Four coffees and still not “drunk”

It is past midnight as I start writing. I am neither sleepy nor drunk, although today I have had four coffees and four small cups of baijiu and shochu. What I feel instead is the reality of living on impulse: the freedom to break my usual rules, and a little regret that the night is not yet enough.

I am sitting at the computer, choosing each word and punctuation mark as I go. Old songs repeat in my ears, with the air conditioner humming behind them. My fingers move over the keys like a pianist’s. Writing and keeping a daily record are things I truly love. I can trace that love back to the summer of 2022, and I have not stopped since.

After watching a recording of a month-end livestream today, I thought more about what it means to love doing something. It is the thing you can keep doing without tiring in the way you tire of other tasks. You would continue even without money or encouragement. In its presence, diligence starts to seem less decisive, let alone “intelligence.” People who keep learning often come to see that the supposedly smart are simply good at learning continuously. I would rank them this way: passion > diligence > intelligence.

Yet passion alone is not enough. It needs a self-learning system. To take something you love to a very high level, you need to be able to teach yourself, assess your work, and keep improving—especially in the age of AI. Someone who loves learning and revises what they make can go further than someone who never examines their own work.

I have seen this in my “regular-investment checklist,” which is really a daily checklist for examining what I do. Over five years, it has changed substantially at least five times: from a single sentence into a quantified list. There have been so many smaller revisions that I cannot count them. Without learning and checking myself, the later versions would never have existed. I cannot fully describe how much the process has changed me. Friends who have watched along the way may have their own thoughts about it.

Behind all this is a set of values becoming clearer in my mind:

• Self-learning system > passion > diligence > intelligence