The Three Clarities: Seeing Yourself, Seeing the World, Seeing Other People

There is a line attributed to Master Hong Yi, to the effect that all the busyness of this world comes down to three kinds of clarity — seeing yourself honestly, understanding the world you live in, and comprehending other people. Growth, in his framing, begins with those three acts of seeing.

I have found that idea useful in business, perhaps because it is not a business idea at all. The following is what the three clarities have meant in our work building and supporting indoor play venues.

The hardest thing in a life is not understanding other people. It is understanding yourself — what you genuinely love, and where your limits actually sit. Many people stay busy and anxious for years without ever facing that question directly, which is usually why the anxiety persists.

I have met a great many people who invest in indoor play venues. Some treat it as a trade; some treat it as a calling. The outcomes differ enormously, and the difference rarely comes down to capital.

Work you love does not require pushing. It recharges you while you do it. Bao Ge, a steadying presence on our team, runs marathons — he travels for races at home and abroad, and just when we think he should rest after a business trip, he has already booked a flight to the next one. People ask how he tolerates forty-two kilometers. For him the running is not depletion; it is the recharge. He comes back clearer and more energetic than before.

Stefan Zweig wrote in Decisive Moments in History that a person's greatest fortune may be to discover their life's mission while still young and strong. I have kept that line for years. Willpower alone eventually runs out. Love does not feel like strain.

Seeing your passion tells you what you can do. Seeing your limits tells you what you cannot — and that admission takes more courage than most people expect. Ma Yun once remarked that he did not understand computers, technology, or finance, but he understood talent and the direction of the internet. Precisely because he accepted his limits, he could find people who covered them.

The same logic explains a decision that puzzles people about Pokiddo: why we work through brand partners overseas rather than entering every market ourselves. Why share the business with partners in the United States, India, Myanmar, and Chile?

The answer is that we know what we do well and what we do not. End-to-end support for a venue — planning, design, production, delivery, operations — is our strength. Local culture, physical distance, the local safety rules and legal requirements are not. Our partners understand those things far better than we do. Our job is to support them with real professional capability so they can build good businesses, and then they extend that capability to others.

That approach has carried us further than self-reliance would have. Pokiddo now operates more than 60 brand venues worldwide, and our partners in the United States, India, Chile, and Myanmar are the "right people" we went looking for. They deepen their markets; we grow the whole pie together instead of trying to eat it alone.

Admitting what you cannot do is not retreat. It is clarity. Once your limits are visible, you can find the people who fill them and concentrate your own energy on the few things you can make excellent.

Once you can see yourself, the next step is to go out and look at the world properly. Travel far enough, meet enough people, read enough books, and a realization arrives on its own: the world does not revolve around you.

At a certain stage, effort alone stops being sufficient. Business has its rules, markets have their logic, human nature has its momentum. Respect them and they carry you. Ignore them and they will teach you the lesson again, more expensively.

Indoor play investment works the same way. Some locations suit a large venue; others only work at a smaller scale with a sharper concept. Some neighborhoods are full of young families; others are aging fast. Overlook those realities and charge ahead, and no amount of effort will make the project perform. For newcomers in particular, a 1,000 to 2,000 square meter venue is usually the saner entry point — get one profitable model store working before expanding toward 5,000 square meters.

The lesson Pokiddo has drawn most from in recent years is simply that we followed the right trends. As China's indoor play market moved from rough expansion toward fine-grained operations, we focused on operational services and training. When overseas demand rose, we built the brand export business. Not because we were especially clever — we saw a direction and moved with it.

Zhang Yiming built ByteDance by reading two large directions early: the spread of smartphones and the rise of personalized recommendation. He followed those two lines, and Douyin was the result.

Seeing yourself and understanding the world lead to the last and most demanding clarity: understanding people — which in practice means compassion and, eventually, mutual benefit.

Compassion in the old formulation has two halves: giving others joy, and helping them out of suffering. In plain terms, it is putting yourself in another person's position and taking their circumstances seriously.

Many of the investors we meet are entering the indoor play industry from another field. They have no baseline for what to expect, and what they need most is someone who will genuinely help. What we can offer is our own record honestly — the detours we took, the mistakes we paid for. When we believe a particular site carries too much risk right now, we say so plainly. We earn less on those projects, but the client loses less money, and losing a deal is preferable to watching a customer learn an expensive lesson we could have prevented. That is not nobility; it is simply having walked the same road and knowing how it feels.

Cao Dewang, who donated billions to charitable causes, was once asked why. He said he had known poverty as a child and understood what it tasted like, and that having the means now, he wanted others to suffer less of it.

There is a well-known parable from Kazuo Inamori about two identical kitchens — one in hell, one in heaven — each with a single pot of noodles and diners holding chopsticks a meter long. In hell, everyone fights to feed themselves and cannot get the food into their own mouths; they starve and grow thin. In heaven, everyone lifts the noodles to feed the person across the table, and everyone eats well.

Business runs on the same principle. An operator who thinks only about taking money finds the road narrowing. An operator who helps customers make money and helps partners sleep at night tends to find that everyone does better. We have long believed something simple at Pokiddo: help a client open a venue that works, help them become profitable, and they will naturally bring more people to you. It is the least sophisticated insight in commerce and the most consistently undervalued.

If you are willing to help others succeed, they will be willing to help you succeed.

Growth is hidden inside these three acts of seeing. Seeing yourself means finding what you love and recognizing where your limits are. Seeing the world means respecting how things work and moving with the direction of the times. Seeing others means holding compassion and understanding that benefiting people is how you benefit yourself.

That holds for building venues, for building brands, and for the longer project of being a person.

Those considering how to start a trampoline park often come to us wanting a technical answer, and we try to be candid that the technical part is the easier half. Knowing which markets and formats your capability actually suits is the same exercise as seeing yourself. The indoor trampoline park design should reflect an honest read of your location and local audience rather than a copy of someone else's success. Trampoline park equipment can be specified from a catalog, but the fit between the equipment, the market, and the team matters more than the specification sheet. A realistic trampoline park cost model — one that treats local conditions as facts rather than frictions — is worth more than an optimistic one.

Similarly, when weighing the trampoline park franchise cost against a direct relationship with a trampoline park manufacturer, we would suggest the same honesty about your own strengths. As a trampoline park manufacturer with venues in operation on several continents, we have learned most of what we know from the partners who handle what we cannot.

See yourself clearly, and the rest becomes easier to see.