It's all about people

I grew up in a small town in northern China, where my parents, and their parents, have lived their whole lives. At seventeen I left for university, the first in my family to go. It was my first glimpse of life in a big city. Only a glimpse.

I spent four years studying, without much thought, the subjects meant to make me an engineer. They turned out to be of little use, because I never meant to become one. My days went to reading: Wang Xiaobo, A Cheng, Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez. Their minds were open and inventive, and I wanted mine to be like that.

I was also in love. I followed her to Beijing. I had no idea I'd stay more than ten years.

My first job was as an editor at a publishing house, because I loved reading. I met many creative people there. I also burned out there: day after day of reading, editing, working, because back then I thought work was my only purpose.

My second job was at ByteDance, a company setting out to win the world through screens. I started as a content moderator, and saw from the inside how it works: the algorithm is built to grab attention, so the most fun, most interesting videos are weighted onto everyone's For You page. Soon I moved to the training team. I worked with colleagues all over the world; some of them are still good friends.

There I had my first breakdown. My girlfriend of more than six years left me. It made me realise I was bad at something. Bad at love, bad at being a partner. The most important subject there is, and no one had ever taught me.

I buried myself in work. Glamorous global training programmes, huge budgets. It was an era of spending freely, and I had the privilege of watching what training actually does to people's work, and to the state they work in. Plot twist: it isn't the money that matters.

An Excel programme I led taught me that. Instead of a trainer at the front, I asked colleagues who had built something useful, people at the same level as everyone else, to show their own work: what they made, how it saved them time, which functions they used. Teams in different regions started talking to each other. Good habits travelled. And people saw, in a colleague's spreadsheet, how a tool actually makes their day easier. Nobody needed a bigger budget. They needed each other.

After ByteDance I moved to Deloitte, to see a new sector and a different approach to learning and development. There I ran more in-person, multi-day programmes, and studied coaching as a method. Things moved slowly. My nerves could rest. But somewhere along the way I lost my sense of direction, however much I learned about the world.

Until one day I couldn't move. Not even a little. I asked for professional help and learned it was depression. That was the start of my fight against inertia. My girlfriend at the time offered help, but the sudden change overwhelmed her too.

That was when I made a new rule for living: whatever I did had one purpose, to make today work. I had no strength to spare for anything else. It forced me to live in the moment. It forced me to go to my friends. It forced me to see what matters in my life.

One of those friends was D. Every week we ran together, ate together afterwards, and she told me her little discoveries in the hutongs. Her energy for life became mine, a little at a time.

Two years on, my days look different. A new love taught me a new way of living. And AI gave me something I'd only had in books: the power to build what I imagined.

We live seven hours apart. The subject no one taught me, I'm learning now on purpose: how two people stay close across a time difference, and how what they have keeps growing.

I've come closer to what I want to do: help us thrive. At work, where we spend a third of our lives. And after hours, with a clear mind, an energetic body and the people we love around us.

So I build. By day, FREE//BUILDER: tools that set up the conversation a team keeps avoiding, then step aside, the way colleagues taught each other Excel. After hours, small free things that end the same way: a run with a friend, a dinner across seven hours, someone next to you. The rule that got me through still holds. Each one only has to make today work, with someone.

I know the other way well; I worked inside it. KPIs, scores and algorithms keep us on the screen because that's the business model. It isn't the only way, and it shouldn't be.

This is what I believe. People are the point. When we're at our best, we do what's best for the people around us. We don't work for companies; we work with people. We don't live alone; we live with people.

It's all about people.