…is actually not that hard at all.
I have a very good childhood friend from primary school — though we’re both middle-aged men now, I’ve watched him walk a genuinely inspiring and straightforward road in life.
This friend is an interesting case. Because his grades weren’t great, he stopped studying after vocational high school and threw himself entirely into running small businesses.
It started with renting out martial arts novels, VHS tapes, and CDs. Then came an internet café, then a bar, and now he runs a chain of optical stores. All along, he’s been on a slow but steady upward climb.
Yes — compared to those four words: peace and safety.
All the wealth and money, fame and power, romantic entanglements, and grudges and grievances — these are nothing but trivial additions to your life.
Even the most twisted, difficult hardships are merely colorful episodes that make the journey richer and more interesting.
The truth is, genuine happiness is a life of quiet stability — an ordinary career, free from great disasters or suffering.
Master Chi’s suggestion to you: go to the entrance of any large hospital’s emergency room. Don’t do anything — just stand there and watch the people coming and going.
Not to build your happiness on others’ suffering.
But to help you understand that everything you’re facing today — career setbacks, troubled marriages, life’s misfortunes, all of it — becomes utterly trivial in the face of real life and death.
So don’t despair at every little thing. Stop spending your days sulking and complaining.
Work, money, fitness, socializing, love, ambitions… all of these are simply building blocks of your life experience — episodes that make this adventure richer, more vivid, and more fulfilling.
They are fragments of your journey, not its destination.
If a certain way of living, a job, or a relationship begins to drain you — leaving you far more exhausted than joyful — always remember: you always have the right to pay the bill and walk away.
1 — Many couples know each other from their school years, some even developing early crushes and relationships during that time. They know each other inside and out, with clear emotional expectations already established. For those who met after entering the workforce, there is still a deep mutual understanding. Impulsive marriages are extremely rare.
2 — Both sets of parents are solid and dependable — either holding a certain professional position or having built a modest achievement in their own field. They may not be wealthy, but they carry themselves with dignity. This means the couple can avoid ugly financial squabbles in the early years of marriage; no one is fixated on petty gains, and no seeds of resentment are planted from the start.
Today’s article is primarily about how Master Chi has helped countless female readers rebuild their lives over the years — taking past failures as lessons, transforming them into the fuel for a comeback, and finding a fresh start in life, marriage, and wealth.
If you are a woman going through a dark season right now, you will find wisdom and strength in these pages that you can apply directly to your own situation.
Recently, a once-top male actor went viral again — so much so that even I, who rarely scrolls through short videos, kept seeing news about him. As someone who was hugely famous in the entertainment world, the state he’s in now is genuinely melancholy to witness.
So let me just say a few words — both as my personal perspective, and as my most sincere advice to him and to others like him.
Never lower yourself to seek anyone’s pity or affection — because doing so is drinking poison to quench your thirst.
Even if you end up together, the price you’ll pay is a slow, prolonged burning of yourself in exchange for a fleeting, hollow warmth.
In the end, it amounts to nothing more than years of self-delusion and a heart completely drained dry.
This is especially common among women — because proportionally, women tend to love more completely, more resolutely, and more recklessly. And so the price they pay is greater — sometimes an entire lifetime.
The deepest personal lesson I — Master Chi — have learned is this: if your life after thirty grows increasingly cluttered, if you say yes to every task and rush in to help with every favor, the result is more frantic scrambling, not more achievement. You look exhausted. Yet in reality, you’ve accomplished almost nothing.
So every time I analyze someone’s life pattern (格局) and help them map out their path, I’m essentially helping them do subtraction. Because for adults — no matter how chaotic the circumstances — everything traces back to a few fundamental core points. Master these, and that’s enough:
1 - The vast majority of people whose marriages and families are falling apart have essentially said a short-term goodbye to good things like earning money, getting promoted, and getting things done.
Because a family battered by constant storms takes an enormous toll on your mental and physical energy.
The old saying “when the family is in harmony, all things will prosper” — it really is that true.
2 - If you haven’t developed the awareness of “two people teaming up together to face and solve every problem as one,” then it will be very hard to find a good outcome with anyone.