"No Effort Goes Unrewarded" — How the Concept of Accumulating Luck Changed My Work

“Some Efforts Are Wasted” — I Used to Think

Honestly, I used to think effort was a simple equation.

I drew it on a vertical axis:

Self → Goal

Hit the goal: effort “rewarded.” Miss it: effort “wasted.” Done.

Pass a cert exam — rewarded. Fail — wasted. Get the promotion — paid off. Miss it — meaningless. Clean. Logical. Brutal.

Then one book quietly took an axe to that whole premise.

The Axis of Effort Shifted

The book proposed a completely different definition of effort.

	My Definition (Before)	The Book’s Definition (After)
Axis of Effort	Vertical (Self → Goal)	Horizontal (Self → Others)
Measure of Effort	Am I closer to my goal?	Am I spending time for others?
Is It Rewarded?	Depends on results	Always (it accumulates)

“Rewarded,” in this frame, isn’t about visible returns. It means time spent for others accumulates as “luck” and eventually comes back as serendipity.

Luck Accumulates Like a Point Card

A line from the book that stuck with me:

Luck isn’t about “good or bad” — it’s about “accumulated or not.” It builds up like a point card through effort.

The “lucky people” around us aren’t innately lucky. We’re just witnessing the moment they cash in luck they’ve quietly been stacking up.

And the trigger that lets you spend that luck is staying in good spirits. Enjoying what happens, embracing it positively — that’s what cracks open the doors where opportunities come through.

Applying This to Engineering Work

Since absorbing this idea, I’ve gotten more deliberate about “spending time for others” at work.

Taking Time for Thorough Code Reviews

Reviews mean pausing your own work to seriously engage with someone else’s code. The pull to rush is always there. But a careful review comment lifts the other person’s growth and the team’s overall code quality in one stroke.

Stopping to Help When a Junior Is Struggling

While studying for certifications and reading after work, a junior colleague told me one day: “Watching you put in effort made me actually buy and start reading tech books too.”

I’d never taught them directly. Effort propagates quietly, and sometimes it nudges someone’s heart. That moment was my first tangible evidence that horizontal effort really does accumulate.

Writing Documentation

Choosing to write READMEs and design docs for code “only I need to understand.” Yes, it’s for my future self. But it’s also time spent for teammates and successors I may never meet.

Positive Thinking Increases Your “Total Luck”

Imagine two people: one declines anything that doesn’t directly benefit them, the other says yes when asked for time. Over years, who runs into better opportunities?

Pretty obvious: the more time you spend for others, the more luck quietly piles up. From the outside, that person ends up looking “lucky.”

This is not a self-sacrifice pitch. Keep your own goals (vertical axis) honest, while not neglecting contributions to others (horizontal axis). It’s the balance of the two that matters.

What Changed in Me

Before	After
Tended to decline requests unrelated to my outcomes	Accept them as “chances to accumulate luck”
Minimal answers to junior questions	Include background and reasoning
Passive about study groups and events	Show up, knowing good spirits unlock luck

In Closing

Effort is always rewarded — but you have to redefine what “rewarded” means.

For someone who only ever measured reward by goal achievement, the line that “time spent for others accumulates as luck” was a quiet turning point.

Even without visible results, time spent helping others is never wasted. That accumulation will, somewhere down the line, come back in shapes you didn’t plan.

If you’ve been weighing some “should I help, or should I just push my own work?” decision recently, maybe lean toward help this once. You might be quietly stamping a point card you can’t see yet.

“Words Are Blades” — How a Single Phrase Can Stay with Someone Forever — Communication with awareness of impact on others
INTJ-AS (The Lone Grand Designer) — My Working Style Through Personality Assessment — How an independent type learned to invest time in others