Vol. 18: Our Task Is to Cross the River, but Where Are the Bridge and the Boat? How Big Goals Become Real, from "Be Concerned with the Well-Being of the Masses, Pay Attention to Methods of Work"

We are confronted with the task of crossing a river, but we cannot cross it without a bridge or a boat. Unless the bridge or boat problem is solved, it is idle to speak of crossing the river.
—Mao Zedong, "Be Concerned with the Well-Being of the Masses, Pay Attention to Methods of Work"

---

"Be Concerned with the Well-Being of the Masses, Pay Attention to Methods of Work" is a short piece Mao wrote in January 1934.

It's only about two thousand characters in all. A fast reader can finish it in five minutes. In Volume I of the Selected Works, it's one of the B-list pieces. It isn't long, but when it comes to solving real problems and turning ideas into reality, this essay carries enormous weight.

The title looks ordinary: the first half, "be concerned with the well-being of the masses," the second half, "pay attention to methods of work."

Without the historical background, it's easy to take this as an ordinary talk to cadres, or even to think the first half is about attitude and style and the second about management tips.

But put the essay back into the situation of the time and you'll find it isn't condescending preaching at all. It's a logic of survival forced out at an extreme moment of life or death.

A Wooden Bridge at a Moment of Life or Death

To read this essay, you first need to know what the Soviet Area was facing in early 1934.

Chiang Kai-shek had massed hundreds of thousands of troops for the fifth "encirclement and suppression" campaign. The fighting at the front was extremely dangerous, and the Central Soviet Area could be strangled at any moment.

Inside the base area, the biggest task was supporting the front: expanding the Red Army, raising grain for the troops, and selling millions of yuan in economic construction bonds.

With the front in desperate straits, many grassroots cadres naturally got impatient.

As they saw it, a great battle with countless lives at stake was right in front of them. Who had time to worry about what ordinary people in the rear were eating or wearing?

So when mobilizing the masses, many places turned to "commandism": the higher-ups handed down hard quotas, the grassroots forced them onto people, and some even used crude, rough methods to force ordinary people to hand over men and grain. As a result, few of the quotas were met, the people complained bitterly, and relations inside the base area suddenly became very tense.

Many cadres couldn't understand it. Why were the people so selfish, so blind to the bigger picture?

At a congress, Mao overturned that way of thinking outright.

He compared two places: Changgang Township in Jiangxi and Caixi Township in Fujian.

In Changgang, 80 percent of the township's young men volunteered for the Red Army, and every time grain loans and bond sales came around, they exceeded their targets. It was a model for the whole Soviet Area.

Why could Changgang's cadres get it done? Mao went and investigated in detail, and found they had no secret to mobilization. They had just honestly done a few very unremarkable small things:

An old woman in the village had a house about to collapse, and the township soviet government immediately sent people to repair it. A wooden bridge over the river at the edge of the village was washed away by a flash flood, making it hard for people to get to their fields every day, so the cadres led everyone in rebuilding it. At spring plowing time, some families were short of oxen and tools, so the township organized plowing teams to help turn the soil. When people couldn't get salt or couldn't afford medicine when they were sick, the soviet cooperative did everything it could to bring in fairly priced salt and herbal medicine from the White areas.

Approach	Core logic	Specific means	Final result
Commandism	Stress only the big goal; ignore the difficulties in front of people	Force quotas, lecture stiffly, blame the masses for low consciousness	The masses resist and resent it; the big goal falls through completely
The dialectical method	The big goal has to land on concrete interests	Solve salt and housing, repair bridges and roads, help with production	The masses sincerely support it and throw everything into supporting the front

At the congress, Mao said this:

Do we want to win the support of the masses? Do we want them to devote all their efforts to the front? If so, we must be with the masses, be concerned with their troubles and well-being, work in their interests, and solve their problems of production and everyday life, the problems of salt, rice, housing, clothing, childbirth, and all the other problems of the masses.

Think about it. At a moment of life or death, with hundreds of thousands of troops bearing down, the top decision-maker on stage wasn't talking about grand strategy. He was talking about a bag of salt, a room, a rotten wooden bridge.

The logic behind it is very practical: if you want people to share the risks with you, you first have to solve the troubles right in front of them.

If someone's family can't even get enough to eat, the bridge is out so they can't get across, and the roof leaks, then no matter how much you talk to them every day about the big picture at the front, they won't hear it.

The grander and more urgent the goal, the deeper its roots have to reach into the most concrete interests.

The Task Is to Cross the River, but What About the Bridge and the Boat?

Once he had made the point about interests, Mao moved on to the second question: methods of work.

In the essay, he uses the most famous metaphor in all of the Selected Works:

We should not only set tasks but also solve the problem of the methods for carrying them out. Our task is to cross a river, but we cannot cross it without a bridge or a boat. Unless the bridge or boat problem is solved, it is idle to speak of crossing the river.

It's said very simply, but applied to getting things done, it exposes a common flaw: mistaking a wish for a method.

In materialist dialectics, a task is just a direction (a subjective wish), and a method is the tool (the means) that turns the wish into reality.

When many of us can't get something moving at work or in life, it's often not because we don't want to do it. It's because we spend all our strength "standing on the bank shouting slogans."

A boss sets a department a target of doubling its results and stresses in meetings every day how important the goal is. Parents want their child to read on their own and nag in their ear every day to study hard. We write a long list of plans at the start of the year and swear this year we'll finally make some changes.

All of these are really just announcing "we're going to cross the river."

Announcing a river crossing takes so little effort. A few words and a resolution and it's done.

But how deep is the water? Where will the wood come from? How do you make the oars? Where does the first piling go? If nobody does these concrete things, you can shout about crossing the river ten thousand times and you'll still be standing where you started.

Without concrete tools, steps, and paths, any goal is, in the end, just venting emotion.

Cao Cao's Grain and Zhuge Liang's Hearts

Put this principle into history and it's very clear.

Let's look at how two people in Romance of the Three Kingdoms got things done.

The first is Cao Cao.

In the great chaos at the end of the Han, Cao Cao's goal was to wipe out his rivals and pacify the north. You can't say that goal wasn't grand.

But every warlord at the time faced the same fatal problem: no grain. The lords plundered wherever they fought, the fields all went to waste, ordinary people died in countless numbers, and Yuan Shu in Huainan even had his soldiers fishing for river clams to eat.

If Cao Cao had also just gone around shouting "restore the Han, put down the tyrants, protect the good people," his army would sooner or later have broken up for lack of grain too.

The really big thing Cao Cao did was set up the tuntian farming-colony system at Xu: organize refugees to reclaim waste land, with the government providing oxen and tools and the harvest split by a fixed ratio. The army also farmed in peacetime and fought only in war.

In the first year of the tuntian system, it brought in millions of hu of grain. It not only saved countless refugees but completely shored up the Cao army's logistics.

Later, at the Battle of Guandu, Cao Cao held off Yuan Shao, whose army far outnumbered his, for months, and finally turned the tables by burning the granary at Wuchao. On the surface it was a brilliant tactical stroke. Underneath, it rested on the "grain bridge" of the tuntian system, built well ahead of time.

The second is Zhuge Liang pacifying Nanzhong.

After Liu Bei died, several commanderies in Nanzhong rebelled, and Meng Huo rose up. Zhuge Liang needed to settle Nanzhong so there would be nothing to worry about behind him during the Northern Expeditions.

With the fighting strength of Shu Han's regular army, cutting a path through and beheading all the rebel leaders wouldn't have been hard.

But Zhuge Liang knew that crushing them by force would only feel good for a moment. Once the army pulled out, the locals would rebel again right away.

So he took Ma Su's advice that "winning hearts is the best strategy," captured Meng Huo seven times and released him seven times, until Meng Huo submitted wholeheartedly. After the pacification, Zhuge Liang left no garrison from outside and levied no heavy grain taxes there. Instead he appointed locals to govern, brought farming techniques and iron tools from the heartland into Nanzhong, and solved the local people's livelihood problems of too little iron and too little grain.

Pacifying Nanzhong was "crossing the river." Capturing Meng Huo seven times, local self-rule, and bringing in tools of production were the "bridge and boat" Zhuge Liang built.

People who really get big things done never hang themselves up in grand visions. They put most of their mind on the practical tools that let things move forward step by step.

Why Won't Things Move?

Back to our own daily lives. This flaw of "shouting about crossing the river without building a bridge or boat" happens almost every day.

First, Mobilizing Others

In teamwork or everyday communication, we often see this scene:

Someone wants to push something forward. They pull everyone into a meeting and keep explaining how promising it is and how much it'll benefit everyone once it's done.

But they soon find that people agree out loud and don't lift a finger, and even resist it in private.

At this point, many people's instinctive reaction is to get angry, to think the others are backward, irresponsible, blind to the bigger picture.

But honestly, that way of thinking is itself a form of subjectivism. You only see your own goal and never look at the mud under other people's feet.

You want people to charge ahead with you, but they may be tangled up in a pile of hassles they can't get free of: their desk already piled with small tasks, some approval process that's a nightmare, or just whether they can make the bus to pick up their kid after work today.

To a person doing the actual work, your grand vision is too vague. The trouble in front of them is what's real.

If you don't find a way to help them move the stumbling block in front of them, don't care about what's actually bothering them, and just expect them to devote themselves to you out of political consciousness, that defies common sense.

When you feel others won't budge, don't rush to stand on the moral high ground and blame them. First go see what's actually got their feet stuck.

Then, Driving Yourself

Apply this logic to yourself, and it's the same principle.

People often tell me their troubles: "I really want to learn a skill well, or get an essay written. So why, the moment I sit down at my desk, do I want to escape and scroll my phone?"

We're used to blaming this on "poor self-control, not enough willpower," and then sinking into self-blame.

But honestly, willpower is the thing in the world that wears out fastest. Grinding at a vague, grand goal on pure willpower is like wading naked into a deep, bottomless river.

You want to write an essay. If the only thought in your head is "I have to write a masterpiece today," all your brain feels is huge resistance and fear, and escape is inevitable.

At that point, don't wrestle with your willpower. Stop and find yourself a handhold:

This morning, can you skip the main text and just read two related sources? This afternoon, can you forget about style and jot down three things you most want to say? When you write, can you toss your phone into the living room and close all the chat pop-ups on your computer?

These things are so small they take hardly any willpower. They're the planks you lay across the surface of the river.

With the planks laid, you step across them one by one, and crossing the river is really just going with the current.

A Word on Today's "Levers"

While I'm at it, I want to talk about a word that's especially popular in workplaces now: "levers" (抓手, literally "handholds").

These past few years, lots of people can't open their mouths without saying "we need to find levers," "we need to align on granularity," "we need to empower the business."

But watch closely and you'll see that many people shouting about levers are really still doing the same old "commandism": talking grandly about strategic direction in meetings, setting lofty targets, and paying no attention at all to how the front line is supposed to carry it out, what difficulties they've hit, or whether they have the right tools in hand.

In the Selected Works, Mao never uses fancy words like these. His words are as plain as plain can be:

The people need to cross the river, so you build a bridge. The people's roof leaks, so you patch it. The people can't get salt, so you bring the salt in.

That's the toughest method of work there is.

There's nothing mysterious about it. It only asks you to come down off your high horse, walk into real life, and clear away, one by one, the concrete obstacles keeping things from moving forward.

Anyone can propose a grand goal. But people who really get things done never have only the view on the far bank in their eyes.

Go see how deep the water in front of you really is, and honestly lay the first plank on its surface.

---

That's all for this issue.