Look at the people around you — every single one of them is wracking their brains trying to extract something from you, yet not one is willing to give or share with you without expecting something in return. No wonder they spend their entire lives scraping by at the bottom. Whatever you do, don’t follow their example. Because you were born to fly higher.
Today, hear a word from Master Chi — and learn exactly what it takes to win the favor of fortune.
I have to be honest: young white-collar workers and wage earners today are in a genuinely pitiable position. Looking at the path they’ve traveled to get here — no one has ever taught them, and no one ever will, how to actually rise in this era and in this society.
Many of them have solid educational backgrounds and professional skills. But there is one particular quality — visible the moment someone acts — that reveals whether they have it or not. This single quality tells you whether a person will ever amount to something, whether they can carve their own path in the world. Without it, a person is destined to clock in and out at some company, quietly climbing the ladder, until they grow old and die.
What is this quality? Generosity — whether a person spends freely or clutches every coin.
Don’t believe me? Look around you. Among your friends and close companions, how many are truly open-handed? The best test: on your birthday, how many friends — with no business dealings between you, no mutual interests at stake — would simply reach out and give you a five-figure gift?
Or try this: ask to borrow money. See if anyone in your circle would readily lend you a million without hesitation.
If the answer is no, then frankly — you haven’t yet broken into the right circles, and those people you call friends aren’t worth cultivating too deeply.
Pick yourself up. Find a way to climb. Go breathe the cleaner air at higher altitudes. You’ll thank yourself for it.
I remember once, dining with my wife at a rather nice restaurant. At the table next to ours, a young man and woman were having what was clearly a flirtatious meal together.
The young man looked polished — classic investment banking attire, well-presented. The woman was elegantly dressed, quite beautiful. In any other context, you’d say they made a lovely pair. But then the man did something that shattered the entire image.
While ordering, he said: “This dish isn’t really worth the price — should we look at something else?”
Now I know what you’re thinking: what a sensible, cost-conscious young man.
And I don’t entirely disagree. But Master Chi will tell you flat out — if that girl were my daughter, I would tell her to think again.
The reason is simple: spending money is about reading the room. In certain moments, money simply has to be spent. Even if it looks like poor value on paper, what it buys in those moments cannot be replaced by money alone.
If a young man is calculating every penny while taking my daughter on a date, I wouldn’t admire his thriftiness — I’d find it more troubling. If he has energy to pinch pennies, he’d be far better off channeling that into his career and earning more. That’s how you have both face and substance.
Think about it: if that young man had instead leaned back and said — “Hey, don’t worry about the price when you’re somewhere like this! Order whatever you like!” — which approach do you think would actually win over a woman’s heart?
Masculine appeal and “rational thinking” genuinely operate on two entirely separate systems. This is why so many people can’t figure out how certain flashy, unreliable men effortlessly attract women that model, hardworking employees can only dream of. You work hard, you’re dependable, and yet a woman won’t spare you a single glance. The answer is simple: stop talking to me about being smart — have you actually shown up like a man and made a woman feel something? That’s your real weakness.
Trust me: a romance forged through bold, generous gestures will always be of far higher quality than a marriage built on haggling and penny-pinching.
I remember in my younger days, when we were out and someone picked up the tab — no one ever stressed over the smaller costs. A bottle of Screaming Eagle, double the outside price inside the venue — you opened it without blinking. Anyone who hesitated, who second-guessed — they never held their head up again among us. Quibble over small costs, and you’ll never accomplish great things.
Because generosity is the finest opening move in any relationship. It’s the mode of interaction that puts people most at ease. With that kind of start — whether you’re dealing with men or women — the other person understands your sincerity and becomes far more willing to open up and trust you fully.
Now, I can already hear many people sneering: “Ha! People are ruthless these days — act that generous and they’ll just take you for a fool and exploit you.”
To that, Master Chi has nothing to say — except: by all means, continue being stingy with yourself and guarded with others. Because in my entire life, I have never once seen a miser accomplish anything great.
You have to understand: money is itself a resource. And like any resource, its value doesn’t lie in obsessively counting its digits — it lies in whether spending it achieves your objective.
This is where you see the fatal flaw of the wage-worker mentality. Their understanding of “wealth” is impoverished and empty.
In their minds, money equals wealth — just as peasants of old believed a storehouse full of rice bags meant prosperity. What they don’t realize is that among all the vehicles of wealth in this world, money itself is the weakest. (Underline this: “wealth vehicle” — remember those two words.)
So when they see their savings grow from zero to a few hundred thousand in their bank account, they feel successful and financially savvy. They start buying property, dabbling in stocks, occasionally dipping into high-risk ventures.
Predictably — unless their parents are wealthy — the ceiling of their entire life’s work is a modest few million left when they retire. And that’s on the good end.
What they fail to understand is that the heart of “connections” (人脉, rén mài) isn’t the “people” — it’s the “network of veins.” And veins require a constant flow of resources to stay nourished.
Yet the wage-worker’s imagination for this kind of investment is severely limited.
There’s a famous line on a popular Chinese forum: “When you’re nobody, you can’t possibly meet valuable connections.” That’s not entirely wrong — but it only applies to white-collar pseudo-elites, because what they believe in is fairness, courtesy, mutual non-imposition, and rational consumption — the standard cultural norms of the lower rungs.
Don’t mistake this for enlightened thinking. It’s not just wrong — it’s a direct continuation of the peasant mentality.
Because if that were how the world worked, every high-end entertainment venue and corporate hospitality establishment in China would be out of business.
The reality? Spending forty or fifty thousand on a single dinner, dropping two hundred thousand for a private room for an evening — this is completely normal in the business world. Every enterprise that actually generates real wealth understands that this is how the game is properly played. And only through this kind of investment can you ever access elite connections.
Why? Because only when you offer genuine sincerity will others feel a reason to connect with you.
Who would ever work with someone who haggles over every penny? Please — go as far away as possible, collect your fixed salary for the rest of your life.
When it comes to making real money, the bigger the deal and the greater the interests involved, the more deliberately blurred the accounting should be. In that blur live the crumbs and commissions that keep certain people fed and loyal — and in that blur, people also sense that you’re someone worth trusting.
How do you think the hidden loyalties and deep trust of this world are built? Were they calculated line by line on a spreadsheet? No — they were built through mutual vulnerability, through people knowingly eating small losses, letting things slide, pretending not to notice, treating being taken advantage of as a mark of virtue.
And now I know someone will jump up and protest: “Master Chi, look at the billionaires on the Forbes list — they all have squeaky-clean reputations! Even the big real estate tycoons are cracking down on gray income within their own organizations!”
Sure. But do you know the rule: don’t just look at how they manage those below them — look at how they manage those above them?
Even if you don’t have the channels to see all of that, you should understand: the day a tycoon decides to stop playing by the unwritten rules with those above him, the real power brokers will come settle accounts with him too.
People who ask these questions simply don’t know what the billionaires’ various “business associations” are actually for. They also don’t realize that nobody is a saint. In the turbulent, worldly rush of life, the most relaxed and effortless conversations about major deals happen precisely in those “vulgar” settings. Like it or not — it really is those unglamorous things that close the gap between people.
So: the best way to judge whether someone has a future is simply to measure how strong the “wage-worker smell” is on them.
The more intensely someone radiates that nine-to-five, fixed-salary energy, the lower their chances of ever breaking through.
Similarly, judging how well someone is doing in life comes down to one thing: social energy. How much can they mobilize? When trouble comes, can one phone call set the right people, connections, and resources in motion?
If a person reaches forty still going it alone — facing everything solo, unable to call on any network when setbacks come — then I’m sorry, the odds of that person rising again are genuinely very slim.
You have to understand: a life spans decades of walking through this world. And on that journey, those who fight alone almost always exhaust themselves and fall. Only those who know how to draw on others’ strength, and who continuously forge bonds and accumulate goodwill, can remain standing through one test and setback after another.
In the language of destiny charts (命盘), those with truly great life patterns (格局) aren’t people who sail smoothly from start to finish — they are precisely the ones who, in their weakest moments, knew how to bask in the fortune of those around them. And the reason others were willing to share their prosperity? Because at some earlier moment, they had looked out for each other and helped each other stand.
Let me close today with a classic line — and may the wise among you understand its true meaning and live it fully:
“Generosity is often merely ambition in disguise — it scorns small gains in order to secure the greater ones.”