Around mid-last year, a friend’s daughter returned to China after studying abroad and was figuring out her next steps. Her father specifically asked me to mentor her — at the very least, help her develop the ability to stand on her own two feet.
I had actually read this young woman’s life pattern (格局) when she was thirteen or fourteen years old — she was born with the makings of an entrepreneur. So I agreed.
Strictly speaking, from June of last year to March of this year — nine months — this young woman had already mapped out her own business path and was earning close to six figures every month through her own hustle.
Let me walk you through the details, step by step.
1
When I first began guiding her career, I made things crystal clear: in this day and age, any traditional business you’re familiar with is incredibly hard to break into. Veterans already have deep mastery of cost control and operational detail — you simply can’t compete with them head-on.
On top of that, even the most ordinary small business — a café, a bubble tea shop, a little flower store — requires 300,000 to 400,000 yuan just to get started, with no guarantee of profit.
Unless you bring genuinely strong domain expertise and razor-sharp operational thinking, these businesses all follow the same pattern: a grand opening, frantic activity, and a quiet, humiliating end.
So stay away from brick-and-mortar. Stay away from traditional business — unless you have a direct, powerful advantage, like owning the property outright.
2
The essence of commerce is simple: people know you, trust you, and then they’re willing to do business with you.
This applies to every single business under the sun. If you don’t grasp this, you’re destined to spend your whole life as someone else’s employee.
So I gave her a crucial piece of guidance: you think of yourself as smart, you have youth, looks, and easy, articulate speech — use those advantages. Add to that your solid family background, your overseas study experience, and years of traveling the world since childhood. All of that is soft capital. Put it on display.
Then, no excuses, no reasons — just shoot 10 to 15 ninety-second short videos every week. Talk about life, share funny observations, interesting stories — topics people actually want to hear.
Be genuine, candid, and real. Don’t treat your audience as traffic — treat every viewer as a living, breathing person. Study their feedback carefully.
Figure out what content people love and what sparks the liveliest conversation, then follow that path.
But don’t overthink it. Don’t spiral into “what if I can’t make money?” or “what if people criticize me?”
Once you’ve built enough reach and recognition, criticism and controversy will arrive alongside wealth and admiration. If you want to make money, drop the idea of staying perfectly pure — there’s no such thing as untainted profit. Stay legal and ethical, and that’s enough.
3
After two months of persistence, she was slowly developing her feel for the online world — but felt frustrated that after all that effort, she’d only gathered two or three thousand followers.
So I gave her another important lesson in business fundamentals: wealth and reputation both grow like a snowball — slowly at first. You either accept defeat and go find some junior office job to drift through, or you put your entire focus into making something out of what you’ve started.
Trust me — while you’re holding on, tens of thousands of people who started making content are quitting every single day. The market they abandon is your opportunity.
And here’s the reality: once the snowball starts rolling, all you have to do is hand the rest to time. The further it goes, the faster it grows — and a single day’s gains will eventually surpass what once took one or two months of grinding.
And indeed, that’s exactly what happened. Nine months in, this young woman had become a mid-tier content creator covering life abroad — around 100,000 followers across multiple platforms. Not an astronomical number, but by taking on relevant work each month, her income thoroughly outpaces the average office worker.
4
What to sell? How to make money? These are the least important questions to think about, because once you have enough reach, the answers resolve themselves.
The most basic, brainless approach: start a few fan group chats and sell everyday goods, fresh produce, whatever. Don’t say it’s hard — if you have four or five groups of around 300 people each and you run daily group buys for good deals, even the most ordinary housewife can pull in 40,000 to 50,000 yuan a month.
During the pandemic years, Master Chi had dozens of female readers exactly like this reach out asking for a destiny reading — wanting to understand their life pattern and map out their financial future.
Why? Because they’d gone from living at the mercy of their husbands’ moods to suddenly having abundant income — and genuinely didn’t know how to hold on to what they’d built.
So with this young woman, I laid out the logic just as clearly: in your spare time, add and sort through all the followers you’re close to. Get a rough sense of who they are — students? Office workers? Middle-aged?
Then sort them into groups of a few dozen each. In the student group, share advice on studying abroad. For office workers, share guidance on working overseas. For middle-aged followers, organize group buys for quality overseas products.
Once people read your advice and express a need, immediately connect them with the relevant service. Take your cut, earn your commission — clean and simple.
And another thing: always do business with people who have money. More money means less hassle. The reverse is equally true.
Don’t be afraid of embarrassment. Don’t be afraid of being ignored. Don’t be afraid of looking too eager for money. You know why ordinary people have no relationship with wealth? Because they genuinely “dare not and feel embarrassed to bring up anything money-related — they find it hard to even say the words.”
The truth? Any business in the world — as long as it’s legal and the exchange is fair — is perfectly righteous commerce.
And good business must be pursued and fought for. Close it once, and you can close it ten times, a hundred times, ten thousand times.
That is how wealth is built.
5
The reason I’m writing this article is that too many readers lately have left comments that make my blood boil: “Master, I’m really struggling. Because of XXXXXX” — some rambling, incoherent string of complaints — “I don’t know where to go. I want to get a destiny reading and join the community, but I can’t afford either. What should I do?”
Does that not raise your blood pressure too?
Because it tells me that despite reading so many of my articles, they haven’t grasped even a fraction of what I’ve been saying all along: this world is a vast hunting ground — brutal, but fair.
As long as you’re willing to “keep trying with the right mindset,” you will inevitably reap what you sow.
But if all you do is punch the clock and wait for your paycheck, then that ceiling is as high as it gets. No windfall is coming, and nothing extra will grow.
Master Chi still doesn’t understand how so many people can sustain decades of complaining without making a single real attempt to change anything.
How lazy, how stubborn, how weak must a person be?
The most absurd case of all: a female reader messaged me to say she’d shot five or six videos, got no real response, and gave up.
What can you say to that? You chose to quit — you own that.
6
Note: I’m not saying the only path is shooting videos or writing online content. But every road to business and wealth follows the same core principle — it’s all built on “relentless, consistent cultivation, gradually correcting your mindset and abilities through real-world experience.”
In Master Chi’s lifetime, I’ve seen it all — people who failed speculating, people who lost their bets.
But I have never once seen someone who worked with genuine, consistent diligence and walked away with nothing.
Whatever the case, Master Chi hopes you get to experience what wealth truly nourishes — a comfortable life that’s yours, the freedom to travel and broaden your horizons without financial pressure, and the ability to give your family an easy, pleasant existence.
The world is a hunting ground. Be too dull, too docile, too timid, too rigid — and you’re destined to come home empty-handed.
Brothers and sisters — sharpen your claws and your fangs without hesitation. This world is waiting for you to claim it.