Vol. 20: Don't Mistake the Means for the End: Why Gear Junkies Never Get Anywhere, from "On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party"

The Chinese Red Army is an armed body for carrying out the political tasks of the revolution. Especially at present, the Red Army should certainly not confine itself to fighting; besides fighting to destroy the enemy's military strength, it should shoulder such important tasks as doing propaganda among the masses, organizing the masses, arming them, helping them to establish revolutionary political power and setting up Party organizations.
—Mao Zedong, "On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party"

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"On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party" is the resolution Mao drafted for the Gutian Conference in December 1929.¹

In Volume I of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, this essay comes very early. Right at the start, Mao lists eight mistaken ideas then present in the Red Army, and the first on the list is "the purely military viewpoint."

When I first read the Selected Works at seventeen, I couldn't understand at all why Mao came down so hard on the "purely military viewpoint."

My gut reaction back then was simple: doesn't an army exist to fight? Polish the guns, train the troops, win the battles: isn't that perfectly natural? How did that become a mistaken idea, and the first one on the list at that?

Only after I went out into the world and started really doing things did it slowly sink in: what Mao was attacking back then wasn't military skill at all. It was a lazy instinct people fall into very easily when doing things: mistaking the means of execution for the final end.

Today this flaw has a name everyone knows: the gear junkie.

The Purely Military Viewpoint: Mistaking the Means for the End

To understand why Mao criticized the purely military viewpoint so harshly, we first have to go back to the real bind the Fourth Red Army was in at the end of 1929.

By then the Fourth Red Army had moved from Jinggangshan to fight in southern Jiangxi and western Fujian. Its ranks were very mixed: officers from the old armies, captured soldiers, and peasants who had just put down their hoes.

In an army like that, many people carried the deep habits of the old armies. Their understanding of war was one-track: "We're soldiers, we serve for our rations, and our job is to fight with guns. As long as we have plenty of guns and bullets and win the battles, every problem is solved."

People who held this view showed a very typical trait in the army: they were extremely keen on the forms of a regular army, spending all day on drill commands, standard field manuals, and weapons and equipment. Some even argued that Red Army headquarters only needed to handle the fighting, and that the political department going out to do propaganda among the masses and local work was a complete "waste of time."

At the Gutian Conference, Mao said straight out that if this way of thinking wasn't corrected, the Red Army would go down the wrong road.

Why?

Because in the extreme conditions of a strong enemy and a weak Red Army, the Red Army's real foundation for surviving and growing was never the few guns in its hands. It was the support of ordinary people and the building of base areas.

If you just bury your head in fighting, without helping the masses divide the land, building soviet political power, or organizing and mobilizing, then even if you win a battle or two now and then, your men and ammunition will only dwindle as you fight, and you'll inevitably sink into "roving rebels," wandering around and fighting wherever you happen to end up.

Mindset	Core focus	Attitude toward supporting work	Where it really ends up
The purely military viewpoint	Obsessed with fighting and the forms of weaponry	Neglects mobilizing the masses and building base areas	Fighting wears it down; it loses its foundation and becomes roving rebels
The dialectical, systemic viewpoint	Grasps the core aim and the whole system	Fighting serves the political tasks and the mass line	Grows stronger with every battle; a solid foundation, steady growth

Mao explains it thoroughly in the essay:

The Red Army fights not merely for the sake of fighting but in order to conduct propaganda among the masses, organize them, arm them, and help them to establish revolutionary political power. Without these objectives, fighting loses its meaning and the Red Army loses the reason for its existence.²

Think about it. Fighting was only ever a means to survive and carry out political tasks. But when a person takes the means for the whole end, he pours all his strength into the act of fighting itself and completely forgets what he set out for in the first place.

The dialectical logic behind this is coldly clear: the means always serve the end. Once the means come loose from the overall end, however impressive the moves, in the face of reality they're just pointless self-depletion.

Breaking the Obsession with Form: From Outer Gear Back to Inner Purpose

From this passage of the Gutian Conference, we can distill a transferable framework for dissecting how people do things.

In materialist dialectics, getting anything done involves two layers: one is outer forms and tools (external causes), the other is inner core ability and fundamental purpose (internal causes).

Many people stay very busy and get nothing done, usually because they make three hidden mistakes in how they think:

First, mistaking "getting ready" for "solving the problem." Buying a pile of tools, setting up a process, going through the whole ritual gives a false sense of compensation, the illusion that you've already gotten it done.

Second, using outer gear to cover a lack of inner ability. Tools only amplify ability. If your own fitness and underlying logic are zero, then whether you're holding top-tier gear or a stick, the amplified result is still zero.

Third, using fussy means to escape the pain of the core difficulty. Fiddling with tools and arranging forms is always the easiest instant gratification. Facing the real bottleneck in the work, sweating through training, going deep into the most complicated reality to resolve concrete contradictions: that's the hard, against-the-grain work.

Distilled from the original, it comes down to a few core judgments worth checking yourself against again and again:

The means always serve the end. Once fiddling with the means becomes the end, you sink into blind, self-moved depletion.

Outer tools only amplify ability. Inner ability is what really solves problems. No gear, however advanced, can replace real skill.

Don't use fussy preparations to escape the pain of actually solving the core problem.

When you do something, keep your eyes on the final result you deliver, not on how well stocked your toolbox is. Any fussy process that doesn't act directly on the core work is, at bottom, formalism eating itself up.

The Modern Workflow Trap: The "Reinvent the Wheel" Craze of the AI Era

This habit of mistaking the means for the end is playing out again in today's tech and business world on an unprecedented scale.

The most typical example is the "workflow craze" so many people fall into when using AI.

Over the past two years, with the development of large language models, the market has filled up with AI agent frameworks, automated workflow orchestration tools, and elaborate prompt-engineering templates.

Many people, once they come across these tools, immediately go into a state of extreme excitement: they spend a dozen hours a day figuring out how to chain four or five tools together, how to draw dazzling logic flowcharts with complex nodes, how to make the AI pass work along automatically through seven or eight steps.

On the surface, the flowcharts are packed tight, and all the automation settings look very geeky and professional.

But calm down and look at what they actually produce, and you'll find an absurd fact: the workflow that took days to build may solve nothing more than summarizing three news items a day that could have been skimmed at a glance, or generating a few hollow posts no real reader wants to read.

Lots of people spend all day in group chats discussing "how to build the latest workflow" and "which orchestration tool is better," putting all their energy into reinventing the wheel.

How much this looks like the purely military viewpoint in the Red Army back then: pouring huge amounts of time and energy into building complex toolchains, without caring at all whether the tools bring even a scrap of real gain to the core work.

Real-world business never cares how cool your workflow is. It looks at one thing only: did you solve a real pain point? Does anyone pay for your product? Does your content really move people?

Complex architecture cut off from real business needs is, at bottom, gear-junkie behavior in a technical costume, using technical abundance to cover up an extreme poverty of output.

Gear Junkies in Everyday Life: How We Lose Our Way Step by Step

Bring this logic back into our everyday lives and you'll find that every one of us has been a "gear junkie" at some point.

I know this firsthand.

The Gap Between Hiking Boots and Fitness

A few years ago, hiking and climbing mountains were all the rage among the people around me.

I eagerly got ready to join in. Before taking a single real step, I spent all my time reading reviews and picking gear.

A professional waterproof, breathable shell jacket, abrasion-resistant shell pants, thick-soled grippy hiking boots, ultralight carbon-fiber trekking poles, a professional outdoor hydration pack... I fussed over it for a week or two and bought a complete, very professional-looking set.

The moment I finished unboxing the packages and put the whole outfit on, I had an extremely strong illusion: looking at myself in the mirror, I felt like I was already a seasoned outdoor explorer.

But reality soon slapped me in the face.

When I actually got to the foot of the mountain and started climbing with the group, less than two kilometers in, the steep slopes and stone steps crushed all my illusions.

My heart rate shot through the roof, my legs felt like they were filled with lead, and every few steps I had to stop and gasp for air. In the end all I could do was watch old men in ordinary sneakers, using some dead branch they'd picked up as a walking stick, stride lightly past me.

In that moment I was a mess, but something suddenly became clear: buying gear doesn't make you stronger.

A shell jacket keeps out wind and rain, and trekking poles give you support, but they can't take a single step for your legs. What decides whether you reach the top is always the endurance of your heart and lungs, the strength in your thighs, and the patience to keep your feet on the ground.

Putting all your energy into buying gear looks like getting ready to climb, but really you're using the least effortful act there is, spending money, to buy the false comfort of "I've already started."

Shelves Full of Supplements, Not a Drop of Sweat

The same absurdity plays out in fitness every day.

Lots of people decide they're going to get in shape and lose weight, and their first reaction usually isn't to do ten push-ups right away or go run two laps around the track. It's to open a shopping app.

A tub of protein powder in the left hand, a jar of creatine in the right, plus BCAAs, pre-workout nitric oxide boosters, fat-burning capsules, and all kinds of professional wrist wraps, belts, and quick-dry sweat-wicking clothes.

The bottles and jars fill the table, the sense of ritual turned all the way up.

But the reality is that many people's supplements sit until they expire with the seals still on. Or they go to the gym twice, take some photos, drink two scoops of protein powder, and give up completely because they can't stand the sore muscles.

Supplements are for people who sweat and train hard every day, to help their muscles recover. They aren't something you buy to sit on the table and grow muscle for you.

If you don't actually face the weight of the iron and take the tearing and soreness, however many supplements you buy, your body fat won't drop by a single point.

From hiking gear to fitness supplements to worshipping toolchains at work, the psychology behind it is exactly the same: we instinctively fall for outer means, because fiddling with means costs us no pain. But every result in the real world is decided by hard inner skill alone.

Wrapping Up

The worst thing in getting things done is wearing yourself out on flashy forms and forgetting your original purpose in a haze of self-congratulation.

Polishing the gun in your hands is easy. Arranging the tools on your desk is effortless. Buying a full set of gear is easy too.

But in this real world, no mountain has ever been conquered by a shell jacket, and no business has ever been moved forward by a hollow workflow.

Don't mistake the means for the end, and don't use fussy preparations to escape real effort. Let go of the vain obsession with gear, bring your energy back to the core purpose and your inner fundamentals, and only then has anything really begun.

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Footnotes

1. From December 28 to 29, 1929, the Ninth Congress of the Party organization of the Fourth Army of the Chinese Red Army was held in Gutian Village, Shanghang County, Fujian (the Gutian Conference). It adopted the Resolution of the Ninth Congress of the Party Organization of the Fourth Army of the Chinese Red Army drafted by Mao, later included in the Selected Works of Mao Zedong under the title "On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party." See: Party Literature Research Office of the CPC Central Committee, ed., Chronicle of Mao Zedong (1893–1949), Vol. 1, Central Party Literature Press, 2013, pp. 293–295; Party History Research Center of the CPC Central Committee, History of the Communist Party of China, Vol. 1 (1921–1949), CPC History Press, 2011, pp. 280–283. ↩

2. See "On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party," Section 1, "On the Purely Military Viewpoint," in Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Vol. I, People's Publishing House, 1991, pp. 85–88. ↩