Between Effort and the Times: Cross-Cultural Reflections on Personal Choice

Educated in China, I later moved to Australia to study, work, and live, while continuously monitoring the technology industry, academic systems, and workplace cultures in Europe and America. These experiences have made me deeply aware that, regardless of the society one finds oneself in, effort is undoubtedly important, but it is not the sole variable determining an individual’s long-term destiny.

In China, we often hear the saying, “Those who suffer the most will stand above all others.” In Western workplaces, “Work smarter, not harder” is often promoted. And in Australia, people frequently remind you, “Life is not only about work.” Behind these expressions lie different societies’ unique understandings of competition, success, and life. Chinese society emphasizes effort, endurance, and upward competition, while the US more highly values choice, innovation, and personal breakthroughs. Europe focuses on institutional guarantees and quality of life, and Australia strives for balance between career development, family responsibilities, and personal life.

These philosophies have no absolute superiority or inferiority. The truly important question to ponder is: In a complex, ever-changing, and not entirely fair world, how should an ordinary person understand effort, and how should they choose their position?

Over the years, I have gradually formed a simple framework for judgment:

Long-term life outcomes depend on the combined effect of choice, position, ability, time, and the trends of the era.

Effort is an indispensable part of this, but not the entirety.

Effort is Important, but Effort Cannot Replace Choice #

The Chinese education system is very adept at cultivating individuals to achieve results through effort. Exams have clear scopes, questions usually have standard answers, and there’s a relatively clear positive correlation between effort and grades. As long as students study diligently, practice repeatedly, and summarize methods, they can often significantly improve their scores.

For those from ordinary backgrounds, lacking family resources, this system holds immense significance. It provides at least one relatively transparent channel for upward mobility: entering better schools through study, and then entering larger cities, more promising companies, and professional fields through academic qualifications. I myself am a beneficiary of this system. Years of learning and training have convinced me that by breaking down problems, understanding them deeply, and investing sufficient time, most difficulties can ultimately be overcome.

This belief remains invaluable in academic research and technical work. Whether conducting AI research, designing machine learning systems, or leading technical teams to solve complex engineering problems, all require patience, rigorous discipline, and long-term accumulation.

However, after entering society, I gradually discovered the limitations of the logic taught in schools. Society is not an exam with a defined scope. Reality doesn’t always clearly tell you what the problem is, what the correct answer is, how much time is needed, or who will evaluate your performance, nor does it guarantee an equivalent return for your efforts.

Many times, what truly determines the outcome is not whether you can solve a problem correctly, but whether you have chosen a problem worth solving.

China’s rapid industrialization, urbanization, and technological upgrading over the past few decades further reinforced people’s belief in effort. In a fast-developing society, as long as one enters an expanding industry, individuals often grow alongside the industry. Companies create more jobs, cities attract populations, and markets generate demand; even if choices aren’t perfect, rapid growth itself can mask many problems.

But as the economy and industries transition from high-speed growth to a mature stage, the returns on effort become more uneven. Some people work longer hours, only to find their income and positions haven’t significantly improved; some possess strong execution abilities but remain trapped long-term on platforms lacking growth potential; still others continuously learn and acquire certifications without carefully assessing whether their accumulated skills are still relevant for future needs.

This does not mean that effort has lost its meaning. Rather, it implies that when society shifts from general growth to structural differentiation, where one chooses to exert effort becomes as important as effort itself.

If an individual is in a shrinking industry, no matter how diligent they are, it’s hard to entirely counteract the power of the larger environment. If the core work of a position is being automated, extending work hours won’t stop the decline in skill value. If a company consistently lacks investment and development opportunities, simply doing the current job to perfection may not lead to a bigger stage for growth.

The greatest strength of the Chinese approach to effort is that it instills powerful execution and stress resilience; its potential problem is that we may be too accustomed to answering questions posed by others, and not accustomed enough to actively choosing the questions ourselves.

Different Societies Reward Different Abilities #

Western societies generally emphasize individual choice, independent thinking, and self-realization. Especially in the tech and business cultures of the US, an individual’s willingness to enter new industries, found companies, express opinions, and take risks is often valued more than steadily progressing along a standard path.

Silicon Valley’s most influential success narrative is not “ten years of diligent study,” but rather discovering an opportunity, building a product, securing capital, rapid expansion, and then transforming an industry. This culture encourages individuals to proactively define problems, rather than waiting for tasks to be assigned. It makes it easier for people to accept the fact that a career is not the result of a single exam, but the sum of a series of continuous re-choices.

However, Western society is not an ideal world where brave choices alone guarantee success. Behind the surface emphasis on individual ability, there are also disparities in family resources, educational background, social networks, capital accumulation, and geographic location. An individual born in a tech and financial hub, who receives an elite education and possesses a high-quality professional network, faces a different set of opportunities compared to someone lacking these resources.

Western workplaces often emphasize building professional networks. The essence of networking is not merely knowing more people, but the effective flow of information, trust, and opportunities. Some positions may have suitable candidates identified through professional connections before public recruitment; some startup projects can quickly secure resources not just because of better ideas, but because the founders have easier access to capital, talent, and customers.

Therefore, a key insight I gained from Western society is: abilities must be seen through specific social structures to truly translate into opportunities. Simply doing things well is not always enough; an individual also needs to learn to articulate their value, build trustworthy relationships, understand how organizations allocate resources, and ensure their contributions are correctly understood.

This is not to encourage superficial packaging and performance, but rather to acknowledge a reality: most complex work in modern society requires collaboration, and trust itself is an important productive capacity.

The US, Europe, and Australia also have different emphases on the understanding of success. The US more highly reveres high growth, is willing to reward entrepreneurship, capital expansion, technological innovation, and personal ambition, and is more tolerant of extreme success and extreme failure coexisting. In this system, joining a high-growth company, entering an emerging technology field, or founding a business can bring enormous upward potential, at the cost of greater work pressure, higher uncertainty, and a relatively weaker social safety net.

Europe, on the whole, places more importance on labor rights, institutional guarantees, and quality of life. Its pursuit of growth is often not as aggressive as in the US, but it emphasizes stability, fairness, and a social safety net more. An individual’s career might not experience explosive growth in the short term, nor are they likely to lose all social security due to a single failure.

Australia lies somewhere in between. It has an Anglo-American style market economy and professional service system, while also maintaining strong public healthcare, pensions, labor protection, and social welfare systems. After living and working in Australia for many years, I’ve felt a very distinct cultural atmosphere: people generally acknowledge professional achievement, but they don’t strongly encourage seeing work as the entirety of life. Whether an individual has time to spend with family, take care of their health, and enjoy life is also considered an important component of success.

This culture has its distinct advantages; it reminds people that career is just one part of the system of life. But it can also bring another risk: in a relatively stable and comfortable environment, individuals can easily underestimate the changes happening in the outside world.

Australia has mature industries such as resources, finance, healthcare, education, retail, and the public sector. Many professionals can achieve good incomes and work-life balance, but they may also therefore remain within stable business systems for a long time, gradually distancing themselves from the world’s leading-edge technology and business competitive landscape.

Therefore, for tech workers living in Australia, an important challenge is: how to cherish stability and quality of life while avoiding the slow devaluation of one’s abilities within the comfort zone?

Position is a Real Multiplier #

Two equally hardworking individuals, situated in different countries, cities, industries, companies, and teams, may experience completely different development outcomes years later. This is particularly evident in the technology industry.

An engineer who joins a rapidly developing artificial intelligence platform might constantly encounter new problems related to models, data, products, and infrastructure. Another engineer with similar abilities, if long-term maintaining an old system that lacks investment, might be equally busy with daily work, but the speed and direction of their skill accumulation will be entirely different.

This does not mean that the first engineer is necessarily superior. They have simply entered different trajectories of skill growth.

My understanding of “position” is not merely geographical location; it also includes whether the country has a relevant industrial foundation, whether the city attracts talent and capital, whether the industry is growing or shrinking, whether the company is willing to continuously invest, whether the role is close to core value creation, whether there are people worth learning from in the team, and whether personal experience is transferable.

Position cannot replace ability. Entering a good platform without the ability to seize opportunities will also fail to produce long-term results. But ability cannot entirely replace position either. A seed needs its own vitality, but it also needs suitable soil, sunlight, and water to nourish it.

Therefore, I increasingly disagree with overly personalized success narratives: that success is entirely the result of individual effort, and failure is solely attributable to insufficient personal effort. This explanation ignores the influence of social structure, family background, industry cycles, and historical opportunities.

But I also do not agree with another completely passive determinism: that since one’s background and environment are so important, personal effort is meaningless.

A more realistic understanding is that while we cannot choose all our starting points, we can gradually change our position. An individual can learn new skills, can try to enter new industries, can relocate to new cities, and can seek new teams and collaborative networks. These changes may not happen instantly, nor are they necessarily without cost, but position is not the end of destiny; it is a variable that can be progressively adjusted.

For ordinary people, the real risk is often not just unemployment, salary reduction, or startup failure, but a more insidious risk: an individual still has a stable job but is gradually losing market competitiveness.

This change usually doesn’t happen suddenly. Initially, it might just be that new tools are more efficient than old ones; subsequently, new workflows begin to reduce the demand for specific skills; later still, though the position still exists, companies are no longer willing to pay a higher price for the same work; finally, when organizational restructuring or an industry downturn occurs, the individual suddenly discovers that their accumulated experience over many years is not as easily transferable or convertible as they imagined.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating this process. It may not simply replace all jobs, but it will certainly redefine which parts of many roles still hold value.

For software engineers, data scientists, analysts, researchers, and managers, what will be truly scarce in the future may not just be the ability to complete tasks, but the ability to define the right problems, judge the reliability of information, understand the relationship between business and technology, design systems that can run long-term, coordinate people with different professional backgrounds to work together, and make judgments and take responsibility in uncertainty.

Therefore, when I now evaluate a job, I no longer just focus on salary, title, and stability; I also ask one question:

Does this job give me more choices in three years?

If the answer is no, then superficial stability might just be delaying risk.

Choice Is Not Chasing Trends, But Building Continuity #

Simply emphasizing choice and trends can easily lead to another misconception: constantly chasing hot concepts.

Switching to blockchain when it’s hot, then to metaverse research when that trend emerges, and then immediately repackaging one’s professional identity after generative AI rises. Doing this might gain short-term attention, but it is difficult to build true professional accumulation.

I advocate for a growth approach that emphasizes continuity: not negating past experiences, but enabling them to effectively connect with the future.

For someone with an engineering background, entering the field of artificial intelligence does not mean abandoning software engineering, but rather applying engineering capabilities to model deployment, data systems, evaluation frameworks, and production environments. For someone with industry experience, learning AI is not just about mastering prompts, but understanding how to use new technologies to solve truly expensive, repetitive, or complex problems within their industry. For managers, the value of new tools is not just to improve personal efficiency, but to redesign team collaboration methods and decision-making processes.

A truly valuable career transition is not about frequently changing labels, but about expanding the applicability of one’s existing capabilities.

This strategy applies in China, the US, Europe, and Australia. Because no matter how society changes, the market will ultimately reward individuals who can connect new technologies with real problems and consistently deliver results.

I now also prefer to distinguish between two types of effort.

The first is consumptive effort. It primarily relies on extending working hours, repetitive labor, and personal willpower. It may yield results in the short term, but it is difficult to sustain and hard to form transferable skills.

The second is leveraged effort. It generates greater results for the same input by learning methods, building systems, using tools, organizing collaboration, and accumulating credibility.

In the age of artificial intelligence, this distinction will become increasingly clear. What will truly matter in the future is not who can work longer continuously, but who can understand problems faster, allocate tasks more reasonably, use tools more effectively, judge results more accurately, and convert personal experience into team and system capabilities.

Effort remains important, but effort should be used more to build leverage, not just to prove how much consumption one can endure.

Family Responsibilities Change One’s Understanding of Risk #

When young, people tend to view career choices as personal issues. But with age, career decisions gradually become tightly linked with factors such as family, health, housing, education, and retirement.

In China, families often bear a large amount of social security functions. Parents help children purchase homes, adult children take on eldercare responsibilities, and education and medical expenses significantly influence family decisions. In the US, individuals may achieve higher incomes and career development ceilings, but medical, unemployment, and education costs can also amplify personal risk. In Europe, social security reduces the cost of personal failure, but it may come with higher taxes and relatively slower career growth. Australia offers a relatively balanced institutional environment, but housing costs, childcare arrangements, commuting distances, and household income structures still limit an individual’s ability to take on career risks.

Therefore, mature risk management is not simply choosing stability or adventure, but judging which risks might harm the entire family, which risks only temporarily reduce income, how much risk buffer the family possesses, whether there is room for recovery after a failure, and whether new choices can bring long-term skill and income growth.

After having a family, I understand the importance of stability even more, but I am also more vigilant against mistakenly interpreting stability as never changing.

True stability is not about staying in the same job forever, but having the ability to re-choose and adapt, even if the environment changes.

What I Ultimately Learned Is to Let Effort Serve Choice #

As my experience grows, I increasingly disbelieve in simple answers.

Success is not solely dependent on effort, but without effort, choices and opportunities are difficult to translate into actual results. Position is very important, but standing in the right position does not guarantee long-term individual success. Era trends can amplify personal abilities, but no one can consistently and accurately predict the future. Social structures do indeed influence personal destiny, but social structures have not completely eliminated the space for individual action.

My understanding of “comprehension” is not mastering a single theory that can explain all problems, but being able to simultaneously accept several seemingly contradictory things: the world is not entirely fair, yet effort still has value; personal ability is very important, yet platform and era are equally important; stability is worth cherishing, yet excessive stability can also become a risk; choice requires courage, yet courage cannot replace risk management; trends are worth watching, yet one cannot blindly chase trends at the expense of long-term accumulation.

China taught me effort, making me believe that learning can change personal ability and that long-term investment can create a real difference. American-style innovation culture reminds me that choosing problems and defining direction are often more important than merely completing tasks. European society showed me that economic efficiency is not the only standard for evaluating society and life; institutions, a sense of security, and human dignity are equally important. Australia, in turn, helped me understand that a long-term balance is needed between career achievement, family responsibilities, and quality of life.

However, no single social model should be romanticized. Competition in China can lead to over-consumption; high growth in the US can come with greater inequality and insecurity; Europe’s stability might, to some extent, slow the pace of innovation and organizational change; and Australia’s comfort could potentially cause individuals and businesses to become overly conservative.

A truly independent person should not simply replicate the values of a certain society, but rather understand the reasons behind different systems and then make choices based on their own stage, responsibilities, and goals.

Looking back, I still believe in effort, but I no longer think effort itself is the only answer.

Effort should serve better choices, choices should help us enter more suitable positions, positions should provide growth space for abilities, abilities need time to compound, and a deep understanding of era trends can help us avoid over-expending ourselves in the wrong direction.

If I had to condense these years of reflection into one sentence, I would express it thus:

True security in life is not about always having a stable job, but having the ability to understand reality, adjust one’s position, and start anew, no matter how the environment changes.

We cannot choose our birth, nor can we control economic cycles, technological revolutions, and social changes. But we can still choose what to learn, who to collaborate with, what platforms to enter, what risks are worth taking, what professional credibility to build, and how to arrange the relationship between work, family, and life.

An ordinary person’s life rarely changes suddenly due to one grand decision. More often, it is gradually shaped by a series of tiny choices. These choices may not show obvious differences in the short term, but after five or ten years, they will lead people to completely different positions.

So, my understanding of growth is not about working harder than others, nor about always being at the cutting edge, but, beyond effort, gradually learning to judge: what is worth persisting in, what should be given up; what is temporary comfort, what can bring long-term security; what is a path given by external circumstances, and what is a life one truly wishes to choose and embrace.

See the limits of effort, understand the power of position, respect the changes of the era, and then, within one’s ability and responsibility, continuously make better choices.