By Jane Sonnenschein · October 6, 2026

Today I came across a post on Xiaohongshu (a Chinese lifestyle and social media platform, often loosely compared to a mix of Instagram and Pinterest) about the creator Anne-Laure Le Cunff and the company she founded, Ness Labs.

The Chinese blogger had condensed her journey over the years into a series of striking numbers. When Le Cunff started Ness Labs in 2019, she set herself a public writing challenge: write 100 articles in 100 days. About four months later, her newsletter had around 6,000 subscribers. Over time, that audience grew to more than 100,000 readers, followed by a paid community, membership programs, courses and books.

At the end of the post, the blogger also drew lessons from the case for Chinese knowledge-based creators: turn public writing into a project with a clear timeframe, use a WeChat Official Account (a long-form publishing channel inside WeChat, somewhat like a newsletter or blog feed) or an independent website to build a body of work, use Xiaohongshu for discovery and testing topics, and eventually develop communities, courses, databases or books from that content. 

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this. Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s experience is certainly worth studying. What made me stop and think was what happens when a long and complicated personal journey is compressed into a few images. Suddenly, it forms an extremely smooth chain of cause and effect: 100 articles in 100 days, 6,000 subscribers four months later, a growing readership, search traffic from the content, then a community, memberships, a book, and eventually an entire system of knowledge products.

Seen that way, everything looks perfectly logical—and almost a little too simple.

It begins to feel as though the important thing is simply to choose a direction, keep writing, write in public and keep going. Once enough work has accumulated, readers, income and products will somehow begin to grow from it naturally. When numbers like “100 days,” “100 articles,” “6,000 subscribers,” “100,000 readers,” “2,500 members” and “six-figure income” are placed along the same timeline, it becomes very easy to forget everything long and complicated that happened in between. What remains is a conclusion perfectly suited to social media: consistent public writing can become a business.

The more I think about it, the more this seems like a very typical kind of success story on social media today.

We often see headlines along the lines of: “I was broke, so I started writing like crazy—and three months later I was earning RMB 10,000 a month.” Or: “I posted every day for 100 days and finally changed my life through content creation.” Or: “Ordinary people can build a personal brand too, as long as they do these few things.”

The reason these posts attract so many clicks is not simply that people enjoy success stories. A lot of people desperately want to find a path out—one that is clear, simple and repeatable.

Real life is already complicated enough.

Most ordinary people work eight hours a day. Some live with the “996” schedule—9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week—and then still have to commute. By the time they get home, they have very little energy left to analyze all the things that may have shaped another person’s success: timing, the stage a platform was in, existing resources, social networks, individual ability, cash flow, market demand and plain chance.

Often, people barely have enough energy left to cook, tidy the house, spend time with their children or learn something new. They just want to lie down and scroll on their phones for a while.

I did not understand that kind of exhaustion as deeply before as I do now.

I currently work only about four hours a day, and on three days of the week I spend another hour or so dealing with a few additional things. Compared with many people working full time, my workload is not especially heavy, yet I still often feel tired. In the evenings, I write, work on my independent website and make some social media content. Somewhere in the back of my mind, there is often still that little thought: Shouldn’t I post something today too? So even when my actual working hours are not that long, my mind rarely feels completely switched off. 

Today, for example, I was already exhausted when I came home from court. While sitting and talking with a friend, I kept saying how tired I felt. There was a woman nearby in her seventies who somehow looked far more energetic than I did. When I finally got home, all I wanted was to lie down for a while. I ended up sleeping for several hours.

At times like that, I understand much better what it must be like to work eight or ten hours a day and then spend another hour or two commuting.

When someone gets home and only wants to lie down and scroll through their phone, has no desire to study or build a side business, and barely wants to deal with the house or the children, it is too easy to say that they lack discipline, do not work hard enough or are simply lazy.

Physical work drains the body. Mental work drains attention. And repetitive work with very little autonomy can create a particular kind of exhaustion that is hard to describe: you have spent all your energy, yet you do not feel as though you have made anything that truly belongs to you. By the time you are free to begin something of your own, there is nothing left.

It is precisely in this reality that a story like “100 articles in 100 days, 6,000 subscribers in four months” becomes so attractive.

It is not as complicated as real life. It does not ask an already exhausted person to think through dozens of variables. It simply suggests that perhaps there is still a door somewhere: write a little every day, keep going for a hundred days, and maybe your life will begin to change.

There is nothing wrong with that hope.

Wanting to earn money, change your life, leave a job you dislike, gain readers, recognition or social status—or simply live in a nicer home and have a little more financial breathing room—are all perfectly ordinary desires. There is no reason to treat the desire for success as something vulgar. Many people work hard precisely because they want their lives to become better.

What we should be more careful about is what happens when a success story is made too smooth. We begin to take an outcome and work backward until it looks like a rule.

We see someone who wrote for years and eventually gained 100,000 readers, so we say she gained those readers because she kept writing. We see someone learn in public and later build a community and products, so we begin to think that public learning itself is a reliable customer-acquisition strategy. We see someone move from a newsletter to courses and books, and it starts to feel as though products will naturally emerge as long as enough content is accumulated.

There may be some truth in all of those statements.

The problem is that the people we see are overwhelmingly the ones who succeeded.

Imagine that 10,000 creators took writing seriously. They persisted, published hundreds or even thousands of pieces, studied platforms, changed their titles and learned how to distribute their work. Perhaps only a small number of them eventually reached 100,000 readers.

When we go back and study those few successful people, we notice that they all persisted, wrote for years, shared their work publicly and kept learning. It becomes very tempting to treat those shared traits as the reasons for their success.

But what if the other 9,900 people persisted too?

Then the picture changes completely.

What successful people did may be completely real, but those actions may still not be enough to explain their success. Persistence may be one necessary condition, but it is certainly not a sufficient condition that reliably produces a particular result.

Ability influences how well someone can do something. Effort increases the chances of encountering opportunities. Persistence keeps you in the game longer. But whether any of that eventually produces an unusually large outcome still depends on many variables outside your control. 

Was the field already growing when that person entered it? Did the platform still give ordinary users meaningful organic reach? Had they already built professional skills and social connections before they began writing? Where did their first readers come from? Did one article happen to get shared by someone with a large audience? Did they have enough financial security to keep going through several years of disappointing income? Did their subject happen to meet a rapidly growing demand?

Once someone succeeds, all of these conditions are remarkably easy to compress or leave out.

Put them back into the story, and “100 articles in 100 days, followed by a six-figure business” becomes a rather different narrative.

It becomes the story of someone who already had certain abilities, entered a field at a favorable time, gradually built content and an audience through public writing, and then spent years adjusting the topic, products and business model until a whole system slowly took shape.

That is still impressive. There is still plenty to learn from it.

But it is no longer a formula that can simply be copied.

Some time ago, a reader left a comment on my independent website and told me that he had been writing for sixteen years. He did not tell me how many readers those sixteen years had brought him, or whether he had ever made money from his writing. He simply said that there are many people like us, scattered in different places, quietly continuing to write.

I often think about that comment.

We usually see the person who “kept writing for ten years and was finally discovered.” We rarely see the people who have written for ten, fifteen or even twenty years and are still largely unknown.

They do not become success stories on platforms. No one turns their lives into a case study about how ordinary people can use long-term persistence to move up the social ladder.

But they are just as much a part of the real world.

If we leave those people out, then our understanding of persistence is incomplete.

I used to fall into these comparisons very easily too. Someone writes for a few months and gains thousands of subscribers; my independent website has been online for more than three months and currently has three subscribers. Someone tells you that a few months of writing can lead to RMB 10,000 in monthly income, while I have been doing this for much longer and many of the things I have tried have not only failed to make money—they have cost me more than I earned.

Of course, moments like that make you wonder whether your ability is not good enough, whether your method is wrong, or whether everyone else is moving forward while you are the only one progressing painfully slowly.

But lately I have increasingly felt that the world is not a machine where you put in enough effort and receive a predictable amount of reward in return. 

That is not an easy thing to accept.

We naturally want to believe that if we do the right things, we will get results. A world like that feels more orderly and safer. If success follows a formula, then failure simply means we have not done enough yet. Work harder, persist a little longer, and one day we will receive the result we have earned.

But reality does not work that way.

That does not mean effort is meaningless, nor does it mean we should do nothing and blame everything on luck. Quite the opposite. We still need to work seriously, learn, look for opportunities and improve our methods.

I simply think now that the healthiest understanding of persistence should not be:

If I keep going, sooner or later I am guaranteed to succeed.

It should be:

If this is something worth doing, I am willing to keep doing it. At the same time, I know that success is not something the world owes me.

The difference between those two ideas may look small, but psychologically they are very different.

Hidden inside the first kind of persistence is an invisible IOU: I have worked this hard for this long. Why hasn’t it been my turn yet?

When the result fails to arrive, the pain grows. Every day of effort begins to feel like an advance payment toward a future that keeps refusing to pay out.

The second kind of persistence is much clearer-eyed.

I can still want success. I can still want to earn money. I can hope that more people will read my work and that one day my independent website might genuinely become something that brings me income. I simply no longer demand that those things arrive according to a particular timetable.

For me, this matters especially.

If I had to force myself to keep doing something for years only because someone had told me that “it will make money eventually,” I doubt I could do it. I need to know why I am doing something, and I also need some form of feedback that tells me the work is not entirely empty in the present.

One reason I can still keep writing is that writing gives me something before any external result arrives. When I slowly make sense of a question that had been vague in my mind, or finally put into words a feeling I could not previously explain, that understanding itself is a form of feedback.

And the three subscribers my website has today certainly do not prove any kind of growth trend. But they are real.

It is not a poster saying “6,000 subscribers in 100 days.” It is a website that began at zero, where one stranger and then another, slowly, chose to stay.

Perhaps one day it will grow into a large business. Perhaps it never will.

No one knows yet.

What I do know is that I am increasingly unwilling to use someone else’s completed path to create a deadline for my own life.

Anything worth doing for a long time will inevitably include boredom, exhaustion and long periods without much feedback. But if the process gives you absolutely nothing except the fantasy of future success, then what we call “persistence” can slowly turn into a form of self-depletion. 

So when I now see posts about “what I achieved in 100 days,” “how much I earned after three months,” or “how daily posting changed my life,” I still click on them. I am still interested in studying people who have genuinely built something.

I just ask a few more questions now.

Where was this person standing when they began? What did they already have? What stage were the platform and market in at the time? How many people followed a similar path without getting the same result? And if we strip away the most impressive numbers, what is left in that path that I can genuinely learn from?

If there is something useful left, learn it.

The parts that cannot be replicated can simply remain where they are.

We are allowed to want success. We are allowed to want to earn more money, to be seen, and to hope that our work will eventually help us build a better life.

Maybe we just do not need to believe that if we perform a few actions correctly, the world is obliged to return an equivalent reward.

What allows someone to keep going may not be that guarantee at all.

Perhaps it is knowing why we are still willing to continue even when there is no guarantee. 

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 当成功被讲成一道公式，我们就开始误解坚持

German version: Wenn Erfolg wie eine Formel erzählt wird, beginnen wir, Ausdauer falsch zu verstehen