Many people spend every day looking incredibly busy.
In the corporate world, you reply to two hundred emails a day, rush through four status meetings, and frantically type “Received” in massive group chats. You work overtime until midnight, moving yourself to tears, convinced a promotion and a raise are imminent. If you are a founder, today you monitor a competitor dropping their price by twenty cents; tomorrow you check employee attendance at midnight; the day after, you personally argue with a supplier to save a few thousand bucks in the budget.
You are working so hard—as hard as a hamster sprinting on a wheel.
But the brutal reality is this: after running for three or five years, you find yourself exactly where you started. Not only have you failed to make any real money, but the moment an industry winter or corporate layoff hits, you are the first to be “optimized.”
Why? Because everything you do daily covers up a fatal truth: You are using tactical sweat to disguise extreme strategic laziness.
You only see the “tasks” right in front of you. You have never swung a shovel—not even once—to dig the well that will keep you alive three or five years from now.
Sen-Sen-no-Sen: Swinging the Shovel Where No One is Looking
In Kendo, the standard for judging a swordsman’s caliber is absolute. The lowest level is Go-no-Sen (Late Initiative): the opponent strikes, you block, then counterattack. In business, this is a competitor releasing a new feature, and you rushing your team to work overnight to copy it. The intermediate level is Sen-no-Sen (Simultaneous Initiative): the moment you see your opponent’s muscles twitch, right as they are about to exert force, you strike simultaneously, arriving first despite launching later. This requires extreme talent and reaction speed.
But the monsters standing at the very top of the pyramid play Sen-Sen-no-Sen (Preemptive Initiative). Before the thought “I am going to move” has even fully formed in your opponent’s mind, you sense a fractional shift in their breathing and have already taken the match-deciding step.
This is not predicting the future. This is sprinting ten years down the inevitable path of the future and digging the pit in advance.
In business history, the man who perfected this move is a CEO perpetually clad in a black leather jacket.
In 2024, global tech giants are lining up and begging just to snatch a few more Nvidia chips. Even the US government has started regulating them like munitions. But the outcome of this “AI chip war”—which seemingly erupted only in the last two years—was secretly decided by Jensen Huang seventeen years ago.
The year was 2007. Jensen Huang was just a Taiwanese immigrant selling gaming GPUs. At the time, absolutely no one thought his company had anything to do with “artificial intelligence.” Even the term “artificial intelligence” was still an obscure joke in Silicon Valley.
Yet in that very year, Huang launched something called CUDA. Simply put, it allowed programmers to use standard coding languages to harness a GPU’s computing power for general-purpose calculations.
To realize this feature—which the vast majority of his peers considered an utterly useless redundancy—Huang stubbornly shoved an incredibly expensive processing chip into affordable graphics cards originally designed for gamers. He then burned astronomical sums of dollars on the software ecosystem.
The immediate consequences were brutal. Chip costs skyrocketed, and gamers refused to foot the bill. Wall Street couldn’t fathom what he was trying to do. Coinciding with the financial crisis, Nvidia’s stock plummeted all the way to $6. The board of directors even plotted to oust him.
The Most Terrifying Moat is the Compound Interest of Time
Under the pressure of the entire world pointing fingers and calling him a “madman,” Huang gritted his teeth and held the line. Every day, like a laborer digging a bottomless well, he took every hard-earned cent from selling gaming GPUs and funneled it back into the CUDA ecosystem, which was burning cash at a maniacal rate.
He practically subsidized CUDA-equipped chips, giving them away for free to every university, broke student, and researcher around the globe. His goal was singular: to ensure these broke students became habituated to writing code in his ecosystem long before they graduated.
The rest of the story is public knowledge. AlexNet in 2012, AlphaGo in 2016, all the way up to ChatGPT in 2022, which thoroughly detonated in the real world. All the major tech giants suddenly charged toward AI like madmen. Then, they despairingly discovered a terrifying fact:
You want to train the latest large AI models? You have to buy Nvidia’s compute cards. You think they are too expensive and want to switch to cheaper alternatives from AMD or Google next door? Sorry, you can’t. Because the massive foundational codebases written by millions of top-tier developers worldwide over more than a decade are all irrevocably hard-locked to Huang’s CUDA platform. Ripping out CUDA is the equivalent of uprooting an entire city of skyscrapers and moving it to the moon.
Only then did those brilliant Wall Street analysts feel a chill down their spines and suddenly realize: Nvidia’s most formidable moat was never the visible hardware chips at all. It was the software ecosystem he had dug out with his own hands, shovel by shovel, in the dark, while being ridiculed for a decade.
Today, Google is throwing money at the problem, AMD is frantically playing catch-up, and even OpenAI says it will raise funds to build its own chips. Everyone is desperately burning cash. Throwing capital at hardware is easy. But can money buy a seventeen-year “time barrier”? Absolutely not. Those are years that no amount of capital can compress. Why can Jensen Huang make money in his sleep today? Because seventeen years ago, he bled himself dry for the man he is today.
For Which Illusory Future Are You Willing to Play the Fool for Five Years?
Now, turn around and look at ourselves.
The emails you rush to answer every day, the customer complaints you process, the garbage proposals you write by copying competitors—that is tactical diligence. They only guarantee you have a meal today. They only guarantee you won’t be fired immediately.
But they will not solve your mid-life crisis three years from now, nor will they help you survive the tsunami of the next industry cycle.
Within your entire life plan, or your company’s business portfolio, is there even a single investment made solely to prepare for a seemingly highly unreliable future five or ten years down the line? Is there any skill, any product in reserve, that you dare to ruthlessly practice or invest in—a deep well you are willing to dig—even if everyone calls you an “idiot,” and even if you won’t see a single cent of return for the first three years?
If your eyes are fixated every day only on next month’s paycheck, a small immediate order, or a few words of praise from your boss; If your entire life is pulled in all directions by the most urgent, immediate trivialities, flying toward whatever shines brightest like a moth to a flame;
Then a lifetime of crying “I’m so busy” and “I’m so exhausted” is nothing but a cheap stage play. You are doomed to struggle in this suffocating rat race, shedding your last drop of sweat just to scramble for table scraps.
A practical exercise for this week: Forcibly carve out an inviolable “two-hour block” on your weekly calendar. During these two hours, do not handle any urgent tasks, do not reply to messages, and do not read daily reports. Use this time exclusively to learn a skill or foundational concept that has a high probability of being useful in the next three years, but will absolutely not yield immediate cash today. Go dig your deep well.
