Investing

The scorching summer has passed — half the year is already gone. These past six months have surfaced far too many problems that had been lurking beneath the surface. Some of what I’ve witnessed firsthand has reminded both you and me just how cold and warm this world can be. Even if we don’t say it out loud, we all know it in our hearts: that era is gone, and it’s never coming back.

Master Classics 💰 The Intelligent Investor 📘 One Up On Wall Street by Peter Lynch 📘 Poor Charlie’s Almanack 📘 The Essays of Warren Buffett: Letters to Shareholders 📘 Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits 📘 Investment Foundations 💼 The Wisdom of Great Investors 📘 24 Essential Lessons for Investment Success 📘 The Investment Philosophy of Charlie Munger 📘 Investment Thinking 🎓 The Most Important Thing 📘 Influence 📘 Mental Frameworks 🚩 Thinking in Frameworks 📘 The Model Thinker 📘

Ladies — unless your family of origin sits on assets worth at least a hundred million, commands powerful connections in a major city, or your parents can mobilize entire industries with a single word — Everything they’ve accumulated over a lifetime cannot match the ten hard-won truths I’m sharing in this article today. Why am I so confident? Because years of immersion in traditional Chinese culture and Chinese metaphysics (玄学) have allowed me to distill these genuine insights.

Students often ask me how to improve their professional abilities — is there some shortcut they can take? I’ve thought about it, and honestly, the paths are few: Read relentlessly Work relentlessly Keep your body strong That’s it. For ordinary people without exceptional talent, there’s no special formula for growth. Those legendary stories you’ve heard? They’re written for geniuses — they have nothing to do with us. The only path to success is constant grinding: accumulating experience and building mastery.

Once, you believed happiness meant earning big money, driving luxury cars, living in a gleaming high-floor apartment adorned with fine things — surrounded by vast assets and profits flowing endlessly your way. Then one day, you fell asleep and had a dream. In the dream, you returned to your younger years — back to that small, familiar home, seeing your parents as they were then, still in the prime of their lives. You tasted again that flavor only your childhood kitchen could produce.

1 - The sheer volume of real estate policies that core cities have released in this period is itself proof of one thing: a sweeping, fully-formed consensus has been reached, and a new wave of prosperity in the real estate sector is being pursued as a serious, concrete goal. Objectively speaking, with a consensus this powerful and a direction this clear, “failing to pull it off” is simply not a realistic outcome.

Luchengming asks: Commander, greetings. I’d like to ask your thoughts on the future of the photovoltaic sector. Right now it looks like many domestic solar companies are nearly dead — there was just an announcement allowing M&A in the solar industry, but then nothing else followed. Do you think more policies are coming to prop up the solar industry? After all, it wasn’t easy for the country to cultivate a globally dominant sector like this — they wouldn’t just let it die, would they?

Today’s lesson: Step One: Patiently wait for the emergence of a global or regional financial or economic crisis. These crises occur on a recurring basis. Step Two: During the crisis, use news and other resources to observe how the situation unfolds. When prices of quality assets drop sharply, deploy various loans and leverage tools to purchase these undervalued core assets. At the same time, anticipate that central banks and governments will likely respond with interest rate cuts and large-scale monetary easing.

On the subject of financial freedom, I have hard-won insights and experience — lessons accumulated through repeated failures, confusion, and learning. I have also closely observed those who have achieved true wealth. They realized early on that a salary alone can never make you rich. The shift must happen: from trading time for money, to letting assets generate money. Let me first define what it means to be wealthy. In my view, wealth means that when you don’t want to work, you don’t have to — and even when you’re not working, your income still exceeds your desires.

Just last Sunday evening, I was invited to an old European-style villa in the Wutong district, where I gave a down-to-earth talk on classical Chinese wisdom to a gathering of traditionally defined “high-net-worth” individuals. We discussed Feng Shui, Chinese metaphysics, Chi fortune (气运), and more — and I had the pleasure of meeting many new faces. But none of that is what compelled me to write this article. What truly moved me to share was a spontaneous speech I gave that evening.