Part 6 | Why Could Taiwanese Diligence Become a Trap in the AI Era?

Taiwanese people are very good at pushing hard — I have never denied this, and one could even say it is the deepest undertone of this land. Many industries have been held up this way, many families have turned their fortunes around this way, and many business owners, entrepreneurs and self-made people have got where they are thanks to this spirit of refusing to admit defeat and not fearing hardship or fatigue. What are we familiar with? When others have gone home, we are still working; when conditions are insufficient, we make up for it with time; when resources are insufficient, we trade physical effort for them; when methods aren’t mature enough, we first force it out through willpower. Our generation, and the previous one, have almost all lived inside this logic. This spirit deserves respect, because it is not a slogan; it truly brought many people out from zero. But the problem lies right here: a method that once helped you succeed may, in the next era, turn around and become your limit. And I increasingly sense that this way of survival that Taiwanese are most familiar with — “diligence makes up for lack of talent,” “heaven rewards the diligent,” “eating bitterness is a tonic” — is beginning to carry structural risk in the AI era, not because diligence is wrong but because the future world no longer rewards crude effort. This is what I want to discuss in this piece.



1. Taiwan’s Success Narrative Has Long Been Built on “Diligence Makes Up for Lack of Talent” and “Heaven Rewards the Diligent”

If you look back carefully at Taiwan’s development over the past several decades, you will find that one of our most central collective beliefs is: as long as you work hard enough, life can move upward. This belief permeates almost every level. Our parents’ generation tells you: being poor doesn’t matter, just be diligent. Teachers tell you: ordinary aptitude doesn’t matter, diligence makes up for lack of talent. Bosses tell you: we don’t fear that you can’t do it, only that you don’t do it. The startup scene tells you: do it first, push hard first, tough it out first. Even many life stories, success narratives and media reports like to stress: this person had no connections but worked harder than others; this company was originally tiny but the founder was tough enough, patient enough and bold enough. So the deep reflex we have been trained into from childhood is: when you meet a problem, first work harder; if you can’t get it done, spend more time; if you can’t catch up, sleep less; if resources are short, carry more yourself; if hands are short, fill in yourself. This model has indeed been effective in many cases, because in the linear era effort was a very strong lever: when everyone’s tools, information and systems were about the same, whoever pushed harder could really win a bit more. So it is no surprise that Taiwan formed this culture. It is not a wrong idea; it is a product of its time, and a kind of survival wisdom this land forged for itself under limited conditions. It is just that the rules have changed today.



2. This Spirit Once Helped Us Turn Our Fortunes Around and Deserves Respect

I must make one thing very clear here: I am not negating diligence, nor saying Taiwan’s past logic of success was wrong, and I am certainly not preaching the cheap notion of “no need to work hard.” On the contrary, I deeply respect this force, because without generation after generation willing to push hard, Taiwan would not have got where it is today; without the spirit of taking a small matter to the extreme, turning a small business into a grand design, enduring a small factory into a listed company and carrying a small family into a springboard for the next generation, many things simply would not have happened. So we cannot casually use today’s language to look back with contempt at the methods of the old era; that would be dishonest. What should truly be done is not negation but upgrading. That is, we must admit that this spirit was once extremely useful, even great, but also admit that if we still use it exactly as before today, it will begin to have side effects. Like a company that in its early days burned the founder to break into the market — fine — but if ten years later the company can still only be sustained by the boss burning himself every day, that is not a virtue; it is a system that hasn’t been upgraded. The survival model of a country, an industry or an individual is the same: gritting your teeth in the past was survival wisdom; if you still rely only on gritting your teeth in the future, you may become structurally behind. So it is not that we don’t want diligence, but that we must ask: in the AI era, how should diligence be redefined?



3. But After the AI Era Arrives, Much Repetitive Effort Will Be Quickly Replaced

This is the turning point of the whole problem. The biggest change of the AI era is not that one tool suddenly became stronger but that many things that used to depend on manpower slowly grinding can now be quickly systematized, automated, templated and made intelligent. In the past, writing a plan meant stacking it up page by page; now AI can first run out the structure, a first draft and a logical framework. In the past, making a presentation meant thinking up the page order, grabbing the key points and arranging the content yourself; now much can first be generated and then refined by a person at a high level. In the past, finding information meant spending a lot of time searching, organizing and compiling; now models can do the first layer of extraction. In the past, content output depended heavily on the density of personal labor; now, as long as you design the process, the overall output speed is completely different. Note! What matters most here is not simply that “AI saves you time”; what matters is that much value that used to be built up by working hours is being rapidly compressed. That is, in the future it is not necessarily true that spending eight more hours makes your value higher, because another person may, through tools and system design, compress your eight hours into one hour, or even twenty minutes. If you still believe at that point that as long as I am more tired than others I must be more competitive, that is dangerous, because the world no longer does its accounting that way. In the future, much repetitive effort, mechanical effort, information-hauling effort, formatting effort and low-level structure-building effort will be quickly replaced; if you still treat these as your main source of competitiveness, in the end you will lose not to someone who works harder than you but to the tool upgrade of the whole era. This is why I say the diligence model Taiwanese are most familiar with is beginning to become a trap in the AI era. Its biggest risk is not that it is useless but that it makes you believe you are still advancing when you are only staying, more painfully, inside an old map.



4. Hard Work Isn’t Worthless — It Just Can’t Be This Crude Anymore

So the question is not whether to work hard but whether your effort has structure. This will become a watershed in the future. What is crude effort? It is doing everything yourself, relying on willpower for everything, making up for everything by working overtime, squeezing out results by compressing sleep and sacrificing life and rhythm. In short-term sprints, in the early stage of a startup, when resources are scarce, this approach of course still works; but if you treat it as a long-term method, it will certainly have problems, because crude effort is in essence high-wear low efficiency: on the surface it looks very driven, but in reality it has not built a sustainable system. What will truly be valuable in the future is not “I can carry a lot alone” but “can I, through AI, processes, knowledge structures and team division of labor, turn my capabilities into a replicable, scalable system?” That is the new era’s effort. That is, diligence will not disappear but it will be upgraded: from physical diligence to structural diligence; from time-based diligence to leveraged diligence; from “I’m tired” to “I’m good at allocating”; from “I do everything” to “I know what to do, what to give to tools and what to turn into a system.” Only this kind of effort will not turn you into a consumable. So I often say one thing: it is not that we shouldn’t push hard, but that we can’t push in such a crude way anymore. This holds for companies and for individuals alike.



5. What Will Be Compared in the Future Are Systems, Allocation, Cognition, Rhythm and the Power of Repair

What does the AI era truly compare? Not who is more anxious, not who stays up later, not who is more like an ascetic, and certainly not who squeezes themselves driest. What truly gets compared are five things:

First, systems.
Have you turned your capabilities into processes? Have you turned processes into structures that can scale? Have you made your knowledge, content, management and decisions not depend only on inspiration of the moment but be replicable, accumulable and collaborative?

Second, allocation.
How do you allocate your time? Your energy? Which things should you do yourself? Which should you hand to AI? Which to the team? Which are not worth entering at all? These decide the ceiling of your efficiency.

Third, cognition.
How do you understand trends? How do you understand industry change? How do you understand what real value creation is? After tools become widespread, what widens the gap is not whether you can press buttons but the depth of cognition.

Fourth, rhythm.
Are you always pushed along by the outside, or do you have your own beat? Do you know when to accelerate, when to stop, when to settle, when not to keep yourself on high alert?

Fifth, the power of repair.
Can you come back after high pressure? Can you keep your nervous system from being stuck in combat mode for long? Can you output over the long term without collapsing? In the future this ability is not only a health matter but a matter of competitiveness. So the truly strong in the AI era are not those best at staying up late but those best at living themselves as a system.



6. Meditation, Mindfulness and Sitting Will Go from Spiritual Tools to Foundational Capabilities of Senior Workers

At this point we return to something many people may not understand at first: why does talk about AI end up with meditation, mindfulness and sitting? Because what drags a person down in the future is not necessarily not knowing how to use tools; more often it is inner loss of control: getting chaotic when there are many things, scattering when there is much information, rushing when there is much comparison, exploding when pressure arrives, having many tools yet less control, becoming more efficient while living more like a system being constantly rushed. If this state isn’t dealt with, AI will only amplify it. So meditation, mindfulness and sitting will no longer be only personal cultivation, no longer just something discussed in mind-body-spirit circles; they will become a foundational capability of senior workers. Why? Because they train several of the most important things: can you settle your attention, can you avoid being dragged away by every thought, can you avoid reacting immediately to every stimulus, can you see your anxiety rather than being driven directly by it, can you let the sympathetic nervous system slowly step down and the parasympathetic take over repair again, can you keep a stable center in a high-speed world. All these abilities will directly affect the quality of decisions in the future, because truly high-level work is not only output but judgment, and judgment cannot sustain high quality inside a chronically chaotic nervous system. So you seem to be cultivating the heart, but you are also cultivating your leadership, your business judgment and your capacity to carry resources. At this stage meditation is no longer merely “making yourself more comfortable”; it is doing something more fundamental: upgrading you from a high-wear manpower mode to a life system that can carry the density of the AI era over the long term.



7. A Truly New Kind of Effort: Not Burning Your Life but Precisely Orchestrating Yourself

If I had to sum up this piece in one sentence, I would say: the most valuable effort of the future is not burning your life but orchestrating. Orchestrating what? Tools, time, attention, teams, information, emotions, rhythm, your own nervous system and your power of repair. You still have to work hard, but that effort is no longer “I carry everything myself” but “I know how to use the most suitable way to complete the most critical thing.” These are two completely different models of life: the former is the heroic diligence of the old era, the latter the systematic diligence of the new. The former deserves respect, but the latter goes further. So Taiwanese diligence does not need to be thrown away; what it needs is an upgrade: upgrade that spirit of refusing to concede into a more leveraged capability; upgrade the resilience of being willing to push hard into more structured output; upgrade the undertone of hard, honest work into a new kind of effort that knows how to use AI, build systems, preserve rhythm and repair oneself. Because the future world will not reward those who burn themselves out; what will be truly valued are those who can stay clear, stay stable and keep producing at high quality over the long term.

So for Part 6, the sentence I want to leave is: Taiwanese diligence was once the force that turned our fortunes around, but in the AI era, what is truly formidable is no longer pushing yourself to death but orchestrating yourself just right. This is not weakening; it is upgrading — and only diligence that has been upgraded deserves to walk into the next, bigger round of competition.