The bell of New Year is ringing, and I’m half way through my undergraduate life at Oxford, precisely. I think it’s a time to be marked, and I deem it worthwhile to write down some thoughts I built up over the past months before I age and my memory rots, and time changes.

Looking back, if I were given a second chance to choose where to go, I would pick Oxford without hesitation. Just as the saying goes, this is a place where talents converge and minds diverge. Cliché exists as a cliché for a reason. Once you embrace yourself to the storm, it strips off your questionable values and blows away your immature beliefs. Growth marks my life here, and I was renewed and charged up day by day. Our world is so diversified that as long as you wish, you could always be flooded by new gadgets and challenged, shaken by new values. You shape yourself by trials and errors, and university is the very lab you need. I may or may not build up many life-long friendships here, and the staggering mobility of the world put them at test perpetually, but I am sure that I will remember many of the names here, as a symbol of gurus, vanguards, aliens, and role models. At the end of the day, it’s knowledge and people matters. And I weigh them the same.

One of the takeaways I got from Kaifu Li is that the cost of failure at colleges is the lowest on your way down the road. I embedded that in my philosophy and it might be the single most critical factors to trap me in the ivory tower. What I didn’t grasp in Peking is that as life unfolds its multiple dimensions, the cost of failure finds its second layer of meaning. Life is colourful, but to attain the spark of YOUR life, you have to narrow down, be focused, and be determined. Variety, together with mobility, presents another ultimate test in your life. And I believe that, genuine passion, and only your genuine passion, could gravitate you back from all the distractions. This is what the interviewers look for, and indeed it’s what really matters. So, I ask myself, why finance, why trading? My honest answer is, I’m not completely sure. That’s why we stay testing.

Life changing decisions aside, there’s something yet less ambiguous. That’s the beauty of wisdom. I am reading Alan Greenspan. I am touched by its extensive coverage of global economy and US economy in particular and its comprehensive historic snapshots of this world over the past decades. Indeed, we live in an age of turbulence. But there’s no reason to fear and to pull back. Volatility itself is a beauty, and we are at the very center of the vortex. The man is a live fossil, and I don’t see anyone on this planet has better authority to write such a broad review.

Another book I am reading now is ‘Market Wizards’ written in late 1980s. It composes a list of interviews of the world’s most successful traders. Trading is a business where your failure as well as success are immortalized by the figures and there’s no way to cover them up. It’s an ultimate psyche challenge as well as a technique test. You are competing with an army of intelligent wizards together with the collective wisdom of the market. It sounds really scary, but glory comes from the storms and endless darkness.

Leave book crunching alone, what affects me most now is undoubtedly the society. Presidency means leadership in real, not in textbooks. Probably it’s my last chance to shoulder so many responsibilities in the foreseeable future, so I value it and cherish the chance. The experience is invaluable to me and I have learned so much indeed. Details omitted.

Once Cathy said to me that we were luck to get the chance to stand out and see how this world is really formed. The more I spend time on this island, the more I feel it that way. Looking around, I clearly see people trapped by routine doomed to end with pain, see my past mistakes repeated here and other, conscience of the fact that I am always in one of those loops as well. This is the evolution of life, this is the way to GROW.

 Growth, is the story