Computing Life

Introduction: Why Does Your Carefully Crafted Long Post Get Ignored While Someone Else's Meme Goes Viral?

We've probably all had moments like this:

You spend days polishing a well-reasoned, substantial long post, publish it full of confidence, only to find it gets little attention. Meanwhile, some blogger just casually throws out a "carpe diem" with a meme, and it becomes a hot topic, racking up likes and comments.

It's the same at work: Your meticulously prepared proposal, developed through layers of deduction, barely gets implemented. Someone else makes an off-the-cuff remark in a meeting, and it becomes the team's new direction.

You might initially doubt yourself: Am I not working hard enough? Is my emotional intelligence lacking? Do I not understand communication rhythms or human psychology? But sometimes, these doubts linger and evolve into a harder question:

Is this just fate?

This isn't a complaint, but a serious question. We often say effort leads to success, yet reality is full of counterexamples. So, what structure lies between effort and success? Can we truly change our destiny's trajectory through willpower? Or are we directed from the start by some invisible variable?

I want to discuss these questions. Not to find a more correct answer, but to offer a more structural perspective:

What if fate isn't superstition, but a set of underlying parameters written into us, influencing our probability of success?

Going Viral is a Matter of Probability

Let's start with the most easily overlooked fact: the world is indeed random.

How does a recommendation system decide the fate of a post? It doesn't look at effort but observes a set of rapid feedback metrics—open rate, dwell time, like ratio, interaction volume. After you publish a post, it might give you a few dozen trial exposures to see if there's any signal.

And what determines these signals?

Was the timing of your post right? Did your cover image happen to hit a certain aesthetic? Did it clash with other hot topics? Was the platform's traffic undergoing A/B testing at that moment?

You can certainly improve content quality, but you can't control the system's experimental parameters for the day, nor can you dictate the randomness of user clicks.

So, luck definitely exists. Whether a piece of content goes viral or a project succeeds often depends on the superposition of multiple uncontrolled variables in a complex system—a very unfair probabilistic process.

But here's the question:

If we attribute everything to luck, is there still any point in trying? And why do some people seem to consistently hit the mark, while others always fall just short?

This brings us to the second layer of fate we'll discuss today—a structurally determined preference for success.

Passion + Proficiency: The Engine Determining Your Upper Limit

If going viral involves luck, then who is more likely to go viral is not just luck.

You'll notice some people are genuinely better at creating popular content. It's not occasional good fortune; they consistently hit the right rhythm. Analyze their work, and you'll find they not only write or speak naturally but also consistently make the right choices at crucial points—whether it's the topic angle, language rhythm, or emotional evocation.

This isn't simply because they work harder. It's because a powerful system operates within them: a flywheel engine driven by the twin wheels of passion and proficiency.

1. Passion is Low Psychological Friction

What you genuinely love is something you want to do without needing external prodding, rewards, or sheer willpower.

It has a sense of flow. Writing, drawing, coding, editing videos, telling jokes... these aren't tasks for you, but sources of mild excitement, things you're willing to invest in repeatedly, even getting hooked.

This passion is often not accidental; it's backed by long-term, systemic positive feedback:

• Early family atmosphere and exposure
• Past recognition and encouragement received for this activity
• A subtle feeling of being noticed

In other words, passion represents low internal resistance, the direction you naturally flow towards.

2. Proficiency is High Unit Return

We have a natural efficiency advantage in things we are good at.

You spend an hour writing ad copy with a high conversion rate and quick feedback; someone else might spend a day and still struggle to produce an acceptable version.

The essence of proficiency is that your cognitive structure is better adapted to the domain: your perceptual dimensions, information processing methods, and even attention mechanisms align more easily with the core structure of the task.

Its return isn't just speed and quality, but something even more important—feedback. People who are proficient are more likely to be praised, relied upon, and needed, which in turn boosts their confidence in the activity.

3. The Double Helix Flywheel: Passion Reinforces Proficiency, Proficiency Fuels Passion

These two are not independent.

Because you love it, you're willing to repeatedly invest time; Because you repeatedly invest time, you become more proficient; Because you're proficient, you receive more feedback; Because of the feedback, you love doing it even more.

Once this cycle gets going, it rapidly widens the gap between individuals. It's not because they work harder, but because their efforts are structurally amplified.

What if you happen to be doing something you neither like nor are good at? Then you have to rely on willpower, endurance, and resources outside of system alignment just to keep going. In that system, you need to invest ten times the energy just to maintain the starting speed of others. You become increasingly tired and anxious, eventually having to admit: Maybe I really can't succeed at this.

This isn't giving up or encouraging surrender. Instead, it forces us to ask deeper questions:

Can this engine be assembled later in life? If not, what else can I do?

Why is This Engine Difficult to Install Later in Life?

Previously, we discussed how the flywheel formed by passion + proficiency can lead to stable, continuous success. This sounds reasonable, but it also leaves one feeling unwilling to accept it:

Can't I just practice? Can't I force myself to practice until I become proficient and start liking it?

Many people have told themselves this: I know I'm not good at it initially, but if I grit my teeth and persist, improve the feedback, one day I'll be like those people. If I can just endure the initial negative feedback period and turn it into positive feedback, the flywheel will start spinning.

This line of thinking isn't actually wrong. It reflects the reality of many growth paths, especially common in child development, skill training, and athlete selection. But the problem is: What is the likelihood that you can truly turn negative feedback into positive feedback?

What we'll discuss next is the underlying reality of this problem. It's not that you're not working hard, but that you underestimate the complexity of system inertia, emotional drain, and structural feedback asymmetry.

1. The Chicken-and-Egg Reinforcement Structure: Not an Inspirational Story, but a Law of Physics

When someone both likes and is proficient at something, they will continuously repeat the behavior, gain feedback, improve skills, and achieve exponential growth.

This structure resembles the chicken-and-egg scenario; it sounds simple but is actually a closed-loop accelerator within the system. Its metabolic pathway is low-energy, low-loss, and high-amplification. The smoother it goes, the stronger it becomes.

And the opposite direction also holds true: If you dislike something, doing it is painful; Because it's painful, you're more likely to avoid, procrastinate, and reduce frequency; Because you do it less, you can't improve your proficiency; As a result, you keep making mistakes and don't get feedback; The less feedback you get, the more you dislike it.

You haven't done anything wrong. You're just not on a path that provides positive feedback for you. At this point, the idea of forcing results through sheer effort to kickstart the feedback flywheel starts to seem overly idealistic.

Why?

Because it ignores the intense drain experienced in a negative feedback zone. The harder you work in an ill-suited field, the faster you burn out, and the higher the cost. It's like taking off against the wind—possible, but your fuel tank isn't infinite.

The underlying reasons are twofold: cognitive load + emotional drain.

2. Cognitive and Emotional Drain: The Essence of Why Passion Can't Be Forced

Psychology has a classic concept called cognitive load. When you do something you're not good at, your brain needs to allocate more resources to process information, suppress errors, and overcome resistance. This state is like an old car's engine roaring uphill: noisy, slow, and extremely fuel-inefficient.

You can certainly drive this car uphill, but not for long. Furthermore, if you also dislike the task, you need to engage a second system: willpower. You fight inner voices daily: You must do this, you can't give up, you can't be lazy. This self-coercive effort not only lacks positive feedback but also leads to long-term emotional depletion and even self-doubt at a personality level (Am I not good enough? Am I useless?).

Effort driven by what's called passion, however, doesn't require willpower. It happens almost automatically. So the question isn't whether you're working hard enough, but whether the energy source for your effort is positive feedback or self-exploitation.

3. Structural Asymmetry in Returns: The Core Reason Why Effort Can Be Invalidated

We often use examples like piano learners eventually succeeding to illustrate that no one is born knowing; it's all about practice. But this analogy overlooks a crucial point: the unit cost and unit feedback of practice are highly asymmetrical. A child who has a feel for music, strong coordination, and pitch sensitivity can produce decent sound after an hour of practice and receive praise. Another child, dull in all these aspects, might practice for ten hours and still not produce a decent melody, possibly even getting criticized by the teacher.

We say effort pays off, but we don't mention that the conversion rate of effort varies dramatically among individuals. One person invests ten and gets a hundred back; another invests a hundred and gets zero. If the latter persists, they won't get stronger; they'll just break down. And at the moment of breakdown, we finally have to accept: this person is not suited for this path.

This isn't anti-effortism. Nor do we deny that some people have achieved miracles through willpower in unsuitable directions. But to do this, you need to understand what you're up against:

• A structurally negative feedback system
• A well-trodden path optimized for failure
• And your own depleting willpower

You can run against the wind, but please know how strong the wind is and how much stamina you have.

Defying Fate: Possible, But Extremely Difficult

At this point, we can probably accept a reality: the fit between a person and a task largely determines the cost-effectiveness of effort. But this doesn't mean we have to just lie flat.

Many will ask: Is there a way to break the structure? Is it possible to—

Defy fate?

The answer is: Yes. But it's far more difficult than we imagine.

Changing one's fate isn't without success stories, but these successes often require extremely drastic interventions, very high execution costs, or exceptionally rare lucky variables.

The paths I've seen for rewriting fate generally fall into three categories:

1. Drastic Environmental Change: Forcibly Changing the System Through Physical Relocation

This is the most direct, radical, and least replicable method.

You might have heard miracle stories:

• An orphan from a mountainous region in Yunnan is adopted by Americans and eventually becomes an international lawyer.
• A family with an underachieving student grits their teeth, immigrates to Singapore, throws the child into a strictly disciplined education system, and the child suddenly transforms.
• Mencius's mother moving three times, changing school districts repeatedly, turned Mencius from a brawler into a sage for the ages.

Behind these stories lies the same model: by completely restructuring the system environment, a new structure redefines your behavioral feedback pathways.

When the system changes, new positive feedback might kick in.

But the problems with this path are obvious: extremely high costs, immense uncertainty, and heavy reliance on resources, luck, and the openness of social structures. You can hardly plan to walk this path. More often, it's an all-or-nothing gamble.

2. Cognitive Restructuring: Changing the Fit by Adjusting Internal Structures

This is a more subtle, sustainable, but equally difficult method.

We occasionally hear about people who:

• Completely changed their perception of something due to a painful failure or epiphany.
• Understood childhood traumas and underlying motivations through psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, correcting long-term avoidance patterns.
• Met a mentor or peer, had a conversation that resolved a mental block, and opened up a new direction.

This type of cognitive restructuring isn't about forcing yourself to like something, but about finding a different way to understand, experience, and approach it, thereby changing internal resistance and rebuilding the path to interest.

But its difficulty is also significant because it requires you to:

• Have high self-awareness.
• Have a sufficiently safe emotional space to admit failure.
• Have the right catalyst: a book, an event, suffering, someone who truly sees you.

Ultimately, cognitive restructuring isn't achieved through sudden enlightenment but is gradually unlocked through systemic repair. And many people may never have the right environment to do this in their lifetime.

3. Early Intervention: The Truly Replicable Way to Change Fate

This is the only path we can proactively plan to take.

If the first two methods involve swimming upstream as an adult, early intervention is like channeling the stream from its source. Its basic logic is: Before the system solidifies (in childhood or adolescence), expose individuals early to paths with structural positive feedback.

• A child discovers the joy of expression through drawing at age six, and the teacher provides positive feedback.
• A teenager encounters programming in middle school, writes small games, solves problems, participates in competitions, and the feedback snowballs.
• Parents observe their child excelling in a certain direction and provide resources, opportunities, and a sense of achievement around it...

This isn't just about enrolling them in more classes, but consciously designing feedback loops to start the engine earlier and smoother.

The keyword here is choosing fit over compensation: It's not about throwing them into piano lessons saying "you'll thank me later," but about observing, trial-and-error, and quickly building the dual-wheel zone of passion and proficiency. This is also what I currently believe to be the most effective strategy for changing fate—not for oneself, but for the next generation.

Those Who Can Change Their Fate Are Often Not the Hardest Workers, But Those Who Recognize the System Earlier

You can certainly force yourself to practice an ill-fitting skill and reverse your destiny through willpower. You might also have a breakthrough moment that opens your mind. You might even gamble big, changing cities, industries, or circles...

But like quantum tunneling, these paths exist, but their probability is extremely low, and the cost is extremely high. What's truly worth practicing proactively is the third option: Using systemic awareness to understand the system, recognize the system, and adjust the system. Make strategic micro-adjustments for yourself, and systematic restructuring for the next generation.

And the first step to doing this isn't changing your fate, but knowing—where your fate lies. Knowing the structure of your internal engine, how it starts, its limitations, its blind spots. Knowing your fate isn't resigning to it, but using your effort more rationally from now on.

And this is precisely what we'll discuss in the next chapter: Under the reality of fate, what else can we do? What high-quality strategies are worth practicing for every one of us?

Three Directions for Dancing with Fate

We've talked a lot about fate.

Ultimately, it's not some mystical destiny, but a personality-capability system formed early, reinforced by feedback, and structurally solidified. What you like, what you're good at, in which areas you can activate a low-friction, high-efficiency flywheel—these things took root within you before you were even aware of them.

Is this despairing?

To some extent, yes. But it doesn't have to be.

Because true maturity isn't about becoming omnipotent, but about knowing: Who am I? Where am I most likely to be ignited? In which directions am I destined for high cost and low output?

Since we can't rewrite our starting point, let's learn to design our paths more intelligently. I think we can approach this from the following three directions:

1. Reconcile with Yourself

The most painful effort isn't the hardship, but the ineffectiveness. The deepest self-negation isn't failure, but continuous effort that always leads to failure.

Many people constantly think they're not good enough, so they push harder with more time, stronger willpower, and harsher self-criticism— But the direction they're pushing might be a path structurally unsuited for them. Not proficient, don't like it, high cognitive load, heavy emotional burden, the unit feedback of effort is an order of magnitude lower than others'.

In this situation, trying harder leads to more wear and tear, ultimately losing not just time, but confidence and passion itself.

So, instead of self-optimization, start with self-recognition: In which direction do you experience the least friction? What activities don't tire you out, give you a sense of accomplishment even without praise, and make you want to delve deeper? And what activities annoy you, lead to procrastination, distraction, repulsion, or even anger?

These aren't moral issues; they are system parameters. Identifying these parameters and finding the position that allows you to flow downstream is finding your ecological niche.

An ecological niche doesn't mean you only do easy things, but that you can afford the difficulty. It won't make things easy, but it will make them worthwhile.

2. Build Complementary Systems

No single person is a perfect system, but there can be perfect complementary systems.

You might be insensitive to expression, lack intuition for communication, or be unskilled with words. That's okay. As long as you can find someone who naturally has low friction and high cognitive fit in these areas— You can build a collaborative body stronger than any individual.

People are systems, but systems can also be combined. In this highly complex era demanding high specialization, what's truly valuable isn't being able to do everything yourself, but knowing what to let go of and whom to trust. Partners, colleagues, spouses, even friends—these are all part of your system. Choosing who collaborates with you is part of designing your destiny.

And the prerequisite for building complementary systems is acknowledging your structural weaknesses without feeling inferior, and seeing others' structural strengths without envy. Then use consensus, trust, and transparency to combine these structures, piecing together a larger system where the flywheel can truly roll.

3. Set Parameters for the Next Generation

Some people are destined to take a winding path because their starting point was off, feedback was delayed, and their cognitive structure took many detours before realizing, "Oh, I can do this."

But a winding path isn't entirely regrettable. If it can become your heuristic model for understanding systems, it's the best gift for the next generation.

We've already discussed: the most effective way to change fate is early intervention. And you, as someone who has navigated a complex system, have the ability—even the responsibility—to design the next generation's system.

This is more than just choosing schools or signing up for interest classes. True parameter optimization happens when:

• You give them the freedom to explore interests.
• You capture the subtle signals of when they get ignited.
• You convey "I see you" in a way that doesn't harm them.
• You resist the urge to replicate your own success formula and instead stay curious about their unique feedback structure.

This is a long-term project, not expecting immediate results. But you can rest assured: Your awareness of the system will become the underlying guarantee of their destiny's structure.

You Don't Need to Break Fate; You Need to Recognize, Collaborate with, and Pass It On

If fate is our factory setting, then wisdom isn't used to break fate, but to design more rational strategies within its constraints.

Effort is not useless, but effort needs direction.

Collaboration is not incompetence, but a necessary option for system optimization.

Inheritance is not control, but unleashing the potential of the next structure.

All of this isn't because we're already strong, but because we're finally beginning to understand: Success is never a race against others, But whether you've found the path, within your system, that is most likely to be amplified.

Fate isn't a wall; it's a map.

It tells you which roads are clear and which are muddy. True freedom isn't pretending fate doesn't exist, but becoming a smarter player within it.