On the subway, two ragged-skinned, dark-faced migrant workers were looking at a girl nearby playing on her phone Top One of the migrant workers asked: Girl, your phone is really nice How much is it? I want to buy one for my daughter too.. The girl said disdainfully: "It’s over ten thousand. Just forget it—you can’t afford it even if you ask.." At this moment, the other migrant worker said "Bro, forget it. Don’t buy it. It’s basically your half-month’s wages Around them, everything went silent instantly"
My cousin worked a summer job at Mixue Bingcheng, and when he came back he told me a rule.
After I heard it, I just stared for a long time. Their drink employees can drink freely—no charge at all—but there’s one red line they absolutely can’t cross: don’t touch the paper cups.
Whoever touches the paper cups gets severely punished? I didn’t understand at the time. I said, a cup only costs a few cents—what’s the big deal? My cousin said: Every day after closing, they reconcile the books. They don’t count money— they count cups. How many cups are used has to match how many orders there are; it can’t be off by even one. The cups employees use to try drinks are special tasting cups, not part of the regular cup inventory. If anyone takes a proper cup, the accounts will suddenly show an extra entry with no way to trace it. The whole store will still be balancing the books until midnight and still won’t get it to add up.
Free drinks are a matter of goodwill, but moving the cups is breaking the rules. You make people comfortable, but the rules can’t bend even halfway.
Three things everyone should do as early as possible
1. Learn how to consistently access the internet overseas
After you go abroad, you’ll naturally come across X, Reddit, YouTube, GitHub, and all kinds of professional forums
The information there isn’t just about “expanding your mindset” anymore—it’s finally possible to break free from domestic marketing accounts, official WeChat subscriptions, Douyin, and Bilibili’s secondhand, heavily processed content, and get original information directly from the source, without being filtered or “curated.”
In this world, many of the truly leading technologies, tools, and ways of thinking first emerge overseas. If you’re late by a year, the gap will widen.
2. Subscribe to a real overseas top-tier AI membership (don’t use a middleman)
Along the way, you’ll run into all kinds of traps—payment cards, SIM/verification code forwarding (“number matching”), region restrictions, and more. You’ll need to solve them one by one yourself.
To get everything sorted, you’ll probably end up setting up an overseas Google account, PayPal, and a US-region Apple ID as well.
The value of these accounts is something insiders understand.
With official memberships, the experience and stability are absolutely incomparable to what a middleman can offer.
3. Be able to pull excellent open-source projects from GitHub and run them locally
On GitHub, almost all the accumulated wisdom of humankind since the birth of the internet has been deposited.
There’s a saying that hits the nail on the head: when you think you have an extremely brilliant idea and you’re ready to start “vibe coding” to implement it, go check GitHub first and see how high you’re standing on the shoulders of those who came before.
There you’ll find some of the best, most practical, and top-tier tools, projects, and resources on nearly the entire planet—and everything is free and publicly available.
So you must first have the ability to “find a project → pull the code → run it locally.” As for how to find truly great projects—that’s a later matter. First, get yourself up there.