These past couple of days, as the year winds down, something rather remarkable has been happening.
The comment section of my public channel — and the private messages on my knowledge platform — have been flooded with dozens, sometimes hundreds of messages every single day. And nearly every one of them is asking the same question: Master, do you think 2024 will be better?
My position on this has always been clear.
Stop waiting for some miracle to materialize in the short term. Even if 2024 does begin to warm up, it will be a slow, gradual thaw — not a sudden burst of spring that makes everything feel easy again.
But even so, life goes on. We keep moving.
So no matter how many worries are weighing on your heart, you cannot let them stop your slow, steady forward march.
Those of you who know me well already know that I come from a fairly typical wealthy merchant family. Through several turns of the times, my family missed some opportunities and made some mistakes — enough to lose the standing we once held among the prominent families of Jiangnan. But that very experience gave me a front-row seat to the rise and fall of a family, and to the ups and downs of all kinds of people around me.
That’s what gave me, from a young age, a toughened and resilient heart — the ability to absorb hard blows. And it planted deep in my blood the instincts of a merchant and a man of the world.
You see, the defining trait of people like that — beyond the fact that when wealth fortune (cáiyùn) comes, the money flows fast — is that they carry big hearts and never stop turning over new possibilities in their minds.
That’s exactly why, when I see so many of you walking around with your faces creased in worry, I genuinely find it hard to understand.
Because in my view: a human life is supposed to have its peaks and valleys. Living through spring, summer, autumn, and winter — many cycles of them — is perfectly normal. So why does one slightly longer winter make people feel like all hope is lost?
It really isn’t that serious.
And I’m not just talking about others — let me tell you about myself. When I first started out as a young man, I stepped straight into a losing hand. Right out of the gate, I was shouldering my family’s massive debts, with the label of “the one they’d given up on” hanging around my neck.
Then, after I finally managed to resolve the debt situation, I went through several rounds of starting businesses — some succeeding, some failing. Each failure was like scraping down to the bone. Back to zero. Then get up and do it again.
Even today, now that I’ve reached financial freedom and things have gradually stabilized, I keep myself mentally prepared at all times. Because I know full well that the next setback might not come in the form of money or business — it could be health, or any number of other things.
And so what?
You meet the soldier with a general, you meet the flood with a wall of earth. Life, by its very nature, is a process where fortune and misfortune lean on each other.
That said, I can understand — to a degree — what’s behind the anxiety so many of you are feeling. Because just looking at people’s professions, it’s easy to see why they’re so unsettled.
Right now, the people carrying the most internal anxiety are overwhelmingly white-collar workers in internet companies, finance, real estate, and various sunset industries. Sometimes just listening to their casual conversation, you can feel the weight and dread radiating off them.
And their worry isn’t without reason.
First — many of them are approaching 35, 40, or 45. The chances of being “optimized out” keep rising. And this round of elimination is particularly brutal because there’s no clear new path waiting for them on the other side.
Second — many have built families by now. The household expenses are real and concrete. One career disruption, and everything they spent over a decade building could collapse back to zero.
But here’s something harsh I’ve actually written about four or five years ago: The reason people fear the future is fundamentally because they didn’t lay the groundwork for it when they had the breathing room to do so.
It’s something I’ve been asking everyone who comes to me these days for a destiny reading and life planning session — very directly: You’re coming to me now, scrambling for answers at the last minute. But what did you do with the four or five years before this? Did you build any kind of contingency plan?
And 99% of them say: “Those were good years. I didn’t think that far ahead.”
Well. There it is.
The thing I’m most proud of over these past few years is not that I’ve gradually built a solid reputation in the merchant and official circles of Jiangnan. What I’m proud of is sharing, through my writing, wisdom that has genuinely helped readers — and through traditional Chinese metaphysics, helping many of my friends and followers find their footing and build lives of stability and prosperity.
Is there some secret formula to that?
Honestly, no. If I had to name one thing, it’s this: by reading someone’s life pattern (géjú), I identify the few key years and pivotal opportunities, and then I encourage them to take that step — boldly. Don’t hesitate. Don’t drag your feet. Just have the courage to seize those moments and not let them slip by.
And the results?
All I can say is that 2023 — the Year of the Rabbit — was a year when the gifts and tokens of gratitude filling my home had nowhere to go. Almost every day, someone was coming back to express their thanks for what had come to pass.
I’m not saying this to get you to book a session with me. I’m saying it so you understand this: the more turbulent the times, the clearer your thinking needs to be.
When you’re already standing on a shifting ice floe, you can’t afford to keep waiting. You can’t keep deceiving yourself. You need to start gently testing other possible paths with one foot — slowly working your way free from the danger.
If you can really take that in and hold it close, then it won’t just be this winter you’ll get through — it will be every winter that comes after it, for the rest of your life. You won’t be trapped in hopelessness.
There’s one more thing I’ve come to feel deeply: never let yourself be afraid of failure — in any form. And never, before you’ve even tried, let your imagination run straight to the worst possible ending and scare yourself back into doing nothing.
Strictly speaking, as long as what you’re doing is reasonable and law-abiding, and you’re not betting everything on a single throw — making small mistakes actually works in your favor.
Especially if you have reliable businesspeople, investors, or seasoned operators in your circle — you’ll quickly understand that small failures in various forms are just part of the daily texture of life for these people. The key is to not give up. And every time you hit a wall, settle your mind, think through solutions step by step, and keep nudging things forward until the path finally opens.
And look — even I have quietly started making a little video content lately. Without any promotion, without even telling most of the people who follow my public channel. And yet the response has been strong.
Worth noting: every single video is made by my own hands. Whenever a good thought strikes me, I write it down immediately, then record it and make it into a video. It’s a bit rough around the edges, I’ll admit. And I know that working alone, I’ll never match a professional production team. But I believe that, in time, I can slowly draw in a small community of people who need some positive energy and an upward spirit. That’s more than enough.
I’ve written quite a lot here, but really, the entire piece comes down to this:
Don’t be afraid. Hard winters are hard for everyone.
The more difficult the times, the more important it is to encourage yourself to make small attempts — whether with friends, colleagues, childhood companions, distant relatives, or people you’ve met online. Wherever there’s even a small opportunity worth reaching for, don’t let it pass. Approach it with initiative and energy. Give yourself another chance to grow, another possible path to walk.
Maybe without a grounding in Chinese metaphysics, you’ll still feel uncertain sometimes. But don’t be afraid. As long as your general direction is right, the small obstacles in between will gradually be overcome.
When you look back a few years from now, you’ll see that the hardest gate — you’ve already passed through it.
The light boat has crossed ten thousand mountains.