My understanding of the Copper Picking-up principles Recently I have learned some ideas from Caitong, a well-known author in the most popular Q&A community—Zhihu. Now I want to express his idea with my own understanding in English. By doing this, I could have a more profound perspective about the idea, and at the same time, I could share this brightening idea with more people. The author’s name, Caitong(采铜), means “picking up copper” in Chinese, and this is also the name of his idea—Copper Picking-Up principles. These principles are used to help people decide what to do in their spare time, which suits me just fine. According to Caitong, when making a decision about what to do, we need to take two factors into account—how much return we can get(mentally, physically, etc.) and how long the return can last(the duration). With these two factors, we can devide things into four quadrants. Quadrant 1--High Return& Long Duration: Obtaining an effective thinking pattern; traveling; communicating with the top person in your field… Quadrant 2--High Return& Short Duration: Buy fashionable clothes; playing video games; dinning out… Quadrant 3--Low Return& Short Duration: Surfing the Internet without aim; Wechat messaging… Quadrant 4--Low Return& Long Duration: Memorizing ten English words; reading a classic novel; reply your friend’s email seriously… If you have a look at your own life, very likely you will find that you spend most of your time in Quadrant Two—High Return and Short Duration, and then Quadrant Three—Low Return and Short Duration. The problem is that the duration of these things are so short that we get bored again, which leads us to a circle where we will find that every day we spend is homogeneous. But for the rest two quadrants, no matter the return is high are not, it can be accumulated day by day, thus a difference will be there if we stick to these things for enough long. For example, assume that you are waiting in the queue, you could either play with your phone or try to remember ten English words. By playing the phone, no difference is made. But if you memorize words and do that every day, you will make a difference. The point is that when we do something which can benefit us in a long term, we are more likely to improve our life. It’s just like picking up copper in a mine, no matter how big the copper is, as long as it’s copper, just pick it up, for collected, this can worth a lot.