Business is like water: How I understood the underlying logic of the Crypto world from a single course

Many people think that only those who do business need to understand commerce. That's not true. Business flows silently like water in the cracks of life, permeating our every decision, choice, and action.

Life is like an RPG game, pieced together by countless choices. A person's success often depends on making the right choices at critical junctures. Those who truly understand business are often better at making choices.

I realized this a few years ago while listening to Teacher Zhang Xiaoyu's "Classic Business Cases Course."

The course discussed many companies we are familiar with: how Starbucks shapes pricing power through the "third space," how Costco builds membership loyalty with "low SKU high trust," how Disney creates an IP empire through content extension... For the first time, I truly understood the meaning of "business model"—why a business exists, how it makes money, and how it sustains itself.

I began to understand that business is not merely about "selling," but rather a systematic engineering approach to design and operations. It designs how people pay attention, how they act, and how they invest resources and trust over the long term.

Just like LABUBU, those who don't understand it often think it's just an ordinary plush toy, but behind it is Popmart's marketing, capital operations, and even China's necessary transition from a production-oriented society to a consumption-oriented society.

Crypto is similar. When I entered the Crypto world in 2021, I found myself back at that familiar starting point—only this time, what was meticulously designed was no longer coffee, membership cards, or amusement park tickets, but tokens, chains, protocols, narratives, and communities.

Many Crypto newcomers constantly ask: Which project will rise? Which token is worth buying? But to me, the potential of a project is not determined by how strong the technology is, but whether its business design is viable in the short or long term.

The so-called business design is whether the project team has truly thought through these questions:

Who are its true "users"? Why would they come, stay, and pay?

Does the token, beyond speculation, form an effective incentive loop?

Is the narrative precise, sustainable, and reusable enough to transcend cycles?

Is the underlying game structure cooperative or zero-sum?

Many people think Crypto is a "decentralized new order," but I increasingly feel that it is essentially an extreme interpretation of business logic in a free market.

Crypto has no protective mechanism; the life and death of projects can change in an instant. It forces everyone to constantly return to the two fundamental questions:

What value are you really providing?

How do you turn attention, resources, and trust into sustainable growth?

Isn't this the purest essence of business?

If we break it down further to the individual level, we can also ask ourselves:

Is what you are doing, in the medium to long term, a positive EV (expected value)? Is it becoming easier, or is it becoming more exhausting?

As your wealth grows, do you become happier and freer?

Now you can watch the market all day, what do you plan to do in five years?

In the Crypto world, we have witnessed how narratives create FOMO, how mechanisms shape behavior, and how KOLs influence pricing power; we have also seen the disassembly, reorganization, and tokenization of the Web2 traffic model.

Here, business is not a skill, but a cognitive ability that transcends cycles.

I am very grateful to Teacher Zhang Xiaoyu for helping me establish a coordinate system for "understanding the world" in advance. Now, whether I am evaluating a new protocol, designing an incentive model, or dissecting a TGE roadmap, the same underlying capability is always at work: insight into human nature, designing incentives, and understanding structure.

This is also why I recently gave up a lot of short-term trading and focused more on long-term investment and marketing.

So, if you are struggling in Crypto, I have one suggestion:

Don't just chase hot topics; don't fantasize that getting rich overnight will solve all problems—because after getting rich, more problems will arise.

Find a good business book or listen to a business podcast. Understanding the "science of water" in business, you will find that many seemingly incomprehensible behaviors have already played out in the traditional business world.

This is a slow but highly rewarding training in the long term.

Just as what lies behind LABUBU is not just a doll, but structure and narrative; behind Crypto, it is not just technology, but deep business design.

As long as we continue to learn, we will ultimately understand the world and see our position within the system of "human society."