A story about how one urbanite who can never “stop” learns to “stop” and recalibrate his life.
At 33, Su Yuan is the ultimate practitioner of “goal management”: a product director at a top tech company, earning a million a year, with the highest quarterly OKR score on his team. His life is precisely divided into progress bars measured in weeks. He excels at achieving every “quantifiable goal,” yet one late night after working overtime, he realizes he cannot answer the simple question: “Where am I actually going?”
A car accident forces him to “pause.” In the hospital, he meets Chen Jing, a former marathon runner forced to retire by an injury, now a “life direction coach.” Chen Jing doesn’t teach him how to “get there faster,” but how to “find the right direction”: goal management is tactics; direction management is strategy. Running without a destination is just running in circles and wasting your life.
Through Su Yuan’s eyes, the novel unfolds as a kind of “spiritual orienteering” for modern city dwellers:
He must clear away the countless “to-do items” burying his innermost desires.
He must draw a line between “goals others expect him to pursue” and “the direction he himself longs for.”
He must learn to accept “uncertainty” as part of moving forward, rather than an enemy to be eliminated.
In the end, he will use this approach to help his team, his friends, and even his rivals find their own “true north” in a noisy age.
This is a parable for all the modern people who are “busy but lost”: when the whole world is teaching you how to run faster, this book wants to give you the courage to stop and ask yourself: Is where I’m running really where I want to go?
