I keep making mistakes.
This carries no derogatory or self-deprecating meaning. From a neutral, objective perspective, I made mistakes in the past, I make them now, and I will inevitably make them in the future.
My most recent mistake was promising to post this afterword within two weeks of finishing the book, then dragging it out until the third week.
I struggled with it for a long time these past few days, forcing myself to think about why. There were mainly two reasons.
I'll explain the first one at the end.
The second was definitely procrastination, but I hadn't determined its cause. It might have been perfectionism—the desire to write a good conclusion. It might have been unwillingness to face readers' criticism. Or it might have been the confusion caused by past experiences, involving my motivation for writing this book.
Why did I write this book? It certainly had the most vulgar and ordinary motivation: money.
But to write a book that didn't make much money all the way to 3.7 million Chinese characters—rounding up, four million—there had to be other, stronger and more important motivations for me.
After all, other people's novels tell stories. Mine explained principles from beginning to end, and the principles were the most difficult ones to understand.
Anyone who truly wanted to make money couldn't do something this absurd.
During the writing process, I considered giving up for various reasons, but I still persevered.
After thinking it over, I realized that my deepest motivation came from an impulse in my heart.
What exactly was that impulse? A foolish, ignorant man who had muddled through more than thirty years of life suddenly discovered what he believed to be the truth. He simply couldn't suppress that impulse, so he shared many of the truths he believed in