Vol. 14: "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire": In Everyday Life, This Line May Be More Useful Than Perseverance

There is a Chinese saying, "A single spark can start a prairie fire."

—Mao Zedong, "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire"

When I wrapped up "On Contradiction" in the last post, I said that from here on we'd take the two tools we've learned back into the specific essays of Volume I.

"On Practice" helps us see where knowledge comes from and how to take it back to practice to test it. "On Contradiction" lets us try to see, in a tangled mess, why things change and what to grab right now. With the tools in hand, sooner or later you have to try them on something real.

I want to start with "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire."

In January 1930, Mao received a letter from Lin Biao. The Jinggangshan base area was small, the Kuomintang's "encirclement and suppression" campaigns were close at hand, and the mood in the ranks was far from relaxed. In the letter, Lin Biao asked a very blunt question: how long can the red flag keep flying?¹

At the time, that question wasn't strange at all.

In front of you is a force of limited strength, surrounded by stronger enemies on all sides. The base area holds out in the mountains along the border regions. It's standing today, but nobody can say if it'll be standing tomorrow. At a moment like that, it's easy to feel you're missing too much, and there's no good news anywhere. The more you look, the more it seems this thing has no way forward.

That's when Mao wrote "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire."

Of course he knew the Red Army was small, and he knew the situation was dangerous. The essay doesn't gloss over those difficulties. What he did was take his eyes off the patch of ground at Jinggangshan and look over the bigger picture.

The conflicts among China's warlord factions hadn't stopped. The land problem still weighed on huge numbers of peasants, and many people were looking for a way to survive. Look back at Jinggangshan with that in mind: the Red Army was small, but it had already taken root locally. The masses were organized, the agrarian revolution was moving forward, and the army was growing inside the base area. Seen this way, its present weakness couldn't be judged by headcount and territory alone.

What Mao saw was that this thing, still small, already had the conditions to keep going.

We roughly know the history that followed. The base areas expanded and also shrank, and the road of the revolution went through many hard turns. But that first bit of fire lit in the border mountains really did spread across the whole country in the end. Later history gave this essay a very long footnote.

The first time I read this essay, it was easy to read it as a line full of bravado: however small a thing is, believe it will grow big someday.

Only later did I feel that reading was too light.

Mao didn't promise that every small thing would grow. He was answering another, harder question: when something in front of you looks small, has it just started, or has it already run out of ways to go on? At the start, the two look much alike. Judge wrong, and the effort you spend afterward will be very different.

First, See Whether It Has a Next Step

This is also why, when I later heard the word "compounding," I stopped to think a little more.

Compounding is often made to sound easy. Do a little every day, and after a while it grows into something huge on its own. It sounds reasonable, but anyone who's really done something probably knows that time doesn't automatically reward anyone.

Part of what you finish today has to carry over to tomorrow. When you pick it up tomorrow, it has to save you a bit of effort or bring something new. Round after round like that, accumulation slowly starts to mean something. If you start from scratch every day, however long you go on, it can hardly be called compounding.

So now when I look at something just getting started, the first thing I ask is: has it put the next step in my hands?

That's also the judgment I read out of "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire."

Don't rush to judge something by today's size. First see whether it has the ability to grow its next step.

That sounds a bit convoluted. It gets much clearer with a real experience.

Seedraft's First Dashboard

When I was building Seedraft (文芽), it started out very simply.

My friend Liang suggested building the software around a dashboard. I followed the idea and made a first version. The dashboard was a circle with one step at each of the top, bottom, left, and right. Each time the user finished a step, the dashboard moved to the matching position, and the middle prompted them on what to do next.

Looking back now, it was of course far from a mature product. When I made it, I wasn't thinking very far ahead either. I was mostly playing around, trying to turn a vague idea in my head into a page I could see.

But the first time I ran the whole flow through that dashboard, something shifted in me.

It's hard to call that feeling excitement. It was more like an idea that had been floating suddenly touching the ground. I started to feel that this thing might really be doable.

Later, Seedraft's product axis slowly grew out of the thinking behind that first dashboard.

Looking back now, I don't think the dashboard's real value had much to do with whether it was round. It took something that had been hard to explain and gave it a flow you could actually walk through. Where the user was, what to do next, where something was missing: after one run, it all started to show.

Once the flow ran end to end, what came after had something to grip.

We knew where to fill gaps, and we could slowly tell which things were just pretty and which affected the main axis. Each adjustment could build on the results of the last, and what the first version left behind started taking part in what grew later.

I later understood that the dashboard didn't prove back then that Seedraft would turn out any particular way. It just put the next step in my hands. That was already a lot.

If you'd only counted the features in the first version, there were very few. But it had already answered a more crucial question: can writing be organized into a flow users can keep walking? Once that question had an answer, the development that followed knew where to put its effort.

A Small Thing's Future Lies in What It Leaves Behind

When things are just starting, a lot of them feel alike.

Something you've just started usually shows no obvious change. It's hard to find any encouragement in how it looks right now, and doubt follows: did I pick wrong from the start?

But its current size is more like a photo. It can tell you what's there right now, but it can hardly answer what will happen next.

What's really worth looking at is what this thing leaves for the next round once this round is done. As long as it leaves a usable starting point for the people and work that follow, things have a chance to slowly connect.

What Seedraft's dashboard left me was a main axis. It was still rough, with plenty not yet thought through, but what came after could already grow along it.

When Mao looked at Jinggangshan back then, he saw a set of conditions still taking shape. Whether the conditions were enough, whether the fire could catch, of course still had to be seen. But at least that bit of fire was no longer hanging in midair.

A small thing's future usually lies in whether it can leave behind a next step.

That line also reminded me of something. Seeing something that can keep growing is still a long way from judging that it will.

A spark only has a chance to last if it lands somewhere that can burn. The wind can change, the ground can get wet, and the spark itself may be weak. Many beginnings look alike, then end up in completely different places.

So for something still small and weak, how do you look at its own foundation, the conditions around it, and the changes it's about to face, to tell whether it's a real spark or a burst of enthusiasm that will soon pass?

That question will wait for the next post.

Footnotes

1. "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire" was written in January 1930 as a letter replying to Lin Biao. In the standard texts, his question is usually recorded as "how long the red flag can be kept flying." ↩