Student Question:
Master Chi, in recent years, many people around me have experienced significant turbulence in their lives. Expectations we once took for granted have been suddenly shattered. We are all eager to understand — in the current environment, how does one find development opportunities suited to their own situation? This includes the challenges and opportunities facing both the nation and individuals within the current major cycle. What are your thoughts on this?
Master Chi’s Response:
Looking at the current situation from a micro perspective — it is a time of life’s full spectrum: joy and sorrow, union and parting, sunshine and shadow.
The underlying logic carries the heavy weight of a market economy, while also bearing the distinct characteristics of our national circumstances.
People with relatively lower incomes feel, in practice, a kind of inflation. Why is it that despite working every day, earning money feels harder and harder, and the things you buy keep getting more expensive? Yet by conventional metrics, our price indices are not particularly high.
And those with higher incomes — what do they sense?
Right now it seems we exist in a state of semi-inflation or quasi-deflation. Different income groups — and even different regions — experience prices very differently. This divergence and imbalance is itself an important characteristic of the economy.
In the past, domestic production value-add was relatively low. When we first entered the WTO in the early 2000s, we were already discussing industrial upgrading. But high-precision, high-tech industries have very limited capacity to absorb employment. Now, as intelligent technology continues to advance and the value-add of exported goods climbs higher, the connection between these industries and ordinary people grows weaker and weaker. This is part of the reason employment becomes increasingly difficult.
So where does the individual find opportunity — where is the moat?
The best return is investing in yourself. Honestly, even that is not easy. The causes behind these problems are extremely complex. Some in society say: Kong Yiji should take off his long gown (a reference to Lu Xun’s famous scholar-in-poverty, used to mean over-educated people should simply accept manual work). But the proper answer is that Kong Yiji should be able to study in peace, and Camel Xiangzi (the hardworking rickshaw puller crushed by circumstance in another Chinese classic) should be able to live with dignity and security.
This reflects, in truth, that our education still has enormous room for improvement. This era is changing with fierce speed — catching everyone off guard. The cost of switching tracks is enormous. You cannot simply decide: AI is exploding, so tomorrow I’ll launch an AI-related project. That requires meaningful professional depth — and that depth is the enormous switching cost.
So what can we do? I think: maintain a rational, objective attitude. Work to improve yourself. Investing in yourself has the highest return rate. It keeps you sensitive to industry shifts and transformations in business models.
I believe everyone should aspire to become a slash-talent — someone with rich and varied experience across multiple domains. This is essential preparation for hedging against the economic risks and employment risks that come with different cycles.
Of course, there is no need for excessive anxiety. Think it through clearly and adapt — there is no single magic solution.
Historical cycles offer us great insight. When you look at a specific industry, a specific social group, or a specific individual — including you and me — once you understand the defining features of the cycle you are in, a basic playbook begins to take shape.
On building an investment moat:
For individuals, I think you need to be somewhat conservative. Because an upward cycle and a downward cycle operate by entirely different rules.
During an upward cycle, everyone feels as though their own capabilities are improving —
— yet they fail to consider that it may simply be the elevator going up. The tide rising. But when the cycle turns downward, most people’s instinct is: “See, it’s not that I’m not working hard enough. It’s just that the cycle is going down.”
It has always been this way. This is the nature of human psychology.
From an investment perspective: in the past, the attitude was “better to be wrong than to miss out.” Now it has flipped: “better to miss out than to be wrong.”
For most ordinary people, I think the path forward is to dig into the opportunities hidden in the cracks — to find where your own ceiling lies, and where possible, to go deeper in those areas. To refine your craft to its absolute limit.
In the future, wealth will increasingly take the form of financial assets. In terms of portfolio allocation, the proportion of financial assets will continue to rise. Real estate, too, has entered a new phase — its financial attributes are steadily diminishing. In many places, real estate has already lost its financial character entirely.