Three Behaviors That Actually Bend the Trajectory of Your Life

I've been writing technical articles for over a decade, and every now and then I pause to think about things that have nothing to do with code. Lately, I've been turning one question over and over in my mind: what behaviors actually bend the trajectory of a person's life? Not the "just work hard and you'll succeed" platitudes, but something more concrete and actionable. After a lot of thought, I've narrowed it down to three: don't give up easily, make decisive bets, and be other-oriented.

Holding On Is Harder Than You Think — and More Useful

I've seen too many people throw around the word "persistence" casually, but when you're in year three or four and everyone around you is telling you to "just give it up," whether you can still sit still and keep going is an entirely different story.

Li Ming is a young man from a small town who set his sights on becoming a professional photographer. Back home, the default path for everyone was to become a teacher or pass the civil service exam — safe and steady. Li Ming refused to follow that script. In the first few years, he barely made any money, scraping by on side jobs while pouring all his free time into learning photography and building a portfolio. Family and friends thought he'd lost his mind. The turning point came when he was almost into his fifth year — his work started appearing in small exhibitions, with a distinctive style focused on the kind of beauty in everyday life that nobody usually notices. Then commercial gigs started coming in: shooting ads for local businesses, covers for magazines. After that, an international art magazine took notice of his work and invited him to exhibit at an international photography show. Following that exhibition, he had firmly established himself among young photographers.

I'm not telling this story to be sentimental. My take is this: what Li Ming truly lacked wasn't talent — it was "not running away during those years with no positive feedback." Most people start to waver in year two or three, thinking "maybe I really am not cut out for this." He held on.

But persistence isn't about white-knuckling your way through. I learned that the hard way once — I pushed through eight months on a project that was fundamentally misdirected, and in the end, it all went to waste. So the prerequisite for persistence is making sure the direction isn't fundamentally wrong. Here are a few principles I've been using:

• **Break goals down.** Once you've set a long-term goal, break it into quarterly, monthly, or even weekly milestones. Give yourself a small positive feedback loop for each step completed — "belief" alone won't carry you very far.
• **Treat difficulties as data.** I treat every blockage like a debugging session — not "I'm done for," but "there's a bug here, let me track it down."
• **Do the math on time and resources.** How much time do you have, how much money, what skills do you bring? Lay it all out and prioritize. Don't just wing it.
• **Don't carry it alone.** Find one or two people who can give you honest feedback — they don't have to be mentors; a colleague or a friend works. Every time I finish a first draft of a technical article, I send it to a friend or two. Not to get praise, but to get them to poke holes in it.
• **Allow yourself to adjust course.** Persistence means "don't give up easily," not "charge headfirst into a wall." When the environment changes, your strategy has to change with it.
• **Don't overlook small wins.** Even if it's just taking one decent photo today, it's worth giving yourself a pat on the back.
• **Your body is the underlying hardware.** If you're not eating well, not sleeping enough, not exercising, none of the software running on top of you will work. I know this from experience — after two consecutive weeks of overtime, the quality of my writing dropped off a cliff.

Don't Wait for Perfect Information When You Already Have Enough

There's another detail from Li Ming's story I really want to pull out.

When he decided to enter a major photography exhibition, the timeline was extremely tight. His work wasn't ready, and the registration window was about to close. He didn't hesitate — he committed to exhibiting and then threw himself into finishing the pieces with everything he had.

Every time I think back to that moment, I feel like if it were me, I'd probably have agonized for two more days: "Let me think about it more," "What if I'm not ready enough?" "Should I wait for the next one?" But Li Ming didn't wait. He took the bet, and he won.

From my experience, **the cost of hesitation is often severely underestimated**. In the three days you're agonizing, the opportunity window may have already closed. This isn't to say every decision should be made on a whim — it's to say: when you've already gathered 70% of the information and the direction is basically right, the remaining 30% isn't worth spending another week polishing.

Behind the indecision, there are usually a few psychological sticking points, and I've hit every single one:

• **Fear of choosing wrong.** You feel that once you commit, there's no turning back. But in reality, most decisions have room for correction.
• **Too many options.** Five choices laid out in front of you are harder to pick from than one. I call this "choice overload" — it's especially easy to fall into when writing technical proposals.
• **Perfectionism.** You always want to find the "optimal solution," but in reality, there's often only a "good enough" solution.
• **Information anxiety.** Too little information and you feel uneasy; too much and you can't process it. Stuck on both ends.

What Li Ming's example taught me is this: making the "best available" decision under imperfect information and then owning the consequences is far braver — and far more effective — than waiting indefinitely for perfect information.

Being Other-Oriented Isn't Moral Coercion — It's a Rational Strategy in Long-Term Games

I'm putting this one last because it's the most counterintuitive of the three.

Being other-oriented, stripped down to its essence, means thinking about whether others can benefit from what you're doing, rather than only keeping your own slice in mind. It sounds like a motivational platitude, but the longer I've been in tech, the more I've come to believe this is a hard truth.

You help a colleague review a piece of code, and they owe you a favor — next time you're stuck, they're likely to lend a hand. You open-source a small tool with no immediate payoff, but six months later someone builds a product on top of it and reaches out to collaborate, and your visibility in the industry shoots up. These are things I've actually experienced.

The payoff cycle for being other-oriented is usually longer than for self-interest. You spend three months helping someone build a system and get nothing out of it in the short term; but six months or a year later, that system is running, your name is on it, and opportunities start flowing in. My judgment is this: **in a long-term game with asymmetric information, being other-oriented is one of the optimal strategies**, because it lowers your transaction costs while building up trust as an asset.

A Few Final Thoughts

These three — persistence, decisiveness, and being other-oriented — don't sound complicated, but I know very few people who can actually do all three at once. Changing your life isn't about one epiphany; it's about the countless small choices — "one more day," "let's decide right now," "let me help out while I'm at it" — that gradually bend your trajectory.

I didn't write this to pump you up. If you take away only one thing after reading this, I hope it's this: don't wait until everything is perfectly in place before you act, and don't give up too early just because there's no positive feedback yet. Start moving first, and adjust as you go.