The ideograms for the eight disciplines in this book would make sense to all those who have learned Chinese characters in the traditional way. Simplified Chinese characters no longer contain some of these thousand-year-old concepts which have been embedded or have grown out of the Chinese language.

Chinese Title	超越創新	Chāoyuè Chuangxin (Beyond Innovation)
Innovation	創新軟力	Chuangxin Ruanli
Discipline	技巧	Jì Qio
Listen	聽	Ting
Lead	領	Ling
Position	計	Jì
Promote	提	Ti
Connect	連	Lian
Commit	承	Cheng
Execute	行	Xing
Evolve	變	Bian

Whenever a Chinese character appears, it is followed by a Romanization according to the pinyin system, now officially used worldwide. It is not a phonetic system, nor a strict Romanization system. It uses the Roman alphabet to stand for sounds or groups of sounds that exist in China but perhaps not elsewhere. Certain letters deemed “underused” were assigned to stand for a group of sounds. For example, the underused letter “x” was drafted to stand for “hs,” while underused “q” takes on the burden to stand for “ch.” Economy is a virtue. When language is involved, clarity is perhaps more important than economy. Throughout the work, traditional Chinese characters are used. Traditional Chinese characters evolved over thousands of years from inscriptions with sharp implements onto oracle bones. These evolved into slightly more abstract or angular forms, but remain closer to the original pictures. In time, ideas were represented by ideographs. Pictographs and ideographs combined to form actions or objects which cannot be drawn. For readers who wish to see what the simplified characters may be, please use Google, which tends to include more modern renditions of meaning as well.

Most of the characters used are contained within Zhongwen.com, Guoyuromaji jiten, and Matthews Dictionary.

Some of the basic items are simple pictographs or slightly more sophisticated ideographs. These begin to combine to form more sophisticated ideas; by the time of Confucius (551–479 BCE), a gentleman's canon of books to study already consisted of five classics and the four books. These continued to be the curriculum for scholars throughout Imperial China for two thousand years.