Dear brothers and sisters — a true classic is one that holds infinite wisdom no matter when you return to it.
Master Chi doesn’t care whether you are riding high or weathering hardship right now. This Ode to Heaven’s Mandate is something you must commit fully to heart.
The video runs a mere 90 seconds, yet it speaks the whole truth of fortune’s winding road. It is well worth your time.
I previously wrote about how Shanghai’s former richest man made his fortune — and it sparked enormous curiosity among many of you. You wanted to understand how that group of people managed to accumulate their first pot of gold during those wild, lawless years. They started out just like everyone else — penniless and powerless. So how did they break through the class ceiling and rise to wealth?
True to Master Chi’s long-standing habit, I don’t just want you to understand those old stories. I want you to extract real knowledge from them. So I’ve structured this article into several chapters, each building on the last:
Prologue: Your family of origin may well be the most terrifying thing in this world — because it transforms people who wouldn’t even qualify as your friends into relatives you can never quite escape.
I. The Truth About Toxic Family Bonds # The reason I have nothing but contempt for domestic television dramas is that they invariably love to attempt, at the story’s end, a forced rehabilitation of utter human garbage.
On a rare quiet occasion, a question surfaced unbidden in my mind: if you — my reader — were somehow a close friend or family member in my life, what would I want to say to you? What would I want to give you?
That question held me for a long time. Many things drifted through my mind — worldviews, perspectives on wealth, strategies for navigating life, sharp and penetrating insights. But when I thought it through carefully, none of them felt quite right.
I’ve been wanting to say something lately — something to quiet the restless hearts of people caught in this era of relentless competition and burnout (what the Chinese call neijuan — the exhausting spiral of diminishing returns). So let me share a small insight from the angle I know best: life pattern (格局).
There are three things you must always keep clearly separated: your own affairs, other people’s affairs, and heaven’s affairs.
“If you can cultivate an aura of wealth and nobility, you carry with you the finest Feng Shui for gathering fortune and attracting luck.” — Master Chi
It happens to be a day off, so I’m setting aside the heavier topics and talking about something interesting and genuinely valuable: “how to cultivate good face reading (面相).” Don’t underestimate it — having good 面相 can give you enormous natural advantages in career, business, and marriage.
Let me first lay bare the hidden truth behind the great casino: remember, every single dollar you earn here has an owner behind it. Sometimes you manage to pocket a little money — and that’s simply because the person on the other side of that trade is just as naive as you are, another foolish sheep who wandered in hoping to get lucky. The only reason you took their money is that they were slower, dumber, and more sluggish than you. Nothing more.
Introduction: There exists in this world a towering structure that reaches the heavens. Each floor requires you to produce the right key to unlock it. The first floor demands diligence. The second demands tenacity. The third demands intelligence. Every floor requires a different key — and each key works only for its designated lock. Yet the tragedy is this: countless people, having unlocked the first floor through diligence, are foolish enough to believe that diligence is the master key. They remain forever trapped on that first floor, straining desperately to climb higher. They convince themselves that the reason they can’t reach the second floor is that those above have sealed the door shut. So they seethe with resentment, railing against an unjust world — never realizing that the door above requires only a light, clever touch to open. Today, Master Chi wants to talk to you about the true nature and secrets of this Tower of Destiny.
Preface: “Class stratification” has become a buzzword in recent years — especially beloved by mediocre people drawing monthly salaries, who can’t wait to pin these four characters to their lips as if they’ve finally found an excuse for their failure. If you’ve achieved even modest success, you’ll immediately recognize this for the nonsense it is. Summer insects live too briefly to comprehend winter ice; small-minded people see too little to speak of the world. Today, let’s talk about poverty’s original sin — that unexamined word: “inertia.”
(Sometimes, a melody speaks louder than a thousand words.)
For a long stretch of my youth, I never quite understood: Why should a person deeply love their homeland?
It wasn’t until life had tested me that the answer arrived with sudden clarity — and it came down to just two words: worthy of it.
Only by choosing to love her deeply will you possess the tenacity, trust, and sincerity needed to engage with everything that happens on this land without prejudice — to truly begin to understand it. And that understanding will repay you, endlessly, across every dimension of your life: in how you navigate the world, in how you invest, in how you grow.