Guiding Your Children Education and Career Choice by Meng Wan Zhou (Huawei Rotating CEO)

 "Understand the trends, choose a career where your abilities are the needed strengths (making others, including AI, irrelevant), and follow through with grit and adaptability."

The speech in Chinese is here .

The Summary by DeepSeek is:

Summary of Meng Wanzhou's Speech Key Points

This 2016 speech, given from the perspective of a mother and observer of education, discusses how to guide the next generation's education and career choices in an era of rapid technological change. The core points can be summarized into three main areas:

1. Career Choice: Avoid Competing with Machines, Focus on Uniquely Human Value

This is the most discussed point of the speech. Based on her reading of tech trends, Meng offered clear career advice:

1. Core Argument: "Do not choose a career that competes with machines."
2. Reasoning:
• Tech Trend: Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be burgeoning and will take over many jobs in the next 10-20 years. Humans cannot compete with machines in pure efficiency, calculation, or physical strength.
• Historical Analogy: The Industrial Revolution solved problems of human physical strength, the Information Revolution will solve problems of efficiency.
3. Strategy: When choosing a career, one should think about what kinds of work machines cannot do. This implies that valuable future careers will focus on human creativity, emotional interaction, critical thinking, and complex decision-making.

2. Foundations for Success: Two Core Abilities Beyond Knowledge

Meng argues that since knowledge itself is easily accessible in the future, the focus of education should not just be imparting knowledge, but fostering more fundamental core abilities.

1. Persistence & Belief (执念 - Zhíniàn):
• Definition: Perseverance, dedication, and conviction. In an uncertain world, this is key to turning the "best choice" into the "best outcome."
• Importance: Using her son's experience with swimming and homework as examples, she stated that persistence is the "bottom line in life." There are no unsurmountable difficulties, success often depends on whether one can persevere to the end.
• Implication for Education: Parents and teachers need to focus on children's level of engagement and concentration, nurturing their ability to overcome difficulties and persevere.
2. Critical Thinking (思辨 - Sībiàn):
• Definition: The ability to think independently, question, and debate.
• Importance:
• In the information age, "what you know" is no longer important (because knowledge is readily available), "what you think about" and "how you challenge established views" are paramount.
• She praised the Western education model of roundtable discussions for sparking critical thinking rather than seeking standard answers.
• Implication for Education: Children should be encouraged to form their own opinions, find evidence, and welcome challenges, rather than passively accepting information. The goal of education is to build mature thinking, broad vision, and independent analysis and judgment skills.

3. Educational Philosophy: Embrace the "Usefulness of the Useless," Cultivate the Whole Person

Drawing from her child's course selection experience, Meng proposed a broader view of education.

1. Respect Individual Choice: Parents should let children make their own choices (e.g., selecting courses), even if those choices seem "useless" (like photography, woodworking, art).
2. The Usefulness of the 'Useless': These seemingly unimportant courses have their own internal logic; they can aid understanding of main subjects, accumulate life experience, create lasting memories, and enrich life.
3. Ultimate Goal of Education: Test scores and knowledge acquisition are not the core. What truly matters is nurturing a child's willpower, vision, breadth of mind, and moral character; these are the drivers of lifelong growth.

Conclusion & Call to Action

• Future Trend: The world is "flat" but also highly uncertain. In the past, capital hired talent, in the future, talent will hire capital.
• Personal Strategy: To establish unique value in this parallel world, strive to make yourself "scarce talent in the world," thus taking the initiative in life.
• Final Attitude: Quoting the Chinese women's volleyball team's spirit – "Aside from victory, we have no other choice" – encouraging everyone to face future challenges proactively.

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In summary, Meng Wanzhou's speech conveys a core message: in the face of the rise of AI, we should not fear, but rather refocus and全力培养 (quánlì péiyǎng - wholeheartedly cultivate) those traits that make humans unique – perseverance, critical thinking, and a rich soul. This is the core of future-oriented education and personal development.

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Conclusion：

 "Understand the trends, choose a career where your abilities are the needed strengths (making others, including AI, irrelevant), and follow through with grit and adaptability."

 This serves as a superb three-part principle for modern career strategy:

1. Strategic Foresight (The Head): Understand the trends.
• Analyze the macro-environment. Where is the world going? What is becoming obsolete? What is becoming invaluable?
2. Unique Positioning (The Blueprint): Choose a career where your abilities are the needed strengths, making others irrelevant.
• This is the core strategic move. It’s about finding the intersection of your innate talents and a future-proof need, thereby creating an unassailable competitive advantage.
3. Relentless Execution (The Engine): Follow through with grit and adaptability.
• A perfect plan is nothing without execution. Grit provides the perseverance to overcome obstacles, and adaptability ensures you can navigate the unforeseen changes within those very trends.

This consolidated advice moves from passive fear of technology to proactive and empowered human excellence. It's a robust framework for not just surviving, but thriving in the future.