Long-Termism Wins With Grunt Work: Stay at the Table With Time

WeChat Moments at 3 a.m. are always flooded with all kinds of money-making hacks, with courses like *Learn Video Editing in 3 Days, Earn 10k a Month* and *Build Your Personal IP in 7 Days, Make Your First Fortune* selling even hotter than daily essentials. Our generation seems to have been hit with a fast-forward button. We demand instant feedback for everything we do: delete a WeChat post if it gets no likes, switch niches after a week if your social media account gains no followers, break up after three months of dating if there’s no progress. Everyone is terrified of being slow, of missing out on trends, of being left behind while everyone else is cashing in. I’ve seen so many people set grand resolutions at the start of the year, only to pivot to a new goal by mid-year. When they take stock at year-end, they’ve accomplished nothing, and blame bad luck or the poor macro environment.

Last year I ran into a friend who had been making short videos for three years. The first thing he said when we met was, “There’s no money in this industry, I’m planning to switch careers.” After asking for details, I learned he chased the knowledge payment trend in March, switched to the beauty niche after half a month of no traction, jumped on the rural life bandwagon in May, filmed 20 videos with fewer than 100 likes each, and stopped posting entirely in October. Little did he know that a creator who started at the same time as him didn’t hit a viral hit until their fourth year. Now they charge six figures for a single sponsored post, and are still firmly at the table.

We always mock people who put in grunt work as “foolish,” laugh at them for not taking shortcuts or chasing trends. But in the end, those who stay at the table are never the fastest runners, but the steadiest walkers. What you think is a shortcut is often the longest detour. The grunt work you look down on is the only ticket to ride out business cycles.

Many people misunderstand grunt work, thinking it’s just mindless grinding or stubbornly obsessing over meaningless tasks. But true grunt work is repeating simple tasks until you master them, doing repetitive work with intention, and persisting with purpose in what you do. I follow a creator who writes career advice content. For the first two years, her posts often only got a few hundred views. Instead of switching niches, she refined the logic of each draft three times, revised titles eight times, and replied thoughtfully to every comment—even the ones calling her work “total garbage,” to which she’d ask, “Which part do you think needs improvement?” She even spent three months compiling a document of 100 frequently asked questions from readers, and tailored each piece of content to address one of them.

For her first post, she spent three days writing and revised it 12 times. It only got 300 views when published. She cried in the bathroom for half the night, but sat down the next day to keep revising the draft. After two years of this grind, her follower count grew from 0 to 100k. Now, a single sponsored post pays what used to be half a year’s salary for her. She still maintains the habit of revising three drafts a day, saying, “Keep doing the grunt work long enough, and it becomes second nature.”

Here’s a question for you: Have you ever committed to a goal, put your head down and worked for three months or more with no visible results? Is your so-called persistence really just pivoting after three days without feedback? When you mock others for being slow, have you ever thought that the time you wasted jumping from one thing to another would have been more than enough for someone else to pave their way to success?

We’re always afraid of time slipping away, desperate to monetize our investments immediately. But in the logic of long-termism, time is your partner, not your enemy. Every minute you spend on your craft is logged by time—it won’t run away, and it won’t lie to you. I have a friend who runs a Taobao store. For the first six months, he only made a few hundred yuan a month—not even enough to cover rent. Everyone around him urged him to close the store and get a regular job, but he didn’t listen. He studied product selection every day, optimized main product images, replied to every customer inquiry, and even sent follow-up cards to past buyers asking, “How is the product working for you? Is there anything we can improve?”

After eight months of this grind, his store suddenly hit it big with a storage box product, shipping over 200 orders a day. Now his annual revenue is hundreds of thousands of yuan, and he’s opened his own small warehouse. Even during big sales events, his store doesn’t panic about stock like others do, because his repeat purchase rate among old customers is over 40%—he never has to worry about sales. See? In the short term, it’s grunt work. In the long term, it’s being friends with time. Every ounce of energy you invest will become a moat for your future.

Stop saying “I’m working hard but getting no results.” The effort you’ve put in is barely a drop in the bucket when measured against time. Have you ever seen anyone who truly made it big rely on overnight luck? Those who ride the trend waves to success had already spent three to five years honing their wings long before the wind picked up. When you get impatient with how slow things are, do the math: improve 1% every day, and you’ll be 37 times better off after a year. Slip 1% every day, and you’ll only have 3% of what you started with left. Time never fails those who are sincere in their efforts—it only weeds out the fickle and impatient.

Long-termism is never the exclusive domain of the elite—ordinary people like us can practice it too. You don’t need to set a grand goal like “earn 1 million in three years” right off the bat. Start with small, seemingly “useless” grunt work every day: write 500 words a day if you make content, no matter if anyone reads it. Make 10 extra sales calls a day if you’re in sales, no matter if they lead to deals. Practice your skill for 30 minutes a day, no matter if you get any feedback. I have a designer friend who practiced hand-drawing for half an hour every day for five years. Now his rate for commercial projects is three times the industry average. Everyone envies his luck, but only he knows that the stack of discarded drafts from those five years is taller than a person.

When I first started writing, my monthly payment for articles was less than 2,000 yuan for the first 18 months—I had to take side gigs to cover rent. But I wrote every day, revised every day, and went through the logic of each draft three times. Now a single article pays what used to be three months’ income for me. Grunt work was never meant for fools—it’s reserved for those who understand long-term value. The effort you put in behind the scenes will one day become an unshakable confidence that no one can take away from you. All those late nights you burned, drafts you revised, skills you practiced, and detours you took will become your chips to stay at the table.

One final gut-punch question: Is what you’re working on now worth grinding at for three years or more? If it is, ignore how fast others are running or jumping—just walk slow, walk steady. Remember: the table always keeps its last remaining players. Those who rush to leave early will never claim the final prize.