Day 13: You are not a lottery ticket
（Wednesday）
各位书友，今天我们一起阅读《Zero to One》第六章YOU ARE NOT A LOTTERY TICKET的76-81页。
What kind of future will our indefinitely optimistic decisions bring about?
我们不明确的乐观决定会带来什么样的未来？
01 IS INDEFINITE OPTIMISM EVEN POSSIBLE?
对未来不明确的乐观主义可能持久吗？
What kind of future will our indefinitely optimistic decisions bring about? Unfortunately, indefinite optimism seems inherently unsustainable: how can the future get better if no one plans for it?
我们不明确的乐观决定会带来什么样的未来？不幸的是，对未来不明确的乐观主义看起来根本无法持续：如果没有规划未来，未来怎么可能越变越好呢？
In contrast, the other three views of the future can work.
相较未来不明确的乐观主义，另外三种对未来的态度都有一定作用。
Definite optimism works when you build the future you envision.
对未来明确的乐观主义可以使你创造出你想要的未来。
Definite pessimism works by building what can be copied without expecting anything new.
对未来明确的悲观主义可以对已经存在的东西进行复制，毫无新意。
Indefinite pessimism works because it’s self-fulfilling: if you’re a slacker with low expectations, they will probably be met.
对未来不明确的悲观主义也有作用，因为这样的未来会自我实现：如果你是一个对生活要求不高的懒人，你的要求很容易就达到了。
Actually, most everybody in the modern world has already heard an answer to this question: progress without planning is what we call “evolution.” Darwin himself wrote that life tends to “progress” without anybody intending it. Every living thing is just a random iteration on some other organism, and the best iterations win.
事实上，现代社会的大多数人应该都听说过：没有计划的进步就叫“演化”。达尔文写道：生命就算没有准备，也会自己“演化”。每个生命都只是某些有机体随机变异的结果，而最佳版本会在最后胜出。
Yet in recent years Darwinian (or pseudo-Darwinian) metaphors have become common in business. Journalists analogize literal survival in competitive ecosystems to corporate survival in competitive markets. Hence all the headlines like “Digital Darwinism,” “Dot-com Darwinism,” and “Survival of the Clickiest.”
近年来，达尔文说（或伪达尔文学说）在商界的隐喻已经司空见惯。记者把竞争生态系统中的生存类比为在竞争市场中企业的生存，因此报纸上出现了诸如“数码达尔文学说”、“网络达尔文学说”和“点击量最高者生存”等新闻标题。
Even in engineering-driven Silicon Valley, the buzzwords of the moment call for building a “lean startup” that can “adapt” and “evolve” to an ever-changing environment.
甚至在工程师主宰的硅谷，现在的流行词也是要求建造一个“精益的初创公司”，要能“适应”不断变化的坏境，并随着坏境变化而“演化”。
But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum.
但是精益是一种方法，而不是目标。对已经存在的事物做出小的改变可能让你达到局部市场最大化的成绩，但是不能帮助你取得全球市场的最大化。
Would-be entrepreneurs are told that nothing can be known in advance: we’re supposed to listen to what customers say they want, make nothing more than a “minimum viable product,” and iterate our way to success.
想创业的人被告知在商界所有事情的发生都不可预料：我们应该做的就是倾听顾客的需要，创造最基本的可用产品，然后反复修正，最后走向成功。
A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in start-ups, intelligent design works best.
对于一个对未来不明确的乐观主义者，公司是最奇怪的地方：没有一个计划，你有什么理由希望自己的生意成功？达尔文主义在其他环境中也许是个有用的理论，但是对于初创公司，最有效的还是富有智慧的设计。
02 THE RETURN OF DESIGN
长期规划仍是最重要的
What would it mean to prioritize design over chance? Today, “good design” is an aesthetic imperative, and everybody from slackers to yuppies carefully “curates” their outward appearance. It’s true that every great entrepreneur is first and foremost a designer.
规划优先于机遇是什么意思呢？现在，”好的设计“是一种审美需求，任何人，从懒人到雅皮士，都对自己的外在形象非常在意。确实，每个伟大的企业家都首先是一位设计师。
Anyone who has held an iDevice or a smoothly machined MacBook has felt the result of Steve Jobs’s obsession with visual and experiential perfection. But the most important lesson to learn from Jobs has nothing to do with aesthetics. The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business.
任何手里拿着苹果的智能设备或是外形流畅的苹果笔记本电脑的人都会感觉到乔布斯对产品完美的视觉和体验的痴迷。但是我们从他那里学到的最重要的东西与美学无关。乔布斯最好的设计是他的企业。
Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively. Forget “minimum viable products”—ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others’ successes.
苹果公司发挥想象，并多年执行明确的未来计划，去创造新产品，有效分销。忘掉“基本的可用产品”吧——自从乔布斯在1976年创立了苹果之后，他就意识到只有对未来精确地规划，才可以改变整个世界，而非倾听焦点团体的意见或是复制其他人的成功。
Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world. And a business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random. The power of planning explains the difficulty of valuing private companies.
长期规划在我们未来不明的追求短期利益的世界里经常被低估，并且在一个人人看未来都迷茫的世界里，目标明确的企业总是被低估。计划的力量解释了评估私有企业价值的困难。
A good example:
Facebook为例：
When Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced: “Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.” Mark saw where he could take the company, and Yahoo! didn’t.
2006年7月，当雅虎公司出价10亿美元要收购Facebook时，我认为如果是我们，至少会考虑一下。但是马克.扎克伯格在会议上宣布：“好了，伙计们，这个会议只是走个程序，10分钟也不用。我们显然不会把Facebook卖掉。”马克清楚他能够领导公司开创出怎样的未来，而雅虎不清楚。
03 YOU ARE NOT A LOTTERY TICKET
你不是一张彩票
Where to start? John Rawls will need to be displaced in philosophy departments. Malcolm Gladwell must be persuaded to change his theories. And pollsters have to be driven from politics. But the philosophy professors and the Gladwells of the world are set in their ways, to say nothing of our politicians. It’s extremely hard to make changes in those crowded fields, even with brains and good intentions.
从哪里开始呢？约翰.罗尔斯必须被哲学系扫地出门，马尔科姆.格拉德威尔必须说服改变他的理论，而且民意测验不猛影响政治。但是世界上无数的哲学教授和格拉德威尔都积习难改，更不用说政客了。就算有智慧，出于好意，想在人多的地方做些改变，也是极度困难的事。
Fortunately a startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.
初创企业是你可以明确掌握尽最大努力的机会。你不只拥有自己生命的代理权，还拥有这世界上某个重要角落的代理权。而这一切都要从抵制不公平的概率主宰开始，因为你并不是一张被概率决定命运的彩票。
拓展
Malcolm Gladwell says you can’t understand Bill Gates’s success without under-standing his fortunate personal context: he grew up in a good family, went to a private school equipped with a computer lab, and counted Paul Allen as a childhood friend.
马尔科姆.格拉德威尔说，如果你不了解比尔.盖茨幸运的生活环境，就不能明白比尔.盖茨的成功：他成长在一个生活优越的家庭，所上的私立学校配有电脑实验室，童年好友是保罗.艾伦。
But perhaps you can’t understand Malcolm Gladwell without understanding his historical context as a Boomer (born in 1963). When Baby Boomers grow up and write books to explain why one or another individual is successful, they point to the power of a particular individual’s context as determined by chance.
但是如果你不知道马尔科姆.格拉德威尔是赶着婴儿潮出生的人（生于1963年），你就不可能理解他的言论。这些婴儿潮时期出生的人长大后，认为成功人士之所以能都成功由其个人背景决定的，而个人背景具有很大的偶然性。
But they miss the even bigger social context for their own preferred explanations:A whole generation learned from childhood to overrate the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning. Gladwell at first appears to be making a contrarian critique of the myth of the self-made businessman, but actually his own account encapsulates the conventional view of a generation.
但是他们忽视了更大的社会背景：这一代人从孩童时期就过高地估计了机遇的力量，低估了规划的重要性。格拉德威尔开始时想要打破商人白手起家的神话，但是事实上他自己的解释就是对这代人传统想法的阐述。
悄悄告诉大家：英语共读，可以打卡啦~