The Theory of Self as Seed

The Great Dao can be broken. The seed can only grow by itself.

1. Where it started

When I was in my senior year of high school, I really liked a novel called Perfect World (完美世界). The main character, Shi Hao, lives in a world where the Great Dao is broken. The old road to immortality doesn’t work anymore, no matter how hard anyone cultivates. Shi Hao doesn’t wait for heaven and earth to be repaired, and he doesn’t borrow the broken rules either. He takes his own body as the seed and opens a new road inside himself. Back then, I really believed I could also walk a road that nobody could compare with.

Later, when I started to study at home on my own, I tried meditation, sitting practice, and some Taoist exercises. I found that if I only explored my inner world, it sometimes felt empty. I didn’t get the result I wanted in the college entrance exam that year.

What really worked was meeting more people, taking part in offline events, and trying different things. Switching my major, joining communities, entering competitions, building projects: every turning point in my life started when I stopped carrying everything alone.

So the seed is mine. But it grows in soil.

2. The era now is like a broken Great Dao

I think the era we live in now is like the world in Perfect World. It’s not that there is no road. It’s that the road the last generation walked has broken.

The old road	What I see now
Good school → stable job → buy a house	The return on a degree is getting thinner, and stable jobs are shrinking
Master one skill and live on it for life	AI makes the shelf life of many skills much shorter
Work hard step by step, and you will rise	Hard work doesn’t automatically pay off anymore

And AI moves fast. Almost every month there is a big model release, and every one of them feels like watching a nuke go off in the distance. The first reaction is panic.

I know a huge number of people want to use this AI opportunity to get into some kind of hall of fame. But in light of reality, we must accept one fact: only a very small number of people can truly stand out from the crowd.

In a world where the rules are broken, I see roughly three ways to live:

Wait. Wait for the rules to be fixed, for the next wave, for someone else to give you a road.
Survive inside the broken rules. Learn every trick to compete for what is left. The Chinese internet calls this kind of thing a “version answer”, a gaming word for the strongest build in the current patch. It is smart, and it describes real pressure. But it is still a game played on the pieces of the old rules.
Take yourself as the seed. Stop counting on the old rules, and open a road from yourself.

Self as seed is the third one. Two notes, so it doesn’t turn into a slogan:

A broken Dao is a condition, not a destiny. Blaming everything on “the times are bad” is just another excuse.
Where the old rules break, new rules appear. For someone who can use AI, AI is both the force that broke the old road and the entrance to a new one.

3. What “self as seed” means

Self as seed means: take yourself as the source, not external things.

External things are like someone else’s supreme bone, the treasure that was taken from Shi Hao when he was a child. New models, new frameworks, other people’s methods, growth tricks, persona templates. They are powerful, but they belong to everyone, and the next version can replace them at any time. When everyone gets the same tool, the advantage that came from the tool is gone.

The seed inside yourself is different: energy, attention, judgment, taste, a real understanding of some people’s pain, and the courage to take risks. You can’t download them. You can’t outsource them. And nobody can take them away from you.

Behind this there is a simple economic logic:

Abilities that can be outsourced to a model will get cheaper and cheaper. The gap that remains grows inside people.

The stronger the models get, the scarcer the seed becomes. So I don’t think the best investment in the AI era is chasing every release. It is growing your own seed.

4. How the seed grows

I use a picture of a tree to think about it:

          Sky · No regrets        ← the final view
               │
          Fruit · Doing           ← make things, let the world test them
               │
          Trunk · Mind            ← not hijacked by things or emotions
               │
          Roots · Body            ← energy is the first lever
               │
          Seed · Yourself         ← the source
  ─────────────┴─────────────
   Soil · Time, environment, people

Roots · Body. Energy is the first lever. A lot of “I don’t dare to do it” and a lot of anxiety start with low energy: not enough sleep, no exercise, a body that feels weak. But it is the first lever, not the only cause. If you blame everything on the body, it becomes another way to delay: “Let me train a bit more first.”

Trunk · Mind. Don’t let external things or emotions hijack you. When a big release comes out, I try to ask only one question: what does it change for my users? Not “am I falling behind?”

I also try to be fast but not hurried. Fast is a speed. Hurried is a state of mind. When everyone is chasing speed, speed becomes cheap, and the things that can’t be rushed become rare: your body, your judgment, your taste, deep understanding, and the relationships between people. Speed should be set by me, not by the rhythm outside.

Fruit · Doing. Wang Yangming said: “A person must be tempered in real affairs to stand firm.” Self as seed has to land on doing things. Otherwise nobody can prove it wrong, and it slowly turns back into closed-door cultivation. So: build products, meet users, publish, write. And treat the result as information, not as a verdict on yourself.

Soil · Time, environment, and people. Three things here.

Free time is not the precondition. It is the first fruit. If I say “I’ll start once I’m financially free”, the theory becomes a privilege for people who already have money and time. So I start by taking back one hour a day that nobody else controls, then half a day, then one project. Spinoza ground lenses for a living. Einstein wrote his 1905 papers while working as a clerk at the patent office.
Soil can be designed. Distraction is not only a lack of self-discipline; often we try to think in an environment that is designed to stop us from thinking. Spend willpower once, on designing the environment, not every day on fighting it. Put the phone in another room. Open one window at a time. Choose input that has an end, like a book, instead of a feed that never ends.
Self as seed does not mean being alone. Shi Hao was raised by Stone Village and protected by the Willow God. The seed is yours, but the soil and the rain come from other people.

5. An answer about time: no regrets

This is the base of the whole theory: don’t measure your life by success or failure. Just don’t leave regrets at the moment you die.

According to Gilovich and Medvec’s research on regret (The experience of regret: What, when, and why, Psychological Review, 1995), in the short term, the mistakes we made by acting (errors of commission) bring more regret. But over a longer period of time, the things we didn’t do (errors of omission) bring more regret.

So another core of self as seed is this: if you don’t want to look back on your life with regret, the most expensive mistake is usually not the thing you tried and failed at. It is the thing you never started.

I’m not the only one who arrived here. When Jeff Bezos left a well-paid job on Wall Street to start Amazon, he used what he called a “regret minimization framework”: imagine yourself at eighty, looking back, and ask whether you will regret not trying.

Why does this cure “I don’t dare”? Because not daring is, at its core, fear of failure. When the measure changes from success to no regrets, failure is no longer a threat. It is just part of the experience.

6. Testing it on myself

A theory should be something my own life can prove wrong. So I’m testing it, starting with the body.

From September 19, I started recording everything I eat. Two things changed quickly:

Free sugar went from about 60–78 g a day to zero within three days. I didn’t fight the urge to drink sweet drinks. I changed my default drink to plain water. All three sweet drinks before had been “just grabbed on the way”.
Protein went from about 69 g to 83–93 g a day, four days in a row. I fixed one breakfast (milk, oats, two eggs, nuts) so I don’t have to choose every morning.

Neither of them used willpower. Both changed the default option.

There was also a counterexample. My sodium stayed high for four days, for the same reason every day: in the canteen, the windows with protein are all heavy-flavored, and the light ones have almost no protein. Designing defaults doesn’t work when the good options are not on the menu. Then you have to change the menu: add a plain vegetable dish, or go to another place. That was a boundary my theory hadn’t written down before.

What is still not tested: the body lever itself. Does more energy really make me dare to do more? I don’t have any data on that yet.

I also keep a list of how this theory could fail, so I can catch myself:

Closed-door cultivation: only training body and mind, never doing anything or meeting anyone. That was my high school year at home.
Being swept along by the rhythm: afraid of missing every release, mistaking “hurried” for “fast”.
Unfalsifiable: every result can be explained as “right”, and nothing is ever tested.

7. Last

The best test of a theory is what its author becomes. This applies to me too.

I’m still a seed under the soil. I don’t know yet what it will grow into, and I’m not going to pretend I do. But I know which way I want to face: not waiting for the broken Dao to be repaired, and not just surviving on its pieces, but opening a road from myself, slowly and for real.

The Great Dao can be broken. The seed can only grow by itself.