True entrepreneurship lies not in disrupting the external world, but in awakening one's true self.

This summer, we'll be publishing the second book in our "Vital Bridge Series" — The Way of the Heart.

Last week we released the first preface for the book; today, we're sharing the second. This preface was written by Professor Li Shanyou.

Here's the full text. Enjoy.

Entrepreneurship as Spiritual Practice in the Age of AI

Li Shanyou

As the dawn of AGI breaks across the horizon, as 80% of code comes to be written by silicon-based life, human civilization stands at the threshold of a cognitive revolution. This revolution demands not merely that we redefine productivity, but that we confront the ultimate question of existence: In the torrent of algorithms, how do we preserve the dignity of being human? The answer may lie in the leap of consciousness — from prisoner of rational cognition to traveler of awakened awareness. What was once the pursuit of a minority will become a required course for the survival of the many.

Work is practice; commerce is the dojo. This is not merely the poetic metaphor of Eastern wisdom, but a survival guide for the age of digital civilization.

First Realm: Piercing the Single Point, This Moment Is Eternity

A Zen koan tells us: "When chopping wood, chop wood; when carrying water, carry water." When the whole of body and mind dwells in the present, the lock of time falls away of its own accord. This transcendent state of presence is the ultimate antidote to anxiety in the age of AI.

Observe the predicament of contemporary business strategy: entrepreneurs drown themselves in filling out perfect nine-box grids, weaving cages from endless "both/and" demands. Yet Charlie Munger long ago revealed the truth of commercial evolution: "All successful systems are wildly, insanely focused on a single variable, to the near exclusion of other variables." This resolve to choose one and abandon nine requires pouring all resources into a breakthrough point no larger than a needle's tip, thereby triggering a Lollapalooza effect of chain reactions.

When we practice this extreme focus with a mind of presence, a transcendent energy infuses the field of work. Concentration becomes not drudgery, but a vital state flowing with peace and joy. Like the "no single thought" of the samurai's blade, like the "union of human and machine" when a programmer debugs code, each present moment becomes an eternal vortex of energy.

Second Realm: The Work Is the Person, Dissolving the Boundary of Subject and Object

Human beings habitually imprison themselves in cages of dualistic opposition: I am the subject, the product is the object; I am the creator, the work is the tool. This severance produces mechanical creations and alienates the authenticity of making.

True artistic creation is never the product of instrumental rationality. When Steve Jobs said "the product has to move you first," he revealed the essence of creation — the work is the extension of the creator's soul, the concrete projection of spiritual territory beyond language's reach. Just as Van Gogh's sunflowers burn with the painter's life-fire, SpaceX's rockets carry Elon Musk's obsession with the stars.

When creator and work achieve quantum-entangled resonance, the boundary between subject and object dissipates like morning dew. The beauty of being then flows through the work naturally, as moonlight pierces through clouds.

This state of creative "forgetting of both self and thing" may be the modern interpretation of Zhuangzi's words: "Heaven and earth were born together with me, and the ten thousand things are one with me."

Third Realm: Commerce as the Vessel, Ferrying Toward the Shore of Mission

Every entrepreneurial journey surges with two currents: the explicit logic of business and the implicit call of spirit.

The former satisfies the market's practical needs; the latter answers the soul's ultimate questioning.

When an entrepreneur's inner territory is smaller than their commercial empire, money becomes an inescapable nightmare; when the elevation of the spiritual world surpasses material pursuit, wealth naturally transforms into the vessel that ferries others. The mission blueprint Elon Musk sketched in his University of Pennsylvania dorm — sustainable energy, interplanetary migration, human-machine symbiosis — eventually became Tesla's batteries, SpaceX's rockets, Neuralink's brain-computer interfaces.

The Zen-like paradox is that when he chased the stars with complete devotion, worldly success followed like a shadow.

This perhaps reveals the ultimate secret of commercial practice: taking the red dust as one's meditation cushion, regarding profit and loss as the master's shout, transforming each business decision into a koan that interrogates the original mind. When the entrepreneur rides the waves of commerce with the wisdom of "the mind that abides nowhere yet arises," the enterprise ceases to be a cold profit machine and becomes a lighthouse illuminating human civilization.

Standing at the threshold of the AGI era, we will finally understand: True entrepreneurial practice lies not in disrupting the external world, but in awakening the original mind.

When every business decision becomes a dharma gate for clarifying the mind and seeing one's nature, when every product becomes a vessel of self-nature's luminosity, only then can we, in the torrent of algorithms, preserve for human civilization that unextinguished lamp of the heart.

If you'd like to share your reflections after reading, we'll select 6 readers from the comments to receive a copy of The Way of the Heart.

May every one of you who walks alone on the entrepreneurial path right now

find the power to awaken your original mind