First, clarify your ultimate goal in life.

You can consider three choices.

The first choice is not to study, not even to get a basic education. Do whatever you want, play in sunny beaches in bikinis. The benefit is that you don’t suffer any hardship. But the downside is: you’re having fun now, but slowly you’ll find yourself surrounded only by slackers. Serious people are off studying. Will it still seem fun then?

The second choice is to study, but not take the Gaokao (college entrance exam). You’d need to strengthen your foreign language skills, study abroad in your lower grades, and live and study overseas for a long time. One day you might even find it hard to readjust when you return.

The third choice is to study and take the Gaokao. Within this path, there are Tier 1 universities, 211 universities, 985 universities, and so on. Different goals require different strategies and tactics, and the hardships you endure will differ accordingly.

When you boil a pot of water, you either heat it to 100°C, or you shouldn’t waste a single stick of firewood at all. At the beginning, when the temperature is low, should you cut your losses? But once you’ve reached 90°C, you’ll be urged to persist—to push through to 100°C. Otherwise, all the hardship you’ve endured so far was pointless. That 90°C mark is what we call “sunk cost.”

In life, don’t assume that every unit of effort brings an equal return—such a thing never exists. Returns come in stages. Only at that precise moment when each pot of water reaches boiling point do massive rewards pour in. All the effort expended in the meantime is merely sunk cost.

Masters are those who consistently apply just enough effort to reach that threshold and secure the reward—transitioning smoothly from one stable state to another.