The quickest way to understand someone is to read what they wrote themselves. Zhang Yiming posted more than 2,000 times on Weibo between 2009 and 2019; the most widely circulated selection contains 231 posts. I read these alongside several outside interpretations and put together these notes.
A Portrait in One Sentence
The young Zhang Yiming was a programmer who treated self-management as an engineering problem: tracking his health with metrics, using delayed gratification to resist inertia, and breaking life goals into smaller tasks. At the same time, he reflected seriously on his own laziness, recorded six moves in six years as a newcomer in Beijing, and urged his father to take a chance on Father’s Day.
From “escaping the gravity of mediocrity” (2010) to “doing extraordinary things with an ordinary mind” (2021), the first is about acceleration, the second about steadiness. They are two sides of the same person.
Background
- A graduate of Nankai University, he worked as an engineer at Microsoft, then joined Fanfou, working with Wang Xing and Wang Huiwen. In 2009, he left to start his first independent venture, 99fang, a property search service. In late 2011, he stepped down as its CEO to prepare for Toutiao.
- He published more than 2,000 Weibo posts between 2009 and 2019. The 2010 posts, from his 99fang period in his late twenties, are the strongest: he had just started a company and was earnestly sharing his thinking. After starting Toutiao in 2012, he reposted many more articles, with fewer substantial thoughts of his own.
- His recurring terms over the decade: delayed gratification, self-control, rationality, reflection, innovation, learning.
- His Weibo bio long read “escaping the gravity of mediocrity,” from his October 20, 2010 post: “Mediocrity has gravity. It takes escape velocity to get away.”
- An interesting parallel: he once read through all of Pony Ma’s Weibo posts himself, then wrote two posts about the experience.
Selected Thoughts by Theme
Refusing Mediocrity
- Mediocrity has gravity. It takes escape velocity to get away. (2010-10-20)
- A mind full of ideas, yet actions that settle for mediocrity.
- The gaps between people’s lives widen while they are feeling good about themselves.
- If I could give my past self one piece of advice for the last five years, it would be: be bolder, then bolder still.
Delayed Gratification (His Most Frequent Term)
- Delayed gratification and a firm goodbye to inertia are the two most important foundations of excellence. (2010-9-29)
- Most people are so poor at delaying gratification that talent never even enters the contest.
- When others indulge, we work; when others kill time, we learn. The satisfaction we postpone will eventually arrive, backed by everything we have accumulated.
- Sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually.
Self-Knowledge and Growth
- I’m nearly thirty. In recent years, I’ve started relearning things I should have learned as a teenager: how to read, understand myself, communicate with people, manage my time, take other people’s opinions properly, motivate myself, write, keep exercising, and be patient.
- People often unconsciously remember only the parts that favor themselves. This is a major reason they feel wronged.
- When someone begins to understand and study themselves deeply, it means they have begun thinking philosophically, and signals a new stage in life.
- Find energy when you have none; stay calm when you have too much.
Life and Values (Where the Person Comes Through Most Clearly)
- At a friend’s wedding, he learned that the couple would still have to live in separate cities. His reflection: we should realize as much of our potential and experience as much of life as possible. Enduring things for a fixed payoff, at the expense of living, is a great loss. It is not a life of creation.
- Some young people now see retirement in their thirties or forties as an ideal. I don’t agree. Wanting to retire suggests you think your life right now is something to endure.
- You don’t have to wait until everything is 100% certain to start a business, love someone, or build a belief. Certainty will never reach 100%. Will you keep waiting forever?
- We feel unhappy because what we pursue is not happiness, but being happier than other people.
- Life does not lack beauty. It lacks sharing.
- In six years in Beijing, I lived in six places: Huilongguan, Shuangyushu, Zhichunli, Hepingli, Huixin West Street, and Xitucheng. Where have you lived?
Diligence and Inertia
- Few successful people have not worked extremely long hours: GE’s CEO worked a hundred hours a week for at least ten years; Buffett often picked up the next day’s Wall Street Journal at four in the morning to read it as early as possible. Diligence is not a ritual. It is a state of mind.
- The Road Less Traveled describes laziness as the root of all evil. He often reflected on slipping time management in his Weibo posts: “Inertia is the root of all evil. Starting today, I’m consciously working on it again.”
Character
- In a society where information moves faster and becomes more transparent, the cost of being one person on the outside and another within keeps rising. Being unpretentious is both a better moral choice and a more economical one.
- In short-term dealings, glib talk earns a premium. In long-term relationships, honesty earns a premium.
- Reputation matters. Character matters. Trustworthiness matters. They matter more as you grow older. Stand firm on your principles.
- To judge a young person’s potential, look at when they get up on weekends, what they do on weekends, and what they do after work.
The Ninth-Anniversary Speech: “Doing Extraordinary Things with an Ordinary Mind” (2021, His Later Years)
- An ordinary mind means eating properly when you eat, and sleeping properly when you sleep.
- The outside world rises and falls; within, you remain calm. (Context: the period of most intense pressure on TikTok.)
- He criticized going “all in”: often it is just the laziness of “I don’t want to think anymore. Let’s take a gamble.”
- He criticized the worship of methodologies and formulaic internet-industry jargon, reading an employee’s jargon-filled report aloud to make the point.
- Don’t misattribute success or mistake luck for ability. Don’t rush to conclusion.
Three Outside Interpretations
1. Nine traits identified by “Guige’s Operations Notes” on Zhihu: refusing mediocrity / pursuing excellence without fixed boundaries / delayed gratification / candor and clarity / focus and commitment / breaking down goals / immediate incentives / winner takes all / building a company as you would a product. The central observation: he has stayed in a cycle of “gather information → think → accumulate → review.” ByteDance’s growth was the natural outcome of that long accumulation.
2. NetEase’s “To Understand ByteDance, Study Zhang Yiming”: the person and the company share the same structure. His habit of self-calibration — first identifying a mismatch with his environment, then reallocating time, skills, and relationships — became ByteDance’s way of dealing with reality. Boundaries are an outcome, not a starting point.
3. The nuwa-skill research repository (GitHub): cross-checks speeches, Weibo posts, and internal letters across the years. Key points: debug yourself as you would an algorithm (“the optimal state is somewhere between mild joy and mild frustration”); he has explicitly said that “outside accounts of ByteDance’s formula for success are all deeply flawed.”
Download the Full Collection
The full selection of 231 posts — 157 on growth, 45 on management, and 29 on business, with the original numbering preserved — together with the reading guide above, is laid out as a 19-page A4 document in Chinese. Something to save and read slowly:
Download Zhang Yiming: Ten Years on Weibo — PDF (19 pages, in Chinese) →
Sources
| Source | Notes |
|---|---|
| 231 selected posts, compiled by Huo Qian | The most widely circulated selection, organized into Growth, Management, and Business |
| Complete archive of 2,286 Weibo posts | guozh.net/zhang-yiming-weibo-pdf |
| Zhihu: A compilation of ten years of Zhang Yiming’s Weibo posts | Interpretations organized around nine traits |
| Full ninth-anniversary speech, “Doing Extraordinary Things with an Ordinary Mind” (2021) | His final anniversary speech as CEO |
| NetEase: “To Understand ByteDance, Study Zhang Yiming” | An in-depth profile |
| nuwa-skill research repository (GitHub) | Cross-checks speeches, Weibo posts, and internal letters, distinguishing firsthand material from uncertain claims |