我曾经是一个高才生的梦想被迫中断，转而在一家小有名气的报社当记者。但两年后，我发现自己并不适合这份工作，也没有取得任何显著成就，因此成了首位被裁员的对象。

有一天，在一家豆浆铺里，我 sits at a table, lost in thought, contemplating my future. The bean milk on the table had grown cold, and the shop was empty of other customers, but I remained seated. It was then that the old man who ran the shop approached me and asked if I needed any service. I looked up at him and felt a sense of comfort from his kind eyes, so I asked him to sit with me for a while.

The old man listened to me pour out my troubles for nearly an hour before sharing his own story with me. "I'm just a simple soybean vendor," he said. "All I know is how to make soybean milk." He explained that he would often take unsold soybeans from the market and use them to make soybean milk, which he would then sell half of it as is. The remaining half he would turn into tofu, which his wife would sell at the market. Any leftover tofu he would ferment into fermented bean paste (doubanjiang). Through multiple transformations, he managed to sell all of his soybeans without changing their quality or quantity.

Hearing this story opened my eyes. Why hadn't I thought of changing myself like this? Afterward, I tried various careers - newspaper delivery boy, salesperson for welding machines - but none seemed quite right for me either. Eventually, however,

I took up writing full-time.

Years later,

I became known worldwide through works such as The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The History of Siege, and Blindness. My name is José Saramago,

and in 1998,

I won

the Nobel Prize.

This classic tale teaches us that success lies not only in finding our unique selling points but also in constantly evolving ourselves; once we do this,

we have no reason not to succeed.