Love & Relationships

Let me start with the girls who surprised me most — the way they changed their own destinies was remarkably simple and direct. She became the owner of a beauty and gift shop, earning hundreds of thousands a year. Every year she would come find me to review her annual fortune cycle (流年). But smart girls are probably all the same at heart — she was restless inside. Nothing in this world is impossible if you’re truly determined. As long as you put your heart into anything, your noble benefactor (Gui Ren) fortune will come. And this girl truly seized hers.

Someone who habitually invokes Metternich has claimed that Putin is cut from the same cloth as the grandiose-but-underdelivering Mussolini. Anyone who has actually organized and led a team of more than ten people in real life — and kept it running well — would never say such a thing. Cherry-picking fragmentary historical records and using analogy to imply inevitable causal relationships is a way of showing off cleverness, not a method for analyzing problems and making decisions. Eastern modes of thinking tend to favor association and analogy over logical argumentation and rational debate, using them to suggest that two things must have some singular, necessary correlation.