u/sumizeit

I have a few questions. I watch Chinese dramas and talked to Chinese people and some things confuse me.

I don’t mean to offend. I want to understand.

I’m asking because these issues come up a lot in every show even the normal ones. I mean if it was one show, I would be like the writer is creative. But it’s every show and people write from their experiences. I write a lot and it’s usually from what I’ve experienced.

So please don’t get offended. I’m from a country that most people have misconceptions about. But i patiently try to explain. I don’t want to have misconceptions of China.

- how big is the mistress problem in China? Almost all shows I watch, the rich ML has a mistress and treats his wife badly. I looked on Google and saw a lot of rich men keep mistresses.

- are there kidnappings? Almost every show has a mistress kidnapping the FL?

- is arranged marriage common? And if so, how does that affect the male and female relationship?

- how are women treated in China? General, but I see families marrying them off for money.

- how are black people perceived in China? This question comes from other black people who traveled to China and their experiences. Not from the dramas I watch (there are no black people in them)

I know these shows take it to the extreme. But I don’t want to have the wrong perception of China because of them.

I love China.

Also I want to know the real China. I thought I could get a feeling form Chinese shows (short or long form) but I feel like that’s not the case. How can I learn and educate myself?

I had an interesting day today. I went to an apartment complex with a friend and it was beautiful. And then I read the google reviews and that told a different story

- most people gave a 5 star before even trying the apartment. They rated right after the tour and the tour was great especially listening to a super hot guy with an English accent talking about how great the place is. There was even a basketball court and jacuzzi. I mean I thought I was in heaven.
- the people who were actual residents gave a 1

Some apps move the rating after the onboarding. Wondering why. Maybe the novelty dissipates after a while.

Thoughts?

A man hated his shadow. He hated the footprints he left behind, too. So he started running to get away from them. But every step he took made a new footprint. And the shadow stayed right with him no matter how fast he moved. He decided the problem was that he wasn't running fast enough. So he ran harder, and he kept running until he dropped dead. All he ever had to do was step into the shade and sit down. In the shade there is no shadow. Sitting still, you make no footprints. That story comes from a Chinese book called the Zhuangzi, written about 2,300 years ago.

Most self love advice tells you to add something. Start a journal. Build a morning routine. Try harder at being nice to yourself. This story says the trying can be the thing wearing you out. You don't always fix it by doing more. Sometimes you fix it by stopping. I'm not sure it works every time, because sitting still is hard in its own way. But I keep thinking about it. What's something you stopped doing that helped you more than anything you started?

Someone told me exclamation points make women read as eager instead of authoritative. So I stopped using them. No "Thanks so much!" No "Happy to help!" Just flat sentences. Replies did get faster. Shorter too, which I liked. Then three people asked if something was wrong. One was a woman on my own team who pulled me aside about it, and that's the one I keep thinking about. Turns out all that warmth was doing something. I just couldn't see what until I took it away.

So what's the advice then. Be warm and get read as junior, be flat and people think you're mad at them. Everyone says find the middle, but the middle moves depending on who opens the email, which means you're running a little calculation before you send the words "sounds good." Maybe that's just the job. Maybe I overthought a month of my life. Where did you land on this? Did you cut the exclamation points and the justs and the sorry to bother yous, and did anything actually change? Or do you think this whole debate is a waste of energy and the work speaks for itself?

I spent two years "working on myself" and somehow the thing I actually needed to fix never got touched. I read the books. I did the morning routine, the journaling, the cold showers, the whole circuit. And the entire time there was one conversation I was avoiding and one habit I knew was wrecking me, and I never went near either. Because reading about discipline feels like discipline. Planning the change gives you the same little hit as making it. I was busy enough with the scaffolding that I never noticed I hadn't built anything. The uncomfortable version of self improvement has no aesthetic. It's just one ugly conversation, or quitting the thing you don't want to quit, and then nothing to post about afterward.

So here's what I'm actually asking. What's the thing you already know you need to do, that no book or system is going to solve for you? Not the vague one. The specific one you thought of immediately when you read that sentence and then flinched away from. And for anyone who did finally do theirs, how long had you been circling it, and what made you stop circling? I want to know if there's a moment that flips it or if you just get tired enough of yourself one day.

I have many customers who have dementia or struggle in some other way. I want to be useful to them. But I feel like I’m failing them.

My grandmother had dementia and she died. Worst day of my life. But that’s another story.

I don’t want to be an entrepreneur who builds stuff for one group of people. But I never took a UX class or any course on this. Anyone run into the same issue?

I feel so terrible when I get an email from someone who tries to buy an item multiple times or has some other struggle and can’t use my app.

I’m trying to improve my UX skills. It’s a constant complaint that comes up. Anyone know a good YouTube channel on good UX? Please dont say Claude design. Thanks

Focus is on android and iOS UI skills for mobile app.

Some questions
- where do we place most used features
- when you have so many features, how do you not confuse users with a busy app
- how to have menu buttons that are intuitive.
- common design patterns across mobile apps
- if a feature requires extra payment even for premium users how do you not piss people off
- how to handle elderly, people with dementia, etc - what are the common issues there
- if you have many options for an item, how do you make it intuitive that they have to click the menu button
- how to highlight new features. People don’t know they exist without annoying people
- what are the rules to follow when designing each page so the app looks coherent
- Android vs IOS design patterns

Maybe checking out other mobile apps would help.

I’ve started wondering if reading self-improvement books can actually become a form of procrastination. You finish Atomic Habits, feel motivated, highlight a dozen ideas, then immediately start another book about productivity, discipline, money, or happiness. It feels like you’re improving because you’re constantly learning, but six months later, your actual life may look surprisingly similar.

So I’ve been thinking about a rule: for every self-improvement book you read, you have to make one permanent change before starting another. It could be tiny. Delete an app, automate a savings transfer, start walking every morning, change how you handle disagreements.

Would this make reading more valuable, or do you think there’s value in reading widely even when you don't immediately act on what you learn? What's one book that actually changed your behavior rather than just your thinking?

Here's what I did today

- Connected Amplitude to Claude
- Created a dashboard with top events
- Saw where people were falling off, etc
- Which features to kill or improve
- Asked Claude to interpret the results and give me suggestions

I have a dashboard that I can send to my marketing department or co-founder.

For those who don't know what amplitude is, it's analytics like Google Analytics. I usually use it for mobile apps. It's pretty good.

Pretty cool, right?

I plan my weeks on Sundays. Every Sunday, I write down what I'm going to do for that week. Anything that is not on that list, I don't do. My stress and productivity level went up so much. Before, I was feeling sad sometimes because I just had way too much work and wasn't very organized about it. Ever since I've been planning on Sundays, I feel much happier. Of course, there are emergencies that come up. When it gets too much, I take a day off or two. I live near the beach so I go there to clear my head.

The other thing is I moved to a walkable area of the state. Walking really helps me clear my mind, stay sane, and focus on what matters the most. I love to travel so when I travel, I walk a lot. My best ideas came when I was abroad after a long day of walking.

What keeps you productive these days?

The math is not complicated. Switch jobs and you get a real raise, stay and you get whatever the annual pool allows. Everyone under 35 knows this now and acts on it. I've been on the other side of it, watching good people leave for a number I couldn't match, and I don't blame a single one of them.

But the thing that compounds is not salary, it's context. The people I trust most are the ones who have seen a company through a bad year, watched a decision play out over three years instead of six months, and know why the weird process exists. That knowledge is worth real money later, when you're the one making the calls. So you're trading current cash for future judgment, and nobody frames it that way.

Which trade did you make, and would you make it again?

Me - I’m an entrepreneur. I took another path.

EDIT - Some really interesting responses. Learned a ton today. Thanks for your honest opinions. Really appreciate the lively discussion. I wish every employer can read this post and its comments. Though they might not give a damn. Some people suck like that.

So, I’ve been through my fair share of hardships and have a lot of compassion and love for people except trolls. Some of the comments made me sad because I’m a very hopeful and optimistic person - it seems some of you went through hardships that I can’t comprehend.

Somewhere along the way I learned to justify every number I said out loud. Here's the price, and here's why, and here's what went into it, and here's why that's fair. I thought I was being transparent. What I was actually doing was handing people a list of things to argue with. Two companies in, I tried something different on a partnership deal and just said the number and stopped talking. No paragraph after it. The silence felt awful for about four seconds and then they said yes. I've watched a lot of women in this sub describe the same habit and call it professionalism, and I think we picked it up because we got punished early for sounding certain without proof. But a price with an explanation attached sounds like an opening offer. A price by itself sounds like a price. So I'm curious where the line sits for the rest of you, because I know some of you work in rooms where saying a number flat gets read as difficult.

Have you found that stating it plainly cost you anything real, or did the discomfort turn out to be mostly yours?

The change was simple. Instead of emailing a prospect to ask for a call, I’d spend 30-45 minutes doing something concretely useful for them first — an audit, a teardown, a rewritten page, whatever was relevant — and send it with no ask attached. Response rate went from the usual cold-email numbers to something that felt broken. That part is well-trodden advice and you’ve heard it.

What nobody mentions is what it does to you. When sending an email costs 45 minutes instead of 45 seconds, you become extremely honest about who you actually want as a customer. I couldn’t do a hundred of these, so I did twelve, and choosing the twelve forced me to admit that most of my “target market” was a category I’d invented to feel like I had a strategy. The unscalable approach didn’t just convert better, it corrected my thinking about who the business was for. I think that’s the real mechanism and it’s why automating it — which several people have asked me about — would destroy the thing that makes it work.

People overwhelmingly tell you they left because of price. Price is the polite exit. It doesn’t require them to critique you, it doesn’t make them the problem, and it ends the conversation. So you discount, and the discounted cohort churns at roughly the same rate, and you’ve learned nothing except that you now make less money. It took me [X] months and a real drop in revenue to understand that the survey was measuring social convenience, not causation.

What actually worked was ignoring the stated reason entirely and looking at behavior in the [7/14/30] days before they left. The pattern was boring and unflattering: the product broke for them, once, at a moment when they were relying on it, and they never really came back. They didn’t rage-quit, they just stopped opening it, and six weeks later they cancelled and typed “too expensive” into a box. Stability isn’t a feature that shows up in a roadmap review because nobody requests it. It shows up in the retention curve of people who will never tell you about it.

I built a website that gives you TV recommendations based on your mood

I was feeling down and needed an uplifting show to watch so I built a website that recommends TV shows based on how I want to feel.

By the way, I was watching short dramas (which I've come to realize are depressing and crazy as hell) so I need more uplifting shows.

Check it out at - https://www.feelmetv.com

If a free. Just something for fun. Let me know what you think!

Thanks for your comments - I found some bugs and fixed them. Give me more comments so I can make the product better. Maybe I should add more shows?

I was the person you gave the messy thing to. Broken project, angry client, the account nobody wanted. I liked it, honestly. It felt like being trusted. Then I looked up after three years and realized I'd become load-bearing. Not promotable. Load-bearing. My boss told a peer he couldn't move me because the team would fall over without me, and I found out later and was supposed to take it as a compliment.

The people who moved past me were doing something I read as slacking at the time. They said no. They handed things off half-explained and let someone else figure it out. They spent the hours I spent fixing things on being seen instead. I still don't totally know how I feel about it, but I know which one worked.

What did being good at your job end up costing you?

Where can I find an AI tool to create animated videos?

Ideally I should be able to try for free. If i like it, I’ll pay.