This article was written on February 20, 2020.

I mention this date first because timing matters here. In February 2020, COVID-19 had already spread from Wuhan, but most countries worldwide were still watching and waiting. Taiwan was beginning to heighten its vigilance, the mask rationing system had just launched, but people on the street were still commuting as usual, working as usual, still thinking “it probably won’t be too serious.”

No one knew what would happen next.

But if you’re willing to step back and put the chaos before us into a larger framework, you’ll see something that makes your skin crawl: we’re standing at a massive historical turning point, and most people haven’t realized it yet.

Let’s take inventory of the “firsts” our generation has experienced.

We personally lived through the rise of the internet, watching it transform the landscape of almost every industry within twenty years. From an era without mobile phones to an era where everyone has a smartphone—the dramatic nature of this transformation is unprecedented in human history.

We personally felt the brutality of climate change. The Australian bushfires that began in late 2019 burned for nearly six months, destroying over 18 million hectares—roughly half the size of Japan. This wasn’t distant news, but real-time footage you saw on social media: orange skies, animals fleeing for their lives.

We witnessed a city of ten million people completely locked down. On January 23, 2020, Wuhan was sealed, with approximately 11 million people forbidden to leave. Land, sea, and air transport were all controlled. This wasn’t a movie, not a drill.

We faced the possibility of the Olympics being canceled due to pandemic—as we now know, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics were indeed postponed to 2021, becoming the first Olympics in modern history to be delayed due to pandemic.

We saw global medical resource runs, massive corporate bankruptcies, schools transitioning entirely to online learning—each one “unprecedented.”

These aren’t movie plots. This is the reality we’re breathing.

Looking back from the future, history textbooks might mark this period as “The Great Rupture” or “The Great Reorganization.” Just as later generations view the period from 1914-1945—two world wars, the Great Depression, complete collapse and reconstruction of order—what we’re experiencing might be another level of civilizational turning point.

But we’re in the middle of it, unable to see the full picture. Like a fish in the ocean that can’t feel the “wave”—it only knows the water is moving, sometimes pushed forward, sometimes pulled down.

That’s how I felt in early 2020. Not panic, but a strange clarity—feeling that many things I thought were stable were actually loosening, and the pandemic just accelerated that loosening to a visible degree.

Our experience in the early pandemic gave me a very concrete understanding of this “loosening.”

We’re not a big company. Small team, few clients, relatively tight operational cost control. But even so, when the pandemic hit, the impact was direct and swift. Face-to-face workshops couldn’t proceed, several confirmed projects were suspended, and second-quarter revenue projections had to be rewritten.

But I observed something interesting: among our clients, the first to struggle weren’t the smallest companies, but the largest ones.

Those organizations with massive physical structures, extensive fixed assets, and rigid processes responded slowest when the giant wave hit. Because to turn around, they first had to hold countless meetings; to hold meetings, they first had to find all stakeholders; to find stakeholders, they first had to confirm decision-making processes. By the time decisions emerged, the wave had already passed.

Conversely, lightweight, flexible small teams with elastic asset allocation could redeploy within days. That’s what we did—converted all services online within two weeks, not because we had foresight, but because we were small enough, light enough that the cost of pivoting was low.

This isn’t bragging about small company advantages. Rather, it’s stating a more fundamental observation: in environments of massive change, large physical structures aren’t assets—they’re liabilities.

I later used a metaphor to understand this: when seas are calm, big ships are more stable than small boats. But when tsunamis come, when big ships capsize, they’re finished, while small boats might actually ride the waves and survive.

This metaphor isn’t perfect, but it points to a core insight: in dramatically changing environments, the key to survival isn’t being “bigger,” but being “lighter.”

Asset lightweighting. This isn’t just financial strategy—it’s survival strategy.

It means: don’t lock all your resources into a single form, single location, single assumption. Maintain liquidity. Maintain your ability to reconfigure at any time.

For businesses, this means flexible team structures, remote-capable work modes, revenue sources not dependent on single clients or single markets.

For individuals, this means skill diversity, income diversity, mental flexibility. Don’t bind your identity to a single business card—because that card could disappear at any time.

When I wrote this article in February 2020, I still didn’t know how long the pandemic would last or how deep the impact would be. I only knew one thing: what we were experiencing wasn’t temporary disruption, but structural transformation.

Looking back six years later, this judgment wasn’t wrong.

The pandemic changed work patterns, consumption modes, educational methods, and international relations frameworks. Some changes were reversed after the pandemic ended, but more changes were irreversible. Remote work won’t completely disappear, online education won’t return to zero, and global supply chain reorganization is still ongoing.

The great wave has already crashed. But the sea surface won’t return to calm.

So the question isn’t “will waves come”—waves will always come.

The question is: are you riding the wave, or are you drowning?

This depends on whether you made yourself light enough before the wave arrived. Being light doesn’t mean “having nothing,” but rather “not being crushed by what you have.” Your assets, your titles, your plans—when giant waves hit, are these flotation devices that help you rise, or lead weights that drag you down?

This is perhaps the most important survival question of our era.

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