Yi — Wind over Thunder. Your Wind Is Not a Draft Passing Over Your Head — It's Your Choice to Actively Push It Down to Your Roots Below
You got your first round of funding at the end of last year. The week the money hit your account was the happiest seven days since you started your company — your seven days shone brighter than your previous two years combined. On your eighth day you started feeling nervous — you suddenly realized with more money in your account your responsibility toward it weighed far more than the money itself. You started hiring — you offered the first person you brought in a salary higher than what you dared pay yourself after two years as a founder. What your high salary bought back wasn't the fighting power you expected — in their first two months your new hire produced one-third of what you used to do alone. You felt you were losing. Your loss got cleared in the third month when your new hire did one thing — while you were too busy to touch your own product iteration for two months, they independently got your most headache-inducing module running. After your module ran you realized what you thought two months ago was a loss was your gain misjudged as waste in your shortsightedness. Yi — Wind over Thunder. Xun wind above, Zhen thunder below. Wind blows over thunder — thunder is vibration, the force that cracks open the hard shell pressing on the ground for too long. Wind moves upward — it's the nourishment blown into your cracks. Your thunder is your first strike on the market — your wind is after your thunder strike, you focus all your attention on making things grow in the ground your thunder cracked open. Yi doesn't tell you you'll keep growing — Yi tells you where your growth comes from and where it flows. When your source is right — every drop of water becomes your future reservoir. When your source is wrong — every drop you add is raw material for your future tsunami.
Yi — Wind over Thunder. Xun is wind, above. Zhen is thunder, below. Wind above, thunder below — wind blows thunder moves, thunder moves and all things grow. This is the most direct hexagram about increase in all sixty-four — it tells you increase doesn't appear out of nowhere, it's wind blowing to the right place, thunder cracking open the right fissures. The Judgment: Yi, favorable to go somewhere. Favorable to cross the great river. Going forward is favorable — crossing your great rivers is also favorable. Your increase isn't something you stay in place to enjoy — your increase is a supply station you didn't expect to find at a corner of the road that only appears after you set out. The Tuan Commentary: Decreasing above to increase below, the people's joy knows no bounds. You decrease what's above to increase what's below — the people below you receive it gladly, your joy has no boundaries. The best leader in your company is the one who puts you in the spotlight and steps back behind you — because they stepped back you got seen, your capability in the position they pushed you forward into grew results they could never achieve alone when you were hidden. Your results aren't yours — they belong to both of you. Their decrease — they shared their spotlight with you. Your gain — you turned their trust into a flag they gave you on your battlefield. The Image Commentary: Wind and thunder — Yi. The noble person seeing good moves toward it, having faults corrects them. Your wind and thunder sound before you — you see where others do better than you and you move that way, you discover your own mistakes and you correct them. Your moving and correcting are the lowest-cost highest-return combination among all your increase behaviors — you don't need to invent anything new, you just need to not stay stuck in the wrong place to save face when you see the right direction.
Yi is not about you profiting — it's about you discovering that after you let your benefit flow downward, what the people below you grow exceeds your own output so much you can't carry it all alone. Your gain is in your flow — not in your hoarding.
Is Your Increase Because You're Growing — Or Are You Just Piling More Weight onto a Structure That Was Never Healthy
- Is your growth because your product is genuinely needed by the market — or are you just putting a dying thing on life support with your discounts and subsidies. Your app downloads tripled during last month's promotion season — your triple dropped to sixty percent of pre-promotion levels by the third week after the promotion ended. The drop isn't the market's fault — your product gives your users no reason to open it when you're not subsidizing them. You heard that reason when you opened your user interviews — your users said your app is fine, but the one next door is one second faster on your core function. That one second isn't a bug — it's you spending your development resources on three cosmetic features your users don't care about in the past half year. Your cosmetics made your product look prettier from the outside — your prettiness is vanity increase, not real value increase. Your Yi makes you cool down from your promotions — you stop your three cosmetic features, you press all your engineers onto that one second of core experience. Two months later after you close that one-second gap, your organic user growth returns to pre-promotion levels without you spending a cent on promotion — you didn't triple, but your single is real, every penny is yours after you stop burning.
- You get a lot from your relationship — are you being nourished, or are you just passively receiving satisfaction at the lowest standard you no longer dare to raise above. They treat you well enough — when they're in a good mood they bring you dessert from that shop you like. Their goodness is carefully stored in your heart — you store it because in your past relationships you were never treated this way. Your never made you feel their occasional giving is the best thing you can get in this relationship — your best is actually your own standards being lowered by your past without you noticing. Your lowered standards aren't their problem — it's that you don't dare ask yourself what dimensions of your life are truly moving in the direction you want beyond their occasional dessert. The answer about your direction — you don't have one. Not having one made you cry facing that box of dessert after they left next time they brought it. You cried not because you weren't moved — your being moved got choked by a voice deep inside you after one bite of dessert. That voice said this isn't what you want. Your Yi — your increase isn't about how much they give you, it's about whether you yourself are getting better in this relationship. Your getting better is your measuring stick — not theirs. Before you ask them to give you more, ask yourself whether your life would improve without them. Your answer is — you're afraid to know. Your fear is your answer.
- When you lead a team you always want control — your control makes everyone on your team glance at you before making any decision. That glance isn't respect — it's your authority planting in their hearts a fear of falling when they dare to walk on their own. That fear is the biggest decrease you give your team — everyone's autonomy gets cut in half under your control. Your cut makes the combined output of your three-person team less than you plus one-third of a hands-off you. Your hands-off isn't neglect — it's handing off what you've already mastered to the people below you, using the time you save to do something only you can do. Your thing gets done — everyone on your team after you let go starts making their own decisions faster than you imagined. Your increase isn't in how much you do — it's in the space you free up to redefine your own role when your team after you let go does more than double what you could do alone.
- Your body in your life is the bottom layer — something you always say you'll pay attention to but forever ranks last on your priority list. Every morning your first alarm rings — you snooze it, you keep sleeping. Your second alarm rings — you finally get up, your first action isn't pouring yourself that glass of water you know you should drink but always forget, it's opening your phone to check that work message you forgot to reply to last night. Your body's signals over the past two years got suppressed by your coffee and your deadlines — your suppression isn't control, it's delay. Your delay gave your body two more yellow arrows on last year's physical where everything used to be green. Yi health — you put your first glass of water of the day in front of your phone. You don't touch your phone until you finish that glass of water. Your water is the base coat you apply to your body each day before the first button gets pressed. After two months your base coat brings your body's signals back from low-power mode to normal output — your output isn't extra gain, it's the basic capacity you were supposed to have returning after being crushed by your priorities.
Common Breakers
- Thinking increase means more is always better — you moved every good practice you saw in any other company into yours. You moved three performance review systems, five project management methodologies, and an OKR system you don't understand but your investor said you should have. During your first all-hands on your OKRs you saw the light in your people's eyes go out — it didn't go out because they won't cooperate, it went out because what you brought in exceeded your team's digestive capacity. Your digestive system after three straight months of force-feeding methodologies started producing rejection reactions you couldn't see — your people started leaving. They left not because your company's compensation was bad — it's that everyone lost the certainty they needed most in your endless additions. Your increase became your burden — your burden isn't because the things were bad, it's because your rhythm was out of sync with your people's heartbeats. Yi tells you — heaven bestows and earth produces, increase has no fixed formula. Your heaven above scatters rain, your earth below will grow on its own. Your method isn't turning your company into someone else's management textbook — your method is finding the one fertilizer best suited to your company's soil, giving it only that, and nothing else.
- Thinking if you just treat others well your increase will return to you — you keep giving in your relationships, your giving without you noticing turned into people-pleasing. You're afraid your partner will be unhappy — your fear makes you drop everything to solve their emotions at the slightest sign of their displeasure. Your emotions became an unpaid 24-hour customer service job you never signed a contract for but perform every day. Your customer service job dropped your own task completion rate from your past ninety percent to your current forty percent — your forty percent is you spending your energy maintaining a balance you don't know if it can last. Your balance isn't mutual — they rest their feet high while you stand tiptoe below straining to hold them up. Your Yi — your gain isn't the occasional smile you get while holding them up. Your gain is you stopping, looking at them when you tell them you no longer need to hold them up, and seeing whether they're still there. Their absence is your answer — your gain after they're gone actually starts returning to your hands, because you no longer pour your energy into a cup you yourself know shouldn't be filled anymore.
- Thinking growth is your only standard of success — you bet all your energy and resources on your monthly growth numbers. Your numbers at the start of each month flash before your eyes like the pedometer of a marathon whose finish line you can't see. The flashing blinds you — you can't see what your growth is sacrificing. Last month you used money that should have gone to product stability for a big promotion — your promotion doubled your monthly number, and your servers crashed for four hours the night of the doubling. Your crash wasn't an accident — your infrastructure got torn open after being pumped with too much water your growth desire shouldn't have poured in yet. The crack in user complaints became a hole that cost three times what you earned to patch. The faster your growth charges upward before you solidify your foundation — the farther the ground is from you when you fall. Yi — favorable to cross the great river. You can cross your great river — but the prerequisite is your boat's bottom was inspected before departure. While you sprint on shore the holes in your bottom get temporarily hidden by the spray your speed kicks up — being hidden doesn't mean your holes don't exist. Your holes will fill with water at your most unguarded midpoint — your boat sinks halfway to the opposite shore.
- Interpreting Yi as you can expand infinitely — after three consecutive quarters of growth you feel invincible, you expand your business from one city to ten cities in one breath. In seven of your ten cities by the third month of expansion your team discovered your operating model didn't fit the local conditions — the misfit wasn't your product's problem, it's your expansion loosening the soil around your roots too early before your foundation could be compacted locally. The soil around your roots got ripped out in the first storm you didn't expect — your core city team collectively resigned in the fourth month of your localization misfire. Their resignation wasn't mutiny — it's you pulling your people out of the soil they knew and planting them in ground you hadn't examined yourself, telling them you believe they can grow well. Your belief isn't nutrients — they didn't grow well because you didn't test the soil's pH before planting. Yi — all ways of increase move together with time. Your increase must follow your season — your season isn't your ambition, it's your land's actual carrying capacity. Before your next expansion you'll first master one city — mastery means every link in that city no longer needs you watching from afar.
How Yi Plays Out in Career, Love, Personality, and Health — Signals of Increase and Its Source and Flow
Career & Wealth
Your company's current growth has three sources — only one is your real engine. Your first source is your content — you've cultivated your content for four years, every week search engines bring you a hundred new people you've never met but who developed trust in a certain point of your content. After these new people arrive you put a link below your content — your link is free, it leads to a low-priced product. Your low price is the first crack you open in the floodgate — after they squeeze through your crack they see more in your product than what was visible in your free content. Your second source is your ad spend — your ads burn forty percent of your revenue each month. The return on that forty percent slowly drops in every quarterly review — the drop isn't your ad team's fault, your channel's users in your space have been washed too many times by your competitors. Your third source is an accident — one of your users created a use case on your platform you never planned, after sharing it in their circle a new user group grew itself without you spending a cent. Your Yi is telling you — your real increase comes from your users' self-propagation, not your ad spend. Your ads are your amplifier — the quality of your source determines whether your voice stays in tune after being amplified. You take the money saved from ads and pour it into a new content format you've been thinking about but thought you had no budget for — in its second month your new format brought your product a type of user your ads could never bring, users whose tone when talking about your product you recognize instantly — it's recommendation, not advertising.
Love & Relationship
You've been together two years — you notice in the second half of your second year you stopped proactively creating new experiences for your relationship. Your stopping isn't that you don't love them anymore — it's your energy being drained by work, and what's left for your relationship is only a maintenance level you feel is passable. You maintained two dinners every weekend — in the third week of your weekly movie you noticed while watching the same film two-thirds of your attention was pulled away by what you had to deliver tomorrow. Your two-thirds meant after the movie ended, on the walk home, you heard what they said with your ears but your brain didn't process it. You didn't process it not because their topic wasn't good — your brain at that moment had no space left for them. Yi love — you don't need to add quantity to your relationship, you need to add quality. You change your two casual weekly dinners into one dinner at home where you put thought into the appetizer and dessert. Your dinner doesn't need to be expensive — what you need is your mind having space for only them during that entire hour of cooking. After you put your heart into it they did something they'd never done before — while you were washing dishes they hugged you from behind. That hug wasn't a whim — it's your undivided time growing a warmth in your uninterrupted air that they had always wanted to give but never found the right window, a warmth you'd seen long ago but rarely appeared. Your increase is your quality — not your quantity.
Personality
Yi personality — you are the leader in your company who shares credit. After finishing your quarterly report you wrote in your email at least two things you saw each person on your team do better this quarter than last. Your email got forwarded within your team — the forwarding wasn't any management technique, it's your people feeling your genuine care for their growth. Your care made someone on your team who had been there two years but was on the fence about leaving reply to your email that night with a message they'd never written — they said they had already planned to leave, and your email made them cry while typing the reply. Their tears weren't your retention — it's your sincerity building a bridge without you noticing, making them feel they're not a screw you can replace anytime on your ship — they know they have a place in your heart. Yi personality's cost — you're used to sharing credit, and when reporting upward you often forget to mention your own contributions. Your forgetting isn't nobility — it's your self-promotion switch being turned off from the factory. That off switch at your year-end review became your boss's comment that you're great in every way but you didn't let the higher-ups see your impact in your reports. Your impact isn't nonexistent — you hid it behind your team's light. Your Yi tells you not just how to flow benefits downward — you also need to flow upward. Next time in your report, before your colleagues' names add three words: under my leadership. Those three words are the upstream return you deserve — your return isn't stealing credit, it's your position itself having irreplaceable value.
Health
In the past year your body has been worn down by your work in a way you don't notice but is very consistent. You have no major illness — your major illness hasn't come. Your body is reminding you in its own way — your reminder is that you used to sleep through till your alarm, now you wake at 4 AM every day without knowing why. After waking you lie in bed — your mind during that one hour of wakefulness is blank. Your blankness isn't relaxation — it's your nervous system sending you a signal that you've crossed a warning line your body doesn't dare tell you about while you're awake. When your warning line startled you awake your body's signal wasn't pain — it was the disappearance of your sleep depth. The disappearance is your body talking to you — your response is you haven't responded. Yi health — you don't need to see a doctor, you need to go straight home after work today. You cut your three overtime nights per week — two months after cutting your 4 AM awakenings go from daily to weekly. Weekly isn't full recovery — but you finally start your mornings with your body's battery charging from thirty percent instead of zero. Your thirty percent is the first buffer you gave yourself — your buffer is slowing the rate at which work draws blood from your body to a speed where your bone marrow has time to make new blood. Your new blood comes from you picking back up one by one the three things you never took seriously before — eating time, sleeping time, and time not looking at work messages.
Classic Yi Verses and Their Real-World Reading
The Way of Increase — A Yi Practical Guide
- Yi Increase Flow Map — Take a sheet of A4 paper, draw a vertical line down the middle. On the left write where you experienced loss this month (what you gave out without return). On the right write how you can turn some of those losses into gains for others. Track what new things flow back to you within three months from the losses you converted on the right.: On your left you wrote down the three hours you spend each week replying to your team's questions after 10 PM — those three hours are time you could spend with your family after shutting your computer at ten. On the right your time got converted into — you decide to hold one high-density sharing session per week, no more than forty-five minutes, where you solve the most common type of questions in one shot. Your session is Monday morning — in the following week your team's evening questions drop from an average of three per day to one every two days. The drop isn't because problems vanished — it's because your preemptive answers solved them before they became problems. Your three-month result — the three hours you reclaimed each evening you invested in a learning project in a field you're not especially familiar with but want to understand. Your project after three months isn't a direct money-maker — but it's forty percent of your judgment source for your next strategic choice. Your source is time you reclaimed and reinvested — time is the only resource you can't copy, you pulled it from low-level use and placed it into high-level use.
- Yi Seeing Good and Moving Toward It List — Each week find one person or company in your field you admire. Analyze one specific action you admire — don't look at the big picture, just find one small detail you can replicate. In the following week, apply it in your daily routine.: Last week you watched a founder in your industry you admire most — what you admire isn't their fundraising ability, it's that at the start of every email they first ask about the background of your question in your context, helping you define it more clearly in a way that doesn't make you feel embarrassed about your rough expression. That background in their reply made you realize the step you often skip when asking questions — you spill a pile of details without first establishing the coordinate system of your question. This week when replying to your colleague's email your first paragraph starts with — here's my understanding of your question, you restate their problem to prove you didn't miss their core difficulty. Your new writing style gets your colleague to reply in five minutes with information that used to take forty minutes of back-and-forth in your inbox to align. The thirty-five minutes between five and forty is your increase — your increase isn't in your technical skill, it's in your expression structure. Your structure is something you gained from observing one detail of someone better at it than you — they didn't need to teach you, you just did it and gained the missing link in your own practice. Next week you find another learnable detail — after three months of accumulation people working with you think you attended some expensive communication bootcamp. Your bootcamp is your seeing good and moving toward it — free, accumulated by yourself in your daily life.
- Yi Sacrifice Above to Increase Below Experiment — Pick one thing you currently handle but can hand off to someone below you, together with decision-making authority. You only do check-ins, no interference. After two weeks, come back and see the extra time you gained and what the person grew while doing this task.: You picked the weekly client monthly report you write — you've done it for two years, your report template has stabilized to the point you can finish it with your eyes closed in twenty minutes. You handed your twenty-minute report to that colleague you always thought could handle it but you never truly let them touch clients independently. What you said to them wasn't write a draft for me to review first — you said this week's client report is yours to write, send it directly after you finish, and after you send it we'll talk about what you think can be improved. After their first report went out you couldn't resist looking — after looking you typed four words in your chat box and deleted them. You deleted them because you found their report wasn't as polished as yours, but its information accuracy and logical structure weren't as different as you imagined. Your twenty minutes got freed from your weekly Tuesday — in your freed twenty minutes you did a competitive analysis that sat unopened on your computer for eight months — by the third week your analysis turned into a micro-adjustment to your product, and that adjustment nudged next month's client retention up two points. Your two points aren't big growth — but they're a chick hatched from your twenty minutes freed by letting go, a chick you could never find time to incubate while doing reports alone. In the third week after your letting go your chick walked up to you on its own — you seeing it isn't your achievement, it's your power outlet on another workbench starting to output power on its own.
Yi in Action — Common Questions
Q:I've been at my current company for four years. My income is on the higher end among my peers, but I feel zero growth — my daily work is pure repetition. I want to jump to somewhere more challenging, but my mortgage and family keep me from moving. Where is my increase?
A:
Your increase isn't in whether you jump — it's in whether you pave your future path while staying in your current role. Your current role gives you something your peers don't have — a stable platform. Your platform doesn't mean you have no challenges — it means your platform can absorb you spending one extra unrequired hour after your core duties on an experiment in a direction you want for your future but your boss didn't assign. Your experiment is your increase — your job hop on your resume isn't the strongest statement — your strongest statement is proving at your current place, using something outside your job description, that you can produce results in your next place they haven't seen before. You use your current salary to support your family — your salary is the return for not jumping. Your extra hour is interest-free capital you're saving for your future — when you've saved enough, you become the person your dream company proactively seeks out, you don't need to send your resume — your resume is the thing you did at your current place that wasn't your job but you did well, mentioned by people in your industry's circles.
Q:My business partner and I got through the hardest phase of our startup together. Now the company is stable but we increasingly disagree on many things — they want to be conservative, I want to expand. Every meeting drains me. I don't want to fight but feel I'm suppressing myself. Can this relationship still increase me?
A:
Your differences aren't your problem — it's your company moving to its next stage and your two steering wheels starting to turn slightly in different directions. Your expansion idea isn't wrong — your cautious partner's idea isn't wrong either. Your right answer isn't on your side or theirs — it's in whether you two can find your company's next axis that supports both of you between your two extremes. Before your next conversation, first find the risks in your expansion plan yourself — the traps you're most likely to fall into. When you walk into the meeting room carrying your traps, your first sentence isn't that you must be right — you say let me first tell you what I'm afraid of, see if on my side I can help plug what you're afraid of. This sentence means you took one step left from your position — your step lets the person across from you see in your posture that you're not here to fight, you're here to piece together your different perspectives into a complete picture you each only saw half of. After your picture comes together your plan isn't your original expansion or their original conservatism — it's a new plan you both agree on, where each of your fears gets partially plugged by the other. Your relationship after your one step shifts from draining to increasing — your increase isn't your partner changing, it's you choosing a way to start the conversation where they don't need to stand opposite you.