Clarity of Mind: As Times Change, What Do Effort and Choice Mean?

Living in different social environments gradually reveals that effort, success, and a life well lived do not mean the same thing everywhere.

These differences often hide in everyday expressions. In China, the traditional saying “Only those who endure the bitterest hardships can rise above others” celebrates diligence, endurance, and the hope of changing one’s circumstances through striving. As society has developed, however, people have also placed growing value on choice, efficiency, and quality of life. In American workplaces, “Work smarter, not harder” emphasizes method, innovation, and leverage. European societies tend to give greater attention to institutional protections and quality of life. In Australia, people often remind you that “life is not only about work.”

None of these expressions can capture an entire society, but each reflects something of what a particular culture has emphasized at a particular time: China’s tradition of striving, America’s admiration for individual breakthroughs, Europe’s concern for institutional protection, and Australia’s pursuit of work-life balance. It is difficult to rank them in any simple way. A more interesting question may be this: in a complex, changing, and imperfectly fair world, how might an ordinary person understand effort—and how might they choose where to stand?

Following these differences a little further, I prefer to treat the following not as a formula, but as a way of looking:

The long-term course of a life may emerge from the interaction of choice, position, capability, time, and the currents of an era.

Effort is often an important part of that interaction, but it rarely explains the whole result on its own. Time allows capabilities to accumulate, while gradually magnifying the consequences of different choices. Perhaps “clarity of mind” does not mean having everything figured out. Perhaps it means seeing these variables with less needless self-blame and inner friction, a little more understanding of reality, and a little more patience with action.

The Search Goes On; Ask Before Setting Out; Know Which Way to Turn #

China’s education system is very good at teaching people that effort can change outcomes. Exams have defined boundaries, questions usually have standard answers, and the relationship between input and results is relatively clear. Study seriously, practise repeatedly, refine your methods, and your marks will often improve.

For people from ordinary backgrounds with limited family resources, this system matters enormously. At the very least, it offers a relatively visible path upwards: education can lead to better schools, and qualifications can open doors to larger cities, stronger organisations, and professional careers. This system supported me as well. Years of study and training taught me to believe that if I was willing to break a problem down, understand it deeply, and give it enough time, many difficulties could eventually be worked through.

That belief remains valuable in academic and technical work. Whether one is conducting artificial intelligence research, designing machine-learning systems, or leading a technical team through a difficult engineering problem, patience, discipline, and sustained learning still matter.

Outside school, however, one slowly discovers that society is not an examination with a clearly defined syllabus. Reality does not always tell you what the problem is, where the answer lies, how much time it deserves, or who will judge the result. Nor does it promise that every effort will receive a proportionate return.

What shapes the outcome is often not only whether we can solve the problem in front of us, but whether we have chosen a problem worth staying with.

China’s rapid industrialisation, urbanisation, and technological development over recent decades also strengthened faith in effort. In a fast-growing society, entering an expanding industry often made it possible to grow with the industry itself. Companies created jobs, cities absorbed new populations, and markets generated demand. Even imperfect choices could be carried for a time by the force of growth.

As economies and industries move from rapid expansion towards maturity, however, the returns on effort become less even. Some people work longer hours without seeing much improvement in income or position. Some are highly capable executors but remain on platforms with little room to grow. Others continue collecting qualifications without pausing to ask whether the capabilities they are building still point towards the future.

This does not mean that effort has lost its value. It suggests only that as broad-based growth gives way to structural divergence, where we apply effort—and why—can become as consequential as effort itself.

If someone works in an industry undergoing sustained contraction, diligence alone may not offset the environment. If the core of a role is being automated, longer hours cannot prevent the value of its skills from declining. If an organisation persistently lacks investment and room to develop, perfecting the work immediately at hand may still fail to open a larger stage.

The strength of the Chinese tradition of effort lies in the execution and resilience it can cultivate. Yet it may also leave people more practised at answering questions set by others than at choosing the questions themselves. Once we have left the examination room, perhaps there is another question worth keeping: beyond solving the problem well, are we also choosing a problem worthy of long-term commitment?

Cultures Differ; Talent Has Its Measures; Each Writes Its Own Chapter #

European and North American societies often emphasise individual choice, independent thought, and self-realisation. In American technology and business culture in particular, entering a new industry, starting a company, expressing a view, and accepting risk may be valued more highly than steady progress along a standard path.

Silicon Valley’s most influential story is not one of “ten years of arduous study,” but of spotting an opportunity, building a product, raising capital, scaling quickly, and changing an industry. This culture encourages people to define problems rather than wait for tasks to be assigned. It also makes it easier to see a career not as the result of one examination, but as a process of choosing again and again.

Yet Europe and North America are not ideal worlds in which courage alone guarantees success. Beneath the language of individual merit remain differences in family resources, education, social networks, accumulated capital, and geography. Someone born near a centre of technology or finance, educated at elite institutions, and connected to a strong professional network does not face the same set of opportunities as someone without those advantages.

Professional networks carry particular weight in Western workplaces. Their value lies not simply in how many people one knows, but in how effectively information, trust, and opportunity can move. Some candidates are recognised through professional relationships before a role is publicly advertised. Some start-ups gain resources quickly not only because their ideas are better, but because their founders can more readily reach investors, talent, and customers.

One lesson I draw from these observations is that capability often has to become visible through a social structure before it can turn into opportunity or reward. Doing the work well matters, but sometimes so does making one’s value intelligible, building relationships of trust, and understanding how an organisation allocates resources.

This is not an argument for empty self-promotion. Most complex work in modern society depends on collaboration, and trust is itself a productive capacity.

The United States, Europe, and Australia also place different emphases on success. The United States celebrates growth and readily rewards entrepreneurship, capital expansion, technological innovation, and personal ambition. It is also more tolerant of spectacular success and spectacular failure existing side by side. Joining a fast-growing company, entering an emerging field, or founding a business may offer substantial upside, at the cost of greater pressure, more uncertainty, and comparatively weaker protections.

Europe as a whole places greater weight on labour rights, institutional protection, and quality of life. Its pursuit of growth is generally less aggressive than America’s, but it gives more attention to stability, fairness, and the social safety net. A career may be less likely to rise explosively in the short term, while a single failure is also less likely to strip away every form of security.

Australia sits somewhere between the two. It has an Anglo-American market economy and professional-services system, while retaining relatively strong public healthcare, retirement provision, labour protection, and social welfare. After many years of living and working in Australia, I have noticed a distinct cultural inclination: professional achievement is respected, but work is not generally encouraged to become the whole of life. Time with family, care for one’s health, and the enjoyment of life are also treated as part of success.

That culture helps people rediscover life beyond work. It may also carry another risk worth noticing: in a relatively stable and comfortable environment, it is easy to underestimate how quickly the outside world is changing. Australia’s resources, finance, healthcare, education, retail, and public sectors are all mature. Many professionals earn good incomes and maintain a healthy balance between work and life, yet may remain within stable business systems for so long that they gradually drift away from the frontiers of global technology and business.

For technology professionals in Australia, then, one question may be worth keeping over the long term: how can we value stability and quality of life while still leaving room for our capabilities to grow?

When Talent Finds Good Soil; Peers Grow Together; Time Lets It Flourish #

Two equally diligent people, placed in different countries, cities, industries, companies, and teams, may find themselves in very different places a few years later. This is especially visible in technology. By “position,” I mean more than a job role or the social group one belongs to. It also includes whether a country has the relevant industrial base; whether a city concentrates talent and capital; whether an industry is expanding or contracting; whether a company continues to invest; whether a role sits close to the creation of core value; whether a team contains people worth learning from; and whether one’s experience can travel to other settings.

An engineer who joins a rapidly evolving artificial intelligence platform may encounter new problems in models, data, products, and infrastructure every day. Another engineer of similar ability may spend years maintaining a legacy system that receives little investment. Both may be equally busy, yet the capabilities cultivated by each role may gradually diverge in pace and direction.

This does not mean that the first engineer is necessarily better. They have simply entered different loops of capability growth. Position cannot replace capability. A good platform produces little if we cannot make use of the opportunities it offers. Yet capability cannot entirely replace position either. A seed needs vitality of its own, but it also needs suitable soil, sunlight, and water.

Rather than attribute success wholly to individual effort and failure simply to insufficient diligence, it may be more illuminating to notice the effects of social structure, family background, industry cycles, and historical opportunity. At the same time, recognising those forces need not lead to the opposite extreme: if origins and environment matter so much, then individual action must mean nothing.

A more realistic view may be that while we cannot choose every starting point, we can sometimes adjust where we stand. Learning a new capability, entering a different industry, moving to another city, or finding a new team and network can all form part of that adjustment. Such changes often carry costs and may not pay off immediately. But position is not necessarily the endpoint of fate; it can also be a variable that changes slowly.

For ordinary people, the risk worth noticing may not be limited to unemployment, reduced income, or a failed business. There is a quieter possibility: someone may still hold a stable job while gradually losing competitiveness in the wider market.

That change rarely arrives all at once. At first, a new tool is simply more efficient than the old one. Then a new workflow reduces demand for a particular skill. Later, the role still exists, but employers are no longer willing to pay more for the same work. Only when an organisation restructures or an industry turns down does someone suddenly discover that years of experience are not as transferable as they once imagined.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating this process. It may not simply replace everyone, but it is likely to redefine which parts of many roles continue to carry value.

For software engineers, data scientists, analysts, researchers, and managers, what becomes scarcer in the future may be more than the ability to complete assigned tasks. It may include defining the right problem, judging the reliability of information, understanding the relationship between business and technology, designing systems that endure, bringing people from different disciplines together, and making decisions—and accepting responsibility—under uncertainty.

When considering a job, then, perhaps we can ask one more question alongside salary, title, and immediate stability:

Will this job leave me with more choices in the future?

If the answer is discouraging, it becomes harder to tell whether present stability represents security or merely postpones risk.

Once we recognise how position, resources, and the times shape a life, another question follows: if individual effort is constrained by so many external conditions, how much room and meaning remain for individual action? Structural understanding can free us from simplistic stories of success, but it can also, almost unnoticed, push us towards fatalism or even nihilism.

After the Clouds, Hope Remains; Spring Will Come in Its Time #

Nihilism is more than emotional pessimism. At a deeper level, it appears when a person gradually loses any reason to take life seriously. If truth can be questioned, morality is shaped by circumstance, and success may be the product of resources and luck, then persistence, responsibility, creation, and commitment can all begin to seem unstable in value.

This attitude is sometimes presented as maturity or worldly wisdom. “That is just how the world works.” “Everything comes down to self-interest.” “Effort changes nothing.” Such phrases can make disbelief feel like protection from disappointment.

But seeming to see through a few rules is not the same as seeing through life.

Deconstruction and nihilism are also worth distinguishing. Deconstruction is a way of examining the world. It allows us to revisit ideas that appear natural, eternal, and beyond question, and to see the historical conditions, interests, and internal tensions beneath them. “Success must follow effort,” “one way of life is inherently superior to another,” and “the existing system is the only possible one” may not be self-evident truths.

This kind of dismantling has value. Without it, we can mistake contingent rules for eternal answers and assign structural problems entirely to individuals. Yet deconstruction can show us how a building was assembled; it cannot automatically tell us where to rebuild after it has been dismantled.

Criticism is meant to help us see the world more clearly. But if recognising the limits of every value also drains our willingness to invest, trust, and build, then deconstruction may cease to be only a method of understanding and become fertile ground for nihilism.

Tearing down an idol does not require us to tear down life.

This question deserves particular attention in relation to children and young people today. Earlier life paths did not suit everyone and were never fulfilled fairly for all, yet they often supplied a relatively coherent narrative: study seriously, acquire skills, find work, form a family, and gradually improve life through sustained labour. At the very least, that story gave time, effort, and hope a structure.

Today, many traditional paths have become less certain. Qualifications no longer guarantee stable work. Diligence may not be enough to make housing affordable. Technological change can quickly alter the value of a skill. At the same time, social media and recommendation algorithms continually display extreme success, conflict, and anxiety, making an ordinary pace of growth feel slow—or even like failure.

Artificial intelligence adds another layer of uncertainty. A child may ask: if a machine can quickly produce essays, images, and software, why should I spend years learning? A young adult may wonder whether a newly acquired skill will soon lose its value. When technological progress is described only in terms of efficiency gains, job replacement, and intensified competition, people can begin to see themselves as units of production waiting to become obsolete.

Young people therefore encounter the complexity and anxiety of the adult world earlier than previous generations, without necessarily having the experience or stable relationships needed to absorb it. Old answers have been dismantled; new systems of value have not yet formed. A sense of meaninglessness can enter through that gap.

Being alert to nihilism does not mean asking young people to return to rigid authority, nor does it mean accepting old stories of success without question. Once old answers have been taken apart, whether we can build relationships, responsibilities, and lives worth investing in may be a harder question still.

The meaning of life need not come from an eternal, universal, and unquestionable answer. It can also grow out of particular acts: mastering a skill with care, completing difficult work, looking after someone who needs us, building a trustworthy relationship, keeping a promise, creating something that did not exist before, or making one small part of the world better through our presence.

These acts may not solve society’s largest problems or bring dazzling rewards. They may nevertheless reconnect us with reality. Meaning is often not discovered fully formed; it takes shape through sustained action.

Recognising that the world is not entirely fair need not lead us to abandon action. Understanding the limits imposed by structure and the times does not mean that every space for choice has disappeared. Seeing that the traditional path is not the only path does not make all paths indistinguishable.

Perhaps what is worth preserving is the capacity both to question and to build: to understand structure without treating it as a complete explanation for inaction; to accept that life offers no guarantees while still taking our choices seriously. The world will not automatically reward every effort, but that does not make every effort meaningless. Precisely because no answer has been written in advance, choice, responsibility, and creation return to each individual.

If someone still wishes to act, the next question may be: what kind of effort can carry what we build today into tomorrow?

New Tides Rise; Build on What Endures; Let Growth Accumulate #

Paying attention to choice and trends can create another risk: endlessly chasing whatever concept happens to be fashionable. For example, when blockchain is hot, one pivots to blockchain; when the metaverse rises, one begins studying the metaverse; when generative AI captures attention, one immediately repackages one’s professional identity. Such moves may generate short-term visibility, but they rarely produce substantial professional depth.

Another possibility is to preserve some continuity in growth: not to dismiss earlier experience too quickly, but to let the past connect naturally with the future.

For someone with an engineering background, moving into artificial intelligence need not mean abandoning software engineering. It may mean extending engineering capability into model deployment, data systems, evaluation frameworks, and production environments. For someone with industry expertise, learning AI is not only a matter of mastering prompts, but of understanding how new technology might address problems that are expensive, repetitive, or genuinely difficult. For a manager, the value of new tools may lie not only in personal efficiency, but in redesigning how a team collaborates and makes decisions.

To me, the more compelling form of transition is not the repeated adoption of new labels, but the expansion of where existing capabilities can be applied. Across China, the United States, Europe, and Australia, people who can connect new technology to real problems and continue delivering results are generally more likely to earn lasting returns.

From this perspective, continuity determines whether capability can accumulate; leverage determines whether that accumulation can produce greater effect. Effort, then, might be understood in two forms.

The first is depleting effort. It depends chiefly on longer hours, repetitive labour, and willpower. It may produce results in the short term, but it is difficult to sustain and rarely builds capability that can travel.

The second is high-leverage effort. It improves methods, builds systems, uses tools, organises collaboration, and accumulates trust, allowing the same input to produce a larger result.

In the age of artificial intelligence, the difference may become increasingly visible. What matters may be less who can work for the longest uninterrupted stretch than who can understand the problem faster, allocate work more intelligently, use tools more effectively, judge results more accurately, and turn individual experience into a capability shared by a team or embedded in a system.

Yet the effectiveness of effort is not the whole of a career decision. How much change a person can bear also depends on their stage of life and the responsibilities they carry.

With Loved Ones in Mind; Know When to Advance or Retreat; Walk at an Unhurried Pace #

When we are young, it is easy to treat a career decision as an individual matter. With age, work becomes increasingly entangled with family, health, housing, education, and care for older generations.

In China, families often carry a substantial share of responsibilities that might otherwise fall to social systems. Parents help their adult children buy homes; adult children take responsibility for ageing parents; education and healthcare costs weigh heavily on family decisions. In the United States, higher income and a higher career ceiling may be possible, while the costs of healthcare, unemployment, and education can magnify personal risk. In Europe, social protection lowers the cost of failure, but may come with higher taxation and slower career growth. Australia offers a comparatively balanced institutional environment, yet housing costs, childcare arrangements, commuting distance, and the structure of household income still limit how much career risk a person can bear.

Risk management, then, may be more than a simple choice between “stability” and “adventure.” It may involve asking which risks could harm the whole family and which choices would only reduce income temporarily; how much buffer the household has; whether recovery would remain possible after failure; and whether a new choice might lead to longer-term growth in capability and income.

Since having a family, stability has taken on another meaning for me. It may not mean remaining in the same role indefinitely, but retaining the ability to choose again and adapt when circumstances change. Understanding risk in this way does not necessarily make a person conservative. It may simply bring a greater awareness of responsibility into choice, allowing courage without requiring blindness to cost.

When a choice can accommodate growth, responsibility, and manageable risk at the same time, clarity becomes more than simply “feeling at peace.” It begins to become a way of meeting life.

Know What Calls You; Align Thought and Action; Let the Mind Grow Clear #

With experience, simple answers often become less convincing.

Effort can sometimes help choice and opportunity turn into results, but it cannot guarantee success; position matters greatly, but standing in the right place cannot guarantee lasting success; the currents of an era can amplify individual capability, but no one can predict the future accurately for long; social structures shape individual lives, but they do not erase every space for action.

Perhaps being “clear-minded” is not a matter of possessing a theory that explains everything, but of gradually recognising several persistent tensions: the world is not entirely fair, yet how much room for action remains? How do individual capability, platform, and era interact? When does stability protect us, and when does it merely defer risk? When is a trend worth following, and when does it interrupt long-term accumulation?

Seeing the limits of effort need not lead to abandoning action. Understanding the force of structure does not mean that an individual has no room to choose. Maturity may lie in knowing that the world offers no certain answers and still being willing to invest time in particular relationships, responsibilities, and long-term aims.

Effort can serve better choices. Choice can help us move towards a more fitting position. Position can give capability room to grow. Capability needs time to compound. And some understanding of the times may help us avoid spending too long in the wrong direction.

If I were to condense these reflections into one sentence, it might be this:

A deeper form of security may lie not only in having a stable job, but in retaining the ability to understand reality, adjust one’s position, and begin again when circumstances change.

We cannot choose where we are born, nor can we control economic cycles, technological revolutions, or social change. Yet within different circumstances, we may still retain different degrees of choice: what to learn, whom to work with, which platforms to enter, which risks are worth taking, what professional reputation to build, and how to arrange the relationship between work, family, and life.

Ordinary lives are rarely transformed overnight by one grand decision. More often, they are shaped slowly by a series of small choices. Those choices may look insignificant in the short term, but over five or ten years they can carry people to very different places.

Perhaps growth is not about working harder than everyone else or always standing where the next wave will break. Beyond effort, it may mean learning to distinguish between paths handed to us from outside and paths that lead closer to a life we are willing to choose and bear.

Perhaps the “clarity of mind” I have been describing is closer to this: not rushing to find the one answer to the world, and not rejecting action simply because the answer remains uncertain; continuing instead to understand and choose within what we can bear, while allowing our answers to change as our lives do.

Still seeking, ask which road to take; through countless paths, each life takes shape.
With peers we build foundations strong; new knowledge keeps the journey long.
Clouds may pass, yet trees we sow; by hearthside light, what matters grows.
Know when to advance, retreat, or stay; a clearer mind can find its way.