This article is a worldly primer dedicated to all young people. It is dark, dense, and thoroughly utilitarian — yet it is one of the most important pieces of wisdom you will need once you step into society.
Fair warning: this article may cause you some discomfort. Read with care.
If your life philosophy is “life should be peaceful, full of quiet little joys, and free of strife” — please exit now.
But if your life philosophy is “I want to win. I want an extraordinary life” — good. Then do me the favor of reading on.
1. Your Position Matters Far More Than Your Brain
Master Chi has stated countless times in his writing: the world operates on one eternal logic — it is always a game of “division of labor and cooperation.”
Don’t underestimate those words. Because their deeper meaning is this: there will always be people playing the role of cattle and horses, doing the repetitive, grueling, thankless work. And there will always be people playing the role of lions and dragons — leading and skimming the profits from what those below them create.
Always. Without exception.
And you already know — no matter how uncomfortable this makes you feel — this is iron logic that has never been broken and never will be. It is the foundational rule of this world, unchanged since the beginning of time.
Even if civilization collapsed and life began again, you would still see the same division between predators and prey.
So now that we understand that “someone will always be used” and “someone will always be the one doing the using” — let me ask you: what is your job?
No need to think about it. Your job is to become one of those who command resources and control others — an upper-tier player.
In three words: Win your way up.
Otherwise, settle down and become the lower-tier worker who is used and hired, dutifully handing over everything you produce so those above can pick the best cuts and toss you the scraps.
It doesn’t matter what profession, industry, or credentials you have. Because what determines your rewards has never been your brain — it has always been the position of your ass.
Don’t get offended. This is the reality of where you sit. You’re welcome to slam the door and walk out — but if you don’t solve the “position problem,” you’ll never escape this cycle. You’ll circle around and come crawling back, still eating the leftovers.
That is fate — the inescapable destiny of those who remain at the bottom.
This is precisely why Master Chi has never had much patience for those fools who believe “everything should be done with righteousness and transparency.”
The greatest lie of this era is this: a bunch of idiots love telling you that hard work and hustle are the only answer.
Bullshit. Who said so? Hard work and hustle are merely two entries in the playbook of what you should know — they are nowhere near the core of the matter.
On top of that, these same people tell you that ambition, desire, and scheming are beneath dignity. That they are despicable tricks not fit for polite company.
Allow Master Chi, with full dramatic emphasis, to say: get out of here.
Let them explain how they themselves achieved what they’ve achieved today.
Here is what Master Chi will tell you: regardless of what field you’re in, set yourself a clear direction and goal for climbing. And when you strip it down, there are only two paths:
One — climb as high as possible within the existing system, to a core position or key partnership.
Two — quietly accumulate the system’s resources and relationships, hold them in reserve, and one day break away with like-minded allies to build your own operation.
No third option. It’s that simple. Otherwise, your position will always be at the bottom of someone else’s machine, being quietly digested.
Note that the first path looks crude and blunt, but it is the starting point of everything. And its execution is remarkably pure: once you have direction, methods and strategies will follow naturally.
For example, say you’re currently a junior employee with the ambition to climb to a senior executive position. The moment that ambition is lit, you’ll find that compared to your aimless colleagues, the questions you ask yourself each day become more complex and comprehensive:
How do I deliberately make my work performance stand out?
How do I suppress those who want to outcompete me, or who will someday become my subordinates?
How do I cultivate the attention and favor of the right connections?
These questions may seem naive at first. You won’t see results immediately. But with each cycle of friction and learning, you will sharpen. Gradually, you’ll mature and grow powerful.
Life, in many ways, doesn’t work the way people think. Capability doesn’t create achievement — it’s the hunger for achievement that cultivates capability.
2. Ambition, Desire, and Scheming Are All Good Things
The vast majority of children born into ordinary households come into this world with a built-in “low-tier mindset.” Its core: study hard, work diligently, live simply.
Their parents never teach them to have ambition or drive — because the parents themselves are operating at a “staying alive is enough” level.
Even holiday phone calls go like this: “Sweetheart, you’re out there grinding alone in a strange city — are you doing okay?”
Come on. Use your head. A kid grinding alone in a strange city — how well could they possibly be doing? The most you’ll get back is a strained “Don’t worry, I’m fine” — and you think that means everything is fine?
What a parent should be saying is: “What obstacles are you hitting that you can’t get past? Tell me — I’ll give you advice or connect you with resources.”
But they just relax the moment they hear “I’m fine,” not realizing the kid is quietly in despair: I’m clearly capable. All I lacked was slightly better footing, and everything could have been different.
This is the mental model of the ordinary household — the parents and the children they raise.
And honestly, Master Chi doesn’t even have a problem with it. If it weren’t like this, where would all those compliant, easy-to-manage workers come from? Who would fill all those low-tier roles that keep the world running?
The world always needs its bolts and components.
Of course, some people are perfectly fine with that kind of life. But as Master Chi has said, the cost is that you will never experience material or spiritual abundance. You will always be the party that gets used. There is no version of reality where employees and workers rise up to claim the feast.
Your family will never live in a spacious, quality home. Your parents will never access top-tier medical care. Your children will never receive the finest education and taste what it feels like to be truly ahead.
All of that requires relentless, unstoppable ambition and desire to keep driving you forward.
But how can you expect a pair of mediocre parents to teach you something as elevated as ambition?
All they can pass down is penny-pinching, calculating every cent, and squeezing every advantage from petty situations. They don’t know how to teach you that true ambition means sacrificing small gains for large ones — enduring a period of strategic patience and investment in exchange for far greater returns down the line.
True ambition means never being satisfied with the present. It means always pushing for better — for yourself and your family — until what others have never even heard of becomes your everyday normal.
Take the white-collar crowd always talking about “poetry and distant places.” What does that actually mean for you? It means a plane ticket, a luxury hotel, and a private custom tour guide — a few thousand dollars, and other people’s “poetry and distant places” become a folk-culture trip you’d rather not repeat.
So never, ever look down on yourself. The reason you’re ordinary is almost certainly because, from a young age, you were like an elephant chained to a small stake. You couldn’t break free as a child — so as an adult, you never even try. And so you remain domesticated for life.
What you don’t realize is that in many things, just a little effort would produce results far beyond what most people achieve. The vital instinct that was stripped from you has a name: ambition and desire.
3. Never Associate with the Weak
This point is critical. Understand that weaknesses exist for a reason — those who remain weak have fundamental deficiencies within themselves.
These aren’t personality flaws in how they relate to you. They are an absence of the talent and potential required to level up. Whether it’s capability or character, it ultimately means this person will not be recognized or rewarded by the system they operate in.
Whatever you do — do not be infected by their image of struggling hard with no ambition. Don’t mistake them for partners worth huddling with for warmth.
A laborer’s friends are all laborers. A boss’s friends are all bosses.
Crude but true — not for any other reason except that you’ll only understand why some people are permanently stuck at the bottom once you’ve climbed past them yourself. The longer you spend time with these people, the more their habits seep into you, until you’ve caught their mindset like a contagion.
I always encourage young people: when you’re first starting out, put your pride aside and attach yourself to the strongest person you have access to — even if that means being an apprentice for a while.
An apprentice may look lowly, but it is the fastest shortcut to leveling up. What you pay is flattery, deference, and handling their miscellaneous tasks. What you get is front-row observation of every detail and nuance of how a successful person operates. Is that tuition not worth it?
Many people refuse. Too proud to bend. They’d rather huddle with a group of equally weak peers to brainstorm — not realizing that a room full of losers can only collectively produce a blueprint for failure. Worse, there’s a real chance that one smooth-talking loser in the group leads everyone else into an even deeper ditch.
Everyone has a mentor worth following nearby. Even among three people walking together, at least one has something to teach.
For ordinary young people, spending less time aimlessly hanging out and more time with experienced veterans will always pay off.
One important caveat: make sure you attach yourself to people with genuine accomplishment or deep experience. What I genuinely fear is young people falling in with “semi-successful” types — those with a silver tongue and modest results. These people are the ones most likely to lead you astray.
The type who opens a small shop or lands a cushy job and comes looking for an audience in their little circle. In their eyes, everything you try is flawed, risky, or problematic. And in your eyes, because they’ve managed to buy a property or two or look moderately successful on the surface, you mistake them for a role model.
But their path is not the right path — it’s a one-off fluke.
Here’s a tell: connections and resources have a nature — they attract each other upward. So if someone is constantly claiming to be doing well and highly accomplished, yet still keeps coming to your circle looking for validation — that person is almost certainly a hollow shell.
4. What Truly Useful Knowledge Looks Like
There is one kind of knowledge that matters above all others: the complete experience of success.
Its value, from start to finish, is that it gives you the experience of playing an entire hand — not just understanding one card.
This is extremely critical. It is the core insight behind why many people suddenly flip the table and win.
First, understand this: we absorb enormous amounts of information and knowledge every day, all day. Some of it is brilliant and original. But almost all of it is meaningless to you right now.
Why? Because it cannot help you actually see one “big project” through from start to finish.
Take real estate investing as an example. Knowing whether prices will rise or fall is worth nothing on its own.
Truly valuable knowledge means: starting from sourcing and evaluating properties, drilling into floor plans and unit levels, then negotiating with agents and sellers to drive the price as low as realistically possible. Once you’ve secured the property, knowing how to renovate it cost-effectively — including the sequencing of construction, selection of materials, and layout of the interior design. And finally, packaging that asset for high-premium rental or resale.
That entire chain of logic is what has value. Only that comprehensive, end-to-end mastery allows you to profit from real estate regardless of whether the market is bull or bear.
This is even more true in domains like stocks and capital markets.
Master Chi has spent considerable time reading destiny charts for heavyweights in the capital world — and even they run into setbacks and unpredictable obstacles.
Take a confirmed bull market. Even with total certainty, how do you maximize your returns? The simple answer is leverage — but do you go through a brokerage or a capital backer? Every link in the chain must be airtight.
How do you negotiate with the market makers to anchor a mutually beneficial range and align on a direction? How do you coordinate with the hot money in the market so the retail theater plays out correctly — because only then do retail investors come in? How does a major capital position accumulate a stake without attracting attention — 200 accounts or 500? Do you bring in a public fund willing to work for a thin margin to act as the weight-lifter?
That is what a complete investment playbook actually looks like.
The rest — scattered, clever, attention-grabbing “insights” and “knowledge” — are not worthless, but they don’t add up to anything actionable. They’re interesting sideshows, not your core toolkit.
Every one of these paths must be walked in person. Only then does the knowledge become genuine wisdom, absorbed into your blood as your own capability.
Everything else — disconnected fragments of striking observations — is mostly just entertaining stories.
5. This World Always Has Opportunities for the Ambitious
When Master Chi reads destiny frameworks (格局), he has always believed: the warmth of this world lies not in how much mercy it shows to those who surrender quietly — but in how much reward it offers to those who refuse to give in.
Ask yourself honestly: how many times in your life have you truly chased something?
Let me clarify what “chasing” means: running seriously toward one emerging wave. Going all in, at least once.
Don’t tell me there were no opportunities. Think harder.
Look at just the past five years: the rise of Taobao and the entire ecosystem it spawned. Weibo and the media and marketing industries it created. WeChat and the ocean of resellers and overseas buyers it fed. Public accounts and the enormous cultural publishing platforms they generated. Live streaming and short video, and the countless careers they made possible.
These were the visible opportunities — the ones anyone could see. Not everyone who tried succeeded. The odds were still slim. But the barrier to entry was low, the learning curve was fast, and a single success could easily push annual income into the hundreds of thousands.
Set aside the question of how unlikely it seems. I just want to ask you one thing: did you try?
That is the only question. Did. You. Try.
Because if you had tried — you wouldn’t be sitting still. You’d be watching eagerly for the next wave, the next game to enter.
Why? Because win or lose, once you’ve been in the arena, you realize none of it is as terrifying as it seemed. Even failure is a gain. You walk away with experience and logic — the foundation for the next attempt.
And here’s the thing: people are always falling from the clouds and making room for the next person. Given that, why wouldn’t you take your shot?
Closing
Today’s article is, relatively speaking, written in plain language. Some words are sent from one wave to the next. My words are sent from one wolf to the next.
So I refuse to treat the young like fools, feeding them motivational soup and hollow platitudes.
They should understand: all the rules and moral codes of this world were drawn up by those who benefit from them.
Since we’ve fought our way through, the right thing to do is to help the young break free from their chains — not keep them boxed in by frameworks designed to hold them back.
That is the true responsibility and obligation of the wolves who came before to the wolves who follow.