Today’s content is fairly straightforward — though perhaps not immediately accessible to all readers.
This piece is written specifically for the members of Master Chi’s knowledge community. Given their standing and caliber, Master Chi has put together a few grounded, practical pieces of advice tailored for them.
Compared to content written for young people still striving, or for readers who haven’t yet achieved much, this is more philosophical than prescriptive — not a simple list of actionable tips.
That’s simply how life works: the cruder and more direct the wisdom, the more it speaks to the masses. But the more refined and comprehensive the thinking, the more it resonates with the elite.
So take these three brief pieces of advice seriously — even if you’re still “on the road.” Read them carefully. Let them sink in.
Someday, you’ll need them.
1. Travel More
Almost every friend of mine who has truly made something of themselves once believed that traveling abroad during the height of their ambitions was a form of self-sabotage.
For us Chinese, “traveling abroad” has essentially become synonymous with tourism. And tourism? That’s just another word for leisure and escape.
The irony, however, is that the generation of Chinese who genuinely got rich — those with serious capital allocation ability — unanimously view travel as one of the most valuable life habits a person can have.
Think about it: how many of the truly successful people you admire spent their entire lives in one city, never taking a break? How many don’t fly somewhere around the world each year to vacation and recharge?
We must acknowledge that our homeland, our hometowns, and the cities where we’ve built our careers are remarkable. They offer unparalleled pathways to business and wealth creation.
But that same daily environment carries a disproportionately high level of pressure.
Under that kind of pressure, the life and business decisions you make tend toward the impulsive and short-sighted — because you lack the space and mental stillness needed for periodic self-reflection.
But when you choose to spend time somewhere far away, quieting your mind, you’ll find that many things that once troubled you or kept you tangled in indecision were, in fact, trivial.
And in that state, your decisions and choices become far more clear-headed and far-reaching.
What’s more, those experiences allow you to rediscover what life itself is actually about.
Take buying a modest, clean little property abroad for family vacations — even while your heart remains tethered to things back home, you find yourself fully immersed in the simple joy of being with the people you love.
To put it simply: “change your environment, get some fresh air.” That’s all it is.
What I want you to understand is this: when the elite of a community unanimously and organically develop the same habits, what others say simply doesn’t matter. The only group you should align yourself with is the elite — using their behavior as your benchmark and reference, not drowning in online circles full of people who’ve never accomplished anything, spreading cynicism.
The elite are different from the mediocre masses. Everything they do has a reason behind it — you may just not be able to read it yet.
When the public mocks those who study abroad or relocate overseas, set your emotional reactions aside. Think calmly: why do some people choose to leave?
There’s no right or wrong here — it’s everyone’s basic right to choose. But shouldn’t you at least take time to examine and compare their paths and reasoning?
I love my country too. And that love was born precisely through comparison.
So — travel more, see more. The world is truly vast.
2. Play More
Many of the readers in Master Chi’s knowledge community have already reached a level in their careers where they should have moved beyond penny-pinching and meticulous calculation.
Of course, managing costs, expenses, and the various day-to-day details of business still requires their attention.
But business and career-building are also genuinely strange and fascinating things.
The most interesting truth is this: yes, the operational details of what you do matter. But what ultimately determines your ceiling — your final height and depth — is your life pattern (格局).
And life pattern is something you can cultivate. One of the most direct ways to do it is to have a hobby — especially an expensive one.
Consider: why is it that people with genuinely intimidating net worths tend not to pinch pennies the way ordinary people do? Shouldn’t greater success mean greater intelligence, and greater intelligence mean greater shrewdness — less extravagance, less impulsive spending?
At this point, many ordinary people will conclude that the wealthy are simply foolish with money. But wait — if being foolish with money is the formula, shouldn’t everyone who spends recklessly end up rich?
It’s the same with many young people today who love to mock those who buy luxury goods. They call it a “stupidity tax,” a racket — anyone who buys is a fool, and anyone who doesn’t is clever.
This is a deeply problematic mindset. When someone explains away everything they don’t understand as other people’s stupidity, that explanation becomes the greatest wall blocking them from real knowledge.
Let’s be direct: the habit of splitting every coin has always been associated with a very specific group — you don’t even need to name them. The more obtuse members of that group will treat it as a virtue. That’s their loss. In any domain — biology, finance, business logic — the penalty for obtuseness is elimination, without exception.
Remember this: at a certain stage, there is money you must “burn.”
That might mean occasionally treating yourself to luxury items — even when we both know the premium is manufactured and the glamour is artificial.
It might mean buying a sports car at some point, or picking up a few high-end watches — even when you understand they’re ultimately just status signals.
But this process — you must go through it. Experience it. And then let it bore you completely.
You cannot expect someone who has never been washed clean by material indulgence to leap directly into the pursuit of intellectual and cultural growth.
Yet our culture of mediocrity is fanatically devoted to “restraint” — and it gets proven wrong again and again. Only those who’ve lived through it truly understand: sometimes the antidote is the very poison itself.
Play when you should play. Spend when you should spend. Not a cent less than what needs to be burned.
Once you’ve played enough and had your fill, you’ll finally have the peace of mind to settle down and pursue the bigger goals in life.
After that, you’ll begin to develop a genuine interest in things that truly matter — exploring and expanding a domain of knowledge, deepening your understanding of your own cognitive framework. You’ll start to have a clearer, more grounded sense of your own life.
And when you sit down to think about business and career again, you’ll find that even the most formidable obstacles are nothing more than that.
I’m saying this today, and you feel nothing. But once you’ve lived it, you’ll agree with me without question.
3. Run in the Right Circles
The lives of people at the bottom are endlessly varied — and not particularly worth studying in detail.
But for someone at your level, with your particular trajectory upward, the most important thing to observe carefully is the people and events in the circles directly around you.
I’ve always held one conviction: even if every achievement in your life came purely from your own effort, once your net worth reaches somewhere in the range of 50 million and above, you must — and I mean deliberately, consciously must — build a circle composed of people at your level or higher.
Because the winds at the bottom are completely different from the winds at your altitude.
When liquidity floods the system, those at the bottom only feel the rising cost of living — opportunities and tailwinds have nothing to do with them. But the higher you climb, the more directly you benefit from what flows downward.
In the same way, if you have no peer network or circle, you might be doing reasonably well today. But you will have lost access to a “potential energy circle” (势能圈) — and make no mistake, that circle itself already constitutes a form of enormous wealth.
Think about it: when everyone around you earns barely five figures a month, all you can really do together is commiserate about life and complain about being exploited. Nothing of real substance comes from that.
But with a mature potential energy circle, combined with a solid foundation of your own, sustaining and growing wealth — even riding the tide to prosperity together — becomes entirely within reach.
Now, the popular argument today is that information flows freely, so information asymmetry no longer exists.
Anyone who says that has clearly never built anything of real consequence. Have you ever heard a founder or captain of industry say something like that?
The correct answer is: information asymmetry never disappears. It’s just that, compared to the early days of China’s reform and opening-up, there’s less of it and the gaps close faster.
Today’s information asymmetry — in modern terms — operates more like a trickle-down effect. It’s still everywhere. It just only circulates within small, closed circles, and it doesn’t throw open its doors to the general public. I won’t expand further on that here.