Waking Up at the End of the Ladder: 拆解职场进阶的世纪谎言
那年感恩节，他在冰岛。
别人去冰岛是追极光，他却整夜失眠 。靠喝酒试图麻痹紧绷的神经，凌晨爬起来给跨级老板写了一封长信，倒出自己在这个系统里无法消解的压力和绝望 。那时，他刚入职 Meta 仅仅两个月 。
上海的高中，美国的本科，康奈尔的博士，再到 BCG、亚马逊、Meta、腾讯 。这串履历摆出来，很容易让人联想到一种步步为营的精密规划 。但他自己坦言，并没有 。在斯坦福上夏校时沉迷《魔兽世界》，大学时打《Dota》 。很多时候，他只是处于一种“懵懂”状态，顺着大环境的惯性往前走 。他甚至觉得，在世俗的成就里，个人的努力和选择占比很小，绝大多数是那些不可控的因素 。他借用“一命二运三风水”来形容这种感受，但也相信《了凡四训》里的话：既要信命，也要信能改命。
后来，他坐进了大厂的工位。
在亚马逊，折磨他的是一种深深的无力感 。一个再简单的想法想要落地，也要穿透层层审批与排期，变成几个月的漫长等待 。他看透了现代白领工作的底色：既然雇佣买断了你每天的八小时，系统就会想方设法用“毫无意义的工作”把这八小时填满 。这里没有计件时代“一分耕耘一分收获”的直接反馈 。
为了在内耗中寻找自洽，他转向哲学。读《禅与摩托车维修艺术》时他意识到，真实的“Quality”（良质），仅仅存在于主观与客观相遇的那一刹那 。换句话说，只有“当下”是真实的，脑子里对过去和未来的焦虑都是虚幻。然而，大厂的系统恰恰在不断偷走人的“当下” 。他在 Meta 的冰岛之夜，就是一次被无力感压垮的崩盘 。
后来他回国去了腾讯，发现真正的能动性，往往始于你不再害怕 。一次年会上，CEO 马化腾公开表示不该依赖“买量”。这与游戏出海的客观现实相悖，他没有选择明哲保身，而是直接给马化腾写了一封长信，直言买量是规模化增长的必然途径。敲下发送键前，他评估了最坏的结果——顶多被开除。他发现，自己其实并不害怕 。
而真正让他对“职场进阶”这件事发生断崖式心态转变的，是成为父亲 。
孩子的降生，让他对传统职场中不断向上的野心瞬间归零 。他不再想去什么顶尖 AI 公司继续“卷”，那种爬梯子的动力消失了。
关于“职业”（Career）这层滤镜的彻底破碎，则是在一次次对话和独处中完成的。他曾和朋友 Leon 聊天，听对方轻描淡写地说自己处于“职业生涯的末期”，准备做 Multiple FIRE（财务独立、提前退休）。他当时的本能反应是极度震惊：“一个不到四十岁的人怎么可以退休了？”
直到后来，他才真正从体感上理解了这背后的逻辑 。他开始意识到，Career本身可能就是一个被构建出来的谎言，是一套被设计好的说辞，用来把人规训成庞大机器上的齿轮。
“就觉得自己被骗了，或者活在梦境，然后醒了。”
而一旦觉醒，就再也回不去了 。
他脱离了打工的轨道，全职投入自己的事业：做自媒体、卖课、运营社区 。市场的反馈是强烈且真实的。他的第一门课，内容还没做出来，在只有一个网页的时候，就有一百多人痛快地付了五百美金买单。如今，他和极度专注、能力互补的伙伴“鸭哥”合作，把这门生意做到了年收入一百万美元。
在这个过程中，他重新定义了财富。他提到脱口秀演员 Dave Chappelle —— 只有缺钱了，才会举办脱口秀，而每每举办一场都能座无虚席 。钱只是一种生存工具，而真正的财富，是你确信自己不依赖任何公司和系统，依然能为他人创造价值的底气。
曾经那种大厂里无休止的、漫延到周末和被窝里的慢性焦虑，消失了 。取而代之的是最原始的逻辑：你做一件事，就有一分的反馈。
我们大多数人，可能不一定会经历同样的大厂至暗时刻，也不会去给CEO写信。但我们都在某种“轨道”里挣扎过。都在某个深夜怀疑过，眼前这份消耗心力的工作，到底意义何在。
他很喜欢《臣服实验》里的一句话：
“生活会给你各种礼物，但是我们的问题就是我们太活在自己脑子里边了，我们会拒绝生活的礼物。”
看穿那条深不见底的阶梯，或许只是一个微小的瞬间。
松开紧抓着扶手的手。
转身接住生活递来的礼物。
meet THE GUEST
Yuzheng Sun, known online as 课代表立正, is a Seattle-based economist turned data scientist turned AI educator whose career is best understood not as a linear climb but as a series of deliberate experiments — each one stress-testing his model of what work, and life, should actually feel like.
Sun grew up in Yantai, Shandong before moving to Shanghai for high school, then left for the United States for college, earning a Bachelor's in Economics and Mathematics at Lake Forest College — where he was also on the NCAA swimming team — before completing a PhD in Economics at Cornell University, with a concentration in empirical corporate finance and applied econometrics. His academic training gave him something more durable than credentials: a habit of asking what would have to be true for an idea to work, and what evidence would change his mind.
That instinct followed him through a decade of institutional life. He interned at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in Beijing before joining Amazon as an Economist building causal inference models. He then moved to Meta, where as a Senior Data Scientist on Facebook Marketplace he was a key contributor to a 30x growth in onsite transactions — and became, in the process, a devoted practitioner of A/B experimentation as a tool for replacing opinion with reality. He then joined Tencent Games as Vice Director of Data, Growth, and AI, leading a team of over thirty people across data science, machine learning, and strategy. Recognizing that the constraints of large corporate life were no longer the right conditions for how he wanted to work, he left to join Statsig as its Principal Data Scientist and sole evangelist — departing the day before the company was acquired by OpenAI in 2025.
Today, Sun runs Superlinear Academy, an AI education platform with over 300,000 followers, 3,000 paying students, and a course rated 4.9 out of 5. His thesis is simple and stubborn: the best way to learn AI is to build with it — not consume it. In April 2025, he published 《真本事：从会工作到会赚钱》 with 人民邮电出版社 — a book that distills his frameworks on turning workplace competence into independent income. He is also a strategic advisor at AhaCreator and Cookiy AI. His writing and teaching can be found at superlinear.academy and lizheng.ai.
Away from the work, he is most likely thinking about metaphysics, raising his son, or reading something that sits at the edge of where physics runs out of answers.
Yuzheng Sun was a guest on Talk to Jane｜ 对话身边的人, Season 2, Episode 5, where he spoke about what it actually takes to leave a corporate career, why most people's Plan B never materializes, and why — in his view — the risk of staying is almost always larger than the risk of going.
