Category business

English vs. Mandarin: Which Will Dominate the World?

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While I don’t believe we’ll have a universal language any time soon, it seems like the two obvious answers for one would be either English or Mandarin. This seems like a bit of a fight between east vs west, and I’ve heard good arguments from both sides, but I wanted to see if I could throw my own thoughts about this into the ring.

First, I find it ironic that the two most likely candidates for lingua franca are the two languages that are possibly the most complicated. English, with its various nuances and outdated rules, can certainly be hard to understand. However, I believe that the sheer size of the Mandarin language causes it to be much harder to grasp fully than english. While having a large alphabet combined with a large vocabulary may help in describing details, most international communication would be fine in just getting the general point across; and so I think more would be willing to describe less in order to spend less time learning a new language for business.

There’s also the fact that, due to eurocentricity, English has already had a grasp on global communications for quite some years now. With China not opening up broadly until roughly the 1960s, combined with the fact of the relatively isolationist nature of Asian cultures in general, Mandarin has had much less time to fester internationally. And while China’s population may have exploded in the meantime, this doesn’t necessarily translate to exponential cultural exporting. As English has expanded, more English-speaking generations have passed, and more people globally are prone to picking up English as their preferred second language.

Finally, to summarize this, I do think it’s certainly possible to have a lingua franca. In an age where the majority of people on Earth have endless knowledge at their fingertips, it becomes quite a bit more easy to learn a new language. And, with globalization becoming a key force due to such technology, more and more people need a common tongue to speak in.

 

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Analysis of “Hustler Culture”

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It’s true; the key to success is, for the most part, hard work. But there’s a difference between working hard and doing hard work. Just because you devote a lot of time to something doesn’t inherently mean that you’re going to perform well in that category. And yet, it seems that a lot of what the modern “hustle culture” values are long hours and back-breaking work above all.

If you’ve followed any startup community for long enough you’ve definitely come across the hustlers; individuals who are convinced that caffeinated 100-hour work weeks, constant social media blitzes, and product rushing are the keys to success in the modern business world. And while I can see that their heart comes from the right place and that this somewhat holds to be true, what we end up getting is a bunch of people walking around who are much more obnoxious than they are motivational. This is primarily because many of these so-called hustlers go around spewing the virtues of hustling while not really understanding anything that they’re saying.

This, I believe, comes from the commodification of “the hustle” based on individuals such as Gary Vaynerchuk and company. Now, I don’t actually have anything against GaryVee, and I do understand the motivational importance of his videos, but when describing the same five “hustling principles” over and over again without elaborating too much, I believe it can easily confuse people who only take those principles at their surface level without actually looking at all into “Hey, do I really need to spend 100 hours a week working on this project?” or “Hey, is answering five Quora posts a day really helping my business?”.

The problem with this I believe comes from a more intrinsic issue with people themselves. It is easier for people to just have an answer given to them rather than for them to have to say “Well, it’s more complicated than that”. People thrive on simplicity, and so if you tell them “just work a really long and stressful amount of time and you’ll reach your goals”, they’ll believe it regardless of how dumb it sounds. Now, is this innately the “hustler”’s fault? I don’t think so. But something all founders should keep in mind is that there’s no shortcut to success.