CEO Analysis: Have You Thought About Using 'Leverage' to Propel Your Life?

After a coffee chat with an excellent student yesterday, I discovered something interesting.

We've known each other less than a month, but she's already proactively scheduled two conversations, her questions are getting more precise, and progress is excellent.

Her state is like many excellent freshmen: high action, clear goals, but still finding her judgment model on "which path is most efficient."

Many people think they're choosing "which internship is better".

Actually, you're choosing "acceleration for the next ten years."

Just like these years, whenever you hear "join so-and-so big company," people automatically assume three things:

• Grow faster
• Resume looks better
• Life more stable.

Everyone's chasing "big company shine." The difference is, the shine is bright, but it might not shine in your direction.

More realistically, it might just make you more suitable to be an employee.

So what I discussed with the student yesterday wasn't interests, not functions, not a syllabus-style learning checklist.

I only asked her one question:

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▌Two Options, Essentially Two Types of Leverage

This student has two possible internships:

Company A: Large communications and platform group (infrastructure and industry nodes)

Company B: Management department of a large e-commerce platform (high-density projects and metrics-driven)

She was also honest that she'd already discussed choices with supervisors.

I think supervisors mostly evaluate with "what do you like" or "what can you learn."

So I said I wanted to add a different perspective: leverage perspective

Early career's scarcest resource isn't time, it's path slope.

You're not lacking effort, you're lacking methods to "get bigger returns for the same year."

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▌Leverage 1: Career Narrative Leverage

Talking about Company B e-commerce platform, I told her a very direct conclusion:

If you want to go the corporate route in the future, it's likely a better entry ticket.

The reason isn't romantic, but true:

• High resume recognition, market understands at a glance
• High peer density, information flows fast, you'll quickly know "how things work outside"
• Lower friction costs for internal referrals and job hopping
• Easier to be quickly categorized as "worth interviewing" in the talent market

It's like a well-trained school.

You'll develop an "employee-type" rhythm: break down tasks, align with metrics, deliver under time pressure.

But I also reminded her of a realistic risk, I put it gently:

This environment easily locks your vision to "doing work right," not "making things into a game."

This isn't about who's higher level, or saying the employee route doesn't work.

Just if you actually want to go entrepreneurship or investment, you need to be very careful,

don't unknowingly train yourself into someone who only knows how to score within systems.

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▌Leverage 2: Decision-Maker Access Leverage

Company A communications group, my view is more like looking at a "rare window."

Many people intuitively think this kind of big company isn't cool enough. I completely understand,

because community and peer narratives usually don't package it very nicely.

But I told her, people who want to go entrepreneurship or capital routes need to ask one more question:

In this kind of platform-type, infrastructure-type organization, the focus usually isn't what features you built or reports you wrote.

The focus is whether you have opportunities to access higher-level perspectives,

understand how they make trade-offs, how they deploy resources, how they face risks.

If you can actually do three things during the internship, the value will be completely different:

• Be remembered: not just presence, but letting them know you can handle things
• Be trusted: what you deliver lets them worry less, step on fewer landmines
• Be connected: you bring information, cooperation, or better decision quality they care about

I put it more plainly:

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▌You Think You're Accumulating Experience, Actually Accumulating Friction

I also discussed a very common pitfall with her:

Many interns finish a big company internship feeling they've "done projects." But when projects finish, connections don't remain, influence doesn't remain, next steps aren't smoother.

What does this internship really leave?

Probably just one resume line, and a bunch of effort only you understand.

This actually isn't you not working hard enough. It's that you didn't design "what this experience should exchange for" from the start.

If you don't design, you're leaving results to luck. Good luck meeting a supervisor willing to promote you, you go up. Bad luck, you're just running in place on a treadmill.

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Time Span Extended to Ten Years Later: Should I Wait for Better Economy Before Going to America?

In the second half we discussed her long-term plans. She said she wants to accumulate work experience in Taiwan first, get a master's, then go to America for MBA, enter U.S. tech giants.

She also said: economy is bad now, lots of layoffs, so wants to go later.

I continued asking:

If your goal is clear, what are you waiting for?

Macro environment is certainly important. But many people use macroeconomics as a shield, dragging themselves into a path that "looks safe, actually slow." The slowest strategy is usually "I'll stack time and experience first."

A faster strategy is more like how we entrepreneurs test markets:

Use work and problem-solving ability to exchange opportunities, not use seniority to wait for opportunities,

use output to build trust, not wait for others to know you before starting to output

Education can be a ticket, but tickets are never the main thing,

the main thing is whether you can quickly create verifiable value in an unfamiliar market. That's what you can take anywhere.

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▌Corporate vs Life Battlefield

If you're going corporate, choose a path that makes you stronger, more stable, more easily recognized by the market,

if you're going entrepreneurship or capital, choose a path that gets you closer to decision-makers, learn value exchange, accumulate leverageable resources.

Both can succeed. But you can't use the same strategy for both paths.

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▌Written for You Who Read to the End: I Use These 3 Questions to Force Myself Awake

If you're also between two offers or two paths, I suggest you don't rush to ask "do I like it."

Ask these three first:

1. Does this choice bring me closer to whom? Further from whom?
2. Will it make it easier to get the next opportunity three years later?
3. Am I accumulating skills, or accumulating transferable leverage?

Finally, a thinking framework for you who read this far:

延伸閱讀：Success is Not a Miracle, But Accumulation

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