By Jane Sonnenschein · April 9, 2026
Yesterday I wrote an essay titled Why Are Chinese Parents So Obsessed with Competition Today? Chen Lihua’s Generation Had Already Given Us the Answer.
Someone in the comments on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese lifestyle and social-media platform often compared loosely to a mix of Instagram and Pinterest, asked me:
“Do you know how she made her first fortune? Which person worth tens of billions ever got there just by working hard?”
Then they added that perhaps I had lived in Germany for so long that I had become naive.
When I saw those comments, my first reaction was not anger. I actually found them quite interesting.
Because I have noticed that whenever people talk about success, they often reduce it to a simple either-or: either someone succeeded through hard work or through their background; either through ability or through connections.
But reality is rarely that simple. And when someone eventually builds a fortune worth tens of billions, it becomes even more impossible to explain the whole thing with a single cause.
When I was young, I loved watching old Hong Kong television dramas.
They often featured a certain kind of character: someone who began with almost nothing, perhaps as an apprentice, on a construction site, or working away in a tiny street-side shop. Then, at some point, something changed. They moved into property, trade, or manufacturing, and within a few years it seemed as though some invisible force had suddenly pushed their whole life forward.
When I was younger, I sometimes wondered whether those television dramas were simply making people’s lives too legendary. Later I began to understand that the very fact that these stories appeared again and again probably meant there were plenty of real-life versions of them in that particular period.
Li Ka-shing’s generation is a good example.
What people see now is the extraordinary position he eventually reached. What is easier to forget is that he did not begin with the kind of resources we associate with him today. He first had to survive, then build something, and only after that was he able to make it much bigger.
What enabled that enormous leap was not simply “hard work.” He happened to live through the period when Hong Kong’s manufacturing and property sectors were taking off. He caught that wave, and when it arrived, he was willing to step into it.
The more I thought about this, the more convinced I became of one thing: when someone reaches the level of tens of billions, “working hard” alone can no longer explain it.
If a person earns hundreds of thousands or a few million, individual ability may account for much of the result. To reach tens of millions, luck and judgment usually begin to matter much more. But once we are talking about fortunes in the tens of billions, the era itself almost certainly has to be moving in that person’s favor.
Without that particular wave, many people’s ceiling would simply never open up. Without the enormous window created by a particular historical moment, even an exceptionally capable person might never be able to push their life to such heights.
But if we stop there, we fall into another kind of simplification: as though whenever a favorable wind arrives, anyone can fly.
That is not how reality works either.
A more accurate way to put it is this: the opportunities created by an era determine whether your upper limit can be opened up at all, while your ability and personality determine whether you can actually catch that opportunity, how much of it you can hold on to, and how far you can go with it.
Without the wind, many people could never reach that height. But without enough ability, courage, judgment, and capacity to carry what comes with success, even a strong wind blowing directly toward you may not turn out to be a blessing. It could become a disaster instead.
This makes me think of my father.
He graduated from the chemistry department at Zhejiang University. At the time, a degree like that carried enormous weight.
He spent most of his career in the chemical industry and was genuinely excellent technically. When a real problem appeared, he was the kind of person who could actually solve it.
At one factory, he was head of the production department. The plant produced caustic soda, which involved fairly dangerous industrial processes.
Once there was a serious chlorine leak. The situation became extremely dangerous. People could have lost their lives, and large areas of nearby rice fields might also have been damaged.
Whenever something major went wrong, my father was the first person the factory thought of sending in to deal with it.
When a crisis became serious enough, they would temporarily place him in a very important position and ask him to clean up the mess. At one point, they even made him deputy factory director. But once the emergency had passed, he would be moved back again, returning to the difficult, dangerous work that attracted the least attention.
As I grew older, I slowly understood that my father’s problem had never been a lack of ability.
If anything, the opposite was true. He was extremely capable, and he was also too straightforward.
He was a very typical old-school intellectual: technically excellent, honest in the way he dealt with people, but not skilled at maneuvering, building useful relationships, or performing at the moments when performance mattered. My mother was not the kind of person who knew how to work connections or plan strategically for the family either.
The result was that people who were not necessarily as capable but were much better at navigating the system gradually rose higher and higher. They were allocated apartment after apartment, and their lives became increasingly comfortable.
My father, meanwhile, was always the person pushed forward when something was most urgent, dangerous, and difficult. Once the problem was solved, he was placed back where he had been before.
Later he went to the factory where my mother worked as a technical adviser and quickly managed to increase production there as well.
That is one reason I became increasingly certain that whether a person manages to build something meaningful is never determined by ability alone.
Ability matters. The era matters. But so do personality, decisiveness, the ability to handle relationships, whether the people around you know how to advocate and maneuver on your behalf, and even whether you are the kind of person willing to present yourself in the way a particular system rewards.
Some people do not lose because they are unintelligent.
They do not even lose because they failed to work hard.
Sometimes they lose simply because they are not the kind of person that a particular era, or a particular system, is most willing to reward.
There is another very concrete example in my own family: buying property.
Some of my father’s colleagues were also ordinary salaried workers. Many of them did not have extraordinary insight or some great long-term vision. They simply needed a home, stretched themselves financially, and bought one.
Later, when property prices rose, that one decision changed the lives of many of those families quite dramatically.
My parents were much more cautious. They always felt they should wait a little longer, watch a little longer, and think about it some more.
By the time they finally decided to buy, prices were already at their highest. They not only missed most of the gains from the property boom, but ended up carrying greater financial pressure as well.
Were they not hardworking?
Of course they were.
Were they unintelligent?
No.
Their personalities simply leaned toward stability, caution, and avoiding risk.
And during a period that strongly rewarded people who were willing to act quickly and make bold decisions, that kind of personality could itself cause someone to miss an opportunity.
That is why I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that whenever someone succeeds, it must mean they simply worked harder than everyone else.
Reality often looks very different.
Some people work extremely hard and are highly capable, but miss the crucial moment. Others may not be any smarter than the people around them, but make one important decision at exactly the right time, and their lives change because of it.
That logic has not disappeared today.
The arena has simply changed.
Take weishang¹, for example.
Some of the earliest people to enter that business really did make money. But by the time everyone else started doing the same thing, the same amount of effort and investment could no longer produce the same result.
Or take WeChat Official Accounts, the long-form publishing feature within WeChat that combines elements of newsletters, blogs, and social-media subscriptions.
A few years ago, most of the accounts I followed were run by people who seriously wrote long essays. Readers followed them because they liked that particular person, their way of thinking, and their writing.
Now open the platform and look again. It often feels as though everything is about “teaching you to write,” “teaching you how to build an account,” or “teaching you how to monetize.”
Even the character of the platform has changed.
Years ago, it was relatively rare to see endless content teaching people how to write or how to make money from writing. Now those articles seem to be everywhere.
You may see someone post a single sentence and one picture and receive hundreds of thousands of views, while another person spends hours writing several thousand carefully considered words and is barely seen at all.
It is not that one person suddenly became stupid.
It is not that another suddenly forgot how to write.
The rules changed. The amount and kind of content available changed. The platform’s preferences changed. And the place where the opportunity lay changed too.
So I increasingly believe something else:
When a field becomes crowded with people teaching everyone else “how to do it,” the most profitable phase of the opportunity has often already passed.
By this point, I no longer felt much need to argue with the people in the comments.
Because they were actually half right.
Yes, nobody reaches a fortune worth tens of billions through sheer hard work alone.
But reducing everything to “background” or “inside connections” is just another way of avoiding a more complicated reality: when the same historical opportunity appears, not everyone is capable of turning it into tens of billions.
Some people never see the wind coming.
Some see it but are afraid to step into it.
Some step into it but cannot handle what follows.
Others may be highly capable, yet because of their personality, the way they deal with people, or the decisions they make at crucial moments, they still fail to benefit from that particular opening.
Eventually I stopped asking myself which mattered more: hard work or background.
Because the question itself was wrong.
A more realistic answer is this:
The opportunities created by an era determine whether your upper limit can be opened. Your ability determines whether you can catch the opportunity. Your personality and decisiveness determine whether you can turn it into your own life trajectory. And luck determines whether you happen to be standing there at the exact moment the wind arrives.
Of course, I am not writing this to say that because historical opportunity matters so much, effort is pointless and everyone might as well tǎng píng².
That is not what I mean.
If anything, I increasingly think the real question is not whether we should work hard, but how we should understand hard work.
For a long time, many people treated effort as though it were almost all-powerful. If you worked hard enough, suffered enough, and disciplined yourself enough, fate would eventually have to reward you.
Now more and more people are tempted by the opposite extreme: if the era has changed and the old opportunities are disappearing, perhaps effort has no meaning at all.
I think both ideas are too absolute.
Effort matters.
Much of the time, effort is a way of quietly building your own strength.
The books you have read, the things you have done, the abilities you have developed, the judgment you have trained, and even the difficulties you have gone through may not immediately turn into visible results.
But they are still shaping you, little by little.
What we may need to admit is simply that effort is not a master key.
It cannot guarantee success.
It cannot guarantee that your life will suddenly turn around.
But if you give up completely and stop developing yourself, then when an opportunity finally arrives and the wind really does begin to blow in your direction, you may no longer even have the ability to see it, recognize it, or hold on to it.
I still remember something someone in my industry told me in 2019.
He said he did not know what the future would look like, but he knew that 2019 would be the best year of the next ten years.
The sentence stayed with me.
After everything that has happened in the years since, I understand its weight much more clearly.
Times change.
The wind changes direction.
Opportunities move.
And once some windows close, they really do close.
But that is exactly why we should not allow ourselves to become people with no preparation, no strength, and no judgment of our own.
Perhaps what we need today is neither blind faith in hard work nor an easy dismissal of it.
We need to stay clear-eyed while continuing to grow.
To understand clearly that not every effort will receive the same return, while still becoming the kind of person capable of meeting the opportunities that may one day appear.
Because opportunities do not belong only to the hardest-working people.
But they often come closer to those who are already prepared.
As Louis Pasteur put it:
“Chance favors the prepared mind.”
Notes
1. Wēishāng (微商) — Literally “micro-commerce.” The term became widely used in China for small-scale social selling conducted through personal networks, especially through WeChat. Sellers often promoted products through their contacts and social feeds rather than through a conventional online shop. During its early boom years, some people built substantial businesses through this model, but as participation grew, competition intensified and the early advantages became harder to reproduce.
2. Tǎng píng (躺平) — Literally “lying flat.” The expression became popular in China as a way of describing a refusal to keep participating in relentless competition, overwork, and conventional expectations of success. Depending on context, it can range from simply lowering one’s ambitions and choosing a less demanding life to a broader rejection of the pressure to constantly strive, compete, consume, and move upward.
This essay is also available in other languages:
Chinese version: 陈丽华能赚上百亿，难道靠的只是努力拼搏？90%的人都忽略了这两点
Jane Sonnenschein | A Chinese Way of Seeing 
Leave a comment