Zhang Yiming
An ordinary mind for extraordinary things
The ninth-anniversary speech
ByteDance ninth-anniversary all-hands speech, March 2021
A company known for ferocity spent its ninth anniversary on composure. The specific kinds of interference he named.
What actually happened?
At ByteDance's ninth anniversary in 2021 Zhang Yiming's all-hands had a single theme: keep an ordinary mind while doing extraordinary things. He named the common distortions. Toward the past, vanity about achievements or self-pity about setbacks. Toward competition, watching the rival so closely that the rival leads you. Toward the future, targets set so far from reality that anxiety eats the effort. His argument is that lifting attention off the patterns and the noise and seeing the present as it is produces better judgement. Extraordinary results come from an ordinary state of mind held at the decisive moments.
Watching the rival hands over the steering wheel
Excess attention to competition means the agenda gets taken over: they ship and you answer, they attack and you defend. It looks like fighting back, but you are already executing their strategy for them. Composure here is concrete. A rival's move is one input, and its weight should not exceed your own user data.
A team that calls an emergency alignment for every competitor launch finds a year later that the roadmap was written by the other side. Make it a monthly review.
Vanity and self-pity are the same coin
Pairing them is exact. Pride in past success and grief over a setback run on the same mechanism, with attention locked on me rather than on the thing. Decisions made in either state serve a self-image: one proving it still has it, the other proving it was unfair.
After a winning streak you cannot kill a project you started; after a loss you rush a comeback. Opposite moves, one driver.
Targets within reach keep anxiety from taking over
A target detached from reality does not produce drive, it produces anxiety, and anxiety distorts judgement systematically: short horizons inflated, fundamentals skipped, remedies grabbed at random. Composure is not the absence of ambition. It is ambition cut to a scale you can reach on tiptoe.
Break number one in three years into two verifiable milestones this quarter. Same ambition: one phrasing manufactures anxiety, the other manufactures progress.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: competition is white-hot and the team swings between elation and dread.
Ask first: how much of this week's agenda was set by the other side, and are we looking at the thing or at ourselves?
Where it goes wrong: reading composure as refusing to fight the fights that have to be fought; or saying ordinary mind while the targets and the review cycle are still designed by anxiety.
Lines to keep
Watch your rival too closely and you end up being led.
See the present as it is and judgement improves.
Same situation, other people are asking
I'm only ever reacting. I never set the tempo.They want it settled this quarter and I'm the weaker side.I react to every move they make and I am always a beat behind.Their whole timeline assumes I will wait for approval first.They're setting the pace · all 6 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.