"Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone."

—Mao Zedong, "Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?" (May 1963)

After a Dozen Dan Koe Essays, I Caught My Breath: Has He Read "On Practice"?

After reading a dozen or so of Dan Koe's essays, I sat back in my chair, caught my breath, and thought: has this man read "On Practice"?

We start reading because we want to get better, and end up reading "to feel like we're getting better." To put it bluntly, that's mental masturbation. You immerse yourself in knowledge about how to improve yourself but never actually get to work on improving.

—Dan Koe

Dan isn't hard to understand. He often says in his essays that he himself is his best product, and he often uses his own experience as examples.

For instance, he failed at several businesses in a row. He did digital art, ran a Facebook ad agency, shipped rave clothing, and also did design, e-commerce, SEO, and more.

Judging from the past he describes in his essays, Dan is someone who isn't afraid of failure and is happy to look for something positive in it.

All those failures were bound to make him a practitioner. In essay after essay he stresses the importance of actually doing things, and criticizes people who only keep learning and never dare to try.

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Every one of us is unique, and a method that works for someone else won't necessarily work for you. The people who try something once or twice, give up, and then go around complaining that "it's a scam" are making a fatal mistake: they quit after a taste and judge too early.

—Dan Koe

Why is quitting after a taste and judging too early a fatal mistake?

All knowledge originates in perception of the objective external world through man's physical sense organs. Anyone who denies such perception, denies direct experience, or denies personal participation in the practice that changes reality, is not a materialist.

—"On Practice"

"On Practice" stresses that our knowledge starts from our first perceptions of a thing. Dan says that exploring something can't stop at that first stage, which fits perfectly with "the practice that changes reality."

The practice that changes reality isn't a one-off. It's a cycle that keeps moving. Take working out. Some people say the bench press is the king of chest exercises. Others say it doesn't do much and gets people hurt. Who's right?

Set the theories aside. The core point is this: if you haven't done it consistently and seriously for a while, how would you know whether it suits you?

You need to stick with it for at least six to twelve months, keep adjusting, keep adding weight, and actually feel and record it with your own body. Only then have you earned the right to judge whether the bench press is good or bad for you.

Everything in life works like this. Try something today, find it too hard tomorrow and quit, and all you do is confirm "I can't do it" again and again until you've achieved nothing.

The solution of some problems cannot depart from practice in the slightest. Whoever wants to know a thing has no way of doing so except by coming into contact with it, that is, by living (practising) in its environment.

—"On Practice"

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Look at anyone you admire, and you'll find "continuous improvement" written into the dictionary of their life. The world changes, life changes. It's like rowing upstream: if you don't move forward, you slide back.

—Dan Koe

Marxism-Leninism has in no way exhausted truth but ceaselessly opens up roads to the knowledge of truth in the course of practice.

—"On Practice"

There's no such thing as absolute truth in this world. What's truly worth holding up as a standard has always been a method for exploring where truth ends.

Beyond his rich life experience and thinking, Dan also understands how to look at things as they develop.

His career itself has been a process of constant development, and that experience shaped him into someone who sees everything in terms of how it develops.

More than that, when Dan says "look at anyone you admire," he's saying that the ability to see and handle things as they develop is the foundation of a person's success.

Don't be a giant in thought and a dwarf in action. Real change only begins the moment you close the book and stand up.

—Dan Koe

If you want to learn faster, don't start by learning. 1. Plan a project 2. Start building it 3. Learn as you go

—Dan Koe

Dan is a practitioner through and through. He knows how much practice matters, and again and again in his essays he urges readers: if you have an idea, go do it.

Even if you fail, that's fine. Dan stresses in his writing that we need to rethink and redefine our relationship with failure, and he believes the chapters full of twists and setbacks are the best parts of a life story.

Most people instinctively avoid failure. Why? Because we misunderstand it. We fear it only because we don't know what it really is. And the irony is that only by going through failure ourselves can we see it for what it is.

—Dan Koe

Life is a dance between order and chaos, between gaining and losing. If you never take on a challenge, never fail, never explore a new direction, you'll never reach new heights or see new views.

—Dan Koe

In many instances, failures have to be repeated many times before errors in knowledge can be corrected and correspondence with the laws of the objective process achieved, and consequently before the subjective can be transformed into the objective, or in other words, before the anticipated results can be achieved in practice.

—"On Practice"

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A lot of Dan's writing carries the spirit of "On Practice." Of course, I'm not trying to box Dan in with "On Practice." I'm reading Dan's essays through the lens of "On Practice."

More and more, I find that in my world, the essays and content that really make me slap the table all share the same underlying logic.

Why would Dan Koe and Mao Zedong, living in different eras and different societies, share the same logic of action and the same method?

From this, I'd like to venture an inference: the philosophy of practice is an underlying law that transcends culture and era, a philosophy shared by all of humanity.