Today I want to cut straight to the point and tackle one critical question: “Where does money actually flow — and how do you become someone it flows toward?”
Get this right, and you’ll jump an entire level.
Most people are still stuck on the idea that money is earned. They haven’t grasped that money is operated.
This article sets the record straight. I’m going to walk you through exactly how the truly wealthy accumulate their fortunes — so you can hold a mirror up to yourself and see where you fall short.
Read this carefully, and you’ll finally understand why, despite all your effort, real wealth keeps its distance.
First: working in isolation will never make you rich.
Grinding away with your head down, disconnected from society, cuts you off from the freshest and most cutting-edge ideas in circulation. Your existing skills get quietly eroded. Eventually, you fall behind in every dimension.
This is precisely why wealthy people are so particular about their circles. It’s not that we love the clinking of glasses at banquets — it’s what those gatherings represent: the exchange of social resources and financial intelligence.
I use “banquet” loosely here. It could be a tea gathering, a dinner, any kind of gathering. The substance — the exchange of resources and information — is what matters.
On this point, the experience that most shattered my assumptions came after I turned thirty. That was when I first truly understood that behind every significant place, there is always a group of people deciding how to cut the cake.
I remember it was around eight in the evening. A well-known figure in Jiangnan’s capital circles — a Mr. Xu you’d occasionally spot in mainstream financial media — called me out of the blue. He was at a gathering with some heavyweight players, someone had brought up Feng Shui and destiny reading, and he invited me to come by and join.
Of course I went. As a younger man receiving an impromptu invitation from figures of that stature, there was nothing to deliberate.
The venue was a Western-style mansion on Wukang Road, in the 300s. If you have well-connected friends in Shanghai, you’ll know what that stretch of that street represents.
In a certain sense, this place is the center of Jiangnan — much like the Ye family estate in Guangdong. Not necessarily gilded, but every person who walks through the door illuminates the room.
It was also, in its way, a dragon’s den. Some people enter that world and shine brilliantly, then fade into nothing. Others use it as a launchpad — and some of those plunge into ruin. For a young man like me at the time, the wisest posture was simple: keep my head down, answer what I was asked, and say nothing more.
I stayed about ninety minutes in total, then had a driver take me home.
But those ninety minutes were among the most eye-opening of my life. In that time, several elders spoke freely — dropping names, discussing projects, sharing things without guard.
You have to experience something like that to truly understand what it means when people say “one person ascends, and their whole household rises with them.” To understand what it means to hear a single sentence and walk away with a windfall. To understand the phrase a single word worth ten thousand gold.
I won’t dress it up: that evening was genuinely lucrative for me. The figure — even by today’s standards — was the kind that could permanently alter someone’s life, or set a family up for three generations.
But I’m not raising this to boast. It’s because of two lessons that crystallized for me.
Lesson one: never become obsessed with windfall money.
I’ve seen too many people destroyed by it. I myself paid a steep price afterward because of that experience.
Windfall money is ultimately a test. A test of whether you can rapidly elevate your own capacity and judgment after acquiring wealth — and actually control it.
If you can, it means the money was meant to be in your hands. If you can’t, you got lucky — and it will eventually devour you.
The larger the windfall, the more it drags you toward danger. Imagine an ordinary person suddenly finding three hundred million in their account. That’s almost always where the tragedy begins. Desire compounds. Confidence inflates. Until finally they tumble into a catastrophe they never had the capacity to navigate — fortune lost, person broken.
I came very close to that trap myself. Fortunately, I managed to navigate through it.
Lesson two: wealth has specific flows.
In most cases, all your exhausting, solitary effort — working like a burdened camel — is worth less than standing faithfully beside someone genuinely close to wealth’s core and earning a word or two of guidance.
When someone at the right level opens their mouth and points you toward a path, that alone can sustain you for half a lifetime. That is what a noble benefactor (Gui Ren) truly means.
A noble benefactor carries another profound gift: in just a few sentences, they hand you the essential knowledge for climbing within their particular system. Which direction to push. Which relationships to prioritize. Even what angle to take when presenting gifts to unlock a door.
This is insider knowledge that outsiders might spend half a lifetime trying to reverse-engineer — and would never be told freely. And by the time an outsider figures it out on their own, they’re already past fifty with one foot in the grave.
Don’t think this only applies to institutional systems. It holds across every industry, everywhere.
Take the stock market. Why is it that most people are destined to be fleeced — where even talent and grinding effort make little difference?
Because everything you know as an ordinary person, while broadly circulated, is fundamentally outdated and stale. No matter how solid your value-investing fundamentals or how sharp your trend-reading, none of it can be fully deployed. Meanwhile, the people who stand closest to the answers — a single glance from them outweighs three thousand nights of your grinding.
Take real estate. I consider myself a solid half-expert by now — my return rates are among the best, and I approach property selection and financing with complete confidence.
But I can’t touch one friend of mine. His returns are several multiples of mine.
Is that an ability gap? In this property market, where most people are converging on the same outcomes — where does that gap come from?
He had access to draft policy memos on urban renewal priorities sitting in a government office. With that, do you think his real estate moves weren’t just continuously doubling and redoubling?
It’s not that his ability is greater. It’s that his circle is different.
Circle, circle, circle. Inside the circle or outside it: heaven and earth apart.
So when you see people complaining that they’ve worked so hard and still can’t make money, still can’t rise above mediocrity — you don’t need to wonder why.
At the root: no family foundation of accumulated wisdom, no noble benefactor to guide them, and far too distant from the circles where wealth actually concentrates. They’ve always been on the outside. Cutting the cake was never a conversation they were part of.
From the perspective of an ordinary person climbing upward, the true essence of material success is simply this: did you successfully join one small circle after another as you built your way up?
As I’ve said before — observe the people who spent a decade or more drifting around a major city and ultimately couldn’t stay, couldn’t make it. You’ll find that “lack of money” is an extremely surface-level explanation.
The deeper reason is that they gradually, step by step, came to feel they never truly belonged to the city — and never merged into the smaller circles within their own industry.
In the end, they never managed to embed themselves as a working part of a larger engine.
The result?
Career setbacks — with no one to offer strategy or guidance. Unexpected trouble — with no lawyer or well-connected friend to help navigate it. A bad day health-wise — with no medical contact to offer quiet advice.
Broke. Alone. Surrounded by no one.
And wealth? Not even worth mentioning. It was never going to include them.
I’ve thought through all of this clearly enough now that after thirty-five, my business and investments made a step-change upward — because I began approaching everything through a people-first, circle-first lens.
No matter how dazzling a pitch sounds, no matter how airtight the logic — if the person making it isn’t a respected figure within a specific circle, I won’t consider it.
Not because nothing can succeed outside the circle. It’s that the success rate differential is simply too large to ignore. Outside the circle: a 5% gamble. Inside: 90% certainty.
Similarly, when I do destiny readings (命理) for clients seeking wealth paths, I’ve never been interested in simply identifying which year brings good wealth fortune (财运). Windfalls that fall from the sky are not what I’m looking for.
What I’m looking for are a series of meaningful connections — the kind that place you inside one distribution system, one cake-cutting circle, after another.
Achieve that, and you’ll find that even the largest windfall doesn’t compare to steady, rain-or-shine income that flows reliably and without interruption.
The difference between one full meal and a lifetime of full meals. Anyone with sense knows which they’d choose.
One final thought: whether in the real world or in destiny reading, it all comes down to this — have you found your stage? Have you found your positioning?
Don’t let this sound like empty inspiration. Most people genuinely don’t know their true positioning.
The commanding authority of the Purple Star. The effortless social grace of Tianfu. The commanding presence of the Sun Star. The razor-sharp precision of Wuqu. The strategic brilliance of Tianji.
Most people have no idea how their destiny is meant to unfold to maximize their benefit — let alone how to enter the right circles and play the role that suits them.
But destiny reading is a topic worth exploring properly on its own. We’ll save that for another time.