After extensive contact with both the wealthy and the general public, I came to realize why ordinary people can work themselves to the bone their entire lives and still amount to nothing: they simply don’t understand where wealth comes from or how it actually operates.
This is why they stumble through life making one bad move after another — and in their relentless anxiety, they get harvested by one predatory scheme after another until there’s nothing left.
It can’t be helped. Our education system claims to cover everything — language, math, foreign languages, physics, chemistry, history — yet it never once teaches you how society actually functions, let alone what wealth really is.
Yet helping ordinary people understand the logic of wealth is an enormously difficult task, because most people have absolutely no grasp of it — while being completely convinced that they do.
So before the right understanding can take root, the old, wrong beliefs must first be completely torn down. Only then can something new be built.
With that in mind, today’s article starts from the foundational level of society and works its way up, layer by layer. I hope you take something useful from it.
The article is organized into three parts: 1 — Three Generations of Accumulation: What exactly is being accumulated? 2 — Position, Opportunity, and Circles: What do these resources actually mean? 3 — The Logic of Wealth: How does it truly operate?
By the end, your understanding will outstrip most economists and finance scholars who are all surface and no substance.
Three Generations of Accumulation: What Exactly Is Being Accumulated?#
Let’s start by addressing a piece of nonsense that barely deserves a response: “I spent ten years grinding through school — why can’t I compete with your three generations of accumulation?”
Anyone with even a little real-world experience can tell you: the people who say this are almost always still in school — and specifically, mediocre students from lower-tier institutions.
Only that kind of student asks questions at that level.
Because any young person with even a bit of insight can figure it out: studying is nothing more than the process of earning a college admission letter. Three generations of accumulation, on the other hand, represents real, tangible wealth and networks built up over decades. The very act of comparing the two is an insult to the latter.