Please note: this article is absolutely not persuading anyone to trade stocks. You cannot enter the market at technology’s peak and then say you’ve taken a favorable position — losing money that way, no one will sympathize with you.
Suppose you think the stock market is too risky, so you buy nothing and keep all your money in the account.
You’d feel you haven’t participated in the market. But in terms of relative purchasing power, you’ve actually made a very definite choice: holding cash, giving up stocks’ potential returns.
When stocks rise, the cash number doesn’t change, but relative purchasing power falls; when stocks fall, the cash still doesn’t change, but you gain stronger purchasing power. This isn’t equivalent to a financial “short”, yet it shows one thing:
Not betting is also a bet.
Not buying a house, not changing jobs, not learning a new technology — none of these is “doing nothing”; they are continuing to hold the current state. But the world won’t stop changing just because you didn’t click “confirm”. Cities, industries, companies and other people all keep moving.
We cannot choose whether to participate in the world — only what position to participate from.
1. Position: Where You Stand Determines What Flows to You
I really like the English word position. It means both a person’s “place” in space, organization or relationships, and a “position” in financial markets.
This may be more than a linguistic coincidence. A position, in essence, is choosing which side of the market to stand on: holding stocks is a position, holding cash is a position, carrying debt or holding nothing at all are each positions too.
Outside financial markets, the concept still holds.
- Which city you live in is a geographic position;
- Whether you’re near core business or peripheral business is an organizational position;
- Whether you’re the platform, supplier, customer or capital provider is an industrial position;
- Whether you’re seen as an executor, coordinator or expert is a mental position.
A position isn’t just a static location; it’s more like your mode of exposure within some system. It determines what you more easily see, what resources flow to you, and what risks strike you first.
Geographic Position: Time Quietly Changes Lives
The same income means different quality of life in different cities; even in the same city, living near the office versus commuting two hours daily leads to different lives.
Two hours doesn’t look like much in a day, but over a year it’s several hundred hours. That time is enough to complete a systematic study, deliver a project, or maintain better health and relationships. A good geographic position doesn’t directly deliver success, but like compound interest it changes your time, energy and opportunities a little every day.
Organizational Position: The Same Company, Different Realities
The boss sees cash flow, organizational structure and survival probability; managers see resource allocation and result delivery; ordinary employees see tasks, performance and rewards; customers only care whether the product works well.
They face the same company, yet live in different realities. So many arguments aren’t necessarily about who’s right — they may reflect different information, interests and risks borne.
Before evaluating a behavior, first see from what position it arose.
Mental Position: Opportunities Seek “the Person Deemed Suitable”
Position also exists in others’ cognition. If a person is considered good at solving a certain class of problems, similar problems come to them more often. They thus gain more practice, information and resources, further cementing the impression.
But positioning also means trade-offs. You can have many abilities, yet others can usually clearly remember only a few labels. When you choose to become “the person who solves complex infrastructure problems”, you more easily get such opportunities — and may miss opportunities unrelated to this positioning.
Building a positioning is much like building a position: both gain some return exposure while accepting corresponding opportunity costs.
2. Good Positions Form Self-Reinforcing Cycles
The gap between people doesn’t come entirely from ability — it also comes from position.
Living in a city where an industry clusters, you more easily meet related companies and talent; joining an excellent team, you more easily learn high-standard ways of working; being near core business, you more easily understand what the organization truly cares about.
These benefits look small individually, but sustained long enough they compose a positive cycle:
Good positions bring more information and opportunities; opportunities form ability; ability in turn helps you obtain better positions.
This is the cumulative effect of good positions. It also explains why some apparent “ability gaps” may initially have been only position gaps.
This doesn’t deny effort. Quite the opposite — it reminds us: effort shouldn’t only improve your performance at your current position; it should also be used to identify and approach better positions.
There Is No “Best Position” Apart from the Individual
Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, New York or a small city — they cannot be abstractly ranked best and worst. Managers, experts, entrepreneurs and freelancers have no absolute hierarchy either.
Whether a position is good depends on whether it lets you exercise existing abilities and accumulate new ones, whether it brings high-quality information and opportunities, and whether its risks fall within what you can bear.
Therefore, a more useful question than “where is best” is:
Where suits me better, and how should I gradually approach it?
3. A Good Position Should Let You Keep Moving
We can hardly know in advance which position is definitely best. So evaluating a position can’t only look at how much return it brings now — also at how many future options it preserves.
A high-income but extremely closed post isn’t necessarily better than a temporarily lower-income post that accumulates general abilities. A seemingly stable asset, if it occupies all your capital, also leaves you unable to act when new opportunities appear.
Good positions often have several characteristics:
- Downside losses within bearable range;
- Continuous access to new information and feedback;
- Accumulation of transferable abilities and trust;
- Multiple options still available in future;
- Even if judgment is wrong, you won’t be permanently trapped.
Options don’t guarantee success, but they preserve your ability to keep acting in future. Rather than accurately predicting the world ten years hence, better to place yourself in a position that can adapt to multiple futures.
A position also isn’t chosen once and kept unchanged forever. Cities, industries and companies change; a person’s age, wealth, ability and goals change too. Positions once valuable may gradually become ordinary; paths once effective may fail as the environment changes.
Sometimes adjusting position means changing a city, an industry or a company; more often it’s just moving closer to the office, shifting from peripheral to core business, proactively meeting a few people from different fields, or investing part of your time in new skills.
Many long-term gaps are accumulated precisely from these tiny position adjustments.
4. Rethinking “Doing Nothing”
Waiting itself can also be an active position.
When the market has no reasonable opportunities, holding cash can preserve options; when career direction is still unclear, small-scale exploration may suit better than hasty commitment. Keeping your current position can also be a considered choice.
Take the same empty position: one is out of fear, not knowing what you’re waiting for; the other is because current odds are unreasonable, actively preserving the ability to act. Take staying in the same job: one stems from inertia; the other knows clearly that the current post still provides the accumulation you need.
The surface behaviors are identical, but the cognition behind them and the future paths differ.
So the real question isn’t “did I act”, but:
Do I clearly know why I stand here?
5. If There Really Were Gods in the World
Finally, I want to push “position” to a more abstract place.
If there really were a god in the world who could see everyone and hear everyone’s wishes, a question follows:
Why does he grant your wish, and not someone else’s?
Some hope housing prices rise; others wait for them to fall. One person hopes to get a position; another competes for the same one. On both sides of a match, people pray for victory. Human wishes are not only vast in number — they often contradict each other.
If all wishes could be fulfilled simultaneously, the world instead couldn’t run. So even if a god really existed, he probably wouldn’t be like a machine receiving requests, fulfilling everyone’s every wish one by one. The wish itself is not enough to constitute a result.
A person who never buys lottery tickets can hardly win the lottery; a person who never submits a resume can hardly wait for the ideal job to descend on its own; someone who never enters the market also cannot gain the market’s rising returns.
This doesn’t say effort always pays off, nor that standing in some position necessarily yields results. It only says:
If you are infinitely far from a result, even when the opportunity appears it can hardly land on you.
Therefore, a person’s responsibility may not be repeatedly asking gods to change the whole world, but first moving yourself to a position closer to the result. Wanting to meet certain people, enter environments where meeting them is more likely; wanting certain opportunities, make yourself appear where opportunities can identify you; wanting a coincidence to change you, at least stand on a path the coincidence might pass.
Luck Is Being Present When Opportunity Passes By
So-called luck may not be results descending from the sky without cause. It’s more like: when some low-probability event occurs, you happen to stand where it can pass.
The opportunity appears, and you can see it; someone needs a certain ability, and you happen to already have it; the market misprices something, and you happen to have capital, knowledge, and preserved courage to act.
Seen from outside, these things look like fate’s favor. But before the luck happened, the person had often already made many positional moves: choosing a city, entering an industry, meeting some people, accumulating some ability, reserving some resources, and bearing appropriate risks.
These choices cannot manufacture miracles, but they leave miracles a landing point.
If you hope opportunities find you, lower the difficulty of opportunities finding you; if you hope wishes come true, transform the wish into a series of real-world position changes.
A wish is not an order demanding the world cash it out; it’s more like a direction: reminding you where to move, what kind of people to approach, what abilities to accumulate, what risks to bear, and what options to preserve.
You cannot guarantee a wish will definitely come true, but you can keep shortening the distance between yourself and the result. When the distance is close enough, a coincidence, a stranger’s help, or even an inexplicable stroke of luck may become the final push.
At that moment we can call it probability, call it fate, or call it a god’s response. But before it happens, you must first have a position able to receive the result.
Conclusion: Not Pursuing Being Right Every Time
The world will probably always be uncertain. We cannot guarantee every judgment is correct, but we can keep understanding and adjusting our position:
- Approach positions that suit you better;
- Notice what information, resources, opportunities and risks are flowing toward you;
- Verify direction with small moves instead of sitting and waiting for perfect answers;
- At all times, preserve options for the next move.
Investors needn’t profit on every trade; entrepreneurs needn’t succeed with every product; a person’s career choices needn’t be the theoretical optimum at every step.
What’s truly worth asking yourself repeatedly are these three questions:
Where do I stand now?
What is this position letting me gain, and lose?
Where can it still take me?
Whether gods exist, we may never be able to prove. But the truly meaningful belief isn’t sitting in place waiting for the world to satisfy you — it’s still walking step by step toward the result when the outcome cannot be certain.
Perhaps gods aren’t responsible for handing wishes directly to you.
They only occasionally open a door — and you need to have walked to the door beforehand.