For the next three days, Master Chi will be taking a short family trip, so updates will come a little less frequently. We’ll pick up our conversations again after I’m back on the 5th.
But before I go, I want to share a few simple thoughts with you. I know clearly that lately your spirits haven’t been high — there’s a persistent sense of frustration, a feeling like you can’t quite get any traction.
If pressed for a reason, it’s this: you don’t know what effective efforts to make in the years ahead to bring good financial returns to your family and yourself. You’re lost and anxious. Worse, you have this nagging feeling that you’re quietly missing opportunities again.
In Master Chi’s view, here are three things you should be doing right now:
1 — Don’t make mistakes, don’t slip up, don’t act on impulse. Hold your cash firmly. Don’t blindly invest in businesses you don’t understand, and don’t lend money to others. Protect what you have — not losing is already winning.
Use this time to carefully review and optimize your existing assets. Properties in declining cities, low-quality stocks — replace them decisively, or they’ll only keep dragging you down.
Over the past four or five years, I’ve repeated this countless times: get rid of your dead-weight properties and third-rate stocks. Some readers listened. They haven’t made a killing, but their rental income and dividends have brought them steady, substantial returns year after year. Others, through procrastination, inertia, and weakness — refusing to face their own mistakes — have watched things deteriorate to the point where the chance to turn it around is gone entirely.
2 — Commit steadfastly to building, investing in, and strengthening your mind. Read extensively — books that make you more rational and mature — rather than letting a flood of low-quality short videos drag your thinking down.
I deleted all short-video apps mid-last-year. When I do watch clips occasionally, it’s things friends share with me — because the objective reality is this: even the best short video is just a lower-efficiency, less information-dense rehashing of wisdom you’d find in a classic book.
Always remember: if you spend your days surrounded by people who blindly follow and mindlessly consume, you will inevitably become one of them — and your judgment and decision-making will suffer for it. In today’s world, a person who possesses clear, independent thinking will not remain trapped in hardship for long. When the times offer one or two opportunities, they will seize them and rise — this is inevitable.
3 — Don’t blindly condemn the current environment, but don’t give up and lie flat either. We are in a period of minor historical adjustment — small ups and small downs, with an overall relatively stable path ahead. This is the most likely scenario.
That’s fine. Given that, use this time to exercise, read, and cultivate both your inner and outer strength. Spend more time with family. Use this rare period of calm to truly experience life itself — that is your real wisdom.
Just look at myself and the well-off friends around me — we’re actually spending more time these past couple of years traveling, sightseeing, experiencing, and feeling. Honestly, even at our spending level, simply enjoying life doesn’t cost that much — but the joy it brings cannot be measured in money.
What I’ve feared most, over these years, is the type of person who scrimps in daily life while endlessly making futile efforts — investing here, losing money there — and drowning in fear and anxiety every single day. This is the most foolish path. The direction of effort is entirely wrong. The result: no wealth gained, and life itself lost.
Master Chi doesn’t want that for you. Remember this.