Today’s article is truly not for everyone to understand — you need to have lived deeply enough, and your intuition needs to be sharp enough.
But if you’re willing to quiet your mind and read carefully, you’ll come to understand the value of this article: worth its weight in gold many times over.
It will play a pivotal role in your growth and ascent in life.
1 — Your founding mentor matters enormously, in everything you do.
If your founding mentor is a titan of the industry — a master of an established lineage — then you’ll gain not only the clarity of sudden enlightenment from them, but also a gradual correction of the many flaws and blind spots in your thinking.
But if your founding mentor is merely someone with a modest fortune of forty or fifty million — a minor success — then what you can gain from them amounts to nothing more than a handful of small tricks and half-formed ideas: unstructured, three-legged-cat skills.
So if when you started out you lacked the noble benefactor fortune (Gui Ren) to encounter a true master, then reading the autobiographies of the top talents in your field in large quantities is the best shortcut available.
You certainly know Schwarzenegger — action film icon, bodybuilding champion, former Governor of California. His autobiography is decidedly obscure, yet after reading it, I found his success was absolutely inevitable.
That incomprehensible focus and dedication to his craft. That total, unguarded hunger for success. That iron will to sculpt his own life like a block of marble.
All of it is laid bare in those six hundred-plus pages, holding nothing back — and that’s just one man’s story.
The important criterion I use to judge whether a person has a future is how deeply they understand the founding masters of their own field.
If a person knows nothing of those who came before them, it means they’ll not only repeat the same mistakes predecessors have made countless times over, but they’ll also have no idea how to move forward efficiently.
2 — Life is the grand sum of countless small bets.
Many people go through their entire lives never understanding that nothing in this world has a 100% success rate.
The top masters succeed roughly 60% of the time. Intelligent people succeed roughly 40% of the time. Ordinary people succeed somewhere between 10 and 20%.
So with any investment or gamble you make, you must calculate the risk-to-reward ratio clearly — and never carry the attitude of “this is absolutely foolproof, nothing can go wrong.”
Instead, always keeping a reserve card to protect your principal and your position is profound wisdom of the highest order.
3 — Recognizing your own role is the first step to genuine maturity.
Some people need no training at all — hand them a microphone and they talk with effortless confidence. Others practice for just a few days and beautiful melodies flow from their fingers.
What are they drawing on? Two words: natural talent.
I have always firmly believed that every person is born with a purpose. Especially in today’s era of a hundred flowers blooming and ten thousand trades competing, there is always a place suited for your development — you simply haven’t found it yet.
Young or old, I hope you always keep at least one interest that you’re actively nurturing. Not pure play, but actively thinking about how to continuously refine and perfect it.
A couple of years ago, a young office worker came to me to have her destiny framework read. I discovered striking correlations between her Fortune-Virtue and Wealth palaces, both brimming with signs of blessing. I immediately asked what her hobbies were — and it turned out she loved collecting and tinkering with ball-jointed dolls. I looked at some of her work, and it was exquisitely crafted.
So I encouraged her to treat it as a side business and explore it, certain she had a bright future in it. Sure enough, she now spends four or five hours every weekend dressing and doing makeup for other enthusiasts’ dolls, charging eight hundred to one thousand per commission.
4 — Always follow the market maker. Never run with the retail crowd.
I never see “market maker” as a negative or derogatory term. On the contrary, to me the market maker is simply the party in any game that holds the advantages of rules, resources, information, and first-mover position.
Whether you follow the market maker’s logic or move against it — both can be correct in different situations. The only thing you must never do is act rashly before you even know what the market maker’s logic is.
I can’t expand on this too much here, but the nature of far too many people is fundamentally that of sheep. When something happens, they don’t think about the broader picture at all. They just look at what the people around them are doing, and follow the herd.
The result? Well — you know how that goes.
When you’ve truly made a name for yourself in a field — whether real estate or equities — studying the market maker becomes your permanent core question.
Especially in our environment, once you’ve truly understood the market maker, every decision ultimately simplifies down to two choices: follow or don’t follow. After that, it’s the great Dao made simple, and wealth flows like a river.
5 — The fundamental question of any investment: how many people are willing to carry the sedan chair after you.
Whether it’s conventional wealth or alternative income, anything involving money always comes back to this critical question: who takes the last baton?
Some businesses are truly great — they can sustain for decades, with an endless stream of people and capital stepping up to pass the baton one more time. Naturally, with everyone adding fuel, the fire burns high, and such enterprises grow into towering leviathans.
But most businesses, assets, and properties can’t sustain dividends that long. So sometimes I’ll ask friends who come to me for direction quite bluntly: forget your logic for a moment. Just ask yourself — how many people do you think will follow your position afterward?
Will there be buyers? Will there be many?
Yes and many — then it’s definitely something worthwhile. None and few — then you’re the fool holding the last baton.
6 — Life cycles differ for everyone. Some are heroes in youth; others are destined to spend twenty years sharpening one sword.
The greatest tragedy in life is when you finally arrive at your own maturity, only to find that all your chips have been squandered in the years that have passed.
And all you can do is watch helplessly as opportunities you could now handle with ease slip by you again and again.
I have always held deep respect for growth curves and life cycles. Having seen so many people, I know that some have an uncommon brilliance and intuition during specific years of their lives — while others need to go through enough setbacks and failures before they can distill their own philosophy of operating.
Tigers, eagles, leopards, and great bears are all formidable predators, but each has different prey and different ways of hunting. People are the same.
So never let someone else’s windfall rattle you.
Whether in stocks or real estate, every cycle seems to have its winners — but the logic and reasons behind each win are not the same. Sometimes the market favors the trend-followers; sometimes it favors the value investors. It’s purely a matter of timing and circumstance.
Ten years on one side of the river, ten years on the other. If you truly have what it takes, your wealth fortune (财运) will find you in due time. Trust that.
7 — Weakness and ignorance are never the real obstacles to survival. Arrogance is.
Those who are truly skilled at generating wealth are invariably the ones most skilled at reading the direction of the great tide.
Like buying property — those who try to cut a clever angle or find some contrarian path almost always end up badly burned. The ones who quietly follow the mainstream trend while aligning with the market maker’s interests are the ones who steadily make real money.
Think about it: if there’s a path that tens of millions of people are walking successfully, what possible reason do you have to go out of your way to contradict it?
The highest good flows like water (上善若水). Following the current is wisdom. Don’t be clever for its own sake — that is the great wisdom.
8 — There are no overnight successes. It’s always step by step.
If a person earns fifty thousand a year, it’s because they’ve monetized their basic physical labor. If a person earns five hundred thousand a year, it’s because they’ve monetized physical labor plus skills. If a person earns five million a year, it’s because they’ve monetized physical labor plus skills plus macro-vision. If a person earns fifty million a year, it’s because they’ve monetized physical labor plus skills plus macro-vision plus character.
Focusing on making money is of course important — but focusing on improving your own capabilities is the truly paramount goal.
You’ll gradually come to see that your net worth is perfectly correlated with your comprehensive ability. Wealth comes from strong inner foundations; poverty comes from weak inner foundations. There are no excuses or arguments to be made about it.
People often ask me in the comments: if I have four to five hundred thousand on hand, what should I do with it — what property to buy, what stocks to pick?
My uniform answer is always the same: first figure out how to raise your annual income above five hundred thousand. This is not easy — but it’s far easier than trying to level up through investment alone.
If you can’t do this, then wherever you invest, you’ll most likely end up as someone else’s harvest.
Because if a person can’t even make a decent plate of fried rice, how could they possibly cook a perfect pot of Buddha Jumps Over the Wall?
Of course, shortcuts always exist in this world. And there will always be a group of people who, just like you, started from ordinary and obscure beginnings — but were willing to accumulate and build, growing stronger and more capable with each passing year.