Tonight I have an important dinner, so a long piece isn’t in the cards.
But walking home, lost in thought, some ideas came to me — ideas I want to share with you. So let me just follow the rhythm of the highway traffic and talk freely.
My personal read on the next decade goes roughly like this:
First, social stratification will solidify further. For ordinary people trying to leap ahead on pure hard work alone, the difficulty will be immense. But this isn’t entirely bad news — it means the path upward will be clearly defined. Those who can read and apply the wisdom left by those who came before will leave the brute-force grinders in the dust.
Second, every field will establish clear thresholds. And if you want to carve out your place in any domain, beyond following the right path, you absolutely must find the right guide to bring you through the door.
Without that — if you can’t read the road yourself and refuse to let someone show you the way — you’ll spend a lifetime running headfirst into walls, rediscovering dead ends that others proved impassable long ago.
If you’re an ordinary person, there’s no need to envy wealthy second-generation heirs. What you see is the surviving result of generations of struggle, competition, and elimination — for every winner, countless others were weeded out. There’s something genuinely worth learning from those who made it through.
We should learn from them and surpass them — not harbor resentment and quietly give up.
Besides, the bigger the empire, the greater the risk of capsizing. In the past three years, I’ve seen far too many businesspeople and investors make one wrong move and lose everything — straight back to zero.
Speaking purely from a personal standpoint, I would no longer encourage anyone to pursue entrepreneurship in any form. In fact, the very concept of “starting from scratch” (创业) is no longer suited to this era. I’d rather use the word expand (扩业) to describe how wealth gets built going forward.
To expand means: take what you already have, in a domain you already know, and turn something small into a business.
If you have a craft, a skill, a capability — let the people who need it know it exists. Then, in your spare time, slowly build your reputation, raise your level, and charge more as your quality rises to match.
If you have a small resource or connection — try offering it first within your own industry or social circle. Stabilize, then expand your reach, and grow from there.
Remember this: the move where you see someone else’s business thriving, impulsively decide to go all-in, and pour your life savings into it — that approach now carries a 99% failure rate. Full stop.
Most people who have never truly been wealthy can’t imagine this, but even now there are people out there making real money, riding wave after wave of wealth. The breadth of this land, the richness of its resources, the opportunities buried in its soil — they remain almost absurdly abundant.
Yes, digging up those opportunities is enormously difficult.
But let me sketch the profile of the people still doing it, and you’ll see — beneath the bitter cold, the logic of making money looks like this:
We — oh, I mean they — live simply every day. They absolutely refuse to drown themselves in material excess. It’s not that they can’t afford lavish spending — they simply won’t waste their energy on entertainment and distraction.
No chaos, no complexity, no mental exhaustion — that’s the consensus in this circle.
Because what’s truly expensive isn’t money. It’s energy and mental bandwidth.
With that same energy, they’d rather sit down and read a handful of foundational books — spending a month or two going deep on a single field. Finance, business, capital, trade, history, military strategy, politics, philosophy, logic, geography… Over the course of a year, in sheer depth and breadth of knowledge, they simply crush the masses glued to short videos all day. It’s the gap between an elephant and an ant.
Over three years, the difference becomes indescribable — essentially the gap between a prehistoric human and a modern one.
Protect your core assets with sharp instincts. Ignore those who scream all day that this market is done, that sector is collapsing. Hold your core assets with unwavering conviction — never foolishly liquidate them at a loss. And at the same time, never recklessly acquire heavy new assets or take on new debt. Let time gradually lighten the load, until there are only assets, no liabilities — completely unburdened.
Then, most importantly:
The people in this circle are constantly engaged in resource reintegration — and everyone in it knows it.
No one is pulling out large sums of real cash right now. So everything runs on resources and assets instead of money.
“I have this critical connection — he needs a certain qualification and platform. Whoever can pull it together, let’s get moving.”
“I have a great space sitting idle, no cost to me anyway — let’s incubate good businesses there. Waive the rent, give me equity.”
“I have a loyal clientele who trust my reputation. Point me to genuine quality services, and I can get the whole operation running.”
And so it goes. Money never sleeps. Beneath the winter chill, unseen soil remains teeming with life.
Not everyone will grasp all of the above — I know that. Even with a high-caliber readership, I’d estimate maybe 30% will truly get it.
Some things don’t need to be said twice. Say them too many times and I start to feel uncomfortable myself.
I’ll just say this one thing: human nature is not stupidity — it is ignorance. Whether you ultimately evolve into a predator or prey depends entirely on which circle you run in.