Day 17: Take the hidden paths
（Sunday）
各位书友，今天我们一起阅读《Zero to One》第八章SECRETS的99-106页。
WHY AREN’T PEOPLE LOOKING FOR SECRETS
为何不再探索秘密
英语共读编辑团队在后台等您来！在后台等您来！等您来！
01 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO CONVENTION
How must you see the world if you don’t believe in secrets? You’d have to believe we’ve already solved all great questions. If today’s conventions are correct, we can afford to be smug and complacent: “God’s in His heaven, All’s right with the world.”
如果不相信还有秘密存在，你该如何看待这个世界呢？你不得不相信人类已经解决了所有重大问题。如若现今的常规性知识都是正确的，那我们完全可以自鸣得意、沾沾自喜地说：“ 大家各得其所，世界一切正常。”
For example, a world without secrets would enjoy a perfect understanding of justice.
例如，一个没有任何秘密的世界，对公平有着完美的理解。
Every injustice necessarily involves a moral truth that very few people recognize early on: in a democratic society, a wrongful practice persists only when most people don’t perceive it to be unjust. At first, only a small minority of abolitionists knew that slavery was evil; that view has rightly become conventional, but it was still a secret in the early 19th century. To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.
任何不公平都必然涉及一个之前极少有人意识到的道德真理：在民主社会，一种错误的做法，只有当大多数人不认为它是不公平的时候，才能延续下去。起初，只有少数主张废除奴隶制的人认为奴隶制是罪恶的。这一观点现在已是公认的了，但在19世纪初还是个秘密。认为现在的世界已经毫无秘密，就意味着我们生活在一个处处公平的社会。
In economics, disbelief in secrets leads to faith in efficient markets. But the existence of financial bubbles shows that markets can have extraordinary inefficiencies.
在经济学方面，不相信秘密的存在，导致人们盲目相信市场的有效性。但是金融泡沫的存在表明市场有时根本不起作用。
And the more people believe in efficiency, the bigger the bubbles get. In 1999, nobody wanted to believe that the internet was irrationally overvalued. The same was true of housing in 2005: Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan had to acknowledge some “signs of froth in local markets” but stated that “a bubble in home prices for the nation as a whole does not appear likely.” The market reflected all knowable information and couldn’t be questioned. Then home prices fell across the country, and the financial crisis of 2008 wiped out trillions. The future turned out to hold many secrets that economists could not make vanish simply by ignoring them.
相信市场作用的人越多，金融泡沫就越大。1999年，没人愿意相信人们对互联网估计过高。无独有偶，2005年，房地产业遭遇了相同问题。美联储主席艾伦·格林斯潘不得不承认“当地市场出现了金融泡沫的迹象”，但声称“就整个国家而言，房地产价格泡沫不会出现”。市场反映所有可知信息，而且不容置疑。随后全美房价下跌，2008年的金融危机，使我们损失了几万亿美元。这一事实表明，未来仍存在很多秘密，仅靠忽略它们，经济学家是不能将这些秘密消灭的。
What happens when a company stops believing in secrets? The sad decline of Hewlett-Packard provides a cautionary tale.
当一个公司不再相信有秘密的存在，会有什么事发生呢？惠普的悲惨下滑就是个警告。
In 1990, the company was worth $9 billion. Then came a decade of invention. This relentless product expansion paid off: by mid-2000, HP was worth $135 billion.
1990年，这家公司有90亿美元的资产。接下来的10年是发明创造的10年。不停地拓展产品最终得到了丰厚回报：到2000年年中，惠普资产达到1350亿美元。
But starting in late 1999, when HP introduced a new branding campaign around the imperative to “invent,” it stopped inventing things. By 2005, the company’s market cap had plunged to $70 billion—roughly half of what it had been just five years earlier.
1999年末，惠普发起了一项新的品牌活动，强调它是重视“发明”的公司，但从那时开始，惠普却没有再发明过新东西。到2005年，惠普的市值跌落至700亿美元，大约是5年前的一半。
Having abandoned the search for technological secrets, HP obsessed over gossip. As a result, by late 2012 HP was worth just $23 billion—not much more than it was worth in 1990, adjusting for inflation.
放弃了对科技秘密的探索之后，惠普公司为流言蜚语所困。结果是，到2012年末，惠普公司的市值仅为230亿美元，还不及通货膨胀调整后1990年的市值。
02 THE CASE FOR SECRETS
You can’t find secrets without looking for them. Andrew Wiles demonstrated this when he proved Fermat’s Last Theorem after 358 years of fruitless inquiry by other mathematicians—the kind of sustained failure that might have suggested an inherently impossible task.
不探索是发现不了秘密的。数学家安德鲁·怀尔斯的经历说明了这一点。在经过358年、许多科学家求证无果后（持续的失败似乎意味着这是一项根本无法完成的任务），怀尔斯终于证明了费马最后定理。
Andrew Wiles needed brilliance to succeed, but he also needed a faith in secrets. If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth.
安德鲁·怀尔斯的成功需要智慧，更需要坚信秘密的存在。如果你认为有些困难的事情无法完成，就不会做出尝试。相信秘密才是探索有效进行得关键所在。
The actual truth is that there are many more secrets left to find, but they will yield only to relentless searchers. There is more to do in science, medicine, engineering, and in technology of all kinds. We are within reach not just of marginal goals set at the competitive edge of today’s conventional disciplines, but of ambitions so great that even the boldest minds of the Scientific Revolution hesitated to announce them directly. We could cure cancer, dementia, and all the diseases of age and metabolic decay. We can find new ways to generate energy that free the world from conflict over fossil fuels. We can invent faster ways to travel from place to place over the surface of the planet; we can even learn how to escape it entirely and settle new frontiers. But we will never learn any of these secrets unless we demand to know them and force ourselves to look.
事实是还有许多秘密等待我们去探索，只有坚持不懈的探索者才能发现它们。在科学、医药、工程及各种技术方面还有很多事情要做。不管是常规学科方面具有竞争优势的边际目标，还是连科学革命中最大胆的人都迟疑是否要直接宣布的宏伟目标，我们都可以实现。我们可以治疗癌症、痴呆、所有老年病和代谢衰变；我们可以开发新能源来避免化石燃料引起的冲突；我们可以发明地球上更快捷的交通工具；我们还可以彻底离开地球，定居在新的疆域。但是如果我们不想了解，并迫使自己去探索这些奥秘，我们将永远也不会了解这些秘密。
The same is true of business. Great companies can be built on open but unsuspected secrets about how the world works. Consider the Silicon Valley start-ups that have harnessed the spare capacity that is all around us but often ignored.
商业也是一样。成功的企业建立于开放却未知的秘密之上，这秘密关乎世界如何运作。想想硅谷的那些新创公司，正式利用我们周围常被忽略的闲置生产能力。
If insights that look so elementary in retrospect can support important and valuable businesses, there must remain many great companies still to start.
回头想想：如果看起来如此简单的想法都能支撑起重要而有价值的企业，那么一定还有许多好公司等待我们去创办。
03 HOW TO FIND SECRETS
There are two kinds of secrets: secrets of nature and secrets about people. Natural secrets exist all around us; to find them, one must study some undiscovered aspect of the physical world. Secrets about people are different: they are things that people don’t know about themselves or things they hide because they don’t want others to know. So when thinking about what kind of company to build, there are two distinct questions to ask:
What secrets is nature not telling you?
What secrets are people not telling you?
秘密分为两种：关于自然的和关于人的。自然界的秘密无处不在，想要发现，你必须探索物质世界的未知部分。关于人的秘密是不同的：是人类对自身认知的空白或者是人们以防他人知道而隐藏的事情。思考要创建哪种公司时，需要问自己两个不同的问题：
自然没有告诉你的秘密是什么？
人类没有告诉你的秘密是什么？
It’s easy to assume that natural secrets are the most important: the people who look for them can sound intimidatingly authoritative. Sometimes looking for natural secrets and looking for human secrets lead to the same truth. The best place to look for secrets is where no one else is looking.
人们很容易认为自然的秘密是最重要的：探索自然秘密的人说起话来有一种令人生畏的权威感。其实，探索自然秘密和探寻人类秘密得到的是一样的真相。而且，探索秘密的最佳处所就是无人关注的地方。
Consider the monopoly secret again: competition and capitalism are opposites. If you didn’t already know it, you could discover it the natural, empirical way: do a quantitative study of corporate profits and you’ll see they’re eliminated by competition. But you could also take the human approach and ask: what are people running companies not allowed to say? You would notice that monopolists downplay their monopoly status to avoid scrutiny, while competitive firms strategically exaggerate their uniqueness. The differences between firms only seem small on the surface; in fact, they are enormous.
请再思考一下垄断的秘密：竞争和资本主义是对立的。如果事先不知道，你可以很自然地从经验中发现：如果对公司利润进行量化研究，你就能发现利润被竞争吞噬掉了。然而，你也可以用比较人性化的方法来提问：开公司的人忌讳说什么？你会注意到垄断者以贬低他们的垄断地位来避免审查，而竞争厂商则巧妙地夸大独特性。两种公司的区别表面上是细微的，事实上是巨大的。
04 WHAT TO DO WITH SECRETS
If you find a secret, you face a choice: Do you tell anyone? Or you keep it to yourself?
发现秘密时，你将面临选择：告诉别人？还是保守秘密？
It depends on the secret: some are more dangerous than others. Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know.
这取决于秘密本身：有些秘密险于其他。除非你的理念完全符合习俗，否则将你所知道的一切告诉每个人绝不是什么好主意。
As Faust tells Wagner:
正如浮士德对瓦格纳所说：
The few who knew what might be learned,
Foolish enough to put their whole heart on show,
And reveal their feelings to the crowd below,
Mankind has always crucified and burned.
掌握秘密的极少数人，
愚蠢地将心扉全然洞开，
将自己的满腔热情示人，
总是惨遭迫害与火刑。
So who do you tell? Whoever you need to, and no more. In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody—and that’s a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.
那么要告诉谁呢？不管你必须要对谁说，都不要多讲。实际上，选择谁也不告诉和选择人人都告诉之间有一个黄金平衡—那就是公司存在的秘密。最好的企业家深谙此道：所有成功的企业都是基于鲜为人知的秘密创立的。好企业是改变世界的密谋者，当你与人分享秘密时，听众就成为了你的谋士。
As Tolkien wrote in The Lord of the Rings:
就像托尔金在《魔戒》中所写：
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
不断向前延伸的道路，
是从家门开始的。
Life is a long journey; the road marked out by the steps of previous travelers has no end in sight. But later on in the tale, another verse appears:
人生是漫长的旅程；由前任踏出来的路，一眼望去，没有尽头。不过这个故事后面还有另一首诗：
Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though we pass them by today,
Tomorrow we may come this way
And take the hidden paths that run
Towards the Moon or to the Sun.
转角处等待我们的
是新路或神秘的门，
即使我们今天路过，
明天可能还会回转。
请选择这隐秘的路
通向月亮或者太阳。
The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.
道路不必无限延伸，一直走下去。选择那条隐秘的路吧。
☞ 领读达人：刘亚南，英语共读负责人，85后
☞ 主播：熊叔（公众号：熊孩子聚集地），别人说我英语讲得像母语，是个美国人，我笑~谁说不出国门就学不会地道美语?，别人说我拥有TESOL国际教师资格证~，我笑~自己只是个教书的逗比小光头罢了。
☞ 设计：刘莹
☞ 编校：陈珺洁