How do you keep working after learning your maximum was not the currency that mattered?

I worked on a project for several years. At the beginning, I was full of enthusiasm, but I felt the company culture slowly wore me down. The colleagues who had been with me from the start were laid off one by one. For about three or four months, we worked overtime every day without producing results. The project lead had no ideas of his own and mainly passed along the boss’s demands. Because he did not fully understand them, the project kept going off course. The communication was ineffective, and so was the overtime. In the end, we failed the first project acceptance, and management let a group of people go. I stayed. I could still see some hope, and I liked the new person in charge. They promoted working efficiently, and proved that this was more than a slogan. I also still believed in the hardware market. I was somewhat shaken at first, but the project eventually passed acceptance fairly successfully, and I felt a huge sense of relief. Then the operational problems became difficult. Because of the budget, the hardware product could not be updated or iterated. For a hardware company, that was fatal. After giving so much of myself to the project, I reached a simple conclusion: it was over.

I grew up hearing that when something fails, I should look for the reason in myself: What did I do wrong? What can I improve? That can be useful, but it can also become misleading. It can make every outcome feel like evidence about who you are. I remembered this because of a difficult period at a previous company. A new manager seemed determined to diminish me. At the time, I kept asking myself what I had done wrong. I assumed that if I worked hard, treated everyone well, and was capable, people would like me. But the situation was more complicated. I was one of the strongest engineers in the organization, and senior leaders already knew and trusted me. The new manager was also trying to establish authority and prove their technical leadership. Looking back, I can see that the conflict was not simply a performance problem or a failure on my part. I was young then, and eventually I decided to leave. Now I think the important thing is not to treat yourself as the dominating factor in everything that happens. The world is made of many people and many conditions, and you are only one of them. That applies to success as well as failure. When you succeed or lose, it is not just you. Remembering that makes life easier—and most of the time, better—because you do not torture yourself trying to fix what was never yours alone to control.

I stayed at my company for about five years and spent all my time on one project. It was a machine—not exactly a robot—that could help people connect across the world. Someone could stay at home, control the machine through an app, and see video from another place. You could be in a Chinese home and watch a show in the United States. I thought it was very interesting, so I gave it my time. There were many difficult technical details. We overcame them. The video could travel through the network, and the machine could be controlled by the app. We finally showed the device on the web. Then one year passed, and two years, and three years. No one wanted to buy it. The painful part is that we designed the feature before we really analyzed the market. We did not collect users’ thoughts. We did not even know whether the machine was useful. My friends and family probably did not want to hurt me, so they told me it was useful. But they were not real users or customers. I had no one giving me the truth that it was not useful. Finally, we will close the company. Now, when someone wants to design something new or start a company, I want to tell them: analyze the market first. Listen to what users want. Know whether your features really help people, and what the main value is. We solved the technical problems. We just did not first solve the question of whether anyone needed what we had made.

I study very hard, but I still don't feel like I'm good at studying or exams. I do a lot of practice and take many quizzes, trying to keep going until around three in the morning every day. Even with all that effort, the concepts feel vague and ambiguous to me, and I can't really remember them. Most of what I do is reread the material and take quizzes, so I keep putting in the hours without feeling that the ideas have become clear.

Two years ago, I was bored with my job and looking for another way forward. I had a choice between returning home for a very good job and staying where I was to start a company. Just before I packed everything up, I changed my mind. I stayed and founded a startup. At first, I wanted to build an AI mental-health product. Then, partly because of other people's opinions and partly because I doubted whether I understood the patients, we moved toward social products. I stopped those projects after realizing something that took me a long time to admit: the company has to build something my soul actually echoes with, not something that only makes sense to other people. By then, we had raised money, opened the company, spent most of it, and carried a lot of pressure from investors. The constant changes exhausted the team. Now we have a product under development that feels much more like me. I have decided to stay with this direction until the company closes, whether it succeeds or fails. I am not going to keep changing it. That decision has not made me feel proud yet. I still think it is not enough. I keep wondering whether I need to work harder or become more open-minded, but I do not know what it takes to reach a better stage, and I cannot see that stage yet. The pressure follows me everywhere. I cannot remember the last day I took off.

There was a period when my work was extremely busy, and I felt completely worn down. I had headaches every day. I faced challenge after challenge, often figuring things out while doing them, and it was very painful when something was beyond my abilities. I gritted my teeth and kept going, but I became slower. My body and mind were under enormous pressure. I am in a similar situation now. I still have not found a real solution, but I cannot simply leave because the pressures of life do not allow it. What I fear is not having enough money to support the rest of my life. “Enough” feels like something I may never reach. Whether it will come depends on having sufficient funds—but isn’t that a cycle? I am confused now. I can see it a little, but I do not know how to get out.