Schools compare learning, grades, and scores. Students study only a handful of subjects, and the bucket only has so many staves. With a maximum score of 100, a 99 in math and a 19 in Chinese, of course shoring up the weak subject can make a significant difference. Scores have a ceiling, and subjects can be failed. The bucket analogy is very apt here, and the reasoning makes sense. That was how things were back then.
After graduation and entering society, the times have changed, and so has the wooden barrel. There is no more 100 points—only the pursuit of excellence, which is endless, so the ceiling is broken. There are no more 'Old Nine Gates' (nine fixed tracks); instead, there are 360 industries, further subdivided, making the number virtually infinite. At this point, you can't patch your shortcomings; you can only take your longest plank and compete with others in the barrel game. Whether starting a business, working a job, organizing ventures, or running projects, you need to use your longest plank to form different barrels—careers, companies, platforms, departments, teams, and so on. So these days, the barrel mindset only works in reverse. As for 'these days' versus 'those days'—it's not about calendar years, but about years of age. When you're young and in school, you use the barrel mindset; when I'm an adult out in society, I use the reverse-barrel mindset.
Barrel thinking emphasizes the short staves, encouraging well-rounded development and reducing personal weaknesses. Anti-barrel thinking emphasizes the long staves, leveraging strengths and encouraging collaboration to create more value. Both have their own merits, so more often than not, barrel thinking and anti-barrel thinking should be held together. For example, while pushing your strengths to the next level in specialized areas, it's also essential to make sure your other fundamental abilities pass muster. It's not uncommon to see products with perfect design but poor marketing reluctantly pulled from the market, or employees with top-notch expertise but no self-presentation skills forced to leave. There is no right or wrong between well-rounded development and playing to your strengths. So whether we should be a barrel or not, we should view it dialectically—at the very least, we shouldn't trash one while praising the other. Finally, let me offer a counter-anti-barrel principle to join the fun: when you hit a ceiling in a certain field and improvement stagnates, try turning your spear around, diverting some energy, and making cross-domain improvements in related abilities to build a second strength. Become the best crosstalk performer among top TV hosts, the best poet among martial arts masters, the best video maker among PPT designers. This boosts your competitiveness. This is what I call counter-anti-barrel thinking—it sits between barrel thinking and anti-barrel thinking yet differs from both. This may be something we need to pay attention to in the coming year. When your longest stave is locked in a life-or-death battle with someone else's longest stave, you can still pull out another stave and catch them off guard.