I have been putting off this piece for nearly a month. The topic felt too vast to start. So today I just begin — in small, deliberate pieces.
Grasping "Pattern · Momentum · Currents" has been a long and painful exercise of retrospection. Even now I cannot summarize it plainly. Maybe the cure is to say more, write more, and let the synthesis emerge. These three words describe how we exist inside a system (the Pattern), how we shift our position within it (the Momentum), and how we let resources converge toward us (the Currents).
Many people have picked up terms like the Matthew effect or the K-shaped economy from short videos and finance channels. But those are surface descriptions. How do we cut through the phenomena to the underlying structure? My answer began with watching one family.
A long time ago, I observed a household where a couple lived with the husband's mother. The house was poor and cramped, and the front entrance was piled with scrap metal the old woman collected. From her body type, I suspected she either already had diabetes or would soon. Every day, I could hear arguments coming through the wall. I was at the bottom of my own life then, hungry for any insight about the structure and cycles of fate.
I tried to simulate the family's future. As a programmer, I instinctively turned each role into a node and enumerated their inputs and outputs. Patterns began to emerge.
On the input side, both cash flow and emotional flow were chronically tight. A weak financial base and a weak emotional baseline compress idle time and amplify internal friction. It is hard to imagine such a household ever using spare time to create extra value. Worse, the baseline distortions drive the household toward low-value dopamine. High-calorie food briefly lifts the mood but inflicts long-term harm. As the body deteriorates, the family conflicts deepen.
This is a reinforced negative loop. It is hell. But it gave me a thread to pull on: the best way out of a valley is to break the reinforcing loops so they cannot feed each other. Without those loops, the poor person's Matthew effect never forms.
Pattern And Currents: The System We Live In
Two years later, I started naming this framework "Pattern and Currents".
The macro environment is a Pattern. The micro environment is also a Pattern. Even your personality, perhaps, is the smallest Pattern. Currents are everything that flows into a given node: it can be money (the salary that lands once a month), emotion (your partner's monthly low), or information (everything you see when you unlock your phone).
Thought of this way, we seem to have ways to take back the initiative. Open more channels of cash flow. Make friends with optimists. Cut ties with the malicious. Delete the low-grade short-video apps. Watch deeper documentaries.
Beautiful, isn't it?
Reality is harsher. Once you start that kind of discipline, you probably won't keep it up for long. I used to feel ashamed for not being disciplined, watching one self-help influencer after another to reinforce myself. One day I grew tired of society's discipline sermons and started looking for a strategy that actually fit me.
What was wrong? Why couldn't I do what I knew I should?
Momentum: The Overlooked Variable
In the last two years, I found the answer, born out of the low point I hit during the pandemic. My answer is: Be the valley.
What does "be the valley" mean? Picture money — or anything you want — as water. Where does water flow to? Not to the mountaintop, but to the valley.
This is the crux: potential energy matters. And what determines potential energy is position. Anyone who has studied physics knows that when two places have a pressure differential, air flows from high pressure to low. Stand at high potential and your energy flows outward; stand at low potential and energy flows toward you.
Traditional discipline is essentially holding the line at high potential. You force yourself to wake early, work out, study — all of which require sustained energy output. You stand on the mountaintop, fighting the constant outward leak of energy. It works, but the cost is relentless willpower drain, and that is why most people cannot sustain it.
The wisdom of "be the valley" is to stop relying on willpower and instead adjust your position, so you naturally sit where energy converges.
This is why Chinese tradition keeps emphasizing humility and modesty. Imagine someone in your circle who is genuinely humble, tolerant, eager to learn, and generous with praise. Wouldn't you tell them everything? Doesn't the information current bend toward them? They don't have to chase information — information flows to them on its own.
But not everything is absolute; humility isn't always right. Sometimes, given your stance and interests, you need to be loud — that's the only way to attract public attention. That is, in a sense, another form of low potential: you place yourself somewhere easy to be seen, so attention naturally flows toward you.
Public attention is also a current. Naval said: if life has a currency, it is not money — it is human attention. From that angle, TikTok is brilliant. They make the app effortless, which is, in effect, lowering the potential — lowering the cost of use so attention naturally flows in. And so they have earned the colossal traffic they have.
Change Position, Don't Brute-Force Yourself
"Momentum" explains why discipline cannot last. If your potential is too high, energy keeps leaking out. The harder you grind at altitude, the sooner you run dry.
Maybe what you need is not stronger willpower, but a change of position to lower your potential. It might be a new job that aligns with what you naturally enjoy; a new social circle full of people on the way up; a vacation that pulls you out of a draining environment; moving out of your parents' home to escape household friction; or even moving to a new city where you finally feel relaxed.
Think about it: when you move into a position that feels right, doesn't a lot become effortless? You no longer have to fight yourself every morning, because the environment itself nudges you forward. That is the power of Momentum.
To Be Continued
This is my current "Tao": Pattern · Momentum · Currents.
Pattern is the system and structure we live inside. Momentum is the position and potential difference we hold within that system. Currents are the resources that flow naturally because of those potential differences.
Holding these three together, perhaps we can be a little less harsh on ourselves and a little more thoughtful about where we stand. We are not lazy — we just haven't yet found the position where energy converges on us.
One day I hope to compress this into a single sentence. Until then, I'll keep writing, keep thinking, and keep searching for clearer expression.