know what we finished, seventh, eighth, I don't even care. That wasn't the expectation.

那从来不是我们的目标，对吧？但到了第二年，不知怎么我就被套上了'必须夺冠'的期望枷锁。当我们未能夺冠时，感觉就像被千斤重压垮。这种经历我反复遭遇过。每当我自觉在赛道上表现出色时，这一切只关乎我内心的竞赛。

That wasn't the goal, right? And then already the year after, somehow I got suckered into expectations that said you're supposed to win. And when we didn't win, it felt like a ton of bricks on us. And I've had this over and over again. Whenever I feel like I've personally done a good job at the racetrack, it's all about my internal competition.

与最终排名毫无关系。我经历过最精彩的某些比赛，最终排名是垫底；而有些最糟糕的比赛，我们却拿了第一。关键在于我是否感到进步，是否竭尽所能做到最好，是否让自己失望。而失望本质上与期望紧密相连。

It's not about where we end up finishing up. Some of the best races I've ever had, we finished last. Some of the worst races I've ever had, we finished first. They're all about whether I felt like I progressed and I did everything in the best way I could possibly do, whether I disappointed myself. And disappointment is intrinsically linked to expectation.

因此，如何设定期望值需要极度谨慎，我认为这对我来说是获得内心平静的首要关键。很多斯多葛学派的著作都直接阐述了这一点。关于期望设定，我最推崇斯多葛主义中的'消极想象'概念。

So being extremely careful about how you set your expectations, think is probably the number one key to tranquility for me. And there's a lot of stoic writing that addresses this point directly. One of the things that I love around expectations is and stoicism is this notion of negative visualization.

哦，这是我最爱的理念。可以说这是我从斯多葛主义中收获的最宝贵财富。

Oh, my favorite. Yeah. Arguably the most valuable thing that I've taken from stoicism.

你需要想象所有可能发生的糟糕情况，对吧？以此重新构建认知框架，彻底改变期望的视角。我几乎每周（至少每周）都会设想：如果破产怎么办？如果遭遇重大事故失去肢体怎么办？如果家人、事业或整个世界遭遇各种灾难怎么办？接着我会消化这些想象，一方面尝试与这些可能性和解，另一方面将其转化为动力，让自己感恩现有的一切而不执着其中。这些思维训练我认为是最重要的。

You imagine all these terrible things that could happen, right? To set the context and set your expectations in a completely different light. That every day probably, at least every week, I imagine what would happen if I went broke, if I had a major accident where I would lose some of my limbs, if all sorts of terrible things would happen to either my family or to my professional life or to the world at large. And then I process that and A, try to come to terms with those things, and B, use it as a driver to be sort of thankful for the things I have without becoming attached to them. And playing those mental games, I think that's the number one thing.

比如幸福与否，平静与否，很大程度上都取决于你进行的思维训练。当然，世界上某些地方确实比其他地方更难获得幸福与平静。但如果我们讨论的是远离贫困线的西方发达国家，我会说心态博弈几乎决定了一切。至于具体实践——早在2006年2月，我在互联网行业和风投圈浸淫已久，已然明白那绝非我们所想追求的道路。接受风投资金意味着要承担所有附加条件，这与我们想要的愿景根本不相容：我们想要经营公司二十年，想要自主决策，不想被迫出售公司或上市，不想为了增长采取不可持续或不当的手段——所有这些压力都源于接受他人资金并将其作为公司发展的火箭燃料。

Like happiness, not happiness, in state of tranquility, not in state of tranquility, they're all about the mental games that you play, to a large degree. Mean, obviously there are some places in the world where it's a lot harder to be happy and in a state of tranquility than in other places. But if we're talking about Western developed worlds where you're not living on the edge of poverty, then I'd say the mental game is almost all of it. And then in terms of sort of the mechanics, so in 02/2006, I had already been exposed long enough to the internet industry and to the venture capital world to realise that's not what we wanted to do. That that was an incompatible goal to take a bunch of money from venture capitals with all the strings that that implies, and getting the other things that we wanted, like running a company for twenty years, like calling the shots ourselves, like not having to go and sell our company or go IPO, or being forced into some unsustainable or devious tactics for growth or any of all these other pressures that come from taking other people's money and trying to fuel them in as rocket fuel for your company.

所以最终的情况是，Jason和我审视了我们的风险状况，我们说，好吧，现在37signals的Basecamp已经有了些基础，就像人们常说的那样，我们获得了一定的吸引力，对吧？这种吸引力是有价值的。有人愿意给我们投资数百万美元，希望我们能将公司打造成价值1亿或10亿甚至更高的企业，从而从中获利，对吧？我们可以接受投资，然后套现一部分，或者全力冲刺以实现那个目标。或者，我们也可以尝试寻找另一种方式，不是像风投那样通过注资来推动公司增长。

So what ended up happening was, Jason and I looked at our sort of risk, and we said like, okay, right now, 37 signals base camp, like there's something, we have some traction as people like to call it, right? There's traction, that's valuable. There are people who want to give us millions of dollars to put into the company in hopes that we can turn this company into being worth 100,000,000 or a billion or whatever else that they're trying to get out of it, right? So we could do that and then we could take some money off the table or we could try to just swing for those fences to try to get that. Or we could try to see if we can find someone where instead of investing in the company as in taking money and putting them into the company to use that money for growth, which is what VCs do.

我们或许可以找到人与我们进行对冲赌注，即出售Jason和我各自持有的一小部分无控制权、无附加条件的股权，然后将这笔钱收入囊中。不将任何资金投入公司，不接受风投合同中常见的任何条款，不遵循任何时间表，不启动任何定时炸弹或其他类似的东西。就是说，嘿，Jeff，如果你想搭个便车，我们可以每人卖给你一小部分股份，通常拿这笔钱作为我们的对冲。这样，如果Basecamp项目失败了，变成了下一个Frenchster之类的，至少我们已套现了一部分，避免了将所有风险集中在一个篮子里。我坚信多样化的价值，无论是在各种方式还是努力中，正如我们讨论过的。

We could perhaps find someone to make a hedge bet with us, where we could sell a small non control, no strings attached portion of the ownership that Jason and I each have, and then just pocket that money. Not put any of it into the company, not accept any of the strings that would normally go with a venture capital contract, not accept any of the timeline, not start any of the time bombs or any of the other stuff that goes on. Just say like, hey, Jeff, if you want to be alone for the ride, we'll sell you a small slice of each of our share and typically take the money and use it as our hedge. So that if this Basecamp thing goes poof, and turns into the next Frenchster or whatever, then at least we've taken something off the table, such that we don't have 100% of the risk in just one basket. I'm a big believer in diversification and all sorts of manners and endeavours as we've talked about.

我试图分散我的兴趣，这样即使发生最坏的情况——就像我经常负面想象Basecamp倒闭那样，仿佛我的整个身份都与之绑定——我也可以转向其他事情并过得很好，对吧？所以我们套现了一小部分，这就是那篇《我成了百万富翁》帖子的由来。有趣的是，即使我觉得自己对这些事准备得相当充分，我仍然被之后发生的事情所欺骗。在我看来，在当今的文明社会中，几乎不可能不被那种关于‘变富’后会发生什么的持续宣传所影响。

I've tried to diversify my interests such that should the terrible thing happen as I frequently negatively visualise that Basecamp collapses, like I'm it was my whole identity wrapped up in that. I can go off to other things and be fine, right? So we took a little bit off the table and that's where that post I Became a Millionaire came from. And it's funny because even I felt like I was pretty well prepared for all of that stuff and I was still deceived by what happened afterwards. In the sense that I think it's almost impossible in our sort of civilization today to not be infected by the constant propaganda for like what happens when you get quote unquote rich.

比如街上流淌着牛奶和蜂蜜，某些事情变得美妙无比。这是一个需要巧妙把握的细微差别，尤其当你已经成功到达另一边时，要说‘哦，其实没那么重要’。很多人实际上会说，好吧，我今天还没吃饭呢，所以再告诉我一遍什么叫‘没那么重要’。但这并不意味着不能谈论这个话题。它很有趣，而且我反正还是会谈论它。

Like milk is flowing and honey in the streets and like certain things are wonderful and it's a fine thread to needle to thread, especially once you made it to the other side to say like, oh yeah, it doesn't matter that much. And tons of people will actually say, yeah, okay, I didn't eat today. So tell me again what it is about doesn't matter. That to me doesn't mean you can't talk about the topic of it. It is interesting and I talk about it anyway.

我最终得出的结论是，即使我知道所有我以为我知道的事情，我的期望仍然太高了。我仍然认为它会对我的生活产生比实际更大的影响，对吧？而这只是再次证实了我的信念：幸福和宁静的来源并不在于那些地方。生活中最好的东西确实是免费的。而我尝到了一些次好的东西，那也很有趣。

And the conclusion I basically came to was that even knowing all the things that I thought I knew, like my expectations were still too high. I still thought that it was going to have a bigger dent on my life than it ended up doing, right? And it only reaffirmed my belief that where happiness comes from, where tranquillity comes from are not those places. That the very best things in life indeed are free. And I got to taste some of the second best things and that was a lot of fun too.

但归根结底，它们更加短暂。而我一直在做的事情，我几乎每天都在编写Ruby代码。通常来说，能编写Ruby代码的日子更好，因为这才是我真正喜欢做的事情。如果你看看很多非常成功的人，他们仍然继续做着他们热爱的事。就像我们谈论过的Jeff Bezos。

But at the end of the day they were much more transient. And the things I've kept on doing, I still program Ruby almost every day. A day is better generally speaking when I get to program Ruby, because that's just what I truly enjoy doing. And if you look at lots of people who've made it very well, they still continue to do with it. Like we talked about Jeff Bezos.

他经营亚马逊多久了？大概二十多年了吧，对吧？

How long has he been running Amazon now? Like twenty plus years, right?

加好多年，是的。

Plus years, yeah.

他不需要。他可以退休去某个海滩，坐在那里那样生活。但他不想那样做，对吧？就像从史蒂夫·乔布斯到你所能列举的所有标准英雄名单上的所有人一样。大多数人只是坚持那些能给他们带来心流、有趣的新挑战、定义生命意义的奋斗的事物。

He doesn't need to. He could retire to a beach somewhere and sit there and do that. He doesn't want to do that, right? Like none of the people like everyone from Steve Jobs to like all the sort of standard list of heroes you can go through. Like most people just stick to the things that provide them flow and interesting new challenges and the striving that defines life and the purpose of it.

如果你意识到这一点，你就可以优先考虑它。你可以把其他事情放在次要位置。我认为这是指导决策的非常有帮助的方式。对我们来说，它帮助我们决定不想走那种风险投资的时间炸弹路线，因为它与我们生活中的其他目标和抱负完全不相容。现在我得稍微展开说一下，如果我们当初在2006年2月接受了那笔资金，Basecamp现在要么已经上市，要么被收购了。

And if you realize that, you can prioritize that first. And you can prioritize other things below that. And I think that that's a really helpful way to guide your decisions. For us it helped guide the decision that we didn't want to do that venture capital time bomb because it was completely incompatible with these other goals that we had and aspirations for life. And now I've got to play that out a bit, Like Basecamp would either have IPO'd or be sold or whatever now if we had taken that money back in 02/2006.

我们早已过了资金期限。而我坐在这里的另一边说，没有人，这样挺好的。另一边其实也不错。虽然没有那么壮观，没有那么光鲜，也许没有那么多水晶香槟或私人飞机之类的。但你知道吗，这样真的挺好的。

We're well past the deadline of when the money would be up. And I'm sitting here on the other side and saying like, no one it's pretty good. The other side is pretty good. It's not as spectacular, it's not as glamorous, perhaps there's not as much crystal champagne or private jets or whatever. But you know what, it's pretty good.

而且我能够比原本有更多时间做更多的事情。我经常和很多创业者交流，他们要么得到了他们认为是成功的东西，比如卖掉了公司，然后在海滩上度过了三周。然后他们发现情况甚至更糟。他们意识到宁静并不隐藏在海滩生活中。他们回来了，现在他们在想，我现在该做什么？

And I get to do more of the things more of the time than I would otherwise. Like I talk to lots of entrepreneurs all the time, who either ended up with what they thought was success, like they sold their company, then they did the beach thing for three weeks. And then they ended up even worse off than that. They realized that the beach thing was not where tranquility was hidden. They came back and now they're like, what am I supposed to do now?

或者我猜是再开一家公司。但往往第二次创业并不如第一次好。要么想法不够好，要么很难再来一次。你失去了一些非常宝贵且难以找回的东西。我看到很多人在那另一边，比他们还是那个只有两个人苦苦挣扎让事情运转的小初创公司时更糟糕，但那时他们是在心流中奋斗，在宁静中前行。

Or I guess start another company. And oftentimes the second time around is not as good. It's not either as good of an idea, or it's hard to do it again. You've lost something really valuable that's hard to get back. And I see a lot of people at that other side, like worse off than they were when they were just that tiny startup, two people struggling to make things work, but striving in flow, in tranquility.

是的，这非常普遍。我认为我至少试图为自己应用的是练习。就像，如果你想要做得好，并希望通过有钱后用时间享乐来享受所有这些，你必须在有钱之前就练习那样做。这听起来很荒谬，但我认为金钱就像酒精，它只会让你变得更加像你本来的样子。所以并不是说某人喝醉时变成一个大混蛋，清醒时身上就一点混蛋的影子都没有。

Yeah, it's extremely common. And I think what I've at least tried to apply for myself is practice. Like, if you want to be good and you hope to enjoy all of these things by using your time for fun when you have money, you have to practice that before you have money. And it sounds ridiculous, but I I think that money is like alcohol in the sense that it just makes you more of who you already are. So it's not like somebody who becomes a huge asshole when they're drunk has no amount of asshole in them when they're sober.

他们只是秘而不宣。金钱对人也施加着同样的压力，对吧？所以它会放大你的优势、你的弱点、你的神经质。因此你必须练习那些技能，或者比如时间运用，这些是你希望在压力涌入时能够掌握的。

They just keep it under wraps. And money applies the same type of pressure to the vessel. Right? And so it's going to amplify your strengths, your weaknesses, your neuroses. And so you have to practice the skills or the the use of time, for instance, that you want to have when you have this influx of pressure.

另外，我正要提到，因为你刚才讨论了消极想象，我强烈推荐——这是公开资料，任何人都可以阅读——塞内卡（小塞内卡）的一封信。他有一套书信集叫《道德书简》（致卢齐利乌斯，Lucilius），其中有一封非常具体的信，第18封。

And, I was going to mention because you, were discussing negative visualization, I highly recommend, and this is in public domain. Anybody can read it. There is a letter by Seneca the younger. Well, he has a compilation of letters called the moral letters to Lucilius, l u c I l I u s. And there's a very specific letter, letter 18.

大概十分钟就能读完，标题是《论节庆与斋戒》。它谈的不仅是消极想象，实际上是恐惧预演，即你每月留出几天时间，比如——这些是我编的——在厨房地板上睡睡袋几晚，或者只吃米饭、豆子或速溶燕麦几天，穿同一条牛仔裤，等等，模拟你害怕的状况。换句话说，如果你失去一切，或者因为讨厌当前工作而需要六个月找下一份活导致不得不减薪，不管是什么，通过消除那种恐惧，它会让你有胆量去做很多事情，包括你和杰森非常出名的一点：直言不讳。对吧？我的意思是，如果你总是害怕被人釜底抽薪，你就做不到那样。

Probably takes ten minutes to read, but it's called on festivals and fasting. And it talks about not just negative visualization, but, fear rehearsal effectively, where you set aside a few days each month to say, I'm making these up, but sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag in your kitchen for a few nights or eat nothing but rice and beans or instant oatmeal for a few days, wear the same pair of jeans, whatever it might be, simulating the condition that you fear. In other words, if you lost everything or if you had to take a pay cut because you needed six months to figure out your next gig because you hate your current gig, whatever it might be, by removing that fear, it emboldens you to do something that, do many different things, including, you know, one thing that you and Jason are very well known for, which is being outspoken. Right? I mean, you can't do that if you're constantly in fear of having the rug pulled out from under you.

关于贝佐斯，最后再说一点。他投资Basecamp能得到什么？是他希望你们某天会回心转意，寻求或至少考虑流动性事件或被收购吗？

The on Bezos, just one last point on that. Is he what does he get out of investing in Basecamp? Is it that he hopes at some point you guys will have a change of heart and look for or at least entertain a liquidity event or an acquisition?

先说TechBasic或贝佐斯吧，他首先收回了本金还有赚，而且他仍然拥有公司的一部分。我们偿还了他。拥有一家盈利的私营公司的一个美妙之处就是你能获得利润。就像钱实际上会从方程中出来，我知道这在硅谷几乎是个外来的脏话。比如，等等，什么？

So TechBasic or Bezos first, he got his money back and then some, and he still owns a part of the company. We paid him back. Like one of the wonderful things of having a private company that's profitable is that you get profits. Like money actually comes out of the equation, which I know is almost a foreign dirty word in Silicon Valley. Like wait, what?

公司居然在产出资金？你们不是应该亏损吗，这是怎么回事？但事实就是这样。我们经营这家盈利公司已经十七年了。事情是复利增长的。

There's money coming out of the company? You're supposed to be in the red, like what's going on here? But that's what happened. Like we've run a profitable company for seventeen years. Like things compound.

而且，第一年没有大笔收益没什么，如果你连续十年都这样，那就是钱了，是真正的钱。他已经得到偿还了。他不仅完全回本，还继续每年获得他那份利润。我的意思是，这些只是零头，该死的美元变动1美分，他在两小时内损失的钱都比在我们投资上可能赚或亏的要多。所以我认为他其实不是为了钱才这么做的。我觉得钱只是他享受这个过程、享受投资等等的延伸。

And like what's not a big payday in year one, like if you do that ten years in a row like that's money, that's real money. And he's been paid back. He's more than made whole and he continues to earn his share of the profits every And I mean, these are rounding errors, the freaking dollar moves 1¢ and he has lost more money in like two hours than he would ever gain or lose on our investment. So I don't think he actually does it that much for the money. I think the money is just an extension of simply him having fun with this, having fun with the investments and so on.

所以这或许不像风险投资家那样纯粹出于经济考量——他们用别人的钱投资某个基金，需要展示特定成果。我认为贝佐斯在人才上投入了大量资金，仅仅因为他享受这个过程，喜欢看到成果，并且欣赏我们对许多事情那种不拘一格的态度，想要支持这种精神。再说，对他而言，这只是九牛一毛，对吧？

So it's not perhaps as pure economical as someone like a VC who's investing other people's money, a fund in something and has to show certain things. I think Bezos has made a ton of investments in people simply because he enjoyed doing that and enjoyed seeing it and he enjoyed our sort of irreverent take on a lot of things and kind of wanted to support that. And again, the it was pocket change to him to to do it. Right?

你见过他本人吗？

Have you met him in person?

是的，尤其是在早期，我们和他共度了相当多的时间。通常我们每年会见他一次，每次都会相处很长时间。我总是能学到很多东西。有趣的是，我能学到这么多，部分原因在于他并非我和贾森的翻版，而是在很多方面恰恰相反，对吧？

Yeah. We've spent quite a especially in the earlier years, a fair amount of time with him. Usually, we would meet up with him about once a year and spend a good amount of time with him. And I always learned a bunch. And the funny thing is of course that one of the reasons I learned a bunch was that he wasn't just a version of Jason and I, he was in many ways the direct opposite, right?

比如他将亚马逊上市的方式，与我们做事的方式截然相反，相差180度。我认为这正是吸引力的一部分——他并非在寻找只会模仿他的小跟班，而是在寻找能挑战他思维的人，当然我们的思维也经常受到他的挑战。所以我觉得，生命中有这样的关联非常棒：不是遇到一个做得比我更好但完全一样的人，而是遇到做法完全不同的人，我能从那个视角学到真正重要的东西。但就像你提到的习惯，我也一直非常注重这一点，我见过很多人被自己的习惯所困。大多数人都是如此，对吧？我们的生活就是这样运行的。

Like the way he launched Amazon as a public company is like 180 degrees the opposite of how we do things, which is I think part of the attraction, Like that he wasn't just looking for little minions that were trying to do the same thing as him, he was looking for people who could challenge his thinking and we've certainly had our thinking challenged by him as well. So I think that it's great to have those kind of associations in your life where it's not just like, someone does exactly exactly the same thing that I do but better, but someone does something totally different than me and I can learn something really important from that perspective. But I'd say too, as you mentioned with habits, that that has been one of the things I've been incredibly conscious about, that I've seen people just be trapped by their habits. Most people are, right? Like that's how we run our lives.

因此，我们一直非常审慎地培养正确的习惯。不仅为我们自己——对我和贾森来说，这意味着每周只工作四十小时，对吧？不会因为我们是自举创业或其他原因，就试图工作八十甚至一百二十小时。我们希望建立一些在成功后也能舒适保持的习惯。也为公司这样做，甚至为产品也如此。

So we've been extremely conscientious about getting the right habits. Not just for ourselves, which for both Jason and I have meant like, hey, let's just work forty hours a week, right? Like not try to do the eighty thing or the one hundred and twenty thing just because we're bootstrapping or whatever else it is. We want to set habits that we can comfortably want to have on the other side as well. And do that for our company as well, and do that even for the product.

我们为新版Basecamp努力的一个理念是：工作可以等待。我认为在这个手机和应用无处不在的时代，用户参与度成了不断打扰人们的万能借口。

One of the things we worked on for the new version of Basecamp was this notion that work can wait. That I think in this age of mobile phones and apps and so on, engagement has become this magic excuse for interrupting people all the time.

是的，100%同意。嗯，这也是一种……一种虚荣指标，

Yeah. 100100% agree. Well, it's also a it's it's a vanity metric that

是的。

Yes.

那些风险投资支持的初创公司可以用它来对投资者施展绝地心灵控制，让他们相信正在发生有意义的事情，而实际上并没有发生任何有意义的事情。是的。

That that venture backed startups can use to Jedi mind trick their investors into convincing them that something is happening that's meaningful when nothing meaningful is happening. Yeah.

没错。我认为这正是我们得以摆脱的事情之一，对吧？比如我们不必维护任何虚荣指标。如果Basecamp的参与度不那么高，它实际上可以成为对我们和客户都更好的产品。如果人们能在需要时从中获取所需，然后Basecamp就可以悄然退场。

Right. And I think that that's one the things that we've been freed from, right? Like we don't have to maintain any vanity metrics. Basecamp can actually be a better product both for us and for our customers if it doesn't have as much engagement. If people can get the things that they need out of it when they need out of it, and then Basecamp can kind of go away.

举个例子，在Basecamp 3中，我们有一个叫'工作可以等待'的功能。你打开它，Basecamp就不会发送任何通知、任何邮件，下班后绝不会以任何方式打扰你。默认设置是朝九晚五。但在那之后以及周末，如果你公司有人——在50人的公司里通常会有——比如在周六发邮件什么的，你不会打扰到所有人。你不会一直广播和轰炸所有人。

So for example, Basecamp three, we have this feature called Work Can Wait. You click it on and Basecamp won't send you any notifications, won't send you any emails, won't bother you in any way once you're off the clock. By default it's set to nine to five. But then after that and on weekends, if you have someone in your company, which in a company of 50 you usually do that like sends an email on Saturday or whatever, you're not interrupting everyone. You're not broadcasting and blasting everyone all the time.

这一直是我非常珍视的事情之一。我觉得在美国，人们会对此一笑置之，觉得这很傻。比如，等等，你就不能学会管理自己的生活之类的吗？不，我认为这些习惯很重要。如果你看看法国人——虽然嘲笑法国人也有理由，但在我看来这不是其中之一。

That's been one of the things that's been near and dear to me. And I think in The US people kind of laugh that off as silly. Like wait, Can't you just like figure out how to manage your own life and so on? No, I think these habits matter. I think if you look at the French, which also the reason to laugh at the French, but this is not one of them in my opinion.

去年他们的议会有一个提案，我相信是去年，他们说员工应该有断开连接的权利，有权不接收老板期望他们在周六回复的邮件。当然这需要一些修改，总会有灾难之类的事情发生。但大多数时候不会。大多数时候你的老板只是在周六发一些愚蠢的邮件，暗示你必须处理，即使它并不重要。全世界都有这种'尽快'文化，但在美国尤其严重，每个人都认为他们有权随时立即联系到其他人。

There was a proposal in their parliament last year, I believe it was, where they said like, employees should have the right to disconnect, that they should have the right to receive emails that their boss expects them to answer on Saturdays. Now, that's a truth with some modification, there are always disasters and whatever that can happen. Most of the time they don't. Most of the time your boss just sends you an email on something stupid on Saturday that is kind of implied that you have to deal with even though it's not that important. There's just such an ASAP culture all over the world, but in The US in particular, where everyone thinks that it's their right to have access to everyone else immediately all the time.

我认为这是极其有害的。而且在某些方面，情况还在变得更糟，对吧？手机是一回事，工作场所聊天应用的兴起是另一回事。有很多新的压力在不断用干扰轰炸我们。如果我发现了什么的话，那就是宁静和心流状态与干扰是不相容的。

And I think that's just incredibly corrosive. And I think in some ways it's just getting worse, right? Like mobile phones is one thing, the rise of chat applications in the workplace is another. There's a lot of new pressures bombarding us with interruptions all the time. And if there's one thing I've found is tranquility and flow is not compatible with interruptions.

如果你的时间被切割成零碎的工作片段，比如这里四十分钟，那里一小时二十分钟，你将无法完成任何有意义的工作。你可以完成常规工作，但无法完成有趣且有创造性的工作。我在公司创意方面取得任何实质性进展的唯一时刻，都是当我拥有大段不被打扰的时间。这意味着没有聊天，没有手机震动，没有任何这些干扰。你只需要两、三、四个小时来真正深入钻研，对问题进行足够深入的剖析，从而真正理解它，然后取得进展。

If your day is chopped up and into tiny work moments of forty minutes here and an hour and twenty there, you will get nothing interesting done. You can get routine work done, you can't get interesting creative work done. The only time I make progress of any material kind on anything that has ended up mattering really on the creative side of the company has been when I've had large stretches of uninterrupted time. That means no chat, it means no phone buzzing, it means none of these interruptions. You just need two, three, four hours to really sink your teeth in, scratch deep enough on the problem where you can really truly understand it and then make progress on it.

而如今我们几乎把它变得不可能。而且在很多方面，我们正让它变得越来越难，比如大多数应用自带的未读消息计数器、默认设置总是轰炸所有人、以及你必须待在聊天室里并在两分钟内回应每一个表情包的新期望，这太糟糕了。这在很多方面都很荒谬，顺便说一句，这也是我正在读的另一本关于当代哲学的精彩书籍。迈克尔·弗利的《荒谬的时代》，这本书借鉴了我们讨论过的许多话题，包括斯多葛主义，以及当前这种不断加速的、充斥着持续干扰和所谓的‘多任务处理’（实际上只是任务切换）的文化。我认为这简直糟透了。

And we've just made it almost impossibly hard these days. And in many ways we're making it harder and harder, like the number of unread counters that most apps ship with, the default settings for blasting everyone all the time, the new expectation that you have to hang out in a chat room and respond to every meme within two minutes, it's terrible. It's just absurd in many ways, which by the way is another great book on philosophy in the current age that I'm reading right now. Michael Foley, The Age of Absurdity that draws on a lot of these things we've talked about, stoicism included, and on this current and accelerating culture of just constant interruption and quote unquote multitasking, which it really is, it's task switching. I think it's just terrible.

我们必须采取行动来抵制这种趋势。

And we got to do something to push back.

不，我同意。而且我认为这必须从个人层面开始，对吧，做出像你那样创建这些时间块的决定。你是按周、月还是季度来安排这些时间？你是如何创造这些时间的？

No. I agree. And I think it has to start at a personal level, right, making decisions like you have in creating these blocks of time. Do you schedule those on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis? How do you create that time?

或者你是如何安排它的？

Or how do you schedule it?

我尽量每天都拥有这样的时间。我经常被人们问到这个问题，他们总是说，哦，你怎么能完成这么多事情？有时候我会困惑地看着他们，然后说，其实我并不觉得自己完成了那么多事情。我只是碰巧以某种方式配置了我的生活和工作，以至于大多数时候我都有长时间不被打扰的时段。当你每天都能拥有三小时或类似长度的整块时间时，你自然就能完成很多事情，而这看起来并不显眼。

I try to have it every day. I get that question from people all the time where they like, oh, how do you get so much done? And I look at them sometimes in bewilderment and I go like, I don't actually feel like I'm getting that much done. I just happen to configure my life and my business in such a way that most of the time I have long uninterrupted stretches of time. And when you every day can get like a three hour block or whatever, you just get a lot of stuff done and it doesn't seem like it.

感觉起来

What feels

嗯，感觉并不匆忙，

Well, doesn't feel rushed,

对吧？如果你的日子是那种标准的公司日，一天被分割成这些零碎时刻，一天下来筋疲力尽，感觉没干成什么像样的工作，然后你看看别人，心想：他们是怎么完成所有那些事的？他们是怎么创建并维护Ruby on Rails的？他们是怎么用那么少的人手让Basecamp服务着数百万用户的？他们是怎么做到所有这些的？

right? It looks impossible when if your day is this kind of standard corporate day where your day is just chopped up into these tiny moments, you're exhausted at the end of the day and you feel like you didn't get a good day's work and you can look at someone else and like, how did they get all that done? How did they create and maintain Ruby on Rails? How did they keep Basecamp running with the millions of people that they have using it with that few people on board? How do they do all these things?

我们常常会想，至少我经常这样，我不知道我们看到的是不是同一个东西，这不可能啊。对我来说这并不感到有压力。我每周工作四十小时或更少，夏天的时候我们实行周五办公室——我们过去这么叫，现在就叫四天工作周。夏天我们每周工作大约三十二小时，但仍然完成了一大堆事情。所以这绝对是可能的。

And we go like, I at least go oftentimes, I don't know what we're looking at, we can't be looking at the same thing. It doesn't feel stressful to me. I work forty hours or less sometimes in the summer when we do Friday's office, we used to call it, now we just call it the four day work week. During the summer, we work like thirty two hours a week and we still get a bunch of stuff done. So it's absolutely possible.

关键在于你如何配置并榨取时间的质量，而不是时间的数量。不在于在办公室里待满八小时，而在于提高你所花费小时的质量。而大多数人产出的时间质量真的很差，小时数很糟糕。他们有八小时，但这些时间完全被污染和糟蹋了。

It's how you configure and squeeze out the quality of time, not the amount of time. It's not about being eight hours in an office. It's about increasing the quality of the hours that you spend. And most people just produce really crappy quality, really shitty hours. They have eight of them, but they're completely soiled and spoiled.

相比之下，如果你只有四个小时，但处于 pristine 绝佳状态，你就能轻松超越那些坐着度过四或八个糟糕时段的人。

Versus if you just have four of them that are in pristine great condition, you'll run laps around the person who sits with four or eight shitty alps.

这部分也是为什么我几乎从不同意让记者跟着我做任何报道的原因，因为那会太无聊了。我提起这个是因为人们可能对我有这种印象，像是极限单板滑雪遇上《女孩也疯狂》，再加上，我不知道，二十四小时不停的攀岩之类的。而现实是，我觉得我大部分时间都在发呆，但我确实会划出区块。我尽量把每天的头三到四个小时留出来，完全用于非反应性活动。对吧？

This part of the reason why I almost never agree to let journalists, follow me for any piece because it would be so boring. And the reason that I bring it up is that people might have this image of me, like, it's kind of like extreme snowboarding meets girls gone wild meets, I don't know, rock climbing like twenty four seven. And the reality is, I feel like I spend most of my time staring off into space, but I I do block out. I try to block out the first three to four hours of each day for completely nonreactive activities. Right?

就这样。事实上我昨天还在想这个，因为我昨天一天结束时觉得，我不觉得我今天真的完成了什么。这倒没特别困扰我，我只是在观察它。我心想，好吧，好消息是，如果我有那些时间区块——这听起来可能有点怪，但就像如果我有那些不受打扰的时间区块，而这很重要，我是在专注于那一两个力量倍增器。对吧？

And that's it. And and I was thinking about this yesterday, in fact, because I had a day yesterday where was like I got to the end the day and was like, I don't really think I got anything done today. It doesn't particularly bother me, but I was just observing it. I thought to myself, well, I the good news is if I have those blocks of time and this may sound odd, but it's like if I have those uninterrupted blocks of time and this is important, I'm focusing on the one or two force multipliers. Right?

那一两件真正能让其他事情变得更容易或不重要的事情。我每周其实只需要两天时间把事情妥善完成，通过按正确顺序推倒正确的多米诺骨牌，就能创造出完成了一大堆其他事情的假象。

The one or two things that are really gonna make everything else easier or irrelevant. I only really need two days a week where I get my shit done properly, and it creates the illusion of having done a ton of other things because I'm hitting the right dominoes in the right orders.

我经常有这种感觉。我经常会有这样的日子，感觉这一天其实没做多少事。但当我放在两周的时间线上看，往往会发现，哇，我对此非常满意。再看看比如公司一年内完成的工作时间线。

I I have that feeling all the time. I have days all the time where I feel like, really there wasn't that much in this day. But I look at it on a timeline of like two weeks. And I often go like, oh wow, I'm very happy with that. And look on a timeline of for example, what we got done at the company in a year.

就像我们去年刚刚发布了Basecamp三，一个全新版本的软件，一年前对吧？Jason刚刚总结了今年我们做的所有工作，我就想，等等，这其实太不可思议了。我们是怎么完成所有这些事情的？虽然每个具体的星期或每一天，一般来说都不是那种疯狂、忙乱、拼命赶工的状态对吧？但这正是良好习惯的复利效应，平静的复利效应，持续、可持续进步的复利效应。

Like we just released Basecamp three, an all new version of the software last year, a year ago, right? And Jason just wrote up a summary of all the things we've worked on this year, and I go like, wait a minute, that's actually incredible. Like how did we get all that stuff done? When each individual week or each individual day, generally speaking, they're not like frantic, crazy death march rushes, right? But it's just a compound nature of good habits, compound nature of tranquility, compound nature of sustained, sustainable progress.

这和我们讨论业务时的情况是一样的，对吧？我们从未有过曲棍球杆式的业务增长。Basecamp从来不是曲棍球杆式的业务。它一直是一个线性增长的业务。如果你能把这条线画得足够长，那依然很好。

It's the same thing as we talked about with the business, right? We have never had a hockey stick business. Basecamp has never been a hockey stick business. It's just been a linear growth business. And if you keep drawing that line out long enough, that's still good.

线性增长依然非常不错，只要你能持续足够长的时间。

Linear growth is still pretty damn good if you can just keep drawing long enough.

嗯，这归结于你的期望线，对吧？我的意思是，因为你说过决定幸福的是期望而非结果，但它影响的远不止于此。我的意思是，你用来审视自己进步的时间线视角非常重要。对吧？因为如果你像许多风投支持的初创公司那样运作，我的意思是，看，我是这个游戏的参与者，而且历史上一直是。

Well, comes down to your expectations line, right? I mean, it's because you say expectations not outcomes govern the happiness, but it also governs a lot more than that. I mean, if if you the timeline with through which as a lens you look at your progress is really important. Right? Because if if you are making like a lot of venture backed startups, I mean, look, I'm I'm a player and I have been historically a player in that game.

所以我不会完全否定它的所有方面，但确实有相当

So I'm not gonna totally slam every aspect of it, but there are quite

这就是我在这里的原因。

That's why I'm here.

是的。这就是你在这里的原因。在那个世界里确实存在一些大规模的集体妄想活动。其中之一就是过于关注短期利益，以至于从长远来看基本上是在自取灭亡。即使你是一个人单干，也可能这样做。

Yeah. That's why you're here. And there there are but there are some like mass delusional activities that go on in that world. And one of them is being so focused on the short term that you basically just commit suicide over the long term. And you can do that even if you're a one man show or a one woman show.

对吧？如果你不关注两周的计划，而只盯着每一天，结果就是忙于事务，而不是花时间确定优先级——这通常需要留出三到四个小时的空闲时间。我想问你关于你的另一篇文章，以及它的灵感来源，因为我认为背景故事没有包含在里面，那篇文章叫《这总是你的错》，我觉得这在很多方面都与斯多葛主义很好地契合。这让我想起了一个问题，是一位名叫杰里·科隆纳的先生曾经问我的，他现在算是一位教练。我的意思是，他做的远不止这些，但他之前还是一位非常成功的投资者，等等。

Right? If you're not looking at the two weeks, you're looking at each day, and as a result, commit to being busy instead of actually taking the time to prioritize, which requires that slack, that empty space of having three to four hours in many cases. I wanted to ask you about another piece of yours, and the inspiration for it because the I I don't think the backstory is in there and it's called it's always your fault, which is I think ties into stoicism pretty well in in a lot of respects. And it brought to mind a question that I was asked once by a gentleman named Jerry Colonna, who's a coach at of sorts at this point. I mean, he does a lot more than that, but he was, previously very successful investor among other things.

他喜欢问的一个问题是：你是如何合谋创造了你声称不想要的条件的？对吧？所以这种承担责任的态度，是什么启发了……也许你可以简要介绍一下《这总是你的错》这篇文章，但我也想知道灵感来源。比如，你为什么写那篇文章？是什么促使你写的？

And one of the questions he likes to ask is how are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don't want? Right? So this taking of accountability, what inspired maybe you can give a sort of a synopsis of the piece, It's Always Your Fault, but also I want to know the inspiration. Like why did that why did you write that? What prompted that?

是的，这是个好问题。我认为我一直试图做的一件事，也是我们在多个领域讨论过的，就是将情况视为系统，视为反馈循环。'这总是你的错'是认识到你是所有系统的一部分。嗯，这有点像不言自明的真理，就像你是你所参与的所有系统的一部分。例如，在Basecamp，我在某种程度上参与了发生的所有事情。

Yeah, it's a good question. I think one of the things I've always tried to do, and we talked about this in multiple domains, is to look at situations as systems, as feedback loops. And it's always your fault is recognising that you're part of all systems. Well, it's kind of like a truism, Like you're part of all the systems you're part of. So at Basecamp, for example, I am in some way part of everything that goes on.

无论我是否参与某个项目，我设定了一些大纲，我建立了一些框架，我帮助创建了一些导致事情发生的文化。这也是我一直试图灌输给赛车团队的事情之一。赛车团队很多时候喜欢说，哦，是的，只是发生了。我的意思是，只是运气不好，对吧？人们总是这么说，运气不好。

Whether I'm involved in a project or not involved in the project, I set up some of the outlines, I set up some of the frameworks, I helped create some of the culture that led to what happened. It's one of the things I keep trying to hammer into race teams as well. Race teams, a lot of times they love these things of like, oh yeah, just happened. I mean, it's just a bad luck, right? That's what people say, bad luck.

有时候你确实会运气不好，而运气不好通常意味着某件事出错的概率非常低，但它还是出错了。这至少我认为是对运气不好的公平定义。很多人用运气不好来表示这件事有很大可能出错，结果确实出错了，这很糟糕。你知道吗，那不是运气不好。那是糟糕的计划、设计，各种糟糕的事情——那是你的错。

And sometimes you have bad luck, and bad luck generally means like, there's a very low percent chance of something going wrong and it went wrong anyway. That's at least I think a fair definition of bad luck. A lot of people use bad luck as there was a great chance of this going wrong and it went wrong and that sucks. You know what, that's not bad luck. That is bad planning, design, bad all sorts of things that's your fault.

如果你只是把它归咎于运气不好，短期内你确实逃避了接受自己在这结果中的共谋责任所带来的痛苦，但你也什么都没学到。如果你什么都没学到，又怎么能让事情变得更好呢？你怎么能防止所谓的'坏运气'下次再发生呢？这是我无法接受、无法容忍的事情之一。我的观点是，我们都会犯错，这很正常。

And if you just write it off as bad luck, you're in the short term escaping some pain of accepting your complicity as you said in the outcomes, but you're also not learning anything. And if you're not learning anything, how are you going to make anything better? How are you going to prevent the quote unquote bad luck from happening next time? That is just one of the things I cannot take, I cannot stand for. Like, I am all about we make mistakes, and that happens.

但当我两次犯同样的错误时，那是我经历过最痛苦的体验之一。在公司和个人生活中，这种情况发生得够多了，以至于我会想：等等，这情形似曾相识。我是怎么让自己陷入这种境地的？你知道吗，这是我的错。是我把自己置于这种境地的错。

But when I make the same mistake twice, that is one of the most painful experiences that I go through. And that has happened enough in both company and personal life where I just like, wait a minute, this situation seems familiar. How did I get myself into this? Do you know what, this is my fault. This is my fault for putting myself into this situation.

是我强化了这种局面动态的错。是我促成了这种局面的错。即使技术上不是我的错，比如汽车某个部件因为别人安装不当而坏了——我的意思不是我亲手操作的，对吧？比如不是我拧的那个扳手，但选择加入一个预算不足的团队是我的错，没有强调价值并坚持团队稳定性的错，或者团队人员没有足够重视复盘和事后分析来找出问题根源的错。

It's my fault for reinforcing the dynamics of this situation. It's my fault for enabling this situation. Even when it's not technically my fault, like let's say something breaks on the car because someone didn't set up in the right way. That's not I mean, I didn't do it, right? Like I didn't swing that wrench, but it's my fault for let's say getting on a team that doesn't have the budget that they need to have to do this, to not emphasizing the value and insisting on the stability of the team, or if the people who are on the team, not doing enough work on debriefs and some postmoderns of trying to figure out what's the root cause of our problems.

永远都是我的错。在任何我觉得'哦，坏运气影响了我'的情况下，总存在某种我的共谋责任。而这恰恰让事情变得更具可操作性。这是我喜欢的特质之一。我喜欢那些可以采取行动的事情，让我能够实际做些改变，以不同的方式行动，从而让我变得更好，让我们变得更好。

It's always my fault. There's always some complicity in any situation where I feel like, oh, that bad luck affected me, my fault. And it's just so much more actionable. That's one of the things that I like. I like things that are actionable, where I can actually do something, change something, act in a different way where now I'm better, we're better.

我们学到了东西，我们前进了，对吧？我们会犯新的错误，只要它们是新颖的就没问题。只是不要一遍又一遍地犯同样的错误。我无法忍受重复自己。我记得在版本控制系统出现之前，在Git、CVS和Subversion等工具之前，我有时会覆盖自己的文件，对吧？

We've learned something, we moved forward, right? And we will make new mistakes and as long as they are novel, that's fine. Just let's not make the same mistakes over and over again. I cannot stand repeating myself. I remember in the days before version control, before Git and CVS and Subversions and so on, I would sometimes overwrite my files, right?

我可能花了四个小时写一段代码，然后犯了个错误把文件删了。没有什么比不得不重做那份工作更让我难受的了。那种肉体上的痛苦如此真切，我记得在Basecamp和早期工作的系统中，有好几个功能模块，我明明已经做出了可用的功能，却不知怎么搞砸了，之后就再也没重做出来。我就是无法忍受再次重做那份工作。这种心态一直延续下来，并且在错误面前更加放大了，因为错误带来的痛苦是加倍的，对吧？

I would have spent four hours in a piece of code and then I would make a mistake and I would delete the file. Like I knew of nothing worse than having to redo that work. It was so physically painful to me that I can remember several features of both Basecamp and earlier systems I worked on where I had a working feature and I somehow killed it and I just never made it again. I simply could not stand to redo the work again. So that has carried over and it's just even amplified with mistakes because mistakes are just extra painful, right?

像这些错误，特别是对于Basecamp这样规模的公司，我不只对自己的错误负责，我还要为所有人的错误负责。每次发生这种情况我都需要学习，改变系统，改变动态，改变反馈循环的流程，改变输入，改变事物安装配置的方式——但不是那种'哦，让我们永远防止这种情况再次发生'的方式，因为我认为那往往会导致过度反应。但仍然要全面考虑整个系统，认识到自己是系统的一部分，而不是把问题归咎于运气不好。我的意思是，你在赛车中经常听到这种说法，但在Basecamp我不常听到。我想部分原因可能是每次有人提出这种说法时，我可能会有点失控——这本身就是一个应该从中学习并改正的失败。

Like these mistakes, especially as a company size of Basecamp, I'm not just responsible for my own mistake, I'm responsible for everyone else's mistake. And I need to learn every single time that happens and change the system, change the dynamic, change the flow of the feedback loop, change the inputs, change the configuration of how things are installed in such a way that it's not like, oh, let's prevent this from ever happening again, because I think that often leads you down a path of an overreaction. But still just considering the whole system, considering you're part of it, not writing things up to bad luck. I mean, you hear that a lot in racing, I don't hear that a lot in at base camp. And I think perhaps in part just because every single time someone have brought that up, I weakness kind of perhaps lost my cool a little bit on that, which in itself is a failure that you should learn from and correct from and so forth.

这当然不是运气不好。但确实，我就是无法忍受。我们必须接受这份责任并且全部承担。你离系统越近，比如我经常在推特上谈论政治，主要是美国政治。为什么我谈论美国政治而不是伊朗、格鲁吉亚、俄罗斯或其他地方的政治？

It's certainly not bad luck. But yeah, I just, I can't take it. And we got to accept that responsibility and we got to do it all. The closer you are to the system, for example, I tweet a fair amount about politics and I tweet mostly about US politics. Why do I tweet about US politics and not about the politics of, I don't know, Iran or Georgia or Russia or something else?

部分原因是我已经缴纳了数百万税款，所以我对这个特定国家有既得利益。我碰巧住在这里，至少在一定程度上拥有直接的影响力渠道，尽管我没有被授予投票权。我仍然觉得这是我最密切相关的领域——我对这些行动有牵连，也有机会去影响它。当没有个人牵连时，指责别人要容易得多。

Well, partly because I've paid millions in taxes, so I kind of have a vested interest in like this particular country. I happen to live here, I happen to have a direct line of influence to some extent at least, even though I'm not granted the right to vote. I still feel like this is the closest area where I have complicity. I have complicity in these actions and I have some chance of kind of affecting that. It's so much easier to just call shit out when there when there's no personal complicity.

对吧？就像

Right? Like it's

确实如此。

For sure.

你邻居眼中的木屑之类的。所以是的。

The speck in your neighbor's eye and and all that stuff. So yeah.

你认为你的不耐烦——好吧，我不该说是不耐烦。你对重复工作的厌恶是否在某种程度上让你成为了优秀的程序员？

Do you think your impatience well, I shouldn't say impatience. Your distaste for repeating work is part of what made you a good programmer?

绝对是。我觉得这几乎是一种病态，我对重复做同一件事如此反感——我的意思是，这并不独特。很多程序员都有这种特质，以至于我有时会过度努力防止这种情况再次发生。这时我就需要克制自己，告诉自己：好吧，这个问题我只遇到过一次。我可能担心会再次遇到，但在真正再次遇到之前，不要过度反应，去构建一个庞大的框架来处理它。

Absolutely. I think it's almost pathological actually, that I have such an aversion to doing the same thing twice that I mean, not that it's that unique. I think that lots of programmers have it that I'll sometimes go overboard in just trying to prevent that from happening again. And that's where I need some restraint of saying like, okay, I've only seen this problem once. I might fear that I'll see it again, but until I actually see it again, let's not overreact here and build some huge honking framework to do it again.

但通常我会匹配，实际上在开源和Ruby on Rails工作中我最喜欢的一点，就是在我已经做的工作中进行模式匹配。所以并不是说事情完全一样，而是存在一种模式，有一个相似的大纲。当我发现这些相似的大纲，并提出一种提取方法，使得下次遇到类似形状和轮廓的事情时，这项工作就不复存在了，这真的让我在个人工作满意度方面达到了巅峰。我特别喜欢发现这些事情，我会想，嘿，如果我明天必须从头开始重写Basecamp，我会做得更好，因为我会解决所有这些问题，我会把所有工具都放进Basecamp的工具箱里。这是负面可视化的一点，我有这种，我不知道，噩梦般的幻想，不管你怎么称呼它，就像我们失去了一切，对吧？

But I usually match, one of the things I like the most actually in terms of working on open source and on Ruby on Rails has been pattern matching in the work that I already do. So it's not so much that the thing is exactly the same, but there's a pattern, there's an outline that's similar. And when I spot those similar outlines, and I come up with an extraction that kind of makes that work go away next time that something has a similar shape and outline, that is really where I hit the jackpot in terms of personal satisfaction with the work. I love just spotting these things where I think to myself, hey, if I had to write Basecamp again from scratch tomorrow, I'd be so much better off because I'd solve all these problems, I'd put all these tools into the toolkit of Basecamp. This is one of the things with negative visualisation where I have this, I don't know, nightmare fantasy, however you want to put it, where like we lose it all, right?

我必须从头再来一遍。我们必须重新编写Basecamp，只有我和Jason还有随便谁。而且，我们不再有那50个人了。我们没有所有的钱，就像，随便吧，我在哪里？我能做到吗？

I have to do it all over again from scratch. We have to write basecam again, it's just me and Jason and whatever. And like, we don't have the 50 people anymore. We don't have all the money and like, whatever, like where am I? Can I do it?

我可以想象整个事情，我已经打包好了这个背包。我在Rails公司做过一次演讲，我想是去年，关于Rails对我来说是生存工具包。我在想，如果一切都出错了，我必须从头开始，我至少会有生存的工具吗？这就是我对RAILS的使命，而且一直都是。就像如果我必须完全重启，我没有员工，没有其他程序员，什么都没有，只有我自己。

I can imagine this whole thing, and I've packed this backpack. I gave a talk at the Rails company, I think last year about the survival kit that Rails is for me. I think of like, if everything goes wrong, and I have to start over from scratch, will I at least have the tools to survive? And that's my mission for RAYALD, and it's always been. Like if I had to reboot fully, I don't have a staff, I don't have other programmers, I don't have anything, I just have myself.

自给自足，正如我们一开始谈到的，已经重要到了近乎病态的程度。我的意思是，有好的一面，有时也有不好的一面。我认为思考如何依赖和依靠他人是好事。但是，嘿，我背负着这个十字架，处理它，并试图最大化其好处，最小化其缺点。但好处之一就是专注于创造真正高效的工具，让小型团队能够做出惊人的事情。

Self sufficiency, as we talked about at the beginning, has been just such an important driver to the pathological level. And I mean good things have come out of it and sometimes not so good things come out of it too. I think there are good things to think about like how can you rely on and depend on other people. But hey, I carry that cross and deal with that, and just try to maximise the benefits and minimise the drawbacks of it. But one of the benefits have been just this focus on creating truly productive tools that allow tiny teams to do amazing things.

因为我想让其他想像我们一样做事的人——小团队、没有外部资金——有机会竞争。因为过去不是这样的，对吧？如果你想在95年或什么时候创办一个网络初创公司，你必须花200美元买一个Oracle许可证才能启动数据库，那真是个糟糕的起步时代。现在从未如此容易过。我太喜欢这一点了。

Because I want to enable other people who want to do it like we did it, tiny team, no external money, to have a chance to compete. Because it didn't used to be that way, right? If you wanted to start a web startup in '95 or whatever, and you had to spend $200 on an Oracle license just to get a database going, like that was a terrible time to get things going. Now it's never been easier. And I just love that.

我的意思是，这很有趣，我们正在降低进入门槛，这在某种意义上可能让竞争变得更难，因为有更多人参与竞争。但对我来说，这更公平一些，我可以想象自己处于那种情况。我可以想象自己重启，进行所有的负面可视化，并认为一切都会好起来的。

Mean, it's funny, we're lowering the barriers of entry, which in some sense makes it perhaps harder because there's more people competing. But to me, it's just there's something fairer about that and I can imagine myself in that situation. I can imagine myself rebooting, doing all the negative visualization and thinking it's gonna be okay.

不，我的意思是，过去三次图书发布我都在使用Basecamp，大约一个半月后我将再次使用。我经常被问到，你的团队有多少人？我就说，我有一个，也许两个全职员工，其余都是合同工，而且所有人都是分布式的。所以，我认为从低门槛的角度来看，从未如此容易过。我觉得这很鼓舞人心，因为a，如果你不竞争，你就不会变得更好。

No, I mean, I've used Basecamp for the last three book launches, and I'm going to be doing so again shortly in about a month and a half. And I'm asked all the time, how many people do have on your team? And I'm like, I have one, maybe two, really, full time employees, and then the rest are all contracted it, and everyone's distributed. So it's it has I think it's never been easier from the standpoint of having a low barrier to entry. And I find that encouraging because a, if you're not competing, you're not getting better.

你的生活中应该有一些竞争，某种促使你进步的压力。其次，它给了你参与一场可以某种程度上操纵的游戏的机会，就像我们之前讨论的，如果你在某个领域处于前20%，比如前十分之一甚至前四分之一，你就能找到脱颖而出的方法。而以前，如果进入成本主要由资金决定，比如你没有钱，那你就完蛋了。你知道吗？所以如果你没有500美元购买或租用科技创业所需的基础设施，你就无法开始。

You should have some type of competition in your life, some type of pressure to improve. And second, it gives you the opportunity to compete in a game that you can rig in a sense because, like we were talking about earlier, if you are in the top twentieth, you know, like, the top decile or even quartile in two or three areas, you can find a way to differentiate yourself. Whereas previously, if the cost entry was mediated primarily by finances, like if you don't have the money, you're fucked. You know? So you if don't have $500 to buy or rent the infrastructure you need for that tech startup, you do not pass go.

就是这样。你没有机会运用那些其他能力。但我可以一直说下去。你提到了荒谬时代。你还有其他喜欢的哲学家或作家吗？

That's it. You don't have a chance to use those other abilities. But I could go on and on. You mentioned the age of absurdity. Do you have any other favorite philosophers or writers?

哦，很多。我们来谈谈一些我们提到过的影响。就斯多葛主义而言，最初真正吸引我的是那种入门文本，它总结了很多作品，就是《美好生活指南》。

Oh, a lot. I'll let's draw on some of the influence we talked about. In terms of stoicism, think what really just got me turned on to that originally was sort of an introductory text that summarizes a lot of the work, is the guide to a good life.

是的，是的。那是欧文写的，对吧？威廉·欧文。没错。

Yeah. Yeah. That's Irvine, right? William Irvine. Yep.

这不是原始材料，如果我知道塞涅卡或奥勒留的原始材料那么容易接触，也许我也可以直接去读那些。但我发现《美好生活指南》这本入门书很容易学，再次体现了我们喜欢的那种易学难精的特点。我通过它轻松了解了斯多葛主义，并认识到为什么它能引起共鸣。然后我就顺着这条线继续深入阅读。还有什么呢？

Which is not source material and perhaps if I knew known how approachable the source material was either Seneca or Aurelius, then you can also go straight to that. But I just found it a very easy, again, one of those things as we talked about what we like, like easy to learn, hard to master. I found The Guide to Good Life, the introductory text was just an easy way to learn about it and recognise why this resonates. And then I kept pulling on the thread and kept reading from there. Let's see what else?

我们没怎么谈过的一点是，我大约四年前成为了父母，所以现在我有两个儿子。我也在某种程度上尝试将其视为一个系统，思考如何能更好地为人父母，更好地陪伴我们的两个孩子。阿尔菲·科恩的作品，他有很多非常好的书。让我入门的是《奖励的惩罚》，这本书实际上是关于动机的，讲述了奖励在大多数情况下对于培养孩子或鼓励创造性工作并不起作用，它涵盖了从学生到工作者再到孩子的方方面面。还有一本很棒的书叫《被宠坏的孩子的神话》，这本书更具体地探讨了养育和支持孩子等方面。

One of the things we haven't talked so much about is I became a parent four years ago or so, so now I have two boys. And I've tried to treat that as a system too, to some extent of like, how can I become better at simply being a parent and being there for the two kids that we have? And the work of Alfie Cohen, he has a bunch of really good books. The one that got me started was Punished by Rewards, which is actually a book all about motivation and how rewards basically don't work in most cases for developing kids or encouraging creative work, it kind of tackles both everything from students to works to kids. There's also a great book called The Myth of the Spoiled Child, which is even more specific about nurturing and supporting kids and so forth.