【译文】如何保持胜利

How to Keep Winning 如何保持胜利

导读： 这篇文章是 Replit 创始人 Amjad Masad 的“反脆弱”创业生存指南。作者用 6 条“如何一直赢”的原则，把“别死、别退、别分心”这些朴素道理拆成可落地的战术：

1. 把“死亡线”画在现金流、法律、健康三条红线之前，先求不死再求爆发；
2. 用“内部记分牌”对抗外部噪音，把“再站起来一次”当成唯一 KPI；
3. 进入“锁定模式”——像拼字比赛前默背生词、赛车前记别人失误那样，把竞争变成单人副本；
4. 主动挑难的路，自研分布式文件系统而非买现成 API，把技术深度变成复利资产；
5. 在对手靠灰色捷径超车时，坚持“按规矩出牌”，让隐私、安全、品牌成为越滚越大的复利雪球；
6. 把路线图、代码、经验全部开源，用“把东西放回人类经验池”换来人才与机会的复利。

全文穿插 Replit 八年起落、职业电竞夺冠、赛车逆袭等故事，把“长期主义”翻译成可感知的细节：现金流表格、拼字比赛现场、分布式文件系统的 Git commit。读完你会得到一张“反脆弱清单”：下次在融资寒冬、赛道切换、团队动荡时，先检查六条原则，再决定是 pivot 还是 persist。

I’ve always been fiercely competitive. I enjoy everything about it—from training to get better, to building and developing teams, to the stress, pressure, and intensity. And while I love winning, there are very few things I dread more than losing. It just feels awful. This meant that I had to get good at constantly not losing. Here are six tactics and principles I learned along the way to protect against failure and keep winning.

我一直是一个极具竞争力的人。我喜欢竞争的一切——从训练提升自己，到组建和发展团队，再到压力和紧张氛围。虽然我喜欢胜利，但失败比什么都让人害怕，感觉非常糟糕。这促使我必须不断提升避免失败的能力。以下是我一路上总结出的六个预防失败、保持胜利的策略和原则。

1. Don’t Die 不要“阵亡”

Almost everything else you can come back from except death. I’m using “death” both literally and figuratively to mean the point of no return. First, know the death boundaries, and obsess over the extreme downside scenarios and prioritize survival. Visualize all the ways you could die—all the time. In that way I’m very careful, almost paranoid. I ran Replit for eight years with little commercial success, but at no point did we ever get to the red zone when it came to runway—we always had plenty of cash on hand. You’d be surprised by the number of brilliant founders that reach out to me for advice when they’re three months from death.

除了“阵亡”，几乎所有失败你都可以东山再起。这里说“阵亡”，既是字面意思，也是比喻（指无法回头的失败）。首先，要知道什么是“死亡”边界，经常关注最极端的风险情景，把生存优先放在首位。时刻想象各种可能失败的方式。因此我很谨慎，甚至有些偏执。我运营Replit八年，商业上没太大成功，但资金方面从未出现危险，总是资金充足。你会惊讶有多少优秀的创始人在距离“死亡线”只有三个月时向我寻求建议。

Once you’re deeply familiar with the death conditions, you can take extreme risks because you know you’ll always come back when things go sideways. Especially in America, and especially in Silicon Valley, people are forgiving of failure. You can come back from almost anything.

一旦你对死亡条件非常熟悉，你就能大胆冒险，因为你知道出了问题还能回来。特别是在美国和硅谷，人们很能包容失败。你几乎可以从任何失败中重新崛起。

At Replit, there were many times when the business sort of worked and any rational founder would have decided to scale it. For example, we had a decently growing business in education and recruiting, but both markets felt unexciting to me—we couldn’t build a big company or achieve our mission that way. So we pivoted. The most recent pivot was from being primarily a coding editor to becoming a natural-language creation interface (vibe coding). Some employees and customers were upset and left (some have since returned), but I knew I had to align with the biggest revolution the world has seen since the internet. When you eventually make it, people won’t just forgive you, they’ll join you.

在Replit，有很多阶段业务可以继续扩展，理性的创始人都会选择走规模化，比如我们在教育和招聘领域发展不错，但这些市场都没让我激动——无法建立大公司或实现愿景。因此我们果断转型。最近一次就是从代码编辑器转向自然语言创作界面（vibe coding）。有些员工和客户因此不满而离开（部分后来又回来了），但我知道自己必须跟随互联网以来最大的技术变革。当你成功时，人们不仅会原谅你，还会主动加入你。

2. Never Quit 永不放弃

Everything takes time. Some startups explode from day one and some prodigies play piano at three, but those are rare—and often fleeting. Most sharp rises end in sharper declines. If you’ve set your mind to something, then why ever quit? If you’re not dead, then you’re still in the game.

一切都需要时间。有些公司诞生即巅峰，有些天才三岁就能演奏钢琴，但这种现象非常罕见，而且多半昙花一现。多数陡峭的上升最后都急速下坠。如果你下定决心了，为什么还要放弃？只要你没“阵亡”，你就还在局中。

When you talk to entrepreneurs who quit on their dreams, even when they still get massively rich through investing, they always have a look of immense pain in their faces when they tell you that they timed it wrong. That they were too early.

你和那些放弃梦想的创业者交流时，会发现即使他们靠投资赚了很多钱，但回忆“退场”时总是有种深深的痛苦：觉得自己退出得太早，时机没掌握好。

Well, you’re only “too early” if you actually quit (or died). They had all the right ideas but stopped short of striking gold. Often, gold is only two strikes away. Don’t let that be you.

事实上，只有真正放弃（或失败）了，才算是“太早”。他们点子都很棒，却在成功前停步不前。往往成功就在再坚持两步之后。不要让这种事发生在自己身上。

When you consider quitting, try to find a different scoreboard. Score yourself on something else: on how many times you dust yourself off and get up, or how much incremental progress you make. Almost always, in your business or life, there are things you can make daily progress on that can make you feel like you’re still winning. Start compounding.

如果你考虑放弃，不妨找一个新的“记分板”。用别的标准衡量：比如你重新振作的次数，例如每天点滴进步。在工作或生活中总有些事情可以不断进步，让你感觉在持续胜利。开始积累、滚雪球吧。

Some of the best businesses started off slow and just compounded all the way to heaven. One of my favorite charts is Amazon’s growth because it’s consistent over many years—and it’s still compounding. It’s really hard to stop companies like this. It’s impossible to stop founders like this. So maybe you’re not winning on some external scoreboard, but you always have your internal scoreboard to measure yourself and your team on. Have patience.

一些最优秀的企业都是缓慢起步、不断积累，最终一路高涨。亚马逊增长曲线是我最喜欢的例子，连年稳定增长，还在继续。这样的企业难以阻挡，这样的创始人不可能被击败。所以也许外部记分板还没赢，但你始终有内部记分板可以衡量自己和团队。耐心点。

3. Lock In 专注投入

I remember doing a spelling bee when I was maybe in third grade, standing in line waiting to get called on to spell the next word. I looked around me and all the other kids were talking and joking around. I thought that was strange. How could you ever win if you’re not in the mindset of winning. If you’re not locked in?

我记得三年级参加拼写比赛时，排队等着叫我拼下一个单词。周围孩子都在开玩笑聊天，我觉得很奇怪。你如果没进入“赢”的状态，怎么可能赢呢？没专注投入，哪里能争胜？

For me, I would stand there and keep reciting difficult words. And although I was slightly dyslexic, I still won every freaking spelling bee. With this simple trick, I dominated it so much to the point that my teachers, who loathed me for being a slacker, once tried to rig it in favor of their obedient A-students (I still won).

我则会站在一旁背难词。即使有一点阅读障碍，也次次夺冠。用这个诀窍，我赢到老师都想通过操纵比赛让听话学生获胜（我还是赢了）。

On a day I have to perform, I’m impossible to be around. I’m in the winning mindset. If I can observe how others are doing, I will study their every move. I recently participated and won a timed car race. While waiting, I watched everyone’s mistakes and learned from them. By the time I went to do my trial, I knew exactly the bare minimum I needed to do to put myself in a winning position. After you eliminate risk, it’s all upside from there.

每逢需要发挥的时候，我会变得让人很难接近。我全心处在取胜心态。如果能观察别人，我会研究每个动作。最近赛车比赛我也是如此，耐心在旁观看别人的失误，从中学习。轮到自己试跑时，我已知道最低限度要做什么才能获胜。风险排除后，一切都是上升空间。

4. Do Hard Things 做难的事

Most people do the obvious thing. They don’t want to look weird or different—but winning is weird and different. You’re definitionally different because you stand apart from everyone else as the ultimate winner.

多数人只做显而易见的事，他们不想显得另类或奇怪——但赢家就是独特和不同。你之所以能成为最终胜者，就是因为和别人不一样。

I used to be a pro gamer, and when my friends and I picked up a new video game, everyone would follow the game’s instructions and do the obvious thing. On the other hand, I would explore the edges of the game. I’d explore every weird build, every different weapon, and frankly look like a noob for a long time. That’s good. They’ll underestimate you. But you’re compounding. And eventually, you’ll go vertical, creating a massive distance between you and the next participant before they know what hit them.

我曾是职业电竞玩家，每当玩新游戏，大家都按规则走套路，我则探索边界，尝试各种奇怪玩法和装备，结果很长时间像新手一样。这其实很好，别人会低估你。但你在积累，最终爆发时一举超越他人，让人措手不及。

People by nature take the path of least resistance. If it’s working, they’ll keep going. Doing hard things means you’re going on an untraveled path. It’s risky.

人本能会走阻力最小的路，能奏效就一直走。做难事意味着走别人没走过的路，的确有风险。

When I started working on Replit many years ago, venture capitalists would look at our competitors and see that they were growing faster or making superficially more progress, and they’d ask us “why not just do this or that?” But it was never that simple. I wanted to build real technological depth. Something lasting. If it’s easy, then there is no real lasting advantage. It’s easy to create the surface thing, but the right (hard) infrastructure technology compounds.

刚做Replit时，投资人看同行增长快、表面进展多，就问我们“为什么不照做？”但事情从来没这么简单。我要的是扎实技术深度，能传承下来的东西。容易的事情没真正持久的优势。表层功能好做，难但正确的底层技术才会不断滚雪球。

In building a technology company, you’re often faced with a strategic decision of whether to build or buy. Every build-or-buy decision should be treated with care, but what’s certain is that buying tech is strategically fraught because once you run into the limits of the technology, you can’t fundamentally change it. But when you build, you’ll be able to adapt a lot faster and find ways to win on the tail events—e.g. valuable yet rare use-cases—that are impossible to handle with an outsourced platform.

技术公司常常需要战略上决定自研还是采购，每次都要谨慎。但可以肯定的是，买技术战略隐患很大——一旦碰到技术瓶颈就难以改变；自研则可以迅速适应变化，在极少但非常有价值的特殊场景里取得胜利——这些外部平台根本搞不定。

For example, at Replit we built a distributed file system to solve the problem of collaborative coding. The easy solution was to buy any one of those services that give you an API to do collaborative editing. Instead, we took the problem one level deeper and built a powerful abstraction. A filesystem where any operation can be reversed, where it can be forked in a fraction of a second, and can be easily stored and backed up. When coding AI agents became possible, we quickly adapted the technology, and now we use this tech to do parallel agents—and as a side effect of concurrency features we were able to build a time-travel feature that’s important for reversing destructive agent actions.

比如Replit我们为了多人协作编程自研了分布式文件系统。简单办法是买外部API，但我们选择更深层次抽象：任意操作都能逆转，可以秒级分叉、轻松存储与备份。后来AI编程代理兴起，我们立即将技术用于并发代理，并意外创造了“时光倒流”功能，能逆转代理的破坏性操作。

5. Play by the Rules 按规矩行事

You might think that maximizing risk means you can break the law or do unethical or immoral things. But in my opinion, there’s something about the universe that really doesn’t reward that. Yes, there are exceptions—there are slimebags that make it really big, and evil companies that maintain a winning position—but those are either the exceptions or their time will come. For the most part, if your competitors are lying, deceiving, or taking unethical shortcuts, it’ll only help them in the short term. Don’t be tempted to do the same. Stay focused.

你可能认为最大化风险意味着可以违法、违德或不道德。但我认为，宇宙终究不会奖励这种行为。确实有些卑鄙小人和邪恶公司能获巨大成功并长期领先，但他们要么是极少数，要么迟早会被清算。大多数情况下，竞争对手撒谎、欺骗、走捷径只会短期有效。不要被这种诱惑分心，专注于自己的目标。

Playing by the rules is hard. It’s doing the hard thing, and that has the side effect of forcing you to innovate your way out of problems. Those innovations might compound in interesting and weird ways resulting in longterm moats. Think of Apple and how taking privacy and security seriously—despite competing against Microsoft, which didn’t care about either at the time—created a lasting consumer trust advantage.

遵守规则很难，本身就是做难事，这反而会逼迫你创新解决问题。创新会以奇特的方式积累起来，形成长期护城河。比如苹果非常重视隐私和安全——即使对手微软当时完全不在乎——结果苹果赢得了持久的消费者信任。

6. Put Something Back 回馈社会

Steve Jobs talked about “putting something back in the pool of human experience.” He said that putting something back was “extremely neat”—I agree!

乔布斯说过要“为人类经验库做些贡献”，他觉得这是“非常棒”的事——我也赞同！

But it’s not just neat. It’s not just an ethical good, it might also benefit you in the future. Karma seems real. When you put something back into that pool, your reputation will grow, people will be familiar with your work, and they will want to be around you and work for you. Winning can compound by giving back. Win and give to win more later.

但这不仅仅是“棒”，不仅是道德层面的善事，还可能未来帮助到你。因果很真实。当你贡献回报社会时，你的声誉会提升，人们会熟悉你的工作，愿意与你共事。胜利可以通过回馈社会滚雪球，赢了以后继续付出，会赢得更多。

I always liked open-sourcing software, sharing my experience, and talking publicly about how I’m building things—in some cases an entire roadmap. For example, Replit Agent was the first fully generative software creator on the market that’s accessible to anyone. I shared the roadmap for that in its entirety in a TED talk almost a full year before launch. Our roadmap was public—it still is—but I can’t remember a time where that was a disadvantage. Ideas are important, but what’s precious is the generating function. The well from which those ideas spring.

我一直喜欢开源软件、分享经验、公开描述自己的建设过程——有时会把整个技术路线都亮出来。比如Replit Agent是首个面向所有人开放的真正生成式软件创作工具，发布前一年我在TED演讲就把路线图全盘公布了。我们的规划一直都是公开的，但从来没有吃亏。想法固然重要，但更宝贵的是那些孕育想法的“生成函数和源泉”。

原文地址：https://amasad.me/keep-winning/ 分布时间：2025年10月24日星期五

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